qualified to become one of the most popular of the age. The subject itself is singularly attractive. Youth and innocence have a degree of loveliness of their own, rank and education give them the additional interest of elegance, and the result is that the faces and forms of the higher ranks of England are amongst the most attractive in the world. The beauty of France may be piquant, of Spain may be sentimental, or of Italy may be sublime, but they are all not equal to the fresh and simple charm of English beauty at its first entrance into thew orld of life and fashion. What it becomes after it has been withered by late hours, faded by hot atmospheres and candlelight, and turned into sallowness by the "delights of the season," let other describers tell. But the subjects of this splendid volume are exempt from those perils, and they live before us the very images of unexhausted grace and beauty in promise. The volume contains portraits of the children of the Duke of Beaufort, of Lord Carlisle, of the Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Lyndhurst, &c. The principal artist is Chalon, so well known by the fantastic elegance of his style; the rest are by M'Clise, clear, forcible, and characteristic. The volume is edited by Mrs. Fairlie; we believe, her first performance in a species of authorship which has now generally fallen into the hands of the sex.

The Rector. The fifth volume of the "Life of Sir Walter Scott," not less vigorous and anecdotical than its predecessors, is more interesting from its being more English. His distinction as a novel-writer was then established; and his works were acknowledged to have thrown open a new source of public gratification, investing romance with the strength of history, and touching history with the colours of romance. He had revived the novel, of all compositions the most attractive to the general mind. Since the days of Richardson and Fielding, nothing had so strongly excited public curiosity, or repaid it with such natural and solid interest, as the Waverley Novels.

The Barrister. It will fairly be owned that, so far as truth can be taught through romance, it will be taught through Scott's. His pictures are so forcible, his conceptions so true to life, his characters so close to reality, that we forget the fiction of the story in the vigour of the personages, and feel more like men mixing in circles of living beings, than gazers on the brilliant idealism of ages long gone by.

The Rector. His biographer makes one striking remark, which he appears to have adopted from Scott himself,-that men of the strongest sagacity often escape the blunders of inferior minds, only to sum them up in one master-blunder of their own. Scott's private dealings with the Ballantynes occupy a large portion of this volume. His powerful understanding seems to have been under a spell in all his transactions with those men. John Ballantyne, his favourite, was a source of perpetual embarrassment. Whatever that luckless humorist touched instantly failed, and the man of genius went down with the man of whim. Always speculating, and succeeding in nothing; always calculating on unlimited gains, and always either struggling out of bankruptcy, or sinking into it again; always abjuring his excesses, and always enjoying them. This incubus of Scott's fortunes lived till he had involved the author in undeserved calamity; and died, as if to make that calamity irreparable.

The Doctor. Scott seems to have been always surrounded with oddities. His powerful common sense evidently acted on the weak brains of the people by whom he was surrounded, like so much aqua vitæ poured into their mouths. It was putting the new wine in old bottles, and the most sober of them all soon became as eccentric as the rest. All his publishers seem to have successively identified themselves with his authorship till they actually imputed to their own faculties a share of his success. Constable and the Ballantynes appear to have even attempted to dictate the catastrophes of some of his volumes. Of Constable, though a singularly sharp and strong-headed man, it is said "that his vanity boiled over so much at this time, on having the title of Kenilworth' given at his suggestion, that, in his high moods, he used to stalk up and down the room, exclaiming, with an oath, 'I am all but the author of the Waverley Novels!" James Ballantyne, the best conducted of the party, used at intervals to assume an oracular manner, make mysterious speeches on the subject, and look unutterable things. As for John Ballantyne, he seems to have been worked up by the magic of the hour to little short of absolute frenzy. One of his extravagances was, to fabricate a villa out of a group of old houses in Kelso, which he called Walton Hall, with a pleasance or ornamented ground, which was to be laid out in the old Italian style, with a fountain and a jet d'eau, and a terrace overhanging the river, and commanding a view of the finest landscape in Scotland; and all this extravaganza was the work of a little auctioneer loaded with debts, with his constitution run to the last dregs, and his means on the very verge of bankruptcy.

This is

The Rector. "Alison's History of the French Revolution.” unquestionably the ablest historical work of our time. The period demanded a great history. The years from 1789 to 1815 comprised the most extraordinary changes of human character, national conflicts, martial glory, and imperial downfall, ever comprehended in so short a space of time. All was more like the eccentric wildness and startling terrors of a nightmare than a transaction of reality. The characters of the men, too, like the characters of the time, were gigantic. The daring ambition of Mirabeau, the tigerish ferocity of Robespierre, the brilliant selfishness of Buonaparte, and the splendid intrepidity of Wellington, were all shapes of another mould than the world had been accustomed to look upon. The rapid development of human passions, the fall of religion, the fall of superstition after it, the empire of infidelity, the overthrow of law, the general crush of European governments, and finally the re-ascent of the buried principles of order and religion, from the midst of the general ruin, form one of the most powerful junctures in the history of human change.

The Barrister. Mr. Alison has brought to his task powers evidently adequate to this ample undertaking. Gifted with an eloquent pen, he has added to it an enlightened judgment, and with striking faculties for generalization, he has not shrunk from diligence of detail. His pages are loaded with marginal references, and those references always adopted from the highest authorities. The texture of his work is as solid as its learning is unanswerable, and its principles sound. So far as the work

has gone, it is the most valuable historical gift which English authorship has presented to its country.

The Colonel. This fifth volume extends from the Russian campaign of Eylau, in 1806, to the battle of Corunna. It is a perpetual struggle of arms, exhibiting extraordinary daring on both sides, and yet only preliminary to those grand struggles which in the north and south of Europe alike were destined to hew down the strength of Napoleon. Those conflicts are described with remarkable spirit; the facts, taken alternately from the Russian and French authorities, are balanced with a vigorous judgment; the facts from the British dispatches require only to be thrown into historic order; it being the honourable distinction of British dispatches, that they disdain the paltry and scandalous fictions familiar to foreign correspondence even of the highest kind.

The Rector. Alison shows power, but, like all our Scotch philosophers, he is too fond of philosophizing. Thus, with a natural and just hatred of Napoleon's passion for blood, he adopts Napoleon's plea for this havoc of the human race, speaks of his perpetual wars as being urged upon him by the nature of his position, and unconsciously palliates his public crimes as the creatures of circumstance.

The Barrister. On such grounds the blackest atrocities lose their sting. Milton's Satan used the same apology before. "Necessity, the tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds." To all the arguments derived by Napoleon from the restlessness of the French character, there are the valid answers, that Napoleon himself first stimulated that restlessness into frenzy; that the French were sick of war, and actually exclaiming against it, whilst he was proclaiming hostilities against every state that was not already his slave; and thirdly, Louis Phillippe

The Rector. This successor of Napoleon has amply shown that the French can be ruled without war, and by a king who knows nothing of war; who for these five years, notwithstanding their republican propensities, the new freedom of their constitution, and the furious violence of their press, has kept them in as good order as Napoleon ever did with his half-million of bayonets; and who, in going to war with the miserable savages of Algiers, has, in fact, committed the only blunder of his intelligent and vigorous reign.

The Barrister.-The truth is, that the robber might plead the same necessity for plundering on the highway, and the gamester for ruining his family at the hazard-table. They and Napoleon alike simply indulged their own atrocious propensities, without care of the consequences; and never discovered the necessity of the case until the consequences had crushed them. None but impostors ever call themselves the victims of destiny.

The Colonel. "Mary Raymond, with other Tales." Mrs. Gore has here thrown her vivacity into a new shape. A succession of sketches of character are given chiefly in the form of foreign tales. The volume begins, however, with an English one. Mary Raymond is a beautiful girl, who has been left by her parents with just eighty-five pounds a-year, an income which probably might buy the wash-balls and essences of a fashionable belle. She has been placed in the very reluctant protection

of an uncle, who, after barely tolerating until she can be got rid of by marriage, drives her into an unwilling match. Her aunt, whose daughters are thrown into the back ground by the beauty of her protege, willingly aids the conspiracy against the future quiet of the young bride. Yet there is nothing exaggerated in the characters. The husband, though neither a captain of hussars, nor the next heir to an earldom, is what the ladies would generally pronounce an eligible personage, a man whom most mothers would rejoice to entrap, and whom few daughters would refuse. He is middle-aged, with sufficient manners, an employé under government at the showy rate of four thousand a-year, and, by the additional help of a well-furnished house in a fashionable quarter, a villa on the Surrey side all roses and geraniums, and a dashing equipage, altogether presenting an attractive menage to most ladies of blushing eighteen. But there is a previous passion in the case. A relative, who under the pressure of circumstances has gone to seek his fortune, has left his stamp upon her mind. Mary marries notwithstanding, commences her career in the fashionable world, bears her husband's rather sullen humours as she may, and looks, and is, as happy as the generality of the world with fine houses, and well-mounted equipages.

But all this is too natural, too tranquil, and too insincere to last. On a visit to her stately friends she sees, like a returning vision with a pallid form, the man of her heart. The man of her hand feels indignant at the discovery, as well he might, and the parties lead for awhile the unenviable life of suspicion on one side, and disgust on the other. But this cannot last, the lover suggests a separation; the lady rejects the project, yet ponders on the idea; the husband, stung by a sense of wrong, fires his pistols at both parties in an accidental rencontre; both escape, but the consequence is the birth of a dead child, and a sudden illness, whose end the novelist shrouds in tragic obscurity. The husband, infuriated by his own vindictiveness, gradually loses his faculties, is deprived of the greater portion of his income, and retires from active life. A few years more find him the inmate of a lunatic asylum, where he pours out his mind in wild and melancholy recollections, terrors of conscience for some nameless crime, and dark hints of his having hastened the death of his unfortunate wife by his own ferocious hands.

The Barrister. In the other tales a different spirit is adopted, variety is the charm, and our gay neighbours of the continent figure in all their whims, scarlet caps, and embroidered bodices, for the benefit of English morality.

The Doctor. "Napoleon at Fontainbleau" is a trait of the great eccentric, a wave of the great magician's wand-or, in simpler history, a trick of the great charlatan. The story is cleverly sentimental, a petite comédie larmoyante. Napoleon has been startled from council by the news that the Papal Nuncio is dying of poison. He pauses in his deliberation, and Cardinal Caprara probably has thus the honour of checking the fall of an old dynasty, or stifling the birth of some new empire. Napoleon, caring little for cardinals in general, and nothing for Cardinal Caprara, yet runs to the patient's bed-side, through fear of unpopularity with the Papal world, administers the restorative, and sets the cardinal on his feet again. He discovers that an unwholesome mushDec.-VOL. LI. NO. CCIV.

20

room, mixed with the cardinal's soup, had been the means of thus nearly depriving the world of one of the lights of holiness. But this discovery leads to another. The seller of the mushrooms is found to be a disguised emigrant, an agent of the Bourbons, who has made his way into France; no one, not even Fouché himself, can find out how or why.

The Rector. But the more interesting part of the narrative will probably be found in the recollections of the Château of Fontainbleau. Always a favourite with the French sovereigns, from the time when its feudal towers first projected above its groves; the palace of "The fountain of fine water," Fontaine de belle eau, saw its most brilliant days in our own times. Then Napoleon, the "blazing star" of France, shed the ominous lustre of his presence within its carved, embroidered, gilded, and marble halls. It was the autumnal residence of the Imperial Court, where he enjoyed the fantasies of a French court, left to follow its own fantastic will; received in succession the fallen crowned heads of the continent; and more than all, gave way to the sullen but splendid romance of his own fiery imagination; or, as its describeṛ strikingly says," The whole a gorgeous mask of mimic majesty; chivalrous as the court of Francis I. was, magnificent as that of Louis le Grand, and a thousand-fold more animated than either."

The Colonel. Nothing could be more striking than the Imperial fêtes. France was always a nation of show, and even during the Reign of Terror she danced to the clash of the guillotine; but the Napoleon fêtes exceeded all the monarchical and all the republican vanities of Frauce. There was in them the freshness of new excitement, the desire to outstrip all that kings or demagogues had done before, and more than all, the keen avidity to enjoy, heightened by the involuntary consciousness that this state of things could not last, and that pleasure must be snatched at the moment or never. It is a remarkable instance of the sagacity of Napoleon's mind, that while all Europe was trembling at the permanence of his power, he himself should constantly speak of its fragility. He has been heard to say, even in his council, "All this may be very well whilst I live, but when I am gone my son may look upon himself as a very lucky fellow if he has two thousand francs a year." Moderate as was this calculation, it was afterwards found to be too large, for all was not very well, even while Buonaparte lived. His empire perished even before he met the grave, and before either event occurred, his son was a pauper and a pensioner,—so much more expeditious can Time be even than prophecy.

The Doctor. The whole affair was one of charlatanry. France has been always fond of the mountebank. The people are equally delighted with the grotesque and the grand. The national mind, even in its most mature state, has the child's taste, toys and gilt gingerbread. The Buonaparte family were mountebanks by nature and necessity. Their kings and queens felt that they were only actors of royalty; that the diadem and ermine were put upon their heads and shoulders only as they were put upon the heads and shoulders of Talma aud Duschesnois; that every hour of wearing them only brought the hour nearer when the curtain was to fall, the theatre to be darkened, the tinsel to be thrown off, and the kings, queens, and heroes, returning to the little