Kitabı oku: «Autobiographic Sketches», sayfa 19

It was not until after the year 1715 that the main improvement took place in the English travelling system, so far as regarded speed. It is, in reality, to Mr. Macadam that we owe it. All the roads in England, within a few years, were remodelled, and upon principles of Roman science. From mere beds of torrents and systems of ruts, they were raised universally to the condition and appearance of gravel walks in private parks or shrubberies. The average rate of velocity was, in consequence, exactly doubled—ten miles an hour being now generally accomplished, instead of five. And at the moment when all further improvement upon this system had become hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us by railroads; which again, considering how much they have already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more astonishing to our preconceptions.

One point of refinement, as regards the comfort of travellers, remains to be mentioned, in which the improvement began a good deal earlier, perhaps by ten years, than in the construction of the roads. Luxurious as was the system of English travelling at all periods, after the general establishment of post chaises, it must be granted that, in the circumstance of cleanliness, there was far from being that attention, or that provision for the traveller's comfort, which might have been anticipated from the general habits of the country. I, at all periods of my life a great traveller, was witness, to the first steps and the whole struggle of this revolution. Maréchal Saxe professed always to look under his bed, applying his caution chiefly to the attempts of robbers. Now, if at the greatest inns of England you had, in the days I speak of, adopted this marshal's policy of reconnoitring, what would you have seen? Beyond a doubt, you would have seen what, upon all principles of seniority, was entitled to your veneration, viz., a dense accumulation of dust far older than yourself. A foreign author made some experiments upon the deposition of dust, and the rate of its accumulation, in a room left wholly undisturbed. If I recollect, a century would produce a stratum about half an inch in depth. Upon this principle, I conjecture that much dust which I have seen in inns, during the first four or five years of the present century, must have belonged to the reign of George II. It was, however, upon travellers by coaches that the full oppression of the old vicious system operated. The elder Scaliger mentions, as a characteristic of the English in his day, (about 1530,) a horror of cold water; in which, however, there must have been some mistake. ⁹¹ Nowhere could he and his foreign companions obtain the luxury of cold water for washing their hands either before or after dinner. One day he and his party dined with the lord chancellor; and now, thought he, for very shame they will allow us some means of purification. Not at all; the chancellor viewed this outlandish novelty with the same jealousy as others. However, on the earnest petition of Scaliger, he made an order that a basin or other vessel of cold water should be produced. His household bowed to this judgment, and a slop basin was cautiously introduced. "What!" said Scaliger, "only one, and we so many?" Even that one contained but a teacup full of water: but the great scholar soon found that he must be thankful for what he had got. It had cost the whole strength of the English chancery to produce that single cup of water; and, for that day, no man in his senses could look for a second. Pretty much the same struggle, and for the same cheap reform, commenced about the year 1805-6. Post-chaise travellers could, of course, have what they liked; and generally they asked for a bed room. It is of coach travellers I speak. And the particular innovation in question commenced, as was natural, with the mail coach, which, from the much higher scale of its fares, commanded a much more select class of company. I was a party to the very earliest attempts at breaking ground in this alarming revolution. Well do I remember the astonishment of some waiters, the indignation of others, the sympathetic uproars which spread to the bar, to the kitchen, and even to the stables, at the first opening of our extravagant demands. Sometimes even the landlady thought the case worthy of her interference, and came forward to remonstrate with us upon our unheard-of conduct. But gradually we made way. Like Scaliger, at first we got but one basin amongst us, and that one was brought into the breakfast room; but scarcely had two years revolved before we began to see four, and all appurtenances, arranged duly in correspondence to the number of inside passengers by the mail; and, as outside travelling was continually gaining ground amongst the wealthier classes, more comprehensive arrangements were often made; though, even to this day, so much influence survives, from the original aristocratic principle upon which public carriages were constructed, that on the mail coaches there still prevails the most scandalous inattention to the comfort, and even to the security, of the outside passengers: a slippery glazed roof frequently makes the sitting a matter of effort and anxiety, whilst the little iron side rail of four inches in height serves no one purpose but that of bruising the thigh. Concurrently with these reforms in the system of personal cleanliness, others were silently making way through all departments of the household economy. Dust, from the reign of George II., became scarcer; gradually it came to bear an antiquarian value: basins lost their grim appearance, and looked as clean as in gentlemen's houses. And at length the whole system was so thoroughly ventilated and purified, that all good inns, nay, generally speaking, even second-rate inns, at this day, reflect the best features, as to cleanliness and neatness, of well-managed private establishments.

CHAPTER XII.
MY BROTHER

The reader who may have accompanied me in these wandering memorials of my own life and casual experiences, will be aware, that in many cases the neglect of chronological order is not merely permitted, but is in fact to some degree inevitable: there are cases, for instance, which, as a whole, connect themselves with my own life at so many different eras, that, upon any chronological principle of position, it would have been difficult to assign them a proper place; backwards or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever place they had been introduced; and in their entire compass, from first to last, never could have been represented as properly belonging to any one present time, whensoever that had been selected: belonging to every place alike, they would belong, according to the proverb, to no place at all; or, (reversing that proverb,) belonging to no place by preferable right, they would, in fact, belong to every place, and therefore to this place.

The incidents I am now going to relate come under this rule; for they form part of a story which fell in with my own life at many different points. It is a story taken from the life of my own brother; and I dwell on it with the more willingness, because it furnishes an indirect lesson upon a great principle of social life, now and for many years back struggling for its just supremacy—the principle that all corporal punishments whatsoever, and upon whomsoever inflicted, are hateful, and an indignity to our common nature, which (with or without our consent) is enshrined in the person of the sufferer. Degrading him, they degrade us. I will not here add one word upon the general thesis, but go on to the facts of this case; which, if all its incidents could now be recovered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever yet has tried the spirit of fortitude and patience in a child. But its moral interest depends upon this—that, simply out of one brutal chastisement, arose naturally the entire series of events which so very nearly made shipwreck of all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the tranquility of a whole family for seven years.

My next brother, younger by about four years than myself, (he, in fact, that caused so much affliction to the Sultan Amurath,) was a boy of exquisite and delicate beauty—delicate, that is, in respect to its feminine elegance and bloom; for else (as regards constitution) he turned out remarkably robust. In such excess did his beauty flourish during childhood, that those who remember him and myself at the public school at Bath will also remember the ludicrous molestation in the streets (for to him it was molestation) which it entailed upon him—ladies stopping constantly to kiss him. On first coming up to Bath from Greenhay, my mother occupied the very appartments on the North Parade just quitted by Edmund Burke, then in a decaying condition, though he did not die (I believe) till 1797. That state of Burkes's health, connected with the expectation of finding him still there, brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the childish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted upon him what he viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus began a persecution which continued as long as his years allowed it. The most brilliant complexion that could be imagined, the features of an Antinous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life, (afterwards he lost it,) made him the subject of never-ending admiration to the whole female population, gentle and simple, who passed him in the streets. In after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse and scornful coyness. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible was he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle with all his might to liberate himself from the gentle violence which was continually offered; and he renewed the scene (so elaborately painted by Shakspeare) of the conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years this continued a subject of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of laughter on the other, between my brother and his plainer school-fellows. Not that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject—far from it; it struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be subjected to the caresses of women, without leave asked; this was felt to be a badge of childhood, and a proof that the object of such caressing tenderness, so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a baby—not to mention that the very foundation of all this distinction, a beautiful face, is as a male distinction regarded in a very questionable light by multitudes, and often by those most who are the possessors of that distinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. Not one of us could feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situation; nor did he cease, when increasing years had liberated him from that female expression of delight in his beauty, to regard the beauty itself as a degradation; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it; though, in reality, it did him service in after distresses, when no other endowment whatsoever would have been availing. Often, in fact, do men's natures sternly contradict the promise of their features; for no person would have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of a Narcissus, lay shrouded a most heroic nature; not merely an adventurous courage, but with a capacity of patient submission to hardship, and of wrestling with calamity, such as is rarely found amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, to think that the state of degradation in which he believed himself to have passed his childish years, from the sort of public petting which I have described, and his strong recoil from it as an insult, went much deeper than was supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, and in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to resent, as an original insult of nature, the having given him a false index of character in his feminine beauty, and to take a pleasure in contradicting it. Had it been in his power, he would have spoiled it. Certain it is, that, from the time he reached his eleventh birthday, he had begun already to withdraw himself from the society of all other boys,—to fall into long fits of abstraction,—and to throw himself upon his own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary. Schoolfellows of his own age and standing—those, even, who were the most amiable—he shunned; and, many years after his disappearance, I found, in his handwriting, a collection of fragments, couched in a sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most extraordinary evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously concentrating his own hopes in himself, and abjuring the rest of the world, that can ever have emanated from so young a person; since, upon the largest allowance, and supposing them to have been written on the eve of his quitting England, they must have been written at the age of twelve. I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious compositions; they were of a nature to have proceeded rather from some mystical quietist, such as Madame Guyon, if with this rapt devotion one can suppose the union of a rebellious and murmuring ambition. Passionate apostrophes there were to nature and the powers of nature; and what seemed strangest of all was, that, in style, not only were they free from all tumor and inflation which might have been looked for in so young a writer, but were even wilfully childish and colloquial in a pathetic degree—in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the difference between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they somewhat resemble that beautiful poem ⁹² of George Herbert, entitled LOVE UNKNOWN, in which he describes symbolically to a friend, under the form of treacherous ill usage he had experienced, the religious processes by which his soul had been weaned from the world. The most obvious solution of the mystery would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied from some obscure author; but, besides that no author could have remained obscure in this age of elaborate research, who had been capable of sighs (for such I may call them) drawn up from such well-like depths of feeling, and expressed with such fervor and simplicity of language, there was another testimony to their being the productions of him who owned the penmanship; which was, that some of the papers exhibited the whole process of creation and growth, such as erasures, substitutions, doubts expressed as to this and that form of expression, together with references backwards and forwards. Now, that the handwriting was my brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I go on with his story. In 1800, my visit to Ireland, and visits to other places subsequently, separated me from him for above a year. In 1801, we were at very different schools—I in the highest class of a great public school, he at a very sequestered parsonage on a wild moor (Horwich Moor) in Lancashire. This situation, probably, fed and cherished his melancholy habits; for he had no society except-that of a younger brother, who would give him no disturbance at all. The development of our national resources had not yet gone so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map of England everything like a heath, a breezy down, (such as gave so peculiar a character to the counties of Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious, indeed, as the landes of France, but equally wild and romantic. In such a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman, retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. To that I can speak myself; for in the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one; since, even to my youngest brother H., a headstrong child of seven, he used no stronger remonstrance, in urging him to some essential point of duty, than "Do be persuaded, sir." On another occasion I, accompanied by a friend, slept at Mr. J.'s: we were accidentally detained there through the greater part of the following day by snow; and, to the inexpressible surprise of my companion, a mercantile man from Manchester, for a considerable time after breakfast the reverend gentleman persisted in pursuing my brother from room to room, and at last from the ground floor up to the attics, holding a book open, (which turned out to be a Latin grammar;) each of them (pursuer and pursued) moving at a tolerably slow pace, my brother H. silent; but Mr. J., with a voice of adjuration, solemn and even sad, yet kind and conciliatory, singing out at intervals, "Do be persuaded, sir!" "It is your welfare I seek!" "Let your own interest, sir, plead in this matter between us!" And so the chase continued, ascending and descending, up to the very garrets, down to the very cellars, then steadily revolving from front to rear of the house; but finally with no result at all. The spectacle reminded me of a groom attempting to catch a coy pony by holding out a sieve containing, or pretending to contain, a bribe of oats. Mrs. J., the reverend gentleman's wife, assured us that the same process went on at intervals throughout the week; and in any case it was clearly good as a mode of exercise. Now, such a master, though little adapted for the headstrong H., was the very person for the thoughtful and too sensitive R. Search the island through, there could not have been found another situation so suitable to my brother's wayward and haughty nature. The clergyman was learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies; humble and modest beyond the proprieties of his situation, and treating my brother in all points as a companion; whilst, on the other hand, my brother was not the person to forget the respect due, by a triple title, to a clergyman, a scholar, and his own preceptor—one, besides, who so little thought of exacting it. How happy might all parties have been— what suffering, what danger, what years of miserable anxiety might have been spared to all who were interested—had the guardians and executors of my father's will thought fit to "let well alone"! But, "per star meglio" ⁹³ they chose to remove my brother from this gentle recluse to an active, bustling man of the world, the very anti-pole in character. What might be the pretensions of this gentleman to scholarship, I never had any means of judging; and, considering that he must now, (if living at all,) at a distance of thirty-six years, be gray headed, I shall respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He was of a class now annually declining (and I hope rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God, in this point at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, amongst the many, many cases of reform destined eventually to turn out chimerical, this one, at least, never can be defeated, injured, or eclipsed. As man grows more intellectual, the power of managing him by his intellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all appeals to his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on pari passu. And, if a "Te Deum," or an "O, Jubilate!" were to be celebrated by all nations and languages for any one advance and absolute conquest over wrong and error won by human nature in our times,—yes, not excepting

"The bloody writing by all nations torn"—

the abolition of the commerce in slaves,—to my thinking, that festival should be for the mighty progress made towards the suppression of brutal, bestial modes of punishment. Nay, I may call them worse than bestial; for a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or with his hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not be moved or won over by conciliatory means,—by means that presuppose him a reasonable creature,—then let him die, confounded in his own vileness; but let not me, let not the man (that is to say) who has him in his power, dishonor himself by inflicting punishments, violating that grandeur of human nature which, not in any vague rhetorical sense, but upon a religious principle of duty, (viz., the scriptural doctrine that the human person is "the temple of the Holy Ghost,") ought to be a consecrated thing in the eyes of all good men; and of this we may be assured,—this is more sure than day or night,—that, in proportion as man is honored, exalted, trusted, in that proportion will he become more worthy of honor, of exaltation, of trust.

This schoolmaster had very different views of man and his nature. He not only thought that physical coercion was the one sole engine by which man could be managed, but—on the principle of that common maxim which declares that, when two schoolboys meet, with powers at all near to a balance, no peace can be expected between them until it is fairly settled which is the master—on that same principle he fancied that no pupil could adequately or proportionably reverence his master until he had settled the precise proportion of superiority in animal powers by which his master was in advance of himself. Strength of blows only could ascertain that; and, as he was not very nice about creating his opportunities, as he plunged at once "in medias res," and more especially when he saw or suspected my rebellious tendencies, he soon picked a quarrel with my unfortunate brother. Not, be it observed, that he much cared for a well-looking or respectable quarrel. No. I have been assured that, even when the most fawning obsequiousness ad appealed to his clemency, in the person of some timorous new-comer, appalled by the reports he had heard, even in such cases, (deeming it wise to impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his Jovian thunders) he made a practice of doing thus: He would speak loud, utter some order, not very clearly, perhaps, as respected the sound, but with perfect perplexity as regarded the sense, to the timid, sensitive boy upon whom he intended to fix a charge of disobedience. "Sir, if you please, what was it that you said?" "What was it that I said? What! playing upon my words? Chopping logic? Strip, sir; strip this instant." Thenceforward this timid boy became a serviceable instrument in his equipage. Not only was he a proof, even without coöperation on the master's part, that extreme cases of submission could not insure mercy, but also he, this boy, in his own person, breathed forth, at intervals, a dim sense of awe and worship—the religion of fear—towards the grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by electrical conductors, was conveyed throughout every region of the establishment a tremulous sensibility that vibrated towards the centre. Different, O Rowland Hill! are the laws of thy establishment; far other are the echoes heard amid the ancient halls of Bruce. ⁹⁴ There it is possible for the timid child to be happy—for the child destined to an early grave to reap his brief harvest in peace. Wherefore were there no such asylums in those days? Man flourished then, as now, in beauty and in power. Wherefore did he not put forth his power upon establishments that might cultivate happiness as well as knowledge? Wherefore did no man cry aloud, in the spirit of Wordsworth,—

 
  "Ah, what avails heroic deed?
  What liberty? if no defence
  Be won for feeble innocence.
  Father of all! though wilful manhood read
  His punishment in soul distress
Grant to the morn of life its natural blessedness"?
 

Meantime, my brother R., in an evil hour, having been removed from that most quiet of human sanctuaries, having forfeited that peace which possibly he was never to retrieve, fell (as I have said) into the power of this Moloch. And this Moloch upon him illustrated the laws of his establishment; him also, the gentle, the beautiful, but, also the proud, the haughty, the beat, kicked, trampled on!

In two hours from that time, my brother was on the road to Liverpool. Painfully he made out his way, having not much money, and with a sense of total abandonment which made him feel that all he might have would prove little enough for his purposes.

My brother went to an inn, after his long, long journey to Liverpool, footsore—(for he had walked through four days, and, from ignorance of the world, combined with excessive shyness,—O, how shy do people become from pride!—had not profited by those well-known incidents upon English high roads—return post chaises, stage coaches, led horses, or wagons)—footsore, and eager for sleep. Sleep, supper, breakfast in the morning,—all these he had; so far his slender finances reached; and for these he paid the treacherous landlord; who then proposed to him that they should take a walk out together, by way of looking at the public buildings and the docks. It seems the man had noticed my brother's beauty, some circumstances about his dress inconsistent with his mode of travelling, and also his style of conversation. Accordingly, he wiled him along from street to street, until they reached the Town Hall. "Here seems to be a fine building," said this Jesuitical guide,—as if it had been some new Pompeii, some Luxor or Palmyra, that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst the undiscovered parts of Liverpool,—"here seems to be a fine building; shall we go in and ask leave to look at it?" My brother, thinking less of the spectacle than the spectator, whom, in a wilderness of man, naturally he wished to make his friend, consented readily. In they went; and, by the merest accident, Mr. Mayor and the town council were then sitting. To them the insidious landlord communicated privately an account of his suspicions. He himself conducted my brother, under pretence of discovering the best station for picturesque purposes, to the particular box for prisoners at the bar. This was not suspected by the poor boy, not even when Mr. Mayor began to question him. He still thought it an accident, though doubtless he blushed excessively on being questioned, and questioned so impertinently, in public. The object of the mayor and of other Liverpool gentlemen then present was, to ascertain my brother's real rank and family; for he persisted in representing himself as a poor wandering boy. Various means were vainly tried to elicit this information; until at length—like the wily Ulysses, who mixed with his peddler's budget of female ornaments and attire a few arms, by way of tempting Achilles to a self-detection in the court of Lycomedes—one gentleman counselled the mayor to send for a Greek Testament. This was done; the Testament was presented open at St. John's Gospel to my brother, and he was requested to say whether he knew in what language that book was written; or whether, perhaps, he could furnish them with a translation from the page before him. R., in his confusion, did not read the meaning of this appeal, and fell into the snare; construed a few verses; and immediately was consigned to the care of a gentleman, who won from him by kindness what he had refused to importunities or menaces. His family he confessed at once, but not his school. An express was therefore forwarded from Liverpool to our nearest male relative—a military man, then by accident on leave of absence from India. He came over, took my brother back, (looking upon the whole as a boyish frolic of no permanent importance,) made some stipulations in his behalf for indemnity from punishment, and immediately returned home. Left to himself, the grim tyrant of the school easily evaded the stipulations, and repeated his brutalities more fiercely than before—now acting in the double spirit of tyranny and revenge.

In a few hours, my brother was again on the road to Liverpool. But not on this occasion did he resort to any inn, or visit any treacherous hunter of the picturesque. He offered himself to no temptations now, nor to any risks. Right onwards he went to the docks, addressed himself to a grave, elderly master of a trading vessel, bound upon a distant voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The skipper was a good and sensible man, and (as it turned out) a sailor accomplished in all parts of his profession. The ship which he commanded was a South Sea whaler, belonging to Lord Grenville—whether lying at Liverpool or in the Thames at that moment, I am not sure. However, they soon afterwards sailed.

For somewhat less than three years my brother continued under the care of this good man, who was interested by his appearance, and by some resemblance which he fancied in his features to a son whom he had lost. Fortunate, indeed, for the poor boy was this interval of fatherly superintendence; for, under this captain, he was not only preserved from the perils which afterwards beseiged him, until his years had made him more capable of confronting them, but also he had thus an opportunity, which he improved to the utmost, of making himself acquainted with the two separate branches of his profession—navigation and seamanship, qualifications which are not very often united.

After the death of his captain, my brother ran through many wild adventures; until at length, after a severe action, fought off the coast of Peru, the armed merchant-man in which he then served was captured by pirates. Most of the crew were massacred. My brother, on account of the important services he could render, was spared; and with these pirates, cruising under a black flag, and perpetrating unnumbered atrocities, he was obliged to sail for the next two years; nor could he, in all that period, find any opportunity for effecting his escape.

During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader imagine the perils of every sort which beseiged one so young, so inexperienced, so sensitive, and so haughty; perils to his life; (but these it was the very expression of his unhappy situation, were the perils least to be mourned for;) perils to his good name, going the length of absolute infamy—since, if the piratical ship had been captured by a British man-of-war, he might have found it impossible to clear himself of a voluntary participation in the bloody actions of his shipmates; and, on the other hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which they frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a Spanish guarda costa, he would scarcely have been able, from his ignorance of the Spanish language, to draw even a momentary attention to the special circumstances of his own situation; he would have been involved in the general presumptions of the case, and would have been executed in a summary way, upon the prima facie evidence against him, that he did not appear to be in the condition of a prisoner; and, if his name had ever again reached his country, it would have been in some sad list of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country; and even these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by the name of pirate, which at once includes them all, and surpasses them all. These were perils sufficiently distressing at any rate; but last of all came others even more appalling—the perils of moral contamination, in that excess which might be looked for from such associates; not, be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless principles adopted into his creed of practical ethics, but that brutal transfiguration of the entire character, which occurs, for instance, in the case of the young gypsy son of Effie Deans; a change making it impossible to rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consigning its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself might have lost its horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers enfeebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their slumbers by the glare of conflagration, reflected from gleaming cutlasses and from the faces of demons. This fear it was—a fear like this, as I have often thought—which must, amidst her other woes, have been the Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal heart, the grief paramount, the "crowning" grief—the prospect, namely, that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty to peace and humble innocence; but that his fair cheek would be ravaged by vice as well as sorrow; that he would be tempted into brutal orgies, and every mode of moral pollution; until, like poor Constance with her young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that the royal mother should see her son in "the courts of heaven," she would not know again one so fearfully transfigured. This prospect for the royal Constance of revolutionary France was but too painfully fulfilled, as we are taught to guess even from the faithful records of the Duchesse d'Angoulême. The young dauphin, (it has been said, 1837,) to the infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become loathsome for coarse brutality, as well as for habits of uncleanliness, to all who approached him—one purpose of his guilty tutors being to render royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. And, in fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this purpose, for the moment, and to the extent of an individual case, that, upon that account alone, but still more for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome news with respect to him—him whose birth ⁹⁵ had drawn anthems of exultation from twenty-five millions of men—was the news of his death. And what else can well be expected for children suddenly withdrawn from parental tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at such an age as nine or ten, and under the wilful misleading of perfidious guides? But, in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelming as they seemed, were turned aside by some good angel; all had failed to harm him; and from the fiery furnace he came out unsinged.