Chapter XV (2)

The impressible visitor declares that he felt disposed to fall upon his knees before this grand and simple human being, but refrained. They went to the middle of a bridge thrown across an arm of the lake, and Chateaubriand drew from his pocket a piece of bread which he had placed there after breakfast. This he began to throw into the lake, when a dozen ducks darted forth from a sort of isle formed of reeds, and hastened to dispute the repast prepared for them by the hand which had written _Rene, The Genius of Christianity_ and _The Martyrs_. Whilst thus engaged, Chateaubriand leaned upon the parapet of the bridge, his lips contracted by a smile, but his eyes grave and sad. Gradually his movements became mechanical, his face assumed an expression of profound melancholy, the shadow of his thoughts passed across his large forehead like clouds of heaven; and there were among them recollections of his country, his family and his tender friendships, more sorrowful than all others. He moved, sighed, and, recalling the presence of his visitor, turned round.

"If you regret Paris," said Dumas, "why not return? Nothing exiles you--all recalls you."

"What could I do?" said Chateaubriand. "I was at Cauterets when the revolution of July took place. I returned to Paris. I saw one throne in blood, and another in the mud--lawyers making a constitution--a king shaking hands with rag-pickers: that was mortally sad; above all, when a man is filled as I am with the great traditions of the monarchy."

"I thought you recognized popular sovereignty?"

"Well, kings should go back from time to time to the source of their authority--election; but this time they have cut a branch from the tree, a link from the chain. They should have elected Henry V., not Louis Philippe."

"A sad wish for the poor child! The Henrys are unfortunate: they have been poisoned or assassinated."

"Well," said Chateaubriand, "it is better to die by the poniard than from exile: it is quicker, and you suffer less."

"You will not return to France?"

"Possibly, to defend the duchess de Berri if she is tried."

"And if not?"

"Then," said Chateaubriand, throwing bread into the water, "I shall continue to feed my ducks."

JOHN ESTEN COOKE.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

BACONS AND BARONETS.

There died in November last a gentleman who, though not remarkable himself, was the head and representative of so famous a family and order that his death is an event deserving of some notice. This was Sir Henry Hickman Bacon, premier baronet of England. This gentleman was not the descendant of the great Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, but head of the family whence that eminent man, a cadet of the house, sprung.

The origin[M] of this family is lost in the obscurity of centuries. Sir Nicholas, an eminent lawyer of England in the reign of Queen Mary, succeeded, when Elizabeth ascended the throne, to the lord-keepership of the great seal. He married twice, and had a numerous issue, and the baronet lately deceased is the direct representative of the lord-keeper's eldest son by his first marriage, who was the first person created--by James I., on May 22, 1611--a baronet.

And it is not a little remarkable that whilst of the baronetcies since created an immense percentage have become extinct, and only some half dozen of those created in 1611 remain, the first ever created has survived, and bids fair to do so for some time to come. The baronetcy of Hobart (earl of Buckinghamshire)--whose ancestral seat of Blickling, in Norfolk, passed some time since, with its magnificent collection of books, by marriage, into the Scotch family of Ker, and now belongs to the marquis of Lothian--and that of Shirley (held by Earl Ferrers), seem to be the only baronetcies now extant whose patents bear date the same day as that of Bacon.

The others left of the same year are Mordaunt, of which we heard so much in a trial in 1870; Gerard, an ancient Lancashire Catholic house; Monson (Lord Monson); Musgrave of Edenhall ("the luck of Edenhall" is the subject of one of Longfellow's poems); Gresley, Twysden, Temple and Houghton. The last became well known a few years ago in this country as the largest holder of Confederate bonds.

Francis Bacon, familiarly known as Lord Bacon, though in fact he never enjoyed that honor, his titles being Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Alban's, was second son of his father's second marriage, his mother being one of three sisters, the most eminent blue-stockings of the period, daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gidea Hall, Essex.

Another of Sir Anthony Cooke's daughters was Lady Burleigh, who had been governess to Edward VI., second wife of the famous lord-treasurer, and direct ancestress of the present talented marquis of Salisbury, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, whose sister, Lady Mildred Beresford-Hope, wife of the well-known son of the author of _Anastasius_, bears the same name (Mildred) as her ancestress. Indeed, names are thus frequently transmitted for centuries in English families, and often thus serve as links in genealogical research. The Cooke family has long been extinct, and their stately seat was pulled down by a London alderman in the eighteenth century.

Another sister, Lady Hobby--whose husband resided at Bisham Abbey, a fine old place, maintained in admirable repair, near Windsor--was a terrible disciplinarian, and there is an ugly story of her having whipped a wretched son of hers into his grave, from exasperation at his inability to make his "pothooks," when she was teaching him writing, without blots. Curiously enough, when, some years ago, improvements were being made at the Abbey, a number of copy-books of the style of writing common at the period in which Lady Hobby lived were discovered behind wainscoting, and all were blotted.

The manor of Gorhambury, the great Bacon's seat, was purchased by his father, whose other seat was Redgrave in Suffolk. Gorhambury is near the town of St. Alban's, renowned for its abbey, now in course of splendid rehabilitation.

Not far from St. Alban's once stood the celebrated Roman city of Verulam, called by Tacitus _Verulamium_, which Bacon, deeply imbued with Latin learning, appropriately selected for his first title. The plough has now for many centuries made furrows over it, and the only vestiges remaining are a few detached masses of the wall. Verulam was bounded on the south-west by the Roman Watling Street. Gorhambury was built by Sir Nicholas, and in the archbishop of Canterbury's library at Lambeth may be seen an interesting account of the expenses. It need scarcely be added that Queen Elizabeth paid her lord-keeper a visit there. Sir Nicholas Bacon left Gorhambury to Mr. Anthony Bacon, the eldest son of his second marriage, and he, dying unmarried, left the estate to his brother Francis.

Gorhambury now belongs to the earl of Verulam, whose family name is Grimston. It was left by the great Bacon to his friend, Sir Thomas Meautys, and thence, by a course of intricate successions, came to the present proprietor.

Bacon, like so many other famous men, had no children. He died in Lord Arundel's house at Highgate in 1626.

Sir Robert Bacon, fifth baronet, sold Redgrave, the family seat in Suffolk, to Lord Chief-Justice Holt toward the end of the seventeenth century. Holt, who died in London 5th of March, 1710, was buried there, and a grand monument to his memory may be seen in the church. It was erected by his brother and heir, for, like Bacon, he was childless.

Redgrave Hall, eighty-seven miles from London by the coach-road, is a large square mansion. The male line of the Holt family has long been extinct, but the present owner of the estate is descended from the great lord chief-justice's niece, who married Mr. Wilson, a younger son of an ancient Westmoreland family.

But to pass to the origin of the order of baronets. After one of the almost chronic Irish insurrections against British rule, James I. conceived in 1609 the idea of offering to English and Scotch settlers, known to be possessed of capital, a large portion of the forfeited estates in Ulster. The supposed necessity of a military force for the protection of the colonists suggested to Sir Antony Shirley a project of raising money for the king. He proposed the creation of a new honor, between those of knight and baron, and that it be conferred by patent at a fixed price for the support of the army in Ulster--that it should descend to heirs male, and be confined to two hundred gentlemen of three descents in actual possession of lands worth one thousand pounds a year--a sum equal to five thousand now.[N]

James I. approved of the scheme, as he would have done of any which seemed feasible for raising the wind, and the patents were offered at the price of ten hundred and ninety-five pounds, the estimated amount of the charge of thirty soldiers during three years. The purchasers did not prove so numerous as had been expected. In the first six years ninety-three patents were sold at L101,835. "It is unnecessary to add," says Doctor Lingard, "that the money never found its way to Ireland" in the shape of forces paid for by this process.

There have been three or four creations of baronetesses in their own right, but nearly two centuries have elapsed since such a creation. James II. made a curious remainder clause in a patent, by creating a Dutchman a baronet with remainder to his mother. It has been a mooted question whether baronets are not entitled to a coronet, and a certain Sir Charles Lamb, who died a few years ago, was so determined to uphold their privileges on this score that he had this ensign worked into the ornamentation of his entrance gates at Beaufort, near Battle Abbey, Sussex; but he met with small encouragement in such notions from his brother-baronets. An old English gentleman was wont to declare that more of disagreeable eccentricity is to be found amongst members of the baronetage than amongst those of any other order of men. He chanced to be thrown early in life amongst several eccentric beings of the class, and took his ideas accordingly; but it is a fact that a very large number of stories about eccentric baronets are in circulation. A marked man of the kind was early in the last century an individual who, in consequence of his height, was called Long Sir Thomas Robinson. It was in allusion to him that the lines were penned:

Unlike to Robinson shall be my song--
It shall be witty, and it sha'n't be long.

This was the man to whom a Russian nobleman displayed the greatest anxiety to be introduced, under the impression that he was the real identical and unadulterated Robinson Crusoe.

Sir Thomas was a bore of the first magnitude, and an inveterate hanger-on about cabinet-ministers and other prominent persons. He was constantly worrying Lord Burlington and Lord Burlington's servants by his Paul-pry-like presence. On calling at Burlington House, and being told that his lordship had gone out, he would desire to be let in to look at the clock or to play with a monkey which was kept in the hall, and so at length get into his lordship's room. The servants, exasperated, preconcerted a scheme to be rid of the nuisance. So, one day, as soon as the porter opened the gate and found Sir Thomas outside, he said, "His lordship is gone out, the clock has stopped, the monkey is dead."[O]

MISS NEILSON.

The story of _La Giulietta_ was told, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, by Luigi da Porto, a gentleman of Vicenza who had served in the army, and to whom it was narrated by one of his archers to beguile a solitary night-march. After passing through various translations the story was taken by Shakespeare as the groundwork of his wonderful tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, one of his earliest plays, and one of the most varied in passion and sentiment. Schlegel says of it: "It shines with the colors of the dawn of morning, but a dawn whose purple clouds already announce the thunder of a sultry day."

The stormy acting of the elder Kean in _Richard III._--that epitome of ambition and bloodshed--was said to produce the effect of reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning: in _Romeo and Juliet_ the first two acts are illumined only by the soft moonlight of love, and we are not startled by the lightning of tragedy until it gleams upon the bloody blade of Tybalt in the beginning of the third act: then Love and Death join hands, and move for a time with equal step across the stage. Finally come the poisoning and self-slaughters, and in the representation the curtain falls upon a corse-strewn graveyard, where Death reigns alone. Sad contrast to the lighted ball-room where the lovers first looked into each other's eyes--to the fair garden that lay at midnight "all Danae to the stars"--to the moon-silvered balcony from which Juliet leaned in her loveliness as she exchanged with Romeo her earliest vows!

Beneath Italian skies girls spring with sudden leap to womanhood, and the seed of the tender passion hardly drops into the heart before it buds and blooms, a perfect flower. Though the actual lapse of time represented in the play occupies only a few days, Juliet in that brief period must assume several distinct characters. We see her first the coy, heart-whole maiden, the cherished heiress of a patrician house: soon the blind bow-boy launches his shaft, and, quick as thought, she is passionately, impulsively, enduringly in love; then we see her but a few hours a bride, with black sorrow creeping already to darken her happiness; her kinsman is slain, Romeo banished, and the coy maiden is changed at once to the devoted wife, capable of any sacrifice that will enable her to rejoin her husband, then follow the fearful drinking of the philter, the miscarriage of the Friar's scheme, and the death of the lovers, who seek in the grave that union denied them on earth. What varied qualities and acts are clustered here!--simplicity, love, hope, fear, courage, despair, suicide. In the whole range of Shakespeare's female characters there is none so difficult to portray--none requiring such a combination of beauty and talent; and we need not marvel that the part of Juliet is rarely attempted, and still more rarely with success.

That Miss Neilson was successful during her recent short engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre may be inferred, not alone from the great audiences that thronged the theatre night after night--for people will often throng to see a very unworthy performance--but from the intellectual character of those audiences, and the manifest pleasure they derived from seeing the fair English actress.

In every criticism it should be borne in mind that she played under great disadvantage. She was unfortunately, with some few exceptions, very badly supported. It seems ungracious, therefore, to search for any flaw in the performance of such an admirable actress, who has left behind her so many charming memories; yet it must be admitted that her acting is not always as faultless as her face. In her Juliet there are striking inequalities perceptible: sometimes she seems to have just grasped perfection, then again she makes one wonder that she does no better. In portraying love-scenes she is unsurpassed: she is graceful and beautiful, has studied her parts thoroughly, has a sweet, penetrating voice, and seems herself to feel the sentiments she would convey to others. Her enunciation is remarkably distinct, and she has the power of mingling more or less pathos with the tones to express sorrow in greater or less degree: in one scene, where she thinks that Romeo has been murdered, her cheeks are wet with actual tears. At the close of the ball, when she learns that the fascinating young pilgrim is a Montague, the hereditary enemy of her house, she gives her first touch of pathos to the words--

My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

But it is a pathos entirely different from that which later tinges her sad good-night to her mother and nurse when she has determined to counterfeit death:

Farewell!--God knows when we shall meet again.

Miss Neilson also possesses, in an eminent degree, the power to portray that sly humor without malice known as _archness_. In the earlier phases of Juliet's career, and throughout the whole impersonation of Rosalind in _As You Like It_, this accomplishment stands the actress in good stead: she undoubtedly owes to it much of her power to charm. It strikes one when she first comes on the stage as Juliet and gently checks the garrulous old Nurse, taking up the thread of the discourse--

And stint thou too, I pray thee, nurse, say I

again, in her witty word-fencing with the mock palmer at the ball--

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss;

so too in the garden-scene, when she half rebukes herself, and all encourages her lover--

O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully;
Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.

And she shows it wonderfully in her coaxing, half-pettish behavior to the provoking old woman--talkative and reticent by fits and starts, now whining and now laughing--who has been to seek out Romeo, and brought back news of him. In _As You Like It_, Rosalind's bright humor ripples and laughs like a silver brook through the glades of Ardennes, and trickles gently even into the epilogue: in this lively comedy--so much lighter and easier than the heavy tragedy we are discussing too--love and despair never come to overlay and destroy the arch humor. If there be any defect in the performance of the banished princess, it must still remain, like Orlando's verses, tacked to some tree in the forest, but, unlike those verses, still unseen.

To return to the tragedy--for in the discussion of two plays in which the same faculties are exhibited by the same actress it is most convenient to pass at times from one play to the other--who that has seen Miss Neilson tread the stately _minuet de la cour_ at the ball given in the palace of the Capulets will deny her the possession of marvelous grace? The long floating robe and abundant train, the high-heeled, pointed shoe of the period, instead of embarrassing her, seem but to give additional opportunity for displaying elegance of pose and gesture. In the garden-scene, when nightingales are whist, bright moonlight falls upon the balcony, and lights up the face of Juliet who leans there, certainly the fairest flower in that scenic paradise. As yet the course of love runs smooth for her: she does not dream of the dreadful gulf down which she is about to plunge, and her happy tones fall musically upon the air, "smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiles." This happiness continues till her speedy and clandestine marriage. Soon after the Nurse comes home, and by her incoherent mutterings leads Juliet to suppose that Romeo is slain: then we have the first display of grief, but it is a grief so sudden and so violent that the blow stuns and almost silences the young wife. She is roused from this by learning at last that it is Tybalt who is dead, and that Romeo is exiled; which last causes her far greater grief than the loss of her cousin. Her sorrow, however, is at once displaced by rage when the Nurse speaks against her husband--

Shame come to Romeo!--

Blistered be thy tongue,
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.

The sorrow and anger here are well enacted, being neither overdone nor forced. It is here at least shown that Miss Neilson can, when she pleases, express great passions with that suppressed vehemence which carries the cultivated spectator away far more than violence of voice and gesture. Such suppression, with a view to producing greater effect by leaving much to the excited imagination of the beholder, is not practiced only by the tactful histrionic artist--it pervades all art. To take a single brief example: the greatest sculptors, knowing that the chisel could produce form, not color, have shrunk from indicating the pupil of the eye in their statues, and left the eyeball smooth, because the imagination was more pleased with entire absence of the organ than with its imperfect representation. So with ultra-clamorous passion and wild melodramatic action on the stage: both are better omitted than expressed. These remarks are made here in connection with Miss Neilson's first fair displays of passionate sorrow and sorrowful passion: presently they may be applied again, less favorably, to her Juliet. In her Rosalind, however--to refer to _As You Like It_ once more--she gives another fine example of the power of suppressed, suggestive action accompanying the expression of hot wrath. When the tyrant duke informs her that she is banished from his court, she kneels before him in supplication and begs to know the reason of his harsh decree. But the instant he intimates that her father is a traitor, and she another as his daughter, she springs to her feet, and in an attitude of intense defiance, but without a motion of her folded arms, flings back her scornful retort:

So was I when your highness took his dukedom;
So was I when your highness banished him:
Treason is not inherited, my lord;
Or, if we did derive it from our friends,
What's that to me? my father was no traitor.

Here again is a display of power without distortion or over-acting, such as must give the actress fair title to celebrity.

Let us return now to Juliet and her approaching doom. There is a sad scene in her chamber at early daybreak, for banished Romeo must leave her and haste to Mantua, lest sunrise betray him still lingering in Verona. Juliet at first lovingly detains him, then fearfully urges him to fly; then as he descends from the balcony would fain recall him, and sinks in a swoon when she finds he is really gone. The parents come in and announce their determination that she must marry Paris forthwith: finding her unwilling to comply, they leave her with fierce threats in case she continue disobedient, and even the time-serving, timid old Nurse, though aware of her marriage with Romeo, urges her to comply with their wishes. Thus left entirely to herself, Juliet determines to die rather than prove false to her husband. She hastens to the Friar who married them, and he gives her the philter, which she accepts joyfully and carries home in her bosom. Up to this point her acting is good, because it is natural. Love, grief, stern determination are here successively and skillfully developed by Miss Neilson. But in the next act, just before she drinks the philter alone in her chamber, she oversteps the modesty of nature. In her attempt to express extreme terror at the fearful visions that her excited imagination conjures up, she loses herself in a wild whirlwind of vociferation, accompanied by frantic looks and gestures. All the loud artillery of old melodrama seems at once to be unlimbered and brought into action, with so much noise and smoke that one can neither hear the signals of the bugle nor see the manoeuvring of the guns. Of course, even to this part a superior actress like Miss Neilson can impart a certain dignity and interest which would be lacking in an inferior performer. She strikes a certain horror to the spectator by the very hideousness of her terror displayed. It is natural that a young girl about to be laid out alive in a tomb should be tormented with fearful imaginings; but then that young girl cherishes an all-pervading love for a living husband, whom she hopes to rejoin by means of her entombment: she expects that the gates of the mausoleum will open to admit her to life, not death, and she is urged by fear of a hateful second marriage; therefore it is unlikely--no matter what gloomy, blood-stained phantoms she may see--that she should shriek out her fears with such appalling clamor as would arouse any well-organized household, and thus defeat her prospects of success. As Miss Neilson has shown in former instances, a less violent announcement of her feelings would be far more forcible and far more natural. Besides, the actress has not yet reached the time when she wishes to depict her greatest misery: that climax is reached when she wakes in the vault and finds not only Tybalt "festering in his shroud," but her Romeo, her husband, a bloody corpse at her feet. If ever the ungovernable shriek of dying despair be allowable on the stage, it must be at such a time, when Juliet falls upon the still warm body. Even the effect of such a wild performance at the very climax and end of a tragedy may be questioned; but there can be little doubt that the great violence exerted before in describing her horrible suspicions merely, deprives the actress of power to throw increased stress into her performance as the play moves to its close, and she is confronted with a far more horrible reality.

As though she feels that her power of melodramatic declamation has been weakened, Miss Neilson in the graveyard seems to rely more on melodramatic action. And it is very melodramatic. She rises from Romeo's body, where she has flung herself, where it would be natural she should remain to kill herself, and standing at some distance from the corpse, stabs herself openly with a stage dagger, then falling, drags herself slowly, accompanied by soft music, back to the body, and there at last expires. How much more effective would this part become if more were left to the beholder's imagination! Great artists generally avoid open stabbing on the stage, as it almost invariably produces the impression of trickery. We may see the gleaming blade and the arm descending to strike the blow, but it is best not to see the weapon pretending to enter the victim's body; and this can always be avoided by proper management. When Ristori as Medea murdered her children at the base of Saturn's statue, the other actors grouped around and screened the act from the view of the audience: when the crowd opened again, the bodies were discovered lying on the steps of the pedestal. The death of Juliet, instead of bringing tears to all eyes, as Miss Neilson undoubtedly could make it do, is thus rendered ineffective by over-acting; and when she drags herself six or eight feet along the stage, prostrate and stabbed,

Oh, 'tis dreadful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she,
Beautiful, exceedingly!

On the last evening of her engagement Miss Neilson appeared in the _Lady of Lyons_, and after the performance recited the following epilogue, suggested by Lord Lytton's recent death:

FAIR LADIES AND GOOD SIRS: Since last this play
Was acted on this stage, has passed away
Its noble author from the gaze of men,
No more, alas! to wield his facile pen.
In Knebworth's ancient park, across the sea,
Lord Lytton sleeps, but not his witchery.
The dramatist, romancer, poet, still
Can touch our hearts and captivate our will;
For laureled genius has the power to brave
Death's fell advance, and lives beyond the grave:
Bear witness, this grand audience clustered here.
Your plaudits cannot reach dead Lytton's ear,
But no more sweet libation can you pour
To Lytton's memory, on this distant shore,
Than your prolonged applause, which now proclaims,
Though the great author's gone, his fame remains.

M. M.

GENERAL LEE CONVULSED.

An old lady who knew General R. E. Lee almost from childhood declared that when he was a young man he enjoyed fun and indulged in harmless frolics as much as anybody. Later in life, and after his sons became stout lads, it is said that he was fond of sleeping with them, in order that he might in the morning engage in a regular old-fashioned romp and pillow-fight with the boys. During the war, though habitually grave, as befitted a commanding officer, he relished an occasional joke very highly. When some of his staff mistook a jug of buttermilk that had been sent him for "good old apple-jack," and made wry faces in gulping it down, he did not attempt to conceal his merriment. So, too, when inquiring into the nature of "this new game, 'chuck-a-buck,' I think they call it," which had been introduced into his army, there was a sly twinkle in his eye that showed how shrewdly he guessed its real purport as a gambling game. So, again, it is reported that he appreciated fully the "sell" which a wag on his staff palmed off upon a reporter, who promptly inserted it in the papers. The reporter wanted to know General Lee's hour for dining.

"Six o'clock--exactly at six," was the reply.

"I infer, then, that it is rather a formal meal?"

"Decidedly formal--in fact, I may say it is a rigidly military dinner."

"Military! how military?"

"Well, you see General Lee sits at the head of the table, and Colonel Chilton at the foot, and everything is done in red-tape style."

"Red tape at table! I don't understand you. Please explain."

"Certainly. General Lee never carves and never helps--all that is left to Colonel Chilton--but General Lee asks the guests what they will have: they tell him, then he issues his orders, and Colonel Chilton executes them. That's all."

"Go on, go on!" opening his notebook: "give me an example--tell me exactly how it is done."

"Suppose, then, that we have beef--we generally have beef. Grace is said by the chaplain, then General Lee raps on the table with the handle of his knife and says, 'Attention!' Everybody is silent. Every eye is turned toward General Lee. He looks at one of us--me, for example--and I rise and make a military salute. 'Captain C----, what will you be helped to?' says General Lee. I say 'Beef,' make another salute, and sit down. General Lee, fixing his eye on Colonel Chilton, says, 'Beef, for Captain C----.' My plate is passed, helped, and then Colonel Chilton, handing it to the servant, says,

'Beef for Captain C----,
By order of General Lee.
R. H. CHILTON, A. A. G.'"

And this absurd story went the round of the Southern papers.

After the war, General Lee rarely smiled, and one may say never laughed outright. Yet he was neither sad nor unsociable. But there was that about him which made it wellnigh impossible to believe that he could ever have given completely away to feelings of mirth and indulged in a real fit of cachinnation. Such, however, was the fact, and it occurred at a time when, of all others, one would have least expected it--in the retreat to Appomattox--and General Henry A. Wise was the occasion of it.

On the second or third day of the retreat, General Wise, who had long desired an interview with General Lee, discovered him at a distance, and immediately hastened toward him. While he was yet a great way off, General Lee, who happened at the time to be alone, turned and began to stare in a way that was most unusual with him. As Wise drew nearer the stare became intense and mixed with wonderment. A few steps more, and still General Lee gazed and gazed wonderingly, as if he had never seen Wise in his life. Amazed and puzzled at General Lee's unmistakable ignorance of his identity, Wise advanced quite close to him and said rather stiffly, "Good-morning, General Lee." It was very early and very cool, too--a sharp spring morning.

As he said this, General Lee's intense gaze relaxed, a smile appeared in its place, the smile deepened, broadened, and, spreading from feature to feature, ended at last in a fit of the most immoderate and uncontrollable laughter.

Astounded beyond words, and indignant beyond measure at such a reception, it was some time before General Wise could demand an explanation. During all this time General Lee laughed as a mature man rarely ever laughs.

The explanation, given through tears of laughter not yet dried, was simple enough. General Lee had mistaken the general for a Comanche Indian. He had lost his hat or cap, a dirty blanket was thrown over his shoulders to protect him from the keen morning air, and his face, washed in a mud-puddle and hastily wiped, retained a ring of red mud around the borders, which made the resemblance to an Indian as exact as well could be--all the more so in consequence of Wise's strong features.

Barely sufficient at the time (so incensed was Wise), the explanation eventually proved ample, for General Wise now laughs at this incident as heartily as any one, and often relates it himself, while it may well be doubted whether ever again in life General Lee found either the occasion or the disposition to relax his wonted gravity.

FUNERALS vs. PARTIES.

A Southern correspondent sends the following incident from real life, which illustrates the well-known negro fondness for so-called lugubrious festivals:

A lady friend of mine was much beset a few days ago by her cook for permission to attend the funeral of some relative. The _res angustae_ forbade her leaving just at that time, but, to compensate her for the deprivation, her mistress said, "Rose, I really feel very sorry for you, but you shall lose nothing by staying at home. I promise that you shall go to the first party that is given by any of your friends, and stay all night long."

Rose, tossing her head, replied, "Law! Miss Susan, how kin you talk like dat? You know I don't set no vally on parties. _Forty parties couldn't pay me for de sight of one corp!_" She saw the "corp."

FOOTNOTES:

[M] The origin of the name of Bacon is thus explained by Richard Verstegan, famous for Saxon lore and historical research:

"Bacon, that is, 'of the beechen tree,' anciently called Bucon; and whereas swines' flesh is now called by the name of bacon, it grew only at the first unto such as were fatted with Bucon or beech-mast."

It is, as a writer in _Notes and Queries_ points out, a curious authentication of this derivation that Collins, in his _Baronetage_, mentions that the first man of the name of Bacon of whom there is record in the Herald's College, bore for his arms "argent, a beech tree proper." Additional confirmation seems afforded by the fact that in certain places in England boys call beechen tops "bacons."

[N] "My father," says Thomas Shirley to the king, "being a man of excellent and working wit, did find out the device of making baronets, which brought to Your Majesty's coffers wellnigh one hundred thousand pounds, for which he was promised by the late Lord Salisbury (son of Miss Cooke, Bacon's aunt), lord-treasurer, a good recompense, which he never had." Ninety-three patents were sold within six years. It was promised in the patents that no new title of honor should be created between barons and baronets, and that when the number of two hundred had been filled up, no more should ever after be added. The first promise has been kept.

[O] This recalls a story of the Marquis of L----, Sydney Smith's friend, grandfather of the present peer. His lordship's gallantries were notorious, though most carefully concealed. On one occasion he went to visit a lady with whom he maintained very intimate relations. Not choosing to take a groom on such an occasion, he gave his horse to a boy in the street to hold. On coming out he looked up and down the street, but in vain, and at length had to go home steedless. On reaching L---- House, the groom, waiting at the door for his return, said, "Shall I go for the horse, my lord?" "The horse is dead," was the brief response. "Where shall I send for the saddle and bridle, my lord?" "Oh--a--a--h" (and then with emphasis), "they're dead too!"

NOTES.

As a knowledge of the circumstances under which a work of art is composed occasionally gives a clearer insight into certain of its peculiarities, so perhaps an analysis of the individual elements which go to make up the present Assembly of Versailles may give the reader a clue to the reason of some of its legislative measures, as well as to its possibilities for the future and its political tendencies. Such an analysis is made by the _Rappel_ of Paris in an elaborate article, from which we must only cite a few points. The Assembly, then, contains, it appears, 2 princes (the princes d'Orleans), 7 dukes, 30 marquises, 52 counts, 17 viscounts, 18 barons and 97 untitled nobles, or those "_n'ayant que la particule_;" which last phrase we may explain to mean having the _de_ prefixed to their names, without other titular distinction. Next, it contains 163 great landed proprietors, including the richest in France; 155 advocates; 48 leading manufacturers; 45 officers or ex-officers of the army, chiefly of high rank; 35 magistrates or ex-magistrates; 25 engineers; 23 physicians; 21 professors; 19 notaries or ex-notaries; 16 wholesale merchants; 14 officers or ex-officers of the navy; 10 attorneys; 5 bankers; 2 druggists; 1 bishop; 1 curate; 1 Protestant minister; and 10 others of sundry occupations. The difference in composition between this republican Assembly and our own Congresses is in some respects remarkable; for, independently of the very large and indeed altogether disproportionate representation of the nobility or titled classes, we observe a very great preponderance of rich land-owners, representing in their own persons the agricultural and vine-growing interests. Very singular, also, is the small proportion of lawyers, only 155 being classed as advocates, and the magistrates and attorneys swelling the number only to 200. In an ordinary American Congress at least one-half, and usually two-thirds, of the members are or have been lawyers by profession. The clerical representation seems to reach a total of three, all told, Catholic and Protestant; and as trivial is that of the retail traders and mechanics, of whom there are but two or three in all. We may add that a full-blooded negro member, M. Pory-Papy, came as deputy from Martinique. The standard of intelligence and political experience is rather high: it is said, for example, that no less than 33 members have been ministers. Altogether, the Assembly may be considered as rather fortunately constituted.

* * * * *

During the session of the medical congress at Lyons one day was set apart for the study of alcoholic stimulants. On that occasion the physician of Sainte-Anne asylum, Dr. Magnan, comparing the chemical action of alcohol and absinthe on man, drew the conclusion that the former acts more slowly, gradually provoking delirium and digestive derangement, while absinthe rapidly results in epilepsy. Then, producing a couple of dogs, he treated one with alcohol and the other with essence of absinthe, this latter being the active principle of the absinthe liquor which is commonly drunk. The alcoholized brute could not stand up, became sleepy and stupid, and, when set on his legs, trembled in an inert mass: the other dog experienced at once frightful attacks of epilepsy. Analogous effects are produced in mankind. Surely the "absinthe duel" which is said to have taken place at Cannes, when both the combatants perished after drinking an extraordinary quantity, may be strictly denominated a duel with deadly weapons. In the south of France, it is said, one person sometimes invites another to partake of absinthe by the slang phrase, "Take a shovelful of earth;" as if an American bar-room lounger, recognizing with grim humor the deadly quality of his liquor, should say, "Come and get measured for your coffin." The French expression has certainly, in view of Dr. Magnan's disclosures, a melancholy picturesqueness. This subject has to France a national importance, since, if the recent report of Dr. Bergeron does not exaggerate, the _absintism_ introduced amongst the French army in general by the Algerian officers did its part toward producing that inertness and lack of vigor which generals often complained of in their subordinates during the disastrous invasion of 1870.

* * * * *

Richard II., in the play of that name, disheartened by his calamities, responds to all the encouraging words of his lords and followers with a bitter satire on the wretchedness of royalty:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd;
Some poison'd by their wives; some sleeping kill'd;
All murther'd; for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court.

The unhappy monarch was destined to furnish in his own tragic fate one more illustration of his homily. His words come vividly to mind in reviewing the curious catalogue which a European statistician lately furnished of the number of sovereigns who have perished by violent deaths or been discrowned by disaster. The list, which must perforce be incomplete, embraces 2540 emperors or kings, who have ruled over 64 nations. Of these, 299 were dethroned; 151 were assassinated; 123 died in captivity; 108 were formally condemned and executed; 100 were killed in battle; 64 abdicated; 62 were poisoned; 25 died the death of martyrs; 20 committed suicide; and 11 died insane. Even these lists do not probably include all the unnatural deaths and dethronements that have occurred among the 2540 rulers thus tabulated, for it was often deemed politic to conceal the circumstances of a monarch's death, and history mentions many such instances in which the cause of death is doubtful; so that, for example, the 11 insane and the 20 suicides and the 62 poisoned doubtless do not comprise the whole number of deaths which ought to be included under those descriptions. Nevertheless, taking these figures as they are, they furnish a striking comment on King Richard's melancholy words; which, by the way, Richard's own conqueror and successor almost paralleled in his lamentations over the anxieties and perils that encompass the kingly state. We may add that the death of Napoleon III. at Chiselhurst has now, by one more name, increased the number of sovereigns dying in exile, while giving the whole subject a fresh interest.

* * * * *

The authority of Professor Godebski of St. Petersburg is given for the extraordinary statement that the Russian authorities in Poland have prohibited the contemplated erection of a monument to Chopin in his native Warsaw, on the ground that it might become an occasion for a political manifestation. M. Godebski was to have executed the statue, a plan had been submitted and accepted, musical admirers of Chopin had favored the project, Prince Orloff, Princess Czartoryska and many ladies of the Polish nobility had contributed the necessary funds, when the whole scheme was vetoed by Count von Berg, on the pretext already stated. Surely this was pushing caution to extremes, even in Poland. It was Chopin's fate to be driven from his country in 1836 by revolutionary disorders; but the very composition of the monumental committee, which was under the direction of Madame Mouchanoff, an ardent admirer of the master, indicated that the enterprise was an artistic, not a political one. Chopin, reposing between Bellini and Cherubini in the Pere la Chaise, his chosen burial-place, has long since passed from the narrow confines of his Polish nationality to the worldwide and immortal realm of art. In pretending, thirty years after his death, that the genius of the artist is of less account than the accident of his birthplace, and in reviving against this memorial project the entirely secondary facts of the revolutionary epoch (when Chopin's career was not in politics, but in art), the Russian authorities are wondrously sensitive, to say the least. A chagrined friend of the sculptor has proposed that a piece of ground should be bought, a temporary wooden house built on it, the statue set up as if in a private courtyard or gallery, and the doors then thrown open to the public, while, after some days or months, the building could be taken down, leaving the statue substantially on a public square. But the prohibition which vetoed the original project would of course cover this stratagem also, and besides, it would be rather too petty a device to engage in.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. Vol. II. New York: Harper & Brothers.

As a "study of provincial life" _Middlemarch_ appeals to a class of readers who might have little taste for the psychological studies in which the book abounds, and which give it a much deeper import. Its variety, spirit and truth of local color are Hogarthian, while it shows a figure, in the heroine, of far higher beauty and belonging to the great circle of epic characters. Dorothea, with her loveliness and her history of divine blunders, is fit to stand with any queen of song or story. This volume begins with the closing scenes in her scholar-husband's life. The character is a curious, and, after all, a pathetic one. What Philadelphia reader, at least, can pursue the narrative of poor Casaubon's misplaced study and ill-judged bequest without being reminded of another career of futile scholarship near home? Like him, as it will seem to the curious annalist, Richard Rush was a student without an audience, and like him a mistaken testator. Locking up his mind from the public amidst a company of ideas imbibed in the day when his city was the great book-producing city of the country, Rush prosecuted his barren researches in a moral prison, saw domestic life only through a grating woven from his own prejudices, and died in the confidence falsely sustaining him that the inefficiency of a lifetime would be amended by the bequests of an impracticable will. Rush, too, was wealthy, of influential family, studious, sterile, and apt to put off present action in the hope that the grave would one day co-operate with his motives; and Rush, like the imagined author of the _Key to all Mythologies_, finds the grave a treacherous trustee. The heroine of _Middlemarch_, in her action over her husband's testament, behaves as every true and lovable woman, obeying the emotions, will behave while the world lasts: a flippant, easy, youthful censor has told her, in a boudoir in the Via Sistina at Rome, that her husband's labor was thrown away because the Germans had taken the lead in historical inquiries, and that they laughed at those who groped about in woods where they had made good roads. The censor is agreeable, curly, and has engaging ways of lying about on hearth-rugs and giving his arm to quaint old maids: his criticism is therefore securely effective against all the conclusions of a life of dry labor; and so it comes that Dorothea writes on her husband's posthumous schedule: "_I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in?_" That is the way in which schemes of more or less erudition will for ever be lost to the world when entrusted to those who reason as Nature imperiously teaches them to do, through their affinity with blooming cheeks, curled locks and versatile intellects. It is inevitable that Dorothea must sink, from her dreams of emulating Saint Theresa, to comradeship with the glossy occupant of the hearth-rug. George Eliot, as a true artist, sees what is faulty in the catastrophe, but she will not unsex her creation. Another of her characters, Rosamond, she pursues with a minute, withering, one would say vindictive, contempt. It is the beautiful, distinguished young creature who marries Lydgate on account of his high connections, and who trains him to do up her plaits of hair for her, and allows him to talk the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, "accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling toward her votary." How such a creature can become the cool blighting Nemesis of a hopeful home, ruining it by extravagance, and taking credit to herself for every act of calm revolt, until her wretched husband, who had meant to be another Vesalius, compares her to Boccaccio's basil, that flourished upon the brains of a massacred man, the author sees only too plainly, and shows forth in some of the most cutting scenes she has ever written. Her "Study of Provincial Life," while it reveals her warm poet's love for a lofty nature defeated by its conditions, shows still plainer her intimate and personal dread of the cold thin nature that kills by its commonplace. The last she rewards contemptuously with a carriage in the Park and a rich second match: the first she punishes with exquisite Junonine tenderness by giving her a little boy in the bride-chamber of the home of the clever young politician whom the local editor has called a "violent energumen."

* * * * *

In laying down the book the reader is conscious of a different feeling from that with which he ordinarily parts with a work of fiction which has gratified his artistic tastes and furnished him with a high intellectual pleasure. Comparing the productions of George Eliot with those of other novelists, we are tempted to think of these as trivial fond records, which might well be blotted from the tablets of the memory, leaving the inscription she has placed there to live alone in ineffaceable characters. It is not that they show her to be endowed with a larger measure of those gifts which constitute the artist. In each of these she has perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronte's, nor her great scenes the dramatic fire of Scott's. In the minor matters of invention and plot she sometimes has recourse to shifts that betray the deficiencies they are intended to conceal. The quality in which she is supreme is one that lies beyond the strict domain of art. It is the power of penetrating to the roots of human character and action--a power which seems to be something more than insight, but for which sympathy would be a still less adequate term, indicating as it does a nature harmonious and complete, one in which intellect and feeling are resolved into an element that overflows and envelops its object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more often correct than confirm our impressions; they make large additions to our knowledge; they suggest the necessity of reconstructing our theories and placing them on a new and wider base.

A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary. By Mary Clemmer Ames. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Alice Cary was a poetess of feeling, tender, prolific, overworked, unhealthy, and cooked to desiccation in a New York "elegant residence" that was but one enormous stove. Phoebe, working less, was amusing, plump, gay and original. Alice, obediently grinding out her sweet morning poem for the _Ledger_ before she went to market, died at her desk, and then Phoebe died of loneliness. It is a gentle and a thoroughly American history. In the eyes of both these Ohio women, New York was the market where they could easiest sell their wares, and their poems were commodities from which they were determined to derive as comfortable an existence as possible. Any strict idea of duty to their art, as the responsibility committed to them above all things on earth, seems never to have crossed the mind of either sister, though Alice, who wrote a great many volumes, would occasionally complain--not, however, more feelingly than all sincere authors do--that she knew her labors were overtaxing her faculty. They arranged, at their handsome residence on Twentieth street, a _salon_ of Sunday evenings, where Mr. Greeley, Robert Bonner and Whitelaw Reid used to meet and converse kindly with the minor literati, and which were believed to have much of the pleasantness and life of French conversaziones. Alice Cary has left a profusion of pensive poetry: the following is the most beautiful extract she affords:

The fisher droppeth his net in the stream,
And a hundred streams are the same as one;
And the maiden dreameth her lovelit dream;
And what is it all when all is done?
The net of the fisher the burden breaks,
And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.