and mundane ladies, and the simple-mannered, rather burly monk preached to this Second-Empire throng as they had never been spoken to before. He did not, like Father Felix, give them abstruse controversy dashed with rosewater religion; he tried to rally a moral circulation in hearts benumbed with the effects of sensuality, or palsied with mere idle fears of the Devil; he was pitiless in exposing the shams of every-day life; he denounced hypocrisy, told his hearers that their consciences were truer guides to them than any priest, and combated that pernicious system which would in social matters set up the authority of the confessor against that of the husband and father, and substitute in educational matters the mandate of the Church for the judgment of the State, or the private convictions of individuals. No wonder the Ultramontanists took alarm. Father Hyacinthe's teaching was tantamount to a declaration that the clergy were simple administrators of sacraments, 66 servants of the Church," to use the old term, instead of rulers over it. M. Louis Veuillot in the Univers attacked these doctrines and their propounder with fury; and it was well for Father Hyacinthe that his private life bore looking into, even with a thousand-power magnifying glass; for few men were ever overhauled as he was by the most trenchant of journalists, and the most unscrupulous of newspapers. As it was, M. Veuillot's impeachment caused the stout-hearted friar to be summoned to Rome. He appeared as an accused man, defended himself in the pope's presence, and went away almost absolved: the truth being, that, though the papal court detested his opinions, they saw in him a man too strong and dangerous to be quarrelled with. A few weeks after his return to France, however (1869), Father Hyacinthe, speaking at the International Congress of Peace, put the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic faiths on a footing of equality, as "the three great religions of civilized peoples;" and hereupon sacerdotal patience gave way. Archbishop Darboy, his friend and patron, wrote nervously to tell him he was going too far. The general of his order, a by no means intolerant man, who admired, and had therefore encouraged him in every way, let himself be overawed by the Jesuit faction, and intimated to the monk that he must either speak according to canon law, or hold his peace. It was then Father Hyacinthe wrote his famous letter of Sept. 20, 1869, which, coming on the eve of the cecumenical council, and indignantly assailing, as it did, the doctrine of papal infallibility, exploded like a shell in the Catholic ranks. Mgr. Dupanloup sent one of his chaplains to Father Hyacinthe, and, in great episcopal flurry, entreated him to spare the Church the sight of a grievous scandal. Finding his chaplain had arrived too late to stop the publication of the letter, he wrote and begged the father to recant, to throw himself at the pope's feet, and solicit forgiveness. Father Hyacinthe answered, that he felt no need of pardon; and, braving the major excommunication launched against him, he sailed for the United States, in order to withdraw himself for a few weeks from the ultra-orthodox annoyances that would have beset him in his own country. His recent marriage, which had been foreseen for some time by those personally acquainted with him, is but the logical sequence of the theories contained in his letter, and re-advocated in all his speeches and conversations on American soil.

Now, Father Hyacinthe best knows by what means the cause he has at heart should be served; but he must certainly be aware that there is not a country in Christendom where he would have so little chance of success as in France. In Spain a man of his parts might have effected a schism; in Italy he would have rallied a strong, or at least demonstrative party round him; in Germany he would have proved a valuable ally to Prince Bismarck in that statesman's warfare against Jesuitism. But in France he could expect little sympathy and no support; neither has he obtained any. For religious purposes the French may be roughly divided into two parties, the bigots, and those who do not believe any thing; the latter being much the larger section, though subdivided into the rampant school, who are outspokenly infidel, and the deferential set, who

profess to believe every thing for peace and propriety's sake. None of these categories desire church-reform. The bigots ban the idea as blasphemy; the free-thinkers dismiss it as not worth their attention; the poco-curante majority would much rather not hear ecclesiastical matters discussed at all. To these last the Church is a necessary ornament: they send their wives and children to it; they themselves are influenced neither politically nor socially by its edicts; and they deprecate almost savagely any controversy tending to revive topics which they regard as settled long ago. Moreover, -and Father Hyacinthe seems rather to have overlooked this fact, the Roman Catholic Church, as at present managed, is much more of a political than of a religious body. It represents antagonism to all that men call progress. It is the enemy of science, free discussion, and human reason. By the instrumentality of the confessional, and by the enforced celibacy of priests (which is but the propping-stone to the confessional) it finds it can exercise more prestige over weak minds than it could by liberal concessions. And so long as this is the case, it will not abate a jot of its pretensions. No doubt the time will come when, thanks to the spread of education, men will take the sensible view of faith, and look upon it as a thing of the heart, not of outward observance. In that day, there will be a majority of men, who, rejecting the comfortless conclusions of atheism, will ask for a religion which will be in ritual simple, in dogmas tolerant, in charity universal. Then the papal see, in order not to be left high and dry by the flood of human enlightenment which has already begun to roll ahead of it, may fling itself into the stream, throw off its encumbering superstitions, and once more take the lead it held when it fought the victorious fight against Paganism, and earned that proud title of Catholic which it has since ceased to merit. But many years and generations must elapse before that time; and meanwhile those who, like Charles Loyson, endeavor to improve the Church without subverting it, must be prepared for harder treatment than the Church's worst enemies. Happily the efforts of church-reformers are no longer sealed in blood: nowadays they need only be watered with tears. Let it, at all events, be a comfort to Father Hyacinthe to know that any tears wrung from him by the cruel aspersions which are being poured upon his head at this moment by all those of his countrymen whom he had been trained to love, will not be thrown away: no affliction entailed by the conscientious advocacy of a worthy cause ever is.

THE NURNBERG TORTURE-CHAMBER.

We need not describe the once free imperial city of Nürnberg. The old Frankish city, with its citadel, its walls, its endless towers and gates, its streams and bridges, its fountain, its houses, witnesses of civic splendor and civic taste, are among the best known things in Europe. Its churches are renowned as the most striking examples -unless, perhaps, Lübeck Dom-of the truth, that, if we wish to know what a medieval church really looked like, it is not among either Roman Catholics or Anglicans, but among Lutherans, that we must go for it. To the strictly architectural student the city will, perhaps, be of less interest than some others of less renown. His treasure will be, not St. Lawrence, not even St. Sebald, doubleapsed as it is, but the two precious little twelfth-century chapels placed one over the other in the imperial fortress, the contrast between the massive pillars of the lower one which bears the weight, and the airy shafts of the upper one, the private chapel of the emperors, which rests upon it. The nave of St. Sebald, too, has its value as an elegant example of German Transition, and from its singular contrast with the later choir. Yet the traveller who comes from many other German cities will, perhaps, be disappointed in the Nürnberg churches taken alone. What is thoroughly striking at Nürnberg is the general aspect of the whole city far more than any particular object. To the student of municipal history, no place is clothed with a deeper

interest. The city shows no signs of decay, no sign that its fall from its ancient dignity has carried with it any loss of material prosperity. The modern wealth of Nürnberg has happily made for itself dwellings without the walls, and has left the city itself almost untouched, to breathe in all its fulness the spirit of the old patrician commonwealth which passed away within the memory of men yet living.

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That commonwealth has a long history, a history of the usual type in city communities, how freedom was wrested or bought bit by bit from an external power, and then lost bit by bit to an oligarchy within the city itself. The House of Burggraves of Nürnberg has grown, step by step, into a house of German emperors. But the first step was when there came to be a House of Burggraves at all. In the eleventh century, Nürnberg itself is first heard of in history in the twelfth, we first heard of its Burggraves. The name, the same as our own boroughreeve, was at first the title of an imperial officer who represented the emperor in a city which acknowledged no meaner lord. In the thirteenth century, as the emperor sank in power, his representative gained; and the first king of the House of Hapsburg first made the burggraveship of Nürnberg hereditary in the House of Hohenzollern. The city had for some centuries to struggle for its freedom against protectors who were growing into masters. At one time the rights of the burggrave were bought off: at another the city had to stand a regular siege. At last Nürnberg came out of the strife a free city, ruling over an unusually large surrounding territory, and safe from external enemies. But the freedom of elder times had vanished. A noble class had long existed in the city, and certain of the noble families gradually grew into an exclusive patriciate. When the commonwealth came to an end, though the forms of a more democratic constitution had not wholly passed away, all power was practically lodged in the hands of twenty-three patrician houses.

But it is not on Nürnberg, or on the history of Nürnberg, that we wish now to dwell. We would carry our readers to one dark corner of the city, and to relics some of which may, for aught we know, be apocryphal, but which, even if apocryphal, are not the less suggestive of thought. A flight of steps near one of the gates in the northern wall of the city leads down to a series of small and gloomy underground chambers which go by the general name of the Folterkammer or Marterkammer. We know so little of the ways of the regulation tourist that we know not whether the torture-chamber forms part of his regulation bill of fare, along with Albert Dürer's house, and the pictures in St. Lawrence and St. Sebald. But, be this as it may, the thoughtful traveller will hardly leave Nürnberg without a visit to this chamber of horrors. It brings us nearer to the frightful jurisprudence of a past time to see with one's own eyes the engines which the perverse ingenuity of man devised for the express purpose of inflicting suffering on his fellows. We have a little show of our own on a smaller scale; but English patriotism has sometimes tried to make itself believe that the instruments of torture which survive in the Tower were brought over in the Spanish Armada for the purpose of tormenting English Protestants. Nürnberg has a much larger stock to display; and she has not hit on the device of affirming that the stock in trade of her own oligarchy formed part of the camp-furniture of Albert Achilles. Indeed, if we may believe the guide whose flickering lamp leads the way through these accursed vaults, men were walking about Nürnberg within living memory who had themselves felt some of the lesser tortures in their own persons. There is the rack, the thumb-screw, the cord, the ladder, the chair set thick with nails, the weights for the feet, and-what we think of an engine rather of military than of civic cruelty-the famous wooden horse," the colt foaled of an acorn," which at Nürnberg goes by the name of the Spanish ass. And among them are other forms of punishment, which illustrate the grotesque, rather than the directly cruel, side of medieval jurisprudence, instruments not of suffering but of shame, the hideous masks in which some classes of offenders were made to stand exposed to the mockery of all beholders. At last a journey through many

narrow passages and massive doors, a path evidently designed as a fitting approach to the crowning horror of all, leads us to the masterpiece of devilish skill in this particular craft, die eiserne Jungfrau, the iron virgin. A figure with no definite limbs, but which might pass for a female form shrouded in a spreading cloak, is crowned with a distinct woman's head, with ruff and head-dress of an antique local fashion. This is the iron virgin, whose deadly embrace was the most fearful means of inflicting death. The figure opened, and the victim was thrust into its destroying grip: as it closed, nails pierced every part of his body, two being specially mapped out to hit the eyes; and, if life was not at once put an end to, he fell to starve and rot in a lower depth, a yet more hideous vault below. Such is the tale as it is told us on the spot. We have not made the matter the subject of any antiquarian inquiries, but we know of nothing to raise a doubt as to the genuineness of the story. And, even if any thing should have been touched up a little, whether in the instruments themselves or in the stories told about them, we know enough instances of the like kind from other sources to leave little doubt as to the general truth of the picture which this frightful exhibition calls up. To take one instance only, the first which comes into our head: the illustrations to the chronicle of Diebald Schilling of Luzern set before us tortures done in the face of day as bad as any-save the virgin herself-which are alleged to have been done at Nürnberg in the bowels of the earth.

Among the engines in the Nürnberg torture-chamber there are engines of two classes. There are instruments of torture strictly so-called, and there is, in the virgin herself, at least one instrument for the infliction of death in a cruel form. These are two classes which should be carefully distinguished; and the distinction is of special importance in our own history. Torture applied with the purpose of getting the truth out of the person tortured is one thing the infliction of death in a form involving needless pain or insult is another thing. The former is bad enough, but the latter is much worse. The objections to the torture in the ordinary sense are mainly two. First, as the civil law itself, in allowing it, admits, it is a most uncertain and untrustworthy way of getting at truth. A man of a strong body and a firm will may steel himself to endure any amount of pain rather than either confess the charge against himself, or bear witness against his comrade. A weaker soul in a weaker body may, at the first touch of the rack, or even in sheer fear of it, confess any thing, true or false, simply to be spared the pain. It was Felton, we think, who, when threatened with the rack, told the privy-councillors, that, on the rack, he was as likely to denounce them as his accomplices as anybody else. In the jurisprudence of some times and places a man could not be put to death unless he confessed. An innocent person whom torture drove to a false confession might thus be put to death: while the hardy criminal might save his life, if he thought such life worth living for. Secondly, the increased humanity of later times would argue, that even if torture was a certain means of getting at the truth, yet it could not be right to get at the truth in such a way. It would argue that it is better to come to a few wrong decisions than to turn a judicial proceeding into something so horrible as the infliction of torture. It might argue further, that its infliction would tend to harden the hearts of all concerned, and so tend in the long run to injustice, to a general needless severity in the administration of justice. But, with all this, it should be remembered that the infliction of torture in order to get at evidence does not necessarily imply any personal delight in cruelty on the part of him who inflicts it. It is very likely to lead to it; but it does not necessarily imply it. A judge who believes that the rack is really a sure way of extorting truth may order the rack to be applied in all sadness and sympathy for the victim. The executioner himself- the "tormentor "-must, one would think, like an executioner of any other kind, soon grow callous, and one would think that no good man would willingly undertake such a post. Yet a man might come to the office of tormentor, as to some other unpleasant offices, without any

very deliberate choice on his own part. And it is theoretically possible, though not very likely in practice, that he might feel, like the surgeon performing a painful operation, that the object in view justified the apparent immediate cruelty of the means. On the part both of judge and of executioner the torture was most likely to be abused, most likely to have a corrupting effect on the minds of those who had any thing to do with it. But it is possible in idea that both might look upon it as a hard duty, which the end justified; and might inflict it with a heavy heart, and even with a purpose not to make the torture one jot more severe than was actually needed for the purpose at which they aimed.

To some extent this applies also to torture used as a means of punishment, not as a means to extract evidence. The chief case of this is when death is inflicted in a lingering or needlessly painful form. It might be argued, that, by making punishment yet more terrible than the mere infliction of death, it better fulfilled its purpose of striking terror into others. We need hardly say that experience does not bear out this argument; and, as a matter of fact, we may doubt whether this was the argument really most present to the minds of the inventors or inflictors of cruel forms of death. In ruder and coarser minds, the prevailing feeling would be that of direct vengeance on the criminal, a feeling which might easily degenerate into an actual pleasure in the suffering inflicted. A prolonged death of any kind, like the deaths of Rivaillac and Damiens, is much more of a spectacle, it supplies much more of interest and curiosity, than a mere hanging or beheading. When the most learned physicians of Paris had settled how Damiens might be put to most pain, all Paris went to look at the show as if it had been a bear-baiting or a pigeon-shooting. But mixed up with this there was, in earlier times at least, a feeling one degree more respectable. There was something besides the wish either to rid the world of a dangerous person, or by fear of his example to hinder others from walking in his ways. There was a notion that certain forms of death or suffering were in themselves appropriate to certain crimes. The heretic was burned as a foretaste in this world of what his doom was to be in the next. When David of Wales and William Wallace were put to death piecemeal, it was not for one crime only, but for an accumulation of crimes; and each portion of the sentence was held to be specially appropriate to some portion of the offence. Barbarous as all this was, it was something different from the mere spiteful cruelty by which Bernabos or Galeazzo Visconti took forty days to put a man to death, inflicting some mutilation every alternate day, and leaving days of rest between.

Another stage, the last of all, is when, besides the infliction of pain, the notion of mockery_comes in; when, in short, the infliction of death, or of suffering short of death, is directly brought within the region of sport. There is something of mockery, as well as of suffering, in forms of death like crucifixion and impaling. The notion of mockery comes out more strongly in such a case as the military punishment of the wooden horse, which we have also seen among the tortures of Nürnberg. When we come to throwing men to the wild beasts, the element of sport is distinctly avowed: the very name of the process is ludus or venatio. But the notion of mockery in addition to suffering comes out most strongly of all in such a devilish engine as the eiserne Jungfrau. The name and the particular form of suffering, the dying a horrible death under the guise of an embrace, seems to bring this particular form of wanton cruelty to its height.

Here in England we may fairly say, that in these matters, although we have been bad enough, we have not been so bad as our neighbors. Torture to extort evidence or confession, though freely practised during an evil time of about two hundred years, was never for a moment legal. Whenever a man was sent to the rack or the scavenger's daughter, it was done by a special exercise of prerogative, not as any part of the ordinary process of a court of law. But we may notice in such names as the "scavenger's daughter" and "little ease some degree of the element of mockery coming in. In some of our forms of execution, as

in the burnings of our heretics, and the embowellings of our traitors, there was plenty of cruelty, but there was nothing of mockery. The thing was done in all seriousness, and a grave reason was given for every disgusting detail. The mutilations at one time in use, pre-eminently under the Conqueror, were done, strange as it may seem, under a notion of mercy. William bored out the eyes and chopped off the hands of men whom less merciful princes would have hanged outright. The thing which we seem to have had wholly to ourselves was the fate, whether we are to call it torture or punishment, which befel those who refused to plead. This, unlike the torture strictly so-called, was done in regular course of law. But it should be remembered that its familiar name, "peine forte et dure," was a corruption of "prisone forte et dure." Those who devised this procedure would most likely have had elaborate arguments to show that it was not torture at all.

THE MAD DUCHESS.*

Two of the most interesting figures of the seventeenth century, whether considered separately, or in their joint relations, are the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. "Mad Madge of Newcastle," as it was the fashion to call the seeond wife of the duke, is known as the biographer of her husband, and as the author of more plays, poems, orations, and literary productions of one kind or another, than are assigned to any woman of her own or any preceding age. Her works have not stood high in popular estimation. In spite of this, the editions of them have been absorbed into the libraries of collectors, until, at the present moment, they may rank among rarities. Few readers have had the courage to dip into the folios the duchess poured forth with indefatigable zeal. Charles Lamb, with his insatiable taste for seventeeth-century literature, commented upon her poems; but he, even, shrank dismayed from her plays. Campbell did not include her in his specimens. Hallam knows her not; and no modern collection of works or specimens of poets of which we are aware makes mention of her name. In days more closely approximating her own, her rank, doubtless, stood her in stead. Langbaine devotes several pages to a catalogue of her writings, and a criticism upon them, speaking of her as the "admirable dutchess." Winstanley, in his "Lives of the most Famous Poets," fails to give her a separate place; but divides pretty equally between her and her husband the space he nominally allots the duke. Walpole, of course, includes her in his "Noble Authors; and Ballard gives, in the "Memoirs of Celebrated British Ladies," a résumé of her autobiography. For practical purposes her writings are unknown,- the reprint, by Sir Egerton Brydges, of a portion of her "World's Olio," being, if any thing, rarer than the original edition. Mr. Lower's edition of her Autobiography, and her Life of her husband, will serve to awaken interest concerning her writings generally. So much freshness, naïveté, and candor charaeterize the Autobiography of the duchess, readers can scarcely fail to have a measure of curiosity concerning her other works. Disappointment is the certain result of a quest in this direction. Eminently superficial are the literary qualities of the duchess which interest modern readers; and a very slight taste of her works administers all the gratification they are capable of affording. Her plays are the most formidable productions ever put forth under the title.

not seldom in two, and even three parts. Her characters are mere abstractions, their names denoting the part they are supposed to play. The list of dramatis persona in her comedies form ordinarily the most amusing portion of them.

In the first part of the "Lady Contemplation," we have, for instance, such characters as Lord Title, Lord Courtship, Sir Experience Traveller, Sir Fancy Poet, Sir Golden Riches, Sir Effeminate Lovely, Sir Vain Compliment, Sir Humphrey Interruption, Mr. Adviser, Dr. Practice, Roger Farmer, Old Humanity, The Lady Conversation, The Lady Virtue, Lady Amorous, Mrs. Troublesome, Moll Meanbred, and others in plenty. Scenes are introduced for no purpose but to exhibit the humors of these various characters. Thus, the Lady Conversation meets Sir Experience Traveller, and discusses with him the effect of heat and cold upon the intellectual and physical faculties; and Lady Contemplation entertains Sir Fancy Poet with allegories that unite the most extravagant conceits of Euphues and his England to the interminable pastoralizing of the Arcadia. Not seldom the entire action of a scene, when action is necessary, is explained by the stage directions, which are eminently full, and the conversations proceed independently of the action. The speeches are of enormous length. Every thing done by the duchess is, indeed, on the largest scale. Her first volume of plays has no less than ten separate addresses to the reader, besides a poetical dedication, a prologue in verse, and an explanation in prose. These addresses are explanatory, apologetic, didactic, and controversial. Ben Jonson appears to have been the model of the duchess, as he was of all the most tedious writers of the age. For Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, she has a word of approval; and she conjures her readers, with some modesty, not to compare her verses with those of these masters. A reason for their inferiority which she advances is funny:

"But Noble readers, do not think my Playes
Are such as have been writ in former daics,

As Jonson, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, writ,
Mine want their Learning, Reading, Language, Wit:
The Latin phrases I could never tell,

But Jonson could, which made him write so well."

Some foretaste of matters that have made a stir in modern times is shown in one of the plays, "The Female Academy," wherein the experiment of the Princess Ida, described by the laureate, is anticipated. A nearer approach to interest than is elsewhere attained is reached in this piece, in which the attempt to found a university with "prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans," is depicted. This play is, perhaps, unique in the language, in having no specified or individualized characters. The list of the dramatis person is made up of two grave matrons, two or three ancient ladies, two or three citizens' wives, and a company of young gentlemen, and others.

Much praise, accompanied by some sneers from the more libertine of her contemporaries, has been bestowed upon the duchess for propriety of language, and decorum. Her reputation, however, in this respect, seems to have been rather cheaply purchased. The piety of the duchess is as unquestionable as her love for her husband; but accompanying both are a boldness of investigation, and a habit of calling a spade a spade, which render her works wholly unsuited to general perusal. Passages occur in her writings which, for genuine unsavoriness, may compare with any thing to be found in the "admirable Astræa" or the "matchless Orinda,” and one or two references seem inspired by the Cloacinian muse of the Queen of Navarre.

In judging the works of the Duchess of Newcastle, it must be remembered that the habit of composition was at that time rare among females of quality. Lady Juliana Barnes, Margaret, Countess of Richinond, Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, and more than one of our English queens, had written sufficient verse or prose to entitle them to a place in the catalogue of authors. The publication of volume after volume of plays, poems, and essays, was still a novelty; and the eccentricity of such a course must have had something to do with acquiring for the duchess her unenviable appellation.

No such worship as the duchess accords her husband is to be found elsewhere in literature. Her affection and admiration for her spouse reach a point in which her own individuality seems merged and lost. She is nothing except for and through him. What in body and mind are of value she prizes on his account; and her pedigree is a source of pleasure to her as bringing her nearer him. One whole section of the life of the duke is occupied with the enumeration of his virtues and accomplishments. Nothing appears to this faithful scribe and follower too small to be noticed, or too unimportant to be chronicled. We learn thus concerning him, that "he shifts ordinarily once a day, and every time when he uses exercise, or his temper is more hot than ordinary." Concerning his diet, she informs us that,

"He makes but one meal a day, at which he drinks two good glasses of small beer: one about the beginning, the other at the end, thereof, and a little glass of sack in the middle of his dinner; which glass of sack he also uses in the morning for his breakfast, with a morsel of bread. His supper consists of an egg, and a draught of small beer."

In pronouncing upon his moral excellences, she unites to wifely affection and admiration the kind of reverence that the Cavalier noble, the believer in divine right, felt for the king:

"His behaviour is such that it might be a pattern for all gentlemen; for it is courtly, civil, easie, and free, without formality or constraint, and yet hath something in it of grandure that causes an awful respect towards him."`

Her estimate of his literary power is whimsically high. "She may," she says, "justly call him the best lyrick and dramatick poet of this age."

Extremely naïve and attractive is the account given by the duchess of her own "birth, education, and life." In no contemporary book do we get such an insight into the manners of the gentry as is here supplied us. The picture of domestic serenity, unruffled until the all-disturbing influ ences of war drove the sons into the battle-field and the daughters into exile, is thoroughly charming:

"As for the pastimes of my sisters when they were in the country, it was to reade, work, walk, and discourse with each other; for though two of my three brothers were married, my brother the Lord Lucas to a virtuous and beautiful lady, daughter to Sir Christopher Nevil, son to the Lord Abergavenny, and my brother Sir Thomas Lucas, to a virtuous lady of an ancient family, one Sir John Byron's daughter. Likewise, three of my four sisters: one married Sir Peter Killegrew, the other, Sir William Walter; the third, Sir Edmund Pye; the fourth, as yet unmarried, yet most of them lived with my mother, espe cially when she was at her country-house, living most commonly at London half the year, which is the metropolitan city of England; but when they were at London, they were dispersed into several houses of their own: yet, for the most part, they met every day, feasting each other like Job's children. But this unnatural war came like a whirlwind, which fell'd down their houses, where some in the wars were crusht to death, as my youngest brother, Sir Charles Lucas, and my brother Sir Thomas Lucas; and though my brother Sir Thomas Lucas died not immediately of his wounds, yet a wound he received on his head in Ireland short'ned his life. But to rehearse their recreations: their customs were in winter time to go sometimes to plays, or to ride in their coaches about the street to see the concourse and recourse of people; and in the spring-time to visit the Springgarden, Hide-park, and the like places; and sometime they would have musick, and sup in barges upon the water: these harmless recreations they would pass their time away with; for I observed they did seldom make visits, nor never went abroad with strangers in their company, but onely themselves in a flock together, agreeing so well that there seemed but one minde amongst them. And not onely my own brothers and sisters agreed so, but my brothers and sisters-in-law, and their children, although but young, had the like agreeable natures and affectionable dispositions; for to my best remembrance I do not know that ever they did fall out, or had any angry and unkind disputes. Likewise, I did observe that my sisters were so far from mingling themselves with any other company that they had no familiar conversation or intimate acquaintance with the families to which each other were linkt to by marriage, the family of the one

"But my mother said it would be a disgrace for me to return out of the court so soon after I was placed; so I continued almost two years, until such time as I was married from thence; for my lord, the Marquis of Newcastle, did approve of those bashful fears which many condemn'd, and would choose such a wife as he might bring to his own humors, and not such an one as was wedded to self-conceit, or one that had been temper'd to the humors of another; for which he wooed me for his wife; and, though I did dread marriage, and shunn'd mens companies as much as I could, yet I could not, nor had not the power to refuse him, by reason my affections were fix'd on him, and he was the onely person I was ever in love with. Neither was I ashamed to own it, but gloried therein; for it was not amorous love: I never was infected therewith. — it is a disease, or a passion, or both. I only know by relation, not by experience: neither could title, wealth, power, or person entice me to love; but my love was honest and honorable, being placed upon merit, which affection joy'd at the fame of his worth, pleas'd with delight in his wit, proud of the respects he used to me, and triumphing in the affections he profest for me, which affections he hath confirmed to me by a deed of time, seal'd by constancy, and assigned by an unalterable decree of his promise: which makes me happy in despight of Fortune's frowns; for though misfortunes may and do oft dissolve base, wilde, loose, and ungrounded affections, yet she hath no power of those that are united either by merit, justice, gratitude, duty, fidelity, or the like; and though my lord hath lost his estate, and banish'd out of his country, for his loyalty to his king and country, yet neither despised poverty nor pinching necessity could make him break the bonds of friendship, or weaken his loyal duty to his king or country."

Concerning her own nature and feelings, the charming little Philistine is thoroughly open. Utterly powerless is she to withhold any thing she knows or thinks. In a flux of words she informs us how honest, truthful, modest, and virtuous she is; how, when "she places a particular affection," she loves "extraordinarily and constantly, yet not fondly, but soberly and observingly; not to hang upon them as a trouble, but to wait upon them as a servant; "how she is bashful, ambitious, and lazy; afraid to hear a 66 popgun," or see a drawn sword; unable to kill a fly, or endure the groans of a wounded animal. The self-drawn picture is, in fact, Madame Englentyne, as described by Chaucer. Almost in the very words of Chaucer, the duchess informs us how

or how

"wel i-taught was sche withalle, Sche let no morsel from hire lippes falle, Ne wette hire fyngres in hire sauce deepe;"

"Sche was so charitable and so pitous

Sche wolde weepe if that she saw a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde."

His

Her lord, whom she so delights to honor, appears to have borne with equanimity this weight of adoration and adulation. He is chiefly known in literature by his "Methode et Invention nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux," first published in Antwerp in 1657, and since frequently reprinted. interest in the ménage of horses was, indeed, next to his zeal for his king, his most distinguishing characteristic. His comedies, which are now very scarce, are not without touches of humor. On the whole, however, there is little to distinguish the duke from the "mob of gentlemen who write with ease." Some of his sayings, as preserved by his duchess, are thoughtful. His views upon the subject of witchcraft are beyond his age. On this point, and on other matters, he seems, according to the account of the duchess, to have influenced Hobbes, certainly the most original thinker of the day. His maxims of statecraft are at times

Machiavelian. At times, however, his views extend far ahead, in advance even of modern statesmanship. He might have anticipated recent legislation when he said, that "many laws do rather entrap, than help. the subject.

For the value of the picture of the civil war in the north of England it presents, and for the interest of its private revelations, this reprint is valuable. The title-nage of the volume from which the memoir of the duchess is taken describes aptly the contents of the work. It is so amusingly like the famous description of plays by Polonius, it is difficult to regard the resemblance as accidental. After giving the first title, " Nature's Pictures,” and the name and style of the author, the title-page continues:

"In this Volume there are several feigned stories of Natural Descriptions, as Comical, Tragical, and Tragi-Comical, Poetical, Romantical, Philosophical, and Historical, both in Prose and Verse, some all Prose, some mixt, rartly Prose and partly Verse. Also there are some Morals, and some Dialogues, but they are as the advantage Loaves of Bread as a Baker's Dozen; and a true Story at the latter End, wherein there is no feinins."

The whole character of the duchess is legible in this quaint, extravagant, and preposterous title-page.

THE GUARDIAN CAT.

I HAVE grown tired of photography, partly because my fingers were continually black, partly because people who meant to praise me always said that my results were very good for the work of an amateur; but some years ago I was wild about it. My mania was to photograph bits of scenery and ruins which had never been focused before; and in seeking to indulge it, I was perpetually getting away into corners. The cornerest corner I ever explored in these rambles was in the west of England. The wildest parts of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales have a tourist-taint about them; slimy touts and ciceroni have crawled over their surface with snail-like perseverance and stolidity, and left traces. But no one has ever written a hand-book of Dowd: : no one would buy it if he did. Dowd has no scenery in particular, no waterfall, no antiquities of historical or philosophical interest. There was a ruin, indeed; but commonplace impecuniosity, not romantic war nor mysterious haunting, had caused its decay, and, what was more, a fellow lived in it, not a smuggler nor coiner either, but the rightful owner.

I should not have found that out, if it had not been for a thunder-storm. I was hard at work with my apparatus and imagination, "Ruin near Dowd, West Front;' "Ruin near Dowd, supposed remains of Keep," &c., when the sky became so black that you would have thought it was going to rain ink, and the first electric gun was fired. Now, Dowd, a village consisting of a farm, a few laborers' cottages, a forge, and a small beer-shop not licensed to sell spirits, was quite four miles off. I had my knapsack, and some bread and cheese with me; so it was perfectly indifferent where I passed the day or the night, so long as I got shelter. Part of the roof seemed to be in good enough repair; so I struck my camera and little tent at once, and commenced an exploration of the interior as the first drops began to make their half-crown-sized splashes. penetrating the dilapidated outer walls, I ought to have seen that the kernel of the place was in a more habitable condition; for there had been an attempt at cultivating vegetables in an inner garden, and the framework of certain windows was glazed. But I was so eager to get my appar atus under shelter before the rain came on in earnest, that I noticed nothing of this; and so it happened that I blundered into a furnished apartment. Not that the furniture was extensive; but there was enough to swear by: a dealtable, three cherry-wood chairs, and a portrait of a gentleman, in oils, about totaled it. A man was sitting at the deal-table when I entered. He jumped up at the intrusion; and I saw that he was tall, young, thin, and dressed in a suit of shepherd's plaid considerably the worse for wear.

After