one grief more would suffice to calm all; she is of the "porcelain of human clay;" Chatterton loves Kitty Bell, but has shown it only in caresses to her child. She, too, feels a deep interest in the stranger, so young, and proud, and poor, but unknown to herself as to him; there is a Bible given by Chatterton to little Rachel, which returned by the mother, falls again into the quaker's hands, and thence a second time into hers, which perhaps she prizes more because it belonged to him. But this is all-even this she feels too much for after a violent reproof from her husband, caused by some small sum not accounted for, and which, indeed, had served to save Chatterton from starving; but on whose score she is silent, since she will not tell a falsehood, when he grants her the respite of a day ere he question her again, and she kisses his hand in gratitude. She murmurs, gazing after him, as he roughly leaves her " Why, when I touched my husband's hand, did I reproach myself for having kept this Bible? Conscience cannot be in the wrong, I will return it."

There is a scene we make room for, because we have seen it captivate to closer attention than any belonging to the French stage, the most impatient audience in Europe. Chatterton's retreat has been discovered by some former and joyous companions; they have insulted Kitty Bell; he is stricken in his pride and his affections, and he is now alone in his chill garret with the physical pains of his unsatisfied hunger, and the manuscript which must be finished to-night to save him from gaol to-morrow.

Chatterton's room, sombre, small, poor, without fire-a miserable bed in disorder-Chatterton seated on the foot of his bed and writing on his knee.

"It is certain that she does not love me-and I-I will think of her no more. My hands are icy, my head is burning; here I am alone before my labour; I am no longer called upon to be gentle and to smile, to salute and to press a hand. All that farce is played; I commence another with myself: it is needful that now my will should be strong enough to take hold on my soul, and bear it by turns within the resuscitated corpse of the personages I invoke, and the phantom of those I imagine; or else, before

Chatterton ill, Chatterton cold and hungry, it must bid another Chatterton to sit affectedly, gracefully tricked out for the amusement of the public, that the one may be described by the other, the troubadour by the mendicant. These are the two kinds of poetry possible; one can do no more. Divert them, or excite their pity; pull the strings of miserable puppets, or be a puppet oneself, and traffic in this mummery. Open the heart to spread it on a counter, if it has wounds so much the better, it will fetch a higher price; slightly mutilated, it is bought dearer. [He rises.] Rise up creature of God, created after his image, and admire thyself still in this condition. [He smiles and seats himself—an old clock strikes the half hour.] No, no; the hour warns you; sit down and labour, unfortunate! Thou losest time in reflection; thou hast but one to make, it is that thou art a beggar. Dost thou hear? a beggar! every minute of reverie is a theit from thyself, it is a sterile minute. The idea is not the question. Great God! what brings profit is the word. Such and such may fetch even a shilling; thoughts are not current in the market. Oh, begone from me, begone, icy discouragement, I implore thee! Contempt of myself, do not come to complete my ruin; turn aside, oh, turn aside, for now, my name and my dwelling, all are known; and if to-morrow this book is not finished, I am ruined; yes, ruined, without hope! arrested! tried! condemned! flung into prison! oh, degradation! shameful labour! [He writes.] It is certain this young creature will never love me. Well, well, can I not cease to have this idea? [A long silence.] I have very little pride to think of it still; but let any one tell me why I should be proud? proud of what? I hold no place in any rank, yet it is certain that what supports me is this natural pride; it calls to me in mine ear not to bend and seem wretched. And for whom then do we play the part of a happy man when we are not so? I think it is for women. We all sit to them-poor creatures-they take thee for a throne-oh, publicity, vile publicity! thou who art but a pillory, whereon the profane passers by may smite us. In general, women love the man who will stoop to no oneby heaven, they are right!—at least, this one whose eye is on me, shall not see me bow the head! Oh, if she had loved me! [He sinks into a reverie from which he starts violently.] Write, then, unfortunate, bid thy will obey! Why is it so feeble as to fail to urge forward this rebel mind it rouses vainly, and which stops? This is a new humiliation-till now I had ever seen it start before its

master, it needed a curb, and to-night it wants the spur-ha, the immortal! ha, the body's rude master! Proud spirit, are you paralyzed by the miserable mist which penetrates within a ruinous room? Mighty one, does a little cold vapour suffice to conquer you? [He flings the blanket of his bed round his shoulders.] Heavy fog, it hangs without my window like a white curtain or a shroud; it hung thus at my father's window the night of his death. [The clock strikes the three quarters.] Again, time presses and nothing written! [He reads.] Harold, Harold! oh, Christ! Harold

Duke William-eh, what I pray you was Harold to me? I cannot comprehend how I wrote this. [He tears the manuscript as he speaks.] I feigned the Catholic-I lied; if I were a Catholic. I would be a monk and a Trappist; a Trappist has a coffin for bed, but at least be sleeps in it; all other men have a bed where they sleep; I have one where I toil for money. He raises his hand to his head.] Where am I? Where am I going? The word draws the idea after it in spite of itself-oh, God! Doth not madness march thus? This is that might affright the bravest. So, so-Let me be calmI was reading over this-Yes! This poem is not sufficiently fine!-Written too fast-Written to live-Oh, torture! The battle of Hastings !-The old Saxons, the young Normans-Was I interested in all this? No-Why then did I speak of it, when I had so much to say on all I saw ? [He rises and walks to and fro.] Why awaken cold ashes, when all trembles and suffers around me; when virtue calls for aid and dies of weeping; when pallid labour is disdained; when hope has lost her anchor, faith her chalice, charity her poor children; when Divine law is atheistical, and corrupt as a courtezan; when earth lifts up her voice, and demands justice of the poet on those who search her ceaselessly to have her gold, and who tell her she can dispense with heaven— and I-I who feel this, I shall not reply to it? Yes, by heaven, I will reply. I will strike with my lash the wicked man and the hypocrite; I will unmask Jeremiah Miles and Wharton. Ah, wretch! But this is satire-thou growest wicked thyself. [He weeps long and despairingly.] Write rather on the fog which has lodged itself at thy window as it did at that of thy father. [He pauses and takes a snuffbox from the table.] Here you are, my father here you are good old sailor! frank sea-captain! You slept at night, and you fought by day! You were not an intelligent Paria, such as your poor child has become. Do you see this white paper-do you see it? If it is not filled to-morrow I shall go to prison, my VOL. XXII.-No. 127.

father; and I have not in my brain a word wherewith to blacken it because I am hungry. I sold, that I might eat, the diamond which was there on this box, like a star on your noble forehead! and now, I have it no longer and the hunger always. And I have always your pride, my father, which is the reason that I do not say so; but you, who were old, and who knew that money was necessary to live, and that you had none to leave me, why did you give me being? [He throws the box away from him-he runs after it, throws himself on his knees and weeps.] Ah, forgive me, forgive me, my father! my old whiteheaded father 1 You have so often embraced me on your knees! It is my own fault! I believed I was a poet! It is my own fault; but I assure you that your name shall not go to prison; I swear it to you, my old father! See, see-here is some opium! if I am too hungry- -I shall not eatI will drink. [He bursts into tears over the snuff-box, on which the portrait is painted.] Some one mounts my ladder stair heavily. Let me conceal my treasure! [Hiding the opium]—and wherefore? am I not free? freer than ever. Cato did not hide his sword-stay as thou art, Roman, and look firmly before thee. [He places the opium on his table.]"

[Enter the Quaker.

This time, calmed and saved, he waits a reply to a letter written to the lord mayor. Beckford, the protector, arrives-arrives to deprecate his past uselessness as a poet, and offer him a post of a hundred a year as his valet; and Chatterton, in that despair which Alfred de Vigny says, in his preface, “is not an idea, but a thing, a material thing, which tortures, and grasps, and grinds the heart of a man, like an iron forceps, till it has made him mad”— Chatterton who, interrogated on the duties of an Englishman, had likened England to a mighty ship, sending her boats to far shores, having on deck king, lords, commons, with hand to mast, and rope, sail and gun, rudder, and compass, who has said that the poet's part on board the glorious ship was "to read in the stars the road marked out by the finger of God"-Chatterton swallows poison. Kitty Bell, in some undefinable fear, is come to seek him. He has read the libel given by Beckford as a cure; he has cast on the seacoal fire the manuscripts trusted in so vainly for fame, if not for life; his aspect terrifies her more than his absence; he bids her to live calmly and piously, to love her children, to drive

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from her all thoughts and grief foreign to them; he commands her to leave him, when he has tried all other reasons vainly, because "he loves her." The answer is beautifully returned"Ah! sir, if you tell me so, it is because you are determined to die." He confesses what he has done, and staggers up the stair, while she sinks down at its foot. The old quaker enters and hurries after him; and Kitty follows also, clinging to the bannister, with little of her body's strength, with all that of her soul in her hold, opens the door at the top, and perceives, as does the audience, Chatterton dying. She utters a cry, and slips down, step by step, falling on the last. We hear the harsh voice of her husband, calling, "Mistress Bell;" she rises as by mechanism; a second summons makes her walk forward to her chair, seat herself slowly, draw her bible from her pocket, turn over its leaves, and-die. The tragedy of the "Marechale d'Ancre" was acted before Chatterton, although we name it after the subject historical, as well as 66 Cinq Mars;" and belonging to an earlier date of the same reign is the power and the fall of Concini, Marechale d'Ancre, and his wife Leonora Galigai. The former believed to be, jointly with Marie de Medicis, contriver of the death of her royal husband, Henry IV, and shot by Vitry's hand, and Louis XIII's order; the latter, favourite of the queen regent, and sharer of her power, burned at the stake for a sorceress. The successful crime marching blindly on to expiation is finely drawn in this tragedy, which is one of great power and dramatic interest; but we must refer our readers to the volume or the stage, and quote no farther. We are aware that our extracts have been long; but we know no other mode of placing a foreigner in his true light before our countrymen. It is easy to say that a writer's colouring is never coarse, and his thought never impure; that he is not trivial from being exclamatory, or feeble through exaggeration; that phrases are not amplified to conceal a

lack of ideas; and that where we find a pearl, we do not dive for it in a world of water. We might, with truth, have said more than this of Alfred de Vigny, but that we believed his own pen would make him better known than ours, and render praise unnecessary. We have not mentioned the translations of "Othello" and the "Merchant of Venice," which preceded the "Marechal d'Ancre as the latter did "Chatterton." Our limits do not permit to quote as we intended from Servitude et Grandeur, the Veilleé de Vincennes," a reminiscence of the author's military life; they allow us only to name his letter on "Mademoiselle Sedaine et la Propri eté Celleraire," and the poems which now appearing in the Revue des deux Mondes, are his latest productions. The letter on Mademoiselle Sedaine, daughter of the dramatist, united with the interest of a romance, found in her true story, his arguments for a law of copy-right for the better protection of literary men and their descendants. If it was not echoed as it should have been in the Chamber of Deputies, for we think it took the fair and just view of the question, for Mademoiselle Sedaine, old, and blind, and poor, and till then, forgotten, it procured a pension immediately. The first published poems to which we referred are three in number,-" le Sauvage," "la mort du Loup," "la Flute:" like those of his early volumes, they carry a philosophical idea on their rhyme. "Le Sauvage" is an argument for civilization; "la Mort du Loup," a voice of fortitude; "la Flute," of resignation. We rejoice that they have broken a silence so protracted as to seem obstinate; the more to be deplored, as in French literature we find none who can replace him.

The years of imagination are brief; its stream does not flow alike or always; it is too turbulent in early youth; it grows shallow in the decline of manhood; it has but a space wherein it can reflect earth and heaven: and of this space the writer does well to profit.