There is little to admire in the state or on canvas. There is an expression in apartments now. The great attraction is the eyes that is almost superhuman, and in the magnificent collection of modern the fading light I could almost have imFrench paintings. I think the great agined that the figure lived and moved, so genius of some of these artists must aston- strongly did the white form stand out ish the English, who can not fail to be im- with its pale face and glaring eyes. pressed with the utmost admiration by this collection. Here are the chefs d'œuvre of Paul Delaroche, (and what beautiful paintings they are!) of Delacroix, and all the great living artists. One painting by the latter, representing Lady Macbeth in the sleeping scene, gives a better idea, I think, of her agony, her remorse, and her sufferings, than any representation I ever saw, either on the stage It is impossible to visit the gallery of the Luxembourg without entertaining a very exalted idea of the genius of the present race of French artists. Nor can one fail to remark that they receive, indeed, every incentive to excellence in the admirable manner that their works are here exhibited to the world during their lifetime within the spacious apartments of this interesting palace. From Tait's Magazine. THE DREAM O F NAPOLEON III. BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. to bear a reference to his uncle, so in the present case he was the first to appear before the slumberer. Holding his hands behind him, as thieves and assassins are apt to do, he appeared to look down on the bed, and to speak in a hoarse whisper these words: His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon III. | were not so unconnected as they generally had been afflicted for several nights with | are; nearly all of them bore somewhat on rheumatic pains. At last it was the opinion his condition. As they mostly were wont of his physicians that opiates would be beneficial, and that almost every potentate had been in the habit of taking them. The medical men forbore to mention to his Majesty that they had slept in consequence with their eyes open, and were alarmed at every noise without. He showed some suspicion and some reluctance, but at last consented. He slept, not indeed soundly, but neither was it with his eyes open; for he was very differently constituted from those weaker patients. As the chamber was closed, and the nurses not quite awake throughout the night, it was impossible to ascertain how long he slumbered, how quietly, how unquietly, or whether at longer or at shorter intervals. But, as is usual under this medicament, he had a series of dreams and hallucinations. They "Mind and obey me, Louis! You possess at once my experience and my throne. Permit no Bourbon to reign or exist in Europe; permit no power in France to be commensurate, or long coëxistent, with the Imperial. Marry a virtuous woman, if you can find one; even a virtuous woman will accept a vicious man, if he shows her a ring and a sceptre. For want of warning and reflection I committed the sin that ruined me. An Austrian wife brought Louis XVI. to the scaffold; never theless, fool that I was! I took an Austrian wife. Delila might have been silly, Louise was certainly; each betrayed her captive. But there was the man, and the man stands now before you, sillier than either. Impatient of the obscurity that environed my family, I sprang upwards to seize the splendid regalia that hung about the house of Loraine. Little did I consider or care whether its secret heritage, scrofula, would infect my offspring. The lark and the looking-glass were soon under the same net." He sighed, and disappeared. Scarcely had he gone away, when a soft and silvery voice insinuated into the Imperial ear what was as nearly an interrogation as is admissible in such an audi "It will not be, if delayed. Perspicacious as your Majesty is, I venture to af firm that your Majesty can discover no general or statesman out of Russia. The policy of the Czars hath always been to procure at high prices the most able-minded men. Her generals at the present day are incomparably better than ours. The English have none. The conqueror of Scinde, the victor at Sobraon and Mianee, was unrequited: Guyon and Williams will be decorated like a couple of drums, and hundreds of inferior officers will be left in the full enjoyment of their inferiority, and will rise only upon the grave of seniors. Your Majesty has obedient and enthusiastic soldiers, from among whom great men may spring." "So much the worse. M. de Talleyrand, I love equality." A smile of subdued sarcasm came over the Emperor's countenance, and he added: "I wish the tranquillity of Europe." "May it please your Majesty, I too have always loved tranquillity. But it is only to be possessed by satisfying the reasonable desires of men, maintaining them in their possessions and rights, and by restoring such of these as have been forcibly torn from them." "We will consider in due time." "The time is come; when it is passed it will be too late to consider." "M. de Talleyrand, you were not always so urgent; let me add, so importunate." "Sire, I have not always, nor ever, had to deal with a personage so clear-sighted." "Was not my uncle ?" "Sire! Permit me to speak plainly in reply ?" "Do so." "The Emperor your uncle committed more mistakes, and more grievous ones, than any man upon record. He lost five armies, and six or seven kingdoms, besides the empire of France. Had he listened to milder and warning counsels, your Majesty at this hour would only have been Emperor of Germany, and King of Hungary and Poland: your cousin would have been seated on the throne of France. Lombardy would have been under one branch of your family, Southern Italy and Sicily under another. The face of Europe was then ploughed, it now is haggard, dejected, and expressive of despondency. There never was a time in the history of the world when it contained so small a number of vigorous minds in war and politics. Take advantage, Sire, of this conjunction. England hath solicited your alliance and coöperation; your Majesty hath acceded to her suit. She gains nothing by her defence of Turkey; you recover there your ascendency. Constantinople is become a faubourg of Marseilles." After a pause, the Emperor said: 66 I have been censured for abstaining from the restoration of Poland. At the expense of three hundred thousand muskets, and half the army I sent into the Crimea, I could have effected this; but Austria and England were more averse to it than I myself was, unwilling, as you may well suppose me, to excite a spirit of republicanism in any country whatever." "Your Majesty judges rightly in suppressing such a spirit in France, where one strong will must rule; but there are countries where, not only constitutional, but even republican institutions, long ago took root and flourished. Aragon, Biscay, and some other parts of Spain, were as free as the Hanse towns, or as Genoa, Venice, and Ragusa. Municipalities are republics. They flourished formerly, and still exist, in Italy. The Italians are more capable of self-government than any other nation on the continent. The staple of our soil is worn out by uncongenial crops. It has now been well harrowed and pulverized; by rest it may recover." "You teach me to talk figuratively. A watch must be wound up to go. There are times when it must be taken to pieces, cleaned, oiled, the works put together again, and the movements regulated." "Who are those two men ?" said the Emperor in his dream. But Talleyrand had vanished. "Sir!" deliberately and firmly spoke the voice of an armed and strong man, with a crown upon his head, "I am John Sobieski. I claim nothing from the recreant at Vienna, which town my people saved from massacre and destruction; I would have claimed nothing from that perfidious man whose name and office you bear, who hated and reviled every brave enemy, and treated every brave friend with an ingratitude amply repaid him; but, Sir, you are under obligations, you and England equally, to restore to my people what hath been wrenched away from them. The Polish Lancers, more than once, saved the French army." During this speech, a man wearing no crown, but his head bandaged with black silk, took the hand of Sobieski, with a sickly smile, and pressed it to his lips. The Emperor knew him to be Kosciusko, and looked as if expecting him to speak. He was not disappointed. In the gentlest and softest voice he uttered these few words: "Sir, I come not to implore of you any favor for my country; but I leave the consideration to your sagacity, whether your power would not be increased, and much added to the probability of its duration, by an act of justice and gratitude to Poland. It would render it impossible for either Austria or Russia to molest you -it would raise an army for you, at no cost to you, always ready for your defence. You are fond of glory. This is never to be attained by deception of any kind. Your historians, formerly men of honor and veracity, now lie cum privilegio." "Do you suspect me of authorizing what has been lately written on the conduct of the war in the Crimea ?" "Your Majesty is above suspicion." "Thiers indulges in less rhodomontade; yet I would not have purchased the "Lives" of M. Thiers at three sous apiece." "Your Majesty was never parsimonious; in such an expenditure there had been prodigality. But, Sir, you who write better than any of your subjects, will, I am confident, write the history of your own life. I entreat of you so to write it that every line may give you pleasure and satisfaction; and that men hereafter, on reading it, may say, Napoleon III. was just." Kosciusko did not walk backwards, in courtly fashion, from the Imperial presence, nor, indeed, bow before it, but, reposing his wounded limbs against the firm stature of Sobieski, sighed deeply. "Courage! my comrade," said the animated king; "despair not, distrust not: thy soul is large and pure enough to animate more than one people. Thou art the greatest of Poland's great men ; I am confident in Providence that thou shalt not be the last." Louis Napoleon then dreamt that his uncle, become a dwarf, grinned horribly between their legs; and that he himself was formed into a cat, and was beginning to devour a number of mice, whose skins resembled his own in color, and who, while they feared him, fawned upon them. His eyes were long, half-shut, as cats' are, but his mouth was soon wide open and in full activity. What strange things dreams are! irritating at one time the distempered brain, at another soothing its anxieties. Napoleon was now walking in a narrow path, surrounded and overgrown with briers. He trampled them down easily, but warily, and saw under them the fragments of ancient and grave and noble images. In one he recognized the face of Liberty, turned upward and looking sternly; he gazed a moment at it, and passed on. Suddenly there descended from its pedestal a tall figure, the only one quite entire, and took him by the left hand, which she has always been in the habit of taking. It was Ambition. But they had not walked long together, when a matron of serene and placid dignity, on whose arm a lovely girl was leaning, came in sight. He stopped, and looked earnestly at the heavenly apparition. Calm in her innocence, she lowered her eyes, she did not turn them aside; the sangre azur did not mount into her cheek. Bowing first to the Countess, the Emperor spoke to her daughter in tones of gentle- ! "Wretch!" said Love (for it was he), ness, of tenderness, of deference. After "Boastful wretch! I was the blessing of a while, the marble in all its purity was earth before thy existence. I reigned in animated; the heart was there. Napo- heaven before thou wert driven out. Howleon thought he should be reproved and ever, let there now be peace between us. reprimanded by Ambition; on the con- Insensate as thou art, thou hast but to trary, she smiled on him. Presently, a god-look on thy right hand, and thou wilt then like youth, in the bloom of adolescence, acknowledge my superiority." stood before them, and pointing at Ambition, said to the others: "Attend to me. left is no goddess." That creature on the She looked contemptuously, and said: "Thou descendest on all indifferently; I converse with the great alone. I give to Mars his spear and shield; I command the Furies; I chain down Discord." He went away, but kept two of the three ever in sight. "We are suddenly come to the Champ Elysées," said the Countess. Madame!" replied the Emperor, "I once thought the place fantastically called so; I now find it was prophetically called so. To France I owe my crown, to Spain my happiness. From Bentley's Miscellany. 66 SOME twenty years since, the poet last, but not least in our dear love"Wordsworth sat by his home on Rydal we have to chronicle the demise of the Mount from whence had issued such Vestris, the witching actress of our younger grave yet cheerful wisdom-and thought days. of the many friends whose sun had gone down behind the distant hill. In addition to other rare spirits, Scott had departed, and the funeral calendar of a year or two included the name of Crabbe, of Coleridge, and of Lamb; and the old man plaintively sighed as the melancholy phantoms haunted his memory— "How fast has brother followed brother From sunshine to the sunless land!" Innumerable times have we been asked the age of this most popular of London's favorites-whose fame was little short of European-and generally has our reply been received with an apparent shrug of doubtfulness. "I am not so very old,” said Madame herself, a few years since, on taking leave of a provincial audience; but the world had been so long familiar with her fascination, that it was fain to exaggerate her age, and place her in the list devoted to far more matronly ladies. Let us again repeat her age, with some few records of her professional career. We seem again to have fallen upon cheerless days, the poets giving place to the players, whose brightest lights are being The lovers of art can not fail to rememfast extinguished. Within the last few ber the pleasure they have derived from months we have lost Braham, to whose the exquisite specimens of engravings songs a previous generation had listened; bearing the name of an academician, the chaste Young, the link that held us to Francesco Bartolozzi. The son of this the Siddons and the Kemble; and now-artist, Gaetano Bartolozzi, married a Ger man lady of great musical acquirements, | having been educated with a view to the Madame Teresa, from which union sprang stage-she stepped upon the boards of the the charming actress now lost to us, Lucia Opera House, the great temple of the Elizabeth Bartolozzi, who was born in Lon- lyrical drama which still graces the Haydon, in the January of 1797. In the course of a liberal education, she evinced an early talent for music, as well as a most retentive memory; she soon became mistress of the French and Italian languages, and, we are pleased to add, had not forgotten the purity of her own. At the age of fourteen she was a visitant at the principal places of fashionable resort in the metropolisher brilliant eyes attracting towards her considerable notice. With the symmetry of youth and the grace of mien, there were blended in her "The glance that wins us, and the life that throws market. This was on the 20th of July, 1815, the part in which she first appeared being Proserpina, in Winter's "Il Ratto di Proserpina." This character was repeated several times, a favorable impression having been created, the public accepting youth and elegance for more artistical accomplishments. Susannah, in "Figaro," and a few other performances, followed; and subsequently Madame Vestris accompanied her husband to Paris, where she first appeared, at the Théâtre Italien, on the 7th of December, 1816, as Proserpina. Whilst in this gay city, she found herself neglected by her liege lord, with but little inclination to pine in solitude. The licentious metropolis beckoned her with its smiles, and for a time she revelled in its giddy maze. She had constant thoughts, however, of the profession to which she had been introduced, and, being a perfect mistress of the language, frequently played at the French theatres both in tragedy and in drama. In an evil hour, whilst mingling in the circle of gayety, the young Lucia was introduced to M. Armand Vestris, who was then turning the heads of the frequenters of the Opera by his unrivalled dancing. Armand was the grandson of the Vestris Returning to England in the winter of whom the enthusiastic Parisians styled 1819, Madame Vestris was introduced to "Le Dieu de la Danse," and appeared for the English stage, upon the boards of the first time in England at the Opera, in Drury Lane, on the 19th of February, 1809, dancing a pas de deux with Madame 1820, in the character of Lilla, in the Angiolini. He was known as a man of "Siege of Belgrade." Adela, in the pleasure, and dissipation was stamped upon" Haunted Tower," was her second perhis features. After a short acquaintance, formance; and after a few other imperArmand Vestris was united to the bright-sonations, she fascinated the town by her eyed Bartolozzi, at the church of St. Mar- inimitable assumption of Giovanni. tin's-in-the-Fields, where a theatrical heroine of a former day-the warm-hearted Nell Gwynne-found interment, Archbishop Tenison (at that time the vicar of St. Martin's) preaching at her funeral a sermon of forgiveness. The marriage ceremony was performed on the 28th of January, 1813, the bridegroom being then just twenty-six, whilst the attractive bride had numbered but sixteen summers. We have said that Armand Vestris was a gay man. Moving in a fashionable sphere, he discovered, soon after his marriage, that a life of pleasure brought with it liabilities which his own income failed to meet, and he therefore proposed that his young wife should venture for a prize in the lottery of the stage. The gifted descendant of the old engraver was nothing loth; and so, after some preliminary training-not It was about this time we first met Madame Vestris, a period in our career when the heart was young, and when the stage, with its bright eyes and glowing forms, dazzled the imagination. At one of our first meetings, Madame warbled, with all her pristine witchery, the unforgotten ballad of "Who'll buy a heart ?" It was then we became conscious of the full extent of our poverty, for alas! the means of effecting such a purchase were denied us. The success of Madame Vestris in Giovanni led to the revival of other pieces in which she figured in male attire, the list including Captain Macheath, Apollo, Hypolito, ("The Kind Impostor,") Cherintus, ("The Fatal Urn,") Young Malcolm, ("Lady of the Lake,") and Paul, ("Paul and Virginia.") Much was said at the time of the impropriety of act |