terms.

By-and-by, the separation between the their husband is one of the most extraorquondam friends becomes more marked, dinary men in existence and possesses and it is by no means a rare case for them the rare virtue of entertaining due affecin time to almost completely forget each tion and respect for his wife; and other other. Looking back upon their lives, similar matters of an equally important most women must remember some bosom and interesting character. But these friend whom they now know not at all, or elderly friends make no pretence of being knowing them, are merely upon bowing bound up in one another; they steer Young men, never so earnest clear of lengthy correspondence; and in their friendships, are almost as fickle. they do not mourn that is to say, beDrawn together, in the first instance, yond indulging in a few hackneyed conprobably by a fondness for the same ventionalities when they fail to see sports, the same studies, and the same each other except at rare intervals. Havmodes of life generally, they quietly drop ing their own families and interests to asunder as their tastes and ways of ex-look after, they virtually concede that isting change. Sometimes they quarrel. they have no time for elaborate friendBut, whatever may be the cause or causes ships. This is, of course, when they are of their separation, it is a fact that com- married. When they are single, the case paratively few friendships contracted in is slightly different, and it not unfreearly life continue true to the last. It may be said, indeed, that it is the exception rather than the rule for them to do so. And yet, if a man does not make friends when he is young, the probability is that he will never do so, for, after he is well up in years, circumstances arise which render the task more difficult.

quently happens that spinsters knock-up a species of lasting friendship. They go nowhere except in each other's company, and they co-operate in each other's schemes, whether it be one for the founding of a blanket club or one for the advancement of the principles of the Women's Rights Association. They, perThe friendships formed by people after haps, say hard things of each other, they, they have passed their thirtieth year are probably, repeat these matters, with sunby no means so sentimental, so ostenta- dry elaborations, behind each other's tiously thorough, as those contracted backs, but they never regularly quarrel. when people are younger. Middle-aged If Miss A is maligned, Miss B is quick men make little, if any attempt, at being to resent the affront, and let Miss A know confidential towards each other. Their what has been said of her, which last act converse instead of being of a personal is, however, a somewhat questionable character is principally upon politics, the- kindness. The two keep together, and ology, and business, seasoned by a certain that is the main thing. It is a small matamount of gossip. Matured women on the other hand, are more confidential, but they are not so demonstrative and gushing as girls just out of their teens. They do not make protestations of eternal affection. Still, they tell as much as they know and learn as much as they can about their neighbours and their affairs, and discuss matrimony and dress in a manner which shows how much they rel- There is, then, very little really genuine ish doing so. Properly prompted, they friendship. The present constitution of will, too, enlarge upon their own affairs. society is unfavourable to its growth. Into sympathetic cars they will pour the When everything is artificial, and everystory of how their first-born, as fine a thing is conducted upon the high pressure youth as ever lived, is developing certain principle, it is impossible for it to flourcharacteristics calculated to cause his ish. We may regret this, but the best guardians serious inconvenience; how thing is at once to admit the truth.

ter that their motives for so doing are found, when fairly analyzed, not to be purely disinterested, but that they cultivate each other's society for the want of better, and because it is among the necessities of their nature that they should have some willing ear to pour scandal into, and some ready tongue to amuse them in like manner.

MDME. Andryane, whose death was recorded | prisons. Mdme. Andryane and her sister, by the Paris papers lately, was the sister-in-law Mdme. Baudin, were daughters of Merlin of of Andryane, well-known as the companion of Douai, who was a member of the Convention Silvio Pellico, and it was to her intercession and a colleague with Barras in the Directory. that he owed his liberation from the Austrian

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From The Contemporary Review.
THE YOUNGER VANE.

ancient stock; one of his ancestors had received knighthood for bravery on the field of Poictiers; his father was a prosperous and pliant courtier. He was himself the polar opposite of all that this lin

pect. History might be ransacked in vain for a pair of men so antithetically in contrast with each other as Sir Harry Vane the father and Sir Harry Vane the

I chosen books and guides, and of his own imperious, working intellect, and sleepSIR HENRY VANE, known to history as less dialectical faculty. Born in 1612, he the younger Vane, and to most people passed from boyhood into youth at the solely as the man to whom Cromwell very time when the Puritan fervour was said, "Sir Harry Vane, Sir Harry Vane, reaching its climax in England; and the the Lord deliver me from Sir Harry fact that every influence immediately surVane," was a characteristic figure in the rounding him would be directed to check English Revolution of the seventeenth and discountenance Puritanism, was likecentury, a living epistle of much that was ly to predispose the logically intrepid and characteristic, memorable, and curious in wilful boy in its favour. He was of an English Puritanism. The writing about him is not satisfactory. Vituperation, ample in quantity and vigorous in quality, you have from Clarendon and his historical fraternity, whose account of Vane, toned down a little, is substantially adopt-eage and parentage would lead us to exed in the Biographia Britannica; commendation has recently abounded on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. C. Wentworth Upham and Mr. Forster strenuously exerting themselves to depict him as a son. The father was incapable of standfaultless hero and Puritan Washington, ing erect; the son was incapable of bowin contrast with the traitorous dissimu- ing or bending: the father could adapt lator Oliver Cromwell: but fairness is himself to any hole, round or square; the absent on the one side, discrimination on son could never find any hole that would the other. Clarendon, having been Vane's quite suit him: the son could adjust himbitter enemy during his life, was not like- self neither to Charles I. nor to Oliver ly to do his memory justice; but Claren- Cromwell; the father smirked, and ate don's portrait-sketches are sharp; he has good things, and made himself generally an eye for a man's distinctive quality; useful under Charles, under the Parliaand his language is eloquent. You can ment, and under the Protector! They discover the true Vane in Clarendon's seem to have remained on the best of portrait, though the "jaundiced eye" of terms all their lives, a circumstance due, the artist has quenched the white and red I suppose, to the totality of their differof honest health, and substituted a false ence. The father could tolerate all prinand sickly hue. In the favourable biog- ciples because he had none; the son raphies the figure of Vane seems to float could not quarrel with, or complain of, waveringly on a reflecting surface of wa- his father, because his most vehemently tery panegyric; you fail to trace a deter-asserted principles never evoked contraminate outline, or to form an idea of the diction. It might be interesting to know flesh-and-bone Sir Harry, as distinguished whether the extremes of flexibility and from an abstract of political perfection inflexibility have alternated in the chiefs prefiguring the sublimities of the Amer- of the house of Vane from the days of old ican constitution. The reader of the Howel ap Vane of Monmouthshire, the modern eulogistic biographies of Vane is first recorded progenitor of the Knight of not unlikely to repeat the prayer of Crom- Poictiers, until now. That the race has well. had tough vitality is unquestionable, for at this hour the Vane blood runs in several of our ducal and lordly families, and the Duke of Cleveland is a lineal descendant of Sir Harry.

Henry Vane comes before us from the first as pointedly original. From the age of fifteen he was a law unto himself. The influence of his father, his relatives, and the court-circle in which he moved, was Till fifteen, Vane tells us, he lived the weak in comparison with that of self-life of a worldling and "good fellow;"

tinguish, define, was for him, now and henceforward, the highest possible happiness. The son of an eminent English courtier, the heir of an ancient and opulent house, he was likely to receive from the hierarchs of the Puritan Rome sufficient deference to flatter his intellectual pride, while their argumentative skill, practised in the debates of the most controversial century in the history of the world, would polish to a gossamer attenuation that subtlety which was at once the force and the foible of Vane. He returned to England in a white glow of Puritan illumination, and the court began to look with chagrin upon the prospect of such an addition to the Puritan ranks. It was arranged that Laud should take him in hand, but the result was as might have been foreseen. Laud had a limited logical faculty and a short temper; Vane had a genius for argumentative logic, an invincibly placid temper, and that ineffable self-complacency which is irritating in any man, insufferably irritating in a stripling. Finding that he made no progress, Laud flew into a passion and brought the discussion to an end. Shrewd Sir Harry, the father, looked on with philosophical tranquillity, speculating perhaps on the possibility that his son's Puritanism might turn up as a good card one of these difficult and dubious days.

it then pleased God to call him to repent- Westminster School, he finds, when still ance, and to reveal Jesus Christ in him. a mere boy, that his conscience will not His religion was Puritan, and the word permit him to take the oath of supremin his case points to the moral fervour as acy. After lingering for a period at Oxwell as to the scholastic dogmatism of the ford in unattached study, he travels on Puritans. In point of fact, the most the continent, and makes his way, as was characteristic men of the entire period customary for spiritual knights errant of between the rise of Calvin and the Res- the time, to Geneva. Here the Calvinistoration of Charles II. are unintelligible tic doctors would give him play for his unless we to some extent realize that dialectical weapons, and to dispute, disspiritual heat, that transcendent belief in responsibility to God, which could not, like the Puritan theology, be embodied in creeds, but which is vividly present in the best religious literature of the time, in Calvin's letters, and indeed in all Calvin's writings, in Jeremy Taylor's sermons and devotional treatises, in Milton's best poetry and Baxter's best prose. The religious inspiration of the age reached all parties in England, but it burned most vehemently in the Puritans. The fundamental allegation of Luther and Calvin was that the Church of Rome had falsified Christianity. They did not, as they have been a thousand times misrepresented to have done, proclaim the emancipation of the human mind from authority. They appealed to an infallible Bible against a Church whose claim to infallibility they rejected; and they affirmed it to be the duty of all men to submit to the infallible Bible as emphatically as Rome affirmed it to be the duty of all men to submit to the infallible Church. The English Puritans, whose theory of inspiration was more rigid than that of Luther and Calvin, insisted with fiery importunity that the Bible and the Bible alone should be the religion of England. Laud and the anti-Puritans urged that rites and ceremonies, though not enjoined in the Bible, might be lawfully imposed by the Church. The Anglican We next find young Henry, with the view was something of a compromise and acquiescence of his father, who is doubtsomething of a retrogression; both cir- less glad to have him temporarily out of cumstances would discredit it with the the way, on board an emigrant ship amid emotionally fervid and dialectically abso- a company of Puritans bound for New lute Henry Vane. Accordingly, from the England. The honest exiles cannot help earliest point at which we can trace him, looking on him as a surprising, if not he is a Puritan. A scrupulous conscien- alarming, phenomenon. His long hair, tiousness was combined in him with con- his courtly dress, his aristocratic deportsistent, unswerving Biblicism. At Ox-ment, strike them as more compatible ford, to which he had been sent from with the character of a court spy than of