rous or more serious philosophy. In some papers published a few years ago in the Cornhill Magazine, called "Chapters on Talk," a great deal of this delightful and pleasant humor appears.

station is, he will in this case ask you to tell him. "What station is this?" is a favorite inquiry with him. He doesn't want to know: he is not going to stop at it: he merely asks because his mouth is full of words, and they must needs dribble out in some form or other. In this case it takes an interrogative form. A tiresome individual this: one cannot help speculating how many times in the course of his life he has thought it necessary to inform his fellow-creatures that the morning has been fine or cold, as the case might be, and the weather generally seasonable, or the reverse.

live in a street, and will only sit at your window for a sufficient length of time, one of them is sure to pass. He has a companion with him, the recipient of that small dropping talk. Perpetual Drop points with his stick, calling his friend's attention to a baker's shop-what is he saying? He is saying, "Ah, German, you Frantzmann, German name. Great many Ger man bakers in London: Germans and Scotch:

see:

nearly all bakers are either one or the other." You continue to watch, and you observe that this loquacious gentleman is again pointing.

Where you see those houses," he is saying now, "there were nothing but green fields when I was a boy. Not a brick to be seen anywhere." And so he goes on commenting on everything. Whatever his senses inform him of, he seems obliged to put on record. "Piebald horse," he says, as one goes by him in an omnibus ; or, "Curious smell," as he passes the fried-fish stall. This is the man with whom we have all travelled in railway-trains. He proclaims to his companion -a person much to be pitied-the names of the stations as the train arrives at each-“Ah, Croy don," he says; or "Ah, Redhill,-going to stop, I see." He makes his comments when they do stop. "Little girl with fruit," he says; or, Boy with papers.' Very likely he will imitate the peculiar cry of this last-" Mornin' papaw,' for his friend's benefit. This kind of talker may be studied very advantageously in railway-trains. He is familiar with technical terms. He remarks, when there is a stoppage, that we are "being shunted on to the up-line till the express goes by.' Presently there is a shriek, and a shake, and a whirl, and then our friend looks round with triumph. "That was it," he says; "Dover express, down-line." This is a very wearying perHe cannot be quiet. If he is positively run out and without a remark to make, he will ask a question. Instead of telling you what the

66

sonage.

You require the recipient of your talk

to manifest intelligence, to show interest, and, what is more, to feel it. The fact is, that to listen well-as to do anything else well-is not easy. It is not easy even to seem to listen well, as we observe notably in the conduct of bad actors and stage amateurs, who break down in this particular, perhaps more often and more frequently than in any other.

But it is even more in his society than in his writing that our friend showed himself as he was. His talking was unlike that of anybody else; it sometimes put me in mind of another voice out of the past. There was an earnest wit, a gentle audacity and simplicity of expression that made it come home to us all. Of late, E. R. was saying he spoke with a quiet and impressive authority that we all unconsciously acknowledged. The end of pain was near. Of his long sufferings he never complained. But if he spoke of himself, it was with some kind little joke or humorous conceit and allusion to the philosophy of endurance, nor was it until after his death that we knew what his martyrhad borne it. dom had been, nor with what courage he

He thought of serious things very constantly, although not in the conventional manner. One of the last times that we met he said to me, "I feel more and more convinced that the love of the Father is not unlike that of an earthly father, and that as an earthly father, so He rejoices in the prosperity and material well-doing of his children." Another time, quoting from the Roundabout Papers, he said suddenly, "Be good, my dear.' Depend upon it, that is the whole philosophy of life; it is very simple."

Speaking of a friend, he said with some emotion, "I think I love M. as well as if he were dead."

He had a fancy, that we all used to laugh over with him, of a great central building, something like the Albert Hall, for friends to live in together, with galleries for the sleepless to walk in at night. Perhaps some people may think that allusions so personal as these are scarcely fitted for the pages of a Magazine, but what is there in truth more unpersonal than the thought of a wise and gentle spirit, of a generous and truthful life? Here is a life that belongs to us all; we have all been the better for the existence of the one man. He could not be good without doing good in his generation, nor speak the truth as he did without adding to the sum of true things. And the lesson that he taught us was—“ Let us be true to ourselves; do not let us be afraid to be ourselves, to love each other and to speak and to trust in each other."

Last night the moon rose very pale at first, then blushing flame-like through the drifting vapors as they rose far beyond the downs; a great black-bird sat watching the shifting shadowy worlds from the bare

branch of a tree, and the colts in the field set off scampering. Later, about eleven o'clock, the mists had dissolved into a silent silver and nightingale-broken dream— in which were vaporous downs, moonlight, sweet sudden stars, and clouds drifting, like some slow flight of silver birds. Ltook us to a little terrace at the end of his father's garden. All the kingdoms of the night lay spread before us, bounded by dreams. For a minute we stood listening to the sound of the monotonous wave that beats away our time in this pleasant place, and then it ceased-and in the utter silence a cuckoo called, and then the nightingale began, and then the wave answered once more. It will all be a dream tomorrow, as we stumble into the noise, and light, and work of life again. Monday comes commonplace, garish, and one can scarce believe in the mystical Sunday night. And yet this tranquil Sunday night is more true than the flashiest gaslamp in Piccadilly. Natural things seem inspired at times, and beyond themselves, and to carry us upwards and beyond our gas-lamps; so do people seem revealed to to us at times in the night, when all is peace.-Cornhill Magazine.

BUT for Pepys and Evelyn we should know but little of the social life of the seventeenth century. A host of letter writers-Walpole, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Montagu, at the head of them-may be said to have photographed the next century for us. Lord Malmesbury, Lord Auckland, and some others succeeded; and now we are beginning to have revelations exclusively of the first years of the nineteenth century. The most important contributor to our knowledge in this respect is the late Sir George Jackson, whose recently published volumes will afford us samples of the times in which our grandmothers were young and had swains at their feet-unless war called them away. Gay people on the continent had a bad time of it when war broke out in 1803, and the French government issued orders for the arrest of all English persons on whom hands could be laid. Bath expect ed to be more brilliant than ever by the return of the absentees; but their difficulty

All who were in

was how to return. France were made prisoners. A precipitate flight of crowds of English travellers from Geneva suddenly took place. They were not safe on any part of the Continent; but some, in disguise and on foot, reached Berlin, others got to the sea and arrived in England; but Bath was not sensible of any increase in numbers or gaiety, for the times were out of joint, though dowagers still played whist and young couples danced minuets.

Many of those who were shut up at Verdun chafed under the restraint as intolerable. Some, however, bore it philosophically, others gaily. A few took to French mistresses; other few to French wives. The French officials made "a good thing" out of those who had money, granting them partial liberty for so many days or hours, according to the "consideration." Two or three, having spent hundreds of pounds in their bribes, at last took "French leave," and were lucky in

not being recaptured. Their course is not to be commended. We have a higher opinion of Sir Sidney Smith, who, when a prisoner in the Temple, refused to have his parole, used to tell the governor to be vigilant, as he would be off on the first opportunity, and ultimately kept his word, broke prison, and found his painful way to England.

The seriousness of the times and their events little affected the Prince of Wales. He was indeed thought to be ill in the early part of 1804; but the illness arose, it was said, from the fact that the Prince and the Duke of Norfolk had been so drunk, for three whole days, that the former at last fell like a pig, and would have died like one, but for prompt and copious bleeding. How rude the "first gentleman" could be, when he chose, to his wife, is well-known. At a drawing room, held by Queen Charlotte in June 1807, when the. Prince and Princess of Wales were present, he took no notice of the Princess. Turning his back upon her, he stood between her and the Queen, and as long as the Princess remained he kept up a conversation with his sisters, thereby preventing them from addressing a word to his wife. This feeling against his wife he paraded everywhere. He was jealous of her popularity quite unnecessarily, for she made herself ridiculous, and the subject of scornful criticism, by her lavish display at evening parties of her protuberant beauties. At these parties, the Prince would stare at ladies whom he knew, without speaking to them. His condescending speech was addressed only to his first wife, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and her sister, Lady Haggerstone. The first of these ladies lived at Brighton with the state of a queen and the spirit of a goddess of mirth. Meanwhile, his Royal Highness flirted with his "future Duchess," the Marchioness of Hertford. One of Queen Fitzherbert's merriest tales related how a man had sent to her some lemonade powders he had invented, on the ground that they were highly approved and constantly used by the Marchioness in question.

In 1802 Bath was surprised by a visit from the Duke of York. He brought the Duchess with him, and left her there next day. Her friends reported that she had been bitten in the hand by one of her numerous pet dogs, and that the wound was privately pumped upon daily. But the

public story was, that his Royal Highness had lost 200,000l. at play, and had been compelled to break up his town establishment. The scandalous story of the Duke and Mrs. Clark, a mistress, who sold places and commissions, is pleasantly balanced by an incident respecting a son of the Duke of Clarence and his mistress, Mrs. Jourdan-Lieutenant Fitzclarence, in 1809. He was in Spain with our army in that year, and he reversed La Fontaine's fable of the mule who was always talking of his mother the mare, but said little of his father the ass. The Lieutenant was the foolish aide-de-camp of a foolish General Shaw, who was always showing him about to the Spaniards, as the King of England's grandson.

That grandson was about to be despatched on a mission to the Continent in 1813, but ministers changed their minds. They were afraid he would write everything to his father, who would publish it in Bond Street; and so the gentleman was kept at home to sun himself in the bow window at White's.

The grandest fête of sixty years since was the one given by the Prince, at Carlton House, in 1811. The King was in such ill health and the Princess Amelia in such a precarious condition that it was often deferred; and Jekyll remarked that no one could ever again say," Fixed as fate!" At length it came off, and, for one happy invited guest, made a hundred mad who were not invited. The Queen and Princesses declined to be present; but Louis the Eighteenth and the sad-looking Duchess of Angoulême appeared there, and the Prince received the former as a sovereign de facto. "I am only a Comte de Lille," said Louis modestly. "Sire," said the Prince, "you are the King of France and Navarre ;" and he treated his guest accordingly. Both the Prince's wives (Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Princess of Wales) sat at home by themselves; but the "favorite" was honored by a command to attend the festival. One of the Prince's ideas was to divorce his second wife and shut her up in Holyrood House for ever. This grand fête, it may be added, was soon forgotten in the excitement caused by the fight that was to come off between the Baltimore negro, Molyneux, and the chief of English boxers, Tom Cribb! was a time, moreover, when later hours began to be fashionable. We hear of a ball

It

lasting from twelve till eight; and of another at which the majority of dancers kept it up till ten in the morning.

We go back a couple of years, in order to remark that in 1809, while there was no lack of enjoyment among optimists, the press saw the worst side of everything; and the Times especially denied or explained away our victories generally, and that of Talavera in particular. The public seem to have been almost as ill-informed as to what was being done abroad as they are now by "our own correspondents," who are sent to describe battlefields or other troublesome matters, and who write columns on the boiling of their eggs and the obstinacy of their laundresses. "It is too much," says Jackson, " to hear the victory of Talavera called in question by the Times; a victory as honorable to British arms and British generalship as any they ever achieved. That paper should be offered up as a sacrifice to the manes of the heroes who fell on the Alberche. I have not patience to read it."

In 1814 the Prince Regent had a narrow escape for his life. On one of his evenings of ennui he sent for George Colman to come from the King's Bench, where he was a prisoner, to amuse him. Court jester and prince, they passed the night, drinking and fooling, till six o'clock, when his Highness was carried to bed in an apoplexy, from which he only recovered at the cost of seven and twenty ounces of blood! He was as near death at this critical juncture as a man could be and yet live. His constitution, however, carried him through. When the allied sovereigns entered London he was ready for all the duties and eager for all the pleasures that the occasion offered; but he shocked some people on one occasion by presiding at a public dinner on a Sunday.

That English society wanted refinement in the first decade of the present century is not to be disputed. When Mr. Jackson returned from long diplomatic service abroad in 1806, he dined one day at Lord Westmoreland's. The guests were chiefly Russians. They were as much out of their element in English society as the young diplomatist says he was after the sociability, ease and elegance of the society at foreign courts to which he had so long been accustomed.

Some of that foreign society was quite as free as it was easy. Jackson and

other Englishmen at the Prussian court were admitted to the morning toilette of Madame de Vos, the King of Prussia's grande maîtresse. While under the hands of her hairdresser she laughed and flirted with the English lords and gentlemen, who paid tribute to her beauty and its uses by making her presents of wine and tea, and other English matters, which she greedily accepted. There are three things, says the Welsh proverb, which always swallow and are never satisfied - the grave, the sea, and a king's concubine.

Austerlitz killed Pitt as surely as Trafalgar killed Nelson. Each died for his country, but that country mourned more deeply for the great admiral, stricken down in the battle where he was the victor, than it did for the great minister who died of a broken heart. The last book he read, at Bath, was Miss Owenson's (Lady Morgan's)Novice of St. Dominic.' That now unreadable romance, Pitt said, he could not lay down till he had finished it, and thence did the 'Novice' come to be the rage for a time. almost fought to obtain it at the libraries, and nothing in literature was talked of but a book which has long since fallen out of literature and of memory altogether. People, too, fought for another novel, 'A Winter in London,' in which fashionable life was illustrated by an incapable whose name and whose work are equally wrapt in oblivion.

People

Fox did not long survive his great rival Pitt. He died on the 13th of September, 1806. A week previously, when he was already dying, he transacted public business. He gave an audience in his bedroom to George Jackson, with instructions as to how the latter was to act on his new mission to Germany. There was a mixture of the solemn and the ludicrous in the scene. When Jackson was announced Mrs. Fox, in complete dishabille, was in the room. In her flurry she slipped into a closet, and, as the interview was prolonged, the lightly-draped lady kept signalling to Mr. Fox, as if he alone could hear her, by little coughs and murmurs, to warn him not to over-exert himself, or to dismiss the envoy, that she might be set free. At a moment when there was a pause in the conversation between the minister and his agent the fair captive tapped at the panel, asked if the young gentleman was not gone, and complained