thus faithfully recorded his impressions of that eventful day. After mentioning, in an earlier part of his captivating work, that the French were very nearly winning the battle of Trafalgar, and indeed might have done so had they felt so disposed, and telling us that at Waterloo "the French cavalry took sixty guns and six standards,"* M. Thiers plaintively adds, "History has nothing more sublime to record, and it redounds to the eternal honour of our heroic martyrs (not the Japanese, but those of Waterloo), to notice it, for the punishment of those who spill human blood without reason!" He draws a most graphic picture of an episode in that action so well known as "the battle of the Standard;" how a gallant French Lancer, "M. Urban, takes the English General Ponsonby prisoner; how the Scotch endeavoured to deliver their General, on which Urban kills him instantly with his sword, then

*Victor Hugo represents the cavalry all tumbling into a ditch, and never reappearing; but perhaps this was after they had captured the sixty-six flags and cannons, and despatched them by the first post direct to Paris.

when threatened by several English dragoons, he marches up to a Scotchman (Sergeant Ewart), who had previously captured the standard of the 45th French infantry, dismounts him with one hand and kills him with the other, snatches the flag from the dead man (? martyr), shakes off another Scotchman, and returns covered with blood to deliver to his Colonel the standard which he had so gloriously reconquered!" There are some ill-bred Englishmen, envious of the martial deeds of our neighbouring "martyrs," who have the bad taste to contend that General Ponsonby could not have been killed by M. Urban in 1815, for he was living in 1837, when he is supposed to have died a natural death; that neither could Sergeant Ewart have been killed there and then, for he received an ensign's commission for this very act, and lived many years in the enjoyment of his reward; and as for the flag itself, some stolid Englishmen obstinately contend, Thiers non obstante, that it was seen by several in Brussels on the afternoon of the 15th June, that it

1

was conveyed to England immediately afterwards and placed in Chelsea Hospital, where it has remained to this day.

However, the French historians can well afford to disregard such carping and malicious remarks as these. And perhaps we on this side of the channel may console ourselves with the opinion, which M. Guizot is said to have given of M. Thiers' "History," in reply to a questioner, "C'est un roman," as being a just definition of PYRRHONISM in general, as well as of German sceptics and English rationalists in particular.

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CHAPTER III.

Man as a Necromancer.

OUR last chapter left man in the position of a Romancer, according to the definition given by an illustrious French statesman, of the peculiar qualities belonging to his compatriot, so distinguished for his Pyrrhonism, as exhibited especially in that portion of his great history which describes the closing struggle between England and France, after their twenty years' war. As this chapter proposes to treat of man under an entirely opposite aspect, we think no better term can

be selected, as characteristic of the antithesis to Pyrrhonism, than that of Necromancer.* As the abiding principle of the one is, as we have already remarked, to believe nothing, and to doubt everything, so necromancy may be understood as descriptive of exactly the reverse; and even more than this, for it embraces the dead as well as the living. Just as we know certain men are termed obese who are gifted with a fulness of body, so is there a plethora of spirit which delights to believe in everything relating to the dead.

Three eminent Englishmen, equally distinguished for their theological proclivities and their intellectual acumen, are charming specimens of this valuable and boundless belief. Cardinal Wiseman teaches us that in order "we may in all things attain the

דרש

*This is commonly derived from two Greek words, signify. ing "Divination about the dead." Its Hebrew relative signifies literally "One that inquireth of the dead." We should prefer a slight alteration in the etymology, and treat it as expressive of "Maniacs about the dead," or, in more homely Saxon, as those who may be considered "dead-drunk.”