For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for- warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made Of life should shut, and thou return no The breast-knots were broken; the roses more? Good Words. CARYL BATTERSBY. IRISH SONG. 'Young Carroll Maginn, Put the beard to your chin together Floated forth on the wings of the wind and the weather, And they drifted afar down the streams of the sea. And the sea was as red as when sunset uncloses, But my raiment is sweet from the scent of the roses, Thou shalt know, love, how fragrant a memory can be. ANDREW LANG. DEAR child, thou knowest, I blame not thee; Thou too, I know, hast shared my smart. And the change in your purse, if a wife Neither did wrong; 'twas only she, you would win." Nature, that moulded us apart. Then Carroll made Kate his most illigant But not to have sinned, in Nature's eyes, bow, I find a brittle plea to trust; And off to the Diggins lampooned from the She punishes the just unwise plough; Till, the beard finely grown, And the pockets full-blown, Says he, “Maybe Kate might be kind to me now!" So home my lad came, To try a fresh fling at his cruel ould flame. More hardly than the wise unjust. She placed our souls, like Heaven's lone spheres, In separate paths, no power can move; LAURENCE BINYON. From Blackwood's Magazine. LORD WOLSELEY'S MARLBOROUGH.1 BY GEN. SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON, G.C.B. IT has for long been known that Lord Wolseley has been engaged upon a life of Marlborough, and that he has had access to all papers and private documents connected with the career of that great man. The appearance of the work has, therefore, been looked for with much interest; and the two first volumes of it- which are now before the public-although they relate to the first half only, and that the darkest one, of that varied story, will fully bear out the high expectations formed in regard to it. There is no life of Marlborough approaching it in dramatic interest, minuteness of detail, and excellence of literary execution. Much as we had always admired Lord Wolseley's great talents, we had no conception before of his power as a writer. There is so much of novelty, so much of interest, in the work, that it is a very difficult one to review; and we can only pretend, by a few extracts, to give a general idea of the great value of its contents. In the early part of the first volume there are many interesting anecdotes illustrative of the state of society, and especially of female society, in the middle of the seventeenth century. To these we will presently allude. There is a wide gulf between our standard of female virtue and that of the Restoration epoch. This is brought home to us by the fact that an upright, God-fearing gentleman like Sir Winston Churchill should have wished to see his only daughter estab lished as a maid of honor at a court where Charles II. was king. But in those days it was no slur upon a lady to become the mistress of a prince; nor did her family suffer in reputation. Lord Arlington, in a letter of advice to the beautiful Miss Stewart, refers to the position, which he thought she had accepted, of mistress to Charles II., as one to which "it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her." It is said that the parents of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, sent her originally to Versailles, in the hope that Louis XIV. would Sir E. Warcup records thus favor her. with pride, in one of his letters, that his daughter, a maid of honor to Queen Katherine, was one night and t'other with the The mistress to a royal prince was courted king, and very graciously received by him. by all who had access to her. Other women envied her good fortune, and her family looked upon her as a medium Speaking of the old home of Ash, through which court favors, power, and Lord Wolseley says: Standing on these garden steps, the threshold of Marlborough's forgotten birthplace, what heart-stirring memories of English glory crowd upon the brain! Surely the imagination is more fired and national sentiment more roused by a visit to the spot where one of our greatest countrymen was born and passed his childhood, than by any written record of his deeds. This untidy farmhouse, with its neglected gardens and weed-choked fish-ponds, round which the poor, badly clothed boy sported during his early years, seems to recall his lucrative employment were to be obtained. In allusion to the statement that Marl borough owed much of his success in early life to his sister Arabella, Hamilton, who knew thoroughly the French and English courts, writes, "Cela était dans l'ordre." In common with others of his time, he assumed that the favorite of the king's mistress, and brother of the duke's mistress, was in a fair way to preferment, and could not fail to make his fortune (i. 35, 36). No one will understand this period who does not realize this remarkable, but true, picture of female virtue in the upper classes then. As Lord Wolseley says further on: "Modesty, the old outward sign of feminine virtue, was Of her Lord Wolseley She was the most inconstant of women, and had lovers of all degrees, even whilst openly recognized as the king's mistress. no longer reckoned an inward grace, mistresses. and even regard for common decency says: was stigmatized as prudish. Chastity was held up to scorn, and faithless husbauds made faithless wives." It so happens that all the incidents | She was a gambler and a spendthrift, imin Marlborough's life which are of a perious in temper, and far from wise. Her shady character, and which have been cousin, Mrs. Godfrey - sister of Marlgreedily seized upon by that numerous borough's mother was the governess of class whose delight it is to blacken the her children by the king, and is said to character of great and public men, have designedly thrown her handsome nephew, John Churchill, in her way. The occur within the period embraced in result was, as anticipated by the lady, an these volumes immediate intrigue between them (i. 68, 69). Lord Wolseley has most carefully gone into all these incidents, and, while anxious to do the best he can for his hero, has always stated the facts as they appear against him with scrupulous impartiality. The charges against Marlborough are four. The first is that he accepted money from the Duchess of Cleveland, the king's mistress, with whom he had an intrigue; the second, that he deserted James; the third that he was traitor to William; the fourth, that he disclosed to the French the plan for Tollemache's attack on Brest. It will be most convenient to examine these charges in succession. We will first give Lord Wolseley's picture of him as a young man. Marlborough, he says, 66 was tall, and his figure was remarkably graceful, although a contemporary says, "Il avait l'air trop indolent, et la taille trop effilée." His bearing was noble and commanding, and one who particularly disliked him tells us that "he possessed the graces in the highest degree, not to say engrossed them." He adds that his manner was irresistible either to man or woman. The truth was, he knew how to be all things to all men. Kings, courtiers, and private soldiers alike were captivated by his gentle demeanor, his winning grace. He understood court life thoroughly, caressed all people with a soft, obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices. Such being the man, it is not to be wondered at that he soon became the intimate friend of the exquisitely beautiful Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, one of King Charles's many I. Having now cleared the way and put the pieces on the board, we come to the first charge against Marlborough, which is thus stated by our author : Ex Churchill spent the winter (1673) at home, and again fell a victim-doubtless a willing victim-to the wiles of his kinswoman, the Duchess of Cleveland. travagant in her style of living, she squandered on every passing whim the the king. Her young lover, Jack Churchill, large sums of money bestowed on her by was poor, and she is said to have been most liberal to him. She had purchased for him the position of gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York, and she is supposed to have now bestowed upon him, as a new mark of her affection the sum of £4,500; but the authority for this statement is the Earl of Chesterfield, who never lost a chance of repeating any gossip that told against the fame or reputation of the man whom he disliked. But whether the duchess did or did not supply the money with which the annuity was purchased in 1674, it is certain that Churchill came into possession of it about this time. The ordinary courtier of the period who had suddenly found himself in possession of so much money; would have gambled with it, or spent it on some form of pleasure. But this strangely constituted young man was already thinking more of the future than of the present. Bitter experience had taught him the miseries of poverty, and he determined to purchase an annuity, so that, come what might, he should at least feel himself above the daily sting of want. Lord Halifax, who, in consideration thereof, The money was accordingly handed over to settled £500 per annum upon him for life. ... Want of money had engendered in Churchill that strict attention to economy from which parsimony is so often bred. Long-practised frugality degenerates easily | mature years. He, a Cavalier, was becominto penuriousness, and that again into ing a traitor, in the common acceptation of miserly habits of avarice. It did so in this the term, and throwing in his lot with case (i. 131, 132). his king's greatest enemy. James and Churchill alike suffered for their steady adherence at this epoch to the faith that Having now clearly stated the case against Marlborough, Lord Wolseley takes up his defence thus : was within them. One lost his crown, and died in exile, the despised dependant upon the bounty of a foreign sovereign; and the other, though he lived to be the foremost man in Europe, died detested and vilified by the nation which he made great and famous (ii. 42). Upon this point Lord Wolseley's opinion is that, as a soldier, Marlborough's conduct was utterly unjustifiable, but that, as a statesman, he acted for the good of his country. Books have been written with the express purpose of proving that, however great Marlborough may have been, he was a monster of ingratitude, and only rose to power by low and infamous methods. That he should take money from the woman he intrigued with is often denounced as the worst and most ignoble action a gentleman could be capable of. But this was not the opinion entertained of the transaction by his contemporaries. It was regarded as quite natural that a handsome young solFrom a military point of view, it is imdier should be selected by the mistress of possible to acquit Marlborough of desertion the king as one of her lovers, and that, in 1688. Although he was not then in penniless as he was, she should make him James's confidence, and held no military large presents.. Throughout this incommand, still, as a favorite of many years' trigue with Barbara Palmer he did noth-standing, and as a courtier who had been ing more than was done by many others by Monmouth, for instance, who, when an exile, lived chiefly upon the bounty of his mistress, Lady Wentworth. Yet Monmouth has not been held up to everlasting obloquy. No English gentleman of to-day would act as Marlborough and Monmouth did; but their conduct was not regarded at the time as either disreputable or unusual, and it is by contemporary law and custom that we must judge them, and not by our own code of morality and honor (i. 132, 133), This is the best excuse that it is possible to make for Marlborough's conduct on this occasion, but we cannot consider it satisfactory. It implies a complete inversion of the position of the sexes to one another; and it ever must, at any time and in any age, have been a most degrading thing for a gentleman to assume the position of a paid prostitute. II. We come now to the second charge against Marlborough - that he deserted James. This [says Lord Wolseley] was the great turning-point in his life. Actuated by lofty motives, and in what was to him a sacred cause, he was breaking away from the patron of his boyhood, the friend of his most in his secrets and had been promoted by him to high honor, we must be painfully impressed with Churchill's ingratitude and heartlessness. His conduct was in the highest degree treacherous and deceitful; and it is revolting to think of him and other officers travelling with James from Windsor to Salisbury, and showing him all outward marks of loyalty and obedience, while they were in league with his enemies to betray him on the first favorable opportunity. To hold daily converse with the man whom they were seeking to destroy, and to act towards him as if they were still his faithful servants, implies a depth of baseness and treachery which are all but diabolical. It must be freely admitted that during the ten years between 168S-1698 Marlborough's career was sullied with acts which in the present day would place him beyond the pale of society, and which furnished Swift and Macaulay with ample materials for condemning him. But the real question is, Had Marlborough the public good in view when he deserted James, or was his conduct inspired by motives of personal ambition?. There is no practical standard by which the conduct of great men of action can be measured. Patriot leaders have generally been unscrupulous as to the means they employed to secure their aims. Thus, without attempting to extenuate or excuse the |