.. Eczane & Napoleor the Third. Vi were not destined 11 Naturo Donaparte her much I nevous, mon patrie; Ti gurit garçon, es el pas You To the highest The Demens of destiny are destued 1. Te fr dhe next half-century. None out a partir dal mile France. No proud Austrian ir vak mi hanging Barba shall flame their eniors from the palaces of France. No, my antryman! he who serves you who leads your arles to vistory, who raises your citizens to distincLe whose courage is undaunted, he who has the er of prescience—is Napoleon. en Louis shall join me his spirit and mine ..still animate the Bonapartes who shall come er us. Repose entire confidence in his discretion. Napoleon the Third lives only for France. You cry for liberty of speech and liberty of the press. But liberty is anarchy. Would you demand liberty for the army? Without a head to guide and control it, the army of France would be a scourge. Through calamity the most depressing, the hand of destiny has led Louis Napoleon to the throne of France, and against sickness and disease, against the hand of the assassin, and against vilifications of his enemies, it will hold him there, firm. His time has not yet come. Before he bids adien to life he will secure an able leader for France. I give him my hand. I embrace him in spirit. The shadow of Napoleon attends him by day and by night. Adieu, NAPOLEON. W. M. THACKERAY. HIS POST MORTEM EXPERIENCE. POOR Will Thackeray, when a stripling, was fit to kneel in the street before his mistress, that bright luminary who shone to his boyish eyes like a star of the first magnitude! Alas, he discovered her to be one of the sixteenth, and by the time he had ceased to care for polished boots and stiff, broad collars, she had dwindled down to an ordinary piece of humanity! He found his boon companions, like himself, liable to mistake an ant for a whale and think the King of England next in royalty to a god! What a fool he made of himself in the eyes of those who were wiser than be, when he swore the crown of England was made of unalloyed gold! The water he drank was filled with animalculæ, yet he swore it was pure as the gods' nectar. The best freshest air he breathed contained poison, yet ish wisdom knew better than that. Thackeray! wiser men than he knew that l imagination was a cheat; that the mistress heart was not a goddess; and wiser beings they all knew-angelic beings, living in the streets of Paradise, knew that the concepof what the spirit after death would be able to do was as far from the truth as were his boyish dreams of the mistress of his heart! Poor Thackeray! he has attained that superior wisdom now! He walks, himself a ghost, among the ghosts of the past; and these "airy nothings" nod and smile, and shake hands, and say: "Yes, we are ourselves.” He thrusts his hands into his trowsers pockets, and remembers the time when he thought it would be indecent to go naked in the New Jerusalem! Trowsers, forsooth! Yes, here they are, pockets and all; and he dives his hands in deeper, jingling something which strongly resembles cash; and struts about and hobnobs with Addison, Spencer, Sterne, old Dean Swift, and he asks himself, "are these the great men of my fancy?" On reflection he finds he had expected to meet these luminaries shining like actual stars in the firmament, attended by some undefined splendor. Poor Will Thackeray! he finds the same dross in the gold, the same animalculæ in the water, the aTTO poison in the air, the same fact that men are not gode in that much-vaunted place called heaven, as on the much-abused earth. But he wipes his spectacles, and clears away the mist of speculation and fancy, which has bedimmed his eyes, and looks about him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when be walked through Vanity Fair and saw how Mr. Timms, with not a penny in the bank, pinched himself to give a little dinner in imitation of a great lord who gave a great dinner, and had gold beyond his count; snobs, who wore paste jewels and cotton the various products of this great land which were displayed upon the table. The most luscious fruits, I considered, both in flavor and quality, were those produced on an island in the spirit land corresponding to your island of Cuba, which was under the protection of a band of spirits called the "Good Sisters." The company having regaled themselves at the table, arose and divided into groups, laughing and chatting like ordinary mortals. I felt immediately attracted to a cluster of which Benjamin Franklin was the magnetic centre. I reminded him of the duties imposed on him by our host, and told him playfully that I desired to investigate the mysteries of this wonderful palace. He cordially acquiesced, and, in company with a few friends, we commenced our explorations. I inquired as to the construction of the table from which we had just arisen, so superior to the cumbersome ones of earth. "It is a very simple contrivance," he smilingly remarked. "You observe inserted in these twisted columns, ornamented with leaves, which support the ceiling, an electric wire, similar to that of a telegraph. From each of these central columns, this wire connects with the upper gallery. Here," said he, pointing to one of the leafy ornamemts, "you perceive the means of communicating. Unobserved by you, our gracious host touched one of these springs which are connected with the crystal bells, and announced to his servan his desire for refreshments." "Servants?" d I. "How singular! I little supposed, from ous teachings I had received, that there menials in heaven!" |