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the foulest abuse of the powers of the other. He who has set at naught all human bonds, is best committed at once to the hands of God. Man can no longer deal with him. But we must confess that the satisfaction of justice, in this instance, does not appear to be accompanied by the effects which, in every other instance, seem to attend it. Of the reformation of the offender, we will say only this, that it seems to us to show a false philosophy, a superficial acquaintance with human nature, altogether and always to distrust the apparent penitence evinced by the culprit during the time which elapses between the sentence of death and its execution. Minds sunk to the lowest pitch of degradation can often only be reached by some such powerful shock as the anticipation of a speedy and violent death is calculated to produce. There are many instances of reformation, or conversion, call it which you will, effected by a sudden and appalling peril, when all other agencies had failed,-reformation proved by the after-life to be genuine. Why should it not be so in cases where his impending execution is presented to the thoughts of the guilty? It may often succeed,-there are strong grounds of analogy, as well as of positive evidence, for believing it does often succeed,-where nothing less could. It snaps all at once the ties which connect a man with the scenes and relationships of his past career, which are the strongest fetters of sin, convulses the soul, and directs its gaze to the future; creating, it may be, a susceptibility of more solemn hopes and fears than he has yet known.

We cannot dwell on these considerations; we can only summarily suggest them. But, it is said, the punishment of death does not prevent murder by others. Of all violent crimes, it alone is capital; and it alone is steadily increasing in England. But may not causes not essential to the punishment produce this effect? The foul exhibition of the culprit's death-struggles has a depraving tendency, which would be removed by making executions private, in conformity with the recent recommendation of a Committee of the House of Lords. The uncertainty of the punishment, owing to the capricious manner in which the royal prerogative of commuting the sentence is exercised by those who wield the Queen's authority, must have a pernicious influence. The unwillingness of juries to convict, where a life is at stake, is another prejudicial circumstance. This shows, it will be said, that the punishment is out of harmony with popular sentiments, and such punishments should be abolished. But it is a dangerous policy for a government to lower the standard of right to the laxity of the age. Rather ought it to elevate the popular morality to the true standard of right, by persistence in it. And it should be regarded, surely, as à more awful thing to affix the

Madame de Hautefort and her Contemporaries.

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stigma of murder upon a man than to deprive, him of the existence which becomes a curse under such an imputation. Whom you dare not put to death for any crime,-admitting that death is its proper penalty,-you ought as little to dare to pronounce guilty of that crime. It is impossible to give back a life which has been wrongly sacrificed. It is equally impossible to give back the years which have been spent in unjust imprisonment, to revive the hopes which have been blighted, to open out again the career that has been closed, or restore the energetic spirit which alone can pursue it. These considerations are, we think, of some weight in counterbalancing the strong arguments that may be urged on the other side: we will not say, we do not feel prepared to say, of how much weight. In this, as in all other matters relating to punishment, or indeed aught else, our effort must be to discover what right demands, and then to do it unwaveringly. Our concern is not, except in a secondary degree, with consequences. They are ordered by a higher Power. But we may learn from them; for when they go wrong, it is a sign that we have erred. Fiat justitia, ruat cælum,-"Let justice be done, though the sky should fall,"-represents the true spirit of human conduct. But to do justice is the best way to prevent the falling of the sky.

ART. III.-VICTOR COUSIN ON MADAME DE HAUTEFORT AND HER CONTEMPORARIES.

Madame de Longueville. Etudes sur les Femmes illustres et la Société du XVIIe Siècle. Par M. Victor Cousin. Troisième édition. 8vo. Paris, 1855.

Madame de Sablé. Par M. Victor Cousin. 8vo. Paris, 1854.

Madame de Hautefort et Madame de Chevreuse. Par M. Victor Cousin. 2 tom. 8vo. Paris, 1856.

THERE is nothing comparable for moral force to the charm of truly noble manners. The mind is, in comparison, only slightly and transiently impressed by heroic actions, for these are felt to be but uncertain signs of a heroic soul; nothing less than a series of them, more sustained and varied than circumstances are ever found to demand, could assure us, with the infallible certainty required for the highest power of example, that they were the faithful reflex of the ordinary spirit of the actor. The spectacle

of patient suffering, though not so striking, is more morally impressive; for we know that

"Action is transitory-a step, a blow,

The motion of a muscle, this way or that-
'Tis done; and, in the after vacancy,
We wonder at ourselves like men betray'd:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And has the nature of infinity."

The mind, however, has a very natural repugnance to the sustained contemplation of this species of example, and is much more willingly persuaded by a spectacle precisely the reversenamely, that of goodness actually upon the earth triumphant, and bearing in its ordinary demeanour, under whatever circumstances, the lovely stamp of obedience to that highest and most rarely-fulfilled commandment, "Rejoice evermore." Unlike action or suffering, such obedience is not so much the way to heaven, as a picture, say rather a part, of heaven itself; and truly beautiful manners will be found upon inspection to involve a continual and visible compliance with that apostolical injunction. A right obedience of this kind must be the crown and completion of all lower kinds of obedience. It is not compatible with the bitter humiliations of the habit of any actual sin; it excludes selfishness, since the condition of joy, as distinguished from pleasure, is generosity, and a soul in the practice of going forth from itself; it is no sensual partiality for the "bright side" of things, no unholy repugnance to the consideration of sorrow; but a habit of lifting life to a height at which all sides of it become bright, and all moral difficulties intelligible: in action it is a salubrity about which doctors will not disagree; in the countenance it is a loveliness about which connoisseurs will not dispute; in the demeanour it is a lofty gentleness, which, without pride, patronises all the world, and which, without omitting the minutest temporal obligations or amenities, does every thing with an air of immortality. When Providence sets its inheritors upon a hill where they cannot be hid, acknowledging, as it were, their deserts by conferring upon them conspicuous fortune and corporeal advantages, and proving them by various and splendid opportunities, the result is an example to which, as we have said, there is nothing else to be compared in the way of moral agency; a spectacle so clear in the demonstration of human majesty and loveliness, that the honouring of it with love and imitation is the only point of worship upon which persons of all countries, faiths, customs, and morals, are in perfectly catholic agreement. For the benefit of a single such example it were scarcely possible that the world could pay too dearly. Monarchy and aristocracy have nothing to fear from the arguments of their opponents so long as democracies have

failed to produce a Sidney or a Bayard, a Lady Rachel Russell or a Madame de Hautefort.

It is far from our intention to imply that the loveliest blossoms of humanity appear, like the flowers of the aloe, at centenary intervals, and then only in kings' gardens. We are not allowed to doubt but that the poor and suffering most often are what "the rich should be, right-minded;" and that they therefore, more frequently than the rich, have the foundation of right manners. Nevertheless, spiritual loveliness when found in conspicuous places, and "clothed upon" with extraordinary personal and intellectual gifts, while it is more impressive than humble worth in the sight even of the best, as being exposed to subtler temptations to deny itself, is made visible to many who would refuse to acknowledge the same lustre were it shining in a dark place, and is more imposing to all, not only because all are naturally delighted with the extraordinary occurrence of harmony between the apparently hostile realms of grace and nature, fortune and desert, but also because such harmony explains, exalts, and really completes its seemingly-opposed elements, and grace, expressing itself with thorough culture and knowledge of the world, becomes natural, and nature, instructed in its true perfection, gracious. Moreover, fine manners are always more or less an art, and this art is one which the poor and socially obscure have no means of bringing to perfection: their lives may be purified in the furnace of affliction, and worked by the blows of circumstance into the finest temper; faith and resignation may give evenness, and love a certain lustre to their demeanour; but the last touch, which is that which polishes the mirror, and tells more in the eyes of the world than all the rest, is the work of art. And, let it be acknowledged, none of the fine arts is so fine as that of manners, and, of all, it is probably the only one which is cultivated in the next world as well as in this, where also it is, like its sisters, immortal; for the contagion of fine manners is irresistible, and wherever the possessor of them moves, he leaves behind him lovers and imitators who indefinitely, if not infinitely, propagate his likeness. Unlike the lower arts of poetry, music, architecture, and painting, which may be regarded as secondary and derivative from this primary art of good manners, which imitates nothing but God; unlike these arts, in which men have always been the most excellent professors, that of fine manners has been carried to its highest perfection by women. Than some of these, in whom station, beauty, wit, and holiness, have been united, it seems scarcely possible that the angels themselves should shine with a more bright and amiable lustre.

Women, not to speak of their beauty, their docile and selfadaptive natures, and that inherent aptitude for goodness which

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makes devotion their chief intemperance, enjoy, in their privilege of subordination to men a vast advantage for the development of the noblest manners. Obedience is the proper perfection of humanity; fine manners are the expression of that perfection; and that obedience and consequent perfection are likely to be frequent and complete in proportion as the object to which submission is directly due is near and comprehensible. Remote and incomprehensible Deity is the "head of the man ;" and his obedience to that vast and invisible authority, though of a loftier nature, is necessarily incomplete in its character and indistinct in its expression, when compared with the submission of the woman to the image of the same authority in himself. While the one obeys from faith, the other does so from sight; and the sensible "beauty of holiness" is therefore almost exclusively the prerogative of the woman. The light of her duty strikes directly upon that to which it is relative, and is reflected back in loveliness upon herself; while his appears to be lost in the space it has to traverse to its object. Here is a great spiritual distinction of sex, which those who reject the doctrine of subordination confound and destroy; pulling down the majesty of man by abolishing his principal responsibility, and turning the peculiar strength and glory of the woman into weakness and disgrace.

There was one place and time singular in the history of the world for the development of the woman's character to the extreme limit of her capacities in various directions. The court of France in the reign of Louis XIII., the regency of Anne of Austria, and the early part of the reign of Louis XIV., produced a company of ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract of history looks dim. The wars of the League had left the great nobles of France in the enjoyment of an amount of personal freedom, importance, and dignity, greater than was ever, before or since, the lot of any aristocracy. Chivalrous traditions; the custom of appeal to arms for the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as many years; the worship of womanhood carried to a pharisaical strictness of observance, were conditions which, though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual "valeur" of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to secure that personal predominance which it is their instinct to seek. The political state of France was one which afforded the members of its court extraordinary occasions for the display of character. That state was one of a vast transition. Feudal privileges had to be either moderated, defined and constitutionalised, or else destroyed. The revolution which was about to operate in England and to end in liberty, was already

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