from the slightest allusion to it. Even at last, as he delayed longer and longer to return, Traynor maintained the same reserve, and thus there grew up gradually a secret between them a mystery that neither ventured to approach. With a delicacy that seemed an instinct in his humble nature, Billy would now and then feign occupation or fatigue to excuse himself from the evening stroll, and thus leave the youth free to wander as he wished; till at length it became a settled habit between them to separate at nightfall, to meet only on the morrow. These nights were spent in walking the garden around the villa, sitting stealthily amid the trees to watch the room where she was sitting, to catch a momentary glimpse of her figure as it passed the window, to hear perchance a few faint accents of her voice. Hours long would he so watch in the silent night, his whole soul steeped in a delicious dream wherein her image moved, and came and went, with every passing fancy. In the calm moonlight he would try to trace her footsteps in the gravel walk that led to the studio, and lingering near them, whisper to her words of love.

One night, as he loitered thus, he thought he was perceived, for as he suddenly emerged from a dark alley into a broad space where the moonlight fell strongly, he saw a figure in a terrace above him, but without being able to recognize to whom it belonged. Timidly and fearfully he retired within the shade, and crept noiselessly away, shocked at the very thought of discovery. The next day he found a small bouquet of fresh flowers on the rustic seat beneath the window. At first he scarcely dared to touch it; but with a sudden flash of hope that it had been destined for himself, he pressed the flowers to his

lips, and hid them in his bosom. Each night now the same present attracted him to the same place, and thus at once within his heart was lighted a flame of hope that illuminated all his being, making his whole life a glorious episode, and filling all the long hours of the day with thoughts of her who thus could think of him.

Life has its triumphant moments, its dreams of entrancing, extatic delight, when success has crowned a hard-fought struggle, or when the meed of other men's praise comes showered on us. The triumphs of heroism, of intellect, of noble endurance the trials of temptation met and conquered-the glorious victory

over self interest - are all great and ennobling sensations; but what are they all compared with the first consciousness of being loved, of being to another the ideal we have made of her? To this nothing the world can give is equal. From the moment we have felt it, life changes around us. Its crosses are but barriers opposed to our strong will, that to assail and storm is a duty. Then comes a heroism in meeting the every day troubles of existence, as though we were soldiers in a good and holy cause. No longer unseen or unmarked in the great ocean of life, we feel there is an eye ever turned towards us, a heart ever throbbing with our its own-that our triumphs are triumphs-our sorrows its sorrows. Apart from all the intercourse with the world, with its changeful good and evil, we feel that we have a treasure that dangers cannot approach; we know that in our heart of hearts a blessed mystery is locked up--a well of pure thoughts that can calm down the most fervered hour of life's anxieties. Such the youth felt, and, feeling it, was happy.

Nov.- -18

"My dear Harcourt,

XXXIV.

if it occasion you any thing beyond inconvenience. How a private sec. should permit himself the luxury of an attack of influenza I cannot conceive. We shall hear of one's hairdresser having the impertinence to catch cold, to-morrow or next day!

"If I dont mistake, it was you yourself recommended Crawley to me, and I am only half grateful for the service. He is a man of small prejudices ; fancies that he ought to have a regular hour for dinner; thinks that he should have acquaintances; and will persist in imagining himself an existent something, appertaining to the legation,-while in reality he is only a shadowy excrescence of my own indolent habits, the recipient of the trashy superfluities one commits to paper, and calls despatches. Latterly, in my increasing laziness, I have used him for more intimate correspondence; and, as Doctor Allitore has now denied me all manual exertion whatever, I am actually wholly dependent on such aid. I'm sure I long for the discovery of some other mode of transmitting one's brain-efforts than by the slow process of manuscript-some photographic process, that by a series of bright pictures might display en tableau what one is now reduced to accomplish by narrative. As it ever did, and ever will happen too, they have deluged me with work when I crave rest. Every session of parliament must have its blue book; and by the devil's luck they have decided that Italy is to furnish the present one.

"You have always been a soldier, and whenever your inspecting general came his round, your whole care has been to make the troop horses look as fat, the men's whiskers as trim, their overalls as clean, and their curb-chains as bright, as possible. You never imagined or dreamed of a contingency when it would be desirable that the animals should be all sorebacked, the whole regiment under stoppages, and the trumpeter in a quinsey. Had you been a diplomatist instead of a dragoon, this view of things might perhaps have presented itself, and the chief object of your desire been to show that the system under which you functionated worked as ill as need be; that the court to which you were accredited abhorred you; its ministers snubbed, its small officials slighted

you; that all your communications were ill received, your counsels ill taken; that what you reprobated was adopted, what you advised rejected; in fact, that the only result of your presence was the maintenance of a perpetual ill will and bad feeling; and that without the aid of a line of battle ship, or at least a frigate, your position was no longer tenable. From the moment, my dear H- that you can establish this fact, you start into life as an able and active minister, imbued with thoroughly British principlesan active assertor of what is due to his country's rights and dignity, not truckling to court favour, or tamely submitting to royal impertinencesnot like the noble lord at this place, or the more subservient viscount at that but, in plain words, an admirable public servant, whose reward, whatever courts and cabinets may do, will always be willingly accorded by a grateful nation.

"I am afraid this sketch of a special envoy's career will scarcely tempt you to exchange for a mission abroad! And you are quite right, my dear friend. It is a very unrewarding profession. I often wish myself that I had taken something in the colonies, or gone into the church, or some other career which had given me time and opportunity to look after my health; of which, by the way, I have but an indifferent account to render you. These people here can't hit it off at all, Harcourt they keep muddling away about indigestion, deranged functions, and the rest of it. The mischief is in the blood; I mean in the undue distribution of the blood. So Treysenac, the man of Bagneres, proved to me. There is a flux and reflux in us as in the tides, and when, from deficient energy, or lax muscular power, that ceases, we are all driven by artificial means to remedy the defect. seynac's theory is position. By a numher of ingeniously contrived positions he accomplishes an artificial congestion of any part he pleases; and in his establishment at Bagneres you may see some fifty people strung up by the arms and legs, by the waists or the ancles, in the most marvellous manner, and with truly fabulous sucI myself passed three mornings suspended by the middle, like the sheep in the decoration of the Golden

cess.

Tre

Fleece, and was amazed at the strange sensations I experienced bfeore I was cut down.

"You know the obstinacy with which the medical people reject every discovery in the art, and only sanction its employment when the world has decreed in its favor. You will, therefore, not be surprised to hear that Larrey and Cooper, to whom I wrote about Treysenac's theory, sent me very unsatisfactory, indeed very unseemly, replies. I have resolved, however, not to let the thing drop, and am determined to originate a suspensorium in England, when can chance upon a man of intelligence and scientific knowledge to conduct it. Like mesmerism, the system has its antipathies, and thus yesterday Crawley fainted twice after a few minutes' suspension by the arms. But he is a bigot about anything he hears for the first time, and I was not sorry at his punishment.

"I wish you would talk over this matter with any clever medical man in your neighbourhood, and let me hear the result.

"And so you are surprised, you say, how little influence English representations exercise over the determinations of foreign cabinets. I go further, and confess no astonishment at all at the no-influence! My dear dragoon, have you not, some hundred and fifty times in this life, endured a small martyrdom in seeing a very indifferent rider torment almost to madness the animal he bestrode, just by sheer ignorance and awkwardness --now worrying the flank with incautious heel, now irritating the soft side of the mouth with incessant jerkings always counteracting the good impulses, ever prompting the bad ones of his beast? And have you not, while heartily wishing yourself in the saddle, felt the utter inutility of administering any counsels to the rider? You saw, and rightly saw, that even if he attempted to follow your suggestions, he would do so awkwardly and inaptly, acting wrong moments and without that continuity of purpose which must ever accompany an act of address; and that for his safety and even for the welfare of the animal, it were as well they should jog on together as they had done, trusting that after a time they might establish a sort of com

promise endurable if not beneficial to both.

"Such, my dear friend, in brief, is the state of many of those foreign governments to whom we are so profuse of our wise counsels. It were doubtless much better if they ruled well; but let us see if the road to this knotty consummation be by the adoption of methods totally new to them, estranged from all their instincts and habits, and full of perils, which their very fears will exaggerate. Constitutional governments, like underdone roast beef, suit our natures and our latitude; but they would seem lamentable experiments when tried south of the Alps. Liberty with us means the right to break heads at a county election, and to print impertinences in newspapers. With the Spaniard or the Italian it would be to carry a poignard more openly, and use it more frequently than at pre

sent.

"At all events, if it be any satisfaction to you, you may be assured that the rulers in all these cases are not much better off than those they rule over. They lead lives of incessant terror, distrust, and anxiety. Their existence is poisoned by ceaseless fears of treachery-they know not where. They change ministers as travellers change the direction of their journey, to disconcert the supposed plans of their enemies; and they vaccillate between cruelty and mercy, really not knowing in which lies their safety. Don't fancy that they have any innate pleasure in harsh measures. The likelihood is, they hate them as much as you do yourself; but they know no other system; and, to come back to my cavalry illustration, the only time they tried a snaffle, they were run away with.

I trust these prosings will be a warning to you how you touch upon politics again in a letter to me; but I really did not wish to be a bore, and now here I am, ready to answer, so far as in me lies, all your interrogatories; first premising that I am not at liberty to enter upon the question of Glencore himself, and for the simple reason, that he has made me his confidant. And now as to the boy, I could make nothing of him, Harcourt; and for this reason,-he had not what sailors call "steerage way" in him. He went wherever you

bade him, but without an impulse. I tried to make him care for his career-for the gay world-for the butterfly life of young diplomacy---for certain dissipations-excellent things occasionally to develop nascent faculties. I endeavoured to interest him by literary society and savans, but unsuccessfully. For art indeed he showed some disposition, and modelled prettily; but it never rose above amateurship.' Now enthusiasm, although a very excellent ingredient, will no more make an artist, than a brisk kitchen-fire will provide a dinner where all the materials are wanting.

6

"I began to despair of him, Harcourt, when I saw that there were no features about him. He could do everything reasonably well; because there was no hope of his doing anything with real excellence. He wandered away from me to Carrara, with his quaint companion the doctor; and after some months wrote me rather a sturdy letter, rejecting all monied advances, past and future, and saying something very haughty, and of course very stupid, about the "glorious sense of independence." I replied, but he never answered me, and here might have ended all my knowledge of his history, had not a letter, of which I send you an extract, resumed the narrative. The

writer is the Princess Sablonkoff, a lady of whose attractions and fascinations you have often heard me speak. When you have read and thought over the enclosed, let me have your opinion. I do not, I cannot believe in the rumour you allude to. Glencore is not the man to marry at his time of life, and in his circumstances. Send me, however, all the particulars you are in possession of. I hope they don't mean to send you to India, because you seem to dislike it. For my own part, I suspect I should enjoy that country immensely. Heat is the first element of daily comfort, and all the appliances to moderate it are ex officio luxuries; besides that in India there is a splendid and enlarged selfishness in the mode of life, very different from the petty egotisms of our rude Northland.

"If you do go, pray take Naples in the way. The route by Alexandria and Suez, they all tell me, is the best and most expeditious.

"Mellish desires me to add his remembrances, hoping you have not forgotten him. He served in the 'Fifth' with you in Canada; that is, if you be the same George Harcourt who played Tony Lumpkin so execrably at Montreal. I have told him it is probable, and am yours

ever,

H. U.

Ir would be difficult to say to what class a book like this belongs, unless to those volumes of Ana in which great thinkers have sometimes bound together their loose thoughts. We have here, collected under one cover, the "wise saws" of Lord Bacon and the "modern instances" of the Archbishop of Dublin.

The table of contents of "Bacon's Essays" is, as our readers well know, a miscellaneous one; and the Archbishop's additions are taken from sources quite as various. Together, the Essays and the Annotations remind us of the work of Smalgruenius,

who wrote a work entitled, " De Omnibus Rebus," and afterwards added a supplementary treatise, "De quibusdam aliis.”

The first edition of "Bacon's Essays" was printed in 1597; it then contained only ten Essays. The volume was reprinted several times during the author's life time, and received continual additions. In 1612, Bacon published an enlarged edition, which he dedicated to Prince Henry. He seems then to have adopted the word "Essays" as a new name for this style of composition. He calls them in his dedication, "Certain brief

notes set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays the word is late but the thing is ancient." In the title-page of the first edition, they are quaintly described as places (loci) of persua

sion and dissuasion.

To these Essays or Places the Archbishop of Dublin has contributed another collection of thoughts and common-places. It is thus a treatise on human nature, to which two wise observers, separated by an interval of two centuries, have contributed their several stock of experience. The critics will, no doubt, object that this is not so much an edition of Bacon as a compilation of Baconiana and Whateleiana bound up together; and it will be further asked, is such an act of literary partnership justifiable, for which consent has been obtained only on one side? The Chancellor, who can only act the sleeping partner in such a concern, must not be held accountable for the opinions of the Archbishop.

Limited liability must be the rule in this concern, in which the dead and the living are entered for an equal amount of shares. This much must be premised in fairness to the great Chancellor, who cannot appear either to consent or dissent to the act of the Archbishop. But admitting this, the combination is a useful one for the general reader. There is sufficient congeniality of mind between the essayist and and his annotator to smooth down the differences of age and expression. The wise saw and the modern instance are so thoroughly one at bottom, but so unlike each other on the surface, that we feel on reading the two all the force of the argument from undesigned coincidence.

On some points, particularly cases of Christian experience, the annotator is, as might be expected, in advance of the essayist. Although the king's conscience-keeper, the Chancellor is not always a safe guide to a weak conscience. His empirical principles often appear where they ought not.

It is the glory of physics but the weakness of ethics to be tried by experience. In Bacon's moral maxims we are sometimes unpleasantly reminded that he was the father of the Experimental Method. Honesty is the best policy, it is true,

but it will not do to be honest from policy. In morals, high principles produce high practice-if you lower the one, the other necessarily falls with it. Bacon is not professedly, as many of his degenerate disciples, an experimentalist in morals. But the standard is not always as high as could be wished. We need an occasional “caution for the time,” such as the Archbishop judiciously supplies.

There is an Irish proverb quoted by the Archbishop, "He is a good hurler that's on the ditch." To judge of worldly wisdom by its own rules, we must look down on it from a height. The "wisdom which is from above" can alone truly pronounce on the wisdom of this world. Bacon in this respect was only the hurler in the field. He had not stood on the ditch, at least when he wrote the Essays. Perhaps, when, old and sick at heart, he flung the writ of summons to the upper house with an air of contempt on the table, exclaiming, "I have done with such vanities," he may have learned that sagacity is not wisdom. But such an appendix to his Essays we must note as deficient. The annotations in part supply this want.

It is strange that the man who sailed round the coasts of intellectual knowledge, explored every bay (to follow out his own metaphor) and sounded every creek, who noted all its deficiencies, and almost filled them up himself, should have shown as striking a specimen of moral littleness as of mental greatness. His own age and posterity have both fallen into strange confusion through this anomaly. The one rejected what was great, and the other has long revered what was little and mean. His intellect was misunderstood by the men of his own age. Queen Elizabeth said of him, Bacon hath a great wit and much learning; but in law showeth to the utmost of his knowledge, and is not deep." King James affectedly compared his Novum Organum to the peace of God, "for it passeth all understanding." Posterity, to which Bacon appealed, has reversed this judgment as to his parts as a writer; but posterity should remember that Bacon made no appeal against the judgment of his own age on his conduct as a man. They forgave, and we may forget that