no attention whatever to me. The table was spread outside the King's tent, and I looked on from a distance." What appeared to strike the Crown Prince most on his entry into Verdun was the light-heartedness of the inhabitants and the noisy welcome they gave him. "They clustered round us," he writes, "and one of them, laying a finger on my brother's coat at the spot where he usually wore his star, said, Ah, you must be a prince, here is the mark of an order.' They told us they were very glad to see us, and professed great esteem for Prussia, comparing our kings with their own, and saying many things that were highly complimentary. If I had stayed a few days among them I believe they would have asked me to become their king. One of them did honour me with this proposition, which I presume was only a pretext for talking; but it sounded strange to me in a French mouth." Further on he observes: casion a good one for declaring in the face of the Assembly, "Le commandant de Verdun et le bataillon de Maine-et Loire ont juré de ne se rendre qu'à la mort." Beaurepaire had sworn nothing of the kind, but he was chivalrous enough to consider himself pledged by the tall talk of the vestryman, and so, when the mayor and deputation came whining to him to give in, he replied, "Never." Lamartine, in his Girondins," here asserts that Beaurepaire killed himself there and then, in the presence of the mayor, exclaiming, Survivez à votre honte. Quant à moi, je meurs libre. Je légue mon sang en opprobre aux lâches et en exemple aux braves." This, however, was not the way which the commander of Verdun selected. Beaurepaire had nothing stagey in him. He let no one into the secret of his intentions, but went quietly home and shot himself in the silence of the night. The Duke of Brunswick was so much affected at the recital of this suicide that on coming"Their officers do not seem to be so well into Verdun he asked for the pistol with which Beaurepaire had done the deed, and vowed that it should thenceforth have the place of honour in his armoury. 64 educated as ours. One of them, who I learned was colonel of the Civic Guard, informed me that he had a cousin in the Prussian service. I asked him where. He said Verdun having capitulated, the Prussian at Munich." However, the capitulation of general Kalkreuth was sent to take posses- Verdun was not to pass off in a mere exsion of it, and with him came the King's change of civilities, for as General Kalktwo sons, who had obtained leave from their reuth and the princes were riding out of father to accompany the general on condi- the town on their way back to the camp, tion that they should take off their orders after ratifying the conditions of the surrenand pass as his aides-de-camp. The eldest der, an officer of their suite, the Count of of these two princes (afterwards Frederick Henkel, lieutenant in Koehler's hussars, William III.) was then two and twenty. was shot dead in the street by somebody His rank in the army was major-general, firing out of a barber's window. Whether and he appears to have been a quick and this murder was the result of an accident, humorous observer as well as a clever or an idle freak, or a piece of misplaced officer. In a book of memoirs which he patriotism has never been correctly ascerpublished later, under the title Reminis- tained; but the occurrence led indirectly to cences of the French Campaign," he enters that most melancholy drama of the revoluinto the minutest particulars of all he saw tionary annals which Delille, Lamartine, and did in France, not even forgetting such and Victor Hugo have all sung as the details as the following: — 66 'On the 30th I martyrdom of the virgins of Verdun." smoked a pipe with tolerable success." "On the 2nd, when I was half dead with hunger after a day's march, the King sent me a plateful of lentils and pork. Ensign Turbenheim, who brought the dish, laid it on a drum. I was changing my boots at the time, and before I was ready to eat a French dog belonging to M. d'Herbelin put his nose into the dish and went away with the pork. Turbenheim was very much excited, and wanted to go after the dog and kill him, but I told him this wouldn't bring back my dinner. I dined off the lentils." "On the 16th there were fowls at the King's table, and the officers appeared to think it strange that, although his Majesty invited the Prince of Nassau and Luchesini, he paid 64 They were eight in number these virgins of Verdun, and their tale is indeed a pitiful one. The news of the murder had no sooner spread through the town than immense consternation seized hold of everybody, and of course the Mayor was among the first to gallop after Kalkreuth, and assure him that every reparation should be accorded if only the Prussians would take a merciful view of the unlucky affair. But the General, who was scared and furious, answered that the rules of war were peremptory, that the shot had been meant for him, and that Verdun knew now what it had to expect. One can conceive the dismay of the Mayor and panic among the citizens, who at once made sure that the Prussians would come and massacre them all, and afterwards put their foe, and upon the evacuation of Verdun by 66 town to the sack- no unlikely contingency the Prussians after Valmy and Jemmapes, as times went. In the midst of the confu- the eight "Virgins of Verdun," their mothsion, while everybody was wringing his or ers, Mme. de Lalance, and twenty-one old her hands, and uttering lamentations, a gentlemen who had subscribed for the bonlady stepped forward and suggested that, as bons, were arraigned before the revolutiona means of mollifying the King, a deputation ary tribunal on the charge of having "deof the prettiest girls of Verdun should be livered the town of Verdun to the Prussians, chosen to offer a corbeille of bonbons to his aided and abetted the success of their arms Majesty. The idea of presenting a basket on French territory, and conspired with of sweetmeats to a tough, grimy old soldier them to destroy liberty, to dissolve the nawas not, perhaps, the most appropriate tional representation, and to restore despotthing that could have been devised, but it ism." It may be mentioned incidentally was accepted by the Verdunites with enthu- that the surrender of Verdun was one of the siasm, and eight young ladies were immedi- principal causes that sent Louis XVI. to ately designated as legates - their names the scaffold. Then, as now, it was pretty were Suzanne, Gabrielle, and Barbe Henry, much the way with the French to believe daughters of M. Henry, President du Bail- that whenever they were beaten it was their liage de Verdun; Anne, Henriette, and king's fault, not their own; so that when Helene Watrin, daughters of a retired the ill-starred monarch pleaded that he officer; Marguerite-Angélique La Girori- really could not help it if the bourgeois of sière, daughter of the Keeper of Woods and Verdun had failed in endurance, this anForests of the province; and Claire Ta-swer was treated as flippant, derisive, and bouillot, daughter of a magistrate. They an insult to the sovereign people. The were all of radiant beauty," say the Crown Prince's memoirs; the eldest of them was not more than three-and-twenty, and the two youngest were only sixteen. A subscription was raised on the spot to buy a handsome casket, the Baroness de Lalance, aunt of the sisters Henry, offered herself as chaperon, and the nine ladies were soon on their way to the camp in the Baroness's coach - a fact which, by-the-by, speaks well for the capacity of vehicles in those days. One would scarcely imagine that in such a simple proceeding as this bonbon embassy to the King of Prussia lurked all the elements of a future indictment for treason; and yet so it was, and the unfortunate box of sweetmeats was fated to cost three-and-thirty persons their heads. The King refused the present, but there is very little doubt that it saved Verdun from pillage; for, although Frederick William II. showed himself cold, and even harsh, to the deputation, there is his son's authority for believing that he was very much struck with the beauty of the young girls, and had not the heart to consign them to the fate which would inevitably have been theirs had Verdun been abandoned to his soldiery. The French, however, were then even fuller of the Prussian spy mania than they are now. Everybody who was not a sans-culotte in those blessed days of freedom was accounted sold to the same system of argument was adopted towards the Virgins of Verdun. After being carted about from prison to prison for two years, they were at last put upon their trial in Paris in 1794. Their beauty, their gentleness, and their resignation were such that a thrill of sympathy went through the audience, and upon Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Accuser, rising to ask that they might be sentenced to death, one of the soldiers on duty, who had been kind to them throughout the trial, fell heavily forward and rolled on the floor senseless. Naturally they were found guilty-guilty of being in league with the Prussians; and they were all condemned to be bebeaded. As a particular mark of Republican clemency, however, the two youngest of the virgins, Barbe Henry and Claire Tabouillot, saw their sentence commuted to twenty years' penal servitude and one day of pillory. Barbe Henry was released after the fall of Robespierre, and subsequently married a Colonel Meslier; but both her sisters, her mother, and her aunt were executed, along with the other young girls who had carried the sweetmeats to Frederick William, and the twenty old gentlemen who had subscribed to the gift, five of whom were over seventy. Of course the mayor and the vestryman Cordier escaped; those sort of men always do. From The Academy. THE frequent republication of the works of our old dramatists, is a sufficient proof that the contemporaries of Shakspere to some extent still divide the attention of the reading public with their great superior. Yet it may be doubted whether, in spite of the labours of Lamb and Hazlitt among critics, of Dodsley, Gifford, Dyce, and others among editors, the works of men like Marlowe, Webster, Heywood, Chapman, Ford, or Massinger, can ever take the place they merit in the ranks of English literary worthies. These lesser lamps stars which are sufficient by themselves to adorn a national drama pale before the sun of Shakspere, and are swallowed in his "main of light." Again, the very volume of our Elizabethan dramatic literature is an obstacle to its proper appreciation by any but enthusiastic lovers of old poetry, or students. in richness, insolence, and pomp. Marlowe could rough-hew like Michael Angelo. Speaking of Doctor Faustus, Göthe said with admiration, "How greatly it is all planned!" It is this vastness of design and scale which strikes us most in Marlowe. His characters are not so much men as types of humanity, the animated mould of human thought and passion which include, each one of them, a thousand individuals. The tendency to dramatize ideal conceptions is very strong in Marlowe. Were it not for his own deep sympathy with the yassions thus idealized and for the force of his conceptive faculty, these gigantic personifications might have been insipid or frigid. As it is, they are very far from deserving such epithets. The lust of dominion in Tamburlaine, the lust of forbidden power and knowledge in Faustus, the lust of wealth and blood in Barabas, are all terrifically realized. The poet himself sympathizes with the desires which sustain his None of the playwrights have either de- heroes severally in their revolt against served or received more posthumous celeb-humanity, God, and society. Tamburlaine's rity than Marlowe. He is justly honoured confidence in his mission as "the scourge as the father of the English theatre. He of the immortal God; " the intrepidity with made blank verse what it was for Shakspere, which Faustus, ravished by the joys of his Jonson, and Fletcher, and he first taught imagination, cries: the art of designing tragedies on a grand scale, displaying unity of action, unity of character, and unity of interest. Before his day plays had been pageants and shows. the stubborn and deep-centred hatred of He first produced dramas. Before Mar- the Jew, who, in the execution of his darklowe it seemed seriously doubtful whether est schemes, can pray :the rules and precedents of classic authors might not determine the style of dramatic composition in England as in France: after him it was impossible for a dramatist to please the people by any play which had not in it some portion of the spirit and the pith of Faustus, Edward II., or Tamburlaine. When we remember that Marlowe, born in the same year as Shakspere, died at the early age of twenty-nine, while Shakspere's genius was still, as far as the public were concerned, almost a potentiality when we reflect upon the sort of life which Marlowe led among his disreputable friends in London, and estimate the degradation of the dramatic art in England of his day we are forced to acknowledge that his production, imperfect, unequal, and limited as it may be, still contains the evidence of a commanding and creative genius. About Marlowe there is nothing small or trivial: his verse is mighty; his passion is intense; the outlines of his plots are large; his characters are Titanic; his fancy is extravagant "Had I as many souls as there be stars, "O Thou, that with a fiery pillar ledd'st Of Abigail this night!" These audacities of soul, these passionate impulses are part and parcel of the poet's self. It is his triumph to have been able thus to animate the creatures of his imagination with the reality of inspiring and inflaming enthusiasm. At the same time there is no lack of dramatic propriety in the delineation of these three characters. Tamburlaine is admirably characterized as the barbarian Tartar chief, in whose wild nature the brute instincts of savage nations, yearning after change, and following conquest as a herd of bisons seek their fields of salt, attain to consciousness. Faustus represents the medieval love of magic, and that deeper thirst for realizing imag ination's wildest dreams which possessed the souls of men in the Renaissance. Barabas remains the Jew, staunch to his creed, at war with Christians, alternately servile and insolent, persecuted and revenge 66 With reference to Colonel Cunningham's edition of Marlowe's works, it is enough to say that it is based, as every edition of Marlowe must be, upon that of Mr. Dyce, and that in his introductory notice he sums up, briefly and agreeably, the few facts of Marlowe's life, quoting the eulogies of his contemporaries and of subsequent critics, but not adding, as indeed how should he? any new material. The book is handy, and well printed, upon paper of good quality and pleasant tone. The notes are thrown together at the end and indexed. Altogether, this volume is likely to be the most popular edition of the complete works of Marlowe. ful, yet dignified by the intensity of his be- modern embodiment of fancy. Thought, liefs, and justfiied in cruelty by the unnatu- passion, language, and rhythm all combine ral pariah life to which he is condemned. to give a Titianesque pomp and splendour Upon these three characters, and upon the to the pictures of Marlowe's poem. no less powerful representation of the history of Edward II., the pyramid of Marlowe's fame is based. Hazlitt was not wrong in his assertion that the last scene of Edward. II is " certainly superior to the similar scene in Shakspere's Richard. Nor was Lamb perhaps extravagant in saying that the death scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." But there is one quality of Marlowe's which his critics have been apt hitherto to neglect the overpowering sense of beauty which appears in all his finest works. It is by right of this quality that Marlowe claims to be the hierophant in England of that Pagan cult of beauty which characterized the Italian Renaissance. We find it in Tamburlaine's passion for Xenocrate, upon whose shining face 66 Beauty, mother of the Muses, sits And comments volumes with her ivory pen." We find it again in the visions of Faustus and his familiars: "Like women, or unwedded maids, Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of love." Or in his Helen: and Leander "O, thou art fairer than the evening air From The Academy. THE LOUVRE COLLECTION OF GEMS.* or and vases to be interred in the tomb of the father of Charlemagne, together with what a warrior most prized — his sword. Again, the celebrated agate cup prewhich is sculptured the mysteries of Bacchus served in the Imperial Library at Paris, on and Ceres, was the gift of Charles the SimEleanor of Aquitaine was affianced to Louis ple to the Abbey of St. Denis, and when le Jeune, her present to the king on her betrothal was a vase of crystal, the sides minister Suger, a patron of art, caused to carved in a honey-comb pattern, which the be mounted in silver gilt filigree, and enriched with precious stones. In the collec Les Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne, par M. Barbet de Jouy. Paris, 1865-70. Folio. tion are many other specimens belonging to the Abbé, a richly mounted cruet (burette), cut out of a single 'piece of sardonyx given to him by the king, and offered by Suger to the saints and martyrs, as an inscription round the foot sets forth. Another, an ancient amphora of porphyry, probably of Egyptian workmanship, has been ingeniously mounted by Suger's workmen in the form of an eagle, intended probably as an evangelistic symbol. and vases of rock crystal, bloodstone, lapislazuli, and jasper, decorated by a Cellini or engraved by a Bernardi or a Misseroni, were to give place to the productions of Murano, to whom Europe became tributary, for two centuries, for her enamelled vases, and her glass with filigree ornaments and of graceful forms. In the work before us, M. Barbet de Jouy, the learned conservator of the Louvre, describes the most characteristic pieces in the There is also a representation given by Louvre collection, and shows that many M. Barbet de Jouy, of another ancient ves- specimens attributed to Italian art were the sel, called the Vase of Mithridates, re-work of French artists. The illustrations ferring to the vases and cups of precious are by M. Jules Jacquemart, and no greatmaterials, enriched with precious stones, er praise can be given to them than to prowhich formed part of the spoils carried in nounce them equal to his engravings for his the triumph of Pompey, and which first in- father's ceramic works. While strictly pretroduced a passion for these costly vessels serving the form of each piece, he has so into Rome. treated the materials of which the object represented is composed, whether it be the pellucid crystal or the semi-transparent onyx, as to give to each its original and peculiar character. In this point, M. J. Jacquemart is one of the most remarkable artists of the day. Another number is wanting to complete this beautiful volume. Passing over an interval of many centuries, the next period of the development of the lapidary's art is that of Louis XII. and Francis I. Rock crystal and jasper were then the chosen materials; oriental rock crystal was preferred from its purer water, but that of the Alps was extensively used, and Milan, where it was an article of commerce, had a school for engraving upon crystal. The Louvre collection is rich in specimens exquisitely engraved with subjects, others fashioned in the form of shells, birds, and various grotesque devices. The Italian artists of the school of Fontainebleau introduced a taste for mythological subjects, and we find the mounting and decoration of the cups, ewers, &c., of this period, all adorned with pagan deities. Cellini introduced coloured enamels combined with the metal mountings, and under the sons of Henry II., translucent enamels of ruby red, the neo-classical artists of the renaissance emerald green, and sapphire blue, were in favour. Under Henry IV. opaque and of the eighteenth century, and the neoenamels were added to the brilliant translucent gems art-colony in Rome and of England, opposed medieval painters of the modern German of the Valois. From the Renaissance the specimens are numerous, and mounted in the richest style of decoration, gold, enamels, and precious stones. On a sardonyx cup of the 16th century, a cameo head of Elizabeth is introduced. From Chambers' Journal. ANACHRONISMS OF ARTISTS. THE anachronisms of painters and sculptors must be divided into those which are purely unconscious, and those which are their root in the fashion and prejudice of the age or the school of the anachronist. Thus, conscious and deliberate. The latter have as they are to each other, agree in a common disrespect for their own age, and in a istic of their ideal epochs. Think of Dr. common taste for reproducing the characterPaul's Cathedral. His brawny arms, broad Johnson as he stands represented in St. The Minerva cup has been so often rep-no shoes on his feet! He has apparently chest, and herculean legs are naked; he has resented as hardly to require alluding to the head of the goddess in gold, gems and got out of bed in the middle of the night, enamels, the helmet of onyx, surmounted merely throwing a blanket around him, to by a winged dragon. This cup, resembling in its style of decoration the beautiful sardonyx ewer belonging to Mr. Beresford Hope, was abstracted from the crown jewels of France at the end of the last century. But the time had come when the costly cups, ewers, drageoirs (sweetmeat boxes), I keep out the cold. It must have been after But me, alas! to beds of pain |