massacre them all, and afterwards put their foe, and upon the evacuation of Verdun by 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. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.* 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 lampsstars 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. None of the playwrights have either deserved or received more posthumous celebrity than Marlowe. He is justly honoured as the father of the English theatre. He made blank verse what it was for Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher, and he first taught the art of designing tragedies on a grand scale, displaying unity of action, unity of character, and unity of interest. Before bis day plays had been pageants and shows. He first produced dramas. Before Marlowe it seemed seriously doubtful whether 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 potentialitywhen 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 66 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 heroes severally in their revolt against humanity, God, and society. Tamburlaine's confidence in his mission as "the scourge of the immortal God; " the intrepidity with which Faustus, ravished by the joys of his imagination, cries: "Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophiles! 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 to give a Titianesque pomp and splendour to the pictures of Marlowe's poem. 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. Upon these three characters, and upon the 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 "O, thou art fairer than the evening air From The Academy. THE LOUVRE COLLECTION OF GEMS.* THE collection in the Louvre of cups and vases cut out of rock crystal, or sardonyx and other semi-transparent stones, is, perhaps, the richest in existence, not excepting those of the Cabinet of Gems at Florence, and the Grüne Gewölbe and other with the enamels of Limoges, in the gortreasure chambers in Germany. Arranged, geous Gallery of Apollo, it comprises the rarest specimens of the lapidary's art. Vases of precious materials formed, from the first centuries of the French monarchy, part of the royal treasures. The produce of Greece or Rome, they had been taken by the invaders of the Roman Empire, who had, in their turn, been deprived of their spoils by other barbarian tribes. That rock crystal was held as rare and curious is proved by the crystal ball deemed worthy to be interred in the tomb of the father of 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 carved in a honey-comb pattern, which the minister Suger, a patron of art, caused to 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. Follo. 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. 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, emerald green, and sapphire blue, were in favour. Under Henry IV. opaque enamels were added to the brilliant translucent gems of the Valois. On a sardonyx cup of the 16th century, a cameo bead of Elizabeth is introduced. The Minerva cup has been so often represented as hardly to require alluding to the head of the goddess in gold, gems and enamels, the helmet of onyx, surmounted 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), Another number is wanting to complete this beautiful volume. From Chambers' Journal. ANACHRONISMS OF ARTISTS. the neo-classical artists of the renaissance medieval 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 conscious and deliberate. The latter have age or the school of the anachronist. Thus, and of the eighteenth century, and the neoart-colony in Rome and of England, opposed painters of the modern German 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. no shoes on his feet! He has apparently chest, and berculean legs are naked; he has got out of bed in the middle of the night, merely throwing a blanket around him, to keep out the cold. It must have been after some indulgence in such an attitude and such a dress as this (for the statue represents he was compelled to write the lines — nothing else that he ever did or said), that But me, alas! to beds of pain The only way by which the sculptor could | lication of illustrated books, and the travredeem such a statue of an eighteenth-cen- ellers had not the sense we have of this untury scholar from anachronism would be to carve a folded coat, waistcoat, and breeches as a cushion for his elbow on the pillar upon which he is leaning. changing character of manners and fashion in the East. It was indeed the sense of a most tremendous change, a kind of upheaving of the whole past, which first carried Western Christians in great multitudes to the East; the East, the home of the Faith, had become Infidel. The Crusaders saw the life of the biblical lands daily before them in all its conservative completeness; but they would hardly desire to see that life pictorially reproduced in their books of devotion and their church pictures. The East had become, to their mind, alien from the God of the Bible and the old saints of the Bible; and it would have seemed theologically false, and a kind of pictorial denial of the faith once delivered to the saints, to represent Joshua and Gideon as Saracen knights, or Abraham and Jacob as miscreant (that is, Mohammedan) sheiks. Joshua and Gideon were enemies of God's enemies, and could therefore only be truly represented by a devout painter in the forms of true Christian knights. For the same reason, a Jewish priest is habited as a Christian priest, and the Jewish high-priest as a Christian bishop. The similarity between the pictures of Annas or Caiaphas and the living bishops whom the people saw in their churches, led to the interchange of the terms "chief-priest" and The painters have been always the first to disentangle themselves from the bonds of a technical anachronism. The fact that they have the service of colour as well as of form at their beck makes it comparatively easy for them to do; but the sculptor, who has only form and light and shade (for colour if he had it, would in this case give him no help), is still unwilling to give up the dignified vestments of the Greek and Roman. He can indeed use with satisfaction any kind of male or female dress which arranges itself into long and flowing lines, or which reveals the human figure, and affords occasion for exhibiting good anatomy. The modern dresses of Western Europe must be of necessity a perpetual torment to him. Long-lined dresses are eschewed, on account of the dirty streets and muddy roads through which the wearers have to drag them, and the impedimenta which they prove to that quick progress which civilized life demands from every one. The priest first tucked up his cassock, then permanently shortened it, and at last restricted it to the peg in the vestry. The undergraduate and the lawyer cast off their gowns the moment they are off" bishop" in the miracle-plays: the soldiers duty. The trouser (invented, as old gentlemen of our younger days used to say, to hide bandy legs) has cruelly robbed the sculptor of that anatomical outline of the leg which the breeches of the past generation still permitted him to render. At the present day, if he is to be free from all anachronism, he must represent his hero, so far as costume is concerned, as a well-made tailor's block. He is driven to put what genius he has into the face, the hands, and the poise and attitude of his subject. It is well for him, indeed, if his subject be a judge, or a mayor, or a peer, or a Knight of the Garter, or any other occasional wearer of a long and flowing robe. A pictorial anachronism was inoffensive to the eye and the mind of its observer in the middle ages. The heroes and heroines of Holy Scripture and of hagiology were, of course, represented in the dress which the artist saw daily before his eyes in church, or hall, or court-yard, or market-place. This, at least, was one way of suggesting to the beholders that the patriarchs and apostles were men like themselves, of like passions and temptations. The changes of fashion were slower than they are now. Travel into Scripture lands was not followed by the pub who seize our Lord in the garden, and drag him before Annas and Caiaphas, always address the two high-priests "Sir Bushoppes;" and in the rubric, or stage direction, they are also called the bishops." The successors of Aaron and the Christian bishops are identical in appearance. Even so far back as Eli, the old high-priest is represented wearing an episcopal mitre, cope, and gloves, in a picture of the dedication of the child Samuel in Mr. Boxall's Speculum. The want of travel, or the want of any other than verbal pictures from those who had travelled, was a cause of many anachronisms. If a city was mentioned in Holy Scripture, and the painter had to represent any part of it, he would put into his background a faithful photograph of whatever city he knew best. This anachronism has proved of some value to us, as M. Haussmann has shewn in his great folios on the history of Paris, who gives copies of French illuminations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which Paris does duty for Jerusalem. There is a miniature of the shepherds receiving the tidings of the birth of Christ, in which the Seine, the tower of the Temple, the Church of St. Jean-en-Grève, and the Petit Chatelet are translated into |