IX.

Marie Antoinette.

"My hair is gray, but not with years,

For it grew white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears."-BYRON.

THE first French Revolution, like the superlative vices it both sprang from and gave birth to, was "a monster of frightful mien;" but it cannot be said of it, as of vice, that

"Seen too oft, familiar with its face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace”—

the revolting theme, as one congenial to any sympa. thies of our nature. There is such a thing as human nature, and such a thing as French nature, said a great writer; and nothing but a French temperament, that still delights in "blue-fire and bloody-bone" fiction, can often relish such a dish of horrors as the Reign of Terror, at least it must be a jaded Parisian sensualism that needs such an incentive to mental appetite. The craving for the horrible that, like the inclination to fix a fascinated gaze on the face of the dead, or to ap

proach and leap from a precipice, is a strange attribute of mind, finds this portion of earth's history too nauseating to be many times perused. The ingredients collected by the Witches of Macbeth "for a charm of powerful trouble," of which the most palatable were

"Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,"-

are mere child's confectionery in the comparison. The tortures of the Hindoo and of the American savage, are tender mercies when contrasted with the "red foolfury of the Seine." And besides the disgusting and stupefying nature of the details, they are too familiar to every one in this reading age, to make a repicturing of them pardonable. No subject has been so often rehearsed; and it is necessarily and sufficiently brought into view in the accounts of other heroines of the period, so that the events accompanying Marie Antoinette's agonies may be now dismissed with a glance. Into her cup, all the blackest drops of those dreadful years seem to have been pressed. So protracted, intense and every way sharpened were her sufferings, and so indescribable was the monster Revolution that slowly crushed her in its coils, that no language can represent the reality, except it be Pollok's unequalled painting of the Undying Worm-a passage of poetry well worth examining in this connection.

"One I remarked

Attentively; but how shall I describe

What nought resembles else my eye hath seen?
Of worm or serpent kind it something looked,

But monstrous, with a thousand snaky heads,
Eyed each with double orbs of glaring wrath;
And with as many tails, that twisted out
In horrid revolution, tipped with stings;
And all its mouths, that wide and darkly gaped,
And breathed most poisonous breath, had each a sting
Forked, and long, and venomous, and sharp;
And, in its writhings infinite, it grasped
Maliguantly what seemed a heart, swollen vast,
And quivering with torture most intense;
And still the heart, with anguish throbbing high,
Made effort to escape, but could not; for
Howe'er it turned, and oft it vainly turned,
These complicated foldings held it fast.

And still the monstrous beast with sting of head
Or tail transpierced it, bleeding evermore."

Such was Marie Antoinette's high-throbbing heart, and such was the mob of Paris, an unimaginable dragon, headed by mad tribunals.

No connected sketch of the life of this unfortunate queen is intended; a few scenes in that life of wonder ful vicissitudes will be given. The influences that surrounded her early years, may be gathered from the biography of Maria Theresa, her imperial mother, who gave birth to this daughter in the palace at Vienna, Nov. 2d, 1755. The day was also memorable for the great earthquake at Lisbon, which, like the terrible. thunder-storm that followed Marie Antoinette's marriage, was regarded by her as an evil omen, and certainly was a fit emblem of the earthquake and storm of political revolution which buried the splendors and joys of her reign in ruin, misery, and death.

Fair-haired, beautiful, and joyous, Marie grew up in

the peace and freedom of her early home. She was surrounded by brothers and sisters of remarkable loveliness and promise, who were enough company for her in all the occupations or sports of childhood and youth. The imperial nursery was their kingdom, where they ruled even their governesses and preceptors, and were safe from all intrusion. Their handsome and gay father, the emperor Francis of Austria, visited them only to mingle in their gayeties, and receive their noisy, familiar caresses; him they loved, and deeply mourned his death, as of one who was numbered in their happy band. He died when Marie, his favorite daughter, was ten years old; and before he set out on the journey from which he never returned alive, he ordered his coachman to wait, until she was called, and he had again embraced her affectionately.

The young princes and princesses regarded their masculine and heroic mother with little feeling except that of distant awe. She was too much occupied with her wars and affairs of state, to think much of her family. But once a week did she visit them, with much the same business spirit that she reviewed her troops or inspected her public asylumns. In the same way that one glances at a morning paper, or that she inquired the foreign news of her minister, she questioned her family physician, each morning, in regard to the health of her children; and she only deigned to see them when a sickness was reported, or when she occasionally gathered them at her dinner-table, in order to impress some ambassador with the idea that she herself superintended their education.

The teachers of Marie Antoinette were more solici tous to win her favor, from interested motives, than to advance her in knowledge. As feigned proofs of her proficiency, they exhibited to the empress the exercises in composition which they had first written in pencil for Marie to trace afterwards in ink, or sketches of drawing which she had never touched with her own hand; and they taught her Latin sentences which she did not understand, but calmly recited to visitors at court, on occasions of presentation, as if she were able to converse in that language. Metastasio, her Italian instructor, was alone faithful to his charge; he was so agreeable and assiduous that she could speak and write the soft, musical language of Dante and Tasso, with fluent elegance. She at length gained much facility in French conversation; but, through all her life she was forced to lament her deficiency in every solid acquire

ment.

After her engagement to the dauphin of France, two French actors, of superficial character, were employed to perfect her in elocution and singing; and when these were dismissed as incompetent, the Abbé de Vermond was sent from Paris, to be her tutor. He seems to have accomplished little else than the encouraging of her naturally unrestrained, frolicsome and capricious disposition, and the instilling into her mind a lasting and fun-loving contempt of the ceremonious French court to which she was destined. After her arrival there, no effort of hers was sufficient to subdue her uncontrollable vivacity, the teachings of the Abbé, and the fashionable freedom of manners she had learned