north and south. They gradually feel the earth's rotation; but on
their arrival at the tropics, being still inferior in velocity to the
equatorial sea, they seem to roll backwards; in other words, they form
a current from east to west. This current is farther impelled by the
trade-winds.

The progress of this great perpetual current includes almost every part
of the ocean. In going westward, it necessarily rushes against the
coast of America, where it divides into two vast branches, one running
south with great force, and the other north-west. A succession of
currents, all connected, obviously form a "moving power" to prevent the
stagnation of the ocean, and, by their branches, visit every shore of
the globe.

Some of those currents are of great breadth, but they generally move
slow. Humboldt calculates that a boat, carried _only_ by the current
from the Canaries to Caraccas, would take _thirteen months_ for the
voyage. Still there would be obvious advantages to navigation in moving
along a district of ocean in which all the speed, such as it was,
furthered the movement of the vessel, and which offered none of the
common sources of hindrance.

But another curious effect of the Atlantic currents is to be
commemorated, as giving us probably the first knowledge of the western
world. "Two corpses, the features of which indicated a race of unknown
men, were thrown on the coast of the Azores, towards the end of the
fifteenth century. Nearly at the same period the brother-in-law of
Columbus, Pedro Correa, governor of Porto Santo, found on the strand of
the island pieces of bamboo of an extraordinary size, brought thither
by the western currents."

Those coincidences might have confirmed the idea of the great
navigator. But Columbus still deserves all the glory. A thousand
conjectures may be formed, and a thousand confirmations given, and yet
all be lost to the world. The true discoverer is the man of practice.
Columbus was _that_ man; and we are to remember also his indefatigable
labour in realising that practice, the unexhausted resolution with
which he struggled against the penury and neglect of the Continental
courts, his noble scorn of the sneers of European ignorance, and the
heroic patience with which he sustained the murmuring of his crews, and
asked "but one day more." The world has never seen a man more equal to
his great purpose; if he was not a direct instrument appointed to the
noblest discovery of man.

But those evidences of connexion are not unfrequently given to our more
observant time. "When the wind has been long from the west, a branch
of the Gulf Stream runs with considerable force in a north-easterly
direction towards the coasts of Europe. By this the fruit of trees
belonging to the torrid zone of America is annually cast ashore on the
western coasts of Ireland and Norway. Pennant observes, that the seeds
of plants which grow in Jamaica, Cuba, and the adjacent countries, are
collected on the shores of the Hebrides. Thither also barrels of French
wine, the remains of vessels wrecked in the West Indian seas, have
been carried. In 1809, H.M.S. Little Belt was dismasted at Halifax,
Nova Scotia, and her bowsprit was found, eighteen months after, in the
Basque Roads. The mainmast of the Tilbury, burned off Hispaniola, in
the Seven Years' War, was brought to our shores.

"To the Gulf Stream, England and Ireland are partially indebted for the
mildness of their climate. The prevailing winds are the south-west.
Coming over a vast space of the comparatively heated ocean, it is
calculated, that if those winds were so constant as to bring us all
the heat which they are capable of conveying, they would raise the
column of air over Great Britain and France, in winter, at once to the
temperature of summer."

But interesting as it might be thus to range through the great
phenomena of the globe, and demonstrate its abundant and astonishing
adaptation to the purposes of living existence, our more immediate
object is to mark to the reader the materials of this noble volume.

The especial sciences of which it treats are, geology, hydrography,
meteorology, and natural history, with their several subdivisions; the
whole delivered in the most intelligible form of modern knowledge,
and with the fullest information acquired by modern research; and
illustrated by maps, the skill of whose execution can have been
equalled only by the labour of their formation.

The volume commences with the geological structure of the globe in
all its branches, and with separate articles given to the mountain
chains of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, all illustrated by maps:
then follow the glaciers and glacial phenomena, with maps; then the
phenomena of the volcanoes and volcanic regions, developed by charts
and descriptions,--this department closing with that most curious, most
disputed, and still most obscure of all subjects, the Palæontology of
the British Isles.

The second division--hydrography, commences with charts of the ocean,
and with charts of those wondrous, and still comparatively obscure,
agencies, the eleven currents which intersect it in all quarters. Then
follow charts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, now forming such new
and interesting objects to the navigator and the philanthropist. We
then have maps of the tides and river systems.

The Indian Ocean, now scarcely more than beginning to be the subject
of scientific inquiry, will probably assist us effectively in the
discoveries of those most important agents, the winds. The monsoon
and the typhoon of those seas exhibit characters apparently almost
exclusive. To ascertain their general direction, and their especial
limits, must be a great boon to the commerce which is now directing
itself, with such renewed vigour, to those tempting regions. The lights
which have been thrown on the use of the barometer, and on the rise
and direction of the West Indian storms, have already given a species
of guidance to this important investigation; and if the theory of the
hurricane can never render its power harmless, it may, at least, make
human precaution more vigilant, and, of course, more successful.

Those investigations are naturally followed by the third great division
of the work--meteorology. The value of exact observations on wind and
weather must have been felt from the beginning of the world; but,
until our day, it was little more than the science of the shepherd,
who foretold a high wind or a shower, generally when both had already
come. The barometer and thermometer, though both well known, and both
admirable, had done but little for a science, which, without exactness
of practice and connexion of causes, is nothing.

Humboldt, by his attempt to trace lines of temperature on the map of
the globe, first raised those scattered conceptions into the shape
of a science. Yet Humboldt was not the original inventor of the
inquiry into the mean temperatures. Meyer of Gottingen first threw the
observations on this important and evasive subject into the well-known
formula, which made the temperature depend on the square of the cosine
of the latitude. Playfair followed, by including in his formula the
elevation of the place and the season. The object of Humboldt was, to
determine, by a series of curves on the earth's surface,the points at
which--however the temperature differed from time to time--the average
annually was the same. On this important subject we are now furnished
with a map of striking detail and execution.

The late magnetic researches pursued round the globe may, at no remote
period, establish a connexion between the revolution of the magnetic
poles and the isothermal lines, as had been long since conjectured.
But, as practical science advances, we shall probably see all the
great agencies of nature combined,--if not all shown to be but the
modifications of _one_.

The Hyetographic or rain chart of this volume gives a most complete and
minute detail of a most important subject. It exhibits the rains of the
globe, in their constant gradation from the equator to the pole, in
their influence on the seasons, and in their degrees from the plains
to the summit of the hills. A map is added, on the polarisation of the
atmosphere--almost a new science--with an explanatory article by Sir
David Brewster.

The fourth division is Natural History; itself divided into Phytology,
Zoology, and Ethnography. This division abounds in maps, and in these
departments they are obviously of the most necessary use. In the
description of plants and animals, the pencil must speak, the tongue
loses its faculty; a sketch, executed at the moment, will give a
fuller explanation than any dexterity or copiousness of language can.
We accordingly have here charts of all the geographical positions
of the plants important to the food of man, and of the geographical
distribution of plants on the surface of the globe.

The Zoological charts give the regions, the habitats, and the
characters of all the diversities of animal life on the land--from the
mammalia to the birds and reptiles.

The Ethnographical portion, or view of the general position and
races of the European nations, commences with a fine map, by Kombst,
exhibiting a view of all its varieties, with reference to birth,
language, religion, and forms of government. Having thus glanced at
the scientific contents of this noble volume, we propose to give some
sketches of those portions of the globe which, within the last half
century, have become the refuge or the property of the emigration from
the British shores.

Australia, the _fifth_ continent, is nearly as large as Europe. Divided
by the tropic, it is capable of producing the chief plants of both the
temperate and the tropical zones. Its principal geological feature is
a mountain chain, which, extending through its whole length on its
eastern coast, runs on the north into New Guinea, and on the south into
Van Diemen's Land. From its immense size, (two thousand four hundred
miles from east to west, and one thousand seven hundred from north
to south,) and from the savage state of its native population, the
exact nature of its central portion is yet only to be conjectured. But
conjecture has been busy; and by some it is held, that the centre is
a Mediterranean, from the direction of some of the rivers; by others,
that it is a huge Sahara, from the hot winds which often blow towards
the coast. But two late expeditions, sent from Sydney, have passed,
without difficulty, the one as far as Torres Strait, and the other
almost to the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is true, that neither
of those was towards the centre; but they had the wiser practical
object, of ascertaining the nature of the country most important to
the British settler--that great tract lying between the mountains of
the cast coast and the sea. And that country they found to be fair
and fertile, temperate and easily accessible. The whole expedition
of Colonel Mitchel, the surveyor-general, has almost the air of
romance. He describes the country, in the latter half of his advance
to the north, as not only of remarkable richness, but of singularly
picturesque beauty; the latter a quality of the most unusual order in
Australia. To the customary complaint of want of water in the interior,
Colonel Mitchel answers, that Australia, to remedy this defect, wants
nothing but labour; that it has rivers which supply water in the rainy
season sufficient for the use of the year; that the formation of the
land everywhere suggests the idea of vast reservoirs; and that man has
only to complete what nature has begun. The British settlements in the
south and west will probably soon bring these resources into action.

Large deposits of minerals are already beginning to bring wealth to
the settlers. Coal has been found. The tide of emigration which some
years ago was checked, has suddenly flowed with increased force to
Australia; and the vigour of the English character, the only character
in the world _capable_ of effective colonisation, has already made
Sidney a flourishing metropolis, and before another century (a moment
in the life of nations) will exhibit to Europe an English empire at the
antipodes! And this is the history of a land which, though coasted by
the celebrated Cook in 1770, was never trod by a colonist till nearly
twenty years after. This wonder has been wrought within the lifetime of
one generation.

Van Diemen's Land affords a striking evidence of the variety in which
nature seems to delight. It forms a contrast in everything to its huge
neighbour: it is small, it is a mass of mountains, it is well watered,
it is rainy, it is agricultural, and it abounds in fine harbours.
On the whole, it bears the same relation to Australia which Ireland
might bear to England, if England were united to the Continent. It is
also about the size of Ireland--Van Diemen's Land containing nearly
twenty-eight thousand square miles, Ireland perhaps thirty thousand.

In Europe, the continent is richer than the islands; at the antipodes,
the islands are richer than the continent. New Zealand, the last
colony of England, promises to be one of the noblest of the British
possessions. It may either be regarded as _one_ island, fifteen
hundred miles long, or as three, divided by boisterous channels, and
lashed everywhere by a roaring ocean. It has remarkable advantages for
colonisation--a fertile soil, boundless forests, beds of minerals,
and picturesque beauty. The mountains in its interior have all the
grandeur of the Alps, with more than their forest clothing, and (more
picturesque than all) with the volcano, which is wanting to the
supremacy of the Alps. It has table-lands for the agriculturist, sites
on a luxuriant coast for cities, fine harbours for commerce, copious
rivers for communication, and mountains of from twelve to fourteen
thousand feet high, to irrigate the soil, and supply the heated regions
with the luxury of perpetual ice. The climate seems to be healthy; and
the country, by its boldness, storms, varying temperature, and even by
the roughness of the billows which toss for ever on its shore, appears
destined for the school of Englishmen and English constitutions.

To the north of Australia, and almost within sight--another vast and
lovely region, and another contrast to the great continent--lies
New Guinea, fourteen hundred miles long, and two hundred broad. Its
appearance from the sea is magnificent--an immense undulation of
luxuriance covering the coasts, and rising up the sides of mountain
ranges loftier than Mont Blanc. But the tropical excess of vegetation
may render it dangerous to European life: at all events, it will
be only wisdom to people Australia before we intrude on the naked
foresters, and do battle against the more fatal enemy, the swamps of
New Guinea.

Borneo, which has so lately become an object of English interest, by
the settlement of Sir James Brooke, is also a large and noble island;
it has the bold mountain interior, the table-lands, the rivers, and the
harbours, which belong to New Guinea. The English settlement, and the
presence of British ships, may introduce such imperfect civilisation
as the Oriental savage can ever receive; piracy may be partially put
down, and even honesty may be partially introduced. But there is this
great drawback to the success of English colonisation--that the land is
already peopled, and that the strangers are more likely to fall into
the indolent habits and luxurious vice of the native, than the native
ever to rise to the manly habits of the Englishman.

The Indian Archipelago is almost a new world to the European. Though
known to the Dutch soon after the decay of that empire which the
Portuguese secured by the discoveries of de Gama, and occasionally
touched upon by English commerce, it had been almost forgotten among
the stirring scenes in which Europe was involved in the last three
centuries. Our conquests in Hindostan, our possession of Ceylon, the
capture of the Dutch colonies in the French war, and, later still, our
establishment at Singapore, and the opening of China, have turned the
eyes of England to those exuberant countries; and we shall now probably
reunite them to the world of Europe.

But we must hope that, beyond commerce, and the communication of the
comforts and intelligence of English life, our ambition will not
extend. Those climates are generally hazardous to European life; they
are not less hazardous to the manliness and vigour of English habits,
and even to the force of the English character. It has been said that,
if the first generation of colonists are English to the grave, the
second are Indian from the cradle. They contract the lassitude of the
tropics; they become incapable of effort: dissipation is the natural
resource of opulent idleness; they linger through life from excess to
excess; and, unless a revolution of the hardier native drives them out,
or an emigration of their hardier countrymen keeps them in, the colony
sinks into the ground.

The new impulse reserved for our century is Colonisation. Always
existing, even from the earliest ages of mankind, it had hitherto
scarcely deserved the name. The French colonisation of Canada had
not advanced, in a century, beyond the nook where they first nestled
themselves, and where the most absurd of all policies--that of allowing
them to place their language on a footing with the manlier tongue
of their conquerors--has perpetuated them as a separate race, with
all their absurdities, all their prejudices, and even with all their
hostility to the British name. The Spanish colonisation of South
America amounted to scarcely more than settling the descendants of the
Spanish garrisons, of the Spanish refugees, and of the attendants on
the viceroys.

The only true _colonists_ were the English of North America; who, for
a hundred years, poured a feeble stream towards the prairies of the
Mississippi, recruited and stained by the vagabondage of Europe. But
no great impulse of national necessity gave depth and force to the
current. But within these two years a more powerful impression has
been made by necessity. The Irish famine of 1846, and the following
year, drove multitudes to seek for bread on the shores of America.
Some hundred thousands probably have left Europe behind for ever, and
are now delving and woodcutting in the forests of the western world. A
German emigration, though of a more tardy order, has followed, from a
pressure, if not of direct famine, yet of difficulty. And within the
last year a powerful impulse has been also made in the direction of
Australia, of all countries the one which offers the fairest prospect
for the Englishman. The success of these emigrations will naturally
tend to continue the outpourings of Europe. The emigrants, once settled
and successful, will encourage the movement of those whom they have
left behind, as much embarrassed as they themselves originally were;
and the comforts which come into the possession of industry, in a land
of cheap purchase--unburthened with taxes, and unburthened with the
still heavier taxes which the vanities of old countries lay on the
myriads of middle life--must form a strong temptation, or rather a
rational inducement, to seek independence at the antipodes.

But the sudden discovery of the Californian gold-country has given a
still more determined urgency to emigration. That a vast territory,
which, if we are to rely on the reports of its labourers, is a sheet
of gold, should have lain for three hundred years in the hands of
the Spaniards, wholly unknown to a people always hungry for gold, is
among the wonders which sometimes strike across us in the history
of nations. But its immediate effect is, unquestionably, to aid the
general tendency. It is already drawing thousands from every part of
the world towards California. Columns of men, followed by their trains
of oxen and wains of merchandise, are already pouring over every
track of the West. In a few years, the desert will probably be filled
with population; and when the mines are exhausted, or taken into the
possession of the government, the more valuable mine will remain, in
the existence of a new nation, in the commerce of the Pacific, and in
the richness of a soil unploughed since the Deluge.

The effect of this emigration, for the moment, is obviously to
assist the reception of the multitudes from Europe. It is thinning
the population of the United States, carrying off the labourers,
and turning every unoccupied eye in the direction of the west. The
drudgery of Ireland, the skilled labour of England, and the patient and
not unintelligent toil of Germany, will daily find the mart more open;
and thus even the mania of gold-digging will have its effect on the
sober welfare of mankind.

But a still more important effect, though more remote, may follow
from the Californian mines. The celebrated Burke, sixty years ago,
predicted that the new population on the plains of the Mississippi
would extinguish the power, if not the existence, of the cities on
the coast, and that when those "English Tartars," as he imaginatively
described them, once poured down on the New Yorks, Bostons, and
Philadelphias, they would turn them into warehouses, and their sites
into watering-places. They would have fulfilled his prophecy long
since, but for the boundless expanse of territory which lay behind this
"Tartar" region. Their discontents evaporated into the wilderness; the
provincial who looked with a jealous eye on the man of cities, found it
easier to travel than to make war; and he forthwith set up a state for
himself in the boundless prairie. A Californian republic may erect a
formidable balance to the domination of the old States. Washington will
no longer be the capital of America, and the north of the New World may
yet have a stronger resemblance to Europe--with its great kingdoms,
its little princes, and its commercial cities--than the anomalous
government of the Stripes and Stars.

But the noblest of all the projects which have ever excited the
curiosity of the world is still to be consummated--the communication
between the Atlantic and the Pacific--a canal across the Isthmus of
Darien. That isthmus is but twenty miles broad, but a passage across
it would shorten the voyage to China, perhaps to six weeks, instead
of four months; annihilate, the perils of the navigation round South
America, and bring Europe into rapid contact with Australia, India,
and the unexplored glories and exhaustless opulence of the finest
archipelago in the ocean.

The project is so natural that it had been a hundred times conceived;
but the perpetual wars of Europe, the angry jealousy of Spain, and,
in later years, the disturbances of the native governments, have
wholly obstructed the mightiest benefit ever offered to the progress
of civilisation. The enterprise of the Americans had not overlooked
this key to both hemispheres, and, some years since, a compact was
entered into with a company headed by the American Biddle. But it was
suffered to die away; other contracts succeeded, equally abortive,
the government on the spot demanding terms of such exorbitance that
it was impossible to carry the work into execution. With the usual
short-sightedness of the foreigner, they had placed all their profit
on the rent and tolls of the canal, foolishly forgetting that their
_real_ profit was to be found in the wealth which the intercourse of
all nations must bring into their country.

Two projects are now said to be under consideration--a railroad, which
would be exclusively for the benefit of the Americans; and a canal
capable of carrying large vessels across the Isthmus, and which would
be open to all nations. There can be no question as to the superior
benefits of the latter to mankind.

Of the five routes, four are exposed to obstacles arising from
elevation of ground, (the track to Panama rises a thousand feet,)
from insalubrity, and from other circumstances of the soil and the
locality. The fifth, by the river of Nicaragua, evidently deserves the
preference. It lies through a fine river, reaching from the Atlantic
to a central lake, and thence descends through a second river to the
Pacific. The whole distance would be but two hundred and seventy-eight
miles, which would require locks and other works, (the rivers being at
intervals interrupted by rapids,) but this portion would amount to but
eighty-two miles. The lake-sailing would be a hundred and twenty-five
miles. The whole expense, estimating it at the prices of Europe, would
be less than four millions sterling. Sanguine calculators value the
profits at twelve per cent. But whatever might be the smallness of the
dividends in the first instance, there can be no imaginable doubt that,
with fair dealing on the part of the local government, the Isthmus
would soon be worth all the mines of Peru, with all the gold-washings
of California besides.

The next great enterprise would be the junction of the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea, by a passage across the Isthmus of Suez. There is
already a road, but the passage is slow and difficult, from the heat,
the soil, and the imperfect conveyance. Two proposals have been long
since made, the one for a canal and the other for a railroad. To the
canal there seem to be insuperable objections, the shallowness of the
sea at Suez, the shifting nature of the sands on the way, which would
soon fill up the canal, and the difficulty of water for its supply. It
has been also ascertained by the survey of the French engineers that
the Red Sea is about thirty feet higher than the Mediterranean.

The railroad is obviously not merely the true expedient, but the only
one. But it is almost impossible to deal the foreigner on any subject
of prospective profit. The habit of living but for the day deteriorates
all the movements of national progress. Unless he can grasp his profit
at once, it exists no longer to his eye. With the man of the East, the
grasp is eager and avaricious. Mehemet Ali might have brought millions
of wealth into Egypt by a railroad, while he was wasting thousands in
paltry contrivances to make a royal revenue for himself, out of the
contending bargains of English and French engineers. The result is,
that except a miserable canal between Alexandria and the Nile, dry
half the year, and scarcely navigable during the other half, nothing
has been done; and the journey across the isthmus occupies nearly two
days, gives infinite trouble, and makes money only for donkey-boys and
tavern-keepers, which, by a railroad, might be effected luxuriously in
three hours.

The Ethnography of this volume forms the material of a treatise, which
might itself be expanded into a volume. Some years ago the population
of the globe was computed at 860 millions; but, from the accelerated
rapidity of increase, year by year, we should suppose it to be now
900 millions; and even that, a number which, unless some great human
catastrophe should arrive, would speedily increase to 1000 millions!
The laws of population are yet imperfectly comprehended; but, like all
the other great problems of nature, they are given for our inquiry, and
will ultimately yield to our inquiry.

The chief obstacle to population is evidently neither poverty, nor
general discomfort of living, nor inferiority of food. Under all these
circumstances, population accumulates in an extraordinary degree.
The population of Ireland is a case in point. War seems to exercise
but a slight check on population. Barrenness of soil must have its
effect, for where men cannot eat, they, of course, cannot live; but
insecurity of property, implied in tyrannical government, is the great
depopulator. Men will not labour, where they cannot be certain of
the fruits of their labour; they sink into lassitude, indolence, and
beggary. The actual power of life departs from them, and they either
perish by the first pressure of famine, sink under the first attack
of disease, or emigrate, to make the experiment of renewing their
existence in a freer soil. But the subject is still equally obscure,
boundless, and interesting.

Till within these few years, French and German scepticism, always
hostile to the Mosaic revelation, had adopted the opinion that the
races of mankind were of different parentage, and thus that the
scriptural account was _untrue_. But the manlier research and honester
philosophy of Dr Pritchard, and others, in this country, have proved
the assertion to be as unfaithful to facts, as the argument was
sophistical. Whatever may be the external differences in the five great
races of the earth--the Circassian, the Mongolian, the Malayan, the
Ethiopian, and the American--all are fully capable of being accounted
for by the accidents of climate, food, temperature, and position, while
the internal configuration of all is the same. There is still the more
convincing similitude in their faculties, affections, intelligence,
passions, and language. All that constitutes the class "Mankind" is the
_same_, from the mountaineer of Circassia, the finest, and probably the
original, type of the human form, to the Esquimaux, probably the most
degraded. Even evidences of relationship in higher things might be
given. All, in various degrees, acknowledge a Supreme Ruler of earth
and heaven, admit the necessity of worship, retain some traditions of
paradise, recognise the general morals of life, have impressions of
justice, temperance, and truth, however often forgotten. All look to a
future state of being!

But we must now close our remarks on the volume, which Mr Johnston
has thus contributed to the knowledge, and, we will believe, to the
admiration of his time. The mere circumstance of its appearing under
the auspices of its present publishers, has not in the slightest
degree coloured our necessarily rapid and cursory criticism. If we
had found the volume in the dust of a monkish library, we should have
pronounced it a masterly performance; if we were about to offer a gift
to the rising intelligence of our age, there is none which we should
offer in preference. So ample, so definite, and yet so comprehensive
are the stores of information presented by this admirable digest of
physical science--of all that we know regarding the structure of the
great globe we inhabit, and regarding whatever lives and moves on
its surface, together with the laws that regulate the whole--and, at
the same time, so absolutely necessary is that information for the
proper culture of the mind, that we must confess it was with a sigh
of regret, while turning over the leaves of the magnificent folio,
that we felt that such a work could only be destined for the wealthy
and for the privileged class who have access to public libraries, but
that it was likely to remain "a book sealed" to the great bulk of
general inquirers. Our fears, however, on this subject, we rejoice to
be informed, are groundless; and, since commencing this paper, we have
learned that a reduced edition is on the eve of publication. As was
also to have been desired, this is to appear in a serial form, so as to
render it accessible to every class of readers, and at only one-fifth
of the original cost.

This is as it should be. To the scholar, to the student, and to the
already large yet daily increasing multitude of inquirers who cultivate
natural science, the _Physical Atlas_ is a treasure of incalculable
value. It brings before the mind's eye, in one grand panoramic view,
and in a form clear, definite, and easily comprehensible, all the facts
at present known relative to the great subjects of which it treats, and
may be regarded as a lucid epitome of a thousand scattered volumes,
more or less intrinsically valuable, of which it contains the heart and
substance.

From this time henceforward an acquaintance with physical geography
must form the basis of educational knowledge, and on no basis so
adequate can the superstructure of general scholarship be reared.
History, without such an acquirement previously made, can only be half
understood; and, in ignorance of it, the works of creation are, at
best, but a maze without a plan. If we were called on to give proof to
the world of the combination of vigorous diligence, manly acquirement,
clear reasoning, and philosophical conception of which the British
mind is capable, we should lay on the table this noble volume of Mr
Johnston. Indeed, if we might hazard a prediction, the future is not
far distant when such a work must be indispensably requisite to every
educational establishment, and be found in the hands of every scholar.

THE CAXTONS.--PART XII.

Chapter LIX.

The Hegira is completed--we have all taken roost in the old tower. My
father's books have arrived by the waggon, and have settled themselves
quietly in their new abode--filling up the apartment dedicated to their
owner, including the bed-chamber and two lobbies. The duck also has
arrived, under wing of Mrs Primmins, and has reconciled herself to the
old stewpond; by the side of which my father has found a walk that
compensates for the peach wall--especially as he has made acquaintance
with sundry respectable carps, who permit him to feed them after he has
fed the duck --a privilege of which (since, if any one else approaches,
the carps are off in an instant) my father is naturally vain. All
privileges are valuable in proportion to the exclusiveness of their
enjoyment.

Now, from the moment the first carp had eaten the bread my father threw
to it, Mr Caxton had mentally resolved, that a race so confiding should
never be sacrificed to Ceres and Primmins. But all the fishes on my
uncle's property were under the special care of that Proteus Bolt--and
Bolt was not a man likely to suffer the carps to earn their bread
without contributing their full share to the wants of the community.
But, like master, like man! Bolt was an aristocrat fit to be hung _à
la lanterne_. He out-Rolanded Roland in the respect he entertained for
sounding names and old families; and by that bait my father caught him
with such skill that you might see that, if Austin Caxton had been an
angler of fishes, he could have filled his basket full any day, shine
or rain.

"You observe, Bolt," said my father, beginning artfully, "that those
fishes, dull as you may think them, are creatures capable of a
syllogism; and if they saw that, in proportion to their civility to me,
they were depopulated by you, they would put two and two together, and
renounce my acquaintance."

"Is that what you call being silly Jems, sir?" said Bolt; "faith, there
is many a good Christian not half so wise!"

"Man," answered my father thoughtfully, "is an animal less
syllogistical, or more silly-Jemmical than many creatures popularly
esteemed his inferiors. Yes, let but one of those Cyprinidæ, with his
fine sense of logic, see that, if his fellow-fishes eat bread, they are
suddenly jerked out of their element, and vanish forever; and though
you broke a quartern loaf into crumbs, he would snap his tail at you
with enlightened contempt. If," said my father soliloquising, "I had
been as syllogistic as those scaly logicians, I should never have
swallowed that hook, which--hum! there--least said soonest mended. But,
Mr Bolt, to return to the Cyprinidæ."

"What's the hard name you call them 'ere carp, your honour?" asked Bolt.

"Cyprinidæ, a family of the section Malacoptergii Abdominales," replied
Mr Caxton; "their teeth are generally confined to the Pharyngeans,
and their branchiostegous rays are but few--marks of distinction from
fishes vulgar and voracious."

"Sir," said Bolt, glancing to the stewpond, "if I had known they had
been a family of such importance, I am sure I should have treated them
with more respect."

"They are a very old family, Bolt, and have been settled in England
since the fourteenth century. A younger branch of the family has
established itself in a pond in the gardens of Peterhoff, (the
celebrated palace of Peter the Great, Bolt--an emperor highly respected
by my brother, for he killed a great many people very gloriously in
battle, besides those whom he sabred for his own private amusement.)
And there is an officer or servant of the imperial household, whose
task it is to summon those Russian Cyprinidæ to dinner by ringing
a bell, shortly after which, you may see the emperor and empress,
with all their waiting, ladies and gentlemen, coming down in their
carriages to see the Cyprinidæ eat in state. So you perceive, Bolt,
that it would be a republican, Jacobinical proceeding to stew members
of a family so intimately associated with royalty."

"Dear me, sir!" said Bolt, "I am very glad you told me. I ought to have
known they were genteel fish, they are so mighty shy--as all your real
quality are."

My father smiled, and rubbed his hands gently; he had carried his
point, and henceforth the Cyprinidæ of the section Malacoptergii
Abdominales were as sacred in Bolt's eyes as cats and ichneumons were
in those of a priest in Thebes.

My poor father! with what true and unostentatious philosophy thou didst
accommodate thyself to the greatest change thy quiet, harmless life
had known, since it had passed out of the brief burning cycle of the
passions. Lost was the home, endeared to thee by so many noiseless
victories of the mind--so many mute histories of the heart--for
only the scholar knoweth how deep a charm lies in monotony, in the
old associations, the old ways, and habitual clockwork of peaceful
time. Yet, the home maybe replaced--thy heart built its home round
it everywhere--and the old tower might supply the loss of the brick
house, and the walk by the duck-pond become as dear as the haunts by
the sunny peach wall. But what shall replace to thee the bright dream
of thine innocent ambition,--that angel-wing which had glittered
across thy manhood, in the hour between its noon and its setting?
What replace to thee the Magnum Opus--the Great Book?--fair and
broadspreading tree--lone amidst the sameness of the landscape--now
plucked up by the roots! The oxygen was subtracted from the air of
thy life. For be it known to ye, O my compassionate readers, that
with the death of the Anti-Publisher Society the blood-streams of
the Great Book stood still--its pulse was arrested--its full heart
beat no more. Three thousand copies of the first seven sheets in
quarto, with sundry unfinished plates, anatomical, architectural, and
graphic, depicting various developments of the human skull, (that
temple of Human Error), from the Hottentot to the Greek; sketches of
ancient buildings, Cyclopean and Pelasgic; Pyramids, and Pur-tors,
all signs of races whose handwriting was on their walls; landscapes
to display the influence of Nature upon the customs, creeds, and
philosophy of men--here showing how the broad Chaldean wastes led to
the contemplation of the stars, and illustrations of the Zodiac, in
elucidation of the mysteries of symbol-worship; fantastic vagaries of
earth fresh from the Deluge, tending to impress on early superstition
the awful sense of the rude powers of nature; views of the rocky
defiles of Laconia; Sparta, neighboured by the "silent Amyclæ,"
explaining, as it were, geographically, the iron customs of the
warrior colony, (arch Tories, amidst the shift and roar of Hellenic
democracies,) contrasted by the seas, and coasts, and creeks of Athens
and Ionia, tempting to adventure, commerce, and change. Yea, my father,
in his suggestions to the artist of those few imperfect plates, had
thrown as much light on the infancy of earth and its tribes as by the
"shining words" that flowed from his calm starry knowledge! Plates
and copies, all rested now in peace and dust--"housed with darkness
and with death" on the sepulchral shelves of the lobby to which they
were consigned--rays intercepted--worlds incompleted. The Prometheus
was bound, and the fire he had stolen from heaven lay embedded in the
flints of his rock. For so costly was the mould in which Uncle Jack
and the Anti-Publisher Society had contrived to cast this Exposition
of Human Error, that every bookseller shyed at its very sight, as an
owl blinks at daylight, or human error at truth. In vain Squills and I,
before we left London, had carried a gigantic specimen of the Magnum
Opus into the back-parlours of firms the most opulent and adventurous.
Publisher after publisher started, as if we had held a blunderbuss
to his ear. All Paternoster Row uttered a "Lord deliver us." Human
Error found no man so egregiously its victim as to complete those two
quartos, with the prospect of two others, at his own expense. Now, I
had earnestly hoped that my father, for the sake of mankind, would
be persuaded to risk some portion,--and that, I own, not a small
one--of his remaining capital on the conclusion of an undertaking so
elaborately begun. But there my father was obdurate. No big words about
mankind, and the advantage to unborn generations, could stir him an
inch. "Stuff!" said Mr Caxton peevishly. "A man's duties to mankind
and posterity begin with his own son; and having wasted half your
patrimony, I will not take another huge slice out of the poor remainder
to gratify my vanity, for that is the plain truth of it. Man must atone
for sin by expiation. By the book I have sinned, and the book must
expiate it. Pile the sheets up in the lobby, so that at least one man
may be wiser and humbler by the sight of Human Error, every time he
walks by so stupendous a monument of it."

Verily, I know not how my father could bear to look at those dumb
fragments of himself--strata of the Caxtonian conformation lying
layer upon layer, as if packed up and disposed for the inquisitive
genius of some moral Murchison or Mantell. But, for my part, I never
glanced at their repose in the dark lobby, without thinking, "Courage,
Pisistratus, courage! there's something worth living for; work hard,
grow rich, and the Great Book shall come out at last."

Meanwhile, I wandered over the country, and made acquaintance with
the farmers, and with Trevanion's steward--an able man, and a great
agriculturist--and I learned from them a better notion of the nature of
my uncle's domains. Those domains covered an immense acreage, which,
save a small farm, was of no value at present. But land of the same
kind had been lately redeemed by a simple kind of draining, now well
known in Cumberland; and with capital, Roland's barren moors might
become a noble property. But capital, where was that to come from?
Nature gives us all except the means to turn her into marketable
account. As old Plautus saith so wittily, "Day, night, water, sun, and
moon, are to be had gratis; for everything else--down, with your dust!"

CHAPTER LX.

Nothing has been heard of Uncle Jack. When we moved to the tower, the
Captain gave him an invitation--more, I suspect, out of compliment to
my mother than from the unbidden impulse of his own inclinations. But
Mr Tibbets politely declined it. During his stay at the brick house,
he had received and written a vast number of letters--some of those
he received, indeed, were left at the village post-office, under the
alphabetical addresses of A B or X Y. For no misfortune ever paralysed
the energies of Uncle Jack. In the winter of adversity he vanished, it
is true, but even in vanishing he vegetated still. He resembled those
_algæ_, termed the _Prolococcus nivales_, which give a rose-colour to
the Polar snows that conceal them, and flourish unsuspected amidst the
general dissolution of Nature. Uncle Jack, then, was as lively and
sanguine as ever--though he began to let fall vague hints of intentions
to abandon the general cause of his fellow creatures, and to set up
business henceforth purely on his own account; wherewith my father--to
the great shock of my belief in his philanthropy--expressed himself
much pleased. And I strongly suspect that, when Uncle Jack wrapped
himself up in his new double Saxony, and went off at last, he carried
with him something more than my father's good wishes in aid of his
conversion to egotistical philosophy.

"That man will do yet," said my father, as the last glimpse was
caught of Uncle Jack standing up on the stage-coach box, beside the
driver--partly to wave his hand to us as we stood at the gate, and
partly to array himself more commodiously in a box coat, with six
capes, which the coachman had lent him.

"Do you think so, sir!" said I, doubtfully. "May I ask why?"

MR CAXTON.--On the cat principle--that he tumbles so lightly.
You may throw him down from St Paul's, and the next time you see him he
will be scrambling a-top of the Monument.

PISISTRATUS.--But a cat the most viparious is limited to nine
lives--and Uncle Jack must be now far gone in his eighth.

MR CAXTON--(_not heeding that answer, for he has got his hand
in his waistcoat._)--The earth, according to Apuleius, in his _Treatise
on the Philosophy of Plato_, was produced from right-angled triangles;
but fire and air from the scalene triangle--the angles of which, I need
not say, are very different from those of a right-angled triangle.
Now I think there are people in the world of whom one can only judge
rightly according to those mathematical principles applied to their
original construction; for, if air or fire predominates in our natures,
we are scalene triangles;--if earth, right-angled. Now, as air is so
notably manifested in Jack's conformation, he is, _nolens volens_,
produced in conformity with his preponderating element. He is a scalene
triangle, and must be judged, accordingly, upon irregular, lop-sided
principles; whereas you and I, commonplace mortals, are produced, like
the earth, which is our preponderating element, with our triangles all
right-angled, comfortable, and complete--for which blessing let us
thank Providence, and be charitable to those who are necessarily windy
and gaseous, from that unlucky scalene triangle upon which they have
had the misfortune to be constructed, and which, you perceive, is quite
at variance with the mathematical constitution of the earth!

PISISTRATUS.--Sir, I am very happy to hear so simple, easy,
and intelligible an explanation of Uncle Jack's peculiarities; and I
only hope that, for the future, the sides of his scalene triangle may
never be produced to our rectangular conformations.

MR CAXTON--(_descending from his stilts, with an air as
mildly reproachful as if I had been cavilling at the virtues of
Socrates._)--You don't do your uncle justice, Pisistratus: he is a very
clever man; and I am sure that, in spite of his scalene misfortune, he
would be an honest one--that is, (added Mr Caxton, correcting himself,)
not romantically or heroically honest--but honest as men go--if he
could but keep his head long enough above water; but, you see, when the
best man in the world is engaged in the process of sinking, he catches
hold of whatever comes in his way, and drowns the very friend that is
swimming to save him.

PISISTRATUS.--Perfectly true, sir; but Uncle Jack makes it his
business to be _always_ sinking!

MR CAXTON--(_with naïveté._)--And how could it be otherwise,
when he has been carrying all his fellow creatures in his breeches'
pockets! Now he has got rid of that dead weight, I should not be
surprised if he swam like a cork.

PISISTRATUS--(_who, since the_ Anti-_Capitalist_, _has become
a strong Anti-Jackian_.)--But if, sir, you really think Uncle Jack's
love for his fellow-creatures is genuine, that is surely not the worst
part of him!

MR CAXTON.--O literal ratiocinator, and dull to the true logic
of Attic irony, can't you comprehend that an affection may be genuine
as felt by the man, yet its nature be spurious in relation to others. A
man may genuinely believe he loves his fellow creatures, when he roasts
them like Torquemada, or guillotines them like St Just! Happily Jack's
scalene triangle, being more produced from air than from fire, does not
give to his philanthropy the inflammatory character which distinguishes
the benevolence of inquisitors and revolutionists. The philanthropy,
therefore, takes a more flatulent and innocent form, and expends its
strength in mounting paper balloons, out of which Jack pitches himself,
with all the fellow creatures he can coax into sailing with him. No
doubt Uncle Jack's philanthropy is sincere, when he cuts the string
and soars up out of sight; but the sincerity will not much mend their
bruises when himself and fellow creatures come tumbling down, neck and
heels. It must be a very wide heart that can take in all mankind--and
of a very strong fibre, to bear so much stretching. Such hearts there
are, Heaven be thanked!--and all praise to them! Jack's is not of
that quality. He is a scalene triangle. He is not a circle! And yet,
if he would but let it rest, it is a good heart--a very good heart,"
continued my father, warming into a tenderness quite infantine, all
things considered. "Poor Jack! that was prettily said of him--'That if
he were a dog, and he had no home but a dog-kennel, he would turn out
to give me the best of the straw!' Poor brother Jack!"

So the discussion was dropped; and, in the meanwhile, Uncle Jack, like
the short-faced gentleman in the SPECTATOR, "_distinguished
himself_ by a profound silence."

CHAPTER LXI.

Blanche has contrived to associate herself, if not with my more active
diversions--in running over the country, and making friends with the
farmers--still in all my more leisurely and domestic pursuits. There is
about her a silent charm that it is very hard to define--but it seems
to arise from a kind of innate sympathy with the moods and humours of
those she loves. If one is gay, there is a cheerful ring in her silver
laugh that seems gladness itself; if one is sad, and creeps away into
a corner to bury one's head in one's hands, and muse--by-and-by--and
just at the right moment--when one has mused one's fill, and the heart
wants something to refresh and restore it, one feels two innocent
arms round one's neck--looks up--and lo! Blanche's soft eyes, full
of wistful compassionate kindness; though she has the tact not to
question--it is enough for her to sorrow with your sorrow--she cares
not to know more. A strange child!--fearless, and yet seemingly fond of
things that inspire children with fear--fond of tales of fay, sprite,
and ghost--which Mrs Primmins draws fresh and new from her memory, as
a conjuror draws pancakes hot and hot from a hat. And yet so sure is
Blanche of her own innocence, that they never trouble her dreams in her
lone little room, full of caliginous corners and nooks, with the winds
moaning round the desolate ruins, and the casements rattling hoarse
in the dungeon-like wall. She would have no dread to walk through the
ghostly keep in the dark, or cross the churchyard, what time,

    "By the moon's doubtful and malignant light,"

the grave-stones look so spectral, and the shade from the yew-trees
lies so still on the sward. When the brows of Roland are gloomiest,
and the compression of his lips makes sorrow look sternest, be sure
that Blanche is couched at his feet, waiting the moment when, with some
heavy sigh, the muscles relax, and she is sure of the smile if she
climbs to his knee. It is pretty to chance on her gliding up broken
turret stairs, or standing hushed in the recess of shattered windowless
casements, and you wonder what thoughts of vague awe and solemn
pleasure can be at work under that still little brow.

She has a quick comprehension of all that is taught to her; she already
tasks to the full my mother's educational arts. My father has had to
rummage his library for books, to feed (or extinguish) her desire
for "farther information;" and has promised lessons in French and
Italian--at some golden time in the shadowy "By-and-By,"--which are
received so gratefully that one might think Blanche mistook _Telemaque_
and _Novelle Morali_ for baby-houses and dolls. Heaven send her through
French and Italian with better success than attended Mr Caxton's
lessons in Greek to Pisistratus! She has an ear for music, which my
mother, who is no bad judge, declares to be exquisite. Luckily there
is an old Italian settled in a town ten miles off, who is said to be
an excellent music master, and who comes the round of the neighbouring
squirearchy twice a-week. I have taught her to draw--an accomplishment
in which I am not without skill--and she has already taken a sketch
from nature, which, barring the perspective, is not so amiss; indeed,
she has caught the notion of "idealising" (which promises future
originality) from her own natural instincts, and given to the old
wych-elm, that hangs over the stream, just the bough that it wanted to
dip into the water, and soften off the hard lines. My only fear is,
that Blanche should become too dreamy and thoughtful. Poor child,
she has no one to play with! So I look out, and get her a dog--frisky
and young, who abhors sedentary occupations--a spaniel, small and
coal-black, with ears sweeping the ground. I baptise him "Juba," in
honour of Addison's Cato, and in consideration of his sable curls and
Mauritanian complexion. Blanche does not seem so eerie and elf-like,
while gliding through the ruins, when Juba barks by her side, and
scares the birds from the ivy.

One day I had been pacing to and fro the hall, which was deserted; and
the sight of the armour and portraits--dumb evidences of the active and
adventurous lives of the old inhabitants, which seemed to reprove my
own inactive obscurity--had set me off on one of those Pegaséan hobbies
on which youth mounts to the skies--delivering maidens on rocks, and
killing Gorgons and monsters--when Juba bounded in, and Blanche came
after him, her straw hat in her hand.

BLANCHE.--I thought you were here, Sisty: may I stay?

PISISTRATUS.--Why, my dear child, the day is so fine, that
instead of losing it in-doors, you ought to be running in the fields
with Juba.

JUBA.--Bow--wow!

BLANCHE.--Will you come too? If Sisty stays in, Blanche does
not care for the butterflies!

Pisistratus, seeing that the thread of his day-dreams is broken,
consents with an air of resignation. Just as they gain the door,
Blanche pauses, and looks as if there were something on her mind.

PISISTRATUS.--What now, Blanche? Why are you making knots in
that ribbon, and writing invisible characters on the floor with the
point of that busy little foot?

BLANCHE--(_mysteriously_).--I have found a new room, Sisty. Do
you think we may look into it?

PISISTRATUS.--Certainly, unless any Bluebeard of your
acquaintance told you not. Where is it?

BLANCHE.--Up stairs--to the left.

PISISTRATUS.--That little old door, going down two stone
steps, which is always kept locked?

BLANCHE.--Yes! it is not locked to-day. The door was ajar, and
I peeped in; but I would not do more till I came and asked you if you
thought it would not be wrong.

PISISTRATUS.--Very good in you, my discreet little cousin. I
have no doubt it is a ghost-trap; however, with Juba's protection, I
think we might venture together.

Pisistratus, Blanche, and Juba, ascend the stairs, and turn off down
a dark passage to the left, away from the rooms in use. We reach the
arch-pointed door of oak planks nailed roughly together; we push it
open, and perceive that a small stair winds down from the room: it is
just over Roland's chamber.

The room has a damp smell, and has probably been left open to be aired,
for the wind comes through the unbarred casement, and a billet burns
on the hearth. The place has that attractive, fascinating air which
belongs to a lumber room, than which I know nothing that so captivates
the interest and fancy of young people. What treasures, to them, often
lie hid in those quaint odds and ends which the elder generations have
discarded as rubbish! All children are by nature antiquarians and
relic-hunters. Still there is an order and precision with which the
articles in that room are stowed away that belies the true notion of
lumber--none of the mildew and dust which give such mournful interest
to things abandoned to decay.

In one corner are piled up cases, and military-looking trunks of
outlandish aspect, with R. D. C. in brass nails on their sides. From
these we turn with involuntary respect, and call off Juba, who has
wedged himself behind in pursuit of some imaginary mouse. But in the
other corner is what seems to me a child's cradle--not an English one
evidently--it is of wood, seemingly Spanish rosewood, with a rail-work
at the back, of twisted columns; and I should scarcely have known it to
be a cradle but for the fairy-like quilt and the tiny pillows, which
proclaimed its uses.

On the wall above the cradle were arranged sundry little articles,
that had, perhaps, once made the joy of a child's heart--broken
toys with the paint rubbed off, a tin sword and trumpet, and a few
tattered books, mostly in Spanish--by their shape and look, doubtless,
children's books. Near these stood, on the floor, a picture with its
face to the wall. Juba had chased the mouse that his fancy still
insisted on creating, behind this picture, and, as he abruptly drew
back, it fell into the hands I stretched forth to receive it. I
turned the face to the light, and was surprised to see merely an old
family portrait; it was that of a gentleman in the flowered vest and
stiff ruff which referred the date of his existence to the reign of
Elizabeth--a man with a bold and noble countenance. On the corner was
placed a faded coat of arms, beneath which was inscribed, "HERBERT
DE CAXTON, EQ: AUR: ÆTAT: 35."

On the back of the canvass I observed, as I now replaced the picture
against the wall, a label in Roland's handwriting, though in a younger
and more running hand than he now wrote. The words were these:--"The
best and bravest of our line. He charged by Sidney's side on the field
of Zutphen; he fought in Drake's ship against the armament of Spain. If
ever I have a ----" The rest of the label seemed to have been torn off.

I turned away, and felt a remorseful shame that I had so far gratified
my curiosity,--if by so harsh a name the powerful interest that had
absorbed me must be called. I looked round for Blanche; she had
retreated from my side to the door, and, with her hands before her
eyes, was weeping. As I stole towards her, my glance fell on a book
that lay on a chair near the casement, and beside those relics of an
infancy once pure and serene. By the old-fashioned silver clasps I
recognised Roland's bible. I felt almost as if I had been guilty of
profanation in my thoughtless intrusion. I drew away Blanche, and we
descended the stairs noiselessly, and not till we were on our favourite
spot, amidst a heap of ruins on the feudal justice-hill, did I seek to
kiss away her tears and ask the cause.

"My poor brother," sobbed Blanche; "they must have been his--and we
shall never, never see him again!--and poor papa's bible, which he
reads when he is very, very sad! I did not weep enough when my brother
died. I know better what death is now! Poor papa, poor papa! Don't die,
too, Sisty!"

There was no running after butterflies that morning; and it was long
before I could soothe Blanche. Indeed, she bore the traces of dejection
in her soft looks for many, many days; and she often asked me,
sighingly, "Don't you think it was very wrong in me to take you there?"
Poor little Blanche, true daughter of Eve, she would not let me bear
my due share of the blame; she would have it all in Adam's primitive
way of justice,--"The woman tempted me, and I did eat." And since then
Blanche has seemed more fond than ever of Roland, and comparatively
deserts me, to nestle close to him, and closer, till he looks up and
says, "My child, you are pale; go and run after the butterflies;" and
she says now to him, not to me,--"Come too!" drawing him out into the
sunshine with a hand that will not loose its hold.

Of all Roland's line this Herbert de Caxton was "the best and bravest!"
yet he had never named that ancestor to me--never put any forefather in
comparison with the dubious and mythical Sir William. I now remembered
once, that, in going over the pedigree, I had been struck by the name
of Herbert--the only Herbert in the scroll--and had asked, "What of
him, uncle?" and Roland had muttered something inaudible and turned
away. And I remembered also, that in Roland's room there was the mark
in the wall where a picture of that size had once hung. It had been
removed thence before we first came, but must have hung there for years
to have left that mark on the wall;--perhaps suspended by Bolt, during
Roland's long Continental absence. "If ever I have a ----." What were
the missing words? Alas, did they not relate to the son--missed for
ever, evidently not forgotten still?

CHAPTER LXII.

My uncle sate on one side the fireplace, my mother on the other; and
I, at a small table between them, prepared to note down the results of
their conference; for they had met in high council, to assess their
joint fortunes--determine what should be brought into the common stock,
and set apart for the civil list, and what should be laid aside as
a sinking fund. Now my mother, true woman as she was, had a womanly
love of show in her own quiet way--of making "a genteel figure" in the
eyes of the neighbourhood--of seeing that sixpence not only went as
far as sixpence ought to go, but that, in the going, it should emit
mild but imposing splendour--not, indeed, a gaudy flash--a startling
Borealian coruscation, which is scarcely within the modest and placid
idiosyncrasies of sixpence--but a gleam of gentle and benign light,
just to show where a sixpence had been, and allow you time to say,
"Behold," before

    "The jaws of darkness did devour it up."

Thus, as I once before took occasion to apprise the reader, we had
always held a very respectable position in the neighbourhood round
our square brick house; been as sociable as my father's habits would
permit; given our little tea-parties, and our occasional dinners,
and, without attempting to vie with our richer associates, there had
always been so exquisite a neatness, so notable a house-keeping, so
thoughtful a disposition, in short, of all the properties indigenous
to a well-spent sixpence, in my mother's management, that there was
not an old maid within seven miles of us who did not pronounce our
tea-parties to be perfect; and the great Mrs Rollick, who gave forty
guineas a-year to a professed cook and housekeeper, used regularly,
whenever we dined at Rollick Hall, to call across the table to my
mother, (who therewith blushed up to her ears,) to apologise for the
strawberry jelly. It is true that when, on returning home, my mother
adverted to that flattering and delicate compliment, in a tone that
revealed the self-conceit of the human heart, my father--whether to
sober his Kitty's vanity into a proper and Christian mortification of
spirit, or from that strange shrewdness which belonged to him--would
remark that Mrs Rollick was of a querulous nature; that the compliment
was meant not to please my mother, but to spite the professed cook and
housekeeper, to whom the butler would be sure to repeat the invidious
apology.

In settling at the tower, and assuming the head of its establishment,
my mother was naturally anxious that, poor battered invalid though the
tower was, it should still put its best leg foremost. Sundry cards,
despite the thinness of the neighbourhood, had been left at the door;
various invitations, which my uncle had hitherto declined, had greeted
his occupation of the ancestral ruin, and had become more numerous
since the news of our arrival had gone abroad; so that my mother saw
before her a very suitable field for her hospitable accomplishments--a
reasonable ground for her ambition that the tower should hold up its
head, as became a tower that held the head of the family.

But not to wrong thee, O dear mother, as thou sittest there, opposite
the grim captain, so fair and so neat,--with thine apron as white,
and thy hair as trim and as sheen, and thy morning cap, with its
ribbons of blue, as coquettishly arranged as if thou hadst a fear that
the least negligence on thy part might lose thee the heart of thine
Austin--not to wrong thee by setting down to frivolous motives alone
thy feminine visions of the social amenities of life, I know that thine
heart, in its provident tenderness, was quite as much interested as
ever thy vanities could be, in the hospitable thoughts on which thou
wert intent. For, first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that
thine Austin might, as little as possible, be reminded of the change
in his fortunes,--might miss as little as possible those interruptions
to his abstracted scholarly moods, at which, it is true, he used to
fret and to pshaw and to cry Papæ! but which nevertheless always did
him good, and freshened up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it
was the conviction of thine understanding that a little society, and
boon companionship, and the proud pleasure of showing his ruins, and
presiding at the hall of his forefathers, would take Roland out of
those gloomy reveries into which he still fell at times. And, thirdly,
for us young people, ought not Blanche to find companions in children
of her own sex and age? Already in those large black eyes there was
something melancholy and brooding, as there is in the eyes of all
children who live only with their elders; and for Pisistratus, with his
altered prospects, and the one great gnawing memory at his heart--which
he tried to conceal from himself, but which a mother (and a mother
who had loved) saw at a glance--what could be better than such union
and interchange with the world around us, small as that world might
be, which woman, sweet binder and blender of all social links, might
artfully effect?--So that thou didst not go like the awful Florentine,

    "Sopra lor vanita che par persona,

'over thin shadows that mocked the substance of real forms,' but rather
it was the real forms that appeared as shadows or _vanita_.

What a digression!--can I never tell my story in a plain
straightforward way? Certainly I was born under the Cancer, and all my
movements are circumlocutory, sideways, and crab-like.

CHAPTER LXIII.

"I think, Roland," said my mother, "that the establishment is
settled. Bolt, who is equal to three men at least; Primmins, cook and
housekeeper; Molly a good stirring girl--and willing, (though I've had
some difficulty in persuading her, poor thing, to submit not to be
called Anna Maria!) Their wages are but a small item, my dear Roland."

"Hem!" said Roland, "since we can't do with fewer servants at less
wages, I suppose we must call it small--"

"It is so," said my mother with mild positiveness. "And, indeed, what
with the game and fish, and the garden and poultry-yard, and your own
mutton, our housekeeping will be next to nothing."

"Hem!" again said the thrifty Roland, with a slight inflection of the
beetle brows. "It may be next to nothing, ma'am--sister--just as a
butcher's shop may be next to Northumberland House, but there is a vast
deal between nothing and that next neighbour you have given it."

This speech was so like one of my father's;--so _naïve_ an imitation
of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called
ANTANACLASIS, (or repetition of the same words in a different sense,)
that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not
thinking of the ANTANACLASIS, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she
replied in the yet more formidable figure of speech called EPIPHONEMA,
(or exclamation,) "Yet, with all your economy, you would have had us--"

"Tut!" cried my uncle, parrying the EPIPHONEMA with a masterly
APOSIOPESIS (or breaking off;) "tut! if you had done what I wished, I
should have had more pleasure for my money!"

My poor mother's rhetorical armoury supplied no weapon to meet that
artful APOSIOPESIS, so she dropped the rhetoric altogether, and went
on with that "unadorned eloquence" natural to her, as to other great
financial reformers:--"Well, Roland, but I am a good housewife, I
assure you, and--don't scold; but that you never do,--I mean don't look
as if you would like to scold; the fact is, that, even after setting
aside £100 a-year for our little parties--"

"Little parties!--a hundred a-year!" cried the Captain aghast.

My mother pursued her way remorselessly,--"Which we can well
afford; and without counting your half-pay, which you must keep for
pocket-money and your wardrobe and Blanche's, I calculate that we can
allow Pisistratus £150 a-year, which, with the scholarship he is to
get, will keep him at Cambridge," (at that, seeing the scholarship
was as yet amidst the Pleasures of Hope, I shook my head doubtfully;)
"and," continued my mother, not heeding that sign of dissent, "we shall
still have something to lay by."

The Captain's face assumed a ludicrous expression of compassion and
horror; he evidently thought my mother's misfortunes had turned her
head.

His tormentor continued.

"For," said my mother, with a pretty calculating shake of her head,
and a movement of the right forefinger towards the five fingers of the
left hand, "three hundred and seventy pounds--the interest of Austin's
fortune--and fifty pounds that we may reckon for the rent of our house,
make £420 a-year. Add your £330 a-year from the farm, sheep-walk, and
cottages that you let, and the total is £750. Now with all we get for
nothing for our housekeeping, as I said before, we can do very well
with five hundred a-year, and indeed make a handsome figure. So, after
allowing Sisty £150, we still have £100 to lay by for Blanche."

"Stop, stop, stop!" cried the Captain, in great agitation; "who told
you that I had £330 a-year?"

"Why, Bolt--don't be angry with him."

"Bolt is a blockhead. From £330 a-year take £200, and the remainder is
all my income, besides my half-pay."

My mother opened her eyes, and so did I.

"To that £130 add, if you please, £130 of your own. All that you have
over, my dear sister, is yours or Austin's, or your boy's; but not a
shilling can go to give luxuries to a miserly, battered old soldier. Do
you understand me?"

"No, Roland," said my mother, "I don't understand you at all. Does not
your property bring in £330 a-year?"

"Yes, but it has a debt of £200 a-year on it," said the Captain,
gloomily and reluctantly.

"Oh, Roland!" cried my mother tenderly, and approaching so near that,
had my father been in the room, I am sure she would have been bold
enough to kiss the stern Captain, though I never saw him look sterner
and less kissable. "Oh, Roland!" cried my mother, concluding that
famous EPIPHONEMA which my uncle's APOSIOPESIS had before nipped in the
bud, "and yet you would have made us, who are twice as rich, rob you of
this little all!"

"Ah!" said Roland, trying to smile, "but I should have had my own way
then, and starved you shockingly. No talk then of 'little parties,' and
suchlike. But you must not now turn the tables against me, nor bring
your £420 a-year as a set-off to my £130."

"Why," said my mother generously, "you forget the money's worth that
you contribute--all that your grounds supply, and all that we save by
it. I am sure that that's worth a yearly £300 at the least."

"Madam--sister," said the Captain, "I'm sure you don't want to hurt my
feelings. All I have to say is, that, if you add to what I bring an
equal sum--to keep up the poor old ruin--it is the utmost that I can
allow, and the rest is not more than Pisistratus can spend."

So saying, the Captain rose, bowed, and before either of us could stop
him, hobbled out of the room.

"Dear me, Sisty!" said my mother, wringing her hands, "I have certainly
displeased him. How could I guess he had so large a debt on the
property?"

"Did not he pay his son's debts? Is not that the reason that--"

"Ah," interrupted my mother, almost crying, "and it was that which
ruffled him, and I not to guess it? What shall I do?"

"Set to work at a new calculation, dear mother, and let him have his
own way."

"But then," said my mother, "your uncle will mope himself to death, and
your father will have no relaxation, while you see that he has lost
his former object in his books. And Blanche--and you too. If we were
only to contribute what dear Roland does, I do not see how, with £260
a-year, we could ever bring our neighbours round us! I wonder what
Austin would say! I have half a mind--no, I'll go and look over the
week-books with Primmins."

My mother went her way sorrowfully, and I was left alone.

Then I looked on the stately old hall, grand in its forlorn decay.
And the dreams I had begun to cherish at my heart swept over me, and
hurried me along, far, far away into the golden land, whither Hope
beckons Youth. To restore my father's fortunes--reweave the links of
that broken ambition which had knit his genius with the world--rebuild
these fallen walls--cultivate those barren moors--revive the ancient
name--glad the old soldier's age--and be to _both_ the brothers what
Roland had lost--a son! These were my dreams; and when I woke from
them, lo! they had left behind an intense purpose, a resolute object.
Dream, O youth--dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be
prophets!

CHAPTER LXIV.

LETTER FROM PISISTRATUS CAXTON, TO ALBERT TREVANION, ESQ., M. P.

(_The confession of a youth who, in the Old World, finds himself one
too many._)

"My dear Mr Trevanion,--I thank you cordially, and so we do all, for
your reply to my letter, informing you of the villanous traps through
which we have passed not indeed with whole skins, but still whole in
life and limb--which considering that the traps were three, and the
teeth sharp, was more than we could reasonably expect. We have taken to
the wastes, like wise foxes as we are, and I do not think a bait can be
found that will again snare the fox paternal. As for the fox filial,
it is different, and I am about to prove to you that he is burning to
redeem the family disgrace. Ah! my dear Mr Trevanion, if you are busy
with 'blue books' when this letter reaches you, stop here, and put it
aside for some rare moment of leisure. I am about to open my heart to
you, and ask you, who know the world so well, to aid me in an escape
from those _flammantia mænia_, wherewith I find that world begirt and
enclosed. For look you, sir, you and my father were right when you
both agreed that the mere book life was not meant for me. And yet what
is not book life, to a young man who would make his way through the
ordinary and conventional paths to fortune? All the professions are so
book-lined, book-hemmed, book-choked, that wherever these strong hands
of mine stretch towards action, they find themselves met by octavo
ramparts, flanked with quarto crenellations. For first, this college
life, opening to scholarships, and ending, perchance, as you political
economists would desire, in Malthusian fellowships--premiums for
celibacy--consider what manner of thing it is!

"Three years, book upon book,--a great Dead Sea before one, three years
long, and all the apples that grow on the shore full of the ashes of
pica and primer! Those three years ended, the fellowship, it may be,
won,--still books--books--if the whole world does not close at the
college gates. Do I, from scholar, effloresce into literary man, author
by profession?--books--books! Do I go into the law?--books--books.
_Ars longa, vita brevis_, which, paraphrased, means that it is slow
work before one fags one's way to a brief! Do I turn doctor? Why,
what but books can kill time, until, at the age of forty, a lucky
chance may permit me to kill something else? The church? (for which,
indeed, I don't profess to be good enough,)--that is book life _par
excellence_, whether, inglorious and poor, I wander through long
lines of divines and fathers; or, ambitious of bishopricks, I amend
the corruptions, not of the human heart, but of a Greek text, and
through defiles of scholiasts and commentators win my way to the See.
In short, barring the noble profession of arms--which you know, after
all, is not precisely the road to fortune--can you tell me any means
by which one may escape these eternal books, this mental clockwork,
and corporeal lethargy. Where can this passion for life that runs riot
through my veins find its vent? Where can these stalwart limbs, and
this broad chest, grow of value and worth, in this hot-bed of cerebral
inflammation and dyspeptic intellect? I know what is in me; I know I
have the qualities that should go with stalwart limbs and broad chest.
I have some plain common sense, some promptitude and keenness, some
pleasure in hardy danger, some fortitude in bearing pain--qualities for
which I bless Heaven, for they are qualities good and useful in private
life. But in the forum of men, in the market of fortune, are they not
_flocci, nauci, nihili_?

"In a word, dear sir and friend, in this crowded Old World, there
is not the same room that our bold forefathers found for men to walk
about, and jostle their neighbours. No; they must sit down like boys
at their form, and work out their tasks, with rounded shoulders and
aching fingers. There has been a pastoral age, and a hunting age, and
a fighting age. Now we have arrived at the age sedentary. Men who sit
longest carry all before them: puny delicate fellows, with hands just
strong enough to wield a pen, eyes so bleared by the midnight lamp
that they see no joy in that buxom sun, (which draws me forth into
the fields, as life draws the living,) and digestive organs worn and
macerated by the relentless flagellation of the brain. Certainly,
if this is to be the Reign of Mind, it is idle to repine, and kick
against the pricks; but is it true that all these qualities of action
that are within me are to go for nothing! If I were rich, and happy
in mind and circumstance, well and good; I should shoot, hunt, farm,
travel, enjoy life, and snap my fingers at ambition. If I were so
poor and so humbly bred that I could turn gamekeeper or whipper-in,
as pauper gentlemen virtually did of old, well and good too; I should
exhaust this troublesome vitality of mine, by nightly battles with
poachers, and leaps over double dykes and stone walls. If I were so
depressed of spirit that I could live without remorse on my father's
small means, and exclaim with Claudian, 'The earth gives me feasts that
cost nothing,' well and good too; it were a life to suit a vegetable,
or a very minor poet. But as it is!--here I open another leaf of my
heart to you! To say that, being poor, I want to make a fortune, is to
say that I am an Englishman. To attach ourselves to a thing positive,
belongs to our practical race. Even in our dreams, if we build castles
in the air, they are not _Castles of Indolence_,--indeed they have very
little of the castle about them, and look much more like Hoare's Bank
on the east side of Temple Bar! I desire, then, to make a fortune. But
I differ from my countrymen, first, by desiring only what you rich men
would call but a _small_ fortune; secondly, in wishing that I may not
spend my whole life in that said fortune-making. Just see, now, how I
am placed.

"Under ordinary circumstances, I must begin by taking from my father a
large slice of an income that will ill spare paring. According to my
calculation, my parents and my uncle want all they have got--and the
subtraction of the yearly sum on which Pisistratus is to live, till he
can live by his own labours, would be so much taken from the decent
comforts of his kindred. If I return to Cambridge, with all economy, I
must thus narrow still more the _res angusta domi_--and when Cambridge
is over, and I am turned loose upon the world--failing, as is likely
enough, of the support of a fellowship--how many years must I work, or
rather, alas! not work, at the bar (which, after all, seems my best
calling) before I can in my turn provide for those who, till then, rob
themselves for me?--till I have arrived at middle life, and they are
old and worn out--till the chink of the golden bowl sounds but hollow
at the ebbing well! I would wish that, if I can make money, those I
love best may enjoy it while enjoyment is yet left to them; that my
father shall see _The History of Human Error_, complete, bound in
Russia on his shelves; that my mother shall have the innocent pleasures
that content her, before age steals the light from her happy smile;
that before Roland's hair is snow-white, (alas! the snows there thicken
fast,) he shall lean on my arm, while we settle together where the
ruin shall be repaired or where left to the owls; and where the dreary
bleak waste around shall laugh with the gleam of corn:--for you know
the nature of this Cumberland soil--you, who possess much of it, and
have won so many fair acres from the wild;--you know that my uncle's
land, now (save a single farm) scarce worth a shilling an acre, needs
but capital to become an estate more lucrative than ever his ancestors
owned. You know that, for you have applied your capital to the same
kind of land, and, in doing so, what blessings--which you scarcely
think of in your London library--you have effected!--what mouths you
feed, what hands you employ! I have calculated that my uncle's moors,
which now scarce maintain two or three shepherds, could, manured by
money, maintain two hundred families by their labour. All this is worth
trying for! therefore Pisistratus wants to make money. Not so much! he
does not require millions--a few spare thousand pounds would go a long
way; and with a modest capital to begin with, Roland should become a
true squire, a real landowner, not the mere lord of a desert. Now then,
dear sir, advise me how I may, with such qualities as I possess, arrive
at that capital--ay, and before it is too late--so that money-making
may not last till my grave.

"Turning in despair from this civilised world of ours, I have cast
my eyes to a world far older,--and yet more to a world in its giant
childhood. India here,--Australia there!--what say you, sir--you who
will see dispassionately those things that float before my eyes through
a golden haze, looming large in the distance? Such is my confidence in
your judgment that you have but to say, 'Fool, give up thine El Dorados
and stay at home,--stick to the books and the desk--annihilate that
redundance of animal life that is in thee--grow a mental machine. Thy
physical gifts are of no avail to thee; take thy place among the slaves
of the Lamp," and I will obey without a murmur. But if I am right--if
I have in me attributes that here find no market; if my repinings are
but the instincts of nature, that, out of this decrepid civilisation,
desire vent for growth in the young stir of some more rude and vigorous
social system--then give me, I pray, that advice which may clothe my
idea in some practical and tangible embodiments. Have I made myself
understood?

"Rarely do we see a newspaper here, but occasionally one finds its
way from the parsonage; and I have lately rejoiced at a paragraph
that spoke of your speedy entrance into the administration as a
thing certain. I write to you before you are a minister; and you see
what I seek is not in the way of official patronage: A niche in an
office!--oh, to me that were worse than all. Yet I did labour hard with
you, but--_that_ was different! I write to you thus frankly, knowing
your warm noble heart--and as if you were my father. Allow me to add
my humble but earnest congratulations on Miss Trevanion's approaching
marriage with one worthy, if not of her, at least of her station. I do
so as becomes one whom you have allowed to retain the right to pray for
the happiness of you and yours.

"My dear Mr Trevanion, this is a long letter, and I dare not even read
it over, lest if I do, I should not send it. Take it with all its
faults, and judge of it with that kindness with which you have judged
ever

Your grateful and devoted servant,

    "PISISTRATUS CAXTON."

LETTER FROM ALBERT TREVANION, ESQ., M.P. TO PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

  _Library of the House of Commons, Tuesday Night._

"My dear Pisistratus,--* * * * * is up! we are in for it for two mortal
hours. I take flight to the library, and devote those hours to you.
Don't be conceited, but that picture of yourself which you have placed
before me has struck me with all the force of an original. The state of
mind which you describe so vividly must be a very common one, in our
era of civilisation, yet I have never before seen it made so prominent
and life-like. You have been in my thoughts all day. Yes, how many
young men must there be like you, in this Old World, able, intelligent,
active, and persevering enough, yet not adapted for success in any of
our conventional professions--'mute, inglorious Raleighs.' Your letter,
young artist, is an illustration of the philosophy of colonising. I
comprehend better, after reading it, the old Greek colonisation,--the
sending out not only the paupers, the refuse of an over-populated
state, but a large proportion of a better class--fellows full of pith
and sap, and exuberant vitality, like yourself, blending in those
wise _cleruchiæ_ a certain portion of the aristocratic with the more
democratic element; not turning a rabble loose upon a new soil, but
planting in the foreign allotments all the rudiments of a harmonious
state, analogous to that in the mother country--not only getting rid
of hungry craving mouths, but furnishing vent for a waste surplus of
intelligence and courage, which at home is really not needed, and more
often comes to ill than to good;--here only menaces our artificial
embankments, but there, carried off in an aqueduct, might give life to
a desert.

"For my part, in my ideal of colonisation, I should like that each
exportation of human beings had, as of old, its leaders and chiefs--not
so appointed from the mere quality of rank, often, indeed, taken
from the humbler classes--but still men to whom a certain degree of
education should give promptitude, quickness, _adaptability_--men in
whom their followers can confide. The Greeks understood that. Nay,
as the colony makes progress--as its principal town rises into the
dignity of a capital--a _polis_ that needs a polity--I sometimes think
it might be wise to go still farther, and not only transplant to it a
high standard of civilisation, but draw it more closely into connexion
with the parent state, and render the passage of spare intellect,
education, and _civility_, to and fro, more facile, by draughting
off thither the spare scions of royalty itself. I know that many of
my more 'liberal' friends would pooh-pooh this notion; but I am sure
that the colony altogether, when arrived to a state that would bear
the importation, would thrive all the better for it. And when the day
shall come (as to all healthful colonies it must come sooner or later)
in which the settlement has grown an independent state, we may thereby
have laid the seeds of a constitution and a civilisation similar to
our own--with self-developed forms of monarchy and aristocracy, though
of a simpler growth than old societies accept, and not left a strange
motley chaos of struggling democracy--an uncouth livid giant, at which
the Frankenstein may well tremble--not because it is a giant, but
because it is a giant half completed.[8] Depend on it, the New World
will be friendly or hostile to the Old, _not in proportion to the
kinship of race, but in proportion to the similarity of manners and
institutions_--a mighty truth, to which we colonisers have been blind.

[8] These pages were sent to press before the author had seen Mr
Wakefield's recent work on Colonisation, wherein the views here
expressed are enforced with great earnestness and conspicuous sagacity.
The author is not the less pleased at this coincidence of opinion,
because he has the misfortune to dissent from certain other parts of Mr
Wakefield's elaborate theory.

"Passing from these more distant speculations to this positive present
before us, you see already, from what I have said, that I sympathise
with your aspirations--that I construe them as you would have
me;--looking to your nature and to your objects, I give you my advice
in a word--EMIGRATE!

"My advice is, however, founded on one hypothesis--viz., that you
are perfectly sincere--you will be contented with a rough life, and
with a moderate fortune at the end of your probation. Don't dream
of emigrating if you want to make a million, or the tenth part of
a million. Don't dream of emigrating, unless you can _enjoy_ its
hardships,--to _bear_ them is not enough!

"Australia is the land for you, as you seem to surmise. Australia is
the land for two classes of emigrants: 1st, The man who has nothing but
his wits, and plenty of them; 2dly, The man who has a small capital,
and who is contented to spend ten years in trebling it. I assume that
you belong to the latter class. Take out £3000, and before you are
thirty years old, you may return with £10,000 or £12,000. If that
satisfies you, think seriously of Australia. By coach, tomorrow, I will
send you down all the best books and reports on the subject; and I
will get you what detailed information I can from the Colonial Office.
Having read these, and thought over them dispassionately, spend some
months yet among the sheep-walks of Cumberland; learn all you can, from
all the shepherds you can find--from Thyrsis to Menalcas. Do more; fit
yourself in every way for a life in the Bush, where the philosophy of
the division of labour is not yet arrived at. Learn to turn your hand
to everything. Be something of a smith, something of a carpenter--do
the best you can with the fewest tools; make yourself an excellent
shot; break in all the wild horses and ponies you can borrow and beg.
Even if you want to do none of these things when in your settlement,
the having learned to do them will fit you for many other things not
now foreseen. _De-fine-gentlemanise_ yourself from the crown of your
head to the sole of your foot, and become the greater aristocrat for so
doing; for he is more than an aristocrat, he is a king, who suffices
in all things for himself--who is his own master, because he wants no
_valetaille_. I think Seneca has expressed that thought before me; and
I would quote the passage, but the book, I fear, is not in the library
of the House of Commons. But now--(cheers, by Jove. I suppose * * * * *
is down! Ah! it is so; and C---- is up, and that cheer followed a sharp
hit at me. How I wish I were your age, and going to Australia with
you!) But now--to resume my suspended period--but now to the important
point--capital. You must take that, unless you go as a shepherd, and
then goodbye to the idea of £10,000 in ten years. So, you see, it
appears at the first blush that you must still come to your father;
but, you will say, with this difference, that you borrow the capital,
with every chance of repaying it, instead of frittering away the income
year after year till you are eight-and-thirty or forty at least. Still,
Pisistratus, you don't, in this, gain your object at a leap; and my
dear old friend ought not to lose his son and his money too. You say
you write to me as to your own father. You know I hate professions; and
if you did not mean what you say, you have offended me mortally. As a
father, then, I take a father's rights, and speak plainly. A friend of
mine, Mr Bolding, a clergyman, has a son--a wild fellow, who is likely
to get into all sorts of scrapes in England, but with plenty of good in
him, notwithstanding--frank, bold--not wanting in talent, but rather
in prudence--easily tempted and led away into extravagance. He would
make a capital colonist, (no such temptations in the Bush,) if tied to
a youth like you. Now I propose, with your leave, that his father shall
advance him £1500,--which shall not, however, be placed in his hands,
but in yours, as head partner in the firm. You, on your side, shall
advance the same sum of £1500, which you shall borrow from me, for
three years without interest. At the end of that time interest shall
commence, and the capital, with the interest on the said first three
years, shall be repaid to me, or my executors, on your return. After
you have been a year or two in the Bush, and felt your way, and learned
your business, you may then safely borrow £1500 more from your father;
and, in the meanwhile, you and your partner will have had together the
full sum of £3000 to commence with. You see in this proposal I make you
no gift, and I run no risk, even by your death. If you die, insolvent,
I will promise to come on your father, poor fellow!--for small joy
and small care will he have then in what may be left of his fortune.
There--I have said all; and I will never forgive you if you reject an
aid that will serve you so much, and cost me so little.

"I accept your congratulations on Fanny's engagement with Lord
Castleton. When you return from Australia you will still be a young
man, she (though about your own years) almost a middle-aged woman, with
her head full of pomps and vanities. All girls have a short period of
girlhood in common; but when they enter womanhood, the woman becomes
the woman of her class. As for me, and the office assigned to me by
report, you know what I said when we parted, and--but here J---- comes,
and tells me that 'I am expected to speak, and answer N----, who is
just up, brimful of malice,'--the House crowded, and hungering for
personalities. So I, the man of the Old World, gird up my loins, and
leave you with a sigh, to the fresh youth of the New--

    'Ne tibi sit duros acuisse in pr[oe]lia dentes.'

  "Yours affectionately,
  "ALBERT TREVANION."

CHAPTER LXV.

So, reader, thou art now at the secret of my heart.

Wonder not that I, a bookman's son, and, at certain periods of my
life, a bookman myself, though of lowly grade in that venerable
class,--wonder not that I should thus, in that transition stage between
youth and manhood, have turned impatiently from books.--Most students,
at one time or other in their existence, have felt the imperious demand
of that restless principle in man's nature, which calls upon each son
of Adam to contribute his share to the vast treasury of human deeds.
And though great scholars are not necessarily, nor usually, men of
action,--yet the men of action whom History presents to our survey,
have rarely been without a certain degree of scholarly nurture. For
the ideas which books quicken, books cannot always satisfy. And though
the royal pupil of Aristotle slept with Homer under his pillow, it
was not that he might dream of composing epics, but of conquering new
Ilions in the East. Many a man, how little soever resembling Alexander,
may still have the conqueror's aim in an object that action only can
achieve, and the book under his pillow may be the strongest antidote
to his repose. And how the stern Destinies that shall govern the man
weave their first delicate tissues amidst the earliest associations of
the child!--Those idle tales with which the old credulous nurse had
beguiled my infancy--tales of wonder, knight-errantry, and adventure,
had left behind them seeds long latent--seeds that might never have
sprung up above the soil--but that my boyhood was so early put under
the burning-glass, and in the quick forcing-house, of the London world.
There, even amidst books and study,--lively observation, and petulant
ambition, broke forth from the lush foliage of romance--that fruitless
leafiness of poetic youth! And there passion, which is a revolution in
all the elements of individual man, had called a new state of being,
turbulent and eager, out of the old habits and conventional forms it
had buried,--ashes that speak where the fire has been. Far from me,
as from any mind of some manliness, be the attempt to create interest
by dwelling at length on the struggles against a rash and misplaced
attachment, which it was my duty to overcome; but all such love, as I
have before implied, is a terrible unsettler:--

    "Where once such fairies dance, no grass doth ever grow."

To re-enter boyhood, go with meek docility through its disciplined
routine,--how hard had I found that return, amidst the cloistered
monotony of college! My love for my father, and my submission to his
wish, had indeed given some animation to objects otherwise distasteful;
but, now that my return to the University must be attended with
positive privation to those at home, the idea became utterly hateful
and repugnant. Under pretence that I found myself, on trial, not yet
sufficiently prepared to do credit to my father's name, I had easily
obtained leave to lose the ensuing college term, and pursue my studies
at home. This gave me time to prepare my plans, and bring round--how
shall I ever bring round to my adventurous views those whom I propose
to desert? Hard it is to get on in the world--very hard! But the most
painful step in the way is that which starts from the threshold of a
beloved home.

How--ah, how, indeed! "No, Blanche, you cannot join me to-day; I am
going out for many hours. So it will be late before I can be home."

Home!--the word chokes me! Juba slinks back to his young mistress,
disconsolate; Blanche gazes at me ruefully from our favourite hilltop,
and the flowers she has been gathering fall unheeded from her basket.
I hear my mother's voice singing low, as she sits at work by her open
casement. How--ah, how, indeed!

ANCIENT PRACTICE OF PAINTING.[9]

[9] _Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting._ Preceded by a General
Introduction, with Translations, Prefaces, and Notes. By MRS
MERRIFIELD. 2 vols.

We are beginning to find out that the "dark ages" were not so utterly
dark as they have been represented. We ascertain that there was not
that universal blight upon the human mind which it has been the
practice of historians to contrast with the flourishing condition
of their own times. Nay, if we are now to take that measure which
those historians adopted, we should estimate their own era with as
disparaging a comparison with the present. But the inventions of our
own days--the great advance of arts and sciences--so far from having a
tendency to depreciate, throw a light upon, and acknowledge the value
of, those of the middle ages. The appreciation is becoming general.
We are old enough to remember the time when it was thought of little
moment to block up with low unseemly edifices, or mutilate for any
purpose, those amazing works of mediæval genius, our Gothic religious
structures. We need but refer to the dates on the mural deformities
in most of our old churches and cathedrals. Who, that will turn his
eye in disgust from such monstrosities of taste, to the decorations
they have misplaced and mutilated, and to the general aspect, of an
indestructible character, of our minsters, will not rather ask, which
were the dark ages--those of the builders and founders, or those of
the obliterators and defilers? It is astonishing that such wondrous
magnificence should ever have been viewed with indifference, and still
more astonishing that disfigurement and desecration should have been
suffered; yet men thought themselves wise in those days, and learned,
and ingenious. And so they were; but in respect of arts they were dark
enough--and the spirit of Puritanism was indeed a blight infecting that
darkness; and the effects of that blight have not yet passed away. It
may appear strange that, after a long period of worse than neglect, we
not only appreciate, but such is our admiration of those works of past
genius, that we imitate them, and study them for a discovery of the
canons of the art which we think we cannot with impunity set aside. We
here speak of those large and conspicuous monuments of the mind of the
middle ages, but the increasing admiration leads to discoveries of yet
more hidden treasures. The genius that designed the structures was as
busily and as devotionally employed in every kind of decoration; and
with a surprising unity of feeling; and as if with one sole object, to
carry out the new Christian principle--to make significant a "beauty
of holiness" in all outward things, that men might look to with an
awe and reverence--and learn. The sanctity of that one religious
art--architecture--demanded that nothing without or within should be
left "common" or "unclean," but that in the whole and minutest parts
this precept should be legible and manifest--"Do all to the glory of
God." All art was significant of the religion for which all art, all
science was pursued. The workers of those days laboured with a loving
and pious toil, and lifted up their works to an unseen and all-seeing
eye, and not to the applause of men; for who was there to value, or to
understand, even when in some degree they felt the influence of the
skill which designed and executed such infinite variety of parts, to
the manifestation of one great purpose?

We must no longer speak of the middle ages as a period of universal
intellectual darkness. If it were so, it would be a miracle, contrary
to the intention of miracle; and the thought has in it a kind of
blasphemy, which would weaken the sustaining arm of Providence, and
imply an unholy rest. We do not believe in the possibility of the
human race universally retrograding. We trust that there is always
something doing for the future as well as for the present; something
for progression, neither acceptable nor perceived by the present
generation--from whose sight it is, as it were, hidden--buried as
seed in the earth, to spring up in its proper abundance, and in its
due time. We want a history of the human mind, sifted from the large
doings--from events which fascinate us to read of, born as we are to
be active, taking interest in things of a bold violence, that have
really benefited the world but little, at least in the sense in which
we have accepted them. The rise of one nation, the subjugation of
another; dynasties, the dominion of the sword--these are the themes
of histories. But in reality all these historical actions, viewed for
their own purpose, are of little value; while out of all the turbulence
an unintended good has been the result. There has been throughout some
quiet and unobserved work going on, whose influence, felt more and
more by degrees, has at length become predominant, showing that the
stirring events and characters which had figured the scenes and amused
spectators, were but the underplots and subordinate _personæ_ of a
greater and more serious drama. Since the overthrow of heathenism, the
world's drama, still going on, is the development of Christianity; and
doubtless even now, however sometimes with a seeming contrary action,
every invention, every extension of knowledge--all arts, all sciences,
are working to that end. It is strange, but true, that our very wars
have furthered civilisation. The Crusades, worthless and fruitless as
regards their ostensible object, have ameliorated the condition and
softened the manners of our own and other nations.

In the fall of heathenism, fell the arts of heathenism; not, indeed,
to be entirely obliterated--not for ever, but for a time. Their
continuance would have been one of imitation: such imitation would
have little suited the new condition of mankind; they were therefore
removed, and hidden for awhile, that the new principle should develop
itself unshackled. The arts had to arise from, and to be rebuilt
upon, this new principle: all in them that would have interfered
with this great purpose was allowed to be set aside, to be resumed
only in after times, when that new principle should be safely and
permanently established. It was only by degrees that the old buried
art showed itself, and that the new was permitted to resume some of
the old perfection. It may be that even yet the two streams, from
such dissimilar sources, have not, in their fulness and plenitude,
united: the characteristic beauty which they bear is of body and of
soul; but they bear them separately, severally. What will the meeting
of the waters be? and may we yet hope to see it? If it was required
that there should be a kind of submerged world of heathenism, the
germs of the true and beautiful would not necessarily perish. The
church was, in fact, the ark of safety, to which all that intellect
had effected, all arts, all sciences, all learning, fled for refuge.
And as was the ark among the dark waters, so was the church and the
treasures it bore providentially preserved amid the storms without
that darkened and howled around it. What heathenism was to the middle
ages, in respect of the hidden treasures, the middle ages are or have
been to us. Their arts, their sciences, in their real beauty, have been
hidden; they have had, indeed, invisible but effective virtues--the
darkness, the blindness, has been ours. We have been doing the work of
our age, and are now discovering the good that was in theirs, and how
much we are indebted to them for our own advancement. Let us imagine
for a moment all that was then done obliterated, never to have been
done, we should now have to do the work of the so-called "dark ages."
It would be impossible to start up what we are without them. As we
reflect, their works present themselves to us in every direction.
Look where we will, we shall see that the church has been the school
of mankind, in which all knowledge was preserved, and from which new
sources of knowledge have arisen. She was the salt of the earth, to
rescue it from rankness. The germ of life was in her in the winter
of the times. When the wars of the Roses would have made our England
a howling wilderness, there were places and persons unprofaned and
respected by the murderer, the ravisher, the spoiler. When the nobles,
the great barons throughout Europe, were little better than plunderers,
and robbers even on the highway--Robin Hoods, without that outlaw's
fabulous virtue and honest humanity--what was then doing within the
walls of convents and monasteries? What were then the monks about?
Embodying laws of peace, and, with a faith in the future improvement
of mankind, cultivating sciences; planning and building up in idea
new society, foreseeing its wants, and for its sake pursuing the
useful arts; inventing, contriving, constructing, and decorating all,
and preparing even the outward face of the world, by their wondrous
structures, their practical application of their knowledge, more
worthily to receive a people whom it was their hope, their faith, to
bring out of a state of turbulence into peace. So far as the church
was concerned in governments, it is astonishing how, when the body of
the state was mutilated and dislocated, she kept the heart sound; so
that where it might seem tyranny would have overwhelmed all, she made,
and she preserved those wholesome laws to which we now owe our liberty
and every social advancement. But it is in the light of the arts and
sciences our present purpose directs us to view their doings. Let us
take one fact--walk the streets of even our inferior provincial towns,
see not only the comforts which, in their dwellings, surround the
inhabitants, but the magnificence of the shops with their glass fronts.
Whence are they? The first skill, the first invention, arose from the
study of ecclesiastics, and was practised by cloistered monks. Monastic
institutions grew out of the church; we speak of them as one. It would
not be very difficult, in fact, to trace every useful invention, in
its first principle, to the same source. But with a great portion of
mankind it would not be pleasing so to trace their means of enjoyment.
They have been habituated to think, or at least to feel, otherwise.
History has been too often written by men either averse to religion
itself, or inimical to churchmen. History, such as it has been put
into the hands of children, for the rudiments of their education, has
taught them to lisp falsehoods against the church, the priesthood. The
"rapacity" of churchmen is an early lesson. Nor can we wonder if men so
educated grow up with a prejudice, and, when they begin to, scramble
themselves for what they can get in the world's active concerns, and
know something of their own natures, are little inclined to cast the
film from their eyes, and more fairly to unravel the mysteries of
historical events. Were they in candour to make the attempt, they
would see rapacity elsewhere; and that, in times more irreverent than
the middle ages, the churchmen have not been the plunderers, but the
plundered. The church has been the nurse, of art, of knowledge, of
science. Let those who are accustomed to see light but a little way
beyond them, and to think all a blank darkness out of the illumination
of their own day, consider how they have often seen, in many a dark
and stormy night, little lights shining through a great distance, and
hailed them as notices of a warm and living virtue of domestic and
industrial peace; and then let them see, if they will have it that the
middle ages were so dark, the similitude; when the light in many a
monastic cell shone brightly upon the depth of that night, and dotted
the general gloom with as living a light; when monks, when churchmen,
were making plans for the minsters that we now gaze at with so much
astonishment--were transcribing, were illuminating works of sacred
use, were registering their discoveries in art, their "secreti"--and
at the same time, were not unobservant of the highest office to watch
and keep alive in their own and others' hearts the sacred fire, which
still we trust burns, and will burn more and more, sending forth its
light into surrounding darkness. We would speak of a general character,
as we from our hearts believe it to be the true one--not asserting
that there were no instances, as examples from which hostile writers
might draw plausible inferences to justify their prejudice. The fairest
spots are overshadowed by the passing clouds of a general storm, though
there may yet be lights of safety in many a dwelling. The history of
the arts is the history of civilisation, and these arts were preserved
or originated in monastic institutions. If the monks were legislators,
were physicians, were architects, painters, sculptors, it was because
all the learning of the age was centered in them. "Neither Frederic
Barbarossa, John, king of Bavaria, nor Philip the Hardy of France,
could read; nor could Theodoric or Charlemagne write. Of the barons
whose names are affixed to Magna Charta, very few could write."

We suspect that Mrs Merrifield has fallen into a common error,
propagated by historians such as Robertson, with regard to this
ignorance of letters. It was not only "usual for persons who could not
write to make the sign of the cross, in confirmation of a charter," but
for those who could. If a little more had been accurately ascertained
of the feelings and manners of the periods in question, it would have
been seen that the signature of the cross, instead of the name, was
more according to the dignity of the signing person and the sanctity
of the act--in fact, a better security for the full performance of
the contract. We are not quite sure that "pro ignoratione literarum"
implies so much as an inability to write a name; for, writing being
then not the kind of clerkship which it now is, but in documents of
moment, especially an artistic affair, it may not be very wonderful if
"persons of the highest rank" were unable to compete with the practised
hands, and were unwilling to show, and to the deterioration of the
outward beauty of the documents, their inferiority in caligraphy. But,
after all, the "innumerable proofs," between the eight and twelfth
centuries, amount only to four.

That of Tassilo duke of Bavaria, by its wording, may express the
ornamental character, "Quod manu propriâ, ut potui, characteres
chirographe inchoando depinxi coram judicibus atque optimatibus meis."
If, however, this Duke of Bavaria was so poor a scribe, he was at least
the founder of a convent that made full amends for his deficiency--one
of whose nuns, Diemudis, was the most indefatigable transcriber of
any age. An amazing list of her caligraphic handicraft is extant,
almost incredible, if we did not know the patient zeal of those days
of fervent piety. Those who are desirous to obtain better information
than is commonly received on the subject of the learning, as well
as the piety of the middle ages, will be amply repaid by consulting
Mr Maitland's "Dark Ages," in which the historians are refuted to
their shame, and the charge of ignorance is most fairly retorted. In
his very interesting volume, this list of Diemudis may be seen. The
works copied are indeed religious works, which some of our historians
may have looked upon with a prejudice, and as proofs of the darkness
of the times. Mr Maitland's book will undeceive any who are of that
opinion, containing, as it does, so many proofs, in original letters
and discourses, of erudition, perfect acquaintance with the sacred
Scriptures, of eloquence and intellectual acuteness. Whatever books
these "ignorant" monks and ecclesiastics possessed, there is one
invention of a time included by most censurers of the "dark ages" in
that invidious term, the absence of which would have deprived this
"enlightened" age of half the books it possesses, of half the knowledge
of the "reading public," and of we know not how many other inventions
to which it may have been the unacknowledged parent: we are grateful
enough to acknowledge that, without it, we should not be now writing
these remarks, and should certainly lose many readers--the invention
of spectacles. There are notices of them in A. D. 1299. It is said on
a monument in the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, at Florence, that
Salvino degli Armati, who died in 1317, invented them. "Indeed P.
Marahese attributes the invention of spectacles to Padre Alesandro,"
(a Dominican and miniature painter;) "but the memorial of him in the
Chronicle of St Katherine, at Pisa, proves that he had seen spectacles
made before he made them himself; and that, with a cheerful and willing
heart, he communicated all he knew."

"The proof," says Mrs Merrifield, that Europe is indebted to religious
communities for the preservation of the arts during the dark ages,
rests on the fact that the most ancient examples of Christian art
consist of the remains of mural pictures in churches, of illuminations
in sacred books, and of vessels for the use of the church and the
altar, and on the absence of all similar decorations on buildings and
utensils devoted to secular uses during the same period--to which
may be added, that many of the early treatises on painting were the
work of ecclesiastics, as well as the paintings themselves. A similar
remark may be made with regard to architecture, many of the earliest
professors of which were monks." We believe Mrs Merrifield here is
short of the fact; and that, where the monks were not the builders,
they were in almost all instances the designers. Their architecture,
indeed, and all that pertained to it, was a Christian book to teach;
their designs contained Christian lessons, which the knowledge of
ecclesiastics could alone supply. "Painting was essentially a religious
occupation; the early professors of the art believed that they had
an especial mission to make known the works and miracles of God to
the common people who were unacquainted with letters:--'Agli uomini
grossi che non sanno lettere.' Actuated by this sentiment, it is not
surprising that so many of the Italian painters should have been
members of monastic establishments. It has been observed that the
different religious orders selected some particular branch of the
art, which they practised with great success in the convents of their
respective orders. Thus the Gesuati and Umiliati attached themselves
to painting on glass and architecture, the Olivetani to tarsia work,
the Benedictines and Camaldolites to painting generally; and the monks
of Monte Casino to miniature painting; while the Dominicans appear to
have practised all the various branches of the fine arts, (with the
exception of mosaic,) and to have produced artists who excelled in
each." Their devotion to the arts was, indeed, a religious devotion;
their treatises commence with most earnest prayers, and solemn
dedication of themselves and their works to the Holy Trinity; and not
unfrequently with a long exordium, introducing the creation and fall of
man, as we see in the prefaces of Theophilus and Cennino Cennini.

Whilst the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries saw the erection
of magnificent cathedrals, (our own York, Salisbury, and Westminster
were built in the thirteenth,) the manners of the people were yet
rude: one plate served for man and wife; there were no wooden-handled
knives; a house did not contain more than two drinking-cups. There were
neither wax nor tallow candles; clothes were of leather, unlined. Had
the middle and lower classes, in our day, no better dwellings than were
the houses belonging to those conditions so late as the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, we dare not to conjecture how much worse would
be their moral condition. "In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the houses of the English, of the middle and lower classes, consisted
in general of a ground-floor only, divided into two apartments--namely
a hall, into which the principal door opened, and which was their room
for cooking, eating, and receiving visitors; and a chamber adjoining
the hall, and opening out of it, which was the private apartment of
the females of the family, and the bed-room at night. The greater part
of the houses in London were built after this plan." The more wealthy
classes were not very much better lodged; the principal difference,
being an upper floor, the access to which was by a flight of steps
outside. As arts advanced, manners refined: the Crusades had their
domestic as well as warlike effects; they induced a taste for dress,
and general luxury; and the Saracens were ready examples for imitation.
It was then, and when commercial enterprise enriched a few cities, the
arts of the monks began to be appreciated; but they did not readily
assume a secular character--painting and other decorations were in
design either religious, or historical with a religious reference or
moral. It is curious that clocks were not found in convents after
they had been among the articles of domestic furniture in castles and
palaces. Perhaps, this may be an instance of a devotional spirit of
the monks, who may have thought it an impiety to relax the discipline
of reckoning time by the repetition of Ave Marias, Paternosters and
Misereres. They were, however, generally adopted about the latter half
of the fifteenth century.

To those who are at all advanced in life, and who must themselves
remember a very different state of society from the present, and the
introduction of our present luxuries and comforts into houses, and
alteration of habits and manners, it must seem but a step backwards
into comparative barbarism. A very few centuries take us back to paper
windows; and even they were removable as furniture, not attached to the
house. We have ourselves heard an old person say, that he remembered
the time when there were only two carriages kept in a city, the second
in importance in England--who now in that city would task himself to
count the number? Nor was our own country singular in the deficiencies
of the luxuries of life. The changes were general and simultaneous; and
this is extraordinary, that the revival of arts and literature was not
confined to one country or one place, but arose as it were from one
general impulse, and simultaneously, among people under varieties of
climate, circumstances, and manners.

It is time we should say something of the book which has led us to make
this somewhat long introduction. It consists of two volumes, containing
original treatises, dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth
centuries, on the arts of painting in oil, miniature, mosaic, and on
glass; of gilding, dyeing, the preparation of colours and of artificial
gems, by Mrs Merrifield, whose valuable translation of Cennino Cennini
has been reviewed in the pages of Maga. Mrs Merrifield is likewise
the authoress of an excellent little volume on fresco painting,
very opportunely published. The present work is the result of a
commission from the Government to proceed to Italy, to collect MSS.,
and every possible information respecting the processes and methods
of oil-painting adopted by the Italians. As the Original Treatises
discovered, and now published, contain much other matter besides that
which relates to painting in oil, the work is more comprehensive
than the first purpose of the commission would have made it. The
introduction, which occupies nearly two-thirds of the first volume, is
a very able performance; in it is a comprehensive view of the history
of the fine arts. The conclusions drawn from the documents, the result
in detail of her search and labours, are so clearly laid before the
reader, with ample proofs of each particular fact and inference, as
greatly to facilitate the reader in his inquiry into the documents
themselves. He will find that Mrs Merrifield, by her arrangement of the
parts, and bringing them to bear upon her purpose, has saved him that
trouble which the nature of the work would otherwise have necessitated.
Besides that her introduction contains a separate and complete treatise
on each branch of art, the preliminary observations, heading each
document, render its contents most tangible. At the end of the second
volume is an index, which in a work of this kind it is most desirable
to possess--the want of which in Mr Eastlake's excellent _Materials for
a History of Oil-painting_ we have often had occasion to regret; and we
do hope that, in his forthcoming work on the Italian practice, he will
make amends for this defect by an index which will embrace the contents
of the "Materials." We have ourselves spent much time, that might have
been saved by an index, in turning over the pages for passages to
which we wished to refer, for that work is one strictly of reference,
although interesting in the first reading.

The documents consist of the following MSS.--the manuscripts of Jehan
Le Begue, of St Audemar, of Eraclius, of Alcherius, in the first
volume. In the second--the Bolognese, Marciana, Paduan, Volpato, and
Brussels manuscripts; extracts from all original manuscript by Sig.
Gio. O'Kelly Edwards; extracts from a dissertation read by Sig. Pietro
Edwards, in the academy of fine arts at Venice, on the propriety of
restoring the public pictures.

As these several MSS. open to us new sources of information, most
important in establishing certain facts, from whence the art of
painting among us may enter upon great and important changes, it may
not be altogether unprofitable to give some short account of them in
their order.

The manuscript of Jehan Le Begue, "a licentiate in the law, and
notary of the masters of the mint in Paris," was composed by him in
the year 1431, in his sixty-third year. It is, however, professedly a
compilation from works of Jehan Alcherius, or Alcerius, of whom little
is known, nor is it certain that he was a painter. His work probably
preceded Le Begue's about twenty years. Alcherius himself was a
collector of recipes, from various sources, during thirty years, and
twenty years afterwards his MSS. came into the hands of Le Begue.

The manuscript of Petrus de St Audemar, according to Mr Eastlake, may
be of the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century.
He is supposed to have been a native of France, (Pierre de St Omer.)
Some of the recipes are found in the "Clavicula," attributed to the
twelfth century; but this is no argument against the date, for it was
at all times the practice to make selections from former "secreti."

The manuscripts of Eraclius consist of three books--the first two
metrical, the third in prose. Nothing is known of the author. "Two
ancient copies only of the MS. of Eraclius have been hitherto
discovered, and it is somewhat singular that both are bound up with
the MSS. of Theophilus." It is not easy to fix a date to Eraclius.
Mrs Merrifield thinks "that the metrical parts only constituted the
Treatise '_de coloribus et artibus Romanorum_' of Eraclius, and that
this part is more ancient than a great part of the third book."

Manuscripts of Alcherius.--These are of two dates, 1398, and again
corrected 1411, after his return from Bologna, "according to further
information, which he subsequently received by means of several
authentic books treating of such subjects, and otherwise." These are
the Le Begue manuscripts.

"The Bolognese manuscript is of the fifteenth century. It is a small
volume in duodecimo on cotton paper, and is preserved in the library
of the R. R. Canonici Regolari, in the convent of St Salvatore in
Bologna." There is no name of the author--it is written sometimes "in
Italianised Latin, and sometimes Italian, with a mixture of Latin
words, as was usual at that period." It has no precise date. It is an
interesting notice of all the decorative arts practised in Bologna
at that period, and contains a systematically arranged collection of
recipes.

The Marciana manuscript is of the sixteenth century, in the library of
St Marco at Venice. The recipes are in the Tuscan dialect, and some are
but little known. They appear to have been compiled for the use of a
convent, by some monk or lay brother, who, in his capacity of physician
to the infirmary, prepared both medicaments, varnishes, and pigments.
Names of artists are mentioned which show that the author lived at the
beginning or middle of the sixteenth century.

The Paduan manuscript, Mrs Merrifield asserts to be Venetian. It
is in quarto, on paper, without date; but the handwriting is of
the seventeenth century. It shows a manifest deviation from the
practice established in the Marciana MS.--the introduction of spirit
of turpentine as a diluent, and mastic varnish, instead of the hard
varnishes of amber and sandarac. In it we find that "oil-paintings had
begun to suffer from the effects of age; and that they required, or
it was believed that they required, to be washed with some corrosive
liquid, and to be revarnished. Directions, or rather recipes, for both
these processes are given." Some of the recipes are in Latin, supposed
"secreti," and therefore given in that language.

The Volpato manuscript.--The author, a painter, Giovanni Baptista
Volpato, of Bassano, was born 1633--a pupil of Novelli, who had been
a pupil of Tintoretto. A work from a MS. of Volpato was announced for
publication at Vicenza in 1685, but it is believed that it has not been
published. The MS. now first brought to light by Mrs Merrifield was
lent to her, with permission to copy, by Sig. Basseggio, librarian and
president of the Athenæum of Bassano. There is good reason to believe
that it was written during the latter end of seventeenth, or beginning
of eighteenth century.

The Brussels manuscript.--This now published is a portion of a MS.
preserved in a public library of Brussels, written by Pierre Le Brun,
contemporary with the Caracci and Rubens; its date is 1635.

Sig. Edwards's manuscript is written by the son of Sig. Pietro
Edwards, who was employed by the Venetian and Austrian governments in
the restoration of the pictures in Venice. He died in 1821. His son,
Sig. O'Kelly Edwards, wrote an account of the method of restoration,
with interesting matters respecting the public pictures generally.
Mrs Merrifield has taken extracts, the work not being permitted to be
published without the permission of the Academy of Venice, which was
refused.

There follow also extracts from a dissertation read by Sig. Pietro
Edwards to the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, on the propriety of
restoring the public pictures.