"Little enough," said De Vigne, "but it is always of those of whom it knows least that it will affect to know most; and the stranger you sit next at a dinner-party is ten to one far better acquainted with your business than you are yourself."

"Ah! isn't he?" said I. "That reminds me, Sabretasche, I heard from three different ladies the other day that you were engaged to Valencia Prie-Dieu, that you were certainly going to be married to Fanella de Vaux; and thirdly, that you, without the slightest doubt, were going to elope with Ascott's wife. I believe they mentioned the hour, and where you were going."

"Well done for your morals, Sabretasche," laughed De Vigne; "three women on your hands at the same time! How will you manage them all?"

"Good Heavens!" cried the Colonel, laughing. "Commend me to the ingenuity of women! With Val Prie-Dieu I danced twice at Almack's, and that's all, for she hasn't two ideas, and I never waste my time on a stupid woman; no coiffure can make up to me for lack of brain under it. Miss de Vaux, I don't think I know; I have a dim recollection of staying last autumn in the same house with a hideous large-boned filly of a girl, who went by that name. With my Lady Ascott, I plead guilty to mild flirtation; but, as she has red hair, is the most prudent of women, and Ascott is one of my best friends, and has many a time confided to me how thankful he would be to any Don Juan that rid him of his better-half, I should be about as likely to elope with your new mare. Fancy my supporting life, for a week only, in the proximity of red hair!"

"Then I may contradict the statements ?"

"No. I never honour reports by denying them."

"Quite right," said De Vigne; "they die quickest of inanition. Feed them with denial, they thrive apace; neglect them, they perish of chagrin. We shall hear you are to marry-what is her name?-Violet Molyneux next?"

"Not I," said Sabretasche; "at least you may hear it, but I shall live and die as I am now-alone !"

"Who would care for reports?" said De Vigne, breaking off the ash of his cheroot; "the whispers of idle mischief or industrious malice. For my part, I can as soon imagine a man taking heed of every tuft of dandelion that passes him in the air, or every petty insect that crawls beneath his feet, as taking note of the reports that buzz round his career. If they are false, of course he can afford to laugh at them; if true, why the judgment of society is not so infallible that we must needs bow to it, but quite the contrary, it is most apt to err: it judges from the outside, in utter ignorance of the motive powers and springs within. The purity of a whitened sepulchre may attract it-the errors and weaknesses of a warm and noble nature may win its unjust censure. It is always ready to condemn, never ready to extenuate; and those whom it ostracises are often worth the most. Opinion decreed David and Brutus fools; Eldon a profligate; Columbus a dreamer and blasphemer; Leibnitz, Sheridan, Washington Irving, and a host of others, dunderheads. Report has never yet been a true index to merit; and I should as soon dream of heeding the purposeless buzz of flies on a midsummer day as the venom and gossip with which petty natures seek to sting one. Bah! how I hate all those

petitesses and turmoils, those pitiful wheels within wheels, those arrows, hit for so trifling a vengeance yet barbed with such a poisoned head, those lowering jealousies and meannesses, that debasing atmosphere of scandals, and envies, and detractions that spoil social life. Out campaigning, one is free from all that. It is action, it is reality; before the cannon's mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one's own life on a thread, one cannot stop to stoop and ruin another's character. I do not know how it is.—I have read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endurance to me as well as the grand eternal calm of nature, nor sermons humbled me like the sense of my own insignificance as I lay under the great cathedral of the sky, with its multitudinous worlds rolling on and on in their changeless course. A few months ago I was camping out to net ortolans; the night was so still, so clear! What night is like a tropical one! Round us was the dense stretch of the forests and jungles -no wind stirring the great palm groves-no sound, except the cry of the hill deer, or the deep voice of a tiger far away-there was nothing stirring, except now and then an antelope flitting like a ghost across the clearing, and, over it all, those dark blue skies with the intense brilliance of the southern stars. On my life, as I lay there by our watch-fire alone, with my pipe, it struck me that, if we would let her, Nature would be a truer teacher than theories or homilies. Human life seems so small beside the vast life of universal creation. The calm grand silence of the worlds going on in their noiseless path rebukes our own feverishness, our fretful passions, our ambitions, so arrogant, and yet so petty. We who fancy that the eyes of all the universe are on us, that we are the sole love and charge of its Creator, feel what ephemera we are in the giant scale of existence; what countless myriads of such as we, have been swept from their place out of sight, and not a law of the spheres around been stirred, not a moment's pause been caused in the silent march of creation. Under men's tutelage I grow impatient and irritated. What gage have I that they know one bit better than I? They rouse me into questioning their dogmas, into penetrating their mysteries, into searching out and proving the nullity of the truths they assume for granted; but under the teaching of Nature I am silent. I recognise my own infe riority. I grow ashamed of my own weaknesses, my pride, my lack of charity and tolerance. Have not you often felt the same ?"

"Yes," answered Sabretasche. "A wayside flower, a sunny savannah, a rose-hued Mediterranean sunrise, even a little bit of lichen on a stone in the Campagna, has taught one truer lessons than are taught in the forum or the pulpit. Man sees so little of his fellow-man; he is so ready to condemn, so slow to sympathise with him, that, if he attempt to teach, he is far more apt to irritate than aid; whereas, to the voices of flowers, and sunlight, and midnight stars, the bluntest sense can hardly fail to listen, and they speak in a universal tongue, whose cadence is translatable alike to the Indian in his primeval woods, and the civilised savant in his scientific study."

"But one is apt to lose sight of Nature in the hurry and conflict of actual every-day social life. Standing alone under the shadow of the Alps, a man learns and feels his own utter insignificance; but back again in the world, the first line of a favourable review, the first hurrah of an admiring constituency, the first applause that feeds his ear in the world he lives in, will give him back his self-appreciation, and he will find it

hard not to take himself at the high gauge that others take him, and not to fancy himself of the importance to the universe that he naturally is to the clique to which he belongs. That is partly why I was unwilling to leave campaigning. There the jungle and the stars took me in hand, and there, many a night by my camp-fire, with my cheroot or my pipe in my mouth, I would listen to them, though God knows whether I am the better for it. Here, on the contrary, men will be prating at me, and I shall chafe at them, and it will be a wonder if I do not kick out at some of them. I am impatient, you know; my guerilla life suited me better than my fashionable one."

you.

"You are too good for it all the same," said Sabretasche; "and if you should put the kicking process into execution, it will be a little wholesome chastisement for them, and a little sanitary exertion for Jungles and planets are grander and truer, sans doute, but Johannisberger and society are equally good for men in their way, and, besidesthey are very pleasant!"

"Your acme of praise, Sabretasche," laughed De Vigne. "I agree with you that human nature is, after all, the best book we can learn, only the study is irritating, and one sees so much en noir there, that if we look too long we are apt to spoil our eyes for daylight, or to fling away our lexicon, with a curse upon it for deceiving us.'

"The best way, after all," said the Colonel, with a cross between a yawn and a sigh, "is not to take it au sérieux, or make anything a study. Men and women are marionettes; the best way is to learn the tricks of their wires and strings, and make them perform, at our will, tragedy, comedy, farce, whatever pleases our mood. To be sure, one sometimes has a penalty to pay for learning to manage the puppets, as Charles Nodier found when he was taught to make Polichinelle talk upon the Boulevards; but human life is a kaleidoscope, with which the wise man amuses himself; it has pretty pictures for the eye, if you know how to shake them up, and as for analysing it, pulling it to pieces, for being only bits of cork and burnt glass, and quarrelling with it for being trumpery instead of bonâ fide brilliants-cui bono?-you won't make it any better."

66

Possibly; but I shail not be taken in by it."

My dear fellow, I think the time when we are taken in by it is the happiest part of our lives."

66

Maybe. His drum is no pleasure to a boy after he has broken it, and found the music is empty wind, with no mystery about it whatever.

I say, what is your clock? Am I not keeping you fellows from some

engagement or other ?"

"None at all," answered Sabretasche, "and you will just sit where you are for the next four hours. Give me another cheroot, and take some more cognac: it is the true thing; I brought it from France myself. Is it likely we shall let you off early after an eight years' absence?"

We did not let him off early; and all the small hours had chimed before we had done talking over our cheroots, with the fire burning brightly in the Colonel's luxurious room, and the Cid lying full-length between us, with his muzzle between his fore-pads, while De Vigne told us tales of his Indian campaign that roused even tired and listless Sabretasche, and fired my blood like the war-note of Boot and the Long Roll, or the trumpet-call of Saddle!

NORTH AND SOUTH.*

THE internecine war which threatens at each moment to break out in America is becoming the engrossing subject of speculation. If, up to the present, the English have displayed but a lukewarm interest in it, it is because North America turned us from it by the unwise protectionist tariff it lately carried through. Still we cannot believe that any who have reflected on the subject can sympathise with the Southerners, for there is no use in disguising the fact that the question of slavery or nonslavery is now at issue. The American Union consists of eighteen states in which slavery is not recognised, and fifteen in which it prevails. The former have a population of nineteen millions; the latter eight millions and a half white men, and four millions free and slave negroes. Among the slave states there are several in which the cultivation of cotton holds the first place, namely, those in the neighbourhood of the sea-South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The other seven produce hardly any cotton, and they may be regarded as the tobacco or border states. They are Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Great quantities of corn are also grown in these states, and those highlands to the east of the Mississippi, as well as the plains to the westward of the Missouri, offer an extremely favourable climate for the white race. Through this variety of temperature and produce, Nature herself has drawn a very decided line of demarcation between the cotton and tobacco states, and only in the former have the secessionist ideas thoroughly taken root, and the treaties been broken. In our present paper we purpose, then, to show what the Northerners have to say in justification of their resolve to regard the movement of the cotton states as rebellion, and for that purpose select the recently published work of a Frenchman, who is evidently put forward as the European apologist for the Northern states.

The name of Count Agénor de Gasparin is one that should be honoured by all who entertain the memory of Clarkson and Wilberforce, for he may be simply described as the continental abolitionist. For many years he has fought the good fight on behalf of the wretched beings who, under various appellations, have existed in the French colonies as de facto slaves. Believing, not without cause, that his countrymen will be disposed to side with the secessionists in the impending American struggle, he has put forth a protest, which deserves attention, inasmuch as it exposes the views of the abolitionists more fully than themselves might be disposed to do. In fact, the book we have under notice is a paradox: eminently Christian as we know the count to be, he evinces a grim delight at the coming bloodshed. His book reads, in a word, like the sermon of an Ironsides, urging on his brethren to smite the Amalekite hip and thigh. The South must have sorely offended to produce such feelings among the sober men in drab, who are now the most eager to punish them.

*Un Grand Peuple qui se Relève : Les Etats-Unis en 1861. Par le Comte Agénor de Gasparin, Ancien Député. Paris: Michel Lévy.

The struggle between the North and South for supremacy is no new thing; it has existed nearly since the Declaration of Independence. At the outset, the count considers, the Southerners regarded slavery as a necessary evil, and Washington, himself a slave-owner, expressed an earnest desire to see it promptly suppressed. The feeling that then prevailed was to hem in slavery, prevent its extension, and reduce it to a local and temporary fact. At the present day, however, slavery has come to be regarded in the South as the corner-stone of the Republic, and every effort is made to increase the number of slave states. During the present century considerable progress has been made: free Texas was converted into a slave state, and the South would not tolerate the slightest opposition to further conquests of this nature, until the election of Mr. Lincoln checked it. The South had reason to feel furious at this check, for all had hitherto gone on so well. The South spoke as a master, acted as a master, and the North humbly bowed its head before its imperious will. The progress made our author thus describes :

Let us content ourselves with going back to the last Mexican war and the Wilmot proviso. This was a measure stipulating that slavery would not be introduced into the conquered provinces. The territorial extension of slavery must be prevented, and this seems to me sufficiently reasonable, and I am not surprised that Mr. Lincoln's programme tended to a simple return to this primitive policy. Next came the Missouri question, in which, after many threats of secession, the South gained the day: the introduction of slavery into the new state was conceded, on the condition that henceforth it should be prohibited beyond the 36th deg. of latitude. This is what is called the "Missouri Compromise." The South soon began complaining about this check to the development of the "peculiar institution." There were fresh combats, fresh victories. A bill, proposed by Mr. Douglas, abrogated the compromise, and, based on the principle of local sovereignty, deprived congress of the right of interfering in the question of slavery. The Wilmot proviso could not subsist in the pressure of these absolute pretensions: the liberty of slavery (forgive the expression) was applied on the spot. At this period Texas was admitted into the Union as a slave state. What happened then? The partisans of slavery-whom nothing now checked, neither proviso nor compromise-met, to their great annoyance, with an obstacle of a very different nature. The local sovereignty they had invoked was turned against themselves in Kansas territory the majority voted the exclusion of slavery. At once the Southerners changed their tactics; they appealed to the central power against local sovereignty, and if the South did not gain the day this time, it was more the fault of the Kansas people than of the United States government. Mr. Buchanan showed himself what he always was -the very humble servant of the slave party. For the first time the South found opposed to it the Squatter sovereignty-that solid resistance of the West which was manifested in the last election. But, in the mean while, the South took another step in advance, through the Dred Scott decision, by which the highest judicial authority did not hesitate to proclaim two principles: in the first place, there was no difference between a slave and any other description of property; and, secondly, all American citizens could settle where they pleased with their property.

But this, bad as it was, was not the worst; for, during Mr. Buchanan's presidency, the South governed the whole country. The filibustering expeditions to Central America and Cuba proved that the South was bent on establishing new states, in order to secure it a working majority in congress. Next came the haughty claims for the independence of the national flag at sea; and, last of all, an incredible demand for the avowed