of the ministerial malady if the dagger had not hurried on his end. Lord Castlereagh, driven to despair, took his own life. Lord Liverpool fell in the same manner, in a death of imbecility. The noble Canning, his life embittered by the Tories, succumbed like a sick Atlas under the weight of a world. In sad succession are buried in Westminster Abbey these poor Ministers, who, night and day, have thought for the kings of England, while they, in florid health and free from care, live to a good old age.

He went also to Westminster Abbey, and spent hours of musing in the Poet's Corner. From his early infancy he had known the English language, and had studied its greatest masters, and he is now in their national tomb. Many of them are dear to him, but the dearest of them all is Shakespeare. Everything in England reminds him of the world's greatest genius. The history of England is embalmed for ever in his plays; and he hears them quoted in the Houses of Parliament for their historical value. The streets and public places of London have been rendered familiar by his works. Heine heard him spoken of everywhere. The beefeaters in the Tower took him into the dungeon where the princes were murdered, and recited Shakespeare. The members of Parliament quote him; Charles Kean clothes his plays with life and beauty on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre. Every lion in London speaks of the still greater lion Shakespeare. And so Heine stands before his bust in deep meditation. He looks at his pale lips and the blank scroll in his hand. He looks round at the tombs of England's Kings and Queens, of its heroes in arts and arms. He sees Shakespeare, at the witching hour of twelve, call them all forth from their graves. They come in their rusty armour, cavaliers of the Red Rose, and of the White Rose, courtiers in their stars and garters, and grand ladies in their silks and jewels. He hears the clinking of their swords, and the sounds of their laughter, and the hissing of their curses. He searches their reins and their hearts, and reveals the inmost recesses of their souls unto themselves and unto the world. With his magic pen he makes the dead past live again. He gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. And so he wears the triple crown of the Dramatist, the Historian, and the Poet.

As Heine left the Abbey he gave the verger his fee of one shilling and sixpence, with the remark that he would gladly have paid double the money if the collection had been complete.

We next find Heine standing at a shop-window in Fleet Street. He is looking at a picture of Beresina Bridge. But he has scarcely time to see it. He is jostled on this side and on that, and compelled to move on. And so he cries, Send a German philosopher to London, but, for pity's sake, no poet. The philosopher will learn more in an afternoon in Fleet Street from the hurrying

crowd than from all the books in Leipsig fair. This Fleet Street is Beresina Bridge, and every man and woman on it is hurrying as if for very life. It is everyone for himself here. You must be wide awake, and have your thoughts fixed on yourself, or you will be trampled in the mud. And so a poor dreaming poet, who goes about with his thoughts in fairyland, and his eyes without vision in them, is sure to come to grief.

Another characteristic of English life that seemed wonderful to Heine was the perfection of our machinery. There was something uncanny to him in seeing combinations of iron and wood doing the work that seemed to be the prerogative of man. Our spinning, weaving, printing machines, inspired him with a feeling of awe. He tells the story of an English mechanic who, after many inventions, resolved to make a man. He did so, making his body of iron and brass, and his lungs of leather. He was so successful that the automaton could perform all the ordinary functions of a human creature. But the automaton was not satisfied with this, and kept running after his maker crying, "Give me a soul!"

Heine was a satirist, and he foretells a danger that lies before our country. The very manufacture and serving of machines has a tendency to render human work mechanical. A man's work becomes less and less the exponent of his thought, and so loses the great characteristic that makes labour sublime. And so Heine, hearing everywhere the clank of machinery, and seeing everywhere men and women labouring like automata, declares that John Bull is a born materialist, who can only learn mechanics, analytical. method, and the art of ready reckoning. He cannot understand philosophy, and will never excel in the fine arts.

After exhausting the sights of London, Heine went to the seacoast for the warm weather. He there made the acquaintance of a charming lady, whom he calls Miss Gordon. She seems to have fascinated him very much, and he declares that John Bull's. daughters are beyond all praise. But his money, by this time, was getting scarce. He had spent a guinea and a half on the steamer for food and steward's fees, and two guineas a day ever since. He had been in debt at home, and although his uncle, a rich banker, had given him a letter of credit for £400, he had added a strict order that it was not to be cashed. Heine, however, was too needy to obey this. He cashed it on the first opportunity, and sent a large portion back to pay his creditors. The remainder was almost spent, and so the poet had to make arrangements for going home again. He left England on the 8th day of August, and endeavoured to pay his expenses by writing in the German press on what he had seen.

THOMAS PRYDE.

PEASANT PROPERTIES IN FRANCE, 1787-1887.

ARTHUR YOUNG is now so much quoted at second-hand by many who have never opened his book, that it is pleasant to turn to the large, thick quarto in which that shrewd and accurate observer embodied his observations, in a manner which will always make the work a standard authority for the agricultural condition of France before the Revolution, and to compare its report with the present state of its rural population. Young was a Suffolk country gentleman, who farmed his own land and studied agriculture, finance, and the incidence of taxation at home, a good "Liberal," as he would now be called, who corresponded with "General" Washington, and answered for his being "an excellent farmer," when made a member of the French Chamber of Agriculture. He had received several French gentlemen at his country house, spoke French easily, and had remarkable opportunities of obtaining everywhere the best information on all the points he desired to study.

He started in May 1787, intending to ride through France. Nine hours at anchor after crossing, however, so upset his mare, that he had to rest at Calais; he then proceeded at the rate of from twenty to thirty miles a day, according as he could get a good resting-place for the night, opening his eyes and ears as he rode along to their greatest extent.

The first thing that strikes him particularly, as would still be the case, is what he terms "the labours of the sex." Women were ploughing with a pair of horses; "while in England they will do little in the fields except glean and make hay—the first is a party of pilfering, and the second of pleasure-here they plough and fill the dung-cart." Half-way to Paris his mare fell ill. “French stables, which are covered dung-hills, and the carelessness of the inn garçons," had given her cold, so that he was obliged to go on in a post-chaise, leaving her to follow.

During this and his many other visits to Paris, he was struck with the absence of traffic on the roads near so great a capital. "No carriages, few carts, it is a perfect desert as compared with the neighbourhood of London." When the mare arrived, he started again on horseback, to cross the whole kingdom to the Pyrenees,

riding with two French gentlemen, one of them the Count de Larochefoucauld, through the Pays de Beauce, which he describes as "one universal flat, unenclosed, uninteresting, the soil excellent, but fallows everywhere,"-onward to Orleans, where, from the top of the cathedral he "looked out on rich meadows, vineyards, gardens, forests, through which the magnificent Loire bends his stately way"; by Limoges, Toulouse, to Bagnères de Luchon, where he stayed some time, investigating the agriculture of the Pyrenees. He was living with the Duke of Larochefoucauld (one of those whom he had received at his house in Suffolk), and a number of other agreeable people; but complains rather bitterly of the dinners at noon, which shortens the time for business in a way that would not be borne in England. "We dress for dinner in England, because the rest of the day is given to relaxation, but what is a man good for after his silk breeches and stockings are on, his hat under his arm, and his head bien poudrée. A dinner at noon is hostile to every view of science, to every spirited exertion, and to every useful pursuit in life." From Luchon he went to Bordeaux in one direction, and to Nismes in the other, observing and noticing all the way. The fallows perpetually vex his soul, together with the small produce and excessive sub-division of the land. He returned to Paris, still on horseback, in October, where he lived with some of the best society of the time, social, political, and scientific, visited the theatres, listened to the music, saw the public buildings, being specially interested in the excellent Halle aux Blés; took a letter from Dr. Priestly to the great chemist Lavoisier, who showed him his electrical and other experiments ; and was introduced to "an ingenious mechanic," a M. Lomond, who showed him "an electric machine, connected with a wire and a similar electrical meter at a distance, where his wife writes down the words indicated by the motions of a pith ball-the length of the wire makes no difference." It is strange to find the electric telegraph thus forestalled, and that nothing was made of the great invention until our own day; the old sad story of the uselessness of being too far beyond your age to be able to benefit it.

"Niagara," the great cataclism, was so close at hand that it is curious to find how everything was going on in much the same sleepy fashion as usual in France (except in some of the great towns), and that agriculture, therefore, was in its normal condition.

It is exactly a hundred years since Arthur Young set down the results of his investigations; since that time a Republic has succeeded to the monarchy, which he saw still in power. Seas of blood, the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, the destruction of all the institutions of the country, civil and religious, of all usages and customs, of class distinctions, religious worship and education took

place; an Empire succeeded, which restored everything as much as possible to the old state. Fearful and costly wars of conquest ensued, ending in an invasion of France by Europe, which set up the old dynasty again by force. Another revolution brought in the Orleans family. Revolution the third, and a Republic gave birth to another Empire; and this to another Republic, which, changing its Prime Minister about every twelve months, now rules over the country.* All these floods of change have passed over France, and the result to Jacques Bonhomme is, that he is found at the present moment as nearly as possible in the same condition as he was before their passage, certainly in no respect better.

Young's account of rural France might have been written yesterday; the wretched state of agriculture and the small yields of crops, only half as much as in England-the same calculation as is now made by Sir James Caird-the entangling of the tiny plots scattered over half a commune, which the jealousy of the peasants prevents their ever exchanging or selling to each other; the severe labour of the women, ground down by toil, and the consequent ill-health of the children; the small expenditure of the rural class, whose ideal is to buy nothing, but produce almost everything on their own land; the utter stagnation of thought and want of interest in the outer world, which strikes a traveller on a bicycle at the present day as strongly as Young on his horse; the high price of land, in spite of the small return from it, "owing to the rage of possessing a piece, in which all peasant savings are invested"; the impossibility of employing machines, or improving such tiny patches by drainage or irrigation, as the neighbours quarrel too much to combine; the extraordinary thrift, with neither comfort, health, nor pleasure resulting from their savings ("We live to save in France, not save to live," says the Revue des Deux Mondes); the unremitting toil, with scarcely any result, owing to "the wastefulness of ignorance," as Mr. Chadwick calls it: these may all be paralleled exactly at the present day, and are lamented over by the best French economists, Lecouteux, Lafargue, Leplay, &c.

To take the first question-the extreme badness of the farming -wheat and barley was and is followed by a fallow, compared with the English four-course system, which, even at that day, included "tares and beans, turnips and clover, besides the manure returned to the ground by the cattle and sheep, while the land of the Frenchman is stationary." The enormous amount of fallow

*M. Laveleye remarks in a preface, dated 1887, that under the Republic there have been 18 Ministers of War, and 14 of Foreign Affairs in fifteen years; now 19 and 15. † 1886. "We could hardly ever find a newspaper in any country district or small town, except the Petit Journal.", August 1887.