by their wisdom, or by the inventiveness of their genius, we cannot but wonder where they have been concealed. How is it, we have said, while the world is so full of incompetents and incapables, that they have been hidden so long? Alas! the course of the noblest and the bravest has usually been concealed. Has it not usually been the way of the world, to keep folly at the helm and wisdom under the hatches?' 'High buildings have a low foundation.' Fame, narrow at its source, like a small river, broadens like an ocean at its close.

God only knows the illustrious clouds of witnesses who gather around our path and over our career, who have been and are 'nameless,' as Sir Thomas Brown would say, 'in worthy deeds.' Depend upon it, the most illustrious lives-lives dignified by the most eminent holiness, the most exalted self-denial, and beautified by the most celestial affections-have ever been unwritten, save 'in the Lamb's book of life. The Canaanitish woman,' says the dear old writer, 'lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one. And who would not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?'

A bragging bully, who has impertinently elbowed his way to power, easily pushes aside that modest merit, to whose wisdom in a moment of emergency he will be compelled to appeal, and on whose strong arm he will be compelled to lean. Great moments and great emergencies reveal truly great men, as surely as ordinary times and ordinary circumstances conceal them. It is one of the most eminent characteristics of a truly illustrious man, that he does not desire greatness, either for himself or for its own sake; and he will be concealed amidst

* The old patrician trees, so great and good, on the farm or in the cottage, at the villages of Hampden, St Ives, or Lostwithiel; but the occasion calls, and he obeys and comes forward. It is to such a moment that we owe the eminence of Havelock.

You will not judge the time misplaced if I keep it, this morning, with some no

tices of the great soldier and his course. It was passed in comparative obscurity, and but few glimpses can be obtained; but the few illustrate the whole, and the early morning of the day illustrates its closing evening. The first incidents especially are in keeping with those legends which generally surround, with a shadowy and romantic cloudland, the cradles and the childhoods of eminent men. His name instantly suggests his ancestry-as a descendant of those strong Northmen who settled in the North of England, and from thence-from Bishopswearmouth, in Sunderland, of a respectable father, who had not only founded his fortunes, but had also lost them again-Henry Havelock claimed his parentage.

'No,'

Is it not characteristic of the human nature of the boy, that when he was about seven years of age, from a very high bough he was attempting to take a bird's nest, the branch broke, and he fell down; the boughs broke his fall, or there probably the young hero had terminated his career; as it was, he lay on the ground insensible: when he recovered from the stunning effects of his fall, he was asked if he did not feel frightened when the branch snapped, and he felt himself falling. said he; 'I did not think of being frightened; I had enough to do to think of the eggs, for I thought they were sure to be smashed to pieces!' It is a small incident; but the answer is the very soul of all truly great character-the entire forgetfulness of self in the object pursued, whether that object be in childhood a bird's nest, or in old age the relief of Lucknow. And this little incident is mentioned of courage and forethought at twelve, when, seeing an infuriated dog worrying a sheep, he did not merely fly before the dog with force to meet brutality with brutality, but made a rope from a haystack near at hand, threw it round the dog's neck, and then threw the dog into a neighbouring pond to cool and recover, and so walked coolly himself away. Thus, you see, nature laid the foundations in a truly noble human character, and divine grace afterwards glorified it with 'the seeds of the kingdom.'

And what are the works contained in this book, whose author was between seventeen and twenty-five when he wrote them? They are a collection of tales, anecdotes, and dramatic scenes in verse ('Les contes d'Espagne et d'Italie,' 'Le Spectacle dans un Fauteuil,' 'Namouna,' &c.), in which not only every rule of propriety or decency is so broken through, that no modest woman could safely read twenty consecutive lines of them all, but in which there does not exist an honest, or honourable, or manly sentiment that is not turned into ridicule. Moore, it may be said, is bad enough as to indecency, and there is no denying the charge; but Moore believes in love and in patriotism. Voltaire abuses religion to the heart's content of an atheist, and Beranger falls not far short of him, added to which he treats sentiment full lightly; but both believe in the strong and exalted love of country. Musset scoffs at all: at religion, at patriotism, and at love! and, as he himself says, his first verses are those of a boy, his last barely those of a man, in this volume which represents 'all his youth!'

We are not proposing at this moment to preach against the tendencies or opinions of Alfred de Musset-we are merely registering a fact; and we say, Alfred de Musset, as a boy just entering upon life before he could find it either bitter or sweet, is inspired by the Genius of Distrust; he proclaims the absurdity of every hope or trust, and he is the poet of youth in France! Therefore he is a curious subject of study to us, precisely because he plainly shows what are some of the incompatibilities of the French nature, and of our own.

We are so far from a wish to hold forth' against Musset, that we not only

admit him to be decidedly, incontestably one of the very first of the poets of his nation, but we even allow also that his genius is inseparable from his scepticism. In his bitter irony, in his scorn or negation of all things pure, lies Musset's force and originality; this is his key-note, as Sainte Beuve calls it 'La note chantante d'Alfred de Musset.'

Before going into the details we will enter upon later touching Musset's poems, we will call the reader's attention to a writer who, of all others perhaps in France, was the most perfect counterpart of Musset-Delphine Gay (known in recent times as Madame Emile de Girardin). In their ages there was a difference only of three years; both were born with the 'gift of poesy, both addressed the public when childhood was scarcely passed; both died at the same period; and both were so exclusively French, that it would be impossible to imagine the fame of either in any country except in France.

Madame de Girardin and Musset were great friends, but of the two she is, morally, better worth than him, precisely in the same proportion_in which she is inferior to him in genius. At sixteen Delphine Gay seizes the lyre of Sappho, casts the wavy treasures of her golden hair to the four winds, and, with inspired attitudes, sings of all the glories of France, for which 'Corinnades' (as her mother, Madame Gay, was wont to style these exhibitions) she is soon hailed as la muse de la patrie, and has her bust sculptured by David in the front of the Pantheon. At eighteen Alfred de Musset makes his first appearance in the world of letters with Don Paez,' which he reads at one or two literary houses, and which at once wins for him the renown he has carried to his

grave. After making acquaintance with Musset's works, we beg to call attention to the fact of his having read his earlier poems in society, for it is characteristic of the nation he belongs to, and of the influence he could acquire over it. No book ever was, or probably ever will be, written, however objectionable it may be, that will not be read by separate individuals, and in this way read by nearly everybody; but we cannot help our amazement at what the state of any society must have been, in which such poems as 'Don Paëz,' and, indeed, nearly all those composing Musset's first volume, could be read aloud, and listened to with applause.

In this respect Delphine Gay was less to be blamed, although, probably, in no country save France could many of those verses be recited, which, in the mouth of this young girl, excited universal enthusiasm some thirty years ago. But, at all events, in the first outpourings of her muse, there really was youth; and though she is perhaps not sufficiently astonished at what we should call vice, though she admits, with true French feeling, all sorts of situations which we should term impossible, yet she never scoffs. She is not naturally impious, as was Alfred de Musset.

It was not till some few years after her first début that Madame de Girardin proved the conformity of certain peculiarities of her talent with those that distinguish Musset, and proved it then so completely, that it is impossible to separate the two. No sooner has she published 'Napoline,' than it becomes obvious that she stands with Musset at the head of the semiserious school in France, and that, indeed, they two alone represent that school, whereof, since then, the disciples have done nothing to make their names rise above the common herd.

Lamartine, in one of his late Entretiens, very justly remarks, that the Italians were the inventors of the semiserious style, of which Ariosto's 'Orlando' is the first and the immortal monument. Dating from thence, he points out St Evremond, Voltaire, Lord Byron, and Henri Heine as the evident sources of all the contemporary attempts of the semi-serious school in France. But Lamartine has

been here careless of chronology, as he too often is. The two latter could in no way have influenced a French poet who was but eighteen in 1828; for, as to the former, his 'Don Juan' (the poem thought of in this case as a model) was but vaguely hinted at at that time as something inaccessible to translation; and, as to the latter, he was only beginning to prelude to his future fame by some of the satires which cost him the right of living in his own country. Voltaire, again, is not a direct ancestor of Musset's, or of Madame de Girardin's; for Voltaire is anything but a born poet: whereas both of these two, whatever their other faults, are such born poets that Voltaire's laboured verse could never have been read by either without fits of angry impatience. Remains, then, St Evremond; and here there is analogy, but little or no direct influence. Madame de Girardin was, above all, impressed by the atmosphere in which she lived, and only deserted the classics, such as Racine and the rest, because she breathed the air of a world in which Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Balzac, and George Sand were the objects of literary passion. Musset may have read St Evremond, but it is just as likely that he never did so. Musset was not a reader; he was what is termed in France a viveur, and there was little enough of the homme de lettres about him. No! it would be truer, perhaps, to say that there was a certain mysterious intellectual 'pressure from without,' that acted, they knew not why, upon some minds, forcing them to see the discrepancies of this nether world, the mixture of absurdity in disaster, and of sadness in pleasure, which really does go far sometimes to make all the world a stage.' That this influence was mysteriously and everywhere at work, finds a proof in a fact that Lamartine ignores: in the effect produced upon the most metaphysical of all poets, upon a man really absorbed in the unselfish passion of things,' as he himself expresses it-upon Shelley. Julian and Maddalo' is anterior to 'Don Juan,' and it is not uninteresting to mark, in Shelley's own letters, the impression it produced upon Lord Byron, and the reflections made by both poets upon a style that should