so; and was carried to such an excess, that frequently the moment a gentleman appeared in a new coat the ladies crowded round him and soon divested it of all its gold ornaments.

The following is an instance:- The Duke de Coigny one night appeared in a new and most expensive coat suddenly a lady in the company remarked that its gold bindings would be excellent for untwisting. In an instant he was surrounded-all the scissors in the room were at work; in short, in a few moments the coat was stripped of its laces, its galoons, its tassels, its fringes; and the poor duke, notwithstanding his vexation, was forced by politeness to laugh and praise the dexterity of the fair hands that robbed him."

But what a solace did that passion for needlework, which the queen indulged in herself and encouraged in others, become to her during her fearful captivity. This unhappy princess was born on the day of the Lisbon earthquake, which seemed to stamp a fatal mark on the era of her birth; and many circumstances occurred during her life which have since been considered as portentous.

""Tis certain that the soul hath oft foretaste

Of matters which beyond its ken are placed."

One circumstance, simple in itself and easily explained, is recorded by Madame Campan as having impressed Marie with shuddering anticipations of evil:

"One evening, about the latter end of May, she was sitting in the middle of her room, relating several remarkable occurrences of the day. Four wax

candles were placed upon her toilet; the first went out of itself—I relighted it; shortly afterwards the second, and then the third, went out also: upon which the queen, squeezing my hand with an emotion of terror, said to me, Misfortune has power to make us superstitious; if the fourth taper go out like the first, nothing can prevent my looking upon it as a fatal omen!'-The fourth taper went out.”

At an earlier period Goëthe seems, with somewhat of a poet's inspiration, to have read a melancholy fate for her. When young he was completing his studies at Strasburg. In an isle in the middle. of the Rhine a pavilion had been erected, intended to receive Marie Antoinette and her suite, on her way to the French court.

I was admitted into it," says Goëthe, in his Memoirs : on my entrance I was struck with the subject depicted in the tapestry with which the principal pavilion was hung, in which were seen Jason, Creusa, and Medea; that is to say, a representation of the most fatal union commemorated in history. On the left of the throne the bride, surrounded by friends and distracted attendants, was struggling with a dreadful death; Jason, on the other side, was starting back, struck with horror at the sight of his murdered children; and the Fury was soaring into the air in her chariot drawn by dragons. Superstition apart, this strange coincidence was really striking. The husband, the bride, and the children, were victims in both cases: the fatal omen seemed accomplished in every point."

The following notices of her imprisonment would but be spoiled by any alteration of language. We

shall perceive that one of her greatest troubles in prison, before her separation from the king and the dauphin, was the being deprived of her sewing implements.

During the early part of Louis XVI.'s imprisonment, and while the treatment of him and his family was still human, his majesty employed himself in educating his son; while the queen, on her part, educated her daughter. Then they passed some time in needlework, knitting, or tapestrywork.

At this time the royal family were in great want of clothes, insomuch that the princesses were employed in mending them every day; and Madame Elizabeth was often obliged to wait till the king was gone to bed, in order to have his to repair. The linen they brought to the Tower had been lent them by friends, some by the Countess of Sutherland, who found means to convey linen and other things for the use of the dauphin. The queen wished to write a letter to the countess expressive of her thanks, and to return some of these articles, but her majesty was debarred from pen and ink; and the clothes she returned were stolen by her jailors, and never found their way to their right owner.

"After many applications a little new linen was obtained; but the sempstress having marked it with crowns, the municipal officers insisted on the princesses picking the marks out, and they were forced to obey.

"Dec. 7.-An officer, at the head of a deputation from the commune, came to the king and read a decree, ordering that the persons in confinement

should be deprived of all scissors, razors, knives— instruments usually taken from criminals; and that the strictest search should be made for the same, as well on their persons as in their apartments. The king took out of his pocket a knife and a small morocco pocket-book, from which he gave the penknife and scissors. The officer searched every corner of the apartments, and carried off the razors, the curling-irons, the powder-scraper, instruments for the teeth, and many articles of gold and silver. They took away from the princesses their knittingneedles and all the little articles they used for their embroidery. The unhappy queen and princesses were the more sensible of the loss of the little instruments taken from them, as they were in consequence forced to give up all the feminine handiworks which till then had served to beguile prison hours. At this time the king's coat became ragged, and as the Princess Elizabeth, his sister, was mending it, as she had no scissors, the king observed that she had to bite off the thread with her teeth

What a reverse!' said the king, looking tenderly upon her; you were in want of nothing at your pretty house at Montreuil.' Ah, brother!' she replied, can I feel a regret of any kind while I share your misfortunes?""

The Empress Josephine is said to have played and sung with exquisite feeling: her dancing is said to have been perfect. She exercised her pencil, and-though such be not now antiquated for an élégante - her needle and embroidery-frame, with beautiful address.

Towards the close of her eventful career, when,

after her divorce from Bonaparte, she kept a sort of domestic court at Navarre or Malmaison, she and her ladies worked daily at tapestry or embroidery— one reading aloud whilst the others were thus occupied, and the hangings of the saloon at Malmaison were entirely her own work. They must have been elegant; the material was white silk, the embroidery roses, in which at intervals were entwined her own initials.

An interesting circumstance is related of a conversation between one of those ministering spirits a sœur de la charité and Josephine, in a time of peculiar excitement and trouble. At the conclusion of it, the sœur, having discovered with whom she was conversing, added, "Since I am addressing the mother of the afflicted, I no longer fear my being indiscreet in any demand I may make for suffering humanity. We are in great want of lint; if your majesty would condescend" "I promise you

shall have some; we will make it ourselves."

From that moment the evenings were employed at Malmaison in making lint, and the empress yielded to none in activity at this work.

Few of my readers will have accompanied me to this point without anticipating the name with which these slight notices of royal needlewomen must conclude a name which all know, and which, knowing, all reverence as that of a dignified princess, a noble and admirable matron-Adelaide, our Dowager Queen. It was hers to reform the morals of a court which, to our shame, had become licentious; it was hers to render its charmed circle as pure and virtuous as the domestic hearth of the most scrupulous