so void of any thing remarkable in his aspect, that, being asked if I knew who he was, I judged him a Scotch officer-for he was sandy complexioned and in regimentals-who was cautiously awaiting the moment of promotion." All this is in Walpole's style of fashionable impertinence; but there can be no doubt that Paoli was a brave man, and an able commander. He gave the French several severe defeats, but the contest was soon too unequal, and Paoli withdrew to this country; which was so soon after to be a shelter to the aristocracy of the country which had stained his mountains with blood. By a singular fate, on his return to France in an early period of the Revolution, he was received with a sort of national triumph, and actually appointed lieutenant-general of Corsica by the nation which had driven him into exile. In the war which followed, Paoli, disgusted by the tyranny of French republicanism, and alarmed by the violence of the native factions, proposed to put his country under the protection of the English government. A naval and military force was sent to Corsica, and the island was annexed to the British crown. But the possession was not maintained with rational vigour. The feeble armament was found unequal to resist the popular passion for republicanism. And, from this expenditure of troops, and probably still more from the discovery that the island would be wholly useless, the force was altogether withdrawn. Paoli returned to England, where he died, having attained the advanced age of eighty. His red hair and sandy complexion are probably fatal to his character as an Italian chieftain. But if his locks were not black, his heart was bold; and if his lip wanted mustaches, his mind wanted Reither sagacity nor determination. Walpole was born for a cynic philosopher. He treats men of all ranks with equal scorn. From Wilkes to George III., he brands them all. Ministers meet no mercy at his hands. He ranges them, as the Sultan used to range heads on the spikes of the seraglio, for marks for his arrows. His history is a species of moveable the panorama; scene constantly shifting, and every scene a burlesque of the one that went before; or perhaps the more faithful similitude would be found in a volume of HB.'s ingenious caricatures, where all the likenesses are preserved, though perverted, and all the dexterity of an accomplished pencil is employed only in making its subjects ridiculous. He thus tells us: "The Duke of Grafton was the fourth prime minister in seven years, who fell by his own fault. Lord Bute was seized with a panic, and ran away from his own victory. Grenville was undone by his insolence, by joining in the insult on the princess, and by his persecution of Lord Bute and Mackenzie. Lord Rockingham's incapacity overturned him; and now the Duke of Grafton destroyed a power which it had depended on himself to make as permanent as he could desire." But rash and rapid as those changes were, what were the grave intrigues of the English cabinet to the boudoir ministries of France? Walpole is never so much in his element, as when he is sporting in the fussy frivolities of the Faubourg St Germain. He was much more a Frenchman than an Englishman; his love of gossip, his passion for haunting the society of talkative old women, and his delight at finding himself revelling in a region of petits soupers, court gallantries, and the faded indiscretions of court beauties in the wane, would have made him a rival to the courtiers of Louis XIV. Perhaps, the world never saw, since the days of Sardanapalus, a court so corrupt, wealth so profligate, and a state of society so utterly contemptuous of even the decent affectation of virtue, as the closing years of the reign of Louis XV. A succession of profligate women ruled the king, a similar succession ruled the cabinet; lower life was a sink of corruption; the whole a romance of the most scandalous order. Madame de Pompadour, a woman whose vice had long survived her beauty, and who ruled the decrepit heart of a debauched king, had made Choiseul minister. Choiseul was the beauideal of a French noble of the old régime. His ambition was boundless, his insolence ungoverned, his caprice unrestrained, and his love of pleasure predominant even over his love of power. "He was an open enemy, but a generous one; and had more pleasure in attaching an enemy, than in punishing him. Whether from gaiety or presumption, he was never dismayed; his vanity made him always depend on the success of his plans, and his spirits made him soon forget the miscarriage of them." At length appeared on the tapis the memorable Madame du Barri! For three months, all the faculties of the court were absorbed in the question of her public presentation. Indulgent as the courtiers were to the habits of royal life, the notoriety of Madame du Barri's early career, startled even their flexible sense of etiquette. The ladies of the court, most of whom would have been proud to have taken her place, determined "that they would not appear at court if she should be received there." The King's daughters (who had borne the ascendant of Madame du Pompadour in their mother's life) grew ontrageous at the new favourite; and the relatives of Choiseul insisted upon it, that he should resign rather than consent to the presentation. Choiseul resisted, yielded, was insulted for his resistance, and was scoffed at for his submission. He finally retired, and was ridiculed for his retirement. Du Barri triumphed. Epigrams and calembours blazed through Paris. Every one was a wit for the time, and every wit was a rebel. The infidel faction looked on at the general dissolution of morals with delight, as the omen of general overthrow. The Jesuits rejoiced in the hope of getting the old King into their hands, and terrifying him, if not into a proselyte, at least into a tool. Even Du Barri herself was probably not beyond their hopes; for the established career of a King's mistress was, to turn dévote on the decay of her personal attractions. Among Choiseul's intentions was that of making war on England. There was not the slightest ground for a war. But it is a part of the ctiquette of a Frenchman's life, that he must be a warrior, or must promote war, or must dream of a war. M. Guizot is the solitary exception in our age, as M. Fleury was the solitary exception in the last; but Fleury was a an ecclesiastic, and was eighty years old besides-two strong disqualifications for a conqueror. But the King was then growing old, too; his belligerent propensities were absorbed in quarrels with his provincial parliaments; his administrative faculties found sufficient employment in managing the morals of his mistresses; his private hours were occupied in pelting Du Barri with sugar-plums; and thus his days wore away without that supreme glory of the old régime—a general war in Europe. The calamities of the French noblesse at the period of the Revolution, excited universal regret; and the sight of so many persons, of graceful manners and high birth, flung into the very depths of destitution in foreign lands, or destroyed by the guillotine at home, justified the sympathy of mankind. But, the secret history of that noblesse was a fearful stigma, not only on France, but on human nature. Vice may have existed to a high degree of criminality in other lands; but in no other country of Europe, or the earth, ever was vice so public, so ostentatiously forced upon the eyes of man, so completely formed into an established and essential portion of fashionable and courtly life. It was even the etiquette, that the King of France should have a mistress. She was as much a part of the royal establishment as a prime minister was of the royal councils; and, as if for the purpose of offering a still more contemptuous defiance to the common decencies of life, the etiquette was, that this mistress should be a married woman! Yet in that country the whole ritual of Popery was performed with scrupulous exactness. A vast and powerful clergy filled France; and the ceremonials of the national religion were performed continually before the court, with the most rigid formality. The King had his confessor, and, so far as we can discover, the mistress had her confessor too; the nobles attended the royal chapel, and also had their confessors. The confessional was never without royal and noble solicitors of monthly, or, at the furthest, quarterly absolution. Still, from the whole body of ecclesiastics, France heard no remonstrance against those public abominations. Their sermons, few and feeble, sometimes declaimed on the vices of the beggars of Paris, or the riots among the peasantry; but no sense of scriptural responsibility, and no natural feeling of duty, ever ventured to deprecate the vices of the nobles and the scandals of the throne. We must give but a fragment, from Walpole's catalogue raisonné, of this Court of Paphos. It had been the King's object to make some women of rank introduce Madame du Barri at court; and he had found considerable difficulty in this matter, not from her being a woman of no character, but from her being a woman of no birth, and whose earlier life had been spent in the lowest condition of vice. The King at last succeeded-and these are the chaperons. "There was Madame de l'Hôpital, an ancient mistress of the Prince de Soubize! The Comtesse Valentinois, of the highest birth, very rich, but very foolish; and as far from a Lucretia as Madame du Barri herself! Madame de Flavacourt was another, a suitable companion to both in virtue and understanding. She was sister to three of the King's earliest mistresses, and had aimed at succeeding them! The Maréchale Duchesse de Mirpoix was the last, and a very important acquisition." Of her, Walpole simply mentions that all her talents were "drowned in such an overwhelming passion for play, that though she had long and singular credit with the King, she reduced her favour to an endless solicitation for money to pay her debts." He adds, in his keen and amusing style-“That, to obtain the post of dame d'honneur to the Queen, she had left off red (wearing rouge,) and acted dévotion; and the very next day was seen riding with Madame de Pompadour (the King's mistress) in the latter's coach!" The editor settles the question of her morality, too.-"She was a woman of extraordinary wit and cleverness, but totally without character." She had her morals by inheritance; for she was the daughter of the mistress of the Duke of Lorraine, who married her to Monsieur de Beauvan, a poor noble, and whom the duke got made a prince of the empire, by the title of De Craon. Now, all those were females of the highest rank in France, ladies of fashion, the stars of court life, and the models of national manners. Can we wonder at the retribution which cast them out into the highways of Europe? Can we wonder at the ruin of the corrupted nobility? Can we wonder at the massacre of the worldly church, which stood looking on at those vilenesses, and yet never uttered a syllable against them, if it did not even share in their excesses? The true cause for astonishment is, not in the depth of their fall, but in its delay; not in the severity of the national judgment, but in that longsuffering which held back the thunderbolt for a hundred years, and even then did not extinguish the generation at a blow! A FEW PASSAGES CONCERNING OMENS, DREAMS, APPEARANCES, &C.. IN A LETTER TO EUSEBIUS. No. II. Ir is somewhat late, my dear Eusebius, to refer me to my letter of August 1840, and to enquire, in your bantering way, if I have shaken hands with a ghost recently, or dreamed a dream worth telling. You have evidently been thinking upon this subject ever since I wrote to you; and I suspect you are more of a convert than you will admit. You only wish to provoke me to further evidence; but I see-through the flimsy veil of your seeming denials, and through your put-on audacity-the nervous workings of your countenance, when your imagination is kindled by the mysterious subject. Your wit and your banter are but the whistle of the clown in the dark, to keep down his rising fears. However good your story* may be, there have been dreams even of the numbers of lottery-tickets that have been verified. We call things coincidences and chances, because we have no name to give them, whereas they are phenomena that want a better settlement. You speak, too, of the "doctrine of chances." If chance have a doctrine, it is subject to a rule, is under calculation, arith metic, and loses all trace at once of our idea of absolute chance. If there be chance, there is also a power over chance. The very hairs of our head, which seem to be but a chance-confusion, are yet, we are assured, all numbered-and is it less credible that their every movement is noted also? One age is the type of another; and every age, from the beginning of the world, hath had its own symbols; and not poetically only, but literally true is it, that "coming events cast their shadows before." If the "vox populi" be the "vox Dei," it has pronounced continually, in a space of above five thousand years, that there is communication between the material and immaterial worlds. So rare are the exceptions, that, speaking of mankind, we may assert that there is a universal belief amongst them of that connexion by signs, omens, dreams, visions, or ghostly presences. Many professed sceptics, who have been sceptics only in the pride of understanding, have in secret bowed down to one form or other of the superstition. Take not the word in a bad sense. It is at least the germ, the The story given by Eusebius is very probably of his own manufacture. It is this. Some years ago, when all the world were mad upon lotteries, the cook of a middle-aged gentleman drew from his hands the savings of some years. Her master, curious to know the cause, learned that she had repeatedly dreamed that a certain number was a great prize, and she had bought it. He called her a fool for her pains, and never omitted an occasion to tease her upon the subject. One day, however, the master saw in the newspaper, or at his bookseller's in the country town, that the number was actually the L.20,000 prize. Cook is called up, a palaver ensues— s-had known each other many years, loth to part, &c.—in short, he proposes and is accepted, but insists on marriage being celebrated next morning. Married they were; and, as the carriage took them from the church, they enjoy the following dialogue. "Well, Molly-two happy events in one day. You have married, I trust, a good husband. You have something else—but first let me ask you where you have locked up your lottery-ticket." Molly, who thought her master was only bantering her again on the old point, cried-"Don't ye say no more about it. I thought how it would be, and that I never should hear the end on't, so I sold it to the baker of our village for a guinea profit. So you need never be angry with me again about that." natural germ, of religion in the human mind. It is the consciousness of a superiority not his own, of some power so immeasurably above man, that his mind cannot take it in, but accepts, as inconsiderable glimpses of it, the phenomena of nature, and the fears and misgivings of his own mind, spreading out from himself into the infinite and invisible. I am not certain, Eusebius, if it be not the spiritual part of conscience, and is to it what life is to organized matter-the mystery which gives it all its motion and beauty. It is not my intention to repeat the substance of my former letter-I therefore pass on. You ask me if the mesmeric phenomena-which you ridicule, yet of which I believe you covet a closer investigation--are not part and parcel of the same incomprehensible farrago? I cannot answer you. It would be easy to do so were I a disciple. If the mesmerists can establish clairvoyance, it will certainly be upon a par with the ancient oracles. But what the philosopher La Place says, in his Essay on Probabilities, may be worth your consideration-that" any case, however apparently incredible, if it is a recurrent case, is as much entitled to a fair valuation under the laws of induction, as if it had been more probable beforehand." If the mesmerized can project, and that apparently without effort, their minds into the minds of others-read their thoughts; if they can see and tell what is going on hundreds of miles off, on the sea and on distant lands alike; if they can at remote distances influence others with a sense of their presence--they possess a power so very similar to that ascribed, in some extraordinary cases, to persons who, in a dying state, have declared that they have been absent and conversed with individuals dear to them in distant countries, and whose presence has been recognised at those very times by the persons so said to be visited, that I do not see how they can be referable to different original phenomena. Yet with this fact before them, supposing the facts of mesmerism, of the mind's separation from, and independence of its organic frame, is it not extraordinary that so many of this new school are, or profess themselves by their writings, materialists? I would, however, use the argument of mesmerism thus:-Mesmerism, if true, confirms the ghost and vision power, though I cannot admit that dreams, ghosts, and visions are any confirmation of mesmerism; for if mesmerism be a delusion and cheat, it may have arisen from speculating upon the other known power-as trus miracles have been known to give rise to false. In cases of mesmerism, however, this shock is felt-the facts, as facts in the ordinary sense, are incredible; but then I see persons who have examined the matter very nicely, whom I have known, some intimately, for many years, of whosegood sense, judgment, and veracity I will not allow myself to doubt-indeed to doubt whose veracity would. be more incredible to me than the mesmeric facts themselves. Here is a conflict-a shock. Two contradictory impossibilities come together. I do not weigh in the scale at all the discovery of some cheats and pretenders; this was from the first to have been expected. In truth, the discoveries of trick and collusion are, after all, few. Not only has mesmerism been examined into by persons I respect, but practised likewise; and by one, a physician, whom I have known intimately many years, who, to his own detriment, has pursued it, and whom I have ever considered one of the most truthful persons living, and incapable of collusion, or knowingly in any way deceiving. Eusebius, we cannot go into society, and pronounce persons whom we have ever respected all at once to be cheats and liars. Yet there may be some among them who will tell you that they themselves were entirely sceptical until they tried mesmerism, and found they had the power in themselves. We must then, in fairness, either acknowledge mesmerism as a power, or believe that these persons whom we respect and esteem are practised upon and deluded by others. And such would, I confess, be the solution of the difficulty, were it not that there are cases where this is next to an impossibility. Now, But I do not mean now, Eusebius, |