(which is better than knowing, he says) -that he and Lucy will be married one day; that one day they will be able to make their nest somewhere, like the birds, in some pleasant tree, with green branches all round, and the sky shining through.

Meanwhile, though he waits, he does not despond. He attains more than serenity in his quick sympathies with all human interests, his keen appreciation of beauty, his love of flowers and sunshine, music and pictures (moving pictures, as well as those fixed to canvas), his sensitive perception of the good and true in all that is before him-whether people in the streets, flowers in the fields, or clouds in the sky. In all this-his heritage from nature, of which his own true heart recognises the value-Wentworth unconsciously finds, and ever will find, a happiness that you, poor Dudley Vavasour, vainly look for half over the world, with three thousand a-year, 'position,' connection-all appliances and means to boot.

Truly, we may well ask, who are the happy? One-twentieth part of these said appliances, which are all impotent to give ease or contentment to him who possesses so much, would, how often! remove the sharpest thorn from the path of those who tread their hard way unaided, only drawing gladness from the wealth of their own hearts. Thank God for that wealth of the heart! His justice and even-handed wisdom even our finite vision can perceive, sometimes.

Who are happy? Not they who, to our eyes, possess most means of happiness.

Not Mrs Courtly, who married for love, with the unusual appendage of plenty of money, and the thorough approbation of her friends, and who is cited by every one as an example of 'a fortunate woman indeed.' Fortunate she may be-happy she is not as I have known ever since I spent three days with her at her Richmond Villa. She has so many pleasures, she has no time to be pleased. All those things that to most people are enjoyments, are to her only soporifics. It needs strong wine indeed to exhilarate her. She is clearly not a denizen of this terra incognita-this happy land.

Neither is pretty Laura Haverill-the belle of her circle-the idol of her family -the universally admired and flattered Corinne of half-a-hundred evening parties. How many good gifts have fallen to her share?-beauty, talent, affluence, and love-love as common to her as day

light, and, alas! as little thought of. Yet she is fretful, fastidious, blasé of the very blessings fate showers upon her. Her days seem to pass in an alternation of excitement and reaction. She is now in a whirl of gaiety-anon plunged in the stagnant, unprofitable slough of ennui. What is it she needs, to convert her matériel into that mysterious, impalpable thing whereof we speak? I am not prepared to say. I do not pretend to tell why it is that these people, who appear to possess most of the means, appear farthest from the end: why they who receive most blessings are oftentimes least blessed. I only declare; I cannot profess to explain.

Very likely you would smile (yet I think it would be in a sad sort), if you knew the whole life-history of the woman that always occurs to me as the truest example of happiness I have ever known. But you shall see her.

She was already middle-aged when I first knew her. I heard she was once eminently attractive in look and manner

as, indeed, such a sweet simple nature and clear intellect as she possessed would make any woman. But at the time I saw her, all this was seen through the cloud left by severe suffering, both of mind and body, such as she had known almost continuously during the past ten years. Hers was a nature that lavished its love as summer clouds the rain-it fell noiselessly, abundantly, in simple, unquestioning delight of giving. In her earliest womanhood, a younger sister was the recipient of all this wealth of tenderness and care. The sister married-went abroad-almost forgot her, or remembered her only in a way that was perhaps bitterer than oblivion. Then, Anna loved, in the woman's great sense of loving, one who was to her the model of all manliness, nobility, and greatness. Within a few weeks of the time that they last spent together, when he, by every eloquence of look and tone, had persuaded her of his love while winning hers, he married a rich woman, old, unloveable, and foolish. Anna lost not only her love, but her ideal. tiful fabric of her life's dearest dream was shivered into a million pieces, and the very fragments were of dross.

The beau

After that her health failed, and all her relations being either far away, or indifferent to her fate, she went through the bitterness worse than that of death, of a long illness in a hired home, attended by paid nurses; cared for at so much a-week.

When she recovered, one or two of her kinder-hearted friends took her to stay with them for a time. It was on one of these occasions that I first met her. I remember what an impression I received from the sight of her cheerful face, that kindled anew with every new pleasure. And how many pleasures she had, and how intensely she enjoyed them! I did not know her history then, and I thought to myself how fairly apportioned must be the blessings of life, since she, who was poor and still suffering, evidently possessed compensating good gifts sufficient to make her happiness. I was right: but I did not know all. The good gifts were hers indeed, but they were of another and less tangible kind than I thought.

She very seldom spoke of herself, as may be supposed. Nothing can be more incompatible with the sort of unconscious, praiseful thanksgiving which was her daily life, than the morbid self-analysis, the continuous, ever-flowing, under-current of egotism that seems to be one of the prevalent diseases of these days. But once or twice she became unwontedly retrospective, and fragments of her Past came out unawares. And the depth of feeling she involuntarily betrayed showed me very clearly that the peace she knew was not that of indifference, and that the joys which yet blossomed about her had their root in sorrows greater and sufferings keener than most of those about her guessed.

She had all a woman's passionate necessity of loving, but very little of its usual more selfish complement of the necessity of being loved. Thus, her love showed itself in and towards a thousand things that by no possibility could yield her return. Birds, and flowers, and music, books, pictures, shells-such things as these, that other people admire and are content, she seemed rather to love; so fond, and grateful, and tender was her appreciation of their beauty. I have seen her radiant with a sort of tremulous delight in hearing of some lovely trait of character, or in watching little children at their play, or in gazing at some exquisite bit of scenery. Sunshine was brightness to her, clouds were pictures, the wind was music. The air came to her most balmily, the breeze most freshly. She was attuned to Nature somehow, so that all her variations were made musical; and even that which to other people would produce discord was only harmony with her.

She had faults undoubtedly; but I cannot think of them now. They were very visible to herself as well as to others. They did not make her miserable or despondent, but rather vitalised her energies for herself, and made her charity for others wider and warmer than in any other person I ever knew.

It was curious to hear her sometimes discussing, in her gentle way, with her hostess, a lady with an adoring husband, fair children, an ample fortune, and other minor advantages. This lady's views of life were gloomy-of humanity, condemnatory even to hopelessness.

'It makes me perfectly sick at heart to hear of such people. Oh dear! how much vileness and deceit exist in the world. Wickedness, crime, sin, meet us on every hand. Isn't it terrible?'

'Nay,' would be Anna's reply, 'I do not believe in the vileness of the world, nor in the utter depravity of mankind. Human nature must be very dear to the God who watches over its salvation. We have no right to cast out whom He receives.'

'Oh, of course, religiously speaking,' the lady would admit.

It was one wide difference between Anna's speaking and most other people's, that, though rarely religious in language, it was always so in spirit.

Dear Anna! I left her very bright, with her health renewed into its usual strength, and her heart as blithe and grateful as a skylark's song. When I next saw her, it was under a new load of pain and trial. A violent cold had settled on her limbs, and deprived her for many months of the power of walking. I found her confined to a sofa, in a suburban lodging, her window looking out over the trim road and opposite houses, with their little green gardens in front. But the aspect was south, and she was eloquent over the warmth and brightness of her domicile.

'This room is so cosy, and the people of the house are very considerate. And my friends here are so kind, and come to see me, and sit with me, and write me long letters when they are away. You see my suffering and helplessness bring out everybody's goodness. I feel quite glad and grateful, not only for my own sake, when old Mrs Cross, who is so disliked, comes and brings me books and fruit; and Mr Seamore, whom people call avaricious and selfish, sends his carriage

to take me a drive, as he has done several times.'

Soon after this, a new hope brightened her life. Her youngest brother wrote to her from India, to say he was coming to England; that he longed for a home, and looked to her to share in and superintend it when he should arrive.

'I shall have a real home, with my brother, my very own brother; my own home! Oh, how good, how dear a blessing, no one can tell!'

But I could guess, seeing her tears of passionate rejoicing, how sad had been the gap that now promised to be filled up.

Well, the happiness of anticipation she had, and enjoyed to the uttermost. The gladness of fulfilment never was hers. Her brother died on his passage home. By his death, moreover, a portion of her slender income devolved away from her. She was so poor now, that she had to eke out her means of livelihood by working at her needle.

'But that is a blessing. To be obliged to work, makes the time of my forced imprisonment pass more quickly. There is an added interest given to the work, you see, that only necessity could supply. It must be bad for me, if I had time to think too much of my brother. Oh, my dear brother Francis, we were little children together!'

Her external fortitude broke down at the mention of her brother.

'It seemed so very sad and desolate at first. I had hoped and yearned so much. For a little while I felt quite heartbroken, like a chidden child. But then came the peace God sends to his chidden children. It is so comforting to feel that, when trouble is with us, God is with us too.'

Not long after, I saw Anna once again. She lay very quiet, and calm, and pale, on her white bed. Strong in her love, undoubting in her faith, she was waiting for death.

'Dear, don't you grieve; there is no pain left now; and I have been thinking so happily. It is strange, my mother died while I was a little child, but I can remember her face now quite well. . . . How good every one is to me! I love you all very much, but not half enough. Nay, don't cry. Think how happy I have been, how happy I am, even though Ah, thank God for all!'

And when I looked on her an hour after, when her face shone with that wonderful shining that never comes till the earthly light is gone, and there has come on the mortal shell the passionless, emotionless, far-removed stillness of death, I, too, could say, 'Thank God for all!' and think, as I turned again to the outer, living world of sunshine, sound, and movement, 'Truly, she is happy.'

Ar the very moment when the manly language of Pascal, Molière, and the grand school of Port Royal was tapering away into the refined and almost effeminate delicacy of Labruyère and the moralists of his school, Saint-Simon, a youth of twenty, nurtured in the traditions and phraseology of the past, was busy infusing into his memoirs something of the force and freedom of that vigorous and racy French written and spoken towards the close of the reign of Louis XIII. The style of Saint-Simon, variously appreciated by Frenchmen, has been particularly impugned by observers of grammatical niceties as loose and desultory. By those,

With some

on the contrary, who do not absolutely pin their faith as the slaves of such sciolists as Vaugelas and Dumarsais, it is justly considered as affording one of the richest and most substantial specimens of the language in existence. thing of the length and musical sweep of our Clarendon's periods, it presents ever and anon a curtness, an elliptical abruptness, which, while it prevents the sentence from palling on the ear, gives it additional zest and poignancy. It would be absurd, however, to assign any particular manner to a work, the essential characteristic of which is variety: a variety exhibiting at one time the austere and searching

style of the inexorable historian, with a dash of the broadest humour, the richest comedy: at another, the most harrowing or bewitching narrative, graced too, when occasion requires it should, by the elevated reflections of the moralist, or the still loftier strains of the Christian orator. These inimitable qualities of style, the exponents of almost unparalleled powers of penetration and portraiture, have long since assigned to the works of their possessor a place on the same shelf with those of Tacitus and Bossuet. Saint-Simon's memoirs, now publishing for the third time in France, made their first appearance entire (such is the statement of the early editors) in 1829; and created, despite a literary school thus openly at variance with the classical past, a sensation scarcely inferior to that produced by the first French translation of the Waverley Novels. They embrace a period of paramount importance in the eyes of Frenchmen-namely, the second half of Louis XIV.'s reign, precisely that of his contest with our English William and Anne, and the whole of the regency, closing only with the death of the Duke of Orleans, in 1723. They are the work of a man who traversed, undazzled, some of the most glorious years of the 'Grand Monarque's' reign, and who resisted, notwithstanding his youth, the enthusiasm which blinded the rest of his countrymen; judging severely, nay sometimes harshly, a policy which his contemporaries all but worshipped. Macaulay's observation, that the French of Louis XIV.'s time were not aware, in their infatuation of king-worship, that their adored monarch was in stature even below the usual standard, cannot for an instant apply to a mind so vigorously tempered as that of the Duke de Saint-Simon. No man ever took the measure, either mental or bodily, of his sovereign with more provoking coolness than he. No man more clearly understood than he did the object of that sovereign's policy in calling his nobles around him. None ever went deeper into the vices of his administration, the vices of his education, the

* 'Mémoires Complets et Authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon, sur le Siècle de Louis XIV. et la Régence. Nouvelle édition collationnée soigneusement sur le manuscrit original, avec le consentement de M. le Duc actuel de Saint-Simon qui en est seul propriétaire; avec une notice de M. Sainte-Beuve de l'Academie Française, et une table alphabétique compléte des matières redigée spécialement pour cette edition.' Paris: 1856.

None

vices of his temper and character. ever brought out in more appalling or more ludicrous colours the vices and dangers of the bigoted and idiot piety which could repeal the edict of Nantes, and erect hypocrisy into a standing law of French society. It is he who tells us, that the king's education had been so neglected as to leave him in ignorance of the most vulgar facts connected with law or history, exposing him even in public to the grossest and most palpable absurdities. It is he who informs us that flexibility, meanness, a cringing, slavish air of admiration, or rather of helpless imbecility, seen save by and through the king himself, was the only means of winning his favour; and that this spirit of self-adulation and complacency was carried such lengths by a prince neither deficient in sense nor experience, that, though without either voice or ear for music, he would, in private, keep incessantly humming such opera prologue passages as were most outrageous in his praise. He admits, too, with a candour which communicates a deeper tinge to the darker parts of the portrait, that Louis XIV., though his intellect was below par, was possessed of many good qualities: had a remarkable power of appropriation, an air of natural grandeur; talked well, easily, and in good terms; and that even his ordinary conversation was not devoid of a certain stamp of majesty: adding, however, that his ears were poisoned by the most crying and hideous flattery; that he was deified within the very pale of Christianity, made drunk with his authority, his grandeur, and glory; and that, but for that fear of the devil which it pleased God to leave him a prey to as his greatest disorder, he would assuredly have had himself worshipped, and as certainly have met with adorers. On the score of the royal religion, we have one brief, pertinent, and conclusive anecdote. When the Duke of Orleans was about to leave for Spain, where, says Saint-Simon, he intended to join Berwick (the bastard son of our James II.), Louis asked him what persons he meant to take with him. The duke mentioned, among others, Fontpertuis.— 'What, nephew,' replied the king, with emotion, 'the son of that madwoman who ran after the Jansenist Arnauld?'—'Upon my faith, sire,' rejoined D'Orleans, I know not what the mother did, but the son I uphold to be no Jansenist; he doesn't even believe in God.'-'Is it

possible?' was the king's exclamation; and are you sure of it? Well, if that is the case, you may take him with you.'

'Saint-Simon,' says Sainte-Beuve, in his introduction to the present edition of that nobleman's memoirs, 'is the greatest painter of his age, the age of Louis XIV. in the full blaze of its development. Till the publication of his memoirs, there existed not even a suspicion of the life, interest, and ever-recurring dramatic movement supplied by the court, court scenes, marriages, deaths, and sudden changes, nay, even the ordinary tenor of daily life, with the reflex hues of its hopes and disappointments thrown over the features of countless faces, not one of which is alike, the ebb and flow of conflicting ambitions imparting more or less visible animation to all the characters and groups seen in the great gallery of Versailles, once a mighty maze, but not now without a plan, inasmuch as, thanks to his labours, they give up the secret of their combinations and contrasts. Till the publication of Saint-Simon, we had but snatches, mere sketches of all this: he was the first to give, with an infinity of detail, a vast impression of the varied whole. If ever man has rendered it possible to re-people Versailles in imagination, and re-people it without a feeling of weariness, he is the man. His page, as Buffon says of spring, is warm with life. But they produce, at the same time, a singular effect with regard to the times and reigns which they do not include. On leaving off the perusal of his pages, to open those of any other history or even memoirs, you are apt to find everything flat, stale, and unprofitable. Every period which has not had its Saint-Simon, at once appears something uninhabited and forlorn, something voiceless and colourless. Very few periods of French history, were the trial made, would stand such a test, resist such a counter-shock; for painters of his description are rare; indeed, for animation and fulness, there has been, down to the present time, but one Saint-Simon. Not but there have been memoirs varied and beautiful in form before his time. He would have been the first to protest against an act of injustice calculated to lessen his predecessors, who were, he makes the declaration himself, his prompters and pattern, the sources from which he derived a taste for living and animated history. Painters, too, were the Ville

hardouins and Joinvilles, in the midst of their somewhat cramped but delightfully and artlessly awkward narrations. The Froissarts, the Commynses, also had already attained to skill and art without forfeiting the graces of simplicity. Then what a galaxy, what a generation of writers, at once soldiers and civilians, was produced by the wars of the sixteenth century-a Montluc, a Javannes, a D'Aubigné, and a Brantöme. What originality of language, and all from the fountainhead, and what diversity in the accent and evidence! Sully, in the midst of his operoseness, evinces many really beautiful, solid, and attaching qualities, lit up by the smile of Henri IV. And the Fronde-what a crop of recitals of all sorts, what a sudden covey of unexpected historians hatched from among its own actors, at the head of which stands his eminently brilliant and conspicuous Retz, the greatest painter before the advent of Saint-Simon. But the generation of memoir writers proceeding from the Fronde pause, as it were, on the threshold of the real reign of Louis XIV. From that period we have nothing but rapid, unfinished sketches, traced by elegant, acute, but somewhat listless pens: Madame de La Fayette, La Fare, Madame de Caylus. They beget a relish, but do not satisfy it: they begin, but leave you half-way. Now, no pen is less liable to fail or leave you, less indolent, less apt to be dispirited, than that of SaintSimon. He addicts himself to history, from his youth up, as to a task and a mission. He does not allow his pen to run on in old age like Retz, calling up dim and distant recollections; a method always perilous, and unavoidably the source of confusion and error. He stores up facts day by day, and writes them down night after night. He begins at the early age of nineteen, in his military tent, and plies his task incessantly at Versailles, and everywhere else. He is, like Herodotus, ever and ever inquiring. On pedigree he is second to none: on the past he argues with the learning of an antiquary. To the present he is all eye and ear, scenting whatever is on foot, and setting it down incontinently. He turns every spare hour to account. In old age, and when living in retirement on his estate, he arranges the whole mass of materials in one unique and continuous stream of narrative, merely dividing it into distinct paragraphs, with marginal titles; and the whole of this im