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The Chevalier de Belle-Isle, therefore, arranged his plan from conjecture; and tranquilly awaited the day when he should be confronted with his accusers.

According to the old French system of judicial investigation, the first examinations were always secret. The witness appeared in the presence of the accused, and no person attended the proceedings except the judge and the clerk. The prescribed rules, however, were not very rigorously observed when the accused party happened to be a person of rank. In the present case the deposition was read. It was very strong; but the Chevalier soon knew the man he had to deal with. He composed himself, and listened with profound attention to the evidence. Surprise, grief, and impatience, were by turns painted in his countenance. When the reading was ended, he rushed forward to the witness, and, seizing his hand, he exclaimed, in the most emphatic way, "How, Sir, can it be possible that you are my accuser?-You, for whom I have always felt so much interest!-You, whom I have ever regarded as a friend!-Can you lend an ear to such absurd calumnies?"-He continued to address the witness in a tone of vehemence and warmth, which indicated an affectionate complaint rather than a bitter recrimination, until he observed some happy result of his eloquence. He, moreover, employed an argument on which he relied with still greater confidence. On seizing the witness's hand, he contrived secretly to slip into it a note, which he had prepared for the purpose; and thus placed the witness in the delicate alternative of becoming either his accuser or his accomplice. The movement of the Chevalier de Belle-Isle was so sudden and unexpected, that nobody could think of opposing him; and, besides, it appeared extremely natural, and strictly within the bounds of legal defence. The witness was confounded by the impressive appeal that had been made to him; and found that he was in possession of a secret, which might decide the fate of an accused person, who had thus thrown himself on his generosity. He was aware of the danger of retracting, while, at the same time, he was flattered by the condescending way in which a man of rank treated him as his friend-in short, he was perplexed by conflicting thoughts and sentiments. The Chevalier observed the embarrassment of his antagonist, and felt the necessity of immediately relieving him. Resuming the evidence article by article, he endeavoured to soften it down, and at the same time to avoid compromising the witness by blank denials. His plan succeeded. The charges became more and more feeble, till, at length, the whole evidence rested on a few unimportant assertions, which, there was reason to hope, might be satisfactorily refuted. The sitting terminated; but such was the terror with which the witness was seized, that he had not courage to unclose the hand

in which he held the note. He passed the drawbridge of the Bastille, and wandered through almost every street in Paris, like a criminal, dreading the glance of every one he met. It was not until he reached the Pont-Royal that he ventured, by stealth, to cast his eyes on the note. Within the first envelope were written these words: "If you faithfully and speedily deliver the enclosed note according to its address, your fortune is made." The inner note was directed to a lady, the intimate friend of the Chevalier, requesting her to take charge of, and to suppress, certain letters which might prove of the utmost injury to his cause. The commission was punctually fulfilled, and the witness received the promised reward.

The above were not the only extraordinary circumstances attending the fate of the M. M. de Belle-Isle. When the evidence against them was at an end, the two brothers were granted somewhat more freedom, and also the permission of living together. By means of secret communications, they had agreed with a friend that, if their sentence should be unfavourable, they were to be warned of it by the firing of a certain number of guns. One day, as they were walking together on one of the ramparts of the prison, they heard the signal, and the fatal number of guns announced their irrevocable condemnation. They descended mournfully, and retired to their gloomy apartment. In a few moments, their friend rushed in to inform them of their acquittal. On enquiring into the cause of the mistake, it was found to have been occasioned by a gun-maker of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who happened that day to be making trial of some of his guns.

After their liberation, the most brilliant fortune attended the two prisoners. The Chevalier was created a Count, and promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-general: after distinguishing himself honourably in the service of his country, he was killed at the attack of Col-de-l'Assiette, in the year 1746. His eldest brother, who is celebrated for many acts of valour and military skill, particularly for the retreat of Prague, was created a Duke, a Peer and Maréchal of France, and died minister of war in 1761. At the commencement of the seven years' war, he had the misfortune to lose his only son, the Count de Gisors, a young officer of the greatest promise. Thus perished the last branches of the family of the Intendant. Like him, they possessed all the brilliant qualifications necessary for the success of ambitious projects; and they were memorable examples of the frowns and favours of fortune.

ON THE LESS CELEBRATED

PRODUCTIONS OF THE AUTHOR

OF DON QUIXOTE. NO. I.

THAT kindly feeling for literature, which is the characteristic of the present day, and which beams equal patronage on every production of the cultivated mind, receiving with the same hospitable welcome the child of every native muse, has hardly yet displayed a genial warmth in fostering the offspring of a foreign soil. The translations of our own times have been distinguished more by their ability than by the encouragement they have met with from the public; and little anxiety has been manifested, on the whole, to improve our acquaintance with the languages from which they have been transfused. Our immediate approximation to, and our constant and daily intercourse with our neighbours the French, have indeed rendered their language the favourite accomplishment of all who aim at some addition to their mother-tongue; and a slight knowledge of the works which have been written in that language is necessarily implied as the medium, if not the aim, of its acquirement. Our opera, too, and the airs which are derived from it, and have become favourites in the musical circles of fashion, recommend the Italian to the notice of those who are charged with the education of young ladies, as an useful, if not a necessary, appendage to familiarity with the mysteries of waltzing and quadrilling; whilst the cessation of the long war which closed the Continent upon English travellers, admitting a vast influx into the provinces of Italy, has tended to facilitate to our youth of the male sex the pronunciation of the delicate language "dove il si suona ;" and to teach them the conversational idiom, which their former method of study, commencing with the reading of Tasso and concluding with Dante or Petrarch, as little enabled them to attain, as a draught from the "pure wells of English undefiled," that bubbled in the Elizabethan age, would render a foreigner au fait to the compliments of a London levee. But, though neither the prose writers of ancient nor modern Italy are yet suffered to occupy much of our attention, it is certain that no inconsiderable degree of interest has recently been excited for the productions of her later bards, one of whom (Alfieri) is pretty generally talked of, if not read. But rarely is a glance of enquiry cast towards the Spanish peninsula. Spain offers no inducement to the traveller: the monotonous mould into which tyranny and anarchy have bent her national character, affords no relief that observation can seize on to describe, and music has not yet claimed her strains of poetry for its own. That noble language which, in the 17th century, every man eminent for rank or literature, in Italy, in Flanders, in Germany, in France, and even in Eng

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land,* would have blushed to have been thought ignorant of, is now the jargon of traffic; whilst its sister tongue, a scion of the same root, is almost wholly neglected and despised, except as a means of intercourse with the degenerate natives of the soil of Portugal. Those dramas which, at one period, were received on the same night with equal and eager approbation by a different audience at Madrid, at Brussels, at Munich, at Vienna, at Milan, and at Naples; which were imitated by Corneille, by Quinault, by Scarron, by Molière, by Shakspeare, by Fletcher, and by Dryden, have been thought worthy of translation only by a few German enthusiasts, and are not to be met with except in single plays or in small collections, having for the most part escaped the diligent search of those whose object it was to give an account of them. Of the thirty plays composed by Cervantes in his youth, only two can now be found; the two thousand dramas of Lope de Vega have dwindled into a moderate number, which are of rare occurrence; whilst Calderon owes a temporary reputation, as brilliant but as transient as the lights of the Aurora Borealis, to the eloquence of one solitary admirer, whose animated descriptions of his excellence have not yet tempted a single English pen to transfer his beauties to our language. If it be true that we have little acquaintance with Spanish literature, with much greater truth may it be affirmed that of the literature of Portugal we absolutely know nothing. The English language boasts but of two translations from the Portuguese, and both comprise portions of the works of Camöens: we may hereafter have occasion to speak of the degree of fidelity with which these are executed. We have been led into these reflections by contemplating the practicability of re-awakening some slight interest for the productions of men of no common genius, who lived in no ordinary times :-productions once so widely diffused, now so strangely neglected. In making the attempt, however, we shall select a few only from the host, and of these the limits of a work like the present will enable us to give but a very brief description. Were this not the case, we should be deterred from undertaking the task on a longer scale, aware as we are that this subject has long occupied the pen of one of the ablest writers of his age, who possesses all the information that can be derived from learning and local knowledge, and every charm of eloquence to render that information interesting to others.

The first writer whom we would select for this purpose is Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; and, having mentioned his name in the same page with that of the great founder of Portuguese

The marriage of Philip II. with Mary of England, and that of the Infanta Dona Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip III. with Louis XIII. of France, must have greatly increased the study of the Spanish language in the courts of London and Paris.

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poetry, we are tempted to indulge in the melancholy pleasure of tracing a comparison between their lives and fortunes; being struck with a similarity which we think is more than fanciful. They were contemporaries. Camoëns was born in 1524-9;* Cervantes in 1547: they have continued 'fellows in survivorship, standing side by side in the annals of Fame, whilst names that were thought greater in their day, have been obliterated from its rolls. They both served as soldiers in the ranks: the one lost an eye, the other a hand, in battles far from the native land of each, and in a warfare not essential to her interests, and yet both gloried in military exploits for which neither received a recompense. The former passed six years of his life in voluntary exile: the latter, nearly an equal period in slavery. They were both satirists, and visited by all the envy and malignity of their contemporaries: the mighty production of each was at first neglected and despised by all but its author, who saw with prophetic vision into futurity, and beheld the Babel of his fame rise above every petty tower by which it was then encompassed. Imprisonment for debt, poverty, and even beggaryt, were the lot of both the one received from a monarch a pension of less than five pounds per annum, as a recompense for the dedication of his poem; and the other was more largely, but hardly more liberally rewarded by a Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo. On their death-beds the parallel will not hold good; for the lastrecorded expressions of the former were words of melancholy foreboding; whilst the dedication which the latter penned four days before he expired, was written in a strain of cheerful

* M. De Souza believes 1525, on the authority of Manoel de Faria, who discovered an entry in the register of India at Lisbon, which mentions the age of Camoëns at the period of his departure for the East.

+ The melancholy fact that Camoëns was supported in his last moments by alms, which his black servant gathered in the streets of Lisbon, has been frequently alluded to; but what Capmany states is not so generally known, that Cervantes was so reduced as to be compelled "to beg for his support, and to receive assistance by the hands of the servants of his patrons, with, perhaps, the additional mortification to his noble spirit, of having it bestowed with insult and reproaches: “Anecdota," adds Capmany, "muy curiosa y quiza mas importante de saberse que todos los que se ignoran de su vida privada:"-a very curious anecdote, and perhaps more deserving of note than all which we are ignorant of, relating to the circumstances of his private life.— Teatro Historico Critico de la Eloquencia Espanola. Madrid, 1788. Tom. 4.

"At last death will terminate my sufferings, and it will be seen by all that my attachment to my country was so constant, that I was not merely satisfied with dying in her arms, but that I died with her."-Fragment of a letter of Camoens written in 1578. Vida de Camoes-Os Lusíadas Edic. De Souza. Paris, 1819.

"I would not," writes Cervantes, "be called upon to apply to myself the old stanzas which begin thus, the foot already in the stirrup; for I may say, with a slight alteration, that my foot is already in the stirrup, since I feel the pangs of death are on me, my Lord, whilst I am penning this dedication. Yesterday the extreme unction was administered to me; to day I resume my pen: my time is short, my pains increase, my hopes diminish; nevertheless, I wish that enough of life remained to enable me to behold you once more in Spain." Dedication of "Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda," to the Conde de Lemos, dated 23d April, 1616.

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