entire income of the estate-eighty thousand francs-in preserving and restoring the château: owing to the smallness of the sum, the works progress very slowly. The glass paintings in the windows represent St. Clotilde, and Queen Blanca, mother of St. Louis, as well as St. Henri and Charlemagne. It may be asked what the last does here. In the first place, the Catholic Church made him a saint, and, secondly, he is reckoned in France a French emperor, an ancestor of the Count de Chambord, according to the Legitimists. Lilies and H's are everywhere painted on the walls and ceiling. In this solitude a monastic silence constantly rules. I sat down and thought over the varied scenes which I had witnessed during my wanderings in Brittany and the Vendée, and saw how history buried a dynasty. It was thus I bade farewell to Chambord. THE CARNIVAL OF ROSPORDEN. BRETON LEGEND. BY LOUISA STUART COSTELLO. [The amusements of the Carnival, generally leading to licence, have, in all ages, been prohibited by the Church, and the preachers of Brittany are always loud in their censures of them. Amongst other records of judgment overtaking the profane, this legend is frequently cited:] FEBRUARY seven and twice ten, Three idle youths sat at the board, In fiery wine their sense to drown, They went the youngest, left behind, And horrible to view! And in the holes, where once were eyes, In trembling haste withdrew. The circuit each had made alone, The Lord look'd on with awful frown, The youngest, ere his home he sought, And, as he cast it down, cried out, He threw him on his bed and slept, As all were set, the table round, Some one knocks-at once they ran- DEATH entered: stalk'd with solemn pace: "Behold me! come to sup with thee! But, comrade, 'tis not far the place; All is ready in my tomb, Supper waits us, comrade, come!" Scarce he spoke-the youth, all dread, SUNSHINE OUT OF SEASON. A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE. BY FRANCIS JACOX. DESDEMONA dead, Othello, who has done her to death, stands looking on. He thinks she stirs again. No. No more moving. Still as the grave.-Emilia's footfall is heard outside. Shall he admit her? If she come in, she'll sure speak to his wife. His wife?—the word escaped him unawares; and instantly all that its import can suggest arouses in him a storm of frenzied grief and despair: My wife my wife! what wife ?-I have no wife : O insupportable! O heavy hour! And then comes the thought which for ever and ever will occur to the bereaved among the children of men, that surely Nature should sympathise with a sorrow like his, like theirs; that the sun should hide his face for a season, and sunshine be veiled and be clouded, until at least the tyranny of this great anguish be overpast. Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse How can the soul thus overwhelmed by some master woe, endure the light of gaudy babbling day, or even the softer sheen of moon and stars that govern the night? Should they not all be darkened for a while, is the self-absorbed mourner's wistful query,-so that the sun may not burn me by day, neither the moon by night? What but the blackness of darkness befits such insupportable and heavy hour, darkness that may be felt? Let such darkness be the burier of the dead. It has been remarked-but this by the way-that the daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else: In the night it presses on our imagination-the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. "The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine."+ Condolence catches at any semblance on Nature's part of sympathy with the grief of the day, and affects to soothe the bereaved with such outward and visible sign. So the Prince of Verona, in another of Shakspeare's tragedies, speaks words of comfort, such as they are, to childless Capulet and childless Montague, in bidding them discern the face of the sky, at daybreak after Romeo's, and Juliet's, death: A glooming peace this morning with it brings; Othello, Act V. Sc. 2. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life: Janet's Repentance, ch. xvi. And the same great poet makes the very Goddess of Beauty and Love adopt Othello's style, when the bleeding corpse of him she loved lies on the green sward before her: Wonder of time, quoth she, this is my spite, That, you being dead, the day should yet be light.* Byron, in his bitternes of soul, bids man gaze on the smiling glories of mighty Nature, while yet his gladdened eye may see: A morrow comes when they are not for thee: Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all.† When the Empress Irene put out the eyes of her son Constantine, a subsequent darkness over the whole land for seventeen days was attributed by superstition to that bloody deed; during which darkness many vessels in mid-day were driven from their course, as if, says Gibbon, the sun, a globe of fire so vast and so remote, could sympathise with the atoms of a revolving planet. Montaigne quotes but to deride "that idle fancy" of the Roman People, that for a whole year the sun carried in his face mourning for Cæsar's death; and cites with approval the doctrine of Pliny, that there is no such affinity betwixt us and heaven, that the brightness of the stars should be made mortal by our mortality. Non tanta cælo societas nobiscum est, ut nostro fato mortalis sit ille quoque siderum fulgor.§ Familiar to us all is a passage in Pope's correspondence in which the writer, like Othello, has his "methinks." When he reflects what an inconsiderable little atom every single man is, with respect to the whole creation, "methinks," says he, "tis a shame to be concerned at the removal of such a trivial animal as I am. The morning after my exit, the sun will rise as bright as ever, the flowers smell as sweet, the plants spring as green, the world will proceed in its old course, people will laugh as heartily, and marry as fast as they were used to do."|| Boswell defends "Pope's plaintive reflexion," as natural and common. Mr. Ingoldsby Barham versifies and diversifies it, in an unwonted interval of gravity: And thus 'twill be,-nor long the day, Ere we, like him, shall pass away! * Venus and Adonis, last stanza but eleven. † Lara, canto ii. Decline and Fall, ch. xlviii. Plin. Hist. Nat., II. 8; Montaigne, Essais, II. 13. The Tree, whose bending branches bear But where the hand that carved it ?-Where ?* The Shepherd in the Noctes Ambrosiana, waxing sentimental, some might think well-nigh maudlin, towards the close of a symposium, breaks out into the articulate reverie, "I sometimes wunner how the warld will gang on when I'm dead. It's no vanity, or ony notion that I gar the wheels o' the warld wark, that makes me think sae, but just an incapacity to separate my life frae the rest o' creation. Suns settin and risin, and me no there to glower! Birds singin, the mavis in the wood, and the laverock in the lift, and me no there to list-list-listen! . . . Some ane, lovelier than the lave, singin ane o' my ain sangs, and me in the unhearin grave!" The same Gentle Shepherd can ungently, if not ungenerously, snub Mr. Ambrose for a spice of sentiment of the like flavour-though it must be owned the snub is not inconsistent with the preliminary protest of the foregoing quotation. North is asleep, the Shepherd muses on sleep's affinity to death; and Mr. Ambrose-fervent worshipper of the Old Man with the Crutch-is indignant and shocked. "How can you utter the word death in relation to him, Mr. Hogg? Were he dead, the whole world might shut up shop." Na, na," retorts the Shepherd. "Ye micht, but no the warld. There never leeved a man the warld missed, ony mair than a great, green, spreading simmer tree misses a leaf that fa's doun on the moss aneath its shadow." One of Swift's many squibs on the alleged death of poor persecuted protesting Partridge the Almanack-maker, ruthlessly points out that 66 The sun has rose and gone to bed, Just as if Partridge were not dead; Sir Walter Scott, in his manly way, when he wrote his first letter to his eldest son when the young Cornet had joined his regiment, tells him : "The girls were very dull after you left us; indeed, the night you went away, Anne had hysterics, which lasted some time. Charles also was down in the mouth, and papa and mamma a little grave and dejected. would not have you think yourself of too great importance neither, for the greatest personages are not always long missed, and to make a bit of a parody Down falls the rain, up gets the sun, Just as if Walter were not gone."|| I The pathetic exhortations on country tombstones, "Grieve not for me, my wife and children dear," &c., are for the most part, says William Hazlitt, speedily followed to the letter: we do not leave so great a void in society as we are inclined to imagine: people walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. Well knows and keenly feels the poet as he looks his last * Ingoldsby Legends, A Legend of the Reign of Queen Anne. † Noctes Ambrosianæ, vol. i. No. xii. Swift, A Grub-street Elegy, 1708. Sir W. Scott to Cornet Walter Scott, at Cork, Aug. 1, 1819. |