Abroad and at home Wilkie was ever the same. Tall and slightly gauche, he was frank and straightforward, and open as the day. There was, indeed, a simplicity in his character which tended to make society his friends. It appeared to the worldly wise that it would be something like a scandal to resort to deceit in order to im pose upon so unguarded a nature; but they were not quite correct in their reckoning, for Sir David had enough of the "canny Scot" about him for self-defence. He did not wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. As in art he was gifted with the finest perceptions the foundation of a highly cultivated judgment so in the business of life his astute sagacity served faithfully as a guide to save him from a rash reliance on appearances, and too ready confidence in words and professions. His own firm integrity, too, was a poweful shield against the temptations to error. Wilkie was prudent, not distrustful. He was also rather grave, or undemonstrative in his demeanour; and even when he appeared at evening parties he might have been mistaken for a Dominie Samson. Yet sometimes Sir David would astonish his younger friends by a specimen of a Scottish dance, a reminiscence of his earlier flings-double quick, over the buckle, and I know not what other strange frisks and capering vagaries. Other artists are depicted in Mr. Jerdan's gallery of friends; and there also are the portraits of men of science like Dean Buckland and Edward Forbes; seamen like Sir John Franklin and Captain Crozier; journalists like James Perry and William Gifford; and nondescripts like Dick Martin of Galway. From The London Review. THE DESCENDANTS OF THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE. WHEN the beautiful Creole, Rose Josèphe Tascher de la Pagène, afterwards better known as the Empress Josephine, was a young girl in her West Indian home, it is said that one day she had her fortune told by an Obeah woman, who predicted that she and her descendants should sit on thrones. Such a fortune seemed far enough off at the time, and seemed even further off at a later period, when she was the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, and stood in a relation which we had better not try to define towards the Director (some time the dancing-master) Barras. About this time we find her in the train of Madame Tallien, "intent," as Mr. Carlyle says, "to blandish down the grimness of Republican austerity, of lean, almost cruel aspect; for he has Madame Beauharnais soon became Madame Bonaparte, and not long after the Obeah woman's prophecy began to be fulfilled. An evening contemporary, whose toned paper and archaic type convey to the world of the more enlightened a great variety of misinformation, stated some time ago, in an article on the Marriage Laws, that Napoleon was a bigamist when he was crowned by Pius VII. But every one who is not absolutely ignorant of modern history is aware that Napoleon had no wife but Josephine at the time of his coronation. Rome, in fact, never acknowledged the validity of his subsequent marriage with Maria Louisa. It would seem that the Obeah woman's prophecy had made some impression not only on Josephine's mind but also on Napoleon's; for it is recorded that she said to him at one time, when the project of divorce had reached her ears, "Remember, Bonaparte, that it is to my descendants the thrones have been promised." However this may be, it is certain at least that the King of Rome (whom Bonapartists call Napoleon II.) died Duke of Reichstadt. Josephine's daughter Hortense, on the other hand, became Queen of Holland, and mother of the present Emperor of the French. Josephine's son, Eugene Beauharnais, did not attain any higher dignity than that of Viceroy of Italy, but he married a daughter of the King of Bavaria, and assumed, after Napoleon's downfall, the title of Duke of Leuchtenberg and Prince of Eichstadt. His eldest son married Donna Maria da Gloria, and shared with her for a few short months the throne of Portugal. His second son, Maximilian, married the Grand Duchess Mary of Russia. His daughter Josephine married King Oscar of Sweden. His daughter Amelia was the second wife of Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil. His daughter Theodolinda did not make as great a match as either of her sisters: she married Count William of Wurtemberg. The children of Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg, received from their grandfather, the Emperor Nicholas, the name of Romanowski and the title of "Imperial Highness." One of them, the Princess Mary, is married to Duke William of Baden. The second daughter, the Princess Eugénie, has been spoken of, probably without sufficient authority, as likely to be married to Prince Humbert of Italy. It will be remembered that the eldest son, Nicholas, has been put forward, from time to time, by the Russian party in the Principalities, as a candidate for the throne of Roumania. If the interests of nations did not clash with those of families, the claims of a candidate who is at once the nephew of the Emperor Alexander II. and the cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III., would seem to be irresistible. Queen Josephine, Dowager of Sweden, is still alive. Her eldest son, Charles XV., is the reigning king. It is considered very probable that his only child, the Princess Louisa, now in her fifteenth year, will become the wife of the Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark. Thus, then, while the Crown of the First Napoleon has come, not to a descendant of his own, but to the grandson of his discarded wife, her great grandson sits at the same time on the throne of Sweden, and the connection of her descendants with nearly all the great and little royalties of Europe is extending every day. But it was not merely in the person of her own children that Josephine made the Beauharnais family illustrious. Two orphan girls of the name, nieces of her first husband and cousins of Eugene and Hortense, were adopted by her. One of them married the Grand Duke Charles of Baden; the other married the Comte de Lavalette, to whose romantic escape from prison, after the Hundred Days, her devoted affection lent such effectual aid. Her son, the Marquis de Lavalette, is now Minister of the Interior in France, in which position, however, he makes it very apparent that the lessons of adversity which the history of his parents ought to teach have been lost upon him. The Grand Duchess Stephanie of Baden had two daughters; the elder of them, the Princess Josephine, is the wife of the Prince of Hohenzollern. Her eldest daughter, the Princess Stephanie, was married to the late Dom Pedro V., King of Portugal, whose untimely death was hastened by grief at hers. The eldest son of the Princess of Hohenzollern, Prince Leopold, is married to the younger sister of the King of Portugal, the Princess Antonia. Her second son, Prince Charles, has just been elected, by universal suffrage, Hospodar of Roumania. This is no small promotion-supposing it to take effect for a young officer of Prussian dragoons. The Princess Mary of Baden, younger daughter of the Grand Duchess Stephanie, married the late Duke of Hamilton, and is the mother of the present duke. She ranks as a member of the Imperial family of France. It will be seen, from our rapid summary, that the Beauharnais family has become one of the greatest marrying families in Europe. Once it was sung of the House of Hapsburg: the world we ought to have no heart for mere amusements, and the cultivation of finnicking tastes. The first is the favourite view of the man of practical energy and vulgar ambition. The second satisfies those who are too dull and fussy for anything but their so-called philanthropy. The people who care about nothing very much except growing rich naturally look on anybody who sacrifices this object, in order to get some share in the best pleasures which the world offers, as a sentimental fool. The others consider him horribly wicked and selfish. There is an odious complacency in the trick to which the relentless drudge is amazingly partial, of replying to anybody who talks to him about pleasure, that his pleasure is of unceasing work. As if unceasing work, passing every solid day in the counting-house, reading and answering hundreds of letters every week, keeping the mind uninterruptedly bent on business details and prospects, were an exhaustive and unimprovable system of life, beyond which the force of nature could not go. Only more strange than this is the delusion that the claims of relaxation are satisfied by spending a month out of the twelve at the sea-side or on the Continent. To alternate a long spell of excessive labour with a comparatively short spell of excessive repose is about as rational as to maintain that a man who takes a bottle of neat brandy one day, and a quart of water the next, has been drinking brandy and water. If it be a sound doctrine that a line every day is the secret of success in art, it is not less true that an instalment of pleasure every day is at least one of the secrets of happiness. From our school-days upwards we are taught, first by masters and discipline, and afterwards by the temper which we find prevailing in the world outside, that if anything is pleasant it is pretty sure to prove to be wrong. It is attempted to represent even cricket and football rather in their utilitarian aspects, as good for the body, just as grammar is good for the soul, than as means of pleasure and enjoyment. The notion that pleasure as pleasure is a desirable thing is repugnant to the heart of the commonplace pedagogue. The theological idea that mortals are sent here as to a place of sore chastisement and mortification has taken deep root. The more dull, difficult, and unintelligible a Latin grammar, the more suitable it is for the use of boys. All the most obviously uninteresting books are on that account the more creditable kind of reading. If a lad or a man be found poring over Milner's Church History, he is well! thought of, because it is dull and dismal; but if he were laughing over Pickwick or Tom Jones, nine people out of ten would declare him, in comparison with the disciple of Milner, to be wasting his time. That pleasure, amusement, mere recreation, thorough unbending, is a legitimate object of deliberate pursuit, is a truth pretty invariably disparaged, just because a man immoderately addicted to self-indulgence is a very bad sort of man. People do not seem to suspect that it is possible to be just as immoderately and evilly addicted to work as to indulgence, and that an equal amount, though of a different kind, of mischief may accrue to one's family from excess in one direction as in the other. The proposition that all pleasant things are right is untrue, but it is certainly not so radically untrue as the more popular proposition that most pleasant things are wrong. And the prevalence and popularity of the more untrue of these two absurdities has an especially mischievous effect. Its constant presence, exerting an influence of whose operation one is mostly unconscious, checksand, if it be supported by other influences, such as a conviction that mirth is unscriptural, actually extinguishes - all blitheness and freedom of spirit. Why should not a jocund capacity for pleasure and enjoyment be as eagerly desired by parents and teachers as a capacity for remembering dates or names? It may be said that Nature settles the first, and that she only is responsible for it, whereas, though she may have to give one the faculty of memory in the first instance, it must be developed from without afterwards. As if Nature could be responsible for the cheerfulness and joyousness of a creature whom every care is habitually taken to depress. This is the department in which the moral part of education has always been weakest, though vigorous attempts are occasionally made to strengthen it. That people should be trained and encouraged to be upright, self-controlling, industrious, and magnanimous, is never denied. But there is every bit as much reason why the faculty of being jolly, of finding an eager pleasure in all sorts of objects and pursuits, should be trained and encouraged. An hilarious elasticity of nature is surely one of the most invaluable qualities anybody can have. Yet somehow the man who goes through the world with sober solemn jowl is always thought to be showing a deeper sense of the worth of life, and to be making more of his talents, than the elastic man. May we not reasonably wonder why? From The Saturday Review. RAILWAY READING. We Isumption of this literature, as we must call it for want of a better name, spread amongst an absolutely non-reading class, and displaced nothing of a more serious AMONGST the incidental results of rail-kind, its increase would, on the whole, be way travelling, one appears to be a dispro- gratifying. The farmer who went to church portionate development of the lower growths with the view of sitting down and thinking of literature. It is sometimes said that about nothing would doubtless have been over-indulgence in railway travelling pro- the better for listening to the sermon. duces a tendency to disease. The incessant should watch the process of intellectual devibration has an injurious effect upon the velopment as Mr. Darwin would watch a spinal marrow or the brain. And there is polar bear turning into a whale; it is very certainly an apparent confirmation of this slow, but it is a progress. If, on the other in the state of mind to which most travel- hand, the consumption of this material is lers are reduced. In many cases a tempo- displacing any more legitimate branch of rary idiocy sets in. We cannot other- study, it is of course so much loss. And wise explain the eagerness with which the when we look at the enormous abundance long rows of green and red-coloured novels, of the purely frivolous varieties of literawith startling illustrations on the back, are ture, and the pains and expense incurred in brought up by the travelling public. their cultivation, we can hardly flatter ourStrange works, dignified by the name of selves that it is all destined for an enStandard Novels, ornamented with repre- tirely new class of consumers, or that it is sentations of headless horsemen or of atro- all raised upon ground which would othercious murders, crowd the shelves of the wise be barren. Some men who would be bookstalls, and persons without any obvious capable of producing better things must be signs of imbecility may be seen pouring tempted into a field where profit is to be over their pages in the carriages when gained in return for such a trifling expenthey might be deriving a more rational diture of labour; and the mere habit of amusement from a study of the intricacies indulging in this inferior growth must disof Bradshaw. The same material cut into qualify men for judging fairly of the finer shorter lengths is that of which such works qualities of literature. Perhaps the most as the Sunnyside Papers are composed; the probable theory would be somewhere interdifference between these small miniature mediate between these two opinions. There stories and the green-backed novel being, is a positive increase in the demand for that the novel is calculated to last from more seriously valuable writing; but relaLondon to Liverpool, and the story only as tively, it does not extend in the same ratio far as Colney Hatch. The curious reflec- as the appetite for a less desirable commodtion which results may be stated in two ity. To determine this point would require ways; it is singular that people should have a much fuller investigation than it is possible such a desire for some sort of quasi-intellec- even to hint at in this place; but we should tual occupation, or it is singular that they be glad to suggest to persons about to inshould be content with so remarkably small vest small sums of time, money, and attenan instalment. The novel or novelette is a tion in this tenth-rate stuff that a very slight mere mental fig-leaf, supposed by a happy additional effort would qualify them for a fiction to cover absolute vacuity of mind, superior enjoyment. It is common to meet although, but for the look of the thing, one people who are familiar with enough modwould have thought it could make but lit- ern sensation novels to stock a library. If tle difference. The practice of such read- they had been content to spend the same ing reminds one of the boyish trick of time and a very little more trouble in readsmoking a piece of cane instead of tobacco; ing Scott, or even, not to make too great a a man who has grown accustomed to cigars demand upon them, in reading Mr. Dickfinds it rather difficult to sympathize with ens' best works, they would really have the enjoyment. It may be admitted that, if something to look back upon. It is a lamthe choice lies between not reading at all entable thing to think that many minds and reading this very innocuous matter, the are filled with a sort of ephemeral lumber, reading may be rather the better practice which is scarcely better fittted to support of the two. It tends at any rate to spread intellectual health than the mud with which a knowledge of spelling, and makes people South American Indians are said to fill their familiar with books considered as a mechan-stomachs is fitted to maintain the bodily ical contrivance. If, therefore, the con-functions. No. 1151. Fourth Series, No. 12. 23 June, 1866. POETRY.-The Cave of Trophonius, 814.- Bait for the Iron Horse, 831. SHORT ARTICLES.-Speeches by an Old Smoker, 831.- Two Hundred Pounds, 832. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO. BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. The Complete work Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. |