warned his master that the hour had arrived for him to meet the Hofrath. Need it be said we promptly discovered we were going in the same direction? We sallied forth, the blind man leaning on the arm of his attached attendant, we following with the gentle Magdalena, for such we discovered her name to be. A walk of some minutes brought us to the door of the hotel; the blind man entered the portal, and would have been followed by his daughter, but, suspecting her intention, he interposed: "Enter not with me, my child," he said; "it were better for us both that I saw the Hofrath alone. I am not afraid to hear my fate pronounced, but thy presence would unnerve me and distress thee. Antonio shall enter with me; the afternoon is fair; if the strangers object not, tarry here with them." To this somewhat embarrassing suggestion the blind man's child gave a quiet acquiescence, and the patient and his attendant entering the hotel, we remained in the presence of Magdalena. As we well knew the subject on which her thoughts must be centred, to the best of our skill we sought to give them utterance by touching as delicately as we could upon the sad bereavement under which her father laboured, and we inquired what dire circumstance had brought down so grievous a visitation upon him. “Oh, it is a sad story," she replied; "but as I can now think of nothing else, I may as well briefly relate it to you. At the close of last summer my father and I were riding late one sultry afternoon, near to Valencia, on the banks of our own dear Guadalaviar. I was never weary of hearing him narrate the stirring scenes in which he had been a prominent actor in his younger days. He was on this occasion telling me of those calamitous times when such accumulated misery was heaped upon our unhappy country by the vile factions of a court still tainted with the corruptions of a Godoy and the imbecilities of a Charles IV. My father had been present at the splendid victories of Salamanca and Vittoria-in his mind's eye those brilliant exploits lived over again, as he vigorously depicted them. I was lost to the sense of everything but his thrilling recital; the reins fell loosely upon the arched neck of the beautiful animal I rode, an Andalusian jennet, a recent gift from my father. We saw not that the clouds had gathered, and were black and lowering; we noticed not that the air was hushed, that not a leaf moved, and that nature seemed motionless, as though awaiting in terror the conflict of the elements so soon to take place; but some heavy raindrops aroused our attention. We looked around for shelter, but none presented itself. The rain commenced to fall in torrents; bright flashes of lightning followed one another in quick succession. We urged on our steeds, and presently seeing in the distance a clump of trees, we made for the sorry shelter they promised to afford us; but, oh! better had we braved the storm. My father's anxiety for me made him heedless of the danger we encountered in remaining beneath the trees during the prevalence of the lightning, which now became terrific. Suddenly a flash came, exceeding in vividness all that had preceded it, and followed instantly by a peal of thunder like the roar of a thousand cannon. The very ground vibrated beneath our feet. Then came a dreadful crash of falling timber. I gave a loud scream, and pressed my hand to my eyes, whilst my docile steed stood as if rooted to the ground, his eyes dilated, his nostrils expanded, with a white foam gathered about his mouth, which fell in snowy flakes around him. A deathlike stillness succeeded to this fearful moment. I recovered myself, and withdrew my hand from my eyes, and oh, horror of horrors! I beheld my father stretched apparently lifeless on the ground, by the side of a huge limb of a tree torn from its parent stem, whilst his horse stood violently trembling a few paces off. In an instant I had dismounted and was by his side; in vain I looked round for assistance: I threw myself by his prostrate form, I raised his head, and taking water from a pool the falling rain had formed, I dashed it in his face. I waited, in breathless anxiety; I put my hand to his heart, and felt that it still beat, and I knew that he lived. After some moments he slowly opened his eyes, but only to close them again, as a look of pain and anguish unutterable passed across his pale face. For some minutes more he remained motionless, and then I saw his lips move and heard some indistinct murmurs escape them. I put my ear to his mouth; I called upon him, in passionate accents, to speak to me. At length I caught his words, and, oh! how my heart sank! 6 "My child,' he faintly uttered, art thou safe?' "I assured him that I was. He then bade me hasten to Valencia and bring aid. 666 Tarry not,' he said; a great calamity has overwhelmed me. God give me strength to bear it. I thank him it has fallen on me and not on thee. The lightning has bereft me of my sight. I am quite blind!'" The utterance of the beautiful speaker was quite choked as she came to this part of her narrative. What followed was briefly told. Her father was conveyed home, and the best advice Spain could afford summoned ; but no success attended it. The stricken man then heard by accident of some great cure wrought by him of Graefrath, and yielding to the entreaties of his child, who was all that he held dear in the world, for her mother in giving her birth had surrended her own life, had consented to come this long, weary way in the hopes of deriving benefit from the Hofrath's skill. She had hardly concluded her sad tale, when we beheld the tall figure of the blind man emerging from the gate of the hotel on the arm of the faithful Antonio. To spring to his side-to seize his hand-to playfully thrust aside Antonio, and draw her father's arm within her own, was the work of a moment. We heard not the words with which she greeted her father, but could easily guess their purport; but we joined the group in time to hear the patient say, "He bids me hope, my child; he does not think my sight irrevocably gone. Ah! sweet one, if God grant I may again trace thy features and thy sainted mother's face in thine, it is all I pray for-all I desire." We had heard enough, and had no further excuse for intruding upon their presence. We prayed Heaven to prosper the means of the Hofrath; the blind man and his daughter extended their hands; we warmly grasped them. Antonio stood by; his grim features relaxed into a look of gratitude and devotion at the hopes held out by the Hofrath. We hastened down the hill, on the summit of which the hotel stands perched, and, looking round after a few paces, found the group was hidden from our gaze. Mingle-tangle by Monkshood. DOWNFAL OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY. ONE of the chapters in M. Charles Nisard's volume of Miscellanies, recently reprinted from the Revue Contemporaine, has for its subject the suppression of the French Academies, the creation of the Institute, and the re-establishment of the Académie Française with the title of second class of the Institut. Instead of taking a discursive review of the volume at large, the contents of which are too multifarious to be manageable, let us confine ourselves on this occasion to a notice of the chapter in question, and "assist" at its sketchy representation of the Decline and Fall. As a matter of course, the more partial and exclusive the Academy showed itself, the more unpopular it became. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century this unpopularity went on increasing by a sort of arithmetical progression, which anon became geometrical, and so, as an ultimatum, finding no end for itself, found an end for the Academy. There is not a writing of the time, friendly or unfriendly, says M. Nisard, which does not bear witness to the discontent of the public at the exclusiveness of the Forty. In this matter, the highest classes in society entertained the same feelings as the bourgeoisie; and all, of the latter class, who had adopted literature as a profession, whether to win their daily bread, or to exalt themselves into credit and renown, carped and cavilled at the privileged body to the top of their bent. A year or two before the accession of Louis XVI., the philosophe party, after having asked for and obtained some places for itself in the Academy, in the name of toleration, had so far gained ground that, without at present using it as a battle-field, and saying, "Je suis prête à sortir avec toute ma bande, Si vous pouvez me mettre hors," it already occupied one-half of the logis, and was on the look-out for any and all opportunities of seizing on the other. At last, its weaklings having grown strong, Ses petits étant déjà forts, though not sufficiently so to venture on such a step as expelling its hosts, the philosophe party was content to leave its interests in the hand of busy Death, which grim visitor kept emptying fauteuil after fauteuil with a fatal facility all his own; the philosophes, meanwhile, taking good care that the vacancies should not be readily filled up except from their own ranks, by approved candidates of their proper clique: whosoever had not their password, was made to dance attendance at the doors, till all but sick of waiting-their Open, Sesame! was practically the only means of entry-so closely, at this period, and in this particular, did the Forty Academicians approximate in their social tactics to the Forty Thieves. * Mémoires et Correspondances historiques et littéraires inédits-1726 à 1816publiés par Charles Nisard. Paris: Michel Lévy frères. 1858. Moreover, the encroaching party invoked the aid of the good friends it had in the Ministry, to persecute and put down such journalists as presumed to castigate its principles or practices. And what added to the tyranny of this procedure, was, that the parti philosophique included in its ranks at the Academy a number of journalists, for whom their title of Academicians was in some sort a title to impunity.* Of these the most celebrated was La Harpe. This pretentious and fussy gentleman indulged in a system of acrid and aggravating polemics, which naturally provoked angry replies, some of them the reverse of civil or complimentary to the Academy itself—that corporation seeming, as matters now stood, to tolerate if not command the obnoxious attacks. Linguet, in his Journal de Politique et de Littérature, having taken the liberty to scoff at La Harpe, on the occasion of his stately and solemn receptionspeech, the Academy was weak enough to demand the suppression of the scoffer's journal; and not only was it suppressed, but Linguet had the chagrin of seeing himself replaced by this very La Harpe in the literary department, and in the political by Fontanelle. Instead of being ashamed of stepping into the quasi dead-man's shoes, La Harpe exulted in his new dignity, and became more pretentious than ever; before long, indeed, his "insolence" and "peevishness" increased to such a degree, that other weapons of offence than the pen were resorted to by his victims. For example, there was circulated in 1777 a paper purporting to be signed by Jean F. de la Harpe, which acknowledges that he, the subscribed, was, on the previous night, between the hours of eleven and twelve, while returning home from a supper "de philosophie bourgeoise," accosted and assailed by a certain man who refused to give his name, but manifestly devoid of taste, gaiety, and all idea whatsoever of sound literature, and who suddenly, with a brutality worthy of the sixteenth century, paid on the right and left shoulder of the subscribed, cash down, without reserve, the sum of two hundred strokes with a cudgel, as a halfyear's dividend of his yearly income, &c. &c. The signature is made by the subscriber on his knees, because he can't help himself. And the morrow sees this production current far and wide through that capital which, of all others in the wide wide world, is least likely to pass by such pleasantries unappreciated or unimproved. The pleasantry was in form a fiction, but the fiction was founded on fact. Before La Harpe took his chair among the Forty, he had written a merciless epigram-sanglante, M. Nisard styles it-against Dorat, a man to whom he was under some obligations. Scarcely had he taken his seat when he renewed hostilities against this insipid author, whose Malheureux imaginaire, a comedy certainly of no value, he proceeded briskly to attack. Dorat, in his rage, got the Année littéraire to insert a letter in which he upbraided La Harpe with his vanity and ingratitude, and professedly endeavoured to administer suitable correction. A fillip was enough, it said, to rid you of a dwarf who would play the giant. Such an insult might seem to call for blood; but La Harpe spared his blood, and shed a deal of ink instead-such a deal of ink, and so black, that the Academy was "obliged to make a dyke" for the occasion, and arrest the flood in its impetuous advance. The Academy spent an entire sitting in VOL. XLIV. *Nisard, pp. 255 sq. 2 s admonishing La Harpe on the sour, hard, bad tone too often predominant in his journal, whereby he exposed himself to affronts in which the honour of the Academy was compromised. "We all have an infinite love for M. de La Harpe," said malicious Abbé de Boismont, on this occasion, "but really it is too afflicting to see him constantly arriving at the Academy with a torn ear." Though admonished, La Harpe was not corrected. If he laid the admonition to heart, it was only to cherish there a splenetic feeling against his remonstrant colleagues. He was as a man who, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck. Some letters of his, published in the Courier de l'Europe, bewrayed his rancour, and matters soon came to an open quarrel. But the success of his "Muses rivales," in which he had represented the apotheosis of Voltaire, so "touched" the Academy, that it took the traitor to its arms again, and fondled him as a favourite son. The Journal de Paris paid the cost of this reconciliation. La Harpe, having been sharply attacked in that journal, called at the office one day, to complain, in pathetic accents, that he had in a manner been picked out as a butt for public amusement. The officials made game of the complainant. Whereupon, the perpetual secretary of the Academy, D'Alembert, made his way in person to the office, in one of his morning walks, to ask the Journal de Paris to have the goodness to suspend its hostilities against a colleague who was in actual possession of the public favour, and who had friends as numerous as their arms were long. But the chief was no better received than the simple member had been. Not even a perpetual secretaryship in propria persona, could dazzle the eyes, or damp the spirit, or bend the stubborn knees, of the office-people. This was too much for the perpetual secretary. D'Alembert was a great stickler for respecting freedom of thought, when the free-thinking was his own, or that of his party; but he had no notion at present of respecting the free thoughts, too freely vented, of a defiant Journal de Paris. He laid a complaint against that offender before the Directeur de la librairie, who compelled the journal to capitulate. The only terms it could secure in this capitulation were, that, when the subject under discussion chanced to be some sorry production by one of Messieurs the Academicians, the journal should be at liberty to say that the production was of a sorry sort, but should at the same time express this opinion with an air of regret, and should on no account and for no consideration incite the reader to giggle on the subject. Having in this instance tasted the sweets of authority, even to the extent of persecution, the parti philosophique followed up its success by others of a similar kind. In 1781, it obtained the suspension of the same Journal de Paris for speaking irreverently of a composition by one of the privileged. In 1782, feeling itself "wounded by the way in which the Journal de Monsieur, edited by the Abbé Royou, had described the séance de la Saint-Louis," it addressed Monsieur himself, through Ducis as medium, begging him to have the offending journalist chastised-depicting Royou as an unbridled satirist, and a man of immoral life. His Royal Highness was scandalised to find his name made use of to abet the circulation of a journal thus edited; and forbade Royou to continue the title which implicated Monsieur in its guilt. Before long, however, the prince was made to see that the editor had been calumniated, and he then |
