into grass, and trees, and all the mutations that are the course of nature; but here, in black hideousness, they lie in rocky sepulchres, millions on millions, the dead of two thousand years of glory such as no nation before or since has equaled; and could we but speak into visible existence their haunting spirits, what room above this narrow valley would there be to let the moonlight through their crowded ranks? What maidens would sit on white rocks over the burial-vaults of lovers! what mothers, in white-robed sorrow, would bow their heads over the forms of beloved children! what angelwatchers would be seen at the head and foot | of countless fathers and friends!

We ate our lunch in the large room, spreading our carpets in the centre, where we could look out across the valley and feast our eyes with the glorious view. In the foreground was the city; beyond, its groves of palms, and then the lordly river, on which the only visible flag was our own-the only memorial before us of home. While we ate, the cawass and ten or a dozen attendants, men and boys, sat outside the doorway, and one of them chanted to the others a chapter from the Koran. It rang in the vault of the room, and, closing our eyes, we could imagine ourselves in a cathedral of Europe, so priestlike was the sound.

Lunch over, I left the ladies and climbed to the top of the hill, looking into a hundred tombs on the sides of the rocky terraces, and finally crossing the summit, where I descended into a wild ravine, the habitation of desolation itself. Here, musing as I walked, I started a fox from his hole in some recess of a tomb, and as he dashed down the side of the hill I sent a ball after him. It did not stop him, though it killed him, for he went a hundred feet down and fell into the ravine, while the sound rang through the rocky chasms with a hundred echoes that might well have startled the sleepers under those gray hills. Descending to secure my game, I returned to the party by a path around the hill, and came upon a crude brick ruin which may be Christian or possibly Roman. It was remarkable only for the abundance of scorpions which were in the walls, and I killed a dozen within a minute, perforating two of them with a thorn for exhibition to the ladies, who had heard much of them as common in Egypt, but had never yet seen any.

I found them still sitting in the doorway of the Stabl Antar, looking out on the valley view, and on a mournful procession that carried a dead man to the burial-place in the sand near the foot of the hill. The loud cries of the mourners, mingled with the chant of the bearers, came up to us with peculiar effect, and we sat silent in the broken entrance of an ancient prince's tomb, to watch the burial of a poor fellah, and wonder how many days the wolves and jackals would let him repose. And then we looked off at the great river, which came from far up in the south, and disappeared far down in the north:

"It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought, threading a dream;
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands."

And then gathering cloaks, and shawls, and books, and leaving the servants to finish the luncheon and follow us, we mounted the donkeys and took our way back toward the city.

MARIA, A LOST QUEEN OF ENGLAND. THE name of Mrs. Fitzherbert has long been

familiar to the world. Every one has heard of the lady whose fascinations warmed Sheridan's eloquence in the British Parliament, whose equivocal position provoked one of Brummell's most bitter sarcasms, and whose wrongs roused the Edinburgh Reviewer, Brougham, to denounce the monarch of Great Britain as a traitor, a bigamist, and a felon. But her real history has never been thoroughly cleared up. On the one side, Horne Tooke called her in his newspaper the Princess of Wales; on the other, the Reverend biographer of George the Fourth, Dr. Croly, and after him Lord Holland and others of minor note, have classed her simply among the unfortunate ladies who sacrificed their honor to the whim of the monarch who was called the first gentleman in Europe. tween the two the public have been befogged.

Be

A new light is thrown upon her romantic story by a volume just published in London by the Honorable Charles Langdale, the brother of the late Lord Stourton, a relative, co-religionist, and most intimate friend of hers. The volume has been provoked, it seems, by a sneer contained in Lord Holland's Memoirs; and though, from reasons explained below, it does not wholly exhaust the subject, it is the first authentic account that has appeared of Mrs. Fitzherbert's history-it tells the story plainly, and is none the less valuable because it makes no pretension to literary excellence.

Royal frailties are not always a wholesome subject of contemplation; still, to us lookers-on in America, the picture of society in foreign aristocratic circles presented by the story of this lady would be worth a glance for its interest alone, independently of the historical importance of the facts it discloses.

Marianne or Maria Smythe was born just one hundred years ago, at Brambridge, in the County of Hants, England. Her father was wealthy; brought her up in luxury; took her once to Versailles to see Louis XV. pull a chicken to pieces with his fingers, as his custom was; whereat the child laughed, as well she might, and received from the gorged monarch a present of sugar-plums as a reward for her astonishing sense of humor. Grown up, and uncommonly beautiful, she married, at nineteen, a Mr. Weld, who died the same year. Three years afterward, she married again; her second husband, Thomas Fitzherbert, of Swinnerton, died a couple of years after the marriage, leaving his widow childless, with a fortune of $10,000 a year.

Four years afterward she was living at Richmond Hill. A blooming widow of twenty-nine, so beautiful that the village poets celebrated her in a well-known song, of which the chorus was: "I'd crowns resign

To call her mine,

Sweet lass of Richmond Hill."

It was there the Prince of Wales first saw her. He was about twenty-three, and as wild a rake as then was in Europe. Like every body else, he fell in love with the sweet lass of Richmond Hill, and offered her the place in his heart which had been last filled by the newest opera-dancer. She declined. Amazed, petrified at such unheard-of scruples, the Prince insisted; sent down to Richmond Hill the most eloquent Whigs of the day; laid a train of presents, and showered jewelry. The widow, calm and beautiful, serenely dismissed ormolu, Whigs, and écrins. His Royal Highness was in despair. To yield was to lose his prestige as a lady-killer. George had an original mind (it is known he invented a shoe-buckle); he proposed marriage. 'Twas a stupendously audacious proposal, for Mrs. Fitzherbert, besides being a subject, and hardly eligible for a royal alliance, was a Catholic, and the Act of Settlement distinctly declared that any Prince who should wed a Catholic should forfeit his throne. For all this, George deliberately proposed to marry the widow. And the widow as deliberately refused him.

This was more than human nature could bear. That a morganatic alliance might be contemned by a fastidious lady, was supportable; but to reject the hand of the heir to the throne offered in lawful marriage, was beyond endurance. So George went home and stabbed himself.

Fast and hot drove chariots to Mrs. Fitzherbert's-two peers of the realm, a surgeon, and an equerry within-to entreat and implore the sweet lass of the hill to see the Prince ere he died.

This was before the Rosa Matilda school of novels arose, and Mrs. Fitzherbert suspected no trick. She stipulated for a peeress as a companion; the beautiful Georgiana of Devonshire threw herself into the breach; and the two, ere morning, stood by the bedside of the Prince. He lay bedabbled with blood, with brandy and water in one hand, and Mrs. Fitzherbert's taper fingers in the other. Nothing would cure him but her consent to wed him. Let her say nay, and he would die that very minute, before they left the room. The poor frightened woman, dizzy and bewildered, let some officious friend put a ring of the Duchess of Devonshire's on her finger, faltered a promise to marry the Prince, and was spirited away. Being asked long afterward whether she believed the Prince had really wounded himself, she confessed, like Candide, with a blush, that she had seen the

scar.

Next day she repented. Hastily packing her trunks, she fled to Holland. The British minister there was negotiating at the time for the hand of the Princess of Orange for the Prince

of Wales; he took Mrs. Fitzherbert into his confidence, and so did the Stadtholder, who never forgave her for having tempted him to commit so great a blunder. Chased by the Prince's agents, she fled to France. There couriers from the Prince followed her in such troops that no less than three of them were arrested and thrown into prison by the French authorities on suspicion of being political agents. Who could stand against such assaults? She promised never to marry any one, if she did not marry the Prince. This point gained, her lover did not rest till she promised to return to England. Having made the promise, she could not long delay its fulfillment. She returned to England, and was married to the Prince of Wales.

The marriage ceremony was performed by a Protestant clergyman, in presence of the bride's uncle, Mr. Errington, and her brother, Mr. Smythe, both of whom signed the certificate as witnesses. No legal formality was wanting te give validity to the marriage. It was valid a. common law in England. It was in strict conformity with the canon of the Church to which Mrs. Fitzherbert belonged. Regarded either as a civil contract or as a religious ceremony, or as a sacrament, it was binding on both parties, and indissoluble-save for certain specific causes, and by an ordained specific process-by any authority on earth.

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It was shortly after the marriage that Charles James Fox, then the leader of the Opposition in Parliament, wrote to the Prince that letter which has been so much quoted, in which he admonishes his friend that a marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert would be fatal to him, and adds, that were he Mrs. Fitzherbert's brother or father, he would advise her to prefer any other species of connection with the Prince." To this letter George replied, asserting broadly that "there not only is, but never was any ground for these reports which of late have been so malevolently circulated." On the strength of this letter, probably, Fox rose in Parliament, when the subject of the marriage was mooted, and denied that it had taken place. Being pressed farther by a country member, who suggested that there might have been a marriage though not a legal one, Fox added that he "denied it not merely with regard to the effect of certain existing laws, but in toto; in fact as well as in law. The fact never did happen in any way whatsoever, and had from the beginning been a base and malignant falsehood." Fox undoubtedly believed what he said; though his standard of morality, as illustrated by his letter, would hardly appear to have interposed an insuperable barrier to his stating the same thing with a better knowledge of the facts; especially as the vote to pay the Prince's debts depended upon the statement.

On the day which followed this speech, says Mrs. Fitzherbert, "the knocker of her door was never still." Crowds came to prove their disbelief in the calumnious imputation, by paying their respects to her. She first learnt what had

His death seems to have made no difference in the social standing of Mrs. Fitzherbert. William the Fourth sent for her, and on her desiring to see him first at her town-house, called without delay. She showed him her certificate of marriage, and letters of George's fully establishing that she was really his wife; on reading these the honest old King burst into tears, and declared he was amazed at her forbearance under such severe trials, with such documents in her possession. He offered to make her a duchess, but she said she had borne the name of Mrs. Fitzherbert all her life, and did not wish to change it. The King himself presented her to his family, and she dined constantly with them. She was treated with equal cordiality by the royal family of France when she went to Paris: indeed, until her death, the world in which she lived behaved toward her as though she had really borne the title of the Princess of Wales and Queen of England.

That she had a right to those titles is incontestable. It is true, that by enforcing the Act of Settlement, George the Fourth might have been debarred from the throne, and the crown deferred to his brother William, who succeeded him; but that act lying dormant, and no proceedings being taken to enforce it, it appears clear that Mrs. Fitzherbert was legally as well as morally Queen of England from 1820 to 1830; that Caroline of Brunswick, as she is understood to have said herself on her trial, was the mistress, not the wife, of George, and that her issue, Charlotte, who married Prince Leopold of Belgium, was illegitimate. That this was the view of many-probably all-the best legal minds in England at the time is quite likely.

Brougham's famous article in the Edinburgh Review pointed distinctly to this conclusion, though, as the counsel of Queen Caroline on her trial, he could not well state it in so many words. William the Fourth would not have offered her the rank of duchess had he not been convinced that her waiver of a still higher rank deserved such reward. And it appears that when her papers were finally disposed of, the noblemen who were intrusted with the direction of that delicate transaction thought it necessary to have her write and sign a memorandum certifying that there was no issue from her marriage with George: they thought, evidently, that any person sprung from that marriage would have valid claims upon the throne.

George died in 1830; Mrs. Fitzherbert in 1837. At his death his executors, the Duke of

upon Mrs. Fitzherbert, and requested her to surrender the papers she had referring to her union with the late King. Generous to the last, she agreed; and all her correspondence with her husband, together with many other papers, were burnt in the presence of the Duke and his colleague. They asked what claims she had upon the estate of the King: she said she had none. The Duke of York had obtained for her a pension of £6000 a year; but from her husband she had not only received nothing, but had actually sold her own private annuity to supply his wants in the days of their happy poverty. Five papers she refused to destroy. These were, 1. The mortgage securing her pension; 2. The King's will (probably an old one, made during their cohabitation); 3. The certificate of marriage; 4. A letter from George the Fourth relating to their marriage; 5. A letter from the clergyman who performed the ceremony, endorsed "no issue from this marriage, M. Fitzherbert." These papers were deposited in the vault of Coutts and Co., bankers, under the seals of the Duke of Wellington and Sir W. Knighton, as the King's executors, and Lords Albermarle and Stourton on behalf of Mrs. Fitzherbert: and a bond was executed by her that these papers should not be published “without the knowledge" of the King's executors.

After her death friends of the royal family spoke of her marriage as a sham ceremony. Lord Stourton, her friend and relative, published a letter in reply, and proposed to publish the papers at Coutts; but the Duke of Wellington protested so strongly against the production of these papers, and threw so many obstacles in the way, refusing even to see Lord Stourton, that the design was abandoned. Years passed over, and all the four trustees of the documents died. By a codicil to his will Lord Stourton appointed his brother, Charles Langdale, his successor in the trust, and drew his attention specially to a letter from Mrs. Fitzherbert, in which she "trusted, whenever it should please God to remove her from this world, that her conduct and character (in Lord S.'s hands) would not disgrace her family and friends."

The other day Lord Holland's Memoirs appeared, containing the most injurious imputations against Mrs. Fitzherbert. Mr. Langdale immediately applied to the executor of Lord Albermale, the Rev. Edward S. Keppel, for permission to publish the documents. The answer was that their production "would only pander to the bad feelings of the great world without doing good;" and the request was accordingly declined. Mr. Langdale, faithful to his trust, did the next best thing; he published a brief memoir of Mrs. Fitzherbert from information and letters given by herself to his brother. It is from that memoir we have derived the material of this article.

Whatever becomes of the papers at Coutts's, whether the pressure of public opinion compel their production, or they lie in the vault till