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ful, as well as candid and undissembling. "No retaliation" is declared to have been a principle of his, which was tested by his conduct, this highly favourable representation being without doubt considerably effected by the visit which Miss Martineau lately paid the fortress of Joux in Switzerland, where Toussaint is supposed to have met with a horrible death,-that of starvation. In an appendix this story is given, from which we take some passages. As to the mystery that attaches to the manner of the murder, we are told,

"Great mystery hangs over the tale of Toussaint's imprisonment and death. It appears that he was confined in the Temple only as long as Napoleon had hopes of extorting from him information about the treasures, absurdly reported to have been buried by him in the mornes, under circum. stances of atrocious cruelty. It has been suggested that torture was employed by Buonaparte's aide, Caffarelli, to procure the desired confession : but I do not know that the conjecture is founded on any evidence. As to the precise mode of L'Ouverture's death, there is no certainty. The only point on which all authoritiesagree, is, that he was deliberately murdered: but whether by mere confinement in a cell whose floor was covered with water, and the walls with ice (a confinement necessarily fatal to a negro,) or by poison, or by starvation in conjunction with discase, may, perhaps, never be known. The report which is, I believe, the most generally believed in France, is that which I have adopted, that the commandant, when his prisoner was extremely ill, left the fortress for two or three days, with the key of Toussaint's cell in his pocket; that on his return he found his prisoner dead; and that he summoned physicians from Pontalier, who examined the body, and pronounced a serous apoplexy to be the cause of death."

Says the author, no words can convey a sense of the dreariness of the fortress and its dungeons; but she found only three persons who pretended to know anything of the Negro prisoner. One of these was a boy.

more.

"Our third informant was a boy, shrewd and communicative, who could tell us the traditions of the place; and, of course, young as he was, nothing It was he who shewed us where the additional stove was placed when winter came on. He pointed to a spot beside the fireplace, where he said the straw was spread on which Toussaint lay. He declared that Toussaint lived and died in solitude; and that he was found dead and cold, lying on that straw,--his wood fire, however, not being wholly extinguished. The dreary impressions of the place saddened our minds for long after we had left it; and, glad as we were, on rejoining our party at Lausanne, to report the complete success of our enterprise, we cannot recur to it, to this day, without painful feelings. How the lot of Toussaint was regarded by the generous spirits of the time is shewn in a sonnet of Wordsworth's written during the disappearance of L'Ouverture. Every one knows this sonnet; but it may be read by others, as by me, with a fresh emotion of delight, after having dwelt on the particulars of the foregoing history.

"Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillow'd in some deep dungeon's earless den :-
O miserable chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee: air, earth, and skies.

There's not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee: thou hast great allies:
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.'

The family of Toussaint were first sent to Bayonne, and afterwards to Agen, where one of the sons died of a decline. The two elder ones, endeavouring to escape from the surveillance under which they lived, were embarked for Belle Isle, and imprisoned in the citadel, where they were seen in 1803. On the restoration of the Bourbons, not only were they released, but a pension was settled on the family. Madame L'Ouverture died, I believe, in the south of France, in 1816, in the arms of Placide and Isaac (two of her sons)."

We shall not be lavish with our extracts from the romance itself; but will content ourselves with a specimen of the writer's trains and habits of sentimentalizing, and one or two short descriptions. Who would be a statesman if his pleasures be so few and so far removed from fresh nature, as is pictured in the following passage?

"Precious to the statesman are the moments he can snatch for the common pleasures which are strewed over the earth-meant, apparently, for the perpetual enjoyment of all its inhabitants. The child gathers flowers in the meadow, or runs up and down a green bank, or looks for birds' nests every spring day. The boy and girl hear the lark in the field and the linnet in the wood, as a matter of course: they walk beside the growing corn, and pass beneath the rookery, and feel nothing of its being a privilege. The sailor beholds the stars every bright night of the year, and is familiar with the thousand hues of the changing sea. The soldier on his march sees the sun rise and set on mountain and valley, plain and forest. The citizen, pent up in the centre of a wide-built town, has his hour for play with his little ones, his evenings for his wife and his friends. But for the statesman, none of these are the pleasures of every day. Week after week, month after month, he can have no eyes for the freshness of nature, no leisure for small affairs, or for talk about things which cannot be called affairs at all. He may gaze at pictures on his walls, and hear music from the drawing-room, in the brief intervals of his labours; and he may now and then be taken by surprise by a glimpse of the cool bright stars, or by the waving of the boughs of some neighbouring tree: he may be beguiled by the grace or the freak of some little child, or struck by some wandering flower-scent in the streets, or some

effect of sunlight on the evening cloud: but, with these few and rare exceptions, he loses sight of the natural earth, and of its free intercourses, for weeks and months together; and precious in proportion-precious beyond his utmost anticipation—are his hours of holiday when at length they come. He gazes at the crescent moon hanging above the woods, and at the long morning shadows on the dewy grass, as if they would vanish before his eyes. He is intoxicated with the gurgle of the brook upon the stones, when he seeks the trout-stream with his line and basket: the whirring of the wild-bird's wing upon the moor, the bursting of the chase from cover, the creaking of the harvest-wain-the song of the vine-dressers-the laugh of the olive-gatherers-in every land where these sounds are heard, they make a child once more of the statesman who may for once have come forth to hear them. Sweeter still is the leisure-hour with children in the garden or the meadow, and the quiet stroll with wife or sister in the evening, or the gay excursion during a whole day of liberty. If Sunday evenings are sweet to the labourer, whose toils involve but little action of mind, how precious are his rarer holidays to the state-labourer, after the wear and tear of toil like his after his daily experience of intense thought, of anxiety, and fear! In the path of such should spring the freshest grass, and on their heads should fall the softest of the moonlight and the balmiest of the airs of heaven, if natural rewards are in any proportion to their purchase-money of toil."

Take a picture of another kind. It is of a deserted plantation, run to wildness.

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Jacques knew where to seek his friend; and led the way, on descending from the hills, straight across the plain to the Breda estate, where Toussant meant to await his family. How unlike was this plantation to what it was when these Negroes had seen it last! The cane-fields, heretofore so trim and orderly with the tall canes springing from the clean black soil, were now a jungle. The old plants had run up till they had leaned over with their own weight and fallen upon one another. Their suckers had sprung up in myriads, so that the racoon, which burrowed among them, could scarcely make its way in and out. The grass on the little enclosed lawns grew so rank, that the cattle, now wild, were almost hidden as they lay down in it; and so uneven and unsightly were the patches of growth, that the blossoming shrubs, with which it had been sprinkled for ornament, now looked forlorn and out of place, flowering amidst the desolation. The slave-quarter was scarely distinguishable from the wood behind it, so nearly was it overgrown with weeds. A young foal was browzing on the thatch, and a crowd of glittering lizards darted out and away on the approach of human feet. Jacques did not stay at the slave-quarter; but he desired his company to remain there and in the neighbouring field, while he went with Thérèse to bring out their chief to them. They went up to the house; but in no one of its deserted chambers did they find Toussaint. Perhaps he is in his own cottage,' said Thérèse. 'Is it possible,' replied Jacques, 'that, with this fine house all to himself, he should take up with that old hut?' Let us see,' said Thérèse, for he is certainly

not here.' When they reached Toussaint's cottage, it was no easy matter to know how to effect an entrance. Enormous gourds had spread their network over the ground, like traps for the feet of trespassers. The front of the piazza was completely overgrown with the creepers which had been brought there only to cover the posts and hang their blossoms from the eaves. They had now spread and tangled themselves till they made the house look like a thicket. In one place, however, between two of the posts, they had been torn down, and the evening wind was tossing the loose coils about. Jacques entered the gap; and immediately looked out again, smiling, and beckoning Thérèse to come and see. There, in the piazza, they found Toussaint stretched asleep upon the bench-so soundly asleep for once, that the whispers of his friends did not alter for a moment his heavy breathing."

Night at St. Domingo :

"For some little time nothing was heard but the sounds that in the plains of St. Domingo never cease-the humming and buzzing of mryiads of insects, the occasional chattering of monkies in a neighbouring wood, and, with a passing gust, a chorus of frogs from a distant swamp. Unconscious of this din from being accustomed always to hear more or less of it, the boy amused himself with chasing the fire-flies, whose light began to glance around us as darkness descended. His sister was poring over her work, which she was just finishing, when a gleam of greenish light made both look up. It came from a large meteor which sailed past towards the mountains; whither were tending also the huge masses of cloud which gather about the high peaks previous to the season of rain and hurricanes. There was nothing surprising in this meteor, for the sky was full of them in August nights; but it was very beautiful. The globe of green light floated on till it burst above the mountains, illuminating the lower clouds, and revealing along the slopes of the uplands the coffee-groves, waving and bowing their heads in the wandering winds of that high region."

ART. III.-The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford. Vol. VI. London Bentley. 1840.

THE Concluding volume of the series, in which numerous letters from the original manuscripts and never before published have appeared, these additions having continued to increase as the work approached completion. In the portion before us there are no fewer than some hundred novelties, and although we have thought all along that the specimens which have been for many years in print were, speaking generally, worthy of preference in selection, yet those which are now given to the world for the first time are acceptable, even while remarkable only for their playfulness and trifling. Howsoever light and empty they be as regards feeling, or cold and superficial in respect of thought, their graceful and sparkling wit is always charming, and the ceaseless gossip sometimes VOL. I. (1841.) No. 1.

informing. The additions in this volume strike us as being fully more interesting than any that are to be found in the earlier parts of the series.

Walpole's letters are not to be viewed alone as charming specimens of epistolary writing, or on account of the wit that sparkles in them, and the amusing anecdotes which they contain. They afford a striking view of the writer's curiously constituted mind, of the aristocracy and courtiers of the period, of political actors and intrigues, and of the fashion in literature and criticism. As regards the man himself, we think that there appear stronger evidences of his "affectations," a term which the Edinburgh Review has applied to him, than Miss Berry in the preface is willing to admit. He seems to us at least to have feigned an easiness of disposition and a reluctance to be deemed anxious about such grave occurrences in life as engage the attention of most men, especially those who move in a public sphere, or are the objects of public curiosity, than he really felt. A person who so often proclaimed his equanimity, his carelessness and his frivolity, may be supposed to have been desirous to pass for something other than he really was. It is not very likely that one who was so superficial as well as eccentric could be free of a kindred weakness, viz. that of affecting superiority to the things which troubled or deeply engaged greater minds. In reference to his literary labours he speaks with a diffidence and want of concern which we believe to have been in a great measure assumed. And when he professes a contempt or carelessness about the opinions of the multitude, are we to take his words in their full and precise meaning? On looking back to the fifth volume, we find what we consider evidence to the effect expressed, in a letter to Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), when speaking of the "Castle of Otranto," and which we copy out :

"Lately I have had little leisure to attend to literary pursuits. I have been much out of order with a violent cold and cough for great part of the winter; and the distractions of this country, which reach even those who mean the least profit by their country, have not left even me, who hate politics, without some share in them. Yet as what one does not love cannot engross one entirely, I have amused myself a little with writing. Our friend, Lord Finlater, will, perhaps, shew you the fruit of that trifling, though I had not the confidence to trouble you with such a strange thing as a miraculous story, of which I fear the greatest merit is the novelty. I have lately perused with much pleasure a collection of old ballads, to which I see, sir, you have contributed with your usual benevolence. Continue this kindness to the public, and smile as I do when the pains you take for them are misunderstood or perverted. Authors must content themselves with hoping that two or three intelligent persons in an age will understand the merit of their writings, and those authors are bound in good breeding to suppose that the public in general is enlightened. They who are in the secret, know how far of that public they have any reason to wish should read

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