ture, the men were driven from their work, covered though they were with heavy coats, thick gloves, and fur caps. At times they were frosted over with icicles, from the mist of the St. Lawrence; scores of them were frostbitten, yet by timely attention and judicious treatment, not a finger or a limb was lost by cold. Thus the work went on, every man working with an enthusiasm which neither the rigour of the season, nor the labour of the undertaking could check; for the general opinion was, that unless the centre tube could be completed before the break up of the ice, it would fall into the river and be destroyed. Hence the last weeks of this great enterprise acquired the interest of a crisis - everything depended on the prosecution of the work and its termination before the thaw let loose the ice floor of the river, and swept away the frames on which the work still rested, by the huge drift of the subsiding waters. On the 28th February, the bottom was completed and riveted, 180 feet of the sides were in place, and 100 feet of the top plated. A fortnight later, on the 15th March, a fearful storm swept away a portion of the scaffolding, and gave signs of a break up of the ice. The thermometer had risen to 50°. On the 21st March, the whole of the plating was finished, and only 18,000 rivets were needed to perfect the work; in three days 12,000 of them were made fast: 5,600 still remained to be done, when on Friday, the 25th March, the first movement of the ice was felt dark ridges became visible above the bridge and it became apparent that the whole field of ice of the Prairie Basin was slowly driving on the Middle Shoal. A panic seized all hands, but as the tube was a mile from the shore escape was impossible, and fortunately in a few minutes the movement of the ice ceased for that day. A return of frost on the following night made the ice safe again for a few hours, and enabled the men to place the last rivets. Measures were then taken to cut away the wedges and remove the artificial stages; as they were cut away, the tube remained firm and unsupported across the centre of the river, with a slight deflection of three inches in the bottom. On the following day the ice came down with tremendous force, crushing and driving before it the temporary piers and staging.

Although this operation completed the most arduous part of the undertaking, many months were required for the removal of the prodigious temporary dams, crib-work, and other materials which had been laid down to protect the masonry. The 17th December, 1859, was the day appointed for the first passage of trains through the bridge. About an hour before the first train was to pass a tremendous crash was heard. Alarm was felt. But on running to discover the cause of the uproar, it was found

that the newly-formed ice in drifting down the river had swept away the last portion of the scaffolding, and left the bridge free, and the river clear of all further obstruction.

It is to be lamented that Mr. Robert Stephenson did not live to witness the completion of this great undertaking-perhaps the most extraordinary of all the great works of engineering genius which have been constructed in this age. But whilst we do homage to the boldness of conception and accuracy of calculation by which such works are rendered possible, we must reserve, at least, an equal degree of admiration for those resolute, ingenious, and long-suffering men by whom such conceptions are realised. To have worked on the Victoria Bridge from its commencement to its completion, is to have fought six campaigns of as much toil and trial as the contests of war. Night and day, summer and winter, in cold the most rigorous and heat the most intolerable, the work proceeded; and the army of gallant artisans, commanded by men, who, under the humble name of contrac-. tors, are in reality officers of inexhaustible skill and resource, triumphed over obstacles and antagonists more formidable than any human resistance. We are indebted to Mr. Hodges for his clear and unpretending narration of this wonderful performance, and in conclusion we shall borrow from his summary the following particulars of the dimensions of the work. The total length of the Victoria Bridge is 9,144 feet, the length of the tubes alone being 6,592 feet. The bottom of the tube rests at a level of 60 feet above the surface of the St. Lawrence. The weight of the iron in the tubes is 9,044 tons, riveted by 1,540,000 rivets; and the surface of the iron work, which has been painted with four coats of paint, is no less than 32 acres, so that 128 acres of paint have been applied to it. The bridge has 24 piers and 25 spans, 24 of these spans being from 242 to 247 feet, and one extending to 330 feet. The masonry in the piers and abutments amounts to 2,713,095 cubic feet, and the quantity of timber used in the temporary works was 2,280,000 cubic feet. By these appliances a railway bridge was laid over one of the greatest and most rapid rivers in the world in the space of five years and five months. Three thousand men, six steamers, seventy-five barges, and four steam engines were constantly employed on this work. Such are the details with which Mr. Hodges concludes his narrative. They are complete, except in one material respect. We are left to surmise what may have been the cost of this prodigious work. On that point no information is vouchsafed to us; and as Louis XIV. burnt the bills of the architects of Versailles, we presume the great Companies of our time would fain forget the outlay of the gigantic monuments of their splendour and ambition.

ART. IV. 1. Political Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, annotated. By W. WALKER WILKINS. 2 vols. London: 1860.

2. The Jacobite Songs and Ballads of Scotland, from 1688 to 1746 with an Appendix of Modern Jacobite Songs. Edited by CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D. London: 1861.

IF

[F I were permitted to make the ballads of a nation, I should 'not care who made its laws.' This phrase has passed into an adage, attributed to one of the most terse of political writers and pregnant of political thinkers, Fletcher of Saltoun. But his it is not. Like most good sayings, it belongs to that comprehensive all the world,' which is proverbially said to have more wit than any one in it. Fletcher does not claim it. 'I 'said,' are his words, I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment' (an imaginary_interlocutor in his Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Government) that he believed, if a man were permitted to 'make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the 'laws of a nation.' But the adage, with all its smartness, is a very deceitful one. A curious essay might be written to show how, in politics, wit is generally on the losing side. The successful ballad is very rarely the accompaniment of a successful cause. The exile, the defeated, the persecuted - these are commonly the favourites of the popular muse.

'It is remarkable, though quite natural' (says Dr. Mackay) that the losing cause in politics should always be associated with lovelier music and poetry than have ever been inspired by success. The defeat of Flodden was a nobler theme for the poets of the fifteenth century than the victory of Waterloo was for those of the nineteenth. Béranger could not sing songs about Napoleon_robed in his purple and conquering the world; but when the great Emperor was stripped of his crown, his power, and his liberty, and sent to die brokenhearted on the lonely rock of St. Helena, the heart of the poet was touched, and his harpstrings quivered to the tenderest and most ennobling music of the time.'

What is true of the elegiac ballad is still more true of the satirical. A Government pursued by the choicest and most effective satire, is apt to be a very long-lived one. 'Qu'ils 'cantent, pourvou qu'ils payent,' said Mazarin, who survived a thousand Mazarinades to die in his bed an all-powerful Prime Minister. But ministers and empires perish, while wit is

immortal, and after ages forget altogether its earthly defeat in its spiritual triumph. Aristophanes seems to live and triumph, after 2000 years, in his irresistible exposure of the arts of demagogues; but those demagogues triumphed in their day, and swayed the fates of his Republic. Pasquin and Marforio have pelted the Vatican for many a century, without knocking down a single abuse. All the exquisite poetry, and humour, and invective, of the Jacobite muse were shot in vain point-blank into the massive earthworks of prosaic solidity which walled about the Whig monarchy. In the fierce encounter of wits which heralded the French Revolution, the royalist punsters and rhymesters had incomparably the best of it: but their heads fell one by one under the guillotine, with the smartest epigrams still trembling on their lips. It is a mistake to suppose, as is sometimes supposed, that Church and State have had a decided preponderance of sarcasm on their side in the English political satires. The notion is in reality only based on the fact that Church and State (in the old sense of the words) have been on the whole more frequently in opposition than in power, since the great Rebellion. It was otherwise during the intervals of Tory triumph; when Andrew Marvell showed up the Court of the Restoration-when Lillibullero raised a host of Orangemen and again in the later campaigns of the authors of the Rolliad,' and of Tom Moore. The much more general statement is the true one that the satirical muse thrives only in opposition, to whatever party she may attach herself. Power, with its responsibilities, restraints, and decencies, speedily reduces her to dulness. The usual exceptions to this rule arise on those rare occasions when Opposition, deserting her station of vantage, descends into the field on equal terms, and exposes a weak side to attack-some favourite delusion, or pet prophet. Then the Government wit may well exclaim, that the Lord hath delivered his enemy into his hands: and may compensate himself for his prudential reserve by such stinging discharges as assailed the contrivers of the Popish Plot, or the Anglo-Jacobin sympathisers, or the forlorn knights-errant of Queen Caroline of Brunswick.

Of all the subsidiary sources of information, therefore, to which a historical inquirer must occasionally resort, satires and caricatures are perhaps the most misleading. They represent the ephemeral feeling, not of the public, as is commonly said, but of a section of the public; generally of a minority. And even this they do, subject to all that exaggeration and distortion which is in truth their very essence. For what would be the

value of a lampoon which stuck to the truth? Voltaire, himself so great a proficient in all the arts of the political and literary partisan, was well aware of this. Il y a encore,' he says, 'une grande source d'erreurs publiques parmi nous, et qui est par'ticulière à notre nation.' (It was so when he wrote; for the French noëls' and similar ballads had a literary vogue long preceding that attained by English political songs, and far surpassing it.) C'est le goût des vaudevilles. On en fait chaque jour 'sur les personnes les plus respectables; et on entend tous les 'jours calomnier les vivans et les morts sur ces beaux fondemens. Ce fait (dit-on) est vrai, c'est une chanson qui l'atteste.' We cannot but set this true judgment of their value, by the man of all others best qualified to pronounce one, against such undiscriminating admiration as that of Mr. Wilkins, in his preface:

'The real value and importance' (says he) of such ephemeral productions may be best discerned in the volumes of the late Lord Macaulay, the only native historian who has thought them worthy of his particular study and use. It is no disparagement to the literary fame of that distinguished writer to affirm that they have imparted to his pages a vitality which the profoundest knowledge of the principles of human action, combined with the greatest erudition and the highest descriptive powers, could never have effected without them.'

To these despised and inexhaustible sources of information he was principally indebted for his life-like delineations of character; for his descriptions of popular commotions; and, not unfrequently, for his knowledge of the motives by which public men were actuated, in particular conjunctures, in their conduct.'

The incautious reader, who might suppose from this passage, that Lord Macaulay had composed a kind of ballad-history of Great Britain, would be surprised to find how few such pieces he really quotes, and on how far fewer he relies' for any purpose at all, except the amusement of his readers and himself-stored with them as was his extraordinary memory. But carefully as his judgment kept his fondness for the broadside and the flying sheet in its proper place, still we can scarcely deny that this fondness contributed to, or arose from, his principal fault,—a tendency to substitute what Mr. Wilkins calls vitality,' what the French term colour,' and we effect,' for literal prosaic truth. But that which was a mere defect in him, is unhappily the engrossing sin of the popular and effective' historians whose names are now most frequently in the mouth of the public. The pleasant temptation to wander in quest of adventures, rather than of solid conquests, in the bye-roads of history, is one of those which that rare personage, a real lover of truth, must keep in very careful control. To quote Voltaire again, Il faut