more ease. A WEEK IN A FRENCH COUNTRY HOUSE. · 1 499 Lady Blankeney and her daughter) have rare even in France - would be quite imthis most fascinating social quality of possible in England: childlike spontaneity, that is, express themselves with so much less relation to abstract rules and general conventions than the English, and therefore with so much Madame Olympe, the mistress and presiding genius of the household, with her imperious self-will and infinite depth of tenderness and compassion, is as childlike nay, as her own little daughter Jeanne, more so, as childlike in her own way as M. Dessaïx, the naif old violinist who imitates the manners of flies and elephants at dinner time, and picks peaches with an elephantine sweep of his arm off his young friend's Ursula Hamilton's plate. Take the following little trait of Madame Olympe's self-will, and notice how much less social restraint childlike self-will of this kind causes, than far less obstinate and far more reasonable self-will of another and more regulated kind: After we had gone steadily along for about ten minutes, one of the horses shied at a piece of paper that was lying in the road. Madame Olympe gave a scream: "It's the white horse!" cried she.. 'It's the bay one," said The coachman Monsieur René, looking out. whipped and whipped in vain; the animal jumped and fidgeted, but would not go by the place. Madame Olympe was beginning to be a good deal frightened. It's the white horse!" she exclaimed again. Monsieur Charles now "No, Olympe," said he, looked out in bis turn. "It's the white horse!" "it is the bay horse." she vociferated, eyeing him despotically, beThe beast now began to kick and plunge, and Madame Olympe got into a state of the most imperious terror. is no white horse at all in the carriage," said Monsieur Charles. "But when I tell you that I choose that it should be a white horse!" tween two screams. There We had nearly finished dessert, when Ursula "What in the world are suddenly exclaimed, He was carefully strok you doing, Jacques?" ing down both sides of his nose with the first finger of each hand, and then rubbing the points of the finger together at the end of his nose, as if to rub off some adhesive substance. I had seen him steadily doing this during the last ten minutes. "That is the way the flies do," he Hast said, looking up at her meditatively. thou never seen how they clean their bodies, first with their legs going carefully under their wings, and then how they clean their legs by scraping them against each other?" and he "Čeci c'est l'éléphant," he condid it again. tinued mournfully, and stretching his arm out with a sudden impetuous sort of circular sweep across to Ursula's plate, he picked up from off it a peach which she was just going to eat, and dropped it with a curve from above into his even own mouth. The dexterity and the likeness to And again: "I will write a new oratorio of Samson," "And Samson shall said Monsieur Jacques. be a contralto, and thou shalt sing it-thou "But how wilt thon write who art strong." it?" said Ursula "thou who art not strong? One does but what one is. Thou dear old inny," she went on caressingly, "thou hast a little soul: how wilt thou do great things with it? But thou hast a tender soul, and a fanci ful brain, and of grace, tenderness, and fancy thou wilt always be master. what thou art. Thou canst but Write me a cantata of David before he went up to slay the Philistine, in the cried she, in her highest key, and with her eye-flower of his shepherd days, and I will sing that brows running straight up her forehead into her hair. It was too funny, and we all went into fits of laughter, in which she could not help joining very heartily herself, in spite of her alarm. The picture of M. Dessaix, the helpless little violinist, who is so utterly dependent on his young companion, Ursula Hamilton, that he knocks at the compartment between their rooms to complain that he cannot sleep for some mysterious smell - which turns - is out to be due to apples under his bed most entertaining and engaging. We have not room for any lengthened extract, but such a relation as this between a man and a young lady, who is neither his relative nor his fiancée a relation admitted to be very for thee." Very striking, too, is the sketch of M. René de Saldes, the ladies' man of the story, with his wonderful influence over everybody, due to a mixture of scornfulness, savoir-faire, and selfishness, and to the "little tired, sad smile," which makes all the women feel him their superior, and leads them to indulge an entirely mistaken fancy that he has some deep sorrow (other than his own pride and selfishness) which they could console. Even he, who has by far the most artificially regulated mind in the story, has a social spontaneity about him which makes him very different from the ladies' hero of an English tale, though it comes out in reckless sarcasms, directed against any one he cannot sway, and in sad little compliments, spontaneous in form, but intended to gain him influence where he sees that he can establish an influence, which imply anything but disinterested spontaneousness of character. Still, the ease, the absolute adaptation of his language to the exigences of the moment, and without any regard to abstract rules, is as remarkable in M. René de Saldes as in any of the others, and his passionate burst of childlike grief when he cannot persuade Ursula Hamilton to marry him, is conceived entirely in the same social school. Nothing can be better than the child (Jeanne's) description of the nature of M. de Saldes' influence in the château: come here in the winters; we should fall back From the Examiner. Wanderings of a Naturalist in India, the Western Himalayas, and Cashmere. By Andrew Leith Adams, M.D., Surgeon 22nd Regiment. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. ARMY surgeons have good opportunities for the practical study of natural history, and Dr. Adams has made good use of those that fell to his lot. He was in India, with plenty of leisure for looking about and plenty of ability to look about intelligently, between 1849 and 1854; and here he gives a rambling history of his observations, with just enough record of his personal adventures and gossip on miscellaneous topics to give coherence to the narrative. His first halt was at Poonah, and there, on beginning his Indian life, he wisely set himself in opposition to the orthodox ways of European residents, thereby proving his theory that "the most part of the so-called insalubrity of the climate is attributable to the neglect of the simplest of hygienic rules." "By rising early and going soon to bed," he says, "I had always a few hours at my disposal for out-door amusements and recreations, and, when the heat of the day kept me within the shade of my bungalow, I could still find occupation and study among the collection of natural objects I had gathered during my morning and evening rambles." In that way he kept his health and was able to lay up a good store of information for his own and other peo "René is travelled, and learned, and artistic, and interesting - above all, interesting; that is the very word for him. But he never thinks much about anybody, that I can see, except himself; and yet somehow, I don't know why, one can't help having a feeling of immense respect for him; I suppose, because he has always the air of despising one so- it gives one immediately a morbid desire after his approbation and notice. It is a great thing for us to have him into the benighted state of the Middle Ages, and do nothing but kill our hogs and eat them, if it were not for him! He keeps us all up to the mark. I always read up to him when he is coming, and we never dare shut an eye of an evening; and Maman dresses herself properly, and puts on no more gowns that were made in the year one; and Charles does not make any dirty jokes; and even the cook sends up superhuman dinners when he is at Marny! Do you under-ple's profit. The naturalist in India, how stand him at all from my description?" All the little side-figures are equally characteristic of a society entirely unknown in England. The little nun and her gossippy self-dedication and devotion to the highest duties of charity is a most amusing and pathetic side-figure; and excellent, though rather faint, is the sketch of M. Charles, the Marquis, who in the absence of Madame Olympe would have been master of the château. Perhaps the poorest sketch in the book is the figure meant to be most striking, Ursula Hamilton, who impresses us as drawn from life only in her exquisitely drawn relation to M. Dessaix. In other aspects of her character she is scarcely well defined. All the studies, however, are mere outlines, and it is somewhat remarkable how much pleasure Madame Sartoris has managed to give us by sketches so very slight and airy as these. ever, has not to wander far in search of objects. Fleas, mosquitoes, beetles, and scorpions swarm in every house and tent; and snakes, of which plenty can always be found near at hand, often come in-doors for better company. "On one occasion," says Dr. Adams, "I was awoke by my servant pursuing a snake across my bed-room floor. He killed it at my bed-side. One of the first injunctions a native servant gives his newly-arrived master is, always to shake his boots well before putting them on,' scorpions being apt to take up their abode in the toe." Dr. Adams tells also how, at the proper time, the pools are almost coated over with the spawn of frogs, and how kites and vultures will dart down and seize the mutton-chops which the servants are bringing to table from the neighbouring cookhouse. My attention was one morning directed to a colony of flying foxes, which had taken up their abode on a banyan tree situate in one of the most central and popu lous quarters of Poonah. Each bat was suspended by the hind feet, in which position it remained even when shot. Some were perfectly motionless, others swaying to and fro with noisy clamour, indifferent to the busy crowd moving onwards in the street below. One I killed measured from tip to tip about five feet." Ants, too, move about in long columns, a foot or so wide. "One day, during a ramble in the neighbourhood of Kurrachee, I observed a string of these ants extending from their nest across a plain for more than a quarter of a mile, in the direction of a barn. Instead of carrying their eggs, they were stocking up supplies for future use. In steady double file they were proceeding to and from their nest; one party moving slowly on, heavily loaded, each individual carrying a vetchseed about the size of its bearer, while the returning party hurried back for a fresh burden. I passed them at dusk, and on the following day found them as busy as ever." These little thieves would soon empty a granary, but he would be a bold man who should attempt to check their course and so subject himself to their stings. Then there are the jackals, with a special liking for human flesh, who even break into the hospital dead-wards in search of food, and whose half-barking, half-wailing cries sounded to Dr Adams like an utterance of these words: Pleasanter objects of study-beasts, birds, and fishes of all sorts - -came abundantly in Dr Adams's way during his stay in Poonah and on his journey to Scinde. In search of others he made expeditions to the Chor mountain and other parts of the Himalayan ranges, as well as into Cashmere and elsewhere. In these expeditions he shot pheasants without number, and hunted deer, wild boars, bears, elephants, and the like. About the appearances and habits of each and all, Dr Adams supplies much interesting information. disabuse her readers, we conclude, from the beginning, of the notion of its being an historical tale. It neither romances on a period, nor beautifies nor blackens actual character. Its merit lies in a very pretty, discriminative conception of two or three specimens of character, which might perhaps have existed in England at any part of the last half of the seventeenth century, but which are certainly drawn from the writer's own imagination, and very slightly from the popular notions of the prevailing parties of the period. Here you have a fastidious, delicate, Puritan lady, wedded to a coarse, illiterate clown of the Cavalier school, and, chiefly by means of her wiser, more teachable, and candid sister, and also of the sensible man whom the sister marries, the business of the book seems to be to show how the discordant couple may not only have their redeeming points, but how these may be by degrees made known to each other, so that the Christian lady may cease to be sour and repelling, and the brutal husband may be softened and elevated. There is a good deal of delicacy, nice handling, and wise suppression in the quiet story. To our minds it is a pleasant, reconciling picture, not resembling Miss Yonge's ordinary stories, probably not destined to please a good many of her readers, but at all events having a great share of merit of its own. An The machinery is common-place. American lady and gentleman come to pay a visit to a certain Sir Bernard and lady Danvers, residing in the north-west of Ireland, at Castle Barrymore, at the head of one of the loughs of the country. By vir tue of ancient kindred descent, they come filled with a curious interest in the annals of the Irish Danvers family, and are permitted to ransack the old letters and records of the time previous to the emigration of their own particular branch (somewhere about 1689). Of course there are also the pictures to see, Lady Penelope Bernard, the Puritan mother of their raceThomas Danvers, her husband. In the same room is the picture of her sister, Lady Frances, afterwards wife to Colonel Richard Chetwynd (who in due time comes to be Knight and Lieutenant-General). The pictures tell a good deal - Lady Pen, small, pale, sandy-haired Sir Thomas, red, is mainly given through the correspondence coarse, double-chinned - but the narrative of the two sisters, after marriage has separated them, and poor Pen is tremblingly obeying her lord and master at his house - Sir and home at Highbury Danvers, in Somersetshire. and the last of the Danvers papers is a let- From the Examiner. After the lapse of some years he takes her to Ireland her own family estate - and to this he is compelled by his lady's own imprudence — for it seems that, all in ignorance and mistaken zeal, sbe in his absence from home has committed him and his retainers to the cause of Monmouth; and poor Sir Thomas, returning, finds himself suddenly placed in great jeopardy. The rebellion is soon put down; but Kirke and Jefferys are pursuing their vengeful career, without an atom of discrimination. He has to pay largely for her disloyalty, and still, fearing for her life, can do no other than take her to his remete castle in Ireland. Capitally do the two characters come out there. He, abrupt, coarse, drunken, yet with a fund of honest and generous feeling, attached to and pitying his lady all the while, and doing his best to reconcile her to the exile; she, only discovering by slow degrees what her conduct has brought upon him, repelling him meantime by her sourness; the sister and brother-inlaw revealing the truth where they can, but cautious in their disclosures. Then comes the invasion of William of Orange; Sir Thomas, staunch in all things, has no hesitation here. He joins his Stuart King, is in the battle of the Boyne; is wounded, and believed to be slain. Then his Orange brother-in-law, Chetwynd, who of course has fought against him, goes down to Castle Barrymore, to break the news to the Lady Pen. But she has already heard it, and now first learns the complete history of what her ill-matched but generous husband has been doing for her through all this time of peril. Of course, conscience and remorse for the mistakes of the past lead to a new feeling of tenderness for the supposed deceased. Then she has a fatherless boy to plead for him. But, as may be conjectured, the husband is not dead, though desperately wounded, and is lying at a well concealed retreat near the castle, while the good brother-in-law, who suspects it all, has to feign ignorance and connive at their inter-period covered by the present volume exviews. THE QUEEN'S BOOK. 99 Next week the public will be reading the account of the Early Years of the Prince Consort, which is the first part of the memoir of Prince Albert now being completed under the direction of her Majesty. The nature of the book removes it from criticism, since it was compiled originally for private circulation amongst the members of the Queen's own family or of the circle of her private friends, and it is now, we are told, given to the public in authentic form to avert the danger of a surreptitious issue. This volume has been prepared with much good taste, and, we may add, literary skill, by Lieutenant-General the Hon. C. Grey, and the preparation of the volumes yet to follow has been intrusted to Mr Theodore Martin. The translations of the Prince's German letters written in his youth have been made by the Princess Helena. The tends from the Prince's birth to his marriage and the birth and christening of the Princess Royal. All this part is extremely well given. The loyal baronet can by no means give pledges to King William, nor can his wife Prince Albert was born on the 21st of endure separation, so they join the exiles June, 1819, at Rosenau, a summer residence at St. Germain, sending over their boy to of his father the Duke of Coburg. His Lady Frances and her husband for educa- mother's marriage was not a happy one, and tion, and after a time they emigrate to Vir- she was separated from his father when the ginia. The eldest born remains in Eng- young Prince Albert was only five years land, serving after a time in Queen Anne's old. During the remaining seven years of armies, and gaining honour and renown; her life his mother never saw her children. Her Majesty writes that "the Prince never forgot her, and spoke with much tenderness and sorrow of his poor mother, and was deeply affected in reading, after his marriage, the accounts of her sad and painful illness. One of the first gifts he made to the Queen was a little pin he had received from her when a little child. Princess Louise (the Prince's fourth daughter, and named after her grandmother) is said to be like her in face. At two years old "little Alberinchen was described as "with his large blue eyes and dimpled cheeks, bewitching, forward, and quick as a weasel," or again, as "lively, very funny, all good nature, and full of mischief." The Prince afterwards spoke to the Queen of his childhood, when his mother was yet with him, as the happiest time of his life. He and his brother Ernest, a year older than himself, were educated under the direction of a Mr. Florschutz. In 1825, aged six, he enters in a childish diary, "I cried at my lesson to-day, because I could not find a verb: and the tutor pinched me, to show me what a verb was. And I cried about it." In 1826 the Duchy of Gotha was given to the Duke of Coburg, the young brothers still abiding by their lessons at Coburg and the Rosenau. A remarkably full and systematic programme of studies, drawn up by Prince Albert for his own use at the age of fourteen, is printed upon one of the pages of this vol and glorious, and that your efforts may be rewarded by the thankfulness and love of your subjects. May I pray you to think likewise sometimes them that kindness you favoured them with of your cousins in Bonn, and to continue to till now. Be assured that our minds are always with you. I will not be indiscreet and abuse your time. Believe me always, your Majesty's most obedient and faithful servant, ALBERT. Holiday time at Bonn was spent in a tour which included Switzerland and Venice. Christmas the Coburg Princes spent with their uncle, the King Leopold, at Brussels. The English marriage was discussed then, the Queen firmly assenting, but requesting some delay. "She thought herself," the Queen says in a memorandum on the subject written in 1864, "still too young, and also wished the Prince to be older when he made his first appearance in England. In after years," her Majesty continues, "she often regretted this decision on her part, and constantly deplored the consequent delay of her marriage. Had she been engaged to the Prince a year sooner than she was, and had she married him at least six months earlier, she would have escaped many trials and troubles of different kinds." The Prince at Bonn took pleasure in arguments on public law and metaphysics, had also a lively sense of the ridiculous, and a talent for mimicry and pencil caricature, which he In 1835 the Prince and his brother made exercised much in jest over the several oda little German tour, and in the following dities of the Bonn professors. He was a year paid their first visit to London, whence good fencer, too, and once in a fencing Prince Albert reported home of the Princess match carried away the prize. In 1838 the Victoria, "Our cousin is very amiable." In Prince was separated from his brother ErApril, 1837, the Princes went to the Uni- nest, who departed for Dresden while Prince versity of Bonn, where they remained for Albert - Herr Florschutz having completthe next year and a half. It was on the ed his elementary studies went to Italy 20th of June, 1837, that Princess Victoria, with Baron Stockmar, who afterwards lived at the age of eighteen, and but three chiefly at the English Court, and of whom months older than the cousin who was even her Majesty writes in a note to this volume: then pointed to as her future husband, be-" The Queen, looking back with gratitude came Queen of England. Here, dated from Bonn, is Prince Albert's letter written to the Queen on her accession, the first letter written by him in English: ume. and affection to the friend of their early married life, can never forget the assistance given by the Baron to the young couple in regulating their movements and general mode of life, and in directing the education of their children." On the 21st of June, Prince Ernest's twenty-first birth-day was celebrated, and Prince Albert was at the same time declared of age by a Government patent; so he wrote "I am now my own master, as I hope al ways to be, and under all circumstances." To which saying the Queen appends "How truly this was ever carried out." In 1839, he visited England again, and his marriage |