city, replied feelingly that he would have sold the city itself to the devil if suitable terms had been offered. Swinton provided the capital, and Latour the talent, and between them both they launched the Courrier de l'Europe, having previously taken care to address a prospectus to the Foreign Minister, Count de Vergennes, who answered that if the Courrier were loyally conducted he should favour its sale to the best of his power. But Count de Vergennes never suspected that a paper designed for the purpose of spying on England, and turning its institutions into ridicule, would redound to the glorification of that country; and yet this is what happened. Latour was relatively an honest writer; that is, he stated facts as they were, without seeking to exaggerate them. He never lost sight of his purpose, which was to depict England faithfully to French eyes; but in pursuance of this object he showed up the good side of British customs along with the bad. Now, when everything had been said against England, that kingdom towered hundreds of cubits above France. There was no Bastile in London, no lettres de cachet, and no Farmers-General. The disputes in Parliament might be paltry, but it was a great point to have a Parliament at all; and then there was Trial by Jury, a comparatively free press-e.g. the Junius Letters still fresh in men's thoughts-and free municipalities. All these things seemed good and grand to the French, and thoughtful men began to brood about them. Count de Vergennes and his brother ministers were too far removed from the people to think in harmony with the public mind; and they saw only the anti-English form of the Courrier de l'Europe's articles, without calculating the hidden moral they bore. To them this foreign sheet really brought news. French politicians are fairly ignorant now, but they were hopelessly so then; and England, in its home-lifeen deshabille, to use the native term-was as much an unknown land to them as that barbarously named Massachussets, where a certain George Washington was beginning to distinguish himself. There can be no doubt either that the Courrier de l'Europe did do England a great deal of harm, by emboldening the French Government to send help to the American rebels. The young Marquis de Lafayette, driven thereto by his mistress, Madame de Simiane, sailed across the Atlantic with a troop of Knight-errants. The Courrier continued to repeat that all was distraction and disorganisation in the English army, and eventually the French gathered pluck, declared war, and shipped to America those six thousand men which turned the scale of the war against us. It is a great pity that the state of our law did not admit of Lord North's Government seizing the man Swinton and wringing his neck a little; for assuredly men have swung at Tyburn and Newgate for villanies less than his. But Lord Mansfield, who was consulted about this French paper, declared that there was no weapon in our arsenal of Parliament Acts which could reach a man who published treason in a foreign tongue; and it was not till 1782 that the happy device was hit upon of confiscating the Courrier at the British Customs as "goods liable to duty." As the duty which the

Customs proposed to levy was on the same scale as if each copy of the paper were a folio volume, this obliged Swinton to get the Courrier printed in Boulogne. At the same time, haying quarrelled with Latour, he chose a new editor, in the person of J. Pierre Brissot, the future Girondist. The change in the printing locality did not abate the antiBritish speech of the Courrier; but had it done so, it would have been too late, for in 1783 the Independence of the United States had been definitely won.

And now, between the excitement of the American War on the one hand, the articles of the Courrier, those of Linguet, and the increasing confusion of home finances on the other, matters were speeding towards a crisis; and the Press of Paris reflected the universal thirst for reform at any cost. The newspapers could no longer be kept in bounds; fresh ones exploded every day; and if a journalist was marched off to the Bastile, twenty others seemed to spring up from under ground to take his place, and shout for his release. Necker, after trying to put money matters into shape, had been sacrificed by the nobility, as Turgot had been before him; and a succession of aristocratic and blundering financiers followed-Joly de Fleury, Calonne, Brienne-all three of whom undid what little good their predecessors had been able to effect. Then it was found necessary to call Necker back again. This was in 1788; and meanwhile the miserable scandal * of the Necklace had compromised Marie Antoinette in the eyes of the malicious Parisian populace, and turned the clamour for reform into a roaring, not only against the Court, but against the Royal Family. The days were past when the papers only spoke with reverence of the Queen; journalists of the popular party now seemed to vie with each other in launching the most vicious invectives. When it was at last decided in Cabinet Council that nothing could save the country but the Convocation of the States General, Louis XVI. asked despondingly of the Duke de Nivernais: "How about the Press the audacity of newspapers is surpassing belief?" "Laissons les brailler, Sire," answered the Duke. "Nous pourrons les museler quand les bavards auront fini leur besogne." By the "chatterboxes" the Duke meant the deputies of the States General; but how their "besogne" ended, and what part the press played in their labours, form a new period of the French Press, the treatment of which must be reserved for another paper.

Cardinal Louis de Rohan being enamoured of the Queen, was hoaxed by an adventuress (Mdlle. La Mothe), who bore some likeness to Marie Antoinette, and who cajoled the Cardinal into sending her a necklace worth 60,000l., under the impression that he was giving it to the Queen. As the Cardinal was in embarrassed circumstances, he had bought the necklace on credit; but the jewellers, unable to get their money, complained to the King, and the whole trickery was exposed. Louis XVI, instead of hushing up the matter, unwisely had the adventuress tried by the Parliament of Paris, and publicly disgraced the Cardinal,

172

Missives in Masquerade.

"IF," says some old satirist, "we passed through life with masks, what a vast number of tears and smiles we might save." But tears and smiles themselves have been found by experience to be an easy and convenient mask to counterfeit emotion and totus mundus agit histrionem. So language is a mask for thought, and cryptograms, if the word be licensed, are a mask for written language. That which is secret and mysterious has always had a magnetic force for the human mind. But mystery, like Proteus, in fear of continual detection, must continually change itself. Like women and materia prima, it ever seeks new forms. The number of dominoes in the property-room of cryptography is therefore legion. We content ourselves in this article with wiping off the dust from a few of these, in order to prepare them for public inspection. Most of them are old enough, it may be, to be new to the present age, worn and faded servants of the mirth and hostility, the loves and the secrets of bygone years. Some masks we have added of our own manufacture, but not many, knowing well that the web woven out of its own body by the spider is not more prized than the honey gathered by the wandering bee from every opening flower.

Cryptography, or the art of secret writing, has been in use from the institution of the Egyptian hieroglyphics to the latest system of shorthand. Its students have been priests, princes, and lovers. Hermes Trismegistus and the lowest juggler on the turf, or advertiser, whose works seem like the dreams of a sick man, in to-day's Times, Charlemagne and Charles the Martyr, Ovid and Don Juan, alike availed themselves of its assistance. It is called also steganography or polygraphy; sometimes cipher writing, from the use of the Arabic numerals; but this, as will be seen, is only one among many methods of cryptography. Such great authorities as Vieta the mathematician of the first Francis, Lord Bacon, and Bishop Wilkins, have considered it as a part of grammar, inasmuch as it is a mode of expression of thought; and, so far as that portion of cryptography is concerned which expresses words or ideas by single characters, it is probably the earliest mode of thought expression. The system of letters looks towards a later and less unrefined age. We know not whether the reader remembers the story of the Savage and the Figs. A barbarian had been entrusted with certain figs, to be taken to a friend of his master's, with a letter enclosed in the basket containing them. The barbarian, experiencing the pangs of hunger on the

way, opened the basket and partook of the figs, seeing they were many, and supposing that a few would not be missed by the donee. But he, on their arrival, reading the letter, which contained an invoice of the fruit, found that seven were deficient. On this he straightway charged the messenger with embezzlement, who was confounded, and confessed, looking on the letter in the light of an evil demon inimical to his interests. He to whom the figs had been remitted sent back sorbs, with a letter, in the same basket and by the same bearer, who thinking, with the Spaniard, that "there is no bread bad to hunger," devoured several of the sorbs; but before doing so carefully hid the letter under a large stone, thus frustrating, as he supposed, evil speculation. The story ends with the extreme astonishment of the savage when again detected, more especially after he had been allowed to examine the letter, and holding it to his ear for a long time, had not heard the faintest sound. It is added, though perhaps on insufficient authority, that, losing all respect for his own divinities, he subsequently became a convert to the Christian creed.

Probably the hieroglyphs of Egypt and China, as the Scandinavian Runes, preceded their alphabet, and were afterwards revived by the priests for the preservation of their secrets. Letters, like words, succeed one another as the leaves of trees, and it was not till the old leaves lay fallen on the ground that the priests consecrated them for their own advantage. So the Roman Church still retains a Latin liturgy, and would as little like a service generally understood as Cotytto the celebration of the mysteries of Bona Dea in the open sunlight, or a Vestal Virgin a dance in the Forum of Rome.

An argument has been urged against any revelations of steganography, on the ground that such may be applied to evil. But, alas! this objection may be urged against all revelation, and besides, steganography is a double-edged sword, teaching deceit and how to discover deceit. It would seem absurd to cut out the tongue because it is a world of iniquity, full of deadly poison and set on fire of hell, or to curse Cadmus, the inventor of letters, because they have too often seemed to be, what he is said to have sown, the teeth of serpents.

A different language from their own is, of course, a kind of secret writing to many, for the universal tongue which prevails in the signs of most of the arts and sciences, as in chemistry, music, astronomy, mathematics, has not yet led to an universal harmonious language, that large hope of the learned Bishop of Chester.

Extremes meet. The earliest kind of secret communication-we will say a few words first of that unwritten—as well as the latest, seems to be the wink. This voiceless voice of the eyelid, succeeded by other facial manœuvres and distortions, gave place to the language of the fingers, more or less modified, learnedly known as dactylology or cheirology, to the venerable Bede as indigitation, and to the people as the deaf and dumb alphabet. Of course the signs were not the same as those in our present scheme, but it was the same method of communicating the

thing signified. The Romans had an ingenious way of expressing all numbers up to 100 on their left hand, proceeding to the right for higher figures; and so Juvenal, speaking of Nestor, ironically complimenting him on his crow-like senility, says he must tell his age on his right hand. The commentators affirm that by this art any numbers could be expressed up to 900,000, but the device, owing to the extreme difficulty, and wonderful variety of its inflexions, has long grown obsolete. The peculiar significative use of the fingers applied only to numbers among the ancients, with a few exceptions, alluded to by Ovid, and never apparently reduced into any system, in which the fingers were used for amatory signals.

A species, however, of deaf and dumb alphabet was in use among the Romans, which consisted in declaring a letter by touching that part of the body of which the name in spelling was commenced by the letter required, as, for instance, if I touch my beard, "B" is signified; if my forehead, "F," and so on.

But the moderns have constructed an alphabet in which A is expressed by the little finger of the left hand held erect, B by the second, and so through both hands till L, which is expressed by the thumb of the right. Trying this alphabet in the privacy of our chamber, with the doors closed about us, we failed in the matter of the letter B-which refused pertinaciously to remain erect unless accompanied by C. The succeeding letters after L are indicated by the thumb and smallest finger of the left held up together, so M is shown by the thumb and two last fingers of the left, and so on; but of course this alphabet might be varied to almost any extent without any difficulty. An old Nurembergian who invented one of these alphabets, a needlessly complicated one, added in a scholium to his work this caution, that lest the company should be led to imagine that the fingers were with any set design contracted (for various contractions occur in his system) and extended, they should appear as if so formed in readiness to rub the head, beard, or face, or to scratch some other part of the body, or as if they were thus disposed from distraction of mind, or gesticulatory impatience, or other

causes.

The scorner alluded to by the wise man, who talked with his fingers as well as winked with his eyes, and spoke with his feet, was one who had evidently entered deeply into the study of arthrology, and may be com pared in excellence with the learned Dr. Gabriel Neal, who is said to have been able to understand any word without its utterance by the mere motion of the lips which formed it.

The giving of intelligence by nightly watchfires is confidently affirmed to have been at least as early as the taking of windy Troy. We know that Eschylus at all events makes them used with reference to Clytemnestra by Agamemnon.

There is a pretty method of private communion which Hero perhaps adopted or invented with Leander. It is described at length by Polybius.