happened to be a contradiction in the two laws I have before mentioned, to which we severally had recourse, Monsieur Capet and Monsieur Polignac felt called upon in a short time-a short time for a lawsuit-to demand the assistance of a very useful man of business -a peremptory man and a sharp; sometimes addicted to blunders, and never much given to deliberate reasoning: nevertheless, he has a peculiar art of cutting short matters, otherwise likely to be tediously prolix; and, in consequence, has often been appealed to in the little quarrels between a landlord and his tenants. His name is Monsieur Le Militaire. Never shall I forget when this fierce fellow called at our house. "Monsieur Le Peuple," cried he, in a voice of thunder, "I hear you are the most ungrateful of men; you continue to stick bills, in spite of your landlord's order to the contrary; and, when he takes the law against you, you presume to resist him; you have dared also to think of having a son; your son is a spurious little rascal-a warming-pan trick. I intend to knock him on the head the first opportunity: meanwhile, I am come to teach you how Messieurs, the landlords, ought to go to law with the canaille."

So saying, Monsieur Le Militaire seized my father by the collar, and began laying it on with a heavy bludgeon. My mother rent the air with her shrieks; my blood boiled at this outrage; I started forth from my hiding-place-for hitherto I had lain perdue; I caught hold of a poker in one hand, and a frying-pan in the other, and I flung myself, like a little Achilles, on Monsieur Le Militaire. He was startled by my unexpected courage; he struck a few blows at random, but I warded them off with the frying-pan, and thrust, carte and tierce, with the poker. My parents rushed to my assistance the dog barkedthe cat spat-the parrot screamed-Monsieur Le Militaire was frightened to death. In fine, we thrashed him to his heart's content, pinned a dish-clout to his tail, and sent him back to Monsieur Capet.

We were vastly proud of our victory over the bully. "Henceforth," cried my father, " the aid of Le Militaire shall be of no avail to landlords in beating him with a frying-pan, we have ruined that part of his profession which depended on authority over us." We now hastened to send a message to Monsieur Capet, offering a reconciliation if he would revoke his orders. Monsieur Polignac received our messenger, and told him the offer was out of the tion; "Then," quoth the messenger, you are prepared for the worst!" Monsieur Polignac bowed. Truly, politeness is a great, good quality!

ques

We recurred to the law, and called in a young lawyer, named "La Raison," very little known hitherto, but now rising greatly in the world; we discovered, through his assistance, that when a landlord broke his engagements, ill-used us, and sent bullies to beat us, we had the right to get, not only a new lease, but a new landlord. We hastened to act on so luminous a discovery; we went straight to a good-natured, popular man, Monsieur Philippe; made a hasty engagement with him, seemingly on eligible terms; met Monsieur Le Militaire, gave him another beating, and behold us turned over a new leaf.

Monsieur Capet and Monsieur Le Militaire, finding the day, the laugh, and the law against them, and dreading the punishment due to

their own illegal aggressions, left the country in an imminent hurry. Monsieur Capet hired a house elsewhere, becoming a tenant himself, and London nursed fools enough to propose a subscription for that brave Monsieur Le Militaire, who had been so valiantly beaten at Paris by a frying-pan and a poker!

CHAPTER III.

It is a pleasant thing to be the rage, especially at Paris. I became the rage. The brave little Revolution the dear little Revolution-the heroic offspring of Monsieur Le Peuple, was the theme of every tongue. Monsieur Philippe spoke of me in the handsomest manner; my picture, in a thousand shapes, filled the windows of the printshops; they put me into a Vaudeville; they put me into a pocket-handkerchief; they laughed at me; they cried at me, and they blew their noses upon me. Never was any Revolution so fashionable before! I must confess, that, dazzled by so much eclat, I did not enough attend to more solid advantages. In the first flush of victory, in the fresh complaisance which existed between us and our new landlord, I might have made peaceable and quiet terms, which, though generally just to both, might have been especially in our favour, and been suited to those changes in the relative situation of landlord and tenant that time had effected. My parents left every thing to me-I should have done more. By foolishly trusting to the generosity of our new friend, I have incurred the risk of permanently quarrelling with him. My father and he have been niggling and higgling ever since, nor is it at all unlikely that I or my son may be called upon again to settle disputes upon a footing, which, if arranged between us at first, would have given peace, security, friendship, and confidence to both. There is an old anecdote of Mr. John Kemble, who, giving a shilling to a beggar, and being rebuked for his profusion, replied, in extemporaneous blank verse—

"It is but seldom that I do these things,

But when I do, I do them handsomely."

I shall bequeath this sentence, as a golden maxim, to my posterity! Being of an elastic and volatile disposition, and seeing that my parents could now settle their affairs without my assistance, I resolved to ramble abroad for a short time. My parents gave me their blessing; put a few books in my portmanteau; girded a sword by my side, but forbade me to be quarrelsome-and so I set out for the Netherlands.

What a clean, pretty town Brussels is! I did not wish to make a noise, and arrived there incog. And now, my dear reader, I hope you are young and gallant, for my adventures take an amatory turn. You must know that a certain Dutchman, Mynheer William Von Butter, was married to a Belgian lady, Madame Choux de Bruxelles; the fruit of these nuptials was a young lady, named, if I may Anglicise the name, “Discontent." Faith! notwithstanding my Gallic origin, I am but little of a coxcomb, and I absolutely blush when I tell you that this young lady fell violently in love with me. I am, as poor dear Lord Byron is reported to have said of himself, rather of an easy than an amorous turn. I do not court ladies myself, but whenever they

condescend to court me, I usually, sooner or later, yield to their solicitations; in short, if I am no Tarquin, I am no Joseph. Miss Discontent, not content with ogling me whenever she saw me, even at a distance-at last, positively wrote to me, and solicited the honour of my acquaintance. We had a few private interviews. Monsieur William Von Butter discovered me secreted in a closet. My God! how he stormed! He threatened to turn me out of the house-he should have turned his daughter out; as long as she was there, I knew well enough that she would not let me be far distant. I hummed an air, and retired for the moment. Now Monsieur William Von Butter led an extremely unhappy life with his lady; it had been a very unsuitable match, and he had behaved to her shamefully since the marriage. I will briefly mention a few instances. Though, according to the marriage-articles, their several fortunes were settled in equal divisions upon each, Mynheer William spent all the poor woman's money-even her pin-money-upon the dykes and canals on his own Dutch farms. He was so jealous that he did not allow her to choose her own lady'smaid; not a servant in the house was at her disposal; she could neither choose one nor discharge one. But what was the most provoking was this all her friends and relations spoke French - Mynheer William enacted that no one should come into his house who did not speak Dutch. All for whom the good lady felt any attachment were, therefore, driven to learn a new language, even at an advanced period of life, or to renounce the honour and pleasure of her acquaintance: these, and various other annoyances, made Madame Choux de Bruxelles at last, I am sorry to say, positively hate her Dutch partner, so that when her daughter confided to her bosom her attachment to me, the old lady sympathised most heartily in the amour, and united cordially with her daughter against the master of the house. From this time, then, I considered my intrigue safe: a house divided against · itself cannot stand-a moral, by the way, applicable to a certain Monsieur John Bull, in whose residence I now scribble these adventures, and an Irish lady, with whom he keeps company, as the phrase is-I wish he would keep the peace with her.

Mynheer, dunderhead as he was, had at least the penetration to perceive that he had not got rid of me; accordingly, one day, he resolved to do so effectually, and hired some bravoes to put an end to my existence. I am a desperate sort of personage when my blood is once up, and finding myself vigorously attacked, I returned the assault in good earnest. I snatched from my assailants a weapon with which Mynheer William had been accustomed to belabour his wife-a club, called a mouture-and by the help of this instrument, I fairly, and without a very hard struggle, routed my antagonists and won the day. No sooner was our engagement over than I dressed myself and hastened to the magistrate. I proved, by a prisoner I had made, the outrage I had received, and traced it home to Mynheer William Von Butter. The magistrate was extremely obliging; he informed me that, for the gross attack and the intended murder, the life of Mynheer was at my disposal; but he hoped that I should be able to accommodate matters to my satisfaction, without scandalising the city by the criminal execution of a principal burgess.

I assured the magistrate that he had done but justice to my humane feelings; that I was quite willing to forgive Mynheer Von Butter on two conditions, first, that he should agree to a separation from his much-injured wife, and, secondly, that he should allow me the disposition of his daughter's hand in marriage. The magistrate smiled at the latter clause, and assured me he would do son possible to adjust so conciliatory an arrangement.

To cut short a long story, Mynheer, after much open grumbling and secret reservation, appeared to agree to a separation with Madame. As to his daughter, he said, she had been the plague of his life, and he should be too happy to get rid of her. I now sought an interview with the young lady; I assured her, in the tenderest manner imaginable, that, though I was sensible of her attractions, I was indisposed at that moment to form any permanent connexion; indeed, I hinted at a previous engagement. She was much hurt at first-but you know how delicate one is in these matters! I learned, at length, that, before she had conceived an attachment to me, she had been secretly enamoured of another gentleman-a gentleman, indeed, of a handsome shape, but, perhaps, too romantic a disposition. I did my best to engage her to listen to his addresses, and when I left Brussels, she seemed in a fair way to yield to my advice. I know that her neighbours do all they can to prevent the connexion; but if, however, it does happen, I make no doubt that it will turn out well on the whole, and that the gentleman in question will kill her with kindness, the only way to get rid of ladies of that peculiar disposition.

Tired of these domestic fracas, I now began to long for the halcyon scenes of peace and enjoyment which my imagination pictured in England. "There," I exclaimed, in a tone of poetical enthusiasm, "there every thing is serene; no quarrels, no coquetries; contented with their roast beef and their coal fire, even the peasants are fat and felicitous. God save the King! resounds night and day through the streets, and Freedom, Commerce, and Happiness-like the three Miss Dennetts have danced their hornpipes on every stage throughout the country-during, at least, the last two centuries," I said, and took my place in a steam-packet. The voyage was dull, and the weather stormy; but I found amusement in reading some old numbers of Cobbett's Register, and whenever I had nothing else to do, I used to talk with a chemist from Normandy, a very intelligent man, who entertained himself with a preparation, for which he had taken out a patent, and by which a fire could be lighted at a minute's notice.

Here, for the present, I suspend my adventures; should they "take with the public," I purpose to continue them, in a more detailed manner-and, being very much charmed with England, I shall animadvert on its customs, character, and prospects, interspersed since I hear the English are the most charitable of all nations-with several scandalous portraits of living characters.

THE MASTER OF LOGAN.

Even in our ashes live our wonted fires.-GRAY.

ONE summer's eve, as I passed through a burial-ground on the banks of the Nith, I saw an old man resting on a broad flat stone which covered a grave. The church itself was gone and but a matter of memory: yet the church-yard was still reverentially preserved, and several families of name and standing continued to inter in the same place with their fathers. Some one had that day been buried, and less care than is usual had been taken in closing up the grave, for, as I went forward, my foot struck the fragment of a bone. I lifted it hastily, and was about to throw it away, when the old man said, "Stay, thoughtless boy, that which you touch so carelessly was once part of a living creature, born in pain and nursed tenderly, was beloved, and had a body to rot in the grave, and a soul to ascend into heaven-touch not, therefore, the dust of thy brother rudely." So he took the bone, and, lifting a portion of the green sod, which covered the grave, replaced it in the earth. I was very young, and maybe thoughtless, but I was touched with the patriarchal look of the man, and also by his scriptural mode of expressing himself. I remained by him, and was in no haste to be gone.

"My child," he said, "I have a melancholy kind of pleasure in wandering about this old burial-place. In my youth I have sat with hundreds of the old and young in the church to which this ground belonged-they are all lying here save one whom the sea drowned and two who perished in a foreign battle, and I am the last of the congregation who lives to say it. I am grown sapless, and I am become leafless. There is not one hair on a head ninety years old and odd-look, my child, it was once covered with locks as dark as the back of yon hooded-crow." He removed his hat as he spoke, and his bald head shone, in the light of the sun, like that of an apostle in a religious painting. "I love to converse," he said, "with children such as your self. The young men of this generation mock the words of age; it would be well if they mocked nothing else; but what can we expect of those who doubt all and believe nothing? If you will sit down on this grave-stone and listen patiently, I shall relate a tradition, pertaining to this burial-ground, which has the merit of a beneficial moral :-A tale which you will remember at eighty, as well as I do now, and which will show what befalls those who meddle, unwisely, with the dust of poor mute human nature.” I sat down as he desired, and he told me the following story.

"In the summer of the last year of the reign of James Stuart, it happened that John Telfer was making a grave in this burial-ground. The church was standing then, and there were grave-stones in rank succeeding rank-for this is a place of old repute, and Douglases and Maxwells and Morrisons and Logans lie round ye thick and threefold. John, as I said, was digging a grave, and as he shovelled out the black mould, mixed with bones, he muttered, Ay! Ay! It was a sad and an eerie day when the earth was laid over the fair but sinful body which I put here last. The clouds lowered, the thunder-plump fell, and the fire flew, and heaven and earth April.-VOL. XXXI. NO. CXXIV.

Y