who read and approved of it. On the 6th of February, after a long conference with the Secretary of State, he was seized with his last illness, and died on the 10th.

Francis Xavier Castiglioni, as Pius VIII., was the successor of Leo. He was a man of scholarly attainments and ecclesiastical learning. In 1800 he was ordained Bishop of Montalto, and was raised to the dignity of cardinal in 1816. In his case, too, as in that of Pius VII. (and we may add also in that of Leo X.), we are told of a prophetic intimation of this future elevation to the Papacy. D'Artaud states that when Castiglioni was once transacting some business with Pius VII., the latter said to him, "Your Holiness Pius VIII. may one day settle the matter." Cardinal Wiseman is scarcely contented to allow this little badinage -possibly a delicate rebuke from the Pope to some assumption of the inferior to fall into the common category of a casual or a sagacious guess at the truth. "One does not see," he says, in commenting on it, "why if a Jewish high priest had the gift of prophecy for his year of office, one of a much higher order and dignity should not occasionally be allowed to possess it." One does not see why he should, nor yet why the pontifical sceptre should become a serpent or bud because the rod of Aaron did so: nevertheless, we would not, while confessing our own blindness, wish to limit the logical vision of another. In matters of belief, faith is the evidence of things unseen, and the eye with which to see them. Be all this as it may, the election was one which caused no surprise, though but for the interference of Austria the choice would have fallen elsewhere. Bowed down with an infirmity which soon preyed upon his vitals and tormented his life, his short pontificate did not endure throughout the succeeding year, for he died on the 1st of December, 1830. Yet short as was his occupation of the chair of St. Peter, it was not uneventful. He witnessed the carrying of the long-contested measure of Catholic Emancipation in England, while he was embroiled with Prussia upon the question of mixed marriages. The revolution of July, too, which hurled a monarch from his throne, did not fail to communicate its im

pulse to other portions of Europe. Belgium speedily arose and cast off the sovereignty of Holland. Poland struggled to be free, but without success, and the spirit of insurrection spread to the Papal dominions. The Pope had to cope with the secret societies that plotted in Rome, against which he issued his edicts: twentysix members of the "Carbonari” were arrested, tried, and condemned-one to death, which sentence was commuted, and the rest to imprisonment.

Another conclave, and not free from the usual intrigues and the interference of other states. Cardinal Giustiniani, in whose favour the electoral tide was setting strongly, was prohibited by the veto of Spain. Cardinal Wiseman assures us, on the authority of Cardinal Weld, who assisted at the conclave, that Giustiniani looked wretched and pining, while the prospect of the Papacy was before him, but that he brightened up and looked himself again the moment the vision had passed away. This it did speedily, dissolving into the reality of Bartolomeo Cappellari, being elected as Gregory XVI. He was a native of Belluno, in Lombardy, where he was born in 1765; entered the monastery of the Camaldolese order, in Venice, in 1783, assuming the name of Mauro; and in 1805 was created abbot of the monastery of St. Gregory in Rome, where he spent twenty years in the retirement of a man of letters, when he was raised to the dignity of Cardinal in 1826. Thus on his accession to the Papal throne, the world was still agitated by the revolutionary storm; and Gregory had to cope with it at home. This he did with some vigour. Scarce a week had elapsed when a plot, formed for the surprise and capture of St. Angelo, had been discovered and foiled by the vigilance of the government; and a few days after an attack was made on the post-office guard, with the intention of seizing their arms and ammunition, which resulted in a conflict in which many of the assailants were wounded and captured. It must be remembered that Rome had no standing army worth speaking of; that the revolutionary party were now advancing upon the capital, not to make terms, but to expel the Pope if possible, and to substitute a republic in

place of the established form of government. Under such circumstances Gregory did, we believe, the best thing to be done, bad as it was-he invited the aid of a foreign power, who, like the allies of his successor, came to protect and remained to occupy. Sir Archibald Alison, in his continuation of the "History of Europe" has given a brief but true summary of the pontificate of Gregory:

"His reign was a long and often arduous struggle with the revolutionary liberals, against whom he was sometimes, at the instigation of the victorious Austrians, obliged to adopt measures of rigour little in unison with the native humanity of his disposition. Fearful of letting in the point of the revolutionary wedge, he saw no safety, but in sturdy resistance to all measures of reform, which he regarded as the first letting in

of the inundation."

Despite the amiability of the man, posterity will, we believe, pronounce the Pontiff to have been bigoted and exclusive in his ecclesiastical administration-the sovereign harsh and despotic in his temporal policy; and that during the fifteen years of his reign his subjects had little intermission of oppression. Nor will the Protestants of England readily forget the Encyclical letter of 1844, against the Bible Societies and the free use of the Holy Scriptures.

Gregory did much to promote the arts. He added largely to the treasures of the Vatican, in Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian monuments; opening in 1837 his Etruscan museum, and in 1839, that of Egypt. He also made many valuable additions to the paintings, which he caused to be rearranged. In his pontificate a national bank was first established in Rome; the laws were revised; and a new coinage was issued; the excavations in the old city were continued, and the Roman forum was thoroughly restored. Cardinal Wiseman commemorates many men of learning and genius, who graced the pontificate of Gregory XVI. His sketches of them are lively, anecdotical, and interesting. Indeed the desultory gossip which ever and anon leads him from the direct course of his narrative into

some by-way of art or literature, to illustrate it by tasteful criticism and thoughtful observations forms one of the chief attractions of the book. A whole chapter is devoted to a sketch of that learned and most patient investigator of manuscripts, Angelo Mai. By his will he left his manuscripts, which were very precious, to the Vatican, and his extensive library was purchased by the Pope, and placed in a separate apartment of that of the Vatican. Another distinguished scholar, too, is not forgotten. One who, as well as Mai, was raised to the dignity of Cardinal-we mean Joseph Mezzofanti. As we perceive that Dr. Russell's biography of this great linguist has just appeared, we shall abstain here from anticipating the notice which that work may induce. We will only say, in passing, that he was as modest and simple as he was learned, and his outward appearance gave small indications of his hidden intellectual wealth.

"His brow," says Cardinal Wiseman, "was a problem to phrenologists: though his eyes were heavily pressed outwards by what they may have considered lingual faculties. One of this order once told him gravely that he had great facility in learning languages. But then,' Mezzofanti archly added, in telling me this wise discovery, he knew that I was already acquainted with fifty.'"

There is a sketch of one singular person which we cannot abstain from quoting partially, that of Baron Géramb:

"Those whose memory does not carry them back beyond the days of Waterloo may have found, in Moore's politicosatirical poems, mention of a person enjoying a celebrity similar to that possessed more lately by a French Count resident in London, as a leader of fashion, remarkable at the same time for wit and accomplishments. Such was the Baron Géramb, in the days when George the Third was king.' But some may possibly remember a higher renown gained by him, beyond that of having his last bon-mot quoted in the morning papers. Being an alien, though neither a conspirator nor an assassin, he was ordered to leave the country, and refused. He barricaded his house, and placarded it with the words 'Every Englishman's house

"WHO writes our novels?" is what we catch ourselves saying to ourselves, after perusing a more than usually incoherent romance.

I will tell you, says a voice, hurrying us back through a year of memory, over green fields, scorched deserts, sunny meadows, and graveyards. Old scenes, dim and indistinct as the backs of pictures, grow gradually clear, thanks to the Genius of Memory. We are at a public dinner at Freemason's Hall-Society for the Diffusion of Gastronomy, or the National Numskull Benevolent Fund. Worlds of dishes have melted into air under the influence of Champagne. The Numskull Society's faces have become more than usually vacant, eager, inquiring, sociable, and ridiculous. The chairman is now of a fine carmine, partly owing to champagne, and partly owing to nervous anxiety about the dreadful speech that must be made. The toast-master, with a stern determination worthy of a better cause, has interrupted the chaotic babble of voices, and the clatter of knives and forks, by two awful coffin-making blows on either the chairman's head, or some equally wooden object. At this moment a friend nudges me in the ribs, and asks me if I "see that fellow opposite, with the imperial and the retreating forehead." I say, "I think I do; second to the man with the double-bottle nose." "Yes. Well, that (voice funereally solemn)—that is the author of the 'Autobiography of a Plagiarist,' the last new novel." The old becomes novel if you give it time. Another live novelist we saw toadying a voluble great little man about his intended trip to China. A celebrated female novelist we remarked at an evening party as a bold-faced portly woman, with a bumping hard forehead, dragging away contemptuously a sneaking little husband, whom she seemed to consider as a sort of serf, chiefly useful as an ornament in her triumphal processions. Other novelists we have pursued and continually bagged in the shape of briefless barristers, much given to the consumption of ink as a remedy for blue demons. Thin sur

geon's wives; intellectual old maids, determined to produce something, if it were only a book; ambitious Bohemians, fresh from sponging houses; worn out rakes; sons wishing to hold a larger circle than usual; professional fictionists, who turned every warm hand and cold shoulder into chapters; publishers' readers, wishing to continue their experiences; athletic persons, and talkative officers, not regardless of money.

The novel of 1858 has many subdivisions. There is the Kingsley, the Christian Chartist, the home-loving, pugnacious, didactic, poet's novel; then the Hughes (Tom Brown), the gymnastic, merry old boy novel; then the Bulwer, the artful, sentimental, verbose, epigrammatical, dramatic novel; then the poetic Aurora Leigh, right of woman novel; then the Miss Mulock, the Lord W. Lennox, the worn-out Mr. Ainsworth, the swellmob Bohemian, the sham classical, the effete, historical, the spasmodic, the caricature (D), the brilliant, the-but let us get to Mr. George Borrow's "Romany Rye" (Murray); a book which stands so much by itself as to defy all attempts to group or class it.

It will much puzzle the antiquarian of the year two million, to find in our annals universal laments of our physical weakness and exhaustion, and yet to meet with books, like Mr. Kingsley's, in which the hero (drawn faithfully from the age) annihilates gamekeepers, overawes ruffians, makes leaps more like a sigurd mad with hemp, than a reasonable every-day man; or to come upon books by a Bible missionary like Mr. Borrow, more like Loyola than a religionist-like our gipsy friend, the linguist, the swimmer, the hammerman, the pugilist, the horse-tamer, the pugnacious despiser of Scott, Sir T. Bowring, and the Pretender. Is this, he will say, the result of selfconscious nervous gesticulation and twitter, or of real muscular animal redundancy? Is it what drives Oxford men to sweat their brains out at boat races and ascetic training till the blood turns to Cyclopean ichor, or that pul

ing sham pretence that leads hardy little men to talk of their dumbells and shower-baths?

Certainly (certes, as Chaucer says), our nation of humourists never produced a more unique specimen, a more complete solitary Dodo, than Mr. J. Borrow, author of the "Bible in Spain," a book that clergymen read, but with averted or semi-reluctant head. It is not, however, every staid wearer of black and white, who in white and black can recount how he fought flaming Tinmans, broke horses, chaffed with Thurtell, the unfortunate brave (a model of whose back still delights our artist students), or twitted Jesuits. Few of the cloth, thank Heaven! are so audacious, so mystic, so desultory, so defiant, so allegorical. Mr. Borrow strikes out with such energy and force, that at first we suppose him rather injured, till we discover that a natural combativeness urges him to a sort of knight errant, universal tournament against Scott, critics, Jesuits, anybody; so he can work his flexors and extensors, and enjoy a certain animal intellectual exertion. His first book, "Lavengro," eccentric as it was, was written in such pure, nervous English, and was filled with such strong-humoured individualities, that we were almost beginning to hope that a sort of compound of Bunyan, Gil Blas, and Smollet, had arisen, to witch the world with strange scenes of Bedouin gipsies, who tented in green dingles; of maniac Methodists, who believed that they had sinned the unpardonable sin; of Thurtell daredevils, of crooning old apple-women, whose only books are blessed Moll Flanders and the Bible; of insolent hairy Tinmans; of romantic dandies. Here was a rich vein in a word of mysterious alchemic, magnetic-eyed Petulengros, of that sacred, wistful, Isabel Berners; of rough-handed, hard-reading Romany Ryes; of wily grooms, subtle landlords, bullying coachmen; but, alas! these two volumes of Romany Rye bring no ripening fruit, but rather nipped and cankered bloom, crotchety, rambling, clever, disappointing, scatter-brained insolent dogmatism about the Zingali language, about the prowess and brain-work leading no whither (to speak in Carlylese) of the writer evidently getting old. Mr. Borrow's age is a petulant old age, like King Lear's: a restless, discon

tented, turbulent, peevish, old age; an old age that flings slippers at you, and curses, and worries. There is nothing venerable, or calm, or reflective about his old age; it is an old, sour, winter-April age. The man who has given away so many Bibles has forgotten those great precepts which it contains-" Blessed are the peacemakers;" and, "Forgive as ye would be forgiven."

There is an old Saxon heathenism working in Mr. Borrow's East-Anglian blood. Let him purge it and cool it before death come, and find him still sawing the air and brandishing his fists. In a word, this second issue of the great gipsy linguist's autobiographical novel is not equal to the first; it is less racy, it has less originality, it is more mannered, and is more contentious, self-asserting, insolent, impudent, unchristian, and paradoxical. It is strong, but it is feverish, Bedlamic strength, tearing its own flesh; it is querulous, when no one chides; pugnacious, when no one cares to fight. The characters are no longer as in the old Romany-robustly eccentric. They are now mere humours. One man is the shadow of an impossible Jesuit; another the shadow of a madman, who learns Chinese from the characters on teapots, and does not know what is a clock.

In his first volume we expected to find some fragments at least of autobiography; we thought we detected them in the wilful, dreamy poet-youth, who will learn smith's work, and insist on teaching his gipsy mistress the troublesome Armenian declensions. We knew that the author's mind must at least be reflected when we found his puppet, his large-limbed moving doll, calling Popery Buddhism, and not merely sneering at, but trying to knock down every thing. To our astonishment we were told that, be the story autobiographical or not, it was certainly allegorical; that the long-armed, fibbing, flaming Tinman, that hardhitting Appolyon, was Dr. Whewell, the small omniscient who speaks encyclopedias, and whose very adieu is an epigram. We heard, moreover, that such a man was a great divine, such an one the divinely small; and now, in these two volumes, with the exception of such good scenes as the Horse Fair, where Romany meets a great Hungarian, lampoons some stingy nobleman,