their leather coats, their rude horse-pickets, their uproarious meals, and their native songs, furnished me many an hour of wonder and gratification. Their appearance was savage and forbidding enough, but their music was peculiar, rather plaintive, and altogether pleasing. In the main they were exceedingly good-natured fellows, of which a proof was related to me by a gentleman on the frontier. He and his family were terrified by having several Cossacks billeted. upon them as they marched that way; but "only think," added my informant, they not only conducted themselves peaceably and civilly throughout the afternoon and night, but when I rose in the morning, I perceived that they were up before, and kindly watering my garden from end to end." I did not dispel his belief; though I was aware that this watering system was habitual with the courteous Cossacks, who knowing that money and valuables were often buried on their approach, adopted this means of ascertaining the fact, as the water immediately sank where the ground had been recently dug up, and remained longer stagnant upon the other parts of the soil. Where it sank they searched, and I was assured immense booty was realised by the simple process.

Another trait may be cited to illustrate my subject. I went with a friend or two to see Versailles, though the noble château was uninhabited, and its vast saloons painfully vacant. There was only a third-rate cabaret close by, where we ordered dinner, and having gone over the palace and seen thirty or forty Spaniards released from the adjacent prison, we went back for our refection. Before sitting down we were invited into the kitchen, where we found a good deal of dilapidation going on by the side of the fire-place. Our host and hostess were mysterious, till at length the apparent wall gave way and discovered a spacious oven of by-gone times, out of which, to our surprise, were brought

portraits of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and the Duchess d'Angoulême, which had been consigned and hidden "à la cache" at the date of the revolution. Of course they were forthwith installed in the dining room; and toasts to the restored Bourbons, the illustrious English, and the loyal French were proposed, right and left, and drunk with enthusiasm.

As a small national drawback, I may just mention that next morning I purchased a pretty pencil-case, within the top of which was concealed, in miniature, one of the best whole-length likenesses of Buonaparte which I ever saw.

Why should I speak of the Opera, where the noble aristocratic presence of Lord and Lady Castlereagh eclipsed every other box, and were admired specimens of the Island race ; showing, perhaps, in public places to greater advantage, in consequence of the tawdry uniforms, and petit and mean appearance of the majority of the French marshals, though some of them were very fine-looking men? Or why should I refer to the delight I experienced in Talma and Georges? I must bid Paris, with all its marvels, farewell, and with two brief reminiscences conclude this chapter.

I was informed, in conversation with the courteous and obliging Lord Burghersh, who, it will be remembered, was accredited, on the part of Great Britain, to the head quarters of the invading forces, that the dash upon Paris was the result of an opportunity afforded the allied generals to ascertain almost exactly the amount of the army of Napoleon, which he, by his amazing activity of movements and crafty stratagems of war, had succeeded in making appear much greater than it really was. When he resolved on the desperate measure to throw himself between the allies and the Rhine and south of France, combine with his numerous garrisons on the former, and still unsubdued divisions in the

latter, and, with the united grand force, again try the fortune of war, his morning march along the heights betrayed his secret weakness, and enabled his enemies to calculate his numbers almost to a single file. On this depended the immediate destiny of his empire: the battled march to and surrender of the capital.

My other anecdote is of peace and the fine arts, though connected with war and pillage. At a soirée, where Talleyrand was of the party, the conversation of a few individuals, knotted in a corner of the room, turned on the pictures brought from Spain by Soult and Wellington; and it was discussed which of the two had the most valuable collection, on which the witty Prince de Périgord, with the usual twinkle of his eye and dry manner, remarked that important as these treasures were, the most extraordinary circumstance of the whole affair was, that the Duke of Wellington had paid money for his acquisitions!!!

CHAPTER XXIV.

RETURN BYRON CHALLENGE-ANECDOTES.

"He whose nod,

Has tumbled feebler despots from their sway,

A moment pauseth ere he lifts the rod;

A little moment deigneth to delay;

Soon will his legions sweep through these his way;
The West must own the scourger of the world.
Oh! Spain! how sad will be thy reckoning-day,
When soars Gaul's vulture with his wings unfurled,
And thou shalt see thy sons in crowds to Hades hurled."

BYRON. Childe Harold. 1812.

"Or, may I give adventurous fancy scope,
And stretch a bold hand to the awful veil
That hides futurity from anxious hope,
Bidding, beyond it, scenes of glory hail,
And fainting Europe rousing at the tale
Of Spain's invaders from her confines hurled;
While kindling nations buckle on their mail,
And Fame, with clarion blast and wing unfurled,
To freedom and revenge awakes an injured world!"

SOUTHEY. Vision of Don Roderick. 1811.

ON leaving Paris, it was my good fortune to meet with a fellow traveller, also bound for London, and to agree with him that we should return together. We accordingly hired a carriage, and proceeded without hurry on our destination, and I soon learnt that I could not have fallen in with a more congenial and agreeable companion. Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, was at the time, one of the most zealous members of the Drury Lane Committee of Management, his enthusiasm

about Kean, and his anxiety about the success of the theatre excessive, and his anecdotes of Lord Byron, Whitbread, Peter Moore, and others, racy and entertaining in the highest degree. With regard to Byron he informed me of a circumstance which more nearly affected me than I had ever dreamt of in my slight intercourse with that noble lord. It appeared that the remarks I published on his unworthy lines to Mrs. Charlemont (his lady's attendant) had given him mortal offence, and, in the ebullition of his fury, he deemed it right to demand satisfaction, and entrusted the challenge to be delivered to Mr. Kinnaird. Knowing his friend, that gentleman found that he could not find me during the whole day. Newspaper folks were difficult of access, and towards evening took occasion to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and to put it to his lordship whether it was not infinitely beneath his dignity to call out a paltry scribbler, who might even, by some awkward chance, shoot him and rob the peerage and the poetic world of one of their greatest ornaments. This and more to a similar effect my informant jocularly told me, and insisted on my owing him a deep debt of gratitude for his prudent conduct, especially as Lord Byron was a certain shot! At any rate he had dissuaded the angry bard from his desperate purpose; and all that the public may have since gained from him or me, may possibly be attributable to the sensible advice of Mr. Kinnaird. He had kept the cartel and promised it to me as an autograph, and I dare say (if not stolen or taken with hundreds of others) I shall turn it up from among the masses of papers, which (very partially examined) have sadly tried my patience and almost crazed my brain, in preparing these sheets for the press.

We slept one night on the road, in a double-bedded