STEREOSCOPIC GLIMPSES.

BY W. CHARLES KENT.

II.-SHENSTONE AT LEASOWES.

SHELTERED by a grotto dank and dreary,
In a drizzling mist of autumn, stands
One of stalwart frame with watching weary-
Blue his furtive face and mottled hands:
From that dripping lair,
Through the humid air,

Many a winding way his eye commands.
Round the pebble-floored and shell-roofed entry
Trails of drenched and withered vine-leaves cling:
Hollyhocks, with soddened blooms, stand sentry-
In the raw gusts to and fro they swing:
Heard no other strain

Than the ceaseless rain-
Saddest song that Nature's self can sing.
Here a leaden dancing-satyr, nibbling
Mimic tendrils, oft a fount uprears:
Stopped for once its now superfluous dribbling,
Erstwhile spouting up from goblin ears.
'Mid its gambols light,

Lo! the leering sprite

Poised upon one shaggy leg appears.

Yonder, through the half-stripped thicket gleaming,
Where the dropping red leaves curl and play,
Seen through gauzy veil of moisture streaming
From the matted thorn's minutest spray-
Dim and ghostlike loom
Through the liquid gloom

Gable ends and spectral walls of grey.

But who thus in rocky covert shivering,
Like a timid caitiff peering thence,
Seems to wait some signal of delivering
From his wretched plight of chilled suspense?
Lonely here doth stand

Lord of house and land

Strung with poignant care his every sense.

Scattered o'er the landscape, mound and dingle

Verdant sweeps of velvet-shaven lawn

Wooded dells where trees and brambles mingle,
Haunt of timorous nightingale and fawn:
Strown around the scene,

Viewed through leafless screen,

Sculptured shapes from dreams of genius drawn.

'Tis a showery maze of sylvan splendour,

Nature tricked with Art, and dying drowned

Art the signs of care for which but render

Sadder yet each lovely nook thus crowned:
Picturesque retreats,

O'er whose flooded seats

Blazoned scraps of classic verse abound.

While her web of fear

Spiderous Debt around her victim weaves.

Mating princely taste with puny treasure,
Seeking dryads and but finding duns,
Legal fears fill up that heart's sad measure,
Lowly fears of every writ that runs :
Like a snow-flake cold

Melts the fairy gold

In the hot and eager grasp it shuns.

Quenched long since each darling home affection,
Dreams of love, ah! vainly dreamt in youth,
Now the shadowy joys of his selection
Fade before the frigid light of Truth—
Truth whose fatal beam

O'er life's waste may gleam,

Hope's mirage oft scattering without ruth.

Woe-worn thus within the rocky hollow,
Whence the sullen rain-flood drips and drains,
Droops the bard that dreads what fate may follow
From the weight of care his soul sustains:
Solace none for him,

Save the echoings dim

Of a tinkling lyre's melodious strains.

MADAME DU BARRY.*

M. CAPEFIGUE, the legitimist, and author of a graceful apology of Madame the Marquise de Pompadour, has added to his literary, if not his philosophical laurels, by penning the memoirs of the less gifted, less artistic, and less tasteful, but still beautiful, joyous, kindly-hearted, clever, and fascinating Du Barry. M. Capefigue wishes it to be clearly understood that, in taking up subjects of so delicate a character, it must not for one moment be supposed that it is from any desire on his part to vindicate the reputation of the king's favourites. These evil manners, these derelictions of family duty have been justly chastised by the French Revolution: the errors of the flesh have been expiated by blood. But the influence exercised by these ladies on political events, on arts, letters, and the social movement of the eighteenth century remain not the less worthy of study-not the less interesting to be appreciated in their true light.

Marie-Jeanne de Vaubernier, afterwards Madame Du Barry, was the daughter of a poor but honourable couple dwelling in Lorraine, a district which had only been annexed to France by the treaty of Vienna of 1756. So straitened were her parents' circumstances, that the death of her father, who was employed under the farmer-general, when she was only eight years of age, obliged the mother to seek refuge in Paris, where she took lodgings in the Rue des Lions-Saint-Paul, not far from the convent of the Picpus. They had a friend in the metropolis in the person of the farmer-general, M. Billard de Monceaux, who had stood sponsor to Marie-Jeanne, and he placed his god-daughter in the convent of Sainte-Aure, whilst a situation was found for the mother, Madame de Vaubernier, in the house of Madame de Renage. Marie-Jeanne, at thirteen years of age, was already a lively, joyous, captivating child, coquette in her dress, and proud of her long light hair, that fell down to her heels, of her eyes so neatly cloven beneath pencilled brows, and of the perfect oval of her figure.

Her prospects were, however, humble at first. On leaving the convent she was apprenticed to a milliner, Madame Labille, of the Rue Saint-Honoré, under the name of Lançon, for it was thought to be derogatory to a Vaubernier to be in business. Her uncle, an ecclesiastic known as Father Lange, and who enjoyed the advantage of being spiritual director to Madame de la Garde ("une veuve de haute finance," as Capefigue amusingly designates a wealthy widow), came to Mademoiselle Lançon's rescue, and got her, after her three years' apprenticeship had expired, a situation as demoiselle de compagnie in the house of the above-mentioned opulent lady. Unfortunately, Marie-Jeanne was so fair and so clever that she won the hearts of both the sons of Madame de la Garde, and the "spiritual director" was obliged to remove her under the charge of the ladies De la Verrière, who received a great deal of company at their Hôtel du Roule, now the park of Monceaux.

Among the frequenters at the said hotel was one Jean de Cérès, Comte du Barry, the eldest son of an old family said to be of Scottish

* Madame la Comtesse du Barry. Par M. Capefigue. Paris: Amyot.

origin, and descended from the Barri-mores, the younger branch of the Stuarts. His escutcheon and his motto, or cri d'armes, "Bouttez en avant," had been given to him by Charles VII., who had taken a company of Scotchmen (since incorporated with the guards) into his service. That most amusing chronicler, Alexandre Dumas, senior, has taken advantage of this traditional descent of the Barrys to declare that Richelieu presented the portrait of Charles I., by Vandyck, to Madame du Barry, because an ancestor of her husband's, one Barry, a page, holds the horse, but in reality as a hint to the king that he must either break with his parliament or go like the Stuart to the scaffold. The same cruel Alexander says, apropos of Jeanne-Marie :

"M. de Richelieu invented Madame du Barry (it is only Capefigue, the legitimist, who writes Du Barry), a young and pretty coquine' of sufficient mediocrity not to obtain any personal influence, and yet clever enough to assist others in acquiring it.

"MM. d'Aiguillon and de Richelieu did the honour to the little 'grisette' of being her lovers in the first place; they then married her to a poor gentleman who lent her his name; and she was then afterwards made a present of to Louis XV."

Chroniclers as little scrupulous as M. Alexandre Dumas, senior, have associated the first intrigues in the life of Jeanne-Marie with the period of her apprenticeship in millinery: there certainly are three long years to account for. Others have made her the mistress of Comte de Cérès, the eldest of the Du Barrys, before she wedded the youngest, Comte Guillaume du Barry, on the 1st of October, 1768. M. Capefigue gets over these disagreeable precedents of early youth by strictly confining himself to that which is documentary or can be proved in evidence. Who, he inquires, opened the book of the first loves of the young work woman of the grisette, as she was after enviously designated at court to the scandalising pamphleteers of London and Holland? And as to the presumed liaison with Count Cérès, he dismisses it with utter contempt, as one of those base calumnies to which all women suddenly raised to a great position are subjected. Yet does he afterwards himself speak of the younger brother being in his turn smitten with the charms of the captivating Marie-Jeanne, just as had been the case with the brothers La Garde, thereby admitting, at all events, that there was some foundation for the scandal.

Nor does M. Capefigue attempt to deny that the king had seen Marie-Jeanne before her marriage. Madame de Vaubernier had been associated by Marshal de Belle Isle, a protector of that good lady's, in certain army contracts, the benefices of which she had to apply for at Versailles. Marie-Jeanne, young, pretty, graceful, and lively, had been spoken of at the suppers of Marly, La Muette, and Choisy. It is not to be supposed that the luxurious old monarch did not ask to see and did not see the young person who was the admiration of all. But M. Capefigue will not allow that Guillaume du Barry wedded a courtesan in order to give his name to the king's mistress. Yet certain it is, amidst all this contradictory scandal, that Marie-Jeanne had not been wedded three months before, to use Capefigue's own words, "la comtesse ne vînt habiter secrètement les communs de Versailles."

Louis XV. had returned for a brief time after the death of Madame

de Pompadour into the bosom of his family. But even if his own habits had permitted him to enjoy the pleasures of an honourable domesticity for any length of time, the intrigues of courtiers would not have permitted it. Each party sought to give a new mistress to the king, in order by that means to hold the reins of power. The Duke of Choiseul fixed his eyes on his sister, the Duchess of Grammont. She was still handsome, but intellectual and haughty-the very spirit of the Encyclopædists feminised-the last person for the worn-out Louis, who wanted, above all things, "délassement," not philosophy, however charmingly dressed up.

De Choiseul's enemies, Richelieu and D'Aiguillon, found something more tempting than the beautiful and ennobled philosopher Madame de Grammont. The reputation of Marie-Jeanne, let M. Capefigue say what he will, had spread to the furthest extremities of France before October, 1768. He himself gives the text of that licentious ballad, entitled "La Bourbonnaise," which was sung from the Pont-Neuf to the remotest provinces, and which M. de Choiseul himself condescended to answer in the light verse which was acceptable in those pagan days, and in which he attempted to prove the decline and fall of the fair and famous "Bourbonnaise."

M. de Choiseul was wrong, however. Madame du Barry was destined to become the centre of a powerful political movement. The hostility of the two parties into which France was at that time divided—the parliamentary and Jansenist, conciliated by De Choiseul; and the absolutist and jesuitical, upheld by De Richelieu-came to a collision in the person of a king's mistress. M. de Choiseul was, as we have before seen, if not the nominee of Madame de Pompadour, the representative of that enlightened lady's political tendencies. The king was, on the contrary, all for royal prerogatives. The new favourite was as hostile to liberality in parliaments or church as was the king himself, and she became, from the moment of her elevation-if not, as seems more likely the case, before she was introduced to the monarch-the pivot upon which the royalist party was prepared to work its way into power.

M. de Choiseul had recourse to lampoons and satires to displace the enemy, and these failing, he did not even reject the more odious weapons of scandal and calumny. He was aided and abetted in this paper warfare by the wits of the day, including ladies as well as gentlemen. Voltaire, however, carried the palm by his "Roi Pétaud," penned at the instigation of M. de Choiseul :

Il vous souvient encor de cette tour de Nesles,
Mintiville, Lymail, Rouxchâteau, Pampodour;
(Vintimille,) (Mailly,) (Chateauroux,) (Pompadour ;)
Dans la foule enfin de peut-être cent belles,
Qu'il honora de son amour,

Pour distinguer celle qu'à la cour
On soutenait n'avoir jamais été cruelle.

La bonne pâte de femelle,

Combien d'heureux fit-elle dans ses bras!

Qui dans Paris ne connut ses appas ?

Du laquais au marquis, chacun se souvient d'elle.

M. Capefigue, however, doubts the authenticity of the supposed