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in describing as an excellent and amiable old man, was greatly af fected; a very strong affection subsisted between them; and, on the part of the Duke, it was evident, that the honest, straightforward character of the Emperor, joined with his paternal kindness and evidently honest intentions, had made a profound impression on the mind and heart of his grandson. On the opening of the body, the opinions of the Duke's physicians were fully confirmed; one lobe of the lungs was nearly gone; and, while the sternum was that of a mere child, the intestines presented all the appearance of decrepid age.

As he laid on his bier, his resemblance to his father, that resemblance so striking in the cradle, became once more remarkable. It might have been detected in life, but the flowing blond hair of his Austrian mother, and his tall form, would naturally mask the resemblance. His manner was graceful and elegantthe expression of his countenance somewhat sad; he was reserved till he fancied he had found a friend, when he became confidential, communicative, and even enthusiastic. He appears to have been universally beloved: no one can recollect an offence-much less an injury; he was full of kindness and consideration for every one about him. But one passion appears to have been developed-that of military ambition. The present with him was but a' preparation; in fact, he lived in a future, which for him was never to arrive.

Looking at the interests of Europe, it is impossible to regret his death; looking at himself, it is impossible not to feel a great interest in his life; had, in truth, his various qualities and dispositions been more generally known during his youth, it is very probable, that the popular feeling of France would have more deeply sympathized in his fate. He was never regarded otherwise than as LE FILS DE L'HOMME, and as such let him rest-a last victim to the turbulent ambition of his own father.

CORRIGENDA.

In the article on Jäkel's German Origin of the Latin Language, in our last number, the reader is requested to make the following corrections. In p. 372, note t, for Anglo-Saxon harja, read hëarra, rj being equal to rr. 385, note, for now, read Ov, disposuit;, exaltatus est, has also been supposed to be the root of the word, which, if this be true, would run parallel to Anglo-Saxon hëofon.

408, Jäkel's false paradigm of the Old High Dutch article, should have been corrected thus: der, des, demu, den.

ART. X.-Le Roi s'Amuse, Drame, par Victor Hugo. Paris, 1832. 8vo. THE "Roi s'Amuse" has more than one claim upon attention: it is from the pen of Victor Hugo, and it has been prohibited after one representation, par ordre. The minor question of the particular drama is sunk in the far greater one of the freedom of dramatic literature.

The drama is a representation of a few supposed scenes of the life of Francis I. and a picture of his court and courtiers, their morals and manners; in the description of which, we believe, the drama deviates very slightly in fact, and not at all in spirit, from the truth. The amusement of Francis I., as is well known, was debauchery, carried on, however, like the debauchery of our Charles II., with so much gaiety and magnificence, that it was rather admired than censured in his day, and has always been very leniently dealt with by historians, who preferred to dwell upon the brilliant points of his character, his valour, his generosity, his patronage of the arts and letters, and his noble bearing as a knight and man of honour. It is now understood, that the due support of these royal qualities is dreadfully expensive to a people, and very much interferes with good government. The drama has ordinarily been as kind to these heroes as the historians: a scene, an exploit, an anecdote, has been selected from the lives of different hero-kings, originally, perhaps, invented by some court-newsman, at that time enjoying high office and proud title, though occupied by menial duties, and has been expanded into a grand and solemn fable, adorned with the loftiest sentiments, and enacted by players on stilts, in whose months a sentence of ordinary life would sound a gross absurdity. Historians, as we have said, have changed their tone on this subject, and why should not dramatists? Here is M. Hugo, who has put the king and his courtiers in a tolerably true light, as viewed with reference to the general good. The amusement in which he has exhibited his majesty and the gentlemen of his court as engaged, is such as has not been uncommon in high places, though, probably, an elegant selection of such scenes was never made before for the purposes of the drama. The morals of many of the most brilliant courts of Europe may be classed under two heads: (1) the infamy of cocuage; (2) the glory of concubinage. Like the French petitmaitre, repairing to the country with a thorough distaste for country pleasures, who tells his host that he proposes to give himself wholly to seduction;" this seems to have been the business of most courtsespecially French courts-and the memoirs and biographies of the times overflow with proofs. But there arises a question, whether that which has been told in books, and conversed of by all people for many years, is a fit subject for the drama-for exhibition in short? If there were now any good object in depreciating royalty, in exhibiting the atrocities of a tyrannical aristocracy, the exhibition might be justified; but if circumstances are such, that the popular danger is less-that royalty and aristocracy are already depreciated far below their true par, then such publication is at least not recommendable. But who is to be the judge? Certainly not royalty itself-not the aristocracy. It is the fact of their having so long had the entire sway over publications of all kinds, that has so long permitted abuse to reign without dispute- or at least with the Bastille or Bicêtre for alternative.

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The charge of immorality has been put forth against Le Roi s'Amuse. The effect of the play is moral in the extreme: it disgusts the auditor with brilliant seduction, it shows the wretchedness of buffoonery, the misery of sinful revenge. If debauchery be exhibited, it is without one single attribute of delusion. The king revels throughout as a sort of licensed freebooter-the destroying prey-seeker of his own forest-attended by a crowd of jackalls, more than half afraid of their own flesh and blood. In order to gratify a base appetite, he visits his lust upon the purest and most virtuous of mankind: he outrages the noble spirit of a Saint Vallier, who a thousand times over preferred death to dishonour: he debauches even the daughter of his fool, a bright spot of purity and beauty in the midst of deformity and vice; he, by another gross and degrading indulgence, draws down the physical destruction of the victim. whom he had already morally destroyed; and drives the poor tool of his leisure, his ribald fool, to madness and despair. For jesters were men, and had their homes and their children, and, like bourreaux, could be loved and respected in a circle of their own, where the man is loved for bis manliness, and without regard to the artificial distinctions of society.

To give our own opinion of Le Roi s'Amuse, we would say, that, as a scenic affair, it is very poor; its dramatic points are not striking, with few exceptions; at the same time, there are in it many eloquent passages, possessing that extraordinary mixture of force, fancy, and finesse, peculiar to Victor Hugo. There is, however, much of the melodramatic, and no finer scene of the horrible kind was ever imagined than the one in which the rancorous jester has got, as he fancies, the corpse of the monarch in a sack, and is gloating over his remains, when he hears in the distance the familiar voice of the king, chaunting one of his ordinary refrains.-It is he! it is the king. Whom then has he got in his sack, what corpse is he about to hurl into the filthy river? it is dark-he fumbles over the features, a horrible suspicion comes across him: he knows his revenge is disappointed, but how-a storm rages, he is in the midst of the raging elements, and at last a friendly flash of lightning comes to his aid, and discloses the features-of his own daughter-the violated, injured Bertha, the only object on earth he regarded, for whom the volcano of vengeance had raged in his breast, for whom it had burst forth in destructive violence.

We have some difficulty in conjecturing what could be the motive of the arbitrary act of the ministry in forbidding the representation of this play: it is scarcely possible to attribute it to the verse which has been quoted in the French papers, supposed to allude to a female branch of the Orleans' family, cotemporary with the latter days of Louis XIV. and the Regency. The same reasons would induce the suppression of half the memoirs of the country, independent of the fact, that the allusion is as applicable to almost any other aristocratic family. No: we apprehend that the true reason is a general one-the tendency, as our lawyers say, of the drama to bring kings into contempt. The arguments against any proceeding so absurd have been urged in all their force in one of Erskine's speeches, in which he eloquently defends what was considered a libel on King John. Subjects bear with kings in their time, but the historians and dramatists of posterity must really be permitted to deal with them as they think proper.

ART. XI.-Di varié Società e Istituzioni di Beneficenza in Londra. 1828. 1832. 2 vols. 12mo. Lugano.

HERE is another Italian traveller, of whom it is impossible to speak in terms less favourable than the one who forms the subject of a preceding article. Signor Arrivabene, of Milan (whom we have already had occasion to introduce to our readers in No. XIX. p. 261), is understood to be the author of these unpretending, though very valuable volumes, in which he has laid before his Italian countrymen a clear, judicious, and well written account of the numerous charitable and other benevolent institutions, which the English metropolis can boast of above any other city in the world. Our object in noticing this work more at length than we did the other, is to make our English readers acquainted with some of the observations which this intelligent foreigner has made concerning several of our philanthropic institutions. It is well, at times, to know what an unbiased visiter, wholly removed from the sphere of local connexions and predilections, thinks of such matters.

The first volume treats more especially of institutions for educating the poor, and also for preventing distress and degradation among them. The second volume treats of those which come directly to their assistance when reduced to a state of actual want: "in this distribution,” says M. A. "I have endeavoured to follow the order of charity herself, who takes, as it were, the infant man in her arms from his very birth, watches his progress through life, and never leaves him until infirmities or old age have laid him in the grave."

Of the infant schools, of which Pestalozzi had the first idea in Switzerland, and which are now spread over this kingdom, our author speaks with unqualified approbation. After treating of the Charity, the National, and the Sunday Schools, he observes that all these are still insufficient for the great number of poor children, and he wishes that parochial schools were established upon the system peculiar to Scotland, where" he says they have proved the greatest blessing that Providence could bestow on the country. It is chiefly through their agency that the Scotch people, once semi-barbarous, turbulent, and rapacious, have become the humane, peaceable, and industrious race they now are.” -p. 36.

To us, who have been often disgusted with the offensive display of irreligious principles in the writings of many a continental liberal, the total absence in M. Arrivabene's work of any thing like sneers or malevolent reflections against either the established church or any of the religious communities which exist in this country, has been peculiarly gratifying. Here is a liberal, but in the honourable sense of the word, a native of a Catholic country, an emigrant from Italy, who speaks of religion as the great means of improvement of mankind, who sneers not at our observance of the Sabbath-day, so dull and insufferable to the eyes of many a witty and free-thinking visiter to these shores, who speaks with respect of our clergy, and praises the zeal of missionaries of every Christian persuasion who labour to spread the light of the Gospel over the world, and the exertions of the Bible Society for the same purpose. The benevolence of our author is pure; he thankfully acknowledges all the good that has

been done, and while he suggests more yet to be done, he does not rail at any one for not having done it before. We have seldom, if ever, read a book written by a foreign traveller, so perfectly honest, so temperate and sober, so totally unmixed with the bitterness of party feeling, religious or political. In speaking of the unavoidable changes which the economy of society undergoes at different epochs,

"Either," he says, 66 we must make of social communities so many monasteries, or by leaving men free to manage their own affairs, we must submit to the inconveniences which will at times result from their management. It has been neither caprice nor perversity of feeling that has caused the small farmers and cottagers almost to disappear from the face of England, but the new economical forms which the nation has assumed. The landholders of former times were probably neither more nor less humane than the present ones, but they found their interest in dividing their property into small tenements, which then corresponded with the general system of society; the present landed proprietors divide their estates into large farms, from motives of a similar nature."-vol. i. p. 132.

And after accounting for the causes that have produced the change, he adds-

"Undoubtedly distress among the workmen in the cities is at times very great; undoubtedly there is often great distress also among the labourers in the country; but we must guard against exaggeration, we must look more to facts, and not give way to imagination. A foreigner who comes to England, with his mind full of the tales he has heard and read of the extreme misery of a very great portion of the English people, and of the alarming increase of the poor, not meeting in his rambles with any considerable number of miserable looking objects, naturally asks, where are the crowds of paupers I have heard so much of? He will probably be shewn in the country neat cottages, their walls covered with fruit trees and flowers, with glazed windows, and in the inside of them beds with curtains, not unfrequently a clock, a piece of carpet, and sufficient furniture; the men warmly clad, wearing shoes and stockings, and eating fine wheaten bread at their meals. These men, he will be told, receive parish allowance,-they form a considerable number of the English poor."-p. 141.

And certainly, to one who is familiar with the habits and mode of living of the corresponding class in most parts of the continent, the lot of the persons above described cannot appear, at first sight, so very deplorable. Our author discusses at great length the system of the English poor laws, and the manner in which they are administered; he reprobates the abuses in the latter, especially that of paying labourers' wages out of the poor rates, and that of encouraging marriages between paupers. He observes that the whole of the rates levied by the parish on the housekeepers, are generally mistaken by foreigners as one and the same thing as the poor rates, whereas the latter often do not constitute much above one-half of the whole amount, the remainder being for the paving, lighting and repairing of streets and roads, for the watching or police, for the building of churches, &c. After fairly stating the various arguments for and against the system of work houses, he adds

"England is the only nation in Europe where the law gives the poor a right to support at the public expense, but several other governments having declared that begging was a crime, have been obliged in consequence to open depôts of

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