the evening before the battle of Jena, when Napoleon found the artillery, which was to open the action, blocked up in a rocky ravine, from which it could neither advance nor retreat. His concentrated rage, his terrible silence, unbroken by one reproach of the unskilful commandant-his instant decision, activity, and remedy of the evil. Resuming his first vocation of a working engineer, he hastily gathers the cannoniers round him, distributing to one a torch, to another a pickaxe. Then placing himself at their head, he clears the brambles, cleaves the rocks, and opens a passage for the guns; and when the first carriage has passed, returns again to those obedient slumbers, which, like all else, then awaited on his powerful will. "J'ai toujours devant les yeux," says Rovigo, " ce qui se paroît sur les figures de ces canonniers, en voyant l'Empereur éclairer lui-même, un falot à la main, coups rédoublés dont il frappoit les rochers."* That the life of such a man should be written

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"I have always before my eyes the expression on the countenances of the men, as they looked on the Emperor with a torch in his hand, himself casting a light on the reiterated blows with which he opened the rocks."

from the refuse of the entresols of the Tuileries, and the gossip of London drawing-rooms! None but a soldier should write the life of a soldier, if he has not the egotism to write it himself. I am sure the Duke of Wellington is of my opinion; and I hope he will furnish documents to some of his own gallant aids-de-camp and companions, to write his military memoirs, beyond the reach of national prejudices and sordid self-interest, to falsify and to disfigure his deeds and intentions. Let him not trust to the promises of living adulation. Be the fate of his imperial competitor his beacon and guide. As to his legislative memoirs, they ́are written in two words :-Catholic Emancipation!

LOVE IN IDLENESS.

"This Signor Junio's giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, lord of folded arms.”

How few love-novels are written now! The market is closed, and the commodity out of date. A Scotch gentleman visited us some time back, and amused himself, while the conversation was occupied by a group of morning callers, in examining the books in my husband's study. He had pitched on a shelf of natural history, and his attention dwelt on Lacépède's voluminous work on fishes. As he ran over the volumes, successively, his voice rising in a climax of tone, with his increasing surprise, he exclaimed-"Fesh, fesh, fesh, hey! Sirs, what sax bukes all on fesh!!!” How many hundred thousand of bukes have been

written "all upon love;" from the loves of Petrarch, in a thousand and one sonnets, to Mr. Moore's "Loves of the Angels," in one elegant volume! In what various ways too, the subject has been treated, from "Cassandra," and "Le Grand Cyrus," in folio, to the Nouvelle Héloise, in four goodly thick volumes! and so on to Werter, in a primmer size, which, bound in black velvet, was hung by a gold chain round the neck of its fair readers, before the age of sentiment had passed away! Sooner than write on love, a modern novellist has recourse to the Newgate Calendar, and the police reports of the Morning Herald.

The fact is, that there is less love in the world than there was; and the stock is daily diminishing. The reason is clear-there is less idleness, and consequently less of the concentration which goes to make passion. That terrible schoolmaster too, who has, some how or other got abroad, whips out poor little Love, wherever he finds him,-“ a domineering pedant o'er the boy ;" and the utilitarians will not hear of the brat, with his anti-Malthusian doctrines, but hunt him from the boudoir to the treadmill, to suffer and repent, with other young offenders.

Cultivation, business, and education, are "the very beadles to an humorous sigh."

excess.

The idlest nations are ever the most gallant; and Doctors' Commons would have little to do, if the désœuvrés of fashion were reduced to assume the moral and physical activity of the tiers-état. The semi-civilized great are idle and intemperate : idle, by their institutions, which, being those of despotism, exclude the mass from a participation in national concerns; and intemperate, because wealthy idleness gives the desire and the means of What scenes of wassailing and riot passed among the courtiers of Henry the VIIIth and Francis the Ist; and amongst those of Charles the IId, and the early part of the reign of Louis the XIVth. In the highest state of savagery, men are governed by appetite; in the highest degree of civilization they are guided by convenance. The Esquimaux, always in the field, and the Englishman always before the public, and occupied with commerce, politics, science, and the arts, have neither of them leisure to love, after the fashion of the Petrarchs and the Rousseaus.

Even now, however, we may have what the