And here the diplomatist shines out in a sealed letter.

"You will soon see at Florence the son of Madame de Boufflers, to whom I have been desired to give a letter. As I conclude the new French minister, who is much connected with his mother, will be at Florence before his arrival, he will not have great occasion for your civilities. However, for once I will beg you rather to exceed in them, for particular reasons. His mother is the mistress, and very desirous of being the wife, of the Prince of Conti. She is a sçavante, philosophe, author, bel esprit, what you please, and has been twice in England, where she has some great admirers. She was very civil to me at Paris, and at the same time very unpleasant, for, being a protectress of Rousseau, she was extremely angry, and made the Prince of Conti so, at the letter I wrote to him in the name of the King of Prussia. It was made up, but I believe not at all forgiven, for it is unpardonable to be too quick-sighted, and to detect anybody's idol. Rousseau has answered all I thought and said of him, by a most weak and passionate answer to my letter, which showed I had touched his true sore; and since, by the most abominable and ungrateful abuse of Mr. Hume, the second idol of Madame de Boufflers to whom she had consigned the first. This new behaviour of Rousseau will not justify me in her eyes, because it makes me more in the right; therefore I should wish, as the only proper return to a woman, to be of use to her son. Adieu !"

Its unsealed counterpart.

"The Comte de Boufflers, who does me the honour of carrying this letter, is the gentleman for whom I have already told you I interest myself so much. His birth and his rank, added to the uncommon merits and talents of the countess, his mother, will everywhere procure him the proper distinctions. If Madame de Boufflers has done me the honour of asking what she is pleased to call a recommendatory letter of her son to you, you may be sure I had not the vanity of accepting such an honour with any other view than to procure you so agreeable an acquaintance. You are too just to merit of all nations to estimate it by countries; and yet, if you can find a way of being more civil than ordinary, I must beg that art may be employed for the amusement and service of Monsieur de Boufflers while he is at Florence. Madame de Boufflers has done so much honour to England and Englishmen, that you will be a very bad representative of both if you do not endeavour to pay some of our debts to her son. Adieu! my dear sir."

Again the enemy ill health, and the doctors.

"When I told you in my last that I was ill, I did not think it would prove so very serious as it has done. It turned to an attack on my stomach, bowels, and back, with continued vomitings for four days. You will ask what it was? So I did. The physician, for Lord Hertford and Mr. Conway sent for one whether I would or not, pronounced it the gout; and because he had pronounced so, was determined it should be so, and plied me with fire, gunpowder, and all the artillery of the college, till, like a true general, he had almost reduced the place to a heap of ashes. This made me resolve to die in my own way, that is coolly. I refused to take a drop more of his prescriptions; have mended ever since; and am really now quite well, and quite convinced that it was no more the gout than the small-pox, but a violent disorder in my stomach. This was my first physician, and shall be my last. How dear one pays for health and justice; and how seldom one obtains them even for buying!

"I am going to the Bath, with more opinion of the journey and change of air, than of the waters, for even water may be too hot for me. 'Tis a sort of complaisance too; and all these trials, when one is no longer young, I regard but as taking pains to be well against one dies. I am pretty indifferent when that may be, but not so patient under the appendixes of illness; the advice everybody gives one, their infallible remedies, and. what is worse, being confined, and thereby exposed to every idle body's visit, and every interested body's flattery that expects a legacy. I had a relation the other day with me, whom I very seldom see, and who begged I would excuse, as I was so ill, her not being able to help laughing very violently at some very trifling thing I said. I will leave her a certain cure for that laugh; that is, nothing.

"Would you believe that such a granary as England has been in as much danger as your mountains? not of famine, but of riots. The demands for corn have occasioned so much to be exported, that our farmers went on raising the price of wheat till the poor could not buy bread; indeed, they will eat none but the best. Insurrections have happened in several counties, and worse were apprehended. Yesterday the king, by the unanimous advice of his council, took upon him to lay an embargo, which was never done before in time of peace. It will make much clamour, among the interested, both in interest and politics; but in general will be popular. The dearness of everything is enormous and intolerable, for the country is so rich that it makes everybody poor. The luxury of tradesmen passes all belief. They would forfeit their characters with their own profession if they exercised an economy that would be thought but prudent in a man of quality in any other country. Unless the mob will turn reformers and rise, or my Lord Clive sends over diamonds enough for curreat coin, I do not see how one shall be able soon to purchase necessaries.

"Count Schoualloff, the favourite of the late Czarina-pray mind, not of this tigress-is here. I knew him at Paris, and when he was here before, and love him much, as one of the most humane, amiable beings upon earth. He is wandering about Europe till this tyranny be overpast, and talks of going to Italy. Pray be acquainted with him: your two natures were made for one another. He is very ill paired with Rasomoufski, the late Hetman of the Tartars, who was forced into the conspiracy, as they say, against the murdered Czar. The woman he served has displaced him, but given him a pension of twelve thousand pounds sterling a-year. He is a noble figure, of the Tartar mould; but I do not advise you to cultivate him. I have refused to be acquainted with him, though Schoualloff desired to bring him to me. He is not a Brutus to my mind. Adieu !"

Mr. Wilkes :

"As Wednesday last was the great day of expectation when Mr. Wilkes was to, and did, make his appearance in the King's Bench, I ought to have told you the event by Friday's post; but, my dear sir, I could tell you no event; nor was I in my life ever so puzzled to translate law into so much sense as would form a narrative. Would not one think that on so common an event as an outlawry and surrender, it must be as well known in Westminster Hall what is to be done, as a schoolboy knows he is to be whipt if he plays truant? No such matter! All the great lawyers in England are now disputing in barbarous Latin and half English, whether Wilkes is Wilkes, whether he can surrender himself when he does surrender, with twenty more questions equally absurd, with which they have puzzled themselves, and, by consequence, all England, and, by consequence, all Europe. There are, at least, two dozen French

now writing from London to Paris, that the capias ut legatum was not taken out as it should have been, and that the fiat should have been issued, &c. Well, patience! Let us come to facts, if we cannot get at meaning.

"On Wednesday, all precautions were taken to prevent riots. Westminster Hall was garrisoned by constables, and horse and foot guards were ready to support them.

"Wilkes had applied to the Attorney-General for a writ of error against his outlawry, which the attorney had promised, as they say; but the night before had been overpersuaded by the Master of the Rolls not to sign the fiat. Wilkes appeared according to promise. The AttorneyGeneral moves to commit him. Lord Mansfield and the judges of the King's Bench tell him the capias ut legatum should have been taken out, and, not having been, there was no such person as Mr. Wilkes before them; nay, that there was no such person, for, Mr. Wilkes, being an outlaw, an utlegatus does not exist in the eye of the law. However, this nonentity made a long speech, and abused the chief justice to his face, though, they say, with great trembling-and then-why then, one or too hallooed, and nobody answered, and Mr. Wilkes walked away, and the judges went home to dinner, and a great crowd, for there was a vast crowd, though no mobbing, retired.

"This passed on Wednesday; it is now Saturday night. Several capias issued, and the Lord Mayor has turned out some of the Sheriff's officers for not apprehending Wilkes. In short, some are afraid; more want to shift the unpopularity from their own shoulders to those of others; Wilkes does not resist, but rather shifts his quarters, not being impatient to have his cause tried when he is on the wrong side of a prison. The people are disposed to be angry, but do not know wherefore, and the Court had rather provocation was given than give it; and so it is a kind of defensive war, that I believe will end with little bloodshed, At least, hitherto, it is so uninteresting, that I should not have studied it so much, but to try to explain it to you, as at such a distance you might think it more considerable. As I shall be in town to-morrow, and my letter cannot go away till Tuesday, I will tell you if I hear any more, though I am heartily tired of the subject, and very indifferent about the hero.'

"I am not a jot wiser than I was. Wilkes nas certainly played at hide and seek, and is heartily sick of his personage, and would fain make his peace, having the sense to see that he must fall at last. There was a great crowd at Westminster to-day, expecting his appearance, but I do not know whether he came or not, for I have not been abroad, nor seen anybody that could tell. Ex quovis ligno fit Mercurius, but not a Cromwell. Adieu!"

*

"Wilkes, on the 27th of last month, was committed to the King's Bench. The mob would not suffer him to be carried thither, but took off the horses of his hackney-coach and drove him through the city to Cornhill. He there persuaded them to disperse, and then stole to the prison and surrendered himself. Last Saturday his cause was to be heard, but his Counsel pleading against the vitality of the outlawry, Lord Mansfield took time to consider, and adjourned the hearing till the beginning of next term, which is in June.

"The day before yesterday the Parliament met. There have been constant crowds and mobbing at the prison, but, on Tuesday, they insisted on taking Wilkes out of prison and carrying him to Parliament. The tumult increased so fast, that the Riot-Act was read, the soldiers fired, and a young man was shot. The mob bore the body about the streets to excite more rage, and at night it went so far that four or five more per

sons were killed; and the uproar quashed, though they fired on the soldiers from the windows of houses. The partisans of Wilkes say the young man was running away, was pursued and killed; and the jury have brought it in wilful murder against the officer and men; so they must take their trials; and it makes their case very hard, and lays Government under great difficulties. On the other side, the young man is said to have been very riotous, and marked as such by the guards. But this is not all. We have independent mobs, that have nothing to do with Wilkes, and who only take advantage of so favourable a season. The dearness of provisions incites, the hope of increase of wages allures, and drink puts them in motion. The coal-heavers began, and it is well it is not a hard frost, for they have stopped all coals coming to town. The sawyers rose too, and at last the sailors, who have committed great outrages in merchant ships, and prevented them from sailing. I just touch the heads, which would make a great figure if dilated in Baker's Chronicle among the calamities at the end of a reign. The last mob, however, took an extraordinary turn; for many thousand sailors came to petition the Parliament yesterday, but in the most respectful and peaceable manner; desired only to have their grievances examined; if reasonable, redressed; if not reasonable, they would be satisfied. Being told that their flags and colours with which they paraded were illegal, they cast them away. Nor was this all: they declared for the King and Parliament, and beat and drove away Wilkes's mob."

SONNET.

MAY.

BY W. H. FISK.

ONCE more fair Nature smiles, and from the hand

Of icy Winter bursts in varied hues

The long bound prisoner-in balmy dews

Bathing the flowers, that o'er the verdant land

In glowing beauty spring, so fair, so frail,

That 'neath the midnight breeze they shrink with fear,
And in the morning drop the glistening tear,

That gathers o'er them, as they crouching trail

Over their mossy beds. How every tree,

Field, flower and bank, in new-clad beauty glows,
Breathing sweet perfume; and each breath, a lay
To gentle Spring; so soft, so light, so free,
That on the merry air it swiftly flows,
A joyful pean to the birth of MAY!

THE

METROPOLITAN.

MAY, 1843.

LITERATURE.

NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

Magic and Mesmerism; an Episode of the Eighteenth Century; and Other Tales.

"Magic and Mesmerism!" Do the words belong to the real or the ideal? Are they used in belief or unbelief? Belong they to faith or to mockery? Is our author a disciple or a scoffer? Has he written under the influence of strong persuasion, or merely used these names" to point a moral and adorn a tale?" Be it as it may, the title of this work at once catches the attention and arouses the curiosity, and our business is to inquire to what extent the work keeps the promise of the title.

"Magic and Mesmerism!" The words seem to revive around us every form of superstition to which every race and every country has been more or less prone since the creation. The most illiterate and the most intellectual have alike been subjected to its subtle influences. Individually, men of the loftiest and most piercing faculties, as well as those whose minds are but as narrow prisons to their souls, have submitted to that innate impulsion which seems but a form of intuitive faith in that immaterial world by which we are surrounded. The fact may be obscured by our own opacity of vision; we may lose sight of the incorporeal by constantly gazing on the corporeal, but every now and then we are startled by glimpses which the mind's eye takes in of the unseen, and are made sensibly to feel that our world is but as one of the provinces of the vast universe. And it is not individually only, but often collectively, that this, the faith of sight, is forced upon us. Not the lone student in his chamber, poring over the mouldy record; May, 1843.--VOL. XXXVII.—NO. CXLV.

B