bility of equality: go where you will, there is always a cock of the walk. There was one here-a stout, well-built, comfortable Breton, of that province of France which preserves, in character, the similarity to Old England, which its name and origin would lead us to expect. Our Breton, however, was not all English: a sharp hook nose, and jaw of more than ordinary dimensions, bespoke the Frenchman. He accosted us all gaily, without any of that long ice-breaking conversation about the weather, which generally occupies the first half-hour of our stage-coach journeys. Of the postilions, peasants, conducteur, &c. he demanded divers questions out of the window in an authoritative tone, designating them with a supercilious tu. Sweet second person singular!-not when thus flung to a menial or inferior, but when the fascinating lip of the foreign fair allows, and replies with the endearing monosyllable.-Reader, if thou intendest to act the gallant traveller, a kind now the most fashionable amongst us, and strangely omitted by Sterne, and if in thy first adventure thine ears are saluted with the novel and delightful sounds of mon cœur-je suis à vous, &c. &c. believe them not. One tu, one va, one va-t-en, is worth a thousand pathetic sentences and protestations, unless, indeed, the lady should go so far as to call you her good friend, her bon ami, for that denotes a conquest won. -Strange! that so vivacious a nation should use, in appearance, the coldest terms of endearment, should mark their affection by one syllable, and its highest point by three.-" Ma respectable amie," writes St. Preux to Julie.-What a sentence for an English lover to preface a love-letter with!-"My respectable friend!"-O Jehu!

The worthy Breton had received answers from, that is, made acquaintance with, all the inmates of our rumbling tabernacle, save and except one, an English dandy, who as yet had not recovered confidence enough in strange company to trust his mouth with French. He, however, shewed his affability and wish to be conversable by admiring with his eyes and fingers the fur-pelisse of the Breton. Having felt it for some time, he demanded what it was made of?" Wolf-skin.”—To which, in the true dandy chain of argument, the Englishman redemanded, where such was to be had, and what it would cost?" Un coup de fusil?" said the Breton.-" And there are such animals here?" said the Briton." Sure as a gun, in Bretagne," said the other.-About ten minutes had elapsed, when my dandy drew out his memorandum-book, as by stealth, and noted down-Mem.-Wolves in Brittany.

In the corner opposite to me sat an old corporal of the Er, or imperial guard, as I soon found out, when the view of the little inn at Cour de France, where Napoleon passed the night of the surrender of Paris, and the Chateau of Fontainbleau, the scene of the Emperor's first abdication, led us to talk of the great man. The corporal had been in Spain, and in Russia, and at Leipsic he had bidden adieu for a while to the grande armée, having got heartily tired of fighting all day, and accompanying the Emperor all night with torches. I envied the rogue's situation of holding a candle to Napoleon. He added, that his regiment had been ecrasé, annihilated at Vaterloo; that, as one of the ex-guard, he could not hope to be again employed; and that he was returning to Nismes, his native town, to turn his sword into a ploughshare. Yet he did not speak as a thorough Bonapartist, whose extreme and uncompromising admirers are now, I have remarked, for the most part confined

to England. Like almost all the French militaires, he had grown not a little ashamed of the later invasions of Napoleon; and he had made that progress in impartiality, which the ignorant generally do, who never arrive farther than common-place. He hated the English mortally, and told me so, for which I honoured him internally, externally striving to put on a smile of contempt; and the fellow was deeply read in the twenty volumes of the "Victoires et Conquêtes des Français," which he quoted, chapter and verse, to my frequent discomfiture, who could by no means cope with the twenty volumes.

To complete my dramatis persona, I should describe the bodkins, otherwise the occupiers of the middle seats, who, however, exchanged places now and then with other and divers wights from the cabriolet, a parte post, and a parte ante, as Mr. Coleridge would describe them. The bodkins proper, consisted of a young gentleman and his wife, both of whom (for in France, in forty-nine cases out of fifty, the gray mare is the better horse) had a little time since established an iron-foundry on the banks of the Loire, through the means of English capital, English machinery, and English workmen an hundred of the latter, he informed me, he had transported from Wales and Staffordshire to his manufactory near La Charité: the rogues did well, but liked the wine too much. He spoke of England, and of Mr. Crachy, the roi de fer. The little man, and his little wife, talked, looked, and breathed nothing less than iron, which, with the brass of the corporal and the Breton, left us Englishmen to look rather soft in such metallic company.

I never yet was in diligence, stage, or public vehicle, that each passenger did not vow, that it was the narrowest and most uncomfortable one he ever was in; this consequently was ejaculated and echoed, nem. con., the responses of the bodkins being the longest and most querulous. "Last year," said the man of iron, "there was delightful travelling, and cheap, by the voiture of the Master of the Posts, that brought one in two nights to Lyons; but our blessed government, which meddles with every thing, was bribed by a round sum of money from the Diligence-office to put a stop to the competition. So now we pay double, and take double the time-the blessed effects of legitimacy. This is not the way they manage matters in England." The Breton being an Ultra and a Bourbonist, kindled at the word legitimacy, as did the corporal at the mention of England, and they growled their invectives in such unison, that it was impossible to understand either. "It's the way with you all," continued the surviving voice of the Breton; "all you 'sacrés négocians et fabriquans,' damned merchants and manufacturers, are insurrectionists, and carbonari, and wish the downfall of your legitimate Sovereigns." The little man, instead of repelling the accusation, grinned assent, and began to open his case by the Guerre d'Espagne. Here they fell to it tooth and nail, the Breton quoting the Drapeau Blanc to prove that Bessières had taken Madrid, and his antagonist bringing forward the Constitutionnel to prove the fleets and armies that England was preparing to defend the Peninsula withal. Here the corporal broke in, "je voudrais bien voir Messieurs les Anglais encore une fois en Espagne." I observed, "he might perhaps have that pleasure." The corporal, skilled in his art, knew the ground he held was weak; so he took up an ironical position. "But the English, it must be allowed," said he, "are good

soldiers, they fight almost as well as the Russians.” * Why," said I, with a lucky memory at the moment, "which of your regiments was it, that beat so gallantly the Russian Imperial Guards at Austerlitz ?”— ""Twas my own," said the soldier with kindling enthusiasm ; "it was the chasseurs of the imperial guard that culbutaient, upset, the Russians at Austerlitz."- "You yourself belonged to that regiment? then you must have been also in Portugal at the passage of the Esla?" The corporal answered "Oh, oui," with a most involuntary accent, it being there that Lord Paget overthrew and cut up the said chasseurs with notable slaugh"But we were out numbered," continued he, as we always were when beaten-at Toulouse, for instance, were you not double our number?"—" Perhaps so, but you were beaten; at Talavera, you were double our number, yet were repulsed." The corporal was about to reply, when he was taken in flank by my dandy compatriot with a burst of French and English, but so mingled and so uncouthly pronounced, that neither of us knew what to make of it. It, however, interrupted an argument which might have gone farther than was agreeable.

ter.

Thus we jogged on through the wild and rocky tract beyond Fontainbleau, the beautiful town of Nemours, and Montargis, when night overtook us. Thence the next day, along the Loire to Nevers, where we were assailed by myriads of those manufacturers of bead purses, bead cords, and bead every thing, selling for sous what costs shillings in England. The Loire is broad and grand, but it possesses no beauty, -I was going to observe great rivers seldom do, but the Rhine occurred, and saved me from an assertion which France and Italy would allow. We had lost our bodkins, and here took in others, people of the country, who joined the corporal in relating feats of the French arms, and bearing testimony to each other's veracity mutually. Their vaunts, however, did not interfere with me, as here the Austrians were concerned, being encamped for a long time in 1814, they on one side of the Loire and Davoust on the other, in a state of truce nominally, but really in continual perils to the Germans from the hatred, sagacity, and courage of the French peasantry. Roanne was generally the scene of these short and sanguinary struggles. Here we passed a beautiful bridge of Napoleon's, not yet over the Loire, but at the side of it. I forgot to mention that we had passed through Moulins, nay through its very market-place, as mean and dirty a hole as ever was hallowed by sentiment. To look for Maria was in vain; the girls of the Bourbonnais are not pretty, and French girls know how to console themselves in better ways than Maria with her pipe. Neither Dandy, Breton, nor Corporal, had ever read the Sentimental Journey; so I was left to a long soliloquy on Sterne and sentiment," all that sort of thing and every thing in the world."-Mounting Tarare, and rolling down to Lyons, little conversation passed worth recording; we entered the second capital of France, and found it in a devil of an uproar-it was the funeral of the God Mercury, the Deity of Commerce, whose obsequies seven or eight hundred youths had followed; and they had finished by casting poor Commerce into the Rhone, to the great annoyance and occupation of the police.

* "La sanglante journée de Talavera avait repandu l'effroi dans l'armée Française, et l'on convenait que les Anglais se battaient tout aussi bien que les Russes." French Account of the Peninsula War.

MR. BARRY CORNWALL'S NEW POEMS.*

We regret that this volume has not reached us sufficiently early in the course of our preparation for the present Number, to enable us either to enter into a critical discussion of its merits at such length as they deserve, or to give as many extracts as we could wish. But the name and reputation of the author are well known, and the following specimens of the Flood of Thessaly and the Girl of Provence will enable the reader at least to judge of the characteristic beauty of two of the principal poems. In the former of these, the phenomenon of a deluge is thus very powerfully delineated.

Higher and higher fled the wasted throngs,

And still they hoped for life, and still they died,
One after one, some worn, some hunger-mad:
Here lay a giant's limbs sodden and shrunk,
And there an infant's, white like wax, and close
A matron with grey hairs, all dumb and dead :-
Meanwhile, upon the loftiest summit safe,
Deucalion laboured through the dusky day,
Completing as he might his floating raft,
And Pyrrha, sheltered in a cave, bewailed
Her child which perished.—

Still the ruin fell:

No pity, no relapse, no hope :-The world
Was vanishing like a dream. Lightning and Storm,
Thunder and deluging rain now vexed the air

To madness, and the riotous winds laughed out

Like Bacchanals, whose cups some God has charmed.

Beneath the headlong torrents towns and towers
Fell down, temples all stone, and brazen shrines;
And piles of marble, palace and pyramid

(Kings' homes or towering graves) in a breath were swept
Crumbling away. Masses of ground and trees
Uptorn and floating, hollow rocks brute-crammed,
Vast herds, and bleating flocks, reptiles, and beasts
Bellowing, and vainly with the choaking waves
Struggling, were hurried out,-but none returned :
All on the altar of the giant Sea

Offered, like twice ten thousand hecatombs,
Whose blood allays the burning wrath of Gods.

Still fell the flooding rains. Still the Earth shrank :
And Ruin held his strait terrific way.

Fierce lightnings burnt the sky, and the loud thunder
(Beast of the fiery air) howled from his cloud,
Exulting, towards the storm-eclipsed moon.
Below, the Ocean rose boiling and black,
And flung its monstrous billows far and wide

Crumbling the mountain joints and summit hills;
Then its dark throat it bared and rocky tusks,

Where, with enormous waves on their broad backs,
The demons of the deep were raging loud ;
And racked to hideous mirth or bitter scorn
Hissed the Sea-angels; and earth-buried broods

The Flood of Thessaly, The Girl of Provence, and other Poems, by Barry Cornwall.

8vo.

Of Giants in their chains tossed to and fro,
And the sea-lion and the whale were swung
Like atoms round and round.—

Mankind was dead :

And birds whose active wings once cut the air,
And beasts that spurned the waters,-all were dead :
And every reptile of the woods had died

Which crawled or stung, and every curling worm :-
The untamed tiger in his den, the mole

In his dark home-were choaked the darting ounce,
And the blind adder and the stork fell down
Dead, and the stifled mammoth, a vast bulk,
Was washed far out amongst the populous foam:
And there the serpent, which few hours ago
Could crack the panther in his scaly arms,
Lay lifeless, like a weed, beside his prey.
And now, all o'er the deeps corpses were strewn,
Wide-floating millions, like the rubbish flung

Forth when a plague prevails; the rest down-sucked,
Sank, buried in the world-destroying seas.-

In the Girl of Provence, which terminates with a story pretty generally known and even alluded to in modern poetry, namely, that of a young French woman who fell in love with the statue of Apollo, and died of her hopeless passion, we have the following spirited description of the sculptured deity.

Life in each limb is seen, and on the brow
Absolute God;- no stone nor mockery shape
But the resistless Sun,-the rage and glow
Of Phoebus as he tried in vain to rape
Evergreen Daphne, or when his rays escape
Scorching the Libyan desert or gaunt side
Of Atlas, withering the great giant's pride.
And round his head and round his limbs have clung
Life and the flush of Heaven, and youth divine,
And in the breathed nostril backwards flung,
And in the terrors of his face, that shine
Right through the marble, which will never pine
To paleness though a thousand years have fled,
But looks above all fate, and mocks the dead.
Yet stands he not as when blithely he guides
Tameless Eous from the golden shores

Of morning, nor when in calm strength he rides
Over the scorpion, while the lion roars
Seared by his burning chariot which out-pours
Floods of eternal light o'er hill and plain,
But, like a triumph, o'er the Python slain :
He stands with serene brow and lip upcurl'd
By scorn, such as Gods felt, when on the head
Of beast or monster or vain man they hurled
Thunder, and loosed the lightning from its bed,
Where it lies chained, by blood and torment fed;
His fine arm is outstretched, his arrow flown,
And the wrath flashes from his eyes of stone.