of a European imagination could ever produce, either in ancient or modern times. And such is the building which our press is urging on the Indian army to reduce to dust when we recapture Delhi! We are fond of boasting of civilisation, and the respect for art which it gives, and at the same time vituperating the Easterns as being now, and at all times, barbarians; but, I ask, would an Eastern king ever commit such an act as destroying this, the finest monument of architectural skill in existence ? No. For when the ignorantly-abused Turks besieged Vienna, they particularly averted the fire of their artillery from the quarter of the church of St. Stephen's, as, like brave men, they fought with human beings, and not with the manifestations of genius.

It would be a nobler monument of our triumph, more impressive to the natives, and more worthy of our fathers' example, when, by the assistance of Heaven, we take the city,* to preserve the palace as the seat of our governor-general, and as an illustration of our moderation in the use of victory. Shame ought to burn the cheek of those writers who not long since were edifying us with homilies full of pious horror at the cruelties of Commissioner Yeh, of Canton, but who now are inciting to the commission of greater atrocities on the capture of Delhi than ever apparently entered into the head of that individual, or have been recorded in authentic history. But the cant of civilisation, like many other fine things when put to the test, is only like the Dead Sea fruit-a brilliant lie. England, however, ought to prove that she has something better to restrain her passions-Religion. For if in the suppression of this rebellion we commit half the crimes urged on us by the daily and weekly press, our doom as a nation is sealed. We shall have proved ourselves unworthy to rule, and, as on the Spaniard before us, the curse of God will come in every form that a nation can suffer.

With all this former splendour in outward show, the Mohammedan rulers did not, as Prince Woronzow declared was his policy with the city of Odessa, look after the ornamental, and leave the useful to come when it could, for as the water of the Jumna, on which Delhi stands, is rendered impure by flowing over beds of natron, an aqueduct of a hundred and twenty miles in length was built to supply the inhabitants with water. For the last three miles near the city it is cut through the solid granite rock, in a channel thirty feet deep and thirty-five broad. The engineer of this astonishing work was Ali Mirdân Khan, a Persian noble. Were there nothing else to prove the contrary, this alone would show the falsehood of the charge of barbarism so confidently and ignorantly brought against the Orientals. Barbarians do not build large and splendid cities.

F. F.

* Delhi has fallen since our excellent contributor's article was in type. With it also the rebellion has been struck at the heart. A great deal may remain to be done before British rule is re-established throughout the breadth and width of India, especially in Oude, but that is a matter of detail compared with the great and decisive blow struck at Delhi, and that without the aid of succours from England, although it is to be regretted with a sad loss of valuable lives. While there has and still will be, no doubt, severe retribution, we happily, however, hear of no undue severity having been exercised by the avenging army; as to palaces, and mosques, and other works of art, the British wage not war against such; there is no fear of their being destroyed except by accidents inevitable in a siege.

PRINCE NAPOLEON'S JOURNEY TO THE NORTH.*

PRINCE NAPOLEON formed the project of an excursion to the North in the spring of the year 1856. The project embraced at first only Scotland and Iceland, but it gradually extended itself till it also took in "the Polar regions and the Scandinavian territories." The corvette Reine Hortense and the tender Cocyte were placed at the disposal of the prince. The little expedition left Havre on the 16th of June, 1856, an orchestra which entered into its composition playing opera airs, whilst the population of the town, crowding the jetty and the shores, expressed in loud plaudits their loyalty and their admiration of the graceful outline of the ship, which, we are told, "appeared like a gull, just shaking its wings as it is about to take flight."

The expedition does not appear to have awakened to a sense of sympathy with the outer world from this time till it was somewhere off Flamborough Head. Up to that period inward emotions monopolised all their attention. But at this last landmark, two boys, "whose cheeks and hair seemed confounded in the same red tint," rowed alongside, and, in exchange for some fresh fish, obtained two bottles of brandy. To effect this exchange, the corvette had to bring up for a short time. "Cela," says M. Charles Edmond-who, by-the-by, disavows the responsibilities of historian to the expedition, whilst the luxe with which his work is got up attests to the contrary" cela s'appelle stoper à bord des navires français." The boys were hailed by one of the expedition, "who, in what concerns the English, could remember that his father used to beat the soldiers of the United Kingdom without having to speak their language." "English spoken here!" shouted the hereditary thrasher of the English; while the boys, if we are to believe the historiographer, replied, "Du beau poisson, milord!" The next day they were to land on British soil for the first time. The corvette lay in the roads of Tynemouth. "The boats are lowered, the tricolor flag is hoisted. A few minutes more and we land at Tynemooth." If our historiographer is not more accurate in his orthography when he gets to Iceland and Greenland, we begin to fear that he will make a sad mess of it.

Well, with all our faults we are a generous nation. Our subscriptions, our charities, attest it. We have homes and asylums of all kinds and characters-for the old and young, for the afflicted or the distressed-for all kinds of conditions and persons. If an asylum was to be erected for master mariners, no place more fit, it might be fancied, than the mouth of the Tyne, out of which river so many stout hearts and able hands go forth every day of the year. Our historiographer does not view the matter in this light. Speaking of the noble charity at Tynemouth, he says:

English vanity reflects itself to the full in the thought that presided at the foundation of this hospital. We are here in the presence of an aristocracy,

* Voyage dans les Mers du Nord à bord la Corvette La Reine Hortense. Par M. Charles Edmond (Choiecki).-Notices Scientifiques, communiquées par MM. les Membres de l'Expédition.-Carte du Voyage.-Carte Géologique de l'Islande.

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which patronises, which opens, as in Rome of old, a corner of its garrets to its indigent clients. At Rome, the aristocracy heaped its favours on those plebeians who helped it up to power, and it erected monuments to the legions who conquered the world for their benefit. British feudality gives its support to those who have spent their lives in inundating other countries with British merchandise, and in subjecting the consumers of the whole world to the productions of England. Here the merits of a citizen are determined by the number of tons that he has exported. His best epitaph would be: "Here lies Williams, who sold as much calico as would make a shift for the terrestrial globe."

This tremendous witticism is printed in capitals. No expense has indeed been spared to bring out the labours of the expedition to the greatest possible advantage. When we see the results, we think sympathetically of the pains of begetting, and we feel how worthily it has been bestowed. From Tynemouth the expedition advanced upon British soil. Generalities, however, take precedence of observations, instead of as they ought legitimately to do-following them.

England is the country of cold positivism. The intimate sensations of humanity find there with difficulty wherewith to satisfy themselves. In all things you recognise the impress of strict necessity, nothing beyond that. That which more particularly strikes one among our neighbours is the absence of the picturesque in all that is not the immediate work of nature. In southern countries, misery has not that hideous aspect that it displays in England: people know how to put art even in the arrangement of their rags, the sun gilds their wretchedness, misery is melancholy, but it is never grotesque. The women of the people whom we meet in the streets of Tynemooth walk with bare feet, and the remainder of their attire seems like the spectre of Parisian fashions as they were in 1815.

Art in England, we are also told, is imported ready done. If she attempts anything herself, success seldom crowns her efforts. There is at Tynemouth a statue of the Duke of Northumberland. It is said to have excited the surprise of the expedition. There is another upon a height. It must be the Duke of Wellington!-No: it is Admiral Collingwood. It looks as if it had been sculptured by a Danish (not a French) enemy.

A hurried visit to Newcastle-a town which presents nothing curious," "which has the monotonous aspect of all British cities," where "it rains five days out of six," "a mere ink-bottle”—and a descent into the coal-pits at Hartley, and we are in the Firth of Forth at Leith, and by train to Edinburgh. Even this noble city, so favoured by its situation, and so justly proud of its private and public buildings, does not give pleasure to the fastidious expeditionists. Tout cela," M. Charles Edmond sums up, "est sombre, austère, uniforme, décemment incolore ou tristement déguenillé. Un ennui incommensurable plane sur la cité.”

This "Great Chartreuse of Presbyterianism," it is further said, assumes on the Sunday the aspect of an acropolis (necropolis we suspect was meant). "A stranger, who has no personal relations or occupation, can then alone conceive the extent to which that evil can go, which was formerly so little known on the Continent, and which, under the name of spleen, tortures the nerves of the inhabitants of Great Britain." Ruskin meets with unexpected auxiliaries among the members of the expedition. There is "an absence of proportions in the monuments and buildings which approaches deformity. The lower portions of the buildings are in general so low, compared with the upper parts,

that all these monuments appear as if about to issue forth from a stage-trap, and to have stopped short when they had got three-fourths of the way out." Even the old town "presents nothing to the lovers of the middle ages. There are, as in most old towns, nothing but narrow streets, flanked by very high houses, and encumbered by a povertystricken population."

The expedition made a pilgrimage to Abbotsford. Sir Walter Scott is in favour even with our most supercilious friends. The place turned out, however, like everything else in our unfortunate island-a failure. "What a frightful distance," exclaims the penman of the party, "from the engraving in the album to the reality!" And then we are told the history of Sir Walter's life; how he was the Great Unknown because he was ashamed of being a literary man. He wished to be a feudal chieftain, and he spent the night in writing, so that he might appear in the daytime to have nothing to do. The secret only came out with the failure of Dallontyne (Ballantyne ?) and Constable!

The expedition also visited Glasgow. A word or two of justice are penned in favour of the wonders of activity in industry and commerce there exhibited; but still the city is declared to be the goose with golden eggs, in respect to "that institution which prevents people from consuming and exchanging their reciprocal products; the custom-house receiving seventeen millions of francs upon imported merchandise." If France would reciprocate free trade, Great Britain would not tax her products. Let the experiment be tried of France accepting our manufactures, and of England receiving French wines and brandies free, and it would then be seen who is the palmiped with golden eggs.

Peterhead was the next station on the journey. It is described as a place that "wants colour like all the other urban agglomerations of the United Kingdom." It is true that it possesses a magnificent harbour cut out of the solid rock, but still there is no "cachet particulier; absence de pittoresque." In the absence of the picturesque, there were at Peterhead mariners experienced in the seas of the North, with whom the members of the expedition opened a rolling fire of questions. But the mariners opposed the British phlegm to the impetuosity of French interrogation. An ice-master was, however, engaged, a man of rare ability, whose name is said to have been Arbutnoth, but more probably Arbuthnot. This person mystified the members of the expedition. They were most anxious to know if the beautiful Reine Hortense was suited for the Polar Seas, but upon that subject he preserved a discreet silence. They revenged themselves by saying that had they been going upon a raft, he would have gone with them just as composedly.

Whilst the corvette made the best of its way under guidance of the Scotch pilot to the Firth of Murray, Prince Napoleon made a trip by land, accompanied by three of his companions. Aberdeen and Banchory led the way to Balmoral. The mansion is described as standing just at that point of the valley of the Dee at which the landscape, deprived of all its grandeur, preserves nothing but its "tristesse mesquine et monotone." As to what intentions presided in the construction of the building, that remains a problem to strangers. It most resembles those pasteboard châteaux with which children play at the Middle Ages. Blair

Athol, with a passing notice of its exclusive proprietor, Culloden, and finally Inverness, and we have done with Scotland. The tradition that the best modern English is spoken at the latter city, is noticed as an observed fact: "That which strikes the stranger most," says our historiographer, "on entering Inverness, is the purity with which the English language is spoken there." This manifests considerable discrimination on the part of a writer upon whose little linguistic mistakes we have before had occasion to remark.

Once more the prince and his companions were "upon the floating soil of France; the tricolored flag was there to attest it." They had not, however, quite done with Scotland. A sudden squall obliged them to seek shelter for a short time at Thurso, and beyond that a discreet silence is observed till the ship came within sight of Iceland, the great point upon which all their hopes were concentrated. The reason of this silence is best understood when we mention that the Reine Hortense is most ungallantly described as 'rolling comme un ivrogne en train de choisir l'endroit ou il cuvera son vin."

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The expedition anchored in the bay of Reikiavik on the 30th of June. The tender Cocyte was already there. There were also two English screw steamers, the Saxon and the Tasmania, loaded with coal for the use of the expedition.

A frigate of war, the Arthémise, bearing the tricolor flag, commands the naval station of Iceland, and protects our French fishermen dispersed over the Polar Seas. The flag of Spain floats from the tall mast of a brig, which has come for a cargo of salt cod, indispensable for the fasts of the most Catholic peninsula. A little steamer belonging to the British navy lies at anchor near the Spaniard. Iceland is a very poor country; Denmark does not figure among first-class powers. The British ship is here to make some claim or other, merely to keep up a good old habit. Lastly, a pleasure yacht has brought a young English lord, who has come to Iceland in search of distraction.

Reikiavik is not a pretty town, although the sketch by Giraud is by no means unpleasing. Sir George Mackenzie said of the capital of Iceland that it had a very mean appearance. M. Charles Edmond goes further. He says, "L'aspect de la ville est triste, morne, chétif." "C'est triste, morne, desolé." But still Reikiavik was a capital, and the imagination of the expeditionists found an agreeable exercise in picturing forth what agitations could pervade the bosoms of people dwelling in such a climate, what metropolis imposed its ideas, its fashions, and its tastes in this northern capital, and what they should be most questioned upon. They were not long in being disillusionised. "The Icelanders whom we met,' M. Charles Edmond relates, after landing, "busy for the most part in drying, weighing, and packing up salt cod, looked at us in a calm, mild, sympathising manner. The men took off their hats as we passed by and muttered kindly expressions. But there was no manifestation of surprise at the visit which we were paying them. Like the Doge of Genoa in the Versailles of Louis XIV., it is rather we who are astonished at finding ourselves in Iceland."

A gentleman of high stature advanced to meet the expeditionists. This was M. Biarni Johnson, rector of the University of Reikiavik. M. Johnson spoke slowly, but the choice of his expressions marked a man who had cultivated the French language at its purest sources. With M. Johnson came M. Gunnlaugson, who has spent a long life in drawing up