addressing the rest of the party, "he does not wear his betrothal-ring, because he does not like answering any question to which his having it on his finger might give rise. As if it were a question of conscience."

"So it may be, sometimes," I replied. "But since questioning is the order of the day, I beg to ask why you wear that little ring on your finger?" "I never gratify impertinent curiosity," said the little devil, colouring up to the very roots of her hair. She seemed very much vexed, and turned angrily away.

"Now-now-children! can you never agree?" said the Justitsraad. "You two will be getting into quarrels every moment, that I foresee; you resemble each other too much; it is from the absolute similarity between you that you cannot be in peace."

66

You flatter me very much, uncle," said I; "would that it were really so."

"I say nothing of the kind," cried Hannè; "I beg to decline the compliment. Gentlemen full of whims are my aversion. But, happily for both of us, you are not engaged to me. Jettè is much too good-she will put up with your bad habits."

her

Jette smiled kindly to her, and that seemed immediately to appease wrath. She ran to her sister, kissed her, and said: "For your sake I will bear with him; but believe me, you will not make an endurable husband of him if you do not begin in time to drive his caprices out of him. He should be accustomed to do as he is bid, and answer the questions that are put to him."

Both Jette and myself turned our faces away to conceal our confusion. Hanne held out her hand to me. "Do you repent of your sins?" "With my whole heart."

"Will you beg pardon, and promise henceforth to be better?"

"Yes. I confess that I am a great sinner, but I humbly beg pardon, and will try to do better in future." So saying, I pressed a long, long kiss on her hand; I could hardly get my lips away from it.

"So-that is enough. Now go and beg Jette's pardon, because you have been naughty in her presence; and," she added, "kiss her hand prettily."

I did so.

66

be

Very well. But I don't think you have ever kissed her as your trothed yet. Let me see you go through that ceremony, properly too." Poor Jettè became crimson at this challenge, which did not in the least embarrass me.

I felt that it was going a little too far, but what could I do? Dear reader! I was compelled to kiss the young lady-do not judge of me too severely because I did it. But I obeyed the command in as formal a manner as possible; it was scarcely a kiss, yet it burned on my lips like fire; as to how it burned my conscience-well, I will say nothing of that.

"He is really quite timid," exclaimed Hannè, who stood by with her hands folded, watching the performance of her command; "I did not expect such an assured young gentleman to be so ceremonious; one would think it were his first essay!"

"And peace being now restored and sealed," said the Justitsraad, “I hope it will be a Christian, a universal, and an eternal peace, both for the present and the future; that is to say, at least till you fall out again. And in order that such may not be the case for a few hours, we will leave

the ladies, nephew, and pay a visit to the new horse I bought the other day. We shall see if you are as good a judge of horses as you are of the Hamburg theatricals."

considerate

"You really should give poor Carl some peace," said my aunt; "you will make him quite tired of us all. One insists chising him as to dates, another as to his veterinary knowledge there is upon cateonly wanting that I should attack him about culinary lore. You shall not be so plagued by them, Carl; as to the horse, it was my husband's own choosing; and if you should not instantly discover, by looking at its teeth, that it is young and handsome, and has every possible good quality, you will be called an ignoramus."

Any how he may be called that," said Hannè; "but I forgot, peace has been proclaimed, so let my words be considered as unspoken."

Ballads from English History.

BY JAMES PAYN.

II.-DUNSTAN.

THE Monastery of Glastonbury, where the famous Dunstan passed his youth, and of which he was subsequently Abbot, had the highest repute of any of the early religious houses: Joseph of Arimathea, the legend taught, had founded that holy fane in the Isle of Avalon, and there was said to lie buried Arthur, last of the British monarchs. The romance which hung about that wondrous prince took a fast hold on the boy Dunstan, and he was even accused in his earlier years of a too great proficiency in weird legend and magical song. He was himself a poet, painter, sculptor, and musician; and amongst numerous miracles ascribed to him at this period, we are told that the strain would burst forth from his harp without touch of hand. In his youth he was betrothed to a beautiful maiden, but his uncle, Athelm, persuaded him with difficulty to become a monk. A disease that seized upon him about this time seems to have been taken as a heavenly warning, and determined him on a life of asceticism. He built a cell by the side of the church, in which he enclosed himself; it was five feet long and two and a half wide, and only rose four feet above the ground. In this sepulchre he abode, fasting to the point of starvation, denying himself needful rest, and constantly working at his forge when not employed at prayer.

:

His fame spread far and wide, and he was invited to court by the superstitious Edmund neither from him, nor from his successor, Edred, however, would Dunstan have accepted any dignity, had not St. Peter and St. Paul both visited him in a vision, and desired his apostolic society. He was then successively appointed Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, and Archbishop of Canterbury. His cruelty, deceit, and arrogance, from that time, were without bounds, although, according to the monkish chroniclers, his life was irradiated down to its last moments by a succession of the most brilliant miracles.

In the Abbey that Joseph founded,
Rich Joseph of the tomb,
There abode a rare young scholar,
A light in the days of gloom;
Where Arthur the prince lies buried,
In Isle of Avalon

(If he do, indeed, lie buried,

Nor hath to Elfland gone!), There abode a rare young poet, Dreaming his golden dreams,

And listing the mystic music,

And seeing more than seems;
Foretold by the fire from Heaven
That lit Dame Cyndrith's torch,
While yet in her side she bare him
Through good St. Michael's porch;
Divinely mark'd in his boyhood,

Was Dunstan watched of all
On the pinnacled roof at midnight,
Led by an angel tall,

OCCASIONAL NOTES ON LITERATURE IN FRANCE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

VII.-SAINTE-BEUVE.

THERE are more romance writers and poets who have turned historians or critics, than critics or historians who have taken to poetry and romance writing. So asserts, safely enough, M. Nisard;* who supports his assertion by instancing, from among his literary compatriots, the case of M. Sainte-Beuve, the author of a romance brimful of imagination, and of poems romantic in staple and charming in sound, but turning from these pursuits to the task of elaborating a history of the austerest of Christian societies; while M. Rémusat keeps locked up in his desk the drama of that same Abelard (though the salons rave about its beauties) whom he has treated at large and in detail in the form of history ;-and then again M. Prosper Merimée, onced evoted to "The Etruscan Vase," and "Columba," is now employed on archæological memoirs. "We shall perhaps see," M. Nisard conjectures, "other desertions from the camp of imagination to that of utility; but I have yet to learn that those who rank the first in works of history or of criticism, MM. Thiers, Cousin, Thierry, Mignet, Villemain, Guizot, have any thought of becoming poets or romance writers." As poet and romancer M. Sainte-Beuve is next to unknown in England: his reputation, however, speeding and spreading, as critical essayist, may entitle him to wear that incognito passing well. It is best to know the best part or parts of a man, if we are to know him at all; and the best parts of this man of song, story, and essay, are not displayed in the two first, but eminently and pre-eminently in the last-the essai, the éloge, the portrait littéraire.

The subject of M. Sainte-Beuve's romance, "Volupté," is, the feud between the senses and the will. The story is simple, with what Gustave Planche calls a "lofty moral :" the destiny of the hero, Amaury, if hero he be in whom heroism is not, is blighted by his own irresolution. "Devoted, early in life, to pleasures of easy purchase, he enervates and corrupts his nature therein; and, when he seeks within himself the power of loving and willing, it is beyond his reach." He involves the destiny of three women, without accomplishing his own; these three being the young Amélie de Linier, meek and unaspiring as regards herself, but ambitious and exigent on behalf of the man to whom she will confide her heart,-Madame de Couaën, melancholy and foreboding, bestowing and requiring unreserved devotion,-and Madame de R, a light-hearted coquette, introduced apparently rather by way of relief to the other two ladies, and so to elucidate Amaury's character (or want of it), than for any distinctive charm or merit of her own. The crisis of the tale turns on the meeting together of the fair trio, "as it fell upon a day," the understanding they come to, one with another, and the effect it has on the not very masculine waverer, who has made them and himself un

"De la Critique et de la Destinée des Ouvrages Contemporains." † Port-Royal.

happy. "He flies, in a religious terror, from these three blighted flowers -blighted by the breath of his aimless love." He enters the priesthood, and is forthwith summoned to assister aux derniers moments of Madame de Couaën, his best-beloved of the three, and whose death causes him, as seasonable penance, the

Pang more sharp than all.

The lyric poetry of M. Sainte-Beuve has been divided into two periods, very distinct from each other, without being contradictory. In what he published under the nom de plume of Joseph Delorme, he "seems to be occupied rather with the mechanism of the versification than with the inner thought itself;" labouring to reproduce all the measures essayed by Baïf, Ronsard, and Dubellay, at the revival of poetry in France; while, in the " Consolations," on the contrary, the "moral element has completely separated itself from questions of rhythm, cæsura, and rhyme." Of "Joseph Delorme," M. Sainte-Beuve himself remarks in his latest notice of Chateaubriand, when referring to the narrative the latter gives us of his early days in England, his melancholy musings in scenes retired, and the "humble consolations" of his miserable life, as a Werther or a Réne of the faubourgs: "Si j'osais prendre un nom qui résumât toute ma pensée, je dirais qu'il y a du Joseph Delorme dans ce Chateaubriand primitif: ce que j'ai voulu en effet dans Joseph Delorme, ç'a été d'introduire dans la poésie française un exemple d'une certaine naïveté souffrante et douloureuse."* M. Planche, who descries a relationship between the poetry of Sainte-Beuve and our "Lake School," says, that the former, like the author of Laodamia, loves to celebrate in his melodious hymns the episodes of domestic life;† and elsewhere describes the "Consolations," poetically considered, as very closely allied to the poetry of Wordsworth-the French poet resembling the Bard of Rydal mainly in his habit of ennobling the most common subjects and ordinary incidents of daily life, rather by the thought and feeling with which he invests, than the expression with which he adorns them.‡

Some of M. Sainte-Beuve's admirers, more exacting and sanguine, perhaps, than calmly and clearly discerning, impute it to him, as a piece of self-injustice, that he should spend on feuilleton fragments the time he might better employ on some independent and harmonious whole. To these we may call to mind M. Cuvillier Fleury's apology for the feuilleton and its most foremost factors. Parlons franchement, says he: how many critics can you tell me of, critics of name and influence, whose books (livres) have put their feuilletons out of mind? And, after asking what there is remaining of La Harpe, but the "Cours de Littérature," what

Note to the essay,

"Chateaubriand: Anniversaire du Génie du Christianisme," in the Moniteur, April 17, 1854.

† Planche: "Portraits Littéraires," II. (Lettre à M. Victor Hugo.) "I am aware that the Consolations' have been charged with too near a resemblance to prose. I am aware, also, that to some minds, habituated of old to the pomp of the Alexandrine, these familiar confessions appear almost trifling. But this, I believe to be rather the effect of surprise, than the symptom of posi. tive dissatisfaction. A like disdain would be manifested for a Hobbema, by a man all whose previous art studies had been confined to Claude Lorraine." Planche's Review of Sainte-Beuve, 1834. (Reprinted in the "Portraits Littéraires," I. pp. 267-289.)