PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE.

Mr. Legaré to I. E. Holmes, Esq.

BRUSSELS, 2D OCT., 1832. My dear Holmes,-I began a letter to you the other day, but it was owing to the state of my mind and the impression made upon me by reading your State-rights manifestoes--in so lugubrious a strain, that I determined it was not fit to be sent as a remembrancer of me to one who, wild as some of his notions are, is, in the main, all that his best friend would wish him to be. I have often thought of my taking leave of you in Washington, which was the first time (though by no means the last) that I felt myself a good deal overcome by my separation from those I love. You thought I should not bestow a recollection upon you, once I formed my grand associations in Europe. How little even you, with whom I have used less disguise than with almost any person besides, know of my character! I have had the honor of dining with two kings, and have been as well received as I had any right to imagine I should be, and yet, I assure you that I never thought more, and more affectionately, of you and all my little circle of friends, than in the most brilliant scenes I have found myself in, and even at Neuilly and Laken. Every circumstance, for instance, of our excursion to Georgetown in the spring, or rather, winter,-from our first meeting on the wharf to our separation at Georgetown, every word, every laugh, almost every thought,-is as distinctly in my recollection now as if it were but yesterday; and the glories of Versailles, the freshness and beauty of the most highly cultivated gardens and groves that adorn the palaces of kings, excite in me feelings far less deep and intense, than those with which I dwell upon the sands and quagmires and pine-barren of our own low country. Ah, why should such a happy state of things,-a society so charming and so accomplished,-be doomed to end so soon, and, perhaps, so terribly!

I was grievously disappointed with every thing in Paris but the Royal family and Ma'mselle Taglioni, the celebrated opera dancer,-oh! yes,--I beg her a thousand pardons, and Ma'mselle Mars, the great comic actress. As for the regeneration of the people of France, it is all in my eye,--they are as much regenerated as I am, and not half so much, for I flatter myself

that, as I grow older, I become wonderfully softened and penitent. It is just the contrary with the Gauls. If liberty consists in a readiness to rush into scenes of blood and outrage,-in the ferocity of a Tartar horde, thirsting for plunder and conquest,in rudeness of manners, violence of passion, and the most concentrated, impenetrable, conceited égoisme,-in wearing mustachios and red pantaloons, and elbowing women into the gutters that bound the side-walks, then, the French are a free people; but, according to my old-fashioned notions of liberty, they are at this moment more unfit to be citizens of a republican country than they were in '93. They think o nothing and desire nothing but war and sensual pleasures. If they can only cover themselves with crosses and stars for victories gained in foreign countries, live upon contributions extorted from their unwilling allies, and deal with the beauty and the booty of subjugated nations at their discretion, one form of government is precisely the same in their eyes as another. Nay, they prefer the one that enables them best and most certainly to achieve these things. I don't mean to say that there are not, among the men of fortune and education, especially in the mercantile classes,-many, many individuals of sounder views and feelings than these, but of the great body of the Parisians and the French generally, (and remember, equality is perfectly established among them,) I have no hesitation in affirming that I think them utterly unfit for a government of laws as contradistinguished from one of men. Indeed, I am more than ever inclined to think that liberty is an affair of idiosyncracy, and not destined to spread very far beyond the Anglo-Saxon race, if even they keep it very much longer. Perhaps, in less than a twelvemonth, you may be able to give in your experience on the subject. Quod deus avertat omen. They swear the government of Louis Philippe is worse than any they have had. Their press is very bold and unsparing,-but the attorney-general plays the devil with the editors by prosecuting for libel, which sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail, but are always most injurious to the printer on account of the interruption they necessarily occasion in his business.

The English, by the way, are very anxious about their reform bill. If you read the Quarterly, you will see what a doleful strain it utters, and, I assure you, even the whigs I have met with seem alarmed about the state of things. Demus has got his finger in, and even Brougham begins to be frightened at the idea which a joint or two of that extremity give him of the dimensions and prowess of the mammoth. There's O'Connel, for instance, still insisting upon "the rapale" of the union, and issuing manifestoes, worthy of his royal progenitors of Kerry, to excite his people to, it seems to me, nothing less than a war without truce or quarter, with every part of the English régime

in Ireland. If the French had a navy, I hav'n't the least doubt Ireland would be wrested from Great Britain. But there's the rub,--and as they hav'n't heard of nullification in this unenlightened part of the globe, they have only one way of settling a dispute of the kind,-which, unless England be too busily engaged with her radicals at home, is likely to end in favor of her mille carinæ.

Apropos of the English navy, I had the pleasure of dining in company with Sir Sidney Smith at Bishop Luscombe's-the chaplain of the British embassy-at Paris. He is an exceedingly interesting and striking old man. He used several times, in speaking of the French, a very significant phrase,-"they are good for nothing," says he, "they have no tenacity of will." He mentioned that, being at Brussels, the day of the battle of Waterloo, he asked a gentleman, who had just returned (it was early in the day) from the field, what was the prospect. "Why," replied the other, "the Duke has come to a stand, and says he will not budge thence." "Is it so," said Sir Sidney, "then all is well, for I know by experience, (at St. Jean d'Acre, you remember,) if he won't stir, the other fellow will." His information, derived principally from his extensive intercourse with mankind in different parts of the world, is very diversified and curious, and there is a mixture of the cavalier and the sailor in him that is very piquant. Among his other narratives, (for he is getting old,) he entertained me with an account of his sojourn in the Temple as a prisoner. He speaks French like a Frenchman. What a race the English are! They are, without exception, the highest specimen of civilization the world has ever seen, but don't tell them I say so.

I have not been here long enough to make any acquaintance beyond the corps diplomatique and the high officers of state. The city is beautiful, beyond its reputation. It has been very much improved since I saw it. I keep a fine carriage, with a noble pair of English horses, and take an airing every day at four o'clock in the suburbs, returning at five, or half-past five, to dinner; but I am alone, and solitude (where it is not devoted to study or contemplation) is so painful!-and especially is it so, where the means of enjoyment, if you had any to sympathise, are all around you. If I could only call and take you or some other crony up, as I go to the Boulevard and the Allée Verte, how happy I should be. As it is, I read a great deal in the daytime, and go to the theatre in the evening.

Talking of study, when I was crossing the ocean I was in horribly low spirits, and I do not know what I might not have been driven to by my despair, had I not taken the precaution to buy in Philadelphia a collection of all the Greek dramatists. I read a tragedy every day, so that, in the course of a voyage of

three weeks, I got through Eschylus, Sophocles, and many of the plays of Euripides. All this is a preface,--for remembering the interest you took in our friend Mr. B**'s doubts about περισσοι παντες οἱ ἐν μέσῳ λόγοι, I must beg your friendly intervention in another affair of the same kind, in which your services to the cause of sound literature will doubtless be acknowledged by him with as much gratitude as he ever feels towards any body that is more successful than himself in solving a classical riddle, at least, I trust he has got over the grudge he owed you for your inconceivable impudence in attempting to talk Latin with our friend Ali Pasha, or Haji Baba, or whatever was his name, at Eliza Lee's,-while he very modestly held his tongue in cudgelling his brains for the right thing. Not long before I left Carolina, the queer old man (for he is half reconciled to me, in spite of my many sins of commission in this way) came to me with another motto, wondering 'what the devil could be the wit of it.' It was this,--Ev ragegyw Sou μs. Of course, as the words were abstracted from the context, it was not easy to say precisely what they meant there, but I gave him an off-hand interpretation, which turns out to have been the right one. The text is in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, v. 474. The hapless solitary of Lemnos implores Neoptolemus, (Pyrrhus,) by all that is dear to him, not to leave him to suffer in the frightful desolateness of the situation in which he had been abandoned by the Greeks, but to add him to his ship's company,-to take him up, as it were by the way, and as a supernumerary.

μη λιπής με ουτῳ μόνον, etc.

ἀλλ' ἐν παρέργῳ που με

So in the Orestes of Euripides, Tyndarens says to Orestes: καλον πάρεργον δ' αὐτὸ θήσομαι πίνων

ὧν ούνεκ' ηλθον, etc.

This will be a good or glorious addition to what I intended, at first, to do." Something done by the way, over and above one's duty or engagement, aga beside and ev opus. In the application of it, made at Cambridge, one friend begs another to take him up en croupe, as they say in French,-to let him pursue his triumph and partake the gala, etc.

You must keep this little piece of pedantry, or pleasantry, as you may please to consider it, a profound secret from every body but our reverend friend of the longs and shorts; but I would have you judge, from this specimen, how full my thoughts are of every thing, how minute soever it may be, at home.

So you are going to nullify,—well, I can't say I have any great confidence in men when they are wound up to the revolutionary pitch, but I strive to hope against hope. I trust in God that

my glorious and happy country, a thousand times dearer to me now and grander in my estimation, by contrast, than it ever was, is not about to seal forever the dismal doom of our miserable species. As for amelioration on this side of the Atlantic, they may expect to see it grow to something worth boasting of, who believe in the perfectibility of men,- but to preserve our happy institutions for ages yet to come,-to prolong the Saturnia regna which our physical condition and the character and order of things we inherited from our fathers, naturally secured to us, and which we have so signally enjoyed,-to do this seems to me so very easy, that should any thing happen, which, for the sake of the omen, I would not even mention, I shall think the world a mockery fit only to inspire the despair of the misanthrope, or to provoke the demoniac sneer of a Mephistopheles. If the Union should go to pieces, it will be one hideous wreck,-of which, excepting New-England, no two parts will hold together. None of us will have any country, except what the rule in Calvin's case may dignify with that name,—a technical country,— a legal right and a civil status to decide on a question of title. But there will be no flag known to the nations, and none of the ennobling and sacred charities that bind, or rather bound us together but the other day,-no proud retrospect to the past,--no glowing anticipations of the future,--but piratical depredations instead, and ignoble border warfare, and the rudeness, coarseness and ferocity of a race of mounted barbarians,--and all the calamities that have scourged this continent, without the chivalry that has adorned her valor, and the grandeur that has half excused the ambition it has excited.- -The politics of the immor

tal Jefferson! Pish!

Write to me soon and at great length,--keep my secrets, and believe me, dear Holmes, ever yours,

H. S. L.

From the same to the same.

BRUXELLES, APRIL 8, 1833.

My dear Holmes,---I have this moment received your letter of the 12th Feb., endorsed by Trapmann on the 16th. I began to think you did not intend to reply to my letter, as supposing it improper, or unsafe, or I know not what, since your scandalous row in South-Carolina, to keep up a correspondence with one of the "mercenaries" (isn't that the word?) of the general government. I was occupied the greater part of yesterday and the day before in writing two very long letters, for when I get at it, I have no moderation, and inflict line upon line on my suffering correspondents, with as little mercy as if I were the representative of a "sovereign State" bellowing out or vomiting forth whole