After dinner I took the company which had remained with us, and which was not very numerous, to view the interior of the house. On reaching my cabinet, a little Italian greyhound that I had there ran to meet us, and began to bark loudly at Count Horn, but when he perceived Count Poniatowsky he seemed wild with delight. As the cabinet was very small, no one observed this but Leon Narichkine, his sister-in-law, and myself. But it did not escape the notice of Count Horn, and while I was going through the apartments to return to the saloon, Count Horn took Poniatowsky by the coat, and said to him: "My friend, there is nothing so terrible as a little Italian greyhound; the first thing I always do with the ladies I am in love with is to give them one of these little dogs, and by this means I can always discover whether there is any one more favored than myself. The rule is infallible. You see it. The dog growled as if he would have eaten me, because I am a stranger, while he was mad with joy when he saw you again, for most assuredly this is not the first time he has seen you there." Count Poniatowsky treated all this as an absurdity on his part, but he could not dissuade him. Count Horn merely replied: "Fear nothing; you have to deal with a discreet person." The chief value of the book, however, is derived from its revelations of the low state of civilization in the imperial family of Russia during the eighteenth century. A coarseness and unrefined licentiousness prevailed which suggest a most unfavorable picture of the civilization of the lower class of the population. The memoirs are written with singular freedom and piquancy of style, and show the author to have possessed the sagacious intellect and strength of will which historians have heretofore assigned her, together with an amount of womanly feeling and goodness which required a systematic and long-continued training in wicked associations to destroy. According to the Dr.'s account, New York takes precedence in iniquity over all the cities of the world. Broadway, formerly a fashionable promenade, is now given up to gamblers and women of the town. We never take up a newspaper but we read some account of a rural lover of pleasure being relieved of his pocketbook by some fashionable Delila. Streets formerly the choice abodes of respectable citizens now swarm with these beautiful frail ones; and, strange to say, the moral New England is not only the place whence they come, but also the land to which they return, to live on their carefully hoarded gains. From the woods of Maine and factories of Massachusetts go forth an exodus of women, who glide. through all the Atlantic cities, till bringing up at Charleston they take passage for Havana, and thence depart for California; by which time they are so worn out that few have strength to return. If the religion of the Mormons would absorb these and convert them to citizen producers we should be inclined to believe in its divine origin. And as the women of New England are three to every male, in addition to which so many of the Yankees go off to seek fortunes elsewhere, that husbands are largely at a premium, this would seem the only way to dispose of the surplus. When we see that passion will thus show itself ungovernable in the cold daughters of the north, ought we not to have some charity for those southern maidens whose blood is liquid fire, and who realize the words of the poet in his address to spring? "Blandum incutiens per pectora amorem Efficies ut pavidæ generatim secla propagant." The following touching verses, by Hood, cause us to wish, that if so many human beings must exist as vessels of dishonor, something might at least be done to raise rather than depress them. One more unfortunate, Gone to her death! Lift her with care, Young and so fair. Now is pure womanly. Rash and undutiful; Only the beautiful. Still for all slips of hers, Escaped from the comb, Who was her mother? Had she a brother? Or was there a dearer one Still and a nearer one Alas for the rarity Home she had none. The rough river ran, Dissolute man, Decently, kindly, Smoothe and compose them; Through muddy impurity, Into her rest. Her evil behavior, Her sins to her Saviour. BUCKLE'S CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND. AFTER the numerous imaginative histories that have been written and read during the last few years, where words supply the place of ideas, it is pleasing to find one founded on fact, and where each proposition is backed by the strongest authorities that labor and learning can get together. Such is the history of civilization in England by Buckle. Starting with the theory of the influence exerted by food, climate, soil, and the general aspect of nature upon the character, habits, and physical formation of man, he glances at the history of the past from the earliest times, and unrolls the panorama of the career of the nations who have gone before us. On one subject, viz. the errors of his own government, he exhibits a candor hardly to be expected from an Englishman. He characterizes the war waged against France at the time of her great revolution as unnatural and unjust. He shows the character of the Georges in a light more clear and unprejudiced than any in which they have heretofore been delineated; and proves that the terror excited among the wealthy by the doctrines of the Republic, was such as to induce Parliament to pass laws which, had they been carried out, would have rendered the English government the worst of despotisms. "At the accession of George III.," he remarks, "all those monstrous doctrines respecting the rights of kings, which the Revolution was supposed to have destroyed, were suddenly revived. The clergy, abandoning the now hopeless cause of the Pretender, displayed the same zeal for the House of Hanover which they had formerly displayed for the House of Stuart. The pulpits resounded with praises of the new king, of his domestic virtues, of his piety, but above all, of his dutiful attachment to the English church. The result was the establishment of an alliance between the two parties, more intimate than any that had been seen in England since the time of Charles I. Under their auspices, the old Tory faction rapidly rallied, and were soon able to dispossess their rivals in the management of the government. This reactionary movement was greatly aided by the personal character of George III., for he, being despotic as well as superstitious, was equally anxious to extend the prerogative and strengthen the church. Every liberal sentiment, everything approaching to reform, nay, even the mere mention of inquiry, was an abomination in the eyes of that narrow-minded and ignorant prince. Without knowledge, without taste, without even a glimpse of one of the sciences, or a feeling for one of the fine arts, education had done nothing to enlarge a mind which nature had more than usually contracted. Totally ignorant of the history and resources of foreign countries, and barely knowing their geographical position, his information was scarcely more extensive respecting the people over whom he was called to rule. In that immense mass of evidence now extant, and which consists of every description of private correspondence, records of private conversation and of public acts, there is not to be found the slightest proof that he knew any one of those numerous things which the governor of a country ought to know, or indeed that he was acquainted with a single duty of his position, except that mere mechanical routine of ordinary business, which might have been effected by the lowest clerk in the meanest office in his kingdom. The course of proceeding which such a king as this was likely to follow could be easily foreseen. He gathered round his throne that great party who, clinging to the traditions of the past, have always made it their boast to check the progress of the age. During the sixty years of his reign he, with the sole exception of Pitt, never willingly admitted to his councils a single man of great ability, not one whose name is associated with any measure of value either in domestic or in foreign policy. Even Pitt only maintained his position in the state by forgetting the lessons of his illustrious father, and abandoning those liberal principles in which he had been educated and with which he entered public life. Because George III. hated the idea of reform, Pitt not only relinquished what he had before declared to be absolutely necessary, but did not hesitate to persecute to the death the party with whom he had once associated in order to obtain it. Because George III. detested the French, of whom he knew as much as he knew of the inhabitants of Kamtschatka or of Thibet, Pitt, contrary to his own judgment, engaged in a war with France by which England was seriously imperilled, and the English people burdened with a debt that their remotest posterity will be unable to pay." Edmund Burke, the greatest of Irishmen, comes in for a very handsome tribute from our author, a tribute similar to the views expressed by Lord Thurlow when he declared that the fame of Burke would survive that of Pitt and Fox. In 1790 Fox stated in the House of Commons" that if he were to put all the political information which he had learnt from books, all which he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one scale, and the improvement which he had derived from his right honorable friend's instruction and conversation were placed in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference." Lord Campbell says, Lord Campbell says, "Burke was a philoso phic statesman, deeply imbued with the scientific principles of jurisprudence." Barry the painter, in his celebrated letter to the Dilettante Society, regrets that Burke should have been diverted from the study of the fine arts into the pursuit of politics, because he had one of those minds of an admirable expansion and catholicity, so as to embrace the whole concerns of art, ancient as well as inodern, domestic as well as foreign." Adam Smith, the author of the "Wealth of Nations," told Burke, after they had conversed on subjects of political economy, "that he was the only man who, without communication, thought on these topics exactly as he did." In vol. xvi. of Parliamentary History we read an admirable instance of the way in which he refuted the common argument, that because a country has flourished under some particular custom, therefore the custom must be a good one. Speaking of the power of the Attorney General to file information ex-officio, he likens such reasoners to the father of Scriblerus who venerated the rust and canker which exalted a brazen potlid into the shield of a hero. "But, Sir," he adds, "we are told that the time during which this power existed is the time during which monarchy was most flourishing; and what then, can no two things subsist together but as cause and effect? May not a man have enjoyed better health during the time that he walked with an oaken stick, than afterwards, when he changed it for a cane, without supposing, like the Druids, that there are occult virtues in oak, and that the stick and the health were cause and effect?" He supported those just claims of the Catholics, which, during his lifetime, were obstinately refused, but which were conceded many years after his death, as the only means of preserving the integrity of the empire. "Yet," says Buckle, "at this distance of time, when his nearest relations are no more, it would be affectation to deny that Burke, during the last few years of his life, fell into a state of complete hallucination." When the French Revolution broke out, his mind, already fainting under the weight of incessant labor, could not support the contemplation of an event so unprecedented, so appalling, and threatening results of such frightful magnitude; and when the crimes of that great revolution, instead of diminishing, continued to increase, than it was that the feelings of Burke finally mastered his reason; the balance tottered, the proportions of that gigantic intellect were disturbed. From this moment, his sympathy with present suffering was so intense, that he lost all memory of the tyranny by which the sufferings were provoked. His mind, once so steady, so little swayed by prejudice and passion, reeled under the pressure of events which turned the brains of thousands. And, whoever |