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meddle which has always been characteristic of French rulers, attempted forcibly to mend the matter. A law was passed, making it punishable to exchange a certain quantity of gold or silver for a more considerable quantity of assignats; in other words, all were required, under a penalty, to regard the paper franc and the metal frane as equal in value; and when this failed to bring down the price of bread by raising the worth of the assignat, the artificial law of the maximum was enacted; that is to say, commodities were not allowed to find or make their own price in the market; the price was fixed for them, in each commune, by the municipal authorities; and the baker or the butcher who charged more than the legal sum for his pound of bread or meat, was liable to be taken up as an offender, and subjected to fine and imprisonment. These regulations were well meant, but, as might have been expected, they worse than failed to maintain the value of the paper-money. It could not but be felt that an article which required such extraordinary aids to keep it afloat, must have an inherent and irremediable tendency to sink, and the depreciation went on accordingly.

But

royalty, and bore upon its face the king's
image and superscription, was believed
to be certain to retain its value even in
the case of a counter-revolution.
the necessity of seeking such investments
led naturally to something other than the
revival of what we may call legitimate
commerce; there followed in the train,
speculation of the wildest description.
The heart of Paris became the Exchange;
and such gambling in gold and silver,
and other commodities, occurred there,
as we can find a parallel to nowhere, ex-
cept, perhaps, in Wall-street, New-York.

The part of Nero fiddling over Rome in flames is reäcted in every age; it was so in France during the revolutionary era. There, men grew rich on the misfortunes of their country, and drank deepest of the cup of pleasure when a defeat or some other calamity had filled the heart of the nation with grief; and so it is in America at the present hour. If we are to believe the accounts which reach us through the public press, the number of those who, in New-York and Washington, have become suddenly rich, has never been greater, and at no period has there been, in those cities, so much gayety and display and extravagance as has appeared of late among the contractors and speculators who have become millionaires through the national distress.

It must not, however, be supposed that the price of the assignat tended invariably downwards; on the contrary, it fluctuated just as the price of the greenback does now; and, indeed, at one time it recovered itself so remarkably, that for a very short period it was nearly on a par with specie. The causes of this extraordinary revival were these: in the first place, a forced loan was decreed, by which it was expected so much money would be realized as to allow the administration to withdraw as many as a thou

Under these circumstances, a state of things was brought about which in some respects strikingly resembled that which we have recently been witnessing in America. All debtors became naturally eager to pay off their incumbrances; and creditors, forced to accept what was due to them in greenbacks, got back no more than perhaps a sixth part of what they lent. Then large holders of assignats, knowing that such capital was perpetually melting away in their hands, made attempts in every direction to exchange them for something of inherent or less-varying value, and a fictitious briskness was thus communicated to trade. These men would buy anything-sand millions from the paper circulation, pictures, furniture, bills of exchange on foreign countries, or shares in stocks, or banks, or companies, which last-mentioned species of property rose, in consequence of this demand, to previously unimaginable rates or quotations. They even scrambled for the possession of a kind of assignat which was supposed to be less subject to sink than its neighbors; this was the assignat of the first issue, which, because it dated from the days of

and anything that had a tendency to lessen the mass helped so far to enhance its intrinsic value. But what contributed more effectually than this to the end referred to, was the increased stringency with which the laws relating to hoarding were enforced. It was made penal to possess a private store of metals. If any one were discovered with a stock of the contraband commodity in his house, the treasure-trove was seized, and divided

between the government and the informer. It thus became positively dangerous to have gold or silver; and hence a perfect rush was made to get rid of them. They were carried to the frontier, and paid away for foreign goods; they were taken to the public offices, and tendered as payment for taxes; they were even, in some cases, gladly exchanged for the assignat itself. In these ways, specie became for the moment actually abundant; and the result was, as we have said, that paper and coin approximated to each other in value, and were for a little while almost on a par.

But this did not last. The extraordinary demands made on the government for the public service necessitated the constant issue by it of fresh paper. It had twelve hundred thousand men to arm and pay, a matériel to create, and a navy to build; and the taxes did not produce more than a fifth of the monthly expenditure. In these circumstances, their only resource was the printing of new assignats; and when, in the beginning of 1794, the sum-total of all the previous issues was doubled, the note lost its temporary value, and fell back to its former depreciated condition. This, however, might have been borne, if the decline had stopped then; but it went on, and that with accelerated speed. The greenback became more and more worthless. Those who received stated incomes, paid not in coin but in its nominal value in paper, felt themselves growing more and more straitened in their circumstances. The distress, in fact, came to be well-nigh universal, and never had the inventive mind of France a more perplexing problem submitted to it than that how the obviously approaching financial crash was to be averted.

Our readers, who remember on what a solid basis the assignat issues rested, may feel inclined to ask why that basis was not turned to more account. How did it happen that the fifteen thousand millions at which the national real property was valued, came in so slowly? The simple answer is, that purchasers could not be found, owing, no doubt, in part to the scruples and suspicions which were entertained by some as to the propriety and security of the sales; but owing chiefly, there is no question, to this-that few in these times had the means to ex

pend in such extensive investments. Still the people felt that they had wherewithal to meet their obligations, and the inquiry was often made, impatiently enough, if there was no way in which the public domains could be made available to relieve the general distress. In answer to this inquiry, various schemes were suggested. One was, to demonetize the assignats, or a portion of them; that is, to take from them the faculty of free circulation, and make them literally what they were theoretically, mere obligations upon land. But to this proposal it was well replied, that to attempt to carry out such a regulation in the case, for example, of a laboring man, was to insure his starvation. He wants bread, and you give him a piece of earth. His family are in rags, but in place of furnishing him, in return for his work, with what will procure clothes, you make him in mockery a landed proprietor. As long as there was no other circulating medium than the assignat, an expedient like this was out of the question; and the simple rumor that it was in contemplation caused a heavy fall in the price of paper.

A far more feasible scheme than this was to make a virtue of necessity, and sell the domains, not for what they were worth, but for what they would bring. They had been valued in 1790, and it was certainly putting a great temptation in the way of the moneyed public to offer them, in 1795, for three times their then estimated value in assignats; and those who had anything to spare were not slow to take advantage of the opportunity. An estate rated at ten thousand in gold, and worth, therefore, sixty thousand in paper, was offered for thirty thousand in assignats, or for half its real value. Such a bargain was not likely to present itself again. Everybody who could scrape together a bundle of notes became ambitious of attaining to the dignity of a landholder; and if the administration had gone only through with the scheme, the country would certainly have experienced a sensible relief. But after launching the scheme, and receiving many offers, the authorities became suddenly alive to its supposed extravagance, and quashed all the proceedings which had been taken in connection with it.

This straightforward plan of meeting the difficulty being abandoned, all sorts

of fanciful proposals were suggested and discussed. Some argued for lotteries, others for a tontine, others still for a great land bank; while many urged the adoption of a certain article, of real value (such as gold or corn), as a standard, and letting the assignat be treated as any other common article of merchandise. Nothing effectual, however, was really done, and the evil went on increasing. By the winter of 1795-1796, the issue of assignats had extended to the enormous sum of forty-five thousand millions; but twenty thousand millions furnished, in actual value, scarcely one hundred millions, for the assignats were not worth more than the two hundredth part of their nominal value. The public now therefore refused to take them. They could pay for, and purchase nothing; and the radical step required to be taken of sweeping them entirely out of the way. This was done by creating a new species of paper-money, to which was given a different name. It does not appear very clearly how this was to mend matters satisfactorily; but here is the account of the revolution as it appears on the page of history:

"A paper was devised, which, by the name of mandats, was to represent a fixed value in land. Every domain was to be delivered, without sale by auction, and upon a mere procès-verbal, for a price in mandats equal to that of 1790. Mandats to the amount of two thousand four hundred millions were to be created; and domains to the like amount, according to the estimate of 1790, were to be immediately appropriated to them. Thus these mandats could not undergo any other variation than that of the domains themselves, since they represented a fixed quantity of them. It would not thence absolutely result that they should be on a par with money, for the domains were not worth so much as in 1790, but at any rate they must have the same value as the domains. It was resolved to employ part of these mandats to withdraw the assignats. The plate of the assignats was broken upon the 30th of Pluviose; forty-five thousand five hundred millions had been issued. By the different returns, either by means of loans or of arrears, the circulating quantity had been reduced to thirty-six thousand millions, and was soon to be further reduced to

twenty-four thousand millions. These twenty-four thousand millions, reduced to one thirtieth, represented eight hundred millions; it was decreed that they should be exchanged for eight hundred millions in mandats, which was a liquidation of the assignat at one twentieth of its nominal value."

Such is a short history of the first French greenback. It was based on what appeared to be excellent security, but within a very few years it had deteriorated in value so fearfully that in the end it was able to pay only eightpence in the pound; and yet, with all that, it served an important purpose. The monarchy was overturned, the Revolution was accomplished, all Europe was defied, on such means as it furnished. And one can fancy a loyal American saying, while he sadly studies this story, so full of sig nificance for him: "Well, if in the meantime the sinews of war are but furnished in quantities sufficient to restore the Union, I care not although, in the end, a paper dollar should be reckoned dear when offered in exchange for a copper

cent."

London Society.

OUR WIDOWED QUEEN.

IN MEMORIAM, DECEMBER XIV., M.DCCC.LXI.

THEY ask me why I weep
And sorrow as I do;
They say my grief should sleep
And memory slumber too.

Who says they sleep not now?

Doth sleep so death-like seem That people marvel how

A sleeping grief may dream? My sorrow long ago

In chastened sadness slept; And mem'ry's flow'rets grow

Where thorns and brambles crept.
And still the fragrant breath
Of roses dead and gone,
Reveals that after death

Their spirit yet lives on.
In dreams they flower at night,

In thoughts they bloom by day;
They have no dread of blight,
They're proof against decay.

I cannot, if I would,

Those thoughts and dreams destroy; I would not, if I could,

Forego their phantom joy

That makes my tears to flow,

And sadly to recall
The spot where here below

I've laid dead flowers and all.

I plead with those who've known
The bitter hour of grief;
That finds in every groan

Some earnest of relief;
Who've lived on year by year,
And learnt the bitter truth
That sorrow sometimes here
Lives on in endless youth.

Oh ye who ask me why

I wear so sad a mien,' And say that I should try

To be in grief a queen,

Alas! there is a power

To which e'en mine must bend; It rules in that dark hour

When earth-born life must end

For crowns and sceptres yet
Have never held a sway
Could bid the heart forget,
Or make true love decay.

And thou, beloved child,

Oh! never may thy breast
Be racked by anguish wild,

That finds no ark of rest:
A written life of years-
Where, marked on every leaf,
Are spots where scalding tears
Write chronicles of grief.
And you, dear people mine,
Bear with me still, I pray,
And let your hearts incline

To mourn with me this day.
Upon your loyal love

I fain would trusting lean, And pray that God above

Will guide your widowed queen.

St. James's Magazine.

F. W. B. B.

THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY.

party as well as by the population in general. But he was not allowed to remain for any considerable time undisturbed in his place of retirement. His expulsion from the French territory was made one of the conditions of the treaty of peace in 1748, concluded at Aix-laChapelle. Charles Edward positively refused to leave the country, and much interest in his behalf was made with the government, both by the dauphin and other members of the royal family, to allow him to remain. But the interference was of no avail; the administration proved inexorable. The Pretender was seized in the opera-house on the 11th of December, 1748, conveyed in the first instance to Vincennes, and from thence was sent out of the country. He wandered about the Continent for some time, and it is supposed that he secretly visited London in the year 1750. When subsequently allowed to return again to France, Charles Edward was so dispirited and depressed by his wanderings and misfortunes, that he fell into the habit of intemperance, of which mention is made in one of the dispatches of the British ambassador Stanley, who, writing from Paris in 1761, states that the Pretender was given to drinking to such an excess as to be often drunk in the morning, and carried senseless to his chamber by his attendants.

By the death of his father in 1766 he became titular King of England, but the elevation to the fictitious dignity did in no wise cure him of his inveterate propensity to intoxication; and the French government, seemingly ashamed of their royal guest, drove him in 1770 once more from their soil. In the following year, however, it suited the policy of the French ministry-as a kind of demonstration or menace against Englandto recall the Pretender to the capital of WE doubt very much whether the his- France, and he was informed by the tory of the Countess of Albany, or even Duke of Fitzjames, on behalf of the her name, is generally known to the great French court, that if he would consent mass of the reading public, though she to be married to a wife chosen for him, was so closely connected with the last a pension of 240,000 francs would be scion of the royal House of the Stuarts. settled upon him. Charles Edward made She was the wife of the Pretender, who, no objection to the proposal, and the after his well-known adventures and fail- lady thus chosen was Louise, the daughure in 1745, in the attempted recovery ter of the Prince of Stolberg-Gedern, a of the British crown, took up his resi- member of one of the most ancient and dence in Paris, where he was received distinguished German families, raised to with great distinction, both by the court | the princely rank in the person of his

father. Her mother, too, was of a most | tendance upon him, an office which she noble family, of the illustrious House of fulfilled with every mark of propriety Horn, maternally allied to the Bruces and attention. of Scotland and to other distinguished families, both in France and in the Low Countries.

The Princess Louise, born September 20th, 1752, lost her father, a general in the Austrian service, when she was in her sixth year. Her widowed mother received a pension from the Empress Maria Theresa, and she was placed in the educational establishment for young ladies of the highest rank of nobility, at Mons, in the Austrian Netherlands. Here she remained until her twentieth year, when she was married to Charles Edward, who was then fifty-two years of age.

The marriage was celebrated at Macerata, in the private chapel of Cardinal Marefoschi's palace, on the 17th of April, 1772, that day being Good Fridaya circumstance which elicited, some years after, the remark from Louise, the Countess of Albany, that her marriage proved what a marriage on such a day-"a day of Christendom's lamentation"-might have been expected to turn out. The newly-married couple arrived, five days after their marriage, at Rome, where they were received with something like royal_honors, though, on the part of the Papal Court, no formal notice was taken of the Pretender's announcement to Cardinal Pallavicini, the Secretary of State, of the arrival of the King and Queen of England. The title, however, under which the royal pair were better known was that of the Count and Countess of Albany. The countess is described as a woman of most dazzling beauty, of great powers of conversation, and as turning everybody's head. Their residence in Rome proving disagreeable, owing to their equivocal position, they retired early in the year 1773 to Sienna, and in October of the following year they took up their abode in Florence. Soon after his arrival in that city, Charles Edward's health gave way, he was seized with symptoms of dropsy, his old habits of intemperance had gained a greater ascendancy, and he was almost confined to his apartment. He required the countess, whether from helplessness or from jealousy, to be in constant atNEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 4.

It was at this period, in the autumn of 1777, that the poet Alfieri arrived in Florence. It were beside our present purpose to draw a biographical sketch of this renowned tragic writer, beyond observing that he was a Piedmontese by birth, of a noble family, of independent fortune, and of a most impressionable temperament. He set out on his travels when he was but seventeen years of age, and found himself very soon engaged in amatory adventures. In Holland he fell in love with a young married woman, who appeared not altogether insensible to the advances of the youthful Italian; but the suspicions of the husband being awakened, and all further intercourse broken off, the poet became so very much affected, that it was necessary to bleed him; and he was with difficulty restrained from tearing off the bandages and wilfully bleeding to death. In England a somewhat similar adventure was attended with graver circumstances. Alfieri had fallen in love with the wife of a peer, who returned his passion and admitted him into her house. The intrigue was discovered to the husband, who challenged the poet; they fought in the Green Park; Alfieri, being ignorant of the use of arms, was speedily wounded in the arm. His antagonist, declaring himself satisfied, assured the poet that he would no longer stand in his way of free access to the lady, as he intended to be speedily divorced from her. The ardent lover, as may be supposed, made no delay in offering his hand to the object of his passion. But on the third day after the duel, the lady frankly told him that, previously to their acquaintance, she had bestowed her favor on a groom still in her husband's service, and that this man, in a fit of jealousy, had betrayed both intrigues to her lord. Alfieri, though at first greatly staggered, mortified, and full of resentment-and the more so as the whole affair, the duel, the intrigues, appeared in the newspapers-was nevertheless so full of infatuation that he clung to his paramour, and travelled about with her for some time. He was made the defendant in the subsequent proceedings for a divorce; and we may here mention

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