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exclaiming, "My husband! my husband!" sobbed as though her heart were breaking. The imperial spirit of Napoleon was for the moment entirely vanquished, and he also wept almost convulsively. He assured Josephine of his love-of his ardent and undying love. In every way he tried to soothe and comfort her, and for some time they remained locked in each other's embrace. The attendant was dismissed, and for an hour they continued together in this last private interview. Josephine then, in the experience of an intensity of anguish which few hearts have ever known, parted forever from the husband whom she had so long, so fondly, and so faithfully loved.

death-like pallor of his cheek, his sunken eye, and the haggard expression of his countenance, attested that the Emperor had passed the night in sleeplessness and suffering.

Great as was the wrong which Napoleon thus inflicted upon the noble Josephine, every one must be sensible of a certain kind of grandeur which pervades the tragedy. When we contemplate the brutal butcheries of Henry VIII. as wife after wife was compelled to place her head upon the block, merely to afford room for the indulgence of his vagrant passions; when we contemplate George IV. by neglect and inhumanity driving Caroline to desperation and to crime, and polluting the ear of the world with the revolting story of sin and shame; when we

After the Empress had retired, with a desolated heart, to her chamber of unnatural widowhood, the attendant entered the apart-contemplate the Bourbons, generation after ment of Napoleon to remove the lights. He found the Emperor so buried beneath the bed-clothes as to be invisible. Not a word was uttered. The lights were removed, and the unhappy monarch was left in darkness and silence to the dreadful companionship of his own thoughts. The next morning the

generation, rioting in voluptuousness, in utter disregard of all the laws of God and man, while we cannot abate one tithe of our condemnation of the great wrong which Napoleon perpetrated, we feel that it becomes the monarchies of Europe to be sparing in their condemnation.

THE GROVE OF ACADEMUS.-A correspondent of the Recorder, writing from Athens, alludes with much spirit and interest to this spot. It was indeed a distinguished one in the history of Greece and the records of this city, the capital. But few men have lived who have possessed the native talents and the literary attainments of Plato. The Academy he planted in what is termed "The Grove of Academus," was consecrated to philosophy and letters, and its light shone over the whole republic of Greece. Plato, for a pagan, and living amid the darkness of paganism, did make some glorious dis coveries of the future, and from it drew exalted and powerful motives to virtue and piety. As a teacher he was never surpassed; and the proof is found in such phi-phy which proceeded from the Academy. The l'ersian, losophers as he trained to imbibe his spirit and extend his researches. The master minds of illustrious Grecce were those who received their discipline and knowledge in this far-famed "Grove." Had he lived in our day, and were his noble powers enlisted in the cause of Christianity, like those of a Paul, what wonders would he accomplish! Yet, we love to read of him and his influence in those dark times, and to hear of the place where he gave his lessons in philosophy and virtue. This correspondent proceeds to say :

scarcely less interest. Stretching along the valley, which is watered by the Cephissus, is an extensive olivegrove. It is at once recognized to be the Grove of Academus. Though no very celebrated works of art were collected here, and though no illustrious spot, yet contests of a different kind were here carried on, and victories scarcely less glorious and permanent than those of Marathon and Salamis were here won. The laurels of Plato are still fresh and green as those of Miltiades and Themistocles. It is surely not easy to estimate the effect of the victories which were gained at Marathon and Salamis on the tide of human events; but it would be equally difficult to estimate the influence of that philoso

To the left of the Acropoiis is another object of

with his millions, without doubt, once occupied a much larger space in the eye of the world than the crowd of Athenian Sophists; but the day has now arrived when victories over mind are considered not less difficult and important than the resistance of physical force, however great; and the conquests of the Platonic philosophy, imperfect though it was as a system, over the sensual and skeptical tendencies of the age in which it flourished, are now ranked among the proudest achievements of the Grecian race."

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From the North British Review.

BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL.*

FOUR faces among the portraits of modern | Robert Burns an honorable station among men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features: Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be in presence weak, in speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh-to interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been given, might learn that soul is after all independent of matter, and not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases, physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not, alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect. Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of

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them. Of Shakspeare's we do not speak, for
it seems to us to combine in itself the ele-
ments of all the other three; but of the rest,
we question whether Burns's be not, after all,
if not the noblest, still the most loveable—
the most like what we should wish that of a
teacher of men to be. Raffaelle-the most
striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-
face pencil sketch by his own hand in the
Taylor Gallery at Oxford-though without a
taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melan-
choly, formed entirely to receive and to elabo-
rate in silence. His is a face to be kissed,
not worshipped. Goethe, even in his earliest
portraits, looks as if his expression depended
too much on his own will. There is a self-
conscious power, and purpose, and self-re-
straint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious
lineaments, which might win worship, and
did, but not love, except as the child of en-
thusiasm or relationship. But Burns's face,
to judge of it by the early portrait of him by
Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of
Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate,
that he was literally mobbed by the Egyp-
tian ladies whenever he walked the streets.
The magic of that countenance, making Burns
at once tempter and tempted, may explain
many a sad story. The features certainly
are not as regular or well-proportioned as
they might be; there is no superabundance
of the charm of mere animal health in the
outline or color; but the marks of intellectu-
al beauty in the face are of the highest order,
capable of being but too triumphant among
a people of deep thought and feeling.
lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of pas-
sion and the faculty of enjoyment, are part-
ed, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness
of the heart; the features are rounded, rich,
and tender, and yet the bones show thought
massively and manfully everywhere; the
eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good
humor and sweetness, with simple, eager,
gentle surprise-a gleam as of the morning
star, looking forth upon the wonder of a new-
born world-altogether

The

"A station like the herald Mercury, New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."

its criticism, was altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the form merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in itself, mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. Before it was admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of "the picturesque," or what not; and the poet was the man who gave it this factitious and superinduced beau

Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence-a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life-a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man -an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and unscientific, only not superstitious-turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighty, by a certain "kompsologia" and "meteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.

teoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming extinct, mainly, we believe, And what an age in which to be turned under the influence of Burns, although he loose for loose he must go, to solve the himself thought it his duty to bedizen his problem of existence for himself. The grand verses therewith, and though it was destined simple old Scottish education which he got to flourish for many a year more in the temfrom his parents must prove narrow and un-ple of the father of lies, like a jar of paper satisfying for so rich and manifold a charac- flowers on a Popish altar. ter; not because it was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly all things necessary for his "salvation"--in every sense, all laws which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it contained so much of them as yet only im- | plicitly; because it was not yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's. It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up his education at the point where it had been left unfinished? He saw around him in plenty animal goodnature and courage, barbaric honesty and hospitality-more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward progress into civilized excellences is sure to be balanced by some loss of savage ones-but all reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It was a harddrinking, coarse, materialist age. The higher culture, of Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French-not a good kind, while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a great many young ladies, who could read French, as the best account of the relation of

the sexes.

Besides, the philosophy of that day, like

No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True, he was admired, petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful, no one could doubt, But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad muse of Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even in the eighteenth century itself-witness Auld Robin Gray. But who suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of all the second-hand French culture which seemed to her then the highest earthly attainment? The review of Burns in an early number of the Edinburgh Review, said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon. Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been the most deep-sighted.

But no.

The reviewer turns the strange thing over and over, and inside out-and some fifteen years after it has vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his mind

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about in any clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross with it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into any established pigeonhole or drawer of the then existing anthropological museum. Burns is "a literary prodigy," and yet it is "a dero- | gation to him to consider him as one. And that we find, not as we should have expected, because he possessed genius which would have made success a matter of course in any rank, but because so well educated-" having acquired a competent knowledge of French, together with the elements of Latin and Geometry;" and before he had composed a single stanza, was "far more intimately acquainted with Pope, Shakspeare, and Thomson, than nine-tenths of the youths who leave school for the University," &c., &c.;-in short, because he was so well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal poet, was a matter of course and necessity. And yet, a page or two on, the great reason why it was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to become an original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of "the herd of scholars and academical literati," who are depressed and discouraged by "perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing with the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that "the literature and refinement of the age does not exist for a rustic and illiterate individual; and consequently the present time is to him what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writers who adorned them." In short, the great reason of Robert Burns's success was that he did not possess that education, the possession of which proves him to be no prodigy, though the review begins by calling him one, and coupling him with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody.

Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma-which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points, and form a complete circle of contradictions-what must have been the bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however manfully he may have kept it down? No wonder that he was unguided, either by himself or by others. We do not blame them; him we must deeply blame; yet not as we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in the least to those temptations under which Burns fell.

Biographies of Burns, and those good ones, according to the standard of biographies in

these days, are said to exist; we cannot say that we have as yet cared to read them. There are several other biographies, even more important, to be read first, when they are written. Shakspeare has found as yet no biographer; has not even left behind him materials for a biography, such at least as are considered worth using. Indeed, we question whether such a biography would be of any use whatever to the world; for the man who cannot, by studying his dramas in some tolerably accurate chronological order, and using as a running accompaniment and closet commentary those awe-inspiring sonnets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of life William Shakspeare must have led, would not see him much the clearer for many folios of anecdote. For after all, the best biography of every sincere man is sure to be his own works; here he has set down, "transferred as in a figure," all that has happened to him, inward or outward, or rather, all which has formed him, produced a permanent effect upon his mind and heart; and knowing that, you know all you need know, and are content, being glad to escape the personality and gossip of names and places, and of dates even, except in as far as they enable you to place one step of his mental growth before or after another. Of the honest man this holds true always; and almost always of the dishonest man, the man of cant, affectation, hypocrisy; for even if he pretend in his novel or his poem to be what he is not, he still shows you thereby what he thinks he ought to have been, or at least what he thinks that the world thinks he ought to have been, and confesses to you, in the most naïve and confidential way, like one who talks in his sleep, what learning he has or has not had; what society he has or has not seen, and that in the very act of trying to prove the contrary. Nay, the smaller the man or woman, and the less worth deciphering his biography, the more surely will he show you, if you have eyes to see and time to look, what sort of people offended him twenty years ago; what meanness he would have liked "to indulge in," if he had dared, when young, and for what other meanness he relinquished it, as he grew up; of what periodical he stood in awe when he took pen in hand, and so forth. Whether his books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to read it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to himself,

and moreover of the most notable things | Shakspeare's own; which even now asserts which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.

This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or eyen in Scottish metaphysics. But after all, the history of a nation is the history of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of that generation, and of much-no man can say how much of the next generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul a generation and a half of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or several to come.

its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader.-And as for his tenderness-the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren-it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, the hypocrite, ever alike "spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui ;" and therefore intolerable to Robert Burns's honesty, whether he be fighting for or against the cause of right. Again we say, there are evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this man, which, with a stronger will and a larger education, might have placed him as an equal by the side of those great names which we mentioned together with his at the commencement of this article.

But one thing Burns wanted; and of that one thing his age helped to deprive him,the education which comes by reverence. Looking round in such a time, with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of humor, what was there to worship? Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was the author of the review Such a man, sent out into such an age, in the Edinburgh, says disparagingly, that would naturally have a hard and a confused Burns had as much education as Shakspeare. battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell So he very probably had, if education mean under the guidance of some master mind, end book-learning. Nay, more, of the practical se ipso minor, stunted and sadly deformed, as education of the fireside, the sober, indusBurns did. His works are after all only the trious, God-fearing education, and "drawing disjecta membra poetæ ; hints of a great might-out" of the manhood, by act and example, have-been. Hints of the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of the Scottish muse, in which

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The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a translation from Dante's Paradiso, so broad, terse, vivid, the painter's touch.-Hints, too, of a humor, which, like that of Shakspeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the sublime; as when

"Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch

Just like a winking caudrons."

Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such a perpetual wordbattle as that amid which Shakspeare lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled

Burns may have had more under his good father than Shakspeare under his; though the family life of the small English burgher in Elizabeth's time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a Scotch farmer's did fifty years ago. But let that be as it may, Burns was not born into an Elizabethan age. He did not see around him Raleighs and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Frobishers, Spensers and Jonsons, Southamptons and Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and moulding the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong, and wise—a wothe proudest, if not to love, yet still to obey. man who, whether right or wrong, bowed

That was the secret of Shakspeare's power. Heroic himself, he was born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. Not a play but gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were common and way-side flowers-among the humors of men which he and Ben Jonson used to wander forth together to observe. And thus

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