Pyrénées," was published at Toulouse, as also a smaller composition in "La Revue de Bretagne" called "Les Caqueux," whom the author designates as "a kind of pariahs of the middle ages.' The most remarkable work of fiction, in which a Cagot figures as a hero, is "L'Andorre" of Elie Berthet. In this romance the Cagot is described as a true descendant of the Goths, with light hair, blue moist eyes, expressive of a certain degree of timidity, fair skin, and athletic form.

Popular songs and poems, composed by Cagots, or having reference to them, are by no means common. Doctor Michel attributes the poverty of the national romancero, so different to what is presented to us by Greece, Spain, and Scotland, to the neglect which has attended this branch of literature in France, but it is also possible that the subject may never have been a popular one. Still the doctor's industry has supplied him with some curious specimens. One which originates from the Landes, and which discusses the origin of the Gahets, dates from the sixteenth century. Another more amusing one, called the "Wedding of Margaret de Gourrigues," dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. It seems to have been mainly written as a vehicle wherein to notice the names of the chief Cagots of the day, and it begins spiritedly enough. "Twenty-five Cagots are gone to Orthez, mounted on horseback like so many cavaliers. They are gone to Pau, to the bridge of the Franciscans," &c., &c.

Some of the Cagot songs are full of repinings at their miserable condition, but most are indicative of a truly praiseworthy resignation, while others, again, celebrate in triumphant language their contests with the Franks. One of the most characteristic is a Breton ballad. It relates that when Jannik Kokard, of Plirmelio, "the handsomest peasants' son in the country, went on Sunday to church, with his light hair floating, more than one young girl was heard to sigh tenderly. One day he said to his parents' Father and mother, in the name of God, if you love me, do not send me to Lannion, for fear you have trouble afterwards, from what may happen to me there. I never see Marie Tilli but that I am obliged to go in; they give fine oats to my horse, and to me every honour; they place before me barley bread, and a vessel full of fresh butter. Bordeaux wine, and of the best too; hydromel, mead; nothing is wanting. Marie, seated by my side, fills my glass to the brim, so much so, that I often leave the market to go and look at her eyes.' His parents answered him angrily My son, you shall still go to market, and you shall pass free before the door of Marie; you shall no more enter her house; for that girl you shall not have her, nor her, nor the daughter of any Caqueux.'

"

"Marie came about a week afterwards to the village of Jannik. 'Give me a seat to sit down and a white napkin to wipe my brow,' she said, 'for your son has said to me that I shall be his wife.' The old head of

the family answered her in a mocking tone. Young girl, a foolish fancy brings you here, for my son you shall not have, nor you, nor the daughter of any Caqueux.' When Marie heard these harsh words, she said, amidst her tears, I never had so much grief as when I heard my father spoken of as a Caqueux; my father has never made ropes; he is a wholesale dealer in white linen,' and as she went out of the house, 'let it be so! I will go to the fair,' she said; I will go to the fair of Plouaret; I will there cleave off my little finger, and it shall be seen by my blood that I am not of the race of the Caqueux!'

"Marie Tilli said to Jannik Kokard that day: The sun is hot, let us go and sit in the shade.' Jannik followed the young girl, and when he got up he did not know, unfortunate young man, what had happened to him. He did not know that, poor young man, he was infected, that he was leprous! But as he returned home, swellings big as peas came out on his skin; it was painful to see him!

"The miserable youth, overcome with grief, said to his parents, God has punished me because I did not obey you. Father and mother, I must bid farewell to the threshold of your door. The poor Caqueux has neither friend nor parent on the earth; the priest forbids him to approach the door of Christians, or to draw water from the well; he is dead to the world. He must keep at a distance from his fellow-creatures, even from little children. The poor Caqueux has on earth nothing but anguish and suffering."

It is impossible but that a tradition so long received and so widely and uniformly diffused in connexion with the Cagots, must have had some foundation in truth, whatever may be their origin historically. It is to be hoped that by the intermixture of races, as now permitted, the malady will be gradually exterminated, which was only permanently upheld by obliging the unfortunate afflicted to intermarry with one another.

The word Cagot and Cagoterie was first introduced into the French language as expressive of bigotry and hypocrisy, by Clement Mant, valet to Queen Margaret of Navarre, and that curiously enough in connexion with other Gothic names familiar in this country. In his epistle of a cock to an ass, written in 1536, to Lyon Jameb, he says:

Ils sont de chaude rencontrée
Bigotz, cagotz godz et magodz,
Fagotz, escargotz eb margotz.

This word was afterwards much affected by Molière, as in the "Tartuffe❞ (Act 1, Sc. 1), where he says:—

Quoi! je souffrirai, moi, qu'un cagot de critique

Vienne occuper chez moi un pouvoir tyrannique ? and also as cagoterie and cagotisme in the same play.

Since writing the above, we have received several communications from Mr. W. Hughes, long time resident in Brittany, and well known by his popular legends of that country, published in Ainsworth's Magazine. Mr. Hughes thinks the word Caqueux may be derived from KANIE, distemper, and that they were afflicted with the leprosy, brought into Europe by the crusaders. Mr. Hughes quotes the opinions of Lobineau, who wrote in 1707, of the "Dictionnaire des Sciences," of De la Villemarque, Souvestre, Pitre Chevalier, &c., as to their supposed infection, and the malediction that lay upon them. At the same time, Mr. Hughes states distinctly that the Caqueux are no longer to be met with in any part of Brittany, not even in the Bishopric of St. Malo, which, according to Lobineau, they particularly affected in the time of Francis II., Duke of Brittany (1477). Mr. Hughes further adds that he never witnessed that in the present day any great prejudice existed against rope-makers, the trade which we have seen the Caqueux chiefly followed in Brittany. Mr. Hughes also quotes "Murray's Handbook," to the effect that even in the Pyrenees, the proscribed and outcast race of Cagots seem to exist more in tradition than in reality. Dr. Michel's learned work throws, however, much light upon the actual distribution of the Cagots, even to the number of families in each district of that country.

April.-VOL. LXXXII. NO. CCCXXVIII.

2 G

ADVERTISING FOR A WIFE.

BY DUDLEY COSTELLO, ESQ.

PART II.

MR. GLUE'S SCHEME-LUCY'S COUNTER-PROJECT-CAPTAIN RHATIGAN'S

TRIUMPH.

Of all the gay tribe of annuals which once used to blaze in the booksellers' windows, there are now but few survivors; such as still hold their ground are devoted to purposes rather of utility than amusement, though in some of them the attentive reader may gather the materials for works of far greater entertainment than he was in the habit of deriving from the "Keepsakes," and "Forget-me-nots" of a former day. They consist, it is true, only of long columns of names, but the list is a variously suggestive one, and there are few whose memory may not supply the incidents of romance, even in one little page of these unadorned volumes.

Not to make a further mystery of these Sybilline books, we may as well say at once that we speak of those agreeable periodicals which belong to the family of the Directories, and are devoted to the enumeration of the members of the several professions. Amongst them is one to which we wish at this moment to direct particular attention. It has little external beauty to recommend it, a dull, red calf-skin forming the cover of the casket which contains-in its way-so many gems. It is labelled as briefly as may be "Law List," and this is the only brevity with which the law has any thing to do, except indeed when a client has turned the corner, and is going down hill; then brevity is the soul of the law as it is of wit, and makes incalculably short work of him.

If the reader refers to this tome, he will find amongst a host of attractive names, arrayed like so many loadstones, the firm of "Easum and Glue." It figures in the section reserved for London attorneys (or solicitors as they are now more generally called), and the place of business indicated is Essex Street, Strand.

This street, which, like a mouse-trap, has a narrow neck and a very capacious stomach, abounds with lawyers whose names are written on both lintels of every doorway, so that whether a pedestrian goes up or down the street, the greeting is the same. The offices of Messrs. Easum and Glue were situated on the left hand side, about half way down, and through the open portals passed daily many a wretch who, entering there, left hope behind. In the passage two doors confronted him: on one was a brass plate inscribed "Mr. Glue," intimating that the worthy gentleman so named had taken up his private residence there; on the other was the important announcement conveyed by the word " Offices." Beyond the latter was a dusky room of moderate dimensions, one half of it railed off, and behind the rail at a desk which stretched from one side of the room to the other, were usually seated half a dozen pale-faced clerks, quill-driving to the utmost extent of their abilities, and only interrupting that interesting pursuit to ask each other lively questions, such as whether Bolter's writ had been served yet; whether judgment had been obtained in the case of

Newcome; or whether it was at all likely that Cribbit and Co., the bankrupts, would pass their last examination. Occasionally the attention of one or other of these pallid myrmidons was specially bespoken by a sepulchral voice, which issued from a tube above the desk, requiring his presence upstairs to answer a particular question or receive some private orders. The owner of this voice was Mr. Glue, whose den was on the first floor, and at the sound every tongue was hushed, the individual summoned disappearing like lightning, though rapidly as he performed his exit, it was not too speedy to prevent him from twisting his mouth with a grotesque expression at his brother clerks, as much as to say he wondered what the old file was after now. Passing through a green baize door studded with brass nails, and having an oval-shaped pane of glass set in the upper part, which afforded a full view of the room from the outside, the applicant for Mr. Glue's professional services ascended a private staircase, leading into another room, where in the midst of piles of parchment and ponderous law books, sat two more clerks, to whom were intrusted the more weighty concerns of the office; at the further extremity of this apartment were double doors, and these opened, the sanctuary of Mr. Glue himself was exposed. The heavy bookcases, the faded curtains, the dusty papers, the lumbering furniture, imparted a sombre aspect to the place, which the appearance of Mr. Glue did not tend to diminish, as he sat in his large arm-chair with his back to the light and his gloomy eyes intently fixed on whoever entered. Had the windows undergone only a moderate amount of cleaning, a glimpse of something cheerful might have been obtained even there, for the room looked over that part of the Temple which lies below the Middle Hall, where one or two large trees still waved their spreading branches, green, in spite of the smoky atmosphere in which they were brought forth. But it was no part of Mr. Glue's system to inspire cheerfulness in any who came near him, and for this reason alone, if motives of thrift had no share in it, the dusky panes were never washed save when there came a shower of rain. Grim, and dark, and solitary he sat in his web, weaving the meshes with which he entangled the unwary.

We have made mention of Mr. Glue only, and for this reason; his partner, Mr. Easum, had retired from the firm. The name, however, was still retained, for it was looked upon by Mr. Glue as not the least valuable part of his stock in trade, there being a soft attraction about Easum, which veiled the adhesive properties belonging to his own name and nature. The combination was typical of what befel the fool who got into their respectable clutches; Easum courteously and smilingly lured him into the snare, and Glue kept him there as long as there remained any thing worth sticking to. But Glue was now alone in his glory, and he made the most of it; nor did the amount of his business decline.

One morning in the month of November, or, to speak with a technicality better suited to the subject, a few days after the commencement of Michaelmas term, when the grand battue of the law begins, Mr. Glue was seated in his office absorbed, not in the preparation of briefs, though several claimed his attention, but in the perusal of the Times newspaper. It was not the leading article that interested him, bitter and personal though it was against a high legal functionary whom he hated; it was not the list of insolvents, several of whom had arrived at that condition through his agency, which attracted his attention; it was not on the

obituary that his eyes were then fixed, as they so often were, in the hope of seeing there the names of friends; neither did he scan the arguments of counsel in the report of a case tried only the day before, where he had been a winner; the leading article was a bonne bouche which would keep till after dinner; the insolvents, the dead, and the defeated antagonists were des faits accomplis, which nothing could change. His eager eye was directed to the movements of the living, to a battle which was still to be fought, and greedily did he devour the first half-dozen advertisements that appeared in the second column of the Times.

Having taken them all in at a glance, he slowly examined them, one by one, reading and commenting upon them aloud.

"Next of kin. If the nearest male relative to the late Matthew Thimblewell, Esquire, of Buckram Lodge, in the county of Westmoreland, will communicate with Mr. Joseph Parkes, No. 28, Bury Street, St. James's, he will hear of something GREATLY TO HIS ADVANTAGE. That's simple enough; the nearest male relative to old Thimblewell is his nephew Tom Skirts, a spendthrift, in every body's books, and thanks to the acceptances which I have here," laying his hand on a tin box, "got cheaply enough, God knows,-deepest in mine. He must have his uncle's property one of these days, not yet though, for the old tailor is still alive; but he keeps out of the way, and may manage to do so a thought too long. I must secure him and make my own terms. He has been looking out for his uncle's death, that I know, so this bait will probably catch him. He little thinks who Mr. Joseph Parkes is! Let me see, what is the next? 'Should this meet the eye of any kind-hearted, benevolent lady or gentleman-bah! that's none of mine; my benevolence takes a different shape. What's this? 'Notice. The persons inquiring three or four months ago for a youth named Augustus Brown,' yes, that's right, will obtain positive information as to his whereabout, with all necessary particulars in other respects, on application by letter, post paid, to A. B., Jerusalem Coffee House. Peculiar reasons prevent a personal interview in the first instance.' That was a lucky discovery of mine! I'll make it worth 500l. at least. Parents who can afford it ought to be made to pay well for the recovery of an only child. He might have stayed in the union till he was old enough to go to sea, or have died there for that matter, if I hadn't ferreted him out. 'Bank of England. Unclaimed dividends.' Yes, I turn a pretty penny that way too-a very good per centage. 'To A FRIEND. YOURS has been RECEIVED; give an address, and your friend will write to you as a friend. Write direct and soon.' And a good friend I am to the scoundrel. I could transport you, Mr. Morley, but I won't. The money's more useful to me than justice satisfied is like to prove. He offers half-profits. Um! it's worth two-thirds. We shall see."

Mr. Glue read one or two more advertisements of the same description. From all of them he looked to derive, more or less, of personal advantage; indeed, since he had hit upon this expedient, the second column of the Times had proved a little fortune to him.

A grim smile had puckered the corners of his hard mouth while he read these advertisements; but the moment he had ceased, the expression vanished, and his features wore their accustomed rigidity. He was thinking of something else.

"That scamp, Fitz-Mortimer!" he muttered, "I wish I could manage to catch him! So near as I was, too. Half an hour later, and he would