chosen a religious life; but overruling events bent her fate to a different destination, though, of course, in her credence, not less sacred, because equally sacramental in character. The day and circumstances had varied"Ita res divina mihi fuit; res serias Omnes extollo ex hoc die in alium diem."*

But, "paullo majora," assuming more elevated ground, and aiming at loftier quarry, I remark that, in the concluding paragraph of the note to which I have adverted, it is observed that, as Bavaria is a Catholic country, and Lord Shrewsbury a Catholic peer, "these connexions seem to intimate that some little Popery has crept into this house of Saxe also." These expressions refer to some of the relatives

The play whence I have quoted these lines, the Poenulus, or Carthaginian Boy, of Plautus, has furnished abundant materials of literary and patriotic controversy. We there find the only written remains of the Punic tongue, (which, however, Dr. Arnold, on inadequate grounds, I think, will not admit to be genuine; vol. ii. p. 556), in ten verses of act V. scene 1, which Bochart, Paræus, Petit, and others, assimilate to the Hebrew, but which our Celtic scholars claim as their genuine language. Valancey (Collectanea, vol. ii.) is very ardent in assertion, and elaborate in proof; but, save our Milesian enthusiasts, I cannot discover that he has impressed his conviction on many others. In my early pedestrian rambles, I ascertained that in the Pays des Basque, in Gascony, the idiom of the country, a dialect of the Cantabrian, was assumed to be the purest residue of the Phoenician; and I was assured that the lines in Plautus were perfectly intelligible through its medium. A learned professor of Greek and Hebrew at Toulouse, M. Fl. Lécluse, in his "Manuel de la Langue Basque, 1826, 8vo." states, that the Basque clergy maintained to him, as they had asserted to me, the identity of the two languages, and the easy explanation of Plautus by the living one; but the trial by no means satisfied him on the point. Like Valancey, who, an Englishman, applied himself so intensely to the study of the Irish, this professor, a native of Paris, has not been less successful in acquiring the Basque; but he is far from having imbibed the deep reverence and high estimation of its importance that animated Valancey in the pursuit of the Irish; and which, it appears, from the recent History of the Celtic Language, published by Mr. L. Maclean,

of Prince Albert, whose profession of Popery amply warranted, in the conception of the reviewer, as in the papers and speeches of the day, the sensitiveness of Protestant England as to the creed of the Prince himself. The relatives here alluded to are the King of Saxony, the chief of a distinct branch which had dethroned his own, and now separated from it by an interval of nearly three centuries; a duke of Saxe-Gotha, great uncle of the Prince, but deceased without progeny ; and the children of his father's brother, George Frederick, by the Princess of Kohary. This consanguinity countervails, it is assumed, any favourable conclusion deducible from his, otherwise, high Protestant

F.S.O. this gentleman carries to an equal extent. Adelung, however, who has classified above 3500 dialects spread over the globe, assigns no inferior rank to the Basque, one of the proofs of the antiquity of which he considers its numeral computation by scores, as in the Irish, instead of decimals, though the latter, derived, according to Sir W. Jones, from the Hindoos, but more probably from our collective fingers, would certainly seem the more natural. So it appeared to the early Romans, as we are told by Ovid, (Fast. lib. iii. 122.)

"...Quia tot digiti per quos numerare solemus:

Hic nostris magno tunc in honore fuit."

An erudite Spaniard, the Doctor Joachim Villanueva, published at Dublin, in 1831, an octavo-" Ibernia Phoenicea, seu Phoenicum in Ibernia Incolatus," &c.to show that the local denominations in our national tongue are obviously Phonician. The volume is a retributive offering for the hospitality he experienced amongst us; and chapter xxiii. on the Milesian name is curious; but fancy too often predominates in the work. I could trace little analogy, I recollect, between the Basque and the Irish, colloquially at least; for scarcely a word was intelligible to my ear. Nor does the patois of Toulouse, of which I possess the poetical collection by P. Goudelin, (Amsterdam, 1700, 12mo.) bear the slightest resemblance to the Basque, notwithstanding the local contiguity; but it does, a marked one, to the Provençal, or language of the Troubadours; which, again, varies little from the Italian of the Middle Ages, as the following version of the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, third canto, will verify:

descent, which is considered an absurd answer to the scruples of England, when she asked for a declaration of the faith of the future consort of her Queen-scruples still powerful and respected, as we see by the new Regency Bill.

The

On these apprehensions, however, and their declared grounds, I must first observe, that they derive no confirmation from the alleged alliance of the Prince of Saxe-Altenberg, for, as I have shown, the event never occurred; and, as to the prince's sister, the Queen of Bavaria, she has not, I am assured, changed her faith, nor ever been molested in the profession of it, no more than the Arch-duchess Charles of Austria, the Duchess of Orleans, or other Protestant princesses married in Catholic countries. only circumstance that can, with any semblance of probability or shadow of a reason, be reflectively brought to bear on Prince Albert, is, the religion of his cousins, the King consort of Portugal, and the Duchess of Nemours, with their brother, the expectant King consort of Spain; but though his eminently and exclusively Protestant succession and education may not be accepted as a guarantee or evidence of his personal sentiments, they surely are entitled to equally inferential weight, as the fact constructively argued to his prejudice, of the Popery of some of his kindred; and, if so, the preponderance will be altogether in favour of his Protestantism. In truth, however, the young prince should only be judged by his own avowed doctrine, of which there can exist no doubt.

To meet, and still further counteract, the scruples said to be entertained on this occasion by Protestant England, I will show, and can have little difficulty in demonstrating, that, at a juncture which would have far better justified this jealousy of Popish kindred, it

Dante.

"Per me si va ne la città dolente;

Per me si va ne l'eterno dolore; Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustitia mosse 'I mio alto fattore; Fecemi la divina potestate,

La somma sapientia e 'l primo amore."

See" Choix des Poésies Originales des Troubadours, par M. Raynouard, 1822," (tome vi.) A similar comparison of some

was wholly powerless on the English mind. Whatever may be the alarm now felt, or proclaimed from conviction or interest, of the advance of Catholicism, it will hardly be pronounced equally founded in cause as when the Act of Settlement was passed in 1702. No one, with the slightest tincture, "primis labris," of our history, will attempt an assimilation of the danger at these periods; and yet, that solemn Act, the special purpose of which was to guard the throne against the contamination of Popery, fixed the inheritance of the crown, not only on a comparatively remote claimant, but one far more closely and extensively related in blood to Papists than our young Prince.

The Princess Sophia, thus selected to found a new dynasty as the nearest Protestant successor to the Stuarts, when the existing descendants of James 1. numbered fifty-four, I need scarcely state, was grand-daughter to our James the First; but it may not be so generally known, that this preferred lady had a brother, a sister, a son, and a niece, with this niece's children, all Papists! Married in 1658 to Ernest-Augustus, duke, and subsequently created, elector of Hanover, she had four brothers and two sisters. The eldest of the former, Charles Louis, succeeded his father in the Palatinate; and the two next, Rupert and Maurice, signalized their valour, if not their skill, in our great civil war under their uncle Charles, as may be seen in Clarendon. But the fourth, Edward, became a Catholic, and withdrew to France, where he married Anne de Gonzague, so highly appreciated by Madame de Motteville and the Cardinal de Retz, daughter of Charles, penultimate duke of Nevers of that family, in 1645. These three brothers left no legitimate issue. Of her two elder sisters, Louisa Hollan

Troubadores.

Per me si va en la ciutat dolent;

Per me si va en l'eternel dolor ; Per me si va tras la perduta gent. Justizia moguet el mieu alt fachor; Fez me la divina potestat,

La somma sapienza e 'l prim' amor. translated lines from Calderon would not be uninteresting, had I not already too far transgressed in my devious course.

dina, and Henrietta Maria, the latter was the wife of Sigismund Racoczi, Prince of Transylvania, who died in 1652; and the former not only embraced the Catholic religion, but took the veil, and died at Maubuisson in France, at an advanced age, in 1709, in odour of sanctity, according to the records of the convent, so deep was the impression of her Catholic piety. Our royal genealogist, Sandford, (Genealogical History, &c. 1707, p. 535,) represents this princess as one of the most learned ladies in Europe. (See Blackstone, book i. ch. 3.) Again, of Sophia's own seven sons, the third, Maximilian, engaged in the Venetian service, and declared himself a Catholic, in which persuasion he'died in 1702, just as the Act of Settlement had passed. And of the two children, the offspring of her brother the Elector Palatine's marriage with Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel, the daughter, ElizabethCharlotte, became the wife of Philip of Orleans, the ancestor of the present King of the French, in 1671, having succeeded our accomplished Henrietta-Anne, in that depraved man's conjugal bed.

If then, as maintained in the article referred to, the religion of Prince Albert's cousins be a legitimate source of apprehension or scruple as to his own, how infinitely less sensitive the past generation of Protestant England must have been to a far greater peril than the present!* And if, independently of the more numerous as well as much closer ties of the Brunswick branch, we institute a comparison between the individuals, will George

With this opinion of our Correspondent we by no means agree. The case was a very different one. In 1702 the Legislature violated even the right of hereditary succession, established for centuries, rather than subject the country to the risk of Roman subjugation; and can it be said to detract from this bold and decisive measure, that it did not disregard the hereditary principle altogether, and set up the Crown of Great Britain to the best bidder? But, in a matrimonial alliance, the question is wholly different. There is then a freedom of choice among the several Protestant houses who possess younger branches suitable in point of age and character, and room for the exercise of all the caution that prudence and foresight can suggest.-EDIT.

the First support a favourable parallel with our young Prince? Let the former's conduct to his wife, as we are instructed by Walpole and others, as well as his open maintenance of two German mistresses, (one the mother of Lady Chesterfield,) answer the question. Or will the profligate Regent of France, † with his daughter, the abandoned Duchess of Berry, be matched with the husband of the Queen of Portugal, and the spouse of the Duke of Nemours? Nor must

†The enormity of this prince's immoralities fully justified the epitaph proposed for his mother-" Ci git l'oisiveté,"-Here lieth idleness,-meant to convey its proverbial definition as the parent of every vice. Louis Philippe, his descendant, has little cause, truly, to boast of his progenitors in general. The founder of his race, Philip, only brother of Louis XIV., even if we acquit him, as, I think, we should, of the alleged murder of his first wife, our interesting HenriettaAnne, whose death is so impressively pourtrayed by Bossuet, yet stands arraigned of ineffable profligacy. He was father of the Regent, whose son Louis forms an honourable exception to this dissolute series of generations; for he was eminent. ly learned, pious, and beneficent. He died in 1752, leaving a son, Louis Phi lippe, the stupid husband of the most licentious of women, so proclaimed, in fact, by her son, Egalité, (Louis' Philippe Joseph,) himself the most debased of men, the emblem of princely degradation. But the present King of the French has ever been distinguished for the exemplary deportment of his private life; nor, surely, has his conduct on the throne verified the prognostic or confirmed the judg ment of his early instructress, Madame de Genlis, which denied him the attri butes, and pronounced him disqualified competently to fulfil the duties of the royal station. In a letter dated from Altona, the 18th of February 1796, on hearing that there was even then question of making him King, she boldly addressed him, resident at that period in the United States, thus-" Vous prétendre à la royauté! devenir usurpateur !...... En vous plaçant sur le trône, vous n'y porteriez jamais que le plus odieux de tous les titres.... vous n'avez ni les titres ni les qualités nécessaires dans ce rang.... Votre institutrice doit mieux qu'un autre connoître votre caractère, et j'ose répondre que vous avez horreur des projets qu'on vous attribue." The lady lived, however, to see her pupil on that throne which she

we overlook Sophia's eldest brother, George's uncle, Charles Louis, who during the life of his legitimate and unoffending consort, Charlotte, daughter of William V. Landgrave of HesseCassel, discarded her, and married the daughter of the Baron de Dagenfeld, by whom he had thirteen children, to whom he gave the title of Rangraves. By his lawful wife he had, in addition to the Duchess of Orleans, Charles, his successor in the Electorate, a weak prince, who died childless. For this double and concurrent marriage, there existed, indeed, high authority, and a memorable precedent, in Philip of Hesse-Cassel, called the Magnanimous! his wife's ancestor, who had been allowed this plurality under singular pretences, by the heads of the Reformation, in 1540. The document is still apparent, subscribed by Luther, Bucer, Melancthon, &c. and not impotently wielded, we may believe, as a weapon of aggression, in the terrible grasp of Bossuet, who first produced it to the astonished world, after above a century of suppression. Mr. Hallam, it is fair to add, (Constitutional History, chap. ii.) maintains that a similar indulgence had been offered to Henry VIII. by Clement VII. in September 1530, in order to prevent the threatened schism, as a mezzotermine, which, indeed, had already been recommended

so energetically deprecated for him, and I could discern the royal carriages at her funeral.*

Napoleon, on the other hand, maintained that the dispossession of a reigning monarch, and transference of his crown to a near relation, as occurred in 1830 between Charles X and Louis Philippe, was by far more pregnant with danger to sovereigns than the elevation to it of an arising military chief, or ordinary subject, like himself "L'example," said he, as if in prevision of the event, " que donnerait le duc d'Orleans peut se renouveller chaque jour. Il n'est pas de souverains qui n'ait à quelques pas de lui, dans

by Luther and Melancthon, rather than sanction the repudiation of so virtuous a wife as Catharine. But, relative to Clement's alleged and accommodating compromise, see Lin. gard. (Henry VIII. ch. iii.)

Catharine and Anne died within a few months of each other. The one has continued unassailed even by the breath of slander. Death procured her justice, and established her rights, as Camoens says of the unhappy Ignes de Castro

"O caso triste, e digno da memoria:
Que do sepulchro os homens desenterra,
Aconteceo da misera, e mesquinha,
Que despois de ser morta foi Rainha! "

Os Lusiadas, Canto iii. 118. The other, (Anne,) in my conviction, innocent of the imputed criminality of her married life, (though the accusing evidence is quite as strong as that on which Mary Stuart is generally condemned,) assuredly died with a conscious untruth in her mouth, when, at the moment of execution, she emphatically declared of Henry"that a gentler and more merciful prince was there never; and to me he was always a good, a gentle, and merciful lord." Nothing could be more opposed to the fact, or to her own persuasion, nor was it justified by her apprehensions for Elizabeth. did not and could not influence the tyrant's feelings, which, though affect

It

son propre palais, des cousins, des neveux, des freres, quelques parens propres à imiter facilement celui qui une fois les aurait remplacés."-(Las Cases, tome ii. p. 20.) "The crown was vacant, observed the imperial orator, Fontanes, on the election of Buonaparte in 1804, and, by right, was conferred on the most worthy."-However obtained, never assuredly has any election united an equal number of favourable suffrages, exceeding three millions and a half, while the adverse votes, of which that of Carnot attracted most attention, only amounted to 2569.

600

ed even to tears for the irreproachable Catharine, were moved to worse than the display of indifference on this sacrifice of the victim, alternately, of his love and hate-the unfortunate Anne. He espoused her successor the ensuing day; and her fate or conduct never elicited from her daughter a word of reproof, or attempt at vindication, we are assured.

The similarity of their final doom may excuse, as it suggests, a brief advertence to another royal victim, not, indeed, of a husband's altered affections, but of the versatility of popular favour.-Marie-Antoinette, the idol, once, of Parisian enthusiasm, in Burke's recollection and delineation, is thus mentioned in the prison registry, and characterised in the Moniteur, after her execution: "La nommée MarieAntoinette, dite Lorraine d'Autriche, veuve de Louis Capet, fut remise à l'exécuteur des jugemens criminels, et conduite à la Place de la Révolution pour y subir la peine de mort.... chargée des imprécations de ceux dont elle avait consommé la ruine. Son nom sera à jamais en horreur!" And the Moniteur, it must be recollected, has been the Protean depository of the acts and sentiments of each succeeding government from the earliest days of the Revolution, though originally entitled "Le Logographe," when I remember it in the hands of Maret, afterwards Duc de Bassano. I also find that the address to Female Republicans, in the Feuille du Salut Public, (Lord Brougham's protégé) contains a similar reference to the Queen.*

The same Moniteur-indeed the

* The distinction drawn by Napoleon between the condemnation of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. is of deep thought and powerful expression-"Quoique ce prince ne méritât pas son malheur, telle est la condition des rois. Leur vie appartient à tout le monde. Un assasinat, une conspiration, un coup de canontelles sont leurs chances: César et Henri IV. ont été assasinés. L'Alexandre des Grecs l'eût été s'il eût vécu plus long

temps; mais une femme, une princesse étrangère, le plus sacré des ôtages, il y a là plus que parricide !" This was in 1810, when his Council of State were discussing the Emperor's marriage with Marie

Louise.

[Dec.

same number-in allusion to the accomplished Madame Roland, thus expresses the feelings of the ruling power on her death-"La femme Roland, bel esprit....fut un monstre sous tous les rapports." (19 Nov. 1793.) Often have I visited the room where this remarkable woman was incarcerated in the gloomy prison of Ste Pélagie, and where she composed the interesting recital of the innocence of her youth, as well as the lamentable irreligion of her maturer years, which she made but too apparent in the acts and laws of her husband's administration-ostensibly his work, but, in reality, the emanation and digestion of her active spirit. And yet, even Machiavelli, in whom she was well read, and who, if not the avowed, was certainly the practical authority of that era, emphatically declares-"Everamente mai non fu alcuno ordinatore di leggi straordinaire," (equivalent here to revolutionary,) "che non ricoresse a Dio." (Discorsi sopra Tito-Livio, i.) The especial object of the most rancorous hatred of Robespierre, her death, preceded only ten days before (31 October 1793) by the holocaust execution of her friends, the Girondins, seemed to sharpen the tyrant's sanguinary appetite, which subsequently luxuriated in those wholesale immolations that present so fearful a spectacle, and so impressive a lesson of unchained revolutionary fanaticism—

"Utque fera tigres nunquam posuêre fu

rorem ;

Sic.... nullus semel ore receptus Pollutas patitur sanguis mansuescere fauces."

Lucan. Phars. i. 328-31.

The deeply-expressed disappointment of this gifted lady in her cherished hopes and anticipated results of the Revolution-"O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"-naturally recalls to our historical or classical remembrance, the similar exclamation attributed to Brutus of his frustrated confidence in virtue, which he des

pondingly characterised as "an empty

name, the mere slave of fortune." But, of the dying words of this "last of the Romans," after his defeat at Philippi, all that can be authenticated is a line, the 332 of the Medea of Euri