coming hither, for I have not wherewithal to pay your services. I am poor, very poor.' "Oh, say not so,' exclaimed my grandmother, starting from the edge of the bed, where she had hitherto been seated, in silence, watching the scene; say not so,' she continued, advancing into the light, and extending her arms with prophetic effect; say not you are poor, young man, you are rich in all that makes life of value-in all that makes riches themselves valueless. You are rich in youth, in hope, in talent. And, oh, more than this, you are rich beyond all things in the affection of a young and generous heart, whose love could not be bought, and is a pearl beyond all price.' She paused for a moment, and added, though while she gazed steadfastly into his face; it is when you shall have outlived all theseit is when you shall have replaced all the fresh feelings of your youth, all the fond trusting of your love, ay, though it be with wealth, and fame, and honour, it is then that you shall find that you are poor indeed!' "The youth bowed his head, as if those words had reached his very soul, and, taking the withered hand of my dear grandmother within his own, he pressed it to his lips, as he said, in a faint and trembling voice; Thus Paquerette herself will sometimes speak. I am, indeed, a fool to reject all that life has yet to offer. I once had these visions too. But, see you, it is the fever which has thus unmanned me, and drawn as it were a dark shade betwixt me and the dreams of glory in which but a short time since I would so love to indulge. But now they are all over, and have given place to disappointment and distrust; and I sometimes think that I were better-far better in my grave!' "As he concluded, his head sank upon his bosom, and the tears trickled slowly down his face, while his whole frame trembled with such violence from head to foot that I grew terrified, but granny, taking him gently by the arm, led him to the bed, while I hurried to fetch the doctor according to her bidding. "It was near midnight when I returned. I found my grandmother much alarmed, for the fever was at its height, and Louis in that state of delirium so frightful to the beholder. Yet, in the midst of it, the name of Paquerette was for ever on his tongue, and now and then snatches of the hymn to the Virgin, which I had heard the lovers sing together, would burst from his parched lips and vibrate like a funeral dirge through the chamber. The doctor arrived soon after I returned. He was a kind and generous young man, himself at that time a poor student struggling against poverty, and if he has since risen to honour and riches, and his name has grown familiar to all, none should envy him who do not feel the courage to strive as he has striven, and to undergo what he has undergone. He, too, had already felt the world's bitterness and the world's scorn, and the whole of that long night did he sit by the bedside of that raving sufferer, listening with tender interest to the story of Paquerette. "The unceasing care and attention of this good young man, aided by the youth and strong constitution of Louis, soon succeeded in getting the better of the fever, but it was when convalescence, with all its train of nervous terrors and of wayward fancies came on, that the horror of his position was felt the most. My grandmother returned home; 1, myself, had to make up for lost time, and for unforeseen expenses; the doctor returned again with redoubled ardour to his profession; and, once more, Louis was left to solitude and poverty. He could not even live from day to day, as he hitherto had done, upon the hope of a few moments' interview with Paquerette, for it would have been madness to have attempted a renewal of his aerial visits; besides which, the doctor had expressly forbidden the risking of any violent emotion, so that a kind message, a few words of love, or a flower, conveyed by me each morning, were all that the poor invalid could expect for some time to come. The spirit of the youth gave way, as is often the case after this kind of nervous fever produced by mental agitation, and left him a prey to a dark and silent melancholy. He would still endeavour to work at his easel, and I would sometimes run all over Paris in my endeavours to find a buyer for his productions, but, whether it was that his talent had decreased, or that his imagination had grown feeble, or, perhaps, that the cloven foot of the demon, which is ever found to press more heavily upon the neck of him who falls and seeks to rise again, weighed with greater force upon his faculties; I know not the reason, but I met with but slight success, and he was often compelled to refuse himself what was absolutely necessary to his cure. Our resources were, by this time, all exhausted. Even the blue pigeon, sole memento of Paquerette, was sold, in spite of his grief on parting with it. I, myself, disposed of it for half its cost, to a bird-fancier on the Quai de la Megisserie. I dared not tell all this to Paquerette, although, at times, I felt some embarrassment when she asked me for minute details concerning Louis, and about his health and renewed prospects of glory and of happiness. "At length my visits to the chamber of the poor young man grew every day more rare, for, to speak truly, I grew at last unwilling to go, for I could no longer afford any further relief than a few kind words of encouragement and hope, with such little pecuniary aid as could be spared from my sick grandmother, who was taken ill about this time with the malady whereof she soon after died." ON RECEIVING A PRESENT OF TRINITY AUDIT ALE. BY C. V. LE GRICE. ONE drop I seek not from the sparkling spring Of Trinity, full in my cup is poured The student's nook, chamber of anxious fears ;- April.-VOL. LXXXII. NO. CCCXXVIII. 21 REVOLUTIONARY PARIS. So much is said upon the excitement of a successful revolt, of intellectual and political progress, that many unthinking minds are carried away with the idea that something new, something that will insure greater happiness and greater prosperity to all classes of society has really been discovered. Yet never was the turbulent and democratic capital of France more signally mistaken, than when it holds itself forth, through the organ of its new republic-the National-as being at the head of either intellectual or political civilisation. The elective franchise of the Parisians dates from the earliest period of their monarchy. At the time when Clovis first fixed his residence in Lutetia, the Franks assembled every year on the Champ de Mars to make laws, or name their king-still, notwithstanding numberless insurrections and several revolutions, France did not possess, up to the Revolution of 1848, nor will it possess now, so free and constitutional a government as that of Great Britain. The extreme to which the same country has now gone in adopting universal suffrage, will, by bringing in as representatives of the people, the uneducated and the prejudiced, tend inevitably to lower the intellect of its metropolis. And the subsidizing of nine hundred, probably for the most part ignorant senators, wili only place a large and incommodious household in the pay and at the bidding of a small executive government. It is impossible, however, to understand in what this boasted intellect and civilisation consists, and where this long and proudly anticipated progress ("a progress," it is triumphantly said, "which would have advanced with the step of a man in each century, with the systems of yesterday; but which will proceed with the step of a giant in every year of the system of to-day") is to be sought for, without tracing back the movements of the intellectual and revolutionary mind of Paris from its earliest development; and more especially from the time that modern philosophies got mixed up with political ideas and tendencies. Such cannot be, at the present moment, either an uninteresting or an unfruitful task. It will lead to a better appreciation of the actual political condition of Paris, and of its future political prospects, than any consideration of the hastily got up proclamations of a Provisional Government, or the daily accidents produced by the collision of parties and factions. It is the history of the national mind developed in its literary, political, and revolutionary aspects. The first titular kings of France were, it is well known, shut up by their mayors, after the Oriental system, in their own palaces, till the latter became strong enough themselves to assume the purple. But even then, the first of the regal mayors-Pepin le Bref-referred all matters of importance to those national assemblies, which held that the law is made by the consent of the people, only to be promulgated by the king. But Pepin introduced an element of subordination into these national assemblies, by appointing the clergy as a distinct political order. Charlemagne introduced schools into France, and, with the assistance of an English monk, the first literary institutions were founded in Paris. By the time of Louis le Débonnaire, the clergy had already attained greater power than royalty, and the alternate attempts to throw off the growing abuse, and an abject submission to its will, entailed a succession of conflicts which made one long and bitter struggle of the imperial reign. At this period the most stupid barbarism corrupted the free course of justice. It was thought that God would rather perform a miracle, than allow an innocent person to suffer to be cleared of an accusation, it was necessary to plunge the arm into boiling water, or to grasp a red-hot iron. At other times crimes and differences were arranged by duel. Men of law, and the clergy even, were obliged to have their champions. The burning of Paris by the Danes, like its temporary subjection by the Normans and the English, are events in its history as a city, which have little or no connexion with the history of its people, and of the progress of the Parisian mind and intellect; to which, matters attach themselves of far greater importance to the world at large, and to the progress of civilisation, than the temporary triumphs of princes or the ever-varying fortunes of mere military enterprises. The Parisians may be said to have first signalised that personal bravery which has since so often characterised their history, when under the Count Odon, or Eudes, they so gallantly defended their city against the Normans for two long years. In the time of Louis le Débonnaire, the bishops had dethroned and nominated kings; in the time of Charles the Simple, of Louis IV., or Lothaire, and of Louis V., it was the turn for the feudal barons to exercise the same privilege of a power that had grown up to be superior to that of the monarchy itself. At length feudalism assumed itself a monarchical form, when the Counts of Paris, having seized upon the richest abbeys, and for a long time nominated the kings, allowed Hughes Capet to be proclaimed by his friends and vassals. The people of Paris were now serfs. Their condition was little better than that of cattle. A serf could be beaten, or even killed, with impunity. The clergy, at war with the barons, despoiled the people who were called vilains in the country, bourgeois in the towns and boroughs; castles and abbeys were alike independent principalities and fortresses. But the right of carrying arms was the exclusive privilege of the barons. A noble on horseback, covered with his iron armour, made a whole population tremble. The church alone succeeded for a time in obtaining what was called la paix de Dieu. It, was, however but a temporary relief to this frightful anarchy of the sword, that could not even be tempered by anathemas. But apart from this social point of view of feudalism, which failed in founding either legal order or political guarantees, it still remained a system which was indispensable to give a new commencement in Europe to a society so utterly dissolved by barbarism, as to be incapable of a more regular or extended form. The third feudal King, Henry I., solemnly proclaimed the universal sovereignty of the pope, an amount of submissiveness to the church, which William the Conqueror, when he introduced the feudal system into England had the courage to resist. There can be no doubt but that the church has aided from the earliest times in giving an extension and variety to the development of the human mind which it had never attained previously. In the East, intellectual progress was altogether religious; in the Greek society it was almost exclusively human. In the modern world again, the religious spirit has mingled with all things, without excluding any. Human sentiments and interests hold a material place in our literatures, and yet the religious character of man, that portion of his existence which is directed to another world, appears at every step therein; insomuch that the two great sources of the development of man, humanity and religion, have flowed abundantly and at the same time; so that in spite of all the evil and all the abuses mixed up with it in an intellectual point of view, the church has always exercised the most beneficial influence on the progress of the human mind. In a political point of view, M. Guizot in his "History of Civilisation" considers the matter to be different. In that which affects the relations of governments with subjects, of power with liberty, that able writer does not believe that upon the whole that the influence of the church has been beneficial. He says the church has always come forward as the interpreter, and defender of two systems, the theocratical and the imperial, that is to say, of despotism; sometimes under a religious form, sometimes under a civil. But the abuses of the system are here placed in the position of the thing itself. It is impossible but that that system which by softening feelings and manners, by denying and suppressing a great number of barbarous practices, contributed so powerfully to the amelioration of the social state, must have also benefited the political condition of the people. Every thing in human affairs tends to abuse, and abuse leads to resistance and to revolution. Theocracy is an abuse of the avocation of the priesthood; but is a whole people without abuses? The error of modern Parisian dialectics is, that they expose so ably, the corruptions and abuses of parties, factions, and institutions; and yet they seem to think it impossible that a nation can unitedly commit an error. pure democracy appears to them in the light of an illumination of mind and intellect of almost heavenly purity, and a pinnacle in the progress of political societies. The opening made for abuses of all kinds, and consequently the chances of falling back into a state of barbarity, are instead of that, as infinitely multiplied, as the number of opinions exceed in such a state, the conflicting sentiment that guided parties under the previously existing institutions. A The Crusades relieved Europe to a great extent of feudalism, but the church gained in temporal power by the same events; and royalty, which also profited by the same movement, was more than ever shackled by an ambitious and turbulent theocracy. Louis VI., who could not avoid being excommunicated by the Bishop of Paris, had still sufficient constitutional spirit to establish little democracies of people independent of their feudal lords, under certain conditions, and which were called communes, a political distinction which has been handed down to this present day. Feudal barons began also at the same time to barter liberty to their serfs for money; in other places the people themselves rose up against the barons and established their own communes. At this time, however, men, driven to extremities by the pride and the excesses of the clergy, began to preach reform. The University of Paris had attained a celebrity at that time unrivalled in the world. Three thousand students listened in the open air to the lessons of the dialectician |