II. The History of an Unknown Lady, who came from III. The History of my Grandmother, who was a Lady of consequence in the West Country IV. My Grandmother dies, and I am left alone, with- V. I am barbarously abused by those who have charge VI. The History of my Grandfather, who was so long kept a Prisoner in one of the King's Castles Cette to Carcassonne 216 153 160 165 297 309 441 XXXIII. Upwards and downwards to an End 25 XXXIV. The Agony of Florence Armytage: Stage the last. 29 TEMPLE BAR. DECEMBER 1861. The Seven Sons of Mammon. A STORY. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. CHAPTER XXXII. TIME WORKS WONDERS. L'AFFAIRE de la Rue des Oursins? The particulars of that affair at Finchley? The mystery of the Man with the Iron Mask? The Gowrie conspiracy? The Spanish marriages? Don Pacifico's wrongs? The Crimean war? Fauntleroy's bankruptcy? Mrs. Potiphar's divorce case? Mrs. Faggot's diamonds? The gold-dust robbery? Mr. Toadycram's Peerage? The great literary quarrel between Mr. Sphoon and Doctor Bunglecrumpus? Why Miss Cygnet left the stage; and how Jack Elbowsout manages to give dinner-parties? Signor Cobra di Capello's hold on my Lord Fitzgypesland; and Signora Mercandotti's relationship to the Bishop of Bosfursus-she is said to be his niece; friendly George Gafferer's daily dinner, and clean shirt even? Does every body know all about those enigmas? Have those mysteries been quite solved? Has the dernier mot been spoken? and does nothing more remain to be told in connexion with those histories? The noble prayer of the historian Niebuhr was, to live until he could bring his Roman record down to the period where Gibbon began. He was not spared to accomplish a tithe of his task; and there is a dark yawning gulf between the end of exploded Roman fable and the beginning of Roman fact. Was Mr. Gibbon quite certain about his facts, either? Truly, he quotes Ammianus and Zosimus, and the Abbé de la Bléterie, and a thousand others; but might not Ammianus and Zosimus, and the Abbé de la Bléterie, with their thousand brethren, have lied sometimes? My greatgrandson may be fortunate enough to receive a somewhat better education than his ancestor. He may turn historian, and write the VOL. IV. B chronicle of the last Tuscan revolution, taking the Marquis of Normanby and Sir George Bowyer as guides for his facts. Your greatgrandson may condescend to undertake a similar task, adopting the state-papers of Baron Ricasoli as his authorities. I don't think the two historians will agree very closely. How, too, is M. Thiers' biography of Napoleon I. in the Consulate and the Empire to be reconciled with our old friend the Père Loriquet's statement, that Louis XVIII. returned to his dominions in 1815, on the "resignation" of the "Marquis de Bonaparte," who, during fifteen years, had governed France for him? And the panegyrics of MM. Méry and Belmontet upon the present order of things? How will they tally with M. Hugo's opuscule, Napoleon the Little? And the Penny Trumpet's eulogy on my last epic, as compared with the Sixpenny Slaughterhouse's demolition of the same? Will the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, ever come out, I wonder? Did Sir Hector Haynaw really beat his wife, or did Lady Haynaw (she was a Miss Brownrigge) beat him? There are people who are ready to take an affidavit that they have seen the letters which passed between Mrs. Aholibah and Captain Lawless, containing, they say, a clear confession of her guilt; there are others who maintain that she was the most injured of women, and that all her troubles were due to the machinations of that wicked Miss Blackadder. I read the other day, in a paper called the Spiritual Magazine, that I had been incognito to a spirit-rapping medium, and expressed myself much surprised and edified by what I saw and heard. The whole narrative-beyond the fact of my having once paid half-a-crown to a very clumsy Witch of Endor in Red Lion Street, Holborn, who was about as successful in raising the ghost of Samuel as though she had tried to evoke the spirit of Samuel Hall-was, from beginning to end, a tissue of abominable lies; and yet I dare say there are people who believe in the Spiritual Magazine, and that my conversion to rappology has been quoted by many devout rapparees. If I am ever unlucky enough to be hanged, I doubt not but that the Seven-Dials Plutarch who compiles my biography will add a belief in spirit-rapping to the catalogue of my crimes. It is all very well to put together a neat collection of statements, and weave an ingenious theory round them, and found a variety of more or less sage comments upon them; but is this, after all, history? I am afraid not; and that my account of the transactions entered into by Mammon and his several Sons, their friends and acquaintances, may be proved, in the main, to be as unreliable—say, as Herodotus, or as Guicciardini, or as Roger of Wendover. You see that I have an implicit belief in the reality of my story and of my characters. There is not an incident or a personage in these pages that is wholly imaginary, any more than in a dream there is a single thing, however wild and improbable it may appear, but has formed part, at some time or another, of the action of our lives; only in this tale, as in a vision of the night, coherence may be to some extent absent, and time and place slightly confused, and the unities violated, and the round people put sometimes into the square holes, or vice |