powers, they're a couple of angels-never saw two lovelier girls in all my life."

"Ain't they!" exclaimed Charles, in ectasy.

“Let us drink their healths," rejoined Mr. Rocket, applying his thumb to the cork of a bottle of forty shilling champagne, charged at the usual inn rate of seven guineas a-dozen; "let us drink their healths," repeated he, as the cork bounded against the ceiling, and the hissing, fizzing, ginger-pop-looking stuff came foaming down the bottle-neck.

Having helped himself to a bumper of froth and fixed air, he handed the bottle to Charles, who got a better potation to his share.

Champagne is doubtless the real balm of Gilead. It soothes and exhilarates, and opens, and expands the heart of the closest and most morose. It performs far greater wonders than Holloway's pills, or Leaming's essence. A party can hardly be said to begin before the champague makes a start. As to one 66 going off well," as it is called, without champagne, that we consider is an utter impossibility.

But then, to make it available it should be iced, and poured into getat-able glasses. Those crane-necked needle-case looking things they generally have at inns, and too often at private houses, only tantalise the palate, and make a man look as if he was taking pills instead of enjoying an exhilarating beverage.

The first glass, which like the first of every thing, is most enjoyable, and most looked for, is generally a flash in the pan, a mere glass of froth. The second, by dint of dribbling down the side, may be better, but it is generally the third ere it gets settled to any thing like steadiness. This is the usual course where two parties are concerned in the destruction of a bottle, but where there is a party, and bottle succeeds bottle in a rapid order, one never gets a "good swig," or feels any better for what one gets.

Every body gives champagne now-a-days of some sort or another, and yet how few seem to think it necessary to do more than just give it. People will spend a couple of guineas in wine, and yet grudge, or never think, of the couple of shillings' worth of ice that makes it drinkable. Very moderate champagne ices into very passable wine. There isn't one servant in twenty (in middle life, at least), with any idea about icing wine. If they do venture to take out the cork on putting it into the ice, they are terrified on seeing all the worthless froth pouring down the neck, and stick the cork in as fast as ever they can, whereas, if they would let it exhaust itself, and then put in the cork, the wine would ice in half the time, and the first glass would be as good as the last. But the fact is, at parties' "blows out," as they are sometimes called, there is so much hurry and confusion, so much to do that the servants are not accustomed to do, and either so few of them to do all there is, or so many, that they do nothing but get in each other's way, that iceing the wine is generally forgot, or done in such a careless way that the wine is very little the better for it. Then "Chaw" gets the bottle bodily in his hand and warming it about the room, squirting it in people's eyes, dribbling it over their coats, and, perhaps, knocking old ladies' turbans and trimmings off as they throw back their hands to get at the thimble-full of wine that lurks in the stalk of the glass.

goes

Then see the same parties when they are not over busy, or in winter with ice to be had for nothing, and what a freezing they give it! They take their revenge. They absolutely perish and annihilate any little body

the poor feeble stuff may have, and guests are obliged to sit with their glasses in their hands to thaw the wine. There should be a public icer appointed in all corporate and dinner-party giving towns. He would be of far more use than many of their M. P.'s.

But to our story. Each succeeding glass, rubbish though it was, raised the spirits and banished the caution of our young friend Charles, who began to talk and chatter in the presence of De la Tour and the waiters, as freely as he would in their absence. He talked of blue eyes and brown hair, and fair forms, and pearly teeth, and sweet voices, speak ing in the strict spirit of impartiality in the plural number.

At length having exhausted the panegyrics and the cheese, Mr. Rocket drew him with the withdrawal of the cloth to closer quarters.

"Our esteemed father-in-law will be deuced rich, I should think," observed he, sotto voce, pouring himself a bumper of rough much doctored claret out of a once smart jug, from which the plating was beginning to disappear, and passing the jug on to his guest.

"I-I—I— don't know, that's to say I—I—I never heard.”

66

Oh, but you should make it your business to inquire," replied Mr. Rocket. "These men in trade are not always so rich as they appear, up one day, down another; you should make him enter into full particulars-tell you all about himself, where he has his tin, what his yearly profits are."

"I-I-I-darn't," replied Charles, "he'd-he'd-he'd."

66

Horsewhip you, perhaps," interposed Mr. Rocket.

"No; I-I-I don't s'ppose that exactly, but he-he-he-that's to say she-she-she would be very an-an-angry."

"Oh, but you should do it gingerly, lead him on by degrees, talk to him about business, ask his opinion of commercial matters, where it would be safe to invest money, and so on."

"But-but-but I haven't any to-to-to-invest," interposed

Charles.

"Never mind that," replied Mr. Rocket, again resorting to the claret jug, and passing it on to Charles. "He's not supposed to know any more your affairs than you are of his."

of

"But Mrs. Do-Do-Doey does," retorted Charles.

"So much the better," rejoined Mr. Rocket, again appealing to the jug; "so much the better," repeated he, passing it back to his guest. "She'll be the very woman for you. Confide in her and she'll tell you

all about her husband's affairs."

Charles shuddered at the thoughts of encountering the old lady again. "I see you are not up to the thing," continued his friend, encouragingly. "Let me manage for you, and I'll bring you safe through; you mus'n't be mealey mouthed. Go at the old girl as a matter of course, praise her daughter, say what a fortunate man he will be that gets her, regret that your fortune does not allow you to aspire to her."

"But I-I-I-have aspired!" exclaimed Charles.

"You have!" retorted his friend, in astonishment, "why they told me you were a mere dangler!"

66

"I-I-I don't know what, what, what they told you," rejoined he; "but-but-but-I'm engaged to Maria, that's to say Miss Do-Do

Dooey."

"The Devil you are!" exclaimed Mr. Rocket, setting down his glass with a thump that snapped it short off by the stalk.

CHATEAUBRIAND.

THE world of letters has experienced, in the death of the Viscount de Chateaubriand, a loss that had been for some time foreseen, but which is not for that the less keenly felt. This distinguished author and statesman died at Paris on the 5th of July. To the honour of France, people of all parties, and of all political factions united to do honour to the memory of their illustrious countryman. The life and adventures of the Viscount de Chateaubriand have filled so large a space in the politics, the literature, and the society of France during the first thirty years of the present century, and his fame has been perpetuated by so much of romantic interest, or conventional adulation, throughout the period immediately preceding our own time, that although the reflection of his past greatness alone remained to light up his declining years, his death was an event of sufficient interest to divert attention from the living occurrences of an age not less agitated than that in which it was his lot to have attained distinction and to have risen to eminence.

M. de Chateaubriand was born in the year 1769, like so many others of the men who were destined to play a prominent part in the gigantic labours of the last generation. Amongst the ample list of his immediate contemporaries, we find the great captains, the statesmen, the poets, who were to inaugurate the 19th century upon the ruins left by the first French revolution. They in their various paths discharged that task; but whilst they conquered nations, governed mankind, or adorned their age, M. de Chateaubriand remained faithful to his vocation. That vocation was not, as has been represented, one simply of knight errantry, The young Breton officer who had retired from the army of Condé, after the siege of Thionville, when the storm of the first French revolution had, for the time, blown over, did not become a mere wandering emigrant. M. de Chateaubriand sought in the gloom and sadness of his solitary exile for a vent for mixed and melancholy emotions, in which his poetic soul had been steeped by the events that had passed around him.

"I was still very young," says M. de Chateaubriand, in his preface to "Atala,” "when I conceived the idea of writing the epopee of the man of nature, or of painting the manners of savages, by connecting them with some known event. After the discovery of America, I saw no subject of greater interest, especially for Frenchmen, than the massacre of the colony of the Natchez at Louisiana, in 1727. All the Indian tribes conspiring, after two centuries of oppression, to restore liberty to the New World, appeared to me to offer as fine a subject for the pen as the conquest of Mexico. I threw a few fragments of this work on paper; but I soon perceived that I wanted reality of colouring, and that if I wished to paint that which was, I must, as Homer did before me, visit the people whom I intended to describe.

"In 1789, I communicated to M. de Malsherbes my intention to visit America. But wishing at the same time to give a useful object to my journey, I formed the design of discovering by land the passage upon which Cook had thrown so many doubts. I started; I saw the American solitudes, and I returned with plans for another journey which was to have lasted nine years. I proposed to myself to traverse the whole of the continent of northern America, to make my way upwards along the coast north of California, and to return by Hudson's Bay. M. de Malsherbes undertook to lay my plans before

government; and it was upon that occasion he heard the first fragments of the little work, which I now present to the public. It is well known what became of France up to the time when Providence caused one of those men to appear whom she sends in sign of reconciliation when she is weary of punishing. Covered with the blood of my only brother, of my sister-in-law, with that of the illustrious old man, their father; having seen my mother and another sister, full of talent, perish from the treatment to which they were subjected in the dungeons, I wandered in foreign lands, where the only friend that remained to me destroyed himself in my arms."*

After ten years of the brutality and blasphemy of Jacobin clubs and revolutionary journals, France was enchanted to strike a fresh vein of poetry in the pages of "Atala." M. de Chateaubriand had previously published in this country, where he had taken refuge for a time, a work, entitled "An Essay on Ancient and Modern Republics," which had not obtained for the author the success which he was now destined to achieve. "Atala" was penned in the desert, under the shelter of the huts of savages. It is a sort of poem, half descriptive, half dramatic; every thing lies in the portraiture of two lovers, who ramble and converse in solitude; the whole interest is embodied in the picture of the anxieties suggested by love amidst the calm of deserts, and the repose of religious feeling. The work is written in the antique form, and is divided into prologue, narrative, and epilogue. The chief portions of the narrative take a denomination, as the huntsmen, the labourers, &c., as in the first ages of Greece, the rhapsodists sang under various titles, fragments of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. "For now some time," says M. de Chateaubriand, "I only read Homer and the Bible; happy if it is made evident, and if I have succeeded in imparting to the tints of the desert, and to the sentiments peculiar to my heart, the colours of these two great and eternal models of the beautiful and the true."

says,

It has been said that Chateaubriand was at this time, profoundly imbued with the feelings and ideas of him whom he called le grand Rousseau, and whom he places in his first published work among the five great writers who must be studied. But he personally defended himself from the imputation of siding with a philosopher, whose eloquence he justly admired, but whose doctrines he equally justly condemned. “I am not," he "like M. Rousseau, an enthusiast for savages; and, although I have, perhaps, had as much reason to complain of society as that philosopher had reason to praise it, I do not think that pure nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. I have always found it very ugly, wherever I have had occasion to see it. So far from being of opinion that the man who thinks is a depraved animal, I think it is thought that makes the man. With that word 'nature,' every thing has been lost. Let us paint nature, but beautiful nature; art ought not to occupy itself in describing monstrosities."

"Atala" was soon followed by "The Genius of Christianity," a work which it is undeniable imparted to France for a time a sacred stamp,-a kind of moral baptism, which the lower class of her literary population vainly struggled to belie and to discard, by plunging into odious and revolting excesses. "It is no doubt permitted to me," remarked the author at the time, "under a government which does not proscribe any peaceable opinion, to take up the defence of Christianity, as a subject of

* They had both been five days without food.

morality and of literature. There was a time when the adversaries of that religion had alone the right to speak. Now the lists are again open, and those who think that Christianity is poetical and moral, can say so aloud, and it is still permitted to philosophers to argue the contrary."

The expression used by the author, "the poetry of Christianity," reveals the whole principle by which he was animated. His enthusiasm, the brilliancy of his thoughts, the pomp of his images, the vividness and animation of his style, however worthy of admiration, all leave the same impression of a straining for effect, that is not congruous with the sobriety and magnitude of the subject of which he treats. With M. de Chateaubriand, reason is generally the slave of imagination and passions. In the "Genius of Christianity," as in his subsequent work "Les Martyrs," we find that the object of their author is not so much to vindicate the truth and sanctity of the Christian religion, as to prove that it is poetical and interesting. We search in vain for any edifying comparison between paganism and true faith; the inquiry resolves itself into a consideration of Homer and Virgil, on the one side, of Tasso and Camoens on the other. Thus the question, instead of being social and religious, becomes merely literary-a question of art and taste-nothing more. M. de Chateaubriand is acknowledged by all to be a most admirable painter, although sometimes guilty of exaggeration; but it may be more than doubted whether he will ever be ranked among men of sound reasoning and profound thought. The true Christian thinker must, it has been most justly observed, be shocked to see the worship of our Saviour defended by flowers of rhetoric; to see paganism, with all its sensual idolatry, its voluptuous absurdities, favourably contrasted with the austere, pure, Christian religion, the eternal symbols of which are self-denial, suffering, prayer. It is, indeed, matter of notoriety, that the ecclesiastics of Roman Catholic Europe universally expressed dissatisfaction with the very books that seemed to be written in the interest of the clergy.

If the works of M. de Chateaubriand had been ever free from this prevailing taint, the illustrious author's friends might contend that he adopted the only mode of making any religious impression on the country; that it was, in fact, necessary to appeal, in the first place, to the imagination of France. But during the whole of his life, and in all his works, he has been misled by poetry, imagination, and love of effect. Thus, in his "Essay on English Literature," there are many sparkling, paradoxical papers, written to prove that Luther had no genius, and that Roman Catholicism is more favourable to liberty than Protestantism. In his "Etudes Historiques," with still greater inconsistency, he places that notorious impostor and would-be Messiah, Apollonius of Tyana, among the Christian martyrs, and allows the truth of the popular tradition, which classes the Saviour of the world among the vile mob of pagan deities wherewith the Pantheon of Tiberius was populated.

Bonaparte was not slow to perceive the use which might be made of a pen which, if it had not the gift of raising an imperishable monument to its possessor's literary fame, had at least the art of gratifying, and sometimes leading the taste of the time. Nothing was better fitted than such compositions to assist in the restoration of letters, of religious observances, and society; but, like most of the ornaments of the consular and imperial times, these productions were of tinsel rather than solid gold; and men