strains O du Hüter Israel, the mournful sand persons, as they only do sing at cadences of Christ lag in Todes Banden; Nürnberg, we shall believe that Protes or last and best, the transcendently solemn tant worshipers have something that will chords of O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, compare with the Miserere in the Sistine St. Bernard's hymn, sung by some thou- chapel. From the Westminster Review. LE GRAND CYRUS.* ages" of the day, but also of all ranks of Parisians down to the lower class of citizens. In the following passage he furnishes his key to the leading characters in Le Grand Cyrus: "Who, indeed, is Cyrus, if not Condé himself, especially while he was yet only Duke d'Enghien, and dreaming of love and glory? Mandane, with her blue eyes and copious blonde locks, her gentleness, wit and pride, is clearly Madame de Longueville. The Asiatic warriors the aides-de-camp or lieutenants of the French who accompany the Persian chief to battle are hero,' namely, the Marshal de Grammont, the Marshal de Gassion, Villequier, afterwards Marshal d'Aumaret, the Marquis de Noiroustier, of the house of Tremouille, the Duke de RohanChabot, Coligny, Duke of Chatillon, the Marquis de la Moussaye, etc. M.VICTOR COUSIN has, with considerable | and this not merely of the court "personingenuity, devised two volumes of lively and amusing reading, which will be welcome in England, though their value will be best appreciated in France. A period comparatively short, indeed, in point of time, but which has had the effect of a geological epoch in its influence on French society, separates the present from the days of Henri IV. and the Fronde. Even a nation of egotists can not exist altogether in the present, but may, nay must, look back with interest and curiosity to the times of their forefathers. Confined to his chamber by long indisposition, M. Cousin professes to have sought in that forgotten and voluminous romance, Le Grand Cyrus of Scudery, a resource against ennui; as he read on, the dull and prolix narrative seemed to have grown upon him, as the identity of the fictitious personages of the story, with distinguished contemporaries of the authoress, forced itself upon him; confirmed, as he assures us, by a key to the romance, subsequently discovered in the library of the arsenal. We had always supposed these historical parallels to have been understood, or at least strongly suspected; be this as it may, the writer seeks to lay before us, from the materials furnished by the romance, a picture of Parisian life in the eariier part of the seventeenth century, *La Société Française au xvii. Siècle, d'après Le Grand Cyrus de Mademoiselle Scudery. Par M. VICTOR COUSIN. 2 tomes. London: Nutt. 1858. actual siege of Dunkerk by Condé; the battle "The siege of Cumes in the romance is the of Thybara, that of Lens; and the victory gained by Cyrus over the Massagetes, the 'glorious and immortal victory' of Rocroi. It is as certain that the fair dames of the court of Ecbatana, of Sardis, and of Babylon, are the celebrated beauties of the court of Anne of Austria. "L'Hotel de Cleomire is undoubtedly l'Hotel de Rambouillet, with its cortege of wits and agreeable women, who constituted its great attractions. Here we have the portraits of the noble hostess and her two daughters, of Julie d'Argennes and her sister, the first Madame de Grignan, Madame de Sablé, and Mademoiselle Angelique Paulet; there, Montausier, Voiture, Chapelain, Arnauld de Corbeville, etc, 220 CRINOLINE AND WHALES. "Sappho is Mademoiselle de Scudery herself, Luxembourg: herself entertaining a very at the head of the commoners, but intellectual, mixed society in her modest drawingand distinguished by the society she assembled room, in the street de Beauce au Marais. about her, in which we find a virtuous, amiable, and learned prelate, Godeau, Bishop of Grasse and Venne, a magistrate who is also a man of the world, a financier who is a wit, academicians and literary men like Sarrasin, Pellisson, and Conrart, with Madame Cornuel, Madame Aragonnais, and other ladies of humbler position." Thus, the Grand Cyrus is, so to speak, a history in portraits of the seventeenth century, written by an individual who was probably of all others best acquainted with the society of that period, thanks to her peculiar position; poor, yet of good family, and received every where in the best circles, at the Hotel de Rambouillet, the Condé Palace, and at the Thus M. Cousin makes out his case, and having retouched the faded portraits with a skillful hand, reproduces for the versatile, volatile, all-forgetting Parisians glance this sketch of a long-vanished social state: they may well afford to throw a backward on the past, in humble deprecation of that future, when they too shall rank as antiquities. We will say nothing of the stupendous egotism that breaks out in the preface, nor quote a passage which, out of France, might suggest doubts of the author's sanity or sincerity. M. Victor Cousin has at least furnished an amusing and readable book, and we must pardon the indulgence of a national conceit, which he evidently takes to be a virtue. As, (borrowing a mechanical simile,) | certain clocks with glass faces are cunningly devised to cheat an observer into the belief that hands move without the aid of spring or weight, actuated through clock-work to move them-so the mental clock-work of ideal association is far too much concealed nowadays. It is a particular case of a very human quality, pride the false pride of chafing under an obligation; even though it be to one's own suggestive senses. When people are less chary of telling the world how they got at results, it will be all the better for the world. As long as the pernicious falsehood is implied of attributing to the creative faculty ideas which merely come by association, so long will there be a hindrance to the onward march of intellect may in many a timid aspirant. It somewhat of the majesty wherewith whales portray themselves to the imagin abate WHALE S. ation of certain people, as it may tend to lower the majesty of our own creative faculty in the estimation of others, if we honestly confess at this-the very outset of our narrative-that between the behemoths of ocean on the one part, and the idea which brought them into our head on the other part, the chasm, though seemingly immense, is spanned by that one step, which, Napoleon (him of the gray coat and cocked-hat, we mean) signalized by a proverb. Wandering down through Bond street one day, we jostled against many a crinoline petticoat, and the crinoline petticoats suggested the topic of whales! Nothing like the material falsely called bone of the Balæna Mysticetus for im All the genus *Or true whaleboue whale. Balana yield whalebone; but the whalebone of the B. Mysticetus is longest, and therefore the most valuable. parting that expansiveness so indispensa- | elasticity. Gutta-percha is non-elastic: it ble to the proper set of a lady's crinoline. There were three formidable competitors when the fashion came into vogue in these latter days. Steel, vulcanized caoutchouc, and gutta-percha they were. Vain illusions all: whalebone's the thing! As to the first, steel is steel; and steel, if badly tempered, (nay, sometimes be the temper ever so good,) breaks short off, leaving a sharp cutting extremity. It is a matter concerning which reliable statistics are difficult to obtain; but we are given to understand, that certain lesions incidental to the rupture of steel petticoatsprings, have thrown them into such evil repute, that, ere long they will be totally abandoned. The idea of hollow, inflated, vulcanized hoops, was eminently ingenious; but their employment involves conditions so difficult to be commanded, that no wonder vulcanized india-rubber hoop-work soon went out. We would not by any incon siderate criticism of ours knowingly abate one iota of the proper credit justly appertaining to the inventor of vulcanized rub ber inflated hoops. It was an idea sug gested by a master mind. In theory the notion is perfect; but alas! from theory to practice there is a bridge, and few there be who cross it. An application of the very same sort of evidence which has proved that out of no kind of wind-bag whatever, no matter how cunningly devised, can a practically good swimming life-preserver be made-seeing the chance of accidents from sunken rocks-might have awakened suspicion from the very first, that no system of inflated hoop-work conld be adopted as the basis of a lady's expansive gear, without imminent peril from puncture and collapse-so long, at least, as pins are a sine qua non to the "fixing" of a lady. Besides, sub rosa be it spoken, and sotto voce-vulcanized rubber has brimstone in its composition; and brimstone, when volatilized, comes reeking to the olfactory sense with evil assoeiations! In common with many others who take an interest in watching the application of means to important ends, we thought hopefully of gutta-percha hoop-work once. There can not be a greater mistake, though some mistakes may be attended with more important consequences. The quality which should dominate over all other qualities, in ladies' manufactured hoop-work, is won't do. So long as a lady can move about on a field all her own-move without touching any body or any thingmove in such wise that no body and no thing, animate or inanimate, shall touch her, gutta-percha is available. But set the lady in a crowd, though it be only for an instant, and she emerges the very instant after, a grotesque, shriveled-uplooking thing, as full of creases as a closed umbrella or a baked pippin. A certain expression, used by Horace in a figurative sense, we could apply to the lady, physically, after a trifling variation. The gutta-percha hoop-expanded belle is— "Cere (a) in vitium flecti." felt it a part of our duty to call the atten And having on more than one occasion tion of a fair sufferer to the existence of this state of bodily collapse, we can from personal experience testify that "Monitoribus asper (a)" is an expression applicable to each particular object of our attentions, in a purely Horatian sense. Depend upon it, there is nothing like whalebone, after all, for a lady's expansion gear: so now about the whales. "What's your opinion about whales, Mike ?" demanded the skipper of a sperm whale-ship, of a Yankee down-easter, who, staring over the bulwarks, gazed upon a sea-monster just captured. "Why, I was jist athinking it's a considerable sort of fish. They ain't got fish like that up the Kennybeck, I guess." "Do you think whales are fish, Mike!" continued the skipper. "Why, some folks says whales isn't fish at all. I rather calculate they are, myself. Whales has fins, so has fish; whales has tails, so has fish; whales ain't got scales on 'em, neither has cat-fish, nor eels, nor tadpoles, nor frogs, nor horse-leeches. I conclude, then, whales is fish. Every body oughter call 'em so. Nine out of ten does call 'em fish." "Fishin's fishin'," continued Mike, after a moment's pause, which he turned to account by contributing to the ocean store of liquid matter, in the form of concentrated tobacco-juice. "I likes fishin' as well as any body; but catchin' of whales is a leetle too extensive. It's orfully alarmin' work." Small wonder, indeed, that Mike, the Yankee down-easter, should find himself perplexed in the endeavor to award a true zoological status to whales. If the Japanese-people who religiously abstain from the eating of all flesh, save fish flesh -decree, in their wisdom, an ichthyological nature to whales; if whales have been proved fishy by synods, and councils, of the Roman Church, and by reasoning, too, equally conclusive with that which proved the world to stand still, and Barnacle geese to be a sort of fish generated, not from eggs like other gecse, but developed from sea-barnacles-no wonder that Mike, after properly weighing pros and cons, should calculate that whales is a sort of fish, and that "every body oughter call 'em so." Had there been yet one lingering doubt in his mind that doubt would have been set at rest by the analogies of cat-fish, cels, tadpoles, frogs, and horse-leeches. Nevertheless, to an observant pair of eyes and a reflective mind-notwithstanding the analogies of slick skin, fluked-tail, fins, etc., a doubt could hardly fail to occur now and then in respect to the fishiness of whales. Even penetrating no deeper than to the external characteristics of form, the close observer could hardly fail to have remarked that a whale's tail is fixed horizontally to the body, whereas a fish's tail has a vertical attachment. Many other particulars must have at times, disturbed the calculations of a reflective naturalist, like Mike, the Yankee down easter, concerning the fishiness of whales. The ordinary technical words of a whaling skipper's language, imply how unsettled must have been the opinions at one time prevalent about the zoological status of whales. He speaks of adult whales as "bulls" and 66 cows." Young ones he terms calves. He may designate them fish for brevity sake, but he scarcely means it. How could he? Do not whales come to the surface of the water to breathe? Do they not suckle their young like land mammalia? No, no! Whales is not a sort of fish, Mike, and every body oughter not to call 'em so. Aristotle and Pliny, though puzzled a little by the fishy exterior of whales, both entertained some doubts concerning their ichthyological character; but Linnæus was the first who really spoke out, seizing with the true determination of genius upon the real type. The difficulty pre vious naturalists had experienced, when feeling half-inclined to remove whales from the fishy category, and refer them to the class of mammals was this: whales have no anterior and posterior extremities, it was advanced; neither hands nor feet; how great, then, would be the discrepancy? But Linnæus, with the true perception of genius, swept away the discrepancy at once. The lateral fins were paws, just peeping through the skin, and leaving the corresponding legs behind them; the tail was nothing more nor less than two paws, consolidated-soldered together. Whales have ever been accepted as typical of the extreme of animated bulk and muscular power. Even now, when descriptions of them are shorn of the exaggerated vagueness attendant upon facts in natural history, collated under difficulties, whales are large enough and strong enough to satisfy the most exacting ima gination; in proof of which, a few anecdotes will be recorded by and by. The statements of Buffon, and Lacepède about whales, are to some extent illusory; which is a pity, considering the highly poetic vein in which they were made. Buffon prefaces his account of the cetacea with an exordium of ponderous grandeur. His tropes are big; his words roll along in rhetorical billows; the very language used is whaly, comes redolent of blubber and ambergris-whaly, smelling of whales. Gradually, the reader is desired to fancy himself lifted from the earth; he is told to ascend the regions of high air, in companionship with the eagle: whence, looking down upon the grosser world, he is to contemplate the earth, the ocean, and their several inhabitants. Then, when man, and other living creatures of terra firma have disappeared from view-when even elephants, and rhinoceris have ceased to be visible-the aërial student of animated nature is told to look down upon the expanse of ocean and behold the majesty of whales. By a bold stroke of the imagination, Buffon, (as if all other standards of comparisons were inadequate) measures his ideal whales against Gothic monuments and mountain bosses. He speculates on the greater size of whales in the good old times before man had begun his persecutions; and, feigning for them a natural span of life commensurate with their volume, he vaguely indicates that the reader may draw indefinitely on the past, and picture any ideal whale to be as aged as he pleases, without any fear of incurring any controlling check from the adverse criticism of M. De Buffon! Lacepède, too, was another naturalist who did not stint himself in elements of the grandiose sort in respect of whales. Like Buffon, he did not doubt the existence of whales upwards of three hundred feet long in past times. He felt assured, that the sort of whale termed by sailors, the " right whale,"* even now, when he wrote, attained a length sometimes of ninety-eight and a half feet, (thirty meters ;) nor that, "right whales" could spout water from their blowers to more than the hight of thirteen meters, or forty-three feet. Nor was Lacepède less enthusiastic about the swimming of the "right whale." The creature, according to him, could manage a pace of eleven meters a second, or twenty-one and a half nautical miles an hour. These are gross exaggerations; nor are either Buffon, or Lacepède, correct in respect of the species of whale for whom they claim the maximum grandeur amongst the creatures of his own genus. The Belana Mysticetus is not the giant amongst giants. There is another whalebone - yielding whale, (Balana) more considerable in length, if not in general dimensions, than he, the dreaded razor-back. The broad-nosed whale is another bone-yielding animal which often exceeds the length of the "right whale." The sperm whale, too, takes a position above that of the true whalebone whale, not only in size, but also in muscular power and general intelligence. Out of three hundred and twenty-two individuals of the "right whale" species, the capture of which was authenticated by Scoresby, no one was more than sixty feet long, and the very largest he ever measured had a length of only fifty-eight feet. According to the same author, the very longest actual measurement of the "right whale" verified, is no more than sixty-seven feet. Now, the average length of the razorback is about one hundred feet; its greatest circumference, thirty or thirty. five. One of this species, found dead in Leaving for a time the Balanæ, or whalebone whales, and taking a glance at the Physeter or sperm whale-listen to what Mr. Thomas Beale, surgeon, the |