Majesty may calculate, for the remainder of your on many generations, and those who do not read life, on her neutrality.*

One argument answers all objections. If the Holy Allies agreed that Naples should be invaded because the Neapolitans were turbulent, how greatly more forcible is the reason when a more powerful nation is not only more turbulent, but when the same principles as those of the Neapolitans are in action on one side, and a fanaticism in hostility to Christianity on the other! Your Majesty is head of the Greek church: bishops and patriarchs have been massacred by the Mahometans. The Treaty of Jassy in 1791, and of Bucharest in 1812, cede to Russia the right of protecting the Greek church; many of whose members, priests and primates, have been condemned to imprisonment without proof and without examination. It becomes not the dignity of your Majesty to grant any accommodation on such outrages. You might have pardoned (which would have been too much) the insult offered to your ambassador; you might have yielded to the entreaties of your allies in forbearing from the same steps as had been taken by Austria; you might have permitted the aggrandisement of that powerful empire; but you cannot abandon the church of God, placed under your especial care and sole protection.

will be as sensible of it as those who do.

Alexander. I am not quite certain that God approves of what my mother disapproves. While we were walking half a mile over scarlet cloth to render him thanks for the victories of our arms in Finland, he knew as well as I do that they were not the victories of our arms, but of our mint; and he sees the Swedish and Russian orders, which Cronstadt wears upon his bosom, drawn back from by the people, as if they were flakes of cotton from Cairo. Yet this is according to our religion, and to that of every Christian church in the world; and many Princes have done worse in zealously serving heaven. My brother Ferdinand of Spain has a sister the most religious woman upon earth, who did the other day what puzzled me, and I cannot say even yet whether it is altogether as it should be. She resolved to offer a silver lamp to the Virgin Mary, whose eyes by this time, the duchess piously considers, may want rather more light than they did formerly. When it was brought to her palace by the silversmith, he, as he held his workmanship in one hand, presented the other to her treasurer for payment. She herself came graciously forth from her apartment, surveying her offering with reverential joy, ejaculating a prayer and a laud,

Alexander. Capo d'Istria! is it you who talk and turning to the tradesman, said she entertained in this manner?

no doubt whatever that the lamp was of proper weight, but that the hook by which it was to be suspended seemed too short. He answered, that he had measured it, and had found it to correspond with her royal order.

Let us see" said she "whether it hangs as it should do before the picture."

Capo d'Istria. No; it is your Majesty. Alexander. I have not always found the high pleasure from my conquests which I was led by my Ministers and Generals to expect. When I had purchased of old Cronstadt the entrance into Finland, and when I heard of its being the happiest and best cultivated portion of the north, A chair was brought; the silversmith hung up and inhabited by not only the most industrious his lamp. As he descended, still gazing on it, but the most civilised and honest and peaceable and stopping with both hands its oscillation, the of men, I expected the compliments of the em- duchess touched his arm gently with the extrepress my mother, who, instead of them, calmly mities of two fingers, and said with religious said to me, "Son Alexander! if you have done firmness, "Remove it at your peril! it is now well, my congratulations are unnecessary; if consecrated: beware of sacrilege!" She then otherwise, they will serve you little:" and saying this she left me with her blessing, to visit and comfort a young man in the hospital whose leg had been amputated that morning; and I found her, on her return, making out an order for the money she should remit to his parents, until he could help them as before by his business as a carpenter.

Capo d'Istria. Sire, let the history of the Empress-Mother be engraven on the hearts of fifty millions, and read by as many millions as you permit to read; yet, like novels and romances, it will interest few beyond the hour, and influence still fewer even so long; while the heroism of your Majesty must leave an indelible impression

To both speakers are attributed more wisdom and reflection than they possess. It is as difficult in life to show that those who are little are little, as to show that those

who are great are great; and in dialogue it is even more

so: for if all men were represented in it just as they are, the reader would throw the book aside with indifference or disgust.

crossed herself before the holy Virgin, and implored her protection for herself, and for each of her children by name, and for her brother Ferdinand, and her brother Carlos, and her brother Francesco, and her sister of Portugal, and her cousins at Naples, and her other cousins, living and dead, and for her poor blind sinful people, and above the rest of them, after the clergy and cloistered, for that artificer behind her who would remain all his life unpaid.

Capo d'Istria. Ah! that is carrying legitimacy a trifle too far: just conquest is another thing. Princes have an undoubted right to the coined money of their subjects; but plate and jewels should only be taxed, and not taken in the concrete.

Alexander. My armies cannot stir in this season of the year; the Turks can march all winter.

Capo d'Istria. Let them: we shall have occupation enough in preparing stores and proving our sincerity. We shall be compelled into the war when we are ready. Wait only until after the

Ramadan the fierceness of the Turks will sub-empires have been lost and gained by one battle,

KOSCIUSKO AND PONIATOWSKI.

distinguished part. . do you sigh at hearing

it !

Kosciusko. Poniatowski! her blood flows for strangers, and her heroism is but an interlude in the drama of Ambition. She is intoxicated from the cup of Glory, to be dismembered with the less feeling of her loss. When she recovers her senses, in vain will she look around for compassion or for gratitude. Beyond a doubt I am a feeble and visionary politician: nevertheless I will venture to express my opinion, that gratitude, although it never has been admitted among the political virtues, is one; that whatever is good in morals is also good in politics; and that, by introducing it opportunely and dexterously, the gravest of old politicians might occasionally be disconcerted. Do not let us be alarmed at the novelty: many have presumed to recommend the observance of justice; and gratitude is nothing more than justice in a fit of generosity, and permitting a Love or a Genius to carry off her scales.

Poniatowski. We live in an age when no experiments of this kind are tried, and when others are exhausted.

History hath given us no example of a man whose errors are so manifold and so destructive. I confess that I have been mistaken in foretelling his downfall: I calculated from observations on mankind in ages less effete. I could not calculate the forces that resisted him: for I knew only the military and financial, and this but numerically; I knew not by whom and where and to what specific object it was to be applied. Fortunate! (if usurpers ever are) to spring up in a season of rankness and rottenness, when every principle of vitality had been extinguished in the state, either by the pestilence of despotism or by the tempests of democracy; when they who came against him from without were weaker in judgment than himself, and when the wildest temerity was equally sure of success as the most prudent combinations and best measured conduct. No general versed in war has been consulted by the principal of the belligerents: but persons the least practised in it have been employed as commanders in chief. The good people of England is persuaded that to open a campaign is as easy as to open an oyster, and to finish it is a thing to be done as quickly as to swallow one.

Poniatowski. England will alter her system from one of these two causes. Either (at the end of twenty years perhaps) the families of her aristocracy will be sufficiently enriched, which is the prime motive in her undertakings; or a serious and earnest effort will be made against increasing danger, and some general of capacity will at last be appointed to satisfy the clamours of the people, and to keep the government, or rather the governors, unshaken. But come, let us cease to specuculate on the English, and indeed on everything else than our own beloved Poland. You have reason to shake your head, and to hold your hand over your eyes: you have reason to complain of ingratitude: but it is rather on the side of fortune than of princes, who, in good truth, owe you little.

Kosciusko. We hear many complaints of princes and of fortune: but believe me, Poniatowski, there never was a good or generous action that met with much ingratitude.

Kosciusko. True, we see nothing in battle but brute force, nothing in peace but unblushing perfidy. War, which gave its name to strategems, would recall them, and can not: they are shut up within the cabinet and counter, where they never should have entered, and the wisest of them are such as would disgrace the talents of a ringdropper. If the person to whom fortune seems to have given the disposal of mankind, had known anything of our national character, he would have augmented the dominions of Poland, instead of diminishing them: if he had known as much of policy as a peasant, he would have united with it Royal Prussia and Hungary, and its southern boundaries would have been the Danube and the Dnieper. Every German province, excepting a few I am about to mention, would have been erected into a kingdom, under the most powerful or the most popular of its princes, its nobles, its eivil magistrates; representatives would have been elected, standing armies would have been abolished. Thus the existence of the governors and the prosperity of the governed would have been his work, and that work would have been indestructible. The erection of twenty kings in twenty minutes Poniatowski. But then his kingdom? what would have abundantly gratified his vanity: a befell that? and from whom? Condescending, as consideration not unimportant when we discourse you have often been, to the meanest peasant for upon crowned heads, and particularly upon heads the slightest service, grateful as I have seen you crowned recently, or indeed upon heads of any to an undistinguished soldier for moistening your kind subject to the vortexes of power. The Scan-horse's bit after a battle, do you thus speak of the dinavian Peninsula should have been strengthened ungrateful? You to whom no statues are erected, by the junction of Denmark, Mecklenburgh, and no hymns are sung in public processions; you, who Pomerania, forming a barrier against the maritime have no country! And you smile upon such force of England, and (united by confederacy with injuries and such losses! Poland) against the systematic and unsuspected march of Muscovite aggression. No German kingdom should have contained much more than a million of inhabitants: for it was his business to lessen both the kingly authority and the kingly

name.

Poniatowski. Not Sobieski from Austria? Kosciusko. Sobieski had his reward: God, who alone was great enough, bestowed it.

Kosciusko. My friend! I have lost nothing: I have received no injury: I am in the midst of our country day and night. Absence is not of matter: the body does not make it: absence quickens our love and elevates our affections: absence is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty.

Were I in Poland, how many things are there | upon our heads an immense column of air, but the

MIDDLETON AND MAGLIABECHI.

Middleton. Some of them are important, some are not; and some appeared so in one age of the church, which were cast aside in another. ledge where it was less likely to be detected, he might have added that the whole idea and much of the substance * Perhaps he may also have cast a glance on Les Con- of his Letter from Rome was taken from a passage in formités des Cérémonies modernes avec les Anciennes, of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. All the remainder may Jean de Croi: and, although he was less likely to acknow-be found in Josiah Stopford's Pagano-Papismus.

our affections chastened, our desires moderated, our enjoyments enlarged by this intercourse with the Deity? And are not men the better, as certainly they are the happier, for a belief that he interferes in their concerns? They are persuaded that there is something conditional between them, and that, if they labour under the commission of crimes, their voice will be inaudible as the voice of one under the nightmare.

Magliabechi. Pray which were they? Middleton. She now worships the blessed Virgin Mary: anciently she condemned the Collyridians, for doing it, and called them heretics. Was she infallible then? or is she now? Infants were formerly admitted by her to the Eucharist, and she declared that they could not be saved without it: she now decrees that the doctrine is false. Formerly it was her belief that, before the destruction of the world, Christ should reign upon earth a thousand years, and the saints under him at present she has no mind that either of them should be so near her. Although there are many things wherein much may be said on both sides, yet it is only on one side in any question that the same thing can be said. Magliabechi. This is specious, and delivered upon those who can. Be convinced, Mr. Middletemperately. ton, that you never will supplant the received Middleton. Saint Augustin is esteemed among ideas of God: be no less convinced that the sum the infallible.

Middleton. I wished to demonstrate that we often treat God in the same manner as we should treat some doating or some passionate old man : we feign, we flatter, we sing, we cry, we gesticulate.

Magliabechi. Worship him in your own manner, according to the sense he has given you; and let those who cannot exercise that sense, rely

of your labours in this field will be to leave the ground loose beneath you, and that he who comes after you will sink. In sickness, in our last particularly, we all are poor wretches: we are nearly all laid on a level by it: the dry-rot of the mind supervenes, and loosens whatever was fixed in it,

Magliabechi. Certainly; and with justice. Middleton. He declares that the dead, even saints, are ignorant what the living do; even their own children; for the souls of the dead, he says, interfere not in the affairs of the living.* Magliabechi. This is strong; but divines can except religion. Would you be so inhuman as reconcile it with religion.

to tell a friend in this condition not to be comMiddleton. What can they not? forted? Would you prove to him that the crucifix, Magliabechi. I will tell you what they can not: which his wandering eye finds at last its restingand it is this on which I began our conversa-ing-place, is of the same material as his bedpost? tion.

Among your other works I find a manuscript on the inefficacy of prayer. I defended you to my superiors, by remarking that Cicero had asserted things incredible to himself, merely for the sake of argument, and had probably written them before he had fixed in his mind the personages to whom they should be attributed in his dialogues; that, in short, they were brought forward for no other purpose than discussion and explosion. This impiety was forgiven. But every man in Italy has a favourite saint, for whose honour he deems it meritorious to draw (I had almost said the sword) the stiletto.

Suppose a belief in the efficacy of prayer to be a belief altogether irrational. . you may: I never can. . suppose it to be insanity itself, would you, meeting a young man who had wandered over many countries in search of a father, until his intellects are deranged, and who, in the fulness of his heart, addresses an utter stranger as the lost parent, clings to him, kisses him, sobs upon his breast, and finds comfort only by repeating father! father! would you, Mr. Middleton, say to this affectionate fond creature, go home, sit quiet, be silent! and persuade him that his father is lost to him?

Middleton, God forbid.

Magliabechi. You have done it: do it no more. The madman has not heard you; and the father will pardon you when you meet.

Middleton. Far be it from my wishes and from my thoughts to unhinge those portals through which we must enter to the performance of our social duties: but I am sensible of no irreligion, I acknowledge no sorrow or regret, in having attempted to demonstrate that God is totally and

Middleton. It would be safer to attempt dragging God from his throne, than to split a spangle on their petticoats, or to puff a grain of powder from their wigs: this I know. Nothing in my writings is intended to wound the jealousy of the Italians. Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in its excess. For which reason, with plain ground before me, I would not expatiate far removed from our passions and infirmities, largely; and I often made an argument, that offered itself, give way altogether and leave room for inferences. My treatise on prayer was not to be published in my lifetime.

Magliabechi. And why at any time? Supposing prayer to be totally inefficacious in the object, is not the mind exalted, the heart purified, are not * Nesciunt mortui, etiam sancti, quid agant vivi, etiam eorum filii ; quia animæ mortuorum rebus viventium non intersunt. De curâ pro Mortuis.

and that whatever seems fit to him, will never seem unfit in consequence of our entreaties. I would inculcate entire resignation to the divine decrees, acquiescence in the divine wisdom, confidence in the divine benevolence. There is something of frail humanity, something of its very decrepitude, in our ideas of God: we are foolish and ignorant in the same manner, and almost to the same degree, as those painters are, who append a grey beard to his chin, draw wrinkles across his