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JOHN OF GAUNT AND JOANNA OF KENT.

Joanna. How is this, my cousin,* that you are besieged in your own house, by the citizens of London? I thought you were their idol.

Gaunt. If their idol, madam, I am one which they may tread on as they list when down; but which, by my soul and knighthood! the ten best battle-axes among them shall find it hard work to unshrine.

Pardon me.. I have no right perhaps to take or touch this hand. . yet, my sister, bricks and stones and arrows are not presents fit for you: let me conduct you some paces hence.

Joanna. I will speak to those below in the street : quit my hand : they shall obey me.

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what was dearer to him than his life: protect what he, valiant as you have seen him, can not! The father, who foiled so many, hath left no enemies: the innocent child, who can injure no one, finds them!

Why have you unlaced and laid aside your visor? Do not expose your body to those missiles. Hold your shield before yourself, and step aside. I need it not. I am resolved ..

Gaunt. On what, my cousin? Speak, and by the Lord! it shall be done. This breast is your shield; this arm is mine.

Joanna. Heavens! who could have hurled those masses of stone from below! they stunned me. Did they descend all of them together? or did they split into fragments on hitting the pavement?

Gaunt. Truly I was not looking that way: they came, I must believe, while you were speaking. Joanna. Aside! aside! further back! disregard me! Look! that last arrow sticks half its head deep in the wainscot. It shook so violently, I did not see the feather at first.

No, no, Lancaster ! I will not permit it. Take your shield up again; and keep it all before you. Now step aside. . I am resolved to prove whether the people will hear me.

Gaunt. If you intend to order my death, madam, your guards who have entered my court, and whose spurs and halberts I hear upon the staircase, may overpower my domestics; and, seeing no such escape as becomes my dignity, I submit to you. Behold my sword at your feet! Some formalities, I trust, will be used in the proceedings against me. Entitle me, in my attainder, not John of Gaunt, not Duke of Lancaster, not King of Castile; nor commemorate my father, the most glorious of princes, the vanquisher and pardoner of the most powerful; nor style me, what those who loved or who flattered me did when I was happier, cousin to the Fair Maid of Kent. Joanna! those days are over! But no enemy, no law, no eternity can take away from me, or move.. further off, my affinity in blood to the conqueror in the field of Cressy, of Poictiers, and Najora. Edward was my brother when he was but your cousin; and the edge of my shield has clinked on his in many a battle. Yes, we were ever near, if not in worth, in danger.

Joanna. Attainder ! God avert it! Duke of Lancaster, what dark thought... Alas! that the Regency should have known it! I came hither, sir, for no such purpose as to ensnare or incriminate or alarm you.

These weeds might surely have protected me from the fresh tears you have drawn forth.

Gaunt. Sister, be comforted! this visor too has felt them.

Joanna. O my Edward! my own so lately! Thy memory.. thy beloved image .. which never hath abandoned me.. makes me bold; I dare not say generous; for in saying it I should cease to be so.. and who could be called generous by the side of thee! I will rescue from perdition the enemy of my son.

Cousin, you loved your brother: love then

Joanna, called the fair maid of Kent, was cousin of the Black Prince, whom she married. John of Gaunt was suspected of aiming at the crown in the beginning of Richard's minority, which, increasing the hatred of the

people against him for favouring the sect of Wicliffe, excited them to demolish his house and to demand his impeachment.

Gaunt. Then, madam, by your leave... Joanna. Hold! forbear! Come hither! hither not forward.

Gaunt. Villains! take back to your kitchens those spits and skewers that you forsooth would fain call swords and arrows; and keep your bricks and stones for your graves!

Joanna. Imprudent man! who can save you? I shall be frightened : I must speak at once.

O good kind people! ye who so greatly loved me, when I am sure I had done nothing to deserve it, have I (unhappy me !) no merit with you now, when I would assuage your anger, protect your fair fame, and send you home contented with yourselves and me! Who is he, worthy citizens, whom ye would drag to slaughter?

True indeed he did revile some one; neither I nor you can say whom; some feaster and rioter, it seems, who had little right (he thought) to carry sword or bow, and who, to show it, hath slunk away. And then another raised his anger; he was indignant that, under his roof, a woman should be exposed to stoning. Which of you would not be as choleric in a like affront? In the house of which among you, should I not be protected as resolutely?

No, no: I never can believe those angry erics. Let none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son, of his king, your darling child Richard. Are your fears more lively than a poor weak female's? than a mother's? yours, whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his father, naming each.. He, John of Gaunt, the defender

of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the astonishment, almost with consternation, while it rallying signal of the desperately brave!

Retire, Duke of Lancaster! This is no time.. Gaunt. Madam, I obey: but not through terror of that puddle at the house-door, which my handful of dust would dry up. Deign to command me! Joanna. In the name of my son then, retire! Gaunt. Angelic goodness! I must fairly win it. Joanna. I think I know his voice that crieth out, "Who will answer for him?" An honest and loyal man's, one who would counsel and save me in any difficulty and danger. With what pleasure and satisfaction, with what perfect joy and confidence, do I answer our right-trusty and welljudging friend!

"Let Lancaster bring his sureties," say you, "and we separate." A moment yet before we separate; if I might delay you so long, to receive your sanction of those sureties; for in such grave matters it would ill become us to be over-hasty. I could bring fifty, I could bring a hundred, not from among soldiers, not from among courtiers, but selected from yourselves, were it equitable and fair to show such partialities, or decorous in the parent and guardian of a king to offer any other than herself.

Raised by the hand of the Almighty from amidst you, but still one of you, if the mother of a family is a part of it, here I stand, surety for John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, for his loyalty and allegiance.

Gaunt (running toward Joanna). Are the rioters then bursting into the chamber through the windows?

Joanna. The windows and doors of this solid edifice rattled and shook at the people's acclamation. My word is given for you: this was theirs in return. Lancaster! what a voice have the people when they speak out! It shakes me with

establishes the throne: what must it be when it is lifted up in vengeance!

Gaunt. Wind; vapour..

Joanna... Which none can wield nor hold. Need I say this to my cousin of Lancaster?

Gaunt. Rather say, madam, that there is always one star above which can tranquillise and control them.

Joanna. Go, cousin! another time more sincerity!

Gaunt. You have this day saved my life from the people: for I now see my danger better, when it is no longer close before me. My Christ! if ever I forget..

Joanna. Swear not every man in England hath sworn what you would swear. But if you abandon my Richard, my brave and beautiful child, may.. Oh! I could never curse, nor wish an evil: but, if you desert him in the hour of need, you will think of those who have not deserted you, and your own great heart will lie heavy on you, Lancaster!

Am I graver than I ought to be, that you look dejected? Come then, gentle cousin, lead me to my horse, and accompany me home. Richard will embrace us tenderly. Every one is dear to every other upon rising out fresh from peril: affectionately then will he look, sweet boy, upon his mother and his uncle! Never mind how many questions he may ask you, nor how strange ones. His only displeasure, if he has any, will be, that he stood not against the rioters; or among them.

Gaunt. Older than he have been as fond of mischief, and as fickle in the choice of a party. I shall tell him that, coming to blows, the assailant is often in the right; that the assailed is always.

M. VILLELE AND M. CORBIERE.

Villèle. We are safe: God defends the monarchy. The Giraffe is arrived.

Corbière. The Giraffe!

Villèle. The Giraffe, the Giraffe.

Corbière. I pay little attention to these barbarians they enter not within my department. In what canton of India are his dominions?

Villèle. Whose dominions? You are absent, my dear Corbière.

Corbière. Oh! I did not recollect at first that the Egyptians call by that name their old mummies and obelisks..

Villèle. It is no mummy, no obelisk, but a return for the fine frigate..

Corbière. Very true! very true! these nautical terms always escape me. Why can not we speak of them in French? Why recur to Dutch, English, Egyptian, and what not?

Corbière. No, not at all. I suspected he would be troublesome to Pondicherry. I know very well he has agents at Madagascar. A schooner off Cape Verde might... Let us think of it. We never can trust the English near us. We ought not to have ceded to them so much at the late The pasha, I understand, has given us another peace, when we made them come to us in Paris frigate, in compensation for that which we and had them under our thumb. Our trade lan-equipped in his service. I hope he has rememguishes extremely in those colonies.

Villèle. The Giraffe is a beast..

Corbière. I know it: who does not know that? So is the unicorn: yet we call a ship the Unicorn. and on the same principle the Giraffe. Have I explained my meaning?

Villèle. Pardon me: I spoke of the Giraffe, that the Pasha of Egypt has sent over, in homage to his ally and friend, our most august master.

bered that we two sent him our best sailors, sent him powder, artillery, gunners, and as many officers as the jesuits could persuade to abjure the christian faith, pro tempore, cum reservatione

mentis, et ad certum finem, nempe gloriam Dei et | that are all heart, and copper and iron upon the suæ ecclesiæ.

Villèle. You speak excellent Latin.

Corbière. Ciceronian, Ciceronian: you may find the very words in that great man's commentary, De Gloria in excelsis.

Well, well, we must not always be scholars: now to business. The pasha, I trust, has notified his gratitude, that we ordered the frigate to sail exactly in readiness to sink M. Cochrane.

Villèle. We are unlucky in our sinking of Englishmen. Several thousands of them were sunk by us in the late war, as we read in the Moniteur; but they rose up again, being amphibious, and fought like devils. The most imprudent thing that Napoleon ever did, was, to drive them into the sea. He did it fifty times at the least, and they always came out again the stronger for it, and finally dragged him in after them, and gave him such a ducking that he died.

Corbière. You used the word amphibious. In my literary recreations, which a close attention to politics renders necessary, I have entered into several discussions upon that word. Originally it is not French, and must be used cautiously, and only in a particular acceptation. It signifies a very fierce animal; such as a crocodile, a dromedary, an ostrich, or a certain serpent of the desert. It may comprehend also, by the figure we call meta that is, meta, &c., &c., . . . a stout man, or strong-minded one. I was formerly at table in company with the Duke de la RochefoucauldLiancourt, and wished him to support my definition, which, as I was not then in the ministry, no one else would. Although he declined to lend me all the assistance I could have desired, he silenced my opponents, or rather he conciliated all parties, by saying that a man was justly called amphibious who could live equally well and happily in office or out. Upon which I turned to M. Gregoire, and said intelligibly enough, “Let faction be silent; let quibbling cease! Democracy herself has no longer the effrontery to deny that amphibious means strong-minded." Overcome by authority, he bowed assent, and declared that neither he nor anyone could follow a surer guide, in thought or action, than M. de la Rochefoucauld. The whole party rose up, bending first to M. Gregoire, then to the duke, who, returning the salute, took the old man by the elbow and conducted him to the ladies. I never was less witty with them in my life.

Villèle. Be contented: we have stripped of their authority, we have deprived of consideration, the two persons that twenty-five millions call the two best in France. As for the word amphibious, we will drop it: it is an ugly word, and I should not like it to be applied to me.

Corbière. But these English; I do not discover that they come under the designation more than other people.

Villèle. Not indeed in your sense. I was observing that by sea they usually give us some trouble. Having more money than we, and oaks

surface of the ground, they can construct more ships; and, before the war is over, we always teach them how to fight. Beside, they take twenty while we build one.

Corbière. We may laugh at that: it can only last for a time.

Now the giraffe you were talking of. There are some difficulties, some considerations.. I would know more about it.

Villèle. The giraffe is . . .

Corbière. I know perfectly well what giraffes are in general: but this one, being sent by our friend the pasha, may differ, not perhaps essentially, but in a leg or two and in colour.

Villèle. The giraffe is a quadruped, that, according to Buffon and Tite-Live...

Corbière. O parbleu! now you explain the thing completely. It is the very creature put down in the list with hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lynx, zebra, and that other. How considerate and attentive is our friend, Mohammed-Ali! Who could have expected that a brute of a pasha would have followed our directions so precisely!

Villèle. He sees his interests as clearly as we see ours, and knows them to be the same. M. Appony told you truly that Athens would fall about this time; that England, as we desired of her minister, would refuse to ratify the convention with Russia and us; and that the people of Paris would be frantic at the extinction of the Greeks, unless there came over some odd beast to look at. The cause of kings triumphs: long live the pasha and the giraffe!

Corbière. Let us order a thanksgiving in the churches, on this signal intervention of divine Providence.

Villèle. Much obliged as we are to the saints of heaven, for such a declaration of their goodwill in our behalf, we may abstain at present from promulgating a royal ordinance, particularly as the archbishop of Paris, though a good Frenchman, had a sort of objection to offer up any, for all the hailstorms and all the inundations we have been favoured with lately to the same effect. He was of opinion that there are people who would carp at it, observing that even the discharge of the national guard had made a bustle, in some quarters of Paris, for almost a week. In vain I promised him that I would restore the censorship on printing: I did it: he still was timid, and recommended that the thanksgiving should be private. He told me that the utmost he could do, was, on his word of honour, as archbishop and peer of France, to assure God and his father and mother that we are quite sincere, and would thank him more openly, more loudly, and more munificently, if the king and clergy thought it expedient.

Corbière. That affair of the censorship was opportune. Every nation is restored to tranquillity and independence, yet is open-mouthed for Lives of Napoleon.

Villèle. Too true: I have seen one, compiled from old gazettes, that made the author's fortune:

yet the style is low and ungrammatical wherever | king must forbid; or where would be distinction? it is his own, and the materials are coarse and where prerogative? M. Canning by our advice undigested. You would not trust a valet with an has assumed the tone and air of a liberal, in order odd glove, who possesses so little discernment of to make the liberals of England keep the peace, the truth, or feels so little desire of it. The and to torpefy and paralyze the efforts of the author had the effrontery to ask Madame Hor- rebels. Two or three years ago an idle visionary, tense for documents; and, because she refused an obscure and ignorant writer, in a work enthem, he blackens the whole house from top to titled Imaginary Conversations, was hired by some bottom, running first among the gazetteers, and low bookseller to vilify all the great men of boasting publicly that she complied with his the present age, to magnify all the philosophers wishes. and republicans of the past, and to propose the means of erecting Greece into an independent state. Unhappily we find ourselves reduced to adopt the plan of this contemptible author, who writes with as much freedom and as little care for consequences as if he could claim the right of entering the cabinet, and held a place under government of three thousand pounds a-year. We have however inserted one paragraph of our own, which totally neutralizes the remainder.

Corbière. Cannot we employ him? Villèle. Peace, peace! He serves us, and is paid by others. The best arrangement possible.

Corbière. We may indirectly guide him to waylay our enemies. All popular writers must have many assistants at the press: without it, who can be popular? Let him call out as many as he wants of these let them join him at the first whistle, and push down the precipice any one we may point out to him, walking alone and unconcernedly in the narrower paths of literature, where few people come, and none help.

Corbière. I am glad to hear it: what is that? Villèle. Turkey shall admit only whom she chooses for chief magistrate of Greece. This will

Villèle. The thought is a good one: we will reduce the nation to the same condition as Walfollow it.

Unless we had erected the censorship, fifty hired writers would not have sufficed. Those who hated and detested Napoleon, while he was living and in authority, began to think his death a calamity to the world. We were told of his victories, of his institutions, of his rewards to valour, to agriculture, to manufactures, to letters, to all the fine arts, to worth of every kind. We were asked what genius languished under him, what industry was discouraged, what invention was reprimanded, what science was proscribed. We were reminded of public festivals to honour the obscurer fathers of general officers, and of public grief at their funerals. He did great evil: how much greater must that be (people cry) which covers and conceals it, and which lets our France, bending in sadness over the abyss, see now but the titles of her triumphs, and one bright name below them.

Corbière. Galimatias! galimatias!

Villèle. So it is. There is no danger of his rising up from the dead before his time. Only one thief ever did that.

Corbière. And it was not to filch or fight, but to eat a good supper in Paradise.

Villèle. Which he must have wanted after the work of the day.

Corbière. He died a catholic; he confessed in articulo; he prayed.

Villèle. Well; we may think at some other time of the worthy thief. Thank God, we have nothing left to apprehend from liberalism or letters.

Corbière. I doubt whether the censorship would not have saved us, even without the giraffe.

Villèle. There never was a question, in ancient days or modern, in which every people of Europe was perfectly agreed, until the Greek cause was agitated. Now what every people wishes, every

lachia and Moldavia.

Corbière. But will it not render the Greeks as ready to admit the Russians?

Villèle. Do not look forward. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Looking forward makes philosophers: looking backward makes dissidents: the good catholic and sound royalist do neither.

Corbière. There never was anything so wonderful in policy, as that Russia should have abstained so long from hostilities with Turkey, when every nation in Europe called on her against the oppres sor of Greece, the violator of treaties, the persecutor of that religion of which her emperor is head, the murderer of those patriarchs whom she vene rates as martyrs; and when the most ingenious of her enemies could not deny the justice of her cause. The British minister would not have dared to ask from Parliament one shilling to oppose it and in France both royalist and republican have entered into a conspiracy for Greece. The king and his ministers alone are out of it: in all other countries of Europe the minority consists of the same number and the same persons.

:

Villèle. Never were three millions of francs so wisely spent as the last of ours at Petersburg. How the child Nicolas will stamp and stare! Chateaubriand says of us, in his poetical mood, "Children of Charlemagne and St. Louis, you have broken the spear of Pallas, and plucked her owlet." Come along, my dear Corbiere! we shall sleep soundly after dinner on the cushion stuffed with her feathers.

Corbière. Russia may give us some trouble yet: not indeed our colleagues his ministers; but Nicolas. He must find them out at last.

Villèle. Why did the booby wait to play his rubber till the lights were out? I suspect he will wake in the morning with a cramp in the calf, for having stood so long cross-legged behind our

chairs. M. Canning may ratify now, if he will ; | the most consistent of men, though (between ourour king will not take it amiss in him; nor his selves) he has deserted his party, supplanted his neither. patrons, and abandoned every principle he protested he would uphold.

Corbière. We will compliment him in the name of our royal master and in our own. We will speak magnificently of his firmness, his perseverance, his timing of things well.

Corbière. Do you call that inconsistency? I thought you a better casuist. We have him where we wanted him: could not we make the other his successor, if still living? He was merely called in the chamber of representatives what we are called Corbière. Is he? How he will laugh then at the every-where else. Such men should divide the dupes he has made!

Villèle. He understands jokes and jeers: he himself is a joker and jeerer.

world.

Corbière. Then the best thing you can do, is, to let people there write for ever. Here indeed they have lost all decency: persons who do not pay fifty franes a-year in taxes, were setting us right perpetually.

Villèle. Ah! my dear Corbière! his dupes Villèle. Keep the world before the fire awhile never shut their eyes but upon full pockets: longer, and its flesh and bones will separate more they are whigs and Scotchmen: cheat them if easily. Let it cool a little in the dish before we you can be not cheated by them if you can help touch it with our fingers: others have harder it. They are lawyers, literators, metaphysicians ; | ones and more enterprising, but will never lift so but whose metaphysics have always a nucleus of much to the mouth. The pulpit is ours, the pen attractive arithmetic in the centre. Scotland is ours, the bayonet is ours: we have quashed is the country where everyone draws advantage everything that was not: we have only to make from every wind that springs up, from every van England do the same, now she has a liberal for a that turns, and catches his grist from under it. minister. In that country, if you wrote dwarf on They are fierce with empty stomachs, and con- the back of a giant he would go for a dwarf. fident with full ones. Their tune is always the same; the words alone are different; and even these are thrown backward and forward and shuttled with such dexterity, they would persuade you they are of the same substance, tendency, and | import; and that, if you cannot perceive it, the fault is entirely in your apprehension. Edinburgh is the city where a youth practises best the gymnastic exercises of patriotism. Time never fails to render his eye-sight clearer, to knit his joints with sounder logic, to force away in due season the shrivelling blossom from the swelling fruit, and to substitute the real and weighty for the speculative and vain. Somebody of this description, I know not whether Scotch or English, or partaking of both, but whig unequivocally, was called a liar in the House of Commons by his worthy friend M. Canning; and you would really have thought him angry; so admirably did he manage it. Now he swears that M. Canning is

Villèle. Always to set one right is very wrong: patience wears out under it. The indexes of a watch may be turned by key after key, and finger after finger, until at last they are so loose that everything moves them but the works.

Corbière. My dear Villèle, you grow dull; you reflect; you reason; you make observations. In fine, the Greeks are past hope; the good cause is safe.

Villèle. Down comes the Parthenon: down comes the temple of Theseus: down comes the study of Demosthenes.

Corbière. Away with paganism and republicanism! Vive le roi !

Villèle. Vive le roi !

THE LADY LISLE AND ELIZABETH GAUNT.*

Lady Lisle. Madam, I am confident you will pardon me; for affliction teaches forgiveness. Elizabeth Gaunt. From the cell of the condemned we are going, unless my hopes mislead me, where alone we can receive it.

Tell me, I beseech you, lady! in what matter or manner do you think you can have offended a poor sinner such as I am. Surely we come into this dismal place for our offences; and it is not here that any can be given or taken.

Lady Lisle. Just now, when I entered the prison, I saw your countenance serene and cheerful; you looked upon me for a time with an unaltered eye: you turned away from me, as I fancied,

* Burnet relates from William Penn, who was present, that Elizabeth Gaunt placed the faggots round her body

with her own hands. Lady Lisle was not burnt alive,

though sentenced to it, but hanged and beheaded.

only to utter some expressions of devotion; and again you looked upon me; and tears rolled down your face. Alas! that I should, by any circumstance, any action or recollection, make another unhappy. Alas! that I should deepen the gloom in the very shadow of death.

Elizabeth Gaunt. Be comforted: you have not done it. Grief softens and melts and flows away with tears.

I wept because another was greatly more wretched than I myself. I wept at that black attire; at that attire of modesty and of widowhood.

Lady Lisle. It covers a wounded, almost a broken heart: an unworthy offering to our blessed Redeemer.

Let us offer our prayers and our thanks at once
Elizabeth Gaunt. In his name let us now rejoice!

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