readily ascribed them to the talents and genius of the conqueror, without perceiving that the fair chances of success were, from the first outset, so much in his favour as to render his task comparatively easy. They forgot that during eight months his victories produced only negative results, brought only moral advantages, and that the success of the whole campaign had to be risked on the fate of every battle fought to maintain the blockade of Mantua: a single defeat would, even at the last moment, have driven the Republicans back beyond the maritime Alps. The extravagancies advanced by his worshippers, who so shamefully exaggerate the strength as well as the losses of the vanquished, shew that they did not think their idol could stand on a plain pedestal of historical truth. These writers tell us on every occasion of the great talents and brilliant genius displayed by Napoleon, but the proofs of these high qualities are constantly wanting; for the merit of victories gained in bold front-to-front onsets by soldiers placed to no particular advantage by their general, may, with more justice, be claimed for the troops than for the commander. The vastly superior composition of the French army greatly outbalanced the small numerical superiority of their adversaries, and the impulse which the French troops had acquired by the conquests of Holland, Belgium, and the left bank of the Rhine, had, of course, extended to the army of Italy. The French general was altogether independent in his actions, and had all the resources of the conquered countries completely at his disposal; and used them, indeed, with the most ruthless and robberlike profusion.

Beaulieu, Wurmser, and Alvinzy, the Austrian commanders vanquished by Napoleon, though no doubt brave, zealous, and honourable men, had never been distinguished for talents, and had only risen to command by family influence and length of service. Time has laid many of their errors fairly open to inspection, and it is now clear that a moderate degree of energy was alone wanting to have rendered them victorious at Castiglione, Arcole, and Rivoli.

When, shortly before the termination of the contest, the Archduke

Charles assumed the command, the Austrian army was so feeble in numbers, the morale of the soldiers so greatly broken, as to leave little prospect of success till reinforced by troops not yet depressed by so many disasters. What forces the imperial commander could have assembled for the defence of Vienna we are unable to state, but all the best-informed writers seem now to agree in the belief, that if the Austrian government had persevered at the moment instead of consenting to the truce of Leoben, the outset of Napoleon's career would already have exhibited a catastrophe little short of what the rout of Leipzig displayed sixteen years afterwards.

We know that it is easy to defeat armies by the aid of buts and ifs, and that it was long the fashion to ridicule those who vanquished Napoleon by such auxiliaries. "Austerlitz, Friedland, Wagram, might all," we are all told," have ended in disasters instead of triumph, if the vanquished had persevered, and if Napoleon had been an ordinary commander; but he was a man of great genius, well able to foil such contingencies." Time, however, brought a change; the hypothetical particle rose into mighty reality; gallant nations and resolute commanders appeared in the field against him; the moral force acquired by so many previous victories lent him great strength; French armies fought with their usual bravery; but of the boasted talents and lauded genius, not a single spark could be discovered. Then it was, when extravagant exaggerations were no longer deemed sufficient, that barefaced romance was called in to supplant history; then we had the St. Helena Memoirs, the Victoires et Conquêtes, the fabricated Memoirs of Fouché, Coulincourt, and others of the same class, appealed to as legitimate sources of history; till in the end, the world actually received the fabulous versions of the burning of Moscow, of the destruction of the bridge of Leipzig, the tales of Marmont's treason, and the celebrated sauve qui peut" of Waterloo, not only as established facts, but as great leading events, which had alone marred the splendid conceptions of Napoleon; and thus influenced the destinies of mighty empires! And all this in the nineteenth century!

66

Nor many seasons ago I was enjoying the summer-tide in the pleasant county of Kent; and as autumn ripened around me, I almost forgot that its maturity would usher in that wintry period which always recalls me to my metropolitan manacles. I do not mean to give the real names of the seaside town in which I had pitched my tent-of the old house near it, of which my anecdote treats -nor of the family to which that house belonged. There are tragedies consummating yearly in pleasant places at this very moment; but it is for the future to exhibit them to the public scrutiny; and there are few actors in such scenes who court the notoriety of a legitimate name. And in truth it was a pleasant place where that old mansion, half castle, half manor-house, had its site. Standing, or rather, when I saw it, falling into gradual decay, amidst rich cornfields, on a gentle acclivity that looked upon the wide sea, it had subsided into a rambling, ruinous farmhouse, with high gables, and couple of projecting parapets, which told their tale of better days in the olden time. But it is not of the olden time our tale tells, or we might have spared ourselves the delicacy of veiling the true name of the place.

a

It was during one of my first rambles through a part of the country to which I was a stranger, that I was struck by the anomalous appearance of the "Old House;" but there was no person in sight of whom I could make inquiries regarding it; so I strolled on and on, until at length I reached a bottom or narrow dell, entirely shut in by the small trees and large shrubs which surrounded it, forming a dense thicket. A limited space at the very lowest part of this bottom remained clear from the redundant wilderness of sloe-bushes, wild roses, and brambles, that formed a safe shelter for the hedgehogs, in which this part of the country abounds. As I reached this clear space I became aware that I was not alone; amongst the long grass in the very middle of the din

gle sat a grim-looking old gipsy. woman, busily shelling a quantity of peas- no doubt her personal booty, reft from some neighbouring field.

She no sooner saw me than beginning the usual whine of solicitation, she offered to read my fortune; and willing to have a little chat with her I crossed her hand with the "sesame silver;" but soon tired of her twaddle, I asked her the name of the old farm-house which I had just passed, and to whom it belonged.

"Rosebourne, my gentleman, has belonged to many," said she; "but the old folk are not there. It was a black deed that brought an ill name on the house, and evil things will walk about it as long as one stone stands upon another."

This reply led to further questioning; and a few additional sixpences elicited the facts I am about to relate.

Almost a hundred years ago the house of Rosebourne was the residence of the Chesterton family, then reduced in numbers and in wealth from what it had been in former times. Gilbert Chesterton, the master of Rosebourne, was a fine, handsome young fellow, whose personal advantages were unfortunately accompanied, as is too frequently the case, by a weak head and a feeble intellect. He was, however, free from vicious propensities; and, luckily, his mother, a lady of great prudence and judgment, resided with him, continuing in truth to exercise the judicious control of a parent over a silly child, to his great advantage as well as to the satisfaction of all belonging to them. She was his able and willing counsellor in every emergency; preserving him from the imposition of crafty and mercenary advisers, as well as from the influence of pernicious example, and the evils into which his natural credulity and good nature might have led him. He was her only living child, but the three orphan daughters of a brother of her late husband shared the hospitalities of Rosebourne, and to one of these

amiable girls it was her chief desire to unite her son; but, in the affairs of matrimony, there are strange discrepancies, events forestalling all our determinations, and thwarting the most Machiavelian manœuvres. It so happened that when Gilbert had reached his thirtieth year, and just as his mother had counted on the speedy termination of her hopes by a union between the cousins, that, to her horror and affliction, she discovered what, indeed, she had never suspected, an intrigue between her son and her confidential servant. This girl, Hannah Filmer, was of low parentage, but great natural shrewdness and a resolute and ambitious disposition had stood her in the stead of education, so that she was generally looked up to as a person very superior to her class. Artful, time-serving, and, withal, very beautiful, she had long crept not only into all the secrets of her kind mistress, but into the accessible heart of her mistress's son, when, unexpectedly, all was revealed.

Hannah was discharged instantly; but the fierce and almost insane anger of Gilbert on the occasion, so utterly unlike his customary childlike docility, coupled with the shock her feelings had sustained at the discovery of so much perfidy in one in whom she had confided, threw the old lady into a fever from which she never recovered; nor had her corpse lain three months in consecrated dust ere Hannah was reinstalled at Rosebourne as the lawful wedded wife of its proprietor. His orphan cousins, expelled with contumely, removed to a small cottage near — and it soon became obvious that the new mistress of Rosebourne was averse to all who had been befriended by her predecessor; while before a year had passed, her husband's happiness seemed to have no better source than idleness, wassailry, and all that want of self-care which preserves respectability.

The hospitality and charity which used to make the Chesterton family so popular, ceased to be practised; and the most churlish niggardliness and meanness marked the living and conduct of the new mistress, whose low-bred and unprincipled kindred were now all in all at Rosebourne. Amongst these was one suspicious

character, long looked upon with little less than detestation by all who knew him. Benjamin Bailey, or, as he was called, Black Ben, had by turns been sailor, pirate, smuggler; he was a huge, powerful fellow, swarthy as a mulatto, and was as coarse in manners as in appearance; while, to the disgust of the few respectable people who continued to associate with the Chestertons, he seemed to rule with undisputed authority over all at Rosebourne, the domineering lady not even excepted. Ere long, however, reports coupled his name with hers in a manner that subjected both to the contempt and scrutiny of the world. It was bruited about that on one occasion Gilbert himself had discovered an intimacy between the cousins which aroused him from his wonted inertion to one of those violent bursts of fury to which the feeble in intellect are prone. Ben Bailey, ferocious as he was, nevertheless was driven with opprobrium from the house; and angry menaces were heard to pass between them. A month, however, had barely passed before a reconciliation was brought about by Mrs. Chesterton; and soon after, at a public dinner at Gilbert was

heard to say that he was going in a few days to Calais on business of importance, which might detain him for a week.

Not many days thereafter a gentleman who called at Rosebourne was informed that Mr. Chesterton had crossed the Channel, but was expected daily. Weeks, however, passed unmarked by his return, and at length his wife instituted inquiries, as she declared she had not heard from him since his departure. She felt, or feigned, the most acute anxiety. Bailey was despatched to Dover, and thence passed over to Calais, returning from both places without having found any traces of the missing squire. At last, when more than a month had elapsed, the family lawyers called a meeting; search was made for a will, and one was discovered of so recent a date as a week before his disappearance. All was left to his wife; not even his nearest connexions or most faithful servants were remembered. Time passed; Gilbert was firmly believed to have perished in France, or to

have been accidentally drowned on his passage to it. And in those days such things might have happened more easily than now; the spirit of investigation was not so busy-it lay dormant beneath the wings of slumbering justice. At length, when all but the members of his own family seemed to have forgotten him, Gilbert Chesterton's widow grew in opulence and increased in unpopularity, no one appearing to benefit by her accumulating wealth but her kinsman, Ben Bailey, who led a life of reckless dissipation, until, in a midnight fray at

he caused the instant death of a comrade by a sudden blow, but had the good luck to escape to the French coast, nor was he again heard of for many years.

At length, when age had bent the form, blighted the beauty, and blanched the black locks, of the lady of Rosebourne, it was reported to her that a travelling tinker craved audience of her. Her refusal to see him was answered by a request that she would look at a ring which he sent her. Mrs. Chesterton evinced considerable agitation at the sight of it, and the stranger was summoned. He was a stout old man, his face seamed with scars, his hair grizzled, and with a fierce red eye, which had no companion. After a long visit, he left the presence of the lady, who issued orders for the immediate instalment of the stranger in a snug little cabin upon her property, recently become vacant by the death of a tenant. And here, under the name of Beale, he continued to ply the trade of a tinker.

Years passed, during which strange stories went about of the singular influence of Tinker Beale over the mistress of Rosebourne, until one night, stumbling over a chalk-pit, he had the misfortune to break his leg, and when discovered in the morning by a chance passenger he was raving under fever.

At the same time, on the same night, another deathbed scene was not far distant. In an oak-panelled chamber at Rosebourne, on a stately bed, lies the mistress of the house in the last struggle. Though upwards of seventy, her eyes are still keen and hawklike; and as they wander, or rather rush, restlessly over the group of mercenaries who attend

her, a something witchlike and unholy seems to fill her whole being. Her favourite kinsfolk are present, but to their earnest questions as to what her last desires are, she replies not, save by brief denials of the proffered aid of priest or physician. Their still more earnest appeals to her benevolence,—their solicitations that she should reveal the secret deposits of her hoarded wealth, are all in vain. No reply, save a muttered word that sounded more like an imprecation than a prayer, was vouchsafed them. The night was stormy, and the cold intense; a wood-fire blazed merrily on the hearth, while death was busy in the chamber where the impatient and worthless relatives of the dying woman would fain have wrested from her the secrets that might enrich them.

"Look, how she keeps gazing at the panel to the right!" whispered one of the women.

"It is quite awful!" said another. "Did not Gilbert's picture use to hang there?"

"What is that you say of Gilbert?" cried the dying woman, in a hollow tone. "Who dares say that he is here? The dead do not walk! -'tis a lie! What for do ye whisper? Water! water!-I am choking!"

They wetted her lips, and were again about to seat themselves, when, crackling on the hearth, a huge fagot burst with a loud report, one of the cinders starting from the fire and striking against the very panel of which they had been a minute before talking. The women, startled at first, arose to remove the still burning cinder.

"No, no!-dare not to touch it!" screamed the expiring woman. "Not there not there! Touch not that,

or curses-curses

And sitting up in the bed, her arm extended at full length, her long, skeleton finger pointing to the panel, her eyes glaring wildly, the mistress of Rosebourne stiffened into a clayey corpse. When the horrified attendants drew near the couch, they found her stone-dead in that strange and unnatural position.

After they had stretched her down, and in vain tried to close the ghastly eyes, their first thoughts were of themselves.

"Depend upon it," said one, "her money lies hid behind that panel, or why forbid us to touch it ?"

It was the spark from the fagot," said another.

"Not a bit; it must have been the panel. Let us break it open before any body is aware that she is dead!"

A carving-knife was in the room, and with that and the poker the covetous gold-seekers soon forced the panel out; nor were their hopes of discovering something defeated. But it was not money they found; it was the mouldering bones of a human corpse !

The tinker lay in the agonies of death next morning, when the medical man who had attended him entered the cabin. A gipsy woman, who had served as nurse to the sick man, and who, indeed was the chance passenger who found him after his fall,

sat near the pallet, and heard the doctor ask him how he felt.

"Is Hannah Filmer-is Mrs. Chesterton still alive?" was the reply.

The medical man related her death, and the strange discovery of the body behind the panel.

"It is the body of Gilbert-of her husband!" said the tinker. "We murdered him, and hid him there!" And so it was.

For many years after that fearful act the room had been shut up, the lady declaring she could not sleep in the apartment where her dear husband had slept so long beside her; but a few weeks before she was seized

with her last illness, she insisted on its being prepared for her. As for her paramour, kinsman, and confederate, Benjamin Bailey, otherwise Black Ben the Tinker, he expired in a few moments after the dreadful confession had passed his lips.

AND who was Musaus? Was he that Museus who lived in the far-off mythic ages of Greece, who claimed Orpheus for his father, or, as Plato will have it, the moon for his mother? Was he the author of the Wars of the Titans, and the first-recorded father that worried a son with moral precepts in hexameters, teeming with all the rugged majesty of the præ-Homeric days? Or was he some forgotten poet of the later times of Greece, who just gave Ovid a model for two of his Heroides and then passed away into oblivion? Or was he a target for Martial's* indignant satire? Was Rufus not to read the sorry Sicilian whose verses were dedicated not to Vesta but Colytto? Or was he only some poor grammarian, who bewildered himself with classifications and particles deep down in the fourth century, who solaced himself with one sunny song of the old days of Greece, and then turned back again for ever to accents and metres, to synæreses and diæreses, to schemata Alemanica and schemata Pindarica, and all the weary labours of coldhearted grammar?

There was a time when these

queries would have been answered with promptitude and knowledge; but, whether for good or for evil, that day has gone by; and few know, and still fewer care about, the author of 340 lines that might be put into competition with any 340 continuous lines in the time-roll of poetry. We mean, however, to make all who read us know something about our forgotten friend, and we shall hope to make some few care. We might indulge in long theories why so gentle a writer has been forgotten in the nineteenth century, when he was the star of the fifteenth; but, after all, it is not worth speculating upon. Nor is it, perhaps, for us to lament over this very pathetically; we have now a sure and certain knowledge of the Greek language, supported on principles that must be common to all languages of the earth; we have Hermann, and Elmsley, and Kühner; and we ought not to sigh for Pareus, Hemsterhuis, and D'Orville; yet still after reading some playful passage of Lucian, some amusing conceit of Chariton, we cannot but regret that we scarcely ever find one single sympathetic soul who can afford a