kingdom, and dwelt thenceforth in the heart of the tribe of Hachan, stimulating their devotion to their young chief. As the power of the emir rapidly increased through the talents and influence of the old marabout and his own transcendent genius, formidable rivals presented themselves to dispute his authority. The beys of Constantine and of Titery had all along protested against the pretensions of the young sultan, as well as the invasion of the French. These powerful chiefs, divided amongst themselves from motives of personal ambition, now united, in the hope of subduing Abd-el-Kader with the help of the French. But he had anticipated them, by entering into a treaty of peace with General Desmichels, who rejected the propositions of the beys, and, in order to protect his new ally from their treachery, advanced against them with his army. During the continuance of this treaty, Abd-el-Kader returned to the guatna, to render the last tribute of filial affection to his now aged and dying father, who, shortly after his return, expired. The great influence and accumulating power of Abd-el-Kader with his people began to receive the attention of the French, until at last, in order to consummate a design of permanently occupying Algiers, it was determined to suppress the young emir, and disorganize his power. General Desmichels had entered into a treaty with the sultan, and had recognized his sovereignty, as well as a definite territory, but the French soon found a pretext for breaking this treaty. Abd-elKader had crossed the Cheliff, the boundary fixed in the treaty, and General Trezil, glad of the pretext, collected his forces and led them against the Arabs. With an army of two thousand five hundred men, Trezil marched to the plain of Figuier, where Abd-elKader had twice before fixed his camp. Finding no Arabs here, he employed a deserter from the emir's forces to lead him upon the enemy. The French set out at four o'clock in the morning, with the hope of taking the emir by surprise and cutting his army in pieces. They found themselves suddenly involved, however, in a swamp, where their horses and baggage sunk so deep as to throw them into confusion, and where the feet of the men and the wheels of the carriages were obstructed by masses of rank herbage. After enduring much fatigue, the army at last passed through this swamp, and began to deploy leisurely upon a plain beyond it; and here it began to be supposed that the guide, to whose fidelity they had trusted, had proved false, and the whisper of treason had just begun to circulate through the ranks, when suddenly the advance-guard was attacked by the cavalry of Abd-el-Kader, and the whole army was surrounded. The Arabs rushed upon the French with great impetuosity. The carriages, half-buried amongst the mud, could not be removed, and the horses sank under their riders to the stirrups. Confined to a narrow space, and treading upon a loose bottom, the army seemed to be a confused mass of men and horses, which the bullets of the Arabs incessantly mowed down. The battle was fierce and bloody, and the French were at last broken, routed, and obliged to retreat with great slaughter. The Arabs, always ready to give up the chase to pillage, ceased the pursuit, and the broken elements of the French army were collected and re-formed, and began to retreat in order. The flying host was still harassed by the horsemen of the desert, however, until it took up a strong position for the night; but when it began to move upon the morrow it was again furiously attacked. Twelve hundred Frenchmen fell in that expedition, nearly the half of the whole army, and almost all their baggage fell into Abd-el-Kader's hands. This battle and defeat at Figuier decided the French government to send to Africa a large army and an energetic leader, in order to contend with and crush the bold and able emir. Marshal Clausel was intrusted with the expedition upon account of his courage, firmness, and long acquaintance with the African mode of warfare; and now it was that France began to develop her vast project of African dominion and colonization, by subduing a country whose government she affected to have merely gone to temporarily chastise. This old and experienced French soldier found, however, that he had no ordinary foeman to contend with in the young emir. The war which the French had begun with the Dey of Algiers, ostensibly as a war of defence against the piratical practices of that potentate, was now by degrees extended and maintained as a war of territorial acquisition, and treaties were made and broken with the young emir upon the merest pretences, if such suited the purposes of the agents of French aggrandizement. The courage, the skill, the rapidity of his motions, and the suddenness and constancy of his attacks, have conduced to render the Algerine war to France one of the most expensive, deadly, and harassing in which she ever engaged, and has exhibited her in the most heartless, cruel, and savage aspect that ever civilized nation assumed. wonderful illustration of the effects of an idea, even upon the most darkened and credulous of minds. Impressed with a belief of his invulnerability and semi-divinity, hosts of armed men flocked around the standard of the young sultan, shaking their bright scimitars on high and shouting their war-cries. Living on parched barley and water, sleeping on rush mats, and sweltering in the rays of a burning sun, they came to do the will of a supposed prophet, and they gave themselves courageously and devotedly to the work. Might not Christian men take from these darkened savages an example of courage and earnestness, in exemplifying the faith of peace and love? The fakirs, or professors of divination, in Ghris, still represent Abd-el-Kader as a second messenger of Allah, and his mother Lella Zahara is held in great esteem as the woman announced in the Scriptures as the mother of him who is to deliver the true believers from the power of the infidels. She threw all the recognized chivalry of warfare aside, and, trampling under foot all the use and wont of national contention, began to commit those awful wholesale massacres and burnings called razzias, the memory of which will disgrace the name of Louis Philippe among civilized nations as long as the history of his reign remains. Men, women, and children were consigned to suffocation, and flames, and the murderous steel, not because they were active enemies of France, but because the armies of Abd-el-Kader were recruited from the dohairs in which they dwelt. A cruel, brutal war of extermination was begun, and those who could not conquer the young emir of the Arabs by the sword, sought to destroy all his hopes and his power by annihilating his people. If the object of these razzias was the subjugation of Abd-elKader, they were successful. He who had refused to succumb to the French power succumbed to the tears and groans of his countrymen. To save his people, Abd-el-Kader That Abd-el-Kader's mission is divine is a yielded, in 1847, to General Lamoriciere, general belief amongst the Arabs. They are under a solemn promise that he should be convinced that he exercises an authority imallowed to retire to Alexandria. That prom-mediately derived from God, and that no ise was broken in the most flagrant manner; the confiding chief was kept, in spite of his petitions and entreaties, in a climate which affected his health; and he still remains a prisoner in the Castle of Paris. The Republic has granted some relaxation to the severity of his confinement, but still it remains for them to deal justly with Abd-el-Kader. In his captivity the Arab chief preserves all the dignity that had characterized his freedom. The same patient submission to the will of Allah, and the same calm and heroic firmness, sustains him in a French prison that had raised him above personal submission, when he was mounted on his Arab steed, on his native plain of Ghris. One noble attribute of Abd-el-Kader's character is his humanity. He was never known voluntarily to consent to the execution of a prisoner. He would oppose the whole of his chiefs in divan when such a measure was proposed, and even submit to play upon their superstitious credulity rather than allow the death of a man in cold blood. He has often saved the lives of those who were in great jeopardy, from declaring that Muley (saint) Abd-el-Kader had, in a vision, denounced heavy misfortunes upon the tribes if they slew the prisoners under trial; and as Muley Abd-el-Kader's benevolent protection is supposed to be extended over Jew, Mussulman, and Christian, without exception, the plea has often prevailed. The life of such a man as the emir is a human power can subdue him. His mishaps are viewed with a perfect indifference as regards his ultimate success. The loss of a battle and the abandonment of his standard by his friends are viewed as accidents from which he will rise more terrible than ever to crush his enemies. If Abd-el-Kader does not partake deeply of the general superstition, he is perfectly subject to the fatalist belief, and the desertion of his soldiers caused him no uneasiness. He speaks of his misfortunes as inevitable. Treachery and defeat are unable to shake his confidence. He yields to his fate without a murmur, assured that his day of success will soon return. It seems now, however, as if the hopes of the emir were completely extinguished, and that he has no other exercise for his faith save resignation. Yet he supports his misfortunes with a dignity which preserves the consistency of his character and puts to shame the policy which would impose restrictions upon that liberty which he voluntarily yielded upon a pledge that it should to a certain extent be secured. Lella Kheira, the wife of Abd-el-Kader, unlike her husband, is tall, and possessed of a noble carriage, while her features are remarkably beautiful, and her voice soft and musical. Her costume is that of all Arab women; but she generally wears a peculiar cloak, made of red or blue cloth. În 1845 she had had four children, two sons and two daughters. From Blackwood's Magazine. MRS. HEMANS. FELICIA HEMANS and the poetesses of England! Such would probably be the form in which the toast would run, if literary toasts were the fashion, or such a mode of compliment the one exactly suited to the case. Not that we would venture positively to assert that Mrs. Hemans stands at the head of our poetesses, the first absolutely in point of genius, though there is but one name, that of Joanna Baillie, which occurs to us at the moment as disputing with hers that pre-eminence, but because she, in a more complete manner than any other of our poetesses, represents the mind, the culture, the feelings, and character, of the English gentlewoman. Her piety, her resignation, her love of nature and of home-that cheerfulness easily moved by little incidents, that sadness into which reflection almost always settled-all speak of the cultivated woman bred under English skies, and in English homes. Her attachment to the privacy of life, her wise dislike and avoidance of the éclat of literary renown, and the dull, dry, fever-heat of fashionable circles, tend to complete her qualifications as a fitting representative of her fair countrywomen. The cultivation of her mind, in its weakness as well as elegance, savored, perhaps, too much of what we are compelled to call feminine. Alive at all times to beauty in all its forms, to music, to tender and imaginative thought, she seems to have been almost equally averse to whatever bore the aspect of an analysis of feeling, or an approach to a severe investigation of truth. Present her with the beautiful, but spare her all scientific dissection of it. Let the flower live as her companion; do not rend it to pieces to show its conformation. Let but the faith be tender and true to the heart, and disturb her not with rude inquiries whether it possess any other truth or not. That too much melancholy (at least for her own happiness) which is traceable in her poems, arose in part from events in her life, but in part, also, from this too partial and limited cultivation of the mind. The feelings were excited or refined, but the reasoning powers not enough called forth: no task-work was therefore given to the active intellect; and a mind that could not be at rest was left to brood over sentiments, either the sad heritage of all mortality, or the peculiar offspring of afflictions of her own. We are not imputing, in this remark, any shadow of blame to her; we make the remark because we think that, eminent as she was, she still suffered much from the unwise and arbitrary distinction which is made in the education of the two sexes. The difference between the mental qualities of the sexes is owing, we apprehend, far more to education than to nature. At all events, there is no such natural difference as warrants the distinction we make in the mental discipline we provide for them. There are certain professional studies with which no one thinks of vexing the mind of any one, man or woman, but those who intend to practise the professions; but why, in a good English library, there should be one half of it, and that the better half, which a young woman is not expected to read-this we never could understand, and never reflect on with common patience. Why may not a Locke, or a Paley, or a Dugald Stewart, train the mind of the future mother of a family? or why may not an intelligent young woman be a companion for her brother or her husband in his more serious moods of thought as well as in his gayer and more trifling? Would the world lose anything of social happiness or moral refinement by this intellectual equality of the two sexes? You vex the memory of a young girl with dictionaries and vocabularies without end; you tax her memory in every conceivable manner; and at an after-age you give the literature of sentiment freely to her pillage; but that which should step between the two-the culture of the reason-this is entirely forbidden. If she learns a dozen modern languages, she does not read a single book in any one of them that would make her think. Even in her religious library, the same distinction is preserved. Books of sen timental piety—some of them maudlin enough -are thrust with kindest anxiety and most liberal profusion upon her; any work of theology, any work that discusses and examines, is as carefully excluded. seeking what he calls amusement in town or But matters are mending, and will continue to mend. There are so many women of richly cultivated minds who have distinguished themselves in letters or in society, and made it highly feminine to be intelligent as well as good, and to have elevated as well as amiable feelings, that by-and-by the whole sex must adopt a new standard of education. It must, we presume, be by leaders of their own starting out of their own body, that the rest of the soft and timid flock must be led. We are not contending that there is no difference whatever in the mental constitution of the two sexes. There may be less tendency to ratiocination in woman; there is certainly more of feeling, a quicker and more sensitive nature. One sees this especially in children. Mark them in their play-hours, in their holiday freedom, when they are left to themselves to find matter of enjoyment-how much more pleasure does the girl evidently derive from any beautiful or living thing that comes before it than the boy! We have an instance of it almost as we write. There is a group of children on the beach. The little girl is in perfect ecstasies, as she looks at the sparkling waves that come bounding to her feet; she shouts, she leaps, she herself bounds towards them, then springs back as they approach, half frightened and half pleased-she knows not how to express her delight at this great playfellow she has found. Meanwhile the boy, her brother, does nothing but throw stones at it-of that he seems never wearied. The beach is a perfect armory to him, and he pelts the graceful waves remorselessly. What is their grace to him? So, too, in an inland scene, a garden or a lawn, we have often no- Yes, we are mending. Very different are ticed what exquisite pleasure a little girl will our times from those when Madame de Genfeel as she watches a sparrow alight near her lis published her little work, De l'Influence upon the ground, in search of crumbs or other des Femmes sur la Littérature Francaise food. Her little frame quite thrills as this comme Protectrices des Lettres, et comme Auother little piece of life comes hopping and teurs. She had to contend, with the same pecking about her. She loads it, but with acrid energy, for the privilege of a lady to suppressed voice, with all the endearing epi- write, as a Turkish dame of the present centhets her vocabulary supplies. She is evi- tury might be supposed to display, who dently embarrassed that they are so few; should contend for the privilege of walking she makes up by their frequent repetition. abroad unveiled, or rather unmuffled. And She absolutely loves the little creature, with even she herself thinks it necessary to give all whose movements she seems to have the certain rules to young women who writekeenest sympathy. Her brother, the boy, as she would to young women who dancehe has nothing for it but his unfailing stone, how to comport themselves with consumor he flings his hat at it. Unfailing, fortu- mate propriety; as not to enter into contronately, the stone is not; for, if his skill as a versy, or use big words-in short, to deal marksman responded to his destructive zeal, with printer's ink without soiling the most there is nothing that a stone would kill that delicate fingers. As to that argument drawn would be left alive, or that a stone would from the supposed neglect of domestic duties break that would be left whole. A mere blind-which it seems, in those days just emerganimal-activity seems, at that very interesting age, to distinguish the future lord of the cre ing from barbarity, was still heard of-she dismisses it very briefly. "Comme ces devoirs dans une maison bien ordonnée, ne peuvent jamais prendre plus d'une heure par jour, cette objection est absolument nulle." As there is much implied in that "maison bien ordonnée," and as Madame de Genlis did not write for simple gentle-folks, it is to be hoped that the one hour per diem may admit of extension without any forfeiture of literary privileges. In her time, too, there was thought to be a sort of feud between authors and authoresses-a thing which in our day is quite inconceivable-for she writes, apropos of a charge of plagiarism against La Fontaine, in the following indignant strains:-"Quelles que soient le bonhomie et la candeur d'un auteur, il sait que, par une loi tacite mais universelle, il est toujours dispensé de convenir qu'il doit à une femme une idée heureuse. Dans ce cas seulement le plagiat et le silence sont également légitimes.' We have changed all that: we have had too many instances of women of talent and of genius to doubt their ability to excel-we make no exception-in any branch of literature whatever. We give them, on the other hand, no monopoly of elegance or grace, or delicacy of touch, as some affect to do. These qualities they are very likely to display; but they will be superior in them to authors of the male sex, only just so far as they are superior to those authors in genius and talent. There is still a practice in many critics to detect the style feminine from the style masculine. The sooner this is laid aside the betThere are styles which, speaking metaphorically, one may say have a feminine grace, or a feminine weakness. Such an observation has been made, by Sir James Mackintosh, on the style of Addison. But to pretend to say of a given page of composition whether a man or a woman has penned it, is absurd. We often hear it said, that none but a woman could have written the letters of Madame de Sévigné. If Cowper had been a woman, people would have said the same thing of his letters. They are unrivalled, at least in our own language, for grace and elegance, and wit and playfulness. ter. No wo man, we believe-and the epistolary style is supposed to belong by especial right to the female pen-has ever written such charming letters as those to Lady Hesketh, and his old friend Thomas Hill. As to the letters of Madame de Sévigné, they so evidently come from a mother to a daughter, that it is impossible to forget for a moment the sex of the writer. But if the qualities which have given them literary celebrity are to be pronounced feminine, half the literature of France is of the same gender. Still less can we tolerate the affectation that pretends to discern a certain weakness, a tremulousness of the hand, when the pen is held by a woThere is a grace and elegance, but, man. forsooth, a certain hesitation-a want of vigor and certainty of touch. Nonsense Take Our Village, by Miss Mitford, and the SketchBook, by Washington Irving: they are both of the graceful and elegant order of style; but the lady writes the English language with far more freedom, ease, and vigor, than the gentleman. The poetic element is mingled in her diction with far more taste and judgment. It glitters through her prose as the sunlight in the green tree-throwing its gold amongst the foliage, yet leaving it the same green, and simple, and refreshing object as before. No-we will grant to woman no monopoly in the lighter elegancies, and presume nothing against her ability to excel in the graver qualities of authorship. We have said that Mrs. Hemans was peculiarly the poetess of her country women, but we do not mean to imply by this that her style is peculiarly feminine-for we do not pretend to know what a feminine style is; we thus characterized her because the sentiments she habitually expresses are those which will almost universally find a response in the minds of her country women. It seems an ungracious thing to say, but we do wish that the biographical notice of Mrs. Hemans, appended to the last edition of her works, had not been written by a sister. So near a relative may be presumed, indeed, to know more of the person whose life she undertakes to narrate than any one else; but she may not know what to tell us. Her very familiarity with the subject is against her: she cannot place it at a distance from her, and regard it with a freshness of view; she does not think of recording, she does not even remember, what to her has none of the interest of novelty. A sister who should give to any impartial biographer the materials he required of her, would be found to contribute far more to our knowledge of the person whose life was written, than by holding the pen herself. Besides, a sister can have none, and show none, but sisterly feelings; and though these are very proper and amiable, we want something more. The two or three events which we learn from this biographical notice, and which bear upon the education of the poetess, are soon recorded, and they are the only class of events we feel particularly interested in. Felicia Dorothea Browne-such was the maid |