like and complete presentation than the form The "other Poems" comprise one idyll, adopted by Mr. Tennyson, and Maud pre-" The Brook," which will rank with the idylls sented only in her lover's diary is a vague and of earlier date in its ease of manner and shadowy image, compared with Margaret freshness of feeling; the corrected version of uttering her own heart's music and gleam- the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington's Fuing like an angel of purity and peace neral;" and three or four smaller poems and joy on the lurid storm of Faust's restless which will not add to their writer's poetical earthly passions, and the stony desert glare of reputation, though the one addressed to Fredthe impassable Devil-nature which tempts and eric Denison Maurice, the godfather of the mocks him. poet's son, is a pleasant epistle in verse.

From the Albany Express.

PERSONAL SKETCH OF MADAME JUMEL, WIFE OF AARON BURR.-In Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution, there is a picture of a house that was erected one hundred and fifteen years ago, and which was at one time the headquarters of General Washington. It is situated near the High Bridge, over the Harlem river, and although really within the city limits, is surrounded by forests and dells, giving it a rural and wild aspect. The grounds are beautifully improved, the gardens laid out with taste, and everything around the establishment bears the marks of refinement and wealth.

everything that is considered rare and costly, and curious, may be seen there in lavish profusion.

Madame Jumel lives the life of a recluse. She knows nothing of, and will have nothing to do with, her neighbors around Fort Washington, with a very few exceptions. Even the boys have a judicious fear of her, and trouble neither her orchards nor her flower gardens, nor anything that is hers.

Every evening a gun is fired off on her premises, to warn intruders. Very few persons ever solicit permission to view her grounds, and only a favored minority of these ever have their pe

On this historical spot lives a venerable wo-tition granted. man, whose history has been varied as the This old lady, now seventy-eight years of age, changes in her country's progress have been has one penchant; and that is for gathering rapid. Madam Jumel is a native of Providence, Rhode Island. Her maiden name was Miss Bowen. She came to this city about the year 1798, and in 1805 was married to Monsieur Jumel, a native of France, but then a refugee from the bloody massacre of St. Domingo. They did not live long together, from incompatibility of temper, or some other cause. He soon afterwards died, leaving her three millions of francs in France.

around her refugees from Europe. She is always taking care of a flock of them, and to make them useful, whenever a good musician comes along, she gets him the instrument with which he is most familiar, and in this way she keeps up a very pleasant band of music, which entertains her by their repeated performances.

Madame Jumel, from having mingled so much in the best kind of society, has all the courtly graces and blandness of manner which distinguished les dames d'Honneur of the last century.

She frequently visited Paris, always living in a style commensurate with her husband's preten-To society and the world, generally, she bears sions and weath. She moved in the highest circles, both in France and in this country, of that day, and received the court and homage of the most distinguished men of the time. She subsequently married Aaron Burr, somewhere about the year 1816; but they, too, soon separated. After his death, she continued to live in seclusion at her stately residence on this island, with exceptions of occasional visits to Paris.

She was there soon after Louis Napoleon became Emperor, and was at the Tuilleries on the occasion of a grand ball, where the Emperor recognized her as the widow of his old friendwhich one, tradition does not state. A friend of mine visited Madame Jumel a few days ago, and this has brought freshly to my recollection the romantic incidents of her checkered career. Her residence is described as an earthly paradise, minus the angels.

herself very haughtily, forbidding anything like approaches to familiarity. She is as much of a despot in her own dominions as any monarch who sways a sceptre. She likes her mode of living, has wealth enough, has seen the world, outlived the desires of life, and will consequently probably never again emerge from the quiet enclosure of her elegant residence. She has a beautiful niece living in Bordeaux, who is mar ried, and to whom her property will most likely descend.

DEVIL'S MARKS IN SWINE. We don't kill a pig every day," but we did a short time since; and after its hairs were scraped off, our attention was directed to six small rings, about the size of a pea, and in color as if burnt or branded, on the inside of each fore leg, and disposed curvilinearly. Our laborer informed us, with great gravity, and Everything that art can achieve, or taste de- evidently believed it, that these marks were sire, or money procure, may be found there. caused by the pressure of the devil's fingers, Costly paintings-and among them a genuine when he entered the herd of swine which imme Rubens-articles of vertu, presents from noble diately ran violently into the sea, (see Mark 5: and distinguished persons, autographs, and 11-15; Luke 8: 22, 33). — The Bee.

From the New Monthly Magazine. NOTES ON LITERATURE IN FRANCE.

66

PHILARETE CHASLES.

66

the oracles of Emerson. But of all writers who have thus taken upon them to familiarize French readers with English literature, and its American offshoots, M. Philarète Chasles enAMONG the critical essays with which the joys probably the repute of pre-eminence; so French press teems, we English take naturally diligent, so persevering, so minute, and so misa special interest in those which relate to our cellaneous have been his researches into our own literature. These are a numerous class, literary doings, from Elizabethan days downand the demand seems likely to increase the wards. Seven years he spent on our shores, rate of supply. To allude to a few writers in and made them seven years of plenty: reapthis department: There is M. Arthur Dudley, ing large harvests of our native lore, and laywho, in the Revue des Mondes, has criticised ing them up for the time to come. Sir Bulwer Lytton's "New Timon," and the In many a passage he sets about disabusing poems of Alexander Smith the romantic, and his countrymen of current fallacies on their of Matthew Arnold the classical; and the lite-part concerning English authors. He does it rary merits at large of Thomas Moore and of with a becoming consciousness of superior Charles Dickens. M. E.-D. Forgues has ini- knowledge, of familiar acquaintance with our tiated his countrymen in a large course of Eng-real claims and characteristics. Many perlish belles lettres · - now taking for his theme sons in France," he says, are still persuaded the "Mount Sorel" of Mrs. Marsh, now the that Dr. Young is a great poet, and that there "Hochelaga" of Mr. Warburton - anon turn- once lived a certain sublime bard of the name ing the pages of (ce spirituel badaud) Mr. Tit- of Ossian."* He can teach them a little betmarsh's Irish Sketch-Book," and analyzing ter than that, and does so. Speaking of French the subtle beauties of Alfred Tennyson, and translations of Shakspeare, after the Letourguessing at the enigma meanings of Robert neur type, he says: "I assert that France, ItBrowning, and doing his best by the subtleties aly, and Spain, who have read Shakspeare of Shelly, and the whims and oddities of Thom- translated in this manner, have no knowledge as Hood, and interpreting the natural super- of any two pages of Shakspeare." Again: naturalisms of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the "France," says he, compassionately, “reads strange vagaries of Edgar Poe, and the equivo-Pamela,' and drinks largely of Young. cal tendencies of "Sir Edouard's" Lucretia, France is ignorant that Young made money and the crosses of Mrs. Norton's Stuart of Dun- by his tears, that he shared in the orgies of leath, and the autobiographical mystifications Mary Wortley Montague and of Wharton, of George Borrow; - M. Eugène Forçade has and that he was the most mercenary of introduced to his country women the romances whining mendicants; or, again, that Richof Charlotte Bronte, and analyzed for his coun-ardson combined in his own person a great trymen the History of Mr. Macaulay, and War-deal of the Tartufe with a little of the Avare. burton's Memoirs of Prince Rupert ;-M. John Generous and deluded France admires whatLemoinne has discussed the Memoirs of Lord ever comes from England." This misplaced Malmesbury and of Beau Brummel;-M. generosity, this amiable delusion, M. Chasles Merimée (and others), Grote's History of has the means and the will to correct. Greece; M. Gustave Planche, not a few of His critical remarks on our belles letters our novelists, including Fielding and Bulwer extend over a wide surface. He has a good Lytton, and of our latter-day dramaturges, Ma- deal to say, and to the purpose, about Skelton, turin and Fanny Kemble; - M. Léon de the satirical laureate of Henry VIII. — about Wailly, the sonnets of Shakspeare, the trage- Shakspeare's predecessors, contemporaries, dies of Shakspeare's predecessors, and the lyrics successors in the dramatic art; - he passes of Robert Burns; the life and times of Bo- sentence on Dryden and Nat Lee, on Swift, lingbroke, and the umbratic career of Junius, Sterne, Fielding, Walpole, and our eighteenthhave been minutely treated by M. Charles de century literature in general, while most of the mémusat, who has also given a "study "of that leading names of the nineteenth also pass unfavorite subject for French études, Horace Wal-der his review. With Sir Walter Scott he was pole;-M. Milsand has discoursed on the po- personally acquainted, during his sojourn etical charms of Campbell, of Tennyson, of amongst us, and cordial though discriminating Westland Marston, of Mrs. Browning, of Ed- in his admiration of the great novelist of mund Reade, and of Henry Taylor, Tal- his Shakspearian faculty of discovering vice fourd's plays, Bulwer Lytton's epic, and Car- latent in virtue, and of virtue in vice-his lyle's Latter-Day pamphlets;-M. Montégut power of analyzing and vivifying the charachas interpreted the Christian Socialism of ters at once of a fierce Balfour of Burley and Charles Kingsley's novels and pamphlets, and a sublimely simple Jeannie Deans — his dis the writings of Margaret Fuller, and has appraised the pretensions of Carlyle, and his Du Genie de la Langue Anglaise.' friend John Sterling, and the humors of Sam † Ibid. § II. Slick, and the aspirations of Longfellow, and

-

Les Voyageurs Anglais dans les Salons de

Paris.'

passionate views of diverse forms of life-his neither the purest, nor the most concise, but freedom from exaggeration, pretence, and rhap- certainly one of the most brilliant writers of sody-his purity of moral tendency, his health- the day: a less doubtful opinion than that ful, bracing freshness of thought and style. Diderot and Jean Paul, Sterne and Charles Byron he accounts the representative of the Nodier seem to have contributed in forming his age's sufferings, vanity, bitterness, ennui, mis-vari-colored, sparkling, rapturous style. What ery, impotent passion, aimless and hopeless vio- Frenchman, some may ask, can possibly relish lence, inappeasable discontent, morbid excite- Christopher North? M. Chasles is no straitment followed by depression, and feverish irri-laced Frenchman of the old régime, in his littability accompanied by disgust. "He was a erary tastes; and he avows a genuine zest for coxcomb, haughty, vicious, pretentious, preju- this Scottish vieillard très-blanc et très-vert, and diced, and bragging about some faults from even for the wild work of criticism pursued in which he was actually free; a dandy and a the Noctes. True, this dithyrambic and vascoffer, capricious and resentful" a great grant way of playing the critic is not, he alman rather in point of style than of thought, a lows, without its risks; but neither is the high master in diction and coloring; like Rousseau, and dry school. After all, he reminds his able to condense into one word, that falls like a brethren, Diderot is the survivor of Fréron; thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emo- Hazlitt and Coleridge are authorities, while tion"-while his "morality" may be called the didactic writers of their age are ignored. the "résumé of Hume's and Bayle's; its only "I prefer," he protests, "that crack-brained corollary, suicide." As Shakspeare had, as it book of Cazotte's, or one line even of that were, summed up the middle ages and an- doctor Mathanasius, who is without common nounced modern analysis; as Molière had im- sense, to the stale and sterile seriousness of mortalized the good sense of the bourgeois La Harpe." One of our critic's brethren in classes; as Voltaire had represented the the craft, M. Ch. de Mazade considers him to French mind, armed for the destruction of the be in fact more than half an Englishman in olden world; so it was reserved for Byron to his reflections, opinions, judgments, tastes, and "express in sublime verses the mortal throes modes of thought; all of which, he (the critof civilization, destroying itself, and struggling ic's critic) says, have been formed in England, for new life from amid its own ruinsof passion, self-devouring and self-accursed- of social refinement aspiring to savage life of Europe, proud of her past while abjuring it of that despairing unbelief which fain would believe, and that impotent faith which becomes immersed anew in doubt."

peare, are further blessed with an ear, a memory, and a nervous system, it is disagreeable to find M. Chasles, when professedly quoting Gentle Willy's ipsissima verba, pervert

'With all my imperfections on my head' into the sorry, scraggy ghost of a ghost's line,

'With all my sins on my head.'

Shelley and Keats are also treated of at some length, the latter with marked ability and fine critical insight. Professor Wilson celebrated saying of Dogberry's (by the way, a Nor do we relish M. Chasles's new reading of a (called by M. Chasles, Doctor Wilson, which great favorite with M. Chasles, who expresses is a mistake, and moreover Doctor Robert special admiration for ce magistrat subalterne, bon Wilson, which is another *) is pronounced petit juge de paix, excellent homme, qui se nomme Dogberry ;-adding, of the man who would fain have been written down an ass, Il a devine les an

Shakspeare's countrymen read and relish it, is, "most tolerable and not to be endured: " but oh, what a falling off is there in M. Chasle's version!Le Dogberry de Shakspeare . . . . dirait, em ployant sa phrase ordinaire (!), qu'elle est most ex cellent and not to be endured." (L'Angleterre au XIXe siecle, p. 895.) As a zealous philologian, alone, we might have expected M. Chasles to catch at the tolerable' and 'not to be endured' of the original.

M. Chasles we should doubt to be a French-tagonismes de Kant):-The phrase in question, as man at all if he did not now and then make a slip in English orthography or onomatology. But, by comparison with others, he is on the whole singularly free from mistakes in this matter. His utmost errors generally extend no farther than the kind instanced above, where one of our glorious John's is turned into a Doctor Bob-or than some slight alteration, addition, or omission of letters: thus Cowper is spelt Cooper, Spenser is Spencer, Jeffrey is Jeffreys (not always, however, though Southey, who called him Judge Jeffrey, would *In the volume on Men and Manners in the have loved to have it so), Collier is Collyer, Sir Nineteenth Century, M. Chases dwells with interThomas More is turned into Thomas Moore, est on his early life in London, 'in a little room Shaftesbury becomes Shaftsbury, etc. Two of near Hyde Park and Grosvenor-square.' James the Second's female victims on the Bloody calls with rapture the days passed on the banks of Assize are called mistriss Lys and mistriss Grant, the Serpentine, with Byron's last poem, or Scott's whom we have no great difficulty in recognizing as new romance. The first balls at which he ever Alice Lisle ('the Lady Alice') and Elizabeth Gaunt.assisted' were 'those of Grosvenor-square.' He Abraham Holmes too is turned into le major Holmer, and Percy Kirke into le colonel Kerk. But even trivial errors of this kind seldom occur; and of them some are perhaps imputable to the printer.

But to those who, being familiar with Shaks

He re

formed acquaintance with several men of renown. Jeremy Bentham was one of them-'that La Fontaine among philosophers.' M. Chasles was 'touched by his evident sincerity, but dissatisfied with his doctrines, the offspring of materialism and