of human feeling. Langhorne, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, tells us to

"Mark how that rooted mandrake wears His human feet, his human hands." Among its names in this connection are those of the "Devil's Food," and the "Devil's Apple," the "Tuphach el Sheitan' of the Arabs. That this uncanny belief continued down to almost modern times is shown by an anecdote for which Madame du Noyer is responsible. According to this, on the murder of the Maréchal de Fabert in 1662, which was popularly attributed to his having broken a compact with the devil, two mandrakes of extraordinary beauty were found by his friends in his rooms, and these were regarded as conclusive proofs of the diabolical league, of which they failed to find, as they hoped, any written record.

It has always been in great vogue in the East, both Jews and Arabs having from time immemorial also valued it for the magic vir. tues which were so long commonly attached to a love-philtre. This attribute, which dates at least from Old Testament times, remained current in Italy until the Middle Ages, for there are plenty of records showing that there was a brisk demand for the root among the Italian ladies. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the properties attributed to it are those which it shared in common with the Rastrivtrava of Russia, of enabling housebreakers to pick locks, which is certainly one of the most amusing developments of the solar theory. "Love," it is said, "laughs as locksmiths;" but the connection between the mandrake and "burgling" seems a little forced. There is a tradition that the moonwort will unshoe horses if they step upon the plant, and similar powers have been attributed to the vervain and the mandrake.-Chambers's Journal.

A FEW FACTS ABOUT THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY.-The great Siberian Railway, which will more closely connect Europe with the teeming millions of China, Japan, and Eastern Asia, will be commenced this spring. The total length of the line will be 4,810 miles, and the cost about thirty-two millions sterling In case permanent bridges are built over the immense rivers Obi, Yenesei, Lena, etc., the outlay will be still greater. The commercial and political importance of this

undertaking is greater than most people suppose. It will not only help to open out the immense resources of Southern Siberia, but will enable Russia to compete more successfully for the Japanese and Chinese carrying and import trade. Goods that are now sent by sea to Europe will ten years hence be carried overland into Europe, and a good deal of the Chinese carrying trade will go into the hands of Russia. A large portion of the railway will run through millions of acres of the finest virgil soil, over immense rivers, primeval forests which have never been cut, and through countries abounding in mineral and vegetable wealth. When the line is ready it will be possible to work the rich gold, silver, iron, copper, and plumbago mines of Eastern Siberia, which have hardly yet been touched in consequence of the scarcity of labor and the absence of machinery. The rich and fertile regions of the Amoor and Usuri, which boast of a climate as fine as that of France, will then be open to colonists, and also millions of acres of land which are at the present moment almost unpopulated. By means of this railway Russia will be able to convert Vladivostock into a great naval and military station like Sevastopol, and, if necessary, pour several hundred thousand troops on the Chinese frontier in less than three weeks' time. And last, and not least, among the benefits which will accrue to mankind through this undertaking, will be the possibility of visiting China or Japan in about a fortnight from Central Europe, with all that comfort that is attached to railway travelling in Russia. From a Correspondent.

COLORED PHOTOGRAPHS.—The theory of Lippmann's process is described by him as follows: The light entering through the objective passes without sensible deflection through the sensitive film of the plate, and effects, with the light reflected from the metallic layer, the division of the film into extremely fine waves, each of which has the exact thickness required for producing the corresponding color. The vibrations of light are conse quently fixed and reproduced almost in the same way as the sound waves in the phonograph. Professor Lippmann submitted to the Académie des Sciences, Paris, the results of his experiments in various plates and prints, in which the colors were completely fixed, without being subject to change by the action of light or air.

THE reality of History is so unlike the report, that we continue, in spite of much disappointment, to look for revelations as often as an important personage leaves us his reminiscences. The famous book which has been so eagerly expected and so long withheld will not satisfy those who, like the first Queen of Prussia, demand to know le pourquoy du pourquoy. The most experienced and sagacious of men discourses about certain selected events that concerned him, and passes sentence on two generations of contemporaries; but he betrays few secrets and prepares no surprises. Nothing could increase the lustre of the talents which he is known, by the malevolent testimony of Vitrolles, to have displayed at the first restoration, or which are proved by his own correspondence from Vienna. But we are made to know him better; and all that he says and much that he conceals NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIII., No. 6.

brings into vivid light one of the wonders of modern politics.

Three months after the fall of Napoleon, Talleyrand went out of office, opposed by Russia, disliked by the King, hated by the triumphant royalists. Under that. constellation, mainly in the year 1816, be wrote these Memoirs. The undercurrent of motive is to explain, or to explain. away, the earlier part of his career; to expose his incomparable services to the crown, the country, and the dominant party; to show that nothing in the various past disqualifies him for the first place in the councils of the Monarchy he had restored. It is not the plea of a vulgar competitor; for, with all his sleepless ambition, he writes with studied moderation and reserve. He has not the tone of a man contemplating from aloft his own achievements, his immense renown,. his assured place in the central history of 46

the world.

Talleyrand is dissatisfied, satirical, and almost always bitter in his judgment of men. The better to dissociate himself from evil communications, he interpolates a labored attack on the Duke of Orleans, which would be a blot on the composition but for the redeeming paragraph on Sieyès, the best of all the characters he has drawn. He slurs over his own share in the work of the National Assembly, justifies his attitude under Napoleon by the pressing need for monarchy, and by his breach with him on the affairs of Spain, and puts himself straight with the Church by a detailed narrative of the disputes with Rome.

He was reputed too idle a man to be a good writer, and it was supposed that Des Renaudes held the pen for him at one time, and La Besnardière at another. Chateaubriand, who devoted his most tremendous sentences to the business of denouncing him as a traitor in politics and religion, and who insisted that the last action of his life was a deceitful comedy, quotes a letter to himself as evidence that Talleyrand was deficient in ideas, and wrote an unsubstantial style. These volumes are composed with much art, and, in the passage which is an express vindication, with uncommon power. Sometimes the author shows that he is accustomed to careless converse with inferior minds. He has more good sense than originality, and few gleams of unexpected light, like his friend Hamilton, or his master Machiavelli.

Although Talleyrand was in the habit of showing portions of the Memoirs to many persons in his time, his literary executor, Bacourt, determined that they should not be published until the year 1888. At that time they were the property of M. Andral, who would have liked to protract the suppression. This excessive caution has not been explained. Andral, the grandson of Royer Collard, who presided over the Council of State under MacMahon, and, in the struggle for class government, was once thought of as the head of an extra-parliamentary ministry on the American model, was much consulted as a shrewd adviser, steeped in the knowledge of public and private affairs. The business of the day left him without time or care for remoter things, and he lightly eluded inquiry into his precious deposit. He communicated the manu

script to the Count of Paris, though he refused it to his friend Thiers; and he died, bequeathing it to the distinguished writer, who is at the same time a party leader and the bearer of an historic name.

Talleyrand is not favorable to men in authority, or to precepts of attachment and respect. His Memoirs forcibly proclaim that there is no such thing in reason as personal loyalty to a party or a man ; that whoever serves one order of things, does well to be preparing for the next; that it is the note of a strong man to employ principles, and of a weak man to obey them. They are especially injurious to the house of Orleans; and a passage relating to Philippe Egalité is the one portion of the manuscript which has been allowed to disappear. This hiatus of several sheets raises the question of the second copy. The Duke de Broglie publishes the final and authentic text; but an earlier transcript exists, and bears marks of having been retouched by the author himself. For appreciable reasons, its possessor has never chosen, hitherto, to make any use of it; but it will now be known whether it completes the published text, and throws light on the successive growth of the Memoirs. Two or three passages are evidently later insertions; some were written earlier; and it will be interesting to inquire whether the Spanish and the Roman chapters are entirely the work of Talleyrand himself. One of them is hardly in keeping with the usually secular turn of his mind, and both are out of perspective.

French critics will easily detect inaccuracies besides those which the editor has pointed out and corrected. It is not true that the Austrians were defeated in Germany in 1796; Carnot never was at Cayenne; Oudinot was not a marshal in 1808. In one of his letters, Talleyrand showed how little he knew about English politics, when he says that the Whigs were seldom in power for more than a short time since 1688. Slips of memory and involuntary mistakes will not discredit the Memoirs. The omissions are more suspicious and indicate design. The remark that Marengo almost made Hohenlinden superfluous, curiously ignores the treaty with St. Julien, one of the less creditable transactions in the life of the French negotiator. But it would be unjust to insist on things untold; for if the

author, sweeping a vast horizon, passes discreetly over treacherous places, he has not sought opportunities for vainglory, and is too well bred to record the scenes which exhibit his promptness in emergencies and the ease with which he disconcerted opponents. He describes neither the deliberations of the Provisional Government, nor the arts of management by which a Senate peopled with regicides was brought to declare for the Bourbons. He does even less than justice to himself when he relates that Napoleon, refusing to preserve his crown by reducing the territory, said: "Find other masters-je suis trop grand pour vous. This saying, made known last year, and bearing the mark of the lion's claw, proved that the mysterious duplicate is authentic. What Talleyrand does not say is that Napoleon, after these heroic words, assented at last to the conditions offered at Châtillon; and that he himself, in May, signed peace on more favorable terms. Instances of this kind are so many, that the Duke de Broglie esteems that the work he has published was not designed for an apology.

He complains that Madame de Staël is not mentioned among those who procured the author's recall from proscription. But Talleyrand acknowledges that he owed to her his introduction to Barras, and his first appointment to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He affirms that he, for his own part, would have preferred to stand aloof, and that he yielded reluctantly to her influence. He allows full credit to her initiative in a step which was to lead so far. The story has been told in another shape. Talleyrand, it is said, declared to Madame de Staël that his money was exhausted, and that he would have to blow out his brains if, in a month, she could not find him a way to supplies. This is the version of Barante, the least inventive of men, who knew them both well, who had seen the Memoirs, and who goes on to describe the meeting with the director and the scene at Suresnes, as they do. If the well-informed and disinterested historian deserves credit, the Memoirs must be discarded as a concatenation of insincerity. But he is not a sufficient witness to carry such a verdict. For he says that the friends soon afterward quarrelled, that Talleyrand never ceased to de test the woman to whom he owed so much, and that she, in her anger, never again

dreamed of a reconciliation. Nevertheless, in February 1809, she entreated his intervention with the Emperor, in terms which would have been barely dignified in any circumstances, and are incompatible with unforgiveness. The breach on her side cannot have been as incurable as Barante has described it. Yet the occasion was one which might have justified strong feelings.

The American envoys made it known that they had been invited to bestow a present of money on the French minister, and Talleyrand had laughed at the idea of being challenged to repel the accusation. The reproach of official corruption is, perhaps, the most difficult to meet of all those that he incurred. Count Senfft, who, when I knew him, was an inmate of the Jesuits' College at Innsbruck, but who had been Talleyrand's warm admirer and friend as early as 1806, relates that he caused a sum of four millions of florins to be returned to the Poles, when he found that he was unable to serve their cause; but that he accepted gifts of money from the German princes, whose interests he promoted, including one payment of forty thousand pounds from the king of Saxony. Senfft himself was Saxon minister, and as such in the secrets both of Dresden and Warsaw. Bacourt, who has been careful to ascertain that Metternich and Nesselrode received no millions from France, says nothing in exoneration of his chief and patron. The next volume, which will contain Talleyrand's account of the execution of Enghien, may possibly give some reply to this more formidable imputation. In one of his earliest despatches he censures the venality of Thugut; but his papers, so far as we have them, say nothing of his own. It might be urged that what he did was not really done in secret, that the reconstruction of the European ruin after the revolutionary war, during the Confederation of the Rhine and at the Congress of Vienna, afforded opportunities so exceptional that they amount to excuses; that Napoleon, who allowed his brother to bring back bags of diamonds from Madrid, admitted the practice of diplomatic douceurs, and distributed enormous sums in that way. Enemies of the United States used to affirm that the Ashburton treaty was carried by a method which may be traced in the books of Barings.

Talleyrand gives himself all the advantage to be got by depreciating others. He speaks warmly of Hamilton, and respectfully of Lansdowne and Fox in England, of Mollien and Caulaincourt in France; and he is above the vulgar and inefficacious error of reviling enemies. Friends enjoy no immunity from his satiric temper; and he is severe toward his tutor, Langfois; his secretary, Des Renaudes, and his intimate associate, Narbonne. He says that the choice of Necker was the worst the King could have made; Lafayette is beneath the level of mediocrity; Breteuil is fit for the second place anywhere; Sieyès would not be a rogue if he was not a coward; the hands of Carnot are dripping with blood; Fesch is a corsair disguised as a cardinal; Joseph and Jerome are inglorious libertines; the most prosperous of the marshals, Suchet, is quelque peu bel esprit; his own successor, Champagny, begins every day trying to repair his blunders of the day before; Humboldt is a bore; Metternich is tortuous and second-rate; Wellington has no head for principles; Castlereagh strains the Englishman's prerogative of igno

rance.

Most historical characters will probably suffer if we try them fairly by a fixed standard; but Talleyrand displays no such thing as a standard of public or private morality. He tells how, greatly to his honor, he remonstrated with the Emperor upon his Spanish policy, saying that much evil-doing may be condoned, but that a mere cheat becomes contemptible. He was ready to make sacrifices to his sense, not of duty, but of propriety. The thing that shocks him is the indignity offered to the royal family, not the wrong done to the Spanish nation, for he himself had proposed that France should annex Catalonia. This passage, jointly with one or two others, gives the measure of his notion of right and wrong. He relates that, as a student at the seminary, he was silent, resentful and morose, and was rescued from this unhealthy condition by an actress, whom he met under an umbrella, and with whom he lived for two years. He confesses that she was stupid; but he adds, with unmixed complacency, that the improvement of his manners and disposition was very much her work, and that the authorities had learned not to interfere with a youth of good family, predestined

to become a minister of State, a cardinal, perhaps even the dispenser of Crown patronage. To write like this in memoirs addressed to the society of the Restoration shows more than a flaw in his knowledge of good and evil. Elsewhere he tells how a lady, whose intimacy with himself had not been free from scandal, requested him to stay away from the place where she was residing, as his presence might hinder her intended marriage. He publishes her name, and adds that the marriage came off without impediment, although there were others about who might have been as much in the way as himself. Here it must be admitted that the great master of ceremonial and the social art touches lowwater mark; and we learn to suspect that a low moral vitality had as much to do with the stains on his life as violent passions or extreme temptation.

Talleyrand means it to be understood that, in all his versatile career, he was not the mere servant of opportunity, but that he was a man steering by fixed stars, applying principles to policy, occupied and possessed by certain general ideas superior to time and place. Many volumes of his letters produced in the last ten years show what truth there is in this thesis of the Memoirs. They show that Talleyrand accepted the essential philosophy of Liberalism, construed from Montesquieu and Turgot, Smith and Bentham. In 1786 he defends the Commercial Treaty as a policy based on the true natural laws, that will put an end to the rivalry of nations. He believes, even then, that France and England ought to be inseparable in the cause of reason and justice against the world of divine right. A little later he declares that the traditional alliances terminate with the traditional monarchy; and anticipating in 1792 the language of James Mill, argues that arbitrary governments labor for their own good, and free governments for the good of mankind. At a time when it was said that there were only two tolerant prelates in the Church of France, he was one of them. If it cost a sceptic no meritorous effort to emancipate the Jews, the ex-bishop of Autun attested his sincerity in an hour of passion and peril, by insisting that the State has no authority over the conscience of citizen or monarch, and that the priests who refused the oath must be protected against the popular rage. He deems it the inter