D'Enghien and his grandson the young Duke de Bourbon.* The latter was seized with smallpox when with the court at Fontainbleau in December 1686. The moment he heard of her illness the old man, in spite of his infirmities, travelled rapidly to Fontainbleau: but the fatigue of the winter journey proved fatal. Being urged to retire to Paris, he said, 'Je sens que je dois faire un plus longue journée,' and immediately summoned his confessor. Having tenderly bid adieu to his family and the numerous officers who knelt with them in his chamber, he expired at seven in the evening of the 11th of December. The English Ambassador, Lord Arran, thus writes on the 14th-and one circumstance that he mentions will remind our readers of the deathbed loyalty of Talleyrand: Le roi avait envoyé demander comment le prince se portait depuis son dernier accès. Lorsque le gentilhomme chargé de ce message entra dans sa chambre, le prince avait déjà perdu la parole; cependant il prit la main du gentilhomme, et la posa sur son cœur, voulant faire entendre qu'il remerciait le roi de cette preuve d'intérêt. Jamais personne ne mourut avec moins de faiblesse ; il resta dans son bon sens jusqu'à son dernier soupir.'

The funeral oration of Condé is the chef-d'œuvre of Bossuet. He was buried at Vallery, by his father and grandfather, but the heart was deposited in the Jesuits' Church of the Rue St. Antoine. The great-grandson states that, on conveying to the same place the heart of a kinsman, he had occasion to see the cases which preserved there the hearts of many of his ancestors, and that he and all with him observed that that of the great Condé was double the size of any of the rest.

This large heart dictated one article of the testament which it is pleasing to recollect. Condé bequeathed 50,000 crowns to be distributed among the poor and the sick of the French districts that had suffered most damage during his rebellious campaigns. But he died without exhibiting the least sign of repenting or relenting as to his unhappy wife. On the contrary, there was found among his papers a sealed letter to the king, in which, recommending his children to his Majesty's protection, he besought him never to recall the lettre du cachet by which the princess was confined to Châteauroux. The mere fact of this cruel legacy seems to us sufficient evidence that Condé did not believe her to be insane; but Madlle. de Montpensier, in relating the circumstance, has language equally irreconcilable with that theory:--J'aurais voulu qu'il n'eut pas prié le roi que madame sa femme demeurât toujours à Châteauroux. J'en suis três-fâchée.' Her

It was at M. de Bourbon's wedding that Condé first appeared with powder, and in the new style of dress introduced by Louis XIV.; till then he had kept his beard and the old Spanish costume-à la Vandyck.

son,

son, however, took no step in her favour. We have no account whatever of her end, except that she died in April, 1694. Her remains were torn from the grave by the mob of Châteauroux during the insanity of 1793, and Lord Mahon's researches as to her epitaph only ascertained that the marble on which it was inscribed had been sold to a builder.

When we reviewed the later volumes of our author's History" of England,' we took the liberty of finding fault with him for giving his admirable characters of various eminent persons before the course of his narrative had embraced their actions. On the present occasion his Lordship begins and closes without any attempt whatever to sum up the qualities either of Condé or of Clémence. We are sorry for this, but not quite so vain as to try what he has chosen to avoid; and if formal characters may be dispensed with in any biographical work, it is certainly in one where the facts have been compiled and collected with the care and fairness, and commented on, as they occur, with the good sense and good feeling of Lord Mahon.

ART. V.-The Bible in Spain. By George Borrow. London. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo.

MR.

R. Borrow's book on the Gipsies of Spain,' published a couple of years ago, was so much and so well reviewed (though not, to our shame be it said, in our own Journal), that we cannot suppose his name is new to any of our readers. Its literary merits were considerable-but balanced by equal demerits. Nothing more vivid and picturesque than many of its descriptions of scenery and sketches of adventure: nothing more weak and confused than every attempt either at a chain of reasoning, or even a consecutive narrative of events that it included. It was evidently the work of a man of uncommon and highly interesting character and endowments; but as clearly he was quite raw as an original author. The glimpses of a most curious and novel subject that he opened were, however, so very striking, that, on the whole, that book deserved well to make a powerful impression, and could not but excite great hopes that his more practised pen would hereafter produce many things of higher consequence. The present volumes will, we apprehend, go far to justify such anticipations. In point of composition, generally, Mr. Borrow has made a signal advance; but the grand point is, that he seems to have considered and studied himself in the interval; wisely resolved on steadily avoiding in future the species of efforts in which he had been felt to fail; and on sedulously cultivating and improving the peculiar talents which were as universally

universally acknowledged to be brilliantly displayed in numerous detached passages of his 'Gipsies.'

His personal history appears to have been a most strange one -fuller of adventure than anything we are at all familiar with even in modern romance. It is a pity that he has been withheld, by whatever and however commendable feelings, from giving a distinct account of it, at least in its leading features; but we have only hints and allusions, widely scattered and often obscure. He must pardon us, therefore, if in stating our notion of what his life has been, we should fall into some little mistakes.

We infer, then, from various obiter dicta of our author, that he is a native of Norfolk-in which county, in very early days, his curiosity and sympathy were powerfully excited by the Gipsy race; insomuch that he attached himself to the society of some members of the fraternity, and so won on their confidence that they initiated him in their dialect, of which, by degrees, he became quite master, and also communicated to him much of their secret practical lore, especially as regards the training and management of horses. From Norfolk the young gentleman appears to have gone to Edinburgh, for the purpose of studying in its university. He, we gather, while thus resident in Scotland, not only studied Latin and Greek and Hebrew with diligence, but made frequent excursions into the Highlands, and, being enthusiastically delighted with the region and the legends of its people, added one more to the very short list of Saxons that have ever acquired any tolerable skill in its ancient language. Whether or not Mr. Borrow also studied medicine at Edinburgh, with a view to the practice of that profession, we do not venture to guess-but that he had attended some of the medical and surgical classes in the university cannot be doubted.

Of the course of his life after the period of adolescence we know scarcely anything, except what is to be inferred from the one fact that he chose to devote himself to the service of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and from the numerous localities which he alludes to as having been visited by him in that occupation, and the most of them, be it observed, so visited that he acquired the free use, in speaking and in writing, of their various dialects. Mr. Borrow, incidentally and unaffectedly (as we conceive), represents himself as able to serve the Society by translating the Scriptures, and expounding them in conversation (he nowhere hints at preaching), in the Persian, the Arabic, the German, the Dutch, the Russian, the Polish; in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese; and in the varieties of the Gipsy dialect actually in use over almost every part of Europe. Of his complete skill in the Scandinavian languages we cannot doubt, because he published some ten years ago a copious body of

translations

translations from their popular minstrelsies, done in a style not at all to be confounded with that of certain clever versifiers, who get a literal version made of a ballad in some obscure dialect into plain French, or English, or German prose, and then turn it into flowing English rhymes worthy of the anthology of the Annuals. His Norse ditties have the unforgeable stamp of authenticity on every line. Had he condescended to take the other course, they would have been more popular among fine ladies and lazy gentlemen-but they would not have been true and real; and uncouthness, and harshness, and barbarity of thought and phrase, and rhyme too, were all with him real features which it would have been a sort of crime to depart from. We are informed that Mr. Borrow's accurate knowledge not only of the Gaelic but of the Welsh has been shown in the composition of another series of metrical translations from these dialects, which, however, the poor reception of the Norse volume discouraged him from printing. Finally, it appears that his anxiety about the Gipsies has induced him to study the Sanscrit, of which great tongue he considers their original dialect to be a mutilated and degraded offshoot; but whether Mr. Borrow has ever been in India, or acquired the use of any of its living languages, does not distinctly appear. We rather think, however, such is the fact. Now, be it observed, Mr. Borrow is at this time under forty years of age-a man in the very prime of life and vigour, though, indeed, his wanderings and watchings have left one broad mark behind them. Tall, strong, athletic, with a clear olive complexion, and eyes full of the fire of genius and enterprise, his hair is already white as Mont Blanc.

How early and entirely the Reformation was checked and extinguished in the Spanish Peninsula is well known to every English reader. During many generations the word of God had been altogether denied to the people in their vernacular speech; when the heavy blow and great discouragement' given to the whole ecclesiastical system, both in Spain and in Portugal, by the political revolutions of recent times, seemed to offer an opportunity too favourable to be neglected by the British and Foreign Bible Society. Accordingly, in November, 1835, Mr. Borrow was despatched to Lisbon, with instructions to travel over whatever parts of the Peninsula he should find most accessible. He carried with him large quantities of Bibles and Testaments in Portuguese; authority to superintend the printing of a Spanish Bible at Madrid, provided the government there would sanction such a proceeding; and so soon as this edition should be completed, he was to undertake personally its distribution in the provinces. Mr. Borrow spent the best part of five years in this service; and the book before us is not a regular narrative of

its

its progress, but a set of fragmentary sketches, intended to convey a general notion of the sort of persons and adventures encountered by him, while endeavouring to circulate the Bible in the Peninsula, which had rested on his own memory as most peculiar and characteristic.

. We are afraid that, if Mr. Borrow had given us a plain prosaic history, and summed up its results in a statistical form, we should have found but little reason for congratulating the Bible Society on the success of their missionary's endeavours. Here and there we do find a glimpse of something like hope. A few, a very few persons, both in Spain and in Portugal, appear to have had their curiosity warmly excited, and to have received copies of the Scriptures in their own languages with not only pleasure and gratitude, but in such a way as might fairly indicate a resolution to study them with a view to the serious comparison of the popular doctrines and practices of the popish system with the word of inspiration. But, in general, the persons willing to purchase, or even to accept of Bibles, seem to have been liberals in religion as well as in politics; who desired to have the books offered by Mr. Borrow from feelings akin to those which must have been uppermost with Napoleon, when, in drawing out a catalogue of books for his cabin-library on the voyage to Egypt, he gave one section to Mythology, and included therein the Old Testament. All the courtesy and kindness which Mr. Borrow often experienced at the hands of the rural curates only leaves us with the melancholy conviction that Blanco White did not exaggerate in his Doblado's Letters' the vast spread of infidelity among the Spanish priesthood. But certainly Mr. Borrow gives some anecdotes about the religion of the Spanish clergy for which even Doblado' had not prepared us. If we are to rely on these pages and assuredly, though we occasionally demur to their authority, we never question the entire veraciousness of their author-there are at this moment priests, and even bishops, in Spain, who adhere in secret to Judaism-nay, to Mahometanism!

6

But it is not our wish to go into any examination or discussion either of the prudence of the Bible Society on this occasion, or of the actual state of the Spanish Church. Our business is literary. We conceive that Mr. Borrow has in these pages come out as an English author of high mark. Considering the book merely as one of adventures, it seems to us about the most extraordinary one that has appeared in our own, or indeed in any other language, for a very long time past. Indeed we are more frequently reminded of Gil Blas, in the narratives of this pious single-hearted man, than in the perusal of almost any modern novelist's pages. We intend to quote largely; but we hope to quote enough to