lous quarters of Poonah. Each bat was suspended by the hind feet, in which position it remained even when shot. Some were perfectly motionless, others swaying to and fro with noisy clamour, indifferent to the busy crowd moving onwards in the street below. One I killed measured from tip to tip about five feet." Ants, too, move about in long columns, a foot or so wide.

"One day, during a ramble in the neighbourhood of Kurrachee, I observed a string of these ants extending from their nest across a plain for more than a quarter of a mile, in the direction of a barn. Instead of carrying their eggs, they were stocking up supplies for future use. In steady double file they were proceeding to and from their nest; one party moving slowly on, heavily loaded, each individual carrying a vetchseed about the size of its bearer, while the returning party hurried back for a fresh burden. I passed them at dusk, and on the following day found them as busy as ever." These little thieves would soon empty a granary, but he would be a bold man who should attempt to check their course and so subject himself to their stings. Then there are the jackals, with a special liking for human flesh, who even break into the hospital dead-wards in search of food, and whose half-barking, half-wailing cries sounded to Dr Adams like an utterance of these words:

Dead Hindōō-Dead Hindōō ! Where-where-where- where ? Here-here-here- here!

Pleasanter objects of study -beasts, birds, and fishes of all sorts came abundantly in Dr Adams's way during his stay in Poonah and on his journey to Scinde. In search of others he made expeditions to the Chor mountain and other parts of the Himalayan ranges, as well as into Cashmere and elsewhere. In these expeditions he shot pheasants without number, and hunted deer, wild boars, bears, elephants, and the like. About the appearances and habits of each and all, Dr Adams supplies much interesting information.

From the Spectator.

THE DANVERS PAPERS.*

THE authoress of the Heir of Redclyffe calls this little book" an Invention," to

The Danvers Papers. An Invention. By the Author of the Heir of Redclyffe. London: Macmillan and Co.

disabuse her readers, we conclude, from the beginning, of the notion of its being an historical tale. It neither romances on a period, nor beautifies nor blackens actual character. Its merit lies in a very pretty, discriminative conception of two or three specimens of character, which might perhaps have existed in England at any part of the last half of the seventeenth century, but which are certainly drawn from the writer's own imagination, and very slightly from the popular notions of the prevailing parties of the period.

Here you have a fastidious, delicate, Puritan lady, wedded to a coarse, illiterate clown of the Cavalier school, and, chiefly by means of her wiser, more teachable, and candid sister, and also of the sensible man whom the sister marries, the business of the book seems to be to show how the discordant couple may not only have their redeeming points, but how these may be by degrees made known to each other, so that the Christian lady may cease to be sour and repelling, and the brutal husband may be softened and elevated.

There is a good deal of delicacy, nice handling, and wise suppression in the quiet story. To our minds it is a pleasant, reconciling picture, not resembling Miss Yonge's ordinary stories, probably not destined to please a good many of her readers, but at all events having a great share of merit of its own.

An

The machinery is common-place. American lady and gentleman come to pay a visit to a certain Sir Bernard and lady Danvers, residing in the north-west of Ireland, at Castle Barrymore, at the head of one of the loughs of the country. By virtue of ancient kindred descent, they come filled with a curious interest in the annals of the Irish Danvers family, and are permitted to ransack the old letters and records of the time previous to the emigration of their own particular branch (somewhere about 1689). Of course there are also the pictures to see, Lady Penelope Bernard, the Puritan mother of their race Sir Thomas Danvers, her husband. In the same room is the picture of her sister, Lady Frances, afterwards wife to Colonel Richard Chetwynd (who in due time comes to be Knight and Lieutenant-General). The pictures tell a good deal-Lady Pen, small, pale, sandy-haired Sir Thomas, red, double-chinned but the narrative coarse,

4

is mainly given through the correspondence of the two sisters, after marriage has separated them, and poor Pen is tremblingly obeying her lord and master at his house

and home at Highbury Danvers, in Somersetshire.

--

After the lapse of some years he takes her to Ireland. - her own family estate and to this he is compelled by his lady's own imprudence for it seems that, all in ignorance and mistaken zeal, she in his absence from home has committed him and his retainers to the cause of Monmouth; and poor Sir Thomas, returning, finds himself suddenly placed in great jeopardy. The rebellion is soon put down; but Kirke and Jefferys are pursuing their vengeful career, without an atom of discrimination. He has to pay largely for her disloyalty, and still, fearing for her life, can do no other than take her to his remote castle in Ireland. Capitally do the two characters come out there. He, abrupt, coarse, drunken, yet with a fund of honest and generous feeling, attached to and pitying his lady all the while, and doing his best to reconcile her to the exile; she, only discovering by slow degrees what her conduct has brought upon him, repelling him meantime by her sourness; the sister and brother-inlaw revealing the truth where they can, but cautious in their disclosures. Then comes the invasion of William of Orange; Sir Thomas, staunch in all things, has no hesitation here. He joins his Stuart King, is in the battle of the Boyne; is wounded, and believed to be slain. Then his Orange brother-in-law, Chetwynd, who of course has fought against him, goes down to Castle Barrymore, to break the news to the Lady Pen. But she has already heard it, and now first learns the complete history of what her ill-matched but generous husband has been doing for her through all this time of peril. Of course, conscience and remorse for the mistakes of the past lead to a new feeling of tenderness for the supposed deceased. Then she has a fatherless boy to plead for him. But, as may be conjectured, the husband is not dead, though desperately wounded, and is lying at a well concealed retreat near the castle, while the good brother-in-law, who suspects it all, has to feign ignorance and connive at their inter

views.

and the last of the Danvers papers is a letter from this young man himself, written from the American Highbury Danvers, where he is visiting his father and mother and younger brothers and sisters. The charming aunt, Lady Frances, has died long before; but here, in 1712, we have the prim, Puritan Lady Pen transformed. And how is it," asks her son, "you never told me how sweet and lovely is my mother's countenance?" And here, too, is the rol licking baronet grown sober. "And sure I am," adds the youth, "that no married pair were ever more blessed than they are;" and so he takes courage to announce to them his love for a cousin, the daughter of the cherished Frances Chetwynd, with whom, let us hope, as we doubt not Miss Yonge and everybody else does, that he "lived very happily ever afterwards."

THE QUEEN'S BOOK.

Next week the public will be reading the account of the Early Years of the Prince Consort, which is the first part of the memoir of Prince Albert now being completed under the direction of her Majesty. The nature of the book removes it from criticism, since it was compiled originally for private circulation amongst the members of the Queen's own family or of the circle of her private friends, and it is now, we are told, given to the public in authentic form to avert the danger of a surreptitious issue. This volume has been prepared with much good taste, and, we may add, literary skill, by Lieutenant-General the Hon. C. Grey, and the preparation of the volumes yet to follow has been intrusted to Mr Theodore Martin. The translations of the Prince's German letters written in his youth have been made by the Princess Helena. The period covered by the present volume extends from the Prince's birth to his marriage and the birth and christening of the Princess Royal.

with her Majesty was settled. He used to say, that, when he was a child of three years old, his nurse always told him that he should marry the Queen, and that, when he first thought of marrying at all, he always thought of her." The idea was originally started and continually fostered by their uncle the King of the Belgians. But it had always been discouraged by the late King William IV., and no less than five other marriages had been contemplated for Princess. young The suggestion of waiting possibly for two or three years before the completion of the English match was very distasteful both to Prince Albert and the Duke his father. Upon this there is an interesting passage from the Queen's hand:

the

Nor can the Queen now, she adds, think without indignation against herself, of her wish to keep the Prince waiting for probably three or four years, at the risk of ruining all his prospects for life, until she might feel inclined to marry! And the Prince has since told her that he came over in 1839 with the intention of telling her, that if she could not then make up her mind, she must understand that he could not wait for a decision, as he had done at a former period when this marriage was first

talked about.

The only excuse the Queen can make for herself is in the fact, that the sudden change from the secluded life at Kensington to the independence of her position as Queen Regnant, at the age of eighteen, put all ideas of marriage out of her mind, which she now most bitterly repents.

A worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections, cannot well be imagined, than the position of a Queen at eighteen, without experience and without a husband to guide and support her. This the Queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God that none of her dear daughters are exposed to such danger.

It was on the 15th of October, 1839, that the Queen, as etiquette required that she should, made her offer of marriage to the Prince, sending for him on his return from hunting at Windsor. She wrote on the same evening in her journal, "How I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made! I told him it was a great sacrifice on his part, but he would not allow it." To her uncle Leopold she wrote also on the same day, telling what she had done, and in that letter said of the Prince, "He seems perfection. I love him MORE than I can say, and shall do every thing in my power to render this sacrifice

(for such in my opinion it is) as small as I can. He seems to have great tact, a very necessary thing in his position. These last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I know hardly how to write; but I do feel very happy." King Leopold replied that her decision gave him almost the feeling of old Simeon: Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. The Queen's declaration of her purpose was made to the Privy Council on the 23d of November, 1839. How touching and simple a tenderness was in her heart, while the Prince's picture in a bracelet that she always wore seemed, as she wrote in her journal that evening, "to give me courage at the Council," these pages bear most interesting witness. The marriage took place on the 10th of February, 1840. Hundreds of years hence, when men look back upon the records of our Kings and Queens, they will read the tender record of the love of the most spotless of our Sovereigns for a Prince worthy of herself, and wonder at, if they ever hear of, the petty carpings of the hour at the long sense of bereavement. In her journal the Queen wrote, on the departure of her husband's family after his marriage: Father, brother, friends, country all has he left, and all for me. God grant that I may be the happy person, the most happy person, to make this dearest, blessed being happy and contented! What is in my power to make him happy I will do." In the stronghold of a happy love lay the reality of life for her; and King Leopold had not written to her without knowing to whom he wrote when, upon her announcement of the coming marriae, he said:

In your position, which may and will perhaps become in future even more difficult in a political point of view, you could not EXIST without having a happy and agreeable intérieur. And I am much deceived (which I think very qualities and disposition which are indisI am not) or you will find in Albert just the pensable for your happiness, and which will suit your own character, temper, and mode of life.

From The Spectator.

THE LAST DAYS OF LOUIS PHILIPPE.

To all who remember politics before 1848, that is, to all readers above forty, this

The Last Days of the Reign of Louis Philippe. By M. Guizot. London: Bentley.

book, which is a condensation of M. Guizot's Memoirs, will be one of exceeding interest. It contains the history of French diplomacy in the extraordinary intrigue known as the Spanish Marriages, in the Sonderbund War, and in Italy during the first reforms of Pius IX., M. Guizot's estimate of Louis Philippe, a chapter on "Parliamentary Government" from a somewhat novel point of view, and a few new facts as to the incidents which preceded the Revolution of 1848. It is written throughout with that chilly lucidity, that haughty forbearance, which are peculiar to M. Guizot's writings; and which, we confess, do not please us, and full of an egotism, perhaps unavoidable, but seldom genial, or even good-natured. M. Guizot does not hate those who oppose him, but at heart he regards them as foolish persons, who may understand facts, but do not understand principles, and he has a way of lecturing intimate correspondents which in a less eminent person would be very tiresome. In the whole book we have found but one good story, and not, we think, one trace of humour; but then it is crowded with information, with personal anecdotes, and with weighty observations on men and affairs. Upon the Spanish marriages, for example, M. Guizot is highly interesting. He does not, it is clear, tell us quite all he knew, but be reveals enough to show that the affair was an intrigue in which the Great Powers of Europe fought for influence in Spain. The Queen herself was never consulted, her own inclination. The Austrians wanted her married to a son of Don Carlos as a

or

new guaranty for legitimacy; Prince Albert and King Leopold sought to insure her choice of a Coburg, as a new throne for that rising family; the British Government tried to resist a French policy, with a side-glance to the interests of the Coburg family, and France had laid it down as a principle that the Queen must marry a Bourbon, almost threatening, if they did not indeed actually threaten, a military occupation of Spain in the event of defeat. M. Guizot affirms, indeed, that the King did not care which Bourbon the Queen married, and that Louis Philippe had no idea of acquiring profit for his family in the transaction; but he himself admits that at one time he threatened the British Cabinet with the Duc de Montpensier, that Prince was married to the Infanta, and the King's secret views may not have been absolutely known to his Minister. They managed foreign business somewhat oddly.

quainting the King and Council with the instructions I gave our agents abroad, except in cases of great importance, and when there was a new direction to be imparted to them; but I conducted my official and private correspondence between several persons is only useful in general according to my own impressions. Deliberation and legislative questions; beyond these, in diplomacy as in administration, executive power, to be effective and dignified, requires unity and confiding independence. Every day, all the despatches from our foreign Representatives were sent from my private cabinet to the King, who returned them with his observations; but he communications. I am not certain that he did had no previous knowledge of my own personal not occasionally feel a little impatient at this; he never gave me any visible indication; and when in some particular case or for some private reason, he wished to know what I had written, he asked me specially, without raising any general pretence to interfere with my diplomatic correspondence."

Consequently the King, to protect himself, kept up his private correspondence also, and as diplomatists believed that he really ruled, this was sometimes, we fancy, the more efficacious of the two. It is certain at least that the European Cabinets distrusted his plans, that the marriage of the infanta excited all Europe, and that the most scandalous stories were believed by everybody except M. Guizot himself, who passes them over in a silence which may be the result either of prudery, of guilt, or of conscious rectitude. The things certain are that M. Guizot did his

very best to force a descendant of Philip V. on an unwilling Queen without reference to the wishes of Spain, to the interests of Europe, or to the inclinations of the lady herself. If she had a preference, it was for Prince Leopold, who had, moreover, her mother's somewhat uncertain support, and who, had he been selected, might have changed the fate of Spain, and possibly saved the dynasty now drawing, to all human appearance, so near its end.

M. Guizot's judgment of Louis Philippe is that of a self-restrained man, who had a liking for his master, but felt his vanity wounded by his proceedings. The King, he says, really believed in the necessity of constitutional government, though he saw its immense difficulties, and the popular notion that His Majesty dictated his own policy was an error: