or his bearing. This same vitality imparts itself marvellously to the colder temperaments of others, and gives out its own warmth to natures that never of themselves felt the glow of an impulse, or the glorious furnace-heat of a rash action.

This was the magnetism he worked with. "Canny" Scotchmen and shrewd Yankees-ay, even Swiss innkeepers-felt the touch of his quality. There was, or there seemed to be, a geniality in the fellow that, in its apparent contempt for all worldliness, threw men off their guard, and it would have smacked of meanness to distrust a fellow so open and unguarded.

Now Paddy has seen a good deal of this at home, and could no more be humbugged by it than he could believe a potato to be a truffle.

F. was too perfect an artist ever to perform in an Irish part to an Irish audience, and so he owes little or nothing to the land of his birth.

Apart from his unquestionable success, which of course settles the question, I would not have called him a great performer - indeed, my astonishment has always been how he succeeded, or with whom.

"Don't tell me of Beresford's blunders," said the Great Duke after Albuera. "Did he beat Soult? if so, he was a good officer."

This man's triumphs are some twenty odd years of expensive living, with occasional excursions into good society. He wears broadcloth, and dines on venison, when his legitimate costume had been the striped uniform of the galleys, and his diet the black bread of a convict. The injury these men do in life is not confined to the misery their heartless frauds inflict, for the very humblest and poorest are often their victims: they do worse in the way they sow distrust and suspicion of really deserving objects, in the pretext they afford the miserly man to draw closer his purse-strings, and

"not be imposed on ;" and, worst of all, in the ill repute they spread of a nation which, not attractive by the graces of manner or the charms of a winning address, yet cherished the thought that in truthfulness and fair dealing there was not one could gainsay it.

As I write, I have just heard tidings of R. N. F. One of our most distinguished travellers and discoverers, lately returning from Venice to the South, passed the night at Padua, and met there what he described as an Indian officer-Major Newton - who was travelling, he said, with a nephew of Lord Palmerston's.

The Major was a man full of anecdote, and abounded in knowledge of people and places; he had apparently been everywhere with everybody, and, with a communicativeness not always met with in old soldiers, gave to the stranger a rapid sketch of his own most adventurous life. As the evening wore on, he told too how he was waiting there for a friend, a certain N. F., who was no other than himself, the nephew of Lord Palmerston being represented by his son, an apt youth, who has already given a bright promise of what his later years may develop.

N. F. retired to bed at last, so much overcome by brandy-andwater that my informant escaped being asked for a loan, which I plainly see he would not have had the fortitude to have refused; and the following morning he started so early, that N. F., wide awake as he usually is, was not vigilant enough to have anticipated.

I hope these brief details, pour servir à l'histoire de Monsieur R. N. F., may save some kind-hearted traveller from the designs of a thorough blackguard, and render his future machinations through the press more difficult to effect and more certain of exposure.

IT has become a fashion amongst our neighbours the French, that when a literary man has exhausted all other subjects, he resorts-to himself; he writes his own biography. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, after making themselves famous by their writings, and expending their best energies in the effort, have turned round upon this famous personality they have created, and written about it. Why should they not? If others are to reap profit out of their celebrity, why should not they who are the authors of that celebrity? If they are to be dissected when dead, why not have a vivisection, and they themselves the anatomist? No one, at least, can rival them in knowledge of their subject, and few in skill to use the scalpel. If the world is so weak, or so wise, as to take an intense interest in whatever concerns them, why should not they, who are most capable of doing so, gratify this curiosity? And why should not they, in the later chair-days of their authorship, be indulged in a task so easy, so grateful, and so profitable? Victor Hugo makes a thin pretence, a poor disguise, that not he, but some other-his wife, we presume-narrates her reminiscences under his supervision. This method of composition, or this literary fictionwhichever it may be-necessarily influences the character of the work; we have less of the selfanalyst than if the author had written in his own name; he debars or excuses himself from entering into the more secret chambers of the heart; he escapes also, in some measure, from that wholesome sense of literary responsibility which restrains an accomplished writer from filling his book with

wearisome extracts, or other materials that add only to its bulk and its weight. Victor Hugo has contrived a plan of autobiography which gives him all the licence of the ordinary compiler of the dead man's memoirs, who never yet had a scruple of conscience about printing any amount of discarded rubbish-juvenile poems and the like

any amount that would not absolutely sink his little craft, or rather the heavy barge he navigates.

When we first heard of Mr Charles Knight's autobiographical work, we bethought ourselves that the fashion of our neighbours was making its way into England, and that he also was about to build one of these private temples, to conduct us into one of those little sanctuaries, where the idol and the priest are one. But a very slight acquaintance with the work sufficed to show that, although the example of these Continental celebrities is so far followed that the living man is writing and publishing his own memoirs, Mr Knight's book is rather a collection of the reminiscences of the past times-say of the last halfcentury-than of his own personal life. It is no elaborate effort at self-portraiture. Judging from the first volume, which, at the time we are writing, is all that has seen the light, we find, indeed, that, in an artistic point of view, it wants this element of a personal interest, of a strong sympathy with the individual who is recording his own reminiscences. We have extracts from his own early compositions, prose and verse, and both irreproachable, but the youth who bore the name of Charles Knight is never vividly brought before us. The portrait drawn of himself is by no means so distinct

as that which, in a very few words, he has given us of two or three other men. Mr Knight has not succeeded-where on every account he ought to have succeeded-in making us interested in Mr Knight. Perhaps he wanted that frank egotism which, while it would have exposed him, with captious critics, to the charge of vanity, would nevertheless have diffused life over his pages, and given a unity to his book. It must be borne in mind also, that a man must first of all be a painter before he can paint even his own portrait ;-nay, his own portrait may be as difficult as any subject that he can select; and the species of literature which our autobiographer had chiefly cultivated, was not precisely that which brings out the artist. Whatever may be the cause, the book indisputably suffers from the want of interest we feel, the want of insight and sympathy we gain, in the chief personage, in the narrator himself. We have before us a young man, always commendable, both when he acts and when he writes, and, so far as we are permitted to judge, never losing his good sense, or his temperate judgment, even when he writes poetry, even when he writes on the disturbing politics of the day but somehow we do not see this youth; we get scraps out of his writing-desk, or well-selected fragments from his youthful journalism, but still we see the writing, not the writer. Some of us will have learnt, for the first time, that our champion of Useful Knowledge for the people was given to poetry in his youth, and has retained to the present day a high appreciation of the value of imaginative literature; but these and other facts and details that are scattered through the volume are not fused, or brought together, so as to present us with any vivid or distinct individuality.

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But, nevertheless, we are very willing to have the events and characteristics of past time recalled to us by that Charles Knight whose name

VOL. XCV.NO. DLXXXII.

at least is familiar to all, from being so often seen, in capital letters, on the title-page of many an excellent publication. The charm and pleasantness of the book lie in this, that it will awake in many readers kindred reminiscences of their own of the epoch just lately passed. No young man-no man under fiftywill feel this charm, or will care anything, we suspect, about the book. It can interest those only of us who have proceeded far enough along the road to feel the pleasure of looking back. Yet one need not be very aged to partake of this pleasure. He who numbers even less than fifty years from his birthday has lived in more reigns than one, has passed through public excitements, public dangers, storms that blustered loud enough at the time, though they have left no trace upon the air; he has outlived many fashions and some social customs which it already tasks his memory to revive, and he has seen new inventions introduced, new modes of locomotion, and the like, which have, in a few years, become so familiar to him, that it requires an effort of imagination to depict the time when they did not exist.

Very pleasant is this looking back over a period of history through which we too have lived. Give a boy a telescope, and if he is far enough away from home, the first or the greatest delight he has in the use of it, is to point it back to the house he lives in. To see the palings of his own garden, to see his father at work in it, or a younger brother playing in it, is a far greater treat than if you were to show him the coast of France, or any other distant object. And so it is with the past in time. If the telescope of the historian brings back to us events through which we have lived, and which were already fading away in the memory, he gives to us quite a peculiar pleasure. The events may be of slight importance compared to the great wars or great revolutions he has to record; but they are ours-we too remember,

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we too can here play the historian. A subtle analyst would detect, as one element of this pleasure, the distinct gratification attendant upon a successful effort of memory. An event which had interested us keenly at the time is so nearly obliterated that we have ceased to recall it some one mentions it, dwells on it, brings back detail after detail, and now our own memory becomes vivid, and follows up this search into the past, and triumphantly brings back fresh details to complete the animated picture.

Mr Knight must excuse us if the perusal of his memoirs should make us also a little garrulous-that is, when the topic comes within the range of our own recollections. We cannot follow him to the times when George III. walked, a living and a healthy man, on the terraces at Windsor Castle. Mr Knight, who was the son of a bookseller in Windsor, is able, from his earliest recollections, to revive for us a scene which seems rather to belong to some German principality than to England. Sunday on the Castle Terrace, with the lords and ladies, deans and bishops, ministers and courtiers walking to and fro under the eye of royalty, presents a picture which it is difficult to associate with the England familiar to us. But when Mr Knight touches upon such venerable institutions as the ancient watchman, lantern in one hand and rattle in the other, and these two instruments separated by a moving mountain of greatcoat, or on the scarcely more animated jarvie, or the extinct hackney-coach, drawn by two miserable beasts, and driven by a shapeless mass of old clothes, which we declare we have seen fall from the box without any distinct apprehension that there was a human being in it-we too are at home. You entered the recesses of a dark vehicle, whose well-worn springs were so lax that a portly man threatened to bring the whole business down upon his head; you planted your feet on the cleanest part of the straw; an array of loose iron steps was folded up after you;

the door was slammed, and something more like a huge mollusc than a man climbed the box, and you proceeded to tilt, and sway, and swing through the streets of London at the rate of four miles an hour. The modern cab-the Hansom into which a young fellow steps from his club-is a very different affair. But this matter of locomotion in London and its environs does not always illustrate our great law of progress: our progress in this very matter of progression is by no means uniform. The old two-horse coach that carried its six inside and six out from Clapham or Kensington to the heart of London, though it has left no very agreeable remembrance behind it, was paradise itself compared to its modern substitute, the present omnibus. He who in the next generation shall describe to listening youth what it was to get into an omnibus in Piccadilly or Oxford Street on a wet day, and ride, the twelfth steaming passenger, to Hammersmith or Bayswater, will have a rich theme for description; he will not fail to excite the wonder and pity and explosive laughter of his hearers. In an area not much larger than what one large man, lying at his ease, allowance made for turning, might reasonably occupy, twelve grown-up men and women, with all their capes, mackintoshes, crinolines, and dripping umbrellas, and as many children as can be carried on their laps, are expected to stow themselves away. And they do it! If this multitude, with all their paraphernalia, were arranged in one long row upon the pavement, and some one, pointing to the green box close at hand, with "Bayswater" written on it, proposed to you the problem to pack all this living load into that narrow receptacle, you would say it was impossible. Why, that lady alone, with her huge tub of silk girt tight about her loins, would fill half the space. Nevertheless, one at a time, with much shaking and infinite pressure, the thing is done; the whole is packed, and trundles on, damp and steam

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ing, in what is at once a cold and a warm bath, for there is perspiration on the brow, and trickling water ab extra stealing down the legs. It is to be inferred that you breathe in some fashion, else a coroner's inquest must sit permanently at the Red Tap or the Green Dragon, or wherever this instrument of torture is wont to stop; but to yourself you seem to bid adieu for the time to the vital air; you scarce belong to the animated creation. sionally a new-comer will venture a jest on the universal misery, but the wheel has not made many revolutions before the same hopeless silence steals over him that had settled on the previous eleven. What mode of transit, what kind of public vehicles, the next age will invent for these shorter journeys in and about the metropolis, remains to be seen. Our longer journeys are triumphantly performed. He who intends to travel a hundred miles does not expect to be taken up at his own door-step, or at the hail of his umbrella; he reconciles himself to the preliminaries of reaching the station, and once in his carriage, seated in his easy well-cushioned chair, he sees the country run past him at an amazing rate, and before he has had time to tire of sitting still, he alights at his destination.

This great revolution in our mode of travelling, this substitution of the steam-engine for the horse, will soon be a matter of history, and older men will begin to record, with that peculiar zest which belongs to the recollection of youth, the aspect which the highroads leading out of London presented in their time. The railway train rushing by you at its full speed is sublime! -it deserves no timid epithet. You stand perhaps in the country, on one of those little bridges thrown over the line for the convenience of the farmer, who would else find his fields hopelessly bisected. A jet of steam is seen on the horizon-a whir of a thousand wheels grows louder and louder on the ear-and there rushes under your feet the very realisation of Milton's dream,

who saw the chariot of God, instinct with motion, self-impelled, thundering over the plains of heaven. You look round, and already in the distant landscape the triumphant train is bearing its beautiful standard of ever-rising clouds, white as the highest that rest stationary in the sky, and of exquisitely involved movement. For an instant the whole country is animated as if by the stir of battle when the spectacle has quite passed, how inexpressibly flat and desolate and still have our familiar fields become! Nothing seems to have a right to exist that can be so still and stationary. Yet grand as this spectacle is, we revert with pleasure to some boyish recollection of the highroad, and to picturesque effects produced by quite other means. We are transported in imagination to a bay-window that commands the great western road-the Bath road, as people at that time often called it. Every evening came in rapid succession, the earth tingling with the musical tread of their horses, seven mail-coaches out of London. The dark-red coach, the scarlet guard standing up in his little solitary dickey behind, the tramp of the horses, the ring of the hornscan one ever forget them? some miles out of London the guard was kept on his feet, blowing on his horn, to warn all slower vehicles to make way for his Majesty's mails. There was a turnpike within sight of us; how the horses dashed through it!-with not the least abatement of speed. If some intolerable blunderer stopped the way, and that royal coachman had to draw up his team, making the splinter-bars rattle together, we looked upon it as almost a case of high treason. If the owner of that blockading cart had been immediately led off to execution, we boys should have thought he had but his deserts. Our mysterious seven were still more exciting to the imagination when, in the dark winter nights, only the two vivid lamps could be seen borne along by the trampling coursers. No darkness checked the

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