to his estate, and occupied himself in pre-subscribe to this. He wrote, too, in secret, paring his great work for the instruction of often hurriedly, -imprisonment, perhaps future ages. "After his withdrawal from death, would have been his doom had his court," writes his biographer, "he occasion- papers been discovered, and it is only ally came to Paris, and visited the Duchess wonderful that he has committed so few of La Vallière, or the Duchess of Nemours, errors. both of the house of Noailles: there, it is No mere description can give an idea of said, with the liberty conceded to an old the contents of this vast, wonderful, and man and great lord, he became a country useful work, which embraces personal gentleman, and in order to be more at his history from the King to his scullions. case he would place his periwig on an arm- Even the abridgment by Mr. St. John can chair, while the vapor escaped from his afford only a representation of the mighty head." He died in 1755, at the good old whole. It is a book by itself, as the author age of fourscore. His reputation is only was a man sui generis, "a literary man just commencing. His Memoirs, the first though a noble," as Mr. St. John remarks, half of which is more personal and less and could he have had more sympathies political than the latter half, convey an idea with the people, we might then add, that he of his time and contemporaries such as no other writer has accomplished for the period in which, and the personages with whom, he passed his life. He was not without strong passions when rivals came in his way, or individuals passed before him for whom he felt a dislike. This feeling has affected the truth of some of his portraitures, but his champion asserts that they are truthful according to the writer's belief and judgment; and that as for his errors in detailing certain facts, they are easy of correction and throw no discredit on his history generally. We fully

was a patriot also. He saw that a downfall was pending, and that a reform was necessary, but he only thought of the crown and aristocracy, and his advice to the Regent was for their benefit alone. He had no idea of the people below both, and who, rising from beneath both, were to overthrow the one and the other. His inestimable work, read and studied in its fullness, will be found to be a justification, not for all that has since then been achieved, but for very much that was, at least, attempted.

FASHIONS.-A correspondent asked for some notices of fashions in dress, &c. I therefore send a few notes on the subject.

A Merry Andrew wore a laced hat in 1714. (Spectator, 572.)

In 1793-4, pantaloons, cropped hair, and shoe-strings, the total abolition of hair powder, buckles and ruffles characterised the men, while ladies exhibited heads rounded à la Victime, à la Guillotine. (Wraxall's Memoirs, i. 142.)

The fashion of ladies of quality taking Brazil snuff in church is mentioned in Spectator, 344. In 1692 gentlemen wore a neckcloth called Steenkirk, so called from being first noticed at that battle; for a similar reason a famous wig in 1706 was called Ramilies. (Ib. 885.)

Whiskers were not worn in 1712. Ladies rode in hat and feathers, coats and periwigs. (Ib. 331.)

They beat drums under a bridegroom's dows at the same period. (Ib. 364.)

with the color of Burke's apparel; he rarely or never came to the House in Blue and Buff." [Wraxall, ii. 275.]

Fox used to attend the House when a young man in a hat and feather; but in 1781 usually wore a frock coat and buff waistcoat, the uniform of Washington. (Ib. ii. 239.)

Rigby was dressed in a dress suit of purple, without lace or embroidery, close buttoned, with his sword thrust through the pocket. [Ib. ii. 214.]-Notes and Queries.

BARNACLES AND SPECTACLES.-What is the real difference between these two words? I have always thought them identical, but they evidently were not considered so by Sir Thomas Urquhart for, in his curious translation of Rabelais (book v. ch. xxvii.), he says: "They had barnacles on the handles of their faces, or

win-spectacles at most." In the original French, the phrase is simply "bezicles au nez.". Notes and Queries.

Colors in dress marked the politics of the wearer. "The spirit of party did not blend

OPTICUS.

From Fraser's Magazine.

every day, and she thinks she admires and A CHAPTER ON THE SEA. likes it: but does she feel or understand it? THERE are very few people who know any Has she, so to speak, any sympathy with thing about the sea. Myriads there are who the sea? Not at all. It is ten to one that sail on it, row on it, walk by it, bathe in it, she does not even note the changes which it fish in it, rave about it, and write about it, undergoes from hour to hour. Exulting in but scarce one of these who has any ac- the fresh, rosy light of morning, or heaving quaintance with it. Sailors least of all. I in the hot mist of the languorous noon, or never knew a sailor who had any real knowl-brooding in the calm, celestial light of evenedge of the sea. What it may do to him ing, its language is much the same to her. and his ship, how he may circumvent and If there is a storm, she is a good deal frightbe even with it, by what judicious manipula- ened and perhaps a little pleased when in tion of cloth and cordage he may utilize its the furious onset of the waves upon the shore power or disappoint its voracity-on such their sharp, dark edges break into cataracts points he is knowing enough: but of the sea of fiercely boiling foam. But on the whole as that which in this strange and awful life- she comes to the conclusion that "the sea theatre of ours is the most astonishing result looks so wild and dreary to-day," and that of creative power and love,-of the sea in she hopes it will be all quiet again to-morthat "infinite variety" of attribute which row.

ion now-a-days, understood far better than our modern bards the comparative poetic interest of the sea. Ατρύγετος, οἴνοψ, δία, Toλúphotoßos, every Homeric epithet for the sea goes to the heart, and recals to the genuine lover of it, with an almost painful fidelity, some one of his idol's numberless delights. I forget whose is that delicious Doric hexameter:

"time cannot wither nor custom stale,❞—of Has any thing good been written about the sea in its terror, its wonder, its sublim- the sea? Not much, considering its poetic ity, its majesty, its fury, and its pride,-of value. Of course when a man is a great poet the sea in its peace, its calm, its gentleness, he cannot altogether avoid thinking occasionits purity, its fascination, and its delight:- ally of the sea; and accordingly, from the harps he, who of all others ought to know most, of the immortals in all ages have sounded knows (I speak generally) absolutely noth- here and there the most precious melodies in ing. "O! the sea is so delightful," says its praise. Homer never speaks of it but young Crinolina; and in her innocent little with "tender dread," and both he and all heart she thinks-of what? Of the new the other poets of old Greece, though they hat with its charming "broad brim that dealt less in the picturesque than is the fashwill throw into such soft, becoming shade the delicate young face, of the fun it will be to walk on the beach without seeming to know that she is seen by those terribly bored and blasés officers peering all day out of the window of the " Subscription Rooms; "' of the ride along the sand under the cliffs with Cousin Frank, whose chestnut moustache and cut-throat collar have figured (fortunate appendages) in many an innocent young dream. Perhaps too, the little darling, if she is of what is vulgarly called a romantic" turn, thinks pleasantly of the fresh Think of all the convulsive attempts of our sea-breezes, and the grand, overhanging modern poets and poetasters to express the same or a kindred idea-think even of cliffs, and the dark expanse of blue water diversified here and there by the fitful gleam Byron's "o'er the glad waters of the dark of a sea-gull or a sail; or if she is a ," and "the green wave that tremsketcher, she thinks of the long washes of bles as it glows," and say whether any of green, blue, and purple, which she will in- them can equal this. We cannot express it flict upon the "block," and go home in the in English, for that glorious Greek definite happy delusion that she has made a faithful article has here a force triumphant, and all likeness of the sea. But as to the sea itself, its own; and the color, yavкos, not green she is no more intimate with it than she is not blue, but that indescribable one seen with a man whom she knows merely because only on the sea and inexpressible only by she has danced with him once. She sees it this one Greek word, and the wonderful skill

66

Τάν ἅλα τὴν γλαύκαν ὅταν ἄνεμος "τρένα βάλλη

bine sea,"

with which dactyl and spondee are handled or of Stanfield-what richest rhapsody of Ruskinian eloquence could come within five hundred miles of that? It is the actual poetic truth which your soul has so often yearned for when you have tried to recal your impressions of a surf-beaten shore; and if you will repeat the whole line over to

so as to express the tremulous volitant mo-
tion of breeze upon wave-these things are
inimitable in our less perfect language.
Ω Δίος αἴθηρ καὶ ταχύπτεροι πνοαι
Ποτάηων τε πήγαι, ποντίων τε κυμάτων
Ανήριθμον γελασμα.

No one could approach, no one has at-yourself till you are quite familiar with it. tempted to translate that. No one, did I you will see and hear, as if you were on the say yes, in the Christian Year we read of wave-worn rock itself the long, impetuous "the many-twinkling smile of ocean," and roll of the threatening surges as their fierce in a note we are quietly referred to this battalions break upon its adamantine base; výplμov yèλaoua, as if it were much the and then, leaping wildly into the air with same thing. And so it might be to a impotent fury and vast expenditure of useless boarding-school miss, but not to the chained foam, fall back at last upon their advancing Prometheus riveted to that pitiless rock, comrades with a long-drawn, melancholy "ringed with the azure" air, mocked, cruelly wail. And here I am reminded of a simile mocked, by the multitudinous merriment of taken from a mock-heroic or 'burlesque poem that illimitable sea. published in our own day, of which I forget even the title, and of which my impression is that it has little to recommend it except the lines in question, which, however, are exquisitely beautiful:

"As in obeisance lowly

It seems strange that the Latin poets should have done so little for the sea: but the truth is, admire them as we may, they were "made-up poets; and that Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the rest, are to the Greek bards as old gentlemen, wigged, rouged, and To Ocean's argent Queen, in some calm bay tightened, are to young ones. Horace was By moonlight ebbs the uncomplaining tide, O'er sheeny sands serenely drawn away.' a great poet, but his muse was curbed by the stiff collar of refined society, and jammed Yes; a small, sand-paved bay by moonin the strait-waistcoat of Imperial flunkey- light (say in Guernsey or Jersey, pre-emiism, so that in the region of the picturesque, nent for their delicious bays), is in itself which by nature was her own, she was very enough, though seen but once, to make life a ill at ease; and Virgil, with all his opportu- blessing. Silence, seclusion, mystery, calm; nities of subject, could not for the same rea- the pale radiance of the moon-the ebb of son make any thing of the sea. tides "serenely drawn away"-not sound, but its beatified spirit; not light, but its inefsanctified soul; deep, peaceful sadness, fable love, "divine despair," and stronger perhaps than all, the memory of the past; for somehow or other, explain it as we will, there is an unfailing link between memory and the moon. Milton loved the sea as only a great poet can love it, though his acquaintance with it was any thing but familiar; and though in Lycidas he insulted it by call66 watery floor"-a chambermaid's metaphor. But from the time when his bright chestnut hair curled about his smooth, young forehead and deep poetic eyes, and he wrote in his ode On the Nativity, how

Shakspeare, Milton-we were going to name many others, but none ought to be named in the same breath with these two, if indeed any other in the same breath with the first;-how Shakspeare felt the sea any one who has read The Tempest may know; and every now and then throughout his plays he speaks of it as only he and perhaps Eschylus could have spoken.

"The multitudinous-sea incarnadine,"

is one of the grandest of his lines; and ing it the

there is one which we like still better. It is in that noble specimen of martial oratory which might make a coward brave and a quaker rush into the battle-the address of Henry V. to his soldiers before Harfleur:

"Let the brow o'erwhelm it (the eye), As fearfully as doth the galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean." "Wild and wasteful; "-What art of Turner

"The winds with wonder wist,

Smoothly the waters kissed,

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean:
Which now had quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the
charmed wave: ""

to the day of his consummate power when noble versification (how should it be otherin the Paradise Lost, he sings, in lines of wise with such an ear as Byron's?), but the elaborately wrought and matchless melody- thoughts, with one or two exceptions, are not of the highest order.

fish that look like serpents without heads, nothing to jar upon the ear-or rather, to and wonder how it is possible that waves the ear there is stunning sound, to the mind can ever again appear on that floor of trans- there is profound and solemn stillness. parent stone, varied here and there by the This may be paradoxical; but who feels tortuous courses of currents stealing far that silence is really broken by the vociferous away with a strange mysterious interest in chorus of birds deep in a thicket of June? their wanderings, till they are lost in the Who does not feel, indeed, that the silence hot mist that confounds at no great distance is rather deepened by the sound-that it is sea and sky. not sound, but melodius silence, that is there?

"Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor sense nor motion.
As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Our greatest living poet (to say the least of him), Alfred Tennyson, has not as yet done much for the sea; but not a few gems

Then in another kind, how wonderfully fine which take their lustre from it are to be is this:

"The fresh wind blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea."

After reading that you hold your breath, and ponder on it with astonishment and delight.

And this reminds us of Barry Cornwall. Of this gentlemen I was for a time inclined to think that his song of the sea was too melodramatic to be really laudable. But there are one or two redeeming touches which lift it well out of that category. "The waves were white, and red the morn, In the noisy hour when I was born, The whale it whistled, the porpoise rolled, And the dolphins bared their backs of gold, And never was heard such an outcry wild As welcomed to life the ocean child."

Compare this with

"The blue above and the blue below,

And silence wheresoe'er I go."

Yes; the sea is both noisy and silent, and the man who could feel this was a poet not altogether of the "Black-eyed Susan" order. There is silence in every sound of it, from the lulling undertone that is just enough on a calm summer evening to mark the union of sea and land, to the wild roar of the fierce Atlantic, maddening in its eternal strife with the iron-hearted cliffs of Western Ireland, making every cave and inlet, won from them by the toil of ages, a seething, howling cauldron of contending waves, which show here and there amidst the deluge of their surf glimpses of blackblue water, and sending up to the very summit of the giant rock, traces of its wrath and power in flakes of scattered foam and blinding mist of spray. In this, too, there is silence, for loud as is the noise, there is

found in his poems. Every one remembers
that masterly touch, so true to the German
Ocean,
about

Looking at this stanza by itself, I should have guessed that the sea which Tennyson here speaks of was a winter or late autumn sea; for it is then, as it seems to me, that the splendor, gladness and beauty of light (not of color) upon the sea are most conspicuous. And accordingly (for a great poet is potentially a great painter too), when we look back to the first stanza, we find that it is in that season when "the chesnut patters to the ground."

As to painters, I really do not remember ever seeing a sea-piece which I thought thoroughly good. Mr. Ruskin's abuse of the Vans and Backs and all their brother charlatans is only too well merited. Claude could paint most exquisite pictures in which the sea figured prominently; but it is in his rendering, not of the sea, but of the light