for unless it happened to be audible among the stars, the two thousand guineas expended upon it were wholly thrown away. Scarcely a note reached the auditors, except those put forth in a roll of two hundred drums which formed the overture; and the chorus of the "Marseillaise," repeated by fifty thousand voices. Immediately after the failure of the concert, the sham ship of the line was taken by storm in a sham fight; and blown up in a bouquet of tri-coloured rockets. Fireworks were exhibited on the bridge of the Chambre des Deputés, which, like other explosions connected with that theatre of eloquence, made much noise, and produced more smoke than fire. The grand piece, intended to represent the statue and the column, was as fairly extinguished as if it had been covered with one of Monsieur Dupin's orations.

The following morning was devoted by the King to laying the foundation of new institutions, for his sons and grandsons to suppress, at some future epoch, as superfluous; and Guizot, the ex-editor, now Minister of Public Instruction, made a long speech on the interests of science; under a vertical sun, which all but melted the statues of Buffon and Cuvier. Under the same ardent influence a perpetual combat was kept up by the flotilla on the Seine; more bread and more sausages were distributed to the people; gratuitous representations of classical dramas, from Moliere and Racine, down to the aristocratic drivelling of Scribe, took place at all the theatres ;-and at a ball and banquet given by the Hotel de Ville, (once so celebrated for its gifts of guillotines and lanternes,) to the brides and bridegrooms married at the expense of the municipality, the King and Queen once more addressed their courtesies to the captivation of the people. Their Majesties bowed-the princes and princesses danced-and the inheritors of the patriotism of July 1830 admitted themselves to be highly honoured by such prodigious condescension. Some among them, perhaps, lamented that the good old Prince de Condé should have hanged himself so effectually and so opportunely, as to deprive them of another offset of legitimacy on which to lavish their adoration. Thus ended the Festival of the Three Days! On the morrow, nothing was left but a few tawdry pavilions of coloured paper, a few faded garlands of laurel. The swings and merry go-rounds were at a stand still. The frying-pans had ceased to fry, and the Minister of Public Instruction to gesticulate. The Mats de Cocagne struck their flags; and nothing was heard on board the Ville de Paris, but the croaking of frogs under her lee scuppers. The paper cannons in the Place Vendôme had taken fire, and were burnt to the ground; and the temporary tombs demolished, plank by plank. No token of the patriotic festival was left, except in a few lads of the Ecole Polytechnique confined in the guard-house, and a few long bills lying loose on the bureau of the new Prefet de la Seine. If a little money was circulated on the occasion, we rejoice with the shopkeepers of a nation, which disdains to be thought a nation boutiquière ; but if the public taste was really consulted in the ordering of these public rejoicings, we cannot congratulate constitutional France upon her refinement, any more than enfranchised France upon her gratitude.

MEMOIRS OF MRS. INCHBALD.

BY JAMES BOADEN, ESQ.

MRS. INCHBALD, take her all in all, was, by her character and genius the most remarkable Englishwoman of a remarkable period. She was the friend of Godwin, Holcroft, and John Kemble; and is seen at this distance as the "bright peculiar star" in that constellation of female genius which illustrated the closing years of the last century, and shed a farewell radiance on the dawning of the present. There is pleasure in dwelling on the names of these lights-the lesser and the greater: Anne Radcliffe, Johanna Baillie, Mary Wolstoncroft, Harriet and Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Barbauld, Mrs. Hunter, Amelia Opie-in ways how different!-Hannah More, and the unfortunate Mary Robinson; and, first in the brilliant cluster, Elizabeth Inchbald. Our blue-stocking ladies have disappeared as rapidly as our great poets. But Mrs. Inchbald was never a blue-stocking, save in a single night of her eccentric life, at a masquerade, when dressing the assumed character cost her nothing. Her garbled Confessions-for we refuse the name of Memoirs to Mr. Boaden's piece of patched work-forms the most important addition lately made to those rare and valuable books which teach men and women to know themselves, by displaying before them, unveiled, the real workings of a noble and powerful, but still a merely human, and a female nature.

The subject of Mr. Boaden's book, was an uneducated country girl, a strolling actress, early left to her own guidance, and endowed with the gift, so perilous in her condition, of great personal beauty, who achieved for herself fame and fortune, and established a reputation for genius and talent which this memoir proves were surpassed by moral greatness; by the magnanimity, candour, and independence of her mind; and by her singular goodness of heart. Yet Mrs. Inchbald was no impossible piece of perfection; she had faults enough, and to spare; some of them the offspring of her virtues. With her acute intellect, and fine genius, were combined even to excess, the qualities of a very woman. She was largely endowed with all the instincts of the sex; its thousand vagaries, caprices; its genius for coquetry; love of admiration; and the romance, generosity, caution, frankness, sensibility, timidity, and daringness which distinguish woman.

Accident made the social discipline of this lady a tolerably fair experiment of what a female may be made who shares in manly education. We mean that education which commences when the spelling-book is closed, and is carried forward by the actual business, and the buffetings and conflicts of life. Seventy years since, the boys and girls of a small Suffolk farm must have been trained exactly alike; and Mr. Boaden's heroine never was at any school, nor received any education, save English reading, picked up in some furtive way. From this position she passed to the stage, where there is a complete breaking down of the thin party-walls which, in humble life, separate the arena in which the sexes are trained, and an entire levelling of all those bulwarks by which our social forms protect and sequester women of higher station, shutting them up alike from the knowledge of good and of evil. If there be originally no essential difference in the mental and moral nature of the sexes; if man, the Bread-Winner, be not

always inherently different from woman, whether the thrifty manager, or the graceful dispenser of the Bread, then ought there to have been no distinction between the tastes and tendencies of Mrs. Inchbald and those of her male friends. But there was wide distinction, though no fairer experiment in training could, as society is constituted, have been made. The result was a noble, self-relying character, and a high-toned consistent morality, but, we hesitate to say it, a not very amiable woman. For this, her domestic and social position were more in fault than her peculiar training. Mrs. Inchbald, a youthful beauty, with a high-spirit, and the requisite share of vanity, had hardly done wrangling with the, respectable, but unsuitable gentleman whom she rashly married, and taken to that habit of living well with him which, with two-thirds of the world, forms the useful substitute of empassioned affection, when she was left a childless widow. It does not appear that, though an affec. tionate and most liberal and dutiful relation, she ever loved any one, as happier women love; or that any portion of her lonely, though active life, was spent under the sweet influences of an entirely confiding and relying sympathy with those among whom she moved. Failing the natural charities, she found their substitute among the beings of imagination, and wedded Dorrifort, and loved with Agnes Primrose and Rebecca. But the most creative and subtle imagination cannot, from ideal abstractions, draw the humanizing uses of the real beings of one's own heart, who may be kissed and chided, frowned at and wept over, sinned against and pardoned for sinning. Her womanly education was never completed; and so far the experiment is not fair. As it was, she showed with equal genius, and under greater difficulty, ten times the common sense of most of her literary brethren; and enjoyed and dispensed far more social happiness.

The materials out of which Mr. Boaden has constructed this memoir are a diary kept by Mrs. Inchbald from girlhood, with candour and fidelity unequalled in autobiography; above two hundred of her letters, and a mass of miscellaneous information about herself and her associates, which he was the very man to gather and store. At first glance, Mr. Boaden's book is, we own, exceedingly provoking. It seems a mere higgledy-piggledy hodge-podge, composed of the most heterogenous ingredients, with here and there a morsel of what you have been promised and are in search of. On a second survey a sort of order begins to arise from the chaos; but it takes a third inspection before one discovers the key to Mr. Boaden's cypher, and finds that he has attempted, after a fashion all his own, and by a sort of chronological arrangement, a strange running commentary on Mrs Inchbald's fifty years' record of her singular life, making her entries a series of pegs on which to hang anecdotes, quotations, puns, puzzles, guesses, sly hints, smart retorts, and a few specimens of what, considering the source whence it emanates, may fairly be called innocent malice. " Motley is your only wear," with Mr. Boaden. He labours under the St. Vitus' Dance; and is evidently, because of his infirmity, unable to approach any object directly, or to perform the simplest action without a variety of preliminary grimaces, nods, winks, and contortions, and comic twitchings of the face, for which he need not be blamed, since he cannot help it. Once this stage is got over, he often goes on tolerably well; and his very slovenliness, we suspect, has done more for those who would see the real Mrs. Inchbald, with her blemishes as well as her beauties about her, than might have been accomplished by fifty cleverer "dressers." If he lays a horrible daub of rouge on one cheek, he forgets, and

blunders on, and leaves the other of the natural colour. The picture is, indeed, true likeness, though the dress and accessories are in bad taste. He has not marred the finer features and nobler proportions he found in his subject; all the rest is pardonable, and we go on with him swimmingly.

ELIZABETH SIMPSON, afterwards Mrs. Inchbald was born at the farm of Standingfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, on the 15th October, 1753. Her father died when she was only eight years of age, leaving her mother with a numerous family, and in circumstances far from opulent. The family were Catholics, in which faith Mrs. Inchbald lived and died. Her religious practice, though not strict, was more regular than her belief was steady and orthodox.

The girls of the Simpson family were distinguished for beauty-Saxon beauty-the beauty tradition ascribes to fair Rosamond and Jane Shore: golden tresses, and the charming and harmonious features, with the dazzlingly fair and delicate complexions of English girls. Elizabeth had a considerable hesitation or impediment in her speech, which made her utterance so indistinct that she early shunned society, and found her amusement in books. She never attended any school; and, from the report given of her slovenly manuscripts and very deficient orthography, which, with whity-brown paper, long frightened theatrical managers from her first dramatic pieces, it appears that she made no great proficiency in the merely mechanical parts of education. Mr. Boaden thinks it singular that, though she shunned company she longed to see the world; or, in other words, that, tired of the monotony and of the dull and narrow realities of Standingfield, she should indulge the more readily the longings of a very young, adventurous, and imaginative girl to reach those regions of splendour and romance which London has prefigured to so many youthful minds. There seems, from some unexplained cause, to have been a more familiar intercourse with players, between Standingfield and the Bury and Norwich theatres, than is usual between the boards and a well-regulated English farm-house. Elizabeth's first romantic girlish passion seems to have been for Mr. Griffiths, the Norwich manager, and probably the first man of his own stage. To this gentleman she secretly applied, in her seventeenth year, for an engagement; for now her long-cherished purpose was fixed to see the world, and to be an actress. Her application was fortunately fruitless. Mr. Boaden, who is a prodigious discoverer of such minute objects as mare's nests, and something of a wag withal, just hints, in his own facetious way, that he has a strong suspicion our Rosalind had a juvenile passion for this gentleman," knowing that she had stolen his picture; and having first read in her pocket-book the name of the hero, Griffiths, entered in separate letters, with the significant commentary—“ Each dear letter of thy name is harmony." Mr. Boaden facetiously remarks, that it may be so in Wales, but has his own doubts as to other places.

About this time, George Simpson, the brother of Elizabeth, went upon the stage, in which profession he never attained even mediocrity; and his conversation and example probably stimulated his sister, who was now left alone at Standingfield, the other daughters being all married. In April 1772, Mr. Boaden's heroine took the adventurous step that ultimately decided her fortunes. She ran away to London without the knowledge of her mother, and with a design of going upon the stage. She had already seen the metropolis, when on a visit to her married sisters; but at this time she avoided them; and, after a series of adventures, with

which many marvels and much romance have been interwoven, she, in a very few days, made her arrival known to her relations. On her former visit she had received pointed attentions from Mr. Inchbald, a respectable comedian of middle age, and they had for a time corresponded. These attentions were now renewed; and, while labouring with all her might to obtain a stage engagement, she, without anything resembling affection or exclusive preference, accepted his addresses; and in a little month became his wife. Her independent character and natural shrewdness breaks strongly out in the first of her published letters, which is an answer to her admirer, Mr. Inchbald, and written in her eighteenth year. After a few airs, allowable to a young beauty in love with one man, and addressing another verging on forty for whom she cared not one straw, she says,

"I find you have seen my thoughts on marriage; but, as you desire it, I will repeat them. In spite of your eloquent pen, matrimony still appears to me with less charms than terrors: the bliss arising from it, I doubt not, is superior to any other— but best not to be ventured for (in my opinion) till some little time have proved the emptiness of all other; which it seldom fails to do. But to enter into marriage with the least reluctance, as fearing you are going to sacrifice part of your time, must be greatly imprudent: fewer unhappy matches I think would be occasioned, if fewer persons were guilty of this indiscretion, an indiscretion that shocks me, and which I hope Heaven will ever preserve me from; as must be your wish, if the regard you have professed for me be really mine."

It is evident that her passion for the stage was intimately connected with her violent love for the stage-manager: yet she had scarcely ever spoken to this enviable and insensible Mr. Griffiths, though, during the festivities of Bury Fair, on the previous year, she had diligently courted opportunities of advancing her double interests; and failing, had returned to Standingfield, "unhappy, and very unhappy."

"The web of life is of mingled yarn," says one great authority; and another, the philosopher Sancho Panza we believe, that most people are neither to be painted with black nor white, but with good brown ochre. Mrs. Inchbald's girlish pocket-book, which much oftener rises up to do honour to her sincerity and honesty than in judgment against her, contains the following notices :-" 1772, January 22d. Saw Mr. Griffiths' picture; 28th, stole it; 29th, rather disappointed at not receiving a letter from Mr. Inchbald." Next month she went to Bury, and clandestinely to Norwich, and had an interview with Mr. Griffiths, probably soliciting an engagement from various motives. She reached Norwich at seven in the evening, and left it at twelve. On the 4th March she wrote to Mr. Griffiths, and received on the 20th an answer which "distracted her;" packed up her clothes on the 10th April; eloped to London; and by the 10th of June was, as we have seen, Mrs. Inchbald. Mr. Boaden who takes good care not to let us know no more of the lady than he sees fit, says, it appears from her Diary, that she never, in after life, saw her first flame with indifference.

It is, we think, conclusive against the profession of an actor, that no respectable player, however successful, ever wished his son or daughter to follow his vocation. It is felt enough to sacrifice one generation to the caprice of the public in this degraded caste. Why it is degraded is not our present inquiry. These memoirs afford abundant evidence both of its dangers and degradations; to women especially. Mrs. Inchbald was too pure-minded ever to be prudish; her profession set her above all false and some true delicacy; and she was of a character too haughty and too sincere for any kind of affectation. For more than