The honor of a review in the Times, from the pen of Caroline Norton, was the crowning reward of that most disagreea ble of tasks, the translation into English of indifferent French; and when she informed me herself that she was the author: ess of the exceedingly able criticism I had read and was mentioning to her, I seldom remember experiencing a prouder mo ment. Mrs. Norton was to me the personification of all that was handsome, clever, fascinating, and agreeable; and the little suppers she was wont to give in Chesterfield Street were pleasures one never forgot, and each of which one tried not to leave without the promise or prospect of a successor to it. In the above-mentioned review, she correctly described the Guiccioli's book in one single sentence: "Madame de Boissy is as constant to Byron as Anacreon's lyre was to love;" and like the emperor Napoleon, was much struck by the courage of the person who, with such reputation as the world and Byron's name had given her, could thus publish the life of her lover, and write it with undiminished admiration of his great talents, and equal blindness to his glaring faults. An English lady who had chanced to have a foreign poet of noble station for her cavaliere servente, would perhaps have maintained a discreet silence to the day of her death. Lady Ligonier never wrote the life of Alfieri; but Madame la Marquise de Boissy is " une grande dame de par le monde," and—well, they man. age these things differently abroad. FRANCO-GERMAN WAR, 1870. AFTER her return from a successful trip to the East, her Majesty the empress Eugénie is supposed to have exercised great influence over her husband; and as it was after that somewhat hasty expedi tion that she was admitted to a recognized place in the Cabinet councils, there is no doubt that the supposition had much to substantiate it. known as rather anti-clerical, became sud- Près de son vieux sur son déclin Not to be worth the head-gear of a priest, But it shows, in its spirit of scurrilous ingratitude, what the state of feeling was at the time. "Nous dansons sur un volcan" was said many years before, but would have been more appropriate in 1869; for it is impossible to remember that year and its events without recalling the extraordinary change that had come over the man, whose utterances on the first of the year had for a long time past been looked upon as the key of what Europe might expect were the wishes of France and its sovereign to be disregarded. The result, however, will be renewed admiration for the astonishing courage and conIn 1869, the personal government of the stancy with which Countess Guiccioli defends emperor came to an end, just as his reliher faultless monster. She takes the late Lady gious views suffered alteration; but — Noel Byron in hand, and treats her with the what is a more significant fact the old most freezing politeness; en vraie Marquise dread of the emperor to engage in war of the Faubourg St. Germain contemplating with Prussia was practically overcome; "une miss Anglaise" through her eyeglass. and there can be but little doubt now, that from this year a settled purpose came to Thomas Moore got rather tired of Byron the front- a resolve which eventually biographically before he had done with him; and Lord Russell grew even more tired of Thomas Moore. But Madame de Boissy's praise knows no surcease or lapse in sustaining power. She is the Paganini of panegyric, and charms the world on one Byronic string. How terse, how graphic, how amiably sarcastic, and how delightfully true, are these little thrusts at the authoress whose work I had translated; and how each recalls the spoken remarks which she made to me, and which were so much relished by her eager listener! brought ruin to France and to the imperial family-the decision taken by the emperor, despite his knowledge of the unprepared state of his country, to divert his country's attention from growing troubles at home by plunging it into a war of conquest. That he took kindly to the decision would be inaccurate; for I heard from more than one royal personage in Germany, that up to the very last Napoleon III. hoped it might be delayed, and my informants were likely to know; but from the beginning of the year 1869, Napoleon | plunge headlong against his better judg was ruled and not a ruler. He played the part of a gambler who stakes his last chance on a throw of the dice; and when his thoughts had been uttered, the die was cast. ment and his own instinctive fears, only to lose himself and France. In August of the preceding year, I had casually told a Prussian colleague of my desire to be some day sent to Germany, when he remarked smilingly, "Wait until it is created" (Attendez qu'elle soit formée); and though at the time the remark struck me as whimsical, still, in weighing events as they subsequently occurred, and In February, 1870, I went to a last reception at the French Foreign Office. M. Daru was then at the head of that important department, and his family were all well known to me. They belonged to that charmed circle which, until the introduc-as history has now chronicled them, it is tion of parliamentary government, had so studiously kept aloof from imperial asso ciations. He did not, therefore, look upon me in a mere official character, but treated me with a friendly courtesy and kindness which my position of attaché alone could not warrant, but which was due to my friendship with his son. When I was announced, he cordially shook hands with me and exclaimed, "Is it true that we are about to lose you?" "I have been transferred to Constantinople." "You don't mean to say that you have asked to be removed from Paris?" "Well, I have had three delightful years, and I must see a little of the rest of Europe." "You will see enough of it if you remain here," said his Excellency. "But Paris is Capua." "It will not be so long. Events are about to take place," gravely remarked the minister, "which will far exceed in importance anything that has gone before; et c'est quand ces grands évènements se préparent que vous quittez vos amis, et vous nous dites adieu. C'est bien mal à vous." I was much impressed by these words; and indeed they have never ceased to ring in my ears. Did M. Daru know that war was resolved upon, or did he speak from the knowledge of what was passing through the imperial mind, regardless of its being a settled intention or not? The question is one I perhaps could solve; but it mat ters little here. All I care to point out in relating this anecdote is the curious fact that in February, 1870, long before the Benedetti incidents, a French minister for foreign affairs alluded to the coming war; and the remarks with which I have prefaced this conversation must show how really grateful Napoleon III. would have been for a friend to stop him on the brink of a precipice from which he was about to impossible to suppose that England was not well aware of both German intentions and French apprehensions. It is not for me to do more in these pages than to record my firm belief that it was in the power of England to stop the Franco-Ger. man war at the outset, in the name of European civilization about to be outraged, and thus prove a friend to Napoleon III., just as it was in the power of this country to delay the Russo-Turkish war of more recent years, had not Igna tiew proved a better diplomatist at the Conference of Constantinople than the representatives of other powers. When in Germany, I was shown a fan belonging to Fräulein von Cohausen, upon which, when she accompanied the Duchess Dowager of Hamilton to Wilhelmshöhe, where Napoleon was a prisoner, the emperor had written these lines of Dante: Nessun maggior dolore, Chè ricordarsi del tempo felice Poor emperor! he was a friend to all, and fell through his friends. He was very true to England, whatever he may have been to other countries; but England failed him unfortunately in Denmark, fortunately in Mexico, and fatally in 1870. From Nature. SOUTH AMERICAN BIRD-MUSIC. MR. BURROUGHS, an American natu. ralist, in his "Impressions of some British Song Birds," has said: "Many of the American songsters are shy wood-birds, seldom seen or heard near the habitations of men, while nearly all the British birds are semi-domesticated, and sing in the garden and orchard. This fact, I had said, in connection with their more soft and plaintive voices, made our song-birds seem less to a foreign traveller than his own." These words apply with much greater force to the birds of South Amer ica, the species being much more numerous and less well known than in the northern portion of the continent; while the true songsters are relatively fewer, owing to the presence of several large songless families, such as the tyrants, humming-birds, and others. sented in the Plata, Chilian, and Patagonian regions. As a fact, the best songsters there belong to the wide-ranging American genus Mimus, while in the more tropical icterine family there is great variety of language, and some exceedingly sweet voices. Of the great naturalists of recent times who have depreciated South American bird-music, I will mention Darwin only, as very great importance must always be attached to his words, even when he fails to show his usual discrimination. He says of the common Mimus calandria: "It is remarkable from possessing a song far superior to that of any other bird in the country; indeed, it is nearly the only bird in South America which I have observed to take its stand for the purpose of singing." He then adds that the song is like that of the sedge warbler. There are many better singers than the M. calandria; and as to its being nearly the only bird that takes its stand for the purpose of singing, there are, in the Plata district alone, a greater number of birds with that habit than in England; though, taking the number of species in the two countries, the Plata singers are relatively fewer. It is equally beside the mark to compare the sedge warbler with the calan The South American songsters certainly do not, like those of Europe, mass them selves about the habitations of men, to sing there as if sweet voices were given to them solely for the delectation of human listeners; they are pre-eminently birds of the wild forest, the marsh, and the savannah; and the ornithologist or collector from Europe, whose principal object is to make a large collection, has little time to make himself acquainted with the accomplishments of the species he desires above all things to shoot. Nor is this all. Doubtless there remains in the minds of most people something of that ancient notion that brilliant plumaged birds utter only harsh, disagreeable sounds; while the sober-toned songsters of temperate regions especially those of Europe have the gift of melody; that sweet songs are heard in England, and screams and grating notes within the trop ics. Only we know now that the obscure species there are greatly in excess of the brilliant ones. It is quite possible, how-dria, the performance of the former bird ever, that the tropics, so rich in other respects, though by no means the realms "where birds forget to sing," do not excel, or even equal, the temperate regions in Darwin does not say much about the the amount and quality of their bird mel- singing of birds, and appears to have ody. Mr. im Thurn only echoes the words taken but little interest in the subject, of many English travellers in the tropics, possibly because this species of natural when he says, in his recent work on Brit- melody gave him little or no pleasure; ish Guiana: "The almost entire absence otherwise he could scarcely have written of sweet bird-notes at once strikes the of the diuca finch that "the male during traveller who comes from thrush and war-incubation has two or three pleasant bler haunted temperate lands." Mr. Bates, on this subject, says: "The few sounds of birds are of that pensive and mysterious character which intensifies the feeling of solitude rather than imparts a sense of life and cheerfulness." On the question of tropical bird-music much remains to be said by future travellers; but South America is not all tropical, and travellers visiting the southern temperate portion of that continent might have looked to find there melodists equal to those of Europe and North America; for even assuming that to utter agreeable sounds a bird, wherever found, must be fashioned after the pattern of some European form, we find that the typical song. sters of the north - the thrushes, wrens, warblers, finches, etc.- are well repre resembling that of the other only as a slight sketch may be said to resemble a finished painting. notes, which Molina, in an exaggerated description, has called a fine song." The fact is, the old Chilian naturalist scarcely does justice to the song of the diuca, which is mellower in sound than any other finch melody I am acquainted with. Of his account of the singing of the thenca mocking-bird, the thili, the black-headed finch, loyca, and various other species, Darwin says nothing. Not all the European writers whose words carry weight, however, have turned a deaf, or, at any rate, a very unapprecia tive ear to the bird-music of the great birdcontinent. Azara is a notable exception. He was not a mere collector, nor was he even a naturalist in the strictest sense of the word; but, made fit for his task by a keen faculty of observation, and an insati. able craving for knowledge of all kinds, the "Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridiohe went into the forest to watch the birds nale," thus describes the singing of the and write the history of their lives. In Thryothorus modulator, which he heard Spain he had been familiar from childhood in Yungas, in Bolivia: "Perched on a with the best songsters of Europe, and in bough overhanging the torrent, its rich, Paraguay he paid great attention to the melodious voice seemed in strange conlanguage of the species he noticed. He trast to the melancholy aspect of its surmakes mistakes sometimes, when speak-roundings. Its voice, which is not coming of the nesting or other habits, but parable with anything we have in Europe, when describing their songs, he records his own impressions only. With the works of his contemporary, Buffon, he only became acquainted after having completed his own observations; and the voluminous strictures on the French naturalist, which burden, and to some extent spoil, the otherwise delightful "Apuntamientos," were only inserted after his own descriptions had been written. In his introductory pages, entitled "De los Paxaros en General," he refers to Buffon's well-known opinion concerning the inferiority of American songsters, and says: "But if a choir of singers were selected in the Old World, and compared with one of an equal number gathered in Paraguay, I am not sure which would win the victory." In another place, in allusion to the same subject, he says: "They are mistaken who think there are not as many and as good singers here as in Europe." To return for a moment to Mr. Bates's words, already quoted, bird-music of that "pensive and mysterious" character he mentions is to many minds more pleasing than the loud, cheerful, persistent singing of many highly esteemed British singers, like the chaffinch and song-thrush. Mr. Bates also heard, in the Amazonian forest, "another bird that had a most sweet and melancholy song, uttered in a plaintive key, commencing high, and descending by harmonic intervals." exceeds that of the nightingale in volume and expression, if not in flexibility. Fre quently it sounds like a melody rendered by a flute at a great distance; at other times its sweet and varied cadences are mingled with clear, piercing tones or deep throat-notes, in one word, a grave music composed of the purest sounds. We have really no words adequate to express the effect of this song, heard in the midst of a nature so redundant, and of mountain scenery so wild and savage." It might be thought that in this description allowance must be made for the enthusiasm natural to a Frenchman, but Mr. Bates, certainly the most sober-minded naturalist that ever penetrated the Brazilian forests, gives a scarcely less fascinating account of a melodist closely allied to D'Orbigny's bird, if not identical with it. "I frequently heard," he says, "in the neighborhood of these huts the realejo or organ-bird (Cyphorhinus cantans), the most remarkable songster by far of the Amazonian forest. When its singular notes strike the ear for the first time the impression cannot be resisted that they are produced by a human voice. Some musical boy must be gathering fruits in the thickets, and is singing a few notes to cheer himself. The tones become more fluty and plaintive; they are now those of a flageolet, and, notwithstanding the utter impossibility of the thing, one is for the moment convinced that some one is playing that instrument. . . . It is the only songter which makes an impression on the natives, who sometimes rest their paddles whilst travelling in their small canoes, along the shady by-paths, as if struck by the mysterious sound." Outside of these pre-eminently tuneful groups — thrushes, warblers, finches, etc. Of the common house-wren of the Plata, Azara says that its song is "in style comparable to that of the nightingale, though its phrases are not so delicate and expressive; nevertheless, I count it amongst the first songsters." He speaks even more highly of the voice of the todo voz (Cistothorus platensis), which greatly delighted him with its sweet, varied, and expressive there are many species belonging to melody. The members of this melodious groups considered songless which nevergenus, and of the allied genera, are found theless do sing, or have, at any rate, some throughout South America, from Panama highly musical notes. Dendrocolaptine to Patagonia, and we know from others birds are not, strictly speaking, songsters; besides Azara that their music does not but they are loquacious, and fill the woods dissolve away in the tropics, or turn to with sound, often pleasant and laughterharsh sounds. Mr. Wallace heard a cis-like in character; and in many species the tothorus singing very sweetly on the male and female combine their voices in a shores of the Amazon, and D'Orbigny, in pretty kind of chorus. In the well-known oven-bird this is very striking, the male | remains to be said. The species which and female singing a ringing, joyous duet "formally take their stand for the purpose in different tones, producing an harmoni- of singing" sometimes delight us less ous effect. D'Orbigny notices this har than others which have no set song, but monious singing of the Furnarius. The yet utter notes of exquisite purity. Nor hirundines in many cases have voices ut- is this all. To most minds the dulcet terly unlike those of Europe, which as a strains of a few favored songsters contribrule only emit a squeaking twitter. They ute only a part, and not always the largest have, on the contrary, rather thick tones, part, of the pleasurable sensations rein many cases resembling the throat-notes ceived from the bird voices of any district. of the skylark, and some have a very pleas- All natural sounds produce, in some measing set song. The human-like tones of ure, agreeable sensations: the pattering some of the pigeons, the plaintive fluting of rain on the leaves, the lowing of cattle, of the tinamous, even the notes of some the dash of waves on the beach, the kingfishers and cuckoos, contribute not a "springs and dying gales " of a breeze in little to the bird-music of South America. the pines; and so, coming to birds, the Waterton's words about the "songless" clear, piercing tones of the sand-piper, the bell-bird are well known, and, allowing cry, etherealized by distance, of a passing that he goes too far when he says that migrant, the cawing of rooks on the treeOrpheus himself would drop his lyre to tops, afford as much pleasure as the listen to this romantic sound, it is still whistle of the blackbird. There is a certain that there are hundreds of species, charm in the infinite variety of bird-lanwhich, like the bell-bird of the Orinoco guage heard in a sub-tropical forest, where forests, utter a few delightful notes, or birds are most abundant, exceeding that produce a pleasing effect by joining their of many monotonously melodious voices; voices in a chorus. Thus, Mr. Bates the listener would not willingly lose any speaks of the Monasa nigrofrons- a bar of the many indescribable sounds emitted bet: "This flock of tamburi-para were by the smaller species, or the screams and the reverse of dull: they were gamboling human-like calls, or solemn, deep booming and chasing each other amongst the or drumming of the larger kind, or even branches. As they sported about they the piercing shrieks which may be heard emitted a few short, tuneful notes, which miles away. The bird-language of an Enaltogether produced a ringing, musical glish wood or orchard, made up in most chorus that greatly surprised me." part of melodious tones, may be compared to a band composed entirely of small wind-instruments with a very lim violent contrasts, or anything to startle the listener a sweet but somewhat tame performance. The sub-tropical forest is more like an orchestra in which a countless number of varied instruments take part in a performance in which there are many noisy discords, while the tender, spiritual tones heard at intervals seem, by contrast, infinitely sweet and precious. But even leaving out all these irregular melodists; also omitting the tanagers, the tyrants, and their nearest allies; the Den-ited range of sound, and which produces drocolaptide and Formicaridæ, and the no storms of noise, eccentric flights, or humming-birds- these few families I have mentioned comprising about eighteen hundred species there would still be a far greater number of regular songsters than Europe can show, so great is the bird-wealth of South America; and concerning the merits of their music I can only say that Azara and D'Orbigny did not hear the best singer - the Mimus triurus. It would have been strange indeed if in that portion of the globe, so inconceivably rich in species, and where bird-life has had its greatest development, the faculty of melody had not been as highly perfected as in other regions. A very long time has passed since Azara made that remark about a choir of song-birds selected in Paraguay, and our knowledge on this subject-possibly because it has been thought unimportanthas scarcely been added to since his day; but it seems to me that when the best sing. ers of two regions have been compared, and a verdict arrived at, something more W. H. HUDSON. From St. James's Gazette. CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART. "REJOICE always: and again I say, rejoice," says one of the highest authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological science writes, - A cheerful heart is what the Muses love. Dante makes melancholy dismally punished in purgatory; though his own inte |