whole surrounding country seems shrouded by an atmosphere which has been whipped into the consistency of pea-soup. One side of the street is sometimes as completely hidden from the other side as by a November fog in London. Woe to the unlucky housemaid who has inadvertently left open a single window! Repentance in sackcloth and dust is her condign punishment.

And thus the enemy speeds up and down the day through. The heat is stifling, but people all seek to close every avenue of approach. Batten down and stew is the order of the day. Of two evils it is by far the least; indeed, the only defence, and every port is closed as on board ship in bad weather. Should the demon succeed in effecting an entrance, he sweeps through the hall, rushes up-stairs, and bangs every door like a maniac. The hotel kitchen is a subject of special anxiety to the functionaries concerned, and certain vendors of perishable commodities close their shops altogether.

Some years ago, in one of the chief cities, the brilliant idea was conceived of an al fresco banquet, which, it was argued, in a warm, sunny climate, under the cloudless blue skies of another Athens in the south, should be "after the high Roman fashion." Nothing was spared that could contribute to the successful reproduction of a classic repast in ancient Greece or Rome. The Falernian wine was absent certainly, but then, was there not an abundance of the finest products of Australian vintage? All went well until the supreme hour, when, tradition relates, swift as the wind from the land of souls came down the shadow

feared by colonial hosts, bearing on its sulphureous wings

grand dull Odyssean ghosts Athirst to drink the cool blue wine. There is no resisting such a despoiler, and in a brief space all was universal rout and disorderly flight.

fidgets, lifts his horsehair wig, and pretends to make notes, but it is a pretence and nothing more. The day wears on, night comes, and you see those nocturnal birds the pressmen adding the torments of countless gas-jets to the suffocating temperature, until the compositors' room becomes another inferno, and the printer's imps run to and fro incessantly with cans which may or may not contain water. And the editorials! Well, they are doubtless affected likewise. Heated blood, simulated wrath, are in harmony with any sensational matter on hand "Was there any baseness like unto this baseness ? " and so on da capo and da capo!

Nearly all "the airs that blow " have in their turn been the theme of some sweet singer. Even the much-execrated east wind found its laureate in Kingsley, the verse of Bryant is cloyed by "the kisses of the soft south-west," and Shelley's deathless ode,

O wild West Wind, Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is, rises to the thought like a clarion-call, But who will hymn the Austral "brickfielder "?

Long-inured colonists contend that these hot winds kill the germs of fever that abound. But typhoid does not diminish. Has the notion ever got beyond the region of hypothesis? At what degree of temperature are germs asphyxiated? Who knows that germs cannot exist at a temperature which, though decidedly unpleas ant, is by no means fatal to other forms of life?

Just as in old Flemish cities every housewife possesses a long black cloth cloak for a stock article of ordinary use, so in Australia every one-man, woman, or child has a dust cloak, or coat, always at hand.

These winds sometimes last two or three days, or even longer. Their cessation is sudden and decisive. And then People you meet appear strangely af- the gentle rain comes down, and converts fected by the wind-despot. That staid the dust into mud, and the sun shines out Evangelical curate wears a face flushed once more; not with the weak, watery like a peony, strangely resembling the smile of northern climes, but broadly and peculiar bloom produced by indulgence blandly as the childlike radiation from the in alcoholic nips; that middle-aged lady countenance of Ah Sing in the Chinese district-visitor, with the severe cast of quarter of the town, and under the revivcountenance, looks red and excited, and ing influence of the cool ocean-breeze you as self-consciously flurried as though she unsay all the evil things you may have had just been the recipient of "an offer." said beneath the spell of the hot wind and The heated air finds its way into the law the dust-fiend. Alas! the enemy has not courts, the leading counsel mops his face gone forever. may be to-morrow, or it incessantly, and glares round with the may not be for many days, but some day ferocity of a wild animal. The judge | return he will.

It

STEPHEN THOMPSON.

wwww

Fifth Series,
Volume LX.

} No. 2265.-November 26, 1887.

{

From Beginning,
Vol. CLXXV.

CONTENTS.

I. MEMOIRS OF PRINCE ADAM CZARTORYSKI, Edinburgh Review,

II. RICHARD CABLE, THE LIGHTSHIPMAN.

451

Chambers' Journal,

• 465

472

480

• 496

510

Good Words,

Contemporary Review,
Spectator,

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From The Edinburgh Review. MEMOIRS OF PRINCE ADAM CZARTORYSKI.*

WHEN Prince Adam Czartoryski died in Paris, in July, 1861, he was more than a nonagenarian, having been born in War saw in 1770, two years before the second partition of Poland. In his family longevity is hereditary, and sorrow and exile and disappointment do not always kill their victims. At the time of his death

the whole Polish party, at home and abroad, was agitated, and men according to their different temperaments, and their more or less clear-sightedness, either welcomed or dreaded the outbreak of civil and insurrectionary war, and the passionate drama of a campaign. Not only had the Hôtel Lambert at that moment its own share of personal trials, but there existed many valid public reasons why these memoirs should not, on the death of the writer, be given directly to the world. In 1862, one long fragment was, however, allowed to appear. It referred to the famous conversation with regard to Poland which occurred at the palace of La Tauride, between Alexander Pavlovitch,

| justificatives, of the drafts of state papers, and of the letters that passed between Alexander Pavlovitch and his Polish friend. The period covered is from 1801 to 1823, two years before the death of the emperor, but when Prince Adam had already experienced the supreme and irreparable deceptions which closed at once his official career and his intimacy with the emperor. The first volume is only a and 1809. Quantities of rough notes for fragment, covering the years between 1770 Mazade says that they are too fragmena further autobiography exist, but M. de tary to be built into anything like a consecutive narrative. As regards Polish matters it is perhaps as well. They could only discover secrets better veiled, and sorrows which death has come to heal. The narrative, had it run on, must have stirred bitter memories, and perhaps for this reason the prince never elaborated his notes about the years of Poland's greatest anguish. Birds sing only in the spring; and if men after the loss of all their illusions lapse into silence, it is because, like Wordsworth's heroine, they

have no more to say

then under the tutelage of his grand- Of that perpetual weight which on their spirit mother the empress Catherine, and Prince Adam Czartoryski, then a subaltern in the

lay.

Imperial Guard. Among the papers col. It is none the less tantalizing to have this lected by Prince Ladislaus Czartoryski autobiography close at Austerlitz. We should have wished to follow Adam Czarwas this famous extract, intended to remind the world of 1862 that the Polish toryski beyond the end of the Coalition, question had once been leniently viewed called in Russia the War of the Forty even by a Muscovite czar, and to show Nations, and to have had his sketches that Poland had once had advocates more of Tilsit and of the campaign in Russia, worthy than the socialists, doctrinaires, still spoken of as its Holy War. These and adventurers who had just hurried her themes have just inspired Count Lyof into another unequal struggle. This book, Tolstoï's "Peace and War," a book so arranged as it was by M. Charles de varied and so complicated in its interest Mazade, did attract some attention, but that it is rather a Summa or a Commedia since then another quarter of a century than a mere historical novel. How far has elapsed, another generation has more delightful would it have been had grown to manhood, and it is to us that M. Charles | Prince Adam sketched those eventful de Mazade now presents the early portrait years! He could have given pictures of Prince Adam Czartoryski, as drawn by

himself.

The book is in two volumes. The second is entirely composed of the pièces

• Mémoires du Prince Adam Czartoryski et Correspondance avec l'Empereur Alexandre I. Avec Préface par M. CH. DE MAZADE, de l'Académie Française. 2 vols. Paris: 1887.

even more faithful. He might even have rivalled the Souvenirs of the young Lithu anian maid of honor, Mademoiselle de Tiesenhäusen (Comtesse de ChoiseulGouffier), in her pictures of life at Wilna, when Napoleon was not only at its gates, but had stirred the hopes of the Lithuanian gentry, whom not all Alexander's

blandishments could win from seeking to reconstitute their country through the help of French victories. Prince Adam has sketched the statesmen of the Coalition. We wish that he had gone on to portray Paulucci and Rostopchine, whose strategy, along with the snows of a most rigorous winter, have left to Alexander the prestige of being not only the most amiable of European sovereigns, but the only adversary before whom Napoleon succumbed.

these proud and insubordinate families the Czartoryskis were second to none in pretensions, in lineage, and in wealth. Descendants of the Jagellons, they had for three hundred years borne the style and title of prince, and this Adam Casimir, covetous of a closed crown, actually offered himself for election to the throne of Poland when the other competitor in the field was his relative Stanislaus Poniatowski. Surnamed the Mæcenas of Poland, he was not unfit to fill the public eye. He was accomplished and generous, received foreigners with a stately courtesy, and gave to his children an education adapted to their great station and to their greater hopes. Of course he had seen some military service, but it had been under the Austrian flag, and in his political leanings he was intensely anti-Muscovite. He led a large party. His brother Michael was chancellor of Lithuania; his sister was married to Prince Lubomirski; while of his daughters, one was given in marriage to Count Stanislaus Zamoyski, and the other to Prince Louis of Würtemberg, brother of the empress Maria of Russia.

While regretting its briefness, let us examine the fragment we have got. We shall assuredly not be disappointed. The style is delightful, and the high breeding and sweet temper of the writer give a charm to every page. Associated with the statesmen and generals of this epoch of really titanic strife, we see two human creatures of the most singular qualities, and of still more singular positions. Of this pair of friends one is the heir to the crown of all the Russias; the other is the heir of Polish palatines and the kinsman of Polish kings. One is heir presumptive to an autocratic sovereignty; the other is a hostage, put into the Guard, as an Israelite of old might have been put into the priest's office, that he "might eat a piece of bread," and purchase for his family some measure of pardon or indemnity. This situation is a moving one, and it would seize on the imagination even if there were not already, in the person, lineage, character, and accomplishments of the young Pole, many of the elements which a novelist would select for his romance. Novels are after all only the his-cordingly with Stanislaus Leczinski, that tories of what might have taken place; and history is not a mere collection of facts, multiplied and multiplying themselves as materials accumulate, but owes its most undying charm to its human interest. In these memoirs the human interest reaches a high degree of pathos. Born in Warsaw in 1770, Adam was the eldest son of Prince Adam Casimir Czartoryski, starost-general of Podolia. War-ments of her stately streets and squares. saw and Cracow were then rivals for the dignity of being capitals of Poland, and Warsaw was full of the palaces of the Poniatowski, Radzivill, Brühl, and Zamoyski families. Yet, assuredly, among

Such was the house. Yet on the birth of its heir fortune could not have been said to smile. Poland was torn by factions; its Diets and Dietines were hotbeds of intrigue; the nobles were impracticable, the feud between them and the peasantry had become envenomed. Adam Casimir Czartoryski saw only one thing plainly – the ambition of Catherine and its consequent danger to Poland. He sided ac

king of Poland who owed his election to the invasion of Charles XII. (1704), and his re-election to the fact that his daughter Marie was the wife of Louis XV. and queen of France. Russia, on the contrary, was ever inimical to him, and, Russian influence prevailing, he was sent to end his days in Lorraine, where Nancy owes to him, even to this day, the many orna

Poland now stood on the brink of the precipice over which she was soon to be hurled, and the election of Augustus III. was so much the work of a party that for some years he was not universally ac