tocracy. THE LATE LOUIS PHILIPPE. From a Review in Tait's Magazine of Burke's Family Ro- | excessively. The only exception to this was mance; or Episodes in the Domestic Annals of the Aris- her father; but all freedom of intercourse even with him was prevented by the constant impediments thrown in the way by her other relatives, who, for some mysterious reason, would never leave them alone together. Vexed and annoyed by this restraint, she removed to another part of Italy, where she dwelt for several years, until news was brought death. She flew to Florence, and arrived a few days before the old man died. He was delighted to see her, and was anxious to bo left alone with her, as he evidently had something important to impart. But, as before, all unrestrained intercourse was denied, the brother, especially, never leaving them for a moment. At length the poor man died, with the harassing secret of his bosom undivulged. A SHORT period after the death of the exKing of the French, Louis Philippe, and when the chances of the elevation of any of his sons to the throne were being rather anxiously considered, a mysterious sort of paragraph was going the round of the newspapers, insin- to her that old Chiappini was at the point of uating that the dethroned monarch was an interloper into the Orleans family, and that neither he nor his heirs had any right to royal honors. There was just enough in the obscure announcement to awaken and stimulate curiosity, but not sufficient to afford to the judgment data for the formation of a decisive opinion. It looked like a wanton scandal flung into the fallen sovereign's grave, or a reckless expedient of political animosity, intended to damage the dynastic interests and prospects of his aspiring family. Strange to Bay, however, if we may credit the startling revelations given in one of the sections of Mr. Burke's work, there is more truth in the significant rumor than we were disposed to admit. According to those disclosures, Louis Philippe was the changeling son of an Italian jailer, while the real heir to the throne had been defrauded of her royal heritage, and died with her wrongs unredressed. But, without further prelude, we proceed to give a condensed view of the facts upon which these startling allegations rest. This scene, as might be expected, made a painful impression on the mind of Maria Stella, and excited vague suspicions of a strange mystery enshrouding her. The only link that bound her to the family being now broken, she bade them farewell forever, and again quitted Florence. Six months afterwards a packet was put into her hands, of which the superscription made her start, as it was in the well-known hand-writing of her father. Her whole attention was at once riveted. The letter had been written by Chiappini after the commencement of his illness, in anticipation of the difficulties of It was about the close of last century that making any oral communication. It disLord Newborough, an Irish peer, lately closed to her the astounding fact that she widowed, while residing at Florence, was was not his daughter, and bitterly bewailed fascinated by the grace and beauty of a the injustice and wrong to which he had so youthful ballerina, named Maria Stella Pe-long been a party. "But if I was guilty," tronella Chiappini, whose performances he remarks the conscience-smitten man, how was accustomed to witness at the opera. An much greater was the guilt of your real acquaintance commenced between them, and, father!" He then proceeds to divulge the after negotiating a bargain with the reputed dazzling secret of her birth as follows: father of the charming girl, she was transferred to the mansion of her noble adınirer. The conduct of Lord Newborough towards his prize was honorable and delicate in the extreme, for he immediately made her his wife, notwithstanding the disparity of years, and, returning to England, introduced her to the highest circles as Lady Newborough. By her he had two sons, who succeeded to the peerage. On the death of the old lord, 1807, Lady Newborough felt a natural desire to revisit her Italian relatives, which she accordingly did, taking with her her two boys. On arriving at Florence, her first care was to seek out her father, whom she found settled in a much superior condition to that of his earlier career. He and all the members of her family treated her with profound respect, but with a distance and reserve that was inexplicable, and that distressed her affectionate heart : About four months before your birth, a great foreign nobleman and his lady arrived in our town, with a numerous Italian retinue, and hired the principal house from the Marchese Band Lord It was said that they were French, and of illustrious rank and great wealth. The lady was far advanced in pregnancy, and so was my wife. I was much astonished by the affability of this great foreigner, who sent for me, gave me money, made me drink wine with him, and expressed a wish to serve me in every possible way. After repeated conversations he disclosed his purposes to me, with large bribes and commands to secrecy. He told me that it was absolutely necessary, on the child which his countess was about to account of the weightiest family reasons, that produce should be a son; and therefore he urged me, in the event of her giving birth to a daughter and my wife bearing a son, to allow the children to be exchanged. It was in vain that I attempted to dissuade him. : He assured me that, in the event of the exchange, my boy should be nobly provided for, and that he would fill one of the noblest places in Europe. Everything turned out according to the count's precautions. His lady had a daughter, and my wife a son; the children were exchanged; I was made comparatively rich; the countess speedily recovered; and she, her husband, my boy, and their numerous Italian suite, speedily left our quiet little town, and were never more heard of. For the course of seven years large sums of money were remitted to me, with the strictest injunctions to secrecy, and terrible threats were held out to me in the event of my divulging the facts- especially to you. tion! known among his contemporaries as Egalité, Duke of Orleans; and it was admitted by the courtier that he had sojourned in Italy at the period stated. Maria Stella was now thoroughly persuaded that she was, indeed, the eldest child of the late Duke of Orleans; and, in fact, along with Mademoiselle Adelaide, his only surviving child; Louis Philippe, the present duke, being, in her estimation, only a changeling, and all his younger and real sons having died. It may be supposed that she was not a little elated at having, as she thought, made the certain discovery that, next to the Duchesse d'Angoulême, she was first princess of the blood of France, and the rightful heiress of immense wealth. have been well for her if she had ended her. Such are the essential points of this strange story this real palace romance. What a But this discovery was the ruin of her potent appeal was here to two of woman's happiness, and produced nothing to her in after most powerful passions- curiosity and ambi- life but discomfort and misery; so that it would She had yet to unriddle the mystery days in the persuasion that she was nothing of her parentage, and learn the greatness and more, by birth, than the daughter of the lowglory of which she had been defrauded. The born Chiappini. The prosecution of her princely only clue possessed by her at present was the claims caused the destruction alike of her fortune name of the little Tuscan town where she had and her peace of mind. She appears to have been so unnaturally abandoned by the mother had no judgment, and no knowledge of characthat bare her. Giving herself at once to the ter. She allowed herself to be imposed upon by search, she started in quest of the old mar- one swindler after another. She was betrayed chese and his steward, who were the only and made a prey of. Her claims never met fair individuals capable of affording her the de- play. As to whether they were true or false, we siderated information. Happily, she learned will not venture to pronounce an opinion. But that both were living, though very aged. it is very evident that they never received that support or consideration to which they were enShe sought the steward first, and, discreetly titled. disguising her object, she elicited the important fact that her parent was the Comte de In her untiring efforts to have her romantic Joinville. She next attempted to sound his claims investigated, Maria Stella received no master, but found him quite impenetrable. countenance or support from either her son or After considerable perplexity as to the next her husband; for it ought to be known that, step to be taken, she visited the town of previously to her visit to Paris, she had conJoinville, in France, where, to her mingled tracted a second matrimonial alliance with a astonishment and delight, she learnt that the Livonian nobleman, the Baron Von Ungarnobject of her search was no less a person than Sternberg. In explanation of this circumhis Highness the Duke of Orleans, the first stance, it has been stated by a nephew of the prince of the blood. With magnificent pros baron, that his uncle was in the receipt of a pects opening in her imagination, she now large annual allowance from Louis Philippe, hastened to Paris (during the reign of Louis whilst King of the French, to induce him to XVIII.) and, establishing herself in a hand-withhold his aid from any measure for ensome hotel, published widely the following forcing the rights of his energetic wife. In a advertisement: "If the heir of the Comte little volume, now very scarce, put forth by de Joinville, who travelled and resided in Lady Newborough, in relation to her claims, Italy in the year 1773, will call at the Hotel she mentions two curious facts, which, cerhe will hear of something tainly, simple as they are, would seem to be in her favor. On visiting Paris, she went as Having laid this trap, Lady N. waited at a stranger to see the Palais Royal, then the home next day to watch the result. She had residence of Louis Philippe, while yet Duke not to wait long; for in the course of the of Orleans. On arriving before a full-length morning a corpulent ecclesiastic, supported portrait of him, her little boy, by whom she on crutches, was announced, whom she soon was accompanied, exclaimed involuntarily, found to be the confidential agent of Louis" Oh! mamma, here is a picture of grandPhilippe. Though generally a wary diplo- papa !?? being struck with the remarkable matist, yet, on this occasion, stimulated by a resemblance of the duke to old Chiappini, or, hope of ministering to his master's well- if this account be true, of the son to the known cupidity, he unwittingly disclosed just father. The second circumstance referred to the facts which Maria Stella was so eager to by Lady Newborough is this; when Louis elicit. The Comte de Joinville was better Philippe was brought to the baptismal font, , rue de- his weight, it is stated, was a matter of as- evening," continued George," and I will extonishment to those who held him, he being plain. as heavy as a child of five or six months. And this would have been about his age if he had been born in the Tuscan provincial town, and secretly smuggled to Paris. Such are the particulars of this extraordinary story. We can add no material evidence either in proof or disproof of the valid ity of the claim thus asserted by a comparatively feeble lady against the wealth and overwhelming influence of a royal house. Things as strange have happened in noble families, as we could relate, and therefore there is no insuperable improbability in the tale of substitution we have here referred to. If true, it affords another illustration of the indurating influence of state policy, political expediency, and family ambition, habitually pursued, upon the natural affections. From the N. Y. Journal of Commerce. He A FEW years since, as Mr. Gallaudet was walking in the streets of Hartford, there came running to him a poor boy, of very ordinary appearance, but whose fine, intelligent eye fixed the attention of the gentleman, as the boy inquired, "Sir, can you tell me of a man who would like a boy to work for him, and learn him to read?" "Whose boy are you, and where do you live?" "I have no parents," was the reply, "and have just run away from the workhouse because they would not teach me to read." The gentleman made arrangements with the authorities of the town and took the boy into his own family. There he learned to read. Nor was this all. He soon acquired the confidence of his new associates, by faithfulness and honesty. was allowed the use of his friend's library, and made rapid progress in the acquisition of knowledge. It became necessary, after a while, that George should leave Mr. Gallaudet, and he became apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the neighborhood. There the same integrity won for him the favor of his new associates. To gratify his inclination for study, his master had a little room finished for him in the upper part of the shop, where he devoted his leisure time to his favorite pursuits. Here he made large attainments in mathematics, in the French language, and other branches. After being in this situation a few years, as he sat at tea with the family one evening, he all at once remarked that he wanted to go to France. His kind friend was invited accordingly. At tea time the apprentice presented himself with his manuscripts, in English and French, and explained his singular intention to go to France. a "In the time of Napoleon," said he, " prize was offered by the French government for the simplest rule of measuring plane surfaces, of whatever outline. The prize has never been awarded, and that method I have discovered." He then demonstrated his problem, to the surprise and gratification of his friends, who immediately furnished him with the means of defraying his expenses, and with letters of. introduction to Hon. Lewis Cass, then our minister to the Court of France. He was introduced to Louis Philippe, and in the presence of the king and nobles, and plenipotentiaries, this American youth demonstrated his problem, and received the plaudits of the court. He received the prize, which he had clearly won, besides valuable presents from the king. He then took letters of introduction, and proceeded to the Court of St. James, and took up a similar prize, offered by the Royal Society, and returned to the United States. Here he was preparing to secure the benefit of his discovery by patent, when he received a letter from the Emperor Nicholas himself, one of whose ministers had witnessed his demonstrations at London, inviting him to make his residence at the Russian Court, and furnishing him with ample means for his outfit. He complied with the invitation, repaired to St. Petersburgh, and is now Professor of Mathematics in the Royal College, under the special protection of the Autocrat of all the Russias ! THE POTATO. THE vegetable originally used as the POTATO was the production of the convolvus batata, or batato edulis, which grows wild in the Malayan peninsula, and has a creeping perennial root, angular leaves, and pale purple flowers about an inch long. At every joint it puts forth tubers (the edible part). These plants were introduced from South America by Captain Hawkins Gerarde, who cultivated them in his garden, in London, in 1597, and called them potatoes (from batata). They are impatient of cold; but are still cultivated in the south of France and Spain. They have the disadvantage of being difficult to preserve, as they "Go to France!" said his master, surprised are apt to grow mouldy. These are the potathat the apparently contented and happy toes of Shakspeare and his contemporaries. youth had thus suddenly become dissatisfied! They were supposed to be restoratives for with his situation · -"for what?" persons of decayed constitutions, and of ad"Ask Mr. Gallaudet to tea to-morrow vanced age; wherefore, Falstaff says, "Let the sky rain potatoes." Windsor, act v. scene 5.) (Merry Wives of The present potato, which has derived its name from the old batata, was brought to Ireland from Virginia, by Sir Walter Raleigh, about 1589, and planted in his lands near Youghal. At a meeting of the Royal Society, 1693, Sir Robert Southwell, the President, stated, that his grandfather was the first person in Ireland to whom Sir Walter Raleigh gave tubers of the potato. They were called Virginian potatoes, to distinguish them from the batatas, called Spanish potatoes. So late as 1629, potatoes in England were roasted, peeled, sliced, and put into sack with sugar, and were also candied by confectioners. They were introduced into France, 1742, but were long held in contempt, as only fit for the use very poor people. of The potato, though a most useful, is a very unromantic vegetable. Yet there is a remi sing their song, Where to the grass are drooping the branches green and long, My love would I discover, so warm, so tenderly, That thou, my truth perceiving, wouldst give thy hand to me. niscence of interest attached to it. In the O, were we in the wild wood, where thrushes imperial gardens of Schonbrun, near Vienna, where poor young Napoleon, the sometime king of Rome, spent the greater part of his short and semi-captive life, there was a plot of ground appropriated for his own amusement, which he tilled with his own hands. Instead of the fruits and flowers in which a boy might be expected to delight, he cultivated only potatoes, whose white or purple wheel-shaped flowers he endeavored to train into tufts, or bouquets, of some grace. When his crop was ripe, he always presented it to his grandfather, the Emperor of Austria, for his own table. ELIZA ROBBINS, author of Popular Lessons, Poetry for Schools, and many other excellent school books, died of a lingering illness, on the evening of the 16th inst., at Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a most useful writer and compiler of works suited to form the minds of methods of communicating knowledge and inyoung persons, and was singularly happy in her spiring sentiments of virtue. Her works had a very extensive circulation, and held their ground against a host of clever and active competitors. In conversation she was one of the most eloquent and witty persons we have known. Her mind was stored with an immense variety of historical and biographical knowledge, gathered from a wide extent of English reading, to which large additions were made from close and keen obser As the potato is now considered peculiarly the vegetable of Ireland, we shall accompany it with our translation of an Irish song, addressed by a peusant to a fair cousin with whom he was in love. The name of the writer is unknown to us, but the song was very popular in Munster, in the days, now gone by, when the country people sang like the birds. The girl sang as she milked her cow, or sat at her spinning-wheel; the peasant sang at the plough, or following his cart vation of character and society, collected in a along the road; the herdsman sang as he various and sometimes unhappy experience of life. With these endowments, her conversations sat on a stone watching his four-footed were the delight of her friends, to whom she was charge, and the mother sang to her child. no less endeared by the generosity and kindness But since the blight of sadness that has fallen of her disposition. She was cut off in the undion the spirit of the people, and that is main-minished vigor of her faculties. We pen these tained by the daily parting from their fast- few words in profound sorrow at her loss. emigrating friends, we have remarked that, N. Y. E. Post, 20 July. go where we will, we never hear the sound of Irish song: THE MAID OF THE VALLEY FROM THE IRISH. A bhean ud shios, a lar an tochair glais. There is no girl whose beauty can thus my heart BEETHOVEN, the composer, had two imperious habits, by which he was constantly swayed that of moving his lodgings, and that of walking. Scarcely was he installed in an apartment ere he would discover some fault in it, and commence looking out for another. Every day after dinner, despite rain, wind, or snow, he would issue forth on foot and take a long and fatiguing walk. From the New Monthly Magazine. AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP, NO. IV. HERMAN MELVILLE. THE Muses, it was once alleged by Christopher North, have but scantly patronized seafaring verse; they have neglected ship-building, and deserted the dockyards- though in Homer's days they kept a private yacht, of which he was captain. "But their attempts to reestablish anything like a club, these two thousand years or so, have miserably failed; and they have never quite recovered their nerves since the loss of poor Falconer, and their disappointment at the ingratitude shown to Dibdin." And Sir Kit adds, that though they do indeed now and then talk of the "deep blue sea, " and occasionally, perhaps, skim over it like sea-plovers, yet they avoid the quarter-deck and all its discipline, and decline the dedication of the cat-o'-nine-tails, in spite of their number. romances. the tuition of a Herman Melville. This graphic narrator assures us, and there needs no additional witness to make the assurance doubly sure, that his sea adventures have often served, when spun as a yarn, not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch, but to excite the warmest sympathies of his shipmates. Not that we vouch for the fact of his having experienced the adventures in literal truth, or even of being the pet of the fo'castle as yarn-spinner extraordinary. But we do recognize in him and in his narratives (the earlier ones, at least) a capital" fund of even untold "interest," and so richly veined a nugget of the ben trovato as to "take the shine out of" many a golden vero. Readers there are, who, having been enchanted by a perusal of "Typee" and "Omoo," have turned again and rent the author, when they heard a surmise, or an assertion, that Others there are, and we are of them, whose his tales were more or less imagination. enjoyment of the history was little affected by a suspicion of the kind during perusal (which few can evade), or an affirmation of it afterwards. "And if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it will be no harm," is Miles Coverdale's morality, when projecting a chronicle of life at Blithedale. raison. Miles a By them, nevertheless, must have been inspired in fitful and irregular afflatus-some of the prose-poetry of Herman Melville's seaOcean breezes blow from his tales of Atlantic and Pacific cruises. Instead of landsman's gray goose quill, he seems to have plucked a quill from skimming curlew, or to have snatched it, a fearful joy, from hovering albatross, if not from the wings of Life in the Marquesas Islands! - how atthe wind itself. The superstition of life on tractive the theme in capable hands! And the waves has no abler interpreter, unequal here it was treated by a man "out of the and undisciplined as he is that superstition ordinary," who had contrived, as Tennyson almost inevitably engendered among men who live, as it has been said, "under a solemn To burst all links of habit-there to wander far sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave; and who see forever one wilderness of waters."* Ilis intimacy with the sights and sounds of that wilderness almost entitles him to the reversion of the mystic blue cloak" of Keats' submarine graybeard, in which sings, away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, knots of Paradise Breadths of tropic shade, and palms in cluster, outlandish things," exclaims Tommo himself, A landsman, somewhere observes Mr. Tuck-nuts - coral reefs erman, can have no conception of the fondness a ship may inspire, before he listens, on a moonlight night, amid the lonely sea, to the details of her build and workings, unfolded by a complacent tar. Moonlight and midsens are much, and a complacent tar is something; but we calculate" a landsman can get some conception of the true-blue enthusiasm in question, and even become slightly inoculated with it in his own terra firma person, under * Thomas de Quincey. "Endymion," Book III. LIVING AGE. VOL. II. 31 CCCCLXXXIII. |