not laugh at me when I proposed a marriage; my first condition, I need hardly say, being that he should never set foot in Parma again."

""But are you aware," interrupted the Countess, "that what you are proposing to me is very immoral?"

:

"Not more immoral than what has been done in our Court and twenty others. There is this convenience in absolute power, that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the governed; and can that which is seen by no one be a blot? Our policy, for twenty years, bids fair to consist in the fear of Jacobinism and what a fear! Every year we shall fancy ourselves on the eve of '93. You will hear, I hope, the phrases I am in the habit of declaiming on that topic, at my receptions. They are grand. Everything that may diminish this fear a little will be supremely moral in the eyes of the noble and the devout. Now, at Parma, everything that is not noble or devout is in prison or preparing to go there; and you may be well assured that this marriage will not appear singular amongst us before the day of my disgrace.""

Three months afterwards, the new Duchess Sanseverina-Taxis was the cynosure of every eye and the observed of all observers at the Court of Parma, where the Prince, whose portrait is a masterpiece, soon seeks to displace and replace his minister. On one of her Thursday receptions, he could not resist the temptation of going in defiance of etiquette, and the following colloquy arises:

""But if I accept your Highness's attentions," observed the Countess, laughing, "with what face should I dare to reappear before the Count?" "I should be almost as much out of countenance as you," replied his Highness. "The dear Count! my friend! But this is an embarrassment very easy to evade, and one on which I have been thinking,—the

Count would be sent to the citadel for the remainder of his days."'

She exerts her influence to make him pay a visit to his wife, an event which electrifies the Court:

"This Prince was not a wicked man, whatever the liberals of Italy may say of him. To be sure, he had thrown a good many of them into prison; but it was from fear; and he sometimes repeated, as if to console himself for certain reminiscences, that it is better to kill the devil than for the devil to kill us. The day after the soirée of which we have been speaking, he was in the highest spirits; he had done two good actions,-gone to the Duchess's Thursday, and spoken to his wife.'

The rivalry of their confiding master and friend a little disturbs the domestic felicity of this exemplary pair, but still their grand cause of anxiety is Fabricio; and it is at length resolved between them that the proper vocation for a young man of family, suspected of liberalism, and more than suspected of libertinism, is the Church. The young man refuses at first, but his scruples are overcome by an appeal to the example of his ancestors.

"What a mistake!" (he had thoughts of enlisting in the army of the United States), remonstrates his aunt. "You will see no war, and you will relapse into the tavern-life, only without elegance, without music, without love. Trust me, American life would be dull work for you or me." She explained to him the worship of the god dollar, and the respect that must be shown for the workpeople in the streets, who decide everything by their votes. "Before turning yourself into a policeman in uniform, reflect well that we are not talking of your becoming a poor priest, more or less vir

tuous and exemplary, like the Abbé Blanès (his tutor). Remember that your uncles were archbishops of Parma. Read over again the notices of their lives in the supplement to the genealogy. Above all, it becomes the bearer of an illustrious name to be grand seigneur, noble, generous, protector of justice, destined beforehand to find himself at the head of his order, and in all his life to be guilty of only one act of knavery, but that one very useful."'

Talleyrand (whose choice of his original profession was probably influenced by similar considerations), when Rulhières said he had been guilty of only one wickedness in his life, asked When will it end?' There was more in this repartee than its readiness or its point; for there are mean, wicked, and degrading actions which never do end, and which colour the entire current of a life. Fabricio, loose as he is, has a vague instinct that he is about to commit one of these, but his scruples are overcome by the Duchess, and he consents with a sigh to become a Monsignore.

The Count's parting advice to his protégé is not quite equal to that given by Polonius to Laertes, but it is in strict keeping with the part.

"“If we are dismissed," said the Duchess, 66 we will rejoin you at Naples. But since you accept, till the new order of things, the proposal of the violet stockings, the Count, who thoroughly understands Italy as it is, has charged me with an idea for you. Believe or disbelieve what you will be taught, but never raise an objection. Fancy to yourself that you are learning the rules of whist; would you raise objections to the rules of whist? I have told the Count that you are a believer, and he is glad of it; this is useful both in this world and the next. But if you believe, do not fall into

the vulgarity of speaking with horror of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal, and all those crackbrained Frenchmen, precursors of the two Chambers. Let those names be rarely in your mouth; but when you must speak of them, speak of them with calm irony: they are people who have been refuted long since, and whose attacks are no longer of any consequence. Believe blindly whatever you are told at the Academy. Reflect that your least objections will be noted down; you will be pardoned a little intrigue of gallantry well managed, but not a doubt: age suppresses intrigue and augments doubt."

"The second idea that the Count sends you is this,If you happen to think of a brilliant argument, a victoricus repartee, which changes the course of the conversation, do not yield to the temptation of shining,-be silent; people of discernment will see your mental superiority in your eyes. It will be time enough to have esprit when you are a bishop."'

How far Fabricio had benefited by these instructions may be inferred from his first interview with the Prince on the completion of his Neapolitan training for the priesthood:

"Well, Monsignor," began the Prince, " are the people of Naples happy? Is the King beloved?" "Serene Highness," replied Fabricio, without an instant's hesitation, "I admired, in passing through the streets, the excellent bearing of the soldiers of the different regiments of His Majesty; the good society of Naples is respectful towards its masters, as it ought to be, but I will fairly own that in all my life I never suffered people of the lower classes to speak to me of anything but the work for which I paid them." "Peste!" said the Prince to himself, "what unction! this is all in the Sanseverina style." Was it possible to repeat more closely the lessons of the aunt? I fancied I heard her speaking. If there was a revolution in my State, she would edit the

Moniteur," like the San-Felice at Naples. But the SanFelice, despite her beauty, and her twenty-five years, was hanged; a warning to over-clever ladies.'

The Duchess narrowly escapes sharing the fate of La San-Felice. The nephew kills a man in selfdefence. He is accused of murder; and henceforth the main interest of the plot turns on the struggles of the aunt to save him from his persecutors, who are secretly set on by the Prince, and to make him an archbishop in defiance of them. The most conspicuous among her adversaries is the minister of police, Rossi, and the least scrupulous of her tools is the republican enthusiast, Palla Ferrante, who robs on the highway to pay for the printing of his democratic tracts, and, whilst daily risking his life for liberty, is made the slave of an aristocratic beauty by a smile. Palla Ferrante, says Balzac, is the type of a family of Italian spirits, sincere but misled, full of talent but ignorant of the fatal effects of their doctrine. Send them, ye ministers of absolute princes, with plenty of money, to France (i.e. in 1840) and to the United States. Instead of persecuting them, let them enlighten themselves. They will soon say, like Alfieri in 1793, "The little at their work reconcile me to the great."

We agree with the same acute critic, that the commencement should have been abridged, and that the curtain should have fallen on the death of the Prince, although the loves of Fabricio and Clelia form one of the finest satires in the book. When the following interview takes place, Fabricio is archbishop of Parma, a popular preacher, and supposed (as is the lady) to be