"Humbly sheweth to your excellency,

"That, whereas, John Cowman, being arraigned, convicted and condemned upon the statute of the first of King James of England, &c., for witchcraft, conjuration, sorcery or enchantment used upon the body of Elizabeth Goodall, and now lying under that condemnation, and hath humbly implored and beseeched us, your lordship's petitioners, to mediate and intercede in his behalf with your excellency for a reprieve and stay of execution.

"Your Excellencie's petitioners do therefore, accordingly, in all humble manner, beseech your Excellency that the rigour and severity of the law to which the said condemned malefactor hath miserably exposed himself, may be remitted and relaxed by the exercise of your Excellency's mercy and clemencie upon so wretched and miserable an object. And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray, &c." The Governor acceded to the humane request with a singular provision. The proceedings of the same date in the Upper House give the following action :-"The Lieutenant-general hath considered of the petition here above, and is willing upon the request of the Lower House, that the condemned malefactor be reprieved and execution stayed, provided that the Sheriff of St. Marie's county carry him to the gallows, and that the rope being about his neck, it be there made known to him how much he is beholding to the Lower House of Assemblie, for mediating and interceding in his behalf with the lieutenant-general, and that he remain at the city of St. Maries to be employed in such service as the governor and councill shall think fitt during the pleasure of the Governor."

E. S. RILEY, JR.

BÉRANGER.

Mes chansons, c'est moi.-BERANGER.

Tow

OWARD the middle of January, 1833, in the sweet seclusion of Passy, sat an old man in a great arm-chair, chatting of the reminiscences of his youth, using a simple eloquence as he wrote that charmed all hearts, scattering wisdom and wit among his godchildren, looking with such tender eyes on human folly, regarding with such amiable indulgence the peccadilloes of men, prattling like a child and a philosopher of a past that had been to him at once beautiful and sorrowful. It was a pleasant sight: Passy with its stately souvenirs of Franklin and Count Rumford, its ample his

torical gardens, its serenity after the great accouchement of July; the old philosopher in the chair, with a face revered by all France, with a head that had grown into a noble spectacle of silvery and reverend hair, with eyes reverted, dim with the dew of those morning reminis cences. It was a preface that he seemed to be writing a preface that was to be an adieu. It did not begin gaily like the other prefaces. There was all the solemnity of a farewell in the deep gratitude which it began by testifying to the audience that had received the author so benevolently for more than twenty years. There was no gay allusion here as formerly to the threat to resolve in three volumes, octavo, the question why booksellers insisted on prefaces and why readers insisted on skipping them; no witty glance at the embarrassments of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme in his efforts to compliment the charming marchioness as in 1815; no sly irony on the scholars that ransacked their brains to derive the words flon-flon and tourelouriho from the Greek and Hebrew. There was a soft reverie, a tender musing while the fires burned again along the lines of remembered youth, an evident effort to overcome emotion at the thought of the patriotic sentiment, the constancy, the disinterested devotion that had been shown him through so many trials. Amid the graceful explanations of the birth and period of his earlier productions there rose before the old man's eye the wistful face of the great Napoleon, the noblest object of his songs, the idolised epic that is written on every Frenchman's heart; then the Cent-Jours, then the Bourbons, then the Citizen-King and the whole host of glorious memories that like Levitical priests blow their silver trumpets around the central figure of the first Buonaparte, all jotted down with nimbleness, gently or indignantly according as the sensitive and impressionable nature of the writer had recorded. It was strange how eloquent the fingers grew as they touched these vitalised reminiscences, how the eye sparkled with interior light, how the lines flew eager and breathless along the page like winged seed burning to find a lodgment, how the thought glowed long after it was written with a beauty and a steadiness that cling to it to-day. It was an old man taking leave of his people, a benefactor blessing the thousands that he had helped and loved, a father kissing his many children and calling down upon them the riches of a benignant Providence. It was Béranger taking leave of his songs. It was the Chansons Nouvelles et Dernières that he was prefacing, a prelude that was rich with the music of one of the most harmonious natures that had visited France. The world listened and wondered as the old man went on, telling with delicate grace and truth the story of a long and eventful life in language that was simply inimitable for artlessness and force. To some the benignant wisdom, the light-hearted philosophy of the Franklin of the widow of Helvétius was suggested, to others a Homeric simplicity and loftiness in the genius that had made a philosophic ballad of a drinking-song and wedded it to perpetual youth-Hebe to Hercules. In all there was the sense of an irreparable loss in this preface, for it contained a renunciation, and a renunciation that was final. It seems odd that one man can do the world so much harm by withdrawing from it his help, his genial and

gentle mirth, his word of cheer, his hand in the darkness, his indignant tears, his passionate remonstrances. It would seem such a man's mission to continually gainsay spiritual darkness in high places; to throw up barricades against wrong in all the moral highways; to march like Cæsar at the head of spiritual armies; to die like the Roman monarch on his feet when his time had come. But a great

and good thing had already been done in the life of this man: strong and sweet and sunny had been his warfare, although his philosophy was an indolent one, and indolence was his favorite vice. His weapon was a laugh, a song, a sword that was thrust home in a gay refrain, the teasing persistence of a chorus that returned and returned until it had acquired a victorious force and its moral purpose was done. It was the pæan, perhaps, even more than the phalanx that wrought such wonders for Alexander. The sunbeam is the most effective of the arms of nature. It is this sweet presence that is the familiar spirit at the fireside of this valedictory preface. As the recollections one by one were marshalled up from the past, and one by one dismissed with a blessing or a tear, it is as if the sun shone upon the glinting helms of a host assembled for the good and glory of mankind. There is nothing shameful among them, nothing that quails or hides its head; and the old man smiles as he cuts his pen and sends it quivering through some proud story of independence or poverty snatched from oblivion and made luminous on the page of history. There is no manipulating, no artful adjustment by which the perspective is made more grandiose than the reality: it is the artless talk of a great man seen through the lens of the most crys talline of tongues, with no reservations, no confiteors to be added in an ugly appendix at the end of a life-history. Perhaps this is the pleasantest song he ever wrote this last chat with his readers, in its crystal honesty, this high and holy spectacle of a soul that no imprisonment, no persecution, no wrath of archbishop or Bourbon. could trample into silence when there was reason to speak, this serene self-measurement that so artlessly tries to shelter itself from popularity under apologies. Like a bell vibrates this clear, crisp prose that sometimes breaks into wonderful little lyric pictures, like frostferns on the pane. There is a sense of rhythm, of repose, of quiet strong will, of summer freshness, of autumn mellowness in these pages. Not garrulous, not egoistic, they constrain respect, admira: tion, reverence. . . . From momentous events he comes to describe his songs: masterly is the touch, acute is the analysis. He naturally shrinks like a father from pointing out too clearly the defects of his children. But there is fatherly wisdom in the observations he makes, a great sweetness in the deference he shows the people to whom they are bequeathed, a profound and sympathetic consciousness of the people's need for a literature. The pen grows talkative, and tells how its master did not know Latin, was not learned in the languages, was foolish and wild in youth, loved the people and wine and women and Buonaparte, was overflowing with all winsome philosophies, and did not take it ill of his old patched coat and his garret to disclose the secrets of honorable indigence. Perhaps it was never more interesting or more persuasive than in these confessions that have a

positive melody of frankness in them, a harmonious aptness to the framework in which they stand. The Dane Andersen (whom he resembles in more than one respect) could not tell of The Loveliest Rose in all the World with warmer hues or tenderer commemoration than does this capital story-teller, who differs from the other in that he sings his stories to the lyre and makes his fairies dance on the village green. It is pleasant to see this tranquil recapitulation in the evening of life, this settling of old scores, this rearrangement of armor after the battle and toil of the day, this adjustment of claims so purged of anger and partiality. Passy has grown greater since: Paris has spread out her suburban arms and amplitudes until the fair rural demesne has become one of a dozen such assimilations; but perhaps it will be long before any event more remarkable than this adieu of January 15, 1833, takes place there. In the song to which this event gives birth - - a song which, like all great things, was born into the world amid pain and tears—the reason is given for this sudden and sharp swerving from the line of promise which the world had for a score of years so keenly and hopefully observed. It was the retreat in good order of a skilful general, drawing off his forces before they were diminished or destroyed, with colors flying and joyous fanfares in all the hope and prime of conquering strength. There were shadowy Cossacks on the horizon-elements of defeat and failure which the poet saw betimes and prepared to meet with instinctive tact and resource. There was to be no sumptuous frozen zone of all the Russias that glittered like a toy before this general and then sank like a Morgana into a scene of disaster, blood, and humiliation. The first menace of the storm, the first key that shivered and threw the instrument into quivering discord, was reverently listened to, carefully heeded. Hence with all their impassioned sweetness, hence with all their Brazilian richness, the Chansons Nouvelles et Dernières, the last songs of Pierre-Jean Béranger.

If Béranger had been an antique poet, Ovid might have put down the 19th of August, 1780- the anachronism apart as a dies fastus, a day in the calendar to be solemnised with thanksgiving to the gods for sending into the world the most joyous-hearted, the most tuneful of mortals. Pretty dame Béranger, the good and careful mother, no doubt saw in the birth-entry of this only son a fact that was pregnant with opulent possibilities. We are not told that the child came into the world sickly, squeamish, dying, like Pascal and Voltaire, with the germs of a life-long dolor that has thrown its halo over more than one great genius. Here was a child of glory, born without the sharp Pauline thorn, absolutely healthy, supremely cheerful, irrepressibly buoyant, no object of doleful foreboding, but saucy and sprightly and well to the heart's core. His very first recorded utterance was a joke, a sally on recovering consciousness after being struck by lightning. His pious aunt had sprinkled holy water copiously round the door-sill during the storm, but in spite of that, poor Pierre was struck and lay long insensible. After listening to the anxious conferences about what should be done, without being able to say a word, he suddenly cried gaily: "Eh bien! à quoi sert donc ton eau bénite?" (Well! what's the good of thy holy water?) Sainte-Beuve gives us

this anecdote. A jolly household must have been that in the Rue Montorgueil, Paris, at his grandfather the tailor's, when this brilliant being enlivened it with his face, before he was sent off to Péronne to his benevolent aunt. It does not at all resemble the stately and sad boyhood of Victor Hugo with his grand royalist mother, his mysterious sadness, his unboyish preference for Tacitus and Juvenal, his sunless and sulphurous gloom. All is air, sunshine, gaiety, sportiveness; no brooding over the sublime historian and satirist of the Cæsars; no poisonous household discords; no travels to Elba, Spain, the province of Avellino, to extirpate Fra Diavolo and his bandits; no passionate fights with little Spaniards in behalf of the "grand Empereur;" no vague purple twilight, such as surrounds the author of Les Misérables, as it were with a sacred awe and mystery comparable only to that of early Pelasgic demi-gods. There is little drapery to this figure; no magnificent withdrawal into a Pagan twilight; no remoteness from the gaze of men; no flinching in the fine nude limbs, the manly open eye, the mirthful physiognomy; no formation of a cult round the spot where the divine fire of genius and song had fallen. You might have seen (had they been there to see) the spear-point that flashed in the hand of the sentinel, the shield that sweated blood, the red-hot stones that fell from heaven, the bloodstained sheaves that lay in the basket, the sun fighting with the moon as we see them in the naïve XXII. Book of Livy: so void of wilful sensationalism is this great poet's coming. After some years of service, and rummaging through Télémaque, Racine, and Voltaire (which happened to be in his aunt's library), he returned to Paris, not, however, before attending, as his biographers tell us, a school which had been modelled after the theories of Emile, and where, as elsewhere in the realm, the visions of Jean-Jacques had been practically realised. The chief thing here was to sport a uniform and compose big-sounding addresses on all public occasions. Such was the ideal of the Genevese doctrinaire; such was the initiation which Béranger received into life; such was the apostleship of the most advanced liberalism that was thrust upon him, and which became the mantle and symbol of his activities henceforth. Questions of social science, however, did not yet occupy, as they afterward did, all the high places of his songs. For a few months fortune smiled and enriched his father. There was a brief interregnum of wealth and independence. Eighteen months passed away, and with them the affluence that had wrapped its caressing arms round father and son, and imbued them with its expensive tastes. But with rare stoical nerve Béranger, with all the instincts of an epicure, cheerfully surrendered his luxurious habits and set to work to learn printing as a profession and support. His teacher fortunately took more interest in his genius than in his handicraft, and while he could not make him learn the mysteries of type-setting, managed to instruct him in versification, and encouraged the very decided inclinations to literature which the young verse-writer evinced. We learn from the song Le Tailleur et la Fée, that his grandfather was opposed to his becoming a "faiseur de chansons." The heavy wooden sabots were light enough on the feet of the young vagabond, "à la paresse, hélas! toujours enclin,” and