the instruction of a Cuvier, a Laplace, a Faraday, or a Herschel, is no small recommendation. It is to the men of which the faculties of the German universities are composed, that those establishments owe their reputation, and they are the attraction which draws pupils from every part of the world to these centres of high intelligence. But men of this character 'are not made, but, like poets, 'born.' Profound learning is not sufficient: however versed a man be in the knowledge of others, he is not of the first order unless he be endowed with the peculiar mental powers which enable him to originate new truths. When such men are found- and they exist in every community in a certain, perhaps small ratio, they should be consecrated to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge. They should be secured by our colleges and universities, and all the facilities given them for original investigation. They should be relieved from the drudgery of drilling in the elementary branches, and be assisted by tutors in the general instruction, being themselves only called upon to give a limited number of lectures on the general principles of the branch of knowledge under their care. Again, no college or university is properly equipped that is not furnished with a complete series of the objects and implements of instruction and research. . . . In reference to original research, as well as to higher instruction in science, besides apparatus of illustration, instruments of precision are required, without which the power of the investigator, however gifted, must be greatly limited.”

Most of the higher institutions in this country, and the great universities in England, are now meditating very liberal reforms in their systems, in order to bring themselves up to the standard demanded by the increasing requirements of the age; and it is to be hoped that the new university will be in the van of every movement toward the elevation of the science of education.

TALLEYRAND, in one of his letters, speaks of Republican France as "a Republic composed of 30 millions of corrupted souls." In reading the horrible revelations of the Credit Mobilier, we have thought that we might apply his description to our own government, by simply raising the numbers from thirty millions to forty. Name after name, of men the most exalted in office, and the most famous in the contemporary history of the North, has been dragged through this loathsome mire of detected villainy, and the owners of them exposed before the world as the bribed retainers of a jointstock swindle. As for these vile men themselves, we know, indeed, that it was on account of their malignant hatred to us that they were placed by the infatuation of the Northern people in those positions that they have so shamefully abused. Over their fall, therefore, the South will not even affect to grieve, but will rather rejoice in seeing their infamy exposed. Yet, since we share in the national name that they have degraded, and have to bear more than our share of the burdens that their corruption has laid on the government, we cannot help a feeling of shame and indignation at these hideous disclosures. History offers no parallel to the low knavery of these high officials, who, in snatching greedily at the bribes that were to control their official actions, seemed to have retained only so much of their feeling of shame as led them to hide their venality by their reckless lying. In reading of them, their greed and their insolence, we are reminded of what every traveller well remembers, those thievish officers of the custom-house that in the worst days of the old Italian States held out their dirty hands not so much to ask as to demand their bribe. The American, who, with half a blush at his own share in the transaction, used to hand over to those shabby rogues the wages of their iniquity, has of late years blushed more deeply to find, on his return to his own country, that these corruptions had migrated from Rome and Civita Vecchia to New York and Boston. Now we are forced to see that Vice-Presidents and Senators have the same base disease

of itching palms: that, from the lowest to the highest, the despotism of the mob, tempered by the bribery of the mob-leader, is the accepted government of our country. For it is not so much in what is disclosed by the accident of a thieves' quarrel, as in what lurks undisclosed in the whole system that the signs of the evil lie. These men, who have sold themselves for a bribe in the Senate, have reached the Senate, as has been shown in Kansas and in South Carolina, by buying up with bribes whole Legislatures, and, as in the house that Jack built, the men that thus earned their bribes in the Legislature have in their turn bought the right of getting bribes by bribing at the ballot-box. When there is no remedy, complaint is useless, and an honest man's duty is to look with hope to the coming end. It is, therefore, very natural that in New England, where they know most about such matters, the Millerites are again preaching lustily the end of the world in 1873. If it come, however, it can scarcely be the millennium; and the people of Vermont, instead of preparing ascension robes, as they are said to be doing, should hasten to equip themselves, like Sam Patch, for a plunge into the abyss.

A LETTER from Copenhagen, lately given by the Nordisk Folkeblad, has the following news about the health of Hans Andersen :

"On the 8th of December, the rumor got abroad in the city that Andersen was dead. It turned out, however, that on the contrary he was rallying from a dangerous attack. Of this the cause is said to be an affection of the liver. During this illness, the warm personal love that the poet has won, as well by his noble character as by his writings, in an enormously wide circle of friends, displayed itself in many proofs of heartfelt sympathy. He has for many days been receiving, one after another, in his sick chamber, the visits of his friends in the literary, artistic, and fashionable world; and, before his little house in the Nyhavn, a long line of equipages is constantly to be seen. For every one has wished to see the face of his old friend, now in his 67th year, and to bear him in person words of sympathy or some stronger token of affection. Andersen has been, as was to be foreseen, deeply touched by all these tokens of the love with which the masses of his countrymen have honored him. Thus, although he was much exhausted by these visits, he was not willing to deny himself to any; but at last his doctors interfered, and now they suffer him to see no one outside of his little circle of household intimates. Yet, in spite of his sickness, he has been able to compose a beautiful little poem, called the 'Flood-tides,' that will soon be published, along with pieces from our other poets, in a little volume for the benefit of the sufferers by the flood. Her Majesty the Queen has written to Andersen to express her warm thanks, and to-day the CrownPrince has been with him on a friendly visit."

Many, in thinking of the pure delights that this glorious old man has brought into half the households of Christendom, will be glad to join in the proposed trip of Dr. Livingston's little daughter. She says that when her papa comes home from Africa, she is going to beg him to take her to Denmark to see Hans Andersen.

THE

SOUTHERN MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1873.

Ο

JASMIN, THE TROUBADOUR.

N the right bank of the Garonne, seventy-three miles southeast of Bordeaux, stands the little town of Agen, for a long time noted for being the entrepôt of trade between Bordeaux and Toulouse. Its prefecture, seminary, public library of fifteen thousand volumes, and churches, were not more remarkable than those of other provincial towns that basked in the warmth and cherished the reminiscences of Southern France. Nor did its manufacture of serge, cotton prints, starch, leather, and sail-cloth suffice to bring upon it greater repute than its Gascon sisters enjoyed as centres of thriving commercial interests active little bourgeois towns that worked bare-footed all the week and came out on Sunday in sabots and ribbons to spend the afternoons in dancing and wine-tippling. It dwelt in the shadow of its rocks, secluded from the world, apart from the passions of the metropolis, sipping its vin blanc and eating its rye-bread in peace, caring nothing for the wayfarer who recounted. the wonders of the capital; in love with its own remoteness, living the life and dying the death which Monsieur le Curé registered in theparochial record, when it was ushered in, and dismissed with the crucifix and the unction, when it was ushered out. Nobody thought. specially that it would ever be sprinkled with the golden dust that flies behind the chariot of a poet; for though it boasted of the residence of one great scholar in the sixteenth century, and the birth of another, and the church of Notre-Dame de Bon-Encontre in its.. neighborhood was famous for its legend, its miracles, and the pilgrimages that were made to it in the month of May, these circumstances

were not enough to bridge over two hundred years of insignificance and make it one of the shining lights of the Hautes-Pyrénées. It was of course proud of the people who had lived in it, of the scholars whose arrogance and rancor, whose learning and boastfulness had been the talk of their century; but it seemed loth to lay claim to a dignity beyond what the accidents of fortune had conferred upon it, and to assert its importance by the production of a great writer-a singer that should warble of its trim poplars and pretty vineyards, a historian that should recall the glory of having once seen there a page of the Emperor Maximilian, a scion of the Princes of Verona, a famous knower of antique physical science—in a word, the commentator on Theophrastus and Aristotle, the author of the first philosophical treatise on the Latin language, the immortal Scaliger. But perhaps the staid capital of the department of Lot-et-Garonne felt in its heart of hearts that the time was coming, that it could afford to wait for the years to break the silence and tell the world of its existence in notes as rich as those that awakening summer sends from the throat of the thrush-in notes that should be at once a tongue and a lyre, a thing that talked and trilled, wherein dwelt fire from heaven, through which a whole segment of the national life should reappear wrapped in the mantle of the old troubadours-only a mantle that had gone with them to the skies and for thirteen generations been lost to the human race. So it is that there is a moment for silence and a moment for speech with all of us. Long silence is indeed the signal for a more delightful break, for according to the adage it has become golden. How much honey can gather in the human mind in four hundred years, through four hundred springs, when four hundred suns have rolled over, and four hundred summers have garnered the sheaves, colored the poppies, winnowed the cornflowers and ripened the juices of a national tendency! When this tendency is poetic, what a fulness is apt to gather, chafed by long reticence as by a nettle, all the more luxurious for long continence, all the more irrepressible when the flood-gates are once opened! Then the slightest occasion evokes a strain of music; the whole man buds and blossoms like the rod of Aaron; the simple meeting of a nymph, a faun, and Silenus, as in the sixth Eclogue of Vergil, becomes the motive for lovely and wonderful singing of the most lovable of ancient philosophies. All the back years are warbled into consciousness again; all the dormant recollections have their ears plucked like Tityrus, and break forth into praise and thanksgiving; every forgotten thing rejoices in being remembered again; all the past breaks like long lines of sea on the beach over the mind and the artistic perceptions of the poet. The very stones that such lucky mortals throw backward grow like Pyrrha's into men and women, and become the source of a world-allegory or a graceful fable. Whatever has imbedded itself in consciousness turns at the first stroke of this sunlight upward toward expression, lifting its head into the light for the crown or the commemoration of the poet. Whatever lay on the book-shelves of human emotion covered with dust or spoiling with neglect, is brought forth and bathed in those beneficent instincts that have given the world so much solace in the works of genius. The glee of him

who has thus been made the mouthpiece of many mute generations is prone to run into extravagance, into enthusiasm, into ardent lyric form, into whatever gives eloquent and laconic expression to emotion, seldom into prose with its colorless periods.

The South of France has always been the home of poetry. The aesthetic invalid of our day seeks its healthfulness as the most genial prescription for his world-worn body; but there was a time when whatever of culture Europe had, be it crowned head, knight-errant or savant, looked to Languedoc for literary sustenance as we look to the presses of London and Leipzig. There in a corner seemed gathered all the sweetness that had survived the Roman Empire -a nest of singing-birds that had escaped from the palaces of the Cæsars, and for three centuries dwelt among the lemon-groves and the vineyards of Provence. It was there, in a second Italy, that were preserved the precious relics of Latin civilisation; and the recollections of the Latin past seemed to maintain themselves longest in the popular language, customs and associations. While the Scalds were filling the language and literature of upper France with the myths of the far North, and the sword of the Moslem was cutting its way through the Iberian peninsula, scattering broadcast the legends of the Koran and the Khalifs, this sunny southeastern nook of France was preparing itself for the lovers of the Gaie Science, who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries filled Europe with their gallantries, their chivalrous manners, their refinement and their literary activity. It was an afterglow of old Rome in the days when Vergil brooded over Theocritus and Horace lived with perpetual eyes on the isles of Greece. It was a strangely modern revival of the olden time too, for the Crusades were at hand, and the rich shadows of the Christian system had fallen athwart the shadowless demesne of the pagan world. There is disturbance, fermentation, outcry unconscious art is no more; it is the beginning of the long chain of forces that culminated in Goethe's Iphigenie as distinguished from the genuine antique; the commencement of the sphere of retrospective and yet creative art. The old mythology had fled and given place to another in which heathen gods and goddesses found themselves metamorphosed into Christian Madonnas and saints, in which Plato's dream of the just man who died in expiation was absolutely realised, in which the speculations of Socrates were surpassed by the most beautiful of ethical systems, and the statue of Jupiter was transformed by the kisses of thousands into the similitude of a Christian martyr.

Perhaps no country has ever been more favored by circumstances than this division of France. It lay with its face toward the Mediterranean, at the very threshold of all the cultivated nations that have given to our world its most glorious heritage: the Greeks had transferred thither in the earliest times much of their beauty and enterprise; it had been traversed by the continual Roman armies that left behind them a taste for the poets and the masters of the literature which they represented; the Goths from the North settled there for two hundred years, and imprinted upon the language something of the chastity and strength that were native to them; finally the Arab gave the finishing touch to its manifold combinations, and until expelled by Charles