lita, the Duke's adopted daughter, who is beloved by both princes. At the hunting-match the princes quarrel over the killing of a boar, and in their mutual taunts the name of Ippolita is spoken. Each claims her for his love, and in an instant their swords are out. Giovanni is slain, and Garcia, tortured by remorse, hurries from the spot. The body is found soon after, and the tidings conveyed to the Duke in the midst of a banquet. After passionate agonising questioning of the messenger, the Duke orders the body to be placed in the anteroom of his chamber. Ippolita next appears and timidly confesses to the Duke the love between herself and Giovanni (of whose death she has not heard), but assures him when she heard of his high plans for his son, and his purpose to marry him to the Emperor's daughter, she not only resolved to lose him, but even prevailed upon her lover himself to submit to the Duke's will. The keen anguish her allusions to Giovanni's noble nature and brilliant future give the Duke, is very powerfully expressed. The combat of the brothers has been espied by one Zacheo, a Moorish pirate, lurking in disguise about the city, and he reveals himself to the prince. Garcia makes an arrangement with him to bury the body of Giovanni by night in the forest. Hither Garcia comes; and while waiting for Zacheo, expresses his anguish and remorse in a soliloquy full of poetic horror. As he crouches here, the Duke's emissaries come, a muffled, ghostly train, take up the body and bear it away. All suspicion points to Garcia, and those who suspect, and those who suspect not, even Ippolita and his mother, turn to him with agonised questionings: "Where is thy brother? How did you part? Were there any unfriendly words between you?" until his racked spirit almost longs for disclosure and the end. A masked messenger summons him to the Duke's private apartment. Garcia soliloquises : Masked! What further would the Duke with me?-my trial Methought I had passed the worst? Why so I have! Queries, conjectures, probabilities. These blows do harden me, and make the deed, Wherein great faces frown and fade; my heart Till hell seems ashes; paralysed despair Lies, carved in ice, outstretched before my path; Remorse is beggared; scarcely grief remains; And of concealment I am grown so sick, That on my coffin I would gladly sit, Saying- -"Cease all this prate -'twas I who slew him!" But I have ta'en my stand beyond retreat: This deed, O Cosmo!-it is none of mine! In the next scene Cosmo is in the ante-chamber of his apartment, waiting for Garcia. Cosmo. Garcia Cosmo The solid earth beneath me seems to rock; Who gaze with solar face on this my deed; O spanning arch! yawn thou, and let heaven down Something like madness lifts me !-so!- he comes ! (after a pause). Sir, I am here. (advancing and fixing his eyes upon him). Shouldst thou not rather be within thy tomb? Garcia. I rather would be there. Cosmo. Wherefore wouldst rather? Garcia. Because, sir, I am sick of this vile life Which I am made to lead by constant questions I turn, suspicions fang me; words are fangs [Cosmo charges him with the murder which he Cosmo. Boy! boy! no more!— thou utterest (They silently confront each other.) I have a picture here, of ancient date, It was thy mother's gift when first we married, A solemn lesson doth the subject teach To erring mortals: recognise - acknowledge! (He throws aside the curtain and discovers the body of Giovanni laid upon a black marble table.) Garcia (after a pause of horror.) I did it! Cosmo then bids him prepare to die. Garcia urges that though he gave the fatal blow, it was in self-defence, his brother having first attacked him. Cosmo spurns the defence with scorn, as the desperate lie of a coward; then takes Garcia's sword from him, and Garcia kneels. For a moment the father relents, and folds his wretched son in his embrace, then raises the sword, and a masked attendant enters and removes the lamp. Cosmo justifies himself to himself for this terrible deed on the ground that he was but executing justice. A formal trial would only have published the disgrace of his house. But in arrogating to himself the prerogative of heaven to judge not only the act but the heart, he has overstepped the limits of mortality, and laid himself open to a terrible retribution. The Duchess suspects the deed, and dies of grief: Ippolita takes the veil. Zacheo, the pirate, claims an audience and tells the Duke that he was a witness of the combat, and that Garcia was not to blame, having been fiercely attacked by his brother and forced to draw his sword in self-defence. This last blow crushes the Duke his soul is shaken by grief and remorse, and the shades of death begin to close around him. He forces himself to attend a solemn mass for the dead, but during the celebration he falls dead. There is a certain terrible, almost Shaksperean, grandeur about this tragedy that our meagre sketch of it can not possibly convey. Or rather, in the steady irresistible march of the tragic events, in the deepening of the gloom and horror, it reminds us of Webster. It is one of the few tragedies of modern times that are worthy of a place beside the great dramas of the sixteenth century. W. H. B. Madame Récamier and her Friends: from the French of Madame Lenormant. Boston: Roberts Brothers. ALL readers who found interest in a translation of Madame Récamier's Life, published three or four years ago by Roberts Brothers, will be glad to have this new volume, which elucidates the history of this "most beautiful woman of Europe," and leaves a more satisfactory impression than the somewhat vague Life itself. This lovely French woman was a power in Parisian society for a long number of years. That the place she occupied was won and held through her extraordinary beauty of person alone, is hardly credible, for she contrived to retain it even after this marvellous combination of perfections had succumbed under the weight of years and partial blindness. It is somewhat amusing to see the persistent way in which her friends and correspondents-her niece and biographer, Madame Lenormant herself Madame de Staël, Châteaubriand, Ampère, Camille Jordan and others, endeavored to ferret out the secret and charm of this subtle fascination which she exerted over them one and all. Madame de Staël, whose jealousy was proverbial, who could brook no rival, whose ugliness was as extreme as Madame Récamier's beauty, was her devoted and passionate friend. Château briand was the lover of a life-time. Ampère, twenty-three years her junior, the courted and petted idol of Parisian society, worshipped her as a divinity, and during her life gave his heart to no other woman. Mentally, Madame Récamier was not brilliant. Nothing in her letters, of which we have some forty in this volume, indicates any great strength or culture. And yet she influenced to a singular degree the most brilliant minds of France, and swayed them with an enduring power. Her American translator says that her " grace and tact" (that wonderful wych-hazel wand in the hand of a French woman!) were such as to amount to "genius," for they produced the effect of genius. Her amiability knew no bounds; her temper had a divine attribute of calmness and patience; her natural kindness of heart seemed to impress those who surrounded her as much as her gift of beauty; her capacity for friendship was limitless. certain mysterious pathos and attractive sadness united to form the atmosphere in which she moved; and she ever maintained a delicate reserve and reticence in regard to herself that stimulated interest without ever satisfying it, and heightened the romantic affection in which she was held. Her constancy was one of her noblest traits; no vicissitudes weakened her devotion to her friends, no sorrows quenched it, no absence rendered her forgetful or indifferent. Death alone seemed able to dissolve the tie that bound her to those whom she had once truly loved. The prevalent idea that Madame Récamier was simply the beautiful queen of society, passes away as we read her Life, or make further acquaintance with her through these Letters to and from her friends. We are brought in contact with the softer side of her character; we have her presented to us as the self-sacrificing daughter; as filling with the most assiduous care the mother's place to her adopted child; as the sympathetic sister; as the tender helper of all the woes she was able to alleviate; as everywhere and under all circumstances a most womanly woman. One rises from these volumes with modified conceptions of domestic French life. Of course, we have known that the château-life of the old noblesse in the Provinces was a different thing from that of Paris salons; but here we have a picture in the simple and unostentatious salon at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, of a Parisian life kept as natural and sweet and pure as if it had been passed in the seclusion of Provence or Gascony. M. J. P. Insectivorous Plants. By Charles Darwin, M. A., F. R. S., &c. New York: D. Appleton & Co. SOME few years ago the general idea was that the animal and vegetable kingdoms parted from each other like two forks of a tree: in contact only at the lowest part; and diverging more widely the further each developed. In some of the protozoa there is either no structure at all, or else a structure of such character as resembles vegetable forms as nearly as it does animal; so that it is not easy to decide where ánimal life begins. Low plants and low animals swim about freely in a fluid medium, absorbing their nutriment through their cell-walls; while plants of higher type are fixed to one spot and feed by roots, and animals of higher type preserve the faculty of locomotion and feed by means of a mouth and digestive apparatus. Recent investigations, however, have shown that these distinctions are not universal: there are animals that are fixed to their habitat by roots through which they feed; and there are plants which feed by mouths and a genuine process of digestion. More than this; there are plants provided with a complex and highly organised mechanical apparatus for catching and destroying the prey on which they feed; so that we may regard them as true carnivora of the vegetable kingdom. To the investigation of the strange properties of some of these, Mr. Darwin has brought those faculties of patient, minute, and conscientious research for which he is so eminently distinguished. There is a genus of plants, common in Europe and parts of the United States, known by the name of Drosera or "sun-dew," distin guished by a peculiar apparatus of hairs or filaments springing from the leaves, and tipped with globules of a clear viscid fluid, which, glistening in the sun, resemble dew-drops, and hence the scientific and popular names of the plant. If a small insect lights upon one of these tentacles he is caught at once by the viscid fluid; the tentacle then slowly bends inward and carries the insect to the centre of the leaf. The contiguous tentacles also bend in the same manner, so that the insect is firmly clasped by them and pressed down upon the glands which arise from the surface of the leaf. These glands, and similar organs which tip the tentacles, now exude an acid fluid which dissolves all the soft parts of the insect, and then re-absorb the resulting solution; so that when the tentacles at last unclose, nothing is left but the scaly insoluble portions, the rest having been digested and absorbed. In this way is this highly organised plant able to support itself on soil so barren that nothing but moss (which is nourished by the air) can grow upon it. Mr. Darwin found, by repeated and careful experiments, that the plant would not only digest insects, but also particles of meat, of hard-boiled egg, of cheese, and fibrin, gluten, and legumin from vegetables. Bone was first decalcified and then digested, and even dentine and enamel were softened. This process is a true digestion: the neutral secretion of the glands becomes acid after the nitrogenous substance has been seized by the tentacle; and the substance dissolves without putrefying, while similar particles laid on damp moss beside the plant soon became putrid. While this process of digestion and absorption is going on, the masses of protoplasm in the cells of the glands were affected in very curious ways. If the particle of matter be laid on the side of the leaf, only the tentacles of that side fold down; and they do not, in that case, bend in to the centre, but fold immediately over the particle; showing that they have a power of directing their motions. Mr. Darwin tried the effects of a great variety of substances on this plant. Inert, insoluble bodies, like bits of glass, coal, &c., were seized, but soon released. Some of the vegetable alkaloids and other strong narcotics were poisonous to the plant; others, even curare and the venom of the cobra, which act so energetically on animal organisms, were not poisonous. Many of the acids were poisonous; but formic acid was innocuous. As many of the insects on which this plant subsists have the power of secreting formic acid, we can easily see why this exception should occur. Another curious phenomenon about this plant is its susceptibility to almost incredibly small quantities of certain substances. This was most marked with phosphate of ammonia, which produced strong inflection when applied in a solution of one part of the salt to 2,187,500 of water, being in the proportion of one grain to about more than thirty-one gallons. Of this solution about half a drachm was poured over a leaf; so that the amount of the pure salt sufficient to produce this action was less than the thirty-millionth of a grain. There is no test known to science, except the spectroscope, that can at all approach this delicacy. Far more curious than this, however, is another member of the |