Certain odours, it has been observed,* awake a vague memory disconnected with anything to remember; and for a moment we feel a weight of intervening years with a sense of some infant joy at the end of them.

Of all painful drugs to contemplate, remarks one of the faculty," that which is daily applied to the moribund nostrils of hundreds, that deathbed drug, the overpowering ether, which, escaping from the narrowest chink in a phial, comes fitfully, coldly, clammily, as a breath escaped from the charnel-house, to force upon our memory many a scene of sorrow where we have inhaled it, in presence of the last struggles of the departing, and amid the sobs, wailings, and faintings of the bereaved-we recoil from with detestation and loathing."+

Cecil Danby, in Mrs. Gore's Adventures of a Coxcomb, has been wont to haunt the opera-box of a Portuguese belle and her guardian friend, from whom circumstances occur to separate him for awhile. When next he visits the opera, that box is empty, and continues so for the night. But "the scent of vanille lingered there still, as though its former inmates had only just quitted the place; and so powerfully were they brought before me by the association, that I kept expecting every moment to hear their voices by my side."+

As a homelier illustration, take Charles Lamb on the subject of French beans. In the exquisite essay on "My Relations" figures prominently an old aunt, of fine sense, and extraordinary at a repartee, of whom we have this incidental notice-that the only secular employment Elia remembers to have seen her engaged in, was the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a china basin of fair water. "The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations."§

To the same category may be referred Wordsworth's old Adam-once a thriving farmer in Tilsbury Vale, now a jobbing porter, odd man, what you will or what he can, in London's stony-hearted streets ;-mark him as

Up the Haymarket hill he oft whistles his way,

Thrusts his hands in a waggon, and smells at the hay;
He thinks of the fields he so often has mown,

And is happy as if the rich freight were his own.

But chiefly to Smithfield he loves to repair,

If you pass by at morning, you'll meet with him there.
The breath of the cows you may see him inhale,

And his heart all the while is in Tilsbury Vale.||

So Mrs. Gaskell's Sally¶ gathers a piece of southernwood, stuffs it up her nose by way of smelling it, and tells Ruth that it and peppermintdrops always remind her of going to church in the country. It is perhaps as much for rustic associations' sake, as because "it gives it a flavour," that she also makes a point on this occasion of getting a black currant leaf to put in the teapot.

*By an anonymous essayist on Time Past.

† C. D. Badham.

§ Essays of Elia: My Relations.

Cecil, vol. ii. ch. ì.

Wordsworth's Poems Referring to Old Age: The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale.
Ruth, ch. xviii.

Mr. Hawthorne's study of all that concatenates physiology with psychology might assure us, à priori, that he would be interested in the curiosities of a question like this. And his writings afford a plurality of proofs that interested he is. How he makes Hilda pine under the crumbly magnificence of hot and dusty Rome, for the native homeliness of her distant fatherland! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, we read, across the windy sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered; and her heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that remembered smell of dead blossoms: it was like opening a drawer, where many things were laid them scented with lavender and dried rose-leaves.* Watch, too, the same author's old Moodie, treated to and taking a preliminary snuff at the aroma, then cautiously sipping the wine, and uttering a feeble little laugh, as he tells his entertainer, "The flavour of this wine, and its perfume, still more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man." And it was wonderful, we read,† what an effect the mild grape-juice wrought upon him; which effect lay not in the wine, but in the associations which it seemed to bring up.

away, and every one of

glass of claret,

Mark, again, the stress laid, in another of Mr. Hawthorne's romances, on Clifford's appreciating notice of a vase of flowers, the scent of which he inhaled "with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organisation so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it." This interfusion, or intercommunication, of physical with spiritual, is Mr. Hawthorne's apparently favourite study; and many are the telling chords he strikes when harping on such a theme. Clifford once seizes a rose, right eagerly, and the flower, "by the spell peculiar to remembered odours," brings innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhales. "Thank you!" he cries. "This has done me good. It makes me feel young again." And so we are told of him in a later chapter, in reference to this incident, that Clifford was a poor forlorn voyager who had been flung, by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbour,-where, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. "With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires."‡

Of Mr. Dickens, again, it might pretty safely be predicated, or prognosticated, that he would offer more than one or two characteristic illustrations of the same subject. Not more than one or two, however, can here find admission. As Pip and Biddy saunter together in Joe Gargery's little garden, Biddy, ill at ease, plucks a black currant leaf, and keeps rubbing it to pieces between her hands-" and," writes the hero and victim of Great Expectations, "the smell of a black currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of

* Transformation; or, the Romance of Monte Beni, ch. xxxvii.
The Blithedale Romance, ch. xxi.

House of the Seven Gables, ch. vii. and ix.

the lane."* And then again, when Barnaby Rudge is down on the grass in St. George's Fields with the rioters of 1780, and is suddenly roused from repose and reverie by the rough hand of Maypole Hugh, who, with a shout of drunken laughter, smites him on the shoulders, and wants to know where he's been hiding for these hundred years, we are told that Barnaby had been thinking within himself that the smell of the trodden grass brought back his old days at cricket, when he was a young boy and played on Chigwell Green."+

Miss Matty's recollections of poor Brother Peter's secession from home, in Mrs. Gaskell's village chronicles, a secession provoked by the flogging he had from his father-are inseparably associated with a certain odour, that, to her, was henceforth a sickly memento of the painful past. "I was in the store-room helping my mother to make cowslip-wine. I cannot abide the wine now, nor the scent of the flowers; they turn me sick and faint, as they did that day, when Peter came in, looking as haughty as any man-indeed, looking like a man, not like a boy: Mother!' he said, 'I am come to say, God bless you for ever.'"‡

We have Mr. Edmund Yates's "unromantic confession," that the pungent odours of gas and orange-peel, not distinct but mixed, a flavour, he remarks, which those not accustomed to the penetralia of a theatre cannot comprehend, always recal to him his happy time of youth, in the lessee's house attached to the Adelphi Theatre. "What extraordinary influence over the memory has that faculty of smell! It is twenty years ago that I, a lad, was staying with some friends in a suburb of Liverpool, where a Methodist chapel was being built, and to this day the smell of newly-carpentered wood reproduces that chapel and its occupants at once and distinctly before my eyes." And there must be few of us, he adds,§ but have had similar experiences with flower-scents and perfumes. For true it is, what Mrs. Hemans enforces in some feeling stanzas, that

Even as a song of other times

Can trouble memory's springs;
Even as a sound of vesper-chimes
Can wake departed things;

Even so a scent of vernal flowers

Hath records fraught with vanished hours.

A posthumous poem of Heine's, on Old Scents, recently translated by Mr. Edgar Bowring, is pat to the purpose, and self-suggestive of citation. But our space is out.

Great Expectations, ch. xix.
Cranford, ch. vi. "Poor Peter."

§ In an essay entitled "Broad Awake."

Barnaby Rudge, ch. xlviii.

For a parallel passage on the gas and orange-peel commixture, see the essay (anonymous)" At the Play," in vol. v. of the Cornhill Magazine, p. 87.

Hemans's Poetical Remains: "To My Own Portrait."

THE SICILIAN VESPERS.

Of all the many tragic events which resulted from the factions of the Guelphs and Ghibelines, perhaps the most remarkable was that which has been made memorable under the name of the Sicilian Vespers. It was honourably distinguished by this, that whereas others were marked with all the meanness and mysterious horror of secret plotting and factious spite, this was the ebullition of a manliness long ground down, but goaded by wicked governance into desperate resistance, under circumstances the most provoking that can be imagined. There was a conflict of nationalities in this which removes it from the category of civil strife, and sets it out in favourable contrast to those fierce demonstrations of party feeling which so constantly disgrace the history of medieval Italy. The long struggle between Pope and Emperor for the supremacy in the Western Empire is marked by a great number of sickening horrors. is quite refreshing to find in a fact, of itself sufficiently revolting, circumstances which are not only extenuating, but which almost merge our sympathy for the sufferers in the admiration we must feel for the passionate vindicators of humanity, who only resorted to horrors because there was no other way of resenting a most wicked oppression.

It

The Popes by little and little had risen from the position of Bishops of Rome, protected by and homagers to the Western Emperors, to that height that they disputed the supremacy with them even in their own dominions. From the gifts of Pepin, Charlemagne, and Constantine, to the recognition of the False Decretals, from that to the bequest of the Countess Matilda and the reign of Gregory VII., and thence to the startling assumptions of Innocent III., are so many steps in the aggrandisement of the Papacy. The interest of the Popes was the interest of a large body of men who, in addition to the influence which their priestly office gave them over an ignorant and superstitious people, exercised an immense power by virtue of the monopoly which they established over the sources of secular learning. Their influence they exerted in behalf of themselves and their master, and succeeded in forming a compact and well-organised party among the laity, which, in opposition to the imperial power, rent Italy and Germany during several centuries, and still shows certain feeble signs of existence.

When Conrad von Hohenstanfen, the first of the Suabian emperors, was elected in 1138, the two factions had become sufficiently distinct to be assailable. Conrad had inherited from the last Salic emperor the property of Waiblingen in the Remsthal, and assumed that name as the patronymic of his family. He also represented the head of the secular party, and was recognised as the uncompromising champion of the rights of the empire. It followed, not unnaturally, that his family became identified with his cause, and that the name of the one should become a convertible term for the other.

The Papal party included the inhabitants of the principal Italian cities, ever apprehensive of danger from their imperial suzerain; the Kings of France; and an un-German following in Germany, which had been known as the Saxon party."

But about the same time that Conrad III. gave his name to the imperial faction, the Bavarian House of Welf took the direction of the opposite one, and distinguished it by its own name. Thus the two great factions of Welf and Waiblingen, changed by an Italian euphemism into Guelphs and Ghibelines, were constituted, the one for the purpose of increasing the temporal power of the Church, the other for the purpose of checking it and of wresting back its usurped privileges. The life of Frederic I. (Barbarossa), the successor of Conrad, was spent in one continuous strife with his ecclesiastical enemies, who, appealing to the particular interests of the Lombard and Tuscan cities, succeeded in arraying against him the formidable League of Lombardy, and in inflicting a tremendous blow upon him on the field of Legnano. He, on the other hand, gained a great accession of strength by marrying his son Henry to Constance, heiress of William II., King of Naples and Sicily, the descendant of Roger Guiscard, who conquered Sicily from the Saracens, and annexed it to Naples on the death of his brother Robert. Henry of course became King of Naples and Sicily, as well as Emperor of Germany, and transmitted his royalty to his son.

The twenty-two years which elapsed between the death of Frederic I. and the accession of Frederic II. were years of gain to the Guelphs. A short reign, and a minority had impaired the imperial strength, and given time to its enemies to consolidate their power. The Ghibeline faction had languished materially in Italy: it had been proscribed, banished, and suppressed in many cities. The hand of the master was needed to reform and handle it. Accordingly Frederic II. devoted himself to the task, and spent the thirty-eight years of his reign in earnest conflict for the good of his cause, dying as he had lived, in bitter hostility to the grasping power, which fixed no bounds to its ambition, and openly aspired to sovereignty over all the princes of the world. He left two sons, Conrad, his heir, and Manfred, who was illegitimate.

Conrad, although he had been elected King of the Romans, was by the arts of Innocent IV. prevented from attaining the imperial dignity; but although strong efforts were made to frustrate that end, he was able to establish himself in his kingdom of Naples. After reigning two years he died, leaving a young son to succeed him, commending him to the care of his uncle Manfred and to that of the Pope. Innocent, to whose paternal charity the orphan king had been commended, commenced as soon as Conrad was dead to deprive the child of his kingdom. He incited the Neapolitan nobles to throw off the yoke of a king, and to form an oligarchical republic under the protection of the Church. In furtherance of this plan he marched into Naples, and established himself there by force of arms.

Into Sicily he sent agitators in the Guelphic interest, to induce the people to throw off their allegiance to the Ghibeline house of Suabia; and he so far succeeded as to get them to reject Conradine, and to form themselves into a sort of republic in connexion with Rome. From the very first it was apparent that the constituent parts of the republic were too uncongenial to be welded into union. The mixed races among the inhabitants, the aristocratic and popular interests, besides those of a small minority yet favourable to royalty, were all so many causes of disunion. After a few months of trouble and confusion, Manfred, who had raised men and money in Germany, appeared in force in the southern provinces,