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ner-when he had one, and perform for him those offices wherein he had been accustomed to "minister unto himself;"-and although he actually went so far as to hire a poor woman of approved honesty in that capacity upon very satisfactory terms,-that is to say, for her board and a certain portion of old clothes, and no wages, yet her notions upon the subject of diet bearing a greater resemblance to Boxer's than her master's, and she having unluckily no Margaret Lane to resort to, she took herself off at the end of eight-and-forty hours, and sought refuge in the workhouse of St. Nicholas, the strictest in the town, as an actual land of plenty in comparison with the watchmaker's dwelling.

as represented in the old poets,)-then he felt, in its fullest extent, the highest ecstasy of which a miser is capable.

From the amount of these accumulations, successful speculations in loans or the moneymarket must have aided his scrapings and savings. Meeting him at the Bank, Stephen Lane became accidentally acquainted with the amount, and remonstrated with his usual goodhumoured frankness on his not allowing himself the comforts he could so well afford. "Wait," replied David, “till it mounts to another plum, and then!"- -Wait! and he was already turned of eighty!

For whom this fortune was destined, the owner himself would have found it difficult to say. His brother had long been dead, and his brother's son. The only survivor of the family was his grandnephew and namesake, a young David Dykes, who left the paternal farm and set up a showy haberdasher's shop in Belford. A showy young man he was himself; bold, speculating, adventurous, plausi ble; with a surface of good-humour and a substratum of selfishness.

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He'll turn out a spendthrift," observed one day David the elder to our friend Stephen Lane.

"Or a miser," replied the butcher, doubtingly.

"We shall see," rejoined David, "whether he'll take up the 201. bill I cashed for him,the first bill I ever cashed for anybody."

And as the grandnephew did not take up the bill, the granduncle, provoked at having been for the first time in his life overreached, instantly arrested him; and other creditors pouring in, he was confined in Belford gaol, with no other chance of release than the Insolvent Act and the consciousness of having irreparably offended his old relation.

David-who, starved as she called herself, had thought her the greatest glutton in existence, and begrudged her every morsel that she put into her mouth-was glad enough of the riddance. Old as he was, his habits were too lonely and unsocial, too peculiar and too independent of the services of others, to find any comfort in attendance and company. To save half an inch of candle by going to bed in the dark, and a quarter of a pound of soap by washing his own linen without that usual companion of the wash-tub; to borrow a needle and beg a bit of thread, and mend with his own hands his own stockings or his own shirt; to sew on the knees of his inexpressibles a button totally unlike the rest,-a metal button, for instance, when the others were bone, or a bit of olive-coloured tape when the companion piece had once been drab; to patch his old brown coat with a bit of old black cloth; to clout his old shoes with a piece of leather picked up in the streets;-to save money, in short, by any of those contrivances and devices which the world calls most sordid, had to him an inexpressible savour. There was a chuckle of ineffable satisfaction when he had by such means avoided the expenditure of twopence; which proves that avarice has its pleasures high in degree, although low in kind. His delight in making a good bargain was of the same nature, and perhaps more exquisite, since the pride of successful cunning was added to the gratification of accumulation. A rise in the Three per Cents. was a less positive delight, since it was dashed with a considerable portion of anxiety; for if Consols rose one day, they might fall the next. But the joy of all joys, the triumph of all triumphs, was on his half-yearly journeys to London, accom- No will could be discovered; and the kinsplished partly on foot, partly by a cast in a man whom he had caused to be arrested, the cart or a wagon bestowed on him for charity, only person whom (thoroughly harmless and and partly by a sixpenny ride on the outside kindly in his general feeling) he had perhaps of a coach. Then, when first receiving and ever disliked in his life, came in as heir-atthen buying in his dividends, and looking on law for his immense fortune and all his poshis bank-receipts (those little bits of paper sessions,-except our friend Boxer, who wisewhich replace so shabbily the tangible riches ly betook himself to his old refuge the butch-the gold and precious stones which gave er's yard, and his old protectress Margaret such gorgeousness to the delights of avarice, Lane.

Our miser, on his part, thought of nothing so much as of replacing the twenty pounds; redoubling for this purpose his industry, his abstemiousness, and his savings of every sort. It was a hard winter; but he allowed himself neither fire nor candle, nor meat nor beer, living as Boxer and the housekeeper had refused to live, on water and potatoes. Accordingly, on one frosty morning, the watchmaker was missed in his accustomed haunts-the shop was unopened-Boxer was heard howling within the house, and on breaking open the door the poor old man was found dead in his miserable bed.

David Dykes the younger realized his granduncle's predictions by getting through his fortune with incredible despatch; assisted in that meritorious purpose by every pursuit that ever has been devised for speeding a traveller on the Road to Ruin, and aided by the very worst company in town and country. Horses, hounds, carriages, the gaming-table, and the turf, had each a share in his undoing; and the consummation was at last reserved for a contested election, which he lost on the same day that his principal gambling companion ran away with a French opera-dancer, who had condescended to reside in his house, wear his jewels, and to spend his money.

Timon of Athens had never more cause to turn misanthrope; but misanthropy was too noble a disease to run in the Dykes' bloodtheir turn was different.

No sooner was our prodigal completely ruined, than he vindicated Stephen Lane's knowledge of character; for, having spent and sold everything except the hovel in which the money was accumulated, and which in his prosperity had been overlooked as too mean an object for the hammer of the auctioneer, he came back to Belford, like the Heir of Lynne to his ruined Grange, established himself in that identical old-clothes-shop, and found there, not indeed a hoard of gold, not a second readymade fortune, but the power of amassing one by thrift and industry.

There he may be seen any day, buying, selling, and bartering, in much such a patched suit as his uncle's, wigged and spectacled like him, I won't answer for the identity of the wig, but the spectacles must have been the very same pair which formerly adorned the nose of the original David,-just as saving, as scraping, as humble, as industrious, and, to sum up all, as miserly as his predecessor; looking as lean, as shrivelled, as care-worn, as crouching, and very nearly as old; and not at all unlikely-provided he also should, as your human anatomies so often do, wither on to the age of four-score,-by no means unlikely to accumulate a plum or two in his own proper person.

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It is my only consolation that the conditions of my exchange forbid my being again opposed to your countrymen. I go, dearest, not to encounter the temptations of peace, but the hardships of war."

"The heroic hardships, the exciting dangers that you love so well! Be it so. Battle, victory, peril, or death, on the one hand;-on the other, the graces and the blandishments, the talents and the beauty of your lovely country-women! What chance is there that I should be remembered either in the turmoil of a campaign, or the gaiety of a capital? You will think of me (if indeed you should ever think of me at all) but as a part of the gloomiest scenes and the most cloudy days of your existence. As Belford contrasted with Paris, so shall I seem when placed in competition with some fair Parisian. No, Victor! we part, and I feel that we part for ever!"

"Cruel and unjust! Shall you forget me?" "No! To remember when hope is gone, is the melancholy privilege of woman. Forget you! Oh that I could!"

"Well then, Jane, my own Jane, put an end at once to these doubts, to these suspicions. Come with me to France, to my home. My mother is not rich;-I am one of Napoleon's poorest captains; but he has deigned to notice me;-my promotion, if life be spared to me, is assured; and in the mean time, we have enough for competence, for happiness. Come with me, my own Jane-you whose affection has been my only comfort during two years of captivity, come and share the joys of my release! Nothing can be easier than your flight. No one suspects our attachment. Your father sleeps

"And you would have me abandon him! me, his only child! Alas! Victor, if we were to desert him in his old age, could I ever sleep again? Go! I am rightly punished for a love which, prejudiced as he is against your nation, I knew that he would condemn. It is

fit that a clandestine attachment should end in desolation and misery. Go! but oh, dearest, talk no more of my accompanying you; say no more that you will return to claim me at the peace: both are alike impossible. Go, and be happy with some younger, fairer woman! Go, and forget the poor Jane!" so saying, she gently disengaged her hand, which was clasped in both his, and passed quickly from the little garden where they stood into the house, where, for fear of discovery, Victor dared not follow her.

And

This dialogue, which, by the way, was held not as I have given it, in English, but in rapid and passionate French, took place at the close of a November evening in the autumn of 1808, between a young officer of the Imperial Army, on parole in Belford, and Jane Lanham, the only daughter, the only surviving child of old John Lanham, a corn-chandler in the town.

Victor d'Auberval, the officer in question,

girl's education was his old friend Mr. Fenton, the minister of the congregation to which he belonged,-a man shrewd, upright, conscientious, and learned, but unfitted for his present post by two very important disqualifications : first, as an old bachelor who knew no more of the bringing up of children than of the train

was a young man of good education, considerable talent, and a lively and ardent character. He had been sent as a favour to Belford, together with four or five naval officers, with whom our jeune militaire had little in common besides his country and his misfortunes; and although incomparably better off than those of his compatriotes at Norman Cross and else-ing of race-horses; secondly, as having a where, who solaced their leisure and relieved complete and thorough contempt for the sex, their necessities by cutting dominoes and whom he considered as so many animated other knick-knacks out of bone, and ornament- dolls, or ornamented monkeys, frivolous and ing baskets and boxes with flowers and land- mischievous, and capable of nothing better scapes composed of coloured straw, yet, being than the fulfilment of the lowest household wholly unnoticed by the inhabitants of the duties. "Teach her to read and to write," town, and obliged, from the difficulty of ob- quoth Mr. Fenton, "to keep accounts, to cut taining remittances, to practise occasionally a out a shirt, to mend stockings, to make a pudvery severe economy, he would certainly have ding, and to stay within doors, and you will become a victim to the English malady with have done your duty." a French name, styled ennui, had he not been preserved from that calamity by falling into the disease of all climates, called love.

Judging merely from outward circumstances, no one would seem less likely to captivate the handsome and brilliant Frenchman than Jane Lanham. Full four or five and twenty, and looking more, of a common height, common size, and, but for her beautiful dark eyes, common features,-her person, attired, as it always was, with perfect plainness and simplicity, had nothing to attract observation; and her station, as the daughter of a man in trade, himself a rigid dissenter, and living in frugal retirement, rendered their meeting at all anything but probable. And she, grave, orderly, staid, demure, she that eschewed pink ribbons as if she had been a female Friend, and would have though it some sin to wear a bow of any hue in her straw bonnet, -who would ever have dreamt of Jane Lanham being smitten with a tri-coloured cockade?

So the matter fell out.

John Lanham was, as we have said, a cornchandler in Belford, and one who, in spite of his living in a small gloomy house, in a dark narrow lane leading from one great street to another, with no larger establishment than one maid of all work and a lad to take care of his horse and chaise, was yet reputed to possess considerable wealth. He was a dissenter of a sect rigid and respectable rather than numerous, and it was quoted in proof of his opulence, that in rebuilding the chapel which he attended, he had himself contributed the magnificent sum of three thousand pounds. He had lost several children in their infancy, and his wife had died in bringing Jane into the world: so that the father, grave, stern, and severe to others, was yet bound by the tenderest of all ties, that of her entire helplessness and dependence, to his motherless girl, and spared nothing that, under his peculiar views of the world, could conduce to her happiness and well-being.

His chief adviser and assistant in the little

According to this scale Jane's education seemed likely to be conducted, when a short visit from her mother's sister, just as she had entered her thirteenth year, made a slight addition to her studies. Her aunt, a sensible and cultivated woman, assuming that the young person who was growing up with ideas so limited was likely to inherit considerable property, would fain have converted Mr. Lanham to her own more enlarged and liberal views, have sent her to a good school, or have engaged an accomplished governess; but this attempt ended in a dispute that produced a total estrangement between the parties, and the only fruit of her remonstrances was the attendance of the good Abbé Villaret as a French master,-the study of French being, in the eyes both of Mr. Lanham and Mr. Fenton, a considerably less abomination than that of music, drawing, and dancing. "She'll make nothing of it," thought Mr. Fenton; "I myself did not, though I was at the expense of a grammar and a dictionary, and worked at it an hour a day for a month. She'll make nothing of it, so she may as well try as not." And the Abbé was sent for, and the lessons begun.

This was a new era in the life of Jane Lanham. L'Abbé Villaret soon discovered through the veil of shyness, awkwardness, ignorance, and modesty, the great powers of his pupil. The difficulties of the language disappeared as by magic, and she whose English reading had been restricted to the commonest elementary books, with a few volumes of sectarian devotion, and "Watts's Hymns," (for poetry she had never known, except the magnificent poetry of the Scriptures, and the homely but heart-stirring imaginations of the "Pilgrim's Progress"), was now eagerly devouring the choicest and purest morceaux of French literature. Mr. Fenton having interdicted to the Abbé the use of any works likely to convert the young Protestant to the Catholic faith, and Mr. Lanham (who had never read one in his life) having added a caution against novels, Jane and her kind in

structor were left in other respects free: her father, who passed almost every day in the pursuit of his business in the neighbouring towns, and his pastor, who only visited him in an evening, having no suspicion of the many, many hours which she devoted to the new-born delight of poring over books; and the Abbé knew so well how to buy books cheaply, and Mr. Lanham gave him money for her use with so little inquiry as to its destination, that she soon accumulated a very respectable French library.

What a new world for the young recluse! -Racine, Corneille, Crébillon, the tragedies and histories of Voltaire, the picturesque revolutions of Vertôt, the enchanting letters of Madame de Sévigné, the Causes Célèbres (more interesting than any novels), the Mémoires de Sully (most striking and most naïf of histories), Télémaque, the young Anacharsis, the purest comedies of Molière and Regnard, the Fables de La Fontaine, the poems of Delille and of Boileau, the Vert-vert of Gresset, Le Père Brumoy's Théâtre des Grecs, Madame Dacier's Homer,-these, and a hundred books like these, burst as a freshlyacquired sense upon the shy yet ardent girl. It was like the recovery of sight to one become blind in infancy; and the kindness of the Abbé, who delighted in answering her inquiries and directing her taste, increased a thousand-fold the profit and the pleasure which she derived from her favourite authors. Excepting her good old instructor, she had no confidant. Certain that they would feel no sympathy in her gratification, she never spoke of her books either to her father or Mr. Fenton; and they, satisfied with M. l'Abbé's calm report of her attention to his lessons, made no further inquiries. Her French studies were, she felt, for herself, and herself alone; and when his tragical death deprived her of the friend and tutor whom she had so entirely loved and respected, reading became more and more a solitary pleasure. Outwardly calm, silent, and retiring,- —an affectionate daughter, an excellent housewife, and an attentive hostess,-she was Mr. Fenton's beau idéal of a young woman. Little did he suspect the glowing, enthusiastic, and concentrated character that lurked under that cold exterior-the fire that was hidden under that white and virgin snow. Purer than she really was he could not fancy her; but never would he have divined how much of tenderness and firmness was mingled with that youthful purity, or how completely he had himself, by a life of restraint and seclusion, prepared her mind to yield to an engrossing and lasting passion.

Amongst her beloved French books, those which she preferred were undoubtedly the tragedies, the only dramas which had ever fallen in her way, and which exercised over her imagination the full power of that most

striking and delightful of any species of literature. We who know Shakspeare, who have known him from our childhood, and are, as it were, "to his manner born," - feel at once that, compared with that greatest of poets, the "belles tirades" of Racine and of Corneille are cold, and false, and wearisome; but to one who had no such standard by which to measure the tragic dramatists of France, the mysterious and thrilling horrors of the old Greek stories which their tragedies so frequently embodied,-the woes of Thebes, the fated line of Pelops, the passion of Phædra, and the desolation of Antigone,-were full of a strange and fearful power. Nor was the spell confined to the classical plays. The Tragedies Chrétiennes"-Esther and Athalie,-Polyeucte and Alzire-excited at least equal interest; while the contest between love and "la force du sang," in The Cid, and Zaïre, struck upon her with all the power of a predestined sympathy. She felt that she herself was born to such a trial; and the presentiment was perhaps, as so often happens, in no small degree the cause of its own accomplishment.

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The accident by which she became acquainted with Victor d'Auberval may be told in a very few words.

The nurse who had taken her on the death of her mother, and who still retained for her the strong affection so often inspired by foster children, was the wife of a respectable publican in Queen-street; and being of excellent private character, and one of Mr. Fenton's congregation, was admitted to see Jane whenever she liked, in a somewhat equivocal capacity between a visiter and dependant,

One evening she came in great haste to say that a Bristol coach which inned at the Red Lion had just dropped there two foreigners, a man and a woman, one of whom seemed to her fancy dying, whilst both appeared miserably poor, and neither could speak a word to be understood. Would her dear child come and interpret for the sick lady?

Jane went immediately. They were Italian musicians, on their way to Bristol, where they hoped to meet a friend and to procure employment. In the meanwhile, the illness of the wife had stopped them on their journey; and their slender funds were, as the husband modestly confessed, little calculated to encounter the expenses of medical assistance and an English inn.

Jane promised to represent the matter to her father, who, although hating Frenchmen and papists (both of which he assumed the foreigners to be) with a hatred eminently British and protestant, was yet too good a Christian to refuse moderate relief to fellow-creatures in distress; and between Mr. Lanham's contributions and the good landlady's kindness, and what Jane could spare from her own frugally-supplied purse, the poor Italians (for they

were singers from Florence) were enabled to bear up during a detention of many days.

Before they resumed their journey, their kind interpreter had heard from the good hostess that they had found another friend, almost as poor as themselves, and previously unacquainted with them, in a French officer on parole in the town, to whom the simple fact of their being foreigners in distress in a strange land had supplied the place of recommendation or introduction; and when going the next day, laden with a few comforts for the invalids, to bid them farewell and to see them off, she met, for the first time, the young officer, who had been drawn by similar feelings to the door of the Red Lion.

It was a bitter December day-one of those north-east winds which seem to blow through you, and which hardly any strength can stand; and as the poor Italian in a thin summer waistcoat and a threadbare coat, took his seat on the top of the coach, shivering from head to foot, and his teeth already chattering amidst the sneers of the bear-skinned coachman, muffled up to his ears, and his warmly-clad fellow-passengers, Victor took off his own great-coat, tossed it smilingly to the freezing musician, and walked rapidly away as the coach drove off, uttering an exclamation somewhat similar to Sir Philip Sidney's at Zutphen -"He wants it more than I do."*

cy in, and fondness for, his language and literature; whilst she (so full of contradictions is love) found no less attraction in his ignorance of English. She liked to have something to teach her quick and lively pupil; and he repaid her instructions by enlarging her knowledge of French authors,-by introducing to her the beautiful though dangerous pages of Rousseau, the light and brilliant writers of memoirs, and the higher devotional eloquence of Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue,—the Lettres Spirituelles of Fénélon, and the equally beautiful, though very different, works of Le Père Pascal.

So time wore on. The declaration of love had been made by one party; and the confession that that love was returned had been reluctantly extorted from the other. Of what use was that confession? Never, as Jane declared, would she marry to displease her father;-and how, knowing as she well did all his prejudices, could she hope for his consent to a union with a prisoner, a soldier, a Frenchman, a Catholic? Even Victor felt the impossibility.

Still neither could forego the troubled happiness of these stolen interviews, chequered as they were with present alarms and future fears. Jane had no confidant. The reserve and perhaps the pride of her character prevented her confessing even to her affectionate My friend Mr. Serle has said, in one of the nurse a clandestine attachment. But she half finest plays of this century,-richer in great feared that her secret was suspected at least, plays, let the critics rail as they will, than any if not wholly known, by Mr. Fenton; and if age since the time of Elizabeth and her imme-known to him, assuredly it would be disclosed diate successor;-Mr. Serle, speaking of the master-passion, has said, in "The Merchant of London,"

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Victor soon contrived to get introduced to Jane, by their mutual friend, the landlady of the Red Lion; and, after that introduction, he managed to meet her accidentally whenever there was no chance of interruption or discovery; which, as Jane had always been in the habit of taking long, solitary walks, happened, it must be confessed, pretty often. He was charmed at the piquant contrast between her shy, retiring manners, and her ardent and enthusiastic character; and his national vivacity found a high gratification in her proficien

*St. Martin was canonized for an act altogether similar to that of Victor d'Auberval.

to her father; and the manner in which a worthy, wealthy, and disagreeable London suitor was pressed on her by both, (for hitherto Mr. Lanham had seemed averse to her marrying,) confirmed her in the apprehension.

Still, however, they continued to meet, until suddenly, and without any warning, the exchange that restored him to his country and tore him from her who had been his consolation in captivity, burst on them like a thunderclap; and then Jane, with all the inconsistency of a woman's heart, forgot her own vows never to marry him without the consent of her father, - forgot how impossible it appeared that that consent should ever be obtained, and dwelt wholly on the fear of his inconstancy -on the chance of his meeting some fair, and young, and fascinating Frenchwoman, and forgetting his own Jane; whilst he again and again pledged himself, when peace should come, to return to Belford and carry home in triumph the only woman he could ever love. Until that happy day, they agreed, in the absence of any safe medium of communication, that it would be better not to write; and so, in the midst of despondency on the one side, and ardent and sincere protestations on the other, they parted.

Who shall describe Jane's desolation during the long and dreary winter that succeeded

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