Ar the time that the great army under Napoleon perished in the snows of Russia, a French woman, stated to be of respectable family and education, was so deeply affected by the calamity of her country, and her melancholy apprehensions for its future fate, that she became deprived of her senses, put on widow's weeds, and wandered about Paris, bewailing the fate of the unfortunate armament. Dressed in deep sables, she may

still almost daily be seen in the Champs Elysées, in the same state of mental alienation; and the Parisians, who allow neither national nor individual sorrows to deprive them of a heartless joke, have long since christened her "The Widow of the Great Army." This unfortunate female is supposed to utter the following stanzas at the period of the first invasion :

Half a million of heroes-I saw them all:
O God! 'twas a sight of awful delight
To gaze on that army, the glory of Gaul,
As it roll'd in its fierceness of beauty forth,
Like a glittering torrent, to deluge the North!

The war-horses' tramp shook the solid ground,
While their neighings aha! and the dread hurra
Of the myriad mass made the skies resound,
As th' invincible Chief, on his milk-white steed,
Vanwards gallop'd, their host to lead.

Sword, sabre, and lance of thy chivalry, France,
And helmet of brass, and the steel cuirass,

Flash'd in the sun as I saw them pass;

While day by day, in sublime array,

The glorious pageant roll'd away!

Where are ye now, ye myriads? Hark!

O God! not a sound;-they are stretch'd on the ground, Silent and cold, and stiff and stark:

On their ghastly faces the snows still fall,

And one winding-sheet enwraps them all.

The horse and his rider are both o'erthrown:-
Soldier and beast form a common feast

For the wolf and the bear; and, when day is flown,
Their teeth gleam white in the pale moonlight,
As with crash of bones they startle the night..

Oh, whither are fled those echoes dread,

As the host hurraed, and the chargers neigh'd,

And the cannon roar'd, and the trumpets bray'd?—
Stifled is all this living breath,

And hush'd they lie in the sleep of death.

They come! they come! the barbarian horde!
Thy foes advance, oh, beautiful France,
To ravage thy valleys with fire and sword:
Calmuc and Moscovite follow the track
Of the Tartar fierce and the wild Cossack.

All Germany darkens the rolling tide;
Sclavonian dun, Croat, Prussian, Hun,
With the traitorous Belgian bands allied;
While the Spaniards swart, and the Briton fair,
Their banners wave in our southern air.

Sound the tocsin, the trumpet, the drum!

Heroes of France, advance, advance!

And dash the invaders to earth as they come!
Where's the Grand Army to drive them back?—
March, countrymen, march!-attack, attack!

Ah me! my heart-it will burst in twain!
One fearful thought, to my memory brought,
Sickens my soul, and maddens my brain,-
That army of heroes, our glory and trust,
Where is it? what is it?-bones and dust!

ON NOSES.

And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose.

SHAKSPEARE.

Ir has been settled by Mr. Alison, in his "Essay on the Philosophy of Taste," that the sublimity or beauty of

66

forms arises altogether from the associations we connect with them, or the qualities of which they are expressive to us; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in discoursing upon personal beauty, maintains, that as nature, in every nation, has one fixed or determinate form towards which she is continually inclining, that form will invariably become the national standard of bodily perfection. "To instance," he proceeds, "in a particular part of a feature the line that forms the ridge of the nose, is beautiful when it is straight; this, then, is the central form, which is oftener found than either concave, convex, or any other irregular form that may be proposed;" -but this observation he is careful to limit to those countries where the Grecian nose predominates, for he subsequently adds, in speaking of the Ethiopians, “I suppose nobody will doubt, if one of their painters was to paint the goddess of beauty, but that he would represent her black, with thick lips, flat nose, and woolly hair; and it seems to me that he would act very unnaturally if he did not; for by what criterion will any one dispute the propriety of his idea?" And he thus concludes his observations on the subject: "From what has been said, it may be inferred, that the works of Nature, if we compare one species with another, are all equally beautiful; and that preference is given from custom, or some association of ideas; and that, in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or centre of all various forms." If this definition be accurate, we are not authorised in admiring either the Roman or the Jewish noses, both of which are too exorbitant and overbearing-the high-born ultras of their class;-still less can we fall in love with the Tartarian

notions, where the greatest beauties have the least noses, and where, according to Ruybrock, the wife of the celebrated Jenghiz Khan was deemed irresistible, because she had only two holes for a nose. These are the radical noses. In medio tutissimus seems to be as true upon this subject as almost every other, and, in the application of the dictum, we must finally give the preference to the Grecian form, of which such beautiful specimens have been transmitted to us in their statues, vases, and gems. Whether this were the established beau idéal of their artists, or, as is more probable, the predominant line of the existing population, it is certain that, in their sculptures, deviations from it are very rare. In busts from the living, they were, of course, compelled to conform to the original; but I can easily imagine, that if it did not actually break the Grecian chisel, it must have nearly broken the heart of the statuary, who was doomed to scoop out of the marble the mean and indented pug-nose of Socrates. Whence did that extraordinary people derive their noble figure and beauti ful features, which they idealised into such sublime symmetry and exquisite loveliness in the personification of their gods and goddesses? If they were, indeed, as the inhabitants of Attica pretended, the Autocthones, or original natives, springing from the earth, it were an easy solution to maintain, that the soil and climate of that country are peculiarly adapted to the most faultless and perfect development of the human form: but if, as more sober history affirms, they were a colony from Sais in Egypt, led by Cecrops into Attica, we must be utterly at a loss to account for their form, features, and complexion. Traces of this derivation are clearly