On the count's arrival, his vassals joyfully greeted him as their master, whom they had given up as slain or lost, and regarded with much curiosity his lady companion, whose countenance was concealed beneath a veil. On entering the castle, the countess rushed into his arms. 66 'My dearest wife," said he, "for my deliverance, and for the pleasure of seeing me, you have to thank this lady, who for my sake has left her home and fatherland." The count covered his streaming eyes with his hands. The beautiful Saracen dropped her veil, and throwing herself at the feet of the countess, exclaimed, "I am thy vassal." "Thou art my sister," replied the countess, raising and embracing her; "my husband shall be thy husband. We will equally share his heart, as we equally deserve it." tally all the caresses which she lavished on me.' At last she hit on the happy expedient of conveying him letters in the following manner: She procured a bow and some arrows, and tying a letter to a thread, she shot the arrow, to which was attached the other end of the thread, into the window of the prisoner's cell. In this way she sent him pens, ink, and paper. He then, by the same ingenious expedient, sent love-letters to her. Thus the separated husband and wife were enabled to correspond, to cheer each other's hopes, and sustain each other in their misfortunes. This was all done at night-time, when the scrutinizing eyes of the sentinels remained in happy ignorance of the medium of communication. Success having inspired courage, the lady, with the assistance of the arrow and thread, afterwards conveyed a file to the captive, with which he silently filed through one of the bars of his prison, and then restored it to its place. On the next evening, when there was no moonlight, a stout cord was fastened to the thread and transmitted to the prisoner. The rope was firmly fastened on the one end to a beam in the garret of the lady, and the other The count's habitation was ever afterwards the abode of peace and happiness, and he, with his faithful wives, were, after death, buried in the same grave, in the Benedictine Church at Egfurth, in Thuringia. A beautiful marble monument was afterwards erected over their tomb, in which the count is represented as placed between his two wives. The Saracen, who had no children, is adorned with a crown; and the feet of the count-end to the bars of the cell; then, summoning ess are encircled with her children. The tomb and monument are still shown to the inquisitive traveller. The relation of this curious circumstance brings to our mind another, which took place several hundred years after. It refers to LAMARTINE'S MOTHER. It was the fate of the father of Lamartine, the great living French poet and orator, to be mixed up with the first French revolution. During that stormy period he, with a great number of his compatriots, were immured in prison at Maçon. He was not there long before his wife, with her child, took lodgings opposite the window of the cell which enclosed the republican. She soon drew his attention to herself and his child, which, though he could not speak to her for fear of the sentinel, reconciled him in some measure to his captivity, and lessened the burden of his woes. "My mother," says Lamartine, "carried me every day in her arms to the garret window, showed me to my father, gave me nourishment before him, made me stretch out my little hands towards the bars of his prison, then, pressing my forehead to her breast, she almost devoured me with kisses in the sight of the prisoner, and seemed thus to waft him men up all his courage, the prisoner glided along the rope, above the heads of the sentinels; he crossed the street, and found himself in the arms of his wife and beside the cradle of his child. Such an adventure required the hero's courage and the philosopher's caution, and none but those who were personally interested in it can ever imagine the feelings which must have agitated their hearts! From time to time, when the night was dark, the knotted cord would glide from window to window, and the prisoner would pass from knot to knot, and enjoy delightful hours of converse with her whom he loved best on earth. We will conclude the present paper on the potency of love, by giving one more illustration, and we venture to assert that history never recorded nor song enshrined any thing more romantic than the life of SOLARIO, THE ITALIAN PAINTER. Solario de Antonio was originally a gipsy, or wandering tinker, and it was in this character he first made his appearance, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, in Naples. He was then in the habit of going from street to street and from house to house in way of his peculiar craft. While in that city, he by chance got some jobs to do in the house of Colantonio del Fiere, a distinguished painter. | mained six or seven years with Lippo, and This painter had a beautiful daughter; the young lady was seen by Solario, who at first sight fell in love with her. The tinker, though of humble origin and pursuing a menial calling, carried with him a warm heart and a bold, enthusiastic mind. This was evinced by his taking the courageous step of going to Colantonio and actually asking him for the hand of his daughter in marriage. His application was treated with ridicule by Colantonio, who, by way of extinguishing the poor gipsy's hopes, told him that he meant to bestow his daughter only upon some one who was as good a painter as himself. "Then will you accept of me," said Solario, "for your son-in-law, if after a certain time I should present myself with that qualification? Will you give me ten years to learn to paint, and so to entitle myself to the hand of your daughter?" The painter, thinking he was not hazarding much by agreeing to such a proposal, and wishing to get rid of the impetuous importunities of the tinker, which were becoming rather alarming, acceded to Solario's request, on condition that he left Naples, and did not show his face for that number of years. The agreement having been ratified by respectable witnesses, one of whom was a princess, the reigning king's sister, who perhaps joined in the affair for the fun of it, Solario left Naples for Rome, but no one there would encourage him in his pursuit of art and love under difficulties. Hearing of Lippo Dalmasi, a painter of Bologna, he repaired thither. Lippo also at tempted to discourage him; but not to be baffled with difficulties or deterred by ridicule, he pressed his application so perseveringly, employing even tears to aid his entreaties, that the reluctant painter was at last induced to admit him as a pupil. But all difficulties were not yet at an end. He was poor, and to supply his necessities he would frequently go to the neighboring villages in his profession of tinker, and return with unquenched ardor to the performance of the higher duties of the artist. His application was as unceasing as his progress was unquestionable. He had not been with Lippo long before his master and fellow-students saw that he had within him the germs of genius, and sufficient industry and enthusiasm to ultimately insure success; and those who at first laughed at him for his adventurous love now encouraged him to persevere with unceasing activity in the great work to which he had luckily committed himself. He re then left Bologna to visit the other great cities The on the neck of the transformed tinker, and kissed him, and said, that if his ancestry did not deserve his daughter, his art did. ness it was his high ambition to promote. They soon went, she in her beauty and he in his pride, to the altar, and there mutually pledged themselves to a union which had been so nobly struggled for and so worthily Solario in the full flush of triumph was introduced to the lady towards whom his heart had so long aspired, and whose happi-won. From Chambers' Edinburgh Journal. A PHILOSOPHER WITHOUT PHILOSOPHY. THAT "the laughing sage of France," as | Wordsworth calls him, could be guilty of contemptible shifts and pitiful insincerities, in his private dealings as a man with men, is an established fact. Perhaps a more characteristic illustration of this can hardly be taken than the history of his feud with the President de Brosses, which has recently been narrated in some detail by a distinguished French author. The memory of the president might to this hour be suffering-as until very lately it has suffered under the odious imputations charged upon him, with matchless effrontery, by the imbittered patriarch of Ferney, had not the publication of the maligned man's correspondence set the matter in quite another light; amply showing, that if charges of calumny and falsehood were valid in the case at issue, it is to Voltaire, not to De Brosses, that they fatally apply. Let us take a hasty review of the dispute, so instructive, as revealing what manner of man was the chief disputant-one all Fire and fickleness; a child, Most mutable in wishes, but in mind dazzled it by concentrating its rays; who was its idol, and courted its idolatry; and who, far from breaking with authority, loved the people as little as he loved the Sorbonne priesthood. "The complaisant courtier of sovereigns and ministers, he could even stand and wait for smiles at the toilet of the French king's mistress, or prostrate himself in flattery before the Semiramis of the north: willing to shut his eyes on the sorrows of the masses, if the great would but favor men of letters."* His intercourse with Old Fritz, however, had disgusted him for some time to come with royalty and courtiership, and he would now fain be king on his own account, in three or four petty domains on the borders of France, where he might feel and show that he was monarch of all he surveyed, and that his right there was none to dispute. Delices, near Geneva, was one of those petty palaces; another was Ferney; a third was Tourney, on the extreme frontier of FrancheComté, which he purchased of the President de Brosses. The The worthy president was a man of learn A wit as various-gay, grave, sage, or wild-ing, ability, and character, whose personal Who multiplied himself among mankind, When Voltaire returned from his sojourn with Frederick the Great, he conceived a whim for securing three or four distinct homes of his own, in which he might play the great man, and affect the aristocrat to the top of his bent; for, despite of all his pretensions, an aristocrat he was by temper and tendency: he was, indeed, what Bancroft the American historian calls him, "the spoiled child of society," who sunned himself in its light, and exertions had early raised him to that dignified office in the Parliament of Burgundy,his native province. His reputation as a magistrate was high, nor was his literary career other than notable. His Letters from Italy abound with evidences of aesthetic discernment and cultivated taste, and made some noise in their day; his treatise on Fetish Worship is still admired for its philosophical tone; and his Principles of Etymology, &c., is said to be ingenious and instructive. It was in 1758 *History of the American Revolution, vol. ii. using all kinds of device to squeeze out a further "consideration" from De Brosses. The latter, on one occasion, with gentlemanly dignity, writes thus: "We have negotiated as men of honor and men of the world, not as pettifogging attorneys or quibbling apprentices of the law. You, for your part, are incapable of using your new possession otherwise than you would a patrimonial inheritance"-an implicit reproach, or warning, conveyed in courteous irony, but little calculated to appease or restrain the restless proprietor. Voltaire is not to be pacified by smooth sentences with a sting in their tail He keeps writing letter after letter of querulous matter. "I read and re-read your con that Voltaire, then in his sixty-fourth year, made overtures with the president with a view to purchase Tourney. He did so in words savoring of an assumption of the whimsical, and as though the desire to purchase were a mere fancy, a pet crotchet, which De Brosses ought to humor on very easy terms. De Brosses, however, was a precise man of business, and answered Voltaire's propositions with scrupulous exactitude, point by point, though not without relieving his reply with touches of wit and pleasantry. Voltaire disliked this matter-offact method; he hesitated, retracted, misunderstood, and, by an affectation of carelessness, misrepresented the purport of the original negotiation. De Brosses was straight-tract," he says, "and the oftener I re-read it, forward and consistent throughout, while his slippery neighbor was trying the game of fast and loose, to drive a good bargain-the while he was writing: "I am old and feeble, you know, and am well aware what a bad bargain I make." After considerable dallying, the two came to an agreement, and Voltaire was accepted as proprietor for life of the château and lands of Tourney, with all the seignorial rights and privileges thereto appertaining. In the pride of his heart, he signed his letters, at this time, Voltaire, Comte de Tourney. There were two curés whom he secured in the sale, and over whom he delighted to play the great man-"girding" at them, and ordering them about, as the fit took him. He built a little theatre, and had comedies performed there, to spite his neighbors the Genevese. In short, he was now his own master, and desired to give the world assurance of the fact. "Does any one ask me what I am about, in my country-seat here? I tell him, I reign; and add, Great is my pity for slaves." The old gentleman had evidently got new vigor by his passage of the grand climacteric. He would be Comte de Tourney in something more than name. When the settlement of the estate was drawn up, it was stipulated that the new proprietor, as enjoying Tourney for life-and that life in its seventh decade-should justly and fairly keep the grounds in order, deal kindly by the trees, and abstain from large alterations in the matter of "landscape gardening," &c. Hardly had Voltaire taken possession, however, before he began teasing the president in all sorts of ways on this subject. A long series of correspondence commenced, curiously indicative of the fidgety, vexatious temper of the potent seigneur. He is constantly expressing his fears that he has been taken advantage of in the contract, and the more plainly I see that you have acted the conqueror in dictating the law to me;" and he expresses his determination to follow his own fancy in pulling down and building up, in planting and transplanting, in "chopping and changing." But the president has agents in the vicinity, who are a check on his tenant's vagaries in this respect. Then it becomes Voltaire's object to buy the property out and out-and the tiresome system of his old tactics is renewed-all is misconstruction, equivocation, and vacillating delay. But he is careful throughout to represent himself as a generous, self-forgetting victim, an amiable dupe in the clutches of overreaching greed. On his own showing, you would take him for a mere innocent, a guileless, simple soul, wholly unsophisticated, utterly unversed in the by-ways and tortuous trickeries of a wily world-an unsuspecting, single-eyed creature, unfit for such a generation of serpents, and liable to be imposed upon at every turn: whereas it is the world-wide fashion to admire this Comte de Tourney as being himself wise and wary as the serpent-though his chief admirers have yet to learn that he was harmless as the dove. A new topic of complaint on his part brought his difference with the president to a crisis. There was at Tourney a peasant named Charles Baudy, with whom De Brosses had had transactions in the sale of the timber on his estate-Baudy being, in fact, a dealer in wood. In chatting with De Brosses on one occasion, it happened that Voltaire had complained of wanting firewood, and the president thereupon mentioned this Baudy as a proper person to apply to, and undertook to speak to him on the subject, on Voltaire's behalf. Baudy accordingly sent a supply, and with it a bill for the amount, of fourteen loads, duly charged on Voltaire. When the wood was burnt, Voltaire somehow saw good to decline paying Baudy, and to assume that De Brosses, if anybody, was the debtor-the wood to be regarded as a present. Nothing could equal the obstinacy with which Voltaire held out in this matter, unless it were the artful unfairness with which he mixed up other supposed grievances with it. De Brosses wrote in reply politely but with firmness. Voltaire then, "according to his wont," as Sainte-Beuve remarks, tried to merge the firewood squabble in a question of larger import, which might seem to interest the human race itself. "The question, Sir," he writes from Ferney, " is no longer about Charles Baudy and four loads of firewood," [observe-for it is characteristic, alas! of the man-how he slides from fourteen to four, with a coolness worthy of Falstaff;] "the question concerns the public interest-it concerns the vengeance of bloodshed, the punishment of a man whom you protect, the crime of a cure who is the scourge of the provinceit concerns sacrilege added to assassination." Now the affair of the curé thus dragged into the dispute was simply this: the curé of the village of Moëns had incited the villagers under his pastorate to bestow a sound thrashing on a young rake of the locality, whose excesses were unblushing enough, the priest thought, to merit summary castigation. The curé was, it would seem, akin to the whipbearing Irish priests still extant, and loved to uphold discipline in his flock. But Voltaire resolved on making the place too hot to hold such a monster. In a letter to D'Alembert, the great Encyclopædist, of this date, he says: "At present, I am intent on getting a priest sent to the galleys." De Brosses remonstrated with his angry correspondent for his "extra-judicial" declamation about the curé, and recurring to the wretched fagots, declared that he had never heard of such a thing as a present of fourteen loads of wood, unless it were to a convent of Capuchins. This comparison of Voltaire to a convent of Capuchins, at the moment of his striving with might and main to despatch a priest to the galleys, must have made the fire of his wrath seven times hotter. It did so; for from that instant he gave way to those paroxysms of rage to which he was subject. "He wrote to all his friends who were members of the Burgundian Parliament, to solicit their judgment in the litigation between their president and himself. In the statement which he forwarded, and into which he introduced a medley of contradictory and irrelevant matter, he distorted facts, falsified them to suit his case, and lied with that ease to which practice had now habituated him. To hear him, you would conclude that he was dragged into the contest in spite of his utmost resistance." From invective against De Brosses, he proceeded to menace. "Let him tremble! he must now be worse than ridiculed! he must be disgraced." Meanwhile, the president retained his calm. dignity of bearing. "Call to mind, Sir," he wrote to his accuser, "the advice I have formerly given you in conversation, when, in relating to me the cross accidents of your life, you added that your character was 'insolent by nature.' I have given you my friendship. That I have not withdrawn it is proved by the counsel I now proffer to you -never to write during these times of mental alienation, in order that you may not have cause, in lucid hours, to blush for what you have penned in a fit of delirium." And after a summing-up of the real state of their original transactions, the president continues: "I am truly and most cordially desirous of your long continuing to enjoy your estate, and would fain see you remain for thirty years to come to adorn your age; for, notwithstanding your failings, you will always be a very great man. . . . in your writings. I only wish you could infuse into your heart half a quarter of the ethics and philosophy which they contain." As to the firewood dispute, and Voltaire's desire of arbitration, De Brosses goes on to say, that really he has nothing to do in the case; that the question of debt is simply between Voltaire and Charles Baudy; that the premier president of the parliament, and all the members appealed to by Voltaire, are of the same opinion; and that, indeed, they cannot help shrugging their shoulders at seeing so wealthy and illustrious a man tormenting himself so strangely about paying a peasant two hundred and eighty livres for firewood. And then, having gravely reproved him for certain malicious insinuations affecting his judicial character, De Brosses concludes by wishing him mens sana in corpore sano. In course of time, the clamor of the strife was hushed, but not forgotten. Years passed on; and Voltaire, tired of Tourney, became the "patriarch of Ferney." It is now 1770; there have arisen numerous vacancies, through death, in the ranks of the Académie, and candidates for the much-coveted honors abound, as a matter of course. Very naturally, the President De Brosses, a littérateur |