succumbed to him. There was no appearance of the growth of any rival power. Finally, he fell by one of those caprices of cruelty which belonged less to the necessities of his position than the rabidness of his tiger heart. At a loss for employment, he had determined to begin a new course of public remedies. The victims got notice of his intention, and surprised the tiger in his den. It has been argued, that if Napoleon had joined him, the ability of the young commandant of Paris might have saved the tyrant from the catastrophe. Possibly it might for the moment. But the love of blood was innate in Robespierre; and supreme power, instead of humanizing, would only have prompted him to more comprehensive cruelties. Even France would have grown weary of the hideous homicide; he must have perished, and all his tools with him.

"To be nearer to Napoleon," says Lucien, "my family established themselves at the Chateau Sallé, near Antibes, only a few leagues from the headquarters. I had left St Maximin, to pass a few days with my family and my brother. We were all assembled there, and the General gave us every moment that was at his disposal. He arrived one day more thoughtful than usual, and while walking between Joseph and me said, that it depended on himself to set out for Paris next day, and to be in a position in which he could establish us all advantageously.' Lucien was the shortsighted one on this occasion, and would probably have led the way of the whole family to the Conciergerie. Napoleon preserved his sagacity and his line. "For my part," says Lucien, in the true vein of a provincial Frenchman, to whose imagination Paris is considerably above a Mahometan paradise," the news enchanted me. To go to the great capital appeared to me a height of felicity, that nothing could overweigh. They offer me,' said Napoleon, the place of Henriot (the commandant of Paris). I am to give my answer this evening. Well, what do you say to it?' We hesitated a moment. Eh, eh,' rejoined the General, but it is worth considering. It is not a case to be enthusiastic upon. It is not so easy to save one's head at Paris as at St Maximin. The younger Robespierre is an honest fellow: but his brother is not to be trifled with. He will be obeyed. Can

I

I support that man? No, never. know how useful I should be to him in replacing his simpleton of a commandant of Paris. But it is what I will not be. It is not yet the time.' (The pear was not ripe). There is no place honourable for me at present but the army. We must have patience. I shall command Paris hereafter.'

"Such were the words of Napoleon. He then expressed to us his indignation against the Reign of Terror; of which he announced the approaching downfall. He finished by repeating several times, half gloomy, half smiling, ، What should I do in that galley?' The younger Robespierre solicited in vain. A few weeks after, the 9th Thermidor arrived, to deliver France, and justify the foresight of the General. If Napoleon had taken the command of Henriot, on which side would have been the victory?"

It has again been argued, that Napoleon's readiness to accept the command under the Directory, but a year later, showed that his reluctance arose from no scruple of conscience. But the parties were different, Robespierre and Barras were the antipodes of each other except in ambition. The one a monster of blood, the other a showy, festive prodigal. The one a cold villain, who loved power for its indulgence of his cruelty. The other a gay man of the world, who loved power for its indulgence of his passions. man can fairly place the character of the Government, when Napoleon was taken into its service, in comparison with the horrid atrocity which raised the universal voice of Europe against Robespierre.

No

That Napoleon was unsparing of blood in the field is sufficiently well known. But he was no butcher on the scaffold. The death of the Due d'Enghien was the act of an assassin, but an act to which he was urged by its connexion with his tyrannical system of polity. It was almost a solitary act. And there are few things more remarkable in the history of this stern, fierce, and implacable mind than the rareness of public executions under his resistless reign.

Another evidence of the sagacity of waiting was exhibited on his return from the Italian campaign of 1798. All France resounded with his name. The Directory were sinking before the eye. The army was rapidly identi

fying itself with sovereignty in France. He was the hero of France. Strong suggestions, too, were made to him on all sides to seize the supremacy. His answer was, "It is not time yet. The public mind is not decided. I should experience unexpected difficulties. I shall return from Egypt, and find all those difficulties extinguished by the lapse of time. I leave the Directory behind me. They will at once do my work and their own. The pear is not ripe." The oracle was true. He left France to writhe under the loss of her Italian conquests; the Directory to sink into popular scorn by the proof of their incapacity; the army to see its laurels torn away, and think of the distant chieftain by whom they had been planted. And when the name of Bonaparte was not only in the mouths but in the hearts of the people; when his presence was felt to be less a pledge of national fame, than a protection against national ruin, he came, and at one bound seized the throne. The pear was ripe!

Among the results to which the new experiments on conveyance through the air may give rise, the most advantageous would be some increased attention to the study of meteorology. When it shall have become important to investigate the currents and changes of the air, we shall enter upon a science almost totally new, yet of the very first interest, and probably opening the widest remain ing avenue to the command of nature. We have largely investigated, and in consequence largely mastered three of the elements. The earth and water are nearly our slaves. But the air has hitherto almost wholly escaped man's dominion. The few general notions which we have adopted on the subject of its matter, operation, and impulses, are wholly inadequate to explain, and, what is of still higher importance, to enable man to anticipate its chief phenomena.

As to the changes of the air from calm to tempest, the principal agency is doubtless caloric. The rush of the cold air to supply the place of the heated is the well-known origin of the tempest. But, what is the agency which influences the caloric itself? The periodical storms and rains of the tropics admit of something like an ex

planation, by the movement of the sun, and the heat which he propagates in his course. But what accounts for years of mist, rain, and tempest ? Why have we for five years scarcely known the existence of snow to be overwhelmed with it in the sixth? The cometary influence has been often assigned, and laughed at, yet, there is scarcely an instance of a comet's having come down towards the earth's orbit, without its being followed by some remarkable change in the temperature of the year. In some instances the most delightful serenity, in others, the whole season, or whole year chill and comfortless. If we are to be told, that there are thousands of comets, and that therefore they must be constantly acting upon the atmosphere, if they act at all, may we not ask, are all comets necessarily the same in their purposes or properties? May they not be as different as there are different objects for them to fulfil? May there not be some of those thousands which exclusively affect the earth, and its seasons, while some may be administering salutary change to other globes, and some may be solely conduits of light to the exhausted energies of the sun?

During the last two months we have had the severest weather experienced in England since 1814. The whole year had been rough, wet, and uncertain. A state of things which the towns and bathing places on the sea-coast felt heavily in their finance, for they were nearly deserted by the landowners, who felt no great satisfaction in travelling fifty or a hundred miles to face premature winter, in the little hovels for which the conscience of the landlords of Brighton, Worthing, and the other summer camps of citizenship charge so rapaciously. But on the 9th of November, the war of elements began. Storm swept the whole coast of England and the western shores of the continent; the sea was covered with wrecks, and the shore with corpses. But it was on the 29th of the same month that the most tremendous tempest swept up from the Atlantic, and moving north-east, devastated all within its vast expanse, up probably to the pole. The wind raged for three days with fearful fury, houses were blown down, mail-coaches hurried away, waggons overturned by the force of the blast, and though these may seem trivial instances of its

mischief, they give an extraordinary conception of the power of the wind. The loss of shipping and life was deplorable. The year closed with the great snow-storm. A slight fall on the night of the 24th of December seemed only to attire Christmas in his ancient robe, and the sight of the snow was almost welcomed.

But on Christmas night down came the whole weight of the vast fall. Before daybreak the entire face of England was a bed of snow. All the mails and conveyances of every kind were stopped at once, as the snow had drifted in some places from ten to twenty feet deep. The few carriages which ventured out were buried in the drifts, and were either left where they had sunk, or with infinite difficulty were dragged back to the towns from which they had travelled. This state of things continued for nearly a week. The single night's fall had the effect of impeding almost the entire machinery of commerce and public communication. Great efforts were made to clear the roads, the peasantry were put in motion by hundreds or thousinds, but the task frequently baffled them, and some of the mails were four days due. The snow was so deep on the Kent road, that all intercourse was suspended until nearly the close of the week, though the pioneers of Woolwich and Chatham were employed to open the line; the foreign mails were sent by steam-boats to Dover. This sudden stoppage of all intercourse produced great inconvenience, if not great evil, in the commercial world. Remittances delayed shook the credit of the merchant, and perhaps another night's fall of snow would have been little short of striking a blow at the commercial credit of the nation.

But from what source did this incalculable fall come? What mighty agency could have at a moment commanded the mass that covered the 60,000 square miles of England; covered the whole north of France, Holland, and Germany in a few hours? The millions of tons must have been beyond all count. And yet the ation was as sudden as it was powerful. No symptom of it was given in the hue, the chill, or the tumult of the air. Perhaps no act of nature gives so high a conception of a more than mortal hand. The rapidity of its effect, the immensity of its product, the sub

oper

tle but resistless chemistry by which the impalpable element was turned into a material of a totally different form and qualities, and that material fabricated in a quantity sufficient to sheet millions of miles, are contemplations made to elevate our minds beyond the world.

But, combined with these conceptions, there is one which most painfully brings us to this world again. On the 24th the battle raged round Bilboa. While the majesty of nature was covering the land with its high evidence of power, man was slaying and being slain; thousands and tens of thousands of the same soil, kindred, and tongue, were slaughtering each other from sunset to sunrise. When Christmas morning, the day of peace, came, it was to wretched Spain a day of havoc; thousands were staining the snows . with their blood, exposed through the storm to all the tortures of the freezing wind. shelterless, naked, stiffening in their gore, and dying in agonies.

The value of the Canadas to Great Britain as a territory for the efflux of her superabundant population, as a customer for her manufactures, and as a balance for the naval ambition of the United States, is well known to European statesmen. But it has a higher value still, of which the generality of statesmen are careless or unconscious. It supplies the means for an illustrious experiment of civilisation. It affords the noble opportunity of filling an almost boundless extent of empire with the laws, the knowledge, and above all, the religion of England. Whether the Canadas are to remain united with England by Government; or finally, to form an independent authority, this at least will have been done. A space but little less than Europe will have been traversed by the steps of order, the wilderness will have heard the voice of morals, and the haunts of the wolf and the bear, or of men more savage than the wolf and the bear, will have been reclaimed into the general and genial inheritance of society.

Under these aspects all that concerns the Canadas becomes of singular importance to this country; and we have read with interest, arising from this source, the details given in the late publication of Washington Irving relative to the trade and con

dition of the vast region lying to the west of the prairies and the Rocky Mountains. This work, entitled "Astoria," professes to be no more than a compilation of the journals and papers connected with the attempt of a Mr Astor to form on the shores of the Pacific a fur-trading settlement, to which he gave his name. The narrative, though told with the grace of the writer, is necessarily dry. The casualties of the individuals are merely those to which we have been accustomed in the crowd of rather tiresome novels from the Backwoods; and the heroes are the heroes of the novels, with all their rudeness and none of their romance. But the occasional episodes of travel, and the insights into the capabilities of those immense countries, have an interest superior to mere rude novelty; and we gratify ourselves in bringing before our readers some fragments of their information relative to a trade now peculiarly Canadian.

By the treaty of 1794 between England and America, the subjects of both countries were permitted to trade alike with the Indians in the territories of both; but, from the circumstances of the case, almost the whole of this trade naturally devolved to the British merchant. The French, the original masters of the fur trade, had given it with the Canadas into British hands at the time of the conquest of the French possessions. The communication by the lakes and northern rivers was in the hands of the conquerors. The Indian war with the United States, from 1776 to 1795, produced still stronger aversion on the part of the natives, and the American traders were nearly proscribed by this aboriginal hostility. An attempt was then made by Mr Astor to purchase half the interest of the Canadian Fur Company, so as to share the British trade, by Machillimachinae, with the Indians in and bordering on the United States. This attempt failed through the nonintercourse act of the war of 1812. A previous attempt to form a company for the trade west of the Rocky Mountains (the one recorded in these volumes) had also failed through the war. This was the condition of the trade from the United States.

In Canada, the trade had been carried on by the two rival companies

the North-west and the Hudson's Bay. The North-west was finally overpowered, and a coalition was formed, of which the Hudson's Bay took the lead. They have raised a powerful settlement, sixty miles up the Columbia river, called Fort - Vancouver, carry on a vigorous trade from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, over a large territory north and south, and keenly shut out all intruders. The American Fur Company still subsists, actively employed in the trade from Machillimachinac to the regions of the Mississippi and Missouri. It employs steam-boats, and penetrates the great internal rivers by them to the great astonishment of the natives, and the great security and relief of their own huntsmen and traders. Other less acknowledged companies are formed, which trade in the intermediate regions.

But, disregarding the valuable results of those enterprises to trade, we may admire them as a striking instance of the ways by which Providence makes the earth known to man. The single circumstance that China produces an herb which the most active, enterprising, and civilized of European nations loves to infuse in water and drink morning and evening, is probably the chief bond of China to the civilized world. The simple circumstance that furs are found in the wildernesses of the West, which women and princes love to wear, probably alone has brought those enormous deserts of mountain, sand, marsh, and forest within the tread of man. Population would, doubtless, in the course of time, have gradually spread over them. But its progress is naturally slow; men reluctantly leave the borders of civilized life, and centuries might have elapsed before the surge of population would have swelled to the shores of the Pacific. But now the whole west country is almost regularly portioned out into regions of trade-in size, future empires. The Russians hold the northwest, from Behring's Strait to Queen Charlotte's Sound, in 53° north latitude; the Hudson's Bay Company from 53° to the south of the Columbia; two American companies, Ashley's and Bonneville's, thence to California. The whole wilderness from the Mississippi to the Pacific is now traversed in every direction. From

the Arctic Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, every mountain, forest, and river is searched for furs.

The furs are thence spread over the world. The Hudson's Bay Company send their furs to London. The American companies send theirs to New York, the chief export trade being also to London: some, however, go southward to the Spanish States, some westward to Canton. But the principal mart is still London, which has thus become the great emporium for the fur trade of the New World.

Of the fur-bearing animals, "the precious ermine," so called by way of pre-eminence, is found, of the best quality, only in the cold regions of Europe and Asia. Its fur is of the most perfect whiteness, except the tip of its tail, which is of a brilliant shining black. With these black tips tacked on the skins, they are beautifully spotted, producing an effect of ten imitated, but never equalled in other furs. The ermine is of the genus mustela (weasel), and resembles the common weasel in its form; is from fourteen to sixteen inches from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail. The body is from ten to twelve inches long. It lives in hollow trees, river banks, and especially in beech forests; preys on small birds, is very shy, sleeping during the day, and employing the night in search of food. The fur of the older animals is preferred to the younger. It is taken by snares and traps, and sometimes shot with blunt arrows. Attempts have

been made to domesticate it; but it is extremely wild, and has been found untameable.

It

The sable can scarcely be called second to the ermine. It is a native of Northern Europe and Siberia, and is also of the genus mustela. In Samoeda, Yadutsz, Kamschatka, and Russia-Lapland, it is found of the richest quality and darkest colour. In its habits it resembles the ermine. preys on small squirrels and birds, sleeps by day, and prowls for food during the night. It is so like the marten in every particular except its size, and the dark shade of its colour, that naturalists have not decided whether it is the richest and finest of the marten tribe, or a variety of that species. It varies in dimensions from eighteen to twenty inches. The finest fur and the darkest colour are the most

esteemed; and whether the difference arises from the age of the animal, or from some peculiarity of location, is not known. They do not vary more from the common marten, than the Arabian horse from the shaggy Canadian.

In this

The rich dark shades of the sable, and the snowy whiteness of the ermine, the great depth, and the peculiar almost flowing softness of their skins and fur, have combined to gain them a preference in all countries, and in all ages of the world. age, they maintain the same relative estimate in regard to other furs, as when they marked the rank of the proud crusader, and were emblazoned in heraldry; but in most European nations they are now worn promiscuously by the opulent.

The martens from Northern Asia and the mountains of Kamschatka are much superior to the American, though in every pack of American marten skins there are a certain number which are beautifully shaded, and of a dark brown olive colour, of great depth and richness.

Next these in value, for ornament and utility, are the sea-otter, the mink, and the fiery-fox.

The fiery-fox is the bright red of Asia; is more brilliantly coloured and of finer fur than any other of the genus. It is highly valued for the splendour of its red colour, and the fineness of its fur. It is the standard of value on the north-eastern coast of Asia.

The sea-otter, which was first introduced into commerce in 1725, from the Aleutian and Kurile islands, is an exceedingly fine, close, soft fur, jet black in winter, with a silken gloss. The fur of the young animal is of a beautiful brown colour. It is met with in great abundance in Behring's island, Kamschatka, Aleutian, and Fox islands, and is also taken on the opposite coasts of North America. It is sometimes taken with nets, but more frequently with clubs and spears. Their food is principally lobster and other shell-fish.

In 1780 furs had become so scarce in Siberia, that the supply was insufficient for the demand in the Asiatic countries. It was at this time that the sca-otter was introduced into the markets for China. The skins brought such incredible prices, as to originate immediately several American and