in Amsterdam and London by the composition of infamous books. His career had been one long shame. He had lain in fifty gaols in twenty different countries. He had been sentenced to death by the parliament of his native province, and beheaded in effigy. Bankrupt, beggared, diseased, at perpetual warfare with his father, branded as a roué and an adulterer, he was justly considered as a disgrace to his order, and a social as well as political outlaw. A time came, however, when this abandoned man could be useful. It is recorded that when he first made his appearance in the tribune of the Legislative Assembly, of which he had been elected a member, a howl of execration arose from the auditory. His colleagues fell away from him, as from one stricken with the plague. The infamy of Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, hero of so many lettres de cachet, and author of the Erotikon Biblion and the Lettres à Sophie, was too recent. Yet he dominated all this repugnance. He passed unblushing through all this ignominy. He was useful, and he became essential. When the ship is sinking, one does not ask whether the man who volunteers to swim to shore with a hawser and rig a boatswain's chair, has been vaccinated, or has been a regular attendant at Sundayschool. The ship Royal Lily was breaking to pieces, and it was thought that this rapscallion of genius could weather the storm. It was not only the masses, the democrats, the republicans that were to be, that hung on Mirabeau's words, cheered them to the echo, and offered incense to him as though he had been a demigod ;-the gentle Marie Antoinette had to bring herself to daily and almost hourly correspondence and converse with this monstrous man. Ten years before, she would as soon have thought of foregathering with a lacquey. He died in the fulness of his new fame, mourned by thirty millions of people. The honours reserved for sovereigns were paid to his remains, and he was buried in the Pantheon. To the last he preserved his vices; but had he been as openly profligate in middle age as he had been in youth, it would not have mattered to his countrymen one liard. He was necessary; there was no man but he to do the work, and he did it. It was only perchance because Heliogabalus was a fool that the Romans abhorred him.

And yet it is to be hoped the present age would reject a Mirabeau or a Jack Wilkes. Would contemporary voters elect the last to be Lord Mayor? Would a house of notables endure the presidency of the first? The reasonable assumption is that they would not. Conduct, conduct, conduct, are imperatively called for. When Rome burns, Nero must play the fiddle under the bed-clothes. If Commodus wishes to enter the lists as a gladiator, he must have the ring in his own park, or put on the gloves to box with the Chicken in his study, and give out to the world that he is reading Huxley or Darwin. There must be no courtcircular about the doings at Capri while Tiberius is enjoying his villeggiatura. As in politics we find that the art of "making things comfortable" has been brought, under the existing consulate, to the highest pitch of perfection, so has the convenient system of "keeping things

quiet" attained universal popularity. Whatever you do, don't make a noise about it. I remember once having an action of law which, the right being clearly on my side, I fondly hoped to win in a canter. I went down to Guildhall, where the case was to be tried, full of pleasureable anticipations, and prepared to prove, when I was put into the witness-box, a tremendous amount of turpitude against the defendant. I found the lawyers had been putting their heads together, as the phrase is, and I was just conning the inscription on Lord Mayor Beckford's monument, when my own counsel came and touched me on the shoulder. "Was there no way of settling matters ?" he asked. "Settling! why settle? had I not right on my side, and would not a British jury properly appreciate a plain unvarnished tale?" a plain unvarnished tale?" "Yes, that was all very well. I had certainly a very strong case, and ought to get a verdict; but then, only consider the disadvantages of publicity. The case would get into those confounded penny papers, and might, by perverted and malevolent ingenuity, be twisted and turned in a hundred ways to my detriment." I was about to reply, with some complacency, that I gained several hundred pounds a year by writing in a penny paper myself; but then I remembered that there were a number of penny papers in which I did not write. I had had some experience of "perverted and malevolent ingenuity;" and I finally consented to a paltry compromise, thus tacitly recognising the expediency of "keeping things quiet."

Of course the great question that arises from the foregoing considerations is to ascertain whether the cause of national virtue and morality has benefitted by the undeniable decorum and decency which have of late made themselves apparent in public manners. Is hypocrisy preferable to open and undisguised vice? Have men and women a chance of really becoming good because the accepted usages of society compel them, under pain of banishment, to seem good? Is a petite maison in the suburbs better than the orgies of the "Rose" and the "Key"? Is it beneficial to the wellbeing of the commonwealth to assume a virtue, even if we have it not? I think that the verdict must be given in favour of judicious simulation. Evil examples are at least avoided; evil communications have no longer unbridled license to corrupt good manners; public nuisances are abated; the contagion of universal laxity of manners is at least kept within some bounds by quarantine regulations and sanitary cordons. But then, are there not people who declare that wherever you have a lazaretto you domiciliate the plague, and who point to the Republic of Venice, which, obstinately refusing to keep up a quarantine establishment, was virtually exempt from the ravages of the great scourge of the Middle Ages?

And it is again to be considered that, as was stated at the commencement of this paper, the age is tame. The presence of a Lady on the throne has made ruffianism, open libertinism, coarse language, and even practical joking unpopular. England has become one large drawingroom; though perhaps in the kitchen there is not altogether the best of

company, and a few roughs and ragamuffins may be hovering about the street-door. Moralists have been so long crying out "manners to mend,” that we have taken at last to mending them in good earnest. All these millions of tracts which have been distributed these ever-so-many years; all these speeches and exhortations that have been delivered on lectureplatforms and at tea-meetings (I don't speak of churches and chapels, for those our ancestors possessed); all these deliberations of SocialScience Congresses and British Associations; all these essays-humorous, pathetic, and didactic-that have flooded our monthly, weekly, and daily literature and journalism; all this wisdom culled from blue-books and the reports of school, factory, and sanitary inspectors; all these speeches at farmers' clubs, mechanics' institutes, and provincial athenæums; all refuges, asylums, penitentiaries, homes, associations, industrial schools, young men's christian associations, cabmen's clubs, youths' institutes, cheap restaurants, coffee-shops, city-missions, and mothers' meetings have surely not been wholly in vain. The palpable result is, that we are all on our good behaviour. There never was a time when so many civil things were said to people by other people. The comic publications have, within the last dozen years, commendably abstained from cruel personal satire, from outrageous caricature, and from boisterous merriment. Their conductors sensibly argue that they don't want to get into hot water; and that as their publications go into families and are read by women and children, it would be in the highest degree unbecoming to give insertion to any matter which could be offensive to the young and to the gentle sex. Papers that used to make us laugh are now so delicately written as to appear well-nigh dull. This is surely another proof of an improvement in the manners of the age. The same progressive refinement and avoidance of strong language must be visible to every one in the leading-articles in the daily and weekly press. There were days when the Times newspaper called WILLIAM COBBETT a “miscreant" and a "ruffian bone-grubber" (the last from his having brought the remains of Tom Paine from America); and Cobbett retorted by saying that he should live to see Baines, the Editor of the Times, exiled, and to spit upon his grave. Here is a specimen of Mr. Cobbett's strong writing. He is speaking of the Courier newspaper, which, after long silence, had feebly replied to one of his diatribes: "Like a stubborn and hardened thief under the lash of the beadle, it long bit its lips and writhed its limbs, seeming resolved not to cry out; but at last came a stripe in a tender part, and forth it bellowed its vices, mingled, thief-like, with lies and curses." What dreadfully ungenteel invective is this: fine, sounding Saxon, if you will, but unpardonably coarse. Here is another bit of our Cobbett, so shockingly unrefined that I am almost afraid to transcribe it. He is describing the operation of bread-making: "Talk indeed of your pantomimes and gaudy shows, your processions and installations and coronations. Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman heating her oven, and setting in her bread. And, if the

bustle does make the sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess?" "The sign of labour!" "lick the plaster"-as though duchesses were ever plastered, or required to be licked. Oh, Mr. Cobbett, Mr. Cobbett, what inexcusable vulgarity! But what could you expect from a person who spoke of the revered contributors to the celebrated journal published in Albemarle Street as the "dottrel-headed old shufflebreeches of the Quarterly Review?" The man was for a short time M.P. for Oldham, to be sure; but then had he not kept a shop and been a common soldier? Not Milton, not Dryden, not Steele, not Junius, not Burke, surpassed him in the art of writing pregnant English prose; but he was an utter vulgarian and a low fellow, of course.

I had the other day some thirty volumes of the Examiner, ranging from 1810 to 1830, given to me. Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt must have written in the earlier numbers; Fonblanque and Forster in the later ones. I was in raptures; but the style was painfully coarse. On my shelves, too, I have a good store of old Blackwoods and Frasers bound up. How coarse were Wilson and Hogg and De Quincy, Maginn and "Oliver Yorke," Carlyle and Thackeray! You see that we have mended our manners, and this kind of prose is no longer tolerated. There are lines in the Ingoldsby Legends that ring somewhat embarrassingly now. Even Tom Hood, all pure-hearted soul as he was, rode sometimes in his minor poems a frisky Pegasus. Captain Marryat was irresistibly funny; but he was occasionally quite as broad as Paul de Kock. My Lord Byron has written stanzas that-but hush: I must be cautious.

I recognise as a very good and grand thing the softening, the refinement, the quiet elegance that so strikingly characterise modern literature and journalism, and which are, of course, but the reflex of the physical and moral amelioration which has taken place in the manners of the people. The coarse language of bygone newspapers and magazines was in accordance with the general coarseness of social life in England. Billingsgate went out with cock-fighting, bull-baiting, the pillory, three-bottledom, and other enormities. Euphemism, or Dellacruscanism, or whatever else you choose to call the modern style, came in with finger-glasses, table-napkins, epergnes, seltzer-water, broughams, boys and buttons, and carte-de-visite albums. I do not watch the amazing increase in polite taste and gentility of deportment without alarm. I belong to the old school (there were dunces, if you please, in that old school, as well as captains and head-boys): but I see that the feeling of the age is against me; and if the world advances in its polite progress, and grows much genteeler, I am very much afraid (the Ethiopian failing to change his skin and the leopard his spots) that I shall starve.

A Hapless Queen.

THE story of the Queen of Denmark, who has been hitherto supposed to have loved "not wisely but too well," has just been told by Sir Lascelles Wraxall with considerable sympathy, great grasp of detail, and in such pleasant kindly fashion as must commend his work alike to the historical student and the reader for mere amusement. His peculiar claims on our attention lie, moreover, in the perfectly new evidence he adduces; in the special permission he has had granted him to examine the private archives of Copenhagen; and in the fact of the private journals of his grandfather Sir N. W. Wraxall containing much relating to the queen which has not been hitherto known, or if known, forgotten. The journals and correspondence of this gentleman have been ransacked by his grandson; all works connected with the subject, and many a forgotten pamphlet and chap-book, have been consulted; an affecting letter written by the poor queen on her deathbed to her brother (George III.) is now published for the first time, by permission of its present holder the Duchess of Augustenberg; and the result is that one more historical cloud is dispelled, and the innocence of Caroline Matilda is established in the minds of all readers who allow their judgment to be tempered by feeling, or who do not turn a deaf ear to aught differing from their preconceived theories and settled ideas. The posthumous child of a vicious father (that Frederick Prince of Wales whose memory is preserved by the stinging Tory epigram commencing "Here lies Fred"); the strictly-trained daughter of an affectionate but prejudiced mother, whose very love for her children was hidden under a repellent coldness; the victim of a state-marriage at an age at which our own daughters are yet at school; the ill-used and injured wife of a husband whose character and conduct was a mixture of insanity, faithlessness, and brutality, this unhappy lady had to contend throughout her short life with sorrow, with jealousy, with malignity, and neglect. Few and evil indeed were the days of her pilgrimage. She was born July 11, 1751; married at fifteen to Christian VII., King of Denmark; cruelly banished from her palace and her capital at twenty; and died, not without a suspicion of poison, at twenty-three. Such is the sad epitome of the young life whose troubles we are about to pity, and whose enemies and persecutors the course of our history will compel us to denounce. Sir Lascelles Wraxall informs us that from her tenderest years Caroline Matilda displayed an endearing vivaciousness, and a sweetness of temper which won the affections of her attendants. Her person was graceful; her manners elegant; her voice sweet and melodious; and her countenance prepossessing. In addition to these personal charms, her mental attainments were of no mean order; her disposition was amiable, and her beneficence and liberality extensive. Her