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to whose moral and physical needs she ministered in love, and the esteem and admiration of the highest in the land— of all, indeed, who are capable of appreciating the true glory of a life which owes its lustre and beauty to its own inherent purity and brightness, unhelped by the meretricious glare that for a time circles and transfigures the conventional heroes and heroines of the world.

Her earthly mission finished, Elizabeth Fry passed tranquilly away to the reward of the Just, in the sixty-seventh year of her mortal life; the seraphic smile which accompanied her last words, "It is a strife-but I am safe," remaining, whilst human eyes rested upon it, as bright and placid as when the passing angel traced it there

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THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.

THE politic allusion by Napoleon the Third, when announ

cing to his Senate the resolution he had himself formed to wed without the pale of sovereign families, to "the good and virtuous wife” (la bonne et vertueuse femme), whom the founder of his dynasty, in sheer insanity of lawless power and ambition, cast off, to make way for the Austrian princess, by whom, in the hour of misfortune, he in his turn was shamelessly abandoned, met with ready approval in this country, where, for various reasons,-resentful dislike of her imperial husband one of them,—the name of the amiable, cruelly-sacrificed Joséphine seldom fails to awaken emotions of respectful sympathy and regret. The brilliant noon of that meteoric life, suddenly terminating in black, premature eclipse, has chiefly challenged the attention and wonder of mankind, albeit it will, I think, be found that the story of its dawn and changeful morning is scarcely inferior in romantic interest and tragic potency to that of the later fortunes of the divorced, discrowned Empress; and this, too, when divested of the false lights and illusive colouring had recourse to by prejudiced or enthusiastic historiographers, and related with the brevity and plainness with which, in these pages, it must necessarily be treated.

Marie Françoise Joséphine Tascher de la Pagérie, the only child of Captain Joseph Gaspard Tascher de la Pagérie, and his wife, Marie de Sanois, who had been for some years settled at St. Domingo, was born at the residence of her uncle and aunt, M. and Madame Renaudin, St. Pierre,

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Martinique, one of the lesser queens of the Antilles, on the 24th of June, 1761. This at least is the date assigned by French historians; but as that happens to be the precise day whereon the treaty of peace restoring Martinique to France was signed, it is quite possible that a natural desire to establish the French birth of the Empress beyond quibble or question may have led to some slight inaccuracy in the matter. The Renaudins were possessed of considerable property in the neighbourhood of St. Pierre, in land and slaves, and Madame Renaudin, a well-educated Parisienne, adopted the child, with a cheerful good-will, which the early development of Josephine's graces of mind and person increased to a thoughtful, zealous tenderness, ever spoken of in after life by her charming niece with grateful acknowledgment. Yes, graces of mind and person-not intellectual superiority of the one, nor absolute beauty in an artistic, or more properly statuary, sense of the other; Joséphine neither as girl or woman having been remarkable for mental power, whilst her beauty confessedly owed its subduing charm to the irresistible fascination which the glowing softness of Creole loveliness, when allied to purity of heart and quiet elegance of manner, exerts over the least impressionable of mankind. Joséphine's large, spiritual eyes were, no doubt, exquisitely beautiful; her complexion in youth, too, was as bright and sunny as her place of birth; her hair lustrous and silken, her teeth unexceptionable, her figure elastic and sylph-like, and her low-pitched, agitating voice so finely toned and modulated that Bonaparte could find no words forcible enough to express the exultant gratification with which the plaudits of the French people for his victories filled him, than "that they were sweet as the voice of Joséphine." Mademoiselle Tascher's aptitude for feminine accomplishments was sedu

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