Upon Saint Agnes' Eve Young virgins might have visions of delight, And soft adorings from their loves receive Upon the honeyed middle of the night, If ceremonies due they did aright; one of these ceremonies being the taking of a row of pins, and pulling them out one by one while repeating a paternoster. Then, by sticking a pin in his or her sleeve, the prying, love-sick damsel or youth might insure sweet dreams of a dear companion for life. Near most Cornish wells, says Mr. Haslam, pins may be collected by handfuls; but these pin-wells into which passers-by drop a pin as they go, in order to propitiate the fairy of the waters, are not confined to the county of Tre, Pol, and Pen, but are found in several parts of England. At a holy well in Wales, dedicated of old time to the Virgin Mary, and supposed to be under her especial guardianship, it is customary to throw in a crooked pin, in the belief that if the dropper possesses faith, all the other pins within the well may be seen rising from the depth profound to greet and welcome the new-comer.

Kitty Hudson of Nottingham, who was employed when very young in cleaning the aisles and pews of the church, used to store all the pins she picked up in her mouth-a fellow-servant giving her some .sweet stuff whenever she brought her a mouthful of pins. She got so used to having her mouth full of them, that at length she could neither eat, drink, nor sleep without them; and before her friends became aware of Kitty's extraordinary mania, her double teeth had granulated away almost to the gums. At last sleep refused to be bribed by any number of pins, her limbs became numb, and the pin-swallower was taken into Nottingham Hospital, where she had to undergo a series of operations, even to the cutting away of her breasts, resulting in the extraction of a great number of pins and needles from various parts of her body. While in hospital, Kitty contrived to make the acquaintance of a male patient, and when she was discharged, married him, and lived to bear seventeen children.

Birmingham, into which the trade was introduced about a hundred years ago, is now the headquarters of the pin-manufac

fourteen pairs of hands in the operations of straightening the wire, pointing, cutting into pin lengths, twisting wire for heads, cutting heads, annealing heads, stamping heads, cleaning pins, whitening, washing, drying and polishing, winnowing, paperpricking, and finally papering up. Adam Smith, arguing on the advantages of the division of labor, can find no better illustration than that afforded in the making of a pin. "Not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pin is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the papers; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day."

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Adam Smith would now have to seek elsewhere for illustrations of the benefit of division of labor, thanks to the American Wright, who brought out, in 1824, a machine producing a perfect pin during the revolution of a single wheel. This machine, improved in many ways, is that employed at the largest pin-factory in Birmingham at the present day.

Pin papers are generally marked by means of a moulded piece of wood, the moulds corresponding to those portions representing the small folds through which the pins are passed and held. The pa perer, usually a girl, gathers two of the

folds of the paper together, and places them a small portion projecting-between the jaws of a vice, having grooves channelled in them, to serve as a guide for the placing of the pins. When filled, the paper is released, and held so that the light strikes upon it, when the eye at once

detects every defective pin, and the ready hand removes it. ready hand removes it. One house consumes three tons of brass wire per week in producing these ever-wasted utilities, the consumption of which in England alone is calculated at fifteen millions per day.

"DURING the wars of the Empire, while their husbands were in Germany, the anxious wives brought into the world a generation ardent, pale, and nervous. From time to time their blood-stained fathers appeared, pressed them to breasts bedizened with gold, then placed them down, and once more mounted their horses.

"After the fall of the Emperor, these men, who had gone through so many battles, embraced their wives, grown thin with anxiety, and spoke of their youthful love. They looked at themselves in the fountains of their native town, and when they saw how old they were, how battered by the wars, they asked for their sons to close their eyes. The boys came back from school, and in their turn asked for their fathers, seeing no sabres, no cuirasses, no infantry, no cavalry. They were told that the war was over, that Cæsar was dead, that in the antechambers of the consulates were hung up the portraits of Wellington and Blücher, with the words, Salvatoribus mundi !

"Then on a world in ruins sat down a youth full of thought.

"For fifteen years they had dreamed of the Moscow snows and the suns of Egypt. . . . They looked abroad upon the earth -the sky, the streets, the roads-but all was empty, and in the distance sounded only the bells of the parish church.

"On his throne was the King of France, looking here and there to see if a single bee was left in the tapestry: some held out their hats to him, and he gave them money; others showed him a crucifix, which he kissed . . . ; others pointed to their old mantles, from which the bees were carefully taken out, and he gave them new ones.

"The children looked on all this, thinking always to see the shade of Cæsar disembark at Cannes ; but silence continued, NEW SERIES.-VOL. XIII., No. 1.

and nothing floated in the sky but the paleness of the lilies.

"When the boys spoke of glory, they said: Make yourselves priests.' When they spoke of ambition: 'Make yourselves priests.' When of hope, of love, of strength, of life: Make yourselves priests.'

"Three elements then divided the life which offered itself to the young behind them, a past forever destroyed, still mov ing on its ruins, with all the fossils of the ages of absolutism; before them, the aurora of an immense horizon, the first bright rays of the future; and between these two . . . something similar to the ocean which divides the Old Continent from the Young America—a surging sea, full of shipwrecks, traversed from time to time by a distant sail . . . the present age, indeed, which separates the past from the future, which is neither one nor the other, but resembles both, and where one does not know, at each step, whether one is stepping on a seed of the future or a ruin of the past.

"Remained the present, the spirit of

the age, and of the twilight which is neither day nor night: they found it seated on a bag of lime full of bones, wrapped in the mantle of selfishness, and shivering with mortal cold.

"And then the body spoke :

"Man is born to make use of his senses he has certain pieces, more or less, of yellow metal, by means of which he gains more or less respect. To eat, to drink, to sleep, is life. As for the ties which exist between men, friendship consists in lending money-it is rare to have a friend for whom one can go so far; and kinship is useful.for inheritance; love is an exercise of the body: the only intellectual enjoyment is vanity!'

"The rich said: There is nothing real but money; let us enjoy and die!' Those of moderate fortune said: 'There is nothing true but forgetfulness; all the rest is a dream. Let us forget and die!' And the poor said: There is nothing real but misfortune; all the rest is a dream. Let us blaspheme and die !'

"All the misery of the present century comes from two causes: the people who have passed through '93 and '14, bear two wounds in their hearts. All which was, is no more: all which will be, is not yet!"

Under these influences, detailed, it is true, with a poet's vehemence and exaggeration, grew up Alfred de Musset, the writer of the words above. It is the story of his own youth. There can be no doubt that he presents a faithful picture, though highly colored, of the profound impression produced in his generation by the crash of the Empire. After glory had been the dream of France for a quarter of a century, they were taught that it was an unreal and a foolish dream; as they arrived at the age when ambition, love, and honor spur on the soul to noble aims, they found a cold system of repression, with the hated Jesuits barring every avenue. In their In their homes they learned the story of the Empire; in the papers of the day they saw what France was. They fell back, disheartened, upon themselves; infidelity, of the most pronounced type, became the fashion. "In the Colleges," says De Musset, "were heard conversations among the boys which would have startled Volaire. Nothing sacred was spared, not even the holy Mystery of the Eucharist." Pleasure became the only good; money to purchase pleasure, the only object.

came a new lease of life and hope, and France, after fifteen years of sullen silence, awoke again.

Alfred de Musset, the son of the wellknown writer (Musset Pathay), and the brother of another, Paul de Musset, was born in 1810. He distinguished himself at the Collége de Charlemagne by distancing his competitors; but on leaving the college he found himself irresistibly drawn to literature, to which he gave himself up with an ardor which never left him. Whatever else he was in his life, he was always an artist. He belonged, at first, to a small set of poets called, blasphemously enough, the Cénacle (Cœnaculum). Among them he wrote his Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, which was published before he was twenty. No one has ever disputed the poetic merits of this volume ; but it contains the gravest faults both of style and morality. Nothing is worthy of respect-nothing of admiration; there are no bounds to passion; no laws of self-restraint; none of religion.

The influence of Byron is very clearly marked in these earlier poems, which have a kind of tumultuous splendor about them; they record stories of man's passion and woman's infidelity; they are written, says Sainte-Beuve, "with more than man's audacity, and with the effrontery of a page. It is Cherubin at a bal masqué, playing at Don Juan." In point of fact, the experience of the young poet was far below his command of verse; he uses language more than adequate to the deepest and strongest passions of manhood to express the calf-love of a boy. Among the pieces, however, is the quaint ballad to the Moon, which alone was sufficient to attract attention. And when the volume was published, Alfred de Musset could be nothing but a poet. His career was settled. He was one more added to the list of marvellous boys from whom the world expects so much.

There are few incidents in his life; but his character, and the kind of life he led, may be well made out from his writings. Thus, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, from which the first long extract was made, gives us the story of a young man of genius and fortune, of keen and artistic susceptibilities, who, born under the influences we have described, leads at first a life of mere thoughtless pleasures.

In his mistress he thinks he possesses an angel. Filled with this belief, he lets the days go by in a kind of Fool's Paradise of delight, which is rudely disturbed by the discovery of her infidelity. His idol shattered, his dream dispelled, there seems at first nothing left to live for, and he sinks into mere despair. From this he is rescued by his friend Desgenais, a cynic of the coldest kind, who lectures nim on the folly of looking for any virtue, or any honor, and persuades him to seek forgetfulness in dissipation and debauchery. The death of his father forces him to go into the country. Here he forms the acquaintance of a Madame Brigitte Pierson, living the life of a sister of charity in the village. He becomes intimate with her: he relates all his history, concealing nothing. She, religious as she is, seems to find little to reprehend in his confession, and comforts him with hope. Presently, after a book of the most tender pastoral beauty, filled with the charm which only St. Pierre had ever known before how to pour over his writings-a sort of atmosphere of calm and peace, in which love, like a flower, easily grows and gradually unfolds its leaves the expected result arrives, and in the arms of Madame Pierson the Enfant du Siècle seeks again the jewel he has thrown away-the freshness and sweetness of pure love. With a cynicism which one hardly expects, the writer makes Brigitte a rosière-the maiden who has won the rose of virtue. And here the book should, artistically, have ended.

As there can be no doubt that in writing the introduction to this book, De Musset attempted to describe the influences of his own childhood, so there can be none that in the scenes of Parisian life, so minutely drawn, so true that they must have been copied, not imagined, he described his own life during the first two or three years of his early manhood. In the part that follows-the liaison with Madame Pierson-we have an account written from his own point of view-an honorable and chivalrous one-in which he takes to himself all the blame of his celebrated relations with George Sand.

It is impossible to speak of Alfred de Musset without dwelling upon this connection, which would, were it not for its influence not only on his life but on his works, properly belong to the Chronique Scandaleuse. It was of short duration, not

lasting more than a twelvemonth in all. Their acquaintance began in 1832. In the winter of 1833-34 they went together to Italy; here, after six months of travel, Alfred had a violent attack of cerebral fever, which nearly lost him his life. His companion nursed him through his illness, and then, immediately after his recovery, they parted, and Alfred came back to France alone. Rumor was of course busy with inventing reasons why they quarrelled, but for a time neither spoke. In the same year, however, there appeared in the Lettres d'un Voyageur of George Sand, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, a highly-colored and imaginative portrait, to which we shall presently recur, of the poet. Two years later came out De Musset's Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, which, under feigned names and other situations, gave an account, most generous and even noble, of the wrongs inflicted by the poet himself. Thirteen years later, when he was dead, George Sand published her celebrated romance of Elle et Lui, and this was followed, almost immediately, by Paul de Musset's Lui et Elle. Never was an amour treated with so much detail, and discussed from so many points of view. The two actors having had their say, a third person gives an account, as he says, from authentic sources, and the result is an insight into the character of both Alfred de Musset and George Sand which is extremely valuable. It is because the portrait of the poet can be drawn from these papers, and because the affair made so profound and lasting an impression on him, that we must notice an episode, in itself, judged from an English point of view, discreditable, which yet. was the only time in his life when the influence of a mind as high as, or even higher than, his own, was brought to bear upon him. In the Confession, Brigitte Pierson comes upon the poet's life like a ministering angel. She brings him consolation and hope; she soothes a spirit troubled with turbid memories; she draws out a genius which else might have slumbered; she bears with the poet's wayward fancies; she follows his humors; she endures his petulance; she forgives his faults. Not only this: when she discovers that pity, more than love, is actuating her, she resolves to sacrifice her life to him, and, while she loves another, never to desist from her patient sufferance

of all that he makes her endure while life remains. In that part of the work where their early friendship grows, she is the poet's dream of what a woman may be; in the latter part, she represents the image left on the poet's heart of what George Sand was to him. And, in discussing his own conduct, he spares himself in nothing: he shows how suspicion and jealousy clouded his brain; in the tenderest moments of their love, there rises between him and his mistress the spectral remembrance of those love-mockeries of Paris. He hates himself for the past, because it spoils his present; he despises himself for the present, because in his selfish passion he makes its object suffer. Finally, when he resolves to go, when he tears away the chains that have become part of his own flesh, and sees Brigitte depart, with her real love, he thanks God that of three beings who have suffered through his faults only one remains unhappy.

Elle et Lui is written entirely from the woman's point of view. There is none of that chivalrous self-sacrifice which made Alfred take to himself the whole blame; she deliberately makes him the guilty one, the first to break the bonds; he is represented, as doubtless he was, irritable, full of fancies, wayward, capricious; one day he would rage at her like a hurricane, and the next, forgetful of the things he had said, would overwhelm her with caresses. He would stay away for days and nights, and return moody, silent, and peevish; he took umbrage at a word, a gesture, a look; he interpreted everything according to his present mood; he was more changeable than an April day, more unstable than the ocean. Only, even while the writer is as it were exculpating herself by pouring reproach on her poor dead lover, we catch glimpses of her own character, which would seem almost to justify the savage attack made upon her by Paul de Musset. She, too, is jealous; she, too, takes umbrage at a look or a gesture; she, as well as her lover, is capricious; she, almost at a word from him, transfers her affections to another; and when she first parts from Alfred, it is to marry her American. The truth appears to be that these two sensitive natures, both seeking what neither could give-repose for the soul-acted as a constant irritant one upon the other; the few months they spent together was a time of perpetual torment, allayed by an

He

The

ever renewed hope that, some day, would dawn the hour of rest and perfect confidence. Two artists, they studied each other, and it irritated both to be made the object of study, George Sand became Brigitte Pierson in her lover's book. became Laurent de Fauvel in hers. man's generosity is superior to the woman's. Laurent is a contemptible, melodramatic self-tormentor; he stamps, and raves, and shouts, without any cause at all; while his mistress is intended to be a saint, but is in reality the most odious of creatures. Brigitte Pierson, on the other hand, is a perfectly human, and sometimes lovable creature, and had Alfred met with her, their tour in Italy would certainly have been prolonged.

Paul de Musset's book, Lui et Elle, is simply an attack on George Sand. It paints her throughout in colors too strong to be reproduced here. The curious in the matter may read it. Doubtless, many of the incidents are true; but it only proves what might have been gathered from the other two books, that the ménage of Mr. and Mrs. Naggleton would be a heaven of peace and comfort, compared with that of this ill-assorted pair.

There are points of singular resemblance between the Confessions and Elle et Lui, which are yet not due to the resemblance of the story so much, as to the similarity of the impression produced by their union on two acutely sensitive minds. We have not space here to pick out these. One only may be mentioned, the curious night scene in the forest. The lovers wander and lose their way, in both books. They resolve to pass the night where they find themselves. But the man. in telling the story, remembers only his mistress's words of consolation and love, and how, with tears, they prayed together at a stone, under the calm light of the stars. "Dieu merci," he says, depuis cette soirée, nous ne sommes jamais retournés à cette roche; c'est un autel qui est resté pur; c'est un des seuls spectres de ma vie qui soit encore vêtu de blanc lorsqu'il passe devant mes yeux." But the inexorable George tells a different story. In her we read how her love left her to wander alone, a prey to evil thoughts: how he was found, almost mad with fear and horror, because he had seen the Spectre of a man bent down with vices, staggering with drunkenness, pass out of the wood and come to

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