years, sometimes a lifetime. On the register of the captives is inscribed, for over twenty years, the name of Marchiali, otherwise known as the man of the Iron Mask, on account of a mask so arranged as always to conceal his features. Who he was, whence he came, what his crime, no one knew. Treated with a respect due to a king, fed and clothed in the most sumptuous manner, none were allowed to address him, and death was the penalty of infringing the command. The most splendid portion of the writings of Dumas hinges upon a supposed elucidation of his origin and confinement, starting with the theory that he was the twin-brother of Louis XV., a dangerous future competitor of the crown, since the rule of primogeniture as to twins is complex, as the law regards no fractions of a day; the writer declares that to save the feelings of the queen, and have a reserved heir to the throne always at hand, he was thus sequestered, and educated in a manner to meet his possible destiny. One of the three guardsmen, at a breakfast with the Governor of the Bastile, discovers these things. At a fête given at Vaux by Fouguet, the splendid spendthrift, who administered the royal treasury, the wonderful Aramis extracts from his bed, in the dead of night, the reigning sovereign, hurries him off through subterranean passages, till arriving at the Bastile, with a counterfeit order, he makes him take the place of his facsimile brother. So well had the new king been instructed to play his part, so perfectly, by portraits and notes communicated to him in prison, was he acquainted with all the persons of the court, that he deceived the two queens, and went through the ceremony of the levée undetected. When Fouguet hears, however, that the rites of hospitality had thus been violated, though he knows the king is his remorseless enemy, he rushes off and liberates him from confinement. Confronting each other, the two identities, each claims to be the king. Both mother and wife are at a loss to decide, when Artagnan, the captain of the guard, laying his hand on the shoulder of the improvisation, says: "My Lord, you are my prisoner." The prison of the Isle St. Marguerite was substituted for the Bastile, and we hear no more of Marchiali, save that a fisher, on the lonely lake, once seeing something thrown from the top of the castle, glitter in the air and fly towards him, discovered that it was a silver plate with the name of Marchiali scratched upon it, but before he could reveal the import of the communication he was accidentally removed. Historic doubts so beset the whole record of the past, that we accept with pleasure an explanation bearing the seeming impress of truth, and fortified by the traditions of contemporaneous chronicles. BRITISH MEN AND MEASURES-LORD BROUGHAM. THOUGH he has lately comparatively withdrawn from the field, fully three generations of men are identified with the history of Lord Brougham. Only eight years prior to his birth, Cook had returned from his first successful voyage round the world, and Gibbon did not complete his great work till eight years afterwards. In 1779, when Brougham first saw the light, the United States were midway in contest with England, and all the glories of Washington, the profound and brilliant discoveries of Franklin, were but half disclosed. Herschel, two years subsequently, first discerned the great planet which has given rise to so many similar astronomical observations; and the first dawn of the French Revolution did not occur til ten years afterwards, when Lord Brougham, as a boy, was carrying his satchel, and receiving his due allowance of birch at the High-School of Edinburgh. His father, a Cumberland squire, had in 1778 proceeded to the Scottish metropolis with the view of economy, and shortly afterwards wedded a niece of Principal Robertson, in whose sister's house he took lodgings; and the future Lord Chancellor was thus, in after years, enabled to boast that he was a relative of the historian of America, Scotland, Charles the Fifth, and the Indies; though, to confess the truth, he himself never showed any disposition to patronize historic literature. When he approached manhood, Fox and Pitt were in their zenith; Grattan, Curran, Canning, Castlereagh, were all his contemporaries. He had many a fierce encounter with Peel, his junior by several years; and the present generation has heard him deliver his extravagant flatteries on the Duke of Wellington, of whom during the better part of his life he was one of the bitterest opponents. It were idle to detain the reader now by any apocryphal stories of his early life and precocity. He is said, when only seventeen years of age, to have written an Essay on the Flection and Reflection of Light, which was then published in the Philosophical Transactions of some society in Edinburgh; but we all know how these affairs are got up with the assistance of a good college tutor, and brought to light by the instrumentality of a good paternal dinner. Many youths, in both hemispheres, have at an earlier period distinguished themselves as honorably, by personal exertions and personal industry, which secured them an unaided maintenance then, and an independence thereafter. The truth is that Brougham, though a pretender, was but a smatterer in science. Only a few years ago he bored and amused the French Institute by reading before its members a Paper on this subject; and the proverbial politeness of the members alone prevented them from openly laughing in his face. Had he confined himself to such abstruse pursuits, he never would have furnished the world with material for a column, or the writer with matter for a page. But, fortunately for him, he was designed by nature for a life more vigorous, keen, active, and impetuous; he at an early period associated himself with a bright phalanx of youthful talent, comprising Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Cockburn, Murray, and others, who were then bursting upon the Scottish metropolis, with a brilliancy such as its past ages had not witnessed, and its future will not see. In some convivial meeting of this quintette was started the project of a periodical which should abandon the old hacknied, tiresome, and nauseous style of criticism, and strike out into new fields in that department of literature. Sidney Smith has recorded that the project was first conceived in some fifth floor or garret, where Jeffrey was then existing on oatmeal and an occasional herring; and that he was only restrained from proposing the motto: "Sylvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena." "Our muse is the result of a meditation upon oatmeal." from feelings of respect for his host who might then have resented it as a personal reflection. The assertion is doubtless exaggerated, for with the exception of Jeffrey,* and perhaps Smith himself, the parents of all of them were what is vulgarly termed "well-to-do" in the world; and then no doubt but that * It is probable that Jeffrey was the most deficient in pecuniary means, as it appears from his biography, by Lord Cockburn, who married a poor girl a year previous to the commencement of the publication of the Edinburgh Review. Meanwhile," says his biographer, "the briefless lawyer had fallen in love with a dowerless maiden, and in November, 1801, he bravely married her, though his income hardly exceeded five hundred dollars a year. The step was saved from the charge of imprudence only by his good sense and resolute economy. He had all his life, a horror of falling into debt. His bride, Catherine Wilson, an amiable and affectionate girl, consented to begin her married life with him in a few rooms on the third story of a mean house, which he furnished and rendered comfortable at an expense of less than thirty pounds" There is little doubt either but that Lord Brougham and others associated with the Review, monopolized much of the credit due Jeffrey and Smith as writers, for Jeffrey was the principal editor of this periodical during the whole period of its incontestable eminence, from 1803 to 1829. It is estimated that his contributions to the Review during this period, would make at least six volumes. the idea was first broached over a liberal supply of whisky toddy. But, whatever was its origin or inspiration, certain it is that from some such meeting emanated the EDINBURGH REVIEW. Howsoever tame and circumscribed as well as circumscribing now, this periodical was bold and aspiring then. It attacked all the Rosa-Matilda novels and drowsy sermons of that day, with as much zeal as it has defended the equally sickening policy and emasculate measures of the Whigs since. At no period, perhaps, was British literature more degraded than at this epoch. Blair, Hume, Smollet, Gibbon, and others, whose genius it is customary now either to deride or deny,* had disappeared from the scene; and,-with the exception of a few bold writers of travel, like Bruce and Park, whose claims too were yet unappreciated, no one had arisen to supply their place with either close argument or manly sense, save perhaps Thomas Paine, whom bigotry, hypocrisy, and tyranny then attempted to destroy, though in strength of reason and in vigorous but untutored eloquence, he surpassed them all. This is said irrespective of his views on religion, the publication of which we always painfully regretted. It was against an ocean of dulness or an army of dunces, accordingly, that the new reviewers now placed themselves in array; and with little more than we should now consider the principles of independence and the exertion of common sense, their triumph was alike easy and secure. Intolerance, cant, and fanaticism shrank for a season under the vigorous wit of Smith; almost every species of abuse, and many an authority really unassailable, was attacked by Brougham with the force of a sledge-hammer; while the fluent and ready, though often pert and sometimes conceited Jeffrey, enlivened and enlightened all by his airy fancy flippancy, general rectitude, and invariable good taste." Being wholly independent of bookvenders, and a fierce assailant of the trash they then poured forth, the review quickly rose into notice; and the ambition of Brougham mounting as he rose, he quickly determined on removing from the narrow field presented by the Scotch metropolis and seeking a wider range in London. It was, however, with no settled principles that he first went there. On the contrary, a work on Colonial Policy, which he then published, though it is now almost forgotten, disclosed that he was ready to adopt almost any side of politics; and we fear, that had a good place been The first of these illustrious writers has been especially derided by a Whig hireling, the editor of the London Spectator newspaper, and Archbishop Whately in his comparatively worthless and wholly incredible treatises upon Logic and Rhetoric. offered him by Lord Melville or Pitt, he would have espoused their cause as readily as he subsequently offered himself to Castlereagh and to Grey. But the former minister he had offended beyond hopes of pardon by the rebellious disposition which he was supposed to have communicated to Dundas's nephew, the witty and eloquent though homely Harry (afterwards Lord) Cockburn,* who had the rare merit of remaining hostile and honest at a time when all the patronage of Scotland lay at his unscrupulous relative's feet. Brougham consequently was not patronized by the puissant subaltern, and he was yet too obscure to have attracted the notice of the lofty Pitt. As a comparatively unfriended Scotchman, he consequently took his place at the English bar, and long remained undistinguished for aught beyond his uncouth appearance, convivial habits, unscrupulous alacrity, and rough "devil-may-care" sort of address, until he obtained a seat in Parliament. He bought this distinction, of course, his limited paternal acres, and"articles" as well as influence in the "Edinburgh," supplying the means of purchase; and we are not sure that it was in any degree a less honorable mode of entering the House of Commons than that corruption of a constituency which now prevails. Having paid for the place, he was comparatively independent, though expected to support the politics of the Whig patron who disposed of it, or "brought him in." He had thus only one master to serve, instead of a multitude, and the task was comparatively easy. Long, however, he might have remained unnoticed, and have continued in obscurity, but for a luckless criticism he wrote in the Edinburgh Review. Byron was his theme; and he attacked the juvenile Lord with a coarseness wholly unwarranted, as well as a lack of critical discernment almost unprecedented. The early poems of Byron, indeed, in no degree equalled in finish or in force those which he soon afterwards poured out with such fervor and such fluency on the public. The very first of them, in fact-the verses written "On Leaving Newstead Abbey"-contained much tenderness and elegance. Where do we find more of either than in the following lines: "Shades of heroes, farewell! your descendant departing He Lord Cockburn, the intimate friend and the biographer of Jeffrey. was a lawyer of some eminence, and was appointed judge, and served on the same bench with Jeffrey for many years, always maintaining his independence of opinion, regardless of consequences to himself or to his friends. |