Madeleine she bore one of her mother's names-was a beautiful child, and, what is seldom the case with beautiful children, she became handsomer as she grew older. She was full of grace, vivacity, and a certain degree of cleverness, which was fitted for, and developed by, the education bestowed on her. Her parents, who agreed in nothing else, were equally anxious about the accomplishments of their little idol, and were desirous that she should shine in society.

Mrs. Stuart paid serious attention to Madeleine's dancing—her air, her carriage, her style of dress, and to the cultivation of those nameless little graces which impart such a charm to the manner and the person.

Colonel Stuart, on his part, took pains that Madeleine should study the elegances of language, that she should recite well, write pretty billets, and speak with fluency some of the modern tongues of Europe. But he did not insist on her reading much. Mrs. Stuart said reading would spoil her eyes; and her father thought, if such was to be the price of knowledge, it would be too dearly purchased. Yet she must not seem ignorant; a certain modicum of literature was necessary to keep pace with the growing intelligence of the age, and Madeleine, who was blessed with a retentive memory, was taught the names of the popular authors of the day, and made to get by heart selections from the best known passages in their works, so as to be able, when necessary, to quote from them with good effect. A few of the most prominent facts in ancient and modern history were also impressed on her recollection. She was taught a little of the jargon of art; could talk of statues and pictures without making very unpardonable blunders, and was familiar with the names of the best composers from the time of Sebastian Bach, from the memorable era of the wars of Gluck and Piccini, down to those who led the musical world in her own day.

She played tolerably well, and sang prettily the French romances, which were then so much the fashion; and those who heard her might have fancied she had some soul, as she warbled:

"Félicité passée
Que ne peut revenir,"

or "L'hirondelle, et le proscrit," both very plaintive airs. She knew little, it was true, of Molière, Corneille, or Racine, but much of the actors who personated their heroes and heroines, still more of the dancers who formed the corps de ballet. In short, she appeared well educated, taking that word not in its most extensive sense. Above all, she was utterly ignorant on those subjects with which it most concerns all rational beings to be acquainted.

She knew nothing of the great truths of religion. To her the Bible was a sealed book, and its holy precepts-the only guides through time to eternity-had never been impressed on her youthful mind. Even the rules of morality had been negligently imparted to her; and experience had taught her that it was, in the eyes of her father and her mother, a greater fault to commit a gaucherie than to break one of the Ten Commandments. The example, too, and the conversation of her parents and her parents' friends, were ill calculated to foster in Madeleine pious and virtuous feelings.

Mrs. Stuart had no principles of any kind; her only aim in life seemed

to be the search for amusement; she was frivolity personified. Like the gay and sportive butterfly, she fluttered away her brief existence-ever on the wing, the chase of pleasure; yet not like the harmless insect, innocent in her folly.

Colonel Stuart was a man of abilities and education, chivalrous in his ideas of honour, and tenacious of the world's good name. But, unhappily, he had imbibed those perverted opinions which became so dangerously prevalent during that mad period of pretended liberalism, but actual despotism-the great French Revolution. That period which should serve as a warning to the infatuated of other nations, when the destroying scythe of Reform swept down religion, virtue, and peace, overturning the Church, the Monarchy, and the State, involving in one common ruin the high and the low, the great, the good, and the innocent, to glut the avarice and feed the fury of a factious mob.

Colonel Stuart was neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, neither Jew nor Gentile; he was-an Atheist, and it was not to be expected that he would inculcate in his daughter that belief which he affected to despise. It was not, however, to his associating with the "beaux esprits," as they styled themselves, the gay infidels of France, that Colonel Stuart owed his utter irreligion, but to the heavy materialists of Germany, to those self-lauding theorists who boasted of their learning and their philosophy, but who were, in reality, as ignorant, though not as blameless, as the beasts of the field.

Although his parents resided at Vienna, he had been principally educated under the auspices of some relations of his mother at Berlin, that hotbed of irreligion and iniquity. There he had listened to the shocking tenets which the corrupt teachers of youth did not blush to disseminate, and which have rendered the Prussian character what it is at the present day-one word will describe it-despicable.

He was a gay man, but dissipation did not lead him into low vice; on the contrary, he was extremely recherché in his gallantries, and very aristocratic was the list of the fair dames who had accepted of his devoirs. For his wife he had ceased to care very soon after his marriage; her jealousy had for a time annoyed him, but that feeling seemed to have worn out on her part, and, so that she did not interfere with his pleasures, he was content to let her follow her own devices, never, however, suspecting that she, too, had her liaisons.

He knew her to be vain and fond of admiration; in her principles he had no faith, yet he trusted her entirely-and why?

"Because she was a fool, and had not wit enough to deceive him." Fool as she was though, Mrs. Stuart could deceive. She had cunning, that quality which, as base coin will occasionally circulate for sterling gold, sometimes passes for real cleverness, and it had fully answered her purpose. Her different friendships, not always Platonic, had remained undiscovered; and, either grown more hardened or more careless, Mrs. Stuart at length took less pains to conceal her conduct.

A splendid necklace which she wore one night at a ball, and to which her husband's attention was directed by the beautiful parvenue duchess on whom he was in attendance, and who envied the magnificent jewels, was the first thing to awaken his suspicion. He knew she could not afford to purchase such expensive ornaments; he knew that this particular set

was not among the jewels, valuable though these were, which she had inherited from her mother's family. How had she become possessed of that costly necklace? It struck him that he had seen it, or one exactly like it, a few days before at the shop of a fashionable jeweller, and had sighed that his limited finances had prevented him from buying it as a birthday gift to his adorable duchess.

And his own wife was wearing it!

He went next morning to the jeweller's shop where he thought he had seen it, and there heard, to his dismay, that it had been purchased by a rich milord Anglais !

Colonel Stuart did not dream of asking himself this question :

"Quelle femme prendrait un amant, si son mari lui donne ce qu'un amant donne? Non pas seulement des soins, des prévenances, des attentions, de l'amitié; mais-un peu d'amour !"

What French woman, at least, he might have asked; for the question would not have applied to English ladies, the code of female morality, happily, being by no means the same in the countries separated by the Straits of Dover.

Colonel Stuart was suddenly roused from his blind security. His violence appalled his wife, and, deserting her home and her child, she fled with the profligate Englishman who was her then admirer, and who had no objection to the éclat of an elopement. Stuart followed the fugitives, and, tracing them from Paris, he overtook them at an obscure inn on the confines of Belgium. The injured and the injurer met, not again to part without deadly strife.

A duel was the inevitable result. The fiery Colonel Stuart would not postpone his vengeance even for a few hours; the spot fixed on was a field at some little distance from the inn, and there with no eye to witness them but the immortal eyes that beheld them from the high heavens above, by the light of the cold, calm moon-they, the equally guilty, sought to take the life which God had bestowed-the life which had been misapplied and misspent by both, and through which neither had given one serious thought to the awful hour of death, on which they were now madly about to rush!

They fought, and Colonel Stuart fell, mortally wounded. The report of the pistols had roused and alarmed the peaceful inmates of a neighbouring cottage, and with their humane assistance the dying man was conveyed to the little inn, whose simple inhabitants had also been terrified by sounds so unusual amidst the happy quiet of these humble scenes. The unfortunate Colonel Stuart lingered a few hours in much bodily and mental anguish, attended, in spite of his earnest remonstrances, by the man who had so deeply wronged, the woman who had so shamefully deceived him. It was a bitter pang to him that they should witness his sufferings; but he was too feeble to oppose their will, and they would not leave him to die by himself.

When all was over, however, his body was committed to the care of strangers, and Mrs. Stuart and her companion set off instantly for Brussels, to avoid any unpleasant investigation which might, perhaps, be entered into by the local authorities. No one thought of detaining them, and they went their way—it would be charity to hope—not rejoicing. Feb.-VOL. CXXXIII. NO. DXXX.

M

FORBEAR TO JUDGE.

WHAT THE KING SAID OF THE CARDINAL.

A ROYAL VETO.

BY FRANCIS JACOX.

APPALLED were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort, rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none. Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man. King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might "look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:

O beat away the busy meddling fiend

That lays strong siege upon this wretch's soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair."

See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do
make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids "peace
to his soul," in parting, "if God's pleasure be." And then the monarch
solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token,
ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own:
"Lord
cardinal, if thou think'st on heaven's bliss, hold up thy hand, make sig-
nal of thy hope." But the cardinal-dies, and makes no sign. The
appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The
baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, "He dies, and makes no
sign: O God, forgive him!" Warwick again interposes a harsher voice,
"So bad a death argues a monstrous life," he is sure. But his sovereign
hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto:

FORBEAR TO JUDGE, for we are sinners all.

Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.*

Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Glo'ster's death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,

O thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:

My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul
Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey's life!

If

my suspect be false, forgive me, God;

For judgment only doth belong to Thee!†

It is by the death-bed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey's death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.

Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to be the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would, in spirit, have echoed the king's forbear. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:

And, how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?

But, in our circumstance and course of thought,

'Tis heavy with him.*

Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.

No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. "This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud. .. Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself." In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation, that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; "for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of his own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him."§

The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. "Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be equitable judge of human beings-so complicated are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men."|| If judge at all we dare, and do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth's counsel:

From all rash censure be the mind kept free;
He only judges right who weighs, compares,
And, in the sternest sentence which his voice
Pronounces, ne'er abandons Charity.T

* Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 3.

† Religio Medici, part ii. sect. iv.

St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with this judgment and sentence.

§ Ibid., part i. sect. lvii.

Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, by Wm. Smith, p. 276.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, part ii. No. 1.