rities. Thus the termination of this bold attempt was to place all three within the same walls.

Bolland and Huger were released at the end of a twelvemonth. But all the old rigors and cruelties were again imposed upon the wretched Lafayette. In the meantime his wife had been released from her Paris dungeon, and, accompanied by her two daughters, had proceeded to Vienna to beg permission to share her husband's captivity. Her prayer was granted. For sixteen months this noble-hearted woman, with her daughters, endured the horrors of the Olmutz dungeons. At the end of that time her health gave way, and she wrote to the Emperor, begging permission to seek, for a short time, a purer air. The reply was, that she was free to leave, but not to return. Her answer may be anticipated. "Whatever might be the state of my health, or the inconvenience to my daughters, I will share my husband's captivity in all its details."

Most touching and noble is this picture of womanly devotion, and yet more so is that of the two young lovely girls sacrificing some of their brightest days in the foetid atmosphere of a dark, humid dungeon, imperilling their very lives to filial love.

Europe began to raise its voice against this barbarous and unjustifiable captivity; it was vehemently discussed in the English House of Commons; and France, now relieved from the dominion of the Terrorists, bestirred herself to obtain her son's release. That release came, thanks to Buonaparte, with the Peace of Campo Formio, in 1797. Lafayette at once hastened to thank his liberator; but his reception was cold, and it was hinted to him that his absence from France for a time was desirable. Buonaparte liked not such restless spirits about him. So Lafayette took up his abode in Holland until 1799. In that year he reentered France, but only to retire to his mother-in-law's estate of La Grange, forty miles from Paris. By-and-by Napoleon made overtures to win him over to his side. Through Talleyrand he offered him the dignity of senator and that of ambassador to the United States. But Lafayette refused both, and stood aloof from politics. This did not prevent him, however, opposing, in a letter of remonstrance addressed to the First Consul himself, the proposition of making the Consulship for life; nor from raising

his voice against the infamous murder of the Duc D'Enghien.

Napoleon's retaliation was paltry; he revenged himself upon the father by withholding from his son, who was an officer in his army, the promotion that he had repeatedly merited.

In 1807 Lafayette lost his noble wife. From that time he caused her chamber to be shut up; thenceforth it was entered only once a year, on the anniversary of her death, and then only by himself, to spend the day in a tearful homage to her memory.* He always wore suspended from his neck a gold medallion, which contained her portrait; round it were engraved these words: "I am yours," and upon the back, "I was then a gentle companion to you." One of the last actions of his dying moments was to kiss and to weep over this last memento of a devoted love.

“I

During the whole period of the Empire Lafayette remained secluded from the political world. At the Restoration he appeared at court in full uniform, and wearing the white cockade; but the royalists could not forget '89, and several semi-official attacks were made upon him. Deeply mortified at his reception, he quickly returned into the country. His vanity never pardoned the Bourbons for this wound upon his self-love; from that time he never ceased to be a thorn in their sides.

During the Hundred Days the department of Seine-et-Marne returned him to the elective chamber, of which he was named one of the vice-presidents. When Napoleon wished to dissolve that chamber Lafayette declared it permanent, and called upon the Emperor to abdicate. Lucien was sent to oppose the motion, but Lafayette was firm, and he carried the day. Yet, when the question was mooted whether peace should be purchased by the surrender of the fallen man, he nobly exclaimed: "I am surprised that in making so odious a proposition to the French nation you should have addressed yourself to the pri

soner of Olmutz." Now that the great conqueror had fallen upon evil days, Lafayette forgot all political differences, all old animosities, and behaved to him with the utmost generosity and respect, even offering to provide him with the means of seeking a refuge in the United States.

With the re-entry of the Bourbons he retired once more into country life. La Grange and its possessor, as they appeared at this time, are thus admirably described by Lady Morgan:

A re

"In the midst of the fertile and luxurious wilderness, rising above prolific orchards and antiquated woods, appeared the five towers of La Grange Blessneau, tinged with the golden rays of the setting sun. Through the boles of the trees appeared the pretty village of Aubepierre. mote view of the village of D'Hieres, with its gleaming river and romantic valley, was caught and lost alternately in the serpentine mazes of the rugged road; which accommodated to the groupings of the trees wound amidst branches laden with ripening fruit, till its rudeness suddenly subsided in the velvet lawn that immediately surrounded the castle. The deep moat, the drawbridge, the ivied tower and arched portals opening into the square court, had a feudal and picturesque character.* We found General La fayette surrounded by his patriarchal family, his excellent son and daughter-in-law, his two daughters, the sharers of his dungeon at Olmutz, and their husbands, eleven grandchildren, and a venerable grand uncle. On the person of Lafayette time has left no impression; not a wrinkle furrows the ample brow, and his unbent and noble figure is still as upright, bold, and vigorous as the mind that informs it. Grace, strength. and dignity still distinguish the fine person of this extraordinary man; who, though than forty years before the world, does not yet appear to have reached his climacteric. Bustling and active in his farm, graceful and elegant in his saloon, it is difficult to trace in one of the most successful agriculturists, and one of the most perfect fine gentlemen that France has produced, a warrior and a legislator."

more

In this delicious retirement he lived until November 1818, when he was sent to the Elective Chamber by the Electoral College of Seine-et-Marne. He at once ranged himself upon the extreme left. Plunged once more into the excitement of political life, once more an actor to be applauded and admired upon the great stage, his vanity, his love of destructiveness, dislike to all constituted authority, and fever

*Climbing about his porch was a parasitic plant which he used to point out to his visitors with much pride. It had been planted by the hand of Charles James Fox, with whom he had contracted a friendship during a short visit to England, just previous to his first expedition to America.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XIX., No. I

ish desire for change, asserted themselves with all their old vigor. Experience had taught him nothing; every revolution abroad, every plot at home, secured his support and active help. He advocated the revolutions of Spain, of Portugal, of Naples, of Piedmont. Still dazzled by the vision of American republicanism, still believing in the practicability of its realisation in France, and still proposing to himself to win the immortal renown of establishing that Utopia, he became the secret leader of Carbonarism, and was ready to involve France once more in blood and anarchy for the hope of realising an idea. How narrowly he escaped being arrested in the very midst of the conspirators has been already recounted. But like so many other valiant demagogues, he appears to have kept a very sharp look-out upon his own safety, and to have left the punishment to

his tools.

In 1823, Lafayette-it was after the burst up of the Carbonari plot-lost his seat in the Chamber. He took this opHis recepportunity to revisit America. tion was magnificent; from state to state his progress was one fête; triumphal arches, balls, feasts, flowers, deputations. The senate voted him back the two hundred thousand dollars that he had expended upon American freedom, and added thereto a complete township of land in North. Carolina, which was called Lafayetteville. The gift was by no means unacceptable, for La Grange and Chavainac were the only estates confiscation had left him, and at the time he was poor and in debt.

In 1823 he again became a member of the Chamber of Deputies. In 1829, he revisited Chavainac, the place of his birth, and in passing through the country was everywhere received with an enthusiasm scarcely inferior to that which he had encountered in America. In Lyons, a crowd of not less than sixty thousand persons assembled to greet him.

At the first outbreak of the revolution of

July he hastened to Paris. During the night of the twenty-eighth he personally visited the barricades, directing and stimulating, with all his old ardor, amidst the cheers of men, women, and children; once more he raised the tricolor upon the Hotel de Ville, and never rested until he had not only compelled the abdication of Charles, but driven him from his last shelter-Rambouillet.

7

But when the moment arrived to decide the future government of France, as usual he shrank back timorously from the republic he had been working for, and declared in favor of constitutional monarchy. He now busied himself in the reconstruction of the National Guard, raising it to one million seven hundred thousand men. There was another grand installation, not so grand as that of 1790 perhaps, but sufficiently imposing, in which the citizen King presented to him the colours, and in which, amidst the acclamations of Paris, he was once more named commander of all the National Guards of the kingdom.

Yet no sooner was a regular government once more established than it discontented him; he resigned the command so recently bestowed, and ranged himself in his old place upon the extreme left.

One other last act of his strange, eventful life was to refuse the crown of Belgium, which had been offered him.

He died on the 20th of May, 1834, at the age of seventy-seven. His funeral was splendid and imposing, thousands of every grade of society attending it. Funeral honors were accorded to him in America; the Senate House was hung with black until the end of the session, and an eloquent eulogy upon his life was pronounced in full Congress. "He would fain be a Grandison Cromwell," said Mirabeau, speaking one day of the commander of the National Guards, whom he always secretly despised. "He would coquette with the supreme authority without daring to seize it." There is much wit and felicity in that oddly compounded epithet "Grandison Cromwell." Imagine, if you can, by some impossible freak of fortune, Sir Charles Grandison thrust into the position of a Cromwell, and you will understand much of Lafayette's character and actions. He was a fine gentleman demagogue, who would have loved to rule over fine gentlemen republicans. He was opposed to all aristocratic distinctions, but desired that the whole nation should be in perpetual salaam to his virtue, his genius, and his omnipotence.

The leading feature of Lafayette's character was VANITY. He was ambitious, not so much of real power as of its appearance, of éclat, and of vainglory. Self-consciousness of power was nothing to him unaccompanied by the acclamations of the mob. In whatever position he stood, in

whatever society he found himself, whether it was that of kings, nobles, senators, soldiers, or shopkeepers, he desired to be the central figure, the cynosure of every eye and of all applause. He had not power of mind for supreme command; he burned for its éclat, but shrank from its responsibility. Thus, to stand between Louis the Sixteenth and the people, to be the protector and master of the one, the liberator and champion of the other, and the observed of all, was to obtain the acme of his ambition. In such leading-strings he would have held every government of France; the moment it escaped from his hands, and that other names were larger and more frequent in men's mouths, he became a revolutionist. During the whole reign of Napoleon, he entirely withdrew himself from public affairs, not only because he conscientiously disapproved of his rule, but because, in the presence of that iron will and splendid genius, he felt that he would be utterly insignificant. Courageous as a soldier, he was timid in resolution. A sincere enthusiast for republican institutions, he shrank from their realization. A man of energy and genius at the head of that vast citizen army of which he was the creator, would have determined the revolution in its earliest days; but when the moment for decisive action came, opposing fears and scruples paralysed his will to impotency. In so excitable a country as France, he was a dangerous citizen; more dangerous in his weakness than he would have been had he been gifted with daring and mental power; for while especially adapted to destroy government, he had not the reconstructive genius of Cromwell or Napoleon, to give a something in their place. In fine, "he had every great quality, yet something was wanting in each."*

Yet beneath all the weakness and vanity of the head, there beat a noble heart, in which love of liberty and hatred of despotism were enshrined in its highest place. The devotion of his person and fortune to the cause of American freedom is one of the most generous actions on record. The fortitude with which he endured his long and terrible imprisonment, and the ardor with which, in the gloom of his loathsome dungeon, he still fostered those dreams of liberty to which he owed all his sufferings, are traits of constancy and greatness of soul

* Dumont.

to which could be found but few parallels. To the poor, he was the most generous of friends to the alleviation of their sufferings he devoted much of his income, and during the terrible cholera time in Paris, he himself bore from house to house food and wine, and medicine and money, and worked unceasingly to mitigate the horrors of sickness and death that raged around him. Above all, he was generous to fallen opponents. How hardly he strove to save Napoleon from the hands of his enemies, and how gratefully he remembered that to

the fallen emperor, with the acts and policy of whom he had ever been at variance, he owed his release from the dungeon of Olmutz, have been already recorded in these pages. When, after the accession of Louis Philippe, the mob clamored at the very doors for the lives of the Polignac Ministry, which he himself had worked so ardently to overthrow, he stood forth their champion and defended them from the popular rage. In the light of so many amiable private virtues, let us bury the shadows of his political errors.-Temple Bar.

THE German Dictionary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of which the first volume was issued nineteen years ago, has been carried on by other hands since the last of the two brothers died, and next year may perhaps see completed its first five volumes, about half the entire work. The French Dictionary of Littré was completely published last year. It is high time to ask when and how we are to have an English Dictionary at the level of these admirable compilations. Old and medieval English Literature, now risen into broad daylight again, must have their treasures inventoried, more fully and strictly than hitherto, for modern readers. New English literature must not merely give account of its vaster possessions, but must register its title-deeds for all that it has inherited; must show its evidence for all that it has newly made at home or imported from abroad. Comparative philology has within the last two generations risen from rude and vague beginnings to the rank of a science, and far deeper linguistic knowledge is now required of the lexicographer than such as sufficed for the literary needs of a century ago. Besides this question of the great standard English

1. A Dictionary of the English Language. By Robert Gordon Latham, M.A., M.D., F.R.S. Founded on that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, as edited by the Rev. H. J Todd, M. A. London, 1866-70. 2. Dr. Webster's Complete Dictionary of the English Language. Thoroughly revised and improved by Chauncey A. Goodrich, D.D., LL.D., late Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, &c., in Yale College, and Noah Porter, D.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in Yale College. London (cir. 1865).

3. A Dictionary of the English Language. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL.D. London (cir. 1860).

Dictionary, there arises another not less. important, how far do our smaller educational dictionaries answer to present requirements? The school-room lexicon ought not indeed to be a museum of farfetched and outlandish words, nor should it confuse the schoolboy's mind with a crowd of speculative etymologies, but it should afford reasonable information as to those words whose derivation is most certain, showing plainly whether they belonged to the original stock of English, or have since been introduced; what they meant at their first appearance in the language, and what they have come to mean since. In discus-sing these and other kindred questions as to what may be distinguished as the library dictionary and the schoolroom dictionary, we shall examine what such works actually are, with the view of showing what they ought to be. And seeing that dictionaries, of all books, are apt to come into existence by successive development from author to author, and from editor to editor, it will be helpful to glance over the whole history of English lexicography, tracing the series of works from the scanty and now almost forgotten vocabularies of the seventeenth century to the most voluminous and learned dictionaries which the modern bookseller has to offer. The comparison shows indeed great literary progress during the last quarter of our national history, yet we have to admit that this progress falls short of what might have been made, and we trust soon will be. Till late years, our dictionaries stood well in comparison with those of other countries, but at present we have fallen somewhat behind. Our Philo logical Society is industriously collecting. and classifying a huge museum of linguistic

specimens, but with no promise of imme diate result, while the separate labors of individual philologists are rather directed to special scientific work than to the production of a public book of reference. Critics, in the meantime, ill-satisfied with even the better dictionaries of England and America, must condemn the worse, which only keep a place in the book-market as educational works because the schoolmasters and parents who buy them are too ignorant of the science of language to know good from bad. It is needful to press this really important subject on public attention, for urgent demand will hasten supply. A few years hence, let us hope, we may have a more gratifying report to give. But dictionary making is a long labor, and for the moment we had rather see a limited work fairly up to the modern level, than the prospectus of a mighty lexicon that shall throw Grimm and Littré into the shade, and be published

A.D. 1900.

Lexicons for the student learning French, Latin, and Greek had been for many years in use before the plain Englishman was provided with a self-explaining vocabulary of his mother-tongue, an English Dictionary in rudimentary form. Few but book-collectors and philologists now ever see the two little volumes of Bullokar and Cockeram:- An English Expositor, teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words used in our Language. By J. B., Doctor of Physicke. London, 1621.' And 'The English Dictionarie, or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words. By H. C., Gent. London, 1632.' These little books have an interest to us, as showing the humble beginnings of our lexicography, and as preserving in the compactest shape some noticeable passages in the history of English. They belonged to an age when many a familiar English word kept an early sense which it has now lost, when animositie was still to be defined as 'courage'; when to edifie meant to builde, to frame, sometime to instruct'; when miscreant was simply 'an Infidell'; and pragmaticall' one that understands the Law.' After Bullokar and Cockeram came Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, with his New World of Words,' John Kersey, with his Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum,' and various other compilers, who gradually improved upon the labors of their predecessors, until, about a century after the first crude attempts, a

work which may be called a tolerable practical dictionary, aiming to register and explain the language at large, was given to the English public.*

Nathan Bailey, a schoolmaster at Stepney, brought out, about 1720, his 'Etymological English Dictionary,' which not only superseded the earlier vocabularies, but was strong enough to hold a place through the time of Johnson, and even into that of Webster. In one or other of its twenty or thirty editions, it is still a staple of our bookstalls; a worthy old book which the student seldom opens without learning something, though most likely not the something he is looking for. Bailey, not content with a copious vocabulary of popular English, dived into technical books of law, alchemy, magic, and other such repositories of quaint terms, bringing up scores of out-of-the-way words, which later lexicographers prudently let drop again, but which still have their value, philological and historical. Thus the language of the occult sciences in full vogue three centuries ago, is represented in Bailey by such definitions as the following:--Cacodamon ‘(in Astrology) the Twelfth House of a Figure of the Heavens, so called because of its dreadful Signification'; Mercury (among Chymists) Quicksilver; and is taken for one of their active principles commonly called Spirits.' Among the dwindling store of Arabic scientific words in English, some which later dictionary writers discard, almugia, alidada, and the like, still remain clear and fresh to Bailey's mind. The following is a curious case in point:- Dulcarnon (Arab.) a certain Proposition found out by Pythagoras, upon the account of which he sacrificed an Ox to the Gods, in Token of Thankfulness, whence Chaucer &c., uses it to signify any knotty Point or Question. To be at Dulcarnon, to be nonplussed, to be at ones Wits end.' To clear up the whole history of this word, which has puzzled many a reader of Chaucer, the modern critic has only to add that the proposition in question is that of the squares on the sides of a right-angled triangle, and that its well-known figure probably sug gested the Arabic name, which dulcarnon is intended to represent, viz., dhu 'l karnain,

liography of English Dictionaries is prefixed to An interesting sketch of the history and bibWorcester's Dictionary.