the offspring of a second unhappy marriage, and of an unjustly persecuted mother, he became at nineteen the hero of that touching the Stuarts with the drama of his own line. "The loves of William Seymour and Arabella Stuart, the secret marriage, the discovery, the imprisoning, the flight, and its disastrous consequences, would supply ample materials for one of those popular tales where historical events form but the skeleton on which feelings, motives, words, and even added incidents, are wrought according to the taste and skill of the writer." Once more, after many years of seclusion, he was called to a post where the eyes of the world were fixed upon him; called to save, if possible, from the consequences of its own misgovernment, that royal race which had visited him and his house with so much relentless tyranny. He held a high military station in the army of Charles I., but was fixed first on the great coming account, and next on the sure prospect of passing at once from a suffering cause and Church to the same cause and Church tri-episode which connects the kingly tragedy of umphant. "Lord Clarendon's conclusion needs no comment, nor admits of any addition: He was a man that, whoever shall after him deserve best of the English nation, can never think himself undervalued when he shall hear that his courage, virtue, and fidelity is laid in the balance, and compared with that of Lord Capell.'" (Vol. ii. p. 157.) Like most of the great royalists of that day, he was scarcely fortunate in his issue. The vein of rich ore in his lineage seemed arrested by a sudden "fault." Cashiobury Abbey Lands, thought some, claimed their expiatory process of misfortune, not completed by the hero's violent death. His eldest son, the first Capell, Earl of Essex, perished miserably and mysteriously in the Tower. His daughter, Theodosia, married Lord Cornbury, after-attended him with unwearied loyalty in his wards second Earl of Clarendon; she died very young, and her death is the subject of one of the best authenticated stories of Scottish second sight on record; it is to be found in the correspondence annexed to Pepys's Diary. Henry Capell, the other son,- -a successful personage enough, but certainly not through the steady adherence to an unfortunate cause which had distinguished his father, was childless. We need not remind our readers of the dispersion of this temporary cloud on the fortunes of the house of Capell, nor how, as has been already noticed, much of the inheritance of Hyde himself ultimately passed to the female descendant of his own illustrious friend. We must confess that we cannot so readily adopt Lady Theresa's taste in the choice of the third member of her triumvirate as one of the élite of the Chancellor's list,-namely, that most wet-brown-paperish of noblemen, to use a phrase of Horace Walpole, William Seymour, Marquis of Hertford, and Duke of Somerset. The Muse of History certainly has a malicious pleasure in mocking her sister of Romance. The situations in her narratives, which are the most enchanting to the novelist, are generally filled by the most common-place of mortals. The history of William Seymour's ancestral fortunes, and his own, resembles one of those great Trilogies in which Greek genius conducted a connecting Fate through a series of generations. Great grandson of the daring Protector, grandchild of Edward Seymour and Katherine Grey, whose hapless union was blasted by the persevering jealousy of Elizabeth, himself last vicissitudes, was one of the four (the Duke of Richmond, Earls Southampton and Lindsay being the others) who obtained permission of the ruling powers "to perform the last duty to their dead master, and to wait upon him to his grave," bore his coffin from his bed-chamber at Windsor to the vault of Henry VIII., and lived to pay homage to that sovereign's restored son, and to receive such reward as could be bestowed on his constancy in the removal of the bar of illegitimacy arbitrarily drawn across his father's scutcheon by Elizabeth, and the restoration of the dukedom forfeited by the Protector. And yet, as we have said, the subject of this lofty story was but a very ordinary being, amidst events which turned men of vulgar fortunes into heroes. He seems to have sauntered through his eventful times,—yet, what an age of thoughts and passions was experienced by one who knelt at the feet of Elizabeth at his introduction into life, and of Charles II. before quitting it,-taking nearly as little share as he could help in the mighty changes which were going on in society around him. Cowed into servility in early life, he settled, after a brief period of aristocratic liberalism, into a steady loyalty, quietly brave, and respectably conservative, but with as little real appetite as might be for either fighting or politics, or anything else but his books and his ease. Even his boyish amour gives little evidence of genuine feeling. At the very time when his unhappy Arabella, in the only letter to her husband which has been preserved, breaks into the tenderest expressions of passion, and assures him that "nothing the State can do with me can trouble me so much as the news of your being ill doth;" he is content to represent to the Privy Council his own attachment as of a much more business-like character, "myself being but a younger brother, and sensible of mine own good, unknown to the world, of mean estate, not born to challenge anything but my birthright, and therefore my fortunes to be raised by mine own endeavors, and she a lady of great honor and virtue, and as I thought, of great means." And, while the late Mr. Disraeli, inclining to the romantic side, set down these expressions of poor Mr. William Seymour to the score of "dissembling his love," Lady Theresa cruelly, we do not doubt justly, declares "that there seems no occasion to search for hidden motives or disguised feelings by which to interpret his own very plain and straightforward explanation otherwise than as he gave it!" A year after his wife's miserable death, we find him a successful suitor, with the gracious permission of Majesty, for the hand of Lady Frances Devereux; and serving on for years more, though under "many and continued disobligations from the Court," in the various functions belonging to his rank and to the great estates which he inherited on succeeding to the peerage. We can scarcely make up our minds, with Lady Theresa, to admire the "christian-like forgiveness" exhibited by one who so evidently lacked gall to make oppression bitter." 46 That Charles should have appointed to high military command one so utterly destitute of military qualities, at a time when the salvation of his crown depended on the latter, and that the appointment should have been popular, is only to be accounted for by that intense love of irreproachable mediocrity, in men of high lineage and good estate, which marks the English character-and which, as some say, has saved the English Constitution more than once from the danger it might have run at the hands of clever and low-born eccentricity. His command was distinguished by nothing but perpetual tracasseries with the King's unruly nephews, against whose encroachments, and the weak partiality of Charles, he had not sufficient personal force of character to defend with success his mortified dignity. Yet he stuck to the Court as long as a Court existed; and he, who had been Lieutenant-general of the West, and was still the first nobleman of his party, was finally worsted by the Queen in a contest for the important office of "Groom of the Stole" to a monarch whose life was | passed on horseback. His sterling qualities remain depicted, perhaps too partially, in the pages of Clarendon; but the only traces of romance which we detect in his career are, that he called his eldest daughter Arabella, probably to the mortification of her mother, the Lady Frances; and that at the siege of Weymouth, he thought proper to challenge his opponent, the Earl of Bedford, to single combat; an offer which the Parliamentarian leader " reasonably declined." Once only we find him placed in a situation where his steady, commonplace principle, amounted to dignity. This was when Cromwell made advances to him, relying probably on the traditional persecution of his house by the Stuarts. But all which the Protector's cajolery could draw from him was only reiterated advice to restore the heir to the crown, and assurances of safety in doing so. (Vol. iii. pp. 122, 123.) The remainder of Lady Theresa's volumes is occupied with slight biographical and family notices of all the principal personages whose portraits remain at "the Grove," interesting especially as bearing on their alliances and connexions; for the Chancellor's family was distinguished, besides its famous union with the royal line of Stuart, by intermarriages with a great number of the highest, especially the courtly, families of the day. There is a fascination it is difficult to account for in such genealogical pursuits, when they are followed, as in these volumes, not in the spirit of a herald, but of an historian; and it is perhaps increased by the great complication of family changes characteristic of the period; the short duration of English houses, the transitory character of English honors, which are peculiarly striking when we trace the descents of titles and property under the Tudors and Stuarts. All is vicissitude in the annals of the great majority of eminent families of those days; a Romance of the Peerage, if vicissitudes constitute romance, court favor and court enmity, civil and foreign war, personal thrift and extravagance, being constantly at work to make fortunes wax and wane, "Come il volger del ciel della Luna Cuopre e discuopre i lidi senza posa." Out of all the noble company assembled on the walls of the Grove, our memory points out only four whose honors have descended from them to the present time in the male line-Burleigh, Pembroke, Capel, Arundel. Even a descent of four males in 46 county history appear, in Johnsonian language, like the "biography of an ephemeron.' But the course of English destiny, and the progress of our society, required this inferior durability in the atoms of which that society is composed. The rapid succession of properties and families in this country has been at once the effect and the cause of continual improvement-of the innovating and remodelling temper of our people, ever working something new." As land is exhausted by repeated crops, so the law of nature seems to ordain that the inherited vigor of families shall generally die out by too long duration in the male line. Let us leave it to such writers as Spelman, and the successors of Spelman in the present dayadmitting the fraction of truth which exists in their philosophy also-to designate such vicissitudes of titles and estates as visitations of Providence, whether on sacrilege in particular, or generally on rash and irreverent innovation; and let us believe, on the contrary, that these changes are among the very instruments through which Providence has raised this community to its present high position. The first House of Clarendon enjoyed its well-earned honors for even less than the ordinary period allotted to a family direct succession was comparatively uncommon. This unquestionable fact may be traced to several co-operating causes, political changes being the most obvious; but the mischievous feudal habit of overearly marriages perhaps the most effectual. Undoubtedly, in heraldic eyes, our nobility stand, in this respect, far below the stately lines of neighboring continental realms; of Germany, for instance, and even of France; still more of stationary countries, like Spain and Italy, where families can, in more instances than is commonly supposed, be traced with reasonable certainty back into ages of remote and fabulous antiquity. There is something which awes the imagination in those great autocthonic races, rooted in the soil like the mighty trees to which botanists now assign almost geological periods of life. In a remote canton of Tuscany there is a river, the Cecina, which has borne the same name ever since history began; and on its banks, as Mr. Dennis informs us, there flourished even from the beginning a family of the same name, until within the last twenty years, when it died out in the person of a priest. The rock tombs of the valley are full of urns inscribed with the Etruscan name of AULE CEICNA. The modernized Cæcinæ of republican and imperial Rome were a dying out in less than a century from the race tolerably well known to history; two first creation. Those honors devolved, just are familiar to readers of Cicero,-one com- a century ago, on another line, of opposite manded against Arminius,-one in Otho's political associations, which is even now in civil war,-one (Cæcina Pætus) was the the full bloom and vigor of its destiny. husband of the courageous Arria. Decius Absit omen, and may they long preserve Albinus Cæcina, of that ilk, occupied a villa their dignity, connected as they are at once on the banks of his ancestral river, when with the triumphs of the past and the hopes Rutilius, the poet, passed that way, A. D. of the future, and owing allegiance, by sep417. Two centuries ago it was still said of arate descents, at once to the cause of conthe family of Cecina on the same spot, "no- servatism and that of progress. But the bilitate suâ viget;" and a Don Lorenzo Aulo natural prospect to which the previous course Cecina was excavating Etruscan antiquities of English social history bids us look is, that in 1740. This were indeed a descent to be they also shall decline whenever their day of proud of, if hoar antiquity conveys honor- usefulness is past, and another period in the a descent fit to dazzle the eyes of the anti- march of human affairs shall call its approquary, and make a pedigree in an English|priate actors on the scene. From Bentley's Miscellany. PARIS IN 1814, ON THE FALL OF NAPOLEON. BY AN EYE-WITNESS. ALTHOUGH considerably weakened by the disasters of the Russian campaign in 1812, by the lost battles of 1813 in Germany, and by the protracted warfare in the Peninsula, attended by repeated defeats, the French armies still maintained their deserved reputation for intrepidity and professional prowess, and the prestige of Napoleon had lost nothing of its magic influence. His name alone was still a host in itself, and inspired the allies with an awe they would not have felt had they been acquainted with the pent-up feelings of the inhabitants of France. In spite, then, of the invasion of his empire, by the united forces of all Europe, on its northern, southern and eastern boundaries, in spite of the daily breaking up of some portion of his political fabric, so accustomed had men become to behold his almost fabulous fortunes ever on the ascendant, few could be brought to believe that they were about to be closed in discomfiture and ruin. It was the 30th of March, at four in the morning, the day after that in which the deJuded inhabitants of Paris had been lulled into fancied security by a lying proclamation of Joseph Bonaparte, the titular King of Spain, recently arrived after his disgraceful flight from Vittoria, and appointed the Emperor's Lieutenant in the capital, when they were startled from their slumbers by sounds which told but too plainly that "grim-visaged War" had reached their cherished hearths, that for the first time for three centuries past Paris was beleaguered by a foreign foe. The day of retribution was at last come, the day in which France was to expiate years of unjust aggressions; when her capital also, like Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Lisbon, Madrid, all of which, with many more, she had visited in her wrath and rapaciously mulcted and despoiled, was now, in its turn, to undergo the direful pains and penalties of a conquered city. Napoleon had been out-marched and cut off from his capital, and every one felt, as if by instinct, and as he himself must have done, that Paris, once lost, his empire had passed away. The struggle before the walls was long and bloody. The little army under Marshals Marmont and Mortier did its duty gallantly during that eventful day, fighting desperately against fearful odds, till five in the afternoon, when, to save the "Capital of Civilization" from being taken by storm, or entered by force of arms, Marmont, the senior in command, in accordance with a resolution of the municipal authorities of Paris, signed a capitulation, by which that city was to be delivered up to the allies on the following morning. Ere the capitulation, however, had been entered into or even thought of, Joseph had decamped, together with the Empress Maria Louisa, her infant son, the imperial ministers and the great officers of state, and taken refuge at Blois. Few of the Parisians slept that night. The excitement produced by the deadly contest of the day was succeeded by apprehensions for the morrow, when Paris, that Paris so idolized by Frenchmen, the centre of arts, taste, fashion, of all worldly enjoyments and pleasures, was to be given up into the hands of men whom they designated as "barbari ans." The barbarians, however, kept their faith to the letter, and, though flushed with success and in possession of several entrances to the city, not one allied soldier crossed the Barrière. The town remained perfectly tranquil, as if stunned by the unthought-of, the incredible, the "impossible" fact, that it had become the captive of despised enemies; and the few National Guards, which had been most reluctantly called out in January by Napoleon (for he disliked and mistrusted the institution), were sufficient to maintain order in the absence of all other police. On the heights of Montmarte gleamed the watchfires of the allies, and from thence proceeded during the night sounds of triumph and revelry, to the dismay of the bewildered Parisians. For a lengthened period the public mind of France had been undergoing a remarkable change. The undisguised despotism of the Imperial Government; the constant action of an inquisitorial police; the total subjection of the press and the deprivation of all civil liberty; the absence of parliamentary discussion; the collapsed state of trade and commerce, and the drain upon the agricultural population by repeated and cruelly enacted conscriptions, were so many causes that successively tended to dissipate, even among the corrupt and the servile, the illusions hitherto entertained on behalf of Bonaparte. Then the interminable Spanish war, commenced by him in treachery, carried on with ruthless barbarity, and closing in defeat: the loss amid the snows of Russia of the most numerous and finest army of modern times; finally, the invasion of the French territory, hitherto unpolluted by the presence of an enemy, contributed greatly to lessen his influence over the nation, as these latter events proved that he had ceased to command success. Nevertheless, the machinery of his arbitrary government worked so well as to repress any attempt at a public expression of the universal feeling. In the Legislative Assembly were found, indeed, some few enlightened and patriotic men, who ventured to make one effort in favor of the country, to hint at the necessity for peace. Their resolution, although embodied in an address couched in timidly cautious terms, was received with insult and contempt. These "legislators," alas! had for years remained utterly mute, in the way of remonstrance or appeal. So long as success attended Napoleon, so long as the cannon of the Invalides continued announcing some conquest or some victory, they were not backward in their applause and adulations; they could see no injustice in his aggressions and usurpations, and acquiesced in all his nefarious acts. But now that the thunderbolt recoiled upon themselves, these inert men began to entertain scruples. They apprehended, instinctively, that their master was wilfully working out his own ruin, and thus endangering the possession of the good things they themselves enjoyed. It was too late for such a body to presume at becoming the spokesmen of the nation, or the defenders of her outraged freedom. And well he made them understand as much. In his gross language he told them, contemptuously, that "they should wash their dirty linen at home, and not in public," and added, "that he alone had a right to speak, for he I alone was the representative of the whole people." This insolent rebuke the poor legislators perhaps deserved, but it had, nevertheless, the effect of alienating the public mind from their ruler. The nation began to examine and to scrutinize into what it had gained by seconding the insatiable ambition of an individual who arrogantly trampled on all its liberties, spurned at advice in a most critical moment, and insultingly sent to the rightabout the pitiful semblance of a national representation that yet remained. Still the public mind was quite in an unsettled state as to what form of government was to supersede that of the empire, if it should fall. A Republic was certainly not thought of. Republicanism, it was felt, had been effectually crushed under fourteen years of military despotism, and its advocates, few in number, had no rallying point from whence to direct their aims, if so disposed. The elements for a second Republic were to arise at a later period, and then only as an ungrateful requital for the enjoyment during four-andthirty years of free and liberal institutions, under enlightened and patriotic monarchs. Some there were who imagined Napoleon's empire might be continued under his son and the regency of the Empress; but it was more generally thought, that, Napoleon once overthrown, and his own personal influence no longer exercised, there remained but little. chance for the perpetuation of his race on a usurped throne. On the other hand, for some time past a feeling had gone abroad, and was gaining ground, that a return to legitimate monarchy would be the only means of closing the abyss of woes formed by the Revolution, of restoring peace and prosperity, and of reconciling France with outraged Europe. This feeling was not confined to the breasts of those who eagerly yearned for the restoration of the House of Bourbon, it had occurred to thinking men of all shades of opinion as a consummation devoutly to be wished." Bonaparte himself had a presentiment that such aspirations in favor of the Bourbons were in embryo, and sought to awe them into terror, for on retaking Troyes, in Champagne, from the Russians, a few weeks only before the fall of Paris, he ordered three or four old French officers, who on the first entrance of the Allies into that town had appeared in the streets wearing the badge of the order of St. Louis, to be immediately shot. Apart from the natural causes for alarm in a beleaguered city, the anticipations entertained |