she stood still. proached it.

Some railings intervened: she got over them, and

ap

A few moments, and she reappeared. Extending her head over the railings, she peered cautiously, this way and that, in the dusky night. Nothing, human or animal, was near, and she tumbled over them in haste and confusion, and sped back the way she had come. Ever and anon, as she tore along, her head was turned back over her shoulder, as if she were fleeing from some darksome thing, and feared its following her. Her movements were free now, and her step was lighter. Yes, surely; for the burden was no longer with her. Where had she left it?

A cab was passing as she emerged from the Park by the nearest gate. She hailed it, and got in, giving the driver only a word of direction: that of the road where her house was situated.

"What part of it?" he inquired.

"Drive on. I'll tell you when to stop."

She sat in it, panting and breathless, shaking as she had shaken at home. She let the man drive past her house some slight distance, and then stopped the cab. The fare was very trifling, but she put half a crown into his hand, and walked on, away still from home. Cabmen are suspicious men, remarkably wide awake. This one glanced keenly at her face through her veil, and stood watching her. Then he turned his cab, and drove slowly back, looking out for a fare.

When the cab was out of sight she turned and approached her home. No lights were in the drawing-room, so her husband had not returned. That was fortunate, but another circumstance was less so. The door, which she had hoped to find on the jar, as she left it, was closed, and she could not get in unseen. The hour she did not know, but thought it might be half-past ten. What should she do? She scarcely dared to knock and enter, and face the surprise as to her proceedings at so late an hour. The parlour shutters were closed, so no prying eyes were on her, and she paced back to the gate in indecision, and paused there, in the full light of the gaslamp. At that moment a cab drove past. She did not recognise it, but the driver recognised her as the liberal fare he had recently set down. He had met another fare, a cab full, whom he was driving home. He turned round on his box, and noted the house: no fear that he would not know it again.

Another cab came up, a private one, and stopped at the gate. Mr. Lyvett jumped from it, and his groom drove off immediately.

"Why, Sophia!" he exclaimed, in the very excess of astonishment, as he entered the gate and encountered her. "Is it you?"

She laughed loudly. "I put on my great shawl, and came out to walk up and down before the gate, waiting for you. It was hot in-doors, and the night air is pleasant."

But he seemed rather cross, seemed to think the proceeding an extraordinary one, and recommended her not to do it again. She thought the servants stared curiously at her, but they ventured no remark. Both were there; one opened the door, the other was in the hall. Mrs. Cooke was sitting in her parlour as they passed it, the door being put back.

"Good night," said Mr. Lyvett to her. "A warm night, is it not?"

Mrs. Cooke came forward. "Yes it is, very warm. You gave us a fright," she added to Mrs. Lyvett, who was hastening up the stairs, but at these words felt compelled to turn. "When Ann came up to light the hall-lamp, she found a beggar-boy in the hall: a young man, indeed, a great, strong, ill-looking fellow. He pretended to ask for bread, but it is a mercy she saw him, or we might all have been murdered in our beds to-night."

"How did he get in ?" exclaimed Mr. Lyvett.

"We could not imagine how, till we found Mrs. Lyvett was out. You must have left the door open," she added, looking at the lady. "If you will kindly take the trouble to ring when you are going out, one of the servants will be at hand to show you out and close the door after you. Perhaps," she continued, smiling, "Mrs. Lyvett is not accustomed to London, and little thinks that the streets are infested with thieves and vagabonds, ever on the watch for plunder."

"Oh, Mrs. Lyvett has lived in London all her life," was Mr. Lyvett's reply. "Had you much trouble in getting rid of him?"

"No. I thought it best to conciliate the gentleman, and called the cook to give him some broken victuals. He then asked for old shoes, and I threatened him with a policeman unless he quitted the house." "It is the police who are to blame," returned Mr. Lyvett. right have they to suffer these sort of fellows to be prowling about the roads at eleven o'clock at night ?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Cooke, "it is an hour and a half ago."

"What

"I hope you will not be troubled again with such a customer," he concluded. "Good night, ma'am."

His wife had run up-stairs, and he followed her. The servant had also gone up with lights. "Sophy," he said, as the girl withdrew, "you must have been out a long while. Where can you have been?"

"Only walking about, watching for you. I told you so."

"Don't go letting yourself out again, my dear, in that odd sort of clandestine way. Ring them up and let them wait upon you. It is different here from that place you were in at Brompton. Mrs. Cooke is a gentlewoman, you know, and accustomed to proper ways. Besides, you are Mrs. Frederick Lyvett now: don't be afraid of giving trouble."

Mrs. Lyvett had no further attack of trembling that night. But she tossed and turned from side to side; and, when she did get to sleep, moaned and started so repeatedly that her husband obtained no rest.

A day afterwards, London was ringing with the news of a dreadful crime. A child was dragged out of the water in the Regent's Park, foully strangled, the cord and its fatal knot being still tightened round its neck. And the police were throwing out all their energies to discover where the child had come from, and who had committed the murder.

SAINT SIMON'S MEMOIRS.*

MR. BAYLE ST. JOHN tells us that a friend of his, talking to a literary man the other day on the subject of Saint Simon, was informed that the Duke in question was "a great republican, a friend of Robespierre, who left very voluminous memoirs ;" and that a person of cultivated mind and wide reading, on hearing of this present translation, asked: "Why did they make him a saint?" We are also told that an amusing article was once written in France, called "The Two Saint Simons," in which a disciple of the new religion and an admirer of the Memoir-writer are made to talk for hours in rapturous tones of their idols without ever discovering their mistake.

And yet with equal propriety might we identify the Sydney Smith of St. Paul's Cathedral, Green-street, and the Edinburgh Review, with his namesake, the hero of Acre; or the D'Aubigné who fought for and quarrelled with Henri Quatre, with the D'Aubigné who writes the history and romance of the Reformation; or Sir Robert Peel fils, ex-Lord of the Admiralty, with Sir Robert Peel père, sometime First Lord of the Treasury. But we will not pay our readers so poor a compliment as to suppose them unaware of the distinction, not only chronological but political, social, personal, in one word, total, between the two Saint Simons. At any rate the chances are, we take it, that if the reader be unacquainted with either, he is so with both. In which case he now enjoys an opportunity, thanks to Mr. Bayle St. John, of coming into close, familiar, and profitable contact with the illustrious writer of the Memoirs.

No one can come to know much about Louis XIV. and his times, without ipso facto knowing a good deal about the Duke of Saint Simon. The Duke's Memoirs are an indispensable condition to our acquaintance with the Grand Monarque. But the Memoirs as they come undocked, uncurtailed, unpruned from the pen of their ready writer, are far too diffuse for the general reader. Abridgments, indeed, always have their evil; but there are cases, and Saint Simon's appears to be one, where they become a necessary evil-where we must have them, or nothing. Of course the student of history will still resort to the original work, in its twenty large octavo volumes of some 450 pages each. But whoso reads without a purposeat any rate, without that purpose-will be glad of a condensation so judiciously managed as the present, wherein the clever translator reduces the given quantity to its lowest terms, while carefully on his guard against unduly impairing its quality; endeavouring in effect to supply us with the concentrated essence of a too bulky original. The entire abridgment, in four volumes, will be equal to about one-sixth of that original. Of course it is the spirit rather than the substance that is here reproduced, the Duke's scattered facts being so collected together as to form one continuous narrative. The translator's aim has been to let Saint Simon "retain as much as possible some of his French garments with

* The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV. and the Regency. Abridged from the French. By Bayle St. John. First Series. In Two Volumes. London: Chapman and Hall. 1857.

July-VOL. CX. NO. CCCCXXXIX.

all his French ways and peculiarities. Whenever practicable," he adds, "I have exactly translated his expressions; when they were untranslatable I have rendered them into the language that seemed best to express his meaning-without being troubled with the idea of elegance. Always, too, I have adhered rigorously to my text. Not a thought, not a reflection, not a phrase, have I willingly given that Saint Simon's words do not justify..... Except in the notes it is Saint Simon who speaks throughout. Of a portion of these notes we shall have a word to say presently; meanwhile the translator may be congratulated on the tact, the spirit, and the judgment with which he has (thus far) half-accomplished his

task.

Mr. St. John has done well in making short work of the Duke's longwinded digressions on the subject of "precedence," and his prolixity on whatever related to the order to which he belonged, and to all the rights of which he was so touchily sensitive. The dissertations on matters of this kind are the dullest part-and a very large part too-of the original Memoirs; to reproduce them for the general reader in this country, would be reproductive industry of a most unprofitable sort. Quite sufficient is retained in the present volumes to give a taste of Saint Simon's quality in this respect as for example, the account of M. de Luxembourg's claim of precedence, which interested the Duke so nearly, and aggravated him so entirely; and that of the quarrel about precedence between his mother and another duchesse at the funeral of Madlle. de Condé-or that other quarrel, on the same sore question, between M. de Coislin and the president of the parliament; or, again, the conflict at Court as to precedence at the Communion Table, and at the King's dinner-table, and at the After-Suppers-each feud, sacred or profane, being contested with a tenacity, violence, and rancour that will rather repel than repay study. Saint Simon had a very cordial contempt for parvenus, and lost no opportunity of giving it practical expression. Deplorable in his eyes was the fact, to which those eyes could not be shut, that "there are in all Courts persons who, without wit and without distinguished birth, without patrons or service rendered, pierce into the intimacy of the most brilliant, and," he continues, "succeed at last, I know not how, in forcing the world to look upon them as somebody." A brave Cavoye, of this class-a truckling Saumery-a Duc de Gesvres, grandson of a "pedlar, or something worse"-a Maréchal de Villeroy, grandson or a "dealer in fresh fish at the markets"-a Secretary Voysin, blessed with "the one indispensable quality for admission into the counsels of Louis XIV.-not a drop of noble blood in his veins"-faugh! these creatures are an offence to the nostrils of Saint Simon. He has no patience with the King's sanction of any such method of rise and progress. He is all indignation at the King's patronage of his own illegitimate children. The Montespan pretenders he cannot away with; he will go all lengths to crush their claims, and uphold the cause of legitimate princedom. And oh the scorn he cherishes for your supple courtiersfor the race of toad-eaters in ordinary, tuft-hunters of every complexion, lickspittles of every degree!-whether it be the "infamous act of personal adoration" by which Alberoni won the heart of Vendôme, or the intrigues of the cabal which beslavered the heir-apparent or the Duchesse de Bourgogne herself, "crawling before that creature" Madlle. Choin,

Monseigneur's favourite-or the truckling mob who deserted and decried Chamillart, when it became the policy of De Maintenon to turn the minister out of office. Not that Saint Simon, after all, was himself sublimely superior to the charm of Court existence. It was the potency of that charm which gave such intensity to his interest in whatever concerned the "dignity" of his order, and the "respectability" of its environments. And when was man more keenly interested in every topic of the kind— in all the highways and byways of the subject-in all its branch lines, ramifications, offshoots, subdivisions, subsections, and most distant relationships? He was conscious of the keenness of his spirit of curiosity, and avows it once and again in the course of these Memoirs. Thus, when the Court witnessed the sham fight at Compiègne, "the most beautiful sight that can be imagined"-the Duke breaks off from his description of the military display, to observe: "But a spectacle of another sort, that I could paint forty years hence as well as to-day, so strongly did it strike me, was" the manner of the King as he every now and then stooped to speak to Madame de Maintenon in her sedan-chair: "Each time that he did so she was obliging enough to open the window four or five inches, but never half way; for I noticed particularly, and I admit that I was more attentive to this spectacle than to that of the troops." So again when Madame de Lude brought word to the King, as he amused himself at the carp basin, of the accident that had happened to the young Duchesse de Bourgogne-and when Louis had exhibited in most unseemly fashion his selfishness, choler, and utter want of feeling, and then, after a while, left the astounded courtiers to themselves-"as soon," says the Duke, " as we dared look at each other out of his sight, our eyes met and told all. . . . . However distant may be that scene, it is always equally present to me..... I myself examined everybody with my eyes and ears, and was satisfied with myself for having long since thought that the king loved and cared for himself alone, and was himself his only object in life." Very characteristic, too, is Saint Simon's exclamation, when reporting the King's decision that the Duc de Berry should marry the daughter of Orleans: "What must have been the state of Madame la Duchesse [de Bourbon, whose daughter was thus set aside]! I never knew what took place in her house at this strange moment; and would have dearly paid for a hiding-place behind the tapestry." And once more, take Saint Simon's account of his feelings and demeanour on learning the death of Monsiegneur: "Thus answered, I tried not to be glad. I know not if I succeeded well, but at least it is certain, that neither joy nor sorrow blunted my curiosity, and that while taking due care to preserve all decorum, I did not consider myself in any way forced to play the doleful. . . . . I felt under no constraint, and followed every face with my glances, and tried to scrutinise them unobserved." With almost rapture he then dilates upon the sensations enjoyed during such an inquest of human faces-the absorbing gratification he then and there derived from watching, like a spy whom nothing escapes, the signs and wonders expressed on the visages that surrounded him-whether the expressions were assumed or genuine, involuntary or put on; a true thing, that did not lie, or a hollow sham, that might deceive others, but could hardly impose upon him.

A special characteristic, indeed, of Saint Simon, is the attention he