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and idleness about them. The appointment, happily, of a bishop and of accredited ministers will be the first step towards weeding this sacred vineyard of such ignorant and vicious men.

It was the same mistaken philanthropy, which has always been legislating in favour of the savage to the neglect of the colonist, which brought about a few years ago the emigration en masse of a large portion of the Dutch Boers; whereby the colony lost many thousand of her ablest defenders, who preferred encountering all the dangers and privations of the wilderness, to being left neglected and unprotected, plundered with impunity, and, "lastly, insult being heaped on injury, not only cruelly calumniated, but actually turned into ridicule."

In that which concerns the observations and suggestions for the defence of the eastern frontier of the Cape of Good Hope, as they were written before the new machinery had been set to work in Cape Colony by Sir Harry Smith, it will be needless to refer to them now beyond observing, that they contain many practical suggestions which might be made available in the present day, and without which the proposed colonisation of the eastern frontier could scarcely be effected with safety. Upon this subject, and that of emigration generally, the information is very full and distinct. Labour is to be provided by means of convict emigration in the west, much to the discomfiture of the existing colonial population; our authors direct the attention of the reader, therefore, more to the eastward, where, they say, "the soil and climate conspire to promise a more copious and varied fertility." England is now fully awakened to the absolute and paramount necessity of emigration, as a means by which she can alone be relieved of the burden of a poor and overwhelming population; and it is to be hoped that the stores of information as to the capabilities of the Cape, here conveyed to us, will not be lost to the country at large.

ADVENTURES OF A GREEK LADY.*

THE Greek lady who here relates her adventures is a person to whom much interest is attached. The daughter of Sciot and Candiot nobles, she accompanied her father to the court of Naples, where she attracted the attention of the late Queen Caroline, who adopted her as her own daughter. Such a close intimacy revives subjects of now by-gone discussion; but the imprudent conduct, to say the least of it, and the vagaries of Caroline of Brunswick, were seldom placed in a clearer and yet less offensive form before the public. It is needless to say that this protégé sides devotedly with her royal protectress; yet she relates examples of the relations that existed between the notorious Bergami and her royal highness that are, even according to her own words, of a very suspicious character. Such most especially is the account of the dinner-party at Genoa, at which the princess appeared leaning on her pseudo-lacquey's arm, and placed him at her right hand. Well may the English portion of the company have been filled with dismay! Equally and glaringly improper was the princess's conduct at Patras.

When only five years of age the little Countess Stephano was affianced to a young Scot named Donald, an officer in the English navy. The ceremony of the betrothal, she intimates, was performed with great solemnity, and the princess settled a handsome dowry on her protégé. Consi

* Adventures of a Greek Lady, the adopted daughter of the late Queen Caroline. Written by Herself. 2 vols. H. Colburn.

dering that such things as the betrothal of children is unknown in this country, it reflects highly on Captain Donald that he adhered through life to this engagement, and that he was ever kind, attentive, and affectionate to the Greek lady; who herself, with the vanity so peculiar to the Eastern character, avows that, "brought up as I had been in the courtly circle of an accomplished princess-introduced by her to many of the most distinguished persons of the age, and having been the companion of her travels through the most interesting regions of the earth, it can scarcely seem surprising that my tastes, and indeed my whole turn of thought, rose somewhat above the ordinary level. The consequence was, that I did not look forward with much of happy anticipation to the time when I should be called upon to enter into a less brilliant position of life."

There was not much promise of happiness here; and indeed the career of the Greek lady, from the time that she parted from her protectress, appears to have been solely devoted to the display of herself and costume throughout Europe and America. At Glasgow she says,

My Greek costume, and my power of conversing in various languages, interested several gentlemen of the company, who had travelled in those parts of the world which I had visited with the Princess of Wales. Some of the ladies present did not, however, appear to be quite pleased with the marked notice directed to me. Lady E-D- --was particularly piqued, and did not disguise her dissatisfaction, though without departing from those rules of politeness which are always observed by well-bred persons. That the umbrage she felt on this occasion was not either slight or transient, is certain; for, in after years of my life, some passages of that lady's conduct towards me savoured strongly of

vengeance.

These points of attraction, as well as others frequently alluded to in the pages before us, brought about many offers of marriage; at Montreal, for example, from an officer of marines; and when in India, she says, "That I am not a begum, or Indian princess, is no one's fault but my own," a native prince, one Allum ud Doulah, having made a formal proposal for her hand. Upon the death of Captain Donald, the persecutions the poor countess underwent to force her into the apparently much abhorred state of marriage are really painful to peruse! Whether these confessions, by their extreme personality, and the peculiarly Oriental turn of mind of their author, do not go beyond what is strictly permissible, we will not venture to say, as a lady and a foreigner is in the case; but there can be no doubt that the mixture of naïveté, ingenuousness, and vanity which belong to them, impart to these said confessions a rich and rare interest. On one point the Greek lady's memory, we suspect, has played her false; it is when she says that Bergami was not with the princess at St. Omer's.

BELL'S WAYSIDE PICTURES.*

THIS very tasteful book must become popular with tourists. Strong appreciation of the beautiful, quick sense of the peculiar and characteristic, and lively perception of social anomalies, are the distinguishing features of the mind of the author of "Wayside Pictures through France, Belgium, and Holland."

Landing at Havre, a first and truly French scene presented itself to Mr. Bell-four Frenchwomen at breakfast, eating, drinking, laughing, and screaming all together with indescribable volubility.

"It was," he says, "a striking sight, upon first landing from Englandstaid, decorous, conventional England-to come suddenly upon such a party in a public room: four ladies, without a gentleman, ordering the waiters with a loud * Wayside Pictures through France, Belgium, and Holland. By Robert Bell, Author of the "Life of Canning," &c. R. Bentley.

confidence that defied criticism, and feasting away at the top of their animal spirits. Of course, that was only the first image which involuntarily forced itself upon us, to be displaced by a moment's reflection; since the universality of such usages may be accepted as evidence of a more advanced stage of civilisation than exists in England in reference to the conduct of women-little as we are disposed ▾ to exchange our retreating manners for this boisterous fearlessness."

It is impossible to follow Mr. Bell in his zigzag paths through town and city, in and out of wood and glen, by mill-stream, village, and hill-side, losing himself in all manner of places, but still touching with the same interest shattered towers, dusk woods,

The hives of men, or whispering solitudes.

The fortifications of France, he justly remarks, and the mercantile spirit enclosed by them, are antagonistic principles, and cannot subsist together. The government of France might as well issue an edict to stop all the clocks and watches in the kingdom at a particular moment every day, for the purpose of regulating the sun, as build fortifications to restrain the free action of industry. All such hindrances must vanish, as knowledge makes head against ignorance, and discovers to us surer safeguards than bastions and dykes. The passport system is a similar contradiction to the spirit of the age, and cannot, even as a source of revenue, continue to co-exist with railroads and steam-packets.

Mr. Bell remarks of the Seine, as compared with the Rhine, that both are dotted all over with traditions, but they are of a different order. On the one, ruined castles of great land-pirates, mouldering in a legendary atmosphere of love and rapine; on the other, the monastery reigns paramount over the château: but where strongholds exist, their traditions are those of knights who won their spurs in legitimate fields, and who, in spite of the vicissitudes of civil and foreign wars, transmitted honourable names to their posterity. Next come antique Norman towns-Rouen and Caen at the head-with annihilated old churches; towns whose history is as much mixed up with English tradition as with that of the Normans themselves; and then the diligence, the interior of which has so long been a complete comedy-in-little of French life, but soon destined to disappear before its potent rival, the railway carriage. To these again succeed the fairy legends of Normandy, "full of a humanising tenderness, which falls in gracefully with the sombre earnestness of the popular temperament." Vaux de Vire, and its lyrists-Ville Dieu, and its pious galantie-showNorman caps, and the faces under them-economical Avranches-Mont St. Michel, its chivalrous legends, and its memorials of war and prisonSt. Malo, "the gustiest spot on the whole coast"--Dinon, and its hero Du Guesclin-the habits and superstitions of the Bretons-the great green Loire, with populous Nantes, and reminiscences of the Duchess of Berri— and Angers, and the war of La Vendée; which lead the way to Saumur, the town which Mr. Bell especially recommends to the settler, "the paradise of the demi-fortune," he expressively calls it. From Saumur to Blois and Orleans is now, it is needless to say, but a step.

And here dropping the curtain on France, Mr. Bell carries the reader, by a sudden change of scene, to "drowsy, stately old Antwerp,"-to Malines, the centre of the railroad system in Belgium-to Bruges, to Brussels, to Waterloo, down the Meuse to Liège, and thence by the Rhine to Holland. This will suffice to give an idea of the variety presented in these Wayside Sketches, though not of the interest imparted to them by the author.

Mr. Bell's remarks upon the English abroad especially deserve perusal; and we sincerely hope they may fall in some places, not as seeds cast upon the wind, to be blown away, but to take root, and work reform.

THE FORTUNES OF WOMAN.*

IN future times the historian will probably look to the "novel" literature of the day for the expression of shades of feeling and manners, which are lost sight of in the lapse of more important events. In such a case

the times we live in may admit of strange representations. The Romans presented in serious history as they are in the pages of the poet of Aquinum, would not be more extravagant. The woman whose fortunes are depicted by the clever pen of Miss Lamont, for example, is, at least at the outset, a vain, worldly, and unprincipled person in an inferior station of life. Such moral, or rather immoral, idiosyncracy, enables her to push her way amidst all sorts of difficulties, to thrive where others would faint, and to come not only unstained, but improved by practice and experience, from all kinds of corruption, mental and corporeal. Such experiences would not be even tolerated from a pen of ordinary calibre: there must be power, to grapple with vice and to render its hideousness manifest; there must be tact and discrimination, to distinguish between errors that spring from position and circumstances, and such as have their origin in a corrupt heart; there must above all be talent, to depict the darker phases of human nature (quite as common as the brighter) alike with vigour and fidelity. These powers Miss Lamont possesses in an eminent degree, and "The Fortunes of Woman" will earn for her high repute in an artistic point of view. The character of the work may be judged of from a few examples. The daughter of a milliner who absconds from her husband with a Lord Walfield, the heroine enters life, after burying her broken-hearted father, as an attendant at Harrow Hall, of which she is destined to be ultimately the mistress, and where "with small flatteries to the lower in the female department, and with ready impertinences to the men," she soon became a favourite. The marriage of one of the young ladies takes the soubrette to London, where she obtains much worldly advice from her runaway mother. By the aid of this experienced person, our heroine rises from lady's maid to be a teacher "in a titled family, without any other pretensions or qualifications than her own impudence." This situation is soon exchanged for another, with a family with whom an episode of romance is associated, the lady being a wife divorced under circumstances of a very painful character. Our heroine's deficiencies are, however, soon found out in her new situation; but her dismissal is anticipated by her being carried off by force by another profligate lord, who compels her attendance, and afterwards makes her assist in the secret burial of a young person whom the said lord has seduced and then deserted, and who had been induced thereby to commit suicide. To the narrative of this terrible catastrophe the author adds:

At this awful price did he (Lord Oldston) purchase that severity of rectitude, that austerity of manners, which ever after characterised him. He ultimately married a lovely and amiable lady, who was entirely ignorant of this fatal error of his youth. But alas! there is many a man who takes the hand of an innocent and excellent wife, with crimes on his conscience which should lie as heavy as Lord Oldston's; yet, because he has not had with his own hand to dig the grave of his victim, does not feel that he has made the grave which he too surely has.

The next scene in which our accommodating heroine is engaged, is as companion to a countess; but this situation she also soon exchanges for the more promising one of companion to a city heiress, with whom she visits Clifton, Bath, &c.; and at each fashionable place of resort she

The Fortunes of Woman: Memoirs, edited by Miss Lamont. 3 vols. Henry Colburn.

labours with great assiduity to entangle one of her heiress's numerous rejected suitors. Her success in these schemes was so great, that the relationship with Lord Arthur Ernton and Mr. Snatt is kept up to the end; and on this strange and eventful relationship depends the gist of what little story is connected with that which is more properly a series of social sketches. As a last act of expiation, our heroine makes one great sacrifice in resigning power over the Harrow estate; and Mr. Snatt, who had wedded the heiress before marrying "the companion," has the enjoyment of his first wife's property only for his life; but we are assured that the discovery that each made with regard to the other has not in any way affected their mutual happiness.

MADAME SONTAG.

THE memoir of this accomplished lady and distinguished singer which has just appeared is exceedingly well-timed, and deserves to be universally read, as well for the truthful simplicity which pervades the narrative, as for the accuracy of its details, which we are ourselves in a condition to verify. There have been three phases in Madame Sontag's professional life, and in all of these she has been eminently successful: first, when as a girl of fourteen she redeemed the fortunes of the great Imperial Opera at Prague; next, when she made her début in the Italian Opera at Vienna, and commenced that triumphal career which terminated in her elevation by marriage to the rank which she so well adorned; and lastly, when, casting aside all considerations of false delicacy, she devoted herself with womanly true-heartedness to the endeavour to repair, by the professional exercise of her genius, those family misfortunes which it was not in her power to avert. A moral victory was gained by the attempt; and though the experiment was to the last degree hazardous, the result has exceeded the expectations of the most sanguine of her early admirers. Madame Sontag's fame stands at the present moment as high as when, twenty years back, she astonished and delighted all who heard her; and the certain success which she has achieved is a guarantee for its continuance. The public is deeply indebted to Mr. Lumley for the earnestness and zeal which he has shown in securing the services of so great an attraction as Madame Sontag, and we trust that he too will have his reward. We find by the country papers that Madame Sontag is gathering crowds to hear her in all the large provincial towns. With fresh laurels on her brow, we shall hail with unfeigned pleasure her re-appearance at her Majesty's Theatre for the season of 1850.

BEFORE AND AFTER.†

A MODEL town-Staggerton by name,--with its characteristic population, is placed before us in the present work, in a series of entertaining sketches and stories. To make the contrast more striking, the little country town is presented as it was before and after the Reform Bill; and the whole is supposed to be narrated by the whilom sub-editor of the Staggerton Recorder. The editor's daughter, who claimed the tender attentions of all her father's sub-editors as a matter of course, and brought them to account by a little bit of stereotyped poetry, although London: Mitchell,

* A Memoir of the Countess de Rossi (Madame Sontag). Old Bond-street.

† Before and After. 2 vols. T. C. Newby.

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