to Cosway for her portrait, perhaps the most faithful resemblance of her existing, not even excepting the fine picture by Gerard, painter of kings and king of painters, in the gallery of the Louvre. Chateaubriand assures us that her portrait, engraved by Bartolozzi, was widely circulated in England, and was thence carried to the isles of Greece, and Ballanche commenting on this circumstance remarked "that it was beauty returning to the land of its birth.'

Arrived once more at home, Madame Récamier was present at the trial of her friend Moreau, implicated (though she believed him wholly innocent of the accusation) in the royalist conspiracy of Pichegru and George Cadoudal. Nothing could exceed the gloom and terror which reigned at this period. Between the arrest and commencement of the proceedings, terri ble events were known to have occurred the Duc d'Enghien had been seized, and after a mock trial shot at dead of night beneath his prison walls, and the spectre of Pichegru seemed as though it hovered over the heads of the accused, for he had been mysteriously strangled in his cell. Madame Récamier was attended upon this occasion by a near relation of her husband, M. Brillat Savarin, a magistrate of gastronomic fame, and the moment she raised her veil, Moreau recognized her, rose and bowed to her, and she returned his salutation, as she expresses it "with emotion and respect." But this interview-if such it may be called-was to be the last; it was deemed wiser that she should not again attend the proceedings of the court, for Napoleon was displeased by her appearance, exclaiming sharply, when he heard that she had been present, "What was Madame Récamier doing there?"

Hitherto we have followed the fortunes of Juliette Récamier floating along the flood-tide of success, but for her, as for others, were appointed times of anxiety and suffering, as well as scenes of triumph and rejoicing, and she was erelong to discover that the power whose stability she had been somewhat too prone to depreciate, could on occasion be employed to do the bidding of passions the most petty and unworthy. Her husband's banking house having become embarrassed, it was necessary to apply to the bank of France for the loan of a million of francs, by which the difficulty could be tided over. The

But no

accommodation, however, which needed the Emperor's sanction, was refused, the bank stopped payment (1806), and at the age of five-and-twenty, in the very zenith of her beauty and power, Madame Récamier was suddenly deprived of the fabulous luxury and splendor with which she had hitherto been surrounded. wise daunted, she met the disaster with the same calm resolution as characterized her in the most trying events of her life. Everything was surrendered to the creditors; plate, jewels, the bright accessories of the shrine wherein so much beauty had sat enthroned; all were sold, and Madame Récamier retired with her husband to the comparatively humble shelter of a small apartment. But even thus, she became the object of universal interest and respect. All Paris was at her door; and Junot-one of the warmest of her friends-on rejoining his Imperial master in Germany, so far allowed his zeal to get the better of his discretion as to expatiate for His Majesty's delectation on the extent of sympathy shown. They could not have paid more honor to the widow of a Marshal of France who had lost her husband on the field of battle," was the Emperor's petulant reply.

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It was at this juncture that Madame de Staël (exiled from Paris in 1803), becoming aware of her friend's embarrassed position, invited her to Coppet, a delightful residence which she occupied near the lake of Geneva. Incidents such as characterized her whole career awaited her here also, and a new personage makes his appearance upon the scene of her triumphs, in the shape of Prince Augustus of Prussia, who had been taken prisoner at the battle of Saalfeld (Oct. 1806), where his eldest brother, Prince Louis, was killed. Handsome, brave, chivalrous, and only twenty-four years of age, the young prince at once fell a victim to the charms of the fair inmate of Coppet, implored her to obtain a divorce and to marry him. Touched, it may well have been, by the devotion of royalty under misfortune, and influenced, perhaps, by the favoring counsel of her hostess, Madame Récamier yielded a somewhat hesitating consent, and even wrote to her husband proposing the formal dissolution of their marriage. M. Récamier professed his willingness to accede to her wishes, but appealed at the same time to her better feelings, and to

the memory of days gone by, ere misfortune had fallen upon his house. The remonstrance was not without its effect, the remembrance of all her husband's indulgence came back upon her, Catholic scruples and dread of quitting her country did the rest; the glamour which had been temporarily cast over her imagination passed away, and the lady returned to Paris in order to avoid the fulfilment of her promise. Yet, strange to say, the prince was not informed of her resolution; she trusted that time and absence-those two potent factors in assuaging the pangs of unrequited affection-would render less painful the destruction of his hopes; nor was it until three or four years later, when, tortured by anxieties, both public and private, he fell dangerously ill, that she summoned courage to give the coup de grâce to his expectations. Meanwhile, she had sent him her portrait, which was the brightest ornament of his home at Berlin until its return to Madame Récamier in ac cordance with his last wishes in 1845, and presented him with a ring, which, at his earnest desire, was buried with him. Albeit thus discomfited, Prince Augustus continued to correspond with Madame Récamier till the year 1815, when he entered Paris with the allied armies, at the head of the Prussian artillery, and his last interview with her took place as late as 1825, when he found her in her retreat at the Abbaye-aux-bois.

The penalty of exile which Madame Récamier now incurred for no other crime than that of paying a thirty-six hours' visit to Madame de Staël-the entire edition of whose celebrated work on Germany, which abounded with allusions to the Imperial police, had been seized, and who was contemplating departure to America-though it involved no more than prohibition to reside within one hundred and twenty miles of Paris, may be regarded as the crowning act of Napoleon's revenge. She fixed upon Châlons as her place of exile, subsequently removing to Lyons where she made the acquaintance of M. Ballanche, who, from the first day that he met her, became her abject slave. He was the son of a printer, and more favored by gifts of intellect than by external advantages. He was in fact extremely ugly, and his ugliness had been aggravated by the unskilled treatment of a charlatan, who had used such violent means for the cure of chronic headache as

to necessitate the removal of a portion of the jaw-bone; and yet it was impossible for any one to be much in his society without being attracted by the charm of his conversation and manner. An episode of the first interview between Madame Récamier and M. Ballanche seems prophetic of the nature of their whole subsequent intercourse. Exerting himself to the very utmost to prove agreeable, M. Ballanche observed the lady turn pale, and on asking the reason, Madame Récamier, who was on the point of fainting, confessed the cause of her indisposition. Poor Ballanche had caused his shoes to be new blacked in honor of the interview and the odor was insupportable to her. Without a word he quietly withdrew, deposited the offending shoes outside the door, re-entered the room as though nothing had happened and resumed the conversation exactly where he left it. Of the three whose names are most intimately associated as friends of Madame Récamier, the palm for sincerity and devotion must be yielded to M. Ballanche. The Duke de Montmorency, shocked at her love of dissipation, was always trying to convert her, but Ballanche thought she was perfect and loved all whom she loved, not even excepting Chateaubriand with his egotism and vanity. "You are my star of destiny," he writes to her, "it is impossible that I should survive you; were you to enter your tomb of white marble, a grave must be dug at once for me, wherein I also may be laid." Ballanche died 1847 and was buried in the same tomb which was two years later to receive all that was mortal of Madame Récamier. She was then old and blind, and in her anxiety to soothe his dying moments, neglected precautions recommended to her after an operation just performed upon her eyes, and with the flood of tears which she shed by his couch was lost forever all hope of recovering her sight.

At the time when Madame Récamier visited Rome in 1813, the capital of the Christian world was bereft of its Pontiff and was simply the headquarters of a French prefect who administered the department of the Tiber. She opened her salon in the Palazzo Fiano, where among others she received Canova, who almost by stealth transferred her bust to marble, and whose brother the abbé penned a daily sonnet to la bellissima Zulièta. From Rome she proceeded to Naples, where she

was received by the King and Queen with the utmost cordiality, precedence being assigned her even over all the ladies of the court. The times were critical and Murat's position was just then one of exceeding perplexity. To save his crown he had joined the coalition against the brother inlaw to whom he owed his greatness, and it was from the balcony of Queen Caroline's apartment that Madame Récamier beheld the British fleet entering, by Murat's invitation, the bright blue waters of the lovely bay.

Three years of husbandless but by no means solitary wandering were terminated by the fall of Napoleon, the gates of Paris were once more opened to her, and she immediately bent her steps homeward. Her beauty was still in full and perfect flower, and to all her other charms was now added the prestige of innocence long persecuted by the fallen power. Her mother's fortune, which amounted to four hundred thousand francs, added to the results of M. Récamier's industry, enabled her once again to surround herself with the comforts and indulgences of life. Old friends were not wanting to welcome her return, Madame de Staël was in Paris, and the widow of Moreau (who met death stricken by a French bullet when serving in the ranks of the Russian army) from whom she had been separated by ten long years of exile. Three generations of Montmorencys were to be seen in her salon, and it was on observing the impression made by Madame Récamier upon his grandson Henri, that the old duke remarked so gracefully "that though they did not die of it, all nevertheless were wounded." It was at this period, and at Madame de Staël's, that the fair Juliette first made the acquaintance of the Duke of Wellington; and it is with reference to the words in which he is said to have addressed her the first time he saw her after the crowning victory over his illustrious enemy-Je l'ai bien battu-that the somewhat dubious assertion has been hazarded that his homage was unwelcome. The truth probably was that from motives of patriotism she disliked the duke; at any rate she preserved a selection of his effusions and ridiculed him as unable to spell correctly two consecutive words of French.

It was not long before the death of Madame de Staël in 1818, that the intimacy between Chateaubriand and Juliette Ré

camier commenced while she was living in a hotel, Rue d'Anjou, which she had purchased and fitted up and wherein she hoped to pass the rest of her life in peace and security. But a fresh reverse of fortune occurring in 1820, she resolved no longer to form part of her husband's family, but while engaging to maintain him out of the wreck of her own fortune, she determined to withdraw entirely from the world, and hired apartments from the nuns of the Abbaye-aux-bois, a little convent which lay somewhat withdrawn from the street in the midst of the fashionable

Faubourg S. Germain. This then was the final retreat which she rendered famous by thirty years of residence. In her "cell" she lived alone, but she dutifully procured a lodging for her husband (who died in 1830) in the neighborhood, and provided him and Ballanche with their daily dinner. But though her salon ever remained a temple, the object of worship, by degrees, was changed, the idol of former days became the priestess, while Chateaubriand who had quickly won the first place, if not in the heart, at least in the imagination of Madame Récamier, occupied the shrine and was worshipped, as it has been said, like the Grand Lama himself. When he deigned to talk, everybody was bound to listen, when he was moderately tired of a speaker, he stroked an ugly cat, placed purposely in a chair by his side, when he was tired beyond endurance he began playing with a bell-rope which lay conveniently within his reach, and then Madame Récamier would immediately rush to the rescue. Now and then the hostess, who sat on one side of the fireplace, the rest round in a circle, wouid relate some anecdote connected with earlier days; one such relating to Joseph Bonaparte has come down to us. "I was standing one day,' said Madame Récamier, "at the door of the Spanish ambassador's hotel, conversing with the King; the royal carriage was in waiting, and the prince, who was always very gallant, had just taken leave of me, when I heard a gruff voice muttering something close to my ear, I turned round, and beheld a grenadier, a thorough' vieux de la vieille,' who had posted himself by the footway as a sort of amateur sentinel. Citizen,' he blurted out, addressing King Joseph, thy equipage is ready,' then changing his tone after a moment's reflection, he added, 'Whenever it may please

the forest primæval is cleared, a new vegetation usurps the soil, a vegetation which necessarily comes from elsewhere. In America, where the substitution is a thing of such very late date, we can trace the limits of the two floras, native and intrusive, with perfect ease and certainty. Strange as it sounds to say so, European weeds of cultivation have taken possession of all eastern America to the exclusion of the true native woodland flora almost as fully as the European white man with his horses and cows has taken possession of the soil to the exclusion of the noble Red Indian and his correlative buffalo. The common plants that one sees about New York, Philadelphia, and Boston are just the familiar dandelions, and thistles, and ox-eye daisies of our own beloved fatherland. In open defiance of the Monroe doctrine, the British weed lords it over the fields of the great republic: the native American plant, like the native American man, has slunk back into the remote and modest shades of far western woodlands. Nay, the native American man himself had noted this coincidence in his Mayne Reidish way before he left Massachusetts for parts unknown for be called our ugly little English plantain or ribgrass the White Man's Foot, and declared that wherever the intrusive pale-face planted his sole, there this European weed sprang up spontaneous, and ousted the old vegetation of the primæval forest. A pretty legend, but, Asa Gray tells us, botanically indefensible.

What is happening to-day under our own eyes (or the eyes of our colonial correspondents) in Australia and New Zealand helps us still further to understand the nature of this strange deluge of ugly and uncouth plants-a deluge which is destined, I believe, to swamp, in time, all the cultivable lowlands of the entire world, and to cover the face of accessible nature before many centuries with a single deadlevel of cosmopolitan weediness. When the great southern continent and the great southern island were first discovered, they possessed the most absurdly belated fauna and flora existing anywhere in the whole world. They were hopelessly out of date; a couple of million years or so at least behind the fashion in the rest of the globe. Their plants and animals were of a kind that had gone out" in Europe about the time when the chalk was accumulating

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on an inland sea across the face of the South Downs, and the central plain of France and Belgium. It naturally resulted that these antiquated creatures, developed to suit the conditions of the cretaceous world, could no more hold their own against the improved species imported from nineteenth century Europe than the Australian black fellow could hold his own against the noble possessor of the Remington rifle. European animals and European plants overran this new province with astonishing rapidity. The English rat beat the Maori rat out of the field as soon as he looked at him. The rabbit usurped the broad Australian plains, so that baffled legislators now seek in vain some cheap and effectual means of slaying him wholesale. The horse has become a very weed among animals in Victoria, and the squatters shoot him off in organized battues, merely to check his lawless depredations upon their unfenced sheep walks.

It is the same with the plants, only, if possible, a little more so. Our petty English knotgrass, which at home is but an insignificant roadside trailer, thrives in the unencumbered soil of New Zealand so hugely that single weeds sometimes cover a space five feet in diameter, and send their roots four feet deep into the rich ground. Our vulgar little sow-thistle, a yellow composite plant with winged seeds like dandelion-down, admirably adapted for dispersal by the wind, covers all the country up to a height of 6,000 feet upon the mountain sides. The watercress of our breakfast tables, in Europe a mere casual brookside plant, chokes the New Zealand rivers with stems twelve feet long, and costs the colonists of Christchurch alone 3007. a year in dredging their Avon free from it. Even so small and lowgrowing a plant as our white clover (which, being excellent fodder, doesn't technically rank as a weed) has completely strangled its immense antagonist, the New Zealand flax, a huge iris-like aloe, with leaves as tall as a British Grenadier, and fibres powerful enough to make cords and ropes to hang a sheep-stealer. For weeds are genuine Jack-the-Giant-killers in their own way; a very small plant can often live down a very big one, by mere persistent usurpation of leaf space and root-medium.

fit

Sometimes the origin of these obtrusive settlers in new countries is ridiculously casual. For example, a dirty little Eng

Fish weed of the weedies won thrives and flourishes abundant & rec.ots L habited island of the Antarcti : 9895. did it get there! Well, the

ers who found it of the bat, notised that it grew in the greatest cantities fear a certain spot, which tilthed out of exanination to be the forgotter grave of at English sailor. Here was the solution of that curions nystery i gralnica de tribution. The grave law of foste imel dag with a civilized space and that stat had presumably been trouzi, from Eng land Clinging to its start a he time it was used were no doute some littet me noticed clots of British cay, enœudeći whose midst was a singt see that rulbed itself of, it would seen., agans, the newly-dag eartil The emre germe nated, and grew to be a plan and it & very few years, in that mosened soi, the whole island was covered wil is me merous descendants. Finding a far field and no favor, which is the very essence of natural selection, it had been fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the ear to some purpose, as all weeds wil de her no human baud interferes to prevent then. The greater pan of our existing weeds, as I already remarked, come to us. Leal the rest of our civilizatim, good, bad, or indifferent, from the In many cases their country of origin is not even now fully known; they are probably as antique as cultivation self contempo raries of the bronze-age or stone-art poneers, and have spread westward with born and barley till they have now fany made the tour of the world, and like a cater globe-trotters might consider themselves entitled at last to write a book about their travels. Our little shepherd's parse is a good typical example of these cosmopoiitan voyagers; there is hardly a quarter of the world where it does not now grow in great profusion: yet it is nowhere found far from human habitations; it loves the roadside, the garden, the fallow, the bare patch in towns where the tail board of the eligible building site lifts its head and lies" with more brazen impudence than even the London Monument. Even today, nobody knows where this ubiquitous foundling, this gypsy among plants, really comes from. It is a native of nowhere. All that the most authoritative of our botanists can find to tell us about it is that it

may be "probably of European or West

Mizik, bai now one of the comcultivated and waste Tisses. Trea a. over the globe without Like the rai and the cockrobows avvilization, in every ship;

I spreads Is seeds with every sack of eon, and it accompanies the emigrant, I the ve dir: or ins boots, to every corner of the colonizable earth.

1: doest necessarily foliow, however, inat al weeds are ng or inconspicuous. Some jambar pests, which seem to have beer ste saly dereinned to suit the exigencies of corunend cultivation, are both noticeable and handsome. Our scariet rot-popnes, our bine corn-cockies, our purbit cor-campion, are instances in point; st is the stil more brilliant southen combag or wild gladiolus that stars, with no tall spikes of crimson blossom, the waring expanse of French and Italian wheat-feds. I think the reason here is that cor is wind-fertilized, so the plan's that grow among its tal, stems, in order to as the fertilizing insects sufficiently, have themselves to be tall and very altramite in other respects, however, it is curious to notice how close'r these beautiful weeds have accommodated their hates to the peculiar circumstances of barbeid tillage. The sol is ploughed over once a year; so they are al, sumunts; TOOLS or bulbs would be crushed or destored in the plonghing; they flower with the corn, ripen with the corn, are resped and thrashed with the corn, and get their seeds sown by the farmer with his seedeorn in spite of his own efforts. One of the most deadly and destructive among them, indeed, the parasition, cow-w host, which fastens its murderous snoker-like roots to the rootlets of the corn, and shor the life-blood of the standing coop, has gone so far as to produce seeds that eurot. ly imitate a grain of whest, and ean or A accurately be distinguished from the onest grains among which they lurk by * close and discriminative botaniese M777tiny. This is one of the best instSPOOR known of true mimiery in the vegersbe world, and it is as successful in the guester part of Europe as such wicked se lomer always manage to be.

Still, as a rule, weeds undoubteda e v weedy-looking; they are the degraded types that can drag out a miserabië evid ence somehow in open sunit spots, with short allowance of either, so or water,