women and children! The scene is again, once more, one of smoke and carnage, and yells of execration and blood.

And now again come other scenes of men scouring along the outskirt plains of Paris. The insurgents are vanquished: the people of the Red Republic fly, and leave traces of the colour of their appalling banner in trails of blood; and there are pictures of soldiers and national guards running to the chase, and shooting down the hunted men like rabbits in an affrighted warren. God have mercy on them all!

We turn over the leaves of the Sketch-book. It is over! The cannon no longer fills the streets with the smoke of the battle-field. Ruined houses compose a scene of hideous desolation in all the further eastern and northern streets of Paris. Affrighted inhabitants begin to crawl out of their houses. Windows are reopened. There is the air of relief from terror upon many a face-and yet how sad an air of grief and consternation pervades every scene in the vast city. The sun is shining brightly and hotly over the capital there is a flood of light and heavenly love and brightness poured down upon the streets; but it only calls up still more reekingly to heaven the vapour of the blood, that goes up like an accusing spirit. How sadly, too, the bright summer air, and its broad cheering lights upon the white houses and the gilded balconies, contrast with the pale forms of the wearied and wounded men who crawl about, and with the weeping women who sit beneath the porchways, and with the coffins incessantly borne along-not one, or two, or three, but twenty or thirty each hour-and with the crape upon the arms of the men in uniform, or upon the hats, and with the convulsed faces of the wounded and dying, who lie upon their beds of down in the richly furnished apartment, or on the pallets of the hospital, as they shine into the windows of the wounded and dying. Bright as is the day of June, never was sadder scene witnessed in any capital: civil war has never raged more furiously within a city's walls since men conglomerated together in cities for mutual advantage and protection. How many hearts have ached!

how many tears have been shed! how many wives are widows! how many children fatherless! how many affianced girls, with fondly beating hearts, will see the face of him they love in life no more! Oh, splendid sun of June! what a mockery thou seemest to be in these pictures of this dark Parisian scrap-book!

But the sun is shining still, and the little birds are twittering merrily upon the house-tops, and the caged canaries chirp at windows, and perchance there is the merry laugh of children. All these things heed not the terror and desolation of the city. It is shining still-into huge churches also, where thick masses of straw are littered down, and the wounded lie in hundreds to overflowing-into courts, where again is scattered straw, and again groan wounded and dyingupon street-side pavements, where again are strewn these sad beds of the victims of civil contention, excited by the most frantic of delusions-and through narrow windows, into prison vaults and palace cellars, where are crowded together masses of prisoners, who, for the most part, regret not the part they have played in the scenes of blood, and sit gloomily upon the damp stone, brooding over schemes of vengeance upon the detested bourgeois, should they escape, and the Red Republic ever be triumphant! It is shining still; and every where it shines, it smiles upon misery: it seems to mock the doomed unhappy city.

But there are still stirring, striking, unaccustomed scenes limned in the Parisian Sketch-book. Paris has been declared in a state of siege by the military autocrat, into whose hands the salvation of the capital and the country from utter anarchy has been given. The scenes of marching men and torrents of bayonets coming down the broad boulevards, and sentinels at street corners, and patrols, and military manoeuvres, and galloping dragoons, and of drums beaten from daybreak until late into the night, are nothing new to Paris: such scenes have been traced upon its Sketchbook again and again, for the last four disastrous months. But Paris has gone further now. See! in these sketches it represents one vast camp. All along the broad vast vista of the

victim to the treachery of a vanquished party's vengeance by assassination? The leaves of the book are blank as regards the future. No one can venture to trace even the slightest outline upon them, with the assurance that it may hereafter be filled up as it has been drawn: and yet that those blank leaves must and will be filled with startling pictures once again, no one can doubt. How far will these young generals supply the most prominent figures in them? together, or sundered in opposition? The hand of fate is ready to trace those sketches; but never was that hand more hidden in the dark cloud of unfathomable mystery. The blank leaves of the album, in which the observing and self-regulating man keeps a daily journal of his doings and his thoughts, are always awful to contemplate: no thinking man can look upon them without asking himself what words, for good or for ill, may be recorded on them. But how far more awful still is the book of fate, upon the leaves of which are to be sketched the stirring scenes of a revolutionary city's history, so intimately connected with a country's destiny! and no one can tell what they may be.

The last sketch in the Parisian Sketch-book, as it is now filled upnow in the middle of the month of July (for others may be painting even as these lines are traced)-is the dark monster hearse containing the bodies of those who have fallen in the cause of order-the black-behung altar in that Place, which has lost its name of Concord and Peace, to take the more suitable one of "Revolution"-the catafalk-the burning candelabras-the black-caparisoned horses that drag the funeral-car-the black draperied columns of the Madeleine-the autho

rities in mourning attire-the long procession-the sprinkled clouds of burning incense from the waved censers-and the widow's tears.

Such a picture of mocking pomp in desolate sorrow closes well the long suite of sketches with which the Parisian Sketch-book has been filled during the first phase of the French revolution. The curtain has fallen at the end of the first act, upon a tableau befitting the dark scenes which have been so fearfully enacted in it. The curtain will rise again-again will bloody scenes, probably, be enacted upon that troubled stage of history,— again will harrowing sketches, probably, be drawn in the Parisian Sketch-book. Those which we have now recorded have been selected from among thousands, because they form a suite, as natural in their course, as fatally inevitable, as any suite of pictures in which the satirising artist painted the natural course of a whole life. From the fallacious promises, and the foolish or culpable designs, that occasioned the establishment of those nurseries of discontent, disorder, and conspiracy, the ateliers nationaux, -the steps through the club-room, the rendezvous of the conspirators, the furious journalist's office, to the sedition, the insurrection, the carnage, the civil war, the murder, the terror, and the mourning catafalk, have followed as they could not but follow. It is only the first series, however, that is closed here. There can be little doubt but that similar consequences will again follow, as similar causes still exist; and that the red banner of the so-called "social and democratic republic" will again wave,

and perhaps before long,-a prominent object in the scenes of the Parisian Sketch-book.