their present of sugar to the convent, and departed with their servants. Some wily Arabs tried to supersede their faithful guides, and actually took possession of the travellers, but, on discovering the cheat, the real set rode after them with all their might, and, overtaking them, a battle was prevented only by the firmness and presence of mind of Baron Taylor; things were then amicably arranged, and the rogues and the true men were all amalgamated into one caravan.

It has been much the fashion to depreciate the dangers of the sand wind in the desert, and to call the descriptions of ancient travellers exaggerations; we therefore give an abridgment of the statement of M. Dumas concerning this phenomenon, leaving those who read it to judge for themselves of the degree of alarm which may be necessary on such occasions.

On entering the Ouaddi Pharan, we felt some of those acrid puffs of wind which are the fiery breathings of the desert; the heat became insupportable, the sand, raised by the breeze, looked like a vapour, and soon enveloped us in a cloud, which burned our eyes, and at each aspiration entered our noses and throats. The Arabs also appeared to suffer, and the dromedaries, stretching out their long necks, appeared to seek each other, and made sudden starts, as if the sand burned their feet. "Take care!" said Toualeb, the chief Arab of the escort; which caution was repeated by each man, as he covered himself with his mantle, leaving the eyes alone exposed. We followed their example, for the khamsin was arrived. The sand rose like a wall before us, the guides hesitated about the track, the tempest increased, and we moved between banks of sand, agitated like waves; and in spite of all our precaution we breathed as much sand as air; our tongues clove to the roof of our mouths; our eyes became haggard and bleeding, and respiration, with a rattling noise, revealed the mutual sufferings of the whole party.

I have sometimes faced danger, but never at any other time experienced such a sensation. We went on like madmen, without knowing whither, with increasing rapidity and obscurity, for the cloud of dust became more and more intense and burning. At length, Toualeb uttered a piercing cry; we stopped, and a council was held. He summed up the whole by extending his arm to the south-west, and the frenzied course recommenced, but without hesitation or deviation, for we followed the steps of the two Sheikhs, who had undertaken to lead the caravan. We evidently proceeded towards some object; what it was we had no time to ask, but we felt that if we missed it we were lost. The desert was grand and melancholy; it seemed to live, to palpitate, to smoke in its entrails. The transition had been rapid and singular; it was no longer the oasis of the preceding evening, repose at the foot of palm-trees, refreshing slumber, and the murmuring noise of the fountain. It was the inflamed sand, the rude shocks of the rough-faced dromedary, devouring, inhuman, maddening thirst, which boiled the blood, and threw a spell over our eyes, showing us burning lakes, islands, trees, fountains, shade, and water. I know not if the others felt as I did, but I was positively delirious. From time to time, our steeds stooped down, scooped out the sand beneath with their heads, in order to find something less fierce than the surface; then rose, feverish, and panting as we did, and resumed their fantastic course. How often we fell I cannot recollect, or how we escaped being crushed by the weight of our beasts, or buried under the sand; and all of which I was conscious was, that our Arabs came rapidly to our aid, but mute like spectres; they raised our dromedaries and ourselves, and then resumed their rapid way.

One hour more, and we must have been buried. All at once, however, a breath of wind cleared the horizon for a moment. "The Mokatteb!" cried Toualeb; "the Mokatteb!" repeated the Arabs. The sand again rose between us and a mountain, but God, as if to give us strength, had shewn us the desired haven. "The Mokatteb!" we uttered in our turn, without knowing what it meant, but supposing it to be life and safety. Five minutes afterwards, we glided like serpents into a deep cavern; the narrow mouth of which admitted but little light or heat. Our dromedaries were left outside, with their heads turned towards the mountains, and soon looked, with their grey skins and accumulations of sand, like animals made of stone. Without seeking either carpet or food, we threw ourselves down at random, in a state of stupor and delirium, resembling the sleep of a burning fever. Here, without speaking or moving, we remained till the next morning, lying on our faces, like unpedestalled statues, while the tempest howled without.

LOUIS XVI. AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Histoire du Regne de Louis XVI. pendant les années où l'on pouvoit prévenir ou diriger la Revolution Française. (History of the Reign of Louis XVI., during the Years in which the Revolution might have been prevented or directed.) By J. Droz, Member of the French Academy, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1839.

Many persons are accustomed to look upon the great French revolution of the last century as a kind of witches' sabbath, in which furies and incarnate fiends mixed together in horrid fraternity, capering about, with pike and torch in their hands, howling, knocking down people right and left, and playing at bowls with the heads that fell from the guillotine. And so it was in 1793-4, but those were the results of the revolution, and not the revolution itself; they were the unavoidable consequences of a revolution effected upon such principles, and by such means, as that of France. But the real revolution took place in 1789, when one single elective assembly usurped all the powers of the monarchy. That revolution was brought about by the agitators, the demagogues, the sophists, of every rank in society, who did not wish to mend and repair, but to destroy; who declaimed against all social distinctions, against all subordination; as if a large and populous empire could pass at once from despotism to pure democracy; as if five and twenty millions of people, with all their passions, their corruptions, their wickedness, and their miseries, could be organized and kept in order on a perfectly flat level, without one high point from which to hold the reins of the state. The first revolutionists were those who babbled about the social contract and the rights of man-of man who, coming into the world naked and the most helpless of living things, is entirely dependent for a number of years on the kindness and compassion of his fellow-creatures, and, even when grown to maturity, would

be subject to the iron law of the strongest, were it not for religion, which interposes and protects his weakness. And there is no other religion but that of the Gospel, which teaches that all men are equally under the care of God, that they are all brethren in his eyes, so that the only rights of men are derived from Christianity. But this was not the faith of those who hurried on the French revolution; some of them fancied a sort of wild, sensual, untutored freedom, which man had brought with him from his native woods; others talked most classically of the liberty of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, while they overlooked the helots, the slaves, the gladiators, and all the abominations of those misnamed republics.

In all revolutions it is the sophists, the visionary fanatics, the ambitious demagogues, the bold bad men, who do the first work; they clear the ground; the pikemen, the men of the dagger and the torch, come later on the stage; but they are sure to come after all restraints have been removed, when the social force has become paralyzed, when the respect for property, rank, and education, has been weakened, when the sophism that "all have an equal right to all" has made numerous votaries. All these blunders were committed, all these errors were propagated, in France, long before the lantern and the guillotine began their work.

In the volumes before us, M. Droz has traced the origin and followed the progress of the revolutionary movement, from the first financial embarrassments of the ministers of Louis XVI., and the convocation of the Assembly of the Notables in February, 1787, to the annihilation of the monarchical principle by the National Assembly, in September, 1789. This work is of a different kind from most of those which treat of the French revo lution. It is a patient, laborious, conscientious investigation of causes and effects, of errors hardly noticed at the time, but which led to the most important results; it is a work deserving the attention of the statesman and the philosopher, and it contains many new details, facts, and remarks, which serve to clear up much doubt and uncertainty concerning the true character of the chief actors in the great revolutionary drama. We understand Mirabeau much better after reading M. Droz. Our limits allow us room for a few extracts only.

The following passage exhibits that process of fermentation in the social mass, which is the precursor of a great convulsion, when the most depraved of men, like birds of ill omen, are seen gathering and croaking before the brooding storm.

Democratic meetings were multiplied in Paris, and the audacity of their manifestations increased every day. The Palais Royal was like a vast club : every coffee-house had its orators; the seats in the garden were transformed into chairs of sedition. Of the first two men who made themselves conspicuous by their harangues, one was a marquis de St. Hurugue, who had married

an actress, and whom his wife had kept for a time in prison by a lettre de cachet; the other was Camille Desmoulins, who, in his parties of pleasure with his intimate friends, one of whom I have known personally, made profession of a system of morality so revoltingly corrupt, that his companions used to tell him that he would certainly end his days on the scaffold. Towards the Palais Royal, as the head-quarters of democracy, all the subaltern agitators were seen flocking; popular meetings are a most valuable institution for this sort of men, because there they are received with marks of approbation which they could not expect in better company. Chevaliers d'industrie, for whom patriotism is a trade, were not wanting, any more than visionary thinkers, issuing from their garrets, bringing with them scraps from Raynal and Mably, and from Rousseau's Contrat Social, which was their Gospel. The crowd of listeners to these oracles consisted chiefly of curious and credulous citizens, of young men who had already figured in the mobs on the return of the parliament, and of unemployed mechanics, who form that part of an audience which is most acceptable to demagogues. Here was a groupe listening to declamations against nobles and priests; there another was admiring the plan of an impromptu constitution, which was read by the self-satisfied projector; others were treated with news, true or false, concerning Paris and the country, calculated to excite the popular passions. In the palace, by the side of this garden, was held a conclave of the familiars of the Duke of Orleans, intent upon making their prince act a conspicuous part in the approaching events. Vol. ii. pp. 166-7.

A few days before the opening of the States General, some mischief-makers spread a report among the people that a manufacturer, named Réveillon, in the faubourg St. Antoine, had said that a mechanic could live on fifteen sols a day, and cried him down as an aristocrat. This Réveillon was an honest and industrious man, who had been himself a journeyman, and had risen in his trade through his abilities and good conduct; he employed 400 workmen, whom he had preserved from famine during the severity of the winter. But other mechanics, not his, joined to a troop of villains who had flocked to Paris from other parts of the country, attacked and plundered his house and manufactory on the 28th of April. The authorities, although warned in time, showed sad neglect in protecting this honest citizen. They sent at first a serjeant and thirty men, who were unable to keep off the plunderers; and it was not till the manufactory had been completely devastated and gutted, and every thing within burnt or destroyed, that a large body of the military made its appearance. The mob was then elated by its success, and by wine; the soldiers were assailed with volleys of stones and tiles; they fired and then charged with bayonet, and more. than two hundred persons were killed or wounded. But who, asks M. Droz, who were the instigators of these disorders? This is a mystery, which, like the fires in Normandy, before the revolution of 1830, has never been, and, perhaps, will never be unravelled. Either party accused the other. Some said that it was a trial of strength of the revolutionists, in order to accustom the populace to such feats; others pretend that the courtiers contrived this popular movement, in order to alarm the king, and

induce him to dissolve the States General. But all these are mere conjectures, destitute of proofs. That there were secret movers behind the scenes seems undoubted, for money was distributed plentifully among the lower orders of the faubourgs, and, on the eve of the riot, the wine-shops werefilled with people, who figured in the outrage of the next day. Six-franc pieces were found upon most of the persons arrested.

I have [continues our author] felt the importance of detecting, if possible, the secret movers of this first riot, which was the forerunner of many other and more lamentable ones. I have questioned many persons well acquainted with the intrigues of 1789, and I declare that I find myself still in uncertainty. It has been said that the English government had excited, underhand, this first tumult, that it kept agents in Paris, as we ourselves had had agents at Boston at the beginning of the American insurrection. Numerous investigations have been made to discover whether the English government had taken an active part in our first disturbances, but these investigations have produced no appearance of proof against that government. It was at a later epoch that the English meddled with our affairs. p. 170.

This is a candid and honest acknowledgment, refuting the thrice refuted but yet occasionally revived story of Mr. Pitt having been a main agent in the French revolution. They know little of the responsibility of an English minister, who can give belief to such insinuations. But, accustomed as the French have been to the perpetual plotting and intriguing of their own government in the affairs of other countries, the suspicion was one just suited to their habits of reasoning. From the times of Richelieu, who, while he was hunting down the Protestants in France, kept secretly in pay the Protestant German Princes, and even the Swedes, against the Emperor, and who, at a later period, gave money and encouragement to the Scotch Covenanters in rebellion against Charles I., the brother-in-law of his own king, to the times of the Directory, plotting, by means of its accredited agents in the capitals of foreign states, against the governments of those very states which were reposing on its professions of friendship, to the time of Napoleon, sowing dissensions in the court and family of his ally, Charles IV., of Spain; the French government has not shrunk from employing such means whenever it suited its purpose. Louis XIV. encouraged the insurgents of Messina, of Transylvania, of Hungary, of Ireland, against their respective sovereigns; he conspired, even in London, against Charles II., his most docile and subservient ally. He has acknowledged this last fact with his own hand: "I kept intelligences with the remains of Cromwell's faction, that through its influence some new disturbance might be excited in London:” (Instructions pour le Dauphin, vol. ii. p. 203.) He kept regiments of all nations, in which he admitted the malecontents and the political emigrants of every country in Europe. He had Germar, Swedish, Piedmontese, Corsican, Polish, and Hungarian