his favor and brought him home again, had they not been kept down by the rest of Europe. How can we compel ourselves to believe such wild improbabilities?

Mr. Whately's Historic Doubts, of which we have given an imperfect abstract form a very clever satire on Hume's "Argument Against Miracles," were originally composed to antagonize the influence of that celebrated treatise. Its revival at this time-for the American publishers are now printing the fourth edition from the eleventh London edition-with postscripts added by the author bearing on recent events, shows that the ingenuity and delicate satire of the work are fully appreciated by the public. We have read Historic Doubts relative to Columbus and Charlemagne, whch were highly amusing; and the arguments by which King Alfred is proved to have been an imaginary character, are well worth the attention of a leisure hour; but this essay of Mr. Whately's, whether as regards the native interest attaching to the subject, or its satirical and effective travesty of the disquisition of Hume, or its ingenuity and mock-gravity, is much superior to any other production of its kind which has, as yet, come in our way. We can confidently recommend it as an antidote to the clever myths touching the long-lost Capet, which Messrs. Hanson and Hawks have recently re-vamped with so much-and with such amusing-eclat.

One of the latest postscripts to the Historic Doubts, suggests an additional doubt as to the probability of future confidence being placed in the present chroniclers of the French empire, and with the reader's permission we will use it as a postscript to this article:

"The public has been of late much interested, and not a little bewildered, by the accounts of many strange events said to have recently taken place in France and other parts of the Continent. Are these accounts of such a character as to allay, or to strengthen and increase such doubts as have been suggested in the foregoing pages.

"We are told that there is now a Napoleon Bonaparte at the head of the government of France. It is not, indeed, asserted that he is the very original Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The death of that personage, and the transportation of his genuine bones to France, had been too widely proclaimed to allow of his re-appearance in his own proper person. But 'uno avulso, non deficit alter.' Like the Thibetian worshippers of the Grand Lama-who never dies, only his soul transmigrates into a fresh body-the French are so resolved, we are told, to be

under a Bonaparte, whether that be a man, or a 'system,' that they have found, it seems, a kind of new incarnation of this their Grand Lama, in a person said to be the nephew of the original one.

"And when, on hearing that this personage now fills the high office of President of the French Republic, we inquire-very naturally-how he came there; we are informed that several years ago he invaded France in an English vessel—the English having always been suspected of having Bonaparte ready, like the winds in a Lapland witch's bog, to be let out on occasions at the head of a force, not of six hundred men, like his supposed uncle, in his expedition from Elba, but of fifty-five (!) with which he landed at Boulogne, proclaimed himself Emperor, and was joined by no less than one man. He was, accordingly, we are told, arrested, brought to trial, and sentenced to imprisonment: but having some years after escaped from prison, and taken refuge in England, he thence returned to France. AND so the French nation placed him at the head of the government.

"All this will, doubtless, be received as a very probable tale by those who have given full credit to all the stories I have alluded to in the foregoing pages".-Historic Doubts, page 66.

THE "RAPPERS."

THE contrast decidedly odd is;

A critical reasoner finds

First, "spirits" gone out of their bodies,
Then "mediums" out of their minds!

Too deep for the miners and sappers
Of letters the secret, mayhap,

Why all the professional rappers,

In Wall street, are not worth a rap.

But what, in this mystical knocking,
Our reason most staggers and shocks,
Is to find that a marriage provoking,
Erst EREBUS wedded to Nox.

And another strange fact in these knocks is,
That those who our citizens dish

Are avowedly cunning as FOXES,

And slippery--even as FISH.

POLITICAL NIGHTMARES.

LET us talk. Let us be merry! This is a holiday article. Our editor in chief has promised to wink at trifles. We are to be regarded as reviewers on furlough, with unlimited ideas to spend just as we see fit. We are emancipated slaves of the lamp-literary" fillibusters" for this night only-political rangers bound to hit something by dint of firing at everything. Walk up, ladies and gentlemen!-we say ladies, because even ladies may read politics such as we develope. Our show is ready-the monsters are dressed up the admission is ten minutes' patience, and the exhibition is worth three courses of Thackeray's lectures, and a dessert in the bargain.

Do you see that lady asleep? Her name is Europa. She is old enough to be in her dotage, but being a goddess, is still, technically speaking, a fine girl. Her pale beauty bears the trace of many passions. She has lived, and seen some trouble in her time, and has been accustomed to the best society, and the most awful domestic dissensions. She has now fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. Nations and continents are like men, they must sleep off their fatigues; and she has been up late o' nights, dancing the dance of death for some time past. Now, for a brief space, she snatches an uneasy slumber, and dreams-dreams horribly-or rather, let us say, is dominated by an insane nightmare. Monsters and absurd phantoms dance before her vision. Well may she laugh and groan by turns at the outrageous carnival of revolution! Behold the goblin drama!

The first scene is laid in France, time, 1848. A fat shopkeeper with an umbrella and a head like a pear, is seated on a throne. His name is Louis Phillippe. He is the reputed offspring of an Italian jailor, and is no more a Bourbon than you are, or than Eleazar Williams. No matter; there he is. The throne was put up at auction to the greatest liar. Louis lied highest, and there he is, and has been for seventeen years. His house of business is at the Tuilleries. He is a sleeping partner in the firm of Rothschild & Co.; he dabbles in railways, works the telegraph, and makes investments in Spanish liquorice in order to set up his son Montpensier in trade. It is said that the old chap has saved no end of money, and that every state on the face of the earth is in debt to him. The amount VOL. I.-NO. IV. 22

of his funds is reported at a fabulous figure. Nobody knows how many old stockings full of odd silver he has secreted around. Behind his chair stands his head clerk, Guizot, a grave, saturnine little Jew, as cool as an iceberg and as cunning as the father of lies. But he serves a master who would outwit the d-l himself, and therefore of course outwits Guizot. So cunning is Louis that he finally overreaches himself. He becomes bankrupt at the very acme of his fortune. The last feather breaks the camel's back, and he and Guizot lay it on. Smash goes the camel, and down tumbles the firm of Louis Phillippe & Co. Valmy and Jemappes won't save him, though he has been telling everybody, any time for the last seventeen years, how he fought at either for the old republic in the days of Robespierre the incorruptible, until he (L. P.) ran away along with General Dumouriez, and gave lessons in French to young gentlemen. But that was long, long ago, when he was a boy; and as his supposed father was beheaded in consequence, he

had better have said less about it.

In the next scene, we see an old gentleman-one Mr. Smith -cutting across country in an absurd manner, without a hat, and with no money in his pocket, but still instinctively clutching an umbrella. We, who are in the secret, know of course that this unfortunate old Smith is no less a personage than an ex-king of the French running away from his creditors. He owes several millions, and the Parisian bourgeois always hate a man who will not pay his debts, especially when he is a king, and has an immense salary, besides unlimited perquisites. He had better have followed the old maxim of honesty the best policy. He had better have robbed less and reigned longer. He had better have let people give reform dinners, even at the hazard of their getting drunk and kicking up a row afterwards. But he did not do it, and he is now Mr. Smith, running away to England to die obscurely at a poor relation's house, in a very miserable and undignified manner. As for head clerk Guizot, he sees that some facetious dog has dipped his finger in red paint and smeared up "Death to rogues on the door of his office, so he takes the hint, changes clothes with his flunkey, and performs the operation vulgarly known as "absquatulating" in an equally undignified manner, affirming, like his master, that he, too, is an Englishman, and that his name is Walker.

Meanwhile the Parisians are up and fighting. They are in the Tuilleries, which they have taken by storm, owing to the fact of everybody running away, instead of defending them, and they are in very high spirits, wondering what next to do.

Two editors of the Democratie Pacifique, one an Irishman, the other a Frenchman, are seated at a table, signing proclamations of the Republic on their own responsibility. Governments provisional are being got up at all the newspaper offices. Jules Janin and Paul de Kock are quarrelling as to who shall be president. Thiers, like a little monkey, sits crouched up in a corner till the fighting is over-Lamartine is making a speech in the house of deputies. Luckily he and his friends make a rush and arrive first at the Hotel de Ville. Albert Ouvrier and Louis Blanc astonish the self-elected government by dropping upon them through a skylight, and establish themselves at one end of the table in the council-room. Albert Ouvrier considerately heightens his little friend's seat by means of a pile of MSS. which the great (minded) organizer of labor luckily carries under his arm. The republic is established. Everybody is happy in the expectation that every impossibility will be immediately performed. The government declare their intentions of going through a course of political miracles right off, and "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" are inaugurated on all the walls and public buildings. Speculators in pigments realize money, and house-painters have a good time. Vive la Republique, democratique et sociale!

Everybody is a republican-is, was, and ever will be a republican. Thiers is a republican; so is De Larochejaquelein; so is Alexandre Dumas; so is Mademoiselle Rachel; so are all the nobility in the Faubourg St. Germain, and all the bankers in the Chausée D'Antin, and the Jews in the Palais Royal (now National), and the porters and the coachmen, and the chiffoniers and the pickpockets, they are all remarkably republican, and fraternise immensely on the strength of it.

Lamartine, as hero of the farce, makes speeches of prodigious eloquence. His images are infinite, his facts invisible. Ledru Rollin, in his character of Robespierre-Danton-Murat cum-Mirabeau the second, shows plenty of force, with a woful paucity of strength. George Sand writes his proclamations and smokes cigars with him in midnight conclave. Armand Marrast, of the "National," makes himself generally useful, and finally edits-we mean presides over-the national assembly. Cremieux does himself justice as minister of that department. Arago, the astromoner, makes astrological calculations and guides the navy by the stars, besides predicting future events for his colleagues, who do not believe him. Above all, Louis Blanc sits in state with his committee of workmen at the Luxembourg, and organizes labor by dint