land, only to find the imperial ultra-protester, within one little
month from the protestations, arranging for the immediate
partition, with the Czar, of the Turkish dominions. Look,
again, at Benjamin Constant, launching his vehement philippic
against Napoleon, in the Journal des Débats on the eve of
the Emperor's return from Elba, and declaring, "Never will I
crawl, like a base deserter from power to power. Under
Louis. XVIII. we enjoy a representative government. Under
Bonaparte we endured a government of Mamelukes. He is an
Attila, a Gengis Khan!" And then we read how, a few days
after this fulmination, Constant, the inconstant, became a
councillor of state under this Attila, an active supporter of this
Gengis Khan. Another ground of indictment against Napoleon
is found by Alison in the eagerness of his protestations to
Russia, that he had no way connived at the election of Berna-
dotte to the throne of Sweden, when next vacant.
"The ex-
treme anxiety which Napoleon evinced for some time after-
wards to convince the court of St. Petersburg that he had
taken no concern in this election, only renders it the more
probable that he was in reality at the bottom of the transac-
tion." The asseverations commenced by the younger Pennyboy,
in Jonson's "Staple of News," are declined and dismissed, by
the elder, who knows their worth, with this summary and sug-
gestive caution:

"No vows, no promises; too much protestation
Makes that suspected oft, we would persuade."

A

FLEETING SHADOWS.

JOB xiv. 2.

S man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; as he is said to come forth like a flower, only to be cut down, so is it further said of him, that "he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." His days are like a shadow that declineth. He himself is gone as a shadow that fleeteth

away. For man is vanity, his days are as a shadow, saith the psalmist. And the preacher, whose text is vanity of vanities, all is vanity, finds vexation of spirit in meditations on man, all the days of whose vain life he spendeth as a shadow.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! The exclamation was that of a great statesman, amid the excitement and the contests of public life, when there reached him news of the sudden death of a fellow-candidate and colleague. Shadow-hunted shadows. The pursued and the pursuers-the game and the sportsmen-shadows all. Burke's exclamation was often in the mind of the late Sir James Graham, and, towards the close of his life, not unfrequently on his lips.

“Ορῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο, πλὴν

Είδωλ ̓, ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν, ἤ κούφην ΣΚΙΑΝ.”

O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane! Men were ever of old, and they are found to be now, the willing victims of illusion in all stages of life: children, youths, adults, and old men, all, as Emerson puts it, are led by one bauble or another. "There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe." For instance, the intellectual man requires a fine bait, while the sots are easily amused. "But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge." Shadows before, and shadows behind, and all fleeting. False glozing pleasures, to adopt George Herbert's diction, are the shadowy lure,

"casks of happiness,

Foolish night-fires, women's and children's wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,

Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,

Embroider'd lies, nothing between two dishes,

These are the pleasures here."

Marcus Antoninus, in his "Meditations," harps on the note of shadow-hunting or shadow-hunted shadows. You will soon be reduced to ashes and a skeleton, he keeps telling himself;

N

1

and even if you leave a name,—what is a name? what is in a name? Vox et præterea nihil. The shadows you, a shade, pursue, are miserably shadowy. The prizes of life are, he says, so paltry, that to scuffle for them is ridiculous, and puts him in mind of a set of puppies snarling for a bone, or of the contests of children for a toy. Wherever he looks, the wide world over, and in whatever age of its history, he sees abundance of people very busy, and big with their projects, who presently drop off, and moulder to dust and ashes. The freshest laurels wither apace, and the echoes of Fame are soon silenced. The "insect youth" that people the air and make it murmurous with busy life,—is not their close resemblance to the children of men one of poetry's common-places?

"To Contemplation's sober eye,

Such is the race of man ;

And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.

"Alike the busy and the gay,

But flutter through life's little day,

In fortune's varying colours drest;

Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,

Or chilled by Age, their airy dance

They leave, in dust to rest."

Having asked to be told her fortune by the Wise Wight of Mucklestane Moor, Miss Ildeston, in Scott's story, is told by the cynical recluse, that it is a simple one; an endless chase through life after follies not worth catching, and when caught, successively thrown away-a chase, pursued from the days of tottering infancy to those of old age upon his crutches. "Toys and merry-making in childhood-love and its absurdities in youth-spadille and basto in age, shall succeed each other as objects of pursuit: flowers and butterflies in spring,— butterflies and thistledown in summer,-withered leaves in autumn and winter-all pursued, all caught, all flung aside." Que vont elles faire de si grand matin, Cleopas asks his demonguide, concerning ces personnes whose early rising and eager bustle have caught and fixed his attention. "Ce que vous

souhaitez de savoir, reprit le Démon, est une chose digne d'être observée. Vous allez voir un tableau des soins, des mouvements, des peines que les pauvres mortels se donnent pendant cette vie, pour remplir, le plus agréablement qu'il leur est possible, ce petit éspace qui est entre leur naissance et leur mort." Telle est la vie, as most of us live it.

"Dream after dream ensues,

And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed,"

writes William Cowper. Not at all in the same measure or manner, but pretty much to the same effect, writes the picturesque poet of Bells and Pomegranates:

"It is but to keep the nerves at strain,

To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again,-

So the chase take up one's life, that's all.

While, look but once from your farthest bound,

At me so deep in the dust and dark,

No sooner the old hope drops to ground

Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark
I shape me-ever removed."

There is much that is suggestive in the Abbé Gerbet's discoursings in the Catacombs at Rome. "Ce dernier calque de l'homme," he says, in what has been called a commentary on Bossuet's mot, that the corpse of a man becomes a je ne sais quoi, for which there is no name in any language—“ cette forme si vague, si effacée, à peine empreinte sur une poussière à peu près impalpable, volatile, presque transparente, d'un blanc mat et incertain, est ce qui donne le mieux quelque idée de ce que les anciens appelaient une ombre. Cette forme est plus frêle que l'aile d'un papillon, plus prompte à s'evanouir que la goutte de rosée suspendue à un brin d'herbe au soleil ; un peu d'air agité par votre main, un souffle, un son deviennent ici des agents puissants qui peuvent anéantir en une seconde ce que dix-sept siècles, peut-être, de destruction ont épargné. Voyez,-vous venez de respirer, et la forme a disparu. Voilà la fin de l'histoire de l'homme en ce monde." What shadows we

are! Ashes to ashes ends, even in Westminster Abbey, man's noblest story, and dust to dust concludes his noblest song.

"O death all-eloquent! you only prove

What dust we doat on, when 'tis man we love."

Hawthorne's Gervayse Hastings is a type and symbol, when he describes himself as depressed by a haunting perception of unreality; as one to whom all things, all persons, are like shadows flickering on the wall. "Neither have I myself any real existence," he says, "but am a shadow like the rest." And the end-not to say the moral-of his story may serve to remind us of the Abbé Gerbet's words. Gervayse Hastings is seated with other guests at a feast-of very odd fellows—over whom is suspended the skeleton of the oddest of all, the founder of the feast. As the speaker ceased his confession of shadowy experiences, "it so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry bones fell together in a heap. The attention of the company

being thus diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived on turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on the wall." The woe of this old man was, that to him the world to come was all shadow too.

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck expresses her belief that in youth and middle age there is often a real conviction of the transitory nature of the most established temporal things, but that in old age it is not merely a conviction, but a vivid palpable reality, and that the eternal mountains do then indeed appear near at hand; while all the campaign around seems faded into shadowy distance; and she inclines to say, like the monk, who for forty years had exhibited the picture of the Last Supper, that he had seen so many pass away, that himself and those he spoke to seemed a shadow, while the blessed institution of the Holy Supper stood before him alone a reality. But many are the young hearts that feel as Margaret Hale felt, in Mrs. Gaskell's story, when to her life seemed a vain show, so unsubstantial, and flickering, and fleeting, and when "it was as if from some aërial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there