pump," the odds are that they would discern in that homely proposition some deeply-laid plot or "weak invention of the enemy." The ingenuity with which facts are distorted-the coolness with which they are denied—the persistent boldness with which false statements are uttered and reiterated, might furnish the curious in intellectual vagaries with studies, not of the most flattering kind, of the lengths to which prejudice will lead men who, apart therefrom, are truthful, courteous, and honourable. In seasons of peculiar excitement—as on the occasion of a county or general electionthis furor transgresses all the bounds of reason and decorum. An unsophisticated visitor from some region where liberty of the press is unknown might imagine, from the perusal of the effusions of a "decided" party journalist, that one-half of the population of the country consisted of the most demoniacal miscreants who ever cumbered the earth. But this impression would only last until he read the productions of an equally decided editor on the other side of the question, which lucubrations would inform him that the other moiety of the inhabitants were beings of still more detestable malignity and wickedness! Between both his ideas of the people amongst whom he was sojourning, coupled with the unanimous tone of eulogium adopted by the hostile editors when purporting to describe, not a party, but the whole community, he would be apt to lapse into a predicament of "most admired confusion." *

Having mentioned the names of a few of the principal provincial journals as specimens of their class, we beg it to be understood that we have done so, not as indicating in those specified any superiority to their neighbours, but simply because the names occurred to us

* Candour requires the memorandum that, to a certain extent, this feature of hyperbolical disparagement is to be found in the columns of metropolitan as well as provincial journals; but some of the latter carry their mystification of matters of fact to an extreme almost unknown in the London press. In most cases, the evil--so to call it-carries in some measure its own cure. It is the outpouring, somewhat exuberantly embodied, of energetic convictions on either side. Articles of strong party bias are usually accepted, not unconditionally, but cum grano salis, by intelligent adherents to the general views which they are intended to support. At the same time, it were devoutly to be wished that the most zealous of our partisan writers -amongst whom, we must again repeat, certain Irish journalists are conspicuous-would "please to moderate the rancour of" their-pens; but how much worse would it be if, as in "the good old times," accusation and attack were the privilege of one party, with no counter-check in the shape of retort and refutation!

on the instant. Other papers published in the towns mentioned by us, as well as those which appear in Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, and elsewhere, exhibit similar characteristics of energy, enterprise, and talent, in their management: and, on the whole, it may be affirmed that the provincial press of the present day is, in many respects, as well adapted to the peculiar duties which it has to fulfil, as are the London journals to the discharge of their own onerous and responsible functions.

Amongst the men to whom provincial journalism owes its present honourable position, the name of the late Edward Baines, of Leeds, deserves particular notice. We have heard that Mr. Baines first entered Leeds as a journeyman printer, and that he worked there for some time as a compositor on weekly wages. Industry, steadiness, and good sense, procured him in good time an opportunity of displaying his ability, and he was not a man to neglect that opportunity. Becoming manager and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury, he devoted the energies of a strong and perspicacious mind to the improvement of its various departments, and ultimately made it the model of what a first-class local newspaper should be. His exertions were rewarded by a signal degree of success, not alone in the high position attained by the paper, but in the agrecable nature of the result in a pecuniary point of view. If we do not mistake, he made a large fortune by his connexion with the Mercury; and to the same connexion is, in a great measure, attributed the extraordinary amount of personal influence which he possessed in Leeds, and its neighbourhood, for many years before his death. For some years he represented the borough of Leeds in the House of Commons, and on local questions his opinion had perhaps more weight than that of any other single individual. Since his death, the Mercury has been carried on by this gentleman's sons, with some slight variation from the course taken by their father. This variation consists in the introduction of a somewhat larger amount of attention to matters verging on the Messrs. character of religious controversy. Baines, it may be observed, have been long recognised as leading members and representatives of some of the Dissenting bodies. Without expressing any opinion as to its propriety or good policy, we may observe that the change just alluded to is very evident.

It has often been remarked, as a strange and unaccountable circumstance, that the mighty, wealthy, prosperous, populous, and intelligent

communities of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, &c., possessed no daily paper, whilst the comparatively poor and long-decaying city of Dublin could boast of two or three. Now a little reflection will serve to show that the circumstance is not by any means unaccountable. Until the passing of the Act of Legislative Union, the government of Ireland was in almost every important particular a thing wholly distinct from that of Great Britain. The existence of a separate parliament in Ireland made all the difference in the world between the past relations of the two islands, and those which exist at present. When the Irish Lords and Commons were sitting in Dublin, the proceedings of these bodies formed the subject of paramount interest in the sister country. That interest is now partly directed to the debates of the Imperial Parliament. It will moreover be remembered, that until towards the close of the last century the English and Scottish provincial towns, which are now the centres of such enormous wealth and population, were comparatively small and unimportant. As they grew in size and importance, the number of newspapers-though not of daily newspapers-increased. Thus, though Liverpool has not had a daily paper, it has papers published on every day in the week; and these papers, appearing weekly, semi-weekly, or otherwise, performed amongst them, in a capital manner-in a manner which could hardly be surpassed—the duty of furnishing the public with early and complete news. It is almost impossible to conceive a substantial improvement on the process through which, by his local papers, in combination with the expresses from London on all important occasions, the Liverpool merchant is put in possession of the current intelligence of the day. The same observation applies to Manchester, Glasgow, &c. We are aware that in many large towns local daily newspapers have lately been much talked of, and in some places have made their appearance. There is the Glasgow Daily Mail, for example. We do not utter a word against the prudence of these speculations; we merely wish to explain how it has happened that in the great provincial business marts of Great Britain people have gone on very well without local papers published daily, and have experienced no inconvenience from their absence, whilst in Dublin such papers have long existed. To our already sufficient explanation on this point may be added the fact, that to this day Ireland has her own set of politics, peculiar to herself, and in many respects separate from those of

Great Britain. The fact may be lamentable, but that it is a fact cannot be doubted.

The allusion which we have made to the existence of a parliament in the city of Dublin, as having led in the last century to the establishment of daily newspapers in Dublin, is confirmed by the position of the eminently intellectual city of Edinburgh. The Scottish parliament relinquished its separate functions, and merged into that of Great Britain, almost a century before the legislative union with Ireland, and many years prior to the appearance of a daily newspaper in any part of the empire. The centre of government was thus transferred to London before the idea of daily publications had been broached; and when the idea was at length carried out in London, the people of Edinburgh had already begun to look to England as the fountain of a large portion of the intelligence most interesting to them. Their weekly papers (some of which are now of a very venerable age) sufficed for the supply of local news. And thus it happened, that notwithstanding the intelligent inquisitiveness, which is a prominent characteristic of the North Britons, they felt no want of a daily journal. Whilst Edinburgh has been pre-eminent in the quality of her literary and philosophic publications, and literary enterprise has flourished there far more vigorously and persistently-in proportion to her size- than in London, the critics and quid-nunes of Modern Athens have been content with their excellent hebdomedal repositories of general news. They had no distinct and separate politics sufficiently exciting to require daily publications. If parliaments had been sitting in Edinburgh down to the close of the last century, or if Scotland had been the scene of that perennial agitation which has marked Ireland for its chosen home, the northern capital would have long since had its own daily newspaper.

In this general view of the position and functions of the provincial press of the empire, we have carefully abstained from any pronunciation on the merits of the many questions canvassed in these important expositories of public opinion. Our object has been to indicate the important and useful duties which they perform in combination with their brethren of the metropolis. The London paper deals more in generalisms, the provincial paper more in details; both together constituting an intellectual edifice the most complete, the most varied, the most salutary in its influences, that has ever existed in the world. If any complain of the license of the press-of

occasional instances of abuse of the freedom which it enjoys, we would confidently ask them to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages, and consider whether the perfect liberty which exists does not, by the

creation of healthful and vigilant competition, furnish the most efficient check on any systematic abuse of the tacit but well-defined conditions on which journalists hold their privileges.*

CHAPTER I.

THERE is much sage talk about men moulding the world, and recasting it after their own fashion; that may be the case sometimes, when the men are very great, and the world has fallen into an abyss of littleness. History presents few such examples; but usually the world moulds the man, fashions him as the potter does the clay, and impresses upon him the stamp of the period. This is the reason why men of the same age-however diverse their original natures may be-ever have some trait or shade of character in common; just as men of the same clime have the same kind of complexion, and men of the same race, like physical aspects: each historic cycle has its own tendencies, its own mode of thought, and even its own diseases. It has been remarked, for example, that at the time of the first French Revolution-when the world awoke, as it were, from a sleep of ages, and was stirred into frenzy by ideas, which, if not new, had lain buried long enough to seem new to that generation-the excitement bred diseases of the heart in unexampled numbers. It has been remarked that in the later revolutions of that country-which appears to be the seed-bed of revolutionary action for Europe-when the new ideas had been developed into theories more or less wild, the unusual strain upon thought caused diseases of the brain to preponderate far beyond their general amount. Thus it is that that aggregate called the world impresses upon each individual, unknown to himself, a general character which belongs to it rather than to him.

At the period of which we write, the effects of the first French Revolution were in their full bloom; men were mad with the hope of power: and it was an age of violence rather than of intellect, of action rather than of thought; power was sought for by physical means rather than by moral influence. France, especially, bred up and sent forth its hordes of adventurers, full of crude ideas of liberty; but blending with

those ideas an intense craving for personal aggrandisement; and to the observer who stood without the whirlpool of excitement, it appeared as though the time had come for a mental deluge, as potent in its own sphere as the old physical one; breaking down ancient institutions, rooting up old landmarks, destroying the social architecture of ages, and leaving the world to begin its progress afresh. The inundation, it is true, did not turn out so complete as that, but it has left plenty of marks by which we may trace its career.

The biographer is often under the necessity of writing pages which one might suppose to

*So universal is the recognition of the benefits which the community derives from the increased diffusion of newspapers, that, at the moment when we write, the government is seriously considering a proposal for the removal of the moderate impost now paid by journals containing political intelligence. The abolition of the penny stamp would doubtless lead to an enormous augmentation of the gross number of papers printed and sold. There is no doubt as to the desirableness of such an augmentation; and the main question at issue is, whether the process by which it is proposed to effect it may not lead to a deterioration of the quality of the article produced. On that point the arguments pro and con. are numerous and curious. Those who advocate abolition call attention to the fact, that since the stamp was reduced from fourpence to one penny, certain infamous prints, which were formerly very profitable to the persons who published them, have expired. To this it is replied, that the disappearance of the publications in question was owing partly to the vigorous prosecutions which were very properly instituted against them, for their attempts to extort money by attacks on private character, and partly to the improved tone of public morality, which effectually discountenances prints of evidently base character. The policy of retaining the penny stamp, by way of a tax upon newspapers, is generally disowned, even by those who are most reluctant to diminish the sources of public revenue in this season of financial emergency; but the stamp is supported by many journals as being only a fee equivalent for the accommodation of free postage. On the other hand, it is argued that a halfpenny charged only on copies actually passing through the post, would defray the expense involved in forwarding them to their destinations.

+ Continued from p. 265, vol. v.

be fragments of a universal history, rather than a part of the necessary record of an individual life; such pages-and we have just waded through one of them-may be skipped by the reader who cares for nothing but the story; but those who like to see the sources of action, as well as what the actions themselves were, will know that such pages are a proper part of the history of a life.

The good ship Rotterdam, in which Hubert and Lelia had embarked, was not by any means a type of progress; the character of the age had not in any degree effected her, she was the product of a nation not easily impressed by the whims and fancies of the time; the sturdy Hollander who built her was no flimsy theorist, departing from the manner of his forefathers, and seeking for new ways to do old things. As Jack Cleves-the only English sailor on board, a great, hairy, brownfaced giant, who acted as Van Tromp's matedeclared," she had enough timber in her to build two ships, and no end of jolly-boats;" she was bluff in the bows, and full in the sides, and almost as round as a tub. She had no idea-if ships can be properly said to have any ideas— of finessing with the waves, and dividing them cleverly and smoothly, like your new-fangled craft; she met them face to face, and took and gave hard knocks with her broad bows as the seas came rolling on, and rolled over them lazily, as though she was not to be hurried even by the elements.

There was a great similarity between the ship and her commander, Van Tromp, who sat, hour by hour, smoking his huge pipe tranquilly on the raised quarter-deck, in a state which it would be difficult to describe as either sleeping or waking, seldom moving a limb, seldom speaking, and leaving all the active business of the ship to his hairy deputy, Jack Cleves. This arrangement suited both parties admirably, for Jack was as active as his commander was inert; and was disagrecable, perhaps, only to the motley herd of Lascars, Chinamen, and Malays, comprising the crew; among whom Jack stalked about incessantly, with a formidable rattan under his arm, making up fully, by the volubility with which he swore in half-a-dozen of the languages of the East, and the activity with which he used his cane on the slightest occasion, for the taciturnity and sluggishness of the captain. But the Rotterdam, old-fashioned as she was, had a type of the age on board, with enough of the new spirit in him, to make up for the tardy progress of all the others put together.

This was Antoine Gavarni, an Italian by

descent, but a Frenchman by birth and adoption; and uniting in his own person the characteristics of both nations. He was tall, thin, sinewy, and restless; he had a haggard, spare, sunburnt face, with a prominent nose, flexible mouth, sunken cheeks, tangled, long black hair, and a pair of large, flashing, black eyes, which gleamed with a mixture of enthusiasm and recklessness. His age it would have been difficult to guess at first sight; he said it was twenty-eight, and though he looked many years older than that, it was probably correct; for on examination, the wrinkles on his high, narrow forehead, sloping back from his prominent, bushy eyebrows, looked more like the traces of passion, and the wear and tear of a turbulent, restless life, than the marks left by years of ordinary existence.

If we were to measure life by action, thought, effort-by all that men call experience, then we should say that some men were older at twenty than others at forty. My good friends, if you doubt that, we will go even further. Look at that street boy, on whose face premature cunning has been written with a heavy hand-stunted, warped, dirty, ragged, precocious, artful-how old should you say he is? Ten or twelve probably. Yes, if reckoned in years; but if reckoned in suffering, in vice, perhaps in crime, in self-dependence, in futile resource, how old then? As old as your boy of the same age, brought up at home, with as little knowledge of the street as may be? Aye, indeed, as old as you are yourself, in all but size, a man of the world. That boy is fifty by such counting, if he is a day.

His

No wonder Antoine Gavarni looked oldmuch older than he was. He had, or appeared to have, no concealments. With all the volubility of his adopted nation, he told you his history without an atom of reserve. father and mother died young, and at nine ho was cast upon the streets of Paris, and managed to live, sometimes honestly, sometimes dishonestly, he laughed when he avowed that—till he was eighteen or nineteen. Then begun the revolutionary ferment, into which he was drawn as a stray straw is sucked into a whirling eddy. He entered, with the hot vehemence which belonged to his race, into the contest between old authority and young liberty. He shouted as loud as any at the Jacobin clubs; he fought in the streets, and helped in the attack on the Bastile; he threw his red cap into the air, and hurrahed when royal blood spouted forth bencath the guillotine. Since then he had seen two campaigns, and fought duels without end. He pulled up the sleeve of

his jacket, and showed scars upon his lean, sinewy arm; he opened his breast, and pointed to cicatrices upon his swarthy, hairy bosom; he pushed aside his tangled hair, and laid his finger on a broad mark on his brow; this he got at Toulon; that in the Italian campaign; and that from Pierre, the fencing-master, whom he had run through the body in return. Antoine Gavarni had seen the world; no wonder that he looked so old! He told Hubert all this rapidly, as a Frenchman, with all the gesticulation of an Italian, with all the confidence and composure of a man perfectly satisfied with himself; this and much more about liberty and reason, and the fall of the rule of kings, and of the overthrow of religion-which he called antiquated superstition-and liberty.

Jack Cleves stood and looked on, won for a time from his activity, although he did not understand a word of the language which Antoine spoke; and even Van Tromp opened both his eyes at once, and manifested an appearance of dim, languid interest. Antoine had tried to tell it all to Van Tromp before, but obtained no other sign of attention than a sort of grunt from the sleepy Hollander, and an extra whiff from his pipe. He had tried, too, to make Jack Cleves a confidant; but there the attempt was even more hopeless,-for Jack, though he could speak Dutch fluently, did not know a word of French; he only, with a hint more British and nautical than polite about his "eye," declared that he could not understand "that 'ere Frencher's 'lingo;'" and went on switching his rattan with that immeasurable contempt for foreigners in general, and frogeating Frenchmen in particular, which is characteristic of a true-bred Briton. But Hubert understood French, and listened with interest. He did not like the man, but was attracted by his career. He felt that there was something in common between them; he thought that Antoine might possibly be useful to him; and as Lelia was kept below in her berth by sea-sickness, and he was unoccupied, he continued the conversation. "Where are you journeying to now?" he asked.

"Ask the wind," Antoine answered, with a reckless laugh, "where it is going-where fate leads. me!"

There was just enough in the tone and manner of the answer to tell Hubert that now the garrulous Antoine was practising a reserve. He was willing enough to speak freely of the past, but for some reason he was anxious to keep his own secret as to the future. That was no business of Hubert; but precisely perhaps because it was not his business, he was

"Yes," Antoine replied, "by the desert; and the sons of the desert are all the richer, and I all the poorer, for my journey. I had as much baggage as loaded two camels; clothes and arms fit for an Indian prince; and a horse that might well carry the first general of France. But three days ago, my friend, a troop of swart, ragged, turbaned Arabs, each with a long spear levelled at me, rushed from behind some sand hillocks, dashed at us as fast as their horses could carry them, killed my guide, and unhorsed me in a twinkling. Splendid irregular cavalry those fellows would make!" "How did you escape?"

Antoine showed a set of white teeth as he laughed out his reply, "I am an old soldier, monsieur; a troop of Austrians rode over me once, and I never moved, though one of their heavy-footed horses trampled on and crushed my arm-better that than to have had a sword stroke on the skull if one had attempted to rise, or being made a prisoner by those dullbrained Germans. When my Arabs dismounted me, I lay still, feigning death; and they found the baggage rich enough to make them forget to search me."

"But you lost all your property."

"All," said Antoine, with a half melancholy look; "except," here he opened his vest, and showed a heavy belt which he wore next his person, "except this. After all," he continued, after a moment's pause resuming his lighthearted laugh and manner, "it was booty; it came as it went. I picked it up myself, and Messieurs the Bedouins have only robbed second-hand."

Hubert laughed too at his new acquaintance's whimsical way of treating the thought of the misfortune, and asked, "How did you manage to escape?"

"When the Arabs went off," said Antoine, "I kept still till they were out of sight, and then I got up; the rogues had taken my horse, but that of my dead guide, I suppose, was not good enough for them, they left that, and here I am. I have always found that fate is only unkind by halves.”

"That is contrary to common experience," Hubert said; "but perhaps your fate is different from that of other men."