DOUBTS AS TO ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN. 61 the rabid animal possesses the virulent property which occasions hydrophobia, when we know that so many persons have been inoculated with it without incurring the disease ? Shepherd. That's geyan puzzlin ! North. Secondly, my ingenious friend in the Westminster observes, that even on those who have been supposed to have been affected by this saliva, the time at which the symptoms appear is altogether indeterminate-contrary to all that we know of the action of poisons. Why-it is believed that it may be injected into a wound, and lie there harmless for months, nay years-till all at once it breaks out, and you are more insane than Sirius. A strange sort of saliva indeed this so capricious and whimsical in its action-whereas all other poisons may be depended on, and do their work subject to certain general regular and acknowledged laws. What say you to all this, James? Shepherd. Never having received a regular medical education, sir, I'm dumbfoundered, and haena a word to throw to a dowg. But are a' thae fearsome accounts o' the heedro naething but lees? North. Many of them most miserably true. But my friend believes that the horrid malady originates in the nature and shape of the wound, and not from any virulent matter injected into it; a nerve has been injured, and tetanus sometimes ensues direful spasmodic affections terminating in death. Any deeply-punctured wound may produce the disease called hydrophobia in man. Shepherd. Ae conclusion to be drawn frae the whole seems to be, that dowgs are mair dangerous animals than is usually suspected, since a dowg that bites you when he's in his perfect senses, is just as likely to gie ye the foby as when he snaps at ye in the hicht o' his delirium in tongue-lolling madness. North. Accidents will happen-but no very great number of people are bitten by dogs in their perfect senses; and it is only some wounds that occasion tetanus by injuring a nerve. This is certain, that in some of the few authenticated cases of the disease called hydrophobia in man, occasioned by the bite of a dog, there was not the least reason in the world for supposing the dog to have been what is called mad.—But fill your glass, James, to the memory of Bronte. [It is drunk in solemn silence. 62 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. Shepherd. Let us hae about half-an-hour's talk o' politicsand then hae dune wi' them for the rest o' the nicht. o' France? What North. James, all men who had visited France with their eyes and ears open since the accession of Charles—now exKing-knew that a struggle was going on-only to cease with the overthrow of one of the parties-between the Royalists and the Liberals. Each party strove to change the charter given by Louis XVIII. into so many dead letters. But the Liberals-as they are called-were from the beginning far more unprincipled than the Royalists were even at the end; and had Charles and Polignac not acted as they did, in the matter of the ordonnances,1 the monarchy had been virtually destroyed by their enemies. Shepherd. Do you really say sae, sir. North. Two courses were open to Charles-to abdicate the throne rather than sit there a shadow-or to support the ordonnances by the sword. That would not have been easy, but it would have been possible; and had Charles been the tenth part a Napoleon, it would have been done-and his enemies having been overawed by the army, the streets of Paris had not been stained with one drop of blood. Shepherd. Oh! but he was a weak man! 1 "The famous ordonnances, which were the immediate cause of the overthrow of the Crown, and the ruin of the elder branch of the house of Bourbon, were six in number, but the three first only were of material importance. The first suspended the liberty of the periodical press, and prohibited the publication but of such journals as were authorised by Government. The license was to be in force only for three months, and might be recalled at any time. It applied to all pamphlets below twenty leaves. The second dissolved the new Chamber, on the allegation of the arts which had been used to deceive the electors as to the real intentions of the Government. The third, on the preamble of the necessity of reforming the Electoral Law according to the principles of the constitution, and to remedy the evils which experience had brought to light, and of the powers applicable to such cases vested in the King by the 14th article of the Charter, reduced the number of deputies to 258, being the number fixed by the 36th article of the Charter: the colleges of departments were to elect an equal number of representatives with those of arrondissements; and the electoral franchise was reduced to the possession of property paying the requisite amount of direct taxes by the exclusion of the suffrage founded on patents; the duration of the Chamber of Deputies was fixed at five years; and the colleges of departments, composed of the fourth of the electors paying the highest amount of direct taxes, were to choose at least a half in the general list of candidates proposed for the colleges of arrondissements. The prefects were re-invested with all the powers with which they had been invested THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. 63 North. I do not know that he is a weak man, James; but on this this crisis of his fate emergency - he reckoned without his host-and thence his second visit to Holyrood. Shepherd. I will ca' on him neist time I come to Embro'; and if he's no at hame, leave my caird. North. Liberty, my dear Shepherd, is like the air we breathe-if we have it not, we die. You have heard these words before-and you and I have felt their meaning on the mountain-top. Slavery is a living death. Shepherd. That's a bull North. But of all slaveries the worst is that which, dancing in chains, supposes itself Freedom. Shepherd. But didna ye admire, sir, the behaviour o' the Mob o' Paris? North. An old man like me, James, is chary of his admiration. In my youth-some forty years ago I was too prodigal of it—and the sun I worshipped set in a shower of blood. The French-with many and great defects—are a gallant a noble people; but the mob that fought—and they fought well-though victorious over but feeble oppositionduring what I leave others to call the Three Glorious Days— were not the French People—and I should be ashamed of prior to the act of 1828. Neither the intervention of third parties, nor an appeal to the ordinary courts of law, were permitted to interfere with the prefects in the preparation of the electoral lists. "It has been already stated that the Polignac Cabinet acted most unwisely in making themselves even the aggressors on the public liberties, and still more imprudently in doing so with but inadequate preparations for a contest. But if the question be put, whether the ordonnances were absolutely illegal, and justified the resistance they experienced? a very different opinion must be formed. According to our ideas in England, where any invasion of established law, except by the act of the three branches of the legislature, is illegal, they unquestionably were a breach of the constitution. But that was not the constitution of France, either according to the letter of the Charter or the interpretation put upon it by the united voice of the whole Liberal party in France. The 14th article of that deed expressly recognised an overruling power to alter the constitution as residing in the sovereign, to be exercised when the safety of the state imperatively required it. Thenceforward it was only a question of circumstances whether the existing state of affairs called for or warranted the exercise of that dictatorial power; and it had repeatedly been exercised, under circumstances less critical than those in which Charles X. was at last placed, not only without any opposition from, but with the cordial and loud approbation of, the whole Liberal party in France."-ALISON'S Europe, 1815– 1852, vol. iii., pp. 503, 585. 64 EDINBURGH MEETING IN ITS CELEBRATION. myself were I to waste any of my enthusiasm on such actors, prepared long beforehand to play their parts-yet, after all, little better than puppets-though the machinery worked well -and was triumphant. Shepherd. I thocht you wadna attend the Meeting.' North. Had I been a republican, I would; and have declared my delight and exultation at the downfall of a great and ancient monarchy. Probably I should have thought it a despotism, and would have sung odes and hymns of thanksgiving when all its towers and temples toppled into dust. Some such men, I believe, were at the meeting here—and believing them to be conscientious and consistent, they have my respect. Shepherd. And mine too-and I howp they'll be proud o't. North. Other men, again, were at the meeting, James, who love what they call a limited monarchy- and limited the French Monarchy is now to their hearts' content! Till Louis Philippe began to reign (to reign!) eyes never saw a cipher. Shepherd. I hae mair power in the Forest-under the young Dyuck, I verily believe though I'm no his grieve-than the son of Egalité now has in Paris, under old Lafayette and that sweet innocent invention for preserving freedom, the National Guard. North. Good, James. They therefore lifted up their voices on high-like sounding harp and tinkling cymbal, and were applauded to the echo. Shepherd. Sae far a' seems to hae been richt. Then what hae you to compleen o', sir? North. I complain of nothing-not I, James-I have left my goutat John-o'-Groat's House-and my complacency and peace of mind are perfect. But oh! the superasinine stupidity of all those sumphs and sumphesses-those Jack and Jeanie donkeys -each row above row, rising up with ears of still-increasing longitude, till those at the acme swept the spiders from the cornice, and crushed the undevoured flies asleep on the ceiling. Shepherd. Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw!—What do you mean? 1 A meeting held in the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, to celebrate the French Revolution of 1830. North. Tories leaning on the bosom of Whigs, and encircled in the arms of Radicals! Church-and-King men shouting their praises of altar-pullers-down, and throne-shatterers, and of all the fierce and ferocious foes of Old Establishments, with mattock and pickaxe razing them all from their very foundations, and howling in each cloud of dust that went darkening up the heavens! Shepherd. Puir infatuated fules! I'm ower angry to pity them-nor ought leal men and true to accept now the peaceoffering o' their humiliation and their shame. North. People there are, as you well know, James, who never can move one single step, either backwards or forwards, unless led by a finger and a thumb, gently or rudely pinching their nose. No will of their own have they-for will and reason go together and only the intelligent are free. More abject slaves never trooped together in a gang before the whip of the overseer to the sugar-canes, than those slaves of both sexes, that sat in our Assembly Rooms, in chains flung over them by masters who despised them too thoroughly to honour them with any portion of their hatred, shouting and bellowing at the prospect of dominion and empire about to be given to them who would trample them into dust. Shepherd. Oh! the ninnies! North. Why not even though the mob of the Faubourg St Antoine had, as if by some seeming miracle, performed their parts like angels-angels of blood at best-and thereby set at defiance all our knowledge, all experience, all history of human mobs, which the Liberty-and-Equality-men, and the old and young Anarchists, have the audacity to ask us to believe-ought they who swear by the BRITISH CONSTITUTION to have uttered one word in eulogy of the "Three Glorious Days," till they knew something more of what was likely to be the upshot of it all-if indeed ignorance could be supposed so dense as to be impenetrable to the lurid lights already gleaming all round the horizon "With fear of change Shepherd. What'n a face! Dinna fa' intil a fit. Tak a swig. Na I didna tell you to drink out o' the bottle —that's spirits—but to kiss the jug. If you speak that way VOL. III. -- green E |