The school, the style, and language of M. Taglioni père was quite different; it demanded a graceful facility of motion, lightness, especially elevation, du ballon; but it did not permit to his daughter a gesture or an attitude which betrayed an absence of decency or shame. He used to say to her, "Women and young girls must see you without blushing; let your dance be austere while it is tasteful and replete with delicacy.'

Vestris wished his pupils to dance as at Athens, like bacchantes; M. Taglioni insisted upon a simplicity in dancing; which was almost mystical and religious. The one taught Pagan dancing; it might be said that the other preferred Catholic dancing. Mademoiselle Taglioni danced differently and better than any one had ever danced before her. "Her name," says the learned director and enthusiastic admirer, represents a whole school of dancing, and will live in the annals of the art known to the ancients, and which modifies itself according to the laws, manners, and religion!" Long may that school live, is all we can add; it teaches that grace is not essentially licentious, nor to be charming does it require to be frivolous.

DE QUINCEY'S "MISCELLANIES."*

THIS, the third volume of Mr. de Quincey's "Selections"—each volume, however, being complete in itself (albeit we understand not their taste who would be satisfied with the single-blessedness of such completeness)

-But we must draw breath after that parenthesis, and begin again. This, then, being volume the third of "Selections, Grave and Gay," is admirably adapted, at once by the variety and the unity of its contents, to the study of those who may be, as yet, slenderly conversant, or even quite unacquainted, with the genius of the inimitable author. It forms a kind of epitomised sample of his discursive powers-a "cunninglydevised" trysting-place of his most salient characteristics. GRAVE and GAY still weave the warp and weave the woof-still, as in this varicoloured life, cross, and intertwine, and relieve one the other-meeting us, like the being "beautiful and bright" in Coleridge's romaunt,

-sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny glade.

The author's grandeur of speculative thought, wandering at its own high will through eternity of time, and infinitude of space; his pathos, deeper than ever plummet sounded, deeper than (too deep for) tears; his scholarship, mastered with so much labour, but wielded with such sprightly ease; his narrative art (in his hands really an art), in which every paragraph is so matterful and every epithet so telling; his stores of illustrations, culled from "a' the airts," and ingeniously introduced in all sorts of places; his pensive humour, now dry, now unctuous, alternating and

Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative. By Thomas de Quincey. London: Groombridge. 1854. (Forming the third volume of De Quincey's "Selections, Grave and Gay.")

commingling the grave and gay; his forays of wit, his quaint flourishes of fancy, his adroit but never malicious passes of satire; all are fairly, if not fully, represented in this volume of Miscellanies.

Dull, dense, matter-of-fact people-people of "imperfect sympathies" -people who recognise no line of beauty that is not straight, and whose literary vision is exercised from an angle anything but acute, though so narrow in its range-people who know little Latin beyond Cui bono (which they are quoting in season, out of season), and who never could see the joke of the senior wrangler's objection to Milton's epic, But what does it prove?-good, worthy, solid, stolid, stupid souls of this order, will probably enough be "stumped" by the very first subject in the present volume-the Military Nun of Spain. We can make nothing of it, you may hear them say. They are perplexed as to its drift. They resent the dubious tactics of the narrator, who leaves them uncertain whether or when they are to laugh or cry. Fairly started as they suppose in a paragraph grave even to tragedy, abruptly they are thrown into a perfect quandary by interjectional sentences, allusions, fancies, boldly and broadly ludicrous. Endeavouring to accommodate themselves to this new inspiration, and to enter into the mirth which they presume is in store for them, they are again flung back by their author's seemingly capricious recurrence to tones of solemn reverie and passionate earnestness. Shakspeare himself, bounding from sleepless Macbeth to a sleepy Porter,-Shakspeare himself, interrupting the stern, sad contemplations of Hamlet by the songs of the churchyard Clown,-Shakspeare himself, who intersperses the latest agonising words and thoughts of Cleopatra with the quips and quirks of the "rural fellow," who brings her "the pretty worm of Nilus, that kills and pains not,"-Shakspeare himself, in this eccentric orbit, this lawless mood of his, is not more unaccountable, not to say offensive, to a starched and straitlaced Frenchman, imbued with the prejudices of pedantry, and saturated with the traditions of the schools, than is the Opium-eater in his "miscellaneous" mood, in his truant disposition, to a non-plussed literalist of the kind just supposed.

How the story of this Military Nun of Spain would fare at the hands of a prosaic matter-of-fact man, scribbling right on, as the crow flies, jealous or incapable of pause, or parenthesis-errantry, or excursusbreak, or interval-additament, or episode, we know not, nor care to know. Enough, that told as Mr. de Quincey tells it, with its fulness of moving accidents by flood and field, it is a singularly interesting tale, garnished with an odd intermixture of reflections, suggestions, and nondescript details, often piquant, often affecting, not unfrequently

Solemn and sweet as when low winds attune
The midnight pines.

Happy Catalina, to have met, centuries after her life's fitful fever, with
such a biographer! A right admiring and affectionate one withal-
chivalric and cordial as could have been any compatriot and contemporary
of her own. 66
Bonny Kate! Noble Kate!" he once exclaims, and
seems again and again on the point of repeating the benison and the
homage "I would there were not two centuries laid between us, that
I might have the pleasure of kissing thy fair hand." But for the two
centuries, Kate's lips would be at the service of such a biographer, and a
hundred welcomes too.

What a description is that of Kate's passage over the Andes! How burn our hearts within us as we mark her fearful encounter with wasting solitude and frost, and the sudden apprehension of deliverance that dawns on the poor wanderer. "Frightful was the spasm of joy which whispered that the worst was over. It was as when the shadow of midnight, that murderers had relied on, is passing away from your beleaguered shelter, and dawn will soon be manifest. It was as when a flood, that all day long has raved against the walls of your house, has ceased (you suddenly think) to rise; yes! measured by a golden plummet, it is sinking beyond a doubt, and the darlings of your household are saved. . . . . Yes, Kate is leaving behind her the kingdom of frost and the victories of death. Two miles farther there may be rest, if there is not shelter. And very soon, as the crest of her new-born happiness, she distinguished at the other end of that rocky vista, a pavilion-shaped mass of dark-green foliage-a belt of trees, such as we see in the lovely parks of England, but islanded by a screen (though not everywhere occupied by the usurpations) of a thick bushy undergrowth. Oh, verdure of dark-olive foliage, offered suddenly to fainting eyes, as if by some winged patriarchal herald of wrath relenting-solitary Arab's tent, rising with saintly signals of peace, in the dreadful desert, must Kate indeed die even yet, whilst she sees but cannot reach you? Outpost on the frontier of man's dominions, standing within life, but looking out upon everlasting death, wilt thou hold up the anguish of thy mocking invitation, only to betray? Never, perhaps, in this world was the line so exquisitely grazed, that parts salvation and ruin. As the dove to her dovecot from the swooping hawk -as the Christian pinnace to Christian batteries, from the bloody Mahometan corsair, so flew-so tried to fly towards the anchoring thickets, that, alas! could not weigh their anchors and make sail to meet her-the poor exhausted Kate from the vengeance of pursuing frost.

"And she reached them; staggering, fainting, reeling, she entered beneath the canopy of umbrageous trees. But, as oftentimes, the Hebrew fugitive to a city of refuge, flying for his life before the avenger of blood, was pressed so hotly that, on entering the archway of what seemed to him the heavenly city-gate, as he kneeled in deep thankfulness to kiss its holy merciful shadow, he could not rise again, but sank instantly with infant weakness into sleep-sometimes to wake no more: so sank, so collapsed upon the ground, without power to choose her couch, and with little prospect of ever again rising to her feet, the martial nun. She lay as luck had ordered it, with her head screened by the undergrowth of bushes, from any gales that might arise; she lay exactly as she sank, with her eyes up to heaven; and thus it was that the nun saw, before falling asleep, the two sights that upon earth are fittest for the closing eyes of a nun, whether destined to open again, or to close for ever. She saw the interlacing of boughs overhead forming a dome, that seemed like the dome of a cathedral. She saw, through the fretwork of the foliage, another dome, far beyond, the dome of an evening sky, the dome of some heavenly cathedral, not built with hands. She saw upon this upper dome the vesper lights, all alive with pathetic grandeur of colouring from a sunset that had just been rolling down like a chorus. She had not, till now, consciously observed the time of day; whether it were morning, or whether it were afternoon, in her confusion she had not distinctly known. But now she whispered to herself- It is evening:' and what lurked half

unconsciously in these words might be-The sun, that rejoices, has finished his daily toil; man, that labours, has finished his; I, that suffer, have finished mine.' That might be what she thought, but what she said was, 'It is evening; and the hour is come when the Angelus is sounding through St. Sebastian's.' What made her think of St. Sebastian's, so far away in depths of space and time? Her brain was wandering, now that her feet were not; and because her eyes had descended from the heavenly to the earthly dome, that made her think of earthly cathedrals, and of cathedral choirs, and of St. Sebastian's chapel, with its silvery bells that carried the Angelus far into mountain recesses. Perhaps, as her wanderings increased, she thought herself back in childhood; became pussy' once again; fancied that all since then was a frightful dream; that she was not upon the dreadful Andes, but still kneeling in the holy chapel at vespers; still innocent as then; loved as then she had been loved; and that all men were liars, who said her hand was ever stained with blood."

We might, had we space, quote as a pendant, by way of contrast, to this fragment of the grave, a bit of the gay, in which the writer so liberally indulges, always with a tender humanity however, and a fast friendship for Kate. But limits defy us; and sooth to say, we prefer the grave to the gay passages in this strange eventful history-and many, we surmise, will mistake the seeming levity and familiar chit-chat with which the adventures are, perhaps on the whole prejudicially, interfused.

A curiously different subject follows, viz., "The Last Days of Kant" -originally forming part of the too-brief series in Blackwood, called "Gallery of the German Prose Classics." This account of the closing years of the great transcendental philosopher, which is based on the narratives of Wasianski, Jachmann, Borowski, and others, excited considerable interest at its appearance seven-and-twenty years ago; since which time the improved and constantly advancing knowledge of Kant, on the part of English readers at large, must be such as to warrant our predicting for it a greatly advanced attraction. It is to be hoped that the author's other writings in elucidation of Kant's philosophy and miscellaneous works will be given in future volumes; the narrative speciality of the present volume is, we presume, the reason why none of these valuable exegetical articles are wrought up with this memoir of the professor's ultimate and penultimate years. We should have been glad to see one volume of the series simply devoted to Mr. de Quincey's contributions to the illustration of German literature: perhaps he may yet be induced to adopt the suggestion. The extent of his labours in this field has never been duly recognised; and others, whom really he anticipated in point of time and surpassed in degree of merit, have been lauded as the almost exclusive interpreters of Teutonic belles lettres and metaphysics. There is plenty to make up a volume from his scattered criticisms in the London Magazine, Tait, and Blackwood-comprising notices of Lessing, Kant, Göthe, Jean Paul, &c. and it would be a volume, we submit, greatly in request, in these days of awakened and widely-spread attention to the characteristics of Deutsch literature and life. If only to assert his own claim, as a leader among those who actually aroused this interest, such a volume is one we fain would see. And its

distinctive character would fall in with the apparant plan according to which the several tomes are distributed.

After "Kant" comes a truly indigenous dissertation, such as none but its writer could put on paper, on "The System of the Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse's Telescopes." It might seem written to prove that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step, and that the writer, for his part, can take the step without straining. It is an imbroglio of the magnificent and the ludicrous. Now we career through the awful grandeurs of dim worlds half realised, and now listen to wayward sallies of fun run riot, mad as a March hare, tricksy as Robin Goodfellow, and not a whit more particular in the choice of jokes. Nothing can be finer, in sustained majesty of style, than the bravura at the end--a glorious specimen of the author's command of diction, and his power to transfigure the glory of another into a new and greater glory, till the former seems to have no glory by reason of the glory that excelleth. Richter himself would have assented, or we mistake the matter and the man.

Then, again, we come to "Joan of Arc"-an enthusiastic tribute to the purity, devotedness, self-sacrifice, and singleness of eye, of the daughter of Domrémy. Her own country can show no such tribute. Nothing so generous, so indignant, so "tender and true." Her trial is

described and denounced in words that burn. "Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence, and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as that lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century,* confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!" And what fatal intensity of reproach, what pathos and energy of upbraiding protest, in the concluding apostrophe to the Bishop of Beauvais! Withering scorn and redeeming pity meet together; and it is beautiful to see how mercy is made, even here, to rejoice against judgment.

"The Casuistry of Roman Meals" is one of those compounds of rare scholarship and lively gossip in which the author is perhaps without a fellow. We see the severe student unbending himself, and freely imparting of his well-hived stores to others, in a manner so amusing, and with aids and appliances so thoroughly gustful, that the veriest ignoramus in classical lore is caught, fixed, converted; indeed, is in danger of coming to believe himself a crack classic, so much has he learned that was new to him, in so scant a space. Mr. de Quincey makes no parade of his reading; his contempt of mere pedantry is patent enough, as his raids against pedants and mere scholars as such are many and merciless; but the variety and breadth of his erudition are evidenced whenever the subject requires or allows of its appearance, and we are reminded of another who could, says the rhymer,

In his capacious mem❜ry bottle

The lumb'ring lore of Aristotle ;

Through Fichte, Schelling, Kant, go on straight,

Like Leslie, or La Place, demonstrate

In allusion to the still retained practice in France, of judges examining the prisoner against himself.