cence of Versailles, the still brilliant remains of the monarchical pride of Louis XIV. and the polished and superb dignity of our nobility on the one hand, and on the other hand the almost rustic apparel, the plain but firm demeanor, the free and direct language, of the envoys, whose antique simplicity of dress and appearance seemed to have introduced within our walls, in the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the eighteenth century, somes sages contemporary with Plato or republicans of the age of Cato and of Fabius. This unexpected apparition produced upon us a greater effect in consequence of its nobility, and of its occurring precisely at the period when literature and philosophy had circulated amongst us an unusual desire for reforms, a disposition to encourage innovations, and the seeds of an ardent attachment to liberty."* M. Lacretelle, a French historian, discourses in a similar strain: "Men imagined they saw in Franklin a sage of antiquity come back to give austere lessons and generous examples to the moderns. They personified in him the republic of which he was the representative and the legislator. They regarded his virtues as those of his countrymen, and even judged of their physiognomy by the imposing and serene traits of his own. Happy was he who could gain admittance to see him in the house which he occupied. This venerable old man, it was said, joined to the demeanor of Phocion the spirit of Socrates." And the German Schlosser says: "Franklin's appearance in the Paris salons, even before he began to negotiate, was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe. Paris at that time set the fashion *Memoirs of Count Ségur, vol. i. p. 101. for the civilized world, and the admiration of Franklin, carried to a degree approaching folly, produced a remarkable effect on the fashionable circles of Paris. His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man and the apparent humility of the Quaker procured for Freedom a mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths." Other chroniclers of the period bear similar testimony. With regard to the rustic apparel, Count Ségur was in error: "Neither Silas Deane nor Dr. Franklin was capable of such an affectation. Nevertheless, Franklin did venture upon one bold and wise innovation: he resisted the tyranny of the hairdressers; he positively would not again submit to the daily nuisance of pigtail and powder. His white hair being now too scanty for the protection of his head, he was accustomed to wear at this time (but soon discarded it) an odd-looking fur cap which did impart to hist appearance something that might pass for rusticity. One of the first letters which he wrote in Paris contains a humorous description of his appearance: "Figure me, in your mind, as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty, only a few years older; very plainly dressed, wearing my thin gray, straight hair, that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris! I wish every lady and gentleman in France would only be so obliging as to follow my fashion, comb their own heads-as I do mine-dismiss their friseurs and pay me half the money they paid to them. You see, the gentry might well afford this; and I could then enlist these friseurs, who are at least one hundred thousand, and with the money I would maintain them, make a visit with them to England, and dress the heads of your ministers and privy counsellors, which I conceive at present to be un peu derangées." A JOURNEY. JAMES PARTON. DIARY OF ADAMS, SEPTEMBER 9, 1776. afraid of the evening air. Dr. Franklin replied, "The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without-doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.' Opening the window and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr. Cooper, in which he had advanced that nobody ever got cold by going into a cold church or any other cold air, but the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox. However, I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that I would run the risk of a cold. The doctor then began a harangue upon air and cold, and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philoso this day Mr. Franklin, Mr. Edward Rutledge and Mr. John Adams proceeded on their journey to Lord Howe, on Staten Island, the two former in chairs and the latter on horseback. The first night we lodged at an inn in New Brunswick. On the road and at all the public-houses we saw such numbers of officers and soldiers strag-phy together; but I believe they were equalgling and loitering as gave me, at least, but a poor opinion of the discipline of our forces and excited as much indignation as anxiety. Such thoughtless dissipation at a time so critical was not calculated to inspire very sanguine hopes or give great courage to ambassadors. I was, nevertheless, determined that it should not dishearten me. I saw that we must, and had no doubt but we should, be chastised into order in time. The taverns were so full we could with difficulty obtain entertainment. At Brunswick but one bed could be procured for Dr. Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window, The window was open, and I, who was an invalid and afraid of the air in the night, shut it close. "Oh," says Franklin, "don't shut the window; we shall be suffocated." I answered I was ly sound and insensible within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep. I remember little of the lecture except that the human body, by respiration and perspiration, destroys a gallon of air in a minute; that two such persons as were now in that chamber would consume all the air in it in an hour or two; that by breathing over again the matter thrown off by the lungs and the skin we should imbibe the real cause of colds-not from abroad, but from within. I am not inclined to introduce here a dissertation on this subject. There is much truth, I believe, in some things he advanced, but they warrant not the assertion that a cold is never taken from cold air. I have often conversed with him since on the same subject, and I believe, with him, that colds are often taken in foul air in close rooms, but they are often taken from cold air abroad too. I have worth preserving. Lord Howe had sent often asked him whether a person heated with exercise, going suddenly into cold air or standing still in a current of it, might not have his pores suddenly contracted, his perspiration stopped, and that matter thrown into the circulation or cast upon the lungs which he acknowledged was the cause of colds. To this he never could give me a satisfactory answer, and I have heard that in the opinion of his own able physician, Dr. Jones, he fell a sacrifice at last to his own theory, having caught the violent cold which finally choked him by sitting for some hours at a window with the cool air blowing upon him. The next morning we proceeded on our journey, and the remainder of this negotiation will be related from the Journals of Congress, and from a few familiar letters which I wrote to my most intimate friends before and after my journey. The abrupt, uncouth freedom of these, and all others of my letters in those days, requires an apology. Nothing was farther from my thoughts than that they would ever appear before the public. Oppressed with a load of business, without an amanuensis or any assistance, I was obliged to do everything myself. For seven years before this I had never been without three clerks in my office as a barrister, but now I had no secretary or servant whom I could trust to write, and everything must be copied by myself or be hazarded without any copy. The few that I wrote upon this occasion I copied merely to assist my memory as occasion might demand. There were a few circumstances which appear neither in the Journals of Congress nor in my letters which may be thought by some over an officer as a hostage for our security. I said to Dr. Franklin it would be childish in us to depend upon such a pledge, and insisted on taking him over with us and keeping our society on the same side of the water with us. My colleagues exulted in the proposition, and agreed to it instantly. We told the officer if he held himself under our direction he must go back with us. He bowed assent, and we all embarked in His Lordship's barge. As we approached the shore His Lordship, observing us, came down to the water's edge to receive us, and, looking at the officer, he said, "Gentlemen, you make me a very high compliment, and you may depend upon it I will consider it as the most sacred of things." We walked up to the house between lines of guards of grenadiers looking fierce as ten Furies and making all the grimaces and gestures and motions of their muskets, with bayonets fixed, which, I suppose, military etiquette requires, but which we neither understood nor regarded. The house had been the habitation of military guards and was as dirty as a stable, but His Lordship had prepared a large handsome room by spreading a carpet of moss and green sprigs from bushes and shrubs in the neighborhood, till he had made it not only wholesome, but romantically elegant; and he entertained us with good claret, good bread, cold ham, tongues and mutton. MAN'S LIFE. JOHN ADAMS. MAN'S life's a book of history: The leaves thereof are days; The letters, mercies closely joined; sant. O RABEQUISTA, THE FIDDLER. N a dark night of winter there was a wedding-ball in a village near the foot of the mountain Estrella. The wedding-dinner was over at two o'clock in the afternoon, and from that hour till midnight the clattering dance of wooden shoes had been almost incesDuring all this time the merriment had been kept alive by liberal supplies of green wine, by love and by a fiddle, the never-failing guest and companion of every merry meeting in all the hamlets of this neighborhood. The fiddler, who possessed nothing in the world but a musical ear (for which we do not know how much percentage he paid out of the hours of industry) had been one of the numerous candidates for the bride; but having been supplanted by the pecuniary charms of his happy rival, he was here on this occasion-no unhappy man, either, but in good humor with his ill-fortune. A philosophical fiddler, he had not only had the courage to attend the marriage ceremony with out concealing himself behind one of the church pillars and rushing forth at the critical moment with a romantic cry of despair, to the dismay of the assembly, but he had helped to twine the arches of pine-boughs for the passage of the triumphant couple. At dinner he had filled repeated bumpers to the health of both, and also of a tawny rustic lass who happened to sit next to him; and all the evening afterward, and all the night, he animated by his quaint old minuets and his inexhaustible store of old-fashioned tunes the fun of the dancers, male and female, of that economical club whose vagaries were superbly illuminated by four classical iron lamps stuck against four newly-whitewashed walls. Some malicious judges of motivesfor there are such even in the country-did not fail to set down his gratuitous perseverance to a lurking desire of putting off as long as he possibly could the fatal moment when the company should disperse and the doors of his ungrateful fair one exclude him from her presence. Others merely supposed that his zeal was inspired by a newly-awakened fancy for another pair of bright eyes, and that he was naturally unwilling to quit a scene where the lady of his thoughts saw him unquestionably playing the first fiddle. As to us, without rejecting or admitting either of these opinions, we think it more orthodox to believe that his pure self-love as an artist is a sufficient explanation. Paganini, in the theatre at Paris or on the stage of the opera-house in London, was not a greater personage than our poor fiddler in a farmhouse of the Estrella mountain. During one of those brief intervals of the ball, when the din of music and feet ceased only to give play to the much more uproar & ious clamor of conversation, our hero-whom the performer. The bow of Cupid, to use we shall call Baptist-found his opportunity the phraseology of the poetico-arcadian school, of insinuating a sly compliment into the ear never twanged off more sharp and quick arof her to whom his looks had already been rows than did the bow of a fiddle on this still more eloquent. A smile and a modest night. The bridegroom, fearing that the look of pleased acknowledgment gave him transport might not subside before sunrise, fresh force for a second attack: he dared to availed himself of a momentary pause to whisper the word love; he saw her blush, and call Baptist apart into the garden, and there, once more he saw her smile. He ventured after some trifling apologetical preamble, with to seize a pretty little hand of this damsel which Baptist would have willingly dispensed, fifteen years old, and from the moment of gave him to understand, in as few words as that endured audacity he considered his felici- his embarrassment and the sense of his disty certain. He asks her name: Anna; her courtesy would permit, that it was time to condition: single, her residence: another close the entertainment and for the guests to farmhouse, distant about half a league, in a retire. Baptist, who, like all happy lovers, locality that he is unacquainted with, but had kept wholly out of view the fact that which she describes so minutely that it is such pleasure must have an end, and in whom evident his visit there will be acceptable. (trust the hearts of men!) the thought of his first love, now hopeless, was already partially eclipsed by the radiant image of his new star-Baptist stood undecided for an instant whether he should obey the master of the house, thanking him for his good cheer, or break the fiddle about his ears. A visit to the cellar, to which the host sagaciously invited him, gave him time to recover his temper; and, thanks to a copious draught that prepared him for the journey, the inward strife that had arisen between the two spirits that contend for mastery in the human breast terminated in the victory of the good angel. During this absence of the life and soul of the party the greater number of the guests disappeared, and Anna, urged by her companions to withdraw, and persuaded, as were the rest, that Baptist would not come back, sadly set out on her way home. "In our house,” adds Anna, "there live only my mother and myself. My mother keeps house; I tend our flock on the mountain in the daytime, and at night work with my mother. Sometimes we sit together at our hearth with nothing new to say to one another, which is dull; now and then we have the company of some young women who live about a quarter of a league from us. I came with two of them to-day, and we are to return together. But for them I should have missed this wedding, and that would have been a pity." The dancing was renewed; Baptist surpassed himself, if that were possible. The fiddle seemed animated with all the fire, all the brilliant freshness, of a newly-rising passion. It imparted more life, more ecstacy, to the dancers; and Anna, every time that the mazy whirl brought her near to the musician, showed by a look, a movement, an air, that she felt something more than gratitude for Returning to the room and finding it deserted by her who alone had filled it to his eyes, Baptist wished his host good-night. |