1

1

PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION AT THIS OFFICE:

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE II. These very interesting and valuable sketches of Queen Caroline, Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Pope, and other celebrated characters of the time of George II., several of which have already appeared in the LIVING AGE, reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine, will be issued from this office, in book form, as soon as completed.

A HOUSE OF CARDS.

THE BRAMLEIGHS OF BISHOP'S FOLLY, by CHARLES LEVER.
OCCUPATIONS OF A RETIRED LIFE, by EDWARD GARRETT.
PHINEAS FINN, THE IRISH MEMBER, by MR. TROLLOPE.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars.

"

Second "

Third

20
32 "
96

50

80

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN | disappointed, injured, high-spirited wife,

OF GEORGE II.

NO. VI. THE YOUNG CHEVALIER.

THERE are some landscapes in the world, in which foreign memories, alien to the place, and in some cases less touching and momentous than the natural local associations, thrust themselves in, and obscure to the spectator at once the nationality and individual character of the spot. The English traveller, when he climbs the height of Tusculum, has a scene before him full of the grandest memories of a past which is the common inheritance of the whole civilised world. His boyish lessons, his youth ful studies, if they have done anything for him, have qualified him to identify every hillock, and hear a far-off voice out of every tomb. Or if it is not old but modern Rome that charms him, there are a hundred lights on that Campagna, a thousand influences of sound and sense about, enough to move the least imaginative soul; Rome lying distant on the great plain; and the dome that Buonarotti hung between earth and heaven standing out the one thing visible, full of

sometimes in open, sometime in tacit rebellion, and an unfaithful, exacting husband, weak, but tyrannical, wicked, yet religious as princes sometimes are permitted to be. Strangely enough, though Queen Clementina, as she was called, would seem to have been of a higher and stronger character than her husband, there is no reference to her in any of her son's letters, and little in the contemporary records. James, whatever his sins were, and they were many, seems to have kept, at least, the affection of his children. But it is impossible to imagine a worse atmosphere for the growth of young lives. The melancholy dispossessed Family was surrounded by a little coterie of a court-a community which, under the best of circumstances, has much of the pettiness, personal squabbles, rumours, and gossip of a village, embittered and set on edge in this case by the fact that its members were discontented and broken men, whose hopes and hearts were elsewhere, and to whom intrigue and conspiracy were daily bread. Plots and counter-plots of all kinds went on in the unquiet

suggestions of the treasures lying under household. Every day a gloomy train atand about it, are sufficient to overbrim tended the mimic king across the Piazza to the eager brain. How is it that, as we the Church of the Holy Apostles, where he stand upon the wistful plateau with that went to pay his devotions. Meddlers of great scene before us, Rome and her mem- all kinds, ruined soldiers, broken-down ories fade from our eyes? "Shrivelling statesmen, shifty priests, surrounded the like a parched scroll," the plain rolls up boys thus growing up to an inheritance of and passes away. The Highland hills all false hopes and idle greatness. The bells black with storms, the lonely, desolate, of the Santi Apostoli, and many a church northern seas, the wild moors and moun- beside, kept ringing in their young ears tain-passes, rise up a sad phantasmagoria with unbroken monotony; the flat ceremoover the grey olives and clustering vines. nials of the priestly court, of which they It is the wild pibroch that rings in our were half-dependents, mocked the exiles. ears, it is the heather that rustles below Now and then they gave a concert at their our feet, and the chill of the north that palace, to which the wandering English breathes into our faces. Why? Because cubs, with their "governors," of whom yonder in the Duomo a line of inscription Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Wortley has caught the traveller's eye, obliterating give so uncomfortable a description, came Frascati and Rome, and all Italian thoughts: in crowds to stare at the handsome gallant "Karolus Odoardus, Filius Jacobi." These lad, condescending to play for their amuseare the words, and there lies the high ment, who was, so far as blood and heredi

heart mouldered into dust, which once beat against the breast of the Young Chevalier! It was in Rome that the life of Charles Stuart began, as it ended, in exile, in an unhappy distracted household, torn asunder by domestic dissensions, divided between a

tary right went, the undoubted heir of England; sometimes they rushed forth across the Campagna to cheat their inactivity with the commotion of a hunting-party-poor copy of the stir of life. And this while out in the world cannons were roaring, battles fighting. Young William of Cumberland, as yet unmarked by his terrible nickname, was getting himself glory at Dettingen at the head of those English who were not his countrymen, that he should have the credit of them. It requires little imagination to conceive how this contrast must have rankled in the high, courageous, adventurous soul of the young Stuart, rightful leader of these Englishmen, who, but for the folly of his fathers, might have been at their head instead of the Hanoverian. He was five

futile old Pretender - and yet with a heart to be wrung for his boy, like other men.

It was on a night in January 1744-the 9th-that the young Chevalier set forth on one of the most extraordinary, splendid, and hopeless expeditions ever recorded in history. "A little after midnight," a heavy coach, followed by a groom leading another horse, rattled through the stony Roman streets to the Lateran Gate. The keys had been left over night with the captain of the guard, that no hindrance might be given to

and-twenty, and had been, no doubt, for the Prince's hunting-party, on which his years consuming his heart in the tedious bustle of the ecclesiastical capital. All his tle Prince Henry, he who was afterwards

biographers echo the general note of wonder how a prince, trained under the soft Italian skies, amid the supposed effeminacy of Italian customs, could have been fit for the hardships of his after-life. But Charles, it is evident, had been trained, by such experience as that climate and those customs give, to bear heat and cold, the two great extremes, and had taken pains to inure himself to long walks and scant fare, as a hunter among the hills would naturally do: At last, in the depths of winter in the year 1744, the long-expected call came to the eager young man. France, with plans of her own in her mind, had suddenly bethought herself of the Stuarts, by way, not

eagerness carried him forth so early. Gen

Cardinal York, was left behind asleep, and, knowing nothing, set out leisurely in the morning to meet the fiery young Nimrod who had preceded him, little thinking on what wild chase it was that his elder brother had gone forth. The chaise and the faithful groom behind went on, across the wintry Campagna in the deep darkness, till they came to the stony causeway, everlasting like all old Roman work, which ascends the Alban hill. There, under some pretext, the young Adventurer left his companion in the coach and mounted his horse. The story goes on to tell how he stood still "at the turning," alone with his faithful Norman groom, until the heavy coach, with Dunbar

necessarily of restoring them, but of occu-in it, who for his part pretended to know pying the attention of England with her nothing, lumbered on upon the resounding

own affairs, and making her recall not the troops only, but money, with which an obsequious Ministry enabled King George to subsidise all the world. The summons was secret and sudden, known only to the father and son and their most intimate counsellors. Out of the brief overwhelming excitement of that moment a few words come to us full of natural feeling. "I trust, by the aid of God," said the youth, trembling with hope and eagerness, as he set out on his enterprise, to the old man who had gone

road towards the hunting-tryst. When the carriage was gone, Charles Edward turned his horse's head the other way, and, facing towards Frascati, towards Florence, and Paris and England, "gave his bridlereins a shake," and escaped into the world. When this romantic incident occurred, the artificial world held on its babbling course at home as if there had been no such startling primitive chances in existence. The armies and commanders of England were on the Continent fighting for other

through that phase and left his hopes be- contested successions, and hiring German hind him ages ago in the cold blank of the troops to aid their arms. The Ministers past, "that I shall soon be able to lay three in London were busy making treaties and crowns at your Majesty's feet." The father granting subsidies, struggling to please answers tenderly, out of his life-in-death, King George, whose heart was rather that "Be careful of yourself, my dear boy. I of an Elector of Hanover than of a King of would not lose you for all the crowns in England. The world of fashion fluttered the world," he says, with, one can imagine, and amused itself as one reads in Horace what smile and what sigh! Weak, feeble, Walpole's letters, its Tories pretending to