horse that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels! Scott's descent was like that of a spent projectile; rapid, straight down ;-perhaps mercifully so. It is a tragedy, as all life is; one proof more that Fortune stands on a restless globe; that Ambition, literary, warlike, politic, pecuniary, never yet profited any man.

Our last extract shall be from Volume Sixth; a very tragical one. Tragical, yet still beautiful; waste Ruin's havoc borrowing a kind of sacredness from a yet sterner visitation, that of Death! Scott has withdrawn into a solitary lodging-house in Edinburgh, to do daily the day's work there; and had to leave his wife at Abbotsford in the last stage of disease. He went away silently; looked silently at the sleeping face he scarcely hoped ever to see again. We quote from a Diary he had begun to keep in those months, on hint from Byron's Ravenna Journal: copious sections of it render this sixth volume more interesting than any of the former ones:It

and more; and one sees not to what wise goal | commend, will utter no word of blame; this it could, in any case, have led him. Book-one word only, Wo is me! The noble warseller Constable's bankruptcy was not the ruin of Scott; his ruin was that ambition, and even false ambition, had laid hold of him; that his way of life was not wise. Whither could it lead? Where could it stop? New farms there remained ever to be bought, while new novels could pay for them. More and more success but gave more and more appetite, more and more audacity. The impromptu writing must have waxed even thinner; declined faster and faster into the questionable category, into the condemnable, into the general condemned. Already there existed, in secret, everywhere a considerable opposition party; witnesses of the Waverley miracles, but unable to believe in them, forced silently to protest against them. Such opposition party was in the sure case to grow; and even, with the impromptu process ever going on, ever waxing thinner, to draw the world over to it. Silent protest must at length come to words; harsh truths, backed by harsher facts of a world-popularity overwrought and worn out, behoved to have been spoken; such as can be spoken now without reluctance when they can pain the brave man's heart no more. Who knows? Perhaps it was better ordered to be all otherwise. Otherwise, at any rate, it was. One day the Constable mountain, which seemed to stand strong like the other rock mountains, gave suddenly, as the ice-bergs do, a loud-sounding crack; suddenly, with huge clangor, shivered itself into ice-dust; and sank, carrying much along with it. In one day Scott's high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, landless, a bankrupt among creditors.

Abbotsford, May 11, (1826.)— withers my heart to think of it, and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek confidence and counsel from that ear, to which all might be safely confided. But in her present lethargic state, what would my attendance have availed?

and Anne has promised close and constant intelligence. I must dine with James Ballantyne to-day en famille. I cannot help it; but would rather be at home and alone. However, I can go out too. I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness which struggles to invade me."

Edinburgh, Mrs. Brown's lodgings, North St. David Street-May 12.-I passed a pleasant day with kind J. B., which was a great relief from the black dog, which would have worried me at home. He was quite alone.

"Well, here I am in Arden. And I may say with Touchstone, When I was in a better place;' I must, when there is occasion, draw to my own Baillie Nicol Jarvie's consolation

-One cannot carry the comforts of the Saut Market about with one.' Were I at ease in mind, I think the body is very well cared for. Only one other lodger in the house, a Mr. Shandy-a clergyman; and, despite his name, said to be a quiet one.'

It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely, like a brave proud man of the world. Perhaps there had been a prouder way still; to have owned honestly that he was unsuccessful then, all bankrupt, broken, in the world's good's and repute; and to have turned elsewhither for some refuge. Refuge did lie elsewhere; but it was not Scott's course, or fashion of mind, to seek it there. To say, Hitherto I have been all in the wrong, and this my fame and pride, now broken, was an empty delusion and spell of accursed witchcraft! It was difficult for flesh and blood! He said, I will retrieve myself, and make my point good yet, or die for it. Silently, like a proud strong man, he girt himself to the Hercules' task, of removing rubbish-mountains, since that was it; of paying large ransoms by what he could still write and sell. In his declining years too; misfortune is doubly and trebly unfortunate that befalls us then. Scott fell to his Hercules' task like a very man, and went on with it unweariedly; with a noble cheerfulness, while his lifestrings were cracking, he grappled with it, and wrestled with it, years long, in deathgrips, strength to strength;-and it proved the May 15.-Received the melancholy intellistronger; and his life and heart did crack and gence that all is over at Abbotsford." break: the cordage of a most strong heart! Abbotsford, May 16.-She died at nine in Over these last writings of Scott, his Napoleons, the morning, after being very ill for two days Demonologies, Scotch Histories, and the rest, criti-easy at last. I arrived here late last night. cism, finding still much to wonder at, much to Anne is worn out, and has had hysterics, which

"May 14.-A fair good-morrow to you, Mr. Sun, who are shining so brightly on these dull walls. Methinks Methinks you look as if you were looking as bright on the banks of the Tweed; but look where you will, Sir Sun, you look upon sorrow and suffering.-Hogg was here yesterday in danger, from having obtained an accommodation of £100 from James Ballantyne, which he is now obliged to repay. I am unable to help the poor fellow, being obliged to borrow myself."

"May 22.Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty, merely because it is painful; but I wish this funeralday over. A kind of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem to be doing and talking."

May 26.

Were an enemy coming

returned on my arrival. Her broken accents were like those of a child, the language as well as the tones broken, but in the most gentle voice of submission. "Poor mamma-never return again-gone for ever-a better place." Then, when she came to herself, she spoke with sense, freedom, and strength of mind, till her weakness returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a stranger-upon my house, would I not do my best to what was it then to the father and the hus- fight, although oppressed in spirits; and shall band? For myself, I scarce know how I feel; a similar despondency prevent me from menta. sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock, some exertion? It shall not, by Heaven!" times as weak as the water that breaks on it. I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family-all but poor Anne; an impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which | break the heart that must bear them alone.Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.

"I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not my Charlotte-my thirty years' companion. There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic-but that yellow mask, with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of extreme pain. Mine go back to a period of comparative ease. If I write long in this way, I shall write down my resolution, which I should rather write up, if I could."

* "I

"Edinburgh, May 30.-Returned to town last night with Charles. This morning resume ordinary habits of rising early, working in the morning, and attending the Court.” * finished correcting the proofs for the Quarterly; it is but a flimsy article, but then the circumstances were most untoward.-This has been a melancholy day-most melancholy. I am afraid poor Charles found me weeping. I do not know what other folks feel, but with me the hysterical passion that impels tears is a terrible violence-a sort of throttling sensation-then succeeded by a state of dreaming stupidity, in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can actually be dead.”—Vol. vi. pp. 297, 307.

This is beautiful as well as tragical. Other scenes, in that Seventh Volume, must come, which will have no beauty, but be tragical only. It is better that we are to end here.

And so the curtain falls; and the strong Walter Scott is with us no more. A possession from him does remain ; widely scattered; yet attainable; not inconsiderable. It can be said of him, "when he departed he took a Man's life along with him." No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity, and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the May 18.- * Cerements of lead and of Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the wood already hold her; cold earth must have joy a!! fled from it;-ploughed deep with laher soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not bour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; the bride of my youth, the mother of my chil- we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Waldren, that will be laid among the ruins of Dry-ter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and burgh, which we have so often visited in gayety and pastime. No, no."

sad farewell.

VARNHAGEN VON ENSE'S MEMOIRS.

[LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, 1838.]

2. Gallerie von Bildnissen aus Rahel's Umgang und Briefwechsel. (Gallery of Portraits from Rahel's Cir

cle of Society and Correspondence.) Edited by K. A.

Varnhagen von Ense. 2 vols. Leipsic, 1836.

3. Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften. (Memoirs and Miscellaneous Writings.) By K. A. Varnhagen von Ense. 4 vols. Mannheim, 1837-38.

at them afterwards, we hope, will be possible. | been a student of literature, an author, a stuBut the third work, that of Varnhagen himself, dent of medicine, a soldier, a secretary, a is the one we must chiefly depend on here; the diplomatist. A man withal of modest, affecfour volumes of "Memoirs and Miscellanies;" tionate nature; courteous and yet truthful; lively pieces; which can be safely recom- of quick apprehension, precise in utterance; mended as altogether pleasant reading to of just, extensive, occasionally of deep and every one. They are "Miscellaneous Writ- fine insight, this is a man qualified beyond ings," as their title indicates; in part col- most to write memoirs. We should call him lected and reprinted out of periodicals, or one of the best memoir-writers we have met wherever they lay scattered; in part sent forth with; decidedly the best we know of in these now for the first time. There are criticisms, days. For clearness, grace of method, easy notices literary or didactic; always of a praise- comprehensibility, he is worthy to be ranked worthy sort, generally of small extent. There among the French, who have a natural turn are narrations; there is a long personal nar- for memoir-writing; and in respect of honesty, rative, as it might be called, of service in the valourous gentleness, and simplicity of heart, "Liberation War," of 1814, wherein Varnha- his character is German, not French. gen did duty, as a volunteer officer, in Tettenborn's corps, among the Cossacks: this is the longest piece, by no means the best. There is farther a curious narrative of Lafayette's escape (brief escape with recapture) from the Prison of Olmütz. Then also there is a curious biography of Doctor Bollmann, the brave young Hanoverian, who aided Lafayette in that adventure. Then other biographies not so curious; on the whole, there are many biographies: Biography, we might say, is the staple article; an article in which Varnhagen has long been known to excel. Lastly, as basis for the whole, there are presented, fitfully, now here, now there, and with long intervals, considerable sections of Autobiography;—not | confessions, indeed, or questionable work of the Rousseau sort, but discreet reminiscences, personal and other, of a man who having looked on much, may be sure of willing audience in reporting it well. These are the four volumes written by Varnhagen von Ense; those are the five edited by him. We shall regard his autobiographic memorials as a general substratum, upholding and uniting into a certain coherence the multifarious contents of these publications: it is Varnhagen von Ense's passage through life; this is what it yielded him; these are the things and persons he took note of, and had to do with, in travelling thus far.

Beyond ascertaining for ourselves what manner of eyesight and way of judgment this our memoir-writer has, it is not necessary to insist much on Varnhagen's qualities or literary character here. He seems to us a man peculiarly fitted, both by natural endowment and by position and opportunity, for writing memoirs. In the space of half a century that he has lived in this world, his course has been what we might call erratic in a high degree: from the student's garret in Halle or Tübingen to the Tuileries hall of audience and the Wagram battle-field, from Chamisso the poet to Napoleon the Emperor, his path has intersected all manner of paths of men. He has a fine intellectual gift; and what is the foundation of that and of all, an honest, sympathizing, manfully patient, manfully courageous heart. His way of life, too erratic we should fear for happiness or ease, and singularly checkered by vicissitude, has had this considerable advantage, if no other, that it has trained him, and could not but train him, to a certain Catholicism of mind. He has

Such a man, conducting us in the spirit of cheerful friendliness, along his course of life, and delineating what he has found most memorable in it, produces one of the pleasantest books. Brave old Germany, in this and the other living phasis, now here, now there, from Rhineland to the East-sea, from Hamburg and Berlin to Deutsch-Wagram and the Marchfield, paints itself in the colours of reality; with notable persons, with notable events For consider withal in what a time this man's life has lain: in the thick of European things, while the Nineteenth Century was opening itself. Amid convulsions and revolutions, outward and inward,-with Napoleons, Goethes, Fichtes; while prodigies and battle-thunder shook the world, and," amid the glare of conflagrations, and the noise of falling towns and kingdoms," a new era of thought was also evolving itself: one of the wonderfullest times! On the whole, if men like Varnhagen were to be met with, why have we not innumerable Memoirs? Alas, it is because the men like Varnhagen are not to be met with; men with the clear eye and the open heart. Without such qualities, memoir-writers are but a nuisance; which so often as they show themselves, a judicious world is obliged to sweep into the cesspool, with loudest possible prohibition of the like. If a man is not open-minded, if he is ignorant, perverse, egoistic, splenetic; on the whole, if he is false and stupid, how shall he write memoirs ?——

From Varnhagen's young years, especially from his college years, we could extract many a lively little sketch, of figures partially known to the reader; of Chamisso, La Motte Fouqué, Raumer, and other the like; of Platonic Schleiermacher, sharp, crabbed, shrunken, with his wire-drawn logic, his sarcasms, his sly malicious ways; of Homeric Wolf, with his biting wit, with his grim earnestness and inextinguishable Homeric laugh, the irascible great-hearted man. Or of La Fontaine, the sentimental novelist, over whose rose-coloured moral-sublime what fair eye has not wept? Varnhagen found him "in a pleasant house near the Saale-gate" of Halle, with an ugly good-tempered wife, with a pretty niece, which latter he would not allow to read a word of his romance stuff, but "kept it locked from her like poison;" a man jovial as Boniface, swollen out on booksellers' profit, church, preferments, and fat things, "to the size of a hogs

nothing forced, nothing studied, nothing that
went beyond the burgher tone.
His courtesy
was the free expression of a kind heart; his
way and bearing were patriarchal, considerate
of the stranger, yet for himself too altogether
unconstrained. Neither in the animation to
which some word or topic would excite him,
was this fundamental temper ever altered;
nowhere did severity appear, nowhere any ex-

heal" for the rest, writing with such velocity | (he did some hundred and fifty weeping volumes in his time) that he was obliged to hold in, and “write only two days in the week;" this was La Fontaine, the sentimental novelist. But omitting all these, let us pick out a family-picture of one far better worth looking at, Jean Paul in his little home at Baireuth,-"little city of my habitation, which I belong to on this side the grave!" It is Sun-hibiting of himself, any watching or spying of day, the 23d of October, 1808, according to Varnhagen's note-book. The ingenious youth of four-and-twenty, as a rambling student, passes the day of rest there, and luckily for us has kept memorandums:

"Visit to Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.-This forenoon I went to Jean Paul's. Friend Harscher was out of humour, and would not go, say what I would. I too, for that matter, am but a poor, nameless student: but what of that?

"A pleasant, kindly, inquisitive, woman, who had opened the door to me, I at once recognised for Jean Paul's wife by her likeness to her sister. A child was sent off to call its father. He came directly: he had been forwarned of my visit by letters from Berlin and Leipsic; and received me with great kindness. As ne seated himself beside me on the sofa, I had almost laughed in his face, for in bending down somewhat he had the very look our Neumann, in his 'Versuchen und Hindernissen,' has jestingly given him, and his speaking and what he spoke confirmed that impression. Jean Paul is of stout figure; has a full, wellordered face; the eyes small, gleaming out on you with lambent fire, then again veiled in soft dimness; the mouth friendly, and with some slight motion in it even when silent. His speech is rapid, almost hasty, even stuttering somewhat here and there; not without a certain degree of dialect, difficult to designate, but which probably is some mixture of Frankish and Saxon, and of course is altogether kept down within the rules of cultivated language.

his hearer; everywhere kindheartedness, free movement of his somewhat loose-flowing nature, open course for him, with a hundred transitions from one course to the other, howsoever or whithersoever it seemed good to him to go. At first he praised every thing that was named of our new appearances in Literature; and then when we came a little closer to the matter, there was blame enough and to spare. So of Adam Müller's Lectures, of Friedrich Schlegel, of Tieck and others. He said, German writers ought to hold by the people, not by the upper classes, among whom all was already dead and gone; and yet he had just been praising Adam Müller, that he had the gift of speaking a deep word to cultivated people of the world. He is convinced that, from the opening of the old Indian world, nothing is to be got for us, except the adding of one other mode of poetry to the many modes we have already, but no increase of ideas: and yet he had just been celebrating Friedrich Schlegel's labours with the Sanscrit, as if a new salvation were to issue out of that. He was free to confess that a right Christian in these days, if not a Protestant one, was inconceivable to him; that changing from Protestantism to Catholicism seemed a monstrous perversion; and with this opinion great Hope had been expressed, a few minutes before, that the Catholic spirit in Friedrich Schlegel, combined with the Indian, would produce much good! Of Schleiermacher he spoke with respect; signified, however, that he did not relish his 'Plato' greatly; that in Jacobi's, in Herder's soaring flight of soul he traced far "First of all I had to tell him what I was more of those divine old sages than in the charged with in the shape of messages, then learned acumen of Schleiermacher; a deliverwhatsoever I could tell in any way, about his ance which I could not let pass without proBerlin friends. He willingly remembered the test. Fichte, of whose 'Addresses to the Gertime he had lived in Berlin, as Marcus Herz's man Nation,' held in Berlin under the sound neighbour, in Leder's house where I, seven of French drums, I had much to say, was not years before, had first seen him in the garden a favourite of his; the decisiveness of that by the Spree, with papers in his hand, which energy gave him uneasiness; he said he could it was privately whispered were leaves of only read Fichte as an exercise, gymnastic'Hesperus.' This talk about persons, and ally,' and that with the purport of his Philothen still more about Literature growing out sophy he had now nothing more to do. of that, set him fairly underway, and soon he "Jean Paul was called out, and I staid had more to impart than to inquire. His con- awhile alone with his wife. I had now to versation was throughout amiable and good- answer many new questions about Berlin; her natured, always full of meaning, but in quite interest in persons and things of her native simple tone and expression. Though I knew town was by no means sated with what she beforehand that his wit and humour belonged had already heard. The lady pleased me exonly to his pen, that he could hardly write the ceedingly; soft, refined, acute, she united with shortest note without these introducing them- the loveliest expression of household goodness selves, while on the contrary his oral utterance an air of higher breeding and freer manageseldom showed the like, yet it struck me ment than Jean Paul seemed to manifest. Yet, much that, in this continual movement and in this respect too, she willingly held herself vivacity of mood to which he yielded himself, inferior, and looked up to her gifted husband. I observed no trace of these qualities. His It was apparent every way that their life togedemeanour otherwise was like his speaking; ther was a right happy one.

Their three