Should we not pity and admire the cruel expiation of his fault? Consider, his honour is now so delicate that he murders a man for saying that he doesn't owe him money. The first day's trial ended with this admirable exposition of the laws of delicacy; on the next, the examination of the witnesses began.

The weapon which had taken the poor wretch's life-the coat he wore

-the ball which killed him-the doctor who extracted it-gave each their testimony. The tavern-keeper testified as to the nature of the amiable orgy and the taquineries de ces messieurs avec ces dames; at which expression there was much laughter in court. Mademoiselle Athenaïs Lievenne, "artist" of the Vaudeville Theatre, aged twenty-one years, gave evidence of Dujarrier's rude and rather familiar conduct, as before reported. After dinner, Dujarrier made an apology, which the goodnatured Athenaïs accepted, and gave him her hand. Then Eugène Roger de Beauvoir explained, how he had intended to have a shot at Dujarrier, too, for his gross behaviour, but that the death of his (the witness's) mother prevented his executing his project. Grisier, the famous fencing-master, came forward to shew that Beauvallon, who sup posed the duel would take place with the sword, had come to him, in order to learn and practise a coup by which an adversary could be disarmed, proving then the exceedingly pacific intentions of De Beauvallon, who, being a perfect master of the sword, did not intend to kill Dujarrier outright. But the great witness on this day was the great Alexandre Dumas: "At the announcement of whose name," says the Débats, "all eyes were directed towards the door at which was about to enter the popular author of The Count of Monte-Cristo." Those who know, from the author's own writings, his history, and that his father was a mulatto general famous in the revolutionary wars, will be surprised to hear that the son is a marquis; for though we have heard of the Marquis of Marmalade and the Duke of Alicompaine in Hayti, we did not know, until now, that the French had recognised a negro aristocracy.

President.-Witness, what is your name and præ-names?

DAVY, MARQUIS DE LA PAILLETERIE.
President.-Your age?
Witness.-Forty-one.

President.-Your profession?

Witness. If I were not in the country of Corneille, I should say I was a dramatic author.

President.-Dramatic authors vary as centuries change. Make your deposition.

Now, the fact is, the Marquis Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie had scarcely any thing to say, but he amplified this little stock of information with a skill and emphasis of rhodomontade which the marquis possesses beyond any marquis or dramatic author in Europe. You would have fancied that he was the centre of the whole action; the great arbiter of chivalry and adjudicator of honour. "As it was Dujarrier's first affair," said Marquis Davy, "we were obliged to be particularly chary of his reputation." "Il faut que je subisse mon baptême,” was the expression that the miserable, poor heathen used himself; as if murder was the baptism which a young neophyte of the world was compelled to undergo!

As an authority for duelling, the marquis quoted a document called "Le Code du Duel," which was drawn up by several of the most reputable persons in France, and instanced a case which had come under his knowledge where a sovereign prince (the King of Wirtemberg or the Duke of Baden?) had permitted a prince, his nephew (one of the Bonaparte family), to come upon his territory in order to fight a duel.

"Who were the princes?" some one in court asked.

The author of Antony replied that "THEY WERE TWO OF HIS INTIMATE FRIENDS," and asked leave to go back to Paris that night, as he believed a new piece of his was about to be produced at one of the theatres.

Next it was the turn of Mademoiselle Lola Montes to be examined. That charming person has appeared on the boards of Her Majesty's Theatre, if we mistake not. Fame adds of her that she whipped a royal aidede-camp at Berlin, and even challenged another military man to meet her with the pistol. She inhabited the same house with Dujarrier at the

time of his death, and inherits a part of his fortune. Dujarrier wished to take her to the house of the Marquis Alexandre Dumas on the last night which he passed in this world.

At seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, as she had seen nothing of Dujarrier, she sent her maid to his apartments. He was eating a basin of soup before going out, and, instead of going to visit her, sent her a note. "Le temoin," says the newspaper report, "prend une lettre placée sur sa poitrine!"

"Ma chère Lola,-Je sors pour me battre au pistolet. Ceci explique pourquoi je ne vais pas te voir ce matin; j'ai besoin de tout mon calme. A deux heures tout sera fini, et je courrai t'embrasser... ou..."

"Mademoiselle Lola Montes," continues the report, "whilst this letter is read, holds down her head, and abundant tears furrow her countenance." What a noble fund of sentiment they have, these French writers!-what a rich and genuine language to express it! A few minutes afterward, it appears from the same report, the versatile Montes had left off furrowing her countenance with tears, and was grinning and bragging about her own particular skill with the pistol.

So for five long days the debates continued. More men of letters gave their testimony; more female "artists" theirs. The seconds of Dujarrier confirmed in the main the statements of the Acte d'Accusation. The onus of the duel lay with Beauvallon and his friends; the cause of it was never explained, nor the cause of the blackening of the pistol-barrels, which, according to Beauvallon and his seconds, had never been used. Dujarrier's friends made one last attempt on the field, addressing themselves to Beauvallon's friends, and finally to him himself. The only point on which they acquitted him was the charge that he had waited for forty seconds before he fired, taking aim all that time. He did not require near so much time; but his adversary having fired and missed, M. Rosemond de Beauvallon, whose life was now quite free from danger, and who could not explain what was the cause of his quarrel with his opponent, took perfectly good aim at him and blew his brains out. This is the upshot of all the depositions.

The advocate of the partie civile, Dujarrier's mother and nephew injured by his death, now made a speech upon the evidence, and, as it seems to us, upon a great deal more. He represented Dujarrier and all his friends in the most favourable light. The unlucky young man was, according to M. Léon Duval, the most amiable of creatures: his love of pleasure you would fancy quite virtuous and becoming; his fondness for play, sheer generosity; if he insulted Mademoiselle Lievenne by a pointblank statement that his money would win her, what did he do but repeat what all poets and all moralists had said before? They call them "moralists" in France who say that every woman has her price!

But as for Beauvallon and his chief second, there were no words too strong for their abuse: if he could not crush them by proofs, he charged them with a fury of hints quite as eloquent, and dragged Beauvallon's friends, his relations, and his father, in for a share of the abuse. M. Duval's speech is quite a curiosity of invective, his pursuit of Beauvallon exceedingly adroit and savage. "He murders Dujarrier (says he), for what? for wishing to avoid his society. On my word, Monsieur Rosemond de Beauvallon will have to kill a great number of people, if he fires at all those who decline the honour of his acquaintance." Beauvallon smiled at this, the report says

smiled and blushed slightly. It was a great unkindness to such a meritorious gentleman; presently Beauvallon cried;" he has every delicacy of sentiment, this young enthusiast, who pawns the watches and blows out the brains of his fellowmen. Berryer took up his defence with his usual fougue and enthusiasm; and the eloquence of the "illustrious advocate," as the French papers call him, appears to have met with prodigious applause.

He begins with a claptrap. What he was most afraid of, the illustrious orator said, was, lest Dujarrier's mother should have appeared, and, with a voice of austere majesty, called for vengeance for her son. The

illustrious orator could not have borne that sight: luckily it was spared him. And he begins falling foul of the partie civile, and accuses him (most justly) of having invented,

exaggerated, and falsified a good deal. The illustrious orator proceeds to do as much in behalf of his client. The fault was all with Dujarrier, not with the peaceful Rosemond. The duel comes: le coup part; Berryer has not a word about the waiting or the taking aim. You would image Dujarrier was shot in spite of Beauvallon, and by some fate which guided that guiltless creature's ball. The advocate having exonerated the duellist, stands up and apologies for duelling itself; and declares that it is vain, absurd, wicked, flying in the face of God to prevent it! It costs the illustrious orator nothing to use the Almighty name; he drags it into court perpetually, and brags and swaggers about the purity of his belief. The morning of the duel Beauvallon was seen coming out of church. "Oh, no!" cries his advocate, "this is no murderer, this is no assassin, the man who at this solemn moment flings himself at the feet of God, of whom we do not always think enough in the midst of our affairs and our passions!" That he was going to fight a duel, is nothing. Noble and honest orator! an hour afterwards this man took aim and murdered a fellow-creature. But then it was a duel, and that is justifiable-absolutely necessary. "Listen!" cries Berryer, "to the opinion of a man profoundly religious,the opinion of M. Guizot on duelling.

"French manners are chivalrous,'

Guizot says: they are elegant. They have substituted duelling for assassination. When the honour of a man or woman has been attacked, a reparation is necessary. The barbarian employs stratagem, the Français has the duel.'"

This quotation is very likely not in Guizot (for Berryer's statements have about as much authority for accuracy, as those of another illustrious orator whose name begins with O'). But that is not the point; nor is it the state of the law of duelling in France, nor the practice of the courts there (that, no doubt, will occasion comment from competent professional persons), which have led to the writing down of this story. It is the moral condition of the country illustrated in the story, which is the most marvellous part

of it-the most marvellous and the most painful.

Guizot lays it down that the Frenchman is chivalrous and elegant, and has invented the duel.

Berryer declares that though a man blows another's brains out with the utmost care and premeditation, he can't be an assasin- because he goes to church.

Léon Duval says that all French moralists and philosophers have declared that every woman is to be bought.

Rosemond de Beauvallon says his honour requires him to take aim at and murder a man, because the latter refuses to say that some unimportant words were really unimportant.

Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie backs up his friend to fight, because it is necessary that a young man should have a chance of murdering, or being murdered, by somebody.

All parties admit a state of concubinage to be so perfectly natural as to call for no question; the venality of the female being a point perfectly established by " moralists," &c.

And a man having killed another, candidly acknowledging his intention to do so, and the fulfilment of his intention, is pronounced by a jury, "on their honour and conscience," not guilty.

What do Honour and Conscience mean? Are they lies and fables? Is honour the property of men alone, and do all women sell theirs? And has Conscience made itself easy in France, and determined that debauchery is justifiable in all cases, and Murder is requisite in some? All which points appear to be established by this astonishing French trial. As for the actors in it, only Dujarrier is under the sod, with an old mother probably still deploring him. Lola and Lievenne are consoled by this time, and ogling and grinning as before the chivalrous Beauvallon is free to return to the world and adorn it the Marquis Davy is rhodomontading away as usual, at the rate of forty volumes a-year: the "illustrious orator" will spout blasphemies and bellow claptraps to the admiration of all France in his next speech. She, meanwhile, retains her position as Centre of Civilisation; and we-how much better are we?

:

If REGINA will permit an UltimaThulian, a dweller in the solitary isles of the Caledonian archipelago, to offer an occasional mite to her great metropolitan treasury of knowledge, I flatter myself I could "submit to public inspection" (as a fashionable modiste newly returned from the spring markets would say) some facts new to our modern periodical literature. Vigilant and far-searching as the spirit of literary enterprise now is, it has scarcely turned a thought to the fields of curious and interesting information that bound the northern extremity of our own empire. An adventure in Tahiti or New Zealand, a ramble in the Marquesas, a tigerhunt in India, "a dinner in ancient Egypt," a legend of the twelfth century, is devoured with avidity, and admired, however trivial in itself, because it is associated in the reader's mind with the idea of rarity or distance. Like the fruits of warm climates, the knowledge that is dug from antiquity or transported across the Pacific is often more prized than the observations which we could gather from the study of society around us, and at the small cost of a few days' sail from the metropolis of the kingdom.

It is for this reason, probably, and because it does not require the writer to encounter savages or circumnavigate the globe, that our cluster of islands, lying between the parallels

VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCVIII.

of the fifty-ninth and sixty-second degrees of north latitude, are a sort of terra incognita in the current literature of the day. An Englishman knows more of Australia or China, of the Oregon or the Punjaub, than he does about any one of the Shetland Isles, though they are above ninety in number, and cover a space of seventy miles from south to north, and more than fifty from east to west. If he has read Sir Walter Scott's Pirate he may, perhaps, remember the name of " Sumburgh Head," the southmost promontory of the group; or of the "Fitful Head," rendered classical by the same pen as the residence of Norna. If he has chanced to be at Windsor, or Brighton, or Buckingham Palace, he may have seen a little hirsute quadruped called a shelty, or Shetland pony, about the size of a Newfoundland dog, and imported expressly for the equestrian amusement of the royal children. But with this animal, and the two extreme points I have mentioned, the probability is that his knowledge of the country and its inhabitants-historical, geographical, zoological, and statistical-terminates.

Ask him about Foula, or Burray, or Bressay, or Papastour, or Whalsey, or Yell, or Fetlar, or Unst, the Out Skerries, the Noup, the Sneug, or any other locality between Lamba Ness and Quendal Bay, and he will

TT

turn a bewildered stare of amazement in your face, or, perhaps, exclaim, with a shrug of his shoulder, that he does not understand Gaelic. We venture to say he never heard of the Grind of the Navir, or the Villains of Ure, or the "Doreholm of Northmaven," or those sublime caverned rocks that present a mural front of porphyry, with arched doorways, to the wild fury of the Atlantic, roaring in the wintry blast, and battering the weatherworn rampart with the force of artillery. Were I to tell him about the Drongs of Hillswick Ness and St. Magnus Bay, towering above the waves like the ruins of Thebes or Palmyra, and carved by the storm into ten thousand shapes, more fantastic than castles in the air, or the cloud-built palaces that adorn the horizon in a gloomy November evening, he would, probably, inquire if I was describing to him the mountains of the moon, or had newly arrived from the last discovered planet. Take him to the Stones of Steffs, or the precipitous cliffs of Noss, rising perpendicularly from the sea, where a tremendous chasm is traversed by a wooden trough named a "cradle," slung across the abyss from rock to rock, and merely large enough to ferry over one man and a sheep, his head would turn giddy at the sight, or he might imagine himself making a first voyage to the north pole in Henson's aerial machine. It would puzzle him to understand flinching a whale, or skyleing a lum; nor could he say with old Basil Mertoun, "I know the meaning of scat, and wattle, and hawkhen, and hagalef, and every other exaction by which your lords have wrung your withers." Sights and sounds would arrest his senses droller than any to be met with in the modern Babylon, where you Londoners have no days two months long, and cannot like us shave by the light of the sun at midnight.

But I could tell him of other wonders in our islands besides those peculiar to our natural scenery, strange and picturesque though our coasts and headlands appear. A great proportion of our inhabitants (they are reckoned about 30,000) are amphibious; the men, like the old seakings, spending more of their lives on the water than the land, "rarely

sleeping under a roof or warming themselves at a cottage fire." The women, too, brave the dangers of a sailor-faring life; for they will navigate boats, as a northern chronicler says, through terrible seas with the utmost skill and ability." And I verily believe our Arctic Grace Darlings would surpass the heroine of the Fern Islands in deeds of generous intrepidity, should it happen that distressed humanity required their aid. No part of the country is more than six miles distant from the sea, and some of our islands (or holms) are not larger than an ordinary drawing - room. We have "horses," and "warts," and "old men," hundreds of feet in height, but they are hills of peculiar shape. Our crows build their nests of fishbones, for lack of sticks; and as trees and hedges are rare with us, our birds, instead of being inhabitants of the air, must become denizens of the soil. Our eagles are worth five shillings a-head to any that can shoot them; we can buy a young calf for eighteenpence, and sell a pair of knitted stockings for four guineas. We are believers in magical arts and preternatural creatures, in the great kraaken and the sea-serpent, in mermaids and mermen, in witchcraft and the evil eye, in the power of invocations and maledictions, in amulets and spectral illusions and occult sympathies, in trows and elf-arrows, in "healing by the coin," "casting the heart," curing by rhyme or rowan-tree, or cow-hair, or a darning-needle stuck in the leaf of a psalm-book. We believe in the possibility of abstracting, by certain charms, "the profits" of a neighbour's cow, or transferring the butter from one woman's churn to another woman's dairy; and all by the "devilish cunning" of spells and cantrips. That such marvels in nature and humanity should exist in the broad daylight of this omniscient age, and yet so little be known about them by the millions who devour monthly articles, is a fact scarcely credible.

It is true we have been visited from time to time by tourists, and naturalists, and moralists, inspectors of education, commissioners of lighthouses, &c. The Great Unknown delighted us with his presence in the summer and autumn of 1814, to