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from a kind of capitation-tax, and from some stamp and excise duties. The expenses average little more than half the revenue. There is a militia, consisting of half the male inhabitants between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, and numbering it seems about 800 men. The affectation of aping powerful states by having regular troops, artillerymen, honorary officers of their army-among whom are the "Gran Capitano" Brizi and one of the Buonapartes-would only be ludicrous, were it not that such follies may one day prove the destruction of the republic. While armed, they are liable to be conquered under some fair or unfair pretext: if disarmed, they could only be oppressed by such an unprincipled abuse of force as would enlist the sympathics of all Europe in their favour. Their military officers, not born and not living within the territory of the republic, are only likely to cause jealousies and bickerings with the petty sovereigns of the states in which they live and where they were born. Two policemen and a population of honest men, ready to assist them in catching rogues and vagabonds, are all that is wanted. It is to be lamented that a collection of thief-takers should have been imported from Tuscany under the name and for the purposes of a Gendarmerie, and we confess we look with suspicion on any, even the slightest, reform at San Marino, which ought to be safe under the ruggine of time; like those small fragments of antiquity which are venerated when genuine and intact, but thrown away like rubbish when attempted to be improved by some modern charlatan.

Justice was, up to the seventeenth century, administered by the Capitani and Consiglictto, but in later times a kind of assessor has been appointed, before whom the parties appear when the Capitani cannot bring about a friendly arrangement as to civil affairs. This assessor is always a foreign barrister, who is appointed for three years only, and cannot be confirmed for more than three more; he is called Commissario. About six or seven civil and two or three criminal suits furnish him all the occupation he has. From his decision there is an appeal to the Gran Consiglio, who decide after having taken the opinion of two foreign barristers on the case. The laws of the republic are both the civil and canon law, as was generally the case in Italy to the end of the last century, mo

dified by the local statutes, which were printed in 1600 and again in 1834. The criminal part of these statutes is no doubt detestable, but it is modified in practice, and in fact the punishments awarded are mild and humane, consisting of nothing more than temporary imprisonment without labour, and which can only be rendered duller by becoming solitary confinement, for want of a plurality of prisoners. At times the prisons are altogether untenanted, and on two distinct occasions they were found so by Brizi. On another occasion it happened that a stranger visiting San Marino wandered to the castle, in which are the prisons, and finding the gates wide open he entered, and asked a man who was gardening and whom he supposed to be the gaoler, where were the prisoners? The man answered, “I have been the only one for some time; the "gaoler is gone out, and, as usual, has requested me to take 66 care of the castle till he comes back." What reader will not join with us in wishing prosperity to such a republic? We say with all our heart, Esto perpetua!

ARTICLE IV.

1. Euvres de CHARLES NODIER. Charpentier, 3ème Edition,

1841.

2. Franciscus Colonna, dernière nouvelle de CHARLES NODIer. 1844.

THESE words, "the last," have a mournful tone, which, even when the talent is small and the loss light, add weight to both, and this was not the case here. We have lost in Charles Nodier one of the purest among French writers, one who never advocated an unworthy sentiment, however it might be his instinct to palliate errors when seen, in what was to him the holy light of misfortune. Historian, bibliographer, naturalist, so enthusiastic in his botanical researches, that one night in the Bois de Boulogne he was arrested as a suspicious individual while pursuing them by the light of a lantern, he failed in being more in one peculiar walk only because he

chose to belong to so many: a romance-writer and poet, he has tried each mode of the lyre,' and shown that in some he might have attained a prouder mastery, but that he went on like a child towards every ray that woo'd him, pursuing it through the forest where grew the plants he loved, and to the embers where the familiar spirit haunted Jeanie's hearth,—often to the human heart, touching a chord so simply and lightly that we wonder at our answering tears. If he excel rather in charm of detail than grandeur of ensemble, and his style in all its polish and perfection want energy, we find compensation in grace and tenderness and fancy; his hand was to what it drew as the microscopic glass to the butterfly's wing, showing a thousand radiant plumes where the unaided eye finds only dust. He had the art so rare in those of his calling (some of his friends named it the gift, it seemed so proper to his nature,) of being universally loved; there was nothing insipid in his indulgence, nothing bitter in his irony. No one has painted himself so truly in his works; it may be their defect, but it is also their charm, that they form an everrecurring biography. The larger portion of his life was a brave struggle with poverty and troubled times; he found courage even in the improvidence which concealed from him the morrow, and in the fantasy which gilded the day. That his political opinions wanted stability is scarcely a fair reproach, considering the epoch in which he lived, so variously filled by the days of terror, the consulate, the empire, the restoration, the revolution of 1830; or if we leave it as a reproach, it sprang from a good quality, since he leaned always to the failing side. As he says himself, he was destined by some peculiarity of character all his life to uphold a desperate cause. He could find honey in even noxious flowers. We rise from the perusal of his works with such feeling as is left by the pressure of a friendly hand, the encouragement of a kind smile they remind us of himself and his own, stretched out to assist and herald in every young triumph; rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep.

In his youth Charles Nodier must have been handsome: in his latter years he had contracted a stoop in his tall figure, and his features were meagre to a degree which betrayed suffering; but his brow was open and still hardly wrinkled, and

his eye and countenance, though they were weary and pallid, and their habitual expression melancholy and resigned, lighted up at times with the enthusiasm which, surviving through all fortunes, left him young to the last. He was born in 1780 or 1781 (he himself was not quite certain of the date), at Besançon, in Franche Comté, where his father, a distinguished lawyer, was the second constitutional mayor and president of the revolutionary tribunal. He was for a time the boy's only preceptor, and found it advisable to restrain rather than prompt a passion for learning, which was joined to extreme delicacy of constitution. When his books were taken from him, Nodier wrote rhymes and sketched comedies. His childish sympathies must have been with the Revolution, owing to the post his father occupied and the persons by whom he was surrounded; at ten or cleven years old he made speeches at the club, but fortunately for him this situation brought correctives along with it, which, working on a warm-hearted and imaginative boy, were never forgotten. In 1793 the Mountain was triumphant, and expedited its proconsuls into every department. The deputy who arrived at Besançon had formerly been curé of the church of St. Louis at Versailles, and was a man who united great facility of clocution with some distinction of appearance and manner. He had just married a beautiful and high-born woman, an aristocrat whom he had thus saved from proscription; such, at least, Nodier believed to have been the motive of his marriage. She never mingled in the new and strange society with which she thus came in contact, living in solitude in her own apartments, and visiting those of the cidevant curé only to solicit in favour of the proscribed. She was often successful, and had thus won from the people the name of Our Lady of Mercy. To the boy she was peculiarly kind. Bassal himself affected in words a violence he did not feel, that he might practise without peril the moderation otherwise dangerous. Returning from an excursion into the country with Championnet and young Nodier, Monsieur and Madame Bassal found before their hotel an agitated mob shouting rage and vengeance. A special courier had just arrived, bearing the news of Marat's death by the hand of Charlotte Corday. Bassal, while his audience lingered, louder than any in his grief for the wise and divine Marat, became

himself again when he was left to its indulgence. He warned however Madame Bassal, as she retired with young Charles to her own chamber, to seal his lips and her own, since all their lives might hang on a word. A few days after young Nodier stood by Madame Bassal's side, to witness that mockery of a funeral which was repeated in various parts of France at the time when the carrion, too vile to be cast to dogs, was deified at the Pantheon. The painter David had sketched the ornaments to be employed, and set down the order of procession. Nodier graphically describes the howling crowd which staggered drunkenly forward, mingling obscene imprecations with the beat of the muffled drums; the coffin and hearse replaced by a kind of oblong vessel, simulating the bath wherein Marat from time to time sought a trifling relief from the hideous leprosy which devoured him; a bloody sheet falling over it, and sweeping on all sides the filth of the streets, except where it was looped up at one spot to allow a livid arm to escape, a withered mutilated limb borrowed for the purpose from a dissecting-room :

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"Neither in barbarian sacrifices," says Nodier, nor in the impious refinements of the most cruel executions, can be fancied any object capable of exciting to the same degree, disgust, horror and fear. Behind the ferocious bearers of this repulsive mummery, between two rows of soldiers, came, the bonnet rouge on their heads and crape on their arms, the quali fied citizens of Besançon, magistrates, judges, revolutionary committecs, jacobins, deputies, and lastly the townspeople. All this rabble paused in a church which happily had been profaned before."

The President Nodier, Charles's father, was rigid, though not cruel; but however he might avoid to condemn wherever the law was not precise, he believed it his duty to exert its fullest rigour when it was otherwise. It was therefore fortunate for his young son that an old friend of the family, Monsieur de Chantrans, whom he mentions in his charming tale of Seraphine, was a noble of the ancient regime, crudite and pious, whose principles were likely to modify the Spartan sternness inculcated by his father. He was at this time more commonly called the citizen Justin, after the name of his patron saint, since the Revolution had robbed him of that of his family; he was an old officer of engineers who had spent his life in scientific studies and his fortune in good works: "he

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