tom. He died there very poor. "A demand," says Nodier, "made, alas! too late, by Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and "myself to Monsieur de Martignac, who was then minister, "for relief for poor Bonneville, obtained a small sum which "came to pay the expenses of his funeral." After nine days' stay at the Temple, Nodier was transferred to St. Pelagie, where he remained forty-two more, au secret, ere the state of his health, seriously injured by strict confinement and the excessive cold of his cell beneath the roof, excited a turnkey's compassion. In consequence of this man's representations he was removed once more to the third floor of the building, called Prison de l'Opinion,' because destined to political offenders, and which had once held Madame Roland: he found her name written on the wall above his pallet. His captivity lasted but some months in all and was not physically severe, since he was allowed to communicate with others detained for opinion also, and to dine at a kind of restaurant, instituted within the walls for prisoners for debt; but any indulgence of this nature was fully compensated by the moral suffering which he shared with his companions. Once imprisoned for opinion, there appeared to be no reason why a man might not lie forgotten for years: some did so till the end of the empire; and the belief in nocturnal executions, taking place without form of trial within the prison-walls, which was general throughout Paris and encouraged rather than disavowed, proved a moral torture to those who lay waiting a midnight summons without the possibility of speaking a dying wish or farewell. At last the prison-doors were opened to him, and some of Nodier's best pages describe the day he was set free, -bewildered by the sense of his own liberty, the size of the streets, the noise of the crowd, the very houses which as he hurried on seemed coming to meet him, and the population which appeared augmented, as if all that crowd had just left dungeons also and was trying to walk; and, when he raised his eyes to a hackney coach which came along followed by a real multitude, the mute adicu he received from three former comrades, on their way to be shot in the plain of Grenelle! and his own inconsiderate bound towards them, and the good rough gend'arme who held him back from casting himself under the wheels, accusing him of wanton cruelty in wishing

to look closely on wretches going to die. Sent to Besançon and placed under surveillance there, Nodier compromised himself once more by contracting close intimacies with the returning emigrants and enemics of the government in general. Accused of aiding in Bourmont's escape, he left the town himself till a favourable sentence made it safe to return. Again implicated in what was denounced as an alliance between jacobins and royalists, and in danger of passing for the bond of union between the two parties, he was warned in time, and gaining the open country remained wandering till about 1806, either in the French Jura or in Switzerland, suffering from extreme poverty and having been obliged to ply all kinds of trades. At one time, it is said, he served as a village postman, at another he belonged to the lowest class of workmen. In 1803 he produced the 'Painter of Saltzburg,' a tale founded on Werther, and which, notwithstanding pages of great beauty, is inferior to those which followed; during the remair.ing interval he wrote Les Essais d'un jeune Barde,' a collection of poems dedicated to his friend Bonneville, and the greater part of his 'Dictionnaire raisonné des Onomatopées Françaises,' a work which even Querard, in his France Littéraire,' little inclined as he is to praise, pronounces one of great research and erudition. The commission of public instruction adopted it for the use of libraries and lyceums. It proves great extent of reading and a marvellous memory in so young a man, written as it was in the mountains while he strayed from cottage to cottage to avoid fresh persecutions; at one time escaping from the two gend'armes who captured him, only through his lightness of foot and knowledge of the localities; at another tracked by six more and hid in the barn of a peasant under the fresh steaming hay, which, piled over him, threatened him with another kind of death, holding his clasped hands above his head, striving to keep a space free for breath, and feeling the gend'armes partly force the forage aside as they trod over him, sounding it with their sabres. He was once slightly wounded. In 1806 his mandat d'arrêt was commuted to a permis de séjour at Dôle, where he became Benjamin Constant's friend, and opened a 'Cours de littérature' which had some success; making excursions, which he has celebrated in some sweet

verses, to the village of Quintigny, where his future wife resided. He shortly after married, and enjoyed for a time the charm of quiet so new to him; his straightened circumstances however forced him again to Paris in the year 1810, where his defence of Monsieur Etienne in his Questions de Littérature légale' brought them acquainted, and Nodier became in consequence a contributor to the 'Débats;' but growing weary of this occupation he accepted the post of secretary in the house of Sir Herbert Croft, a prisoner of war at Amiens, whose portrait he has traced in his charming story of 'Amelia." At the close of a year the love of freedom and his mountains brought Nodier back to Quintigny, where his narrow means forbade him to remain. His brother-in-law, Monsieur de Terey, summoned him to Illyria, where he was named librarian at Laibach, next secretary to Fouché, who was then governor of the Illyrian provinces, and lastly editor of the French newspaper which the duke of Otranto founded there under the title of the 'Illyrian Telegraph.' The abandonment of the Illyrian provinces in 1813 brought him back. The hundred days came, and, invited by the minister of police to range himself among the supporters of Buonaparte, Nodier wrote the piece entitled 'Buonaparte au 4 Mai,' which was printed in the 'Nain Jaune,' and whose success was so startling that the author thought it wise to absent himself from Paris, and returned only after the second Restoration. He wrote, after Waterloo, various pamphlets in apology or defence of many of the fallen. party,-Arnaud, Bories de St. Vincent, David, Jean Debry, and others. Forgotten by the Restoration, and too poor to live in Paris, he went to reside at St. Germain with his wife and two children, and wrote there Jean Sbogar." "It suc"ceeded," said Nodier, "because, on account of its political 66 tendency, I brought it out anonymously." It was attributed to Benjamin Constant. Napoleon, whom the book occupied two days in St. Helena, and who wrote notes on the copy which remained, we believe, in General Gourgaud's hands, guessed the author. It was sketched during his stay in Illyria, and among the scenes which inspired it. Jean Sbogar was the chief of a band of banditti still unforgotten on the shores of the gulf of Trieste. Nodier was present at the trial, whose interest chiefly lay in the prisoner's anxiety to prove

his non-identity with the brilliant and mysterious personage of mask and carnival elsewhere. On the day of his arrest, this extraordinary robber wore jewels to the value of 80,000 francs on his hands, whose whiteness and delicacy were remarked and commented on. He feigned ignorance of the various languages in which he was addressed, and persisted in replying in the Sclavonic dialect. The only moment in which he had well nigh betrayed himself was while listening to the sentence, delivered in French, which condemned in his person no more than a common robber. Nodier, placed near the bench where he sat, remarked his deep attention to a language he had pretended not to know, and that his eye lighted up with triumph as he understood that the condemnation laid aside as irrelevant all facts connected with his appearances in Germany and Italy. After his sentence Nodier saw him several times in prison, speaking purely and cloquently French, Italian, German, modern Greek and the greater part of the Sclavonic dialects, to which he owed the success of his stratagem. Most of the political maxims inscribed by Nodier on the tablets of 'Jean Sbogar,' the ultra-liberalism of which was sufficiently startling to prevent his owning the work, were, he says, scrupulously set down from the robber's conversation. Doomed to die, Jean Sbogar waited in his cell the setting up of a proper guillotine to put his sentence in execution, the carpenters of the place being unfit for a work of such nicety. An unlooked-for event threw open his prison-doors, and Jean Shogar took the freedom which sought him, walking forth last, and returning again to deliver an old woman who was taken at the same time with himself. He walked to the little inn where he had left his horse some time before, saddled, gave him a feed of corn, and rode away. Being taken again, he was guillotined at Mantua. This is the basis of Nodier's story still it is a pity that in the novel he has not entered more into the graphic details set down in his preface, and which would have conferred on his principal figure a reality which our author's personages sometimes want, in wanting the characteristic attributes which make us feel a likeness in the masterly portrait we pause to admire. In 1818 Jean Sbogar' was first printed, when the Abbé Nicole, interesting himself in its author's fate, obtained for him a professor's

chair in the college which the duke of Richelieu had founded at Odessa. Nodier departed to bid his farewell to Franche Comté, but the minister failed to keep his word with him, and he returned as he had gone, at his own expense, to a poor lodging in the Rue de Bouloi, where in 1819 he wrote "Therèse Aubert.' It is of all his works that which we prefer,that of which he says himself, "It is the only one of my books I like." Its style is even more pure than that of Jean Sbogar', the interest deeper, the portraits more true. Adèle,' another souvenir of Werther and very inferior to 'Therèse Aubert,' was published in 1820; Smarra, ou les Démons de la Nuit,' in 1821. Smarra' (the Sclavonic word for nightmare') is a masterpiece of style; its defect lies in its obscurity; it is in truth a troubled dream,-a reminiscence more or less vague of many authors; but the march of the mighty horse, the invocations to the harp of Myrrha, blended with the picture of the lake of Como and the soothings of the beloved who sits by, have all Nodier's grace and music, and more than his usual power. Trilby, ou le Lutin d'Argail,' was published in 1822. The scene need not have been laid in Scotland, to which it bears not the faintest resemblance; but for peculiar beauty of style, for imaginative tenderness, notwithstanding something of mannerism, this must be classed among the better works of Nodier; it has all the faults and merits of the writer. He had found another occupation in the text of the 'Voyage pittoresque dans l'ancienne France,' undertaken by Messrs. Taylor and Cailleux. In Taylor's company he made an excursion to Scotland, writing on his return an account of their journey, which he called 'Promenade de Dieppe en Ecosse,' but which is unworthy his other works from his total ignorance of the country. At the close of 1823 he was appointed librarian to Monsieur (Charles X.) at the Arsenal, where he has since remained. The government of the Restoration also conferred on him letters of nobility, of which he made no use, and the cross of the legion of honour, perhaps in recollection of the mot which, though attributed to so many others, was spoken by Nodier and circulated in the Champ de Mai' :-" Since France absolutely requires a king who can ride, I vote for Franconi."

Since then his life has gone calmly to its close, surrounded