The result of the story is, that the rivals kill each other-and the unhappy lady expires on hearing the dismal event, and beholding the bleeding corpse of Os man. "Beneath an aged cypress' gloomy shade Sleeps Osman---dust to dust now stilly laid; And o'er his narrow chamber frowns alone That nearly perished---one sepulchral stone. In vain the baleful weeds around it twine Their lawless tendrils---Osman, still 'tis thine:-- Full peaceful sleep the ashes of the brave--The fragrant dust betrays the good man's grave.' "This is a celebrated Oriental proverb." [VOL. 2 "But he---his rival's cold detested clay strive.-- "Leila!---thy tomb is fair---no storied stone known:-- Records thy fate---too well-too surely Here oft at eve shall Helles' maids be found- And thy cold ashes oft shall claim the sigh Wulwulleh is the death-song of Turkey; similar to the Coronach of the Highlands. + Nightingale. From the Literary Gazette. FRENCH MANNERS.-L'HERMITE EN PROVENCE. Anglet, 1 April, 1817. THE CHAMBER OF LOVE. Illo non juvenis poterit de funere quisquam, it me with all the address, all the coquetry of an owner of the estate, who takes care, when he leads you about his gardens, to surprise you with some point of TIB. ELEG. I. view; the sudden appearance of a cascade, or the most favourable aspect of some edifice. No youth shall leave unmoved this mournful urn, THERE are nations, as there are wo TH I have accepted with as much pleasure as he has offered it, an hvitation to his house at Monguère, and in our excursions which he alone has directed, I have had no other care than that of seeing and describing, assisted for the most part by his eyes, and his judgment. men, for whom one conceives a passion, before one is conscious of the motives which lead to the predilection which one has for them; this kind of involuntary sentiment is excited among the Basques: one loves them, before one knows them; when among them, one fancies one's self in a little new world; which one remembers often to have dreamt of; these shepherds descending from the mountains with the pipe in their hands; these young women whose walk is so light and graceful, whose hair is so black, whose eyes are so brilliant; this active and cheerful population, with which the country is as it were enamelled; every thing here charms the eyes and interests the heart; I must however say that my greatest purity. amiable guide neglects nothing to heigh This extent of country would suffice ten the charm under the influence of which for a much more considerable number of I see this delightful country. He shews Communes; but a more numerous pop When we had reached the heights which surrounded and command Agnoa, the first French commune on the side of Spain, M. Destère made me observe, that by carrying the eye as far as it can reach to the North, the West, and the East, we took in a space which contains the Labour, the most important of the three Basque Cantons, and that in which the primitive features of this ancient race of men, seem to have been preserved in the VOL. 2.] L'Hermit en Provence-The Chamber of Love. 457 ulation could not be maintained, without and independently of historical tradition, putting a much greater quantity of land is not this conjecture much more natural into cultivation; which would require than that which is solely founded on the only an advance of capital; for no where genius of Columbus, enlightened by thehas all, that was good in the theories of ories of the heavens and of the earth, Virgil and Columella, been better pre- which were so ill understood in that age?" served in practice: this practice is, to say "A conjecture of my own," continued the truth, but a routine; but this routine he, "is, that the archives of Ciboure, of is not the same as that of the other French Saint-Jean-de-Lutz, and of many Compeasantry, who were for so many ages munes of the Spanish Basques, on the attached to the soil. The ancient and same coasts, probably contain many unsecret genius which directs agriculture known narratives of that grand epoch, among the Basques, may easily be reveal- which changed the face of the globe, and ed to them one day, and receive light which a careful examination of these same from the modern genius of the Arthur archives would make known to us; this Youngs and the Fellenborgs. labour would require men profoundly If from the heights of Agnoa, you versed in geography, astronomy, and look towards the left along the shores of particularly in history, and could not be the ocean from the Bidassoa to Bayonne, performed by any but literati of the you see successively the little towns of country; for (whether the annals to be Ourrouque, Ciboure,Saint-Jean-de-Lutz, consulted were written in French or Guetari, Bidart, Biarritz, and Anglet; Spanish) it is in the nature of the Basques names now without honour, but which to carry the spirit of their own language were not always without glory. into all those which they speak or write." **. Saint-Jean-de-Lutz was, three centuries ago, a rich commercial and populous town, the environs of which were covered with pretty country houses. For these hundred years, the prosperity of England and Holland has been fatal to its trade, excluding it from every sea.* *. Biarritz, as I mentioned when I was speaking of the environs of Bayonne, is famous for its sea bathing; it is a charming sight on certain days, to see caravans of Cucolits arrive from all quarters, in which the fair travellers are covered with long gauze veils, which protect them and their horses from the gnats, which are continually buzzing about them. Here were born, and formed those sea wolves (loups de mer) those intrepid mariners, who, in times long preceding the establishment of the English marine, and the existence of Holland, pursued and struck the whales with their harpoons in the highest latitudes of the northern Seas. Many presumptions,not to say the strongest proofs, authorise the idea, that the Basques were the first Europeans who saw and reached Newfoundland; the Basque name of Macaillaona, which the fishermen of all countries give to the dry and salted cod,confirms this opinion. There is another more honourable to this little nation, and less generally adopted, which would deserve a strict examination, in which I The pleasure of sea bathing at Biarritz, have neither time nor means to engage. is taken in cavities in the rocks, which Robertson, in the notes to his history of are called Baths of Love. No where is America, examines whether it be true, the terrible gulph of Gascony agitated by that Christopher Columbus, (when navi- more frequent tempests: the retrograde gating with Basque mariners the North- movement of the waves broken by the ern Seas, long before his great idea, and ebb has often carried away the young his great discovery of a new world) heard women while bathing; immediately the recital of a Biscayan, whom a tempest young and vigorous swimmers have had driven on that same continent,to which hastened to their aid; but almost always Columbus afterwards directed his course, without success. The danger is great ; by the aid of his genius and of the compass. the examples are well known; every "After reading this dissertation (added mother relates to her daughter the anecM. Destère) one may, without being a dote which I am going to recite; they Basque as I am, be convinced, if not of listen, they weep, and they return to the the truth, of the probability of the fact; Baths of Love. 3L ATHENEUM. Vol. 2. 458 L'Hermite en Provence.-The Chamber of Love. [VOL.2 Towards the end of the 17th century direct their steps towards the sea-shore, there lived at the sandy village of Anglet, How smiling and lovely in their eyes are the young Saubade, the only child of a the arid downs on which they wander, rich shepherd of the Labour, and Laorens, retiring from some scattered habitations a young fisherman, who was an orphan; whence they may still be discovered! the former, when hardly more than a Some tufts of ash dispersed here and child, was already quoted as a model of there, again conceal them as they walk, that native beauty, the charm of which and soon a rapid descent leads them to especially depends on the elegance of the the beach. On the right, the downs exform, the vivacity of the features, and the tending to a great distance, offer neither expression of the eyes; the latter at the shelter nor refuge: on the left, a peaked age of twenty, in a country where rock formed an arch, the extremity of strength united with grace is a character- which bent over the waves, and in whose istic of the male sex, had no rival among centre there was a vast and deep grotto. the Basque youth, of whom he was the Had chance conducted to this savage boast and the model. When he appear- place a cool observer, or even an enthued at the furandole or at tennis, dressed siastic, he would have been struck only in a little red waistcoat, with espadrilles with the grandeur of the objects preon his feet, wearing on his head the de- sented to his view. This half-circus, of licous berret, all eyes were turned on him, which the sea appears to be the stage; and left him but to seek Saubade. The this amphitheatre, whence Neptune love with which they were inflamed for seems to have designed to give to man each other was a secret to nobody. People the spectacle of the vast ocean which had not learned, but divined it; they were bathes the two hemispheres, would have sure that they loved, because it seemed alone arrested his attention. Our young necessary that they should love. One lovers embellish this frightful solitude person alone did not see this necessity; with all the illusions in which their souls it was the father of the young woman; are drowned; these gloomy rocks are he was rich in flocks; Laorens was enlightened by the fires with which they without fortune, and this circumstance burn: this formidable ocean which roars raised an insurmountable barrier between at a distance is a barrier which love has the two lovers. raised between them and the rest of the They had passed a year in the torments world: these layers of fine sand, these of a passion, the violence of which was heaps of broken shells which extend in only increased by the obstacles it met beds, which rise in seats, invite Saubade with; unable to indulge in the hope of and Laorens to the charms of a repose, happiness, they vowed to be true to each which is soon intoxicated with all the other till death; a single day acquitted dreams of love. their promise. In this oblivion of the universe, in this The father of Saubade was gone from agitation of a sentiment, which reveals to home one morning, for the annual enume- them an existence beyond nature, they ration of his flocks, on the other side of have not seen the clouds gathering tothe mountains, where he was accustomed gether, they have not heard the winds to assemble his shepherds. He had howl over the waves, and drive them upscarcely disappeared behind the hill, at on the beach beyond the limits where the foot of which his house was situated, they daily stop. The voice of the thunwhen the charming couple met together, der in vain warns them of the impendat the rising of the most deceitful dawn, ing danger. Laorens has trembled for under a kind of arbour covered with his beloved, but Saubade entirely given vines, at the extremity of the habitation. up to this life of love, which she is to en This asylum could conceal them joy but a moment, suffers no other sentibut for a moment from the eyes that ment to approach her heart; she has watched them; this moment escaped pressed her lover to her bosom and fear them; the sun already illumined the will henceforth be a stranger to her. fields; they retire from the village, and Shoes made of cord of aw hemp, fastened with coloured ribbons. Mean time, the waves rise and roll fu riously even to the entrance of the grotto which serves them as an asylum. “O my beloved!" cries Laorens, (carrying her to an interior angle of the rock where the water could not yet reach her,) "death surrounds thee: the tempest redoubles; all hope is lost." "I never have formed but one wish," replied the tender maid, with an angelic smile, "that is, to live and die with Laorens; to-morrow this hope would have been snatched from me; to-day I am thine, and thine for Laorens had swum to the entrance of the grotto, to see if it were still possible to pass through the waves. All is overflowed; every where the sea, the terrible sea, yawns in abysses, or rises in mountains; the waves pursue him and violently throw him back into the hollow of the rock, which they fill up to the height of the point where his fair ever. 459 mistress still braves them; she presents Long beaten by the waves, which could not part them; Saubade and Laorens were thrown lifeless near this rock, which had been to them at once a temple and a tomb. From that time this grotto, consecrated by the memory of this fatal event, received the name which it still bears of THE CHAMBER of Love. HIS is certainly an elegant produc- There, by some lake, whose blue expansive breast, THIS 66 Bright from afar, an inland-ocean, gleams, feet. tion; bearing the stamp of scholarship, and inspired by very considerable poetical genius. Among the numerous English tributes to Modern Greece, only a few have higher claims than the present; and not one composition of the kind is more uniformly classical and cor- Scarce have the paths been trod by Indian huntsman's rect. Were we to assign to it a local habitation," if not " a name," among the myriads who at present people the "city of Literature,' we should say that it dwelt very near the mansions of Messrs. Smedley, Gally Knight, &c. &c. who have lately occupied the best apartments at the genteel end of Parnassus. An allusion to the supposed state of a Greek exile in America gives the author a good opportunity for the exhibition of Chateaubriand his style and manner. suggested the idea in his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem: But thou, fair world! whose fresh unsullied charms The forests are around him in their pride, And stillness, and luxuriance-o'er his head And from those green arcades a thousaand tones Wake with each breeze, whose voice through Nature's temple moans. And there, no traces left by brighter days, Some grassy mound perchance may meet his gaze, There man not yet hath marked the boundless plain The palm his monument, the rock his tower. Remind him but that they, like him, are wildly fres. But doth the exile's heart serenely there 460 Modern Greece.-Management of Children. And shrines itself in mental solitude, That coldly smiles midst pleasure's brightest ray, Such grief is theirs, who, fixed on foreign shore, As pines the seaman, midst the ocean's roar, Though thy least relics, e'en in ruin, bear [VOL 2 A stamp of heaven, that ne'er hath been renew'd- Still be hope ardent, patience unsubdued; Gaze on yon form, corroded and defaced- mould. We apprehend that much of imagina- And still those shattered forms retain their godlike tion prevails in the above picture of yet surviving Grecian patriotism: but that, among the depressed and degraded inhabitants of Greece, enough of fire is still alive to justify a poet in such conceptions, we are ready and happy to acknowledge. Whether a philosopher can build on it any hopes as to the revival of liberty, courage, and genius, is problematical indeed. passage The only remaining quotation which O conquering genius! that couldst thus detain Eternalize expression's fleeting reign, 舍 Arrest warm life in all its energies, And fix them on the stone-thy glorious lot Powers half divine: while nations are forgot, A thought, a dream of thine hath vanquished fate! And when thy hand first gave its wonders birth, The realms that hail them now scarce claim'd a name on earth. Wert thou some spirit of a purer sphere Midst their bright kindred, from their marble throne, And they have borne, to light another land, We earnestly hope that this sanguine prediction may be realized; although it is, we think, tolerably clear that we shall not live to see it. The efforts of Chantry, however, are cheering and ennobling to the English mind; and we have even heard them preferred to the truly classical and chaste productions of his contemporary, Canova. The height of Phidias has been lowered from the Acropolis of Athens to the level of the London pave. ment. Let us trust that, in the contemplation of these unrivalled fragments in their present unexpected situation, some northern and native genius may be awakened, and give the world another object to admire, although not to adore, like the Olympian Jupiter. NEW WORK ON THE MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN. From La Belle Assemblee, September 1817. LETTERS TO A MOTHER, ON THE MANAGEMENT OF INFANTS AND CHILDREN. THIS These HIS is a very useful work for the the general treatment of children. nursery, and for governesses for kind of works afford but little room for the very early ages of childhood-yet comment or criticism: the following exwe cannot pronounce it altogether fault- tracts will speak for themselves, and less; it seems to have too much of the prove this volume worthy the attention rules of medical art attached to it. It is, of our female readers, who have the haphowever, carefully written, and in many piness of bearing the honoured title of parts contains a plain and easy method for mother. |