this Trade Collection among national and provincial museums and learned societies, enabling them, in some instances, to complete their collections, and in others to make important additions to them. This Trade Collection, then, although interesting and valuable in a high degree, may be regarded as temporary, so far as the South Kensington Museum is concerned.

The Economic Museum is a development, on a larger scale, of one of the divisions in the Educational Collection. It was formed by Mr Twining, and presented by him to the government. The object has been, to collect specimens, models, plans, diagrams, and drawings, relating to everything that concerns the daily wellbeing of the working-classes-such as building designs, building materials, furniture and fittings, household utensils, fabrics and clothing, food and cookery, fuel and household stores, &c. Such a series, it is evident, may be almost without limit; and even to the extent of Mr Twining's small collection-made in a feeling of hearty and wholesome benevolence there are abundant contrivances well worth peeping into.

The Sheepshanks Collection is in one sense out of place here, seeing that modern English paintings have little to do with the miscellaneous contents of the museum generally. Yet, what was to be done? A gentleman munificently offers a collection of pictures worth many thousand pounds, and we have nowhere to place them better, then, deposit them in a series of well-lighted rooms in the new building, constructed at a small expense for that purpose, than lose the gift while artistic doctors are quarrelling about a new National Gallery. If viewed in this light, the Sheepshanks Collection may well please us, despite its locality. About 250 oil-paintings by modern English masters, and numerous drawings and etchings, formed the gift; to which other specimens have since been added. Here we may enjoy for hours long the products of Bonnington, Burnet, Clint, Collins, Constable, Cooper, Cope, Creswick, Danby, Eastlake, Etty, Frith, Horsley, Jackson, Lance, Landseer, Lee, Leslie, Mulready, Roberts, Stanfield, Stothard, Turner, Webster, Wilkie, and other well-esteemed knights of

the easel.

THE KING'S WORD. NEVER had the position of a king presented so hopeless an aspect as that of Charles VII. of France, in the year 1456, two years before his deliverance by Joan of Arc. Almost all the ports and fortresses in the hands of the English, an army which it was difficult to maintain, without allies, an empty treasury, and no prospect of soon again being able to fill it-those were the circumstances in which Charles found himself, when one day, during his sojourn at Bourges, he received information that the last remains of his army had, in the preceding night, set fire to their camp, and gone over to the enemy. With the defection of these troops, under the command of the Count de Richemont, constable of France, the cause of Charles appeared to be irretrievably lost.

Such a disaster would have driven any other monarch to despair; but Charles-who received the

'Well, Giac, that is a good joke,' said the king, laughing and turning to his favourite.

'Yes, sire,' answered Giac; and the misfortune could not have befallen your majesty at a luckier moment.' 'Why so?'

and the treasury is empty. At this moment a page "The men, sire, had arrears of pay owing to them, announced the Comte de Richemont, constable of France; and the countenance of the marquis, which had hitherto borne an expression of careless gaiety, instantly changed to one of extreme seriousness, and his face turned deadly pale.

'My cousin is welcome!' cried the king, at the same time looking towards the officer, who was still waiting, and giving him to understand, by a motion of the hand, that he was dismissed.

'Well, Giac?' said Charles, in a tone of wonderment, as his favourite, whilst expecting the entrance of the constable, left the dice-box standing untouched before him; the throw is with you.'

'Sire'- stammered Giac, as he arose in embar rassment from the table. 'What is the matter?'

"Your majesty is aware that the constable is not friendly towards me. As your treasurer, sire, he may think it my fault that the deserting troops had not received their arrears of pay, and I fear he may wish to be revenged.'

'Nonsense, Giac! Do not give yourself any concern on that account. I, your king, will protect you.' 'But circumstances might occur, your majesty'said the marquis, trembling.

"There is nothing to fear. You have my royal word'

Here the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of the constable.

'Welcome, good cousin, to Bourges!' cried Charles. I have already heard what has taken place at St Jacques de Beuvron. The wicked traitors! what brings you to me, worthy cousin?'

But

'I am come, sire,' answered the count, to return to you my sword of office, as it is no longer able to restore

the lost condition of France.'

'Not so hasty, cousin!' cried Charles, knitting his brows. It is not my fault that the cowardly mercenaries have left us.'

'It is not mine, sire,' answered the constable, proudly and with emphasis.

'I know, I know,' said the king. 'You are a faithful servant.' The count bowed coldly.

"When I received the constable's sword from your

majesty,' said he, and assembled an army to protect your throne, I did so upon one condition: I promised to support the troops at my own cost during a period of four weeks, at the end of which time they were to be paid by your majesty, and you promised to send me a hundred thousand dollars for that purpose.' 'Very true, cousin.'

promise, but the money did not arrive. The troops 'Four months have elapsed since then; I kept my refused to serve any longer without pay. I entreated and threatened, but without avail: the traitors deserted secretly. It would not have happened, sire, if you had kept your word as well as I kept mine, and had sent the money as you promised.'

'No, sire.'

'No? And the money has been collected from the country for the purpose! ... What has become of it?'

'Ask the Marquis de Giac, your majesty: perhaps he knows,' answered the constable coldly.

The marquis, who had hitherto listened to the conversation in a state of the greatest anxiety, replied to the king's question:

'Sire,' said he, 'out of the hundred thousand dollars, the Chevalier d'Ange was paid the bet he laid with your majesty; and the rest I took in part-payment for the three horses I had brought from Burgundy.'

'So the money has gone for a bet and three horses!' cried the constable, angrily turning to the marquis: 'you are truly an excellent treasurer!'

'Whether I am so or not,' answered the marquis scornfully, it is not your business to decide.' The constable bit his lip without making any reply, and then fell on one knee before the king, and presented his sword:

'Here, sire,' said he, 'is my sword back again.' 'No, my cousin, we will not accept it,' cried Charles; 'for we know none more worthy to whom we can confide it.' The constable appeared to consider for a minute, and then, with a side-glance at the marquis: 'Since you command it, sire,' said he, 'I will retain my sword, hoping long to wear it to the honour of my king and France; but I must make one condition, which I hope you will grant me.'

'Most willingly, cousin.'

'As constable of France,' continued the count, I exercise the highest jurisdiction within the provinces confided to me, as well as within the district of the town of Bourges.'

'Right!'

'Allow me then, sire, to make use of this power; and permit that the same obedience may be shewn to me that would be shewn to yourself.' Charles appeared for a moment embarrassed, and then, with a side-look at his visibly anxious favourite: 'It shall be so, cousin,' said he, but with one stipulation: you must answer to me with your honour for the safety of the head of the Marquis de Giac.'

'I answer for his life, sire,' said the constable. Then turning to the marquis:

'My lord marquis,' said he, 'you are my prisoner.'

A few hours after the visit of the constable to King Charles, the Marquis de Giac was a prisoner in Bourges, on the charge of having squandered the money belonging to the royal treasury. This, at least, was the form under which the constable had proposed to himself to retaliate upon the marquis, for a long list of offences he had been for some time committing with impunity, feeling himself safe under the especial protection of the king. The prisoner was fully aware of the danger of the position in which he was placed, although the word of the king, as well as that of the constable, was undoubted security for his life. But are there not punishments infinitely more painful than death? Are there not tortures insufficient to destroy the thread of life, yet, in comparison with which, death itself would be a boon? And what was there to hope from the protection of a weak and frivolous king, at the time when the will of the constable was of greater weight than that of his master?

Giving himself up to these reflections, his head resting on his two hands, the marquis sat in a corner of his dark and dismal prison, awaiting the arrival of the messenger who was to make known to him his fate; for in those days no lengthened process was necessary for the condemnation of one who had fallen

fore, that same evening that the door of the prison opened, and the mayor of Bourges, attended by two sheriffs, appeared before the marquis. A long roll of paper in the hand of the former announced to him that his fate was decided.

'My Lord Marquis de Giac,' said the mayor, after clearing his throat, and unrolling the paper, 'draw near, and hear the sentence which the good city of Bourges, according to right and conscience, passes upon you.'

The prisoner, by nature not timid, and endowed with a certain strength of soul which enabled him to meet with fortitude inevitable evils, arose courageously, and walking up to the mayor almost with an air of pride: 'Let me hear it!' said he. But, pray, use not many words.'

'As you command,' replied the mayor, bowing low as he spoke; and then he proceeded to read, with all the pomposity of his office, as follows: "The supreme administrator of the laws of the good and true city of Bourges decrees, according to right and conscience, that Arthur Phoebus Charles, Marquis de Giac, be held guilty of having improperly and fraudulently squandered the royal treasure, and that he be accordingly attainted of high treason, and condemned to suffer death by the sword.'

'How? Death?' cried the prisoner, more in anger than in terror.

'Allow me to proceed, my lord marquis; I have not yet done,' said the mayor; and he read on: 'In consideration, however, of its having pleased his majesty, our most gracious king and master, to pardon with his own royal word the said Marquis de Giac, and to grant him his life, so shall the sentence pronounced upon him be commuted and changed to a penance, which commutation, however, can only be obtained by the condemned declaring in his own handwriting that he is willing to undergo the sentence of death, and to renounce the favour of the royal pardon offered him.'

'And what is the penance which I am to prefer to death-in what does it consist?' asked the prisoner, turning pale.

'It is as follows,' said the mayor, reading further: 'That Arthur Phoebus Charles, Marquis de Giac, shall bind himself to put to death with the sword to-morrow morning before sunrise, in the open market-place of Bourges, one of the criminals at present convicted of murder.'

Uttering a cry of rage and horror, the prisoner sank on the bench of his cell, and the door immediately closed upon the retiring mayor and his attendants.

When we consider the degradation attached to the office of public executioner in the middle ages, the contempt in which the man who filled it was held, and his low position in a civil community, we shall be able to form some idea of the refined cruelty contained in the so-called penance inflicted on the Marquis de Giac. To come in contact, even in the remotest degree, with that administrator of criminal justice, was held to be a disgrace which not even the royal authority was sufficient entirely to obliterate; and the meanest citizen would have preferred death to that act which the authorities of Bourges had imposed, under the name of a penance, upon a man of ancient and honourable race, and one who had long stood high in the favour of a crowned head.

At the dawn of day, on the 5th of June 1456, an agitation began on the market-place of Bourges, which announced that something, as unusual as it was important, was about to take place. Out of all the houses, streets, and alleys streamed men and women of all ages, who assembled round a circle marked out with posts in the middle of the market-place, the

entrance to which was strongly guarded by wellarmed soldiers. Although the morning twilight did not afford a clear sight of what was prepared upon the enclosed spot, still there was a general idea of what was to follow, and those who stood nearest could discern a lightly erected stage, the sight of which left no doubt as to its object. It was a scaffold, which awaited its victim.

The expectation and the interest depicted on the countenances of the constantly increasing mass, was very decidedly different from that which was usually observed on like occasions. This difference had its rise in the circumstance that the present occasion was not one of a common execution, but, as was already known to the inhabitants of Bourges, an example of the administration of justice hitherto altogether without precedent. Besides this, the unusual time of day, as well as the place, contributed much to lend solemnity to the whole; for a gallows had never before been known to be erected within the precincts of the dwelling-houses of the citizens of Bourges; and added to this, the sword of justice was now to be seen in the hand of a man who, although he had not been particularly beloved by the people, had at least always been looked up to by them with respect.

As at length, during the continuation of that rustling and confused noise which is inseparable even from a silent multitude, the daylight increased by degrees, and announced the approaching rising of the sun in the east, a deep and awful stillness suddenly prevailed. Through a passage formed by the crowd, a picket of soldiers approached the fatal ring; surrounded by these soldiers was a miserable cart, in which sat the executioner, and by his side a haggard-looking man, who was evidently about to suffer the death of a malefactor. At a little distance from the cart, followed a clergyman, accompanied by a man, whose face was perfectly pale, but whose carriage was firm and proud, and his aspect imposing. His dress, richly embroidered with gold, but to which the armorial ornaments were nevertheless wanting, shewed him to be of high rank. It was the Marquis de Giac. When he appeared, a suppressed exclamation of sympathy ran through the

crowd.

In the meantime five members of the judicial body of Bourges had approached the scaffold from an opposite direction, and after laying several rolls of paper down upon a table, awaited earnestly and silently the approach of the condemned. A few moments after, the victims appeared upon the place of execution. The clergyman drew near to the culprit who had been convicted of murder, prayed with him for a short time, and then led him to the fatal seat; after which, amidst the breathless stillness which prevailed, the senior of the five judicial officers proceeded to read aloud, first the sentence of the murderer, and then that of the Marquis de Giac, to whom he turned at the conclusion with these words:

'I demand of you, Arthur Phoebus Charles, Marquis de Giac, whether you are willing, under your own handwriting and signature, to give yourself up to the royal mercy, and thus escape the sentence of death which hangs over you?'

'No,' answered the marquis, in a firm voice. 'Then,' continued the officer of justice, 'you will have to perform the penance imposed on you, and do the part of executioner to the delinquent who has been adjudged to suffer death at the hands of the headsman.' Saying this, he made a sign to the executioner, who drew from under his cloak a sword, which he presented to the Marquis de Giac.

An indescribable expression of anxiety was depicted on every countenance. After a short pause, the marquis, pale as death, seized the sword with a firm grasp, bared his right arm, and A shriek of horror burst from the crowd-he had cut off his right hand

by a desperate stroke of the weapon which he held in his left.

Returning the sword to the executioner, and turning to the judicial authorities, whilst the blood streamed from his arm, he said: 'Go, tell the constable, gentlemen, that the Marquis de Giac has no hand with which to perform the duty of executioner'

He could say no more, but fell fainting from loss of blood.

Before the expiration of an hour, the marquis received the pardon of the constable, who admired courage still more than he hated political crime.*

OLD SAWS NEW SET.

I HAVE a great respect for poor Richard and Dr Benjamin Franklin, and have tried in my time to turn some of their famous maxims to account; but I find, from observation and experience, they do not always yield the admirable results they promise. They are sober-looking, sensible-seeming precepts, but somehow they fail on being reduced to practice; or rather, I might say, they are to a great extent impracticable, and do not admit of being wrought into everyday procedure. I begin to be in doubt whether they are so wise and canny as they are commonly considered. I desire, therefore, to make a protest against a few of them, and to state, in my rambling way, what I fancy may be said on the other side. I don't care much about being logical: if anything illogical occurs to me which seems pertinent to the occasion, I shall say it, without regard to consequences. I wish the ghosts of Poor Richard and Dr Franklin, and all other maximmongers, dead or living, to understand, that some of their renowned sayings are becoming questionable; that here, at anyrate, they shall for once be questioned. Anything they may have to say in the way of reply, shall have due consideration; but meanwhile, they are to be politely and respectfully informed, that they are not any longer to pass for the perfect and infallible sages they have been hitherto esteemed.

By way of beginning, let us look at this celebrated saying, which so many of us can remember having heard quoted for our admonition, when perhaps we were too young and heedless to take much notice of it, and were accordingly in no great danger of being misled by it:

Early to bed, and early to rise,

Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Can anybody in his senses take that for truth? I mean to say, I have seen it a thousand times contradicted by matter of fact. If there were any truth in it, I think I know who would have been a rich and a wise man. It would have been Boots at the inn-a fellow most exemplary for early rising, and who, both from principle and disposition, always goes to bed as soon as possible. He even sometimes goes to sleep in his boot-house, or in a hayloft in the middle of the day; and, to shew that his habit in this respect is no pretence, is usually very difficult to awaken. Earlier than the middle of the day, we think, nobody could reasonably be expected to seek repose; and thus Boots may be said to fulfil the first demand of the grave maxim as literally as it is possible to fulfil

it.

that he is always first up in the house. During Then, as to rising early, it is well known most of the year, he is up long before the sun rises:

From the German of Schubar.

he has the traveller to call who is going by the coach or an early train, the hot water to get ready for the gentleman who shaves by candlelight, a score or two pair of boots and shoes to polish, and to clean the knives for breakfast; and all this has to be done before anybody else is moving. Boots plainly fulfils the second condition-that of getting up betimes. And now, what is the result in his experience? Is he wise or wealthy? Not at all. If Boots has any character at all, it is probably a character for stupidity. The most one ever sees in him, is a little flippant shrewdness of the Sam Weller description-a quality as little like wisdom as Day and Martin polish is like sunshine. Boots certainly does not profit on the score of wisdom by his early rising; neither can he be said to gain much by it in the way of healthiness. He has generally a besmutted, dingy, unwashed, unwholesome, and comfortless appearance, which betokens anything but healthiness-betokens rather a worn and forlorn and vagabondish state of mind and body. Boots, perhaps, is dissipated-drinks at the barrel when he is sent to draw the beer, spends his sixpences not unlikely in 'goes' of ardent spirits, disdains contact with soap and water-lives, upon the whole, a shabby and reckless sort of life, thinking that the kind of thing most accordant with his calling. Rarely does he even so much as black his own boots, which, moreover, are commonly without laces. Clean-shirt days are epochs in his existence, like angels' visits, few and far between. Boots is scarcely reputable, looks usually like a blackguard, and is not unfrequently the great original he looks; yet he is pre-eminently the man who is first up in a morning, and, whenever he has opportunity, goes to bed in the afternoon-goes to bed, therefore, sooner than any other bed-requiring creature, for we count nothing of his often being up till midnight, as that may be reckoned the beginning of the next day with him; and with all this early rising and early bed-going, Boots is still-just what you see him.

Early to bed, and early to rise,

makes Boots

Neither healthy, nor wealthy, nor wise. Well, I think that much is proved. The maxim practically carried out, as in this individual case, turns out to be a fallacy. Nobody need tell me, that as there are no rules without an exception,' so Boots is to be accounted an exception. I maintain with pertinacity that Boots comes strictly within the rule. He thoroughly complies with the conditions set down for his observance to gain the proposed end; and if he does not gain it, it is not because his case is anyway exceptional, but because the rule has no relation to the consequences ascribed to it. Early rising is no doubt a wholesome habit at certain seasons of the year, and may be recommended as being in most cases conducive to bodily welfare; but any one who expects to become either healthy, wise, or wealthy, by simply getting up and going to bed betimes, will not have long to live to see the folly of the experiment. No pike-staff can be plainer than the fact, that a man's success in life depends not on his early rising, but on what he does and thinks about when he is up. You may rise before the lark, and go to rest with the domestic poultry, and be neither physically, mentally, nor pecuniarly the better for it, unless you observe at least a few other conditions, which the maxim under consideration does not take into the account. Poor Richard's saw, then, needs to be new set; and if it is not sharpened up a good deal, and turned nearly into a new one, it will

have to pass in future, at a reduced value, as old iron.

Something similar, we apprehend, must eventually be the fate of another of these popular sayings: Diligence is the mother of good-luck, and God gives all things to industry.' The inventor of this, perhaps, may be excused for his short-sightedness, as he did not live in the nineteenth century; consequently, he had never known or heard of the distressed needlewomen. These singular nuns of industry, as we are credibly informed, are in the habit of labouring for sixteen or eighteen hours a day to earn tenpence-finding thread and buttons for the work out of their wages. Here, surely, is diligence with no offspring of good-luckthat it cannot even procure a sufficiency of dry bread industry, which is so far from obtaining all things,' and decoction of chickory without sugar! What can an industrious needlewoman, seeking for consolation among proverbs, think of this one, except that it isbosh? Put not your trust in proverbs, will be her natural prayer and admonition to all shirt-makers, seeing that whatever application they may have to they have little or none at all to them. Those, like the affairs of more favourably conditioned people, the present, which are founded on economical considerations, are utterly inoperative within their sphere of circumstances, and cannot be urged upon them with any shadow of justice or propriety. And what is true in their case, is true also in regard to numerous other sections of the community. What good-luck' from diligence ever befalls the great body their lifetime, when work is to be had, are, to say the of day-labourers who, for six days in every week of least of them, more or less industriously employed? If all things' are to be gained by industry, these laborious people ought to have a considerable accumulation in the savings' bank; but it is notorious that they have nothing of the sort-notorious that most of them find it difficult to make ends meet on Saturday nights, and that the majority are subject How are facts like these to be reconciled with the to the inconvenience of being perpetually in debt. bland assumptions of the maxim? You might as well attempt to reconcile the proceedings of party politicians, after coming into office, with their previous professions while in the ranks of 'opposition.' Good-luck and prosperity are no more the necessary consequences of mere habitual diligence, than good performances are the results of liberal promises in political administration. The great gains promised to industry are dependent on other conditions; on complicated concurrences of circumstances, in which industry comes in as only one of many elements, and that, usually, by no means the most significant. Industry, to be profitable, must be directed to remunerative pursuits; and even then, success will be to a large extent determined by fortunate combinations of opportunity, adroit contrivance, lucky chances, and ingenious expedients, in conjunction with which, mere industry will often play but a very subordinate part. Why, then, should poor, struggling, hard-toiling people be tantalised by such preposterously foolish saws as this we are considering? It has no manner of application to their confused and perplexed circumstances; it can afford them no comfort in any crisis: and as a reproach for their lack of acquisition, it is senseless, and mercilessly cruel. Let it be banished to the limbo of absurd and obsolete thrift-lumber, and never be reproduced, save as a ludicrous curiosity, to shew the senselessness of what formerly passed for wisdom!

The next pretentious fallacy we have to notice takes the form of a plausible admonition: Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.' This seems a simple enough rule for avoiding bankruptcy, and we can fancy a youthful adventurer setting out with it as part of his stock-in-trade, with the confident expectation of