Lavoisier, and see the experiments. Berthollet had already arrived, as we have said, but Priestley was yet absent. It was evening. A large argand lamp, having its rays cast downward by a shade, played upon some diamonds laid on a piece of black paper, ready to be sacrificed to Lavoisier's splendid though exquisite discovery. "It is well Robespierre does not know of this," said Berthollet, a smile lighting up his large features, which seemed as if they had been chiseled out of a rock; "or it would make work for the Louisette."* "We chemists are not high game enough for the monsters," replied Lavoisier. "These are indeed fearful times! Ugh!" continued he, shuddering, "what the end will be I know not." "It seems," replied Berthollet, smiling, "that some sort of revolutionary infection is in the air: even you, my friend, are struck with the malady." Indeed, few persons have been more revolutionary than Lavoisier in his own way; he revolutionized the wholo domains of chemistry; he reduced the nomenclature of that science to a system, and gave us most of the names by which chemical substances are at the present time known. "I shall not wait longer for Priestley," at length said Lavoisier; "I am impatient to show you my experiment:" and, saying this, he made arrangements for burning a piece of iron wire in oxygen gas. Every itinerant chemical lecturer performs the experiment now, because it is so brilliant. The performance of it by Lavoisier, in the presence of his friend Berthollet, marked the downfall of a theory. It was one of the capital discoveries of Lavoisier, that when a body was burned and the results of combustion collected, they were heavier than the body consumed; from which it is quite clear that combustion cannot depend upon the loss of a something which philosophers called "phlogiston," but that it was attended with the gain of something. So Lavoisier proceeded to weigh his iron wire; he then burned it, and weighed the The instrument of death invented by Dr. Guillotin, and now universally known as the guillotine, was for a time denominated the Louisette, because it was the deputy Louis who first made himself acquainted with its capabilities, and furnished a report upon them to the National Assembly. result of combustion; no difficult matter in this case, inasmuch as the result is a solid. We shall not entrap the reader, against his knowledge and will giving him a chemical lecture in the place of a biographical incident; but it will be at least worth while to make him aware of some of the great points of philosophy developed by the subject of our memoir. While Lavoisier and Berthollet were thus engaged, the bell rang, and immediately afterward Priestley was introduced. "Mon ami," said Lavoisier, going to meet him, and grasping his hand, "why so late?" Priestley trembled, and was pale; his coat, too, was torn; he sank into a chair, and for a time could find no words. When at last he spoke, Priestley explained that he had been lost in a crowd of revolutionary miscreants, who were parading the streets with a model of the guillotine. Such wild revels were frequent at the time. Bands of savage creatures, after glutting their eyes with the sanguinary scenes of a wholesale execution, would parade the streets of an evening, calling at the guinguettes, and quaffing strong drinks; carrying with them a model of the guillotine, which every now and then they would set down, and display its mechanism to all who contributed a sou. It was dangerous for a well-dressed person to be in the streets at this time. Rags and drunkenness were the only claims on the respect of these depraved wretches, the "sans culottes," as they gloried in being called. While Priestley was yet explaining the cause of his absence, the ignoble throng surged by. Hoarsely they yelled the revolutionary street cries of the day: "A bas les rois," "A bas les aristocrats," " Vive la Louisette," "A bas les philosophes." "Ah! is it come to this?" ejaculated Lavoisier faintly, as he heard the latter exclamation, a new one to the revolutionary vocabulary. Apparently, a sufficiently large crowd had now come together to give hopes of a plentiful harvest of sous to the bearers of the guillotine. The crowd stopped near where the philosophers were assembled. The hateful machine was placed on the ground; the mock executioner raised the knife, and, instead of letting it fall immediately, gave out the first line of a revolutionary song, while one of the party went round for contributions, as the proprietor of a punch-raree-show does in our own streets. Amid shouts of wild laughter, and abuse of all that is great and good, the words of a song written in honor of the guillotine fell on the ear. "I wish those ruffians would pass on," remarked Lavoisier, losing his patience, as they continued the revolutionary air. But the men had other ends in view. The cry of" Farmer-general! Diamond philosopher!" rose on the breeze, and the crowd surged on. might have escaped; but, actuated by a noble and generous sentiment, he determined to give himself up-not to the officers of justice, for justice was not then in the French dominions-but to the officers of the monster Robespierre. His wife's father, M. Paulzé, happened to be in the power of Robespierre at the time when Lavoisier escaped: the latter no sooner became acquainted with this circumstance, than he determined at once to surrender himself, lest his absence might give color to the charge against him and his father-in-law, and lest the latter might be unduly prejudiced. Revealing his place of concealment, therefore, Lavoisier was seized by the triumvirate, along with twenty-seven others, all of whom had been fermiers-general before the Revolution. A great cry was now being made against the peculation of these same officials; and notwithstanding So, by some means or another, the outside myrmidons of Robespierre had made themselves acquainted with what Lavoisier was about. The three philosophers exchanged glances ominously. To have the reputation of riches was, at the times of which we speak, a cause of political suspicion. Lavoisier saw that he was compromised. Escape while you may," said Berthol- the office had been abolished by the Revolet, addressing him. "What matter?" replied Lavoisier. "If they set their minds upon having my poor fortune, have it they will, whether I escape or not. I have never heeded riches, save for the power they gave me of aiding others. I have used them to accumulate facts. Now in future, if God will, I will earn my bread as an apothecary, and work out theories by reflection." Poor Lavoisier! So soon as he perceived himself to be compromised, he took it as a matter of course that he should lose all the wealth he had, and be obliged to recommence the world at the age of fifty. He anticipated nothing worse: why should he? What wrong had he done? Many days, however, had not passed before a different train of feelings came across him. It was the custom of the myrmidoms of Robespierre at that period to circulate prejudicial reports against those whom they had already doomed to destruction. Vague rumors came to Lavoisier's ear of malversations committed while he was fermier-general. True, conscience acquitted him of the charge; but what mattered whether true or false, provided Robespierre and his confederates had determined to have him? In an evil moment, Lavoisier escaped and hid himself, which only seemed to give probability to the charges brought against him. The minions of Robespierre were still on his track, but could not discover him; indeed, Lavoisier lution, and that none but an unprincipled tyrant would have judged people for retrospective offenses in a case like this, Robespierre was not a man to be restrained by such scruples. The fermiers-general were rich; that was enough. So Lavoisier was sent to prison, in company with the other twenty-seven. He was brought to a mock trial and condemned; but the frivolous charge on which he was to die proclaims, better than a whole treatise, the integrity of his previous life. If the reader of this can divest himself of the knowledge for one moment of the fact that the axe of the guillotine is poised aloft, waiting for a victim; if he can drive out from the recesses of memory recollections of this fearful time, and carry himself ideally back into the council chamber of the horrid triumvirate, where the nature of Lavoisier's derelictions were gravely set forth, he may indulge a passing smile. Fancy a man, retired from business many years, gravely brought to trial for having watered his tobacco some ten years ago! Yet so it was; no graver charge than this could be brought against Lavoisier by those who, depend upon it, said the worst they were able about him. For this he died, on the 8th of May, 1794. It was dangerous to stand up and speak well of a man in those days; nevertheless, the citizen Hallé did so. He boldly impugned the right of trying a man on a retrospective charge; but he did it un availingly. He then, when the trial was over and the sentence passed, invoked the mercy of the triumvirate. Alas! they had none. He set forth Lavoisier's discoveries, his many acts of benevolence, his charity, and his other excellent qualities; but all in vain-Lavoisier was to die. The philosopher did not murmur; he submitted himself to the impending fate with meekness. One request he made, and only one; any individual a shade less vile than Robespierre would have granted it. "Let me live a few more days," said he," to see the result of some experiments now going on." "Bah!" replied Coffinhall, the president of the judicial conclave, who had been sitting on the mock trial," the republic doesn't want philosophers. Away with him!" Thus mournfully ended the mortal career of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. ASCENDING MOUNT VESUVIUS. and day he must be on the alert to note any threatening change in the symptoms of his patient. We have seen one of the curious bulletins which this public functionary presents to his government, and it recorded in the most minute manner the fluctuations in the interesting case under his care. But there are other functionaries who reap the harvest of their daily bread, "in the sweat of their brow," from off the same hot field of labor. There is a whole population of stalwart guides, unreclaimedlooking savages as they are, who may be said to live upon ashes, and to tread their daily path over the heated crust of a furnace. A sobering calling this, a solemnizing engagement! Nay, but you know not a Neapolitan, if you think thus. spirits run up in heat and in fiery danger, like the quicksilver in a thermometer, until they reach the boiling point of true Neapolitan luxury. "Ah, signora mio! your excellency has come at the very moment of such happiness! Vesuvius is mad to-night! For your precious life, excellency, spring upon my beautiful His HERE is an official personage at Na-mule. He is the famous Gennaro, sign THER ples whose duties are of a somewhat remarkable nature. He has to hand in a daily report respecting the state of health, not of the "body politic," with its fever symptoms, its painful delirium, or the dull lethargy and indifference which follow such accessions of disease, but of the mighty Vesuvius himself! It is his responsible duty to feel, as it were, the beating pulse of the volcano; to lay his feeble hand as upon the heaving heart of the giant, and to ascertain whether the forces of nature be working regularly and smoothly, or whether, fierce and intermittent, they betoken the wild disturbance of fever. Campanelli is a man of experience, and when he pronounces on the varying symptoms of the wondrous case before him, and issues his daily bulletins, they may say that he can form a good diagnosis" of disease. But when he stands on the crumbling edge of the fiery crater, when he feels the hot and sulphureous breath of the volcano, and notes the convulsive heavings of the internal malady, he knows well that there is but one Power that can control such mighty forces, and that only he who creates can hold or heal. But it is Campanelli's duty to watch, to listen, and to feel. Night VOL. XI.-19 66 ora mia! He glories in a grand eruption; he is my friend, my own life, my Gennaro! Mount, signora mia.” Of course one cannot resist such burning language as this, illustrated by the fiery flashes of a Neapolitan eye, and the native eloquence of a southern action. You are instantly on Gennaro's back; and Matteo is right; he is a very fine, trustworthy fellow, tough in limb and sure of foot. How carefully he picks his footing on the scrambling path, struggling upward over blocks of lava, wild as the bed of a mountain torrent, the dead and fixed tide of a past eruption. Then up comes Matteo to your side, and chronicles the fearful history of the mountain: "This was the tide, signor, that overwhelmed Pompeii; that was the river that poured down upon Torre del Greco." Still Gennaro struggles upward, only trying to crop surreptitiously a few tempting sprouts of the famous vine, whose rich juice bears a name so irreverent that we hesitate to write it. At last we reach the hermitage, a little desolate lodge in the black and burning wilderness. Within dwells a civil old Franciscan monk, who acts hermit in the waste; but there is rather too bright a sparkle in his eye for a mortified and civilities and bravadoes to exchange. But now begin the true difficulties of the ascent, and now Matteo is in his fiery element. He shouts, he gathers around him a whole troop of subsidiary guides, he collects chaises à porteurs for the less robust of our party, he fastens leather straps to his own belt and to the belts of his men, for the panting gentlemen to drag and hang upon. And now we are off again. Mounted on a straight-backed wooden chair, bound between two poles, up into the air you go, on the shoulders of now four, now six, screaming, struggling porters. chastened anchorite. Besides, we doubt | party, on joining their friends, have many if the fasting anchorites of old kept a couple of such well-fed and insolent cats in their narrow cell as has the hermit of Vesuvius. There is a dog besides; but he has an altogether inferior standing in the establishment, a submissive member of the laity, evidently completely domineered over by the pampered cats. While we are almost fighting with these last individuals for the possession of our cold fowls and sandwiches, Gennaro and his colleagues are rolling luxuriously in the ashes outside, sending up volumes of dust as black as soot. However, they are soon upon their legs again, and carry us kindly to the grand bivouac for the mules, within the sharp and jagged walls of the old crater. This extinct crater is like some gigantic broken shell, which has long ago exploded, and flung far and wide its deathdispensing contents. Within its shivered hollow there is already a considerable encampment of mules; and Gennaro and his But soon the sides of the coneshaped mountain become so almost impracticably steep, that at last no fewer than eight get a grasp at you, plunging into black dusty mold a foot deep at every step, and sliding backward a foot more. The blocks of cinder-like lava, hanging loosely together, are now like the broken rocks on a storm-swept shore. You feel as if the chair must be dislocated, and 66 your own joints also. Coraggio, coraggio," (Courage,) shout the gasping burdenbearers, in mutual exhortation; and down comes a porter between two huge cinders, and your equipage suddenly becomes lopsided. "Coraggio," again vociferate the dark wrestlers; and you are scarcely righted, before down go three, four, six; and if you gaspingly plead, "Aspettate!" (Wait a bit!) down they all lie together, wallowing in the ashes, dark, wild, and picturesque, while you sit up in the center of this singular group on your highbacked chair. sides. Matteo again seizes your arm, for he knows what is coming; it is an awful explosion, like the blowing up of a citadel, and a burst of flame tears its way up into the air from the unknown depths of the burning mine. Explosion rapidly follows explosion, and your only way of counting time is by those mighty minuteguns of the mountain. Between you and the acting cone, a broad canal of liquid lava heaves and surges on in slow and slime-like flow. Now a great black rock, undermined by the current, is separated from the shore, and borne heavily onward, grating, and crunching, and moaning, as it is ground against the banks of the red river. Shall we say what scene of unspeakable awe seems to be represented before the eye at this fearful moment? Need we say how solemnly sounds the language in the awakened ear: "Who can dwell with everlasting burnings?" Ah, sinner! heedest thou not the threat of the fire which shall never be quenched?" Then, come and stand where I stand, beside this lake burning with fire and brimstone, where the smoke" seems to" rise up for ever and ever." Come and stand where I stand, where the mephitic smell of the sulphur, and the hot escape of the pent-up gases, are like to take away one's breath; where the face is scorched and the hair shriveled by the fierce reflection, and the feet are burned by the heated crust. 66 Enough, Matteo: we have done and dared enough." Now is your moment to glance over your shoulder down upon the strange and beautiful world below. There lies that peerless bay, taking its evening rest under the pearly touch of the sunset sky. There that resplendent chain of islands gleams out of the fading distance in all the hues of the dying dolphin. There, headland beyond headland flushes and fades by turns, until, overcome by the crimson glory of the sunset, they drop off into faint and dreamy sleep. There is the shining city drawing its glittering lines of white along the margin of the blue sea. Immediately beneath you lie, in dark confusion, the hardened waves of a once gleaming tide. Before and behind you, dragged by one guide, and propelled by another, the excited strangers reel and wrestle up the steep. The short-lived twilight soon withdraws, and leaves the scene to the fierce fires which are waiting to glare forth upon earth, sea, and sky. The "Nay, pardon, but 'cellenza may safely cloud of smoke over the mountain rolls approach nearer to the edge of the flowoff in writhing folds of red, rent at inter- ing lava. He will answer for 'cellenza's vals by sudden bursts of flame. invaluable safety. Ah! think, would he stripes which, in the brightness of an-he, Matteo, who had lived a whole life Italian day, had only looked like wreaths of curling smoke down the sides of the great cone, now confess their veiled life, and become paths of fire. And now Matteo seizes your arm, and looks full in your face, to see how you brook the wondrous scene which is about to burn its life-long stamp upon your mind. Yes; you are on the edge of a rent and shivered basin, encumbered with its own seared fragments. From its midst rises a smaller cone, the living, acting crater, ever feeding its own growth with the red-hot stones which it flings up from its burning lips, which dart up into the sky, and then fall, like a shower of red meteors, upon its Long of eruptions—would he risk 'cellenza's precious life? Pardon-'cellenza's hand." And so we leap-over a rock of cooled lava? Nay, but over a narrow chasm— a cleft, which, red and burning, carries eye and mind down into the heart of the living volcano -a fiery gulf, which no "deep-sea lead" would fathom. "Now, then, Matteo, that will do ;" and so, turning our back unwillingly upon this scene of indescribable magnificence, we rapidly plunge down through the deep ashes, until we rejoin Gennaro and his friends at the grand encampment of the mules, our route marked by a long line of flashing and flaring torches. |