The sentence was pronounced at two in the morning, the nature of the offence was not set forth in a blank that had been left for the purpose, and the record shows that the only piece of evidence-apart from the statements extracted from the Duc-was the order constituting the court martial! Anything more atrocious it is impossible to conceive :

'The President caused the accused to be brought forward, free and unbound, and ordered the captain, who was in charge of the report, to inform him of the proofs in charge and discharge. These were one, the order made by the Government on March 20.'

The execution was to be at once, and at night, and this was a flagrant violation of law :

This judgement is to be executed at once, as soon as the captain on duty shall have read the sentence to the accused, in the presence of the troops of the garrison.'

The last scene of the tragedy is well known, and it is beside our purpose to describe its incidents. The secrecy and haste which throughout marked these horrible proceedings were duly observed; the executioners were not told the name of the victim, and the Duc was led into one of the courts of the donjon immediately after the sentence was read. The grim figures of a file of musketeers lowering through the torchlight did not shake the nerve of a warrior who had often looked death in the face; his request for a confessor was brutally refused, and Charlotte de Rohan was his last thought:

'He asked for a pair of scissors, cut off a lock of his hair, and put it, with a gold ring, into a letter which he had secretly written on his way from Strasbourg. He requested Noirot to give the packet to the Princesse de Rohan-Rochfort. The officer makes a promise. Supreme and precious memories! the farewell of a husband, the lock of hair, the marriage-token !'

All was quickly despatched, and the body of the Duc wast hurriedly buried on the spot where he fell. If Harel is to be believed, a grave had been dug some hours before the trial had begun, a pledge of the murder about to follow.

The deposition of Bonnelet, a workman at Vincennes, attests this monstrous circumstance. He declared on oath, before the commission of inquiry charged with the exhumation of the Prince-the date is March 18, 1816-that, on March 20, 1804, at about three in the afternoon, he had been directed by Harel to make a grave at the foot of the Queen's Tower. The spot indicated by Bonnelet is exactly that where the Duc was executed and interred.'

Attempts have been made by several writers to excuse or

palliate this foul deed of blood. It is really surprising that a grave historian, like M. Thiers, should prefer a plea based on a statement that the First Consul hummed a few lines from a play of Voltaire significant of the grace of clemency at a game of cards on the evening of March 20; in view of the facts the inference is absurd; and if there be any truth in the story, the thing was probably a trick of the salon to hold out hopes to the Court at Malmaison, alarmed at the prospect of the approaching tragedy. A more serious apology has been made, founded on an assertion that the First Consul had ordered Réal to go to Vincennes to make a report of the trial on the spot, and to take the evidence to Malmaison; but Réal, it is alleged, received the message late at night, and after he had retired to rest, and did not reach Vincennes until the deed had been done; and it is argued from this that it was Napoleon's purpose to review and to set aside the sentence of the Court, and to grant a free pardon to the Duc d'Enghien. M. Welschinger has examined this question at length, and we certainly think it was Napoleon's wish that Réal should have appeared at the trial; and we may accept the statement, though its truth is doubtful, that Réal arrived at Vincennes too late, the order not having been read in time. But how does this prove that the First Consul ever contemplated sparing the Duc d'Enghien, or that a report of Réal would have changed his purpose? The stubborn facts of the case refute the notion; the presence of Savary at the proceedings at Vincennes, and his interposition, are almost conclusive; and had Réal committed the grave offence of frustrating what his master bad meant to do, the excuse that he had not been awakened in time would have been treated as it deserved, and he would have been summarily dismissed from the Consular service. M. Welschinger's account, drawn from that of acquaintances, of what occurred at Malmaison on the morning of the 21st, is certainly true as regards this matter; and we entirely agree with the inference he has made:

'When Réal made his appearance, the Memoirs of M. de Méneval say, the First Consul asked why he had not been at Vincennes. After hearing the explanation made by Réal and exchanging a few words with him, he fell again into a reverie; and then, without uttering a word of praise or blame, he took up his hat, said "Very well," and left M. Réal surprised and somewhat troubled at his evident preoccupation. This is difficult to understand. What! the First Consul has nothing but "Very well" to say to a man who has not executed his orders, who can only allege sleepiness as an excuse, and who has made an intended act of clemency impossible! . . . Had Réal had no excuse

but this, he would never have gone near Malmaison. He would have resigned his office; his resignation would have been accepted; and his incarceration would have ensued.'

The absence of Réal from the court martial-apart from the lame excuse he perhaps offered-may, in fact, be explained in two possible ways. The most probable supposition, we think, is that, like many others acquainted with the truth, he was seriously alarmed at what might happen were the Duc d'Enghien cruelly murdered, and was ashamed of the part he was called on to play; and, accordingly, he kept away from the trial, and simply handed over the papers to Dautancourt, who performed the task committed to himself. Another supposition put forward by M. Welschinger, on tolerably fair grounds, is that the absence of Réal was part of a scheme arranged between Napoleon and his servile agent, a scheme designed to furnish an excuse for the mockery of a trial and the resulting crime, and to leave space open for a false statement that the First Consul had clemency in his thoughts. According to this view, the order to Réal to go to Vincennes and to report the proceedings was a mere sham not meant to be obeyed; the trial and the execution were prearranged, and everything happened as had been settled; and the order was a mere pretext to save appearances and to turn the opinion of Paris in a false direction. If there be any truth in this, Napoleon was guilty of hypocrisy in addition to a deed of shame; but, though he was perfectly skilled in a hypocrite's part, the accusation rests on insufficient evidence, and is, we believe, far-fetched and improbable.

Many years have passed since the tragedy of Vincennes, and all who took part in it have gone to their account. In apportioning the guilt of this terrible crime, History, in our judgement, must lay the chief burden of her accusation on the First Consul. In Talleyrand certainly, and perhaps in others, he found officious and falsehearted Huberts; but he felt none of the compunctious visitings of John; and from the moment when he made the order for the arrest, he marked down the Duc d'Enghien as his victim. Before that time his correspondence shows that he was agitated, perplexed, and perhaps alarmed; and though we think it did not affect him much, we make every allowance for the undoubted fact that a conspiracy existed to take away his life. But the motive which chiefly directed his conduct was that fixed and almost satanic resolve to accomplish his ends whatever the means, of which his career gives proof in a hundred instances;

he determined to immolate a Bourbon Prince, and he allowed no obstacle to stand in his way. With this object in view he did not hesitate to invade friendly territory, and to break the law of Europe; with this object in view he had recourse to expedients which as certainly consigned the Duc to death as the orders of Richard slew his nephews in the Tower. His conduct was the more atrocious that he had time for reflection; and the evidence that reached his hands must have assured him that his victim had no designs to compass his death. Undoubtedly the papers of the Duc were suspicious, and disclosed an offence against the law. But the main charge against him was disproved by them; and it was scarcely possible that he would be convicted by a regular tribunal of any crime. Napoleon, however, was not to be baulked of his prey; the mock trial in defiance of law, the sentence without evidence and in contempt of justice, the midnight execution, and the grave at Vincennes, followed in succession by his express commands; and the wickedness of the deed was made infinitely worse by giving it a pretended judicial sanction. Napoleon often recurred to the subject; and, as we have said, his powerful mind was at variance with itself in this matter. In his later years, however, he gave up the plea that Talleyrand and Savary had misled him; and almost in his last moments he justified the deed, in no uncertain words, as a necessity of the times, protesting against the sentence of History, like a doomed criminal at the bar of Justice. The crime remains a terrible proof of the lawless violence of that Revolution which Republican France is about to celebrate, a century after its first outbreak, but which, to the sober eye of Reason, appears a succession of troubled events-of grandeur, indeed, and of worldwide interest, but of more than doubtful advantage to France and to Europe.

ART. IV.-1. Circuit Journeys. By the late Lord COCKBURN. Edinburgh: 1888.

2. An Examination of the Trials for Sedition which have hitherto occurred in Scotland. By the late Lord COCKBURN. In 2 vols. Edinburgh: 1888.

TH

HOSE who are already acquainted with the writings of Lord Cockburn will turn with eager interest to the perusal of the two works named above, which have just been published by Mr. David Douglas, more than thirty years after the death of their author. Few books give a more delightful picture of Scottish and especially Edinburgh cultivated life than Cockburn's Memorials of his Time' (1800-1830) and Cockburn's Journal, 1830-1854,' whilst his Life of Lord Jeffrey' is recognised as one of the very best of those lives of the lawyers which constitute so large and interesting a portion of modern biographical literature. And no one assuredly could have been better fitted than Cockburn to draw a faithful picture of Scottish life during the first half of the present century. A Scotchman himself to the tips of his fingers; by birth and parentage, in his school life and his university career, at the bar and on the bench, deeply interested and taking an active part in those special controversies of his countrymen which few Englishmen care to take the trouble even to understand, yet not withholding, out of any absorption in merely local politics, the exercise of his influence in the wider field of British politics and thought. He loved Edinburgh and Edinburgh life. He delighted in the picturesqueness of the old Scottish capital, and the associations in which it is so rich. Few men were more social than Cockburn. Indeed, he tells us that he doubts whether there was more than one day in the month, throughout his town life, from the date of his marriage for forty years, when he closed the day alone and in his own house. Collecting his friends around him at supper, or enjoying their hospitality, his evenings were almost invariably spent in free social intercourse with men and women who not merely constituted the best set in Edinburgh, but whose attainments and characters would have added lustre and charm to any cultivated society in the world. Thus there is no book better fitted than the 'Memorials' to recall to the mind, one may almost say to the eyes and ears, of readers the quaint persons of bygone judges and philosophers and ministers, the kindly vigorous