the just contempt of history. The same may be said of Savary's story with regard to the reception given him by Bonaparte when he went to Malmaison to render an account of his mission: "He listened to me with the greatest surprise! He fixed his lynx eyes upon me. There is,' he said, 'something incomprehensible in this. The sentence was not to be pronounced till Réal had examined the prisoner upon a point which it was important for us to clear up. There is a crime that leads to nothing!'" The point to be cleared up was still the question of identity of the duke with the mysterious personage, bald, fair, of middle height! When we think that such impudent inventions have been accepted by a whole generation, we are led to ask if falsehood has not in itself a savor and an attraction so irresistible for vulgar appetites that truth can no longer appear to them other than repulsive! No; in the catastrophe of Vincennes there was neither accident, nor confusion, nor mistake: everything in it was conceived, premeditated, and combined with artistic care, and any one must have let prejudice destroy common sense, who accepts the stories invented by the criminal himself. How could the man, whom we see in his correspondence so particular, so attentive to the smallest details, so penetrating and so inquisitive with regard to the most insignificant agents of the conspiracy, the man who dictated the questions to be asked, and directed all the proceedings against Querelle and the woman Pocheton, suddenly become the sport of quid pro quos, of heedlessness, and the tremendous mistakes which are attributed to him, when the persons in question were a Bourbon or a Condé? How can we admit that a mind so clear-sighted, a character so selfwilled and imperious, could, in this critical circumstance, have been merely a docile puppet in the hands of Talleyrand? No, in spite of falsifications and lies, in spite of hypocrisy more odious than the crime itself, he cannot escape the responsibility of an act which he performed with the utmost calculation; the deed will remain his own before God and before men, and history will not even admit in his favor that division of ignominy which complicity creates for the benefit of the guilty, for in the murder of the Duc d'Enghien there was one principal author, and there were instruments; accomplices there were none.

The news of the execution of the Duc d'Enghien was not known in Paris till the evening of the 21st of March; it produced a most disastrous impression. It was, in fact, a revival

of the terror, but the terror for the benefit of a single man, the terror without the fanaticism, without the publicity and broad daylight; for the whole of this ignoble tragedy, the arrest, the execution, had all taken place at night. Nevertheless, the public, deprived of all means of expressing their reprobation, were forced to keep silence, and the sensation was transient. Men are so inconsistent, even in hatred, that in less than three months after the murder those who had been most indignant were petitioning the murderer for some place in his antechambers. There was only one protestation, that of Chateaubriand, who resigned his office of chargé d'affaires to the Republic of Valais. Fourcroy received a concluding speech, all ready prepared, which he hastened to deliver to the Legislative Body, to dismiss this assembly. Bonaparte went himself to the Council of State and indulged in one of those monologues, in which he seemed to attack an imaginary interlocutor, as if he felt the condemnation that was hidden under the general silence. "The people of Paris were a set of nincompoops; they had always been the misfortune of France! As for public opinion, its judgments were to be respected, but its caprices were to be despised. Moreover, he had fifty thousand men to make the will of the nation respected!" He next entered into endless explanations which no one asked of him; then, as if irritated by the obstinate silence around, he hastily broke up the sitting. The newspapers had orders to say nothing. The Moniteur for that day and the day following, March 22, had a perfectly different character; it was full of mystery, gentleness, and contrition. On the 21st of March it published on the first page a letter from Pope Pius VII. "to his very dear son in Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, relative to the churches of Germany; a precious testimony of affection to display to pious people in these difficult circumstances. It did not contain a word on the tragic event that was in every mouth. A short note, however, informed the public of the assemblage of emigrants on the right side of the Rhine, "crowded with these new legionaries." Without naming the Duc d'Enghien, it said. that "a Bourbon prince, with his staff and bureaux, had taken up his residence on this spot, from whence the movement was to be directed;" a shameful lie, invented to prepare public opinion, for the government had received, several days before, the names of eight perfectly inoffensive persons who surrounded the prince, and it required singular audacity to trans

form them into a staff and bureaux for recruiting. The next day, March 22, the official journal again commenced with an article of the most edifying piety; it was more and more steeped in devotion. This time it is the Bishop of Counstances who vouches for the religious sentiments of the First Consul. In the middle of a solemn mass, demanded by the soldiers to thank God for the discovery of the conspiracy, the bishop proposed for their imitation the enthusiastic faith of the new Constantine: "Soldiers," he said, "never forget that God whom the conqueror of Marengo adores, that God before whom we have seen him in the cathedral of Milan bow his head, crowned by victory," etc. After this edifying introduction, and at the end of the news of the day, in the most obscure corner of the official paper, we find a document which seems placed there like some insignificant historical notice, without preface or reflections, or anything to attract the eye; it is the sentence of the Military Commission on one Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon, Duc d'Enghien. And as a climax to this perfidy and premeditated arrangement, the sentence itself is a forgery. The original decree, which Réal took to Malmaison, had appeared too brutal in its eloquent brevity, and had been lengthened by the addition of some judicial forms.

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.

BY CHARLES WOLFE.

[1791-1823.]

Nor a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light,
And the lanthorn dimly burning.

No useless coffin inclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow;

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed,

And smoothed down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow;

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done,

When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory;

We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone
But we left him alone with his glory.

THE SHIP DUELS AND THE PRIVATEERS.1

By J. B. MACMASTER.

(From "History of the United States.")

[JOHN BACH MACMASTER, American historian, was born at Brooklyn, N. Y., June 29, 1852; is professor of American history in the University of Pennsyl vania. His chief work is the "History of the People of the United States" (1883-1895), not yet completed. He has also written "Benjamin Franklin " in the "American Men of Letters" series, etc.]

WHILE the army which the republicans had expected would long since have taken Canada was meeting with disaster after disaster on land, the hated and neglected navy was winning victory after victory on the sea. Such was the neglect into which this arm of the service had been suffered to fall, that but five ships were ready for sea on the day war was declared. Two of these, by order of the Secretary, were riding at anchor

1 Copyright, 1895, by J. B. MacMaster. Used by permission of D. Appleton & Co.

in the lower bay at New York, where, on the 21st of June, the "United States," the "Congress," and the "Argus" came in from the southward and joined them. The arrival of the frigates was most timely; for they had hardly passed the Hook before Commodore John Rodgers, who commanded, received news of the declaration of war, and within an hour the fleet-composed of the "President," the "United States," the "Congress," the "Argus," and the "Hornet" — weighed anchor and stood out to sea. Rodgers had orders to strike any of the British cruisers that had so long been searching merchantmen off Sandy Hook and return to port. But information had been received that the homeward-bound plate fleet had left Jamaica late in May, and he went off in pursuit. For a while he ran southeast, till, falling in with an American brig that had seen the Jamaica fleet of eighty-five vessels, under convoy, in latitude 36° north, longitude 67° west, he set sail in that direction, and at six in the morning of June 23, made out a stranger in the northeast. She proved to be the British thirty-six-gun frigate "Belvidera," Captain Richard Byron, which stood toward the fleet for a few minutes, and then turned and went off to the northeast, with the Americans in hot pursuit. The "President," happening to be the best sailer, came up with her late in the afternoon, fired three shots into her stern, and was about to send a fourth when the gun exploded, killing and wounding sixteen men, and among them Captain Rodgers. Confusion and demoralization followed, the sailing became bad, the shots fell short, and the "Belvidera," cutting away her anchors and throwing her barge, gig, yawl, and jolly-boat into the sea, and starting fourteen tons of water, drew ahead and was soon out of danger. The fleet now went a second time in pursuit of the Jamaica men, and kept up the chase till within a day's run of the English Channel, when they stood to the southward and came back to Boston by way of Madeira, the Western Islands, and the Grand Banks.

While Rodgers was thus searching for the plate fleet, an English squadron was looking for him. Three days after her fight with the "President," the "Belvidera" reached Halifax with the news of war. Vice Admiral Sawyer instantly dispatched Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke with the "Shannon," the "Africa," the "Eolus," and the "Belvidera," to destroy Rodgers' fleet. Sweeping down the coast, the squadron was joined at Nantucket Island by the "Guerrière," and on July