Negroland by Gando, Sokoto, Wurno, and Kano-towns and countries previously traversed-it is needless to follow his weary footsteps once more through these populous but half-civilised regions. There was the same trouble with greedy rulers, the same annoyances of hostile, thievish populations, the same vexations of rains, swamps, and fevers, and the same old financial difficulties, the last, unluckily, not even destined to be relieved by the meeting effected with Mr. Vogel at Bundi, near Kukawa. "It was with great surprise," Barth relates, "that he heard from his young friend that there were no supplies in Kukawa; that what he had brought with him he had spent, and that the usurper Abd-e-Rahman had treated him very badly, having even taken possession of the property which I had left in Zinder." It is not a little amusing to find Barth adding, that even the news of the want of pecuniary supplies did not cause him so much surprise as the report which he received from Mr. Vogel that he did not possess a single bottle of wine. For he says, having now been for more than three years without a drop of anything stimulant except coffee, and having suffered severely from frequent attacks of fever dysentery, he had an insuperable longing for the juice of the grape, of which former experience had taught him the benefit. Speaking of Vogel, of whose unfortunate end there remains unfortunately little doubt, Barth says:

My residence in the town became infinitely more cheerful, in consequence of the arrival of Mr. Vogel, on the 29th December, when I spent a period of twenty days most pleasantly in the company of this enterprising and courageous young traveller, who, with surprising facility, accustomed himself to all the relations of this strange life. But while borne away by the impulse of his own enthusiasm, and giving up all pretensions to the comforts of life, he unfortunately committed the mistake of expecting that his companions, recently arrived from Europe, and whose ideas were less elevated, should do the same, and this had given rise to a lamentable quarrel, which frustrated in a great measure the intentions of the government who had sent out the party. Exchanging opinions with regard to countries which we had both of us traversed, and planning schemes as to the future course which Mr. Vogel was to pursue, and especially as to the next journey which he was to undertake towards Yakoba and Adamawa, we passed our time very agreeably.

Mr. Vogel was at this time afflicted by a very dangerous weakness in the digestive powers, so much so that it was impossible for him to eat any meat at all. The very sight of a dish of meat made him sick. Corporal Macguire was also affected in the same way. The corporal remained with Mr. Vogel whilst his comrade, Corporal Church, returned to Europe with Barth. He was afterwards, as it is supposed, murdered at the well Bedwaram, after the death of his chief, and on his way home. Barth, on his side, left Kukawa on his homeward journey on the 4th of May, and, crossing the hot and arid desert that extends between Negroland and Murzuk, he entered the latter town, on what may truly be called the extreme boundary of civilisation, on the 13th of July. "I could not," says our patient enduring traveller, "but feel deeply affected when, after so long an absence, I again found myself in friendly hands, and within the reach of European comforts!"

Dr. Barth's work having now reached its completion, it is impossible, whilst giving the traveller all possible credit for his great physical and mental attributes as a traveller, his patience and endurance, his courage

and perseverance, his skill and ability, his knowledge and acquirements, and the indomitable energy with which he applied these in all positions and conditions, not at the same time to acknowledge the first-rate importance of the additions which he has made to geographical knowledge, and the openings presented by these to commerce and to general civilisation. If Livingstone discovered a Zambesi, Barth discovered a Binue. If Livingstone crossed Southern Africa from east to west, Barth explored and mapped the Central Niger, and sojourned for many tedious months at the hitherto semi-mysterious Timbuktu. If Livingstone has met with peaceable, well-disposed populations and available lands in Southern Africa, Barth has explored a vast region teeming with villages, towns, and cities, much divided among themselves, cursed by slavery and the ambitious hostilities of chiefs and of peoples, parties and factions as well as nationalities, and torn to pieces by intestine wars, but still easily opened to commercial intercourse by their great arterial streams; and it is to be hoped that improved communication will lead to a gradual and corresponding improvement in their political and religious condition, as also in their moral and intellectual aptitudes.*

The publisher has done justice to these most important researches in the admirable manner in which he has laid them before the public. The maps are all that can be desired, and the illustrations are charming; but when this first edition, which will be indispensable to every good library, is exhausted, it is impossible not to feel what a boon will be conferred upon the great mass of the reading public-those with whom time is a consideration—if the matter of these five bulky volumes-and they would easily admit of itt—was condensed into one five-shilling volume.

* Sir Roderick J. Murchison, in his Address at the Anniversary Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, observes of Dr. Barth's travels :

"It will be obvious, from the nature of Dr. Barth's investigations, that it is perfectly impossible for me to condense his results into a few paragraphs. The main physical features of the land he travelled in, and the principal geographical discoveries of himself and his coadjutors, are already known to us, and are incorporated into the popular geography of the day; as for example, the desert plateaux, with their Alpine oases, the upper course of the Chadda-Benue, and the vast lagoons and floods of these central equatorial regions. For the rest we are furnished with such a multiplicity of independent details, that broad, general views, calculated to convey a correct though cursory knowledge of his labours in Northern Africa, can with difficulty be embraced on this occasion. He deals with ten or twelve distinct races, each unlike the rest in features, customs, and languages. We have to consider them as distributed into about as many nations, but in such a manner that the boundaries of their territories by no means coincide with the boundaries of the races; and, in addition to this entanglement, we find large settlements or colonies of Fellatahs and of Tuaricks dispersed about the country, bearing relations of a most diverse and anomalous character, both to the government of the land they inhabit and to that whence they migrated."

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

66

MEMOIRS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE.*

MARIE ANTOINETTE JOSEPHE JEANNE DE LORRAINE, Archduchess of Austria, daughter of Francis I., Emperor of Germany, and of Maria Theresa, Empress of Germany and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, was born on the 2nd of November, 1755. Her mother appears to have destined her for France from her earliest years. Everything was done to ensure an air of Versailles ;" from the books of Paris to its fashions, from a French tutor, the Abbé de Vermond, to a French hairdresser, she was surrounded by nothing but French associations. When in 1766 Madame Geoffrin was at Vienna caressing the charming little archduchess, she could not resist declaring that she was beautiful as an angel, and ought to be in France. "Take her with you! take her with you!" was the response of Maria Theresa.

The policy of France came at the same time to serve the designs of the empress. The position of that country, as depicted to us by MM. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, was at that epoch anything but flattering:

In the midst of the eighteenth century, France had lost the heritage of glory left to her by Louis XIV., the best of her blood, half her money, even the audacity and the fortune of despair. Her armies retiring from disaster to disaster, her flags flying, her marine swept away or secreted in her ports and not daring to show itself in the Mediterranean, its commerce annihilated, its coasttrade ruined, France, exhausted and abashed, saw England take from her one day Louisbourg, the next Senegal, another Gorea, and then Pondicherry, Coromandel, and Malabar; yesterday Guadaloupe, to-day Saint Domingo, to-morrow Cayenne. If France turned her eyes from her empire to beyond the seas, she would hear the march of the Prusso-Anglian troops on her frontiers. Her youth had remained on the fields of battle of Dettingen and of Rosbach; her twentyseven vessels of the line were captured, six thousand of her sailors were prisoners, and England, mistress of Belle-Isle, could carry fire and sword along the coasts from Cherbourg to Toulon with impunity.

To remedy such a state of things, it was essential to enter into new alliances:

England is the enemy, the danger of France, at once for the maintenance of her rank among powers, for the House of Bourbon, and for the honour of the monarchy. Before this nation arrived at the domination of the sea by her commerce, by her marine, by the new springs of prosperity opened by modern empires; before that pride which claimed to rule the navy of all the oceans in the world, and whichassumed in parliament assembled "that not a gun should be

* Histoire de Marie-Antoinette. Par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. Oct.-VOL. CXIV. NO. CCCCLIV.

K

fired in Europe without the permission of England;" before that old hatred of France, that jealousy without mercy or conscience, which, after having used surprises and treachery against France, abused its misfortunes; before that English policy which declared, through the mouth of Milord Rochefort, "that any arrangement or event whatsoever that would militate against French policy would be agreeable to his Britannic Majesty," which declared, through the mouth of Pitt, never to esteem the humiliation of the House of Bourbon sufficiently great;" before that enormous growth, that insolent pretension, that implacable enmity, the terrors of which are further kept alive by the impotence and disasters of France, France owed to itself before all things to forget everything in order to defend itself against so many threats.

Strange it is, but too true, that almost every French work treating on historical subjects opens with a grandiloquent exordium at the expense of England. It is manifest that the theme is popular, and this is much to be regretted, for whatever national jealousies and hatreds may have existed in olden times, they are only kept alive by such empty declamation. To judge by the historico-literary denunciations of MM. de Goncourt, one would suppose that the eighteenth century had seen no acts of aggression on the part of the French under the Grand Monarque and his successor Louis XV. of amorous memory, leading to vindictive reprisals on the part of the assailed. No, it is all assault, battery, fire and sword, treachery and implacable hatred, on the part of England! This is not the way to write history in the present day. People know better. The spread of education and humanitarian principles has also taught nations that there are no wars without national enmities, and that the best way to avoid such is to keep alive and entertain amicable and honourable relations, not to distort history in order to embitter and envenom the dying embers of ancient feuds. As to "implacable hatreds and jealousies," there are none such entertained by the English towards France. They glory in everything that conduces to the real honour and prosperity of their neighbour and ally; and they rejoice in every addition to her moral and intellectual strength. They only regret when her natural advantages are perverted to mere purposes of material aggrandisement, and power and prosperity are supposed to be represented by unproductive strongholds and wealth-consuming armies.

Marie Antoinette left Austria for France on the 7th of May, 1770. A pavilion had been erected at the frontiers of the latter country on an island of the Rhine near Strasbourg. It is related in the " Mémoires de Madame de Campan," that when the archduchess attained this point she had to change her dress even to her chemise and stockings, so that nothing should remain to her of a country no longer her own. Etiquette surely became alike barbarous and tyrannical when it thus exacted the utter rejection of the country of nativity for that of adoption. It was, the least of it, a humiliating concession made by an Austrian archduchess to the vainglory of France. Well might Marie Antoinette, received by the Comte de Noailles, be described as going "au-devant de la France, émue, tremblante, les yeux humides et brillants de larmes." The ceremony of reception, or of "remise," as our authors have it, as if a bale of goods was concerned, being over, the future dauphine made her public entry into Strasbourg in the king's carriages. Prince Louis de Rohan received her at the cathedral in pontifical robes. "It is the soul of Maria Theresa," exclaimed the courtly monk-miserable descendant

to say

of Henry and Anne of the same name" which is going to unite itself to the soul of the Bourbons!"

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The interval between Strasbourg and Paris is now traversed by express in nine hours and a half. It took Marie Antoinette seven days to reach Compiègne by Nancy, Châlons, and Reims. The journey was one long and fatiguing ovation. But she was indemnified, her historians tell us, by hearing on all sides, "from rustics in their Sunday vests, from old curés and from young women, 'Qu'elle est jolie, notre dauphine!' The first greeting of the royal family of France occurred at the bridge of Berne, in the forest of Compiègne. Marie Antoinette had to step down from her carriage, the Counts de Saulx, Tavannes, and De Tessé conducting her by the hand to the king, who raised her from her knees, and, embracing her with royal and paternal kindness, presented her to the dauphin, who received his future after the same fashion.

On the 15th of May the court left Compiègne for the Château de la Muette. At supper, we are told, "Madame du Barry obtient du lâche amour de Louis XV. de s'asseoir à la table de Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette sait ne pas manquer au roi; et, après le souper, comme des indiscrets lui demandent comment elle a trouvé Madame du Barry, Charmante,' fait-elle simplement." This from the "Mémoires de Weber!"

The next day the marriage ceremony was performed at Versailles. The king and the dauphin had left for the château after the supper at two in the morning; Marie Antoinette followed, "coiffée et habillée en trèsgrand négligé," having to complete her toilette at Versailles. At the nuptials, the Archbishop of Reims, who presided, blessed thirteen gold pieces, as well as the ring, and presented them to the dauphin. When night came, he had further to bless the nuptial bed, the king himself "donnait la chemise au dauphin, la Duchesse de Chartres à la dauphine."

Strange omens attended upon this royal solemnity. A heavy storm broke over Versailles, accompanied by loud thunder and vivid lightning. Superstitious people can now see a warning in the fact. The very château, it is said, trembled. A more serious catastrophe also came to cast a gloom over the marriage festivities. The day that these were to terminate, on the 30th of May, Ruggieri had the management of a display of fireworks on the place Louis XV. By some strange mischance the crowd was seized with a panic, and the most fearful results ensued. Hundreds of persons were more or less injured, and not less than one hundred and thirty-two were killed. "Ces morts," say our historians, "des fêtes du mariage du dauphin et de la dauphine étaient jetés au cimetière de la Madeleine. Qui eût dit alors les voisins qu'ils y attendaient?"

The career of the dauphine was, notwithstanding these evil omens, smiling at the onset. The marriage of the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois with two daughters of the King of Sardinia had brought two other strange young ladies to the palace, and a close intimacy soon attached the three to one another. They participated in each other's pleasures, walks, rides, and even repasts, when these were not public. They even got up amateur theatrical performances, forbidden by Louis XV., at Versailles, and had the dauphin for an audience.

He

Louis XV. himself took Marie Antoinette in great affection. seemed to breathe a fresher air in her joyous, innocent company, and he sought after it so much as to arouse the jealousies of Madame du Barry,