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The man before him wore two rings, a diamond-and a very beautiful diamond, too—on the one hand; a seal ring on the other; his hands were delicate to a degree, and his handkerchief, a cambric one of unusually fine texture, was not entirely guiltless of scent. Mr. Carlyle quitted the room for a moment, and summoned Joyce to him.

"My lady has been asking for you, sir," said Joyce.

"Tell her I will be up the moment these gentlemen leave. Joyce," he added, "find an excuse to come into the room presently; you can bring something or other in; I want you to look at this stranger who is with young Mr. Herbert. Notice him well; I fancy you may have seen him before."

Mr. Carlyle returned to the room, leaving Joyce surprised. However, she presently followed, taking in some water, and lingered a few minutes, apparently placing the things on the table in better order.

When the two departed, Mr. Carlyle called Joyce, before proceeding to his wife's room. "Well ?" he questioned, "did you recognise him ?" "Not at all, sir. He seemed quite strange to me."

"Cast your thoughts back, Joyce. Did you never see him in years gone by ?"

Joyce looked puzzled, but she replied in the negative.

"Is he the man, think you, who used to ride over from Swainson to see Afy ?"

Joyce's face flushed crimson. “Oh, sir!" was all she uttered.

"The name is the same, Thorn: I thought it possible the men might be," observed Mr. Carlyle.

"Sir, I cannot say. I never saw that Captain Thorn but once, and I don't know-I don't know"-Joyce spoke slowly and with consideration -"that I should at all know him again. I did not think of him when I looked at this gentleman; but at any rate, no appearance in this one struck upon my memory as being familiar."

So, from Joyce Mr. Carlyle obtained no clue, one way or the other. The following day, he sought out Otway Bethel.

"Are you intimate with that Captain Thorn who is staying with the Herberts?" asked he.

"Yes," answered Bethel, derisively, "if passing a couple of hours in his company can constitute intimacy. That's all I have seen of Thorn." "Are you sure?" pursued Mr. Carlyle.

"Sure!" returned Bethel; "why, what are you driving at now? I called in at Herbert's the night before last, and Tom asked me to stay the evening. Thorn had just come. A jolly bout we had; cigars and cold punch."

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"Bethel," said Mr. Carlyle, dashing to the point, "is it the Thorn who used go after Afy Hallijohn? Come, you can tell if you like." Bethel remained dumb for a moment, apparently with amazement. "What a confounded lie !" uttered he, at length. Why, it's no more that Thorn than-What Thorn ?" he broke off, abruptly. "You are equivocating, Bethel. The Thorn who was mixed up-or said to be in the Hallijohn affair. Is this the same man?”

"You are a fool, Carlyle: which is what I never took you to be yet," was Mr. Bethel's rejoinder, spoken in a savage tone. "I have told you that I never knew there was any Thorn mixed up with Afy, and I

should like to know why my word is not to be believed? I never saw Thorn in my life till I saw him the other night at the Herberts', and that I would take an oath to, if put to it."

Bethel quitted Mr. Carlyle with the last word, and the latter gazed after him, revolving points in his brain. The mention of Thorn's name (the one spoken of by Richard Hare) appeared to excite some sore feeling in Bethel's mind, arousing it to irritation. Mr. Carlyle remembered that it had done so previously, and now it had done so again: and yet, Bethel was an easy-natured man in general, far better-tempered than principled. That there was something hidden, some mystery connected with the affair, Mr. Carlyle felt sure, but he could not attempt so much as a guess at what it might be. And his interview with Bethel brought him no nearer the point he wished to find out whether this Thorn was the same man. In walking back to his office, he met Mr. Tom Herbert.

"Does Captain Thorn purpose making a long stay with you?" he stopped him to inquire.

"He's gone: I have just seen him off by the train," was the reply of Tom Herbert. "It seemed rather slow work for him without Jack, so he docked his visit, and says he'll pay us one when Jack's to the fore."

As Mr. Carlyle went home to dinner that evening, he entered the Grove, ostensibly to make a short call on Mrs. Hare. Barbara, on the tenterhooks of impatience, accompanied him outside when he departed, and walked down the path.

"What have you learnt ?" she eagerly asked.

"Nothing satisfactory," was the reply of Mr. Carlyle. "And the man has left again."

"Left!" uttered Barbara.

Mr. Carlyle explained. He told her how they had come to his house the previous evening after Barbara's departure, and his encounter with Tom Herbert that day: he mentioned, also, his interview with Bethel.

"Can he have gone on purpose, fearing consequences ?" wondered Barbara.

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Scarcely or why should he have come ?”

"You did not suffer any word to escape you last night, causing him to suspect that he was doubted?"

"Not any. You would make a bad lawyer, Barbara."

"Who or what is he ?"

"An officer in her Majesty's service, in John Herbert's regiment. I ascertained no more. Tom said he was of good family. But I cannot help suspecting it is the same man.'

"Can nothing more be done ?"

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"Nothing, in the present stage of the affair," concluded Mr. Carlyle, as he passed through the gate to continue his way. "We can only wait on again with what patience we may, hoping that time will bring about its own elucidation."

Barbara pressed her forehead down on the cold iron of the gate as his footsteps died away. "Ay, to wait on," she murmured, "to wait on in dreary pain; to wait on, perhaps for years, perhaps for ever! And poor Richard-wearing out his days in poverty and exile!"

NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES,

OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

And make them men of note (do you note, men?).—Love's Labour's Lost, Act III. Sc. 1.

D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,

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There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks, Notes, notes, forsooth, and noting!

Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3.

And these to Notes are frittered quite away.-Dunciad, Book I.
Notes of exception, notes of admiration,

Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.-Amen Corner, c. iii.

XXIX. THE CHANCELLOR L'HÔPITAL.

To the Chancellor de l'Hôpital is reserved the honour of walking at the head of that illustrious cortége of French magistrates, such as Séguier, Montholon, Pithou, Molé, Harlay, Pasquier, De Thou, &c., who, by the gravity of their lives, their science modeste, and the Roman type in which, for the most part, their characters were cast, formed one of France's purest and least disputed glories. Bred in the naïve tradition of old Gaulish manners, and profound students of antiquity, they conjoined with the loyalty of faithful subjects a sort of rigid virtue, which seemed a relic of the ancient republics.* They were, in Montaigne's phrase, "de belles âmes frappées à l'antique marque." That frivolous libertine, Brantôme, styles Michel de l'Hôpital "the greatest and worthiest Chancellor that ever France had. He was another Cato Censor, and had all the look of it, with his great white beard, pale face, and grave demeanour.' His anxious countenance, now sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, bespoke the long years during which it had been his wont

To meditate with ardour on the rule
And management of nations; what it is
And ought to be; and strive to learn how far
Their power or weakness, wealth or poverty,
Their happiness or misery, depends

Upon their laws, and fashions of the State.†

France has produced nothing, M. Villemain‡ asserts, of which she has more right to be proud, than cette antique magistrature, which, even under the pressure of absolute power, preserved the image of freedom in the independence of justice; and L'Hôpital, owing to his genius and the age wherein he lived, is in some sort the chief and model of this series of

• Demogeot. † Wordsworth, Prelude, book xi. ‡ Vie de L'Hôpital.

great magistrates, which extended through more than a century, as a public safeguard, amid factions, and coups d'état, and civil war.

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Michel de l'Hôpital was born about the year 1505, near the town of Aigueperse, in Auvergne. "The place of his birth is still shown: it is a little manoir, the buildings upon which still preserve, in-doors, the narrow winding staircases of the olden time." His father, a man of learning, and especially addicted to medical studies, owed this domain to the generosity of the Constable Bourbon, whom he had served more in the city of counsellor than physician. Michel, the eldest of three sons, was sent to study law at Toulouse, where a flourishing school of high repute then existed, the pupils being severely disciplined in classical literature, by a mode of training not quite so easy or accurate as that pursued under Mr. Temple at Rugby, or Dr. Vaughan at Harrow. At four o'clock in the morning, a winter's morning too, they got up for prayers; prayers over, they attended the classes till eleven; after which they employed themselves in discussing texts and verifying passages-their whole and sole recreation being to read Aristophanes (whom they found full of fun, but fuller of hard words), Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Tully.

But while Michel was going through this curriculum at Toulouse, his father got into trouble from his connexion with the proscribed Constable, whom he followed into Italy, thereby exposing his family in France to the immediately outstretched hand of authority. Michel, now aged eighteen years, the eldest son of this obnoxious sire, was clapped into prison as a "suspect," and here for some months he languished in green and yellow melancholy-commencing life with cette dure expérience, which must have not a little contributed to instil into him feelings of love for justice and hatred of political and judicial partialities. After several examinations, however, the young man was released, and two years later he obtained leave to quit France and to join his father in Italy. "He was then twenty, but was far from having finished the long course of study to which young men preparing for the learned professions were subjected in the sixteenth century. He found his father at Milan, and was with him in that city when Francis I. came to besiege it.

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"Jean de l'Hôpital, though faithful to the Constable Bourbon, had refrained from bearing arms against France, and, no doubt, was still more reluctant to compromise his son's early years in the service of a foreign cause. So he made him quit Milan. L'Hôpital has himself related this story in his will; and the naïve reason he gives is descriptive of the manners of the age: As the siege dragged its slow length along,' says he, 'my father, fearing lest I should lose my time, directed some carriers to bear me off; with whom I got out of Milan in a muleteer's dress, and passed, not without great danger, the River Addá, below the town of Casano, where was stationed a garrison of war.' The object of this perilous exit was to conduct him to Padua, celebrated for its scholars and its university. The glory of the schools of Italy was then unrivalled in Europe: it was in Italy that the study of Roman law had revived in the eleventh century. The multiplicity of little States, the different interests of the sovrans, the free and much-discussed constitutions of some towns, had imparted great importance to the science and general principles of civil law. It there occupied the place of the feudal usages which weighed on nearly all Europe. It had early awakened men's minds by the subtilty

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of its controversies, and favoured independence in a land which was to be afterwards enslaved by prejudices and conquest. In Italy the elegance of the beaux-arts mingled with learning, with jurisprudence, and even theology. Politian, the most ingenious of modern Latin poets, and a great Italian one, had written an erudite and profound commentary on the Pandects; and thirty years later Tasso, it is well known, before producing his inspired poem, sustained with éclat some theses in jurisprudence. The universities of Bologna, Modena, Pisa, and Padua were equally renowned for scholarship and politeness. They even exhibited some gleams of a philosophie spirit then unknown in Europe. L'Hôpital remained six years at Padua; and we may unquestionably trace to this studious séjour that taste for ancient literature, and that scholarlike urbanity which ever qualified the austerity of his manners and his works, and which forms so marked a feature in his character."*

Michel's six years at Padua grounded him thoroughly in the science of his profession. When his father, at the end of that time, summoned him to come and assist at Charles the Fifth's coronation at Rome, the old gentleman might with justice say of him-though he said it who shouldn't say it-what Bellario (also of Padua) is made to say of his protégé, the pseudo-Balthasar, "I beseech you, let his lack of years be no impediment to let him lack a reverend estimation; for I never knew so young a body with so old a head."+ At Rome young L'Hôpital, already with a reputation for learning, obtained a legal appointment. But he also formed an acquaintance there which was the means of restoring him to his native country. The French ambassador, Cardinal Grammont, fond of literature as well as apt in public affairs, was struck with the "rare merit" of L'Hôpital, and induced him to return to France and practise at the bar of the Parliament of Paris. His prospects now were fair, and full of promise: he married the daughter of the lieutenant-criminel Morin, who had the character of being "one of the most inflexible exécuteurs of the barbarous legislation established against the Protestants. He was of the number of those hard, stubborn spirits who, full of what they then called the good old customs of the realm, believed themselves bound to make the new reformers undergo the cruel punishments decreed of yore against the Manichæans, and would have been fearful they were degenerating from ancient discipline, had they not committed heretics to the flames.

"There can be no doubt," M. Villemain says, "that L'Hôpital moderated eventually his father-in-law's persecuting zeal; but it is not undeserving of remark that the wife he had taken from so anti-Protestant a family, had embraced, and did all her life long profess, the new reformwhether determined in her belief by some unknown motive, or rather, perhaps, that her mild, generous soul had been repulsed from Catholicism by the actual spectacle of severities she had heard talked about from her infancy."+

This marriage made a happy home, and procured L'Hôpital a councillor's seat in the Parliament, where his assiduity, learning, and integrity won the regard of the President Olivier, who, on becoming Chancellor, proved an influential friend to the rising lawyer. But L'Hôpital was no hanger-on of courtly circles, and had other things to do than dance attendance among place-hunters. Such vacant hours as his judiVie de L'Hôpital.

* Villemain. † Merchant of Venice, IV. 1.

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