never reach him; and he could not have escaped it by force of tact; and braved it by dint of self-possession, if he had not been sustained by power of mind,-a buckler which carried a dart in the centre, and changed defence into aggression. Irony is a species of talent which dispenses with every other: Brummell possessed it in an eminent degree, and used it in a manner that chilled the self-love of others, even while he flattered it. Like all dandies, he liked better to astonish than to please-a very natural preference; but it carries men to great lengths, for fear is the grandest species of astonishment. On this declivity where was one to stop? Brummell alone could determine. He measured out equal doses of terror and sympathy, and of these he compounded the magic philter of his influence. His indolence would not allow him to go into raptures; besides, to go into raptures is to be impassioned, to be impassioned is to value something, and to value something is to acknowledge your own inferiority. But of coolness he had du trait, as we say in France. This man, too superficially judged, had so intellectual a power, that he governed more by his air and manner than by his words, and this explains why he has left so few dicta. Moreover, his sayings, as reported in the memoirs of the times, are either too highly seasoned, or are allied to insipidity, and one feels in them the harsh influence of the briny genius of the nation who box and get drunk without coarseness, when we French, under such circumstances, would lose all refinement. These sayings, I repeat, charged with electric fluid, are untranslatable. Find me the correlatives of the English words wit, humour, and fun. Brummell cared only for present pleasures, and was paid by fortune in the coin he best liked. Society gave him all the happiness it could command, and for him there was no greater felicity. He was not like Byron, who thought that the world was not worth one of the joys it costs us. From his eternally intoxicated vanity, the world had subtracted nothing. From the year 1799 to nearly 1814 there was neither rout nor fête in London at which the presence of the great dandy was not accounted a triumph, or his absence a catastrophe. At the balls at Almack's, at the meetings at Ascot, everything bowed low to his dictation. He was the chief at Watier's Club, of which Lord Byron, Lord Alvanley, Mildmay, and Pierrepoint were members; he was the soul (must we say so?) of the famous Pavilion at Brighton, Carlton House, and Belvoir; and intimate with Sheridan, the Duchess of York, Erskine, Lord John Townshend, and the sensuous and singular Duchess of Devonshire, who was a poet in three languages, and with her patrician lips kissed the London butchers, to secure votes for Charles Fox. It is said that Madame de Staël was distressed at not having pleased him: her all-powerful volatility of mind was repulsed by the frigid soul and eternal pleasantry of the dandy,-of that freezing impersonation who had such excellent reasons for laughing at enthusiasm. Another woman, Lady Hester Stanhope, the Arabian Amazon, who broke from English routine and European civilization at a gallop, to refresh her feelings in the dangers and independence of the desert, after years of absence, cared only to remember, of all the civilized beings she had left-George Brummell. Let the power of Brummell's influence be decided by its duration. From 1794 to 1816 there are two-and-twenty years. In the moral, as in the physical world, whatever is light is easily displaced; and when he was obliged to leave England, the interest he had concentrated upon himself was not exhausted. In 1812 and 1813 he was more powerful than ever, notwithstanding that his fortune was much injured by play. But there was another reason for the decline of Brummell's influence, his quarrel with the Regent. The Prince began to get old; embonpoint, that polypus which lays hold upon beauty, and slowly kills it, had seized upon him; and Brummell, with his imperturbable pleasantry, and that savage pride which his success inspired, had sometimes laughed at the powerless assiduity displayed by the Prince in endeavouring to repair the ravages of time. The immensely corpulent porter at Carlton House was called Big Ben, and Brummell transferred the sobriquet to his master, designating Mrs. Fitzherbert by the Italian diminutive of Benina. Such audacious derision pierced the souls of this vain pair; and Mrs. Fitzherbert was not the only woman of those who surrounded the heir-apparent who excited him to take offence at the jest. The story of the bell is apocryphal; but were it not so, and however outrageous it might be, no isolated fact was so likely to cause his disgrace as the thousand little darts sportively, and at brief intervals, launched at the Prince's affections. What the husband of Caroline of Brunswick tolerated, the lover of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Lady Cunningham could not endure; and had they endured it, and had Brummell been allowed with impunity to wound the feelings of the favourites, the Prince would not have borne the attack on his own person, his real moi. But neither the rancorous aversion of the Prince nor his reverses at play had yet (in 1813) shaken his position, and the Regent saw with bitterness a half-ruined dandy proudly struggle with him for influence. Anacreon Archilochus Moore, whose Irish bitterness could well select the words that would cut sharpest, put into his sovereign's mouth the following lines: "Neither have I resentments, nor wish there should come ill A proof that his power was yet unshaken was furnished in the same year by the heads of Watier's Club, who, in preparing to give a grand ball, seriously discussed the propriety of inviting the Regent, only because he had quarrelled with Brummell! But the Beau, who mixed impudence even with his generosity, positively insisted that the Prince should be invited. No doubt he enjoyed, by anticipation, the idea of receiving the Amphytrion, whom he visited no longer at Carlton House,-of meeting him face to face in the presence of the nobility of England. But the Prince lost himself in this interview; he forgot his character of an accomplished gentleman, and did not even recollect the duties which hospitality imposes on those who receive it; and Brummell, who expected to oppose dandyism to dandyism, replied to the sullen hauteur of the Regent with the elegant coldness which rendered him invulnerable. Of all the clubs in England, the rage for play was greatest at Watier's; affreux scandales took place there; and there, intoxicated with gingered port, these blasés, these spleen-devoured fashionables, went every night to kill their mortal ennui, and rouse their Norman blood,-(that blood which never circulates freely but when taking or pillaging,)-by risking the most splendid fortunes on a single cast of the die. Brummell was neither more nor less a gamester than the others who moved in this charming pandemonium, and he lost immense sums with that indifference which, on such occasions, is to the dandy what grace in falling was to the dying gladiator of Rome. But his associates could better afford their losses; and he, though cool and clever, could do nothing against his luck. In 1814 the foreign potentates arrived in London: their appearance inflamed the gambling mania. This was a disastrous moment for Brummell. He grew savage with fate, and was beaten; he applied to the Jews, and was swamped. It is said, but not ascertained, that he compromised his character on this occasion; and he had, unfortunately, the dangerous power of dignifying a base action by the manner of doing it. At last, however, the hour in which a man is as nothing to any one else, the hour of misfortune, arrived. His ruin was consummated; he knew it: with dandy apathy he had calculated, watch in hand, the time that he ought to remain on the field of battle, the theatre of the most wonderful social success that a man of the world ever had, and he determined to show no humiliation at the close of his career. On the 6th of May, 1816, after dining on a fowl from Watier's, and drinking a bottle of bordeaux, Brummell wrote hastily and hopelessly the following note to his friend, Scrope Davies : "MY DEAR SCROPE, "Lend me 2001. The banks are shut, and all my money is in the 3 per cents. It shall be repaid to-morrow morning. "Yours, "GEORGE BRUMMELL." The reply was Spartan in brevity and friendship: "It is very unfortunate, but all my money is in the 3 per cents. "Yours, "SCROPE DAVIES." Brummell was too much of a dandy to be hurt at this answer, and, as Captain Jesse sensibly remarks, he was not a man to moralize upon it. There was a cruel dryness in Scrope's answer; but it was not vulgar; between dandy and dandy their honour was safe. Brummell perused the note, and dressed stoically for the opera. He was as a phoenix is on the pile,—unlike in this, that he knew he should never rise from his ashes. To see him, who would have known him for a doomed man? That night he was at Dover, and the next in France. After his departure, the elegant furniture of a man of fashion gone to the continent was sold by public auction; the purchasers, his friends, were the most fashionable and distinguished of the English aristocracy, and they all paid like Englishmen for what they wanted. In his expatriation his old acquaintances came nobly forward to aid him, proving most forcibly the powerful impression he made upon all who knew him. He was pensioned by the men he had pleased, as the writer or orator of a party often is; and this, in English society, carries no idea of degradation with it. But, stranger still than this rare gratitude, his ascendancy was not destroyed at a stroke by his departure. Brummell was as much thought of in the drawing-rooms of Great Britain in exile as when there "in presence;" public attention crossed the sea, and reached him on the opposite shore. Fashionables made frequent pilgrimages to Calais ; and Brummell, as proud as ever, preserved all the external habits of his previous life. Lord Westmoreland invited him to dine at three: he declined to eat at that hour. Though he did not affect misanthropic or aristocratic haughtiness, his manner was so grand, that it attracted but few of those with whom chance brought him in contact ; nevertheless, in spite of his reserve, he was not so adverse to advances when made in the form of a good dinner. But this sensuality, common enough amongst wits, rendered his vanity more intractable; but his incomparable self-possession covered and excused everything. "Who is that bowing to you, Sefton?" said he to his friend on the public walk. It was one of his honest provincial countrymen, with whom he was to dine that very day, and who was bowing to him. He lived many years at Calais; and, in spite of his vanity, doubtless suffered many a secret trouble under it, and one of the chief must have been the want of conversation. On parle plusieurs langues, mais on ne cause que dans une seule. In this dearth of excitement, and perhaps not knowing how to exercise his dormant faculties, he painted a screen for the Duchess of York. This Princess, after fortune betrayed him, extended to him a friendship which threw a shade of tenderness over his arid existence. He never forgot her; and it seems, but for a promise to her not to reveal the secrets of the Regent's life, he would have written his memoirs, and repaired his fortunes, for the London booksellers offered him immense sums as the price of his indiscretion. This considerate forbearance penetrated not the stubborn and impervious selfishness of George the Fourth; and when he passed Brummell in the streets of Calais, he felt not even that species of emotion at meeting the companion of his youth, which is an impulse common even to vulgar minds. But Brummell's indifference was equal to the King's; had it been otherwise, he would not have been Brummell. He preserved that discreet silence which is the good taste of pride. But debt and misery came on together, and he commenced the descent from exile to poverty spoken of by Dante, at the foot of which he found a prison, alms, and a mad-house wherein to die. The office of consul at Caen was but a momentary check to his progress on this course, for it was very soon abolished. His residence in this town was one of the longest phases of his life; and the French noblesse, by their reception and considerate attentions, must have softened, though they could not save him, the anguish which tortured the last days of his existence. P P VOL. XVII. DISCOVERY OF THE OREGON BY DRAKE AND VARIOUS and profound have been the philological researches of learned men at Washington in the investigation of the origin of the name of OREGON, applied by the people of the far West to that portion of the north-west of North America occupied by the British, but claimed on the grounds of" priority of discovery, examination, and occupation," by the inhabitants of the United States. This great controversy is yet undecided ;—perhaps it will for ever remain uncertain whether the word is of Indian extraction, or whether, under the name of Oregon, we have not disguised the Hibernian patronymic of O'Regon or O'Regan! The proper designation of the territory is NEW ALBION. Sir Francis Drake formally took possession of the country (as we mean to prove) on behalf of her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth, of happy memory, giving it the name of New Albion. It is so styled by our old voyagers and geographers and we see no reason why New Albion it should not still be called. The Americans have very dexterously given the land a new name;—at one dash of the pen they would obliterate the British title! The territory now the subject of such grave discussion between Great Britain and the United States lies on the shore of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It is bounded on the north by Russian America, at 54° 40′ N. lat. On the east, the Rocky Mountains, the lofty summits of which are covered with perpetual snows, form its natural limit. The Pacific is its western boundary. The possessions claimed by Mexico, which extend to 42° N. lat. skirt the southern bounds of New Albion or the Oregon. A distinguished American authority, whose work has been printed by the Government of the United States, gives the following outline of the natural and political divisions of the country :— The North-west Coast is the expression usually employed in the United States at the present time to distinguish the vast portion of the American continent which extends north of the 40th parallel of latitude from the Pacific to the great directing ridge of the Rocky Mountains, together with the contiguous islands in that ocean. The southern part of this territory, which is drained almost entirely by the Columbia River, is commonly called the OREGON. The territory bordering upon the Pacific southward from the 40th parallel to the extremity of the peninsula which stretches in that direction as far as the Tropic of Cancer, is called California,—a name of uncertain derivation, formerly applied by the Spaniards to the whole western section of North America. By the Florida treaty concluded in 1819, between the United States and Spain, a line drawn along the 42nd parallel of latitude, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific was fixed as the northern limit of the Spanish territory, and the southern limit of that of the United States in Western America. By subsequent treaty between the latter power and Mexico, the same line was admitted to separate the possessions of the two republics-Mexico taking the place of Spain. The Mexicans, accordingly, claim the country as far north as the 42nd pa |