on the chartists, counsels Sybil to induce sabred. The indignant spirit of Gerard her father to leave London ere the Govern- resists; he strikes down a trooper to the ment shall strike at the convention. Sybil earth, and calls on those about him not to exerts her influence, but in vain; and Ge- yield. But the father of Sybil is picked rard and his daughter are both arrested, the out and shot dead. Instantly rose a groan daughter having tracked her father to a se- which almost quelled the spirit of Lord cret meeting of delegates somewhere about Marney. The people rush on the troopers, Silver-street. In this agony of her fate, armed with bludgeons and stones, and Lord she addresses, from Bow-street Police-office, Marney falls lifeless on Mowbray Moor, a letter to Charles Egremont, which is de- literally stoned to death. Sybil, who is in livered to him at a ball where Lord John the park of Mowbray Castle, is assailed by Russell is also present, and Sybil (through a band of drunken rioters. One ruffian the instrumentality of the noble lord) is had grasped her arm, another seized her liberated. Walter Gerard, her father, is garments, when an officer, covered with committed for a seditious conspiracy, is held dust and gore, sabre in hand, jumped from to bail, and immediately on his liberation the terrace, and hurried to the rescue. proceeds to Mowbray, to attend a political We will never part again! said Egremeeting. He is received with triumph; mont. Never!' murmured Sybil. Sybil, and now Baptist Hatton appears on the in due season, with her title-deeds, and triscene, a prosperous pedigree-maker. He al by jury, gained possession of Mowbray has seen Sybil, and is touched by her beau- Castle and £40,000 a-year; and Egremont ty; he has seen Gerard, her father, and the having become Earl of Marney, marries thought that the representative of an old her; and so ends the third and last volume. family had been cheated out of his birth- Such are the main features of the story, right by him, by one of the same faith-for in so far as the hero and heroine are conBaptist Hatton is also a Roman-catholic-cerned; but there are various episodes and weighs heavy on his mind. The country minor dramatis persona. The condition is in the throes of political excitement. of the people, however, and more especialThere is a talk of strikes, and of rising of ly the condition of the poor, is kept permatens of thousands of working men; and nently in view, and the condition of the Hatton now conceives the idea, through the mill and the mine, and that of the agriculinstrumentality of Morley, Field, and oth-tural laborer, is mapped forth with breadth ers of the convention, of inducing the of outline and minute fidelity. But few of working people to attack Mowbray Castle, the individual characters are natural, though where, in a strong box, are Walter Gerard's the dialogue is in general racy and charactitle-deeds to a title and estate which Lord teristic. Sybil is a gentle and delicate bede Mowbray has unjustly obtained by the ing, instinct with deep feeling and self-posfraudulent efforts of this same Baptist Hat- session, but yet ever brooding over the ton. The people proceed to the attack, wrongs of her race and her religion-her headed by Morley and Stephen Hatton, a race, the Saxon, one which predominated ferocious lock-maker, and brother of Bap- over every other in England, and which is tist. They enter the cellars, drink the now mingled with Norman, Dane, Celt, and wines, destroy the furniture, and in the Hun; and her religion the Roman-catholic, confusion, Morley mounts the minaret tow-freed from every disability, and enjoying for er, and gets possession of the box contain- the last sixteen years at least, no small faing the title-deeds. But the yeomanry ar- vor. Walter Gerard, too, with all his chartrive at this juncture, and Stephen is fired ism, is ever thinking of his old blood and at, and mortally wounded by a trooper. In older faith. Stephen Morley, the journalhis last agony, he perceives the commander of the forces is Egremont; and throwing the box of title-deeds to Dandy Mike, conjures him to deliver them to Sybil-a request which Dandy faithfully fulfils. While these things are enacting at the castle, Walter Gerard is endeavoring to calm and tranquilize a vast multitude assembled on Mowbray Moor, when Lord Marney encounters the people with his yeomanry. The Riot Act is read; the people are fired on and ist, in love with Sybil, is an enigma rather than a man-at one period he exhibits the malignity of a demon; at another, the selfdevotion and purity of an angel-now, he makes a cowardly attempt on the life of Egremont; and again, an unmanly attack on the feelings of Sybil. Yet maintaining the property in common principle, he puts to hazard his ease, and sacrifices his life to gain an estate for Walter Gerard, who laughs at his politics and loathes his infi that they really cannot any longer vote with government unless the Treasury assists them in satisfying their constituents.' 'And what do they want?' low prices; mild expostulations and gentle 'Statement of grievances; high taxes and hints that they have been thrown over by their friends; Polish corn, Holstein cattle, and British income tax.' plaining.' Their diminished cost of living! said Mr. delity. Simon Hatton, the locksmith, is such a character as never existed, though his brother, Baptist, the pedigree-maker, is well drawn. Lord Marney, too, is a correct sketch, and may be taken as a type of the mean, mercenary, hard-hearted portion of our nobility; but his brother Charles, the hero of the story, is an undefined and undeveloped personage, meant to represent the Normans. And the manuer in which gentleman in Downing Street. 'Well you know what to say,' said the he introduces himself to the hearth of a generally that they are quite mistaken; prove Tell them Saxon Catholic, and passes under a false to them particularly that my only object has name and false profession, is neither re- been to render protection more protective, by concileable with honor, honesty, nor gen-plusage of odium; that no foreign corn can making it practical, and divesting it of its surtlemanly feeling. Tadpole and Taper ap- come in at fifty-five shillings; that there are pear but rarely; but then we have mobs of not enough cattle in all Holstein to supply gentleman and ladies, who talk with ease the parish of Pancras daily with beef steaks; to show their breeding, who discuss per- and that as for the income tax, they will be sons instead of principles, and cloak amply compensated for it by their diminished their want of thought in mimetic dogmas, tariff of which they are so superficially comcost of living through the agency of that very and their want of feeling in superficial raillery.' The social, heartless stupidity of the higher classes, is occasionally happily handled; nothing can be truer than the description of a great dull dinner in a great dull house, were the servants even become infected with the genius of the place, and supply your wants with a lofty air of empty is of course true, but, at the same time, you 'Not at all; your previous demonstration pomposity. But it is in describing the very must impress upon them the necessity of genlowest classes of our increasing and man-eral views to form an opinion of particular ufacturing population, and the shallow polit- instances. As, for example, a gentleman of ical intriguers of the day, male and female, that Mr. D'Israeli conspicuously shines. The description of the girls of the coal mines, and of Degg's Tommy, is admirable, and the characters of Devil's-dust, Daudy Mike, and Master Nixon, are well brought out. Nor is there a better conceived nor a truer character in the book than that of Hoaxem, in the third volume. It is plain that Hoaxem has been a righthand man in high places for some time past. There is an extract we cannot resist the pleasure of making in reference to this useful person. 'Well, Mr. Hoaxem,' resumed the gentleman in Downing Street, as that faithful functionary entered, there are some deputations, I understand, to-day. You must receive them, as I am going to Windsor. What are they?' There are only two, sir, of moment. The rest I could easily manage.' 'And these two?" Hoaxem, a little confused. Would not that assurance, I humbly suggest, clash a little with my previous demonstration that we had arranged that no reduction of prices should take place?' five thousand pounds per annum pays to the income tax-which, by-the-bye, always call property tax-one hundred and filty pounds a year. Well, I have materially reduced the sumption of each of those articles by an esduties on eight hundred articles. The contablishment of five thousand pounds per annum cannot be less than one pound per article. The reduction of price cannot be less than a moiety; therefore a saving of four hundred per annum; which placed against clear increase of income of two hundred and the deduction of the property tax leaves a fifty pounds per annum; by which you see that a property tax in fact increases income.' 'I see,' said Mr. Hoaxem, with an admiring glance. And what am I to say to the deputation of the manufacturers of Mowbray complaining of the great depression of trade, and the total want of remunerating profits?' 'Show 'You must say exactly the reverse,' said the gentleman in Downing Street. them how much I have done to promote the revival of trade. First of all, in making provisions cheaper; cutting off at one blow half 'In the first place, there is our friend Colo- moment under the old law the duty on foreign the protection on corn, as for example, at this nel Bosky, the members for the county of wheat would have been twenty-seven shilCalfshire, and a deputation of tenant farmers.' lings per quarter; under the new law, it is 'Pah! thirteen. To be sure, no wheat could come 'These must be attended to. The mem-in at either price, but that does not alter the bers have made a strong representation to me principle. Then as to live cattle, show how I have entirely opened the trade with the continent in live cattle. Enlarge upon this, the subject is speculative, and admits of expen sive estimates. If there be any dissenters on the deputation who, having freed the negroes, have no subject left for their foreign sympathies, hint at the tortures of the bull-fight, and the immense consideration to humanity, that instead of being speared at Seville, the Andalusian Toro will probably in future be cut up at Smithfield. This cheapness of provisions will permit them to compete with the foreigner in all neutral markets,-in time beat them in their own. It is a complete compensation, too, for the property tax, which, impress upon them, is a great experiment, and entirely for their interests. Ring the changes on great measures and great experiments till it is time to go down and make a house. Your official duties of course must not be interfered with. They will take the hint. I have no doubt you will get through the business very well, Mr. Hoaxem, particularly if you be frank and explicit; that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the mind of others. Good morning.' GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY IN RUSSIA. Revelations of Russia, and the Emperor imperfect. But the story of this tale is ill contrived, and the plot vulgarly managed, in the worst spirit of the Minerva-press school. Few will read the volumes for either the story The modern works on Russia are all or the plot. The book may no doubt be Jones has long been out of taken as a sort of official state-paper of date; Frankland is unpardonably silly, shalYoung England theories, which are, after low, and superficial; Slade, though someall, very old exploded English doctrines, what more grave and serious, only touches in the sense in which they are put forth, on portions of Russia; Bremner, though and may be comprised in the words, fuller, yet speaks with reserve and discreQueen, Church, and People. But the tion, as though he had friends and relatives queen must be a Tory queen-with real in the country who might be injured by his power-who not only reigns, but governs frankness; and the authoress of Letters by her own will; the church must be a high church, either Romanist or Puseyite, or a blending of both together; and the people must be a people, fed with good butcher's meat certainly, but clad in coarse woollens, and humbly disposed to bow to the right divine of princes and of priests. But these jaded, outworn doctrines, however picturesque and medieval they may seem on paper, are gone for ever by, and are abhorrent to the people of England; and though they may please the romantic taste of pure Caucasians, and find favor with scions of aristocracy, more poetical than wise or far seeing, yet they never again can find large favor in this good land of ours. from the Baltic,' though she writes fluently and in flowing strain, is entitled to no credit whatever. Her work, from beginning to end, is a pauky panegyric on Russia, written, perhaps, with the pardonable motive of praising a country which afforded a home and a settlement to some of her Scotch relatives;-but it is not entitled to the least credit as a description of the condition, habits, mode of life, manners, and government of the Russian nation. When we state, as we do, on the authority of the book at present under review, that the authoress of the Letters from the Baltic' lived in the house of the chief of the secret police during the whole period of her sojourn,' we think we state enough to exclude her testimony from consideration. Loath should we be, indeed, to accuse a lady of deliberate misrepresentation; but without going that length, or any thing like it, we think it very plain that the fair au ་ thoress must have been insensibly influ- the religious persecutions, the military and enced by the misrepresentations of the un- naval strength of the empire, the commerce, scrupulous functionary under whose roof manufactures, and mines, on the region of she had consented to remain a guest. In the Steppe and of the Nomades, on the fact, she saw with the eyes, and heard with capitals of Moscow, Novogorod, Kien, and the ears, of the respectable functionary, her Kasan, on Circassia and Georgia, than in brother-in-law, who had become her host. any other work or works with which it has There remain but the works of Kohl and been our good fortune to meet. Whether Custine, both of which have been given to the fact be, as our author states, that the the public in an English dress. The for- general dislike entertained towards Russia mer is a minute and painstaking observer, in England is instinctively true to the nabut he wants vigor and profundity, and that tional interests, feelings, and position, political education in a free state without whether, still to use his words, 'Russia, or which no writer, however book-learned he at least its cabinet, is the implacable, insidmay be, can ever write a perfect work on ious enemy of British commerce, enterprise, Russia. The work of Custine is, in every and prosperity,' we will not at present stop respect, valuable. He has, with the pierc- to inquire or to determine, for it is not ing eye of a man of genius, looked through necessary to the matter in hand that we the very core of the Russian system, and should do so,-but of this, at least, after detected its canker and rottenness with in- reading these volumes, there can be no tuitive quickness. His impressions are al- shadow of the shade of a doubt-namely, most always correct. He gives them forth that Russia is a power invasive of all huin a style forceful, varied, picturesque, and man liberties, civil, political, social, and graphic; and it is an attestation at once to religious. his truthfulness and genius, that the author of the Revelations of Russia,' who has evidently long lived in the country,-who has studied its history thoroughly, and seen the working of its administrative system in every part,-comes, on the evidence of facts, and of facts alone, exactly to the same conclusions as the polished, elegant, and somewhat fanciful Marquis de Custine. The Russian Embassy and Consulate will, of course, raise a cry against this later work as they did against the work of Custine. Some of our own journalists will perform their allotted tasks with zeal and alacrity, but there is not a material representation in it for which we could not vouch from personal observation, and we rejoice to think that not all the Rigby rhetoric in the civilized world will suffice to rail down the evidence of facts which these volumes supply of the tyranny, the perfidy, and the moral turpitude of the Russian system and government; of the cureless cupidity, corruption, and malversation of her public servants, and of the prostrate and unhappy condition of her sixty millions of slaves. To the Christian and philanthropist the sufferings of sixty millions of Russian subjects will not be less affecting-they will rather be more heeded, because they are voiceless and hopeless in their misery, without the power of appeal to any human protective sympathy, or, as they are taught, even to any in Heaven, which in their eyes is the accomplice of the power for whose sole advantage they are born, and toil through life, and die. If these volumes were the production of one who spoke from personal pique and prejudice-of one who, like some expatriated Pole, had wrongs to revenge-we should receive the statements they contain with some grains of doubtful reserve; but the internal evidence of truth which they exhibit-the candor not less than the caution of the author-induce us to afford him a willing, though not too ready credence. It is plain that he speaks without prejudice or passion, and that his volumes are the result of long personal observation, exceeding in extent and minuteness the opportunities afforded to the herd of travellers who generally spend a portion of a winter between Petersburg and Moscow, and then obtrude their crudities on the British public as the result of personal observation. The author of the Revelations' distinctly disclaims any prejudice against the Russian nation. He has pointed out many traits in its character which render it amiable in the midst of its degradation. Neither does The following extract will explain the author's view of the character of the Emperor : he profess to be actuated by any personal made Russia European; but he has done, antipathy to the Emperor Nicholas, because and he bids fair to do, more injury to mankind a long study of his character and acts have than all of them put together. Without, perhaps, the genius or the boldness to have ever taught him, that if he be a more complete played more than a very subaltern part in tyrant, he is not a worse individual than the many situations of life, he was peculiarly calaverage of his predecessors. culated, when placed by the chances of birth in possession of such power, and at the head of such a system, to push it to its extremest limits. He possesses, besides his singleness of purpose, precisely the quantum of moral The Emperor Nicholas, is a more complete courage, of obstinacy, and of intellect, to altyrant than any of his predecessors, because low him to use the means in his power, in the he has the power of being so many succesmost effective manner, to attain this end, and sive reigns, like the growth of succeeding withal the exaggerated self-veneration to inyears which bring a tree to maturity, have im-duce him to do so. During the nineteen years proved and completed the mechanism of a of his reign, only seven men have been convast engine of levelling oriental despotism, demned to death, but probably more than in and enabled him to use it with the full light of European science, whilst all his passions and propensities, tending to the acquisition of absolute power, have never diverted him, like his predecessors, from that object. The Emperor Nicholas, has not the brutal instincts of the Tsar Peter the First, any more than his talents; he has not the disordered passions of the lustful Catharine, his grandmother, any more than her brilliant intellect, and her innate liberality; he has not the fitful ferocity of Paul, his murdered sire, any more than his enthusiastic generosity; neither has he the irresolute, impressionable nature of Alexander, his brother and predecessor, nor Alexander's benevolence of intention. all the united reigns alluded to, have in reality perished by the hands of the executioner. Men, indeed, are not decapitated, impaled, or hanged up by the ribs with hooks, as formerly; but whole companies of Polish prisoners are flogged to death; the knout and plitt, which tear away in strips the muscles from the hone, have been inflicted upon thousands and thousands for political offences, who die within a day or two, or perish on the Siberian journey which inevitably follows. So those have been treated who only refused to change the faith of their fathers on an imperial order. 'We read with horror, that, under the long regency of Biren, twenty thousand individuals were banished to Siberia for political crimes. The Emperor Nicholas, on the lowest computation, has sent on the same weary journey two hundred aud fifty thousand-a quarter of a million of individuals. Of these, three-fifths had offended politically, in some direct, or indirect manner.' If the Emperor Nicholas had been born in the place of Peter, he is the man to have shut himself up with his slaves, in the isolation of a Chinese despot, although he might never have cut off heads with his own hand, or presided at the impalement of his enemies. Incapable of the vices of his grandmother, he would This is horrible to read-horrible to think never, like her, have turned his imperial palaces into temples of the Venus Meretrix; but of-but the vice may be more of the system he is equally incapable, either of allowing his than the man, for the self-deification to subjects, like his bold progenetrice, the liberty which absolute and irresponsible power which did not immediately impede the march acting on a limited intellect and selfish heart of her government, or of conceiving the idea leads, it is not in the power of human inof giving them liberal institutions-a project tellect to conceive, or human pen to portray. which the intoxication of her pleasures and successes caused her to postpone until too late, This emperor who recently appeared among but not to abandon. He is not the man to us, all blandness and smiles, is the greatest shoot, for a wager, a female slave working in slave-proprietor in the world-upwards of his garden, like his brother Constantine, any twenty millions of slaves belonging to his more than to have given up, like Constantine, personal domain. Each year he lends an empire to dry the tears of a woman. He money on the slaves of his nobles, and each would not, like Alexander, for the sake of seeing his favorites smile, have allowed them to year he appropriates them as unredeemed tyrannize over his subjects on their own ac- pledges. Not only does he trample on the count, any more than he would, like Alexan- bondsman and the slave, but on his vander, have wept to see it, any more than he quished enemies, the nobility of the Polish would, like Alexander, have advocated a nation. In that unhappy land, he has upcharter for the French people, although to rooted whole races, and succeeded, accordbe given without prejudice to his own auto-ing to the author of these volumes and every cratic rights, but in sacrilegious precedent At the very against the right divine of princes. On the trustworthy traveller, in extirpating the rewhole, therefore, Nicholas is neither better ligious creed of millions. nor worse than the average of his predecessors, inclusive of the great Tsar, who first moment at which we write, he seems bent, not only in destroying the nationality, but |