work of European statesmanship. I drink their healths, sir, in my brandy-paunee. But you were speaking of the annexation of Pegu."

66

I was observing," said Mr. Maurice, "that, opposed as the Company are to territorial aggrandisement, they will in all probability be forced into the annexation of Pegu. After what has already taken place in that direction, it is possible that the protection of the inhabitants against the vengeance and cruelty of the Burmese, may be advanced as a legitimate pretext for the immediate amputation of that limb of the kingdom of Ava. If not, it will, in all probability, be taken in lieu of a money-payment to cover the expenses of the war. There is no doubt that such a transfer would be far more righteous than the appropriation of Sindh. Indeed, there is no lack of justificatory argument in support of such a measure. But there is little to be said for it on the score of expediency. For my own part, I believe it to be almost an impossibility, if once we begin the work of annexation, to stop short at the confines of Pegu. The whole of the Burmese empire must be added to our Indian dominions. We shall not be able to stop short of this. The Pegu frontier, in point of fact, would be no frontier at all. A line of jungly country, very favourable to the desultory operations of the Burmese, and very unfavourable to our own, would invite them to constant border forays, and we should soon be compelled, 'in selfdefence' the old story!-to deprive our turbulent neighbours of the power to work us further annoyance. We shall be driven, for our own security, not merely to dismember, but to annihilate the Burmese empire. But we do not want Burmah any more than we want Pegu. We shall find it a burdensome possession. I have heard it said that, forty years hence, Pegu, if it now passes into our hands, will be the richest province of the Indian empire. Under proper management, its fertility, it is said, is inexhaustible. But, unfortunately, we are not in a position to make present sacrifices, in the hope of realising prospective benefits. At the other extremity of our Indian empire we have a newly-acquired province-once a great integral kingdom-only wanting a present outlay of Company's coin to develop latent resources, and to fructify, a hundred-fold, after a few years, in the shape of national prosperity of the most remunerative kind. But our exigencies compel us to deny that, which our judgments would fain yield, to the Punjab. The state of our treasury will not suffer us to make the necessary advances, certain as we may be of large prospective returns. How can we afford to manure Pegu, whilst the Punjab is still languishing for want of the same nutriment? Every newly acquired province, for a certain number of years, more or less according to its natural productiveness, is a drain upon the treasury of India-upon the treasury which is recruited from the resources of the older, long-settled districts. And so it always happens, that just as we are beginning to think of carrying out measures for the improvement of the revenue-yielding parts of the country -of spending, in fact, their own money on these old provinces, some new tracts of country are unhappily thrust into our hands, and there is a necessary diversion of the treasure so appropriated into less legitimate and productive channels. Every acquisition of new territory retards the internal improvement of the old, and is, therefore, a curse to the country." "If we take the Burmese empire into our own hands, there must be an augmentation of the army," said the major. "And it will extend our commerce," said the captain, "and employ more shipping."

"I am not so sure of that," said the author. "Extension of empire and extension of commerce are not necessarily connected with each other. Indeed, our best fields of commerce have lain in directions where we have had no empire. The China trade flourished when we had not an inch of territory in the whole celestial empire. I am sceptical of the commercial benefits which would result from the annexation of Pegu. And I do not see its political advantages. It appears to me, that it would lead to endless embarrassments, and eventually propel us still further onward and onward, until our dominions have reached a point of extensiveness beyond which there is nothing but disintegration and decay. Heaven knows, indeed, where we shall stop-perhaps, only at the Yellow Sea. The further we endeavour to penetrate into the future of all the great Eastern States, the more profound is the interest of the subject. There is an unlimited suggestiveness about it. The Burmese empire already totters-the integrity of the Chinese empire has long been jeopardised. The Japan empire is threatened by the navies of the United States. It seems likely, though none of us may live to see it, that the Anglo-Saxon race will cover the whole of those romantic Eastern countries, whose fabulous wealth, two centuries ago, stirred the hearts of the Merchants of London, and impelled them to send out their argosies in search of the produce of the Great Indies, the Spice-Islands, and Cathay. The greatest fact, judged by the magnitude of its results, in the entire history of the world, is the establishment of the East India Company. The expansion of their empire has been a magnificent illustration of the great truth, "L'homme propose; Dieu dispose." The dominions of the East India Company have extended themselves from Cape Comorin to the borders of Afghanistan and Cashmere-from the banks of the Indus to the banks of the Irrawaddy, in spite of the moderation of the East India Com. pany, and their sincere efforts to prevent, from time to time, the extension of an empire which long ago they believed to be overgrown. There are some writers who still speak of the aggressive "system" of the Company. But they have mistaken, designedly or undesignedly, the will of Providence for the system of the Company. If we are now compelled to take Pegu-or the entire Burmese empire-who can lay it to the account of the aggressiveness of the Company?-The Company do not want Pegu-do not want Burmah-would much rather be without them. They have no greed after these territories-they did not plunge willingly into this war. If there was anything in the world against which they devoutly prayed for protection, it was a second Burmese war. But God is stronger than the Company.-All this extension of empire-this diffusion over new countries of the Anglo-Saxon race, is a part of a "system" much more bold and comprehensive than any that has ever had its origin in Leadenhall Street, or any other

human bureau

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may."

I could not hear any more-I was very sorry to leave; but there was no help for it-I heard the clock strike eight-and I had an appointment to keep-I knew my wife was waiting tea. Perhaps, as events further develop themselves, I shall again be able to tell you How we Med about the Burmese War.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

THERE is nothing so apparently easy for every one to arrive at and pourtray, and yet so impossible to obtain, as a genuine picture of private and domestic life. For the present, one scarcely prizes such a thing, it is so common-place, so universal. But have the private domestic life of one century or age daguerreotyped for the contemplation and amusement of the century after-this makes a chef-d'œuvre. Novels do not do this, or have not done it. Does Fielding give a true picture of his age? I hope and believe not. Does Richardson? We know he does not. Does Smollett? A smile must answer. The memoirs of great people tell but the libels of the great, and these are told discreetly. Even amidst the ocean of French memoirs, how few are there that give a faithful and interesting sketch of private and domestic life? Marmontel is charming, but his autobiography savours of the pastoral. Rousseau is abominable. We have in record the life of a soldier, that of a courtier, of a lawyer, of the artist and goldsmith, as] in Benvenuto, of a man of letters, of the actor. But a vivid representation of bourgeois life, that we have not.

Had we been told that Alexandre Dumas would have treated the world to such a picture, we should not have believed it. The dramatist, always seeking to surprize, the novelist ever revelling in the fabulous, the pourtrayer of court and military adventurers and duellists, of all kinds of extraordinary and bustling scenes and character, to sit down and give us the picture of village life. George Sand may do that, we should say, but Dumas never. Yet it is this precisely that Dumas has done. He spent the first fifteen years of his life in a little town, Villers Coterets, about sixty miles north-east of Paris. And he has given a most detailed and pictorial history of this village, or rather town, during ten or twelve years, from the middle of Napoleon's reign to the middle of Louis the Eighteenth's. Dumas's memoirs are of course an Olla Podrida, a mixture of everything, politics, literature, courts and coulisses, dramas, and coups d'état. But amidst such a world of stirring scenes and personages there is nothing so charming or so interesting as the sketches from the life of the friends and acquaintances who illumined his young days, from the humble tradesman and smart modiste, to the lords and ladies of the châteaus in his vicinity.

In this minute picture of a French town, its habits, ways, troubles, prejudices, amusements, and opinions, there is nothing fabulous, improbable, exaggerated, or given for effect. It is the simple truth, told of himself and others, by one who artistically knows that in the representation of that section of life, truth, the simple truth is the greatest of all charms.

Considerable and universal laughter was indulged in at the expense of Dumas by his acquaintances, and even his admirers, when, on the occasion of a certain trial, he gave in his name as Davy Marquis de la Pailleterie. His memoir commences with the proof of his right to this title. His great grandfather bore the appellate of Marquis de la Pailleterie, and had been second to the Marshal Duc de Richelieu, in his well known duel with the Prince de Lixen. He sold his lands and

emigrated to St. Domingo in search of fortune: there, by a woman of colour, whom, Dumas asserts, his grandfather married, he had the future General Dumas, the father of our man of letters. This mulatto giant, a Hercules in form, agreed but ill with his father, although they both returned to France together; and when there, to be independent of his father, he enlisted in a dragoon regiment, dropping his claim to the future title of Davy de la Pailleterie, and assumed merely the name of his mother, Dumas. The Revolution found him a sergeant, but in a very short time made him a colonel and a general. Of the great courage, activity, and strength of General Dumas there cannot be a doubt. Commanding a division, or under any leader, he was invaluable, as he proved in Italy and in the Tyrol; but as Commander-in-chief he evidently had some defects or characteristics, which but too naturally escaped the discernment of his son, but which prevented him remaining even two months consecutively in command. That of La Vendée, indeed, the republican government were inclined to leave him; but he declined the task of reducing the royalist insurrection of these provinces with a republican army, that had abandoned itself to cruelty and rapine. The capture of the Alpine forts of Piedmont, the siege of Mantua, and the advance through the Tyrol, from Botzen to Brixen, were the military struggles in which General Dumas chiefly distinguished himself. His defence of a bridge single-handed in the Tyrol, caused him to be presented to the Directory as the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol. His son may be allowed some pious exaggeration in recounting these faits d'armes. Dumas claims for his father the merit of having surprised and seized, in the intestines of a spy, a letter of General Alvinzi's, addressed to the governor of Mantua, and announcing his intention of forcing the heights and fighting the battle of Rivoli. If so, Bonaparte had the advantage of entering upon that action, aware of the intention and manœuvres of his enemy. Bonaparte, however, gave Dumas no thanks, no promotion, not even a sabre of honour. Still he was too brave an officer not to be employed, and Bonaparte brought Dumas with him to Egypt, where his swarthy complexion and gigantic form commanded immense respect from the Egyptian race. His son gives him credit for having, by personal exertion, put down the insurrection of Cairo, whilst Bonaparte himself, after Kleber's assassination, non erat inventus.

Every one has seen the large picture of Girodet, representing the quelling of the insurrection of Cairo. When first ordered, General Dumas, the real hero of the day, was also to be the hero of the picture. But, by subsequent orders, he was omitted altogether, the fine figure of the French general being replaced by that of a fair-haired and gallant hussar, the likeness of no officer in the army, and thus belying the historical fact which the picture was intended to illustrate. Dumas was so recalcitrant, so open-mouthed against Bonaparte and his ambition, that the latter allowed Dumas to set sail before himself to Europe. He was captured at Naples, thrust into prison, and made to endure all kinds of ill-treatment, of which continued attempts to poison him were the worst feature. General Dumas got free at the peace, but with a constitution destroyed by the drugs given him in the Neapolitan prison, and with all hopes of advancement cut off by the elevation of Bonaparte, between whom and him there was a gulf of enmity. Dumas could never get even the arrears of his pay accruing during his imprisonment. Neither could he ever obtain indemnity or employ. He retired to Villers Coterets, where

he had married, and in the neighbourhood of which he lived till his death.

Dumas's mother, the wife and widow of the General, was the daughter of the chief innkeeper of Villers Coterets, but nevertheless allied to the gentry of the country round, as well as to the bourgeoisie of the town. And nothing can so fully depict the strange originality (to us) of French society, as the pictures of a young man, Dumas, equally intimate with Madame de Valence and her society, M. Deviolaine, Inspector of Forests, and his society, and withal the hail-fellow-well-met with every one, even the lowest tradesfolk, male or female, of the town. In England, with its rules of caste, this were impossible. In Villers Coterets it was quite natural. Not only did young Dumas go from a visit to Villers Hellon, and from the society of Madame de Valence and of M. Leuven to that of the worthy tradespeople of the town, but the persons of these different classes met at the same fête, and joined in the same dance, many a time and oft, without the one derogating from their rank, or the other presuming upon the familiarity so as to cause an inconvenient result. One of the persons whom Dumas met in this society was Marie Capelle, then a child, grand-daughter of M. Collard, and descended illegitimately from Philip Egalité. Marie Capelle, the reader will recollect, was afterwards Madame Laffarge, and claimed relationship by descent with the family of Orleans, reigning at the time of her trial and condemnation. The death of Madame Laffarge has just been announced in the French papers, and it will be seen that a Mademoiselle Collard, to be noticed also in these volumes, attended her not only in her last moments but her last years. Villers Coterets, it should be noted, was the country residence of the House of Orleans, was to it what Versailles was to the King. Hence all the people of Villers Coterets were especially interested in the family of Orleans, and it in them. So that Dumas is able, from the mere traditions heard by his juvenile ear, to give a great many anecdotes and particularities of the family. Young Dumas had even seen Madame de Montesson, wife and widow of the Duke of Orleans, father of Philip Egalité. Madame de Genlis was her niece. The Duke returning home suddenly one day, found M. de Valence on his knees before his wife, Madame de Montesson. The marriage was one by the left hand, that did not make the lady a duchess. She conjured away her husband's surprise, by exclaiming, that M. de Valence was on his knees to her, supplicating that she might use her influence to procure for him the hand of Pulcherie, daughter of Madame de Genlis by the Duke de Chartres. This saved M. de Valence from a scrape, and endowed him with a wife. And hence the descent of these families, the Collards and Capelles, from Philip Egalité. Madame de Genlis used to pay visits now and then to her descendants at Villers Coterets. Dumas was present at one of these visits, and avows that the impression left on him by the authoress of the "Veillées du Château," was that of a witch.

The memoir contains some charming pictures of village fêtes and rustic festivities, will full-length portraits of the personages, so truly done as to interest the reader as much as if he had accompanied, and was destined to accompany, them through sixteen volumes of a harrowing and diluted story. Another powerful portion of the volume consists of sporting stories, the description of the boar-hunts especially in the forest of Villers Coterets. Dumas gives minute portaits of every