eyes, or black ones, as the case may be, very nice ankles, and a charming voice. She is a pretty girl to everybody; to him, thrown across her by chance, she is beautiful-divine! He thinks, over his pipe, that she is just his ideal of Enone, or Gretchen, or airy fairy Lilian, if he be of a poetic turn, and rank with German idealism; or meditates that she's "a clipper of a girl, and, by Jupiter! what lovely scarlet lips, and what a pretty foot!" if of a material disposition. He falls in love with her, as the phrase goes; he flirts with her at water-parties, and pays her a few morning calls; he sees her trifling with a bit of fancy-work, and hears her pretty voice say a few things about the weather. A few cecillades, a few waltzes, a few têtes-à-têtes; when looking at the rosebud lips he never criticises what they utter, and he proposes he is accepted; they are both dreadfully in love, of course, and-marry. It is a pretty dream for a few months; an easy yoke, perhaps, for a few years; then gradually the illusions drop one by one, as the leaves drop from a shaken rose, loth, yet forced to fall. He finds her mind narrowed, bigoted, ill-stored, with no single thought in it akin to his own. What could he learn of it in those few morning calls, those few ball-room têtes-à-têtes, when the glamour was on him, and he would have cared nothing though she could not have spelled his name? Or he finds her a bad temper (when does temper ever show in society, and how could he see her without society's controlling eye upon her?), snarling at her servants, her dogs, the soup, the east winds; meeting him with petulant acerbity, revenging on him her milliner's neglect, her maid's stupidity, her migraine, or her torn Mechlin. Or-he finds her a heartless coquette, cheapening his honour, holding his name as carelessly as a child holds a mirror, forgetting, like the child, that a breath on it is a stain; turning a deaf ear to his remonstrance; flinging at him, with a sneer, some died-out folly—" before I knew you, sir!"-that she has ferreted out; goading him to words that he knows, for his own dignity, were best unsaid, then turning to hysteria and se posent en martyre. Or-and this, I take it, is the worst case for boththe wife is a good wife, as many (ladies say most) wives are; he knows it, he feels it, he honours her for it, but-she is a bitter disappointment to him. He comes home worn-out with the day's labour, but successful from it; he sits down to a tête-à-tête dinner; he tells her of the hardwon election, the hot-worded debate in the House, the issue of a great law case that he has brought off victorious, of his conquest over death by the bedside of a sinking patient, of the compliment to his corps from the commander-in-chief, of the one thing that is the essence of his life and the end of his ambition; she listens with a vague, amiable, absent smile, but her heart is not with him, nor her ear. "Yes, dear-indeed— how very nice! But cook has ruined that splendid haunch. Do look! it is really burnt to a cinder!" She never gives him any more than that! She cannot help it; she is a good, patient, domestic, quiet woman, who would not do wrong for the world, but her sphere is the nursery, her thoughts centre on the misdemeanours of her household, her mission is emphatically to "suckle fools and chronicle small-beer." The perpetual drop, drop, of her small worries, her puerile pleasures, is like the ceaseless dropping of water on his brain; try how he might, he could never waken this woman's mind to one pulse in unison with his in the closest relationship of human life; she is less capable of understanding him in his defeats, his victories, his struggles, than the senseless writing-paper, which, though it cannot respond to them, at least lets him score his thoughts on its blank pages, and will bear them unobliterated! Yet this disunion in union is common enough in this world: when a man marries early it is too generally certain. A man early married, moreover, is prematurely aged. While he is yet young his wife is old; while he is in the fullest vigour of his manhood, she is grey, and faded, and ageing; youth has long gone from her, while in him it is still fresh; and while away from her he is young, by her side he feels old. Married-in youth he takes upon himself burdens that should never weigh save upon middle age; in middle age he plays the part that should be reserved for age alone. I read the other day in an essay a remark of the writer's relative to the marriage of Milverton, in the last series of Friends in Council, with a girl of twenty-two, in which he said that he could well conceive what a delight it might be to a man at or past middle age, who had believed his youth lost for ever, to have it restored to him in a love which gives him the rich and subtle gladness that brings back the "greenness to the grass, and the glory to the flower." It is true; and it is this later love which can satisfy him and not fade and disappoint him; since it is in later years alone that his own character will have become no longer mutable, his own tastes have ripened, and his own judgment grown secure. Yet to the man who has married early this resurrection of his youth can never come, or, if it come, can only come in bitterness, like the bitterness of the prisoner who catches one glimpse of the fair laughing earth lying beyond in the sunlight, and knows that the bars of his cell are fixed, and that on his limbs are the weight of irons. And, to take it in a more practical sense, scarcely the less inevitably from a young man married a man that's marred.” If to men every point is " of fortune, like Sabretasche and De Vigne, with every opiate of pleasure and excitement to drown the gall and fret of uncongenial or unhappy union, early marriage blots and mars life as it does, how much more bitter still to those who are poor and struggling men, with the burden of work, hardly done and scantily paid, upon their shoulders, is its fatal error! A young man starts in life with no capital, but a good education and a profession, that, like all professions, cannot be lucrative to him till time has mellowed his reputation, and experience made him, more or less, a name in it. It brings him quite enough for his garçon wants; he lives comfortably enough in his chambers or his lodgings, with no weightier daily outlay than his Cavendish and his chop; study comes easy to him, with a brain that has no care gnawing on it; society is cheap, for his chums come contentedly for a pipe, and some punch, or some beer, and think none the worse of him because he does not give them turtle and Vin Mosseux. He can live for little if he like; if he want change and travel, he can take his knapsack and a walking tour; nobody is dependent on him; if he be straitened by poverty, the strain is on him alone; he is not tortured by the cry of those who look to him for daily bread, the world is before him, to choose at least where he will work in it; in a word, he is free! But, if he marries, his up-hill career is fettered by a clog that draws him backward every step he sets; his profession is inadequate to meet the expenses that crowd in on him; if he keep manfully and honestly out of debt, economy and privation eat his very life away, as, say what romancists may, they ever must; if he live beyond his income, as too many professional men are almost driven to do in our day, there is a pressure on him like the weights they laid upon offenders in the old Newgate press-yards. He toils, he struggles, he works, as brainworkers must, feverishly and at express speed to keep in the van at all; he is old, while by right of years he should yet be young, in the constant harassing rack and strain to "keep up appearances," and seem well off while every shilling is of consequence; he writes for his bread with the bray of brawling children above his head; he goes to his office turning over and over in wretched arithmetic the sums he owes to the baker and the butcher; he smiles courteously upon his patients or his clients with the iron in his soul and county-court summonses hanging over his head. He goes back from his rounds or his office, or comes out of his study after a long day, jaded, fagged, worn out; comes, not to quiet, to peace, to solitude, with an Havannah and a book, to anything that would soothe the fagged nerves and ease the strain for an hour at least, but only for some miserable petty worry, some fresh small care; to hear his wife going into mortal agonies because her youngest son has the measles, or bear the leer of the servants when they say "the tax-gatherer's called again, and, please, must he go away?" Corregio literally dying in the heat and burden of the day, of the weary weight, the torturing rack of home-cares, his family and his poverty dragging him downward and clogging his genius as the drenching rains upon its wings clog the flight of a bird, is but sample of the death-in-life, the age-in-youth, the self-begotten curse, the self-elected doom, that almost inevitably dog the steps of a man who has married early, be his station what it may, be his choice what it will. This Spring of Love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day, Which shows now all the beauty of the sun, Such is love, rarely anything better, scarcely ever anything more durable. Such are all early loves, invariably, inevitably. God help, then, though we may count them by the myriad, those who in and for that one brief "April day," which, warm and shadowless at morning, sees the frost down long before night, pay rashly as Esau paid in the moment of eager delight, when no price was counted, and no value asked; pay, with headstrong thoughtlessness, in madman's haste, the one priceless birthright upon earth-Freedom! "A young man married is a man that's marred!" NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. REVELATIONS OF THE GUILLOTINE.* THE era of Louis XIV. and of Louis XV. was that of minorities; the system extended itself to the very foot of the social ladder, and to the royal minorities succeeded that of the royal executioners. Charles Sanson was dead, and his widow, the most remarkable woman of the family-Martha Dubut-obtained the father's appointment for his eldest son, Charles Jean Baptiste Sanson, at that time only seven years of age. Jean Baptiste, worthy son of an indomitable mother, took to his profession, when age had rendered him competent to its duties, as a matter of course. He was equally free from the feverish excitement of his grandfather and the gloomy melancholy of his father. So great was the influence of Martha Dubut, "the mother of the Gracchi of the scaffold," that she also obtained the appointment of provost of the king's hotel for her second son, Gabriel, but the execution of Damiens so sickened this youth with the duties that he at once gave up his charge. Jean Baptiste, of a less sensitive nature, on the contrary, took a pride in his profession, and thoroughly identified himself with the sanguinary appanage, which he looked upon as hereditary. Unluckily, he was not of a literary turn-possibly the two avocations do not tally, for Henry Sanson manifestly had his business in horror-and he has left few notices of the terrible dramas in which he was engaged. The fact is, that these appear, from the brevity of such as do exist, to have made no deep impression upon his cynical disposition. Among the most remarkable were one Ruxton, broken on the wheel for having assassinated Andrieu, a barrister-at-law; and Montgeol, a civil engineer, who had murdered Lescombat, an architect, prompted thereunto by Marie Taperet, the wife of the latter. The indifference and egotism of this corrupt woman at his trial so irritated her quondam lover, that he was induced to tax her openly with having instigated him to commit the crime. Marie Taperet, young and beautiful, and whose coquetry equalled her viciousness, reckoned upon her charms and dress to fascinate the magistrates and win them over in her favour, but in this she was disappointed; she was condemned to be hung, and only obtained delay by declaring herself enceinte by the unfortunate man whom she had sent to the scaffold. Marie Taperet's history bears some resemblance to that of Madame Ticquet; like it, it has been made the groundwork of both novels and dramas, but it has no redeeming points like the ill-assorted marriage, and ardent and passionate, albeit criminal, love of Madame Ticquet. Among the other more or less * Mémoires des Sansons, etc. Tome Troisième. Paris Dupray de la Mahérie. July-VOL. CXXVIII, NO. DXI. S distinguished personages who fell into the hands of Jean Baptiste was a magistrate of the name of Dufrancey, who was nearly sacrificing the life of one Roy, a merchant, by false testimony. A slight incident at the trial betrayed the plot. Roy, overwhelmed by the horrible charges brought against him by one of the witnesses, exclaimed: "Miserable man, what have I done to you that you should have me broken on the wheel? I do not know you, or have you ever seen me!" "How!" exclaimed the witness, "broken on the wheel? I did not mean it to go as far as that." These words were a beam of light. A new turn was given to the examination, and the whole plot was discovered. Jean Baptiste was struck down by palsy in January, 1754. We have seen how he attempted to re-vindicate his rights in the instance of Lally Tollendal; in fact, he may be almost said to have loved his profession. Another proof of this lies in the fact that out of ten children, he got all that were boys-seven in number-appointments as executioners at Reims, Orleans, Meaux, Etampes, Soissons, Montpellier, and elsewhere. When these members of a family of decapitators were assembled at the patriarchal board, the aged Martha Dubut at the head, her son paralysed and statue-like at the side, and the mother at the foot, they were designated as Monsieur de Reims, Monsieur de Soissons, &c.-a custom which is still upheld in the profession. The eldest, Charles Henry Sanson, was by birthright Monsieur de Paris, and he was a handsome and even gentlemanly person. Being obliged by law to wear a green coat, he actually brought the colour into fashion, and he even attempted to raise the question, as a descendant of the De Longvals, if the office of executioner derogated from his rights of nobility! His handsome person and love of dress entailed many adventures, some of which, as his acquaintance with Jeanne Vaubernier, afterwards Countess of Barry, had no untoward results, which was not always the case with others. Being out hunting one day, a lady of title inquiring as to who he was, and receiving for answer that he was a "parliamentary officer," she invited him to her house. But discovering afterwards the real profession of our gay Lothario, she was so profoundly irritated that she commenced an action against him, insisting that he should ask pardon publicly with a rope round. his neck, and further, that he should be obliged to wear a distinctive badge. Charles Henry defended himself so effectually, however (the very speeches made on both sides are placed on record in this strange history), that nothing came of this persecution of an indignant lady. The acquaintanceship with Jeanne Vaubernier, afterwards Countess of Barry, is said to have originated in the attendance at the house of Jean Baptiste of the Abbé Gomart, chaplain to the condemned, and who may be supposed to have frequented the society of the Sansons from their duties bringing them so closely and so intimately together. The disputed paternity of Jeanne Vaubernier is attributed by the Sansons to a youthful error on the part of the abbé, who seems in other respects to have been a pious man, and an able and conscientious minister of religion. It was from hearing the worthy abbé talk of the beauty and the frailty of his niece, as he called her, and the latter of which, while he extolled the |