sions signifying successive draughts so taken that the glass is to be filled and emptied entirely the first time, to its half part the second time, to its third part the third time, and so forth. I have seen "the octave" accomplished, but to ascend the ladder so high is a very rare exception, and there is usually some sham in the whole proceeding. Some of Apollo's sons do not even touch the "Swedish wine at all, though they may fetch the glasses and fill them. The clang of the glasses is accompanied by songs; the leader of the national orchestra giving the tune, and all present joining at least in the refrain. The intervals of these songs are occupied by the harmonies of the band in the gallery. In addition, all through the repast every one is free to chat, laugh, walk about, and so forth, the sexa always being a promenade one, and not like a German commerz," where the students are riveted, as it were, to their benches, tables, and schoppen.

The Swedish bread-as indispensable for a sexa as the brandy differs materially from bread in England and on the Continent. "Cosmopolitan" bread is little used with us, being regarded as more appropriate for babies and very old people than for persons of vigorous health, and to the "national" one it will never become a dangerous rival. Fancy the dough baked out in a circular plate of about twelve inches in diameter, and completely flat, with numerous parallel lines on the upper side and a hole in the centre, and you have our Swedish bread before you. Being quite hard, it is easy to break, but you cannot bend it, and in broken pieces it is put into the basket.

"Help yourself" is here the rule. No doubt some attention is paid to the professors knives and forks are put into their hands, for instance ; no doubt all present behave as gentlemen; but there is an American liberty of action about the whole which contrasts strikingly with the manners at a London dinner.j

The sexa lasted about two hours, and no one needed to quit it hungry, as we returned "home" again for the "zwyck." The dancing hall in the nation's house, already spoken of, now presents itself in the shape of a beer saloon, of special splendour. In the middle is a long table, and a couple of small ones in the corners; besides these nothing but a pianoforte, and benches along the walls. The other apartments-drawing-room, library and reading-room, &c.-preserve their usual fittings. On the side-tables are soda and seltzer, and on the large one numbers of small glasses and two or three big bowls, with pitchers for filling the bowls when empty. All these vessels are brimming with "Swedish punch," which constitutes the only stimulating liquor during the rest of the night. This exclusively national drink assuredly owes its great popularity in my Fatherland to its Swedish origin. Among foreigners its repute, however, is not yet solid, and many will probably still say of it, as did a distingushed American scholar: "The Swedish punch has a celestial taste, but there is something of the devil about it." Even a German, albeit accustomed to exhaust twenty or thirty schoppen a night, pays respect to the Swedish punch; it will cause him, he says, "feeble knees" and "Kater" or "graues Elend; but my countrymen, well knowing the "devil" in the punch, take care to elude the charming tempter. ing stepped into the hall we are addressed by the "curator" in a toast, inviting us to be welcome and enjoy life, and are then left to ourselves in all the liberties of the sexa, including power to smoke. Hence forth speeches, student-songs, and performances on the piano alternate. Later on the large table is moved away, and the wardrobe of the theatre is searched for robes, petticoats, bonnets, shawls, muffs, hats, dress-coats, &c., &c. ; for Terpsichore once more deigns to call us, and some of the company prepare to greet her.

Hav

Immediately before her appearance I quitted the nation for my room, not one in a "duly licensed lodging," but one of my own choosing, and with no fear of being reported for late hours. Others had done the same already; among them probably all honorary members, the scholar from Oxford without question. Our absence or presence, however, in no way alters the general character of such a meeting as that of which I have sketched the outline. The students, having no reason to avoid the professors, like to meet them, while the latter know pretty well that the students, though they occasionally show themselves as jolly companions, on the whole live a life more laborious, earnest, and moral than the greater part of other youths of their own class and age. Of those who greeted the Muses some saluted Phoebus also, and in his presence gratified themselves with a so-called "night sexa." This meal, when indulged in, is of course a frugal one, consisting merely of "what the house can afford to offer" out of the national pantry. So far for my initiation to Alma Mater.

As regards the general student festival when I quitted the university in 1874, my account may be condensed into a few lines. This festivity deals with the celebration of the arrival of spring, and is carried on by the "student corps" at large, in accordance with ancient rules. On the evening of

the 30th of April all the students, led by the standard of the corps and the "national" colours, and marching to the airs of the Singers' Chorus, proceed from the market-place to the Royal Castle,c lose by the city, in order to hail the coming of spring. A few lingering snow-flakes will occasionally protest against the festival, whilst blazing bonfires and fireworks from the great restaurant outside Upsala, form a poor substitute for the absent sun, in glory of which "the white-capped" sing "How beautiful the May sun shines.' Having performed the customary proceedings, they set out for their respective nations, for the purpose of finishing by sexa and zwyck the work begun. The festivities are continued through May-day, the nations with their colours mutually greeting each other with songs and addresses. On the occasion in question, these merry customs protracted themselves into an extempore May carnival, characterized by scenes and figures of great extravagance travagance on foot, on horseback, and in coaches.

Closing here my sketch of Upsala University in general, and the student life in particular, I would add but these words:-If there be one feature peculiarly characteristic of an Upsala student, it is his love of singing, in the practice of which he is, perhaps, not unworthy of being a countryman of Jenny Lind and Christine Nilsson.

K. M. THORDEN.

THE beginning of this century witnessed the gradual extinction of a great social power. It has died out, and its place knows it no more.

I

La Grande Dame s'en va, wrote a French author about the year 1830; le milieu respirable pour elle n'existant plus; elle n'a pas faire école. He was right; la Grande Dame is extinct. And not only in France, but in English society almost simultaneously she disappeared. Whether from the same cause that the elements necessary to her existence are wanting here also or whether, according to the inflexible laws of supply and demand, she ceased to exist when the restlessness of modern life no longer required her calm, obstructive influence, I leave to wiser heads to determine. Enough to note the fact that she has departed, and left no successors. trust that I shall not be misunderstood to imply that our society has not still, notwithstanding the debasing influences of slang and fastness, numerous specimens of the high-bred lady "of the best class, and better than her class," who has ever been the boast of our aristocracy, and remains to bear her own witness to her own days. Those who are now gone, but in my youth were still living and retained in their manners the traditions of the old school, were so numerous and well known that to name some would be invidious, to omit none impossible, without trenching on the sacredness of private life. Still, there was one whom I may be forgiven for naming, because her political existence and rôle have marked her place in the history of her times; one who will ever be to me the type of the perfect lady, everywhere recognised, whatever her outward symbols, by that inward grace of good breeding, which in Horace

Walpole's famous words is good feeling. Who that ever knew her does not remember the graceful hostess, whose house the most insignificant never left without feeling he had received an individual welcome, while the familiar word or jest distinguished the friend or habitué? She who had for all the kind word, the happy phrase, yet whose gentle dignity kept aloof any risk of the forwardness which might have been feared in a society as mixed as that which the interests of the Liberal party obliged her to receive. She who to her latest day reigned over society by her exquisite tact even more than by her position; and gained all hearts by that irresistible charm which sprang from the well of kindness in her own. But the exigencies of the society in which she played so prominent a part had effaced in her the traditions of her youthful days. Between the type she represented and that of the Grande Dame de l'Ancien Régime there is a great gulf fixed by national habits and character. Lady Palmerston, under fostering circumstances, might live again; but the Grande Dame was an anomaly: she is gone for ever.

To attempt to trace out this dissimilarity and its causes would require an abler pen than mine, a profound knowledge of the social history of the past century in both countries, and, above all, the risk of entering on a subject treated by master minds of the past generation, and in this by De Tocqueville, Prévost Paradol, Henri Taine, and many other celebrated writers. I wish carefully to avoid any national comparisons, and simply try to fix the recollections of my earliest youth, passed entirely in Paris in close intimacy with many of the families representing the greatest names in

French history. Thus I became better acquainted with their domestic life, with the tone of their very restricted intimate circle, than was perhaps the case with any English in the days succeeding the Restoration, when the soreness of recent defeat had just succeeded the privations of the Continental Blocus, and the name of England was with few exceptions odious to all French ears. It happened in our case that amongst the noble émigrés returned from England my parents had some personal friends, and a family connection in the Faubourg St. Germain, and thus saw them in their own homes, a favour seldom accorded to strangers. We children continued playmates of our still older friends, the children of the Orleans family, which gave us a foot in both camps - for opposite camps they were. The Duc d'Orleans-tolerated from his position as premier Prince du sang, and until the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux, heir to the Crown-was looked upon with distrust by the Court and the noble Faubourg as the son of Egalité, the pupil of Madame de Genlis, the Swiss schoolmaster, the American democratic wanderer, the bold advocate of the political offender. The well-known ambition and influence of his sister, Madame Adelaide, added to this unjust distrust, which not even respect for his angelic wife could conquer. A king's daughter, a Bourbon, aunt of the young Duchesse de Berri, who was tenderly attached to her, such claims as these could not be wholly ignored by the Court and its followers; but the gloomy Duchesse d'Angoulême, who had never forgiven the murder of her parents, naturally kept aloof from the Duc d'Orleans, and only the necessary intercourse took place between the Court and the Palais Royal. The liberal education which Louis Philippe gave his sons, sending them to walk daily, satchel on back, to the College de France, to pursue their studies in common with boys of all classes, went counter to all their ideas. The brilliant society of the Palais Royal and

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Neuilly, where everything distinguished in arts, literature, and even finance, was entertained with the most princely hospitality, was, by its very contrast, equally distasteful to the gloomy, ascetic Court. The Duchesse d'Orleans, adored by all who approached her, lived but for her husband and her beautiful young family, in whom her somewhat southern piety counteracted the liberal tendencies of their education. She cultivated in them religious feelings. She ani

mated them with enthusiastic loyalty to the throne. I remember hearing that when the guns were firing for the birth of the first child of the Duchesse de Berri, the young Duc de Chartres, then between eight and nine years old, sat intently listening for the eventful twenty-first gun (which indicated the birth of a prince), saying, Silence! j'écoute si c'est mon roi, ou;ma femme, unconscious of anxiety for the throne which hung on the balance. Such was the state of parties in 1823, when I first recollect the families of whom I shall now speak.

It is very remarkable how little, although only separated by that narrow Channel passed daily by thousands, how imperfectly we know good French society. We have our preconceived notions, our judgments formed on the writings of a certain class of French novelists, who because they write about comtesses and duchesses, we fancy must know them.1 We in England may safely trust to the novels of the late Lord Lytton, Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Whyte Melville, George Elliot, Mrs. Oliphant, Thackeray, Lady G. Fullerton, and a few others, to give a foreigner a sufficiently accurate idea of life on the higher rungs of the ladder to which they mostly belong. But it is not SO in the France of modern days, where writers do not belong to the upper classes, or do not write novels. Some memoirs written

1 Sce this well stated in "French Novels and French Life," by H. de Lagardie; Macmillan for March, 1877.

by themselves, but printed for private circulation only, could alone give an idea of a class to which in our appreciation of their home life and domestic virtues 1 fear we do but scant justice. I, who have seen them in the bosom of their families, who have received from these, the last of their social type, constant kindness, and cordial reception should indeed feel proud and happy, could my simple but faithful witness serve to dispel one erroneous impression, or conquer one unjust prejudice against those I early learnt to love and respect.

There were other reasons besides the natural distaste for the English to account for so few of them having been admitted into the intimacy of French families. All foreigners, accueillant as they are to strangers in society, are far more chary than we are of admitting them into domestic life, partly because, owing to the spoliations of the Revolution, and the new laws of division of property, many of the great families were poor, partly that "hugger mugger" is the only term to express the life of a French family, even many of the greatest, in those days when it was the custom for all the different ménages composing it to live under one roof. These ancestral houses, Hôtels as they were called, were mostly situated in the Faubourg St. Germain, where some of them are still to be seen spared by the Revolution-although more have perished in the suicidal fires of the Commune. Some streets, as the Rue de Lille, Rue de l'Université, Rue St. Dominique, were entirely composed of these lordly elevations, with their grand old trees towering over the high wall which separated them from the quiet street they overshadowed, to which no shops brought traffic or noise. It was difficult to realise that this was the bustling Paris whose deafening roar and whirl of excitement you had left on the Boulevard but a few minutes before. In this wall the entrance gate, called the Porte Cochère, so gigantic that you wondered how

That

easily the porter swung it on its circular hinges, admitted carriages; the foot-passengers entering by a small door cut in the large one, as in some of our own old houses. These hotels were immense; none of our largest houses in London, except Burlington House before its alteration, give an idea of them. You drove into a large court, round which the house was built, a peristyle in the centre. The garden front on the ground and first floors was devoted to the heads of families and to reception; the second floor, and the two sides of the court, were divided into innumerable apartments with entresols; these although low-pitched, were roomy, and in the clear sky and light air of Paris had none of the stuffy darkness which would be their lot in London. they are pleasant abodes enough any one who has enjoyed the entresol apartment at the Hotel Bristol will testify. In these were lodged the younger branches of the family, the tutor, M. l'Abbé, the secrétaire, and the hangers-on their legion. As the sons and daughters grew up and married, each young couple took an apartment in the caravanserai of one or other paternal abode. There could not be a separate kitchen to each, therefore from mingled motives of economy and a wish to keep a due watch and hold over the young couple, all had their meals in common in the apartment of the head of the house, excepting the morning café, which was taken by each person when and where they liked. There is still in some French houses of my acquaintance a sort of buttery, where, between the hours of eight and nine, an unrestricted supply of coffee, milk, and bread in the rough, but excellent in its kind, can be had; served on white marble slabs, cleaner and less expensive than tablecloths. This arrangement saves time, as each servant comes at the hour most convenient.

name was

Between eleven and twelve came the déjeuner, which we should call luncheon. Often have I assisted with my young companions at these repasts,