measure of faith and love granted them, more | present and for the future, this troubles me or less share." Maurice returned to Le Cayla in the summer of 1837, and passed six months there. This meeting entirely restored the union between him and his family. "These six months with us," writes his sister," he ill, and finding himself so loved by us all, had entirely re-attached him to us. Five his own. years without more than I can say. My sympathies, my towards any other member of our family. I inclinations, carry me more towards you than have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of anything else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life a great affection is a great happiness; the spirit comes to take refuge in never be your sister's portion! Only in the it entirely. O delight and joy which will direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, as it has the power of loving." seldom seeing us had perhaps made him a little lose sight of our affection for him; having found it again, he met it with all the strength of He had so firmly renewed, before he left us, all family ties, that nothing but death could have broken them." The separation in religious matters between the brother From such complainings, in which there is and sister gradually diminished, and before undoubtedly something morbid,—complainMaurice died it had ceased. I have elsewhere ings which she herself blamed, to which she spoken of Maurice's religious feeling and its gave way, but which, in presenting character. It is probable that his divergence her character, it is not just to put wholly out from his sister in this sphere of religion was of sight, she was called by the news of an never so wide as she feared, and that his realarming return of her brother's illness. For union with her was never so complete as she some days the entries in her journal show her hoped. “He coughs, he "His errors were passed," she says, agony of apprehension. "his illusions were cleared away; by the coughs still! Those words keep echoing forcall of his nature, by original disposition, he ever in my ears, and pursue me wherever I had come back to sentiments of order. Igo; I cannot look at the leaves on the trees knew all, I followed each of his steps; out without thinking that the winter will come, of the fiery sphere of the passions (which held and that then the consumptive die." Then him but a little moment) I saw him pass into she went to him and brought him back by the sphere of the Christian life. It was a slow stages to Le Cayla, dying. He died on beautiful soul, the soul of Maurice." But the 19th of July, 1839. the illness which had caused his return to Le Cayla reappeared after he got back to Paris in the winter of 1837-8. Again he seemed to recover; and his marriage with a young Creole lady, Mdlle. Caroline de Gervain, took place in the autumn of 1838. At the end of September in that year, Mdlle. de Guérin had joined her brother in Paris; she was present at his marriage, and stayed with him and his wife for some months afterwards. Her journal recommences in April, 1839; zealously as she had promoted her brother's marriage, cordial as were her relations with her sister-in-law, it is evident that a sense of loss, of loneliness, invades her, and sometimes weighs her down. She writes in her journal on the 4th of May : Thenceforward the energy of life ebbed in her; but the main chords of her being, the chord of affection, the chord of religious longing, the chord of intelligence, the chord of sorrow, gave, so long as they answered to the touch at all, a deeper and finer sound than ever. Always she saw before her "that be"that beautiful head, loved pale face; with all its different expressions, smiling, speaking, suffering, dying," regarded her always:— "I have seen his coffin in the same room, in the same spot where I remember seeing, when I was a very little girl, his cradle, when I was brought home from Gaillac, where I was then staying, for his christening. This christening was a grand one, full of rejoicing, more than that of any of the rest of us; spe"God knows when we shall see one another cially marked. I enjoyed myself greatly, and again! My own Maurice, must it be our lot went back to Gaillac next day, charmed with to live apart, to find that this marriage, which my new little brother. Two years afterwards I had so much share in bringing about, which I came home, and brought with me for him I hoped would keep us so much together, a frock of my own making. I dressed him leaves us more asunder than ever? For the in the frock, and took him out with me along The shortness and suffering of her brother's life filled her with an agony of pity. "Poor beloved soul, you have had hardly any happiness here below; your life has been so short, your repose so rare. O God, uphold me, stablish my heart in thy faith! Alas, I have too little of this supporting me! How, we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him-his wife, and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! Then we followed him to the churchyard, to the grave, to his last resting-place, and prayed over him, and wept over him; and we are here again, and I am writing to him again, as if he were staying away from home, as if he were in Paris. My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see one another again on earth?" But in heaven?-and here, though love and hope finally prevailed, the very passion of the sister's longing sometimes inspired torturing inquietudes : "I am broken down with misery. I want to see him. Every moment I pray to God to grant me this grace. Heaven, the world of spirits, is it so far from us? Oh, depth, oh, mystery of the other life which separates us ! I, who was so eagerly anxious about him, who wanted so to know all that happened to him, -wherever he may be now, it is over! I follow him into the three abodes, I stop wistfully in the place of bliss, I pass on to the place of suffering to the gulf of fire. My God, my God, no! Not there let my brother be! not there! And he is not: his soul, the soul of Maurice, among the lost horrible fear, no! But in purgatory, where the soul is cleansed by suffering, where the failings of the heart are expiated, the doubtings of the spirit, the half-yieldings to evil? Perhaps my brother is there and suffers, and calls to us amidst his anguish of repentance, as he used to call to us amidst his bodily suffering! Help me, you who love me.' Yes beloved one, by prayer. I will go and pray; prayer has been such a power to me, and I will pray to the end. Prayer! Oh! and prayer for the dead! it is the dew of purgatory.' Often, alas, the gracious dew would not fall the air of her soul was parched: the arid wind, which was somewhere in the "I am dying to everything. I am dying of a slow moral agony, a condition of unutterable suffering. Lie there, my poor journal! be forgotten with all this world which is fading away from me. I will write here no more until I come to life again, until God reawakens me out of this tomb in which my soul lies buried. Maurice, my beloved! it was not thus with me when I had you! The thought of Maurice could revive me from the world was enough for me. most profound depression: to have him in the With Maurice, to be buried alive would have not seemed dull to me." And, as a burden to this funereal strain, the old vide et néant of Bossuet, profound, solemn, sterile : "So beautiful in the morning, and in the evening, that! how the thought disenchants one, and turns one from the world! I can understand that Spanish grandee, who, after lifting up the winding-sheet of a beautiful queen, threw himself into a cloister and became a great saint. I would have all my friends at La Trappe, in the interest of their eternal welfare. Not that in the world one cannot be saved, not that there are not in the world duties to be discharged as sacred and as beautiful as there are in the cloisters, but. . . .” And there she stops, and a day or two afterwards her journal comes to an end. A few fragments, a few letters carry us on a little later, but after the 22d of August, 1845, there is nothing. To make known her brother's genius to the world was the one task she set herself after his death; in 1840 came Madame Sand's noble trbute to him in the Revue des deux Mondes; then followed projects of raising a yet more enduring monument to his fame, by collecting and publishing his scattered compositions: these projects, I have already said were baffled; Malle. de Guérin's letter of the 22d of August, 1845, relates to this disappointment. In silence, during nearly three years more, she faded away at Le Cayla. She died on the 31st of May, 1848. M. Trébutien has accomplished the pious This quality at last inexorably corrects the task in which Mdlle. de Guérin was baffled, world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals. and has established Maurice's fame; by pub- It procures that the popular poet shall not lishing this journal he has established Eu- finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular hisgénie's also, she was very different from her torian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher brother; but she too, like him, had that in for a Bossuet. To the circle of spirits her which preserves a reputation. Her soul marked by this rare quality, Maurice and has the same characteristic quality as his Eugénie de Guérin belong; they will take talent, distinction. Of this quality the their place in the sky which these inhabit, world is impatient; it chafes against it, rails and shine close to one another, lucida cidera. at it, insults it, hates it; it ends by receiving MATTHEW ARNOLD. its influence, and by undergoing its law. I Down to posterity famous shall go : Cries Roderick vich Murchison, ho, ieroe! -Punch. THE SOURCE OF THE NILE.-To the Editor of The Times.-Sir: The lustre of Captain Speke's brilliant achievement in settling once and forever the fact that the Lake Victoria Nyanza is the source of the Nile will not, I am sure, be impaired by the disclosure of the strange fact to which I wish by your permission to direct the attention of geographers,-the fact, namely, that this great lake is correctly laid down in an Atlas, published 116 years ago, by the name of the Lake Zambre, extending from the 4th to the 11th degree of S. latitude, and being about 400 miles by 60 in breadth, while the accompanying letter press in a very curious detailed account of the district distinctly states the fact that it is the source of the Nile and of two other great rivers. The work in question is The Complete System of Geography, by Emanuel Bowen, geographer to his majesty, published in two vols., folio, in 1747. The Lake Zambre (alias Victoria Nyanza) will be found in the two maps inserted at pages 384 and 480, and this remarkable paragraph at page 482 under the head of " Congo proper "This kingdom is watered by several rivers, the most considerable of which is the Zaire abovementioned, otherwise called the great river of Congo, which Dapper says springs from three lakes. The first is called Zambre, out of which the Nile issues; the second Zaire, which forms the rivers Lelunde and Coanze, and the third is a lake made by the Nile; but the chief of all is the Zambre, which is as it were the centre from which proceed all the rivers in this part of Af rica." From The Spectator. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. is 1,760 yards; the Scotch mile is one English mile and two hundred and seventeen yards;, and the Irish mile is one English mile and four hundred and eighty yards. As to the smaller standards of weight and length used in trade and commerce, they are almost endlessly diversified. A grocer subdivides his pounds by sixteen; a goldsmith by twelve, twenty, and twenty-four; and an apothecary by twelve, eight, three, and twenty. Again, a firkin of butter is fifty-six pounds, and a firkin of soap sixty-four pounds; while a barrel of soap is two hundred and fifty six pounds, but a barrel of gunpowder only one hundred and twelve pounds. A sack of flour is twenty stone, and a sack of coal fourteen stone, or two hundred and twenty-four pounds. But the little matter as to what the term "stone" means is not at all settled, for a stone of butcher's meat or fish is eight pounds, a stone of cheese sixteen pounds, a stone of glass five pounds, and a stone of hemp thirty-two pounds. In sum total, there seem to be almost as many different weights and measures in this country as there are towns and villages and articles of commerce. It is the quintessence of individualism and self-government-enough, probably, to satisfy even Lord Stanley. THERE is nothing more illustrative of the growth of the social life of England than the system of weights and measures now in use. It is a huge tree, which has developed itself in the open air, under sunshine, wind, and rain, untouched by the scissors of art, and unbiassed by scientific culture. Nearly all the sovereigns and parliaments of Great Britain, from the Conquest to the present time, have tried to regulate and adjust this multiform produce of ages; but it ever escaped their grasp, rewarding all attempts to create uniformity by shooting up in more luxurious disorder. It was enacted in Magna Charta that," there shall be through our realm one weight and one measure," and the injunction was repeated by royal and legislative edicts innumerable, with the only ultimate effect that there are now at least a hundred different weights and measures. Every county, nay, every town and village in England, is happy in its particular standards of weight, capacity, and length. Slight difference in the latitude and longitude of a place will decide whether the measure called a bushel shall consist of one hundred and sixtyeight pounds, or seventy-three pounds, or eighty pounds, or seventy pounds, or sixty- The history of the efforts made by succesthree pounds, or only sixty pounds. The sive governments, for the last six hundred most universal article of consumption, wheat, years and more, to bring order and uniformis sold by the bushel of eight gallons at Salt-ity into this state of things is as curious as ash, in Cornwall, and of twenty stones at amusing. In the long struggle of central Dundalk, in Leinster; it is sold, in towns authorities with the spirit of individualism, near to each other, by the load of five quar- the latter invariably ended by getting the ters, by the load of five bushels, and by the upper hand, and not only defeated the obload of three bushels; by the load of four jects of the former, but turned them in the hundred and eighty-eight quarts at Stow- very opposite direction. Scores of parliamarket, in Suffolk, and of one hundred and mentary commissions deliberated on the vexed forty-four quarts at Ulverston, in Lancashire. question of weights and measures, and nearly It is quite doubtful whether a so-called hun- every one finished the business by adding a dredweight shall contain one hundred and few more to the multifarious standards altwenty pounds or one hundred and twelve ready existing, instead of subtracting therepounds. By custom, a hundredweight of from. The standards of measure and weight pork at Belfast is one hundred and twenty adopted by the people were always taken pounds; while at Cork it is one hundred and either from some part of the human body, twelve pounds. The most popular of all such as the foot, the length of the arm, and measurements, the bushel, is fluctuating from the span of the hand, or from some natural five quarters in some places to four hundred objects, such as a barleycorn, or other kind of and eighty-eight pounds in others, the quar- grain. But the early English sovereigns orter itself being an unsettled quantity, vary-dered the adoption of the yard, supposed to ing no less than from sixty pounds to four be founded upon the breadth of the chest of hundred and eighty. Nor is it even settled our burly Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The yard what is meant by a mile. The English mile continued till the reign of Henry VII., when the ell, being a yard and a quarter, or forty- | of learned men who should settle the matter. five inches, was introduced by the trading They appointed five, among them the famous Flemings and the merchants of the Hanse trio Lagrange, Condorcet, and Laplace, and Towns. Subsequently, however, Queen Eliz- their report was laid before the Legislature abeth brought the old English yard back to at the end of a few months. The unit of its post of honor, and had an imperial stan- length upon which they fixed was the tendard yard made of metal, and safely depos-millionth part of the quadrant, or fourth of ited in the Tower. After that, a series of the meridian of the earth, which measure parliamentary commissions began legislating they proposed to call a metre, deducing thereupon the subject, increasing a hundredfold from, upwards and downwards, on the decithe confusion. Every generation saw a new mal system, all other standards of length, standard springing up, based on the ever-weight, and capacity. The scheme was beauchanging size of barleycorns, or human feet tiful in theory, and irreproachable from the and hands, and the ever-changeable state of philosophical point of view; and though it human minds. Finally, by an Act passed in was well known that its practical execution 1841, the Legislature annihilated all preced- would be productive of many unwelcome ing legislations, abolished all natural stand- changes and much monetary embarrassment, ards of hands and feet and chest, and recom- the Assembly at once adopted it, postponing, mended reference to certain pieces of metal however, the operation of the law for some "enclosed in a case, hermetically sealed and years. Meanwhile, steps were taken to difembedded within the masonry of some public fuse information on the subject; an immense building, the place to be pointed out by a quantity of tables and books were issued at conspicuous inscription on the outside, and nominal prices for the instruction of the gennot to be disturbed without the sanction of eral public, and everything was done to prean Act of Parliament." But the standard pare the people for the coming change in the pieces, and the masonry, and the conspicuous traffic of every-day life. A request had been inscription were never made; new parlia- previously sent to the English Government to mentary commissions took up the work of the co-operate in the great work, so as to bring old ones, changing it entirely; and so the about an international uniformity of weights thing has gone on till the present moment, and measures; but the invitation was dethe last "select committee appointed to con- clined with thanks on this side of the Chansider the practicability of adopting a simple nel. The French people themselves did not and uniform system of weights and meas- seem to admire the metric system at all in ures having been nominated as recently as the commencement, and it took a long time the month of May, 1862. The labors of this before it found favor, particularly with the youngest-born of select committees have been, lower classes. The law came into force on of course, severe; and the evidence gathered the 1st of July, 1794; but so great was the in eighteen sittings was presented to the pub-resistance against it, even at the end of lic in the shape of a tremendous blue-book of eighteen years, that the Emperor Napoleon three hundred pages. It is about the fifteenth found it necessary to agree to a thorough blue-book of the kind issued, and in whatever change of the system at a moment when a else parliamentary commissions may have widely popular measure was required of him. been deficient, the literature of weights and On the 12th of February, 1812, his majesty measures which they have produced certainly issued a decree which virtually superseded weighs and measures something by this time. the law of the Constituent Assembly, and In France, too, the confusion in weights authorized in all retail transactions the use and measures was great before the Revolution, but the Constituent Assembly of 1789 carried through a radical reform, as far as legislation was concerned, in the shortest possible time. The demand for uniformity being universally acknowledged, the Assembly, without further ado, resolved to apply a remedy, and for this purpose requested the Academy of Sciences to nominate a number of the eighth, the sixteenth, and the fourth as divisors, and also the old standard of weights and measures which were still in use throughout France. There were, therefore, now two systems of weights and measures. legally established in France; and the two. were used side by side for a quarter of a century, with the result that the philosophic metric system gradually got the upper hand, |