I never told a lie yet, because I never yet felt fear. The devil, who is the father of lies, must be the father of cowardice also; and directly a son of mine told me a lie, I should know that he was a coward. I never told a lie yet to any one."

"What! never to a woman?" asked Isabelle. Our hero smiled; and, looking up, he perceived the harbour of Calais straight ahead of them. The passage had been quick and easy, and merriment was again visible on all faces. The cordage rattled, the steam was let off, the vessel was hauled to, and Jeannette Isabelle soon found herself once more a denizen of France, and on her road, by the side of Richard Bazancourt, to Fontainebleau.

CHAPTER VIII.

As it is impossible that our heroine should be deposited in better hands than those in which she soon found herself at Fontainebleau, we will just leave her there for the present, in order to revert for a short time to her unprincipled and unamiable husband, who still accompanied by his faithful Griffin and Tartar, continued indefatigably the search after his wife, which had hitherto been prosecuted so unsuccessfully. We are far from citing this individual's affection for his dogs as a reprehensible point in his character; on the contrary, it was a redeeming feature, and almost the only one in a mind stamped with too many vices, and corrupted by too much indulgence. There is something peculiarly English, if we may so say, in the taste.

In reading, the other day, the book of Rush, the American, we remember being struck by the account

he gives of his first call on Lord Castlereagh. In the apartment into which he was shown to await the minister's presence, he found two grim-looking bulldogs, couched comfortably on the rug before the fire; and though Canning's reception, which he afterwards describes, and his complimentary allusion to the rhododendron, as a native of America, is more characteristic of the man, it cannot be denied that the scene at the Tory secretary's fireside was more characteristic of the nation.

We do not mean in hazarding the above remarks, to be mistaken for the patrons of the combat des animaux, nor would we appear, because we are fond of bull-dogs, to stand up like Wyndham as the advocate either of fighting dogs or fighting men.

There is much truth in the satire of Ségur, where he says "pour éviter l'ennui, les Anglais font battre des coqs à mort, et paient très cher les boxeurs, qui se tuent;" and there is still more point in his irony when he says that the English, notwithstanding, are the people who of all others cry out loudest against the cruelty of a Spanish bull-fight, or the barbarous display of a Roman amphitheatre of gladiators. In England there must be cant in every thing; even a dog-fight could not go on without it; but then there

is a kindness in our very cruelty, and a luxury even in our tortures. No dog is petted so tenderly or fed so well as the one which is to be tossed to-morrow on the horns of a bull; no cock is so highly pampered or so proudly arrayed with polished spurs, as the one which is to be lacerated and probably killed in the cock-pit; no bull is so bedecked with ribbands, and ornamented with garlands, as that which is to be chained to a ring, and galled and gored till he bellows with agony. We seem to have taken a hint out of Isaak Walton's book, who, in giving instructions to his pupils how to put a worm upon the hook, tells them "to take him tenderly, as though they loved him."

Lord Clanelly had, as we have said, a great many bad points in his character: we shall not surely be thought too lenient to him in bearing the faint testimony to his praise that he had loved his dogs. It was one of our old friend, Fanny Bazancourt's last good sayings, when some one had ventured to pity Lord Clanelly on account of his solitary wandering life, and his unpopularity in society, and had remarked in the phrase of the poet, that "his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart," that she was sure it could be no other than the dog-star.

Setting Lady Fanny's witticism on one side, we cannot contemplate any one, shewing humanity and affection to the brute creation, and pouring out upon a dumb animal that fund of tender feelings which might haply have been better bestowed elsewhere, had not the heart been soured, and the kindness embittered by some secret reason which we know not of;

-we cannot, I say, contemplate such a person, without feeling for him both a degree of curiosity and of respect of curiosity to know why the human race has been abandoned in his friendships for the society of less ungrateful objects of his benevolence; to know what plighted vows had been broken; what lavished devotion had been unappreciated or unreturned; what unhappy passion had arrested and thus turned aside from its proper channel the gushing floods of his young heart's tenderness; and of respect, because there is still so much of goodness left,-still so much of amiable feeling spared even in the shattered ruin of a broken heart, that some vent is still necessary to give scope to its operation, and to allow room for the ebullitions of natural humanity. Our thoughts revert to the venerable Jeremy Bentham and his pussies, and the superfluous attention which he shewed to the kittens, in having a small hole cut