hear you are about to retire into the country." "Sire," rejoined Talleyrand, "I have no such intention, unless your majesty should think of going to Fontainbleau, for in that case I shall of course solicit permission to accompany you, in discharge of the duties of my office." "No, no," said the king, "I do not exactly mean that-but-in short, let us change the subject." There the matter rested for a few days, but when Louis XVIII. again saw Talleyrand, he repeated his question, to which he received the same answer as before. A third time his Majesty returned to the charge, by asking his grand chamberlain if he was acquainted with the distance from Paris to Valençay-a place to which Talleyrand had once before retired when under a cloud. "Not exactly, sire," replied the practised tactician, "but I believe it to be about twice as far as from Paris to Ghent."

In 1814, at the period of the conferences with the Emperor of Russia, M. Alexis de G**** addressed a number of questions to Talleyrand, on the course which government was likely to adopt. "Well, Prince," at last said the querist, who squinted so horribly that his eyes seemed turned almost inside out, "how go state affairs?"-" Comme vous voyez," replied Talleyrand. The reader will perceive that the point is untranslatable.

On another occasion, the prince was greatly blamed for having been amongst the first to desert the cause of Napoleon. "Bah!" exclaimed Talleyrand, "the fact is simply that my watch went rather too fast; for every body else did the same thing just in the nick of time."

"Some very important discussion must have taken place to-day in the cabinet council,” observed a friend to Talleyrand, "for the sitting lasted full five hours. What can have passed?"-"Five hours," said Talleyrand. An emigrant once spoke to the prince in the most contemptuous terms of the empire, and concluded by asserting, that the regime of the restoration could alone administer effectually to the wants of the country. "Very true," said Talleyrand; "under the empire we proceeded but slowly: we merely achieved wonders, whereas now we work miracles."

A courtier, with sundry bows and scrapes, and "many-wreathed smiles," once accosted Talleyrand with, "Your excellency has deigned to promise me your protection; accordingly I take the liberty of reminding your excellency that such a place is vacant" (designating a particular office.) "Vacant!" exclaimed Talleyrand, with an emphasis on the word, which he repeated: "my good friend, you have yet to learn that when a place is vacant, it is already given away."

When the second restoration took place, a certain pompous personage applied to Talleyrand for a diplomatic post. "What may be your claim?" demanded Talleyrand. "Your excellency," said the applicant with much importance, "must know that I have been at Ghent." "At Ghent? are you certain of the fact?" "Quite positive," replied the courtier, with a feeling of indignation that the truth

of his assertion should for a moment have been called in question. "Now," said Talleyrand, "tell me candidly if you have really been at Ghent, or if you have merely returned from it?" "I do not understand your excellency," replied the suitor in unspeakable amazement. Talleyrand proceeded to explain. "The truth is," said he, "that at Ghent there were seven or eight hundred royalists; not one more; and yet not less than fifty thousand have already returned from that city!" He seems to have been a wholesale dealer in facetiæ.

During the last illness of Louis XVIII., Talleyrand, speaking of certain projected government measures, observed, "His majesty must now open his eyes, or close them for ever."

When he took the oath of allegiance to Louis Philippe, he said, "Thank God, this is the thirteenth I have taken."

Under the Vilele administration, M. Ferraud was in the habit of appearing in the chamber of peers, supported by a couple of lackeys. "There goes an exact personification of the government," cried Talleyrand," carried like a child, and fancying itself walking."

When Prince Polignac was placed at the head of the administration, he was reported to have said that under his auspices and those of his colleagues, France would be saved. 'Why not?" said Talleyrand, "a flock of geese saved the capitol."

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One day at the Tuilleries, where Talleyrand was in attendance as grand chamberlain, he remained for a considerable time in silent contemplation of the minister of Baden, who was remarkable for a spare habit of body. At length he broke silence. "His excellency," observed Talleyrand, "always puzzles me prodigiously. I never can tell to a certainty whether he walks on three legs or wears three swords."

We have thus ventured to give a few of the miscellaneous bon mots of this extraordinary character. They want the support of that inappreciable phlegm which would render even an indifferent pleasantry irresistible; but in spite of this disadvantage we trust they will not derogate from Talleyrand's European reputation as a wit of the first water. Such of our readers as have seen the veteran diplomatist must call fancy to their aid; they must conjure up before their "mind's eye" a countenance to which no description of ours could render adequate justice, and they will thus more fully appreciate the good things here set before them, without much scrupulous attention to the mode of their arrangement or the order of their presentation.

To abler pens we leave the task of dwelling on a political career which exhibits the constant struggle of a man of genius with the grandest epochs of the French history. To Talleyrand belongs the triumph-and to him at least it has proved no empty vain-glorious boast that whether he stemmed the torrent or swam with the stream, he still rose proudly above the waves which engulfed so many of his contemporaries. Monarchs have been made and unmade; dynasties have flourished and faded; nations, and empires have risen and fallen; but the architect who had so prominent a share in rearing the political Babel, survived its wreck.

PHENOMENA OF DEATH.

FROM THE ESSAYS OF SIR HENRY HALFORD, M.D., G. C. B.

Whatever be the causes of dissolution, whether sudden violence, or lingering malady, the immediate modes by which death is brought about appear to be but two. In the one, the nervous system is primarily attacked, and there is a sinking, sometimes an instantaneous extinction, of the powers of life; in the other, dissolution is effected by the circulation of the black venous blood in the arteries of the body instead of the red arterial blood. The former is termed death by syncope, or fainting, the latter, death by asphyxia. In the last mentioned manner of death, when it is the result of disease, the struggle is long protracted, and accompanied by all the visible marks of agony which the imagination associates with the closing scene of life,-the pinched and pallid features, the cold, clammy skin, the up-turned eye, and the heaving, laborious, rattling respiration. Death does not strike all the organs of the body at the same time; some may be said to survive others; and the lungs are among the last to give up the performance of their function and die. As death approaches, they become gradually more and more oppressed; the air-cells are loaded with an increased quantity of the fluid, which naturally lubricates their surfaces; the atmosphere can now no longer come into contact with the minute blood-vessels spread over the air-cells, without first permeating this viscid fluid, -hence the rattle; nor is the contact sufficiently perfect to change the black venous into the red arterial blood; an unprepared fluid consequently issues from the lungs into the heart, and is thence transmitted to every other organ of the body. The brain receives it, its energies appear to be lulled thereby into sleep-generally tranquil sleep-filled with dreams which impel the dying lip to murmur out the names of friends and the occupations and recollections of past life; the peasant "babbles o' green fields," and Napoleon expires amid visions of battle, uttering with his last breath "tête d'armée."

The contrast between the state of the body and that of the mind is often very striking: the struggles of the former are no measure of the emotion of the latter. Indeed, the laborious and convulsive heavings of the chest are wholly automatic, independent of the will,-a part of the mechanism of the body, contrived for its safety, which continues to act when the mind is unconscious of the sufferings of the frame, or is occupied by soothing illusions. No one has described this better than Abernethy.

“Delirium often takes place in consequence of an accident of no very momentous kind,-it may occur without fever, or it may be accompanied with that irritative sympathetic action which is often the 'last stage of all, that closes the sad eventful history' of a compound fracture. Delirium seems to be a very curious affection; in this state a man is

quite unconscious of his disease; he will give rational answers to any questions you put to him, when you rouse him, but he relapses into a state of wandering, and his actions correspond with his dreaming. I remember a man with compound fracture in this hospital, whose leg was in a horrible state of sloughing. I have roused him, and said, "Thomas, what is the matter with you? how do you do?" He would reply, "Pretty hearty, thank ye; nothing is the matter with me: how do you do?" He would then go on dreaming of one thing or another; I have listened at his bed-side, and I am sure his dreams were often of a pleasant kind. He met old acquaintances in his dreams,-people whom he remembered lang syne, his former companions, his kindred and relations, and he expressed his delight at seeing them. He would exclaim every now and then,-"That's a good one; well, I never heard a better joke," and so on. It is a curious circumstance that all consciousness of suffering is thus cut off, as it were, from the body, and it cannot but be regarded as a very benevolent effect of nature's operations that extremity of suffering should thus bring with it its antidote."

Occasionally the last dreams of existence are of a more painful nature;-guilt is delirious with dread, remorse peoples the fancy with terrific visions-but even these are chequered with scenes of a tranquil, not to say trivial character. The death-bed of Cardinal Beaufort, terribly true, is rare; the mixed feelings and shadowings of past life, exhibited in that of Falstaff, are much more frequent.

The second mode of dissolution is marked by the absence of all corporeal struggle. The mind is left free and unclouded, to the very verge of the grave, save by the influence which the particular malady itself exercises on the current of ideas and feelings. The sufferings of the patient are incidental to the progress of the disease; but the "end of all" is placid, painless, and generally sudden. Death, in these cases, attacks the sentient principle, through the nervous system, as it were, directly. It surprises the sufferer sometimes when sighing for the consummation of life, but believing the term yet distant; sometimes in the midst of plans and schemes which are destined never to be realized. In consumption, and, in general, in diseases which are slow in their progress, this sudden termination of life is as common as that more protracted form, already noticed. It is best exemplified by a death produced by lightning, in which the visible alterations in the frame afford a striking contrast to the ordinary ravages of what is termed disease. The machinery of the body appears nearly perfect, and unscathed, and yet in none of the multitudinous forms of death is the living principle so summarily annihilated. Certain poisons appear to act in a similar manner; and, occasionally, the more important operations of surgery are followed by the like result; for which the genius of John Hunter could find no better explanation than the figurative hypothesis, that VOL. II.—MARCH, 1849.

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the vis medicatrix, conscious that the injury is irreparable, gives up the contest in despair.

Severe injuries inflicted on the great centres of the nervous system, the brain, spine, and stomach, are followed by instantaneous death; of which, pithing or wounding the uppermost part of the spinal-marrow of the bull, in the arena, and the coup de grace, or blow on the stomach of the criminal, whose limbs have been previously broken on the wheel, are well-known examples. Emotions of the mind, especially such as, by their depressing character, exhaust the energies of life, often terminate in this mode of death. The slightest causes, a mere fainting fit, trivial in every other state of the frame, in this may be fatal. It is the euthanasia of a healthy old age, and the termination assigned by nature to a life in which the passions have been controlled, and the energies regulated by the authority of reason and a sense of duty.

Whether we look at the one mode of dissolution or the other, the sting of death is certainly not contained in the physical act of dying. Sir Henry Halford, after forty years' experience, says—

"Of the great number to whom it has been my painful professional duty to have administered in the last hours of their lives, I have sometimes felt surprised that so few have appeared reluctant to to the go undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.' Many, we may easily suppose, have manifested this willingness to die, from an impatience of suffering, or from that passive indifference which is sometimes the result of debility and extreme bodily exhaustion. But I have seen those who have arrived at a fearless contemplation of the future from faith in the doctrine which our religion teaches. Such men were not only calm and supported, but even cheerful in the hour of death; and I never quitted such a sick chamber without a wish that 'my last end might be like theirs.'

"Some, indeed, have clung to life anxiously-painfully; but they were not influenced so much by a love of life for its own sake, as by the distressing prospect of leaving children, dependent upon them, to the mercy of the world, deprived of their parental care, in the pathetic language of Andromache

Νυν δ' αν' πολλα παθησι, φίλου από Πατρός αμαρτών. These, indeed, have sometimes wrung my heart.

"And here you will forgive me, perhaps, if I presume to state what appears to me to be the conduct proper to be observed by a physician in withholding, or making his patient acquainted with, his opinion of the probable issue of a malady manifesting mortal symptoms. I own I think it my first duty to protract his life by all practicable means, and to interpose myself between him and every thing which may possibly aggravate his danger. And unless I shall have found him averse from doing what was necessary in aid of my remedies, from a want of