was his pithy invitation to a celebrated wit and beauty. Won't I? H. D.' was the congenial response.

There is no good likeness of him. The fact is, he would never allow one to be taken. He preferred that by Lawrence, because it was the most flattering. There is one designed and drawn on stone by an amateur artist (Lady Morgan's niece, Mrs. Geale) in 1838, which would have been excellent, had she ventured to give him his actual age at the time. Dantan's caricature bust is hardly a caricature, and for that very reason he held it in horror. One day Moore was indiscreet or malicious enough to say that a fresh stock had been sent over, and that he had seen one in a shop window. It is pleasant news,' said Rogers; and pleasant to be told of it by a friend.'

The accident which deprived him of the power of locomotion was the severest of trials to a man of his active habits and still extraordinary strength; for he delighted in walking, and thought his health depended upon the exercise he took in this way. Not long before, he had boasted of having had a breakfast party at home, then gone to a wedding breakfast, where he returned thanks for the bridesmaids,-then to Chiswick, where he was presented to an imperial highness,-dined out,-gone to the Opera,-looked in at a ball, and walked home,-all within the compass of fourteen hours. "When I first saw him after his 'fall,' writes the lady already quoted, I found him lying on his bed, which was drawn near the bed-room window, that he might look upon the Park. Taking my hand, he kissed it, and I felt a tear drop on it, and that was all the complaint or 'regret that he ever expressed. Never did he allude to it to 'me, nor, I believe, to any one.'

One day, between six and seven, when he was just going to dinner, hearing a knock at the door, he desired his faithful and attached servant, Edmund, to say, not at home.

it?' he inquired. E. Colonel

Who was

sir.' R. And who is • Colonel ? E. The gentleman who upset you, sir, and 'caused your accident.' R.It is an agreeable recollection, did he come to refresh it?' E. Oh, sir, he calls very often to inquire for you.' R. Does he? then if he calls again, don't 'let him in, and don't tell me of it.' The gallant officer was (at worst) the innocent cause of the mishap; for as his brougham was passing at an ordinary pace, Rogers, who was about to cross, suddenly checked himself, lost his balance, and fell with his hip against the kerb-stone.

When some one was speaking of a fine old man before Swift, he exclaimed, in a spirit of melancholy foreboding, There's no snch thing as a fine old man; if either his head or his heart

had been worth anything, they would have worn him out long 'ago. Till near ninety, Rogers was a striking exception to this rule. He then gradually dropped into that state, mental and bodily, which raises a reasonable doubt whether prolonged life be a blessing or a curse

'Omni

Membrorum damno major dementia, quæ nec
Nomina servorum, nec vultus agnoscit amicûm,
Cum queis præteritâ cœnavit nocte, nec illos
Quos genuit, quos eduxit.'

Although his impressions of long past events were as fresh as ever, he forgot the names of his relations and oldest friends whilst they were sitting with him, and told the same stories to the same people two or three times over in the same interview. But there were frequent glimpses of intellect in all its original brightness, of tenderness, of refinement, and of grace. Once 'driving out with him,' says a female correspondent, I asked 'him after a lady whom he could not recollect. He pulled the 'check string, and appealed to his servant. "Do I know *“Lady M——————?” The reply was, "Yes, sir." This was a 'painful moment to us both. Taking my hand, he said, "Never "mind, my dear, I am not yet reduced to stop the carriage "" and ask if I know you.'

666

To another female friend, who was driving out with him shortly after, he said, Whenever you are angry with one you 'love, think that that dear one might die that moment. 'anger will vanish at once.'

Your

During the last four or five years he was constantly expatiating on the advantages of marriage. It was a proud, a blessed privilege,' he would repeat, to be the means, under Providence, of clothing an immortal soul in clay.' He introduced and pursued this theme without respect to persons, and not unfrequently recommended matrimony to married people who would have lent a readier ear to a proposal of separation or divorce. In explanation of the rumours circulated from time to time in his younger days respecting his own attempts to confirm precept by example, he said, that whenever his name had been coupled with that of a single lady, he had thought it his duty to give out that he had been refused.' On his regretting that he had not married, because then he should have had a nice woman to care for him, it was suggested,' How do you know she would not have cared for somebody else?'-an awkward doubt at all times.

His own version of his nearest approximation to the nuptial tie was, that, when a young man, he admired and sedulously

sought the society of the most beautiful girl he then, and still, thought he had ever seen. At the end of the London season, at a ball, she said: 'I go to-morrow to Worthing. Are you coming there?' He did not go. Some months afterwards, being at Ranelagh, he saw the attention of every one drawn towards a large party that had just entered, in the centre of which was a lady on the arm of her husband. Stepping forward to see this wonderful beauty, he found it was his love. She merely said: 'You never came to Worthing.'

In the case of most men over whom the grave had closed so recently, we should have refrained from such minuteness of personal detail, however curious or illustrative. But the veil had been removed from the private life of Rogers long before we approached the sanctuary; and we are not responsible for the profanation, if it be one. His habits, his mode of life, his predilections, his aversions, his caustic sayings, his benevolent actions, have been treated like common property as far back as the living generation can remember. They have been discussed in all circles, and have occasionally appeared (with varying degrees of accuracy) in print. Now that monarchs have left off changing their shirts at crowded levées, we should be puzzled to name any contemporary celebrity who, whether he liked it or not, had been so much or so constantly before the public as Rogers. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him. spoke without reserve to the first comer, and the chance visitor (haply some penciller by the way') was admitted to his intimacy as unwarily as the tried friend. This argued a rare degree of conscious rectitude and honourable self-reliance; and in estimating his character, in balancing the final account of his merits and demerits, too much stress cannot be laid on the searching nature of the ordeal he has undergone. Choose out the wisest, brightest, noblest of mankind, and how many of them could bear to be thus pursued into the little corners of their lives? all their faults observed, set in a note-book, learned and conned by rote?' Most assuredly, if the general scope and tendency of their conduct be no worse, they may, one and all-to borrow the impressive language of Erskine

He

'walk through the shadow of death, with all their faults about them, with as much cheerfulness as in the common 'path of life.' But if great virtues may not atone for small frailties, or kind deeds for unkind words, they must call upon the mountains to cover them, for which of them can present, 'for Omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course?'

ART. V.-1. A Cry from the Desert.

London: 1707.

2. Nouveaux Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire des Trois Camisardes, où l'on voit les Déclarations du Colonel CAVALLIER. London: 1708.

3. Memoirs of the Wars of the Cevennes. By J. CAVALLIER. London: 1726.

4. Histoire des Troubles des Cevennes, ou de la Guerre des Camisars sous Louis le Grand. Par A. COURT. Villefranche: 1760.

5. Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert. Par NAPOLEON PEYRAT. Paris: 1842.

6. The Pastors of the Wilderness. London: 1851.

6

DRIVEN from their native villages,' says Gibbon in describing the fiercest and most fanatical of the African sects of Christianity*, the leaders of the Circumcellions assumed the 'title of captains of the saints; and the well-known sound of "Praise be to God," which they used as their cry of war, 'diffused consternation over the unarmed provinces of Africa. They engaged, and sometimes defeated, the troops of the 'province, and in the bloody action of Bagai, attacked in the 'open field, but with unsuccessful valour, an advanced guard 'of the imperial cavalry. The Donatists, who were taken in 'arms, received, and they soon deserved, the treatment which. 'might have been shown to the wild beasts of the desert. 'The captains died, without a murmur, either by the sword, 'the axe, or the fire; and the measures of retaliation were 'multiplied in a rapid proportion, which aggravated the horrors ' of rebellion, and excluded the hope of mutual forgiveness.. In the beginning of the present century, the example of the 'Circumcellions has been renewed in the persecution, the bold'ness, the crimes, and the enthusiasm of the Camisards; and 'if the fanatics of Languedoc surpassed those of Numidia by 'military achievements, the Africans maintained their fierce 'independence with more resolution and perseverance.'

The allusion contained in the last sentences of this paragraph is, in our own time and country, hardly understood. It relates to one of the most curious episodes of French history. We know of no wilder story than that of the revolt of the Cevennes, and of no stranger career than that of Jean Cavallier, the prin

* Gibbon's Decline and Fall,' cap. xxi.

cipal leader of the insurgents. A baker's apprentice in one year, he treated in the next on equal terms with the greatest marshal in France; and he resigned the characters of a priest, a prophet, and a worker of miracles for a commission in the army of Queen Anne. The circumstances of his life give a certain unity to the wild scenes in which he was the principal actor. Unless they are viewed in some such relation, they leave upon the mind a vague impression of confused bloodshed and horror. The contemporary chronicles (now very scarce) are described by M. Peyrat as a dreary list of murders and executions. His own work, though written with much warmth of imagination and local knowledge, is for a similar reason very hard to remember; and the same is true in a still greater degree of the impartial and accurate history of the famous Protestant Pastor Antoine Court, in reading which, it requires,' says Gibbon, some attention to discover the religion of the ' author.'

Jean Cavallier was born at Ribaute, near Anduze, in Languedoc, in the year 1685. His parents were Protestant peasants, and he was brought up first as a shepherd, afterwards as a baker. When he was but a year old the edict of Nantes was revoked. The new law provided that all Protestants should bring up their children as Catholics, and that, if they failed to do so, the children should be taken from them, and educated in convents. Cavallier's father sent his son, for six years together, to the Catholic parish school; the bishop who officiated at his confirmation, pleased by his intelligence, proposed to enter him at a Jesuit college, in which he might be instructed in the higher branches of education. This scheme was, however, frustrated by his mother, who used in the evening to make him read the Bible, and books of controversy, and sometimes took him to the conventicles, which were held in the Cevennes by the Protestants. Some of these meetings were presided over by the famous Claude Brousson, who was driven from his profession as an advocate at the age of forty, and adopted that of a wandering preacher. After preaching for many years in all parts of France, he was hanged and broken on the wheel at Montpellier, on the 4th of November, 1695. Brousson was a pious and sober-minded person, and it is probable that the meetings at which he officiated were free from extravagance; but other scenes were enacted amongst the Protestants, all mention of which Cavallier avoids, although he had probably participated in them.

Ever since the year 1689, Dauphiny and Languedoc had been infested by an epidemic fanaticism, the manifestations of