became insensible; "I would not harm | tion. Far on into the night she sunk into you, ma belle, I adore you!" and he tried a troubled doze. A slight stir in the room to withdraw the hands that covered her awoke her; but she affected still to sleep, and with half-opened eyes watched with eyes. "Monster! I hate you-do not ap-cat-like vigilance. proach me-away!" 66 Gently; I tell you I love you-love you passionately-but remember, you are in my power, do not provoke me, for I am not patient. And what does not yield, I break." Her utter, utter helplessness came across her stronger than any other feeling, and she wept aloud in passionate despair. "Let me go, for Heaven's sake! for mercy's sake let me go! What can you gain by keeping me here? Only release me, and I swear to make you rich for life." "I may not be so poor as I seem; it is for your own sake I choose to keep you. Look here! this is not a beggar's possession." He took from some secret receptacle, and held before her, a ring, which, even in that dim place, gleamed and flashed like a mirror in the sun. She saw her captor moving quietly about, but rather as if in consideration of her slumber than as though fearing detection. What had he to fear from her? She saw him, after casting a glance towards where she lay, and listening to her respiration, take from the place where he kept it, the fated ring. He hesitated for a moment, as if doubtful where to deposit it, then, with a significant upward toss of the head, that said as plain as toss could say, "While I have her safe, there is no danger for it," he placed it in a little closet in the wall, and taking his hat, left the room, locking the door after him. With every nerve on the stretch, the marquise listened for some minutes; then, reassured by the silence, she sprung with noiseless rapidity from the pallet, and in a moment was at the cupboard-door; she tried it; it yielded to her hand almost without an effort. Again she listened, but the rapid beating of her heart was the only sound that came to her ears. Within the closet was a little box; this she took down and opened; and there, encircled in its own light, lay the jewelled serpent, coiled at the bottom, and glaring upward at her with its malignant emerald eyes. She clutched it; the first step was gained; the She knew the only course to be adopted next-the next she was spared the neceswas dissimulation; and, though her soul sity of deciding on, by the sudden openrecoiled from the attempt, she must feigning of the door, with an oath. No love She understood her position now, though not how it came about. Gaston-where was he? Lost to her for ever, wherever he might be. One thing before all others presented itself to her; she must regain possession of the ring, must free herself from the hated thrall of this wretch's affection-any thing-any thing on earth was better than that. a disposition to be won over to listen to his detested advances. She would not irritate him, she would gain time, and trust to find an opportunity to attain her object. And thus temporising and watching, the day, whose wan light she was only dimly conscious of for a few hours, passed away, and again night came. All that time she had, broken in body and spirit, passed crouched on the wretched mattress. Her jailer had offered her food, but she had shrunk from it with loathing; and though she felt not the slightest disposition to eat, still the want of sustenance, and the sufferings, mental and physical, of her situation, had worn her down to a degree of painful prostra now marked the expression of the hated One blow of his clenched fist on her temple, and she fell, white and nerveless, at his feet, while the ring dropped from her limp hand. The robber picked it up; in an instant his aspect underwent a change; he gazed upon the prostrate form with despairing horror; he seized her in his arms, carried her to the light, bent over her with passionate exclamations of tenderness and self-reproach. She did not shrink from him now-she did not turn her face from his-she lay unresisting in his arms-dead. From the North British Review. MEMOIRS OF FREDERICK PERTHES.* THE German people, having in various | most enterprising Scottish publishers to ways been deprived of the fruits which present to British readers one of those they had, reasonably or unreasonably, ex-rich records of the public life of Germany pected from the overthrow of their great during the last fifty years, in a shape that oppressor, Napoleon, at Waterloo, have, cannot fail to recommend the work to during the last twenty years, betaken every intelligent Englishman. The methemselves to the publication of Memoirs moirs of the famous publisher, Frederick of various kinds, rich in the reminiscences Perthes, are not merely the biography of of the great age which has just passed a most vigorous and widely sympathetic away. Among these, the memoirs of German man, living in an age unusually Arndt, Herr von Gagern, Strombeck, rich in stimulating and elevating moments, Varnhagen von Ense, Henry Steffens, the but they contain, as the title bears, a Baron von Stein, and others, are fresh in record of "the literary, religious, and the recollection of all who take any inter-political life of Germany," more truly and est in German matters beyond the usual more comprehensively than any work that, amount of gossip about Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Herder, and Immanuel Kant, which now belongs to the literary furniture of every man of education even in remote Scotland. But works of this class have hitherto been kept almost exclusively within the circle of professedly German scholars. The habitual exclusiveness of the English mind, the well-known narrowness of our political sympathies, our great ignorance of continental history in all matters where we are not expressly called on to perform a prominent part, have no doubt contributed their full share to prevent the enlargement of this circle. But part of the blame also unquestionably belongs to the extreme unwieldiness and portentous prosiness in which some German memoir-writers are apt to indulge; while, in other cases, the jealous eye of the censorship watching over the penman, seems to have deprived his composition of that bold freedom and racy vigor, without which political memoirs, especially to an English reader, lose more than half their value. Now, however, we are glad to see an attempt has been made by one of our to our knowledge, has appeared in that country since the peace. The other memoirs that we mentioned were mainly of a political and literary interest; here, the religious element everywhere marches with an equal right alongside of the other two; and the experience of the "inner life" is unfolded with a faithfulness proportioned to the importance which it must always hold in the eyes of those who do not estimate the significance of history by the mere breadth of flaunting banners, the noise of Lancaster guns, and the pomp of many-colored processions. We cannot, indeed, name a book so crammed with the most substantial materials for a thorough knowledge of Germany, as this life of the great Hamburgh publisher; and we cannot but regard it as a striking fact of more than accidental coincidence, that the most rich record of the life of the most bookmaking people in the world for these "paper times," (as Perthes himself used to phrase it,) should have been made by a bookseller. The subject of the present memoir was born at Rudolstadt, in Thuringia, in the year 1772. At the age of fifteen, he was transferred from his native green hills, and bickering mountain streams, to the narrow streets and the dark counting-houses of Leipzig; and there served his apprenticeship to the book-trade under a bibliopolic rect diagnosis of his patient's case, than Perthes, at the age of twenty-six, here makes of his own character and career. Many people in the world must be content to turn their own wheel, and that in a very intermittent and lame sort of a way sometimes; others endeavor chiefly to turn the wheels of others; but this very delicate task being undertaken often without sufficient knowledge of their own capacity or their neighbors' wants, ends in discomfiture; and some unfortunates have no wheel at all to turn-they merely sit. But Perthes achieved the highest thing; both to work energetically himself, and to set every other person with whom he came in contact, into useful activity. This is a truly kingly habit of mind, which if Julius Cæsar and Napoleon Buonaparte possessed in a high degree, certainly this North German seller of books possessed in no inferior degree. His faculty of drawing all that was good and great within the sphere of his action into quick sympathy and living harmony with himself, is truly wonderful. Some people bristle all round with points of repulsion; and have only one small narrow slit open for the admission of other human natures into their own. Perthes, like Goethe, was quite the reverse of this. He sent out eager feelers on all sides for the reception of whatever was good, and in any wise enjoyable, into the Pantheon of his heart, rejecting only with a tyrannical resoluteness, all intercourse with every form of sneakishness and cowardice. Thus his person became a magnet round which all that was most notable in the then political, religious, and literary life of Germany was attracted; and there are few names of any note in the world of German action or of books, which do not occur very often in the most intimate and significant relationship to this large-hearted and heroic publisher. gentleman named Böhme. Like other young apprentices in that disciplinarian age, he learned, of course, not only to handle his tools, but to endure hardness of all kinds; and showed the stuff of which he was made by falling desperately in love with his master's daughter, and then, when he found that matters were anything but clear in that quarter, "sitting up half the night, and seeking to allay the storm in his bosom by the arduous study of Kant's Philosophy, and Cicero de Officiis." In the year 1793, he was transferred to the first scene of his future labors, Hamburgh. Here he acted at first as an assistant to one Hoffmann, a bookseller, till, in the year 1796, he was in a condition to establish a business of his own; and this he did, not merely for the purpose of making money, and achieving an independence, but with a deep feeling of the important part which a bookseller of the present day may perform in the intellectual and moral elevation of the community to which he belonged. He had observed that "where a bookseller possessed an educated taste, works of a high class were in demand; and that where, on the other hand, the bookseller was a man of low taste and immoral character, a licentious and worthless literature had a wide circulation." That this must be the case in every country, to a certain extent, seems plain; but in Germany, where the public mind is not so prepossessed by party interests and occupations, the sphere of an active bookseller must be greatly more extended. With such a high-toned ideal did Perthes commence his bookselling business in Hamburgh; and his whole career is a most instructive proof of how a human life, commenced with a noble conception, and followed out with a heroic enterprise and with an invincible perseverance, can never remain barren of notable results. Men, generally, do not achieve great things, simply because they That he was large-hearted and heroic, have never greatly willed to achieve not only as a tradesman-(for shop-keepthem. Perthes soon found out what ing also has its heroism)-but as a citizen, Nature had meant him for; and was de- the whole tenor of the rich political cortermined to give himself fair play, and to respondence of this work proclaims. His be and to do nothing by halves. "I am letters form, indeed, a running commentary more than ever persuaded," says he, on the history of his country, for the age "that my destiny is an active masculine in which he lived, and, taken along with career; that I am a man born to turn my the words of his correspondents, will form own wheel, and that of others with a storehouse of political intelligence for energy." Never did physician, with the future historian. As a specimen of stethoscope in hand, make a more cor- the stout German spirit that sustained him during the worst days of Prussian | roots deep in our soil, still the want of religion degradation and French prestige, we select the following: is increasingly felt. I grant you that a miracle "It was with bitter vexation and deep sorrow that he witnessed the stolid apathy which, since the peace of Luneville and the Diet of Ratisbon, had fallen upon men who were regarded as the pride of Germany, and from which neither the unutterable sufferings of their native land, nor This is in the genuine old Roman vein. the audacity of their tormentors, could arouse "Ought we not to feel ourselves happy them. He was indignant at the appearance of just because we are born in such evil Goethe's Eugenie at this season. Our hearts times?" To read this is easy; but to say must and should be filled with shame, burning it and to do it at the needful moment, is shame, at the dismemberment of our fatherland,' the business of a hero. After the peace he writes to Jacobi in 1804; 'but what are our noblest about? Instead of keeping alive their of Tilsit, when Müller the historian, and shame, and striving to gather strength, and other influential Germans accepted places wrath, and courage to resist the oppressor, they of honor in the newly-created kingdom of take refuge from their feelings in works of art!' Westphalialia, and thus gave the sanction A new hope of deliverance dawned, when, in of their name to the favorite idea of Nathe summer of 1805, the report of an alliance poleon-the merging of Germany in between England, Russia, and Austria, was pro- France, Perthes kept aloof, and in his own pagated. But Perthes saw with dismay the political leaders of Germany array themselves sphere as a German publisher, organized on the side of Napoleon against England, and a periodical for the purpose of keeping strive to work upon the minds of the people alive the embers of patriotism, and prethrough the leading journals. 'Our journalists,' paring fuel for the flames of liberation that he writes, 'take up the cause of the tyrant and must one day burst out. He was encouthe "Grande Nation," either from meanness, raged to do this, not only by the essential stupidity, fear, or for gold. I need name only manliness of his political character, but by Woltmann, Archenholz, Voss, and Buchholz; his lofty idea of the intellectual vocation and in a letter to Müller of the 25th of August, he gives vent to his stifled feelings. 'Your of the German people in the great world letter distressed me, by the deep emotions that of modern literature and speculation. The it stirred in my soul. If such men grow faint- following passage indicates a vivid perheart-what then? I am not so hopeless; my ception of the strong and weak points of courage, indeed, has grown of late. True, I am the German character: young, and not well read in history. From the past you form conclusions as to the present, and so despond! But has not every people, till consolidated into unity, been ready to receive a leader, a deliverer, a saviour? This readiness is, I think, very observable among us. There is a universal panting, longing, grasping after some point d'appui. Much is already cleared away; I instance only this--the end of the paper times. Twenty years more of such coquetting with literature, such playing at intellectual de-mans, and elaborated into a form which might velopment, such hawking of literary luxury, and we, too, should have passed through a siècle littéraire still more insipid than that of our neighbors. Are not our youth now persuaded that the country does not exist to serve knowledge, but knowledge to serve the country? How many are now convinced that strength and virtue grow out of moral principles, and are the fruit of no other soil! Do not men regard the love and care for their own houses as more important than a widely diffused love capable of no intensity? Are they not now disposed to honor a hearty and even passionate love of country, rather than a cold cosmopolitanism? And even as regards religion, although through the long-standing abuse of theological tenets, infidelity and indifference have struck their moral and intellectual pursuits of a general na"We Germans have never been wanting in ture; we have always devoted ourselves to knowledge for its own sake. Has not Germany, for many years, been the general Academy of Sciences for all Europe? All that was discovGermany, was at once generalized by the Gerered or expounded, felt or thought in or out of further the progress of humanity. In so far as we Germans had any vitality, we had it not for ourselves alone, but for Europe. We have every right to take credit to ourselves for intellectual wealth and for depth of character, but, alas! we have never known how to use our treasures. We have never given a general education or a general business aptitude to our people; nor have we ever founded those national institutions which would have a tendency to keep alive the feeling of national honor, and which might preserve us from the aggressions of foreign enemies. That which we think and have thought can only be real and influential, when we shall have learned to act as well as to think.” In the eventful year 1813, Perthes entered into that more intimate relation with the stout-hearted Baron von Stein, which was so congenial to his own character. In May 1814, when the Hamburghers had finally got rid of "that wild fellow, Davoust," Perthes returned to his home and to his business; aud there, in the years following the Second Peace of Paris, digested with much more wisdom than most of his ardent contemporaries, the transition from the poetical Kaiser of patriotic imagination, to the prosaic Bund of diplomatic reality. He was a man of large and liberal views in all things, but by no means possessed with the then fashionable rage for pure Constitutionalism, according to French or English models. "We Germans," wrote he to a friend, "are so little acquainted with public affairs, and have so little talent and training for public business, that a strong and firmly established monarchical government will still be necessary for us." For Liberalism, as it was commonly understood by those who imported that word from France, he had no respect; for true liberality, he always said, is that which is the fruit of love, and love is not necessarily stronger, but often weaker, in the minds of those who are most impatient of restraint, and most possessed by the mere idea of freedom. played an active part in the events which | where the affairs of Germany were to be commenced in the temporary expulsion of deliberated on; and here it was that he the French from Hamburgh, and its speedy re-occupation by Davoust. The French, on re-entering the town, proclaimed a general pardon; but ten names were excepted from the grace, and among these was that of Perthes. To escape a rebel's death by the hangman's hands, he was obliged to flee; his premises and dwelling-house were taken possession of by the Government, and his property was sequestrated. He had not a penny in his pocket. But the "mental sprightliness" which Niebuhr so much admired, and the buoyancy of a faith which rode lightly over the flood-tide of misfortune, never deserted him for a moment. "The man who has nothing to repent of," thus, at that time, he wrote to a friend, "has also nothing to complain of. I have acted as in the presence of God. I have often risked my life, and why should I be dispirited because I have lost my fortune? God's I will be done." God was a tower of strength to him as to King David in his affliction; and he in his turn became a tower of strength to other men. "Your indomitable spirit," wrote the Duke of Augustenburg, "fills me with admiration. Your belief in a higher world is a great matter; it is this belief alone which is the source of your strength." Niebuhr felt convinced that Perthes had a clear call from Providence in those days, to leave his private station, and devote himself as a public man to the service of his country. "Would to God," wrote the great historian, “that you would now step forth as a statesman to our fatherland! I call to every man who has love, to tell me how you can in future be brought into the administration of Germany." But, though clear-sighted, and gifted with a sagacity and strength that might have made him a great statesman, Perthes preferred working for his country as a simple citizen in the sphere of life to which he had been bred. He knew that men, like trees when the roots have struck deep, will not bear transplanting. He knew also that men without office are often the most useful to men in office, and he had learned by experience that "the voice of an honest man is a mighty power." Such, in fact, was the confidence reposed in him by all parties, that, in December of the same eventful year, he was deputed to represent the Hanse towns at the diet of Frankfurt, In the year 1822, Perthes being now fifty years of age, made a transfer of the book-selling business in Hamburg to his partner Besser, and removed his own residence to Gotha, where he henceforward devoted himself exclusively to that publishing business, which has connected his name so inseparably with some of the most valuable departments of the German literature of the present century. Those who know how much Gotha, and other German towns, have been metamorphosed under the influence of railways, gas-lights, and hotels for English tourists, during the last thirty years, will read with pleasure the following description of the place, as it was when it first became the residence of the distinguished publisher: "Together with the rest of Germany, Gotha was dragged into the whirlpool consequent upstrongly the period, dating from Luneville to on the first French Revolution; but however the second peace of Paris, had convulsed the whole country, it had not been able to overcome the tenacity inherent in German character and |