By this it seems as if the author of the Frag ment had not been a Frenchman. The worst fault which Divines and the Doctors of the Sorbonne can allege against it, is, that if there is but a cap-full of wind in or about Paris, 'tis more blasphemously sacre Dieu'd there than in any other aperture of the whole city, and with reason good and cogent, Messieurs; for it comes against you without crying garde d'eau, and with such unpremeditable puffs, that of the few who cross it with their hats on, not one in fifty but hazards two livres and a half, which is its full worth. The poor Notary, just as he was passing by the sentry, instinctively clapped his cane to the side of it; but in raising it up, the point of his cane catching hold of the loop of the sentinel's hat, hoisted it over the spikes of the ballustrade clear into the Seine. 'Tis an ill wind, said a boatman, who catched it, which blows nobody any good. The sentry, being a Gascon, incontinently twirled up his whiskers, and levelled his arquebuss. Arquebusses in those days went off with matches; and an old woman's paper lantern at the end of the bridge happening to be blown out, she had borrowed the sentry's match to light it; -it gave a moment's time for the Gascon's blood to run cool, and turn the accident better to his advantage. 'Tis an ill wind, said he, catching off the Notary's castor, and legitimating the capture with the boatman's adage. The poor Notary crossed the bridge, and passing along the Rue de Dauphine into the Fauxbourg of St Germain, lamented himself as he walked along in this manner: Luckless man that I am! said the Notary, to be the sport of hurricanes all my days!-to be born to have the storm of ill language levelled against me and my profession wherever I go! -to be forced into marriage by the thunder of the church to a tempest of a woman!-to be driven forth out of my house by domestic winds, and despoiled of my castor by pontific ones!to be here, bare-headed, in a windy-night, at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of accidents! -Where am I to lay my head?-Miserable man! what wind in the two-and-thirty points in the whole compass can blow unto thee, as it does to the rest of thy fellow-creatures, good! As the Notary was passing on by a dark pas◄ sage, complaining in this sort, a voice called out to a girl, to bid her run for the next Notary.Now the Notary being the next, and availing himself of his situation, walked up the passage to the door, and passing through an old sort of a saloon, was ushered into a large chamber, dismantled of every thing but a long military pike, -a breast-plate,-a rusty old sword, and bandoleer, hung up equidistant in four different places against the wall. An old personage, who had heretofore been a gentleman, and, unless decay of fortune taints the blood along with it, was a gentleman at that time, lay supporting his head upon his hand, in his bed; a little table with a taper burning was set close beside it, and close by the table was placed a chair. The Notary sat him down in it; and pulling out his ink-horn and a sheet or two of paper which he had in his pocket, he placed them before him, and dipping his pen in his ink, and leaning his breast over the table, he disposed every thing to make the gentleman's last will and testament. -Alas! Monsieur le Notaire, said the gentleman, raising himself up a little, I have nothing to bequeath, which will pay the expence of bequeathing, except the history of myself, which I could not die in peace unless I left it as a legacy to the world; the profits arising out of it I bequeath to you for the pains of taking it from me. It is a story so uncommon, it must be read by all mankind;-it will make the fortunes of your house.- -The Notary dipped his pen into his ink-horn.-Almighty Director of every event in my life!-said the old gentleman, looking up earnestly, and raising his hands towards Heaven,-Thou, whose hand has led me on through such a labyrinth of strange passages down into this scene of desolation, assist the decaying memory of an old, infirm, and broken-hearted man!-Direct my tongue by the spirit of thy eternal truth, that this stranger may set down nought but what is written in that Book, from whose records, said he, clasping his hands together, I am to be condemned or acquitted!The Notary held up the point of his pen betwixt the taper and his eye. -It is a story, Monsieur le Notaire, said the gentleman, which will rouse up every affection in nature;—it will kill the humane, and touch the heart of Cruelty herself with pity. The Notary was inflamed with a desire to begin, and put his pen a third time into his inkhorn; and the old gentleman, turning a little more towards the Notary, began to dictate his story in these words : -And where is the rest of it, La Fleur? said I,—as he just then entered the room. THE FRAGMENT, AND THE BOUQUET. PARIS. WHEN La Fleur came close up to the table, A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY nitude; it burns,-but does little good to the world, that we know of. and was made to comprehend what I wanted, he told me there were only two other sheets of it, which he had wrapped round the stalks of a bouquet to keep it together, which he had preIn returning along this passage, I discerned, sented to the demoiselle upon the Boulevards. door, two ladies standing, arm-in-arm, with as I approached within five or six paces of the -Then prithee, La Fleur, said I, step back their backs against the wall, waiting, as I imato her, to the Count de B****'s hotel, and see gined, for a fiacre:-as they were next the door, if thou canst get it.There is no doubt of it, I thought they had a prior right; so edged mysaid La Fleur;-and away he flew. self up within a yard or little more of them, and scarce seen. and quietly took my stand.-I was in black, In a very little time the poor fellow came back, quite out of breath, with deeper marks of disappointment in his looks, than could arise from the simple irreparability of the fragment. Juste ciel! in less than two minutes that the poor fellow had taken his last tender farewell of her, his faithless mistress had given his gage d'amour to one of the count's footmen,-the footman to a young sempstress,-and the sempstress to a fiddler, with my fragment at the end of it. Our misfortunes were involved together; -I gave a sigh,-and La Fleur echoed it back again to my ear. -How perfidious! cried La Fleur.How unlucky! said I. Mon- -I should not have been mortified, THE ACT OF CHARITY. PARIS. THE man who either disdains or fears to walk up a dark entry, may be an excellent good man, and fit for a hundred things; but he will not do to make a good Sentimental Traveller. I count little of the many things I see pass at broad noon-day, in large and open streets.Nature is shy, and hates to act before spectators; but in such an unobserved corner you sometimes see a single short scene of hers, worth all the sentiments of a dozen French plays compounded together, and yet they are absolutely fine;-and whenever I have a more brilliant affair upon my hands than common, as they suit a preacher just as well as a hero, I generally make my sermon out of 'em ;-and for the text," Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,"-is as good as any one in the Bible. There is a long dark passage issuing out from the Opera Comique into a narrow street; 'tis trod by a few who humbly wait for a fiacre, or wish to get off quietly o'foot when the opera is done. At the end of it, towards the theatre, 'tis lighted by a small candle, the light of which is almost lost before you get half way down, but near the door;-'tis more for ornament than use you see it as a fixed star of the least mag woman, of about thirty-six; the other, of the The lady next me was a tall lean figure of a same size and make, of about forty: there was no mark of wife or widow in any one part of either of them ;-they seemed to be two upright vestal sisters, unsapped by caresses, unbroke in upon by tender salutations. I could have wished to have made them happy ;-their happiness was destined, that night, to come from another quarter. A low voice, with a good turn of expression, and sweet cadence at the end of it, begged for of Heaven. I thought it singular that a beggar a twelve-sous piece betwixt them, for the love should fix the quota of an alms,—and that the usually given in the dark. They both seemed sum should be twelve times as much as what is astonished at it as much as myself.-Twelve sous! said one. -A twelve-sous piece! said the other, and made no reply. -The poor man said, he knew not how to ask less of ladies of their rank; and bowed down his head to the ground. -we have no money. -Poo! said they, two, and renewed his supplication. stop your good ears against me. Nature has been bountiful to you; be bountiful the younger, if I had it. himself to the elder,-What is it but your good- impulsively at the same time they both put The two ladies seemed much affected; and their hands into their pocket, and each took out a twelve-sous piece. The contest betwixt them and the poor supplicant was no more,-it was continued betwixt themselves, which of the two should give the twelve-sous piece in charity;—and, to end the dispute, they both gave it together, and the man went away. THE RIDDLE EXPLAINED. PARIS. I STEPPED hastily after him: it was the very man whose success in asking charity of the women before the door of the hotel had so puzzled me; and I found at once his secret, or at least the basis of it:-'twas flattery. Delicious essence! how refreshing art thou to Nature! how strongly are all its powers and all its weaknesses on thy side! how sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart! The poor man, as he was not straitened for time, had given it here in a larger dose: 'tis certain he had a way of bringing it into less form, for the many sudden cases he had to do with in the streets; but how he contrived to correct, sweeten, concentre, and qualify it,-I vex not my spirit with the inquiry ;-it is enough, the beggar gained two twelve-sous pieces, and they can best tell the rest who have gained much greater matters by it. PARIS. We get forwards in the world, not so much by doing services as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it into the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it. Mons. le Count de B****, merely because he had done me one kindness in the affair of my passport, would go on and do me another, the few days he was at Paris, in making me known to a few people of rank; and they were to present me to others, and so on. I had got master of my secret just in time to turn these honours to some little account; otherwise, as is commonly the case, I should have dined or supped a single time or two round; and then, by translating French looks and attitudes into plain English, I should presently have seen that I had got hold of the couvert of some more entertaining guest; and, in course, should have resigned all my places, one after another, merely upon the principle that I could not keep them.-As it was, things did not go much amiss. I had the honour of being introduced to the old Marquis de B****. In days of yore he had signalized himself by some small feats of chivalry in the Cour d'Amour, and had dressed himself out to the idea of tilts and tournaments ever since.-The Marquis de B**** wished to have it thought the affair was somewhere else than in his brain. "He could like to take a trip to England:" and asked much of the English ladies. -Stay where you are, I beseech you, Mons. le Marquis, said I.- -Les Messieurs Anglois can scarce get a kind look from them as it is.The Marquis invited me to supper. Mons. P****, the farmer-general, was just as inquisitive about our taxes.-They were very considerable, he heard.—If we knew but how to collect them, said I, making him a low bow. I could never have been invited to Mons. P****'s concerts upon any other terms. I had been misrepresented to Madame de Q*** as an esprit.-Madame de Q*** was an esprit herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me talk. I had not taken my seat, before I saw she did not care a sous whether I had any wit or no-I was let in to be convinced she had. I call Heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips. Madame de Q*** vowed to every creature she met,-" She had never had a more improving conversation with a man in her life.” There are three epochas in the empire of a French woman:-She is coquette, then deist, -then devoté: the empire during these is never lost; she only changes her subjects; when thirty-five years and more have unpeopled her dominions of the slaves of love, she repeoples it with the slaves of infidelity, and then with the slaves of the church. Madame de V*** was vibrating betwixt the first of these epochas: the colour of the rose was fading fast away;-she ought to have been a deist five years before the time I had the honour to pay my first visit. She placed me upon the same sofa with her, for the sake of disputing the point of religion more closely. In short, Madame de V*** told me she believed nothing.-I told Madame de V*** it might be her principle; but I was sure it could not be her interest to level the outworks, without which I could not conceive how such a citadel as her's could be defended ;that there was not a more dangerous thing in the world than for a beauty to be a deist ;that it was a debt I owed my creed, not to conceal it from her ;-that I had not been five VOL. V. * Plate, napkin, knife, fork, and spoon. R minutes sat upon the sofa beside her, but I had began to form designs ;-and what is it but the sentiments of religion, and the persuasion they had excited in her breast, which could have checked them as they rose up? -We are not adamant, said I, taking hold of her hand ;-and there is need of all restraints, till Age in his own time steals in and lays thei on us. But, my dear lady, said I, kissing her hand, 'tis too-too soon. I declare I had the credit all over Paris of unperverting Madame de V***.-She affirmed to Mons. D*** and the Abbé M*** that in one half hour I had said more for revealed religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it,-I was lifted directly into Madame de V***'s coterie ;-and she put off the epocha of deism for two years. I remember it was in this coterie, in the middle of a discourse, in which I was shewing the necessity of a first cause, that the young Count de Faineant took me by the hand to the farthest corner of the room, to tell me my solitaire was pinned too strait about my neck. -It should be plus badinant, said the Count, looking down upon his own ;-but a word, Mons. Yorick, to the wise. -And from the wise, Mons. le Count, replied I, making him a bow,-is enough. The Count de Faineant embraced me with more ardour than ever I was embraced by mortal man. For three weeks together, I was of every man's opinion I met.- -Pardi! ce Mons. Yorick a autant d'esprit que nous autres.Il raisonne bien, said another.C'est un bon enfant, said a third. And at this price I could have eaten and drank and been merry all the days of my life at Paris; but 'twas a dishonest reckoning; -I grew ashamed of it.—It was the gain of a slave-every sentiment of honour revolted against it; the higher I got, the more was I forced upon my beggarly system;-the better the coterie,the more children of Art,-I languished for those of Nature; and one night, after a most vile prostitution of myself to half a dozen different people, I grew sick,-went to bed ;ordered La Fleur to get me horses in the morning, to set out for Italy. MARIA. MOULINES. I NEVER felt what the distress of plenty was in any one shape till now,-to travel it through the Bourbonnois, the sweetest part of France, in the hey-day of the vintage, when Nature is pouring her abundance into every one's lap, and every eye is lifted up,-a journey through each step of which music beats time to Labour, and all her children are rejoicing as they carry in their clusters;-to pass through this with my affections flying out, and kindling at every group before me, and every one of them was pregnant with adventures.— Just Heaven!-it would fill up twenty volumes;-and alas! I have but a few small pages left of this to crowd it into, and half of these must be taken up with the poor Maria, my friend Mr Shandy met with near Moulines. The story he had told of that disordered maid affected me not a little in the reading; but when I got within the neighbourhood where she lived, it returned so strong into my mind, that I could not resist an impulse which prompted me to go half a league out of the road, to the village where her parents dwelt, to inquire after her. "Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures;-I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them. The old mother came to the door; her looks told me the story before she opened her mouth. She had lost her husband; he had died, she said, of anguish, for the loss of Maria's sense, about a month before.--She had feared at first, she added, that it would have plundered her poor girl of what little understanding was left; but, on the contrary, it had brought her more to herself ;-still she could not rest. Her poor daughter, she said, crying, was wandering soiewhere about the road. -Why does my pulse beat languid as I write this? and what made La Fleur, whose heart seemed only to be tuned to joy, to pass the back of his hand twice across his eyes, as the woman stood and told it? I beckoned to the postillion to turn back into the road. When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in the road, leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar. She was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand::-a small brook ran at the foot of the tree. I bid the postillion go on with the chaise to Moulines; and La Fleur to bespeak my supper; and that I would walk after him. She was dressed in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted with a silken net. She had superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green riband, which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe.-Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she kept tied by a string to her girdle. As I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string. -" Thou "shalt not leave me, Sylvio," said she. I looked in Maria's eyes, and saw she was thinking more of her father, than of her lover, or her little goat; for as she uttered them, the tears trickled down her cheeks. I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own,-and then in hers, and then in mine, and then I wiped hers again;-and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world, ever convince me to the contrary. MARIA. WHEN Maria had come a little to herself, I asked her if she remembered a pale thin person of a man, who had sat down betwixt her and her goat about two years before?—She said, she was unsettled much at that time, but remembered it upon two accounts:-That, ill as she was, she saw the person pitied her; and next, That her goat had stolen his handkerchief, and she had beat him for the theft;-she had washed it, she said, in the brook, and kept it ever since in her pocket, to restore it to him, in case she should ever see him again; which, she added, he had half-promised her. As she told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket, to let me see it; she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine-leaves, tied round with a tendril. On opening it, I saw an S. marked in one of the corners. -She had since that, she told me, strayed as far as Rome, and walked round St Peters once, -and returned back:-that she found her way alone across the Apennines,-had travelled over all Lombardy without money,-and through the flinty roads of Savoy without shoes :-how she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could not tell;-but God tempers the winds, said Maria, to the shorn lamb. -Shorn indeed; and to the quick, said I: -and wast thou in my own land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee; thou shouldst eat of my own bread, and drink of my own cup ;-I would be kind to thy Sylvio;-in all thy weaknesses and wanderings I would seek after thee, and bring thee back; -when the sun went down I would say my prayers; and when I had done, thou shouldst play thy evening-song upon thy pipe: nor would the incense of my sacrifice be worse accepted for entering Heaven along with that of a broken heart! Nature melted within me as I uttered this; and Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped too much already to be of use, would needs go wash it in the stream. -And where will you dry it, Maria? said I.-I'll dry it in my bosom, said she ;'twill do me good. said I. -And is your heart still so warm, Maria? I touched upon the string on which hung all her sorrows; she looked with wistful disorder for some time in my face;-and then, without saying any thing, took her pipe, and played her service to the Virgin.-The string I had touched ceased to vibrate; in a moment or two Maria returned to herself,-let her pipe fall,and rose up. -And where are you going, Maria? said I.She said, to Moulines. Let us go, said I, together.-Maria put her arm within mine, and lengthening the string to let the dog follow,-in that order we entered Moulines. MARIA. MOULINES. THOUGH I hate salutations and greetings in the market-place, yet, when we got into the middle of this, I stopped to take my last look and last farewell of Maria. Maria, though not tall, was nevertheless of the first order of fine forms:-affliction had touched her looks with something that was scarce earthly ;-still she was feminine ;--and so much was there about her of all that the heart wishes, or the eye looks for in woman, that could the traces be ever worn out of her brain, and those of Eliza out of mine, she should not only eat of my bread and drink of my own cup, but Maria should lie in my bosom, and be unto me as a daughter. Adieu, poor luckless maiden !-Imbibe the oil and wine which the compassion of a stranger, as he journeyeth on his way, now pours into thy wounds;-the Being who has twice bruised thee can only bind them up for ever. THE BOURBONNOIS. THERE was nothing from which I had painted out for myself so joyous a riot of the affections, as in this journey in the vintage, through this part of France; but pressing through this gate of sorrow to it, my sufferings have totally unfitted me. In every scene of festivity I saw Maria in the back ground of the piece, sitting pensive under her poplar: and I had got almost to Lyons before I was able to cast a shade across her. -Dear Sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!-thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw,-and 'tis thou who liftest him up to Heaven!-Eternal fountain of our feeling!-'tis here I trace thee,-and this is thy "divinity which stirs within me;”—not that, |