Heroic Sense of Duty.

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corvette, amongst the crew of which the yellow fever was making frightful ravages. Our stoic, during the course of the malady, displayed that firmness which alone stamps the great man. Providence of the ship.

He was the

"At that time the question of the origin of this scourge of our colonies was much debated among our medical men. M- thought the cause of the evil lay in the matter vomited by the patient. He made a trial of it upon himself, the result of which did not tend to convince him. Towards the end of the epidemic he died, though the cause of his death was unknown. Here is the last extraordinary page of his clinical journal.

"M. de Lansmatre, a naval officer, had reached the third day of the complaint, and M had been writing down hourly the progress of the fever, and the aggravation of the symptoms. It ended with this page: 24th June, 1 o'clock, black vomit, diarrhoea, burning thirst, pulse quick and feeble; 2 o'clock, the same symptoms, with delirium, extreme agitation, fixed eyes, and dwindling pulse; 3 o'clock, the same, death imminent, the patient undergoes the empire of his reason, he mentions his father and his native place; 4 o'clock, decubitus on the back, haggard eyes, skin cold, pulse fleeting, rattle, and death. He was a loyal man of war. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.'

Up to this there seems nothing extraordinary in this entry of the journal: but what would be inconceivable but that we knew our friend's own resolution, is the fact that he was, at the very time, himself attacked by the yellow fever; that his mind however still remained invulnerable; and that, all but dead, his intelligence yet lived strong enough within him to enable him to attend to thirty patients, and to note down every observation that occurred to him with respect to the cases of any of them! "At four o'clock Monsieur Lansmatre died, and at five, an hour afterwards, M had ceased to exist, without any trace of malady, except that his whole person was yellow. It might have been supposed that some sudden attack, as of apoplexy, had carried him off; but he had written in the margin of his note-book, I also am taken with the fever, but repose myself in my moral and physical temperament. Fortitudo animi duplex.' This stoicism in the face of inevitable death, this calmness of thought while poison was in the heart; the sentiment of duty, and of its sacred accomplishment, up to life's last breath; have no comparison in modern times, and antiquity makes us acquainted with nothing more sublime."

If M. Lauvergne will read Laird's Travels up the Niger, or the account of the last ill-fated expedition to the same river, he will find a score of such instances of heroic sense of duty, of men in the midst of their hopeless agony commanding and obeying to the last, and only quitting their duty with their life. No tales of heroic deaths are so noble as these, nor is their sublimity a whit lessened, because there is no dying speech to record it.

Here we have the story of a man who has personal courage without moral courage:

"N. ——, a person of mediocre intelligence, and strongly infatuated by materialism, was likewise surgeon on board a ship visited by yellow fever. He continued his attentions to the crew up to the moment when he himself was infected with the malady. The first symptom of the fever is generally a horrible headach, to alleviate which the patient naturally will bind something round his temples. N. seized on a sudden with the fatal headach, says gaily before the officers and men of the ship, 'It's my marriage day, lads; yellow Mary has flung me the handkerchief,' and so saying, binds a handkerchief round his head and descends to his cabin, saying jocularly to his friends, Good night, I'm going down stairs to paint myself.' He bolted his door in order that his sleep should not be disturbed; he set out his cleanest sheets; and after carefully shaving, washing, and perfuming himself, stretched himself out in his cot as commodiously as possible, and so listened to himself dying."

But perhaps the most curious instance of indifference to death is that which M. Lauvergne records of another naval surgeon, who, his ship being on a rock and expected to sink, while the crew and officers were aghast in terror on deck, went down to his cabin, and-went to sleep. They woke him in an hour to say the ship was just sinking; he grumbled at being awakened, turned round and went to sleep again; and so was found two hours afterwards, on a third summons, not to die but to dine. The ship had got off the rock during the repose of this most resolute of sleepers.

Now we come to a character curious for its entire insensibility. "We have already cited several examples of men of instinct only: one remarkable one is that of a sailor, whom we studied for a long time, and who went, on board the vessel in which we knew him, by the name of Sans-Plume. The skull and face of this man reminded every one of a calf. He was, in a moral sense, entirely stupid and brutal. He was quite indifferent as to his dress (hence his nick-name), spent all he got without ever thinking of clothes, and was as insensible to heat as to cold. When sent on shore to tend the small live stock of the ship, he would go to sleep in a field quite regardless of the hour, and the correction which awaited him on board. Once, we remember, in the islands of the Archipelago, an intelligent goat which he had let out to feed, came down to the shore, and bleating loudly warned the sailors on watch on board ship to come to its aid and that of the goatherd, who was asleep in a wet ditch.

، Sans-Plume was all appetite: he would have crammed himself every day to indigestion with meat and wine, but that the rations were fixed: he took them in the company of the sheep or the sailors, it mattered not to him which for as he thought of nothing and listened to nothing, he had in consequence nothing to say. And yet with such animals as were to be found on board he liked to commune, and seemed to have an instinctive penetration into their natures. I have watched him repeatedly on deck of a night when he was on duty, sitting in a corner with a cat or a dog between his legs, and talking to them about eating and drinking, or any subject of mere instinct. He had ways of pinching them too, so as to make them cry out in a manner somewhat resembling speech: and I, for my part, can vouch for having heard him so talking with a cat,

Physical Insensibility.

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of whom he asked in an angry voice, Who has eaten my chop?' and the cat mewed out in a piteous tone, and in the provençal language, es iou!! "Sans-Plume was also called Misère. He suffered, without complaining, all sorts of torments; he was kicked and beaten, and bore all with the patience of a donkey; his only care was to look to his sheep and henroosts. One day, when he was asleep, the sailors covered his face with a mixture of soot and honey, and then stuck feathers into it: SansPlume woke, and laughed with the rest. Another time they cut down his hammock, and he fell on deck: he got up quite patient, and set himself to mend his bed without a murmur.

"Sans-Plume was of a physical insensibility which I never saw equalled. He would have endured a cruel operation for the sake of a large ration of meat; his bodily strength was like that of a bull, and the power of his blow prodigious.

"He had been at school, but did not know his letters; he had, he said, made his first communion, but he did not know with what hand he should begin to cross himself.

"After the cruise I lost sight of Sans Plume for some time, but found him once more on shore, employed at the slaughter-house (abattoir) of the town. Going one day afterwards to visit a farm in the neighbourhood, I found him there in the character of stable-man. He was afflicted with chronic diarrhoea, couched among the cattle, and in a state perfectly desperate. A priest came to him several times to speak to him of his Christian duties, but the clergyman said he had never in the course of his ministry met with a soul so brutalized, with a being so hard to move in respect of conscience and religion. I was present by chance at one of these conferences. Sans Plume, almost dying, his eyes shut, appeared to listen to the priest; but when the latter asked him if he wished to see him again, he answered with a careless tone, Leave me alone or get me something to eat.' One night he disappeared, and was found dead in a cave in a hill. He had near him an empty bottle, a sausage three parts eaten, and a large loaf which he had scarcely begun. As long as I knew Sans-Plume I never thought of him as an intellect but as a stomach. I remember when on board ship he was attacked with frequent indigestions; on these occasions when his comrades spoke to him he would not reply; but if any one told him that an ox was going to be killed the flesh-eater would revive again, and tucking up his shirt sleeves he would come and offer his services to fell and cut up the animal."

6

The writer brings us still lower in his description of death-bed scenes, not in the scale of intellect but of crime. But of these dismal pictures our readers must by this have had enough, or the more ardent must be referred to the work itself. The last chapter especially may be noted as the bouquet, or masterpiece of the whole: wonderful in its cadaverous variety, and not to be read but with discomfort which is a high compliment to M. Lauvergne's descriptive powers.

ART. V.-1. The Mountains and Valleys of Switzerland. By Mrs. BRAY. 3 vols. London. 1841.

2. A Summer in Western France. By J. A. TROLLOPE, Esq., B.A. 2 vols. London. 1841.

AN English party, devouring sandwiches and drinking bottled stout amidst the broken walls of the Amphitheatre, might sit for the portraits of a large class of our travelling countrymen. The ruins of antiquity go for something; but they would be of no account without the débris of the luncheon. Eating is the grand business of a weighty majority of the English out of England. It arises partly from a certain uneasy apprehension that they cannot get any thing fit to eat anywhere else; and this very fear of not finding any thing they can eat, probably tempts them to eat every thing they can find. It is a common occurrence at a continental table d'hôte to hear an Englishman declare, after having run the gauntlet of twenty or thirty plates, that he hasn't had a morsel to eat.

A great deal of this feeling may be traced to the sudden conflict of habits and antipathies, brought face to face at that moment in the day when a man is least inclined to compromise his desires; but making all due allowances on that score, there is no doubt that the English carry a mighty stomach with them every where: the voracity of the shark, the digestion of the ostrich. Their physical sensations are in advance of their intellectual and mental cravings even of their curiosity. The first inquiry at an hotel is-at what o'clock do you dine? They cannot stir another step without something to eat. If the climate is hot, it exhausts them, and they must recruit; if cold, they get hungry with astonishing celerity, the air is so keen and bracing. Change of air, change of scene, change of diet, the excitement of moving from place to place, the clatter of a new language every thing

contributes to this one end: as if the sole aim and business of travelling was to get up an appetite.

The French make a delicate, but important distinction between the gourmand and the gourmet; and they include us, wholesale, under the former designation. We try to get rid of the imputation by sneering at the elaborate labours of their cuisine, just as if we never made any fuss about eating and drinking ourselves; but they take their revenge, and ample it is, upon our grosser vice of excess. It must be granted that no people in the civilized world sit so long at table as the English. In France, the preparation of a dinner is a grave piece of science; in England, the

Mistakes in National Character.

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And it is the

work of gravity begins when dinner is served up. apparition of this uncongenial seriousness which procures us such a reputation abroad as great feeders; and which, by the naked force of contrast, makes the people around us appear so frivolous in our eyes. We can as little understand their exuberant gaiety, as they can reconcile themselves to our animal stupor. They nickname us Roast-Beef, by way of showing that the paramount idea in the mind of an Englishman is that of substantial good living; and we resent it by calling them Soup-maigre, a sort of ignominious hint of vital animation at starvation point. There is no justice at either side. The French eat as much as the English, but they do not set about it so doggedly.

Great mistakes in national character, beginning in prejudices on the surface, and at last sinking into traditions and by-words, have their origin generally in the absurd process of applying the same test to dissimilar things; of trying opposite manners and different circumstances by the same moral or social standard. But of all nations, we have the least right to complain of any injustice of this kind, because, of all people, we are the most sullen and intractable, and have the least flexibility, the least power of adaptation, the least facility in going out of ourselves and falling into the habitual commonplaces of others. We cannot comprehend the reasonableness of usages that differ from our own. are at once for setting them down as so much bigotry or tomfoolery. We cannot change sides for a moment, and, by the help of a little imagination, endeavour to see things from a different point of sight from that to which we have been all our lives accustomed. We allow nothing for varieties of temperament, for constitutional antagonisms. We are solidly inert and impenetrable, and oppose ourselves bodily, bone and muscle, to all strange tastes and fashions.

We

This is the real character of the Englishman, and the true reason why he is so uncomfortable abroad, and why he makes every body so uncomfortable about him. Out of England, he is out of his element. He misses the unmistakeable cookery, the rugs and carpets, the bright steps and windows, the order, decorum, the wealth and its material sturdiness. He comes out of his fogs and the sulphurous atmosphere of his sea-coal fires, into an open laughing climate. His ears are stunned with songs and music from morning till night; every face he meets is lighted up with enjoyment; he cannot even put his head out of the window without seeing the sun. What wonder the poor man should be miserable, and wish himself at home again! He has no notion of pleasure unassociated with care. He must enter on pleasure as a matter of business, or it is no pleasure for him. There must be an alloy to