officers in the Blacks' army, were assembled at the house of Toussaint's old aide-de-camp, the black general, Chavney, at Port-au-Prince.

"It is very certain," observed one of them, "that we all agree in one point to defend General Toussaint with our lives and fortunes. Just now some men are rising up at Arcahay and Boucassin, and on the prairies between the mountains Selle and Mardigras, to restore General Toussaint to the confidence of the army. Let us place ourselves at the head of these worthy people, who have assembled in the general's cause."

This was universally assented to by the company; and in a week after a rumor was afloat in Haiti, that there was an insurrection in the interior and on the west coast.

While this rumor was in circulation, one morning, shortly after the breakfast hour, the governor and commander-in-chief of the republic, Dessalines, holding in his hand a gold-headed cane as a symbol of his office, came out of a room in the Palace of Sans Souci, followed by a fat black officer of rank, clad in a blue coat richly embroidered with gold, and having a long sword dangling at his side, and spurs attached to the heels of his Hessian boots.

"Go, aide-de-camp, to the Cape," said Dessalines, "and tell General La Plume to inform General Le Clerc that I will come over to the French with all the Haitians, unless General Toussaint regains his influence, which seems very likely, as the negroes are rising in his cause. And tell General La Plume to inform General Le Clerc -you hear me, aide-decamp?"

"Yes, your Excellency." "to take prisoner General Toussaint, who is just now staying at L'Ouverture, his house at Gonaives, not far from St. Marc."

The aide-de-camp made his bow and exit from the presence of the governor, and, mounting his horse, rode away at full gallop toward the capital. A few days after, in the dead of night, a French man-of-war, L'Héro, a 74 gun-ship, attended by a small Creole frigate, was standing in toward Calm Beach, near Gonaives. Troops immediately landed in several boats, and surrounded the house of Toussaint, while General Brunet and Le Clerc's aide-de-camp, Ferrari, entered, with a file of grenadiers, the chamber of the black general, where he lay wrapt in slumber. The French general demanded his instant surrender.

"I submit," said Toussaint, seeing his room crowded with armed soldiers, "but take not with me my feeble wife and my harmless child."

They must come with you," said the generals, sternly.

Toussaint, with his family, was hurried that night on board L'Héro, and the ship immediately sailed for France. On its arrival at Brest, Toussaint was conveyed in a close carriage, under a strong escort of cavalry, to the Castle of Joux, in Franche-Comté, and thence to Besançon. There he was immured in a cold and damp dungeon, and there, accustomed for sixty years to a West Indian climate, he perished for want of warmth and air, on the 27th of April, 1803.

This act did not gain Bonaparte St. Domingo. Dessalines, behaving with treachery, instead of joining the French, placed himself at the head of large bodies of troops, and, renewing the struggle for liberty, succeeded in the attempt; and, Toussaint L'Ouverture being removed out of the way of his ambition, he was proclaimed, on the 8th of October, 1804, on the plains near Port-au-Prince, the Emperor of Haiti. But he did not long enjoy this exalted dignity. Charles Bellair, a Congo negro, the nephew of Toussaint, rose up against him, and vowing that he would lay "the rash black villain," (as he styled Dessalines,) "dead at his feet," addressed numerous assemblies of negroes on the subject, and expatiated, at the same time, on the virtues of his uncle. The negroes had feeling minds: they surrounded him and wept as they listened to him.

"When Massa General Toussaint was alive and in fortune, he gib-a we arl, and ebery one, ebery ting," they said.

"A hundred hands," exclaimed an enthusiastic old negro, named Cuffy, holding out both his hands to Charles Bellair; "a hundred hands you shall hab ebery day, Massa Charles, to kill de Emperor."

"We need but one hand," said Charles Bellair, "and that is Gattie's."

The negroes cowered on hearing that name; Gattie was the public executioner. He was a Chamba negro, who had come from Africa, where he had learnt the art of taking off a man's head with one stroke of his sabre, and without staining the shirt-collar with blood. On account of his dreadful office, he was feared by all his tribe and shunned by them. So he lived by himself in a cave, in a thick grove of forest trees in the highest part of the mountains of Cibao, which are the loftiest chain of mountains in Haiti. He was seated at the entrance of his cave one afternoon, on a mound, boiling a kettle of pepper-pot, (the favorite soup of the negroes), when Charles Bellair came to him. Gattie had on, as usual, only trousers, and the upper part of his body, from his shoulders to his waist being quite bare, exhibited a skin as black as a coal and as sleek as a water rat's. A sabre slung by his side told his fatal duties. "Good morning, Gattie!"

"How day, Mas

66

Gattie rose to his feet with a low chuckle, perhaps at the other's emotions, or, more probably, at the mention of his own exploits. However, he followed Charles Bellair down the mountain's side.

It was late in the afternoon of the 17th of October, 1807. The last gleam of twilight had just sunk into the obscurity of night. A deep silence reigned in the neighbourhood of Pont Rouge, broken only by the roll of drums and the peal of martial music. Dessalines, the Emperor, was advancing, in military pomp, to meet his advanced guard at Port-au-Prince. As he was passing the bridge over the river Cul-de-Sac, the moon was a good way up the horizon. Peaceful and light clouds, blanched with her beams, rolled over her disk; and, darting snatches of uncertain light, she chased away, at intervals, the partial darkness which hung over the mountain tops. Before Dessalines, the forest, moved by the night wind, waved up and down in dark and crowded undulations. Many objects, diminished by distance, suddenly issued from the gloomy forest, and immediately lost themselves beneath the shadows of accumulated clouds which intercepted the moon-light.

"You see those people yonder?" said Dessalines, in his usual quick and hasty manner, to a general of his staff. "Who are they?"

body of men bearing onward toward him. In their speedy motions and indignant countenances he might have read his death-warrant. His looks wandered over their closely serried body, in anxiety, as he watched them form themselves in platoons and slowly load their guns. The platoon then advanced, and halted within gun-shot of him. He heard the word, "Make ready." In anticipation of the next order, he shouted aloud to them, and rode forward with amazing courage to chastise them with his cane. He had nearly reached them, when a voice cried out, "Now Gattie, take your victim!"

A little black man, panting for breath, ran forward, his unsheathed sabre flashing bright in the moonbeam.

Dessalines retreated, speaking with desperate anger:-"Rebels! traitors all!". he said. "do with me as you like; but, bear witness, I die, as I have lived, a brave soldier!"

Scarcely had these words left his lips, when his head (taken off by one stroke of Gattie's sabre) rolled from his shoulders to the ground. He fell without a groan.

"The tyrant is no more. Rejoice!" said the Congo negro. "Now on to St. Marc. We will make the good Christophe our Emperor."

The morning of the morrow dawned sunless on the scene of slaughter. The mutilated carcass of the Emperor was, meanwhile, consigned to the silent tomb. His fate created no sympathy among the people, the justice of his doom being universally acknowledged; and his murderers made no expiation for their crimes at a human tribunal. But Nemesis, who punishes unrelentingly, all criminals - if not with her right, with her left hand caused Charles Bellair to make atonement for his murderous deed, a few years after, by being shot to death, as a prisoner of war, in the Champs-de-Mars, at the back of the Grandes Casernes, or barracks, in the City of Cape Français.

-Douglas Jerrold's Magazine.

Rollo and his Race; or, Footsteps of the Normans. By ACTON WARBURTON. Two vols. Bentley.

Read in the right spirit, this is a very interesting and charming work. A man of elegant mind, of delicate and lively perceptions, habituated to regard the picturesque, whether in the aspect of nature, or the history of mankind

- rambles loiteringly over a country which is to the modern inhabitant of Northern Europe what the Doric Peloponnesus might have been to the Dorian colonist of Sicily or Byzantium, and gives us, with honest enthusiasm, not unmixed with fervid prejudices, his impressions of the present, blent with his recollections of the past.

It is impossible to describe befittingly the Norman land, without touching upon the Nor

man architecture, - and without a sentiment of reverence for the noble relics of that grand art which records in stone the chronicle and character of a race. Mr. Warburton writes on this enticing theme, with all "its vexed subjects," in a spirit that will provoke many dissentients from his taste. We do not agree with his scorn of the pointed arch, nor his execration of the Tudor innovations. But, de gustibus non disputandum; and we content ourselves with observing that Mr. Warburton's reflection will convince him that he has not hit upon the truth, when he supposes that the Norman style of architecture, like the Norman mind, was formed "by the appearances of Nature-long nights, unending frosts, limitless wilds," &c. (in short the aspects of a Norwegian clime and land)-"all tending to nourish the idea of perpetuity," and so "expressed in the salient feature of the architectural style that bears his name, viz., the circular arch." For Mr. Warburton should surely recollect that it was not till our friend the Norman had got out of these "unending frosts and limitless wilds," and ensconced himself comfortably in Neustria, that the idea of "perpetuity expressed in the circular arch" ever entered into his head. In his native Norway, so far from thinking about architectural perpetuity, he was contented with his log huts; and even the palaces of his kings were built but of timber. It was as he contemplated the works of that civilization into which he had forced himself, that he saw (not invented) the circular arch already existing in half the Roman churches throughout Christendom; and with the marvellous adaptability which was the true characteristic of the Scandinavian, he borrowed what he beheld. Far from this "perpetuity principle" in institutions, character, &c., being the attribute of the Norman, it was precisely because he was the least rigid, the most supple, plastic, and accommodating of mortals that he became the civilizer and ruler wherever he was thrown. In France he becomes French, in England English, in Italy Italian, in Novgorod Russian; in Norway only, where he remained Norwegian, he failed to accomplish his elevated mission.

Above all men (and of this truth Mr. Warburton is not sufficiently sensible) the Norman was an imitator, and therefore an improver. Wherever his neighbours invented or possessed something worthy of admiration, the sharp, inquisitive Norman poked his aquiline nose. Did Sicily invent a better kind of helmet, instantly the Norman clapped it on his head. Did the Moore or the Breton breathe sentiment into a ballad, the Norman lay forthwith adopted the humanizing music. From a Franc castle or Lombard church, to a law by Canute or a witan

under Athelstan, the Norman was always a practical plagiarist. Wherever what we now call the march of intellect advanced, there was the sharp, eager face of the Norman in the van. All that he retained, in his more genial settlement, of his ancestral attributes, were the characteristics of a seaman. He was essentially commercial; he liked adventure and he liked gain. He was also a creature social and gregarious. He always intermarried with the population in which he settled, borrowed its language, adopted its customs, reconciled himself to its laws; and confirmed the aristocracy of conquest, by representing, while elevating, the character of the people with which he so closely identified himself.

Even in Ireland it is remarkable to see how much better the Norman families, such as the De Burghs, the Fitzgeralds, &c. amalgamate with the Celtic population than the later Saxon immigrants, who for the most part form a class perfectly apart. The fact is, that the Norman was especially an amalgamator; the Saxon, on the contrary, is a sad exterminator. The contrast in this between the Saxon's conquest of Britain, and the Norman's conquest of Saxon England, is striking. If a body of Normans had colonized America, we firmly believe that they would have intermingled with the Indians, and raised that semi-savage population to their own level. The stubborn Saxon drives them into their wilds and forests, and civilizes for himself alone.

On the flood of Saxon immigration nothing floats but the Saxon.

Mr. Warburton is too partial to be discriminating, but his partiality has a charm. He exaggerates the virtues of the Norman, or rather, he leaves out of sight the concomitant vices. He forgets the proverbial cunning or astuteness of his favorite ideal-its avarice and rapacityqualities which the Norman possessed as long as he was Norman, and only lost as he became fused in the general character of the population in which he was settled. As long as he was (at first in Neustria, at first in Sicily, at first in England), one of a garrison amidst a subject population, he could not help being cunning. He was constrained for his safety to have recourse to the ruses of a camp- and as long as he was lusting after some "bel maneir" that belonged to his neighbour, we do not see how he could help being greedy and rapacious. But Mr. Warburton does not exaggerate the astonishing influence for good which this remarkable race have exercised, especially in their noblest settlement - England. No one who has not paid some attention to our Saxon poetry, with its most artificial structure, its meretricious alliterations, its tedious, unanimated tone, relieved

it is true by some exquisite descriptions, and an ethical allegorical spirit (as in the song of the Phoenix), can be aware how thoroughly it differs from the genius of our existing national muse, —and how much, immediately from the AngloNorman, and his kinsman the Anglo-Dane (though perhaps remotely from the Saracen,) we derive of sentiment, vivacity, character, passion, simple construction, easy humor, and true pathos, all, in short, that now especially distinguish the poetic and popular literature of England. But for the Norman and the Dane, we think it probable that we might have had writers like Thomson, Young, and Wordsworth, but we feel a strong conviction that we should have wanted Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspeare. No one who has not made himself familiar with the wretched decrepitude of the Saxon Church, its prostrate superstition and gross ignorance, at the age preceding the Conquest, can appreciate the impetus given to learning by the Norman ecclesiastics; and no one who has not studied the half-organized empire of disconnected provinces and rebellious earldoms under the Confessor, with laws of succession both to the throne and to lordship most irregular, can comprehend all the advantage derived from the introduction of an hereditary aristocracy, singularly independent and high-spirited-quickly infusing its blood and its character into the native population-leaguing its own interests with those of the whole subject communityand headed by a line of monarchs who, whatever their vices and crimes, had at least the power to defend the land from all other invaders, and the wisdom to encourage the trade and the commerce which have ultimately secured to England at once its fame and its freedom.

Even war, both civil and foreign, became an agent of good under the sway of these kindly,' if turbulent, lords. The chiefs were in want of the people—and they became also in want of money. Popular rights soon grew acknowledged. First burghs, then peasants, became enfranchized; and the solid mass of bondage under the Anglo-Saxons, with its divisions of subject Ceorl and enslaved Theowe, rapidly melted away. Our society soon resolved itself into its great elements, King, Lords, and Commons; and in the gripe of the Normans, the unwieldy dismembered empire was compressed into symmetry, and hardened into strength.

We can afford to do justice to this race, for, as a distinct class, it is vanished from

amongst us; its body is gone, though its spirit remains. It did its office; it poured its fresh, vigorous blood into the worn-out Saxon; but it is the Saxon man thus rejuvenated that breathes, and moves, and lives. No greater mistake can be committed than that so common with the French and some of our own writers - the mistake to suppose that the bulk of our landed aristocracy are of Norman origin; that there is any distinction of race between our patrician classes and the plebeian. All such distinctions, indeed, ceased to be perceptible under the earlier Plantagenets. Already the heirs of the first Norman invaders were the descendants of English mothers. But as the wars of the Roses finally swept away the old ruling families, we find Saxons of pure origin rising everywhere into the ascendancy. Not now discussing a question liable to dispute, viz., what was the precise extent of spoliation and dispossession at the Conquest (though we think, at least, that it has been greatly exaggerated,) it is certain that the bulk of the Saxon proprietors continued under the great barons to hold their lands in fief. As these great barons vanished, those Saxon proprietors emerged; and now form the body of our territorial aristocracy.

A glance at the names of our Peerage will suffice to show how Saxon or Saxon-Danish proprietors are predominant amongst all the creations subsequent to Henry the VIIth. In our great dukedoms, Cavendish and Russell are names emphatically Saxon. The old Norman houses of Fitzalan, Mowbray, and Maltravers, are represented by the direct heir of the Saxon Howards. The great Norman house of Percy is blent with the blood of a yet older family in England, the Smithsons (a name that speaks at once of the Northumbrian Anglo-Dane.) The mirror of all chivalry, Sidney, comes from Saxon fathers; the model of all country gentlemen, Hampden, from the Saxon-Danes. In most of the counties, the oldest names amongst our landed gentry manifest English descent. In Kent, for instance, the Oxendens, Honeywoods, Knatchbulls, Derings, Hodges, &c. In Norfolk, Jerningham, Walpole, Woodhouse, Bedingfield,* Wigget (the last derived from Wig, viz., a warrior, a name as genuinely Saxon as in the days of Alfred.) North of the Humber, and in Cambridgeshire, Huntindonshire, and Lincolnshire, we recognize names that speak trumpettongued of the early Dane settlers - Thorold, Trollope, "Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves,”

*In Norfolk, the proprietors were generally AngloDanish before the Conquest, and some names quoted are rather significant of that part of the English family than of Saxon kindred, but at all events they are decidedly not Norman.

Cromwell, Lambton. Most of the names ending in son or in by, such as Coningsby, Willoughby, are peculiarly Danish patronymics. In short, despite all the ingenuity of fabulous genealogies, the majority of our most ancient aristocracy is as thoroughly English, ante-dating from the Conquest, as the ploughmen in our fields, or the tradesmen in our shops.

We have left ourselves, unfortunately, small space for extracts from Mr. Warburton's volumes; but we must find room for the very interesting description of the Chateau D'Eu.

"This tranquil-looking spot seems always to have possessed an anomalous attraction for fierce spirits. Napoleon set his heart upon it, and it was actually purchased for him by the Senate; but England provided for the Emperor another domain, and the château, with the furniture and

portraits, though with greatly diminished dependencies, was restored to the daughter of the Duke of Penthiévre, mother of Louis Philippe. "The exterior presents a vast oblong building of brick, propped with stone pilasters, and surmounted by an irregular slated roof; the whole immediately bringing the Tuileries to your recollection.

"The park contains forty hectares. The lower part, which is not visible from the castle, is after the present fashion. Here the classic taste of the seventeenth century has been brusqued by the romantic spirit of the modern English garden; winding walks, scattered shrubs and trees, ponds of all shapes and sizes, white swans sailing by green islands, aquatic plants of all kinds, and willows weeping over banks of sward that take (as fancy might say) their verdure from the tears.

The upper park, commanded by the windows of the château, is laid out in terraces, and planted by Le Notre. It consists of a large square plot of ground, divided by cruciform walks, and disposed in formal beds. A stone deity stands at each corner of the plot, and the metrical cadence of a fountain in the midst distributes order through the whole. Beyond the flower-beds, the park reaches away until it disappears in the perspective of lofty elms and beeches, that bound it on either side. From the open space innumerable alleys of trees vista off to right and left, forming, with their interlacing branches, many a beautiful aisle beautiful, but so serious withal, that no excitement of the moonlight or soft air would justify the most frivolous fairy in dancing anything less solemn than a minuet upon the sward below.

"The window of the King's study was open; a fit spot to stand and gaze upon the scene. 'Twas impossible not to feel how well the severe disposition of the trees, and the mournful regularity of the parterres accorded with the grave recollections of the place. How often must the great man to whom the castle now belongs, look from that window upon the historic spot, comparing its chequered destiny with his own eventful life.

"There are few indeed can look back on a career so full of vicissitude, as the present King of the French. Fate has crowded into his seventy-four years, such an amount of hardship, danger, and extremes of condition, as seldom fall to the lot of man. Fortunately for France, happily for the peace of the world, he has survived them all. The fates seem to hover round his hale old age, as loath to touch a life on which so much depends."

Alas, and alas! Certainly the Fates hovered long, and when they pounced at last, who could have foreseen that they would have dropped their victim, “se suâ virtute involvens," wrapped in his virtue and his pea-jacket, into the parlor at the little inn of Newhaven.

Mr. Warburton has a very happy art in blending external description with historical reference or illustration, take, from among many, the following passages:

"The scenery of the Seine is beautiful here, and a boat bears you pleasantly up the river towards Jumièges. On the right, opposite Vi!lequier, lies buried deep among the richly-wooded hills, the lovely Caudebec. It was the favorite haunt of the painter Vernet, who used to gaze day after day upon this exquisite landscape; the parti-colored town, with "its face fixed upon the flood," and the beautiful church-"La plus belle chapelle," said Henry IV, “ que j'ai encore vu." Then passing La Mailleraie and Le Lendin, we come to Jumièges.

"At one time the right bank of the Seine from Rouen to the sea presented a succession of monastic establishments. The Abbey of Jumièges was the most remarkable of these. It had existed from the time of Clovis, and was celebrated for its beauty, its wealth, the number and holiness of its inmates. Among its abbots were some of the most illustrious names of France. The church was in a decaying state in the time of Longsword, who rebuilt and enlarged it in 940. It was again added to, and beautified, by the Abbot Robert, in 1067. The Huguenots first, and afterwards the Revolutionists, visited the abbey with especial destruction, and now all remaining of the once famous establishment, is the gate of the conventual building which has been turned into a dwelling-house, and the ruins of the Norman Church.

Again

"We are now gliding down the Seine by Elbœuf, Rouen, St. George de Bocherville, Jumièges, Caudebec, Tancarville, Lillebonne to Havre. He who with a hearkening imagination has floated down the silver stream has learned lessons of history he will not soon forget. All nations of the western world, the Celts, the Gauls, the Romans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Normans, the French, the English, — have encountered each other on its waters, and dyed them with their blood. The sword has thrown its gleam upon the wave, the fagots of the Inquisition their glare. The prayers of the clergy,

-