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journals. In brief they amount to thisthat he has no recollection of his childhood beyond a few faint dreamy images, in which horror and magnificence are blended, and has always been troubled with painful uncertainty as to the occurrences of his early life; but that from two separate sources he has been informed that he is Louis XVII of France: first, by the Prince de Joinville, at Green Bay, in 1841; and, secondly, through the reported dying confession of Bellanger, in 1848.

Such is the sum of the evidence which has been proven before us, and we see for just how much Mr. Williams is responsible, and what there is to give credibility to his statements. Nothing rests merely on his evidence except what in the very nature of things must do so.

All these separate classes of facts tend to one common centre. They do not clash with the history of the times or the probabilities of human action, but coincide with them. Startling as is the conclusion to which they lead-its rejection would be attended with greater difficulties than its acceptance. Physical evidences and moral probabilities are both in its favor.

He

who denies it must confess the strangest concurrence of coincidences. The Dauphin, if alive, could not be more like himself than Mr. Williams is, in native constitution and accidental disfigurement. Events ranging through more than half a century, and occurring in opposite quarters of the world, blend harmoniously together, and are capable of no satisfactory solution apart from each other. The Dauphin disappeared from the Temple. What became of him? Bellanger was with him. What became of him? The counterpart of the Dauphin is found among the Indians, sought out by the royal family of France, indicated by report, as having been brought to the country by Bellanger, years before any thing is known historically about Bellanger. Report says that Bellanger on his death-bed "declared the Dauphin to be Eleazer Williams.

Supposing that nothing more could be discovered on the subject, we have enough to lift it far above the atmosphere of ridicule, and invest it with the gravity of an historical problem too important and romantic ever to be forgotten.

Such is one aspect of the evidence. There is another, to which I adverted in my previous article, but had then no means of testing. De Joinville's letter supplies the deficiency. The whole subject narrows itself to a single, simple, but stern issue-that of veracity between the only two witnesses who can testify concerning a contested fact. Dismiss from the mind the comparative rank of these two individuals: look at them merely as men. An interview has taken place between them. One asserts that it was purely accidental and unsought, and gave rise to no secret communication of a startling fact, and his account of the inter

view is made to correspond with the hypothesis of a purely accidental meeting. The other person affirms that the interview was not accidental, but was sought by the first individual, who communicated to him a startling fact, up to that moment unknown to him. Which shall we believe? The rule of law is, falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus. The first asserts an accidental meeting, and an unimportant conversation, its necessary consequence. The accidental meeting is positively disproved. The foundation goes and the superstructure goes with it. A sought interview requires a specific object. The second person, who has a fair character, and in whose story no misrepresentation can be proved, relates a fact communicated at the interview, adequate to explain the proved solicitude of the first person in seeking him, but which communication that person has the highest earthly interest in denying. If you believe the first, you must do so in the face of a falsehood and an unexplained fact. If you believe the second, the fact is explained, and no falsehood on his part can be shown. I leave the world to decide on which side probability inclines.

To those who have charitably attributed to me the origination of a moon hoax to sell a magazine, or the credulity of adopting the baseless tale of a monomaniac, I reply with all good nature, that I am content to leave the case to speak for itself, quite satisfied with the approbation of those, neither few, nor stupid, nor credulous, who entertain, with me, the strongest conviction of the high probability that beneath the romance of incident there is here the rocky substratum of indestructible fact.

Shall the subject rest where it now does? Will the public, satisfied with having been amused and excited for a moment, allow the matter to drop? or shall organized means be taken to probe it to the bottom! I can do little by myself. What I can do I have done, in so presenting it as to arrest attention. It now passes out of the hand of an individual, and becomes the property of the civilized world.

In conclusion, let me say, that Mr. Williams has no political pretensions, assumes no name other than he has borne during his recollection, continues, and desires to continue, in the duties of the Christian ministry, and submits himself to the will of God and the shapings of his Providence. He makes no claim. He simply asserts facts. He remains what he has always been, passive; and come what may, he will be resigned.

To all those who have aided me in the accumulation of evidence I return my sincere thanks, and would beg also their continued co-operation; and I would further request all persons, either on this continent or in Europe, who may be able to throw light on the transaction, to address me, to the care of G. P. Putnam, Esq., New-York.

J. H. HANSON.

LITERATURE.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

AMERICAN. We announced in our last number the probable conclusion of a treaty between the United States and Great Britain, in which the rights of authors to the labor of their brains would be reciprocally recognized. But the hum and confusion incident to a change of administration have thrown the subject into the shade for a while. Mr. Fillmore and Mr. Everett have retired, without the glory of having achieved this noble act of justice, which is reserved for President Pierce and Secretary Marcy. Both of them, we believe, are men of literary tastes and. literary associations, the personal as well as political friends of Hawthorne, Bancroft, Bryant; and it is, therefore, to be hoped, that in the midst of their absorbing occupations, they will not allow that gross and damaging denial of justice, which has hitherto marked our legislation, to disgrace our national character. It is a piece of self-injuring baseness on the part of the United States, that it suffers so vast and important an interest as that of literature to remain without the protection of law, exposed to almost universal piracy. Some rumors allege that the treaty is already before the Senate; if so, we shall look to that body for prompt and decisive action.

-A sensitive author, of whose little work we may have spoken in too curt and harsh a way, sends us a long letter to say that we have done him an injustice, but that we are forgiven. We are sorry to have hurt his feelings, but glad to find in him so much Christian magnanimity. Let us add, however, in self-defence, that we really thought he had mistaken his vocation, and expressed ourselves accordingly; but if he has not, his future works will show none the worse for our brief criticism, as the grass is greener where the fire of past years has scorched it the

most.

-One of the hardest things in the world to write well is a book for children; but Mr. STODDARD, in his Adventures in Fairy Land has overcome the difficulty with no little success. There is a remarkable daintiness and delicacy in his treatment of his several subjects, quite uncommon; while the stories themselves, mostly allegories, are charming for their purity and tender simplicity of style, which would hardly be anticipated by those familiar with the luxuriant and highly-colored verse of the author.

-It gives us pleasure to remark that

the Works of the late JOHN C. CALHOUN, one of the most clear-sighted, pure, and powerful of our statesmen, have come into the hands of a New-York publisher, who will give them a wide circulation. The first volume contains his posthumous treatise on Government, and on the Constitution of the United States-both remarkable productions-while the two volumes that are to follow will embrace his State Papers and Speeches. Mr. Calhoun was a man of genius, and all that he wrote and spoke bore the impress of a penetrating and original mind. His pages carry you away by the mere force of will that is in them, by his sharp grasp of his subject, his keen, stern logic, his indomitable earnestness of purpose, and by the rapidity of his progress. Without humor, pathos, rhetorical illustration, or any of the ordinary marks of literary culture, his style is still fascinating, on account of its clearness, directness, and conscious energy. But, as we mean to write an elaborate criticism of late American statesmen very soon, we reserve the many other thoughts suggested by this publication.

-A uniform edition of the writings and sermons of that Boanerges of the Congregational pulpit, Dr. LYMAN BEECHER, is in the course of publication. It is easy to see, in reading the strong, terse, eloquent sentences of this vigorous preacher, where his son, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and his daughter, Mrs. Stowe, learned the secrets of their success in the literary and religious worlds. They are emphatically "chips of the old block," with more imagination, than the father, but with the same wiry power and tenacity of purpose.

-Amabel; a Family History, is the title of a novel, by ELIZABETH WORMLEY, which has just been published simultaneously by Putnam & Co., of New-York, and Smith, Elder & Co., of London. Miss Wormley is a daughter of the late Admiral Wormley, of the Royal Navy, who was a native of Virginia. She has been some years a resident of this country, which she intends making her future home.

Amabel is an interesting narrative, and contains many scenes of highlywrought interest. The scene, in the earlier part of the story, is laid in the island of Malta. But the author has aimed at a higher motive than merely to absorb the attention of the reader: the moral which she has attempted, and we think successfully, to teach, is, that love is not an impulse nor an instinct merely, but a principle which may be cultivated.

-An acceptable service has been rendered to his profession by Dr. SKINNER, in his translation of the "Pastoral Theology" of Vinet, one of the most distinguished of the Protestant divines of Europe. It is a work of great thought, admirably methodized, and full of tender religious sentiment, as well as practical truth.

-One of the most important literary acquisitions made by this country of late is the library of NEANDER, the celebrated German theologian and historian. It was purchased for the Rochester University, we believe, and consists of five thousand volumes, many of them of the rarest kind, not to be found elsewhere in this country, and hardly in Europe. They relate mostly to Neander's own favorite pursuit, church history, embracing a complete collection of the Fathers, from Clement and Polycarp to the latest of them; of the scholars of the middle age, such as Duns Scotus, Anselm, Albertus Magnus, Roscellinus, &c.; of the contemporary writers of the Reformation, in the original editions, besides the copious philosophies of all ages. But we are sorry to learn that this treasure-house of rare learning is kept in a wooden building, which may at any moment be destroyed by fire!

-LAYARD'S account of his recent oriental researches appears simultaneously from the press of Murray in London, and Putnam in New-York. They form no inconsiderable volume, and are even fuller of new and strange matter than his first work. We have found time, as yet, only to glance over the proof-sheets, which promise the richest and rarest entertainment for the reader. In our next number we shall give a detailed review of this important addition to our knowledge.

-The "London Quarterly" has a labored review of the Life and Letters of Justice Story, in which that jurist is extensively patronized, and the United States in general kindly patted on the head. It is not long since the "Quarterly" characterized the Yankees as a set of semi-barbarians; and it gives us the more pleasure therefore, to find its writers taking juster views of the Republic and its people. Who knows but that, some time or other, Bull and Jonathan will be very great cronies?

-Mr. KIMBALL's last work, called Romance of Student Life, we observe, has reached a third edition, and has been translated into the German, and is now in course of publication In the feuilleton of the Atlantische Blätter

- Miss ABBY WHEATON, youngest daughter of the late Honorable Henry Wheaton, has in preparation a Memoir

of her distinguished father, for which his long diplomatic residence in Europe, and his peculiar opportunities of intimacy with the most famous of his contemporaries, will also afford abundant and various material of interest. The volume will also include a notice of her brother Robert, a youth of singular promise, who died a few months after his father.

-Thalatta is the attractive title of a volume of choice poetical selections for the sea-side, to be published early in the month, by Ticknor, Reed & Fields. The taste, ability, and elegant culture of the compilers, promise us in this book of summer reading by the sea, a collection of permanent value.

-Considerations upon some Recent Social Theories, is the title of a volume in the press of Little, Brown & Co. of Boston. It is the work of a young and earnest thinker upon the great humane interests of the time, a gentleman of wide experience and observation of all social speculations and experiments. We anticipate in it a book which will command the sympathetic attention of thoughtful men. It will be issued, probably, about the first of May.

FRANCE. Some of the fair advocates of the Woman's Movement might appropriately employ their time and genius in translating Le Monde des Oiseaux (the World of Birds), a Treatise on Passional Ornithology which M. TOUSSENEL has just published at Paris. This writer alone, of the once numerous, but now scattered Fourierist School, who formerly had their centre in that capital, still retains the pen and commands the attention of the public. Endowed with a vivacious and fertile mind, a great reach and brilliancy of fancy, a lively, dashing and readable style, he makes of the analogies of the natural world, a vehicle always bizarre and often very charming, for the ideas and theories of Fourier, heightened and varied by the inventions of his own brain. One of his earlier works, the Esprit des Bêtes, or Passional Zoology, has had the luck of a translation and extensive sale in this country. In that, the genius and character of the masculine division of Humanity were congenially illustrated from the habits and characters of beasts. He now takes a higher flight, and from the facts of ornithology, by the help of fine-drawi analogies and far-fetched fancies, demonstrates that, physiologically, morally and humanely, the women are altogether the better part of creation-not so hard an

undertaking, as every body will admit.

"The real and secret aim of this book,”

says M. Toussenel, "is to prove, by a thorough examination of the manners and institutions of these privileged creatures [the birds] the following revolutionary propositions: 1. The reign of Man, an inferior creature, is the reign of brute force, of constraint, of imposture, and of old age, the reign of Satan; it fatally coincides in the history of Humanity with the phase of Infancy, the age of silly terrors and superstitions. 2. The reign of Woman, who is a superior creature, is the reign of Right and of Liberty, the reign of Truth and of Youth, the reign of God, whose coming all good hearts daily implore. It coincides with the phase of apogee, or the full development of the human species."

This theme M. Toussenel expounds and rings the changes on through the whole of his octavo volume. Not a bird that flies in the celestial blue, or that haunts the marshy waters of a pond, but furnishes him with some new argument for feminine superiority. The dove and the falcon, the swallow and nightingale, all lend their voices to swell the anthem of love, beauty, and the divine right of wo

man.

"All lovely birds," says our author, "have in their hearts a longing passion for woman; all ardently desire to be called to adorn and inhabit her abode. The taming of the pigeons of the Tuileries is more conelusive on this point than the longest speeches would be. In the natural state, these birds are the shyest and most untamable of the woods; but their wildness melted like snow in the gentle influence of that focus of attraction which is known in all languages as the Parisian woman. I am perhaps the

first writer that has not feared to reveal to the young beauties of my country this marvellous proof of the omnipotence of their charins. The pigeon is the cherished bird of Venus Aphrodite, and is a noble and elegant creature, that admits with the socialists of the best school, that happiness is the destiny of beings, and that it consists in loving. One beautiful day of spring a century or two ago, chance brought some of them to the shades of the royal chateau of the Tuileries; they saw, and heard, and fixed themselves for ever in a place so sympathetic with their secret attractions. They chose that garden for their residence, because the beauty which honors those alleys with its steps, and whose words echo in the boughs of those trees, was endowed with the power of supreme fascination; because there has always been the veritable court of love for the European world. I know that this is trite, and that all men of taste, of every country, have long admitted the supremacy of Parisian beauty; but this unanimous opinion of men required to be sanctioned by the opinion of the pigeon, the sovereign judge in matters of love."

Thus through science, sentimentality
VOL. I.-30

and fancy, M. Toussenel pursues his object, enveloping birds and women in a common glory. Among the feathered race, feminine authority is universally recognized, as it ought to be among all other bipeds. The happiness of individuals, the prosperity of communities, and the duration of empires, are in proportion to the degree in which woman exercises a controlling power.

"We admire the birds," exclaims our author, "because among them, as in every well-organized system, it is gallantry which distributes ranks. We admire them for the purity of their morals, and the wisdom of their legislation, which invests the female, the producer and worker par excellence, with the supreme direction of the social movement."

In this philosophy M. Toussenel finds the key which unlocks every intellectual mystery.

"It contains the immediate and radical solution of all the knotty questions of religion, politics, fine arts, and literature, with which for six thousand years poor humanity has been torn."

Every thing will be settled in the reign of woman. She alone is the true type of humanity; her beautiful features form the only genuine human countenance. She is superior in volume of brain, in good sense and lucidity of mind. The entrance of a single woman of talent into a family is sufficient to keep it clear of fools for several generations. Those nations where the men bring themselves most nearly to resemble women are, according to our author, the most powerful; hence the greatness of England and of Russia; of England, because the men shave themselves; of Russia, because her sons pay particular attention to the development and rounded fulness of their chests.

Finally, in justice to M. Toussenel, let us say that if we have not here reported the most fantastic parts of his book, we have also passed over those which are most pleasing and most truly scientific. And we will assure any incredulous reader, that if he opens Le Monde des Oiseaux, he will not be likely to lay it aside until he has read it to the end. Whether it will convince him of the truth of Passional Ornithology and the divine right of women to all sorts of supremacy, mundane and celestial, we do not venture to predict.

-Madame EMILE DE GIRARDIN has had the boldness to measure herself with the most famous production of Molière. She has brought out a comedy with the title of Lady Tartuffe, and what is more, it has succeeded. The first performance

took place before the most brilliant audience possible in Paris. Jules Janin, who gives a long analysis of the piece, says that

"It is both a comedy and a drama: it shines at unequal intervals with the spirit, the grace and the vivacity of comedy, and then it covers itself with crape-it laments, it weeps, it blasphemes! We may find fault with many things in the five acts, but we cannot deny the interest, the curiosity, the movement they excite. We cannot deny the pity, the terror, the improbability, and a thousand trifling points which are almost all successful. The triumph is a great one, and it will be durable."

-JULES JANIN, the redoubtable and fantastic critic of the Journal des Debats, has published a little volume on the Art of Raising and Multiplying Canary Birds, which he makes the subject of a long and agreeable article in that paper, affecting to treat its author as an entirely different man from himself. He concludes in the following fashion:

"Well then! I will read again this famous treatise on the art of raising birds, and I hope-yes, I hope-that in the course of ages some readers, lovers of good things, deceived by the similarity of the two names, will attribute to the maker of feuilletons the delightful book of the raiser of canaries. After all, they will say, he was a good man; he loved the sweet melodies of spring; he would have given all the rusty poems of the world for the song of a warbler; he would gladly have swapped all bloody melo-dramas for the cooing of a turtle-dove. No doubt he made very bad books-romances, histories, criticisms, frivolous things, spiced with pedantry; he very improperly mixed the Latin with the French; he used a dialect of his own, made up of tricks very tiresome to follow, of trifling researches very fatiguing to read, of little hits which had no great point, of little malices which but few readers could understand: in a word, he had a foolish dialect, fitter for a linnet than a man; and this dialect, made with so much pain and research, died with him, and now nobody knows the first word of it. Luckily, and this is what saves him, and what will make him live in the future, this Marivaux of the written word, this seeker of new worlds, this Falstaff of the sylphs, this skimmer over the corn-blossoms and foolish waving grass of ribbon-flaunting rhetoric-wrotewho would believe it?-a charming book, a useful book, a famous book, an immortal book, on the Art of Raising and Multiplying Canary Birds!"

-In these days of Dauphins resurrected, M. PROSPER MERIMEE'S last book, Les Faux Demetrius (The False Demetriuses), may have an even greater interest than belongs to it intrinsically. In the

latter part of the sixteenth century, Demetrius, the seventh son of Ivan the Terrible, Czar of Russia, and heir to the crown, was either assassinated or accidentally killed himself with a knife, probably the former, at the age of ten years. At any rate, his death was a fact that could not honestly be called in question, whatever doubt there might be as to the manner of it. The imperial authority-then far from what it now ispassed into the hands of Boris Godounof, who had been prime minister, and was accused of the murder, though unjustly. He exercised the government greatly to the dissatisfaction of the people, till twelve years after the decease of the young prince, when suddenly it was announced that the latter had not been killed, but only carried off, and had all the while been living in Poland, and that having now reached manhood, he was coming back to assert his right to the throne. And so he did, supported by Prince Adam Wiszniowecki, a rich and powerful Polish grandee, who furnished the funds for the expedition. The face of the pretender was universally recognized as that of the family of Ivan, and his person bore all the marks ever heard of as belonging to the defunct heir of the crown. More than this, a man was found who declared that he had been a servant of the boy, and was perfectly sure that this was the identical person. It has been supposed by historians that this Russian dauphin was a priest by profession, that he had been a sort of missionary among the savage Cossacks, and that his real name was Grichka Otreprief; but M. Merimée rejects this hypothesis. It does not appear how our pretender came to invent the rather plausible story by which he imposed on so many persons. However, he entered Russia at the head of an army; after a prolonged struggle he defeated Boris, who then died suddenly, probably by suicide; and finally, he was recognized by the nation as Czar. His glory was, however, of short duration. After a reign of eleven months, during which he exhibited more talent and better qualities as a ruler, along with a smaller proportion of brutal vices than could have belonged to any of the race of Ivan, he was assassinated again, never to be restored to life. But this was not generally believed; it was affirmed among the people that the Czar Demetrius was still in existence; and in fact some four or five other pretenders successively came forward, claiming to be the murdered monarch, and made a vain but often bloody war on Basil Chouiski, who had got possession of the throne. Of these new pretenders M. Merimée narrates the adventures of three.

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