Читать книгу: «International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 7, August 12, 1850», страница 6

Mr. Cumming's exploits in the water are no less exciting than his land adventures. Here is an account of his victory over a hippopotamus, on the banks of the Limpopo river, near the northernmost extremity of his journeyings.

"There were four of them, three cows and an old bull; they stood in the middle of the river, and though alarmed, did not appear aware of the extent of the impending danger. I took the sea-cow next me, and with my first ball I gave her a mortal wound, knocking loose a great plate on the top of her skull. She at once commenced plunging round and round, and then occasionally remained still, sitting for a few minutes on the same spot. On hearing the report of my rifle two of the others took up stream, and the fourth dashed down the river; they trotted along, like oxen, at a smart pace as long as the water was shallow. I was now in a state of very great anxiety about my wounded sea-cow, for I feared that she would get down into deep water, and be lost like the last one; her struggles were still carrying her down stream, and the water was becoming deeper. To settle the matter I accordingly fired a second shot from the bank, which, entering the roof of her skull, passed out through her eye; she then, kept continually splashing round and round in a circle in the middle of the river. I had great fears of the crocodiles, and I did not know that the sea-cow might not attack me. My anxiety to secure her, however, overcame all hesitation; so, divesting myself of my leathers, and armed with a sharp knife. I dashed into the water, which at first took me up to my arm-pits, but in the middle was shallower. As I approached Behemoth her eye looked very wicked. I halted for a moment, ready to dive under the water if she attacked me, but she was stunned, and did not know what she was doing; so, running in upon her, and seizing her short tail, I attempted to incline her course to land. It was extraordinary what enormous strength she still had in the water. I could not guide her in the slightest, and she continued to splash, and plunge, and blow, and make her circular course, carrying me along with her as if I was a fly on her tail. Finding her tail gave me but a poor hold, as the only means of securing my prey, I took out my knife, and cutting two deep parallel incisions through the skin on her rump, and lifting this skin from the flesh, so that I could get in my two hands, I made use of this as a handle; and after some desperate hard work, sometimes pushing and sometimes pulling, the sea-cow continuing her circular course all the time and I holding on at her rump like grim Death, eventually I succeeded in bringing this gigantic and most powerful animal to the bank. Here the Bushman, quickly brought me a stout buffalo-rheim from my horse's neck, which I passed through the opening in the thick skin, and moored Behemoth to a tree. I then took my rifle, and sent a ball through the center of her head, and she was numbered with the dead." There is nothing in "Waterton's Wanderings," or in the "Adventures of Baron Munchausen" more startling than this "Waltz with a Hippopotamus!"

In the all-wise disposition of events, it is perhaps ordained that wild animals should be subdued by man to his use at the expense of such tortures as those described in the work before us. Mere amusement, therefore, is too light a motive for dealing such wounds and death Mr. Cumming owns to; but he had other motives,—besides a considerable profit he has reaped in trophies, ivory, fur, &c., he has made in his book some valuable contributions to the natural history of the animals he wounded and slew.

From Graham's Magazine for August

MANUELA

A BALLAD OF CALIFORNIA

BY BAYARD TAYLOR

 
From the doorway, Manuela, in the sheeny April morn,
Southward looks, along the valley, over leagues of gleaming corn;
Where the mountain's misty rampart like the wall of Eden towers,
And the isles of oak are sleeping on a painted sea of flowers.
All the air is full of music, for the winter rains are o'er,
And the noisy magpies chatter from the budding sycamore;
Blithely frisk unnumbered squirrels, over all the grassy slope;
Where the airy summits brighten, nimbly leaps the antelope.
Gentle eyes of Manuela! tell me wherefore do ye rest
On the oaks' enchanted islands and the flowery ocean's breast?
Tell me wherefore down the valley, ye have traced the highway's mark
Far beyond the belts of timber, to the mountain-shadows dark?
Ah, the fragrant bay may blossom, and the sprouting verdure shine
With the tears of amber dropping from the tassels of the pine.
And the morning's breath of balsam lightly brush her sunny cheek—
Little recketh Manuela of the tales of Spring they speak.
When the Summer's burning solstice on the mountain-harvests glowed,
She had watched a gallant horseman riding down the valley road;
Many times she saw him turning, looking back with parting thrills,
Till amid her tears she lost him, in the shadow of the hills.
Ere the cloudless moons were over, he had passed the Desert's sand.
Crossed the rushing Colorada and the dark Apache Land,
And his laden mules were driven, when the time of rains began.
With the traders of Chihuaha, to the Fair of San Juan.
Therefore watches Manuela—therefore lightly doth she start,
When the sound of distant footsteps seems the beating of her heart;
Not a wind the green oak rustles or the redwood branches stirs,
But she hears the silver jingle of his ringing bit and spurs.
Often, out the hazy distance, come the horsemen, day by day,
But they come not as Bernardo—she can see it, far away;
Well she knows the airy gallop of his mettled alazan,⁵
Light as any antelope upon the Hills of Gavilan.
She would know him mid a thousand, by his free and gallant air;
By the featly-knit sarape,⁶ such as wealthy traders wear;
By his broidered calzoneros⁷ and his saddle, gaily spread,
With its cantle rimmed with silver, and its horn a lion's head.
None like he the light riata⁸ on the maddened bull can throw;
None amid the mountain-canons, track like he the stealthy doe;
And at all the Mission festals, few indeed the revelers are
Who can dance with him the jota, touch with him the gay guitar.
He has said to Manuela, and the echoes linger still
In the cloisters of her bosom, with a secret, tender thrill,
When the hay again has blossomed, and the valley stands in corn,
Shall the bells of Santa Clara usher in the wedding morn.
He has pictured the procession, all in holyday attire,
And the laugh and look of gladness, when they see the distant spire;
Then their love shall kindle newly, and the world be doubly fair,
In the cool delicious crystal of the summer morning air.
Tender eyes of Manuela! what has dimmed your lustrous beam?
'Tis a tear that falls to glitter on the casket of her dream.
Ah, the eye of love must brighten, if its watches would be true,
For the star is falsely mirrored in the rose's drop of dew!
But her eager eyes rekindle, and her breathless bosom stills,
As she sees a horseman moving in the shadow of the hills;
Now in love and fond thanksgiving they may loose their pearly tides—
'Tis the alazan that gallops, 'tis Bernardo's self that rides!
 

From Fraser's Magazine for July

LEDRU ROLLIN

Ledru Rollin is now in his forty-fourth or forty-fifth year, having been born in 1806 or 1807. He is the grandson of the famous Prestidigateur, or Conjurer Comus, who, about four or five-and-forty years ago, was in the acme of his fame. During the Consulate, and a considerable portion of the Empire, Comus traveled from one department of France to the other, and is even known to have extended his journeys beyond the Rhine and the Moselle on one side, and beyond the Rhône and Garonne on the other. Of all the conjurers of his day he was the most famous and the most successful, always, of course, excepting that Corsican conjurer who ruled for so many years the destinies of France. From those who have seen that famous trickster, we have learned that the Charleses, the Alexanders, even the Robert Houdins, were children compared with the magical wonder-worker of the past generation. The fame of Comus was enormous, and his gains proportionate; and when he had shuffled off this mortal coil it was found he had left to his descendants a very ample—indeed, for France, a very large fortune. Of the descendants in a right line, his grandson, Ledru Rollin, was his favorite, and to him the old man left the bulk of his fortune, which, during the minority of Ledru Rollin, grew to a sum amounting to nearly, if not fully, £4,000 per annum.

The scholastic education of the young man who was to inherit this considerable fortune, was nearly completed during the reign of Louis XVIII., and shortly after Charles X. ascended the throne il commençait à faire sur droit, as they phrase it in the pays Latin. Neither during the reign of Louis XVIII., nor indeed now, unless in the exact and physical sciences, does Paris afford a very solid and substantial education. Though the Roman poets and historians are tolerably well studied and taught, yet little attention is paid to Greek literature. The physical and exact sciences are unquestionably admirably taught at the Polytechnique and other schools; but neither at the College of St. Barbe, nor of Henry IV., can a pupil be so well grounded in the rudiments and humanities as in our grammar and public schools. A studious, pains-taking, and docile youth, will, no doubt, learn a great deal, no matter where he has been placed in pupilage; but we have heard from a contemporary of M. Rollin, that he was not particularly distinguished either for his industry or his docility in early life. The earliest days of the reign of Charles X. saw M. Ledru Rollin an étudiant en droit in Paris. Though the schools of law had been re-established during the Consulate pretty much after the fashion in which they existed in the time of Louis the XIV., yet the application of the alumni was fitful and desultory, and perhaps there were no two classes in France, at the commencement of 1825. who were more imbued with the Voltarian philosophy and the doctrines and principles of Rousseau, than the élèves of the schools of law and medicine.

Under a king so sceptical and voluptuous, so much of a philosophie and phyrronéste, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society—to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes: and not all the lately acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the efforts of the Jesuits could restrain or control the tendencies of the étudiants en droit. What the law-students were antecedently and subsequent to 1825, we know from the Physiologie de l'Homme de Loi; and it is not to be supposed that M. Ledru Rollin, with more ample pecuniary means at command, very much differed from his fellows. After undergoing a three years' course of study, M. Rollin obtained a diploma as a licencié en droit, and commenced his career as stagiare somewhere about the end of 1826 or the beginning of 1827. Toward the close of 1829, or in the first months of 1830, he was, we believe, placed on the roll of advocates; so that he was called to the bar, or, as they say in France, received an advocate, in his twenty-second or twenty-third year.

The first years of an advocate, even in France, are generally passed in as enforced an idleness as in England. Clients come not to consult the greenhorn of the last term; nor does any avoué among our neighbors, any more than any attorney among ourselves, fancy that an old head is to be found on young shoulders. The years 1830 and 1831 were not marked by any oratorical effort of the author of the Decline of England; nor was it till 1832 that, being then one of the youngest of the bar of Paris, he prepared and signed an opinion against the placing of Paris in a state of siege consequent on the insurrections of June. Two years after he prepared a memoir; or factum, on the affair of the Rue Transonain, and defended Dupoty, accused of complicité morale, a monstrous doctrine invented by the Attorney-General Hebert. From 1834 to 1841 he appeared as counsel in nearly all the cases of émeute or conspiracy where the individuals prosecuted were Republicans, or quasi-Republicans. Meanwhile, he had become the proprietor and rédacteur en chef of the Reforme newspaper, a political journal of an ultra-Liberal—indeed of a Republican—complexion, which was then called of extreme opinions, as he had previously been editor of a legal newspaper called Journal du Palais. La Reforme had been originally conducted by Godefroy Cavaignac, the brother of the general, who continued editor till the period of the fatal illness which preceded his death. The defense of Dupoty, tried and sentenced under the ministry of Thiers to five years' imprisonment, as a regicide, because a letter was found open in the letter-box of the paper of which he was editor, addressed to him by a man said to be implicated in the conspiracy of Quenisset, naturally brought M. Rollin into contact with many of the writers in La Reforme; and these persons, among others Guinard Arago, Etienne Arago, and Flocon, induced him to embark some portion of his fortune in the paper. From one step he was led on to another, and ultimately became one of the chief—indeed, if not the chief proprietor. The speculation was far from successful in a pecuniary sense, but M. Rollin, in furtherance of his opinions, continued for some years to disburse considerable sums in the support of the journal. By this he no doubt increased his popularity and his credit with the Republican party, but it cannot be denied that he very materially injured his private fortune. In the earlier portion of his career, M. Rollin was, it is known, not indisposed to seek a seat in the Chamber, under the auspices of M. Barrot, but subsequently to his connection with the Reforme, he had himself become thoroughly known to the extreme party in the departments, and on the death of Gamier Pagès the elder, was elected in 1841 for Le Mans, in La Sarthe.

In addressing the electors, after his return, M. Rollin delivered a speech much more Republican than Monarchical. For this he was sentenced to four months' imprisonment, but the sentence was appealed against and annulled on a technical ground, and the honorable member was ultimately acquitted by the Cour d'Assizes of Angers.

The parliamentary début of M. Rollin took place in 1842. His first speech was delivered on the subject of the secret-service money. The elocution was easy and flowing, the manner oratorical, the style somewhat turgid and bombastic. But in the course of the session M. Rollin improved, and his discourse on the modification of the criminal law, on other legal subjects, and on railways, were more sober specimens of style. In 1843 and 1844 M. Rollin frequently spoke; but though his speeches were a good deal talked of outside the walls of the Chamber, they produced little effect within it. Nevertheless, it was plain to every candid observer that he possessed many of the requisites of the orator—a good voice, a copious flow of words, considerable energy and enthusiasm, a sanguine temperament and jovial and generous disposition. In the sessions of 1845-46, M. Rollin took a still more prominent part. His purse, his house in the Rue Tournon, his counsels and advice, were all placed at the service of the men of the movement; and by the beginning of 1847 he seemed to be acknowledged by the extreme party as its most conspicuous and popular member. Such indeed was his position when the electoral reform banquets, on a large scale, began to take place in the autumn of 1847. These banquets, promoted and forwarded by the principal members of the opposition to serve the cause of electoral reform, were looked on by M. Rollin and his friends in another light. While Odillon Barrot, Duvergier d'Haurunne, and others, sought by means of them to produce an enlarged constituency, the member for Sarthe looked not merely to functional, but to organic reform—not merely to an enlargement of the constituency, but to a change in the form of the government. The desire of Barrot was à la vérité à la sincerité des institutions conquises en Juillet 1830; whereas the desire of Rollin was, à l'amélioration des classes laborieuses; the one was willing to go on with the dynasty of Louis Philippe and the Constitution of July improved by diffusion and extension of the franchise, the other looked to a democratic and social republic. The result is now known. It is not here our purpose to go over the events of the Revolution of February 1848, but we may be permitted to observe, that the combinations by which that event was effected were ramified and extensive, and were long silently and secretly in motion.

The personal history of M. Rollin, since February 1848, is well-known and patent to all the world. He was the ame damnée of the Provisional Government—the man whose extreme opinions, intemperate circulars, and vehement patronage of persons professing the political creed of Robespierre—indisposed all moderate men to rally around the new system. It was in covering Ledru Rollin with the shield of his popularity that Lamartine lost his own, and that he ceased to be the political idol of a people of whom he must ever be regarded as one of the literary glories and illustrations. On the dissolution of the Provisional Government, Ledru Rollin constituted himself one of the leaders of the movement party. In ready powers of speech and in popularity no man stood higher; but he did not possess the power of restraining his followers or of holding them in hand, and the result was, that instead of being their leader he became their instrument. Fond of applause, ambitious of distinction, timid by nature, destitute of pluck, and of that rarer virtue moral courage, Ledru Rollin, to avoid the imputation of faint-heartedness, put himself in the foreground, but the measures of his followers being ill-taken, the plot in which he was mixed up egregiously failed, and he is now in consequence an exile in England.

GENERAL GARIBALDI

MR. FILIPANTE gives the following notice of this Italian revolutionary leader in a communication to the Evening Post. "His exertions in behalf of the liberal movement in Italy have been indefatigable. As active as he was courageous, he was among the first to take up arms against Austrian tyranny, and the last to lay them down. Even when the triumvirate at Rome had been overthrown, and the most ardent spirits despaired of the republic, Garibaldi and his noble band of soldiers refused to yield; they maintained a vigorous resistance to the last, and only quitted the ground when the cause was so far gone that their own success would have been of no general advantage.

"The General is about forty years of age. He was in early life an officer in the Sardinian service, but, engaging in an unsuccessful revolt against the government of Charles Albert, he was compelled to leave his native land. He fled to Montevideo, where he fought with distinction in the wars against Rosas. At the breaking out of the late revolution he returned. His military capacities being well known, he was entrusted with a command; and throughout the war his services were most efficient. He defeated the allied troops of Austria, France, and Naples, in several battles; his name, in fact, became a terror, and when the republic fell, and he was compelled to retire to the Appenines, the invaders felt that his return would be more formidable than any other event.

"From Italy he went to Morocco, where he has since lived. But his friends, desiring that his great energies should be actively employed, have offered him the command of a merchant ship, which he has accepted. He will, therefore, hereafter be engaged in the peaceful pursuits of commerce, unless his country should again require his exertions."