safely say there would be no excesses. | hairs sticking out in all directions. In As a beginning, soldiers were quartered the present day, a smooth surface is given on Fontaine to an extent beyond endur- to tissues by a process of singeing over ance, and the poor man could see noth- fiery hot rollers. Fontaine did not know ing but a determination to bring him to anything of this process, but he conjecruin. Taunton was a place in which he tured that singeing would effect the recould no longer do any good as a retail quired smoothness. "I recollected," he dealer, and so far he was resolved to wind says, "that when I was at school, I had up his affairs. Being occupied during often gone to warm myself in a hatter's the day teaching French and Latin, he shop, and I used to watch the process of was obliged to steal many hours of the burning off the long hairs from the hats night to find time to make an exact with a blazing wisp of straw, so I thought inventory of all he possessed. To dis- that a similar plan might be adopted for charge his debts, he sold off his stuffs to remedying the defect in my calimanco." wholesale merchants, and the residue of He thus fell upon the very process which his effects was disposed of to a purchaser has now attained so much perfection. for four hundred pounds, which he re- How Fontaine laughed with joy when by tained as a little leaven, to begin business means of a burning wisp of straw, folin some new line when opportunity lowed by a proper degree of pressure, the offered. calimanco came out beautiful, about as good as that of Norwich! He sold lots of it at Exeter at half-a-crown a yard, realizing a hundred per cent. of profit after all expenses were paid. We do not know that there is anything finer than this as an instance of ingenuity and perseverance in the history of British manufactures.

For several months his only employment was keeping a school, by which, however, he did not make quite enough to maintain his family, now consisting of several children. Thoughtful and ingenions, he pondered on the probability of success as a manufacturer of a new kind of worsted stuff, called calimanco, for which Norwich had become celebrated. Soon Fontaine had fifteen looms at In a spirit of enterprise, he determined to work on his calimanco, and to all appearmake an attempt to imitate the article, ance he was on the road to fortune. He even though ignorant of the requsite me- got discouraged, however, by attempts to chanical knowledge. How distressing to withdraw his workmen, and to rival his have to record that the authorities of an manufacture. In fact, he was too suscepEnglish country town should have had tible on this score, for the world is wide the despicable meanness to oppress a man enough for everybody, and he ought to with so noble a spirit of self-reliance and have held on in his course. With charindustry! Meanly tyrannized over, Fon-acteristic unsettledness, he became weary taine was not to be baffled. "I engaged," of the business, and contemplated emisays he, "a weaver for my experimental gration to Ireland. We let him tell what attempt, who was out of employment, and was apparently very docile. I made all the machinery, I put it up with my own hands, and spent a couple of hours every day trying to instruct him. This went on for three months, altering the threads and machinery for new trials about once a fortnight, and still not an inch of the desired fabric was produced; and I was paying the weaver his full wages all the time."

ensued in his own words. "Seeing that I had now made one thousand pounds in the course of three years, I thought I would leave the place, and try whether I could not find a French church in want of a minister. I knew that there were many French Protestant refugees in Ireland, so I went to Dublin to make inquiries. I was there recommended to go to Cork, and I accordingly proceeded thither, and found there were several French The attempt to manufacture calimanco families settled there who were very dewas like to be abortive, when by good sirous to have a minister." As a result luck a young man with some skill in the of this expedition, Fontaine removed in art was lighted upon, and employed. Af- 1694 with his family to Cork, where he ter no little trouble with the imperfect set up as a French Protestant preacher; mechanism, this young craftsman suc- but the emoluments being nil, he continceeded in making several yards of stuff ued to dabble in yarns, dye-stuffs, and in the day. There yet remained a serious manufacturing industry. Preaching, indrawback. The stuff produced was like deed, was his favourite pursuit, for no calimanco in substance, but not in finish; man had a more earnest desire to be useful it was rough on the surface, with great in expounding the gospel message. His

W. C.

manufacture was taken up only as a means glory of England, the kindly home of op of livelihood. There is some historical pressed nationalities. interest in his proceedings, for they afford a glimpse of the social changes arising from the introduction of French refugees into these islands.

From The Spectator.

THE LATE EMPEROR'S SUPERSTITION.

66

At Cork, M. Fontaine was at the height of his ambition. He was an admired preacher, and he gained from his small EVERYONE knew, by general rumour at manufactory ample support for his family. | least, that the late Emperor of the This state of things was too good to last. French, with all his longheadedness and Dissensions broke out in the congrega- power of slow, tenacious reflection, was a tion, and considering himself ill-treated, superstitious man, who profoundly bethe hitherto too confiding pastor resigned lieved that his uncle watched over his his office. Some mercantile adventures destinies and protected his career. But were now tried, but they only brought the publication, this week of his will, loss and vexation. As a finishing calam- made in 1865, is much the most authentic ity, the British parliament, in its then evidence accessible to us of the depth of mistaken policy, passed an act forbidding this superstition. In it he declares posi- . the export of woollen manufactures from tively, "One must think that from the Ireland, by which the luckless Fontaine height of Heaven those whom you have was adroitly ruined. What hand could loved look down upon you and protect he turn to now? Fishing, and exporting you. It is the soul of my mighty uncle the produce to Spain, occurred to him as that has always inspired and sustained a grand idea. With this project in view, me." And again, "As to my son, let him Fontaine removed with his family and keep as a talisman the seal which I wore the wreck of his worldly possessions to attached to my watch, and which I got Bear Haven, where he rented the farms from my mother; let him preserve with for his fishery. care all that I have inherited from the Emperor my uncle, and let him be assured that my heart and my soul remain with him." In a will so short, which would not occupy forty lines of this journal, and in which only the wishes to which the Emperor attached the most significance are enumerated at all, the solemn mention of this belief in the angelic guardianship exercised on his behalf by his uncle, and the injunction to his son to keep as a talisman the seal which he himself had had from his mother, prove that these impressions were not in the Emperor's view transient fancies to which now and then he was able to attach a certain half-playful importance, but that they were deeply cherished superstitions, superstitions of which he was so far from being ashamed, that he wished to give them all the emphasis of deliberate registration in an imperial testament, tament certain to be made public, and, had he died on the throne, to be made public at a moment full of gravity for the career of his son. Nor can it well be that the Emperor wished to pose before the people of France as entertaining a superstition of this kind, if he did not really entertain it. It is certainly not one of the kind of beliefs which it would be the proper imperial rôle to counterfeit; it suggests too completely the conscious subordination of the Emperor to his un

In this new enterprise, with all his diligence, he was unsuccessful, and, to add to his misfortunes, he was pillaged and cheated by neighbours in a thousand indirect ways. As a climax, his house was attacked by privateers, against whom he for a time carried on a war for bare existence. On one occasion he did the state some service by his courageous defence, for which he had the good fortune to be rewarded with a pension of five shillings a day. There is something melancholy in what follows.

Broken down in health, though not so in spirit, and relying on his pension, Fontaine removed to Dublin, rented a house in Stephen's Green, and there for several years carried on a school for teaching French, Latin, and Greek. In 1721, he lost his wife, and the shock so greatly distressed him that he gave up his school. At this point, his personal narrative draws to a close, and all that follows is an account of his sons, several of whom emigrated to Virginia, and founded families which rose to distinction in the colony. We cannot speak of the work embracing an account of the family as artistic in construction; but it is valuable as shewing us the struggles of one of those honest and ingenious foreigners who, driven by short-sighted persecution from their own country, contributed to the

-a tes

cle, as well as a belief neither sufficiently apparently so much a general tendency to consistent in tone with the dutiful Cathol- superstition which was at the basis of icism officially expressed in the last sen- Louis Napoleon's particular illusion, but tence of his will, nor with the "enlight- that it was the heat and intensity of imened" views of his more radical adhe- agination with which he dwelt upon the rents, to admit of the hypothesis that he fact of his relationship to his uncle, and wrote these clauses of his will for the on the political consequences which this sake of any effect they might be supposed relationship might involve, that led to the to have on the people of France. We are superstition. In short, the illusion was disposed to think that even in his last ex- the over-growth of a particular vein of ile, when his sainted uncle's protection intense thought in which any politician of had so entirely failed him, he would not the same birth and origin would necessahave hesitated to reaffirm these same su- rily have more or less indulged, and not a perstitions. Indeed, a man who trusted mere individual instance of a generally so much to the angelic guardianship of superstitious temper. Louis Napoleon's an Emperor who had completely broken superstition was due to the enormous exdown in his own career, would hardly aggeration of a shrewd and sagacious withdraw his confidence because the tu- conviction, that his relationship to the telary power had also failed to save the First Emperor was a mine of unworked prestige of his protégé from a catastrophe power which he could work if he pleased. of a similar, though more humiliating na- It was not the wild exaggeration of a ture. It would be hardly reasonable to germ of religious feeling, but the wild expect a man even from the other world exaggeration of a perfectly correct worldto show more sagacity in overruling the ly appreciation of the power that lay for destiny of another than he had shown in him in the connection with the great Emruling his own. Indeed Bishop Butler peror. There are superstitions which would have constructed a very ingenious come of religious feeling, superstitions argument to show that the same moral in which the impression exaggerated is and intellectual defects which showed a more or less religious impression, like themselves in Napoleon I.'s career as religious melancholy generally, and the Emperor and General, might have been religious visions of such a dreamer as expected a priori to show themselves Swedenborg; and again, there are suagain in his career as guardian angel. perstitions which come of mere overWe believe we may assume, then, that concentration of thought on some these superstitious beliefs of the late Em- half-felt and half-perceived chance of peror were not only a real part of his worldly advancement. Thus, Macbeth's mind, but were very deeply ingrained in superstition was evidently little more it, were of the very warp of his character. than the dreamy exaggeration of the There would seem to be something murderous ambition in his own mind. strange in the admission of what may be And Louis Napoleon's was, we suspect, called such an intellectual taint in the nothing more than the exaltation of his character of one who was able to gain the own profound belief that the heir of the position which Napoleon III. did gain in great Emperor ought to find in that EmEurope, and it will seem not perhaps the peror an immense store of political power less strange if we hold that it was in great and the occasion for a brilliant destiny. measure by virtue of this taint and in This notion, long entertained and cherconsequence of it, that he was able to ished and dreamt upon, led no doubt to reach the height he did. For no one can a perfectly sincere conviction that the really doubt that but for Napoleon III's late Emperor was the actual author of all firm belief in superhuman influences aid- his nephew's highest dreams, most ambiing his plans, he hardly would have ven-tious plans, and most successful political tured either on the successful or on the ventures. Nor apparently would his mere silly enterprises by which he endeavoured to gain the French Throne. That a great part of the moving force of Napoleon III's career was in his superstition, the Emperor's will seems to us to place almost beyond doubt. And yet it will seem, as we have said, remarkable that a man of the Emperor's great power should have been the victim of this strange kind of illusion, till we observe that it was not

belief in the power of his birth have been adequate to qualify him for his actual career, without the superstitious extension which it continually took in his mind as the working of a potent will external to himself, and wielding powers which he could not wield. This unsafe and indeed in its essence insane exaggeration of his sense of the political value of his birth, had this advantage for him, that it gave

and that grander and deeper kind of superstition which comes of religious awe and wonder. The Emperor seems to have had exceedingly little of this. He regarded himself not as the servant of Heaven, but as the protégé of the first Buonaparte. What he was to do in the world was not God's will, but the will of the "Exile of St. Helena." He worshipped at second-hand; was the instrument of an instrument; and felt not that he was serving Man as a Divine tool, but that he was working out the uncompleted thought of the coarse genius with whom he claimed relationship. Never was there less of that humility, awe, and wonder which are at the basis both of true wor

him the sense of an unlimited power to tween a superstition of this kind, -vulfall back upon, whereas the sane convic-gar in origin, whatever it be in manner, tion would have given him no such assurance, but would have told him that there were very well marked limits to the strength it lent him, that it was a mere opportunity for his use, not an independent force on which he could lean. Of course it is never safe for men to believe they have a force behind them which they have not got; but it does seem that some slow natures like the late Emperor's need this sort of false stimulus to give them staying-power, if they are to be anything great at all as men of action. Louis Napoleon in our view was not naturally at all constituted for a man of action. He was a slow, hesitating dreamer, of considerable power and lucidity, who had no gifts for action; but just as nature some-ship, and often also of that extra-belief or times seems to go out of her way to pro- Aberglaube, which, according to Mr. Arvide a compensation even by a sort of nold, constitutes superstition, than in the monstrosity for a great deficiency, just as late Emperor's heated illusions about the she sometimes gives a dwarf arms of pre-protection of his demi-god uncle. It was ternatural strength and length, so Louis the worship of the Roman world for the Napoleon was in great measure made into divus Augustus over again in a cruder a man of action from a mere dreamer by and somewhat baser form. The late Emthe growth of the morbid superstition peror's mind could not reach, and did not which led him to find in his uncle's de- care to reach, the throne of the supreme parted soul a sort of fetish that impelled Omnipotence at all. He stopped at the him into the thick of the contest. Com-best idol he could form for himself of the moner men have a milder degree of the Divine Ruler, - namely, the caricature same kind of superstition. When the contained in that coarse, vigorous, fertileMr. Whitbread who gave rise to Can-minded, supremely self-willed incarnation ning's celebrated couplet, recalled solemnly to the House of Commons the fact that the day was sacred to him because it was at once the day of the foundation of the Brewery and of his father's death, - whereupon Canning wrote down, — This day I still hail with a smile and a sigh, For his beer with an e, and his bier with an i, - Mr. Whitbread had evidently been unconsciously engaged in making a mild sort of fetish of the founder of his own fortunes, precisely similar in kind to that which Louis Napoleon, with a more grandiose imagination, made of his mighty uncle. The Emperor's egotistic exaggeration of the importance of a relationship which had transmitted hardly any hereditary quality for empire to him, was nevertheless a superstition the constant brooding on which made him into an emperor, as a queen-bee is made by being fed on a particular kind of food into a queen. But the superstition was essentially vulgar in origin, though taken up into a grandiose nature capable of a certain loftiness of manner and phrase.

In fact, there is no real connection be

of selfish ambition who had founded the Democratic Empire of France and his own house. It was a poor, pinchbeck kind of worship, and led, as such kinds of worship do, into superstitions that are at least as ruinous in the end, as they are sometimes, by accident and for a time, mines of political force.

From The Spectator. THE PROGRESS OF THE SPANISH REVO

LUTION.

SPAIN is evidently in for much more than a series of changes of goverment. She is undergoing, nearly a century later, something very like the same process that France underwent in her great throes of 1789 and the following years, but undergoing it in a milder form, milder partly on account of the familiarity of the mind of Europe with the character of the social movements which created so much wonder, enthusiasm, and terror then, partly on account of the more phlegmatic nature of the Spaniard, which

does not seem to take the malady of sus- curse of France does not seem to take picion nearly so violently as the nature root easily in Spain. The danger rather of the Frenchman. There was as De is an apathy too great to admit of the Tocqueville very well brought out in those people taking any side definitely, so as latest chapters of his book on the French to render organization possible. As the Revolution which Mr. Henry Reeve has French have always had a genius for just added to the second edition of his centralization,- which it is a pity, by the excellent translation a universal expec- way, they did not manage to impart more tation of completely new social forces and effectually to the Spaniards during their new possibilities of government, pervad- occupation of Spain, the Spaniards aping Europe for years before the French pear to have always had and still to have, Revolution, an expectation which added a taste for decentralization, and the fear enormously to the exciting character of is that this will so favour disorganization that great event. Throughout Europe as to render the process of new political men believed that they were on the eve crystallization difficult, tardy, and inadeof changes in which society 'would be quate. The example of Madrid has none quite transfigured, and this belief, which, of the fascination for the other great curiously enough, pervaded most com- cities of Spain, for Barcelona, and Seville, pletely not those classes which were most and Malaga, that the example of Paris miserable, but those which were far above has for Lyons, and Marseilles, and Bourwant and living in luxury, stimulated deaux. This indeed, is the argument for every wave of emotion and passion which that "Federal" Republic which is now spread over France, and intoxicated the apparently in the ascendant. But this actors in those great scenes. Spain has fact makes the political future of Spain at least the advantage that the changes even more uncertain than the political which her political and social life seem future of France ever was. Spain is like destined to undergo are no longer waited a ship built in cellular compartments, less for with awe, as if they were the results easy to wreck as a whole, more easy to of the inspiration of a sort of divine Muse. break up into distinct parts. Now that The excitement of the drama has been in the Army is in active decomposition, and great degree discounted by the history of that the voice of the only actual authority the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. left, is favourable to Federalism rather Spain knows that no golden era of society than unification, it becomes a very diffiis to be expected from any changes, how-cult matter indeed to anticipate the course ever fundamental; that the alternative of political change. between anarchy, and strict taxation under some form of government, is the only alternative to be hoped for; that the most enthusiastic republics have once and again been much severer sufferers than even despotic States; that if a Federal Republic is to succeed, the Federal Republic must not hope to restore a social Paradise, but must drill its troops, impose discipline, resist riot, adjust taxation, and enforce justice. There is now, thanks to France, no vast illusion, no rainbow of imaginary hope, to dazzle the eyes even of ignorant Spain. There may be great changes for the better, or great changes for the worse,- and for a time, at least, we fear the latter are the more likely, but there will be no such wild intoxication as alone rendered the great French agony of hope and fear possible. And fortunately, too, Spain takes differences of political opinion easier than France. Carlists, Alfonsists, Radicals, and Republicans, get on very fairly together, except during the crisis of a physical struggle. That "fear" which M. Gambetta justly tells us is the great

It seems, however, from the accounts, that the actual Government is not only not in fault for suppressing the Permanent Committee appointed by the National Assembly before its separation, but that it was almost compelled to take that course. A rebellion had been apparently organized by the friends of the Permanent Committee against the Government. The Government was called upon by the Permanent Committee to revise the course decided on by the National Assembly, to recall that body and put off the election of a Constituent Cortes. An armed demonstration, it is said by "Monarchical" Volunteers, was made in favour of this policy, so that it became a question of life and death between the Permanent Committee and the Government. If the Permanent Committee had won, there would have been a coup d'état and a reaction. But the victory of the Government only means the dissolution of the Permanent Committee. The unitary party, some of them Reactionists including apparently Marshal Serranosome of them Radicals, clearly demanded