treaty, similar to what my Lord Brougham negotiated lately with Lord Londonderry, viz. let-be for let-be—but if wounded, he is dangerous in the extreme. You should always, therefore, hunt him in couples, and have a shot in reserve, or a goodly cudgel, ready to apply to the root of his nose, where he is as vulnerable as Achilles was in the heel. Some ludicrous stories are told of bear-hunting; for Bruin is rather a humorist in his way. A friend of mine, with his surveying party, ten men in all, once treed a very large one; they immediately cut clubs, and set to work to fell the tree. Bruin seemed inclined to maintain his position, till the tree began to lean, when he slid down to about fifteen feet from the ground, and then clasped his fore-paws over his head and let himself tumble amongst them. Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert; he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front, and escaped with two or three thumps on the rump, which he valued not one pin. When once they have killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear, you will never keep one hog; for they will come back till they have taken the last of them;—they will even invade the sacred precincts of the hog-sty. An Irishman in the Newcastle district once caught a bear flagrante delicto, dragging a hog over the walls of the pew. Pat, instead of assailing the bear, thought only of securing his property; so he jumped into the sty, and seized the pig by the tail. Bruin having hold of the ears, they had a dead pull for possession, till the whillilooing of Pat, joined to the plaintive notes of his protegé, brought a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest in Pat's favour by knocking the assailant on the head.—A worthy friend of mine, of the legal profession, and now high in office in the colony, once, when a young man, lost his way in the woods, and seeing a high stump, clambered up it with the hope of looking around him. While standing on the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and he was precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond the power of extricating himself. Whilst bemoaning here his hard fate, and seeing no prospect before him, save that of a lingering death by starvation, the light above his head was suddenly excluded, and his view of the sky, his only prospect, shut out by the intervention of a dense medium, and by and by he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon him. With the courage of despair he seized fast hold of Bruin behind, and by this means was dragged once more into upper day. Nothing, surely, but the instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin thus to extricate his distressed brother.

THE CHOLERA IN INDIA.

Captain Skinner, in one of his Excursions, says arriving at the village of Lugrassa, I thought there was an appearance of desolation about it. I saw no people within the village, and observed merely a few stragglers about the fields. Four or five men had died during the last week, and some before: such mortality would depopulate a mountain city in a month. Nothing can be more melancholy than a pestilence among these fragments of humanity: cut off from their fellow-mountaineers by high ridges, these isolated little communities are left to perish unknown and unmourned.

I have learned from some natives, who have lately been at Badri Nath, that that neighbourhood also has been ravaged by the cholera morbus. They cannot check the disease: it seizes them in all situations—in their houses—in the fields; and in a very few hours they are its victims. As the most hardy fall first, the infants, deprived of their protectors, should they escape the infection, must die of starvation. The cattle are abandoned, the crops neglected, and every traveller shuns the "city of the plague:" and even that precaution is no security. Pilgrims die in agony on the road: to enter one of these little vales is indeed to enter "the valley of the shadow of death."—The inhabitants resign themselves to their destiny: the same fate would await them in a neighbouring village, perhaps, should they seek refuge there. They cling to their homes to the last gasp; and the survivor of a once happy people, where all were gay but a few days before, has to steal to his grave unnoticed, or roam elsewhere for human intercourse. Could the vision of "the Last Man" be ever realized, it would be in the highest habitations of the Himalaya mountains; for there many a little world is left for its last man to mourn over!

NEW BOOKS

CHARLEMAGNE.

[The appearance of a Life of Charlemagne in these days of cobweb literature may probably be regarded as a phenomenon by booksellers. Whatever their feelings may be upon the matter, we are inclined to regard it as a valuable contribution to our substantial literature. The author, Mr. G.P.R. James has hitherto produced no work that can at all compete with the present in our esteem. He has shown his aptitude for research in three or four semi-historical novels, which will be forgotten, while his Life of Charlemagne will be allowed place with our standard historians. He has wisely left the novel to the titled folks of the Burlington-street press, and betaken himself to better studies, that will not only gain him a name, but maintain him a proud distinction, in the literature of his country. We trust the public—for, in these days, every man is a Mecaenas—will reward his industry and talent, and thus encourage him to proceed in his design—to illustrate the History of France by the Lives of her Great Men; each volume, though forming a distinct work, being connected with that which preceded it, by a view of the intervening period. The portion before us has our most cordial approbation and recommendation.

Of Charlemagne, the greatest man of the middle ages, no accurate life had ever been written. Mr. James tells us that, in his work, he believes he has corrected some of the errors to be found in former statements, and has added a few facts to the information which the world before possessed upon the subject. The Life is preceded by an Historical Introduction, from A.D. 476, to A.D. 749, recounting the state of Gaul from a little previous to the final overthrow of the Roman Empire, to the birth of Charlemagne.

The precise birthplace of Charlemagne is unknown;⁷ neither have any records come down to us of his education, nor any particulars of those early years which are generally ornamented by the imagination of after biographers, even when the subject of their writing has left his infancy in obscurity. The year of his birth, however, seems to have been A.D. 742, about seven years before his father, Pepin, the Brief, assumed the name of king. The first act of Charlemagne—a task which combined both dignity and beneficence—was to meet, as deputy for his father, the chief of the Roman Church, and to conduct him with honour to his father's presence. Charlemagne was then scarcely twelve years of age. This is the first occasion on which we find the great man mentioned in history; "but," observes Mr. James, "the children of the Francs were trained in their very early years to robust and warlike exercises; and there is every reason to believe that great precocity, both of bodily and mental powers, fitted the prince for the office which was intrusted to him by his father."

Our admiration of the style in which Mr. James has executed his task almost tempts us to travel with the reader, page by page, through the volume. Our time will not allow this task; though we must be less chary of praise than of our space. The great events are told with elegant simplicity; the language is neither overloaded with ornament, nor made to abound with well-rounded terms, at the sacrifice of