thou stale and common drudge

'Tween man and man: but thou, thou meagre lead,

Which rather threat'nest than doth promise aught,

Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence,

And here choose I; joy be the consequence!"

I may just observe, that in Troilus and Cressida, Act II. Sc. 2., the quarto copies have printed pale for stale, which is corrected in the folio.

S. W. Singer.

EPISODE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Mademoiselle de Sombreuil and the Glass of Blood.

"... In the Abbaye, Sombreuil, the venerable Governor of the Invalides, was brought up to the table, and Maillard had pronounced the words 'à la Force,' when the Governor's daughter, likewise a prisoner, rushed through pikes and sabres, clasped her old father in her arms so tightly that none could separate her from him, and made such piteous cries and prayers that some were touched. She vowed that her father was no aristocrat, that she herself hated aristocrats. But to put her to a further proof, or to indulge their bestial caprices, the ruffians presented to her a cup full of blood, and said 'Drink! drink of the blood of the aristocrats, and your father shall be saved!' The lady took the horrible cup, and drank and the monsters kept their promise."

Thus, in relating the massacres of September, writes the author of Knight's Pictorial Hist. of Engl. (Reign of Geo. III., vol. iii. p. 160.); and thus tradition has handed down to us this most horrible episode of the first French revolution; one which made so deep an impression on my own mind, that the scene was always uppermost whenever the atrocities committed during that eventful period of French history were under consideration. This impression, I am glad to say, has now been removed by M. Granier de Cassagnac, who (Histoire du Directoire) states that the tradition is not founded on fact; and as it is the first denial of the event which has come under my notice, I send you the substance of the evidence which M. de Cassagnac brings forward in support of his statement:—

1. The Marquise de Fausse-Lendry, in her work, Quelques-uns des Fruits amers de la Révolution, does not make any allusion to the fact, although she was in the same chamber with Mlle. de Sombreuil, and relates her heroic devotion to her father.

2. Peltier, who was in Paris at the time, and published his Histoire de la Révolution du 10 Août early in 1793, does not say a word as to the occurrence.

3. The report of Piette, which was drawn up in Mlle. de Sombreuil's favour, and from details supplied by herself, is completely silent on the matter.

4. Being arrested with her father, and her younger brother, Mlle. de Sombreuil was taken to the Prison de la Bourbe on the 31st of December, 1793. One of the prisoners thus notices the event in his journal:

"Du 11 Nivôse, an II.

"L'on amena aussi a famille Sombreuil, le père, le fils, et la fille: tout le monde sait que cette courageuse citoyenne se précipita, dans les journées du mois de Septembre, entre son père et le fer des assassins, et parvint à l'arracher de leurs mains. Depuis, sa tendresse n'avait fait que s'accroître, et il n'est sorte de soins qu'elle ne prodiguât à son père, malgré les horribles convulsions qui la tourmentaient tous les mois, pendant trois jours, depuis cette lamentable époque. Quand elle parut au salon, tous les yeux se fixèrent sur elle et se remplirent de larmes."—Tableau des Prisons de Paris sous Robespierre, p. 93.

Here again, not a word about the glass of blood, although the narrative was written at no very distant period from the occurrences of September.

Maton de la Varennes, in his Hist. particulière des Evènemens, written subsequent to the events of Fructidor, year V., is enthusiastic in his praise of Mlle. de S.'s devotion; but says not a word as to the horrible sacrifice by which she is represented to have purchased her father's life.

The tradition is found for the first time in print in a note to Legouvé's Mérite des Femmes, which appeared in 1801; and the subject has been consecrated by the pen of the exiled poet Victor Hugo, in an ode to Mlle. de Sombreuil. Since then M. Thiers, without further looking into the matter, has given place to it in his Hist. de la Révolut. Française:

Victor Hugo's lines are the following:—

The subsequent history of this unfortunate family was this. M. de Sombreuil and his youngest son perished on the scaffold, the 10th June, 1794. The elder brother, Charles de Sombreuil, was shot at Vannes in June, 1795, after the Quiberon expedition. Leaving prison and France, after the 9th Thermidor, Mlle. de S. married an emigrant, the Comte de Villelume, who, under the Restoration, became governor of the Invalides at Avignon, at which place she died in 1823.

Philip S. King.

MILTON INDEBTED TO TACITUS.

There is perhaps nothing in "Lycidas" which has so commended itself to the memory and lips of men, as that exquisite strain of tender regret and pathetic despondency in which occur the lines—

It is with no desire to impair our admiration of these noble lines that I would ask, if that graceful glorifying of Fame as "the last infirmity of noble minds" was not suggested by the profound remark of Tacitus, in his character of the stoical republican, Helvidius Priscus (Hist., l. iv. c. 6.):

"Erant, quibus appetentior famæ videretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriæ novissima exuitur."

The great Englishman has condensed and intensified the expression of the concise and earnest Roman. This is one of those delightful obligations which repay themselves: Milton has more than returned the favour of the borrowed thought by lending it a heightened expression.

Thomas H. Gill.

Minor Notes.

Note by Warton on Aristotle's "Poetics."—Some of your correspondents having expressed a wish that the MS. remarks of eminent scholars, when met with by your readers, might be communicated to the world through your pages, I beg to send you the following observations, signed J. Warton, which I have found on the blank leaf of a copy of Aristotle's Poetics (edit. of Ruddimannos, Edinb. 1731):—

"To attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested this treatise, would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a skill in geometry without having studied Euclid. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters, wherein he has pointed out the properest methods of exciting terror and pity, convince us that he was intimately acquainted with those objects which most forcibly affect the heart. The prime excellence of this precious treatise is the scholastic precision and philosophical