The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861. Various

him no real responsibility for evil or for good.

      It was in this room that he passed the greater part of the time that was not given to his farm or his guests. I never entered it without finding him at his desk, with his pen or a book in hand. His correspondence was so extensive that he was always obliged to keep a secretary, though a large portion of his letters were written with his own hand. He wrote rapidly in fact, though not rapidly to the eye; and you were surprised, in seeing his hand move over the paper, to find how soon it reached the bottom of the sheet, and how closely it filled it up. His handwriting was clear and distinct, neither decidedly French nor decidedly English,—like all his habits and opinions, formed early and never changed. I have letters of his to my grandfather, written during the Revolution, and letters of his to myself, written fifty years after it, in which it is almost impossible to trace the difference between the old man and the young one. English he seemed to write as readily as French, although a strong Gallicism would every now and then slip from his pen, as it slipped from his tongue. "I had to learn in a hurry," said he, giving me one day the history of his English studies. "I began on my passage out, as soon as I got over my sea-sickness, and picked up the rest in camp. I was compelled to write and talk, and so I learned to write and talk. The officers were very kind and never laughed at me. After the peace, Colonel Tarleton came over to Paris, and was presented to the King one day when I happened to be at Court. The King asked him how I spoke English. 'I cannot say how he speaks it, Sire,' said the Colonel, 'but I occasionally had the good-luck to pick up some of his letters that were going the wrong way, and I can assure your Majesty that they were very well written.'"

      His valet was an old soldier, who had served through the Peninsular War, and who moved about with the orderly gait and quiet air of a man who had passed his heyday under the forming influences of camp discipline. He was a most respectable-looking man, as well as a most respectful servant; and it was impossible to see him busying himself about the General at his morning toilet, and watch his delicate handling of the lather-brush and razor, without feeling, that, however true the old proverb may have been in other cases, Bastien's master was a hero to him.

      The General's dress was always simple, though studiously neat. His republicanism was of the school of Washington, and would have shrunk from a public display of a bare neck and shirt-sleeves. Blue was his usual winter color; a frock-coat in the morning, and a dress-coat for dinner, and both near enough to the prevailing fashion to escape remark. He had begun serious life too early to have ever been anything of a dandy, even if Nature had seen fit to contradict herself so far as to have intended him for one.

      Jewelry I never saw him wear; but there was one little compartment in his library filled with what in a certain sense might be called jewelry, and of a kind that he had good reason to be proud of. In one of the drawers was a sword made out of a key of the Bastile, and presented to him by the city of Paris. The other key he sent to Washington. When he was a young man the Bastile was a reality, and those keys still plied their dismal work at the bidding of a power as insensible to the suffering it caused as the steel of which they were made. Of the hundreds who with sinking hearts had heard them turn in their massive wards, how few had ever come back to tell the tale of their misery! Lafayette himself, but for the quick wit of a servant-maid, might have passed there some of the youthful days that he passed at the side of Washington, and gazed dimly, as at a dream, in the Bastile, at what he could look back upon as a proud reality in Olmütz. Another of his relics was a civic crown, oak-leaf wrought in gold, the gift of the city of Lyons; but this belonged to a later period, his last visit to Auvergne, the summer before the Revolution of July, and which called forth as enthusiastic a display of popular affection as that which had greeted his last visit to America. But the one which he seemed to prize most was a very plain pair of eye-glasses, in a simple horn case, if my memory does not deceive me, but which, in his estimation, neither gold nor jewels could have replaced, for they had once belonged to Washington. "He gave them to me," said the General, "on my last visit to Mount Vernon."

      He was an early riser, and his work began the moment he left his pillow. First came his letters, always a heavy drain upon his time; for he had been so long a public man that everybody felt free to consult him, and everybody that consulted him was sure of a polite answer. Then his personal friends had their claims, some of them running back to youth, some the gradual accession of later years, and all of them cherished with that genial and confiding expansiveness which was the great charm of his private life, and the chief source, when he did err, of his errors as a public man. Like all the men of Washington's school, he was systematically industrious; and by dint of system and industry his immense correspondence was seldom allowed to get the start of him. Important letters were answered as they came, and minutes or copies of the answers kept for reference. He seemed to love his pen, and to write without effort,—never aiming, it is true, at the higher graces of style, somewhat diffuse, too, both in French and in English, but easy, natural, idiomatic, and lucid, with the distinctness of clear conceptions rather than the precision of vigorous conceptions, and a warmth which in his public letters sometimes rose to eloquence, and in his private letters often made you feel as if you were listening instead of reading.

      He was fond of anecdote, and told his stories with the fluency of a man accustomed to public speaking, and the animation and point of a man accustomed to the society of men of wit as well as of men of action. His recollections were wonderfully distinct, and it always gave me a peculiar thrill to hear him talk about the great men he had lived and acted with in both hemispheres, as familiarly as if he had parted from them only an hour before. It was bringing history very close to me, and peopling it with living beings,—beings of flesh and blood, who ate and drank and slept and wore clothes as we do; for here was one of them, the friend and companion of the greatest among them all, whom I had known through books, as I knew them long before I knew him in actual life, and every one of whose words and gestures seemed to give me a clearer conception of what they, too, must have been.

      Still he never appeared to live in the recollections of his youth, as most old men do. His life was too active a one for this, and the great principles he had consecrated it to were too far-reaching and comprehensive, too full of living, actual interest, too fresh and vigorous in their vitality, to allow a man of his sanguine and active temperament to forget himself in the past when there was so much to do in the present. This gave a peculiar charm to his conversation; for, no matter what the subject might be, he always talked like a man who believed what he said, and whose faith, a living principle of thought and action, was constantly kept in a genial glow by the quickness and depth of his sympathies. His smile told this; for it was full of sweetness and gentleness, though with a dash of earnestness about it, an under-current of serious thought, that made you feel as if you wanted to look behind it, and reminded you, at times, of a landscape at sunset, when there is just light enough to show you how many things there are in it that you would gladly dwell upon, if the day were only a little longer.

      His intercourse with his children was affectionate and confiding,—that with his daughters touchingly so. They had shared with him two years of his captivity at Olmütz, and he seemed never to look at them without remembering it. They had been his companions when he most needed companionship, and had learnt to enter into his feelings and study his happiness at an age when most girls are absorbed in themselves. The effect of this early discipline was never lost. They had found happiness where few seek it, in self-denial and self-control, a religious cultivation of domestic affections, and a thoughtful development of their minds as sources of strength and enjoyment. They were happy,—happy in what they had done and in what they were doing,—entering cheerfully upon the serene evening of lives consecrated to duty, with children around them to love them as they had loved their father and mother, and that father still with them to tell them that they had never deceived him.

      A FIELD NIGHT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

      To an intelligent American visiting London for the first time, few places of interest will present stronger attractions than the House of Commons during an animated debate. Commencing its existence with the first crude ideas of popular liberty in England, steadily advancing in influence and importance with the increasing wealth and intelligence of the middling class, until it came to hold the purse and successfully defend the rights of the people, illustrated for many generations by the eloquence and the statesmanship of the kingdom, and to-day wielding the power and directing the destinies of the foremost nation in the world,