that portion, if I had my army, I could
crush them all. The people would join me,
they would fling every available missile on
the heads of the Allies. The peasants of
Burgundy would finish the work. Not one
of them should return to the Rhine; the
greatness of France would be restored."

At Fontainebleau Napoleon matured this
last daring plan. The Allies were divided,
eight thousand of them on the left of the
Seine, between the Essonne and Paris,
another portion within the city, and a
third on the right of the Seine. Bonaparte's
plan was to dash across the Essonne,
and with his seventy thousand men drive
back Schwartzenberg's army on the
enraged citizens of the suburbs, and either
enter Paris pell-mell with the Allies, or,
crossing by the bridges to the right bank
of the Seine, cut off his retreat. He instantly,
with that stony heart of his that
no danger shook, and that vast brain that
foresaw everything, acted upon this plan,
placed Marmont and Mortier at Essonne
and Moncey, and replaced their artillery.
He surrounded Corbeil with earthworks,
so as to hold the bridge there as well as at
Melun, in order to manoeuvre as he wished
on either bank of the river. He collected
grain at Corbeil, and powder at Essonne.
His cavalry were en échelon in the direction
of Arpajou, to communicate with his
wife, son, and ministers at Orleans. He
ordered the Young Guard between Chailly
and Ponthierry to keep the position for
Macdonald's army, which was expected.

"All will be over in two hours," said this
great genius, still insatiable for war; "the
enemy is in a position of imminent danger.
What glory should we succeed in driving
them forth! What glory for the Parisians
to expel the Cossacks from their capital, and
hand them over to Burgundy and Lorraine
to finish them! My old moustaches of
the Guard will march at once. In a few
days all will be changed, then what
satisfaction, what glory! One last effort and
we shall enjoy in repose the benefit of our
twenty-five years of labour."

But it was not to be. Mortier had
already been beguiled by the wily
Talleyrand to take over his corps of fifteen
thousand men. The marshals were weary of
shedding blood, and unwilling to sacrifice
Paris. On the 6th of April Napoleon gave
up the game, and signed the act of abdication
at Fontainebleau.

"If those fools," he said, "had not
abandoned me, be assured the Allies, with
Paris behind them and me in front, would
have been destroyed. Ah, Courlaincourt,
what joy it would have been to have rebuilt
the greatness of France in a few hours!"

ON THE MOORS.

RED lie the moors, the glorious autumn moors,
Crimson, and red, and scarlet, with the glow
Of twice ten thousand nodding heather-bells;
With wealth of colour, gorgeous as the tints
Of Iris' purple robe: What time the bee,
Gauze-winged and eager-eyed, and amorous,
Drunk with the nectar of his paradise,
Hums o'er the honeyed blooms, his song of love.

The grouse-cock whirs, exultant, from the whins,
Proud covey-sultan, spreading his brown wings,
Nor boding coming doom; the red deer bears
Grandly aloft his many-antlered head,
And o'er the rippling burns, and o'er the fells,
As yet untrodden by the sportsman's foot,
Falls soft the mellowing silver of the night.

On the hill-side, the white flocks rest and browse,
Nor heed the shepherd's tyke: sweet Even comes
With folded hands, with soft, full, limpid eyes,
Grey-robed and placid from the golden West,
And from her starry lap, drops asphodels
On eyes of tired mortals: silence reigns,
And all around is beauty—all is peace!

OLD ROMANCE AND MODERN
POETRY.

Is it too much to assume that some—a
few—half a dozen or so—of the readers
who delight in our Laureate's Idylls of the
King, Morte d'Arthur, and Holy Grail,
have but a vague and hazy notion of the
origin of those legends, and whence it is
that our modern literature has derived
them?

The present writer has suffered so much
in his quality of reader, from having all
kind of recondite lore and out-of-the-way
knowledge attributed to him by merciless
authors, from their inveterate habit of
taking it for granted that he is intimately
acquainted with subjects he never heard of,
and has at his fingers' ends whole sciences
of which he knows no more than the mere
A,B,C, that he feels emboldened to hazard
the guess that others of his fellow-readers
may have suffered inconvenience from
similar causes. Having long ago steeled
himself against any assaults of false shame on
that score, and having openly persisted in
"wanting to know, you know," the present
writer has gleaned some knowledge on the
subject above alluded to, which he proposes
modestly to set before the reader.

The word Romance itself appears to have
been originally used to signify the Roman
language as spoken in the European
provinces of the empire, and comprised all the
dialects of which the basis was the vulgar
Latin. Its earliest and most familiar use