a man, and that there would be no harm in the
people's believing that the devil had carried
Voltaire off. His friends, relatives, and heirs: his
niece, Madame Denis; his nephew, the Abbé
Mignot; and the Marquis de Vilette, in whose
house, Rue Beaune, he died; had foreseen this,
and determined accordingly. They dressed his
body in a dressing-gown and nightcap, and put it
upright in a carriage, and took it in the dead of the
night to the abbey of the Bernardins, at Scellières.
Here, among the solitary monks, the name of
Voltaire was as good as unknown; the Abbé Mignot
was their curé; and so Voltaire was, on the 2nd of
June, 1778, without let or hindrance, buried in
their cemetery: the interdiction of the Bishop of
Troyes, to whose parish Scellières belonged,
arriving four-and-twenty hours too late at the
convent.

But fate gave no rest to the earthly remains
of this mighty and unquiet spirit. In 1791,
four commissaires arrived at the cemetery of
Scellières; the abbey had been sold in 1790,
and the monks dispersed; they came for the
body of Voltaire, which the people of Paris
wanted to carry with high honours to the
Panthéon. Upon this occasion the coffin was
opened, and "there," says an eye-witness, "lay
Voltaire, as if in sleep, so still and calm was his
face; but as the air swept over it, it suddenly
changed, and could soon no longer be
recognised." All histories of the revolution record
with what pomp and splendour the Parisians
carried the corpse to the Panthéon, and, also,
how they soon afterwards placed Marat by his
side.

When the body had been opened and embalmed,
the Marquis de Vilette had unlawfully appropriated
the heart. A letter from the Abbé Mignot
to the editor of the Mercure, informs him that
Voltaire never intended or wished for such a
separation, and disclaims the fact of its having
taken place at all; but therein the good old abbé
was mistaken. The marquis really did possess
himself of the heart, and when he had bought
the château Fernay, for two hundred and thirty
thousand livres, from Voltaire's principal heiress,
Madame Denis, he promised there to erect a
costly monument for the heart. And what was
the costly material? The glazed Dutch tiles of
an old stove, bearing the inscription—

His spirit is everywhere, but his heart is here.

Later, the marquis sold all the furniture and
ornaments, with which Voltaire had adorned
his Tusculum, and let Fernay to an English
gentleman, whom he persuaded that Voltaire's
heart still rested under the monument, whereas
he had long ago removed it to his house
in Paris. Poor heart! how it had to suffer from
the unsteady caprices of its proprietor, who now
abused philosophy, and cast "the heart" into the
lumber-room; now, awakening from his short
dream about church and religion, put the relic
back in his salon, which he called "The Chamber
of the Heart." On the walls of this chamber
you saw the following portraits: On one side,
Benedict the Fourteenth, Ganganelli, Buirini,
Fénélon; opposite, Mesdames Sévigné, Tenein,
Lambert, Geoffrin, Boufflers, Dudeffant, Genlis;
on the other side, the poets and writers Saint-
Lambert, Chastellux, Thomas, Tressan,
Marmontel, Regnal, Delille. Jules Janin, to whom
we are indebted for the greater part of these
details, exclaims, "Profanation!"

From the hands of this man, the heart passed
into those of his son, who bequeathed it, with the
rest of his property, nominally to a bishop, but
really to the last legitimate descendant of the
Bourbons, Henry the Fifth. Luckily, the
Marquis de Vilette's natural heirs have now won
their lawsuit vice the bishop, and have made
a present of "the heart" to the Académie
Française. Let us hope that there it may have found
rest at last.

SMALL-BEER CHRONICLES.

TAKING, the other morning, my weekly walk
round that Moral Brewery which it is my
business to superintend, I was struck by the
enormous size and fulness of a certain vat, which,
on inspection, I found to be labelled SOCIAL.
SMALL-BEER. I saw, at a single glance, that
there was plenty of work cut out for me here,
and that it must be set about at once.

The Small-Beer which I have now to chronicle
is, I am happy to say, of a very high class,
and we may expect to derive a great deal of
advantage as well as pleasure from a careful
scrutiny and measurement of the contents
of this same Social Vat. In plain English,
I may as well announce that we are going
into the subject of MANNERS—the manners of
our own immediate day. And it is possible
that we may occasionally glance at the manners
of the day which preceded it, and compare
the two in various small ways, one with the
other.

Those persons who are of opinion that the
changes which have taken place of late in our
manners are all changes for the worse, will, I
am afraid, turn away disgusted from my page
when they find that, in the main, it is my purpose
to defend the social customs of the day, and
while doing full justice to their defects, to show,
or attempt to show, that they are to the full as
wholesome as those which have lately passed
away. It may, however, serve to conciliate this
class of readers, if I own frankly that it has
been with much difficulty and great sacrifice of
prejudice that I have reached this conclusion:
the dead manners and customs to which some
people cleave, being still attractive enough in
my eyes to render me inclined to do them
something more than strict justice. The old times
were easier times, and in some respects
pleasanter times, than the new.

What do you bring us? asks the porter who
now stands at the gate of society. What right have
you here, and what can you shew to justify your
admission? "I have had a first-rate education,"