Laudantur simili prole puerpera;

Culpam Pœna premit comes,* &c.

So, too, in "The Praises of Augustus," which conclude the odes, the poet says no more than the historians confirm, when he tells us that law and example had abolished licentiousness and vice, and praises Cæsar, not only for defending the empire by his arms, but reforming its laws by his wisdom. Could Augustus have desired more immortal fame for the good deeds of his later reign than has been given to them by Horace? Apropos of the campaign in Gaul, the reader will recollect that the colony of Augustodunum (Autun), which the emperor then founded, became the seat of letters and Athens of Gaul, and continued to flourish in the time of Constantine. The Gauls, indeed, seem to have acquired a regard for the institutions of the Romans, together with their arts and learning.

At length the universal gratitude of the people awarded to Augustus the crowning glory of his life. The illustrious Messala, addressing him in full senate, said: "Cæsar Augustus! the senate and Roman people with one voice salute you FATHER OF YOUR COUNTRY." To which the emperor, affected even to tears, replied: "Having now attained the utmost height of my wishes, what more can I ask of the immortal gods than that you may retain towards me to the last moment of my life the sentiments you now express?" It was on this occasion that Augustus for the fourth time accepted the empire. History does not present so striking a contrast as we find between the mild and beneficent splendour of his imperial reign, and the dark shadows of licentiousness, cruelty, and bloodshed that stained his triumvirate. To what extent this transformation of the character of Augustus was due to the influence and the wise counsels of Mæcenas and his illustrious friends, it would not be possible to discuss in our present limits. But great as their influence undoubtedly was, the conduct of Augustus, when he had adopted the maxims of virtue and greatness, and resolved to become the parent of his country and people, affords another proof of the power of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.

* Thus gracefully translated in Lord Ravensworth's English lyric version of the Odes of Horace:

O Thou, from gods propitious sprung,
Best guardian of our land, too long

Thine absence here we mourn;
The sacred conclave of the state
Thy welcome promise still await;
Redeem it, and return.

Restore, O gracious prince, the light
Of dawn unto thy country's night;

For when thy face benign

Like spring, hath met thy people's gaze,

More pleasantly pass by the days,
The suns more gaily shine.

*

*

*

By thee our matrons' homes are pure,
Th' approving father owns secure
His likeness in his son;

Morals and law maintain their sway,
And justice stops the culprit's way
Soon as the crime is done.

Independently of the imperial power, he had continued to exert the immense authority of a tribune, and the office of "prefect of the laws and manners," in which he showed zeal for the glory of the state and the happiness of the people. By adding the dignity of high-priest, on the death of Lepidus, the emperor accumulated in himself the sacred, the military, and the civil power, and it was in virtue of this office that he suppressed all books of oracles and divination. To the spiritualists of these latter days he certainly would have showed no mercy.

His victories and administrative policy had restored peace to the world, stability of government, and good administration of the laws, shortly before the era of that crowning event in human annals-the birth of the PRINCE OF PEACE, to whom, ere two centuries elapsed, regions that were inaccessible even to the Romans were subdued. Augustus was not destined to know the God of Love, who came in the time of this mortal life to redeem and visit the world in great humility: could it have been his privilege, who in his later years so nobly cast away works of darkness, to put on as a Christian the armour of light, how Christendom through all the ages would have held his name in saintly honour!

the

Amid the splendour of his public life, Augustus had now to mourn the loss of his beloved sister-whose life for the twelve years she survived her son Marcellus were years of mourning; of Horace, his attached and honoured friend; and, shortly afterwards, of Mæcenas, his faithful minister, to whose encouragement we doubtless owe no small part of the works of Horace as well as Virgil. Maecenas and Horace, in their lives united by a mutual friendship, were not divided in their death, both being interred in the Esquiliæ, to which the celebrated gardens of Mæcenas reached. The latter years of the emperor's life were clouded by domestic ills. His daughter Julia, on the death of Agrippa, took for her third spouse, Tiberius, the son of Livia by her first husband. After losing both his grandsons, Caius and Lucius, the emperor adopted Tiberius, whom he promoted to the highest military commands, and bestowed on him, after his successful campaign against the Germans, the government of the provinces of the empire, and the command of the armies. Augustus thenceforth sought retirement from his public cares. His conquests in Spain had been his last military exploits, and he afterwards avoided war with as much care as the Roman generals of old had been used to seek it. At length, in the seventy-sixth year of his age and the forty-fourth of his reign, when he had seen peace restored to his country, her laws reformed, her commerce extended, her colonies flourishing, her people prosperous and grateful, and offering him divine honours, arts and learning carried to a height unknown before, Rome boasting a splendour worthy the capital of the world, and an empire founded that was to endure for generations, Augustus died, and his last words were from the heart: "Livia! remember our happy union. Farewell!”

W. S. G.

GUSTAVE AIMARD.

WHAT may be termed savage literature, always possesses a great fascination for the reader, and the few writers who have devoted themselves to that field have always secured ready perusal. Who is there among us who has not hung with breathless interest over the "Last of the Mohicans?" or followed the "Pathfinder" through the series of works that depict his adventurous career? Next came Ruxton, too soon taken from us, alas! but the few memorials he left showed how great a loss our literature suffered in him. Lastly, we have had Mayne Reid, who has his readers by tens of thousands, and whose novels are full of incident and vitality. Others have trod this field and have failed: in charity to them we will omit their names.

This literature has, hitherto, been almost indigenous to the AngloAmericans, for no other nation has come so much in contact with the savages as those who sent forth these daring pioneers from north and south to drive the Indians farther and farther back from their huntinggrounds. Among Germans, the only persons who have touched on the Indians are Charles Sealsfield, in his "Cabin Book," and Kohl, who gave us his charming monogram of the Ojibbeways in his "Travels Round Lake Superior." The French had a very celebrated representative, Louis de Bellamare, better known as Gabriel Ferry, but even his deservedly great reputation, resting on his "Coureur des Bois," has paled before the rising lustre of Gustave Aimard, who is at once the French Mayne Reid and Fennimore Cooper.

Aimard's Indian tales will be found superior to those of both the above-named authors, and for very simple reasons. Although Cooper possessed a great talent for inventing a story, the misfortune is, that the scene is laid within a very confined space: he deals with only the eastern tribes, those which the Yankee element came most into collision with; and these tribes, inexorably driven back before the white man, soon lost those salient points which distinguish the savage of the western prairies. The Tuscaroras and Delawares were not lords of the land after the landing of the first pale faces; they contended inch by inch of their territory, it is true, but their opponents had the prestige of victory, and the tribes, decimated by whisky and white diseases, had not the energy left to resist. If they formed a confederation, it was but limited in its extent, and fell to pieces from internal dissension. Cooper was, therefore, virtually right in calling one of his books "The Last of the Mohicans," even though the scattered fragments of that race still exist beyond the Mississippi.

Mayne Reid, on the other hand, acted wisely in laying the scene of his stories among the untameable tribes of the western prairies-the Pawnees, the Apaches, and the Comanches-that haughty race which calls itself "Queen of the Prairies," and defies the white man. These tribes still lord it in the desert; they are constantly at war with the pale faces, and during the "Mexican moon "commit frightful ravages in Sonora and along the frontier. The degenerate descendants of Cortez are unable to resist them, and they spread desolation on their path. Villages, even towns, are burned, the crops are ruthlessly destroyed, and

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the women led into captivity, to become the slaves of the red-skin warriors. Such men, though they be savages, supply a thrilling subject for the romance writer, and Mayne Reid did well in laying the scene of his Indian tales among them.

Unfortunately, however, when you have read one of Captain Reid's stories, you have read them all, for a marvellous likeness pervades them. The feeling cannot be overcome that, having exhausted his stock of personal observation in his earlier works, he repeats himself, or is obliged to fall back on reading. Another great defect in these otherwise charming tales is the utter absence of plot: you have incidents piled on incidents, but the conclusion lies as plainly before you as the town you are travelling to on a Dutch road. It may be that Mayne Reid, having to write for a popular periodical, does not display that artistic finish of which we believe him quite capable, and that, under different circumstances, he might produce works in every way satisfactory to his readers; but there is nothing so injurious, he should remember, to a popular author than the whispered "he is writing himself out," from which some of our best writers are now suffering, simply because, having made a reputation, they do nothing on their side to support it.

The case is very different, however, with the subject of our paper. Gustave Aimard has written some dozen Indian tales, all interesting and all unlike. The great charm of his stories is, indubitably, the vitality he manages to throw into them; and he writes with such spirit, that, while reading, you cannot but imagine that he is describing to you scenes of which he was an eye-witness. And this was very probably the case, for Aimard's life has been one which we defy the most practised romancer to out-romance. He has lived an age (for such an existence cannot be measured by years) among the savages. As adopted son of one of the most powerful Indian nations, he has fought, hunted, trapped by their side, and is thoroughly acquainted with their every ruse. But this is not all; and, fortunately for his readers, he has gone through every phase of desert life. He has been in turn squatter, hunter, trapper, and miner, and has seen the mode of life of all the adventurers who traverse the Indian deserts in every direction. Twice he was led to the stake of torture by the Apaches, and only saved by a miracle: he wandered about alone for upwards of a month on the great Del Norte desert; he was a slave in one of the sacred cities of the Sun, and is probably the only European who returned alive from those gloomy caverns, where the sacred fire of Montezuma is still kept burning, carefully tended by Vestals, as in ancient Rome; he was a prisoner for a lengthened period with the cruel and treacherous Patagonians-in a word, there is not a portion of uncivilised America, North or South, which he has not traversed, with his good rifle in his hand, in defiance of the wild beasts and the still wilder and more dangerous inhabitants.

But even such a life as this would avail a man but little for literary pursuits, unless he possessed the gift of putting it in an attractive form, and this Gustave Aimard has in an eminent degree. He is endowed with all the qualities of a novelist, and while his works read so truthfully, they are of absorbing interest, owing to the clever way in which the author maintains the surprise, which is the great characteristic, even though an unworthy one, perhaps, of the successful novelist. With the first novel

he produced on his return, "Le Grand Chef des Aucas," his reputation was established in France, and he has constantly marched to fresh triumphs. Nearly every month a fresh work is produced from his prolific pen; and yet, though we have read them all with unabated interest, we have not found an instance where he has repeated them, excepting, of course, where he has found it necessary to describe Indian manners and customs, which do not vary. Many of his earlier works have reached the sixth edition, and we may safely say that he has a clientèle in Paris greater than even Paul de Kock had in his palmiest days.

It is no slight merit for a French author to achieve, that these works do not contain a single line which an English reader would wish away. M. Aimard is too truly a man to attempt corrupting the hearts and minds of his readers by high-flown sentiment; if we find fault with him at all, it is for investing his Indian characters with too much humanity, and endowing them with attributes which are generally the boast of civilisation alone. But he is the best judge of such matters: he has made the Indian character the study of his life, and we may safely accept at his hands a picture which we may deem too flattering, but which, after all, may be explained by the many-sided phases human life assumes, to the skin that covers white, red, or black. If Mrs. Stowe was allowed to rehabilitate the negro in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," surely no fault is to be found with Gustave Aimard because he manfully upholds the men with whom he spent so many years of his life, and whom he learnt to love and admire in spite of their faults, which are, after all, inherent in their

nature.

After the fashion of Fennimore Cooper, Aimard generally selects one hero, whom he accompanies through several volumes, although they are all complete in themselves, and require no elucidatory remarks. In one series, composed of "La Grande Flibuste," "La Fièvre d'Or," and "Curumilla," his hero is the unfortunate Count de Raousset Boulbon, who fell a victim to Mexican ill-faith in 1848, and was shot like a dog by the governor of Sonora. His hapless fate created a sensation throughout Europe at the time, but faded away in presence of the weird political events that occupied all minds in that eventful year. Had the count been successful, he would have ranked in history by the side of Cortez and Pizarro, and his exploit of taking the fortified town of Hermosello, at the head of scarce three hundred men, and with no guns, has hardly been surpassed in the history of modern warfare. No better hero for a romance could have offered; and while M. Aimard has adhered rather closely to facts, he has interwoven a web of human interest by sundry love passages that take place between the count and the daughter of his great enemy, the governor of Sonora.

Among all that is good, it is difficult to choose the best, but, in our opinion, "L'Eclaireur" is the most successful of all M. Aimard's Indian stories, possibly because it deals more with civilisation than the rest of the tales do. Perhaps our readers will not object to a short analysis of the plot, which we trust will impel them to seek the book itself.

In consequence of intrigues, Don Real de los Montes is obliged to fly from Mexico, leaving his wife and daughter in charge of his brother, Don Estevan. The latter, who has concocted the intrigue in the hope of succeeding to his brother's wealth, forces the ladies into a convent, where the mother dies, and the daughter, Doña Luisa, is immured alive in the oubliettes. Fortu