BOOKS.

LIFE OF MRS. SHERWOOD.* Alamo-non Mrs. Sherwood has been before the public for fifty years as a writer of serious and didactic tales, she was scarcely of sufficient general importance to require a memoir of six hundred ample octavo pages, especially when her life really contained little of biographical incident. Her daughter Mrs. Kelly has consider- ably curtailed the fifteen volumes of manuscript from which this autobiography is drawn ; but if only the characteristic events were to appear in a life, the volume might be melted down very considerably. Maternal feelings as to the beauty of children and of grief for their death, with recollections of excellent and amiable persons whom the writer encountered, might stand as not devoid of human interest. Long stories of Sunday and other schools, with memorials of the scholars, juvenile and other conversions brought about by means of the writer's books, frequent reflections or outpourings of the nature of prayer or praise, with many of the commonplaces of domestic life, might have been greatly cur- tailed or omitted altogether.

Yet it is probable that much further excision would have injured the book, not indeed as a biography, but as what it now really is, the reminiscences and commentary of a life. The writer's age, 'which carries her back to the last quarter of the last century, and her subsequent residence in India, would alone give attraction to the pictures of a society so different from our own. Her family and circumstances were not unfavourable to observation and the collection of anecdote. With a worldly vanity scarcely con- sistent in so Evangelical a person, Mrs. Sherwood delights to trace the origin of the family of her father, the Reverend George Butt, to the Conquest ; deriving the name from " archery, the butts being the dead marks at which the archers shot." Mr. Butt, at all events, was well connected, a fascinating companion, and a man of very genial disposition—a "good Christian without knowing it," as Pope said of Garth. His friends and qualifications procured him profitable Church preferment, with a Royal chaplain- ship ; and he attained some temporary distinction in literature. These circumstances threw Miss Butt into the company of eminent persons in their day, whose names are still preserved by a sort of tradition through literature. As she was a child of precocious in- telligence and sharp observation, and had, when she wrote her autobiography, acquired by long practice a style both copious and facile, the account of her childish and youthful days is very agreeable for the pictures of manners and domestic life eighty years ago, as well as for the anecdotes. This little sketch of Miss Seward, flavoured by a drop or two of vinegar, paints the poetess of Lichfield as more pleasing, and withal weaker, than we have hitherto pictured her—less associated with the blue.

"Miss Seward was at that period, when my father was a very young man, between twenty and thirty ; for I know not her precise age. She had that peculiar sort of beauty which consists in the most brilliant eyes, glowing complexion, and rich dark hair. She was tall and majestic, and was un- rivalled in the power of expressing herself. She was at the same time exceedingly greedy of the admiration of the other sex ; and though ca- pable of individual attachment, as she manifested in after life much to her -wet, yet net very nice as to the person by whom the homage of flattery.was rendered at her shrine.

"She was, in a word, such a woman as we read of in romances ; and, had she lived in some dark age of the past, might have been charged with sor- -eery, for even in advanced life she often bore away the palm of admiration from the young and beautiful, and many even were fascinated who wholly condemned her conduct."

Here, from a later period, the writer's school days, is the author of " Our Village," at the age of four.

"I have said that Dr. Valpy and Dr. Mitford understood the high talents of Monsieur St. Q****, and were his great associates. Dr. Mitford was .then a physician in Reading, and I remember once going to a church in the town, which we did not usually attend, with Madame St. Q****, and being taken into Mrs. Mitford's pew, where I saw the young authoress, Miss Mit- lord, then about four years old. Miss Mitford was standing on the seat, and so full of play that she set me on to laugh in a way which made me thoroughly ashamed. " When next we met, Miss Mitford had become a middle-aged woman, and I was an old-one."

Mr. George Butt was a native of Lichfield, and Johnson in his youth an intimate of the family ; a connexion kept up in the Doctor's famous days. Of him Mrs. Sherwood has a story to tell. "My mother, I remember well, used to tell me, that being out one day, walking with Mrs. Woodhouse under the trees in the Close in Lichfield, they met the celebrated Johnson. My mother happened to have a volume of The Rambler, or of lawless, I forget which, in her band. Johnson seeing the book, took it from her, looked into it, and, without saying a word, threw it among the graves, from which my mother had to recover it. This was pro- bably done in a fit of awkward vanity by the great Doctor, who, finding a

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young lady with one of his own volumes in her hand, could neither let the circumstance pass unheeded, as a man of less vanity would have done, nor make sonic polite speech, which a man with more address would have thought of; but he must needs act the bear and do the rudest thing he could do. Oh, poor human nature, how exceedingly absurd we all are ! our very great- ness, or imaginary or comparative greatness, makes our absurdities only the more remarkable. There is one thing, however, which I must be permitted to say; that if we know anything of ourselves, we shall be led to see that there is little cause for one human being to despise another on the score of folly."

The action was probably the result of a morbid temper at the moment : Johnson was not usually indifferent to flattery, even in a more direct form.

After a home education of a peculiar kind both by father and

• The Life of Mrs. Sherwood, (chiefly Autobiographical); with Extracts from Mr. Sberwood's Journal during his Imprisonment in France and Residence in lailM. Edited by her Daughter, Sophia Kelly, Authoress of " The De Cl/Horde," &c. &c.

Published by Darien and Co.

mother, Miss Butt was sent asparlour boarder at a celebrated school at Reading, conducted by a French gentleman who had been in the diplomatic service, and his English wife. As the Revolu- tion advanced, numbers of emigrants came to Reading, and ga- thered round their compatriot.

"We had only just returned to Reading when the news came of the mur- der of the ill-fated Louis XVI. He was guillotined on the 21st of January 1793, and I may truly say that all the civilized world were astounded at the fearful deed. France had dipped her hands in the blood of one of her most amiable, and assuredly one of her mildest and best-intentioned kings. If families who had no connexion with France truly and deeply lamented the fate of the King, how much more was his fate deplored in the family at the Abbey, half of the members of which were actually French, and the other half so deeply interested in what was going on in Paris that it might have been thought many of us had lost a father. Monsieur and Madame went into deep mourning, as did also many of the elder girls. Multitudes of the French nobility came thronging into Reading, gathering about the Abbey, and some of them half living within its walls. Amongst these were several single and some married men, who were always about the house du- ring the day, and very frequently came to supper in the evening. One of these, whom we the young ladies of the family thought very little of, was M. de Calonne, the ex-minister. We understood not then his importance in history, and in consequence we were better pleased with those nearer our own standing, and more delighted with the gay sallies of the young Cheva- lier St. Julien than the deep-toned political orations of the financier. "No one in these days can have an idea of the effect which the tragedies wrought by the French at that time had on the minds of the English. Bat, to return to these emigrants : there is nothing so difficult to appreciate as another person's feelings, and nothing on which we form more false esti- mates. There are in the world a set of whining, lugubrious persons, who are constantly speaking of past afflictions, and, as it were, for ever describing wounds, bruises, and running sores. These persona pass for such as feel deeply, whereas none but those whose feelings are very dead can bear to dwell long on the occasions of their sorrows. Where one has suffered much, one cannot linger in discourse, for there are certain feelings which must be avoided and suppressed. It is a question, whether the French are a deeply feeling nation in general ? Be that as it may, there was, I am certain, a very acute and deep sense of sorrow for their King and his family, for their country and their homes, in the minds of the emigrants whom I knew at Reading. Some songs and airs seemed almost at times to work them up to a state of agony. One of our young ladies, one day, very thoughtlessly struck up the air of Ca Ira on the pianoforte, in the presence of the old sister of the Marquise St. Julien, mother of the chevalier I named above. The poor lady jumped up from her chair, flew out of the house and into the street, wringing her aged hands and crying aloud like one deranged; and it was- with difficulty we could get her hack."

Another glimpse Miss Butt had of the refugees at Bristol was of a different kind.

"Here I had another view of the French emigrant nobility, and by no means so favourable a one as I had had at Reading. One of these gentle-. men, however, seemed to be a highly respectable man, and much depressed with his country's griefs ; another was even more gay and thoughtless a man that my old friend the Chevalier St. Julien, although his family, as he himself told us, was in most distressing circumstances. He had, it seems, a young wife in France, and she, in order to save him from destruction, Ad on one occasion pretended that she knew him to be dead, and, in order to try the truth of this assertion, the authorities of the moment had insisted upon her choosing another husband. She had selected the only man she could trust, namely, an old bailiff or steward, and with him had gone through the ceremony of marriage, and had found him a loyal and faithful protector during the Reign of Terror. This was the story told by the young nobleman to my godmother, and told with a heart so light that he was ready the next moment to sing, dance, and flirt with me, the only young lady within his circle of acquaintance."

Miss Butt married her first cousin by the mother's side, an officer in the Fifty-third Regiment. Captain Sherwood, in early youth, had gone through more troubles and adventures than fall to the lot of most people. The boy's father had quarrelled with his own father, Mr. Sherwood the elder; had plunged, it was supposed out of revenge, into the Democratic excesses of the time ; and finally went to France as a friend of Freedom ! He also removed his chil- dren from the care of the family, and got disinherited, the property at the disposal of the grandfather being left to the grandchildren. To cap the business, the black sheep took a Frenchwoman for a second wife, and neglected the children he had removed from their relations in England. On the accession of the Terrorists and the breaking out of the war, Mr. Henry Sherwood with his family became suspected as English ; were separately imprisoned, half- starved, and only reached England with great difficulty, after the downfall of Robespierre, by the circuitous route of Switzerland, Germany, and Hamburg. Captain Sherwood drew up an account of these adventures on his return, which is printed in the present volume, and forms one of the most interesting parts of it. It begins with an outbreak at Toulon, whither the youth had gone as an amateur sailor, in an old vessel which his father had bought, it was thought to oblige a friend with the command. "On returning to our brig on the Sunday, on which day I had been to see the chapel of Notre Dame, whilst walking about the street, at the corner of one of them, I fell in with a mob, dragging with them certain unfortunate persons, whom these wretches were going to murder in the fury of their De- mocratic zeal.

" One of these doomed men was so tall that his head appeared clearly above those of the populace ; he had no covering on it, and was otherwise dressed like a sportsman, in a short shooting-jacket and spatterdashes. He was pale, but looked with contempt on the crowd around. I followed this mob without knowing what they were about. I saw a man let down a lamp which hung from a rope suspended across the street. Having taken down the lamp, they hung their prisoner in cool blood with the same rope, fasten- ing him to the place from whence they had taken the lamp. It was a dread- ful sight ; but when I would have fled, the people caught me by the arm and detained me. I was afterwards afraid to attempt to get away. They hung another of their prisoners (whose name I heard was Vasque) by the feet, and afterwards cut him down, opened his body, and dragged it round the gill, singing and dancing in their mad and cruel excitement, as they followed the mutilated and mangled form. As soon as I could get away unobaerY I fled to the brig, and in my way saw several bodies hanging to the lamp-cor the frequent cry on these occasions being, ' A is lantern. it is lanterns! Young Henry Sherwood's imprisonment at Abbeville, and the

subsequent long journeying of the family when reunited, furnish as good a picture of the strange disjointed state of the Continent at that time as we remember to have seen. From his narrative it seems clear that the proceedings of the Revolutionists were dis- approved by the mass of the people, but submitted to and even applauded from fear, or rather the want of a power of acting publicly together. He met with less fanaticism and less cruelty than others have encountered, and more general good-nature. The troubles of a penniless boy in a prison, where the allowance of black bread was scant and irregular, needs no comment. This ac- count of his liberation is a curious picture of kindness, sense, senti- ment, absurdity, and love of theatrical effect.

"In the end of December a grand ceremonial fete was enacted; it was called The Fête de la Raison' ; and it was celebrated as usual in the Place d'Aimes. The intent was to show the superiority that reason had over reve- lation or religion, called on that occasion superstition. A large platform was erected, and near it an immense pile of wood, on which was placed a mon- strous figure called Superstition, together with many pictures, images, cru- cifixes, and Madonnas, from the churches. An actress of noted bad charac- ter represented the Goddess of Reason, who, with her torch, was to fire the pile and reduce it to ashes. Yet at this very fête, such was the feeling of the populace and National Guard, that I saw many of the little images, pictures, &c., plucked out of the fire ; and some of these were even brought into our prison, and publicly shown to us English, whilst curses were poured out against the Government, by them called the nation, for the desecration of their holy things. Whilst this mockery was going on, I was sent for, and I found my little tailor [a marrin authority who had been a tailor] disposed to be very kind. He told me that reason declared that I at my age, sixteen, could not be answerable for the crimes of my country, and that Dumont, the Representative of the people, was going to release many prisoners, as an act of grace, and me among the number.

"I observed that liberty was of no use to me without bread; but he kindly persuaded me, saying, Take your liberty, at all events, and if nothing better offers, you can return to prison.' "After the exhibition at the platform in the Place d'Armes, the procession moved on to the principal church, where was another platform erected over what formerly was the altar. On this platform stood Andre Dumont, wear- ing a peculiar dress, as a member of the Convention, and in his hand he held a hat or cap having three long ostrich feathers in it. On his right stood the Goddess of Reason, and some few attendants placed around them for effect. Dumont was addressing the crowd as I entered ; he was talking of the her- lequinades of the priests; he said, 'There was neither heaven nor hell, neither resurrection, angel, nor spirit ; but that a fate attended us all, he knew not from whence, or how it happened ; so that no one could say why Louis XIV. died in his bed and Louis XVI. on the scaffold.'

"When he had finished his oration all those detenues who were to be re- leased advanced to the platform : I was one in the rank, and we were directed to ascend some steps on the one side of the altar, pass across it, receive the accolade, and descend on the other side. "The Goddess of Reason, dressed like Minerva, with a spear in her hand, gave us this accolade, which was a touch as we passed, it being supposed that by this touch our fetters were to fall off. The owl was exchanged on her helmet for a cock, and on the point of her spear was the cap of liberty ; her train was held by four of the Municipality, and as she moved the persons near fell on their knees, as they do at the passing of the Host in Roman Catholic countries. At the moment that my turn came to receive the acco- lade the stage cracked and gave symptoms of falling. We all, with the god- dess, rushed to the side of the platform to save ourselves. As I was the youngest of our party, I mean of the males, more notice was taken of me than the others, and her goddeaship embraced me twice. Dumont asked me if I would serve in a French ship ; but he did not press it, which was well for me, for I was at the moment so excited that I began to speak of and defend my country, scarcely knowing what I said. Strange to say, he also praised the English, but regretted that we were governed by a tyrant."

A large part of Mrs. Sherwood's life was passed in India, whither her husband was ordered with his regiment. Her account of her labours to educate the orphans of the soldiers and others, her sketches of India as it was at that time, as well as of some of her religious friends, amongst others Henry Martyn, appeal to our common feelings, though they are not biographical, and are some- what weak from the diffuseness of the style. The writer's experi- ence, however, is chiefly confined to the religious world. The religious idea of Anglo-Indians in general half a century ago is indicated in an anecdote.

"It was about the month of February that the Reverend Mr. Jeffries (one of the Company's chaplains, a venerable person, and the father of ten chil- dren) called to see us on his way up from Calcutta to Furruckabad, to which station he had been appointed. We were very much pleased with him; and he told us that, in the beginning of the year 1806, three clergymen arrived from Cambridge, appointed chaplains in Bengal, the Reverends Mr. Martyn, Mr. Collie, and Mr. Parson. These gentlemen, Mr. Jeffries told us, were, acoording to the term then in use, called Methodists, that is, close followers of the Thirty-nine Articles ; whilst the chaplains on the establishment be- fore,. with the exception of Dr. Buchannan and David Browne, were un- happily believed to have been inclined to Soeinianism.

"Mr. Martyn's doctrines were therefore thought very strict, when he de- livered them m Calcutta ; and he was commented on with some bitterness by the superior.chaplains, who considered that doctrines should be left out of the question altogether in sermons, and morality only preached. The con- troversy was carried on in the pulpit, and all Calcutta became excited on the subject. Mr. Jeffries never spoke publicly on one side or the other, as he was a military chaplain, and on a distinct service, till he was called upon to give his opinion in Calcutta ; which he did by reading the homily on the sub- ject under agitation instead of a sermon. The subject of the homily was, I think, 'Justification by Faith.' The homily, of course, went against the preachers of a cold morality, and caused great anger. The inhabitants of Calcutta were divided respecting the propriety of reading this homily ; one side remarking, 'that they wondered that Mr. Jeffries should read so old a book, for were we not making improvements every year in the sciences, and of course, in religion also "