66 of birth the Earl of Shrewsbury, a lineal descendant of the renowned Talbot-the hero of Shakspere's Henry VI.* or possess, in a higher proportion, all the attributes, personal or derivative, of genuine nobility. Principibus præstant, et Regibus æquiparantur," may well be predicated of such noblemen, the honor of their order and pride of the British name, quite as pertinently as of the Spanish Grandees or Roman Cardinals, to whom the expressions have been respectively applied. Here it is proper to remark, that each party, the Duke and the Earl, resisted alike the temptation of riches and seduction of ambition. With the dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, the *This venerable warrior, as he is called by Hume, (chapter xxi.,) was defeated, and lost his life at Castillon, on the Dordogne, in 1453, after having been successfully engaged, it is asserted, in forty battles, or minor engage ments "Where valiant Talbot, above human thought, Shaks. Henry VI., Act ii., Sc. 1. He had, however, been made captive by the Pucelle d'Orléans in 1429, as we learn from Monstrelet, livre iii. In 1795, I passed some time on the banks of the Dordogne, and often traversed the traditional field of battle, where Talbot, then aged eighty, was slain, and of which the neighbouring peasants still fondly indicated some residuous vestiges, though wholly undiscernible to my vision; but a poor maniac, I recollect, was to be seen there-lance in rest-and calling himself "Le Bâtard d'Orléans" (Dunois,) waiting to encounter his appointed foe, England's champion, Talbot, and expressing the feelings, with little variation of words, attributed by Shakspere to Dunois, the protagonist of France "I think this Talbot be a fiend of hell.” Our English historians name the place Chatillon, instead of Castillon, the true Gascon, modern as well as ancient appellation. Quite near it is Sainte Foy, the refuge of the Huguenots, after the capture of their citadel, La Rochelle, in 1628, by Richelieu, and where I knew many of their descendants, still naturally recollective of the persecution endured by their ancestors, and animated with an equally hostile remembrance of what they called the treachery of Buckingham, in his unsuccessful attempt to relieve their long beleaguered city. presumed spouse of the Saxon prince, I may claim the honor of a remote, though long interrupted acquaintance, for its date precedes her marriage in 1792. The lady, with a younger sister, had been in a convent at Libourne for their education, whence the suppression of religious establishments compelled their removal; and they were visitants at the house of Messieurs French, venerable bachelors, and friends of their parents, in Bordeaux, waiting for a passage to Dublin, when Lord Shrewsbury, who had been on a voyage of health and pleasure in the Mediterranean, left his yacht, which he had purchased for £10,000, as I was told, from Lord Uxbridge, at Marseilles, and arrived by land at Bordeaux, where the attractions of Miss Hoey, then a beautiful young woman of two and twenty, won his heart and coronet. My residence was within a few doors of her old hosts', whose kind, I may say, paternal attentions, I had uniformly experienced. The younger Miss Hoey married afterwards an eminent mercantile gentleman of the city, Monsieur Guestier, and their son has been one of the representatives of Bordeaux, in the Chamber of Deputies. Her name was Jenny; for I recollect that, on an English Captain's hailing his ship from the quay, or Chartrons, the residence of Messrs. French"The Jenny, ahoy!" the lively girl, then preparing for repose, ran to the window half undressed, and cried out-Here I am, who calls? Lady Shrewsbury was some years elder, and of a much more serious turn. She would have preferably chosen a religious life; but overruling events bent her fate to a different destination, though, of course, in her credence, not less sacred, because equally sacramental in character. The day and circumstances had varied "Ita res divina mihi fuit; res serias Omnes extollo ex hoc die in alium diem."* But, assuming more elevated ground, and aiming at loftier quarry, I remark that, in the concluding paragraph of the note to which I have adverted, it is observed that as Bavaria is a Catholic country, and Lord Shrewsbury a Catholic peer, "these connexions seem to intimate that some little Popery has crept into this house of Saxe also." These expressions refer to *The play whence I have quoted these lines, the Pœnulus, or Carthaginian Boy, of Plautus, has furnished abundant materials of literary and patriotic controversy. We there find the only written remains of the Punic tongue, which, however, Dr. Arnold, (History of Rome, vol. ii., p. 556,) on inadequate grounds, I think, will not admit to be genuine, in ten verses of act v., scene 1, which Bochart, Paræus, Petit, and others, assimilate to the Hebrew, but which our Celtic scholars claim as their genuine language. Valancey (Collectanea, vol. ii.) is very ardent in assertion, and elaborate in proof; but, save our Milesian enthusiasts, I cannot discover that he has impressed his conviction on many readers. In my early pedestrian rambles, I ascertained that in the Pays des Basques in Gascony, the idiom of the country, a dialect of the Cantabrian, was assumed to be the purest residue of the Phoenician; and I was assured that the lines in Plautus were perfectly intelligible through its medium. A learned professor of Greek and Hebrew at Toulouse, M. Fl. Lécluse, in his "Manuel de la Langue Basque, 1826, 8vo." states, that the Basque clergy maintained to him, as they had asserted to me, the identity of the two languages, and the easy explanation of Plautus by the living one; but the trial by no means satisfied him on the point. An erudite Spaniard, the Doctor Joachim Villanueva, published at Dublin, in 1831, an octavo-"Ibernia Phoenicea, seu Phonicum in Ibernia Incolatus," &c.-to show that the local denominations in our national tongue are obviously Phoenician. The volume is a retributive offering for the hospitality he experienced amongst us; and chapter xxiii. on the Milesian names is curious; but fancy too often predominates in the work. I could trace little analogy, I recollect, between the Basque and the Irish, colloquially at least ; for scarcely a word was intelligible to my ear. Nor does the patois of Toulouse, of which I possess the poetical collection by P. Goudelin, (Amsterdam, 1700, 12mo.) bear the slightest resemblance to the Basque, notwithstanding the local contiguity; but it does, a marked one, to the Provençal, or language some of the relatives of Prince Albert, whose profession of Popery amply warranted, in the conception of the reviewer, as in the papers and speeches of the day, the sensitiveness of Protestant England as to the creed of the Prince himself. The relatives here alluded to are the King of Saxony, the chief of a distinct branch, which had dethroned his own, and now separated from it by an interval of nearly three centuries; a duke of Saxe-Gotha, great-uncle of the Prince, but deceased without progeny; and the children of his father's brother, George Frederick, by the Princess of Kohary. This consanguinity countervails, it is assumed, any favorable conclusion deducible from his, otherwise, high Protestant descent, which is considered an absurd answer to the scruples of England, when she asked for a declaration of the faith of the future consort of her Queen-scruples of the Troubadours; which, again, varies little from the Italian of the Middle Ages, as the following version of the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, third canto, will verify : Dante. “Per me si va ne la città dolente: Per me si va ne l'eterno dolore; La somma sapientia, e 'l primo amore." Troubadores. "Per me si va en la ciutat dolent; Per me si va en l'eternel dolor ; La somma sapienza, e 'l prim' amor." See "Choix des Poésies Originales des Troubadours, par M. Raynouard, 1822," (tome vi.) A similar comparison of some translated lines from Calderon would not be uninteresting, had I not already too far transgressed in my devious course. still powerful and respected, as we see by the new Regency Bill. On these apprehensions, however, and their declared grounds, I must first observe, that they derive no confirmation from the alleged alliance of the Prince of Saxe-Altenberg, for, as I have shown, the event never occurred; and, as to the Prince's sister, the Queen of Bavaria, she has not, I am assured, changed her faith, nor ever been molested in the profession of it, no more than the spouse of the Arch-duke Charles of Austria, the Duchess of Orleans, or other Protestant princesses married in Catholic countries. The only circumstance that can, with any semblance of probability or shadow of a reason, be reflectively brought to bear on Prince Albert, is, the religion of his cousins, the King consort of Portugal, and the Duchess of Nemours, with their brother; but though his eminently and exclusively Protestant succession, and education, may not be accepted as a guarantee or evidence of his personal sentiments, they surely are entitled to equally inferential weight, as the fact constructively argued to his prejudice, of the Popery of some of his kindred; and, if so, the preponderance will be altogether in favor of his Protestantism. In truth, however, the young Prince should only be judged by his own avowed doctrine, of which there can exist no doubt. To meet, and still further counteract, the scruples said to be entertained on this occasion by Protestant England, I will show, and can have little difficulty in demonstrating, that, at a juncture which would have far better justified this jealousy of Popish kindred, it was wholly powerless on the English mind. What |