The "Academy" was now well established, and for nine years Handel conducted it with great success. After that time, however, a serious quarrel arose between him and his principal singer, Senesino, and the nobility taking the part of the latter, the affair led to the dissolution of the Academy. His former patrons raised a subscription to carry on operas in opposition to the master; but, nothing daunted, Handel undertook the management of the theatre at his own expense, and continued to bring out fresh works. At length however his resources became exhausted, and the mental anxiety he endured, in consequence, brought on a stroke of paralysis, and this illness compelled him to visit Aix-la-Chapelle. A short residence here restored his health, and with renewed vigour he returned to England, and lost no time in settling the demands of his creditors. He undertook a few more operas, but finding they met with little success, he again devoted himself to the composition of those memorials of his genius which will live throughout all generations. The oratorios which he first produced were "Saul " and "Israel in Egypt;" they were not received with much favour, and the master, discouraged by the loss of his popularity, left England for Dublin in 1741. Here his talents were acknowledged, and the kindness he met with on all sides induced him to bring out his great oratorio of the Messiah." This masterpiece achieved a great success, and at once established his reputation in the hearts of the Irish. After a residence of nine months in Ireland, during which time he gave many performances of his oratorios, Handel, with raised spirits, returned to England. Soon after his arrival he produced the "Messiah" at Covent Garden, and so great was its success that it regained him the favour of the people. Soon after, he composed, by order of the king, the Te Deum" and "Jubilate," in honour of the victory at Dettingen. Returning to his oratorios, he lost again, in a pecuniary point of view, till he brought out his "Judas Maccabæus," to celebrate the victory of Culloden, in 1746, and this oratorio achieved an unprecedented success. His health from this time began to decline slowly, and in 1751 he became quite blind. This great affliction necessarily interfered much with his musical pursuits, and he engaged his pupil, Mr. Smith, to assist him in managing his oratorios. During the latter part of his life he composed many songs and choruses with his usual vigour, though at times his mind was disordered. On April 6th, 1759, he conducted the performance of his immortal oratorio, the Messiah," for the last time. He returned home in a state of great exhaustion, and died on April 14th, and the 20th of the same month saw consigned to the tomb in Westminster Abbey all that was mortal of this great and talented musician. 66 66 BOADICEA. WHEN the standard-bearer of the tenth legion leaped upon the shores of Britain, more than nineteen hundred years ago, he waved the Roman eagle in front of the opposing crowds of barbarians, and the soldiers of Cæsar, who had hung back from the fray, followed him to the battle. The Britons, warlike but undisciplined, gave way before the well-trained legionaries, and after a fierce fight retired to the recesses of the forests. The Roman invader stayed in the island three weeks on the occasion of this first visit, and, after many engagements with the Britons, retired to Gaul, where Cæsar consoled himself by writing an account of the expedition. Many other invasions, under various Roman emperors, followed on the first attempt to subju gate this island, but it was not for many years that the invaders made good their footing on the soil, although they reduced parts of the kingdom to the condition of Roman provinces. Britain, at the time we are speaking of, was governed by a despotic priesthood, the all-powerful Druids. They ruled supreme over the various tribes into which the people were divided, made and interpreted the laws (which were unwritten), and conducted with mystery and pomp the terrible human sacrifices which formed a part of their strange worship. They lived for the most part in the remote depths of the primeval forests; and in different places in our island may still be seen the circles of immense stones in the midst of which their hideous sacrifices were offered. That of Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, is one of the most famous, and there is another in Wiltshire which covers many acres of ground. Carnac in France is also the site of a Druidic temple of vast size. We speak of these remains here in accordance with what has generally been believed on the representation of archaeologists and historians, but, as the critical reader is aware, their true character is very far from having been placed be yond doubt; while recent critical researches have also brought into question much that is believed of the Druids themselves, and of the power they are supposed to have wielded as a priestly caste. However this may be it behoves us, in a popular sketch like the present, to follow the common traditions of history. To strike a blow at these priestly rulers, who from the time of Cæsar's first landing had never ceased to animate the Britons, and stir them up to oppose the invaders, was one of the most important duties of the Romans. The principal home of the Druids was in the isle of Anglesea, and Suetonius, one of the governors of Britain, determined to invade their sanctuary and put an end to their power. Flat-bottomed boats were used for the transport of the army across the narrow belt of water that divides Anglesea from the mainland. On the shores of the island the Britons were drawn up in battle array, and conspicuous among them, in their long robes, the aged Druids were seen uttering the most terrible maledictions upon the invaders. For a time the Romans were appalled, but after a while the standard-bearers rushed forward, and the soldiers following their eagles, a general massacre ensued. The Britons were surrounded, and the Druids, with the men, women, and children who had gathered to them for protection, perished in the flames of the sacrifices prepared to invoke the aid of heaven in repelling the legionaries. A blow was thus inflicted upon the power of the Druids from which they never recovered. But about this time a part of Britain, which had for some years been under Roman rule, broke out into insurrection; and now the heroine of our sketch, Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, appears upon the scene Prasutagus, the king of that tribe, had been an ally of the Romans for years, and on his death he made the emperor a joint heir to his kingdom with his two daughters. But the Roman procurator seized upon the whole of the possessions in the name of the emperor, a deed of injustice of which Boadicea, the widow of Prasutagus, complained and demanded redress. The insolent servant of the emperor, in reply to her request, ordered her to be scourged with rods like a slave, a decree which was carried into execution, accompanied with the dishonour of her daughters. The severity of the Roman rule had often been felt before, and the unfortunate Britons were no strangers to injustice; but this was such a crowning act of outrage, that several tribes at once rushed to arms. The Iceni were anxious to avenge the insult offered to their royal family, and the Trinobantes and others were glad of an opportunity of throwing off the oppressive yoke of Rome. Suetonius was engaged with the flower of the army in Anglesea, and the Britons had therefore chosen a favourable moment for revolt. The queen marched with the army, and for a time her revenge was successful and her triumph complete. The colony of Camelodunum, defended by a garrison of veteran soldiers, was the first to succumb to the advancing tribe, and after slaughtering the inhabitants, the insurgents marched upon London, where another terrible massacre took place. Suetonius had in the meantime returned from his work of extirpating the Druids, but prudently abandoned London to the victorious Britons, and collecting his auxiliaries, quietly prepared to give them battle. So furious were the Britons at the iniquities of the Roman rule, that when London fell into their hands they massacred both the Romans and their own countrymen, without any distinction, seeing that the latter had bowed their heads to the hated oppressor. Upwards of seventy thousand people are said to have perished on this occasion, and for a while, as we have said, Boadicea was triumphant. But Suetonius was still to be conquered, and he had posted his army judiciously at the entrance of a narrow defile, the force under his command numbering upwards of ten thousand men, infantry and cavalry. Before the commencement of the battle, the Romans could see the Queen Boadicea driven through the ranks, accompanied by her outraged daughters, and like Elizabeth at Tilbury, when England expected the invasion of the Spanish Armada, the queen of the Iceni harangued her soldiers in a speech which has been handed down to us by the Roman historian Tacitus. Around her were the fierce tribes who longed for further vengeance on their enemies, and in front the terrible legions of Rome waited for the onset. Had the battle that was to come been decided in a different fashion the history of our land would have been other than it is, and the Romans would probably have hardly made good their footing in Britain again. Boadicea, a noble woman, girt with a golden chain, and with her long yellow hair floating on the wind, spoke as follows: | give back the shouts, and would tremble at the sound? Weep upon thy matchless wrongs, 'Tis because resentment ties All the terrors of our tongues. Rome shall perish-write that word Then the progeny that springs From the forests of our land, Regions Cæsar never knew Animated by the queen's speech and the recollection of their wrongs, the Britons rushed on to battle. The Romans let them come some distance, and then in a phalanx they also advanced to the charge. The heavy infantry of the legion, the finest and most perfectly equipped soldiers that the world could then produce, was supported by the cavalry and the auxiliaries. The mass of undisciplined Britons broke upon that impenetrable body of men as the wave breaks upon some opposing rock. The legions strode steadily on, the Britons fled in all directions, and the Romans massacred their women and children to the number of eighty thousand. True to her promise, the queen did not survive the defeat of her army, but rather than fall into the hands of the enemy she poisoned herself. The supremacy of the Romans was established in Britain, and the ill-fated Boadicea left no lasting legacy of success to her country but a name famous for ever in history and in song. 66 BONDAGERS. ALTHOUGH it is at least a century and a quarter since the poet Thomson lyrically proclaimed that "Britons never will be slaves," yet, thanks chiefly to Dr. Arne's inspiring melody, the line not only lives in memory, but is enthusiastically vociferated, with more or less meaning, up to the present day, usually by convivial gentlemen who are the modern representatives of those guardian angels" who, on the testimony of Thomson, first "sung the strain." According to this poetic fustian, the proclamation of Britain's immunity from slavery "was the charter of the land" when it first, like Aphrodite, "arose from out the azure main." The charter, however, was violated, as other charters "Ye have fought before, O Britons! under the com- have been; and, as the records of Bristol can tell, mand of a woman, but I do not ask you to avenge the slavery once existed on English soil. But it, and its illustrious ancestors from whom I am descended, nor successor, villeinage, have long since ceased to disgrace to regain for me the empire which the invader has our country; and, except for the paltry purposes wrested from me. I ask you to avenge my dishonoured political vituperation and rhetorical artifice, we now womanhood, the shameful scourge, the blood of a think of slavery and serfdom as things that are, or queen, and my daughters outraged by the Roman foe. lately were, confined to other lands than ours; and we That foe respects neither youth nor old age, and is regard the emancipation of a servile population as one insatiable in its lust after gold. Already we have been of the noblest objects on which modern philanthropy victorious over some of the stoutest soldiers of Rome, can expend its efforts. We little imagine, perhaps, let us teach the remainder the same stern lesson. The that while we prolong the chorus about Britons never day has dawned upon which we must conquer or die. being slaves, we shut our eyes to the fact that we have I ask death for myself rather than defeat, and you also slaves, not only at our very doors, but within our very must make your choice between death and slavery.' walls. We do not refer to those who, either voluntarily So spake the insulted queen. Cannot the reader or involuntarily, are the slaves of bad customs and fancy what shouts of barbaric joy would greet such vicious habits; nor do we now speak of the forms of sentiments; how strong hands would hold the battle-child-serfdom that are still permitted to exist in fac axe with a firmer grasp, and how the Roman legions, standing afar off in serried lines, would hear the hills دو of tories, brickyards, and agricultural gangs-an inhuman and brutalising serfdom, from which, it is to be hoped, the poor children of England will be rescued by that strong arm of the law that has dragged them out of the dismal depths of the coal-mines. To say nothing of these, we need do no more to prove our proposition than to point to the present existence of the bondage system and its bondagers. This word may, to many, be a new word, descriptive of a race as unknown to us as any in Ashango-land or Equatorial Africa, or as the natives of Borioboola-gha. It is true that "the house of bondage" is an expression that is familiar to us from our earliest years, and brings home to us the picture of a people suffering cruel slavery under stern taskmasters; but, it may be asked, who and what is a bondager? To this question we reply that a bondager, although sometimes a lad, is generally a female, and, in nearly every case, an unmarried young woman, who is "bound," or in bondage, for a year to a farm labourer, to assist him in performing his round of agricultural work; and that the existence of bondagers and the bondage system is happily confined to the southern counties of Scotland, and, notably, to Roxburghshire and Berwickshire, and to that northern portion of the county of Northumberland that includes the wild border district of the Cheviots. In this purely agricultural part of the country, where the flocks of sheep are reckoned by thousands, and wander over the vast rolling downs of the grassy hills-where a hundred acres of grain will ripen within one enclosure-where farms are from two to three thousand acres in extent, and where all the operations of agriculture seem to borrow a largeness from the scenery in which they are exercised, the villages are widely scattered, and their inhabitants are usually the labourers of the same employer, who holds the cottages in which they live as a necessary portion of his farm premises. The labourer, or “hind,” as he is termed, is paid in a way somewhat different from that which is customary elsewhere. In money he only receives from four to six pounds, but the deficiency is made up to him in kind. His master provides him with the keep of a cow and the cultivation of a thousand yards of potatoes; " leads," or draws his coals for him at the price paid for them at the pit's mouth; gives him some wool at sheep-shearing time, and about fourteen bolls (84 bushels) of wheat, barley, oats, peas, or beans; and, furthermore, gives him his house and stocked garden rent-free. On the whole, the yearly wages of the hind are found to be equivalent to from 351. to 401. of money; and, by the arrangement provided for him, he is made, to a certain extent, independent of shops and indifferent to the fluctuations of the corn market. But from his yearly total, a sum that is reckoned at about 107. has to be deducted for the following purpose. One of the "conditions," as the mutual agreement between the employer and the employed is called, is, that the hind shall provide a labourer, who shall be boarded and lodged by him, and paid by the master at a lower rate of wages, eightpence or tenpence a day, except in harvest time, when double pay is given. This labourer, so hired and "bound," is called the bondager." Sometimes a lad may be found to do the work; but in nearly every case the person hired is a young woman. If the hind has a daughter old enough, and willing to do the work, so much the better; though in such cases, unless the full pay of the bondager is allowed her, it is usually found that the daughter is not sufficiently disinterested to throw in her lot with that of her own family, but prefers to wander farther afield, to new scenes and fresh surroundings, and to hire herself as a bondager to a stranger. The woman hired by the hind may possibly be a widow, or a married woman who has left her husband "for good," or, more probably, for bad; but in the great majority of cases the bondager is a young unmarried woman, of no particular home, and of less particular morals. She is hired-generally at the "hirings" or statute fairs provided for the purpose-without any form of inquiry being gone through as to her character; a look at the girl and her outward and physical" points," and probable capacity for hard field work, being all that is deemed necessary; and thenceforth, from May 12th in one year, to the same date in the ensuing year, she is "bound” in serfdom to the hind, and becomes his goods and chattels for the next twelve months. It is, of course, an integral part and parcel of the bondage system, that its main feeders are not only immigrant Celts from Ireland and the Western Highlands, but girls of loose character and lost reputation, and inhabitants of pit districts and densely populated towns, who desire to lead a brief agricultural life, not so much for the sake of the wages received, as from the wish for change and novelty. In this respect, and in other social and moral aspects, the bondagers somewhat resemble many of the hop-pickers of southern counties. 66 But it is not so much out of doors, as in the hind's cottage, that the evils of the bondage system flourish in full rankness. The cottage-unless it belong to such a village as those created by the Duke of Northumberland-consists of one room, in which the whole family live by day and sleep by night. In many cases, this room is destitute of a back door, and of all outbuildings and offices. To sleep upstairs is considered 'uncanny;" and even in those rare instances in which a second sleeping room has been provided by the landlord, it has been found that it has been used as a storeroom for odds and ends, and that the family are unwilling to depart from their old habits of sleeping, promiscuously and gregariously, in their living room. Their beds are those horrible inventions of frouzy uncleanness, "box-beds," cupboards, divided into upper and lower strata, infinitely worse than the worst berths in the steerage of an ill-appointed emigrant-ship, and to be seen nowhere else, perhaps, south of the Cheviots, though common enough and dirty enough in the Western Highlands of Scotland. These box-beds are usually arranged against the wall facing the fire, and are seldom more than four in number. One is occupied by the hind and his wife; their children, divided rather according to age than to sex, fill two others; and the fourth is claimed by the bondager, whom a thin plank only divides from the nuptial couch of the hind and his wife, or from the bed of their strapping lads. Whether the ceremony of dressing and undressing ever takes place on retiring to, or arising from, these box-beds, and whether personal cleanliness and the institution of the tub ever penetrate into such a home, are points on which the imagination may speculate, but on which both the tongue and pen must preserve silence. The evils, however, to which such a state of things must give rise must be sufficiently apparent, even if they stopped short of groundless jealousy on the part of the hind's wife, on whom also, on wet and wintry days, when there is little or no farm work to be done, the bondager's companionship is enforced; and it is notorious, that either from incapacity or unwillingness, the bondager never assists in house-work or engages in domestic occupations. She considers herself merely to be engaged for out-door labour; and when employment at that is deficient, she remains in the house listlessly watching the busy doings of the wife, or wandering to a neighbour's to indulge in idle talk and scandal. The out-door work of the bondager varies, of course, with the season of the year; but turniphoeing enters largely into her duties. Since those "Rob Roy" days, when Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistone classed "the new turnips" with those French antics and Hanoverian rats, that, as he declared, had “changed the world in old England," this particular root-crop has been largely cultivated in the strong soil and amid the humid atmosphere of the Border country. And it is to the prevalent and increasing cultivation of turnips that the continuance of the bondage system is attributed. The defenders of the system, even those | ment; but, so long as the "conditions" exist between who recognize its many evils, allege that in their sparsely-populated districts they cannot properly cultivate their land without the help of the bondagers; and that as they give their hind so many advantages, it is but right that he should in part repay them, by always providing a labourer for the turnip-hoeing and other work. If the hind does not like the agreement, he is at liberty to please himself, and to look out elsewhere for other employment on different conditions; which he certainly will have to do unless he can show to his master the young woman who is "bound" to him for the next twelvemonth as a bondager. Practically, therefore, it comes to this; that notwithstanding the charter granted to Britannia by the poet Thomson, and the undertaking that Britons never shall be slaves, the bondage system is, to a certain extent, a state of slavery; not only as regards the position of the bondager to the hind, but also as touching the connection between the hind and the occupier of the farm. That such a system is offensive to the larger number of the hinds we are assured on good grounds, and we can readily believe the state them and their masters, so long must they submit to them with all their drawbacks, or choose the alternative of losing their places. And, although "flitting" is common, yet usually it is but for a change of masters, and not of "conditions;" and the hind prefers to retain the certainty of his home, coupled with its perquisites of food, to wandering further afield in quest of work to which similar advantages are not attached. For the certainty of his own board and lodging, he will consent to share it with a strange young woman, who may destroy his own domestic peace, demoralise his children, and, by her gross language and deeds, both in the fields and in the village, sap any purity that may yet be left to the inhabitants. But, in this matter, is the hind the proper person on whom to thrust the blame? Is he not, rather, the landlord's scapegoat? and if the landlords themselves cannot, or will not, combine to put an end to the bondage system, could not the legislature assist them to give the coup de grâce to the bondagers? CUTHBERT BEDE. PARISIAN SKETCHES. VIII. THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL. THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL. THE Foundling Hospital of Paris, or, as it is now called, L'Hospice des Enfans Assistés, was founded in the year 1640, by St. Vincent de Paul. This excellent man-far more worthy of the title of a saint than the majority of those to be found in the Romish calendar-feeling deeply for the many unfortunate children who were in the habit of being exposed in the public streets, either to attract the pity of the passers-by or to perish, took upon himself the noble task of providing an asylum to which they might be taken, and there receive, to the fullest possible extent, that care and attention which ought to have been bestowed upon them by their own unnatural parents. Having resolved to accomplish the task, he humbly prayed for a blessing on his work, and that he might be endowed with courage and perseverance to complete it. He then applied himself to |