on the wings of the lightning, and has subdued
the elements of fire and water; developing the
powers of steam and gas and electricity, making
each and all subservient to the advantage of
man. Some people have a notion that the poetic
ages have gone, and that we now live in a dull
prosaic age of utility. No opinion can be more
erroneous. Fulton, Arkwright, Watt, Telford,
and Stephenson have been our poets, who, like
Dante, have made themselves the heroes of their
own poems, the actors in the biographies of
their discoveries and inventions. So novel and
extraordinary were their preconceptions, that,
in the early part of their career, many suspected
them of insanity. These things inspire hopes
of the future, that the cherished ideas which
many of us now entertain, but which are thought
to be mere dreams by the duller-minded, will
yet justify themselves by becoming facts in the
coming history of the race. The electrical
machine, the steam-engine, the high-level bridge,
and other triumphs over matter, are so many
victories which merit an Iliad even more than
the invasion and fall of Troy. These
actualities of man's productive intelligence far
excel the ideals of his imagination; which, however
grand they may be, fall short of their
achievements. Thus, even now, the face of the
social and political world is undergoing
alteration while we look on as careless observers;
and reforms, which wise and good men only
a few years ago regarded as hopeless, are
now in actual operation. Let us not, therefore
any longer err with those unenterprising
men of old who thought Sir Hugh Myddelton
a madman for proposing to bring the New
River to London, or with the over-cautious Sir
Walter Scott, who laughed at the notion of
lighting our towns with gas. We will not
imitate the House of Commons that ridiculed
George Stephenson for his estimate of the speed
at which railway trains might safely travel, or
those carpers that recently doubted the
possibility of a submarine cable. These wonders
have been accomplished, and with them the
poetic has passed into our common life.

Nor has our modern civilisation been wanting
in heroism, nor will our future lack its peaceful
warriors, who conquer rather with the word
than with the sword. There will be, as there
has been, a Sir John Franklin, a Robert
Stevenson, a Brunel, a Livingstone, a Hugh Miller,
and a Humboldt, who, in the onward march of
time, of mind, and of morals, will, whether as
martyr or victor, make the annals of the future
rich in names and deeds that confer honour on
our common humanity. What has happened is
a promise and pledge of what will happen; but
the plane of the future will occupy a higher level,
and the heroic man appear yet nobler as he moves
on a loftier platform. No longer regarded as
a Giant, his work no longer stigmatised as the
result of witchcraft, nor his success attributed
to the adroitness with which he had outwitted
the fiend by whom he had been taught magic,
the truly great man of the future will be
worshipped, at a less reverential distance, perhaps,
but with more brotherly love. The proper
sympathy between classes will be promoted, by
their better acquaintance with each other; and
the mists of ignorance being dispelled from the
popular mind, the human objects of admiration
will be seen in their natural proportions, and
neither the teacher nor the taught suffer from
the illusions which are the inevitable consequences
of a false medium. And thus the antagonism
which has hitherto existed between them
may happily cease.

THE MARQUIS DE FRATTEAUX.

FEW events made a greater sensation in
England generally, and more particularly in London,
in March, 1752, than the mysterious disappearance
or abduction—it was called for a time the
murder—of the unfortunate Marquis de Fratteaux,
who was actually dragged by force from
the heart of the English metropolis, and immured
in the Bastille, to gratify the strange and
unnatural hatred of his own father.

This noble, whose name was Louis Mathieu
Bertin, Marquis de Fratteaux, Chevalier of the
Order of St. Louis, and a distinguished young
captain of French cavalry, was the eldest son
of M. Jean Bertin de St. Geyran (Honorary
Master of Requests and Counsellor to the
Parliament of Bourdeaux) and of his wife Lucretia
de St. Chamant, both of whose families were
deemed, by character and descent, most
honourable among the Bordelais. In the Blazon
ou Art Héraldique,* Bertin is represented as
bearing an escutcheon argent, charged with a
saltire (simple) dentelé.

From his birth, the Marquis Louis Mathieu
was an object of aversion to his father, who, on
the other hand, doted even to absurdity on his
youngest son, on whom he lavished all his love and
his livres, and on whom he bestowed the estate
of Bourdeille. M. Bertin would seem, almost,
from the birth of his second boy, to have
determined, by every scheme he could devise, to
deprive the eldest of his birthright; and this
object he followed with singular rancour nearly
to the end of his life.

It has never been hinted that M. Bertin
suspected the paternity of his heir. Through life
the conduct of Madame Bertin was irreproachable
and above all suspicion.

In the infancy and boyhood of Louis, his
father strove by systematic oppression, and by
cutting neglect, to degrade, mortify, and break
the spirit of the poor little fellow: on all occasions
giving the place of honour, and the whole
of his affection, to his second son. As his
manhood approached, his father proposed to him
the profession of the law, but as he, weary of
his unhappy home, displayed an inclination for
the army, open war was at once declared by his
father against him. To more than one abbé did
the young man in his misery appeal for intercession
with his tyrannical parent; but such appeals
only made matters worse, and the Counsellor

* French Encyclopaedia, 1789.