POEMS by DANTE Gabriel RosseTTI. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1870. JUST PUBLISHED AT THIS OFFICE: CLEMENCE D'ORVILLE; or, From the Palace to the Steppe. A Novel of Russian High Life. And CLELIA, from Family Papers. Translated for, and first published in America in, THE LIVING AGE. One vol., price 38 cents. NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10. A MORNING PICTURE. THE Morning opens like a rose, The Eastern skies are faintly flushed, While all the West is filled with clouds, Where late the last sweet evening blushed. No sparkles from the dewdrops come; A fleece-like mist hangs o'er the vale; The clouds as stately and as slow As ships in some calm ocean sail ! The unsunned breeze is cool and fresh, The massive oak-tree's shadow lies. His notes with liquid freedom swim. The flowers awake, and now dissolves Appear like hills of snow and gold. Athenæum. From The Sunday Magazine. OUR STRENGTH AND SHIELD. But with the love which yearns to see, Yea, LORD, for GOD WITH US Thou art, With Thee Thy Church is one. And Thou art near us in our bliss, And Thou art near to come, O Lord: Lord Jesus! speed the promised hour; Untrembling then, O grant us grace HENRY DOWNTON. From Blackwood's Magazine. THE PRINCESSE DES URSINS.* THE dynasty of the Bourbons in Spain, which has just ended in a woman, was founded by a woman; for it was the Princesse des Ursins who was veritably Queen of Spain for the first fifteen years of their domination; and without the aid of her protection, courage, and indomitable spirit, the descendants of Philip V. would never have occupied the throne of Spain. This extraordinary person has hitherto obtained too little consideration in the page of history. Writers, relying almost solely on the pages of St. Simon, have passed her by as a mere intriguante; but there was infinitely more than this in the Princesse des Ursins. She was the incarnate representative of the French spirit of progress in Spain, a female politician of the school of Richelieu and Colbert; she thoroughly understood by what means a stable government was to be secured for the country with which the peculiar circumstances of her early life had made her acquainted before the Bourbon accession; she had entirely comprehended by what measures bankrupt, beggarly, incapable Spain could be raised again in the scale of nations. The chief of these measures were the repression of the superb, punctilious, and factious spirit of the grandees, the reform in taxation and administration of the finances, the assimilation and centralization of the charter-system of provincial rights, privileges, and legislatures (the provincial fueros) which embarrassed the operations of government, and the suppression of ecclesiastic immunities in a country which was being yearly devoured by priests and monks. For the Spain which Charles II. had left behind him was a desert land, eaten up by grandees and churches and convents. After fifteen years of immense activity, Madame des Ursins, without a moment's warning, was forcibly seized in the middle of a horribly cold December night and carried out of Spain; but the greater part of the reforms she set on foot "La Princesse des Ursins. Essai sur sa vie et son caractere politique d'apres de nombreux documents inedits." Par M. Francois Combes. Paris, 1858. This volume, two volumes of Correspondence of the Princess, published by M. Geffroy, and the Memoires of the time, have given us the materials out of which the present article is constructed. ultimately took root; and if Spain under the Bourbons rose in the scale of nations, much of the credit is due to Madame des Ursins. Although her sudden fall was owing directly to the ordinary ingratitude of absolute monarchs, yet the inspiring primal causes were the machinations of the grandees whose authority she had curtailed, joined to the dark workings of the Inquisition. To the honour of Madame des Ursins she dared to proclaim herself the enemy of this abominable institution; and the first, a small but ultimately deadly wound, which their power received, came from the hand of a woman, and that of a woman of nearly eighty years of age. For, strange to say, the historic career, the public life, of Madame des Ursins did not begin till she was sixty-five years old. Her long life may be divided into five portions that of the handsome, brilliant, witty, and intelligent Mademoiselle de la Tremouille up to the age of twenty-two; that of the loving and devoted wife, the Princesse de Chalais, up to the death of her first husband, Adrien Blaise de Talleyrand, Prince de Chalais, in 1670, when she was thirty-five years of age; that of the great Duchesse de Bracciano, when she was the leader of fashion and of elegant amusements in the great Orsini palace in the Piazza Navona, at Rome, after her second marriage in 1675; that of the Princesse des Ursins, which title she took after the death of the Duke of Bracciano in 1698, when her diplomatic and political career first commenced; that of the ex-regent of Spain, during her second residence at Rome, from 1715 to 1722, where she died at the age of eighty-seven. If the Princesse de Chalais had been a mother, we might never have heard of the Princesse des Ursins; but, a solitary widow, childless and without scope for her great intelligence and her deeply affectionate nature, she seems to have thrown herself in the decline of life, when the brilliance of her beauty no longer inspired the makers of sonnets and madrigals, upon diplomacy and politics, from the very lack of womanly occupation. She first became acquainted with Spain in 1663, when she accompanied her first husband, the Prince de Chalais, in his flight from France to escape the sanguinary edicts of Richelieu still in force against duelling. He had fought in one of the duelling en- which the Papal Court was the unrivalled counters so common among the nobility of school. The portrait of St. Simon, even in the Fronde, a duel of four against four, in this reduced form, will afford some explawhich the Due De Beauvilliers had been nation of the absorbing fascination which killed. From Spain they passed to Italy, the Princesse des Ursins exercised on the where the Prince died while away from his young, brilliant, devoted, and heroic-nawife at Venice. The Princess, who was at tured Marie Louise, the first wife of Philip that time at Rome, showed exemplary grief V. "Don't let her speak to you for two as a widow, and gained the sympathies of all hours," said Philip V. to his second wife, as Roman society. She remained for some she was about to meet the Princesse des time secluded in a convent, and only five Ursins in her first and only interview, “or "years afterwards accepted the hand of the she will enchain you for ever." During the Duke of Bracciano, the head of the Orsini time of her second marriage she made sunfamily. This marriage, however, was not dry visits to France, and renewed her a happy one: the Duke and Duchess had acquaintance with Madame de Maintenon, different tastes and divergent views in poli- of whom she had been a rival in the salons tics. The Orsini Palace was, however, the of the Hotel d'Albret when the latter was centre of all that was distinguished in Rome. only Madame Scarron and she herself was The Duchess supported the honours of her but a girl. It may be imagined that the position with consummate grace, but also unrivalled position and influence of Madame with a great deal of extravagance—an ad- de Maintenon may have stimulated the ditional item in the Duke's list of complaints | seeds of ambition hitherto dormant in her against her, for from the age of forty to the nature, for she certainly was conscious of commencement of her diplomatic career, she no inferiority to Madame de Maintenon. seems to have taken part with a ready spirit It has been even said that she nourished in all the joyous follies of Roman life, in all secretly the design of displacing the rigid "the revel and the masque of Italy," and favourite in the good graces of Louis XIV. to have wanted no taste for art or for the Of this there is no proof, but at any rate growing superiority of Italian music. She she was sufficiently conscious of her abilities was, according to St. Simon, well qualified and her power of command to look out for to take the lead in any line of life. She was a theatre for her activity; and the force of above the middle height, with blue eyes circumstances, as well, perhaps as her own which expressed anything she pleased; she | calculations, drew her to Spain. had a perfect figure and bust; a face without regular beauty, but yet charming; a noble air, an exquisite and natural grace. St. Simon, whose experience was great, said he never saw anything approaching her charm of manner; it was flattering, caressing, animating, yet kept always in due limits, as though she wished to please merely for the sake of pleasing. It was impossible to resist her when she had set her heart on captivating and seducing. With all this, a most agreeable voice and a faculty in conversation delicious, inexhaustible, and highly entertaining. Since she had seen many countries and all their chief people, she was, moreover, a great judge of character; she attracted to her the best society, and kept quite a little court of her own; and from her position at Rome, and intimacy with the Roman cardinals, she became a mistress in that art of polished and subtle intrigue of During the time of her visits to France and to Versailles the question of the Spanish Succession was agitating all Europe; and, as is well known, it was the opinion of Innocent XI., formally expressed in a letter, which finally determined the moribund Charles II. to draw up his famous testament in favour of the Duke d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. The Duchess of Bracciano, connected by alliance with the greatest Pontifical families, with her little court in the Piazza Navona, attended by Roman cardinals, seemed a person deserving of the attention of the French Government. She was thoroughly tutored in the matter by Torcy, the French minister, and it was recommended to her diplomatic advocacy at Rome. She had the credit of having exercised a real influence upon the judgment of Innocent XI.; but she achieved something more effective even than this. Portocarrero, the Archbishop of Toledo, | such a proceeding, she knew, would raise the greatest ecclesiastic in Spain, the confi- the suspicions of the politic monarch in her dential adviser and minister of Charles II., disfavour. She asked merely, as a prelimicame to Rome to receive the pallium and nary, for the honour of being the lady the cardinal's hat. She completely capti- attendant who, as custom was, accompanied vated Portocarrero, and elicited from him a Spanish royal bride across the frontier. a promise to advocate the French claims But she had already previously carefully to the succession with Charles II. When prepared her way to Madrid by gaining Louis XIV. knew that Portocarrero was entirely the friendship of Portocarrero in won over, he considered the matter settled. her intercourse with him at Rome, and by He granted a pension to the Duchess of acquiring the favour of the Duchesse de Bracciano, and Torcy wrote that he had Bourgogne, and of the Piedmontese Court, now only to lower his flag before her in through her activity in obtaining the goodmatters of diplomacy, and to become her will of the great Spanish ecclesiastics and pupil. grandees for the Piedmontese marriage of Philip V. man. Carefully and cautiously did she gradu But neither Louis XIV., nor Torcy, nor Madame de Maintenon, had any notion of the heights to which ambition was now lead-ally disclose the real object of her diploing the Duchess of Bracciano, who, on the macy, working by turns through her friend, death of her husband, appeared before the the Maréchal de Noailles, through the world as the Princesse des Ursins, Ursins Maréchale, the friend of Madame de Mainbeing the French for Orsini, her late hus- tenon, through Madame de Maintenon herband's family name. The Duke had be- self, through Torcy the minister. The come reconciled to her before he died, and Maréchale de Noailles, later called by the left her all he possessed; but she disposed wits of Versailles the mother of the ten of the duchy and title of Bracciano to Don tribes of Israel (she had twenty-two chilLuigi Odelscalchi, her late husband's kins- dren), was fully equal to the confidence reThe young Duke of Anjou had now posed in her by the Princesse des Ursins gone to Spain, and taken the title of Philip and to the occasion. "I think," the PrinV., and was about to be married to a prin- cess suggested to Madame de Noailles, cess of Savoy, aged fourteen, the daugh-"that if I was in a good position I might ter of the wily Victor Amadeus, and the make rain and sunshine in the Court of sister of the Duchesse de Bourgogne. Ac- Spain; and that it would be easy enough cording to the usage of the Spanish Court, for me to establish a dozen of mesdemoiselles the camerera mayor, the head lady-in-wait- vos filles in that country." Moreover, the ing of the Queen, was an indispensable and young Duc d'Ayen, the eldest son and heir awful functionary, a sort of female grand of the Noailles, was named for a mission to inquisitor of etiquette, to whom constant Spain at the Court of Philip V. The Prindomesticity with the royal couple gave ter- cesse des Ursins took care to recommmend rible power and authority. If such was the him carefully to Portocarrero and her friends case ordinarily, what ascendancy might not among the grandees; and when the Duc a camerera mayor such as the Princesse des d'Ayen, who had himself considerable tact Ursins attain over the minds of a boy king and ability, was making way to the favour and a girl queen in the present condition of king and court, she began to make use of Spain? of his influence in the most delicate way possible for it naturally required great nicety of management for an elderly lady of the great position of the Princess to solicit any favour of so young a man as the Duc d'Ayen at the very outset of his career. The way in which she approached the young Duke was a model of diplomatic subtlety. "What opinion can you have of us Roman ladies," she wrote, "when you see Such was the reasoning of Madame des Ursins as she set about diplomatizing for the post of camerera mayor: and she diplomatized in a way which proved her admirable sagacity in the ways of courts, and her knowledge of the natures of kings and ministers. She was by no means so impolitic as to ask at once for the post, which was of course virtually in the gift of Louis XIV.: |