series of crimes we have no inclination to detail, he pursued his wife (a daughter of the Marquis of Châteaumorand) with gross insult, even in her convent-sanctuary at Clermont. The unfortunate lady had contracted such a habit of fear, that she could not be in his presence without trembling; and on his putting his hand to his pocket to take out his watch, whilst separated from her by the grating of the convent parlour, she thought he was about to draw a pistol, and fell fainting from her chair. Numerous traits of this description prove baseness and brutality as well as vice on the part of the higher orders of the province, who appear to have been deficient in the military virtues and redeeming qualities sometimes found in outlawed and desperate banditti. We should have had less gratification in dwelling upon the crimes and excesses narrated in the _Mémoires_, than we have derived from the consideration of their lighter passages, and of the occasional eccentricities and many admirable qualities of their estimable and reverend author. DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA. DON JOHN of Austria, the illegitimate son of the Emperor Charles V. (for an account of whose life we purpose to lay under contribution several curious documents lately published at Madrid) was born in 1545. His parentage on the mother's side is not quite so certain. Brantôme, Moreri, and others, after mentioning the Countess Barbe de Blomberghe as Don John's putative mother, assert that, although Charles's mistress, she certainly was not mother to Don John, whose parentage, they hint, should be laid at the door of some far nobler dame. But Ranke, and the best informed modern historians, affirm that Barbe de Blomberghe was really Don John's mother. This lady belonged to a noble family of Flanders, and was a celebrated beauty of her day. After his love for her was extinct, Charles V. gave Barbe de Blomberghe, with a large dowry, in marriage, to a certain Seigneur Rechem, who held considerable possessions in the province of Luxemburg, and lived constantly at Antwerp.