ve
occurred among the 2540 rulers thus tabulated, for it was often deemed
politic to conceal the circumstances of a monarch's death, and history
mentions many such instances in which the cause of death is doubtful; so
that, for example, the 11 insane and the 20 suicides and the 62 poisoned
doubtless do not comprise the whole number of deaths which ought to be
included under those descriptions. Nevertheless, taking these figures as
they are, they furnish a striking comment on King Richard's melancholy
words; which, by the way, Richard's own conqueror and successor almost
paralleled in his lamentations over the anxieties and perils that
encompass the kingly state. We may add that the death of Napoleon III.
at Chiselhurst has now, by one more name, increased the number of
sovereigns dying in exile, while giving the whole subject a fresh
interest.

* * * * *

The authority of Professor Godebski of St. Petersburg is given for the
extraordinary statement that the Russian authorities in Poland have
prohibited the contemplated erection of a monument to Chopin in his
native Warsaw, on the ground that it might become an occasion for a
political manifestation. M. Godebski was to have executed the statue, a
plan had been submitted and accepted, musical admirers of Chopin had
favored the project, Prince Orloff, Princess Czartoryska and many ladies
of the Polish nobility had contributed the necessary funds, when the
whole scheme was vetoed by Count von Berg, on the pretext already
stated. Surely this was pushing caution to extremes, even in Poland. It
was Chopin's fate to be driven from his country in 1836 by revolutionary
disorders; but the very composition of the monumental committee, which
was under the direction of Madame Mouchanoff, an ardent admirer of the
master, indicated that the enterprise was an artistic, not a political
one. Chopin, reposing between Bellini and Cherubini in the Pere la
Chaise, his chosen burial-place, has long since passed from the narrow
confines of his Polish nationality to the worldwide and immortal realm
of art. In pretending, thirty years after his death, that the genius of
the artist is of less account than the accident of his birthplace, and
in reviving against this memorial project the entirely secondary facts
of the revolutionary epoch (when Chopin's career was not in politics,
but in art), the Russian authorities are wondrously sensitive, to say
the least. A chag