, . THE LIBRARY lJERATUKE . ; ' ' - -"' . " . . fig 1 - TRATED THE LIBRARY CHOICE LITERATURE Bl'i :s '? K THE LIBRARY OF CHOICE LITERATURE PROSE AND POETRY SELECTED FROM THE MOST ADMIRED AUTHORS EDITED, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTES. BY AINSWORTH R. SPOFFORD, Librarian of Congress, and CHARLES GIBBON, Author of "Robin Gray," Etc. ILLUSTRATED WITH SIXTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS ON STEEL IN EIGHT VOLUMES VOL. I. PHILADELPHIA GEBBIE & CO., PUBLISHERS 1882 COPYRIGHTED 1881, BY GEBBIE & GO. 5015654 \M PREFACE. IN launching another argosy, with rich and varied freight, upon the sea of popu- lar favor, it has been the aim of the Editors and Publishers of this Library of Choice Literature to provide for the tastes of the widest circle of intelligent readers. The most largely circulated anthologies are made up of poetical selections mainly ; in this, poetry holds a subordinate place to prose. While a just proportion of space has been given to writers on graver themes, the body of the work is made up of Masterpieces, chosen from the most fresh, vigorous and entertaining produc- tions of the most noted authors, living and dead, of Europe and America. It is believed that the people are ready to welcome an enterprise which will give them in the compact form of Eight Volumes of letter press, (or it may be bound in four) elegantly illustrated, A LIBRARY OF LITERATURE, so comprehen- sive as to include choice specimens from nearly every writer of established fame, representing more than six hundred authors, in nearly two thousand selections. The gems of thought and expression, the exquisite measures of song, the delicate play of fancy, the lofty appeals of patriotism, the choicest bits of description, the delicious sallies of wit and humor, the kindling strains of eloquence all have their place in these pages. From the best works of the best writers, from novel- ists and poets, from eloquent orators and judicious publicists, from philosophers and historians, from travellers and voyagers, from biographers and essayists, not forgetting the reviewers and pamphleteers, we have gleaned the Library here presented to the reader. It is hoped that it may be found worthy of a welcome as extensive as its scope. TI PREFACE. It has been the ambition of the publishers to produce THE LIBRARY in a style worthy of its contents, and it is commended to the lovers of all good things in the study, the workshop, or at the family fireside, in the confident belief that its contents, equally instructive and entertaining, represent a substantial share of the sweetness as well as the strength of the world's literature. The special thanks of the publishers and editors are due. and are hereby cheerfully tendered to all American authors and publishers of copyright works, who have kindly placed at our disposal the many valuable selections from their respective publications herein kid before the reader. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE. The World Behind the Scenes William Makepeace Thackeray . 1 Abraham Lincoln - .... Shirley Brooks, London "Punch." 6 Napoleon Le Petit Victor Hugo 6 The Song of the Dying Captain Dowling 10 Rab and his Friends John Brown, M.D 11 The Ballad of Bouillabaisse Wm. M. Thackeray 17 Oration on the Dedication of a Statue to Burns G. W. Curtis 18 The Prize Ode on the Centenary of Burns Isa Craig Knox 23 Speech on Duluth Hon. J. Proctor Knott .... 24 America Samuel F. Smith 27 The Funeral Oration of Pericles Thucydides 27 The Pope and the Beggar Bulwer Lytton 31 London Society a Hundred Years Ago .....*... George 0. Trevelyan 31 Thanatopsis William Cullen Bryant .... 36 Perling Joan John Gibson Lockhart .... 37 Cleopatra Wm. W. Story 38 A Battle Picture Anonymous 40 The Journey of a Day Samuel Johnson 41 Andrea Del Sarto Robert Browning 42 The Storm and Shipwreck Charles Dickens 45 From "in Memoriam" Alfred Tennyson 49 A Week at Batavia The Marquis De Beauvoir ... 49 The Wedding of Shon Maclean Robert Buchannan 54 A Discourse of Trees Henry Ward Beecher 56 The Suicide Banker A. M. Sullivan, M. P. . . . . 59 Carcassonne LippincotC s Magazine 62 A Night of Terror Paul Louis Courier 62 Parallel between Wm. Penn and John Locke George Bancroft 63 The Youth of AVashington George Bancroft 64 Childe Harold Lord Byron 65 Mark Twain on the Weather Samuel L. Clemens 66 The Vision of Mirza Exhibiting a Picture of Human Life Joseph Addison 67 Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue Alfred Tennyson 69 Positivism on an Island W. H. Malloch 71 The Wants of Man John Quincy Adams 87 The Babies . Samuel L. Clemens 89 viii CONTENTS. PAGK, Paraphrase from Seneca Sir Matthew Hale 9U Budge's Version of the Flood John Habberton . John G. Holland 92 The Laocoou . . . . The Treachery of Mettius and its Punishment .... Lwy The Closing Scene Thoma * Buchanan Read ... 94 The Last Days of the Emperor Otho Tacitus The Little Man all in Grey J. P. de B&rmger A Picture of Wild Nature on the Mississippi F. A. de Chateaubriand . ... 97 Wimfreda Anonymous On Old Age acero 98 The Bill of Mortality Wm - Cowper 100 The Lost and Delicious Leisure of the Olden Time . . . George Eliot 1 The Dream Sir Wm. Davcnant 101 Life in as you Like Douglas J err old 102 A Bridal Song Beaumont and Fletcher .... 105 Disproportion of Man Blaise Pascal 105 The Falcon Boccaccio 107 The King of Thule Goethe 109 Three Sonnets William Drummond .... 109 The Story of Crazy Martha Jacques Jasmin 110 The Complaint Thomas Chatterton 114 The Imprisoned Huntsman Sir Walter Scott 115 England and France Theodore Hook 115 A Garden Reverie Philip Bourke Marston . . . 120 Old Familiar Faces Cliarles Lamb 121 Kabiik, an Eastern Tale A. Crowquill 121 Song. From the Spanish J. G. Lockhart 123 The Lord's Marie Allan Cunningham 124 The Literary Life Matthew Browne 124 Louglirig Tarn Professor Wilson 129 Buy a Broom? Thomas Aird 130 A Retrospective Review Thomas Hood 154 To Blossoms Robert Herrick 155 The Enchanter Faustus and Queen Elizabeth Blackwood's Mag 156 To a Highland Girl Wordsworth 159 The Poet's Dream Lord Lytton 160 On the Moral Qualities of Milton Dr. Channing 161 Song from Faust Goethe 164 On Impudence and Modesty David Hume 165 Stanzas Mrs. Anne Radclijfe .... 165 Human Life Samuel Rogers 166 The Gray Hair Alaric A. Watts 166 Out with the Herring-Fishers Hugh Miller 167 Haidee L or< i Byron 170 The Dean of Santiago From the Spanish 174 The Two Fountains Thomas Moore 176 Master and Man Thomas Crofton Croker ... 177 The Knitter Sir John Bowring 179 To my Honoured Kinsman Dry den 180 The Philosophy of Sorrow D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson. . 182 The Comforter Thomas Moan 184 Peggy Nowlan John Bar, im . 185 CONTENTS. ix PAGE The Banks of Clyde Andrew Park 192 The Spate, a Tale of the Clyde Thomas Atkinson 192 Evening Alaric A Watts 197 To J*** H***, Four Years 01.1 Leirth Hunt 198 A Dirge Rev. Georne Crnly 199 A Family Scene Susan Edinondstone Ferrier . . 199 Baby May W. C. Bennett 202 Baby's Shoes W. C. Bennett 203 The Brigand of the Loire Alexander Sutherland .... 203 Fate Ralph Waldo Emerson .... 211 The Romany Girl Ralph Waldo Emerson 211 To a Sky-lark James Hogg 212 Scene from " The Tryal," a Comedy Joanna Baillie 212 Sonnet Henry Kirke White 214 To the Moon John Keats 215 Servian Lyric Sir John Bowring 215 Journal of a Lady of Fashion Countess of Blessington ... 216 Hymn Before Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni . . . Coleridge 219 The Friend of Humanity and the Kuife-grinder .... Right Hon. George Canning . . 220 Vulgarity and Affectation William Hazlitt 220 The Jester Condemned to Death Horace Smith 224 The Summer Morning John Clare 224 The Horn -book K. a. Pratzel 225 Across the Sands of Dee Charles Kingslty 233 Laura's Bower Leigh Hunt 234 Extracts from the Correspondence of Cowper William Cowper 234 Cupid Taught by the Graces 240 A Choice George Godfrey Cunningham . 240 The Adopted Child Mrs. Hemans 240 My Namesake Theodore Martin 241 Wiustanley, a Ballad . Jean Ingelow 251 The Counterparts 254 Human Life Bernard Barton 258 Polish Superstitions Mrs. Bailie 258 The Sick Child John Struthers 259 Selling Flowers Mrs. Henry Wood 2GO Sonnet, To a Ladye Win. Dunbar 267 Sonnet, the Fear of Death Sir Philip Sydney 2o'7 Sonnet, Degeneracy of the World Drtimmoiid of Hawthornden . . 267 Sonnet, To Mr. Lawrence John Milton 207 Sonnet, Worldliness Wordsworth 267 Sonnet, On the Grasshopper and Cricket John Keats 2C8 Fact and Fiction Thomas Doubleday 268 Ballad of Cresentius Miss Landon 272 The Graves of a Household Mrs. Hemans 273 The Screen, or "Not at Home" Mrs. Opie 273 The Seven Sisters Wordsworth 277 The Mother's Heart Mrs. Norton 278 My Babes in the Wood Mrs. Piatt 278 Martha the Gipsy Theodore Hook 279 Searching after God Thomas Heynood 287 Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples 288 On Revisiting the Scenes of my Infancy Dr John Leyden 290 x CONTENTS. FAQS Mrs. Mellor's Diamonds ijie V oun ff er ... 298 Stanzas . Caroline Bowles Southey . . . 298 The Rustic Wreath Miss Hit ford 299 Wyoming Thomas Campbell 302 Death of Gertru.le Thomas Campbell 302 School Friendship James Smith 303 The Ocean Grave Mrs- John Hunter 306 The Fall of the Leaf Thomas Hood 307 Fidelity From the Spanish 309 Verses . & ndrew Marvel 309 Madame Simple's Investment 310 Song The Old Man Henry Neele 316 The Red-nosed Lieutenant Dr. William Maginn .... 316 The Wall-flower Rev. John Langhorne .... 319 At the Shrine B. Orme 320 Peace and War Shelley 323 Trifles Hannah More 323 Rouge-et-Noir Horace Smith 324 On the Instability of Youth Lord Vaux 329 London Lord Macaulay 330 Laura in Heaven Petrarch 337 An English Landscape George Eliot ..-* 337 Juggling Jerry George Meredith 338 The Dwarf and the Invisible Cap . G. G. Cunningham 340 The Education of Bacchus Rev. George Croly 341 May Morning at Ravenna Leigh Hunt ....... 341 Medicine and Morals Isaac V Israeli 342 From the Arabic 344 The Scottish Sacramental Sabbath James Hislop 344 Little Dominick Miss Edgeworth 346 Lament for her Husband Mrs. Opie 350 The Fags' Revolt Thomas Hughes 351 The Vicar Winthrop M. Praed .... 357 To a Beloved Daughter Henry Alford 358 My Plea Alice Gary 358 The White Boat, Emile Sourestre 359 Soug" Gather ye Rose-buds '' Robert Herrick 370 The Sleep Mrs. E. B. Browning .... 370 Alfred the Truth-teller C/Mrlotte Mary Yonge ... 371 The Forging of the Anchor Samuel Ferguson 375 English Literature Francis Jeffrey .377 The Gondola Glides y. K Uen . ey 3^ Right at Last Mrg ffaskeU 381 The Exchange S.T.Coleridge 386 iood at Sherwood Forest Drayton W The Story of Marullo | Shirley Brooks '. 388 "g of the Virgins of Israel Wm _ ' Sotheby _ 392 V Good Word for Winter J. R. Loioell . . 393 Soldier's Home Robert Bloomfield 397 The Great Storm of 1703 Hone 3Q8 LIST OF THE ENGRAVINGS IN VOLUME I. THREE PORTRAITS, (Bryant, Thackeray, Macaulay) Frontispiece. THE FAIR VENETIAN, Engraved Title. RAB, page 16 CLEOPATRA, " 48 THE POET'S DREAM, "160 THE CLYDE, from Erskine Ferry, " 192 CUPID TAUGHT BY THE GRACES, " 240 NAPLES, from the West "288 THE SHBINE, Roman States, "320 THE LIBRARY OF CHOICE LITERATURE. THE WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES. [WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, born at Calcutta, 1811, died in London, Doc. 24, 186:!. His father was in the East India civil service, to which may be due many life-like pictures in his writings. His early life brought him a varied experience, first of fortune and then of po- verty. The study of art took him for years to the Con- tinent, and at the age of thirty he took up the profession of authorship, writing copiously for Punch and Frcaer's Magazine. His first notable work of fiction, Vanity Fair, appeared in 1840-7, and his Lectures on English Humor- ists and on the Four Georges, wrought out with rare lite- rary skill, were delivered to admiring audiences in England and America from 1851 to 1856. The Cornhill Magazine began in 18GO under Thackeray's editorship, and quickly ran to the unprecedented circulation of over 100,000 copies. In person Thackeray was tall, massive- brained, and commanding with genial and kindly man- ners. His place in the literature of the nineteenth cen- tury is a high one, and the title unquestionably belongs to him of the first satirist of the age. Nowhere are to be found such pictures of the meanness, selfishness, and heartless servility of society to rank and money, com- bined with skilful and masterly portraitures of noble and kindly men, end devoted, unselfish women. The style of Thackeray is his own, always pure, free and flowing, refined, yet forcible, while his delicate and sub- tile humor, frequently sportive, but never too "broad, en- livens all his books, which are not wanting also in the deepest pathos, lofty morality and sometimes tragic power. The best novels of Thackeray are Vanity Fair (1847), The History of Pendennis (1850), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcombs (1855), and The Virginia (1857).] SO Pen had many acquaintances, and be- ing of a jovial and easy turn, got more daily : but no friend like Warrington ; and the two men continued to live almost as much in common as the Knights of the Tem- ple, riding upon one horse (for Pen's was at Warrington's service), and having their chambers and their servitor in common. Mr. Warrington had made the acquaint- ance of Pen's friends of Grosvenor Place VOL. I. during their last unlucky season in London, and had expressed himself no better satis- fied with Sir Francis and Lady Clavering and her ladyship's daughter than was the public in general. " The world is right," George said, " about those people. The young men laugh and talk freely before those ladies, and about them. The girl sees people whom she has no right to know, and talks to men with whom no girl should have an intimacy. Did you see those two re- probates leaning over Lady Clavering's car- riage in the Park the other day, and leering under Miss Blanche's bonnet? No good mother would let her daughter know those men, or admit them within her doors." " The Begum is the most innocent and good-natured soul alive," interposed Pen. " She never heard any harm of Captain Blackball, or read that trial in which Char- ley Lovelace figures. Do you suppose that honest ladies read and remember the Chron- ique Scandaleuse as well as you, you old grumbler? " " Would you like Laura Bell to know those fellows ? " Warrington asked, his face turning rather red. " Would you let any woman you loved be contaminated by their company ? I have no doubt that poor Be- gum is ignorant of their histories. It seems to me she is ignorant of a great number of better things. It seems to me that your honest Begum is not a lady, Pen. It is not her fault, doubtless, that she has not had the education or learned the refinements of a lady." " She is as moral as Lady Portsea, who has all the world at her balls, and as refined as Mrs. Bull, who breaks the king's English, and has half a dozen dukes at her table," Pen answered, rather sulkily. " Why should you and I be more squeamish than the rest of the world ? Why are we to visit the sins of her fathers on this harmless, kind crea- PENDENNIS. ture? She never did anything but kind- ness to you or any mortal soul. As far as she knows, she does her best. She does not set up to be more than she is. She gives you the best dinners she can buy, and the best company she can get. She pays the debts of that scamp of a husband of hers. She spoils her boy like the most virtuous mother in England. Her opinion about lit- erary matters, to be sure is not much ; and I dare say she never read a line of Words- worth, or heard of Tennyson in her life." " No more has Mrs. Flanagan the laun- dress," growled out Pen's Mentor; "no more has Betty, the housemaid ; and I have no word of blame against them. But a high-souled man doesn't make friends of these. A gentleman doesn't choose these for his companions, or bitterly rues it after- wards if he do. Are you, who are setting tip to be a man of the world and a philoso- pher, to tell me that the aim of life is to gjttle three courses and dine off silver ? o you dare to own to yourself that your ambition in life is good claret, and that you'll dine with any, provided you get a stalled ox to feed on ? You call me a Cy- nic why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit ! I'd rather live upon raw tur- nips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn back- woodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilization, and own that a French cook was the thing in life best worth living for." " Because you like raw beef-steak and a pipe afterwards," broke out Pen, " you give yourself airs of superiority over people whose tastes are more dainty, and are not ashamed of the world they live in. Who goes about professing particular admiration, or esteem or friendship, or gratitude, even for the peo- ple one meets every day ? If A. asks me to his house, and gives me his best, I take his good things for what they are worth and no more. I do not profess to pay him back in friendship, but in the convention's money of society. When we part, we part without any grief. When we meet, we are tolerably glad to see one another. If I were only to live with my friends, your black muzzle, old George, is the only face I should see." " You arc your uncle's pupil," said War- rington rather sadly ; " and you speak like a worldling." " And why not? " asked Pendennis ; " why not acknowledge the world I stand upon, and submit to the conditions of the society which we live in and live by ? I am older than you, George, in spite of your grizzled whiskers, and have seen much more of the world than you have in your garret here, shut up with your books and your reveries and your ideas of one-and-twenty. 1 say, I take the world as it is. and being of it will not be ashamed of it. If the time is out of joint, have I any calling or strength to set it right ? " " Indeed, I don't think you have much of either," growled Pen's interlocutor. " If I doubt whether I am better than my neighbor," Arthur continued, " If I con- cede that I am no better, I also doubt whether he is better than I. I see men who begin with ideas of universal reform, and who, before their beards are grown, pro- pound their loud plans for the regeneration of mankind, give up their schemes after a few years of bootless talking and vainglorious attempts to lead their fellows ; and after they have found that men will no longer hear them, as indeed they never were in the least worthy to be heard, sink quietly into the rank and file, acknowledging their aims im- practicable, or thankful that they were never put into practice. The fiercest reformers grow calm, and are fain to put up with things as they are : the loudest Radical ora- tors become dumb, quiescent placemen : the most fervent Liberals when out of power, be- come humdrum Conservatives, or downright tyrants or despots in office. Look at Thiers, look at Guizot, in opposition and in place ! Look at the Whigs appealing to the country, and the Whigs in power 1 Would you say that the conduct of these men is an act of treason, as the Radicals bawl, who would give way in their turn, were their turn ever to come ? No, only that they submit to cir- cumstances which are stronger than they, march as the world marches towards reform, but at the world's pace (and the movements of the vast body of mankind must needs be slow), forego this scheme as impracticable, on account of opposition, that as immature, because against the sense of the majority, are forced to calculate drawbacks and diffi- culties, as well as to think of reforms and advances, and compelled finally to submit, and to wait and to compromise." " The Right honorable Arthur Pendennig could not speak better, or be more satisfied with himself, if he was first Lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer," Warrington said. " Self-satisfied ? Why self-satisfied ? " continued Pen. " It seems to me that my THE WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES. skepticism is more respectful and more mo- dest than the revolutionary ardor of other folks. Many a patriot of eighteen, many a Spouting-Club orator, would turn the Bishops out of the House of Lords to-morrow, and throw the Lords out after the Bishops, and throw the throne into the Thames after the Peers and the Bench. Is that man more modest than I, who take these institutions as I find them, and wait for time and truth to develop, or fortify, or (if you like) destroy them ? A college tutor, or a nobleman's toady, who appears one fine day as my right reverend lord, in a silk apron and a shovel- hat, and assumes a benedictory air over me, is still the same man we remember at Ox- bridge, when he was truckling to the tufts, and bullying the poor undergraduates in the lecture-room. An hereditary legislator, who passes his time with jockeys and black- legs and ballet-girls, and who is called to rule over me and his other betters because his grandfather made a lucky speculation in the funds, or found a coal or tin mine on his property, or because his stupid ancestor happened to be in command often thousand men as brave as himself, who overcame twelve thousand Frenchmen, or fifty thou- sand Indians such a man, I say, inspires me with no more respect than the bitterest democrat can feel towards him. But, such as he is, he is a part of the old society to which we belong : and I submit to his lord- ship with acquiescence ; and he takes his place above the best of us at all dinner- parties, and there bides his time. I don't want to chop his head off with a guillotine, or to fling mud at him in the street. When they call such a man a disgrace to his order ; and such another, who is good and gentle, refined and generous, who employs his great means in promoting every kind- ness and charity, and art and grace of life, in the kindest and most gracious manner, an ornament to his rank the question as to the use and propriety of the order is not in the least affected one way or other. There it is, extant among us, a part of our habits, the creed of many of us, the growth of cen- turies, the symbol of a most complicated tradition there stand my lord the bishop and my lord the hereditary legislator what the French call transactions both of them representing in their present shape mail- clad barons and double-s worded chiefs (from whom their lordships the hereditaries, for the most part, dont descend), and priests, professing to hold an absolute truth and a divinely inherited power, the which truth absolute our ancestors burned at. the stake, and denied there ; the which divine trans- missible power still exists in print to be believed, or not, pretty much at choice ; and of these, I say, I acquiesce that they exist, and no more. If you say that these schemes, devised before printing was known, or steam was born ; when thought was an infant, scared and whipped ; and truth un- der its guardians was gagged and swathed, and blindfolded, and not allowed to lift its voice, or to look out, or to walk under the sun ; before men were permitted to meet, or to trade, or to speak with each other If any one says (as some faithful souls do) that these schemes are forever, and having been changed and modified constantly are to be subject to no further development or decay, I laugh, and let the man speak. But I would have toleration for these, as I would ask it for my own opinions ; and if they are to die, I would rather they had a decent and natural than an abrupt and violent death." '' You would have sacrificed to Jove," Warrington said, " had you lived in the time of the Christian persecutions." " Perhaps I would," said Pen, with some sadness. " Perhaps I am a coward, per- haps my faith is unsteady ; but this is my own reserve. What I argue here is, that I will not persecute. Make a faith or a dogma absolute, and persecution becomes a logical consequence ; and Dominic burns a Jew, or Calvin an Arian, or Nero a Christian, or Elizabeth or Mary a Papist or Protestant ; or their father both or either, according to his humor ; and acting without any pangs of remorse, but on the contrary, with strict notions of duty fulfilled. Make dogma ab- solute, and to inflict or to suffer death be- comes easy and necessary ; and Mohammed's soldiers shouting ' Paradise ! Paradise ! ' and dying on the Christian spears, are not more or less praiseworthy than the same men slaugh- tering a townful of Jews, or cutting off the heads of all prisoners who would not ac- knowledge that there was but one prophet of God." " A little while since, young one," War- rington said, who had been listening to his friend's confessions neither without sympathy nor scorn, for his mood led him to indulge in both, " you asked me why I remained out of the strife of the world, and looked on at the great labor of my neighbor without taking any part in the struggle ? Why, what a PENDENNIS. mere dilettante you own yourself to be, in this confession of general skepticism, and what a listless spectator yourself? You are six-and-twenty years old, and as blast as a rake of sixty." "You neither hope much, nor care much, nor believe much. " Were the world composed of Saint Ber- nards or Saint Dominies, it would be equally odious," said Pen, "and at the end of a few score years would cease to exist altogether. Would you have every man with his head shaved, and every woman in a cloister, carrying out to tlie full the ascetic principle ? Would you have conventicle hymns twanging from every lane in every city in the world ? Would you have all the" birds of the forest sing one note and fly with one feather? You call me a skeptic because I acknowledge what is ; and in acknowledging that, be it linnet or lark, or priest or parson ; be it, I mean, any single one of the infinite varieties of the creatures of God (whose very name I would be understood to pronounce with rev- erence, and never to approach but with dis- tant awe), I say that the study and ac- knowledgment of that variety amongst men especially increases our respect and wonder for the Creator, Commander, and Ordainer of all these minds, so different and yet so united, meeting in a common adoration, and offering up each according to his degree and means of approaching the Divine centre, his acknowledgment of praise and worship, each singing (to recur to the bird simile) his natural song." " And so, Arthur, the hymn of a saint, or the ode of a poet, or the chant of a Newgate thief, are all pretty much the same in your philosophy," said George. " Even that sneer could be answered were it to the point," Pendennis replied ; " but it is not ; and it could be replied to you, that even to the wretched outcry of the thief on the tree, the wisest and the best of all teach- ers we know of, the untiring Comforter and Consoler, promised a pitiful hearing and a certain hope. Hymns of saints ! Odes oi poets ! who are we, to measure the chances and opportunities, the means of doing, or e\vn judging, right and wrong, awarded to men ; and to establish the rule for meeting out their punishments and rewards ? We set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if in comparison to that, Newton's mind, or Pascal's or Shakespeare's, was any loftier than mine as if the ray which travels from the sur would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that alti- tude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, that I say we should take no count for the calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference." " Your figure fails there, Arthur," said the other better pleased ; " if even by common arithmetic we can multiply as we can reduce almost infinitely, the Great Reckoner must ;ake count of all ; and the small is not small, or the great great, to His infinity." " I don't call those calculations in ques- ___>n," Arthur said ; " I only say that yours are incomplete and premature ; false in consequence, and by every operation, multi- slying into wider error. I do not condemn :he men who killed Socrates and damned Galileo. I say that they damned Galileo and killed Socrates." " And yet but a moment since you admit- ted the propriety of acquiescence in the pres- d, I suppose, all other tyrannies ? " " No : but that if an opponent menaces me, of whom and without cost of blood and vio- lence I can get rid, I would rather wait him out, and starve him out, than fight him out. Fabius fought Hannibal skeptically. Who was his Roman coadjutor, whom we read of in Plutarch when we were boys, who scoffed at the other's procrastination and doubted his courage, and engaged the enemy, and was beaten for his pains ? " In these speculations and confessions of Arthur, the reader may perhaps see allusions to questions, which, no doubt, have occupied and discomposed himself, and which he may have answered by very different solutions to those come to by our friend. We are not pledging ourselves for the correctness of his opinions, which readers will please to con- sider are delivered dramatically, the writer being no more answerable for them than for the sentiments uttered by any other charac- ter of our story : our endeavor is merely to follow out, in its progress, the development of the mind of a worldly and selfish, but not ungenerous or unkind or truth-avoiding man. And it will be seen that the lamentable stage to which this logic at present has brought him, is one of general skepticism and sneer- ing acquiescence in the world as it is ; or if you like so to call it, a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant. The tastes and habits of such a man prevent him from being a boisterous demagogue, and his love of truth and dislike of cant keep him from advancing crude propositions, such as many THE WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES. loud reformers are constantly ready with ; much more of uttering downright falsehoods in arguing questions or abusing opponents, which he would die or starve rather than use. It was not in our friend's nature to be able to utter certain lies ; nor was he strong enough to protest against others, except with a polite sneer ; his maxim being, that he owed obedience to all Acts of Parliament, as long as they were not repealed. And to what does this easy and skeptical life lead a man ? Friend Arthur was a Sad- ducee, and the Baptist might be in the Wil- derness shouting to the poor, who were lis- tening with all their might and faith to the preacher's awful accents and denunciations of wrath o# woe or salvation ; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this skepticism lead ? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfish- ness, so to speak the more shameful, be- cause it is so good-humored and conscience- less and serene. Conscience 1 What is conscience ? Why accept remorse ? What is public or private faith ? Mythuses alike en- veloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Ar- thur, as see them you can with only too fa- tal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh : if plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved : if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honor are on the ground armed on the one side or the ether, and you alone are to lie on your bal- cony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward. " The truth, friend ! " Arthur said, imper- t-.irbably ; " where is the truth ? Show it me. That is the question between us. I see it on both sides. I see it in the Conservative side of the House, and amongst the Radicals, and even on the ministerial benches. I see it in this man who worships by Act of Parlia- ment, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a year ; in that man, who, driven fatally by the remorseless logic of his creed, gives up every thing, friends, fame, dearest Lies, closest vanities.. J~ tt result of an army of churchmen, the recognized posi- tion of a leader, and passes over, truth-im- pelled, to the enemy, in whose ranks he is ready to serve henceforth as a nameless pri- vate soldier : I see the truth in that man, as I do in his brother, whose logic drives him to quite a different conclusion, and wh o after having passed a life in vain endeavors to reconcile an irreconcilable book, flings it, at last down in despair, and declares, with tearful eyes, and hands up to Heaven, his revolt and recantation. If the truth is with all these, why should I take side with any one of them? Some are called upon to preach : let them preach. Of these preach- ers there are somewhat too many, methinks, who fancy they have the gift. But we can not all be parsons in church, that is clear. Some must sit silent and listen, or go to sleep mayhap. Have we not all our duties ? The head charity-boy blows the bellows ; the master canes the other boys in the organ- loft ; the clerk sings out Amen from the desk and the beadle with the staff opens the door for his Reverence, who rustics in silk up to the cushion. I won't cane the boys, nay, or say Amen always, or act as the church's champion or warrior, in the shape of the beadle with the staff ; but I will take off my hat in the place, and say my prayers there too, and shake hands with the clergyman as he steps on the grass outside. Don't I know that his being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parlia- ment ? That the church he occupies was built for other worship ? That the Metho- dist chapel is next door ; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by ? Yes, I am a Sadducee ; and I take things as I find them, and the world and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are ; and as I intend to take a wife, if I find one not to be madly in love and prostrate at her feet like a fool not to worship her as an angel, or to expect to find her as such but to be good-natured to her, end courteous, expect- ing good nature and pleasant society from her in turn. And so, George, if ever you hear of my marrying, depend on it, it won't be a romantic attachment on my side : and if you hear of any good place under Govern- me'ht, I have no particular scruples that I know of, which would prevent me from ac- cepting your offer." " Oh, Pen, you scoundrel ! I know what you mean," here Warrington broke out. '' This is the meaning of your skepticism, of VICTOR HUGO. vour quietism, of your atheism, my poor fel- low. You're going to sell yourself and Heaven help you ! You are going to make a bargain that will degrade you and make you miserable for life, and there's no use talking of it. If you are once bent on it, the devil won't prevent you." . , " On the contrary, he's on my side, isn t he, George ? " said Pen with a laugh. " What good cigars these are! Come down and have a little dinner at the club ; the chef s in town, and he'll cook a good one for me. No, you won't? Don't be sulky, old boy, I m going down to to the country to-morrow. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. FOULLY ASSASSINATED, APRIL 14, 1865. You lay a wreath on murdered LINCOLN'S bier, You, who with mjcking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face, His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to shine, of art to please. You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh, Judging each step as though the way were plain: Reckless, so it could point its paragraph, Of chiefs perplexity, or people's pain. Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurril-jester, is there room for you? Yes, he had lived to sham ; me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men. My shallow judgment I had learnt to rue, Noting how to occasion's height he rose, How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true, How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows. How humble yet how hopeful he could be : How in good fortune and in ill the same : Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he, Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. Ho went about his work such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart ami hand As one who knows, where there's a task to do, Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command ; Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow, That God makes instruments to work his will, If but that will we can arrive to know, Nor UUII;HT with the weights of good and ill, So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron-bark, that turns the lumberer's axe, The rapid that o'erbears the boatman's toil, The prairie hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks, The ambushed Indian, and the prowling bear Such were the needs that helped his needs to train: Rough culture but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain. So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it: four long-suffering years. Hi-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses change to cheers, The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood : Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood, A felon hand, between the goal and him Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest, And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long laboring limbs were laid at rest. The words of mercy were upon his lips, Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen ; When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men. The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame, Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high, Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came. A deed accurst ! Strokes have been struck before By the assassin's hand, whereof men doubt Of more of horror or disgrace they bore ; But thy foul crime like Cain's stands daring out. Vile hand, that brandest murder on a strife, Wliate'er its grounds, stoutly and nobly striven, And with the martyr's crown, crownest a life With much to praise, little to be forgiven. PUNCH. VICTOR HUGO NAPOLEON LE PETIT. VICTOR MARIE HUGO, born at Besancon, February 26, 1802, is one of the most eminent writers of France. His precocious genius early produced notable poems and romances, and Chateaubriand decorated him with the title of " L' enfant mMtme." At first a royalist and a Catholic, Hugo became in 1830 an ardent Republican; NAPOLEON LE PETIT. elects! to the National Assembly in 1843, he became one of the boldest and moat eloquent opponents of Louis Na- poleon, in his designs upon the supreme power in France, and had the honor of becoming an exile at the Coup d' Etut of December 2, 1851, not returning to France until twenty years later, on the downfall of Napoleon III. Victor Hugo has produced many masterly poems, dra- mas and romances. His style is vivid and intense. He has done more than any other writer to discredit and to jupplant the so-called classic school of art by the roman- tic. His first great romance, "Notre Dame de Paris," (1831), is a work of remarkable originality, and "Les Mir itcntblcs" (1802), displays the ripened powers of a great creative intellect, although sometimes obscured by er- rors of taste. As a political writer, Hugo wields the pen of a master. In " Napoleon Le Petit," he startles us by the boldness and vigor of his thought, no less than by the intensity of his style. The book is full of vivid antithesis, fierce denunciation, biting sarcasm, glowing apostrophe, tow- ering climax, and terrible invective. He denounces the vices of Napoleon IIL, satirizes his weaknesses, and blazes with indignation at his crimes. Whatever may be our opinion of the correctness of his judgment and the fairness of his book, we can not refuse to it the fore- most place at the head of all political diatribes. History has its tigers. The historians, those immortal keepers of ferocious animals, exhibit to the nations that imperial menage- rie. Tacitus has seized and confined eight or ten of these tigers in the iron cages of his style. Behold them : they are frightful and superb ; their spots constitute a part of their beauty. This is Nimrod, the hunter of men ; that is Busiris, the tyrant of Egypt; that other is Phalaris, who caused men to be baked alive in a brazen bull, that he might hear the bull bellow ; here is Ahasuerus, who tore the scalp from the heads of the seven Maccabees, and caused them to be roasted alive ; there is Nero, the burner of Rome, who wrapped the Christians in wax and bitu- men, and set them on fire like torches ; there is Tiberius, the man of Capreso ; there is Do- mitian ; here is Caracalla ; there is Helioga- balus ; that other is Commodus, who has this merit the more in the horror which he in- spires, that he was the son of Marcus Aure- lius ; these are the Czars ; those, the Sultans ; there go the Popes, behold among them the tiger Borgia ; see Philip, called the Good, as the Furies were called Eumenides ; see Richard III., sinister and deformed; behold, with his great face and his huge belly, Henry VIII., who, of five wives that he had, mur- dered three; see Christiern II., the Nero of the North; behold Philip II., the Demon of the South. They are frightful ; hear them roar ; consider them, one after the other. The historian brings them out before you ; the historian exhibits them, furious and terri- ble, at the side of the cage, opens for you their jaws, lets you see their teeth, shows you their claws ; you can say of every one of them, 'It is a royal tiger.' In truth, they have been taken upon their thrones. History leads them forth across the ages. She takes care that they shall not die ; they are her tigers. She does not mingle with them the jackals. She keeps and guards apart those unclean beasts. M. Louis Bonaparte will be found, with Claudius, with Ferdinand VII. of Spain, with Ferdinand II. of Naples, in the cage of the hyenas. He is a little of a brigand, and very much of a knave. We see always in him the " Chev- alier d" Industrie," who lived by his wits in England ; his actual prosperity, his triumph, and his glory, and his success, go for nothing here; that mantle of purple is dragged under the mire of his boots. Napoleon le Petit, nothing more, nothing less ; the title of our book is good. The baseness of his vices de- tracts from the grandeur of his crimes. What would you have? Peter the Cruel massacred, but did not rob. Henry III. assassinated, but did not swindle. Timour trampled little children under the feet of his horses, just as M. Bonaparte exterminated women and old men on the Boulevards ; but lie did not lie. Listen to the Arabian historian : ' Timour Beg, Sahib Keran, ruler of the world, and of his age, ruler of the planetary conjunc- tions, was born at Kesch, in 1336. He strangled a hundred thousand captives. When he besieged Siwas, the inhabitants, to ap- pease him, sent out to him a thousand little children, each bearing a Koran upon his head, and shouting, Allah ! Allah ! He caused the sacred books to be removed with respect, and the children to be crushed under the feet of horses. He employed seventy thousand human heads, with cement, stones, and bricks, in building towers at Herat, at Sebzvar, at Tekrit, at Aleppo, at Bagdad. lie despised lying ; when he Had given his word, he always kept it.' M. Bonaparte is not of that stature. He has not that dignity which the great despots of the East and of the West mingled with their ferocity. The Cesarean grandeur is wanting to him. To keep a good countenance, and maintain a proper air among all those illustri- ous executioners who have tortured humanity these four thousand years, one must not hesi- tate in his mind between a general of division and a beater of the big drum on the Champs Elyse"es ; one must not have been policeman VICTOR HUGO. at London ; one must not have endured, with eyes cast down, in full assembly of the peers, the haughty contempt of M. Magnan ; one must not have been called pickpocket by the English journals ; one must not have been threatened with Clichy ; one must not repre- sent, in a word, all that there is in man of the knave. ******** Providence conducts to maturity, by the law of universal life, men, things, and events. It suffices, in order that an old world may disappear, that civilization, ascending contin- ually towards its meridian, should shine upon old institutions, old prejudices, old laws, old customs. That radiance burns up and de- vours the past. At its influence, slowly, and without shock, what ought to decay, decays; what ought to decline, declines ; the wrinkles of age grow over all doomed things, over castes, codes, institutions, religions. This work of decrepitude goes on, in some sort of itself. Yet it is a fruitful decrepitude, under which shoots the germ of the new life. Little by little the ruin is prepared; deep, invisible cracks spread here and there in the darkness, and crumble to dust from below that venera- ble pile which still stands secure above : and behold, some fine day. all at once, that assem- blage of worm-eaten facts, of which decaying societies are composed, becomes rotten; the edifice is shaken, loosened, and leans over. Then all goes for nothing henceforward. Let there arrive one of those giants peculiar to revolutions, let but the giant raise his hand, and all is over. There is an hour in history when a hunch of the elbow of a Danton may overthrow Europe. 1848 was one of those hours : old feu- dal, monarchical, and papal Europe, plastered up so fatally by France in 1815, began to tot- ter. But a Danton was wanting. The over- throw did not come. Men have often said, in the hackneyed phraseology applied to such events, that 1848 had opened a gulf in human affairs. No. The corpse of the past hung like a dead weight upon Europe; 1848 opened a grave in which to inter that corpse. It is that grave which men mistook for a gulf. In 1848, everything which held by the past, all that survived of that corpse, met before that grave, not only kings on their thrones, cardinals under their hats, judges under the shadow of the guillotine, captains on their war- horses, were moved ; but whoever had an interest of whatever sort in that which was about to disappear; whoever cultivated to his profit a social fiction, or had an abuse to lease or to hire; whoever was keeper of a lie, guard- ian of a prejudice, or farmer of a superstition ; whoever robbed, extorted, oppressed, lied ; whoever sold by false weights, from those who altered a balance to those who falsified the Bible, from the bad merchant to the bad priest, from those who swindled by figures to those who made money by miracles; all, from a certain Jewish banker, who fancied himself a little of a Catholic, to a certain Catholic bishop, who became a little of a Jew, all the men of the past turned their heads toward each other and trembled. That grave which was yawning for them, and into which were to fall all those fictions which have weighed upon mankind for so many ages, they resolved to close. They re- solved to wall it up, to fill it with stones and with rubbish, and to erect upon that pile a gibbet, and to crucify upon that gibbet, warm and bleeding, that grand criminal, the truth. They resolved to make an end, once for all, of the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to arrest and turn back for ever the ascending force of humanity . The enterprise was formidable ; to undo the labor of twenty generations ; to strangle in the nineteenth century, seizing them by the throat, three centuries, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth, that is to say, Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, reli- gious inquiry, philosophic inquiry, universal inquiry : to crush throughout Europe that immense vegetation of free thought, springing up here like a huge oak, there like a blade of grass; to marry the knout and the crosier; to diffuse more of Spain in the South, and more of Russia in the North ; to revive all that they could of the Inquisition, and to ex- tinguish all that they could of intelligence; to stultify the youth, in other words, to bru- talize the future; to cause the world to assist at the auto dafe of ideas; to overthrow the tribunes ; to suppress the journal, the hand- bill, the book, the speech, the cry, the mur- mur, the whisper ; to enforce silence ; to prosecute thought, in the case of the printer, in the composing-stick, in the type, in the stereotype, in the lithograph, in the picture, in the theatre, on the platform, in the book of the schoolmaster, in the pack of the colpor- teur; to give to every man, for faith, for law, for aim, and for God, material interest ; to say to the people, ' Eat, and think not' ; to take away from man the brain, and leave him only the belly ; to extinguish individual en- terprise, local life, national enthusiasm, all those profound instincts which impel men toward the right ; to annihilate that person- ality of the nations, which men call country ; to destroy nationality among scattered and dismembered people, the constitution in con- stitutional states, the republic in France, liberty everywhere ; to set foot in every di- NAPOLEON LE PETIT. rection upon human effort ; in a word, to close that gulf which is called Progress. Such was the vast, enormous, European plan, which no one conceived, for none of those men of the Old World had the genius for that, but which all pursued. As to the plan in itself, as to that gigantic idea of uni- versal oppression, whence came it ? Who can tell ? Men saw it in the air. It ap- peared on the side of the past. It enlight- ened certain minds. It pointed out certain modes of action. It was a kind of glimmer issuing from the tomb of Machiavelli. At certain moments in human history, at some things that are plotted, at some things that are done, it seems as if all the old de- mons of humanity Louis XI., Philip II., Catherine de' Medici, the Duke of Alba, Tor- quemada were gathered apart in a corner, seated around a table, and holding council. We look, we regard them, and instead of these colossals, we find only abortions. We expected the Duke of Alba, we find Schwartz- enberg ; we looked for Torquemada, and be- hold Veuillot. The old European despotism continues its march, under the lead of these little men, and goes always on. It is like the Czar Peter in his travels. "We made re- lays of whatever we found," writes he; "when we could get no more Tartar horses, we took up with asses." To attain that end, the subjection of all men and all things, it was necessary to enter upon a path, obscure, tortuous, steep, difficult ; they did enter it. Some of those who entered it knew what they were doing. Parties live upon words ; those men whom 1848 had frightened and rallied together have found their catchwords, religion, family, property. They attacked, with that vulgar address which suffices when men speak to fear, certain obscure quarters of what is called socialism. The struggle was to save religion, property, and family. "Follow your banners !" cried they. The herd of frightened interests rushed after them. They coalesced, they made front, they gathered a party. They had a crowd around them. That crowd was composed of divers elements. The landholder joined it because his rents had come down ; the peasant, be- cause he had paid the forty-five centimes : the man who did not believe in God thought it was necessary to save religion, because he had been forced to sell his horses. They separated from this crowd the force which it contained, and availed themselves of it. They enforced the system of oppression by every means, by the law, by the vote, by the legislature, by the tribune, by the jury, by the magistracy, by the police ; in Lom- bardy, by the sabre ; in Naples, by the gal- leys ; in Hungary, by the gibbet. To re- strain intelligence, to put the chain upon intellects, their fugitive slaves, to prevent the past from disappeai'ing, to prevent the future from being born, to continue them- selves kings, princes, nobles, privileged clas- ses, everything became good, everything just ; all was legitimate. They organized for the necessities of the struggle, and spread abroad in the world, a kind of moral ambus- cade against freedom, which Ferdinand put in action at Palermo, Antonelli at Rome, Schwartzenberg at Milan and at Pesth, and still later, the men of December, those wolves of the state, at Paris. * * * * Formerly the world was a place where men walked with slow steps, with backs bent, faces lowered ; where the Count de Gouvion was waited upon at table by Jean- Jacques (Rousseau) ; where the Chevalier de Rohan beat Voltaire with blows of a cudgel ; where they set Daniel De Foe in the pillory ; where a city like Dijon was separated from a city like Paris by a will to be made, by rob- bers at all the corners of the woods, and by ten days of coach : where a book was a kind of infamy and rubbish which the executioner burned on the steps of the Hall of Justice ; where superstition and ferocity joined hand in hand ; where the pope said to the emperor : Jungamus dezteras, gladium gladio copulemus ; where one encountered at every step crosses on which were hung amulets, and gibbets on which were hung men ; where there were heretics, Jews, lepers ; where the houses had battlements and loopholes ; where they shut up the streets with a chain, the rivers with a chain, the cities with walls, the kingdoms with prohibitions and penalties ; where, ex- cept authority and force, which were closely banded, all was penned up, doled out, cut up, divided, parcelled, hated and hating, scat- tered and dead ; men but dust power, the king Log. Now, there is a world in which all is alive, united, combined, related, mingled together ; a world where reign thought, commerce, and industry ; where politics, continually more settled, tends to associate itself with science ; a world where the last scaffolds and the last cannon are hastening to cut off their last heads, and to vomit their list shells ; a world where the day grows with each minute ; a world in which distance has disappeared, where Constantinople is nearer to Paris than Lyons was a century ago, where America and Europe throb with the same pulsation of the heart; a world all circulation and all affec- tion, whose brain is France, whose arteries are railways, and whose fibres are the electric 10 THE SONG OF THE DYING. wires. Do you not see that simply to state such a situation, is to explain, to demon- strate, and to solve everything ? Do you not perceive that the old world was fatally pos- sessed by an old spirit, tyranny, and that upon the new world must necessarily, irresis- tibly, divinely descend a new spirit, that of liberty ? * ***** * Let us proclaim it firmly, proclaim it even in fall and in defeat, this age is the grandest of all ages ; and do you know wherefore ? Because it is the most benignant. This age, the imme- diate issue of the French Revolution, and its first-born, enfranchises the slave in America, uplills the pariah in Asia, destroys the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, pene- trates the Koran with the Gospel, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strong- est to the right of the most just, suppresses pirates, ameliorates penal laws, purifies the galleys, throws the bloody sword in the gut- ter, condemns the death penalty, takes the chain and ball from the foot of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and stigmatizes war, weakens the dukes of Alba and the Charles Ninths, plucks out the fangs from tyrants. This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people and consecrates man. In art, it possesses every kind of genius: writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, figure, splendor, depth, color, form, style ; it reinforces itself at once in the real and in the ideal, and carries in its hand those two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it works all miracles ; it makes saltpetre out of cotton, a horse out of steam, a laborer out of the voltaic pile, a courier out of the electric fluid, and a painter of the sun ; it bathes itself in the subterra- nean waters, while it is warmed with the central fires ; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope on the in- finitely great, the microscope on the infinitely little, and it finds in the first abyss the stars of heaven, and in the second abyss the insects which prove the existence of a God. It an- nihilates time, it annihilates distance, it annihilates suffering ; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has the answer back in ten minutes : it cuts off the leg of a man the man sings and smiles. It has only to realize and it already touches it a progress which is nothing by the side of the other miracles which it has already achieve 1 : it has only to find the means of directing in a body of air a bubbl* of air still lighter ; it has already found the bubble of air, it holds it imprisoned ; it has yet only to find the impulsive force, only to create the vacuum before the balloon, for example, only to heat the air before the aeronaut, as the rocket does before it ; it has only to solve in some manner this problem and it will be solved. And do you know what will happen then ? On the very instant, frontiers will disappear, barriers will vanish away. All that is thrown like a Chinese wall around thought, around commerce, around in- dustry, around nationality, around progress, will crumble ; in spite of censorships, in spite of the index, expurgatorius, it will rain books and journals everywhere ; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau will fall in showers on Rome, on I Naples, on Vienna, on St. Petersburg; the human Word becomes manna, and the serf gathers it in the furrow ; fanaticisms die ; oppression becomes impossible ; man no long- er crawls upon the earth, he escapes from it ; civilization takes to itself the wings of birds, and flies and whirls and alights joyously on all parts of the globe at once : hold ! see i there it passes; point your cannon, ye old despotisms, it disdains you ; you are but the cannon ball, it is the flash of lightning: no more hatreds, no more interests devouring one anothe'r, no more wars ; a kind of new life, made up of concord and of light, sur- rounds and soothes the world ; the brother- hood of nations crosses the bounds of space and mingles in the eternal blue ; men frater- nize in the heavens. THE SONG OF THE DYING. The following verses were written by one of a com- pany of British officers stationed in India, where a ma- lignant plague had broken out among them, from which there was no escape. We meet 'neath the sounding rafter, And the walls around are bare; As they echo the peals of luughter. It seems that the dead are there ; But stand to your glasses steady, We drink to our comrades' eyes, Quaff a cup to the dead already And hurrah for the next that dio*! Time was when we frowned at ethers; We thought we were wiser then ; Ha! ha! let those think of mothers, Who hope to see them again. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. 11 No ! stand to your glasses steady ; The thoughtless are here the wise, A cup to the dead already Hurrah for the next that dies ! There's many a hand that's shaking, There's many a cheek that's sunk ; But soon, though our hearts are breaking, They'll burn with the wine we have drunk. So stand to your glasses steady 'Tis here the revival lies; A cup to the dead already And hurrah for the next that dies I Who dreads to the dust returning? Who shrinks from the sable shore, Where the high and haughty yearning Of the soul shall sting no more? IIo ! stand to your glasses steady This world is a world of lies; A cup for the dead already Hurrah for the next that dies! Cut off from the land that bore us, Betrayed by the land we find, Where the brightest have gone before us, And the dullest remain behind Stand, stand to your glasses steady, 'Tis all we have loft to prize, A cup to the dead already And hurrah for the next that dies ! CAPTAIN Dowiiire. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why. When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up ! And is not this boy-nature ? and human nature too ? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it ? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "de- light" in it, and for the best of all reasons ; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man courage, en- durance, and skill in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy, be ho ever so fond himself of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run oJ wltli Bob and me fa^t enough : it is a natural, and a not wicked interest, that all boys and men have in wit- nessing intense energy in action. Does any curious and finely ignorant wo- man wish to know how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain ? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting ; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wild- ly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, com- pact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small, thoroughbred, white bull- terrier is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it ; the scien- tific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own ; the Game Chicken, as the prema- ture Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat, and he lay gasping and done for. His mas- ter, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would " drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance : it was no use kicking the little dog ; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. " Water !" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle- aged . man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shep- herd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend, who went down like a shot. Still the Chicken holds ; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" observed a calm, highly dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff !" again observes the buck, but with more urgency ; whereon were pro- duced several open boxes, and from a mull which may have been fit Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it to tiio RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of snuff uke their course ; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free ! The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms, comforting him. But the Bull Terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied ; he grips the first clog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende, and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him : down Nid- dry Street he goes bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow, Bob and I, and our small men, panting behind. There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets : he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shakespearian dewlaps shaking as he goes. The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar, yes, roar ; a long, serious, rcmonstrative roar. How is this? Bob and I are up to them. He is muzzled .' The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encom- passed his huge jaws in a home-made appa- ratus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breechin. His mouth was open as far as it could be ; his lips curled up in rage, a sort of terrible grin ; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness ; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring ; his whole frame stiff with indignation and sur- prise ; his roar asking us all round, " Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. We soon had a crowd: the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife; you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then! one sud len jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise, and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead. A solemn pause ; this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow over, and saw he was quite dead ; the mastiff had taken him by the small of the back like a rat. and broken it. He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John, we'll bury Jiiiu after tea." " Yes," said 1, and was ou after the mastiff. He made up the Cowgate at a rapid swing ; he had forgotten some en- gagement. He turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn. There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin, impatient, black-a-vised lit- tle man, his hand at his gray horse's head, looking about angrily for something. " Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk dismayed under the cart, his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too. What a man this must be, thought I, to whom my tremendous hero turns tail ! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and use- less, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and conde- scended to say, " Rab, my man, puir Rabbie," whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted ; the two friends were reconciled. " Hupp !" and a stroke of the whip were given to Jess ; and off went the three. Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the back- green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence ; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector, of course. Six years have passed, a long time for a boy and a dog : Bob Ainslie is off to the wars ; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House Hospital. Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wed- nesday ; and we had much pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasion- al bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw ; he used to call me " Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan. One line October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the large gate open, and in walked Rah, with that great and easy saunter of his. He looked as if taking gener- al possession of the place ; like the Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white with age, with her cart ; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up, the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. 13 back. When he saw me, James ( for his name was James Noble) made a curt and gro- tesque " boo," and said, " Maister John, this is the mistress ; she's got trouble in her breest, some kind o' an income we're think- in'." By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled with straw, her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat, with its large white metal buttons, over her ' feet. I never saw a more unforgetable face, pale, serious, lonely* delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine. She looked sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon ; her silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes, eyes sucli as one sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also of the over- coming of it : her eyebrows black and delicate, and her mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are. As I have said, I never saw a more beau- tiful countenance, or one more subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, " this is Maister John, the young doctor; Rab's freend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you, doctor." She smiled, and made a movement, but said nothing ; and prepared to come down, putting her plai 1 aside and rising. Had Sol- omon, in all his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate, he could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a gentleman, than did James tli3 Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailic his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy, weather-beaten, keen, worldly face to hers pale, subdued, and beautiful was something wonderful. Rab lookel on concerned and puzzled, but ready for anything that might turn up, were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even me. Ailie and he seemed to be great friends. "As I was sayin', she's got a kind o' trou- ble in her breest, doctor; wull ye tak' a look at it ?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four; Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse, on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her ne^k, and without a word showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully, she and James watching me, and Rab eyeing all three. What could I say? there it was, that had once been so soft, so shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, *o "full of all blessed conditions," hard * It i3 not easy giving this look by one word; it was expressive of her being so much of her life alone. as a stone, a centre of horrid pain, making that paie face, with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes, and its sweet, resolved mouth, express the full measure of suffering overcome. Why was that gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable, condemned by God to bear such a burden ? I got her away to bed. " May Rab and me bide?" said James. " You may ; and Rab, if he will behave himself." " I'se warrant he's do that, doctor ' ' ; and in slank the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thickset, like a little bull, a sort of com- pressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head ; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two being all he had gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all over it ; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Arch- bishop Leigh ton's father's; the remaining eye had the power of two ; and above it, and in constant communication with it, was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever un- furling itself, like an old flag ; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long, the mobility, the instantaneousness of that bud were very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings and winkings, the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the oddest and swift- est. Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size ; and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the gravity * of all great fighters. You must have often observed the likeness of certain men to certain animals, and of cer- tain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab without thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, f The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest * A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a cer- tain terrier, of singular pluck, was so much more solemn than the other dogs, said, " 0, sir, life's full o' sairiousness to him, he just never can get enuff o' fechtin'." f Fuller was, in early life, when a fanner lad at So- ham, famous as a boxer ; not quarrelsome, but not with- out " the stern delight " a man of strength and courage feels in their exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a 14 KAB AND HIS FRIENDS. countenance, the same deep inevitable eye, the same look, as of thunder asleep, but ready, neither a dog nor a man to be trifled with. Nest day, my master, the surgeon, exam- ined Ailie. " There was no doubt it must kill her, and soon. It could be removed it might never return it would give her speedy relief she should have it done. She courtesied, looked at James, and said, " When ?" "To- morrow," said the kind surgeon, a man of few words. She and James and llab and I retired. I noticed that he and she spoke little, but seemed to anticipate everything in each other. The following day, at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the great stair. At the first landing-place, on a small, well- known blackboard, was a bit of paper fasten- ed by wafers, and many remains of old wafers beside it. On the paper were the words, "An operation to-day. J. B. Clerk." Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places : in they crowded, full of interest and talk. " What's the case?" " Which side is it?" Don't think them heartless ; they are neither better nor worse than you or I ; they pet over their professional horrors, and into their proper work, and in them pity, as an emotion, ending in itself or at best in tears and a long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity as a motive is quickened, and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human nature that it is so. The operating theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of as- sistants is there. In comes Ailic; one look at her quiets and abates the eager students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit down, and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste ; dressed in her mutch, her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black bombazine petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet- shoes. Behind her was James with llab. James sat down in the distance, and took that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab scholar, and a gentleman live onl.v in the memory of those few who knew and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that when he was in the pulpit, and saw a ImirMj man corns along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his ima- ginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists, and tending to "squarf." He must have been a hard hitter if lie boxed as lie preached, w hut " The Fancy " would call "an ugly customer. " looked perplexed and dangerous; forever cocking his ear and dropping it as fast. Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid her- self on the table, as her friend the surgeon told her ; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at once begun ; it was necessarily slow ; and chloroform one of God's best gilts to his suf- fering children was then unknown. The surgeon did his work. Ihe pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's soul was working within him ; he saw that something strange was going on, Hood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering ; his ragged ear was up, and importunate ; he growled, and gave now and then a sharp, im- patient yelp ; he would have liked to have done something to that man. But James had him firm, and gave him a gJower from time to time, and an intimation of a possible kick ; all the better for James, it kept his eye and his mind off Ailie. It is over : she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the table, looks for James ; then turning to the surgeon and the students, she courtesies, and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has behaved ill. The students all of us wept like chil- dren ; the surgeon happed her up carefully, and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to her room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy shoes, cram- med with tackets, heel-capt and toe-capt, and put them carefully under the table, say- ing, " Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer strange nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang about on my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did ; and handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman, was that horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave her : he seldom slept ; and often I saw his small shrewd eyes out of the dark- ness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little. Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he could be, and occasionally in his sleep, letting us know that he was demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day, generally to the Candlemaker Row ; but he was sombre and mild ; declined doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to sundry indignities ; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight to that door. Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-worn cart, to Howgate, and had doubtless her own dim and placid medita- RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. tions and confusions, on the absence of her master and Kab, and her unnatural freedom from the road and her cart. For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first intention" ; for, as James said, "Oor Ailie' s skin's ower clean to beil." The students came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her, and spoke to her in his own short, kind way, pitying her through his eyes, Kab and James outside the circle, Rab being now reconciled, and even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet no- body required worrying, but, as you may sup- pose, semper paratus. So far well : but, four days after the oper- ation, my patient had a sudden and long shivering, a "groosin 1 ," as she called it. 1 saw her soon after ; her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored ; she was restless, and ashamed of being so ; the balance was lost ; mischief had begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret : her pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn't herself, as she said, and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could. James did everything, was everywhere ; never in the way, never out of it ; Rab subsided under the table into a dark place, and was motionless, all but his eye, which followed everyone. Ailie got worse ; began to wander in her mind, gently ; was more demonstrative in her ways to James, rapid in her questions, and sharp at times. He was vexed, and said, "She was never that way afore ; no never." For a time she knew her head was wrong, and Avas always asking our pardon, the dear, gentle old woman : then delirium set in strong, without pause. Her brain gave way, and then came that terrible spectacle, " The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on its dim and pcrilons way " ; she sang bits of old songs and Psalms-, stop- ping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of Da- vid and the diviner words of his Son and Lord with homely odds and ends and scraps of ballads. Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did 1 ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager Scotch voice, the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the bright and perilous eye ; some wild words, some household cares, something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a "fremyt" voice, and he starting up surprised, and slinking off as if he were to blame somehow, or had been dreaming he heard ; many eager questions and beseechings which James and I could make nothing of, and on which she seemed to set her all, and then sink back ununder- stood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever ; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doating over her as his " ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma womaii ! " "Ma ain bonnie wee dawtie ! " The end was drawing on : the golden bowl was breaking ; the silver cord was fast being loosed, that animula blandula, vagula, hos- pes, comesque, was about to flee. The body and the soul companions for sixty years were being sundered, and taking leave. She was walking alone through the valley of that shadow into which one day we must all en- ter, and yet she was not alone, for we know whose rod and staff were comforting her. One night she had fallen quiet, and, as we hoped, asleep ; her eyes were shut. We put down the gas, and sat watching her. Sud- denly she sat up in bed, and taking a bed- gown which was lying on it rolled up, she held it eagerly to her breast, to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child ; opening out her nightgown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and yet vague, her immense love. "Preserve me!" groaned James, giving way. And then she rocked back and for- ward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her infinite fondness. " Wac's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's that bairn." " What bairn ?" "The only bairn we ever had ; our wee Mysic, and she's in the Kingdom, forty years arid mair." It was plainly true : the pain in the breast, telling its urgent story to a bewildered, ruined brain, was misread and mistaken ; it suggested to her the uneasiness of a breast full of milk, and then the child ; and so again once more they were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie in her bosom. This was the close. She sank rapidly : the delirium left her ; bat, as she whispered, she was "clean silly;" it was the lightening before the final darkness. After having for 16 some time lain still, her eyes shut, she said, " James ! " He came close to her, and lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked for Rab but could not see him, then turned to her husband again, as if she would never leave off looking, shut her eyes, and composed herself. She lay for some time breathing quick, and passed away so gently, that when we thought she was gone, James, in his old-fashioned way, held the mirror to her face. After a long pause, one small spot of dimness was breathed out ; it vanished away, and never returned, leaving the blank clear darkness of the mirror without a stain. " What is our life ? It is even a vapor, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanish- eth away." Rab all this time had been full awake and motionless ; he came forward beside us : Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down ; it was soaked with his tears ; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at her, and returned to his place under the table. James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time, saying nothing : he started up abruptly, and with some noise went to the table, and putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a shoe, pulled them out, and put them on, breaking one of the leather latchets, and muttering in anger, " I never did the like o' that afore ! " I believe he never did ; nor after either. " Rab ! " he said roughly, and pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leapt up, and settled himself; his head and eye to the dead face. " Maister John, ye '11 wait for me," said the carrier; and disap- peared in the darkness, thundering down stairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window ; there he was, already round the house, and out at the gate, fleeing like a shadow. I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid ; so I sat clown beside Rab, and being wearied, fell asleep. I woke from a sudden noise out- side. It was November, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was in statu quo ; he heard the noise too, and plainly knew it, but never moved. I looked out ; and there, at the gate, in the dim morning for the sun was not up was Jess and the cart, a cloud of steam rising from the old mare. I did not see James ; he was already at the door, and came up the stairs, and -met me. It was less than 'three hours since he left, and he must have posted out who knows how ? to Howgate, full nine miles off, yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He had an armful of blankets, and was streaming RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. with perspiration. He nodded to me, spread out on the floor two pairs of clean old blan- kets having at their corners, "A. G., 1794," in large letters in red worsted. These were the initials of Alison Graeme, and James may have looked in at her from without, himself unseen but not unthought of, when be was " wat, wat, and weary," and after having walked many a mile over the hills, may have seen her sitting, while "a" the lave were sleepin' ; " and by the firelight working her name on the blankets, for her ain James's bed. He motioned Rab down, and taking his wife in his arms, laid her in the blankets, and happed her carefully and firmly up, leav- ing the face uncovered ; and then lifting her, he nodded again sharply to me, and with a resolved but utterly miserable face strode along the passage and down stairs, followed by Rab. I followed with a light ; but he didn't need it. I went out, holding stupidly the candle in my hand in the calm frosty air ; we were soon at the gate. I could have help- ed him, but I saw he was not to be meddled with, and he was strong, and did not need it. He laid her down as tenderly, as safely, as he had lifted her out ten days before, as ten- derly as when he had her first in his arma when she was only "A. G.," sorted her, leaving that beautiful sealed face open to the heavens ; and then taking Jess by the head, he moved away. He did not notice me. nei- ther did Rab, who presided behind the cart. I stood till they passed through the long shadow of the College, and turned up Nicol- son Street. I heard the solitary cart sound through the streets, and die away and come again ; and I returned, thinking of that com- pany going up Libberton Brae, then along lloslin Muir, the morning light touching the Pentlands and making them like on-looking ghosts ; then down the hill through Auchin- dinny woods, past " haunted Woodhouselee ;" and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs, and fell on his own door, the company would stop, and James would take the key, and lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and, having put Jess up, would return with Rab and shut the door. James buried his wife, with his neighbors mourning, Rab inspecting the solemnity from a distance. It was snow, and that black ragged hole would look strange in the midst of the swelling spotless cushion of white. James looked after everything ; then rather suddenly fell ill, and took to bed ; was insen- sible when the doctor came, and soon died. A sort of low fever was prevailing in the vil- lage, and his want of sleep, his exhaustion, and his misery made him apt to take it. The S.J Ferris, Er-g r IK .A IB, THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE. 17 grave was not difficult to re-open. A fresh fall of snow had again made all things white and smooth ; Rab once more looked on, and slunk home to the stable. And what of Rab ? I asked for him next week at the new carrier who got the good- will of James's business, and was now master of Jess and her cart. "How's Rab?" He put me off, and said rather rudely, "What's your business wi' the dowg ? " I was not to be so put off. " Where's Rab ? " He, getting confused and red, and intermeddling with his hair, said, "'Deed, sir, Rab's deid." " Dead ! what did he die of? " " Weel, sir," said he, getting redder, " he didna exactly dee ; he was killed. I had to brain him wi' a rack-pin ; there was nae doin' wi' him. He lay in the treviss wi' the mear, and wadna come oot. I tempit him wi' kail and meat, but he wad tak naething, and keepit me frae feedin' the beast, and he was aye gur gurrin', and grup gruppin' me by the legs. I was laith to make awa wi' the auld dowg, his like wasnaatween this and Thornhill but, 'deed, sir, I could do naething else." I believed him. Fit end for Rab, quick and complete. His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep the peace, and be civil ? JOHN BROWN, M. D. THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE. A street there is in Paris famous, For which no rhyme our language yields, Hue Neuve des petits Champs its name is^ The New Street of the Little Fields ; And there's an inn, not rich and splendid, But still in comfortable case The which in youth I oft attended, To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse. This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is A sort of soup, or broth, or brew Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, muscles, saffern, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace ; All these you eat at Terrc's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse. Indeed a rich and savory stew 't is ; And true philosophers, methinks, Who love all sorts of natural beauties, Should love good victuals and good drinks. And Cordelier or Benedictine Might gladly, sure, his lot embrace, Kor find a fast-day too afflicting, Which served him up a Bouillabaisse. I wonder if the house still there is? Yes, here the lamp is as before ; The smiling, red-cheeked ecaillere U Still opening oysters at the door. Is Terr6 still alive and able ? I recollect his droll grimace ; He'd come and smile before your table, And hoped you liked your Bouillabaisse. We enter; nothing's changed or older. "How's Monsieur Terre, waiter, pray?" The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder; " Monsieur is dead this many a day." " It is the lot of saint and sinner, So honest Terra's run his race !" "What will Monsieur require for dinner?" " Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse ?" " Oh, oui, Monsieur," the waiter's answer ; "Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il?" " Tell me a good one." " That I can, sir; The Chambertin with yellow seal." " So Terre's gone," I say, and sink in My old accustomed corner-place ; " He's done with feasting and with drinking, With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse." My old accustomed corner here is The table still is in the nook; Ah ! vanished many a busy year is, This well-known chair since last I took. When first I saw ye, Cari Ivoghi. I'd scarce a beard upon my face, And now a grizzled, grim old fogy I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse. Where are you, old companions trusty Of early days, here met to dine ? Come, waiter ! quick, a flagon crusty I'll pledge them in the good old wine. The kind old voices and old faces My memory can quick retrace ; Around the board they take their places, And share the wine and Bouillabaisse. There's Jack has made a wondrous marriage ; There's laughing Tom is laughing yet ; There's brave Augustus drives his carriage ; There's poor old Fred in the Gazette; On James's head the grass is growing: Good Lord ! the world has wagged apace Since here we set the claret flowing And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse. Ah me! how quick the days are flitting I I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting, In this same place but not alone. A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up. And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me. There's no one now to share my cup. 18 CURTIS ON BURNS'S STATUE. I drink it as the Fatre ordain it. Come, fill it, and have done with rhymes; Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it In memory of dear old times. Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is; And sit you down and say your grace With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is, Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse! WILLIAM M. THACKERAY. CURTIS ON THE DEDICATION OF A STA- TUE TO BURNS. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, American journalist and author, born at Providence, R. I., 1824. Educated partly in America and at the University of Berlin, he travelled widely in 1848-50, writing " Kile Notes of an Hotoadji," mid the "//onxuT/i in Syria." "The Potiphar Papert," ' Prue and I," and other charming articles gathered 1'rom " PtUnam'i Magtizine,'" are still read for their del- icate satire and refined literary skill. Mr. Curtis has been for many years the editor of " Harper's Weekly" and author of the papers styled " TJte Easy Chair" in " Harper's Magazine." The following noble address was delivered at the un- veiling of the statue erected to Robert Burns in Central Park. New York, on the 2d of October, 1880. MR. CURTIS' 8 ADDRESS. The year 1 759 was a proud year for Great Britain. Two years before, amid universal disaster, Lord Chesterfield had exclaimed, " We are no longer a nation." But mean- while Lord Chatham had restored to his country the scepter of the seas and covered her name with the glory of continuous victory. The year 1759 saw his greatest triumphs. It was the year of Minden, where the French Army was routed ; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed ; of the heights of Abraham, in Canada, where Wolfe died hap- py, and the dream of French supremacy upon the American continent vanished for- ever. The triumphant thunder of British puns was heard all around the world. Robert ('live was founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow-Admirals were sweeping France from the ocean ; and in America Col. George Washington had planted the British flag on the fie!9 of Brad- tlock's defeat. " We are forced to ask every :noriiing what victory there is," said Horace AV.ilpolo, " for fear of missing one." But not only in politics and war was the penius of Great Britain illustrious. James Watt was testing the force of steam ; Har- preaves was inventing the spinning-jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would com- plete, and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful. Fielding's "Tom Jones" had been ten years in print, and Gray's " Elegy " nine years. Dr. Johnson had late- ly published his Dictionary, and Edmund Burke his essay on the " Sublime and Beau- tiful." In the year 1759 Garrick was the first of actors, and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters. Gibbon dated in this year the pre- face of his first work ; Hume published the third and fourth volumes of his history of England ; Robertson his history of Scotland, and Sterne came to London to find a pub- lisher for " Tristram Shandy." Oliver Gold- smith, "unfriended, solitary," was toiling for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet Ditch ; but four years later with Burke and Reynolds and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs and sell the " Vicar of Wakefield " to save himself from jail. It was a year of events decisive of the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national possession. But among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes ; and of all that renowned and re- splendent throng of statesmen, soldiers, and seamen ; of philosophers, poets, and inven- tors, whose fame filled the world with accla- mation, not one is more gratefully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire ploughman, Robert Burns. This great assembly is in large part com- posed of his countrymen. You, fellow-citi- zens, were mostly born in Scotland. There is no more beautiful country, and as you stand here, memory and imagination recall your native land. Misty coasts and far- stretching splendors of summer sea ; solemn mountains and wind-swept moors ; singing streams and rocky glens and water falls ; lovely vales of Ayr and Yarrow, of Teviot, and the Tweed ; crumbling ruins of ancient days, abbey and castle and tower ; legends of romance gilding burn and brae with " the light that never was on sea or land ; " every hill with its heroic tradition, every stream with its story, every valley with its song; land of the harebell and the mountain daisy, land of the laverock and the curlew, land of braw youths and sonsie lasses, of a deep, strong, melancholy manhood, of a deep, true, tender womanhood this is your Scotland, this is your native land. And how could you so truly transport it to the home of your adoption, how interpret it to us beyond the sea, so fully and so fitly, as by this memorial of the poet whose song is Scotland? No wonder that you proudly bring his statue and place it here under the American sun, in the chief American city, side by side with that of the other great Scotchman, whose genius and fame, like the air and the sun- CURTIS ON BURNS'S STATUE. 19 shine, no local boundary can confine. In this Walhalla of our various nationality it will be long before two fellow-countrymen are commemorated whose genius is at ouce so characteristically national and so broadly universal, who speak so truly for tlieir own countrymen and for all mankind as Walter Scott and Robert Burns. This season of the reddening leaf, of sunny stillness and of roaring storm, especially be- fits this commemoration, because it was at this season that the poet was peculiarly in- spired, and because the wild and tender, the wayward and golden-hearted Autumn is the best symbol of his genius. The sculptor has imagined him in some hour of pensive and ennobling meditation, when his soul, amid the hush of evening, in the falling year, was ex- alted to an ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret ; and here, rapt in silence, just as the heavenly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he sits and will sit forever. It was in October that Highland Mary died. It was in October that the hymn to Mary in Heaven was written. It was in October, ever after- ward, that Burns was lost in melancholy musing as the anniversary of her death drew near. Yet within a few days, while his soul might seem to have been still lifted in that sorrowful prayer, he wrote the most rollick- ing, resistless, and immortal of drinking songs: " Willie brew'd a peck o'maut, And Bob and Allan cam to pree, Three blither hearts that leo b.ng night Ye wadna find in Christendlo." Here were the two strains of this marvel- ous genius, and the voices of the two spirits that went with him through life: " He raised a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down." This was Burns. This was the blended poet and man. What sweetness and grace ! What soft, pathetic, penetrating melody, as if all the sadness of shaggy Scotland had found a voice ! What whispering witchery of love ! What boisterous, jovial humor, excessive, daring, unbridled ! satire of the kirk, so scorching and scornful that John Knox might have burst indignant from his grave, and shuddering ghosts of Covenanters have filled the mountain with a melancholy wail. A genius so masterful, a charm so universal, that it drew farmers from the fields when his coming was known, and men from their tavern beds at midnight to listen delighted until dawn. It cannot be said of Burns that he ' ' burst his birth's invidious bar.'' He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and ho always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself and of his in- tellectual superiority. He disdained and reseated the condescension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to have lived tranquilly and happily as a poor man. Perhaps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry. We only know that he did not. Like an untamable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his lite was a restless, stormy alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and impotent regret. His pious mother croned over his cradle snatches of old ballads and legends of which her mind was full. His father, silent, austere, inflexi- bly honest, taught him to read good books, books whose presence in his poor cottage helps to explain the sturdy mental vigor of the Scotch peasantry. But the ballads charmed the boy. He could not turn a tune, but driving the cart or ploughing or digging in the field, he was still saying the verses over and over, his heart answering, like a shell the sea, until, when he was fifteen, he com- posed a song himself upon a lassie who drew his eye and heart ; and so, as he says, love and poetry began with him together. For ten years his life was a tale of fer- menting youth : toiling and moiling, turning this way and that, to surveying and flax dressing, in the vain hope of finding a fairer chance ; a lover of all the girls and the mas- ter of the revels everywhere ; brightening the long day of peat-cutting with the rattling fire of wit that his comrades never forgot ; writ- ing love-songs, and fascinated by the wild smuggler boys of Kirkoswald ; led by them into bitter shame and self-reproach, but turn- ing with all the truculence of heady youth upon his moral censors and taunting them with immortal ridicule. At twenty-five, when his father was already laid in Alloway kirk- y c.rd, the seed of old national legend which his mother had dropped into his cradle began to shoot into patriotic feeling and verse, and Burns became conscious of distinct poetic ambition. For two years he followed the plow and wrote some of his noblest poems. But the farm which he tilled with his brother was unproductive, and at the very time that his genius was most affluent his conduct was most wayward. Distracted by poetry and poverty and passion, and brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1780, when he wr.s twenty-seven years old, Burns published his poems by CURTIS ON BURNS' S STATUE. 20 subscription to get the money to pay his pas- sage to America. Ah ! could that poor, des- perate ploughman of Mossgiel have foreseen this day, could he have known that because of those poems, an abiding part of literature, familiar to every people, sung and repeated in American homes from sea to sea, his genius would be honored and his name blessed and his statue raised with grateful pride to keep his memory in America, green forever, per- haps the amazing vision might have nerved him to make his life as noble as his genius, perhaps the full sunshine of assured glory might have wrought upon that great, gene- rous, wilful soul to " Take a thought an' men'." Burns' s sudden fame stayed him and brought him to Edinburgh and its brilliant literary society. Hume was gone, but Adam Smith remained; Robertson was there and Dugald Stewart. There, also, were Blacklock and Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison ; Fra- ser Tytler, and Adam Ferguson and Henry Erskine. There, too, were the beautiful Duchess of Gordon and the truly noble Lord Glencairn. They welcomed Burns as a prodi- gy, but he would not be patronized. Glad of his fame, but proudly and aggressively inde- pendent, he wanders through the stately city, taking off his hat before the house of Allan Ramsay and reverently kissing Robert Fer- guson's grave, his " elder brother in misfor- tune," as Burns called him. He goes to the great houses, and although they did not know it, he was the greatest guest they had ever en- tertained, the greatest poet that then or ever walked the streets of Edinburgh. His famous hosts were all Scotchmen, but he was the only Scotchman among them who had written in the dialect of his country, and who had become famous without ceasing to be Scotch. But one day there stole into the drawing-room, where Burns stood, a boy of fif- teen, who was presently to eclipse all Scottish fame but that of Burns himself. The poet was looking at an engraving of a soldier lying frozen in the snow, under which were some touching lines, and as he read them, Burns, with his eyes full of tears, asked who wrote them. None of the distinguished company could tell him, but the young boy. Walter Scott, timidly whispered the name of the author, and he never forgot that Burn; turned upon him his full, dark, tearful eyes eyes which Scott called the most glorious imaginable, and thanked him. Scott never saw Burns again. The dazzling Edinburgh days were a glar- ing social contrast to the rest of his life. The brilliant society flattered him, but his bril- iancy outshone its own. He was wiser than he learned, wittier than the gayest, and more lourtcous than the courtliest. His genius flashed and blazed like a torch among the ta- )ers, and the well-ordered company, en- .hralled by the surprising guest, winced and wondered. If the host was condescending, he guest was never obsequious. But Burns did not love a lord, and he chafed indignantly at the subtle but invincible lines of social dis- .inction, feeling too surely that the realm of eisure and ease, a sphere in which he knew himself to be naturally master, must always float beyond, beyond the alluring glimmer of a mirage. A thousand times wistfully watching this fascinating human figure amid the sharp vicissitudes of his life, from Foode Nansie's ale-house in Mauchline to the state- ly drawing-room of Gordon Castle, with all liis royal manhood and magnificent capability entangled and confused ; the heart longs, but longs in vain, to hear the one exulting and triumphant cry of the strong man coming to himself, " I will rise." But with all his gifts, that was not given him. Burns left Edinburgh to wander about his bonnie Scotland, his mind full of its his- toric tradition and legendary lore, and begin- ning to overflow with songs born of the na- tional melodies. He was to see, and he wished to see no other land. His heart beat toward it with an affectionate fidelity, as if he felt that somehow its destiny were reflected in his own. At Coldstream, where the Tweed divides Scotland from England, he went across the river, but as he touched the Eng- lish soil he turned, fell upon his knees, stretched out his arms to Scotland, and prayed God to bless his native land. His wanderings ended, Burns settled at twenty-nine upon the pleasant farm of Ellis- land, in Nithsdalc, over the hills from his native Ayrshire. " To make a happy fireside clime For weans and wife." Here his life began happily. He managed the farm, started a parish library, went to church, and was proud of the regard of his neighbors. He was honored and sought by travellers, and his genius was in perfect tune. "Tarn O'Shanter," and "Bonnie Doon," the songs of " Highland Mary," "John An- derson my Joe," and "AuldLang Syne," are all flowers of Ellisland. But he could not be farmer, gaugcr, poet, and prince of good fellows all at once. The cloud darkened that was never to be lifted. The pleasant farm at Ellisland failed, and Burns, selling CURTIS ON BURNS' S STATUE. all his stock and crops and tools, withdrew to Dumfries. It was the last change of his life, and melancholy were the days that followed, but radiant with the keen flashes and tender gleams of the highest poetic genius of the time. Writing exquisite songs, often lost in the unworthiest companionship, consumed with self-reproach, but regular in his official duties ; teaching his boy to love the great English poets, from Shakespeare to Gray, seeking pleasure at any cost, conscious of a pity and a censure at which he could not wonder, but conscious also of the inexpressi- ble tragedy which pity and censure could not know nor comprehend, and through evil re- port and good report the same commanding and noble nature that we know, Burns in these last dark days of Dumfries is like a stately ship in a tempest with all her canvass spread, with far-flying streamers and glanc- ing lights and music penetrating the storm, drifting helpless on the cruel rocks of a lee shore. One summer evening toward the end, as a young man roie into Dumfries to attend a ball, he saw Burns loitering along on one side of the street, while the other was thronged with gay gentlemen and ladies, not one of whom cared to greet the poet. The young man instantly dismounted, and, joining Burns, asked him to cross the street. " Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ;" and then in a low, soft, mournful voice Burns re- peated the old ballad : " His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, His auld aiio looked better than mony ane',3 new, But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, And exists himself dowie upon the corn-bins. Oh were \ve young as we ance hae been, We guld hao been galloping down on yon green, And linking it owro the lillie-white lea, And werena my heart light it wad dee." Five years of letting his life " wear ony way it would hing " and Burns's life w.is ended in 1796, in his thirty-seventh year. There was an outburst of universal sorrow. A great multitude crowded the little town at his burial. Memorials, monuments, biogra- phies of every kind followed. Poets ever since have sung of him as of no other poet. The theme is always fresh and always capti- vating, and within the year our own Ameri- can poet, beloved and honored in his be.iuti- ful and unwasted age, sings of Burns as he S3es him in vision, as the world shall forever see him, an immortal ' youth cheerily singing at his toil in the bright Spring morning. The personal feeling of Longfellow's poem is that which Burns always inspires. There is no great poet who is less of a mere name and abstraction. His grasp is so human that the heart insists upon knowing the story of his life, and ponders it with endless sympa- thy arid wonder. It is not necessary to ex- cuse or conceal. The key of Burns's life is the struggle of a shrinking will tossed be- tween great extremes, between poetic genius and sensibility, intellectual force, tenderness, conscience, and generous sympathies on on side and tremendous passions upon the other. We cannot, indeed, know the power of the temptation. We cannot pretend to determine the limits of responsibility for infirmity of will. We only know that however supreme and resistless the genius of a man may be it does not absolve him from the moral obliga- tion that binds us all. It would not have comforted Jeanie Deans as she held the sor- rowing Effie to her heart to know that the "fause lover" who "staw" her rose was named Shakespeare or Burns. Nor is there any baser prostitution than that which would grace self-indulgence with an immortal name. If a boy is a dunce at school it is a foolish parent who consoles himself with remember- ing that Walter Scott was a dull school-boy. It was not Scott's dullness that made him the magician. It is not the reveling at Poosie Nansie's and the Globe Tavern, and the reck- less life at Mauchline and Mossgiel that en- deared Robert Burns to mankind. Just there is the mournful tragedy of his story. Just there lies its pathetic appeal. The young man who would gild his dissipation with the celestial glamour of Burns's name snatches the glory of a star to light him to destruction. But it is no less true, and in, the deepest and fullest meaning of his own words, " What's done we partly may compute But know not what's resisted." " Except for grace," said Bunyan, " I should have been yonder sinner." " Granted," says Burns's brother man and brother Scot, Thomas Carlyle, in the noblest plea that ono man of genius ever made for another, " Grant- ed the ship comes into harbor with shroud and tickle damaged, and the pilot is there- fore blameworthy, for he has not been all- wise and all-powerful ; but to know how blarne-worthy, tell us first whether his voy- age has been round the globe or only to llamsgate and the Isle of Dogs." But we unveil to-day and set here for per- petual contemplation, not the monument of the citizen at whom respectable Dumfries looked askance, but the statue of a grervt poet. Once more we recognize that no gift 22 CURTIS ON BURNS' S STATUE. is more divine than his, that no influence is more profound, that no human being is a truer benefactor of his kind. The spiritual power of poetry, indeed, like that of natural beauty, is immeasurable, and it is not easy to define and describe Burns' s service to the world. But without critical and careful de- tail of observation, it is plain, first of all, that he interpreted Scotland as no other country has been revealed by a kindred genius. Were Scotland suddenly submerged and her people swept away, the tale of her politics and kings and great events would survive in histories. But essentially Scotland, the customs, legends, su- perstition, language, age, the grotesque humor, the keen sagacity, the simple serious faith, the characteristic spirit of the national life caught up and preserved in the sympathy of poetic genius, would live forever in the poet's verse. The sun of Scotland sparkles in it ; the birds of Scotland sing ; its breezes rustle, its wa- ters murmur. Each " timorous wee beastie," the "ourie cattle," and the "sillie sheep," are softly penned and gathered in this all-em- bracing fold of song. Over the dauntless battle hymn of " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" rises the solemn music of the "Cot- ter's Saturday Night." Through the weird witch romance of "Tarn O'Shanter" breathes the scent of the wild rose of Alloway, and the daring and astonishing Babel of the " Jol- ly Beggars ' ' is penetrated by the heart- breaking sigh to Jessie : " Although thou maun never be mine, Although even hope is denied, Tis sweeter for thee despairing Than aught in the world hcside." The poet touches every scene and sound, every thought and feeling, but the refrain of all is Scotland. To what other man was it ever given so to transfigure the country of his birth and love ? Every bird and flower, every hill and dale and river, whisper and repeat his name, and the word Scotland is sweeter because of Robert Burns. But in thus casting a poetic spell upon everything distinctively Scotch, Burns fos- tered a patriotism which has become proverb- ial. The latest historian of England says that at the time of Burns's birth England was mad with hatred of the Scots. But when Burns died there was not a Scotchman who was not proud of being a Scotchman. A Scotch ploughman singing of his fellow peas- ants and their lives and loves in their own language, had given them in their own eyes a dignity they had never known : " A man's a man for a' that." And America is trying to make the plough- man's words true. Great poets before and alter Burns have been honored by their countries and by the world ; but is there any great poet of any time or country who has so taken the heart of what our Abraham Lincoln, himself one of them, called the plain people, that, as was lately seen in Edinburgh, when he had been dead nearly a hundred years, workmen going home from work beg- ged to look upon his statue for the love and honor they bore to Robbie Burns ? They love him for their land's sake, and they are better Scotchmen because of him. England does not love Shakespeare, nor Italy Dante, nor Germany Goethe, with the passionate ar- dor with which Scotland loves Burns. It is no wonder, for here is Auld Scotia's thistle bloomed out into a flower so fair that its beauty and perfume fill the world with joy. But the power thus to depict national life and character and thus to kindle an imper- ishable patriotism cannot be limited by any nationality or country. In setting words to Scotch melodies Burns turns to music the emotions common to humanity, and so he passes from the exclusive love of Scotland into the reverence of the world. Burns died at the same age with Raphael ; and Mo- zart, who was his contemporary, died only four years before him. Raphael and Mozart are the two men of lyrical genius in kindred arts who impress us as most exquisitely re- fined by careful cultivation ; and although Burns was of all great poets the most un- schooled, he belonged in poetry with Raphael in painting and Mozart in music, and there is no fourth. An indescribable richness and flower-like quality, a melodious grace and completeness and delicacy, belong to them all. Looking upon a beautiful human Ma- donna of Raphael, we seem to hear the rip- pling cadence of Mozart and the tender and true songs of Burns. They are all voices of the whole world speaking in the accent of a native land. Here are Italy and Germany and Scotland, distinct, individual, perfectly recognizable, but the sun that reveals and il- luminates their separate charm, that is not Italian or German or Scotch, it is the sun of universal nature. This is the singer whom this statue commemorates, the singer of songs immortal as love, pure as the dew ot the morning, and sweet as its breath ; songs with which the lover wooes his bride and the mother soothes her child, and the heart of a people beats with patriotic exultation ; songs that cheer human endeavor and console hu- man sorrow and exalt human life. We can- not find out the secret of their power. Until we know why the rose is sweet, or the dew- drop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we can- ODE TO BURNS. not know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity. Whether because he reveals us to ourselves, or because he touches the soul with the fervor of divine aspiration, whether because in a world of sordid and restless anx- iety he fills us with serene joy, or puts into rhythmic and permanent form the best thoughts and hopes of man who shall say ? But none the less is the heart's instinctive loyalty to the poet the proof of its conscious- ness that he does all these things, that he is the harmonizer, strengthener, and consoler. How the faith of Christendom has been staid for centuries upon the mighty words of the old Hebrew bards and prophets, and how the vast and inexpressible mystery of divine love and power and purpose has been best breath- ed in parable and poem ! If we were forced to surrender every expression of human ge- nius but one, surely we should retain poetry ; and if we were called to lose from the vast accumulation of literature all but a score of books, among that choice and perfect remain- der would be the songs of Burns. How fitly, then, among the memorials of great men, of those who in different countries and times and ways have been leaders of mankind, we raise this statue of the poet whose genius is an unconscious but sweet and elevating influence in our national life. It is not a power dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like that of the statesman, the warrior, and the inventor, but it is as deep and strong and abiding. The soldier fights for his native land, but the poet touches that land with the charm that makes it worth fighting for, and fires the warrior's heart with the fierce energy that makes his blow invincible. The statesman enlarges and or- ders liberty in the State, but the poet fosters the love of liberty in the heart of the citizen. The inventor multiplies the facilities of life, but the poet makes life better worth living. Here, then, among trees and flowers and waters ; here upon the green sward and un- der the open sky ; here where birds carol, and children play, and lovers whisper, and the various stream of human life flows by we raise the statue of Robert Burns. While the human heart beats that name will be music in human ears. He knew better than we the pathos of human life. We know bet- ter than he the infinite pathos of his own. Ah ! Robert Burns, Robert Burns, whoever lingers here as he passes and muses upon your statue will see in imagination a solitary mountain in your own beautiful Scotland, heaven-soaring, wrapped in impenetrable clouds. Suddenly the mists part and there are the heather, the brier-rose, and the gow- an fine, there are the Burnies, wimplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foaming strang, wi' hasty stens Frae lin to lin ; the cushat is moaning ; the curlew is calling ; the plover is singing ; the red deer is bound- ing ; and look ! the clouds roll utterly away and the clear summit is touched with the tender glory of sunshine, heaven's own bene- diction. THE PRIZE ODE ON THE CENTENARY OF BURNS. LONDON, 25 JANUARY, 1859. We hail, this morn, A century's noblest birth ; A Poet peasant-born, Who more of Fume's immortal dower Unto his country brings, Than all her Kings! As lamps high set Upon some earthly eminence, And to the gazer brighter thence Than the sphere-lights they flout, Dwindle in distance and die out, AVhile no star waneth yet ; 80 through the past's far-reaching night, Only the star-souls keep their light. A gentle boy, With moods of sadness and of mirth, Quick tears and sudden joy, Grew up beside the peasant's hearth. His father's toil he shares; But half his mother's cares From his dark searching eyes, Too swift to sympathize, Hid in her heart she bears. At early morn, His father calls him to the field; Through the stiff soil that clogs his feet, Chill rain, and harvest heat, He plods all day ; returns at eve outworn, To the rude fare a peasant's lot doth yield; "- To what else was he born? The God-made King Of every living thing; (For his great heart in love could hold them all -J The dumb eyes meeting his by hearth and stall, Gifted to understand ! Knew it and sought his hand : And the most timorous creature had not fled, Could she his heart have read, Which fain all feeble things had blessed and sheltered. PROCTOR KNOTTS DULUTH SPEECH. To Nature's feast, Who knew her noblest guest And entertained him best, Kingly he came. Her chambers of the east She draped with crimson and with gold, And poured her pure joy -wines For him the poet-souled. For him her anthem rolled, From the storm-wind among the winter pines, Down to the slenderest note Of a love-warble from the linnet's throat. But when begins The array for battle, and the trumpet blows A King must leave the feast, and lead the fight And with its mortal foes, Grim gathering hosts of sorrows and of sins, Each human soul must close. And Fame her trumpet blew Before him ; wrapped him in her purple state ; And made him mark for all the shafts of Fate, That henceforth round him flew. Though he may yield Hard-pressed, and wounded fall Forsaken on the field ; His regal vestments soiled ; His crown of half its jewels spoiled ; He is a King for all. Had he but stood aloof ! Had he arrayed himself in armour proof Against temptation's darts? So yearn the good ; so those the world calls wia, With vain presumptuous hearts, Triumphant moralize. Of martyr-woe A sacred shadow on his memory rests; Tears have not ceased to flow ; Indignant grief yet stirs impetuous breasts, To think, above that noble soul brought low, That wise and soaring spirit fooled, enslaved, Thus, thus he had been saved ! It might not be! That heart of harmony Had been too rudely rent : Its silver chords, which any hand could wound, By no hand could be tuned, Save by the Maker of the instrument, Its every string who knew, And from profaning touch His heavenly gift withdrew. Regretful love His country fain would prove, By grateful honours lavished on his grave; Would fain redeem her blame That He so little at her hands can claim, Who unrewarded gave To her his life-bought gift of song and fame. The land he trod Hath now become a place of pilgrimage ; Where dearer are the daisies of the sod That could his song engage. The hoary hawthorn, wreathed Above the bank on which his limbs'ht flung While some sweet plaint he breathed; The streams he wandered near; The maidens whom he loved ; the songs he sung ; All, all are dear! The arch blue eyes, Arch but for love's disguise, Of Scotland's daughters, soften at his strain; Her hardy sous, sent forth across the main To drive the ploughshare through earth's virgin soils, Lighten with it their toils ; And sister-lands have learn'd to love the tougue In which such songs are sung. For doth not Song To the whole world belong? Is it not given wherever tears can fall, Wherever hearts can melt, or blushes glow, Or mirth and sadness mingle as they flow, A heritage to all? ISA CRAIG KNOX. SPEECH OF HON. J. PROCTOR KSOTT, OF KENTUCKY. In the House of Representatives, January 27, 1871. J. PROCTOR KXOTT, born in Kentucky, 1830, became attorney-general of Missouri, afterward Representative in Congress from Kentucky, and Chairman of the Com- mittee on the Judiciary. He possesses remarkable talent for humor, and for caricature in graphic art, both of which are the diversions of a mind engrossed in the serious business of the law, and political affairs. [THE immediate occasion of the following speech was the pressure upon the House of Representatives of a bill which had passed the Senate, extending the time to con- struct a railroad from the St. Croix River to Lake Superior at Duluth, Minn, and to BayfieULWisconsin". The former grant of land by Congress having lapsed by the failure of the railroad company to build the railway within the five years stipulated, it came before Congress in 1871 for a renewal of the enormous free grant of the public lands, amounting to 1,418,451 acres. The bill was pressed by zealous and interested members on the floor of the House, and by a powerful lobby from the outside. Besides this the bill stood as a representative measure, and a test question as to the disposition of Congress to make or to renew subsidies in land for the benefit of private corpo- rations. The Senate passed the bill without difficulty, but in the House, after the exposures of the monstrous land grants already made, and after Mr. Knott of Ken- PROCTOR KNOTT'S DULDTH SPEECH. 25 tuofry had covered with ridicule the whole scheme for the aggrandizement of Duluth, the bill was defeated by a decisive majority. It put an effectual quietus upon all land grants from that day to this.] Mr. SPEAKER : If I could be actuated by any conceivable inducement to betray the sacred trust reposed in me by those to whose generous confidence I am indebted for the honor of a seat on this floor : if I could be influenced by any possible consideration to become instrumental in giving away, in vio- lation of their known wishes, any portion of their interest in the public domain for the mere promotion of any railroad enterprise whatever, I should certainly feel a strong in- clination to give this measure my most earn- est and hearty support ; for I am assured that its success would materially enhance the pe- cuniary prosperity of some of the most valued friends I have on earth : friends for whose accommodation I would be willing to make almost any sacrifice not involving my person- al honor or my fidelity as the trustee of an expressed trust. And that fact of itself would be sufficient to countervail almost any objec- tion I might entertain to the passage of this bill not inspired by an imperative and inex- orable sense of public duty. Now, sir, I have been satisfied for years that if there was any portion of the inhabited globe absolutely in a suffering condition for want of a railroad it was these teeming pine barrens of the St. Croix. At what particular point on that noble stream such a road should be commenced I knew was immaterial, and so it seems to have been considered by the draughtsman of this bill. It might be up at the spring or down at the foot-log, or the water-gate, or the fish-dam, or anywhere along the bank, no matter where. But in what direction should it run, or where it should terminate, were always to my mind questions of the most painful perplexity. I could conceive of no place on "God's green earth" in such straitened circumstances for railroad facilities as to be likely to desire or willing to accept such a connection. I knew that neither Bayfield nor Superior City would have it, for they both indignantly spurned the munificence of the Government when coupled with such ignominious conditions, and let this very same land grant die on their hands years and years ago rather than submit to the degradation of a direct communication by railroad with the piney woods of the St. Croix ; and I knew that what the enterprising inhabi- tants of those giant young cities would refuse to take would have few charms for others, whatever their necessities or cupidity might be. Hence, as I said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be, until I ac- cidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of "Duluth." Duluth ! The word fell upon my ear with pe- culiar and indescribable charm, like the gen tie murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft, sweet accents of an angel's whisper, in the bright joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth ! ' Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart panteth for water-brooks. But where was Duluth ? Never, in all my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. And I felt a pro founder humiliation in my ignorance, that its dulcet syllables had never before rav- ished my delighted ear. I was certain the draughtsman of this bill had never heard of it, or it would have been designated as one of the termini of this road. I asked my friends about it, but they knew nothing of it. I rushed to the Library and examined all the maps I could find. I discovered in one of them a delicate, hair-like line, diverging from the Mississippi near a place marked Prescott, which I supposed was intended to represent the river St. Croix, but I could nowhere find Duluth. Nevertheless, I was confident it existed somewhere, and that its discovery would con- stitute the crowning glory of the present cen- tury, if not of all modern times. I knew it was bound to exist in the very nature of things ; that the symmetry and perfection of our planetary system would be incomplete without it, that the elements of material na- ture would long since have resolved them- selves back into original chaos if there had been such a hiatus in creation as would have resulted from leaving out Duluth. In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the conviction that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but that wherever it was, it was a great and glo- rious place. I was convinced that the great est calamity that ever befell the benighted na- tions of the ancient world was in their hav- ing passed away without a knowledge of the actual existence of Duluth ; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen save by the hallowed vis- ion of inspired poesy, was, in fact but another name for Duluth ; that the golden orchard of the Hesperides was but a poetical synonym for the beer gardens in the vicinity of Duluth. I was certain that Herodotus had died a miser- able death because in all his travels and with all his geographical research he had never heard of Duluth. I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven than that created by his own celestial 20 genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing foun- tain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand, if he could be permitted to be- hold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep Lears of bitter anguish that instead of lavish- ing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Troy it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless song the rising glories of Duluth. Yet, sir, had it not been for this map, kindly furnished me by the Legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could no- where find Duluth. Had such been my mel- ancholy fate, I have no doubt that with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath 1 should have whispered, " Where is Duluth?" But, thanks to the beneficence of that band of ministering angels who have their bright abodes in the far-off capital of Minnesota, just as the agony of my anxiety was about to cul- minate in the frenzy of despair, this blessed map was placed in my hands ; and as I un- folded it a resplendent scene of ineffable glory opened before me, such as I imagine burst upon the enraptured vision of the wandering peri through the opening gates of paradise. There, there for the first time my enchanted eye rested upon the ravishing word " Du- luth." This map, sir, is intended, as it appears from its title, to illustrate the position of Du- luth in the United States, but if gentlemen will examine it, I think they will concur with me in the opinion that it is far too mod- est in its pretensions. It not only illustrates the position of Duluth in the United States, but exhibits its relations with all created things. It even goes further than this. It lifts the shadowy veil of futurity, and affords us a view of the golden prospects of Duluth, far along the dim vista of ages yet to come. If gentlemen will examine it, they will find Duluth not only in the centre of the map, but represented in the centre of a series of concentric circles one hundred miles apart, and some of them as much as four thousand miles in diameter, embracing alike in their tremendous sweep the fragrant savannas of the sunlit South, and the eternal solitudes of snow that mantle the ice-bound North. How these circles were produced is perhaps one of those primoidial mysteries that the most skillful paleologist will never be able to ex- plain. But the fact is, sir, Duluth is pre- eminently a central place, for I am told by PROCTOR KNOTT'S DULUTH SPEECH. gentlemen who have been so reckless of their own personal safety as to venture away into those awful regions, where Duluth is sup- posed to be, that it is so exactly in the centre of the visible universe, that the sky comes down at precisely the same distance all around it. I find by reference to this map, that Du- luth is situated somewhere near the western end of Lake Superior, but as there is no dot or other mark indicating its exact location, I am unable to say whether it is actually con- fined to any particular spot, or whether " it is just lying around there loose." I really cannot tell whether it is one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frostwork, more intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset ; one of those airy exhala- tions of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwa- ry settlers, as the mirage of the desert lures the famished traveller on, and ever on until it fades away in the darkening horizon, or whether it is a real, bona fide, substantial city, all "staked oif," with the lots marked with their owner's name, like that proud commercial metropolis lately discovered on the desirable shores of San Domingo. But, however that may be, I am satisfied Duluth is there, or thereabout; for I see it stated here on this map that it is exactly thirty-nine hundred and ninety miles from Liverpool, though I have no doubt, for the sake of con- venience it will be moved back ten miles, so as to make the distance an even four thou- sand. Then, sir, there is the climate of Duluth, unquestionably the most salubrious and de- lightful to be found anywhere on the Lord's earth. Now, I have always been under the impression, as I presume other gentlemen have, that in the region around Lake Super- ior it was cold enough for at least nine months in the year to freeze the smoke- stack off a locomotive. But I see it repre- sented, on this map, that Duluth is situated exactly half way between the latitudes of Paris and Venice, so that gentlemen who have inhaled the exhilarating airs of the one or basked in the golden sunlight of the other, must see at a glance that Duluth must be a place of untold delights, a terrestrial para- dise, fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an eternal spring, clothed in the gorgeous sheen of ever blooming flowers, and vocal with the silvery melody of nature's choicest songsters. In fact, sir, since I have seen this map I have no doubt that Byron was vainly endeav- oring to convey some faint conception of the FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES. 27 delicious charms of Duluth, when his poetic soul gushed forth in the rippling strains of that beautiful rhapsody : * Know ye tlio land of the cedar and vine, Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine ; Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with per- fume, Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in her bloom : Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, And the voice of the nightingale never is mute ; \There the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky, In color though varied, in beauty may vie." As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, they are simply illimitable and inex- haustible, as is shown by this map. I see it stated here that there is a vast scope of terri- tory, embracing an area of over two million square miles, rich in every element of ma- terial wealth and commercial prosperity, all tributary to Duluth. Look at it, sir. Here are inexhaustible mines of gold, immeasura- ble veins of silver, impenetrable depths of boundless forest, vast coal-measures, wide, extended plains of richest pasturage, all all embraced in the vast territory, which must, in the very nature of things, empty the untold treasures of its commerce into the lap of Duluth. Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours and expatiate with rapture on the gorgeous prospects of Duluth, as depicted upon this map. But human life is too short, and the time of this House far too valuable to allow me to lin- ger longer upon the delightful theme. I think every gentleman on this floor is as well satis- fied as I am that Duluth is destined to become the commercial metropolis of the universe, and that this road should be built at once. I am fully persuaded that no patriotic Repre- sentative of the American people who has a proper appreciation of the associated glories of Duluth and the St. Croix, will hesitate a moment to say that every able-bodied female in the land, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, who is in favor of " women's rights," should be drafted and set to work upon this great work without delay. Never- theless, sir, it grieves my very soul to be compelled to say that I cannot vote for the grant of lands provided for in this bill. Ah, sir ! you can have no conception of the poignancy of my anguish that I am de- prived of that blessed privilege ! There are two insuperable obstacles in the way. In the first place my constituents, for whom I am acting here, have no more interest in this road, than they have in the great question of culinary taste, now perhaps agitating the public mind of Dominica, as to whether the illustrious commissioners who recently left this capital for that free and enlightened re- public, would be better fricasseed, boiled or roasted ; and in the second place these lands, which I am asked to give away, alas, are not mine to bestow ! My relation to them is simply that of trustee to an express trust. And shall I ever betray that trust ? Never, sir ! Rather perish Duluth ! Perish the paragon of cities ! Rather let the freezing cyclone of the bleak North-west bury it for- ever beneath the eddying sands of the raging St. Croix 1 AMERICA. SAMUEL FRANCIS SMITH, D. D., born at Boston, Mass., 1808, devoted himself to literature and the Church; w best known by the lyric given below. My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing ; Land where my fathers died, Land of the pilgrim's pride, From every mountain-side Let freedom ring. My native country, thee Land of the noble free Thy name I love ; I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills ; My heart with rapture thrills Like that above. Let music swell the breeze, And ring from all the trees Sweet freedom's song : Let mortal tongues awake ; Let all that breathe partake; Let r.)cks their silence break, The sound prolong. Our fathers' God, to Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee wo sing ; Lon~ may our land be bright With freedom's holy light ; Protect us by Thy might, Great God, our King. THE FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES. Accordingly over these who were first bur- ied at any rate, Pericles son of Xanthippus was chosen to speak. And when the time for doing so came, advancing from the sepulchre on to a platform, which had been raised to 30 FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES. that adorned her with them ; and few of the Greeks are there whose lame, like these men, would appear but the just counterpoise of their deeds. Again, the closing scene of these men appears to me to supply an illus- tration of human worth, whether as affording us the first information respecting it, or its final confirmation. For even in the case of men who have been in other respects of an inferior character, it is but fair for them to hold forth as a screen their military courage in their country's behalf; for, having wiped out their evil by their good, they did more service collectively, than harm by their indi- vidual offences. But of these men there was none that either was made a coward by his wealth, from preferring the continued enjoy- ment of it ; or shrank from danger through a hope suggested by poverty, namely, that he might yet escape it, and grow rich ; but conceiving that vengeance on their foes was more to be desired than these objects, and at the same time regarding this as the most glorious of hazards, they wished by risking it to be avenged on their enemies, and so to aim at procuring those advantages ; com- mitting to hope the uncertainty of success, but resolving to trust to action, with regard to what was visible to themselves ; and in that action, being minded rather to resist and die, than by surrendering to escape, they fled from the shame of [a discreditable] re- port, while they endured the brunt of the battle with their bodies ; and after the short- est crisis, when at the very height of their fortune, were taken away from their glory rather than their fear. " Such did these men prove themselves, as became the character of their country. For you that remain, you must pray that you may have a more successful resolution, but must determine not to have one less bold against your enemies ; not in word alone considering the benefit [of such a spirit], (on which one might descant to you at great length though you know it yourselves quite as well telling you how many advantages are contained in repelling your foes;) but rather day by day beholding the power of the city as it appears in fact, and growing enamoured of it, and reflecting, when you fiink it great, that it was by being bold, and knowing their duty, and being alive to shame in action, that men acquired these things ; and because, if they ever failed in their at- tempt at nny thing, they did not on that ac- count think it right to deprive their country also of their valour, but conferred upon her a most glorious joint-offering. For while collectively they gave her their lives, individ- ually they received that renown which never grows old, and the most distinguished tomb they could have ; not so much that in which they are laid, as that in which their glory is left behind them, to be everlastingly recorded *on every occasion for doing so, either by word or deed, that may from time to time present itself. For of illustrious men the whole earth is the sepulchre ; and not only does the inscription upon columns in their own land point it out, but in that also which is not their own there dwells with every one an unwritten memorial of the heart, rather than of a material monument. Vicing then with these men in your turn, and deeming happiness to consist in freedom, and freedom in valour, do riot think lightly of the haz- ards of war. For it is not the unfortunate, [and those] who have no hope of any good, that would with most reason be unsparing of their lives ; but those who while they live, still incur the risk of a change to the opposite condition, and to whom the difference would be the greatest, should they meet with any reverse. For more grievous, to a man of high spirit at least, is the misery which ac- companies cowardice, than the unfelt death which comes upon him at once, in the time of his strength and of his hope for the com- mon welfare. " Wherefore to the parents of the dead as many of them as are here among you I will not offer condolence, so much as consolation. For they know that they have been brought up subject to manifold misfortunes ; but that happy is their lot who have gained the most glorious death, as these have, sorrow, as you have ; and to whom life has been so ex- actly measured, that they were both happy in it, and died in [that happiness]. Difficult, indeed, I know it is to persuade you of this, with regard to those of whom you will often be reminded by the good fortune of others, in which you yourselves also once rejoiced ; and sorrow is felt, not for the blessings of which one is bereft without full experience of them, but of that which one loses after be- coming accustomed to it. But you must bear up in the hope of other children, those of you whose age yet allows you to have them. For to yourselves individually those who art subsequently born will be a reason for youi forgetting those who are no more; and to the state it will be beneficial in two ways, by its not being depopulated, and by the enjoyment of security ; for it is not possible that those should offer any fair and just advice, who do not incur equal risk with their neighbours by having children at stake. Those of you, how- * Literally, " on every occasion, either of word or deed, that may from time to time present itself." LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 31 ever, who are past that age, must consider that the longer period of your life during which you have been prosperous is so inucn gain, and that what remains will be but a short one ; and you must cheer yourselves with the fair fame of these [your lost ones]. For the love of honour is the only feeling that never grows old ; and in the helplessness of age it is not the acquisition of gain, as some assert, that gives greatest" pleasure, but the enjoyment of honour. THUCYDIDES. THE POPE AND THE BEGGAR. THE DESIRES THE CHAINS, THE DEEDS THE WINGS. I saw a soul beside the clay it wore, When reign'd that clay tho Hierarch-Sire of Rome; A hundred priests stood ranged the bier before, Within St. Peter's dome. And all was incense, solemn dirge, and prayer, And still the soul stood sullen by the clay : "0 soul, why to thy heavenlier native air Dost thou not soar away?" Ami the soul answer'd, with a ghastly frown, "In what life loved, death finds its weal or woe; Slave to the clay's Desires, they drag me down To the clay's rot below !" It spoke, and where Rome's purple ones repo.'ed, They lowered the corpse ; and downwards from the sua Both soul and body sunk and darknecis closed Over that twofold one ! Without the church, unbnriod on the ground, There lay, in rags, a beggar newly dead; Above the dust no h>ly priest was found, No pious prayer was said ! But round the corpse unnumber'd lovely things, Hovering unseen by the proud passers by, Fonn'd, upward, upward, upward, with bright wings, A ladder to the sky ! " And what are ye, beautiful ?" " We are," Answered the choral cherubim, " His Deeds !" Then his soul, sparkling sudden as a star, Flashed from its mortal weeds, And, lightly passing, tier on tier along The gradual piniom, vanish'd like a smile ! Just then, swept by the solemn-visaged throng From the Apostle's pile. * Knew ye this beggar?" " Knew ? a wretch who died Under the curse of our good Pope, now gone !" " Lioved ye that Pope?" ' He was our Church's pride, And Rome's most holy son !" Then did I muse ; such are men's judgments ; blind In scorn of love ! In what unguess'd-of things, Desires or Deeds do rags and purple find The fetters or the wings ! BULWER LYTTOJJ. LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED YEAES AGO. GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, born in Leicestershire, 1838, educated at Cambridge, took high rank in the East In- dian Civil service, was the nephew of Lord Macaulay, through tho marriage of his father to Macaulay's sister. A skilful critic and a finished writer, elected to Parlia- ment as a Liberal in 18G5, held office under Gladstone, 1868-70; again in Parliament, 1874-1880; author of " Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay," (1876), and " The Early History of Charles James Fox," (1880). The following extract is from his latest work : Moral considerations apart, no more de- sirable lot can well be imagined for a human being than that he should be included in the ranks of a highly civilized aristocracy at the culminating moment of its vigor. A society so broad and strongly based that within its own borders it can safely permit absolute liberty of thought and speech ; whose mem- bers are so numerous that they are able to believe, with some show of reason, that the interests of the state are identical with their own, and at the same time so privileged that they are sure to get the best of everything which is to be had, is a society uniting, as far as those members are concerned, most of the advantages and all the attractions both of a popular and an oligarchical form of gov- ernment. It is in such societies that existence has been enjoyed most keenly, and that books have been written which communicate a sense of that enjoyment most vividly to posterity. The records of other periods may do more to illustrate the working of political forces and to clear up the problems of histor- ical science ; the literature of other periods may be richer in wealth of thought and nobler in depth of feeling ; but a student who loves to dwell upon times when men lived so intensely and wrote so joyously that their past seems to us as our present will never tire of recurring to the Athens of Alcibiades and Aristophanes, the Rome of Mark Antony and Cicero, and the London of Charles Townshend and Horace Walpole. The special charm of the literature produced in communities so constituted is that in those LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 32 communities, and in those alone, personal aLusion, tue most effective weapon in the armory of letters, can be employed with a certainty of success. A few thousand people who thought that the world was made for them, and that all outside their own fraterni- ty were unworthy of notice or criticism, be- stowed upon each other an amount of atten- tion quite inconceivable to us who count our equals by millions. The actions, the for- tunes, and the peculiarities of every one who j belonged to the ruling class became matters j of such importance to his fellows that satire and gossip were elevated into branches of the highest literary art. Every hit in an j Athenian burlesque was recognized on the ; instant by every individual in an audience ! which comprised the whole body of free-born j citizens.' The names and habits of every j parasite and informer and legacy-hunter j within the circuit of the Seven Hills were I accurately known to every Roman who had enough spare sesterces to purchase a manu- script of Juvenal. In the eighteenth century, in our own country, the same causes pro- duced the same results ; and the flavor of the immortal impertinences which two thousand years before were directed against Pericles and Euripides may be recognized in the let- ters which, when George the Third was young, were- handed about among a knot of men of fashion and family who could never have enough of discussing the characters and ambitions, the incomes and genealogies, the scrapes and the gallantries, of everybody who had admission to the circle within which their lives were passed. The society pictured in these letters had much the same relation to what is called good society now that the "Boar Hunt" by Velasquez, in the National Gallery, with its groups of stately cavaliers, courteous to each other, and unmindful of all besides, bears to the scene of confused bustle and dubious en- joyment represented in the " Derby Day" of Mr. Frith. So far from being a vast and ill- defined region, capable of almost infinite ex- pansion, into which anybody can work his way who has a little money and a great deal of leisure, and who is willing to invest his industry in the undertaking, good society, when Lord Chesterfield was its oracle and | George Selwyn its father-confessor, was in- closed within ascertained and narrow bound- aries. The extent of those boundaries was so familiar to all who were admitted and all who were excluded that a great lady, when she gave an evening party, would content herself with sending cards to the women, while she left the men to judge for them- selves whether they had a right to come or not. Within the charmed precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of inter- course which in some respects must have been singularly delightful, Secure of his own position, and with no desire to contest the social claims of others, a man was satis- fied, and sometimes only too easily satisfied, to show himself exactly as he was. Ihere was no use in trying to impose upon people who had been his school-fellows at Eton, his brother-officers in the Guards, his colleagues in Parliament, his partners at whist, his cro- nies at the club, his companions in a hundred revels. Every friend with whom he lived was acquainted with every circumstance in his career and every turn in his aflairs who had jilted him, and who had schemed for him ; how many thousands a year had been allowed him by his father, and how many hundreds he allowed his son ; how much of his rent-roll was unmortgaged, and how much wood was left uncut in his plantations ; what chance he had of getting heard at two in the morning in the House of Commons, and what influence he possessed over the corporation of his neighboring borough. Un- able to dazzle those for whose good opinion he cared, it only remained for him to amuse them ; and the light and elegant effusions in which the fine gentlemen of White's and Arthur's rivalled, and, as some think, ex- celled, the wittiest pens of France remain to prove of what Englishmen are capable when they devote the best of their energy to the business of being frivolous. The frivolity of the last century was not confined to the youthful, the foolish, or even to the idle. There never will be a generation which cannot supply a parallel to the lads who, in order that they might the better hear the nonsense which they were talking across a tavern table, had Pall Mall laid down with straw at the cost of fifty shillings a head for the party ; or to the younger brother who gave half a guinea every morning to the flower- woman who brought him a nosegay of roses for his button-hole. These follies are of all times ; but what was peculiar to the period when Charles Fox took his seat in Parliament and his place in society consisted in the phenomenon (for to our ideas it is no- thing else) that men of age and standing, of strong mental powers and refined cultivation, lived openly, shamelessly, and habitually, in the face of all England, as no one who had any care for his reputation would now live during a single fortnight of the year at Monaco. As a sequel to such home-teaching as Lord Holland was qualified to impart, the young fellow, on his entrance into the great world, was called upon to shape his life ac- LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED YEAR3 AGO. 33 cor ling to the models that the public opinion \ of the day held up for his imitation ; and the j examples which he saw around him would i have tempted cooler blood than his, and turned even a more tranquil brain. The ministers who guided the state, whom the king delighted to honor, who had the charge of public decency and order, who named the fathers of the Church, whose duty it was (to use the words of their monarch) " to prevent any alterations in so essential a part of the Constitution as everything that relates to re- ligion," were conspicuous for impudent vice, for daily dissipation, for pranks which would have been regarded as childish and unbecoming by the cornets of a crack cav- alry regiment in the worst days of military license. The Duke of Grafton flaunted at Ascot races with a mistress whom he had picked up in the street, and paraded her at the opera when the royal party were in their box. So public an outrage on the part of the first servant of the crown roused a mo- mentary indignation even in hardened minds. Libertine men," writes an active politician in April, 1768, "are as much offended as prudish women ; and it is impos- sible he should think of remaining a minis- ter." But George the Third was willing that the Duke of Grafton should bring whom he pleased under the same roof as the queen, so long as he kept such people aa Rockingham and Burke and Richmond out of the cabinet. Where the king gave his confidence, it was not for his subjects to play the Puritan, or, at any rate, for those among his subjects who lived upon the good graces of the prime minister ; and in the following August, when Miss Parsons showed herself at the Ridotto, she was followed about by as large a crowd as ever of smart gentlemen who wanted com- missionerships for themselves and deaneries for their younger brothers. ****** So'.ne excuse for the vices of idle and irre- sponsible gentlemen was to bo found in the example of those elevated personages who em- bodied the majesty of justice and the sanctity of religion. When Charles Fox first took j rank among grown men, the head of the law in England and the head of the Church in Ireland were notorious as two among the hardest livers in their respective countries ; and such a pre-eminence was then not lightly earned. ' They tell me, Sir John/' said George the Third to one of his favorites, "that you love a glass of wine." "Those who have so informed your Majesty," was the reply, "have done me great injustice; they should have said a bottle;" and in the days of Lord Chancellor Northington and Archbishop Stone very small account was VOL. I. taken of any aspirant to convivial honors who reckoned his progress through the evening by glasses. Philip Francis, with a motive for keeping guard upon his tongue as strong as ever man had, could not always get through an after-dinner sitting without losing his head, although he sipped thimblefuls while his com- panions were draining bumpers. Two of his friends, without any sense of having per- formed an exceptional feat, finished between them a gallon and a half of champagne and burgundy a debauch which, in this unheroio age, it almost makes one ill to read of. It ia impossible to repress a feeling of undutiful satisfaction at the thought that few among our ancestors escaped the penalties of this mon- strous self-indulgence, from which so many of their innocent descendants are still suffer- ing. Their lives were short, and their clos- ing years far from merry. " Lord Cholmon- deley," wrote Walpole, "died last Saturday. He was seventy, and had a constitution to have carried him to a hundred, if he had not destroyed it by an intemperance that would have killed anybody else in half the time. As it was, he had outlived by fifteen years all his set, who have reeled into the ferry-boat so long before him." A squire past-five-and fifty who still rode to hounds or walked after partridges was the envy of the country-side for his health, unless he had long been its scorn for his sobriety ; and a cabinet minister of the same age who could anticipate with confidence that, at a critical juncture, he would be able to write a confidential dispatch with his own hand, must have observed a very different regimen from most of his contem- poraries. The memorable denunciation of our alliance with the North American sav- ages, as splendid a burst of eloquence as ever thrilled the House of Lords, was levelled by an ex-secretary of state who never was him- self except after a sharp attack of the gout, against a secretary of state who, at thirty- two, had been almost too gouty to accept the seals. Wine did more than work or worry to expedite that flow of promotion to which modern vice-presidents and junior lords look back with wistful regret. A statesman of the Georgian era was sailing on a sea of claret from one comfortable official haven to another at a period of life when a political apprentice in the reign of Victoria is not yet out of his in- dentures. No one can study the public or personal history of the eighteenth century without being impressed by the truly immense space which drinking occupied in the mental horizon of the young, and the consequences of drinking in that of the old. As we turn over volume after volume we find the same dismal story of gout, first dreaded as an avenger, and LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. then, in the later and sadder stage, actually courted and welcomed as a friend. It is pit- inil to witness the loftiest minds and the brightest wits reduced to the most barren and lugubrious of topics ; talking of old age at eeven-and-forty : urging a fellow-sufferer to ?tutf himself with Morello cherries, in order to develop a crisis in the malady ; or rejoic- ing with him over the cheering prospect that t!e gout at length showed symptons of being aKjut to do its duty. It spoke well for George the Third's common-sense that he never would join in the congratulations which his ministers eagerly and unanimously be- stowed upon any of their number who was condemned to list slippers and a Bath chair. People tell me," said his Majesty, " that the gout is very wholesome ; but I, for one, c^n never believe it,' : As far as he was himself concerned, the ling had no occasion to adopt any such des- porate medical theory. He applied to the management of his own health a force of will nnd an independence of judgment which greater men than he too seldom devote to that homely but most difficult task. His imagina- tion had been profoundly impressed by the ight of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, dying at forty-four of a complication of dis- erises aggravated or caused by an excessive c irpulence, which the vigorous habits of a s-'ldier who entertained a soldier's dislike to rules of diet had altogether failel to keep in check. From that time forward George the Third observed a rigid temperance, which might not have been meritorious in a religious recluse, but was admirable when practised mi.l the temptations of a court by one who husbanded his bodily powers for the sake of hU studies. He never allowed himself to be complimented on hU abstinence. " 'Tis no virtue," he said. " I only prefer eating plain and little to growing sickly and infirm." He would ride in all weathers from Kew or Wind- sor to St. James's palace, and dress for a levee, at which he gave every individual pre- sent some token of his favor or displeasure. Then he would assist at a privy council or do business with his ministers till six in the evening, take a cup of tea and a few slices of bread-and-butter without sitting down at table, and drive back into Berkshire by lamp- light. In his recreations he was more hardy and energetic even than in his labors. On hunting-days he remained in the saddle from eight in the morning till the approach of night sent him home to a jug of hot barley- water, which he in vain endeavored to induce )ts attendants to share with him. His gen- tlemen in waiting listed n 'thing of the lux- ury which the humble world presumes to be the reward of courtiers, and not very much of the comfort on which an Englishman of rank reckons as his birthright. Doors and win- dows so habitually open that a maid of honor encountered five distinct and thorough draughts on the way from her own room to the queen's boudoir : expeditions on foot across country for ten miles on end, without shirking a ploughed field or skirting a patch of turnips ; early prayers in winter, with a j congregation dwindling daily as the mornings ] grew colder and darker, until by Christmas i the king and his equerry were left to shiver i through the responses together. Nothing ' would have retained men of fortune and men ! of pleasure in such a Spartan service, except the strong and disinterested affection with which George the Third inspired all who had to do with him in his character of master of the household. The habit and morals of that household were those which prevailed rather in the mid- dle than the upper classes of his Majesty's subjects. The first two hundred lines of the " Winter's Evening" a passage as much be- yond Cowper's ordinary range as it surpasses in wealth and strength of thought, and in sustained beauty and finish of execution, all the pictures of lettered leisure and domestic peace that ever tantalized and tempted a pol- itician and a Londoner show us what was then the aspect of a modern English home, refined by culture, and ennobled by a reli- gious faith of which hardly a vestige can be traced in the records of fashionable and min- isterial circles. Cowper has elsewhere left .- reference to the astonishment with which the official world witnessed the appearance in its midst of such a phenomenon as " one who wears a coronet and prays " in the person of Lord Dartmouth. Voltaire, writing in 1766, pronounced that there was no more religion in Great Britain than the minimum which was required for party pur- poses. Commenting on this passage in the first blank space which he could find, as was ever his custom when he read. Macaulay re- marks, " Voltaire had lived with men of wit and fashion during his visit to England, and knew nothing of the feeling of the grave part of -mankind, or of the middle classes. He says in one of his ten thousand tracts that no shopkeeper in London believes there is a hell.'- Shopkeepers who had listened to Whitefield and the Wesleys for thirty years were not likely to be skeptics on the ques- tion of future punishment ; but men of fash- ion did not concern themselves about the be- liefs of smaller people. There is just as much LONDON SOCIETY A HUNDRED TEARS AGO. ami as little trace of Christianity in Horace U'alpole 03 in Pliny the younger. * **"***** When the Duke of Graflon was at the Trea- sury, the seals were held by Lord Weymouth, the son of Earl Granville's daughter. With more than his grandfather's capacity for li- quor, he had inherited a fair portion of his abilities ; and anybody who cared to sit up with the secretary of state till the hours were no longer small might obtain a fair notion how Carteret used to talk toward the end of his second bottle. It would have been well for Lord Weymouth if his nights had been consume 1 exclusively in drinking, for he was an ardent and most unlucky gambler, and by the age of one-and-thirty he had played away his fortune, his credit, and his honor. His house swarmed with bailiffs ; and when he sought refuge at the club, he found himself among people whose money he had tried to win without having any of his own to lose, and who had told him their opinion of his conduct in terms which he was not in a po- sition, and (as some suspected) not of a na- ture, to resent. He was on the point of le- vanting for France when, as a last resource, his grandfather's friends bethought them that he had not yet tried public life. ' He must have bread, my lord," wrote Junius ; "or, rather, he must have wine ;" and, as it was convenient that his first services to the state should be rendered at a distance from the scene of his earlier exploits, he was appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. The Dublin trades- men, however, did not relish the prospect of having a bankrupt nobleman quartered upon them for five or six years, in order that at the end of that time he might be able to show his face again at White's. The spirit which, fifty years before, had refused to put up witn the bad half-pence of the dominant country again began to show itself; Lord Weymouth's nomination was rescinded; and, to console him for the rebuff, he was made Secretary of State for the Northern Depart- ment, anl intrusted with half the work that is now done by the Foreign Office, and with the undivided charge of the internal adminis- tration of the kingdom. He did not pay his new duties the compliment .of making the very slightest alteration in his habits. He i still boozed till daylight, and dozed into the ! afternoon ; and his public exertions were confined to occasional speeches, which his a Imirers extolled as preternaturally saza- , cious, and which his severest critics admitted to be pithy. "If I paid nobody," wrote Walpole, "and went drunk to bed every morning at six, I might expect to be called i out of bed by two in the afternoon to save the nation and govern the House of Lords by two or three sentences as profound and short as the proverbs of Solomon." Lord Weymouth's successor as secretary of state was the most eminent, and possibly the most disreputable, member of the Bedford connection. The Earl of Sandwich was ex- cellent as the chief of a department. He rose about the time that his predecessor re- tired to rest, and remained, till what then was a late dinner-hour, closely absorbed in methodical and most effectual labor. " Sand- wich's industry to carry a point in view,'* says Walpole, "was so remarkable that the world mistook it for abilities;" and if genius has been rightly defined as the capability of taking trouble, the world was not far wrong. Like all great administrators, he loved his own way, and rarely failed to get it; but outside the walls of his office, his way was seldom or never a good one. He shocked even his own generation by the immorality of his private life, if such a term can be ap- plied to the undisguised and unabashed liber- tinism that he carried to the very verge of a tomb which did not close on him until he had misspent three quarters of a century. He survived a whole succession of scandals, the least flagrant of which would have been fatal to any one but him. Nothing substan- tially injured him in the estimation of his countrymen, because no possible revelation could make them think worse of him than they thought already. When he was ad- vanced in age, and at the head of what was just then the most important branch of the public service, he was involved in one of those tragedies of the police court by means of which the retribution of publicity some- times overtakes the voluptuary who imagines that his wealth has fenced him securely from the consequences of his sin. But no coroner's inquest or cross-examination at the Old Bai- ley could elicit anything which would add a shade to such a character. The blood had been washed from the steps of the theatre ; the gallows had been erected and taken down ; the poor creature who 'had been the object of a murderous rivalry was quiet in her grave ; and the noble earl was still at the Admiralty, giving his unhonored name to the discoveries of our most celebrated navigator, and fitting out expeditions which might reduce the Puri- tans of New England and the Quakers of Philadelphia to the necessity of contributing to the taxes out of which he replenished his cellar and his seraglio. Corrupt, tyrannical, and brazen-faced as a politician, and desti- tute, as was seen in his conduct to Wilkes, of that last relic of virtue, fidelity toward the partners of his secret anl pleasant vices, po- 36 litical satire itself tried in vain to exaggerate the turpitude of Sandwich. " Too infamous to have a friend ; Too bad for bad men to commend, Or good to name ; beneath whose weight Earth groans ; who hath been spared by fate Only to show, on mercy's plan, How far and long God bears with man," Even this masterpiece of truculence was no libel upon one who had still eight-and-twenty years to pass in living up to the character which Churchill had given him in his wrath. "Such," cried Junius, "is the council by which the best of sovereigns is advised, and the greatest nation upon earth governed." The humiliation and resentment with which decent Englishmen saw this train of baccha- nals scouring through the high places of the state is a key to the unexampled popularity of that writer who, under twenty different signatures drawn from the pages of Plutarch and Tacitus, lashed the self-will and self- delusion of the king, and the rapacity and dissoluteness of his ministers. The spectacle of "the Duke of Grafton, like an apprentice, thinking that the world should be postponed to a horse-race, and the Bedfords not caring what disgraces we undergo, while each of them has three thousand pounds a year and three thousand bottles of claret and cham- pagne," did more than his own somewhat grandiose eloquence and over-labored sarcasm to endow Junius with a power in the country second only to that of Chatham, and a fame hardly less universal than the notoriety of Wilkes. But in the eyes of George the Third the righteous anger of his people was only another form of its loyalty. Intent, heart and soul, on his favorite scheme for establish- ing a system of personal rule, under which all the threads of administration should cen- tre in the royal closet, he entertained an instinctive antipathy to high-minded and in- dependent men of all political parties. He selected his instruments among those who were willing to be subservient because they had no self-respect to lose. TIIANATOPSIS. THANATOPSIS To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forma, she speak* A various language ; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness ere he ia aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Uver thy spirit, and sad images Jf the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, .nd breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at ueart; So forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around Earth and her waters, and the depths of air, Comes a still voice -Yet a few days, and thee 'he all-beholding sun shall see no more n all his course ; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist _'hy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall clam Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, s'aalt thou go ?o mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock, And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak ihall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world with kings, The powerful of the earth the wise, the good. Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun ; the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between ; The venerable woods ; rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green ; and poured round al\ Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste, Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun. The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom. Take the winga Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save his own dashings yet the dead are there : And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years bsojan. have laid them down In their last sleep the dead reign there alone. So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breath* Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom ; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come, And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of a^es glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life's green spring, and he who sroes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, PERLING JOAN. 37 And the gweet babe, and the gray headed man, Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, L'.y those, who in their turn shall follow them. So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scotirsed to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. WlLLIAJI CULLEN BRYANT. PERLING JOAN. Our Laird was a very young man when his father died, and he gaed awa to France, and Italy, and Flanders, and Germany, imme- diately, and we saw naething o' him for three years ; and my brother, John Baird, went wi' him as his own body-servant. When that time was gane by, our Johnny cam hame and tauld us that Sir Claud wad be here the next day, an' that he was bring- ing hame a foreign lady wi' him but they were not married. This news was a sair heart, as ye may suppose, to a' that were about the house ; and we were just glad that the auld lady was dead and buried, not to hear of sic doins. But what could we do ? To be sure the rooms were a' put in order, and the best chamber in the hale house was got ready for Sir Claud and her. John tauld me, when we were alane together that night, that I wud be surprised wi' her beauty when she came. But I never could have believed, till I saw her, that she was sae very young such a mere bairn, I may say ; I'm sure she was not more than fifteen. Such a dancing, glee- some bit bird of a lassie was never seen ; and ane could not but pity her mair than blame her for what she had done, she was sae visi- bly in the daftness and light-headedness of youth. Oh how she sang, and played, and galloped about on the wildest horses in the stable, as fearlessly as if she had been a man ! The house was full of fun and glee ; and Sir Claud and she were both so young and so comely, that it was enough to break ane's very heart to behold their thoughtlessness. She was aye sitting on his knee, wi' her arm about his neck ; and for weeks and months this love and merriment lasted. The poor body had no airs wi' her ; she was just as humble in her speech to the like of us. as if she hud been a cotter's lassie. I believe there was not one of us that could help liking her, for a' her faults. She was a glaiket creature ; but gentle and tender hearted as a perfect lamb, and sae bonny ! I never sat eyes upon her match. She had never any colour but black for her gown, and it was commonly satin, and aye made in the same fashion ; and a' the perling about her bosom, and a great gowden chain stuck full of precious ru- bies and diamonds. She never put powder on her head neither ; oh proud, proud was she of her hair ! I've often known her comb and comb at it for an hour on end ; and when it was out of the buckle, the bonry black curls fell as low as her knee. You never saw such a head of hair since ye were born. She was the daughter of a rich auld Jew in Flanders, and ran away frae the house wi' Sir Claud, ae night when there was a great feast gaun on, the Passover supper, as John thought, and out she came by the back-door to Sir Claud, dressed for supper wi' a' her braws. Weel, this lasted for the maist feck of a year ; and Perling Joan (for that was what the ser- vants used to ca' her, frae the laces about her bosom), Mrs. Joan lay in and had a lassie. Sir Claud's auld uncle, the colonel, was come hame from America about this time, and he wrote for the laird to gang in to Edinburgh to see him, and he behoved to do this ; and away he went ere the bairn Avas mair than a fortnight auld, leaving the lady wi' us. I was the maist experienced body about the house, and it was me that got chief charge of being with her in her recovery. The poor young thing was quite changed now. Often and often did she greet herself blind, blind, lamenting to me about Sir Claud's no marry- ing her ; for she said she did not take muckle thought about thae things afore ; but that now she had a bairn to Sir Claud, and she could not bear to look the wee thing in the face, and think a' body would ca' it a bas- tard. And then she said she was come of as decent folks as any lady in Scotland, and moaned and sobbit about her auld father and her sisters. But the colonel, ye see, had gotten Sir Claud into the town ; and we soon began to hear reports that the colonel had been terri- bly angry about Perling Joan, and threatened Sir Claud to leave every penny he had past him, if he did not put Joan away, and marry a lady like himself. And what wi' flceching, and what wi' flyting, sae it was that Sir Claud went away to the north wi' the col- onel, and the marriage between him and lady Juliana was agreed upon, and everything settled. CLEOPATfeA. Everybody about the house had heard mair or less about a' this, or ever a word of it came her length. But at last, Sir Claud him- self writes a long letter, telling her what a' was to be ; and offering to gie her a heap o' siller and send our John over the sea wi' her, to see her safe back to her friends her and her baby, if she liked best to take it with her ; but if not, the colonel was to take the bairn hame, and bring her up a lady, away from the house here, not to breed auy dis- peace. This was what our Johnny said was to be proposed ; for as to the letter itself, I saw her get it, and she read it twice ower, and flung it into the fire before my face. She read it, whatever it was, with a wonderful composure ; but the moment after it was in the fire she gaed clean aff into a fit, and she was out of one and into anither for maist part of the forenoon. Oh, what a sight she was ! It would have melted the heart of stone to see her. The first thing that brought her to herself wa* the sight of her bairn. I brought it, and laid it on her knee, thinking it would do her good if she could give it a suck ; and the poor trembling thing did as I bade her ; and the moment the bairn's mouth was at the breast, she turned as calm as the baby itsel the tears rapping ower the cheeks, to be sure, but not one word more. I never heard her either greet or sob again a' that day. I put her and the bairn to bed that night, but nae combing and curling o' the bonnie black hair did I see then. However, she seemed very calm and composed, and I left them, and gaed to my ain bed, which was in a little room within hers. Next morning, the bed was found cauld and empty, and the front door of the house standing wide open. We dragged the wa- ters, and sent man and horse every gate, but ne'er a trace of her could we ever light on, till a letter came twa or three weeks after, addressed to me, frae hersel. It was just a line or twa, to say that she was well, and thanking me, poor thing, for having been attentive about her in her down-lying. It was dated frae London. And she charged me to say nothing to anybody of having re- ceived it. But this was what I could not do ; for everybody had set it down for a cer- tain thing, that the poor lassie had made away baith wi' herself and the bairn. I dinna weel ken whether it was owing to this or not, but Sir Claud's marriage was put aff for twa or three years, and he never cam near us a* that while. At length word came that the wedding was to be put over directly : and painters, and upholsterers, and I know not what all, came and turned the hale house up- side down, to prepare for my lady's liauie- coming. The only room that they never meddled wi' was that that had been Mrs. Joan's : and no doubt they had been ordered what to do. Weel, the day cam, and a braw sunny spring day it was, that Sir Claud and the bride were to come hame to the Mains. The grass was a' new niawn about the policy, and the walks sweepit, and the cloth laid for dinner, and everybody in their best to give them their welcoming. John Baird came galloping up the avenue like mad, to tell us that the coach was amaist within sight, and gar us put oursels in order afore the ha' steps. We were a' standing there in our ranks, and up came the coach rattling and driving, wi' I dinna ken how mony servants riding behind it ; and Sir Claud lookit out at the window, and was waving his handker- chief to us, when, just as fast as fire ever flew frae flint, a woman in a red cloak rush- ed out from among the auld shrubbery at the west end of the house, and flung herself in among the horses' feet, and the wheels gaed clean out ower her breast, and crushed her dead in a single moment. She never stirred. Poor thing ! she was nae Perling Joan then. She was in rags perfect rags all below the bit cloak ; and we found the bnirn, rowed in a checked apron, lying just behind the hedge. A braw heartsome welcoming for a pair of young married folk ! The History of Matthew Wald. JOHN GIBSON LOCKUABT, LL.D. CLEOPATRA. WILLIAM W. STORY, an American author and artist, was born at Salem, Mass., in 1819, and was educated for the bar ; his father having been an eminent jurist. Af- ter publishing several works on jurisprudence, W. W. Story took up his residence in Rome, and became widely known as a sculptor and a poet. His versatile and ar- dent mind has enabled him to achieve distinction in the widely various fields of legal and imaginative literature, as well as in art. In 1862 he published " Roba di Roma," a descriptive and critical work on the city of Rome. Hi* " Treatixe on the Law of Contracts" and on " Personal Property" have gone through numerous editions, and he has published five volumes of poems. Here, Charmian, take my bracelets They bar with a purple Btaln My arms ; turn over my pillows, They are hot where I have lain ; Open the lattice wider, A gauze o'er my bosom throw, And let me inhale the odors That over the garden blow. CLEOPATRA. I dreamed I was with my Antony And in his arms I lay : Ah we '. the vision has vanished, The music has died away, The flame and the perfume have perished As this spiced aromatic pastille That wound the blue smoke of ita odor, Is now but an ashy hill. Scatter upon me rose-leaves, They cool me after. my sleep, And with sandal odors fan me Till into my veins they creep , Reach down the lute, aud play me A melancholy tune, To rhyme with the dream that has vanished, And the slumbering afternoon. There, drowsing in golden sunlight, Loiters the slow, smooth Nile, Through slender papyri, that cover The wary crocodile. The lotus lolls on the water, And opens its heart of gold, And over ita broad leaf pavement Never a ripple is rolled. The twilight breeze is too lazy Those feather}' palms to wave, And yon little cloud is as motionless As a stone above a grave. Ah me ! this lifeless nature Oppresses my heart and brain ! 0, for a storm and thunder, For lightning and wild fierce rain ! Fling down that lute I hate it ! Take rather his buckler and sword, And crash them and clash them together Till this sleeping world is stirred. Hark ! to my Indian beauty My cockatoo, creamy white, With roses under his feathers That flashes across the light, Look ! listen ! as backward and forward To his hoop of gold he clings, How he trembles, with crest uplifted, And shrieks as he madly swings ! O cockatoo, shriek for Antony ! Cry, ' Come, my love, come home ! ** Shriek, " Antony '. Antony ! Antony ! " Till he hears you even in Rome. There leave me, and take from my chamber That stupid little gazelle, With its bright black eyes so meaningless, And its silly tinkling bell ! Take him my nerves he vexes The thing without blood or brain, Or, by the body of Isis, I'll snap his neck in twain ! Leave me to gaze at the landscape Mistily stretching away, * Where the afternoon's opaline tremors O'er the mountains quivering play; Till the fiercer splendor of sunset Pours from the west ita fire, Aud melted, as in a crucible, Their earthly forms expire ; And the bald blear skull of the desert With glowing mountains is crowned, That, burning like molten jewels, Circle its temples round. I will lie and dream of the past time, ./Eons of thought away, And through the jungle of memory Loosen my fancy to play ; When a smooth and velvety tiger, Ilibbed with yellow and black, Supple and cushion-footed, I wandered whore never the track Of a human creature had rustled The silence of mighty woods, And, fierce in a tyrannous freedom, I knew but the law of my moods. The elephant, trumpeting, started When he heard my footstep near, And the spotted giraffes fied wildly In a yellow cloud of fear. I sucked in the noontide splendor Quivering along the glade, Or yawning, panting, aud dreaming, Rasked in the tamarisk shade, Till 1 heard my wild mate roaring, As the shadows of night came on To brood in the trees' thick branches, And the shadow of sleep was gone ; Then I roused and roared in answer, And unsheathed from my cushioned feet My curving claws, and stretched me And wandered my mate to greet. We toyed in the amber moonlight, Upon the warm flat sand, And struck at each other our massive arm*- How powerful he was and grand ! His yellow eyes flashed fiercely As he crouched and gazed at mo, And his quivering tail, like a serpent, Twitched curving nervously ; Then like a storm he seized me, With a wild, triumphant cry, And we met as two clouds in heaven When the thunders before them fly ; We grappled and struggled together, For his love, like his rage, was rude; And his teeth in the swelling folds of my neck At times in our play, drew blood. Often another suitor For I was flexile and fair Fought for me in the moonlight, While 1 lay crouching thera, 40 A BATTLE PICTURE. Till his blood was drained by the desert ; And, ruffled with triumph and power. He licked me and lay beside me To breath him a vast half-hour; Then down to the fountain we loitered, Where the antelopes came to drink, Like a bolt we sprang upon them, Ere they had time to shrink. We drank their Wood and crushed them, And tore them limb from limb, And the hungriest lion doubted Ere he disputed with him. That was a 'Jfe to live for! Not tl>t weak human life, With to frivolous, bloodless passions. Its poor and petty strife ! Coirf to my arms, my hero, Thp shadows of twilight grow A"v^ (he tiger's ancient fierceness In my veins begins to flow, ^cme not cringing to sue me ! Take me with triumph and power, As a warrior storms a fortress I I will not shrink or cower. Come as you came in the desert, Ere we were women and men, When the tiger passions were in us, And love as you loved me then 1 A BATTLE PICTURE. Did you ever see a battery take position ? It hasn't the thrill of a cavalry charge, nor the grimness of a line of bayonets moving slowly and determinedly on, but there is a peculiar excitement about it that makes old veterans rise in the saddle and cheer. We have been fighting at the edge of the woods. Every cartridge box has been emptied once and more, and a fourth of the brigade has melted away in dead, wounded and missing Not a cheer is heard in the whole brigade We know that we are being driven foot by foot, and that when we break once more the line will go to pieces, and the enemy wil' pour through the gap. Here comes help Down the crowded highway gallops a battery withdrawn from another position to save ours The field fence is scattered while you coulc count thirty, and the guns rush for the hil behind us. Six horses to a piece threi riders to each gun. Over dry ditches when R farmer could not drive a wagon, througl clumps of bushes, over logs a foot thick every horse on a gallop, every rider lashin] his team and yelling. The sight behind make u? forget the foe in front. The guns jump tw feet high as the heavy wheels strike rock o but not a horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his seat. Six guns, six Caissons, sixty horses, eighty men race for he brow of the hill, as if he who reached t first was to be knighted. A moment ago he battery was a confused mob. We look igain and the six guns are in position, the letached horses hurrying away, the ammuni- ion chests open, and along our line runs the :ommand, " Give them one more volley, and fall back to support the guns!' We lave scarcely obeyed, when, boom ! boom .' boom ! opens the battery, and jets of fire ump down and scorch the green trees under ivhich we fought and despaired. The shat- tered old brigade has a chance to breathe for :he first time in three hours as we form a line of battle behind the guns and lie down. What grim, cool fellows those cannoneers are ! Every man is a perfect machine. Bul- lets plash dust into their faces, but they do not wince. Bullets sing over and around them, but they do not dodge. There goes one to the earth, shot through the head as he sponged his gun. The machinery loses just one beat misses one cog in the wheel, and then works away again as before. Every gun is using short-fuse shell. The ground shakes and trembles the roar shuts out all sound from a battle line three miles long, and the shells go shrieking into the swamp to cut trees short off to mow great gaps in the bushes to hunt out and shatter ami mangle men until their corpses cannot be recognised as human. You would think a tornado was howling through the forest, fol- lowed by billows of fire, and yet men live through it ay ! press forward to capture the battery ! We can hear their shouts as they form for the rush. Now the shells are changed for grape and cannister. and the guns are served out so fast that ail reports blend into one mighty roar. The shriek of a shell is one of the wickedest sounds in war. but nothing makes the flesh crawl like the demoniac singing, purring, whistling grape shot, and the serpent-like hiss of cannister. Men's legs and arms are not shot through, but torn off. Heads are torn from bodies, and bodies cut in two. A round shot or shell takes two men out of the ranks as it crashes through. Grape and cannister mow a swathe and pile the dead on top of each other. Through the smoke we see a swarm of men. It is not a battle line, but a mob of men desperate enough to bathe their bayo- nets in the flame of the guns. The guns leap from the ground almost, as they are depress- ed on the foe, and shrieks, and screams, and shouts blend into one awful and steady cry. Twenty men out of the battery are "down. THE JOURNEY OF A DAY. 41 and the firing is interrupted. The foe ac- cepts it as a sign of wavering, and come rush- ing on. They are not ten feet away when the guns give them a last shot. That dis- charge picks living men off their feet, and throws them into the swamp a blackened, and bloody mass. Up now, as the enemy are among the guns ! There is a silence of ten seconds, and then the flash and roar of more than 3000 muskets, and a rush forward with bayonets. For what ? Neither on the right, nor left, nor in front of us is a living foe ! There are corpses around us which have been struck by three, four, and even six bul- lets, and nowhere on this acre of ground is a wounded man ! The wheels of the guns can- not move until the blockade of the dead is re- moved. Men cannot pass from caisson to gun without climbing over windrows of dead. Every gun and wheel is smeared with blood every foot of grass has its horrible stain. Detroit Free Press. ANONYMOUS. THE JOURNEY OF A DAY, A PICTURE OF HITMAN LIFE J THE STORY OF OBIDAH. Obidih, the son of Abensina, left the car- avansera early in the morning, and pursued his journey through the plains of Indostan. He was fresh and vigorous with rest ; he was animated with hope ; he was incited by de- sire ; he walked swiftly forward over the val- leys, and saw the hills gradually rising be- fore him. As he passed along, his ears were delighted with the morning song of the bird of paradise, he was fanned by the last flutters of the sinking breeze, and sprinkled with dew by groves of spices; he sometimes contem- plated the towering height of the oak, mon- arch of the hills ; and sometimes caught the gentle fragrance of the primrose, eldest daugh- ter of the spring: all his senses were grati- fied, and all care banished from the heart. Thus lie went on till the sun approached his meridian, and the increasing heat preyed upon his strength; he then looked round about him for some more commodious path. He saw, on his right hand, a grove that seem- ed to wave its shades as a sign of invitation; he entered it, and found the coolness and ver- dure irresistibly pleasant. He did not, how- ever, forget whither he was travelling, but found a narrow way bordered with flowers, which appeared to have the same direction with the main road, and was pleased that, by the happy experiment, he had found means to unite pleasure with business, and to gain the rewards of diligence, without suffering its fatigues. He, therefore, still continued to walk for a time, without the least remission of his ardour, except that he was sometimes tempted to stop by the music of the birds, whom the heat had assembled in the shade, and sometimes amused himself with plucking the flowers that covered the banks on either side, or the fririt that hung upon the branches At last the green path began to decline from its first tendency, and to wind among hills, and thickets, cooled with fountains, and murmuring with water-falls. Here Obidah paused for a time, and began to consider whether it were longer safe to forsake the known and common track ; but remembering that the heat was now in its greatest violence, and that the plain was dusty and uneven, he resolved to pursue the new path, which he supposed only to make a few meanders, in compliance with the varieties of the ground, and to end at last in the common road. Having thus calmed his solicitude, he re- newed his pace, though he suspected that he was not gaining ground. This uneasiness of his mind inclined him to lay hold on every new object, and give way to every sensation that might sooth or divert him. He listened to every echo, he mounted every hill for a fresh prospect, he turned aside to every cas- cade, and pleased himself with tracing the course of a gentle river that rolled among the trees, and watered a large region with innu- merable circumvolutions. In these amuse- ments the hours passed away uncounted, his deviations had perplexed his memory, and he knew not towards what point to travel. He stood pensive and confused, afraid to go for- ward lest he should go wrong, yet conscious that the time of loitering was now past. While he was thus tortured with uncertainty, the sky was overspread with clouds, the day vanished from before him, and a sudden tem- pest gathered round his head. He was now roused by his danger, to a quick and painful remembrance of his folly ; he now saw how happiness is lost, when ease is consulted ; he lamented the unmanly impatience that prompted him to seek shelter in the grove, and despised the petty curiosity that led him on from trifle to trifle. While he was thus reflecting, the air grew blacker, and a clap of thunder broke his meditation. He now resolved to do what remained yet in his power : to tread back the ground which he had passed, and try to find some issue where the wood might open into the plain. He prostrated himself on the ground, and commended his life to the Lord of nature. He rose with confidence and tranquillity, and pressed on with his sabre in his hand, lor the 42 THE PERFECT PAINTER. beasts of the desert were in motion, and on every hand were heard the mingled howls of r.tge and fear, and ravage and expiration ; all the horrors of the darkness and solitude sur- rounded him ; the winds roared in the woods, and the torrents tumbled from the hills. Work'd into sudden rage by wint'ry show'rs, Down the steep hill the roaring torrent pours; The mountain shepherd hears the distant noise, Thus forlorn and distressed, he wandered through the wild, without knowing whither he was going, or whether he was every mo- ment drawing near to safety or to destruction. At length, not fear, but labour, began to over- come him ; his breath grew short, and his knees trembled, and he was on the point of lying down in resignation to his fate, when he beheld through the brambles the glimmer of a taper. He advanced towards the light, and finding that it proceeded from the cottage of a hermit, he called humbly at the door, and obtained admission. The old man set before him such provisions as he had collected for himself, on which Obidali fed with eagerness and gratitude. When the repast was over, ''Tell me," said the hermit, "by what chance thou hast been brought hither; I have been now twenty years an inhabitant of the wilderness, in which I never saw a man before." Obidah then re- lated the occurrences of his journey, without any concealment or palliation. "Son," said the hermit, 'let the errors and follies, the dangers and escapes of this day, sink deep into thy heart. Remember, my son, that human life is the journey of a day. We rise in the morning of youth, full of vig- our, and full of expectation ; we set forward with spirit and hope, with gaiety and with diligence, and travel on a while in the strait road of piety towards the mansions of rest. In a short time we remit our fervour, and en- deavour to find some mitigation of our duty, and some more easy means of obtaining the same end. We then relax our vigour, and resolve no longer to be terrified with crimes at a distance, but rely upon our own con- stancy, and venture to approach what we re- solved never to touch. We thus enter the bowers of ease, and repose in the shades of security. Here the heart softens, and vigi- lance subsides ; we are then willing to en- quire whether another advance cannot be made, and whether we may not, at least, turn our eyes upon the gardens of pleasure. We approach them with scruple and hesitation ; we enter them, but enter timorous and trem- bling, and always hope to pass thrqugh them without losing the road of virtue, which we, for a while, keep in our sight, and to which we propose to return. But temptation suc- ceeds temptation, and one compliance pre- pares us for another; we in time lose the happiness of innocence, and solace our dis- quiet with sensual gratifications. By degrees we let fall the remembrance of our original intention, and quit the only adequate object of rational desire. We entangle ourselves in business, immerge ourselves in luxury, and rove through the labyrinths of inconstancy, till the darkness of old age begins to invade us, and disease and anxiety obstruct our way. We then look back upon our lives with hor- ror, with sorrow, with repentance ; and wish, but too often vainly wish, that we had not forsaken the ways of virtue. Happy are they, my son, who shall learn from thy example not to despair, but shall remem- ber, that though the day is past, and their strength is wasted, there yet remains one ef- fort to be made ; that reformation is never hopeless, nor sincere endeavours ever unas- sisted ; that the wanderer may at length re- turn, after all his errors ; and that he who implores strength and courage from above, shall find danger and difficulty give way be- fore him. Go now, my son, to thy repose ; commit thyself to the care of Omnipotence ; and when the morning calls again to toil, begin anew thy journey and thy life." Tht Rambler. SAMUEL JOHNSON. ANDREA DEL SARTO. (Called " The Perfect Painter.") TO HIS WIFE. But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia ; bear with me for once : Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart ? I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it ? tenderly ? Oh, I'll content him, but to-morrow, Love '. I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if forgive now should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine, And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole", Both of one mind, as married people use, Quietly, quietly, the evening through, I might get up to-morrow to my work Cheerful and fresh aa ever. Let us try. THE PERFECT PAINTER. To-morrow how you shall be glad for this ! Your soft hand is a woman of itself, And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. Don't count the time lost, either ; you must servt For each of the five pictures we require It. saves a model. So '. keep looking so My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds ! How could you ever prick those perfect ears, Kven to put the pearl there ! oh, so sweet My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks no one's : very dear, no less ! You smile ? why there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony I A common gray ness silvers everything, All in a twilight, you and I alike You at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone you know), but I, at every point ; Sly youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safor, huddled more inside : The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease And autumn grows, autumn in everything, Eh ? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. How strange, now, looks the life He makes us lead ! So free weseem, so fettered fast we are ! I feel He laid the fetter : let it lie ' This chamber for example turn your head All that's behind us! you don't understand Nor care to understand about my art, But you can hear at least when people speak ; And that cartoon, the second from the door It is the thing, Love! so such things should be Behold Madonna, I am bold to say. I can do with my pencil what I know. What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I over wish so deep Do easily, too -when 1 say perfectly, I do not boast, perhaps : yourself are judge Who listened to the Legate's talk last week, And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it, No sketches first, no studies, that's long past I do what many dream of all their lives Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive you don't know how the others striva To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, Yet do much less, so much less, Some one says, (I know his name, no matter) so much less: Well, loss is more, Lucrozia! T am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed, beating, stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, then goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I kuuw, Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, Enter and take their place there sure enough, Though they come back and cannot tell the world. My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. The sudden blood of these men ! at a word Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. I, painting from myself and to myself, Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame Or their praise either. Somebody remarks Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken -what of that? or else, Kightly tnicoil and well ordered what of that? Speak as they please, what does the mountain care ? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for ? all is silver-grey, Placid and perfect with my heart the worse . I know both what I want and what might gain And yet how profitless to know, to sigh, " Had I been two, another and myself, Our head would have o'erlooked the world !" No doubt, Yonder's a work, now, of that famous youth The Urbinato who died five years ago. ('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) Well, I can fancy how he did it all, Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him, Above and through his art for it gives way ; That arm is wrongly put -and there again A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak : its soul is right, He means right that, a child may understand. Still, what an arm .' and I could alter it. But all the play, the insight and the stretch Out of me I out of me .' And wherefore out ? Had you enjoined them on mo, given me soul. Wo might have risen to Rafael, I and you. Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think More than I merit, yes, by many times. But had you -oh, with the same perfect brew, And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth. And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare Had you, with those the same, but brought a nvnd! Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged " God and the glory . never care for gain. The Present by the Future, what is that? Live for fame, side by side with Angelo Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three '. " I might have done it for you. So it seems Perhaps not. All is as God overrules. Beside, incentives come from the soul's self; The rest avail not. Why do I need you? What wife had Rafael, or has Angelo? In this world, who can do a thing, will not And who would do it, cannot, I perceive: Yet the will's somewhat somewhat, too, the power And thus we half-mnn struggle. At the end, God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. 44 THE PERFECT PAINTER. Tis safer for me, if the award be strict, That I am something underrated here, 1-oor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. 1 dared not, do you know, leave home all day, For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. The best is when they pass and look aside ; But they speak sometimes ; I must bear it all. Well may they speak ! That Francis, that first time, And that long festal year at Fontaineblear ! I surely then could sometimes leave the gl jund, Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear, In that humane great monarch's golden look, One finger in his beard or twisted curl Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, One arm about my shoulder, round my neck, The jingle of his gold chain in my ear, 1 paintiug proudly with his breath on me, All his court round him, seeing with his eyes, Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of soula Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts, And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, This in the background, waiting on my work, To crown the issue with a last reward t A good time, was it not, my kingly day ? And had you not grown restless but I know Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said: Too live the life grew, golden and not grey, And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt Out of the grange whose four walls make his world. How could it end in any other way ? You called me, and I came home to your heart. The triumph was, to have ended there ; then if 1 reached it ere the triumph, what is lost ? Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine ! ' Rafael did this, Andrea painted that The Roman's is the better when you pray, But still the other's Virgin was his wife " Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge Both pictures in your presence : clearer grows My better fortune, I resolve to think. For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives, Said one day An?elo, his very self, To Rafael ... I have known it all these years . . . (When the young man was flaming out his thought* Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see, Too lifted up in heart because of it) " Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub Goes up and down our Florence, none cares h >w, Who, were he set to plan and execute As you are, pricked on by your popes and kin^g Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours 1 " To Rafael's ! And indeed the arm is wrong. I hardly dare yet only you to see, Give the chalk here -quick, thus the line should go ! Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael ! rub it out ! Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth, (What he ? why. who but Michael Angelo ? Do you forget already words like those?) If really there was such a chance, so lost, la, whether you're -not grateful-but more pleased. Well let me think so. And yon smile indeed I This hour has been an hour! Another smile? If you would sit thus by me every night I should work better, do you comprehend ? I mean that I should earn more, give you more. See, it is settled dusk now? there's a star; Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall. The cue-owls speak the name we call them by. Come from the window, Love, Come in, at last, Inside the melancholy little house We built to be so gay with. God is just. King Francis may forgive me. Oft at nights When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, The walls become illuminated, briclt from brick Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, That gold of his I did cement them with ! Let us but love each other. Must you go ? That Cousin here again ? he waits outside ? Must see j-ou you, and not with me? Those loans? More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? Well, let smiles buy me ! have you more to spend ? While hand and eye and something of a heart Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit The grey remainder of the evening out. Idle you call it, and muse perfectly How I could paint, were I but back in France, One picture, just one more The Virgin's face, Not yours this time ! I want you at my side To hear them that is Michael Angelo Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. Will you ? To-morrow, satisfy your friend. . I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the portrait out of hand there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs ; the whole should prove enough To pay for this same Cousin's freak. Beside, What's better and what's all I care about, Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff. Love, does that please you ' Ah, but what does ha, The Cousin : what does he to please you more ? I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. I regret little, I would change still less. Since there my past life lies, why alter it ? The very wrong to Francis ! it is true I took his coin, was tempted and complied, And built this house and ginned, and all is said, My father and my mother died of want. Well, had I riches of my own ? you see How one gets rich ! Let each one bear his lot. They were born poor, live poor, and poor they died : And I have laboured somewhat in my time And not been paid profusely. Some good son Paint my two hundred pictures -let him try I No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, Yon loved me quite enough, it seems to-night. This must suffice me here. What would one have ? In Heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chan<- Four great walls in the New Jerusalem Meted on each side by the angel's reed, THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. 45 For Leonard, Rafael, Angelo and me To cover the three first without a wife While I have mine ! So still they overcome Because there's still Lucrezia, as I choose. Again the Cousin's whistle I Go, my Love. ROBERT BBOWNINO. THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. FROM DAVID COPPERFIELD. It was a murky confusion here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel of flying clouds toss- ed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she ha 1 lost her way and were fright- ened. There ha 1 been a wind ah 1 day ; and it was rising then, with an extraordinarily great sound, la another hour it had much increase 1, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard. But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it wag then late in September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a deal stop ; and we were often in serious apprehensions that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel ; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the stru^le. When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I ha 1 been in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never known the like of this, or anything approaching to it. We came to Ipswich very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since we were ten miles out of London : and found a cluster of people in the market- place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high church- tower, and flung into a bye-street, which they then blocked up. Others had to tell of country people, coming in from neighboring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about the roads and fields. Still there was no abatement in the storm, but it blew harder. As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which the mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became more and more terrific. Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth ; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings. When at last we got into the town, the people came out to their doors, all aslant, and with stream- ing hair, making a wonder of the mail that had come through such a night. I put up at the old inn and went down to look at the sea ; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of seafoam ; afraid of falling slates and tiles, and holding by people I met, at angry corners. Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatman, but half the people of the town, lurking be- hind buildings ; some, now and then braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag back. Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were away in her- ring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to think might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for safety. Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their heads, as they looked from wa- ter to sky, and muttering to one another ; shipowners, excited and uneasy ; children, huddling together, and peering into older faces ; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious, leveling their glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter, as if they were surveying an enemy. The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agi- tation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confused me. As the high w.itery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out a deep cave in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the com- position of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes ski mining through them) were lifted up to hills ; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound ; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away ; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings rose and fell ; the clouds flew fast and thick ; 1 seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature. Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable wind for it is still remem- bered clown there, as the greatest ever known to blow upon that coast had brought togeth- er. I made my way to his house. It was fihut ; ami as no one answered to my knock- ing, I went, by backways and bye-lane, to the yard where he worked. I learned there that he had gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sadden exigency of ship-repairing in which his skill was required ; but that he would be back to-morrow morning, in good time. I went back to the inn ; and when I had washed and dressed, and tried to sleep, but in vain, it was five o'clock in the afternoon. I had not sat five minutes by the coffee-rooin fire, when the waiter coming to stir it, as an excuse for talking, told me that two colliers had gone down, with all hands, a few miles away ; and that some other ships had been seen laboring hard in the Roads, and trying, in great distress, to keep off shore. Mercy on them, and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had another night like the last ! I was very much depressed in spirits : very solitary ; and felt an uneasiness in Ham's not being there, disproportionate to the occa- sion. I was seriously affected, without know- ing how much, by late events ; and my long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that I had lost the clear ar- rangcmcnt? of time and distance. Thus, if I had gone out into the town, I should not have been surprised, I think, to encounter some ono who I knew must be then in Lon- don. So t-) speak, there was in these respects a curhu i inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too, with all the remembrances the place naturally awakened ; and they were particularly distinct and vivid. In this state, the waiter's dismal intelli- gence a')out the ships immediately con- nected itself, without any effort of my volition, with my uneasiness about Ham. I was per- Hua Ic 1 that 1 had an apprehension of his re- turning from Lowestoft by sea, arid being lost. This grew so strong with me, that I resolved to go back to the yard before I took my dinner, and ask the boat-builder if he thought his attempting to return by sea at all likely ? If he gave me the least reason to think so, I would go over to Lowestoft and prevent it by bringing him with me. I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard. I was none too soon ; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his hand, was locking the yard-gate. He quite laughed when I asked him the question, and said there was no fear ; no man in his senses, or out of them, would put off in such a gale of wind, least of all Ham Feggotty, who had been born to seafaring. So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed of doing what I was nev- ertheless impelled to do, I went back to the inn. If such a wind could rise, I think it was rising. The howl and roar, the rattling of the doors and windows, the rumbling in the chimneys, the apparent rocking of the very house that sheltered me, and the prodig- ious tumult of the sea, were more fearful than in the morning. But there was now a great darkness besides ; and that invested the storm with new terrors, real and fanciful. I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue steadfast to anything. Some- thing within me faintly answering to the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory, and made a tumult within them. Yet in all the hurry of my thoughts, wild running with the thundering sea the storm and my uneasiness regarding Ham, were always in the foreground. My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh myself with a glass or two of wine. In vain. I fell into a dull slumber before the fire, without losing my consciousness, either of the uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was. Both became overshadowed by a new and indefi- nable horror ; and when I awoke or rather when I shook off the lethargy that bound me in my chair my whole frame thrilled with objectless and unintelligible fear. I walked to and fro ; tried to rend an old gazetteer ; listened to the awful noises ; look- ed at faces, scenes, and figures in the fire. At length, the steady ticking of the undis- turbed clock on the wall tormented me tc that degree that I resolved to go to bod. It was re-assuring, on such a night, to be told that some of the inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning. I went (o bed exceedingly weary and heavy ; but, on my lying down, all such sensations van- ished as if by magic, and I was broad awaLe, with every sense refined. THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. 47 For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water ; imagining, now, that I heard shrieks out at sea ; now, that I dis- tinctly heard the firing of signal guns ; and now. the fall of houses in the town. I got up several times and looked out ; but could see nothing except the reflection in the win- dow-panes of the faint candle I had left burning, and of my own haggard face looking in at me from the black void. At length my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I hurried on my clothes and went down stairs. In a large kitchen, where I dimly saw bacon and ropes of onions hang- ing from the beams, the watchers were clus- tered together, in various attitudes, about a table, purposely moved away from the great chimney, and brought near the door. A pretty girl, who had her ears stopped with her apron, and her eyes upon the door, screamed when I appeared, supposing me to be a spirit ; but the others had more pres- ence of mind, and were glad of an addition t) their company. One man, referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked me whether I thought the souls of the collier- crews who had gone down, were out in the storm ? 1 remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once I opened the yard-gato, and looked in- to the empty street. The sand, the sea- weed, and the flakes of foam were driving by ; and I was obliged to call for assistance before I could shut the gate again, and make it fast against the wind. There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length returned to it ; but I was tired, now, and, getting into bed again, fell off a tower and down a precipice into the depths of sleep. I have an im- pression that for a long time, though I dream- ed of being elsewhere and in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing in my dream. At length I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and was engaged with two dear friends, but who they were I don't know, at th siege of some town in a roar of cannonading. The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant that I could not hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great exertion and awoke. It was broad day eight or nine o'clock ; the storm raging, in lieu of the batteries ; and some one knock- ing and calling at my door. " What is the matter? " I cried. " A wreck ! Close by !" I sprung out of bed and asked what wreck? " A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. Make haste, sir, if you want to see her ! It's thought, down on the beach, she'll go to pieces every moment." The excited voice'went clamoring along the staircase ; and 1 wrapped myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into the street. Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction, to the beach, i ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon came facing the wild sea. The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been di- minished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds. But the sea, having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every appearance it had then presented bore the expression of being swelled; and the height to which the break- ers rose, and, looking over one another, bore one another down, and rolled in, in intermi- nable hosts, was most appalling. In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves, and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breath- less efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next to me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo' d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the left. Then, O, great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us ! One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging ; and all that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat which she did without a moment's pause and with a violence quite inconceivable beat the side as if it would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made to cut this portion of the wreck away ; for as the ship, which was broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment ; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks, bul- warks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge. The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail and a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling and beat- ing were too tremendous for any human THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. work to suffer long. As he spoke there was another great cry of pity from the beach ; four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining mast ; uppermost the active figure with the curling hair. There was a bell on board, and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned to- wards the sea, the bell rang ; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards us on the wind. Again we lost her and again she rose. Two men were gone. The agony on shore increased. Men groaned and clasped their hands ; women shrieked and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes. They were making out to me, in an agitated way I don't know how, for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to un- derstand that the life-boat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and could do nothing ; and that as no man would be so desperate as to attempt to wade off with a rope, and estab- lish a communication with the shore, there was nothing left to try ; when I noticed that some new sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking through them to the front. I ran to him as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But, distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the determination in his face, and his look, out to sea exactly the same look as I remem- bered in connexion with the morning after Emily's flight awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with both arms ; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen to him, not to do mur- der, not to let him stir from off that sand ! Another cry arose on shore : and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast. Against such a sight, and against such de- termination as that of the calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the people present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. " Mas'r Davy," he all ! Mates, make me ready ! I' m a going off 1 I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people around me made me stay : urging, as I confusedly per- ceived, that he was bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I don't know what I answered, or what they rejoined ; but, I saw hurry on the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then I saw him standing alone in a seaman's frock and trowsers : a rope in his hand, or slung to his wrist : another round his body : and several of the best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet. The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon the mast hung by a thread. Still he clung to it. He had a singular red cap on, not like a sailor's cap, but of a finer color ; and as the few yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend. Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a moment was buffeting with the water ; rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the foam ; then drawn again to land. They hauled in hastily. He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood ; but he took no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for leaving him more free or so I jydged from the motion of his arm and was gone as before. And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was noth< ing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it when a high, green, vast hillside of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone ! Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, GEBBIE a CO. PHILADELPHIA NEW YORK A WEEK AT DATA VIA. 49 as if a mere cask had been broken, in run- ning to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very feet insensible dead. He was carried to the nearest house ; and, no one preventing me now, I remained near him, busy, while every means of restoration were tried ; but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous heart was still- ed forever. As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were chil- dren, and ever since, whispered my name at the door. "Sir," said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which, with his tremb- ling lips, was ashy pale, " will you come over yonder?" The old remembrance that had been re- called to me, was in his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support me : " Has a body come ashore ?" He said, " Yes." " Do I know it?" I asked then. He answered nothing. But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind among the ruins of the home he had wronged I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school. CHABLES DICKENS. IN MEMORIAM. I wage not any feud with Death For changes wrought on form and face ; No lower life that earth's embrace May breed with him, can fright my faith. Eternal process moving on, From state to state the spirit walks ; And these are but the shatter'd stalks, Or ruin'd chrysalis of one. Nor blame I Death, because he bare The use of virtue out of earth : I know transplanted human worth Will bloom to profit, otherwhere. For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart ; He puts our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak. TENNYSOK. TOL.L A WEEK AT BATAVIA. Batavia, 10th November, 18G6. The last in- habitants of Australia of whom we took leave were cannibals, with black skins and carry- ing poisoned arrows: the lirt to receive us on the soil of Java are Dutch custom-house officers, pale and fair, dressed in brilliant uniforms, and beariug huge bunches of keys. They softened for us the transition from savage to civilized life by the ruthless open- ing of our boxes and entire upsetting of their contents. Under the great shed of the Cus- tom House, some four hundred chocolate- coloured porters, with bare chests, scarlet sashes, and green turbans, fight for our lug- gage, and carry it off at a run. My anxious glance follows a certain hat-box, with a clus- ter of sixteen coolies clinging wildly to it, yelling with all their might, and finally be- coming lost in the crowd. We get, two and two, into some charming little open carriages, which seem to abound here, it being essential to the dignity of a European never to go on foot. Each is drawn by Lilliputian ponies, like Newfoundland dogs, brought from the island of Timor, with close- cropped manes, and knowing little heads, and who go at a tremendous pace. The eccentric- looking coachmen who goad them on with voice and whip are Malays, wearing red and yellow striped hats like enormous bell-glasses, which shade them entirely. In this manner we pass at a gallop through the old town of Batavia, built on the unhealthy mud of the sea-shore. Here there are only the dwellings of the natives, and a good many counting- houses, whose old-fashioned gable ends recall the Dutch buildings of the last century, and contrast curiously with the luxuriant verdure of tropical vegetation. In these lanes plenty of Chinamen are to be seen with their con- ceited strut, rich dandies of the Celestial Empire, with heads well shaved, and tails so tightly plaited that they always make one long to pull them. A Malay shades them from the sun with an immense sky-blue um- brella. For more than three-quarters of an hour our drive continues, and we pass by the most novel sights. We skirt canals, where groups of thirty or forty Malay women are bathing, and are suddenly startled in their gambols by a pirogue, heavily laden with fruit, moving silently along by the aid of its languid paddles. Here comes a troop of native cavalry, trotting " a I'anglaise;" their s.words, as tall as their horses, trail upon the ground ; their long spears touch the plumes of the cocoa-nut trees : these Malays, with their gingerbread complexions and hanging lips, are dressed up as European soldiers, and 50 A WEEK AT BATAVIA. their bare feet decorated with magnificent spurs. There, numbers of itinerant mer- chants, adorned with "langoutis" of the most vivid colours, traverse the streets at the peculiar trotting pace common to Indians ; gesticulating, apostrophising the passer-by, and laughing loudly. It is the most bewil- dering, the most picturesque, the liveliest crowd I ever saw. It would take me hours to describe its thousand colours, the incon- ceivable specimens of humanity that compose it, its noisy pantomimic animation. But soon we cross a bridge, and enter the new town. Oh, what a garden of fairyland, what a verdant paradise this is ! Literally speak- ing, there are no streets in Batavia ; there are only splendid avenues, shaded by the most beautiful and luxuriant trees, which form immense long bowers, such as in Europe are only seen in a scene at the opera. The fiery rays of a pitiless sun can only at inter- vals penetrate this shade, but they deck all that forms it with marvellous hues : the many plumes of the cocoa-nut tree ; the slender branches of the tulip tree, which are all flower, and scarlet flower ; bananas with their green leaves as large as a man ; cotton trees, covered with snow white tufts ; the travellers' palm, great fans of the most ex- quisite grace, from which a stream of a milky fluid springs, if you pierce the trunk ; finally, immense banyan trees, from which hundreds of creepers fall straight down, and taking root almost as soon as they touch the ground, climb again to the summit of the tree, twin- ing round it in knotted garlands, only to fall again ! One of these trees alone forms a for- est surrounded by a curtain, a network of interlaced foliage and flowers, through which children in a state of nature, putting on one side the hundreds of creepers waving in the wind, can look at the boats and the swimmers passing along the canal. The greater part of these bowers of the tropical Babylon are, in fact, only the foot- paths to the "arroyos," the greater water- ways, which the Dutch would certainly have formed by hundreds, in recollection of their mother-country, if the Malays had not already made them in thousands. Thus the instincts of the white race from the north and the yellow race of the equator coincided. The greatest navigators and the greatest pirates in the world cut up their soil into innumerable islets, and the canals in this town are the veins by which circulates their whole com- mercial life. Another many-coloured bower therefore, to our left, shades the arroyo on whose opposite shore we are driving. I can- not take my eyes from the innumerable vessels that traverse it ; the laughing groups pad- dling in the water, the tufts of water-lilies blooming there. To ths right through clumps of coffee trees, nutmeg trees, vanilla trees, and tamarinds we catch glimpses of lawns, in fairy-like gardens ; and in the distance the white palaces and green verandahs of the European nabobs. 1 had seen nothing but these avenues and villas, and fancied myself in some delightful suburb of the city, when we found ourselves at the hotel, "der Neder- landen," which, it appears, is in the centre of Batavia ; so that this blossoming wood is the town itself! I am in such ecstacies with it, I can hardly believe my eyes. By the beard of all the monkeys with long tails or short that I have yet seen, I swear that it is impossible to describe to you my amazement and admiration. Our new dwelling is situ- ated in the midst of a garden, and sheltered by large trees. The principal building, which is of marble, is supported by an airy colon- nade, into which it opens on all sides ; on the side of the street and the canal is a circular verandah, where officers, grown thin from the heat, are lounging in cane rocking-chairs. On the opposite side a great oval-shaped kiosk, open to all the winds, but protected by a light roof from the sun, serves as a dining- room. Some sixty Malay servants are swarm- ing like ants to lay the table there. Nothing can be prettier than their long robes, made of red cotton or silk, their blue turbans, and yellow sashes, set off by the whiteness of the balconies and the pavement. Two long wings, of one story only, with verandahs and colonnades, enclose the gardens commanded by the kiosk. Here are our rooms, and on entering them we feel a real sensation of freshness, a delicious temperature compared to that outside ; there, in fact, the thermometer is at 114, and here it is kind enough to go down to 102. It is five o'clock in the after- noon ; good heavens ! what will it be to- morrow at noon ? We had hardly begun to unpack our boxes when a man presented himself. He was a native, half bailiff, half policeman, with bare feet and a sword at his side, and made us write down, according to police regulations, our names and qualities in a register, which he appeared to hold in great veneration, de- manding a legal and minute account for every column. I complied very willingly with the regulations of the colonial "Pietri," but when my august travelling companion was called upon to write down his domicile, he was tempted to put "Batavia itself;" is not every land which is not the beloved country an equally transitory domicile to the exile ? If the flowering trees of this terrestrial paradise are the most characteristic beauties A WEEK AT BATAVIA. 51 of the town, the marble basins for bathing are certainty the greatest charm of a Javanese hotel. In less than ten minutes after alight- ing at the " Nederlanderi," I ha'.l gone to the end of the colonnade, descended a few steps, ani was enjoying in the whitest of basins the voluptuous delights of an abundant shower manufactured by a Malay who pumped the water by a regular movement up to the ceil- ing, whence it fell again to inundate me. I should have remained in my bath to all eter- nity if the patience of these placid Malays had not exhausted mine. Two attendants, in fact, had insisted upon following me, and crouching down some four yards off were waiting till I was pleased to condescend to require their soft towels ; and beside the man who pumped, a fourth man in a red robe offered me a basket full of mangoes, red man- gosteens, whose inside is like pink snow, and the perfumed little-known bananas. In the evening we dined in the kiosk ; round us a many-coloured noisy crowd danced under the big trees, from which hung Venetian lanterns. From time to time, amongst the rel vests and green robej, a wealthy Dutchman passes languidly along in loose white garments, preceded by the light of an immensely long cigar. We are waited upon by the whole troop of Orientals of whom I spoke just now. I have a Malay to supply me with iced water, which he pours out at arm's length ; there are two to change my plate ; three to bring round the dishes ; one carves ; another is awaiting the moment for coffee. I believe if I wished for a dozen dishes, and particularly if I could call for them in the native dialect, I should give em- ployment to the twelve men in red who stand bchin I my chair ! What a charming effect all this variety of colours has on this beauti- ful evening, with a bright light shining upon them! And when, lazily stretchel under the verandah, enjoying the balmy evening breeze, I call "Sapada, cassi api !" immediately one of these Arabian Nights figures, whom one is tempted to call slaves, advances from the column, at the foot of which he has been si- lently crouching like a statue of Buddha, and brings me to light my cigar a long match of which he has the constant care. It is made of stndal wood saw-dust glued together, and burns night and day with the most deli- cious perfume. I feel as if I were turning into a pasha ! As regards the dinner itself, as a North- man I must make some reservation : eight and forty different kinds of capsicums, a mountain of rice covering a microscopic atom of chicken (the anti-type of the fragment of the Australian Dinornis), which with a Cay- enne pepper sauce, constitiites the celebrated curry ; an absence of all meat that can be cut with an ordinary knife; an abundance of bamboo salads and chutnee ; there is a local flavour about this much appreciated by ama- teurs, but which in palates and digestions un- accustomed to Javanese cooking raises fiery torments, which are only increased by drink- ing. llth November, 1866. As I lay down last night on a bed already possessing the peculi- arity of being made with mats instead of sheets, I was greatly surprised to find, be- sides the innumerable gnats imprisoned be- hind the mosquito net, a companion quite as remarkable. This was a long roll made of grass matting, about two yards long, and the thickness of an ordinary bolster, which awaited me laid lengthwise on the bed. It was obligingly explained to me that no in- habitant of Java will sleep without this vege- table production, which must be kept between the legs to cool the body. I was very much amused with this specimen of manners and customs ; but if it soothes the Creoles with a refreshing slumber, it rouses Europeans in- controllably to a bolstering match. Besides the swarms of buzzing mosquitoes, with theii impertinent stings, exasperated us by whist- ling their Javanese airs in our ears ; but as the capsicums, the grass bolsters, and the mosquitoes are necessary features of the locality, I intend in a few days to make friends with them all. Very different from Paris customs, fashion- able life begins here at half-past four in the morning. As soon as the first mists of a tropical dawn appear, old and young begin to be heard moving over the tiled floors in slip- pers, and, wrapped in floating cotton gar- ments, hasten to the pools to enjoy the ice- cold waves. As I left them, I met a real odalisque, with jet black eyes, and of the most foreign appearance ; she glided between the columns, throwing back masses of black hair which fell to the ground, and classically draped like Stratonice in rose-coloured cash- mere. She seemed to us really an appari- tion, with her sudden changing glances, the wild swiftness of her movements, her air as of a lioness surprised, and that Indian fire in her veins which always gives so fascinating a charm. We were told that she was the daughter of a Dutch officer and of a native of Borneo. The half-caste beauties bloom wonderfully under the sun of Java, while the unhappy Europeans, enfeebled and worn out by the heat, look pale and ghastly, and inspire one with the most profound pity. Such was my 62 A WEEK AT BATAVIA. first impression, while taking my walk be- tween four and six in the morning, the especially fashionable hour. But what par- ticularly struck me was a military post: twenty Malays were on guard, armed with pikes and pitchforks more than nine feet long. It was explained to us that iu this country there are a good many natives suffer- ing from mental disease: over-excited by opium, they wander over the island armed with a sword, and run through the body the lirst man they fall in with, in honour of the Koran. This is called running a muck. As soon as one of these men appears, the guard gives chase, encloses him between three pitchforks, and the corporal, whose rank may easily be recognized from the fact of his wearing shoes, has the honour of running through with a javelin the terrible madman. First insight into the internal government. A morning at Batavia consists of a walk, five or six baths running, and an appetizing breakfast. In the afternoon every one sleeps. Towards six o'clock in the evening a little stir begins to be felt : hundreds of open carriages drive about. The European popu- lation, lounging bare-headed, wends its way to the Waterloo plain, where a military band is playing. We follow the stream, still de- lighted by the enchanting avenues and bril- liant dresses. This " Longchamps " partakes completely of the character of the colony ; the garrison, nine thousand men strong, is its principal ornament ; more than three hundred carriages stand in the shade of the great trees ; the national airs, very well played, echo loudly ; and officers gallop about amongst the myriads of Javanese in holiday dress, glittering in the most brilliant Eastern finery. Imagine a tall, fine-looking man, in a blue tunic, loose white trousers, high boots, large spurs, and big sword. Suppose that he will kindly open his legs to admit between them a superbly caparisoned pony, about the size of a Newfoundland dog, and you have a truthful picture of the Javanese representa- tives of the armed force of all the Nether- lands. The small size of the horse detracts in no wise from the greatest military virtues, and Heaven knows that the fame of this army is beyond all praise ; but when a troop of Lilliputian horses, mounted by worthy com- panions of Gulliver, charge the enemy, it is impossible to help laughing with all one's heart. We dined this evening with our friend M. Van Delden, the president of the Chamber of Commerce. Our agreeable companion in the stifling cabin of the ' Hero ' had resumed his princely existence in his palace, amidst the peaceful charms of his delightful family cir- cle. Luxurious pools, gardens of Armida, a verandah dining-room amidst the luxuriant foliage of blooming thickets, swarms of Indian servants in their most splendid national dress, nothing is wanting of all that can be im- agined as the regal reward of industry, probity, and talent. How is it possible after the well-earned delights of such a paradise to return to a muddy, foggy street in Holland, and live there without twenty horses or four score servants? Holland is but a name to be passionately loved by these patriotic hearts ; from time to time they return to see it, and to re-invigorate themselves on their native soil ; but space, wealth, sunshine, authority, are wanting there to the happy inhabitants of Java, whom monopoly has here made pashas and kings, and who feel little inclined to be- come subjects, rate-payers, and tenants on lease again, at home ! 12th November, 1866. We follow the fash- ion and take an airing at five o'clock in the morning on M. Van Delden' s skittish ponies. Still the same bowers, the same marvels of ! verdure and bloom, of perfume and foliage ; i still the same numbers of villas scattered about in gardens, the same movement on a ; hundred different canals, the same brilliant colours in this human ant-hill which moves busily about, screaming noisily like a flight of j cockatoos. At nine o'clock we have already reached our fifth bath. This ton-id tempera- j ture of 104 in the shade would really, I be- lieve, burst any thermometer that was put into the sun. I braved it nevertheless with I a pyramidal white cotton helmet on my head, I which made me look like a white-washed fireman. I was much puzzled with the narrow i winding lanes of the old town, where the j inhabitants pack themselves into their barn- boo huts as we should pile up sacks of wheat in a corn market. Ihe Malay shops are filled with calico goods and sticky eatables ; the Chinese shops are of a superior kind. Here, for example, is the stall of a Chinese watch- maker. The proprietor's plaited tail is the sole garment which appears on his immensely fat body. He holds a magnifying glass in his left eye by a contraction of the eyebrow which contorts his features into a horrible grimace, and this semi-nude jeweller is auda- ciously handling a Breguet watch, and seems very proud of being able to take the Paris workmanship so cleverly to pieces. His neighbour sells monkeys, his opposite neigh- bour innumerable preparations of capsicum in innumerable saucers piled one upon another. Everywhere a putrid and disgust- ing smell reigns. The sea breeze brings A WEEK AT BATAVIA. 53 great whiffs of it, exhaled from the man- grove trees and poisonous shrubs which cover the shore. The advancing tide swells their knotted, twisted, porous roots ; in a few hours they increase some inches in diameter ; then the ebb leaves them exposed on the un- healthy mud ; the sun pours down, evapo- rates and dries them up ; a line of yellowish clouds, of pestilential mists, forms itself, and remains for a moment suspended, waiting to be carried off by the wind, and then, woe to the coast where the caprice of the atmosphere imy direct it ! It is these deadly miasmas which have given to the old town of Batavia that general reputation for unhealthiness which made you fear for us when we left home. And in fact, it is impossible to count the numbers who h ive fallen victims there since the occupation of the place. I was speaking of this subject with an agreeable acquaintance. " Oh !" said he, "before the period when we re- treated from the shores to found the new town, people died like flies in old Batavia, it was actual poisoning for every human being ; but now, what does it signify? no one lives there but Chinese or Malays !" This saying, anything but philanthropic, recalled to my mind a certain correspondence in the last Mexican war. Having enumerated the disas- ters from yellow fever on the coast, and given ai account of the movement of the troops int} the interior, the letter said : " But families m ly feel re-assured now, there are none but sailors on the coast!" The families of the French sailors must have been .about as much co-nforted as those of the natives are here. Notwithstanding the pure air of the new tiwn, we have just had a terrible example of fie consequence of imprudence. One of our neighbours at table, who had eaten too freely of the juicy pine-apples at dessert yesterday evening, looked a little pale at the mid-day breakfast at three o'clock, he was dead ! It is the only thing which is done quickly in these tropical latitudes ! Hardly is the hour of our siesta over before we sit down to write under our verandah. Immediately we are besieged by some fifty Chinese or Malays, wanting to sell us neck- ties or handkerchiefs, French photographs and military sketches. I drive them away, they return; I threaten them, they spread out a hundred new thing*?, this one crying up hU trousers, another his eau de Cologne, a third his monkeys. Determined to await the en I of my letter, they are at this moment crouching down in the full sun ten paces from us, evidently hoping that I shall be in a more conciliatory disposition presently. In the evening we were roused by a fire. A hun- dred and eighty houses reed huts in the old town were blazing like a lot of lucit'er matches. AVhat quantities of vermin rnuat have been roasted ! 13th November, 1866. We might have ex- pected this ! The captain of the Hero,' our neighbour in this corridor, turned pale yesterday evening, and passed the night pros- trate on the ground very sick, and groaning. We ourselves have paid the necessary tribute of new arrivals, and our interiors are in a pitiable, state. If we can preserve our cheer- fulness, we are safe from that phantom of cholera and Javanese cholera which takea fright if it does not inspire it. Here, too, is something to restore us the pure air of the mountains inland. A charm- ing letter from the Governor-General for the time being informs us that, "political con- siderations not permitting him to offer to a prince in exile the honours due to a French prince, he yet begs to be allowed to treat him as the grandson of a king." He sends us a circular passport, a most rare and valuable favour, for the' whole island, and even for the so-called imperial territories, where, -under Dutch protection, the Sultans of Sourakarta and Djokjokarta reign ; notice is given to all the residents and native princes in the island, and the government post horses are put at the Prince's service gratuitously. This is a piece of good fortune which delights us and fills us with the most lively gratitude. Change being recommended for those who feel the enervating effect of this fiery climate, we have not refused the Resident of Batavia, M. Hoogeveen's, kind invitation. At six o'clock in the evening his state carriage came to fetch us. Four outrunners, all dressed in white, carry long white horses' tails with which they flick away the flies from our team ; they make good use of their legs, each run- ning by the side of his pony and effectually chasing the flies. We gallop and they run, such is the custom here. In half an hour we arrive at the palace. A regiment of servants are on the steps, turbans, sashes, arms, all the splendid figures of Oriental scenery stand out brilliantly on the marble. The Resident receives the Prince most cordially ; then come the general in command, the colonels of artillery, the civil engineers, and, finally, the sultan and sultana of one of the principali- ties of Borneo. The husband is a stunted little old man, wrinkled and rheumat?c, furi- ously chewing a paste made of lime and betel nut, which blackens the teeth and makes the gums bleed, and which, stuck between the teeth and the lower lip, swells the Intter, by nature hanging, and so increases a hideous and deformed swelling. THE WEDDING OF SHON MACLEAN. But the sultana is charming. She is a little person, young, and with bright eyes, and re- turns the greeting of the young Europeans -with perfect grace. Her dress consists of a mantle of blue and yellow silk. A red and white scarf, passed across her shoulder, covers her bosom, and is kept in its place by a brooch of twelve intertwined crescents made of diamonds of the island. It is the prettiest jewel I ever saw. A red turban with a dia- mond ornament at the side, frames the smil- ing expressive bronze head. As for us, whilst sauntering amongst the white arcades, amongst strange groups of soldiers, servants, incense burners, and cigar lighters, we had the pleasure of arranging a crocodile hunt with the good-natured resi- dent. 13ih November, 18GG. Beyond the repeated siestas which are the great secret of happi- ness when one is so near the line ; beyond the lounging and bathing, and the delicious cups of coffee, everything is a labour under this sun ! All the same, I have closed my mail-bag for Europe and paid the postage on it ; no mere form of politeness, I assure you. Sevcn-and-twenty shillings for postage have I paid this morning. I had almost forgotten our visit to the museum, of which the Resident did the honours to the Prince. Besides the fly-flag- ging outrunners, M. Hoogevcen is accom- panied by the gilt-umbrella-bearing outrun- ner, and two cigar lighters, who trot behind us brandishing the sandal-wood match, that Vestal fire always kept up for the official " manillas." The museum is magnificent, and so curious as to be quite unintelligible tj the traveller who is not well versed in San- scrit, Javanese, Sunda, Bali, and Hindoo divinities, their big stomachs, slits of eyes, and humped backs, with double faces and half a dozen arms and legs kicking about, Rilver chickens with five legs, ancient lamps and tom-toms, with which we produced the most astonishing noises, and I know not what besides. It is a perfect nightmare. The ' Hero' starts to-day for our dear Aus- tralia ; and we intend, when we confide our letters to her, to wish her a fair wind, and take the customary farewell breakfast on board. Poor ship, in which we had run so many risks ! I see it still clearing by a few yards only the coral reef on which we threat- ened a thousand times to go to pieces ! I see it lo^t for fifteen hours after passing Bali, when a dangerous current carried us to the north-eat, while we were steering west-north- west. And she is getting; h^r steim ut> to start again, and put to flight the flotillas of pi- romies manned by cannibals ! Whatever hap- pens, her last deed here is a good one, for she is carrying off a poor invalid dying under the tropical sun; a mere skeleton i'roiu consump- tion, the poor man is going to seek for health amongst the beauties of New South Wales, or the cool breezes of Tasmania. If he lamils alive, the marks of sympathy and cordial ty which all strangers there receive will surely save him. From the Marquis de Beauvoir' * Voyage Around the World. THE WEDDING OF SHON MACLEAN. A bagpipe melody from the Gaelic. At the wedding of Shon Maclean Twenty Pipers together Came in the wind and the rain Playing over the heather ; Backward their ribbons flew, Bravely they strutted and blew, Each clad in tartan new, Bonnet, and blackcock feather, And every piper was fu', Twenty pipers together. He's but a Sassenach blind and vain Who never heard of Shon Maclean The Duke's own piper, called " Shon the Fair," From his freckled skin and his fiery hair. Father and son, since the world's creation, The Macleans had followed this occupation, And played the pibroch to fire the clan Since the first Duke came and the Earth began. Like the whistling of birds, like the humming f I)je, Like the sough of the south-wind in the trees, Like the singing of angels, the playing of shawms, Like Ocean itself with its storms and its calms, Were the pipes of Shon, when he strutted and blew, A cock whose crowing creation he knew I At last in the prime of his playing life, The spirit moved him to take a wife A lassie with eyes of Highland blue, Who loved the pipes and the piper too, And danced to the sound with a foot and a leg White as a lily and smooth as an egg. So, all the Pipers were coming together Over the moor and across the heather, All in the wind and the rain ; All tho Pipers so bravely drest Were flocking in from the east and the west, To bless the bedding and blow their best At the wedding of Shon Maclean. At the wedding of Shon Maclean, 'Twas wet and windy weather ! Yet, thro' the wind and tho rain Came twenty Pipers together ! THE WEDDING OF SHON MACLEAN. 56 Earach and Dougal Dim, Sandy of Isla too, Each with the bonnet o' blue, Tartan, and blackcock feather: And every Piper was fu 1 Twenty pipers together. The knot was tied, the words were said, Shon was married, the feast was spread, At the head of the table sat, high and hoar, Strong Sandy of Isla, age fourscore, Whisker'd, grey as a Huskeir seal, And clad in crimson from head to heel. Beneath and round him in their degree, Gathering the men of minstrelsie, With keepers, gillies, lads and lassies, Mixing voices, and jingling glasses. At soup and haggis, at roast and boil'd, Awhile the happy gathering toil'd, While Shon and Jean at the table ends Sliook hands with a hundred of their friends, Then came a hush. Thro' the open door A woe bright Form flash'd on the door, The Duke himself, in the kilt and plaid, With slim soft knees, like the knees of a maid, Ami took a glass, and ho cried out plain " I drink to the health of Shon Maclean ! To Shon the Piper, and Jean his wife, A clean fireside and a merry life ! " Then out he slipt, and each man sprang To his feet, and with " hooch " the chamber rang I " Clear the tables," shrieked out one A leap, a scramble, the thing was done I And then the Pipers all in a row Tuned their pipes and began to blow AVhile all to dance stood fain : Sandy of Isla and Earach More, Dougal Dhu from Kilflannan shore, Played up the company on the floor At the wedding of Shou Maclean. At the wedding of Shon Maclean Twenty Pipers together Stood up, while all their train Ceased their clatter and blether, Full of the mountain-dew, First on their pipes they blew, Mighty of bone and thow, Red-cheek 'd with lungs of leather ; And every Piper was fu' Twenty Pipers together. Who led the dance ? In pomp and pride The Duke himself led out the Bride. Great was the joy of each beholder, For the wee Duke only reach'd her shoulder : And they danced, and turned, when the reel began, Like a giantess and a fairy man ! But like an earthquake was the din When Shon himself led the Duchess in ! And she took her place before them there, Like a white mouse dancing with a bear. How the little Duchess, so slim and sweet, Her blue eyea watching Shon's great feet, With a smile which could not be resisted, Jigged, and jumped, and twirl'd, and twisted I Sandy of Isla led off the reel, The Duke began it with toe and heel, Then all joined in full fain ; Twenty Pipers ranged in a row, From squinting Sliamus to lame Kilcroe, Their cheeks like crimson, began to blow. At the wedding of Shon Maclean. At the wedding of Shon Maclean They blew with lungs of leather, And blithesome was the strain Those Pipers played together I Moist with the mountain dew, Mighty of bone and thew, Each with a bonnet o' blue, Tartan, and blackcock feather; And every piper was fu' Twenty Pipers together I Oh for a magic tongue to tell Of all the wonders that befell ! Of how the Duke, when the first stave died, Reached up on tiptoe to kiss the Bride, While Sandy's pipes, as their mouths were meeting, SkiiTd and set every heart abeating. Then Shon took the pipes ! and all was still, As silently he the bags did fill, With flaming cheeks and round bright eyes, Till the first faint music began to rise. Like a thousand laverocks singing in tune, Like countless corn-craiks under the moon, Like the smack of kisses, like sweet bells ringing, Like a mermaid's harp, or a kelpie singing, Clew the pipes of Shon ; and the witching strain Was the gathering song of the Clan Maclean ! Then slowly, gently, at his side, \11 the Pipers around replied, And swelled the glorious strain ; The hearts of all were proud and light, To hear the music, to gee the sight, And the Duke's own eyes were dim that night, At the wedding of Shon Maclean. So to honor the Clan Maclean Straight they began to gather, Blowing the wild refrain, " Blue bonnets across the heather ! " They stemp'd, they strutted, they blow ; They shriek'd ; like cocks they crew ; Blowing the notes out true, With wonderful lungs of leather : And every piper was fu', Twenty Pipers together ! When the Duke and Duchess went away The dance grew mad and the fun grow gay ; Man and Maiden, face to face. 56 A DISCOURSE OF TREES. Leapt and footed .and ecream'd apace ! Round ;md round the dancers whirl' J, Shriller, louder, the Pipers skirl'd Till the sjul seem'd swooning into sound, And all creation was whirling round. Then, in a pause of the dance and glee, The Pipers, ceasing their mUistrelsie, Draining the gliiss in groups did stand, And passed the snuff-box from hand to hand, Sandy of Isla, with locks of snow, Squinting Shamus, blind Kilmahoe, Finlay Beg, and Earach Mora, Dougal Dim of Kililanuan siiore All the Pipers, black, yellow, and green, All the colors that ever were sjen. All the Pipers of all the Macs, Gather'd together and took their cracks. Tlten (no man knows how the thing befell, For none was sober enough to tell), These heavenly pipers from twenty places Began disputing with crimson faces ; Each asserting, like one demented, The claims of the clan ho represented. In vain grey Sandy of Isla strove To soothe their struggle with words of love, Asserting there, like a gentleman, The superior claims of his own great clan ; Then finding to reason is to despair, llu seizes his pipes and he plays an air The gathering time of his clan and tries To drown in music the shrieks and cries. Heavens ! Every Piper, grown mad with ire, Seizes his pipes with a fierce desire, And blowing madly, with flourish and squeak, Begins his particular tune to shriek ! Up and down the gamut they go, Twenty Pipers, all in a row, Each with a different strain, Each tries hard to drown the first, Kach blows louder till like to burst. Thus were the tunes of the Clans rehearst At the wedding of Shon Maclean ! At the wedding of Shon Maclean, Twenty pipers together, i Blowing with might and main Thro' wonderful lungs of leather : Wild was the hullabaloo ! They strutted, they scream'd, they crew I Twenty wild strains they blew, Holding the heart in tether ; And every piper was fu,' Twenty Pipers together. A storm of music ! Like wild sleuth-hounda Contending together were the sounds. At List a bevy of Eve's bright daughters Pour'd oil that's whiskey upon the waters, And after another glass went down The Pipers chuckled and ceased to frown. Embraced like brothers and kindred spirit*, And fully admitted each other's merits. All bliss must end! For now the Bride Was looking weary and heavy-eyed, And soon she stole from the drinking chorus, While the company settled to deoch-an-dorus. One hour another took its flight The clock struck twelve the dead of night And still the Bride like a rose so red Lay lonely up in the bridal bed. At half-past two the Bridegroom, Shon, Dropt on the table as heavy as stone, And four strong Pipers across the floor Carried him up to the bridal door, Push'd him in at the open portal, And left him snoring, serene and mortal. The small stars twinkled over the heather, As the Pipers wandered away together, But one by one on the journey dropt, Clutching his pipes and there he stopt. One by one on the dark hillside Each faint wail of the bagpipes died, Amid the wind and the rain ! And twenty Pipers at bre.ik of day In twenty different bogholes lay, Serenely sleeping upon their way From the wedding of Shon Maclean ! ROBERT BUCHANAN. A DISCOURSE OF TREES. HENRY WARD BEECHEII, an American pulpit orator and versatile writer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, June 21, 131-5, has boon pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. T., since 1817. As the zealous and elo- quent advocate of political reforms, a copious contribu- tor to the press, and a platform lecturer constantly in demand, Mr. Beecher has acquired the widest popular- ity. His style is vigorous, effervescent, and frequently poetic and imaginative. His published volumes, ex- cepting " A Life of Christ" and " Norwood" a. novel of New England life, are reproductions of his sermons, lectures, and voluminous contributions to periodicals. To the great tree-loving fraternity we be- long. We love trees with universal and un- feigned love, and all things that do grow un- der them, or around them "the whole leaf and root tribe. " Not alone where they are in their glory, but in whatever state they are in leaf, or ruined with frost, or pow- dered with snow, or crystal sheathed in ice, or in severe outline stripped and bare against a November sky we love them. Our heart warms at the sight of even a board or a log. A lumber-yard is better than nothing. The smell of wood, at least, is there, the savory fragrance of resin, as sweet as myrrh and A DISCOURSE OF TREES. 57 frankincense ever was to a Jew. If we can get nothing better, we love to read over the names of trees in a catalogue. Many an hour have we sat at night, when after excit- ing work, we needed to be quieted, and read nurserymen's catalogues, and London's En- cyclopedias, and Arboretum, until the smell of the woods exhaled from the page, and the sound of leaves was in our ears, and sylvan glades opened to our eyes that would have made old Chaucer laugh and indite a rapturous rush of lines. But how much more do we love trees in all their summer pomp and plenitude. Not for their names and affinities, not for their secret physiology, and as material for science ; not for any reason that we can give, except that when with them we are happy. The eye is full, the ear is full, the whole sense and all the tastes solaced, and our whole nature re- joices with that various and full happiness which one has when the soul is suspended in the midst of Beethoven's symphonies and is lifted hither and thither, as if blown by sweet sounds through the airy passage of a full heavenly dream. Our first excursion in Lenox was one of salutation to our notable trees. We had a nervous anxiety to see that the axe had not hewn, nor the lightning struck them ; that no worm had gnawed at the root, or cattle at the trunk ; that their branches were not broken, nor their leaves failing from drought. We found them all standing in their upright- ness. They lifted up their heads towards heaven, and sent down to us from all their boughs a leafy whisper of recognition and affection. Blessed be the dew that cools their evening leaves, and the rains that quench their daily thirst! May the storm be as merciful to them when in winter it roars through their branches, as is a harper to his harp ! Let the snow lie lightly on their boaghs, and long hence be the summer that shall find no leaves to clothe these nobles of the pasture ! First in our regard, as it is in the whole nobility of trees, stands the white elm, no less esteemed because it is an American tree, known abroad only by importation, and nev- er seen in all its magnificence, except in our own valleys. The old oaks of England are very excellent in their way, gnarled and rugged. The elm has strength as sig- nificant as they, and a grace, a royalty, that leaves the oak like a boor in comparison. Had the elm been an English tree, and had Chaucer seen and loved and sung it ; had Shakespeare and every English poet hung some garlands upon it, it would have lifted up its head now, not only the noblest of all growing things, but enshrined in a thousand rich associations of history and literature. Who ever sees a hawthorn or a sweet brier (the eglantine), that his thoughts do not, like a bolt of light, burst through ranks of poets, and ranges of sparkling conceits which have been born since England had a written lan- guage, and of which the rose, the willow, the eglantine, the hawthorn, and other scores of vines or trees, have been the cause, as they are now and forevermore the suggestors and remembrancers ? Who ever looks upon an oak, and does not think of navies, of storms, of battles on the ocean, of the noble lyrics of the sea, of English glades, of the fugitive Charles, the tree-mounted monarch, of the Herne oak, of parks and forests, of Robin Hood and his merry men ; Friar Tuck not excepted, of old baronial halls with mellow light streaming through diamond-shaped panes upon oaken floors, and of carved oaken wainscotings. And who that has ever trav- eled in English second-class cushionless cars has not other and less genial remembrances of the enduring solidity of the impervious unelastic oak ? One stalwart oak I have, and only one, yet discovered. On my west line is a fringe of forest, through which rushes, in Spring, trickles in early summer, and dies out entire- ly in August, the issues of a noble spring from the near hillside. On the eastern edge of this belt of trees stands the monarchical oak, wide-branching on the east toward the open pasture and the free light, but on its western side lean and branchless from the pressure of neighboring trees ; for trees, like men, can not grow to the real nature that is in them when crowded by too much society. Both need to be touched on every side by sun and air, and by nothing else, if they are to be rounded out into full symmetry. Growing right up by its side, 4 and through its branches is a long wifely elm beauty and grace imbosomed by strength. Their leaves come and go together, and all the summer long they mingle their rustling harmonies. Their roots pasture in the same soil, nor could either of them be hewn down with- out tearing away the branches and marring the beauty of the other. And a tree, when thoroughly disbranched, may, by time and care, regain its health again, but never its beauty. Under this oak I love to sit and hear all the things which its leaves have to tell. No printed leaves have more treasures of history or of literature to those who know how to listen. But, if clouds kindly shield us from the sun, we love as well to couch down on the grass some thirty yards off, and amidst 58 A DISCOURSE OF TREES. the fragrant smell of crushed herbs, to watch the fancies of the trees and clouds. The roguish winds will never be done teasing the leaves, that run away and come back, with nimble playfulness. Now and then a strong- er puff dashes up the leaves, showing the downy under surfaces that flash white all along the up-blown and tremulous forest- edge. Now the wind draws back his breath, and all the woods are still. Then some sin- gle leaf is tickled, and quivers all alone. I am sure there is no wind. The other leaves about it are still. Where it gets its motion I can not tell, but there it goes fanning itself and restless among its sober fellows. By and by one or two others catch the impulse. The rest hold out a moment, but soon catch- ing the contagious merriment, away goes the whole tree and all its neighbors, the leaves running in ripples all down the forest side. I expect almost to hear them laugh out loud. A stroke of wind upon the forest, indolently swelling and subsiding, is like a stroke upon a hive of bees, for sound ; and like stirring a fire full of sparks for upspringing thougjits and ideal suggestions. The melodious whirl draws out a flittering swarm of sweet images that play before the eye like those evening troops of gauzy insects that hang in the air between you and the sun, and pipe their own music, and flit in airy rounds of mingled dance as if the whole errand of their lives was to swing in mazes of sweet music. Different species of trees move their leaves very differently, so that one may sometimes tell by the motion of shadows on the ground, if he be too indolent to look up, under what kind of tree he is dozing. On the tulip-tree, (which has the finest name that ever tree had, making the very pronouncing of its name almost like the utterance of a strain of music liriodendron tulipifera) on the tulip-tree, the aspen, and on all native poplars, the leaves are apparently Anglo-Saxon or Ger- manic, having an intense individualism. Each one moves to suit itself. Under the same wind one is trilling up and down, an- other is whirling, another slowly vibrating right and left, and others still, quieting themselves to sleep, as a mother gently pats her slumbering child ; and each one intent upon a motion of its own. Sometimes other trees have single frisky leaves, but, usually, the oaks, maples, beeches, have community of motion. They are all acting together, or all are alike still. What is sweeter than a murmur of leaves, unless it be the musical gurgling of water that runs secretly and cuts under the roots of these trees, and makes little bubbling pools that laugh to see the drops stumble over the root and plump down into its bosom ! In such nooks could trout lie. Unless ye would become mermaids, keep far from such places, all innocent grasshoppers, and all ebony crickets ! Do not believe in appearances. You peer over and know that there is no danger. You can see the radiant gravel. You know that no enemy lurks in that fairy pool. You can see every nook and corner of it, and it is as sweet a tathing pool as ever was swam by long-legged grasshoppers. Over the root comes a butterfly with both sails a little drabbled, and quicker than light, he is plucked down, leaving three or four bub- bles behind him, fit emblems of a butterfly's life. There ! did I not tell you ? Now go away all maiden crickets and grasshoppers ! These fair surfaces, so pure, so crystaline, so surely safe, have a trout somewhere in them lying in wait for you ! But what if one sits between both kinds of music, leaves above and water below ? What if birds are among the leaves, sending out random calls, far piercing and sweet, as if they were lovers saying, " My dear, are you there?" If you are half reclining upon a cushion of fresh new moss, that swells up be- tween the many-plied and twisted roots of a huge beech tree, and if you have been there a half an hour without moving, and if you will still keep motionless, you may see what they who only walk through forests never see. * * * Thus do you stand, noble elms ! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no in- dolent birds care to seek you ; and only those of nimble wings, and they with un- wonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. Aspiration '. so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the no- ble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to be only Ambition ! It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow, that we had indeed be- come owners of the soil ! It was with a feel- ing of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-top- ped tree ! Does a man bare his head in some old church ? So did I, standing in the shad- ow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fin- gers ! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said "I may not call thee property, and that property mine ! Thou belongest to the air. Ihou ait the child of summer. Thou art the mighty tern- THE SUICIDE BANKER. 59 pie where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur ! I shall be a lov- er and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk." For, remorseless men there are crawling yat upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the axe and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks : "A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees." Thus famous, or rather infamous was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wish- ed to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalwart and an- cient maples, beeches., ashes, and oaks, a nar- row belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devour- ed my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone. In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain ; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air ; there, a huge double- trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for genera- tions clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut- laden top, and laughed and shouted as bush- els of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of looped-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a shiver in his fingers every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the b irs made of those chestnut rails ! To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference be- tween different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without un- derbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of res- inous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light anJ shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden times among young mythologies, we should say that pines held the imprisoned spirit of naiads and water-nyrnphs, and that their sounds were of the water for whose lucid depths they always sighed. At any rate, the first pines must have grown on the sea-shore, and learned their first accents from the surf and the waves ; and all their posterity have inherited the sound, and borne it inland to the mountains. I like best a forest of mingled trees, ash, maple, oak, beech, hickory, and evergreens, with birches growing along the edges of the brook that carries itself through the roots and stones, toward the willows that grow in yon- der meadow. It should be deep and sombre in some directions, running off into shadowy recesses and coverts beyond all footsteps. In such a wood there is endless variety. It will breathe as many voices to your fancy as might be brought from any organ beneath the pressure of some Handel's hands. By the way, Handel and Beethoven always remind me of forests. So do some poets, whose num- bers are various as the infinity of vegetation, fine as the choicest cut leaves, strong and rugged in places as the unbarked trunk and gnarled roots at the ground's surface. Is there any other place, except the sea-side, where hours are so short and moments so swift as in a forest ? AVhere else except in the rare communion of those friends much loved, do we awake from pleasure, whose calm flow is without a ripple, into surprise that whole hours are gone which we thought but just begun blossomed and dropped, which we thought but just budding! HENBY WARD BEECHER. THE SUICIDE BANKER. I have said that in 1854 the tide had turned with John Sadleir. Alas ! throughout that year, and all the weary days of 1855, un- known to even his nearest and dearest friends, he was suffering tortures indescribable ! Some of his colossal speculations had turned out adversely ; and he had misappropriated the last shilling of the Tipperary Bank. Another venture, he thinks, may recoup all : it only leads to deeper ruin ! He must go on : he cannot turn back now. But where are the funds to be reached for further wild endea- vors ? All calmly as ever he had trod the lobby of the House of Commons. No eye could detect on that impassive countenance of his that there was aught but the satisfaction of success within. His political associates joked with him over Gavan Duffy's " political 60 THE SUICIDE BANKER. funeral." They effusively felicitated him on the signal overthrow and final dispersion of his adversaries. " Ireland is now your own, Jolin,"' said one of them; "you have con- quered all along the line. You must be as happy as a king! " He smiled his cold sad smile, and said, Yes, to be sure he was. At h'jme in Ireland his own journal, and all the Liberal Government organs, were never tired of sounding his praise and proclaiming his triumph over the dead Lucas and the exiled Dutfy. Nightly, after leaving the House of Com- mons, John Sadleir sat up late in the private study of his town house, 11, Glo'ster Terrace, Hyde Park. Morning often dawned and found him at his lonely labors. What were they ? In the stillness and secrecy of those mid- night hours John Sadleir, the man of success, the millionaire, the Lord of the Treasury that had been, the peer of the realm that was to be, was occupied in forging deeds, convey- ances, and bills for hundreds of thousands of pounds ! Still, accumulating disaster overpowered even these resources of fraud. In the second week of February, 1856, some one of his numerous desperate financial expedients hap- pened to miscarry for a day, and the drafts of the Tipperary Bank were dishonored at Glyn's. The news came with a stunning shock on most people ; but quickly, next day, an announcement was issued that it was all a mistake, the drafts presented anew had been duly met, and the mischance would not again befall. The alarm, however, had reached Ireland, and at several of the branches something akin to a run took place. If only a panic could be averted, and twenty or thirty thousand pounds obtained, all might be saved. So, at least, declared Mr. James Sadleir, M. P., who was in charge of affairs in Ireland, telegraphing to John on the morn- ing of Saturday, 16th of February.* Twenty or thirty thousand pounds. Once it was a bagatelle in his estimation ; but now ! He had lain on no bed the night before. All haggard and excited this message found him. James little knew all when he thus lightly spoke of twenty or thirty thousand pounds, by way of reassuring his hapless brother. The wretched man strove in vain to devise * " Feb. 16, 1856. Telegram from James Sadleir, 30 Morion Square South, Dublin, to John Sadleir, Esq., M. P., Reform Club, London : AH right at all the branches ; only a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning all ii eafe." some yet unexhausted means of raising this money. He had already gone so far, so peril- ously far, that there was no possible quarter in which earnest application might not lead to suspicions that would involve discovery ! He drove into the city. Mr. Wilkinson, of Nicholas Lane, telling the sad affair subse- quently, says, " He came to me on the morn- ing of Saturday, and suggested that I could raise some money with the view of assisting the Tipperary Bank. He showed me some telegraphic messages he had received from Ireland on the subject of their wants. He had several schemes by which he thought I could assist him in raising money ; but after going into them I told him I could not help him, the schemes being such as 1 could not recommend or adopt. He then became very excited, put his hand to his head, and said. ' Good God ! if the Tipperary Bank should fail the fault will be entirely mine, and I shall have been the ruin of hundreds and thousands.' He walked about the office in a very excited state, and urged me to try and help him, because, he said, he could not live to see the pain and ruin inflicted on others by the cessation of the bank. The interview ended in this, that I was unable to assist him in his plans to raise money." In this case, what he leared in so many others exactly occurred. Mr. Wilkinson had previously advanced him large sums, for which, to be sure, Mr. Sadleir, on request, had given security, one of those numerous title-deeds which he had fabricated during the past year. Mr. Wilkinson that same Saturday night despatched his partner, Mr. Stevens, to Dublin, to look after the matter. On Monday this gentleman found that the deed was a forgery. But by that time a still more dreadful tale was known to all the world. There is reason to think John Sadleir knew of Mr. St evens' s start for Dublin before ten o'clock that evening. His intimate friend, Mr. Norris, solicitor, of Bedford Row, called on him about half-past ten, and remained half an hour. The fact was discussed between them that the Tipperary Bank must stop payment on Monday morning. John Sadleir sat him down, all alone, in that study, and callous must be the heart that can contemplate him in that hour and nrt compassionate his agony. All was over : he must die. He was yet, indeed, in the prime and vigor of manhood. "Considerably above the middle height," says one who knew him well, " his figure was youthful, but his face, that was indeed remarkable. Strongly marked, sallow, eyes and hair intensely black, and the lines of the mouth worn into CARCASSONNE. 61 deep channels." The busy schemes, the lofty ambitions, the daring speculations, were ended now. The poorest cottier on a Tipper- ary hill-side might look the morrow in the face and cling to life ; but for him, the envied man of thousands, the morning sun must rise in vain. He seized a pen, and de- voted half an hour to letter-writing. Oh, that woful correspondence of the despairing s >ul with those whom it loves, and is to lose forever! Then he took a small silver tankard from the sideboard and put it in his breast- pocket, beside a small phial which he had purchase 1 early in that fatal day. As he passed through the hall and took his hat from the stand, he told the butler not to wait up for him. He went out, and closed the door behind him with a firm hand. The clocks were striking twelve : 'twas Sunday morning; God's holy day had come. Ah, far away on the Suir side were an aged father and mother, with whom when a child he often trod the path to early mass, when Sunday bells were music to his ear ! And now ! oh, fatal lure of wealth ! oh, damned, mocking fiend ! to this, to this it had come at last ! He dare not think of God, or friend, or home Next morning, on a little mound on Hamp- stead Heath, the passers-by noticed a gentle- man stretched as if in sleep. A silver tankard had fallen from his hand and lay upon the ground. It smelt strongly of prussic acid. A crowd soon gathered ; the I police arrived ; they lifted up the body, all stiff and stark. It was the corpse of John Sadleir, the banker. On Monday the news flashed through the kingdom. There was alarm in London ; there was wild panic in Ireland. The Tip- perary Bank closed its doors ; the country people nocked into the towns. They sur- rounded and attacked the branches : the poor victims imagined their money must be with- in, and they got crowbars, picks, and spades to force the walls and "dig it out." The scenes of mad despair which the streets of Thurles and Tipperary saw that day would melt a heart of adamant. Old men went about like maniacs, confused and hysterical ; widows knelt in the street and, aloud, asked God was it true they were beggared for ever. Even the poor-law unions, which had kept their accounts in the bank, lost all, and had not a shilling to buy the paupers' dinner the day the branch doors closed. The letters which the unhappy suicide penned that Saturday night reveal much of the terrible story so long hidden from the world. Banks, railways, assurance associations, land companies, every undertaking with which he had been connected, were flung into dismay, and for months fresh revelations of fraud, forgery, and robbery came daily and hourly to view. By the month of April the total of such discoveries had readied one million two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A. M. SULLIVAN, M. P. CARCASSONNE. FEOM THE FRENCH OF GUSTAVE NADATJE. I'm growing old, I've sixty years ; I've labored all my life in vain : In all that time of hopes and fears I've failed my dearest wish to gain. I see full well that here below Bliss unalloyed there is for none. My prayer will ne'er fulfillment know I never have seen Carcassonne, I never have seen Carcassonne ! You see the city from the hill, It lies beyond the mountains blue, And yet to reach it one must still Five long and weary leagues pursue, And to retnrn as many more ! Ah ! had the vintage plenteous grown ! The grape withheld its yellow store : I shall not look on Carcassonne, I shall not look on Carcassonne ! They tell me every day is there Not more nor less than Sunday gay : In shining robes and garments fair The people walk upon their way. One gazes there on castle walls As grand as those of Babylon, A bishop and two generals ! I do not know fair Carcassonne, I do not know fair Carcassonne ! The vicar's right : he says that we Are ever wayward, weak and blind ; Ho tells us in his homily Ambition ruins all mankind ; Yet could I there two days have spent While still the autumn sweetly shon, Ah me ! I might have died content When I had looked on Carcassonne, When I had looked on Carcassonne 1 Thy pardon, Father, I beseech, In this my prayer if I offend : One something sees beyond his reach From childhood to his journey's end. My wife, our little boy Aignan, Have traveled even to Narbonne ; My grandchild has seen Terpignan, And I have not seen Carcassonne, And I have not seen Carcassonne 1 A NIGHT OF TERROR. So crooned one day, close by Limoux, A peasant double-bent with age. " Rise up, my friend," said I : "with you I'll go upon this pilgrimage." Wt left next morning his abode, But ( Heaven forgive him ! ) halfway on, The old man died upon the road : He never gazed on Carcassonne. Each mortal has his Carcassonne ! LippincoWs Magazine. A NIGHT OF TERROR. PAUL LOUIS COURIER. PAUL Louis COUTUER, one of the most noted of French xumphleteers, born 1772, died 1825, was a Liberal in politics, and had great repute as an eloquent and satiri- cal writer. I was one day traveling in Calabria ; a country of people who, I believe, have no great liking to anybody, and are particularly ill-disposed towards the French. To tell you why would be a long affair. It is enough that they hate us to death, and that the un- happy being who should chance to fall into their hands would not pass his time in the most agreeable manner. I had for my com- panion a worthy young fellow ; I do not say this to interest you, but because it is the truth. In these mountains the roads are precipices, and our horses advanced with the greatest difficulty. My comrade going first, a track which appeared to him more practi- cable and shorter than the regular path, led us astray. It was my fault. Ought I to have trusted to a head of twenty years? We sought our way out of the wood while it was yet light ; but the more we looked for the path, the further we were off it. It was a very black night, when we came close upon a very black house. \Ve went in, and not without suspicion. But what was to be done ? There we found a whole family of charcoal-burners at table. At the first word they invited us to join them. My young man did not stop for much ceremony. In a min- ute or two we were eating and drinking in right earnest he at least; for my own part I could not help glancing about at the place and the people. Our hosts, indeed, looked like charcoal-burners ; but the house ! you would have taken it for an arsenal. There was nothing to be seen but muskets, pistols, sabres, knives, cutlasses. Everything dis- pleased me, and I saw that I was in no favor myself. My comrade, on the contrary, was soon one of the family. He laughed, he chatted with them ; and with an imprudence which I ought to have prevented, he at once said where we came from, where we were going, and that we were Frenchmen. Think of our situation. Here we were among our mortal enemies alone, benighted, and far from all human aid. That nothing might be omitted that could tend to our destruction, he must, forsooth, play the rich man, promising these folks to pay them well for their hospi- tality ; and then he must prate about his portmanteau, earnestly beseeching them to take care of it, and put it at the head of his bed, for he wanted no other pillow. Ah, youth, youth ! how art thou to be pitied ! Cousin, they might have thought that we carried the diamonds of the crown : and yet the treasure in his portmanteau, which gave him so much anxiety, consisted only of some private letters. Supper ended, they left us. Our hosts slept below ; we on the story where we had been eating. In a sort of platform raised seven or eight feet, where we were to mount by a ladder, was the bed that awaited us a nest into which we had to introduce ourselves by jumping over barrels filled with provisions for all the year. My comrade seized upon the bed above, and was soon fast asleep, with his head upon the precious portmanteau. I was determined to keep awake, so I made a good fire, and sat myself down. The night was almost passed over tranquilly enough, and I was beginning to be comfortable, when just at the time it appeared to me that day was about to break, I heard our host and his wife talking and disputing below me ; and, putting my ear into the chimney, which com- municated with the lower room, I perfectly distinguished these exact words of the hus- band : "Well, well, let us see mmt we kill them both?" To which the wife replied, " Yes ! " and I heard no more. How should I tell you the rest ? I could scarcely breathe ; my whole body was cold as marble ; had you seen me you could not have told whether I was dead or alive. Even now the thought of my condition is enough. We two were almost without arms ; against us, were twelve or fifteen persons who had plenty of weapons. And then my comrade was over- whelmed with sleep. To call him up, to make a noise, was more than I dared ; to es- cape alone was an impossibility. The window was not very high ; but under it were two great dogs, howling like wolves. Imagine, if you can, the distress I was in. At the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed to be an age, I heard some one on the staircase, and through the chink of the door, 1 saw the PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAM PENN AND JOHN LOCKE. G3 old man with a lamp in one hand, and one of his great knives in the other. The crisis was now come. He mounted hi i wife followed him ; I was behind the door. He opened it ; but before he entered he put down the lamp, which his wife took up, and coming in, with his feet naked, she being be- hind him, said in a smothered voice, hiding the light partially with her fingers " Gently, go gently." On reaching the ladder he mounted, with his knife between his teeth, and going to the head of the bed where that poor young man lay with his throat uncovered, with one hand he took the knife, and with the other ah, my cousin ! he SEIZED a ham which hung from the roof, cut a slice, and retired as he had come in ! When the day appeared, all the family, with a great noise, came to arouse us as we had desired. They brought us plenty to eat ; they served us up, I assure you, a capital breakfast. Two chickens formed a part of it, the hostess saying, " You must eat one, and carry away the other." When I saw them, I at once comprehended the meaning of those terrible words, " Must we kill them both ? " PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAM PENN AND JOHN LOCKE. GEORGE BANCROFT, bora at Worcester, Mass., Oct. 3, 1800, liberally educated at Harvard and Gottirigon. He early devoted himself to historical writing, publishing the first volume of his " History of the United States " in 1834. This great work is characterized (in the language of the historian Prescott,) "by a brilliant and daring style, picturesque sketches of character and incident, acute rauonin^ and compass of erudition." Ten vol- um3s have appeared, bringing the work down to the close of the Revolution in 1782, and two concluding volumes, closing with the constitutional period, 1700, are to be issued in 1881. Mr. Bancroft's public services, as Secretary of the Navy in 1845-C, minister to Great Britain 1840-49, and minister to Germany in 18G7-74, have conferred additional distinction upon himself and upon his country. Removing to Washington upon hij return from Europe in 1874, and surrounded with one of the richest collections of books and manuscripts ever gathered, Mr. Bancroft enjoys a serene old age, addicted to those historical studies for which his wide converse with books an:l with men, and his native zest for keen philosophical inquiry have eminently fitted him. Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the energy of his mind to the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that "heavenly end" he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom ; as with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever overflowing heart ; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweet- ness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordi- nary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precis- ion, and " surpassing in speculative endow- ments ;" conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering ; familiar with the royal family ; intimate with Sunderland and Syd- ney ; acquainted with Russell, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham ; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age, he valued the promptings of a free mind above the awards of the learned, and reverenced the single- minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the Avisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke when, twelve years before, he had framed the constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant ; both loved freedom ; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition ; Penn, at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world ; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance scrawled their experience : to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmo- nies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, " Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;" to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of pa- rents to preserve their children not to be understood without reward and punishment;" Penn loved his children without a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was THE YOUTH OF WASHINGTON. 64 never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge ; Pcnn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property ; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, de- clares that " there must be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral na- ture, seeks its fundamental rules in the im- mutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes ; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure ; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts;" Penn esteemed happiness to He in the sub- jection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is cer- tainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in ; " Penn, like Plato and Fenc- lon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to 'despots that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrin- sic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke de- clares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visi- ble acts of power ; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for ; " Penn like- wise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries ; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefcre he built such are his own words "a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen Hugh Peter and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriot- ism rather than the sentiment of philan- thropy, when Russell stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchise- ments, when Harrington and Shaltcsbmy and Locke thought government should rest on property, Penn did not despair of hu- manity, and though all history and experi- ence denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the coble idea of mr.n's capacity for self-government. Conscious thr.t there was no room for its exercise in Ing- land, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin end Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "THE HOLT EXPERIMENT." THE YOUTH OF WASHINGTON. At the very time of the congress of Aix-la- Chapellc, the woods of Virginia sheltered the youthful George Washington, who had been born by the side of the Potomac, beneath tl.c roof of a Westmoreland planter, and whore lot almost from infancy had been that cf an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shades, no college crowned him with its honors ; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his degrees in knowledge. And now, at sixteen years of age, in quest of nn honest maintenance encountering the sever- est toil ; cheered onward by being able to write to a schoolboy friend, "Dear Eichard, a doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;" himself his own cook, "having no spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip ; " roaming over spurs of the Alleghanies, and along the banks of the Shenandoah ; alive to nature, and some- times "spending the best of the day in ad- miring the trees and richness of the land ; " among skin-clad savages with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants " that would never speak English;" rarely sleep- ing in a bed ; holding a bearskin a splendid couch ; glad of a resting-place for the night upon a little hay, straw, or fodder, and often camping in the forests, where the place CHILDE HAROLD. 65 neirast the fire was a happy luxury, tnis stripling surveyor in the woods, with no companion but his unlettered associates, and no implements of science but his compass and chiin, contrasted strangely with the imperial magnificence of the congress of Aix-la-Cha- pelle. And yet God had selected, not Kaunitz nor Newcastle, not a monarch of the house of Hipsburg nor of Hanover, but the Virginia stripling, to give an impulse to human affairs ; and, as far as events can depend on an indi- vidual, had placed the rights and the destinies of countless millions in the keeping of the widow's son. CHILDE HAROLD. CANTO THE SECOND. I. Come, bine-eyed maid of heaven ! but thou, alas! Didst never yet one mortal song inspire Goddess of Wisdom ! here thy temple was, And is, despite of war and wasting fire, And years, that bade thy worship to expire : But worse than steel, and flamo, and ages slow, Is the dread sceptre arid dominion dire Of men who never felt the sacred glow That thoughts of thee and thine on polish'd breasts be- gtow. II. Ancient of days ! august Athena ! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul ? Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were: First in the race that led to Glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour ! The warrior's weapon, and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power. III. Son of the morning, rise ! approach you here ! Come but molest not yon defenceless urn : Look on this spot a nation's sepulchre ! Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. Even gods must yield religions take their turn. 'Twas Jove's 'tis Mahomet's and other creeds Will rise with other years, till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds ; Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on roods. IV. Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven Is't not enough, unhappy thing ! to know Thou art ? Is this a boon so kindly given, VOL. I. That being, thou wouldst be again, and so Thou know'st not, reck'st not to what region, On earth no more, but mingled with the skies? Still wilt thou dream on future joy and woe i Regard and weigh yon dust before it Hies : That little urn saith more than thousand homilies. V. Or burst the vanish'd Hero's lofty mound ; Far on the solitary shore he sleeps : Ho fell, and falling nations mourn'd around ; But now not one of saddening thousands weeps, Nor warlike worshipper his vigil keeps Where demi-gods appear'd, as records tell. Remove yon skull from out the scatter'd heaps : Is that a temple where a god may dwell ? Why ev'n the worm at last disdains her shatter'd cell '. VI. Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall, Its chambers desolate, and portals foul : Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall, The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul : Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole, The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit, And Passion's host, that never brook'd control : Can all saint, sage, or sophist ever writ, People this lonely tower, this tenement refit ? VII. Well didst thou speak, Athena's wisest son ! " All that we know is, nothing can be known." Why should we shrink from what we cannjt shun ? Each hath his pang, but feeble sufferers groan With brain-born dreams of evil ail their own. Pursue what Chance or Fate proclaimeth best ; Peace waits us on the shores of Acheron : There, no forced banquet claims the sated guest, But Silence spreads the couch of ever welcome rest. VIII. Tet if, as holiest men have deem'd, there be A land of souls beyond that sable shore, To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee And sophists, madly vain of dubious lore ; How sweet it were in concert to adore With those who made our mortal labors light ! To hear each voice we fear'd to hear no more ! Behold each mighty shade reveal'd to sight, The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught ton right! IX. There, thou ! whose love and life together fled, Have left mo here to love and live in vain Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead, When busy memory flashes on my brain ? Well I will dream that we may nwet agaiu. And woo the vision to my vacant breast : If aught of young Remembrance then remiv'o Be as it may, Futurity's behest. For me 'twere blisa enough to know thy spirit blest I 5 66 MARK TWAIN ON THE WEATHER. X. Here let me sit upon this mossy stone, The marble column's yet unshaken base ; Here, son of Saturn ! was thy fav'rite throne: Mightiest of many such ! Here let me trace The latent grandeur of thy dwelling-place. It may not be : nor ev'n e New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it, you are certain there is going to be plenty THE VISION OF MIRZA. 67 of weather. A perfect grand review ; but you never can tell which end of the proces- sion is going to move first. You fix up for the drought ; you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out with your sprinkling- pot, and ten to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due ; you stand from under and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments ; but they can't be helped. The lightning there is pe- culiar ; it is so convincing when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that behind for you to tell whether well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder. When the thunder com- mences merely to tune up, and scrape and saw and key up the instruments for the per- formance, strangers say, " Why, what awful thunder you have here ! " But when the baton is raised and the real concert begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar, with his head in the ash barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in New England lengthways I mean. It is utterly disproportionate to the size of that little country. Half the time when it is packed as full as it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges, and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring States. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks all about, where she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof, so I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on the tin ? No, sir ; skips it every time. Mind, in this speech, I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather; no language could do it justice. But after all there are at least one or two things about that weather, (or, if you please, effects produced by it) which we residents would not like to part with. If we had not our be- witching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries the ice storm when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top ice that is as bright and clear as crystal ; every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles, cold and white like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and ihe sau comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms, that glow and hum and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity, from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold ; the tree becomes a sparkling fountain, a very ex- plosion of dazzling jewels, and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibil- ity in art or nature of bewildering, intoxica- ting, intolerable magnificence ! One cannot make the words too strong. Month after month I lay up hate and grudge against the New England weather ; but when the ice storm comes at last, I say, "There, I forgive you now; the books are square between us; you don't owe me a cent ; go and sin no more ; your little faults and foibles count for nothing ; you are the most enchanting weather in the world." THE VISION OF MIRZA, EXHIBITING A PICTURE OF HUMAN LIFE. On the fifth day of the moon, which, ac- cording to the custom of my forefathers, I al- ways keep holy, after having washed myself, and offered up my morning devotions, I as- cended the high hills of Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer. As I was here airing myself on the tops of the mountains, I fell into a profound contemplation on the vanity of human life ; and passing from one thought to another, "Surely," said I, "man is but a shadow, and life a dream." Whilst I was thus musing, I cast my eyes towards the summit of a rock that was not far from me, where I discovered one in the habit of a shepherd, with a little musical instrument in his hand. As I looked upon him, he applied it to his lips, and be- gan to play upon it. The sound of it was ex- ceeding sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes that were inexpressibly melodious, and altogether different from any thing I had ever heard : they put me in mind of those heavenly airs that, are played to the departed souls of good men upon their first arrival in Paradise, to wear out the impressions of the last agonies, and qualify them for the plea- sures of that happy place. My heart melted away in secret raptures. I had been often told, that the rock be- fore me was the haunt of a genius ; and that several had been entertained with that music, who had passed by it, but never heard that the musician had before made himself visible. When he had raised my thoughts, by those transporting airs which he played, to taste the pleasures of his conversation, as I looked 68 THE VISION OF MIRZA. upon him like one astonished, he beckoned to me, and, by the waving of his hand, di- rected me to approach the place where he sat. I drew near with that reverence which is due to a superior nature ; and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet, and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that fa- miliarized him to my imagination, and at once dispelled all the fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He lifted me from the ground, and taking me by the hand, "Mirza," said he, " I have heard thee in thy soliloquies ; follow me." He then led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, "Cast thy eyes eastward," said he, " and tell me what thou seest." "I see," said I, "a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it." "The valley that thou seest," said he, "is the vale of misery ; and the tide of water that thou seest, is part of the great tide of eternity." "What is the rea- son," said I, "that the tide I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in a thick mist at the other? " "What thou seest," said he, "is that portion of eternity which is called Time, measured out by the sun, and reaching from the beginning of the world to its consummation. Examine now," said he, "this sea, that is bounded with darkness at both ends, and tell me what thou discoverest in it." "I see a bridge," said I, "standing in the midst of the tide." "The bridge thou seest," said he, "is human life ; consider it attentively." Upon a more leisurely survey of it, I found that it consisted of threescore and ten entire arches, with several broken arches, which, added to those that were entire, made up the number about an hundred. As I was counting the arches, the genius told me that this bridge consisted at first of a thousand arches ; but that a great flood swept away the rest, and left the bridge in the ruinous condition I now beheld it. "But tell me further," said he, "what thou discoverest on it." "I see multitudes of people passing over it," said I, " and a black cloud hanging on each end of it." As I looked more attentively, I saw several of the passen- gers dropping through the bridge into the great tide that flowed underneath it ; and upon far- ther examination, perceived there were innu- merable trap-doors that lay concealed in the bridge, which the passengers no sooner tro(3 upon, but they fell through them into the tide, and immediately disappeared. These hidden pit-falls were set very thick at the entrance of the bridge, so that throngs o people no sooner broke through the cloud but many of them fell into them. They grew hinner towards the middle, but multiplied ind lay closer together towards the end of he arches that were entire. There were indeed some persons, but their number was very small, that continued a cind of hobbling march on the broken arches, >ut fell through one after another, being quite tired and spent with so long a walk. I passed some time in the contemplation of this wonderful structure, and the great va- riety of objects which it presented. My icart was filled with a deep melancholy, to see several dropping unexpectedly in the midst of mirth and jollity, and catching at iverything that stood by them, to save them- selves. Some were looking up towards the icavens in a thoughtful posture, and, in the midst of a speculation, stumbled and fell out of sight. Multitudes were very busy in the pursuit of bubbles, that glittered in their iyes, and danced before them ; but often, when they thought themselves within the reach of them, their footing failed and down they sunk. In this confusion of objects, I observed some with scimitars in their hands, and others with urinals, who ran to and fro upon the bridge, thrusting several persons on trap doors which did not seem to lie in their way, and which they might have escaped had they not been thus forced upon them. The genius seeing me indulge myself in this melancholy prospect, told me I had dwelt long enough upon it : "Take thine eyes off the bridge," said he, " and tell me if thou seest anything thou dost not comprehend." Upon looking up, "What mean." said I, "those great flights of birds that are perpetu- ally hovering about the bridge, and settling upon it from time to time ? I see vultures, harpies, ravens, cormorants, and among many other feathered creatures, several little wing- ed boys, that perch in great numbers upon the middle arches." "These," said the ge- nius, "are envy, avarice, superstition, de- spair, love, with the like cares and passions that infest human life." I here fetched a deep sigh : " Alas," said I, " man was made in vain ! how is he given away to misery and mortality ! tortured in life, and swallowed up in death ! " The genius being moved with compassion towards me, bid me quit so uncomfortable a prospect. " Look no more," said he, "on man in the first stage of his existence, in his setting out for eternity ; but cast thine eye on that thick mist into which the tide bears the several generations of mortals that fall into it." I directed my sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good genius strengthened it with any supernatural force, or dissipated WILL WATERPROOF'S LYRICAL MONOLOGUE. 69 part of the mist that was before too thick for the eye to penetrate) I saw the valley open- ing at the farther end, and spreading forth into an immense ocean, that had a huge rock of adamant running through the midst of it and dividing it into two equal parts. The clouds still rested on one half of it, inso- much that I could discover nothing in it : but the other appeared to me a vast ocean, planted w:iii innumerable islands, that were covered with fruits and flowers, and interwo- ven with a thousand little shining seas that ran among them. I could see persons dress- ed in glorious habits, with garlands upon their heads, passing among the trees, lying down by the sides of fountains, or rest- ing on beds of flowers ; and could hear a confused harmony of singing birds, falling waters, human voices, and musical instru- ments. Gladness grew in me at the discov- ery of so delightful a scene. I wished for the wings of an eagle, that I might fly away to those happy seats ; but the genius told me there was no passage to them, except through the gates of death that I saw open- ing every moment upon the bridge. "The is- lands," said he, " that lie so fresh, and green before thee, and with which the whole face of the ocean appears spotted as far as thou canst see, are more in number than the sands on the sea-shore ; there are myriads of is- lands behind those which thou here discov- erest, reaching further than even thine eye, or even thine imagination, can extend itself. These are the mansions of good men after death, who, according to the degree and kinds of virtue in which they excelled, are distributed among these several islands, which abound with pleasures of different kinds and degrees, suitable to the relishes and perfections of those who are settled in them ; every island is a paradise accommo- dated to its respective inhabitants. Are not these, Mirza, habitations worth contending for ? Does life appear miserable, that gives thee opportunities of earning such a reward ? Is death to be feared, that will convey thee to ao happy an existence ? Think not man was made in vain, who has such an eternity re- served for him." I gazed with inexpressible pleasure on these happy islands. At length, said I , ' ' Shew me no w , I beseech thee, the se- crets that lie bid under those dark clouds, which cover the ocean on the other side of the rock of adamant." The genius making me no answer, i turned about to address my- self to him a second time, but I found that he had leit me : 1 then turned again to the vis- ion which I naa oeen so long contemplating ; but instead of tne rolling tide, the arched bridge, and the happy islands, I saw nothing but the long hollow valley of Bagdat, with oxen, sheep, and camels, grazing upon the sides of it. The Spectator. JOSEPH ADDISOX. WILL WATERPROOF'S LYRICAL MONOLOGUE. MADE AT THE COCK. plump head-waiter at The Cock, To which I most resort, How goes the time ? 'Tis five o'clock. Go fetch a pint of port : But let it not be such as that You set before chance-comers, But such whose father-grapo grew fat On Lusitauian summers. No vain libation to the Muse, But may slie still bo kind, And whisper lovely words, and use Her inlluenco on the mimi, To make me write my random rhymes, Ere they be half-forgotten ; Nor add and alter, many times, Till all be ripe and rotten. 1 pledge her, and she comes and dips Her laurel in the wine, And lays it thrice upon my lips, These favor'd lips of mine ; Until the charm have power to make New lifeblood warm the bosom, And barren commonplaces break In full and kindly blossom. I pledge her silent at the board ; Her gradual fingers steal And touch upon the master-chord Of all I felt and feel. Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans. And phantom hopes assemble ; And that child's heart within the man's Begins to move and tremble. Thro' many an hour of summer suns, By many pleasant ways, Against its fountain upward rurui The current of my days : I kiss the lips I once have kiss'd ; The gas-light wavers dimmer ; And softly, thro' a vinous misl, My college friendships glimmer. 70 WILL WATERPROOFS LYRICAL MONOLOGUE. I grow in worth, and wit, and sense, Unboding critic-pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men, Who hold their hands to all, and cry For that which all deny them Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry, And all the world go by them. Ah yet, tho' all the world forsake, Tho' fortune clip my wing.-), \ '*i!l not cramp my heart, nor take Half-views of men and tilings. Let Whig and Tory stir their bl.xxi ; There must be stormy weather; But for some true result of good All parties work together. - Let there be thistles, there are grapes ; If old things, there are new ; Ten thousand broken lights anJ shapes, Yet glimpses of the true. Let raffs be rife in prose an 1 rhyme, Wo lack not rhymes and raaons, As on this whirligig of Time We circle with the seasons. This earth is rich in man and maid ; With fair horizons bound : This whole wide earth of lig'at and shade Comes out, a perfect round. High over roaring Temple-bar, And, set in Heaven's third story, I look at all tilings as they are, But thro' a kind of glory. / Head-waiter, honor'd by the guest Half-mused, or reeling ripe, The pint, you brought mo, was the best That ever came from pipe. But tho' the port surpasses praise, My nerves have dealt with stiffer. Is there some magic in the place? Or do my peptics differ? For since I came to live and learn, No pint of white or red Had ever half the power to turn This wheel within my head, Which bears a season'd brain about, Unsubject to confusion, Tho' soak'd and saturate, out and out, Thro' every convolution. For I am of a numerous house, With many kinsmen gay, Where long and largely we carouse As who shall say me nay : Each month, a birth-day coming on, We drink defying trouble. Or sometimes two would moet in one, And then we drank it double ; Whether the vintage, yet unk?pt, Had relish fiery-new, Or, elbow-deep in sawdust, slept, As old as Waterloo ; Or stow'd (when classic Canning died) In musty bins and chambers, Had cast upon its crusty side The gloom of ten Decembers. The Muse, the jolly Muse, it is ! She answer'd to my call, She changes with that mood or this. Is all-in-all to all : She lit the spark within my throat, To make my blood run quicker, Used all her fiery will, and smote Her life into the liquor. And hence this halo lives about The waiter's hands, that reach To each his perfect pint of stout, His proper chop to each. He looks not like the common breed That with the napkin dally ; I think he came like Ganymede, From some delightful valley. The Cock was of a larger egg Than modern poultry drop, Stept forward on a firmer leg, And cramm'd a plumper crop ; Upon an ampler dunghill trod, Crow'd lustier late and early, Sipt wine from silver, praising God, And raked in golden barley. A private life was all his joy, Till in a court he saw A something-pottle-bodied boy That knuckled at the taw : He stoop'd and clutch'd him, fair and gootf. Flew over roof and casement : His brothers of the weather stood Stock-still for sheer amazement. But he, by farmstead, thorpe and s"ire, And follow'd with acclaims, A sign to many a staring shire Came crowing over Thames. Right down by smoky Paul's they boio, Till, where the streets grow straiten. One fix'd for ever at the door, And one became head- waiter. But whither would my fancy gp How out of place she makes The violet of a legen'i blow Among the chops and steaKs ! 'Tis but a steward of the can. One shade more plump than common. As just and more a servinpj-'Uiin As any, born of woman- POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 71 I ranged too high : what draws rue down Into the common day ? la it the weight of that half-crown, Which I shall have to pay ? For, something duller than at first, Nor wholly comfortable, I sit (my empty glasa reversed), And thrumming on the table : Half fearful that, with self at strife I take myself to task ; Lest of the fullness of my life I leave an empty flask : Tor I had hope, by something rare, To prove myself a poet : But, while I plan and plan, my hair Is gray before I know it. So fares it since the years began, Till they bo gathered up ; The truth, that flies the flowing can, Will haunt the vacant cup : And others' follies teach us not, Nor much their wisdom teaches ; And most, of sterling worth, is what Our own experience preaches. Ah, let the rusty theme alone ! We know not what we know. But for my pleasant hour, 'tis gone, 'Tis gone, and let it go. 'Tis gone : a thousand such have slipt Away from my embraces, And fall'n into the dusty crypt Of darken'd forms and faces. Go, therefore, thou ! thy betters went Long since, and cams no mare ; With peals of genial clamour sent From many a tavern-door, With twisted quirks and happy hits, From misty men of letters ; The tavern-hours of mighty wita Thine elders and thy betters. Hours, when the Poet's words and looks Had yet their native glow : Nor yet the fear of little books Had made him talk for show : But, all his vast heart sherris-warm'd He flash'd his random speeches ; Ere days, that deal in ana, swarm'd His literary leeches. So mix for ever with the past, Like all good things on earth ! For should I prize thee, couldst thou last, At half thy real worth ? 1 hold it good, good things should pass : With time I will not quarrel : It is but yonder empty glass That makes me maudlin-moral. Head-waiter of the choc-house here To which I most resort, I too must part : I hold thee dear For this good pint of port. For this thou saalt from all things suck Marrow of mirth and laughter; And, whepesoe'er thou move, good luck Shall fling her old shoe after. But thou wilt never move from hence, The sphere thy fate allots : Thy latter days increased with pe.aca Go down among the pots : Thou battenest by the greasy gleam In haunts of hungry sinners, Old boxes, larded with the steam Of thirty thousand dinners. We fret, we fume, would shift our skins, Would quarrel with our lot ; Thy care is, under polish'd tins, To serve the hot-and-hot ; To come and go, and coino again, He turning like the pewit, And watch'd by silent gentlemen, That trifle with the cruet. Live long, ere from thy topmost head The thick-set hazel dies ; Long, ere the hateful crow shall tread The corners of thine eyes : Live long, nor feel in head or chest Our changeful equinoxes, Till mellow Death, like some late guest, Shall call thee from the boxes. But when he calls, and Ihou shalt cease To pace the gritted floor, And, laying down an unctuous lease Of life, shalt earn no more; No carved cross-hones, the types of Death, Shall show thee past to Heaven : But carved cross-pipes, and, underneath, A pint-pot neatly graven. TENNYSON. POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. THE NEW PAUL AND VIRGINIA. A Satire. I. The magnificent ocean-steamer, the Austra- lasian, was bound for England, on her home- ward voyage from Melbourne. She carried Her Majesty's mails and ninety-eight first- class passengers. The skies were cloudless ; the sea was smooth as glass. Never did ves- sel start under happier auspices. No sound of sickness was to be heard anywhere ; and when dinner time came there was not a sin- gle appetite wanting. 72 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. But the passengers soon discovered they were lucky in more than weather. Dinner was hardly half over before two of those present had begun to attract general atten- tion ; and every one was wondering, in whis- pers, who they could possibly be. One of the objects of this delightful curi- osity was a large-boned, middle-aged man, with gleaming spectacles, and lank, untidy hair ; whose coat fitted him so ill, and who hell his head so high, that it was plain at a glance he was some great celebrity. The other was a beautiful la.ly of about thirty years of age. No one present had seen her like before. She ha I the fairest hair and the darkest eyebrows, the largest eyes and the smallest waist conceivable ; in fact, art and nature had been struggling as to which should do the most for her ; whilst her bear- ing was so haughty and distinguished, her glance s ) tender, and her dress so expensive and so fascinating, that she seemed at the same time to defy and to court attention. Evening fell on the ship with a soft, warm witchery. The air grew purple, and the waves began to glitter in the moonlight. The passengers gathered in knots upon the deck. The distinguished strangers were still the subject of conjecture. At last the secret was discovered by the vrife of an old colonial judge ; and the news spread like wildfire. In a few minutes all knew that there were on board the Australasian no less personages than Professor Paul Darnley and the superb Virginia St. John. II. Miss St. John had, for at least six years, been the most renowned woman in Europe. In Paris and St. Petersburg, no less than in London, her name was equally familiar both to princes and to pot-boys ; the eyes of all the world were upon her. Yet in spite of this exposed situation, scandal had proved powerless to wrong her ; she defied detrac- tion. Her enemies could but echo her friends' praise of her beauty ; her friends could but confirm her enemies' description of her character. Though of birth that might be called almost humble, she had been con- nected with the heads of many distinguished families ; and so general was the affection she inspired, and so winning the ways in which she contrived to retain it, that she found herself at the age of thirty mistress of nothing except a large fortune. She was now converted with surprising rapidity by a rit- ualistic priest, and she became in a few months a model of piety and devotion. She male lace trimmings for the curate's vest- ments ; she bowed at church as often and profoundly as possible ; she enjoyed nothing so much as going to confession ; she learnt to despise the world. Indeed, such utter dross did her riches now seem to her, that despite all the arguments of her ghostly counsellor, she remained convinced that they were too worthless to offer to the Church, and she saw nothing for it but to still keep them for herself. The mingled humility and discre- tion of this resolve so won the heart of a gift- ed colonial bishop, then on a visit to England, that having first assured himself that Miss St. John was sincere in making it, he be- sought her to share with him his humble mitre, and make him the happiest prelate in the whole Catholic Church. Miss St. John consented. The nuptials were celebrated with the most elaborate ritual, and after a short honeymoon the bishop departed for his South Pacific diocese of the Chasuble Is- lands, to prepare a home for his bride, who was to follow him by the next steamer. Professor Paul Darnley, in his own walk of life was even more renowned than Vir- ginia had been in hers. He had written three volumes on the origin of life, which he had spent seven years in looking for in infu- sions of hay and cheese ; he had written five Tolumes on the entozoa of the pig, and two volumes of lectures, as a corollary to these, on the sublimity of human heroism and the whole duty of man. He was renowned all over Europe and America as a complete em- bodiment of enlightened modern thought. His min I was like a sea, into which the oth- er great minds of the a~e discharged them- selves, and in which all the slight discrepan- cies of the philosophy of the present century mingled together and formed one harmonious whole. He criticized everything ; he took nothing on trust, except the unspeakable sublimity of the human race and its august terrestrial destinies. And in his double ca- pacity of a seer and a savant, he had de- stroyed all that the world had believed in the past, and revealed to it all that it is going to feel in the future. Nor was he less successful in his own private life. He mar- ried, at the age of forty, an excellent evan- gelical lady, ten years his senior, who wore a green gown, grey cork-screw curls, and who had a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds. Orthodox though she was, Mrs. Darnley was yet proud beyond measure of her husband's world-wide fame, for she did but imperfectly understand the grounds of it. Indeed, the only thing that marred her hap- piness was the single tenet of his that she had really mastered. This, unluckily, was that he disbelieved in hell. And so, as Mrs. POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 73 Darnley conceived that that place was de- signed mainly to hold those who doubted its existence, she daily talked her utmost, and left no text unturned to convince her darling of his very dangerous error. These assiduous arguments soon began to tell. The Professor grew moody and brooding, and he at last suggested to his medical man that a voyage round the world unaccompanied by his wife, was the prescription most needed by his failing patience. Mrs. Darnley at length consented with a fairly good grace. She made her husband pledge himself that he would not be absent for above a twelve- month, or else, she said, she should imme- diately come after him. She bade him the tenderest of adieus, and promised to pray till his return for his recovery of a faith in hell. The Professor, who had but exceeded his time by six months, was now on board the Australasian, homeward bound to his wife. Virginia was outward bound to her husband. III. The sensation created by the presence of these two celebrities was profound beyond description ; and the passengers were never weary of watching the gleaming spectacles and the square-toed boots of the one, and the liquid eyes and the ravishing toilettes of the other. There were three curates, who, having been very quick in making Virginia's acquaintance, soon sang at nightfall with her a beautiful vesper hymn. And so lovely did the strains sound, and so devotional did Virginia look, that most of the passengers the night after joined in a repetition of this touching evening office. The Professor, as was natural, held quite aloof; and pondered over a new species of bug, which he had found very plentiful in his berth. But it soon occurred to him that he often heard the name of God being uttered otherwise than in swearing. He listened more attentively to the sounds which he had at first set down as negro melodies : and he soon became convinced that they were some- thing whose very existence he despised him- self for remembering namely, Christian hymns. He then thought of the three cu- rates, whose existence he despised himself for remembering also. And the conviction rapid- ly dawned on him, that though the passengers seemed fully alive to his fame as a man of science, they could yet know very little of all that science had done for them ; and of the deith-blow it had given to the foul su- perstitions of the past. He therefore resolv- ed that next day he would preach them a lay-sermon. At the appointed time the passenger? gath- ered eagerly round him all but Virginia, who retired to her cabin when she saw that the preacher wore no surplice ; as she thought it would be a mortal sin to listen to a sermon without one. The Professor began amidst a profound si- lence. He first proclaimed to his hearers the great primary axiom in which all modern thought roots itself. He told them that there was but one order of things, it was so much neater than two ; and if we would be certain of anything we must never doubt it. Thus, since countless things exist that the senses can take account of, it is evident that noth- ing exists that the senses cannot take ac- count of. The senses can take no account of God ; therefore God does not exist. Men of science can only see theology in a ridicu- lous light ; therefore theology has no side that is not ridiculous, He then told them a few of the new names that enlightened thinkers had applied to the Christian Deity how Professor Tyndall had called him an " atom-manufacturer," and Professor Huxley, a " pedantic drill-sergeant." The passen- gers at once saw how demonstrably at va- riance with fact was all religion, and they laughed with a sense of humor that was quite new to them. The professor's tones then became more solemn ; and, having ex- tinguished error, he proceeded to unveil the brilliant light of truth. He showed them how, viewed by modern science, all existence is a chain, with a gas at one end, and no one knows what at the other ; and how Humani- ty is a link somewhere ; but, holy and awful thought ! we can none of us tell where. " However," he proceeded, " of one thing we can be quite certain : all that is, is mat- ter ; the laws of matter are eternal, and we cannot act or think without conforming to them: and if," he said, "we would be sol- emn, and high, and happy, and heroic, and saintly, we have but to strive and struggle to do what we cannot for an instant avoid do- ing. Yes," he exclaimed, "as the sublime Tyndall tells us, let us struggle to attain to a deeper knowledge of matter, and a more faithful conformity to its laws ! ' ' The Professor would have proceeded ; but the weather had been rapidly growing rough and he here became violently sea-sick. " Let us," he exclaimed hurriedly, " con- form to the laws of matter and go below." Nor was the advice premature. A storm arose, exceptional in its suddenness and its fury. It raged for two days wv^hout ceasing. The Australasian sprang a leak ; her steering gear was disabled ; and it was teared she would go ashore on an island that was seen POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. dimly through the fog to the leeward. The boats were got, in readiness. A quantity of provisions and of the passengers' baggage was alreauy slowed in the cutter ; when the clouds parted, tne sun came out again, and the surnu suosided almost as quickly as it arose, IV. No sooner were the ship's damages in a fair waj to be repaired than the Professor resumed his sermon. He climbed into the cutter, which was still full of the passengers' baggage, and sat down on the largest of Vir- ginia's boxes. This so alarmed Virginia that she followed the Professor into the cutter to keep an eye on her property ; but she did not forget to stop her ears with her fingers, that she might not be guilty of listening to an un-surpliced minister. The Professor took up the thread of his discourse just where he had broken it off. Every circumstance favoured him. The calm sea was sparkling under the gentlest breeze ; all Nature seemed suffused with gladness ; and at two miles' distance was an enchanting island, green with every kind of foliage, and glowing with the hues of a thousand flowers. The Professor, having reminded his hearers of what nonsense they now thought all the Christian teachings, went on to show them the blessed results of this. Since the God that we once called all-holy is a fable, that Humanity is all-holy must be a fact. Since we shall never be sublime, and solemn, and unspeakably happy hereafter, it is evident that we can be sublime, and solemn, and un- speakably happy here. "This," said the Professor, " is the new Gospel. It is founded on exact thought. It is the gospel of the kingdom of man ; and had I only here a microscope and a few chemicals, I could de- monstrate its eternal truth to you. There is no heaven to seek for ; there is no hell to shun. We have nothing to strive and live for except to be unspeakably happy." This eloquence was received with enthu- siasm. The captain in particular, who had a wife in every port he touched at, was over- joyed at hearing that there was no hell ; and be sent for all his crew, that they might learn the good news likewise. But soon the general gladness was marred by a sound of weeping. Three-fourths of the passengers, having had time to reflect a little, began ex- claiming that as a matter of fact they were really completely miserable, and that for various reasons they could never be anything else. " My friends," said the Professor, quite undaunted, " that is doubtless com- pletely true. You are not happy now : you probably never will be. But that is of little moment. Only conform faithfully to the laws of matter, and your children's children will be happy in the course of a few centu- turies ; and you vri 1 ! like that far better than being happy yourselves. Only consider the matter in this light, and you yourselves will become happy also ; and whatever you say and whatever you do, think only of the effect it will have five hundred years afterwards." At these solemn words, the anxious faces grew calm. An awful sense of the responsi- bility of each one of us, and the infinite con- sequences of every human act, was filling the hearts of all ; when by a faithful con- formity to the laws of matter, the boiler blew up, and the Australasian went down. In an instant the air was rent with yells and cries ; and all the Humanity that was on board the vessel was busy, as the Professor expressed it, uniting itself with the infinite azure of the past. Paul and Virginia, however, floated quietly away in the cutter, together with the baggage and provisions. Virginia was made almost senseless by the suddenness of the catastrophe ; and on seeing five sailors sink within three yards of her, she fainted dead away. The Professor begged her not to take it so much to heart, as these were the very men who had got the cutter in readiness ; "and they are therefore," he said, " still really alive in the fact of our happy escape." Virginia, however, being quite insensible, the Professor turned to the last human being still to be seen above the waters, and shouted to him not to be afraid of death, as there was certainly no hell, and that his life, no matter how degraded and miserable, had been a glorious mystery, full of infinite significance. The next moment the struggler was snapped up by a shark. The cutter, meanwhile, borne by a current, had been drifting rapidly to- wards the island. And the Professor, spread- ing to the breeze Virginia's beautiful lace parasol, soon brought it to the shore on a beach of the softest sand. V. The scene that met Paul's eyes as he landed was one of extreme loveliness. He had run the boat ashore in a little fairy bay, full of translucent waters, and fringed with silvery sands. On either side it was protected by fantastic rocks, and in the middle it opened inland to an enchanting valley, where tall tropical trees made a grateful shade, and where the ground was carpeted with the softest moss and turf. Paul's first care was for his fair companion. POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 75 He spread a costly cashmere shawl on the beich, and placed her, still fainting, on this. In a few moments she opened her eyes ; but was on the point of fainting again as the horrors of the last half-hour came back to her, when she caught sight in the cutter of the largest of her own boxes, and she began to recover herself. Paul begged her to re- main quiet while he Avent to reconnoitre. He had hardly proceeded twenty yards into the valley, when to his infinite astonishment he cams on a charming cottage, built under the shadow of a broad tree, with a broad vc- ranlah, plate-glass windows, and red window- blinds. His first thought was that this could be no desert island at all, but some happy European settlement. But on approaching the cottaga, it proved to be quite untenanted, and from the cobwebs woven across the door- way it seemed to have been long abandoned. Inside there was abundance of luxurious fur- niture ; the floors were covered with gorgeous Indian carpets; and there was a pantry well stocked with plate and glass and table-linen. The Professor could not tell what to make of it, till, examining the structure more closely, he found it composed mainly of a ship's tim- bers. This socmad to tell its own tale ; and he at once concluded that he and Virginia were not the first castaways who had been forced to make the island for some time their dwolling-place. Overjoyed at this discovery, the Professor hastens I back to Virginia. She was by this time quite recovered, and was kneeling on the cashmere shawl, with a rosary in her hands designed especially for the use of An- glo-Citholics, and was alternately lifting up her eyes in gratitude to Heaven, and casting them down in anguish at her torn and crum- pled dress. The poor Professor was horri- fied at the sight of a human being in this degrading attitude of superstition. But as Virginia quitted it with alacrity as soon as ever he told his news to her, he hoped he might soon convert her into a sublime and holy Utilitarian. The first thing she besought him to do was to carry her biggest box to this chirming cottage, that she might change her clothe?, and appear in something fit to be 833n in. The Professor most obligingly at once did as she asked him ; and whilst she wis busy at her toilette, he got from the cutl3r whit provisions he could, and pro- C3el3d to lay the table. When all was ready, Ii3 rani; a gong which he found suspended in t'i3 loboy ; Virginia appeared shortly in a bemtiful pink dressing-gown, embroidered with silver flowers ; and just before sunset, the two sit down to a really excellent meal. The bread-tree at the door of the cotta-ro con- tributed some beautiful French rolls ; close at hand also they discovered a butter-tree ; and the Professor had produced from the cut- ter a variety of salt and potted meats, patt- de-foie-gras, cakes, preserved fruit, and some bottles of fine champagne. This last helped much to raise their spirits. Virginia found it very dry, and exactly suited to her palate. She had but drunk five glasses of it, when her natural smile returned to her, though she was much disappointed because Paul took no notice of her dressing-gown ; and when she had drunk three glasses more, she quietly went to sleep on the sofa. The moon had by this time risen in daz- zling splendour ; and the Professor went out and lighted a cigar. All during dinner there had been a feeling of dull despair in his heart, which even the champagne did not dissipate. But now, as he surveyed in the moonlight the wondrous Paradise in which his strange fate had cast him, his mood changed. The air was full of the scents of a thousand night-smelling flowers ; the sea murmured on the beach in soft, voluptuous cadences. The Professor's cigar was ex- cellent. He now saw his situation in a truer light. Here was a bountiful island, where earth unbidden brought forth all her choicest fruits ; and most of the luxuries of civiliza- tion had already been wafted thither. Ex- istence here seemed to be purified from all its evils. Was not this the very condition of things which all the sublimest and exactest thinkers of modern times had been dreaming and lecturing, and writing books about for a good half-century ? Here was a place where Humanity could do justice to itself, and real- ize those glorious destinies which all exact thinkers take for granted must be in store for it. True, from the mass of Humanity he was completely cut away ; but Virginia was his companion. Holiness, and solemnity, and unspeakably significant happiness, did not, he argued, depend on the multiplication table. He and Virginia represented Humanity as well as a million couples. They were a com- plete Humanity in themselves, and Humanity in a perfectible shape ; and the very next day they would make preparations for fulfill- ing their holy destiny, and being as solemnly and unspeakably happy as it was their stern duty to be. The Professor turned his eyes upwards to the starry heavens ; and a sense came over him of the eternity and the im- mensity of Nature, and the demonstrable ab- sence of any intelligence that guided it. These reflections naturally brought home to him with more vividness the stupendous and boundless importance of Man. His bosom swelled violently ; and he cried aloud, his 76 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. eyes still fixed on the firmament, " Oh, im- portant All ! oh, important Me !'' When he came back to the cottage, he found Virginia just getting off the sofa, and preparing to go off to bed. She was too sleepy even to say good-night to him, and with evident want of temper was tugging at the buttons of her dressing-gown. "Ah," slie murmured as she left the room, "if God, in his infinite mercy, had only spared my maid !" Virginia's evident discontent gave profound pain to Paul. "How solemn," he exclaimed, "for half Humanity to be discontented!" But he was still more disturbed at the appeal to a chimerical manufacturer of atoms ; and he exclaimed, in yet more sorrowful tones, " How solemn for half Humanity to be sunk lower than the beasts by superstition !" However, he hoped that these stupendous evils might, under the present favourable conditions, vanish in the course of a few days' progress ; and he went to bed, full of august auguries. VI. Next morning he was up betimes ; and the prospects of Humanity looked more glorious than ever. He gathered some of the finest pats from the butter-tree, and some fresh French rolls from the bread-tree. He dis- covered a cow close at hand, that allowed him at once to milk it ; and a little roast pig ran up to him out of the underwood, and fawning on him with its trotter;;, said, " Come, eat me." The Professor vivisected it before Vir- ginia's door, that its automatic noise, which the vulgar call cries of pain, might awaken her ; and he then set it in a hot dish on the table. " It has come ! it has come!" he shouted, rapturously, as Virginia entered the room, this time in a blue silk dressing-gown, em- broidered with flowers of gold. " What has come ?" said Virginia, pet- tishly, for she was suffering from a terrible headache, and the Professor's loud voice an- noyed her. " You don't mean to say that we are rescued, are we ?' ' "Yes," answered Paul, solemnly; "we are rescued from all the pains and imperfec- tions of a world that has not learnt how to conform to the laws of matter, and is but im- perfectly acquainted with the science of so- ciology. It is therefore inevitable that, the evils of existence being thus removed, we shall both be solemnly, stupendously, and unspeakably happy." " Nonsense !" said Virginia, snappishly, who thought the Professor was joking. " It is not nonsense,' ' said the Professor. " It is deducible from the teachings of John Stuart Mill, of Auguste Comte, of Mr. Fred- eric Harrison, and of all the exact thinkers who have cast off superstition, and who adore Humanity." Virginia meanwhile ate pate-de-foic-yras, of which she was passionately fond ; and, grow- ing a little less sullen, she at last admitted that they were lucky in having at least the necessaries of life left to them. " But as for happiness there is nothing to do here, there is no church to go to, and you don't seem to care a bit for my dressing-gown. What have we got to make us happy?" " Humanity," replied the Professor eagerly, " Humanity, that divine entity, which is of course capable of everything that is fine and invaluable, and is the object of inde- scribable emotion to all exact thinkers. And what is Humanity ?" he went on more earn- estly, " You and I are Humanity you and I are that august existence. You already are all the world to me; and I very soon shall be all the world to you. Adored being, it will be my mission and my glory to compel you to live for me. And then, as modern philoso- phy can demonstrate, we shall both of us be significantly and unspeakably happy." For a few moments Virginia merely stared at Paul. Suddenly she turned quite pale, her lips quivered, and exclaiming, " How dare you ! and I, too, the wife of a bishop !" she left the room in hysterics. The Professor could make nothing of this. Though he had dissected many dead women, he knew very little of the hearts of live ones. A sense of shyness overpowered him. He felt embarrassed, he could not tell why, at being thus left alone with Virginia. He lit a cigar, and went out. Here was a to-do indeed, he thought. How would progress be possible if one half of Humanity misunder- stood the other ? He was thus musing, when suddenly a voice startled him ; and in another moment a man came rushing up to him, with every demonstration of joy. " Oh, my dear master ! oh, emancipator of the human intellect ! and is it indeed you ? Thank God ! 1 beg pardon for my un- speakable blasphemy I mean, thank cir- cumstances over which I have no control." It was one of the three curates, whom Paul had supposed drowned, but who now related how he had managed to swim ashcrc, despite the extreme length of his black cleri- cal coat. "These rags of superstition," he said, " did their best to drown me. But I survive in spite of them, to covet truth and to reject error. Thanks to your glorious POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 77 teaching," he went on, looking reverentially into the Professor's face, " the very notion of an Almighty Father makes me laugh con- sumedly, it is so absurd and so immoral. Science, through your instrumentality, has opened my eyes. I am now an exact thinker.' ' "Do you believe," said Paul, " in solemn, significant, and unspeakably happy Human- ity?" "I do," said the curate, fervently. " When- ever I think of Humanity, I groan and moan to myself out of sheer solemnity.' ' "Then two-thirds of Humanity," said the Professor, " are thoroughly enlightened. Pro- gress will now go on smoothly." At this moment Virginia came out. having rapidly recovered composure at the sound of a new man's voice. "You here you, too!" exclaimed the curate. " How solemn, how significant ! This is truly Providential 1 mean this has truly happened through conformity to the laws of matter." "Well," said Virginia, " since we have a clergyman amongst us, we shall perhaps be able to get on." VII. Things now took a better turn. The Pro- fessor ceased to feel shy ; and proposed, when the curate had finished an enormous break- fast, that they should go down to the cutter, and bring up the things in it to the cottage. "A few hours' steady progress," he said, "and the human race will command all the luxuries of civilization the glorious fruits of centuries of onward labour." The three spent a very busy morning in examining and unpacking the luggage. The Professor found his favourite cullection of modern philosophers ; Virginia found a large box of knick- knacks, with which to adorn the cottage ; and there was, too, an immense store of wine and of choice provisions. " It is rather sad," sighed Virginia, as she dived into a box of French chocolate-creams, "to think that all the poor people are drowned that these things belonged to." " They are not dead," said the Professor: " they still live on this holy and stupendous earth. They live in the use we are making of all they had got together. The owner of those chocolate-creams is immortal because you are eating them." Virginia licked her lips, and said, " Non- sense ! ' ' "It is not nonsense," said the Professor. " It is the religion of Humanity." All day they were busy, and the time passed pleasantly enough. Wines, provisions, books, and china ornaments were \r.ed up to the cottage and bestowed in proper places. Vir- ginia filled the glasses in the drawing-room with gorgeous leaves and flowers; and declared by the evening, as she looked round her, that she could almost fancy herself in St. John's Wood. "See," said the Professor, "how rapid is the progress of material civilization ! Hu- manity is now entering on the fruits of ages. Before long it will be in a position to be un- speakably happy," Virginia retired to bed early. The Pro- fessor took the curate out with him to look at the stars ; and promised to lend him some writings of the modern philosophers, which would make him more perfect in the new view of things. They said good-night, mur- muring together that there was certainly no God, that Humanity was very important, and that everything was very solemn. VIII. Next morning the curate began studying a number of essays that the Professor lent him, all written by exact thinkers, who disbelieved in God, and thought Humanity adorable and most important. Virginia lay on the sofa, and sighed over one of Miss Broughton's novels ; and it occurred to the Professor that the island was just the place where, if any- where, the missing link might be found. "Ah!" he exclaimed; "all is still pro- gress. Material progress came to an end yesterday. Mental progress has begun to-day. One-third of Humanity is cultivating sen- timent ; another third is learning to covet truth. I, the remaining and most en- lightened third, will go and seek it. Glorious, solemn Humanity ! I will go and look about for its arboreal ancestor." Every step the Professor took he found the island more beautiful. But he came back to luncheon, having been unsuccessful in his search. Events had marched quickly in his absence. Virginia was at the beginning of her third volume ; and the curate had skimmed over so many essays, that he pro- fessed himself able to give a thorough account of the want of faith that was in him. After luncheon the three sat together in easy chairs, in the verandah, sometimes talk- ing, sometimes falling into a half-doze. They all agreed that they were wonderfully com- fortable, and the Professor said "All Humanity is now at rest, and in utter peace. It is just taking breath, before it be- comes unspeakably and significantly happy." He would have said more, but he was here startled by a piteous noise of crying, and tha three found themselves confronted by an olj 78 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. woman, dripping with sea-water, and with an expression on her face of the utmost misery. They soon recognized her as one of the pas- sengers of the ship. She told them how she had been floated ashore on a spar, and how she had been sustained by a little roast pig, that kindly begged her to eat it, having first lain in her bosom to restore her to warmth. She was now looking for her son. "And if I cannot find him," said the old womm, "I shall never smile again. He has half broken my heart," she went on, "by his wicked ways. But if I thought he was dead dead in the midst of his sins, it would be broken altogether ; for in that case he must certainly be in hell." "Old woman," said the Professor, very slowly and solemnly, " be comforted. I an- nounce to you that your son is alive." "Oh, bless you, sir, for that word!' cried the old woman. "But where is he? Have you seen him ? Are you sure that he is living?" " I am sure of it," said the Professor, "be- cause enlightened thought shows me that he cannot be anything else. It is true that I saw him sink for a third time in the sea, and that he was then snapped up by a shark. But he is as much alive as ever in his posthu- mous activities. He has made you wretched after him ; and that is his future life. Be- come an exact thinker, and you will see that this is so. Old woman," added the Professor, solemnly, "you are your son in hell." At this the old woman flew into a terrible rage. "In hell, sir!" she exclaimed; "me in hell! a poor lone woman like me! How dare you !" And she sank back in a chair and fainted. "Alas!" said the Professor, "thus is misery again introduced into the world. A fourth part of Humanity is now miserable." The curate answered promptly that if no restoratives were given her, she would prob- ably die in a few minutes. " And to let her die," he said, "is clearly our solemn duty. It will be for the greatest happiness of the greatest number." "No," said the Professor ; " for our sense of pity would then be wounded, and the hap- piness of all of us would be marred by that." " Excuse me," said the curate ; " but exact thought shows me that pity for others is but the imagining of their misfortune falling on ourselves. Now, we can none of us imagine ourselves exactly in the old woman's case ; therefore it is quite impossible that we can pity her." "But," said the Professor, "such an act would violate our ideas of justice." "You are wrong again," said the curate; "for exact thought shows me that the love of justice is nothing but the fear of suffering in- justice. If we were to kill strong men, we might naturally fear that strong men would kill us. But whatever we do to fainting old women, we cannot expect that fainting old women will do anything to us in return." "Your reasoning cannot be sound," said the Professor, "for it would lead to the most horrible conclusions. I will solve the diffi- culty better. I will make the old woman happy, and therefore fit to live. Old woman,' ' he exclaimed, "you are yourself by your own unhappiness expiating your son's sins. Do but think of that, and you will become un- speakably happy." Meanwhile, however, the old woman had died. When the Professor discovered this he was somewhat shocked ; but at length with a sudden change of countenance, "We neither of us did it," he exclaimed, "her death is no act of ours. It is part of the eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteous- ness righteousness, which is, as we all know, but another name for happiness. Let us adore the event with reverence." "Yes," said the curate, "we are well rid of her. She was an immoral old woman ; for happiness is the test of morality, and she was very unhappy." "On the contrary," said the Professor, " she was a moral old woman ; for she made us happy by dying so very opportunely. Let us speak well of the dead. Her death has been a holy and a blessed one. She has conformed to the laws of matter. Thus is unhappiness destined to fade out of the world. Quick ! let us tie a bag of shot to all the sorrow and evil of Humanity, which, after all, is only a fourth part of it ; and let us sink her in the bay close at hand, that she may catch lobsters for us." IX. " At last," said the Professor, as they be- gan dinner that evening, " the fulness of time has come. All the evils of humanity are removed, and progress has come to an end because it can go no further. We have nothing now to do but to be unspeakably and significantly happy." The champagne flowed freely. Our friends ate and drank of the best, their spirits rose ; and Virginia admitted that this was really "jolly." The sense of the word pleased the Professor, but its sound seemed below the gravity of the occasion ; so he begged her to say "sublime" instead. "We can make it mean," he said, "just the same, but we pre- fer it for the sake of its associations." POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 79 It soon, however, occurred to him that eat- ing and drinking were hardly delights suffi- cient to justify the highest state of human emotion ; and he began to fear he had been feeling sublime prematurely ; but in another moment he recollects 1 he was an altruist, and that the secret of their happiness was not that any one of them was happy, but that they each knew the others were. " Yes, my dear curate," said the Profes- sor, " what I am enjoying is the champagne that you drink, and what you are enjoying is the champagne that I drink. This is al- truism ; this is benevolence ; this is the sub- lime outcome of enlightenod modern thought. The pleasures of the table, in themselves, are low and beastly ones ; but if we each of us are only glad because the others are enjoying them, they become holy and glorious beyond description." " They do," cried the curate rapturously, " indeed they do ! I will drink another bot- tle for your sake. It is sublime!" he said as he tossad off three glasses. " It is signifi- cant !" he said as he finished three more. "Tell me, my dear, do I look significant?" he added, as he turned to Virginia, and sud- denly tried to crown the general bliss by kissing her. Virginia started back, looking fire and fury at him. The Professor was completely as- tounded by an occurrence so unnatural, and exclaimed in a voice of thunder, " Morality, sir, remember morality ! How dare you upset that which Professor Huxley tells us must be for ever strong enough to hold its own ?" But the last glass of champagne had put the curate beyond the reach of exact thought. He tumbled under the tible, and the Profes- sor carried him off to bed. X. The Professor, like most serious thinkers, knew but little of that trifle commonly called "the world." He had never kissed any one except his wife ; even that he did as seldom as possible ; and the curate lying dead drunk was the first glimpse he had of what, par excellence, is called "life." But though the scene just described was thus a terrible shock to him, in one way it gave him an unlooked- for comfort. He felt that even yet things were not quite as sublime as they should be. He now saw the reason. "Of course," he said, "existence cannot be perfect, so long as one third of Humanity makes a beast of itself. A little more progress is still neces- sary." He hastened to explain this next morning to Virginia, and begged her not to be alarmed at the curate's scandalous conduct. " Im- morality," he said, " is but a want cf suc- cess in attaining our own happiness. It is evidently most immoral for the curate to be kissing you ; and therefore kissing you would not really conduce to his happiness. I will convince him of this solemn truth in a very few moments. Then the essential dignity of human nature will become at once apparent, and we shall all of us at last begin to be un- speakably happy." The curate, however, altogether declined to be convinced. He maintained stoutly that to kiss Virginia would be the greatest plea- sure that Humanity could offer him. "And if it is immoral as well as pleasant," he added, " I should like it all the better." At this the Professor gave a terrible groan ; he dropped almost fainting into a chair; he hid his face in his hands ; and murmured half-articulately, "Then I can't tell what to do!" In another instant, however, he re- covered himself; he fixed a dreadful look on the curate, and said, " That last statement of yours cannot be true ; for if it were, it would upset all my theories. It is a fact that can be proved and verified, that if you kissed Vir- ginia it would make you miserable." "Pardon me," said the curate, rapidly moving towards her, "your notion is a rem- nant of superstition ; I will explode it by a practical experiment." The Professor caught hold of the curate's coat-tails, and forcibly pulled him back into his seat. " If you dare attempt it," he said, " I will kick you soundly, and, shocking, immoral man ! you will feel miserable enough then." The curate was a terrible coward, and very weak as well. " You are a great hulking fel- low," he said, eyeing the Professor; " and I am of a singularly delicate build. I must, therefore, conform to the laws of matter, and give in." He said this in a very sulky voice; and, going out of the room, slammed the door after him. A radiant expression suffused the face of the Professor. " See," he said to Virginia, "the curate's conversion is already half accomplished. In a few hours more he will be rational, he will be moral, he will be sol- emnly and significantly happy." The Professor talked like this to Virginia the whole morning; but in spite of all his arguments she declined to be comforted. " It is all very well," she said, "whilst you are in the way. But as soon as your back is turned, I know he will be at me again." "Will you never," said Paul, by this time a little irritated, "will you never listen to 80 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. exact thought? The curate is now reflect- ing ; and a little reflection must inevitably convince hirn that he does not really care to kiss you, and that it would give him very little real pleasure to do so." " Stuff! " exclaimed Virginia, with a sudden vigour at which the Professor was thunder- struck. "I can tell you," she went on, "that better men than he have borne kicks for my sake ; and to kiss me is the only tiling that little man cares about what shall I do?" she exclaimed, bursting into tears. " Here is one of you insulting me by trying to kiss me ; and the other insulting me by saying that I am not worth being kissed ! " " Ah, me ! " groaned the poor Professor in an agony, " here is one third of Humanity plunged in sorrow ; and another third has not yet freed itself from vice. When, when will sublimity begin ? " XI. At dinner, however, things wore a more promising aspect. The curate had been so terrified by the Professor's threats, that he hardly dared so much as look at Virginia ; and to make up for it, he drank an unusual quantity of champagne, which soon set him laughing and chattering at a rate that was quite extraordinary. Virginia seeing herself thus neglected by the curate, began to fear that, as Paul said, he really did not so much care to kiss her after all. She therefore, put on all her most enticing ways ; she talked, flirted, and smiled her best, and made her most effective eyes, that the curate might see what a prize was for ever beyond his reach. Paul thought the state of affairs full of glorious promise. Virginia's tears were dried, she had never looked so radiant and exquisite before. The curate had foregone every at- tempt to kiss Virginia, and yet he seemed happiness itself. The Professor took the lat- ter aside, as soon as the meal was over, to congratulate him on the holy state to which exact thought had conducted him. " You see," he said, " what a natural growth the loftiest morality is. Virginia doesn't want to be kissed by you. I should be shocked at your doing so shocking a thing as kissing her. If you kissed her, you would make both of us miserable ; and, as a necessary consequence, you would be in an agony likewise ; in addi- tion to which, I should inevitably kick you." " But," said the curate, " suppose I kissed Virginia on the sly, I merely put this as an hypothesis, remember, and that in a little while she liked it, what then? She and I would both be happy ; and you ought to be happy too, because we were." "Idiot!" said the Professor. "Virginia is another man's wife. Nobody really hkes kissing another man's wife; nor do wives ever like kissing anyone except their hus- bands. What they really like is what Profes- sor Huxley calls ' the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good,' which, as he says, exact thought shows us is the true end of ex- istence. But, pooh ! what is the use of all this talking? You know which way your higher nature calls you ; and, of course, un- less men believe in God, they cannot help obeying their higher nature." " I," said the curate, "think the belief in God a degrading superstition ; I think every one an imbecile who believes a miracle possi- ble. And yet I do not care two straws about the highest good. What you call my lower na- ture is far the strongest ; I mean to follow it to the best of my ability ; and I prefer call- ing it my higher, for the sake of the associa- tions." This plunged the Professor in deeper grief than ever. He knew not what to do. He paced up and down the verandah, or about the rooms, and moaned and groaned as if he had a violent toothache. Virginia and the curate asked what was amiss with him. " I am agonizing," he said, "for the sake of holy, solemn, unspeakably dignified Hu- manity." The curate, seeing the Professor thus de- jected, by degrees took heart again ; and as Virginia still continued her fascinating behav- iour to him, he resolved to try and prove to her that, the test of morality being happiness, the most moral thing she could do would be to allow him to kiss her. No sooner had he began to propound these views, than the Professor gave over his groaning, seized the curate by the collar, and dragged him out of the room with a roughness that nearly throttled him. " I was but propounding a theory an opinion," gasped the curate. " Surely thought is free. You will not persecute me for my opinions ? " " It is not for your opinions," said the Pro- fessor, "but for the horrrible effect they might have. We can only tolerate opinions that have no possible consequence. You may promulgate any of those as much as you like ; because to do that would be a self-regarding action." XII. "Well," said the curate, "if I may not kiss Virginia, I will drink brandy instead. That will make me happy enough ; and then we shall all be radiant." He soon put his resolve into practice. He got a bottle of brandy, he sat himself down POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 81 under a palm-tree, and told the Professor he was going to make an afternoon of it. "Foolish man!" said the Professor; "I was never drunk myself, it is true ; but I know that to get drunk makes one's head ache horribly. To get drunk is, therefore, horribly immoral ; and therefore I cannot permit it." "Excuse me," said the curate ; "itisaself- regarding action. Nobody's head will ache but mine ; so that is my own lookout. I have been expelled from school, from college, and from my lirst curacy for drinking. So I know well enough the balance of pains and pleasures." Here he pulled out his brandy bottle, and applied his lips to it. "Oh, Humanity!" he exclaimed, "how solemn this brandy tastes !" Matters went on like this for several days. The curate was too much frightened to again approach Virginia. Virginia at last became convinced that he did not care about kissing her. Her vanity was wounded, and she be- came sullen ; and this made the Professor sullen also. In fact, two-thirds of Humanity were overcast with gloom. The only happy section of it was the curate, who alternately smoked and drank all day long. " The nasty little beast ! " said Virginia to the Professor ; "he is nearly always drunk. I am beginning quite to like you, Paul, by comparison with him. Let us turn him out, and not let him live in the cottage." " No," said the Professor : " for he is one third of Humanity. You do not properly appreciate the solidarity of mankind. His existence, however, I admit is a great diffi- culty." One day at dinner, however, Paul came in radiant. "Oh holy, oh happy event!" he ex- claimed ; " all will go right at last." Virginia inquired anxiously what had hap- pened, and Paul informed her that the curate, who had got more drunk than usual that afternoon, had fallen over a cliff, and been dashed to pieces. "What event," he asked, "could be more charming more unspeakably holy ? It bears about it every mark of sanctity. It is for the greatest happiness of the greatest num- ber." "Come," he continued, " let us begin our love-feast. Let us each seek the happi- ness of the other. Let us instantly be sub- lime and happy." XIII. "Let us prepare ourselves," said Paul solemnly, as they sat down to dinner, "for VOL. I. realizing to the full the essential dignity of Humanity that grand etre, which has come, in the course of progress, to consist of you and me. Every condition of happiness that modern thinkers have dreamed of is now ful- filled. We have but to seek each the happi- ness of the other, and we shall both be in a solemn, a significant, and unspeakable state of rapture. See, here is an exquisite leg of mutton. I," said Paul, Avho liked the fat best, " will give up all the fat to you." "And I," said Virginia resignedly, "will give up all the lean to you." A few mouthfuls made Virginia feel sick. " I confess," said she, "I can't get on with this fat." "I confess," the Professor answered, "I don't exactly like this lean." "Then let us," said Virginia, "be like Jack Sprat and his wife." "No," said the Professor, meditatively, " that is quite inadmissible. For in that case we should be egoistic hedonists. However, for to-day it shall be as you say. I will think of something better to-morrow." Next day he and Virginia had a chicken apiece; only Virginia's was put before Paul, and Paul's before Virginia; and they each walked round the table to supply each other with the slightest necessaries. "Ah!" cried Paul, "this is altruism in- deed. I think already I can feel the sublim- ity beginning." Virginia liked this rather better. But soon she committed the sin of taking for her- self the liver of Paul's chicken. As soon as she had eaten the whole of it her conscience began to smite her. She confessed her sin to Paul, and inquired, with some anxiety, if he thought she would go to hell for it. " Meta- phorically," said Paul, "you have already done so. You are punished by the loss of the pleasure you would have had in giving that liver to me, and also by your knowledge of my knowledge of your folly in foregoing the pleasure." Virginia was much relieved by this answer ; she at once took several more of the Profes- sor's choicest bits, and was happy in the thought that her sins were expiated in the very act of their commission, by the latent pain she felt persuaded they were attended by. Feeling that this was sufficient, she took care not to add Paul's disapproval to her punishment, she never told him again. For a short time this practice of altruism seemed to Virginia to have many advantages. But thougli the Professor was always ex- claiming, " How significant is human life by the very nature of its constitution ! " she very soon found it a trifle dull. Luckily, 6 82 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. however, she hit upon a new method of exer- cising morality, and, as the Professor fully admitted, of giving it a yet more solemn sig- nificance. The Professor having by some accident lost his razors, his moustaches had begun to grow profusely ; and Virginia had watched them with a deep, but half-conscious admiration. At last, in a happy moment, she exclaimed, "Oh, Paul! do let me wax the ends for you." Paul at first giggled, blushed, and protested, but as Virginia assured him it would make her happy, he consented. "Then," she said, "you will know that I am happy, and that in return will make you happy also. Ah ! " she exclaimed when the operation was over, "do go and examine yourself in the glass. I declare you look exactly like Jack Barley Barley Sugar, as we used to call him of the Blues." Virginia smiled ; suddenly she blushed ; the Professor blushed also. To cover the blushes she begged to be allowed to do his hair. " It will make me so much happier, Paul," she said. The Professor again assent- ed, that he might make Virginia happy, and that she might be happy in knowing that he was happy in promoting her happiness. At last the Professor, shy and awkward as he was, was emboldened to offer to do Virginia's hair in return. She allowed him to arrange her fringe, and as she found he did no great harm to it, she let him repeat the operation as often as he liked. A week thus passed, full, as the Professor paid, of infinite solemnity. " I admit, Paul," sighed Virginia, " that this altruism, as you call it, is very touching. I like it very much. But," she added, sinking her voice to a whis- per, " are you quite sure, Paul, that it is perfectly moral !" "Moral!" echoed the Professor, " moral ! Why exact thought shows us that it is the very essence of all morality ! " XIV. Matters now went on charmingly. All ex- istence seemed to take a richer colouring, and there was something, Paul said, which, in Professor Tyndall's words, "gave fulness and tone to it, but which he could neither analyze nor comprehend." But at last a change came. One morning, whilst Virginia was arranging Paul's moustaches, she was frightened almost into a fit by a sudden ap- parition at the window. It was a hideous hairy figure, perfectly naked but for a band of silver which it wore round its neck. For A moment it did nothing but grin and stare ; then it flung into Virginia's lap a filthy piece of carrion, and in an instant it had bounded away with an almost miraculous activity. Virginia screamed with disgust and terror, and clung to Paul's knees for protection. He seemed unmoved and preoccupied. All at once, to her intense surprise, she saw his face light up with an expression of trium- phant eagerness. "The missing link!" he exclaimed, " the missing link at last ! Thank God 1 beg pardon for my unspeakable blasphemy I mean, thank circumstances over which I have no control. I must this instant go out and hunt for it. Give me some provisions in a knapsack, for I will not come back till I have caught it." This was a fearful blow to Virginia. She fell at Paul's feet weeping, and besought him in piteous accents that he would not thus abandon her. ' ' I must, ' ' said the Professor, solemnly ; ' ' for I am going in pursuit of truth. To arrive at Truth is man's perfect and most rapturous happiness. You must surely know that, even if I have forgotten to tell it to you. To pursue truth holy truth for holy truth's sake is a more solemn pleasure than even frizzling your hair." "Oh," cried Virginia, hysterically, "I don't care two straws for truth. What on earth is the good of it ? " " It is its own end," said the Professor. "It is its own exceeding great reward. I must be off in search of it. Good-bye for the present. Seek truth on your own ac- count, and be unspeakably happy also, be- cause you know that I am seeking it." The Professor remained away for three days. For the first two of them Virginia was inconsolable. She wandered about mournfully with her head dejected. She very often sighed ; she very often uttered the name of Paul. At last she surprised herself by exclaiming aloud to the irresponsible soli- tude, " Oh, Paul, until you were gone, I never knew how passionately I loved you ! " No sooner were those words out of her mouth than she stood still, horror-stricken. " Alas !" she cried, " and have I really come to this 1 I am in a state of deadly sin, and there is no priest here to confess to ! I must conquer my forbidden love as best I may. But, ah me, what a guilty thing I am ! " As she uttered these words,her eyes fell on a tin box of the Professor's marked " Pri- vate," which he always kept carefully locked and which had before now excited her curi- osity. Suddenly she became conscious of a new impulse. "I will pursue truth !" she exclaimed. " I will break that box open, and I will see what is inside it. Ah ! " she added, as with the aid of the poker she at POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. last wrenched off the padlock, "Paul may be right after all. There is more interest in the pursuit of truth than I thought there was." The box was full of papers, letters, and dia- ries, the greater part of which were marked " Strictly private." Seeing this, Virgin- ia's appetite for truth became keener than ever. She instantly began her researches. The more she read, the more eager she be- came ; and the more private appeared the nature of the documents, the more insatiable did her thirst for truth grow. To her ex- treme surprise, she gathered that the Profes- sor had begun life as a clergyman. There were several photographs of him in his sur- plice ; and a number of devout prayers ap- parently composed by himself for his own personal use. This discovery was the result of her labours. " Certainly," she said, "it is one of ex- treme significance. If Paul was a priest now. Orders are indelible at least in the Church of England I know they are." XV. Paul came back, to Virginia's extreme re- lief, without the missing link. But he was still radiant in spite of his failure; for he had discovered, he said, a place where the creature had apparently slept, and he had collected in a card-paper box a large number of its parasites. " I am glad," said Virginia, " that you have not found the missing link : though as to thinking that we really came from monkeys, of course that is too absurd. Now if you could have brought me a nice monkey, I should really have liked that. The Bishop has promised that I shall have a darling one, if I ever reach him ah me! if Paul," continued Virginia, in a very solemn voice, after a long pause, " do you know that whilst you have been away I have been pursuing truth? I rather liked it; and I found it very, very significant." "Oh, joy!" exclaimed the Professor. "Oh, unspeakable radiance ! Oh holy, oh essen- tially dignified Humanity ! it will very soon be perfect. ! Tell me, Virginia, what truths have you been discovering?" "One truth about you, Paul," said Vir- ginia, very gravely, " and one truth about me. I burn oh, I burn to tell them to you !" The Professor was enraptured to hear that one half of Humanity had been studying human nature ; and he began asking Vir- ginia if her discoveries belonged to the do- main of historical or biological science. Meanwhile Virginia had flung herself on her knees before him, and was exclaiming in piteous accents 4 ' By my fault, by my own fault, by my very grievous fault, holy father, 1 confers to you "Is the woman mad?" cried the Profes- sor, starting up from his seat. " You are a priest, Paul," said Virginia; "that is one of the things I have discovered. I am in a state of deadly sin ; that is the other : and I must and will confess to you. Once a priest, always a priest. You cannot get rid of your orders, and you must and shall hear me." " I was once in orders, it is true," said Paul, reluctantly ; " but how did you find out my miserable secret?" "In my zeal for truth," said Virginia, "I broke open your tin box ; I read all your let- ters ; I looked at your early photographs ; I saw all your beautiful prayers." " You broke open my box ! " cried the Pro- fessor. " You read my letters and my private papers ! Oh, horrible ! oh, immoral ! What shall we do if half Humanity has no feeling of honour ? " " Oh," said Virginia, " it was all for the love of truth of solemn and holy truth. I sacrificed every other feeling for that. But I have not told you my truth yet ; and I am determined you shall hear it, or I must still remain in my sins. Paul, I am a married woman ; and I discover, in spite of that, that I have fallen in love with you. My husband, it is true, is far away ; and, whatever we do, he could never possibly be the wiser. But I am in a state of mortal sin, nevertheless ; and I would give anything in the world if you would only kiss me." " Woman !" exclaimed Paul, aghast with fright and horror, " do you dare to abuse truth, by turning it to such base purposes ? " Oh, you are so clever," Virginia went on, " and when the ends of your moustaches are waxed, you look positively handsome ; and I love you so deeply and so tenderly, that I shall certainly go to hell if you do not give me absolution." At this the Professor jumped up, and, star- ing very hard at Virginia, asked her if, after all that he had said on the ship, she really believed in such exploded fallacies as hell, God, and priestcraft. She reminded him that he had preached there without a surplice, and that she had therefore not thought it right to listen to a word he said. " Ah," cried the Professor, with a sigh of intense relief, " I see it all now. How can Humanity ever be unspeakably holy so long as one half of it grovels in dreams of an un- 84 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. speakably holy God ? As Mr. Frederic Har- rison truly says, a want of faith in ' the essen- tial dignity of man is one of the surest marks of the enervating influence of this dream of a celestial glory.' " The Professor accordingly re-delivered to Virginia the entire substance of his lectures in the ship. He fully im- pressed on her that all the intellect of the world was on the side of Humanity ; and that God's existence could be disproved with a box of chemicals. He was agreeably sur- prised at finding her not at all unwilling to be convinced, and extremely unexacting in her demands for proof. In a few days, she had not a remnant of superstition left. " At last!" exclaimed the Professor; "it has come at last ! Unspeakable happiness will surely begin now." XVI. No one now could possibly be more eman- cipated than Virginia. She tittered all day long, and whenever the Professor asked her why, she always told him she was think- ing of "an intelligent First Cause," a con- ception which she said "was really quite killing." But when her first burst of intel- lectual excitement was over, she became more serious. " All thought, Paul," she said, "is valuable mainly because it leads to action. Come, my love, my dove, my beauty, and let us kiss each other all day long. Let us enjoy the charming license which exact thought shows us we shall never be punished for." This was a result of freedom that the Pro- fessor had never bargained for. He could not understand it; "because," he argued, " if people were to reason in that way, mo- rality would at once cease to be possible." But he had seen so much of the world lately, that he soon recovered himself; and, recol- lecting that immorality was only ignorance, he began to show Virginia where her error lay her one remaining error. "I perceive," he said, " that you are ignorant of one of the greatest triumphs of exact thought the dis- tinction between the lower and higher pleas- ures. Philosophers, who have thought the whole thing over in their studies, have be- come sure that as soon as the latter are pre- sented to men they will at once leave all and follow them." " They must be very nice pleasures," said Virginia, " if they would make me leave kiss- ing you for the sake of them.' ' " They are nice," said the Professor. "They are the pleasures of the imagination, the in- tellect, and the glorious apprehension of truth. Compared with these, kissing me would be quite insipid. Remain here for a moment, whilst I go to fetch something ; and you shall then begin to taste them." In a few moments Paul came back again, and found Virginia in a state of intense ex- pectancy. " Now " he exclaimed, triumphantly. "Now " exclaimed Virginia, with a beating heart. The Professor put his hand in his pocket, and drew slowly forth from it an object which Virginia knew well. It reminded her of the most innocent period of her life ; but she hated the very sight of it none the less. It was a Colenso's Arithmetic. "Come," said the Professor, "no truths are so pure and necessary as those of mathe- matics ; you shall at once begin the glorious apprehension of them." "Oh, Paul," cried Virginia, in an agony, " but I really don't care for truth at all ; and you know that when I broke your tin box open and read your private letters in my search for it, you were very angry with me." "Ah," said Paul, holding up his finger, " but those were not necessary truths. Truths about human action and character are not necessary truths ; therefore men of science care nothing about them, and they have no place in scientific systems of ethics. Pure truths are of a very different character ; and however much you may misunderstand your own inclinations, you can really care for nothing so much as doing a few sums. I will set you some very easy ones to begin with ; and you shall do them by yourself, whilst I magnify in the next room the parasites of the missing link." Virginia saw that there was no help for it. She did her sums by herself the whole morn- ing, which, as at school she had been very good at arithmetic, was not a hard task for her ; and Paul magnified parasites in the next room, and prepared slides for his microscope. When they met again, Paul began skipping and dancing, as if he had gone quite out of his senses ; and every now and then between the skips, he gave a sepulchral groan. Vir- ginia asked him, in astonishment, what on earth was the matter with him, " Matter ! " he exclaimed. " Why, Hu- manity is at last perfect ! All the evils of ex- istence are removed ; we neither of us believe in a God or a celestial future ; and we are both in full enjoyment of the higher pleas- ures, and the apprehension of scientific truth. And therefore I skip because Humanity is so unspeakably happy ; and I groan because it is so unspeakably solemn." " Alas, alas ! " cried Virginia, " and would not you like to kiss me ? " J "No," said the Professor, sternly; "and POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND. 85 you would not like me to kiss you. It is im- possible that one half of Humanity should prefer the pleasure of unlawful love to the pleasure of finding out scientific truths." "But," pleaded Virginia, "cannot we enjoy both? " " No," said the Professor ; " for if I began to kiss you, I should soon not care two straws about the parasites of the missing link." "Well," said Virginia, "it is nice of you to say that ; but still Ah me 1 " XVII. Virginia was preparing, with a rueful face, to resume her enjoyment of the higher pleas- ures, when a horrible smell, like that of an open drain, was suddenly blown in through the window. "Oh, rapture!" cried the Professor, as Virginia was stopping her nose with her handkerchief, "I smell the missing link." And in another instant he was gone. "Well," said Virginia, "here is one com- fort. Whilst Paul is away I shall be relieved from the higher pleasures. Alas ! " she cried, as she flung herself down on the sofa, "he is so nice-looking, and such an enlight- ened thinker. But it is plain he has never loved, or else very certainly he would love again." Paul returned in a couple of hours, again unsuccessful in his search. "Ah," cried Virginia, " I am so glad you have not caught the creature! " " Glad," echoed the Professor, " glad ! Do you know that till I have caught the missing link the cause of glorious truth will suffer grievously ? The missing link is the token of the solemn fact of our origin from inorganic matter. I did catch one blessed glimpse of him. He had certainly a silver band about his neck. He was about three feet high. He was rolling in a lump of carrion. It is through him that we are related to the stars the holy, the glorious stars, about which we know so litttle." " Bother the stars!" said Virginia; "I couldn't bear, Paul, that anything should come between you and me. I have been thinking of you and longing for you the whole time you have been away." " What ! " cried Paul, " and how have you been able to forego the pleasures of the in- tellect?" " I have deserted them," cried Virginia, " for the pleasures of the imagination, which I gathered from you were also very ennobling. And I found they were so ; for I have been imagining that you loved me. Why is the reality less ennobling than the imagination ? ! Paul, you shall love me ; I will force you to \ love me. It will make us both so happy : we shall never go to hell for it ; and it cannot I possibly cause the slightest scandal." The Professor was more bewildered than ever by these appeals. He wondered how Humanity would ever get on if one half of it cared nothing for pure truth, and persisted in following the vulgar impulses that had been the most distinguishing feature of its benighted past that is to say, those ages of its existence of which any record has been preserved for us. Luckily, however, Virgin- ia came to his assistance. " I think I know, Paul," she said, " why I do not care as I should do for the intellec- tual pleasures. We have been both seeking them by ourselves ; and we have been there- fore egoistic hedonists. It is quite true, as you say, that selfishness is a despicable thing. Let me," she went on, sitting down beside him, " look through your microscope along with you. I think perhaps, if we shared the pleasure, the missing link's parasites might have some interest for me." The Professor was overjoyed at this pro- posal. The two sat down side by side, and tried their best to look simultaneously through the eye-piece of the microscope. Virginia in a moment expressed herself much satisfied. It is true they saw nothing ; but their cheeks touched. The Professor too seemed contented ; and said they should botli be in a state of rapture when they had got the right focus. At last Virginia whispered, with a soft smile " Suppose we put that nasty microscope aside ; it is only in the way. And then, oh, Paul ! dear love, dove of a Paul ! we can kiss each other to our hearts' content." Paul thought Virginia quite incorrigible, and rushed headlong out of the room. XVIII. "Alas ! " cried Paul, " what can be done to convince one half of Humanity that it is really devoted to the higher pleasures and does not care for the lower at least nothing to speak of ? " The poor man was in a state of dreadful perplexity, and felt well nigh dis- tracted. At last a light broke in on him. He remembered that as one of his most re- vered masters, Professor Tyndall. had admit- ted, a great part of Humanity would always need a religion, and that Virginia now had none. He at once rushed back to her. "Ah ! " he exclaimed, " all is explained now. You cannot be in love with me, for that would be unlawful passion. Unlawful passion is un- reasonable, and unreasonable passion would 8(5 POSITIVISM ON AN ISLAND, quite upset a system of pure reason, which is what exact thought shows us is soon going to govern the world. No! the emotions that you fancy are directed to me are in reality cos- mic emotion in other words are the reason- able religion of the future. I must now in- itiate you in its solemn and unspeakably sig- nificant worship." " Religion ! " exclaimed Virginia, not know- ing whether to laugh or cry. "It is not kind of you to be making fun of me. There is no God, no soul, and no supernatural or- der, and above all there is no hell. How then can you talk to me about religion ? " " You," replied Paul, " are associating re- ligion with theology, as indeed the world hitherto always has done. But those two things, as Professor Huxley well observes, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. ' It may be,' says that great teacher, ' that the object of a man's religion is an ideal of sensual enjoyment, or ' " " Ah ! " cried Virginia, " that is my reli- gion, Paul." "Nonsense!" replied Paul; "that cannot be the religion of half Humanity : else high, holy, solemn, awful morality would never be able to stand on its own basis. See, the night has fallen, the glorious moon has aris- en, the stupendous stars are sparkling in the firmament. Come down with me to the sea- shore, where we may be face to face with na- ture, and I will show you then what true religion what true worship is." The two went out together. They stood on the smooth sands, which glittered white and silvery in the dazzling moonlight. All was hushed. The gentle murmur of the trees, and the soft splash of the sea, seemed only to make the silence audible. The Professor paused close beside Virginia, and took her hand. Virginia liked that, and thought that religion without theology was not perhaps so bad after all. Meanwhile Paul had fixed his eyes on the moon. Then in a voice almost broken with emotion, he whispered, " The prayer of the man of science, it has been said, must be for the most part of the silent sort. He who said that was wrong. It need not be silent ; it need only be inarticulate. I have discovered an audible and a reasona- ble liturgy which will give utterance to the full to the religion of exact thought. Let us both join our voices, and let us croon at the moon." The Professor at once began a long low howl- ing. Virginia joined him, until she was out of breath. "Oh, Paul," she said at last, "is this more rational than the Lord's Prayer ? " "Yes," said the Professor, "for we can analyze and comprehend that ; but true re- ligious feeling, as Professor Tyndall tells us, we can neither analyze nor comprehend. See how big nature is, and how little ah, how little ! we know about it. Is it not solemn, and sublime, and awful ? Come, let us howl again." The Professor's devotional fervour grew every moment. At last he put his hand to his mouth, and began hooting like an owl, till it seemed that all the island echoed to him. The louder Paul hooted and howled, the more near did he draw to Virginia. "Ah," he said, as he put his arm about her waist, "it is in solemn moments like this that the solidarity of mankind becomes most apparent." Virginia, during the last few moments, had stuck her fingers in her ears. She now took them out, and, throwing her arms round Paul's neck, tried, with her cheek on his shoulder, to make another little hoot ; but the sound her lips formed was much more like a kiss. The power of religion was at last too much for Paul. " For the sake of cosmic emotion," he ex- claimed, "0 other half of Humanity, and for the sake of rational religion, I will kiss you." The Professor was bending down his face over her, when, as if by magic, he started, stopped, and remained as one petrified. Amidst the sharp silence, there rang a hu- man shout from the rocks. " Oh !" shrieked Virginia, falling on her knees, " it is a miracle ! it is a miracle ! God is angry with us for pretending that we do not believe on him." The Professor was as white as a sheet ; but he struggled with his perturbation man- fully. " It is not a miracle," he cried, " but an hallucination. It is an axiom with exact thinkers that all proofs of the miraculous are hallucinations." "See," shrieked Virginia again, "they are coming, they are coming. Do not you see them ?" Paul looked, and there, sure enough, were two figures, a male and a female, advancing slowly towards them, across the moonlit sand. " It is nothing," cried Paul; "it cannot possibly be anything. I protest, in the name of science, that it is an optical delusion." Suddenly the female figure exclaimed, "Thank God, it is he !" In another moment the male figure ex- claimed, "Thank God, it is she!" "My husband!" gasped Virginia. "My wife!" replied the -bishop (for it was THE WANTS OF MAN. 87 none other than he). "Welcome to Chasu- ble Island. By the blessing of God it is on your own home you have been wrecked, and you have been living in the very house that I had intended to prepare for you. Provi- dentially, too, Professor Darnley's wife has called here, in her search for her husband, who has overstayed his time. See, my love, my dove, my beauty, here is the monkey I promised you as a pet, which broke loose a few days ago, and which I was in the act of looking for when your joint cries attracted us, and we found you." A yell of delight here broke from the Pro- fessor. The eyes of the three others were turned on him, and he was seen embracing wildly a monkey which the bishop led by a chain. " The missing link!" he exclaimed, " the missing link !" "Nonsense!" cried the sharp tones of a lady with a green gown and grey cork-screw curls. "It is nothing but a monkey that the good bishop has been trying to tame for his wife. Don't you see her name engraved on the collar?" The shrill accents acted like a charm upon Paul. He sprang away from the creature that he had been just caressing. He gazed for a moment on Virginia's lovely form, her exquisite toilette, and her melting eyes. Then he turned wildly to the green gown and the grey cork-screw curls. Sorrow and su- perstition he felt were again invading Hu- manity. "Alas!" he exclaimed at last, "I do now indeed believe in hell." "And I," cried Virginia, with much greater tact, and rushing into the arms of her bishop, " once more believe in heaven." The Contemporary Review. W. H. MALLOCK. THE WANTS OF MAN. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, sixth President of the United States, (1325-29), was born in Braintree, Mass., July 11, 17G7, died in the Capitol at Washington, Feb. 23, 1848. Ho filled many public stations, was Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, minister to Russia and England, Secretary ef State, and Senator and Representative in Congress. He wrote copiously in prose and verse, and his oratory gained him the title of the " old man eloquent." His styl< is more distinguished for strength than grace, and bis posthumous diary, in twelve volumes, is full of caustic observations upon the men and the events of his time. " Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long." "Tig not with me exactly so ; But 'tis so in my gong. M y wants are many and, if told. Would muster many a score ; And were each wish a mint of gold, I still should long for more. What first I want is daily bread And canvas-backs and wine And all the realms of nature spread Before me, when I dine. Four courses scarcely can provide My appetite to quell ; With four choice cooks from France besida, To dress my dinner well. What next I want, at princely cost, Is elegant attire : Black sable furs for winter's frost, And silks for summer's fire, And Cashmere shawls, and Brussels lace My bosom's front to deck, And diamond rings my hands to grace, And rubies for my neck. And then I want a mansion fair, A dwelling-house, in style, Four stories high, for wholesome air A massive marble pile ; With halls for banquetings and balls, All furnish'd rich and fine ; With high-blood studs in fifty stall*, And cellars for my wine. I want a garden and a park, My dwelling to surround A thousand acres, (bless the markFy With walls encompassed round Where flocks may range and herds iiiay low, And kids and lambkins play, And flowers and fruits commingled grow, All Eden to display. I want, when summer's foliage full*, And autumn strips the trees, A house within the city's walls, For comfort and for ease ; But here, as space is somewhat scant, And acres somewhat rare, My house in town I only want To occupy a square. I want a steward, butler, cooks ; A coachman, footman, grooms ; A library of well-bound books, And picture-garnish'd rooms ; Corregio's Magdalen and Night, The Matron of the Chair; Guido's fleet coursers in their flight, And Claudes, at least a pair. THE WANTS OF MAN. I want a cabinet profuse Of medals, coins, and gems; A printing-press for private use, Of fifty thousand ems ; And plants, and minerals, and shells ; Worms, insects, fishes, birds ; And every beast on earth that dwells In solitude or herds. I want a board of burnish'd plate, Of silver and of gold ; lureens of twenty pounds in weight, And sculpture's richest mould ; Plateaus, with chandeliers and lamps, Plates, dishes all the same ; And porcelain vases, with the stumps Of Sevres and Angouleme. And maples of fair glossy stain, Must form my chamber doors, And carpets of the Wilton grain Must cover all my floors ; My walls with tapestry bedeck'd, Must never be outdone ; And damask curtains must protect Their colours from the sun. And mirrors of the largest pane From Venice must be brought ; And sandal-wood anil bamboo cane, For chairs and tables bought ; On all the mantel-pieces, clocks Of thrice-gilt bronze must stand, And screens of ebony and box Invite the stranger's hand. I want (who does not want ?) a wife, Affectionate and fair; To solace all the woes of life, And all its joys to share. Of temper sweet, of yielding will, Of firm, yet placid mind, With all my faults to love me still With sentiment refined. And as Time's car incessant runs, And Fortune fills my store, I want of daughters and of sons From eight to half a score. 1 want (alas ! can mortal dare Such bliss on earth to crave ?) That all the girls be chaste and fair, The boys all wise and brave. And when my bosom's darling sings, With melody divine, A pedal harp of many strings Must with her voice combine. Piano, exquisitely wrought, Must open stand apart, That all my daughters may be taught To win the stranger's heart. My wife and daughters will desire Refreshment from perfumes, Cosmetics for the skin require, And artificial blooms. The civet fragrance shall dispense, And treasured sweets return ; Cologne revive the flagging sense, And smoking amber burn. And when at night my weary head Begins to droop and doze, A chamber south, to hold my bed, For nature's soft repose ; With blankets, counterpanes, and sheet, Mattress, and sack of down, And comfortables for my feet, And pillows for my crown. I want a warm and faithful friend, To cheer the adverse hour ; Who ne'er to flatter will descend, Nor bend the knee to power, A friend to chide me when I'm wrong, My inmost soul to see ; And that my friendship prove as strong For him as his for me. I want a kind and tender heart, For others' wants to feel ; A soul secure from fortune's dart, And bosom arm'd with steel ; To bear divine chastisement's rod, And, mingling in my plan, Submission to the will of God, With charity to man. I want a keen observing eye, An ever-listening ear, The truth through all disguise to spy, And wisdom's voice to hear: A tongue, to speak at virtue's need, In heaven's sublimest strain ; And lips, the cause of man to plead, And never plead in vain. I want uninterrupted health, Throughout my long career, And streams of never-failing wealth, To scatter far and near The destitute to clothe and feed, Free bounty to bestow, Supply the helpless orphan's need, And soothe the widow's woe. I want the genius to conceive, The talents to unfold, Designs, the vicious to retrieve, The virtuous to uphold ; Inventive power, combining skilL A persevering soul, Of human hearts to mould the will, And reach from pole to pole. THE BABIES. 89 I want the seals of power and place, The ensigns of command ; Charged by the People's unbought grace To rule my native land. Nor crown nor scepter would I ask But from my country's will, By day, by night, to ply the task Her cup of bliss to nil. I want the voice of honest praise To follow me behind, And to be thought in future days The friend of human kind, That after ages, as they rise, Exulting may proclaim In choral union to the skies Their blessings on my name. These are the Wants of mortal Man, I cannot want them long, For life itself is but a span, And earthly bliss a song. My last great Want absorbing all Is, when beneath the sod, And summoned to my final call, The Mercy of my God. And oh ! while circles in my veins Of life the purple stream, And yet a fragment small remains Of nature's transient dream, My soul, in humble hope unseared, Forget not thou to pray, That this, THY WANT, may be prepared To meet the Judgment Day. THE BABIES. MARK TWAIN. Speech of Mark Twain at the banquet given in honor of Gen. Grant, by the Army of the Tennessee, at the Palmer House, Chicago, Nov. 14, 1879. TOAST : "The Babies As they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our fes- tivities." I like that. We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen ; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground, for we have all been babies. It is a shame that for a thou- sand years the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby as if he didn't amount to anything ! If you gentlemen will stop and think a minute, if you will go back fifty or a hundred years, to your early married life, and recontemplate your first baby, you will remember that he amounted to a good deal, and even something over. You soldiers all know that when that little fellow arrived at the family head-quarters you had to hand in your resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere body-ser- vant, and you had to stand around, too. He was not a commander who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else. You had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and dis- respect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a word. You could face the death- storm of Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow ; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of war were sounding in your ears, you set your faces toward the batteries and advanced with steady tread ; but when he turned on the terrors of his war-whoop, you advanced in the other direction and mighty glad of the chance, too. When he called for soothing syrup, did you venture to throw out any side remarks about certain services unbecoming an officer and a gentle- man? No, you got up and got it. If he ordered his bottle, and it wasn't warm, did you talk back ? Not you, you went to work and warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right, three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccups. I can taste that stuff yet. And how many things you learned as you went along ; senti- mental young folks still took stock in that beautiful old saying that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are whispering to him. Very pretty, but " too thin,"' simply wind on the stomach., my friends ! If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual hour, 2.30 in the morning, didn't you rise up promptly and remark with a mental addition which wouldn't improve a Sunday-school book much that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself! Oh, you were under good disci- pline ! And as you went fluttering up and down the room in your "undress uniform" you not only prattled undignified baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing "Rockaby baby in a tree-top," for instance. What a spectacle for an Army of the Tennessee ! And what an affliction for the neighbors, too, for it isn't everybody 90 BUDGE'S VERSION OF THE FLOOD. within a mile around that likes military music at three in the morning. And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet- head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, "Go on!" what did you do ? You simply went on, till you disap- peared in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything ! Why, one baby is just a house and a front-yard full by itself. One baby can fur- nish more business than you and your whole interior department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. Do what you please, you can't make him stay on the reservation. Sufficient unto the day is one baby ; as long as you are in your mind don't you ever pray for twins. Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of the babies. Think what is in store for the present crop. Fifty years hence we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still survive, let us hope it may will be floating over a re- public numbering 200,000,000 souls, accord- ing to the settled laws of our increase ; our present schooner of state will have grown into a political leviathan a Great Eastern and the cradled babies of to-day will be on deck. Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract on their hands. Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this na- tion would preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are. In one of these cradles the unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething think of it! and putting in a world of dead-earn- est, unai-ticulated, but perfectly justifiable profanity over it, too ; in another the future great historian is lying and doubtless he will continue to lie until his earthly mission is ended ; in another the future President is busying himself with no profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become ol his hair so early ; and in a mighty array o1 other cradles there are now some 60,000 fu- ture office-seekers getting ready to furnish him occasion to grapple with that same olc problem a second time ; and in still one more cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the Ameri can armies is so little burdened with his ap proaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, ai achievement which (meaning no disrespect the illustrious guest of this evening turne< At* whole attention to some fifty-six years ago And if the child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few will doubt that he succeeded. S. L. CLEMENS. PARAPHRASE FROM SENECA. Let him that will, ascend the tottering scat Of courtly grandeur, and become as great As are his mounting wishes ; as for me, Let sweet repose and rest my portion be ; Give me some mean obscure recess, a sphere Out of the road of business, or the fear Of falling lower ; where I sweetly may Myself and dear retirement still enjoy : Let not my life or name be known unto The grandees of the time, tost to and fro By censures or applause ; but let my age Slide gently b}' ; not overthwart the stage Of public action ; unheard, unseen, And unconcerned, as if I ne'er had been. And thus, while I shall pass my silent days In Hhndy privacy, free from the noise And bustles of the mad world, then shall I A good old innocent plebeian die. Death is a mere surprise, a very snare To him, that makes it his life's greatest care To be a public pageant ; known to all, But unacquainted with himself, doth fall. SIE MATTHEW HA LI. "BUDGE'S VERSION OF THE FLOOD." A CHAPTER FROM "HELEN'S BABIES." That afternoon I devoted to making a bou- quet for Miss Mayton, and a most delightful occupation I found it. It was no florist's bouquet, composed of only a few kinds of flowers, wired upon sticks, and arranged ac- cording to geometric pattern. I used many a rare flower, too shy of bloom to recommend itself to florists ; I combined tints almost as numerous as the flowers were, and perfumes to which city bouquets are utter strangers. At length it was finished, but my delight suddenly became clouded by the dreadful thought, " What will people say ?" Ah ! I had it. I had seen in one of the library-drawers a small pasteboard box, shaped like a band- box ; doubtless that would hold it. I found the box ; it was of just the size I needed, I dropped my card into the bottom no danger of a lady not finding the card accompanying a gift of flowers neatly fitted the bouquet in the center of the box, and went in search of BUDGE'S VERSION OF THE FLOOD. 91 Mike. He winked cheeringly as I explained the nature of his errand, and lie whispered : " I'll do it as clane as a whistle, yer honor. Mistress Clarkson's cook and mesilf under- sthand each other, an' I'm used to goin' up the back way. Niver a man can see but the angels, an' they won't tell." " Very well, Mike ; here's a dollar for you ; you'll find the box on the hat-rack, in the hall." Toddie disappeared somewhere, after sup- pCr, and came back very disconsolate. " Can't find my dolly's k'adle," he whined. "Never mind, old pet," said I soothingly. " Uncle will ride you on his foot." " But I want my dolly's k'adle," said he, piteously rolling out his lower lip. " Don't you want me to tell you a story?" For a moment Toddie' s face indicated a ter- rible internal conflict between old Adam and mother Eve ; but curiosity finally overpower- ed natural depravity, and Toddie murmured : " Yesh." " What shall I tell you about?" " 'Bout Nawndeark." " About ivhat? ? " " He means Noah an* the ark," exclaimed Budge. " Datsh what / shay Nawndeark," de- clared Toddie. " Well," said I, hastily refreshing my memory by picking up the Bible for Helen, like most people, is pretty sure to forget to pack her Bible when she runs away from home for a few days " well, once it rained forty days and nights, and everybody was drowned from the face of the earth excepting Noah, a righteous man, who was saved with all his family, in an ark which the Lord commanded him to build." " Uncle Harry," said Budge, after contem- plating me with open eyes and mouth for at least two minutes after I had finished, "do you think that's Noah ? " "Certainly, Budge; here's the whole storj in the Bible." "Well, /don't think it's Noah one single bit," said he, with increasing emphasis. "I'm beginning to think we read different Bibles, Budge ; but let's hear your version." "Huh?" " Tell me about Noah, if you know so much about him." " I will, if you want me to. Once the Lord felt so uncomfortable cos folks was bad that he was sorry he ever made anybody, or any world or anything, But Noah wasn't bad ; the Lord liked him first-rate, so he told Noah to build a big ark, and then the Lord would make it rain so everybody should be drownded but Noah an' his little boys a,n' girls, an' doggies an' pussies an' mamma- cows an' little-boy-cows an' little-girl-cows an' bosses an' everything; they'd go in the ark an' wouldn't get wetted a bit when it rained. An' Noah took lots of things to eat in the ark cookies an' milk an' oatmeal an' strawberries an' porgies an' oh, yes, plum- puddings an' pumpkin-pies. But Noah didn't want everybody to get drownded so he talked to the folks' and said, "It's goin' to rain awful pretty soon ; you'd better be good, an' then the Lord' 11 let you come into my ark.' An' they jus' said, ' Oh ! if it rains we'll go in the house till it stops ; ' an' other folks said, ' We ain' t afraid of rain ; we' ve got an um- brella.' An' some more said they wasn't goin' to be afraid of just a rain. But it did rain though, an' folks went in their houses, an' the water came in, an' they went upstairs, an' the water came up there, an' they got on the tops of the houses, an' up in big trees, an' up in mountains, an' the water went after 'em everywhere an' drownded everybody, only just except Noah an' the people in the ark. An' it rained forty days and nights, an' then it stopped, an' Noah got out of the ark, an' he an' his little boys and girls went wherever they wanted to, an' every- thing in the world was all theirs ; there wasn't anybody to tell 'em to go home, nor no kindergarten schools to go to, nor no bad boys to fight 'em, nor nothin'. Now tell us 'nother story." "An* I want my dolly's k'adle. Ocken Hawwy, I wants my dolly's k'adle, tause my dolly's in it, an' I want to shee her," inter- rupted Toddie. Just then came a knock at the door. "Come in !" I shouted. In stepped Mike, with an air of the greatest secrecy, handed me a letter and the identical box in whicli I had sent the flowers to Miss Mayton. What could it mean ? I hastily opened the envelope, and at the same time Toddie shrieked : " Oh, darsh my dolly's k'adle dare tizh !" snatched and opened the box, and displayed his doll ! My heart sickened, and did not regain its strength during the perusal of the following note : Miss Mayton herewith returns to Mr. Burton the package which just arrived, with his card. She recog- nizes the contents as a portion of the apparent property of one of Mr. Burton's nephews, but is unable to un- derstand why it should have been sent to her. "JUNE 20, 1875." " Toddie," I roared, as my younger nephew caressed his loathsome doll, and murmured endearing words to it, " where did you get that box ? " THE TREACHERY OF METTIUS. " On the hat-wack," replied the youth, with perfect fearlessness. "I keeps it in ze book-case djawer, an' somebody took it 'way an' put nasty ole flowers in it." "Where are those flowers?" I demanded. Toddie looked up with considerable sur- prise, but promptly replied : "I froed 'em away don't want no ole flowers in my dolly's k'adle. That's ze way Bhe wocks see ? ' ' J. HABBEBTON. THE LAOCOON. Laocoon ! thou great embodiment Of human life and human history ! Thou record of the pit-it, thou prophecy Of the sad future, thou majestic voice, Pealing along the ages from old time ! Thou wail of agonized humanity ! There lives no thought in marble like to thee ! Thou hast no kindred in the Vatican, But standest separate among the dreams Of old mythologies alone alone ! The beautiful Apollo at thy side Is but a marble dream, and dreams are all The gods and goddesses and fauns and fates That populate those wondrous halls ; but thou, Standing among them, liftost up thyself In majesty of meaning, till they sink Far from tho sight, no more significant Than the poor toys of children. For thou art A voice from out the world's experience, Speaking of all the generations past To all the generations yet to come Of the long struggle, the sublime despair, The wild and weary agony of man ! Ay, Adam and his offspring, in the toils Of the twin serpents Sin and Suffering, Thou dost impersonate ; and as I gaze Upon the twining monsters that enfold In unrelaxing, unrelenting coils, The awful energies, and plant their fangs Deep in thy quivering flesh, while still thy might In fierce convulsion foils the fateful wrench That would destroy thee, I am overwhelmed With a strange sympathy of kindred pain, And gee through gathering tears the tragedy, The curse and conflict of a ruined race ! Those Rhodian sculptors were gigantic men, Whose inspirations came from other source Than their religion, though they chose to speak Through its familiar language, men who saw, And, seeing quite divinely, felt how weak To cure the world's great woo were all the powers Whose reign their age acknowledged. So they sat The immortal three and pondered long and well What one. gr -at work should speak the truth for them,- What one great work should rise and testify That they had found the topmost fact of life, Above the reach of all philosophies And all religions every scheme of man To placate or dethrone. That fact they found, And moulded into form. The silly priest Whose desecrations of the altar stirred The vengeance of his God, and summoned forth The wreathed gorgons of the slimy deep To crush him and his children, was the word By which they spoke to their own age and race, That listened and applauded, knowing nut That high above the small significance They apprehended, rose the grand intent That mourned their doom and breathed a world's despair I Be sure it was no fable that inspired So grand an utterance. Perchance some leaf From an old Hebrew record had conveyed A knowledge of the genesis of man. Perchance some fine conception rose in them Of unity of nature and of race, Springing from one beginning. Nay, perchance Some vision flashed before their thoughtful eyes Inspired by God, which showed the mighty man, Who, unbegotten, had begot a race That to his lot was linked through countless time By living chains, from which in vain it strove To wrest its tortured limbs and leap amain To freedom and to rest ! It matters not : The double word the fable and the fact, The childish figment and the mighty truth, Are blent in one. The first was for a day And dying Rome ; the last for later time And all mankind. J. G. HOLLAND. THE TREACHERY OF METTIUS AND ITS PUNISHMENT. The peace after the combat between the Horatii and the Curiatii which resulted in a treaty of peace between the Romans and the Albans, was not of long continuance. Ihe dissatisfaction of the multitude, on account of the power and fortune of the state having been hazarded on three champions, perverted the unsteady mind of the dictator ; and as his designs, though honourable, had not been crowned with success, he endeavoured, by others of a different kind, to recover the es teem of his countrymen. With this view, therefore, as formerly, in time of war, he had sought peace, so now, when peace was established, he as ardently wished for war : but, perceiving that his own state possessed more courage than strength, he persuaded other nations to make war, openly, by order of their governments, reserving to his own people the part of effecting their purposes, THE TREACHERY OF METTIUS. 93 by treachery, under the mask of allies. The Fidenatians, a Roman colony, being assured of the concurrence of the Veientians, and receiving from the Albans a positive engage- ment to desert to their side, were prevailed on to take arms and declare war. Fidenae having thus openly revolted, Tullus, after summoning Mettius and his army from Alba, marched against the enemy, and passing the Anio, pitched his camp at the conflux of the rivers. Between that place, and Fidenae, the Veientians had crossed the Tiber, and, in the line of battle, they composed the right wing near the river, the Fidenatians being posted on the left towards the mountains. Tullus drew up his own men facing the Veientians, and posted the Albans opposite to the troops of the Fidenatians. The Alban had not more resolution than fidelity, so that, not daring either to keep his ground, or openly to de- sert, he filed otf slowly towards the moun- tains. When he thought he had proceeded to a sufficient distance, he ordered the whole line to halt, and being still irresolute, in order to waste dine, he employed himself in forming the ranks : his scheme was to join his forces to whichever of the parties fortune should favour with victory. At first, the Romans who stood nearest were astonished at finding their flank left uncovered, by the departure of their allies, and, in a short time, a horseman at full speed brought an account to the King that the Albans were retreating. Tullus, in this perilous juncture, vowed to institute twelve new Salian priests, and also to build temples to Paleness and Terror ; then, rebuking the horseman with a loud voice, that the enemy might hear, he ordered him to return to the fight, telling him, that ' there was no occasion for any uneasiness ; that it was by his order the Alban army was wheeling round, in order to fall upon the un- protected rear of the Fidenatians." He com- manded him, also, to order the cavalry to raise their spears aloft ; and, this being per- formed, intercepted, from a great part of the infantry, the view of the Alban army retreat- ing ; while those who did see them, believing what the King had said, fought with the greater spirit. The fright was now trans- ferred to the enemy, for they had heard what the King had spoken aloud, and many of the Fidenatians understood the Latine tongue, as having been intermixed with Romans in the colony. Wherefore, dreading lest the Albans might run down suddenly from the hills, and cut off their retreat to the town, they betook themselves to flight. Tullus pressed them close, and after routing this wing composed of the Fidenatians, turned back with double fury against the Veientians, now disheartened by the dismay of the other wing. Neither could they withstand his attack, and the river intercepting them behind, prevented a precipitate flight. As soon as they reached this, in their retreat, some, shamefully throw- ing away their arms, plunged desperately into the water, and the rest, hesitating on the bank, irresolute whether to fight or fly, were overpowered and cut off. Never before had the Romans been engaged in so desperate an action. When all was over, the Alban troops, who had been spectators of the engagement, marched down into the plain, and Mettius congratulated Tullus on his victory over the enemy. Tullus answered him, without shew- ing any sign of displeasure, and gave orders that the Albans should, with the favour of fortune, join their camp with that of the Romans, and appointed a sacrifice of purifi- cation to be performed next day. As soon as it was light, all things being prepared in the usual manner, he commanded both armies to be summoned to an assembly. The heralds, beginning at the outside, summoned the Al- bans first ; and they, struck with the novelty of the affair, and wishing to hear the Roman king delivering a speech, took their places nearest to him : the Roman troops, under arms, pursuant to directions previously given, formed a circle round them, and a charge was given to the centurions to execute with- out delay such orders as they should receive. Then Tullus began in this manner; " If ever, Romans, there has hitherto occurred, at any time, or in any war, an occasion that called on you to return thanks, first, to the im- mortal gods, and, next, to your own valour, it was the battle of yesterday : for ye had to struggle not only with your enemies, but, what is a more difficult and dangerous strug- gle, with the treachery and perfidy of your allies : for I will now undeceive you ; it was not by my order that the Albans withdrew to the mountains, nor was what ye heard me say, the issuing of orders, but a stratagem, and a pretext of having given orders, to the end that while ye were kept in ignorance of your being deserted, your attention might not be drawn away from the fight ; and that, at the same time, the enemy, believing them- selves to be surrounded on the rear, might be struck with terror and dismay : but the guilt which I am exposing to you, extends not to all the Albans : they followed their leader, as ye would have done, had I chosen that the army should make any movement from the ground which it occupied. Mettius there was the leader of that march, the same Mettius was the schemer of this war. Met- tius it was who broke the league between the 94 THE CLOSING SCENE. Romans and Albans. May others dare to commit like crimes, if I do not now make him a conspicuous example to all mankind." On this the centurions in arms gathered round Mettius, and the King proceeded in his dis- course: "Albans, be the measure prosper- ous, fortunate, and happy to the Roman peo- ple, to me, and to you ; it is my intention to remove the entire people of Alba to Rome, to g ; ve to the commons the privileges of citizens, and to enroll the principal inhabitants amomg the fathers, to form of the whole one city, ore republic. As the state of Alba, from being one people, was heretofore divided into two, so let these be now re-united." On hearing this, the Alban youth who were un- armed, and surrounded by armed troops, however different their sentiments were, yet, being all restrained by the same apprehen- sions, kept a profound silence. Tullus then said, " Mettius Fuffetius, if you were capa- ble of learning to preserve faith, and a regard to treaties, I should suffer you to live, and supply you with instructions ; but your dis- position is incurable : let your punishment, thep, teach mankind to consider those things as sacred, which you have dared to violate. As, therefore, you lately kept your mind divided between the interest of the Fidena- tiann and of the Romans, so shall you now have your body divided and torn in pieces." Then two chariots being brought, each drawn by four horses, he tied Mettius extended at full length, to the carriages of them, and the horses being driven violently in different di- rections, bore away on each carriage part of his mangled body, with the limbs which were fastened by the cords. The eyes of all were turned with horror from this shocking spec- tacle. This was the first, and the last, in- stance among the Romans, of any punish- ment inflicted without regard to the laws of humanity. In every other case, we may justly boast, that no nation in the world has shewn greater mildness. LIVT. THE CLOSING SCENE. THOMAS BUCHANAN READ. THOMAS BUCHANAN READ, an American painter and poet, born in Pennsylvania, 1822, died in New York, 1872. Many volumes of his poems have appeared from 1847 to 1807, and he edited in 1848 a collection of the " Female Poets of America." Within the sober realm of leafless trees, The russet year inhaled the dreamy air; Like some binned reaper, in his hour of ease, When all the fields are lying brown and bare. The gray barns looking from their hazy hills, O'er the dun waters widening in the vales, Sent down the air a greeting to the mills On the dull thunder of alternate flails. All sights were mellowed and all sounds subdued, The hills seemed further and the stream gang low, As in a dream the distant woodman hewed His winter log with many a muffled blow. The embattled forests, erewhile armed with gold, Their banners bright with every martial hue, Now stood like some sad, beaten host of old, Withdrawn afar in Time's remotest blue. On somber wings the vulture tried his flight ; The dove scarce heard his sighing mate's complaint ; And, like a star slow drowning in the light, The village church vane seemed to pale and faint. The sentinel cock upon the hillside crew, Crew thrice, and all was stiller than before ; Silent, till some replying warden blew His alien horn, and then was heard no more. Where erst the jny, within the elm's tall crest, Made garrulous trouble round her unfledged young ; And where the oriole hung her swaying nest, By every light wind like a censer swung , Where sang the noisy martins of the eves, The busy swallows circling ever near, Foreboding, as the rustic mind believes, An early harvest and a plenteous year; Where every bird that waked the vernal feast Shook the sweet slumber from its wings at morn, To warn the reaper of the rosy east ; All now was sunless, empty, and forlorn. Alone, from out the stubble, piped the quail ; And croaked the crow through all the dreary gloom; Alone, the pheasant, drumming in the vale, Made echo in the distance to the cottage-loom. There was no bud, no bloom upon the bowers ; The spiders moved their thin shrouds night by night The thistle-down, the only ghost of flowers, Sailed slowly by, passed noiseless out of sight. Amid all this in this most dreary air, And where the woodbine shed upon the porch Its crimson leaves, as if the year stood there, Firing the floor with its inverted torch, Amid all this, the center of the scene, The white-haired matron, with monotonous tread, Plied the swift wheel, and with her joyless mien Sat like a fate, and watched the flying thread. She had known Sorrow. He had walked with her, Oft supped, and broke with her the ashen crust, And in the dead leaves still she heard the stir Of his thick mantle trailing in the dust. THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPEROR OTHO. 95 While yet her cheek was bright with summer bloom, Her country summoned and she gave her all ; And twice War bowed to her his sable plume, Ke-gave the sword to rust upon the wall. He-gave the sword, but not tho hand that drew And struck for liberty the dying blow ; Kor him who, to his sire and country true, Fell mid the ranks of the invading foe. Long, but not loud, the droning wheel went on, Like the low murmur of a hive at noon ; Long, but not loud, the memory of the gone Breathed through her lips a sad and tremulous tune. At last the thread was snapped, her head was bowed ; Life dropped the distaff through her hands serene ; And loving neighbors smoothed her careful shroud, While death and winter closed the autumn scene. THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPEROR OTHO. C. CORNELIUS TACITCS, the great Roman historian, whose birth is of uncertain date, wrote in the first cen- tury of the Christian era. Ho acquired great reputa- tion both as un orator and as an author. His " Agri- cola " is a charming biography of his father-in-law. His " Manners of the Germans," " History " and " An- nals " constitute his other works, all of which evince a powerful mind, and a skill in condensation sufficiently rare among historians ancient or modern. Otho, in the mean time having taken his resolution, waited, without trepidation, for an account of the event. First, rumors of a melancholy character reached his ears ; soon after, fugitives, who escaped from the field, brought sure intelligence that all was lost. The fervor of the soldiers staid not for the voice of the emperor; they bade him sum- mon up his best resolution : there were forces still in reserve, and in their prince's cause they were ready to suffer and dare the ut- most. Nor was this the language of flattery : impelled by a kind of frenzy and like men possessed, they were all on fire to go to the field and restore the state of their party. The men who stood at a distance stretched forth their hands in token of their assent, while such as gathered round the prince clasped his knees ; Plotius Firmus being the most zealous. This officer commanded the praetorian guards. He implored his master not to abandon an army devoted to his inter- est ; a soldiery who had undergone so much in his cause. " It was more magnanimous," they said, " to bear up against adversity, than to shrink from it ; the brave and stren- uous sustained themselves upon hope, even against the current of fortune, the timorous and abject only allowed their fears to plunge them into despair." While uttering these words, accordingly as Otho relaxed or stiff- ened the muscles of his face, they shouted or groaned. Nor was this spirit confined to the praetorians, the peculiar soldiers of Othc ; the detachment sent forward by the Moesian legions brought word that the same zeal per- vaded the coming army, and that the legions had entered Aquileia. Whence it is evident that a fierce and bloody war, the issue of which could not have been foreseen by the victors or the vanquished, might have been still carried on. Otho himself was averse to any plans of prosecuting the war, and said: "To expose to further perils such spirit and such virtue as you now display, would, I deem, be pay- ing too costly a price for my life. The more brilliant the prospects which you hold out to me, were I disposed to live, the more glorious will be my death. I and Fortune have made trial of each other; for what length of time is not material ; but the felicity which does not promise to last, it is more difficult to en- joy with moderation. Vitellius began the civil war ; and he originated our contest for the princedom. It shall be mine to estab- lish a precedent by preventing a second battle for it. By this let posterity judge of Otho. Vitellius shall be blest with his broth- er, his wife, and children. I want no revenge, nor consolations. Others have held the sov- ereign power longer ; none have resigned it with equal fortitude. Shall I again suffer so many of the Roman youth, so many gallant armies, to be laid low, and cut off from the commonwealth? Let this resolution of yours to die for me, should it be necessary, attend me in my departure ; but live on yourselves. Neither let me long obstruct your safety, nor do you retard the proof of my constancy. To descant largely upon our last moments is the act of a dastard spirit. Hold it as an eminent proof of the fixedness of my pur- pose, that I complain of no man : for to ar- raign gods or men, is the part of one who fain would live." Having thus declared his sentiments, he talked with his friends, addressing each in courteous terms, according to his rank, his age, or dignity, and endeavored to induce all, the young in an authoritative tone, the old by entreaties, to depart without loss of time, and not aggravate the resentment of the conquerors by remaining with him. His countenance serene, his voice firm, and en- deavoring to repress the tears of his friends THE LITTLE MAN ALL IN GREY. as uncalled-for, he ordered boats or carriages for those who were willing to depart. Papers and letters, containing strong expressions of duty toward himself, or ill-will toward Vitel- lius, he committed to the flames. He distri- buted money in presents, but not with the profusion of a man quitting the world. Then, observing his brother's son, Salvius Coccei- anus, in the bloom of youth, and distressed and weeping, he even comforted him, com- mending his duty, but rebuking his fears : "Could it be supposed that Vitellius, finding his own family safe, would refuse, inhuman- ly, to return the generosity shown to him- self? By hastening his death," he said, "he should establish a claim upon his clem- ency ; since, not in the extremity of despair, but at a time when the army was clamor- ing for another battle, he had made his death an offering to his country. For himself, he had gained ample renown, and left to his family enough of lustre. After the Julian race, the Claudian, and the Servian, he was the first who carried the sovereignty into a new family. Wherefore he should cling to life with lofty aspirations, and neither forget at any time that Otho was his uncle, nor re- member it overmuch." After this, his friends having all with- drawn, he reposed awhile. When lo ! while his mind was occupied with the last act of his life, he was diverted from his purpose by a sudden uproar. The soldiers, he was told, were in a state of frenzy and riot, threaten- ing destruction to all who offered to depart, and directing their fury particularly against Verginius, whom they kept besieged in his house, which he had barricaded. Having reproved the authors of the disturbance, he returned, and devoted himself to bidding adieu to those who were going away, until they had all departed in security. Toward the close of day he quenched his thirst with a draught of cold water, and then ordered two poniards to be brought to him. He tried the points of both, and laid one under his head. Having ascertained that his friends were safe on their way, he passed the night in quidt, and, as we are assured, even slept. At the dawn of day he applied the weapon to his breast, and fell upon it. On hearing his dying groans, his freedmen and slaves, and with them Flotius Firmus, the praetor- ian prajfect, found that with one wound he had dispatched himself. His funeral obse- quies were performed without delay. This had been his earnest request, lest his head should be cut off and be made a public spec- tacle. He was borne on the shoulders of the praetorian soldiers, who kissed his hands and his wounds, amidst tears and praises. Some of the soldiers slew themselves at the funeral pile : not from any consciousness of guilt, nor from fear ; but in emulation of the bright example of their prince, and to show their affection. At Bedriacum, Placentia, and other camps, numbers of every rank adopted that mode of death. A sepulchre was raised to the memory of Otho, of ordi- nary structure, but likely to endure. Such was the end of Otho, in the thirty- seventh year of his age. He was born in the municipal city of Ferentum. His father was of consular rank ; his grandfather of praetor- ian. By the maternal line his descent was respectable, though not equally illustrious. The features of his character, as well in his earliest days as in the progress of his youth, have been already delineated. By two ac- tions, one atrocious and detestable, the other great and magnanimous, he earned an equal degree of honor and infamy among pos- terity. THE LITTLE MAN ALL IN GREY. JEAN PIEBBE DE BEEANOER, a French lyric poet, born 1790, died 1857, was one of the most widely popular of Trench writers. An ardent Republican, his political verses brought him fine and imprisonment, but his in- dependence resisted alike persecution and blandishments. The light spirit, gayety and bonhommie of his poems pro- duce the happiest effects by the most simple and inimit- able touches. In Paris a queer little man you may see, A little man all in grey ; Kosy and round as an apple is he, Content with the present, whate'er it may be, While from care and from cash he is equally free, And merry both night and day ! " Mafoi I I laugh at the world," says he, " I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me ! " What a gay little man in grey ! He runs after the girls, like a great many more, This little man all in grey ; He sings, falls in love and in debt o'er and o'er, And drinks without wasting a thought on the score ; And then in the face of a dun shuts his door, Or keeps out of the bailiff's way. " Mafoi I I laugh at the world," says he, " I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at mo ! " What a gay little man in grey ! When the rain comes in through the broken panes, This little man all in grey Goes to bed content, and never complains, And, though winter be chilling the blood in his reins WILD NATURE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. 97 Blows his fro?t-bitten fingers, and merrily feigns JS'ot to care for a lire to-day I * JlTa/oi .' I laugh at the world," says he, " I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me ! " What a gay little man iu grey ! The prettiest wife one need wish to possess Has this little man all in grey ; But the world will talk and I must confess That her exquisite taste and her elegant dress Leads others to wonder perhaps to guess That her lovers perchance may pay. Still her husband looks on. " Ma foi ! " says he, " I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me ! " \Vhat a gay little man in grey ! Now racked by the gout on his comfortless bed Lies this little man all in grey ; And the priest, with his book and his shaven head, Comes and talks of the devil, the grave, and the dead, Till the sick man's patience is wholly fled, And he frightens the priest away ! " Ma foi I I laugh at the devil," says he, " I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me ! " What a gay little man in grey ! TRANSLATED BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS. A PICTURE OF WILD NATURE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. FRANCOIS AUOUSTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND, a distin- guished French writer, born 1709, died 1848. He visited the United States at the age of twenty-two, and from tlie primeval forests of the south was drawn the inspira- tion of some of his most romantic works. His " Alula" (1801), " Genius of Christiinltij" (1802), " The Martyrs" (180'J), and " Journey from Paris to Jerusalem," (1811), are the most valuable of his voluminous works. His style is highly poetical, and his descriptions of natural scenery are eminently fine. France formerly possessed in North Ame- rica a vast empire, extending from Labrador to the Floridas, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the most distant lakes of Upper Canada. Four great rivers, deriving their sources from the same mountains, divided these im- mense regions: the River St. Lawrence, which is lost to the east in the gulf of that name; the Western River, whose waters flow on to seas then unknown ; the river Bourbon, which runs from south to north into Hudson Bay; and the Mississippi, whose waters fall from north to south into the Gulf of Mexico, The last-named river, in its course of more than a thousand leagues, waters a delicious country called by the inhabitants of the United States the New Eden, to which the VOL. T. French left the pretty appellation of Louisi- ana. A thousand other rivers tributaries of the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Arkansas, the Wabache, the Tennessee en- rich it with their mud and fertilize it with their waters. When all these rivers have been swollen by the deluges of winter, up- rooted trees, forming large portions of forests torn down by tempests, crowd about their sources. In a short time the mud cements the torn tree together, and they become in- chained by creepers' which, taking root in every direction, bind and consolidate the de- bris. Carried away by the foaming waves, the rafts descend to the Mississippi ; which, taking possession of them, hurries them down towards the Gulf of Mexico, throws them upon sand-banks, and so increases the num- ber of its mouths. At intervals the swollen river raises its voice whilst passing over the resisting heaps, and spreads its overflowing waters around the colonnades of the forests, and the pyramids of the Indian tombs ; and so the Mississippi is the Nile of these deserts. But grace is always united to splendor in scenes of nature : while the midstream bears away towards the sea the dead trunks of pine-trees and oaks, the lateral currents on either side convey along the shores floating islands of pistias and nenuphars, whose yel- low roses stand out like little pavilions. Green serpents, blue herons, pink flamingoes, and baby crocodiles embark as passengers on these rafts of flowers ; and the brilliant colony unfolding to the wind its golden sails, giides along slumberingly till it arrives at some retired creek in the river. The two shores of the Mississippi present the most extraordinary picture. On the western border vast savannahs spread away farther than the eye can reach, and their waves of verdure, as they recede, appear to rise gradually into the azure sky, where they fade away. In these limitless meadows herds of three or four thousand wild buffaloes wan- der at random. Sometimes cleaving the waters as it swims, a bison, laden with years, comes to repose among the high grass on an island of the Mississippi, its forehead orna- mented with two crescents, and it? ancient and slimy beard giving it the appearance of a god of the river, throwing an eye of satisfac- tion upon the grandeur of its waters, and the wild abundance of its shores. Such is the scene upon the western border ; but it changes on the opposite side, which forms an admirable contrast with the other shore. Suspended along the course of tht waters, grouped upon the rocks and upon the mountains, and dispersed in the valley^ trees of every form, of every colour, and of 7 98 ON OLD AGE. every perfume, throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. AVild vines, big- rionias, coloquintidas, intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks, arid creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the holly-hock, and thus forming thousands ot grottoes, arches, and porticoes. Often, in their wanderings from trees, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers. Out of the midst of these masses, the magnolia, raising its motionless cone, surmounted by large white buds, commands all the forest, where it has no other rival than the palm-tree which gently waves, close by, its fans of verdure. A multitude of animals, placed in these re- treats by the hand of the Creator, spread about life and enchantment. From the ex- tremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees ; cariboos bathe in the lake ; black squirrels play among the thick foliage ; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows fly down upon the turf reddened with strawberries ; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas ; and bird-catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where they swing about like the creepers themselves. If all is silence and repose in the savannahs on the other side of the river, all here, on the contrary, is sound and motion, peckirigs against the trunks of the oaks, frictions of animals walking along as they nibble or crush between their teeth the stones of fruits, the roaring of the waves, plaintive cries, dull bellowings and mild cooings, fill these deserts with tender, yet wild harmony. But when a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing these floating bodies, to confound these masses of white, blue, green, and pink, to mix all the colours and to combine all the murmurs, there issue such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pass before the eyes, that I should in vain en- deavour to describe them to those who have never visited these primitive fields of nature. WINIFREDA. Away, let naught to love displeasing, My Winifreda, move your care, Let naught delay the heavenly blessing, Nor squeamish pride nor gloomy fear. What though no grants of royal donors With pompous titles grace our blood ? We'll shine in more substantial honors, And to be noble we'll be good. Our name, while virtue thus we tender, Will sweetly sound where'er 'tis spoke , And all the great ones, they shall wonder How they respect such little folk. What though from fortune's lavish bounty No mighty treasures we possess, We'll find within our pittance plenty, And be content without excess. Still shall each kind returning season Sufficient for our wishes give ; 1'or we will live a life of reason, And that's the only life to live. Through youth and age in love excelling. We'll hand in hand together tread ; Sweet smiling peace shall crown our dwelling, And babes, sweet smiling babes, our bed. How should I love the pretty creatures, While round my knees they fondly clung ; To see them look their mother's features, To hear them lisp their mother's tongue. And when with envy time transported, Shall think to rob us of our joys, You'll in your girls again be courted, And I'll go wooing in my boys. ANONYMOUS. ON OLD AGE. What, therefore, should I fear, if after death I am sure either not to be miserable or to be happy ? Although who is so foolish, though he be young, as to be assured that he will live even till the evening? Nay, that period of life has many more probabilities of death than ours has : young men more read- ily fall into disease, sufier more severely, are cured with more difficulty, and therefore few arrive at old age. Did not this happen so, we should live better and more wisely, for in- telligence, and reflection, and judgment re- side in old men, and if there had been none of them, no states could exist at all. But I return to the imminence of death. What charge is that against old age, since you see it to be common to youth also ? I experi- enced not only in the case of my own excel- lent son, but also in that of your brothers, Scipio, men plainly marked out for the high- ON OLD AGE. est distinction, that death was common to every period of life. Yet a young man hopes that he will live a long time, which expecta- tion an old man cannot entertain. His hope is but a foolish one : for what man can be more foolish than to regard uncertainties as certainties, delusions as truths ? An old man indeed has nothing to hope for; yet he is in so much the happier state than a young one ; since he has already attained what the other is only hoping for. The one is wishing to live long, the other has lived long. And yet, good gods ! what is there in man's life that can be called long? For allow the latest period : let us anticipate the age of the kings of the Tartessii. For there dwelt, as I find it recorded, a man named Arganthonius at Gades, who reigned for eighty years, and lived a hundred and twenty. But to my mini, nothing whatever seems of long dura- tion, in which there is any end. For when that arrives, then the time which has passed has flowed away ; that only remains which you have secured by virtue and right conduct. Hours indeed depart from us, and days and years ; nor does past time ever return, nor c in it be discovered what is to follow. What- ever time is assigned to each to live, with that he ought to be content : for neither need the drama be performed by the actor, in order to give satisfaction, provided he be ap- proved in whatever act he may be ; nor need the wise man live till the plaitdite. For the short period of life is long enough for living well and honorably ; and if you should ad- vance further, you need no more grieve than farmers do when the loveliness of spring- time hath past, that summer and autumn have come. For spring represents the time of youth, and gives promise of the future fruits : the remaining seasons are intended for plucking and gathering in those fruits. Now the harvest of old age, as I have often said, is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured. In truth every- thing that happens agreeably to nature is to be reckoned among blessings. What, how- ever, is so agree ible to nature as for an old man to die? which even is the lot of the young, though nature opposes and resists. And thus it is that young men seem to me to die, just a^ when the violence of flame is ex- tinguished by a flood of water ; whereas old nnn die, as the exhausted fire goes out, spon- taneously, without the exertion of any force : and as fruits when they are green are plucked by force from the trees, but when ripe and mellow drop off", so violence takes away their lives from youths, maturity from old men ; a state which to me indeed is so delightful, that the nearer I approach to death, I seem as it were to be getting sight of lnd, and at length, after a long voyage, to be just coming into harbor. Of all the periods of life there is a definite limit, but of old age there is no limit fixed ; and life goes on very well in 11, so long as you are able to follow up and attend to the duty of your situation, and, at the same time, to care nothing about death ; whence it hap- pens that old age is even of higher spirit and bolder than youth. Agreeable to this was the answer given to Pisistratus, the tyrant, by Solon ; when on the former iiMjdiring " in reliance on what hope he so boldly withstood him," the latter is said to have answered, "old age." The happiest end of life is this when the mind and the other senses being unimpaired, the same nature, wnieh put it together, takes asunder her own work. As in the case of a ship or a house, he who built them takes them down most easily ; so the same nature which has compacted man, most easily breaks him up. Besides, every fasten- ing of glue, when fresh, is with difficulty torn asunder, but easily when tried by time. Hence it is that that short remnant of life should be neither greedily coveted, nor without reason given up : and Pythagoras forbids us to abandon the station or post of life without the orders of our commander, that is of God. There is, indeed, a saying of the wise Solon, in which he declares that he does not wish his own death to be unattended by the grief and lamentation of friends. He wishes, I sup- pose, that he should be dear to his friends. But I know not whether Ennius does not say with more propriety: "Let no one pay me honor with tears nor celebrate my funeral with mourning." He conceives that a death ought not to be lamented which an immortality follows. Be- sides, a dying man may have some degree of consciousness, but that for a short time, es- pecially, in the case of an old man, after death, indeed, consciousness eith- er does not exist, or it is a thing to be de- sired. But this ought to be a subject of study from our youth to be indifferent about death ; without which study no one can be of tran- quil mind. For die we certainly must, and it is uncertain whether or not on this very day. He, therefore, who at all hours dreads impending death, how can he be at peace in his mind? Concerning which there seems to be no need of such long discussion, when I call to mind net only Lucius Brutus, who was slain in liberating his country ; nor the two Decii, who spurred on their steeds to a vol- untary death; nor Marcus Atilius, who set out to execution, that he might keep a prom- ise pledged to the *nemy ; nor the two Scipios, 100 THE BILL OF MORTALITY. who even with their very bodies sought to obstruct the inarch of the Carthaginians ; nor your grandfather Lucius Paulus, who by his death atoned for the temerity of his colleague in the disgraceful defeat at Carince ; nor Mar- cus Marcellus, whose corpse not even the most merciless foe suffered to go without the honor of sepulture ; but that our legions, as 1 have remarked in my Antiquities, have of- ten gone with cheerful and undaunted mind to that place, from which they believed that they should never return. Shall, then, well- instructed old men be afraid of that which young men, and they not only ignorant, but mere peasants, despise? On the whole, as it seems to me indeed, a satiety of all pursuits causes a satiety of life. There are pursuits peculiar to boyhood; do therefore young men regret the loss of them? There are also some of early youth ; does that now set- tled age, which is called middle life, seek af- ter these ? There are also some of this period ; neither are they looked for by old age. There are some final pursuits of old age; accord- ingly, as the pursuits of the earlier parts of life fall into disuse so also do those of old age; and when this has taken place, satiety of life brings on the seasonable period of death. Indeed I do not see why I should not ven- ture to tell you what I myself think concern- ing death, because I fancy I see it so much the more clearly, in proportion as I am less distant from it. I am persuaded that your fathers, Publius Scipio and Caius Lselius, men of the greatest eminence and very dear friends of mine, are living; and that life too which alone deserves the name of life. For whilst we are shut up in this prison of the body we are fulfilling as it were the func- tion and painful task of destiny, for the heaven-born soul has been degraded from its dwelling-place above, and as it were buried in the earth, a situation uncongenial to its di- vine and immortal nature. But I believe that the immortal gods have shed souls into hu- man bodies, that beings might exist who might tend the earth, and by contemplating the order of the heavenly bodies, might imi- tate it in the manner and regularity of lives. Nor have reason and argument alone influ- enced me thus to believe, but likewise the high name and authority of the greatest phi- losophers. I used to hear that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, who were all but our neighbors, who were formerly called the Ital- ian philosophers, had no doubt that we pos- sess souls derived from the universal divine mind. Moreover, the arguments were con- clusive to me, which Socrates delivered on the last day of his life concerning the immortality of the soul, he who was pronounced by the oracle of Apollo the wisest of all men. But why say more? I have thus persuaded my- self, such is my belief: that since such is the activity of our souls, so tenacious their mem- ory of things past, and their sagacity regard- ing things future so many arts, so many sciences, so many discoveries, that the na- ture which comprises these qualities cannot be mortal ; and since the mind is ever in ac- tion and has no source of motion, because it moves itself, I believe that it never will find any end of motion, because it never will part from itself; and since the nature of the soul is uncompounded, and has not in itself any admixture heterogeneous and dissimilar to itself, I maintain that it cannot undergo dis- solution ; and if this be not possible, it can- not perish : and it is a strong argument, that men know very many things before they are born, since when mere boys, while they are learning difficult subjects, they so quickly catch up numberless ideas, that they seem not to be learning them then for the first time, but to remember them, and to be calling them to recollection. Thus did our Plato argue. CICEBO. THE BILL OF MORTALITY. Pallida Mors cequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas, Regumque turres. Hor,ice Pale Death with equal foot strikes wide the door Of royal halls and hovels of the poor. While thirteen moons saw smoothly ran The Neu's barge-laden wave, All these, life's rambling journey done, Have found their home, the grave. Was man (frail always) made more frail Than in foregoing years? Did famine or did plague prevail, That so much death appears ? Ko; these were vigorous as their j .r.v,, Nor plague nor famine came ; This annual tribute Death requiies, And never waives his claim. Like crowded forest-trees we star, i, Anu some are mark'd to fall ; The axe will smite at God's comma ad. And soon shall smite us all. Green as the bay tree, ever green. With its new foliage on, The say, the thoughtless, have I *eon I pass'd and they were gone. THE DREAM. 1U1 Bead, ye that run, the awful truth With which I charge my page I A worm is in the bud of youth, And at the root of age. No present health can health insure For yet an hour to come ; No medicine, though it oft can cure, (Jan always balk the tomb. And oh ! that humble as my lot, And scorn'd as is my strain, These truths, though known, too much forgot, I may not teach in vain. WM. COWPER. "THE LOST AND DELICIOUS LEISURE OF THE OLDEN TIME." FROM "ADAM BEDE." Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from afternoon church as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder ; when Sunday books had most of them old brown leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philoso- phers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them ; it only cre- ates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now eager for amuse- ment ; prone to excursion-trains, art mu- seums, periodical literature, and exciting novels ; prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage ; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensa- tions which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of ex- cellent digestion of quiet perceptions, undis- eased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and home- steads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sun- shine, or of sheltering himself under the or- chard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so ; for he had an easy, jolly con- science, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port wine not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure ; he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoon ? Fine old Leisure ! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard , he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the I'imes, or Sartor Resartus. GEORGE ELIOT. THE DREAM. No victor that in battle spent, When he at night asleep doth lie Kich in a conquered monarch's tent, E'er had so vain a dream as I. Methought I saw the earliest shade And sweetest that the spring can spread, Of jasmin, briar, and woodbine made; And there I saw Clorinda dead. Though dead she lay, yet could I see No cypress nor no mourning yew ; Nor yet the injured lover's tree ; No willow near her coffin grew. But all showed unconcerned to be, As if just Nature there did strive To be as pitiless as she Was to her lover when alive. And now, methought, I lost all care, In losing her ; and was as free As birds let loose into the air, Or rivers that are got to sea, Methought Love's monarchy was gone ; And whilst elective members sway Our choice, and change makes power our And those court us whom we obey. Yet soon, now from my Princess free, I rather frantic grew than glad, For subjects, getting liberty, Get but a license to be mad. Birds that are long in cages awed, If they get out, awhile will roam ; But straight want skill to live abroad, Then pine and hover near their home. 102 LIFE IN AS-YOU-LIKE. And to the ocean rivers run From being pent in buiiks of flowers ; Not knowing that the exhaling sun Will send them back in weeping showers. Soon thus for pride of liberty I low desires of bondage found ; And vanity of being free Bred the discretion to be bound. But as dull subjects see too late Their safety in monarchal reign, Finding their freedom in a State Is but proud strutting in a chain ; Then growing wiser, when undone, In winter nights sad stories sing In praise of monarchs long since gone, To whom their bells they yearly ring ; So now I mourned that she was dead, Whose single power did govern me ;. And quickly was by reason led To find the harm of liberty. Even so the lovers cf this land (Love's empire in Clorinda gone) Though they were quit from Lov/s command, And beauty's world was all their o>vn. But lovers, who are Nature's best Old subjects, never long revolt ; They soon in passion's war contest, Yet in their march soon make a halt. And those, when by my mandates brought Near dead Clorinda, ceased to boast Of freedom found, and wept for thought Of their delightful bondage lost. And now the day to night was turned, Or sadly night's close mourning wore ; All maids Cor one another mourned, That lovers now could love no more. All lovers quickly did perceive They had on earth no more to do Than civilly to take their leave, As worthies that to dying go. Aud now all quires her dirges sing, In shades of cypress and of yew ; 'me bells of every temple ring, Where maids their withered garlands strew. To such extremes did sorrow rise, That it transcended speech and form, And was so lost to ears and eyes As seamen sinking in a storm. My soul, in sieep's soft fetters bound, Did now for vital freedom strive ; And stralgnt, by horror waked, I found The fair (Jiorinda still alive. Yet she's to me but such a light, As are the stars to those who know We can at most but guess their height, And hope they mind us here below. SIB WILLIAM DAVEMANT. LIFE IN AS-YOU-LIKE. As-you-like is a monarchy ; a limited mon- archy. At the time I dwelt there, the crown was worn by King Abdomen, almost the gieat- est man that ever walked. His natural ac- complishments were many, he was held to make a more melodious sneeze than any man in the universe. He invented buttons, the people of As-you-like before his time tying their clothes about them with strings. He also in- vented quart goblets. He was the son of King Stubborn, known as the King of the Shortwools. After the king came the nobility ; that is the men who had shown themselves better than other men, and those virtues were work- ed into their titles. Thus there was the Duke of Lovingkincl- ness ; the Marquis of Sensibility ; the Earl of Tenderheart ; the Baron of Hospitality, and so forth. Touching, too, was the herald- ry of As-you-like. The royal arms were, charity healing a bruised lamb, with the le- gend, Dieu et paix. And then for the coach- panels of the aristocracy, I have stood by the hour, at holiday times, watching them ; and tears have crept into my eyes, and my heart has softened under their delicious influence. There were no lions, griffins, panthers, lynxes no swords or daggers no short ver- bial incitements to man-quelling. Oh, no ! One nobleman would have for his bearings a large wheaten loaf, with the legend Ask and have. Another would have a hand bearing a purse, with the question Who lacks ? An- other would have a truckle-bed painted on his panels, with the words To the tired and footsore,. Another would display some come- ly garment, with New clothes for rags. Oh ! I could go through a thousand of such bear- ings, all with the prettiest quaintness show- ing the soft fleshly heart of the nobleman, and inviting, with all the brief simplicity of true tenderness, the hungry, the poor, the weary, and the sick, to come, feed, and be comforted. And these men were the nobility of As-you- like ; nor was there even a dog to show his democratic teeth at them. The church was held in deepest reverence. Happy was the man who, in his noon- day walk, should meet a bishop ; for it was held by him as an omen of every manner of good fortune. This beautiful superstition arose, doubtless, from the love and veneration paid LIFE IN AS-YOU-LIKE. 103 by the people to ihe ministers of religion, who from their tenderness, their piety, their affection towards their flocks, were looked upon as the very porters to heaven. The love of the people placed in the hands of their bishops heaps of money ; but as quickly as it was heaped, it was scattered again by the ministers of the faith, who were thus perpet- ually preaching goodness and charity at the hearths of the poor, and the poor were every hour lifting up their hands and blessing them. It was not enough that the bishops were thus toilsome in their out-door work of good ; but in the making of new laws and amending of old ones, they showed the sweetness, and, in the truest sense, the greatness of the human spirit. During my stay in As-you-like, what we should call the House of Lords, but what in that country was called the House of Vir- tues, debated on what some of their lordships deemed a very pretty case to go to war upon ; and, sooth to say, for a time the House of Virtues seemed to forget the active benevo- lence that had heretofore been its moving principle. Whereupon the bishops one by one arose, and from their lips there flowed such heavenly music, in their eyes there sparkled such apostolic tears, that all the members of the House of Virtues rose, and with one accord fell to embracing one another, and called all the world their brothers, and vowed they would talk away the misunder- standing between themselves and neighbours ; they would not shed blood, they would not go to war. And this was ever after called the peace of the bishops. The second deliberative assembly was call- ed the House of Workers. No man could be one of these, who had not made known to the world his wisdom his justice his worship of truth for truth's sake. No worker was returned upon the mere chance of his fit- ness. He must be known as an out-door worker for the good of his fellow-men, before he could be sent, an honoured member, to the House. The duty of the assembly was to make laws ; and as these were to be made for all men, it was the prime endeavour and striving of the workers to write them in the plainest words, in the briefest meaning. They would debate and work for a whole day they always assembled with clear heads and fresh spirits every morning at nine to enshrine their wisdom in the fewest syllables. And whereas, here with us we give our children "Goody Two Shoes" and "Jack and the Bean Stalk," as the easiest and simplest lessons for their tender minds to fasten on, in As-you-like the little creatures read the Abridgement of the Statutes for their first book ; so clear, so lucid, so direct was it in its meaning and its purpose. Nevertheless, as there were some dull and giddy folk, who, after all the labour of tht House of Workers, could or would not know the laws, there were certain meek and loving- kind professors called goodmen guides, an- swering to our attorneys, whose delight it was, for the very smallest imaginable sum, to interpret and make known the power and beauty of the statutes. And whereas among us, physicians and surgeons may the spirits of charity and peace consecrate their fire- sides ! set apart a portion of the day to feel the pulse of stricken poverty, to comfort and solace the maimed and wasting poor so in As-you-like, did these goodmen guides give a part of their time to the passionate and igno- rant, advising them to abstain from the fever- ish turmoil of law ; showing them how sus- pense would bake their blood and eat their hearts, and wear and weigh down man's no- ble spirit. And thus, these goodmen guides would, I say, with a silken string, lead men back to content and neighbourly adjustment. When men could pay for such counsel, they paid a moderate cost 5 when they were poor, they were advised, as by the free benevolence of the mediator. The people of As-you-like had, a thousand years or so before, waged war with other na- tions. There could be no doubt of it, for the cannon still remained. I saw what at one time had been an arsenal. There were several pieces of artillery ; the swallows had built their nests under their very mouths. As I will not disguise anything, I own there were a few persons who, when a war was talked of, the war so happily prevented by the bishops, strutted and looked big, and with swollen cheeks gabbled -about glory. But they were smiled at for their simplicity ; advised, corrected by the dominant reason of the country, and, after a time, confessed themselves to be very much ashamed of their past folly. Perhaps the manner in which the As-you- likeans transacted business was strange ; it may appear incredible. I was never more surprised than when I first overheard two men dealing for a horse. One was a seller of horses, the other seemed a comfortable yeo- man. " That is a pretty nag of yours," said the yeoman. " Pretty enough outside," said the horse-dealer. " I will give you ten lumps for it," said the farmer (the lump sig- nifying our pound). "No, you shall not," answered the horse-dealer, "for the nag shies, and stumbles, and is touched a little in the wind. Nevertheless, the thing ia worth four lumps." "You have said it?" cried 104 LIFE IN AS-YOU-LIKE. the yeoman. " I have said it," answered the horse-dealer. Understand, that this is the only form of oath if I may so call it in As-you-like. "You have said it?" "I have said it." Such is the most solemn pro- testation among all people, from the king to the herdsman. The shops in As-you-like are very beauti- ful. All the goods are labelled at a certain price. You want, let us say, a pair of stock- ings. You enter the shop. The common salutation is "Peace under this roof," and the shopkeeper answers, " Peace at your home." You look at the stockings, and lay- ing down the money, take the goods and de- part. The tradesman never bends his back in thankfulness until his nose touches the counter ; he is in no spasm of politeness ; not he ; you would think him the buyer and not the seller. I remember being particularly astonished at what I thought the ill-manners of a tradesman, to whom I told my astonish- ment. " What, friend," he said, " should I do ? My neighbour wants a fire-shovel I sell a fire-shovel. If I ought to fling so many thanks at him for buying the fire-shovel, should he not first thank me for being here with fire-shovels to sell ? Politeness, friend, as you call it, may be very well ; but I should somehow suspect the wholesale dealer in it. Where I should carry away so much polite- ness, I should fear I had short weight." A strange people, you must own, these As-you- likeans. Taxation was light, for there was no man idle in As-you-like. Indeed, there was but one tax ; it was called the truth-tax, and for this reason : Every man gave in an account of his wealth and goods, and paid in proportion to his substance. There had been no other taxes, but all these were merged into this one tax, by a solemn determination of the House of Virtues. " Since Providence has given to vis the greatest measure of its gifts, it has thereby made us the chancellors to poorer men." Upon this avowed principle, the one tax was made. "Would it not be the trick of roguery to do otherwise?" they said. " Should we not blush to see the ploughman sweating at his task, knowing that, squared by his means, he paid more than we? Should we not feel the robbers of the man not the Virtues banded together to protect him?" And thus, there was but one tax. In former ages there had been many ; for I was shown in the national museum of As-yoU-like, several mummies, dry and coloured like saddle- leather, that in past centuries had been living custom-house officers and excisemen. There were prisons in As-you-like, in which the idle and the vicious were made to work, and taught the wickedness, the very folly of guilt. As the state, however, with paternal love, watched, I may say it, at the very cradles of the poor, teaching the pauper, as he grew, a self-responsibility ; showing to him right and wrong, not permit- ting to grow up, with at best, an odd, vague no- tion, a mere guess at black and white, there were few criminals. The state did not expose its babies for the poor are its chil- dren to hang them when men. So dear were the wants of the poor to the rulers of As-you-like, that on one occasion, in a year of scarcity, the monarch sold all his horses the beautiful cattle went at seventy thousand lumps and laid out the money in building school-rooms and finding teachers for pauper babies. And the state, believing man to be some- thing more than a thing of digestion, was al- ways surrounding the people with objects of loveliness, so that a sense of the beautiful might be with them even as the colour of their blood, and thus might soften and elevate the spirit of man, and teach him true gentleness out of his very admiration of the works of his fellow. Hence, the museums and picture galleries, and abbeys and churches, were all thrown open to the people, who always seemed refined, subdued by the emanations of loveliness around them. There were very many rich people in As- you-like, but I never knew them to be thought a bit the better off for their money. They were thought fortunate, no more. They were looked upon as men, who, having put into a lottery, had had the luck to draw a prize. As for the poor, they were always treated with a softness of manner that surprised me. The poor man in As-you-like seemed privi- leged by his property. He seemed to have a stronger claim to the sympathies of those in worldly substance over him. Had a rich man talked brutally, or domineered over, or ill-used a pauper in As-you-like, he would have been looked upon as we look upon a man who beats a woman. There was thought to be a moral cowardice in the act that made its doer despicable Hence, it was as common in As-you-like to see the rich man first touch his hat to the poor, as with us for the pauper to make preliminary homage to wealth. Then, in As-you-like, no man cared to disguise the smallness of his means. To call a man a pauper was no more than with us to say his eyes are gray or hazel. And though there were poor men, there were no famishing creature, no God's image, sitting with his bony, idle hands before him, like a maniac in a cage brutalized, maddened, by the world's selfishness. DOUGLAS JERROLS. DISPROPORTION OF MAN. 105 A BRIDAL SONG. Roses, their sharp spines being gone> Not royal in tueir smells ulone, But in their hue; Maiden pinks, of odour faint ; Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint, And sweet thyme true ; Primrose, first-born child of Ver, Merry spring-time's harbinger, With her bells dim ; Oxlips in their cradles growing, Marigolds on death-beds blowing, Lark-heels trim ; All, dear Nature's children sweet. Lie 'fore bride and bridegroom's fejt, dossing their g'jiije ! Not an angel of the air, Bird melodious, or bird fair, Be absent hence ! The crow, the slanderous cuckoo, nor The boding raven, nor chough hoar, Nor chattering pie, May on our bride-house perch or sing, Or with them any discord bring, But from it fly ! BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEH. DISPROPORTION OF MAN. Let man contemplate entire nature in her height and full majesty ; let him remove his view from the low objects which surround him; let him regard that shining luminary placed as an eternal lamp to give light to the universe ; let him consider the earth as a point, in comparison with the vast circuit de- scribed by that star (sun) ; let him learn with wonder that this vast circuit itself is but a very minute point when compared with that embraced by the stars which roll in the firmament. But if our view stops there, let the imagination pass beyond : it will sooner be wearied with conceiving than nature with supplying food for contemplation. All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature. No idea ap- proaches it. In vain we extend our concep- tions beyond imaginable spaces ; we bring forth but atoms, in comparison with the re- ality of things. It is an infinite sphere, of which the centre is everywhere, the circum- ference nowhere. In fine, it is the greatest discernible character of the omnipotence of God, that our imagination loses itself in this thought. Let man, having returned to himself, con- sider what he is, compared to what i*; let him regard himself as a wanderer into this remote province of nature ; and let him, Irom this narrow prison wherein he finds iiiiuself dwcil- r (I mean the uni verse J, learii to estimate the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself, at a proper value. What is man in the midst of the infinite ? But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let iiiin seek in what he knows things the most minute ; let a mite exhibit to him in the exceeding smailness of its body, parts incomparably smaller, limbs with joints, veins in these limbs, blood in these veins, humors in this blood, globules in these humors, gases in these globules ; let him, still dividing these last objects, exhaust his powers of con- ception, and let the ultimate object at which he can arrive now be the subject of our dis- course ; he will think, perhaps, tiiat this is the minutest atom of nature. 1 will show him therein a new abyss. 1 will picture to him not only the visible universe, but the conceivable immensity of nature, in the com- pass of this abbreviation of an atom. Let him view therein an infinity of worlds, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as the visible world ; and on this earth animals, and in fine mites, in which he will find again what the first have given; and still finding in the others the same things, without end, and without repose, let him lose himself in these wonders, as astonishing in their littleness as the others in their magnitude ; for who will not marvel that our body, which just before was not per- ceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the all, is now a colossus, a world, or rather an all in comparison with the nothingness at which it is impossible to arrive ? Whoever shall thus consider himself, will be frightened at himself, and observing him- self suspended in the mass of matter allotted to him by nature, between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, will tremble at the sight of these wonders ; and I believe that his curiosity being changed into admiration he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence, than to investigate them with pre- sumption. For, in fine, what is man in the m'dst of nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with nothing- ness: a mean between nothing and ail. In- finitely far from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their principle are for him inevitably concealed in an impenetrable 106 DISPROPORTION OF MAN. secret ; equally incapable of seeing the noth- ingness whence he is derived, and the infinity in which he is swallowed up. What can he do, then, but perceive some appearance of the midst of things, in eternal despair of knowing either their principle or their end ? AH things have sprung from nothingness, and are carried onward to the infinite. Who shall follow this astonishing procession of things ? The Author of these wonders comprehends them ; no other can. Through want of having contemplated these infinities, men are rashly born to the investi- gation of nature, as if they had some propor- tion with it. It is a strange thing that they have wished to comprehend the principles of things, and from thence even to reacli a knowledge of all, by a presumption as infinite as their object. For it is unquestionable that such a design cannot be formed without a presumption or capacity infinite like nature. When we are instructed, we comprehend that nature, having engraved her image and that of her Author upon all things, they almost all participate in her double infinity. Thus we see that all the sciences are infinite in the extent of their researches; for who doubts that geometry, for example, has an infinity of in- finities of propositions to exhibit ? They are also infinite in the multitude and delicacy of their principles ; for who does not see that those which are proposed as the ultimate are not self-sustaining, and that they rest upon others which, having still others for a sup- port, never adnyt an ultimate ? But we do with ultimates that appear to reason as we do in regard to material things, wherein we call that an indivisible point be- yond which our senses perceive nothing more, although it is by its nature infinitely divisible. Of these two infinities of science, that of magnitude is much more obvious, and there- fore it has happened to few persons to pretend to all knowledge of all things. "I am about to speak of all things," said Democritus. But the infinity in littleness is much less discernible. The philosophers have much sooner pretended to arrive at it ; and here it is where they have all stumbled. It is what has given place to these very common titles, "Principles of things," ' Principles of philo- sophy," and the like, as ostentatious in re- ality, although not in appearance, as this other which galls the eye. We naturally believe ourselves much more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visi- ble extent of the world obviously surpasses us ; but as we surpass little things, we be- lieve ourselves capable of possessing them; and yet it requires no less capacity to reach nothingness than to reach the all. It re- quires infinite capacity for either; and it seems to me that whoever should have com- prehended the ultimate principles of things might also arrive at a knowledge of the in- finite. One depends upon the other, and the one leads to the other. The extremes touch and unite by reason of their remoteness from each other, and arc found in God and in God only. Let us know then our range; we are some thing and not all. What we have of bein^ deprives us of the knowledge of first principles, which spring from nothingness, and the little that we have of being conceals from us the view of the infinite. Our intellect holds in the order of things intelligible the same rank as our body in the extent of nature. Limited in every way, this state which holds the mean between two extremes is found in all our powers. Our senses perceive nothing extreme. Too much noise deafens us; too much light daz- zles us ; too much distance or too much prox- imity impedes vision ; too much length or too much brevity of discourse obscures it; too much truth astonishes us : I know those who cannot comprehend that when four are taken from nothing, nothing remains. First princi- ples have too much evidence for us. Too much pleasure incommodes. Too much har- mony in music displeases ; too many benefits irritate : we wish to have wherewith to re- pay the debt . We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are inimical to usj and not discernible ; we no longer feel them, we suffer them. Too much youth and' too much age obstruct the mind ; too much or too little instruction. In fine, extreme things are for us as if they were not, and we are not in regard: they escape us, or we them. Such is our true state. This is what rend- ers us incapable of certain knowledge and absolute ignorance. We drift on a vast ocean always uncertain and floating, driven from one extreme towards the other. Some term, whereat we think to fix ourselves and become settled, wavers and quits us ; and if we follow it, it escapes our grasp, slips from us, and flies with an eternal flight. Nothing stops for us. This is the state natural to us, and yet the most contrary to our inclination : we burn with desire to find a firm seat and an ultimate constant basis, in order to build upon it a tower that shall reach to the infinite; but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth opens to the abyss. BLAISK PASCAL. THE FALCON. 107 THE FALCON. [Giovanni Boccaccio, born in Paris, 1313, died at Certaldo Val d'Elsa. 2.st December, 1375. He was the son of a merchant of Florence, and in that city he was educated. He may be regarded as the father of Ita'ian prose; and he was the author of the first roman- tic and chivalrous poem written in the Italian language, La Ttseide, the subject being the fabulous adventures of Theseus. From the Ttseide Chaucer borrowed the materials of his Kniyht's Tale. The most important of Boccaccio's prose works is the Decameron, which was written at the desire of Queen Joan of Naples. It is a series of one hundred tales, supposed to be narrated by seven ladies and three gentlemen, who have fled to a country house to escape the plague which visited Flo- rence in 1348. The intrigues of lovers form the chief element of the stories, and the details of the greater number display a licentious freedom of manners. Several of the tales, however, are pure and interesting. One of the important labours which Boccaccio accom- plished was the collection of a valuable library of Greek and Latin classics. The library was unfortunately de- stroyed by fire about a century after his deaih.] There lived in Florence a young man, called Federigo Alberigi, who surpassed all the youth of Tuscany in feats of arms, and in accom- plished manners. He (for gallant men will fall in love) became enamoured of Monna Giovanna, at that time considered the finest woman in Florence ; and that he might inspire her with a reciprocal passion, he squandered his fortune at tilts and tournaments, in enter- tainments and presents. But the lady, who was virtuous as she was beautiful, could on no account be prevailed on to return his love. While he lived thus extravagantly, and with- out the means of recruiting his coffers, poverty, the usual attendant of the thoughtless, came on apace; his money was spent, and nothing remained to him but a small farm, barely sufficient for his subsistence, and a falcon, which was however the finest in the world. When he found it impossible therefore to live longer in town, he retired to his little farm, where he went a birding in his leisure hours; and disdaining to ask favours of any one, he submitted patiently to his poverty, while he cherished in secret a hopeless passion. It happened about this time that the hus- band of Monna Giovanna died, leaving a great fortune to their only son, who was yet a youth; and that the boy came along with his mother to spend the summer months in the country (as our custom usually is), at a villa in the neighbourhood of Federigo's farm. In this way he became acquainted with Federigo, and began to delight in birds and dogs, and having seen his falcon, he took a great longing for it, but was afraid to ask it of him when he saw how highly he prized it. This desire, however, so much affected the boy's spirits, that he fell sick; and his mother, who doated upon this her only child, became alarmed, and to soothe him, pressed him again and again to ask what- ever he wished, and promised, that if it were possible, he should have all that he desired. The youth at last confessed, that if he had the falcon he would soon be well again. When the lady heard this, she began to consider what she should do. She knew that Federigo had long loved her, and had received from her nothing but coldness; and how could she ask the falcon, which she heard was the finest in the world, and which was now his only conso- lation? Could she be so cruel as to deprive him of his last remaining support? Perplexed with these thoughts, which the full belief that she should have the bird if she asked it, did not relieve, she knew not what to think, or how to return her sou an answer. A mother's love, however, at last prevailed; she resolved to satisfy him, and determined, whatever might be the consequence, not to send, but to go her- self and procure the falcon. She told her son, therefore, to take courage, and think of getting better, for that she would herself go on the morrow, and fetch what he desired: and the hope was so agreeable to the boy, that he began to mend apace. On the next morning Monna Giovanna, having taken another lady along with her, went as if for amusement to the little cabin of Federigo, and inquired for him. It was not the birding season, and he was at work in his garden; when he heard, therefore, that Monna Giovanna was calling upon him, he ran with joyful surprise to the door. She, on the other hand, when she saw him coming, advan- ced with delicate politeness; and when he had respectfully saluted her, she said, "All happi- ness attend you, Federigo; I am come to repay you for the loss you have suffered from loving me too well, for this lady and I intend to dine with you in an easy way this forenoon." To this Federigo humbly answered: "I do not remember, Madam, having suffered any loss at your hands, but on the contrary, have re- ceived so much good, that if ever I had any worth, it sprung from you, and from the love with which you inspired me. And this generous visit to your poor host, is much more dear to me than would be the spending again of what I have already spent." Having said this, he invited them respectfully into the house, and from thence conducted them to the garden, where, having nobody else to keep them com- 103 THE FALCON. pany, he requested that they would allow the labourer's wife to do her best to amuse them, while he went to order dinner. Federigo, however great his poverty, had not yet learned all the prudence which the loss of fortune might have taught him; and it thus happened, that he had nothing in the house with which he could honourably entertain the lady for whose love he had formerly given so many entertainments. Cursing his evil fortune, therefore, he stood like one beside himself, and looked in vain for money or pledge. The hour was already late, and his desire extreme to lind something worthy of his mistress; he felt re- pugnant, too, to ask from his own labourer. While he was thus perplexed, he chanced to cast his eyes upon his fine falcon, which was sitting upon a bar in the ante-chamber. Hav- ing no other resource, therefore, he took it into his hand, and finding it fat, he thought it would be proper for such a lady. He accord- ingly pulled its neck without delay, and gave it to a little girl to be plucked; and having put it upon a spit, he made it be carefully roasted. He then covered the table with a beautiful cloth, a wreck of his former splendour ; and everything being ready, he returned to the garden, to tell the lady and her companion that dinner was served. They accordingly went in and sat down to table with Federigo, and ate the good falcon without knowing it. When they had finished dinner, and spent a ehort while in agreeable conversation, the lady thought it time to tell Federigo for what she had come. She said to him, therefore, in a gentle tone, "Federigo, when you call to mind your past life, and recollect my virtue, which perhaps you called coldness and cruelty, I doubt not but that you will be astonished at ! my presumption, when I tell you the principal | motive of my visit. But had you children, and knew how great a love one bears them, I am sure you would in part excuse me; and i although you have them not, I who have an i only child, cannot resist the feelings of a ! mother. By the strength of these am I con- strained, in spite of my inclination, and con- trary to propriety and duty, to ask a thing which I know is with reason dear to you, for it is your only delight and consolation in your misfortunes : that gift is your falcon, for which my son has taken so great a desire, that unless he obtain it, I am afraid his illness will increase, and that I shall lose him. I beseech you to give it me, therefore, not by the love which you bear me (for to that you owe nothing), but by the nobleness of your nature, which you have shown in nothing more than in your generosity ; and I will remain eternally your debtor for my son's life, which your gift will be the means of preserving. " When Federigo heard the lady's request, and knew how impossible it was to grant it, he burst into tears, and was unable to make any reply. The lady imagined that this arose from grief at the thought of losing his favourite, and showed his unwillingness to part with it; nevertheless she waited patiently for his answer. He at length said, "Since it first pleased Heaven, Madam, that I should place my affections on you, I have found fortune unkind to me in many things, and have often accused her; but all her former unkindness has been trifling compared with what she has now done me. How can I ever forgive her, therefore, when I remember, that you, who never deigned to visit me when I was rich, have come to my poor cottage to ask a favour which she has cruelly prevented me from be- stowing. The cause of this I shall briefly tell you. When I found that in your goodness you proposed to dine with me, and when I con- sidered your excellence, I thought it my duty to honour you with more precious food than is usually given to others. Recollecting my falcon, therefore, and its worth, I deemed it worthy food, and accordingly made it be roasted and served up for dinner; but when I find that you wished to get it in another way, I shall never be consoled for having it not in my power to serve you." Having said this, he showed them the wings, and the feet, and the bill, as evidences of the truth of what he had told them. When the lady had heard and seen these things, she chided him for having killed so fine a bird as food for a woman; but admired in secret that greatness of mind which poverty had been unable to subdue. Then, seeing that she could not have the falcon, and becoming alarmed for the safety of her child, she thanked Federigo for the honourable enter- tainment he had given them, and returned home in a melancholy mood. Her son, on the other hand, either from grief at not getting the falcon, or from a disease occasioned by it, died a few days after, leaving his mother plunged in the deepest affliction. Monna Giovanna was left very rich, and when she had for some time mourned her loss, being importuned by her brothers to marry again, she began to reflect on the merit of Federigo, and on the last instance of his gener- osity displayed in killing so fine a bird to do her honour. She told her brothers, therefore, that she would marry since they desired it, but that her only choice would be Federigo THREE SONNETS. 109 Alberigi. They laughed when they heard this, and asked her how she could think of a man who had nothing ; but she answered, that she would rather have a man without money, than money without a man. When her brothers, who had long known Federigo, saw therefore how her wishes pointed, they consented to be- stow her upon him with all her wealth; and Federigo, with a wife so excellent and so long beloved, and riches equal to his desires, showed that he had learned to be a better steward, and long enjoyed true happiness. THE KING OF THTJLE. 1 There was a king in Thule Was faithful till the grave, To whom his mistress, dying, A gulden goblet gave. Naught was to him more precious; He drained it at every bout : Ilia eyes with tears ran over, As oft as he drank thereout. When came his time of dying, The towns in his land he told, Naught else to his heir denying Except the goblet of gold. He sat at the royal banquet With his knights of high degree, In the lofty hall of his fathers, In the cast e by the sea. There stood the old carouser, And drank the last life-glow; And hurled the hallowed goblet Into the tide below. He saw it plunging and filling, And sinking deep in the sea; Then fell his eyelids for ever, And never more drank he ! 1 From the new translation of Goethe's Fa'Uft, by Bayard Taylor, published in Boston and London, 1871 Mr. Taylor, born in Chester county. Pennsylvania, llth January, 1825, has earned renown as poet, traveller, novelist, and now as one of the ablest translators of Goethe. His aim was to reproduce in English the metrical peculiarities of the original German, whilst keeping faithful to the text; and the general verdict is that the attempt has been in every respect successful. THREE SONNETS. [William Drummond, of Hawthornden, born 13th December, 1585; died 4th December, lt>4W. He V---IA educated in Edinburgh and studied civil law in France. On the death of his father, 1610, he retired to Haw- thornden, and devoted himself to literary pursuits The lady he loved died oil the eve of tiie day appointed for their marriage, and to that circumstance is attri- buted the melancholy strain of his sonnets, three of which we give here. Philips, the nephew of Milton, edited Drummoud's works, and pronounced him equal to Tasso.] That learned Grecian, who did so excel In knowledge passing sense, that he is named Of all the after-worlds Divine, doth tell, That all the time when first our souls are framed, Ere in these mansions blind they come to dwell. They live bright rays of that eternal light, And others see, know, love, in heaven's great height ; Not toil'd with ought to Reason doth rebel. It is most true ! for straight at the first sight My mind me told, that, in some other place, It elsewhere saw the idea of that face, And loved a love of heavenly pure delight. What wonder now I feel so fair a flame, Since I her loved ere on this earth she came f II. My lute ! be as thou wert when thou did'st grow With thy green mother in some shady grove, When immelodious winds but made thee move, And birds their ramage did on thee bestow. Since that dear voice which did thy sounds approve, Which wont in such harmonious strains to flow, Is reft from earth to tune those spheres above, What art thou but a harbinger of woe? Thy pleasing notes be pleasing notes no more, But orphan's wailings to their fainting ear, Each stroke a sigh, each sound draws forth a tear, For which be silent as in woods before ; Or if that any hand to touch thee deign. Like widow'd turtle still her loss complain. III. What doth it serve to see the sun's bright face, And skies enamell'd with the Indian gold? Or jetty moon at night in chariot roll'd, And all the glory of that starry place? What doth it serve earth's beauty to behold! The mountain's pride the meadow's flowery grac The stately comeliness of forests old The sport of floods, which would themselves embrace? What doth it serve to hear the sylvan's songs The cheerful thrush the nightingale's sad strains, Which in dark shades seem to deplore my wrongs? For what doth serve all that this world contains, Since she, for whom those once to me were dear, Can have no part of them now with me here? 110 THE STORY OF CRAZY MARTHA. THE STORY OF CRAZY MARTHA. FROM THE PROVENCAL OF JACQUES JASMIN. [Jacques Jasmin, born at Agen. department of Lot- et-Garoune, 6th March, 17lS; died there 6th October, 18ti4. As the "last of the troubadours" he has won for himself a permanent place in literature. He was tlie son of a poor tailor, and was himself a barber, like Allan Ramsay. He continued to work at his trade to the end, despite many inducements to abandon it and to quit hU rural home for the city. His answer to all who wished him to change his mode of life, was : " I shave for a liv- ing and I sing for pleasure " His poems became popular in spite of the fact that they were written in a language which lias been long disused except by the peasantry of the south of France. The Provencal was the language of the troubadours, and its popularity was revived for a brief space by Jasmin in his songs of the pastoral delights and traditions of his compatriots. The following is an admirable translation of one of his most pathetic stories (Mttltro L'liioucento) by Professor Henry Coppee, of the Pennsylvania University. The incidents in this little drama commenced in 1798, at Lafitte, a pretty hamlet situated 011 the banks of the Lot, near Clairac, and ter- minated in 180'J. At this last period, Martha, bereftof her reason, esc.iped from the village, and was often after- wards seen in the streets of Agen, an object of public pity, begging her bread, and flying in terror from the children, who cried outafter her : "MaLtro, ungouldat.'" (Martha, a soldier!) The author confesses that more than all others, in his childhood he pursued poor Martha with his sarcasms: he little dreamed that one day his muse, inspired by the wretched lot of the poor idiot, would owe to her one of his most exquisite creations. Martha died in 1834.] I. Drawing th'. lot. Twt different hearts. The cards never lie. T/ie conscript. Tlte oath. Not far from the banks which the pretty little river Lot bathes with the cool kisses of its transparent waters, there lies, half-concealed by the feathering elms, a small cabin. There, on a beautiful morning in April, sat a voung girl in deep thought ; it was the hour when in the neighbouring town of Touneins a band of robust young men were awaiting in suspense the result of the army draft which was to decree their fate. For this the young girl waited too. With uplifted eyes, she breathed a prayer to the good God ; then, not knowing what to do with herself, how to contain her impatience, she sat down ; she got up, only to sit down again. One might see that she was in an agony of suspense; the ground seemed to burn the soles of her feet. What did it all mean? She was beautiful; she had even-thing that heart could wish: she possessed a combin- ation of charms not often seen in this lower world delicate erect figure, very white skin, black hair, and, with these, an eye as blue as the sky itself. Her whole appearance was so refined that, on the plains, peasant as she was, she was regarded as a born lady by her peasant companions. And well did she know all this, for beside her little bed there hung a bright little mirror. But to-day she has not once looked into it. Most serious matters absorb her thoughts ; her soul is strangely stirred ; at the slightest sound she changes suddenly from marble hue to violet. Some one enters ; she looks up ; it is her friend and neighbour, Annette. At the first glance you could not fail to see that she too was in trouble, but at a second you would say "It is very manifest that the evil, whatever it is, only circles around her heart, and does not take root there." "You are happy, Annette," said Martha; "speak; have the lots been drawn? have they escaped? is he free?" " I know nothing yet," replied Annette ; "but take courage, my dear; it is already noon; we shall very soon know. You tremble like a jonquil, your face frightens me. Sup- pose the lot should fall upon Jacques, and he should be obliged to go away; you would die, perhaps?" "Ah! I cannot tell." " You are wrong, my friend. Die ! What a baby you are. I love Joseph. If he has to go, I should be sorry; I should shed a few tears; I would wait for his return, without dying. No young man ever dies for a girl; not a bit of it; and they are right. There is truth in the couplet " ' My lover, when he goes away, Loses far more than I who stay.' A truce to your grief, then. Come, if you feel equal to it, let us try our luck by the cards. / did this morning, and it all came out right for me; so it will for you. See how calm I am; come, to console you, let us see what the lucky cards will say." So the buoyant young girl makes her friend sit down, checks for a moment hor own wild spirits, gracefully spreads a small piece of shining taffeta, and takes the cards in her hands. The suffering heart of Martha stops for a season its fierce throbs. She gazes with eager eyes: she ceases to tremble; she is in- spired with hope. Then both girls the light- hearted Annette and the loving Martha re- peat together the well-known refrain "Cards so beautiful and fair, Lighten now a maiden's care; Knave of Clubs and Queen o To our cauae propitious prove." THE STORY OF CRAZY MARTHA. Ill One after another the cards are turned up, placed in piles, then put together and shuffled. Cut them three times ; it is done. Ah ! a good sign, first comes a king. The girls are a per- fect picture two mouths breathless and speech- less, four eyes, smiling and yet awe-struck, follow closely the motion of the fingers. Upon the lips of Martha a sweet smile slowly rests, like a fairy flower. The queen of hearts is turned up; then the knave of clubs. If now no black malignant spade appears, Jacques will be saved. Seven spades are already out; only one remains in the pack; there is nothing to fear. The beautiful dealer is smiling, is joking stop ! like a grinning skull cast into the midst of a festive crowd, the queen of spades comes up to announce some dire misfor- tune ! Hark ! on the highway the noisy drum strikes in like a mocking laugh, mingled with the strains of the shrill fife and wild bursts of song. It is easy to guess that these are the happy fellows who have escaped the draft, whom the great Moloch of war, with a linger- ing touch of pity, is going to leave to the country. Here they come in two long lines, dancing, leaping, each one wearing in his hat his lucky number. Soon a crowd of mothers gathers around them, many weeping for joy, and some for grief. What a moment for the two young girls whom the cards have just smitten with sorrow! The noisy group comes nearer still. Martha, wishing to put an end to the torturing sus- pense, flies to the little window, but immed- iately recoils, utters a faint cry, and falls cold and fainting beside Annette, who is herself shivering with fear. The cards had not de- ceived them. In the midst of the lucky crowd whose lives are saved to their country stands Joseph. Jacques was not there; he had drawn "number 3." Two weeks pass, and the light-hearted Annette steps out at the threshold of the flower- bedecked church, fast married to Joseph ; while in the house of mourning, Jacques, the un- happy conscript, with tears in his eyes, and a knapsack on his shoulders, bids farewell to his betrothed in touching words as she stands over- whelmed with grief. " Martha," he says, "they compel me to depart; happiness deserts us, but take courage ; men come back from the wars. You know I have nothing, no father, no mother: I have only you to love. If death spares my life, it belongs to you. Let us hope, still hope for the happy day when I shall lead you to the marriage altar like a gift of love- flowers." II. A great torrow. Martha snatched from (he tomb. The handsome gtrl-mercluint. Jacques wiUjind a. rwul. The beautiful month of May, whose new birth brings universal pleasure, king of all the months, let it wear the crown, and surround itself with joys! The month of May has come again. Upon the hill-side and in the valleys happy hearts unite to chant its praises ; it comes softly and sweetly, and like lightning it is gone. But, while it lasts, everywhere is heard the sound of melodious song ; everywhere you behold happy festive groups entwining in the joyous dance. At length the spring is past, and while its pleasures still linger in the groves and fields, in yonder little cabin, one sweet and lonely voice thus moans in a song of sorrow: "The swallows have come back; up there are my two in their nest; they have not been parted as we have. Now they fly down; see, I can put my hand upon them. How sleek and pretty they are; they still have upon their necks the rib- bons which Jacques tied there on my last birthday, when they came to peck from our united hands the little golden flies we had caught for them. They loved Jacques. Their little eyes are looking for him just where I am sitting. Ah ! you may circle round my chair, poor birds, but Jacques is no longer here. I am alone, without a friend, weeping for him, weary too, for the friendship of tears fatigues itself. But stay with me ; I will do everything to make you love me. Stay, dear birds that Jacques loved; I want to talk to you of him. They seem to know how their presence consoles me. They kiss each other, happy little things. Kiss, a long kiss; your joy is balm to my heart. I love them, for they are faithful to me, as Jacques also is. But no one kills swallows; men only kill each other. Why does he write no more? Mon Dleu! who knows where he is; I always feel as if some one is going to tell me that he is dead. I shudder; that terrible fear chokes my heart. Holy Virgin, take it away; the fever of the grave is burning me up; and oh! good Mother of God, I want to live if Jacques still lives! Where are you, beautiful swallows? Ah! my grief has been too noisy; I have frightened you away. Come back, and bring me happiness ; I will mourn more softly. Stay with me, birds whom Jacques loved, for I must talk to you of him." Thus, day after day, mourned the orphan girl her lover's absence. Her old uncle, her 112 THE STOEY OF CRAZY MARTHA. only guardian, beheld her sorrow, and was grieved. .She .saw him weeping, and dissembled her own pain to cha.se away his tears. She tried to keep her troubles from the world, that frivolous, heartless world which is ready to find evil in everything ; which laughed at her sorrow.-!, and had no sympathy with them. At length, when All-Saint*' Day came round, they saw two wax candles burning for the dying, on the Virgin's altar, and when the priest said: ' ' Death is hovering over the couch of a young and .suffering girl : good souls, pray for poor Martha," even' one bent his head in shame, and out of every heart came the Patera bathed iu tears. But she will not die; it was the dark hour before the dawn. Grim Death may fill up his new-made grave. Her uncle, at her bedside, ha* said but one word; it sinks into her heart. That sweet word has brought her back to life; she is saved : The fire cornes back to her eye, her blood begins to course again under her white skin. Life returns in great tidal waves of light. "Everything is ready, my child," Bays her smiling uncle, and her answer is: "Yes, let us work, let us work." Then, to the astonishment of every one, Martha re- quickened, lives for another love, the love of Money f She craves money, she is a miser, money is her only concern. She would coin it with her own blood. Well, hard work will give money to every brave hand, and Martha's hand is more than brave. Under the rustic archway, who is that girl- merchant, rousing the hamlet with her chatter and noise: who is buying and selling inces- santly? That is Martha; how ever}- one praises her, so good, so complaisant, so charming. Her buyers increase in numbers like a rolling ball of snow. Yesterday she had twenty, to- day forty. Gold pours down upon her little arcade. Thus a year passes. Martha is happy while she works, for Jacques is not dead. No, he has been seen more than once in the army. Sometimes when the report of a battle arrives, her arm drops, and her eye loses its light; but her courage soon returns if rumour makes no mention of a regiment which is always in her thought*. One day her uncle says to her: " In order to attain your long-desired happiness, you need a thousand pistoles, and you will soon have them. A little pile soon becomes large. We need no^sell the cottage. Look at your money - br.x. With the proceeds of my vineyard, and what you have already earned, you have already more than half the num. Have patience for ix months more. Why! my child, happiness costs time and labour and money. You have nearly three-quarters. Finish the good work yourself. I am content; before I die 1 hope to see you perfectly happy. Alas! the poor old man was mistaken. Two weeks later, death closed his eyes, and Martha sat in the churchyard, weeping upon his grave. There, one evening, she was heard to murmur: "My strength is exhausted; sainted spirit of my loving uncle, I can wait no longer; forgive me; the good priest sanctions the act;" and, without delay, to the astonishment of the vil- lagers, furniture, shop, house, all that she possesses, change hands. She sells everything, except a gilded cross, and the rose-coloured dress with little blue flowers in which Jacques loved to see her. She had wanted silver, the was now laden with gold ; her thousand pistoles are in her hands; but BO young and inexperi- enced as she is, what is she going to do with them? "What is the poor child going to do with them ? " do yon ask ? The very thought lacerates my heart. She goes out; she seems, as she leaves her little home, an impersonation of the angel of sorrow slowly rising towards happiness, which is beginning to smile upon her flight. That is not a flash of lightning; it is her little foot which with lightning speed spurns the path. She enters the quiet little house, where sits a man with hair as white as snow; it is the priest, who welcomes her with an affectionate air. "Good father," she cries, falling on her knees, "I bring you my alL Now you can write and purchase his freedom. Don't tell him who it is that buys his ransom; he will guess soon enough. Don't even mention my name, and don't tremble for me. I have strength in my arm. I can work for a living. Good father, have pity; bring him back to me ! " IIL The country priext The young girC* happine**. Jacrfufi itfrtt. Return of Jacywu. Wlw teotild have th'jughttif I love the country priest. He does not need, like the city pastor, in order to make men believe in the good God, or the wicked devil, to exhaust his strength in proving, with the book open before him, that there is a paradise as well as a hell. Around him all men believe, every one prays. In spite of this they sin, as we all do everywhere. Let him however but elevate his cross, and evil bows before him; the new-born sin is nipped in the bud. From his every-day seat, the wooden bench, nothing escapes his sight. His bell drives far off the THE STORY OF CRAZY MARTHA. 113 hail and the thunder. His eyes are always open upon his flock. The sinner evades him: he knows it, and he goes in search of the sinner. For offences he has pardon, for griefs a soothing balm. His name is on every lip, a blessed name; the valleys resound with it. He is called, in each heart, the great physician for trouble. And this is the reason that Martha went to him with hers, and found a balm. But from the obscure centre of his little parish, the man of God was far better able to detect sin and drive away malignant thoughts, than to find the nameless soldier, in the heart of an army, who had not written a word of inquiry or information for three years, especially when, to the sound of cymbal, trumpets, and cannon, six hundred thousand excited Frenchmen were proudly marching to conquer all the capitals of Europe. They shattered all obstructions, they put to flight all who stood against them, and only stopped to take breath upon the foreign soil, that they might go on to further and greater conquests. It is true that during the past spring Martha's uncle had written often, but the army had just then made a triple campaign; Jacques, they learned, had been transferred to another regi- ment. Some one had seen him in Prussia; another, elsewhere in Germany. Nothing definite was known about him. He had no relatives, for, let the truth be told, the fine fellow had no parents. He had come out of that asylum where a throng of infants live upon the public pity, which takes the place of a mother. As a boy he had been long searching for his mother, but never could find her. He had an ardent desire to be loved, and as he knew he was loved at Lafitte, had it not been for the war, he would have lived and died there. And now, leaving the good priest to his benevolent task, let us turn aside into a very humble cottage, where poor Martha is hard at work. What a change! Yesterday she had her trousseau; there was gold in her wardrobe. To-day she has nothing but her stool, a thimble, a needle-case, and a spinning-wheel. She spins and sews incessantly. We need not lament that she is tiring her fingers; when she was rich, she wept; now that she is poor, she smiles constantly. Jacques will be saved for a long and happy life; and life, liberty, everything he will owe to her, and her alone. How he will love her! and where one loves and is loved, poverty is powerless. How happy she is; the cup of her future is crowned with honey ; already has her heart tasted its first, rich, overflowing drop. Everything is flowering around her. Thus she works on from week to week, sipping VOL. I. drops of honey amid waves of perfume. Her wheel whirls without ceasing, and hope is en- twining as many cloudless days in the future, as her bobbin spins out armfuls of wool, and her needle makes points in the cloth. You may be sure that all this is well known in the meadow-lands. All the people are now enlisted in her cause. In the clear nights she has serenades, and garlands of flowers are hung upon her door. In the morning the girls come with loving eyes to give her little presents of sympathy and esteem. One Sunday morning, the dear old priest comes to her after mass, his face Seaming with joy, and in his right hand an open letter. He is trembling, but more with joy than with age. "My daughter," he cries, "Heaven has blessed thee and answered my prayers; I have found him ; he was in Paris. It is accomplished ; Jacques is free. He will be here next Sunday, and he has not a suspicion of your part in this matter. He thinks that his mother has at last . come to light ; that she isrich, and has purchased his freedom. Let him come, and when he knows that he owes everything to you, how much you have done for him, he will love you more than ever, more than any one except God. My dear daughter, the day of your reward is about to dawn; prepare your heart for it. Jacques will surely come, and when that happy hour arrives, I want to be near you. I want to make him understand, in the presence of all the people, how happy he ought to be in being loved by such an angel as you. " We are told that blessed spirits in paradise are bathed in bliss when they hear the harmon- ies of heaven. Such is the joy of Martha aa these words sink into her heart. But the Sunday has arrived. All nature shines in green and gold under the beautiful sun of June. Crowds are singing everywhere. 1 1 is a double festival for all. The clock strikes noon : leaving the holy altar, the good old priest advances with the loving, pure-facet! girl. Her eyelids drop over her azure eyes, she is timid and speechless; but an inner voice cries "happi- ness." The crowd gathers around her. All is grand ; you would say that the whole country- side is awaiting the arrival of a great lord. Thus marshalled, they go forth from the village, and with laughing joy take their post at the entrance of the highway. There is nothing to be seen in it; nothing at the far end of that road-furrow; nothing but the shadows checkered by the sunlight. Sud- denly a small black point appears; it increases in size, it moves, it is a man; two men, two soldiers; the latter, it is he! How well he looks; 114 THE COMPLAIMT. how he has grown in the army! Both continue to advance; the other, who is he? he looks like a woman. Ah ! it is a woman ; how pretty and graceful she is, dressed like a cantini&re. A woman! my God.' and with Jacques? where can she oe going? Martha's eyes are upon her, sad as the eyes of the dead. Even the priest, who escorts her, is trembling all over. The crowd is dumb. They approach still nearer; now they are only twenty paces off, smiling and out of breath. But what now ! Jacques has suddenly a look of pain; he has seen Martha! . . . Trembling, aai.amed, he stops. The priest can contain himself no longer. With the strong full voice with which he confounds the sinner, he cries. "Jacques, who is that woman?" and, like a criminal, lowering his head, Jacques replies, "Mine, M. le Cure, mine; I am married." A woman's scream is heard; the priest re- turning to himself, and frightened for Martha, " My daughter, " he said, "Courage! here below we all must suffer." But Martha does not even sigh. Everybody looks at her; they think she is going io die. She does not die, she even seems to console herself. She curtsies graciously to Jacques, and then bursts out into a wild mad laugh. Alas! she was never to laugh again otherwise- the poor thing is mad. At the words which issued from the lips of her unfaithful lover, the poor sufferer had at once lost her reason, never to regain it. When Jacques learned all, he fled the coun- try. They say that, mad with remorse, he re- entered the army, and, like a lost spirit weary of his wretched existence, he flung it away at the cannon's mouth. Be that as it may, what is true, alas! too true! is that Martha escaped from friendly vigilance one night, and ever since, for thirty years past, the poor idiot has been periodically seen in our village stretching out her hands for our charity. In Agen, people said as she passed, "Martha has come out again; she must be hungry." They knew nothing about her, and yet every one loved her. Only the children, who have no pity for any- thing, who laugh at all that is fad, would cry out, "Martha, a soldier!" when she, with a mortal fear of soldiers, would fly at the sound. And now you all know why she shuddered at these words. I, who have screamed them after her more than a hundred times, when I heard the touching story of her life, would like to cover her tattered frock with kisses. 1 would like to ask her pardon on my knees. I find nothing but a tomb. ... I cover it with flowers. THE COMPLAINT. A POEM ATTRIBUTED TO CHATTEBTON. Addressed to Miss P L , of Bristol. Love, lawless tyrant of my breast, When will my passions be at rest, And in soft murmurs roll When will the dove-ey'd goddess, Peace, Bid black despair and torment cease, And wake to joy my soul? Adieu! ye flow'r-bespangled hills; Adieu ! ye softly purling rills, That through the meadows play. Adieu ! the cool refreshing shade, By hoary oaks and woodbines made, Where oft with joy I lay. No more beneath your boughs I hear, With pleasure unallay'd by fear, The distant Severue roar Adieu ! the forest's mossy side Deck'd out in Flora's richest pride: Ye can delight no more. Oft at the solitary hour When Melancholy's silent pow'r Is gliding through the shade; "With raging madness by her side, Whose hands, in blood and murder dy'd, Display the reeking blade ; I catch the echo of their feet, And follow to their drear retreat Of deadliest nightshade wove; There, stretch'd upon the dewy ground, Whilst noxious vapours rise around, I sigh my tale of love. Oft has the solemn bird of night, When rising to his gloomy flight, Unseen against me fled ! Whilst snakes in curling orbs uproll'd Bedrop'd with azure, flame, and gold, Hurl'd poison at my head. O say ! thou best of womankind, Thou mirac'e, in whom we find Wit, charms, and sense unite, Can plagues like these be always borne? No; if I still must meet your scorn, I'll seek the realms of night. 1 This poem appeared in the Universal Magazine, November, 1769. The Rev. W. W. Skeat, whose thorough knowledge of English poetry enables him to speak with authority, says that the poem has every claim to be one of Chatterton's, although, it is not in- cluded in any edition of his work*. ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 115 THE IMPRISONED HUNTSMAN. My hawk is tired of perch and hood, My idle grayhouud loathes his food, My horse is weary of his stall. And I am sick of captive thrall. I wish I were as 1 have been, Hunting the hart in forests green, With bended bow and bloodhound free, For that's the life is meet for me. I hate to learn the ebb of time From yon dull steeple's drowsy chime, Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl, Inch after inch along the wall. The lark was wont my matins ring, The sable rook my vespers sing ; These towers, although a king's they be, Have not a hall of joy for me. No more at dawning morn I rise, And sun myself in Ellen's eyes, Drive the fleet deer the forests through, And homeward wend with evening dew, A blithesome welcome blithely meet, And lay my trophies at her feet, While fled the eve on wings of glee, That life is lost to love and me ! SIR WALTER SCOTT. ENGLAND AND FRANCE. BY DOROTHEA JULIA RAMSBOTTOM. Having often heard travellers lament not having put down what they call tlie inemory- billlous of their journeys, I was determined, while I was on my tower, to keep a dairy (so called from containing the cream of one's in- formation), and record everything which re- curred to me therefore I begin with my departure from London. Resolving to take time by the firelock, we left Mountague-place at seven o'clock, by Mr. Fulmer's pocket thermometer, and proceeded over Westminster-bridge, to explode the Euro- pean continent. I never pass Whitehall without dropping a tear to the memory of Charles the Second, who was decimated after the rebellion of 1745, opposite the Horse Guards his memorable speech to Archbishop Caxon rings in my ears whenever I pass the spot I reverted my head, and affected to look to see what o'clock it was by the dial on the opposite side of the way. It is quite impossible not to notice the im- provements in this part of the town ; the beauti- ful view which one gets of Westminster Hall, and its curious roof, after which, as every- body knows, its builder was called William Roofus. Amongst the lighter specimens of modern architecture, is Ashley's Ampletheatre, on your right, as you cross the bridge (which was built, Mr Fulmer told me, by the Court of Arches and the House of Peers). In this ampletheatre there are equestrian performances, so called because they are exhibited niyhtly during the season. It is quite impossible to quit this 'mighty maze,' as Lady Hopkins emphatically calls London, in her erudite Essay upon Granite, without feeling a thousand powerful sensations so much wealth, so much virtue, so much vice, such business as is carried on within its precincts, such influence as its inhabitants possess in every part of the civilized world It really exalts the mind from meaner things, and casts all minor considerations far behind one. The toll at the Marsh-gate is ris since we last come through it was here we were to have taken up Lavinia's friend, Mr. Smith, who had promised to go with us to Dover; but we found his servant instead of himself, with a billy, to say he was sorry he could not come, because his friend Sir John Somebody wished him to stay and go down to Poll at Lincoln. I have no doubt this Poll, whoever she may be, is a very respectable young woman : but mentioning her by her Christian name only, in so abrupt a manner, had a very unpleasant appearance at any rate. Nothing remarkable occurred till we reached the Obstacle in St. George's Fields, where our attention was arrested by those great institu- tions, the "School for the Indignant Blind," and the "Misanthropic Society" for making shoes, both of which claim the gratitude of the nation. At the corner of the lane leading to Peckham, I saw that they had removed the Dollygraph, which used to stand upon a declivity to the right of the road the dollygraphs are all to be superseded by Serampores. When we came to the Green Man at Black- heath, we had an opportunity of noticing the errors of former travellers, for the heath is green, and the man is black: Mr. Fulmer endeavoured to account for tliip,. by saying, that Mr. Col- umn has discovered that Moors being black, 116 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. and Heaths being a kind of Moor, he looks upon the confusion of words as the cause of the mistake. As we went near Woolwich we saw at a dis- tance the artillery officers on a common, a firing away with their bombs in mortai-s like anything. At Dartford they make gunpowder; here we changed horses; at the inn we saw a most beautiful Rhoderick Random in a pot, covered with flowers; it is the finest I ever saw, except those at Dropmore. (Note, Rhododendron.) When we got to Rochester we went to the Crown Inn, and had a cold collection: the charge was absorbent I had often heard my poor dear husband talk of the influence of the Crown, and a Bill of Wrights, but I had no idea what it really meant till we had to pay one. As we passed near Chatham I saw several Pitts, and Mr. Fulmer showed me a great many buildings I believe he said they were fortyfi- cations ; but I think there must have been near fifty of them. He also showed us the Lines at Chatham, which I saw quite distinctly, with the clothes drying on them. Rochester was remarkable, in King Charles' time, for being a very witty and dissolute place, as I have read in books. At Canterbury we stopped ten minutes, to visit all the remarkable buildings and curio- sities in it, and about its neighbourhood. The church is beautiful: when Oliver Cromwell conquered William the Third, he perverted it into a stable the stalls are still standing. The old Virgin who showed us the church wore buckskin breeches and powder; he said it was an archypiscopal sea; but I saw no sea, nor do I think it possible he could see it either, for it is at least seventeen miles off. We saw Mr. Thomas a Beckett's tomb my poor husband was extremely intimate with the old gentleman, and one of his nephews, a very nice man, who lives near Golden Square, dined with us twice, I think, in London; in Trinity Chapel is the monument of Eau de Cologne, just as it is now exhibiting at the Diarrea in the Regent's Park. It was late when we got to Dover: we walked about while our dinner was preparing, looking forward to our snug tete-a-tete of three. We went to look at the sea; so called, perhaps, from the uninterrupted view one has, when upon it. It was very curious to see the locks, to keep in the water here, and the keys, which are on each side of them all ready, I suppose, to open them if they were wanted. Mr. Fulmer looked at a high place, and talked of Shakspeare, and said out of his own head these beautiful lines: " Half way down Hangs one that gathers camphire ; dreadful trade." This, I think it but right to say, I did not myself see. " Methinks he seems 110 bigger than his head, The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice." This, again, I cannot quite agree to: for where we stood, they looked exactly like men, only smaller; -which I attribute to the effect of distance ajid then Mr. Fulmer said this: -" And yon tall anchoring bark Diminished to her cock her cock a boy I" This latter part I do not in the least under- stand, nor what Mr. Fulmer meant by cock a boy however, Lavinia seemed to comprehend it all; for she turned up her eyes, and said something about the immortal bird of heaven; so I suppose they were alluding to the eagles, which doubtless build their aviaries in that white mountain. (Immortal Bard of Avon, the lady means.) After dinner we read the Paris Guide, and looked over the list of all the people who had been incontinent during the season, whose names are all put down in a book at the inn, for the purpose we went to rest much fatigued, knowing that we should be obliged to get up early, to be ready for embrocation in the packet in the morning. We were, however, awake with the owl, and a walking away before eight ; we went to see the castle, which was built, the man told us, by Seizer, so called, I conclude, from seizing whatever he could lay his hands on ; the man said, moreover, that he had invaded Britain and conquered it ; upon which I told him, that if he repeated such a thing in my presence again, I should write to Mr. Peel about him. We saw the inn where Alexander, the auto- graph of all the Russias, lived when he was here ; and as we were going along we met twenty or thirty dragons, mounted on horses, and the ensign who commanded them was a friend of Mr. Fulmer's ; he looked at Lavinia, and seemed pleased with her Tooting assembly he was quite a sine qua non of a man. and wore tips on his lips, like Lady Hopkins' poodle. I heard Mr. Fulmer say he was a son of Mam ; he spoke it as if everybody knew hlo father ; so I suppose he must be the son of the ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 117 poor gentleman who was so barbarously mur- dered some years ago near Ratcliffe Highway ; if he is, he is uncommon genteel. At twelve o'clock we got into a boat and rowed to the packet ; it was very fine and clear for the season, and Mr. Fulmer said he should not dislike pulling Lavinia about all the morn- ing. This, I believe, was a naughtycal phrase, which I did not rightly comprehend ; because Mr. F. never offered to talk in that way on shore to either of us. The packet is not a parcel, as I imagined, in which we were to be made up for exporta- tion, but a boat of considerable size ; it is called a cutter why, I do not know, and did not like to ask. It was very curious to see how it rolled about ; however, I fell quite mal-apropos; and, instead of exciting any of the soft sensi- bilities of the other sex, a great unruly man, who held the handle of the ship, bid me lay hold of a companion, and when I sought his arm for protection, he introduced me to a ladder, down which I ascended into the cabin, one of the most curious places I ever beheld, where ladies and gentlemen are put upon shelves, like books in a library, and where tall men are doubled up like boot-jacks before they can be put away at all. A gentleman in a hairy cap, without his coat, laid me perpendicularly on a mattress, with a basin by my side, and said that was my birth ; I thought it would have been my death, for I never was so indisposed in all my life. I behaved extremely ill to a very amiable middle-aged gentleman, with a bald head, who had the misfortune to be attending upon his wife, in the little hole under me. There was no symphony to be found among the tars (so called from their smell), for just before we went off I heard them throw a painter overboard, and directly after, they called out to one another to hoist up an ensign. I was too ill to inquire what the poor young gentle- man had done ; but, after I came up stairs, I did not see his body hanging anywhere, so I conclude they had cut him down. I hope it was not young Mr. Marr, a venturing after my Lavy. I was quite shocked to find what democrats the sailors are: they seem to hate the nobility, and especially the law-lords. The way I dis- covered this apathy of theirs to the nobility was this: the very moment we lost sight of England and were close to France, they began, one and all, to swear first at the peer and then at the bar, in such gross terms, as made my very blood run cold. I was quite pleased to eee Lavinia sitting with Mr. Fulmer in the travelling carriage on the outside of the packet. But Lavinia af- forded great proo& of her good bringing-up, by commanding her feelings. It is curious what could have agitated the billiary ducks of my stomach, because I took every precaution which is recommended in different books to prevent ill-disposition. I had some mutton- chops at breakfast, some Scotch marmalade on bread and butter, two eggs, two cups of coffee, and three of tea, besides toast, a little fried whiting, some potted charr, and a few shrimps; and after breakfast, I took a glass of warm white wine negus and a few oysters, which lasted me till we got into the boat, when I began eating gingerbread-nuts all the way to the packet, and then was persuaded to take a glass of bottled porter, to keep everything snug and comfortable. When we came near the French shore, a batto (which is much the same as a boat in England) came off to us, and to my agreeable surprise, an Englishman came into our ship; and I believe he was a man of great consequence, for I overheard him explaining some dreadful quarrel which had taken place in our Royal Family. He said to the master of our ship, that owing to the Prince Leopold's having run foul of the Duchess of Kent while she was in stays, the Duchess had missed Deal. By which I con- clude it was a dispute at cards: however, I want to know nothing of state secrets, or I might have heard a great deal more, because it appeared that the Duchess' head was con- siderably injured in the scuffle. I was very much distressed to see that a fat gentleman who was in the ship, had fallen into a fit of perplexity by over-reaching himself he lay prostituted upon the floor, and if it had not been that we had a doctor in the ship, who immediately opened his temporary artery and his jocular vein, with a lancelot, which he had in his pocket, I think we should have seen his end. It was altogether a most moving spectacle: he thought himself dying, and all his anxiety in the midst of his distress was to be able to add a crocodile to his will, in favour of his niece, about whom he appeared very sangui- nary. It was quite curious to see the doctor flea- bottomize the patient, which he did without any accident, although it blew a perfect harrico at the time. I noticed two little children, who came out of the boat with hardly any clothes on them, speakin? French like anything; a proof of the superior education given to the 118 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. poor in France, to that which they get in England from Doctor Bell of Lancaster. When we landed at Callous, we were ex- tremely well received, and I should have en- joyed the sight very much, but Mr. Fulmer, and another gentleman in the batto, kept talking of nothing but how turkey and grease disagreed with each other, which, in the then state of my stomach, was far from agreeable. We saw the print of the foot of Louis Desweet, the French king, where he first stepped when he returned to his country : he must be a pro- digious heavy man, to have left such a deep mark in the stone; we were surrounded by Commissioners, who were so hospitable as to press us to go to their houses without any cere- mony. Mr. Fulmer showed our passports to a poor old man, with a bit of red ribbon tied to his button-hole, and we went before the mayor, who is no more like a mayor than my foot-boy. Here they took a subscription of our persons, and one of the men said that Lavinia had a jolly manton, at which the clerks laughed, and several of them said she was a jolly feel, which I afterwards understood meant a pretty girl; I misunderstood it for fee, which, being in a public office, was a very natural mistake. We went then to a place they call the Do- Anne, where they took away the poll of my baruch; I was very angry at this, but they told me we were to travel in Lemonade with a biddy, which I did not understand, but Mr. Fulmer was kind enough to explain it to me as we went to the hotel, which is in a narrow street, and contains a garden and court-yard. I left it to Mr. Fulmer to order dinner, for I felt extremely piquant, as the French call it, and a very nice dinner it was we had a purey, which tasted very like soup : one of the men said it was made from leather, at least, so I understood, but it had quite the flavour of hare; I think it right here to caution travellers against the fish at this place, which looks very good, but which I have reason to believe is very unwholesome, for one of the waiters called it poison while speaking to the other: the fish was called marine salmon, but it appeared like veal cutlets. They are so fond of Buonaparte still, that they call the table-cloths Najys, in compliment to him this I remarked to myself, but said nothing about it to anybody else, for fear of consequences. One of the waiters who spoke English, asked me if I would have a little Berg.imi. which surprised me, till Mr. Fulmer said, it was the wine he was handing about, when I refused it, preferring to take a glass of Bucephalus. When we had dined we had some coffee, which is here called Cabriolet; after which, Mr. Fulmer asked if we would have a chasse, which I thought meant a hunting party, and said I was afraid of going into the fields at that time of night but I found chasse was a lickure called cure a sore (from its healing qualities, I suppose), and very nice it was after we had taken this, Mr. Fulmer went out to look at the jolly feels in the shops of Callous, which I thought indiscreet in the cold air; however, I am one as always overlooks the little piccadillies of youth. When we went to accoucher at night, I was quite surprised in not having a man for a chambermaid; and if it had not been for the entire difference of the style of furniture, the appearance of the place, and the language and dress of the attendants, I should never have discovered that we had changed our country in the course of the day. In the morning early we left Callous with the Lemonade, which is Shafts, with a very tall post-boy, in a violet-coloured jacket, trimmed with silver; he rode a little horse, which is called a biddy, and wore a nobbed tail, which thumped against his back like a patent self-acting knocker. We saw, near Bullion, Buonaparte's conservatory, out of which he used to look at England in former days. Nothing remarkable occurred till we met a courier a travelling, Mr. Fulmer said, with despatches; these men were called couriers im- mediately after the return of the Bonbons, in compliment to the London newspaper, which always wrote in their favour. At Montrule, Mr. Fulmer showed me Sterne's Inn, and there he saw Mr. Sterne himself, a standing at the door, with a French cocked hat upon his head, over a white night-cap. Mr. Fulmer asked if he had any becauses in his house : but he said no; what they were I do not know to this mo- ment. It is no use describing the different places on our raut, because Paris is the great object of all travellers, and therefore I shall come to it at once it is reproached by a revenue of trees ; on the right of which you see a dome, like that of Saint Paul's, but not so large. Mr. Fulmer told me it was an invalid, and it did certainly look very yellow in the distance; on the left you perceive Mont Martyr, so called from the number of windmills upon it. I was very much surprised at the height of the houses, and the noise of the carriages in Paris: and was delighted when we got to our hotel, which is called Wag Ram; why, I did ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 119 not like to inquire; it is just opposite the Royal Timber-yard, which is a fine building, the name of which is cut in stone Timbre Royal. The hotel which I have mentioned is in the Rue de la Pay, so called from its being the dearest part of the town. At one end of it is the place Fumdum, where there is a pillow as high as the Trojan's Pillow at Rome, or the pompous in Egypt; this is a beautiful object, and is made of all the guns, coats, waistcoats, hats, boots, and belts which belonged to the French who were killed by the cold in Prussia at the fire of Moscow! At the top of the pillow is a small apartment, which they call a pavilion, and over that a white flag, which I concluded to be hoisted as a remembrance of Buonaparte, being very like the table-cloths I noticed at Callous. We lost no time in going into the gardens of the Tooleries, where we saw the statutes at large in marvel : here we saw Mr. Backhouse and Harry Edney, whoever they might be, and a beautiful grope of Cupid and Physic, together with several of the busks which Lavy has copied, the original of which is in the Vaccuum at Rome, which was formerly an office for government thunder, but is now re- duced to a stable where the pope keeps his bulls. Travellers like us, who are mere birds of prey, have no time to waste, and therefore we determined to see all we could in eacli day, so we went to the great church, which is called Naughty Dam, where we saw a priest doing something at an altar. Mr. Fulmer begged me to observe the knave of the church, but I thought it too hard to call the man names in his own country, although Mr. Fulmer said he believed he was exercising the evil spirits in an old lady in a black cloak. It was a great day at this church, and we stayed for mass, so called from the crowd of people who attend it the priest was very much incensed we waited out the whole ceremony; and heard Tedeum sung, which occupied three hours. We returned over the Pont Neuf, so called from being the north bridge in Paris, and here we saw a beautiful image of Henry Carter ; it is extremely handsome, and quite green I fancied I saw a likeness to the Cartel's of Ports- mouth; but if it is one of his family, his pos- teriors are very much diminished in size and figure. A beautiful statute of Apollo with the Hypo- crite pleased me very much, and a Fawn, which looks like a woman, done by Mons. Praxytail, a French stone-mason, is really curious. A picture of the Bicknells is, I suppose, a family grope; but the young women appeared tipsy, which is an odd state to be drawn in. The statute of Manylaws is very fine, and so is Cupid and Physic, different from the one which I noticed before. Mr. Fulmer showed us some small old black pictures, which I did not look at much, because he told us they were Remnants, and of course very inferior. A fine painting, by Carlo my Hearty, pleased me; and we saw also some- thing, by Sail Vatarosa, a lady, who was some- how concerned with the little woman I have seen at Peckham Fair, in former day, called Lady Morgan. Mr. Fulmer proposed that we should go and dine at a tavern called Very because every- thing is very good there ; and accordingly we went, and I never was so malapropos in my life: there were two or three ladies quite ia nubibus ; but when I came to look at the bill of fare, I was quite anileated, for I perceived that Charlotte de Pommes might be sent for one shilling and twopence, and Patty de Veau for half-a-crown. I desired Mr. Fulmer to let us go; but he convinced me there was no harm in the place, by showing me a dignified clergy- man of the Church of England and his wife, a eating away like anything. We had a voulez vous of fowl, and some sailor's eels, which were very nice, and some pieces of crape, so disguised by the sauce that nobody who had not been told what it was, would have distinguished them from pancakes; after the sailor's eels, we had some pantaloon cutlets, which were savoury : but I did not like the writing paper; however, as it was a French custom, I eat every bit of it ; they call sparrow- grass here asperge, I could not find out why. If I had not seen what wonderful men the French cooks are, who actually stew up shoes with partridges, and make very nice dishes too, I never could have believed the influence they have in the politics of the country : every- thing is now decided by the cooks, who make no secret of their feelings, and the party who are still for Buonaparte call themselves traitors, while those who are partizans of the Bonbons are termed Restaurateurs, or friends of the Restoration. After dinner, a French monsheur, who, I thought, was a waiter, for he had a bit of red ribbon at his button-hole, just the same as one of the waiters had, began to talk to Mr. Fulmer, and it was agreed we should go to the play they talked of Racing and Cornhill, which made me think the monsheur had been in England; however, it was arranged that we 120 A GARDEN REVERIE. were to go and see Andrew Mackay at the Francay, or Jem Narse, or the Bullvards; but at last it was decided unanimously, crim. con. that we should go to see Jem Narse, and so we went but I never saw the man himself after all. A very droll person, with long legs and a queer face, sung a song, which pleased me very much, because I understood the end of it per- fect!}": it was "tal de lal de lal de lal," and sounded quite like English. After he had done, although everybody laughed, the whole house called out "beast, beast," and the man not- withstanding was foolish enough to sing it all over again. THEODORE HOOK. A GARDEN REVERIE.* BY PHILIP BOURKK MARSTON. I hear the sweeping fitful breeze This early night in June; I hear the rustling of the trees That had no voice at noon : Clouds brood, and rain will soon come down, To gladden all the panting town With the cool melody that beats Upon the busy dusty streets. But in this space of narrow ground We call a garden here Because less loudly falls the sound Of traffic on the ear ; Because its faded grass-plot shows One hawthorn tree, which each May blows, Whereon the birds in early spring At sun- dawn and at sun-down sing I muse alone. A rose-tree twines About the brown brick wall, Which strives, when summer's glory shines, To gladden at its festival, Yet lets upon the path beneath Such pale leaves drop as I would wreathe Around a portrait that to me Is all my soul's divinity. From Song-Tide, and other Poe>. London, 1871. This is the first volume of a gentleman who is evidently destined to hold a high place in the realms of poetry. Critics have been unanimous in awarding high |>rai.-e to the work. The Pall Stall Gnzfttr says: "There is much in these poems that impresses us with the force cf real feeling and the grace of a^i esthetic life." A face in no wise proud or grand, But strange, and sad, and fair ; A maiden twining round her hand A tress of golden hair ; While in her deep pathetic eyes The light of coming trouble lies, As on some silent sea and warm The shadow of a coming storm. From those still lips shall no more flow The tones that, in excess Of tremulous love, touched more on woe Thau quiet happiness, When my arms strained her in a grasp That sought her very soul to clasp, When my hand pressed that hand most fair That holds but now a tress of hair. How look, this breezy summer night, The places that we knew When all the hills were flushed with light And July seas were blue? Does the wind eddy through our wood As through this garden solitude? Do the same trees their branches ttss The undulating wind aaross? What feet tread paths that now no more Our feet together tread? How in the twilight looks the shore? Is -still the sea outspread Beneath the sky, a silent plain Of silent lights that wax and wane? What ships go sailing by the strand Of that fair consecrated laud? How hard it is to realize That I no more shall hear The music of thy low replies, As those deep eyes and clear Once looked in my faint eyes uutil I felt the burning colour fill My face, because my spirit caught In that long gaze thine inmost thought. Alas ! what voice shall now reply? Not thine, arrested gale That 'neath the dark and pregnant sky Subsidest to a wail. On a dusty city, silent plain. And on thy village grave the rain Comes down, while I to-night shall jest And hide a secret in my breast. KABAK. 121 OLD FAMILIAR FACES. I hay* had playmates, I have had companions, Iii my days of childhood, in my joyful school days, All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies, All, all are gone, the oJd familiar faces. I loved a love once, fairest among women ; Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man; Like an ingrate, I left, my friend abruptly ; Left him, to muse on the old familiar laces. Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood; Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse, Seeking to find the old familiar faces. Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother. Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? So might we talk of the old familiar faces How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me ; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. CHARLES LAMB. KABAK. AN EASTERN TALE. In the vicinity of the famous city of Bagdad, which standeth on the green and winding Tigris, like a precious jewel on the back of a coiling serpent, dwelt Kabak, the woodcutter, as good a Mussulman as ever stepped out of a sandal into a mosque, or indulged in the mas- tication of opium; and was particularly re- markable for the adroit and dexterous manner in which he handled his bill; although this is not so much to be wondered at when it is re- membered that, like the vulture he used his bill not only to feed but to clothe himself too. In the pursuit of his vocation Kabak was obliged one day to enter the gates of the city under cover of several bundles of wood which he had risen before daybreak to hew from the venerable trees of the wood wherein he resided, the Caliph's cook having commanded him to bring the said fuel for the culinary purpose of roasting a covey of partridges, and a lamb or two, for the delicate maw of the Commander of the Faithful and his numerous household. Oh! a single glance into the kitchen of the Caliph was a feast to the eyes and a provoca- tive to hunger. The plump birds, trimly trussed and powdered for the polished spits the milk-white rice for the pilau the delicate odour of the various spices made the wood- cutter slowly and instinctively project his bearded chin and raise his regaled nostrils in the fragrant air. But the double-chinned, burly cook was too well fed to feel any sympathy for the hungry; and although a single kidney, a gizzard, or a liver plucked from the embrace of a chicken's wing would have satisfied the moderate desires of Kabak, he offered him nothing not even payment for his services; indeed, Kabak dared not for his life ask such a thing of so great a man as the Caliph's cook; so, like many a well-bred modern shopkeeper, he stood playing significantly with his bill in his hand. At last deigning to cast his little, peering, piggish eyes (which just glimmered through his fat heavy eyelids) upon the woodcutter, he uttered such a sharp, repulsive " Go ! " that the startled Kabak fancied, at the moment, that the cook had stuck the silver skewer in his gizzard instead of that of the turkey he was trussing. And confusedly making his satarn, the trembling Kabak vanished. His imagination, but not his stomach, filled with the inviting edibles his eyes had de- voured, Kabak was making his retreat from this temple of luxury and temptation, when, passing through a latticed corridor, the shuffling of a score sandals on the tesselated marble pavement approaching him, in an instant scared away all the sumptuary reveries from his busy brain, and left it empty and confused as a vacated province before the march of a hostile army ; for Kabak expected no less than to be decapitated by some whirligig scimitar sharper than his own bill. Escape was vain: the group rapidly ad- vanced; and his dizzy eyes beheld not only caftans and turbans, but veils too; and being veils, there were of course women, and to look upon these lovely houris M'as not only poeti- cally but actually death. Prostrate fell the trembling woodcutter his forehead throbbing against the cold pavement. But his abject garb and his terror, but too evident in his quivering limbs, fortunately for his head (and this tale), only excited the mirth of the beholders, and the fair ones enjoyed a hearty laugh at his expense, which he doubtless 122 KABAK. considered his profit, for he inwardly thanked Mahomet for his preservation. His fears being lulled, Kabak, moved by curiosity, ventured when they had all passed him to raise his head and cast a glance askance at the retiring group of merry girls; and oh! most fortunate of woodcutters, his vision was blessed by the sunshiny face of a very sylph, who, coquettishly drawing aside her veil, smiled roguishly upon the recumbent Kabak, and the next moment faded like a rainbow from his sight. Poor Kabak! He hurried back to his own hut again, lovesick as a nightingale, and for- lorn as a frog in a stork's bill. Never had he encountered so much and gained so little since he had commenced the arduous calling of lopping trees. He had laboured early and indefatigably to chop up the six bundles of wood for the fat cook without even getting a stake or a chop for him- self; and he had moreover found an appetite and lost a heart. These occurrences had com- pletely turned Kabak topsy-turvy; so sinking listlessly upon his own block, his varying thoughts issued from his lips in an audible soliloquy. "Oh! that I were rich! that I were a wise Caliph, or only a simple cadi, I would kick that cursed cook; and oh! how I would hug that beautiful, little, bright-eyed Georgian! what wicked eyes! what pretty lips! By the beard of the Prophet! that lazy blubber- lipped cook should cut wood, and work till his sandals were no better than dripping-pans to his fat carcass ! How would I make my slaves fly! More sherbet here! rose-water! pis- tachios pilau bring me a lamb! I'll taste those partridges! Oh! I would be hungry and eat for a whole month! Oh! beautiful Georg- ian! sweeter than new-blown roses; whose breath is more fragrant than the caravans of musk from Khoten ; whose eyes are more bright and piercing than the spits of that ill-favoured cook, who gave me nothing but black looks and sharp words for my pains. cook! Georgian! O Georgian! cook! one kills me with cruelty and the other with kindness. I'm pinched by hunger and consumed by love. Yet would I forget all my pains and pangs in the possession of such a nymph as she whom my eyes beheld to-day. What sorrow could possibly befall that her smiles could not have power to sweeten?" Scarcely had he given vent to these compli- cated feelings of his heart when a small vapour issuing from the ground-floor of his humble cabin suddenly cut short his speech. Anon it spread wider and wider, becoming more dense as it arose, when presently the cloud divided, and there appeare_d a beautiful female form to the enchanted eyes of Kabak. She bore the identical figure and face of the fair Georgian. With oilly wonder, half-joyed and half- abashed, the woodcutter, grasping the thumb of his left hand, leered with a smiling look, expressive of his inward delight, upon the sylph before him not daring to approach her. " Kabak," cried she, in a voice more melo- dious than the flute or the rebek, "lord of my heart, receive thy bride ! " "Eh! my mine?" exclaimed the astonished woodcutter, encouraged by these bold advances, "mine but art thou really mine? Don't be putting a jest upon me." "Jest! I dare not jest with my spouse if it did not please him I love my Kabak too too much!" and putting her left arm round her Kabak's neck, she playfully patted his cheek, " This is a dream love me no it cannot be," cried he; "what beautiful lips; what may I presume to to kiss them?" " Presume ! " said the Georgian, "is not my lord the light of my eyes and the joy of my heart ? " "May I then?" said Kabak licking his lips in anticipation, and pressing hers in reality, venting an exclamatory "Oh!" of delight after every ecstatic salute "Oh, this is too much ! " But this pleasant dalliance was disagreeably interrupted by some one rapping loudly at the door. Kabak was alarmed, and fearfully jealous that any human eye should behold the most precious jewel of his house. Unfortunately, his economical establishment consisted only of one room; no Jtaram; no closet; no trunk, save that of a tree,: never was bachelor in such an awkward quandary such a distressing dilemma. The rapping continued, accompanied by the importunate voice of the burly cook ! Kabak would as soon have encountered the devil: however, seeing no alternative, he hastily piled up some faggots, behind which, with many confused apologies, he placed his would- be wife ; then unbarring his door, he cunningly yawned, and rubbed his eyes, as if he had just awakened from a sound sleep. "You lazy dog!" cried the fat cook, "how dare you sleep when I am coming hither? Am I not thy patron, ungrateful slave? Do not I employ thee oftener, and consume more wood, than all thy customers put together, who are but as dust beneath my feet?" SONG. 123 Kabak humbly begged pardon for his re- missness, promising in future to be unre- mitting in his duty. " Mind ye do," said the choleric cook, "and to make you remember your duty to your superiors more faithfully, take that" and raising his round, plump, little leg to kick Kabak, he missed his aim and fell backwards against the barricade which concealed the lady, who,screaming with affright, rushed from her hiding-place, to the terror of Kabak and the unspeakable wonder and ad- miration of the sprawling cook, who, scarcely able to move his mountain of flesh from the floor, sat silently devouring the charms of the lady, as she hung upon her dear Kabak, like a drooping lily propped by a hazel twig. " 0, !" cried the cook, then ruminating a short moment, "Friend Kabak," resumed he, mildly, "lend me thine arm." Kabak raised him; his heart was heavier than the cook. "Thy fortune's made, friend Kabak; thou hast a jewel yonder." "Which I would keep." "Psha! fifty sequins are thine, yield me thy slave 'tis a bargain. " "Never!" cried the woodcutter; "she is above price." "Very well, very well!" cried the cook, shrugging up his shoulders, "thou wilt cry for the fifty sequins to-morrow;" and with this threat he went away. "Here's a predicament!" exclaimed the sorrowful Kabak; "I am undone." And not even the blandishments of the lady of his heart could dispel his sad forebodings; and sure enough, on the following morning the Caliph's guard surrounded his hut, and breaking down the door, demanded the surrender of his slave. Kabak and his bride, whom he now looked upon as the innocent but unhappy source of all his misfortunes, were taken before the Caliph, who, immediately struck with the transcendant beauty of the slave, ordered her to be placed in his haram, and Kabak to be entertained with great care in the dungeons of the seraglio until his pleasure should be known. That the Caliph's pleasure would prove Kabak's pain the woodcutter was well aware; and be- moaning his unhappy fate, he sat, with his head in his hands, cursing the cook, the Caliph, and his own ill luck. "Sure some evil genius must have granted my wish and sent this nymph only for my de- struction. Fool that I was to desire the pos- session of such a grievous care as a beautiful woman, thereby creating the envy of my betters, and whetting a scimitar for my own unfortunate neck ! " "Kabak! Kabak! thou art an arrant zany. Why did thy foolish tongue utter the prepos- terous wishes of thy heart? What did a poor devil of a woodcutter want with a houri a nymph fit for the haram of the Commander of the Faithful? 'Twas like a hog sighing for embroidered sandals, or a lazy toad groaning for a silken palanquin. "A most egregious folly, whereby I shall lose my head, which I still value as an old ac- quaintance, though it has proved of so little use to me." As he concluded these penitential reflections, there arose before him a venerable sage, with a snowy beard descending even to his feet. Mildness and benevolence beamed from his bright blue eyes, and threw a sunshine over his placid features. Kabak, with reverential awe, prostrated him- self at the sage's feet. "Mortal," said he, "thy wishes were wild and unreasonable. But only in the fulfilment thereof could their fallacy have been satisfac- torily proved. Thine eyes are opened, and thine errors punished. Henceforth be content in the station which heaven in its wisdom hath assigned thee. Go forth; thou art free. Be honest and industrious, and the good genii will defend thee from all harm." The sage melted into air; and the no less astonished than delighted Kabak found himself on the floor of his own cabin! A. CROWQUIU. SONG. FROM THE SPANISH. O broad and limpid river, O banks so fair and gay O meadows verdant ever, O groves in green array; Oh ! if in field or plain My love should hap to be, Ask if her heart retain A thought of me. O clear and crystal dews That in the morning ray. All bright with silvery hues Make field and forest g;iy; Oh ! if in field or plain My love should hap to be, Ask if her heart retain A thought of ni8. 124 THE LITERARY LIFE. O woods that to the breeze With waving branches play: O sands, where oft at ease Her careless footsteps stray ; Oh ! if in field or plain My love should hap to be, Ask if her heart retain A thought of me. O warbling birds that still Salute the rising day, And plain and valley fill With your enchanting lay; Oh ! if in field or plain My love should hap to be, Ask if her heart retain A thought of me. J. G. LOCKHART. THE LORD'S MARIE. The Lord's Marie has kepp'd her locks Up wi' a gowdeu kanie, An' she has put on her net-silk hose, An' awa to the tryste has gaue. O saft, suft fell the dew on her locks, An' saft, saft on her brow; Ae sweet drap fell on her strawberry lip, An' I kiss'd it aff I trow. "O whar gat ye that leal maiden, Sae jimpy laced an' sina'? O whar gat ye that young damsel, Wha dings our lasses a' ! O whar gat ye that bonnie, bonnie lass, Wi' heaven in her ee? O here's ae drap o' the damask wine, Sweet maiden, will ye pree?" Fu' white, white was her bounie neck, Twist wi' the satin twine; But ruddie, ruddie grew her hawse, While she sipp'd the bluid-red wine. "Come here's thy health, young stranger dow, "Wha wears the gowden kaine This night will mony drink thy health, And ken na wha to name." Play me up "Sweet Marie," I cried, And loud the piper blew But the fiddler play'd ay struntum strum, An' down his bow he threw. " Here's thy kind health i' the ruddie red wine, Fair dame o' the stranger land ! For never a pair o' een before Could mar my gude bow hand." Her lips were a cloven hinney cherrie, Sae tempting to the sight ; Her locks, ower alabaster brows, Fell like the morning light. An' light on her hinney breath heaved her locks, As through the dance she flew; While luve laugh'd in her bonnie blue ee, And dwalt on her comely mou". "Loose hings yer broider'd good garter, Fair lady, dare I speak?" She, trembling, lift up her silken hand To her red, red flushing cheek. "Ye've drapp'd, ye've drapp'd your brooch o' gowd, Thou Lord's daughter sae gay;" The tears o er-brimmed her bonnie blue ee, "O come, O come away." " O maid, undo the siller ban', To thy chamber let me win." "An' tak this kiss, thou peasant youth, I daurna let thee in. And tak," quoth she, " this kaine o' gowd, Wi' my lock o' yellow hair, For meikle my heart forbodes to me I never maun meet thee mair." ALLAN CWXXIKGHAM. THE LITERARY LIFE. 1 To take up, as promised, the subject of pre- paration for literature as a profession, I begin by saying that probably the greater number of those who try to find their way into litera- ture never think of preparing for it at all, and that some of those who read this will no doubt wonder what kind of preparation can be possible or desirable. Let me be excused for being autobiographical ; it will prove the shortest way of getting into the heart of the subject. The Scripture-loving people among whom my lot was first cast used to say of me that I had "the pen of a ready writer," from the time when I could use the pen. But long before I had learned writing I had a style of what shall I say? slate -pencilmanship of my own, and, on the slate, "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. " By the time I was ten years old I had produced plenty of verse, which, merely as such, was good, and which probably 1 From St. Paul's Magazine, August, 1871. This is one of a series of articles which are full of humour and keen olwervatioii. and which obtain peculiar value from the absolute frankness of the writer. His experience baa been great, and he gives the result without reserve. THE LITERARY LIFE. 125 contained some faint elements of poetry. But my shyness and self-distrust were extreme, and this continued up to long after the time when it had been proved that other people were willing to hear me or read me. These lines may possibly, nay probably, be read by an editor who will remember something of a poetical contributor whose rhymes he used to print, but who utterly disappeared and shot suddenly down the horizon upon being politely requested in the correspondents' column to furnish his name and address. This, which I Suppose would have set the hair of many con- tributors on end with rapturous visions of cheques and conversaziones, was quite suffi- cient to shut me up, though I was a grown man with children. The good-natured editor had heard his first and last of me, unless he recognizes me under this fresh disguise. I will help his memory, if he yet lives, in the following manner: Supposing I wanted to get hold of him by advertisement, I should insert in the agony column of the Times or Telegraph a notice beginning " The Ascent of the Peter Botte. If the Editor who once," &c., &c. Further than this I decline to go, we have all our feelings. The upshot of this is that I had always a certain amount of "encouragement" given to me, especially in matters of verse. My rhymes were almost always inserted, and promptly; and a distinguished man of letters (never mind how I happened to get into com- munication with him it cost me agonies) told me that verse was my "spere." While I write this I am thinking of Dickens' old stager, who failed to make a journey by rail, getting miserably lost at stations, and whose wife was told by the housemaid that "railways wasn't master's spear." It is not an impossible thing to make money by writing verses, but in order to do so you must either have an independent stand-point to begin from, or you must be in such a position that you can afford to go through a long pro- bation before you arrive at the period when you can make poetry pay. Even then the chances are a million to one against success. My own position and feelings at the time when I began to think about writing for money, are expressed in certain paragraphs from my own pen, which I will quote directly. And I should never have begun to think of writing for money at all if it had not been that I was, in a manner, driven to it by finding certain occupa- tions, which I need not describe, telling on my health. The passage I was about to quote is as follows : " Any one who wishes to make a serious mark upon the literature of his country had better, if he possibly can, find some other means of getting his bread than writing. To write for immortality, and for the journals too, is about the most harassing work a man could engage in. There are, of course, cases to the contrary cases of men who have a fine physique to back the large brain, and whose genius is consequently of the productive and popular order. Such men can kill the two birds with one stone, but woe betide the weak- ling who tries the same thing! " In all cases where the brain, whether in- trinsically or by association with a capricious physique, is delicate and incapable of inces- sant production, the problem difficult of solu- tion, but not always insoluble is to find some not too uncongenial employment, which shall yield the nucleus of an income, and leave a good deal of leisure too. Not a clerk's place, if the man be of the Campbell order, but some- thing less continuous, if even more arduous. Men of imaginative mould should choose, if they can, pursuits which leave large yaps of leisure, even if they pay for that advantage by being overworked at occasional times. " I must here say, harsh as the judgment will seem to a good many people, that it is all but impossible for a person to use any form of teaching (except the most mechanical, and scarcely then) as a means of earning a liveli- hood, and yet maintain perfect independence and purity of conscience. Journalists, who are bent to the yoke, will scoff at this ; but the fox without a tail laughs all the world over at the fox who insists on keeping his; and I maintain that what I say is true. At all events I thought so, and determined that I would, at whatever cost, find out some way of earning at least bread and water, so that I might leave myself without excuse if, at the end of every writing day, I could not say, " This hand has never written what this brain did not think, or this heart did not feel. " Besides this difficulty, there were others in my way which forced themselves upon my at- tention. My natural inclination was always either to look at things "in the aibstract" and run off into metaphysics, or else to be what people called transcendental, or florid, or, still more frequently, mystical. And I uniformly observed that writing to which the people I knew my fool-ometers in fact would apply these terms, was certain to be rejected by editors. I also observed, and past experience has amusingly confirmed this, that editors who will look very jealously after what you say 126 THE LITERAEY LIFE. while your articles are new to them, will let you write almost what you please after a little time. Putting one thing with another, I began a determined course of preparatory study that is to say, I minutely analyzed the sort of writing for which I found there was a market. In this way I pulled to pieces erery novel and every leading article that I came across. Thus, 1 took so many pages of a story and chopped it all up into incident, conversation, and com- ment. Leading articles gave me a great deal of trouble. I found that I could write articles that were printed when the subject excited me, or when the appeal in the discussion was to first principles. Hence, an article of mine on a revolution, or on the law of husband and wife, would, I found, be welcomed ; but for politics, in the ordinary sense of the word, I had not a whiff of instinct. Although I always could, and can, adapt means to ends by dint of hard thinking, yet I found myself destitute of all sagacity in dealing with the by-play of minor motives, and utterly lost though scornfully as well as consciously lost in handling what people call politics. I shall never forget, and my friend now beyond the grave will perhaps remember in heaven, the outcome of his asking me to attend vestry meetings and edit a local news- paper. This was not from any contempt of common things, but from a sense that every- body would get a rise out of me which would make my attempt to fulfil editorial duties a farce. My instinct was a true instinct : and, after accepting the engagement, I gave it up, because I was satisfied that, by attempting to keep it, I should put him to more inconvenience than I could possibly do by breaking it. He perfectly understood, laughed, and remained my friend to the last. The things, then, that gave me the most trouble, considered as studies, were leading articles and essays on current politics. With regard to the latter, or indeed both, I never could get a firm footing to begin with. It was Austria wants to do this, and Prussia wants to do the other; the Bourbons aimed at so-and- so, and Spain had her reasons for standing aloof. But I was, for one thing, unable to see that there was any ground for all this sort of thing, outside the fancy of the rtdacteur; and then, again, I could never personify Austria, or Spain, or Prussia, or France. My mind, or as Lord Westbury puts it, what I was pleased to call my mind, said "Austria? But what is Austria? It is so many roods of ground." It was intelligible to me that a man should want to marry a particular woman, or to secure a particular estate, for its beauty or use; but that Scnwarzenburg, and Thiers, and Palmerston, and A. and B. , and who-not, should be play- ing a political ' ' game " with earnestness enough to deserve or justify a serious leading article, was to me utterly unintelligible. This was not for want of strong English feeling and even passionate pride in "speaking the tongue that Shakspeare spake," but from my general in- capacity to understand why people should be always meddling with each other. When I was a little boy I remember hearing a shock-headed wart-nosed tradesman, brandishing a ham knife, holding forth thus: "What does a man go and be a politician for? His own aggrandyzement. What makes a man go and be a clergyman? His own aggrandyzement. What makes me go and keep a 'am-and-beef shop? My own aggrandyzement." Well, I had been brought up in some loneliness, and chiefly in the society of those who had a consuming desire to make certain opinions prevail; the opinions being rooted in first principles, and the only means dreamed of being fair persuasion. And up to this time of my life, late as it was, I had only a very faint appreciation of the activity of the "aggrandyzement" motive in the affairs of the world. Besides this obstacle to my appreciating current political, or even much of different social criticism, there was another difficulty. Leading articles seemed to me to begin from nothing and to lead to no- where, and it was not till after most persever- ing study that I succeeded in cutting open the bellows and finding where the wind came from. Then, again, I carefully examined the magazines, and very carefully indeed the Notices to Correspondents. But at thirty years of age I was still so green as to write one day to the Times, pointing out an error of fact and a clear fallacy of deduction in one of its leaders, doing this in the full undoubting expectation that they would make the neces- sary correction. About this time I had an introduction to Mr. Mowbray Morris, and saw him in his room at the Times office. Nothing came of it, and I expect he thought I was a real Arcadian. I was. My letters of introduction were rather numerous, and addressed to people who could probably have helped me if they had taken pains nay, some of whom would probably have done so if I had "pushed" a little. But this was impossible to me ; and I was much surprised that clever men as I had reason to suppose many of these persons to whom I had letters really were did not seem able at a glance to feel sure that this real Arcadian had THE LITERARY LIFE. 127 * share of honesty, application, and versatility which might make it politic, merely as a matter of business, to treat him civilly. The only person, however, who was really insolent, was a man who had written chiefly on "love" and "brotherhood." I am not writing down a cynical fib, but the simple truth. He certainly annoyed me, and I thought to myself, "One of these days I will serve you out." I have, of course, never served him out; the only effect of his rudeness has been that I have been able to speak of him with cheerful frank- ness. There was some fun in situations of this kind; and I used to enjoy the feeling, that while perhaps some one to whom I had a letter was snubbing me, or at least treating me de haut en has, he was behaving thus to a stranger who would be able to his dying day to describe every look of the superior being's eyes, every line of his face, every word he said, the buttons on his coat, how high the gas was, and what tune the organ-grinder was playing in the next street while the little scene came off. After a time I was told by an old friend of a gentleman who, he thought, might help me. Him I hunted up, by a circuitous route, though I knew neither his name, his qualifi- cations, nor his address. He is a man of genius and of good-nature, and through him I got really useful introductions. From this time there were no external difficulties in my way. But conscientious scruples, and personal habits of my own remained to constitute real and very serious obstacles. I was not what Mr. Carlyle, describing the literary amanu- ensis who helped him in his Cromwell labours, calls "hardy." The manner in which the or- dinary journalist knocks about was always a wonder to me. I could neither stand gas, nor tobacco, nor pottering about, nor hunting people up in the intervals of literary labour, nor what those who know me have (too) often heard me call "jaw." I mean the kind of de- bate which goes on at discussion societies, and among even intelligent men when public topics arise after dinner. It is half sincere; it is wanting in the nicety of distinction which love of truth demands; it is full of push, and loud- ness, personal vanity, and the zest of combat: so it seemed to me that no one could have much of it without loss, not only of self-re- spect, but also of fineness of perception and clearness of conscience. As unpleasant in another way was what we may perhaps call the clever "club" talk of literary men. Here you find men trying apparently which can say the imartest thing to quote a mot of a living writer of admirable vers de tsoclete, "they call their jokes 'quips,' but the work is so hard that they might just as well be called 'cranks.' " On the whole, my tastes and habits were about as unfavourable for making way in journalism as could possibly be supposed. The necessity of keeping a conscience and obstinately keep- ing it under a glass case too was a far more serious matter. It so happened, however, that immediately on starting with my pen in a professional way, I got a character for writing good critical papers. The very first critical essay I ever wrote was quoted, and noticed in high quarters; and it was passed round that I had a quick scent in literary matters. But the way in which this worked was very amusing. Everybody went about to flood me with reviewing work. It was quite natural, but rather wide of the mark. When a man who possesses a pretty good critical scent takes up a book that is either by goodness or badness suggestive, there are "three courses" open to him. He may characterize it in a few sentences; but half-a- dozen lines, even if they are bright and ex- haustive in their way, are not a review are not, in fact, what is wanted of a journalist. Or he may make it a topic, and produce an article as long as a small book. This, again, however good, is not what is wanted of a jour- nalist. The third course, to write a column or two about a book that has no particular life in it, is the arduous one. And arduous indeed it is. There was another difficulty which stood in my way as a journalist. There is a class of article for which there is always a demand. I mean the kind of article which teaches one half of the world how the other half lives. I hope literary beginners who may read these lines will take notice of that. For this kind of writing I had some qualifications quick- ness of eye, a tenacious memory of detail, and a lively sense of fun; but then I could not knock about and come up to time. A day in Spitalfields would make me ill. There was a case in which, under unusually favourable con- ditions, I had to refuse a task of this kind. The kind and discerning friend who proposed it I met by exposing my own unfitness in the matter of knocking about, and I said, " Sir. So-and-so is your man; he will do it better than I shall in many respects." My friend answered, "No, not in every respect; he will not put into it the feeling that you will." In spite of this encouragement I declined the work, and for the soundest reasons. But any beginner who can do writing of this descrip- tion, with plenty of detail and without inter- 128 THE LITERARY LIFE. spaces of meditation, such as would come down by main force upon my pen may make sure of earning money by literature. The practical upshot of most of the foregoing memoranda is this: It so happened that I usually got into print when I desired it : that my very first article "professionally" written was printed in good company; and that I had few difficulties outside of my own personal peculiarities. But how was this? Just thus (shade of Artemus Ward !) : I had for years made the working literature of the day a study; knew the things that tended to exclude a man's writing from magazines and newspapers, and the special points that I had to guard against. Is there anything wrong in suggest- ing that not one in a thousand of the class called "literary aspirants " has ever made the working literature of the hour a systematic study? The articles, like the books, of the class called literary aspirants are usually rejected, even when they have merit, upon what may be termed points of literary form. This paragraph is good, and tliat is good, and this other is really fine ; but the whole thing wants licking into shape. Thus, an editor or reviewer of experience and vision can almost certainly tell amateur work at a glance. See some interest- ing remarks by Mr. Herman Merivale in a recent "Junius" paper in the Cornhiil upon the ease with which literary work is recognized as that of a practised pen. We are sometimes told and thousands of "aspirants" think with bitterness that the distinction between the amateur and the practised writer is idle, because everybody is an amateur to begin with. But I have shown that this is not true. In spite of long practice in the use of the pen, I made working literature a deliberate study, and others have done the same ; that is, they have not relied on mere aptitude. "Look," says the writer of a formless novel, "look at 'Jane Eyre!'" Well, by all means look at "Jane Eyre;" you can hardly look at a more instructive case. Currer Bell did not succeed as an amateur ; she had been a hard student of the conditions of success, and she attended to them so far as her knowledge went, and so far as she desired to use them. Of literary ambition proper she had none, nor if I may speak of myself in the same sentence have I. But whatever one's motive or impulse may be in writing, he must pay some attention to matters of literary form, and he must comply with such of them as have a just and natural foundation. He is, in fact, as much bound to comply with these as he is bound not to com- ply with those which demand some sacrifice of truthfulness, self-respect, and clearness of con- science. Paradoxical as some may think it, the chief hindrance to honest literary success is literary vainglory to begin with. This involves splash, false fire, chaotic "out-lay" (to use a sur- veyor's phrase) of the work, and foolish and exaggerated ideas of the "success" within reach. There was a one-volume novel pub- lished a year or two ago, in which a young journalist, whose suit had been rejected by a young lady's " 'aughty " mother, and who ia under a cloud for a time, makes money at a rate which must have set every journalist in, England laughing, and then suddenly blazes out in the society of dukes and cabinet min- isters because he has written a crushing ex- posure in a daily paper of the probable work- ing of "clause 5" of a certain bill. This particular book was a very innocent one, and no more vainglorious than Currer Bell's notions of the Duke of Wellington. In that specimen sheet of her handwriting given by Mrs. Gaskell in the memoir, she shows us the duke at the war-office, putting on his hat at five minutes to four, telling the clerks that they might go, and scattering "largess" among the clerks with a liberal hand as he takes his leave for the day. Sancla simpllcltas! we cry ; and there is an end. But every writ- ing man knows that "aspirants," as a class, are eaten up with vainglory. They want dis- tinction and the run of the pleasures of a " lite- rary " life as they apprehend them. They have visions of the tenth thousand, and flam- ing reviews, and gorgeous society. I see with infinite amusement the ideas some people have of the sort of life I lead. They think they almost tell me so in words that I have always got my pocket full of orders for the theatre; that I can button-hole anybody I please ; that I go to the queen's garden-parties ; that I sit with a halo round my head in gilded saloons, saying, or hearing said, brilliant mots ; that I drink champagne with actresses behind the scenes ; and that, if they offend me, I shall at once put them in Punch or the Times. I have also been told almost point-blank in some cases that it was only my jealousy and desire to "keep others down" that prevented my procuring immediate admission into periodicals for articles submitted to me by A. or B. , which were perhaps of the silliest and most despi- cable quality. I have had this said or hinted to my face, or behind my back, about articles that were utterly unprintable, at times when my own papers had been waiting months LOUGHRIG TARN. 129 three, six, or eight months for insertion in places where I had what is called "interest." People who have who are capable of having notions of this kind I would certainly do my best to keep out of literature ; not, how- ever, from "jealousy," but because they are morally unfit for it. This opens the way for a word or two which I promised upon "cliqueism." That literary men, like other people, form knots and groups, is a matter of course; and "what for no?" That there must be partiality and some degree of exclusiveness in these, is certain. That there are quarrels I am sure, for I hear of them, and discern their consequences. But so there are everywhere. In some hole-and-corner connections there may be jealousy and exclu- siveness founded on money reasons. But, per- sonally, I have never once come into collision with anything of the kind. As a hindrance to "aspirants," I do not believe such a thing exists. The chief deterring or exclusive influ- ence I have ever suffered from has been that of .1 kindness so much in excess of my capacity to make fair returns, that I have flinched from accepting it. Literary men, as I know them, come nearer to "VVieland's Cosmopolites (" Die Abderiten") than any other class. If anybody thinks there is too much of what is called " egotism " in these notes, I disagree with him. It is a pity I have not had the moral courage to be more "egotistic" still, and I wish other people would set me the ex- ample. This i:s a world in which you cannot wear your heart upon your sleeve ; but it is for a base and disgusting reason namely, that there are so many daws and other unclean birds about. It was not my intention to ap- pend my signature, but the editor did it, and his judgment in such a matter is better than mine. MATTHEW BROWNE. LOUGHRIG TARK Thou guardian Naiad of this little lake, Whose banks in unprofaned Nature sleep, (And that in waters lone and beautiful Divell spirits radiant as the homes they love, Have poets still believed; O surely blest Beyond all genii or of wood or wave, Or sylphs that in the shooting sunbeams dwell, Art thou! yea, happier even than summer-cloud Beloved by air and sky, and floating slow O'er the still bosom of upholding heaven. VOL. I. Beauteous as blest, Naiad, thou must be ! For, since thy birth, have all delightful things. Of form and line, of silence and of sound, Circled thy spirit, as the crowding stars Shine round the placid Moon. Lov'st thou to sinfc Into thy cell of sleep? The water parts With dimpling smiles around thee, and below. The unsunn'd verdure, soft as cygnet's don a. Meets thy descending feet without a sound. Lov'st thou to sport upon the watery gljani? Lucid as air around, thy head it lies Bathing thy sable locks in pearly light, While, all around, the water-lilies strive To shower their blossoms o'er the virgin queen. Or doth the shore allure thee? well it may: How soft these fields of pastoral beauty melt In the clear water ! neither sand nor stone Bars herb or wild-flower from the do.vy toiind. Like Spring's own voice now rippling round the Tara There oft thou liest 'mid the echoing bleat Of lambs, that race amid the sunny gleams; Or bee's wide murmur as it fills the broom That yellows round thy bed. O gentle glades, Amid the tremulous verdure of the woods, In steadfast smiles of more essential light, Lying, like azure streaks of placid sky Amid the moving clouds, the Naiad loves Your glimmering alleys, and your rustling bowers; For there, in peace reclined, her half closed eye Through the long vista sees her darling lake Even like herself, diffused in fair repose. Not undelightful to the quiet breast Such solitary dreams as now have fill'd My busy fancy ; dreams that rise in pe-ice, And thither lead; partaking in their flight Of human interests and earthly joys. Imagination fondly leans on truth, And sober scenes of dim reality To her seem lovely as the western sky To the rapt Persian worshipping the sun. Methinks this little lake, to whom my heart Assigned a guardian spirit, renders back To me, in tenderest gleams of gratitude, Profounder beauty to reward my hymn. Long hast thou been a darling haunt of mine, And still warm blessings gush'd into my heart Meeting or parting with thy smiles of peace. But now. thy mild and gentle character, More deeply felt than ever, seems to blend Its essence pure with mine, like some sweet tune Oft heard before with pleasure, but at last, In one high moment of inspired bliss, Borne through the spirit like an angel's song. This is the solitude that reason loves ! Even he who yearns for human sympathies, And hears a music in the breath of man, Dearer than voice of mountain or of flood. Might live a hermit here and mark the sun Kiamg or setting 'mid the beauteous calm, 9 130 'BUY A BROOM J" Devoutly blending In his happy soul Thoughts boih of eartli aud heaven ! Yon mounULiii- sme, Rejoicing in its clustering cottages, Appears to me a paradise preserved From guilt by Nature's h:md, and every wreath Of smoke, that from these hamlets mounts to heaven. In its straight silence holy as a spire Rear'd o'er the house of God, Thy sanctity Time yet hath reverenced ; and I deeply feel That innocence her shrine shall here preserve For ever. The wild vale that lies beyond, Circled by mountains trod up by the feet Of venturous shepherd, from all visitants, Save the free temjiests and the fowls of heaven, Guards thee; and wojtled knolls fantastical Seclude thy image from the gentler dale, That by the Brathay's often varied voice Cheer'd as it winds along, in beauty fades 'Mid the green banks of joyful Wmdennere ! O gentltt lake ! from all unh.xllow'd things By grandeur guarded in thy loveliness, Ne'er may the poet with unwelcome feet Press thy soft moss eiubathed in flowery dies, And shadow'd in thy stillness like the heavens. May innocence for ever lead me here, To form amid the silence high resolves For future life; resolves, that, born in peace. Shall live 'mid tumult, and though haply mild As infants in their play, when brought to beir On the world's business, shall assert their power And majesty and lead me boldly on Like giants conquering in a noble cause. This is a holy faith, and full of cheer To all who worship Nature, that the hours, Pass'd tranquilly with her, fade not away For ever like the clouds, but in the soul Possess a sacred, silent dwelling-place, Where with a smiling visage memory sits. And startles oft the virtuous, with a show Of unsuspected treasures. Yea, sweet lake ! Oft hast thou borne into my grateful heart Thy lovely presence, with a thousand dreams Dancing and brightening o'er thy sunny wa^e, Though many a dreary mile of mist and snow Between us interposed. And even now, When yon bright star hath risen to warn me home, I bid thee farewell in the certain hope That thou, this night, wilt o'er my sleeping eyes Shed cheering visions, and with freshest joy Make me salute the dawn. Nor may the hymn Now sung by me unto thy listening woods Be wholly vain, but haply it may yield A gentle pleasure to some gentle heart. Who blessing, at its close, the unknown bard, May, for his sike, upon thy quiet banks Frame visions uf his own, and other songs llore beautiful to Nature and to Thee : JOHN WILSON. "BUY A BROOM?" [Thomas Aird, born at Bowden, l.o..l.urghshir, 28th August, 1802 ; died at Castlebank, Dumfries. '.6th April, 1876. He early distinguished himself as a jotit, 1 and his collected poetical works readied the fourth edition in 1863. The Devil'* Dream on Mould A ('ib. ck I was one of his most popular productions ; but his real- istic painting of the varying aspects of nature are quite as powerful, although not so startling. As a tale- writer he also won high reputation in the da}s of Scott, Wilson, and Gait Many of his compositions first appeared in Biackirood. He was ome time editor of the Edinburgh Literary Journal, and he was subse- quently apiwiuted editor of the Dumjriet Herald, which post he held for twenty-eight years. He retired from active labour in 1863, and enjoyed twelve years of well earned leisure. Of his prose works the chief are The Old Bachelor in the Old Scottish Village, a volume of tales and sketches, and a biography of D. M. Moir, prefixed to an edition of the latter's poems. The lollowing tale, on its first appearance in Slack-wood's Magazine, became exceedingly popular, and dramatic versions of it were produced in London and Edin- burgh.] CHAPTEB I. One beautiful afternooon, about the begin- ning of the barley and wheat harvest, young Frederick Hume arose from his desk, where, for several hours, he had been plodding at his studies, and, to unbend himself a little, went to his window, which commanded a view of the neighbouring village of Holydean. A stillness almost like that of the Sabbath reigned over the hamlet, for the busy season had called the youngsters forth to the field, the sunburned sickleman and his fair partner. Boys and girls were away to glean: and none were left but a few young children who were playing quietly on the green; two or three ancient grandames who sat spinning at their doors in the rich sunlight; and here and there a happy young mother, exempted by the duties of nurse from the harvest toils. A single frail octogenarian, who, in hobbling to the almost deserted smithy, had paused, with the curiosity of age, to look long beneath his upraised arm after the stranger horseman, who was just going out of sight at the extremity of the village, completed the picture of still and quiet life which our student was now contemplating. After raising the window, and setting open the door to win into his little apartment the liquid coolness which was nestling among the green fibrous leaves around the casement, he had resumed his station and was again looking towards the village, when, hearing a light foot approach the door of his study, he turned round, and a young "BUY A BROOM?" 131 female stranger was before him. On seeing him she paused at tue threshold, made a sort of reverence, and seemed willing to retire. From her dark complexion, her peculiar dress, es- pecially the head-gear, which consisted merely of a spotted handkerchief wound round her black locks, Hume guessed at once that she was a foreigner; and he was confirmed in this supposition when, on his advancing and asking, "What do you wish, my good girl?" she held forward a light broom, and said, in the quick short pronunciation of a foreigner, "Buy a broom?" "Pray what is the use of it, my good lass?" said Frederick, in that mood in which a man, conscious that he lias finished a dry lesson to some purpose, is very ready to indulge in a little badinage and light banter. "For beard-shaving," answered the girl quiz- zically, and stroking his chin once or twice with her broom, as if with a shaving-brush. It might be she was conscious that he was not exactly the person to buy her broom : or perhaps she assumed this light mood for a moment, and gave way to the frank and natural feeling of youth, which by a fine free-masonry knows and answers to youth, despite of differences in lan- guage and manners, despite of everything. "Most literally an argiimentum ad hominem, to make me buy," said the scholar; "so what is the price, fair stranger?" "No, no," said the girl, in quick reaction from her playful mood, whilst a tear started in her dark lustrous eye, "but they bid me come: they say you are a doctor: and if you will be kind and follow me to my poor brother, you shall have many brooms." On inquiring distinctly what the girl meant, our student was given to understand, that her only brother, who had come with her as a harper to this country, had fallen sick at a gentleman's house about a mile off, and that she, on learning Mr. Frederick Hume was the only person within many miles who could pre- tend to medical skill, had come herself to take him to her poor Antonio. After learning far- ther the symptoms of the lad's illness, the young surgeon took his lancets and some simple medicine, and readily followed the girl, who led the way to a neat villa, which, as Frederick had heard, was the residence of an Italian gentleman of the name of Romelli. He had been an officer in the French service, and had come to this country with other prisoners; but instead of returning home on an exchange being made, he chose to continue in Scotland with his only daughter, who had come over to him from Italy, and who, Frederick had heard, was a young lady of surpassing beauty. Fol- lowing his conductress to Romelli's house, Hume was shown into a room, where, reclining upon a sofa, was a boy, apparently about sixteen years of age, the features of whose pale face instantly testified him to be brother to the maid with the broom. He was ministered to by a young and most beautiful damsel, Signorg Romelli herself, the daughter of the house, wha seemed to be watching him with the softest care. At the head of the sofa stood tae harp of the wandering boy. "I presumed, sir," said the lovely hostess, turning to Hume, "to hint that perhaps you might easily be found, and that certainly you would be very willing to take a little trouble in such a case as this. The affectionate sister has not been long in bringing you." "If the cause of humanity may be enforced by such kind and beautiful advocacy," returned Frederick, bowing, "the poor skill which you have thus honoured, young lady, is doubly bound, if necessary, to be most attentive in this instance. What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" continued he, advancing to the patient. " Nothing," was the boy's answer: and immediately he rose up and went to the window, from which he gazed, heedless of every one in the apartment. " I am afraid the boy is still very unwell," said Signora Romelli; "only look how pale he is, sir." Hume first looked to the boy's sister, to as- sure himself what was the natural healthy hue of these swarthy strangers; then turning to the boy himself, he could not but observe how much the dead yellow of his face differed from the life-bloom which glowed in her dark brown cheek. His eye at the same time burned with arrowy tips of restless lustre, such as are kindled by hectic fever. He resisted, however, all ad- vances on the part of our surgeon to inquire farther into his state of health, impatiently declaring that he was now quite well; then resuming his harp, and taking his sister by the hand, he seemed in haste to be gone. "My father is not at home," said the young lady of the house to Hume; "nevertheless they must abide here all night, for I can easily see that boy is unable to travel farther this evening: and besides they are of my own native country. Use your prerogative, sir, and don't let him go." In spite of the surgeon's persuasions, how- ever, and heedless of Signora Romelli and his sister, who joined in the remonstrance against his departure, the boy would be gone, even though at the same time he declared there was no place elsewhere where he wished particularly to be. "He is a capricious boy, to reject your excellent kindness, Miss Romelli," said 132 'BUY A BROOM?" Frederick: "and I doubt not he will treat, in the same way, a proposal I have to make. With your leave, young lady, I shall try to win him, with his sister, toour houseall night, lest he grow worse and need medical aid. " From the un- happy appearance of the young musician, this proposal seemed so good, that it was readily acquiesced in by his sister, and by the kind lady of the house, provided the boy himself could be brought to accede to it, which, to their joyful surprise, he most readily did, so soon as it was signified to him. "With your permission, Miss Romelli," said Frederick, as he was about to depart, " I shall dojustice to your benevolence, and walk down to-morrow forenoon to tell you how the poor lad is." At this the fair Signora might, or might not, slightly blush, as the thing struck her, or the tone in which the offer was made gave warrant. She did for a moment blush; but of course her answer was given very generally, "that she would be most happy to hear her young coun- tryman was quite well on the morrow." The affectionate sister gratefully kissed the hand of her kind hostess. As for the boy himself, with a look half of anger he took the former by the hand and drew her hastily away, as if he grudged the expression of her gratitude. He had not moved, however, many paces for- ward, till, quitting his sister's hand, he turned, and taking Signora Romelli's, he kissed it fervently, with tears, and at the same time bade the Virgin Mother of Heaven bless her. Struck with the remarkable manner of this boy, our student tried to engage him in conver- sation by the way, but he found him shy and taciturn in the extreme; and as he had already shown himself capricious, he now evinced an equal obstinacy in refusing to allow either of his companions to carry his harp, which being somewhat large, seemed not well proportioned to the condition of the bearer, who, besides being manifestly unwell, was also of a light small make. From the sister, who seemed of a frank and obliging temper, Frederick learned some particulars of their earlier history and present mode of life. Her name, she said, was Charlotte Cardo, and her brother's Antonio Cardo. They were twins, and the only surviving children of a clergyman in Italy, who had been dead for two years. Their mother died a few hours after giving them birth. "After the loss of our father," added the maiden, "we had no one to care much for us; yet I would Iiave dwelt all the days of my life near their beloved graves, had not my brother, who is of a restless and unhappy temperament, resolved to wander in this country. How could I stay alone? How could I let him go alone? So a harp was bought for him; and now every day, from village to village, and up and down among the pleasant cots, he plays to the kind lolk, and I follow him with my brooms. We have been a year in this country, and I know not when we shall return home, for Antonio says he cannot yet tell me." Hume having expressed his surprise that she could talk English so well on such a short residence in this country, she explained, by informing him, that both her brother and herself had been taught the language so carefully by their father, that they could talk it pretty fluently before they left Italy. During the brief narrative of his sister, the boy, Antonio, kept his eye intensely upon her, as if ready to check every point of explanation; but Charlotte ended her short statement with- out any expressed interruption on his part, and again his eye became self-contained and indifferent. The next expression of the boy's character was no less singular and unexpected. On observing a company of reapers, in a field by the way-side, taking their brief mid-afternoon rest, he advanced to the gate, opposite which, at a little distance, they were seated, and, unslinging his harp, began to play, filling up the sweetly dotted outline of the instrumental music with his own low but rich vocal song. After the first preamble, he nodded to his sister, and instantly her loud and thrilling voice turned magnificently into the same strain. On first ^iew of the musician and his party, the rude young swains of the field, for favour, no doubt, in their mistresses' eyes, began to play off their rough wit ; but in another minute these bolts were forgotten, and the loud daffing of the whole company was completely hushed. At first the song was grave and lofty, but by degrees it began to kindle into a more airy strain, till, as it waxed fast and mirthful, the, harvest maids began to look knowingly to their partners, who, taking the hint, sprang to their feet, hauled up their sweet abettors, were mated in a moment, and commenced a dance among the stubble, so brisk, that the tall harvest of spiky wheat, standing by, rustled and nodded to them on its golden rods. Aged gleaners stood up from their bowing task, and listened to the sweet music, while the young came running from all parts of the field, and, throw- ing down their handfuls, began madly to caper and to mix with the more regular dance. The old gray bandsters, as they stood rubbing in their hands ears of the fine grain, smiled as much under the general sympathy, as from a consciousness of their own superior wisdom 'BUY A BROOM?" 133 above such follies. Even the overseer himself, who stood back, silently, was, for a minute, not scandalized at such proceedings, which were converting a time of repose for his weary labourers into mad exertions, which went posi- tively to unfit them for the remaining darg of the day. Consideration, remonstrance, anger, were, however, soon mantling on his face, and he came forward ; but he was anticipated, for the principal minstrel, who, with something like a smile on his countenance, had seen at first the quick influence of his music on the swink't labourers of the sweltering day, had gradually grown dark and severe in his look, and now stopped his song all at once, he refitted his harp to his shoulder and walked away without looking for guerdon, and heedless of the rustic swains, who shouted after him and waved their rye-straw hats. With the greatest good-humour our young surgeon had indulged, to the very top of their bent, this musical frolic of the two foreigners, sitting down by the wayside till it was fairly over, and now he resumed his way with them. Antonio was silent and shy as before; but the manner in which he looked round him over the beautiful country, showed that his spirit was touched with its glad scenes. All the western sky was like an inflamed sea of glass, where the sun was tracking it with his fervid and unallayed wheels. Beneath his golden light lay the glad lands, from right to left white all over with harvest; thousands were plying in the fields; sickles were seen glinting on the far yellow uplands, and nearer were heard the reapers' song, and the gleaners calling to each other to lay down their handfuls in the furrows. The road now led our party by an orchard where boys were up in the trees shaking down the fruit. The little fellows, all joyous in their vacation from study, were tugging with might and main at and among the clefted branches; their sisters below gathered the apples in baskets, whilst the happy father, walking about with his lady, decided their appeals as to the comparative beauty of individual apples. Al- lured by the sound, of the fruit hopping on the ground two or three stray waifs had left off their gleanings in a neighbouring field; and the ragged little urchins were down on their hands and knees, thrusting their heads through holes in the hedge which separated the orchard from the road. One of them having been caught behind the ear by the stump of a thorn, found it impossible to draw back his head, and in this predicament he had to bawl for assistance. This drew the attention of the lady; and, after the rogue had been released, the whole party were summoned to the gate, and blessed with a share of the bounties of the year, which the kind lady dispensed to them through means of her own dear little almoners. Whether it was that he liked the benevolence of this scene, or whether he was reminded of his own beautiful Italy, or from whatever other affec- tion, the young harper again took his harp, and waked those wild and dipping touches, which seem more like a sweet preamble than a full strain. He again accompanied it with his voice, and his sister did the same. The young girls laid down their baskets of fruit, and drew to the gate; the trees had rest for a while from shaking, while the fair-haired boys, with faces flushed and glowing from their autumnal exer- cise, looked out in wonder from between the clefts of the boughs. When the song ceased, the lady offered money, but neither of the minstrels would accept it. On the contrary, Antonio took his sister by the hand, and hurried her away from the gate, ere one of the children could bring the basket of fruit for which she had run, to give a largesse from it to the strangers. Frederick, after talking a few minutes to the lady and gentleman, and telling them how he had fallen in with the foreigners, followed and overtook his companions, just as they had come in sight of Greenwells Cottage, where he resided. "So there is our house now, just beyond the village," said Frederick, ad- vancing to them. "The lady with whom I live will be very kind to you; and you must stay with her for a few days, and give her music, which she loves. What say you, pretty Charlotte?" Antonio here stepped forward between his sister and Hume, and said, with quick emphasis, " I will go with you, sir, and I shall let Charlotte follow me." On arriving at the cottage, Frederick intro- duced the strangers to his relative, Mrs. Mather, with Avhom he resided, and who, on learning their circumstances, kindly received them as her guests. They would have taken their departure next day, but in this they were resisted by the charitable old lady, who farther won from them the promise that they would stay with her for at least a week. Ere the expiry of that time, whether from the caprice or benevolence of her nature, or from her especial liking for Charlotte, who had gaine 1 rapidly upon her affections, Mrs. Mather had conceived the design of adopting the two Italians, and preparing them for situations worthy of their good descent; and she was confirmed in her purpose when, on breaking the matter to Frederick Hume, it met with his entire concurrence. The next step was to gaiu 134 "BUY A BEOOM?" the consent of Antonio, which might be no easy matter, as he seemed a strange and im- practicable boy; but, somewhat to the surprise of Frederick, no sooner was the proposal made to him, than he heartily acceded to it. As for his sister, independent of her dislike to a wandering life, and her growing attachment to Mrs. Mather, her brother's will was, in all cases, her law. It was then settled that Charlotte should be confidential maid to the old lady, to read to her at night, and assist her in making dresses for the poor, among whom she had a number of retainers; while Antonio should be sent to the Rev. Mr. Baillie's, a clergyman, a few miles off, to board with him, and finish his education, which had been neglected since his father's death, that so he might be fitted for a liberal profession. Proud though Mrs. Mather was of this scheme, her self-complacency was not without one qualification, in the cold and doubtful manner in which Miss Pearce nodded to the old lady's statement and explanation of her plan. As this woman, Miss Pearce, had it in her power, ere long, grievously to affect the fortunes of young Hume, we shall notice her here a little fully. She was the only daughter of a half-pay captain, whose death left her with a trifling annuity, and the pro- prietorship of a small house in the village of llolydean. After the death of her husband, a wealthy retired merchant, who had spent the last years of his life at Greenwells, Mrs. Mather, having no family, began to cast about for a companion, and Miss Pearce was soon found out to be one of those indispensable parasitical maidens whom old ladies like Mrs. Mather impress into active service, in the seasons of raspberries, and the elder- vintages; hold long consultations with on the eve of entertainments; retain as their own especial butt in company, and a fag partner at whist when a better fourth hand is wanting: appeal to in case of a (shall we name it?) lie, when there is danger of detection; cherish and moralize with when the party is over; and finally would not dismiss, though one were to rise from the dead and cry out against the parasite. In addition to these implied qualifications, the amiable creature was a monopolist in ailments; and, of course, careless about the complaints of others, of which, indeed, when within reach of Mrs. Mather's sympathy, she seemed to be jealous. In her person she was lean and scraggy, with a hard brown face, kiln-dried by nervous head- aches. Her figure was very straight, and she was elastic in her motions as whalebone or hickory, and might have been cut with advantage into tapes for tying up bundles of her favourite tracts, or sinewy bowstrings for Cupid, for lug arrows, not to be shot at, but to be slioifrom. We need scarcely add, after all this, that her nose was very long, and so sharp it might have cleft a hailstone. When Frederick Hume was thrown a helpless orphan on the world, and Mrs. Mather, who was a distant relative of his mother's, proposed to take him to herself and bring him up as if he were her own son, Miss Pearce, though she could not set her face directly against such a charitable arrangement, yet laboured to modify it by a counter-proposition, that the boy should be provided for, but by no means brought to the cottage. She was then, however, but in the spring-dawn of favour with her patroness, and her opinion being overruled, the boy was brought home to Mrs. Mather, and daily grew in her affections. During his childhood, Miss Pearce advanced steadily iu favour, and she was too jealous of divided influence, and too Jesuitical in her perseverance, not to improve every opportunity of challenging and modifying the growing affection of Mrs. Mather for her adopted son, whose bold and frank nature was endearing him to every one. When this would not do, she began to change her battery, and tried by a new show of kind- ness, to make a party in the young 61eve him- self, whom yet she thoroughly hated. Whether it was, however, that he knew her enmity, and never forgave her for having once or twice secretly and severely pricked him with pins; or whether, with the quick instinct of childhood, which knows in a moment, and despises, the kind notice bestowed upon it for the sake of currying favour with parents, he virtually set down Pearce's new attentions to such a motive; certain it is, if he did not positively hate her, he never once stroked her purring vanity ; and she, on the other hand, was, from his indif- ference, confirmed in her dislike. As Frederick grew up, he had many opportunities of shaking- Miss Pearce's influence with her patroness; but, as he thought her despicable merely, and not dangerous, he was too magnanimous to molest her. In that scheme of life to which the heart has long responded, what was at first a jarring element hath become a constituent part of the general sympathy: and from this it might be that Hume not only continued to endure Miss Pearce, but even loved her with the affection of habit. One might have supposed, that ere the time to which our narrative now refers, Miss Pearce would have been tired of intrigue, and would have seen the folly of being jealous in the favour whifh she had proved exactly, and from which she knew so little was ever to be gained 'BUY A BROOM?" 135 or lost; but a Jesuit would be a Jesuit still, were the Church of Rome utterly annihilated, and petty intrigue merely for its own sake, and little selfish arrangements of circumstances, although nothing was to be gained, constituted the very breath of Miss Pearoe's nostrils; and, therefore, it is not to be wondered at, that, when Mrs. Mather stated her design of adopt- ing the two Italians, as above mentioned, she heard it with that umph, and nod, which ex- pressnot that a thing has been assented to but merely that it has been literally and dis- tinctly heard. Her objections were entered under a masked battery. She began by praising Mrs. Mather's unbounded benevolence of heart. She hoped they would be grateful ; they could not be too grateful ; nay, they could never be grateful enough. She allowed the conversation to take a general turn, then tried to control it gradually to her purpose, and found an oppor- tunity of relating, as if incidentally, how a certain lady, whom once she knew, had been ruined by a foreign protegtie whom she had unwisely cherished. She touched upon swind- ling, vagrants, and obscurely alluded to legis- lature, and the alien act. Notwithstanding all such hints, however, the thing was settled in the affirmative; the boy Antonio was sent to stay with Mr. Baillie, and Charlotte com- menced work under the immediate auspices of her new patroness. The regularity and certainty of her new mode of life, soon subdued the roving qualities which her character might have slightly acquired, and which quickly gave a corresponding wildness to the features. Her dark and comely beauty remained quick and expressive, but it was sobered under the accom- paniments of an English dress, and tamed by the meek offices of our country's excellent morality. Her eye was still drunk with light as when morning coines upon the streams, but it waited and took commands from the looks of her mild hostess. The footstep of the re- claimed wanderer might still be light and airy, but now she went about the house softly, under an excellent ministry. In health she became Mrs. Mather's delight, and still more so when the infirmities of the good old lady required delicate attentions. Like the glorious Una of Spenser's Fairy Qiie.cn, the kind eyes of this beautiful Italian, even amidst affliction, "made a Ight in a shady place." Frederick Hume forgot not his promise to wait upon Signora Romelli, and inform her, that his minstrel-patient was quite well on the morning after the day when he was ill in her honse. At the same time, he presented a card from Mrs. Mather, requesting a mutual ac- quaintanceship. A friendly intercourse grew up accordingly, and, ere the fall of the season, Signor Romelli and his daughter were at least once every week at Greenwells Cottage, to the huge dismay of Miss Pearce, but the delight of our young surgeon, who began most deeply to love the beautiful Julia Romelli. She was taller and fairer than the maid Cardo: her locks were nut-brown : her eye was a rich com- promise betwixt the raven and the blue dove, a deep violet, -"like Pandora's eye, When first it darkeu'd with immortal life." She was quick, capricious, and proud; bold in her pouting displeasure, which was like a glancing day of sunshine and stormy showers: but then she was ardent in her friendships, and very benevolent; ready, withal, nay in haste, to confess her faults, in which case her amende honorable, and her prayer for pardon, were perfectly irresistible. A heart of her am- bition, and so difficult to be won, insensibly exalted her in the eyes of the dashing and manly Frederick; who, without any ostensible calculation of selfish vanity, loved her the more deeply, that she was a conquest worthy of boldest youth. Notwithstanding her superior qualifications, and the ardour of his suit, we infer that the fair Julia kept shy and aloof, and at the same time that her lover was only the more deeply determined to make her his, from the circumstance that, in a few months, he had condescended to calculate how he stood in her father's affections, and was studious to accommodate himself to the manner of the signor, who was grave in his deportment, and almost saturnine, seldom moved to smiles, and never to laughter; and who, though he could talk fluently, and with eloquence, seemed, in general, to wear some severe constraint upon his spirit. CHAPTER II. Things were in this state when the winter session came round, which called Frederick to Edinburgh, to prosecute his studies. The sum- mer following he continued in town studying botany; and after making a tour through the Highlands, it was about the middle of autumn ere he returned to Greenwells Cottage. He found Charlotte Cardo improved in beauty and accomplishments, and advanced in favour with every one who knew her; even Miss Pearce herself condescended to patronize her publicly and privately. But what pleased him most of all, was to find that Julia Romelli was still a frequent visitor at the cottage. The season of 136 'BUY A BROOM?" harvest, too, had given a vacation to Mr. Baillie's scholars, and Antonio Cardo was now at home beside his sister; and the harp and the song of the Italian twins were not forgotten when the sweet gloaming came on. Deeply occupied in spirit as Hume was with thoughts of his fair and shy signora, he was yet con- strained to attend to the abrupt and strange man testation of Antonio's character, which broke forth, from time to time, mocking the grave tenor of his ordinary behaviour. Accord- ing to his reverend tutor's statement, he had been a very diligent scholar; and he testified it thus far, that he talked English with great force and propriety. With the boys of his own age he had consorted little, and seemed to take no delight in conversing with any one, though now and then he would talk a few minutes to the old men of the village, and sometimes to the children. He was now equally taciturn at Mrs. Mather's; but occasionally he broke forth, expressing himself in rapid and earnest elo- quence, and showing a wonderful power of illustrating any point. From his manner alto- gether towards Miss Romelli, his devoted at- tentions at one time, and at another his proud shyness and from his dignified refusal, often, to play on the harp when Hume wished to dance with that lady Frederick could not but guess that he was a rival candidate for Julia's love. But the most striking and unaccountable demonstration of the boy's character, was the risible paleness which came over his face, the current the restless flow of his small features, and the impatience of his attitudes, now shrink- ing, now swelling into bold and almost threaten- ing pantomime, whenever Signor Romelli came near him. Visibly, too, he was often seen to start when he heard his countryman's deep voice : he spoke to Romelli always with an eloquent empresaement in his tone, as if his thoughts were crowding with his crowding blood: he looked him eagerly in the face : he often went round about him like an anxious dog. One night Romelli, more open and talkative than usual, had told two or three stories of the sea, when Antonio, who had listened, with a sharp face, and his whole spirit peering from his eyes, came forward, and sitting down on the carpet before his countryman, looked up in his face, and said, "I will now tell you a legend of the sea, Captain Romelli." CABDO'S LEGEND. "A rude captain in the South Seas had mur- dered his mate, an excellent youth, for pre- tended disobedience of orders: and for this crime God sent the black- winged overtaking tempest, which beat his ship to pieces, and he was cast alone upon a desert island. It was night when he recovered from his drenched dream, and sat down on a green bank above the sea-marge, to reflect on his situation. The storm-racks had fled away: the moon came peering round above the world of seas, and up through the cold clear wilderness of heaven: the dark tree-tops of the forest, which grew down to the very sands, waved in the silver night. But neither this beauty after the tem- pest, which should have touched his heart with grateful hope, nor the sense of his deliverance, nor yet the subduing influence of hunger, could soften that mariner's soul ; but he sat till morning, unrepentant of his murder, fortifying himself in injustice, hardening his heart, kick- ing against the pricks. About sunrise he climbed up into a high tree, to look around him. The island, so far as he could see on all sides, seemed one wild and fenceless forest: but there was a high hill, swathed in golden sun- light, perhaps three or four miles inland, which, if he could reach and climb it, would give him a wide prospect, and perhaps show him some inhabited district. To make for this hill, he descended from the tree, and struck into the woods, studious to pursue the straight line of route which he laid down for himself, in order to reach the mountain. " The forest was full of enormous trees, of old prodigious growth, bursting into wild gums, and rough all over with parasitical plants and fungi of every qolour, like monstrous livers; whilst up and down the trunks ran strange painted birds, pecking into the bark with their hard bills, and dotting the still air with their multitudinous little blows. Deeper from the engulfed navel of the wood came the solitary cries of more sequestered birds. Onward went the wicked captain, slowly, and with little caution, because he never doubted that he should easily find the mountain; but rough and impervious thickets turned him so oft, and so far aside, that gradually he forgot his pro- posed track, and became quite bewildered. In this perplexity, he again climbed a high tree, to discover the bearing of the hill; but it was no longer to be seen. Nothing was before him and around him but a boundless expanse of tree-tops, which, under a sky now darkened to a twilight, began to moan and surnre like a sea. Descending in haste, he tried to retrace his steps; but this it was out of his power distinctly to do; and he only went deeper into the wood, which began to slope downwards per- eptibly. Darkness, in the meantime, thickened among the trees, which were seen standing far fan. 'BUY A BROOM?' 137 as in a dream, crooked in their trunks, like the bodies of old men, and altogether unlike the trees of an upper world. Everything was ominously still, till all at once the millions of leaves were shaken, as if with small eddying bubbles of wind. Forthwith came the tempest. The jagged lightning lanced the forest-gulfs with its swift and perilous beauty; whilst over- head the thunder was crushed and jammed through the broken heavens, making the liv- ing beams of the forest to quiver like reeds. Whether real or imaginary, the wicked captain thought that he heard, at the same time, the roar of wild beasts, and saw the darkness spotted with their fiery eyes; and to save him- self from them, he climbed up into a tree, and sat in its mossy clefts. As the storm above and beneath ranged away, and again drew nearer and nearer, with awful alternations, the heart of the wicked captain began to whirl within him, tugged at by immediate horrors, and the sense of ultimate consequences, from his helpless situation. In his agony, he twisted himself fro.n branch to branch, like a monkey, braiding his legs, and making rings with his arms; at the same time crying out about his crime, and babbling a sort of delirious repent- ance. In a moment the tempest was over- blown, and everything hushed, as if the heavens wished to listen to his contrition. But it was no contrition: nothing but an intoxicated in- continence, a jumble of fear and blasphemy: such a babbling as a man might make if he were drunk with the devil's te.ars, gathered, as they came glittering like mineral drops down the murky rocks of damnation, in bottles made of the tough hearts of old vindictive queens. Holy Mother! Do you hearme, Signor Romelli? By the Holy Mother of Grace! you and I, signor, think he ought to have repented sin- cerely, do we not? Well, what next? God does not despise any working of the sinner's heart, when allied, even most remotely, to re- pentance: and because the wicked captain had felt the first tearings of remorseful fear, God sent to him, from the white land of sinless children, the young little Cherub of Pity. And when the wicked captain lifted up his eyes and looked into the forest, he saw far off, as at the end of a long vista, the radiant child coming on in naked light; and, drawing near, the young Being whispered to him, that he would lead him from the forest, and bring a ship for him, if he would go home, and on his knees confess his crime to the aged parents of the youth whom he had murdered, and be to them as a son. for the only son whom they had lost. The wicked captain readily vowed to perform these conditions, and so the Babe of Pity led him from the forest, and, taking him to a high promontory above the sea-shore, bade him look to the sea: and the promised ship was seen hanging like a patch of sunshine on the far blue rim of the waters. As she came on and came near, the heart of the wicked captain was again hardened within him, and he deter- mined not to perform his vow. "'Your heart has again waxed obdurate,' said the figure, who still lived before him like a little white dial in the sun; 'and I shall now turn the ship away, for I have her helm in my hand. Look now, and tell me what thou seest in the sea.' The wicked captain looked for the ship, but she had melted away from off the waters; and when he turned, in his blind fury, to lay hold on the White Babe, it was vanished too. '"Come back to me, thou imp,' cried the hungry blasphemer, whilst his face waxed grim with wild passions, 'or I will hurl this dagger at the face of the Almighty.' So saying, he drew a sharp clear dagger from his side, and pointing it upwards, threw it with all his might against the sky. It was now the calm and breathless noontide, and when this impious dagger was thrown up, not a breeze was stirring in the forest skirtsor on beaked promontory; but ere it fell, a whirling spiral blast of wind came down from the mid-sky, and, catching the dag- ger, took it away glittering up into the blue bosom of heaven. Struck with a new horror, despite of his hardened heart, the wicked cap- tain stood looking up to heaven after his dag- ger, when there fell upon his face five great drops of blood, as if from the five wounds of Christ. And in the same minute, as he was trying to wipe away this Baptism of Wrath, he reeled and fell from the lofty promontory where he stood into the sea, into the arms of the youth whom he had murdered and thrown overboard, and whose corpse had been brought hither by the tides and the wandering winds. So the wicked Captain sunk for ever in the waters. " "Now, Signor Romelli," said the boy An- tonio, after a brief pause, " what do you think of my legend?" Ere an answer 'could be returned, a broad sheet of lightning flashed in at the window (for the sky all day had been thunderous and warm), and instantly it was followed by a tre- mendous peal of thunder, which doubly startled the whole company sitting in the twilight room. 138 : BUY A BROOM?" "Get up, foolish boy," said Romelli, his deep voice a little tremulous, whilst at the same time he struck Antonio gently with his foot. Not more quickly did the disguised Prince of Evil, as represented by Milton, start up into his proper shape at the touch of Ithur- iel's spear, than did the. young Italian spring up at the touch of Romelli's foot. His very stature seemed dilated, and his pantomime was angry and threatening, as for a moment he bent towards the signor: but its dangerous outline was softened by the darkness, so that it was not distinctly observed; and next mo- ment the youth drew back with this remark " By Jove, captain, there was a flash from the very South Sea island in question! what a coincidence! what a demonstration was there! and oh! what a glorious mirror-plate might be cut from that sheet of fire, for the murderer to see himself in. Thank God, none of us have been in the South Seas, like the wicked cap- tain in the legend. " There was no further reply to this, and Sig- nor Romelli was silent and unusually pale during the remainder of the evening. After waiting one hour, during which there followed no more thunder and lightning, and then a second hour till the moon was up, he arose with his daughter and went home. CHAPTER III. Again the season came round which called Frederick Hume to town for another session, to finish his medical studies, and get his de- gree as a physician; and once more he prepared to take a tender leave of his Julia, whom he loved more than fame or life. Overcome by his deep passion, he confessed it all to the maiden; and when he caught her trembling at his declaration, how could she explain her emotion otherwise than by confessing, de- spite of her pride, that their love was mutual? or answer for it better than by pledging her troth for ever, in return for his vow of con- stancy ? About Christmas, Antonio Cardo came from Mr. Baillie's to spend a few holidays at Green- wells Cottage. One night Signora Romelli gravely assumed tin character of a prophetic improvisatrice, and told the future fortunes of Mrs. Mather's household. "And now," said she to Antonio, "come forward, young harper; you look there for all the world as if you were about to be set down for a murderer." The boy started and went out, but in a few minutes lie returned, and, flinging himself on his knees before Miss Romelli, he prayed her, for the love of Heaven, to reserve her ungentle pro- phecy. " Up, foolish boy," said Julia, "why, you look indeed as if your conscience were fairly measured; as if the red cap fitted you. Well, Antonio, you are either waggish or simple to an uncommon stretch. " The boy rose with a groan, and. J ulia's father entering the room at this moment, he took up a small knife from the table, and shaking it at the Signor Captain, said, in a voice trembling with emotion, " Your foolish daughter, sir, says that I am to be a murderer." On no answer being returned, he bit the handle of the knife for a moment, and then laid it down. Next evening, a party being assembled at the cottage, and Julia Romelli being there, she was of course an object of general attention and the most assiduous gallantry. During a dance, Antonio, who had refused to play on the harp, sat moodily in a corner, watching the graceful signora, and louring against the smiles of her partner; heedless at the same time of his sister, who, when she stopped near him in the dance, gently chid him one while, and then, smiling in her happy mood with a tearful glance, which asked him to share her joy, patted him below the chin, and bid him rise and dance merrily. Miss Romelli saw the sisterly love of Charlotte, and, in her good nature, a little while after, she made up to the youth, and, speaking to him as if he were merely a shy and timid schoolboy, insisted upon his taking part in the dance. " Prithee, do not think me quite a boy," said he in return. Signora, as the best rejoinder, repeated her invitation, upon which he started up, and flinging his arms with mad violence around her neck, saluted her before the whole company. Julia disengaged herself, blushing. There was bridling on the part of the ladies; hearty laughter and cheers from old bachelors; and some of the young gallants looked very high, and ready to call the offender to account. Sig- nor Romelli looked grave and moody after the strange salutation; and poor Charlotte hung down her head, and gradually withdrew from the room. As for the culprit himself, he walked haughtily out, and was followed by Mrs. Mather, who took him to task in another apartment. The amiable Miss Pearce had likewise followed to approve her former pro- phecy of trouble from such guests; but her patroness was not in the vein for tolerating oflicious wisdom, and forestalling that virgin's charitable purpose, she turned her to the right- about in a moment. " Aud now, mad boy," demanded the old "BUY A BROOM?" 189 lady, " what meant this outrageous solecism ? For my sake, what did you mean, Antonio Cardo?" "Kind and gracious lady," he re- plied, "do not question me just now. But if you would have me saved from perdition, bind me hand and foot, and send me far away over seas and lands." " If this is all you have to say for yourself," returned Mrs. Mather, "it is certainly a very pretty speech; though it is far above my comprehension. No no; the thing was a breach of good manners: but I don't exactly see that your precious soul's en- dangered, or that you are entitled to be sent to Botany Bay for stealing a bit kiss doubtless your first offence." " Well, my excellent apo- logist," said Antonio, " if you will use a little address, and bring Signora Julia hither, I will ask her forgiveness perhaps." "You are a very foolish young man indeed," returned the old lady, who was one of those persons whose humour it is, without abating from their real good nature, to rise in their demands or re- proaches when anything like concession has been made. "I say it a very foolish boy; and I have a great mind to let the young lady be angry at you for ever; and so I don't think I shall either bring her or send her." Cardo knew very well that these words of his hostess, as she left the apartment, implied anything but a decisive negative; and he sat still waiting the entrance of Julia, who, after a few minutes, made her appearance accordingly, with Mrs. Mather. " Now, my most gracious hostess," said the youth, rising and turning to the latter, "you must give us leave for a brief while, for I have something particular to say to this young lady. " Mrs. Mather looked to signora. "0 yes, by all means," said Julia, " do according to his request, and let me hear this wonderful secret." When Mrs. Mather had retired, the boy Cardo advanced, and said to Julia in a voice trembling with emotion, " Will you judge me, fair Italian, and condemn me by cold-hearted rules? If you do, I ask ten thousand pardons for my rudeness to-night." "And, pray, what right have I, sir, to give dispensations beyond the laws of wise and prudent society?" "0, let me vary my question then, beautiful wo- man," said the passionate boy, flinging himself on his knees before her, "Can you forgive my deep soul then for loving you to madness, Julia Komelli?" "Now, shall I laugh at you for a very foolish boy, or shall I bid you rise at once, if you would not have me leave the apartment as quickly? Now, sir, that you are up (for you seem to dread the imputation of boyhood), let me tell you, that when I spoke of the rights of society I gave no liberty to suppose that my own maidenly feeling would be more liberal than such a law. The truth is, sir, I have nothing farther to add or hear, unless you sent for me to ask pardon for your breach of good manners, in which case, I read- ily allow, that I mistook you so much as heed- lessly to give you some provocation. As for the offence itself, really you seem so very foolish that I know not whether I do right in saying (with a smile), that it was not by any means very grievous." " Is that all? is that all?" said the Italian boy. "No no; you must let my heart love you, and you must love me in return. 0, if you value your father's life, and your own peace; and if you would save me from perdition, you must become my wife, lady!" "Why, sir, I do think it were charity to believe that you have lost your reason. You are most foolish else. I will not stay flippantly to debate your boyish proposal; but, young sir, Antonio Cardo I think is your name, can you " "Mother in Heaven!" interrupted Cardo. "Do you think so? only think so? Why, my sister's name is Charlotte Cardo, and by Heaven I think she is a lady. You will say, Are we not dependent? Yes, to that: for a certain overwhelming reason I have allowed it for a little while; but soon the whole shall be accounted for." "Condescend not for me, sir," said Julia, "to vindicate your dignity or pride: I have no right, nor am I disposed, to offend either." "Perhaps not, young lady. But be wise and wary as you list, cold and cruel, I shall only love you the more; or plague you with my demon : there are but two alter- natives; and I must be miserable in either, I am afraid." "Sir," said Julia angrily, and walking away, " I will pay the only compli- ment which I can reasonably bestow upon you, by telling you that your conduct obliges me to discontinue my visits in future at this house." "One moment stay then, signora," cried Antonio, stepping between her and the door, " Listen to me this once. Mrs. Mather loves you dearly, and so does Frederick Hume, and so does Charlotte Cardo, and so does . Well, so do you also love to visit at this house; and never for me shall you forego that delight, never, for me shall the three excellent persons above named forego your delightful presence. I shall leave this house for ever to-morrow morning, nor plague you more." "I must now do you justice, sir," said the fair Italian, " and though you certainly speak like a foolish boy, I will not urge this, but address you as a frank, open-minded, honourable man,, and tell you at once that my affections are already 140 "BUY A BROOM?" engaged, and my vow of constancy made to anothar. " "Enough said, Signora Romelli: I can sruess who that highly favoured youth is; and I will say there is not a nobler heart than his in all the earth. Forgive me, young lady, and let me not detain you longer. Be assured too, my impertinent solicitations are ended for ever." The lady withdrew, and Antonio, locking the door, paced hurriedly up and down the apartment. Signor Romelli in the meantime had retired from the house. The yellow moon was swimming through the streams, but not in unison with the lovely night was the heart of this Italian captain as he walked forth along ! the bank. " By Heaven," said he to himself, j "this boy, Cardo, knows it all! whether from ! prophetic divination, or whether the sea hath ' given up her dead to declare against me. I will as soon believe that those hot seething brains of his could produce the literal dagger which his hand seems always in the act of clutching, as that they could frame that cele- brated sea-legend, without some horrid col- ' lusion. Well, 'tis passing strange: but the imp seems daily ripening for some disclosure, or for some act of vengeance, and I must fore- stall him in both. How shall it be done? Stay now, let me see he is nearly mad ; that must be allowed by all well, then, can I not get a professional verdict to that effect? Stay now, is not Stewart, the principal physician of the lunatic asylum in the neighbouring town, a suitor of my daughter? I can easily see that he is bold and unprincipled, and the other consulting physicians are old women. Well, j may I not possess Stewart with the belief that my daughter loves this Antonio Cardo, and get him to warrant the removal of the boy to the mad-house, in virtue of his late strange behav- iour, which, to common observation, will amply j justify a charge of lunacy? Stewart, I think, will do it in the faith that my daughter will never give herself to one that has been in bed- lam; and I, for my share, will gain the secur- ity, that whatever he may hint or declare in future, relative to what I think he knows of me, will be easily ascribed to a taint of remain- j ing madness. Any period, however short, in ! that redoubted place, will serve Stewart's mo- j tives and mine; but if the horrid sympathy of ; the house make a convert of his soul to the I propriety of his chains, so much the better. I Now, Stewart is at present in the cottage, and | why may not the thing be carried into effect this very night? By his authority, we shall get constables from the village without a mo- ment's delay." Romelli lost no time in making his represen- tations to Stewart, who, hearing the signer's professions in his favour relative to Julia's love, if Cardo could be morally black-balled, gave in without hesitation to the wicked scheme. Mrs. Mather, overcome by the explanations of the doctor, and by the dread of having a madman in her house, was constrained also to accede, and charitably undertook to detain Charlotte in a remote part of the house, till her brother should be seized and carried off, which was to be done as quietly as possible. The door, however, of the room in which he had locked himself had to be forced, as he could not be prevailed upon to open it; and ere the constables could do this, and overcome the resistance which he offered to their attempts to seize him, the whole house had been alarmed, and crowded to see what was the matter. Charlotte, when she saw him in custody, uttered a piercing shriek, and fell in a swoon to the ground; some of the ladies retired with her; others, with compassion, drew around the hapless boy, while Stewart, who was a bold and callous tactician, would not attend the unhappy sister till he had en- forced the necessity of sending the brother to the madhouse. "Ha!" cried poor Antonio, at mention of this horrid destination; and a convulsive shud- der ran through his frame. He turned a rue- ful glance on Julia Romelli, whilst at the same time he trembled as if his slight body would have been shaken to pieces. " So, you ruf- fians," he said, at length, " you have crushed my poor sister down to the earth, and all for what? Where is my broken flower? well, she is better hence. Lead on: and, gentle- men, I am not very mad perhaps. Look to Charlotte, and tell her I have escaped any- thing but " Lead him out then. He bowed to the company with a kind of wild, unstead- fast energy ; and was led away manacled. Much, indeed, was Frederick Hume surprised and shocked to hear from Mrs. Mather's next letter, of Antonio's fate, and he determined to visit the country as soon as possible, for the express purpose of seeing the poor Italian boy. A few weeks after this, he was sitting in his apartment one evening with two or three of his college chums, when his landlady announced to him that a young lady was in another apart- ment waiting to see him. "Why, this is something," said Frederick, rising and follow- ing the mistress of the house "who can it possibly be?" "Ah, you are a lucky dog, Hume." observed one of his companions. " Some very fond, faithful, or despairing shep- herdess!" said a second. "BUY A BKOOM?" 141 Little did these gay chaps know the cause of such a visit, for it was poor Charlotte Cardo herself; and no sooner did she see Frederick, than, grasping his proffered hand, she fell on her knees, and looking him wistfully in the face, cried, " Oh, my poor brother, have mercy on me, good sir, and help him." " Poor child!" said Hume, raising her, " I am afraid I can do little for him; but I shall lose no time now iii seeing him. Can I do anything for him in the meantime?" " I do not know, sir," said Charlotte, confusedly; aware, probably for the first time, that she had undertaken a foolish journey. " And have you come all this way, Charlotte, for my poor help?" " 0, speak not, Mr. Hume, of miles, or hundreds of miles, in such a case, if you can do anything for us. 1 am told there are great physicians in this city. Perhaps you know them, and perhaps "- She stopped short. "Well, my good girl," said Frederick, clapping her on the shoulder, "for your sisterly love, everything shall be done for your brother that man can do. I shall see him first myself, and that ere long; and then I shall consult on his case with one or two eminent doctors, friends of mine." "God bless you, sir, all the days of your life!" said the Italian girl, sobbing almost hysteri- cally from her full and grateful heart. " I have no other friend on earth that I can seri- ously trust ; they are all hollow, or foolish in their kindness." "Does Mrs. Mather know of this pious journey of yours, Charlotte?" asked Frederick. " Forgive me, sir she tried rery much to dissuade me, and bade me write if I chose but, pardon me, sir, I thought it better "To see me personally, you would say? Well, Charlotte, you argue fairly that letters are but second-rate advocates, though, to do myself justice, I think, in such a case as this of your brother's illness, the mere representation of the thing was enough to make me do my very utmost. Now, Char- lotte, that you may not be ultimately disap- pointed, let me warn you ' The maiden here looked so piteously, that he was fain to add, " Well, I have good hopes that he may soon recover." To this Charlotte answered nothing; for in the natural sophistry of the heart under an overwhelming wish, she durst not appear confident, lest she should again provoke the doubts of her medical Aristarch, as if the evil were not, when she had not heard it literally expressed by another. Yet still, when Frederick tried to change the conver- sation, by asking indifferent questions, she brought it back to the subject which engrossed her heart, by citing instances of some who had been confined as lunatics, though they were not, and of others who had gradually recovered their reason. Resigning Charlotte to his landlady's care for the night, Frederick in the morning pro- vided for her a seat in the mail, and took leave of her, with the promise, that he would make a point of being at Greenwells in little more than a week. In less than ten days he visited Antonio ia his cell, and found the poor boy lying lowly in his straw, and chained, because, as the keeper explained, he had made the most desperate efforts to get out. He arose, as Hume entered, and, with a suspicious look, demanded, " Are you also come to spy out the nakedness of the land?" "Do you not know me, Antonio?" asked Frederick, kindly. " I think I do," answered the boy, with a faint smile: "but do you know me under this sad change of affairs?" " You have not been very well, I understand?" said Hume. " No doubt you were given to understand so," was the answer; " but if you will request that official gentleman to retire for a little, I shall undeceive you. " Frederick did so; and the keeper, having withdrawn accordingly, the poor patient, with a tear in his eye, looked eagerly at Hume, and said, "Are you too, sir, against me? Holy Virgin! will you also leave me here, and go and tell the world I am truly mad?" " Well, my good boy," said Frederick, "you must be very quiet, and you will soon give the lie to the charge; I am glad to see you as you are." " God in heaven ! to be sure, sir. As you say, very quiet I must be, and reason good; and all that. Let me tell you, Dr. Hume, you have not a good method with madmen. Nothing manages them so well as grave banter, half- angry and half-yielding ; or stern and unmiti- gated awe, which overrules them as the lower range of the creation is controlled by the ' hu- man face divine. ' You may try these methods with me, if you think me bona fide insane. But, oh, rather hear me, sir, this once, and give me justice: take for granted that I am in my right mind: affect neither kindness nor menace in your words: but speak with measman to man, and then you shall not lose perhaps the only opportunity of saving my body and my spirit from this unhallowed coercion, for I may soon be ill enough." " Whatever you have to state," returned Hume, " I shall in the first place hear you without interruption." "I readily grant, sir," said the supposed maniac, "that you have good reason to believe me in- sane, and that it is a very difficult thing for you to be satisfied of the contrary. On the 142 'BUY A BROOM?' other hand, it is no easy matter for me, chafed and tortured as I have been by my horrid con- finement, to refrain from the 'winged words' of an indignant spirit. But I shall try to be calm and consistent; and you must try to be unprejudiced and discriminating. You see, sir, I go to work scarcely like a lunatic, since I have sense and reason to provide allowance for preliminary difficulties." " Very well; tell me what you wish, good Antonio; what can I do for you?" " Either you have little tact, Dr. Hume, or you still think me mad, since you speak in that particular tone of voice I know it well. The God of heaven help me in my words at this time, that I may not speak from my full and burning heart, and you misinter- pret me!" "My dear fellow, Antonio Cardo," said Frederick, with kind earnestness, " for your own sake, and for your sister Charlotte's sake, I will not leave this part of the country, till I have thoroughly sifted the cause and reason- ableness of your confinement ; yet you must allow me to do the thing with prudence. I may not be able to get you released to-night; but, as I said before, I am disposed this very moment to hear and judge what you have to propose or state. I think you ought not now to be suspicious of me!" " Ave Maria!" said Antonio " Holy Virgin of Grace, you have sent one wise and honour- able man to my wretched cell; and I think my hour of deliverance must now be at hand. What shall I say to you, Dr. Hume? What argument shall I try, to lay fast a foundation on which your faith in my sanity may be built? For, ! assuredly beneath the gracious eye of Heaven, there cannot be a fitter temple for Charity to dwell in. The truth is, Frederick Hume, I may at times in my life have felt the madness of whirling and intense passion; and I have a horrid fear that my days shall close in darkness, in pits which I dare not name, in dreams, the dark alienation of the mind. I am thus candid, the better to assure you that my soul at present is self-possessed and compact, of firm and wholesome service. Think, too, that I have leapt against my cage till my heart has been well-nigh breaking ; that my spirit, from feverish irritability, has been a furnace seven times heated, in the next alteration of feel- ings, to be overwhelmed by a suffocating calm- ness. Remember that I have lived for months amidst those horrid cries which thicken the air of this place: and. above all, that I know well I should not be here. Such things may make me mad at times; but say, sir, am not I toler- ably well, every drawback considered ? " " Good God!" answered Hume, "what then could be their purpose or meaning in this confinement of yours!" " My heart, Dr. Hume, is ready to cast out corresponding flames with your indig- nant speech and question; but I shall be calm, and not commit myself, because I still think God hath brought round a gracious hour and a just man. What shall I say to you again, Dr. Hume? Try me by any process of logic. Shall it be an arijumentnm ad kominem, as my kind old tutor styles it? Shall I reason on my present situation, and tell you that things are not well managed in this place? The treat- ment is too uniform, and general, and unmo- dified; whereas, by a proper scale, the patient should be led from one degree of liberty to another, according to his good behaviour, that so he might calculate, that so he might exercise and strengthen his reason, that so he might respect himself, and gradually improve. Now, sir, judge me aright. Nature, in dread appre- hension, sets me far above vanity: and I will ask you have I not uttered deep wisdom? You have not detected aught like the disjointed fervour of lunacy in my speech ! My thoughts are not abrupt and whirling, but well attem- pei'ed, and softly shaded, as the coming on of sleep. " " By my soul, Cardo," said Frederick, " I think you have been most grossly abused." "Have I not, have I not?" "Whose doing was this? and can you guess why it was?" asked Hume. " I owe it to Romelli and Stewart," answered Antonio. " The wherefore I know not, unless it be that I have loved too ardently, and shall never cease to love, Signora Romelli. Go away, sir, and be like the rest of the world: leave me here to perish: for you, too, love the maiden, and may be offended at my passion." " It is my business, in the first instance," answered Hume, "to follow common humanity and justice. I shall instantly over- haul this damnable oppression, and call the above men to task. You must be quiet in the meantime." "0, let it not be long, then! let it not be long! let it not be long! If you knew how my good angel, young Charlotte Cardo, has made me hope for your coming! If you knew how I have counted the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes, for you! How my heart has beat loudly at every sound for you, from morning, till night darkened above my rustling straw, and all for your coming! And in the tedious night-watches too! when my soul longed in vain to rest for a little while beyond the double gates of horn and ivory, in the weary land of Morpheus ! Merciful sleep ! Merciful sleep! How many worn and ghost- like spirits yearn and cry to be Avithin the "BUY A BROOM?" 143 dreamy girdle of thy enchanted land. Let them in, O God! The body's fever and the mind's fever, calentures of the brain and caresrings of the pulse, revenge, and appre- hension, and trembling, fears of death that visit me in the night when I lie here, terror to be alone lest indeed I lose my reason and oh ! hope deferred and then outwardly, around me day and night, beleaguering the issues of my soul, and making me mad by the mere dint of habit, wild laughter unfathomed by reason, sharp cries, 'as fast as mill-wheels strike,' shrieking groans as from the hurt mandrake, muddy blasphemies, enough to turn the sweet red blood of the hearer into black infatuation and despair; add all these precious ingredients to the boiling heart of pride within, and what have you got? 0, something worse than a witch's cauldron, boiling 'thick and slab' with the most damned physical parcels, and casting up the smeared scums of hell ! And such, sir, has been my lot here, and therefore I pray that God may put swift gracious thought for me into your heart ! 0, let it not be long, for the knowledge of hope will make me only the more irritable, and it will be very dangerous for me if that hope oe deferred. I will amuse myself counting off bundles of straw till you visit me again, if you do not die, as I am afraid you may, ere you can free me." "Now then, I must take my leave of you, Antonio, as it ia needless for me to say anything farther at this time." "For the love of the sweet Virgin Mother, Frederick Hume," said the Italian boy, throwing himself down among his straw with a violence which made his chains rattle, " speak comfort to my sister, who has pitched her tent and set down her soul's rest within the shadow of one unhappy boy's heart. I shall sleep none to-night. Farewell, sir, and think upon me!" He nestled with his head in the straw, and Frederick Hume, left the unhappy place. CHAPTER IV. The keeper of the asylum had either been convinced of Cardo's lunacy, or had been bribed to make his reports to that effect; and Hume, when he entered the poor boy's cell, had no doubt whatever that the thing was as represented: but now he was fully convinced of the contrary, and proceeded without delay loudly to challenge the wicked or foolish affair. Had the first movers of it thought that he was to be in the country so soon, they would pro- bably have taken care not to let him visit Antonio privately; and they were not a little tartled when Hume entered his strong re monstrance, and declared that the boy had been most unjustifiably confined. As for llo- melli, his ends were already in a great measure served, and he cared not much farther about the thing. Stewart, who was jealous of Hume's professional character and his present inter- ference, made a show as if he would gainsay Frederick's opinion to the very utmost. The other consulting physicians, nettled, no doubt, that their grave wisdom should be impugned by a stripling, were in a disposition sooner to fortify themselves in injustice, than to see and acknowledge the truth, were it made as plain to them as day. When they heard, however, that Hume was determined to make a repre- sentation of the case to the magistrates of the place, and to visit the asylum again ere long, with one or two of the principal Edinburgh physicians, they were a little alarmed; and Stewart, particularly, from his consciousness of the truth of what Frederick had stated, de- termined that Cardo should have an oppor- tunity of making his escape, which would save himself the shame of being publicly obliged to yield to Hume's interference. About a week after the above interview betwixt Antonio and our young doctor, Miss Pearce, Signer Romelli, and his daughter (for the signer had excused himself pretty well to Frederick), and two or three more, were sitting one evening in Sirs. Mather's parlour. The candles had just been lighted. Immediately the door opened, and admitted a young man, bareheaded, and in worn attire. As he came slowly forward, he waved his hand mournfully, and attempted to speak, but seemed, from emotion, unable for the task. He was now seen to be Antonio Cardo, though he had grown so tall of late, and was so very pale, that he was not so easily recognized. There was a tear in his eye, a slight dilatation of his nostril, and a quivering all round his mouth, like one whose honour has been doubted, and who has just come from trial and danger, and indignant victory. Were an idiot to gain reason and high intellect, and to be seen walk- ing stately with wise men, who would not weep at the sublime sight? Nor is it without awful interest that we behold a man composed and serene, after coming out of a dark dream of insanity, the fine light of reason exhaling from the unsettled chaos of his eye, and a tear there, the last witness of the unaccountable struggle. Some of the young ladies who now saw Antonio Cardo lately recovered, as they had heard, from such a fit, had been talking of him a little before, and styling him "poor unhappy creature;" but no sooner did he 144 'BUY A BROOM?" appear before them, redeemed, as they thought him to be, graceful and beautifully pale as he was, than he gained the yearning respect of all, and was a prouder object to every heart than a bridegroom from his chamber. He ad- vanced slowly without speaking, and sat down on a sofa like a wayfaring man wearied out with his journey. Charlotte entered the room. "There he is at last!" cried she, when she saw him, and throwing herself upon his neck, she swooned away, overcome by a thrill of joy. Kindly for a while did God hold her spirit entranced, that she might not be agonized at her brother's sudden and strange departure. For Antonio at this moment observing Signor Romelli, whom his weak and dazzled eyes had not till now seen, laid his sister, like an indif- ferent thing, upon the sofa, started forward, and pointing with his finger to Eomelli, whis- pered deeply, " Have I found you, mine enemy? Take care of that man, good people, or my soul shall tear him to pieces." Like an unreclaimed savage, the boy grinded his teeth as he hung for a moment in his threat- ening attitude; but he was seen to be working under some strong restraint, till all at once he rushed out of the house, and was lost in the dark night. Days, weeks, and months passed, and still he came not, nor had his friends heard anything of him. During the summer every young beggar lad that came to Greenwells Cottage was keenly scrutinized by poor Char- lotte Cardo ; and every day she went tc the top of a green hill in the neighbourhood, to look for travellers along the road, or coming over the open moor. But all her anxiety was in vain; Antonio came not, and she began to droop. In the house she walked softly, with downcast eyes; she was silent and kind, and very shy, though every one loved her. Amidst gay com- pany she scarcely seemed to know wh^re she was, sitting motionless on her chair, or oblig- ingly playing to the dance without ever seem- ing to be wearied. To every one that kindly requested her to take part in the amusement she answered by a shake of the head and a faint smile. Besides sorrow for her brother's unaccoun- table absence, another passion, which no one suspected, was beginning to prey upon the heart of this Italian maiden; and no sooner did she hear Frederick Hume, about the be- ginning of autumn, propose to go in a few weeks to Paris, there to remain during the winter, than she declined so fast in her health, that in a few days she could scarcely walk about the house. Observing with infinite regret her increasing feebleness, Frederick humanely resolved to defer his journey till he should sec the issue of her illness; and, in the meantime, he procured for her the best medical attend- ance, determined to do every thing which human skill could do for the beautiful alien. By the advice of his medical friends, in accordance with his own view of the case, he would have sent her to her native Italy; but this she overruled, declaring she would be buried in Mrs. Mather's own aisle. "Can none of you tell me," said she one day to Frederick, who was alone with her in the room, as she sat upon the sofa, "what has become of my poor harper?" "To be sure, Charlotte," he answered, " I know very well where he is. He is off to Italy for a while, and will take care of himself, for your sake, you may be assured. " " You are a kind gentle- man, sir," returned the maiden; "but it will not do. Yet what boots such a life as mine? Let me die. You will be happy with the beau- tiful Signora Romelli when I am gone, and then she will be assured that I cannot envy her." As she said this, she covered her face with one hand, whilst she extended the other. It was pale as a lily bleached with rains; and well could Frederick see that the narrow blue rings of Death, her bridegroom, were on the attenuated fingers. He took the hand and gently kissed it, bidding her take courage, and saying that she must take care of her life for her brother's sake. At this the maiden, not without a l.'ttle irritable violence, hastily with- drew her hand, and used it to assist in hiding the tears which began to ourst through between the fingers of the other. Trembling succeeded, and a violent heaving of heart, such as threat- ened to rend her beautiful body to pieces. At this delicate moment Mrs. Mather entered the room, and hastened to her assistance. One afternoon, about a week after this, an eminent doctor from the neighbouring town, who generally attended the maiden, took Frederick Hume aside, and in answer to his inquiries regarding her appearance that day, said, " There is but one possible way, Hume, of saving that girl's life." " For God's sake, name it, sir," returned Frederick. "You will be surprised, perhaps shocked, Dr. Hume," continued the other physician; "but it is my duty to tell it to you. Well, then, that Italian girl is dying of love for you." "Whom do you mean, sir? Not Charlotte Cardo?" said Frederick, afraid of the conviction M-hich had flashed upon him. " I cannot be wrong, Frederick," replied the other; "Mrs. Mather hinted the thing to me some time ago. I have 'BUY A BEOOM?" 145 seen it from the manner of the girl, and her emotion in your presence, compared with her manner when I visited her without your being with me. To-day she spoke of you under a slight degree of delirium, and when she re- covered, I made her confess the whole to me." " You have at least done well to tell me," said Hume, anxiously. " But what must be done?" " Why, sir, as the mere physician in this case, my opinion generally, and without any reference to other circumstances, is, that you must for- mally make the girl your bride this very night, if you would give her a chance for life. To remove her preying suspense, and dread of losing you, may calm her spirit, and lead to ultimate recovery." "You are an honest, but severe, counsellor," said Frederick, shaking his medical friend by the hand with desperate energy; "but, for God's sake, sir, go not away till you tell me again what must be done. Were myself merely the sacrifice, I should not hesitate one moment nor perhaps think it a sacrifice. But, good God! I stand pledged to another lady to Miss Romelli. And now, how can I act? Can there not be at least a little delay say for a week?" " I think not, sir. No, assuredly. But ' "Sir?" de- manded Frederick, eagerly, interrupting him; "speak to me, sir, and propose something. I have entire confidence in your wisdom." "I was merely about to remark," continued the uncompromising physician, "that it is indeed a puzzling case." "The worst of it is," said Hume, "that Miss Romelli is at least fifty miles hence, with her father, at bathing- quarters; and I ought, by all means, to see her and be ruled by her in this matter. Such is certainly my duty." "Much maybe said on both sides," briefly remarked the physician, who, most abstractly conscientious in his pro- fessional character, would not advise against the means of saving his patient's life. " I will bear the blame, then," said Hume, after a short but intense pause. " I cannot see that orphan- child perish without my attempting to save her. Miss Romelli, I trust, will either be proud or magnanimous, and so the sooner, sir, the ceremony is performed the better." The next point was to break the proposal to Mrs. Mather; but besides her wish to see Miss Romelli become the wife of Frederick, she was scandalized at the idea of his marrying a girl whom, despite of her affection for Charlotte, she hesitated not at this time to style a wan- dering gipsy. " Prithee, madam," said Fre- derick, bitterly, "do not so speak of my wife that is to be, but go prepare for this strange wedding." "Never, never," replied the old VOL. L lady; "it is all vile art in the huzzy to inveigle you into a snare; 1 can see that." "Never- theless, the thing shall be done," returned Hume, firmly. " And I must tell you, madam, without any reference to my interest in her, that you are doing gross injustice to the poor girl, and mocking a bruised heart." " It may be so, sir," said the lady, haughtily; "and, moreover, you may do as you list, but you shall not have my countenance at least." Accordingly, the old lady left the cottage without delay, and took refuge at the house of a friend, about six miles off, determined there to stay till bridegroom and bride should leave her own dwelling. Meanwhile, Frederick was not disconcerted; but with almost unnatural decision, summoned Miss Pearce, and one or two maids from the neighbouring village, to prepare his bride, and attend her at the strange nuptials. He was too manly and magnani- mous to fulfil the letter without regarding the fine spirit of his sacrifice, and, accordingly, he took every precaution not to hurt or challenge Charlotte's delicacy of feeling; and, particu- larly, he strictly enjoined every one of the above attendants not to mention that Mrs. Mather had left the house, because the thing was utterly against her wish, but that she was kept by indisposition from being present at the ceremony, which, on the contrary, it was to be stated, was all to her mind. Miss Pearce, when she learned the flight of her patroness, began to remonstrate against taking any part in the transaction; but Hume drew her aside, and spoke to her emphatically as follows: "Why, Miss Pearce, what means this? You know you have been a very obliging madam for a score of years or so, d d obliging indeed, never wanting for a moment with your excellent suppliance, a most discreet time- server. You know, too, very well, what reason I have to dislike you. I shall soon control Mrs. Mather. By my soul, then, you shall now do as I bid you, or be cashiered for ever. Moreover, a word to the wise : you are getting very sharp in the elbows now, you know, and ought to be very thankful for one chance more. So you shall be bride's-maid this evening, and if you enact the thing discreetly, and catch every little prophetic omen or rite by the fore- lock, why then you know your turn may be next. Think of the late luck of your next neighbour, that great, fat, overwhelming sexa- genarian, like the national debt, and do not despair. I am peremptory, Miss Pearce, if you please." The poor creature had not spirit to resist the determined manner of Hume, which she easily 10 146 "BUY A BROOM?" recognized through his moody and (but that he knew her to be Miss Pearce) insolent address v She prepared to obey him, yet making, like a stanch Jesuit, her mental reservations, and storing up his obnoxious language to be avenged should an opportunity ever occur. And now the small company of bridal guests were assembled in the lighted hall. Frederick Hume stood by his bride Charlotte Cardo, and took her by the trembling hand. The words of mutual obligation were said by a neigh- bouring gentleman, a justice of the peace, because, owing to hasty preparation, the cere- mony cauld not be performed according to the forms prescribed by the church, and therefore could not be engaged in by a clergyman. During the brief repeating of the marriage obligations there was death and fire mingled in the bride's eye; her heart was heard by all present beating " Even as a madm;m beats ujxm a drum ;" and no sooner was the marriage fully declared than she sprung forward, threw her arms around the neck of Frederick, kissed him wfth wild energy, and exclaimed, "0 my own husband ! " There was a faint and fluttering sound, like the echo of her passionate exclama- tion, as she sunk back upon the sofa, before which she had stood; the lord of life came reeling down from the bright rotmd throne of the eye; her eyelid flickered for a moment; her lips moved, 'but nothing was heard* yet it was easily interpreted to be a wordless blessing for her beloved one before her by the smile which floated and lay upon her placid upturned face, like sunshine upon marble. Thus died Charlotte Cardo, and Frederick Hume was a husband and a widower in the same moment of time. V. With manly and decent composure Frederick ordered the preparations for the funeral of his short-lived spouse; and Mrs. Mather, having returned home truly affected at the fate of Charlotte, repentant for her own last harsh- ness to the dying maid, and touched with a sense of Frederick's nobte behaviour, gave ample permission to the youth to lay the body of his Italian wife in their family aisle, which was done accordingly, three days after jher death. Frederick laid her head in the grave, and continued in deep mounting for her. According to a decent formula, Dr. Hume would willingly enough have abstained for some time from treating with Signora Romelli about their former mutual vow; but, according to the spirit of his pledge, and his true affec- tion for that lady, which had been virtually unaltered even when he most openly compro- mised it, he wrote to Julia a few days after the funeral, stating the whole circumstances, ask- ing her pardon if he had wronged her, declar- ing his inalienable affection for her, yet modestly alleging that he had first broken his vow, and that he was at her mercy whether or not she would still be bound to him by hers. Such was Frederick's letter to Julia, which, had it been in time, she would have kissed with tears, a moment angry, yet soon honouring her lover the more for the difficult and humane part which he had acted; but the devil of petty malignity and mean rivalry had been before- hand with him in tempting, from without, his lady's heart; and ere his letter reached its des- tination Julia Romelli was lost to him for ever. Dr. Stewart, who, as already stated, was a rival of Hume's, had been mean enough to engage Miss Pearce in his interest, to do everything she could by remote hint and open statement to advance his suit with Signora Romelli; and we can easily suppose that this intermediate party, froimher dislike to Frederick, and her jealousy of' Julia's favour with Mrs. Mather, was not idle in her new office. On the very evening of Charlotte Cardo's marriage and death she sought an -interview with Stewart, reminded him of Miss Romelli's proud heart, advised him, without losing a moment, to wait ufton that lady and urge his own respectful claims in contrast with Hume's ill usage; and to make all these particulars effective, the Pearce tendered a letter, already written, for Stewart to cam* with him to Julia, in which, under the character of a friend, jealous of Miss Romelli's honour, she stated the fact of Hume's having married Charlotte Cardo without men- tioning the qualifying circumstances, or stating that the rival bride was already dead. Stewart was meaa enough to follow this crooked policy to the utmost. The she-devil, Pearce, had calculated too justly on poor Julia's proud heart. He pressed his suit ; was accepted by the Italian maid in her fit ,of indignation against Frederick; and they were married pri- vately in great haste. The first symptom ef this unhappy change of affairs- which occurred to Hume was the return of the letter which he had sent to Julia, and which came back to him unopened. About a week afterwards he heard the stunning news of his own love's marriage with another, to feel that he was cut off for ever from the hopes of 'BUT A EllOOM?" 147 his young life: for he had loved passionately, and with his whole being. Days, weeks passed over him, and his exist- ence was one continuous dream of thoughts, by turns fierce and gentle, now wild as the irftpaled breast of a suicide, now soft as breathings of pity from the little warm heart of a young maid. One while he cursed the pride and cruelty of Julia (for he knew not the part which Miss Pearce had acted), and he made a vow in his soul, for his own peace of mind, never again to see her in this mortal life. Then he was dis- posed to curse the memory of Charlotte Cardo; but his heart was too magnanimous to let him long give way to this feeling. On the contrary, to keep down such thoughts, and to be strictly and severely just, he got Mrs. Mather's consent to let a table-stone be placed in her aisle, with this inscription: "Charlotte Cardo, wife to Dr. Frederick Hume." One clay the youth went alone to the church- yard to see the above tablet for the first time after its erection. As he bent over it, filled with a multitude of hurrying thoughts, a burst of solemn music rolled upon his ear, and, on looking up, there was Antonio Cardo within the door of the aisle playing upon an organ. He was bareheaded, and tears glittered in his eyes, which were upturned with a wild paftios, as, in accompaniment with the rolling organ, he chanted the following song or dirge: The stars that shine o'er day's decline may tell the hour of love, The balmy whisper in the leaves the golden moon above; But vain the hour of softest power: the noon is dark to thee, My sister and my faithful one ! And oh 1 her death to me! In sickness, aye, I cried for her her beauty and her kiss: For her my soul was loath to leave so fair a world as this: And glad was I when day's soft gold again upon me fell, And the sweetest voice in all the earth said, " Brother, art thou well?" She led me -rtfcere the voice of streams the leafy forest fills: She led me where the white sheep go o'er the shining turfy hills: And whan the gloom upon me fell, O, she, the fairest beam, Led forth, with silver leading-strings, my BOU! from darksome dream 1 Now, sailing by, the butterfly may through the lattice peer, To tell the prime of summer-time the glory of the year ; But ne'er for her: to death her eyes have given up their trust, And I cannot reach her in the.grave to clear them from the dust. But in the skies her penrly eyes the Mother maid hatk kiss'd, And she hath dipp'd her sainted foot in the sunshine of the bless'd. Eternal peace her ashes keep who loved me through tlve past ! And may good Christ my spirit take to be with hers at last! With a softened heart Frederick listened to the strain; but after it had ceased, arid An- tonio had kissed his sister's name upon the stone, he could not refrain, in an alternation of sterner feeling, from saying, "By Heaven! most unhappy wanderer, the thing is all your own doing your folly hath ruined us all." The Italian answered not, save by throwing, himself down on the ground and kissing Fre- derick's feet. " Rise up, sir," said Hume, angrily; " I like not your savage philosophy: I like nothing beyond common sense and feeling. As for yourself, I know you not, sir: I do not know what character you are of, or anything about your family." " By ?Mie Holy Mother! you shall soon know me then," said the boy, springing proudly up. " Promise to meet me here on Saturday night at twelve o'clock, and you shall see me then no longer the weak boy that you have spurned, but one that can be strong and do justice. Do you promise to meet me?" "How am I interested in your scheme of j ustice ? " demanded Frederick. ' ' You do not fear me, sir?" asked the Italian in return. "Surely the man that so honoured Charlotte Cardo as you have done need not fear me." "Why, sir," said Frederick, "to tell you a circumstance which you have no right to know, in these late days I do not hold my life of more value than a box of grasshoppers." " You can have no scruple then to meet me," said Cardo-. "And you may have some wish to hear me explain a few circumstances relative to our family, my own character, and the cause of my late absence. You shall also learn some- thing about Signor Romelli. Have I your sure promise to meet me then at this place?" " I eare not though I do," answered Hume, "since I am weary of everything common under the sun, and especially since it is a very pretty hour for a man to speculate a little in." " You are too careless by half for my purpose," said the Italian. " Faith, not so," returned Fre* derick. "Nay, my good friend, I will on mj 348 "BUY A BROOM?" knees on this stone swear to meet you. Well, did you say on Saturday?" " This is mere moody trifling all, Dr. Hume; but no matter, I will ere then give you a memento to mind Saturday night : hour twelve o'clock. " " You go home with me in the interim, I presume?" said Frederick. " You have played the truant from school too long." "Farewell, sir, and remember your promise," answered Antonio. "I do not go with you at present." He ac- cordingly hasted away from Frederick, without answering his farther inquiries. On the forenoon of the following Saturday Hume received a note from Cardo reminding him of his engagement at twelve o'clock that night, which, to do Frederick justice, he had not forgotten, and which he had resolved to fulfil, chiefly from the excellent motive of seeing the poor Italian lad again, and offering to put him in some other respectable situation in life if he did not choose farther to pursue his classical studies. A considerable while before the appointed hour our doctor took the way to the churchyard, which was about a quarter of a mile from Mrs. Mather's house. The belated moon was rising in the east, in an inflamed sphere, as of spilt wine and blood; and the light of her red-barred face tinged the dark tops of the yews, which stood bristling like angry feathers around the churchyard, at the gate of which Hume was now arrived. The owl came sailing by his head on muffled wing, and flew about musing over the graves. The next minute Frederick was startled at hearing the reports of two pistols, one a little after the other; and making his way towards the quarter whence the sounds had come, he was led to his own aisle. On looking through its grated door, Heavens of Mercy ! what saw he within? There was Signor Eomelli on his knees before the tombstone, and Antonio Cardo holding him fast by the neck. To the surprise of Hume, there seemed to be some new inscription on the stone. To this, Cardo, whilst he held Romelli with one hand, was pointing with the other; and at the same time a dark lantern had been so placed upon the tablet, that its light fell directly upon the letters of the inscription. "Rtead aloud, sir, for the behoof of all, or you die this moment," cried Cardo sternly, and flourishing a sort of dagger-knife above the bare head of his prostrate countryman. Ro- melli stared upon the writing, but sat silent. "You cannot see them plainly, perhaps," said the vindictive Antonio. "There is dust on the stone and in the letters, but we shall cleanse them for you." So saying, he drew a white napkin from his pocket, dipped it in the blood that was flowing profusely from Romelli'a throat, and wiped with it the stone. ' ' Read ! " was again the stern mandate. Romelli looked ghastly, kept his eyes fixed upon the stone, but said nothing. And there was a dogged determination in his look, which told that he would die like a fox, without murmur or word. "I will read for you, then," said Cardo: " In memory of Hugo Marli, who perished in the South Seas." "Now, tell me, red-handed hell-fiend, how perished the youth?" A very slight groan, and a harder breathing, was all the answer from the prostrate Italian. "Well then, I am Antonio Marli, the last of my race the brother of thy victim, his avenger, thy prove the title there and find hell." The last vengeful words gurgled in his throat; but his hand was nothing paralyzed, for, lifting high the dagger, he struck it, crashing and glutting itself, down through the skull and brains of the prostrate wretch, to the very hilt. The handle of the dagger, which was shaped like a cross, gave a grotesque tufted appearance to the head, and consorted well with the horrid expression of the features, which were first gathered up into one welked knot of ugly writhen delirium, and then slowly fell back into their proper places, and were gradually settled into the rigidity of death. The body inclined forward against the stone, upon the edge of which stuck the chin, unnaturally raised; and the face, half lighted by the lamp, and adorned by the handle-cross towering above it, looked over the tablet towards the door, a ghastly picture. Antonio Marli (let him now wear the name, thus horribly authenticated), with a red smile, as if his countenance shone from the mouth of a furnace, turned to Hume, who, loudly de- precating the above violence, had made desperate efforts at the same time to break into the aisle, and thus grimly spoke to him: "So, thou art there, thou glorious faithful one! Thou shalt live in the kingdom-to-come with the Marlis. Come in, bird, into the house," continued he, curving his fore-finger, and beckoning to Frederick with it; "advance and join the committee." A change came over his face in a moment: he unlocked the door; threw it open; dragged out the body of Romelli with awful violence; then turning to Hume, tried to speak, but could not, from violent emotion. He con- tinued for a minute merely pointing to the body, but at length he said, "So, there it is out: I would not have its blood mingle with my sister's ashes." "Most murderous wretch," cried Frederick, 'BUY A BROOM?" 149 grappling with him; "how didst thou dare call me to witness this?" "Sir, I thought your good opinion of some value, and I called you to see me approve myself a man of justice." "A wild beast thou! say a fiend rather; but thou shalt answer for it." "Ha!" cried Marli, with desperate energy, casting himself free from Hume's hold; "hear me, sir, now my brother : Go, weep for the little wren that dies in a tussle with the bltfe cuckoo, but give not your sympathy to that carrion, for he was a wretch, whose heart-strings might, unscathed, have tied up the forked bundles of lightning, so callous were they, so wicked, so callous. For your wife's sake, my sister, do not. Moreover, you must leave this country instantly; and for your kindness to my sister I shall go with you wherever you go, and be your slave till death, because in that I shall be honouring her." " A discreet travelling companion, forsooth ! " returned Hume. " Hark ye, sir: like fire and water I can be a good servant ; but my mastery, if your negative to my proposal put it upon me, may be equally dangerous." " Granted in the matters of Italian assassination," said Frederick. " But suppose, sir, that this very moment I dispute your mastery. Suppose I tell you that even now my eye is upon you, and that I do not mean to let you leave the churchyard without a desperate effort on my part to secure your person." " I shall not stay at present," said Cardo, "to show you how easily I can defy you, armed as I am. Let us come to the point. You love Signora Romelli, and she loves you. Well: but you shall never marry her for her vile father's sake. She shall never sit a bride on the throne of your heart, which my sister Charlotte could not gain. Nay, she shall never wear for you the comely garment of marriage which my sister Charlotte gained. She shall never be happy as a wife where my sister Charlotte could not be happy as a wife. I Avill flee this instant, and you will be suspected of Romelli's murder. I have put things in such a train that suspicion must naturally fall upon you. No one, save your- self, and another whom I can trust, has seen me in this visit to your neighbourhood. The deed has been done with your own pistol and dagger, with which, besides the key to open the aisle door, my knowledge of Mrs. Mather's premises enabled me secretly to provide myself a few nights ago. If you think it could serve you aught in the court of justice to produce my card of to-day inviting you hither, look at it again, and see that it is not signed. More- over, on a more careful glance, you will find it fair imitation of your own handwriting, so that it would instantly be declared an ex post facto forgery a poorly-conceived contrivance. That dead dog was honoured likewise with a note of invitation, but I took care to put such dangerous hints in it that he would not fail to burn it as soon as read. Moreover, on your way hither, you met two villagers, who, by a shrewd contrivance of mine, which it is needless at present to explain, were drawn to the road, notwithstanding the late hour, and who could not fail to recognize you, though they might not speak. Now, sir, do you see how you are beleaguered? You can hardly escape a con- demning verdict ; and even were it ' Not proven,' still the lurking suspicion against you, which such a niggardly acquittal implies, would for ever prevent the fine-souled Julia Romell' from becoming your wife. Now for your alternative of choice: Shall I leave you and will you stay to be confounded in this country? or will you not rather flee with me instantly, where both of us shall be safe, and where, because you so honoured and tried to save the twin-sister of my being, my beloved one, I shall tame my safety, and my pride, and my powers, to be with you day and night as your companion and friend? Remember, either alternative will equally well serve my ends." " I have listened to you well, you must allow," said Hume; "and I have come to the conclusion that your ingenuity and finesse are admirable; but what a pity it is that they should all go for nothing! To show you, sir, what an overweening fool you are, I will con- strain myself to tell you that Julia Romelli is already married to Dr. Stewart, in consequence of my choosing a bride elsewhere. Now, sir, seeing what my connection with your family has already gained for me, can you still urge it upon me, as a very important acquisition, to secure your devoted and worshipful attend- ance? Faugh! your hand smells rankly, and I will not taste that bread which you have touched. " At this announcement of Miss Romelli's marriage Marli gave a sort of involuntary scream. With trembling earnestness he then drew forth his bloody handkerchief, tied one end round his neck, and proffered the other to Dr. Hume, with the following words: "Is it so, sir? is Julia lost to you? I knew not of this: and now I do not rejoice. But take the napkin, sir, and lead me away to justice: take it, sir, if you wish any triumph over our family. By the souls of all my race, I shall follow you quietly as a lamb, for you have suffered too much already from the Marlis. Not one hair of your noble head shall for this murder come 150 "BUY A BROOM?" into danger. Not one suspicion shall attach to your cloudless name. Had the law seized you, by my soul's being I would not have let you die, though I wished you never to get Julia Romelli for your wife. As it now is> you shall not for a moment be impeached. Lead mo away." Hume was puzzled what step now to take. He could have no wish to see Marli perish on the scaffold, even though he was a murderer; besides, that he would himself indirectly share the ignominy, from having been so allied to the family. But then, on the other hand, though life might now be of little value to him, he would not have his honour called in ques- tion, nor his name linked with the suspicions of his having had anything to do with such a vile deed of murder, which might assuredly happen to him were the real murderer to escape. He was, besides, though of a very ardent tem- perament, a man of a wise and well-constituted heart, and could not but think that Marli should be directly responsible to the laws of a wise country for his. outrageous act. In some- thing like a compromise betwixt these feelings, he said, "I shall endeavour, sir, to keep the blame from myself, and fix it upon the proper culprit: Should you make your escape, I shall defend myself as well as possible." "So the die is cast against me," said Marli, who, notwithstanding the sincere spirit of his surrender, had perhaps clung to the hope, that Hume might yet be disposed to save him, by leaving the country with him for ever. "But I shall abide it take me now in tow, for I am impatient to grapple with my fate. " "Not at all," said Frederick, refusing the handkerchief, caring not for the outrageous effect of which the wild spirit of Marli seemed studious, in proposing the use of this bloody leading-string. He went close, however, by the side of the Italian, determined now to lay hold on him should he offer to escape. This, however, Antonio did not attempt; but, going quietly with Hume to the village, he himself roused the constables, stated to them his crime, and put himself under their care, to convey him to the jail of the neighbouring town, which was done without delay. CHAPTER VI. Marli was found guilty of Romelli's murder; and condemned to be executed in the church- yard where the murder was committed a place of execution certainly new and remark- able. Frederick Hume, according to a solemn promise which he had made to Marli when one day he visited him in jail before his trial, again waited on the prisoner in his cell a few- days before the appointed time of execution. The Italian boy was sitting on his low pallet- bed, apparently in deep abstraction, and he sat for a minute after Frederick entered. His face was calm and clearly pale, as if it had come out of the refiner's furnace; but his dark hair was raised a little above one of his temples, as if disordered by the wind ; and there was an awful shadow and a trouble in the inner rooms of his eye. So soon as Hume named him, he arose, and, advancing, kissed his visitor on the cheek, exclaiming earnestly, "My brother! My brother!" "Well, then, my poor Antonio Marli," said Hume, much moved, "I trust you repent of your crime?" "Why? and wherefore?" answered the pri- soner, with a gesture of impatience. "But you shall hear me : When you were last in the jail with me I was not in the vein for explana- tions, but now you shall hear and judge of Komelli's deserts. I would make you a prince, sir, if I could, but I have no other way of giving you honour, than by unfolding myself a little to you, which I would do were the confession to show my heart one molten hell. My father, who, as you have already heard, was a clergy- man in the north of Italy, was one stormy night returning home through a small village, about a mile from our house, when he heard a poor sailor begging at a door for a lodging during the night, which was refused him. My good old father, remembering that he him- self had a son a sailor, who might come to equal want, brought home with him the re- jected seaman, gave him food and dry raiment, and made him sit with us by the parlour fire. The man was of a talkative disposition, and being, moreover, cheered by the wine which was plentifully given him, began voluntarily to tell us of his having been lately shipwrecked. 'And how could it be otherwise?' continued the mariner; 'how could that ship thrive? You will hear why she could not ; for I know the whole story. Well, before sailing from Genoa, on our last voyage, our captain, who was a widower, had fallen in love with a young lady. Now, it so happened, that his mate, a nice young chap, liked the same damsel ; and she, in return, preferred him to the sulky captain, who, in consequence, was mightily huffed, and took every opportunity, after we had sailed from port, of venting his spleen against his rival. One day, being becalmed in the South Seas, near a beautiful green island abounding in wild game, the captain with a "BUY A BROOM?" 151 mall party went on shore to have some sport in shooting kangaroos. To the surprise of every one the young mate was allowed to go with us, and glad he was, for he was a lad of fine mettle and delighted in all sorts of amuse- ment. But no sooner had we landed than the captain turned to him and said, peremptorily, 'Now, sir, j'ou must watch the boat till we return. ' Poor fellow, he knew his duty, though he felt the mean revenge, and folding his arms, he turned quickly round with his face from us, which was burning with anger, and began to hum a tune. After we had pursued our sport for some hours in the woods, we returned to the boat, and were surprised to find that the mate was not beside it. We saw him, however, about a hundred yards off (for he had probably been allured from his charge by seeing some game not far off), hasting towards us. The captain, trembling with malignant eagerness, ordered us all into the boat in a moment, and made us pull away as fast as possible from the poor young fellow, who, loudly demanding not to be left in such a wild place, dashed into the sea and swam after us. Be sure all of us used our oars with as little effect as possible to let him make his leeway. This he soon did and took hold of the edge of the boat ; when the cruel captain drew his hanger and cut through his fingers, leaving him again to fall back into the sea. 'You disobeyed my orders, sir, in not staying beside the boat,' cried the heartless savage, whom every soul of us would gladly have tossed overboard, though the instinct of disci- pline kept us quiet. As for the poor mate, he cast a bitter and reproachful glance at the boat, folded his arms, and diving down into the sea, was never more seen. How could the ship, that bore us with the monster, be blessed after such doings ? She was beat to pieces on the coast of Sicily, and the captain and I alone escaped. He used me very scurvily thereafter, and. I ani not ashamed to tell his misdeeds. -But it was a pity for the good ship, the Arrow.' '0, God! hold fast my head!' exclaimed my father, on hearing the name of the vessel ' If if but tell me the captain's name.' 'Romelli.' 'And the mate's?' 'Hugo Marl i; a blythe sailor!' 'My Hugo! my own boy!' cried my father; and the old man's head sunk down upon his breast. Never shall I forget the wild, strange manner in which our sailor-guest at this caught hold of the liquor that was standing on the table, drunk it all out of the bottle, and then fled from the house, leaving me alone, a little boy, to raise and comfort my father's heart. In a few days the old man died of a broken heart, and I was left alone with my twin sister Charlotte. Day and night I thought of Hugo, the gay and gallant sailor boy that all the maids of Italy loved, the pride and stay of my father's heart, who brought presents for Charlotte from far lands, and taught me to fish for minnows in the brook, and to pipe upon the jointed stems of the green wheat: And all this was at an end for ever; and my father's heart was braken. Therefore the desire of revenge grew up and widened with my soul from day to day. I found a medium through which I traced all Romelli's movements, and when I learned dis- tinctly that he was a prisoner in this country, I determined to pay him a visit. My father had left a small sum of money, but now it was nearly expended, having supported Charlotte and myself scarcely a year in the house of our maternal uncle, and we were likely soon to be entirely dependent upon him. On expressing my determination to go to England with my sister, I saw that he was very willing to get quit of us : and the better to insure our removal, he bought me a harp and paid our passage to this country." "Allow me to ask," interrupted Hume "Did Charlotte know this wild purpose of yours?" "No; she was staying with our aunt for a while when the above scene with the sailor took place, and my father was dead ere she knew of his illness. The thoughts of revenge which had already occurred to me made me conceal the true cause of my father's death : or, perhaps, to speak more strictly, although it was well known that his having heard of his son Hugo's death struck the old man to the grave, yet I took care not to reveal through what chan- nel the news had come, or the cruel mode of my brother's death. Had Charlotte known what was within me, she would have tried inces- santly to break my purpose; but she could not possibly know it, and as my will was her law in indifferent matters, she readily followed me to this country. No sooner had we landed than I made her vow never to reveal our true name or distinct place of abode till I gave her leave: and, in the meantime, we assumed the name of Cardo. After wandering about in England till we learned to speak the language fluently, which we attained the more easily that our father had taught it to us gramma- tically, I led the way to Scotland, gradually drawing near my victim, whose place of stay I had taken care to ascertain in Italy, through the same means by which I had hitherto watched his movements. To make my sound- ings, I got into Romelli's house under a feigned 152 'BUY A BROOM?" sickness. When you saw me first, I had in truth no complaint save that the nearness of jny victim and purpose had made my heart so deeply palpitate, that a degree of irritable fever had come over me. The fair Julia was too kind and tender: I fell madly in love with her; I almost forgot my stern duty of revenge. You cannot guess the choking struggles between my two master passions. Yielding so far to the former, I compromised my pride in another point, and consented to be a dependant of Mrs. Mather's. By Heaven! I was not born with a soul to wait at palace doors I would have rejoiced, under other circumstances, to live with my sister, f.ee as the pretty little finches that hunt the bearded seeds of autumn ; but love and revenge, mingled or separately, im- posed it upon me to accede to your charity and Mrs. Mather's, that I might be near the two Romellis. In her playful mood, perhaps, Julia one evening prophesied that I should become a murderer. You cannot conceive the impression which this made upon me. I had begun to flag in my first great purpose, but now again I thought myself decreed to be an avenger; and to avoid stabbing Romelli that very night in your house, I had to keep myself literally away from him. Xow, judge me, my friend. Was < it not by him that I was shut up in a mad- house? Yet for your sake, and Mrs. Mather's, and Charlotte's, and Julia's, and perhaps mine own (for I have been too weak), again I re- frained from slaying him in your house nay, I left the place and neighbourhood altogether, and went to London. I engaged to sing and play in an opera-house, and made enough of money. My heart again grew up dangerous and revengeful. I returned to Scotland to pay Mrs. Mather for having kept us, to send Char- lotte to a seaport town, whence a ship was to sail for the Continent on a given day, then to call Romelli to account, and thereafter to join my sister a few hours before the vessel sailed. On my arrival again in your neighbourhood to make preliminary inquiries, I called at the house of a young woman, who was Mrs. Mather's servant when I first came to the cottage; but who, about a year afterwards, went home to take care of her mother, an old blind woman. So, then, Charlotte was dead! My sister Charlotte! My young Charlotte Marli! and all in my most damnable absence! I heard it all, and your own noble generosity : but nothing of Julia's marriage with Stewart, which my informant, in her remote dwelling, had doubt- less not yet heard. All this might change my line of politics. In the first place, I imposed Becrecy as to my arrival on my young hostess, who readily promised to observe it, in virtue of having loved me for my music. I had now to concert not only how best to strike Romelli, but, at the same time, how to prevent for ever your marriage with Julia. You know my double scheme in one. The brother of my hostess had, in former years, been an organist, and one day I took his instrument, which the affectionate lass had carefully kept for his sake, and went to the remote churchyard to play a dirge over Charlotte's grave. You were there, and I found it an excellent opportunity of for- warding my scheme, by making you promise to meet me afterwards in the aisle; which you did, when Signor Romelli happened to be there. Ha! ha! how came he there, the foolish man? Before naming to you the precise night of our threefold meeting, I had been prudent enough to find out that the excellent signor had just come home from some jaunt, and in all probability would not again, for at least a few days, leave his house. To make sure, however, I instantly forwarded to him my letter of invitation. How expressed? how signed? I remember well (for nothing of that dreadful night will easily pass from my mind) the sailor's name whose story broke my father's heart. So, under his name, I scrawled a letter to Romelli, stating, that if the signor would know the immediate danger in which he stood in consequence of certain things which once happened in a boat in the South Seas, wlien he was captain of the Arrow, and if he would not have these points now brought publicly to light, he must meet the writer alone, at the door of the given aisle, on Saturday night, precisely at eleven o'clock. I was much afraid that he would guess the true writer of the letter, and so would not come. However, about ten o'clock on the appointed night I crouched me down, with a dark-lantern in my pocket, beneath Charlotte's tombstone, upon which, I may here mention, I had got a mason from the village, for a large bribe, to put a slight in- scription relative to my brother, which he secretly executed between Friday evening and the dawn of Saturday. Almost contrary to my expectations, Romelli came; but I think some- what after the. hour appointed, with a dark- lantern in his hand; and, finding the door of the aisle open, he advanced into the interior, and began, I suppose, to read the inscription, which, to heighten the effect of my revenge, as above stated, I had caused to be written the preceding night. In a moment I started up, and ordered him to fall down on his knees and confess his crimes; but instead of obeying me, no sooner did he see who I was than he'drew "BUY A BROOM?" 153 a pistol and shot at me, missing me, however. My turn was next, and I missed not him. He fell : I locked the aisle-door that you might see through the grating, but not interfere. I had him now beneath my will and power. You know the rest! Hugo Marl! is avenged: and I am willing to die." Such were the prisoner Marli's explanations, partly won by the cross-examinations of Hume, but in general given continuously, and of his own accord. "And now, Frederick Hume," continued the prisoner, after a long pause of mutual silence, "you alone, of all the human race, are dear to me; will you promise to lay my head in the grave, despite of the ill which Charlotte and I have done you?" "Bethink you of some other reasonable request and I shall do it for you to the utmost," answered Frederick; "you know the above is impossible." "No, no," cried Marli, impatiently; "you shall lay me beside her in your own aisle." "Antonio Marli, "returned Frederick solemnly, "must I remind you of your sad sentence?" "0 ho! you mean the dissection? The pre- cious carnival for Dr. Pry and his pupils?" said the Italian, laughing grimly. "But if I can accomplish the half If I can get quit of the claim of the law in that respect, would you so bury me, my brother?" "Talk not of this any more," said Hume, not comprehending what the prisoner meant; "but cry for the purifying mercy of Heaven ere you die." "You are from the point, sir," replied Antonio; "but hear me: I will leave one request in a letter to you after my death, if you will pro- mise, and swear nay, merely promise (for I know your honour in all things) to fulfil the same." "Let me hear it, and judge," said Hume. "I will not," said the Italian; "but yet my request shall be simple and your ac- complishment of it very easy. Moreover it shall be offensive neither to your country's laws nor to your own wise mind. Give me this one promise, and I die in peace." "Be it so then," said Frederick; "I will do your re- quest if I find it as you negatively characterize it." "Then leave me leave me for ever!" cried Marli. "But if my heart, and body, and all my soul, could be fashioned into one blessing, they would descend upon thy head and thy heart, and all thy outgoings, thou young man among a million. Oh ! my last brother on earth!" So saying, Marli sprung upon Frederick's neck and sobbed aloud like a little child; and so overcome was Frederick by the sense of his own unhappiness, but chiefly by pity for the fate of the poor Italian boy, in whose heart generosity was strongly mingled with worse passions, that he gave way to the. infectious sorrow; and for many minutes the two young men mingled their tears as if they had been the children of one mother. At length Marli tore himself away, and flung himself violently down with his face upon his low bed. CHAPTER VII. The very next day word was brought to Frederick Hume that the Italian had killed himself in prison by striking his skull against the walls of his cell, and at the same time the following letter was put into Hume's hands: "I claim your promise I forbore distinctly stating to you my purpose last night, because I knew you would have teased me with warn- ings and exhortations, which, despite of my respect for your wisdom, could no more have stayed me in my antique appropriation of myself, than you could make a rain-proof gar- ment from the torn wings of beautiful butterflies. Did you think my soul could afford to give such a spectacle to gaping boors? Well, we must be buried in the first instance (for the law and the surgeon have lost our limbs) among nettles, in unconsecrated ground, at a respectful distance from Christian bones, in the church- yard of this town. But now for my request, and your vow to fulfil it. I demand that you raise my body by night, and take it to your aisle, and bury it beside Charlotte Marli's beautiful body. This request, I think, implies nothing contrary to the laws of your country, or which can startle a wise heart free from paltry superstitions about the last rites of suicides. Moreover, you can do the thing with great secrecy. Then shall I rest in peace beside her whom my soul loved; and we shall rise together at the last day : and you shall be blessed for ever, for her sake and for my sake. Farewell, my brother. "ANTONIO MARLI. Hume prepared without delay to obey this letter, and providing himself with six men from the village of Holydean, on whose secrecy he could well depend, he caused three of them by night to dig up the body of Marli from the graveyard where it had been buried, whilst the other three, in the meanwhile, prepared another grave for it in Mrs. Mather's aisle, as near as possible to his sister Charlotte's. The com- plexion of the night suited well this strange work, darkening earth and heaven with piled lofts of blackness. Frederick himself superin- tended the work of exhumation, which was happily accomplished without interruption. 154 A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. Leaving two of his men to fill up carefully the empty grave, with the third he then accompanied the cart in which, wrapped in a sheet, the body of Marli was transferred to Holydean church- yard. There it was interred anew beside his sister's remains, and the grave being filled up level with the surface, the remains of the earth were carefully disposed of, so that without a very nice inspection, it could not be known, from the appearance of the ground, that this new burial had taken place in the aisle. Thus w&i Antonio Marli's singular request faithfully accomplished. Next morning Hume visited the aisle, to see that all was right. The history of the Marlis, and their late living existence, and his own share in their strange destinies, all seemed to him a dream; yet their palpable tombs were before him, and prostrate in heart from recur- ring recollections of their fate and his own so deeply intertwisted, he remained one last bitter hour beside the graves of these wild and pas- sionate children of the South. Julia Komelli heard, too late, how she had been imposed upon, in reference to Hume's supposed inconstancy of affection, but, for their mutual peace of mind, she determined never to see him more, and never to exchange ex- planations with him. As for Frederick, he too had resolved steadfastly to observe the same forbearance. But though Julia could be 'so self-denied, she was not the less inwardly racked, as she reflected on her own unhappy rashness. Her father's murder was a dreadful aggravation to her distress, which was still farther heightened by the harsh treatment of her husband Stewart, who was conscious pro- bably that his wife had never loved him. The loss of her first-born boy, who was unhappily drowned in a well, brought the terrible con- summation. Poor Julia went mad, and night after night (for her brutal husband cared little for her) she might be seen, when the image of the full moon was shining down in the bottom of the well, sitting on its bank and inviting passengers to come and see her little white boy swimming in the water. From week to week she grew more violent in her insanity, and after many years of woful alienation, she ended her days in that very cell where Antonio Marli had once lain. A few days after the second burial of Antonio Marli, Frederick Hume went to London. There he found means of being present at a ball to see the great Nelson, who was that year in this country. It was most glorious to see the swan-like necks and the deep bosoms of Eng- land's proudest beauties bending towards him, round about, when he entered that man with his thin weather-worn aspect. And never did England's beauties look so proudly, as when thus hanging like jewels of his triumph around their rnanly and chivalrous sailor, who had given his best blood to the green sea for his country. He, too, felt his fame, for the pale lines of hia face, as if charged with electricity, were up and trembling, as in the day of his enthusiastic battle. At sight of this unparalleled man, Frederick was struck to the heart. He bethought him how much more noble it was, since his life was now of little value to him, to lose it for his country, than waste it away in selfish unhap- piness. Accordingly, our doctor gave up his more peaceful profession, and with the consent and by the assistance of his patroness, Mrs. Mather, he entered the navy. In his very first engagement he found the death which he did all but court, and his body went down into the deep sea for a grave. A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. Oh, when I was a tiny boy My days and nights were full of joy, My mates were blythe and kind! No wonder that I sometimes sigh, And dash the tear-drop from mine eye, To cast a look behind ! A hoop was an eternal round Of pleasure. In those days I found A top a joyous thing; But now those past delights I drop, My head, alas ! is all my top, And careful thoughts the string ! My marbles once my bag was stored, Now I must play with Elgin's lord, With Theseus for a taw ! My playful horse has slipt his string, Forgotten all his capering, And harnessed to the law ! My kite, how fast and far it flew! Whilst I, a sort of Franklin, drew My pleasure from the sky ! 'Twas paper'd o'er with studious themes, The tasks I wrote, my present dreams Will never soar so high. My joys ai-e wingless all and dead ; My dumps are made of more than lead; My flights soon find a fall; TO BLOSSOMS. 155 My fears prevail, my fancies droop, Joy never cometh with a Loop, And seldom with a callij! My football's laid upon the shelf ; I am a shuttlecock myself The world knocks to and fro, My archery is all unlearned, And grief against myself has turned My arrows and my bow ! No more in noontide sun I bask; My authorship's an endless task, My head's ne'er oub of school. My heart is pained with scorn and slight, I have too many foes to fight, And friends grown strangely cool ! The very chum that shared my cake Holds out so cold a hand to shake, It makes me shrink and sigh, On this I will not dwell and hang, The changeling would not feel a pang Though these should meet his eye ! No skies so blue or so serene As then ; no leaves look half so green As. clothed the play-ground tree ! All things I loved are altered so, Nor does it ease my heart to know That change resides in me ! Oh, for the garb that marked the boy, The trowsers made of corduroy. Well ink'd with black and red ; The crownless hat, ne'er deem'd an ill, - It only let the sunshine still Kepose upon my head ! Oh for the ribbon round the neck ! The careless dog's-ears apt to deck My book and collar both ! How can this formal man be styled Merely an Alexandrine child, A boy of larger growth ? Oh, ft>r that small, small beer anew! And (heaven's own type) that mild sky-blue That washed my sweet meals down ; The master even ! and that small Turk That fagged me ! worse is now rny work A fag for all the town ! Oh for the lessons learned Hy heart ! Ay, though the very birch's smart Should mark those hours again ; I'd " kiss the rod," and be resigned Beneath the stroke, and even iiud Some sugar in the cane ! The Arabian Nights rehearsed in bed! The Fairy Tales in school-time read, By stealth, 'twixt verb and noun ! The angel form that always walked In all my dreams, and looked and talked Exactly like Miss Brown ! The "omne bene" Christmas come, The prize of merit, won for home, Merit had prizes then ! Bat now I write for days and days, For fame a deal of empty praise Without the silver pen ! Then home, sweet home ! the crowded coach, - The joyous shout, the loud approach, The winding horns like rains' ! The meeting sweet that made me thrill, The sweetmeats almost sweeter still, No "satis" to the "jams." When that I was a tiny boy My days and nights were full of joy, My mates were blythe and kind, No wonder that I sornefcimes sigh, And dash the tear-drop from my ey To cast a look behind ! THOMAS HOOD. TO BLOSSOMS. [Robert Herrick, born in London, 1591 ; died at Dean Prior, October, 1674. The author of the Hesjierides was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside. He was pre- sented by Charles I. to the vicarage of Dean Prior iu Devonshire. een insisted, until he was obliged, at last, to sub- mit, but with the information, that if Rosa- mond should return, it would not be by the way in which she had entered or retired already, and that they had best take care of themselves, as he could answer for no one. The queen, as we have elsewhere observed, kneV not what fear was; and the two courtiers were now a little reassured on the subject of apparitions. The doctor then set about accom- plishing the queen's wishes. Never had con- juration cost hini so much trouble, and after a thousand grimaces and contortions neither pretty nor polite he flung his book into the middle of the gallery, went three times round it on his hands and feet, then made the tree against the wall, head down and heels up; but nothing appearing, he had recourse to the last and most powerful of his spells what that was must remain for ever a mystery, for certain reasons; but he wound it up by three times summoning, with a sonorous' voice, "Rosa- mond ! Rosamond ! Rosamond ! " At the last of these magic cries the grand win'cfow burst open with the sudden crash of a tempest, and through it descended the lovely Rosamond into the middle of the room. The doctor was in a cold sAveat, and while he dried himself, the queen, who thought her fair visitant a thousand times the fairer for the additional difficulty in procuring this second sight, for once let her prudence sleep, and, in a transport of enthusiasm, stepping out of her circle with epen arms, cried out, " My clear likeness !" No sooner was the word out than a violent clap of thunder shook the whole palace; a black vapour filled the gallery, and a train of little fantastic lightnings serpen- tined to the right and left in the dazzled eyes of the company. When the obscurity was a little dissipated, they saw the magician, with his four limbs in air, foaming like a wild boar his cap here, his wig there: in short, by no means an object of either the sublime or beautiful. But though he came off the worst, yet no one in the adven- ture escaped quite dear, except Rosamond. The lightning burned away my lord of Essex's right brow; Sir Sidney lost the left moustachio; her majesty's head-dress smelt villanously of the sulphur, and her hoop-petticoat was so puckered up with the scorching, that it was ordered to be preserved among the royal dra- peries, as a warning, to all maids of honour to come, against curiosity. COUNT ANTHONY HAMILTON, TO A HIGHLAND GIRL AT INVERSNEYDE, UPON LOCHLOMONIX Sweet Highland girl, a very shower Of beauty is thy earthly dowef^ Twice seven consenting years have shed Their utmost bounty on thy head : And these gray rocks; this household lawn ; These trees, a veil just half withdrawn; This fall of water, that doth make A murmur near the silent lake; This little bay, a quiet road That hold iu shelter thy abode; In truth together ye do seem Like something fashioned in a dream; Such forms as from their covert peep When earthly cares are laid asleep ! Yet, dream and vision as thou art, I bless thee with a human heart: God shfeld thee to thy latest years ! I neither know thee nor thy peers, And yet my eyes are filled with teari. With earnest feeling I shall praf For thee when I am far away : t 30 THE POET'S DREAM. For never saw I mien, or face, In which more plainly I could trace Benignity and home-bred sense Ripening in perfect innocence. Here, scattered like a random seed, Remote from men, thou dost not need The embarrassed look of shy distress, And maidenly shamefaeedness : Thou weai'st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a mountaineer. A face with gladness overspread ! Sweet looks, by human kindness bred And seemliness complete, that sways Thy cou tesies, about thee plays ; With no restraint, but such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech : A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life ! So have I, not unmoved in mind, Seen birds of tempest-loving kind, Thus beating up agaiust the wind. What hand but would a garland cull For thee who art so beautiful ! happy pleasure ! here to dwell Beside thee in some heathy dell ; Adopt your homely ways and dress, A shepherd, thou a shepherdess ! But I could frame a wish for thee More like a grave reality : Thou art to me but as a \rave Of the wild sea : and I would have Some claim upon thee, if I could, Though but of common neighbourhood. What joy to hear thee, and to see! Thy elder brother I would be, Thy f ather, anything to thee ! Now thanks to Heaven ! that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place. Joy have I had ; and going hence 1 bear away my recompense. In spots like these it is we prize Our memory, feel that she hath eyes : Then, why should I be loath to stir? I feel this place was made for her; To give new pleasure like the past, Continued long as life shall last. Nor am I loath, though pleased at heart, Sweet Highland girl, from thee to part ; For I, methinks, till I grow old, As fair before me shall behold, As I do now, the cabin small, The lake, the bay, the waterfall ; And thee, the spirit of them all! WORDSWORTH. THE POET'S DEEAM. 1 Snch sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunte i stream. Milton's L' Allege*. It was the minstrel's merry month of June; Silent and sultry glowed the breezeless noon ; Along the flowers the bee went murmuring; Life in its myriad forms was on the wing, Broke through the green leaves with the quivering beam, Sung from the grove, and sparkled on the stream : When where you beech-tree broke the summer ray Wrapped in rich dreams of light young MiLTGir luy. For him the earth beneath, the heaven above, Teemed with the earliest spring of joyous youth; Sunshine and flowers and vague and virgin Love, Kindling his tenderest visions into truth, While Poesy's sweet voice sung over all, Making the common air most musical. Alone he lay, and to the laughing beams His long locks glittered in their golden streams ; Calm on his brow sate wisdom yet the while His lips wore love, and parted with a smile ; And beauty reigned along each faultless limb The lavish beauty of the olden day, Ere with harsh toil our mortal mould grew dim When gods who sought for true love met him here, And the veiled Dian lost her lonely sphere And her proud name of chaste, for him whose sleep Drank in Elysium on the Latmos steep. Nor without solemn dream, or vision bright, The bard for whom Urania left the shore The viewless shore where never sleeps the light, Or falls the voice of music ; and bequeathed Such flowers as ne'er by Thracian well were wreathed And song more high than e'er on Chian Rock was breathed. 1 Painter and poet have united in preserving a pretty anecdote of Milton's youth. A lady with her attendant walking in the forest found the poet asleep under a tree, and she was so charmed by his beauty that she pencilled a few admiring lines and placed the paper beside him . There are different versions of the incident, and by some it is said tor have occurred during Milton's travels in Italy ; but it is quite as likely to have hap- pened during his residence at his father's house at Horton in Buckinghamshire, where he spent the first five years after leaving Cambridge. At that period he was in the prime of youth, and was, according to all accounts, very handsome. His stature did not exceed the middle size, and was formed with perfect symmetry. Manso, Marquis of Villa and the patron of Tasso, re- ceived Milton at Naples with much enthusiasm, and haa left an epigram in praise of the poet, which has been thus translated : "So perfect thou, in mind, in form, and face, Thou'rt not of English but Angelic race." The poem given above is from on* of Lord Lytton'a early productions entitled Milton, ON THE MORAL QUALITIES OF MILTON. 1B1 Dreams he of Nymph half hid in sparry care, Or Naiad rising from her mooned wave, Or imaged idol earth has never known, Shrined in his heart, and there adored alone ; Or such, i>erchaiice, as all divinely stole, In later times, along his charmed soul ; When from his spirit's fire, and years beguiled Away in hoarded passion -and the wild Yet holy dreams of angel-visitings. Mixed with the mortal's burning thoughts which leave Ev'n heaven's pure shapes with ail the woman warm; When from such bright and blest imaginings The inspiring seraph bade him mould the form, And show the world the wonder of his Eve? Has this dull earth a being to compare With those which genius kindles? Can the sun Show his young bard a living shape as fair As those which haunt his sleep? Yea, there is one Brighter than aught which fancy forms most dear Brighter than love's wild dream ; and lo ! behold her here ! She was a stranger from the southern sky, And wandering from the friends with whom she roved Along those classic gardens chanced to stray By the green beech tree where the minstrel lay. Silent in wonder's speechless trance she stood, With lifted hand, and lips apart and eye Gazing away the rich heart, as sh viewed; Darker than night her locks fell clustering O'er her smooth brow, and the sweet Air just moved Their vine-like beauty with his gentle wing; The earliest bloom of youth's Idalian rose Blushed through the Tuscan olive of her cheok (So through the lightest clouds does morning break) And tliere shone forth that hallowing soul which glows Round beauty, like the circling light on high, Which decks and makes the glory of the sky. Breathless and motionless she stood awhile, And drank deep draughts of passion then a smile Played on her lip and, bending down, her hand Traced on her tablet the wild thoughts which stole, Like angel-strangers, o'er her raptured soul ; For she was of the poet's golden land, Where thought finds happiest voice, and glides along Into the silver rivers of sweet song. O'er him she leant enamoured, and her sigh Breathed near and nearer to his silent mouth, Rich with the hoarded odours of the south. So in her spiritual divinity Young Psyche stood the sleeping Eros by ; What time she to the couch had, daring, trod; And by the glad light saw her bridegroom God 1 Did her locks touch his cheek? or did he feel Her breath like music o'er his spirit steal? I know not but the spell of sleep was broke; He started faintly murmured and awoke ! He woke as Moslems wake from death, to see The Houris of their heaven ; and reverently He looked the transport of his soul's amaze : VOL. I. And their eyes met ! The deep deep love supprest For years, and treasured in each secret breast, Wakened, and glowed, and centred in their gaz. And their eyes met one moment and no more ! Nursed in bright dreams of old romantic lore. Of Eastern fairies gliding on the beam, Or Grecian goddess haunting minstrel's dream; He rose and though no faintest voice might stir His lips he knelt adoringly to her, And gazed his worship; Hit the spell was past. And the boy's gesture broke the breathless charm, And maiden shame, and woman's swift alarm, Burningly o'er the Italian's soul was rushing; And her lip trembled, and her \>n s beat f;ist, And with a thousand new-born feelings blushing She turned aw.-iy and with a step of air She fled, and left him mute and spell-bound there. BULWKR. ON THE MORAL QUALITIES OP MILTON. The moral character of Milton was as strongly marked as his intellectual, and it may be ex- pressed in one word, magnanimity/. It was in harmony with his poetry. He had a passionate love of the higher, more commanding, and majestic virtues, and fed his youthful mind with meditations on the perfection of a human being. In a letter written to an Italian friend before his thirtieth year, and translated by Hayley, we have this vivid picture of his aspirations after virtue. "As to other points, what God may have determined for me, I know not ; but this I know, that if he ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, he has instilled it into mine. Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry, than I day and night the idea of perfection. Hence, wherever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire in sentiment, language, and conduct, to what the highest wisdom, through every age, has taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary attachment ; and if I am so influenced by nature or destiny, that by no exertion or labours of my own I may exalt myself to this summit of worth and honour, yet no powers of heaven or earth will hinder me from looking with reverence and affection upon those, who have thoroughly attained this glory, or ap- peared engaged in the successful pursuit of it." His Comus was written in his twenty-sixth year, and on reading this exquisite work, our admiration is awakened, not so much by ob- 11 162 ON THE MORAL QUALITIES OF .MILTON. serving how the whole spirit of poetry had descended on him at that early age, as by witnessing how his whole youthful soul was penetrated, awed, and lifted up by the austere charms, "the radiant light," the invincible power, the celestial peace of saintly virtue. He reverenced moral purity and elevation, not only for its own sake, but as the inspirer of intellect, and especially of the higher efforts of poetry. In his usual noble style, he says, "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him- self to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing of high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." We learn from his works, that he used his multifarious reading, to build up within him- self this reverence for virtue. Ancient history, the sublime musings of Plato, and the heroic self-abandonment of chivalry, joined their in- fluences with prophets and apostles, in binding him "everlastingly in willing homage" to the great, the honourable, and the lovely in char- acter. A remarkable passage to this effect, we quote from his account of his youth. "I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos, the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron ; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn:" ... "So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation of virtue." All Milton's habits were expressive of a refineJ and self-denying character. When charged by his unprincipled slanderers with licentious habits, he thus gives an account of his morning hours. "Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught : then with usual and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness to render light- some, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations, rather than to see the ruin of our protestation, and the enforcement of a slavish life. " We have enlarged on the strictness and lofti- ness of Milton's virtue, not only from our interest in the subject, but that we may put to shame and silence those men who make genius an apology for vice, and take the sacred fire, kindled by God within them, to inflame men's passions, and to minister to a vile sensuality. We see Milton's greatness of mind, in hia fervent and constant attachment to liberty. Freedom in all its forms and branches was dear to him, but especially freedom of thought and speech, of conscience and worship, freedom to seek, profess, and propagate truth. The liberty of ordinary politicians, which protects men's outward rights, and removes restraints to the pursuit of property and outward good, fell very short of that for which Milton lived and was ready to die. The tyranny which he hated most was that which broke the intellectual and moral power of the community. The worst feature of the institutions which he assailed, was, that they fettered the mind. He felt within himself, that the human mind had a principle of perpetual growth, that it was essentially diffusive and made for progress, and he wished every chain broken, that it might run the race of truth and virtue with increasing ardour and success. This attach- ment to a spiritual and refined freedom, which never forsook him in the hottest controversies, contributed greatly to protect his genius, imagination, taste, and sensibility, from the withering and polluting influences of public station, and of the rage of parties. It threw a hue of poetry over politics, and gave a sublime reference to his service of the common- wealth. The fact that Milton, in that stormy day, and amidst the trials of public office, kept his high faculties undepraved, was a proof of no common greatness. Politics, however they make the intellect active, sagacious, and in- ventive, within a certain sphere, generally extinguish its thirst for universal truth, para- lyze sentiment and imagination, corrupt the simplicity of the mind, destroy that confidence in human virtue, which lies at the foundation of philanthropy and generous sacrifices, and ON THE MORAL QUALITIES OF MILTON. 163 end in cold and prudent selfishness. Milton passed through a revolution which, in its last stages and issue, was peculiarly fitted to damp enthusiasm, to scatter the visions of hope, and to infuse doubts of the reality of virtuous principle; and yet the ardour, and moral feel- ing, and enthusiasm of his youth came forth unhurt, and even exalted, from the trial. Before quitting the subject of Milton's devotion to liberty, it ought to be recorded, that he wrote his celebrated Defence of the People of England, after being distinctly forewarned by his physicians that the effect of this exertion would be the utter loss of sight. His reference to this part of his history, in a short poetical effusion, is too characteristic to be withheld. It is inscribed to Cyriac Skinner, the friend to whom he appears to have confided his lately discovered Treatise on Christian Doctrine. " Cyriac. tiiis three-years day, these eyes, though clear To outward view, of blemish or of spot, Bereft of light their seeing have forgot, Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appe;*r Of sun, or moon, or star throughout the year, Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope ; but still bear up and steer Riyht onward. What supports me, dost thou ask ? The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied In liberty's defence, my noble task, Of which all Europe rings from side to side. This thought might lead me through the world's vain musk. Content, though blind, had I no better guide. Sonnet xxii. We see Milton's magnanimity in the circum- stances under which Paradise Lost was written. It was not in prosperity, in honour, and amidst triumphs, but in disappointment, desertion, and in what the world calls disgrace, that he composed that work. The cause with which he had identified himself had failed. His friends were scattered ; liberty was trodden under foot ; and her devoted champion was a by-word among the triumphant royalists. But it is the prerogative of true greatness, to glorify itself in adversity, and to meditate and execute vast enterprises in defeat. Milton, fallen in outward condition, afflicted with blindness, disappointed in his best hopes, applied himself with characteristic energy to the sublimest achievement of intellect, solacing himself with great thoughts, with splendid creations, and with a prophetic confidence, that however neglected in his own age, he was framing in his works a bond of union and fellowship with the illustrious spirits of a brighter day. We delight to contemplate him in his retreat and last years. To the passing spectator, he seemed fallen and forsaken, and his blindness was re- proached as a judgment from God. But though sightless, he lived in light. His inward eyo ranged through universal nature, and his imagination shed on it brighter beams than the sun. Heaven, and hell, and paradise were open to him. He visited 'past ages, and gathered round him ancient sages and heroes, prophets and apostles, brave knights and gifted bards. As he looked forward, ages of liberty dawned and rose to his view, and he felt that he was about to bequeath to them an inheri- tance of genius "which would not fadeaway," and was to live in the memory, reverence, and love of remotest generations. We have enlarged on Milton's character, not only from the pleasure of paying that sacred debt which the mind owes to him who has quickened and delighted it, but from an appre- hension that Milton has not yet reaped his due harvest of esteem and veneration. The envious mists, which the prejudices and bigotry of Johnson spread over his bright name, are not yet wholly scattered, though fast passing away. We wish not to disparage Johnson. We could find no pleasure in sacrificing one great man to the manes of another. But we owe it to Milton and to other illustrious names, to say, that Johnson has failed of the highest end of biography, which is to give immortality to virtue, and to call forth fervent admiration towards those who have shed splendour on past ages. We acquit Johnson, however, of inten- tional misrepresentation. He did not and could not appreciate Milton. We doubt whether two other minds, having so little in common as those of which we are now speaking, can be found in the higher walks of literature. John- son was great in his own sphere, but that sphere was comparatively "of the earth;" whilst Milton's was only inferior to that of angels. It was customary in the day of John- son's glory to call him a giant, to class him with a mighty but still an earth-born race. Milton we should rank among seraphs. John- son's mind acted chiefly on man's actual con- dition, on the realities of life, on the springs of human action, on the passions which new agitate society, and he seems hardly to have dreamed of a higher state of the human mind than was then exhibited. Milton, on the other hand, burned with a deep yet calm love of moral grandeur and celestial purity. He thought not so much of what man is, as of what he might become. His own mind was a revela- tion to him of a higher condition of humanity, 164 SONG. and to promote this he thirsted and toiled for freedom, as the element for the growth and improvement of his nature. In religion, John- son was gloomy and inclined to superstition, and on the subject of government leaned towards absolute power; and the idea of reforming either, never entered his mind but to disturb and provoke it. The church and the civil polity under which he lived seemed to him perfect, unless he may have thought that the former would be improved by a larger infusion of Romish rites and doctrines, and the latter by an enlargement of the royal prerogative. Hence, a tame acquiescence in the present forms of religion and government marks his works. Hence we find so little in his writings which is electric and soul-kindling, and which gives the reader a consciousness of being made for a state of loftier thought and feeling than the present. Milton's whole soul, on the con- trary, revolted against the maxims of legiti- macy, hereditary faith, and servile reverence for established power. He could not brook the bondage to which men had bowed for ages. " Reformation " was the first word of public warning which broke from his youthful lips, and the hope of it was a fire in his aged breast. The difference between Milton and Johnson may be traced not only in these great features of mind, but in their whole characters. Milton was refined and spiritual in his habits, tem- perate almost to abstemiousness, and refreshed himself after intellectual effort by music. Johnson inclined to more sensual delights. Milton was exquisitely alive to theoutward crea- tion, to sounds, motions, and forms, to natural beauty and grandeur. Johnson, through de- fect of physical organization, if not through deeper deficiency, had little susceptibility of these pure and delicate pleasures, and would not have exchanged the Strand for the vale of Tempe or the gardens of the Hesperides. How- could Johnson be just to Milton ' The com- parison, which we have instituted, hascompelled us to notice Johnson's defects. But we trust we are not blind to his merits. His stately march, his pomp and power of language, his strength of thought, his reverence for virtue and religion, his vigorous logic, his practical wisdom, his insight into the springs of human action, and the solemn pathos which occa- sionally pervades his descriptions of life and his references to his own history, command our willing admiration. That he wanted en- thusiasm, and creative imagination, and lofty sentiment, was not his fault. We do not blame him for not being Milton. We love intellec- tual power in all its forms, and delight in the variety of mind. We blame him only that hia passions, prejudices, and bigotry engaged him in the unworthy task of obscuring the brighter glory of one of the most gifted and virtuous men. We would even treat what we deem the faults of Johnson with a tenderness approach- ing respect ; for they were results, to a degree which man cannot estimate, of a diseased, irri- table, nervous, unhappy physical temperament, and belonged to the body more than to the mind. We only ask the friends of genius not to put their faith in Johnson's delineations of it. His biographical works are tinged with his notoriously strong prejudices, and of all his Lives, we hold that of Milton to be the most apocryphal. L>K. CHASMNU. SONG. FBOM GOETHE'S FAUST. [Lord Francis Leveson Gower, afterwards Lord Francis Egerton, bom 1800, died October, 1S57. He was the second son of the first Duke of Sutherland. Possessed of much literary ability, he obtained consider- able reputation by hia translation of " Faust."] My peace is vauish'd, My heart is sore ; I shall find it never, And never more ! Where he is not Is like a tomb ; And the sunniest spot Is turned to gloom. My aching head Will burst with pain And the sense has fled My wilder'd brain. I look through the glass Till my eyes are dim ; The threshold I pass Alone for him. His lofty step, And his forehead high, His winning smile, And his beaming eye ! His fond caress, So rich in bliss ! His hand to press And ah ! his kiss ! My peace is vanish'd, My heart is sore ; I shall find it never, And never more! STANZAS. 165 ON IMPUDENCE AND MODESTY. I have always been of opinion, that the complaints against Providence have been ill- grounded, and that the good or bad qualities of men are the causes of their good or bad fortune, more than what is generally imagined. There are, no doubt, instances to the contrary, and pretty numerous ones too; but few in comparison of the instances we have of a right distribution of prosperity and adversity; nor, indeed, could it be otherwise, from the common course of human affairs. To be endowed with a bene- volent disposition, and to love others, will al- most infallibly procure love and esteem; which is the chief circumstance in life, and facilitates every enterprise and undertaking; besides the satisfaction that immediately results from it. The case is much the same with the other virtues. Prosperity is naturally, though not necessarily, attached to virtue and merit; and adversity, in like manner, to vice and folly. I must, however, confess that this rule admits of an exemption with regard to one moral quality, and that modesty has a natural tendency to conceal a man's talents, as im- pudence displays them to the utmost, and has been the only cause why many have risen in the world, under all the disadvantages of low birth and little merit. Such indolence and incapacity is there in the bulk of mankind, that they are apt to receive a man for whatever he has a mind to put himself off for; and admit his overbearing airs as a proof of that merit which he assumes to himself. A decent assur- ance seems to be the natural attendant of virtue ; and few men can distinguish impudence from it; as, on the other hand, diffidence being the natural remit of vice and folly, has drawn disgrace upon modesty, which, in outward appearance, so nearly resembles it. As impudence, though really a vice, has the same effects upon a man's fortune as if it were a virtue; so we may observe, that it is almost as difficult to be attained, and is, in that respect, distinguished from all the other vices, which are acquired with littie pains, and continually increase upon indulgence. Many a man, being sensible that modesty is extremely prejudicial to him in making his fortune, has resolved to be impudent, and to put a bold face upon the matter: but it is observable that such people have seldom succeeded in the attempt, but have been obliged to relapse into their primitive modesty. Nothing carries a man through the world like a true, genuine, natural impudence. Its counterfeit is good for nothing, nor can ever support itself. In any other attempt, whatever faults a man commits, and is sensible of, he is so much nearer his end, but, when he endeavours at impudence, if he ever failed in the attempt, the remembrante of it will make him blush, and will infallibly disconcert him; after which, every blush is a cause for new blushes, till he be found out to be an arrant cheat, and a vain pretender to impudence. If any thing can give a modest man more assur- ance, it must be some advantages of fortune, which chance procures to h im. Riches natural ly gain a man a favourable reception in the world, and give merit a double lustre, when a person is endowed with it; and supply its place, in a great measure, when it is absent. 'Tis won- derful to observe what airs of superiority fools and knaves with large possessions give them- selves above men of the greatest merit in poverty. Nor do the men of merit make any strong opposition to these usurpations , or rather seem to favour them by the modesty of their behaviour. Their good sense and experience make them diffident of their judgment, and cause them to examine everything with the greatest accuracy; as, on the other hand, the delicacy of their sentiments makes them tim- orous lest they commit faults, and lose, in the practice of the world, that integrity of virtue, so to speak, of which they are so jealous. To make wisdom agree with confidence is as diffi- cult as to reconcile vice to modesty. DAVID HUME. STANZAS. [Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, bom in London, 9th July, 17(54 ; died 7th February, 1823. A very popular romance writer. Of her many works, Tlu MygUi-ie.s of Udolpho is most prominent.] On the bright margin of Italia's shore, Beneath the glance of summer-noon, we stray, And, indolently happy, ask no more Than cooling airs that o'er the ocean play. And watch the bark that on the busy strand Wash'd by the sparkling tide awaits the gale, Till, high among the shrouds, the sailor band Gallantly shout, and raise the swelling sail. On the broad deck a various group recline, Touch'd with the moonlight, yet half hid in shade ; 166 THE GRAY HAIR Who, silent, watch the bark the coast resign, The pharos lessen, and the mountains fade. We, indolently happy, watch alone The wandering airs that o'er the ocean stray, To bring some sad Venetian sonnet's tone From that lone vessel floating far away. HUMAN LIFE. The lark lias sung his carol in the sky ; The bees have liuiume*! their noontide lullaby; Still in the vale the village-bells ring round, Still in Llewellyn hall the jests resound ; For now the caudle-cup is circling there, Now, glad at heart, the gossips breathe their prayer, And, crowding, stop the cradle to admire The Labe, the sleeping image of his sire. A few short years and then these sounds shall hail The day again, and gladness fill the vale ; So soon the child a youth, the youth a man, Eager to run the race his fathers ran. Then the huge ox shall yield the broad sirloin, The ale, now brewed, in floods of amber shine. And, basking in the chimney's ample blaze, 'Mid many a t.ile told of his boyish days. The nur.se shall cry, of all her ills beguiled, '"Twas ou these knees he sate so oft and smiled." And soon again shall music swell the breeze ; Soon, issuing forth, shall glitter through the trees Vestures of nuptial white ; and hymns be sung, And violets scattered round ; and old and young, In every cottage porch with garlands green. Stand still to gaze, and, gazing, bless the scene; While, her dark eyes declining, by his side Moris in her virgin veil the gentle bride. And once, alas ! nor in a distant hour, Another voice shall come from yonder tower; When in dim chambers long black weeds are seen, And weeping's heard where only joy has been ; When by his children borne, and from his door Slowly departing to return no more. He rests in holy earth with them that went before. And such is Human Life ; so gliding on, It glimmers like a meteor, and is gone ! Yet is the tale, brief though it be, as strange, As full methinks of wild and wondrous change, As any that the wandering tribes require. Stretched in the desert round their evening fire; As any sung of old in hall or bower To minstrel harps at midnight's witching hour! BuOKHd. THE GRAY HAIR. [Alaric Alexander Watts, born in London, 1795; died 5th April, 1864. As the poet of domestic life he is widely known and appreciated. His first collection of poems appeared in 18'J2, and from that date he be- came busily occupied in journalism, first as editor of the Letdt Intelligencer, next of the Manchester Courier, and subsequently as the projector of the United Service azMe t which he edited for ten years. In 1851 a com- plete collection of his poetical works was issued under the title of Lyrics of tke Heart. In 1853 government provided him with a pension of 100 a year.] Come, let me pluck that silver hair Which 'mid thy clustering curls I see: The withering type of time or care Hath nothing, sure, to do with thee I Years have not yet impair'd the grace That charmed me once, that chains me now; And Envy's self, love, cannot trace One wrinkle on thy placid brow ! Thy features have not lost the bloom That brighten'd them when first we met ; No !- rays of softest light illume Thy unambitious beauty yet ! And if the passing clouds of care Have cast their shadows o'er thy face, They have but left, triumphant, there A holier charm more witching grace. And if thy voice hath sunk a tone, And sounds more sadly than of yore, It hath a sweetness all its own, Methiuks I never mark'd before ! Thra, young and fair, and happy too If bliss indeed may here be won In spite of all that Care can do ; In spite of all that Time hath done ; Is yon white hair a boon of love, To thee in mildest mercy given? A sign, a token from above, To lead thy thoughts from earth to heaven? To speak to thee of life's decay ; Of beauty hastening to the tomb; Of hopes that cannot fade away ; Of joys that never lose their bloom? Or springs the line of timeless snow With those dark glossy locks entwined, 'Mid Youth's and Beauty's morning glow To emblem thy maturer mind! It does it does : then let it stay ; Even Wisdom's self were welcome now; Who'd wish her soberer tints away, When thus they beam from beauty's brow? OUT WITH THE HERRING FISHERS. 157 OUT WITH THE HERRING FISHERS. [Hugh Miller, born in Cromarty, 12th October, 1302; died in Edinburgh, 2lth December, 1S06. He was for some time a stone-mason, and it was whilst working in this capacity that he obtained the impressions and experiences of the science of geology, which afterwards yielded such great results. Next he became clerk in the bank of his native town, and about this time he published a small volume of poems. He berime a fre- quent contributor to the Juttrnent Cuuri r, and in that journal his important ''Letters on the Herring Fishery" were fitst published. From these letters we quote the following sketch of a night's adventures with the her- ring fishers. At the period of the Disruption, wheu the Free Church party established the Witness, a semi- weekly newspaper, Mr. Miller was appointed its editor, and continued to hold that post until the date of his melancholy death. Whilst performing all the dutiea )f his editorial post he wrote numerous essays, sketches, and tales ; and also produced the works by which hia name will be best known to posterity T/ie Old Red SandntQHe, Fuot^rlnts of the Creator, and T/u Testimony of (lie Jiockg. Sir David Brewster says of him, " With the exception of Burns, the uneducated genius which lias done honour to Scotland during the List century has never displayed that mental refinement and classical taste and intellectual energy wliich mark all the writ- ings of our author " An exhaustive biography of Mr. Miller, by Peter Bayne, has been recently published; and an excellent complete edition of his works has been issued by \Y. P. Ximnio, Edinburgh.] In the latter end of August, 1819, I went out to the fishing then prosecuted on Guilliam in a Cromarty boat. The evening was remark- ably pleasant. A low breeze from the west scarcely ruffled the surface of the frith, which was varied in every direction by unequal stripes and patches of a dead calmness. The bay of Cromarty, burnished by the rays of the declin- ing sun until it glowed like a sheet of molten fire, lay behind, winding in all its beauty be- neath purple hills and jutting headlands; while before stretched the wide extent of the Moray Frith, speckled with fleets of boats which had lately left their several ports, and were now all sailing in one direction. The point to which they were bound was the bank of Guilliam, which, seen from betwixt the Sutors, seemed to verge on the faint blue line of the horizon; and the fleets which had already arrived on it had, to the naked eye, the appear- ance of a little rough -edged cloud resting on the water. As we advanced, this cloud of boats grew larger and darker; and soon after sunset, when the bank was scarcely a mile distant, it assumed the appearance of a thick leafless wood covering a low brown island. The tide, before we left the shore, had risen high on the beach, and was now beginning to recede. Aware of this, we lowered sail several hundred yards to the south t>f the fishing ground; and after determining the point from whence the course of the current would drift us direct over the bank, we took down the mast, cleared the hinder part of the boat, and began to cast out the nets. Before the Inlaw appeared in the line of the Gaelic chapel (the landmark by which the southernmost extremity of Guilliam is ascertained), the whole drift was thrown overboard and made fast to the swing. Night came on. The sky assumed a dead and leaden hue. A low dull mist roughened the outline of the distant hills, and in some places blotted them out from the landscape. The faint breeze that had hitherto scarcely been felt now roughened the water, which was of a dark blue colour, approaching to black. The sounds which predominated were in unison with the scene. The almost measured dash of the waves against the sides of the boat and the faint rustle of the breeze were incessant; while the low dull moan of the surf breaking on the distant beach, and the short sudden cry of an aquatic fowl of the diving species, occasionally mingled with the sweet though rather monoto- nous notes of a Gaelic song. "It's ane o' the Gairloch fishermen," said our skipper; "puir folk, they're aye singin' an' thinkin' o' the Hielands." Our boat, as the tides were not powerful, drifted slowly over the bank. The buoys stretched out from the bows in an unbroken line. There was no sign of fish, and the boat- men, after spreading the sail over the beams, laid themselves down on it. The scene was at the time so new to me, and, though of a somewhat melancholy cast, so pleasing, that I stayed up. A singular appearance attracted my notice. "How," said I to one of the boat- men, who a moment before had made me -an offer of his greatcoat, "how do you account for that calm silvery spot on the water, which moves at such a rate in the line of our drift?" He started up. A moment after he called on the others to rise, and then replied: "That moving speck of calm water covers a shoal of herrings. If it advances a hundred yards farther in that direction, we shall have some employment for you. " This piece of informa- tion made me regard the little patch, which, from the light it caught, and the blackness of the surrounding water, seemed a bright opening in a dark sky, with considerable interest. It moved onward with increased velocity. It came in contact with the line of the drift, and 103 OUT WITH THE HERRING FISHERS. three of the buoys immediately sunk. A few minutes were suffered to elapse, and we then commenced hauling. The two strongest of the crew, as is usual, were stationed at the cork, the two others at the ground baulk. My assist- ance, which I readily tendered, was pronounced unnecessary, so I hung over the gunwale watch- ing the nets as they approached the side of the boat. The three first, from the phosphoric light of the water, appeared as if bursting into flames of a pale green colour. The fourth was still brighter, and glittered through the waves while it was yet several fathoms away, remind- ing me of an intensely bright sheet of the aurora borealis. As it approached the side, the pale green of the phosphoric matter ap- peared as if mingled with large flakes of snow. It contained a body of fish. "A white horse! a white horse!" exclaimed one of the men at the cork baulk; "lend us a haul." I immedi- ately sprung aft, laid hold on the rope, and commenced hauling. In somewhat less than half an hour we had all the nets on board, and rather more than twelve barrels of herrings. The night had now become so dark, that we could scarcely discern the boats which lay within gunshot of our own ; and we had no means of ascertaining the position of the bank except by sounding. The lead was cast, and soon after the nets shot a second time. The skipper's bottle was next produced, and a dram of whisky sent round in a tin measure contain- ing nearly a gill. AVe then folded down the sail, which had been rolled up to make way for the herrings, and were soon fast asleep. Ten years have elapsed since I laid myself down on this couch, and I was not then so ac- customed to a rough bed as I am now, when I can look back on my wanderings as a journey- man mason over a considerable part of both the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland. About midnight I awoke quite chill, and all over sore with the hard beams and sharp rivets of the boat. Well, thought I, this is the tax I pay for my curiosity. I rose and crept softly over the sail to the bows, where I stood, and where, in the singular beauty of the scene, which was of a character as different from that I had lately witnessed as is possible to conceive, I soon lost all sense of every feeling that was not pleasure. The breeze had died into a per- fect calm. The heavens were glowing with stars, and the sea, from the smoothness of the surface, appeared a second sky, as bright and starry as the other, but with this difference, that all its stars appeared comets. There seemed no line of division at the horizon, which rendered the illusion more striking. The distant hills appeared a chain of dark thundery clouds sleeping in the heavens. In short, the scene was one of the strangest I ever witnessed ; and the thoughts and imaginations which it suggested were of a character as singular. I looked at the boat as it appeared in the dim light of midnight, a dark irregularly-shaped mass; I gazed on the sky of stars above, and the sky of comets below, and imagined myself in the centre of space, far removed from the earth and every other world, the solitary in- habitant of a planetary fragment. This al- lusion, too romantic to be lasting, was dissi- pated by an incident which convinced me that I had not yet left the world. A crew of south- shore fishermen, either by accident or design, had shot their nets right across those of another boat, and, in disentangling them, a quarrel ensued. Our boat lay more than half a mile from the scene of contention, bulj I could hear without being particularly attentive that on the one side there were terrible threats of vio- lence immediate and bloody, and on the other, threats of the still more terrible pains and penalties of the law. In a few minutes, how- ever, the entangled nets were freed, and the roar of altercation gradually sunk into a silence as dead as that which had preceded it. An hour before sunrise, I was somewhat disheartened to find the view on every side bounded by a dense low bank of fog, which hung over the water, while the central firma- ment remained blue and cloudless. The neigh- bouring boats appeared through the mist huge misshapen things, manned by giants. We commenced hauling, and found in one of the netsasmall rock-cod and a half-starved whiting, which proved the whole of our draught. I was informed by the fishermen, that even when the shoal is thickest on the Guilliam, so close does it keep by the bank, that not a solitary herring is to be caught a gunshot from the edge on either side. We rowed up to the other boats, few of whom had been more successful in their last haul than ourselves, and none equally so in their first. The mist prevented us from ascertaining, by known landmarks, the position of the bank, which we at length discovered in a manner that displayed much of the peculiar art of the fisherman. The depth of the water, and the nature of the bottom, showed us that it lay to the south. A faint tremulous heave of the sea, which was still calm, was the only remaining vestige of the gale which had blown from the west in the early part of the night, and this heave, together with the current, which at this stage of the flood runs in a south western direc- OUT WITH THE HERRING FISHERS. tion, served as our compass. We next premised how far our boat had drifted down the frith with the ebb-tide, and how far she had been carried back again by the flood. We then turned her bows in the line of the current, and in rather less than half an hour were, as the lead informed us, on the eastern extremity of Guilliam, where we shot our nets for the third time. Soon after sunrise the mist began to dissi- pate, and the surface of the water to appear for miles around roughened as if by a smart breeze, though there was not the slightest breath of wind at the time. "How do you account for that appearance?" said I tooneof the fishermen. " Ah! lad, that is by no means so favourable a token as the one you asked me to explain last night. I had as lief see the Bhodry-more." " Why, what does it betoken? and what is the Bhodry-more?" "It betokens that the shoal have spawned, and will shortly leave the frith ; for when the fish are sick and weighty they never rise to the surface in that way; but have you never heard of the Bhodry-more?" I replied in the negative. "Well, but you shall." "Nay," said another of the crew, "leave that for our return; do you not see the herrings playing by thousands round our nets, and not one of the buoys sinking in the water? There is not a single fish swimming so low as the upper baulks of our drift. Shall we not shorten the buoy-ropes, and take off the sinkers?" This did not meet the approbation of the others, one of whom took up a stone, and flung it in the middle of the shoal. The fish immediately disappeared from the surface, for several fathoms round. "Ah! there they go," he exclaimed, "if they go but low enough; four years ago I startled thirty barrels of light fish into my drift just by throwing a stone among them." The whole frith at this time, so far as the eye could reach, appeared crowded with her- rings ; and its surface was so broken by them as to remind one of the pool of a waterfall. They leaped by millions a few inches into the air, and sunk with a hollow plumping noise, somewhat resembling the dull rippling sound of a sudden breeze ; while to the eye there was a continual twinkling, which, while it mocked every effort that attempted to examine in detail, showed to the less curious glance like a blue robe sprinkled with silver. But it is not by such comparisons that so singular a scene is to lie described so as to be felt. It was one of those which, through the living myriads of creation, testify of the infinite Creator. About noon we hauled for the third and last time, and found nearly eight barrels of fish. I observed when hauling that the natural heat of the herring is scarcely less than that of quadrupeds or birds; that when alive its sides are shaded by a beautiful crimson colour which it loses when dead; and that when newly brought out of the water, it utters a sharp faint cry somewhat resembling that of a mouse. We had now twenty barrels on board. The easterly har, a sea-breeze so called by fishermen, which in the Moray Frith, during the summer months and first month of autumn, commonly comes on after ten o'clock A.M., and fails at four o'clock P.M., had now set in. We hoisted our mast and sail, and were soon scudding right before it. The story of the Bhodry-more, which I de- manded of the skipper as soon as we had trimmed our sail, proved interesting in no common degree, and was linked with a great many others. The Bhodry-more 1 is an active, mischievous fish of the whale species, which has been known to attack and even founder boats. About eight years ago, a very large one passed the town of Cromarty through the middle of the bay, and was seen by many of the townsfolks leaping out of the water in the manner of a salmon, fully to the height of a boat's mast. It appeared about thirty feet in length. This animal may almost be regarded as the mermaid of modern times : for the fishermen deem it to have fully as much of the demon as of the fish. There have been instances of its pursuing a boat under sail for many miles, and even of its leaping over it from side to side. It appears, however, that its habits and appe- tites are unlike those of the shark ; and that the annoyance which it gives the fisherman is out of no desire of making him its prey, but from its predilection for amusement. 1 1 seldom meddles with a boat when at anchor, but pur- sues one under sail, as a kitten would a rolling ball of yarn. The large physalus whale is comparatively a dull, sluggish animal; occa- sionally, however, it evinces a partiality for the amusements of the Bhodry-more. Our skipper said, that when on the Caithness coast, a few years before, an enormous fish of the species kept direct in the wake of his boat for more than a mile, frequently rising so near the stern as to be within reach of the boat-hook. He described the expression of its large goggle eyes as at once frightful and amusing: and so graphic was his narrative that I could almost paint the animal stretching out for more than sixty feet behind the boat, with his black marble-looking skin and cliff-like fins. He at 1 Properly, perhaps, the musculous v hale. 170 HAIDEE. length grew tired of its gambols, and with a sharp fragment of rock struck it between the eyes. It sunk with a sudden plunge, and did not rise for ten minutes after, when it appeared a full mile astern. This narrative was but the first of I know not how many, of a similar cast, which presented to my imagination the Bhodry- inore whale and hun-fish in every possible point of view. The latter, a voracious formid- able animal of the shark species, frequently makes great havoc among the tackle with which cod and haddock are caught. Like the shark, it throws itself on its back when in the act of seizing its prey. The fishermen frequently see it lying motionless, its white belly glitter- ing through the water, a few fathoms from the boat's side, employed in stripping off every fish from their hooks as the line is drawn over it. This formidable animal is from six to ten feet in length, and formed like the common shark. One of the boatmen's stories, though some- what in the Munchausen style, I shall take the liberty of relating. Two Cromarty men, many years ago, were employed on a fine calm day in angling for coal-fish and rock-cod, with rods and hand-lines. Their little skiff rode to a large oblong stone, which served for an anchor, nearly opposite a rocky spire termed the Chapel, three miles south of Shandwick. Suddenly the stone was raised from the bottom with a jerk, and the boat began to move. "What can this mean," exclaimed the elder of the men, pulling in his rod, "we have surely broken loose, but who could have thought that there ran such a current here!" The other, a young daring fellow, John Clark by name, remarked in reply, that the apparent course of the skiff was directly contrary to that of the current. The motion, which was at first gentle, increased to a frightful velocity; the rope ahead was straightened until the very stem cracked ; and the sea rose upon either bows into a furrow that nearly overtopped the gunwale. "Old man," said the young fellow, "didst thou ever see the likeo' that!" "Guid save us, boy." said the other, "cut, cut the swing." "Na, na, bide a wee first, I manna skaith the rape: didst thou ever see the like o' that!" In a few minutes, according to the story, they were dragged in this manner nearly two miles, when the motion ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the skiff rode to the swing as before. The scenes exhibited on the shores of Cromarty, during the busy season of the fishing, afford nearly as much scope for description, though of a different character, as those in which the occupations of the fisherman mingle with the sublime scenes of the Moray Frith. But this description I will not attempt. Your readers must have already anticipated it. If not, let them picture to themselves the shores of a seaport town crowded with human figures, and its harbour with boats and vessels of trade. Let them imagine the bustle of the workshop combining with the confusion of the crowded fair! You, Mr. Editor, who have seen Holbein's "Dance of Death," would perhaps not question the soundness of the imagination that would body forth so busy a scene as the dance of commerce. Sailors, fishermen, curers, mechan- ics, all engaged, lead up the ball amid heaps of fish that glitter to the sun, tiers of casks and pyramid* of salt. Hark to the music ! It is a wild combination of irregular sounds, the hammering, of mechanics, the rolling of casks, the rattling of carts, and the confused hum of a thousand voices. HAIDEE. 1 Juan and Haidee gazed upon each other With swimming looks of speechless tenderness, Which mixed all feelings friend, child, lover, brother, All that the best c:in mingle and express When two pure hearts are pour'd in one another, And love too much, and yet cannot love less; But almost sanctify the sweet excess By the immortal wish and power to bless. Mix'd in each other's arms, and heart in heart, Why did they iiot then die? they had lived too long Should an hour come to bid them breathe apart ; Years could but bring them cruel things or wrong ; The world was not for them, nor the world's art Fur beings passionate as Sappho's song; Love was born with them, in them, so intense It was their very spirit not a sense. 1 The first two cantos of Don Juan appeared in 1819 ; neither author's nor pxiblisher's name was given on the title page But the authorship was at once divined, and proclaimed by the critics. The work was roundly abused for its immorality, but all acknowledged it marvellous power, and the brilliant gems of poetry which thickly studded the production throughout they were the stars which gave their light to good and bad impartially. Byron complained often, and with reason, that his personality was always identified with the heroes of his imagination. Of the purpose of Don Juan, he said, it was "to remove the cloak which the manners nnd maxims of society throw over their secret sins and show them to the world as they really are." Notwithstanding, it is only selected portions, such as the above that nviy be safely re-id by those whose judgment has not obtained complete conti'ol of passion. HAIDEE. 171 They should have lived together deep in woods, Unseen a- Biugs the riightingale ; they were Unfit to mix in these thick solitudes Call'd oociai, haunts of Hate, and Vice, and Care : How loneiy every freeborn creature broods ! The sweetest song-birds nestle in a j air; The eagle soars alone ; the gull and crow Flock o'er their carrion, just like men below. Now pillow'd cheek to cheek, in loving sleep, Haidee and Juan their siesta took, A gentle slumber, but. it was not deep, For ever and anon a something shook Juan, and shuddering o'er his frame would creep : And Haidee s sweet lips murmur' d like a brook A wordless music, and her face so fair Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air. Or as the stirring of a deep clear stream Within an Alpine hollow, when the wind Walks over it, was she shaken by the dre^m, The mystical usurper of the mind O'erpowering us to be whate'er may seem Good to the soul which we no more can bind; Strange state of being ! (for 'tis still to be; Senseless to feel, and with seal'd eyes to see. She dream'd of being alone on the sea-shore, Chain'd to a rock ; she knew not how, but stir She could not from the spot, and the loud roar Grew, and each wave rose roughly, threatening her ; And o'er her upper lip they seera'd to pour, Until she sobb'd for breath, and soon they were Foaming o'er her lone head, so fierce and high Each broke to drown her, yet she could not die. Anon she was released, and then she stray d O'er the sharp shingles with her blee.ling feet, And stumbled almost every step she made ; And something rolled before her in a sheet, Which she must still pursue howe'er afraid: 'Twas white and indistinct, nor stopp'd to meet Her glance nor grasp, for still she gazed and grasped, And ran, but it escaped her as she clasp'd. The dream changed ; in a cave she stood, its walls Were hung with marble icicles ; the work Of ages on its water-fretted halls, Where waves might wash, and seals might breed and lurk; Her hair was dripping, and the very balls Of her black eyes seem'd turn'd to tears, and murk The sharp rocks look'd below each drop they caught, Which froze to marble as it fell -she thought. And wet, and cold, and lifeless, at her feet, Pale as the foam that froth 'd on his dead brow. Which she essay'd in vain to clear 'how sweet Were once her caret, how idle seem'd they now !) Lay Juan, nor could aught renew the beat Of his quenched heart ; and the sea dirges low Hang in her sad ears like a mermaid's song. And ih.it brief dream appe.tr' d a life too long. And gazing on the dead, she thought his taoe Faded, or alter'd into something new Like to her father's features, till each trace More lik and like to Lambro's aspect grew With all his keen worn look and Grecian grace: And starting, she awoke, and what to view? Oh ! Powers of Heaven ! what dark eye meets she ther*f 'Tis 'tis her father's fix'd upon the pair ! Then shrieking, she arose, and shrieking fell, With joy and sorrow, hope and fear, to see Him whom she deem'd a habitant where dwell The ocean-buried, risen from death to be Perchance the death of one she loved too well : Dear as her father had been to Haidee, It was a moment of that awful kind I have seen such but must not call to mind. Up Juan sprang to Haidee's bitter shriek, And caught her falling, and from off the w.ill Snatch'd down his sabre, in hot haste to wreak Vengeance on him who was the cause of all ; Then Lambro, who till now forebore to speak, Smiled scornfully, and said, "Within my cull A thousand scimitars await the word; Put up, young man, put up your silly sword." And Haidee clung around him; "Juan, 'tis 'Tis Lambro 'tis my father ! Kneel with me He will forgive us yes it must be yes. Oh ! dearest father, in this agony Of pleasure and of pain even while I kiss Thy garment's hem with transport, can it be That doubt shall mingle with my filial joy? Deal with me as thou wilt, but spare this boy." High and inscrutable the old man stood, Calm in his voice, and calm within his eye Not always signs with him of calmest mood : He look'd upon her, but gave no reply ; Then turn'd to Juan, in whose cheek the blood Oft came and went, as there resolved to die; In arms, at least, he stood, in act to spring On the first foe whom Lambro's call might bring. "Young man, your sword;" so Lambro once more said: Juan replied, " Not while this arm is free !" The old man's cheek grew pale, but not with dread. And drawing from his belt a pistol, he Replied, "Your blood be then on your own head !" Then look'd close at the flint, a.-t if to see 'Twas fresh for he had lately used the lock And next proceeded quietly to cock. It has a strange quick jar upon the ear, That cocking of a pistol, when jou know A moment more will bring the sight to bear Upon your person, twelve yards off, or BO; A gentlemanly distance, not too near, If you have got a former friend for foe; But after being fired at once or twice. The ear becomes more Irish, and less nice. 172 HAIDEB. Lambro presented, and one instant more Had stopp'd this canto, and Don Juan's breath, When Haidee threw herself her boy before ; Stern as her sire, "On me," she cried, "let death Descend the fault is mine ; this fatal shore He found but sought not. I have pledged my faith ; I love him I will die with him; I knew Your nature's firmness - know your daughter's too." A minute past, and she had been all tears, And tenderness, and infancy; but now She stood as one who champion'd human fears Pale, statue-like, and stern, she woo'd the blow; And tall beyond her sex, and their compeers, She drew up to her height, as if to show A fairer mark ; and with a fix'd eye scann'd Her father's face but never stqpp'd his hand. Ha gazed on her, and she on him ; 'twas strange How like they look'd! the expression was the same; Serenely savage, with a little change In the large dark eye's mutual-darted flame; For she too was as one who could avenge, If cause should be a lioness, though tame; Her father's blood before her father's face Boil'd up, and proved her truly of his race. I said they were alike, their features and Their stature, differing but in sex and years ; Even to the delicacy of their hand There was resemblance, such as true blood wears ; And now to see them, thus divided, stand In fix'd ferocity, when joyous tears, And sweet sensations, should have welcomed both, Would show what passions are in their full growth. The father paused a moment, then withdrew His weapon, and replaced it ; but stood still, And looking on her, as to look her through, "Not /," he said, "have sought this stranger's ill ; Not / have made this desolation : few Would bear such outrage, and forbear to kill; But I must do my duty how thou hast Done thine, the present vouches for the past. " Let him disarm; or, by my father's head, His own shall roll before you like a ball!" He raised his whistle as the word he said. And blew; another answer'd to the call, And ru.-hing in disorderly, though led, And arm'd from boot to turban, one and all, Some twenty of his train came, rank on rank ; He gave the word "Arrest or slay the Frank." Then, with a sudden movement, he withdrew His daughter; while compress 1 '! within his grasp, 'Twixt her and Juan interposed the crew In vain she struggled in her father's clasn, His arms were like a serpent's coil ; then flew Upon their prey, as darts an angry asp. The file of pirates : save the foremost, who Had fallen, with his right sbxrulder half cut through. The secand had his cheek laid open ; but The third, a wary, cool old swortler took The blows upon his cutlass, and then j-ut His own well in so well, ere you could look His man was floor'd and helpless at his foot, With the blood running like a little brook From two smart sabre gashes, deep and red One on the arm, the other on the head. And then they bound him where he fell, and bore Juan from the apartment ; with a sign Old Lambro bade them take him to the shore, Where lay some ships which were to sail at nine. They laid him in a boat, and plied the oar Until they reach'd some galliots, placed in line; On board of one of these, and under hatches, They stow'd him, with strict orders to the watches. I leave Don Juan, for the present safe Not sound, poor fellow, but severely wounded; Yet could his corporal pangs amount to half Of those with which his Haidee's bosom bounded ! She was not one to weep, and rave, and chafe, And then give way, subdued because surrounded; Her mother was a Moorish maid from Fez, Where all is Eden, or a wilderness. There the large olive rains its amber store In marble fonts ; there grain, and flower, and fruii Gush from the earth until the land runs o'er ; But there, too, many a poison-tree has root, And midnight listens to the lion's roar, And long, long deserts scorch the camel's foot, Or heaving whelm the helpless caravan; And as the soil is, so the heart of man. Afric is all the sun's, and as her earth Her human clay is kindled ; full of power For good or evil, burning from its birth, The Moorish blood partakes the planet's hour, . And, like the soil beneath it, will bring forth ; Beauty and love were Haidee's mother's dower; But her large dark eye show'd deep Passion's force, Though sleeping like a lion near a source. Her daughter, temper'd with a milder ray, Like summer clouds, all silvery, smooth, and fair, Till slowly charged with thunder they display Terror to earth, and tempest to the air, Had held till now her soft and milky way ; But overwrought with passion and desjiair, The fire burst forth from her Numidian veins, Even as the simoom sweeps the blasted plains. The last sight which she saw was Juan's go-e. And he himself o'ermaster'd and cut down ; His blood was running on the very flcxjr Where late he trod, her beautiful, her own ; Tims much she virw'd an instant and no more Her struggles ceased with one convu'sive groan; On her sire's arm, which until now scarce tieid Her writhing, fell she like a cedar fell'd. HAIDEE. 173 A vein had burst, and her sweet lips' pure dyes Were dabbled with the deep blood which ran o'er ; And her head droop' d as when the lily lies O'ercharged with rain: her summon 'd handmaids bore Their lady to her couch with gushing eyes ; Of herbs and cordials they produced their store, Birt she defied all means they could employ, Like one life could not hold nor death destroy 1 Days lay she in that state, unchanged, though chill With nothing livid, still her lips were red ; She had no pulse, but death seem'd absent still; No hideous sign proclaim'd her surely dead ; Corruption came not, in each mind to kill All hope ; to look ui*>n her sweet face bred New thoughts of life, for it seem'd full of soul- She had so much, earth could not claim the whole. The ruling passion, such as marble shows When exquisitely chisell'd, still lay there, But fix'd as marble's unchanged aspect throws O'er the fair Venus, but for ever fair; O'er the Laocoon's all-eternal throes, And ever-dying Gladiator's air, Their energy like life forms all their fame, Yet looks not life, for they are still the same. She woke at length but not as sleepers wake Rather the dead, for life seem'd something new, A strange sensation which she must partake Perforce, since whatsoever met her view Struck not her memory, though a heavy ache Lay at her heart, whose earliest bsat, still true, Brought back the sense of pain without the cause, For, for a while, the furies made a pause. She look'd on many a face with vacant eye, On many a token without knowing what; She saw them watch her, without asking why, And reck'd not who around her pillow sat ; Not speechless, though she spoke not : not a sigh Relieved her thoughts ; dull silence and quick chat Were tried in vain by thosa who served she gave No sign, save breath, of having left the grave. Her handmaids tended, b'lt she heeded not; Her father watch'd she turn'd her eyes away She recognized no being, and no spot, However dear or cherish'd in their day ; They changed from room to room, but all forgot, Gentle, but without memory she lay : At length those eyes, which they would fain be weaning Back to old thoughts, wax'd full of fearful meaning And then a slave bethoxight her of a harp ; The harper came and tuned his instrument; At the first notes irregular and sharp On him her flashing eyes a moment bent; Then to the wall she turn'd, as if to warp Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart resent ; And he began a long low island song. Of ancient days ere tyranny grew strong. Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall In time to his old tune; he changed the theme, And sung of love ; the fierce name struck through all Her recollection ; on her flash'd the dream Of what she was, and IB, if ye could call To be so, being : in a gushing stream The tears rush'd forth from her o'erclouded brain, Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain. Short solace ! vain relief! thought came too quick, And whirled hr brain to madness : she arose As one who ne'er had dwelt among the sick, And flew at all she met as on her foes ; But no one ever heard her speak or shriek, Although her paroxysm drew towards its close: Hers was a frenzy which disdain'd to rave, Even when they smote her in the hope to sav. Yet she betray'd at times a gleam of sense ; Nothing could make her meet her father's face, Though on all other things with looks intense She gazed, but none she ever could retrace ; Food she refused, and raiment ; no pretence Avail'd for either ; neither change of place, Nor time, nor skill, nor remedy, could give her Senses to sleep the power seem'd gone for ever. Twelve days and nights she wither'd thus ; at last Without a groan, or sigh, or glance, to show A parting pang, the spirit from her pass'd ; And they who watch'd her nearest could not know The very instant, till the change that cast Her sweet face into shadow, dull and slow, Glazed o'er her eyes the beautiful, the black Oh 1 to possess such lustre and then lack! She died but not alone ; she held within A second principle of life which might Have dawn'd a fair and sinless child of sin ; But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie wither'd with one blight; In vain the dews of heaven descend above The bleeding flower, and blasted fruit of love. Thus lived thus died she; never more on her Shall sorrow light, or shame. She was not made Through years or moons the inner weight to 1-cai-, Which colder hearts endure till they are laid By age in earth ; her days and pleasures were Brief, but delightful such as had not staid Long with her destiny ; but she sleeps well By the sea-shore whereon she loved to dwell That isle is now all desolate and bare, Its dwellings down, its tenants pass'd away, None but her own and father's grave is there, And nothing outward tells of hviman clay; Ye could not know where lies a thing so fair No stone is there to show no tongue to say What was ; no dirge, except the hollow seas, Mourns o'er the beauty ol the Cyclades. LUUL BYRON. 174 THE DEAN OF SANTIAGO. THE DEAN OF SANTIAGO. It was but a short hour before noon when the Dean of Santiago alighted from his mule at the door of Don Julian, the celebrated magician of Toledo. The house, according to old tradition, stood on the brink of the per- pendicular rock which, now crowned with the Alcazar, rises to a fearful height over the Tagus. A maid of Moorish blood led the dean to a retired apartment, where Don Julian was reading. The natural politeness of a Castilian had rather been improved than impaired by the studies of the Toledan sage, who exhibited nothing either in his dress or person that might induce a suspicion of his dealing with the mys- terious powers of darkness. " I heartily greet your reverence," said Don Julian to the dean, "and feel highly honoured by this visit. Whatever be the object of it, let me beg you will defer stating it till I have made you quite at home in this house. I hear my housekeeper making ready the noonday meal. That maid, sir, will show you the room which has been prepared for you ; and when you have brushed off the dust of the journey, you shall find a canonical capon steaming hot upon the board." The dinner, which soon followed, was just what a pampered Spanish canon would wish it abundant, nutritive, and delicate. "No, no," said Don Julian, when the soup and a bumper of Tinto had recruited the dean's spirits, and he saw him making an attempt to break the object of his visit, "no business, please your reverence, while at dinner. Let us enjoy our meal at present ; and when we have discussed the Olla, the capon, and a bottle of Yepes, it will be time enough to turn to the cares of life." The ecclesiastic's full face had never beamed with more glee at the collation on Christmas-eve, when, by the indulgence of the church, the fast is broken at sunset, instead of continuing through the night, than it did now under the influence of Don Julian's good humour and heart -cheering wine. Still it was evident that some vehement and ungovernable wish had taken possession of his mind, break- ing out now and then in some hurried motion, some gulping up of a full glass of wine without stopping to relish the flavour, and fifty other symptoms of absence and impatience, which at such a distance from the cathedral could not be attributed to the afternoon bell. The time came at length of rising from table, and in spite of Don Julian's pressing request to have another bottle, the dean, with a certain dignity of manner, led his good-natured host to the recess of an oriel window looking upon the river. "Allow me, dear Don Julian," he said, "to open my heart to you; for even your hospitality must fail to make me completely happy till I have obtained the boon which I came to ask. I know that no man ever pos- sessed greater power than you over the Invis- ible agents of the universe. I die to become an adept in that wonderful science, and if you will receive me for your pupil, there is nothing I should think of sufficient worth to repay your friendship." "Good sir," replied Don Julian, "I should be extremely loath to offend you; but permit me to say, that in spite of the knowledge of causes and effects which I have acquired, all that my experience teaches me of the heart of man is not only vague and indis- tinct, but for the most part unfavourable. I only guess, I cannot read their thoughts, nor pry into the recesses of their minds. As for yourself, I am sure you are a rising man and likely to obtain the first dignities of the church. But whether, when you find yourself in places of high honour and patronage, you will re- member the humble personage of whom you now ask a hazardous and important service, it is impossible forme to ascertain." "Nay, nay," exclaimed the dean, " but I know myself, if you do not, Don Julian. Generosity and friend- ship (since you force me to speak in my own praise) have been the delight of my soul even from childhood. Doubt not, my dear friend (for by that name I wish you would allow me to call you), doubt not, from this moment, to command my services. Whatever interest I may possess, it will be my highest gratifica- tion to see it redound in favour of you and yours." "My hearty thanks for all, worthy sir," said Don Julian. " But let us now pro- ceed to business: the sun is set, and, if you please, we will retire to my private study." Lights being called for, Don Julian led the way to the lower part of the house ; and dis- missing the Moorish maid near a small door, of which he held the key in his hand, desired her to get two partridges for supper, but not to dress them till he should order it: then un- locking the door, he began to descend by a winding staircase. The dean followed with a certain degree of trepidation, which the length of the stairs greatly tended to increase ; for, to all appearance, they reached below the bed of the Tagus. At this depth a comfortable neat room was found, the walls completely covered with shelves, where Don Julian kept his works on magic ; globes, planispheres, and strange drawings, occupied the top of the bookcases. THE DEAN OF SANTIAGO. 175 Fresh air was admitted, though it would be difficult to guess by what means, since the sound of gliding water, such as is heard at the lower part of a ship when sailing with a gentle breeze, indicated but a thin partition between the subterraneous cabinet and the river. " Here, then," said Don Julian, offering a chair to the dean, and drawing another for himself towards a small round table, "we have only to choose among the elementary works of the science for which you long. Suppose we begin to read this small volume. " The volume was laid on the table, and opened at the first page, con- taining circles, concentric and eccentric, tri- angles with unintelligible characters, and the well-known signs of the planets. "This," said Don Julian, "is the alphabet of the whole science. Hermes, called Trismegistus " The sound of a small bell within the chamber made the dean almost leap out of his chair. "Be not alarmed," said Don Julian; "it is the bell by which my servants let me know that they want to speak to me. " Saying thus he pulled a silk string, and soon after a servant appeared with a packet of letters. It was ad- dressed to the dean. A courier had closely followed him on the road, and was that moment arrived at Toledo. "Good Heavens!" ex- claimed the dean, having read the contents of the letters ; "my great uncle, the Archbishop of Santiago, is dangerously ill. This is, how- ever, what the secretary says from his lord- ship's dictation. But here is another letter from the archdeacon of the diocese, who assures me that the old man was not expected to live. I can hardly repeat what he adds. Poor dear uncle ! may Heaven lengthen his days ! The chapter seem to have turned their eyes towards me, and pugh ! it cannot be but the electors, according to the archdeacon, are quite decided in my favour." "Well," said Don Julian, "all I regret is the interruption of our studies; but I doubt not that you will soon wear the mitre. In the meantime I would advise you to pretend that illness does not allow you to return directly. A few days will surely give a decided turn to the whole affair ; and, at all events, your absence in case of an election will be construed into modesty. Write, therefore, your despatches, my dear sir, and we will pro- secute our studies at another time." Two days had elapsed since the arrival of the messenger, when the verger of the church of Santiago, attended by servants in splendid liveries, alighted at Don Julian's door with letters for the dean. The old prelate was dead, and his nephew had beei>. electad to the see by the unanimous vote of the chapter. The elected dignitary seemed overcome by contend- ing feelings; but, having wiped away some decent tears, he assumed an air of gravity,- which almost touched on superciliousness. Don Julian addressed his congratulations, and was the first to kiss the new archbishop's hand. "I hope," he added, "I may also congratu- late my son, the young man who is now at the university of Paris ; for I flatter myself your lordship will give him the deanery which is vacant by your promotion." "My worthy friend, Don Julian," replied the archbishop elect, "my obligations to you I can never sufficiently repay. You have heard my char- acter; I hold a friend as another self. But why would you take the lad away from his studies? An archbishop of Santiago cannot want preferment at any time. Follow me to my diocese ; I will not, for all the mitres in Christendom, forego the benefit of your instruc- tion. The deanery, to tell you the truth, must be given to my uncle, my father's own brother, who has had but a small living for many years; he is much liked in Santiago, and I should lose my character if, to place such a young man as your son at the head of the chapter, I neglected an exemplary priest, so nearly related to me." "Just as you please, my lord," said Don Julian; and began to prepare for the journey. The acclamations which greeted the new archbishop on his arrival at the capital of Galicia were, not long after, succeeded by a universal regret at his translation to the see of the recently conquered town of Seville. "I will not leave you behind," said the archbishop to Don Julian, who, with more timidity than he showed at Toledo, approached to kiss the sacred ring in the archbishop's right hand, and to offer his humble congratulations, "but do not fret about your son. He is too young. I have my mother's relations to provide for ; but Seville is a rich see; the blessed King Ferdinand, who rescued it from the Moors, endowed its church so as to make it rival the first cathedrals in Christendom. Do but fol- low me, and all will be well in the end." Don Julian bowed with a suppressed sigh, and was soon after on the banks of the Guadalquivir, in the suite of the new. archbishop. Scarcely had Don Julian's pupil been at Seville one year, when his far extended fame moved the pope to send him a cardinal's hat, desiring his presence at the court of Rome. The crowd of visitors who came to congratulate the prelate kept Don Julian away for many days. He at length obtained a private audi- ence, and, with tears in his eyes, entreated his 176 THE TWO FOUNTAINS. eminence not to oblige him to quit Spain. "I am growing old, my lord," he said ; " I quitted my house at Toledo only for your sake, and in hopes of raising my son to some place of honour and emolument in the church; I even gave up my favourite studies, except as far as they were of service to your eminence. My son " " Xo more of that, if you please, Don Julian," interrupted the cardinal. " Follow me, you must ; who can tell what may happen at Rome? The pope is old, you know. But do not tease me about preferment. A public man has duties of a description which those in the lower ranks of life cannot either weigh or comprehend. I confess I am under obligations to you, and feel quite disposed to reward your services ; yet I must not have my creditors knocking every day at my door ; you understand, Don Julian. In a week we set out for Rome." With such a strong tide of good fortune as had hitherto buoyed up Don Julian's pupil, the reader cannot be surprised to find him, in a short time, wearing the papal crown. He was now arrived at the highest place of honour on earth ; but in the bustle of the election and subsequent coronation, the man to whose won- derful science he owed this rapid ascent had completely slipped off his memory. Fatigued with the exhibition of himself through the streets of Rome, which he had been obliged to make in a solemn procession, the new pope sat alone in one of the chambers of the Vatican. It was early in the night. By the light of two wax tapers which scarcely illuminated the farthest end of the grand saloon, his holiness was enjoying that reverie of mixed pain and pleasure which follows the complete attainment of ardent wishes, when Don Julian advanced in visible perturbation, conscious of the intru- sion on which he ventured. "Holy father!" exclaimed the old man, and cast himself at his pupil's feet: "Holy father, in pity to these gray hairs do not consign an old servant might I not say an old friend? to utter neglect and forgetful ness. My son " "By St. Peter ! " ejaculated his holiness, rising from the chair, "your insolence shall be checked you my friend? A magician the friend of heaven's vicegerent ! Away, wretched man ! When I pretended to learn of thee, it was only to sound the abyss of crime into which thou hadst plunged ; I did it with a view of bringing thee to condign punishment. Yet, in compassion to thy age, I will not make an example of thee, provided thou avoidest my eyes. Hide thy crime and shame where thou canst. This moment thou must quit the palace, or the next closes the gates of the Inquisition upon thee." Trembling, and hU wrinkled face bedewed with tears, Don Julian begged to be allowed but one word more. " L am very poor, holy father," said he: "trusting in your patronage I relinquished my all, and have not left where- with to pay my journey." "Away, I say," answered the pope; "if my excessive bounty has made you neglect your patrimony, I will no farther encourage your waste and improvi- dence. Poverty is but a slight punishment for your crimes. " ' ' But, father, " rejoined Don Julian, "my wants are instant; I am hungry: give me but a trifle to procure a supper to-night. To-morrow I shall beg my way out of Rome. " "Heaven forbid," said the pope, "that I should be guilty of feeding the ally of the prince of darkness. Away, away from my presence, or I instantly call for the guard." " Well, then," replied Don Julian, rising from the ground, and looking on the pope with a boldness which began to throw his holiness into a paroxysm of rage, "if I am to starve at Rome, I had better return to the supper which I ordered at Toledo." Thus saying, he rang a gold bell which stood on a table next the pope. The door opened without delay, and the Moorish servant came in. The pope looked round, and found himself in the subterraneous study under the Tagus. "Desire the cook," said Don Julian to the maid, "to put but one partridge to roast ; for I will not throw away the other on the Dean of Santiago. " From the Spanish. THE TWO FOUNTAINS. I saw, from yonder silent cave, Two fountains running side by side; The one was Memory's limpid wave, The other cold Oblivion's tide. 'O love!" said I, in thoughtless dream, As o'er my lips the Lethe pass'd, 'Here in this dark and chilly stream, Be all my pains forgot at last." But who could bear that gloomy blank, Where joy was lost as well as pain? Quickly of Memory's fount I drank, And brought the past all back again; And said, "O Love! whate'er my lot, Still let this soul to thee be true Rather than have one bliss forgot, Be rJI my p Jna remember'd too ! " THOMAS MOOBE MASTER AND MAN. 377 MASTER AND MAN. Thomas Crofton Croker, born at Cork, 15th January, l~9i; died at Bromptou, London, 8th August, 1854. His Vniry Legends and Traditions of the Soath nf Ireland, the first edition of which appeared in 1825, remains the standard work on the fairy lore of the author's country. Sir Walter Scutt, in his Dcmoneace both parties want, is like to last : Which, if secure, securely we may trade ; Or, not secure, should never have been made. Safe in ourselves, while on ourselves we stand, The sea is ours, and that defend* the land. Be, then, the naval stores the nation's care, New ship* to build, and batter'd to repair. Observe the war, in every annual course ; Wiiat has been done, was done with Bi-Uisli force. Namur subdued, is England'! palm alone; The rest besieged ; but we constrain' d the town : We saw the event that follow'd our success ; France, though pretending arms, pursued the peace: Obliged, by one sole treaty, to restore What twenty years of war had won before. Enough for Etimpe lias our Albion fought : Let us enjoy the peace our blood has bought. When once the Persian king was put to flight, The weary Macedoiis refused to fight : Themselves their own mortality confess'd ; And left the son of Jove to quarrel for the rest. Even victors are by victories undone ; Thus Hannibal, with foreign laurels won. To Carthage was recall'd, too late to keep his own. While sore of battle, while our wounds are green, Why should we tempt the doubtful dye again 2 In wars renew'd, uncertain of success, Sure of a share, as umpires of the peace. A patriot, both the king and country serves; Prerogative, and privilege preserves : Of each, our laws the certain limit show, One must not ebb, nor t'other overflow : Betwixt the prince and parliament we stand; The barriers of the state on either hand : May neither overflow, for then they drown the land> When both are full, they feed our bless'd abode ; Like those that water'd once the paradise of God. Some overpoise of sway, by turns they share ; In peace the people, and the prince in war ; Consuls of moderate power in calms were made; When the Gauls came, one sole dictator eway'd. Patriots, in peace, assert the people's right ; With noble stubbornness resisting might : No lawless mandates from the court receive, Nor lend by force ; but in a body give. Such was your generous grandsire ; free to grant In parliaments, that weigh'd their prince's want: But so tenacious of the common cause, As not to lend the king against hid laws. And, in a loathsome dungeon doom'd to lie, In bonds retained his birthright liberty, And shamed oppression, till it set him free. O true descendant of a patriot line, Who. while thou shar'st their lustre, lend'st them thina, Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see ; 'Tis so far good as it resembles thee : The beauties to the original I owe; Which, when I mis. my own defects I show. Nor think the kindred-muses thy disgrace; A poet is not born in every i*o. Two of a house, few ages can afford; One to perform, another to record. Praise-worthy actions are by thee emV.raced ; And 'tis my praise, to make thy praises last. For even when death dissolves our human frame. The soul returns to Heaven, from whence it came; Earth keeps the body, verse preserves the fame. 182 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SORKOW. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SORROW. [D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, of Cumberland parentage and connections, born April, 1829, on the river Derwent in Tasmania ; graduated at Cambridge, 1S52, elected in the same year to a classical mastership in the Edinburgh Academy, and nominated in 18t>t to the professorship of Greek in the Gal way College of the Queen's University, Ireland. He has successfully em- ployed his pen in prose and verse, and his writings present us with profound thought in simple and attrac- tive language. He is the author of Nursery ffonsente, or Rhymes without Reason; Fun and Earnest, or Rhymes vi h Reason; ancient Ltaves, or R ndenngs of Greek and Latin Authors in English Verse; Da : /-dreaMS of a School- master a, delightful book, full of suggestive thought; SdltsAUici, or tin Wit and Wisdom of Atlteniun Drama; Wayside Thoughts, A CMtctivn of Lectures; and &ala Itovie, or a Ladder to Latin. He has also contributed to Ma.Cidillaris Magazine; and for the interesting series of miscellaneous sketches published by Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh, under the title of Odds and JSiids, he wrote the Wayside Thoughts of an Af>jihojihiloso^htr, from which we take the following essayette.] For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories about everything, And see which one amongst us shall weep first; And from the tangled skein of circumstance Let's weave a web of dreariest argument, And make us comfortably miserable. Listen! how the rain is pattering against the window- panes ! and how the rain drives down the smoke ! and this is spring weather; the season belauded by our old poets, in phrases borrowed from southern singers and suited only to southern climes. I wish M'e had one of the old conventional fellows here; with permission to treat him as we thought fit. It would be a pleasure to stick him in the water-butt, and watch him from behind the window-blinds. But, after all, this weather is better than what an east wind brings; the wind as cold and cutting as ill-natured wit; the wind that blows with such a penetrative cheerlessness, that, while your sunny-side is baking, your shady- side is down at zero. You are, beneath its in- fluence, a walking allegory of French toast: you have your nose eqxiatorially at home, and your nadir in a Siberian exile. So it is: no blessings come unmixed : from the cup of enjoyment we never drink pleasure neat. The sweet, delicious wind that blows from the warm west, too often deluges us and our new hats with rain; and, if the sun shine brightly over- head, it is too often through the icy wind- medium, that comes surcharged with rheuma- tism and bad temper from the uncomfortable east. But what does it matter to be kept indoors? Could we walk abroad, should we in an after- noon's ramble cast eyes upon a single happy face? Let us take a long retrospect of our own lives, and try to recall a week of uninterrupted happiness. If he is to be pitied that has no such green oasis to look back upon, how much more pitiable the wretch that looks back upon the plea- sant spot and knows it may never be revisited ! Let the rain fall. 'Tis a good thing to be kept indoors. Let us be idle for a day, and hold aloof from the busy, restless world. Let us strip off oar work-a-day clothes, and bare us to the skin, and wallow in luxurious laziness. Let the rain fall. We are thrown upon an unquiet age of competitive rivalry: we keep the bow eternally on the stretch : we are in a continuous state of training: we have ceased to perspire, from the lack of superfluous flesh and comfortable fat. We are eliminating all lym- phatic temperaments from out the population: ere long there will not be a man among us to weigh fifteen stone. Plethora and apoplexy are waxing rare: not a bad thing of itself: but in their stead have come heart-disease and a spectral troop of shadowy nervous maladies. We begin life as our fathers ended it. We start our house-keeping with the luxuries that to them were the well-won rewards of half a century's unambitious toil. We are uncon- tentable hangangerels. We are uneasy dogs, for ever on the wrong side of the door. But wherefore all this discontent, and hurry, and pressing forward ? Were it not a pleasure to pause awhile ; to stand at ease ; to lie upon our oars, and hear the rippling of the water ; to spin, like a top, in a dizzy, quasi-motionless, sound sleep? were it not sweet to leave behind us the busy factory, the humming town, the many-languaged harbour; and to loll at ease upon one's solitary sofa; or, better still, on the green grass of beautiful Dalmeny; and to listen with ear and soul to listen? And to what? Why, to the birds, or to anything. Heaven knows what music we should hear ! The school-boy longs for the holidays ; the maiden for her bridal morn; the student for his fellowship; the father for the manhood of his boys. To reach a distant bourn, we are ever ready to leap the interval; forgetting that the interval may be a momentous fraction in our little life-total. It may be, indeed, that all intervals of life are not equally valuable. What infinitesimal price should we set upon a year of hobbydyhoyhood ? What imagination could appraise an hour spent rapturously in speaking and listening to love-nonsense? It is also possible that the speed as well as THE PHILOSOPHY OF SORROW. 183 the value of time is only relative; and that clocks, with all their humdrum regularity, are but respectable delusions. There are times with us all, when in a concave mirror we see a minute distorted into long hours; and, again, in the convex glass the long hours dwindle to a point. When summoned by peremptory duty from a warm bed upon a keen, frosty morning, how precious are the last five minutes of snoozle- dom ! You live introspectivcly all through them : you chew the cud of your own cosiness. Then comes the wrench: in a moment you are in the cold tub, careless and forgetful of repose, So, when the hour is come for rising after our long life-sleep, we beg another hour in vain. A minute yet remains: only one. Each second is an epoch; divided into distinct and awful intervals. The senses are preternaturally quickened, as under the first influence of ether, and you hear the beating and the pulsing of some great inner-world machinery; the terrible ticking of some eternal timepiece. The hour strikes, and in a moment we are up to our necks in water ; in the water of a cold, deep river: in a moment we have forgotten all the past, even the friends that now are weeping at the bed-side: in a few more moments they will have forgotten us, to be themselves in due turn forgotten. The pebble on the beach neither lives nor dies; and we can but imperfectly describe the conditions of its actuality by negational terms. The trees of the forest lead an unconscious life through leafy ages: they toil not, neither do they spin: in the pleasant spring- tide they don gradually their green robes: in the rich and sad autumn they pass slowly into beautiful decay ; slowly and noiselessly, like dreams. The lower type of animals most probably have no anticipatory fears of death, but may pass almost painlessly into inanimate matter out of semi-vegetable life. I passed yesterday, in the neighbourhood of Leith, a public slaughter-house. A flock of sheep were going one by one up an inclined gangway into an upper room of unpremeditated death. They were pushing each other upwards, to the yelping music of two collie-dogs, in ap- parent eagerness to follow their leader. As each in turn would stand upon the gangway's upper ledge, too soon he would solve the secret of the horrible charnel-house. Too soon; and too late. For Ba-ba is the cry behind; which interpreted would mean: "Move on, and let us see what's to be seen." They would see it soon enough, poor bleating simpletons ; and then there would be the last Ba-ba and the babbling o' green fields. The higher animals, and especially such as have been highly educated by companionship with man, have unquestionably some dim idea of the last change. Man alone is prescient of all its horrible concomitants; can predict with a fearful accuracy the gradations of the hum- bling analysis. In the face of these terrible considerations, may we not expect some com- fort to be derived from reflections upon our spiritual nature? Comfort ? comfort there might have been, but for our suicidal propensity of turning bless- ings into curses. We may safely premise that, in respect of philanthropy, any 0113 sect of Christians is in advance of any body whatsoever of other religionists. Yet there is not a. single sect of Christians, but that peoples its particu- lar hell with by far the greater portion of the outer-lying world, and no inconsiderable por- tion of its own adherents. So covetous are we of pain; so greedy of sorrow; so dissatisfied with the diseases and mischances of life, and the death that inevitably crowns all, that in our most serious and meditative moods we revel in prefigurements of eternal, unutterable, and all but universal misery. From our little noisy pulpits we wag wise pows, and condole in an exhilarating way with our credulous con- gregations on the steady approach of our com- mon doom. We build in air a world-wide, spiri- tual scaffold, and erect thereon innumerable gibbets, and comfort one another with detailed speculations on the phases of the never-ending strangulation. We stand upon our little plat- forms of life and time, and over the edge peer curiously and shudderingly into the dark, outer void; and through the magnifying lenses of fear and imagination descry therein, or seem to descry, ghastly and hideous forms of physical and spiritual decomposition. And it were not so very sad that we should do all this, if the doing so made us in the least sad. But the unspeakable sadness of it all is, that the process gives a general though undefined thrill of pleasurable satisfaction. In the days when men would stand together in the shade and argue a dog's tail off, it was a favourite occupation of the old philosophers to define, chronologically, geographically, and circumstantially, the conditions of perfect hap- piness. We have no time now-a-days for such idle speculations. We are pulling down our old barns and building greater ones : we are grovelling on the ground before a golden image, like that set up of old in the plain of Babylon r we are searching for a vulgar and ignoble phi- losopher's stone. But supposing we could give the time and pains required for the consider*- 184 THE COMFORTER. tion of the old question, should we find the problem an easy one? Childhood cannot be esteemed happy, as being an age that, apart from the troubles of teething, is a continued lamentation and a cry. Educational traditions sit as a nightmare on the clastic spirits of boyhood. Youth and early manhood bring heat of blood and immature judgment to cope with the perilous temptations of the unknown world. Over professional life in manhood broods an universal Grundyism; and commercial life is crenellated by a corrod- ing eovetousness. We might look to religion for consolation, were it not that the usually received doctrines represent divinity as sterner than the sternest of all human judges, and mankind as a set of hopeless and incorrigible scoundrels. We are sailing in a shut-up ark over a wide sea, fathomless and shoreless. Send out Hope like a dove, and it will come back with no green leaf in its bill. Let us open the narrow door-way, the one window, and end our misery by a plunge into the deep sea. Nay : we are so numerous and disorderly a crew, that we should only trample each other to death in the effort to get out. Let us sit still in the cabin and wait the end. What? are we to go drifting on and on, until we are starved or suffocated ; until our melancholy bark, with its ghastly crew of sitting skeletons, is picked up and opened by mariners of the new order; mariners to whom are reserved the new heavens and the new earth, after the sub- sidence of our troubled waters? Heaven for- bid ! sit still, and wait in hope. One day or other we shall come bump upon Mount Ararat. Yea, surely ; one day or other. We are, indeed, weak creatures, moving ever onwards beneath some irresistible pressure towards an inevitable gulf. From time to time we catch a fleeting glimpse of happiness; but misfortunes cling to us like burrs; and sorrow clothes us with a Nessus-shirt of pain. In the morning we are green and grow up: in the evening we are cut down, dried up, and withered. But is there no balm in Gilead? Hath philosophy no anodyne, and religion no herb of healing? Let us cease complaining; and consider awhile the dignity, and majesty, and sublimity of our human nature. Let us draw comfort, as in a bucket, from the well of tears. For our weakness is our strength, and our shame our glory. It is the unspeakable sadness of our common lot that gives fiat lot whate'er of sweetness and of beauty it can call its own. The angels in heaven, amid their monotone of grand, eternal praise, must look, not with pity, but with an almost envying wonderment at the spectacle of a son weeping beside his dead mother, or of a father staring down into the new grave of his dead son. Good men have told us that the Infinite made himself finite, and that the Omnipotent divested himself of power, to save a ruined world. They have only given us half the reason. If a world could not be saved by less than such a sacrifice, by only such a sacrifice could Divinity win love. The Hand that guides the stars and wields the thunderbolt might enforce obedience and strike terror; but Omnipotence is not omnipotent in respect o( love. Nay, even goodness is not lovable ; but admirable only, unless it be crowned with sor- row and girdled round about with infirmity. Divinity was not perfect until when the Lord wept: there was a culmination of God- head when the Man-Christ was agonized in the garden ; when his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. There went a shudder of awful joy throughout the universe, when the dying lips said, "It is finished ." So grand a thing is human sorrow: so grand, and terrible, and sublime, and holy. THE COMFORTER. Oh ! thou who dry'st the mourner's tear, How dark this world would be, If, when deceived and wounded here, We could not fly to thee ! The friends who in our sunshine live, Wheu winter comes are flown ; And he who has but tears to give, Must weep those tears alone ; But thou wilt heal that broken heart, Which, like the plants that throw Their fragrance from the wounded part, Breathes sweetness out of woe. When joy no longer soothes or cheers, And even the hope that threw A moment's sparkle o'er our tears, Is dimm'd and vanish'd too ; Oh who would bear life's stormy doom, Did not thy wing of love Come brightly wafting through the gloom One peace-branch from above. Then sorrow, touch'd by thee, grows brighi With more than rapture's ray ; As darkness shows us worlds of light We never saw by day. THOMAS MOORS. PEGGY NOWLAN. 185 PEGGY NOWLAN. [John Banim, born 1SOO, died 1st August, 1842. A native of Ireland, ho successfully illustrated the char- acter and history of his countrymen in a number of powerful novels. In conjunction with his elder brother, Michael, be produced the Tula of the O'Hara Family, which became very popular. His principal novels are : Croppy, a Tale or 17'JS; The Bit ' \Vnti,i'; lioynt Water; John Doe; and The Mayor of Wind-Gey). He also wrote the tragedy of Damon and Pi/thiax. His writings deal with turbulent passions and incidents, but they are always interesting and elicit the sympathy of the reader. The following is from the O'Hara Talcs, second series.] Late in the second morning of her journey, the coach upset within about a stage of Dublin, and Peggy Nowlan was violently thrown off, and deprived of sense by the shock. When she recovered, she found herself in a smoky- looking room, dimly lighted by a single dipped candle of the smallest size. The walls were partly covered with decayed paper, that hung off, here and there, in tatters. There were a few broken chairs standing in different places, and in the middle of the apartment a table, that had once been of decent mould, but that now bore the appearance of long and hard service, supporting on its drooping leaves a number of drinking glasses, some broken and others capsized, while their slops of liquor remained fresh around them. Peggy was seated with her back to the wall; she felt her head support- ed by some one who occasionally bathed her temples with a liquid which, by the odour it sent forth, could be no other than whisky; and if she had been an amateur, Peggy might have recognized it as pottheen. " My God, where am I?" looking confusedly around, was her first exclamation. " You're in safe hands, Peggy Nowlan," she was answered in the tones of a woman's voice: "an' I'm glad to hear you spake at last." Turning her head, she observed the per- son who had been attending her. The woman was tall and finely-featured, about fifty, and dressed pretty much in character with the room and its furniture; that is, having none of the homely attire of the country upon her, but wearing gay flaunting costume, or rather the remains of such; and there was about her air and manner a bold confidence, accompanied by an authoritative look from her large black eyes, that told a character in which the mild timidity of woman existed not. Yet she smiled on Peggy, and her smile was beautiful and fascinating. " How do you know me, good woman?" again questioned our heroine, for we believe she is such. " Oh, jist by chance, afther a manner, miss ; onct, when I went down to your counthry to see a gossip o' my own, the neighbours pointed you out to me as the come- liest colleen to be seen far an' wide; an' so, Miss Peggy, fear nothing ;" for Peggy, as she looked about her, and at the woman, did show some terror; "an* I'm glad in the heart to see any one from your part, where there's some kind people, friends o' mine; an' for their sakes, an' the sake o' the ould black hills you cum from, show me the man that daares look crooked at you." This speech was accompanied by such soft- ness of manner, that Peggy's nervousness less- ened. She gained confidence from the presence of one of her own sex looking so kindly on her, and though years had been busy with her fine features, looking so handsome too. Her next question was, naturally, a request to be informed how she came into her present situation. ' ' You were brought here jist to save your life," an- swered the woman; "a son o' mine coming along the road from Dublin, saw the coach tumble down; he waited to give it a helping hand up again; and when it druv away " "And has it gone off, and left me behind?" interrupted Peggy, in great distress. " Of a thruth, ay has it, my dear." " What then am I to do? " " Why, you must only stay where you are, wid me, until the day, and you're welcome to the cover o' th' ould roof, an' what- ever comfort I can give you; and when the day comes we'll look out for you, Miss Peggy, a-roon. But, as I was saying, when the coach dhrew off again, my son was for hurrying home, when he heard some one moaning inside o' the ditch; an' he went into the field, an' there was a man lying, jist coming to his senses, an' you near him, widout any sense at all; an' when the man got better, my son knew him for an old acquaintance; and then they minded you, and tuck you up between them; an' sure here you are to the fore." " It is absolutely neces- sary I should continue my journey to-night," said Peggy. " If you're for Dublin, child, you can hardly go; it's a thing a friend can't hear of. " Peggy reflected for a moment. Her usual caution now told her, what her first sus- picions had suggested, that, in some way or other, the house was an improper one, and perhaps that good -nature had not been the only motive in conveying her to it. The wo- man's last words seemed to show a particular determination that she should remain. It would be imprudent, then, to express a design to go away: she might be detained by force. Nor would she suffer herself to become affected 185 PEGGY XOWLAN. by her fears, lest she might incapacitate her- self for escaping by stealth. Prompted by growing suspicion, she stole her hand to her bosom to search for her purse; it was gone: and Peggy became confirmed in her calcula- tions, though not more apparently shaken by her fears. " I had a small hand-basket," she said, "containing a few little articles, and my money for the road; it's lost, of course, and I am left penniless; if I go to the spot where the coach fell, maybe I could find it." "We can go together," said the woman, " if you are able to walk so far." Peggy had made the proposal, not in hopes of recovering any- thing, but that she might be afforded a chance of walking away; if, indeed, the story of the coach having driven on proved to be true. Now, however, she was, in consistency, obliged to accept the attention of her officious protec- tor; and the woman and she walked to the road along a narrow, wild lane, on each side of which a few old decayed trees and bushes shook their leafless branches in the wintry wind, while the footing was broken and miry, and overgrown by weeds and long grass. It seemed to have been a winding avenue to the house she had left, once planted with rows of trees, when the mansion was better tenanted and in better repair, but which had disappeared from time to time beneath the axe or the saw of the marauder. Arrived at the spot required, she commenced aseemingly careful search: but, finding nothing, returned at the continued urgency of the wo- man, who linked her closely, to the house they had quitted. Ere Peggy re-entered she took a survey of the fabric: it was, like everything around it and within it, a ruin. She could see that it had been a good slated house, two stories high, but that in different places the slates were now wanting ; indeed she trod, near the threshold, upon their fragments, mixed with other rubbish. Some of the win- dows were bricked up, some stuffed through their shattered panes with wisps of straw and old rags; and of the lower ones, the shutters, which were, however, attached to the wall, outside strong iron bars, hung off their hinges, and napped in the blast. Again entering the room in which she had first found herself, two men appeared seated. Peggy, in something like the recurrence of a bad dream, thought she recognized in one of them the air and figure of the person who, on a late and fearful occasion, had stood so near her in the Foil Dhuiv. But as she did not feel herself entitled to draw any certain deduc- tions from feature, complexion, or even dress, Peggy, after a moment's faltering pause, strug- gled to assure herself that this misgiving was but a weakness of her agitated mind, and firmly advanced to the chair she had before occupied. The second man was very young, his person slight, and twisted into a peculiar bend and crouch as he sat; his face pale and sharp, re- sembling that of the woman who called herself his mother; and in the sidelong glance of his cold jetty eye there lurked a stealth, an inquiry, and a self-possession, as, in reply to Peggy's curtsy and her look of observance, he, in turn, observed her, and gave, slowly and measuredly, his " Sarvent, miss." He and his companion sat close to the drooping table. Two of the glasses that had been capsized now stood up- right, and were frequently filled from a bottle of whisky, of as one might augur from the smell home manufacture. The person whose first view had startled Peggy, made more free with the beverage than the other ; the pale young man visibly avoiding the liquor; but often filling for his friend, and urging him to drink bumpers. " Go, Phil, my boy," resumed the old wo- man, addressing the pale lad, " take Ned and yourself up-stairs; an' the bottle wid you; you must have the hot wather, when it's ready, and the sugar along wid it: this young woman and myself '11 stay together." Phil arose, taking the bottle and glasses; he was sidling out of the room before his com- panion, when, at a renewed signal from the wo- man, he hung back, allowed the other to stag- ger out first, and then he and she paused together, beyond the threshold of the room, in the passage, where Peggy could hear them exchange a few earnest though cautious whis- pers. "An 1 now, Peggy Nowlan," resumed the woman, coming back and reseating her- self, " as you don't seem to like the whisky, you must have whatever the house can give you." " I would like some tey, ma'am. " "Then, sure enough, you'll get it; we won't be long lighting the fire an' biling the wather, and we'll take our tey together. " There were some embers dimly gleaming in the blackened fireplace, to which the woman added wood and chips, that, by blowing with her mouth, rs she knelt, soon blazed; and, according to her promise, a dish of tea, not badly flavoured, was manufactured, of which, with much seeming hospitality and kindness, the hostess pressed her young guest to partake. Peggy felt thankful, and strove to compel her- self to feel at ease also: but, amid the smilea and blandness of her entertainer, there wer PEGGY NOWLAN. 187 moments when her thin and bloodless, though handsome lips, compressed themselves to a line so hard and heartless, moments when a shade of deep abstraction passed over her brow, and when her eyes dulled and sunk into an expres- sion so disagreeable, that the destitute girl internally shivered to glance upon her. The momentary changes did not, however, seem to concern her. She argued that they rather intimated an involuntary turn of thought to some other person or subject. The woman never looked on her without a complacent smile; and it was after her getting up occasion- ally, and going to the door of the room, as if to catch the sound of voices from above, that her countenance wore any bad character. But, whatever might have been passing in her mind, Peggy prudently resolved not to allow her hostess to perceive that she observed these indications of it. Her glances were, therefore, so well timed, and so quick, that they could not be noticed; and her features so well mas- tered, as always to reflect the easy smile of her companion. Her manners, too, she divested of every trait of alarm or doubt; and even the tones of her voice were tutored by Peggy into an even, pleased cadence; and the questions she asked, and the topics she started, calcu- lated to lull all suspicion. As part of her plan, she would show no un- easiness to retire; and it was not until the woman herself offered to attend her to her bed, that Peggy rose from her chair. She was conducted out of the little, half- ruined parlour, or kitchen, a few paces along the passage, and then a few steps up a rent and shaking staircase, into a mean sleeping-chamber, of which the door faced the passage: the stairs continuing to wind to the right, to the upper rooms of the house. As they passed into the chamber, it was with difficulty Peggy prevented herself from draw- ing back, when she perceived that the patched door had bolts and a padlock on the outside, but no fastening within. Still, however, she controlled her nerves, and displayed to her attendant no symptom of the apprehension that filled her bosom. "I'm sorry the poor house doesn't afford a betther an' a handsomer lodgin' for you, Miss Peggy," said the woman, as both stumbled about the half-boarded floor of the room: " but you'll jist take the will for the deed: an' so, good-b'ye, an' a pleasant night's sleep to you." "Can't you oblige me with the candle?" asked Peggy, as her hostess was about to take it away. " I would, tvith a heart an' a half, if it was to spare; but I'll have nothing else to light me to bed, an' help me to set things to rights for the morning; for the matther o' that, the good moon shines so bravely through the window, and I believe through another little place in the loft here, that you'll be able to say your prayers an' go to bed by it, Miss Peggy; so bannockth-lath;" and she finally took the candle away, securing the door on the outside, and leaving Peggy 1 standing in the middle of the filthy chamber. The moon did, indeed, stream in upon the floor as well through the shattered window, as, | first, through a breach in the slates of the house- ; roof, and then down the broken boards of the I room overhead. Peggy looked round for her bed, and saw, in a corner, a miserable sub- stitute for one, composed of straw laid on the floor, and covered with two blankets. There was no chair or table, and feeling herself weak, she cautiously picked her steps to the corner, and sat down on this cheerless couch. The motive of her conduct hitherto had been to hide her feelings, so as to throw the people of the house off their guard, and eventually create for herself an opportunity to escape to the main road, and thence to the next cabin at hand. In furtherance of her project, she now begged of God to strengthen her heart, and keep her in a steady mind; and after her zealous aspiration, Peggy continued to think of the best part to act. At once she resolved not to stir in her chamber until the woman and the two men should seem to have retired to sleep if, indeed, it was doomed that they were to do so without disturbing her. In case of a noise at the door, she determined to force her way through the crazy window, and trust- ing herself to God, jump from it to the ground, which, she argued, could not be many feet under her, as Peggy had not forgotten to count the steps while she ascended from the earthen passage to her present situation. If, after long watching, she could feel pretty sure that no evil was intended to her during the night, still she planned to steal to the window, open it with as little noise as possible, drop from it, and try to escape. More than an hour might have passed, when she heard a noise, as if of two persons stumbling through the house ; it came nearer, and two men, treading heavily and unevenly, entered a room next to here, and only divided from her by a wooden partition, which here and there admitted the gleams of a light they bore. Without any rustling, Peggy applied her eye to one of the chinks, and gained a full view of the scene within. She saw the person she so much dreaded, led by the pale young man towards such a bed as she occupied; the one overcome by intoxication; the other, cool, col- 133 PEGGY NOWLAN. lected, and observant. With much grumbling, and many half-growled oaths, the drunken fellow seemed to insist on doing something that the lad would not permit, and at length Peggy heard an allusion to herself. "Go to sleep, Xed: you're fit for nothing else to-night; there's your bed, I tell you," said the young man, forcing him to it. " I say, Master Phil, stoopid, I'll have one word with that wench before I close a winker," replied Xed; "that wench, I say hie! what I picked up on the road; and why the devil should I bring her but to chat a bit with her? Your house isn't fit for much better, you know, Master Phil; and, my eyes but " Lie down, you foolish baste," interrupted his companion, push- ing him down on the straw. " I'll stand none of that nonsense neither, "continued the ruffian, scrambling about; "and it's no use talking; I'll see her, by ; I'll see the wench as I brought to this house: and don't you go to tell me, now, as how it's all a hum, and that I brought no such body into it; I'm not so cut but I remember it: so fair-play, Master Phil; she must be accounted for: none of your old mother's tricks will do, now. I am not to be done, by ; first and last, that's my word : hie ! I'll hie!" and he lay senseless. The pale young man watched him like a lynx, until, after some moments, his growling changed into a loud snore, and there was no doubt but he slept soundly. Then he stepped softly to him, knelt on one knee, took out of his breast a large pistol, thrust it under his own arm, and finally emptied his pockets of a purse and some crumpled papers, Arising, with continued caution, he glanced over the latter close by the candle, and Peggy saw his features agitated. The next moment he Btole out of the room, barred the door outside, and she heard his stealthy step, betrayed by the creaking boards, about to pass her chamber. At this moment, however, another step, Peggy supposed that of the woman, met his from the lower part of the house, and both stopped just at her frail though well-secured door. "Well?" questioned the woman, in a sharp whisper: "you pumped him? and soaked him? and touched the lining of his pockets? Did we guess right?" "We did, by ," answered the young man; "the rascal has peached, by the ; his very shuffling with me showed it at once; but here's the proof: here's an answer from Mr. Long to his offer to put him on his guard against the swag at Long Hall this blessed night; and here's another letter, from Lunnon, closing with another offer of his to set the poor private for the Bow Street bull-dogs." They had, during these words, been perhaps speaking to each other at some little distance; for their whispers, now that Peggy supposed them to have come close together, were lost on her aching ear, though she still heard the hissing sounds in which the conversation was carried on. A considerable time elapsed while they thus stood motionless outside her door: at length they moved; seemed about to part; and, at parting, a few more sentences became audible. Go, then," said the woman, "an" let us lose no time: nothing else can be done; poor Maggy is to be saved from the treachery of the Lunnon sneak, if there was no one else consarned in the case; speed, Phil; make sure o' the horn- hafted Lamprey that you'll find on the dresser: I'll meet you at his dour with a light and a vessel. Are you sure he sleeps sound enough?" " There is only the one sleep more that can be sounder, "replied Phil; and Peggy heard them going off. In panting terror she listened for their steps again passing her door: nor had she to listen long. Slowly and stealthily, and with heavy breathings, or a suppressed curse at the creak- ing boards, they separately came up. In a moment after she heard them undo the fasten- ings of the inside room, and, fascinated to the coming horror, as the bird is to the reptile's glance, her eye was fixed to a chink, ere the light they carried afforded her a renewed view of the victim's chamber. The woman first entered, bearing the candle in one hand and in the other a basin which held a cloth. Her face was now set in the depth of the bad expression Peggy had seen it momentarily wear below stairs; and she was paler than usual,- though not shaking or trem- bling. The lad followed, taking long and silent strides across the floor, while his knife gleamed in his hand, and his look was ghastly. They made signs to each other. The woman laid down the candle and the basin, and tucked up the sleeves of her gown beyond her elbows. She again took up the basin, laid the cloth on the floor, stole close to the straw couch, knelt by it, and held the vessel near the wretch's head. Her companion followed her and knelt also. He unknotted and took off, with his left hand, the man's neckcloth. As it was finally snatched rather briskly away the wearer growled and moved. He never uttered a sound more. Peggy kept her eye to the chink during the whole of this scene. She could not withdraw it. She was spell-bound ; and perhaps an in- stinctive notion that if she made the slightest change in her first position, so as to cause the PEGGY NOWLAN. 189 slightest rustle, her own life must be instantly sacrificed perhaps this tended to hold her perfectly still. She witnessed, therefore, not only the details given, but the concluding de- tails which cannot be given. Even when the murder was done she durst not remove her eye until the woman and lad had left the chamber; so that she was compelled to observe the re- volting circumstance of washing the blankets and the floor, and other things which again must not be noticed. It is certain that moral courage and presence of mind never won a greater victory over the impulses of nature than was shown in this true situation by this lonely and simple girl. Often, indeed, there arose in her bosom an almost irresistible incli- nation to cry out at the moment the neck- cloth was removed, when the sleeping man muttered and turned, she was scarcely able to keep in her breath ; yet she did remain silent. Not even a loud breathing escaped her. All was over, and she a spectatress of all, and still she mastered herself; and although, so far as regarded her, the most home cause for agita- tion finally occurred as the murderers were about to withdraw. "He'll touch no blood-monej r now," whis- pered the woman; "an" we may go to our beds, Phil, for the work is done well ; so come away but stop ; high-hanging to me if I ever thought of that young in the next room: an', for anything we know, she may be watch- ing us all this time." "If you think so, mother, there's but one help for it," observed the lad. "A body could peep through the chinks well enough, "resumed the female mon- ster; "but, on a second thought, Phil, d'you think it's in the nature of a simple young counthry girl like her to look at what was done without givin* warning?" "May be not; come, try if she's asleep anyhow; she can't bam us there, mother." "Come," and they left the chamber. The moment they withdrew, Peggy stretched herself on her couch, threw a blanket over her person, closed her eyes, and breathed as if fast asleep. Yet it was with many doubts of her own ability to go success- fully through this test that she listened for the noise of unbarring her door. The creeping steps approached, and her heart nearly failed her. A bolt was shot, and her brain swam. But again the assassins seemed to hesitate, and again she heard their whispers. "Stop," said the lad, "she must be sound asleep, as you say ; it's not to be thought she could look on and stand it." "That's my own notion," replied the woman. " Then if we rouse her at this time o' night wid those marks about us," meaning the marks on their hands and clothes, " why, it'll be tellin' our own sacret, when we might hould our tongue." "Yes, an' only makin' more o' the same work for ourselves when we have done enough of it." " Besides, she'll be to the fore in the mornin', and then we can cross- hackle her on the head of it ; an', if she shows any signs of knowin' more than we want her to know why, it can be a good job still." " You spake rason; an', sure enough, she'll be to the fore; because I have a notion o' my own that we ought to keep her fast till the poor private an' Maggy sees her; they'll want to have a word wid her, may be : so, by hook or crook, she's to pass another day and night in the house." "Let us go sleep, then, mother; an' you must get me a little wather." "Yes, a-vich; but I don't think myself wants much o' the sleep for this night, anyhow." They left Peggy's door, and she was thus saved the test her soul shrank from. In some time after their steps became silent, she lay on her straw with clasped hands and eyes turned to heaven, offering the most fervent thanks for her preservation. The winter morn- ing broke; all seemed quiet in the house; and she ventured to sit up and think again. Her neighbourhood to the mangled body occurred to her, and delirium began to arise. She had recourse to her prayers for help and strength, and they did not fail her. Hour after hour passed away, still she kept herself employed, either by communions with her God, or by laying out her mind to meet the trials she had yet to encounter. They would watch her, they had said, in the morning; she was able to will and determine that the investigation should be vain: Peggy felt that she could defeat them. They intended to induce or force her to spend day and night where she was; against this plan she also attempted to lay a counter-plot. It might be nine o'clock when she heard them stirring about. But, at the first sound, she lay stretched on her bed; and this proved a good precaution. One of them walked softly up the stairs; then into the next room; and afterwards, close to the partition, by her couch; and, as Peggy judged by the hard breathing through the chinks, seemed to watch if she slept. She was now able to give every appear- ance of sleep to the eye of the observer. After a few moments they were together in the room, and she heard their whispers, and then the noise of trailing out the body. For about another hour they left her undis- turbed. At length the door was opened and the woman entered her chamber. Peggy still 190 PEGGY NOWLAN. pretended to sleep, showing, however, some signs of the restlessness that attends on being disturbed from sleep without our being fully aroused. The hideous visitor stooped down and stirred her. Peggy bore the touch of that hand on her shoulder without wincing in any way. The woman stirred her again, and she seemed gradually and naturally to become awakened. " Musha, it's the good sleep that's on you, a colleen,'' said the woman, as she sat up. "Yes, indeed, I'm not used to be with- out sleep so long, and I had none before this since I left the mountains," answered Peggy. "Is it very late? but I don't care much about that, as there's no use in my starting from you till the coach comes again to night, and gives me a seat for Dublin." "We'll tell you all j about that by-and-by : get up now, my woman, i an' break your fast: you ought to be hungry." | "And I am very hungry, and able to help myself out of anything you lay before me." The woman led her down-stairs. A good breakfast was prepared. Peggy seemed to eat with a keen appetite ; but she continued to slip the bread she had cut into her large coun- try pockets. The young man entered: she bade him a smiling good-morrow. He hoped she had passed a good night: she answered promptly and easily. "It's an odd question I'm for axin'," he continued, "but I thought I heard strange noises in a room next to yours last night did you?'' With the consciousness that the eyes of both were watching her face for a change of expression, Peggy baffled the in- quiry. " It's said this ould house is haunted," rejoined the woman, "an" that's the ghost's room." "My faith isn't strong in ghosts," said Peggy, smiling; "but I'm glad you did not tell of it before I went to bed, or I might be kept waking." A pause ensued, during which she knew that her catechists were consulting each other by looks and nods. " Why don't you ax afther your friend that helped to bring you to us last night?" pursued the lad. " I was thinking of him, but said to myself he was in bed, maybe ; and as he's no kith or kin o' mine, only a stranger met on the road, I didn't believe it would be right for a young lone woman like me to be asking so closely after him." " He's not in his bed," said the lad. fixing his eye. She stood his glance. "No," resumed the woman, "but gone his road at the first light this mornin'." "Why, then, I'm sorry for his going." " How's that?" asked the lad. "Because I'm left without a farthing in the world, and I thought that, as he looked to be a dacent man, maybe he'd lend me a few shillings to take me on to Dublin ; and now I don't know what to do under heaven." " Never make yourself uneasy about that," remarked the hostess: " for if you thought he looked so like a dacent body, he thought you looked like a hansome colleen, as you are; an' for a token, hearin' o' your loss by the coach, he left us the very thing you're talking about, to give you when you'd get up." "Yes, he left this wid me for you," pursued the other, handing some silver, "and just his word to take care an' have as much ready to pay him in the next place he an" you are to see ach other." As he gave the money and spoke these words very significantly, he again fixed her eye ; but Peggy allowed him no advantage. With many professions of thanks to her chance benefactor she quietly put up the supposed gift. Perhaps they became fully assured that they had no- thing to fear, for they soon stopped questioning her. " I'll pay him, with hearty thanks, sure enough," she continued, recurring to the topic, "and sooner than he thinks, maybe. I have only to go to Dublin, to the Brazen-Head, where my father stops, when I'll have money enough ; and after a word there, I'm to pass your door to-morrow, about the night-fall, when I'll be axin' a night's lodgin' from you again; and I can jest lave the honest man's shillings in your hands, and you'll give 'em to him the next time he calls, in Peggy Nowlan's name, and her best wishes along with 'em. " The day wore awaj r in common topics, and she showed no anxiety to depart. She said she grew hungry for her dinner ; and, when it came before her, still seemed to make a hearty meal. No living creature came to the house during the day : but she could understand that the person called Maggy, and who she con- cluded was her wretched cousin Maggy Nowlan, and the other person called "the private," were expected during the night; as also a num- ber of " the customers " from Dublin. Nothing had yet been said to deter her from proceeding to town in the night-coach, which, as usual, was to pass about three o'clock in the morning. She often alluded to its hour of passing by, and they did not make an observa- tion. This gave her courage; and, after the night fell for Peggy, still to avoid a shadow of suspicion, would not motion to stir in the daylight she said, inadvertently, andyetM-ith some natural show of anxiety to proceed in her interrupted journey " Maybe I couldn't get a seat in it, an' what should I do then? But maybe I ought to take the road some time before ye expect it to come up, so that, when PEGGY NOWLAX. 191 it overtakes me, if I get the place, well and good ; and if I don't, why I could be so far on my way, and sure of walking the six or seven miles more to Dublin by the morning, anyhow; for I must be there in the morning: what brings me up is to get a good lot of money from my father, that'll be wanted at home the day after to-morrow, or the next day, at farthest; and so, ye see, honest people, I'm beholding to be soon back and forward, and, as I said, sleeping in your house, on my way to the country, by to-morrow night anyhow." They said little in reply to this ; but Peggy believed they again exchanged some glances and signs, while her head was purposely held down; and then they retired to whisper at the outward door. Fervently did she pray, al- though the prayer involved an uncharitable contradiction, that, influenced by the hope of plunder she had held out, their resolves not to let her depart for the night might be changed. And perhaps her plan took effect. In a short time they rejoined her; and after a few ordinary remarks, said, by the way, that she might do well to "take a start of the road, afore the coach, just as she was a saying of it; and they wished her safe to Dublin, anyhow: and they hoped she would keep her promise, and come see them on her way home again. " Without discovering any extraordinary joy at this concession, Peggy bid them a steady and cordial good-b'ye; engaged her bed for the next night; and it was not till the very moment she was crossing the murderous threshold that she feared her face and fluttered step might have given intimation of the smothered emo- tions that battled in her heart. But, again befriended by her extraordinary presence of mind, she checked her rising ec- stasy, and trod,with a sober and wayfaring step down the dark, tangled, and miry lane. When fairly launched on the broad road her breast experienced great relief; yet still she kept her demure pace, neither faltering, nor looking back nor about her, nor yet sure of the policy of rushing into the first cabin she might meet. Her heart whispered that the people of the abominable house might have noticed her parting struggle, and, after a little reflection, would perhaps follow her and put her to another trial. To her left, as she walked along, waa some rather high ground, falling down to the road, little cultivated, and crowded with furze and briers. A straggling path ran through it, parallel to the road, but, at some distance, and, she believed, led to the ione house in the " bosheen." Her eye kept watching this path 1 every step she took. The moon shone full upon it so as to enable her to discern any near ' object. Peggy, her head down, and her re- | gards not visibly occupied, soon caught a figure ! rapidly striding along the path, through the I clumps of furze and briers. As it abruptly turned towards a gap in the road-fence, some yards before her, she could ascertain that this individual was closely muffled in the common female Irish mantle, holding, as Irishwomen often do, the ample hood gathered round the face. "That's not a woman's step," thought Peggy, as the figure issued through the gap: " and now this will be the sorest trial of all." And, with her suspicions, well might she say so. The gigantic resolution of her heart, so long kept up, had just begun to yield to an admitted sense of relief : she had just permitted her mind to turn and sicken on the contem- plation of the horrors she had witnessed and escaped; an opportunity at last seemed created for an indulgence of the revulsion and weakness of her woman's nature and now again to call back her unexcelled philosophy; again to rally herself; again to arrest and fix the melting resolution; to stead y the pulse-throb, tutor the vei'y breath, prepare the very tones of her voice; this, indeed, was her sorest trial. But it was her greatest too; for Peggy, assisted a little by the shadows of night, came out of it still trium- phant. "God save you !" began the person in the cloak, in a female voice. Peggy gave the usual response with a calm tone. "Are you for thravellin' far, a-roon?" continued the new- comer. She said she was going to Dublin. " I'm goin' there myself, an' we may's well be on the road together." "With all my heart, then," answered Peggy, and they walked on side by side. "You're not of these parts, ma-colleen, by your tongue," resumed her companion. Peggy assented. "An" how far did you walk to-day, a-chorra?" "Not far; not a step to-day; only from a house in a bosheen behind us a few minutes ago. " "What house, a good girl? do you mane the slate- house that stands all alone in the middle o' the lane?" Peggy believed that was the very one. "Lord save us! what bad loock sent you there?" "None, that I know of; why?" "It has a bad name, as I hear, among the neighbours, and 'ud be the last place myself 'ud face to for the night's rest." "Well, a-roon, it's only a Christian turn to spake of people as we find 'em; I have nothing at all to say against the house; an' maybe it won't be long till I see it again." " That's bould as 192 THE SPATE. well as hearty of a young girl like you. Did you come across the woman o' the house?" "Yes, and met good treatment from her; the good tey, and good dinner, everything of the best." " But what kind of a bed did you get from her, a-hager?" continued the catechist, speaking very low, sidling to Peggy, and grasp- ing her arm. This threw her off her guard. She shrieked, and broke from her companion, who, as she ran, fast pursued her; and the person's real voice at last sounded in her ear. "Stop, Peggy Xowlan, or rue it! I know what you think of the bed you got now!" The road suddenly turned in an angle; Peggy shot round the turn: as her pursuer gained on her she heard the noise of feet approaching in a quick tramp, and a guard of armed soldiers, headed by two men in civil dress, and followed by a post-chaise, met her eyes at a short dis- tance; she cried out again and darted among the soldier.-?; one of them caught and held her from falling, and she had only time to say "Lay hands on the murderer!" when nature at last failed, and Peggy's senses left her. THE BANKS OF CLYDE. [Andrew Park, born at Renfrew, 7th March, 1807 ; died in Glasgow, 27th December, 1863. He published twelve volumes of poems, the most popular of which was Silent Lrive. He obtained considerable celebrity as a song-writer, and several of his songs continue to be held in high estimation. A complete edition of his poetical works in one large volume was issued in 1854 by L>. Bogue, London.] How sweet to rove at summer's eve By Clyde's meandering stream, When Sol in joy is seen to leave The earth with crimson beam; "When island-clouds that wander'd far Above his sea-couch lie, And here and there some gem-like star Ke-opes its sparkling eye. I see the insects gather home, That lov'd the evening ray ; And minstrel birds that wanton roam, Now sing their vesper lay: All hurry to their leafy beds Among the rustling trees, Till morn with new-born beauty sheds Her splendour o'er the seas. Majestic seem the barks that glide, As night creeps o'er the sky, Along the sweet and tranquil Clyde, And charm the gazer's eye, While spreading trees with plumage ga Smile vernal o'er the scene, And all is balmy as the May All lovely and serene. THE SPATE. A TALE OF THE CLYDE. [Thomas Atkinson, the writer of the following tale, was a bookseller in Glasgow, and the author of a great variety of fugitive pieces in prose and verse. He died of pulmonary disease while on his passage to Barhadoes for the benefit of hia health, on 10th October, 1833, in the thirty-second year of his age. "The Spate" ap- peared in a Glasgow periodical named The Ant, pub- lished 1826-27, of which the author was editor.] It was on the of , 17 , that the fearful rise in the waters of the river Clyde carried away the stone bridge which crossed it at the foot of the Saltmarket Street of Glas- gow. It is a day memorable in the annals of that city, but still more so in my private history, and the records of my recollection, and my love; for, old, and dull, and cold a* I now am, I liave, loved. There is, far up oa the wall of a building at a great distance from the usual channel of the stream, an inden- tation cut, to show the height to which its waters rose, and an inscription to tell the tale. The tablets of my heart have a more deeply engraven line a more enduring im- press and record of that day of desolation. The waves passed not the limits* of the one, and they left everything beneath as it was before. From me all that preceded that tide- mark of fate is reft away, or is left shattered and broken; and still it would appear as if the gloomy waters rose above" and passed be- yond even that boundary for, welling out from the fountains of a melancholy memory, the flood yet seems to sweep along the heart it left a desert, but which must dree its lone- liness till the spring-tide of fate shall bear me away in its ebb to peace and Isabella. She was the first the only woman I ever loved. Dark-haired, bright-eyed, and nine- teen, it was little wonder she caught my affec- tion. Yet it was her heart that secured the love her charms excited her mind that fixed into esteem what had else been but fleeting admiration. But I cannot go on to describe her. Suffice it, that in all her girlish beauty she seems still before me: could I paint that vision it would not add to my pleasure, nor yet increase the interest of my story. Her father was a highly respectable tradesman, THE SPATE. 193 who reside:! fatally for me in the lower part of the city. Modern improvements have swept away the last relics of a building where Cromwell resided for a time, and Prince i Charles is said to have lodged fora night. Its j historical associations and venerable exterior long made it an object of interest to the antiqua- rian and the stranger : its having been the dwell- ing of Isabella Oswald made me weep its fall. We never had a cross in our love till but let me not anticipate. My mistress was too artless and candid to seek to conceal that my passion was reciprocated, and her widowed father too indulgent to his cnlychild to throw any obstacle in the way of her happiness. The clay was fixed which was to see her mine, and the wedding-garments already waited for the wearers. A trivial circumstance had deferred my happiness and our union for a whole month, as we then thought, for the correspond- ing day of the succeeding one was determined upon as the one fittest for the festivity, which could not be celebrated on the 16th of , but we could then see nothing to prevent its being so on the 16th of . Isabella's father was married on this day of the calendar, and ho had been so peculiarly happy as a husband, that he seemed almost to think that no man could be equally so unless he was wedded on that identical day. Alas ! this month was to be eternity I had almost said yet, yet surely I shall meet with my Isabella, and be again united with her in the bonds of enduring affec- tion ! It was fated to be lengthened, however, into aH the weary years which have since crept along, and have yet to elapse before it is the will of the Giver of my life to resume it to himself and ask me for my compt. The winter had been very open, and the great quantities of rain which fell around Glasgow and in the upper ward of Lanark- shire, had repeatedly swollen the river Clyde to an uncommon height. But the house in which resided Mr. Oswald was BO far from its banks that the successive spates never reached, nor even nearly approached it. At length, however, the frost set in with sudden and keen severity. A temporary thaw followed in a day or two, but was speedily succeeded by a considerable fall of snow, which lay on the hills above the county town, and round Tinto, to a great depth. The frost again became in- tense, but was of brief duration, for, returning from a wedding-party at an early hour on the morning of Saturday, itseemed tome increasing in bitterness ; but, on rising from bed after a short rest, I found torrents of rain pouring J-nvn, the wind blowing a gale from the west- VOL. I. ward, and the air unnaturally warm. In the city the thaw was instantaneous, and almost magical in its operation, sweeping the streets of their accumulated frost in a few hours. The gale increased as the day wore on, and the rain descended without intermission till evening, when the fury of both seemed to abate. About nine o'clock or the Saturday evening there was almost what the sailors call a "lull," and every me imagined the storm had altogether ceased. Although dwelling in a quarter of the city remote from Isabella's home, many of my evenings, as might have been expected, were passed there in the delightful anticipation of the approaching time when all our hours of leisure should be spent together. The business of the week concluded, I hastened to scat my- self beside my untiring betrothed, who would hardly cease to ply her needle, or lay aside her work, even when my arm, hanging over her chair and perhaps even intruding upon hci waist, interfered with the swift but ever grace- ful motion of her hand in sewing. My request itself, that she would be idle for a time, wan but half conceded. But then it was upon preparations for her new station household comforts for her future husband becoming garments for a young wife that she was occupied ! And she could speak and look oh ! speak by snatches, and look in glances, as she raised her eyes from her task when so em- ployed more beautifully, as it seemed to me, thanany other one could, withnothingelsetodo, and no other object to attain but admiration. Thus seated, we noticed not that the wind had again risen and the rain begun to pelt against the casement, until I gave my first threatening motion of departure. This, of course, preceded the actual effecting of it about an hour, but during that time it was evident that the storm had resumed all its violence. We were told, too, that the river was rising, and that those who lived near it were deserting their houses ; but the thought of danger to the place where we sat never occurred. Eleven o'clock arrived, and with a reluctance I was loath to exhibit and could not then account for but which was the sensation the very brutes feel at impending calamity I bade my Isabella good-night and proceeded to my dis- tant home. It was in vain that I sought by occupation to weary myself into sleepiness when I had arrived there. The tempest increased, and with it my restlessness and agitation. To bed, however, I went ; but certainly not to rest for as the watches of midnight wore on, the gale became a hurricane, anu came in such 13 134 THE SPATE. terrific gusts of violence, as at each of them to threaten the destruction of everything that opposed its fury. In the midst of that, and even louder than its voice, was heard, ever and anon, the crash of some chimney that had given way, or the rattle of slates and shingles torn up from the roofs of tenements and pre- cipitated into the street. The scream of human voices and the yelling of dogs followed these, and added to their horror; and, Sabbath morn- ing as it was, the rattle of the wheels of carts, hastily summoned to bear away household furniture from dwellings which the affrighted tenants deemed insecure on account of their exposure to the tempest, to places of greater strength or better sheltered, had a very peculiar effect in heightening the impression of sudden danger and well-grounded fear. It was as if another element that of tire had been ravag- ing the neighbourhood. And it occurred to almost every one, that if that were to break out, with such a wind to fan it, the consequences would be terrible beyond even apprehension. Twice or thrice the terror led to the anticipa- tion, and the alarm was actually, but erroneously given. It was impossible to remain in bed. The frightful thought flashing across my brain, that the gale setting so from the west- ward, and the snow melting with such unpre- cedented rapidity the one swelling and the other stemming the river might bring its stormy waters even to the dwelling of my Isabella, I hastily grasped at my clothes, that I might personally ascertain whether there was a chance of her suffering inconvenience. Danger I could not dream of from the stream, and the lowness of the site of her residence, while it might expose it to the flood, protected it from the gale. I dressed and made for the door. It was impossible, however, to pass through it. Beset by an agitated mother, screaming sisters, and younger brothers, I was alternately taunted with caring for my own safety above theirs, or for that of another indi- vidual rather than my "born relations," and assured and reasoned with that there could be no possible danger elsewhere, as the Clyde had never been known to rise to the height of Mr. Oswald's dwelling-house. This I was aware of, and hope and entreaty prevailed. I returned to my pillow; but, it is needless to say, I could not sleep. After having, however, procured the promise, that, with the first light of morning, a messenger would be sent to ascertain if our friends in the lower part of the city were in safety, and hearing the wind gradually abate, and the rain cease, I fell into a slumber which continued agitated, indeed, with dreams of alternate vague delight and dim and dreary horror, but unbroken until far in the morn- ing, whose rays had been religiously excluded from my pillow. Once awake, it was but the work of a moment to ascertain that no mes- senger had been sent, and to prepare personally to ascertain the welfare of my future wife. By this time the day was shining as unclouded and bright as if it had been a forenoon in spring, and the wind blew with no more violence than to dry up almost every vestige of last night's deluge, in the higher streets of Glasgow. The bells rung for sermon, and well-dressed crowds passed calmly along as I apparelled myself with something like deliberation ! It seemed impossible that anything could have happened to Isabella's home, since not one vestige of all the crashing havoc we had heard appeared ia the broad and sunny light of day: the few chimney-tops and slates which had been over- thrown with a noise so disproportionate to the real danger and destruction, having been decorously removed from the Sabbath path of the church-going crowds. I began to feel in daylight almost ashamed of my midnight ap- prehensions and, however rapid my gait might be as I proceeded down the High Street, I did no more than walk. I even paused for a moment to answer an interrogatory from a passing friend so assured was I willing to think myself that my fears had been visionary. The city cross was at length passed but I ran as I approached that bend in the Saltmarket which, when turned, permitted me to see the building that held all I loved on earth. A crowd hid its lower part from me, but a glance told that all was secure on its roof. The throng extended, as it seemed, so far above her residence, as to block up the street at where it opens to St. Andrew's Square. I was but a moment in penetrating its outer rank and finding my- self, a few steps farther on, on the verge of a vast body of sullen and muddy water, which stretched thus far up, and onwards beyond where had stood the opposite end of the dis- tant bridije, that now, in vain, 1 looked for! It had been swept away in the rapid and mighty current which threw its superabundant streams thus far into the city streets. All was desolation below where I stood. I was horror- struck at the sight of houses before me whose first-floor windows, from the declivity of the descent towards the river, were almost under water, and the thought that Isabella and her father might have perished in seeking to escape in terror from a flood, that, though it could not reach their own apartments, might yet en- danger the safety of the whole tenement, and, THE SPATE. 195 at the best, imprison them, and separate her from me until it had subsided. The inhabi- tants who had escaped from the shops and lower floors of the houses between where I was and the river, were all crowded in the upper ilats, whose windows, crammed with a terrified population, contrasted strangely with the utter solitude nearer the street, where every opening was closed, and not a living thing visible. The carcasses of drowned domestic animals, filth, and fragments of furniture floated around; but beneath the second story of the houses, vestige of animated being there was none. Boats could not be procured from the harbour, and carts did not then ply through the stream ; indeed the water was much too deep for them, even if they had had a dry spot to resort to after passing through. The wailing of women and children, driven from their houses, and the chattering inquiries of idlers asking parti- culars which those who knew them were too deeply affected to communicate, prevented my eager questions as to Mr. Oswald and family's safety, meeting with an answer. At length I found one who said blessed words ! that he could assure me that they were still in their own house and in a security their elevated position insured them. But then he also told me that it was but three or four hours since it became impossible to reach them by the in- crease of the flood; so that my delay my con- fidence my hope had exiled me during her da iger from my sweetheart's side ! Had I hastened at an earlier hour to assure myself of her safety, I would have shared her imprison- ment, and been at her side in case of peril ! This was indeed a bitter thought. After as careful a survey as my perturbation and self-reprobation would permit of the posi- tion and depth of the water, and being assured that a boat Avas hourly expected from some quarter, I judged that if I could procure a horse I might ride so far down as to obtain a glimpse of the windows of Mr. Oswald, and perhaps see Isabella at one of them. A proffer of about as much as the value of the brute, procured me the loan of a miserable creature from a carter, who unharnessed the animal, and on its naked back I rode into the water till it reached my knees and the girths of the hack, which then would go no farther. I however attained my purpose. The jeers of the crowd, and the awkward spluttering of the animal, unaccustomed equally to water and being rode on, attracted to the windows all who could spare a thought from their own fears. Isabella opened the casement of her room and looked out. A glance showed me that she was safe, and her that I was an object of not uncalled- for merriment to the ga/.ers. I perceived this myself but not till the wave of her 'kerchief told me all was well and the arch nod of her head showed she was sufficiently at her ease t smile. I returned to the shore, as I may call it, happy yet, shall I confess it, almost angry too. The waters continued to rise and, as the wind had abated, it was obvious that the melt- ing of the snow was the cause. Of course it was impossible to guess at what hour there was a chance of them subsiding. I hesitated for a time whether to exhibit any further violence of anxiety to reach Mr. Oswald's, or wait for the expected boat which was to be employed in carrying provisions to the besieged who might need a supply. The delay of its arrival at length became intolerable as I paced to and fro upon the margin, on which the rising waters still seemed to encroach. The day wore on the churches emptied their crowds to throng to the scene and return again to ser- mon with a tranquillity that I envied. At length, chafed to contempt for even the titter of a hundred gazers, or the deprecatory smile of my mistress herself, I retraced my steps to the Trongate, and pursued its westward course towards the Broomielaw, anticipating the pos- sibility of procuring there a boat and a couple of rowers from one of the vessels in that har- bour. In my anxious haste, I had forgotten that the same river which leaped over its bounds at a higher part of its course, was not likely to confine itself within them so much far- ther down the level of its channel. As 1 might have anticipated, I found the scene at the Jamaica Street bridge which the elevation of its roadway enabled me to reach one of wider desolation, but far more awful grandeur, than the circumscribed one I had left. Placed on its centre arch, and looking upward, it seemed as if some mighty transatlantic stream, and not an island river, rolled along in terrible depth and irresistible might, between banks whose edges were steep and abrupt indeed, for, defined only by the fronts of the far-separated lines of houses that stood many hundred feet distant from its usual channel, but close beside which it now rushed furiously by in boiling eddies of clay-coloured waves, fearful in their silent, unfoamy turbulence, which no wind stirred up as is the angry malice of a man, for whose fury we perceive no pre- sent cause. Beneath the bridge the water roared with thundering turmoil, and all of it that could not escape through the roomy arches, curled up into yeast by the resistance of the abutments, raged noisily and fiercely through 196 THE SPATE. the ornamental circular openings placed above them. Looking down the stream, if there was less turbulence, because greaterrooin for ex- pansion, the prospect was not less terrible and uncommon. Between the houses far remote from the breast-work of the harbour and those on the opposite shore, still more widely separated from the broad and level bank of the river, on that side, by a pasture park and road, there was but one vast channel for the sea-like stream that filled it brimmingly. The water was even seen to extend far up the streets, which on either side opened laterally from what seemed now but the stone edging of this gigantic canal, or vast basin ; and the long line of vessels, secured to their usual rings and fastenings on the quay, and either riding close to its front, or over its top, as their cables gave them space, looked but a large fleet at anchor in the middle of the stream. At the moment I turned my lace westward, a little sloop had broke from its fastenings with apparently but an old man and a boy on board, and wa.s reeling down the e.Jdyhig current in drunken-like whirls, while the ear shrunk from the screams of these help- less extremes of existence, as did the eye from their peril a peril from which they could only escape by the miracle of their bark being speedily driven on the level shore, or running foul of some larger vessel that could stand the shock. Of yawl or pinnace there was not one in view. Everything without a mast that was not swamped had been hoisted up into snug security on the deck of the larger vessels they attended ; and to my hurried, and, I fear, in- coherent inquiries whether I could hire a boat and some rowers to proceed to the Saltmarket and carry me to a building insulated by the water, I only procured in answer the stare of vacant astonishment, or vulgar jesting and fresh-water sailors' slang. It soon became ob- vious even to myself that it was altogether hopeless to expect effecting a communication with Mr. Oswald's family by such means, and there was obviously nothing for me but patience a sufficient punishment. I strained my eyes to watch if there was any perceptible de- clension in the height of the water, and almost blessed a person who assured me that he thought it had begun to ebb, although even my eagerness could not perceive its recession. I returned again to my station in the street where Isabella lived. The waters had not subsided; but the wind had again risen, and at six o'clock it was now four the tide would be full, and, consequent!}', the flood greater. In my absence, I learned with regret, but Without self-reproach, that the expected boat had arrived from the neighbouring canal basin; but, after carrying assistance to many sufferers, had swamped upon a bulk, hidden under water, and it was not thought worth while to cart another from such a distance. For some hours, then, even under the most favourable circum- stances, it was evident that no exertion on my part could enable me to overcome the obstacles which separated me from my beloved; and, exhausted with anxiety, fatigue, cold, and hunger, I was prevailed upon by some friends who had now joined me, to retire to a neigh- bouring tavern for refreshment. Night was now closing in, but it was in the unclouded beauty of a rising moon, and the clear atmo- sphere of a returning frost, so that I was cheered witli the hope, on my part, and certainty on that of others, that, ere nine o'clock, the pas- sage to the foot of the Saltmarket would be practicable. Some of my companions even asserted that the street would be almost as soon drained as the bowl in whose brimming contents they pledged my mistress, and the wish, at the same time, that I might never suffer so much from drought as I had done from moisture. Though anxious, I became almost cheerful, but was again at my post by the time of high -water. And there, to and fro did I pace, marking and measuring the recession of the slimy flood, whose retreat had now obviously, though slowly, begun. At eight o'clock I conceived it practicable to reach the entrance to Mr. Oswald's dwelling, by driving a cart through the water. When the owner of it, however, found that it sunk beneath the trams, he refused to proceed. Another hour of feverish watchfulness was mine, and another attempt, although nearer success because coming closer to the mark yet did not reach it. At length, just as the first chimes of the ten o'clock bells were in- ducing the few uninterested stragglers who lingered upon the spot to turn homewards, a loud cry was heard to proceed from the lower part of the street, near to which we could now advance. Lights were seen at many windows ; casements were hurriedly opened; and in the tenement for whose security alone I cared, a singular bustle and confusion was observed. Suddenly there ran along the line of gazers that defined the dry street and the water, the broken whisper, whence communicated I have never learned, that the foundations of the houses farthest down had been sapped and were giving way. The flags of the pavement, it was said, were starting up upon their ends, and the screams were occasioned by the inmates observing fearful rents in the walls of the EVENING. 197 buildings, from the lower flats of which the water was now hastening with rapid and de- structive suction. I ftaw nothing of this, for I waited not to look. It was enough that I had heard. Throwing myself into a cart, I seized the haiter of the horse, and, hardly waiting for the driver, forced it onwards through the still deep, though receding flood. The water was over the flooring of the car before it reached the gateway leading to Isabella's dwelling; and was up to my breast as at one bound I leaped over the wheels, regardless of the snorting capers of the affrighted horse. In one minute I was under the archway, and in utter dark- ness; but I half-stepped half-floated onwards towards where I guessed was the entrance to the stair. In a moment I was over the eyes plunged into a hole occasioned by the breaking up of the pavement but in another, dripping at every lock, I had struggled, I hardly knew how, but instinctively, to the turnpike, and was above the water-mark on its steps. A second showed me a frightful rent in the wall of the stair; and almost with but one bound, I was by the side of Isabella. Less alarmed than I, she was, however, lik^e all the inmates of the land, greatly terrified, and anxiously waiting the assistance for which her father was by this time making signals at the window. A word served to explain that the means of succour and escape were near at hand in the cart I had ordered to wait my return. The old man was grateful : my beloved silently but fondly submitted to be lifted up in my arms; and, followed by the servants with papers and other valuables, I proceeded down to the still half choked-up archway. As we proceeded a loud crack from the timbers of the building, and a visible widening of the rent before no- ticed, together with the fall of masses of plaster from the roof, increased their terror, and quick- ened our speed. Bearing aloft my precious charge, and exclaiming that I should lead the way, I plunged into the water, which now reached no higher than my middle. Taking care to avoid that side where I had stumbled as I entered, I cautiously advanced, pressing my dear burden to my breast with one arm, while the other served to pilot me along the walls with I still remember unhurrying care. The father and domestics hesitated to follow, and the lights they held in their hands threw a dazzling glare upon the dismal waters as I turned round to inquire the cause of their delay, and to encourage their advance. In one instant of time I was plunged into a dark and narrow gulf, which had yawned open for my destruction as I advanced. I felt myself sink in a moment, and graze against the sides of the chasm as I descended; and she was with me clinging to me locked in my arms! One dreadful scream from her a gurgling groan from myself and the feeling of intense pain in my temples for a moment is all that 1 re- member of this dreadful hour. Dim recollec- tions I have, indeed, of flaming torches coils of ropes and iron-spiked drags bleeding tem- ples, and draughts forced down my throat oaths exclamations wail ings and tears; but these I dare not think upon for I v-as mad, they tell me, for a time, when, weeks after, I inquired where I stood and for my Isabella. I then learned that it was presumed she more severely bruised than even I had been in the descent to the cellar beneath the gateway, whose arch had fallen in had sunk with me, while her body had not instantaneously risen to the surface of the horrid gap, with mine, and had perished half-stricken and half- drowned beneath this low-browed vault, and amid these slimy waters! Her father died broken-hearted. It has been my award to live so. Lunatics are mad when the moon is at the full ; I am only so when again the hateful waves of the spate are in the streets of the city, and, it may be, sapping more foundations and drowning more earthly hopes of happi- ness and Isabellas. It is but then only that I can speak of her name, or tell her fearful and untimely fate. EVENING. Tlie holy time is quiet as a nun, Breathless with adoration ! WORDSWORTH. Tis Evening. On Abrnzzo's hill The summer sun is lingering still, As though unwilling to bereave The landscape of its softest beam, So fair one can but look and grieve To think that, like a lovely dream, A few brief fleeting moments more Must see its reign of beauty o'er! 'Tis Evening ; and a general hush Prevails, save when the mountain spriu Bursts from its rock, with fitful gush, And makes melodious murmuring; Or when from Corno's height of fear, The echoes of its convent bell Come wafted on the far-off ear With soft and diapason swell, But sounds so wildly sweet as they, Ah ! who would ever wish away? 198 TO J*** H***, FOUR YEARS OLD. Yet there are seasons when the soul, Rapt in some dear delicious dream, Heedless what skies may o'er it roll, What rays of beauty round it beam, Sliuts up its inmost cell ; lest aught, However wondrous, wild, or fair, Shine in and iuterruut the thought, The one deep thought that centres there ! Though with the passionate sense, so shrined And canonized, the hues of grief Perchance be darkly, closely twined, The louely bosom spurns relief; And could the breathing scene impart A charm to make its sadness less, Twould hate the balm that healed its smart, And curse the spell of loveliness That pierced its cloud of gloom, if so It stirred the stream of thought below. ALARIC A WATTS. TO J*** H***, FOUR YEARS OLD. fien d'amori, fien di canti, epien, dijiori. FnuiioNi. Ah, little ranting Johnny ! For ever blithe and bonny, And singing nonny, nonny, With hat just thrown upon ye; Or whistling like the thrushes With voice in silver gushes; Or twisting random posies With daisies, weeds, and roses; And strutting in and out so, Or dancing all about so, With cock-up nose so lightsome, And sidelong eyes so brightsome, And cheeks as ripe as apples, And head as rough as Dapple's, And arms as sunny shining As if their veins had wine in ; And mouth that smiles so truly, Heaven seems to have made it newly, It breaks into such sweetness, With merry-lipped completeness; Ah Jack, ah Gianni mio, As blithe as Laughing Trio, Sir Richard, too, you rattler, So christened from the Tattler, My Bacchus in his glory, My little cor-di-fiori, My tricksome Puck, my Robin, Who in and out come bobbing, As full of feints and frolic as That fibbing rogue Autolycus, And play the graceless robber on Your grave-eyed brother Oberon, Ah ! Dick, ah Dolce-riso, How can you, can you be so? One cannot turn a minute, But mischief there you're in it, A getting at my books, John, With mighty bustling looks, John, Or poking at the roses, In midst of which your nose is; Or climbing on a table, No matter how unstable, And turning up your quaint eye And half-shut teeth with "Mayn't I ?" Or else you're off at play, John, Just as you'd be all day, John, With hat or not, as happens, And there you dance, and clap hands. Or on the grass go rolling, Or plucking flow'rs or bowling, And getting me expenses With losing balls o'er fences Or, as the constant trade is, Are fondled by the ladies, With "What a young rogue this is ! ' Reforming him with kisses; Till suddenly you cry out, As if you had an eye out, So desperately tearful, The sound is really fearful; When, lo, directly after, It bubbles into laughter. Ah rogue ! and do you know, John, Why 'tis we love you so, John? And how it is they let ye Do what you like, and pet ye, Though all who look upon ye Exclaim "Ah, Johnny, Johnny!" It is because you please 'em Still more, John, than you teaze 'em Because, too, when not present, The thought of you is pleasant; Because, though such an elf, Johu, They think that if yourself, John, Had something to condemn too, You'd be as kind to them too ; In short, because you're very Good-tempered, Jack, and merry; And are as quick at giving, As easy at receiving; And, in the midst of pleasure, Are certain to find leisure To think, my boy, of ours, And bring us lumps of flowers. But see, the sun shines brightly, Come, put your hat on rightly, And we'll among the bushes, And hear your friends the thrusehs; And see what flow'rs the weather Has rendered fit to gather; And when we home must jog, you Shall ride my back, you rogue you, A FAMILY SCENE. Your hat adorned with fine leaves, Horse-chestnut, oak, and vine-leaves ; Aud so, with green o'erhead, John, Shall whistle home to bed, John. LEIGH HUMT. A DIRGE. "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" Here the evil and the just, Here the youthful and the old, Here the fearful anil the bold, Here the matron and the maid In one silent bed are laid; Here the sword and sceptre rust "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" Age on age shall roll along O'er this pale and mighty throng ; Those that wept then, those that weep, All shall with these sleepers sleep. Brothers, sisters of the worm, Summer's sun or winter's storm, Song of peace or battle's roar, Ne'er shall break their slumbers more. Death shall keep his sullen trust "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" But a day is coming fast, Earth, thy mightiest and thy last! It shall come in fear and wonder, Heralded by trump and thun ler ; It shall come in strife and toil. It shall come in blood and spoil, It shall come in empire's groans, Burning temples, trampled thrones; Then Ambition, rue thy lust ! "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" Then shall come the judgment-sign; In the east the KING shall shine; Flashing from heaven's golden gate, Thousand thousands round his state; Spirits with the crown and plume; Tremble then, thou sullen tomb ! Heaven shall open On our sight, Earth be tura'd to living light, Kingdom of the ransom'd just "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" Then thy mount, Jerusalem, Shall be gorgeous as a gem ; Then shall in the desert rise Fruits of more than Paradise; Earth by angel feet be trod, One great garden of her God ! Till are dried the martyrs' tears Through a thousand glorious years! Now, in hope of HIM we tuist, "Earth to earth, and dust to dust!" CROLY. A FAMILY SCENE. [Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, born in Edinburgh, 178^; died November, 1S54. She was the daughter of James Ferrier, one of the clerks of the Court of Session, Edinburgh. In 18 IS she published her first novel, Mar,-ii.sie, which earned her a lasting reputation. Scott ill his epilogue to the Tales of My Landlord, distinguishes his "sister-shadow, the author of the very lively work entitled Marriage," as one of those be.st qualified to illustrate the varieties of Scottish character which he had left untoucheL Miss Furrier's second work, 1'ke Inheritance, appeared in 1824; and in 1831, Destiny, ur the Chiefs Daughter, a story illustrative of Highland manners and scenery. The following amusing sketch is from the second work.] The great use of delineating absurdities is, that we may kuow how far human folly can go. the account, therefore, ought, of absolute necessity, to be luiuiful. JOHNSON. The first appearance of the Holm was highly prepossessing. It was a large, handsome-look- ing house, situated in a well-wooded park, by the side of a broad placid river, and an air of seclusion and stillness reigned all round, which impressed the mind with images of peace and repose. The interior of the house was no less promising there was a spacious hall and a handsome staircase, with all appliances to boot but as they approached the drawing-room, all the luxurious indolence of thought, inspired by the tranquillity of the scenery, was quickly dispelled by the discordant sounds which issued from thence; and when the door was throwa open, the footman in vain attempted to an- nounce the visitors. In the middle of the room all the chairs were collected to form a coach and horses for the Masters and Misses Fairbairn. One unruly-looking urchin sat in front, cracking a long whip with all his might another acted as guard behind, and blew a shrill trumpet with all his strength while a third, in a night-cap and flannel lappet, who had somewhat the air of having quarrelled with the rest of the party, paraded up and down, in solitary majesty, beating a drum. On a sofa sat Mrs. Fairbairn, a soft, fair, gen- teel-looking woman, with a crying child of about three years old at her side, tearing paper into shreds, seemingly for the delight of litter- ing the carpet, \vhieh was already strewed with headless dolls, tailless horses, wheelless carts, &c. As she rose to receive her visitors it began to scream. " I'm not going away, Charlotte, love don't be frightened," said the fond mother, with a look of ineffable pleasure. 200 A FAMILY SCEXE. "You no get up you shan't get up," screamed Charlotte, seizing her mother's gown fiercely to detain her. "My darling, you'll surely let me go to speak to uncle good uncle, who brings you pretty things, you know;" but, during this colloquy, uncle and the ladies had made their way to the enthralled mother, and the bustle of a meeting and introduction was got over. Chairs were obtained by the footman with some difficulty, and placed as close to the mistress of the house as possible, aware that otherwise it would not be easy to carry on even question and answer amid the tumult that reigned. "You find us rather noisy, I am afraid," said Mrs. Fairbairn with a smile, and in a manner which evidently meant the reverse; "but this is Saturday, and the children are all in such spirits, and they won't stay away from me Henry, my dear, don't crack your whip quite so loud there's a good boy that's a new whip his papa brought him from London; ami he's so proud of it ! William, my darling, don't you think your drum must be tired now? If I were you I would give it a rest. Alexander, your tnimpet makes rather too much noise one of these ladies- has got a headache wait till you go out there's my good boy, and then you'll blow it at the cows and the sheep, you know, and frighten them Oh ! how you'll frighten them with it ! " "No, I'll not blow it at the cows; I'll blow- it at the horses, because then they'll think it's the mail-coach." And he was running off, when Henry jumped down from the coach-box. "No, but you shan't frighten them with your trumpet, for I shall frighten them with my whip. Mamma, aren't horses best frightened with a whip?" and a struggle ensued. "Well, don't fight, my dears, and you shall both frighten them," cried their mamma. "No, I'm determined he shan't frighten fiem ; I shall do it," cried both together, as they rushed out of the room, and the drummer was preparing to follow. "William, my darling, don't you go after these naughty boys; you know they're always very bad to you. You know they wouldn't let you into their coach with your drum." Here William began to cry. "Well, never mind, you shall have a coach of your own a much finer coach than theirs; I wouldn't go into their ugly dirty coach; and you shall have " Here something of a consolatory nature was whispered, William was comforted, and even prevailed upon to relinquish his drum for his mamma's ivory work-box, the contents of which were soon scattered on the floor. "These boys are gone without their hats," cried Mrs. Fairbairn in a tone of distress. "Eliza, my dear, pull the bell for Sally to get the boys' hats." Sally being despatched with the hats, something like a calm ensued, in the absence of he of the whip and the trumpet; but as it will be of short duration, it is neces- sary to take advantage of it in improving the introduction into an acquaintance with the Fairbairn family. Mrs. Fairbairn was one of those ladies, who, from the time she became a mother, ceased to be anything else. All the duties, pleasures, charities, and decencies of life, were hencefortk concentrated in that one gr\nd characteristic: every object in life was henceforth viewed through that single medium. Her own mother was no longer her mother ; she was the grand- mamma of her dear infants, her brothers and sisters were mere uncles and aunts, and even her husband ceased to be thought of as her husband from the tima he became a father. He was no longer the being who had claims on her time, her thoughts, her talents, her affec- tions; he was simply Mr. Fairbairn, the noun masculine of Mrs. Fairbairn, and the father of her children. Happily for Mr. Fairbairn, he was not a person of very nice feelings, or refined taste; and although, at first, he did feel a little unpleasant when he saw how much his children were preferred to himself, yet, in time, he became accustomed to it, then came to look upon Mrs. Fairbairn as the most exemplary of mothers, and finally resolved himself into the father of a very fine family, of which Mrs. Fairbairn was the mother. In all this there was more of selfish egotism and animal instinct, than of rational affection or Christian prin- ciple; but both parents piqued themselves upon their fondness for their offspring, as if it were a feeling peculiar to themselves, and not one they shared in common with the lowest and weakest of their species. Like them, too, it was upon the bodies of their children that they lavished their chief care and tenderness, for, as to the immortal interests of their souls, or the cultivation of their minds, or the im- provement of their tempers, these were but little attended to, at least in comparison of their health and personal appearance. Alas ! if there "be not a gem so precious as the human soul," how often do these gems seem as pearls cast before swine ; for how seldom is it that a parent's greatest care is for the im- mortal happinessof that being whose precarious, and at best transient, existence engrosses their every thought and desire ! But perhaps Mrs. Fairbairn, like many a foolish ignorant A FAMILY SCENE. 201 mother, did her best; and had she been satis- fied with spoiling her children herself for her own private amusement, and not have drawn in her visitors and acquaintances to share in it, the evil might have passed uncensured. But Mrs. Fairbairn, instead of shutting herself up in her nursery, chose to bring her nursery down to her drawing-room, and instead of modestly denying her friends an entrance into her purgatory, she had a foolish pride in show- ing herself in the midst of her angels. In short, as the best things, when corrupted, always be- come the worst, so the purest and tenderest of human affections, when thus debased by selfish- ness and egotism, turn to the most tiresome and ridiculous of human weaknesses, a truth but too well exemplified by Mrs. Fairbairn. " I have been much to blame," said she, ad- dressing Miss Bell, in a soft, whining, sick- child sort of voice, "for not having been at Bellevue long ago; but dear little Charlotte has been so plagued with her teeth, I could not think of leaving her for she is so fond of me, she will go to nobody else she screams when her maid offers to take her and she won't even go to her papa." "Is that possible?" said the major. "I assure you it's very true she's a very naughty girl sometimes," bestowing a long and rapturous kiss on the child. "Who was it that beat poor papa for taking her from mamma last night? Well, don't cry no, no, it wasn't my Charlotte. She knows every word that's said to her, and did from the time she was only a year old." "That is wonderful !" said Miss Bell; "but how is my little favourite Andrew?" "He is not very stout yet, poor little fellow, and we must be very careful of him." Then turning to Miss St. Clair, "Our little Andrew has had the measles, and you know the dregs of the measles are a serious thing much worse than the measles themselves. Andrew Andrew Waddell, my love, come here and speak to the ladies." And thereupon Andrew Waddell, in a night-cap, riding on a stick, drew near. Being the major's namesake, Miss Bell, in the ardour of her attachment, thought proper to coax Andrew Waddell on her knee, and even to open her watch for his entertain- ment. "Ah! I see who spoils Andrew Waddell," cried the delighted mother. The major chuckled Miss Bell disclaimed, and for the time Andrew Waddell became the hero of the piece; the blaina of the measles were carefully pointed out, and all his suffer- ings and sayings duly recapitulated. At length Miss Charlotte, indignant at finding herself eclipsed, began to scream and cry with ad her strength. "It's her teeth, darling little thing," said her mother, caressing her. " I'm sure it's her teeth, sweet little dear," said Miss Bell. "It undoubtedly must be her teeth, poor little girl," said the major. "If you will feel her gum," said Mrs. Fair- bairn, putting her own finger into the child's mouth, "you will feel how hot it is." This was addressed in a sort of general way to the company, none of whom seemed eager to avail themselves of the privilege, till the major stepped forward, and having with his fore-finger made the circuit of Miss Charlotte's mouth, ga\e it as his decided opinion, that there was a tjoth actually cutting the skin. Miss Bell followed the same course, and con- firmed the interesting fact adding, tiiat it appeared to her to be "an uncommon large tooth." At that moment Mr. Fairbairn entered, bearing in his arms another of the family, a fat, sour, new-waked-looking creature, sucking its finger. Scarcely was the introduction over " There's a pair of legs !" exclaimed he, holding out a pair of thick purple stumps with red worsted shoes at the end of them. "I don't suppose Miss St. Clair ever saw legs like these in France ; these are porridge-and-milk legs, are they not, Bobby?" But Bobby continued to chew the cud of his own thumb in solemn silence. "Will you speak to me, Bobby?" said Miss Bell, bent upon being amiable and agreeable but still Bobby was mute. "We think this little fellow rather long of speaking," said Mr. Fairbairn; "we allege that his legs have run away with his tongue." " How old is he?" asked the major. "He is only nineteen months and ten days," answered his mother, "so he has not lost much time ; but I would rather see a child fat and thriving, than have it very forward. " "No comparison !" was here uttered in a breath by the major and Miss Bell. "There's a great difference in children in their time of speaking," said the mamma. "Alexander'didn't speak till he was two and a quarter: and Henry, again, had a great many little words before he was seventeen monthw ; and Eliza and Charlotte both said mamma as plain as I do at a year but girls always speak sooner than boys as for William Pitt and Andrew Waddell. the twins, they both suffered so much from their teething, that they were 202 BABY MAY. longer of speaking than they would otherwise have been indeed, I never saw an infant suffer so much as Andrew Waddell did he had greatly the heels of William Pitt at one time, till the measles pulled him down." A movement was here made by the visitors to depart. "U! you mustn't go without seeing the baby," cried Mrs. Fairbairn "Mr. Fairbairn, will you pull the bell twice for baby?" The bell was twice rung, but no baby answered the summons. "She must be asleep," said Mrs. Fairbairn; "but I will take you up to the nursery, and you will see her in her cradle." And Mrs. Fairbairn led the way to the nursery, and opened the shutter, and uncovered the cradle, and displayed the baby. "Just five months uncommon fine child the image of Mr. Fairbairn fat little thing neat little hands sweet little mouth pretty little nose nice little toes," &c. &c. &c., were as usual whispered over it. Miss St. Clair nattered herself the exhibition was now over, and was again taking leave, when, to her dismay, the squires of the whip and the trumpet rushed in, proclaiming that it was pouring of rain! To leave the house was impossible, and, as it was getting late, there was nothing for it but staying dinner. The children of this happy family always dined at table, and their food and manner of eating were the only subjects of conversation. Alexander did not like mashed potatoes and Andrew Waddell could not eat broth and Eliza could live upon fish and William Pitt took too much small-beer and Henry ate as much meat as his papa and all these peculi- arities had descended to them from some one or other of their ancestors. The dinner was simple on account of the children, and there was no dessert, as Bobby did not agree with fruit. But to make amends, Eliza's sampler was shown, and Henry and Alexander's copy- books were handed round the table, and Andrew Waddell stood up and repeated "My name is Norval," from beginning to end, and William Pitt was prevailed upon to sing the whole of "God save the King," in a little squeaking mealy voice, and was bravoed and applauded as though he had been Braham himself. To paint a scene in itself so tiresome is doubtless but a poor amusement to my reader, who must often have endured similar persecu- tion. For, who has not suffered from the ob- trusive fondness of parents for their offspring? and who has not felt what it was to be called upon, in the course of a morning visit, to enter into all the joys and the sorrows of the nursery, and to take a lively interest in all the feats and peculiarities of the family? Shakspeare's anathema against those who hated music is scarcely too strong to be applied to those who dislike children. There is much enjoyment sometimes in making acquaintance with the little beings much delight in hearing their artless and unsophisticated prattle, and some- thing not unpleasing even in witnessing their little freaks and wayward humours ; but when a tiresome mother, instead of allowing the company to notice her child, torments every one to death in forcing or coaxing her child to notice the company, the charm is gone, and we experience only disgust or ennui. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbairn had split on this fatal rock on which so many parents make shipwreck of their senses and so satisfied were they with themselves and their children, so impressed with the idea of the delights of their family scenes, that vain would have been any attempt to open the eyes of their under- standing. Perhaps the only remedy would have been found in that blessed spirit which " vaunteth not itself, and seeketh not its own." BABY MAY. [William Cox Bennett, D.C L., bora at Greenwich, 1S20. He has taken an iictive part in the political and social movements of his native town, whilst he has won fame !is a poet, and especially as the poet of infant life. Miss Mitford, in her Recollection* of a Literary Life, says, ''Of all writers, the one who has best understood, best painted, best felt infant nature, is Mr. Bennett. We see at once that it is not only a charming and richly- gifted jioet who is describing childish beauty, but a young father writing from his heart. Baby May is amongst the most popular of Mr. Bennett's lyrics, and amongst the most original, as that which is perfectly true to nature can scarcely fail to be." His chief works are, Baby May. The Worn Widding-Ring, and other Home Poems; Queen Eleanor's Vengeance; Ballads and No.rrative Poems; Songs by a Song- Writer; Poems of Thought and Fancy; and The Ballad and Song Hiftory of Enftland. A complete edition of Mr. Bennett'* poetical works is published by Routledge & Son*.] Cheeks as soft as July peaches, Lips whose dewy scarlet teaches Poppies' paleness ro\md large eyes Ever great with new surprise, Minutes filled with shadeless gladness, Minutes just as brimmed with sadness, Huppy smiles and wailing cries, Crows and laugl.s and tearful eyes, THE BRIGAND OF TKU LOIRE. 203 Lights and shadows swifter born Thau on wind-swept autumn corn, Ever some new tiny notion Making every limb all motion Catchings up of legs and arms, Throwings back and small alarms, Clutching fingers straightening jerks, Twining feet whose each toe works, Kickings up and straining risings, Mother's ever new surprisings, Hands all wants and looks all wonder At all things the heavens under, Tiny scorns of smiled reprovings That have more of love than lovings, Mischiefs done with such a winning Archness, that we prize such sinning, Breakings dire of plates and glasses, Graspings small at all that passes, I'ullmgs off of all that's able To be caught from tray or table; Silences small meditations, Deep as thoughts of cares for nations, Breaking into wisest speeches In a tongue that nothing teaches, All the thoughts of whose possessing Must be wooed to light by guessing ; Slumbers such sweet angel-seemings, That we'd ever have such dreamings, Till from sleep we see thee breaking, And we'd always have thee waking ; Wealth for which we know no measure, Pleasure high above all pleasure, Gladness brimming over gladness, Joy in care delight in sadness, Loveliness beyond completeness, Sweetness distancing all sweetness, Beauty all that beauty may be That's May Bennett, that's my baby. BABY'S SHOES. O those little, those little blue shoes ! Those shoes that no little feet use ! O the price were high That those shoes would buy, Those little blue unused shoes ! For they hold the small shape of feet That no more their mother's eyes meet, That by God's good-will, Years since grew still, And ceased from their totter so sweet ! And O, since that baby slept, So hush'd ! how the mother has kept, "With a tearful pleasure, Th.it little dear treasure, And o'er them thought and wept! For they mind her for evermore Of a patter along the floor, And blue eyes she sees Look up from her knees, With the look that in life they wore. As they lie before her there, There babbles from chair to chair A littie sweet face, That's a gleam in the place, With its little gold curls of hair. Then O wonder not that her heart From all else would rather part Than those tiny blue shoes That no little feet use, And whose sight makes such fond tears start. W. C. iiENMiTX. THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. It matters not to my story to enumerate the countries I visited, or the route by which I eventually entered France. At the expiration of two months after crossing the frontier, I found myself traversing a gloomy forest road in the department of the Mayenne and Loire; my path chosen at a venture; my resting- place for the coming night a matter of vague speculation. But neither the loneliness and intricacy of the way, nor my uncertainty as to the place where I might sleep, gave me un- easiness. True it was that the brigand cohorts of Napoleon a -crest-fallen and desperate rem- nant, escaped from the recently fought field of Waterloo had but lately been disbanded: but I knew that the French soldier rarely turns rob- ber in his own country; and as to a bed, I had already oftener than once had no cause to regret my having relied on the hospitality of the brave and simple VendSens. Nevertheless, as the day began to decline, I felt a strong desire to exchange the rich repast of bramble- berries, which nature had displayed by the way-side, and of which I had freely partaken, for the produce of some well-stored larder; and it was, therefore, with a feeling of agreeable satisfaction that I at length descried the waters of the Loire sparkling in the brilliant rays of the setting sun. He who has once beheld that majestic stream the boast of troubadour song will not soon forget the assemblage of charma which its banks present. Vine-clad hills, crowned with castles and towns; shady glades, echoing to the chime of the vesper-bells; far- spreading meadows of perennial verdure; and groups of prosperous and picturesquely-dressed peasants; arrest the eye in every direction. 204 THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. I could descry the towers of Angers from the point where I had first attained a sight of the river; but the intervening distance was too great to allow me to reach that city before nightfall. In these circumstances I resolved to seek for a nearer resting-place: an arrange- ment which hunger and fatigue equally advo- cated. A bright-looking village, situated on the very brink of the stream, was before me, and I made haste to reach it. The principal aubenje stood in the "Grande Place" a small square, ornamented by several rows of slim lime-trees, and a lofty cross, cov- ered with a variety of offerings symbolical of the Church of Rome. The hotel was a heavy grotesque pile, by far too large for the purpose to which it was at present devoted. It had j been the chateau of the seigneur of the village j under the old regime, and a prison during the j horrid alternation of the revolution. Its here- ! ditary possessor, as I afterwards learned, had, in common with many of his retainers, long ! been held in durance within its walls, and had at length quitted them only to perish in one of the notorious/Msi//od by him in his hu- miliation? Thyself. Victor, you have sacri- ficed enough for your chief; you must now think of yourself and me." " What would you with me then, Jacque- line?" said the soldier, whose lack-lustre eye had sadly kindled at the recapitulation of his deeds. " I have told you, dearest, that my vigour is impaired; and that the fatigue and privation I must unavoidably be exposed to, if I try to quit France, would inevitably ter- minate my life." "Of that scheme, then, we must think no more," said Jacqueline. "Your life is all I seek to save; and to me the loss were equally great, whatever way it might be sacrificed. But your uncle, the Count de Laval, has the ear of royalty: he has been true to the Bour- bons through every alternation of their fortunes; and has but to petition the king, and your par- don will be granted." "Jacqueline," answered her companion, "you would, indeed, have me stoop low in my misfortunes. Have you forgotten, that when a captive in England, I contemned my uncle's proffered friendship, because it was to be pur- chased by treachery to the emperor. Have you forgotten that the count penned me a letter, abjuring me as a kinsman, and denounc- ing me as a rebel, when he and his king were driven from Paris to Ghent by our victorious arms? No, though the deadly fusils were al- ready at my breast, I would not now solicit his intercession. " Jacqueline was about to persevere in her entreaties, when, ashamed of longer acting the eaves-dropper, I attempted to grope my way back to my chamber. But the passage was damp and slippery: and an awkward stumble threw me with some violence against the door that intervened between me and the speakers. It instantly yielded to the pressure, and I was precipitated headlong into their apartment. The consternation my unlooked-for appearance occasioned to the inmates filled me with dis- may. Jacqueline shrieked to the utmost pitch of her voice, and flung herself on the bosom of her companion to shield him from the threat- ened danger; but Delagarde, with the self- possession of a soldier, quickly extricated himself from her embrace, caught up a sword that lay near his couch, and prepared to defend himself. Before he could use it to my injury, however, I felt a powerful hand grasping my throat, and saw the surly avber- giste standing over me with the fierce eye of an avenger. " Villain!" exclaimed the veteran, as he put his knee on my breast, "what base purpose has brought you hither? Could our enemies find no nobler bloodhound to run our hero down? But your temerity shall cost you dear. Make your peace with Heaven. The Loire has served as a grave to many a better man." " You threaten me with a punishment my crime scarcely merits," said I, remaining pas- sive under his grasp, but shuddering at the intimidating roar of the stream. " Believe me, I came not here for the base purpose you appre- hend. Under the influence of sleep, I wandered into the adjacent passage, a stumble threw me against the door, and burst it open. It is surely hard that my life should be required as an atonement." Before I had done speaking, I could discover that Delagarde was assured of the truth of my story, and even the veteran's stern brow began to relax. " Shall we trust him, Victor?" said he, looking dubiously at his son-in-law, "or shall we fling him into the river? We are in his power, and the blood shed at Saumur is not yet dry. " " Heaven forbid that we should harm an innocent man!" said Delagarde. " This stran- ger can be no spy; he belongs to a nation, which, though long our enemy in the field, abets not the slaves of a tyrant. We will confide in his honour. Shall we not, my Jacqueline?" THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. 207 "Yes, yes," answered Jacqueline, "he will not, he cannot be so barbarous as to betray us : who knows but the Virgin, to befriend us, has sent him in mercy ? The English are brave and generous; and this stranger can have no interest in denouncing you. Is it not so, my friend?" addressing me. "Look at my Vic- tor, he is wounded, dying: he has suffered this for France and his emperor. Mark the paleness of his cheek, the dimness of his eye, the feebleness of his step. There was a time when he looked not so helple.-ss. When he re- turned from the terrible Avars of Russia though the grand army had perished he still bore the port of a hero. But he went again to the bat- tle: these hands bound the helmet on his bold brow: you see how he has come back to me! Englishman! " she threw herself at my feet " save my husband ! " The aubenjiste had by this time permitted me to rise; and I made an attempt to lift up the fair suppliant, but she clung to my knees, reiterating her invocation. At that moment I could not bethink myself of any mode by which I could effectually serve the unfortunate pair, but I readily pledged myself to do all in my power; and with this promise she was sat- isfied. A short explanatory conversation en- sued; and instead of returning immediately to bed, I wrapped myself in a cloak belonging to Delagarde, and sat down to consult with them on the desperate circumstances in which he was placed. Now that the consternation occasioned by my untoward introduction had subsided, I found them eager to confide in me; and Jac- queline's dark eyes sparkled with hope when I intimated that I was so far acquainted with surgery as to be able to undertake the cure of her husband's wound, a gun-shot in the shoulder, which had been prematurely closed, and, in consequence of recent fatigue, had broken out afresh. On examining it, I found there was no reason to despair of his speedy restoration to health; and, inspirited by this intelligence, Jacqueline cheerfully busied her- self in preparing such dressings as the house could furnish. While she was thus employed, Delagarde gave me the following brief sketch of his life, and the circumstances that had now so seriously compromised his safety. The chateau of which we were now inmates had originally belonged to his family, as her- editary seigneurs of the village, and his father had inhabited it at the commencement of the revolution. Descended from a race whose loy- alty was proverbial, the Seigneur Delagarde engaged heart and hand in the arduous struggle long maintained against a bloody democracy by the brave peasants of La Vendee, and followed the youthful hero Larochejaquelin through all the perils of the campaign of the Outre Loire. On the dispersion of the royal- ists, he was captured by the republicans, con- fined for a time in. his own chdteuu, and ultimately shot at Angers. His lady had pre- viously perished in one of the horrid noyades at Nantes: one of his brothers had fallen at his side in the unsuccessful attack on Gran- ville: another had fled to England: and his orphan son, then a child only six years of age, was left a beggar on the streets of Angers. In these days it was a tempting of fate to furnish food or shelter to any person who had a claim to aristocratical descent; and Victor Delagarde would have died of famine had not a humane soldier, one of the same execrated "Blues" who had smitten the loyal Vend^ens to exter- mination, commiserated his case, and taken him under his protection. This man adopted him as a son; and when his age qualified him for military service, sent him to the army, where, under the imperial banner, he gradually acquired rank and renown. His young heart, harrowed by the recollection of his parent's fate, had turned with abhorrence from the more notorious abettors of republicanism ; but he soon learned to regard with a very different eye the military chief to whom he had sworn fealty. Napoleon, in his estimation, was the saviour of France the avenger of the innocent blood shed by the advocates of terror at the revolution. He it was who had opened to him a path of fame and honour; and, dazzled by the Corsi- can's renown, he allowed himself to forget that his own father had perished for another dy- nasty, and followed the emperor with chivalric devotion through all his wars. At length, while fighting among the sierras of Spain, he was captured by the British army, and com- pelled to exchange the more arduous duties of the field for an English prison. Thus inter- rupted in his race of glory, he bethought him- self of the only relative who had survived the butcherings of the revolution, the uncle who had escaped to England, and who had now at- tained an elevated rank in the British service. Delagarde had found an opportunity to make this stanch royalist acquainted with his mis- fortunes; and the count, never doubting that his young kinsman had served in the imperial army from necessity, and that he, of course, inherited the abhorrence of his ancestors to usurpation, and would readily embrace the first opportunity to league against Napoleon, lost no time in restoring him to freedom. 203 THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. Delagarde hurried to Portsmouth, to thank his relative for this prompt recognition of his consanguineal claims; and, delighted with the military bearing and gay unsubdued spirit of the young soldier, the count tendered him a most affectionate welcome, and frankly deve- loped certain plans which he had already farmed for his future advancement. These were, that Delagarde should accept a commis- sion in the English army, avow himself the faithful subject of the house of Bourbon, and continue to fight against his native country, till Napoleon should be humbled, and the way opened for Louis' restoration. The youth rejected this proposition with unequivocal dis- gust. He had formed his political opinions in a school hostile to legitimacy and the whole race of Capet; and even the shades of his parents were invoked in vain to resuscitate his hereditary loyalty. He called upon his kins- man to send him back to prison, if such were his pleasure; but to spare his honour, which he was persuaded would be eternally stained if he lifted his arm against his native land. The count, exasperated at his degeneracy, spurned him from his presence, and thus repulsed, Delagarde found himself at liberty to rejoin the standard of his choice. At this period the mighty host collected by Napoleon for the in- vasion of Russia was about to burst on the North. Delagarde arrived in time to accom- pany it in its proud advance, and shared in all the disasters that subsequently overwhelmed the grand army ; but, more fortunate than the majority of his comrades, outlived the horrors of that unprecedented campaign. In the later struggles in Germany and on the French fron- tier, he repeatedly distinguished himself as an intrepid soldier, and was rewarded by two military orders, and the special commendation of th e em peror, a circumstance which attached him more devotedly than ever to the fortunes of that extraordinary man. When Paris capi- tulated, he retired beyond the Loire with the defeated army; and, on Napoleon's abdication, Delagarde, in common with all his companions in arms, reluctantly acknowledged the supre- macy of the house of Bourbon. In the brief pause that followed, he paid a visit to his birth- place, to fulfil his engagements with Jacque- line, the younger daughter of the same gener- ous-hearted veteran who had protected his helpless infancy, and who, by one of those alternations not rare in France in later times, had become the owner and occupant of the chateau in which his prot&jt, had been born. Scarcely had the young pair been united, when France was again agitated in every quarter by the sudden return of Napoleon. Delagarde was with his Jacqueline, who had been only a few weeks his bride, when this intelligence reached him; and though he had never been reconciled to his uncle, who now held a high appointment at the court of his sovereign, he was beginning to admit that France might benefit more under the pacific supremacy of the ancient race than under the sway of her warrior king. But no sooner did the long- familiar cry of "Vive 1'Empereur!" reach his ear, than all his half-extinguished anticipations of military glory revived. He instantly hur- ried off to join the small but resolute band, at the head of which his old leader had undertaken the resumption of his crown, and was promoted, for his fidelity, to an important command. He fully participated in the triumph of the imper- ial cause during the famous "hundred days." He was one of the gayest and most knightly- looking of the emperor's cortege at the cele- brated Champ de Mai; and only laughed in scorn when he received a letter from his, for a second time, expatriated uncle, imprecating vengeance on his head, as the abettor of regi- cides and the tool of usurpation. The battle of Waterloo followed : Napoleon's star set in blood; and Delagarde was one of the many whom the severe policy of the triumphant dy- nasty found it necessary to proscribe. Denoun- ced as a "brigand," and aware that his life must be the penalty if he fell into the hands of his enemies, he fled to the forests of La Vendee, and for a time secreted himself in their re- cesses. But the opening of his wound at length reduced him to despair; and, imagining him- self on the brink of the grave, he determined to visit his Jacqueline at all hazards, and die at her side. His return to her residence had taken place on the evening preceding my arriv- al ; and thus he accounted for the anxiety and gloom that pervaded the household. These incidents were narrated with a degree of vivacity and energy which I have vainly tried to imitate ; and it is scarcely necessary to add, that I felt more and more interested in the fortunes of their hero. The lateness of the hour, however, necessarily curtailed our interview ; and, after exerting my surgical skill to alleviate his wound, I returned to my bed and passed the remainder of the night un- disturbed. As my time was at my own command, I readily agreed to Jacqueline's entreaty to re- main for some days in attendance on my patient. His wound rapidly assumed a favour- able appearance ; and, at the end of a week, his strength and spirits were so far resuscitated THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. 209 as to encourage the hope that he would now be equal to any exertion or fatigue which he might be exposed to in making his escape. At his request I drew up a plan by which I thought it probable he might reach the island of Jersey, by the way of Granville ; an-d it was determined that this should be put in execu- tion without further delay. More intimate association with the family had only rendered me the more anxious to befriend them. The young outlaw was just such a gallant as ladies love: brave, generous, and devoted, and withal courtly in his bearing, and attractive in his person. Jacqueline, re- stored to comparative happiness, grew daily more beautiful ; and, as is not uncommon with French females even of the humblest grade, her conversation had a loftiness, perhaps it ought to be called extravagance, of sentiment, altogether peculiar to her countrywomen, which, conjoined with her natural grace, had a very fascinating influence even on my chilled heart. Thus favourably impressed, I entered readily into all their hopes and fears, and prayed as earnestly as themselves that their anxieties might have a happy termination. The parting bet ween Delagarde and his young wife was extremely painful on both sides. Neither of them knew when they might be reunited ; and though I tried to point out a glimmering of hope amid the darkness of the future, it scarcely mitigated their anguish. Yet, in the depth of his distress, Delagarde's fiery spirit could not repress a burst of enthu- siastic anticipation. "Cheer thee, my own Jacqueline," he exclaimed, with a romantic fervour; "though thy Victor is now a fugitive, though the billow may soon separate him from his country, yet his arm shall be ready when the day of vengeance returns. The emperor ! What though his enemies have chained him to a rock hid in the farthest soli- tudes of the tropic sea? Frenchmen still sur- vive who will peril all to burst his fetters, and dash him like a thunderbolt on the slaves who now lord it over our beautiful France. Jacque- line, when you hear from the south or from the west, the proud war-cry of Napoleon, the cry which your husband's voice has assisted to swell on many a crimson field, then remember Delagarde. When you are told that the once unconquered eagle has again appeared among the valleys of France, let your womanly heart exult; for it guides me back to your arms. These will be prouder times for the beloved of Delagarde." Poor Jacqueline was but little comforted by this rhapsodic loyalty, which, to a staid Briton VOL. I. like myself, appeared somewhat related to bombast. At midnight I assisted the auberyiste to ferry the fugitive to the northern bank of the Loire; and on the broad dyke that embanks the river we bade him adieu. His wonted spirit had now returned, and he departed with a firm and fearless step. As we rowed slowly back to the spot where we had embarked, I heard the veteran at my side heave more than one deep sigh, which proved that his thoughts accompanied his adopted wanderer. I had now done everything in my power to serve the outlaw; and on the following morn- ing I took leave of his disconsolate but grate- ful wife, and proceeded on my way to Angers. The heat was oppressive and I travelled leisurely, being nothing loath to linger upon the banks of the noble river that ran parallel to my path. It was considerably after mid-day when I entered the town ; and I was making the best of my way to the hotel at which I intended to abide, when, in passing through a narrow crowded street, I encountered a party of gens d'armes, who were escorting a prisoner to the quarters of the military commandant. The poor man was bound on a horse, and had re- ceived a deep sabre-cut on his temple, which bled profusely and frightfully disfigured his countenance. Notwithstanding his melancholy plight, I quickly recognized my unfortunate friend, the brigand Delagarde. He had been arrested by a patrol of gens d'armes ere he had lost sight of the river; and his captors were now conducting him before the authorities appointed to take cognizance of his crime. In these circumstances it would only have been endangering my own liberty to have openly recognized him; but I could not bring myself to leave Angers while his fate was un- decided, and therefore resolved to remain there till after his arraignment. It was then the policy of the reigning family to expedite the progress of justice; and in the course of a few days he was tried by a military commission and sentenced to be shot as a traitor, who had grossly abused the clemency of his legitimate king. So long as I remained in suspense as to his sentence, I could not summon resolution to awake poor Jacqueline from the dreams of hope in which she had chosen to indulge at the time I left her. But when the remainder of his days were declared to be rigidly meted out by the stern and perhaps just code of political vengeance, I felt it imperative on me to inti- mate to her the perilous circumstances in which he was placed, and, if possible, to procure for 210 THE BRIGAND OF THE LOIRE. both the consolation of a final interview. I was on the eve of setting off for her residence, in order to be myself the bearer of this heart- rending intelligence, when I encountered the object of my anxiety wandering like a ghost through the streets of Angers. She had learned accidentally of her husband's apprehension and trial, and, like a faithful and devoted wife, had instantly hurried off to be near to comfort him in his last moments. Strict orders, how- ever, had been issued to prevent all access to the prisoner, whose execution had been delayed until the result of an appeal he had made to Paris should be ascertained; and his unhappy wife, ready to catch at the slightest hope, had now resolved to repair to the capital in person, and solicit his pardon at the king's feet. This project she unhesitatingly communicated to me; and, struck by her magnanimity, I felt a spirit of errantry stir within me, and volun- teered to bear her company. Jacqueline had already made her prepara- tions, and was urgent that no time should be lost. When I suggested the propriety of wait- ing until she had consulted with her father, she assured me that she had already secured his consent; and, moreover, that he had sup- plied her with the money requisite to defray her expenses. His own reasons for not accom- panying her to the capital were too obvious to be disputed. He was known as an avowed Bona- partist ; and instead of serving his daughter by appearing as her protector, his name was of itself likely to shut the ears of royalty to her petition. Under these circumstances he had left her to rely solely on Heaven and her own heroic spirit. We departed by the earliest public convey- ance that started for the capital ; and though it was late on the third day before our journey terminated, my fair companion bore the fatigue of travelling and the agony of her own mind without complaint. She was no longer the timid, heart-stricken girl whom I had known under her father's roof, but the magnanimous wife, resolute even to death to succour her husband. As the vehicle in which we travelled emerged from the defile of Sevre, and the towers and palaces of Paris rose in splendour before us, I tried in vain to interest her by pointing out the more prominent features of the scene, and recapitulating the historical events with which they were associated. "My Victor ! my Victor!" was her answer. "Of him alone I can now think. You tell me that yonder green meadow is the plain of Crenelle; alas ! was it not there that Ney and Labedoyere perished? You say that these arches that span the river are the bridge of Jena: that yonder broad grove-surrounded field is the Champ de Mars : but I only remember that at Jena my Victor fought his first battle; and that on the Champ de Mars he was the most admired of the host of warriors that swelled the last pageant of his imperial master's pride. Lead me ! lead me to the Tuileries. It is there my fate must be decided. " I carried my charge to a hfitel in the Hue Crolx des Petite Champs; and, leaving her to regain strength for the trials of the coming day, set off to learn how she might best obtain the ear of royalty. On this point I was not long in coming to a decision. A religious pro- cession from the Tuileries to the Cathedral of N6tre Dame was to take place next morning; and aware that no moment could be more opportune for working on the feelings of the king than that on which his mind was occupied by devotional enthusiasm, I resolved that poor Jacqueline should avail herself of it to make the essay. Next morning the deep roll of the drums of the royal guard announced the approach of the important hour, and, with trembling hearts, we repaired to the Place du Carrousel. Jacque- line was dressed in deep mourning; and a long black veil, flung lightly over her simple yet becoming head-dress, shrouded her pallid but lovely countenance. I thought I had never seen one of her country women equally beautiful. Her sable garments, extremely rich of their kind, and conventual in their fashion, gave an unusual air of grace and dignity to her tall, graceful form; and, for the moment, I could have imagined her the sister of those dark-eyed Andalusian damsels I used to admire so much when cooped up by the French within the walls of Cadiz. I had instructed her that she was to throw herself before the king at the moment he emerged from under the triumphal arch in the centre of the Place: as to her petition, I left her own heart to frame it. On entering the Place du Carrousel, that vast arena, so famous in the history of the national vicissitudes, we found the troops already marshalling, and the giddy, pleasure- anticipating populace beginning to congregate. Cuirassiers, lancers, cJiasseurs dt, clicval, and several battalions of the Garde Royal, filed in proud, military march, from their distant casernes into the palace-yard, their bands playing " Vive Henri Quatre," their banners flaunting bravely over their splendid array. Jacqueline had no eye for this military pomp; and fluttering pennons and flashing steel had long ceased to excite in me any extravagant THE ROMANY GIRL. 211 admiration of warlike achievement. I grad- ually made way for my charge through the dense multitudes, until we arrived within a few paces of the magnificent arch ; and there, immediately in rear of a knightly-looking cap- tain of lancers, we took our station. The procession commenced. All the pomp of Catholicism was called into requisition to increase its splendour. Priests, statesmen, warriors, princes, walked in penitential mood behind the sacred emblems of their faith; but Jacqueline looked only for the king. At length His Most Christian Majesty emerged from beneath the proud triumphal monument of his predecessor's glory: and the trembling girl saw before her a corpulent, unwieldy man, with an expression of benignity on his coun- tenance, supported by attendants, and falter- ing under the weight of bodily infirmities and pious cogitations. I merely whispered to Jacqueline, "That is the king." The next moment she had sprung past the lancer's horse and prostrated herself at the feet of royalty, exclaiming, in a voice that might have softened adamant, "Mercy, mercy from my king!" The commotion this interruption occasioned for a time among the guards and priesthood threatened to annihilate our hopes. Several soldiers made attempts to push the suppliant away; but Louis, so soon as he saw that he was in no danger of being daggered, ordered them to desist and allow the petitioner to state her claims on his clemency. Jacqueline was not slow to profit by this permission. With an eloquence which amazed even me, and ex- cited a breathless attention in the listeners, she detailed the birth, the services, the pro- scription of Delagarde. She dwelt with femi- nine pathos on his love for bar, and on her unutterable misery at the prospect of his death; and vowed, that if his life were spared, his fidelity to his king should henceforth be as inviolate as that of his ancestors. Louis listened with some patience to her appeal. He was not insensible to the popularity which he would acquire by publicly reprieving one of the bitterest of his enemies ; but a constitutional timidity made him hesitate to grant the boon. At that moment one of his courtiers, an elderly nobleman, knelt down beside Jacqueline and joined in her prayer, exclaiming, "Sire, I too am a suppliant. Save this Victor Delagarde, for the loyalty of his father and the fidelity of the servant who now humbles himself at your feet." It was the Count de Laval who had thus stepped forward to support the heroic wife of his nephew. Louis could not resist the sup- plications of a man whe had been true to him through every change of fortune. His royal heart leaned to mercy. Shouts of " Vive le Roi" rent the air; and the brigand Delagarde was pardoned. 1 Talet of a Ptigrii*. FATE. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, born at Boston, U. 8., 1803. He is regarded us the Carlyle of America, and is as widely known in this country as in his own by his various philosophical and ethical works, but he is not so generally known as a poet. Although his verses are chiefly reflective, there is considerable lyrical feel- ing iii some of them, as in The Rwnany Girl. His poems, May-Day and other Pieces, were published in 1846. Those of his prose works which will be found most interesting by general readers are Re/.resentutive Men; English T/aits; and the Conduct of Life a seriea of valuable essays.] Deep in the man sits fast his fate To mould his fortunes mean or great: Unknown to Cromwell as to me Was Cromwell's measure or degree ; Unknown to him, as to his horse, If he than his groom be better or worse. He works, plots, fights in rude affairs, With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares, Till late he learned, through doubt and fear, Broad England harboured not his peer : Obeying Time, the last to own The Genius from its cloudy throne. For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified ; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates. THE ROMANY GIRL. The sun goes down, and with him takes The coarseness of my poor attire ; The fair moon mounts, and aye the flair* Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher. Pale Northern girls ! you scorn our race; You captives of your air-tight halls, Wear out in-doors your sickly days, But leave us the horizon walk, 1 The word "brigand" has been used, throughout the preceding narrative, in the sense in which it was applied by the Bourbon government to the proscribed partisans of Napoleon, immediately subsequent to hi* dethronement. 212 SCENE FROM THE TRYAL. And if I take you, dames, to task, And say it frankly without guile, Then you are Gypsies in a mask, And I the lady all the while. If, on the heath, belovf the moon, I court and play with paler blood, Me false to mine dare whisper none, One sallow horseman knows me good. Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain, For teeth and hair with shopmen deal ; My swarthy tint is in the grain, The rocks and forests know it real. The wild air bloweth in our lungs, The keen stars twinkle in our eyes, The birds gave us our wily tongues, The panther in our dances flies. You doubt we read the stars on high, Nathless we read your fortunes true ; The stars may hide in the upper sky, But without glass we fathom you. R. W. EMERSON. THE SKY-LAKK. Bird of the -wilderness, Blithsome and cumberless, Light be thy matin o'er moorland and lea ! Emblem of happiness ! Bless'd is thy dwelling-place! O to abide in the desert with thee ! Wild is thy lay and loud, Far in the downy cloud ; Love gives it energy, love gave it birth. "Where, on thy dewy wing, Where art thou journeying? Thy lay is in heaven, thy love is on earth. O'er fell and fountain sheen, O'er moor and mountain green, O'er the red streamer that heralds the day; Over the cloudlet dim, Over the rainbow's rim, Musical cherub, hie, hie thee away ! Then when the gloaming comes, Low in the heather-blooms, Sweet will thy welcome and bed of love be: Emblem of happiness ! Bless'd is thy dwelling-place ! O to abide in the desert with thee ! JAMES Hoco. SCENE FROM "THE TRYAL, A COMEDY." BY JOANNA BAILLIE. [Joanna Baillie, born in Bothwell, Lan&rKshire, 1702; died at llampstead, London, 23d February, 1S51. She made her reputation by her PUiys on the Patsiont, the first volume of which appeared in 1798. The prin- ciple she adopted was to make one play subservient to the development of one particular passion, as lovo, hate, envy, and so on. She attempted to reveal the serious and the absurd aspect of each humour in the course of a tragedy and a comedy. The idea was novel, and at- tracted attention ; but the theory narrowed the develop- ment of her genius, and it was only the possession of rare poetical gifts which rendered the result successful. For the stage they are unsuitable, owing to the absence of that variety of passion which is requisite in dramatic representations. " De Montfort" was produced on the London stage in 1801, with John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in the leading parts, and again in 1821 with Edmund Ke an as the hero. On both occasions it was comparatively a failure, in spite of the ability and popularity of the principal actors. The "Family Legend " was played in Edinburgh in 1810, the prepara- tion having been superintended by Scott, who wrote a prologue for it, whilst Henry Mackenzie wrote an epi- logue. The production was successful, and the play was afterwards brought out in London. The merits of her compositions can only be properly estimated in the study, and they will always hold a high place in litera- ture. "The Tryal, a Comedy," is the companion play of " Count Basil, a Tragedy." She has also written a num- ber of Scotch songs, which are still popular. Amongst others, The Gmcan Glitters on the Sward, Woo'd and Mari-ied and a', and Hooly and Fairly.] MB. WITHRTNGTON'S house: Eiiter Withrington and hit two Nieces Agnes end Mnrinne, hanging upon hit arms, coaxing him in a playful mutintr as they advance to- wards the front of the stage. With. Poo, poo, get along, young gipsies, and don't tease me any more. Ag. So we will, my good sir, when you have granted our suit. Mar. Do, dear uncle, it will be so pleasant ! With. Get along, get along. Don't think to wheedle me into it. It would be very pleasant, truly, to see an old fellow, with a wig upon his bald pate, making one in a holiday mummery with a couple of mad-caps. Ag Nay, don't lay the fault upon the wig, good sir, for it is as youthful, and as sly, and as saucy-looking as the best head of hair in the country. As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much curmudgeon-like austerity about it, that young people fled from before it, as. I daresay, the birds do at present, for I am sure that it is stuck up in some cherry-orchard, by this time, to frighten the sparrows. SCENE FROM THE TRYAL. 213 With. You are mistaken, young mistress, it is up-stairs in my wig-box. Ay. Well, I am glad it is anywhere but upon your pate, uncle. (Turning his face towards Mariane. ) Look at him, pray; is he not ten years younger since he wore it? Is there one bit of an old grumbler to be seen about him now? Mar. He is no more like the man he was than I am like my god-mother. (Clapping his shoulder.) You must even do as we have bid you, sir, for this excuse will never bring you off. With. Poo, poo, it is a foolish girl's whimsy : I'll have nothing to do with it. Ag. It is a reasonable woman's desire, gentle guardian, and you must consent to it. For if I am to marry at all, I am resolved to have a respectable man and a man who is attached to me, and to find out such a one, in my present situation, is impossible. I am provoked be- yond all patience with your 'old greedy lords, and match-making aunts, introducing their poor noodle heirs-apparen-t to me. Your am- bitious esquires and proud obsequious baronets are intolerable, and your rakish younger brothers are nauseous: such creatures only surround me, whilst men of sense keep at a distance, and think me as foolish as the company I keep. One would swear I was made of amber, to attract all the dust and chaff of the com- munity. With. There is some truth in this, 'faith. Ag. You see how it is with me: so my dear, loving, good uncle (coaxing him), do let Mariane take my place for a little while. We are newly come to Bath; nobody knows us: we have been but at one ball, and as Mariane looks so much better than me, she has already been mistaken for the heiress, and I for her portionless cousin : I have told you how we shall manage it; do lend us your assistance ! With. So in the disguise of a portionless spinster, you are to captivate some man of sense, I suppose? Ag. I would fain have it so. With. Go, go, thou art a fool, Agnes! who will fall in love with a little ordinary girl like thce? why, there is not one feature in thy face that a man would give a farthing for. Mar. You are veiy saucy, uncle. Ag. I should despair of my beauty, to be sure, since I am reckoned so much like you, my dear sir; yet old nurse told me that a rich lady, a great lady, and the prettiest lady that ever wore silk, fell in love, once on a time, with Mr. Anthony, and would have followed him to the world's end too, if it had not been for an old hunks of a father, who deserved to be drubbed for his pains Don't you think he did, sir? With, (endeavouring to look angry). Old nurse is a fool, and you are an impudent hussy. I'll hear no more of this nonsense. (Breaks from them and goes towards the door: they run after him, and draw him back again. ) Ag. Nay, good sir, we have not quite done with you yet: grant our request, and then scamper off as you please. Mar. I'll hold both your arms till you grant it. With, (to Mar.) And what makes you so eager about it, young lady? you expect, I sup- pose, to get a husband by the trick. fy, fy ! the poorest girl in England would blush at such a thought, who calls herself an honest one. Ag. And Mariane would reject the richest man in England who could harbour such a suspicion. But give yourself no uneasiness about this, sir; she need not go a husband- hunting, for she is already engaged. (Mariane looks frightened, and makes signs to Agnes over her uncle's shoulder, which she answers with a smile of encouragement. ) With. Engaged! she is very good, truly, to manage all this matter herself, being afraid to give me any trouble, I suppose. And pray what fool has she picked out from the herd, to enter into this precious engagement with? Ag. A foolish enough fellow, to be sure, your favourite nephew, cousin Edward. Wit. Hang the silly booby ! how could he be such an idiot! but it can't be, it shan't be! it is folly to put myself into a passion about it. (To Mariane, who puts her hand on his shoul- der to soothe him.) Hold off your hands, ma'am ! This is news indeed to amuse me with of a morning. Ag. Yes, uncle, and I can tell you more news; for they are not only engaged, but as soon as he returns from abroad they are to "be married. With. Well, well, let them many in the devil's name, and go a begging if they please. Ag. No, gentle guardian, they need not go a begging; they will have a good fortune to support them. With. Yes, yes, they will get a prize in the lottery, or find out the philosopher's stone, and coin their old shoes into guineas. Ag. No, sir, it is not that way the fortune is to come. With. No; he has been following some knight-errant, then, I suppose, and will have an island in the South Sea for his pains. Ag. No, you have not guessed it yet. (Strok- 214 SONNET. inr/ his hand gently.) Did you never hear of a good, kind, rich uncle of theirs, the generous Mr. Withrington? he is to settle a handsome provision upon them as soon as they are married, and leave them his fortune at last. With, (lifting up his hand). Well, I must say thou art the sauciest little jade in the kingdom ! But did you never hear that this worthy uncle of theirs, having got a new wig, which makes him ten years younger than he was, is resolved to embrace the opportunity, and seek out a wife for himself? Ag. 0! that is nothing to the purpose; for what I have said about the fortune must happen, though he should seek out a score of wives for himself. With. Must happen! but I say it shall not happen. Whether should you or I know best? Ag. Why me, to be sure. With. Ha, ha, ha! how so, baggage? Ag. (resting her arm on his shoulder, looking archly in his face). You don't know, perhaps, that when I went to Scotland last summer, I travelled far and far, as the tale says, and farther than I can tell; till I came to the isle of Skye, where everybody has the second sight, and has nothing to do but tear a little hole in a tartan-plaidy, and peering through it in this manner, sees every thing past, present, and to come. Now, you must know, I gave an old woman half-a-crown and a roll of tobacco for a peep or two through her plaid, and what do you think I saw, uncle? With. The devil dancing a hornpipe, I sup- pose. Ag. There was somebody dancing, to be sure, but it was not the devil though. Who do you think it was now? With. Poo, poo! Ag. It was uncle himself, at Mariane's wed- ding, leading down the first dance, with the bride. I saw a sheet of parchment in a corner too, signed with his own blessed hand, and a very handsome settlement it was. So he led down the first dance himself, and we all followed after him, as merry as so many hay-makers. With. Thou hast had a sharp sight, 'faith ! Ag. And I took a second peep through the plaidy, and what do you think I saw then, sir? With. Nay, prate on as thou wilt. Ag. A genteel family house where Edward and Mariane dwelt, and several little brats running up and down in it. Some of them so tall, and so tall, and some of them no taller than this. And there came good uncle amongst them, and they all flocked about him so mer- rily; everybody was so glad to see him, the very scullions from the kitchen were glad; and methought he looked as well pleased him- self as any of them. Don't you think he did, sir? With. Have done with thy prating. Ag. I have not done yet, good sir; for I took another peep still, and then I saw a most dismal changed family indeed. There was a melan- choly sick-bed set out in the best chamber; every face was sad, and all the children were weeping. There was one dark-eyed rogue amongst them, called little Anthony, and he threw away his bread and butter, and roared like a young bull, for woe's me! old uncle was dying. ( Observing Withrington affected.) But old uncle recovered though, and looked as stout as a veteran again. So I gave the old woman her plaidy, and would not look through any more. With. Thou art the wildest little witch in the world, and wilt riever be at rest till thou hast got everything thine own way, I believe. Ag. I thank you, I thank you, dear uncle! (leaping round his neck), it shall be even so, and I shall have my own little boon into the bargain. With. I did not say so. Ag. But I know it will be so, and many thanks to you, my dear good uncle ! (Mariane ventures to come from behind, Withrington looks gently to her, she holds out her hand, he hesitates, and Agnes joins their hands together, giving them a hearty shake.) With. Come, come, let me get away from you now : you are a couple of insinuating gipsies. LExiT hastily. SONNET. What art them, MIGHTY ONE ! and where thy seat? Thou broodest on the calm that cheers the lands. And thou dost bear within thine awful hands The rolling thunders and the lightnings fleet; Stern on thy dark-wrought car of cloud and wind, Thou guid'st the northern storm at night's dead noon; Or, on the red wing of the fierce monsoon, Disturb'st the sleeping giant of the Ind. In the drear silence of the polar span Dost thou repose? or in the solitude Of sultry tracts, where the lone caravan Hears nightly howl the tiger's hungry brood? Vain thought ! the confines of his throne to trace. Who glows through all the fields of boundless space. HENRY KIRKE WHITS. SERVIAN LYRIC. 215 TO THE MOON. [John Keats, born in Moorfields, London, 29th October, 1796; died at Rome, 24th February, 1821. Whilst at school, and whilst serving his apprenticeship to a surgeon at Edmonton, Keats was an earnest student. In 1S17 he published a volume of juvenile verses, and in the following year, Enilymion, a Poetic Romance. This poem was severely criticized by the Quarterly Re- view, and it was for some time the popular belief that the harsh criticism was the immediate cause of the poet's early death. On this subject Byron wrote : " Who killed John Keats?, 'I,' says the Quarterly, So savage and tartarly, ' 'Twas one of my feats.'" The fact was, however, that he died of consumption, and it was the hope of finding some relief from that ailment which caused him to proceed to the Continent. Ill 1820 he issued his third and last volume, containing Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Hi/t>(i-i'>n. His poetry is characterized by profuse imagery and redundant fancy.] O Moon ! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees Feel palpitations when thou lookest in : O Moon ! old boughs lisp forth a holier din The while they feel thine airy fellowship. Thou dost bless everywhere, with silver lip Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine. Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine : Innumerable mountains rise, and rise, Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes ; And yet thy benediction passeth not One obscure hiding-placa, one little spot Where pleasure may be sent : the nested wren Hiis thy fair face within its tranquil ken ; And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf Takes glimpses of thee : thou art a relief To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps Within its pearly house. The mighty deeps, The monstrous sea is thine the myriad sea ! Moon ! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee. And Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load. What is there in thee, Moon ! that thou should'st move My heart so potently? When yet a child 1 oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled. Thou seem'dst my sister : hand in hand we went From eve to mom across the firmament. No apples would I gather from the tree, Till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously: No tumbling water ever spake romance, But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance : No woods were green enough, no bower divine, Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine : In sowing time ne'er would I dibble take, Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake; And, in the summer tide of blossoming. No one but thee hath heard me blithely sing, And mesh my dewy flowers all the night. No melody was like a passing spright If it went not to solemnize thy reign. Yes, in my boyhood, every joy and pain By thee were fashioned to the self-same end; And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend With all my ardours : thou wast the deep glea Thou wast the mountain-top the sage's pen The poet's harp the voice of friends the sun; Thou wast the river thou wast gloi-y won ; Thou wast my clarion's blast thou wast my steed My goblet full of wine my topmost deed : Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon J O what a wild and harmonized tune My spirit struck from all the beautiful I On some bright essence could I lean, and lull Myself to immortality. SERVIAN LYRIC. 1 Was it a vine, with clusters white, That clung round Buda's stateliest tower? O no : it was a lady bright, That hung upon an armed knight It was their parting hour. They had been wedded in their youth : Together they had spent their bloom ; That hearts so long entwined in truth Asunder should be torn in ruth, It was a cruel doom. "Go forth," she said, "pursue thy way; But some fair garden shouldst thou see, Alone among the arbours stray, And pluck a rose-leaf from the spray. The freshest there may b ; "Unclasp thy mail, when none is by, That leaf upon thy breast to lay. How soon 'twill wither, fade, and die. Observe for that poor leaf am I, From thee, my stem away." "And thou, my soul," the soldier said, "When I am wandering faint and far, Go thou to our own greenwood shade, Where I the marble fountain made, And placed the golden jar. "At noon I filled my jar with wine, And dropp'd therein a ball of snow, Lay that on this warm heart of thine, And while it melts behold me pine In solitary woe." SIR JOHN BOWRIJTO. i From "Translations from the Servian Minstrelsy,' &c. , London, 1826, 4to. 216 JOURNAL OF A LADY OF FASHION. JOURNAL OF A LADY OF FASHION. [Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, born at Knockbut, Tipperary, 1787 ; died in Paris, 4th June. 1849. She was the second daughter of Mr. Edmund Power of Carrabeen. She was twice married, her second husband being Charles John Gardiner, Earl of Bless- ington. After the earl's death (1829), the countess estab- lished herself at Gore House, which became the resort of all the celebrities of the day. She was famous as much on account of her beauty' as her wit, and Byron has left hw testimony to the former in his verses addressed to her : " Were I now- as I was, I had sung What Lawrence has painted so well ; But the strain would expire on my tongue, And the theme is too soft for my shell." She wrote over a dozan novels, several gossipping books of travel, numerous short tales, and for seveu years edited the Ketpgake and Geiii* of Beauti/ annuals. Her most notable works are : Cimvct'satioru with Lard Byron: The Idler in Italy: Th-Adltr in France (contain- ing sketches of the most eminent home and foreign statesmen and men of letters); Tke Belle of tke Seas'in; Victims of Society ; and Sketches and Fragments, from which the following u taken.] Monday. Awoke with a headache, the cer- tain effect of being bored all the evening before by the never-dying strain at the Countess of Leyden's. Nothing ever was half so tiresome as musical parties: no one gives them except those who can exhibit themselves, and fancy they excel. If you speak, during the perform- ance of one of their endless pieces, they look cross and affronted: except that all the world of fashion are there, I never would go to another; for, positively, it is ten times more fatiguing than staying at home. To be com.- pelled to look charmed, and to applaud, when you are half-dead from suppressing yawns, and to see half-a-dozen very tolerable men, with whom one could have had a very pleasant chat, except for the stupid music, is really too bad. Let me see, what have I done this day ? Oh ! I remember everything went wrong, as it always does when I have a headache. Flounce, more than usually stupid, tortured my hair; and I flushed my face by scolding her. I wish people could scold without getting red, for it disfigures one for the whole day; and the con- sciousness of this always makes me more angry, as I think it doubly provoking in Flounce to discompose me, when she must know it spoils my looks. Dressing from twelve to three. Madame Tornure sent me a most unbecoming cap : mem. I shall leave her off when I have paid her bill. Heigh-ho, wlieu will that be? Tormented by duns, jewellers, mercers, milliners : I think they always fix on Mondays for dunning: I suppose it is because they know one is sure to be horribly vapoured after a Sunday-evening's party, and they like to increase one's miseries. Just as I was stepping into my carriage, fancying that I had got over the desagr&nens of the day, a letter arrives to say that my mother is very ill and wants to see me : drove to Grosvenor Square in no very good humour for nursing, and, as I expected, found that Madame Ma Mere fancies herself much worse than she really is. Advised her to have dear Dr. Emulsion, who always tells people they are not in danger, and who never disturbs his patient's mind with the idea of death until the moment of its arrival : found my sister support- ing mamma's head on her bosom, and heard that she had sat up all night with her: by-the-by, she did not look half so fatigued and ennuied as I did. They seemed both a little surprised at my leaving them so soon; but really there is no standing a sick room in May. My sister begged of me to come soon again, and cast a look of alarm (meant only for my eye) at my mother; I really think she helps to make her hippish, for she is always fancying her in danger. Made two or three calls: drove in the park: saw Belmont, who looked as if he expected to see me, and who asked if I was to be at the Duchess of Winterton's to-night. I promised to go he seemed delighted. What would Lady Allendale say, if she saw the plea- sure which the assurance of my going gave him? I long to let her see my triumph. Dined tete-a-ttte, my lord very sulky abused my friend Lady Winstanley, purposely to pique me he wished me not to go out ; said it was shameful, and mamma so ill; just as if my staying at home would make her any better. Found a letter from madame the governess, saying that the children want frocks and stock- ings: they are always wanting: I do really believe they wear out their things purposely to plague me. Dressed for the Duchess of Win- terton's : wore my new Parisian robe of blonde lace, trimmed, in the most divine way, with lilies of the valley. Flounce said I looked myself, and I believe there was some truth in it ; for the little discussion with my Caro had given an animation and lustre to my eyes. I gave Flounce my puce-coloured satin pelisse as a peace-offering for the morning scold. The party literally full almost to suffocation. Bel- mont was hovering near the door of the ante- room, as if waiting my approach: he said I never looked so resplendent: Lady Allendale appeared ready to die with envy very few JOURNAL OF A LADY OF FASHION. 217 handsome women in the room and still fewer well dressed. Looked in at Lady Calderwood's and Mrs. Burnet's. Belmont followed me to each. Came home at half-past three o'clock, tired to death, and had my lovely dress torn past all chance of repair, by coming in contact with the button of one of the footmen in Mrs. B.'s hall. This is very provoking, for I dare say Madame Tornure will charge abominably high for it. i Tuesday. Awoke in good spirits, having had delightful dreams: sent to know how mamma felt, and heard she had a bad night: must call there, if I can: wrote madame a lecture, for letting the children wear out their clothes so fast: Flounce says they wear out twice as many things as Lady Woodland's children. Head a few pages of Amelia Mans- field: very affecting: put it by for fear of making my eyes red. Lady Mortimer came to see me, and told me a great deal of scandal chit-chat : she is very amusing. I did not get out until past five: too late then to go and see mamma. Drove in the park and saw Lady Litchfield walking: got out and joined her: the people stared a good deal. Belmont left his horse and came to us: he admired my walk- ing dress very much. Dined alone, and so escaped a lecture: had not nerves sufficient to see the children they make such a noise and spoil one's clothes. Went to the opera : wore my tissue turban, which has a good effect. Belmont came to my box and sat every other visitor out. My lord came in and looked, as usual, sulky. Wanted me to go away without waiting for the dear delightful squeeze of the round room. My lord scolded the whole way home, and said I should have been by the sick- bed of my mother instead of being at the opera. I hummed a tune, which I find is the best mode of silencing him, and he muttered something about my being unfeeling and incorrigible. Wednesday. Did not rise till past one o'clock, and from three to five was occupied in trying on dresses and examining new trim- mings. Determined on not calling to see mamma this day, because, if I found her much worse, I might be prevented from going to Almack's, which I have set my heart on: drove out shopping, and bought some lovely things: met Belmont, who gave me a note which he begged me to read at my leisure: had half a mind to refuse taking it, but felt con- fused, and he went away before I recovered my self-possession: almost determined on re- turning it without breaking the seal, and put it into my reticule with this intention ; but somehow or other my curiosity prevailed, and I opened it. Found it filled with hearts, and darts, and declarations: felt very angry at first ; for really it is very provoking tnat one can't have a comfortable little flirtation half-a- dozen times with a man, but that he fancies he may declare his passion, and so bring on a denouement; for one must either cut the crea- ture, which, if he is amusing, is disagreeable, or else he thinks himself privileged to repeat his love on every occasion. How very silly men are in acting thus ; for if they continued their assiduities without a positive declaration, one might affect to misunderstand their atten- tions, however marked ; but those decided de- clarations leave nothing to the imagination ; and offended modesty, with all the guards of female propriety, are indispensably up in arms. I remember reading in some book that "A man has seldom an offer of kindness to make to a woman, that she has not a presentiment of it some moments before;" and I think it was in the same book that I read, that a con- tinuation of quiet attentions, leaving their meaning to the imagination, is the best mode of gaining a female heart. My own experi- ence has proved the truth of this. I wish Belmont had not written to me: I don't know what to do: how shocked my mother and sister would be if they knew it ! I have pro- mised to dance with him at Almack's too: how disagreeable ! I shall take the note and return it to him, and desire that he will not address me again in that style. I have read the note again, and I really believe he loves me very much: poor fellow, I pity him: how vexed Lady Winstanley would be if she knew it ! I must not be very angry with him: I'll look grave and dignified, and so awe him, but not be too severe. I have looked over the billet again, and don't find it so presumptuous as I first thought it: -after all, there is nothing to be angry about, for fifty women of rank have had the same sort of thing happen to them without any mischief following it. Belmont says I am a great prude, and I believe I am ; for I frequently find myself recurring to the sage maxims of mamma and my sister, and asking myself what would they think of so and so. Lady Winstanley laughs at them and calls them a couple of precise quizzes ; but still I have remarked how much more lenient they are to a fault than she is. Heigh-ho, I am afraid they have been too lenient to mine: but I must banish melancholy reflections, and dress for Almack's. Flounce told me, on finishing my toilette, that I was armed for conquest; and that I never looked so beautiful. Mamma would not much approve of Flounce's 218 JOURNAL OF A LADY OF FASHION. familiar mode of expressing her admiration ; but, poor soul, she only says what she thinks. - I have observed that my lord dislikes Flounce very much ; but so he does every one that I like. Never was there such a delightful ball: though I am fatigued beyond measure, I must note down this night's adventures: I found the rooms quite filled, and narrowly escaped being locked out by the inexorable regulations of the Lad}' Patronesses, for it only wanted a quarter to twelve when I entered. By-the-by, I have often wondered why people submit to the haughty sway of those ladies; but I suppose it is that most persons dislike trouble, and so prefer yielding to their imperious dictates to incurring a displeasure, which would be too warmly and too loudly expressed, not to alarm the generality of quiet people. There is a quackery in fashion, as in all other things, and any one who has courage enough (I was going to write impudence), rank enough, and wealth enough, may be a leader. But here am I mor- alizing on the requisites of a leader of Fashion, when I should be noting down the delicious scene of this night in her favourite and favoured temple. I tried to look very grave at poor Belmont; but the lights, the music, and the gaiety of the scene around me, with the con- sciousness of my looking more than usually well, gave such an exhilaration to my spirits, that I could not contract my brows into any- thing like a frown, and without a frown, or something approaching it, it is impossible to look grave. Belmont took advantage of my good spirits to claim my hand and pressed it very much. I determined to postpone my lecture to him until the next good opportunity, for a ball-room is the worst place in the world to act the moral or sentimental. Apropos of Belmont, what have I done with his note? My God, what a scrape have I got into ! I left my reticule, into which I had put the note, on my sofa, and the note bears the evident marks of having been opened by some one who could not fold it again: it must have been Flounce. I have often observed her curiosity and now I am completely in her power. What shall I do? After serious consideration, I think it the wisest plan to appear not to sus- pect her, and part with her the first good oppor- tunity. I feel all over in a tremor, and can write no more. Thursday. Could not close my eyes for three hours after I got to bed; and when I did, dreamed of nothing but detections, duels, and exposures: awoke terrified: I feel ner- vous and wretched: Flounce looks more than usually important and familiar or is it con- science that alarms me? Would to Heaven I had never received that horrid note or that I had recollected to take it to Almack's and give it back to him. I really feel quite ill. Madame requested an audience, and has told me she can no longer remain in my family, as she finds it impossible to do my children justice unassisted by me. I tried to persuade her to stay another quarter, but she firmly, but civilly, declined. This is very provoking, for the children are fond of and obedient to madame, and I have had no trouble since she has been with them ; besides, my mother recommended her, and will be annoyed at her going. I must- write to madame and offer to double her salary; all governesses, at least all that I have tried, like money. I must lie down, I feel so fatigued and languid: mamma is worse, and really I am unable to go to her ; for I am so nervous that I could be of no use. Friday. I am summoned to my mother, and my lord says she is in the utmost danger. Madame, to add to my discomforts, has declined my offers: I feel a strong presentiment of evil, and dread I know not what .... Good Heavens ! what a scene have I wit- nessed my dear and excellent mother was in- sensible when I got to her, and died without seeing or blessing me. Oh ! what would I not give to recall the past, or to bring back even the last fleeting week, that I might atone, in. some degree, for my folly my worse than folly my selfish and cruel neglect of the best of mothers ! Never shall I cease to abhor myself for it. Never till I saw that sainted form for ever insensible did I feel my guilt. From day to day I have deceived myself with the idea that her illness was not dangerous, and silenced all the whispers of affection and duty, to pursue my selfish and heartless plea- sures. How different are the resignation and fortitude of my sister, from my frantic grief ! she has nothing to accuse herself of, and knows that her care and attention soothed the bed of death. But how differently was I employed ! distraction is in the thought ; I can write no more, for my tears efface the words. Saturday. My dear and estimable sister has been with me, and has spoken comfort to my afflicted soul. She conveyed to me a letter from my sainted parent, written a few hours before her death, which possibly this exertion accelerated. The veil which has so long shrouded my reason is for ever removed, and all my sel- fishnessandmisconduct are laid bare to my view. Oh ! my mother you whose pure counsel and bright example in life could not preserve your HYMN". 219 unworthy child from the bed of death your last effort has been to save her. As a daughter, a wife, and a mother, how have I blighted your hopes and wounded your affections. My sister says, that my mother blessed me with her last words, and expressed her hopes that her dying advice would snatch me from the paths of error. Those dying hopes, and that last blessing, shall be my preservatives. I will from this hour devote myself to the per- formance of those duties that I have so shame- fully, so cruelly neglected. My husband, my children with you will I retire from those scenes of dissipation and folly, so fatal to my repose and virtue; and in retirement commune with my own heart, correct its faults, and en- deavour to emulate the excellencies of my lamented mother. Oh ! may my future conduct atone for the pa.st but never, never let the remembrance of my errors be effaced from my mind. HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. Hast thou a charm to stay the Morning-Star In his steep course? So long lie seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLAXC ! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Have ceaselessly ; but thou, most awful form ! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently ! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass : methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge ! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity ! dread and silent mount ! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer 1 worshipp'd the Invisible alone. Yot, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret Joy: Till the dilating Soul, em-apt, transfused, Into the mighty Vision prssing there, As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven 1 Awake, my soul ! not only passive praise Thou owest ! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstauy ! Awake, Voice of sweet song ! Awake, my Heart, awake 1 Green Vales and icy Cliffs, all join my Hymn. Thou first and chief, sole Sovran of the Vale ! O struggling with the Darkness all the uight, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the Morning Star at dawn, Thyself Earth's ROSY STAR, and of the dawn Co-herald : wake, O wake, and utter praise I Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who fill'd thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad ! Who call'd you forth from night and utter death. From dark and icy caverns call'd you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks, For ever shattered and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, Unceasing thunder and eternal foam? And who commanded (and the silence came), Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest? Ye ice-falls ! ye that from the mountain's brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty Voice, And stopp'd at once amid their maddest plunge 1 Motionless torrents ! silent cataracts ! Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God ! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer ! and let the ice plains echo, God ! God ! sing ye meadow streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds ! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God 1 Ye living flowrs that skirt the eternal frost! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest ! Ye eagles, play-mates of the mountain-storm ! Ye lightnings, tho dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element ! Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise ! Thou too, hoar Mount ! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the Avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering thro' the pure serene Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breust Thou too again, stupendous Mountain ! thou That as I raise my head, awhile bow'd low In adoration, upward from thy base, Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, To rise before me Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a cloud of incense, from the earth! Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven, Great Hierarch ! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun. Earth, with her thousand voices, praise* God. COLERIDGE. 220 VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE-GRINDER. IN ENGLISH SAPPHICS. [Right Hon. George Canning, born in London, llth April, 1770; died in Cliiswick, 8th August, 1827. His lite was devoted to politics it is said at the instigation of Sheridan and he became prime minister in the beginning of the year in which he died. He was one ot' the champions of the Catholic Emancipation move- ment. From early youth he was in the habit of writ- ing prose and verse. When a school-boy at Eton he commenced a weekly periodical called the Microcosm, which was written by himself and two companions. Tlie following satire upon the extreme republican spirit to which the French Revolution gave so great an im- petus, was one of the most powerful squibs of the period. It first appeared in the Anti-Jacobin, and the Rt. Hon. J. H. Fiere is said to have written part of it.] Friend of Humanity. "Needy Knife grinder, whither are you going? Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in't, So have your breeches ! "Weary Knife-grinder ! little think the proud ones, Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike- Road, what hard work 'tis crying all day, ' Knives and Scissors to grind, O ! "Tell me. Knife-grinder, how came you to grind knives? Did some rich m:m tyrannically use you? Was it the squire? or parson of the parish ? Or the attorney? "Was it the squire for killing of his game? or Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining? Or roguish lawyer made you lose your little All in a lawsuit? " (Have you not read the R ifihts of Man, by Tom Paine ?) Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids, Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your Pitiful story." Knife-grinder. "Story ! Lord bless you ! I have none to tell, sir, Only last night a drinking at the Chequers, This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were Torn in a scuffle. "Constables came up for to take me into Custody : they took me before the Justice ; Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish Stocks for a vagrant. "I should bo glad to drink your honour's health in A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence; But for my part, I never love to meddle With politics, sir." Friend of Humanity. " I give thee sixpence ! I will see thee damn'd first Wretch ! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to ven- geance Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded, Spiritless outcast 1" (Kicks the Knift-grindtr, overturns his icheel, and exit in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy.) VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two vulgarity and affectation. It may be said of them truly that "thin partitions do their bounds divide." There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is always trying to avoid whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty contempt for anything, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I hardly know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the more fortunate of their less happy neighbours with contempt. They are habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought (only reversed by the relative situation of either party) occupy their whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve, and out- raging common-sense, to be thought genteel ; the others have no other object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is but poor spite; a very pitiful style of am- bition. To be merely not that which one heartily despises, is a very humble claim to superiority: to despise what one really is, is still worse. Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges of the worth of everything by name, fashion, opinion; and hence, from the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction in itself, it VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the "Great Vulgar and the Small" is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticizes the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at thebackslidingsof her frail acquaint- ance. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves, naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers : scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common- sense and decency. 1 True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of others ; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to in- dulge in an unmanly triumph over it. Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a sign- post, nor Homer hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub Street bard. Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority ; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineff- able disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors. Thus a fashionable miss titters till she is ready to burst her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet, or the abrupt drop of a courtesy (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country- girl who comes to be hired by her mamma as a servant : yet to show how little foundation there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of herself and contempt 1 "If a European, when he has ctit off his beard and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly make it; and after having rendered them im- movable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if when thus attired he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and atten- tion his yellow and red ochre on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; who- ever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashion of hU country, whichever first feels him- self provoked to laugh, is the bnrharian." Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses^ vol. i. p. 231-32. for the untutored rustic, she would herself the next day be delighted with the very same shaped bonnet if brought her by a French milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in a week's time will become quite familiar with the maid, and chatter with her (upon equal terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour together. There is no difference between them but that of situation in the kitchen or in the parlour: let circumstances bring them together, and they fit like hand and glove. It is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dis- likes, are the same. The mistress' head runs continually on dress and finery, so does the maid's : the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does the maid if she could: miss forms a beau-ideal of a lover with black eyes and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from that of her attendant : both like a smart man, the one the footman and the other his master, for the same reason : both like handsome fur- niture and fine houses: both apply the terms shocking and disagreeabl* to the same things and persons: both have a great notion of balls, plays, treats, song-books and love-tales: both like a wedding or a christening, and both would give their little fingers to see a corona- tion, with this difference, that the one has a chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is dying with envy that she has not. Indeed, this last is a ceremony that delights equally the greatest monarch and the meanest of his subjects the vilest of the rabble. Yet this which is the height of gentility and the consummation of external distinction and splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony. For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of virtue is required in the individual who is so distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying this idle and imposing parade of his person? Is he delighted with the state-coach and gilded panels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty and symmetry of the eight cream-coloured horses? There is not one of the immense mul- titude, who flock to see the sight from town or country, St. Giles's or Whitechapel, young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to admire the same object. Is he delighted with the yeomen of the guard, the military escort, the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon and the judge's robe, the array that precedes and follows him, the crowded streets, the windows hung with eager looks? So are the mob, for they "have eyes and see them!" There is no one faculty of 222 VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. mind or body, natural or acquired, essential to the principal figure in this procession more than is common to the meanest and most despised attendant on it. A wax-work figure would answer the same purpose: a lord-mayor of London has as much tinsel to be proud of. I would rather have a king do something that no one else has the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's idea of him in his being made a show of: jf the pageant would do as well without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings have been declared to be "lovers of low company:" and this maxim, besides the reason sometimes assigned for it, viz., that they meet with less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupid- est slave worships the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility of the dependant: whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual refine- ment might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expec- tation raised would probably end in mortifica- tion on both sides! There is little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout if he loses that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable. But enough of this. The essence of vulgarity, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions, words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement, together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing we shall secure the suff- rages of those we associate with. To affect a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set of persons very little, if at all, better informed, cry it down to distinguish them/selves from the former, is in either case equal vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is vulgar that is natu- ral, spontaneous, unavoidable. Crossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awk- wardness is not vulgarity : but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the company we keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as well spurn the clod under our feet, and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original can be vulgar: but I should think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a York- shireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life of a particular district; it has "a stamp exclusive and provincial." He might "gabble most brutishly" and yet not fall under the letter of the definition: but "his speech bewrayeth him," his dialect (like the jargon of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. If he were a mere blockhead, it would not signify : but he thinks himself a knowing hand, according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought up, and which he thinks the go every where. In a word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of slang in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in-the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis: so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble : nor is it a bit purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headlong, gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth and as indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lover orders, because they resolve to differ from them. The VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 223 fashionable have the advantage of the unfashion- able in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the servum penis imitatorum the herd of pretenders to what they do not feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life. To belong to any class, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Kefinement will in all classes be the exception, not the rule ; and the exception may fall out in one class as well as another. A king is but an hereditary title. A nobleman is only one of the Hou.se of Peers. To be a knight or alderman is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the three estates could make another author of Waverley. Princes, heroes are often common-place people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed mob, both which I hate. Odl profanum vulijus, et arceo. The vapid affectation of the one is to me even more intolerable than the gross insolence and brutality of the other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to show their disregard of the com- pany, a set of fashionable coxcombs are, to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and misguided, which is something: the others consult only appearances, which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in his prints has trimmed the balance of pretension between the downright blackguard and the soi-disant fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not appear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it may do in, the genteel letter-writing of Lord Chesterfield, or the chivalrous rhap- sodies of Burke), that vice by losing all its grossness loses half its evil. It becomes more contemptible, not less disgusting. What is there in common, for instance, between his beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquets, and the men and women, the true heroic and ideal characters in Raphael? But his people of fashion and quality are just upon a par with the low, the selfish, the unideat characters in the contrasted view of human life, and are often the very same characters, only changing places. If the lower ranks are actuated by envy and uncharitableness towards the upper, the latter have scarcely any feelings but of pride, contempt, and aversion to the lower. If the poor would pull down the rich to get at their good things, the rich would tread down the poor as in a vine-press, and squeeze the last shilling out of their pockets and the last drop of blood out of their veins. If the head- strong self-will and unruly turbulence of a common ale-house are shocking, what shall we say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common-sense, the callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional politeness. The one may be cor- rected by being better informed ; the other is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy, gratuitous assumption of superiority to eve.ry feeling of humanity, honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental and moral costume of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den. Or to put this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men in a rude state of nature outraging the human form, than I have with apes "making mops and mows" at the extravagances they have first provoked. I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better than the inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a fire; the insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and is more fatal and inevit- able. The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive struggles of anarchy. "Of all evils," says Hume, "anarchy is the shortest lived." The one may "break out like a wild overthrow;" but the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want, and agony, and woe. It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated multitude stung by the sense of wrong, and maddened by sympathy : it is more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of the whisper echoed by other assenting whispers, which doom them first to despair and then to destruction. Popu- lar fury finds its counterpart in courtly servility. If every outrage is to be apprehended from the one, every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without regard to justice or 224 THE SUMMER MORNING. decency. If there are watchwords for the rabble, have not the polite and fashionable their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome un- meaning jargon as well? Both arc to me anathema ! HAZLITT. THE JESTER CONDEMNED TO DEATH. One of the kings of Scanderoon, A royal jester Had in his train, a gross buffoon, Who used to pester The court with tricks inopportune, Venting on the highest folks his Scurvy pleasantries aiid hoaxes. It needs some sense to play the fool, Which wholesome rule Occurr'd not to our jackanapes, Who consequently found his freaks Lead to innumerable scrapes, And quite as many kicks and tweaks, Which only seem'd to make him faster Try the patience of his master. Some sin, at last, beyond all measure Incurr'd the desperate displeasure Of his serene and raging highness; Whether he twitch'd his most revered And sacred baard, Or had intruded on the shyness Of the seraglio, or let fly An epigram at royalty, None knows ; his sin was an occult one ; But records tell us that the sultan, Meaning to terrify the knave, Exclairn'd " 'Tis time to stop that breath; Thy doom is seal'd, presumptuous slave ! Thou stand'st condemn'd to certain death. Silence, base rebel! no replying! But such is my indulgence still Out of my own free grace and will I leave to thee the mode of dying." "Thy royal will be done 'tis just," Replied the wretch, and kiss'd the dust ; "Since, my last moments to assuage, Your majesty's humane decree Ha deign'd to leave the choice to me, I'll die, so please you, of old age !" HORACE SMITH. THE SUMMER MORNING. [John Clare, born in Helpstone, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire, 13th July, 1793; died 20th May, 1864. He was the son of a farm-labourer, and when a mere child was sent to work in the fields. Despite many privations he managed to educate himself, and in 1819 he was fortunate enough to secure a publisher for his first work, foemi of Rural Life. The Quarterly Review, which had used Keats so harshly only a little time before, spoke of Clare in the highest terms of praise. The rustic poet was invited to London : for a season he was the lion of the town, and a subscription was raised which provided him with an income of about 45 a year. About fifteen years afterwards he became insane; for some time his wife nobly struggled to man- age him at home ; but at last he had to be conveyed to the Northampton County Asylum, where the remainder of his life was passed. Previous to that calamity he had added to his first book, The Village Minstrel, TM S/tejJie.-d't Calendar, 1S27; and the Rural Muse, lt>35. His widow died in the spring of 1871.] The cocks have now the morn foretold, The sun again begins to peep, The shepherd whistling to his fold, Unpens and frees the captive sheep. O'er pathless plains at early hours The sleepy rustic gloomy goes ; The dews, brush'd off from grass and flowers, Bemoistenirig, sop his hardened shoes. While every leaf that forms a shade, And every floweret's silken top, And every shivering bent and blade, Stoops, bowing with a diamond top. But soon shall fly their diamond drops, The red round sun advances higher, And stretching o'er the mountain tops Is gilding sweet the village spire. 'Tis sweet to meet the morning breeze, Or list the gurgling of the brook ; Or, stretched beneath the shade of trees, Peruse and pause on nature's book, When nature every sweet prepares To entertain our wish'd delay, The images which morning wears, The wakening charms of early day. Now let me tread the meadow paths While glittering dew the ground illumes, As sprinkled o'er the withering swaths, Their moisture shrinks in sweet perfumes; And hear the beetle sound his horn, And hear the skylark whistling nigh. Sprung from his bed of tufted corn, A hailing minstrel of the sky. THE HORN-BOOK. 225 THE HORN-BOOK. Learned gentlemen, who drive the trade of authorship, will undoubtedly be surprised to see a common weaver busy himself in their matters. But without paying any attention to them I shall begin, gaily and cheerfully, the history of my life. One of the first things I remember is, that I was seized, when about seven years old, with a sore disease, which I afterwards leai-ned was the small-pox. It marked my visage very deeply, and left behind the seeds of a disorder which cost me and other people much trouble to cure. My head was rendered so weak that I fell asleep when anybody attempted to talk to me of books and learning. Heading was a sore trouble to me: and without carrying my modesty too far, I may say, that at my twelfth year I still found it necessary to spell a few words. I will not raise suspicions of my fitness for authorship by referring to the period when my letters first became legible. For the rest, however, I am healthy as a roach, and enjoy a happiness that does not need to be increased, but only con- tinued. People even assure me that the marks of the small-pox do not distort my features, but only serve to give me a sounder appearance at some little distance. I regard this, how- ever, as good-natured flattery, and am con- vinced that a smooth red face would add to my beauty. On the last page of my horn-book stood a red cock, which I could not look at without reverencing, notwithstanding, as a work of art, it was one of the rudest produc- tions of wood-engraving. If I brought from school a testimony of good behaviour during the day, I was sure to find, on the following morning, a small piece of money on the cock, which my mother told me was a gift from him to reward my good conduct and encourage me to persevere. Such friendly means could not fail. I opposed with all my might when any of my mischievous schoolfellows sought to en- tice me away; and continued to spell with such perseverance, that the veins of my head some- times swelled. I became by this means the favourite of my teacher, Mr. Ezekiel Quartz. Some quarrelsome envious fellows named me the Walking Horn-book; but I did not mind this, for I enjoyed, among the orderly and well-behaved, the reputation of being the best boy in the village. With the presents I ob- tained so honourably from the red cock, I always ran straight to the nearest shop and bought a new, and sometimes warm, cake of VOL. j, gingerbread, which I usually shared with Lina, who generally took care to wait for me at the garden gate when she saw me returning. She was the only child of our neighbour, a poor widow, who earned her daily bread by running on errands, and was never off her feet from morning till night. While she was tramping from village to village, Lina sat at the spinning- wheel, and laboured as constantly as I did at my book, though without being so well re- warded. She was at that time, as she still is, the ornament of the village. Her good nature, and the dimple on her chin, pleased everybody. On my return from the pastry-cook's, such a friendly smile spread over her whole face that I was sometimes obliged forcibly to turn away my eyes, in order not to give the cake unbroken into her hands. "Godfred," said she, as we sat near one another devouring our gingerbread, ' ' when we are bigger we will be married, and then we will live as if we were in heaven nothing but gingerbread and seed-cake ! " This pleased me, and I resolved to keep friends with the red cock; and thought to myself that with time would come the means of fulfilling our wishes. In my thirteenth year I was taken from school and placed apprentice to a weaver, who was a relation and friend, and who promised to remember my weak state of health in ap- pointing me my task. As I was to leave my mother's house I thought of nothing so much as how to give Lina something in place of the gingerbread she would no longer receive. A red cock, like the one in my horn-book, might be as good a friend to her as to me. I copied the picture, therefore, carefully on another piece of paper, by holding it up to the window, and afterwards coloured it red. When the work was ended I could scarcely wonder enough at the resemblance. Towards evening I went to the garden gate and threw a handful of sand against Lina's window to inform her of my presence. I already enjoyed, in imagination, her astonishment at my dexterity, and her joy at my kindness. When she appeared, as I told her of my intended departure, and that I had brought her a present of not a little value, she looked eagerly towards it ; but when she saw the picture I was mortally disappointed : instead of the praise I expected she shook her head and turned up her nose, almost as if she despised me and my work. She scarcely looked at it ; and wrapping it up again in paper, ex- pressed plainly enough that she would rather have had a substantial cake of gingerbread than all the painted cocks in the world. I was vexed at this contempt for my labours; 15 223 THE HORN-BOOK. measured the ungrateful one from head to foot, ;tnd in a moment resolved I would tear myself from her and never again have anything to do | with her. "Your servant, Miss Lina," said I I aloud, and proudly turning on my heel, j stalked lordly and hastily home, without pay- | ing any attention to her calling after me. My cousin's house, where I was now to dwell, was at the opposite end of the village, which would not, however, have hindered me from , keeping company with Lina, if I had not re- , solved to have nothing more to do with the earthly-minded thing, who had rather tickle her palate than her eyes, and had no taste for the fine and noble arts. She, however, sought, j by all her little means, to get hold of me when | I went to drink coffee with my mother on Sun- j days and feast-days. But I persisted in avoid- ing her, and in cherishing the ill-temper she had awakened by the unkind reception of the picture. The most which I did was to show , myself at the window and pretend not to ob- serve her. At length, when she found she was only thrashing empty straw, she left off looking after me. Only wait, thought I; you shall yet repent of the scornful manner you ' treated me; only let me become a journeyman weaver. The years of apprenticeship passed away, j and the day at last arrived on which I was to ; be set free, and admitted into the journeyman's guild allowed to smoke tobacco in every com- pany, and to walk with my cane wherever I ; pleaaed. As I sat at breakfast with my mother, and talked over the necessary arrangements for the coming festivities, the father -journey- man entered, took his place at my side in a ' friendly way, and helped me to despatch the coffee. Formerly he hardly deigned to look at me, now he began to talk freely and jovially, which pleased and exalted me prodigiously. I was quite in raptures, however, as my mother brought forth some spirits, and he, clapping me on the shoulder, said, "What think you, brother Fred, shall we drink to our lasting friendship?"' The words ran through me like ilre My mother seemed to utter a prayer for the continuance of our fellowship as we stood up. and entwining each an arm with the other, in this manner carried the glasses to our mouths and emptied them. Now was I able to snap my fingers at the ! whole world, and only found it necessary to muster up all my self-command that my sense of acknowledged worth might not be blown up into folly. The reader will undoubtedly like to know how I was clothed on this, for me, important day. My coat was of dark blue, hanging down to my ankles, and lined with bright red; my waistcoat was of plush, and on it might be seen, very naturally drawn, the whole planets running their course. My boote were of the best calf's skin, with yellow topa. By my especial desire my mother had bound ttiree handkerchiefs round my neck, so that the outward one reached my under lip. A long tail, tied with new shining ribbon, hung down my back, and the fore-part of my head was covered with curls, which, after being pressed down by the hat, rose again into pretty ringlets when it was removed. In truth, for eight days before, my hair was pressed up in papers, and not taken down till the important moment in which I was to show myself. In my left hand I held a large bunch of flowers, in my right a silver-headed cane inherited from my grandfather, and from both my pockets hung the corners of two fine flower-worked pocket- handkerchiefs. In this stately dress I began, about mid-day, to make the course of the vil- lage, and to invite, according to custom, the maidens to the dance which I was to give that evening at the sign of the Crow. I passed by Lina's door, however, several times without allowing my inclinations to conquer the reso- lution I had laid down ; and if Lina was not entirely blind she must have known by my conduct that I had drank to our lasting friend- ship with the father of the journeymen, and had banished all recollection of our ginger- bread-eating years from my heart. In the evening, however, as all the beauties of the place swam past me in the waltzing circle, the true queen of the feast, precisely the contemned Lina, appeared to be wanting, as the only per- son worthy to stand at my side. In vain did I frisk and whirl with the stiff daughter of the cartwright in order to banish the unpleasant thoughts ; the image of Lina preserved its place and darkened every other joy. Streams of perspiration and powder, from exercise and anxiety, flowed down my face and spoiled my neck-handkerchiefs. Sighing and panting, my partner sank on the nearest stool and gasped for breath. I could hold out no longer in the dust and vapour, but drank copiously of beer, stuffed my pipe, and went to the door to cool myself. A secret impulse I could not explain led me farther and farther, and blowing away the smoke as I thumped along, I found myself, before I knew where I was, under Lina's win- dow. She sat solitary and quiet in the little room, dimly lighted by a lamp, and turned her wheel, drawing out her threads fine and firm, for she span as well as any girl of the village. The music and the shouts of th THE HORN-BOOK. 227 joyous dancers were plainly heard, but she sat and worked, busied alone with her own thoughts. Sorrowful and melancholy reflections appeared in her countenance, but she paid no attention to the distant music, and there was nothing about her which could lead me to suppose she was vexed at being excluded from tne dance. She had already put on her night-cap, and I was obliged to confess to myself that she was very pretty, and that not one of the gaily dressed ladies at the dance could compare with her. I possessed, however, firmness enough not to betray my presence, or to give in any way expression to my feelings ; yet I was much disposed to do it, and resolved, on my way back to the dance, to receive her again into favour. Nor was this resolution altered by the jokes of my companions at my melancholy appearance, but remained even till daylight, when, with a cloudy head, I returned home to give myself up, after so much exertion of body and mind, to the sweet empire of sleep. It was noon, and the dinner ready, before I returned to my senses on the following day, rejoiced to find that the honours and praises I had harvested the night before were no idle dreams. My mother had prepared me one of my favourite dishes, and, after making up the loss of my morning's drink by a hearty meal, I turned my thoughts to the immediate execu- tion of my last night's plan. My pipe was lighted, and I took myself into the garden, in hopes that Lina, informed of my presence, would find something to do there, and give me an opportunity of speaking to her. And, in truth, the only son of my mother found him- self not deceived. Lina was in the garden, and I had nothing further to do to begin the conversation than to bid her good-day, which I did, and she answered in as friendly a way as if she had been invited to the dance and the merriest person there. This vexed me, but I endeavoured, like a man, to keep down the unpleasant feeling, and, approaching the garden railing as near as possible, said, in con- fidential kind tone, " I wish, dear Lina, yon had been with us yesterday evening ; we shouted and huzzaed like victorious heroes, and danced and sprung like young does, and were all as happy as kings." " I do not know," said she, with a sort of contemptuous smile, " what business I had there, and I trouble myself as little about it to-day as yesterday." "You may say what you please," said I, "but you cannot deny that the manner in which I have hitherto treated you has not been indifferent to you. You would have gladly been at the dance yesterday. Come, everything shall be forgotten and forgiven. Here is my hand we will be again good friends," " Is it worth the trouble," said she, with a sneering loud laugh. "No, Mr. Godfred, people must not be so hasty in the choice of their friends ; and nobody cares about puffed-up fools they are passed without any notice." So saying, she seized her watering-pot, and before I could muster up my senses to -answer such an unex- pected impertinence, she had disappeared. "Zounds!" said I, calling after her, ''that was clearly, very clearly said." I stood a quarter of an hour as if somebody had beat me, stuck my fists in my side, and gnashed my teeth, as I endeavoured to find out some way of revenging my wounded honour. She had called me a fool ; not directly, indeed, but in such a manner as to mean no other person but me ; and to affront me ten times more than if she had called me so downright. The more I thought on the matter the more I became doubtful and desponding. Shall I revenge myself immediately and give grist to all the scandal-mills of the place? or shall I bear in patience an insult that the burgomaster him- self would condemn me for submitting to? The father-journeyman occurred to me. " He," said I to myself, " may give me the best ad- vice how to behave myself, for he has already had, by virtue of his office, many such cases to decide. I must explain the unpleasant matter to him, and be guided by his opinion." It was Saturday, and the whole weavers' guild had a ort of a blue day in consequence of the festivities of yesterday, and I knew that 1 should not fail to find my friend at the Crow, where he spent every hour he was not at the loom. He seemed ill-tempered, for he sat still and gloomy in a corner of the tap-room, and it was not till he had heard me command the landlord to bring me a tankard of the right stuff that his contracted eyebrows expanded to their usual cheerfulness. I begged to be allowed to take my place near him, offered him a glass, and told him, in a few words, of what had just happened to me. " Brother," said he, after he had let me tell my tale fully, " from all you have said to me, it is clear enough that, in spite of what the maiden said, and you have done, she is yet deeply and des- perately in love with you." As he said this he fixed his eyes on the glasses, which were drained dry; and I, understanding him, gave a sign to the landlord, and they were again soon filled. "Brother," continued he, "the maiden felt herself insulted by your neglect; and, indeed, you went too far to slight her before the whole village. However, she i 228 THE HORN-BOOK. chiefly offended because she yet likes you; you are, as it were, stuck on to her heart. This, therefore, is my advice. You must bear the shaaie she has put on you with patience, instead of making it the talk of everybody. You must take the title as a piece of maiden's wit, such as is to be had every day, and pay her for it with a dozen good kisses on the scandalous mouth on the first opportunity, and afterwards act as it suits your heart and understanding. I will give you a certificate that the fool shall remain betwixt us it shall descend with us into the grave." The advice did not appear .so bad, after some reflection, as at first. I thanked the brotherly friend with my right hand, made him again promise me secrecy, and assured him I would direct my future con- duct to Lina according to what he said. Unhappily, however, my promise was easier given than kept ; and the four weeks which intervened between my liberation and begin- ning my travels passed away without my being able rightly to understand on what terms I stood with Lina. If she saw me before the door or in the garden she behaved herself well and politely, but showed no sign of uncontrol- lable love. This made me melancholy and low-spirited, particularly as I observed that, '.mable to make proper resistance, I was daily more in love with Lina. Good counsel would now have been valuable to me, and all the wisdom of the father-journeyman was of no avail. The evil was always increasing. Eat- ing and drinking no longer pleased me. My pipe remained untouched the whole day ; and my mother, who saw in my conduct my sorrow at parting from home, shook her head with melancholy foreboding. Lina was our nearest neighbour, and it was impossible she should not know of my intention to wander through the wide world ; yet she did not lose the smallest part of her usual cheerfulness. On the con- trary, I remarked, when she was in her garden bleaching her yarn, she trulled and hummed such gay airs, that every note was like a dagger to my heart. Her mirth made me shy and reserved, and wrecked every attempt I made to speak, and perhaps be reconciled with her. I cursed my former stupid conduct ; whenever I saw her I trembled, and had not the courage to approach and declare to her my secret thoughts. On the day before my expected departure, my mother had collected some friends to keep her and me cheerful. In the evening I left the table, went and rapped at Lina's door, determined to have an explanation, and be ertain what I had to hope or to fear for the future. My trouble was vain ; I could make nobody hear, the house appeared deserted; my thumps were echoed as from a vault, and ah the inhabitants of the spot, where I had hoped to find comfort, appeared dead and gone. No light was in her chamber, everything remained in quiet darkness, and the door was firm against all my attempts to enter. Afterwards I heard that Lina had been called away before noon to her mother, who had been taken suddenly ill in one of the neighbouring villages, and that she was not likely to return for some days. Every spark of hope was now extinguished. It was decided that I was quite indifferent to her, and I ought not to think of regaining the favour I had so foolishly lost. If the father-journeyman could now have given his opinion, he would have advised me to resign myself to my fate, to banish the maiden from my thoughts, and throw out my hook for a new prize. He, hoM-ever, had seen fifty springs, and I was in my eighteenth year. What was I to do? It was scarcely possible to postpone my departure for a few days and trust to Lina's return, even if I were disposed to bear with the taunts of my comrades as a mother's spoiled child, for I had taken a solemn farewell of all my friends and relations. Sor- rowful, therefore, I packed up my knapsack, stowed away carefully the hoarded and the collected money my mother had provided me, and, after a sleepless night, started at day- break, accompanied by some guild companions to the next village, and thus wandered in a very melancholy mood from my native place into the wide world. More than half a year did I traverse back- wards and forwards the holy Roman empire without finding it necessary to seek employ- ment. The money my mother had given me was sufficient to keep me, and the picture of Lina which I carried in my heart prevented the time from being wearisome. At noon I readily sought the cool shade by the side of some stream, to look over the images of former times that were stored up in my memory. For whole hours I fixed my gaze on the red cock, which I had preserved as my best friend, and carefully placed in my letter-case on leaving home. The sight of my gingerbread buyer recalled, as if present, all the pleasures he, and all the sorrows his copy, had procured me. In living clearness the days stood before me in which Lina placed rm at her side, called me her little Fred, and talked of our future mar- riage. I cursed the passionate haste with which I separated from her on the unhappy evening, the proud overlooking by which I made her THE HORN-BOOK. 223 understand my displeasure for several years, aiftl the rude conduct by which I at last had put tlie crown on my insult. I was penetrated with shame and repentance as I recalled all this; and not seldom I began to punish myself, by pinching my own nose, when I reflected my own misconduct had deprived me of the maiden's favour; and at times the blood would rise in my head till I became almost mad. Always, I confess it, have I been a desperate man. As autumn, however, approached, and my money was nearly at an end, my wandering unoccupied life was necessarily put a stop to. Terrified to find myself without a home for the winter, and at the prospect of being obliged to beg my bread travelling on the highways, I resolved to suppress my love for freedom, and to obtain some occupation by which I could be secure against want through the winter. With this intention I turned my steps towards a large town, in which I hoped to find employ- ment. The steeples were already visible from a height when I put my hand by accident in my pocket, and, to my great grief, missed my letter-case, which clearly appeared to have descended through a hole gradually formed. Though I could readily have resigned all the other papers that it contained, I could not bring myself to give up the cock, which in former times had procured me so many enjoy- ments. I returned without delay on my steps, and sought, by every means, to recover my lost treasure. In vain did I go back ten miles, poking and creeping on all sides it was lost for ever. As night came on and I was exhausted, I was obliged to seek a place of repose. Soon afterwards I reached a solitary public-house, where I hoped to find what I wanted, with something to eat for money and fair words. The room was full of carriers, surrounded with thick clouds of smoke, who were terrifying one another with numerous tales of ghosts and murder. I took my place in a corner, got something to eat, and could not but express now and then, by a smile, my surprise at the credulity of these rude people. At the end of half an hour a tall elderly man, of a sallow complexion, came in, whom I took for a rich dealer in cattle, as he threw off his greatcoat, and discovered his girdle well loaded with money. He called, in a commanding voice, for something to eat, and was immediately served ; while a stuffed arm-chair, drawn out of the neighbouring chamber, showed that the people were disposed to respect him. As he at himself at his ease, he said, showing my letter-case, " I have found on the road a packet, which may perhaps be of value; and now ior ly their eager task. Between them sits A l.riglit-haired child, whose softly-glistening wings Quiver with joy, as ever and anon He, at their bidding, sweeps a chorded shell, And draws its music forth. Wondering, he looks For their approving smile, and quickly drinks (Apt pupil I) from their lips instruction sweet, Divine encouragement ! And this is LOVE TAUGHT BY THE GUACES how to point his darts With milder mercy and discreeter aim ; To stir the !>osom's lyre to harmony, AnJ waken strains of music from its chords They never gave before ! A CHOICE. Come look on this rose with its lofty stem, And these bright green leaves around it, And say if in Flora's diadem There shines a brighter and lovelier gem, Or did Bulbul err when his queen he crowu'd it? Methinks it blooms like a youthful bride In nature's and art's adorning, As she casts on high her looks of pride, The lowly around her scorning. Now look on this flower of heaven's own hue, This violet pensively drooping, As if 'twere afraid that any one knew The worth of its beautiful fragrance and hue, Bo low in the sward it is stooping. The creeping ant and the grasshopper Beneath its smiles rejoice ; But the butterfly sails through the summer air, And spies not its loveliness. Now which will ye choose for such choice is cure- Ail emblem in life to guide ye? Will ye have the proud crested Queen of Flowers, The i omp and the might of worldly powers, The honours of earth beside ye? Or will ye not lather be as this Sweet flower which smiles in a hidden spot, To scatter around you happiness, The bloom of love ami the breath of bliss, Where tuo lowly may feel though they see you not ? GEORGE QODKUEY CUNNINGHAM. THE ADOPTED CHILD. " Why wilt thou leave me, oh! gentle child? Thy home on the mountains is bleak ad wild, A straw-roofed cabin with lowly wall Mine is a fair and pillared hall, Where many an image of marble gleams. And the sunshine of picture for ever streams." " Oh ! green is the turf where my brothers play Through the long bright hours of the summer's day ; They find the rSd cup-moss where they climb, And they chase the bee o'er the scented thyme ; And the rocks where the heath-flower blooms they know Lady, kind lady, oh ! let me go !" "Content thee. boy, in iny bower to dwell! Here are sweet sounds which thou lovest well: Flutes on the air in the stilly noon Harps which the wandering breezes tune ; And the silvery wood-note of many a bird Whose voice was ne'er in thy mountains heard." " My mother sings at the twilight's fall, A song of the hills more sweet than all ; She sings it under her own green tree, To the babe half slumbering on her knee, I dreamt last night of that music low- Lady, kind lady, oh ! let me go 1" " Thy mother is gone from her carec to rest, She hath taken the babe to her quiet b east; Thou wouldst meet her footstep, my boy, no more, Nor hear her song at the cabin-door. Come thou with me to the vineyard nigh, And we'll pluck the grapes of the richest dye." " Is my mother gone from her home away ? But I know that my brothers are there at play ! I know they are gathering the foxglove's bell, And the long fern leaves by the sparkling well Or they launch their boats where the blue streams flow Lady, sweet lady, oh 1 let hue go 1" " Fair child ! thy brothers are wanderers now, They sport no more on the mountain's brow ; They have left the fern by the spring's green sidi. And the streams where the fairy barks were tried. Be thou at peace in thy brighter lot, For thy cabin home is a lonely spot." " Are they gone, all gone from the sunny hill?- - But the bird and theblue-ny roam o'er it still; And the red deer bound, in their gladness free, And the heath ia bent by the singing bee : And the waters leap and the fresh winds blow Lady, sweet lady, oh 1 let me go |" MY NAMESAKE. 241 MY NAMESAKE. BY BON GAULTIER. [Theodore Martin, born in Edinburgh, 16th Sep- tember, 1816. He was the joint-author, with Professor Aytoun, of the famous Bon Gaultier ballads and tales of which series lie was the originator. In his Life of Aytoim (Bluckwooil and Sons, 1867) he says: ''Some papeis of a humorous kind which I had publishe 1 uiuler the nnm de plume of Bon Ganltier, 1 had hit Aytoun's fancy; and when I proposed to go on with others in a similar vein, he fell readily into the plan, and agreed to assist in it. In this way a kind of Beaumont-and-Fletcher partnership commenced in a series of humorous papers which appeared in Tail's and Fraser's Magazines during the years 184'2, 1843, and 1844." The following tale was published in Franer's Magazine, December, 1812. Amongst Mr. Martin's valuable translations are: Goethe's Faust; Odes of Horace; Catullus; The Vda Nuova of Dante ; Aladdin, a Dramatic Poem, and Cnrrtggio, a. Tragedy, both by Oehlenschlaeger; and King Rene's Daughter, a, Danish lyrical drama by Heurik Hertz. Under the special sanction of Her Majesty the Queen, Mr. Martin wrote the "Life of II. R. H. the Prince Cumort." Why was I called Brown why John Brown? The cruelty of custom ! to fasten upon me such an every-day sort of name, solely because my ancestors had borne it contentedly for years. If it had only been Alfred Brown, or Frederick, or even Edward, the thing might have passed; but John Brown ! There is no getting over the commonplace of the cognomen. John Brown is everybody, anybody, nobody. Any one John Brown is quite as good as another: he belongs to a class so numerous that it is vain to attempt to individualize your conceptions of them. Had ever any man a distinct idea of a John Brown? No! There are at least some fifty of his acquaintances who bear the name, and these are all jumbled together in his mind in one vague and undefined chaos, "A mighty maze, and all without a plan." We are the nobodies of society. " John, my boy," said my father to me one day, " John, my boy, we are a pair of miser- able selfish dogs living here, a brace of bachelors, upon the fat of the land, with not a bit of womankind about us. This sort of thing will never do. One or other of us must get married, that's plain. I'm a thought too old for it; besides that my regard for your poor dear mother will hardly allow me ; so, John, my boy, the lot falls on you. What say you to the plan ? " 1 The name is taken from the prologue to the flwt book of Rabdais, VOL. I. "Oh, I'm perfectly agreeable, if you wish it; indeed, I rather like the plan than other- wise." "Indeed, you rather like the plan than otherwise ! You apathetic puppy, you should go into raptures about it. You don't know what a splendid thing it makes life to have a fine, affectionate, gentle-hearted creature for the wife of your bosom " ' The treasures of the deep are not so precious As are the concealed comforts of a man Lock'd up in woman's love.' The old boy who wrote that knew what was what." " Well, well, father, I bow to your experi- ence; and, since you wish it, shall look out for a better-half forthwith. But perhaps you can give me a hint where to direct my search?" I continued, seeing, from the old gentleman's looks, that he had some project on his mind, of which he was bursting to unburden it. " I think I can, indeed. A splendid girl!" "No? Who is she?" " Oh, I have tickled your curiosity, have I? It would serve you right, you cold-blooded rascal, not to tell you." " Nay, but "Well, well, I'll be merciful. So, then, what say you to the daughter of my very worthy friend David Smith of Edinburgh?" "Smith!" I exclaimed in dismay, thinking of the unhappy conjunction of the uncommon names of Brown and Smith. " Yes, sir, Miss Smith Miss Julia Smith. Have you any objection to the lady, you puppy, that you stand staring at me as if I were a hobgoblin?" Julia Smith ! The Julia did certainly set off the surname a little. It was not so bad, after all. " Objection, sir? None in the world. How could I, when the lady may be as beauti- Al as day, and as amiable as Mrs. Chapone, for anything I know?" " None of your sneering, you impudent dog, or I'll knock you down. The girl is only too good for you every way. If you haven't seen her, I have, and that's enough. But there is no time to be lost. I warrant me there are lots of young fellows ready to throw themselves at her feet, and you may be cut out before you can say Jack Robinson. So the sooner you see her the better. Smith and myself have talked over the matter together. He is anxious for the match, and you start therefore with the odds in your favour. I have written to him to expect you this week. So be off with you, my boy; and if you don't secure the prize, order 16 212 MY NAMESAKE. a new pair of garters, and hang yourself in them upon a day's notice." Expostulation was out of the question, and I therefore set about the execution of the old gentleman's project without delay. Indeed, it jumped more with my own inclination than I cared to tell him. I was heartily tired of a bachelor's life ; and being well to do, at least, if not rich, with the certainty of succeeding to my father's fortune, which was considerable, in perspective, marriage appeared to me to be at once a duty and a pleasure. In short, I had at that moment a favourable predisposi- tion towards the sex in general ; and as Miss Julia Smith had been selected as my bride, I was perfectly contented with the arrangement, provided always that the lady came up to my father's description of her, and had herself no objection to the match. I drove to Charing Cross, and was just in time to secure the only sleeping-berth in the Clarence steam-packet for Leith that was left untaken. I also engaged a seat in the omnibus for Blackwall, and, directing that I should be taken up at the end of Ludgate Street, I returned home to make the necessary arrangements for my expedi- tion. St. Paul's bell was intimating to the pub- lic that nine hours and a quarter had elapsed since noon, when, punctual to a minute, up Blattered the omnibus. On it rolled, giving no indication of an intention to stop ; but, by directing sundry excited gestures towards the conductor of the vehicle, I at length succeeded in getting him to pull up. " Full, sir, out and in," said the cad in a commiserating tone. "Full the deuce you are! Didn't I book myself for a place?" " Can't say, really. Ve've got our comple- ment, any vay." " Isn't the name of Brown on your list!" "Brown?" * "Yes, Mr. Brown Mr. John Brown." " Veil, vot of it? Ve've got two Browns in the buss, von on 'em a Mr. John Brown; took him up at Vellington Street, Strand. More brorens than guineas goin' vith us any day, I b'lieve you. Drive on, Bill, time's up!" and away dashed the omnibus, leaving me at the mercy of a dozen or two of cab-drivers, who by this time had seen my predicament, and had each deposited me in imagination in his own break-neck conveyance. In a moment of des- peration I consigned myself to the management of one of these gentlemen, and, shutting my eyes to danger, allowed him to drive me in his wn reckless and fanciful manner to the wharf at Blackwall. I was just in time and no more; which had merely the effect of enabling the cab-driver to charge me about five times as much as he was entitled to knowing well that I was not likely to stay behind to call him to account. Having seen my portmanteaus safely de- posited on deck, I proceeded to reconnoitre my sleeping berth. I had been extremely fortunate in my selection ; it was an upper berth, nearly amidships; and, congratulating myself on the "snug lying" I was likely to have during the voyage, I made my way to the cabin. The vessel was crowded to inconveni- ence ; every seat was occupied, and every man seemed to be vying with his neighbour in the consumption of cold beef, ham, ship-biscuit, mustard, Jamaica pickles, porter, and brandy - and-water. The heat was intolerable, and I went on deck to refresh myself with the cool breeze that played across the water, and there I sat watching the vessels that glided past us like so many ghosts as we descended the Thames, till all the other passengers had re- tired to rest. Cold and wearied I made my way down stairs, through avenues of sleepers distributed over every couch that could be made to do duty for a bed a duty which, if anything might be augured from the groans of dissatis- faction that rose up here and there through the saloon, they did very ill. "Poor devils!" I said to myself, letting off a little of that super- fluous sympathy which costs a man nothing, but is very comfortable to the conscience, nevertheless. Having with some' difficulty gained the sleeping cabin, I proceeded to un- dress by the dim light of a lamp that was fighting desperately against a predisposition to go out, and had begun to scramble into my berth', when, hark! a snore? No, it could not be! Another, a distinct, and most unmistak- able snore! I peered forward into the gloom; and, judge of my dismay, when, protruding from the bed-clothes, I beheld a head fringed with jet-black whiskers, and surmounted by a nightcap, the proprietor of which, undis- turbed by my approach, continued to doze away like a dormouse. Here was a pretty position to be in to be standing nearly in a state of nature, at three in the morning, in the sleeping-cabin of a steamboat, shut out of my berth, and not a corner to take refuge in anywhere! It would have provoked a saint, and yet I could not think of rousing the usurper of my bed, and turning him out by a process of summary ejectment. There might be some mistake ; but, then, No. 32, that cer- MY NAMESAKE. 243 tainly was my berth. I looked at my ticket to make sure. Yes, there it was, No. 32. Something must be done, however ; for I felt my pei-son growing chiller and chiller, and my teeth began to chatter like a fulling-mill. I whipped on my small-clothes, and, with my feet thrust into a stray pair of slippers, felt my way back through the cabin to the sanctum of the steward, to whom I detailed the hard- ships of my case. He turned up his book, and there, certainly, opposite No. 32, stood the name of Mr. John Brown. " That's me!" I exclaimed triumphantly, pointing to the place ; when my eyes, glancing along the page, alighted upon a succession of Mr. Browns, and near the bottom, among the "waifs " who had no berths provided for them, but were to take their chance of a sleeping-place anywhere, stood the name of a Mr. John Brown at full length. "I see how it is, sir; this Mr. Brown has got into your bed by mistake," said the pur- veyor of victuals. We must see what we can do for you." Saying this he accompanied me below, where he commenced a sort of custom-house inspec- tion of the intruder's travelling gear. "Just as I said, sir; there it is, Mr. John Brown!" he exclaimed, pointing to a brass plate upon a portmanteau bearing that interesting in- scription. Confound the fellow ! I could have sworn it was the same person that cut me out of my seat in the omnibus. It was provoking to a degree. But I was always conspicuous for good-nature, and even here it got the better of my wrath. He might have done it quite innocently; and, upon reflection how horribly uncomfortable it would be for him to be turned out of a warm bed in the middle of his first sleep, I told the steward if he could stow me away anywhere for the night, I shouldn't mind. There was a place that had apparently been at one time intended for a berth a cramped, dark, mouldy sort of place, where all the dirty table-cloths and towels, the accumulation of three or four voyages, were crammed ; and this, it occurred, might be turned into a recep- tacle for my wearied limbs. It was better than want, at all events; and, accordingly, after the "filthy dowlas" had been routed out, and a mattress and its appendages tumbled in, I followed the example of the latter articles, and deposited my person in the aperture. Such a hole did never man confide himself to, ex- cept with a view to suicide. Falstaff in the buck-basket inhaled not more unsavoury per- fumes ; Prometheus chained to the rock had a resting-place as soft. Anything like sleep was out of the question. Every roll of the vessel transfixed my person upon some acute angle, of which there were countless numbers, formed, Heaven and the ship's carpenter alone knew how; and just as I might be going pff into a doze, roll went the vessel, and bang went my haunch against an obtrusive angle of my bed, in a way that left me groaning for the next half-hour. Snore snore, went all the noses in the place, with a demoniac purpose to taunt my sleepless wretchedness. I distinctly heard that fellow Brown. There was a sort of gurgle in his note ; he was chuckling in his sleep at my discomfort. The impulse to rise and strangle him seized me more than once ; in- deed, how I restrained myself is to this moment a mystery to me. At length day broke, and heads, with night- caps, began to pop out from behind the cur- tains, and after looking round with no very definite purpose, popped in again. Some time after, the steward's boy entered the cabin, and husky voices were heard demanding what was the hour and whereabout the vessel was. It was by this time blowing pretty fresh, but as most of the passengers were as yet nearly as fresh as the breeze, they had the temerity to get up, and, one after another, disappeared up stairs. At last my namesake, Mr. John Brown, emerged from his dormitory and pro- ceeded to dress himself. I lay watching the villain with quiet disgust. He was a good- looking man of some eight-and-twenty, with a prominent nose and sharp dark eyes. His florid complexion bespoke him of that com- fortable, sanguine temperament which nothing can dash, but which, in all seasons and cir- cumstances, retains an easy and self-satisfied complacency. There was a desperate independ- ence about the man, of which a nervous per- son, like myself, would have given worlds to have had a sprinkling; and, besides all this, he had a look of freshness and vigour natural to one who has had a good night's rest, that to me, who had not shut an eye, was sufficiently aggravating. He was one of those people, too, the nuisances of steamboats, who take a long hour to fit themselves up for the day, who monopolize the dressing-place, splashing and spluttering, and gobble obble obbleing in one basin of water after another till the other passengers grow revolutionary and the under- steward shows symptoms of partial delirium. Although the breakfast-bell had sounded for some time, still did Mr. John Brown keep combing his whiskers, paring his nails, polish- ing his teeth, and adjusting a thousand et- 244 MY NAMESAKE. ceteraa about his person, whilst I lay frying with impatience to hear the clatter of cups overhead, and the everlasting" calls for herrings and buttered toast. My appetite was growing decidedly wolfish, and yet there stood that detestable namesake of mine, ducking and diving into the basin-stand, and swilling his face and neck with oceans of water as though he were never to have done. There was no hope for me, so I sunk back upon my pillow and resigned myself to my fate. The breeze had continued to freshen, and by the time my tormentor had finished his toilette, it was a matter of perfect indifference to me what he did, provided I were left to the calm indul- gence of my misery. The truth is, that I be- came extremely sick, and after this feeling had gone off it left a splitting headache behind to keep me company. One by one the inmates of the cabin, that had left it full of buoyancy and animation for the breakfast-table, re- turned pale, with ashy lips and uncertain steps. It was comfort to me to watch the reckless haste with which they tore off their garments and plunged into their berths, where they lay groaning in a manner that would have been pitiable but for its being ludicrous. I had grown utterly callous, and felt a savage pleasure in knowing that there were others as uncomfortable, or nearly so, as myself. The three days that followed were a blank in my existence. Hour succeeded hour and brought with it no relief. It was blowing great guns all the time; and what between the rolling, pitching, and swinging of the vessel, the straining of her timbers, the vibration of the engine, and the howling of the wind, we had about as much torture concentrated into a compact space as any merely human imagina- tion can conceive. But all aquatic, as well as all terrestrial things, even a rough sea-voyage, must come to an end, and so did ours, just as our coals were within a few shovelsfull of run- ning out, and sundry wags were beginning to sport forlorn jokes about immolating and cook- ing the steward for lack of other provisions. If anything could have compensated me for the misery I had undergone, it would have been our disembarkation at Newhaven on a bright sunshiny morning. The change which the Toyage had produced upon the passengers was miraculous, "a thing to dream of, not to tell." Pride, puppyism, and fine airs had all vanished, and the whole body were reduced to one common level of helplessness that seemed to say, "You may do with us whatever you please." Dandies, with dishevelled hair and disordered attire, drooped over the side of the steamer that carried us ashore, with visages mottled into a variety of tints as numerous ae the rainbow's, a purply-blue predominating. Blustering town-councillors and arrogant cock- neys fat, apoplectic men had sunk into their native smallness, and skulked anywhere. As for the ladies, their plight defies descrip- tion. Silks and satins crumpled and stained past recovery, bonnets bruised into the most fantastic shapes, parasols in fragments, and bandboxes falling to pieces, .were everywhere to be seen. Cheeks without the bloom, eyes robbed of the lustre that had wooed admiration when we started, and hair without glossiness, straggling unreproved across the so lately dazzling brow, left all devotees to the sex to mourn over what Byron calls "The beauty of the sick ladies (Cydo.de*)" But I soon found that I had something else to mourn over that concerned me more nearly, which was the loss of a small portmanteau, containing all my letters and private papers. Hurrying back to the steamer and pouncing upon the cabin-boy, I demanded of him if he had seen it. "Oh! you mean a square, narrow, brown leather thing?" inquired the urchin, in a voice of hateful indifference. "Yes, yes, exactly!" replied I. " With a handle over the top and a brass plate with the name of Mr. John Brown upon it?" "The very thing!" I exclaimed in rapture, thinking it was all safe. "And where is it?" "Oh! sir, the other gentleman's got it." " The other gentleman ! And who the devil is the other gentleman?" " Mr. John Brown, sir; him as got into your berth, you know. He went ashore when we cast anchor last night, and I remember seeing the steward take it on deck with the gentle- man's other things. " Confound that Mr. John Brown! he waa doomed to be my annoyance at every turning! He had kept me in hot water ever since I started, and the very first move he makes in Scotland puts me to a nonplus, for in that portmanteau were my letter to old Smith and all my other introductions. It was of no use fretting, however. He surely would never think of appropriating my property. I should hear of it at the steamboat-office, no doubt, next day; and in this hope I drove up to the Crown Hotel, where, after replenishing the vacancy which the fast of the last three days had occa- sioned, and putting myself into presentable attire, I called for a directory, to search for MY NAMESAKE. 245 the whereabouts of my prospective father-in- law, of which I knew no more than the man in the moon, having trusted to the direction upon my letter for that information. Among the interminable list of Smiths I found, at least, a score of David Smiths. One of these lived in Castle Street. "Castle Street, that is the place," said I, repeating the name, till I worked myself into the belief that I had heard it mentioned before as the residence of my father's friend. For Castle Street, accord- ingly, I made, and there found the house, which, to my discomfiture, was shut up. The brass plate was the colour of bronze, not hav- ing been scoured for weeks, and I was just able to decipher the name of Mr. David Smith upon it. A written placard in one of the windows intimated that letters and parcels were to be left at Mr. M'Grugar's, solicitor, 103 Queen Street, to whose chambers I pro- ceeded to inquire whither Mr. Smith and his daughter had emigrated. Mr. M'Grugar was not at home, and I was ushered into a room where three of his clerks were seated. A hurried and scuffling sound, as if of desk-lids being slammed down, and of people jumping up upon stools, was heard as I approached the door, and when I entered, the youthful scriveners were driving their quills vehemently across the paper before them as if they were bent upon making a fortune at threepence a page. " Mr. M'Grugar is not at home, I believe?" said I. "No, sir, he is not. He is in Fifeshire at present on business of Lord Chowderhead's. Did you wish to see him particularly?" replied a raffish-looking youngster, with a dirty shirt and a breath that savoured strongly of "half- and-half," who looked altogether very much as if he had not been in bed the night before. " Oh, no! nothing particular. Perhaps you can tell me what part of the country Mr. Smith of Castle Street is gone to?" "Thomson, do you know where old Smith is just now?" said the youth in the foul linen to another youth with an immense shock of red hair and great owlish eyes, with which he had been staring at me over the top of the desk ever since I entered. "Od, I'm thinking he'll be some wye (way) doon about Ayrshire ! He gangs there files (at times) in the summer time," returned Thomson in a strong Banffshire accent. "Wasn't his last letter dated from Jed- burgh?" broke in a shabby-looking, smoke- dried piece of humanity, who had hitherto been amusing himself with biting his nails. "Ah, you're right; so it was," said the first speaker, turning to me once more. " I be- lieve, sir, he is either in Roxburghshire or Ayrshire at present, and any letter addressed to him at either of these places will be sure to find him." This was definite information with a ven- geance. Mr. M'Grugar's clerks, it was plain, knew as much about Mr. Smith's movements as they knew about law, so I inquired when their master was to return to town, and learn- ing that this would not be till the end of the week, I left his chambers, resolving to make the most of my time in examining the locali- ties of modern Athens and its environs till his return. [In an elegantly furnished drawing-room, that same evening, sat an old gentleman and his daughter. The lady was seated at the piano, and sang in a clear and most tuneful voice from a volume of Scottish melodies, while the old gentleman lay back in his easy chair, with eyes running over with tears of quiet joy, as he listened to the plaintive strains to which the beloved notes of his daughter's voice gave thrilling expression. The door opened, and the servant's announcement of "Mr. Brown" was followed by the entrance of that gentleman, who bowed gracefully to a fire-screen, which in the haze of twilight he mistook for the owner of the house. " My dear sir," said the old gentleman, starting forward and grasping him warmly by the hand, " I am very glad to see you very glad, indeed. Julia, my dear, this is Mr. Brown that I mentioned to you. Mr. Brown, my daughter." Mr. Brown bowed again and mumbled the usual quantity of inarticulate nothings, and Miss Julia curtsied and blushed a great deal more than anybody in the room fancied. "And when did you come to town? We have been looking for you for some days," continued the old gentleman. The deuce you have! thought Mr. Brown, but he only answered, "We had a very tedious passage : left London on Wednesday, and only got here this morning. Four days of most intolerable bumping about. I hoped to have been here on Friday night, and am a good deal annoyed at the detention, as my stay will be proportionally curtailed. I must start again, on Saturday next." " Pooh, pooh, nonsense! We shan't let you off for a month to come. Shall we, Julia?" " Oh, you are too kind! " replied Mr. Brown, wondering what on earth all this cordiality meant. "I have a letter for you here," ha 246 MY NAMESAKE. continued, drawing one from his pocket, and presenting it to the old gentleman. "Tut, tut! never mind the letter! The usual thing, I suppose. I'll take it all for granted, and take you as I find you. The son of my old friend Brown needs no introduc- tion. And how is the old gentleman? Hale and lively, eh? The same jolly fellow as ever, I promise you. Always the life and soul of his friends ever since 1 knew him, and that's not yesterday ! " And so on the old gentleman rattled, overwhelming his visitor with ques- tions which, to that individual's great relief, he generally answered for himself. There is something about the twilight that tends amazingly to sociality; and before Mr. Brown had sat an hour, or, as it seemed to him, half that space, he felt as much at his ease with his new acquaintances as if he had known them for years. The old gentleman was a frank, chatty, warm-hearted kind soul ; and his daughter's soft and gentle voice, "that excellent thing in woman," had produced an impression upon their guest, to which he will- ingly resigned himself. Twilight had melted into darkness when he rose to depart. " Come, come!" said the old gentleman, "it is not Scotch hospitality to let friend's bairns off in that way. Julia, dear, ring the bell and see if they are getting supper for us. Keep your seat, sir, and my daughter shall let you hear what we barbarians of the north can do in the musical way, while the lassie's getting the gas lighted. Something short and sweet, Julia, there's a dear." Having seated herself once more at the piano, the young lady ran over the chords with a skilful touch, and then broke into a symphony of a wild and mournful character, which aptly ushered in the melody to which she sang the following words: SONO. " Look tip, look up, my bonny May, And cheer me wi' your winsome e'e ! Though I look sad, and little say, Yet dinna hide your smiles frae me. " The sunny rays on winter days, Although they canna melt the snaw, Yet glad creation wi' their blaze. And chase the settled gloom awa'. *'And my cauld heart that's frozen o'er, And has nae joyanoe o' its ain, Must from another's glee implore A smile to light its weary pain. "Look up, look up, my bonny May, And cheer me wi' your winsome e'e ! My thoughts are wandering far away, I fain would fix them all on thee." They are hazardous things these twilight introductions. A man's heart may be gone before he knows where he is. The calmness of the hour, spreading its serenity over the feel- ings, and preparing them for the finest impres- sions, the half-murmured tones, and the unre- serve of communication which is imperceptibly produced by the absence of the garish light, which, with its bold and obtrusive glare, always seems to operate as a curb upon our impulses, have a strange effect in quickening the imagi- nation and affections. In such a situation the presence of beauty is felt it needs not to be seen. An unerring instinct tells a man that the voice beside him is not more sweet than the flush of the cheek is beautiful, and the light of the eyes which the dimness of the hour enshrouds soft and soul-subduing. So was it with Mr. Brown, who was perfectly prepared for the charms which the light of the room to which his fair hostess conducted him revealed. As he gazed on her he felt those resolutions of celibacy with which young men are in the habit of deluding themselves oozing, like Bob Acre's courage, from his fingers' ends even' minute. Meanwhile he sat trifling with a piece of cold salmon, and affecting to bestow the most earnest attention upon the old gentleman's conversation, while, in fact, he was wandering in dreams, in which the old gentleman's daughter was the principal feature. "My dear sir," said his host, "you make no way with that bit of grilse. Why, you sit nibbling away at it for all the world like that horrid woman in the Arabian Nights, the Ghool, that picked grains of rice with a needle when other folks were laying in a hearty meal, and then stole off to the churchyard to sup on human flesh, instead of staying at home with her husband and family like a decent Moslem. Mind you, we don't allow any of these pranks here. The watchman would be down upon you in a twinkling ; so take your supper like the rest of us, and don't trust to picking a bone in the West Kirk or the Calton on your way home." "Trust me, I'm getting on famously," re- plied Mr. Brown; and, bending over his plate, he began to work away with his fork as if for very life. " Famously! infamously, you mean! If you don't get on any better than you're doing, I'll set you down for sea-sick, or brain-sick, or love-sick, and then Heaven pity you!" " Oh, my dear sir, make yourself easy ! Sea- sick I have been, as who has not ? according to the saying of the poet 'oh, si sic omnia!' But hitherto I am not conscious of being MY NAMESAKE. 247 squeamish in either of the other ways; and, to prove to you that I am neither damaged in brain nor heart, I mean to make an attack upon your whisky-toddy forthwith, which all lovers and madmen have forsworn time out of mind. " "Ay, ay, that's all very true, but I hardly know whether one who has made such a poor hand at the platter should have the freedom of the cup. We can't let you have the nectar if you won't patronize the ambrosia. What do you say, Julia? Do you think we may trust Mr. Brown with a tumbler to himself?" "If he promises first to make it strong enough, not otherwise." " I accept the conditions, and you shall be the judge," replied Brown, and proceeded to mix a tumbler of that compound fluid which, in Scotland, is beloved of the men, and has been said to "charm all womankind." The lady pronounced it "pretty well, considering," and her father said he had hopes they would make something of their guest after all. The conversation then turned into an easy and cheerful strain about men, manners, books, and things in general, and Mr. Brown felt strongly impressed with the conviction that he had never enjoyed himself so much anywhere in his life before. When he rose to depart it did not require much solicitation to induce him to abandon his intention of leaving Edin- burgh at the end of the week. There were so many people to see, so many places to visit, that he began to think it would be perfectly impossible to get through them all by that time. He was urgently pressed by his host to make head-quarters of his house during his stay in Edinburgh, and with a warmth which alone would have made it impossible for Mr. Brown to refuse it; but the liking which he had conceived for the old gentleman, and the still warmer feeling which he entertained towards his daughter, rendered the proposal a most acceptable one. He returned home to his h6tel in high spirits, and, tumbling into bed, dreamed all night of a parish priest and the Elysian fields. ] Eight or ten days had elapsed since my arrival in Edinburgh, and still I had obtained no tidings of my portmanteau. It had not made its appearance at the steam-packet office; and accordingly I had set it down for lost, and my namesake, Mr. John Brown, for a member of the swell mob. Trusting to obtain the requisite information from Mr. M'Grugar, I waited patiently for that worthy's return. At the expiry of a week I called at his chambers, when I had the pleasure of another interview with the young gentleman in the foul linen, in which I learned that Mr. M'Grugar had re- turned, but was off again to Forfarshire to collect Sir Somebody Something's rents. My friend had, of course, as a point of principle, forgot to make any inquiries of him regarding Mr. Smith; and I was, therefore, just as wise on that point as before. Mr. M'Grugar, how- ever, was to be back in a day or two, and a day or two I waited accordingly. I called again and again, but the mysterious Mr. M'Grugar was always either in Perthshire, or Aberdeenshire, or in the isle of Sky, called thither on particular business, and I had well- nigh given up all prospect of his return as hopeless. I had surveyed the streets of Edin- burgh like a police-inspector; visited the lib- raries and museums till the attendants, I saw, began to eye me with suspicion ; stared from the Calton Hill till I was tired, and grown familiar to the box-keeper at the theatre; in short, I had exhausted all the sources of amusement which the northern metropolis af- fords, and felt a good deal puzzled how to dispose of myself with any sort of comfort for a few days more. I had resolved to wait that time to see if Mr. M'Grugar would return, as I did not like to go back to London just as I had left it. To kill the time, therefore, I made a trip into the Highlands, and returned to my old quarters in the Crown Hotel about a week after. "What's this?" said I to the waiter the morning after my return, as he presented me with a piece of paper folded lengthways, in that fashion which, to an observant mind, too surely bespeaks the presence of a tradesman's bill. " "To a double-breasted coat, claret - colourcd best mill cloth, 4, 14s. 6d. Brass buttons for do. 5s. To a white satin vest, fancy sprig, rolling collar, 1, 15s.' Why, what in the name of all the tailors is this? There must be some mistake. These things were never ordered by me. Is there anybody waiting?" " Yez, zir. The man that brought it's be- low." " Send him up to me." "Yez, zir," replied the waiter, and dived out of the apartment. "'A white satin vest, fancy sprig, rolling collar! To pair trousers, best Saxony black, 2, 2s. ; straps for do. Is!' What is the mean- ing of all this?" I inquired of an over-dressed clothescreen who had just shuffled into the room, and was bowing to me from the door with a pitiable smirk upon its face. " It's our small account, sir took the liberty 248 MY NAMESAKE. heavy payments to-day, sir feel greatly obliged;" and having unburdened itself oi this announcement, the clothescreen drew itself up, and drew down at the same time a pale blue satin vest with which its waist was en- circled. "I see it is an account, sir, but what have I to do with it? You don't expect me to pay this, do you?" "Heavy payments to-day, sir feel greatly obliged." " Heavy payments be hanged! This ia no concern of mine. Who ordered these things?" "Who ordered?" tremulously retorted the screen. "Why, sir, you or-dered them your- self. Mr. Brown, I believe, sir Mr. John Brown. You'll see it at the top of our little bill." "Well, sir, and what of that? Mr. John Brown I certainly do see at the top of this account, but that doesn't prove it to be mine. I should think I'm not the only person of that name in the world, am I?" "Certainly not, sir; oh, no, sir, I should think not! but you certainly ordered these articles." " I order them! When, where, and how?" "Last week, sir. Our Mr. Stitchells took your measure. You remember you said you wanted them in a particular hurry, and we had to work extra hours to get them done. They were sent home on Friday last, and when we sent for payment next day, as you gave orders, you had le-ft town." " There must be some mistake here. I never ordered these things, and, what's more, I never got them. As to paying for them, therefore, it's quite out of the question," I said, returning the clothescreen its document. " But, sir " remonstrated the screen. "Will you walk out?" I exclaimed, point- ing anxiously with the index finger of my right hand towards the door, and glancing sig- nificantly at the window at the same time. " But, I assure you, sir " "Will you go?" " Very sorry, sir, but we must take steps to recover." " Take what steps you like, but step out at once!" and I slammed the door in the clothe- screen's face with such vivacity as to upset it. I heard it muttering denunciations as it picked itself up and shuffled along the passage, while I, chafing with impatience, returned to the breakfast-table, and, pouring the contents of the teapot into the slop-basin, sweetened them with two pats of butter, poured some Harvev's sauce over the whole by way of cream, and only discovered the mistake when the first mouthful had passed irrecoverably over my throat. I was upset for the day, and lay idly on the sofa revolving with considerable earnest- ness all the different methods of suicide which I had ever heard of. I had just come to the conclusion that suffocation by the smoke of charcoal was the neatest, when I was disturbed by the entrance of a thin weazon-faced man, with a hard stony voice, arrayed in a suit of faded black, very white in the seams, and very seamy at the buttons. He was accompanied by a stout, flabby-cheeked individual, smelling strongly of snuff, stale ale, and rancid cheese, and habited in a suit of indescribable garments, over which was a shaggy pea-jacket not any the better for the wear. This person had on a broad-brimmed hat, unctuous and shining round the edges, and he carried a most seeming- lethal stick for his own individual security, and the annoyance of her majesty's lieges. Looming in perspective followed two wholly unaccountable characters, very dirty, very shabby, and very drunk. These gentlemen were also provided with sticks, upon which they rested their right arms in a very impres- sive manner. "Good morning, gentlemen," exclaimed I, sitting up on the sofa, and surveying this quar- tette of curiosities with no slight surprise, "Your servant, sir," said the man with the petrified voice. " Sorry to trouble you, but business and pleasure sometimes draw cross- ways, you know," and the wretch grinned at his own facetiousness. I asked the cause of this unexpected visit. " I believe, sir, you object to paying this account," said he of the stony voice, showing me the tailor's bill of the morning. " Unquestionably I do. It is none of mine, and pay it I certainly shall not ! " " I am sorry for that, because I always pre- fer settling these matters amicably. I think, Mr. Brown, you'd better pay it at once, and have done with it," said the brute in a confi- dential tone. "And pray who is it I am indebted to for this advice?" "You will find my name there, sir," said stony voice, coughing, as he handed me a card all brown and dirty about the edges, with the name of Mr. Brail Weazil, solicitor, upon it. "Then, Mr. Weazil, you will oblige me by keeping your own breath to cool your own porridge, as you say in Scotland, for I do not think your advice is very likely to be followed in the present instance." " Very well, Mr. Brown, my instruction! MY NAMESAKE. 249 are peremptory, and I must proceed as law directs as law directs, Mr. Brown. Mes- sengers, do your duty." Upon this the gentleman in the pea-coat ad- vanced, and produced a warrant to arrest Mr. John Brown, now or formerly residing in the Crown Hotel, Edinburgh, or elsewhere in Scot- land, as in meditations fugce, at the instance of Messrs. Snipwell and Cabbitch, tailors and clothiers in Edinburgh, to whom the said John Brown was said to be indebted, resting, and owing the sum of 12, 13s. llfr/. Ever since I was able to know a "hawk from a hernshaw," I have had a horror of the law. I was bred to it originally, but left the profession in disgust; and as I now cast my eyes over the warrant, grim visions of bonds of caution judicio slsti, followed up by replies and duplies innumer- able, rose up before my mental optics, and I resolved to pay the rascals and have done with them at once, rather than be pestered with an action in which it was ten chances to 6'ne they would ultimately succeed. I therefore paid the sum under protest, and bowed Mr. Brail Weazil and his friends out in as summary a manner as possible, and with good reason, for, as it was, I had to burn pastiles in the room for the rest of the day to dispel the odour they had left behind them. That same night I was sitting in the theatre when my attention was arrested by the en- trance at the opposite box of a young lady of most fascinating appearance, accompanied by a gentleman, in whom I thought I recognized my namesake who had haunted me ever since I left London. The lady was, I think, one of the loveliest creatures I ever beheld. She had a complexion clear and glowing, a full and finely-rounded brow, shaded with hair dark and glossy as the raven's wing, a mouth around which a thousand graces hovered, and rich dark eyes, bright, but with a softness in their lustre. When she turned them full upon her companion, and smiled through them upon him with an expression of confidence and affec- tion, oh! how I envied till I almost hated him. How it happened the reader may guess, but when the curtain dropped I found I had a very vague recollection of what had passed on the stage, and a very vivid impression with regard to the lady in the opposite box. By this time, too, I was fully satisfied that the gentleman beside her was no other than my namesake ; and as this was an opportunity for getting scent of my missing portmanteau which was not to be lost, I sent the box-keeper to him with my card, and requested a few mo- ments' conversation. " My dear sir," he exclaimed, after we had interchanged the usual civilities, " I hope you got your portmanteau again quite safe. I can assure you I was excessively annoyed at the mistake. " " That was the very thing I wished to see you about. I have not seen it to this hour, and am horribly put about for want of it." " Bless me! you don't say so. Why, I sent it to the ofiice the very day I landed, thinking you would be sure to ask for it there." " And so I have, but the people tell me they have seen nothing of it." "The deuce they do! the fellow I sent with it must have made some blunder. I daresay, now, he'll have taken it to the wrong ofiice. If these fellows can make a mistake, they're sure to do so. Have you inquired at the other company's office?" " No, I have not ; and egad! I shouldn't be at all surprised if you were right in your conjecture. I shall inquire to-morrow, cer- tainly." " Do, like a good fellow, and let me know. You'll find my address there," he continued, handing me his card; "or stay where do you put up?" I told him. "At the Crown? That's odd. Why, I put up there. Well, I'll look in upon you, and hear how you have succeeded. A lady, you see, is in the case, and then, you know " All other things, of course, give place." "Bye, bye. Au revoir." And my friend hurried back to his enviable seat, while I re- turned to mine, and eyed him with very much the same class of emotions as may be supposed to have possessed the common enemy of man as he watched the connubial bliss of the first husband and wife of whom we have any record. "Put up at the Crown!" thought I, as I walked home. He it was, then, whose tailor's bill I had paid. I should try to get that out of him at all events. Next morning I proceeded to the ofiice of the other steam-packet company, and there, sure enough, my portmanteau was brought to light from under a huge pile of packages of all descriptions, battered, bruised, and broken. My letters were all safe, however, and that was the great point. There, among others, lay the important document, the letter to my father-in-law that was to be, with the address staring me in the face, "David Smith, Esq., No. North Castle Street." North Castle Street! and I had been hunting for the last three weeks after a Mr. David Smith of South Castle Street. I wished my namesake very 250 MY NAMESAKE. especially at the bottom of the sea, and the waiter who had miscarried my portmanteau skewered with half-a-dozen of his own cork- screws. What other extravagances I may have committed in the first gush of my spleen it is hard to say, but I have a distinct recollection of kicking Boots out of the room, and dashing my hat to pulp against the bedpost, in the course of dressing previous to making a call upon the veritable Mr. David Smith, whom I found seated very comfortably in his library reading. When the servant announced my name, he rose, and beckoned me to a seat with rather a bewildered air. "Mr. John Brown, I think you said?" "Yes, the same, son of your old friend of Dorset Square, who has armed me with these credentials to you," I replied, handing him the letter. He took it, and, as he read, I never saw a man look so thoroughly perplexed in my life. Every now and then he cast a glance at me over the top of it, and then resumed the per- usal, which he seemed desirous to protract as much as possible. "Dear me, this is extremely awkward extremely awkward, indeed. A most unac- countable circumstance!" muttered the old gentleman in a sort of reverie. "And how was your father when you left him? Well, I hope? Bless my soul, what is to be done? How it could have happened, I really cannot comprehend." Here the old gentleman rung the bell, and gave some instructions to the servant, which I could not hear. He then entered into con- versation with me, but in a manner so ab- stracted and embarrassed, that I was convinced there was a screw loose somewhere. Shortly afterwards a lady and gentleman entered the room, who to my astonishment turned out to be my namesake and the lady with whom I had seen him the night before. "Julia, my dear, there has been some very awkward mistake here. I'm afraid you've married the wrong man!" "Father!" exclaimed the lady in surprise. "Sir!" exclaimed my namesake in wrath. " The devil! " exclaimed I, feeling very much as if I were shut up in a vapour-bath. "Are you," continued Mr. Smith, turning to my namesake, "not Mr. John Brown, son of Mr. John Brown, Dorset Square, London?" " Not 1 ; I am Mr. John Brown, indeed, but my father is Henry Brown, of Thistlecrop Manor, Bucks." "And who was the letter from, you brought me?" "Old Tom Johnson, of Johnson, Thomson, G-ibson, and Co., Lombard Street, who was kind enough, knowing I had no acquaintances in Edinburgh, to give me one to you." "Confound my stupid old head! I see it all I see it all. This all conies of my not looking at that letter. I was expecting my friend here at the time, and took you for him." " I am selfish enough to say," replied my double, "that I cannot regret the mistake, since it has gained me this hand, and I hope your friendship." " But it is so odd that you should have come the very day we were expecting Mr. Brown here," said old Smith, who evidently felt extremely at a loss what to say. "A most remarkable coincidence!" " Very remarkable indeed," said I, feeling that it was necessary to relieve all parties from their embarrassment by putting the best face on the matter possibl*. "Very remarkable, indeed, considering what an uncommon name ours is, that two of us should have crossed each other in this way. However, I am used to these little contretems. I have twice figured in the police reports as the perpetrator of shocking murders ; been found drowned in the Regent's Canal some six times, with a love- sonnet, a tooth-pick, and fourpence-halfpenny in my pocket; have eloped thrice with Chancery wards, and made various desperate attempts upon her Majesty's person, yet here I am as quiet and well-behaved a young man as ever bore the name of Mr. John Brown. My namesake here has cost me a good deal of bother and annoyance one way or another; and oh! unkindest cut of all, he has been before- hand with me in securing a charming wife. However, it is all the chance of war, and he shall have a quittance from me in full, pro- vided he reimburses me for this tailor's bill, which I have had to settle for him." "My marriage suit, by all that's absurd! And you paid this?" "Your marriage-suit, was it? Now posi- tively this is too bad. It is adding insult to injury. Not to be content with robbing me of my intended, but absolutely to nu&e me pay for the clothes you wedded her in. Flesh and blood could not bear it." " Since you have given up so much already, perhaps you will surrender this point too, for my sake!" said Mrs. Brown. "I see you will." There was no resisting that smile. I gave in, and that evening saw us all seated in a friendly circle, laughing heartily over my mis- WINSTANLEY. adventures. Brown and I have been good friends ever since. He is the happiest of Benedicts, and I am still a bachelor. Will any benevolent female take compassion on JOHN BKOWN? WINSTANLEY. A BALLAD. [Jean Ingelow is a native of Ipswich. In 1863 her first volume of poems appeared ; and the work possessed so much matured poetic power, that it won for her at once a foremost place amongst our living poets. The Story of Dnom, another volume of poems, increased and established the reputation she had already won. In America, her poems are said to be even mure popular than in England. She has also written several interest- ing prose works, notably ttudies for Stories; A Sister's By-Hours; and Stories told ti> a Child. The following quaint and pathetic ballad is from the volume contain- ing the Stury of Doom (Longmans and Co., London).] THE APOLOGY. Quoth the cedar to the reeds and rushes, '* Water-grass, you know not what I do; Know not of my storms, nor of my hushes, And I know not you." Quoth the reeds and rushes, " Wind! O waken! Breathe, O wind, and set our answer free, For we have no voice, of you, forsaken, , For the cedar-tree," Quoth the earth at midnight to the ocean, ' ' Wilderness of water, lost to view, Nought you are to me but sounds of motion; I am nought to you." Quoth the ocean, "Dawn! O fairest, clearest^ Touch me with thy golden fingers bland; For I have no smile till thou appearest For the lovely land."' Quoth the hero dying, whelmed in glory, "Many blame me, few have understood; Ah, my folk, to you I leave a story Make its meaning good." Quoth the folk, "Sing, poet! teach us. prove us; Surely we shall learn the meaning then: Wound us with a pain divine, O move us, For this man of men." Winstanley's deed, you kindly folk, With it I fill my lay, And a nobler man ne'er walk'd the world, Let his name be what it may. The good ship Snowdrop tarried long, Up at the vane look'd he; "Belike," he said, for the wind had dropp'd, "She lieth becalm'd at sea." The lovely ladies flock'd within, And still would each one say, "Good inercer, be the ships come up?" But still he answered "Nay." Then stepp'd two mariners down the street, With looks of grief and fear : "Now, if Winstanley be your name, We bring you evil cheer ! ' ' For the good ship Snoiodrop struck she struck On the rock the Eddystone, And down she went with threescore men, We two being left alone. "Down in the deep, with freight and crew, Past any help she lies, And never a ba!e has come to shore Of all thy merchandise." "For cloth o' gold and comely frieze," Winstanley said, and sigh'd, "For velvet coif, or costly coat, They fathoms deep may bide. "O thou brave skipper, blithe and kind, O mariners bold and true, Sorry at heart, right sorry am I, A-thinking of yours and you. "Many long days Winstanley's breast Shall feel a weight within, For a waft of wind he shall be 'fear'd And trading count but sin. "To him no more it shall be joy To pace the cheerful town, And see the lovely ladies gay Step on in velvet gown." The Snowdrop sank at Lammas tide, All under the yeasty spray; On Christmas Eve the bri^ Content Was also cast away. He little thought o' New Year's night, So jolly as he sat then, While drank the toast and praised the roast The round-faced aldermen, While serving lads ran to and fro, Pouring the ruby wine, And jellies trembled on the board, And towering pasties fine, 252 WINSTANLEY. While loud huzzas ran up the roof Till the lamps did rock o'erhead. And holly boughs from rafters hung Dropp'd down their berries red, He little thought on Plymouth Hoe, With every rising tide, How the wave wash'd in his sailor lads, And laid them side by side. There stepp'd a stranger to the board: "Xow, stranger, who be ye?" He look'd to right, he look'd to left, And "Rest you merry," quoth he; "For you did not see the brig go down, Or ever a storm had blown; For you did not see the white wave rear At the rock the Eddystone. "She drave at the rock with sternsails set; Crash went the masts in twain; She staggor'd back with her mortal blow, Then leap'd at it again. "There rose a great cry, bitter and strong, The misty moon look'd out ! And the water swarmed with seamen's heads, And the wreck was strew'd about. "I saw her mainsail lash the sea As I clung to the rock alone; Then she heeled over, and down she went, And sank like any stone. "She was a fair ship, but all's one! For nought could bide the shock." '.'I will take horse," Winstanley said, "And see this deadly rock." "For never again shall barque o' mine Sail over the windy sea, Unless, by the blessing of God, for this Be found a remedy." Winstanley rode to Plymouth town All in the sleet and the snow, And he looked around on shore and sound As he stood on Plymouth Hoe. Till a pillar of spray rose far away, And shot up its stately head, Eear'd and fell over, and rear'd again : " 'Tis the rock ! the rock ! " he said. Straight to the mayor he took his way, "Good Master IVHyor," quoth he, " I am a mercer of London town, And owner of vessels three, "But for your rock of dark renown, I had five to track the main." "You are one of many," the old mayor said, "That on the rock complain. "An ill rock, mercer! your words ring right, Well with my thoughts they chime. For my two sons to the world to come It sent before their time." "Lend me a lighter, good Master Mayor, And a score of shipwrights free, For I think to raise a lantern tower On this rock o' destiny." The old mayor laugh'd, but sigh'd also; "Ah, youth," quoth he, "is rash; Sooner, young man, thou'lt root it out From the sea that doth it lash. "Who sails too near its jagged teeth, He shall have evil lot; For the calmest seas that tumble there Froth like a boiling pot. "And the heavier seas few look on nigh, But straight they lay him dead; A seventy-gunship, sir ! they'll shoot Higher than her mast-head. "O, beacons sighted in the dark, They are right welcome things, And pitchpots flaming on the shore Show fair as angel wings. "Hast gold in hand? then light the land, It 'longs to thee and me; But let alone the deadly rock In God Almighty's sea." Yet said he, "Nay I must away, On the rock to set my feet; My debts are paid, my will I made, Or ever I did thee greet. "If I must die, then let me die By the rock, and not elsewhere; If I may live, O let me live To mount my lighthouse stair." The old mayor look'd him in the face, And answered : " Have thy way; Thy heart is stout, as if round about It was braced with an iron stay : "Have thy will, mercer! choose thy men, Put off from the storm-rid shore; God with thee be, or I shall see Thy face and theirs no more." WINSTANLEY. 253 Heavily plunged the breaking wave, And foam flew up the lea, Morning and even the drifted snow Fell into the dark gray sea. Winstanley chose him men and gear; He said, "My time I waste," For the seas ran seething up the shore, And the wrack drave on in haste. But twenty days he waited and more, Pacing the strand alone, Or ever he set his manly foot On the rock the Eddystone. Then he and the sea began their strife, And work'd with power and might : Whatever the man rear'd up by day The sea broke down by night. He wrought at ebb with bar and beam, He sail'd to shore at flow; And at his side, by that same tide, Came bar and beam alsd. "Give in, give in," the old mayor cried, "Or thou wilt rue the day." "Yonder he goes," the townsfolk sigh'd, "But the rock will have its way. "For all his looks that are so stout, And his speeches brave and fair, He may wait on the wind, wait on the wave, But he'll build no lighthouse there." In fine weather and foul weather The rock his arts did flout. Through the long days and the short days, Till all that year ran out. With fine weather and foul weather Another year came hi : "To take his wage," the workmen said, "We almost count a sin." Now March was gone, came April in, And a sea-fog settled down, And forth sail'd he on a glassy sea, He sail'd from Plymouth town. With men and stores he put to sea, As he was wont to do; They show'd in the fog like ghosts full faint A ghostly craft and crew. And the sea-fog lay and wax'd alway, For a long eight days and more; "God help our men," quoth the women then; For they bide long from shore." They paced the Hoe in doubt and dread : "Where may our mariners be?" But the brooding fog lay soft as down Over the quiet sea. A Scottish schooner made the port, The thirteenth day at e'en : "As I am a man," the captain cried, "A strange sight I have seen: "And a strange sound heard, my masters all, At sea, in the fog, and the rain, Like shipwrights' hammers tapping low, Then loud, then low again. "And a stately house one instant show'd, Through a rift, on the vessel's lee; What manner of creatures may be those That build upon the sea?" Then sigh'd the folk, "The Lord be praised!" And they flock'd to the shore amain; All over the Hoe that livelong night, Many stood out in the rain. It ceased, and the red sun rear'd his head, And the rolling fog did flee; And, lo ! in the offing faint and far Winstanley's house at sea ! In fair weather with mirth and cheer The stately tower uprose; In foul weather, with hunger and cold, They were content to close; Till up the stair Winstanley went, To fire the wick afar; And Plymouth in the silent night Look'd out, and saw her star. Winstanley set his foot ashore : Said he, "My work is done; 1 hold it strong to last as long As aught beneath the sun. "But if it fail, as fail it may, Borne down with ruin and rout, Another than I shall rear it high, And brace the girders stout. "A better than I shall rear it high, For now the way is plain, And tho' I were dead," Winstanley said, "The light would shine again, "Yet, were I fain still to remain, Watch in my tower to keep, And tend my light in the stormiest night That ever did move the deep; 254 THE COUNTERPARTS. "And if it stood, why then 't were good, Amid their tremulous stirs, To count each stroke when the mad waves broke, For cheers of mariaers, " But if it fell, then this were well, That I should with it fall; Since, for my part, I have built my heart In the courses of its wall. *'Ay! I were fain, long to remain, Watch in my tower to keep, And tend my light iu the stormiest night That ever did move the deep." With that Winstanley went his way, And left the rock renowned, And summer and winter his pilot star Hung bright o'er Plymouth Sound. But it fell out, fell out at last, That he would put to sea, To scan once more his lighthouse tower On the rock o' destiny. And the winds woke, and the storm broke, And wrecks came plunging in; None in the town that night lay down Or sleep or rest to win. The great mad waves were rolling graves, And each flung up its dead; The seething flow was white below And black the sky o'erhead. And when the dawn, the dull, gray dawn, Broke on the trembling town, And men look'd south to the harbour mouth, The lighthouse tower was down. Down in the deep where he doth sleep Who made it shine afar, And then in the night that drown'd its light, Set, with his pilot star. Many fair tombs in the glorious glooms At Westminster they show; The brave and the great lie there in state : Winstanley Iwth low. Winstanley's lighthouse of wood was erected 1696- 1700, and was destroyed in 1703. Another lighthouse of wood, with a stone base, was built between 1706 and 1709, and was burned in 1755. The present lighthouse, of Portland stone and granite, was constructed by Mr. Smeatou iu 1757-59. THE COUNTERPARTS. " One of these men is genius to the other." Comedy of Errort. Messer Basilic, of Milan, M'ho had fixed his residence in Pisa on his return from Paris, where he had pursued the study of physic, having accumulated, by industry and extra- ordinary skill, a good fortune, married a young woman of Pisa, of very slender fortune, and fatherless and motherless ; by her he had three sons and a daughter, who in due time was married in Pisa; the eldest son was likewise married, the younger one was at school; the middle one, whose name was Lazarus, although great sums had been spent upon his education, made nothing of it; he was naturally idle and stupid, of a sour and melancholy disposition; a man of few words, and obstinate to such a degree, that if once he had said NO to anything, nothing upon earth could make him alter his mind. His father, finding him so extremely troublesome, determined to get rid of him, and sent him to a beautiful estate he had lately bought at a small distance from towa. There he lived contented, more proud of the society of clowns and clodpoles than the acquaintance of civilized people. While Lazarus was thus living quietly in his own way, there happened about ten years after a dreadful mortality in Pisa; people were seized with a violent fever, they then fell into a sleep suddenly, and died in that state. The disease was catching: Basilio, as well as other physicians, exerted their utmost skill, as well for their own interest as the general good; but ill fortune would have it that he caught the infection and died. The contagion was such that not one individual of the family escaped death, except an old woman servant. The raging disease having ceased at last, Lazarus was induced to return to Pisa, where he in- herited the extensive estates and riches of his father. Many were the efforts made by the different families to induce him to marry their daughters, notwithstanding they were aware of his boorish disposition; but nothing would avail. He said he was resolved to wait four years before he would marry; so that his ob- stinate disposition being well known, they ceased their importunities. Lazarus, intent upon pleasing himself alone, would not associate with any living soul. There was, however, one poor man named Gabriel, who lived in a small house opposite to THE COUNTERPARTS. 255 him, with his wife dame Santa. This poor fellow was an excellent fisherman and bird- catcher, made nets, &c. , and what with that, and the assistance of his wife, who spun, he made shift to keep his family, consisting of two children, a boy of five and a girl of three years old. Now it happened that this Gabriel was a perfect likeness of Lazarus; both were red-haired, had the same length of beard, every feature, size, gait, and voice so perfectly alike, that one would hare sworn they were twins; and had they both been dressed alike, certainly no one but would have mistaken the one for the other; the wife herself would have been deceived but for the clothes, those of Lazarus being fine cloth, and her husband's of coarse wool of a different colour. Lazarus, observing this extraordinary resemblance, could not help fancying that there must be something in it, and began to familiarize himself with his society, sent his wife presents of eatables, wines, &c., and often invited Gabriel to dinner or supper with him, and conversed with him. Gabriel, though poor and untaught, was shrewd and sagacious, and knew well how to get on the blind side of any one; he so humoured him, that at last Lazarus could not rest an instant without his company. One day, after dinner, they entered into conversation on the subject of fishing, and the different modes of catching fish, and at last came to the fishing by diving with small nets fastened to the neck and arms; and Gabriel told him of the immense numbers of large fish which were caught in that manner, insomuch that Lazarus became very anxious to know how one could fish diving, and begged of him to let him see how he did it. Upon which Gabriel said he was very willing, and it being a hot summer's day, they might easily take the sport, if he too were willing. Having rk.en from table, Gabriel marched out, fetched his nets, and away they went. They arrived on the borders of the Arno, in a shady place sur- rounded by elders; there he requested Lazarus to sit and look on. After stripping, and fastening the nets about him, he dived in the river, and being very expert at the sport, he soon rose again with eight or ten fish of terrible size in his nets. Lazarus could not think how it was possible to catch so many fish under water; it so astonished him, that he determined to try it himself. The day was broiling hot, and he thought it would cool him. By the assistance of Gabriel he undressed, and the latter conducted him in at a pleasant part of the shore, where the water was scarcely knee- deep. There he left him with nets, giving him charge not to go farther than the stake which he pointed out to him. Lazarus, who had never before been in the water, was de- lighted at its coolness, and observing how often Gabriel rose up with nets full of fish, bethought himself, one must see under as well as above water, otherwise it would be impossible to catch the fish in the dark; therefore, in order to ascertain the point, without thinking of consequences, lie put his head under water, and dashed forward beyond the stake. Down he went like a piece of lead; not aware he should hold his breath, and knowing nothing of swim- ming, he struggled hard to raise himself above the surface. He was almost stifled with the water he had swallowed, and was carried aAvay by the current, so that he very shortly lost his senses. Gabriel, who was very busy catching a great deal of fish in a very good place, did not care to leave it; therefore poor Lazarus, after rising half-dead two or three times, sunk at last never to rise again. Gabriel, after he had got as much fish as he thought would do for him, joyfully turned round to show Lazarus his sport; he looked round and did not see him; he then sought him everywhere, but not finding him, he became quite alarmed, and terrified at the sight of the poor fellow's clothes that were laid on the bank. He dived, and sought the body, and ftmnd it at last driven by the current on the beach ; at the sight he almost lost his senses ; he stood motionless, not knowing what to do, for he feared, that in relating the truth people would think it was all a lie, and that he had drowned him himself, in order to get his money. Driven thus almost to despair, a thought struck him, and he determined to put it in instant execution. There was no witness to the fact, for every one was asleep, it being the heat of the day; he therefore took the fish, and put them safe in & basket, and for that purpose took the dead body on his shoulders, heavy as it was, laid him on some grass, put his own breeches on the dead limbs, untied the nets from his own arms, and tied them tight to the arms of the corpse. This done, he took hold of him, dived into the water, and tied him fast with the nets to the stake under water. He then came on shore, slipped on Lazarus' shirt, and all his clothes, and even his fine shoes, and sat himself down on a bank, determining to try his luck first in saving himself from his perilous situation, and next to try whether he might not, from his extreme likeness to Lazarus, make his fortune and live at ease. Being a bold and sagacious fellow, he immediately undertook the daring and dangerous experi- 256 THE COUNTERPARTS. ment, and began to cry out with all his might and main, "Oh! good people, help! help! run and help the poor fisherman who is drowning." He roared out so, that at last the miller, who lived not far off, came running with I know not how many of his men. Gabriel spoke with a gruff voice, the better to imitate that of Lazarus, and weepingly related that the fisher- man, after diving and catching a good deal of fish, had gone again, and that as he had been above an hour under water he was afraid he was drowned; they inquiring what part of the river he had gone to, he showed them the stake and place. The miller, who could swim very well, rushed in towards the stake, and found the corpse, but being unable to extricate it from the stake, rose up again and cried out, "Oh! yes, he is dead sure enough, but I cannot get him up by myself:" upon which two others stripped, and got the body out, whose arms and limbs were lacerated by the nets, which (as they thought) had entangled him, and caused his death. The news being spread abroad, a priest came, the corpse was put in a coffin, and carried to a small church, that it might be owned by the family of Gabriel. The dreadful news had already reached Pisa, and the unfortunate wife, with her weeping children, came to the church, and there be- holding her beloved husband, as she thought, she hung over him, wept, sobbed, tore her hair, and became almost frantic, insomuch that the by-standers were moved to tears. Gabriel, who was a most loving husband and father, could scarce refrain from weeping, and seeing the extreme affliction of his wife, came forward, keeping Lazarus' hat over his eyes, and his handkerchief to his face, as it were to wipe away his tears, and approaching the widow, who took him, as well as others, for Lazarus, he said, in the hearing of all the people, " Good woman, do not give way to such sorrow, nor weep so, for I will not forsake you; as it was to oblige me, and afford me pleasure, that he went a fishing to-day against his inclination, methinks it is partly to me he owed his death, therefore I will ever be a friend to thee and thine; all expenses shall be paid, therefore return home and be comforted, for while I live thou shalt never want; and should I die, I will leave thee enough to make thee as com- fortable as any of thy equals. " Thus he went on, weeping and sobbing, as if regretting the loss of Gabriel, and really agonized by the distress of his widow. He was inwardly praised by all present, who believed him to be Lazarus. The poor widow, after the funeral was per- formed, returned to Pisa, much comforted by the promises of him whom she considered as her neighbour Lazarus. Gabriel, who had been long acquainted with the deceased's ways, manners, and mode of living, entered Lazarus' house as if the master of it; without uttering a syllable ascended into a very beautiful room tha't looked over a fine garden, pulled out of the dead man's coat he had on a bunch of keys, and opened several chests, and finding some smaller keys, he opened several desks, bureaus, money-chests, and found, independent of trunks filled with cloth, linen, and jewels, which the old father the physician and brothers of the deceased had left, nearly to the value of two thousand gold florins, and four hundred of silver. He was in raptures all the night, and began to think of the best means to conceal himself from the servants, and appear as the real Lazarus. About the hour of supper he came out of his room, weeping; the servants, who had heard the dreadful situation of the widow Santa, and that it was reported that their master had partly been the cause of the accident, were not much surprised at seeing him thus afflicted, thinking it was on account of Gabriel. He called the servant, and desired him to take a couple of loaves, two bottles of wine, and half his supper to the widow Santa, the which the poor widow scarcely touched. When the servant returned, Gabriel ordered supper, but ate sparingly, the better to deceive the servants, as Lazarus was a very little eater; then left the room without saying a word, and shut himself up in his own room as the deceased used to do. The servants thought there was some alteration in his countenance and voice, but attributed it to the sorrowful event that had occurred. The widow, after having tasted of the supper, and considering the care that had been taken of her, and the promises made by Lazarus, began to take comfort, parted with her relations, who had come to condole with her, and retired to bed. Gabriel, full of thought, could not sleep a wink, and got up in the morning at Lazarus' usual hour, and in all things imitated him. But being informed by the servants that Santa was always in grief, weeping and discomforted, and being a fond husband, and loving her tenderly, he was miserable upon hearing this, and determined to comfort her. Thus resolved, one day after dinner he went to her, and found a cousin of hers with her. Having given her to under- stand he had some private business with her, the cousin, knowing how much she was indebted to him, and her expectations, left the room, and departed, saying he begged she would be advised by her worthy neighbour. THE COUNTERPARTS. 257 As soon as lie was gone he shut the door, went into his room, and motioned her to follow; she, struck with the singularity of the case, and fearing for her honour, did not know what to do, whether she should or she should not follow; yet thinking of his kindness, and the hopes she had from his liberality, and taking her eldest son by the hand, she went into the room, where she found him lying on a little bed, on which her husband used to lie when tired; upon which she started and stopped. Gabriel, seeing her come with her son, smiled with pleasurable feelings at the purity of his wife's conduct; one word that he uttered, which he was in the habit of using, staggered the poor Santa, so that she could not utter a syl- lable. Gabriel, pressing the poor boy to his breast, said, " Thy mother weeps, unaware of thy happy fate, her own, and her husband's." Yet not daring to trust himself before him, though but a child, he took him into the next room, gave him money to play with, and left him there. Returning to his wife, who had caught his words, and partly recognized him, he double-locked the door, and related to her every circumstance that had happened, and how he had managed everything; she, delighted and convinced, from the repetition of certain family secrets, known to themselves alone, embraced him, giving him as many kisses as she had bestowed tears for his death, for both were loving and tenderly attached. After reciprocal marks of each other's affection, Ga- briel said to her that she must be perfectly silent, and pointed out to her how happy their life would hereafter prove: he told her of the riches he had found, and what he intended to do, the which highly delighted her. In going out, Santa pretended to cry on opening the street door, and said aloud, that she might be heard by the neighbours, " I recommend these poor fatherless children to you, signer." To which he answered, "Fear not, good Mrs. Santa;" and walked away, full of thoughts on his future plans. When evening came on, observing the same uniform conduct of his predecessor, he went to bed, but could not sleep for thinking. No Booner did the dawn appear than he rose and went to the church of St. Catherine, where a devout and worthy pastor dwelt, and who was considered by all the Pisanians as a little saint. Friar Angelico appearing, Gabriel told him he wanted to speak to him on particular business, and to have his advice upon a very important and singular case that had happened to him. The kind friar, although he did not know him, led him into his room. Gabriel, who well knew the whole genealogy of Lazarus, son of Basilio of Milan, related it fully to the friar, likewise the dreadful accident, adding, tiiat he considered himself as a principal cause of it, making him believe it was he who induced the unfortunate man to go a fishing against his will; he represented the mischief which resulted from it to the widow and children of the de- ceased, and that he considered himself so much the cause of it, and felt such a weight on his con- science, that he had made up his mind, though Santa was of low condition, and poor, to take her for his wife, if she and her friends approved of it, and to take the children of the poor fisher- man under his care as his own; bring them up with his own children, should he have any, and leave them co-heirs with them ; this, he said, would reconcile him to himself and his Maker, and be approved by men. The holy man, see- ing the worthy motives which actuated him, ap- proved of his intention, and recommended as ' little delay as possible, since he would thereby meet with forgiveness. Gabriel, in order the more effectually to secure his ready co-opera- tion, threw down thirty pieces of money, say- ing that in the three succeeding Mondays he wished high mass to be sung for the soul of the deceased. At this tempting sight the friar, although a very saint, leaped with joy, took the cash, and said, " My son, the masses shall be sung next Monday; there is nothing more to attend to now but the marriage, a ceremony which I advise thee to hasten as much as thou canst; do not think of riches or noble birth; thou art, thank Heaven, rich enough; and as to birth, we are all children of one Father; true nobility consists in virtue and the fear of God, nor is the good woman deficient in either; I know her well, and most of her relations." "Good father," said Gabriel, " I am come to you for the very purpose, therefore, I pray you, put me quickly in the way to forward the busi- ness." "When will you give her the ring?" said the holy man. " This very day," he an- swered, "if she be inclined." "Well," said the friar, "go thy ways, and leave all to me; go home, and stir not from thence these blessed nuptials shall take place." Gabriel thanked him, received his blessing, and went home. The holy father carefully put the cash in his desk, then went to an uncle of Dame Santa, a shoemaker by trade, and a cousin of hers, a barber, and related to them what had happened ; after which they went together to Dame Santa, and used every possible argument to persuade her to consent to the match, the which she feigned great difficulty in consenting to, saying that it was merely for the advantage 17 258 POLISH SUPERSTITIONS. of her children that she submitted to such a tiling. I will only add, that the very same morning, by the exertions of the friar, they were married a second time; great rejoicings took place, and Gabriel and his wife laughed heartily at the simplicity of the good friar and the credulity of the relations and neighbours. They happily lived in peace and plenty, pro- vided for and dismissed the old servants; were blessed with two more children, from whom afterwards sprung some of the most renowned men, both in arms and letters. 1 HUMAN LIFE. I walk'd the fields at morning's prime, The grass was ripe for mowing : The sky-lark sung his matin chime, And all was brightly glowing. "Arid thus," I cried, "the ardent boy, His pulse with rapture beating, Deems life's inheritance his joy The future proudly greeting." I wander'd forth at noon: alas! On earth's maternal bosom The scythe had left the withering grass And stretch'd the fading blossom. And thus, I thought with many a sigh, The hopes we fondly cherish, Like flowers which blossom but to die, Seem only born to perish. Once more, at eve, abroad I stray 'd, Through lonely hay-fields musing ; While every breeze that round me play'd Rich fragrance was diffusing. The perfumed air, the hush of eve, To purer hopes appealing, O'er thoughts perchance too prone to grieve, Scatter'd the balm of healing. For thus "the actions of the just," When memory hath enshrined them, E'en from the dark and silent dust Their odour leave behind them. BERNARD BARTON. 1 From Italian Talet of Humour, Gallantry, and Ko- rnu.nct. POLISH SUPERSTITIONS. A lady told my fortune by the cards in a very interesting and lively manner, and had talent enough to fix my attention in spite of good sense ; she mentioned that the Polanders are universally addicted to the oracles of cards and dice, and are almost all fatality, even in their more serious opinions. A gentleman of that nation, who was formerly in the habit of visiting at her house, once undertook to predict the fortune of one of her female relations by means of dice; he threw them in a particular way, with many strange ceremonies, and then remarked, that such and such occurrences would happen to her in such and such a time. He was extremely ridiculed, as what he ha< foretold came scarcely within the bounds of possibility, much less of probability; but the subsequent events faithfully verified his words. As there are some distinguished names both in England and Portugal mixed up in the above relation, I am not at liberty to mention the par- ticulars, but at all events I must say that the Polander, if he was not actually an adept in the occult sciences, had at least a very keen and extended vision with regard to possible politi- cal events; the fate of the lady depended much upon the affairs connected with the Portuguese and English governments; and it appears to me not improbable that this w'se man's mind foreboded the changes which have so lately taken place in the former, although they were then at a great distance. Among other supeirtitions to which the Polish nation is addicted, I may be forgiven for relating the following, as its elegance of fancy almost redeems its absurdity. Every individual is supposed to be born under some particular destiny or fate, which it is im- possible for him to avoid. The month of his nativity has a mysterious connection with one of the known precious stones, and when a per- son wishes to make the object of his affections an acceptable present, a ring is invariably given, composed of the jewel by which the fate of that object is imagined to be determined and described. For instance, a woman is bcrn in January ; her ring must therefore be a jacinth or a garnet, for these stones belong to that peculiar month of the year, and express "constancy and fidelity." I saw a list of them all, which the Polander gave to the lady in question, and she has allowed me to copy it, viz. : ' ' January Jacinth or garnet. Constancy and fidelity in every engagement. THE SICK CHILD. 259 "February Amethyst. This month and stone preserve mortals from strong passions, and insure them peace of mind. "March Bloodstone. Courage, and suc- cess in dangers and hazardous enterprises. " April Sapphire or diamond. Repent- ance and innocence. "May Emerald. Success in love. "June Agate. Long life and health. "July Cornelian or ruby. The forgetful- ness or the cure of evils springing from friend- ship or love. "August Sardonyx. Conjugal fidelity. " September Chrysolite. Preserves from or cures folly. "October Aquamarine or opal. Misfor- tune and hope. "November Topaz. Fidelity in friend- ship. "December Turquoise or malachite. The most brilliant success and happiness in every circumstance of life; the turquoise has also the property of securing friendly regard ; as the old saying, that 'he who possesses a tur- quoise will always be sure of friends.'" From MRS. BAILIE'S Li THE SICK CHILD. [John Struthers, born in East Kilbride, Lanark- ihire, 18th July, 1776; died in Glasgow, 30th July, 1853. The son of a country shoemaker, he began the work of life at seven years of age as a herd-boy. After- wards he learned his father's trade, and worked at it for some time. But from childhood onward he took advantage of the few opportunities his circumstances provided for improving his mind. In this sturdy en- de-ivour to educate himself he was assisted by his own mother and by the mother of Joanna Baillie. In 1804 ho published his principal poem, The Poor Man's Sab- bith. which gave him some reputation. He was sub- sequently employed by a Glasgow publishing firm, and edited various historical and poetical works, besides acting as corrector of proofs for the press. He wrote essays biographical and social which have not been published in a collected form and maintained his claim to be identified as a poet by the production of occasional verses. At the age of seventy four he was obliged to resume his original craft, and earn a livelihood by shoemaking. The efforts of a few private friends helped to relieve his latter years of the most pressing difficul- ties. His memory is worth preserving as that of a representative of the best class of the Scottish pea- santry, and as that of a poet who has left us some valu- able pictures of national life.] I passed the cot but yesterday, 'Twas neat and clean, its inmates gay, All pleased and pleasing, void of guile, Pursuing sport or healthful toil. To-day the skies are far more bright, The woods pour forth more wild delight, The air seems all one living hum, And every leaflet breathes perfume. Then why is silence in the cot, Its wonted industry forgot, The fire untrimmed, the floor unred, The chairs with clothes and dishes spread, "While, all in woeful dishabille, Across the floor the children steal? Alas ! these smothered groans ! these sighs ! Sick, sick the little darling lies ; The mother, while its moan ascends, Pale, o'er the cradle, weeping, bends; And, all absorbed in speechless woe, The father round it paces slow. Behind them close, with clasped hands, The kindly village matron stands, Bethinking what she shall direct; For all night long, without effect, Her patient care has been applied, A ud all her various simples tried, And glad were she could that be found "Would bring the baby safely round. Meanwhile, the little innocent, To deeper moans gives ampler vent, Lifts up its meek but burdeu'd eye, As if to say, " Let me but die, For me your cares, your toils give o'er, To die in peace, I ask no more." But who is there with aspect kind, Where faith, and hope, and love are joined, And pity sweet? The man of God, Who soothes, exhorts, in mildest mood, And to the pressure of the case Applies the promises of grace Then lifts his pleading voice and eye Tc Him enthron'd above the sky, W ao compass'd once with pains and fears, Utter'd strong cries, wept bitter tears And hence the sympathetic glow He feels for all his people's woe For health restored, and length of days, To the sweet babe he humbly prays; But 'specially that he may prove An heir of faith, a child of love; That, when withdrawn from mortal eyes, May bloom immortal in the skies; And for the downcast parent pair, Beneath this load of grief and care That grace divine may bear them up, And sweeten even this bitter cup, Which turns to gall their present hopes, With consolation's cordial drops. He pauses now the struggle's done, His span is closed his race is run, No yet he quivers Ah ! that thrill ! That wistful look Ah ! now how still. 260 SELLING FLOWERS. But yesterday the cot was gay, With smiling virtue's seraph train! There sorrow dwells with death to-day, When shall the cot be gay again ? SELLING FLOWERS. BY THE AUTHOR OF " EAST LYNNE." [Mrs. Henry Wood, born at Worcester about 1820. She maintains a high place amongst the most popular of our living novelists. Her first work was Dantsbwy House, which gained the prize of 100 offered by the Scottish Temperance League for the best tale illustra- tive of the evils of drunkenness. East Lynne was her next work, and won enduring popularity for the author. After it came, Mrs. Halliburton' s Troubles; The Shadow of Asklydyat ; The Channings ; Roland Yorlce; Mildred Arke.ll; Oswald. Cray: George Canterbury's Will; Betsy Raiie, and others. In 1866 Mrs. Wood became the pro- prietor of the A rgosy magazine, to which she contributes largely. It is from that magazine (June, 1868; we take the following pathetic sketch it would be unfair to call it a tale, it is so pitilessly true to the life led by many of the poor in the metropolis. Cheap editions of Mrs. Wood's novels have been published by Beutley and Son.] On a certain day in the first week in April, 1867, there stood a man against the wall that bounds the north-west corner of the Regent's Park. It was a bitter cold day, in spite of the sun shining with full force and warmth on that particular spot, for the cruel north-east wind was keen and sharp, cutting its way into delicate frames. The man looked like a countryman, inasmuch as he wore what country people call the smock-frock; he was a tall, dark- haired man, about forty five, powerfully made, but very thin, with a pale and patient face. Resting on the ground by his side was a high round hamper or, as he called it, a kipe containing roots of flowers in blossom, prim- roses chiefly, a few violets, and a green creep- ing plant or two. The man was not a countryman by habit now: he had become acclimatized to London. He had been up by daylight that morning and on his way to the woods, miles distant, in search of these flowers. He dug up the roots carefully, neatly enveloped them in moss, obtained close by, tying it round with strips of long dried grass. It was nearly ten before the work was over and the roots packed, blossoms upwards, in the kipe, which was three parts filled with mould. Lifting it up, he toiled back to Lon- don with it and took up his standing on the broad pavement against this high wall which seemed as likely a spot for customers as any other. The clock of St. John's Church oppo- site to him was striking twelve when he put down his load. It was a pretty sight enough, and artistically arranged: the blue violets in the centre, the delicate primroses around them, the green creeping plants, drooping their branches gracefully, encircling all. Did the spring- flowers remind any of the passers-by of their spring? of the green lanes, the mossy dells which they had traversed in that gone-by time, and plucked these flowers at will ? If so, they had apparently no leisure to linger over the reminiscence, but went hurrying on. The man did not ask any one to buy : he left it to them. The hours went on. At three o'clock he had not sold a single root. He stood there silently ; waiting, waiting; his wistful face less hopeful than at first. He did not much expect gentlemen to purchase, but he did think ladies would. They swept by in numbers, well-dressed women in silk and velvet, a'nd gay bonnets gleaming in the sunny day ; some were in car- riages, more on foot; but they passed him. Occasional glances were cast on the flowers; one lady leaned close to her carnage-window and gazed at them until she was beyond view; two or three had stopped with a remark or question ; but they did not buy. As the clock struck three the man took a piece of bread from his pocket and ate it, going over to the cab-stand afterwards for a drink of water. He had eaten another meal while he was getting up the roots in the morn- ing, and washed it down with water from a neighbouring rivulet. Better water that than this. " Not much luck this afternoon, mate, eh?" remarked a cab-driver, who had been sitting for some time on the box of his four-wheeled cab. "No," replied the man, going back to his post. Almost immediately the wide path before him seemed crowded. Two parties, acquaint- ances apparently, had met from opposite ways. They began talking eagerly: of a ball they were to be at that night; of a missionary meet- ing to be attended on the morrow; of various plans and projects. One lady, who had a little girl's band in hers, held out a beautiful bou- quet. " I have been all the way into Baker Street to get it," she said. "Is it not lovely? It was only seven-and-sixpence. I felt inclined to take a cab and bring it home, lest the hot sun should injure it." A good deal more talking, the man behind standing unnoticed, and they parted to go on their several ways. But the little girl had SELLING FLOWERS. 261 turned to the kipe of flowers and her feet were glued to the pavement. The flaxen hair flow- ing on her shoulders was tied with blue ribbons, the colour of her eyes. " Mamma, buy me a bouquet." The lady, then arrested, turned round and cast a glance on the flowers. "Nonsense," she answered rather crossly. "But they are primrose flowers, mamma; do buy me some." "Don't be tiresome, Mina; those are roots, not flowers; come along; I have no time to spare." She made quite a dazzling vision in the poor man's sight as she went away with the child; the silk gown of bright lavender, the white lining of the black velvet mantle, as the wind blew back its corners, and the monstrous gold net stuffed with yellowish hair that stood out from her head behind, and glittered in the sun. How fashionable it all was, and free from care, and indicative of wealthy ease! but you must not blame the man if life did seem to him for uie moment to be dealt out unequally. Seven- and-sixpence for a bouquet, and a cab to carry it home in! He did not see a lady crossing the road until she stood before him. A quiet, gentle lady this, very much lacking in fashion, especially in the matter of back hair. "Are they roots or flowers?" she asked. "Roots." His natural civility had gone out of him; a feeling of injustice was chafing both temper and spirit. " Roots are of no use to me," she observed, thinking him very surly. "You do not seem to have sold many." " I have sold none. I had a walk of some hours to get the roots; I've stood here in this blessed spot since twelve o'clock; and there's the kipe as I set it down. " "Kipe! he is country-bred," thought the lady. As she was. " The ladies in their grand dresses have been going by a-foot and in their carriages, and not me of them has offered to lay out a penny on me. They'd go into a shop and give half-a- crown for a pot o' flowers; they'll give their seven-and-sixpence for their bouquets: but they won't help a poor man, trying to get a living." He spoke almost fiercely, not looking at her, but straight before him. This sort of thing is not pleasant, and the lady prepared to depart. Feeling in her pocket for some halfpence, she found a penny only, and would have given that to him. "No; T will not take it. If I can't earn an honest penny, I'll not take one in charity." She walked on, glad to leave the man and his incivility. Besides, she had just before been beset by the rude girls that congregate in those as in other parts of London, importuning her to buy flowers. This man was different. She began to think well, of many things; and she went back to him with a sixpence in her hand; the face looked stern yet: but it was an honest face and very pale. " Will you take this?" she gently asked, holding out the sixpence. He shook his head. "No, no. I'll not take money without giving goods in return. 'Twould be as good as a fraud." "But they are roots: and I can't carij them." No answer. " How do you sell them?" " Threepence a-piece." " Have you any children?" "Y es." The hesitation was caused by his innate truthfulness. He had but one child, but his temper just now would not allow him to explain. " Then let me buy two of these roots, and you keep them and give the flowers to your children when you get home." "No, ma'am. No." " Well, then, give me one cf the primrose- roots." She was about to pluck the flowers from it, as being then more convenient to carry, when he interposed to stop it, his voice betraying strange feeling. "Oh, don't do that! 'Twould be a'most a sin." It was evident that he loved earth's produc- tions. And then she remarked that it was done up so neatly and carefully in the dry moss, that no inconvenience could arise from carrying it. Dropping the sixpence into his hand, she went away quickly, lest his honesty should break out again, and insist on return- ing threepence. Perhaps it was only lack of change that caused him not to do it. He waited on. Presently a woman in a red shawl came by, stopped at sight of the prim- roses, scanned them critically, and spoke. " What's the price of 'em, master?" " Threepence a root." " Threepence a root! What, for them messes o' primroses?" "I've been far enough to get 'em." "Let's look at one." He put one into her hand, and she turned it about in-all directions, as if fearing imposture. Apparently she satisfied herself. " If you'll let me have six of these for a 262 SELLING FLOWEKS. shilling, I'll take 'em. I've got half-a-dozen window -pots at home, waiting to be filled with eome'at or other." He did not think it well to refuse the offer, considering how slow the day's sale had been. She held the six roots across her arm, resting against the red shawl. " You'll give me one in?" she said, keeping the shilling in her hand. She must have had a conscience, that woman! "Xo. " Relinquishing the shilling she de- parted with her purchases. Two or three stray buyers came up after that, each one for a soli- tary root of either primroses or violets. One gentleman, who got off an Atlas omnibus close by, appeared t.) regard his standing there in the light of a personal grievance, and asked him in a sharp, implacable voice why he didn't go to work instead of skulking there with flowers, a great strong, lazy fellow like him! He stamped on, not waiting for an answer; upon which another gentleman who had heard the reproach came up and bought a root of vio- lets, paying for it with a threepenny piece. And so, with one thing and another, the day wore on to twilight. He took up his hamper then and went away towards home, seeking to sell on his road. But luck was not with him. Home! It was situated in the heart of Lon- don, and had best be indicated as lying some- where between Oxford Street and the Strand. The locality was occasionally described as "awful" by those who knew it: not in refer- ence to the people, but to the dwellings they lived in. As a rule, thieves and pickpockets did not inhabit there, only the poorest of the labouring poor, quite the one half of whom were out of work six months in the year on an average. As the man went down a close street, where men congregated in rags, holding pipes in their mouths, and women stood about with hanging hair and shrill tongues, he turned into a miserable greengrocery shed. The mas- ter, weighing out twopennyworth of coal for a customer, looked round. " Is it you, Sale? Had a good day on't?" " No. You'll let me leave the kipe here for the night. They'd wither in my place." "Leave it, and welcome." Putting the kipe into a corner, contriving to cover its remaining flowers so that the coal dust should not altogether blacken them, Richard Sale went on, down the street. Two shillings of the money he had taken must be paid for rent; there was no grace; and it left him tenpence to spend. He went into a shop and bought that dainty with the poor, a "saveloy," and a loaf of bread. He bought a pennyworth of milk, a large quan- tity considering his means; and he bought a modicum of tea and sugar. There was a sick child at home, always thirsty, and they had said at the dispensary that milk was good for him. And now, admire the enduring patience of this man. He had gone without food all day, except the two slices of bread, lest he might not have enough money left to make a meal with his boy in the evening. Long fast- ing does not seem so hard to them as it would to us, who live regularly: they have to fast so often. Richard Sale's later history is but that of many. He had been attracted to London from his country home by greater wages earned there, and for some time did well. But mis- fortune came to him in the shape of rheumatic fever; it lasted long enough to sell him up, and turn him out with his wife and children, when he was still too weak to work. He never recovered position if that word may be applied to a daily labourer. The fingers of one hand were considerably weakened, the joints stiff, and for four years he had to get a living how he could, at odd jobs; at buying things to sell again; or, as he had been doing to-day, walk- ing out miles to get up roots, or cress, and sell : keeping his honesty always, and self-deny- ing to the end. You never saw or dreamed of such a place as the one he finally turned into. It was not fit for human beings to dwell in. A pig-sty in- habited by respectable pigs would have been sweet in comparison. They called it by dis- tinction a court. A court ! On either side an alley ten feet wfde, which had no thoroughfare, was a block of buildings: old, overhanging, tumble-down dwellings. They had no outlet behind on either side, being built against the backs of other houses: and two women, hang- ing out their linen to dry on the cords stretched across from roof to roof, could lean from the windows and shake hands with each other. The fresh air of heaven, given us so freely by God, could not penetrate to these miserable houses. A whole colony of people lived in them, how many in a room at least in some of the rooms it would be regarded as a libel to say. The stairs were scarcely safe, the floors were rotten; dirt and sickness prevailed. As to cleaning the places water was a great deal too scarce for that. Richard Sale went nearly to the bottom of this court, turned into a doorway on the left, and thence into a room on the right. A small , low room. Standing in its midst he could have touched the side walls, and his head SELLING FLOWERS. 263 narrowly escaped brushing the ceiling. What [ colour the walls had originally been, nobody could tell; the window, facing the courtyard, had most of its panes broken, and pasted over with newspaper. On the high mantle piece, opposite the door, was a lighted candle stuck in a gingerbeer-bottle. The man looked at it as he went in. " Hal loa, Charley, got a light ? " he exclaimed, in a kind tone. " Bridget Kelly came in and lighted it, da," replied a weak young voice from the floor. " I've been ill, da." He lay on a mattress against the wall oppo- site the window, covered with a gray woollen blanket, a boy of nine years old. In frame he looked younger; in face considerably older, for it wore that preternatural expression of intel- ligence sometimes seen in delicate children of any station, often in the extreme poor. It was a fair, meek little face ; and something in the blue eyes, bright to-night, and in the fall- ing flaxen hair, momentarily reminded the man of the other child with the blue ribbons he had seen that day. This little boy was the only one of all his family left to Richard Sale. He had been ailing some time, as if consumed by inward fever, and got weaker and weaker. A chair without a back ; a low wooden stool on three legs; a board laid across a pan in the middle of the room, serving for a table, appeared to constitute the chief of the goods and chattels : but everything, including the floor, was scrupu- lously clean. Sale put down the things he had brought in, and stooped to kiss the child. "Been ill, d'ye say, Charley? Worse?" The boy was sitting up now. He had on a warm comfortable shirt, made of some dark woollen stuff. The father stroked the hair from his brow with a gentle hand. " Tell da what the matter has been." At this juncture a woman came bursting in. A very untidy woman, in attire just suited to the place; the Bridget Kelly spoken of. She with her husband and children occupied one of the upper rooms, and would often look after the lonely boy when his father was away. From what she said now, Sale made out that she had come in that afternoon and found Charley "off his head:" meaning that his mind had been wandering. "May be it's the beginning o' faver," she said. " His eyes was wild, and his cheeks had the flush o' the crimson rose. I think he must ha' been in it some time, for he couldn't re- member nothing of how the day had gone. After that he took a fainting fit, and I thought sure he was" she stopped a moment, and then substituted better words for the boy's hear- ing than those she had been about to say " worse, and it frighted me." Sale made no reply, only looked down at his child. The woman continued : " I just called my big Pat, and sent him to ask the doctor to step down here. But we haven't seen the colour of him yet; and Pat, he've not come back nather. I'll be after walloping of him when he do." "What doctor did you send to?" asked Sale. " One that Jenny told us on. She come i' the thick o' the fight, and she said she'd stay wi' him then. I was busy a dabbing out my bits o' things for the childer. " Mrs. Kelly went away, and Richard Sale knelt down then to be nearer the child. He felt his ; hot brow; he felt his little hands, they were cold; and as he looked attentively into the face turned up to him, a great aching took possession of his heart. He loved the boy with a fervent love, as it was in his nature to do, Contact with the rough usage of a rough world had not seared his affections as it does those of most men. The boy turned, as if in sudden remembrance, and brought up a flower from somewhere between the bed and the wall. It was one of those single hyacinths, or field blue- bells, common to the season. "See, da!" Da, a substitute for daddy, as may be surmised, had grown into common use. The boy had never called his father by any other name. "Jenny gave it me. See how nice it smells. " "Ay. Are you hungry, Charley?" " I'm thirsty," answered Charley. Sale rose. He took off his smock-frock, standing revealed in a coloured shirt, trousers, and braces made of string; lifted the board off the earthenware pan, and brought up from thence some dry bits of wood and a handful of coal : with these he made a fire. From a cup- board in the wall he took a few useful articles, a cup or two, plate or two, a teapot, and small tin kettle, which he went into the courtyard to fill. But ever and anon as he busied him- self, waiting for the water to boil, he cast a yearning look on the boy's face, who lay lan- guidly watching. This evening social meal, so patiently waited for through the day, through many a day, was the one white interlude in his life of labour. " It's ready now, Charley. Will you sit up to it?" Charley left the bed and took his place on the three-legged stool close to the fire, and there seemed to be taken with a shivering fit. 264 SELLING FLOWERS. Sale folded the gray blanket over him; cut him some bread and the half of a saveloy, and gave it him on a plate. Charley took a bite of each and apparently could not swallow either. " The tea's coming, lad." The tea did come : and he drank it down at a draught, giving back the cup and the eatables together. It was nothing very unusual: his appetite had been capricious of late. " I can't eat it, da." "We'll try some sop, Charley. Here's a drop of milk left." Going to the cupboard for something, Sale came upon an unexpected luxury. Two cold potatoes on a plate and a bit of cooked herring. " Why, Charley, here's your dinner!" he ex- claimed. " Haven't you eat it?" " I forgot it, da." Of course this implied that his appetite had failed. Sale did not like it: it was tlie first time the mid-day food left for him had been wholly untouched. Slicing a bit of bread into a small yellow basin, Sale poured some boiling water on it, covered it for a minute or two, then drained the water off, and put in some sugar, and the milk that remained. It may be remarked that Richard Sale did things neatly and tidily, quite different from the habits of his apparent class: as he was different in speech and manner. Charley eat a spoonful of the sop, and gave the basin back again. " I'm only thirsty, da." He was lying covered up again, and had fallen asleep in his own place next the wall, for the mattress served for both of them, and the father was washing up the cups, when a strange voice was heard above the tongues of the natives, who seemed to be always keeping up a perpetual traffic in the passage, and were by no means choice in their language. Sale opened the door. "Is there a sick boy here, named Charles Sale?" It was the doctor, come at last. A young man, a Mr. Whatley, who had just set up in a neighbouring street, and hoped to struggle into practice. He had a shock head of hair, and a loud voice, in which he was wont to ex- press decisive opinions ; but he wanted neither for common sense nor innate kindliness. He came in, sniffing emphatically, saying in a word that he had been detained, and giving a keen look round the room. Sale began to ex- j plain the features of the boy's illness, but the doctor cut it short by unceremoniously taking the candle in his hand (leaving the bottle, which Sale made a faint apology for, but the candle- stick had come to pieces a night or two ago), and holding it close to the sleeping face. A wan white face, with a faint streak of pink across the cheeks, and the dry lips open. He touched the child gently, feeling his skin and his pulse. "Shall I wake him, sir?" " Presently," replied Mr. Whatley. H put the candle back in the bottle, and stood against the side of the mantle-piece, his elbow resting on a projecting ledge of it, in silent disregard of the broken chair Sale offered. " Have you had advice for him before?" " I've taken him to the dispensary. But " " Well?" for the man had stopped. " The gentlemen there told me they could not do much for him, sir. Nothing, in fact. All he wanted was fresh air and exercise, they s"aid, and good living." "And have } - ou given him the fresh air and exercise?" Looking round the room, he did not add, "and the living." " How could I, sir ? He is not strong enough to go about with me, and he's too big for me to carry. Now and then I've put him to sit on the street-flags in the sun, but it don't seem to answer. The street has got no good air in it, and in better streets the police would only hunt him away, and tell him to move on." The young doctor gazed steadfastly at the speaker. That the man was superior to his apparent class, and could answer intelligence with intelligence, was unmistakable. Sale just mentioned that he had lost two children before, also his wife ; this one, Charley, had been ail- ing for about eight months now, nothing seemed to nourish him. The doctor listened to all, never answering. " What is it that's the matter with him, sir?" "Well, I should say it was poison." " Poison!" echoed Richard Sale. "Poison," repeated Mr. Whatley. "He is being poisoned as fast as he can be, and the process is nearly over. Children die of it daily in London ; and men and women too. You say yon have lost two children already, and your wife: they died of poison; there can't be a doubt of it. I don't care what particular form the final end may take low fever typhus cholera consumption the cause is poison, and it's bred in these horrible tene- ments. If I had my way, I'd blow the whole of such rookeries up sky-high with gunpowder. " " My wife used to say the place was poison- ing her," observed Sale. "She was country- born. What she seemed to die of was decline: but she was always delicate." "Decline! " wrathfully repeated Mr. Whatley. SELLING FLOWERS. 265 "If I stopped in this hole of a room long, I should heave my heart out." " There's no drainage, sir, to the place; there's nothing that there ought to be; and the stench naturally strikes on them not accus- tomed to it. At times it's hardly to be borne by us who live in it." " I should think not. How you, an evi- dently intelligent and decent man, can live in it, is to me a mystery." " What else am I to do, sir? " returned Sale, with the subdued accent he mostly spoke in. " There's nothing better to be had at the price I can afford to pay. I wish there was. The greater part of us that live in these places don't do it by choice, but because we can't help our- selves. Some don't care; they'd pig on con- tentedly to their lives' end; but most of us would like to do better. There's no chance for us: there's no decent dwellings to be had for the very poor." The doctor could not gainsay this if Sale insisted on it, though he had a combative tem- per. Sale continued: " It's growing worse every day, more diffi- cult to get a lodging. What with so many of the old houses being pulled down for what they call improvements and for railways, and what with the increase of population, we shall soon have no homes at all." " I'd go out and encamp in the fields; I'd lay under the arches of the bridges; I'd walk the streets all night, rather than drug myself to death in this tainted atmosphere!" cried the surgeon, speaking as if he were in a passion. " No, sir, you wouldn't. It's easy enough to think this and that, but it's not easy to do it. A room, let it be as bad as it will, as bad as this, is a home, and open fields and bridges are not. Sir, believe me, we can't help our- selves : as long as there's no better places for us, we must put up with these." " It will kill some of you. It will sap away your health and strength; and your life after it." "Yes, sir; I dare say." Mr. Whatley wondered what sort of man he had got hold of: the tone of voice was so quiet and resigned. Almost as if he took these grievances as a matter of course, against which he and the rest of the world were helpless. It was but a natural result of the state of things. "You have been better off, have you not?" cried the surgeon. " Not for this four or five years. I was a good workman once, earning my thirty-five shillings a week. I went in for respectability then, for improvement clubs, reading-rooms, and the like: my father was a printer in the country, and we had good schooling and training; which gave me a taste for such things. But I got rheumatic fever above five years ago, and was laid up for many months." "And then?" "It left my hands partly crippled, sir: in some weathers they're nearly useless still. I've had to do what I can since then; pick up odd jobs and live any way. Sometimes I get a job at Covent Garden Market : or hawk things about the streets when I've money to buy them first. I don't complain, sir; there's some worse off than me." " Not in lodgings, I know," retorted the sur- geon. ' ' D'ye ever have a case of murder here ? " " I've not heard of one, sir. There's plenty of fighting and quarrelling. You may hear it going on now." "A nice school to rear children in! decent men and women they'll grow up! If I lived in such a place, I should go in for drinking," concluded the young man with candour, as he took his arm from the ledge of the mantle-pieca. "As most of them do. About the child, sir is it fever that he has got?" ' ' I tell you it's poison. " " He was delirious to-day." " Yes: from weakness. I suppose you have fever in the house?" " It's never out of it, sir; one sort or an- other. Never, at any rate, out of the locality. " " Just so. But this child's has been nothing but the chronic inward fever induced by the tainted atmosphere. It has nearly left him now. " " Will he get well, sir?" Mr. Whatley knew that, far from getting well, the little life was at its close. It was one of those cases where the end comes so gradually, without adequate apparent cause, as to be unsuspected by ordinary observers. Sale waited for the answer, his lips slightly parted. " Would you rather hear the truth?" asked the plain-speaking doctor. There was a minute's silence. " Well yes. Yes, sir." " I am sorry to have to tell it you. You seem to value him and that's what can't be said, I'll wager, of all the fathers in this place. He will not get well." " But what's killing him?" cried Sale, with a pause and a sort of breath-catching. " I tell you : the foul air he has breathed. It must and does affect children, and this one as I can see at a glance had not sufficient natural strength to throw off the poison. " "And he'll not get well!" repeated the 266 SELLING FLOWERS. father, who seemed to be unable to take in the fact. "Jenny says so too. She says I'm going to heaven." The interruption, quiet as it was, came on them with a start, and they both turned sharply. The child was lying, with his eyes wide open, his blue-bell in his hand; perhaps had been awake all along. Mr. Whatley bent down to the bed, and Sale held the candle. " Who is Jenny, my little fellow ?" asked he, all his roughness of manner gone, and touch- ing the child as tenderly, speaking as gently, as if he had been lying in a satin cradle. "She's the Bible-woman, sir," answered the boy, who had caught his father's correct diction. "She comes because I'm by myself all day, and reads to me and tells me pretty stories. " " Stories, eh. About Jack the Giant-killer?" "No, sir. About heaven." Mr. Whatley rose. He took a small white paper from his pocket, shot some powder from it into a tea-cup, and asked for fresh water if there was such a thing. Sale brought some, which the doctor smelt and made a face over; and he put it to the powder and gave it the child to drink. "He won't eat his food, sir," observed Sale. " I dare say not. He's getting beyond it." The boy held up the flower. ' ' When Jenny gave me this, she said there'd be prettier blue- bells in heaven." "Ay, ay," answered the young man, in a tone as though he were lost in some dream. " I'll look in again in the morning," he said to Sale, when the latter went out with him to the unsavoury alley. "Y ah!" cried he, wrathfully, as he sniffed the air. Sale seemed to want to say something. " I've not got the money to pay you now, sir. I'll bring it to you, if you'll please to trust me, the very first I get." And the young man, who was a quick reader of his fellow-men, knew that it would be brought, though Sale starved himself to save it. "All right," he nodded, "it won't be much. Look here, my man," he stopped to say, willing to administer a grain of comfort in his plain way, " if it were my child, I should welcome the change. He'll have a better home than this." Sale went in again; to the stifling atmo- sphere and the dirty walls, in the midst of which the child was dying so peacefully. The boy did not seem inclined to sleep now; he lay in bed talking, a dull glazed light in the once feverish eyes. Sale drew the three-legged stool close, and sat down upon it. The lad put his hand into his father's, and the trifling action upset Sale's equanimity, who had been battling in silence with his shock of grief. Very much to his own discomfiture, he burst into tears; and he had not done it when his wife died. " Don't cry, da. Is it for me?" " It seems hard, Charley," he sobbed. "The three rest all taken, and now you; and me to be left alone!" " You'll come next, da. Jenny says so. It's such a beautiful land; music and flowers and sweet fresh air. Mother's there, and Bessy and Jane; Jesus took them home to it because it was better than this, and he's coming for me. Jenny has told it me all. " Sale made no reply. He saw how it was that others had discerned what he had not: the sure approach of death and the good Bible- woman had been at her work preparing, sooth- ing, reconciling even this little child. But it did seem very hard to the father. "If I could have kept you all in a whole- some lodging, Charley, the illness mightn't have come on : on you or on them. God knows how I've strove to do my best. Things be against us poor, and that's a fact; these hor- rible tumble-down kennels be against us. " " Never mine, da: it'll be better in heaven." Ah yes ! yes, it will be better in heaven. And may God sustain all these unaided ones with that sure and certain hope as they struggle on. The boy slept at length; but he started continually ; sometimes waking up and asking for water, sometimes rambling in speech. Sale sat and watched him through the night, he and his heavy heart. You may be sure that the dawn could not penetrate quickly into that close place, shut in from the open light and air. It was candle- light there, but getting bright outside, when the boy started up, a gray look on his wan face, never before seen there. "What is it, Charley? Water?" The child looked about him as if bewildered; then he caught up the blue-bell that lay still at hand, and held it out to his father. " Take it, da. I can see the others up there. They are better than this. " He lay down again, his little face to the wall, and was very still. So still that Sale hushed his own breath, lest he should disturb him. The sounds of the day were commencing out- side: two women had already pitched upon some point of dispute, and were shrieking r.t each other with shrill voices. By-and-by Sale leaned over to look at the still face, and saw what had happened that it was still for ever! SIX SONNETS. He went out later with his basket of roots. It is not for the poor to indulge grief in idle- ness; death or no death indoors, money must be earned. The world was as busy as though no little child, free from want now, had just been laid to rest; people jostled each other on the pavements; and the sun shone down, direct and hot, from the clear blue sky. As Richard Sale looked up, he wondered how long it might be before God removed him to the same bright world : and he took his stand meekly in a con- venient spot for the sale of the flowers. SIX SONNETS. [I. William Dunbar, born 1460, died 1520. He was a Scottish poet, but there is little known as to the events of his life. He commemorated the m image of James IV. with Margaret Tudor in The Tki* le ami Rose; and received a yearly pension of 10, which was afterwards increased. II. Sir Philip Sidney, born in Penshurst, Kent, 29th November, 1554 ; died in Aruheim, 7th October, 1586. A soldier, courtier, and poet, and eminent in the three characters He was the author of the A readier , and the Defence of Poesie. The nobility of his nature is best illustrated by the anecdote related by Lord Brooke. He was governor of Flushing during the war between the Spaniards and the Hollanders. Wounded in one of the battles, he was leaving the field faint and bleeding when he was attracted by the cries of a dying soldier who craved water. Sidney gave the man his own supply, saying, " Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." IV. John Milton, born in Bread Street, London, 9th December, 1608 ; died Sth November, 1674. Para- dise Loft was first published in 1067, and the author, it is said, received 10 for his work. He became blind about the year 1654. Whilst his poems are to be found in almost every household, it is to be regretted that liis prose works are seldom read. He published a History of England in 1670.] I. TO A LADYE. V Sweit rois of vertew and of gentilness ; Delytsum Jyllie of everie lustyues ; Richest in bontie, and in bewtie cleir, And everie vertew that to hevin is deir, Except onlie that ye ar mercyles ! Into your garthe this day I did persew : Tliair saw I flouris that fresche wer of hew; Baythe q unite and rid most lustye wer to seyne; And halsum herbis upoue stalkis grene ; Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of Rew. I doute that Merche, with his caulde blastis keyne, Has slayne this gentill herbe, that I of mono ; Quhois (wtewus deithe dois to my hart sic pane, That I would vrak to plant his rute agane. WILLIAM DUNBAR. n. FEAR OP DEATH. Since nature's works be good, and death doth serve As nature's worke : why should we feare to die? Sjnce feare is vain but when it may preserve : Why should we feare that which we cannot Hie? Feare is more paiue than is the paine it leurs, Disarming human minds of native might: While each conceit an ougly figure bears, Which were not evil well view'd in reason's ligh'^ Our only eyes, which dimm'd with passions be, And scarce discerne the dawne of coming day. Let them be clear'd, and now begin to see, Our life is but a step in dustie way. Then let us hold the blisae of t-eacelull mindu, Since this we feele, great losse we c.inuot ;i. ,ue. Sin Pump SIDNEY. III. DEGENERACY OF THE WORLD. AVliat hapless hap had 1 for to be born In these unhappy Times and dying days Of this now doating World, when Good decays, Love's quite extinct and Virtue's held a scorr ! When such are only prized, by wietched ways, Who with a golden fleece them can adorn ; When avarice and lust are counted praise, And bravest minds live orphan-like forlorn ! Why was not I born in that golden age When gold was not yet known ? and those black ai ta By which base worldlings vilely play their parts, With horrid acts staining Earth's stately stage? To have been then, O Heaven ; 't had been my bliss, But bless me now, and take me soon from this. DBUMMOND of Hawthoi-iMC'it. IV. TO MR. LAWRENCE. Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son. Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mir?, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will rim On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun. What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice, Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? He who of those delights can judge and spare To interpose them oft, is not unwise. JOHN MILTON; V. WORLDLINESS. The world is too much with us ! late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our poweis, Little there is in nature we call ours : We have given away our hearts a sordid boon: That sea which bares its bosom to the moou. 263 FACT AJS 7 D FICTION. Those clouds that will be weeping at all hours, And are upgathered now like summer flowers. For this for everything we are out of tune ! They move us not ! O God, I'd rather be A Pagan, cradled in a creed outworn, So might I standing on this pleasant leu Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn) Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his many -wreathed horn. WORDS WORTH. VI. OX THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET. The poetry of earth is never dead ! When all the birds are faint with the hot sun And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead ; That is the Grasshopper's he takes the lead In summer luxury he has never done With his delights ; for when tired out with fun. He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. Tiie poetry of earth is ceasing never ! On a lone winter evening, when the frost Hrts wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, Ami seems to one, in drowsiness half lost, i'he Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. JOHN KEATS. FACT AND FICTION. "HERE B2 TRUTHS." "When the heathen philosopher had a mind so eat a grape, he would open his lips when he put, it into his mouth, meaning, thereby, that grapes were made to eat, and lips to open." These are "Facts;" and as such are detailed by Monsieur Touchstone the clown, "a great lover of the same." "Shepherd," quoth he, "learn of me: To have is to have;" another sage maxim, and much acted upon in these enlightened times. Touchstone's relish, how- ever, for "matter of fact " is but the substratum of a vein of humour which puts him a little out of the pale of your true and veritable mat- ter-of-fact people. They God help them ! don't understand jokes. They would no more think of disguising a fact under a covering of fun, than an unsophisticated Costar Pearmain or Tummas Apple-tree would of metamorphosing a piece of fat bacon into a sandwich. They deal in simples, and love what's what for its own sake, as a patron of the "pure disinterested- ness" system does virtue. In their vocabulary "whatever is, is right." "Qtiicquid ar/unt homines, nostri est farrago libelli," might be their motto. They are of Sir Isaac Newton's opinion, who thought all poetry only "ingen- ious nonsense." They ask, with the professor of the mathematics who read Homer, "What does the Iliad prove?" They are the precise antipodes to the lady who doated on Plutarclis Lives until she unluckily discovered, that, in- stead of being romances, they were all true. With the Irish bishop, they think Gulliver s Travels a pack of improbable lies, and won't believe a word of them ! Some of their fav- ourite authors are David Hume, Sir Nathanael Wraxall, Pepys, Sir John Carr, Bubb Dod- dington, Sir John Manderille, and John Wes- ley. While they eschew, as downright fables, the Waverley Novels, The History of John Bull, Robinson Crusoe, The Annals of the Par'sh, S'nbad the Sailor, Adam Bla>r, and Humphrey Clinker. If they meet with a book that is dull, "it is useful, for it contains mat- ter of -fact." If they happen to meet with one that is not dull, they say the same thing. They never for a moment, as other worthies sometimes do, mistake their imagination for their memory ; for which there is perhaps a sufficient reason, "if philosophy could find it out." In short, all imaginative literature they call "light reading;" at the same time they are unaccountably shy of calling their own peculiar favourites heavy, which is odd enough, considering that they seem to estimate useful- ness (upon which they lay mighty stress) a good deal by weight, and prefer, as in duty bound, "a pound of lead to a pound of feathers. " They are most gravelled by the metaphysics, of which they are rather at a loss what to make. They contrive, however, to avoid studying them as being something "not tangible." To con- clude they write themselves under the style and title of "Lovers of Fact," and are yclept "matter-of-fact people" by the rest of Europe. That " Facts are chiels wha winna ding, An* dowiia be disputed," is a truth whi-ch Burns has, after his own manner, long ago asserted, and which will not be readily controverted. But still this is no more a reason for loving them, than it is for a henpecked husband to love his better-half, because he dare not contradict her. "Facts are indisputable things," quoth Doctor Dryas- dust. Very true; but so much the worse; for, in that case, there is an end of the conversa- tion. Rosalind knew better when she recom- mended "kissing" as "the cleanliest shift for a lover lacking matter;" for if it be resisted, argues she, "this breeds more matter" a re- sult the very reverse of the doctor's definition. It is a strange thing, but in all ages divers potent, grave, and reverend signers seem to FACT AND FICTION. hare got it into their heads that "a fact," as they call it, has a sort of intrinsic value, as a fact, per se. They attach a mystical and peculiar value to it, as mortals (before the new birth of the political economists) used to do to gold, without reference to its uses, its origin, or its adjuncts. Adam Smith and Peter Mac- culloch have put the gold-doctrine to flight; but the other, its twin brother, remains there still, "unbated and envenomed." "Facts," say they triumphantly, "are true; now Fiction is untrue." Very well, doctor; and suppose it were the reverse. Suppose the "Fact" was untrue and the Fiction true what then ? This is a sort of query that sometimes makes a man's head spin like a teetotum; and what an effect were this to befall a head that never spun any- thing but almanacks during life? "Tilly Vally! " The value of a Fact lies not in its being what it is, but in the effect it produces. A his- torical series is valuable, not because it is true, but because, being true, it, in consequence, pro- duces certain effects upon the human mind. Could that same effect be produced by a ficti- tious narrative, it would be just as good. The same effect cannot be so produced, to be sure; and what does this prove? It proves that truth is capable of producing certain effects, of which fiction is incapable. This is ail very well ; but it happens to be true also of fiction, and to a much greater extent. This is no joke; but of it more by-and-by. If we take a series of historical or other truths, its value seems to lie in this, that, being true, it forms, as it were, an extended experience. It serves as a rule of action for those who read it. To do this, the truth of the series is no doubt absolutely neces- sary. It is essential to the process. But it is in the effect upon the mind that the value really resides ; and the truth of the record is only one aid, amongst others, to the production of that end. The sagacious personages who are, for the most part, accustomed to dogmatize upon this subject, take it broadly for granted that Fiction is something directly the opposite of Fact. They make them out at once to be as light and darkness, virtue and vice, or heat and cold. This is short-sighted work. There are no fictions absolute. None which do not in their essence partake of Fact. For all Fiction is, and must be, more or less, built upon nature. Nor have the most extravagant any very distant resemblance to it. We can only combine. It is beyond the power of man to invent anything which shall have no smack and admixture of reality throughout its whole. If it were possible, it would be incomprehen- sible. The wildest inventions are only partial departures from the order of nature. But to nature they always look back, and must ulti- mately be referred. They are no more inc'e- pendent of her, than a balloon is of the earth, although it may mount for a while above its surface. The connection between them may not be so obvious, but it is no less certain. Fact, then, is the primary substratum the primitive granite upon which all Fiction is formed. And this being so, Fiction has always more or less of the advantages of truth, besides superadded advantages peculiar to itself. In its employment we have this privilege. We can, at will, produce such a concatenation of supposed and yet natural events, as may be requisite to bring about the effect, and teach the lesson we wish. We can always do poetical justice. We need never want an instructive catastrophe. We escape that want of result to which accidental series are so liable; nor do we bring it about, as sometimes it happens in real life, through an unworthy instrument. The murderer who escapes at Newgate is punished upon the stage. Historical ruffians become heroes in an epic; and love, sometimes selfish in its origin, is ever pure in its poetry. The effect arising out of a good tragic or epic poem springs from the same principle as if it were from history. The experience we derive from it, though nominally artificial, is essentially, and to all intents, real. Fiction only enables us to render the effect more direct and complete than events might have done. We conduct the lightning where we want it ; but it is not the less lightning. The "vantage-ground" gained by this faculty is unquestionably enor- mous. We can not only command the sequence of incident and the tides of passion, but we can exhibit them again and again, as often as we please. A century might have elapsed before the gradual progress of wickedness, and the torments of guilty ambition, were exhibited as fully and as much to the life, as they are in Macbeth and Richard. A million of Italian intrigues might have been concocted and enacted, before treachery and jealousy were so completely anatomized as in Othello. But this is not all. In real life, be the series of events what they will, they are rarely manifested to any in their completeness. Dark deeds and intricacies of passion have few witnesses ; and even these seldom witness the entire detail. They are only seen in their integrity in news- paper narratives and judicial reports; and then the passions of the actors are buried and lost in the verbiage of an editor or the dry tech- nicality of legal inquiry. Now, in a theatre, 270 FACT AND FICTION. Macbeth murders and repents three times a week. Boxes, pit, and galleries are witnesses to the subtle poison of his ambition and the terrible shrinking^ of his remorse. The LESSON which in nature would have been imprinted but once, is stereotyped by the art of the poet, and diffused amidst thousands who else had never known either its import or its name. In the circle of the sciences the reign of Fact would, at the first blush, seem to be fully established. Fiction there would either seem to be an open usurper, or at best a sort of Perk in Warbeck a pretender who can only hope to succeed by counterfeiting the appear- ance of another. They, however, who acquiesce in this, see a short way into the question. The exact sciences, beautiful and invaluable as they are, seldom embrace the whole, even of the subjects of which they profess to treat. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The simplest natural objects have bearings which calculation does not touch, and appear- ances and relations which definition fails to include. They must have a poor conception of " this goodly frame the earth," of "this brave overhanging firmament, this majesticat roof, fretted with golden fire," who think that these, in all their infinitude of variety and beauty, can be ranged in categories, and ticketed and labelled in definitions. Can we get an idea of the splendour and odour cf the flower by looking out genus and species in Linnseus? Do we hear the roar of the waterfall, or behold the tints of the rainbow, in the theory of acoustics, the law of falling bodies, and the prismatic decomposition of the solar ray ? Can we strain an idea of a storm at sea out of an analysis of salt-water and the theories of the tides and winds? Can we compass the sublimity of the heavenly vault by knowing every constellation, and every star of every magnitude, of every name, and of every character, Latin or Greek, upon the celestial globe? Can geography or geology show us Mont Blanc in his unap- proachable majesty, or Chamouni in her beauty? It is in vain to ask these questions. Of the sublimer qualities of objects, science (so called) affords no ideas. It gives us substance and measurement, but for the aggregate intellectual effect, we must resort to imaginative description and the painting of the poet. He who never saw Dover Cliff, will find it in King Lear, and not in the County H story or the Transaction* of the Geoloi/ical Soc'ety. To him who never beheld a shipwreck, Falconer and Alexander Stevens are better helps than the best calcula- tion of the strength of timber, as opposed to the weight of a column of water multiplied into its velocity. If we want a full perception of the power of the beautiful, Professor Camper's facial angle, and Sir Joshua's waving line, sink to nothing before Shakespeare's Imogen or Cleopatra, or Kit Marlowe's description of Helen, in the play of Faustus. All the topo- graphical quartos that ever were written afford no such prospects as the Lady of the Lake or Thomson's Seasons. The true lover of flowers had rather read Lycidas, or Perdita's descrip- tion of her garden, than hunt for "habitats" in herbals or botanists' guides; and whether Glencoe and Borrodale be primary or secondary formations, their sublimity and grandeur re- main the same, in freedom and in contempt of systems and scientific arrangements. All this, however, is still not directly to the question. The point is has Fact or Fiction produced the most important changes in society? This is the real gist of the matter, and as this is answered, so must the dispute terminate. It sounds perhaps somewhat like a paradox, yet the reply must be given in favour of the latter. Let us look at it. The exact sciences have, without doubt, most changed the outward and bodily frame and condition of society. But the great mutations of the world have not their origin in these things. They spring from those causes, what- ever they may be, which soften the manners, modify the passions, and at once enlarge and purify the current of public thought. The Spartan legislator who punished the poet for adding another string to his lyre, well knew this. A people are the most quickly affected through their imaginative literature. A few ballads have altered the character and destiny of a nation. The Troubadours were amongst the most early and most successful civilizers of Europe. The obscure writers of romances, fabliaux, and metrical legends were the most potent changers of the face of society. Upon a barbarous and treacherous brutality, they gradually ingrafted an overstrained courtesy and the most romantic maxims of love and honour. Romance, the mother of chivalry, at length devoured her own offspring, Don Quixote and the Knight of the Burning Pestle put down the errant-knights and the paladins; and what Archbishop Turpin and the author of Amadis began, Cervantes and Fletcher ended. Looking at the literature of England, it is certain that the plays of Shakspeare and his fellows have produced a greater effect upon the English mind than the Principia of Newton. Had the laws of attraction never been demon- FACT AND FICTION. 271 ttrated, and the planetary system of Ptolemy remained uncontroverted, the general intellect would hare been much as it is. These great truths come little into common use. They do not mix themselves with our daily concerns. We love, hate, hope, fear, and revenge, without once considering, or caring, whether the earth revolves from west to east, or from east to west. Whatever stimulates or purges our passions whatever gives a higher pulse to generosity, or a deeper blush to villany whatever has enriched pity with tears, or love with sighs whatever has exalted patriotism and laid bare ambition that it is which ferments and works in the mind of a nation, until it has brought it to the relish of its own vintage, be it good or evil. Such were the writings of Shakspeare and his great contemporaries, Spenser, Marlow, Fletcher, Chapman, Deckar, and "the immortal and forgotten Webster." In all ages, the imagina- tive writers, when they had scope, have ex- hibited the same powers of changing and moulding the habits of a nation. The Puri- tanical authors of the Commonwealth turned England into a penitentiary; and the wits and poets of Charles II., by way of revenge, next turned it into a brothel until the poetical satires of Pope, and the moral wit of Addison, Steele, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay, again helped to "purge it to a sound and pristine health." Look over the page of history where we will, and the footsteps of the poet, the dramatist, and the essayist, may be traced as plainly as those of the lawgiver and the philo- sopher. Amongst the light stores of the play- wright, the novelist, and the ballad-maker, must the historian and the antiquary look for ma- terials, as well as amidst the graver annals of their predecessors. He who wishes to ascertain Hannibal's route across the Alps, must read Silius Italicus as well as Polybius. He who wishes to behold the true features of the Rebellion of Forty-five, must read the Jacobite Relics as well as the Culloden Papers. The antiquary who would illustrate the idiom, manners, and dress of Queen Elizabeth's reign, must go to Shakspeare, Lyly, and Heywood. Nay, even the politician who would construct a perfect commonwealth, must read Plato, More, Sir John Harrington, Swift, and Lord Erskine, as well as Montesquieu or Locke. There is yet another view to be taken of this question, and that perhaps the most decisive. It is this that Fiction has probably contri- buted in a double proportion to the sum of human delight. If then rational and innocent enjoyment be the end of life (and if it be not, what is?) there is little more to be said. There j are, to be sure, certain worthy and, upon the whole, well-meaning persons, who make a loud outcry about what they exclusively call "Utility." If, however, you happen to ask them of what use is utility, excepting to ad- minister to the pleasure and comfort of man- kind, they ("bless their five wits") are at a nonplus. They have confounded themselves and others with a notion that things necessary, or which cannot be done without, are there- fore more useful than things which can. Thi they take to be an axiom. It happens only to be a mistake. It arises out of a confused per- ception of the real scope and meaning of the term Usefulness. They forget that their sort of usefulness is negative and collateral, not positive and intrinsic. It is only a consequence of the imperfection and infirmity of human nature, which requires certain things to enable it to enjoy certain other things. This, however, only is a negative merit, being the filling up a defect, and not the addition of a positive good. Necessaries are better than superfluities, quoad the infirmity of our nature but not in the ab- stract. To supply, or rather avoid a defect, is a negation, as far as enjoyment is concerned. To obtain a positive pleasure is "the very entelechia and soul" of our being. Were this not so, we might as well assert that the child's A, B, C, are better than all the learning to the acquisition of which they are necessary that the foundation is better than the house, water than wine, oaten cake than ambrosia, a jakes than a summer-house. That the sum of intel- lectual pleasure afforded by Fiction is beyond that obtained from other sources, is tolerably plain. It is evident in this, that imaginative compositions will bear almost infinite repetition, whilst other descriptions of writing hardly en- dure repeating at all. We make ourselves acquainted with a series of facts, and having done so, are contented, excepting in as far as we may make them the means of arriving at other facts. The only passion to be gratified is curiosity, and that can only be once gratified. We take a pursuit, and having got as far as we can, the delight is for the most part at an end. Not so with works of the imagination. They address themselves, in turn, to every feeling and passion of our nature; and as long as we re- tain those feelings, so long are we enchained by them. There are few minds by which they can- not more or less be felt and appreciated, and, once felt, they never fail us. Poetry may be said to be the only thing of this world which is at once universal and immortal. Time obscures every other monument of human thought. History becomes obsolete, doubtful, and for- 272 BALLAD OF CRESENTIUS. gotten. Sciences ar changed. But poetry, never fading, never dies. The events of Homer's life are in irrecoverable oblivion. His very birthplace is unknown: and of his heroes and his wars, not a trace remains to prove that such have ever been. Yet he and they live, breathe, and act as freshly in his poetry at this hour as they did two thousand years ago. The hearts that have leaped at the tale of his Achilles, would march ten thousand such armies; and the tears that have dropped over the parting of his Hector and Andromache, might almost make up another Scamander. Well may we exclaim with a living bard : " Blessings be on them, aud eternal praise, The Poets" They whose courtesies come without being sought, who mingle themselves like friends amid our everyday pursuits, and sweeten them we scarcely know how Who enhance pros- perity and alleviate adversity ; who people solitude and charm away occupation Who, like flowers, can equally adorn the humblest cottage or the proudest palace Who can de- light without the aid of selfishness, and soothe without the opiate of vanity Please when ambition has ceased to charm, and enrich when fortune has refused to smile. If we glance over the everyday literature of the time, it is amusing to observe how the im- aginative and metaphysical have gone on pre- dominating. Turn to a popular treatise or an essay in a popular periodical, and ten to one it contains reflections on the modifications of character, inquiries into the changes of the human mind, or an analysis of some one or other habit, mood, or passion. The tangible has given way to the abstract. Dry details of Druidical monuments, and openings of barrows and cromlechs; queries as to whether fairy rings are caused by lightning or mushrooms; histories of old churches and market- crosses, annals of water-spouts and land-floods; heights of mountains and depths of lakes; meteors, fire-balls, and falling stars; lunar rainbows; lusus naturae; elopements; deaths, births, and marriages have all yielded to compositions in which the feelings such objects produce form as large a portion of the subject as the things themselves ; and what has been felt and thought is treated of as fully as what has been seen and done. This is the progress of the mind. Facts are only the precursors of abstractions ; and thus may it proceed until, in the fulness of time, our very children may prefer setting afloat a metaphysical paradox to blowing an air-bubble. THOMAS POUBLKDAY. BALLAD OF CRESENTIUS. [Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, bom iu Chelsea, Lon- don, 14th August, ISOi ; died at Cape Coast Castle, Africa, 15th October, 18-J8. At an early age she gave evidence of her literary abilities. She says: "1 cannot remember the time wheu composition, iu some shape or other, was not a habit. I used to invent long stories, which I was only too glad if I could get my mother to hear. These soon took a metrical form ; and I used to walk about the grouijds, and lie awake half the night, reciting my verses aloud." Her father's neighbour was Mr. William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette. To him several of her compositions were submitted, and he could scarcely believe that they were the productioi.a of the girl he had seen iu the next garden, bowling ;v hoop with one hand, whilst the other held a book. He published a number of her poems in the GazMf, niidm- the signature L. E. L., and they immediately attracted attention to the new poet. Miss Landon then produced her first volume, The Improvisatricf, which was iu every respect successful. The Troubadour followed, and her fame spread rapidly over the world. Family difficulties rendered the exercise of her pen a necessity, and she worked with untiring industry in prose and verse for the Literary Gazttte and the animals. Her poems are marked by a melancholy, which at times becomes morbid ; yet in social intercourse she displayed the liveliest disposi- tion. She published three novels : Francesco, Carrara: Romance and Reality: and Ethel Churchill. She married Mr. George M'Lean, then governor of Cape Coast Castle, on the 7th June, 1838. and five months afterwards die, and dearest treasure, My heart received thee with a joy beyond All that it yet had felt of eirthly pleasure; Nor thought that any love again might be So deep and strong as that I felt for thee. Faithful and fond, with sense beyond thy years, And natural piety that lean'd to heaven ; Wrung by a harsh word suddenly to tears, Yet patient of rebuke when just'y given : Obedient easy to be reconciled : And meekly cheerful, such wert thou, my c'..rd! Not willing to be left ; still by my side Haunting my walks, while summer d iy was dying : Nor leaving in thy turn : but pleased to glide Through the dark room where I was sadly lying, Or by the couch of pain, a sitter meek. Watch the dim eye, and kiss the feverish cheek. Oh ! boy, of such as thou art oftenest made Earth's fragile idols ; like a tender flower No strength in all thy freshness, prone to fade. And bending weakly to the thunder shower ; Still round the loved thy he.irt fonud force to bind, And clung, like woodbine shaken in the wind! Then THOU, my merry love ; bold in the glee, Under the bough, or by the firelight d ineing, With thy sweet temper, and thy s lirit free. Didst come, as restless as a bird's wing glancing, Full of a wild and irrepressible mirth. Like a young sunbeam to the gladden' d earth! Thine was the shout ! the swig ! the burst of joy ! Which sweet from childhood's rosy lip resoundeth ; Thine was the eager spirit nought could cloy. And the glad heart from which all grief reboundeth, And many a mirthful jest and mock reply, Lurk'd in the laughter of thy dark blue eye! Anil thine was many an art to win and bless, The cold and stern to joy and fondness warming; The coaxing smile : the frequent soft caress ; The earnest tearful prayer all wrath disarming! Again my heart a new affection found ; But thought that love with tliee had reach'd its bound. At length THOU earnest; thou. the last and least ; Nick-named "theemperor," by thy laughing brothers, Because a haughty spirit swell'd thy breast, And thou didst seek to rule and sway the others ; Mingling with every playful infant wile A mimic majesty that made us smile : And oh ! most like a regal child wert thou ! An eye of resolute and successful scheming; Fair shoulders curling lip and dauntless brow- Fit for the world's strife, not poet's dreaming ; And proud the lifting of thy stately head. And the firm bearing of thy conscious tread. Different from both ! Yet each succeeding claim, I, that all other love had been forswearing, Forthwith admitted, equal and the same ; Nor injured either, by this love's comparing: Nor stole a fraction for the newer call, But in the mother's heart found room for ALL ! MY BABES IN THE WOOD. I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder, Thau any story painted in your books. You are so glad? It will not make you gladder; Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks. " Is it a fairy story ?'' Well, half fairy At least it dates far back as fairies do, And seems to me as beautiful and airy ; Yet half, perhaps the fairy half, is true. You had a baby sister and a brother, Two very dainty people, rosy white, Sweeter than all things else except each other 1 Older yet younger gone from human sight ! And I. who loved them, and shall love them ever. And think with yearning tears how each light hand Crept toward bright bloom and l>erries I shall never Know how I lost them. Do you understand t Poor slightly golden heads ! I think I missed them First in some dreamy, piteous, doubtful way ; But when and where with lingering lips I kissed them, My gradual parting, I can never say. Sometimes I fancy that they may have perished In shadowy quiet of wet rocks and moss. Near paths whose very pebbles I have cherished, For their small sakes, since my most bitter loss. I fancy, too, that they were softly covered By robins, out of apple flowers they knew. Whose nursing wings in far home sunshine hovered. Before the timid world had dropped the dew. Their names were what yours are. At this you wonder. Their jiictures are your own, as you have seen; And my bird-buried darlings, hidden under Lost leaves why, it is your dead selves I mean! SARAH M. B. Pi ATT. 1 1 Mrs. Piatt was born at Lexington. U.S , in ".835. She is a contributor to the principal American maga- zines, and was joint author, with her husband, of Til* Easts at Washington and other fuenn, Is04. MARTHA THE GIPSY. 279 MARTHA THE GIPSY. [Theodore Edward Hook, born in London, 22d Sep- tember, 1788 ; died at Fulhara, 24th August, 1841. He was the author of sixteen novels and numerous other works. Maxwell, Jack Brag, and Gilbert Gurney the latter is autobiographical are considered his best novels. It was as a wit and a practical joker that lie made the greatest reputation, and in this character lie won the [uitronage of the Prince Regent, who secured for him in 18 1 2 the appointment of accountant-gen- eral and treasurer at the Mauritius. Hook had no knowledge of accounts, and in 1819 he was obliged to return to England, as a deficiency of about 12,000 was discovered in the treasury, and the government claimed repayment from the treasurer. A friend hoped that he had not been obliged to come home on account of ill health; Hook regretted to say "they think there is something wrong in the chest." He was quite unable to refund the money ; but the prosecution was not pressed until after he had made himself obnoxious to the Whig party by his articles in the John Bull, of which he was the editor, and in 1S24 he was imprisoned for the debt. He was discharged in 1825, and continued a brilliant but sad career as the reigning wit of society. The last dinner-party he attended was in July, 1841, when he looked at himself in a mirror and said, "Aye, I see, I look as I am done up, in purse, in mind, and in body, too, at last." His powers as an improvisatore are reported to have been marvellous. 'J -These midnight hags, By force of potent spells, of bloody characters And con j urations. horrible to hear, Call fiends and spectres from the yawning deep, And set the ministers of hell to work. London may appear an unbefitting scene for a story so romantic as that which I have here set down: but, strange and wili as is the tale I have to tell, it is true; and therefore the scene of action shall not be changed; nor will I alter nor vary from the truth, save that the names of the personages in my domestic drama shall be fictitious. To say that I am super- stitious would be, in the minds of many wise personages, to write myself down an ass ; but to say that I do not believe that which follows, as I am sure it was believed by him who re- lated it to me, would be to discredit the testi- mony of a friend as honourable and brave as 1 In his recently published Book of Memories, Mr. S. C. Hall tells the following pathetic anecdote. At a party during Hook's latter years, of which he had been the mainspring of mirth throughout the night, he was seated at the piano sustaining the fun to the last. A servant opened the shutters and the morning light shone upon the wit and a fair-haired boy who was stand- ing beside him. Hook paused, laid his hand on the boy's head, and in tremulous tones improvised a verse, of which these were the concluding lines : " For you is the dawn of the morning, For me is the solemn good-night." ever trod the earth. He has been snatched from the world, of which he was a bright orna- ment, and has left more than his sweet suffer- ing widow and his orphan children affectionately to deplore his loss. It is, I find, right and judi- cious most carefully and publicly to disavow a belief in supernatural visitings; but it will be long before I become either so wise or so bold as to make any such unqualified declaration. I am not weak enough to imagine myself surrounded by spirits and phantoms, or jostling through a crowd of spectres as I walk the streets; neither do I give credence to all the idle tales of ancient dames, or frightened children, touch- ing such matters: but when I breathe the air, and see the grass grow under my feet, I cannot but feel that He who gives me power to inhale the one, or stand erect upon the other, has also the power to use, for special purposes, such means and agency as he in his wisdom may see fit; and which, in point of fact, are not more incomprehensible to us, than the very simplest effects which we every day witness, arising from unknown causes. Philosophers may pore, and, in the might of their littleness, and the erudition of their ignorance, develop and disclose, argue and discuss; but when the sage, who sneers at the possibility of ghosts, will explain to me the doctrine of attraction and gravitation, or tell me why the wind blows, why the tides ebb and flow, or why the light shines effects perceptible by all men then will I admit the justice of his incredulity- then will I join the ranks of the incredulous. However, a truce with my views and reflections: proceed we to the narrative. In the vicinity of Bedford Square lived a respectable and honest man, whose name the reader will be pleased to consider Harding. He had married early; his wife was an exem- plary woman; and his son and daughter were grown into that companionable age at which children repay, with their society and accom- plishments, the tender cares which parents bestow upon their offspring in their early in- fancy. Mr. Harding held a responsible and respectable situation under government, in an office in Somerset House. His income was adequate to all his wants and wishes; his family was a family of love ; and perhaps, taking into consideration the limited desires of what may be fairly called middling life, no man was ever more contented or better satisfied with his lot than he. Maria Harding, his daughter, was a modest, unassuming, and interesting girl, full of feeling and gentleness. She was timid and retiring; but the modesty which cast down her 280 MARTHA THE GIPSY. fine black eyes, could not veil the intellect wiiich beamed in them. Her health was by no means strong ; and the paleness of her cheek too frequently, alas ! lighted by the hectic flush of her indigenous complaint gave a deep interest to her countenance. She was watched and reared by her tender mother, with all the care and attention which a being so delicate and so ill-suited to the perils and troubles of this world, demanded. George, her brother, was a bold and intelligent lad, full of rude health and fearless independence. His char- acter was frequently the subject of his father's contemplation, and he saw in his disposition, his mind, his pursuits and propensities, the promise of future success in active life. With these children, possessing as they did the most enviable characteristics of their respective sexes, Mr. and Mrs. Harding, with thankfulness to Providence, acknowledged their happiness and their perfect satisfaction with the portion as- signed to them in this transitory world. Maria was about nineteen, and had, as was natural, attracted the regards and thence grad- ually chained the affections of a distant relative, whose ample fortune, added to his personal and mental good qualities, rendered him a most acceptable suitor to her parents, which Maria's heart silently acknowledged he would have been to her, had he been poor and penniless. The father of this intended husband of Maria was a man of importance, possessing much personal interest, through which George, the brother of his intended daughter-in-law, was to be placed in that diplomatic seminary in Downing Street whence, in due time, he was to rise through all the grades, of office (which, with his peculiar talents, his friends, and especially his mother, were convinced he would so ably fill), and at last turn out an ambassador, as mighty and mysterious as my Lord Belmont, of whom probably my readers may know nothing. The parents, however, of young Langdale and of Maria Harding were agreed that there was no necessity for hastening the alliance between their families, seeing that the united ages of the couple did not exceed thirty- nine years ; and seeing, moreover, that the elder Mr. Langdale, for private reasons of his own, wished his son to attain the age of twenty- one before he married ; and seeing, moreover still, that Mrs. Langdale, who was little more than six-and-thirty years of age herself, had reasons, which she also meant to be private, for seeking to delay, as much as possible, a ceremony, the result of which, in all proba- bility, would confer upon her, somewhat too early in life to be agreeable to a lady of her habits and propensities, the formidable title of grandmamma. How curious it is, when one takes up a littlt bit of society (as a geologist crumbles and twists a bit of earth in his hand to ascertain its char- acter and quality), to look into the motives and manoeuvring^ of all the persons connected with it; the various workings, the indefatigable labours which all their little minds are under- going to bring about divers and sundry little points, perfectly unconnected with the great end in view; but which, for private and hidden objects, each of them is toiling to carry. Nobody but those who really understood Mrs. Langdale understood why she so readily ac- quiesced in the desire- of her husband to post- pone the marriage for another twelvemonth. A stranger would have seen only the dutiful wife according with the sensible husband; but I knew her, and knew that there must be more than met the eye or the ear in that sympathy of feeling between her and Mr. Langdale, which was not upon ordinary occasions so evidently displayed. Like the waterman, who pulls one way and looks another, Mrs. Langdale aided the entreaties and seconded the commands of her loving spouse, touching the seasonable delay of which I am speaking; and it was agreed, that immediately after the coming of age of Frederick Langdale, and not before, he was to lead to the hymeneal altar the delicate and timid Maria Harding. The affair got whispered about; George's fortune in life was highly extolled Maria's excessive happiness prophesied by everybody of their acquaint- ance ; and already had sundry younger ladies, daughters and nieces of those who discussed these matters in divan after dinner, begun to look upon poor Miss Harding with envy and maliciousness, and wonder what Mr. Frederick Langdale could see in her: she was proclaimed to be insipid, inanimated, shy, bashful, and awkward; nay, some went so far as to discover she was absolutely awry. Still, however, Fred- erick and Maria went loving on ; and their hearts grew as one ; so truly, so fondly were they attached to each other. George, who was somewhat of a plague to the pair of lovers, was luckily at Oxford, reading away till his head ached, to qualify himself for a degree and the distant duties of the office whence he was to cull bunches of diplomatic laurels, and whence were to issue rank and title, and ribands and crosses innumerable. Things were in this prosperous state, the bark of life rolling gaily along before the breeze, when Mr. Harding was one day pro- ceeding from his residence to his office in MARTHA THE GIPSY. 281 Somerset Place, and in passing along Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, was accosted by one of those female gipsies who are found begging in the streets of the metropolis, and especially in the particular part of the town in question. "Pray, remember poor Martha the Gipsy," said the woman; "give me a halfpenny for charity, sir." Jtr. Harding was a subscriber to the Mendicant Society, an institution which proposes to check beggary by the novel mode of giving nothing to the poor: moreover, he was a magistrate moreover, he had no change ; and he desired the woman to go about her business. All availed him nothing; she still followed him and reiterated the piteous cry, "Pray, remember poor Martha the Gipsy." At length, irritated by the perseverance of the woman for even subordinates in government hate to be solicited importunately Mr. Hard- ing, contrary to the usual c istomary usages of modern society, turned hastily round and fulminated an oath against the supplicating vagrant. "Curse!" said Martha: "have I lived to this? Hark ye, man poor, weak, haughty man ! Mark me, look at me ! " He did look at her; ~and beheld a countenance on fire with rage. A pair of eyes, blacker than jet and brighter than diamonds, glared like stars upon him; her black hair, dishevelled, hung over her olive cheeks; and a row of teeth, whiter than the driven snow, displayed them- selves from between a pair of coral lips, in a dreadful smile, a ghastly sneer of contempt, which mingled in her passion. Harding was rivetted to the spot; and what between the powerful fascination of her superhuman coun- tenance and the dread of a disturbance, he paused to listen to her. "Mark me, sir," said Martha; "you and I shall meet again! Thrice shall you see me before you die. .My visitings will be dreadful ; but the third will be the last ! " There was a solemnity in this appeal which struck to his heart, coming as it did only from a vagrant outcast. Passengers were approach- ing; and wishing, he knew not why, to soothe the ire of the angry woman, he mechanically drew from his pocket some silver, which he tendered to her. "There, my good woman, there," said he, stretching forth his hand. "Good woman!" retorted the hag. "Money now? I I that have been cursed? 'tis all too late, proud gentleman the deed is done, the curse be now on you." Saying which, she tossed her ragged red cloak across her shoulder and hurried from his sight, across the street, by the side of the chapel into the recess of St. Giles'. Harding felt a most extraordinary sensation: he felt grieved that he had spoken so harshly to the poor creature, and returned his shillings to his pocket with regret. Of course, fear of the fulfilment of her predictions did not mingle with any of his feelings on the occasion, and he proceeded to his office in Somerset House, and performed all the official duties of reading the opposition newspapers, discussing the lead- ing politics of the day with the head of another department, and of signing his name three times before four o'clock. Martha the Gipsy, however, although he had pooh-poolied her out of his memory, would ever and anon flash across his mind : her figure was indelibly stamped upon his recollection, and though, of course, as I before said, a man of his firmness and intellect could care nothing, one way or another, for the maledictions of an ignorant, illiterate being like a gipsy, still his feelings whence arising I know not prompted him to call a hackney-coach and proceed en vo'ture to his house, rather than run the risk of en- countering the metropolitan sibyl, under whose forcible denunciation he was actually labouring. There is a period in each day of the lives of married people at which, I am given to un- derstand, a more than ordinary unreserved communication of facts and feelings takes place; when all the world is shut out, and the two beings, who are in truth but only one, commune together, freely and fully, upon the occurrences of the past day. At this period, the else sacred secrets of the drawing-room coterie, and the tellable jokes of the after-dinner convivial ists, are mutually interchanged by the fond pair, who, by the barbarous customs of uncivilized Britain, have been separated during part of the preceding evening. Then it is that the husband informs his anxious consort how he has forwarded his worldly views with such a man how he has carried his point in such a quarter what he thinks of the talents of one, of the character of another; while the com- municative wife gives her view of the same subjects, founded upon what she has gathered from the individuals composing the female cabinet, and explains why she thinks he must have been deceived upon this point, or misled upon that. And thus in recounting, in arguing, in discussing, and descanting, the blended in- terests of the happy pair are strengthened, their best hopes nourished, and perhaps even- tually realized. A few friends at dinner and some refreshers in the evening had prevented Harding from saying a word to his beloved Eliza about the gipsy; and perhaps till the "witching time," which I have attempted to define, he would 282 MARTHA THE GIPSY. not have mentioned the occurrence, even had they been alone. Most certainly he did not think the less of the horrible vision : and when the company had dispersed and the affectionate couple had retired to rest, he stated the circumstance exactly as it had occurred, and received from his fair lady just such an answer as a prudent, intelligent, and discreet woman of sense would give to such a communi- cation. She vindicated his original determin- ation not to be imposed upon wondered at his subsequent willingness to give to such an undeserving object, while he had three or four soup-tickets in his pocket was somewhat sur- prised that he had not consigned the bold in- truder to the hands of the beadle and, ridicul- ing the impression which the hag's appearance seemed to have made upon her husband's mind, narrated a tour performed by herself with some friends to Norwood when she was a girl, and when one of those very women had told her fortune, not one word of which ever came true and, in a discussion of Some length, animad- verting strongly upon the weakness and im- piety of putting faith in the sayings of such creatures, she fell fast asleep. Not so Hard- ing: he was restless and worried, and felt that he would give the world to be able to recall the curse which he had rashly uttered against the poor woman. Helpless as she was and in distress, why did his passion conquer his judg- ment? Why did he add to the bitterness of refusal the sting of malediction? However, is was useless to regret that which was past and, wearied and mortified with his reflections, he at length followed his better-half into that profound slumber which the length and subject of his harangue had so comfortably insured her. The morning came and brightly beamed the sun that is, as brightly as it can beam in London. The office hour arrived; and Mr. Harding proceeded, not by Charlotte Street, to Somerset House, such was his dread of seeing the ominous woman. It is quite impossible to describe the effect produced upon him by the apprehension of encountering her; if he heard a female voice behind him in the street, he trembled, and feared to look round lest he should behold Martha. In turning a corner he proceeded carefully and cautiously, lest he should come upon her unexpectedly; in short, wherever he went, whatever he did, his actions, his movements, his very words, were controlled and constrained by the horror of beholding her again. The words she had uttered rang in- cessantly in his ears; nay, such possession had they taken of him, that he had written them down and sealed the document which contained them. " Thrice shall you see me before you die ! My visitings will be dreadful; but the third will be the last ! " "Calais" was not imprinted more deeply on our queen's heart than these words upon that of Harding; but he was ashamed of the strength of his feelings, and placed the paper wherein he had recorded them at the very bottom of his desR. Meanwhile Frederick Langdale was unre- mitting in his attentions to Maria; but, as is too often the case, the bright sunshine of their loves was clouded. Her health, always delicate, now appeared still more so, and at times her anxious parents felt a solicitude upon her ac- count, new to them; for symptoms of consump- tion had shown themselves, which the faculty, although they spoke of them lightly to the fond mother and to the gentle patient, treated with such care and caution, as gave alarm to those who could see the progress of the fatal disease, which was unnoticed by Maria herself, who anticipated parties, and pleasures, and gaieties in the coming spring, which the doctors thought it but too probable she might never enjoy. That Mr. Langdale' spunctilio, or Mrs. Langdale's excessive desire for apparent juven- ility, should have induced the postponement of Maria's marriage, was indeed a melancholy circumstance. The agitation, the surprise, the hope deferred, which weighed upon the sweet girl's mind, and that doubting dread of something unexpected, which lovers always feel, bore down her spirits and injured her health; whereas, had the marriage been cele- brated, the relief she would have experienced from all her apprehensions, added to the tour of France and Italy, which the happy couple were to take immediately after their union, would have restored her to health, while it in- sured her happiness. This, however, was not to be. It was now some three months since poor Mr. Harding's rencontre with Martha ; and habit, and time, and constant avocation, had conspired to free his mind from the dread she at first inspired. Again he smiled and joked, again he enjoyed society, and again dared to take the nearest road to Somerset House; nay, he had so far recovered from the unaccountable terror he had originally felt, that he went to his desk, and, selecting the paper wherein he had set down the awful denunciation of the hag, deliberately tore it into bits and witnessed its destruction in the fire with something like real satisfaction, and a determination never more to think upon so silly an affair. Frederick Langdale was, as usual, with his betrothed, and Mrs. Harding enjoying the MARTHA THE GIPSY. 283 egotism of the lovers (for, as I said before, lovers think their conversation the most charm- ing in the world, because they talk of nothing but themselves), when his curricle was driven up to the door to convey him to Tattersall's, where his father had commissioned him to look at a horse, or horses, which he intended to purchase; and Frederick was, of all things in the world, the best possible judge of a horse. To this sweeping dictum Mr. Harding, how- ever, was not willing to assent; and therefore, in order to have the full advantage of two heads, which, as the proverb says, are better than one, the worthy father-in-law elect pro- posed accompanying the youth to the auc- tioneer's at Hyde Park Corner, it being one of those few privileged days when the labourers in our public offices make holiday. The proposal was hailed with delight by the young man, who, in order to show due deference to his elder friend, gave the reins to Mr. Harding, and, bowing their adieu to the ladies at the window, away they went, the splendid cattle of Mr. Langdale prancing and curvetting, fire flaming from their eyes, and smoke breathing from their nostrils. The elder gentleman soon found that the horses were somewhat beyond his strength, even putting his skill wholly out of the question ; and, in turning into Russel Street, proposed giving the reins to Frederick. By some misunderstanding of words, in the alarm which Harding felt, Frederick did not take the reins which he (perfectly confounded) tendered to him. They slipped over the dashing iron between the horses, who, thus freed from re- straint, reared wildly in the air, and, plunging forward, dashed the vehicle against a post and precipitated Frederick and Harding on the curb-stone : the off-horse kicked desperately, as the carriage became entangled and impeded, and struck Frederick a desperate blow on the head. Harding, whose right arm and collar- bone were broken, raised himself on his left hand and saw Frederick weltering in blood, apparently lifeless, before him. The infuriated animals again plunged forward with the shat- tered remnant of the carriage, and as this object was removed from his sight, the wretched father-in-law beheld, looking upon the scene with a fixed and an unmoved countenance MARTHA THE GIPSY. It was doubtful whether the appearance of this horrible vision, coupled as it was with the verification of her prophecy, had not a more dreadful effect upon Mr. Harding than the sad reality before him. He trembled, sickened, fainted, and fell senseless on the ground. Assistance was promptly procured, and the wounded sufferers were carefully removed to their respective dwellings. Frederick Lang- dale's sufferings were much greater than those of his companion, and, in addition to severe fractures of two of his limbs, the wound upon the head presented a most terrible appearance, and excited the greatest alarm in his medical attendants. Mr. Harding, whose temperate course of life was greatly advantageous to his case, had suffered comparatively little; a simple fracture of the arm and dislocation of the collar-bone (which was the extent of his mis- fortune) were, by skilful treatment and im- plicit obedience to professional commands, soon pronounced in a state of improvement; but a wound had been inflicted which no doctor could heal. The conviction that the woman whose anger he had incurred had, if not the power of producing evil, at least a prophetic spirit, and that he had twice again to see her before the fulfilment of her prophecy, struck deep into his mind: and although he felt him- self more at ease when he had communicated to Mrs. Harding the fact of having seen the gipsy at the moment of the accident, it was impossible for him to rally from the shock which his nerves had received. It was in vain he tried to shake off the perpetual apprehension of again beholding her. Frederick Langdale remained for some time in a very precarious state. All visitors were excluded from his room, and a wretched space of two months passed, during which his affec- tionate Maria had never been allowed to see him, nor to write to, nor to hear from him; while her constitution was gradually giving way to the constant operation of solicitude and sorrow. Mr. Harding meanwhile recovered rapidly, but his spirits did not keep pace with his mending health: the dread he felt of quit- ting his house, the tremor excited in his breast by a knocking at the door, or the approach of a footstep, lest the intruder should be the basilisk Martha, were not to be described; and the appearance of his poor Maria did not tend to dissipate the gloom which hung over his mind. When Frederick at length was sufficiently recovered to receive visitors, Maria was not sufficiently well to visit him : she was too rapidly sinking into an early grave, and even the physician himself appeared desirous of pre- paring her parents for the worst, while she, full of the symptomatic prospectiveness of the disease, talked anticipatingly of future happi- ness when Frederick would be sufficiently re- established to visit her. At length, however, the doctors suggested a change of air a s g- 284 MARTHA THE GIPSY. gestion instantly attended to, but, alas ! too late; the weakness of the poor girl was such, that upon a trial of her strength it was found inexpedient to attempt her removal. In this terrible state, separated from him whose all she was, did the exemplary patient linger, and life seemed flickering in her flushing cheek, and her eye was sunken, and her parched lip quivered with pain. It was at length agreed that, on the following day, Frederick Langdale might be permitted to visit her: his varied fractures were reduced and the wound on the head had assumed a favourable appearance. The carriage was ordered to convey him to the Hardings at one, and the physician advised, by all means, that Maria should be apprised of and prepared for the meeting, the day previous to its taking place. Those who are parents, and those alone, will be able to understand the tender solicitude, the wary caution, with which both her lather and mother proceeded in a disclosure so important, as the medical man thought, to her recovery careful that the coming joy should be imparted gradually to their suffering child, and that all the mischiefs resulting from an abrupt announcement should be avoided. They sat down by her spoke of Frederick Maria joined in the conversation raised herself in her bed by degrees hope was excited that she might soon again see him this hope was gradually improved into certainty the period at which it might occur spoken of that period again progressively diminished : the anxious girl caught the whole truth she knew it she was conscious that she should behold him on the morrow she burst into a flood of tears and sank down upon her pillow. At that moment the bright sun, which was shining in all its splendour, beamed into the room, and fell strongly upon her flushing countenance. ' ' Draw the blind down, my love," said Mrs. Harding to her husband. Harding rose and proceeded to the window. A shriek of horror burst from him "She is there! " exclaimed he. " Who?" cried his astonished wife. "She she the horrid she !" Mrs. Hardins: ran to the window and beheld on the oppo-ite side of the street, with her eyes fixed attentively on the house MARTHA THE GIPSY. "Draw down the blind, my love, and come away; pray come away," said Mrs. Harding. Harding drew down the blind. "What evil is at hand!" sobbed the agonized man. A loud scream from Mrs. Harding, who had returned to the bedside, was the horrid answer to his painful question. Maria was dead ! Twice of the thrice had he seen this dreadful fictid in human shape; each visitation was (as she had foretold) to surpass the preceding one in its importance of horror. What could surpass this? Before the afflicted parents lay their innocent child, stretched in the still sleep of death neither of them believed it true it seemed like a horrid dream. Harding was bewildered, and turned from the corpse of his beloved to the window he had just left. Martha was gone and he heard her singing a wild and joyous air at the other end of the street. The servants were summoned medical aid was called in but it was all too late ! and the wretched parents were doomed to mourn their loved, their lost Maria. George, her fond and affectionate brother, who was at Oxford, hast- ened from all the academic honours which were waiting him, to follow to her grave his beloved sister. The effect upon Frederick Langdale was most dreadful; it was supposed that he would never recover from a shock so great, and, at the moment, so unexpected; for although the delicacy of her constitution was a perpetual source of uneasiness and solicitude, still the immediate symptoms had taken rather a favour- able turn during the last few days of her life, and had reinvigorated the hope which those who so dearly loved her entertained of her even- tual recovery. (Of this distressed young man I never, indeed, heard anything till about three years after, when I saw it announced in the papers that he was married to the only daughter of a rich west-country baronet, which, if I wanted to work out a proverb here, would afford me a most admirable opportunity of doing so. ) The death of poor Maria, and the dread which her father entertained of the third visitation of Martha, made the most complete change in the affairs of the family. By the exertion of powerful interest, he obtained an appointment for his son to act as his deputy in the office which he held: and, having achieved this desired object, resolved on leaving England for a time, and quitting a neighbourhood where he must be perpetually exposed to the danger which h was now perfectly convinced was inseparable from his next interview with the weird-woman. George, of course, thus checked in his classical pursuits, left Oxford, and at the early age of nineteen commenced active official life, not certainly in the particular department which his mother had selected for his debut; and it was somewhat observable that the Langdales, after the death of Maria, had not only abstained from frequent intercourse with the Hardings during their stay in England, but that the MARTHA THE GIPSY. 285 mighty professions of the purse-proud citizen dwindled by degrees into an absolute forgetful- ness of any promise, even conditional, to exert an interest for their son. Seeing this, Mr. Harding felt that he should act prudentially, by endeavouring to place his son where, in the course of time, he might perhaps attain to that situation from whose honourable revenue he ceuld live like a gentleman, and "settle com- fortably." All the arrangements which the kind father had proposed being made, the mourning couple proceeded on a lengthened tour of the Conti- nent ; and it was evident that his spirits mended rapidly when he felt conscious that his liability to encounter Martha was de- creased. The sorrow of mourning was soothed and softened in the common course of nature; and the quiet, domesticated couple sat them- selves down at Lausanne, "the world forget- ting, by the world forgot," except by their excellent and exemplary son, whose good quali- ties, it seemed, had captivated a remarkably pretty girl, a neighbour of his, whose mother appeared to be equally charmed with the good- ness of his income. There appeared, strange to say, in this affair, no difficulties to be sur- mounted, no obstacles to be overcome; and the consent of the Hardings, requested in a letter, which also begged them to be present at the ceremony if they were willing it should take place, was presently obtained by George; and, at the close of the second year which had passed since their departure, the parents and son were again united in that house, the very sight of which recalled to their recollection their poor unhappy daughter and her melan- choly fate, and which was still associated most painfully in the mind of Mr. Harding with the hated gipsy. The charm, however, had no doubt been broken. In the two past years Martha was doubtless either dead or gone from the neighbourhood. They were a wandering tribe: and thus Mrs. Harding checked the rising apprehensions and renewed uneasiness of her husband; and so well did she succeed, that, when the wedding-day came, and the bells rang, and the favours fluttered in the air, his countenance was lighted with smiles, and he kissed the glowing cheek of his new daughter-in-law with warmth and something like happiness. The wedding took place at that season of the year when friends and families meet jovi- ally and harmoniously, when all little bicker- ings are forgotten, and when, by a general feeling, founded upon religion, and perpetu- ated by the memory of the blessing granted to the world by the Almighty, a universal am- nesty is proclaimed; when the cheerful fire and the teeming board announce that Christ- mas is come, and mirth and gratulation are the order of the day. It unfortunately hap- pened, however, that to the account of Miss Wilkinson's marriage with George Harding I am not permitted, in truth, to add that they left town in a travelling carriage and four to spend the honeymoon. Three or four days permitted absence from his office alone were devoted to the celebration of the nuptials; and it was agreed that the whole party, together with the younger branches of the Wilkinsons, their cousins and second cousins, &c., should meet on Twelfth-night to celebrate, in a juve- nile party, the return of the bride and bride- groom to their home. When that night came it was delightful to see the happy faces of the smiling youngsters: it was a pleasure to be- hold them pleased a participation in which, since the highest amongst us, and the most accomplished prince in Europe, annually evinces the gratification he feels in such sights, I am by no means disposed to disclaim; and merry was the jest, and gaily did the evening pass; and Mr. Harding, surrounded by his youthful guests, smiled, and for a season forgot his care; yet, as he glanced round the room, he could not suppress a sigh when he recollected that, in that very room, his darling Maria had entertained her little parties on the anniver- sary of the same day in former years. Supper was announced early, and the gay throng bounded down stairs to the parlour, where an abundance of the luxuries .of middling life crowded the board. In the centre appeared the great object of the feast a huge twelfth- cake; and gilded kings and queens stood lingering over circles of scarlet sweetmeats, and hearts of sugar lay enshrined with warlike trophies of the same material. Many and deep were the wounds the mighty cake re- ceived, and every guest watched with a deep anxiety the coming portion relatively to the glittering splendour with which its frosted surface was adorned. Character- cards, illus- trated with pithy mottoes and quaint sayings, were distributed; and, by one of those little frauds which such societies tolerate, Mr. Hard- ing was announced as king, and the new bride as queen; and there was such charming jok- ing, and such harmless merriment abounding, that he looked to his wife with an expression of content, which she had often, but vainly, sought to find upon his countenance since the death of his dear Maria. Supper concluded, the clock struck twelve, 236 MARTHA THE GIPSY. and the elders looked as if it were time for the young ones to depart. One half-hour's grace was begged for by the "king," and granted; and Airs. George Harding, on this night, was to sing them a song about "poor old maidens'' - an ancient quaintness, which, by custom and usage, ever since she was a little child, she had annually performed upon this anni- versary: and, accordingly, the promise being claimed, silence was obtained, and she, with all that .show of tucker-heaving diffidence which is so becoming in a very pretty downy-cheeked girl, prepared to commence, when a noise, re- sembling that producible by the falling of an eight-and-forty pound shot, echoed through the house. It appeared to descend from the very top of the building, down each flight of stairs, rapidly and violently. It passed the door of the room in which they were sitting, and rolled its impetuous course downwards to the basement. As it seemed to leave the parlour the door was forced open, as if by a gust of wind, and stood ajar. All the chil- dren were in a moment on their feet huddled close to their respective mothers in groups. Mrs. Harding rose and rang the bell to in- quire the meaning of the uproar. Her daugh- ter-in-law, pale as ashes, looked at George; but there was one of the party who moved not, who stirred not: it was the elder Harding, whose eyes first fixed steadfastly on the half- opened door, followed the course of the wall of the apartment to the fireplace there they rested. When the servants came they said they had heard the noise, but thought it pro- ceeded from above. Harding looked at his wife; and then, turning to the servant, ob- served carelessly that it must have been some noise in the street; and, desiring him to with- draw, entreated the bride to pursue her song. She did; but the children had been too much alarmed to enjoy it, and the noise had in its character something so strange and so un- earthly, that even the elders of the party, although bound not to admit anything like apprehension before their offspring, felt glad when they found themselves at home. When the guests were gone, and George's wife lighted her candle to retire to rest, her father-in-law kissed her affectionately, and prayed God to bless her. He then took a kind leave of his son, and putting up a fervent prayer for his happiness, pressed him to his heart, and bade him adieu with an earnestness, which, under the commonplace circumstance of a temporary separation, was inexplicable to the young man. When he reached his bed- room he spoke to his wife, and entreated her to prepare her mind for some great calamity. "What it is to be," said Harding, "where the blow is to fall, I know not; but it is impend- ing over us this night!" "My life!" ex- claimed Mrs. Harding, "what fancy is this?" "Eliza, love!" answered her husband, in a tone of unspeakable agony, " I have seen her for the third and last time!" "Who?" "MARTHA THE GIPSY." " Impossible:" said Mrs. Harding, "you have not left the house to-day !" " True, my beloved," replied the husband; "but I have seen her. When that tremendous noise was heard at supper, as the door was supernaturally opened, I saw her. She fixed those dreadful eyes of hers upon me; she proceeded to the fireplace, and stood in the midst of the children, and there she re- mained till the servant came in." "My dearest husband," said Mrs. Harding, "this is but a disorder of the imagination." "Be what it may," said he, "I have seen her, human or superhuman natural or superna- tural there she was. I shall not strive to argue upon a point where I am likely to meet with little credit; all I ask is, pray fervently, have faith, and we will hope the evil, whatever it is, may be averted." He kissed his wife's cheek tenderly, and, after a fitful feverish hour or two, fell into a slumber. From that slumber never woke he more. He was found dead in his bed in the morning. " Whether the force of imagination, coupled with the unexpected noise, produced such an alarm as to rob him of life, I know not," said my communicant, "but he was dead. " This story was told me by my friend Ellis in walking from the city to Harley Street late in the evening; and when we came to this part of the history we were in Bedford Square, at the dark and dreary corner of it, where Caro- line Street joins it. "And there," said Ellis, pointing downwards, "is the street where it all occurred." "Come, come," said I, "you tell the story well, but I suppose you do not expect it to be received as gospel." " Faith," said he, "I know so much of it, that I was one of the party, and heard the noise." " But you did not see the spectre?" cried I. " No," said Ellis, "I certainly did not." "No," answered I, "nor anybody else, I'll be sworn." A quick footstep was just then heard behind us; I turned half round to let the person pass, and saw a woman enveloped in a red cloak, whose sparkling black eyes, shone upon by the dim lustre of a lamp above her head, dazzled me. I was startled. " Pray, remember old MARTHA THE GIPSY," said the hag. SEARCHING AFTER GOD. 287 It was like a thunder-stroke I instantly slipped my hand into my pocket, and hastily gave her therefrom a five -shilling piece. "Thanks, my bonny one," said the woman; and setting up a shont of contemptuous laughter, she bounded down Caroline Street, into Russel Street, singing, or rather yelling, a joyous song. Ellis did not speak during this scene; he pressed my arm tightly, and we quickened our pace. We said nothing to eah other till we turned into Bedford Street, and the lights and passengers of Tottenham Court Road reassured us. "What do you think of that?" said Ellis to me. " SEEING is BE- LIEVING," was my reply. I have never passed that dark corner of Bedford Square in the evening since. SEARCHING AFTER GOD. Thomas Heywood, died 1649. Although, as he himself tells us, he had "either an entire hand, or at the least a main finger in two hundred and twenty plays," scarcely anything is known of his life. His most notable production was, A Woman Killfd with Kindness, which has been highly commended by Schlegel and other critics.] I sought thee round about, O thou my God, In thine abode. I said unto the Earth " Speake, art thou He?" She answer* d me, " I am not." I enquired of creatures all, In general!, Contain'd therein; they with one voice proclaime, That none amongst them challenged such a name. I nskt the seas, and all the deeps below, My God to know. I askt the reptiles, and whatever is In tlm iihysse ; Even from the shrimpe to the leviathan Enquiry ran ; But in those deserts which no line can sound The God I sought for was not to be found. I aekt the aire if that were He? hut lo! Ft told me No. I from the towering eagle to the wren, Demnncled then. If any feather' d fowle 'mongct them were such? But they all much Offended with my question in full quire. Anawer'd " To flnde thy God thou must look higher." I askt the heavens, sun, moon, and stars, but they Said "We obey The God thou seek'st." I askt, what eye or eare Could see or heare ; What in the world I might descry Or know Above, below : With an unanimous voice, all these things said, "We are not God, but we by him were made." I askt the world's great universal masse, If that God was? Which with a mighty and strong voice reply'd, As stu|)ify'd, "I am not He, O man ! for know, that I By him on high Was fashion'd first of nothing, thus instated, And sw.iy'd by him, by whom I was created." A scrutiny within myself I, than, Even thus began : " O man, what art thou?" What more could I say, Than dust and clay ? Fraile, mortal, fading, a meere puffe, a blast, That cannot last ; Enthroned to-day, to-morrow in an urne; Form'd from that earth to which I must retume. I askt myself, what this gre it God might be That fashion'd me? I answer'd The all-potent, solely immense, Surpassing sense ; Unspeakable, inscrutable, eternal), Lord over all ; The only terrible, strong, just, and true. Who hath no end, and no beginning knew. He is the well of life, for he doth give To all that live, Both breath and being : he is the Creator, Both of the water, Earth, aire, and fire. Of all things that subsist He hath the 1W ; Of all the heavenly host, or what earth claimes, He keeps the scrole, and calls them by their ninies. And now, my God, by thine illumining grace Thy glorious face, (So far forth as it may discover'd be), Methinks I see; And though invisible and infinite, To human sight Thou, in thy mercy, justice, truth, appearest; In which to our weake senses thou com'st nearest. O make us art to seeke, and quid e to findo, Thou God. most kinde ! Give us love, hope, and faith in thee to trust, Thou God most just ! Remit all our offences, we entreat; Most Good, most Great I Grant that our willing, though unworthy quest May, through thy grace, admit us 'mongst the blart. 28S MASANIELLO. MASANIELLO, THE FISHERMAN OF NAPLES. 1 Tomaso Anello, or, as he is more generally called, Masaniello, was the son of a fisherman of Amalfi, where he was born about the year 3 623. He followed the occupation of nis father, was clad in the meanest attire, went about bare- foot, and gained a scanty livelihood by angling for fish, and hawking them about for sale. AVho could have imagined that in this poor abject fisher-boy the populace were to find the being destined to lead them on to one of the most extraordinary revolutions recorded in history? Yet so it was. No monarch ever had the glory of rising so suddenly to so lofty a pitch of power as the barefooted Masaniello. Naples, the metropolis of many fertile pro- vinces, the queen of many noble cities, the resort of princes, of cavaliers, and of heroes. Naples, inhabited by more than 600,000 souls, abounding in all kinds of resources, glorying in its strength. This proud city saw itself forced, in one short day, to yield to one of its meanest sons such obedience as in all its his- tory it had never before shown to the mightiest of its liege sovereigns. In a few hours the fisher lad was at the head of 150,000 men; in a few hours there was no will in Naples but his; and in a few hours it was freed from all sorts of taxes, and restored to all its ancient privi- leges. The fishing wand was exchanged for the truncheon of command, the sea -boy's jacket for cloth of silver and gold. He made the town be entrenched; he placed sentinels to guard it against danger from without; and he established a system of police within, which awed the worst banditti in the world into fear. Armies passed in review before him; even fleets owned his sway. During the viceroyship of the Duke of Arcos the Neapolitans were much oppressed by heavy taxes on the necessities of life. At length, in 1647, the viceroy mortgaged to ertain merchants the duty on fruit, at once 1 From tlie Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and fn- rtruftim. This once popular periodical was one of the early pioneers of cheap literature, and it ran a very successful career from November. 1822. till 1S49. It was first edited by Mr. Thomas Byerly, the Reuben of the Ptrcii Anectli'ttf (the Percit Anecdote*, by Sholto and Rentaii Percy. 20 vols.) At his death it was placed in the hands of a Mr. Ray for six months ; then it was en- trusted to Mr John Timbs, who carried it on until 1840. U|Min his retirement the editorship passed suc- cessively into the hands of Mr. D. M. Aird, Mr. Gaspey, and Mr. J. B. St. John. the luxury and staple of life to the temperate Neapolitans. Masaniello saw with grief his countrymen obliged to sell the'r beds, and even abandon their offspring, in order to pay the odious im- post. At length his sense of the public misery was worked up to the utmost by an outrage on his own family. His wife was carrying a small quantity of contraband flour home for her cWldren when she was seized and dragged to prison; nor was it until he was obliged to sell his furniture, and pay 100 ducats, that he could obtain her release. He now resolved to rescue his country from slavery; he harangued the fruit-dealers in the market-place, urging them not to buy a single basket of the growers until the duty was taken oif. He then assem- bled a number of boys, who went wailing through the streets, and calling out for redress. When remonstrated with by some of his neigh- bours, and jested with by others, he replied, "You may laugh at me now; but you shall soon see what the fool Masaniello can do: let me alone, and give me my way, and if I do not set you free from all your taxes, and from the slavery that now grinds you to death, may I be cursed and called a villain for ever ! " In the meantime Masaniello's army of boys amounted to 5000, all active and docile youths, from the age of sixteen to that of nineteen. He armed each with a slender cane, and bade them meet him in the market-place next morn- ing, Sunday, July 7, 1647 a day when a sort of mock fight and storming of a wooden tower used to take place between the Neapolitan youths in the respective characters of Turks and Christians. It was during the confusion occasioned by this custom that Masaniello ran in among the children and the mob and cried out, " No taxes! no taxes !" In vain did the magistrates attempt to quell the mob. Masaniello armed his troops with the plunder of the tower, and haranguea them. "Rejoice," said he, "my dear companions and countrymen, give God thanks, and the most gracious Virgin of Carmine, that the hour of our redemption, and the time of our deliverance, draweth nigh. This poor fisher- man, barefooted as he is, shall, like another Moses, who delivered the Israelites from the cruel rod of Pharaoh, the Egyptian king, free you from all gabels and impositions that were ever laid on you. It was a fisherman I mean St. Peter who redeemed the city of Rome from the slavery of the devil to the liberty of Christ; and the whole world followed that deliverance, and obtained their freedom from MASANIELLO. 239 the same bondage. Now another fisherman, one Masaniello I am the man shall release the city of Naples, and with it a whole king- dom, from the cruel yoke of tolls and gabels. Shake off, therefore, from this moment the yoke. Be free, if you have but courage, from those intolerable oppressions under which you have hitherto groaned. To bring this glorious end about, I do not care for myself, if I am torn to pieces, and dragged about the city of Naples, through all the kennels and gutters that belong to it ; let all the blood in this body flow cheerfully out of these veins; let this head fly from these shoulders at the touch of the fatal steel, and be perched up over this market- place, on a pole to be gazed at, yet shall I die contented and glorious; it will be triumph and honour sufficient for me to think that my blood and life were sacrificed in so worthy a cause, and that I became the saviour of my country. " Masaniello ceased to speak, and the shouts of the multitude attested the spirit that his words had excited. The firing of the toll-house, with all the account-books that were kept there, and many commodities that belonged to the farmers of the customs, was a signal for a general conflagration of all that was rare, precious, and curious throughout Naples. The houses of the nobility were ransacked; their fine furniture and valuable pictures, their libraries, wardrobes, jewels, and plate, were all brought forth into the streets, and thrown into immense fires, which were fed every moment by additions of the most costly fuel that luxury could supply. The house of a man who had originally carried bread up and down the streets of Naples, but becoming a favourite of the viceroy's had been enabled to acquire immense wealth by dealing in the funds, was sought out by the mob with peculiar eagerness. They assembled round his gates with lighted torches in their hands, forced an entrance, and, strip- ping the rooms as they went along, threw the furniture, books, papers, and everything that they could lay their hands on, out of the win- dows. Twenty-three large trunks were thus hurled into the streets, and being forced open by the violence of the fall, displayed the richest tissues and embroideries in gold and silver to the eyes of the beholders, who notwithstanding immediately consigned them to the flames, along with a cabinet full of oriental pearls; exclaiming, as they had done before, that they were wrung from the heart's blood of the people, and should perish in flames, as tho extortioners themselves ought to do. The viceroy became alarmed, and solicited VOL. L an interview; Masaniello, in the meantime, organized his forces, which assumed all the appearance of a well-disciplined army, amount- ing to 114,000 men. While a negotiation was going on with the viceroy, an attempt was made to assassinate Masaniello by some of the j viceroy's troops, who discharged a shower of musket-bullets at him, one of which singed th breast of his shirt. Becoming distrustful by this act of treachery, Masaniello issued several sumptuary laws, making every person leave off wearing cloaks or long garments, under which daggers could be concealed. He demanded a treaty from th# viceroy, to secure their liberties, which was granted. The treaty was accordingly solemnly read in the cathedral church, amidst countless mul- titudes of people, and Masaniello afterwards went to pay his respects to the viceroy at his excellency's particular request. He would have gone in his mariner's dress, as usual, but at the persuasion of the archbishop he consented to lay it aside, and appeared on horseback, attired in a white habit, splendidly embroidered, a magnificent plume of feathers waved from his hat, and in his hand he carried a drawn sword; thus accoutred he rode in front of the archbishop's carriage. His brother, also richly habited, rode on his right hand; one. of his colleagues, Arpaja, tribune of the commons, on the left; and the other, Julio Genevino, last; followed by a hundred and sixty companies of horse and foot, consisting in all of about fifty thousand men. All eyes were fixed on Masan- iello as he passed, all hearts sprang towards him, all voices joined in pronouncing him "the saviour of his country." The way before him was strewed by grateful hands with palm and olive branches, the balconies were hung with the richest silks to do him honour as he passed, and the ladies threw from them the choicest flowers and garlands, accompanying their homage with the most respectful and admiring obeisances. The air was filled with the sweetest music, and Naples, which for three days before was a scene of the most appalling anarchy and tumult, now presented nothing but images of peace and joy. A day was fixed for ratifying the treaty in public; but that day saw a wonderful change in Masaniello ; his incessant fatigue and anxiety, his want of rest, and neglect of food, were too much for a frame merely mortal, and his vigorous mind became affected. The viceroy took ad vantage of this circumstance, proclaimed his authority at an end, and promised a reward of ten thousand ducats to any one who should 19 290 ON REVISITING THE SCENES OF MY INFANCY. cause him to be destroyed. Naples was never deficient in assassins even without so large a bribe. His disordered reason displayed itself in several acts of wanton cruelty, with which, till then, his power, absolute as it was, had never been sullied: he wandered about the streets in rags, without anything on his head, and with only one stocking on: in this humili- ating state he went to the viceroy, and com- plained of hunger; a collation was ordered for him, but he declined waiting for it, and order- ing his gondola, went on the water, probably to seek relief from his feverish sensations. Unfortunately thirst preyed upon him, and in the course of a few hours he drank twelve bottles of Lachrymse Christ! ; an excess which, to one of his temperate habits and long priva- tion, was enough in itself to bring on insanity; and which increased his disorder to so alarming a degree, that the next day he rode furiously up and down the streets, wounding every one he met with his drawn sword, summoning the nobles to kiss his naked feet, striking and in- sulting his colleagues, and committing every i outrage and inconsistency. Hasan iello attended church on the festi- val of "our Lady of Carmine," July 16; here he told the archbishop that he was ready to resign his office and authority to the viceroy; the archbishop promised him everj'thing he desired, and with fatherly kindness commanded one of the monks to take him to the dormitory, and prevail upon him to refresh himself with a little sleep. Unfortunately his eminence left the church as soon as he saw his order executed ; and scarcely was he gone when the assassins rushed in, calling out, "Long live the King of Spain, and death to those who obey Hasaniello!" Few as the conspirators were, the cowardly people made no attempt to oppose them; but, on the contrarj-, fell back for them to pass, and they went accordingly straight to the convent, searching everywhere for Masaniello. He, unhappy man, hearing himself loudly called, and thinking his presence was required on some public matter, started from the pallet on which he had thrown him- self, and ran out to meet his murderers, crying, "Is it me you are looking for, my people? be- hold I am here; " but all the answer he received was the contents of four muskets at once, from the hands of his four detestable assassins : he instantly fell, and expired, with the reproach- ful exclamation "Ah, ungrateful traitors!" bursting from his dying lips. His murderers then cut off his head, and, fixing it on the top of a pike, carried it to the viceroy, after which it was thrown into one ditch, and his body into another, with numerous indignities be- stowed upon it, whilst ten thousand of his tote followers stood stupidly by, without making a single effort to redeem it from disgrace. Thus fell Masaniello, after a reign of nine days, from the 7th to the 16th of July. It was a reign marked with some excesses, and with some traits of personal folly; yet as long as it is not an everyday event for a fisher-boy to become & king, the story of Hasaniello of Naples must be regarded with equal wonder and admiration, as exhibiting an astonishing instance of the genius to command existing in one of the humblest situations of life, and as- serting its ascendency with a rapidity of enter- prise to which there is no parallel in history. ON REVISITING THE SCENES OF MY INFANCY. [John Leyden, M.D., born in Denholm, Roxburgh, 8th September, 1 775 ; died in the island of Java, 28th August, 1811. He was distinguished as an oriental scholar and a poet. He was a friend of Scott, and assisted in collecting materials for the Boi-der Minttrelsy. His intense abstraction whenever he had a book in his hand is said to have suggested the character of " Dom- inie Samson." He was the author and editor of num- erous important works. His death occurred shortly after his appointment to the judgeship of the Twenty- four Pergunnahs of Calcutta. His poetical works were published in 1819, with a memoir.] My native stream, my native vale, And you, green mends of Teviotdale, That after absence long I view ! Your bleakest scenes that rise around, Assume the tints of fairy ground, And infancy revive anew. When first each joy that childhood yields I left, and saw my native fields At distance fading dark and blue, As if my feet had gone astray In some lone desert's pathless way, I turn'd, my distant home to view. Now tired of Folly's fluttering breed, And scenes where oft the heart must bleed. Where every joy is mix'd with pain; Back to this lonely green retreat, Which infancy has rendered sweet, I guide my wandering steps again. And now, when rosy sunbeams lie In thin streaks o'er the eastern sky, MRS. MELLOR'S DIAMONDS. 291 Beside my native stream I rove : When the gray sea of fading light Ebbs gradual down the western height, I softly trace my native grove. When forth at morn the heifers go, And fill the fields with plaintive low, Re-echoed by their young confined; When sunbeams wake the slumbering breeze And light the dew-drops on the trees, Beside the stream I lie reclined, And view the water-spiders glide Along the smooth and level tide, Which, prin tless, yields not as they pass; While still their slender frisky feet Scarce seen with tiny step to meet The surface blue and clear as glass. I love the rivulet's stilly chime That marks the ceaseless lapse of time, And seems in Fancy's ear to say " A few short suns, and thou no more Shalt linger on thy parent shore, But like the foam-streak pass away!" Dear fields, in vivid green array'd ! When every tint at last shall fade In death's funereal, cheerless hue, As sinks the latest fainting beam Of light that on mine eyes shall gleam, Still shall I turn your scenes to view. MRS. MELLOR'S DIAMONDS. [George Augustus Sala, born in London 1827. His father was a Portuguese gentleman, and his mother an eminent vocalist. For some time he studied art with the intention of becoming a painter ; but having made several successful ventures in literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to that profession, and the celebrity which he rapidly achieved justified the altera- tion of his plans. The vivacity and marvellous fertility of his genius maintain his wide-spread popularity. He has displayed his power as an essayist, novelist, traveller, and journalist, and in each character has won new laurels. His principal works are A Journey due North being Notes of a Refidence in Russia in the Sum- mer of 1856; Twice Round the Clock, nr the Hours of the Day and Night in London, 1859; The Baddington Peer- age, I860 ; History of H'igarth and His Times, 1860 ; Dutch Pictures, 1861; Captrought Mrs. Mellor by post a number of polite MES. MELLOE'S DIAMONDS. 2<>5 but most pressing inquiries from, among other West-end tradesmen, Messrs. Tulle and Tab- binet of Regent Street, Messrs. Goer, Gauffer, and Gigot of Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, and Madame Coral ine of the Burlington Arcade as to whether Mrs. Surbiton P. Mellor would at once forward them cheques for the amounts as per margin, or whether they should instruct their solicitors to make application to Mr. Surbiton P. Mellor. The poor woman was in despair. She had spent her last quarter's pin- money to the last farthing weeks before. Only five days previously her husband had presented her with a cheque for fifty pounds, "for the missionaries," as he jocosely said. Alas! she had paid five-and-forty pounds at once to the cannibals, and they were still hungering for her flesh and her blood. " How am I to find a hundred pounds?" she cried desperately. ' ' I could as easily find a hundred millions. I can't give you a hundred pence; and if you speak to my husband I shall be utterly and entirely ruined." "Bah!" replied the Dutchwoman; "fat vor you drubble yourself so moch, mein tear ! It is easy enov. De moneys is comeatterful. You af your tiamonds." "My diamonds!" "Yes, surely. De peautiful tiamonds Mr. Mellor (de gind shentlemans !) he puy you only last year, an' gif you on your boffday when you vash dwenty-doo." "But Mr. Mellor likes me to wear those diamonds. He was looking at them in my jewel-case only this morning, and admiring them; and I am to wear them this very night at the French plays." " Bah, I say agen. Fat a tear liddle stoopid lof of a laty you are! Dere is tiamonds and tiamonds. Bring me de britty liddle dings, and I vill ged dem match by vour o'glock dis fery avternoon; and I vill lent you vivdy bounds more, and geep them in bledge, and lent you de oders vich is baste, and your hovspond he not know nefer one tarn ding aboud de drick ve blay. Ah, ah! Ha!" And Madame Schu- makers took snuff like an ogress if ogresses ever took snuff, which I believe they did. What was the wretched Maude Matilda Wilhelmina to do? What but bow down be- fore the demon and obey her? This interview, I may observe, took place about noon in the upper room of a house in Newman. Street, Oxford Street, where Madame Schumakers, trading under the name of Van Tromp, De Ruyter, and Co., announced herself, with her partner and the company, to be dealers in articles of vertu. Her victim took a four- wheeler. This time she did not haggle with the cabman; for she had purposely left her house ' on foot, and hastened back to Gallipoli Villa. She rushed upstairs to her bedroom, keeping the cab at the door; and an hour afterwards Madame Schumakers, alias Van Tromp, alias De Ruyter, alias Co., was in possession of Mas. MELLOR'S DIAMONDS. Now these diamonds, the birth-day present of Surbiton P. Mellor, Esq., and which had cost at Messrs. Hancock's no less a sum than seven hundred and fifty pounds, consisted of a necklace, two bracelets, a locket, a spray for the hair, and a pair of ear-rings, all in bril- liants of the purest water. They were to be held in pledge by Madame Schumakers for the sum of four hundred pounds, which she alleged to be due to her, and were to be restored to Mrs. Mellor on the payment of four hundred and fifty pounds ; the balance being advanced to that demented woman in cash, and Madame Schumakers very generously charging nothing at all for interest. Meanwhile Mrs. Mellor took home a morocco-case, containing a suite of diamonds, which certainly appeared to be the exact counterpart of her real gems; and in this suite she attended, as previously arranged, the performance of the French plays with her attached husband, and was infinitely admired for the splendour of her parure. A. few evenings afterwards they were to dine at home and alone Mr. Mellor was, contrary to his established habits, fully three- quarters of an hour late. When he did come, it was in a state of great disorder, and with a pale and disturbed countenance. For a long time he remained silent, and the dinner was sent down untasted. Then he hastily swal- lowed a glass of sherry; and after pacing the room for some time, thus addressed himself to speech : " Mall" this was Irer petit nom "I have some terrible news to tell you." She turned pale, and felt ready to swoon; she thought for a moment that the bank had broken. It was not that, however, Ifut, so far as her husband was concerned, even a worse calamity. He explained that he had recentlj embarked in very hazardous speculations, and that those speculations had proved unlucky. He was, he said, on the very verge and brink of ruin. He had embezzled a large amount of the funds of the bank, and an investigation which might take place at any moment would inevitably lead to his arrest on a criminal charge. He had raised money, he said, on all his available property. There was a bill of sale on the fine furniture in Gallipoli Villa, 296 MRS. MELLOR'S DIAMONDS. the lease of the house was mortgaged: but he still lacked four hundred pounds to complete the deficiency in his accounts. "Four hundred pounds, "he concluded, would save me, or at least give me time to turn my- self round. There are those diamonds of yours, Mall. I gave seven hundred and fifty pounds for them, and surely they ought to be good for four hundred. Mall, my own dear true wife, you must let me have those diamonds, and we must pawn them. It grieves me to the heart to do so, for you looked superb in them last night. " She blushed, turned pale, stammered, equi- vocated, asked what the world would say, and whether there were no other means of tiding ever the difficulty. She was told that there were none; and as for the world, her husband cried out passionately that it might say what it liked, and go hang. She offered him all her other trinkets; he told her disdainfully that, altogether, they would not fetch a hundred pounds, and that he must have the diamonds. She said faintly that she could not let him have them. He stared at her for some moments in blank amazement; and then, passing from entreaty to command, insisted on having the jewels forthwith; adding that, if she did not instantly obey him, he would take them from her by force. Sick with terror and apprehen- sion of discovery, the wretched woman went up- stairs and returning, brought the morocco-case, and laid it tremblingly on the dining-room table. He opened the etui, and sarcastically admired the sheen and sparkle of the gems. Then he told her that early the next morning they must be taken to the pawnbrokers; but that she should go with him, and assure herself that he had been telling the truth. She remembered the falsity of the stones, and the marrow in her spine turned cold. After a night spent in infinite and sleepless wretchedness, the cheerless morning came ; and Mr. and Mrs. Mellor drove in their elegant brougham down to Beaufort Buildings, Strand, at the corner of which, at the time of which I speak, was the well-known pawnbroking estab- lishment of Mr. Amos Scantleterry. They entered the "private office," in which loans of too much importance to be discussed in the vulgar boxes where the poor pawned their clothes were negotiated, and the diamonds were submitted to Mr. Amos Scantleberry, who was reputed to be one of the best judges of precious stones in Europe. That gentleman examined Mrs. Mellor's "diamonds" minutely, weighed and tested them, and did not hesitate for the moment in advancing on them the sum required four hundred pounds sterling. He paid over the amount at once in crisp bank- notes, and a bond for the loan, at a rate of interest agreed upon, was made out. This document Mr. Mellor handed to his wife, tell- ing her sardonically, that she might very soon redeem her finery if she would only practise a little economy for a time. He seemed to have become a very different personage from the Surbiton P. Mellor of the day before yesterday, and of the four happy years of their married life. At the pawnbroker's door he handed her into her brougham, and saying that he had an engagement in the city, left her. She went home half -distracted. In the course of a few hours she was certain the spurious nature of the gems must be dis- covered, and her husband would be prosecuted for fraud. What was she to do? Why had she not told him the truth in the first instance? He would not have killed her, had she confessed that her real diamonds were in the custody of Madame Schumakers. But then those em- bezzled 1 funds belonging to the bank, and the awful peril he was in? It was too late, and something must be done. She sat for hours revolving in her mind scheme after scheme, but none seemed practicable. At length, with shame and horror and ghastly loathing, she hit upon one which appeared feasible. She could borrow eight hundred pounds; somebody had told her so over and over again. Why had she not gone to him when the hag Schumakers pressed her? Because she was afraid and ashamed. But the worst was come now, and she must brave it. Somebody lived in very grand style in the Albany and in very grand style too and was highly curled, oiled, ringed, chained, pinned, and locketed. Somebody's name was Mossby Mr. Algernon Mossby: and some- body else by whom may be meant everybody or anybody declared that the name of Alger- non Mossby was only an elegant paraphrase of the less aristocratic appellation of Abraham Moses. Mr. Mossby was a frequent visitor at Gallipoli Villa; Mr. Mossby had horses and carriages and a yacht; Mr. Mossby was a gay man, a fashionable man; and Mr. Mossby admired Mrs. Surbiton P. Mellor to distrac- tion, and had frequently insinuated that not only was his heart laid at her feet, but that his purse was at her command. She had been a good and true wife to her husband, and had never given the oily, im- pudent, much bejewelled Jew any undue encouragement. She was determined to give him none now, dire as was her extremity. She went nevertheless to his chambers in the MRS. MELLOR'S DIAMONDS. 297 Albany within an hour after leaving Mr. Scan- tleberry's establishment; and she fell on her knees before Mr. Algernon Mossby, and be- sought him to save her from utter ruin and de- struction. Mr. Mossby behaved with thorough gallantry. He admitted that eight hundred pounds was a very large sum, but he thought, he said, that he could at once oblige her with a cheque for the amount. For all security he merely required her note of hand, payable on demand for the sum of eight hundred pounds and for "value received." "That is enough, my dear Mrs. Mellor," said Mr. Algernon Mossby, as he handed her the cheque and locked up the promissory note in his cash-box. " I will make my demand all in good time. That little scrap of writing is quite sufficient to ruin your reputation if produced; and I have no doubt, that ere I pro- duce it we shall have arrived at a very satisfac- tory understanding. Allow me to conduct you to the door; the staircase is rather dark." Half- distraught she hastened to Mr. Scantle- berry's, stopping on her way at the bank to get the cheque cashed. She had still the fifty pounds which the Dutchwoman had advanced to her on the previous day; and with the eight hundred lent to her by Mr. Algernon Mossby, she felt that one great peril was at least sur- mounted. Mr. Scantleberry seemed somewhat surprised to see her; but on her producing the loan-bond and the requisite money, handed her over the diamonds. She hurried then to Madame Schumakers in Foley Street, who was delighted to see her; the more so, she said, as she was starting for Rotterdam that very even- ing. To her Mrs. Mellor handed the sum of four hundred and fifty pounds, and received her jewel-case and her own diamonds. Now she felt relieved. She would hasten back to Mr. Scantleberry 's, re-pawn her diamonds, and then give Mossby back half his money. He would surely wait for the rest. It was four in the afternoon ere she reached Beaufort Build- ings, and in a few half-incoherent words ex- plained that, through unforeseen events, she was compelled to renew the transaction of the previous day. The pawnbroker bowed, observed that such things frequently happened in the way of business, and proceeded to examine the jewels merely, he observed, as a matter of form. Mrs. Mellor felt perfectly at ease as he weighed and tested them ; in this, at least, there was no fraud, she thought. Suddenly the pawnbroker fixed upon her a searching glance. "These are not the stones you brought me yesterday, madam," he said. "At all events," Mrs. Mellor faltered out, "they are my own jewels, and fully worth the sum I ask upon them." "I only know," replied Mr. Scantleberry, very slowly and deliberately, and handing her back her "diamonds," "that the stones you brought me yesterday were genuine, and of great value and that these are FALSE." "False!" "False, madam; you may take them to any lapidary to any judge of precious stones in London, and he will tell you that they are not worth ten pounds. There has been some very ugly mistake here. " And with a low bow Mr. Scantleberry retired into his back office. She found herself, she knew not how, in the street. She was now utterly, entirely ruined. She had no diamonds at all, either in pledge or in her own possession; and the accursed Mr. Algernon Mossby of the Albany held her note of hand for eight hundred pounds "for value received." She would go home, she thought, and kill herself. "No, my darling," said Surbiton P. Mellor that night, when she had thrown herself at his feet, and with passionate tears and outcries confessed all; "you are not ruined; no harm has come to you at all, or to me either, for the matter of that. I have merely been reading you a little lesson, to cure you of your one fault extravagance. The diamonds I gave you on your birthday were false. I knew that, sooner or later, they would come into the pos- session of that Dutch beldame Schumakers; I found the hag out, and took her into my pay; I intrusted to her the real diamonds, which she gave you as imitation ones. They were the real stones we pawned, and the sham ones which you afterwards vainty endeavoured to pledge. As to Mr. Algernon Mossby, he is my very good friend and agent to command. Here is your note of hand: and it may relieve your mind to know, that I was concealed in the next room throughout your interview with that obliging gentleman in the Albany. He will come no more to this house, and he has five hundred good reasons for holding his tongue. Now, then, come and give me a kiss, and to-morrow morning I'll give you your real diamonds and your sham ones too. Only, under any circumstances, don't take either the genuine or the spurious ones to Foley Street, to Beaufort Buildings, or to the Albany." The cure was efficacious and complete. Mr*. Surbiton P. Mellor has since made considerable additions to her jewel-case; but she has ceased to raise money either on the hypothecation of her personal effects or on notes of hand. 293 STANZAS. HOME AT LAST. Sister Mary, come and sit Here beside me in the bay Of the window ruby-lit With the last gleams of the day. Steeped in crimson through and through, Glow the battlements of vapour; While above them, iu the blue, Hesper lights his tiny taper. Look ! the rook flies westward, darling, Flapping slowly overhead; See, iu dusky clouds the starling Whirring to the willow bed. [Through the lakes of mist, that lie Breast-deep in the fields below, Underneath the darkening eky, Home the weary reapers go. Peace and rest at length have come, All the day's long toil is past; And each heart is whispering "Home Home at last ! " Mary ! in your great gray eyes I can see the long-represt Grief, whose earnest look denies That to-night each heart's at rest. Twelve long years ago you parted He to India went alone; Young and strong and hopeful-hearted "Oh he would not long be gone." Twelve long years have lingered by ; Youth, and strength, and hope have fled, Life beneath an Indian sky Withers limb and whitens head ; But his faith has never faltered, Time his noble heart has spared; Yet, dear, he is sadly altered So he writes me. Be prepared ! I have news good news! He says In this hurried note and short That his ship, ere many days, Will be anchored safe in port. Courage ! soon, dear, will he come Those few days will fly so fast; Yes ! he's coming, Mary Home Home at last. Idle words! yet strangely fit! In a vessel leagues away, In the cabin, ruby-lit By the last gleams of the day, Calm and still the loved one lies; Never tear of joy or sorrow Shall unseal those heavy eyes They will ope to no to-morow. Folded hands upon a breast Where no feverish pulses flutter, Speak of an unbroken rest, That no earthly tongue may utter. And a sweet smile seems to grow Seems to hover on the lip, As the shadows come and go With the motion of the ship. Rest and peace at length have come Rest and peace how deep and vast; Weary wanderer truly Home Home at last. TOM HOOD. STANZAS. There is a tqngue in every leaf! A voice in every rill ! A voice that speaketh everywhere, In flood and fire, through earth and air; A tongue that's never still! 'Tis the Great Spirit, wide diffused Through everything we see, That with our spirits communeth Of things mysterious Life and Death, Time and Eternity. I see Him in the blazing sun, And in the thunder-cloud ; I hear Him in the mighty roar That rusheth through the forests hoar, When winds are piping loud. I see Him, hear Him, everywhere, In all things darkness, light, Silence, and sound ; but, most of all, When slumber's dusky curtains fall At the dead hour of night. I feel Him in the silent dews By grateful earth betrayed; I feel Him in the gentle showers, The soft south wind, the breath of flowers, The sunshine, and the shade. And yet (ungrateful that I am !) I've turned in sullen mood From all these things whereof He said, When the great whole was finished, That they were "very good." My sadness on the loveliest things Fell like unwholesome dew The darkness that encoinpass'd me, The gloom I felt so palpably, Mine own dark spirit threw. 1 Son of Thomas Hood, the author of "The Song of the Shirt." This poem is from " The Daugluera oj King Dofter, and other Pvtmf." THE RUSTIC \VKEATH. 299 Yet He was patient slow to wrath, Though every day provoked By selfish, pining discontent, Acceptance cold or negligent, And promises revoked. And still the same rich feast was spread For my insensate heart. Not always so I woke again, To join Creation's rapturous strain, "O Lord, how good Thou art!" The clouds drew up, the shadows fled, The glorious sun broke out, And love, and hope, and gratitude Dispell'd that miserable mood Of darkness and of doubt. CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY. THE RUSTIC WREATH. [Mary Russell Mitford, born at Alresford, Hamp- shire, loth December, 17S6; died at Swallowfield, near Heading, 10th January, 1855. The extravagance of her father, Dr. Mitford, dissipated a considerable fortune which her mother had possessed, and also made away with 20,000 which Miss Mitford, at the age often, had obtained as a prize in a lottery. It w;ts the pecuniary difficulties of her family which suggested to her the idea of authorship as a profession, and in 1800 she began her literary career with a volume of Miscellaneous Verse, which was favourably received everywhere except in the Quarterly. In the succeeding year she made a more ambitious venture, and issued Christina, or the Maid of the South Seas, a narrative poem founded on the romantic incidents which followed the mutiny of the Bounty. Her genius and persevering energy achieved the greatest success in poetry, drama, and fiction. Of her plays the most iiotaMe are, Julian, a Tragedy, first performed in 1823 with Macready in the part of hero; The Foscari, a Tragedy, 18-6; Rienzi, 1828 ; and Charles t/ie First. But of all her works the most widely appre- ciated is Ou.r'Village : Sketches of Rural Characttr and Scenery. The first of these sketches appeared in the Lady's Magazine, 1819 ; they were subsequently collected, and with the additions made to them from year to year formed five volumes the first having been published in 1824, the last in 18.'i2. In the Nodes, Christopher North speaks of Miss Mitford as "that charming painter of rural life;" and the Shepherd says, "Oh, sir, but that leddy has a fine and bauld hand, either at a sketch or finished picture." Her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) form a work full of useful memo- randa about books, places, and people. Bentley and Son have recently published in three volumes a life of Miss Mitford, "told by herself in letters to her friends." It is edited by the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange, and has an introductory memoir by the late Rev. William Harness, her literary executor.] I had taken refuge in a harvest-field belong- ing to my good neighbour, Farmer Creswell: a beautiful child lay on the ground, at some little distance, whilst a young girl, resting from the labour of reaping, was twisting a rustic wreath enamelled corn-flowers, brilliant pop- pies, snow-white lily-bines, and light fragile harebells, mingled with tufts of the richest wheat-ears around its hat. There was something in the tender youth- fulness of these two innocent creatures, in the pretty, though somewhat fantastic, occupation of the girl, the fresh wild flowers, the ripe and swelling corn, that harmonized with the season and the hour, and conjured up memories of "Dis and Proserpine," and of all that is gorgeous and graceful in old mythology of the lovely Lavinia of our own poet, and of that finest pastoral in the world, the far lovelier Ruth. But these fanciful associations soon vanished before the real sympathy excited by the actors of the scene, both of whom were known to me, and both objects of a sincere and lively interest. The young girl, Dora Creswell, was the orphan niece of one of the wealthiest yeomen in our part of the world, the only child of his only brother; and, having lost both her parents whilst still an infant, had been reared by her widowed uncle as fondly and carefully as his own son Walter. He said that he loved her quite as well, perhaps he loved her better; for, although it were impossible for a father not to be proud of the bold, handsome youth, who at eighteen had a man's strength and a man's stature, was the best ringer, the best cricketer, and the best shot in the county, yet the fair Dora, who, nearly ten years younger, was at once his handmaid, his housekeeper, his plaything, and his companion, was evi- dently the very apple of his eye. Our good farmer vaunted her accomplishments, as men of his class are wont to boast of a high-bred horse or a favourite grayhound. She could make a shirt and a pudding, darn stockings, rear poultry, keep accounts, and read the news- paper: was as famous for gooseberry wine as Mrs. Primrose, and could compound a syllabub with any dairy-woman in the county. There was not such a handy little creature anywhere; so thoughtful and trusty about the house, and yet, out of doors, as gay as a lark, and as wild as the wind nobody was like his Dora. So said and so thought Farmer Creswell ; and, before Dora was ten years old, he had resolved that, in due time, she should marry his son Walter, and had informed both parties of his intention. Now, Farmer Creswell's intentions were well known to be as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. He was a fair sped- 300 THE KUSTIC WREATH. men of an English yeoman, a tall, square-built, muscular man, stout and active, with a reso- lute countenance, a keen eye, and an intelli- gent smile: his temper was boisterous and irascible, generous and kind to those whom he loved, but quick to take offence, and slow to pardon, expecting and exacting implicit obe- dience from all about him. With all Dora's good gifts, the sweet and yielding nature of the gentle and submissive little girl was un- doubtedly the chief cause of her uncle's par- tiality. Above all, he was obstinate in the very highest degree, had never been known to yield a point or change a resolution ; and the fault was the more inveterate because he called it firmness, and accounted it a virtue. For the rest, he was a person of excellent principle and perfect integrity ; clear-headed, prudent, and sagacious ; fond of agricultural experi- ments, and pursuing them cautiously and suc- cessfully; a good farmer, and a good man. His son, Walter, who was, in person, a handsome likeness of his father, resembled him also in many points of character; was equally obstinate, and far more fiery, hot, and bold. He loved his pretty cousin mucli as he would have loved a favourite sister, and might, very possibly, if let alone, have become at- tached to her as his father wished: but to be dictated to, to be chained down to a distant engagement ; to hold himself bound to a mere child the very idea was absurd and re- straining, with difficulty, an abrupt denial, he walked down into the village, predisposed, out of sheer contradiction, to fall in love with the first young woman who should come in his way and he did fall in love accordingly. Mary Hay, the object of his ill-fated passion, was the daughter of the respectable mistress of a small endowed school at the other side of the parish. She was a delicate, interesting creature, with a slight drooping figure, and a fair, downcast face like a snow-drop, forming such a contrast with her gay and gallant wooer, as Love, in his vagaries, is often pleased to bring together. The courtship was secret and tedious, and prolonged from months to years ; for Mary shrank from the painful con- test which she knew that an avowal of their attachment would occasion. At length her mother died, and, deprived of a home and maintenance, she reluctantly consented to a private marriage. An immediate discovery ensued, and was followed by all the evils, and more than all, that her worst fears had anti- cipated. Her husband was turned from the house of his father, and, in less than three months, his death, by an inflammatory fever, left her a desolate and penniless widow, un- owned and unassisted by the stern parent, on whose unrelenting temper neither the death of his son nor the birth of his grandson seemed to make the slightest impression. But for the general sympathy excited by the deploral le situation, and blameless deportment, of the widowed bride, she and her infant must have taken refuge in the workhouse. The whole neighbourhood was zealous to relieve and to serve them ; but their most liberal benefactress, their most devoted friend, was poor Dora. Considering her uncle's partiality to herself as the primary cause of all this misery, she felt like a guilty creature ; and casting off at once her native timidity and habitual submission, she had repeatedly braved his anger by the most earnest supplications for mer.-y and for pardon; and when this proved unavailing, she tried to mitigate their distresses by all the assistance that her small means would admit. Every shilling of her pocket-money she ex- pended on her dear cousins; worked for them, begged for them, and transferred to them every present that was made to herself, from the silk frock to a penny tartlet. Everything that was her own she gave, but nothing of her uncle's ; for, though sorely tempted to transfer some of the plenty around her to those whose claim seemed so just, and whose need was so urgent, Dora felt that she was trusted, and that she must prove herself trustworthy. Such was the posture of affairs at the time of my encounter with Dora and little Walter in the harvest field : the rest will be best told in the course of our dialogue : "And so, madam, I cannot bear to see my dear cousin Mary so sick and so melancholy ; and the dear, dear child, that a king might be proud of only look at him!" exclaimed Dora, interrupting herself, as the beautiful child, sitting on the ground, in all the placid dignity of infancy, looked up at me, and smiled in my face. "Only look at him!" continued she, "and think of that dear boy and his dear mother living on charity, and they my uncle's lawful heirs, whilst I, that have no right whatsoever, no claim, none at all, I that, com- pared to them, am but a far-off kinswoman, the mere creature of his bounty, should revel in comfort and in plenty, and they starving! I cannot bear it, and I will not. And then the wrong that he is doing himself; he that is really so good and kind, to be called a hard- hearted tyrant by the whole country side. And he is unhappy himself, too ; 1 know that he is. So tired as he comes home, he will walk about his room half the night; and often, THE RUSTIC WREATH. 301 p.t meal -times, he will drop his knife and fork, and sigh so heavily. He may turn me out of doors, as he threatened ; or, what is worse, call me ungrateful or undutiful, but he shall see this boy." "He never has seen him, then? and that is why you are tricking him out so prettily?" "Yes, ma'am. Mind what I told you, Walter ; and hold up your hat, and say what I bid you." " Gan-papa's fowers!" stammered the pretty boy, in his sweet childish voice, the first words that I had ever heard him speak. "Grand-papa's flowers!" said his zealous preceptress. "Gan-papa's fowers!" echoed the boy. "Shall you take the child to the house, Dora?" asked I. " No, ma'am ; I look for my uncle here every minute, and this is the best place to ask a favour in, for the very sight of the great crop puts him in good humour; not so much on account of the profits, but because the land never bore half so much before, and it's all owing to his management in dressing and drill- ing. I came reaping here. to-day on purpose to please him: for though he says he does not wish me to work in the fields, I know he likes it ; and here he shall see little Walter. Do you think he can resist him, ma'am?" con- tinued Dora, leaning over her infant cousin with the grace and fondness of a young Ma- donna ; " do you think he can resist him, poor child, so helpless, so harmless ; his own blood too, and so like his father? No heart could be hard enough to hold out, and I am sure that his will not. Only," pursued Dora, re- lapsing into her girlish tone and attitude, as a cold fear crossed her enthusiastic hope "only I'm half afraid that Walter will cry. It's strange, when one wants anything to be- have particularly well, how sure it is to be naughty ; my pets especially. I remember when my Lady Countess came on purpose to see our white peacock that we got in a present from India, the obstinate bird ran away behind a bean-stack, and would not spread his train, to show the dead white spots on his glossy white feathers, all we could do. Her ladyship was quite angry. And my red and yellow Marvel of Peru, which used to blow at four in the afternoon as regular as the clock struck, was not open at five the other day when dear Miss Julia came to paint it, though the sun was shining as bright as it does now. If Walter should scream and cry, for my uncle does sometimes look so stern and then it's Saturday, and he has such a beard! If the child should be frightened! Be sure, Walter, that you don't cry!" said Dora in great alarm. "Gan-papa's fowers!" replied the smiling boy, holding up his hat ; and his young pro- tectress was comforted. At this moment the farmer was heard whistling to his dog in a neighbouring field ; and, fearful that my presence might injure the cause, I departed, my thoughts full of the noble little girl and her generous purpose. I had promised to call the next afternoon to learn her success ; and passing the harvest- field in my way, found a group assembled there which instantly dissipated my anxiety. On the very spot where we had parted, I saw the good farmer himself, in his Sunday-clothes, tossing little Walter in the air; the child laughing and screaming with delight, and his grandfather apparently quite as much delighted as himself; a pale, slender young woman, in deep mourning, stood looking at their gambols with an air of intense thankfulness ; and Dora, the cause and the sharer of all this happiness, was loitering behind, playing with the flowers in Walter's hat, which she was holding in her hand. Catching my eye, the sweet girl came to me instantly. "I see how it is, my dear Dora, and I give you joy, from the bottom of my heart. " Little Walter behaved well, then?" " Oh, he behaved like an angel!" "Did he say Gan-papa's fowers?" "Nobody spoke a word. The moment the child took off his hat and looked up, the truth seemed to flash on my uncle and to melt his heart at once; the boy is so like his father. He knew him instantly, and caught him up in his arms and hugged him, just as he is hug- ging him now. " " And the beard, Dora?" "Why, that seemed to take the child's fancy: he put up his little hands and stroked it ; and laughed in his grandfather's face, and flung his chubby arms round his neck, and held out his sweet mouth to be kissed; and, oh! how my uncle did kiss him! I thought he would never have done ; and then he sat down on a wheat-sheaf and cried ; and I cried too. Very strange, that one should cry for happiness!" added Dora, as some large drops fell on the rustic wreath which she was adjusting round Walter's hat: "very strange," repeated she, looking up, with a bright smile, and brushing away the tears from her rosy cheeks, with a bunch of corn-flowers "very strange that I should cry when I am the happiest creature alive ; for Mary and Walter are to live with us; and my dear uncle, instead of being angry 302 DEATH OF GERTRUDE. with me, says that he loves me better than ever. How very strange it is," said Dora, as the tears poured down faster and faster, "that I should be so foolish as to cry!" WYOMING. On Susquehana's side, fair Wyoming ! Although the wild flower on thy ruiu'd wall And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring Of what thy gentle people did befall, Yet thou wert once the loveliest land of all That see the Atlantic wave their morn restore. Sweet land ! may I thy lost delights recall, And paint thy Gertrude in her bowers of yore, Whose beauty was the love of Pennsylvania's shore I Delightful Wyoming ! beneath thy skies, The happy shepherd swains had nought to do But feed their flocks on green declivities, Or skim perchance thy lake with light canoe, From morn, till evening's sweeter pastime grew, With timbrel, when beneath the forests brown Thy lovely maidens would the dance renew : And aye those sunny mountains half way down Would echo flagelet from some romantic town. Then, where of Indian hills the daylight takes His leave, how might you the flamingo see Disporting like a meteor on the lakes And playful squirrel on his nut-grown tree : And ev'ry sound of lift) was full of glee, From merry mock bird's song, or hum of men ; While heark'ning, fearing nought their revelry, The wild deer arch'd his neck from glades, and then, Unlimited, sought his woods and wilderness again. And scarce had Wyoming of war or crime Heard but in transatlantic story rung, For here the exile met from ev'ry clime, And spoke in friendship ev'ry distant tongue: lien from the blood of warring Europe sprung Were but divided by the running brook ; And happy where no Rhenish trumpet sung, On plains no sieging mine's volcano shook, The blue-eyed German changed his sword to pruning- hook. Nor far some Andalusian saraband Would sound to many a native roundelay. But who is he that yet a dearer land Remembers, over hills and far awayt Green Albyn I ' what though he no more survey Thy ships at anchor on the quiet shore, Thy pellochs rolling from the mountain bay, Thy lone sepulchral cairn upon the moor, And distant isles that heir the loud Corbrechtan roar !* 1 Scotland. 2 The great whirlpool of the Western Hebrides. Alas ! poor Caledonia's mountaineer, That want's stern edict e'er, and feudal grief, Had forced him from a home he loved so dear ! Yet found he here a home, and glad relief. And plied the beverage from his own fair sheaf, That fired his Highland blood with mickle glee; And England sent her men, of men the chief, Who taught those sires of empire yet to be, To plant the tree of life to plant fair freedom'! tree. THOMAS CAMPBELL. DEATH OF GERTRUDE. " Clasp me a little longer, on the brink Of fate ! while I can feel thy dear caress, And when this heart hath ceased to beat O think, And let it mitigate thy woe's excess, That thou hast been to me all tendernesB, And friend to more than human friendship just. Oh ! by that retrospect of happiness, And by the hopes of an immortal trust, God shall assuage thy pangs when I am laid In dust ! ''Go, Henry, go not back, when I depart, The scene thy bursting tears too deep will mov% Where my dear father took thee to his heart, And Gertrude thought it ecstacy to rove With thee, as with an angel, through the grove Of peace imagining her lot was cast In heav'n ; for ours was not like earthly love. And must this parting be our very last? No! I shall love thee still, when death itself is past. " Half could I bear, methinks, to leave this earth And thee, more loved than aught beneath the sun, If I head lived to smile but on the birth Of one dear pledge; but shall there then be none In future times no gentle little one, To clasp thy neck, and look, resembling me 1 Yet seems it, ev'n while life's last pulses run, A sweetness in the cup of death to be, Lord of my bosom's love ! to die beholding thee !" Hush'd were his Gertrude's lips! but still tbeir bland And beautiful expression seem'd to melt With love that could not die ! and still his hand She pi-esses to the heart no more that felt. Ah heart ! where once each fond affection dwelt, And features yet that spoke a soul more fair. Mute, gazing, agonizing as he knelt Of them that stood encircling his despair, He heard some friendly words but knew not what they were. THOMAS CAMPBELL, SCHOOL FRIENDSHIP. 303 SCHOOL FRIENDSHIP. Colonel and Mrs. Nightingale reside in Albemarle Street. The colonel's movements may be said to form the two sides of an obtuse- angled triangle: that is to say, he rides into Hyde Park before dinner, and to the Opera- house in the Haymarket after it. Mrs. Night- ingale reads the English poets: she possesses them all neatly bound, placed upon a species of literary dumb-waiter. When tired of Sir Walter Scott, she has only to give her satin- wood machine a jerk, and Cain a Mystery tumbles into her lap. About two-and-thirty years ago 1 , Jack Nightingale (as he was then called) quitted Westminster School. His most intimate crony at that establishment was George Withers, a fair round-faced boy with flaxen hair. Old General Nightingale, Jack's father, used to call him "the sweet little cherub," partly with reference to the chubby-cheeked ornaments of old tombstones, and partly to Dibdin's celebrated ballad, which introduces that bodiless personage at the close of every stanza. The cherub would often accompany young Nightingale to dine with the General, in Hertford Street, May Fair. Upon these occasions, the latter would take upon him to cross-examine his visitant in Latin. The general seldom advanced into the Roman ter- ritories beyond " Mars, Bacchus, Apollo," but he continued, nevertheless, to make George Withers sit very uneasy upon his chair. Be that as it may, the friendship of the two boys was most exemplary: I am as fond of new quotations as the author of Saint Ronaris Well, and shall therefore satisfy myself with assert- ing that " In infancy their hopes and fears Were to each other known." Time makes terrible havoc with school friendships. Jack Nightingale quitted West- minster, and became a member of his father's profession ; George Withers entered the church, and became curate of Scoresby, in Yorkshire. For the first six months nothing could be more constant than their correspondence. Many a one shilling and ninepence of theirs did my lords the Joint Postmaster pocket : after that period the attachment hung fire, like the New Post- office itself in St. Martin's le Grand. Some- thing of importance was continually occurring to abbreviate their epistles: Jack Nightingale had to try on a new hussar cap, and George Withers had to bury an old woman, " So no more at present from," &c. &c. The case is by no means a singular one. Gibbon, when living at Lausanne, was always hammering out an excuse for not writing to his friend Lord Sheffield. The fault, in these cases, seems to consist in attempting to apologize: why not boldly leave off writing at once, and imitate the man with a toothache, who, after being pestered with seven civil inquiries from a friend, couched in the accustomed phrase, " How do you find yourself now?" at length answered, "When there is any alteration I will let you know." The revolutionary French war now broke out, and Cornet Nightingale joined his regi- ment in Flanders. Two letters, " like angel visits" (anothernew quotation), were despatched by him to his clerical Orestes, from before Valenciennes. In one of these the following phrase occurred, "Our troops have sat down before the town." George Withers in his reply observed, " I am very glad to hear it, for the poor fellows must have been sadly tired." Our military Pylades took this as a joke, but I confidently believe that it was written in sober seriousness. George Withers had heard talk of camp-stools, and concluded that the Duke of York had provided his weary troops with a due assortment of them. Upon the firing of these two epistolary shots, both batteries were silenced. After a lapse of upwards of thirty years, one fine Saturday afternoon, in the last variable month of March, when Colonel Nightingale had availed himself of a gleam of sunshine to take his canter in the park, his lady, busied at her rotatory book-stand, heard a hard double rap at the street door. The two heavy concussions made her think it was either a twopenny post- man or a twopenny creditor. In either case the affair excited but little emotion. John, however, in a few seconds entered the drawing- room, and informed his mistress that a fat man wished particularly to see Colonel Night- ingale or his lady. "Show him up," said Mrs. Nightingale, " but leave the door ajar, and remain within call." The door was re- opened, and in walked the Rev. George Withers. He begged pardon for intruding; but, being summoned up to town to attend a trial (here he produced the subposna), he could not for the life of him avoid calling upon his old friend and school-fellow, whom he had not seen for thirty years and upwards : he had had a vast deal of trouble in finding him out: at the Horse Guards he was referred to the United Service Club : he had turned, by mistake, into a large glass shop, in what used, thirty years 30i SCHOOL FRIENDSHIP. agi, to be called Cock-pur Street, but the name was now changed to Pall Mall East, why he could not devise: the man at the counter was very civil, that he must say for him, but could give him no information: the two sentinels fronting Carlton Palace had contented them- selves with shaking their heads: but at length, Mr. Samms the bookseller, at tho corner of St. James's Street, had cast his eye over a little j thick red book, called Boyle's Court Guide, and ; had directed him to the proper place. Mrs. | Nightingale received Mr. Withers, notwith- ; standing the decided mauvaiv ton of his aspect, with great politeness. She intimated that she had often heard the colonel speak of his ffiend Withers, and how delighted he should be to ; meet with him again: the colonel was riding in Hyde Park; but she hoped and trusted that Mr. Withers would name an early day for par- ! taking of a family dinner in Albemarle Street. ; Mr. Withers looked a little duller than usual at this sine die adjournment, and said that he ! must go back to Scorcsby on the morrow. Mrs. | Nightingale hereupon hoped that Mr. Withers ! would so far oblige them as to partake of their I humble fare to-day. The reverend gentlemen j acquiesced with alacrity; and after many bows, j and backing against a frail mahogany table, i surmounted with a chess-board, whereby knights and pawns were precipitated to the ground, took his departure to the New Hum- j mums. " I have invited a friend to dine with - you to -day, "said Mrs. Nightingale, as her spouse with splashed boots entered the room. The | brow of Colonel Nightingale lowered "My dear, how could you be so dreadfully incon- siderate : are you aware that it is opera night ?" " True," rejoined the lady, " but the gentle- man is obliged to quit town to-morrow. " " He must be a very extraordinary gentleman if he induces me to postpone Catalani." " I think, notwithstanding, that that consequence will follow, when you learn who it is." "And pray, who is it?" "What do you think of George Withers." "What, my old crony at Westminster?" "Yes, he." "My dear Augusta, you have acted with your accustomed good sense. George Withers! I shall be de- lighted to see him! Why, it is nearly twenty years since we last saw each other." " For nearly twenty, read upwards of thirty," thought Mrs. Nightingale, but she was too good a wife to give the erratum utterance. Precisely at half-past six the same sort of heavy double-rap at the door denoted that George Withers had arrived. The school- fellows advanced with delight to accost each other, but in the act of shaking hands mutually gave a start of astonishment. Good heaven! said Nightingale to himself, is it possible that this can be Withers? and, Good heavens! said Withers to himself, is it possible that this can be Nightingale? a sympathy of ejaculation which could only proceed from friendship of such a long standing. Dinner was immediately announced, and Mrs. Nightingale was destined to be amused by an eager recital of the.r mutual "hairbreadth 'scapes" at their ancient seminary. " Do you remember Sam Talbot?'' " To be sure I do. What is become of him ? ' "He married a planter's daughter, an;l settled in Tobago." "Where's Lawrence?' "Which of them, Charles or Robert?" " Robert I meant." " He is a barrack-master at Colchester." "And what's become of Charles Enderby, who broke his leaping-pole, and fell into Drayton's ditch in Tothill Fields? ' "Oh, he has purchased half a million of swampy acres in the back settlements of America!" "Indeed! well he always had a turn that way. Do you remember his battle with Frank Parsons? he certainly would have scalped him if he had not worn a wig. " Dis- course like this is highly entertaining to the parties interested; but they are apt, in the hurry of colloquy, to keep all the entertain- ment to themselves. Mrs. Nightingale, inde- pendently of her dislike to these exclusive reminiscences, found serious internal fault with the Reverend George Withers' style of eating. The food unquestionably reached his mouth, but somehow it never got there as it should have done. His four-pronged silver fork lay idle upon the table-cloth, while his knife was doing all the duty which polite custom has thrown upon its silver associate, passed to and fro from his mouth to his plate with fearful impetuosity. " I have one chance yet," sighed the lady to herself; "he will cut his own tongue out in a minute I plainly perceive that nothing else can check his garrulity. " Still the conversation ran in the same channel. "Do you remember this?" and "Do you remem- ber that?" ushered in every speech. At length the Reverend Mr. Withers asked the friend of his heart, whether he remembered how he served the Italian image-men? Nightingale had forgotten it. "Oh, then I must recall it to your memory," said the divine. "There was a party of us, madam (turning to the lady of the mansion), at our window, when in came a man into Dean's yard with a set of plaster images upon a board, balanced upon his head. These Italians are certainly admirable artists. Such correct grouping of figures, such har- mony! Let me see, there were Socrates, SCHOOL FRIENDSHIP. 305 Mendoza, Necker, Lord Howe, Milton, a gilt lion, Count Cagliostro, Whitfa'eld, and a green parrot, all cheek-by -jowl together. The man oh, you must remember it, Jack walked under the window, crying, 'Image, image, Trho'll buy my image ?' when you 0, you must recollect threw a basin of water upon his board. Away floated Whitfield and the green parrot: Mendoza gave Milton a knock- down blow: the gilt lion fell tooth and nail upon Count Cagliostro: and Necker could not find ways and means to keep his place Lord Howe was the only officer who kept the deck." "Yes, yes, now I do remember it," exclaimed Colonel Nightingale, laughing heartily. It would have been better if he had remained serious. The opening of his fauces set Mr. Withers' tongue afloat upon a very ticklish topic. " Why, Jack," exclaimed the re- lentless clergyman, ' ' you have got a new tooth. " The colonel reddened ; but the ecclesiastic proceeded. "Well, that's droll enough; you certainly had lost a tooth : I think it was your left eye-tooth." "Do you retain your wise ones?" inquired the caustic colonel. " Yes, both of them," replied the matter-of-fact divulger of secrets. " You must remember the loss of yours; it was on the left side: Frank Anderson knocked it out with a cricket-ball." There are certain secrets which men keep even from their wives. For "twice ten tedious years" the colonel had been hugging himself in the cer- tainty that the affair in question was confined to Chevalier Ruspini and himself. " Will you take a glass of champaign, sir?" said the master of the mansion. The movement was most dexterous. The Rev. Mr. Withers had made a "god of his belly" too long to allow the thoughts of any teeth, save his own, to cross his Bacchanalian devotions. When the summons of " Coffee is ready " had induced the two school friends to rejoin Mrs. Nightingale in the drawing-room, all former incidents had been pretty well ex- hausted, and they now proceeded to discuss "things as they are." But in this species of duet they by no means chimed harmoni- Dusly together. Withers thought Scoresby and its concerns were the concerns of all mankind; and Nightingale could not imagine that any- body upon earth had anything to think of save Rossini and his prima donna of a wife, Lindley's violoncello, Garcia in Atjorante, and Catalani in II Fanatico per la Mmica. " I have news to tell you," said the country parson to the frequenter of the Italian opera, "which I am sure you will be glad to hear." " In- deed, what is it?" " My black sow has pro- VOL. i. duced me seven of as pretty pigs as ever you saw in your life. Then I've another thing to tell you: I enlarged my pig-sty seven feet fourinches: fourinches? I really think it was five : yes, it certainly was five. This caused the building to project a little, and but a little, upon the footpath that leads the back way, up town from the Red Lion to Mrs. Marshall's meadow. Well, now, what do you think Tom Austin did? He told Richard Holloway that I had been guilty of a trespass: whereupon Holloway, by advice of Skinner his attorney, pulled down four planks of the new part of the pig-stye, and let the whole litter out into the village! Little Johnny Mears caught one of them it was the black and white one and Srnithers, the baker, contrived to get hold of five more ; but I have never set eyes upon the seventh from that day to this! The poor black sow took on sadly. Dick Holloway ought to be ashamed of himself. He is a fellow of very loose habits, and never sets out his tithes as he should do. But what can you expect from a Presbyterian?" " This bald unjointed chat" made Colonel Nightingale fidget up and down like the right elbow of Mr. Lindley pending the agony of his violoncello accompaniment to the " Batti Batti"of the now forgotten Mozart. The colonel had hitherto with marvellous patience, from com- plaisance to his guest, foreborne to mount his own hobby: finding, however, that the latter was in no hurry to dismount, he resolved, coute qul coute, to vault into his own proper saddle. The following dialogue forthwith ensued. I copy it verbatim, as a model of school friend- ship standing firm, in its community of tastes, amid the wreck of thirty years and upwards. " I am, I own, extremely partial to Rossini's Ricciardo e Zoraule: Garcia in Ayorante ex- cels himself: the critics object to his excess of ornament; but I own this has always ap- peared to me to be his chief merit." " When the black sow litters again, I shall keep a sharp look-out upon Master Holloway ; and if he pulls down any more planks from my pig-sty I mean to put him into the Spiritual Court." " Catalani's spiritual concerts are not particu- larly well attended, and I am not sorry for it: Bochsa has started his oratorios with all the talent in town, and therefore ought to be en- couraged. By-the-by, Madame Vestris is a woman of most versatile talent. Her mock Don Giovanni is admirable : not that I approve of any mockery of the Italian Opera: profane- ness cannot be too steadily discouraged. But it is not a little surprising, that a woman who can act that sprightly comic extravaganza should be able to depict the jealous and indig- 20 306 THE OCEAN GRAVE. nant Princess Zomira. " " We have a club of clergymen who meet once a month at Kettering to shake hands and exchange sermons: last Friday month I gave one of mine to Doctor Pringle, whose grandfather was chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, and received one of his in exchange. I intended to look it over on Sunday morning before church, but " " How extremely well Madame Vestris, Camporese, and Garcia, execute that trio in the first act, 'Sara Talma delusa schernita :' when Madame Vestris comes in with her ' 1'indegno qui dove perir,' I declare she stands her ground most womanfully: the fact is, that the sweet- ness of Italian music " " But Hannah and I were busy hunting the black sow out of the cucumber beds: we were so busy, crying, 'Hey tig! tig!' that we did not hear the bell toll: so up I walked into the pulpit without ever once looking at the sermon " "Those orange-tawny stuff' curtains are a disgrace to the Opera house " " well 1 began reading it, and to my great surprise I found that it had been preached by Doctor Pringle's grandfather immediately after the great earthquake at Lisbon. I therefore found myself under the disagreeable necessity of thus addressing my congregation at Ketter- ing: ' When I look around me, and behold the effects of the late horrid devastation of nature : trees torn up by the roots ; houses toppling to their foundation ; men and cattle ingulfed in the earth, and the whole horizon rocking like the ocean in its most tempestuous moments. ' You cannot imagine the sensation I excited: the women fanned themselves and fainted ; and the men muttered to each other, ' Dear me ! something unpleasant must have occurred since we entered the church!' I never preached with so much effect either before or since." The regular amble of the Rev. George Withers' hobby had now contrived to distance the curvature and prance of Colonel Nightin- gale's. Thecolonel pulled up, andliftinga small gold watch from his right waistcoat pocket, muttered to himself "Ah, the wretch! it is half-past ten, and Catalan! must have sung her second Cavatina. Where do you lodge, Sir?" said the host, coldly to his guest "At the New Hummums. " "Indeed! are you aware that they close their doors at a quarter past eleven?" "You don't say so?" "Yes, I do: but you may find very pretty accommo- dation at ' the Finish :' the street strollers and market-gardeners speak of it in high terms. " This hit told: the Reverend George Withers looked at his watch, and made a rapid retreat. " Well !" cried the colonel the moment the door was closed, "so much for school friend- ship : did you ever see such a vulgar dog such an idiot too so blind to his own interest: if he had but held his tongue two minutes, I could have given him my opinion of ' Rossini's Zelmira. ' I am one Opera night out of pocket by him, and that is enough to make me detest him to my dying day. Such illiberality too did you hear him say, ' What can you expect from a Presbyterian!' How I hate a man who vilifies a whole tribe for the faults of an indi- vidual! I have long thought it, and I now know it All men who live in the country are fools." JAMES SMITH. THE OCEAN GRAVE. [Mrs. John Hunter (Anne Home), born in Hnll, 1742 ; died in London, 7th January, 1821. She was the wife of the celebrated anatomist, and the authoress of several songs which have been popular. Of the.-e, M/i Motlier Bids me Bind my Hair, is perhaps the best known. A collection of her poems appeared in 1802.] Friends ! when I die, prepare my welcome grave, Where the eternal ocean rolls his wave ; Rough though the blast, still let his freeborn breeze. Which freshness wafts to earth from endless seas, Sigh o'er my sleep, and let his glancing spray Weep tear-drops sparkling with a heavenly ray, A constant mourner then shall watch my tomb, And nature deepen while it soothes the gloom. O let that element whose voice had power To cheer my darkest, soothe my loneliest hour. Which through my life my spirit loved so well, Still o'er my grave its tale of glory tell. The geii'rons ocean, whose protid waters bear The spoil and .produce they disdain to wear, Whose wave claims kindred with the azure sky From whom reflected stars beam gloriously ; Emblem of God ! unchanging, infinite, Awful alike in loveliness and might, Rolls still untiring like the tide of time, Binds man to man, and mingles clime with clime: And as the sun, which from each lake and sti&im Through all the world, where'er their waters gleam, Collects the cloud his heavenly ray conceals. And slakes the thirst which all creation feels, So ocean gathers tribute from each shore, To bid each climate know its want no more. Exiled on earth, a fettered prisoner here, Barr'd from all treasures which my heart holds deor, The kindred soul, the fame my youth desired. Whilst hope hath fled which once each vision fired : Dead to all joy, still on my fancy glow Dreamsof delight which heavenward thoughts bestow. Not then in death shall I unconscious be Of that whose whispers are eternity. THE FALL OF THE LEAF. 307 THE FALL OF THE LEAF. There is no vice that causes more calamities in human life, than the intemperate passion for gaming. How many noble and ingenuous persons it hath reduced from wealth unto poverty; nay, from honesty to dishonour, and by still descending steps into the gulf of per- dition. And yet how prevalent it is in all capital cities, where many of the chiefest mer- chants, and courtiers especially, are mere pitiful slaves of fortune, toiling like so many abject turnspits in her ignoble wheel. Such a man is worse off than a poor borrower, for all he has is at the momentary call of imperative chance ; or rather he is more wretched than a very beggar, being mocked with an appearance of wealth, but as deceitful as if it turned, like the moneys in the old Arabian story, into decaying leaves. In our parent city of Rome, to aggravate her modern disgraces, this pestilent vice has lately fixed her abode, and has inflicted many deep wounds on the fame and fortunes of her proudest families. A number of noble youths have been sucked into the ruinous vortex, some of them being degraded at last into humble retainers upon rich men, but the most part perishing by an unnatural catastrophe; and if the same fate did not befall the young Marquis de Malaspini, it was only by favour of a circumstance which is not likely to happen a second time for any gamester. This gentleman came into a handsome re- venue at the death of his parents, whereupon, to dissipate his regrets, he travelled abroad, and his graceful manners procured him a dis- tinguished reception at several courts. After two years spent in this manner, he returned to Rome, where he had a magnificent palace on the banks of the Tiber, and which he further enriched with some valuable paintings and sculptures from abroad. His taste in these works was much admired; and his friends remarked with still greater satisfaction, that he was untainted by the courtly vices which he must have witnessed in his travels. It only remained to complete their wishes, that he should form a matrimonial alliance that should be worthy of himself, and he seemed likely to fulfil this hope in attaching himself to the beautiful Countess of Maraviglia. She was herself the heiress of an ancient and honour- able house ; so that the match was regarded with satisfaction by the relations on both sides, and especially as the young pair were most tenderly in love with each other. For certain reasons, however, the nuptials were deferred for a time, thus affording leisure for the crafty machinations of the devil, who delights, above all things, to cross a virtuous and happy marriage. Accordingly, he did not fail to make use of this judicious opportunity, but chose for his instrument the lady's own brother, a very profligate ynd a gamester, who soon fastened, like an evil genius, on the un- lucky Malaspini. It was a dismal shock to the lady when she learned the nature of this connection, which Malaspini himself discovered to her, by in- cautiously dropping a die from his pocket in her presence. She immediately endeavoured, with all her influence, to reclaim him from the dreadful passion for play, which had now crept over him like a moral cancer, and already dis- puted the sovereignty of love; neither was it without some dreadful struggles of remorse on his own part, and some useless victories, that he at last gave himself up to such desperate habits, but the power of his Mcphistophiles prevailed, and the visits of Malaspini to the lady of his affections became still less frequent; he repairing instead to those nightly resorts where the greater portion of his estates was already forfeited. At length, when the lady had not seen him for some days, and in the very last week before that which had been appointed for her mar- riage, she received a desperate letter from Malaspini, declaring that he was a ruined man, in fortune and hope; and that, at the cost of his life even, he must renounce her hand for ever. He added, that if his pride would let him even propose himself, a beggar as he was, for her acceptanf';, he should yet despair too much of her pardon to make such an offer; whereas, if he could have read in the heart of the unhappy lady, he would have seen that she still preferred the beggar Malaspini to the richest nobleman in the Popedom. With abundance of tears and sighs perusing his letter, her first impulse was to assure him of that loving truth; and to offer herself with her estates to him, in compensation of the spites of fortune: but the wretched Malaspini had with- drawn himself no one knew whither, and she was constrained to content herself with griev- ing over his misfortunes, and purchasing such parts of his property as were exposed to sale by his plunderers. And now it became apparent what a villanous part his betrayer had taken; for, having thus stripped the unfortunate gen- tleman, he now aimed to rob him of his life also, that his treacheries might remain un- discovered. To this end he feigned a meet 303 THE FALL OF THE LEAF. vehement indignation at Malaspini's neglect and bad faith, as he termed it, towards his sister; protesting that it was an insult to be only washed out with his blood, and with these expressions he sought to kill him at any ad- vantage. And no doubt he would have become a murderer, as well as a dishonest gamester, if Malaspini's shame and anguish had not drawn him out of the way; for he had hired a mean lodging in the suburbs, from which he never issued but at dusk, and then only to wander in the most unfrequented places. It was now in the wane of autumn, when some of the days are fine, and gorgeously deco- rated at morn and eve by the rich sun's embroid- eries ; but others are dewy and dull, with cold nipping winds, inspiring comfortless fancies and thoughts of melancholy in every bosom. In such a dreary hour Malaspini happened to walk abroad, and avoiding his own squandered estates, which it was not easy to do by reason of their extent, he wandered into a by-place in the neighbourhood. The place was very lonely and desolate, and without any near habi- tation; its main feature especially being a large tree, now stripped bare of its vernal honours, excepting one dry yellow leaf, which was shak- ing on a topmost bough to the cold evening wind, and threatening at every moment to fall to the damp, dewy earth. Before this dreary object Malaspini stopped sometime in contem- plation, commenting to himself on the desolate tree, and drawing many apt comparisons be- tween its nakedness and his own beggarly condition. "Alas! poor bankrupt," says he, "thou hast been plucked too, like me; but yet not so basely. Thou hast but showered thy green leaves on the grateful earth, which in another season will repay thee with sap and sustenance ; but those whom I have fattened will not so much as lend again to my living. Thou wilt thus regain all thy green summer wealth, which I shall never do ; and besides, thou art still better off than I am, with that one golden leaf to cheer thee, whereas I have been stripped even of my last ducat ! " With these and many more similar fancies he continued to aggrieve himself, till at last, being more sad than usual, his thoughts tended unto death, and he resolved, still watching that yellow leaf, to take its flight as the signal for his own departure. "Chance," said he, "hath been my temporal ruin, and so let it now determine for me, in my last cast between life and death, which is BOW all that its malice hath left me." Thus in his extremity he still risked some- what upon fortune; and very shortly the leaf being torn away by a sudden blast, it made two or three flutterings to and fro, and at last settled on the earth, at about a hundred paces from the tree. Malaspini interpreted this as an omen that he ought to die; and following the leaf till it alighted, he fell to work on the same spot with his sword, intending to scoop himself a sort of rude hollow for a grave. He found a strange gloomy pleasure in this fanci- ful design, that made him labour very earnestly : and the soil besides being loose and sandy, he had soon cleared away about a foot below the surface. The earth then became suddenly more obstinate, and trying it here and there with his sword, it struck against some very hard substance; whereupon, digging a little further down, he discovered a considerable treasure. There were coins of various nations, but all golden, in this petty mine; and in such quan- titj r as made Malaspini doubt, for a moment, if it were not the mere mintage of his fancy. Assuring himself, however, that it was no dream, he gave many thanks to God for this timely providence; notwithstanding, he hesi- tated for a moment to deliberate whether it was honest to avail himself of the money; but believing, as was most probable, that it was the plunder of some banditti, he was reconciled to the appropriation of it to his own necessi- ties. Loading himself, therefore, with as much gold as he could conveniently carry, he hasten- ed with it to his humble quarters; and by making two or three more trips in the course of the night he made himself master of the whole treasure. It was sufficient, on being reckoned, to maintain him in comfort for the rest of his life; but not being able to enjoy it in the scene of his humiliations, he resolved to reside abroad; and embarking in an English vessel at Naples, he was carried over safely to London. It is held a deep disgrace amongst our Italian nobility for a gentleman to meddle with either trade or commerce; and yet, as we behold, they will condescend to retail their own produce, and wine especially, yea, marry, and with an empty barrel, like any vintner's sign, hung out at their stately palaces. Malas- pini perhaps disdained from the first these illiberal prejudices; or else he was taught to renounce them by the example of the London merchants, whom he saw in that great mart of the world, engrossing the universal seas, and enjoying the power and importance of princes, merely from the fruits of their traffic. At any VERSES. 309 rate, he embarked what money he possessed in various mercantile adventures, which ended so profitably, that in three years he had regained almost as large a fortune as he had formerly inherited. He then speedily returned to his native country, and redeeming his paternal estates, he was soon in a worthy condition to present himself to his beloved countess, who was still single, and cherished him with all a woman's devotedness in her constant affection. They were, therefore, before long united, to the contentment of all Rome; her wicked re- lation having been slain some time before, in a brawl with his associates. As for the fortunate windfall which had so befriended him, Malaspini founded with it a noble hospital for orphans; and for this reason, that it belonged formerly to some fatherless children, from whom it had been withheld by their unnatural guardian. This wicked man it was who had buried the money in the sand: but when he found that his treasure was stolen, he went and hanged himself on the very tree that had caused its discovery. THOMAS HOOD.' FIDELITY. FROM THE SPANISH. One eve of beauty, when the sun Was on the streams of Guadalquiver, To gold converting, one by one, The ripples of the mighty river; Beside me on the bank was seated A Seville girl with auburn hair, And eyes that might the world have cheated, A wild, bright, wicked, diamond pair ! She stooped, and wrote upon the sand, Just as the loving sun was going, With such a soft, small, shining hand, I could have sworn 'twas silver flowing. Her words were three, and not one more What could Diana's motto be? The Syren wrote upon the shore "Death, not inconstancy!" And then her two large languid eyes So turned on mine. that, devil take me, I set the air on fire with sighs, And was the fool she chose to make me. Saint Francis would have been deceived With such an eye and such a hand: But one week more, and I believed As much the woman as the sand. l National Tales, London, 1827, 2 vols. 8vo. VERSES. [Andrew Marvell, born at Kingston-upon-Hull, mh November, 1620; died liitli August, 1078. He was a politician and a poet, the friend of Milton, and the steady opponent of the court party in parliament. il was elected one of the members for Hull in 1660, and continued to represent that city in parliament till his death. Charles II. is reported to have attempted to bribe him and failed, although Marvell' g circumstances were comparatively poor. No temptation could move him from the principles he held, and his prose works, satirical and political, exercised much influence on the government of the day. His miscellaneous poems, with portrait and memoir, were published in 1681, and there have been various editions issued since.] Why should man's high aspiring mind Burn in him, with so proud a breath; When all his haughty views can find In this world, yields to death ; The fair, the brave, the vain, the wise, The rich, the poor, and great, and small, Are each but worms' anatomies, To strew his quiet hall. Power may make many earthly gods, Where gold, and bribery's guilt, prevails; But death's unwelcome honest odds Kicks o'er the unequal scales : The flatter'd great may clamours raise Of power, and their own weakness hide. But death shall find unlooked-for ways To end the farce of pride. An arrow, hurtel'd ere so high From e'en a giant's sinewy strength, In time's un traced eternity, Goes but a pigmy length Nav, whirling from the tortured string, With all its pomp of hurried flight, 'Tis, by the skylark's little wing, Outmeasured, in its height. Just so, man's boasted strength and power Shall fade, before death's lightest stroke; Laid lower than the meanest flower Whose pride o'ertopt the oak. And he, who like a blighting blast, Dispeopled worlds, with war's alarms, Shall be himself destroyed at last, By poor, despised worms. Tyrants in vain their powers secure, And awe slaves' murmurs with a frov:n j But unawed death at last is sure To sap the Babels down A stone thrown upward to the sky, Will quickly meet the ground agen : So men-gods, of enrth's vanity, Shall drop at last to men; 310 MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. And power, and pomp, their all resign Blood-purchased thrones, and banquet halls, Fate waits to sack ambition's shrine As bare as prison walls, Where the poor suffering wretch bows down To laws a lawless power hath past ; And pride, and power, and king, and clown, Shall be death's slaves at last. Time, the prime minister of death, There's nought can bribe his honest will; He stops the richest tyrant's breath, And lays his mischief still : Each wicked scheme for power, all stops, With grandeur's false and mock display, As eve's shades, from high mountain tops, Fade with the rest away. Death levels all things in his march, Nought can resist his mighty strength; The palace proud, triumphal arch, Shall mete their shadows' length : The rich, the poor, one common bed Shall find, in the unhonoured grave, Where weeds shall crown alike the head Of tyrant and of slave. . MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. I. In 186 there were at Paris, as well as in the departments, a hundred lotteries for charitable purposes. Monsieur and Madame Simple, retired her- balists, enjoyed, on a third floor in the Rue Chalot, about three thousand francs a year, of which they scarcely spent two-thirds. They arose at nine, breakfasted, went to the Jardin des Plantes to look at the bears, the monkeys, and the two elephants; returned to dinner at five, played a game at piquet, and went to bed when the drums beat the retreat. How was it possible for them to spend more? On Sundays they passed the day at Belle- ville, where they had hired a square patch of garden, in the middle of which rose a sort of cabin, christened with the title of "country house." Their friends and messmates con- sisted of a pug-dog named Pyrame, who was Madame's spoiled child; a cat called Minette, especially petted by Monsieur; and a family of turtle-doves, a source to both of the most delightful recollections, particularly when the cock entertained the hen with his intermin- able series of salutations. In short, their life to them was a succession of cloudless days, varied every year with one or two important events, such as the happy hatching of a pair of little turtles, or the imprudent propensity which Minette manifested to hunt after noctur- nal adventures in early spring. The Simples, therefore, were as happy as it was possible for people to be, when Madame took it into her head to lay out the joint savings of her husband and herself in the purchase of a ticket in each lottery. Madame Simple, who was now and then tickled by dreams of luxury and grandeur, was not sorry to sow the seed of emotions in the somewhat too uniform furrow of her ex- istence. Madame Simple's hopes were not disappoint- ed. Her husband announced to her thLty- three times that they had won the principal prize in each lottery, thereby affording her thirty-three different emotions, which varied according to the importance of the sum, from trembling to convulsion, from exclamation to fainting. The result of the whole was, that the good works of Monsieur and Madame Simple brought them in the trifle of one million two hundred and fifty thousand francs. II. The clock struck nine. M. Simple sat up in his bed and rubbed his eyes. "Wake up, Goody!" " I am not asleep," replied Madame Simple with importance; "I am reflecting." " Let us make haste and dress. We shall be too late to see the monkeys let out. " "You well deserve the name which you have given me, Monsieur Simple ! When people have sixty thousand francs a year, they do not amuse themselves with such nonsense as monkeys. We will go shopping this morn- ing along the Boulevards, as far as the Madelaine. I must have a thousand francs' worth of lace." " To open a shop with, Goody dear?" " To trim a satin mantelet, Monsieur Simple. " " That will indeed be a fine mantelet then." " I mean we should have plenty of other smart things too. Do you fancy we are to live any longer in this stupid, humdrum way, in a sort of public barrack, where twenty lodgers elbow each other on the staircase?" " Nobody has ever elbowed me." " But that might happen. In short, I have long and maturely meditated upon our new position, as well as on the changes which it ought to cause in our existence. My plans are arranged." " But, Goody " i must remark, once for all, Monsieur, MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. 311 that there is nothing so vulgar as for married people to call each other Goody, Totsy, duck, or ' By Jove! I do it out of affection." " But when people have sixty thousand francs a year, they show their affection in a more genteel form of words. " " Very likely, my honey ; but habits to which one has been accustomed for thirty years are not shaken off in half an hour. " " Certainly, you will not do it in a hurry, if you are as long about it as you are in dressing. " " I am ready now, darling duck." " Make haste and get your breakfast. I want to be off." Madame Simple was an extremely expedi- tious person. Her plan was no sooner con- ceived than executed; and the happy couple were soon installed, as if by enchantment, in a grand hotel in the Chaussee d'Autin. Four servants, in splendid liveries, loitered about the door; a caleclie and a coupe stood in the coach-house; and four magnificent horses . pawed the floor of the stable. M. Simple I regarded all these fine things with an air of complete astonishment. He wandered from room to room, walked on the tips of his toes, as if he had been in a sick man's chamber. He wiped off with his sleeve any dust of snuff which he might happen to let fall upon the furniture; and his wife had the greatest pos- sible difficulty in making him understand that he need not take off his hat when he spoke to his servants. III. M. Simple wished to get up. Following the instructions his wife had given him, he pulled a bell-rope which hung at his bed's head. At the end of five minutes he repeated the opera- tion. After another five minutes, as nobody came, he pulled at the rope for the third time. At last Jacque, the valet -de-chambre, showed ! himself, puffing as if he had put himself out of breath by coming in such an extraordinary ' hurry; so that M. Simple, instead of making any remarks about his negligence, internally pitied the fate of poor servants, who are com- pelled to throw themselves into a perspiration to satisfy the impatient demands of their mas- ters. Jacque took a good quarter of an hour to collect and arrange the requisites for M. Sim- ple's toilet. He employed a second in shaving him and brushing his hair, a third in pulling on his boots, a fourth in tying his cravat, and a fifth in assisting him with his waistcoat and coat. M. Simple had the pleasure of spending an hour and a half in an operation which for- merly took him only twenty minutes to com- plete. But, in recompense for that, his pan- taloons girded him so tightly that he could scarcely breathe; his cravat made him feel as if he were in the pillory ; and his corns, imprisoned in tight -fitting boots, gave him horrible pain. Nevertheless, on perceiving, unexpectedly, his own image reflected in a mirror, he had the self-command to subdue all outward indication of the tortures he suffered, and to make himself a respectful bow, believing the figure to be some stranger of distinction who had come to visit him. IV. Dinner-time arrived, and M. Simple sat down to the table. " Dear, dear! what can this be, ducky?" he said, as he tasted some soup which was per- fectly unknown to him in regard to colour, taste, and smell. " It is cray -fish soup, delicately seasoned." "Delicately poisoned, you mean, my darling. Now that we are rich, there is no reason why we should not have a hotch-potch every day, with a chicken in it too, as good Henry IV. used to say." "You deserve to have been born in those primitive times! A hotch-potch! The idea of requiring a cook, who has served in Milord Plumpudding's kitchen, to make a hotch- potch!" "Ah! Our cook has " "People who have a cook who has cooked for Milord Plumpudding ought not to dine like everyday folks. " "What a pity! I should have been very well satisfied with a hotch-potch." At the second course M. Simple opened his eyes in astonishment, and let his hands fall upon his lap in complete despair. "Take something, my dear; help yourself to something!" said Madame Simple. "Quite impossible, Goody! I have not room for a morsel more. I have already done honour to two dishes." " Our ordinary private little dinners will consist of six. We cannot have less now that we are worth " "Of course; six be the number, my love, since our position requires it; but you will allow me to observe that there is no compulsion to eat of every one of them. " "That is to say, you would cause Milord Plumpudding's cook the vexation of supposing that his ragouts had failed, and that you are dissatisfied with his exertions!" 312 MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. "Do you think it would have that effect upon Milord Plumpudding's cook?" "Only put yourself in his place." "That is all I require," thought M. Simple. " I am sure he does not feel obliged to taste of every mess he makes." During the night M. Simple was exceedingly unwell. "Whatever my wife may say," he muttered to himself, " hotch-potch would not have disagreed with me in this way." V. " Dear! did you observe how certain persons smiled yesterday when they heard our name mentioned?" " I confess I paid no attention to them." "Even our very servants, whenever they have to pronounce it, find it difficult to keep a serious countenance." "Our servants are ridiculous servants then." " Xo, 'tis our name that is ridiculous!" "My father's name!" " Your father had not sixty thousand francs a year." ' ' He was an honest gardener, glad enough to get six days' journey-work every week, at the handsome rate of three francs a day." " To be sure; to be sure! People don't talk of those things except when they are alone, and that as little as possible, for fear of con- tracting the habit of doing so. I said at the time that it was a matter of necessity for us to change our name." " Renounce my father's name!" cried M. Simple, crimson with indignation. " Pray, who asks you to renounce it? Con- tinue Simple as long as you like; only be so in more fashionable style. Do you fancy, for instance, that it would be any affront to your father's memory to have us announced, when we enter a drawing-room, as Monsieur and Madame Simplencour?" " I should have no objection, my darling duck ; but you have pitched upon quite a grand alteration. If you had had the modesty to propose Simplenbourg, I might have said something to it!" ' Oh, no! That sounds Germanified. I am a Frenchwoman. France for ever! I stick to Simplencour!" "And I to Simplenbourg!" The discussion was long, and ended in a compromise. It was agreed that henceforth Monsieur and Madame Simple should bear the name of Monsieur and Madame de Simplen- ville. VI. "By Jove!" said M. de Simplenville to himself one day, "as my wife is gone out alone this morning, I have a great mind to devote a couple of hours to my friend Coun- ardin. The dear fellow may very likely think" that I scorn his acquaintance now that I am become a millionaire. I will pay him a visit, to show him he is mistaken; and will go in my carriage, to flatter his vanity. I remember that, when I was an herbalist, I was very proud of seeing a carriage stop at my door. Jacque!" " Monsieur." " Tell Jean I want the carriage." " Impossible, Monsieur. Madame has taken the caleche, and it is Jean who drives her." " Then tell Pierre to let me have the coitpt in half an hour." "Monsieur forgets that Saidee was in har- ness yesterday and caught cold, and that the veterinary surgeon forbid her going out for a week. " "Oh! then I will make my call on foot." But, while proceeding on his way, M. de Simplenville discovered that certain habits are contracted with marvellous facility; and that, in point of fact, to do without a carriage is much easier for the man who has no such con- veyance in the world, than for him who believes he has two at his service. While M. de Sim- plenville was amusing himself with this dis- consolate reflection, a shower of mud from the wheels of a passing caleche bespattered him from head to foot. "Stupid ass!" he shouted, with upraised cane, to give the insolent driver a good drub- bing. But he refrained from striking. He recognized Jean upon the box; and to spoil a livery that had been paid for out of his own pocket, M. de Simplenville was incapable of such an action! "At least, Totsy," he said to Madame de Simplenville, who put her head out of the carriage -window,-^- "at least, open the door and give me a lift home." "Extremely sorry, my dear, to be obliged to refuse." " But if I walk through the streets in this state, I shall soon have the rabble shouting after me." " But you do not mean, I suppose, to seat yourself inside a caleche lined with white satin, in such a condition as that! Go, my dear, and dry yourself in the sunshine." Jean touched his horses with his whip, and the carriage was off at full speed. M. de Sim- MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. 313 plenville contrived to get taken up in a hack- ney cabriolet, which was not so nice about its lining. During his ride he had plenty of time to reflect on the pleasure of having a carriage of his own. VII. Dinner was over. M. de Simplenville was delighted to be once more alone with his wife, as in old times, which had seldom been the case since he came to his fortune; so he said to her, rubbing his hands, "Suppose we have a game of piquet, darling dear." "You are crazy, my dear; this is opera- night!" "Again?" " When people hire a quarter of a box by the year, and pay a couple of thousand francs for it, they do not stop at home to play piquet." " This, for instance, is one chapter of our budget which I should have great pleasure in striking out with my pen." "A pretty idea!" "Certainly; because I don't like music." "And am I particularly fond of it, Mon- sieur?" "Well, what then?" "But I pretend to be fond of it. It is one of the exigencies of our position." M. de Simplenville resigned himself to his fate. During the first act he drummed with his fingers upon his knees, and read the pro- gramme backwards. At the second act his head fell gently on his breast. At the third he snored like a drummer after a long day's march. "Wake up, dear!" exclaimed his wife, tap- ping him on the back. " This is the second time that the conductor has looked at us and frowned." " Tierce to the king ! " answered M. de Simplenville, without opening his eyes. The unhappy man was enjoying in imagination the pleasure which he was forbidden to taste in reality. VIII. One day Madame de Simplenville said to her husband, " My dear, you will accompany me this morning." "To go and see the monkeys?" And M. de Simplenville's countenance brightened at the very thought. The lady regarded him with a haughty look, which said as plain as possible, " Poor dear man! He has sold too many simples not to continue simple for the rest of his days!" "No, dear!" she answered. "No, 'tis not the monkeys that we are to see. I am going to introduce you to-day into a world where you ought to have figured long ago." " I don't know what world you are talking about; but it is all one to me, if it is an amus- ing one." " It is not a question of amusement, Mon- sieur, but of philanthropy." " The name does not sound very entertain- ing!" "No more is the thing. It is not for the sake of selfish amusement that we are made the depositaries of a large fortune, but to render ourselves useful to mankind at large. Now, I do not know whether it has ever struck you that you are utterly good for nothing in a philanthropic sense, and of no earthly service to any living creature." " I confess that this fact had completely escaped my observation." " Well, people whose authority in such sub- jects is incontestable have already made the discovery for you. And they had only to indicate the circumstance to me to make me resolve immediately that your nullity and in- significance should forthwith cease." " My nullity and insignificance!" " Here is your diploma as a member of the society for the mutual safeguard of the respec- tive rights of man and animals. This morning the installations take place. We will be present on that occasion." M. de Simplenville went as he was bid. The meeting was a protracted one. The president spoke two hours and a half, giving the history of all sorts of societies, past, present, and future, without saying a single Word about that which had caused them to assemble. At last the discussion began; and the speakers went into the heart of the question. Then came a rolling fire of propositions, considera- tions, observations, recriminations, exhorta- tions, and explanations. Amongst other philobestial arrangements, the meeting voted the following: " 1. Man having the incontestable right to hunt the rabbit, and the rabbit the no less incontestable right to live, a prize-medal shall be awarded to the sportsman who, in the course of a season, shall have fired the greatest number of shots and killed the smallest number of rabbits. " 2. Since one of the chief duties of the members of this society consists in propagating, by their own proper example, the principles which they profess touching the respect due to animals, they pledge themselves individually 314 MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. to sentence themselves to fines, graduated ac- cording to the gravity of the cause, so much for forgetting to feed their dog at the regular hour; so much for treading on pussy's toes, and double the sum if it happens to be her tail, &c. &c. c. "3. Seeing that, without pigs, a state of nonentity is the ultimate condition and fate of all bacon, ham, black-pudding, and sausages; seeing the important part which these various eatables play in human alimentation, this society, desirous of reconciling the interests of pork -butchers with the rights of a not less interesting animal, hereby offers a prize of three hundred francs to the author of the best treatise on the art of killing pigs without mak- ing them squeal." 'What is your opinion, my dear, of these respectable gentlemen whose eloquence you have just been listening to?" was Madame de Simplenville's question to her husband as soon as the meeting was dissolved. " My opinion, Goody, is, that the monkeys are a great deal more amusing. " IX. Notwithstanding M. de Simplenville's ir- reverent opinions, he was obliged to practise all the duties, and participate in all the privi- leges, of the aforesaid Philobestial Society. And since Goody, who had been seized with the crotchet that her husband should remain a nobody no longer, was not a woman to take i half-measures, before long there was not a benevolent, industrial, or learned society to which he did not belong in some shape or other. In this way M. de Simplenville soon found himself at once president of the Society of Utilitarian Botanists, instituted for the ameli- oration of the conditions of the colossal cab- bage, the monster beet-root, and the phenome- nal carrot; secretary to a joint-stock company which had secured the patent of an invention whose basis consisted in doubling the super- ficial area of land by raising artificial mounts all over its surface; reporter to a society for the propagation of sound literature, the object of which was the exclusive publication and distribution of the works of its members, all writers of equal ability and industry ; and, lastly, questor to a temperance society, founded for the suppression of drunkenness, the test required to be admitted a member consisting in swallowing four bottles of wine and an equal number of glasses of absinthe, without mani- festing the slightest unsteadiness of body or mind. But all the while that Madame de Simplen- ville was in ecstasies at seeing her husband hold so high a position if not in society, at least in societies, the poor man himself fell into a deplorable state. What with presiding over the meetings, the summing up of the reports, the keeping of the registers, and the classification of documents, his time was filled to such a degree that he had not a moment to collect his thoughts. He was reduced to the state of an automaton. Nevertheless, an ob- server might have remarked that he occa- sionally ground his teeth, and looked desper- ately fierce, when he heard people say, ' ' Wh:it a lucky fellow is M. de Simplenville! What a capital thing it is to have a large fortune!" At such times he invariably muttered to him- self, "What the deuce was I thinking about when I put into those horrid lotteries?" X. One day M. de Simplenville said to Madame, " I am harassed, worn out, morally as well as physically; and I feel that I want to be sent out to grass, exactly like an old broken- down cab-horse. Ah, if I could only go into the country ! " "Good heavens! I ought to have thought of that," exclaimed Madame de Simplenville. The idea never entered my head; and it is Easter week already, the fashionable time for ruralizing! But it is impossible to bear every tiling in mind." She soon made the discovery and the acqui- sition of a country-seat on the banks of the Marne, flanked by four pepper-box turrets, and known as the Chateau de la Jobardiere, which gave her the right of henceforth styling herself Madame de Simplenville de la Jobar- diere. A gleam of joy illumined M. de Sim- plenville's woebegone countenance. "I shall get a little rest at last," he said, stretching himself in delight on the cushions of the carriage which bore him to his new domain. But, alas ! he must have been made of very primitive materials if he fanced that people with sixty thousand francs a year go into the country to breathe the morning air, to loll on the grass in the noontide shade, to live at their ease, and go to bed early, in one word, to rest themselves. As to Madame de Sim- plenville de la Jobardiere, she was richly en- dowed with every instinct of gentility, and understood the principles of country life quite as well as she did the routine of life in town. Her husband, as usual, was obliged to con- form. No sooner had they reached their chateau than there was a round of calls to MADAME SIMPLE'S INVESTMENT. 315 make on all the neighbours to entreat them to come and augment by their presence the pleasure they anticipated from their country residence. Nor must we omit to mention that similar invitations had been given to all their Paris acquaintances. In a very short time the Chateau de la Jobardiere became the general rendezvous for girls looking out for husbands, young men sharp-set after well- portioned damsels, the male and female rela- tions of each; with multitudinous crowds of parasites, who, with a very small income of their own, manage to taste at other people's houses all the enjoyments which wealth can furnish. Now, in the midst of such a rabble as this, let us just see what was the kind of repose permitted to poor M. de Simplenville de la Jobardiere. In the morning he had to gather and arrange bouquets for all the dowagers and old maids. When out for a walk the aforesaid ladies begged him to take charge of their hats and shawls, converting him into a species of walking clothes-press. Every day he had regularly to travel four or five leagues to inform a husband that he would have to do without his wife for a week, to beg a mother's permission to rob her of her daughter, to act the sheriff's officer, and apprehend and bring back, living or dead, the fashionable man of the neighbourhood, without whose presence every fishing-party would end without a bite, every picnic would be spoiled by a shower, every dinner would turn out as dull s.nd silent as a funeral entertainment. It may, perhaps, very naturally be inquired what the servants were doing at the Chateau de la Jobardiere. But their number, though far too great in town, was utterly insufficient in the country. They had to wait upon twenty, thirty, and forty people at once. Every service which they were unable to perform fell to the lot of M. de Simplenville de la Jobardiere. He, consequently, was the head-servant of his own establishment, and by far the hardest worked of any. Chance did sometimes leave him a few moments of liberty, which he was obliged to devote to keeping guard in the park, the garden, or the orchard, in order to put a little restraint on his numerous visitors, who treated flower-beds, borders, and ripening fruits with no more pity than a swarm of locusts. "What could I be thinking of, gracious goodness! when I put into those horrid lot- teries!" was the unceasing exclamation uttered from morning till night by M. de Simplenville de la Jobardiere. One day one fatal day it rained. The company were assembled in the drawing-room, and were devising the means of battling with the weariness which bad weather brings in country quarters. Some one proposed privata theatricals. A shout of delight welcomed the motion. The very next day they went to work. To M. de Simplenville de la'jobardiere was assigned the task of erecting the theatre, planning the decorations, arranging the seats and the mode of lighting. He had parts to copy in round-hand text, to save the eyesight of the various actors. He was chosen referee and umpire in the endless disputes which Thalia is sure to inspire in little theatres as well as in great ones. And besides that, he had to study a long, stupid part, which it was unanimously decided he alone was capable of filling. It was too much ! For some time past the measure had been full; nothing now could hinder the vessel from overflowing. In the middle of a dark night, during which he saw dancing before his eyes a medley of bouquets, hats, shawls, benches, side-scenes, and lamps, all performing a sort of witch-like jig, M. de Simplenville de la Jobardiere suddenly jumped out of bed, stole out of the chateau with nothing on but his shirt and his cotton night- cap, crossed the park, made straight for the open country, with his arms folded, his head resting upon his breast, walking on with that solemn pace which budding tragedians delight to imi- tate. After devoting a considerable time to this gymnastic but unhealthy exercise, he reached the foot of a lofty mountain. Then he climbed from rock to rock, constantly maintaining the same pace and attitude. Ar- rived at the summit, he found himself on the edge of a precipice whose depth it was impos- sible to fathom. He halted a moment, glanced a look of bitter scorn at the world behind him, and, with one loud, resounding yell, cast him- self headlong into the abyss! XL At eight o'clock next morning the sunshine was playing on the white curtains of her bed, when Madame Simple sat up and looked about her. "Old ducky darling!" said she impatiently. Monsieur Simple stretched out first one arm and then the other. "Wake up, my pet! make haste and wake, else we shall be too late to see the monkeys let out." M. Simple rubbed his eyes, looked first at his wife, then at the bed, and then all around the chamber. Everything was in its usual 316 THE RED-NOSED LIEUTENANT. state, the pair of turtles cooing in their cage, Pyrame grunting at his mistress' feet, and Minette stretched carelessly on the hearth. He then pronounced the voluptuous "Ah!" which a man utters when he feels his bosom relieved of a heavy load. M. Simple discovered with joy that he had been the victim of a frightful nightmare! "Oh, yes, Goody!" he said, pausing in the operation of washing his face: "let us go and see the monkeys ; and to-night we will play our game of piquet. Happiness lies in peace and contentment, and not in the plagues and worries of wealth. Preserve me from such another dream!" Old and New, 1871. SONG. [Henry Neele, born in London, 20th January, 179$ ; died 7th February, 1828. He was an attorney by profession, but his entire sympathies were given to literature. During his brief career he produced various poems, tales, and sketches, and wrote an interesting work entitled the Romance of History. Unhappily his reason became affected, and in a fit of insanity he de- stroyed his own life. A complete edition, of his works was published in 1829.] " Old man, old man, thy locks are gray, And the winter winds blow cold ; Why wander abroad on thy weary way, And leave thy home's warm fold?" " The winter winds blow cold, 'tis true, And I am old to roam ; But I may wander the wide world through, Ere I shall find my home." " And where do thy children loiter so long? Have they left thee, thus old anil forlorn, To wander wild heather and hills among, While they quaff from the lusty horn?" " My children have long since sunk to rest, To that rest which I would were my own; I have seen the green turf placed over each breast, And read each loved name on the stone." " Then haste to the friends of thy youth, old nun, Who loved thee in days of yor ; They will warm thy old blood with the foaming can, And sorrow shall chill it no more." * To the friends of my youth in far distant parts, Over moor, over mount I have sped; But the kind I found in their graves, and the hearts Of the living were cold as the dead." The old man's cheek as he spake grew pale ; On the grass-green sod he sank, While the evening sun o'er the western vale Set 'mid clouds and vapours dank. On the morrow that sun in the eastern skies Rose ruddy and warm and bright; But never again did that old man rise From the sod which he press'd that nighu THE RED-NOSED LIEUTENANTS Five-and-twenty years ago I was just five- and-twenty years of age. I was thus neither young nor old; in addition, I was neither handsome nor ugly, neither rich nor poor, neither active nor indolent, neither a Socrates nor a simpleton. More ordinary men than I had been married for love, poorer men had got credit and rolled on their carriage-wheels till it was out, and greater fools had been cabinet councillors. Yet all this did not satisfy me. Years had swept along, and I was exactly the same in point of publicity at five-and -twenty that I had been at fifteen. Let no man say that the passion for being something or other in the world's eye is an improbable thing. Show me that man, and I will show him my Lord A. driving a mail-coach, the Earl of B. betting at a boxing-match, the Marquis of C. the rival of his own grooms, and the Duke of D. a director of the opera. My antagonist has only to look and be convinced; for what could throw these patricians into the very jaws of public jest but the passion for publicity? I pondered long upon this, and my resolution to do something was at length fixed. But the grand difficulty remained, what was the thing to be done? what was the grand chemin d'hon- neur the longest stride to the temple of fame, the royal road to making a figure in one's generation? The step was too momentous to be rashly taken, and I took time enough, for I took a year. On my six-and-twentieth birth- day I discovered that I was as wise and as public as on my birth-day before, and a year older besides! While I was in this state of fluctuation my honoured uncle arrived in town and called upon me. Let me introduce thig most excellent and most mutilated man. He had commenced his career in the American war a bold, brave, blooming ensign. What he was now I shall not describe; but he had taken the earliest opportunity of glory, and at Bunker's Hill had lost an eye. He was no- thing the worse as a mark for an American rifle; and at Brandy wine he had the honour of seeing La Fayette run away before him, and paid only a right leg as his tribute to the victory. 1 From the Forget-me-not, 1827. THE EED-NOSED LIEUTENANT. 317 My uncle followed on the road to glory, gaining a new leaf of laurel and losing an additional fragment of himself in every new battle, till with Burgoyne he left his nose in the swamps of Saratoga, whence, having had the good fortune to make his escape, he distinguished himself at the siege of York Town, under Corn wall is, and left only an arm in the ditch of the rampart. He had returned a major, and after lying on his back for two years in the military hospital, was set at liberty to walk the world on a pair of crutches, and be called colonel. I explained my difficulty to this venerable remnant of sol- diership. "Difficulty!" cried he, starting up on his residuary leg, " I see none whatever. You are young, healthy, and have the use of all your limbs the very thing for the army!" I glanced involuntarily at his own contribu- tions to the field. He perceived it, and re- torted, " Sir, I know the difference between us as well as if I were the field-surgeon. I should never have advised you to march if you had not limbs enough for the purpose ; but you have your complement. " "And therefore can afford to lose them, my good uncle," said I. "Nephew," was the reply, "sneering is no argument, except among civilians. But if a man wants to climb at once to a name, let him try the army. Have you no estate? why, the regiment is your freehold ; have you no education? why, the colour of your coat will stand you in place of it with three-fourths of the men and all the women ; have you no brains? why, their absence will never be missed at the mess; and as for the field, not half a dozen in an army ever exhibit any pretensions of the kind." This was too flattering a pros- pect to be overlooked. I took the advice; in a week was gazetted into a marching regiment, and in another week was on board his Majesty's transport No. 10 with a wing of the gallant thirty regiment, tacking out of Ports- mouth on our way to Gibraltar. Military men have it that there are three bad passages the slow, the quick, and the neither quick nor slow: pronouncing the two former detest- able, the latter ! the storm making a man sick of the sea; the calm making him sick of himself a much worse thing; and the alternation of calm and storm bringing both sicknesses into one. My first passage was distinguished by being of the third order. I found my fellow- subalterns a knot of good- humoured beings the boys with the habits of men, the men with the tricks of boys all fully impressed with the honour of the epau- lette, and thinking the man who wore two instead of one the most favoured of all things under the sun. We at length came in sight of the famous Rock. It loomed magnificently from the sea; and every glass was to the eye as the lines and batteries, that looked like teeth in its old white head, rose grimly out of the waters. The veterans of the corps were in high delight, and enumerated with the vigour of grateful recollection the cheapness of the wines, the snugness of the quarters, and the general laudible and illaudible pleasantries of the place. The younger listened with the respect due to experience, and, for that even- ing, an old red-nosed lieutenant, of whom no man had ever thought but as a lieutenant before, became the centre of a circle a he blue- stocking surrounded with obsequious listeners, by virtue of his pre-eminent knowledge of every wine-house in the garrison. Such is the advantage of situation! Nine- tenths of man- kind, till they are placed on the spot of dis- play, what are they but red-nosed lieutenants? At Gibraltar, like Thicbault in Frederic's paradise at Potsdam, we conjugated from morning till night the verb, " Je m'ennuie, tu t'enmiies, il s'ennuie," through all its persons, tenses, and moods. At length we were ordered for Egypt. Never was regiment so delighted. We supped together upon the news, and drank farewell to Gibraltar and confusion to in bumpers without measure. In the very height of our carousal my eye dropped upon my old friend's red nose. It served me as a kind of thermometer. I observed it diminished of its usual crimson. "The spirit has fallen," thought I;' "there is ill luck in the wind." I took him aside, but he was then too far gone for regular counsel; he only clasped my hand with the fervour of a fellow-drinker, and mut- tered out, lifting his glass with a shaking wrist, "Nothing but confoundedly bad brandy in Egypt for love or money." We sailed; were shipwrecked on the coast of Caramania, and surrounded by natives. Soldiers are no great geographers; the line leave that business to the staff, the staff to the artillery, the artillery to the engineers, and the engineers to Provid- ence. At our council, which was held on a row of knapsacks, and with one pair of trousers among its seven sages, it was asserted, with equal show of reason, that we were in Africa, in Arabia, in Turkey, and in the Black Sea. However, our sheepskin friends were urgent for our departure. We finally sailed for Egypt; found the French building fortifications on the shore; and, like a generous enemy, landed just where they had provided for our reception. But the world knows all this already, and I disdain te 313 THE RED-NOSED LIEUTENANT. tell wkat everybody knows. But the world does not know that we had three councils of war to settle whether the troops should land in gaiters or fa-ourcrs, and whether they should or should not carry three days' pipe-clay and blacking in their knapsacks. The most valu- able facts are, we see, often lost for want of our being a little behind the curtain. The famous landing was the noisiest thing conceiv- able. The world at a distance called it the most gallant thing, and I have no inclination to stand up against universal opinion. But whether we were fighting against the sandhills, or the French, or the sun in his strength; whether we were going to the right, or the left, or the rear; whether we were beating or beaten, no living man could have told in two minutes after the first shot. It was all cla- mour, confusion, bursting of shells, dashing of water, splitting of boats, and screams of the wounded, the whole passing under a coverlet of smoke as fuliginous as ever rushed from furnace. Under this "blanket of the dark" we pulled on, landed, fought, and conquered; and for our triumph, had every man his length of excellent sand for the night, the canopy of heaven for his tent, and the profoundest curses of the commissariat for his supper. On we went day after day, fighting the French, starv- ing, and scorching, till we found them in our camp before daybreak on the memorable 21st of March. We fought them there as men fight in the pit of a theatre, every one for himself. The French, who are great tacticians, and never fight but for science sake, grew tired before John Bull, who fights for the love of the thing. The Frenchman fights but to man- O3uvre, the Englishman manoeuvres but to fight. So, as manoeuvring was out of the question, we carried the affair all after our own hearts. But this victory had its price, for it cost the army its brave old general, and it cost me my old red-nosed lieutenant. We were standing within half a foot of each other, in front of the little ruin where the French Invincibles made a last struggle; they fired a volley before they threw themselves on their knees, according to the national custom of earning their lives, when I saw my unlucky friend tumbled head over heels, and stretched between my legs. There was no time for thinking of him then. The French were hunt- ed out, la bayonette dans le cul; we followed, the battle of Alexandria was won, and our part of the success was to be marched ten miles off to look after some of their fragments of baggage. We found nothing, of course ; for neither in defeat nor in victory does the French- man ever forget himself. In our bivouac the thought of the lieutenant came over me: in the heat of the march I could not have thought of anything mortal but my own parched throat and crippled limbs. Absurd as the old subal- tern was, I "could have better spared a better man." We had been thrown together in some strange ways, and as the result of my medita- tions I determined to return and see what was become of the man with the red nose. Leave was easily obtained, for there was something of the odd feeling for him that a regiment has for one of those harmless madmen who some- times follow its drums in a ragged uniform and formidable hat and feather. It was lucky for the lieutenant that I rode hard, for I found him as near a premature exit as ever hero was. A working-party had already made his last bed in the sand, and he was about to take that possession which no ejectment will disturb, when I felt some throbbing about his heart. The soldiers insisted that as they were ordered out for the purpose of inhuming, they should go through with their work. But if they were sullen, I was resolute; and I prevailed to have the subject deferred to the hospital. After an infinity of doubt I saw my old friend set on his legs again. But my labour seemed in vain; life was going out; the doctors prohibited the bottle; and the lieutenant felt, like Shylock, that his life was taken away when that was taken "by which he did live." He resigned himself to die with the composure of an ancient philosopher. The night before I marched for Cairo I sat an hour with him. He was a changed man, talked more rationally than I had believed within the possibility of brains so many years adust with port, expressed some rough gratitude for my trouble about him, and finally gave me a letter to some of his relatives in England. The regiment was on its march at daybreak ; we made our way to Cairo, took possession, wondered at its filth, admired its grand mosque, execrated its water, its provi- sions, and its population ; were marched back to storm Alexandria (where I made all possible search for the lieutenant, but in vain); were saved the trouble by the capitulation of the French; were embarked, landed at Portsmouth just one year from our leaving it, and, as it pleased the wisdom of Napoleon and the folly of our ministry, were disbanded. I had no reason to complain, for though I had been shipwrecked and starved, sick and wounded, I had left neither my life nor my legs behind. Others had been less lucky, and from the losses in the regiment I was now a captain. One day in looking over the relics of my baggage, THE WALL-FLOWER. 319 a letter fell out: it was the red-nosed lieuten- ant's. My conscience reproached me, and I believe for the moment my face was as red as his nose. I delivered the letter; it was re- ceived by a matron at the head of three of the prettiest maidens in all Lancashire, the country 'ul beauty a blonde, a brunette, and a younger one who was neither, and yet seemed alter- nately both. I liked the blonde and the bru- nette infinitely, but the third I did not like, for I fell in love with her, which is a very different thing. The lieutenant was her uncle, and regretted as his habits were, this family circle had much to say for his generosity. Mary's hazel eyes made a fool of me, and I asked her hand that they might make a fool of no one else. The colonel without the nose was of course invited to the wedding, and he was in such exultation that either the blonde or the brunette might have been my aunt if she pleased. But they exhibited no tendency to this gay military Torso, and the colonel was forced to content himself with the experience of hie submissive nephew. The wedding-day came, and the three sisters looked prettier than ever in their vestal white. The colonel gave the bride away, and in the tears and congratulations of this most melancholy of all happy ceremonies Mary chose her fate. We returned to dinner, and were seated, all smiles, when the door opened, and in walked the red-nosed lieutenant! Had I seen, like Brutus, "the immortal Julius' ghost," I could not have been more amazed. But nature was less doubting. The matron threw herself into his arms ; the blonde and the brunette clasped each a hand; and my bright-eyed wife forgot the conjugal duties, and seemed to forget that I was in the world. There was indeed some reason for doubt : the man before us was fat and florid enough, but the essential dis- tinction of his physiognomy had lost its regal hue. All this, however, was explained by degrees. After my departure for Cairo he had been given over by the doctors; and sick of taking physic, and determining to die in his own way, he had himself carried up the Nile. The change of air did something for him the absence of the doctors perhaps more. He domesticated himself among the peasants above the cataracts, drank camel's milk, ate rice, wore a haick, and rode a buffalo. Port was inaccessible, and date-brandy was not to his taste. Health forced itself on him; and the sheik of the district began to conceive so good an opinion of the stranger that he offered him his daughter, with a handsome portion of buf- faloes, in marriage. The offer was declined. But African offence is a formidable thing; and after having had a carbine-load of balls dis- charged one night through his door, he thought it advisable to leave the neighbourhood of his intended father-in-law. I am not about to astonish the world, and throw unbelief on my true story, by saying that the lieutenant ha* since drank of nothing but the limpid spring. Whatever were his Mussulman habits, he re- sumed his native tastes with the force of nature. Port still had temptations for him; but prudence, in the shape of the matron sister and the pretty nieces, was at hand, and, like Sancho's physician, the danger and the glass vanished at a sign from those gentle magicians. Our chief anxiety arose from the good-fellow- ship of the colonel. He had settled within a field of us, and his evenings were spent by our fireside. He had been, by the chances of ser- vice, once on campaign with the lieutenant; and all campaigners know that there is no free-mason sign of friendship equal to that of standing to be shot at together. But there was an unexpected preservative in this hazard- ous society. The colonel was incapable of exhibiting in the centre of his countenance that living splendour which made Falstaff raise Bardolph to the honour of his admiral; he could "carry no lantern in his poop." If envy could have invaded his generous soul it would have arisen at the old restored distinc- tion of his comrade. He watched over his regimen, kept him to the most judicious allow- ance of claret: and the red nose of the lieu- tenant never flamed again. DR. MAGIKN. THE WALL-FLOWER. i "Why loves my flower, the sweetest flower That swells the golden breast of May, Thrown rudely o'er this ruin'd tower, To waste the solitary day? "Why, when the mead, the spicy vale, The grove and genial garden call, Will she her fragrant soul exhale Unheeded on the lonely wall? "For never sure was beauty born, To live in death's deserted shade! Come, lovely flower, iny banks adoro. My banks for life and beauty inacifl-" From Langhorne's Fablei of Flora. This piece it remarkable as being one from which the aatboi at Waverley has taken several of his mottoes. 320 AT THE SHRINE. Thus pity wak'd the tender thought; And, by her sweet persuasion led, To seize the hermit flower I sought, Aud bear her from her stony bed. I sought, but sudden on mine ear A voice in hollow murmurs broke, And smote my heart with holy fear The Genius of the Ruin spoke. "From thee be far th' ungentle deed, The honours of the dead to spoil, Or take the sole remaining meed, The flower that crowns the former toil ! "Nor deem that flower the garden's foe, Or fond to grace this barren shade; 'Tis nature tells her to bestow Her honours on the lonely dead. "For this, obedient zephyrs bear Her light seeds round yon turret's mould, And undispers'd by tempests there, They rise in vegetable gold. "Nor shall thy wonder wake to see Such desert scenes distinction crave; Oft have they been, and oft shall be Truth's, honour's, valour's, beauty's grave. "Where longs to fall that rifted spire, As weary of th' insulting air; The poet's thought, the warrior's fire, The lover's sighs are sleeping there. "When that, too, shades the trembling ground, Borne down by some tempestuous sky, And many a slumbering cottage round Startles how still their hearts will lie ! "Of them who, wrapp'd in earth so cold, No more the smiling day shall view, Should many a tender tale be told; For many a tender thought is due. "Hast thou not seen some lover pale, When ev'niug brought the pensive hour, Step slowly o'er the shadowy vale, And stop to pluck the frequent flower? "Those flowers he surely meant to strew On lost affection's lowly cell, Tho' there, as fond remembrance grew, Forgotten from his hand they fell. " Has not for thee the fragrant thorn Been taught her first rose to resign? Wit!) vain but pious fondness borne, To deck thy Nancy's honour'd shrine ! "'Tis nature pleading in the breast, Fair memory of her works to find; And when to fate she yields the rest, She claims the monumental mind. "Why, else, the o'ergrown paths of time Would thus the letter'd sage explore, With pain these crumbling ruins climb. And on the doubtful sculpture po/ei "Why seeks he with unwearied toil Through death's dim walk to urge his wny, Reclaim his long-asserted spoil, And lead oblivion into day?" AT THE SHRINE. Teresa Berini was the daughter of an inn- keeper in one of the little villages that lie along the foot of the Sabine Hills. She had been a gay and spirited young woman, and had had her own share of lovers. Had she been as conscientious in confessing the peccadilloes which she had slid into by the necessity for what she had come to deem a little guileless deceit towards rivals, as she was in acknowledging terribly vicious thoughts and desires, she would have been at confession even oftener than she was. The priest, Padre Androvi, a shrewd and active man, who knew more about the affairs of the young women of the village than he chose to acknowledge in their hearing, would sit with eyes apparently half-closed, as in a dream, listening to Teresa's confession, only now and then putting a quiet question calculated to draw forth more detailed admissions. At length he would wind up by saying to her " My daughter, such thoughts as these come to all of us unbidden. If we entertain them not, the church, like a good mother, freely absolves without rebuke. It is only when they are hospitably provided for, and try to pay us for such entertainment as we give them by urging us to falseness or cruelty of act or word, that they are in danger of becoming deadly. Go in peace, my daughter, and forget not to pray for counsel and help to our sacred mother Mary." Now, over and over again had the padre dismissed Teresa in this wise. And she would go straight from confession to deceive a lover; for it must be known that, as the daughter of Jacopo Berini, she was esteemed a prize worth striving for among the young men of the dis- trict. Jacopo having conducted the inn with shrewdness and economy for nearly half a life- time, and having at the same time looked very sharply after a mulberry-yard, and always sold his silk well, was a man of some means; and C. Rolls, sculp? AT THE SHRINE. 321 Teresa herself was attractive. Her eyes were dark and sparkling, as Italian women's are wont to be, but they had a softness that gave a peculiar deptli to their charm; her features, though not too pronounced, were well formed, and her skin was fairer than is usual with Italian women. And she was not only attrac- tive, but clever. Ever since her mother's death, which had taken place some ten years bsfore in giving birth to a second daughter, Teresa had looked after the domestic arrange- ments, and the prospect was that the man she accepted would succeed her father in the inn. So it is not to be wondered at that at fair and festa, or at harvest or vintage-gathering, her hand was greatly in request; and many were the offerings of flowers and fruits that were brought to her. But of her admirers there were two more noted than all the rest Paolo Benzi, the village blacksmith, and Carlo Speni, the mule-driver between the village and the city. Carlo had been her friend from childhood; but Paolo had come from tlie Nea- politan side a few years before, and had settled in the village. Now, though Carlo was fav- oured by the father, Teresa loved Paolo. But she hated the thought of vexing her father, and her devotion to him encouraged her in her deceptions. Her secret thoughts and her un- noticed smiles were all for Paolo; but she had to make feint of openly wooing Carlo, hard as it was for her. Often as she went singing about her work, while her father sat thinking what a fine pair she and Carlo would make, she was thinking sadly to herself, in spite of all her outward cheer, " I know what's in his head; but for all that I know at the same time I shall never marry Carlo;" and a sigh would steal from her in the pauses of her song. Of course it could not wholly escape Carlo that she looked on his rival, the blacksmith, with favour; but he flattered himself that the authority of the father would be enough to secure success to his suit in the long run. So he waited, but he could not help watching; for when was lover in such circumstances ever with- out jealousy ? But Paolo waited and watched likewise, for love made him determined; and the sweet consciousness that he was loved ren- dered him strong and resolute. So one evening he wandered up the hill behind the village by a road to a vineyard, which he knew that Teresa was wont to visit. He sauntered leisurely along, not taking much notice of the beauty of the olives and the wild vines that festooned the way; and at length he sat himself down under a mulberry-tree to rest. He had not sat long when he saw Teresa round a corner of VOL. L the road; but, to his great chagrin, Carlo was with her, carrying her basket and smiling down on her. Paolo was stung as he Iiad never been before, and crept round to the other side of the tree to hide, and gathered himself together with a muttered curse. They 'avme on slowly, as though they were both concerned to prolong the journey to make each step take as much time as possible; and Paolo could hear snatches of their conversation only snatches, for if he had heard the whole he might have taken consolation instead of voviiig revenge. " How nice it will be to live up there in the summer, in the little house beside the yard, when we are man and wife," said Carlo, who had been induced by recent observations to appeal to the old man and to speak to Teresa more plainly than ever. " It is nice living up there," said she; "but I love the village." "No doubt you do," said he; "but one wants a change. I always think more of the village when I have been longer away than usual." "Men are maybe different," said Teresa; " I have no wish for changes." "'Tis good to be content," said he; "I know I won't be content till I have yon for my own my very own;" and then he kissed her just as they passed the tree which concealed Paolo. She blushed, though so far as she knew there was no eye to see, and made feint to put a step's space between them; but, recall- ing the need for appearances, she drew closer again and whispered " Women's love is different from men's love, I think, Carlo : it likes to wait and feel each daj' that it is growing." " It may be," said Carlo; "but if love grows by waiting, how have we ourselves got here?" and he smiled at bis own remark. Teresa laughed also; and they two went on ; and, as they disappeared, Paolo heard the silvery echoes of their laughter. He crept down the hill behind them, like some ominous shadow. Instead of going home, he opened his work- shop; and, on pretext of being busy, began to work again, and puffed and blew and ham- mered till the people wondered what on earth had come to the blacksmith. Paolo was that night doing more than forging vine-rods. Things went on for a while without change; Paolo saw Teresa occasionally: for sometimes he would go to the inn with a farmer who had come to the village to settle accounts with him; and then he always took heart of grace, for he read love for him in Teresa's eyes in spite of 81 322 AT THE SHRINE. her attempts at womanly disguises. But neither to her nor her father did he say aught of what lay so near his heart. Months passed on and the winter came. One evening the village was thrown into great con- sternation by the arrival of one of Carlo's mules that had evidently broken away from its master in some great danger. As on that occasion Carlo was carrying commodities of more than ordinary value, it was presumed that he had been carried off by brigands; and that in a short time he would return. But weeks passed on, till they grew to months, and still no word of Carlo. Jacopoand others, who had loved and respected him, had caused all sorts of inquiries to be made, and had offered rewards, but with no effect. And gradually Paolo had thrown himself into Jacopo's way, till at length the latter was forced to own that Paolo was clever and dis- creet, and, as all hope of Carlo's return had now passed, he was not averse to his becoming a sweetheart to Teresa. There was no need for a long wooing; and they two were wedded within a year and a half from the time that Paolo had sat under the mulberry-tree and muttered his curses. But, in spite of their love for each other, Paolo and Teresa were not so happy as they had told themselves that they would be. There was a something that lay between them un- spoken a something only guessed at, but dark and gloomy, and it distressed them. Paolo would mutter in his sleep, and Carlo's name could be clearly heard in the mutterings; for now Paolo was haunted by a great fear. The robbers whom Paolo had bribed with all his savings of these half-dozen years to rid him of a rival, had done more than he had bargained for, they had compelled Carlo to go with them in a very adventurous expedition which was not so successfully carried through as most of their enterprises; and he was seen and described, and orders were sent to try and apprehend him as one of the leaders of the brigands. So it was not safe for him, as he conceived, to show himself in the village; and when he heard that Paolo had married Teresa, he grimly accepted his hard fate, and was even consoled by the thought that some day it would give him the better chance of revenge. And his chance came sooner than he had hoped. A relative of Paolo in the Neapolitan territory had died, leaving him his money, and it became neces- sary that Paolo should go there to arrange matters. He performed his journey safely, and, having realized the wealth that iiad been left him, was returning home, and had got within a few miles of the village, when he was set upon by the brigands, his treasure taken from him, and he himself stabbed in various places, and left for dead on the way. He certainly would have died had not a friendly shepherd found him and carried him to the nearest farm- house, from whence he was in time taken home. He was so seriously wounded, that there was no hope that he would ever be able to go about again. And as he lay thus faint from pain and loss of blood, a child was born to Teresa. At the first blush she knew it all how Paolo, for love of her, had terribly wronged Carlo, and how now Carlo had revenged him- self upon them both. She felt that she had sinned in making a pretence of love even to please her father, and blamed herself sorely for being the cause of all the evil by having been deceitful. The thought of all this soon bred a change in her. She grew serious and thoughtful; and whilst ministering to Paolo's needs, would speak to him of religion. Xow, when she went to confession, the padre did not dismiss her with the old style of words ; but would say to her tenderly : " My daughter, trials like these are hard to bear, and little sins sometimes bring heavy burdens; but you did it hoping to save your father's peace, and the saints will not judge you so hardly as you judge yourself. Go in peace, and forget not to ask help of our sacred mother Mary. She is always ready to succour such as you are, and to pour the oil of conso- lation into such wounds as yours." And often in the bright Italian afternoons, Teresa was to be seen, accompanied by her little sister Beatrice, carrying her baby up the valley to where, at the ruined convent, there was a shrine, as there is in many remote as well as in the most frequented corners of Italy. To these shrines all classes of people repair, to implore the intercession of the Madonna for themselves and those who are dear to them. At the shrine Teresa bestowed simple gifts, and begged mercy for herself and a blessing for the child who had been born to her in such sad circumstances. All the people in the district knew her story, and knew her habit of going daily to the convent shrine, where she would linger for hours. They pitied and sympathized with her sorrow, for she who was so late the petted beauty had now become a gentle and devout woman. Carlo escaped to France, and was nevwr heard of again. Paolo was crippled for life. .B. ORMK. TRIFLES. 323 PEACE AND WAR. How beautiful this night ! the balmiest sigh, Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear, Were discord to the speaking quietude That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which Love has spread To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills, Robed in a garment of untrodden snow ; Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend, So stainless, that their white and glittering spires Tinge not the moon's pure beam ; yon castled steep, Whose banner haugeth o'er the time-worn tower So idly, that rapt fancy deemeth it A metaphor of peace ; all form a scene Where musing solitude might love to lift Her soul above this sphere of earthliness ; Where silence undisturbed might watch alone, So cold, so bright, so still. Ah ! whence yon glare That fires the arch of Heaven? That dark red smoke Blotting the silver moon ? The stars are quenched In darkness, and the pure and spangling snow Gleams faintly through the gloom that gathers round ! Hark to that roar, whose swift and deafening paals In countless echoes through the mountains ring, Startling pale Midnight on her starry throne! Now swells the intermingling din ; the jar, Frequent and frightful, of the bursting bomb ; The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout, The ceaseless clangour, and the rush of men Inebriate with rage : loud, and more loud The discord grows; till pale death shuts the scene, And o'er the conqueror and the conquered draws His cold and bloody shroud. Of all the men Whom day's departing beam saw blooming there, In proud and vigorous health ; of all the hearts That beat with anxious life at sunset there ; How few survive, how few are beating now 1 All is deep silence, like the fearful calm That slumbers in the storm's portentous pause ; Save when the frantic wail of widow'd love Comes shuddering on the blust, or the f.iint moan. With which some soul bursts from the frame of clay, Wrapt round its struggling powers. The gray morn Dawns on the mournful scene ; the sulphurous smoke Before the icy wini's slow rolls away, And the bright beams of frosty morning dance Along the spangling snow. There tracks of blood Even to the forest's depth, and scattered aims, And lifeless warriors, whose hard lineaments Death's self could change not, mark the dreadful path Of the on (sallying victors: far behind Black ashes note where their proud city stood. | Within yon forest is a gloomy glen Each tree which guards its darkness from the day Waves o'er a warrior's tomb. PBRCT BYSSHJS SHELLEY. TRIFLES. [Hannah More, born at Stap!eton, Gloucestershire, 1745 ; died 7th Sei tember, 1833. One of the most pro- niinent of authors at the beginning of this century, yiie was the daughter of a schoolmaster, and at tlu a^-e of seventeen she published her first work, a pastoral drama, entitled The Search after Hap/tines*. This at- tracted considerable attention, and in the following year she produced The Inflexible Cajitive, a tragedy. Two of her tragedies Pmy and The Fatal Falsi hood wen brought out by Garrick at Drury Lane. Johnson greatly admired her works, and considered her the best of the fern. ile poets. She early directed her genius to the high task of conveying religious instruction in prose and veise, and in this she was eminently successful. The following couplets will show how epigrammatic she could be at times : " In men this blunder still you find, All think their little set mankind." "Small habits well pursued betimes, May reach the dignity of crimes." She was one of the few authors who have made a for* time by their craft. She made about 30.000 by her writings, and bequeathed a third of that sum to various charitable institutions. In 1782 appealed her Sacred Z>/-masand a poem entitled Sensibility, from which w take our extract.] Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs; Since life's best joys consist in peace and ease. And though but few can serve, yet all may please; O let the ungentle spirit learn from hence, A small unkindness is a great offence. To spread large bounties, though we wish in vain, Yet all may shun the guilt of giving pain. To bless mankind with tides of flowing wealth, With rank to grace them, or to crown with health, Our little lot denies; yet liberal still, God gives its counterpoise to every ill ; Nor let us murmur at our stinted powers, When kindness, love, and concord may be ours. The gift of minist'rinj to others' ease, To all our sons impartial Heaven decrees; The gentle offices of patient love, Beyond all flattery, and all price above ; The mild forbearance at a brother's fault, The angry word suppress d, the taunting thought : Subduing and subdued the petty strife, Which clouds the colour of domestic life; The sober comfort, all the peace which spring* From the large aggregate of little things ; On these small cares of daughter, wife, and friend, The almost sacred joys of Home depend : There, Sensibility, thou be exaggeration to say that, but for the hostility of the City, Charles the First would never have been vanquished, and that without the help of the City, Charles the Second could scarcely have been restored. The considerations may serve to explain why, in spite of that attraction which had, during a long course of years, gradually drawn the aristocracy westward, a few men of high rank had continued, till a very recent perio 1, to dwell in the vicinity of the Ex- change and of the Guildhall. Shaftesbury and Buckingham, while engaged in bitter and unscrupulous opposition to the government, had thought that they could nowhere carry on their intrigues so conveniently or so securely as under the protection of the City magistrates and the City militia. Shaftesbury had therefore lived in Aldersgate Street, at a house which may still be easily known by pilasters and wreaths, the graceful work of inigo. Buckingham had ordered his mansion near Charing Cross, once the abode of the Archbishops of York, to be pulled down ; and while streets and alleys which are still named after him were rising on that site, chose to reside in Dowgate. These, however, were rare exceptions. Almost all the noble families of England had long migrated beyond the walls. The district where most of their town houses stood lies between the City and the regions which are now considered as fashionable. A few great men still retained their hereditary hotels in the Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square, which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite spots. Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as one of the wonders of England. Soho Square, which had just been built, was to our an- cestors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly sympathise. Monmouth Square had been the name while the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth flourished ; and on the southern side towered his mansion. The front, though ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned. The walls Of the principal apart- ments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage, and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin. Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared ; and no aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical quarter. A little way north from Holborn, and on the verge of the pastures and corn-fields, rose two celebrated palaces, each with an ample garden. One of them, then called Southampton House, and subsequently Bedford House, was removed about fifty years ago to make room for a new city, which now covers with its squares, streets, and churches a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth century for peaches and snipes. The other, Montague House, cele- brated for its frescoes and furniture, was, a few months after the death of Charles the Second, burned to the ground, and was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent Montague House, which, having been lon< the repository of such various and precious treasures of art, science, and learning as were scarcely ever before assembled under a single roof, has now given place to an edifice more magnificent still. Nearer to the Court, on a space called Saint James's Fields, had just been built Saint LONDON. 333 James's Square and Jermyn Street. Saint James's Church had recently been opened for the accommodation of the inhabitants of this new quarter. Golden Square, which was in the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state, had not yet been begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen onthe north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile erected by Clarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke of Albemarle. The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the memory of the site. He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and was sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock. On the north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a meadow renowed for a spring from which, long after- wards, Conduit Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed without a shudder by a Londoner of that age. There, as in a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No foundations were laid there till two generations had passed away without any re- turn of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot had long been surrounded by buildings. We should greatly err if we were to sup- pose that any of the streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The great majority of the houses, indeed, have, since that time, been wholly, or in great part rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed before us as they then were, we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere. In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy mar- ket was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham. The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardi- gan and Winchester House, to hear mounte- banks harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and im- portunate as in the worst governed cities of the Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many accidents and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was knocked down and nearly killed in the mid- dle of the Square. Then at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid out. Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At an- other time an impudent squatter settled him- self there, and built a shed for rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Or- mond, Kent, and Pembroke, gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for permis- sion to put up rails, and to plant trees. When such was the state of the region inha- bited by the most luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the great body of the population suffered what would now be considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was detestable ; all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon be- came torrents. Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill, bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. Ihis flood was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met, they cocked their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere bully he sneaked off, muttering that he should find a time. If he was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind Montague House. The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little advan- tage in numbering them ; for of the coach- men, chairmen, porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could read. 334 LONDON. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or sculptured signs, which gave a gay and gro- tesque aspect to the streets. The walk from 'haring Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer re- quired for the direction of the common people. When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were opened, and pails were emptied with little regard to those who were passing below. Falls, bruises, and broken bones were of con- stant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity : yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another class of ruf- fians. It was a favourite amusement of dis- solute young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet young men, and offering rude caresses to pretty women. Several dynas- ties of these tyrants had, since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of Mohawk. The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly contempti- ble. There was an Act of Common Council which provided that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their homes ; and those few generally found it more agree- able to tipple in alehouses than to face the streets. It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of Charles the Second, began a great change in the police of London, a change which has perhaps added as much to the hap- piness of the body of the people as revolutions of much greater fame. An ingenious projector, named Edward Heming, obtained letters patent conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate consideration, to place a light be- fore every tenth door, on moonless nights, from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock. Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile to think of Heming's lanterns, which glim- mered feebly before one house in ten during a small part of one night in three. But such was not the feeling of his contemporaries. His scheme was enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends of im- provement extolled him as the greatest of all the benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the introduction of what, was called the new light as strenuously as fools in our age have opposed the introduction of vac- cination and railroads, as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plough and of alphabetical writing, Many years after the date of Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no lamp was seen. We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the state of the quarters of London which was peopled by the outcasts of society. Among those quarters one had at- tained a scandalous pre-eminence. On the confines of the City and the Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a House of Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white hoods. The precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to be found in every dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a large proportion were knaves and libertines, and were followed to their asylum by women more abandoned than themselves. The civil power was unable to keep order in a district swarming with such inhabitants ; and thus Whitefriars became the favourite resort of all who wished to be emancipated from the re- straints of the law. Though the immunities legally belonging to the place extended only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate no peace- officer's life was in safety. At the cry of " Rescue," bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits and broom- sticks, poured forth by hundreds ; and the intruder was fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street,* hustled, stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice of England could not be exe- LONDON. 335 cuted without the help of a company of mus- keteers. Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were to be found within a short walk of the chambers where Somers was studying history and law, of the chapel where Tillotson was preaching, of the coffee- house where Dryden was passing judgment on poems and plays, and of the hall where the lloyal Society was examining the astro- nomical system of Isaac Newton. Each of the two cities which made up the capital of England had its own centre of at- traction. In the metropolis of commerce the point of convergence was the Exchange ; in the metropolis of fashion the Palace. But the Palace did not retain its influence so long as the Exchange. The Revolution completely altered the relations between the Court and the higher classes of society. It was by de- grees discovered that the King, in his indi- vidual capacity, had very little to give : that coronets and garters, bishoprics and embas- sies, lordships of the Treasury and tellerships of the Exchequer, nay, even charges in the royal stud and bedchamber, were really be- stowed, not by him, but by his advisers. Every ambitious and covetous man perceived that he would consult his own interest far better by acquiring the dominion of a Cornish borough, and by rendering good service to the ministry during a critical session, than by becoming the companion, or even the minion, of his prince. It was therefore in the antechambers, not of George the First and of George the Second, but of Walpole and Pelham, that the daily crowd of courtiers was to be found. It is also to be remarked that the same Revolution, which made it impos- sible that our Kings should use the patronage of the state merely for the purpose of gratify- ing their personal predilections, gave us several Kings unfitted by their education and habits to be gracious and affable hosts. They had been born and bred on the Continent. They never felt themselves at home in our island. If they spoke our language, they spoke it in- elegantly and with effort. Our national cha- racter they never fully understood. Our national manners they hardly attempted to acquire. The most important part of their duty they performed better than any ruler who precede! them : for they governed strictly according to law : but they could not be the first gentlemen of the realm, the heads of polite society. If ever they unbent, it was in a very small circle where hardly an Eng- lish face was to be seen ; and they were never so happy as when they could escape for a summer to their native land. They had in- deed their days of reception for our nobility and gentry; but the reception waa a mere matter of form, and became at last as solemn a ceremony as a funeral. Not such was the Court of Charles the Sec- ond. Whitehall, when he dwelt there, was the focus of political intrigue and of fashion- able gaiety. Half the jobbing and half the flirting of the metropolis went on under his roof. Whoever could make himself agreeable to the prince, or could secure the good offices of the mistress, might hope to rise in the world without rendering any service to the government, without being even known by sight to any minister of state. This courtier got a frigate, and that a company ; a third, the pardon of a rich offender ; a fourth, a lease of crown land on easy terms. If the King notified his pleasure that a briefless lawyer should be made a judge, or that a libertine baronet should be made a peer, the gravest counsellors, after a little murmuring, submitted. Interest, therefore, drew a constant press of suitors to the gates of the palace ; and those gates always stood wide. The King kept open house every day, and all day long, for the good society of London, the extreme Whigs only excepted. Hardly any gentleman had any difficulty in making his way to the royal presence. The levee was exactly what the word imports. Some men of quality came every morning to stand round their master, to chat with him while his wig was combed and his cravat tied, and to accompany him in his early walk through the Park. All persons who had been properly introduced might, without any special invitation, go to see him dine, sup, dance, and play at hazard, and might have the pleasure of hearing him tell stories, which indeed he told remarkably well, about his. flight from Worcester, and about the misery which he had endured when he was a state prisoner in the hands of the canting, meddling preachers of Scotland. Bystanders whom His Majesty recognised often came in for a courteous word. This proved a more successful kingcraft than any that his father or grandfather had practised. It was not easy for the most austere republi- can of the school of Marvel to resist the fas- cination of so much good humour and affa- bility ; and many a veteran Cavalier, in whose heart the remembrance of unrequited sacrifices and services had been festering during twenty years, was compensated in one moment for wounds and sequestrations by his sovereign's kind nod, and "God bless you. my old friend ! " Whitehall naturally became the chief staple of news. Whenever there was a rumour that anything important had happened or was about to happen, people hastened thither to 836 LONDON. obtain intelligence from the fountain-head. The galleries presented the appearance of a modern club-room at an anxious time. They were full of people enquiring whether the Dutch mill was in, what tidings the express from France had brought, whether John Sobiesky h vd beaten the Turks, whether the Doge of Genoa was really at Paris. These were matters about which it was safe to talk aloud. But there were subjects concerning which information was asked and given in whispers. Had Halifax got the better of Rochester ? Was there to be a Parliament ? Was the Duke of York really going to Scot- land? Had Monmouth really been sum- moned from the Hague ? Men tried to read the countenance of every minister as he went through the throng to and fro from the royal closet. All sorts of auguries were drawn from the tone in which His Majesty spoke to the Lord President, or from the laugh with which His Majesty honoured a jest of the Lord Privy Seal ; and in a few hours the hopes and fears inspired by such slight indi- cations had spread to all the coffee-houses from Saint Jaims's to the Tower. The coffee-house must not bo dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at thai time have been not improperly called a most important political institution. No Par- liament had sat for years. The municipal council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such circum- stances the coffee-houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the me- tropolis vented itself. The first of these establishments had been set up by a Turkey merchant, who had ac- quired among the Mahometans a taste for their favourite beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that the fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle class went daily to his coffee-house to learn the news and to discuss it. Every coffee-house had one or more orators to whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and who soon be- came what the journalists of our time have been called, a fourth Estate of the realm. The Court had long seen with uneasiness the growth of this new power in the state. An attempt had been made, during Danby's ad- ministration, to close the coffee-houses. But men of all parties missed their usual places of ressrt. so much that there waa an universal outcry. The government did not venture, in opposition to a feeling so strong and general, to enforce a regulation of which the legality might well be questioned. Since that time ten years had elapsed, and during those years the number and influence of the coffee- houses had been constantly increasing. Fo- reigners remarked that the coffee-house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities ; that the coffee-house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who laid down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and pro- fession, and every shade of religious and po- litical opinion, had its own head quarters. There were houses near Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The wig came from Paris and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's garments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which up- held his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington, to excite the mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of richly scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown, ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the sneers of the whole assembly and the short answers of the waiters soon con- vinced him that he had better go somewhere else. Nor, indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in general the coffee-rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard-room : and strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the midst of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking more constant than Will's. That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert Temp* LONDON. 337 lars, sheepish lads from the Universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Lh-yden sate. In win- ter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire ; in summer it stood in the bal- cony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of llacine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee-houses where the first medical men might be con- sulted. Doctor John Ka Jcliffe, who , in 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found, surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee-houses where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men dis- cussed election and reprobation through their noses ; Jew coffee-houses where dark-eyed money changers from Venice and Amsterdam greeted each other ; and Popish coffee-houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King. LOBD MACAULAY. LAURA IN HEAVEN. Raised by my thought, I found the region where She whom I seek, but here on earth in vain, Dwells among those who the third heaven gain, And saw her lovelier and less haughty there. She took my hand and said "In this bright sphere, Unless my wish deceive, we meet again : Lo ! I am she who caused thee strife and pain, And closed my day before the eve was near. My bliss no human thought can understand: I wait for thee alone my fleshly veil So loved by thee is by the grave retained." She ceased, ah why? and why let loose my hand? Such chaste and tender words could so prevail, A little more, I had in heaven remained. PETEABCH. AN ENGLISH LANDSCAPE AND A COUN- TRY CONGREGATION. FROM " ADAM BEDE." The Green lay at the extremity of the vil- lage, and from it the road branched off in two directions, one leading farther up the hill by the church, and the other winding gently down toward the valley. On the side 22 of the Green that led toward the church the broken line of thatched cottages was con- tinued nearly to the church-yard gate ; but on the opposite, north-western side there was nothing to obstruct the view of gently- swelling meadows, and wooded valley, and dark masses of distant hills. The rich undu- lating district of Loainshire to which Hny- slope belonged lies close to a grim outskirt of Stonyshire, overlooked by its barren hills, as a pretty blooming sister may sometimes be seen linked in the arm of a rugged, tall, swarthy brother ; and in two or three hours' ride the traveler might exchange a bleak, treeless region, intersected by lines of cold gray stone, for one where his road wound under the shelter of the woods, or upswell- ing hills, muffled with hedgerows and long meadow-grass and thick corn ; and where at every turn he came upon some fine old coun- try-seat nestled in the valley or crowning the slope, some homestead with its long length of barn and its cluster of golden ricks, some gray steeple looking out from a pretty con- fusion of trees and thatch and dark-red tiles. It was just such a picture as this last that Hay- slope church had made to the traveler as he began to mount the gentle slope leading to its pleasant uplands, and now from his station near the Green he had before him in one view nearly all the other typical features of this pleasant land. High up against the horizon were the huge conical masses of hill, like giant mounds intended to fortify this re- gion of corn and grass against the keen and hungry winds of the north, not distant enough to be clothed in purple mystery, but with somber greenish sides visibly speckled with sheep, whose motion was only revealed by memory, not detected by sight ; wooed from day to day by the changing hours, but re- sponding with no change in themselves left forever grim and sullen after the flush of morning, the winged gleams of the April noon- day, the parting crimson glory of the ripen- ing summer sun. And directly below them the eye rBted on a more advanced line of hanging woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deep- ened into the uniform leafy curtain of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash and lime. Then came the valley, where the woods grew thicker, as if they had rolled down and hurried together from the patches left smooth on the slope, that they might take the better care of the tall mansion which lifted its parapets and sent its faint blue summer smoke among them. Doubtless there was a large swoop of park and a broad, glassy pool in front of that mansion, but the swell- 388 JUGGLING JERRY ing slope of meadow would not let our traveler see them from the village green. He saw, instead, a foreground which was just as lovely the level sunlight lying like trans- parent gjld among the gently -curving stems of the feathered grass and the tall red sorrel, and the white umbels of the hemlocks lining the bushy hedgerows. It was that moment in summer when the sound of the scythe be- ing whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the flower-sprinkled tresses of the meadows. He might have seen other beauties in the landscape if he had turned a little in his sad- dle and looked eastward, beyond Jonathan Burge's pasture and wood-yard toward the green corn fields and walnut-trees of the Hall Farm ; but apparently there was more in- terest for him in the living groups close at hand. Every generation in the village was there, from " old Feyther Taft" in his brown worsted night-cap, who was bent nearly double, but seemed tough enough to keep on his legs a' long while, leaning on his short stick, down to the babies with their little round heads lolling forward in quilted linen caps. Now and then there was a new ar- rival ; perhaps a slouching laborer, who. having eaten his supper, came out to look at the unusual scene with a slow bovine gaze, willing to hear what any one had to say in explanation of it, but by no means excited enough to ask a question. But all took care not to join the Methodists on the Green, and identify themselves in that way with the ex- pected audience, for there was not one of them that would not have disclaimed the im- putation of having come out to hear the "preicher-woman " they had only come out to see " what war-a-goin' on, like." The men were chiefly gathering in the neighbor- hood of the blacksmith's shop. But do not imagine them gathered in a knot. Villagers never swarm ; a whisper is unknown among them, and they seem almost as incapable of an undertone as a cow or a stag. Your true rustic turns his back on his in- terlocutor, throwing a question over his shoulder as if he meant to run away from the answer, and walking a step or two farther off when the interest of the dialogue culminates. So the group in the vicinity of the black- smith's door was by no means a close one, and formed no screen in front of Chad Cran- age, the blacksmith himself, who stood with his black brawny arms folded, leaning against the door-post, and occasionally sending forth a bellowing laugh at his own jokes, giving them a marked preference over the sarcasms of Wiry Ben, who had renounced the pleas- ures of the Holy Bush for the sake of seeing life under a new form. But both styles of wit were treated with equal contempt by Mr. Joshua Rann. Mr. Kami's leathern apron and subdued grimness can leave no one in any doubt that he is the village shoemaker ; the thrusting out of his chin and stomach, and the twirling of his thumbs, are more subtle indications, intended to prepare un- wary strangers for the discovery that they are in the presence of the parish clerk. " Old Josh way," as he Li irreverently called by his neighbors, is in a state of simmering indignation ; but he has not yet opened his lips except to say, in a resounding bass un- dertone, like the tuning of a violoncello, " Sehon, King of the Amorites ; for His mercy endureth forever ; and Og, the King of Basau ; for His mercy endureth forever" a quotation which may seem to have slight bearing on the present occasion, but, as with every other anomaly, adequate knowledge will show it to be a natural sequence. Mr. Rann was inwardly maintaining the dignity of the Church in the face of this scandalous irruption of Methodism ; and as that dignity was bound up with his own sonorous utter- ances of the responses, his argument naturally suggested a quotation from the psalm he had read the last Sunday afternoon. GEORGE ELIOT. JUGGLING JERRY. 1 [GEORGE MEREDITH, born in Hampshire, 1828. H was educated for the legal profession, but devoted him- self to that of literature. He has laboured industriously and well ; and has been recognized as one of the best class of contemporary novelists. " In his poetry," says one of his critics, " we can trace the same qualities which have made his Evan Harrington and his Richard Fecerel such pleasant reading, namely, much humour joined to very uncommon powers of observation and graphic painting." His chief works are : The Shaving of Shaypat; Farina, a legend of Cologne; Emilia in England; Rhoda Fleming; VUtoria ; and his latest (1872) The Adventures of Harry Richmond.] Pitch here the tent, while the old horse grazes : By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage. It's nigh my last above the daisies : My next leaf '11 be man's blank page. Yes, my old girl ! and it's no use crying : Juggler, constable, king, must bow. One that outjuggles all's been spying Long to have me, and he has me now. 1 From Modern Lore and Poems of Ote English Roadside, by George Meredith. London: Chapman and Hail, 1862, JUGGLING JERRY. 339 II. We'^e travelled times to this old common : Often we've hung our pots in the gorse. We've had a stirring life, old woman ! You, and I, and the old gray horse. Races, and fairs, and royal occasions, Found us coming to their call : Now they'll miss us at our stations: There's a Juggler outjuggles all! III. Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly! Over the duck-pond the willow shakes. Esv to think that grieving's folly, When the hand's firm as driven stakes! Ay ! when we're strong, and braced, and manful, Life's a sweet fiddle : but we're a batch Born to become the Gre.tt Juggler's hau'ful : Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch. IV. Here's where the lads of the village cricket: I was a lad not wide from here : Couldn't I whip off the bale from the wicket? Like an old world those days appear ! Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatch'd ale-house I know them ! They are old friends of my halts, and seem, Somehow, as if kind thanks I owe them : Juggling don't hinder the heart's esteem. V. Juggling's no sin, for we must have victual: Nature allows us to bait for the fool. Holding one's own makes us juggle no little; But, to increase it, hard Juggling's the rule. You that are sneering at my profession, Haven't you juggled a vast amount? There's the Prime Minister, in one Session, Juggles more games than ray sins '11 count. VI. I've murder'd insects with mock thunder: Conscience, for that, in men don't quail. I've made bread from the bump of wonder: That's my business, and there's my tale. Fashion and rank all praised the professor: Ay ! and I've had my smile from the Queen : Bravo, Jerry ! she meant : God bless her ! Ain't this a sermon on that scene? VII. I've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and, I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy: Most, a dash between the two. But it's a woman, old girl, that makes me Think more kindly of the race : And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me When the Great Juggler I must face. VIIT. We two were married, due and legal: Honest we've lived since we've been one. Lord! I could then jump like an eagle: You danced bright as a bit o' the sun. Birds in a May-bush we were! right merryj All night we kiss'd we juggled all day. Joy was the heart of Juggling Jerry ! Now from his old girl he's juggled away. IX. It's past parsons to console us : No, nor no doctor fetch for me: I can die without my bolus; Two of a trade, lass, never agree! Parson and Doctor ! don't they love rarely, Fighting the devil in other men's fields! Stand up yourself and match him fairly: Then see how the rascal yields ! X. I, lass, have lived no gipsy, flaunting Finery while his poor helpmate grubs: Coin I've stored, and you won't be wanting: You shan't beg from the troughs and tubs. Nobly you've stuck to me, though in his kitchen Many a marquis would hail you cook ! Palaces you could have ruled and grown rich in, But your old Jerry you never forsook. XI. Hand up the chirper! ripe ale winks in it; Let's have comfort and be at peace. Once a, stout draught made me light as a linnet. Cheer up ! the lord must have his lease. May be for none see in that black hollow It's just a place where we're held in pawn. And, when the Great Jugg : er makes as to swallow, It's just the sword-trick I ain't quite gone! XII. Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty, Gold-like and warm : it's the prime of May. Better than mortar, brick, and putty, Is God's house on a blowing day. Lean me more up the mound; now I feel it: All the old heath-smells ! Ain't it strange? There's .the world laughing, as if to conceal it, But He's by us, juggling the change. XIII. I mind it well, by the sea-beach lying, Once it's long gone when two gulls we be- held, Which, as the moon got up, were flying Down a big wave that spark'd and swell'd. Crack ! went a gun : one fell : the second Wheel'd round him twice, and was off for new luck : There in the dark her white winjr beckon'd: Drop me a kiss I'm the bird deud-strucki 340 THE DWARF AND THE INVISIBLE CAP. THE DWARF AND THE INVISIBLE CAP. A HARZ LEGEND. 1 Shepherd Jacob's greatest pleasure was his bagpipes. Almost before the morning dawned he was puffing upon them, and he puffed away at night when all other honest people were in bed. Though this afforded much pleasure to Jacob, it was not so well relished by his neighbours. In a cavern of the mountain upon which Jacob generally took his seat lived a dwarf, who, at the christenings and weddings of the surrounding country, made himself very useful by lending the people knives and pewter plates. Wherever he found a good reception the dwarf provsd very friendly, and was well liked by all. Now to this dwarf, the eternal puffing that went on above his head became very tiresome; he therefore one day took his way up the moun- tain, and with much politeness requested the shepherd to give up his music for a little; but Jacob, casting a contemptuous look on the diminutive figure before him, insolently an- swered, " What right have you to command me? And what does it signify to me though your head should ache again when I blow my pipes ? " And from this time Jacob blew away more furiously at his bagpipes than ever. The dwarf resolved on revenge, but concealed his anger under the mask of friendship, and strove to win by degrees the confidence of the shepherd. He soon succeeded in this; for he had wit enough to praise the exq uisite melody of his pipes, and gradually wrought himself into his full confidence, entertaining him with a thousand merry stories, for the sake of listen- ing to which the shepherd would sometimes forget his darling pipes for half a day. At last the dwarf invited the shepherd to a party at which he promised him a great deal of pleasure. " Knight Fegesack, who lives in yonder castle," said he, "celebrates his wedding to-morrow; he once set his dogs after me to hound me from his court when carrying some plates to his, servant to help at a christening. There will be gathered together those great people of the country who look with such contempt upon us and our acorns; we will go thither, and give them a little sauce to their mirth. Here, Jacob, is an invisible cap: if you put it on your head nobody will be able to see you, though you see everything that is going on i From Foreign Tales and Tradition*, translated by George Godfrey Cunningham. around you. Try its virtues at home, and leave the rest to me; only clean out that bag you have got there, for, unless 1 am sadly de- ceived, you will soon have occasion to fill it with something better." Jacob took the wonderful cap from the dwarf, and made an attempt to try its virtue even before he reached his hut. Well, the sheep came running against him, and not even his own children could find him out when he called them by name with the cap on his head. He now gave himself implicitly up to the di- rection of the dwarf. The day afterwards Jacob and the dwarf set out with their caps on their heads, and two empty wallets under their arms, to the castle of the knight. During the bridal ceremony they placed themselves upon the large round table, around which the bridegroom and bride and the principal guests were to sit. The dwarf then instructed the tittering shepherd in the part he was to perform. In the course of an hour the whole company entered the room in pairs, and all took the places which were pointed out to them accord- ing to their several dignities, little suspecting the presence of any other guests. And now the frolic began. The invisible dwarf pulled out the pins which fastened the myrtle garland on the bride's head, and Jacob pushed a large dish out of the hand of the butler which splashed the gravy over the scold- ing guests. Meanwhile the bridal wreath fell from the head of the bride a bad omen, which might well wrinkle the brow of the old ladies, and set the younger ones a whispering. A pause ensued, in which the guests, who waited the filling of the bumpers to resume the conversation, set their jaws briskly in motion. But, good saints defend us ! What was the surprise of the whole company when, on the appearance of the second course, they stretched their hands out towards the delicates scarcely had they got a morsel on their forks and raised it to their mouths ere it was snatched away by the dwarf or by Jacob, who crammed it with much laughter into their invisible wallets. The guests opened their eyes wider and wider their faces lengthened more and more a silence, like that of midnight in a cemetery, reigned throughout the whole room Knives, mouths, jaws, were laid at rest, while each gaped in blank astonishment upon his neigh- bour. Flagon after flagon, cup after cup, now disappeared from the table, and still the thief remained invisible! Well might the hair of the guests now begin to rise on end; every- MAY MORNING AT RAVENNA, 341 where all was silent as death, not a sound was heard but the chattering of teeth. How they might best make their way out of the enchanted room, or hide themselves under the table, became now a question with the horror-stricken guests. Most of them were about to adopt the latter alternative when the dwarf, having suddenly snatched the cap from the head of his companion, all at once the cul- prit stood revealed to their astonished sight, sitting upon his heels, with each arm supported by a well-filled wallet. The deathlike silence now gave place to the most outrageous uproar; every arm and every tongue was again in motion, while Jacob, with his head hanging down like a broken reed, was dragged away, under a thousand curses, towards a dark dungeon, where serpents and newts crawled about, there to starve beside his emptied wallets. They were just about to lower the unfortu- nate shepherd into this loathsome place, and all around stood the guests mocking and jeer- ing the trembling rustic, when lo ! the invisible dwarf approaches the half dead shepherd, claps the cap again on his head, and in the twinkling of an eye the prisoner disappears. The spectators stood there as if changed into as many stones, with faces as long as a yard, for the full space of an hour, without bethink- ing themselves either of eating or drinking or the merriment of the wedding. And there they might have been standing to this hour had not the dwarf, compassionating their blank amaze- ment, taken off his cap and revealed himself for a minute's space in his true form. " Now, Sir Knight," said he, "do not hound me again with your dogs out of your castle-yard; and you, Jacob, I hope you will in future put your bagpipes a little while aside when I politely ask that favour of you." The guests now tumbled over one another, and scrambled out of the house where the mys- terious dwarf had appeared. THE EDUCATION OF BACCHUS. I had a vision ! 'Tvvas an Indian vale Whose sides were all with rosy thickets crown'd, That never felt the biting winter gale; And soon was heard a most delicious sound ; And to its music danced a nymph embrown'd, Leading a lion in a silken twine, That with his yellow mane would sweep the ground, Then on his rider fawn a hoy divine! While on his foaming lips a nymph shower'd purple wine. CROLY. MAY MORNING AT RAVENNA. [James Henry Leigh Hunt, born at Sonthgate, Middlesex, ls>tii October, 1784; died iu London, 2ath August, 1859. As a poet, critic, and novelist he has won a prominent place in the standard literature of our century. As one of the stanchest combatants for the liberty of thought and speech, his name \s amongst th foremost in the history of modern progress. He was for some time a clerk in the war-office, and resigned that post in 1808 to become joint editor with his brother John, of the Examiner newspaper, which they estab- lished in that year. An articie upon the conduct of the Prince Regent in which he was satirically called an "Adonis of fifty" (22d March, 18 12), led to a government prosecution. The brothers were imprisoned and. fined .300 each. After his release, and until nearly the close of his life. Leigh Hunt continued to work assiduously at poem, essay, and story. In 1844 the son of the poet Shelley gave him an annuity of K'0 ; and in 1847 government awarded him a pension of 200. His first book was a collection of poems written between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and issued under the title of Juvenilia. His principal works are: The Hmry nf Rimini, The Descent easant poets. His early years were spent as a herd-boy to his grandfather; and being distant from any school, his elements of education were acquired by diligent self- instruction. He afterwards attended the parish school of Sanquhar. Whilst still a youth, he became a teacher in Gi-eenock, where he wrote the Camenndan's Dream. This poem attracted the attention of Lord Jeffrey, who introduced the poet to Mr. Constable, the publisher, and in many waj s befriended him through life. Hislop was for a short time a reporter on the staff of the Timtg newspaper ; then teacher of a London school ; but he was obliged to retire from both api ointments on account of ill health. He next started on a voyage in the ca- pacity of travelling tutor to several young gentlemen ; and a visit to the Cape de Verd Islands (reduced an attack of fever from the effects of which he died in a few days. Several of his poems were published in the Edinburgh Magazine, to which he also contributed '"Letters from South America." The following poem valuable as a faithful picture of a national custom is said to have been suggested by the commemoration of the solemn ordinance in the Sanquhar Churchyard. 1815.] The Sabbath morning gilds the eastern hills, The swains its sunny dawn wi' gladness greet, Frae heath-clad hamlets, 'mong the muirland rilla, The dewy mountains climb wi naked feet, Skiffin' the daisies droukit i" the weet ; The bleatin' flocks come nibblin' donn the brae. To shadowy pastures screen'd frae summer's heat; In woods where tinklin' waters glide away, 'Mong holms o' clover red, and bright brown ryegrass hay. His owes and lambs brought carefu' frae tbe height, The shepherd's children watch them frae the corn; On green sward scented lawn, wi' gowans white, Frae page o' pocket psalm-book, soil'd and torn, The task prepar'd. assigu'd for Sabbath morn, The e de bairns their p .rents join in prayer; On daughter dear, beneath the flow'ry thorn, Kneels down apart her spirit to prepare. On this her first approach the sacred cup to share The social chat wi' solemn converse mix'd, At early hour they finish their repast, The i lions sire rejieats full many a text Of sacra mental Sabbaths long gone past. To see her little family featly dress'd The carefu' matron feels a mother's pride, Gie's this a linen shirt, gie's that a vest ; The frugal father's frowns their finery chide, He prays that Heaven their souls may wedding roots provide. THE SCOTTISH SACRAMENTAL SABBATH. 345 The sisters buskit, seek the garden walk, To gather flowers, or watch the warning bell, Sweet-william, dangliii' dewy frae the stalk, Is mix d wi' mountain-daisies, rich in smell, Green sweet briar sprigs, and daisies frae the dell, Where Spango shepherds pa>s the lane abode, An' Wiinlock miners cross the muirland fell; Then down the sunny winding muirland road, The little pastoral band approach the house of God. Streams of my native mountains, oh ! how oft That Sabbath morning walk in youth was mine; Yet fancy hears the kirk-bell, sweet and soft, Ring o'er the darkling woods o' dewy pine ; How oft the wood-rose wild and scented thyme I've stoop''d to pull while passing on my way ; But now in sunny regions south the line, Nae birks nor broom flow'ns shade the summer brae, Alas! I can but dream of Scotland's Sabbath-day. But dear that cherish' d dream I still behold: The ancient kirk, the plane trees o'er it spread, And seated 'mong the graves, the old, the young, As once in summer days, for ever fled. To deck my dream the grave gives up its dead: The pale precentor sings as then he sung, The long-lost pastor wi' the hoary head Pours forth his pious counsels to the young. And dear ones from the dust again to life are sprung. Lost friends return from realms beyond the main, And boyhood's best belov'd ones all are there; The blanks in family circles fill'd again ; No seat seems empty round the house of prayer. Tlie sound of psalms has vanish' d in the air, Borne up to heaven upon the mountain breeze. The patriarchal priest wi' silvery hair, In tent erected 'neath the fresh green trees, Spreads forth the book of God with holy pride, and sees The eyes of circling thousands on him fix'd. The kirkyard scarce contains the mingling mass Of kindred congregations round him mix'd; Close seated on the gravestones and the grass, Some crowd the garden-walls, a wealthier class On chairs and benches round the tent draw near; The poor man prays far distant ; and alas! Some seated by the graves of parents dear, Among the fresh green flow'rs let fall a silent tear. Sublime the text he chooseth : "Who is this From Edom conies? in garments dy'd in blood. Travelling in greatness of His strength to bless, Treading the wine-press of Almighty God." Perchance the theme, that Mighty One who rode Forth leader of the armies cloth d in light, Around whose fiery forehead rainbows glow'd, Beneath whose head heav'n trembled angels bright. Their shining ranks arrang'd around his head of white. Behold the contrast, Christ, the King of kings, A houseless wanderer in a world below; Faint, fisting by the desert springs. From youth a man of mourning and of woe. The birds have nests on summers blooming ixmgh, Tlie foxes on the mountain find a bed ; But mankind's F.iend fuiiutl every man his fue, His heart with anguish in the garden bled, lie, peaceful like a lamb, was to the slaughter UU. Tlie action-sermon ended, tables fenc'd. While elders forth the sacred symbols bring, The day's more solemn service now coinmenc'd ; To heaven is wafted on devotion's wing. The psalms these entering to the altar sing, "I'll of salvation take the cup, I'll call With trembling on the name of Zion's King; His courts I'll enter, at His footstool fall, And pay my early vows before His people all." Behold the crowded tables clad in white, Extending far above the flowery graves; A blessing on the bread and wine cup bright With lifted hands the holy pastor craves, The summer's sunny breeze his white hair waves, His soul is with his Saviour in the skies; The hallow'd loaf he breaks, and gives The symbols to the elders t-eated nigh, Take, eat the bread of life, scut down from heaven oil high. He in like manner also lifted up The flagon fill'd with consecrated wine, Drink, drink ye all of it, salvation's cup, Memorial mournful of His love divine. Then solemn pauseth ; save the rustling pine, Or plane tree boughs, no sounds salute mine ears; In silence pass'd, the silver vessels shine. Devotion's Sabbath dreams from bygone years Return 'd, till many an eye is moist with springing tears. Ajjain the preacher breaks the solemn pause. Lift up your eyes to Calvary's mountain see. In mourning veil'd, the mid day sun withdraws, While dies the Saviour bleeding on the tree; Bnt hark! the st-irs again sing jubilee, With anthems heaven's armies hail their King, Ascenil in glory from the grave set free ; Triumphant see Him soar on seraph's wine. To meet His angel hosts around the clouds of spring. Behold His radiant robes of fleecy light, Melt into sunny ether soft and blue ; Then in this gloomy world of tears and night, Behold the table He hath spread for you. What though you tread affliction's path a few, A few short years your toils will all be o'er. From Pisgah's top the promis'd country view; The happy land beyond Immanuel's shore, Where Eden's blissful bower blooms green for ever- more. 346 LITTLE DOMINICK. Come here, ye houseless wanderers, Boothe your grief, While faith presents your Father's lov'd abode; And here, ye friendless mourners, find relief, And dry your tears in drawing near to God ; The poor may here lay down oppression's load, The rich forget his crosses and his care; Youth enter on religion's narrow road, The old for his eternal change prepare, And whosoever will, life's waters freely share. How blest are they who in thy courts abide, Whose strength, whose trust, upon Jehovah stay; For he in his pavilion shall them hide In covert safe when comes the evil day ; Though shadowy darkness compasseth his way. And thick clouds like a curtain hide his tnruuo; Not even through a glass our eyes jhall gaze In brighter worlds his wisdom shall be shown. And all things work for good to those that are h.s own. , And blessed are the young to God who bring The morning of their days in icrifice, The heart's young flowers yet fresh with spring Send forth an incense pleasing in his eyes. To me, ye children, hearken and bj wise, The prophets died, our fathers where are they? Alas! this fleeting world's delusive joys, Like morning clouds and early dews, decay; Be yours that better part that fadeth not away. Walk round these walls, and o'er the yet green graves Of friends whom you have lov'd let fall the tear ; On many dresses dark deep mourning waves, For some in summers past who worshipp'd here Around these tables each revolving year. What fleeting generations I have seen, Where, where my youthful friends and comrades dear ? Fled, fled away, as they had never been, All sleeping in the dust beneath those plane-trees green. And some are seated here, mine aged friends, Who round this table never more shall meet; For him who bowed with age before you stands, The mourners soon shall go about the street ; Below these green boughs, shadow' d from the heat, I've bless'd the Bread of Life for threescore years ; And shall not many mould'ring 'neath my feet, And some who sit around me now in tears, To me be for a crown of joy when Christ appears? Behold he comes with clouds, a kindling flood Of fiery flame before his chariot flees, The sun in sackloth veil'd, the moon in blood, All kindreds of the earth dismay shall seize, Like figs untimely shaken by the breeze ; The fix'd stars fall amid the thunder's roar; The buried spring to life beneath these trees, A mighty angel standing on the shore, With arms stretch'd forth to heaven, swears time shall be no more 1 The hour is near, your robes unspotted keep, The vows you now have sworn are senl'd on high ; Hark! hark! God's answering voice in thunders deep, 'Midst waters dark and thick clouds of the sky ; And what if now to judgment in your eye He burst, where yonder livid lightnings play. His chariot of salvation passing by; The great white throne, tho terrible array Of Him before whose frown the heavens shall flee away. My friend*, how dreadful is this holy place, Where rolls the thick'ning thunder, God is near. And though we cannot see Him face to face, Yet as from Horeb's mount His voice we hear; The angel armies of the upper sphere Down from these clouds on your communion gaze ; The spirits of the dead, who once were dear, Are viewless witnesses of all your ways ; Go from His table then, with trembling tune Hie praise. LITTLE DOMINICK. [Maria Edgeworth, born at Black-Hoarton, near Ox- ford. 1st January, 1707; died at Edgeworthstown Ire- land, 22d May, 1849. A long life well-spent is the fitting epitaph of this gifted lady. Her father, Richard Lo\ eli Edgeworth, erected the first telegraph in England ; his life was devoted to science and to the improvement of the condition of his Irish tenantry In this noble labour his daughter was his energetic and constant assistant. They were the joint authors of various works on education and character. It is, however, by her moral tales and novels, illustrative of Irish life, that Miss Edgeworth is most widely known. Civile Racl-- rent, Belinda, Helen, and Talef o.fFa>hionable Life, are the titles of a few of her most important works. To these Scott said he was indebted for the suggestion that he might do for Scotland something "of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth had achieved lor Ire- land ;" something that would tend to procure for h : s countrymen "sympathy for their virtues, and indul- gence for their foibles." Her career as a novelist Ueg;m in 1801 with Cattle Maelrent.] Little Dominick was born at Fort fieilly, in Ireland, and bred nowhere till his tenth year; when he was sent to Wales, to learn manners, and grammar, at the school of Mr. Owen ap Davies ap Jenkins ap Jones. This gentlen.an had reason to think himself the greatest of men; for he had, over his chimney-piece, a well-smoked genealogy, duly attested, tracing his ancestry in a direct line up to Noah: and, moreover, he was nearly related to the learned etymologist, who, in the time of Queen Eliza- beth, wrote a folio volume to prove that the language of Adam and Eve in Paradise was pure Welsh. With such causes to be proud, LITTLE DOMINICK. 347 Mr. Owen ap Davies ap Jenkins ap Jones was excusable for sometimes seeming to forget that a schoolmaster is but a man. He, however, sometimes entirely forgot that a boy is but a boy; and this happened most frequently with respect to Little Dominick. This unlucky wight was flogged every morn- ing by his master; not for his vices, but for his vicious constructions: and laughed at by his companions every evening, for his idio- matic absurdities. They would probably have been inclined to sympathize in his misfortunes, but that he was the only Irish boy at school; and as he was at a distance from all his rela- tions, and without a friend to take his part, he was a j ust object of obloquy and derision. Every sentence he spoke was a bull, every two words he put together proved a faise concord, and every sound he articulated betrayed the brogue. Bat as he possessed some of the characteristic boldness of those who have been dipped in the Shannon, though he was only little Dominick, he showed himself able and willing to fight his own battles with the host of foes by whom he was encompassed. Some of these, it was said, were of nearly twice his stature. This may be exaggerated: but it is certain that our hero sometimes ventured, with sly Irish humour, to revenge himself on his most powerful tyrant, by mimicking the Welsh accent, in which Mr. Owen ap Jones said to him "Cot pless me, you plockit, and shall I never learn you Enc- lish crammar?" It was whispered in the ear of this Dionysius that our little hero was a mimic, and he was now treated with increased severity. The midsummer holidays approached; but he feared that they would shine no holidays for him. He had written to his mother to tell her that school would break up on the 21st; and to beg an answer, without fail, by return of post: but no answer came. It was now nearly two months since he had heard from his dear mother, or any of his friends in Ireland. His spirits began to sink under the pressure of these accumulated mis- fortunes: he slept little, eat less, and played not at all. Indeed, nobody would play with him on equal terms, because he was nobody's equal: his schoolfellows continued to consider him as a being, if not of a different species, at least of a different cast from themselves. Mr. Owen ap Jones' triumph over the little Irish plockit was nearly complete, for the boy's heart was almost broken, when there came to the school a new scholar 0, how unlike the others! His name was Edwards: he was the son of a neighbouring Welsh gentleman; and he had himself the spirit of a gentleman. When he saw how poor Dominick was perse- cuted, he took him under his protection; fought his battles with the Welsh boys; and instead of laughing at him for speaking Irish, he en- deavoured to teach him to speak English, in his answers to the first questions Edwards ever asked him, Little Dominick made two blunders, which set all his other companions in a roar; yet Edwards would not allow them to be genuine bulls. In answer to the question "Who is your father?" Dominick said, with a deep sigh "I have no father I am an orphan I have only a mother." "Have you any brothers and sisters?" "No! I wish I had; for perhaps they would love me, and not laugh at me," said Dominick, with tears in his eyes; "but I have no brothers but myself." One day Mr. Owen ap Jones came into the school-room with an open letter in his hand, saying "Here, you little Irish plockit, here's a letter from your mother." The little Irish blockhead started from his form; and, throwing his grammar on the floor, leaped up higher than he or any boy in the school had ever been seen to leap before; then, clapping his hands, he exclaimed "A letter from my mother! And will I hear the letter? And will I see her once more? And will I go home these holidays? 0, then I will be too happy!" " There's no tanger of that," said Mr. Owen ap Jones; "for your mother, like a wise ooman, writes me here, that, py the atvice of your cardian, to oom she is going to be married, she will not pring you home to Ireland till I send her word you are perfect in your Enclish crammar at least." " I hare my lesson perfect, sir," said Domi- nick, taking his grammar up from the floor; "will I say it now?" "No, you plockit, you will not; and I will write your mother word, you have broke Pris- cian's head four times this tay, since her letter came." Little Dominick, for the first time, was seen to burst into tears "Will I hear the letter? Will I see my mother? Will I go home?" "You Irish plockit!" continued the relent- less grammarian: "you Irish plockit, will you never learn the difference between sliall and will?" The Welsh boys all grinned, except Edwards, who hummed loud enough to be heard "And will I see him once again? And it ill I hear him 34S LITTLE DOMINICK. Many of the boys were, unfortunately, too ignorant to feel the force of the quotation; but Mr. Owen ap Jones understood it, turned on his heel, and walked off. Soon afterwards, he ssmmoned Dominick to his awful desk; and pointing with his ruler to the following page in Harris' Hermes, bade him "reat it, and understant it," if he could. Little Dominick read, but could not under- stand. " Then reat it aloud, you plockit." Dominick read aloud " There is nothing appears so clearly an object of the mind or intellect only as the future does: since we can find no place for its existence anywhere else: not but the same, if we consider, is equally true of the past . " "Well, co on What stops the plockit? Can't you reat Enclish now?" "Yes, sir; but I was trying to understand it I was considering, that this is like what they would call an Irish bull, if I had said it." Little Dominick could not explain what he meant in English, that Mr. Owen ap Jones would understand; and to punish him for his impertinent observation, the boy was doomed to learn all that Harris and Lowth have written to explain the nature of shall aiid will. The reader, if he be desirous of knowing the full extent of the penance enjoined, may consult Lowth's Grammar, p. 52, ed. 1799; and Harris' tier men, p. 10, 11, and 12, fourth edition. Undismayed at the length of his task, Little Dominick only said "I hope, if I say it all, without missing a word, you will not give my mother a bad account of me and my grammar studies, sir?" " Say it all first, without missing a word, and then I shall see what I shall say," replied Mr. Owen ap Jones. Even the encouragement of this oracular answer excited the boy's fond hopes so keenly, that he lent his little soul to the task; learned it perfectly; said it at night, without missing one word, to his friend Edwards; and said it the next morning, without missing one word, to his master. "And now, sir," said the boy, looking up, "will you write to my mother? And shall I see her ? And shall I go home ? " " Tell me, first, whether you understand all this that you have learned so cliply?" said Mr. Owen ap Jones. That was more than his bond. Our hero's countenance fell; and he acknowledged that he did not understand it perfectly. " Then I cannot write a coot account of you and your crammer studies to your mother; my conscience coes against it!" said the conscien- tious Mr. Owen ap Jones. No entreaties could move him. Dominick never saw the letter that was written to his mother; but he felt the consequence. She wrote word, this time punctually by return of the post, that she was sorry she could not send for him home these holidays, as she had heard so bad an account from Mr. Owen ap Jones, &c., and as she thought it her duty not to interrupt the course of his education, especially his grammar studies. Little Dominick heaved many a sigh when he saw the packings up of all his schoolfellows; and dropped a few tears as he looked out of the window, and saw them, one after another, get on their Welsh ponies, and gallop off towards their homes. " I have no home to go to!" said he. "Yes, you have," cried Edwards; "and our horses are at the door, to carry us there. " "To Ireland? Me! the horses!" said the poor boy, quite bewildered. "No; the horses cannot carry you to Ire- land," said Edwards, laughing good-naturedly; "but you have a home, now, in England. I asked my father to let me bring you home with me; and he says "Yes," like a dear, good father, and has sent the horses Come, let's away. " " But will Mr. Owen ap Jones let me go?" " Yes! he dare not refuse; for my father has a living in his gift, that Owen ap Jones wants, and which he will not have if he do not change his tune to you." Little Dominick could not speak one word, his heart was so full. No boy could be happier than he was during these holidays: "the genial current of his soul," which had been frozen by unkindness, flowed with all its natural freedom and force. Whatever his reasons might be, Mr. Owen ap Jones, from this time forward, was observed to change his manners towards his Irish pupil. He never more complained, unjustly, of his preaking Priscian's head; seldom called him Irish plockit; and once, would have flogged a Welsh boy for taking up this cast-off expression of the master's, but that the Irish blockhead begged the culprit off. Little Dominick sprang forward rapidly in his studies; he soon surpassed every boy in the school, his friend Edwards only excepted. In process of time his guardian removed him to a higher seminary of education. Edwards had a tutor at home. The friends separated. After- wards, they followed different professions, in distant parts of the world; and they neither LITTLE DOMINICK. 349 saw, nor heard, any more of each other, for many years. Dominick, now no longer little Dominick, went over to India, as private secretary to one of our commanders-in-chief. How he got into this situation, or by what gradations he rose in the world, we are not exactly informed; we know only that he was the reputed author of a much-admired pamphlet on India affairs; that the despatches of the general to whom he was secretary were remarkably well written; and that Dominick O'Reilly, Esq., returned to England, after several years' absence, not miraculously rich, but with a fortune equal to his wishes. His wishes were not extravagant: his utmost ambition was, to return to his native country with a fortune that should enable him to live independently of all the world; especially of some of his relations, who had not used him well. His mother waa no more ! On his first arrival in London, one of the first things he did was to read the Irish news- papers. To his inexpressible joy he saw the estate of Fort-Reilly advertised to be sold the very estate which had formerly belonged to his own family. Away he posted, directly, to an attorney's in Cecil Street, who was em- powered to dispose of the land. When this attorney produced a map of the well-known demesne, and an elevation of that house in which he spent the happiest hours of his infancy, his heart was so touched, that he was on the point of paying down more for an old ruin than a good new house would cost. The attorney acted honestly by /us client, and seiz;d this moment to exhibit a plan of the stabling and offices; which, as sometimes is the case in Ireland, were in a style far superior to the dwelling-house. Our hero sur- veyed these with transport. He rapidly planned various improvements in imagination, and planted certain favourite spots in the demesne! During this time the attorney was giving directions to a clerk about some other business; suddenly the name of Owen ap Jones struck his ear. He started. "Let him wait in the front parlour: his money is not forthcoming," said the attorney, "and if he keep Edwards in jail till he rots "Edwards! Good heavens! in jail! What Edwards?" exclaimed our hero. It was his friend Edwards ! The attorney told him that Mr. Edwards had been involved in great distress, by taking on himself his father's debts, which had been incurred in exploring a mine in Wales; that, of all the creditors, none had refused to com- pound, except a Welsh parson, who had beea presented to his living by old Edwards; and that this Mr. Owen ap Jones had thrown young Mr. Edwards into jail for the debt. "What is the rascal's demand? He shall be paid off this instant," cried Dominick, throwing down the plan of Fort-Reilly; "send for him up, and let me pay him off on this spot. " " Had we not best finish our business first, about the O'Reilly estate, sir?" said the attorney. "No, sir; damn the O'Reilly estate!" cried he, huddling the maps together on the desk; and, taking up the bank-notes, which he had began to reckon for the purchase money "I beg your pardon, sir if you knew the facts, you would excuse me. Why does not this rascal come up to be paid?" The attorney, thunderstruck by this Hiber- nian impetuosity, had not yet found time to take his pen out of his mouth. As he sat transfixed in his arm-chair, O'Reilly ran to the head of the stairs, and called out, in a stentorian voice, " Here, you Mr. Owen ap Jones; come up and be paid off this instant, or you shall never be paid at all." lip-stairs hobbled the old schoolmaster, as fast as the gout and Welsh ale would let him " Cot pless me, that voice?" he began "Where's your bond, sir?" said the attor- ney. "Safe here, Cot be praised!" said the ter- rified Owen ap Jones, pulling out of his bosom first a blue pocket-handkerchief, and then a tattered Welsh grammar, which O'Reilly kicked to the farther end of the room. " Here is my pond," said he, "in the cram- mer," which he gathered from the ground; then, fumbling over the leaves, he at length unfolded the precious deposit. O'Reilly saw the bond, seized it, looked at the sum, paid it into the attorney's hands, tore the seal from the bond; then, without looking at old Owen ap Jones, whom he dared not trust himself to speak to, he clapped his hat on his head, and rushed out of the room. He was, however, obliged to come back again, to ask where Edwards was to be found. " In the King's Bench prison, sir," said the attorney. " But am I to understand," cried he, holding up the map of the O'Reilly estate, " am I to understand that you have no further wish for this bargain?" "Yes No I mean, you are to understand that I'm off," replied our hero, without looking back "I'm off That's plain English," 350 LAMENT FOB HER HUSBAND. Arrived at the King's Bench prison, he hurried to the apartment where Edwards was confined The bolts flew back; for even the turnkeys seemed to catch our hero's en- thusiasm. " Edwards, my dear boy! how do you do? Here's a bond debt, justly due to you for my education O, never mind asking any un- necessary questions; only just make haste out of this undeserved abode Our old rascal is paid off Owen ap Jones you know Well how the man stares? Why, now, will you have the assurance to pretend to forget who I am? and must I spake," continued he, assuming the tone of his childhood "and must I spake to you again in my old Irish brogue, Lefjre you will ricollict your own Little Do-m'mick?" When his friend Edwards was out of prison, and when our hero had leisure to look into the business, he returned to the attorney, to see that Mr. Owen ap Jones had been satisfied. "Sir," said the attorney, "I have paid the plaintiff in this suit, and he is satisfied: but I must say," added he, with a contemptuous smile, "that you Irish gentlemen are rather in too great a hurry in doing business; busi- ness, sir, is a thing that must be done slowly, to be well done." "I am ready now to do business as slowly as you please; but when my friend was in prison, I thought the quicker I did his busi- ness the better. Now tell me what mistake I have made, and I will rectify it instantly. " " Instantly! "Tig well, sir, with your promp- titude, that you have to deal with what pre- judice thinks so very uncommon an honest attorney. Here are some bank-notes of yours, e'r, amounting to a good round sum! You hive made a little blunder in this business: you left me the penalty, instead of the prin- cipal, of the bond just twice as much as you should have done." "Just twice as much as was in the bond; but not twice as much as I should have done, nor half as much as I should have done, in my opinion!" said O'Reilly: "but whatever I did, it was with my eyes open. I was persuaded you were an honest man; in which, you see, I was not mistaken; and as a man of business, I knew that you would pay Mr. Owen ap Jones only his due. The remainder of the money I meant, and now mean, should lie in your hands for my friend Edwards' use. I feared he would not have taken it from my hands : I therefore left it in yours. To have taken my friend out of prison, merely to let him go back again to day, for want of money to keep himself clear with the world, would have been a blunder, indeed! but not an Irish blunder: our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heartl" LAMENT FOR HER HUSBAND. There was an eye whose partial glance Could ne'er my numerous failings see, There icas an ear that still untired Could listen to kind praise of me. There icas a heart Time only made For me with fonder feelings burn; And which, whene'er, alas ! I roved, Still long'd and pined for my return. There was a lip which always breathed E'en short farewells with tones of sadness; There was a voice, whose eager sound My welcome spoke with heartfelt gladness. There was a mind, whose vigorous powers On mine its fostering influence threw; And call'd my humble talents forth, Till thence its dearest joys it drew. There was a love that oft for me With anxious fears would overflow; And wept and pray'd for me, and sought From future ills to guard but now That eye is closed, and deaf that ear, Thiit lip and voice are mute for ever! And cold that heart of faithful love, Which death alone from mine could seven And lost to me that ardent mind, Which loved my various tasks to see; And oh ! of all the praise I gain'd, This was the dearest far to me ! Now I, unloved, uncheer'd, alone, Life's dreary wilderness must tread, Till He who loves the broken heart In mercy bids me join the dead. But, "Father of the fatherless," O ! thou that hear'st the orphan's cry, And "dwellest with the contrite heart," As well as in "thy place on high!" Lord ! though like a faded leaf That's severed from its parent tree, 1 struggled down life's stormy tide, That awful tide which leads to thee ! Still, Lord ! to thee the voice of praise Shall spring triumphant from my breast, Since though I tread a weary way, I trust that he I mourn is bless'd ! MRS. OPIB. THE FAGS' REVOLT. 351 THE FAGS' REVOLT. 1 [Thomas Hughes, born at Donnington Priory, Berks, 1323, educated at Rugby and Oxford; tal'ed to the bar in 1848. He was returned to Parliament for Lambeth in 1865, and for Frome in 1868. It was in the leisure of a busy life that he produced Turn Brown's School Daiis, Tom Brown at Oxford, The Scouring of the White H .rue, &c. The first of these obtained immediate popu- larity, and had much influence in bringing about a reform of many abuses which prevailed at public schools during the author's school-days. The book is remark- able for its vigorous sketches of actual experiences.] In no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a public school. Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again. Quit yourselves like men, then ; speak up, and strike out if necessary, for what- soever is true, and manly, and lovely, and of good report ; never try to be popular, but only to do your duty and help others to do theirs, and you may leave the tone of feeling in the school higher than you found it, and so be doing good which no living soul can measure to generations of your countrymen yet unborn. For boys follow one another in herds like sheep, for good or evil : they hate thinking, and have rarely any settled principles. Every school, indeed, has its own traditionary standard of right and wrong, which cannot be transgressed with impunity, marking certain things as low and blackguard, and certain others as lawful and right. This standard is ever varying, though it changes only slowly and little by little ; and, subject only to such standard, it is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the school either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in London streets, or anything between these two extremes. The change for the worse in the school-house however, didn't press very heavily on our youngsters for some time ; they were in a good bedroom, where slept the only praepostor left who was able to keep thorough order, and their study was in his passage ; so, though they were fagged more or less, and occasionally kicked or cuffed by the bullies, they were on the whole well off; and the fresh, brave school-life, so i Fr..m Tom Ji.-omi't Hch ul London : Macmillan & Co. By an O.d Boy 'ull of games, adventures, and good fellowship, so ready at forgetting, so capacious at enjoying, so bright at forecasting, outweighed a thousand- 'old their troubles with the master of their 'orm and the occasional ill-usage of the big wys in the house. It wasn't till some year or so after the events already recorded that the prae- postor of their room and passage left. None of the other sixth-form boys would move into their passage, and to the disgust and indig- nation of Tom and East, one morning afUr breakfast they were seized upon by Flashman, and made to carry down his books and furni- ture into the unoccupied study which he had taken. From this time they began to feel the weight of the tyranny of Flashman and his friends, and now that trouble had come home to their own doors, began to look out for sym- pathizers and partners amongst the rest of the fags ; and meetings of the oppressed began to be held, and murmurs to arise, and plots to be laid as to how they should free themselves and be avenged on their enemies. While matters were in this state East and Tom were one evening sitting in their study. They had done their work for first lesson, and Tom was in a brown study, brooding, like a young William Tell, upon the wrongs of fags in general, and his own in particular. " I say, Scud," said he at last, rousing him- self to snuff the candle, "what right have the fifth-form boys to fag us as they do?" " No more right than you have to fag them," answered East, without looking up from an early number of Pickwick, which was just coming out, ajid which he was luxuriously devouring, stretched on his back on the sofa. Tom relapsed into his brown study, and East went on reading and chuckling. The contrast of the boys' faces would have given infinite amusement to a looker-on, the one so solemn and big with mighty purpose, the other radiant and bubbling over with fun. "Do you know, old fellow, I've been think- ing it over a good deal," began Tom again. " Oh yes, I know, fagging you are thinking of. Hang it all, but listen here, Tom here's fun. Mr. Winkle's horse" "And I've made up my mind," broke in Tom, " that I won't fag except for the sixth." "Quite right too, my boy," cried East, putting his finger on the place and looking up; " but a pretty peck of troubles you'll get into, if you're going to play that game. However, I'm all for a strike myself, if we can get others to join it's getting too bad." " Can't we get some sixth-form fellow to talw it up?" asked Tom. 352 THE FAGS' REVOLT. "Well, perhaps we might; Morgan would interfere, I think. Only," added East, after a moment's pause, "you see, we should have to tell him about it, and that's against School prin- ciples. Don't you remember what old Brooke sa.d about learning to take our own parts?" Ah, I wish old Brooke were back again it was all right in his time." " Why, yes, you see, then the strongest and best fellows were in the sixth, and tne fifth- form fellows were afraid of them, and they kept good order ; but now our sixth-form fellows are tjo small, and the fifth don't care for them, and do what they like in the house." " And so we get a double set of masters," cried Tom, indignantly ; " the lawful ones, who are responsible to the Doctor at any rate, and the unlawful the tyrants, who are respon- sible to nobody." " Down with the tyrants! " cried East; " I'm all for law and order, and hurra for a revolu- tion. " " I shouldn't mind if it were only for young Brooke now," said Tom, "he's such a good- hearted, gentlemanly fellow, and ought to be in the sixth I'd do anything for him. But that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath " " The cowardly brute," broke in East, "how I hate him ! And he knows it too, he knows that you and I think him a coward. What a bore that he's got a study in this passage ! Don't you hear them now at supper in his den? Brandy punch going, I'll bet. I wish the Doctor would come out and catch him. We must change our study as soon us we can. " " Change or no change, I'll never fag for him again," said Tom, thumping the table. "Fa-a-a-ag!" sounded alongthe passage from Flashman's study. The two boys looked at one another in silence. It had struck nine, so the regular night-fags hae told, but soon afterwards, when he got into the sixth, chose them for his fags, and excused them from study-fagging, thereby earning unto himself eternal gratitude from them, and from all who are interested in their history. And seldom had small boys more need of a friend, for the morning after the siege the storm burst upon the rebels in all its violence. Flashman laid wait, and caught Tom before second lesson, and, receiving a point-blank "No" when told to fetch his hat, seized him and twisted his arm, and went through the other methods of torture in use: " He couldn't make me cry though," as Tom said triumphantly to the rest of the rebels, "and I kicked his shins well, I know." And soon it crept out that a lot of the fags were in league, and Flashman excited his associates to join him in bringing the young vagabonds to their senses; and the house was filled with constant chasings, and sieges, and lickings of all sorts; and in return, the bullies' beds Avere pulled to pieces and drenched with water, and their names written 854 THE FAGS' REVOLT. up on the walls with every insulting epithet which the fag invention could furnish. The war in short raged fiercely; but soon, as Diggs had told them, all the better fellows in the fifth gave up trying to fag them, and public feeling began to set against Flashman and his two or three intimates, and they were obliged to keep their doings more secret, but, being thorough bad fellows, missed no opportunity of torturing in private. Flashman was an adept in all ways, but above all in the power of saying cutting and cruel things, and could often bring tears to the eyes of boys in this way which all the thrashings in the world Avouldn't have wrung from them. And as his operations were being cut short in other directions, he now devoted himself chiefly to Tom and East, who lived at his own door, and would force himself into their study when- ever he found a chance, and sit there, some- times alone, sometimes with a companion, interrupting all their work, and exulting in the evident pain which every now and then he could see he was inflicting on one or the other. The storm had cleared the air for the rest of the house, and a better state of things now began than there had been since old Brooke had left : but an angry dark spot of thunder- cloud still hung over the end of the passage, where Flashman's study and that of East and Tom lay. He felt that they had been the first rebels, and that the rebellion had been to a great extent successful ; but what above all stirred the hatred and bitterness of his heart against them was, that in the frequent collisions which there had been of late they had openly called him coward and sneak, the taunts were too true to be forgiven. While he was in the act of thrashing them, they would roar out instances of his funking at football, or shirking some encounter with a lout of half his own size. These things were all well enough known in the house, but to have his disgrace shouted out by small boys, to feel that they despised him, to be unable to silence them by any amount of torture, and to see the open laugh and sneer of his own associates (who were looking on, and took no trouble to hide their scorn from him, though they neither interfered with his bully- ing or lived a bit the less intimately with him), made him beside himself. Come what might, he would make those boys' lives miserable. So the strife settled down into a personal affair between Flashman and our youngsters; a war to the knife, to be fought out in the little cock- pit at the end of the bottom passage. Flashman, be it said, was about seventeen years old, and big and strong of his age. lit played well at all games where pluck wasn't much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for hearti- ness, and considerable powers of being pleasant when he liked, went down with the school in general for a good fellow enough. Even in the school-house, by dint of his command of money, the constant supply of good things which he kept up, and his adroit toadyism, he had managed to make himself not only tolerated, but rather popular amongst his own contemporaries: although young Brooke scarcely spoke to him, and one or two others of the right sort showed their opinions of him whenever a chance offered. But the wrong sort happened to be in the ascendant just now, and so Flashman was a formidable enemy for small boys. This soon became plain enough. Flashman left no slander unspoken, and no deed undone, which could in any way hurt his victims, or isolate them from the rest of the house. One by one most of the other rebels fell away from them, while Flashman's cause prospered, and several other fifth-form boys began to look black at them and ill-treat them as they passed about the house. By keeping out of bounds, or at all events out of the house and quadrangle, all day, and carefully barring themselves in at night, East and Tom managed to hold on without feeling very miserable; but it was as much as they could do. Greatly were they drawn then towards old Diggs, who, in an uncouth way, began to take a good deal of notice of them, and once or twice came to their study when Flashman was there, who imme- diately decamped in consequence. The boys thought that Diggs must have been watching. When therefore, about this time, an auction was one night announced to take place in the Hall, at which, amongst the superfluities of other boys, all Diggs' Penates for the time being were going to the hammer, East and Tom laid their heads together, and resolved to devote their ready cash (some four shillings sterling) to redeem such articles as that sum would cover. Accordingly, they duly attended to bid, and Tom became the owner of two lots of Diggs' things; lot 1, price one-and-thrce- pence, consisting (as the auctioneer remarked) of a "valuable assortment of old metals," in the shape of a mouse-trap, a cheese-toaster without a handle, and a saucepan; lot 2, of a villanous dirty table-cloth and green-baize curtain; while East, for one-and-sixpence, purchased a leather paper-case, with a lock but no key, once handsome, but now much the THE FAGS' REVOLT. 355 worse for wear. But they had still the point to settle of how to get Diggs to take the things without hurting his feelings. This they solved by leaving them in his study, which was never locked when he was out. Diggs, who had attended the auction, remembered who had bought the lots, and came to their study soon after, and sat silent for some time, cracking his great red finger-joints. Then he laid hold of their verses, and began lookingover and altering them, and at last got up, and turning his back to them, said, "You're uncommon good-hearted little beggars, you two I value that paper- case, my sister gave it me last holidays I won't forget;" and so tumbled out into the passage, leaving them somewhat embarrassed, but not sorry that he knew what they had done. The next morning was Saturday, the day on which the allowances of one shilling a week were paid, an important event to spendthrift youngsters: and great was the disgust amongst the small fry to hear that all the allowances had been impounded for the Derby lottery. That great event in the English year, the Derby, was celebrated at Rugby in those days by many lotteries. It was not an improving custom, I own, gentle reader, and led to making books, and betting, and other objectionable results; but when our great Houses of Palaver think it right to stop the nation's business on that day, and many of the members bet heavily them- selves, can you blame us boys for following the example of our betters? at any rate we did fol- low it. First there was the great School lottery, where the first prize was six or seven pounds ; then each house had one or more separate lot- teries. These were all nominally voluntary, no boy being compelled to put in his shilling who didn't choose to do so: but besides Flash- man, there were three or four other fast sport- ing young gentlemen in the school-house, who considered subscription a matter of duty and necessity, and so, to make their duty come easy to the small boys, quietly secured the allowances in a lump when given out for dis- tribution, and kept them. It was no use grumbling, so many fewer tartlets and apples were eaten and fives'-balls bought on that Saturday; and after locking-up, when the money would otherwise have been spent, con- solation was carried to many a small boy by the sound of the night-fags shouting along the passages, "Gentlemen, sportsmen of the School-house, the lottery's going to be drawn in the Hall." It was pleasant to be called a gentleman sportsman also to have a chance of drawing a favourite horse. The Hall was full of boys, and at the head of one of the long tables stood the sporting interest, with a hat before them, in which were the tickets folded up. One of them then began calling out the list of the house ; each boy as his name was called drew a ticket from the hat and opened it, and most of the bigger boys, after drawing, left the Hall directly to go back to their studies or the fifth-form room. The sporting interest had all drawn blanks, and they were sulky accordingly; neither of the favourites had yet been drawn, and it had come down to the upper-fourth. So now, as each small boy came up and drew his ticket, it was seized and opened by Flashman or some other of the standers-by. But no great favourite is drawn until it comes to the Tadpole's turn, and he shuffles up and draws, and tries to make off, but is caught, and his ticket is opened like the rest. "Here you are! Wanderer! the third fa- vourite," shouts the opener. " I say, just give me my ticket, please," remonstrates Tadpole. "Hullo, don't be in a hurry," breaks in Flashman; "what'll you Bell Wanderer for now?" " I don't want to sell," rejoins Tadpole. " Oh, don't you ! Now listen, you young fool you don't know anything about it ; the horse is no use to you. He won't win, but I want him as a hedge. Now, I'll give you half-a-crown for him." Tadpole holds out, but between threats and cajoleries at length sells half for one-shilling- and-sixpence, about a fifth of its fair market value; however, he is glad to realize anything, and as he wisely remarks, " Wanderer mayn't win, and the tizzy is safe 'anyhow. " East presently comes up and draws a blank. Soon after comes Tom's turn ; his ticket, like the others, is seized and opened. " Here you are then," shouts the opener holding it up, "Harkaway! By Jove, Flashey, your young friend's in luck." " Give me the ticket," says Flashman with an oath, leaning across the table with opened hand, and his face black with rage. " Wouldn't you like it!" replies the opener, not a bad fellow at the bottom, and no admirer of Flashman's. " Here, Brown, catch hold," and he hands the ticket to Tom, who pockets it; whereupon Flashman makes for the door at once, that Tom and the ticket may not escape, and there keeps watch until the draw- ing is over, and all the boys are gone, except the sporting set of five or six, who stay to com- pare books, make bets, and so on, Tom, who 356 THE FAGS' REVOLT. doesn't choose to move while Flash man is at the door, and East, who stays by his friend anticipating trouble. The sporting set now gathered round Tom. Public opinion wouldn't allow them actually to rob him of his ticket, but any humbug or intimidation by which he could be driven to sell the whole or part at an under-value was lawful. "Now, young Brown, come, what'll you sell me Harkaway for? I hear he isn't going to start. I'll give you five shillings for him," begins the boy who had opened the ticket. Tom, remembering his good deed, and more- over in his forlorn state wishing to make a friend, is about to accept the offer, when another cries out, " I'll give you seven shillings." Tom hesitated, and looked from one to the other. "No, no!" said Flashman, pushing in, " leave me to deal with him ; we'll draw lots for it afterwards. Now, sir, you know me you'll sell Harkaway to us for five shillings, or you'll repent it." " I won't sell a bit of him/' answered Tom, shortly. " You hear that now!" said Flashman, turn- ing to the others. " He's the coxiest young blackguard in the house I always told you so. We're to have all the trouble and risk of getting up the lotteries for the benefit of such fellows as he." Flashman forgets to explain what risk they ran, but he speaks to willing ears. Gambling makes boys selfish and cruel as well as men. " That's true, we always draw blanks," cried one. " Now, sir, you shall sell half, at any rate." " I won't," said Tom, flushing up to his hair, and lumping them all in his mind with his sworn enemy. " Very well then, let's roast him," cried Flashman, and catches hold of Tom by the collar; one or two boys hesitate, but the rest join in. East seizes Tom's arm and tries to pull him away, but is knocked back by one of the boys, and Tom is dragged along struggling. His shoulders are pushed against the mantel- piece, and he is held by main force before the fire, Flashman drawing his trousers tight by way of extra torture. Poor East, in more pain even than Tom, suddenly thinks of Diggs, and darts off to find him. " Will you sell now for ten shillings ! " says one boy who is relenting. Tom only answers by groans and struggles. " I say, Flashey, he has had enough," says the same boy, dropping the arm he holds. " No, no, another turn'll do it," answers Flashman. But poor Tom is done already, turns deadly pale, and his head falls forward on his breast, just as Diggs, in frantic excite- ment, rushes into the Hall with East at hia heels. "You cowardly brutes !" is all he can say, as he catches Tom from them and supports him to the Hall table. "Good God! he's dying. Here, get some cold water run for the housekeeper." Flashman and one or two others slink away; the rest, ashamed and sorry, bend over Tom or run for water, while East darts off for the housekeeper. Water comes, and they throw it on his hands and face, and he begins to come to. "Mother!" the words came feebly and slowly "it's very cold to-night." Poor old Diggs is blubbering like a child. "Where am I ?" goes on Tom, opening his eyes. "Ah! I remember now;" and he shut his eyes again and groaned. "I say," is whispered, "we can't do any good, and the housekeeper will be here in a minute;" and all but one steal away; he stays with Diggs, silent and sorrowful, and fans Tom's face. The housekeeper comes in with strong salts, and Tom soon recovers enough to sit up. There is a smell of burning; she examines his clothes, and looks up inquiringly. The boys are silent. " How did he come so?" No answer. " There's been some bad work here," she adds, looking very serious, "and I shall speak to the Doctor about it." Still no answer. " Hadn't we better carry him to the sick- room ?" suggests Diggs. " Oh, I can walk now," says Tom! and, sup- ported by East and the housekeeper, goes to the sick-room. The boy who held his ground is soon amongst the rest, who are all in fear of their lives. " Did he peach ?' "Does she know about it ?' "Not a word he's a stanch little fellow." And pausing a moment he adds, "I'm sick of this work; what brutes we've been! " Meantime Tom is stretched on the sofa in the housekeeper's room, with East by his side, while she gets wine and water and other restoratives. "Are you much hurt, dear old boy?" whispers East. " Only the back of my legs," answers Tom. They are indeed badly scorched, and part of his trousers burned through. But soon he is in bed, with cold bandages. At first he feels broken, and thinks of writing home and getting THE VICAR. 357 taken away; and the verse of a hymn he had learned years ago sings through his head, and he goes to sleep, murmuring "Where the wicked cease from troubling, And the weary are at rest." But after a sound night's rest, the old boy- spirit comes back again. East comes in re- porting that the whole house is with him, and lie forgets everything, except their old resolve never to be beaten by that bully Flashman. Not a word could the housekeeper extract from either of them, and though the Doctor knew all that she knew that morning, he never knew any more. I trust and believe that such scenes are not possible now at school, and that lotteries and betting-books have gone out ! but I am writing of schools as they were in our time, and must give the evil with the good. THE VICAR. [Winthrop Mackworth Praed, born in London, 2tit!i July, 1802; died there, 15th July, 1S39. He was c.tl eathos. character and satire, are delightfully mingled in his works. An edition of his poems, in two volumes, edited by Derweut Coleridge, M.A., is published by Moxon & Co.] Some years ago, ere time and taste Had turned our parish topsy-turvy, When Darnel Park was Darnel Waste, And roads as little known as scurvy, The man who lost his way, between St. Mary's Hill and Sandy Thicket, Was always shown across the green, And guided to the Parson's wicket. Back flew the bolt of lissom lath ; Fair Margaret, in her tidy kirtle, Led the loru traveller up the path, Through clean-clipt rows of box and myrtle; And Don and Sancho, Tramp and Tray, Upon the parlour steps collected, Wagged all their tails, and seemed to say " Our master knows you you're expected. " Uprose the Reverend Dr. Brown, Uprose the Doctor's winsome marrow; The lady laid her knitting down, Her husband clasped his ponderous Barrow ; Whate'er the stranger's caste or creed. Pundit or Papist, saint or sinner, He found a stable for his steed, And welcome for himself, and dinner. If, when he reached his journey's end, And warmed himself in Court or College, He had not gained an honest friend And twenty curious scraps of knowledge, If he departed as he came, With no new light on love or liquor, Good sooth, the traveller was to blame, And not the Vicarage, nor the Vicar. His talk was like a stream, which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses: It slipped from politics to puns, It pussed from Mahomet to Moses ; Beginning with the laws which keep The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For dressing eels, or shoeing horses. He was a shrewd and sound Divine, Of loud Dissent the mortal terror; And when, by dint of page and line, He "stablished Truth, or startled Error, The Baptist found him far too deep ; The Deist sighed with saving sorrow ; And the lean Levite went to sleep, And dreamed of tasting pork to-morrow. His sermon never said or showed That Earth is foul, that Heaven is gracious, Without refreshment on the road From Jerome, or from Athauasius : And sure a righteous zeal inspired The hand and head that penned and planned them, For all who understood admired, And some who did not understand them. He wrote, too, in a quiet way, Small treatises, and smaller verses, And sage remarks on chalk and clay, And hints to noble Lords and nurses; True histories of last year's ghost, Lines to a ringlet, or a turban, And trifles for the Morning Post, And nothings for Sylvanus Urban. He did not think all mischief fair, Although he had H knack of joking; He did not make himself a bear, Although he had a taste for smoking; And when religious sects ran mad, He held, in spite of all his learning, That if a man's belief is bad, It will not be improved by burning. 358 MY PLEA. And he was kind, and loved to sit In the low hut or garnished cottage, And praise the fanner's homely wit, And share the widow's homelier pottage: At his approach complaint grew mild ; And when his hand unbarred the shutter, The clammy lips of fever smiled The welcome which they could not utter. He always had a tale for me Of Julius Csesar, or of Venus; From him I learnt the rule of three, Cat's-cradle, leap-frog, and Qnceyenus: I used to singe his powdered wig, To steal the staff he put such trust in, And make the puppy dance u> jig, When he began to quote Augustine. Alack the change ! in vain I look For haunts in which my boyhood trifled, The level lawn, the trickling brook, The trees I climbed, the beds I rifled : The church is larger than before; You reacli it by a carriage entry ; It holds three hundred people more, And pews are fitted up for gentry. Sit in the Vicar's seat : you'll hear The doctrine of a gentle Johnian, Whose hand is white, whose tone is clear, Whose phrase is very Ciceronian. Where is the old man laid? look down, And construe on the slab before you, " Hie jacet GVLIFLM'-'S Bwirx, Vir n ulld non donandus lauru." TO A BELOVED DAUGHTER. [Henry Alford, D.D., Dean of Canterbury, born in London, 7th October, 1810; died 12th January, 1871. Author of Poems and Poetical fragments : The School of Hie Heart; Chapters on the Pottt of Ancient Greece; Psalms and Hymtit, adapted to the Sundays and Holy- days throughout the Year; Village Sennonx, Ac. He edited an edition of the New Testament. His language is always simple and direct, and all his works are in- spired by fervent religious feeling. ] Say wilt thou think of me when I'm away, Borne from the threshold and laid in the clay, Past and unheard of for many a day? Wilt thou remember me when I am gone, Further each ye,ir from the vision withdrawn, Thou in the sunset, and 1 in the dawn ? Wilt thou remember me when thou shalt see, Daily and nightly encompassing thee, Hundreds of others, but nothing of me? All that I ask is a tear in thy eye, Sitting and thinking when no one is by, 'Thus look'd he on me, thus rang his reply; " 'Tis not to die, though the path be obscure ; Vast though the peril, there's One can aecuia ; Grand is the conflict, the victory sure ; But 'tis to feel the cold touch of decay ; 'Tis to look back on the wake of one's way, Fading and vanishing day after day ; This is the bitterness none can be spared ; This the oblivion the greatest have shared; Thia the true death for ambition prepared. Thousands around us are toiling as we, Living and loving, whose lot is to be Past and forgotten like waves on the sea. Once in a lifetime is uttered a word That doth not vanish as soon as 'tis heard ; Once in an age is humanity ttirred; Once in a century springs forth a deed From the dark bands of forgtt.'iiluess freed, Destined to shine, and to bless, and to le id. Yet not even thus we escape from our lot The deed lasts in memory the doer lasts not ; Tha word liveth on, but the voice is forgot. Who knows the forms of the mighty of old ? Can bust or can portrait the spi, it unfold? Or the light of the eye by description Le told? Nay, even He who our ransom became, Bearing the cross, and despising the .-hanie, Earning a name above every name They who had handled him when He was here Kejit they in memory His lineaments clear? Could they command them at will to appe:ir? They who had heard Him a7id lived in His voice. Say could they always recall at their choice The tones and the cadence which made them rejoice? Be we content then to pass into shade, Visage and voice in oblivion laid. And live in the light that our actions have made. MY PLEA. Master, whose life long work was doinj; .^Kid, Keep, first of all, my body out of pain : Then, whether of myself, or not, I wou.d, Make me within the universal chain A link, whereby There shall have been accomplished some slight gain For men and women, when I come to die. ALICE CART, THE WHITE BOAT. 359 THE WHITE BOAT. A STORY OF LA VENDfiE. [Emile Souvestre is one of the very few French novelists whose works are pure ia thought and incident. His most important work is the Souvenirs d'un Baa- ret on ; but he has written many others several specially for children and all in;iy be read without fear of en- countering any indelicate scene or suggestion.] The traveller who visits La Vendee, with the stirring memory of its gigantic struggle of loyalty versus revolution fresh in his mind, and looks on it as the land that, in the short space of three years, became the grave of five Republican armies, as well as of the greater proportion of its own heroic population, and was thus converted into a vast and blood-steeped wilderness of smoking ruin.s, would naturally expect to find in the inhabitants a people gloomy and daring, proud, impetuous, and warlike. To his astonishment, he sees himself sur- rounded by a race whose character is in every respect the reverse of this quiet, thoughtful, taciturn almost to dulness, and whose might, like that of their powerful yoked oxen, slumbers and asks but for repose. Such is the case especially in the hill-country of La Vendee proper, the region of the pure Pictish blood; the people of the plain country bordering on old Anjou are distinguished by greater vivacity and friendliness. It is in contemplating this aspect of the Vendean character that we learn to estimate iJie power of that deadly grasp which the bold hand of revolution must have laid on the in- nermost sanctuary of popular feeling to pro- voke an outburst of resistance so vigorous and so long sustained. But if the physiognomy of the Vendeans be marked by a general sameness, nothing can be more varied than the aspect of their country. The eastern shore is indeed barren, dark, and gloomy; but to the north stretches a long tract of undulating country, rich in golden meadows and fertile fields, and dotted with groups of noble forest-trees, in whose shadow nestles many an orchard-circled chateau and peaceful hamlet: while here and there may be seen a large and populous village, with spire pointing to the skies. The high hedges and deep-em- bowered lanes, turned to such good account in the burgher struggles of the Chouan warfare, are still the peculiar and distinctive character- istics of the scene. This is indeed the Boccage; and wherever there is an opening, wide tracts of heath are seen, offering the strongest and most picturesque contrast by the bright blossoms of the yellow furze and the purple glow of the heath flower to the solemn edging of green by which they are bordered. Totally different is the appearance of La Vendee proper a long and boundless plain of waving corn, almost without trees, except where some narrow strip of orchard ground points to the neighbourhood of chateau or village. No sooner is the golden harvest brought in, than the waste and dreary stubble-lands are covered with loads of lime, giving to them, in the distance, the appearance of an interminable battle-field strewn with bleaching bones. Proceeding onward towards the south, to the marshes the Marais as it is called we again find ourselves in a new world. The land here shows, like an accident, an exception a crea- tion of art, a sort of rustic Venice. The com and the fruit seem to ripen on piles, and the flocks to be grazing on floating pastures. Ever since the sixteenth century efforts have been made to reclaim tracts of this marsh by drainage on the Dutch plan, so that the district should rather have been called Little Holland than "Little Poitou," as it is. Some business con- nected with one of these recently-drained tract* gave me the long-desired opportunity of seeing something of the mode of life of the Cabanneers the name by which the inhabitants of the reclaimed lands are known, as Hutters is that appropriated to the dwellers in the marsh. I had made an appointment with Guillaume Blaisot, the farmer with whom my business was to be transacted, to meet him at Marans, at the mouth of the Sevre, opposite to the Isle of Rh6, in Pertuis- Poitou. I reached Maille- pais, after a very uncomfortable journey, by the diligence, hoping to proceed by water. As I was waiting at the door of the little inn for the arrival of the boat that mine host h&d promised me, I perceived an old acquaintance approaching, whom, by his little waxcloth hat and his wooden leg, I had at once recognized as Maitre Berand, better known as Fait-tout. Berand was one of those equivocal traders who get a livelihood by various nameless handicrafts, and who, in common parlance, are said to live by their wits. He now assured me that busi- ness called him in the direction in which I was going. I invited him to embark with me in the boat, which at that moment came alongside. He thankfully accepted my invitation, and I thus secured a companion who, if not altogether trustworthy, was at least well acquainted with the country and its inhabitants; and who was, moreover, himself an interesting subject far my observation. 360 THE WHITE BOAT. Immediately on leaving Maillepais we found ourselves in the district familiarly known as l.e Marais Mouill6, and a wonderful spectacle it presented. As far as the eye could reach, it t.eemed as it were a water landscape whereon numberless islets, fringed with willows and ivy, were floating; now and then we passed a larger one, on which hemp and flax were cul- tivated. On the most elevated point of these little islands stand the solitary dwellings of the H utters; they are of plaited wicker-work, and look like so many bee-hives. They have neither window nor chimney, and the door appears too low for a full-grown man to enter without stooping. We could generally distin- guish a fire flickering on the hearth, and sending its smoke through all the interstices of the basket-work. The older huts are often covered with a mass of vegetation; and not un- frequently the willow-wands woven into the dwelling bud and* sprout, and form a thick green trellis-work of leafy branches around the hut. The people find their food in the waters by which they are surrounded, the neighbouring towns offering a ready market for their fish and ducks. In winter, when the waters often rise to the level of their dwellings, the poor people are forced to take refuge, with their wives and children, in their boats, which are kept by them ready for such emergencies. In tiiese they frequently pass long days and nights, till the floods are abated. Our passage among the islets was much retarded by the tangled masses of the water- lily, the leaves of which were thickly spread over the surface; and our approach not unfre- quently scared whole flocks of wild ducks and other water-fowl from their shelter, and sent them screaming and cackling over our heads. The Hutters are said, by the proprietors on the coast, to have very inadequate perceptions and very short memories of the distinction between meurn and tuum. My companion, however, soon proved that this confusion of ideas was not peculiar to the islanders. When- ever he saw a snare hanging from a willow, he hastened to the spot; if the jar of a leech- gatherer were left on the ground, he scrupled not to empty it into his own; and when I asked if his friends on the islands were thus solicitous to provide for his wants, he laughed, and said that what was taken from a Hutter was only indemnification; for that when he went round the islands with his pack, the wives and maidens were not particular in the matte* of needles and ribbons a cross made at the back of any article going in evidence that it was nut stolen. As I wished to see the interior of one of these huts we drew towards the shore, and I landed. The inside was incrusted with a black and shining coating of soot. In the dusky back- ground two cows were lying down and chewing the cud at their ease before a sort of rough crib. This was the only piece of furniture in the hut, with the exception of a pair of earthen pitchers, a clumsy stool, and a hurdle covered with a layer of moss; on this lay a woman whose appearance showed her to be suffering from the biliary fever so common in this moist and fetid atmosphere. To our words of comfort she at first made no reply, but at length, rousing herself, she said "What good can anything do me? I have seen the White Boat. All I want is the priest." These words had evidently a startling effect, not only on the sailor who had accompanied us, but on our friend Fait-tout, notwithstanding his habitual readiness to parade his scepticism. '"The White Boat!'" exclaimed both to- gether, in a half whisper, at the same time looking towards the shore. "Yes, yes," continued the sick woman, with feverish excitement; "I was coming with a bundle of willows from the other side of the island, and there, gliding noiselessly through the channel, I saw the death-boat, with the yellow dwarf seated at the helm; and as I passed I heard him cough and groan ; I felt his poison breath upon me, and fell to the ground. My husband found me and brought me home, and I have never raised my head since, and never shall." I endeavoured to soothe the poor woman, and to explain the thing away as an optical delusion but all in vain ; she stared wildly into the darkness, and my companions slipped quietly away; I myself felt a sort of indefinable dread, thus left alone in the dusky hut with the dying woman, and hastened int the air. When we got back to the boat our conver- sation was in monosyllables; and, in order to set it agoing, I made some inquiries respecting the young Blaisot whom I was to meet at Marans. At the sound of his name Fait-tout started from his reverie, but made as though he had not heard me, and called my attention to the great number of boats that were lying in a little bay which we were then crossing. It was no uncommon sight, but he wished to divert me from my subject. We soon came alongside of an embankment, on which we rather heard than saw some travellers for the view was entirely obstructed by a low growth of willows and alders. At intervals the plaintive monotonous chant of some shepherds broke upon the ear; they were THE WHITE BOAT. 361 singing one of those Christmas carols (Hymnes de Noel or Nau) wherein the shepherds of Poitou celebrate the glad tidings that it was given to the shepherds of Palestine to hear first. We did not reach Marans till late in the evening, and there were no tidings of Blaisot at the inn. To my repeated and urgent inquiries the host replied with a counter-question: "Do you mean the old Jerome Blaisot?" "No; the question now is of his son, Guil- laume," said Fait-tout, answering for me, and with singular emphasis. "The great Guillaume!" repeated the man, stepping back in astonishment. "And why not?" I rejoined sharply. "I have very good grounds for expecting him, having made an appointment with him to take charge of a business which is likely to be as advantageous to him as to me. I should rather ask what reason he can have for staying away." "Nay," replied mine host with some hesita- tion, "how can any third person assign reasons for another? To-morrow is our market-day, and there will surely be some of Blaisot's people in the town ; you can ask them, s.r, any ques- tions you please." "Ask, indeed!" muttered Fait-tout in a mocking tone, as I moved away half-satisfied, and the host devoted himself with obsequious civility to some freshly-arrived guests. Marans is now the principal port of La Vendee, and the depot of the export fisheries, and I was early awakeaed by the bustle of the market. It was thronged with H utters bring- ing in the rich spoils of the fishing and the chase, as well as by Cabanneers and the peasants from the plain; the former with wool and flax, the latter with heavy loads of corn and wood, in ponderous waggons drawn by six yoke of oxen. Still, all my inquiries for Blaisot were unavailing; and the evident shyness in answer- ing the frequent assumption of stupidity, as though they could not understand me raised my previous uneasiness to the highest pitch. On my return to the inn I found Berand the centre of a wondering circle, and prosecuting one of the thousand branches of his vocation. He was etching, an allegorical decoration on the arm of a young sailor, and had been profuse in sentimental verses and allusions; he now showed me his work with evident self-compla- cency. " You see that it is all that could be wished," he said. "Le Fier-gas could desire nothing better, were he the king himself." "Ay," rejoined the young man whose cog- nomen he had given, "for a bright half-dollar one has a right to expect something." "And I have accordingly given you the 'best article,' my son," said the artificer. "The altar of love, religion, death and the royal flower; what could you have more? You and Le Bien-nommg, you are the only ones to whom such luck has fallen." "Indeed," replied the young man, shaking his head emphatically; "then I amtheonlyone, for Le Bien-nomme lies deep beneath the water! " " What is that you are saying?" "It is so indeed," said another of the by- standers; "his body has never been seen, but his boat was found keel upward." "No one knows how it happened," observed a third. "Some say that he met the Lady of the Pool!" "Who is that?" said I, attracted rather by the expression, and by the manner of the speaker, than by the fact itself." "Why, the Lady of the Pool is she who entangles the boats in her long tresses, and so drags them down into the deep." I now took counsel with mine host, and he advised me to proceed in his conveyance to the cottage of the Blaisots, which he said was distant about a mile and a half. Fait-tout would be my conductor, as he was at home, and had business everywhere. The matter was soon arranged, and in half an hour Berand and I were placed side by side in the little car, with a board for our seat. My guide had plied the flask so deeply in honour of his last performance, that it was not without hesitation that I committed the reins to his hand. We soon came in sight of the long tract of land reclaimed from the waters. Canals, small and great, intersected it in every direction, and emptied themselves by an infinity of sluices into ponds varying in size. It was surrounded by a deep ditch, bordered for the most part with oaks. The numerous proprietors and farmers form a corporation for the management of the drainage; and their simple and appro- priate regulations have secured to them a large measure of independence, amid the mechanism of modern centralization and the despotism of modern liberality. The rich alluvial soil requires no manuring. Indeed, that it was covered by the sea within the historical period is proved by the frequent discovery of snips' keels and other fragments, as well as by the appearance of lofty oyster- banks here and there. The fallow fields afford a generous pasturage to numerous herds of oxen, and to a breed of the heavy horses of the country. The sun was declining, and the simple but 362 THE WHITE BOAT. varied landscape was bathed in rosy light all the more beautiful from its contrast with the silvery vapour that began to rise from the lower grounds, and that mingled with, and broke it into a thousand rays as it fell on the pools and the broad canals. At sunset we reached Jerome Blaisot's cottage one of a somewhat different construction to the greater part of those we had previously seen. In a field by the roadside I saw an old man and a child keeping sheep. The former had a sheepskin coat over his shoulders, and was resting his chin upon his staff and looking attentively at us. A black .sheep of unusual size trotted by his side with a familiarity that evinced a connection of a peculiar nature be- tween them. "There is old Jacques the shepherd and his Flemish sheep," said my guide, with a friendly greeting to the old man. "Tlie creature gives three times as much wool as any other sheep, and as much milk, besides, as three goats; it belongs to him as the chief shepherd." "Ay, ay," responded the old man in reply to the last words; "it is with this beast as with the King of France, who never dies; when his time is out, the next best takes his place. That is my right, is it not, La Bien-gagne'e?" he added, affectionately stroking his favourite, which seemed conscious of deserving the name. "At them! at them, Flandrine!" said the old man suddenly, and in a half-whisper, to his attendant; and in a moment the sensible creature set off, and soon collected the straying sheep together, showing as much zeal as dis- cretion in the conduct of the affair. "How have you been able to teach the crea- ture this?" said I, by way of beginning a conversation with the old man. "Well, then," he replied, half- musing, "the brute creatures only need to be reminded, you see. There is in every beast some trace of its great Creator; only for the most part we tease or worry this out of them, according to our selfish will. You see, sir," he continued turning directly towards me, "we are always forgetting that the shepherd is here for the sake of the sheep, and not the sheep on account of the shepherd. " "And instinct is powerful," I added, without bestowing much thought on the subject. "And so, instinct is the name the gentry give it? Well, the name is of no great conse- quence. The sheep, like all the brutes that remember the earthly paradise, has a special gift. You cannot find it out by thinking, but my Bien-gagnee knows whether good or ill luck is to befal us in the day." "Then you may rest in peace, my friend," cried my conductor, "for the brute has a noble appetite, and that is the best sign for man or beast all the world over. And now, let your youngster show the gentleman the way to Blaisot's, for I want to go in a contrary direc- tion. Au revoir, sir!" And so saying, my mysterious but pleasant companion alighted, and disappeared at once behind the hedge. The youngster, however, sprang into the vacant seat, and carefully drove the car along the narrow, miry road, to the comfortable dwelling of the Blaisots. As we were approaching, an elderly man came out and hastily advanced to meet us. But when he got near enough to distinguish our features he suddenly stopped, and without either listening to or answering us, kept calling aloud "Loubette! Loubette!" till a young maiden stepped over the threshold, whom at first I only remarked for her extreme plainness, and her tall, ungainly form. When I had seen her more nearly I became conscious of a look of energy and intelligence in the depths of her large gray eyes, that glimmered through the dark lashes like stars through the mist. My appearance seemed rather to surprise than to alarm her. With an air of mingled simplicity and good-breeding she invited me to enter. I found that Fait-tout had been right in advising me to keep to Loubette; she was evidently the head of the house. On my asking for her brother the father uttered an exclamation; but a warning look from her restored his composure. "You are, then, the gentleman who sent the letter that we gave back to the postman two days ago?" said Loubette quietly, but with a penetrating glance. "Gave back again?" I repeated; "and why did you do that?" "Because he to whom it was addressed is not in the country." "Not to be found in all Little Poitou!" ex- claimed the old man. "But you know where he is," I rejoined; "you could have given the postman the neces- sary instructions." "We know nothing,'' cried the father: "and he who says otherwise is no friend of ours. The tall Guillaume is away on his own errand, without either consulting or revealing it to us and this I do solemnly aver." "Yes, yes, father," interrupted the maiden; "you see that the gentleman meant well by my brother, and why then should you make a disturbance or deny him? You will take some refreshment with us, sir?" And so saying, THE WHITE BOAT. 363 she covered the table, and thus diverted my questionings and my curiosity. After a while, and when he had taken sundry long pulls at the cider-jug, the old Blai.sot appeared to have regained his self-possession, and to have formed some great resolution. He began by asking me my reason for coming, and my answers had the effect of quieting his suspicions altogether; and without any further allusion to his son, we talked of things in general, and then discussed the business I had in hand, and the conditions on which it could be executed. By degrees, however, and with the deepening twilight, the conversation flagged, and we sat in silence, each falling back upon his own thoughts. Loubette had been for a long time silent, with her eyes fixed on the hearth, whence the embers now shot up a ruddy glow that lighted the room with a dazzling glare, and then sinking down again, cast only straggling rays of pale and flickering light around. With- out, the wind sighed and moaned in half- whispers through the thicket of reeds across the water, and came blustering with louder tones over the stubble-fields, now bringing sounds of other kinds from the far distance, so that even I was impressed by an undefmable sensation of awe. Loubette threw fresh branches on the fire, which soon flared brightly and cheerfully enough, though the wood was very wet, and gave out all sorts of strange hissing and whistl- ing sounds in burning. "The 'Pavas' weep; that is a bad sign for the absent," said Loubette, with a deep sigh, which the old man echoed in a hollow tone. "The gentleman brought him good luck," con- tinued Loubette; " if he were but once directed there, he and others might forget what" Here she suddenly broke off. "No, no, it is all in vain!" muttered the old man to himself. "There is no such a thing as good luck for one who has been rocked on the knees of the dead. " I inquired what he meant by this. " I mean what my own eyes have seen," continued he with mingled emotion and reserve. "For that matter, everyone in Vix can tell you the story of the rocking-woman. But if you wish to hear it from me, why, with all my heart! You see, sir, it was in the time of the great war, when 1 was newly married. It was a bad time ; and whatever pains one took everything went wrong. Then my poor Sillette (God have mercy upon her!) gradually lost her spirits, and let her hands drop down, or sat with them folded, instead of working away where work was much needed especially us our boy William was then born, and required to be taken care of. It was in vain that I told her of it, both kindly and cros-sly. I used oftea to say to her: 'If children are left to scream at night, the old people in the grave awake.' It did no good; she let him scream on, and oniv wrapped herself up the more in the bed-clothes. So the child dwindled day by day, till it was pitiful to see him. One night, when I wad half-asleep myself, I thought I heard a hum- ming sound; and when I was thoroughly aroused, I found sure enough that it was no dream. I sat up and listened again, and it was the humming of a spinning-wheel. And when I put out my head through the bed-curtains, there, at the other end of the room, in the bright moonlight, sat the grandmother, who had been under the sod for seven years. And she spun on and on, rocking the child upon her knees the while. Can there be any good fortune for that poor child, who was made over by his own mother to the nursing of the dead? He who has been touched by the dead is doomed to misfortune! There is no blessing upon him. Something deathlike clings to him; no floiks, no crops prosper under his care the hearts of all those he loves turn away from him. And so it is with our poor William ; and it is not without reason that he is called 'Mourning- child.'" "Did you ever see the spinning visitor after that?" inquired I. " I took good care not to do so," replied he. "Why, every child knows that he who sees one of the dead return a second time may as well get his own shroud ready. But I heard the spinning-wheel go round who can say how often ? However, the child throve afterwards ; and, strange to say, he seemed to turn away from his mother entirely, and attached himself to old Marion, the stable- woman." We now sank back into the former oppressive silence. Loubette went up and down the room, busied about household matters, and often stood as if listening at the window; then she came and sat down with us again. Suddenly a most strange and piercing cry, like that of a biro, sounded without. Both father and daughter started up, but each with a very different ex- pression of countenance. He said half-loud "It is the night raven, and at so lite an hour! that, too, bodes no good." She seemed to be listening intently; and as three similar sounds were heard in quick succes- sion, each drawing nearer, she said in a tremb- ling voice, which was little in accordance her words 364 THE WHITE BOAT. "Ay, a boat must have disturbed him in his nest. It is the sleeping time of beasts, but the eating time of men.- If you please, sir, supper is now ready." She had already lit a lamp, and we sat our- selves down to a table covered with a clean cloth, and well provided with simple fare. As the old peasant gradually thawed, and threw off the curse of suspicion the sad inheritance of this people I began to be quite comfortable; and only remarked, after a while, that the girl, who had often risen from table to see about one thing or another, as well as about my sleeping-quarters for the night, had now ab- sented herself altogether. The old man told me a good deal about his son how brave, obedient, and industrious he used to be, and how he had been betrothed to a wealthy maiden of the district; who had, however, been faithless to him, and taken another person and how, since then, he had become altered in everything. He was even going, in answer to a question of mine, to explain what he meant by this, when we sud- denly heard heavy footsteps and the clattering of arms outside, and in a moment or two -the door was opened, and the brigadier of the gendarmerie of Chaillg entered the room in full uniform, let the butt-end of his musket fall noisily on the floor, and greeted us in the peculiar, jovial, and free-and-easy tone belong- ing to his class. Old Jerome rose, then sank down again as pale as death; and the glass, which he took up by way of strengthening his courage, rattled against his teeth. "Good appetite to you, sirs! and do not let me disturb you," said the gendarme, casting a keen and rapid glance around the room. " How goes it with your health, Papa Jerome?" continued he, as the old man sat opposite him, still silent and motionless; "and where in the world is Loubette? she is not generally absent." "Loubette?" said the old man, who, as it appeared to me, really did not at the moment know where she was; "why, is she not in the kitchen?" "Old fox," said the gendarme in a sharper tone, and drawing nearer, "you know as well as I do that she is not; and now, then, out with it at once where is she?" "I I will look for her," stammered the peasant, getting up and going towards the door. "No such thing, old man; you are not to stir from this spot; and let us have no more tricks, if you please. You know quite well why I come, and we know just as well that your son is with you here." "My son my William here!" exclaimed the old man with an air of surprise wh.ch must have appeared natural and genuine even to the gendarme. At least he continued in a less harsh tone: "Well, whether you know it or not, he is here, and we must take him up as a refnictoire: so be reasonable, and, at all events, get hold of the girl for me." Blaisot swore by all the saints of Upper and Lower Poitou that he knew nothing about it; that his son had never told him a word. By this exaggeration of ignorance he only awoke again the suspicion of the brigadier. "We know you," he exclaimed, stroking his moustaches; "everything is white here; and before you will help a servant of the govern- ment so much as with your little finger but wait a little, and we will soon manage you." The old man now declared in the most elo- quent manner his attachment to the July dynasty, and his ignorance respecting any offence committed against any government whatsoever. . " Hold your peace, you old hypocrite ! " replied the soldier with a certain degree of restored confidence in his tone. " Do not we know you of old? Did not you do just the same when you were thirty or forty years younger ? Sure I am it is not so serious an affair as it was then. The Blues did not under- stand a joke; and a bullet or the guillotine soon made an end of the refractory. But still, mind what you are about, for the prison and the galleys are no trifle either, and an execution in the house I say, old fellow!" The poor man would perhaps have been able to bear all threats against life and liberty stoically enough, but the thought of being deprived of his goods and chattels by an exe- cution woke up his covetousness the heredi- tary vice of the peasants of Poitou and he lost all control. " Forthesakeof the holy Virgin,M. Durand," he piteously exclaimed, with his hands clasped, "do but believe me! William has never returned home since" Here he stopped, having observed the scru- tinizing glance cast at him by his tormentor, and continued in a less doleful tone: " It has been through no fault of mine: how much I said to him when the lot fell upon him and how I told him, over and over again, that he must make up his mind and obey, and be no ' bush recruit.' But you know very well, my good M. Brigadier, as well as all Lower THE WHITE BOAT. Poitou does, that since his betrothed jilted him and married another man, there is no getting him to leave the country, even though he were as free as a bird on the tree." "That is the very thing, old man," exclaimed the gendarme in triumph. ' ' He cannot leave Louise; and yesterday he was seen at Vallem- breuse, and is it likely that his own father should not know where he spent the night? But now we have had prattle enough; we must search the house thoroughly, and if we have to dig up the hearthstone to find him, yet find him we must!" He was moving quickly towards the door, when Loubette's voice was heard outside in loud disputation, as it soon appeared, with the brigadier's men who were stationed without. One of them dragged her in, while she struggled violently, and defended herself with her tongue most courageously: "Is this, then, the law, right, and good order of the day, to say nothing of its polite- ness," cried she with her harsh but full-toned voice; " that a virtuous girl should be treated like a criminal, when she comes home from the field?" "Why, only see now! the mistress of the house!" exclaimed the brigadier tauntingly. ' ' And may we ask where thou coniest from so late, old lady?" " From a place where it is not usual to say ' thou ' to girls one has not the honour of knowing, M. Gendarme," answered Loubette with a degree of boldness that had something of the heroic when contrasted with her father's embarrassment. After the dialogue had been carried on a while in this tone, growing even bitterer and bitterer, the experienced old soldier observed that she only pretended to be indignant to conceal her distress and confusion, as well as to gain time, and induce him, through very anger, to abandon the part he had to play. He therefore quickly composed himself, and said in a tone of grave and ironical politeness "Now, then, we will take hold of the ques- tion with silk gloves, and perhaps Miss Loubette will have the great kindness to inform us where she has just come from." "Why, if you are quite bent upon knowing this great secret, I have been taking the shep- herd his supper." The gendarmes at once confronted her they had caught her coming from the very opposite direction. But Loubette was not to be puzzled by this. She asserted that although she had gone round to the field where the sheep were feeding by the meadow, that had only been for the purpose of fetching the sickle, which she had forgotten at noon. " Or perhaps you may think that I wanted to cut old Jerome's bread with the sickle," added she with a sneer, as she threw down the sickle, which she really drew from under her apron. The brigadier now tried to catch her by alt manner of artful questions and assertions; but she parried them so well, that he began to contradict himself, and knew no longer what he was about. " There's no catching the subtle creature !" he exclaimed at last, in dudgeon. "And there's no dragging the truth out of the stupid old Chouans either. Two of you stay here to watch these people, and the rest of us will rummage the whole place he must be here." The brigadier had taken no further notice of me than that implied in his first curt greeting, for he knew me before. But I plainly saw that he found my presence inconvenient. I followed him to the house-door, and heard one of the gendarmes say to him, " Was not that a boat that glided over the water behind the bushed yonder?" In fact, we soon heard the sound of oars, and the trilling of a cheerful song, then a scream, and a momentary silence; then some quick oar-strokes, a rustling in the thicket; and, an instant after, the vagabond Berand, my tra- velling companion, rushed towards the house, breathless, and evidently beside himself, and threw himself down upon the bank before the door. At once assailed by the brigadier, who not unreasonably charged him with being an old drunkard, he broke out in the following unconnected sentences "I have seen seen him! There there I tell I tell you. He glided in his white boat out from the bushes and and under the trees opposite and he was gone!" " But who there what there, in the name of all that is holy 1" screamed out the brigadier in his impatience. "Who? He!" was the low reply; "the white boat, and the little yellow man at the helm ! And he had a corpse in its white grave- clothes lying across the boat before him; its head was hanging over the water !" " The wooden leg is drunk ; he has been dreaming!" laughed the brigadier. "Would to God I had dreamed it, and were not sober!" said poor Berand, who had indeed been pretty effectually sobered by the fright. " But I have not only seen but heard. 'Turn back, unhappy man!' the figure exclaimed, ' or I will turn thee round aud round. ' Tto 366 THE WHITE BOAT. brandj- still gave me courage to answer, ' Man or woman, whom hast thou there?' But it cried out in a voice that went through the marrow of my bones, 'I have got tall William to-day, and in eight days I shall have thee !' That was enough for me ; and here I am, thank God, at least on dry land still ; and in eight days hence I shall take pretty good care to be far enough from here!" Scarcely had the cripple named the name of William than the brigadier hurried off, with an exclamation, to the canal, and all his party after him. We heard the click of their muskets as they cocked them in setting off; next, we heard the brigadier call out three times, and then a gun was fired: and on hastening to the place whence the sound came, we found the gendarmes collected on the bank of the side canal, by which Blaisot's land was bounded, and occupying a portion of the causeway from which one could see part of the great canal and its nearest ramifications. " If the little yellow man has escaped us, he has at all events left his freight behind him," called out the brigadier as he pointed towards a moonlit spot on the opposite side of the small canal which belonged to Blaisot's land. With horror we discovered a corpse stretched out at full length in the moonlight. The gendarmes brought out the boat in which our wooden- legged friend had just arrived, and went to fetch the body. Scarcely had they laid it down upon the dyke than Loubette, followed by her father and their guard, rushed towards it, kneeling down to look at the face, and find- ing it unrecognizable through decomposition, snatched at the right hand of the corpse, and exclaiming, "Holy Virgin, it is my brother!" sprang up, and held out a ring to her father, with the names of William and Louise in- scribed on it, and a flaming heart between them. After the first outburst of grief, the girl soon attained to a remarkable degree of outward composure ; though there was certainly some- thing overstrained and excited about it ; and it was often interrupted by almost convulsive gestures, wringing of the hands, and deep- drawn sobs. However, it was such as enabled her to give all the orders she deemed necessary. Agreeably to her directions the corpse was taken to an outbuilding near the house, to which Loubette made her escape as soon as she had with inconceivable celerity prepared every- thing against the arrival of guests. The old father appeared quite broken down, and almost childish with grief and horror; and, with lamentable groans and unconnected cries, he meekly allowed himself to be led back to the arm-chair in his own room. Either by the shot, or by the sort of presen- timent or instinct which never fails to draw people to a place where a calamity has occurred, even before any definite tidings of it can have had time to reach them, a number of the country people of the neighbouring district were soon collected. Loubette was now busily occupied; for according to the popular custom, which makes a death, as well as a wedding or a christening joy and sorrow alike a pre- text for eating and drinking, she had to pro- vide both food and liquor, during which task she seemed to be struggling rather with anxiety than grief. Old Jerome welcomed each arrival with loud lamentations, which did not, how- ever, interfere with his activity in passing round the jug. As soon as Loubette had attended to her guests, and especially seen that the gendarmes were favourably placed as regarded the circu- lation of the cider-jug and the brandy-pitcher, she hurried out again, and placed at the thresh- old of the little outhouse, where lay the corpse, covered with a coarse linen cloth, two lighted candles, which were not rendered super- fluous by the dawning light for it was a dark corner enough. The maiden was seated at the entrance" with her head covered, and as one neighbour after another came in, she appeared neither to see nor hear, and kept all at a distance by the violence of her emotion ; so that even those who would fain have taken a nearer look at the body, refrained from passing her to do so. Each fresh comer was contented with a hasty glance and a murmured prayer, and then with- drew. After a while the aged shepherd presented himself, a venerable form, that seemed rather to belong to other times. " This also comes in the train of old age," he said in a half-whisper, as he remained stand- ing close to Loubette. " The son of the house, whose birth I commemorated, lies dead upon the bier, and the daughter sits weeping at the threshold!" "God is proving our faith and patience, Master Jacques," replied the girl, looking up as if struggling with contending purposes, and then, deeply moved, looked sadly in the old man's face, as he continued his waitings. He placed his broad hand upon her head, as if to bless her ; but his consolations only in- creased her grief, for he spoke of the virtues of the deceased, who was evidently an object of affection to the whole neighbourhood. At THE WHITE BOAT. 367 length, groaning deeply, he shaded his face w.th his hands, and the few large tears that trickled slowly over his furrowed cheeks Mjemed as though wrung by the greatness of his agony from fountains that had long been dry. He now made a movement towards the corpse, and at first Loubette appeared in- clined to hinder his advance, but checking herself, she muttered in an undertone, "The gray-head will not betray us!" and followed him with looks of earnest attention. He lifted the cloth that covered the face, but let it fall again immediately. There was no trace of identity ; and the spectacle revealed by the uncertain light was one of horror. The pet sheep, which had accompanied the old man, and at first attentively sniffed the air around the corpse, now turned unconcerned away a great offence in the eyes of old Jerome. " I have thought more highly of the beast than it deserved," he said sullenly. " It is no better than the children of men! Should you not recognize your master's son, living or dead even though his features be disfigured ? But such is the way of the world to have no memory for the absent and the dead ! " And so saying, he withdrew, accompanied by the black sheep, which looked half -ashamed, half -sur- prised at his reproof. The brigadier, finding I had studied the law, had asked me to visit the body, and to draw up the proccx-verbal of the finding of the corpse. Berand offered to assist me, as he had experi- ence in such matters. On the discovery of a corps malheMreux as a body whose manner of death is suspicious or doubtful is termed in this country it fre- quently happens that the next of kin devolve the duties of preparing it for burial on an official styled the Gravedigger of the Lost, who is seldom a person of good repute, although the pay is excellent. Master Fait-tout seemed, nevertheless, accustomed to the work ; and his help was very acceptable, for it was no pleasant task ; and I wrote down what he dictated in answer to my inquiries. On a sudden, as he was busied with the right arm, he burst into a loud exclamation of aston- ishment. " What is the matter?" I cried. "Wnat is the matter!" he replied softly, coming uearerthan was agreeable to me; "what do you see on this arm?" "I see a tattooing mark, such as you were making at the inn at Marans." "Just so; the grand piece the altar, the lily, the cross and a cipher. Now, except the lad on whom I etched it this morning, there is only one in all Lower Poitou who has the grand piece on his arm; and that is, or was not Guillaumc Blaisot, but Pierre Sauvage, called the Well-reputed, who was drowned a week ago, no one knew where, or how, and now" A half-suppressed scream prevented the com- pletion of tiie sentence, and on looking round we saw Loubette standing erect at the entrance, pale, and with dishevelled hair and flaming eyes, and her arm stiffly extended. "Come hither, maiden!" he exclaimed, "your brother is alive! At least, this is no more he than it is the Pope of home." But her emotion was at first too great for words; and when she did speak, the accents were not those of joy, but of anguish and terror " On thy life on thine everlasting salva- tion, say not another word ! And who allowed you to meddle with the dead? what business have you here?" she added with a deep groan, at the same time approaching him. I quieted her with a few words of explana- tion, and an assurance that she might trust me. She grasped my hand, but cast a look of suspi- cion on my assistant. The latter, after a short pause, during which he displayed more feeling than was his wont, exclaimed "Now I see it all! You knew that it waa not Guillaume?" She nodded assent. "You are a brave lass, and I understand the game ; and may the deuce take me if I meddle or mar ! I've no such liking for the bloodhounds, especially since ' the glorious days' in Paris yonder. So, my word upon it, I'm silent." " Now I know the meaning of the bird-call," said I to Loubette; "a signal that Guillaume was there with the corpse, was it not ?" Again she nodded and whispered, faintly smiling "He had most fortunately seen it lying in the mud and slime at the border of a little creek two hours ago, and had arranged it all with me. He is in concealment, while he is supposed to be dead, and the hue and cry it thus stopped. He hovers about here a* though Louise had bewitched him, and declares that he must see and speak to her yet once more." She turned again to Berand "You keep our secret?" she said, looking earnestly at him, and holding out her band. He was about to grasp it, when he suddenly drew back, and exclaimed " Not so fast! Your fine brother, then, was the yellow dwarf with the hollow cough, and the corpse in his White Boat, who gave me 363 THE WHITE BOAT. such a fright as he chased me on the water? No, that was too much that's not to be for- given ! To make such a fool of me, and terrify me, like a child with a scarecrow! We'll see wiiat the brigadier says to that game!" I strove to appease him ; but, unluckily, another weight dropped into the wrong balance. "No, no," said he; "what a fool I should have been ! The Sauvages have offered fifty pounds for the body of their son, and I may as well have the reward as anyone else." He was rushing out, but she stood in the doorway, and placing both her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with sharp and earnest gaze, while her cheeks glowed with the excitement of her situation, she said in a calm but harsh and determined voice "Look well to yourself, wooden-leg; you have a choice to make. Are we in future to be friends or foes? Give me your word that you will say no more than you are asked, and from this hour you have a home in the house of the Blaisots and you know the value of such a home to you and the like of you. Or say but a word, make but a sign a gesture that may involve peril to my brother, and you have Loubette Blaisot for your deadly enemy and Loubette keeps her word for good and for evil. If you know it not, ask throughout Lower Poitou; and then, old man, ask yourself whether it can bring you either honour or profit in this country to betray a loyal Ven- dean to the gendarmerie? Guillaume is lost if he is not dead! Do you understand? As to the promise of the Sauvages, the Blaisots can fulfil it as well." A host of conflicting feelings was struggling in the man's breast. It was mortified vanity alone that had caused him to swerve from his original friendly resolution; and thus, when I told him that if he did not himself represent his fright as a mere idle joke, in order to jus- tify his treacherous betrayal of the young Blaisot, no one in the country Avould for a moment doubt the fact of a spectral appear- ance, or regard his terror as otherwise than perfectly natural he was pacified, and able to estimate Loubette's promised gratitude, as well as her threatened vengeance, at their proper value. He now put his hand into that which she again held out " Done ! I keep counsel." It was indeed high time that we came to an understanding, for during the discussion all the neighbours had withdrawn, and the brig- adier had called twice ; and scarcely had we turned again towards the corpse, while Lou- bette resumed her place and attitude at the entrance, when he appeared, and inquired if the deposition were not yet ready, as it was time he should be setting out. I hastily wrote the concluding words, and handed the docu- ment to him. He scarcely looked at it ; and it was evident that the cider had done its work. Calling his men together, he departed with them and old Jerome to make his deposition before the nearest magistrate. The old shep- herd would fain have taken another look at the corpse, but this Loubette prevented. "He knows nothing of it," she whispered in my ear, shrugging her shoulders, and shak- ing her head significantly. No sooner had the tread of the gendarmes and the clang of their weapons died away in the distance, than Loubette, who had been in- tently listening, sprang to the back-door, and twice repeated the bird-call that I had heard at the beginning of the evening. After a few minutes I heard her speaking with some one, and, in company with a young peasant, she walked into the room, to which, unable any longer to bear the neighbourhood of the corpse, I had betaken myself. Fait-tout now proved his right to his name by undertaking to dig a grave in the garden, and to superintend the interment of the de- ceased, by which the gendarmes, as well as the neighbours, asserted that he had sought his own death, and had thus forfeited all claim to Christian burial. As Loubette came in leading her brother, the likeness between them was very striking; and those traits which took from her the soft- ness of womanly attractiveness rendered him a type of manly beauty. He was an active, well-looking fellow, in spite of the hardships that he had recently endured while he had been wandering about like a criminal or a baited wolf. On seeing me he retreated a step, and put his hand in his vest as if seeking a weapon, but Loubette soon reassured him. When the first greetings were over, and he had offered me a few words of thanks, Lou- bette interrupted us, reminding him that it was time to refresh himself. " For you cannot stay here," she added, with a heavy sigh; and for a moment it ap- peared that the struggle of her full heart was about to find relief in tears. She rallied, how- ever, and resumed her usual calmness of bear- ing; it was as though hers were a life of action, not of emotion. And yet with what motherly tenderness she now ministered to her brother, carefully ap- propriating to him his place, his cup, his THE WHITE BOAT. 369 spoon ; anxious to give him yet once more the full impression of home. It was touching to see him fold his hands in prayer before he cut the bread. " It is the first of the new wheat," said Loubette; "I would not use any till you were with us." "God bless thee, my sister! I praise Him that He has permitted me to taste again the corn of our paternal fields for the last time," he added slowly, and with a deep-drawn sigh. He, however, turned to the table, and set to in good earnest as though he were making a meal that might carry him through more than one day. Between whiles he asked a hundred questions about all the little matters that had occurred in field and stable during his absence; and in the interest of these domestic details both seemed to have forgotten the perilous circumstances in which he was placed. I was compelled to remind him that if there were nothing more to be apprehended than the return of his father, the meeting with him must be avoided, as he was not in the secret. When Guillaume was away, he might know all with safety. At the same time I offered to take him with me to Marans, from whence he could readily get across the country. It was so early that we ran but little risk of meeting neighbours on the road, and in case of a straggler or two he could contrive to hide his face. He accepted the proposal, and slowly arose from his seat in the home of his youth. " God's will be done! but it is hard for a son to shun his own father, and steal from his own home like a felon!" said he as he grasped his staff and took the bundle which his sister had prepared. She now turned aside, and for the first time during this trying scene, her strong mind gave way beneath the storm of her feel- ings. She covered her head, and sobbed as though her heart were breaking. He stood undecided, and struck his stick against the floor. She made a strong effort, turned towards her brother, and cutting a small slice from the loaf, she made the sign of a cross on it, then kissed it, and put it in his vest. She then grasped his hand, and looked imploringly at me. I understood her, and went out to look te the vehicle, and to leave the brother and sister alone to their bitter parting. She still strove against her weakness before the stranger. In a few minutes he came out, and without saying a word took his seat beside me in the car, gathered up the reins, and we were off. We drove on for about an hour and a half, when he suddenly halted and said VOL. I. " Excuse me, sir, I will not detain you, but I have business here, hard by." I represented to him the risk he incurred, and expressed my surprise at his having any business that could hinder him for a quarter of an hour under such circumstances. It availed not, and he only entreated me to Wiit for him, " Only ten minutes," he exclaimed with the deepest emotion. " It is no business it is but a house a look. I cannot leave the country without once more" He pointed to a house overshadowed by trees, about a hundred paces from the spot. " Louise?" I asked. He coloured, and nodded assent, and then hurried towards the dwelling. I fastened the horse to a tree, and followed him, to be at hand in case of trouble. He stood a while beneath a tree that was growing out of the hedge which surrounded the garden. The window of a projecting angle of the build- ing was just opposite, and doubtless he had good reasons for choosing his post. The cur- tains were drawn, and the inmates of the house seemed buried in sleep. The distant village dock struck three, and I thought it high time that we were again on the road. I approached, and bade him be comforted, and take courage. His expression awed me; it was rather one of anger and passion than of sorrow, with the same stern fixed look that he had in common with his sister. "One moment more!" he whispered softly. " She must know that I have been here, and then she will see how to settle it with her conscience. Yes; if she should learn that my corpse was found here!" He laughed a bitter laugh as he untied his cravat, and was about to fasten it to a branch which overhung the window. "She will know it but too well," he mur- mured. Just at this moment the cry of an infant was heard from the chamber. It had a won- derful effect on him, and changed his fiercer mood into one of complete prostration. "She is a mother!" he cried. "I did not know it ; Loubette should not have concealed that from me. It is all over now; and God forbid that I should bring terror to a mother! " He let go the bough, which swung back against the window, and fastened the cravat round his neck, and in a few seconds waa seated by my side, lost in thought, and rapidly urging forward the horse on the road to Marans. He drew up at the bridge of Vix, and d* 24 370 THE SLEEP. clared that his route now lay in a different di- rection. I offered him the charge of a little farm in Touraine if he would let me know where to find him. He was evidently grateful for my sympathy, but declined the offer, saying " It can't be; I must live as the rest do. To manage a farm properly I must have a wife, and I could not think of that. Man must labour in the quietness and the peace of his heart ar-d oi his life, and that I cannot do. I should never see a gendarme without think- ing that he was seeking me!" "You are dead for the gendarmes, Guillaume, and for all the world except Loubette and me," I replied, half-jestingly. But the words made a painful impression on him. " It were perhaps the best thing that could happen for me if it were true," he rejoined gloomily. But recovering himself quickly, he imparted to me his plan, which was to seek a home with some friends in the Talmond country. I made some inquiries as to his means of subsistence; but he was shy, and broke off the conversation abruptly, saying that he had still far to travel, and that people were coming in sight along the road from Marans. He was right; and we had scarcely time for a brief farewell, and a hearty grasp of each other's hand, when he was lost in the thicket, and I saw him no more. But among the bodies of those who were shot by the gen- darmerie in the slight rising that soon after- wards took place in La Vendee, on the appear- ance there of the Duchess de Berri, that of Guillaume Blaisot was recognized. SONG. Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old time is still a flying ; And this same flower that smiles to-day, To morrow may be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he's a getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he's to setting. That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse and worst Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while you may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry. Hb.fi HICK. THE SLEEP. [Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born in London, 1800; died in Florence, 'Jyth June, 18;i. She was equally distinguished by her genius and hrr scholarship. At the age of seventeen she published her E.-say mi Mind, with other poems ; and that volume was followed by The 8 raphim, 1838; The Romaunt of tht Page, 1839; The Di-ama of Exile ; Isobefs Child ; Ca*a Guidi Windnvit, 1851 ; Aurora Ltigh, and numerous miscellaneous poems. She also translated into English the Prometheus BnunA of jEschylus, which in after years she pronounced an "early failure." Having ccme to that conclusion, she produced a new translation, which is published in the collected edition of her works (five volumes, Smith, Elder & Co.) Leigh Hunt calls her, in one of his poems, " The sister of Tennyson ; " another writer claims her as " Shakspeare's daughter;" and all critics, whilst ad- mitting with regret the occasional obscurity of her lan- guage, agree in acknowledging her marvellous poetic power. Miss Mitford's tribute to her friend will interest every admirer of the poet : " Such is the influ- ence of her manners, her conversation, her temper, her thousand sweet and attaching qualities, that they who know her best are apt to lose sight altogether of her learning and of her genius, and to think of her only as the most charming person they have ever met." In, 1816 Miss Barrett was married to Mr. Robert Browning. ] "He giveth His beloved sleep" (Psalm cxxvii. 2). Of all the thoughts of God that are Borne inward into souls afar, Along the psalmist's music deep, Now tell me if that any is, For gift or grace, surpassing this "He giveth His beloved, sleep?" What would we give to our beloved? The hero's heart to be unmoved, The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep, The patriot's voice to teach and rouse, The monarch's crown to light the brows?- He giveth His beloved, sleep. What do we give to our beloved? A little faith all undisproved, A little dust to overweep, And bitter memories to make The whole earth blasted for our sake: He giveth His beloved, sleep. "Sleep soft, beloved !" we sometimes say, Who have no tune to charm away Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep t But never doleful dream again Shall break the happy slumber when He giveth His beloved, sleep. O earth, so full of dreary noises! O men, with wailing in your voicesl O delved gold, the waiters heap ! O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall I ALFRED THE TRUTH-TELLER. 371 God strikes a silence through you all, And givetli His beloved, sleep. His dews drop mutely on the hill, His cloud above it saileth still, Though on its slope men sow and reap : More softly than the dew is shed, Or cloud is floated overhead, He giveth His beloved, sleep. Ay, men may wonder while they scan A living, thinking, feeling man Confirmed in such a rest to keep; But angels say, and through the word I think their happy smile is heard 'He giveth His beloved, sleep." For me, my heart that erst did go Most like a tired child at a show, That sees through tears the mummers leap, Would now its wearied vision close, Would child-like on His love repose Who givetli His beloved, sleep. And friends, dear friends, when it shall be That this low breath is gone from me, And round my bier ye come to weep, Let one, most loving of you all, Say, " Not a tear must o'er her fall! He giveth His beloved, sleep." ALFRED THE TRUTH -TELLER. [Charlotte Mary Yonge, born 1S23. As a no- velist and writer for the young slie is perhaps the most popular of living writers The Heir f Rtdclyffe has passed through numerous editions, and her many other works are only second to it in general esteem. Miss Yonge writes simply and earnestly, and she has a special gift for reproducing the most interesting passages of history with a vigour and spirit which gives them all the attraction of novelty. Her Caiiieog from English History from which we take the following narrative is an example of this power. Her works are published fcy Macmillan id these holy proverbs say, The man who had never a thought of fear, Though he ieared the Lord alway. " ' Would yon love your Lord and Head, He would teach you all His will, He doth in honour this wide earth tread. \Yhu in liiiu is living still. THE FORGING OF THE ANCHOR. 375 ' ' Long for Him. O my friend, Aliklly I warn you here To make His glory your chiefest end, And never forsake His fear ! ' ' Mildly I warn you now, Seek Him in everything; The crown sits not well on that monarch's brow Who owns not a higher King. ' ' He is God and man also ; Good, the highest gc od above; Bliss above blessedness he shall know Who the Lord of Life doth love. ' ' He doth all orders sway, And the king by Him must reign, The priest bear rule b.y His perfect way, And wisely the knight and thane.' ' To Sifford came many thanes. Where the king his wittiin met; And bishops and knights, with their warlike train*. Were in solemn conclave i*)t t ' Then Alfred, to England dear, Did his parting b.essing give, His brow was calm, and his eye was clear Though he looked not long to live. ' For his eye afar did rest Where his soul is resting now, And holy faith was the crown that prest That steadfast monarch's brow. ' He was England's noblest son, He is England s comfort styled ; O well hath King Alfred this title won From each loyal English child." THE FORGING OF THE ANCHOR. [Samuel Ferguson, LL.D., Q.C., born in Belfast, 1810. A distinguished member of the Irish bar. He has written a number of ballads which have secured for him a permanent place amongst the poets of his native country. Mr. Gavaii Duffy, in his introduction to The Jjatlad Pottry of Ireland in which collection ten, of Mr. Ferguson's poems appear says his productions ar 'fired with a living and local interest. ' And "they are coloured with scenery and costume, and ventilated with the free air of the country. In this respect they are of a class with the old English and Scotch bal- lads."] Come see the Dolphin's Anchor forged; 'tis at a white heat now: The bellows ceased, the flames decreased ; though on the forge's brow, The little flames still fitfully play through the sable mound ; And fitfully you still may see the grim smiths ranking round, All clad in leathern panoply, theif broad hands only bare ; Some rest upon their sledges here, some work the windlass there. The windlass strains the tackle chains, the black mound heaves below; And red and deep, a hundred veins burst out at every throe: It rises, roars, rends all outright O, Vulcan, what a glow ! 'Tis blinding white, 'tis blasting bright; the high sun shines not so! The high sun sees not, on the earth, such fiery fearful show ; The roof-ribs swarth, the candent hearth, the ruddy lurid row Of smiths, that stand, an ardent band, like men before the foe ; As, quivering through his fleece of flame, the sailing monster, slow Sinks on the anvil all about, the faces fiery grow "Hurrah !" they shout, "leap out, leap out ;" bang, bang, the sledges go; Hurrah ! the jetted lightnings are hissing high and low; A hailing fount of fire is struck at every squashing blow; The leathern mail rebounds the hail ; the rattling cinders strow The ground around; at every bound the sweltering fountains flow; And thick and loud, the swinking crowd, at every stroke, pant "ho!" Leap out, leap out, my masters ; leap out and lay on load ! Let's forge a goodly Anchor; a bower thick and broad: For a heart of oak is hanging on every blow, I bode. I see the good ship riding, all in a perilous road, The low reef roaring on her lee ; the roll of ocean pour'd From stem to stern, sea after sea; the mainmast by the board: The bulwarks down ; the rudder gone ; the boats stove at the chains ; But courage yet, brave mariners the Bower still remains, THE FORGING OF THE ANCHOR. And not an inch to flinch he deigns save when ye pitch sky biglL, Then moves his head, as though he said, "Fear nothing here am I!" Swing in your strokes in order; let foot and hand keep time, Your blows make music sweeter far thau any steeple's chime; But while ye swing your sledges, sing ; and let the burden be The Anchor is the Anvil King, and royal craftsmen we. Strike in, strike in the sparks begin to dull their rustling red: Our hammeis ring with sharper diu, our work will soon be sped; Our Anchor soon must change its bed of fiery rich array, For a hammock at the roaring bows, or an oozy couch of clay; Our Anchor soon must change the lay of meriy craftsmen here, For the Yeo-heave-o', and the Heave-away, and the sighing seaman's cheer ; "When, weighing slow, at eve they go, far, far from love and home ; And sobbing sweathearts, in a row, wail o'er the ocean foam. In livid and obdurate gloom he darkens do~wn at last; A shapely one he is, and strong, as e'er from cat was cast. O trusted and trustworthy guard, if thou hadst life like me, What pleasures would thy toils reward beneath the deep green seal O deep-sea diver, who might then behold such sights as thou? The hoary monster's palaces ! methinks what joy 'twere now To go plumb plunging down amid the assembly of the whales. And feel the churn'd sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails! Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea unicorn, And send him foiled and bellowing back, for all his ivory horn; To leave the subtle sworder-fish of bony blade forlorn ; And for the ghastly-gnnning shark to laugh his jaws to scorn ; To leap down on the kraken's back, where 'mid Norwegian isles He lies, a lubber anchorage for sudden shallow'd miles; Till snorting, like an under-sea volcano, off he rolls ; Meanwhile to swing, a-buffeting the far astonished shoals Of his back-browsing ocean-calves; or, haply in a cove, Shell-strown, and consecrate of old to some Undine's love, To find the long-hair'd mermaidens ; or, hard by icy lands, To wrestle with the sea-serpent, upon cerulean sands. O broad-armed Fisher of the deep, whose sports can equal thine? The Dolphin weighs a thousand tons, that tugs thy cable line ; And night by night 'tis thy delight, thy glory day by day, Through sable sea and breaker white, the giant game to play But shamer of our little sports ! forgive the name I gave A fisher's joy is to destroy thine office is to save. O lodger in the sea-king's halls, couldst thou but understand Whose be the white bones by thy side, or who that dripping band, Slow swaying in the heaving wave, that round about thee bend, With sounds like breakers in a dream blessing their ancient friend Oh, couldst thou know what heroes glide with larger steps round thee; Thine iron side would swell with pride ; thou'dst leap within the sea ! Give honour to their memories who left the pleasant strand, To shed their blood so freely for the love of Fatherland Who left their chance of quiet age and grassy churchyard grave^ So freely, for a restless bed amid the tossing wave Oh, though our Anchor may not be all I have fondly sung, Honour him for their memory, whose bones he goes among 1 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 377 ENGLISH LITERATURE. By far the most considerable change which has taken place in the world of letters in our days is that by which the wits of Queen Anne's time have been gradually brought down from the supremacy which they had enjoyed without competition for the best part of a century. When we were at our studies we can perfectly remember that every young man was set to read Pope, Swift, and Ad- dison as regularly as Virgil, Cicero, and Horace. All who had any tincture of letters were familiar with their writings and their history: allusions to them abounded in all popular discourses and all ambitious conversa- tion; and they and their contemporaries were universally acknowledged as our great models of excellence, and placed without challenge at the head of our national literature. New books, even when allowed to have merit, were never thought of as fit to be placed in the same class, but were generally read and forgotten, and passed away like the transitory meteors of a lower sky; while they remained in their brightness, and were supposed to shine with a fixed and unalterable glory. All this, however, we take it, is now pretty well altered; and in so far as persons of our antiquity can judge of the training and habits of the rising generation, those celebrated writers no longer form the manual of our studious youth, or enter necessarily into the institution of a liberal education. Their names, indeed, are still familiar to our ears; but their writings no lon'ger solicit our ha- bitual notice, and their subjects begin already to fade from our recollection. Their high privileges and proud distinctions, at any rate, have evidently passed into other hands. It is no longer to them that the ambitious look up with envy, or the humble with admiration; nor is it in their pages that the pretenders to wit and eloquence now search for allusions that are sure to captivate, and illustrations that cannot be mistaken. In this decay of their reputation they have few advocates and no imitators. And from a comparison of many observations, it seems to be clearly ascertained that they are declined considerably from "the high meridian of their glory," and may fairly be apprehended to be "hastening to their Betting." Neither is it time alone that has wrought this obscuration ; for the fame of Shakspeare still shines in undecaying brightness, and that of Bacon has been steadily advancing and gathering new honours during the whole period which has witnessed the rise and decline of his less vigorous succes- sors. There are but two possible solutions for phenomena of this sort. Our taste has either degenerated, or its old models have been fairly surpassed; and we have ceased to admire the writers of the last century, only because they are too good for us, or because they are not good enough. Now, we confess we are no believers in the absolute and permanent cor- ruption of national taste; on the contrary, we think that it is, of all faculties, that which is most sure to advance and improve with time and experience; and that, with the exception of those great physical or political disasters which have given a check to civilization itself, there has always been a sensible progress in this particular, and that the general taste of every successive generation is better than that of its predecessors. There are little capricious fluctuations, no doubt, and fits of foolish ad- miration or fastidiousness, which cannot be so easily accounted for. But the great move- ments are all progressive; and though the progress consists at one time in withholding toleration from gross faults, and at "another in giving their high prerogative to great beauties, this alternation has no tendenc)' to obstruct the general advance, but, on the contrary, is the best and the safest course in which it can be conducted. We are of opinion, then, that the writers who adorned the beginning of the last century have been eclipsed by those of our own time, and that they have no chance of ever regaining the supremacy in which they have thus been supplanted. There is not, however, in our judgment, anything very stupendous in this triumph of our contemporaries; and the greater wonder with us is that it was so long delayed, and left for them to achieve. For the truth is, that the writers of the former age had not a great deal more than their judgment and industry to stand on, and were always much more remarkable for the fewness of their faults than the greatness of their beauties. Their laurels were won much more by good conduct and discipline than by enterprising boldness or native force; nor can it be regarded as any very great merit in those who had so little of the inspiration of genius to have steered clear of the dangers to which that inspiration is liable. Speaking generally of that generation of authors, it may be said that, as poets, they had no force or greatness of fancy no pathos, and no enthusiasm, and, as philosophers, no 373 ENGLISH LITERATURE. comprehensiveness, depth, or orginality. They are sagacious, no- doubt neat, clear, and rea- sonable; but for the most part cold, timid, and superficial. They never meddle with the great scenes of nature or the great passions of man, but content themselves with just and sarcastic representations of city life, and of the paltry passions and meaner vices that are bred in that lower element. Their chief care is to avoid being ridiculous in the eyes of the witty, and above all to eschew the ridicule of exces- sive sensibility or enthusiasm to be witty and rational themselves with a good grace, and to give thei* countenance to no wisdom and no morality which passes the standards that are current in good company. Their inspiration, accordingly, is little more than a sprightly sort of good sense; and they have scarcely any in- vention but what is subservient to the purposes of derision and satire. Little gleams of plea- santry and sparkles of wit glitter through their compositions, but no glow of feeling no blaze of imagination, no flashes of genius ever irradiate their substance. They never pass beyond "the visible diurnal sphere," or deal in anything that can either lift us above our vulgar nature or ennoble its reality. With these accomplishments they may pass well enough for sensible and polite writers, but scarcely for men of genius; and it is certainly far more surprising that persons of this de- scription should have maintained themselves for near a century at the head of the literature of a country that had previously produced a Shakspeare, a Bacon, and a Taylor, than that towards the end of that long period doubts should have arisen as to the legitimacy of the title by which they laid claim to that high station. Both parts of the phenomenon, how- ever, we dare say, had causes which better ex- pounders might explain to the satisfaction of all the world. We see them but imperfectly, and have room only for an imperfect sketch of what we see. Our first literature consisted of saintly le- gends and romances of chivalry, though Chaucer gave it a more national and popular character by his original descriptions of external nature, j and the familiarity and gaiety of his social humour, la the time of Elizabeth it received a copious infusion of classical images and ideas, but it was still intrinsically romantic, serious, and even somewhat lofty and enthusi- astic. Authors were then so few in number that they were looked upon with a sort of veneration, and considered as a kind of in- spired persons, at least they were not yet so numerous as to be obliged to abuse each other in order to obtain a share of distinction for themselves; and they neither affected a tone of derision in their writings, nor wrote in fear of derision from others. They were filled with their subjects, and dealt with them fearlessly in their own way; and the stamp of originality, force, and freedom is consequently upon almost all their productions. In the reign of James I. our literature, with some few exceptions, touching rather the form than the substance of its merits, appears to us to, have reached the greatest perfection to which it has yet attained, though it would probably have ad- vanced still farther in the succeeding reign had not the great national dissensions which then arose turned the talent and energy of the people into other channels first to the asser- tion of their civil rights, and afterwards to the discussion of their religious interests. The graces of literature suffered of course in those fierce contentions, and a deeper shade of aus- terity was thrown upon the intellectual chro- nicler of the nation. Her genius, however, though less captivating and adorned than in the happier days which preceded, was still active, fruitful, and commanding; and the period of the Civil wars, besides the mighty minds that guided the public councils and were absorbed in public cares, produced the giant powers of Taylor, and Hobbes, and Bar- row; the muse of Milton, the learning of Coke, and the ingenuity of Cowley. The Restoration introduced a French court under circumstances more favourable for the effectual exercise of court influence than ever before existed in England, but this of itself would not have been sufficient to account for the sudden change in our literature which ensued. It was seconded by causes of a more general operation. The Restoration was un- doubtedly a popular act; and indefensible as the conduct of the army and the civil leaders was on that occasion, there can be no question that the severities of Cromwell and the ex- travagance of the sectaries had made repub- lican professions hateful, and religious ardour ridiculous, in the eyes of the people at large. All the eminent writers of the preceding period, however, had inclined to the party that was now overthrown; and their writings had not merely been accommodated to the character of the government under which they were pro- duced, but were deeply imbued with its ob- noxious principles as those of their respective authors. When the restraints of authority were taken off, therefore, and it became profit- able as well as popular to discredit the fallen party, it was natural that the leading authors ENGLISH LITERATURE. 379 should affect a style of ( levity and derision, as most opposite to that of their opponents, and best calculated for the purposes they had in view. The nation, too, was now for the first time essentially divided in point of character and principle, and a much greater proportion were capable both of writing in support of their own notions, and of being influenced by what was written. Add to all this, that there were real and serious defects in the style and manner of the former generation ; and that the grace, and brevity, and vivacity of that gayer manner which was now introduced from France were not only good and captivating in them- selves, but had then all the charms of novelty and of contrast, and it will not be difficult to understand how it came to supplant that which had been established of old in the country, and that so suddenly that the same genera- tion, among whom Milton had been formed to the severe sanctity of wisdom and the noble independence of genius, lavished its loudest applauses on the obscenity and ser- vility of such writers as llochester and Wy- cherly. This change, however, like all sudden chan- ges, was too fierce and violent to be long main- tained at the same pitch; and when the wits and profligates of King Charles had sufficiently insulted the seriousness and virtue of their predecessors, there would probably have been a revulsion towards the accustomed taste of the nation, had not the party of the innovators been reinforced by champions of more temper- ance and judgment. The result seemed at one time suspended on the will of Dryden, in whose individual person the genius of the English and of the French school of literature may be said to have maintained a protracted struggle. But the evil principle prevailed. Carried by the original bent of his genius and his famili- arity with our older models to the cultivation of our native style, to which he might have imparted more steadiness and correctness for in force and in sweetness it was already match- less he was unluckily seduced by the attrac- tions of fashion, and the dazzling of the dear wit and gay rhetoric in which it delighted, to lend his powerful aid to the new corruptions and refinements, and to prostitute his great gifts to the purposes of party rage or licentious ribaldry. The sobriety of the succeeding reigns allayed this fever of profanity, but no genius arose sufficiently powerful to break the spell that still withheld us from the use of our own peculiar gifts and faculties. On the contrary, it was the unfortunate ambition of the next generation of authors to improve and perfect the new style rather than to return to the old one; and it cannot be denied that they did improve it. They corrected its gross indecency, increased its precision and correctness, made its pleasantry and sarcasm more polished and elegant, and spread through the whole of iu irony, its narration, and its reflection, a tone of clear and condensed good sense which re- commended itself to all who had and all who had not any relish for higher beauties. This is the praise of Queen Anne's wits, and to this praise they are justly entitled. This was left for them to do, and they did it well. They were invited to it by the circumstances of their situation, and do not seem to have been pos- sessed of any such bold or vigorous spirit as either to neglect or to outgo the invitation. Coming into life immediately after the con- summation of a bloodless revolution, effected much more by the cool sense than the angry passions of the nation, they seem to have felt that they were born in an age of reason rather than of fancy, and that men's minds, though considerably divided and unsettled upon many points, were in a much better temper to relish judicious argument and cutting satire than the glow of enthusiastic passion or the richness of a luxuriant imagination. To these accord- ingly they made no pretensions; but, writing with infinite good sense and great grace and vivacity, and above all, writing for the first time in a tone that was peculiar to the upper ranks of society, and upon subjects that were almost exclusively interesting to them, they naturally figured, at least while the manner was new, as the most accomplished, fashion- able, and perfect writers which the world had ever seen; and made the wild, luxuriant, and .humble sweetness of our earlier authors appear rude and untutored in the comparison. Men grew ashamed of admiring, and afraid of imi- tating, writers of so little skill and smartness; and the opinion became general, not only that their faults were intolerable, but that even their beauties were puerile and barbarous, and unworthy the serious regard of a polite and distinguishing age. These and similar considerations will go far to account for the celebrity which those authors acquired in their day; but it is not quite so easy to explain how they should have so long retained their ascendant. One cause undoubt- edly was the real excellence of their productions in the style which they had adopted. It was hopeless to think of surpassing them in that style; and recommended as it was by the fel- icity of their execution, it required some cour- sso ENGLISH LITERATURE. age to depart from it and to recur to another which seemed to have been so lately abandoned for its sake. The age^ which succeeded, too, was not the age of courage or adventure. There never was, on the whole, a quieter time than the reigns of the two first Georges, and the greater part of that which ensued. There were two little provincial rebellions indeed, and a fair proportion of foreign war, but there was nothing to stir the minds of the people at large to rouse their passions or excite their imaginations: nothing like the agitations of the Reformation in the 16th century, or of the Civil wars in the 17th. They went on accord- ingly minding their old business and reading their old books with great patience and stu- pidity. And certainly there never was so re- markable a dearth of original talent so long an interruption of native genius as during about sixty years in the middle of the last century. The dramatic art was dead fifty years before, and poetry seemed verging to a similar extinction. The few sparks that ap- peared, however, showed that the old fire was burned out, and that the altar must hereafter be heaped with fuel of another qualit}'. Gray, with the talents rather of a critic than a poet with learning, fastidiousness, and scrupulous delicacy of taste, instead of fire, tenderness, or invention began and ended a small school which we could scarcely have wished to become permanent, admirable in many respects as some of its productions are, being far too elaborate and artificial either for grace or for fluency, and fitter to excite the admiration of scholars than the delight of ordinary men. However, they had the merit of not being in any degree French, and of restoring to our poetry the dignity of seriousness and the tone at least of force and energy. The Whartons, both as critics and as poets, were of considerable ser- vice in discrediting the high pretensions of the former race, and in bringing back to public notice the great stores and treasures of poetry which lay hid in the records of our ancient literature. Akcnside attempted a sort of clas- sical and philosophical rapture which no ele- gance of language could easily have rendered popular, but which had merits of no vulgar order for those who could study it. Goldsmith wrote with perfect elegance and beauty, in a style of mellow tenderness and elaborate sim- plicity. He had the harmony of Pope without his quaintness, and his selectness of diction without his coldness and eternal vivacity. And last of all came Cowper, with a style of complete originality, and for the first time luade it apparent to readers of all descriptions that Pope and Addison were no longer to be the models of English poetry. In philosophy and prose writing in general the case was nearly parallel. The name of Hume is by far the most considerable which occurs in the period to which we have alluded. But though his thinking was English, his style is entirely French; and being naturally of a cold fancy, there is nothing of that eloquence or richness about him which characterizes the writings of Taylor, and Hooker, and Bacon: and continues, with less weight of matter, to please in those of Cowley and Clarendon. War burton had great powers, and wrote with more force and freedom than the wits to whom he succeeded; but his faculties were perverted by a paltry love of paradox, and rendered useless to mankind by an unlucky choice of subjects, and the arrogance and dogmatism of his temper. Adam Smith was neatly the first who made deeper reasonings and more exact knowledge popular among us; and Junius and Johnson the first who again familiarized us with more glowing and .sonorous diction, and made us feel the tameness and poorness of the serious style of Addison and Swift. This brings us down almost to the present times, in which the revolution in our literature has been accelerated and confirmed by the concurrence of many causes. The agitations of the French revolution, and the discussions as well as the hopes and terrors to which it gave occasion the genius of Edmund Burke and some others of his country; the impression of the new literature of Germany, evidently the original of our Lake-school of poetry, and of many innovations in our drama; the rise or revival of a general spirit of Methodism in the lower orders; and the vast extent of our po- litical and commercial relations, which have not. only familiarized all ranks of people with distant countries and great undertakings, but have brought knowledge and enterprise home, not merely to the imagination, but to the actual experience of almost every individual, all these, and several other circumstances, have so far improved or excited the character of our nation as to have created an effectual demand for more profound speculation and more serious emotion than was dealt in by the writers of the former century, and which, if it has not yet produced a corresponding supply in all branches, has at least had the effect of decry- ing the commodities that were previously in vogue as unsuited to the altered condition of the times'. FRANCIS JEFFREZ. EIGHT AT LAST. 331 THE GONDOLA GLIDES. The gondola glides, Like a spirit of night, O'er the slumbering tides, In the calm moonlight. The star of the north Shows her golden eye, But a brighter looks forth From yon lattice on high ! Her taper ia out, And the silver beam Floats the maiden about Like a beautiful dream ! And the beat of her heart Makes her tremble all o'er; And she lists with a start To the dash of the oar. But the moments are past, And her fears are at rest, And her lover at last Holds her clasped to his breast; And the planet above, And the quiet blue sea, Are pledged to his love And his constancy. Her cheek is reclined On the home of his breast; And his fingers are twined 'Mid her ringlets, which rest, In many a fold, O'er his arm that is placed Round the cincture of gold Which encircles the waist. He looks to the stars Which are gemming the blue, And devoutly he swears He will ever be true; Then bends him to hear The low sound of her sigh, And kiss the fond tear From her beautiful eye. And he watches its flashes, Which brightly reveal What the long fringing lashes Would vainly conceal; And reads while he kneels All his ardour to speak Her reply, as it steals In a blush o'er her cheek ! Till won by the prayers Which so softly reprove, On his bosom, in tears. She half-murmura her love; And the stifled confession Enraptured he sips, 'Mid the breathings of passion, In dew from her lips. J. K. HERVBT. RIGHT AT LAST. [Mrs. Elizabeth C. (Jaskell, born 1811, died 12h November, 1S05. She was the author of Alary Barton, Jlutk, No,th and S -utlt, and other novels, chiefly de- scriptive of the jieople in the mining district* around Manchester, in which city the greater part of her life was passed. She also wrote a biography of lier friend Charlotte Bronte. Rigkt ut Last u,ul olke,- Tutei Samp- sou Low, Son and Mansion) contains some of her best work. The first of the stories narrates the trials of a young doctor and his wife who have just commenced house-keeping ill Loiidon.] "Two hundred and thirty-six pounds," he said, putting the accounts away to clear the table for tea, as Crawford brought in the tilings. "Why, I don't call that much. I believe I reckoned on theit coming to a great deal more. I'll go into the city to-morrow, and sell out some share*, and set your little heart at ease. Now don't go and put a spoonful less tea in to-night to help to pay these bills. Earning is better than saving, and I am earning at a famous rate. Give me good tea, Maggie, for I have done a good day's work." They were sitting in the doctor's consulting- room, for the better economy of fire. To add to Margaret's discomfort, the chimney smoked this evening. She had held her tongue from any repining words; for she remembered the old proverb about a smoky chimney and a scolding wife; but she was more irritated by the puffs of smoke coming over her pretty white work than she cared to show ; and it was in a sharper tone than usual that she spoke, in bidding Crawford take care and have the chim- ney swept. The next morning all had cleared brightly off. Her husband had convinced her that their money matters were going on well; the fire burned briskly at breakfast-time, and the unwonted sun shone in at the windows. Margaret was surprised when Crawford told her that he had not been able to meet with a chimney sweeper that morning, but that he had tried to arrange the coals in the grate so that, for this one morning at least, his mistress should not be annoyed, and by the next he would take care to secure a sweep. Margaret thanked him, and acquiesced in all plans about giving a general cleaning to the room, the more readily because she felt that she had RIGHT AT LAST. spoken sharply the night before. She decided to go and pay all her bills and make some distant calls on the next morning; and her husband promised to go into the city and pro\ ide her with the money. This he did. He showed her the notes that evening, locked them up for the night in his bureau; and, lo, in the morning they were gone! They had breakfasted in the back parlour, or half-furnished dining-room. A charwoman was in the front room, cleaning after the sweeps. Doctor Brown went to his bureau, singing an old Scotch tune as he left the dining-room. It was so long before he came back, that Margaret went to look for him. He was sitting in the chair nearest to the bureau, leaning his head upon it, in an attitude of the deepest despon- dency. He did not seem to hear Margaret's step, as she made her way among rolled-up carpets and chairs piled on each other. She had to touch him on the shoulder before she could rouse him. "James, James!" she said in alarm. He looked up at her almost as if he did not know her. "0, Margaret!" he said, and took hold of her hands, and hid his face in her neck. "Dearest love, what is it?" she asked, think- ing he was suddenly taken ill. "Some one has been to my bureau since last night," he groaned, without either looking up or moving. "And taken the money," said Margaret, in an instant understanding how it stood. It was a great blow; a great loss, far greater than the few extra pounds by which the bills had exceeded her calculations; yet it seemed as if she could bear it better. "0, dear!" she said, "that is bad; but after all Do you know," she said, trying to raise his face, so that she might look into it, and give him the encourage- ment of hor honest loving eyes, "at first I thought you were deadly ill, and all sorts of dreadful possibilities rushed through my mind, it is such a relief to find that it is only money " "Only money!" he echoed, sadly, avoiding her look, as if he could not bear to show her how much he felt it. "And after all," she said with spirit, "it can't be gone far. Only last night here. The chimney-sweeps we must send Crawford for the police directly. You did not take the numbers of the notes!" ringing the bell as she spoke. "No; they were only to be in our possession one night," he said. "No, to be sure not." The charwoman now appeared at the door with her pail of hot water. Margaret looked into her face, as if to read guilt or innocence. She was a prote'ge'e of Christie's, who was not apt to accord her favour easily, or without good grounds; an honest, decent widow, with a large family to maintain by her labour, that was the character in which Margaret had en- gaged her; and she looked it. Grimy in her dress because she could not spare the money or time to be clean her skin looked healthy and cared for; she had a straightforward, busi- ness-like appearance about her, and seemed in no ways daunted nor surprised to see Doctor and Mrs. Brown standing in the middle of the room, in displeased perplexity and distress. She went about her business without taking any particular notice of them. Margaret's suspicions settled down yet more distinctly upon the chimney-sweeper; but he could not have gone far, the notes could hardly have got into circulation. Such a sum could not have been spent by such a man in so short a time, and the restoration of the money was her first, her only object. She had scarcely a thought for subsequent duties, such as prosecution of the offender, and the like consequences of crime. While her whole energies were bent on the speedy recovery of the money, and she was rapidly going over the necessary steps to be taken, her husband "sat all poured out into his chair," as the Germans say; no force in him to keep his limbs in any attitude requiring the slightest exertion; his face sunk, miserable, and with that foreshadowing of the lines of age which sudden distress is apt to call out on the youngest and smoothest faces, " What can Crawford be about?" said Mar- garet, pulling the bell again with vehemence. "0, Crawford!" as the man at that instant appeared at the door. "Is anything the matter?" he said, inter- rupting her, as if alarmed into an unusual discomposure by her violent ringing. " I had just gone round the corner with the letter master gave me last night for the post, and when I came back Christie told me you had rung for me, ma'am. I beg your pardon, but I have hurried so," and, indeed, his breath did come quickly, and his face was full of penitent anxiety. "0, Crawford! I am afraid the sweep has got into your master's bureau, and taken all the money he put there last night. It is gone at any rate. Did you ever leave him in the room alone?" "I can't say, ma'am; perhaps I did. Yea! I believe I did. I remember now, I had my RIGHT AT LAST. 333 work to do; and I thought the charwoman was come, and I went to my pantry; and some time after Christie came to me complaining that Mrs. Roberts was so late; and then I knew that he must have been alone in the room. But, dear me, ma'am, who would have thought there had been so much wickedness in him?" "How was it that he got into the bureau?" said Margaret, turning to her husband. ' ' Was the lock broken?" He roused himself up, like one who wakens from sleep. "Yes! No! I suppose I had turned the key without locking it last night. The bureau was closed, not locked, when 1 went to it this morning, and the bolt was shot." He relapsed into inactive, thoughtful silence. "At any rate, it is no use losing time in wondering now. Go, Crawford, as fast as you can, for a policeman. You know the name of the chimney-sweeper, of course," she added, as Crawford was preparing to leave the room. "Indeed, ma'am, I'm very sorry, but I just agreed with the first who was passing along the street. If I could have known " But Margaret had turned away with an im- patient gesture of despair. Crawford went without another word to seek a policeman. In vain did his wife try and persuade Doctor Brown to taste any breakfast; a cup of tea was all he would try to swallow, and that was taken in hasty gulps, to clear his dry throat, as he heard Crawford's voice talking to the policeman whom he was ushering in. The policeman heard all, and said little. Then the inspector came. Doctor Brown seemed to leave all the talking to Crawford, who apparently liked nothing better. Margaret was infinitely distressed and dismayed by the effect the robbery seemed to have on her hus- band's energies. The probable loss of such a sum was bad enough, but there was something so weak and poor in character, in letting it affect him so strongly to deaden all energy and destroy all hopeful spring, that although Margaret did not dare to define her feeling, nor the cause of it, to herself, she had the fact before her perpetually, that if she were to judge of her husband from this morning only, she must learn to rely on herself alone in all cases of emergency. The inspector repeatedly turned from Crawford to Doctor and Mrs. Brown for answers to his inquiries. It was Margaret who replied with terse, short sentences, very different from Crawford's long involved expla- nations. At length the inspector asked to ppeak to her alone. She followed him into the room, past the affronted Crawford and her despondent husband. The inspector gave one sharp look at the charwoman, who was going on with her scouring with stolid indifference, turned her out, and then asked Margaret where Crawfom came from, how long he had lived with them, and various other questions, all showing the direction his suspicions had taken. Thia shocked Margaret extremely; but she quickly answered every inquiry; and, ut the end, watched the inspector's face closely, and waited for the avowal of the suspicion. He led the way back to the other room without a word, however. Crawford had left, and Doctor Brown was trying to read the morning's letters (which had just been deliv- ered), but his hands shook so much that he could not see a line. "Doctor Brown," said the inspector, "I have little doubt that your man-servant has committed this robbery. I judge so from his whole manner; and from his anxiety to tell the story, and his way of trying to throw suspicion on the chimney-sweeper, neither whose name nor dwelling can he give; at least he says not. Your wife tells us he has already been out of the house this morning, even before he went to summon a policeman; so there is little doubt that he has found means for concealing or dis- posing of the notes; and you say you do not know the numbers. However, that can pro- bably be ascertained." At this moment Christie knocked at the door, and, inastateof greatagitation, demanded to speak to Margaret. She brought up an additional store of suspicious circumstances, none of them much in themselves, but all tending to criminate her fellow-servant. She had expected to find herself blamed for starting the idea of Crawford's guilt, and was rather surprised to find herself listened to with atten- tion by the inspector. This led her to tell many other little things, all bearing against Crawford, which, a dread of being thought jealous and quarrelsome, had led her to conceal before from her master and mistress. At the end of her story the inspector said: "There can be no doubt of the course to be taken. You, sir, must give your man-servant in charge. He will be taken before the sitting magistrate directly; and there is already evidence enough to make him be remanded for a week, during which time we may trace the notes, and complete the chain." "Must I prosecute?" said Doctor Brown, almost lividly pale. "It is, I own, a serious loss of money to me; but there will be the 334 RIGHT AT LAST. further expenses of the prosecution the loss of time the " He stopped. He saw his wife's indignant eyes fixed upon him; and shrank from their look of unconscious reproach. "Yes, inspector," he said, "I give him in charge. Do what you will. Do what is right. Of course I take the consequences. AVe take the consequences. Don't we, Margaret?" He spoke in a kind of wild low voice, of which Margaret thought it best to take no notice. "Tell us exactly what to do," she said, very coldly and quietly, addressing herself to the policeman. He gave her the necessary directions as to their attending at the police-office, and bringing Christie as a witness, and then went away to take measures for securing Crawford. Margaret was surprised to find how little hurry or violence needed to be used in Craw- ford's arrest. She had expected to hear sounds of commotion in the house, if indeed Crawford himself had not taken the alarm and escaped. But when she had suggested the latter appre- hension to the inspector, he smiled, and told her that when he had first heard of the charge from the policeman on the beat, he had sta- tioned a detective officer within sight of the house, to watch all ingress or egress; so that Crawford's whereabouts would soon have been discovered if he had attempted to escape. Margaret's attention was now directed to her husband. He was making hurried prepara- tions for setting off on his round of visits, and evidently did not wish to have any conversation with her on the subject of the morning's event. He promised to be back by eleven o'clock; before which time, the inspector had assured them, their presence would not be needed. Once or twice Doctor Brown said, as if to himself, " It is a miserable business. " Indeed, Margaret felt it to be so; and now that the necessity for immediate speech and action was over, she began to fancy that she must be very hard-hearted very deficient in common feel- ing; inasmuch as she had not suffered like her husband at the discovery that the sen-ant whom they had been learning to consider as a friend, and to look upon as having their in- terests so warmly at heart was, in all proba- bility, a treacherous thief. She remembered all his pretty marks of attention to her, from the day when he had welcomed her arrival at her new home by his humble present of flowers, until only the day before, when, seeing her fatigued, he had, unasked, made her a cup of coffee, coffee such as none but he could make. How often had he thought of warm dry clothes for her husband; how wakeful had he been at nights; how diligent in the mornings! It was no wonder that her husband felt this discovery of domestic treason acutely. It was she who was hard and selfish, and thinking more of the recovery of the money than of the terrible disappointment in character, if the charge against Crawford were true. At eleven o'clock her husband returned with a cab. Christie had thought the occasion of appearing at a police-office worthy of her Sunday clothes, and was as smart as her pos- sessions could make her. But Margaret and her husband looked as pale and sorrow-stricken as if they had been the accused, and not the accusers. Doctor Brown shrank from meeting Craw- ford's eye, as the one took his place in the witness-box, the other in the dock. Yet Craw- ford was trying Margaret was sure of this to catch his master's attention. Failing that, he looked at Margaret with an expression she could not fathom. Indeed, the whole character of his face was changed. Instead of the calm smooth look of attentive obedience, he had assumed an insolent, threatening expression of defiance; smiling occasionally in a most un- pleasant manner, as Doctor Brown spoke of the bureau and its contents. He was remanded for a week ; but, the evidence as yet being far from conclusive, bail for his appearance was taken. This bail was offered by his brother, a respectable tradesman, well known in his neighbourhood, and to whom Crawford had sent on his arrest. So Crawford was at large again, much to Christie's djsmay; who took off her Sunday clothes, on her return home, with a heavy heart, hoping, rather than trusting, that they should not all be murdered in their beds before the week was out. It must be confessed Margaret herself was not entirely free from fears of Crawford's vengeance; his eyes had looked so maliciously and vindictively at her and at her husband, as they gave their evidence. But his absence in the household gave Margaret enough to do to prevent her dwelling on foolish fears. His being away made a terrible blank in their daily comfort, which neither Margaret nor Christie exert them- selves as they would could fill up: and it was the rnore necessary that all should go on smoothly, as Doctor Brown's nerves had re- ceived such a shock, at the discovery of the guilt of his favourite trusted servant, that Margaret was led at times to apprehend a serious illness. He would pace about the room at night, when he thought she was asleep, EIGHT AT LAST. 335 moaning to himself and in the morning would require the utmost persuasion to induce him to go out and see his patients. He was worse than ever, after consulting the lawyer whom he had employed to conduct the prosecution. There was, as Margaret was brought unwill- ingly to perceive, some mystery in the case; for he eagerly took his letters from the post, going to the door as soon as he heard the knock, and concealing their directions from her. As the week passed away, his nervous misery still increased. One evening the candles were not lighted he was sitting over the fire in a listless atti- tude, resting his head on his hand, and that supported on his knee, Margaret determined to try an experiment, to see if she could not probe, and find out the nature of the sore that he hid with such constant care. She took a stool and sat down at his feet, taking his hand in hers. " Listen, dearest James, to an old story I once heard. It may interest you. There were two orphans, boy and girl in their hearts, though they were a young man and young woman in years. They were not brother and sister, and by-and-by they fell in love; just in the same fond silly way you and I did, you remember. Well, the girl was amongst her own people, but the boy was far away from his, if indeed he had any alive. But the girl loved him so dearly for himself, that sometimes she thought she was glad that he had no one to care for him but just her alone. Her friends did not like him as much as she did; for, per- haps, they were wise, grave, cold people, and she, I daresay, was very foolish. And they did not like her marrying the boy; which was just stupidity in them, for they had not a word to say against him. But, about a week before the marriage day was fixed, they thought they had found out something my darling love, don't take away your hand don't tremble so, only just listen! Her aunt came to her and said: 'Child, you must give up your lover: his father was tempted, and sinned, and if he is now alive he is a transported convict. The marriage cannot take place." But the girl stood up and said: 'If he has known this great sorrow and shame, he needs my love all the more. I will not leave him, nor forsake him, but love him all the better. And I charge you, aunt, as you hope to receive a blessing for doing as you would be done by, that you tell no one!' I really think that girl awed her aunt, in some strange way, into secrecy. But, when she was left alone, she cried long and sadly, to think what a shadow rested on VOL. L the heart she loved so dearly, and she meant to strive to lighten the life, and to conceal for ever that she had heard of the burden; but now she thinks 0, my husband ! how you must have suffered " as he bent down "his head on her shoulder and cried terrible man's tears. "God be thanked!" he said at length. "You know all, and you do not shrink from me. 0, what a miserable, deceitful coward I have been! Suffered! Yes suffered enough to drive me mad; and if I had but been brave, I might have been spared all this long twelve months of agony. But it is right I should have been punished. And you knew it even before we were married, when you might have drawn back." "I could not: you would not have broken off your engagement with me, would you, under the like circumstances, if our cases had been reversed?" "I do not know. Perhaps I might, for I am not so brave, so good, so strong as you, my Margaret. How could I be? Let me tell you more: We wandered about, my mother and I, thankful that our name was such a common one, but shrinking from every allusion in a way which no one can understand who has not been conscious of an inward sore. Living in an assize town was torture: a com- mercial one was nearly as bad. My father was the son of a dignified clergyman, well known to his brethren: a cathedral town was to be avoided, because there the circumstance of the Dean of Saint Botolph's son having been transported, was sure to be known. I had to be educated: therefore we had to live in a town; for my mother could not bear to part from me, and I was sent to a day-school. We were very poor for our station no! we had no station; we were the wife and child of a convict, for my poor mother's early habits, I should have said. But when I was about fourteen, my father died in his exile, leaving, as convicts in those days sometimes did, a large fortune. It all came to us. My mother shut herself up, and cried and prayed for a whole day. Then she called me in, and took me into her counsel We solemnly pledged ourselves to give the money to some charity, as soon as I was legally of age. Till then the interest was laid by, every penny of it ; though sometimes we were in sore distress for money, my education cost so much. But how could we tell in what way the money had been accumulated?" Here he dropped his voice. "Soon after I was one- and-twenty the papers rang with admiration of the unknown munificent donor of certain sums. I loathed their praises. I shrank from all 25 386 EIGHT AT LAST. recollection of my father. I remembered him dimly, but always as angry and violent with my mother. My poor, gentle mother! Margaret, she loved my father; and for her sake I have tried, since her death, to feel kindly towards his memory. Soon after my mother's death I came to know you, my jewel, my treasure!" After a while he began again. "But, Margaret! even now you do not know the worst. After my mother's death I found a bundle of law papers of newspaper reports about my father's trial. Poor soul! why she had kept them, I cannot say. They were j covered over with notes in her handwriting; \ and, for that reason, I kept them. It was so touching to read her record of the days spent by her in her solitary innocence, while he was embroiling himself deeper and deeper in crime. I kept this bundle {as I thought so safely!) in a secret drawer of my bureau ; but that wretch Crawford has got hold of it. I missed the papers that very morning. The loss of them was infinitely worse than the loss of the money; and now Crawford threatens to bring out the one terrible fact, in open court, if he can; and his lawyer may do it, I believe. At any rate, to have it blazoned out to the world, I who have spent my life in fearing this hour! But most of all for you, Margaret! Still if only it could be avoided ! Who will employ the son of Brown, the noted forger? I shall lose all my practice. Men will look askance at me as I enter their doors. They will drive me into crime. I sometimes fear that crime is heredi- tary! Margaret! what am I to do?" "What can you do?" she asked. "I can refuse to prosecute." " Let Crawford go free, you knowing him to be guilty?" " I know him to be guilty." "Then, simply, you cannot do this thing. You let loose a criminal upon the public." ' ' But if I do not, we shall come to shame and poverty. It is for you I mind it, not for myself. I ought never to have married." "Listen to me. I don't care for poverty; and as to shame, I should feel it twenty times more grievously if you and I consented to screen the guilty, from any fear or for any selfish motives of our own. I don't pretend that I shall not feel it, when first the truth is known. But my shame will turn into pride, as I watch you live it down. You have been rendered morbid, dear husband, by having something all your life to conceal. Let the world know the truth, and say the worst. You will go forth a free, honest, honourable man, able to do your future work without fear." "That scoundrel Crawford has sent for an answer to his impudent note," said Christie, putting in her head at the door. "Stay! May / write it?" said Margaret. She wrote : Whatever yon may do or say there is hut one course open to us. No threau can Ueter your master from doing his duty. MARGARET BBOWN. "There ! " she said, passing it to her husband ; "he will see that I know all, and I suspect he has reckoned something on your tenderness for me." Margaret's note only enraged, it did not dannt Crawford. Before a week was out every one who cared knew that Doctor Brown, the rising young physician, was son of the notorious Brown the forger. All the consequences took place which he had anticipated. Crawford had to suffer a severe sentence; and Doctor Brown and his wife had to leave their house and go to a smaller one; they had to pinch and to screw, aided in all most zealously by the faithful Christie. But Doctor Brown was lighter-hearted than he had ever been before in his conscious lifetime. His foot was now firmly planted on the ground, and every step he rose was a sure gain. People did say that Margaret had been seen, in those worst times, on her hands and knees cleaning her own door- step. But I don't believe it, for Christie would never have let her do that. And, as far as my own evidence goes, I can only say that, the last time I was in London, I saw a brass-plate with Doctor James Brown upon it, on the door of a handsome house in a handsome square. And as I looked, I saw a brougham drive up to the door, and. a lady get out, and go into that house, who was certainly the Margaret Frazer of old days graver, more portly, more stern I had almost said. But, as I watched and thought, I saw her come to the dining-room window with a baby in her arms, and her whole face melted into a smile of infinite sweetness. THE EXCHANGE. "We pledged our hearts, my love and I, I in my arms the maiden clasping; I could not tell the reason why, But, oh ! I trembled like an aspen. Her father's love she bade me gain ; I went, and shook like any reed : I strove to act the man in vain ! We had exchanged our hearts indeed. 8. T. COLERIDGB. ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN. iS7 EOBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN AT SHERWOOD FORES'?. The merry pranks he play'd would ask an age to tell, And the adventures strange that Robin Hood befell, When Mansfield many a time for Robin hath been laid, How he hath cozen'd them that him would have betrayed; How often he hath come to Nottingham disguised, And cunningly escaped, being set to be surprised. In this our spacious isle I think there is not one But he hath heard some talk of him and Little John; And to the end of time the tales shall ne'er be done, Of Scarlock, George-a-green, and Much the miller's son, Of Tuck the merry friar, which many a sermon made In praise of Robin Hood, his outlaws, and their trade. An hundred valiant men had this brave Robin Hood Still ready at his call, that bowmen were right good, All clad in Lincoln green, with caps of red and blue, His fellow's winded horn, not one of them but knew, When setting to their lips their little bugles shrill, The warbling echoes waked from every dale and hill; The bauldricks set with studs athwart their shoulders cast, To which, under their arms, their sheafs were buckled fast; A short sword at their belt, a buckler scarce a span ; Who struck below the knee not counted then a man ; All made of Spanish yew, the bows were wondrous strong; They not an arrow drew but was a cloth-yard long. Of archery they had the very perfect craft, With broad arrow or but, or prick or roving shaft, At marks full forty score they used to prick and rove, Yet higher than the breast for comfort never strove ; Yet at the farthest mark a foot could hardly win : At long-buts, short, and hoyles, each one could cleave the pin. Their arrows finely paired, for timber and for feather, With birch and brazil pieced, to fly in any weather; And shot they with the round, the square, or forked pile, The loose gave such a twang as might be heard a mile. And of these archers brave there was not any one But he could kill a deer his swiftest speed upon, Which they did boil and roast in many a mighty wood, Sharp hunger the fine sauce to their more kingly food, Then taking them to rest, his merry men and he Slept many a summer's night under the greenwood tree. From wealthy abbots' chests, and churls' abundant store. What oftentimes he took he shared among the poor; No lordly bishop came in lusty Robin's way, To him before he went, but for his pass must pay. The widow in distress he generously relieved, And remedied the wrongs of many a virgin grieved: He from the husband's bed no married woman wan, But to the mistress dear, his loved Marian, Was ever constant known, which, wheresoe'er she came, Was sovereign of the woods, chief lady of the game ; Her clothes tuck'd to the knee, and dainty braided hnir, With bow and quiver arm'd, she wandered here and there Amongst the forest wild ; Diana never knew Such pleasures, nor such harts as Mariana slew. DRAYTOH. 388 THE STORY OF MAEULLO. THE STORY OF MARULLO. [Charles Shirley Brooks, born 1815, died in London 23d February, 1874. He studied for the bar, but adopted literature as his profession. He began his literary career as a dramatist, and produced a number of successful pbiys, amongst them Honour and Riclies ; The Cn-ole ; The Lnuther Arcade, &c. He was even more successful as a novelist, and A+pin Coui-t, The Gordian Knot, The Silver Cord, and Sooner or Later obtained a large share of public favour. In 1854 he visited Russia, Turkey, and Egypt; and the letters descriptive of his travels, which first appeared in the London Moi-ning Chronicle, were afterwards collected and pub- lished in Longman's ''Travellers' Library." For jears he was one of the principal contributors to Punch ; and on the death of Mark Lemon, he succeeded him as editor of that journal. Mr. Brooks wrote for the Gentleman's Magazine a series of Tales fiom the Old Dramatists, and has succeeded in imbuing witli new life several of the works of our early play-writers. The following is one of the tales, and in this, as in all his writings, will be found humour, delicacy, and vigour.] I purpose, with the aid of an old friend, to tell an old story. But I have reasons for thinking that it will not be old to all who may do me the honour of reading it. If I satisfy myself at the end that I have not quite spoiled my friend's tale, I will mention his name; if I do not, I shall only say, "Ah, but you should hear him tell it." A great many years ago, in a certain magni- ficent island, rich in all that nature can do for islands, and :eht;r in a race of brave men and virtuous women take note, if you please, that this is not a satire, nor an allegory, but a story there was great alarm, confusion, and trouble. For which, this was the reason. A strong nation, that dwelt at some distance from the island, but not too far for war-ships to cross a sea, and throw an overwhelming force upon the coast, coveted larger empire than it possessed, and sent forth a powerful fleet against the islanders. It is convenient to give the island a name, so we will call it Sicily, and we may as well call its ambitious and greedy enemy Carthage. The beautiful city in which most of the incidents of our story occurred, we will name Syracuse. The Syracusans, I say, were in a state of great alarm. For not only did they know that the Carthaginian fleet was a very strong one, manned by skilful sailors, and bringing soldiers of extraordinary fierceness and admir- able discipline, but they knew that they them- selves had much neglected the duty of being armed against an enemy. It was not that any Syracusans were of opinion that people ought not to defend themselves when attacked, or that a government with false economical principles had starved their armaments, for they lived a great many years ago, and had not arrived at that noint of enlightenment. But the fact is, that the Syracusans were rich and luxurious; and though, as has been told, the island was rich in brave men and virtuous women, it abounded also with men and women who were neither rich nor virtuous, and these had given the tone to public opinion, such as it was. They had splendid houses, lovely gardens, beautiful equipages, and large wealth ; and while they could enjoy these things, all good in their way, they cared nothing about the general welfare. There was a show of an army and a navy, and the services were favour- ites, especially with the ladies. The naval and military reviews enabled the young officers to display themselves in gorgeous uniforms, and to look like heroes; but the heroic spirit was wanting. When the time came for the hard and cruel work of war, the Syracusans shrunk from it, and felt that they had no chance against men wit!i whom soldiering meant business, and not an excuse for delight- ful and picturesque spectacle. I need not say that everybody, at the crisis, began to lay the blame of the helplessness on everybody but himself, and rushed about declaring that the people who had brought the island into such a shameful condition ought to be burned; but such declarations, though they might be true, did very little good. The Carthaginian fleet was coming, and people told one another of the terrible cruelty of the nation, and how captives were put to death by prolonged tor- tures when Carthage wanted a particularly pleasant holiday. Some little comfort they found (while the better among them were showing a good ex- ample, hastily fortifying, drilling volunteers, and acting the pail of brave men, who would not go down without a fight) in saying that the Carthaginian admiral was but a weak young fellow, named Gisco, whose life had been passed in admiring himself and making ladies admire him, and who would be seized with a headache if he wore his helmet and plume. That was not much. But there was better comfort for them. The wiser men among them had met in council, and had resolved on sending to ask aid from another state let us say Corinth... The Corinthians had a great general and a fine army, and their rulers were not deaf to the argument that if Carthage took Sicily, Corinth would be in danger; for in those days statesmen looked THE STORY OF MARULLO. 389 ahead a little, and were not content with keeping matters smooth for their own time. But the Corinthians imposed certain very .stringent conditions. They were not going to fight for an ally that might ruin them by imbecility. If they sent Timoleon, their general, with his army to help Syracuse, the islanders must accept him as a dictator for the war-time, and submit to whatever he chose to ordain for the good of the cause. This the vainer part did not like at all, but they were overruled by the wiser part; and General Timoleon arrived to take command in Syra- cuse, and to defy the Carthaginians. So much for public affairs; now for private ones. The Praetor or Mayor of Syracuse was named Archidamus, and he had a son called Timagoras, and a beautiful and spirited daugh- ter named Cleora. This young lady was of the kind to which the best women of all ages belong. She could love devotedly, but her love must rest upon a noble object, and she would be her lover's friend, confidante, and helpmate, not his toy and slave. She was as chaste as fair, and her nobility of nature was well known throughout Syracuse. The show- soldiers and the fops and idlers knew better than to ask her in marriage, but there were two men, either of whom she might have wedded without self-sacrifice. One of these, at this time, had been got rid of. His name was Pisander,a gallant gentleman from Thebes, who was every way worthy of her. But her brother Timagoras favoured another suitor, Leosthenes, who was also a gallant soldier, but of a jealous and suspicious nature, though not a mean one. Whether the young lady had cared for Pisander or not does not matter now; he had been sent back, not over civilly, to Thebes, through the influence of the brother over the father. Leosthenes now found things in his favour, for Cleora had all admi- ration for the brave men who rallied for the defence of Syracuse, and he meant to win her love by some desperate achievement against the Carthaginians. On the whole, therefor?, the brave Leosthenes was the only man who was altogether pleased with the condition of public affairs such is the power of love. Here it must be mentioned that in Syracuse the domestic institution of slavery existed, and the unfortunate slaves were generally ill- treated. Of course there were exceptions to this rule; there were some kind masters and mistresses. But for the most part the slaves were beaten on the least provocation, or without any; they were treated worse than beasts, for they were neglected and starved, or if not starved, no consideration was paid to their comforts: they were left without food till their owners had wearied themselves out at their banquets, and were obliged to lie about on the floors or the stairs until, perhaps far into the night, their tyrants had done their revel, when woe to the slave who did not spring at the first call to be ready with the torch and the carriage. They were oppressed more than was prudent, to rest the case no higher, for they murmured and repined, and made no secret of their joy that the Carthaginians were coming to reduce the haughty Syracusans to the same condition as that of their unhappy slaves. Among them was a tall, handsome, and clever man, named Marullo, whom the praetor had bought as an attendant on Cleora's carriage, or to aid in carrying her litter when she chose that means of visiting. He did his duty well, but there was danger in his eye. He was never beaten: Cleora would not have permitted that, and if she would, I think that the angriest master would have thought twice before rousing Marullo's blood. The Corinthian general came, and all the great folks of Syracuse assembled in the senate- house to receive him. He was already a fav- ourite with the ladies, by reason of his renown and by reason of his being a novelty; and while they sat waiting for him, some of the friskier matrons declared that they should be happy to kiss him. We may be sure that Cleora joined in none of this vulgar flippancy. She rejoiced that Syracuse was to be defended, but she felt with her father, and other grave men, that the terms of Corinth were humiliat- ing to the Syracusans. Timoleon came, and after a proper reception he addressed them in a very stern way. He declared that he would not take the command unless they ratified the agreement that he was to be absolute. He was so far from kissing the ladies that the frisky sort pronounced him a bear, and set themselves against him. But the Syracusan authorities could only submit, and he was made absolute lord. Then did Timoleon make them a still sterner speech, pointing out how while they had spent worlds of gold in folly and luxury, and to please their wives (here more scowls from the matrons), they had ne- glected their defences and starved their sol- diers. This they could not deny. He then ordered that all money in the posseasion of private people should be brought into the public treasury. A terrible outcry arose, but the dictator crushed opposition. He pointed out that they might deny the money if they liked, but that 390 THE STORY OF MARULLO. the Carthaginians would come and would triumph, and then he drew a black picture of the desolation that would follow, the victors seizing the wealth that should have been employed against them, plundering and ran- sacking, carrying off wives and daughters, and selling sons for slaves. So effectively did he depict the catastrophe that the beautiful Cleora was excited out of her maidenly silence, and coming forward with blushes, but with spirit, she delivered some eloquent words in support of Timoleon, and laid down her own costly jewels at his feet as a contribution to the treasury. This tired them all, the decree was assented to, and every man tried to show him- self more earnest than the others in suggesting means of defence. One reminded them that they could arm the slaves and make them fight. But Cleora's spirit again broke out. and she asked them proudly whether they would confide the patriot's noblest duty to such despicable hands. The idea was rejected. Marullo, in waiting on his young mistress, heard her words, and bade some fellow-slaves meet him next night in secret. Then he attended his proud and beautiful lady home. Every man was soon in arms, Leosthenes, I need not say, among the rest. He ventured to seek Cleora, and in a passionate interview he declared his love. She gave him hers in return, and promised to be his when the enemy should be driven from Syracuse. But even then, at a moment when the beautiful girl's frank heart might be seen through her eyes, the doubting nature of Leosthenes was his enemy. He dared to hint that in his absence she might forget him, and that the addresses of other suitors might be listened to. Yet her loving heart conquered her pride, and she did not say that he who could doubt her was no mate for her. What think you she did? It would not have occurred to the most devoted maiden of our time, but what I tell is true. Cleora commanded him to obey her on pain of losing her. He could but obey. She gare a last look at the sun then glowing above them, and declared that she vrould see it no more until the return of that distrustful man. Then she bid him bind her kerchief over her eyes. It was done, and she begged him to guide her *o his lips, on which she set the last kiss she would receive until he came back. She did more: she vowed that she would not even speak to any one until they should meet again. These \vere the vows of a time when follies were done; but if you deserve to hear of such a girl as Cleora, you will not smile at her devotion. The lords, and the gentlemen, and the sol- diers went bravely forth to the battle, and Syracuse was left to the women and the slaves. To the slaves! Marullo had not listened in vain, nor met his fellows in vain. He had held his council, and some he had inflamed with speech, some with wine. He put a new spirit into the trampled men, and he bade them change places with their masters. The city was their own. Let them seize treasure, houses, luxuries, wives, and daughters, and revel in the enjoyment of liberty. Only they must shed no blood. The fire spread, the slaves flew exultingly to their vengeance, and in an hour all was changed, and the slaves were masters. Marullo, no longer a slave, demanded an interview with Cleora. The splendid bondman had dared to love her. Love her, but how? This is not a French- man's story. Here would come in his lurid and powerful wickedness, and he will give me his artistic pity for throwing away the effect he would have made. But I am in a friend's hands, and he bids me tell of no atrocity. Marullo could command an entrance, but he entreated it, and, followed to the door of the house by his furious adherents, drew his sword and menaced death to any man who should dare come a step further and affright Cleora. Then, sheathing his sword and baring his head, he trod gently into the lady's pre- sence. He then begged leave to tell his story to the blindfolded girl. But he would not even venture to begin it until she gave some gracious sign that she would be pleased to hear him. His voice must have been gracious, for Cleora held out her hand, which he reverently kissed. Then he in his turn declared his love and his knowledge that Leosthenes was his favoured rival. He could have slain Leosthenes, he said, with more ease than he could tell of his power; but love, seconded by duty, bade him remember that Cleora loved the man. It was so? he asked, and Cleora bowed her head in token of assent and thankfulness. But Leosthenes was gone, he went on, yet then, when the baser passions of Marullo were chid- ing him for neglecting his opportunity, and reminding him that he could now, without let or stay, carry off Cleora and make her his own, he was still master of himself. He asked nothing but what could be freely yielded. He told once more the story of his ardent love, and had nought else to say save that not only hope was gone, but that at the end of the war he must expect torture and death. But he defied all, and would remain to protect her. THE STORY OF MARULLO. 391 and prove his devotion by delivering her over in safety and purity to his rival. Again, with her permission, he pressed a kiss upon her hand, and averring that such a favour had paid him for all past and future sufferings he left her. Timoleon had led the Syracusans to victory : the Carthaginians were slaughtered in thou- sands; and the remnant, with their helpless admiral Gisco, fled to their ships and made sail for their savage city. Syracuse was saved, and the armies marched back to it in triumph. But there were no signs of welcome no pro- cession of virgins with the statues of the gods, no laurel crowns and hymns. The gates were shut, and above them and on the walls were the defiant slaves, headed by Marullo. To the furious demands of the masters a mocking slave replied by informing them of what had been done in their absence, and his ribald boasts drove them to fury. Then, in a nobler vein, Marullo, at the call of the rest, spoke out, told the lords that slaves ought to be treated as in the good old times (so you see that there were good old times to be regretted even then), and not with the cruelty and bru- tality which the slaves of Syracuse had endured. They had been forced into revolt, and unless redress were given they would defend them- selves with the strong hand. He demanded pardon for all that had been done, liberty for those who chose to leave the island, and for those who remained to serve competent main- tenance. The masters, in a whirlwind of rage, rejected all his proposals and rushed to the assault, thinking to sweep away the defenders of the gates; but Marullo cheered his friends to the fight, and they fought bravely ; and the masters, baffled, were forced to retreat, foaming with new rage. Again Timoleon came to their aid, and he gave them counsel. It was based on the vete- ran's long acquaintance with human nature brutalized by slavery. They will fight, he said, while the arms of a soldier are brought against them their pride is roused, and they show themselves men. And they have never learned to fear the sword. Show them that which they have learned to fear : go out against them again, but instead of swords brandish your wh>2)8. His counsel was taken, and it gave the day to the masters. The sight of the weapons of torture struck abject terror into the hearts of the slaves, and they fled from the presence of their lords. The gates were opened, and Syra- cuse was again in the hands of its aristocracy. Foremost rushed in Leosthenes to learn what had chanced to Cleora, and dreading to hear. He sought her house, and hardly dared to question her maid ; but at length, when he was assured that Cleora had been unharmed and was ready to be led forth to him, the demon of suspicion again arose from the deepa and whispered. The true and faithful girl came forth, still wearing the bandage which he had bound upon her brow. He removed the kerchief, and received back from her the kiss which she said she had but borrowed when last they met. Leosthenes was happy for the moment, and his natural generosity was shown in his instant demand for the name of the man who had preserved her. He would load him with gold, if his station permitted such reward, or labour to win him honours, if of higher rank. Then Cleora, all truth, told him the whole story, and that she had been saved by one who hated him and loved her, and she dwelt on all his reverent tenderness. " But you withhold his name," impatiently cried Leosthenes. "Marullo, my father's bondman." Leosthenes broke into angry laughter, which yielded to fiercer utterance as Cleora, with generous gratitude for her salvation, remon- strated with him for his scorn of one who had acted so nobly. Again she dwelt upon the chivalry of the slave (it was in days before chivalry was so called, but the quality was there), and bade Leosthenes consider how grandly Marullo, with all in his power, had borne himself. And she then asked, as of right, that whatever vengeance might be re- served for other rebels, Marullo, for what he had done for her, was to be unharmed. To the voice in the jealous eye of Leosthenes she answered that she could not be so greatly injured as by unjust suspicion, and that she loved the mind of Marullo, not his person. And Leosthenes remaining darkly moody, Cleora left him. But Marullo, who had in- stinctively remained in his mistress' house, was instantly seized, and after a fearless decla- ration that he loved Cleora, and even hdd deserved her, was loaded with chains and dragged away to a dungeon. This was unknown to Cleora, who sought her father, and after telling him of her fears that the nature of Leosthenes, noble as he was, would bar their happiness, she obtained a promise that Archidamus would do all he could to serve Marullo. But when the maiden learned from her attendant that he had been hurried away to the jail, her spirit flashed up once more, and she followed him thither. Gold made way for her: a bribe to the jailer, 292 SONG OF THE VIRGINS OF ISRAEL. and Marullo's chains fell ; and Cleora told him her sense of the wrong that was done him. She would do her utmost to serve him, and weep for that which she could not prevent. Marullo's nature was not to be subdued by chain and cell, and again kneeling to her, he besought her pardon for having dared to love her, and assured her that he should die in happiness if certain of her forgiveness. And then the power of an earnest love in a noble heart began to tell upon Cleora, fresh from a svf ne in which her long penance and her faith- fulness had been forgotten and insulted, and she even gave Marullo some words of hope, and they were overheard by Leosthenes and her brother. Timoleon, for the third time a friend to Syracuse, had restrained the vengeful masters, and had reminded them that to work upon the slaves the cruel punishments which they medi- tated, was to destroy their own wealth. And it turned out that there had been no outrages that needed to be atoned for with blood. The slaves, male and female, had indeed made free with their masters' property, and had visited retributory justice on some cruel mis- tresses by making them wait as servants, starve for long hours, and linger till the late revel should be over, but nought worse had been done. But for Marullo. who had dared to love the child of the pra;tor, and to declare his love nay, to extract from her lips words of hope for a slave there could be no mercy. Timoleon had forbidden that aught of violence should be done save under his rule, and all our personages met in a chamber of justice. There Leosthenes confronted Cleora, and there Marullo was brought; and in the presence of Timoleon the jealous and now savage lover broke out into reproaches to Cleora for the favour she had shown the slave, and he dared to call upon her to clear herself by solemn declaration of having given Marullo her love. At this, Cleora proudly silent, Marullo himself flamed up like fire, and declared that, though a slave and in all respects unworthy of Cleora, lie was more worthy of her than Leosthenes, for he would never dare to suspect her of aught that was evil. There was a fierce cry among the lords for vengeance on the daring slave, but he, opposing them with an equal fierceness, tore away some disguises that he had worn, and discovered himself as Pisander of Thebes ! Do you not guess all the rest? The gallant lover, banished by intrigue, had come back as a slave, to be near his mistress had borne for her all the humiliations of slave-life, and had seized occasion to help those to justice whow sorrows he had thus discerned. He had watch- fully guarded her amid all the dangers, and would have shown his loyalty by yielding her to another had that other been worthy. But now, Cleora insulted beyond pardon, Pisander claimed the love (already half given) and the hand of the beautiful maiden. How Leo- sthenes, conscience-struck, confessed not only that he ought to surrender Cleora, but found the best reason for it in the form of another lady whom he had wedded and abandoned, and how the stern dictator blessed the nuptials of Pisander and Cleora, I need not tell. I have not satisfied myself; but yet I think I will name my friend. He lies in a nameless grave by St. Saviour's, Southwark ought it to be so? but in the register is set down, " March 20. 1639-40 buried, Philip Mas- singer, a Stranger. " SONG OF THE VIRGINS OF ISRAEL. [William Sotheby's principal poems are Said, pub- lished in 1807 'London), and Constance de Caxlile. 1810. He translated Wieland's Oberon and Virgil s Georyict. He died in 1S3S, and his works are now almost entirely forgotten, although they were numerous and attracted considerable attention during the poet's lifetime.] Daughters of Israel ! praise the Lord of Hosts ! Break into song ! with harp and tabret lift Your voices up, and weave with joy the dance ; And to your twinkling footsteps toss aloft Your arms ; and from the flash of cymbals shake Sweet clangour, measuring the giddy maze. Shout ye ! and ye, make answer ! Saul hath slain His thousands ; David his ten thousands slain. Sing a new song. I saw them in their rage, I saw the gleam of spears, the flash of swords, That rang against our gates ! The warder's watch Ceased not. Tower answer'd tower: a warning voice Was heard without ; the cry of woe within I The shriek of virgins, and the wail of her. The mother, in her anguish, who fore wept, Wept at the breast her babe, as now no move. Shout ye ! and ye, make answer ! Saul hath slain His thousands ; David his ten thousands slain. Sing a new song. Spake not th' insulting foe? I will pursue, o'ertake, divide the spoil, My hand shall dash their infants on the stones: The ploughshare of my vengeance shall draw out The furrow, where the tower and fortress rose. Before my chariot Israel's chiefs shall clank Their chains. Each side, their virgin daughters groan ; Erewhile to weave my conquest on their looms. Shroit. ye ! and ye, make answer ! Saul hath slaiu His thous.ij.ls, David his ten thousands slain. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. Thou heard'st, O God of battle I Thou whoge look Bnappeth the spear in sunder. In thy strength A youth, thy chosen, laid their champion low. Saul, S.iul pursues, o'ertakes, divides the spoil ; Wreathes round our necks these chains of gold, and rohes Our limbs with floating crimson. Then rejoice, Daughters of Israel 1 from your cymbals shake Sweet clangour, hymning God, the Lord of Hosts ! Ye sheut ! and ye, make answer ! Saul hath sLiiu His thousands ; David his ten thousands slain. 303 A lusty plain abundant of vitaille. Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, That founded were in time of fathers old, And many an other delectable sight; And Salu&is this noble country hight " A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 1 The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a mo- dern thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mount Ventoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe employment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or medieval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world; and I think none has ap- proached him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the Prelude. But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his "Clerk's Tale" with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well com- posed as any Claude. " There is right at the west end of Itaille, Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, l From .V.v Sta-lii Wwioirt. By J. Russell Lnwell, /\ \\ 1'i-nfMsnnr of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College, Boston : Houghton, Mifflin w* Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in rlouu*. A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne 396 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. A gliding car, indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along its slippery way, I love tliee all unlovely as thou seem'st, And dre uled as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun A prisoner in the yet undawning east, Shortening his journey between morn and noon, And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, Down to the rosy west, but kindly Mil Compensating his loss with added hours Of social converse and instructive ease, And gathering at short notice, in one group, The family dispersed, and fixing thought, Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. I crown tliee king of intimate delights. Fireside enjoyments, hoinuborn happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening know." I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, too not so flushed, not so ... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word!) as the modern style since poets have got hold of a theory that imagination is common-sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sub- limed -but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has! How he heightens, for example, your sense of winter evening seclusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, during the consulate of the second Adams. Words- worth strikes a deeper note; but does it not sometimes come over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavour of W. W.? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that but! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can't look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate's gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift's profane version of Romanes rerum dominos into Roman nose! a rare tin! dom your nose! But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on me by the man who wrote them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the character and its intellec- tual product are inextricably interfused. If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his magnificent skating-scene in the Prelude) has not much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that in the Lake country even the winter storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they ".helped him through the winter." His only hearty praise of winter is when, as General F6vrier, he defeats the French : " Humanity, delighting to behold A fond reflection of her own decay, Uath painted Winter like a traveller old, Prop | ed on a staff, and, through the sullen day, In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: Or, if a j uster fancy should allow An undisputed symbol of command, The chosen sceptre is a withered bow Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn; But mighty Winter the device shall scoru." The Scottish poet Grahame, in his Sabbath, says manfully: " Now is the time To visit Nature in her grand attire;" and he has one little picture which no other poet has surpassed : : " High ridged the whirled drift has almost reached The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch: Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried." Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his winter face as long and as brightly as in Central Italy, the seduction of the chimney- corner is apt to predominate in the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields and penitential woods. The very title of Whittier's delightful Snow-Sound shows what he was thinking of, though he does not vapour a little about digging out paths. The verses of Emer- son, perfect as a Greek fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has chosen for his epigraph, tell us too how the " Housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm." They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them- having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering round the house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home to us the comfortable contrast of without and within, during a storm at night, and the pas- sage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an undertone of bour- geois : THE SOLDIER'S HOME. 397 " How touching, when, at midnight, sweep feiiow muffled winds, and all id dark, To hear, and sink again to sleep." J. H. , one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies win- ter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety against having your evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Bmerson, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of the " tumultuous privacy." But I would exchange this, and give some- thing to boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur of a north-north-east snow- storm, and getting a strong draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first furrows through its sandy drifts. I love those " Noontide twilights which snow makes With tempest of the blinding flakes." If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in white; but you must have plenty of north in your gale if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During the great storm of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floundered a couple of miles through the whispering night, and brought home that feeling of expansion we have after being in good company. " Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend; for He saith to the snow, 'Be thou on the earth.'" There is admirable snow scenery in Judd's Margaret, but some one has confiscated my copy of that admirable book, and perhaps Homer's picture of a snow-storm ia the best yet in its large simplicity: "And as in winter-time, when Jove his'cold sharp javelins throws Amongst \is mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest promi- nents, Hill tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most rut ii rs The toils of men, seaporteand shores, are hid, and every place, But floods, that fair snow's tender fUkes, as their own brood, embrace." Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, comes nearer Homer than any- body else. There is nothing in the original of that fair snow's tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the psalmist's tender phrase, " lie giveth his snow like wool," for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of " dissolving fleeces," and Cowper of a " fleecy mantle. " But David ia nobly simple, while Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have pretti- ness, Martial would have supplied them with it in his " Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum," which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thes- salonica calls snow 05wp ipiuStt, woolly water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, has amplified into this: ''Lorsque la froidure inhumaine De leur verd ornement de|>otiille les fore'ta Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les gut-rets, Et la neige a pour eux la uhaleur de la laine." In this, as in Pope's version of the passage in Homer, there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blinding drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look at the sweet miracle itself. THE SOLDIER'S HOME. My untried muse shall no high tone assume. Nor strut in anus ;- farewell my cup and plum* Brief be my verse, a task within my power, I tell my feelings in one happy hour : Bnt what an ho ir was that ! when from th main I reach d this lovely valley once again I A g'orious harvest fill'd my eager sight, Half shock'd, half-waving in a flood of light; On that poor cottage roof where I was bom The sun look d down as in life's early morn. I gazed around, but not a soul apisar'd, I listen'd on the threshold, nothing lieard ; I call'd my father thrice, but no one came: It was not fear or grief that shook my frawo. But an o'erpowering sense of peace and how% Of toils gone by, perhaps of joys to come. The door invitingly stood open wide, I shook my dust, and set my staff aside. How sweet it was to breathe that cooler ah, And take possession of my father's chair 1 THE GREAT STORM OF 1703. Beneath my elbow, on the solid frame, Appear'd the rough initials of my name, Cut forty years before ! the same old clock Struck the same bell, and gave my heart a shock I never can forget. A short breeze sprung, And while a sigh was trembling on my tongue, Caught the old dangling almanacs behind, Anil up they flew, like banners in the wind; Then gently, singly, down, down, down, they went, And told of twenty years that I had spent Far from my native land : that instant came A robin on the threshold ; though so tame, At first he look'd distrustful, almost shy, And cast on me his coal-black steadfast eye, And seem'd to say (past friendship to renew), " Ah ha ! old worn-out soldier, is it you?" Through the room ranged the imprisou'd humble-bee, And bonib'd and bounced, and struggled to be free. Dashing against the panes with sullen roar, That threw their diamond sunlight on the floor; That floor, clean sanded, where my fancy sti-ay'd O'er undulating waves the broom had made, Reminding me of those of hideous forms That met us as we pass'd the t"/. of Stoi-mt, Where high and loud they break, and peace comes never They roll and foam, and roll and foam for ever. But here was peace, that peace which home can yield ; The grasshopper, the partridge in the field. And ticking clock, were all at once becom* The substitutes for clarion, fife, and drum. While thus I mused, still gazing, gazing still On beds of moss that spread the window-sill, I deem'd no moss my eyes had ever seen Had been so lovely, brilliant, fresh, and green, And guess'd some infant hand had placed it there, And prized its hue, so exquisite, so rare. Feelings on feelings mingling, doubling rose, My heart felt everything but calm repose; I could not reckon minutes, hours, nor ye.irs, But rose at once, and bursted into tears ; Then, like a fool, confused, sat down again, And thought upon the past with shame and pain ; I rived at war and all its horrid cost. And glory's quagmire, where the brave are lost. On carnage, fire, and plunder, long I mused, And cursed the murdering weapons I had used. Two shadows then I saw, two voices heard, One bespoke age, and one a child's appear'd. In stepp'd my father with convulsive start, And in an instant clasp'd me to his heart. Close by him stood a little blue eyed maid, And, stooping to the child, the old man said, " Come hither, Nancy, kiss me once again, This U your uncle Charles, come home from Spain." The child approach'd, and with her fingers light Stroked my old eyes, almost deprived of sight. But why thus spin my tale, thus tedious bet Happy old soldier ! what's the world to met ROBERT BLOOM FIELD. THE GREAT STORM OF 1703. In Little Wild Street Chapel, Lincoln' s-Inn Fields, a sermon is annually preached on the 27th of November, in commemoration of the "GREAT STORM" in 1703. This fearful tempest was preceded by a strong west wind, which set in about the middle of the month; and every day, and almost every hour, increased in force until the 24th, when it blew furiously, occasioned much alarm, and some damage was sustained. On the 25th, and through the night following, it continued with unusual violence. On the morning of Friday, the 26th, it raged so fearfully that only few people had courage to venture abroad. Towards evening it rose still higher; the night setting in with excessive darkness added general horror to the scene, and prevented any from seeking security abroad from their homes, had that been possible. The extraordinary power of the wind created a noise, hoarse and dreadful, like thunder, which carried terror to every ear, and appalled every heart. There were also appear- ances in the heavens that resembled lightning. "The air," says a writer at the time, "was full of meteors and fiery vapours; yet," he adds, "I am of opinion that there was really no lightning, in the common acceptation of the term; for the clouds that flew with such vio- lence through the air, were not to my observa- tion such as are usually freighted with thunder and lightning; the hurries nature was then in do not consist with the system of thunder." Some imagined the tempest was accompanied with an earthquake. "Horror and confusion seized upon all, whether on shore or at sea; no pen can describe it, no tongue can express it, no thought can conceive it, unless theirs who were in the extremity of it; and who, being touched with a due sense of the sparing mercy of their Maker, retain the deep impressions of his goodness upon their minds though the danger be past. To venture abroad was to rush into instant death, and to stay within afforded no other prospect than that of being buried under the ruins of a falling habitation. Some in their distraction did the former, and met death in the streets; others, the latter, and in their own houses received their final doom." One hundred and twenty-three persons were killed by the falling of dwellings; amongst these were the Bishop of Bath and Wells (Dr. Richard Kidder) and his lady, by the fall of part of the episcopal palace of Wells; and Lady Penelope Nicholas, sister to the Bishop of THE GREAT STORM OF 1703. 393 London, at Horsley, in Sussex. Those who perished in the waters, in the floods of the Severn and the Thames, on the coast of Holland, and in ships blown away and never heard of afterwards, are computed to have amounted to eight thousand. All ranks and degrees were affected by this amazing tempest, for every familv Vuat had anything to lose lost something: land, houses, churches, corn, trees, rivers, all were disturbed or damaged by its fury; small buildings were for the most part wholly swept away, " as chaff before the wind." Above eight hundred dwell- ing-houses were laid in ruins. Few of those that resisted escaped from being unroofed, which is clear from the prodigious increase in the price of tiles, which rose from twenty-one shillings to six pounds the thousand. About two thou- sand stacks of chimneys were blown down in and about London. When the day broke, the houses were mostly stripped, and appeared like so many skeletons. The consternation was so great that trade and business were suspended, for the first occupation of the mind was so to repair the houses that families might be pre- served from the inclemency of the weather in the rigorous season. The streets were covered with brickbats, broken tiles, signs, bulks, and pent-houses. The lead which covered one hundred churches, and many public buildings, was rolled up, and hurled in prodigious quantities to distances almost incredible; spires and turrets of many others were thrown down. Innumerable stacks of corn and hay were blown away, or so torn and scattered as to receive great damage. Multitudes of cattle were lost. In one level in Gloucestershire, on the banks of the Severn, fifteen thousand sheep were drowned. In- numerable trees were torn up by the roots; one writer says, that he himself numbered seventeen thousand in part of the county of Kent alone, and that, tired with counting, he left offreckoning. The damage in the city of London only was computed at near two millions sterling. At Bristol it was about two hundred thousand pounds. In the whole, it was supposed that the loss \vas greater than that produced by the great fire of London, 1666, which was estimated at four millions. The greater part of the navy was at sea, and if the storm had not been at its height at full flood, and in a spring-tide, the loss might have been nearly fatal to the nation. It was so considerable, that fifteen or sixteen men-of-war were cast away, and more than two thousand seamen perished. Few merchantmen were lost; for most of those that were driren to sea were safe. Rear-admiral Beaumont, with a squadron then lying in the Downs, perished with his own and several other ships on the Goodwin Sands. The ships lost by the storm were estimated at three hundred. In the river Thames only four ships remained between London Bridge and Limehouse, the rest being driven below, and lying there miserably beating against one another. Five hundred wherries, three hun- dred ship-boats, and one hundred lighters and barges were entirely lost; and a much greater number received considerable damage. The wind blew from the western seas, which pre- venting many ships from putting to sea, and driving others into harbour, occasioned great numbers to escape destruction. The Eddystone Lighthouse near Plymouth was precipitated in the surrounding ocean, and with it Mr. Winstanley, the ingenious architect by whom it was contrived, and the people who were with him. "Having been frequently told that the edifice was too slight to withstand the fury of the winds and waves, he was accus- tomed to reply contemptuously, that he only wished to be in it when a storm should happen. Unfortunately his desire was gratified. Signals of distress were made, but in so tremendous a sea no vessel could live, or would venture to put off for their relief. " x The amazing strength and rapidity of the wind are evidenced by the following well- authenticated circumstances. Near Shaftes- bury a stone of near four hundred pounds weight, which had lain for some years fixed in the ground, fenced by a bank with a low stone wall upon it, was lifted up by the wind, and carried into a hollow way, distant at least seven yards from the place. This is mentioned in a sermon preached by Dr. Samuel Stennett in 1788. Dr. Andrew Gifford, in a sermon preached at Little Wild Street, on the 27th of November, 1734, says that "in a country town a large stable was at once removed off its foundation and instantly carried quite across the highway, over the heads of five horses and the man that was then feeding them, without hurting any one of them, or removing the rack and manger, both of which remained for a considerable time, to the admir- ation of every beholder." Dr. Gifford, in the same sermon, gives an account of "several remarkable deliverances." One of the most remarkable instances of this kind occurred at a house in the Strand, in which were no less than fourteen persons: "Four of them fell with i Belgium' B H'ttoiy of Qnat .\tain. 400 THE GREAT STORM OF 1T03. a great part of the house, &c., three stories, and several two: and though buried in the ruins, were taken out unhurt: of these, three were children; one that lay by itself, in a little bed near its nurse; another in a cradle; and the third was found hanging (as it were wrapped up) in some curtains that hitched by the way; neither of whom received the least damage. 1 n another place, as a minister was crossing a court near his house, a stone from the top of a chimney upwards of one hundred and forty pounds weight fell close to his heels, and cut between his footsteps four inches deep into the ground. Soon after, upon drawing in his arm, which he had held out on some occasion, another stone of near the same weight and size brushed by his elbow, and fell close to his foot, which must necessarily, in the eye of reason, have killed him, had it fallen while it was extended." In the Poultry, where two boys were lying in a garret, a huge stack of chimneys fell in, which making its way through that and all the other floors to the cellar, it was followed by the bed with the boys asleep in it, who first awaked in that gloomy place of confusion without the least hurt. So awful a visitation produced serious im- pressions on the government, and a day of fasting and humiliation was appointed by authority. The introductory part of the pro- clamation, issued by Queen Anne for that purpose, claims attention from its solemn import : " WHEREAS, by the late most terrible and dreadful storms of wind, with which it hath pleased Almighty God to afflict the greatest part of this our kingdom, on Friday and Saturday, the twenty-sixth and twenty -seventh days of November last, some of our ships of war, and many ships of our loving subjects have been destroyed and lost at sea, and great numbers of our subjects, serving on board th same, have perished, and many houses and other buildings of our good subjects have been either wholly thrown down and demolished, or very much damnified and defaced, and thereby several persons have been killed, and many stacks of corn and hay thrown down and scat- tered abroad, to the great damage and impo- verishment of many others, especially the poorer sort, and great numbers of timber and other trees have by the said storm been torn up by the roots in many parts of this our kingdom : a calamity of this sort so dreadful and astonishing, that the like hath not been seen or felt in the memory of any person living in this our kingdom, and which loudly calls for the deepest and most solemn humiliation of us and our people: therefore out of a deep and pious sense of what we and all our people have suffered by the said dreadful wind and storms (which we most humbly acknowledge to be a token of the divine displeasure, and that it was the infinite mercy of God that we and our people were not thereby wholly de- stroyed), we have resolved, and do hereby command, that a General Public Fast be ob- served," &c. This public fast was accordingly observed throughout England on the nineteenth of January following, with great seriousness and devotion by all orders and denominations. The Protestant Dissenters, notwithstanding their objections to the interference of the civil magistrate in matters of religion, deeming this to be an occasion wherein they might unite with their countrymen in openly bewailing the general calamity, rendered the supplication universal, by opening their places of worship, and every church and meeting-house waa crowded. HONE'S EwyJay Book. END O*' VOLUME FIRST.