earthquake-only a momentary contemplation of one conscience in revolt-murderous Macbeth's. When I think of the thronged hades of spectral horrors whereby the Poet has illustrated Macbeth's mind, I am sensible of an inclination to the perpendicular in "each particular hair" of the scanty remnant left to me; yet start not thou, meek Maiden! for knowing not "the doctrine of ill-doing,"* little canst thou comprehend the torture that e'en here treads hard on Guilt;-unimaginable to thy timidity is the cowardice begot by Crime.

"One cried,' God bless us!' and' Amen" the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman's-hands:
I could not say ' Amen,'

LADY MACBETH.-Consider it not so deeply.

MACB. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen ?' '

Ah! Mr. C., were all our designs invariably referred to the court of equity that sits within;—were the representative of Justice untampered with, and its decrees made absolute in our actions, soon would shoals of a certain species of fish-by some naturalists called the land-shark—offend by stagnancy the air at West

* Winter's Tale, i. 2.

minster and elsewhere. Mourning, ye gowned gentry! your occupation gone, are there many who, in grievous destitution of chattels, might righteously compute as their own, both

"Their robe and their integrity to heaven?"

"The

Now were you to forswear Ivy Lodge for ever, in dudgeon, or as the penalty of its occupier's prolixity, I could not forbear mentioning a colloquy in Measure for Measure, between majestic Isabella and her more craven brother Claudio: the circumstances are her dishonor, or the alternative, his loss of life. dread of something after death" unmans him, and he quails in shuddering hesitancy between opposing causes;-before him are shadowy horrors; behind, the urgent, lofty, and indignant honor of his sister. "Death," murmurs the reluctant sacrifice,

"Death is a fearful thing!

ISABELLA. And shamed life a hateful.

CLAUDIO.-Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible, warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death!"

The garrulous Old Man identified himself so perfectly with the shrinking Claudio in the recital of this fine passage, that when he resumed his original character I fell back on the Sun's Darling (from which he had previously quoted,) for an exclamation of Raybright

"Your eyes amazed me first, but now mine ears
Feel your tongue's charm!"

E.-Nay, to great Will the creator be the praise, none to the mere earthen vessel. But now, having dwelt at tolerable—or, haply, intolerable length, on the dread of death and the timidity of wisdom, turn we to what my friend Folly might have laughed at as "the bravery of ignorance." Know firstly, then, that urchinless myself, I have the honor to be on excellent terms with half-a-dozen of the rosiest rogues you ever smiled to look at, the property respectively

of three humble neighbours. The hour has some time gone since the imagery alone of grace and beauty had power to captivate,-when I feasted after the regimen of Robbie Burns, "the admiring a fine woman;" and long hath the sage maximist, William of immortal memory, convinced me that goodness is the essential gold of loveliness-" Virtue of beauty." And with these changed feelings-travelling farther from the East (sic Wordsworth,) into the fading light of near-spent day, I find a new pleasure in the frank, fond heart-the "spritefulness, fair cheeks, and full eyes of childhood." It would cheer you in a December distress to see the ruddy fronts of the fellows of whom I spoke, to whom I let out joy on short leases by a word in season, a penny never out of season, and an approving pat on the head; and how pitiable the pale, precocious lads in town appear, these, my jocund younkers! The mother of one of them—a reckless, super-rosy rebel, rising five-told me the other day, that the child had been to witness the funeral of a person of excessive corpulency, and came home with a serious look unusual. A resolution suggested by the ponderosity of the dead man, and the hour of his interment, was brooding in him, and, when duly matured, burst in a request to his

to

mother, that he might not be buried in the afternoon of a winter-day-in case he should'nt get to heaven before dark!

The sixth stroke towards ten was sounding, when E.'s veteran retainer announced the vehicle in which his daughter-in-baptism was accustomed to migrate to and from Ivy Lodge. There was a striking contrast in the physiognomical aspects of the Elder and his servant; for while the former was habitually mirthful, there was a settled sedateness in the face of the latter which remained unruffled, either by smile or frown, under the raillery of his voluble but kind superior. His gesture, too, was desperately methodical; evincing none of that submission to impulse which ever animated the demeanor of his master. On that declining plane of our mortal term, wherefrom, when man brings his years to an end, he slides into the grave, it was hard to say which of the two was foremost; but if the domestic were "under authority," he did not appear to derive contentment in the especial circumstance of contiguity with a clime in which distinctions cease-in the prospect of a situation without servitude, or such as is perfect freedom. If his were a gravity impressed by con