gained my seat with my face in a right position. I immediately seized his fore-legs, and by main force twisted them on his back; thus they served me for a bridle. He now seemed to have recovered from his surprise, and, probably fancying himself in hostile company, he began to plunge furiously, and lashed the sand with his long and powerful tail. I was out of reach of the strokes of it, by being near his head. He continued to plunge and strike, and made my seat very uncomfortable. It must have been a fine sight for an unoccupied spectator. The people roared out in triumph, and were so vociferous, that it was some time before they heard me tell them to pull me and my beast of burden further in-hand steadied, the very pulsation of my finger pulled land. I was apprehensive the rope might break, and then there would have been every chance of going down to the regions under water with the cayman. That would have been more perilous than Arion's marine morning ride intended victims might have prided themselves on their superior nonchalance; and, indeed, as I approached them, there seemed to be a sneer on their ghastly mouths and winking eyes. Slowly they rose, one after the other, and waddled to the water, all but one, the most gallant or most gorged of the party. He lay still until I was within a hundred yards of him; then slowly rising on his finlike legs, he lumbered towards the river, looking askance at me with an expression of countenance that seemed to say: 'He can do me no harm; however, I may as well have a swim.' I took aim at the throat of this supercilious brute, and, as soon as my the trigger. Bang! went the gun; whizz! flew the bullet; and my excited ear could catch the thud with which it plunged into the scaly leather of his neck. His waddle became a plunge, the waves closed over him, and the sun shone on the calm water, as I reached the brink of the shore, that was still indented by the waving of his gigantic tail. But there is blood upon the water, and he rises for a moment to the surface. 'A hundred piasters for the timseach!' I exclaimed, and half-a-dozen Arabs plunged into the stream. There! he rises again, and the blacks dash at him as if he hadn't a tooth in his head. Now he is gone, the waters close over him, and I never saw him since. From that time we saw hundreds of crocodiles of all sizes, and fired shots enough at them for a Spanish revolution; but we never could get possession of any, even if we hit them, which to this day remains uncertain. I believe each traveller, who is honest enough, will make the same confession. The cayman, killed and stuffed, was also added to the curiosities of Walton Hall. Mr Waterton's next work was Essays on Natural History, chiefly Ornithology, with an Autobiography of the Author and a View of Walton Hall, 1838-reprinted with additions in 1851. His account of his family-an old Roman Catholic family that had suffered perse-trative of savage life: cution from the days of Henry VIII. downwardsis a quaint, amusing chronicle; and the notes on the habits of birds shew minute observation, as well as a kindly genial spirit on the part of the eccentric squire. ELIOT WARBURTON. As a traveller, novelist, and historical writer, MR ELIOT WARBURTON, an English barrister (18101852), was a popular though incorrect author. He had a lively imagination and considerable power of description, but these were not always under the regulation of taste or judgment. His first work, The Crescent and the Cross, or Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel, 1844, is the best of his productions. To ride on a crocodile was Mr Waterton's unparalleled feat, and Mr Warburton thus describes his first shot at a crocodile, which, he said, was an epoch in his life. Crocodile Shooting in the Nile. We had only now arrived in the waters where they abound, for it is a curious fact that none are ever seen below Mineyeh, though Herodotus speaks of them as fighting with the dolphins at the mouths of the Nile. A prize had been offered for the first man who detected a crocodile, and the crew had now been for two days on the alert in search of them. Buoyed up with the expectation of such game, we had latterly reserved our fire for them exclusively, and the wild duck and turtle, nay, even the vulture and the eagle, had swept past or soared above us in security. At length, the cry of Timseach, timseach!' was heard from half-a-dozen claimants of the proffered prize, and half-a-dozen black fingers were eagerly pointed to a spit of sand, on which were strewn apparently some logs of trees. It was a covey of crocodiles! Hastily and silently the boat was run in-shore. R- was ill, so I had the enterprise to myself, and clambered up the steep bank with a quicker pulse than when I first levelled a rifle at a Highland deer. My 702 In the same work is a striking incident illus Nubian Revenge. There appears to be a wild caprice amongst the institutions, if such they may be called, of all these tropical nations. In a neighbouring state to that of Abyssinia, the king, when appointed to the regal dignity, retires into an island, and is never again visible to the eyes of men but once-when his ministers come to strangle him; for it may not be that the proud monarch of Behr should die a natural death. No men, with this the island, which is guarded by a band of Amazons. fatal exception, are ever allowed even to set foot upon In another border country, called Habeesh, the monarch is dignified with the title of Tiger. He was formerly Malek of Shendy, when it was invaded by Ismael Pasha, and was even then designated by this fierce cognomen. Ismael, Mehemet Ali's second son, advanced through Nubia, claiming tribute and submission from all the tribes. Nemmir-which signifies Tiger-the king of Shendy, received him hospitably, as Mahmoud, our dragoman, informed us, and, when he was seated in his tent, waited on him to learn his pleasure. My pleasure is,' replied the invader, 'that you forthwith furnish me with slaves, cattle, and money to the value of one hundred thousand dollars.' 'Pooh!' said Nemmir, 'you jest; all my country could not produce what you require in one hundred moons.' 'Ha! Wallah!' was the young pasha's reply, and he struck the Tiger across the face with his pipe. If he had done so to his namesake of the jungle, the insult could not have roused fiercer feelings of revenge, but the human animal did not shew his wrath at once. 'It is well,' he replied; 'let the pasha rest; to-morrow he shall have nothing more to ask. The Egyptian, and the few Mameluke officers of his staff, were tranquilly smoking towards evening, entertained by some dancing-girls, whom the Tiger had sent to amuse them; when they observed that a huge pile of dried stacks of Indian corn was rising rapidly round the tent. 'What means this?' inquired Ismael angrily; am not I pasha?' 'It is but forage for your highness's horses,' replied the Nubian, for, were your troops once arrived, the people would fear to approach the camp,' Suddenly, the space is filled with smoke, the tent curtains shrivel up in flames, and the pasha and his comrades find themselves encircled in what they well know is their funeral pyre. Vainly the invader implores mercy, and assures the Tiger of his warm regard for him and all his family; vainly he endeavours to break through the fiery fence that girds him round; a thousand spears bore him back into the flames, and the Tiger's triumphant yell and bitter mockery mingle with his dying screams. The Egyptians perished to a man. Nemmir escaped up the country, crowned with savage glory, and married the daughter of a king, who soon left him his successor, and the Tiger still defies the old pasha's power. The latter, however, took a terrible revenge upon his people: he burned all the inhabitants of the village nearest to the scene of his son's slaughter, and cut off the right hands of five hundred men besides. So much for African warfare. The other works of Mr Eliot Warburton are Hochelaga, or England in the New World, 1846 (Hochelaga is an aboriginal Indian name for Canada); Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, 1849; Reginald Hastings and Darien, novels, and a Memoir of the Earl of Peterborough -the famous earl (1658-1735). The last was a posthumous work, published in 1853. Mr Warburton had been deputed by the Atlantic and Pacific Junction Company to visit the tribes of Indians who inhabit the Isthmus of Darien, with a view to effect a friendly understanding with them, and to make himself thoroughly acquainted with their country. He sailed in the Amazon steamer, and was among the passengers who perished by fire on board that ill-fated ship. That awful catastrophe carried grief into many families, and none of its victims were more lamented than Eliot Warburton. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. his after-years. It is strange, as Miss Martineau has remarked, and as indeed occurred to himself when reflecting on this miserable period of his life, that while tortured with hunger in the streets of London for many weeks, and sleeping (or rather lying awake with cold and hunger) on the floor of an empty house, it never once occurred to him to earn money. As a classical corrector of the press, and in other ways, he might no doubt have obtained employment, but it was not till afterwards asked why he did not, that the idea ever entered his mind.' His friends, however, discovered him before it was too late, and he proceeded to Oxford. He was then in his eighteenth year. In the following year (1804) De Quincey seems to have first tasted opium. He took it as a cure for toothache, and indulged in the pleasing vice, as he then considered it, for about eight years. He continued his intellectual pursuits, married, and took up his residence in the Lake country, making_occasional excursions to London, Bath, and Edinburgh. Pecuniary difficulties at length embarrassed him, and, enfeebled by opium, he sank into a state of misery and torpor. From this state he was roused by sharp necessity, and by the success of his contributions to the London Magazine, which were highly prized, and seemed to open up a new source of pleasure and profit. He also contributed largely to Blackwood's and to Tait's magazines, in which his 'Autobiographic Sketches,' Recollections of the Lakes,' and other papers appeared. Next to Macaulay, he was perhaps the most brilliant periodical writer of the day. After many years' residence at Grasmere, De Quincey removed to Scotland, and lived at Lasswade, near Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh, December 8, 1859, in his seventy-fifth year. Besides the Confessions, Mr De Quincey published the Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy, 1824; and twenty years later, he proThe Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, duced a volume on the same science-The Logic originally printed in the London Magazine, and of Political Economy, 1844. The highest authority published in a separate form in 1822, describe the on political economy-Mr M'Culloch-has eulopersonal experiences of a scholar and man of gised these treatises of Mr De Quincey as comgenius who, like Coleridge, became a slave to the pletely successful in exposing the errors of Malthus use of opium. To such an extent had he carried and others in applying Ricardo's theory of value. this baneful habit that in 'the meridian stage of A collected edition of the works of De Quincey has his career' his daily ration was eight thousand been published in sixteen volumes, distributed in drops of laudanum. He had found, he says, that the main, he says, into three classes: first, papers the solid opium required a length of time to expand whose chief purpose is to interest and amuse its effects sensibly, oftentimes not less than four (autobiographic sketches, reminiscences of distinhours, whereas the tincture, laudanum, manifested guished contemporaries, biographical memoirs, its presence instantaneously. The author of the whimsical narratives, and such like); secondly, Confessions was THOMAS DE QUINCEY, son of an essays, of a speculative, critical, or philosophical English merchant, and born August 15, 1785, at character, addressing the understanding as an Greenhay, near Manchester. His father died insulated faculty (of these there are many); and, while his children were young, leaving to his thirdly, papers belonging to the order of what may widow a fortune of sixteen hundred pounds a year. be called prose-poetry-that is, fantasies or imaginThomas was educated at Bath, and subsequently ations in prose-including the Suspiria de Proat Worcester College, Oxford. When about six-fundis, originally published in Blackwood's Magateen, he made his way to London, and tried to zine-and which are remarkable for pathos and raise a sum of two hundred pounds on his expec- eloquence. In all departments, De Quincey must tations from the paternal estate. He was reduced rank high, but he would have been more popular to extreme destitution by his dealings with the had he practised the art of condensation. His Jews, and by his want of any profession or episodical digressions and diffuseness sometimes remunerative employment. He was saved from overrun all limits-especially when, like Southey perishing on the streets by a young woman he (in the Doctor), he takes up some favourite philoknew-one of the unfortunate waifs of the city-sophical theory or scholastic illustration, and who restored him to consciousness with some warm cordial, after he had fainted from exhaustion. This 'youthful benefactress' he tried in vain to trace in presents it in every possible shape and colour. The exquisite conversation of De Quincey was of the same character-in 'linked sweetness long drawn out,' but rich and various in an extraordinary degree. His autobiographic and personal sketches are almost as minute and unreserved as those of Rousseau, but they cannot be implicitly relied upon. He spared neither himself nor his friends, and has been accused of unpardonable breaches of confidence and exaggerations, especially as respects the Wordsworth family. It has been said that if his life were written truthfully no one would believe it, so strange the tale would seem. The following is part of the melancholy yet fascinating Confessions. One day a Malay wanderer had called on the recluse author in his cottage at Grasmere, and De Quincey gave him a piece of opium. Dreams of the Opium-Eater. May 18.-The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night, through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery. I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point, but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, history, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man_fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that Southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires, also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. * Memoir of Professor Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs Gordon. 'I remember,' says Mrs Gordon, his (De Quincey's) coming to Gloucester Place one stormy night. He remained hour after hour, in vain expectation that the waters would assuage, and the hurlyburly cease. There was nothing for it but that our visitor should remain all night. The Professor (Wilson) ordered a room to be prepared for him, and they found each other such good company, that this accidental detention was prolonged, without further difficulty, for the greater part of a year. He rarely appeared at the family meals, preferring to dine in his own room, at his own hour, not unfrequently turning night into day. An ounce of laudanum per diem prostrated animal life in the early part of the day. It was no unfrequent sight to find him lying upon the rug in front of the fire, his head resting upon a book, with his arms crossed over his breast, plunged in profound slumber. He was most brilliant at supper parties, sitting till three or four in the morning. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are to be found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brahma, through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. rest. Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my oriental dreams, which filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than all the I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way. I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke; it was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside, come to shew me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. No experience was so awful to me, and at the same time so pathetic, as this abrupt translation from the darkness of the infinite to the gaudy summer air of highest noon, and from the unutterable abortions of miscreated gigantic vermin to the sight of infancy and innocent human natures. June 1819.-I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the contemplation of death generally, is (cæteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of the infinite; and, thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Per- | Somewhere, but I knew not where-somehow, but I knew not how-by some beings, but knew not by whom a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages-was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. ، Deeper than ever plummet sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad ; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! And again, and yet again reverberated-everlasting farewells! And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, 'I will sleep no more ! I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams. There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far larger between them of savannahs and forest lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, in the same summer when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said to myself: It yet wants much of sunrise; and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they celebrate the firstfruits of Resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten to-day : for the air is cool and still, and the hills are high, and stretch away to heaven; and the churchyard is as verdant as the forest lawns, and the forest lawns are as quiet as the churchyard; and with the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead; and then I shall be unhappy no longer.' I turned, as if to open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony. The scene was an oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city-an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked, and it was-Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length, “So, then, I have found you at last.' I waited; but she answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last; the same, and yet, again, how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light of mighty London fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted !), her eyes were streaming with tears. The tears were now no longer Sometimes she seemed altered; yet again sometimes not altered; and hardly older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed upon her with some awe. Suddenly her countenance grew dim; and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapours rolling between us; in a moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in London, walking again with Ann-just as we had walked, when both children, eighteen years before, along the endless terraces of Oxford Street. seen. ، In the same impassioned and melodious prose, De Quincey talks of dreams 'moulding themselves eternally like the billowy sands of the desert, as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns.' They soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a minute all aglow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and dislimn with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that eddying breeze De Quincey had a peculiar vein of humour or under which their vapoury architecture had arisen.' irony, often breaking out where least expected, and too long continued. This is exemplified in his paper on Murder as one of the Fine Arts, which fills above a hundred pages, and in other essays and reviews; but the grand distinction of De Quincey is his subtle analytical faculty, and his marvellous power of language and description. Joan of Arc. What is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd-girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that-like the Hebrew shepherdboy from the hills and forests of Judea-rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender: but so did they to Then suddenly would come a dream of far different the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw character-a tumultuous dream-commencing with a them from a station of good-will, both were found true music such as now I often heard in sleep-music of and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. preparation and of awakening suspense. The undula- Enemies it was that made the difference between their tions of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of subsequent fortunes. The boy rose-to a splendour and the Coronation Anthem; and like that, gave the feeling a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that of a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing rang through the records of his people, and became a off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning|by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, 97 until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang together with them the songs that rose in her native Domrémy, as echoes to the departing steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent. No! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for thy side, that never once-no, not for a moment of weakness-didst thou revel in the vision of coronets and honours from man. Coronets for thee! O no! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. Daughter of Domrémy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, king of France, but she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd-girl that gave up all for her country-thy ear, young shepherd-girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this life; to do-never for thyself, always for others; to suffer-never in the persons of generous champions, always in thy own: that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. 'Life,' thou saidst, 'is short, and the sleep which is in the grave is long. Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long.' This poor creature-pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious-never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there until nature and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints; these might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the voice that called her to death, that she heard for ever. Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was he that sat upon it; but well Joanna knew that not the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was for her; but, on the contrary, that she was for them; not she by them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gorgeous were the lilies of France, and for centuries had the privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until, in another century, the wrath of God and man combined to wither them; but well Joanna knew, early at Domrémy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. Flower nor bud, bell nor blossom would ever bloom for her. On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by hollow spaces in every direction, for the creation of air-currents. The pile struck terror,' says M. Michelet, 'by its height.'. There would be a certainty of calumny arising against her-some people would impute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence could escape that. Now, had she really testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And those will often pity that weakness most, who in their own persons would yield to it least. Meantime there never was a calumny uttered that drew less support from the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no positive testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony to stem.. .. What else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? Ten thousand men,' says M. Michelet himself, ten thousand men wept; and of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier-who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow-suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood? What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy? And if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose up in billowy columns. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. No, she did not, though one should rise from the dead to swear it. JOHN WILSON CROKER. The last and most indefatigable of the original Corps of the Quarterly Review was MR JOHN WILSON CROKER (1780-1857). He was a native of Galway, his father being surveyor-general of customs and excise in Ireland, and he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. His first literary attempts were satirical-Familiar Epistles on the Irish Stage, 1804; and an Intercepted Letter from Canton, or a satire on certain politicians and magnates in the city of Dublin, 1805. These local productions were followed by Songs of Trafalgar, 1806, and a pamphlet, entitled A Sketch of Ireland, Past and Present, 1807. Sir Walter Scott, in his Life of Swift, has copied one passage from this Sketch, which appears to be an imitation of the style of Grattan. Character of Swift. On this gloom one luminary rose, and Ireland worshipped it with Persian idolatry; her true patriother first-almost her last. Sagacious and intrepid, he saw-he dared; above suspicion, he was trusted; above envy, he was beloved; above rivalry, he was obeyed. His wisdom was practical and prophetic-remedial for the present, warning for the future. He first taught Ireland that she might become a nation, and England that she must cease to be a despot. But he was a churchman; his gown impeded his course, and entangled his efforts. Guiding a senate, or heading an army, he had been more than Cromwell, and Ireland not less than England. As it was, he saved her by his courage, improved her by his authority, adorned her by his talents, and exalted her by his fame. His mission was but of ten years, and for ten years only did his personal power mitigate the government; but though no longer feared by the great, he was not forgotten by the wise; |