him, also, for six long years; but he is gone to join my sainted mother and my little sister in Heaven! Ah, madam, ours has been a sorrowful story; but Heaven has been merciful to me in sending me such friends as Borruelo and Eustache!" "Thy name is Antonio Netcelli, is it not?" demanded the lady. "Yes, most honoured lady," answered the youth; "such truly is my name." "Then thy sorrows and trials have ceased," exclaimed the lady. "Thou need'st no longer toil for thy daily subsistence; thou hast found thy family, and art become rich. My child-my child! I am thy mother's aunt, Louise." And, with many tears, the kind-hearted lady warmly embraced the young Antonio. At that moment a heavy step was heard approaching the door, and Borruelo made his appearance. The youth left the arms of Dame Louise, and joyfully met his foster-father. "Here is aunt Louise, father,aunt Louise, of whom my mother spoke so often, and so affectionately," said Antonio. Dame Louise informed the tailor of the sudden change in Antonio's fortunes. Borruelo heard the communication with evident sorrow of heart. His lips moved, and his eye was turned towards heaven in silent prayer. He then took the boy in his arms, and said, in a low, plaintive voice, "Thou art now become rich, Antonio; thou need'st no longer work thy trade; thou must quit my roof, and wilt perhaps soon cease to love thy father." "Never-never!" said Antonio, struggling with deep emotion. "As thou hast been, so thou shalt always be-my father. The same roof shall always cover us; we will never separate." "Worthy man," said the good Louise, "you deserve the world's esteem; it is an honour to know you. Henceforth, look upon me as your intimate friend. And now, nephew, come with me; your uncle Rembrandt is anxious to see you." "My uncle Rembrandt ?" said the youth, drawing back, and shuddering. "Hush !" said Dame Louise. "You must forgive the past, as those have who are now in heaven!" "Come, then, my father," said Antonio, turning to Borruelo; "if I go, you must come with me." And he took the old man gently by the arm, and led him along. 66 "Young man," said Rubens, laying his hand on Antonio's shoulder, "wilt thou become my pupil? I will take thee and thy excellent father to Antwerp, and my house shall be thy home. Dost thou consent? I am Peter Paul Rubens!" "Rubens!" cried Antonio, enthusiastically,-Rubens! What! I beHe come the pupil of Rubens!" paused for a few moments in great hesitation; then, running up tenderly to Dame Louise, he said, "Par don me, noble sir, I cannot do it; I must remain with this good lady; for she is the living resemblance of my dead mother!" Antonio Netcelli became the pupil of Rembrandt, and rapidly obtained eminence as one of the first masters of Flemish Art. To please his old uncle, he gave a Flemish termination to his Italian name, and always signed his paintings GASPARD ANTOINE NETSCHER. BUNYAN AND BUNHILL FIELDS. HOWEVER much people may affect to question the right of Mr. Southey to the name of a great poet-and critics speak confidently both for and against him-no one will affect to dispute his claim to be considered one of the very best of our English prose writers. Nor is it too much to say, perhaps, that his least merit is his style. His range of reading was wide, his diligence great, his memory still greater. He knew the world by something more than the mere spectacles of books; he had looked on nature for himself, and had compared his own experiences with the experiences of others. His observations on life are almost always to the point, and his opinions of men and books invariably of value. He had many of the inborn and acquired qualifications of a good biographer. He could suck the marrow of a book, and give you in a Quarterly Review article the cream of what Coxe had scattered, with an uncunning skill, over two thick quarto volumes. But he always wanted a good pioneer to go before him; and, though he affected at times to despise the poor but faithful antiquary, with his corn and chaff inconsiderately got together into one unmeaning heap, he was willing to admit the great utility of the pioneer species of literary men, and the important services which men like Rymer and Oldys, or Carte and Coxe, had conferred upon English history. He was, what is more, a pioneer himself, as much as his leisure time or the resources of his own library would well permit him. His Life of Cowper exhibits a long and patient examination of the dead or dormant literature of the last century, and an anxiety to detect any little particle of information likely to throw light on the subject of his memoir. He was very well aware of the charm with which new materials invariably invest a new biography; of the importance of a date, either in establishing a circumstance beyond cavil or dispute, or in rejecting it altogether from the pale of authentic matter. His diligence was unceas ferent publications. But his library, though large for a private individual, and large, moreover, for his means, was very ill suited for the wide and diversified range of his writings. Nor was there a library amid the lakes and wilds of Cumberland likely to be of any use to him. He wrote, therefore, under very heavy disadvantages; and it has always appeared to us, that his continuation of Warton's invaluable history, over which he brooded for so many years, must ne cessarily have been, had it ever been executed, a most imperfect publication. The reading and research of Warton were not confined to the college libraries of Oxford, or the glorious treasures of the Bodleian; he had availed himself of the treasures at Winchester and Cambridge, and had carried his researches into the then newly established British Museum. But we are not likely soon to see another Tom Warton among us; perhaps we shall never see another Southey. They were both great men. The unfinished history by Warton is a monument human industry and learning; and the prose works of Southey masterpieces of English composition. Southey thought his best prose work his History of Brazil; nor are we inclined to dispute his preference. The manner is above all praise, and the matter, considering its want of European attraction, highly enter taining. Ile thought comparatively little of his Life of Nelson; nor is his a solitary case of an author differing in his estimate of the value of his own writings from the standard measure of public opinion. The Nelson is a delightful narrative, within the compass of a pocket volume, of the heroic life and the heroic end of the greatest admiral of all time,the most English of all English heroes. But it is far from a satisfactory Life in the minuteness of its informall ation; and men who test and try biographies by the standard of their favourite Boswell-and we know very many who do this--will find it wanting in the scale of excellence by which they weigh and measure a ing. He always read with an object, biography. Southey's Life of Nelson and with a view to a variety of dif will live as long as the English lan guage, and will always form an enduring introduction to the Nelson Despatches, now in course of publication under the watchful eye of Sir Harris Nicolas. Mr. Southey was an author by profession; he lived (his pension excepted) entirely by his pen. He was too apt, therefore, to measure out his articles and biographies by the sheet. He was, moreover, a writer too apt to diverge into other speculations, from the width and variety of his reading. His Life of Wesley is too big a book for the importance of Wesley. His Life of Cowper is written on too extended a scale for the little variety of incident or circumstances in the recluse-like life of the Olney hermit; his Life of Kirke White is more in the nature of a preface; his Life of Isaac Watts too hurried a performance to be criticised by the Southey standard of excellence in prose; while his Life of Bunyan abounds in all the beauties of his style, and all the defects of his library and reading. was wanting in the first edition. When we have mentioned these curious circumstances in the Life of Savage in the hearing of people well acquainted with the minute circumstances of the narrative, we have found them unwilling to believe us. The truth is, the matter is so romantic, and the manner so irresistible, that people read it, as Reynolds read it, at a standing, and in the avidity of their reading forget every thing about dates, those necessary landmarks in history of every kind. It is fitting to observe here how our best writers such as Hume, Johnson, Southey, and others-have too often been careless in their facts, and how our worst writers in point of style have been painfully minute in their pins' heads of particulars. The lives, by Strype, of the various churchmen in the time of Queen Elizabeth; the biographies of Dr. Birch; and the Life of Dryden by Malone, are so many storehouses of minute and even extraneous information. The student of English history The best biographies in the world are the inimitable Lives of the inimitable Plutarch. They arc models in this style, in manner, treatment, and length. We have good biographies of our own. The Lives of the Poets, by Dr. Johnson, is one of the most fascinating books in the whole range of English literature. We are at a loss to decide which of the several Lives we should admire the most. Cowley was the doctor's own favourite, not for the method or excellence of its narrative, but from the clear and concise account it contains of the rise and fall of the socalled metaphysical poets among us. The Dryden is a delightful Life, but there is hardly a date that is correct throughout the whole of its pages. Pope we read in spite of Mr. Roscoc, nor will it be easy, or even possible, to push it out of favour. The Life of Savage was an early composition, and the reader may observe thirty years' difference of style between it and the Dryden. Savage extends over some one hundred and fifty pages; and of the three or four dates -we use the word in its wide sense -will seldom quit their pages without finding what he seeks, and without carrying away much curious matter, foreign, it is true, from his subject, but still important. The rare art is to combine the two great qualities of research and style. A Strype and Southey combined would make a perfect biographer, and a Life by their united exertions a complete biography. No country is richer in Worthies than Great Britain, or richer in materials for the proper compilation of their Lives. But these materials lie scattered over so many volumes,some small and scarce, and consequently dear, others large and expensive. history is perpetually at a loss for a The student of English good Biographia Britannica. He feels a difficulty at every turn, and wanders out of his way in search of information which one good work should supply to his hand at once. We have, it is true, several sets of Lives. Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets from Cowley to Gray; throughout the whole biography, Campbell, the Lives of the British and it actually contains no more, two, at least, are seriously incorrect. The date of his birth is grossly erroneous, and the year of his death Admirals; Macdiarmid, the Lives of the British Statesmen; Allan Cunningham, the Lives of the British Artists; and Sir Walter Scott, the Lives of the British Novelists. All possess a variety of merits, and some of the shorter Lives are good specimens of matter and manner. But the Biographia Britannica, though a century old, is still our great storehouse of facts; nor is it likely, from what we hear, to be soon supplanted. This we regret, because the Lives of British Worthies should be a British undertaking,-one that would prove, when properly performed, a far nobler monument to their memories than the statues in bronze about the squares of London, or the statues in marble that choke Westminster Abbey, or stand half seen within St. Paul's. We have been led into these remarks from a reperusal of Mr. Southey's "Life of Bunyan," in Mr. Murray's Colonial Library; and from the recent publication of a new Life of the fine old Baptist dreamer by Mr. George Godwin, before Mr. Selous's illustrated edition of the Pilgrim's Progress. Mr. Southey exhausted the stores of his own shelves and the supply of books which his publisher had sent him in the composition of his biography. Mr. Godwin exhibits a spirit of patient investigation, and the recent annotator of Southey's Life a love of reference and research, which merit imitation. But the Life of Bunyan, though inimitably well written by Mr. Southey, and succinctly compiled by Mr. Godwin, has yet to be written, not at greater length, we must allow, but with the new materials which fresh investigation cannot fail to produce; and, in the hope that some painstaking inquirer will go into the subject forthwith, we here contribute a new and important fact in the consideration of Bunyan's life to the future biographer of this "Spenser of the people." No kind of religion was safe under Charles II. Persecution prevailed at one time, and toleration at another. The king was careless and indifferent; perhaps he was a Deist; he died a Roman Catholic. The duke, his brother, was an uncompromising Papist. The king disliked the Presbyterians; the ill-bred familiarity of the Scotch divines had given him a distaste for that part of the Protestant religion. The church for which his father lost his head was as little to his liking; sectaries of all kinds he viewed with fear and disgust. His licentious course of life led him to repose at last on the bosom of a forgiving and infallible church, and the easy nature of his temperament to enforce an Act of Uniformity at one time, and a Declaration of Indulgence at another. Barrow and South were as little to his taste and inclination as Calamy and Baxter. He would not trust sufficiently to his own sense of what was just and proper, but threw himself into the hands of others, who used him as a means to their own evil ends, or their own personal aggrandisement. This was his father's fault; but the father did think, and then allowed himself to be overruled; while the son was ruled, to save himself the trouble of thinking at all. Raleigh wrote his History of the World in the prison of the Tower; Wither, his Shepherds Hunting within the walls of the Marshalsea; Lovelace, his little poem on the Freedom of the Mind within the Westminster Gate House; and Bunyan, his glorious dream of the Palgrim's Progress in the gaol at Bedford. Raleigh perished on the block; and Lovelace in a Shoe Lane lodg ing, surrounded, it is said, by want. Wither was afterwards an inmate of Newgate and the Tower; but Bunyan had a happier end. State matters were of very little moment to honest John Bunyan; and, so long as he was allowed to preach the Lord openly and honestly, his happiness was at its height; and this he was allowed to do unmolested from the pe riod of his enlargement till his death. The fruit of his imprisonment is before the world; the true history of his release has yet to be related. The toleration promised by the king at Breda was wholly overlooked in the Act of Uniformity; and Bunyan was one of the first persons, after the Restoration, who was punished for disobedience of the law. He was unwilling to desist from preaching the Word of God, and was imprisoned for his preaching. Twelve long years was Bunyan an inmate of Bedford Gaol; and he at length owed his release to accident, and to his old enemies the Quakers. After the fatal fight at Worcester, the king made his way, it is well known, through dangers and difficulties, to the sea-side at Shoreham, from whence he effected his escape, by a small fishing-vessel, to the coast of France. The master and mate of this little vessel were Quakers, as we gather from the following interesting letter, hitherto unpublished, from Ellis Hookes to the wife of Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers. The original letter is preserved among the Quaker records at Devonshire House in Bishopsgate Street: "For Thomas Greene, shopkeeper in Lan caster. "For M. F. He has been with the king lately, and Here the records cease; but the after-history of this Quaker application is related by Whitehead in that curious picture of his own life and times printed in 1725, under the name of The Christian Progress of George Whitehead. Whitehead was all prayer and application for the release of his brethren in the Lord, and had intimated his intention of writing to the king to his honest and loving friend Thomas Moore, [January 1669-70.] "Yesterday there was a friend with the king, one that is John Grove's mate. He was the man that was mate to the master of the fisher-boat that carried the king away when he went from Worcester fight, and only this friend and the master knew of it in the ship, and the friend carried him (the king) ashore on his shoulders. The king knew him again and was very friendly to him, and told him he remembered him, and of several things that were done in the ship at the same time. The friend told him the reason why he did not come all this while was that he was satisfied in that he had peace and satisfaction in himself, and that he did what he did to relieve a man in distress, and now he desired nothing of him but that he would set friends at liberty who were great sufferers, and told the king he had with him a paper of 110 that were præmunired, that had lain in prison about six years, and none can release them but him. So the king took the per and said, that there were many of them, and that they would be in again in a month's time, and that the country gentlemen complained to him that they were troubled with the Quakers. So he said he would release him six. But the friend thinks to go to him again, for he had not fully relieved himself." pa This highly interesting letter is endorsed by Fox himself," E. Hookes to M. F., of passages concerning Richard Carcer, that carried the king of his back. 1669." Hookes' next letter among the Quaker papers is addressed to Fox, the founder of the sect: "Who was often willing," he says, "to move the king in behalf of our suffering friends, the king having some respect to him, for he had an interest with the king and some of his council more than many others had, and I desired him to present my few lines, or letter, to the king, which he carefully did, and a few days after both he and myself had access into the king's presence, and renewed our request." The king listened to their application with attention and granted them liberty to be heard on the next council-day. "And then," he goes on to say, "Thomas Moore, myself, and our friend Thomas Greene, attended at the councilchamber at Whitehall, and were all admitted in before the king and a full council. When I had opened and more fully pleaded our suffering friends' case, the king gave this answer, I'll pardon Whereupon Thomas Moore pleaded the innocency of our friendsthat they needed no pardon, being innocent; the king's own warrant, in a few lines, will discharge them, For where,' said Thomas Moore, 'the word of a king is, there is power.' them.' The king's answer was curious,"Oh, Mr. Moore, there are persons as innocent as a child new born that are pardoned; you need not scruple a pardon." And Sir Orlando Bridgman, the lord keeper, added, "I told them that they cannot be legally discharged but by a pardon under the great seal." The king's Declaration of Indulgence was published on the 15th of |