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"But their blood shall never mingle with mine."-"Lookye, Tomkins; you're an unforgiving fellow: your blood would suffer no contamination by the union: and I can tell you this, that whatever animosity you may bear to them, they always speak in the highest terms of you. Mrs. Ferguson, to this day, says you are the best-hearted man she ever knew." My uncle's features here assumed a more complacent aspect. "Answer me one question," said he. "Can you deny that she jilted me ?"—"I can. You might have had a regard for her, but it does not follow that she was in love with you; and surely she had a right to consult her own happiness by marrying the man of her heart."-" Humph! well, I care little about that now. I hate animosity as much as any man; and Bob knows it has always been my wish that he should be happy; and if I thought they really wished to renew the acquaintance." I interrupted the conclusion of the sentence by putting into his hand the letter I had just received. He was much agitated while perusing it, and I could see a tear in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, and desired me to reach him the writing-apparatus. In a few minutes a letter was written, announcing his wish for a reconciliation, and giving his consent to the marriage. Our hearts were too full to speak. My uncle reached out his hand to his friend. He shook it heartily. "You've acted," said he, "like yourself. This is as it should be." I quitted the room to despatch the letter, and in three week's time became the husband of the fellmonger's daughter. Q. Q. Q.

THE FALL OF GRENADA, OR THE MASSACRE OF THE

ABENCERRAGES.*

ALHAMBRA! Alhambra! red are thy courts with gore,

Thy marble courts that murder's hand ne'er stain'd with blood before:
Alhambra! Alhambra! Grenada mourns thy shame,

No more thy country's chivalry shall glory in thy name.

Where are thy gallant chieftains now proud of unsullied blood?

Where are thy stately virgins now the pride of maidenhood?

Dim are their full black eyes with tears, their swelling bosoms show,
With deepfelt agitation heaved, their's is no common woe.

*The rapid descent of the Moorish empire in Grenada may be dated from the Massacre of the Abencerrages in the reign of Boadillin, the son and sharer of the crown with his father Muley Hassan at the close of the 15th century. The Abencerrages, the most faithful, powerful, and brave, of the Moorish factions, being envied by the Zegris and their partisans, the latter secretly persuaded the king that Albin Hamar, an Abencerrage, had been too intimate with his Queen Alfaïma. The monarch immediately joined the Zegris in a scheme of revenge, without enquiry respecting the innocence or guilt of the accused party, and thirty of the Zegris, well armed, having placed themselves in the Court of the Lions, in the Alhambra, agreed to despatch the Abencerrages of the palace, one by one, as they were sent through it by the King on different pretences. Thirty-six Abencerrages were thus destroyed, when a page, who followed the last and witnessed his master's death, ran off and alarmed the other Abencerrages of the palace, and those in the city, who immediately armed themselves, attacked and destroyed two hundred of the Zegris, made the King fly, and set fire to the Alhambra, which was partially burned. Soon afterwards the Abencerrages left the city, and joining the Spaniards became Christians. After their departure, Grenada became tributary to Spain, and the glory of the Moorish empire was no more.

No common woe is their's to-day, for many a knight is dead,
On whom with looks of love they gazed, in whom they gloried;
No other robes their fair limbs shade but sacred ones of grief,
And bursting hearts, and bosoms rent, call death to their relief.

Mourn, beautiful Grenada! mourn, thy bravest sons are low,
Thou 'rt widow'd now and left forlorn by treachery's secret blow;
Cursed be the King, the coward King, that sacrificed the brave,
And by the assassin's lurking hand gave them an unwarn'd grave.

Thoughtless of treachery, one by one, th' Abencerrages were sent,
Where thirty Zegris watchfully in crouching ambush bent,
And many pass'd, but one true page, that saw the murderous sight,
Told of his noble master's fate upon his timely flight.

The Lions' marble court and walls with their heart's blood are dyed,
Fierce stand the Zegris, sword in hand, bathed in the reeking tide,
They wait the vietim coming next, and gaze with silent rage
Toward the fatal door, nor dream the tidings of the page.

None enter more to glut their ire, but with no vain delay

Th' expected victims roused and arm'd dash through the portal's way:
The Zegris fight and seek to fly, but fight and flight are vain,
Upon the blood they basely shed th' assassin band is slain.

Revenge! revenge! the people call, and every street career,
With cymeter and torch in hand th' Abencerrages appear,
Two hundred Zegris pay the price of their assassin deed,
Amid the streets, in their own halls, at their own hearths they bleed.

And now the climbing flame ascends and ruin stalks along,
The red fires flash on Daro's wave and shake their volumes strong
Th' Alhambra blazes, Yemen's sons* no pause in anger make,
Dear is the game at which they play, for vengeance is the stake.

Alhambra! Alhambra! thou totterest to thy fall,

Already shoots the pitiless flame through corridor and hall,

It wreathes around thy columns white, it charks thy friezes fair,
Till quench'd with gore th' aspiring blaze dies in the burning air.

Alhambra! Alhambra! Grenada's boasted pride,

Though half-consumed, thou 'rt beautiful as a dark Moorish bride;
But never shalt thou be again the thing which thou hast been,
Of love, of faith, of loyalty, the high and gallant scene!

Mourn, beautiful Grenada! mourn, no more thy tourneys gay
Shall make thee envied as the pride and soul of gallantry;

Thy bravest knights are low in death, thy monarch hides his head,
His heart is base, his word a lie, his race is tarnished.

Long shalt thou grieve in weeds and dust thy empire's mighty loss,——
Thy bravest sons turn infidel and raise the impious cross-
O, slur on Moorish constancy! stain on thy prophet's fame!
Curse on the Zegris faction vile that covered thee with shame!

Mourn, beautiful Grenada! mourn, from this unhappy day
Declines thy sun of glory fast, swift parts thy power away-
Mourn, beautiful Grenada! mourn, soon of thee all shall be
An empty dream of by-gone power, a tale of chivalry!

* The Abencerrages were supposed to be descended from Yemen.

THE SPIRITS OF THE AGE.NO. I.

Jeremy Bentham.

MR. Bentham is one of those persons who verify the old adage, that "a prophet has no honour, except out of his own country." His reputation lies at the circumference, and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chili and the mines of Mexico. He has offered Constitutions for the New World, and legislated for future times. The people of Westminster, where he lives, know little of such a person; but the Siberian savage has received cold comfort from his lunar aspect, and may say to him with Caliban, "I know thee and thy dog and thy bush"-the tawny Indian may hold out the hand of fellowship to him across the Great Pacific. We believe that the Empress Catherine corresponded with him; and we know that the Emperor Alexander called upon him, and presented him with his miniature in a gold snuffbox, which the philosopher, to his eternal honour, returned. Mr. Hobhouse is a greater man at the Hustings, Lord Rolle at PlymouthDock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is, that our author's influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to those studies,-"that wait a thought from Indus to the Pole,”—and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party-politics. He once indeed stuck up a hand-bill to say that he (Jeremy Bentham) being of sound mind, was of opinion that Sir Samuel Romilly was the most proper person to represent Westminster, but this was the whim of the moment. Otherwise, his reasonings, if true at all, are true everywhere alike: his speculations concern humanity at large, and are not confined to the hundred, or bills of mortality. It is in moral as in physical magnitude. The little is seen only near the great appears in its proper dimensions only from a more commanding point of view, and gains strength with time, and elevation from distance !

Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets-in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He hardly ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have the privilege of the entrée, are always admitted one by one. He does not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal, and listens to nothing but facts. When any one calls upon him, he invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and exercise)—and there you may see the lively old man, his mind still buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or planning a code of laws for some "lone island in the watery waste," his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of

his person, his dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY—or pausing perhaps for want of breath, and with lacklustre eye, to point out to the stranger a stone in the wall at the end of his garden, (over-arched by two beautiful cotton-trees) Inscribed to the Prince of Poets, which marks the house where Milton formerly lived. To shew how little the refinements of taste or fancy enter into our author's system, he proposed at one time to grub up these beautiful trees, to convert the garden where he had breathed the air of Truth and Heaven for near half-a-century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for all the rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs. Let us not, however, be getting on too fast-Milton himself taught a school!-There is something not altogether dissimilar between Mr. Bentham's appearance, and the portraits of Milton--the same silvery tone, a few dishevelled hairs, a peevish, yet puritanical expression, an irritable temperament corrected by habit and discipline. Or in modern times, he is something between Franklin and Charles Fox, with the comfortable double-chin, and sleek thriving look of the one, and the quivering lip, the restless eye, and animated acuteness of the other. His eye is quick and lively, but it glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought. He is evidently a man occupied with some train of fine and inward association. He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He meditates the coming age. He hears and sees only what suits his purpose, some foregone conclusion ;" and looks out for facts and passing occurrences only to put them into his logical machinery and grind them into the dust and powder of some subtle theory, as the miller looks out for grist to his mill! Add to this physiognomical sketch the minor points of costume, the open shirt-collar, the single-breasted coat, the old-fashioned halfboots and ribbed stockings; and you will find in Mr. Bentham's general appearance, a singular mixture of boyish simplicity and of the venerableness of age. In a word, our celebrated jurist presents a striking illustration of the difference between the philosophical and the regal look; that is, between the merely abstracted and the merely personal. There is a lack-a-daisical bonhommie about his whole aspect, none of the fierceness of pride or power; an unconscious neglect of his own person, instead of a stately assumption of superiority; a goodhumoured, placid intelligence, not a lynx-eyed watchfulness, as if it wished to make others its prey, or was afraid they might turn and rend him; he is a beneficent spirit, prying into the universe, not lording it over it; a thoughtful spectator of the scenes of life, or ruminator on the fate of mankind, not a painted pageant, a stupid idol set up on its pedestal of pride for men to fall down and worship with idiot fear and wonder at the thing themselves have made, and which, without that fear and wonder, would itself be nothing!

Mr. Bentham, perhaps, over-rates the importance of his own theories. He has been heard to say (without any appearance of pride or affectation) that "he should like to live the remaining years of his life, a year at a time at the end of the next six or eight centuries, to see the effect which his writings would by that time have upon the world.” Alas! his name will hardly live so long! Nor do we think, in point of

fact, that Mr. Bentham has given any new or decided impulse to the human mind. He cannot be looked upon in the light of a discoverer in legislation or morals He has not struck out any great leading principle or parent-truth, from which a number of others might be deduced; nor has he enriched the common and established stock of intelligence with original observations, like pearls thrown into wine. One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so: for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed. But Mr. Bentham's forte is arrangement; and the form of truth, though not its essence, varies with time and circumstance. He has methodised, collated, and condensed all the materials prepared to his hand on the subjects of which he treats, in a masterly and scientific manner: but we should find a difficulty in adducing from his different works (however elaborate or closely reasoned) any new element of thought, or even a new fact or illustration. His writings are, therefore, chiefly valuable as books of reference, as bringing down the account of intellectual inquiry to the present period, and disposing the results in a compendious, connected, and tangible shape; but books of reference are chiefly serviceable for facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, and are constantly liable to be superseded and grow out of fashion with its progress, as the scaffolding is thrown down according as the building is completed. Mr. Bentham is not the first writer, by a great many, who has assumed the principle of UTILITY as the foundation of just laws, and of all moral and political reasoning: his merit is, that he has applied this principle more closely and literally, that he has brought all the objections and arguments, more distinctly labelled and ticketed, under this head, and made a more constant and explicit reference to it at every step of his progress, than any other writer. Perhaps the weak side of his conclusions also is, that he has carried this single view of his subject too far, and not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will. "He has not allowed for the wind." It is not that you can be said to see his favourite doctrine of Utility glittering every where through his system, like a vein of rich, shining ore, that is not the nature of the material,—but it might be plausibly objected that he had struck the whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, and whim, with his petrific, leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile Hermes,” and reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation. The gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the constitution of his mind will scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to consequences: if we consider the criminal man (with whom the legislator has chiefly to do), it will be found to be still less so.

Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue or the perpetration of a crime. We are afraid the human mind does not readily come into this doctrine, this ultima ratio philosophorum, taken according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are

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