After leaving Stockton-on-Tees, Mr. Webber resided for three years at St. Helier's, as sub-editor of the Jersey Independent. Returning to his native town, he was for some time engaged as reporter and correspondent of the Newcastle Daily Chronicle. At present, he resides in London, and is engaged on the Sportsman.

Since Charles Dickens moved so many human hearts with his holy Christmas Carol, the press has teemed with Christmas tales and other genial literature at the sacred season of Yule-tide, all more or less calculated to foster those friendly feelings which should always actuate us, but especially at Christmas time, "when," as CAMILLA TOULMIN well observes, "the old and new years meet, and the world pauses, as it were, to breathe amid the toil, and strife, and struggle of life; and the holy gratitude to which the sacred season should give birth, inclines us to be at peace with all men: and none the less that we show our gratitude in mirth, and revelry, and song, and laughter!" In the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle of December 24th, 1864,we find "Our Christmas Box of Yule-tide Stories," contributed by the subject of this notice: Chapter I. "which is prefatory," opening with the following free and forcible sketch of

The North Mind.

"The Editor, seated in his velvet-cushioned easy chair, his purely classical countenance surmounted by one of those innumerable bonnets Grees wrought by the dainty fingers of the prettiest of his accomplished female devotees, the Editor, I say, was lazily inhaling the breath of his fragrant hookah. It was an ugly night outside the shutters, as the shutters every one shakily testified. There was a North Wind hard at work in the raw street, pouring forth a shrill song of defiance; and although he, the North Wind I mean-one may personify, in the poetical manner, at Christmas time, you know-had been engaged in a similarly vocal manner for a full week, night and day, there did not as yet appear to be the least sign of his giving in.

He was up to concert pitch at present, and his putting in a deep dotted crotchet now and again was more from choice than necessity. Ordinary vocalists will tell you that street singing, under the best of circumstances, is an awful fag; and, except at fashionable watering-places (famous Tiddler's grounds these!) not to be borne on any account. But our Street Singer! Hark! How he loves to sweep the chill street and the bare plain, trolling sturdily the while! How he loves to skim the heathery moor and climb the mossy mountain-to curl the crests of the drunken river, and tumble the billows of the mad sea! And

he does help the blast of the seaside cottage-grate and sends the finely sifted seacoal scudding over the good wife's sea-sanded floor; and when he does stir the tarry knobs of Wallsend that top the rich man's bars-stirs them till they shoot forth sudden jets of joyous flame, it is merely condescension on his part, nothing more. Bless you, he has other fish to fry.

"He is an honest carle, too, and it is almost a wonder to me however he has come to be so coldly shouldered. Why have poets, for example, treated his rhymthmical claims so scurvily? I could mention a score twangers of celestial lyres who have belauded the Zephyrs of the west and south-weak effeminates, these! no end, and could name one rare rhymer who has piped magnificently of the wild wind of the east. But point out the bard who has dared to publish the grim grandeur of the Wind o' the North? Never mind your books. No dusty disentombing of black-letter lore for me. No knotted forehead and sagely-crooked forefinger here. If any of your especial literary ones have had a kindly word to say of the strongest son of Eolus, out with it at once. Run it off the reel of your memory, my friend, and I will call yours loving testimony.

"Ha! Ha! I know. Whose wings brush the cold Winter stars till they blink again? The North Wind's. Whose neaf cuffs my crusty neighbourcuffs him till his nose is as blue as a carpenter's whetstone, and his cheeks as chill as a post-office pillar, cuffs him till he is constrained to feel human about those poor shivering bodies that are less comfortably clad than his ? Why the North Wind's. Who lays a firm hold on the limpid lake, binding it hard and fast for the sinuous skater ? The North Wind. Who chokes off hectic fever and trips up ravening disease? The North Wind. Who comes to clear the way of dead leaves and to dry up autumn pools that Christmas may have such a carpet as beseemeth the hale chief of Saxon cheer? The North Wind. That there is another side to the shield, another verse to the song, another chapter in the story, another act in the drama, is, alas, too true. The bluff breeze, whose place of nativity is leagues away (where the many-hued bergs of Winter glisten wondrously in the dancing spires of the borealis) has been too rudely nurtured, if one may call his bleak beginnings nurture, to heed the mighty cairns which Life and Art pile fearfully high to stay his wrath. So we shrink from him in his rougher moods, and look askance at him perhaps ; cuddling closer together in the chimney corner. Yet not so close, I trust, as to be gentled into forgetfulness of the want and suffering and danger which hurtle so thickly in the world that lies beyond our own fire-lit walls."

Both in his Snowdrift and in his Yule-tide Stories, Byron Webber has given proof that he has all the elements of a great man within him; and he only has to be true to his own soul to make for himself a proud position in English literature.

Ff

JOHN WALKER ORD, F.G.S.L.

66

Hail, child of Genius! Cleveland's honour'd bard!
Who, singing England's praise, forgat not her
Whose hills, and brooks, and plains, thou didst prefer
To all the world: thou wert a worshipper
Of Nature fair; and on the daisied sward
Of thy dear native vale did ofttimes lay,
(When Phoebus high in azure heaven did ride,
And sea-nymphs sported in the ocean tide,)
To hear the lark's glad song, see lambkins play,
And view thy Cleveland clad in garments gay
Of lovely green,
with Flora's gems bedight

So rich and profuse, that thy gladden'd soul
Felt inspiration at the very sight,

And wing'd its way beyond the world's control."

PETER PROLETARIUS.

Amongst the poets and prose-writers of Cleveland, few deserve a more prominent place than the late John Walker Ord; an excellent portrait of whom forms the frontispiece to the present volume. And I cannot but express my very deep regret, that his nearest relatives should, from some cause or other, have thought fit to refuse me even the slightest materials towards his biography; as I would fain have penned a much better memoir than my readers, under the circumstances, are ever likely to get from me. He was a man of considerable genius, warmly attached to our dear old Cleveland; and, though he penned many passages which I for one consider to be unjust, in his criticisms and in his political partizanship, yet few men have had a stronger love for literature, or a keener sense of the beauties of nature, as the extracts I am about to give from his writings will show.

John Walker Ord was born at Gisbro', on the fifth of March, 1811, where his father still carries on a respectable business as a currier. For some years our author attended the Grammar School of his native place, founded along with the

Hospital of Jesus, by Robert Pursglove, the last Prior of Gisbro',-an engraving of whose portrait, from his sepulchral brass in the chancel of Tiddeswell Church, Derbyshire, is given in the present work. From Gisbro', our author was removed to a school at Sowerby, near Thirsk; and, on his return home, he devoted himself assiduously to the study of the English poets, English history, and the classics. His first production that I can ascertain the date of was the following poem, written at Gisbro', on New Year's Day, 1829, and pronounced by PROFESSOR WILSON to bo "full of fancy, feeling, and imagination":

A Vision of the Soon.

"There is an hour, an holy hour, a time of bliss and peace,

When night has set upon the earth, and caused our cares to cease;
When midnight, brooding o'er the plain, breathes stillness and repose,
And calms and soothes the raging main, as dew the breeze-stirr'd rose ;
When through the woods more softly creep the winds which stirr'd the day,
Or on their pinions lull'd to sleep, thus dream the hours away;
When through the sky the night-bird wings his long and darken'd course,
And feeds upon the earth-born things, the victims of his force ;-
There is an holy, hallow'd hour for feeling and for love,

When Nature wantons in her power, and draws our thoughts above;
When visions float across the soul, and fast in their embrace,
Unawed by Reason's stern control, our thoughts are lost in space.

I dreamt that I had left this earth to dwell within the moon,
And wander'd through its halls of mirth, unfetter'd and alone;
It seem'd like to our world below in structure and in form,
Yet still, and calm, and undisturb'd by tempest or by storm.
The beings who inhabited its wide and sunny land
Seem'd to my dream of mightier mould than aught on earthly strand:
Their natures were of nobler stamp, their thoughts of wider scan,
And more unlimited in range than those of earthly man.
In palaces of gold they dwelt, yet there was not their sleep,
But'neath the glorious canopy of heaven's o'er-arching steep;
For their's was one unvaried clime of brightness and of heat,
And ne'er upon its parched soil had Winter set his feet.

I look'd unto our world below, and thought upon the worms-
The things of clay, the sons of dust, and all its boasted charms :
How paltry did Earth now appear, a speck upon the sky—
A dusky spot on heaven's bright face, to stain its majesty !

Who would have thought that man, so proud, so mighty in his sphere,
All-powerful, all-commanding man, should wholly disappear ?—
He who hath done such wond'rous things, and vaunted in his pride
All things in earth and sky were his, and in the ocean wide!

And thou, my own, my sea-girt isle of freedom and the brave,
The lord of many nations, and the conqueror of the wave,
Where now were all thy bulwarks, thy armaments of power,
Which triumph on the waters unto earth's remotest shore ?
And where thine Autumn's smiling fields, thy harvest rolling bright,
Which gently waves beneath the blast in mockery of its might ?
Thy blooming fields of fertile Spring, thy regal mountain oak,
Which from its seat so long hath braved the whirlwind's fiercest stroke?
And where were now the fair and brave who graced thy much-loved land?
And where the wise who, by their nod, light up thy gifted strand ?
Thy men of North, thy men of South, are nowhere to be seen,
All centred in that dusky spot,' as if they ne'er had been.
The scorch'd plains of the distant East, and Afric's dreary wastes,
And Arabs' lands, so oft upturn'd by the Simoon's sweeping blasts
Kamtschatka, lord of Norland snows, its sons the scoff of men,
The first-born child of the misty storms, and knight of the hurricane.
The West, the East, the North, where now are all your boundless climes ?—
And thou, sweet South, so oft gone o'er in the poet's glowing rhymes ?
The Sea, whose caverns ne'er have been unveil'd to human ken,
Where lifeless forms have oft 'repair'd, and will repair again,'-
Where were you all, when from Night's lamp I gazed in quest of each,
In that other orb, from burning Ind to Lapland's sounding beach?
And nought might now distinguish you save a bright and dusky stain,
The bright the scorching southern fields, the dark the watery main :
I saw but dimly, yet, methought that such must be the change
Which spangled o'er the brighten'd face of Earth's unbounded range.

;

And now my dream hath pass'd away, like a thought across the mind,
The dews before the sun's hot ray, or a bubble on the wind,-
The joys we felt in dawn of youth, when all our thoughts were bliss,
A shower upon a Summer's eve, the rapture of a kiss ;

Yea, even as these, 't is vanish'd, fled—its fancies all are gone,

No vestige on my soul is left save memory alone;

And there, long as life's lamp may burn, imprinted shall it be,
A phantom of the bygone years-a treasure unto me !"

Early in 1829, John Walker Ord proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, to study with a view to become a physician, and for this purpose became a pupil of the celebrated anatomist, Dr. Knox; and between the two there was afterwards a lifelong intimacy, notwithstanding the pupil's too-great devotion