There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;-Turn wheresoe'r I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more. Blessings, therefore, and not sarcasm, on the simple creed of childhood! for surely heaven lies about us in our infancy; and it is matter of joy that nature yet remembers what was so fugitive. These shadowy

recollections

M'Queen.-Better quote Wordsworth's ode verbatim et literatim while you are about it.

Crotchet.These shadowy recollections are the fountain light of all our day-uphold us, cherish, and have power to make our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence

M'Queen.-Truths that wake to perish never. Crotchet.-Your hand, brother! Thank you.-Truths which nought can utterly abolish or destroy. TruthsM'Queen.-A truce to your gratitude and your sentiment. Pull up, or I shall play Mr. Burchell directly, and cry fudge!-Nay, never shake thy auburn locks at me, thou canst not say I did it. But I will, if you don't stop.

Crotchet. Pardon the droppings of a fountain at my fond heart's door, whose only business was to flow. M'Queen.

And flow it did, not taking heed Of its own bounty, or my need of a change in the conversation.

Crotchet. Have your revenge. What was your firstlove in fiction?

M'Queen. My elders be thanked! they did not inoculate my young mind with Miss Porterish volumes -but at once dropped me within the charmed circle of the wizard of the north. The earliest story my mother ever told me, at least that I can remember, was from one of Scott's best works: and as soon as ever I could mind my p's and q's, and put consonants and vowels into intelligible juxta-position, the very first tale I began to spell over was that which she had narrated piece-meal as I leaned against her knees.

Crotchet. And which of the great series was it? M'Queen-Guy Mannering. The abduction of little Harry Bertram I had listened to again and again-nor did the old thrill which accompanied the narration ever lose its power-nor was I ever disinclined to hear it rehearsed once more. Every ill-looking fellow was to me a Dirk Hatterick, and every benevolent man in black a Dominie Sampson. The combined love and awe I felt for Meg Merrilies knew no bounds-and when she died in the cave, my heart was literally wrung with anguish. For her sake I love gipsies to this hour, at least the better halves of the fraternity. I would have thankfully undertaken a pilgrimage, afoot, to grasp the brawny fist of Dandie Dinmont, and see the real living Mustard and Pepper family; nor would a less pressing motive for such a journey have been the opportunity of kicking that arch-scoundrel, Gilbert Glossin. Crotchet.-It is a beautifully told story, and one by the side of which Miss Porter's seem feeble enough. But comparisons are invidious-and let us remember that Sir Walter himself traced not a little of the stimulus which made him a novelist to the literary example of the lady who so long survived him.

M'Queen.-I am not addicted to the melting mood, and all that; but there are bits of Guy Mannering, the reading of which-connected, I suppose, with my baby reminiscences-proves to me by sundry chokings in the throat, and pit-pat operations inside my waistcoat, and damp misty prospect about the eyes, that I shall never do for a stoic. I may be a great fool for

my pains; but I can't help it, and I don't wish to. That's poz.!

Crotchet.-Your hand again, mio tesoro. Go on. M'Queen.-There is one part in Guy Mannering that I am in the habit of reading once in every two or three months-because it helps to keep down the stoic in me. It's that part where Harry Bertram, now a man, visits his paternal home-the home from which he was torn away when five years old, and which he has never set eyes on since. He does not know himself as Bertram, but as Vanbeest Brown; nor has he any conception of his relationship to the Ellangowan (beautiful name!) which he cursorily visits. But a strange sensa tion creeps over him as he treads the old spot-a vague, dim, mysterious something-and it is the description of this which makes my own blood curdle as I read. The psychological interest of that description is, to me, exquisite. There he stands-an utter stranger, and yet no stranger at all-gazing on the house and lands as unknown and yet well-known-perplexed by the unaccountable conflict of feelings and fancies-bewildered by his inability to get rid of them by cold calculationreminding me of Lamartine's lines in the address to Lord Byron,

Je marche dans la nuit par un chemin mauvais, Ignorant d'où je viens, incertain où je vais; Et je rappelle en vain ma jeunesse écoulée, Comme l'eau du torrent dans sa source troublée. And then the interest reaches its grand climacteric when the unconscious visitor of his own domains hears a peasant girl begin to trill forth a Scottish melodyand that melody one that he remembered (ah, what moves us like music?)-one that he had sung-one that recalled in an instant faces that were forgotten, and scenes on which he little thought even with the mind's eye ever to look again-as I read the words I hear the very music carolled by that light-hearted girl over her bleaching

Are these the links of Forth, she said,
Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonny woods of Warroch-head,
That I so fain would see?

That subdues me quite-anti-sentimentalist as I am; and, without knowing why, I could pipe like a threeyear-old--aye, outpipe Niobe herself, all tears!

Crotchet. And you scoff at the tender and the pensive in some of my cherished authors! Never do that again, an thou lovest me, an thou lovest thy own consistency. As to the scene you refer to, I remember it well; well enough, by the way, to remind you that Brown himself plays the air first on his flageolet (rather Ranelagh-like, that pocket sentimentalism of the wandering youth), and then the bleaching damsel takes up the words-which had long since left his memory, though the tune lingered still. In your love for Guy Mannering I fully share; and, little as the critics may countenance such a preference, I am inclined to prefer it to any other of the Waverley series--and when I say this I have in my eye Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lammermoor and Old Mortality.

M'Queen. They are noble works, one and all. At boarding school I used to keep the boys awake of nights, retailing aloud in familiar narrative the stories which I had crammed from Scott during the last holidays. Mighty little of the wit and humour, of the pathos and descriptive power of my author did my applauding audience obtain. They lost the conversational beauties, but they got, and were grateful for, the plots and dramatic situations, which probably suited them better to hear, as it did me to tell. At the close of the "half," the fellows would specially beseech me to be diligent during the next vacation in reading up a fresh batch of Waverley tales, that I might be duly equipped for a fresh campaign of story-telling nights, of which I believe they would have welcomed the Arabian com

plement, a thousand and one. Nor did I shrink from the pleasant covenant. What joy it was-joy such as the sated adult never tastes again-to hurry in midsummer holidays from the cricket-field to the sofa in a quiet shaded room, where I could lay at full length, and gloat over the fascinations of Quentin Durward and the Fair Maid of Perth-now following step by step the Fortunes of Nigel, now involved in the intricate wards of the Heart of Midlothian-one day smit with wonder by a Legend of Montrose, the next quaffing at a draught the contents of St. Ronan's Well-at this session, or siesta rather, making love to Anne of Geirstein or the Surgeon's Daughter, at that making fun of the Antiquary or the Black Dwarf.

Crotchet-I am glad to catch you in this mood, and, having caught, to keep you there. For you affect in general the sturdy bearing of one to whom everything soft is a sham. Soft-hearted is not necessarily softheaded.

M'Queen.-Why, d'ye see, when I get into the company of soft people, I have the weakness of falling into their soft ways. Not always without laughing in my sleeve.

But

Crotchet.-Getting into your old vein, I see. there is a difference between affected and real feeling. The latter you have involuntarily betrayed to-day, and silly would it be to blush for it. On the other hand, laugh loudly and often as you will at the morbid sensibility professed by lack-a-daisical folks-a generation like that described by Sydney Yendys

We are a wealthy people

In all the faculties of woe. We have Our sighs for roses, elegies for sparrows, And seas of salt tears for deceased gold-fish. M'Queen.-I admire what Southey says in a letter to Chauncy Townsend-that if there be any evil connected with poetry, it is that it tends to make us too little masters of ourselves, and counteracts that stoicism, or necessary habit of self-control, of which all of us must sometimes stand in need. "You talk," says Southey to his young friend, "of mourning the loss of your trees, and not enduring to walk where you were wont to see them. I can understand this, and I remember when I was little more than your age saying

that

He who does not sometimes wake And weep at midnight, is an instrument Of Nature's common work

66

but the less of this the better. We stand in need," he continues (and it was shortly after losing his darling son Herbert), we stand in need of all that fortitude can do for us in this changeful world; and the tears are running down my cheeks when I tell you so." The sensibility at which I profanely make mouths is of the kind satirised by George Canning

Taught by nice scale to mete her feelings strong,
False by degrees, and exquisitely wrong;
For the crush'd beetle, first, the widow'd dove,
And all the warbled sorrows of the grove;
Next for poor suffering guilt-

and so on. He has a slap at Sterne a little after.
Crotchet.-Yes;

Mark her fair votaries, prodigal of grief, With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief, Droop in soft sorrow o'er a faded flower; O'er a dead jackass pour the pearly shower; But hear unmov'd of Loire's er.sauguined flood, Choked up with slain-of Lyons drenched in blood. MQueen-Enough of declamation and quotation; we shall be capping verses next. We were talking of school boy days-revenons à nos moutons, or agneaux. I wish you had been with me at the school at Ebecause you could have then known me in the character of an accomplished interpreter, to admiring contemporaries, of the Waverley Novels. When we met for

the first time at K--school, I had given up the habit, and gradually lost the capacity.

Crotchet.-Never altogether, for I remember walking with you many a time, through woodland solitudes, our arms interlaced, schoolboy fashion, while you poured into my willing ear the results of your homereading-consisting more of fiction than anything else but told with unction, and highly acceptable. And a capital memory was yours the day after you had been to the play, when you concentrated in a monologue all the actors of last evening. Such a mania as possessed you for theatricals was never equalled, I do believe, in this sublunary world.

M'Queen. I don't suppose it ever was. Certainly, if indulged to the full, that preposterous taste of mine, so voracious, so insatiable, so untameable, would have led to mischievous results. But as it was, I cannot, on calm retrospection, trace anything wrong, anything sinful in the taste itself. I loved the theatre, not as the man about town loves it, for I shrunk instinctively from everything which conscience told me was evil, and was invariably disgusted and indignant if ever I witnessed speech or gesture which bordered on indecorum; but I loved it as the enchanted isle whither my fancy could fly and expatiate-I loved it as the gatheringplace, the nucleus of all my poetical and romantic feelings; and to me it was much more real than life itself; more suggestive, more fraught with meaning.

Crotchet. It was a notorious fact in the school, that you could tell what pieces would be performed at every theatre in London, every single night of your existence-and not only so, but the actor of each part in each drama.

M'Queen. I used to come to a dead halt before every playbill in the streets, and get up the contents by heart. An old crony would interrogate me in the playground, with beautiful confidence in the infallibility of my knowledge-"I'm going to Covent Garden to. night, Willie, what shall I see ?" "Are you? happy dog!-mind you come and talk with me to-morrow :see?-why, you'll see Sheridan Knowles's Hunchback, with Knowles himself as Master Walter, and Charles Kemble as Clifford, and the new actress, Helen Faucit as Tinsel, and Vale as Fathom, and-" but before I had Julia, and Miss Taylor as Helen, and Pritchard as Lord gone through the list, my inquirer, less careful about details, would be off to hockey, or hare and hounds. Many a time, too, have you sat to witness my mimic show at home, with its duly pasted and tinselled "characters" enjoying the locomotion of tin slides; many a time have you clapped me into enthusiasm while managing the paper puppets which enacted The Miller and his Men, and Jonathan Bradford, and The Forty Thieves, and One o'Clock, or the Wood Demon, and Home's Douglas, and whatever other plays were prepared by Mr. Lloyd and other purveyors of precious sheets of "characters." Painting the scenes and pasting the actors was a delight that lapped my senses in elysium; writing out the programme in red and black ink was as exciting as ever could be Wellington's wardespatches. Oh, the days of yore! As Barry Cornwall puts it

If my dreams were sinful, God forgave the crime; For I look back with calmness back upon my prime. Have you quite forgotten all that sunny time, When we whispered secrets-not to be told in rhyme? The chief marvel of my thoughts at that time was, that people of sense, with money at command, should fail to pass every night of their lives at the temple of Thespis. It was perfectly unaccountable. This feeling was strong upon me while as yet acquainted only with inferior pieces and actors; but it grew tenfold in intensity when saw Macready in The Winter's Tale, Vandenhoff in Cato, Charles Kean in Hamlet, Farren in The Country Squire, and so forth. I could talk of

which thou art now ashamed. But know that some of the chiefest minds of our age express cordial love and reverence for William Lisle Bowles. Southey-who eventually married a near relation of his-makes grateful and cordial acknowledgment" of the benefit he derived from Bowles--greater still, he avows, than that gathered from Cowper. I would call other witnesses into court, good men and true; but we are nearing the end of our tether, and must play at Bowles another day, or adjourn it sine die. PARSON FRANK.

THE PLAGUE ON SHIPBOARD. "JUST fancy," said Simms; "a fellow swam from the shore-a native; caught hold of the cable nearly drowning. They've pulled him on board."

串

*

In ten minutes Brunt came running in, "Did you ever see a person die, either of you?" he asked. "No." Impelled by the fearful curiosity which carries us to the scene of the great mystery, they both followed him. They went inside a screen, and there they saw a dark swarthy man lying delirious, and galloping on to death. He was muttering away some words which they could not understand.

"Send Dato here," said Brunt. Dato was a Maltese, who served as a sailor on board the brig. He came, anxious, and wondering what the doctor wanted him for. When he caught sight of the dying man, all his native superstitions crowded on him. "Oh! sar," he said, crossing himself, "what you want me for?"

"Hush! you fool," said Brunt: "you know Arabic; is the man speaking Arabic?" Death had no terrors for the surgeon. He minded it no more than the stopping of a watch. The Maltese knelt down, and put his ear near the dying man's mouth, and again made the sign of the cross. They formed a curious group. The Maltese grinned like a negro with emotion; Brunt gazed calmly on; Simms shed tears; Singleton held his breath; prayer was stirring in the depths of his soul.

"He speak of his wife and little ones, sar;" said the Maltese, looking up terrified.

"Poor fellow," said Brunt. "Hippocrates could not save him now.'

"He speak of destruction-and ruin-and starvation -and revenge, sar," cried Dato, running out the words suddenly, and with big tears on his brown face. The muttering ceased; the face changed its expression; the head gave a short sharp vibration: life was gone. Singleton and Simms hurried away.

But what were the tidings that reached them soon, spreading through the ship like a fatal fire, making every face pale, and every heart beat?

Holy of Holies! The "Viper" had the plague! This, then, was the dead man's avenger. This was the revenge which he had taken, for the ruin brought upon him by the English Crusade. He had left a curse as a legacy, and death for an executor. The plague was on board the brig.

*

*

In the morning they saw the ghastly emblem of the dread disease-a yellow flag with a black ball in the centre-flying from the fort: already, two men were seized on board. Nausea, faintness, delirium, death, were the steps in regular succession. Some died raving violently, some in a muttering torpor. Of some, the death-bed was attended by beautiful dreams. Some floated away to the dark river to the sound of soft music.

Like a wounded bird, that flies away, endeavouring to escape from the agony which it bears within itself, the "Viper" left Tripoli next day, and carried her agony into the loneliness of the sea. All the night before, they had heard from the shore the howl of the jackal.

As she moved away in the forenoon, they saw two dark specks approaching. The specks increased in size; they were vultures, lured from their distant homes in Lebanon by the unerring instinct which tells them where there is death. At noon, two sharks were seen sailing about four hundred yards off, with their fins just above water. They had seen no sharks before. Yet there they were, drawn from some secret haunt by the promise of a feast.

Commander Tinsley assembled the officers in his cabin to deliberate, and to give his general instructions in the crisis. Everybody was present. There was a solemnity about the Commander's manner that contrasted strangely with his usual language and appearance. But the clements of tragedy are simple enough. Once bring in death, and your other dramatis persona soon suit themselves to the play. When fair Ophelia's body enters, the grave-digger's jesting is forgotten. Tinsley consulted Flibb and Brunt. The surgeon was nervous, uncertain, and embarrassed. Brunt was cool and grand, confident and courageous, for Brunt had a theory: and very often a theory is as supporting as a religion.

*

*

*

*

One more morning, and here they all were still alive. Singleton used to say that every such morning seemed in itself a resurrection.

"It is odd," muttered Brunt at last, turning over paper after paper: "scarcely one case with symptoms of recovery. But I'll tell you what is odd: none of the officers have had it yet. Now, their number being in proportion to that of the whole crew in the ratio of "

"Hush, doctor!" interrupted little Simms, turning pale, and glancing round as if he thought death was listening; don't give us such calculations. I declare there is no hope anywhere." So saying, he pulled out a Bible, which his mother had given him, and, opening it in the psalms, he read aloud: "How excellent is thy loving-kindness, O God; therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings."

It was rumoured that the captain was "seized;" and two or three of the men whispered that it was a punishment to him for saying that the plague had made the crew lazy.-Welwyn and Singleton went upon deck soon after, and, just as they reached it, Welwyn pinched Singleton's arm, and whispered, "look there." Looking aft, they saw old Bobus peering down the cabin skylight into Tinsley's cabin with eager curiosity. "Mark the ghoul," said Welwyn in disgust. Bobus raised his head, walked aft, and stretched his arms violently, with the air of one who is practising gymnastic exercises. "How well I know what he is thinking!" Welwyn continued. "He is testing his own health, and congratulating himself upon it."*** Another morning. Once more the little band met in their berth, sound and well. the plague was going on, still Brunt was active and hopeful; and still the awful notes of phenomena swelled. Whatever that theory might be which sustained the doctor's soul, death seemed the practical part of the affair. Simms read his Bible, and looked forward with timid hope. Welwyn was wrapped up in his serene philosophy; but poor Fontenoy was wretched--disturbed-miserable-he had no theory.

Still

Oh! sceptical philosophers, who destroy, and cannot build; oh! fair poets, who dream, and do not teach; oh! brilliant essayists, who suggest, and cannot satisfy, behold your pupil here. Pleasant Lalage, whose face beamed dimmer through the past; fair Adela, star of the morning land; ye could bring him no consoling thought now. Better to have been spawned on the banks of the Nile in the olden time, and believed, if it were only in a brute, than to live amidst the wonders of civilization, and have no faith.-Singleton Fontenoy.