CHAPTER I.

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BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLIV. APRIL, 1845. VOL. LVII.

CONTENTS.

VIRGIL, TASSO, AND RAPHAEL, 401

PING-KEE'S VIEW OF THE STAGE, 415

THE MIDNIGHT WATCH, 424

VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, 448

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. PART XVI., 461

BETHAM'S ETRURIA CELTICA, 474

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS OF AN

ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 489

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS. NO. III.--DRYDEN, 503

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;

AND 22, PALL-MALL, LONDON.

_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLIV. APRIL, 1845. VOL. LVII.

VIRGIL, TASSO, AND RAPHAEL.

Originality of conception and fidelity of observation in general mark the

efforts of genius in the earlier ages of society; and it is then,

accordingly, that those creative minds appear which stamp their own

impress upon the character of a whole people, and communicate to their

literature, in the most distant periods, a certain train of thought, a

certain class of images, a certain family resemblance. Homer, Phidias, and

AEschylus in ancient times--Dante, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, and Shakspeare

in modern, belong to this exalted class. Each in his own department has

struck out a new range of thought, and created a fresh brood of ideas,

which, on "winged words," have taken their flight to distant regions, and

to the end of the world will never cease to delight and influence mankind.

Subsequent ages may refine their images, expand their sentiments, perhaps

improve their expression; but they add little to the stock of their

conceptions. The very greatness of their predecessors precludes fresh

creations: the furrows of the ancient wheels are so deep that the modern

chariot cannot avoid falling into them. So completely in all persons of

education are the great works of antiquity incorporated with thought, that

they arise involuntarily with every exercise of the faculty of taste, and

insensibly recur to the cultivated mind, with all that it admires, and

loves, and venerates.

But though originality of conception, the creation of imagery, and the

invention of events belong to early ages, delicacy of taste, refinement of

sentiment, perfection of expression, are the growth of a more advanced

period of society. The characters which are delineated by the hand of

Genius in early times, are those bold and original ones in which the

features are distinctly marked, the lines clearly drawn, the peculiarities

strongly brought out. The images which are adopted are those which have

first occurred to the creative mind in forming a world of fancy: the

similes employed, those which convey to the simple and unlettered mind the

clearest or most vivid conception of the idea or event intended to be

illustrated. Valour, pride, resolution, tenderness, patriotism, are the

mental qualities which are there portrayed in imaginary characters, and

called forth by fictitious events: and it is this first and noblest

delineation of mental qualities in an historical gallery which has

rendered the _Iliad_ immortal. The images and similes of Homer are drawn

from a close observation of nature, but they are not very varied in their

range: he paints every incident, every occurrence, every feature, but he

is not much diversified in conception, and surprisingly identical in

expression. His similes of a boar beset by hunters, of a lion prowling

round a fold and repelled by the spear of the shepherd, of a panther

leaping into a herd of cattle, are represented in the same words wherever

he has a close fight of one of his heroes with a multitude of enemies to

recount. So forcibly is the creative mind, in the first instance,

fascinated by the variety and brilliancy of its conceptions, that it

neglects and despises their subordinate details. It is careless of

language, because it is intent on ideas: it is niggardly in language,

because it is prodigal of thought. Homer's expressions or epithets are in

general admirably chosen, and speak at once a graphic eye and an

imaginative mind; but it is extraordinary how often they recur without any

variation. It is the same with Ariosto: he is somewhat more varied in his

expression, but even more identical in his details. Prodigal of invention,

varied in imagination, unbounded in conception, in the incidents and great

features of his story, he has very little diversity in its subordinate

parts. He carries us over the whole earth, through the air, and to the

moon: but giants, castles, knights, and errant damsels occur at every

step, with hardly any alteration. The perpetual jousts of the knights,

charging with the lance and then drawing the sword, are exactly parallel

to the endless throwing of the spear and leaping from the chariot in the

_Iliad_.

No man can read the _AEneid_ without seeing that it has been constructed,

both in its general conception and chief incidents, on the poems of Homer;

and yet so exquisite was the taste, so refined the sentiment, so tender

the heart of VIRGIL, that he has produced upon the world the impression of

a great original author. Dante worshipped him as a species of divinity; he

made him his guide through the infernal regions, to unfold the crimes of

the wicked and the intentions of the Deity in the distribution of future

rewards and punishments. Throughout the middle ages he was regarded as a

sort of necromancer, a mighty magician, to whom the past and the future

are alike known, and whose power even the elements of nature were

constrained to obey. The "Sortes Virgilianae," so well known, and so long

practised in every country of Europe, arose from this belief. The imagery,

mythology and characters of his epic poem are drawn from the _Iliad_: but

in two particulars he is entirely original, and his genius has opened the

two fountains from which the most prolific streams of beauty in modern

poetry have flowed. He is the father of _descriptive_ and _amatory_

poetry. The passion of love, as we understand it, was unknown to Homer, as

much as was the description of nature as a separate and substantive

object. He has made the whole _Iliad_, indeed, turn upon the wrath of

Achilles for the loss of Briseis; and he has painted, with inimitable

tenderness and pathos, the conjugal attachment of Hector and Andromache;

but he had no conception of love as a passion, mingled with sentiment, and

independent of possession. The wrath of Achilles is the fury of an Eastern

sultan whose harem has been violated: the parting of Hector and Andromache

is the rending asunder of the _domestic_ affections, the farewell from the

family hearth, the breaking up of the home circle. But the love of Dido

for AEneas is the refined passion which is the soul of the romances and of

half the poetry of modern times. It was the creature of the imagination,

the offspring of the soul from its own conceptions, kindled only into life

by an external object. It arose from mental admiration; it was inhaled

more by the ear than the eye; it was warmed at his recital of the sack of

Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. It had no

resemblance to the seducing voluptuousness of Ovid, any more than the

elegant indecencies of Catullus. It resembled the passion of Desdemona for

Othello.

Homer painted with graphic fidelity and incomparable force, often with

extraordinary beauty, the appearances of nature; but it was as

illustrations, or for the purpose of similitude only, that he did so. It

was on human events that his thoughts were fixed: it was the human heart,

in all its various forms and changes, that he sought to depict. But Virgil

was the high-priest of nature, and he worshipped her with all a poet's

fervour. He identifies himself with rural life, he describes with devout

enthusiasm its joys, its occupations, its hardships: the rocks, the woods,

the streams, awaken his ardent admiration; the animals and insects are the

objects of his tender solicitude. When the Mantuan bard wrote,

----"Saepe exiguus mus

Sub terram posuit domos atque horrea fecit,"

he was inspired with the same spirit that afterwards animated Burns when

he contemplated the daisy, Cowper when he sympathized with the hare. The

descriptive poetry of modern times has owed much to his exquisite eye and

sensitive heart. Thomson, in his _Seasons_, has expanded the theme in a

kindred spirit, and with prodigal magnificence. Scott and Byron have

brought that branch of the poetic art to the highest perfection, by

blending it with the moral affections, with the picturesque imagery of the

olden time, with the magic of eastern or classical association. But none

of our poets--how great soever their genius, how varied their

materials--have exceeded, if they have equalled, the exquisite beauty of

his descriptions; and the purest taste in observation, as the utmost

beauty of expression, is still to be best attained by studying night and

day the poems of Virgil.

Modern epic poetry arose in a different age, and was moulded by different

circumstances. The mythology of antiquity was at an end, and with it had

perished the gay and varied worship which had so long amused or excited an

imaginative people. The empire of the Caesars, with its grandeur and its

recollections, had sunk into the dusk; the venerable letters, S. P. Q. R.,

no longer commanded the veneration of mankind. A new faith, enjoining

moral duties, had descended upon the earth: a holier spirit had come to

pervade the breasts of the faithful. An unknown race of fierce barbarians

had broken into the decaying provinces of the Roman empire, and swept away

their government, their laws, their property, and their institutions. But

the Christian faith had proved more powerful than the arms of the legions;

it alone had survived, amidst the general wreck of the civilized world.

Mingling with the ardent feelings and fierce energy of the barbarian

victors, it sat

----"a blooming bride

By valour's arm'd and awful side."

Incorporating itself with the very souls of the conquerors--descending on

their heads with the waters of baptism, never leaving them till the moment

of extreme unction--it moulded between these two extremes their whole

character. A new principle superior to all earthly power was introduced--a

paramount authority established, to which even the arm of victorious

conquest was compelled to submit--ruthless warriors were seen kneeling at

the feet of unarmed pontiffs. The crown of the Caesars had more than once

been lowered before the cross of the head of the faithful.

From the intensity and universality of these religious emotions, and the

circumstance of the Holy Land being in the hands of the Saracens, with

whom Christendom had maintained so long, and at times so doubtful, a

struggle, a new passion had seized upon the people of modern Europe, to

which no parallel is to be found in the previous or subsequent history of

mankind. The desire to recover the Holy Sepulchre, and re-open it to the

pilgrimages of the faithful, had come to inflame the minds of men with

such vehemence, that nothing approaching to it had ever before occurred in

the world. It had pervaded alike the great and the humble, the learned and

the ignorant, the prince and the peasant. It had torn up whole nations

from Europe, and precipitated them on Asia. It had caused myriads of armed

men to cross the Hellespont. In Asia Minor, on the theatre of the contest

of the Greeks and Trojans, it had brought vast armies into collision, far

outnumbering the hosts led by Hector or Agamemnon. It had brought them

together in a holier cause, and on more elevated motives, than prompted

the Greek confederates to range themselves under the king of men. It had

impelled Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Godfrey of Bouillon from Europe. It

had roused Saladin and Solyman the Magnificent in Asia. Unlike other

popular passions, it had continued through successive generations. It had

survived for centuries, and declined at length less from want of ardour in

the cause, than from failure of the physical and material resources to

maintain at so vast a distance so wasting a struggle, and supply the

multitudes of the faithful whose bones whitened the valley of the Danube

or the sands of Asia.

But religious and devout emotions had not alone become all-powerful from

the blending of the ardour of a spiritual faith with the fierce energy of

northern conquests. The northern nations had brought with them from their

woods two principles unknown to the most civilized nations of antiquity.

Tacitus has recorded, that a tribe in Germany maintained its authority

solely by the justice of its decisions; and that in all the tribes, women

were held in the highest respect, and frequently swayed the public

councils on the most momentous occasions. It is in these two principles,

the love of justice and respect for women, that the foundation was laid

for the _manners of chivalry_, which form the grand characteristic and

most ennobling feature of modern times. New elements were thence infused

into the breast of the warriors, into the heart of women, into the songs

of poetry. Chivalry had arisen with its dreams, its imaginations, its

fantasy; but, at the same time, with its elevation, its disinterestedness,

its magnanimity. The songs of the Troubadours had been heard in southern

Europe; the courts of love had been held in Provence; the exploits of

Charlemagne and Richard had resounded throughout the world. The _chevalier

sans peur et sans reproche_, who dedicated himself to the service of God

and of his lady, was a less natural, but he was a far more elevated being,

than either Achilles or AEneas. Knights-errant, who went about in quest of

adventures, redressing wrongs, succouring damsels, combating giants,

defying sorcerers, delivering captives--faithful amidst every temptation

to their lady-love, true amidst every danger to the Polar-star of

duty--formed the leading characters in a species of romance, which is less

likely, in all probability, to be durable in fame than the _Iliad_ or the

_AEneid_; but which is so, in a great degree, from the circumstance that

the characters it portrays had, from an extraordinary combination of

events, been strung upon a higher key than is likely to be sympathized

with by future generations of man.

Ariosto was the great original mind in this extravagant but yet noble

style of poetry; he was the Homer of this romance of modern Europe. He

possessed the same fruitful invention, the same diversified conception,

the same inexhaustible fancy as the Grecian bard; and in melody and

occasional beauty of versification, he is often his superior. But he will

bear no sort of comparison with Homer in knowledge of character or the

delineation of the human heart. His heroes are almost all cast in one of

two models, and bear one of two images and superscriptions. The Christian

paladins are all gentle, true, devoted, magnanimous, unconquerable; the

Saracen soldans haughty, cruel, perfidious, irascible, but desperately

powerful in combat. No shades of difference and infinite diversity in

character demonstrate, as in the _Iliad_, a profound knowledge and

accurate observation of the human heart. No fierce and irascible Achilles

disturbs the sympathy of the reader with the conquerors; no

self-forgetting, but country-devoted Hector enlists our sympathies on the

side of the vanquished. His imagination, like the winged steed of Astolfo,

flies away with his judgment; it bears him to the uttermost parts of the

earth, to the palace of the syren Alcina, to the halls in the moon, but it

destroys all unity or identity of interest in the poem. The famous siege

of Paris by the Saracens in the time of Charlemagne, which was so often

expected during the middle ages, that it at last came to be believed to

have been real, was the main point of his story; but he diverges from it

so often, in search of adventures with particular knights, that we

wellnigh forget the principal object of the poem, and feel no absorbing

interest in the issue of any particular events, or the exploits of any

particular heroes. He had no great moral to unfold, or single interest to

sustain, in his composition. His object was to amuse, not instruct--to

fascinate, not improve. He is often as beautiful as Virgil in his

descriptions, as lofty as Homer in his conceptions; but he as often equals

Ovid in the questionable character of his adventures, or Catullus in the

seducing warmth of his descriptions. There is no more amusing companion

than the _Orlando Furioso_ for the fireside; but there is none less likely

to produce the heroes whom it is his object to portray.

That which Ariosto wants, TASSO has. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ is, beyond

all question, the epic poem of modern Europe. In it, as in the _Iliad_,

unity of interest and of action is entirely preserved. It is one great

struggle between Europe and Asia which is recorded; it is for the attack

and defence of one city that the forces of Christendom and of Mahometanism

are arrayed. But the object of contention, the moral character of the

struggle, is incomparably higher in the modern than the ancient poem. It

is not "another Helen who has fired another Troy;" it is no confederacy of

valour, thirsting for the spoils of opulence, which is contending for

victory. It is the pilgrim, not the host, whose wrongs have now roused

Europe into action; it is not to ravish beauty from its seducer, but the

holy sepulchre from its profaners, that Christendom has risen in arms. The

characters of the chiefs correspond to the superior sanctity of their

cause, and indicate the mighty step in advance which the human mind, under

the influence of Christianity and civilization, had made since the days of

Homer. In Godfrey of Bouillon we perceive enthusiasm guided by wisdom;

difficulties overcome by resolution, self-subdued by devotion. Rinaldo,

like Achilles, is led astray by beauty and the issue of the war is

prolonged from the want of his resistless arm; but the difference between

his passion for Armida, and the Grecian hero's wrath for the loss of

Briseis, marks the influence of the refined gallantry of modern times. The

exquisite episode of the flight of Erminia, the matchless pathos of the

death of Clorinda, can be compared to nothing either in the _Iliad_ or

_AEneid_; they belong to the age of chivalry, and are the efflorescence of

that strange but lofty aspiration of the human mind. Above all, there is a

moral grandeur in the poem, a continued unity of interest, owing to a

sustained elevation of purpose--a forgetfulness of self in the great cause

of rescuing the holy sepulchre, which throws an air of sanctity around its

beauties, and renders it the worthy epic of Europe in its noblest aspect.

Notwithstanding these inimitable beauties, the _Jerusalem Delivered_ never

has, and never will make the impression on the world which the _Iliad_ has

done. The reason is, that it is not equally drawn from nature; the

characters are taken from romantic conception, not real life. The chiefs

who assemble in council with Godfrey, the knights who strive before

Jerusalem with Tancred, have little resemblance either to the greyhaired

senators who direct human councils, or the youthful warriors who head

actual armies. They are poetical abstractions, not living men. We read

their speeches with interest, we contemplate their actions with

admiration; but it never occurs to us that we have seen such men, or that

the imagination of the poet has conceived any thing resembling the

occurrences of real life. The whole is a fairy dream--charming,

interesting, delightful, but still a dream. It bears the same resemblance

to reality which the brilliant gossamer of a snow-clad forest, glittering

in the morning sun, does to the boughs when clothed with the riches and

varied by the hues of summer. It is the perfection of our conceptions of

chivalry, mingled with the picturesque machinery of antiquity and romantic

imagery of the East, told with the exquisite beauty of European

versification. But it is a poetical conception only, not a delineation of

real life. In Homer, again, the marvellous power of the poet consists in

his deep insight into human character, his perfect knowledge of the human

heart, and his inimitable fidelity of drawing every object, animate or

inanimate. Aristotle said that he excelled all poets that ever appeared in

"[Greek: diagnoia]." Aristotle was right; no one can study the _Iliad_

without feeling the justice of the observation. It is the penetration,

the piercing insight of the Greek bard, which constitute his passport to

immortality. Other poets may equal him in variety of imagination; some may

excel him in melody of versification or beauty of language: none will

probably ever approach him in delineation of character, or clothing

abstract conceptions in the flesh and blood of real life.

Considered with reference to unity of action and identity of interest, the

_Jerusalem Delivered_, equal to the _Iliad_, is much superior to the

_AEneid_. Virgil appears, in his admiration of Homer, to have aimed at

uniting in his poem the beauties both of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_,

and thence in a great measure his failure to rival either. While the first

six books, which contain the wanderings of the Trojan exile and the dismal

recital of the sack of Troy, are an evident imitation of the _Odyssey_,

the last six, containing the strife in Italy, the efforts of the Trojans

to gain a footing on the Ausonian shores, and the concluding single combat

of Turnus and AEneas, are as evidently framed upon the model of the

_Iliad_. But it is impossible in this manner to tack together two separate

poems, and form an homogeneous whole from their junction. Patchwork will

appear in spite of all the genius and taste of Virgil. Epic poetry,

indeed, is not confined within the narrow limits of the Grecian stage; the

poem may embrace a longer period than it requires to read it. But in epic

poetry, as in all the fine arts, one unity is indispensable--the unity of

interest or emotion. Unity of time and place is not to be disregarded to

any great degree without manifest danger. The whole period embraced in the

_Iliad_ is only forty-eight days, and the interest of the piece--that

which elapses from Hector lighting his fires before the Greek

intrenchments till his death in front of the Scaean Gate--is only

thirty-six hours. Tasso has the same unity of time, place, and interest in

his poems: the scene is always around Jerusalem; the time not many weeks;

the main object, the centre of the whole action, the capture of the city.

The charming episodes of Erminia's flight and Armida's island are felt to

be episodes only: they vary the narrative without distracting the

interest. But in Virgil the interest is various and complicated, the scene

continually shifting, the episodes usurp the place of the main story. At

one time we are fascinated by the awful recital of the murder of Priam,

the burning of Troy, and the flight of AEneas: at another, we weep with the

sorrows of Dido at Carthage, and the exquisite pathos of his heart-rending

lamentations: at a third, we are charmed by the descent into the infernal

regions on the shores of Avernus, we sympathize with the patriotic effort

of Turnus and the people of Ausonia to expel the invaders from the Italian

shores. Though Virgil did not intend it, he has twice transferred the

reader's sympathy from the hero of his story: once by his inimitable

description of the mourning and death of Dido from the departure and

perfidy of AEneas, and again, from the burst of patriotic feeling which he

has represented as animating the Etruscan tribes at the violent intrusion

of the Trojan invaders.

Virgil's heroes will bear no sort of comparison with those either of the

_Iliad_ or the _Jerusalem Delivered_. AEneas himself is a vain conceited

man, proud of his piety and his wanderings, and destroying our admiration

for either by the ostentation with which he brings them forward on all

occasions. The well-known line,

"Sum pius AEneas, fama super aethere notus,"

occurs too frequently to render it possible to take any interest in such a

self-applauding character. Compare this with the patriotic devotion, the

heroic courage, the domestic tenderness, the oblivion of self in Hector,

in the _Iliad_, and it will at once appear how far deeper the insight into

the human heart was in the Grecian than the Roman poet. One striking

instance will at once illustrate this. When Hector parts from Andromache

at the Scaean Gate, and after he has taken his infant son from his arms, he

prays to Jupiter that he may become so celebrated that the people in

seeing himself pass, may say only--"He far exceeds his father." What

sentiment on the part of a hero himself, and at the moment the bulwark

and sole stay of Troy! But what does Virgil make AEneas say in similar

circumstances?--"Learn, boy, virtue and true labour from ME, fortune from

others."

What a difference between the thought in the two poets, and the interest

which their words excite in the breast of the reader!

What an historical gallery, or rather what a gallery of imaginary

portraits, does the _Iliad_ contain! It is the embodying so many separate

and well-distinguished characters, in different persons, which forms the

grand characteristic--the unequalled supremacy of the poem. Only think of

what they are. Achilles, vehement alike in anger and in grief, wrathful,

impetuous, overbearing, "the most terrible character ever conceived by

man;" yet not insensible at times to the tender emotions, loving his

country, weeping for his father, devoted to his home, but yet determined

to purchase deathless renown by a short life, ere he met the death he knew

awaited him under the walls of Troy. Hector, calm, resolute, patriotic;

sustaining by his single arm the conflict with a host of heroes; retaining

by his single suavity the confederacy of many jealous and discordant

nations; unconquerable in the field; undaunted in council; ever watching

over his country; ever forgetful of himself; overflowing with domestic

affection, yet prodigal of self-sacrifice; singly awaiting before the

Scaean Gate the approach of Achilles, when his celestial armour shone like

the setting sun, and all Troy in terror had sought refuge within the

walls; deaf to the wailing even of Andromache and Priam, at the call of

patriotic duty; and when betrayed by Minerva in the last conflict, and

deprived of his home, yet drawing his sword to do deeds of which men might

speak thereafter! Diomede, unsubdued even amidst the wreck of Grecian

fortunes during the absence of Achilles, alone sustaining the war, when

all around him quailed before the spear of Hector; and resolute to hold

his ground with a few followers, even though the whole of his Grecian

leaders fled in their ships. Agamemnon, proud, imperious, passionate;

doing injustice in anger, yet willing to repair it on reflection; wresting

the blue-eyed maid from Achilles in the first burst of fury, yet publicly

acknowledging his fault in the council of the chiefs; sending embassies,

and offering his own daughter, to obtain a reconciliation with the son of

Peleus. Ulysses, wary alike in council and in action; provident in forming

designs, intrepid in carrying them into execution; sparing of the blood of

his soldiers, but unconquerable in the resolution with which they were

led; ever counselling prudent measures, but ever ruled by invincible

determination. Ajax, singly resisting the onset of the Trojan multitude;

slowly retreating, covered by his broad shield; midway between the two

armies, when all around him fled; striving with desperate resolution for

the body of Patroclus, and covering the retreat of his followers who

dragged along the lifeless hero, when Hector, clad in the shining panoply

he had wrested from the Myrmidonian chief, was thundering in close

pursuit. What has Virgil to exhibit as a set-off to this band of

heroes--"Fortem Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum"--the boyish eagerness of

Ascanius, the savage wrath of Turnus when bereaved of his bride! We seem,

in passing from the _Iliad_ to the _AEneid_, to have fallen, so far as

character goes, from a race of giants to a brood of pigmies.

Modern partiality cannot claim for Tasso the merit of having conceived a

band of heroes whose characters were as strongly marked, or boldly drawn,

as those of the Grecian bard; yet may it justly claim for the Italian poet

the second honours. Tasso did not draw his characters from nature, like

Homer; he lived at a period when the manners of the heroic age had passed

away, and the recollections of it were preserved only in the stanzas of

poetry and the romances of the Troubadours; yet did the force of his

genius, the elevation of his sentiments, the loftiness of his conceptions,

in a great measure supply the defect, and produce a magnificent, and to

this day unequalled, picture of the chivalry of modern Europe. Godfrey of

Bouillon is the model of a Christian hero whose arm has been devoted to

the sacred lance; antiquity did not, and could not, conceive any such

character. Hector is the nearest approach to it; but the patriotism of

the Trojan chief is mingled with his domestic affections; it is for his

father, his wife, his child, his hearth, his country, that he fights. In

Godfrey, all these affections, warm and ennobling as they are, appear to

be obliterated by the perpetual sense of a sacred duty superior to them

all--by the intensity of the pious fervour which had concentrated all

earthly affections. He is the personification of the Church militant,

combating for its Saviour's cause. The profound feelings, the

self-negation, the martyr-like spirit which had been nursed for centuries

amidst the solitude of the cloister, appears in him brought forth into

action, and producing the most intense enthusiasm, yet regulated by the

caution of Ulysses, combined with the foresight of Agamemnon, sustained by

the constancy of Ajax.

Rinaldo, youthful, vehement, impassioned, is the ideal of a hero not yet

weaned from the passions of the world. Vehement, capricious, and

irascible, he disturbs, like Achilles, the council of the chiefs by his

wrath, and is seduced by the beauty of Armida to abandon the cause of the

cross; yet even in her enchanted gardens, and when surrounded by all that

can fascinate the imagination and allure the senses, the sparks of a noble

nature are not extinct in his breast; he is recalled to his duty by the

sight of her warriors; he flies the arms of the syren; he penetrates with

invincible courage the enchanted forest; and when he descends purified

from the stains of the world from the lofty mountain, on whose summit at

sunrise he had dedicated himself to God, he is the worthy and invincible

champion of the cross. Not less bold than his youthful rival, not less

enthusiastic in his affections, Tancredi is the victim of a romantic

passion. But it is no enchantress for whom he pines; it is no seducing

frail one who allures him from the path of duty. Clorinda appears in the

Saracen ranks; her arms combat with heroic power for the cause of Mahomet;

the glance which has fascinated the Christian knight came from beneath the

plumed helmet. Lofty enthusiasm has unstrung his arm--devoted tenderness

has subdued his heart--the passion of love in its purest form has

fascinated his soul; yet even this high-toned sentiment can yield to the

influences of religion; and when Tancredi, after the fatal nocturnal

conflict in which his sword pierced the bosom of his beloved, is visited

by her in his dreams, and assured that she awaits him in Paradise, the

soul of the Crusader is aroused within him, and he sets forth with ardent

zeal to seek danger and death in the breach of Jerusalem. It cannot be

said that these characters are so natural as those of Homer, at least they

are not so similar to what is elsewhere seen in the world; and therefore

they will never make the general impression which the heroes of the Iliad

have done. But they are more refined--they are more exalted; and if less

like what men are, they are perhaps not the less like what they ought to

be.

How is it, then, if Virgil is so inferior to Homer and Tasso in the unity

of action, the concentration of interest, and the delineation of

character, that he has acquired his prodigious reputation among men? How

is it that generation after generation has ratified the opinion of Dante,

who called him his "Divine Master"--of Petrarch, who spent his life in the

study of his works? How is it that his verses are so engraven in our

recollection that they have become, as it were, a second nature to every

cultivated mind, and insensibly recur whenever the beauty of poetry is

felt, or the charms of nature experienced? Rest assured the judgment of so

many ages is right: successive generations and different nations never

concur in praising any author, unless his works, in some respects at

least, have approached perfection. If we cannot discern the beauties, the

conclusion to be drawn is that our taste is defective, rather than that so

many ages and generations have concurred in lavishing their admiration on

an unworthy object. Nor is it difficult to see in what the excellence of

Virgil consists; we cannot read a page of him without perceiving what has

fascinated the world, without concurring in the fascination. It is the

tenderness of his heart, his exquisite pathos, his eye for the beauty of

nature, the unrivalled beauty of his language, which have given him

immortality, and to the end of time render the study of his works the most

perfect means of refining the taste and inspiring a genuine feeling of

poetic beauty.

So melodious is the versification, so delicate the taste, so exquisite the

feeling, so refined the sentiment of Virgil, that it may truly be said

that he will ever remain the model on which the graces of composition in

every future age must be formed. Of him more truly than any human being it

may be said, "Nihil quod tetegit non ornavit." The _Georgics_ demonstrate

that, in the hands of genius, and under the guidance of taste, the most

ordinary occupations of rural life may be treated with delicacy, and

rendered prolific of beauty. The dressing of vines, the subduing of the

clod by the sturdy heifers, the different manures for the soil, the sowing

of seed, the reaping of harvest, the joys of the vintage, the vehemence of

storms, the snows of winter, the heats of summer, the blossoms of spring,

the riches of autumn, become in his hands prolific of description and

prodigal of beauty. Even the dumb animals are the objects of his tender

solicitude. We hear the heifers lowing for their accustomed meal in

winter; we gaze on the sporting of the lambs in spring; we see the

mountain goat suspended from the shaggy rock in summer; we sympathize with

the provident industry of the bees; we even feel we have a friend in the

little underground nest of the field mouse. The opening lines of the

Eclogues, which every schoolboy knows by heart, give an earnest of the

exquisite taste which pervades his writings:--

"Tityre, tu patulae, recubans sub tegmine fagi,

Sylvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena;

Nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva.

Nos patriam fugimus: tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra,

Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida sylvas."

Virgil, it has been said, was so strongly impressed with the inferiority

of the _AEneid_ to what he conceived epic poetry should be, that he desired

that poem to be thrown into the flames after his death; yet though

deficient in the principal requisites of an epic poem, so far as the

structure of the story and the delineation of the characters are

concerned, what exquisite beauties does it contain--what an assemblage of

lovely images has it brought together--what an irreparable loss would its

destruction have been to all future generations of men! Not all the genius

of subsequent ages could have supplied its place. There are beauties in

the _AEneid_, which neither Thomson in descriptive, nor Racine in dramatic

poetry, have been able to rival.

If Homer excels all subsequent writers in conception of character, vigour

of imagination, and graphic delineation, Virgil is not less unrivalled in

delicacy of sentiment, tenderness of feeling, and beauty of expression.

There are many more striking scenes in the _Iliad_, more animating events,

more awful apparitions; but in the _AEneid_, passages of extraordinary

beauty are much more numerous. What is present to the imagination when we

rise from the former, is the extraordinary series of brilliant or majestic

images which it has presented; what is engraven on the memory when we

conclude the latter, is the charming series of beautiful passages which it

contains. There are many more events to recollect in the Grecian, but more

lines to remember in the Roman poet. To the _Iliad_, subsequent ages have

turned with one accord for images of heroism, traits of nature, grandeur

of character. To the _AEneid_, subsequent times will ever have recourse for

touches of pathos, expressions of tenderness, felicity of language.

Flaxman drew his conception of heroic sculpture from the heroes of the

_Iliad_: Racine borrowed his heart-rending pathetic from the sorrows of

Dido. Homer struck out his conceptions with the bold hand, and in the

gigantic proportions, of Michael Angelo's frescoes; Virgil finished his

pictures with the exquisite grace of Raphael's Madonnas.

Virgil has been generally considered as unrivalled in the pathetic; but

this observation requires to be taken with a certain limitation. No man

ever exceeded Homer in the pathetic, so far as he wished to portray it;

but it was one branch only of that emotion that he cared to paint. It was

the _domestic pathetic_ that he delineated with such power: it was in the

distresses of home life, the rending asunder of home affections, that he

was so great a master. The grief of Andromache on the death of Hector, and

the future fate of his son begging his bread from the cold charity of

strangers--the wailings of Priam and Hecuba, when that noble chief awaited

before the Scaean Gate the approach of Achilles--the passionate

lamentations of the Grecian chief over the dead body of Patroclus--never

were surpassed in any language; they abound with traits of nature, which,

to the end of the world, will fascinate and melt the human heart. The

tender melancholy of Evander for the fate of Pallas, who had perished by

the spear of Turnus, is of the same description, and will bear a

comparison with its touching predecessor. But these are all the sorrows of

domestic life. Virgil and Tasso, in the description of the despair

consequent on the severing of the ties of the passion of love, have opened

a new field, unknown in the previous poetry of antiquity. It is to be

found touched on in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and but

touched on. The passion they represent under the name of love was not what

we understand by the word, or what constitutes so important an element in

the poetry and romance of modern Europe. It was not the imaginative flame

feeding on hope, nursed by smiles, transcendent in enjoyment, but a

furious mania, resembling rather, and classed with, the ravings of

insanity. Destiny was the grand ruling power in Greek tragedy: the

distress brought out was the striving of man against the iron chain of

fate. Love as a passion, independent of destiny, detached from sense,

feeding on the imagination, living in the presence of the beloved object,

is glanced at in Catullus; but it is in Virgil that we must look for the

perfect delineation of its suffering, a thorough knowledge of its

nature--in Tasso, that it has been wrought up to the highest conceivable

perfection.

But, for all that, we will not have old Homer defrauded of his dues. The

_Iliad_ cannot, for the reasons already mentioned, produce passages to be

placed beside the pathetic tenderness of Dido's love for AEneas, the

romantic chivalry of Tancredi, or Erminia's passion. But in the earlier

and more natural affections, in the delineation of domestic grief, in the

rending asunder the parental or filial ties, who has ever surpassed the

pathetic simplicity of the Grecian bard? Where can we find such

heart-rending words as Priam addresses to Hector, leaning over the towers

of Troy, when his heroic son was calmly awaiting the approach of the

god-like Achilles, resplendent in the panoply of Vulcan, and shielded by

the AEgis of Minerva?

But we know not whether three lines in the _Odyssey_ do not convey a still

more touching picture of grief--so powerful is the wail of untaught

nature. When Proteus informed Menelaus of the murder of Agamemnon, his

grief is thus described--

"[Greek: Hos ephat': autar emoige kateklasthe philon etor

Klaion d' en psamathoisi kathemenos; oude ny moi ker

Ethel' eti zoein, kai horan phaos heelioio.]"

_Odyssey_, IV. 538.

"Thus he spoke; my soul was crushed within me; I sat weeping on the sand;

nor had I the heart to wish to live, and behold the light of the sun."

Here is the pathos of nature: "Rachel weeping for her children, and would

not be comforted, because they are not."

One peculiar beauty belongs to the epic poems of antiquity, and especially

Homer, from the combination of heroic sentiments and actions with a

simplicity which will be looked for in vain, and in truth would be

unseemly, in the later ages of society. We hear of princes, kings, and the

daughters of kings, and our imagination immediately clothes them with the

pomp and circumstance of modern royalty. But erelong some little

circumstance, let out as it were accidentally, brings us back at once to

the simplicity and habits of early life. Bellerophon met the daughter of a

king amidst the grassy meads, and a race of heroes sprung from this

occasion; but he met her as he was tending his herds, and she her lambs.

The beauteous daughters of the Trojan chiefs repaired to the hot and cold

springs of the Scamander, near the Scaean Gate, but they went there to wash

their clothes in its limpid fountains. The youngest daughter of Nestor,

with the innocence of a child, though the beauty of womanhood, did, by her

father's desire, to Telemachus the duties of the bath. Many a chief is

described as rich; but generally the riches consist in flocks and herds,

in wrought brass or golden ornaments--not unfrequently in meadows and

garden-stuffs. This beauty could not, from the superior age of the world,

belong to Tasso. His soldans are arrayed in all the pomp of Asiatic

magnificence--his princes appear in the pride of feudal power--his

princesses surrounded with the homage of chivalrous devotion. Virgil has

often the same exquisite traits of nature, the same refreshing return to

the young world, in the _AEneid_: He dwells on those peeps into pastoral

simplicity as Tacitus did on the virtue of the Germans in the corrupted

days of Roman society, when "corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur." We

may conceive the enchantment with which the Romans, when the Capitol was

in all its splendour in the time of Augustus, read his charming

description of its shaggy precipices in the days of Evander.

"Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,

Aurea nunc, olim sylvestribus horrida dumis.

Jam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestes

Dira loci; jam tum sylvam saxumque tremebant.

'Hoc nemus, hunc,' inquit, 'frondoso vertice collem,

Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum

Credunt se vidisse Jovem, cum saepe nigrantem

AEgida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret.'

* * * * *

Talibus inter se dictis, ad tecta subibant

Pauperis Evandri, passimque armenta videbant

Romanoque foro, et lautis mugire Carinis."--_AEneid_, viii. 347.

What Homer was to Virgil, and Ariosto to Tasso, that Michael Angelo was to

RAPHAEL. Though both these illustrious men lived in the same age, yet the

former was born nine years before the latter,[1] and he had attained to

eminence while his younger rival was yet toiling in the obscurity of

humble life. It was the sight of the magnificent frescoes of Michael

Angelo that first emancipated Raphael from the stiff and formal, though

beautiful style of his master, Pietro Perugino, and showed him of what his

noble art was susceptible. So great was the genius, so ardent the effort,

of the young aspirant, so rapid the progress of art in those days, when

the genius of modern Europe, locked up during the long frost of the middle

ages, burst forth with the vigour and beauty of a Canadian spring, that he

had brought painting, which he had taken up in a state of infancy in the

studio of Pietro Perugino, to absolute perfection when he died, at the age

of thirty-seven. Seventeen years, in Raphael's hands, sufficed to bring an

art as great and difficult as poetry to absolute perfection! Subsequent

ages, vainly as yet attempting to imitate, can never hope to surpass him.

How vast must have been the genius, how capacious the thought, how intense

the labour, of the man who could thus master and bring to perfection this

difficult art, in a period so short as, to men even of superior parts and

unwearied application, barely to gain the command of the pencil!

Modern painting, as it appears in the works of Michael Angelo, Raphael,

and Titian, is an art as elevated in kind as the highest flights of the

epic or tragic muse, and it has been brought to a perfection to be

paralleled only by the greatest conceptions of Grecian statuary. If

called upon to assign the arts which human genius had, since the beginning

of the world, brought to absolute perfection, no one would hesitate to fix

on Grecian sculpture and Italian painting. Imagination can conceive a more

faultless poem than the _Iliad_, a more dignified series of characters

than those of the _AEneid_, a more interesting epic than _Paradise Lost_;

but it can figure nothing more perfect than the friezes of Phidias, or

more heavenly than the _Holy Families_ of Raphael. It is one of the most

extraordinary and inexplicable facts recorded in the history of the human

mind, that these two sister arts should both have been brought to

perfection near each other, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the

lifetime of a single generation; for the transition from the marbles of

AEgina to those of the Parthenon, made in the lifetime of Pericles, is as

great as from the paintings of Pietro Perugino to those of Raphael, made

in the lifetime of Leo X.

The sculpture of antiquity aimed chiefly, if not entirely, at the

representation of a _single figure_. Even the procession on the frieze of

the Parthenon is not sculpture--it is a series of isolated horsemen or

figures passing. The group of Niobe and her children is the only attempt

extant at telling a story, or representing emotion by a variety of

figures. Within this limited range, the great sculptors carried the art to

the highest imaginable perfection. The Apollo is the most perfect

representation of manly beauty, the Venus of feminine grace and delicacy.

The Laocoon exhibits the most fearful contortions and agonized expressions

of pain and anguish in suffering humanity; the Fighting Gladiator--the

most inimitable representation of war-like energy at its extreme

tension--the Dying Warrior of the Capitol, of valour sinking beneath the

ebbing stream of blood. The Hercules Farnese is the perfection of physical

strength, the Jupiter Tonans of awful majesty, the Venus Calipyge of

alluring beauty. Thus the expression of _character_ was their great

object; emotion was not overlooked, but it was studied only as it brought

out or illustrated the permanent temper of mind. A collection of ancient

statues is a vast imaginary gallery, in which, as in the heroes of the

_Iliad_, every conceivable gradation of the human mind is exhibited, from

the stern vengeance of Achilles, whom not even the massacre of half the

Grecian host could melt, to the tender heart of Andromache, who wept her

husband's valour, and her sad presentiments for her infant son.

In modern painting, as it appeared in the hands of Raphael and Michael

Angelo, a wider range was attempted: more spiritual and touching objects

had come to engross the human mind. The mere contemplation of abstract

character--its delineation by the graphic representation of the human

form, had ceased to be the principal object of genius. The temple of the

unknown God was no longer to be filled with idols made under image of man.

The gospel had been preached to the poor; the words of mercy and peace had

been heard on the earth. Painting had come to be the auxiliary of

religion; it was in the churches of a spiritual and suffering faith that

its impression was to be produced. Calvary was to be presented to the eye;

the feeling of the centurion. "Truly this man was the Son of God,"

engraven on the heart. It was to the faithful who were penetrated with the

glad words of salvation, that the altar-pieces were addressed; it was the

feeling of the song of Simeon that had gone forth on the earth. It was

those divine feelings which painting, as it arose in modern Europe, was

called to embody in the human form; it was to this heavenly mission that

the genius of Italy was called. And if ever there was a mind fitted to

answer such a call--if ever the spirit of the gospel was breathed into the

human breast, that mind and that breast were those of Raphael.

Michael Angelo was the personification of the genius of Dante. The bold

conceptions, the awful agonies, the enduring suffering which are brought

forth in that immortal poet, had penetrated his kindred spirit, and

realized the _Inferno_ in the representation of the _Last Judgment_. But

it was the Spirit of Christ which had been breathed into the heart of

Raphael. The divine words, "Suffer the little children to come unto me,

and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven," had inspired

his immortal conceptions. It is neither physical beauty nor mental

character, as in the Greek sculpture, which is represented in his

paintings. It is the Divine spirit breathed into the human heart; it is

the incarnation of deity in the human form that formed the object of his

pencil. He has succeeded in the attempt beyond any other human being that

ever existed. If any works of man ever deserved the name of divine, they

are the _Holy Families_ of Raphael.

Superficial writers will ask, what has Raphael to do with Virgil? mere

artists will enquire, how they are to be benefited by the study of Tasso?

Those, again, who have reflected on the means by which the higher stages

in any art are attained, will acknowledge that, at a certain elevation,

their principles are the same.

To move the heart, whether by painting, poetry, or eloquence, requires the

same mind. The means by which the effect is to be produced are not

different. The one works, indeed, with the pencil, the other with the pen;

the one composes in verse, the other in prose--but what then? These are

the means to the end, they are not the end itself. There are many avenues

to the human heart, but the inner doors in them all are to be opened only

by one key, and that key is never denied to the suit of genius.

It is in his lesser pieces that the exquisite taste and divine conceptions

of Raphael are chiefly to be seen. His greater paintings, the

_Transfiguration_, the frescoes in the Vatican, the cartoons, are

invaluable to the artist as studies, and specimens of the utmost power of

drawing and energy of conception; but it is not there that the divine

Raphael appears. In the larger ones his object was to cover space and

display talent; and in the prosecution of these objects he never has been

exceeded; but it is in his groups of two or three figures that his

exquisite conceptions appear. It is there that he has given free scope to

his exquisite conception, intended to represent in the maternal, and

therefore universally felt affection, the divine spirit and parental

tenderness of the gospel. "My son, give me thy heart," was what he always

aimed at. "God is love," the idea which he ever strove to represent, as

embodying the essence of the Christian faith. The Madonna della Seggiola

at Florence, the Assumption of the Virgin at Dresden, the Madonna di

Foligno in the Vatican, the Holy Family at Naples, St John in the Desert

in the Tribune at Florence, the small Holy Family in the Louvre, the large

Holy Family, with the flowers, brought from Fontainbleau, also in the

Louvre, St Mark at Munich, and several of the lesser pieces of Raphael in

the same rich collection in that city, are so many gems of art, embodying

this conception, which to the end of the world, even when preserved only

in the shadowy imitation of engraving, will improve the heart and refine

the mind, as well as fascinate the imagination. It may be doubted if they

ever will be equalled: excelled they can never be.

Whoever will study those inimitable productions, even when standing to

gaze at the engravings from them in a print-shop window, will have no

difficulty in feeling the justice of Cicero's remark, that all the arts

which relate to humanity have a certain common bond, a species of

consanguinity between them. The emotion produced by the highest excellence

in them all is the same. So intense is this emotion, so burning the

delight which it occasions, that it cannot be borne for any length of

time: the mind's eye is averted from it as the eyeball is from the line of

"insufferable brightness," as Gray calls it, which often precedes the

setting of the sun. It is difficult to say in which this burning charm

consists. Like genius or beauty, its presence is felt by all, but can be

described by none. It would seem to be an emanation of Heaven--a chink, as

it were, opened, which lets us feel for a few seconds the ethereal joys of

a superior state of existence. But it is needless to seek to define what,

all who have felt it must acknowledge, passes all understanding.

It is a common saying, even among persons of cultivated taste, that it is

hopeless to attempt to advance any thing new on the beauties of ancient

authors; that every thing that can be said on the subject has already

been exhausted, and that it is in the more recent fields of modern

literature that it is alone possible to avoid repetition. We are decidedly

of opinion that this idea is erroneous, and that its diffusion has done

more than any thing else to degrade criticism to the low station which,

with some honourable exceptions, it has so long held in the world of

letters. But when ancient excellence is contemplated with a generous eye,

even when the mind that sees is but slenderly gifted, who will say that

nothing new will occur? When it meets kindred genius, when it is elevated

by a congenial spirit, what a noble art does criticism become? What has it

proved in the hands of Dryden and Pope, of Wilson and Macaulay? It is in

the contemplation of ancient greatness, and its comparison with the

parallel efforts of modern genius, that the highest flights of these

gifted spirits have been attained, and the native generosity of real

intellectual power most strikingly evinced. Criticism of words will soon

come to an end; the notes of scholiasts and annotators are easily made, as

apothecaries make drugs by pouring from one phial into another. But

criticism of things, of ideas, of characters, of conceptions, can never

come to an end; for every successive age is bringing forth fresh

comparisons to make, and fresh combinations to exhibit. It is the

outpouring of a heart overburdened with admiration which must be

delivered, and will ever discover a new mode of deliverance.

How many subjects of critical comparison in this view, hitherto nearly

untouched upon, has the literature of Europe, and even of this age,

afforded! AEschylus, Shakspeare, and Schiller--Euripides, Alfieri, and

Corneille--Sophocles, Metastasio, and Racine--Pindar, Horace, and

Gray--Ovid, Ariosto, and Wieland--Lucretius, Darwin, and

Campbell--Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke--Thucydides, Tacitus, and

Gibbon--Thomson, Cowper, and Claude Lorraine: such are a few which suggest

themselves at first sight to every one who reflects on the rich retrospect

of departed genius. It is like looking back to the Alps through the long

and rich vista of Italian landscape; the scene continually varies, the

features are ever new, the impression is constantly fresh, from the

variety of intervening objects, though the glittering pinnacles of the

inaccessible mountains ever shine from afar on the azure vault of heaven.

Human genius is ever furnishing new proofs of departed excellence. Human

magnanimity is ever exhibiting fresh examples of the fidelity of former

descriptions, or the grandeur of former conception. What said Hector,

drawing his sword, when, betrayed by Minerva in his last conflict with

Achilles, he found himself without his lance in presence of his

fully-armed and heaven-shielded antagonist? "Not at least inglorious shall

I perish, but after doing some great thing that men may be spoken of in

ages to come."[2]

PING-KEE'S VIEW OF THE STAGE.

This is not, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! a barbarian land, as in our foolish

childhood we were taught; but, contrariwise, great is the wisdom of the

English, and great their skill. Yea, I will not conceal the fact, that in

some things they are worthy to be imitated by the best and most learned in

the flowery land. Three moons have I resided in London, and devoted

myself, with all the powers of my mind and body, to fulfil the task which

you and the ever-venerated Chang-Feu have laid upon me. Convey to his

benignant ear the words of my respect, and tell him that my brow is ever

on the outer edge of his footstool. As I understand my office--having

pondered over the same ever since the ship left the shore of my beloved

country--it is, to give you a report of the manners and customs of the

inhabitants of this extraordinary land, and smooth the way for the sending

forth of an ambassador from the immaculate emperor to the governor of this

nation. I have completely executed your commission, O excellent

Cho-Ling-Kyang! and this was the manner of the doing thereof. When I

embarked on board of the large ship with the three masts, which had for

name the Walter Scott--after a great general who conquered a province

called Scotland, and was presented with a blue button as a reward for his

magnanimity--I was entirely ignorant of the language spoken by the

mariners, with the exception of the short form of prayer which they

constantly use when speaking of each others' eyes, and a few phrases not

easily translatable into our refined tongue; and I accordingly experienced

great difficulty in making myself understood. Notwithstanding, I soon got

friendly with the captain, and also with the men--who pulled my back hair

whenever I passed them, in the most warm and affectionate manner possible.

I took greatly to study when I had overcome the sea-sickness; and although

I could not master the pronunciation of their words, I soon arrived at a

degree of skill, which enabled me to read their printed books. There was a

large library on board of the ship, and all day long--with the aid of

Morrison's wonderful dictionary--I toiled in the delightful task of making

myself acquainted with the masterpieces of English literature. And this I

considered the best preparation for the duty set before me; for without

books, how could I furnish my mind with a knowledge of the past?--and

without mastering the language, how could I understand the characters and

modes of thought of the men who now are? I therefore studied history; but

their historians write so much, and differ so greatly from each other,

that it was perplexing to know if what they told was true--and I was

utterly confused. But, fortunately, there was in the ship a young person,

who had been sent out by his friends to a merchant's office in Canton; but

had discovered that he was a great poet, and very clever man, and was

going back to tell his father he would not hide his talents any more, but

be a wonder to all men for his genius and abilities; and this young person

was very kind to me. He advised me what to read--which was principally his

own writings; and on my telling him I wished to study history, he said

nobody cared for it now, and that all the history he knew was in

Shakspeare's plays. This Shakspeare was a great writer long ago, who

turned all the histories of his country into dramatic scenes; and they are

acted on grand occasions before the Queen and her court at this very day.

When I enquired of the young person how his countrymen preserved the

memory of events which had happened since the death of the great

Shakspeare, he said there were other people as clever perhaps as

Shakspeare, who embalmed important incidents in immortal verse, but whom a

brutal public did not sufficiently appreciate; and he offered to read to

me a poem of his own called the Napoleonad, giving an account of a great

war that happened some time ago--and which had been published, he said,

week after week, in the Bath and Bristol Literary Purveyor. He read it to

me, and it was very fine; but I did not gain much information. I read

various parts of English history in Shakspeare; but from the specimens he

gives of the kings that reigned long ago in England, I fear they were a

very cruel and barbarous race of men. One of the name of Lear gave up the

kingdom to his three daughters, and two of them treated him very cruelly,

turned him out of doors on a stormy night, put out his followers' eyes,

and behaved very ill indeed. Another was called John--a bad man. Three

Henries--the first two great fighters, and one of them a common highway

robber in conjunction with a fat old gentleman who was a great coward, but

boasted he killed the chief warrior of the enemy--and the other Henry, a

weak old man, who was murdered by another very bad king called Richard.

There was another Henry who sent away his wife--a fat, bloated, villanous

kind of man; and after that no mention is made of any of the English kings

in Shakspeare's history. And when I asked the young person if there had

been any kings since, he said he had never heard of any except George the

Third, grandfather of the present Queen. I demanded of him if all the

plays in England were forced to be histories? and he said, no. And when I

further enquired what they represented, and of what use they were, he said

they were to hold a mirror up to nature, and to be the abstract and brief

chronicle of the time; by which he afterwards explained to me he meant

this--that although tragedies and the loftier portions of the drama

treated generally of great events, yet that, in England, there were many

men of extraordinary talent, who taught great moral lessons by means of

the stage, and, above all things, never overstepped the modesty of nature,

but in every scene gave a vivid and true imitation of the actual events of

life. In short, that the best way of seeing English character was to study

the English stage; for all classes of men were more fully, truly, and

fairly represented there, than even in the House of Commons itself. The

young person, to prove the truth of this, read me a comedy, which he was

going to have acted at Covent-Garden Theatre; and it was very amusing, for

he laughed excessively at every speech. You will easily believe, O

Cho-Ling-Kyang! that I rejoiced greatly at hearing this account of the

stage; and unbounded was my satisfaction in finding among the books in the

library a large collection of English plays, which I studied deeply and

took notes from, for my future guidance in mingling with society. What a

blessing it is for a nation to be in possession of so useful an

institution, where the actual manners of the time are brought exactly

forward, and the people can see the different classes of society with all

their different feelings and peculiarities--their modes of thought--their

faults and weaknesses--their wishes and vices--as vividly produced as if

the performers were in reality the very beings they represent! How it must

instruct the boorish in the gracefulness of polished life--how it must

reprove the bad by the contemplation of honest simplicity--and what an

insight must it give to the foreigners, into all the secrets of the

domestic existence of this great and extraordinary people! O

Cho-Ling-Kyang! when the young person told me this, I said to my

heart--"Be still--beat no more with the pulses of uncertainty--I shall

only buy a perpetual ticket to the pit of the theatre, and write home a

minute account of all I see and hear." On my arrival in London I took down

the names of the theatres, and for three months I have studied character

every night. Yet, though I devoted my nights to the stage, I pored all the

morning over the many volumes I have collected of the printed dramas; and

as they all agree in their descriptions, I think I cannot be deceived, and

that you may safely present the subjoined result of my enquiries to the

very sparkling eyes of the ever-venerated Chang-Feu. There are many ranks

of men in this land, and he of the highest rank is called a lord. When

young, a lord is always rich and gay, and a great admirer of the ladies;

and it is also the case that many ladies are devotedly attached to him,

and make no scruple to confess it to their chambermaids, before they have

been acquainted with him half an hour. When the lord is old, he is a

stiff stupid man, who generally talks politics, and boasts how eloquent he

is in the great national assembly. He is also always very harsh to his

children, till they marry against his will, and then he forgives them, and

prays for their happiness. The title bestowed on the wife, and sometimes

on the daughter of a lord, is lady or ladyship; but this dignity is also

possessed by the wives of a class of men very numerous in this country,

who are called sirs.

The "ladies," almost without exception, are very disagreeable people, and

highly immoral, as they are always in love with some one else besides

their husbands,--and are great gamblers at cards, and very malicious in

their observations on their friends. The "sirs" are divided into two

classes--sometimes they are fat rich old men who have made large fortunes

by trade, and have handsome girls either of their own, or left to their

charge by deceased relations,--and sometimes they are gay fascinating

young men, running away with rich people's daughters, or stupid people's

wives; but luckily they always take names that give fair warning of their

character, so that they are generally foiled in their infamous attempts.

And this is a fine illustration of the openness of the English

disposition. A man here seldom conceals his propensities, but assumes a

name which reveals all his character at once. Sir Brilliant Fashion, and

Sir Bashful Constant, and Sir Harry Lovewit, show at once their respective

peculiarities--as do Colonel Tornado, Tempest, Hurricane, Absolute, Rapid,

and a thousand others that I have met with in my reading. But the thing

which astonished me most of all was, that in this great mercantile nation,

a merchant is very little appreciated unless he is in debt or a cheat; but

the hero of most of the histories, if he is of a mercantile family, is

over head and ears in the books of Jew usurers, and has left the

respectable circle of his equals in rank, and spends his time and

constitution in the gaieties of the lords and ladies. And that this has

long been the case, is proved by old plays and new ones. There is a play

in the oldest-looking of the volumes I possess, called, "How to grow

Rich," which shows the style of manners in this respect forty or fifty

years ago; and I will translate the beginning of it, that you may see a

real picture of English society with your own eyes.

Mr Warford, the nephew of Mr Smalltrade, a banker, is in conversation with

Mr Plainly, the head clerk:--

"_Plainly._--Nay, do not think me curious or impertinent, Mr Warford.

I have lived so long with you and your uncle, that I cannot see you

unhappy without enquiring the cause.

"_Warford._--My uncle is himself the cause. His weakness and

credulity will undo us all.

"_Plainly._--Excuse me, sir; but I'm afraid the young lady now on a

visit at our banking-house, the charming Lady Henrietta, has she not

made a very deep impression?

"_Warford._--To confess the truth she has; and though, from my

inferior situation in life, I can never aspire to the gaining of her

affections, she may still have to thank me for saving her from ruin.

"_Plainly._--From ruin, sir?

"_Warford._--Ay; she is now on the very brink of it. When her father,

Lord Orville, went abroad for his health, he gave her a fortune of

eight thousand pounds, and left her to the care of her uncle, Sir

Thomas Roundhead. At his country seat Mr Smalltrade met with her,

and, being banker to her father, he thought it his duty to invite her

to his house.

"_Plainly._--And she had no sooner entered it than she became

acquainted with Sir Charles and Miss Dazzle? I suspect their infamous

designs.

"_Warford._--Yes, Plainly, when Miss Dazzle has robbed her of her

fortune at the gaming-table, Sir Charles is to attempt to deprive her

of her honour; but if I don't shame and expose them! Oh, think of the

heartfelt satisfaction in saving such a woman as Lady Henrietta! 'Tis

true most of her fortune is already lost, and Sir Thomas is so

offended at her conduct, that, wanting an heir to his estate, he has

adopted his god-daughter Rosa."

In the next page we are shown the mode in which banking was carried on in

country towns by persons who had the daughters of lords visiting them--who

have gone abroad for their health, and left then such uncountable heaps of

sycee silver.

"_Smalltrade._--There is nothing like a snug country bank.

[_Enter a servant._

"_Servant._--I want change for this draft of Sir Harry Hockley's.

"_Smalltrade._--Very well, how much is it for?

"_Servant._--A hundred pounds.

"_Smalltrade._--What?

"_Servant._--A hundred pounds.

"_Smalltrade._--Mercy on me! you've set me all in a tremble. Draw on

a country bank for a hundred pounds!--why, does your master suppose

himself drawing on the bank of Amsterdam?

"_Plainly._--True, sir; and, if you recollect, we had a large run

upon us yesterday.

"_Smalltrade._--So we had--a very large run! Sir Thomas Roundhead

drew in one draft for the enormous sum of twenty-five pounds, and

here's your master draws for a hundred. Talk of a country bank! the

Bank of England couldn't stand this.

"_Servant._--I can't tell, sir; Sir Harry said he had ten times the

money in your hands.

"_Smalltrade._--So he has, and what then? Doesn't he place money in

my hands that it may be safe; and if he is to draw it out in large

sums, that is, if he is to get it out when he wants it, where would

be the use of a banker?"

In a succeeding scene, Miss Dazzle meets her brother Sir Charles, and

says,--

"Welcome from London, brother! I have just left the idol of your

heart, the charming Henrietta. As usual, the banker's nephew was

attending her.

"_Sir Charles._--Ay, ay, it's all pretty plain, but I won't be

scandalous.

"_Miss Dazzle._--Well, if she's his to-day she'll be yours to-morrow.

I have seen Mr Smalltrade; he talks of becoming a partner; and, if

you play your cards well, Lady Henrietta will be completely in your

power.

"_Sir Charles._--Yes, for when I've won all her money I can be

generous enough to become her protector. Well, sister, we shall ruin

them all."

It will be seen from this, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! that sirs and their sisters

unite with country bankers in setting up a gaming-house--and that the

method of treating a lord's daughter, is to ruin her first at cards, and

in character afterwards. The picture of private life which I have quoted,

is from the works of one Frederick Reynolds; the play was acted with the

greatest applause, and has passed through a great many editions. So there

can be no doubt of its presenting a true image of the usual course of

events in this great and wonderful nation.

In another volume I find a similar representation. It is called, "The Way

to get Married," and is written by one Thomas Morton. I will translate

some passages for you, and you will see that the English are very

different people in their own country from what they are in their

counting-houses at Hong-Kong.

There was a gentleman of the name of Toby Allspice, a grocer, who was

sheriff of his county, and expected by the death of an old maid, Miss

Sarah Sapless, to succeed to thirty thousand pounds. He has a daughter who

is very anxious to be "stylish," and marry a "lord" or a "sir," if she

can.

To Mr Allspice's town goes a London merchant of the name of Dashall, who

receives a letter on his arrival, and reads it to the whole of the

audience:--

"_Dashall_, (_reads_).--'Dear Dashall, all's up. Transfer swears if

you don't settle your beer account in a week, he'll blackboard you.

Affectionate enquiries are making after you at Lloyd's; and to crown

all, hops were so lively last market, that there is already a loss of

thousands on that scheme. Nothing can save you but the ready. Yours,

"'TIM TICK.

"'N.B.--Green peas were yesterday sold at Leadenhall market at

ninepence a-peck, so your bet of three thousand pounds on that event

is lost.'--So! Lurched every way; stocks, insurance, hops, hazard,

and green peas, all over the left shoulder; and then, like a flat, I

must get pigeoned at Faro by ladies of quality, for the swagger of

saying, 'The Duchess and I were curst jolly last night.' But

confusion to despair! I'm no flincher. If I can but humbug Allspice

out of a few thousands, and marry his daughter, I shall cut a gay

figure, and make a splash yet.

"_Waiter_, (_without._)--A room for Lady Sorrel.

"_Dashall._--What the devil brings her here? Old and ugly as she is,

I'll take decent odds that 'tis an intrigue.

[_Enter Lady Sorrel._

"_Lady Sorrel._--Inform my cousin Caustic I'm here. Ah, Dashall! I

suppose the warm weather has driven you from town?

"_Dashall._--True, London was certainly too hot for me, but how could

your ladyship leave the fascination of play?

"_Lady Sorrel._--Hush! that's not my rural character. I always

assimilate. The fact is, Dick, I have here a strange, plain-spoken,

worthy, and wealthy relation; he gives me considerable sums to

distribute in London to the needy, which I lose in play to people of

fashion; and you'll allow that is giving them to the needy, and

fulfilling the worthy donor's intentions.--Ha! ha!

"_Dashall._--Then you are not here because your favourite, young

Tangent, is arrived?--Eh?

"_Lady Sorrel._--What, Dick, have you found out my attachment there?

Well, I confess it; and if my regard be not, I'll take care my

revenge shall be, gratified; and 'tis a great consolation that one is

nearly as sweet as the other."

And when the above-named cousin of Lady Sorrel has a palaver with the same

merchant Dashall, he is instructed in the inner secrets of the commercial

world after the following guise:--

"_Dashall._--Capital!--an old bugbear--never thought of now. No!

paper, discount, does it all.

"_Caustic._--Paper!

"_Dashall._--Ay. Suppose I owe a tradesman--my tailor, for

instance--two thousand pounds--

"_Caustic._--A merchant owe his tailor two thousand pounds!--Mercy on

me!

"_Dashall._--I give him my note for double the sum--he discounts

it--I touch half in the ready--note comes due--double the sum

again--touch half again--and so on to the tune of fifty thousand

pounds. If monopolies answer, make all straight; if not; smash into

the Gazette. Brother merchants say, 'D----d fine fellow; lived in

style--only traded beyond his capital.' So certificate's signed, ruin

a hundred or two reptiles of retailers, and so begin the war again.

That's the way to make a splash--devilish neat, isn't it? How you

stare! you don't know nothing of life, old boy.

"_Caustic._--Vulgar scoundrel!

"_Dashall._--We are the boys in the city. Why, there's Sweetwort the

brewer--don't you know Sweetwort? Dines an hour later than any duke

in the kingdom--imports his own turtle--dresses turbot by a stop

watch--has house-lamb fed on cream, and pigs on pine apples--gave a

jollification t'other day--stokehole in the brew-house--asked a dozen

peers--all glad to come--can't live as we do. Who make the splash in

Hyde Park?--who fill the pit at the opera?--who inhabit the squares

in the West? Why, the knowing ones from the East to be sure.

"_Caustic._--Not the wise ones from the East, I'm sure.

"_Dashall._--Who support the fashionable Faro tables? Oh, how the

duchesses chuckle and rub their hands, when they see one of us!

"_Caustic._--Duchesses keep gaming-tables!

"_Dashall._--To be sure! How the devil should they live?"

Such, O learned Cho-Ling-Kyang! is the real life of those extraordinary

beings who are so steady and plodding to outward appearance. Little would

you suspect that, when one of the merchants of the factory got home, he

would aid duchesses in the setting up of Faro tables, and mix with all the

brilliant and dissolute society of a great city. To us, such thoughts

would seem unnatural, and scarcely would the president of the Hong

consider himself qualified to hold a chopstick in the presence of a yellow

button. And I fear greatly; that in the extremity of your unbelief you

say, Tush, tush--Ping-Kee is deceiving us by inventing foolish deceits! An

English merchant would not make open profession of his bankruptcy; an

English lady of rank would not exult in the number of people she had

ruined by false play at cards; an English gentleman would not concert

plans with his sister for the seduction of a lord's daughter; an English

sheriff would not throw off his grocer's apron to go and receive the

judges, while an English barrister put it on, and sold figs to the

beautiful daughter of a British captain. But consider, O Cho-Ling-Kyang!

that I am a man of veracity from my youth, and that if I make so bold as

to invent, or even to misquote, there may be many beside you who can

convict me at once. And if you persist in your doubts, and say, verily the

writers of those plays give no true account of their countrymen, but write

false things which have no existence in reality, what shall we think of

the countless numbers who go to see those representations, and take no

steps to punish the authors for libels and defamations--but, contrariwise,

applaud and clap their hands, and say "good, good"--would they do this if

the picture had no resemblance? But they hold up the stage as a school of

morals, and a copy of things that are. And another argument, O

Cho-Ling-Kyang! that these dramas are drawn from experience and

observation is, that they do not contradict each other, as they would

assuredly do if they proceeded from any source but reality. No, no--great

sir--believe me, that the scenes I have quoted are excellent descriptions

of the characters introduced, and that their originals are to be met with

every day. Again, perhaps you will say--not so; O Ping-Kee, the writers of

those plays are stupid men--with shaved heads--that have no understanding,

and receive no greater reward than the conjurers who catch balls on their

foreheads, and balance long poles in the market-place! But the case is far

different, as I will prove to you from the preface to one of those works,

written by a lady called Inchbald, who herself wrote many comedies, and

received much money for the same.

"It is well known that the English theatres never flourished as they do at

present, (1807.) When it is enquired, why painting, poetry, and sculpture,

decline in England? want of encouragment is the sure reply; but this reply

cannot be given to the question, why dramatic literature fails? for never

was there such high remuneration conferred upon every person, and every

work belonging to the drama. A new play which, from a reputed wit of

former times, would not with success bring him a hundred pounds, a manager

will now purchase from a reputed blockhead at the price of near a

thousand, and sustain all risk of whether it be condemned or not. Great

must be the attraction of modern plays to repay such speculation. It is a

consolation to the dramatist of the present age, that while his plays are

more attractive than ever those of former writers were, those authors had

their contemporary critics as well as he, though less acute and less

severe indeed than the present race."

I have not time to reduce into celestial money the English sum of a

thousand pounds; but it is great, yea, more than the value in three years

of the longest peacock's feather in Pekin, and the value of a play is not

diminished since then. Not many moons ago, there was a reward offered by

one of the managers, of five hundred gold coins called guineas, to the

person who should send to him the best comedy illustrative of present

manners. O Cho-Ling-Kyang, the power of five hundred guineas in awakening

the poetic powers of mankind! The great majority of the English nation for

a whole year wrote nothing but plays; all the world was a stage, and all

the men and women merely writers; and when the time came, all had broken

down in the attempt, except ninety-six. But through these fourscore and

sixteen dramas, all painting the habits and characteristics of the present

time, the judges appointed by the manager had to read. And they read--and

read; and when they came to a decision, lo! it was in favour of a

lady--one of the cleverest authors, in other styles, that England has ever

seen--bright, polished, witty; and although not in a dramatic form, more

dramatic and lively than any professed play-writer since one called

Sherry, from his fondness for drinking wine. 'Midst the applause of all

the rest of the world, and the hatred and jealousy of her ninety-five

competitors, she was presented with the money; and the manager, on looking

through a hole in the curtain on the first night of the performance, saw

the whole house crowded from the floor to the roof, and thought he had

never so wisely laid out five hundred guineas in his life. "Oho!" said

wise men to each other in the boxes, "we shall see ourselves as we are--no

farcical exaggeration, no vulgar grievances; the woman is an observing

woman, and has mixed in great society; moreover, it is the best play out

of nearly a hundred; let us wait, it will be as good as the _School for

Scandal_." And they stamped loud with their feet. The play was called the

_Day of Dupes_; and wise men in the boxes were not exempt from the general

fate. All were dupes together. For the authoress was a wise woman, and

jingled the five hundred guineas in a purse, and kept all her own clever

observation of life and manners to be used on some other occasion, and

took the same view and no other of English customs and character that

Reynolds, and Morton, and O'Keefe, and Colman, had done before her. So her

heroes and heroines flew about the stage, and talked funny things, and

swore a little, and conversed in a provincial dialect called slang, and

behaved exactly as Dashall, and Miss Dazzle, and Lord Sparkle had behaved

before. Oh! was not this a triumph to the great authors of former days,

and did it not prove that wise men in the boxes are foolish men when

judging of the stage? It did, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! but a greater triumph was

at hand. The manager having read and studied the preface by the female

Inchbald, which I have translated for your instruction, and having given a

small sum--so they consider five hundred guineas in this land of

ingots--to a reputed wit, thought he would gain much silver if he obtained

a drama from a reputed blockhead. And he was right in his calculation; for

he applied to an author who had written farces in five acts, where various

impossible things were done, and persons talked in great jokes invented

long ago by a nobleman of the name of Miller, and behaved like the clown

in a pantomime, without the advantage of being dressed in his

parti-coloured garments; and in a short time this author furnished the

manager with a comedy called _Old Heads and Young Hearts_. Oh! he knew so

much of life, this famous author; he would show what the real state of

society was; and, said I to myself, I will go and judge for myself. I will

see whether the books I have been studying are filled with lies. I will

see how gentlemen speak, and how ladies look and act. Oho! I will put

Reynolds and Morton to the proof. I will put on my European dress. I will

ask the way to the theatre. I will sit in the pit. So shall I be able to

send to Cho-Ling-Kyang, and to the venerated Chang-Feu, an account from my

personal experience of English fashionable life. And so the first person I

saw on the stage was a young gentleman greatly in debt, a studier of the

law, who lives in a building called the Temple, in a room meagrely

furnished, and talks about his intimacy with duchesses, exactly as Dashall

and Tangent had done before. Oh! said I, this is complete proof that the

great Reynolds and great Morton drew from life, and also the great author

of this beautiful play. His name, not the author's name, but the young

gentleman's name, is Littleton Coke, after two sages of the law called

Coke and Littleton; but he makes no money by his profession, and has found

all his great friends desert him when he made application to them for a

loan. Their names are Lord St James and Mister Deuceace. His brother also

writes him a letter, enclosing the blessing of the Reverend Mr Rural, but

no cash. But suddenly comes in Lord Charles Roebuck, the younger son of

the Earl of Pompion, (for in this country all the younger sons of Earls

take the title of "Lord,") and tells Mr Littleton Coke that he is in love

with a lady he lifted out of a carriage that had been upset.

"_Littleton._--Is that all?

"_Roebuck._--Forbid it, Venus! No, with incredible trouble I traced

them. The father, the dragon who guards this Hesperian fruit, is an

old East Indian colonel, as proud as Lucifer, and as hot as his

dominions. I hovered round the house for a week.

"_Littleton._--Successfully?

"_Roebuck._--I saw her once for a second at the back garden-gate.

"_Littleton._--To speak to her?

"_Roebuck._--I hadn't time.

"_Littleton._--No? Oh!

"_Roebuck._--No. So I gave her a kiss.

"_Littleton._--Excellent economy; and her name--

"_Roebuck._--Is Rocket--her father, an eccentric old bully, turns his

house into a barrack, mounts guard at the hall door; the poor girl

can't move without a sentry, and I believe her lady's-maid is an old

one-eyed corporal of artillery."

From this you will perceive, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! that the English are

different from the Chinese in many respects; but that Colonel Rocket so

far differs from his countrymen as to keep a strict guard over his

daughter. There was a gentleman of the name of Thunder in one of the

volumes I read on board of the ship, who was very like this

Rocket--probably his uncle; and he again was the son or grandson of an old

admiral I read of in a book, called _Trunnion_--all evidently excellent

men, and frequently met with in English society. The Earl of Pompion is

prime minister of England, and of course a very clever man, and he has

determined that his son shall marry his cousin Lady Alice, the widow of

another lord--Lord George Hawthorn. She is called Lady Alice, though her

husband's name was George; for it is usual for a lady to retain her

Christian name in spite of her marriage, although instances, I am told,

are known where a lady--even a duke's daughter--marrying a marquis's son,

takes the Christian name of her husband along with his title, and calls

herself Lady Thomas or Lady William; but the author of this drama, of

course, knows best. Lord Charles Roebuck tries to avoid a marriage with

Lady Alice, and begs Mr Littleton Coke to propose for her himself, which

he of course agrees to do; and in preparation for which he would probably

have found the large sum of twenty pounds he wished to borrow from Lord St

James, very useful. In addition to the hand of the widow, who has a

fortune of L5000 a-year, Lord Charles insures him a seat in Parliament;

and the two friends go out in a great hurry on hearing a knock at the

door, to take up their residence in the house of the Earl of Pompion.

The knock at the door is given by the brother of the young barrister, who

speaks in a language which they told me was the vernacular of a foreign

kingdom called York; he is accompanied by a priest of one of the religions

tolerated in this country, called the Christian, which was once universal,

but has now fallen into disrepute. They come in search of the spendthrift,

and are taken for a money-lender and a bailiff by the young lawyer's

clerk; and this makes a great laugh, it is so natural a mistake.

Lady Alice Hawthorn is a delightful lady. She has invited Colonel Rocket

and his daughter to dine with Lord Pompion, (whom she calls Pompey, after

a great philosopher in ancient Rome,) and who, she says, although he is

her uncle, "talked impudence" to her when he was half tipsy at a ball at a

place called Almacks. She tells the Earl that Colonel Rocket is rich and

powerful; but in this she tells a non-verity--for she looked at me--even

me--where I was sitting in the pit, and said he is "a half-pay colonel,

with less interest than a treasury clerk, but a glorious old fellow; I'll

bet he'll kiss the countess in a week. What fun!" I, even I, Ping-Kee, was

so astonished, that I could say nothing, but sat and blushed very much at

the communication; and still redder did my cheek become when I saw what

followed. For when Lord Charles and the barrister came in, the young lord

recognises Lady Alice's tones. "Blest voice," he says, surely it is--

"_Lady Alice._--Your cousin Alice; how are you, Charley?--(he

hesitates)--all right go on, I'm human nature, (he kisses her.)

What's your friend's name?"

And then Mr Littleton Coke is presented to Lord and Lady Pompion, who

receive him very kindly; for they mistake him for the foreign gentleman

who does not speak English, his brother from the kingdom of York. And Lady

Alice, besides asking her cousin to kiss her, lets the young barrister

make love to her, and kiss her hand before they are acquainted ten

minutes, and altogether gives a very fascinating idea of widows of high

rank. Colonel Rocket always gives his commands in military language, as if

he were at the head of his regiment, and Lord Charles Roebuck frightens

the common people with his haughty looks. There is a very elegant

gentleman, who is called a butler, and comes in to inform Lord Charles

that dinner is on the table; and the second act ends in the following

dignified manner:--

"_Butler._--Ahem--dinner, my lord"--(a pause--he goes behind their

causeuse)--"Dinner, my ------" (They start up confused.) Roebuck

looks sternly at the butler, and they _exeunt_ followed by Butler,

bowing.

In the next act there is a great deal of kissing and talking, for which I

could see no reason; and people ran out and in, and up and down so much,

that I became rather confused. But the old Bonze is very stupid, and makes

a number of mistakes; and the young barrister is very gay, and treats Lady

Alice as if she was no better than a dancer at a festival; and they all

treat each other in such extraordinary ways, that I could only perceive

that English young ladies and English young gentlemen, if they behaved in

Canton as they do at home, would speedily be consigned to the

lockup-house. But at last I was glad to recognise Lord Charles, disguised

in top-boots and knee-breeches as a groom, and I was very proud of my

cleverness in recognizing him; for his own father speaks to him for a long

time, and never makes the discovery; and shortly after, Mr Littleton Coke

appears, also disguised as a groom, but for what purpose I could not find

out. And there was a long time employed in love-making again, and

quarrelling and mistaking, till at last all things seemed to go right, and

the old Bonze united the hands of the lovers on the stage, and we all

laughed and clapped our hands. Of a truth, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! the persons

who find fault with the drama are foolish. It is not with the drama such

critics should find fault, but with the people who believe in real life in

such a curious manner. No--it will not do to throw the blame of such

representations on the author. He does nothing but paint what he sees. And

therefore you will be wise if you send over to this people an ambassador

who is not of the sect of the moral Con-fu-tse; for as he will have to mix

in the society of Lady Alices and Countesses of Pompions, he might be

shocked and degraded by meeting them, if he had any regard for female

delicacy or manly feeling. It will not require a man of the abilities of

the venerated Chang-Feu to twist round his thumb so very stupid a mortal

as the Earl of Pompion, who is secretary of state; and, therefore, you may

save much silver by engaging a common Button to conduct the negotiations

with the English crown. I could see no one on the stage, or meet with any

one in the books, bearing any resemblance to Pottinger or Davis; and,

therefore, I suppose all the clever men are banished by this curious

people, and all the silly ones kept at home. You will therefore be wise to

make your treaties with the Pompions, who reside in Whitehall, rather than

with the Goughs and Parkers, who are transported to Hong-Kong. In the mean

time I will continue my researches, and I will also make personal

experiments as to the veracity of the stage representations. I will go at

once to one of the great men's houses, and will kiss his wife in a week,

and disguise myself like a postilion, and run away with one of his

daughters. And of the result I will make you aware. Such is the view of

your servant Ping-Kee, who touches the ground you stand on with his

forehead nine times--and one time more.

THE MIDNIGHT WATCH.

CHAPTER I.

"For the watch to babble and talk,

Is most tolerable, and not to be endured."

_Much Ado about Nothing._

About the period when the civil wars between the Republican and Royalist

parties in England had terminated, after the execution of the unfortunate

Charles I., in the utter defeat of his son at the battle of Worcester, and

the dispersion of all the adherents to the royal cause, a small

castellated mansion, not far from the eastern coast of England, was

garrisoned by a party of the Parliamentary troops.

This mansion, which had belonged to a Royalist family who had fled the

land, having been seized upon and confiscated by the Parliamentary

commissioners employed in sequestrating the property of confirmed enemies

of the commonwealth, had been converted into a sort of fortress or

stronghold, the natural defences and isolated position of which, rendered

it peculiarly adapted as a place of confinement for prisoners of war. Its

situation, at the same time, so near the coast, gave it an additional

advantage as a post of observation, whence measures might be taken for the

interception of such Royalists, who, proscribed as obstinate malignants,

might be led to this part of the country in their attempts to seek the

means of escape.

Flanked on one side by the waters of the river, this isolated house was

cut off on the other three by a broad ditch or moat, being thus entirely

surrounded by water, except at one point the most remote from the river,

where it communicated by a wooden bridge with a causeway, lined by an

avenue of trees, which served as an approach, and traversed at some length

a low level tract of land before it reached the higher and more hilly

country. A similar tract of level, but of a more marshy and swampy

description, stretched along the opposite bank of the river, terminating

at some distance by a line of low well-wooded hills. Not far from the

house, which stood thus alone, like a solitary bittern in a Dutch

landscape, the river widened suddenly into a large expanse of water,

called in this part of England a "broad," which was itself only separated

from the sea by a narrow strip of low sand-banks, and sandy downs or

deanes, as they are there termed, and extended thus along the shore to

some distance, when again assuming the form of a river, it poured its

waters into the German Ocean.

Of the more ancient part of this mansion, which boasted (it was never well

known upon what authority) a Roman origin, only a large circular tower was

left, which was attached somewhat awkwardly, like an ill-adjusted

headpiece, on to the more modern building. Although constructed in the

comparatively peaceful times of Henry VII.'s reign, the more modern house

had been evidently built with some ideas of strength and defence, and in a

demi-castellated form, various smaller additions having been made to it at

subsequent and different periods, without any great observance of order or

style.

Behind the main body of the house thus irregularly constructed, was a

species of small inner-court or garden, enclosed between the old tower and

the walls that connected it with the mansion on one side, and a wing of

the building which extended to the side of the stream on the other; whilst

opposite to the back of the house, which was now wholly unoccupied, and

almost in a ruinous state, a strong and thick parapet skirted the river,

and completed the parallelogram.--Formerly an opening in the centre of

this parapet had evidently conducted by several steps to the water's edge,

in order to facilitate the communications with boats on the river; but it

had now been blocked up by a fresh mass of heavy brickwork and masonry,

as if for the purpose of adding security to the place; and at the time we

write, two culverins, mounted so as to be on a level with the top of the

parapet, contributed to give to the spot the look of a fortified

stronghold. The forms of flower-beds of prim shapes, the former

decorations of the spot, might still be traced here and there in the now

almost level and sandy surface of the coast, giving evidence that some

pains had probably been originally bestowed upon this interior enclosure.

But beyond these faint traces of flower-beds, nothing now remained of its

better days but a few evergreens and other bushes, which, growing close by

the parapet wall, had equally escaped the rude trampling of the unheeding

soldiers, or the wanton devastations of some of the over-zealous of the

day; men who looked upon all adornment of whatever kind, all appearance of

gratification of a refined taste, however innocent, as sinful and

condemnable. A vaulted passage traversed the wing of the building

mentioned as stretching to the water's edge, and formed the usual and more

direct communication between this sort of court and other parts of the

establishment.

Late on a fine autumn afternoon of the year 1652, some little time after

the battle of Worcester, a young man, musket on arm, paced up and down

this inner court as sentinel. His dress, which partook of the military

uniform of the times, without precisely belonging to any particular

regiment, and the finer cloth of some parts of his attire, which was of a

far finer texture than was customary upon the person of a common soldier,

proved that he was one of the many volunteers who had enrolled themselves

among the troops of the Parliamentary army, and probably of gentler birth

than might be generally found employed in such humble military functions.

Loose boots of so great a size towards their upper part, that each might

have been imagined to contain, at least, half a calf-skin, mounted towards

his large hose of plain but good material. A tuck or rapier of some length

was girded round his loins; a corselet, with bandoleer slung around it,

covered the front of his buff-coat; and a morion, destitute of all feather

or ornament, concealed for the greater part his hair, closely clipped in

compliance with the puritanical fashions of the times, the colour of

which, however, might be divined by the fairness of the young mustache

that curled lovingly about his upper lip.

Sometimes, as he paced backwards and forwards upon his lonesome watch, the

eye of the young man rested for a while upon the dull swampy landscape,

the chief beauty of which, at the moment, was a slight haze that hovered

over stream and marsh, and stunted willow and distant hill, tinged with a

golden hue from the slanting rays of the sun; the only living sights and

sounds of which, were busy flights of gnats whirling up and down with

drowsy hum; an occasional frog, that splashed from the opposite shore into

the water with an uneasy croak; and one solitary fisherman, who, after

having drawn up his boat among the rushes on the river's bank, near the

opening upon the "broad," and left his line to float along the lazy

stream, seemed to have lain down in his broad flat-bottomed punt, to sleep

at his ease. Sometimes he paused to scrutinize more earnestly the heavy

pile of the old tower, to guard all egress from which might be supposed,

from his periodical examinations of its walls, to be the peculiar duty of

his post. Sometimes again he gazed listlessly upon the marks of

devastation, where the carved armorial bearings of the family to whom the

mansion had belonged, had been hacked away from the walls of the building,

and other symbols of nobility or religion had been wantonly mutilated or

destroyed; and at such moments, an almost unconscious sigh would escape

him, ill according with the tenets of the party which he evidently served.

But most generally his attention was directed towards a low window in the

first floor of the projecting wing, not very many feet above the level of

the ground, in front of which a small wooden balcony, filled with flowers,

showed that the occupant of the chamber to which it belonged was probably

of the gentler sex, and of an age when such matters are still objects of

tender and careful solicitude. At these times, evidences of impatience,

almost amounting to pettishness, would appear in his uneasy gestures; and

after a scrutiny of some duration, he would again turn away to resume his

pacing, with a look of trouble and annoyance upon his brow. The handsome

features of that fine face, however, were not formed to express grief, nor

that clear bright eye sorrowful thought; yet, such were the circumstances

of the times, that whenever disengaging them from associations connected

with the balconied window, as his reflections reverted to himself and his

own position, his countenance would fall, and his eye cloud over with an

expression of sadness.

Gerald Clynton was of old family and noble birth. His father, Lord

Clynton, had doated upon his wife with the fondest and most exclusive

affection; and the birth of Gerald, his second son, having been the

occasion of her death in childbed, the agonized husband, who was

inconsolable for her loss, had never been able to look upon the child,

and, in its infant years, had banished it altogether from his sight. The

time arrived, however, when it became necessary to remove the little boy

from the sole care of menials, and to commence the rudiments of his

education; and at that period Mr Lyle, the brother of the deceased Lady

Clynton, finding the aversion of the father towards the poor innocent

cause of the mother's death still more strongly rooted by time, and his

whole paternal affections centred and lavished upon his eldest born, had

taken the child to his home, and, being himself childless, had treated,

and as it were adopted, the boy as his own son.

Time crept on. The boy grew into the youth; the youth approached to the

man; but still Lord Clynton evinced no interest in his young son--gave no

demonstration of awakening affection. With time also crept on the angry

and troubled clouds that arose upon the political horizon of the land. The

storm at length burst forth. The fatal struggle commenced between the

unfortunate Charles and his Parliament; and the civil wars broke out. A

stanch Royalist, Lord Clynton joined with enthusiasm the cause of the

monarch; while Mr Lyle, whose tenets were of the Presbyterian persuasion,

and whose political opinions were entirely of that party, found himself

enrolled in the ranks of the Parliamentary army, in which his name and

fortune and his active, but stern, cold courage, gave him much influence.

Entirely deprived of the affections of a father, whom he never remembered

to have seen, and on whom, with the usual levity of boyhood, he seldom or

never bestowed a passing thought, Gerald Clynton, or Gerald Lyle, as he

was constantly called after his uncle--and most people knew not that he

bore any other name--naturally imbibed the opinions and sentiments of his

protector; and, when the civil war was openly declared, followed him to

the camp. The reflection never crossed him, that the unknown author of his

being might be engaged in the ranks of the enemy; that his uncle and his

father might chance to meet face to face upon the battle-field; that

either his real parent, or the parent of his affections, might fall by the

hand of the other. To do justice to the feelings of the youth, no idea of

the kind had ever been suggested to him by his uncle, not a word mentioned

of the political sentiments of his father. Colonel Lyle--for such became

his rank in the Parliamentary army--was a man of firm adherence to his

principles; and although a cold, hard man, in all things but his affection

for his adopted son, too earnest and eager a supporter of the party for

which he battled, to allow such a proselyte to what he considered the just

and upright cause--such a follower in his own footsteps as his nephew--to

escape him on account of any family considerations, which he stigmatized

as "prejudices to be despised and set at nought in so holy a matter."

Enrolled as a volunteer in his uncle's regiment, Gerald had, in some of

the scanty moments of peace and repose snatched between the quickly

following phases of the struggle, found opportunities to cultivate the

acquaintance of an old friend of his uncle's--an officer in the same

regiment--or rather, it ought to be owned without reserve, the

acquaintance of the fair daughter of that friend. In these troubled but

precious moments it was, that Gerald's young heart first awakened to love;

and when, upon the death of his uncle Colonel Lyle, who never recovered

the wounds he had received upon the field of Naseby, old Lazarus Seaman

received the command of the regiment, it was again the bright eyes of

pretty Mistress Mildred that served as a loadstone to attach him to it,

and to attract him to follow the troop which garrisoned the lone mansion

upon the eastern coast of England; for Colonel Lazarus Seaman was the

governor or commander of this impromptu sort of fortress; and Colonel

Lazarus Seaman's daughter, his only and motherless child, quitted her

father's side as little as possible. She it was who was the tenant of the

room appertaining to that balconied window, and those bright and

carefully-tended flowers, to which the eyes of Gerald now so often

strayed, as he paced up and down the dull court, to perform the duties of

sentinel.

Gerald's thoughts, however, as already intimated, were not placid, nor

were they exclusively occupied by the object of his affections. They

dwelt, from time to time, with grief upon his uncle, whose death had

excited in him so many bitter regrets; and those sad recollections, in

their turn, called forth in him other reflections of a new and painful

nature. He recalled to mind how, in his dying moments, the self-elected

father of his youth had summoned him to his side, and talked to him of

that other father whom he had never known; how he had spoken, in broken

accents, and with much remorse, of the possible hatred engendered between

father and son; of his own regrets, now first clearly awakened in him,

that he himself might have been the cause of such a consummation; and how

then, with his last breath, he in vain endeavoured to murmur expressions

of bitter repentance for some cruel wrong done, the nature of which no

longer met the ear of the anxious listener, and was soon left for ever

unexplained in the silence of death. These sad remembrances led to a train

of thought of a most painful and harassing description. His position as a

voluntary supporter of a cause repugnant to the principles of a father,

whom, although unknown to him, it was his duty to honour and obey, and as

affianced to the daughter of a man whose Republican principles were so

decided, appeared to him involved with the most perplexing difficulties.

New and conflicting feelings had arisen in the young man's breast. There

was already within him a bitter struggle between love and duty--between

long inculcated opinions and newly awakened emotions. As the one or the

other feeling predominated, Gerald walked backwards and forwards with

gloomy face, or turned to gaze upon the window, the closed casement of

which seemed then to call forth from him gestures and words of a somewhat

testy impatience.

"She knows that this is my hour for mounting guard, and yet she comes not

to the window. She shows no sign of the least thought or care for me," he

muttered angrily to himself, stamping more firmly and sharply as he

recommenced his pacing, after a pause, in which he had eyed the window

with bent brow and bitten lip. "But she does not love me," he added

bitterly. "She has never loved me. She has never done otherwise than

trifle with my affections--seeking for demonstrations of my love to feed

her vanity, and then flinging them aside with the sick stomach of an

over-pampered child. I am a fool to let myself be thus dragged at her

skirts, in such tinselled leading-strings. No; I will loose myself from

this thraldom. But what if she love another? More than once I have thought

she looked with much complacency upon that young recruit--the new

volunteer--that Maywood, I think they call him. Were it true, 'sdeath! I

would slit his ears for him. God forgive me the oath!" Gerald asked no

forgiveness for the revengeful thought.

He was still continuing his half-muttered soliloquy of jealousy and spite,

when the click of a casement-hasp caught his lover's ear. In a moment,

the angry expression of his brow was cleared away like a mist before the

sun--a bright gleam of satisfaction illumed his countenance, as he looked

eagerly and hastily towards the window of Mistress Mildred's chamber. The

casement opened, and first appeared a fair hand, which, with a long

tapering jug of blue and white Dutch porcelain, was bestrewing water upon

the flowers in the little wooden balcony. Then there stood at the open

window a youthful female form; but the head was bent down so low over the

flowers--the damsel was so absorbed in her gentle occupation--she was of

course so completely unaware of the presence of any person in the court

below who might expect a greeting from her, that it was difficult at first

to distinguish the features. A pure white, pinched, and plaited cap

covered the bended head, but not, however, so entirely, as fully to

contain or hide a profusion of dark brown hair, which perhaps, according

to the fashion of the times, it should have done. Through the flowers,

also, that partially obscured the long low window, might be distinguished

part of a sad-coloured gown, the simplicity of which, in its make, could

not conceal, as perhaps it ought to have done, the rounded outlines of a

full but graceful form; while, at the same time, its dull hue was

charmingly relieved--of course without any intention of coquetry--by a

ruff and gorget of the most glittering purity, and, at the end of the long

sleeves, by two small, delicate, white cuffs, which seemed to be playing a

game of rivalry with the little hands for the palm of fairness.

As Gerald hemmed, and coughed, and shuffled with his feet impatiently, he

imagined, for a moment, that one hasty glance of the eyes which bent over

the flowers was directed into the court, and then averted with the

quickness of lightning, but he was no doubt mistaken; for when the task of

watering the plants was at an end, the head was only raised to watch the

clouds for a very short space of time--sufficient time, however, to show

two dark pencilled eyebrows placed over a pair of bright dark eyes, in

that peculiar arch which gives a look of tormenting _espieglerie_ to the

expression, and in the blooming cheeks, full, but not too full for grace,

two laughter-loving dimples, which imparted to a lovely countenance a

joyous and fascinating character--and then was again withdrawn. The fair

white hand again already rested upon the hasp of the casement, as if to

close it, when Gerald, who had waited with renewed feelings of vexation

the greeting of his lady-love, called in a low, but almost angry tone of

voice, "Mildred!--Mistress Mildred!"

"Master Gerald Lyle, is it you? Who would have thought that you were

there?" said pretty Mistress Mildred, again showing at the window her arch

countenance, the expression of which seemed to be at most wicked variance

with her prim attire.

"Methinks a friendly greeting were not ill bestowed upon an old

acquaintance," muttered the young man in the same tone of testy

impatience.

"Know you not," responded the damsel, with something of the canting whine

adopted at the time, and in a semi-serious tone, to the genuineness of

which her dimples very naughtily gave a direct lie--whatever their

mistress might have intended--"Know you not, that such bowings of the

head, and kissings of the hand, are but vain and worldly symbols and

delusions."

"Trifle not with me, I beseech you, Mildred," said the vexed lover, "for

my heart is sad and my mind is harassed. During the weary hours of my

watch, I have longed for a smile from that sweet face--a glance from those

bright eyes, as my only solace; and yet the hours passed by and you came

not to your window, although I had let you know that it was my duty to

keep this watch; and when you did come, you would have left again without

a single word to me. This was unkind. And now you are there, you bend your

brow upon me with an angry look. What have I done to offend you, Mildred?

You cannot doubt my love, my truth."

"And what is there in my conduct or in my words that can justify Master

Lyle in thus treating me as a trifler?" answered Mildred with a pouting

air, avoiding any direct answer to all his other remarks. "Methinks I have

every right to be offended at so unjust an accusation." But in spite of

the gross offence, Mistress Mildred now seemed to have no thought of

punishing it, by withdrawing from the window.

"I offend you! you know I would give the whole world, were it mine, to

spare you one painful feeling," cried the young man. "It is you who wrong

me, it is you who are unjust, and even now you seek to quarrel with me.

But perhaps you wish to break the troth you have given me--perhaps your

light heart has already offered its affections to another!"

"As you will, sir. Perhaps my light heart, as you are pleased to call it,

would do well to seek some less morose and tetchy guardian," said the

young lady, tossing up her head, and preparing again to close the windows.

But as her eye fell upon the despairing look and gestures of her lover,

the arched eyebrow was unknit, and raised with an expression of comic

vexation; a smile lurked for a moment in the dimples and corners of the

pouting mouth; and then at last broke out into a fit of decided laughter.

After indulging a moment in her mirth, Mildred looked at the young man

fondly and said, "Go to, Gerald! you show not the patient spirit of a

Christian man; and even now your face wears such a frown, as methinks must

have wrinkled the brow of the jealous blackamoor in those wicked

stage-plays, of which my poor mother told me, before my father chid her

for it, and bid her cease to speak of such vanities--fie now! out upon

you! shall I throw you down my little mirror that you may see that face?

Well! I am a naughty froward child. See there! I am sitting on the stool

of penance, and I ask thee pardon."

"Forgive me also," cried Gerald, springing forward, his heart melting

before the arch look of fondness that beamed down upon him. "Forgive me my

pettish impatience with you, Mildred."

"Forgiveness of injuries is ordained unto us as our first of duties,"

rejoined Mildred with another demure look--which was all the wickeder for

its demureness.

"But why came you not before, my Mildred?" said the lover, with a slight

lingering tone of expostulation; "you know not the bitterness of those

countless minutes of anxiety, and doubt, and eager waiting."

"I could not leave my father," replied Mildred more seriously; "although

he knows and approves our attachment; he would have chid me had he been

aware that I come to have speech of you from my window; and as it is, I

have done wrong to come. Besides, he was weary, and bade me read to him,

and I sat by his side, and read to him the Bible, until, in the midst of

an exhortation to watch and pray, I heard a sound that he himself might

have called an uplifting of the horn of Sion, and behold he was snoring in

his chair; and then, in the naughtiness of my heart, I stole from his

presence to come to my room--and--and--tend my flowers," she added with an

arch smile.

"You thought of me then, and came, though late, to see me?" said Gerald

eagerly.

"You? Did I not say my flowers, Master Gerald?" asked Mildred still

laughing.

"Oh! mock me no longer, cruel girl! You know not all I have suffered

during this tedious watch--all the doubts and fears with which my poor

mind has been tortured. Did you know, you would console, not mock me, and

one word would console all. Tell me you love me still."

"One word, you say--what shall it be?" said Mildred, raising her eyebrows

as if to seek the word; and then, looking down upon him kindly, she added,

"Ever."

"And you love none but me? you have no thought for any other?" continued

the lover with an evident spice of jealousy still lurking in his mind.

"What! two words now?" said the laughing girl. "Are all lovers such arrant

beggars? give them a penny and they ask a groat. Well! well! but one

other, and that shall be the last. None"--and as Mildred spoke, she bent

herself over the balcony to smile on Gerald, and rested one tiny hand, of

course unconsciously, on the outer framework.

"Thanks, thanks, my dear, my pretty, my darling Mildred!" exclaimed the

young man, and as he spoke, he sprang, musket on arm, upon a stone bench,

which stood out from the wall immediately under Mistress Mildred's window,

and endeavoured to snatch the white hand that just peeped so invitingly

over the edge of the low wooden balcony.

"Out upon you, Master Sentinel," said the young lady, putting back her

hand. "Is it thus you keep your watch? Another such step and I shall sound

the alarm, and denounce you as a deserter to your post. Look ye! your

prisoner will escape."

Gerald instinctively turned his head to the old tower behind him, as he

stepped down again from the stone bench, with somewhat of that

tail-between-the-legs look, which a spaniel wears when repulsed from his

mistress's lap. But there was no one stirring. He shook his head

reproachfully at the laughing girl.

"Nay! I did but remind you of your duty," said Mildred; "and you know my

father sets much store by the capture of this prisoner, whom he supposes

to be some one of rank and note; a fugitive from the dispersed army of the

malignants; perhaps a friend of the young King of Scots, and, as such,

aware of his retreat."

"I saw him as they brought him hither, after capturing him in an attempt

to gain the coast," replied the young soldier. "He is an old cavalier, of

a stately and goodly presence, although cast down by his ill fortune. But

enough of this. Tell me, Mildred"--But here the ears of the young couple

caught the sound of a distant bell as it came booming over the water of

the broad.

"Hush! It is the curfew from the town," said Mildred. "The watch will now

be changed. Back! back! They will be here directly. I must away."

"Already," cried Gerald with vexation. "But another word, Mildred--but

one--some token of your love until we meet again."

"Impossible!" replied the fair girl. "How can you ask me for a token? It

were very wrong in me to give you such. You ask too much." Then, as she

was about to close the window, she exclaimed again, "This poor rose wants

trimming sadly. Alack! these early frosts destroy all my poor plants;" and

taking up her scissors, which hung from her girdle, she snipped at a

withered leaf. Perhaps Mildred's pretty little hand trembled, for of

course it was an accident--the unfortunate scissors, instead of cutting

the withered leaf; closed upon the very prettiest rose upon the little

tree--that rose happened to hang over the edge of the balcony, and so it

came to pass that it fell at Gerald's feet.

Gerald seized it and pressed it, like all true lovers from time

immemorial, to his lips.

"Thanks! darling girl," he cried.

"Thanks! for what?" rejoined Mistress Mildred, putting on a very

lamentable air. "Now, don't suppose I have done this purposely. My poor

rose! how you crush it and tumble it in your hand. How could I be so

awkward!" and with these words the window was wholly closed.

Gerald still stood with his eyes fixed upon the window, when a noise, as

if a sharp rustling among leaves, startled him. Immediately upon the

alert, he looked cautiously around; but there was no one in the court. He

walked hastily to the parapet wall and bent over it--all was still except

the boat of the fisherman, which he had before observed. It had apparently

been rowed to another part of the river about the mansion, as a better

place for fishing, without having been observed by the inattentive

sentinel, for it was now floating down the stream towards the opening into

the broad. The fisherman again lay motionless at the bottom of the boat.

Suddenly a thought seemed to cross the young soldier's brain, for he

sprang to the bushes still left growing near the parapet wall, and

searched hastily among the leaves. From the ground beneath their thick

shelter he raised a small packet. His musket was already jerked into his

right arm to fire an alarm, in order that the fisherman might be pursued,

as suspected of attempting to establish a communication with the prisoner,

when his eye fell upon the superscription of the packet. He stared for one

moment with surprise; and then his colour changed, and he grew deadly

pale. His eye hurried rapidly to the tower--an exclamation of bitter grief

burst from his lips--and he stood aghast. At this moment the steps of the

soldiers coming to relieve guard resounded along the vaulted passage

communicating between the court and other parts of the mansion. At the

sound the blood rushed back into Gerald's face, until it covered forehead

and temples. He hastily replaced the packet in the hiding-place where he

had discovered it, and stood with musket in arm, and in a state of

ill-repressed agitation, awaiting the corporal and guard.

The young soldier who was now brought to relieve him from his post, was

the same Mark Maywood of whom he had expressed his jealous doubts.

The usual ceremony of relieving guard was gone through; but although the

words of order were few, these few words were communicated by Gerald in a

brief angry tone, and received by the other young soldier with a cold

frowning air. Between the two young men there appeared to exist feelings

of an instinctive repulsion.

As he turned to leave the court, Gerald gave another anxious, eager look

at the old tower, and glanced askance at the leafy hiding-place of the

packet. Another troubled sigh burst from his heart; but whatever thoughts

occupied him before passing under the vaulted passage, he raised his eyes

to the well-known chamber casement, which was close by. He could evidently

perceive Mildred's graceful form partly ensconced behind a hanging to her

window. Was she watching his departure? No. It seemed to him as if her

eyes were turned in the direction of the handsome young recruit--that

detested Maywood. And he? Gerald looked round once more. He felt convinced

that the young sentinel's eyes were fixed upon pretty Mistress Mildred's

window. It was in a high state of agitation--a new fit of raging jealousy

mingling with other painful and harassing emotions, that Gerald followed

the corporal and soldiers from the court.