SCENE I.--THE INTRODUCTION.

BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLXVII. MAY, 1846. VOL. LIX

CONTENTS.

THE STUDENT OF SALAMANCA. PART THE LAST, 513

SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA, 534

BIRBONIANA; OR, ITALIAN ANTIQUARIES AND ANTICHITÀ, 543

THE AMERICANS AND THE ABORIGINES. PART I., 554

STATE OF IRELAND--ITS CONDITION--THE LIFE AND PROPERTY BILL--THE

DEBATE, AND THE FAMINE, 572

THE MODERN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, 604

THE ILIAD OF HOMER--BOOK THE FIRST. (IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS,) 610

PROSPECTUS, 621

TRUTH AND BEAUTY, 624

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE SUTLEJ, 625

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW,

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.

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLXVII. MAY, 1846. Vol. LIX.

THE STUDENT OF SALAMANCA.

PART THE LAST.

There was a crowd and a clamour in the principal coffee-house of

Pampeluna at nine o'clock on a July evening, that of the first day after

Don Baltasar's escape from the town. The numerous tables were surrounded

by officers of Cordova's army, still flushed with their recent victory,

and eager to enjoy to the utmost a period of relaxation, which, for

aught they knew, the next day might bring to a close. Great was the

clattering of glasses and the consumption of ices and _refrescos_,

rendered especially grateful by the extreme heat of the weather; long

and loud were the peals of laughter that echoed through the apartments,

and dense the clouds of tobacco smoke, which, in spite of open doors and

windows, floated above the heads of the jovial assembly. In one room a

party of monté-players, grouped round a baize-covered table, on which

were displayed piles of gold and silver coin, and packs of Spanish

cards, with their queer devices of horses, suns, and vases,

notwithstanding the numerous general orders prohibiting gambling in the

army, were busy in increasing or getting rid of a small and recently

made issue of pay. Here comparative stillness reigned, only broken by

the monotonous voices of the bankers, or by an occasional angry

ejaculation from some unlucky subaltern who saw his last dollar drawn

into the vortex, without any means occurring to him whereby to replenish

his empty pockets. The other apartments were thronged to suffocation;

even the balconies were filled with idlers, leaning over the balustrade,

puffing their cigars and listening to a band of amateur musicians, who

performed a serenade, in honour of his late victory, under the windows

of the commander-in-chief.

In a corner of the coffee-house two persons were seated, both of

remarkable appearance, although in very different styles. One was a

young man of about six-and-twenty years, low in stature and slightly

built; his features regular, without beard, and of an expression of

countenance rather pleasing than otherwise. His dress was a short

braided jacket, unbuttoned on account of the sultriness of the evening,

and disclosing a shirt of fine texture, and a coloured silk handkerchief

tied loosely about his throat, which was round and moulded as that of a

woman. His cavalry overalls were strapped and topped with leather, and

had rows of large bright buttons down the sides; double-rowelled spurs

were fixed to his boots, and on a chair beside him lay a foraging-cap

and a light sabre. Although his features were small and delicately

chiselled, there was great daring and decision in the thin compressed

lips, slightly expanded nostril, and keen grey eye; and when he smiled,

which was but rarely, certain lines around his mouth gave a cruel,

almost a savage expression to his otherwise agreeable physiognomy. A

Navarrese by birth, and of a roving and adventurous disposition, this

man, at the commencement of the civil war, had espoused the cause of Don

Carlos; but a violent quarrel with a superior officer, punished, as he

considered, with undue severity, soon induced him to transfer his

services to the Christinos. He raised a free corps, composed of Carlist

deserters, smugglers, and desperadoes of every description, and made war

upon his former friends with unbounded vindictiveness and considerable

success. At the period now referred to, he had already, by various

well-planned and boldly-achieved expeditions, accomplished chiefly in

the nighttime, gained a high reputation, and the _sobriquet_, by which

he was generally known, of El Mochuelo, or the Night Owl.

The man seated opposite to the partisan just described, was of a totally

different stamp. Several inches taller than his companion,

broad-shouldered and powerful, he had the careless weatherbeaten look of

an old campaigner, equally ready to do his devoir in the field, or to

enjoy a temporary repose in snug quarters. A bushy beard covered the

lower part of his face, which was further adorned with a purple scar

reaching completely across one cheek, the result of a sabre cut of no

very ancient date. He wore a dragoon's uniform: his right arm, which

rested on the table before him, was large and brawny, apparently well

fitted to wield the ponderous sword that hung from his hip; but his left

had been severed between wrist and elbow, and in its stead an iron hook

protruded from the empty coat-cuff. On his right shoulder a single

epaulet, with long silver bullion, marked his rank as that of lieutenant

of free corps.

"I tell you I'm sick of it, Velasquez," cried the Mochuelo, striking the

table impatiently with his fist. "Why are we idling in towns instead of

following up our late victory? When there's work to be done, do it at

once, say I. If there's no sign of a move to-morrow, I shall venture

something by myself, that I'm determined."

"Can't say I'm so impatient," returned his companion. "Fighting is very

well in its way, and I believe I take to it as kindly as most men; but a

feast after a fray, that's fair play and the soldier's privilege. But

you are never easy without your foot is in the stirrup. Give the poor

devils a day's rest; if it's only time to shake their feathers after

their last thrashing."

"Curse them!" cried the Mochuelo; "not an hour, if I could help it. They

treated me like a dog, and my debt of ill-usage is not half paid. No,

to-morrow I move out, come what may."

"And why not to-night, Mochuelo?" said a young staff-officer who had

approached the table and overheard the last words of the revengeful

guerilla. "It is yet early, the night is dark, why not at once?"

The Mochuelo sprang to his feet.

"Do you bring me orders, Señor Torres?" said he in a low eager tone to

the aide-de-camp. "So much the better! Whither to go? In half an hour my

men are ready."

"Not so fast, amigo," answered Mariano Torres, smiling at the guerilla's

impatience. "It's no ordinary or easy expedition that I propose to you,

nor need you undertake it unless you choose. I bring the general's

authorization, not his order. The risk is great, and the object a

private one; but by accomplishing it you will lay my friend Captain

Herrera, and consequently myself, under deep obligation.

"I would gladly oblige Captain Herrera," said the Mochuelo, bowing to

Luis, who accompanied Torres. "Velasquez once served in his squadron."

And he pointed to his one-handed companion.

"You have forgotten Sergeant Velasquez, captain," said the latter. "He

escaped the ambuscade in which you were taken prisoner. You see I've got

the epaulet at last."

"I remember you well," replied Herrera, cordially shaking the hand of

his former subordinate. "Your promotion has been dearly purchased,"

added he, glancing at the mutilated limb; "and I am sure well deserved."

"No time for compliments, señor," said the Mochuelo. "To business."

He again seated himself, and the others following his example, Herrera

in few words exposed to the guerilla the nature of the projected

expedition.

Notwithstanding the precautions taken to prevent Don Baltasar from

leaving Pampeluna, precautions which, as the reader already knows,

proved fruitless, Herrera, finding after a lapse of twenty-four hours

that no tidings were obtained of the fugitive, resolved not to trust to

the chance of his recapture, but at once to execute the plan he had

formed when first he became aware of Rita's state of durance. This plan,

it will be remembered, was to penetrate clandestinely and with a small

force into the enemy's country, to surprise the convent and rescue his

mistress. Impracticable when first devised at Artajona, the difficulties

besetting the scheme, although diminished by the comparative proximity

of Pampeluna to Rita's prison, still appeared almost insuperable. Could

the expedition have commenced and terminated between sunset and sunrise,

a party of active guerillas, well acquainted with the country and

accustomed to such enterprises, might have accomplished it without

incurring more than a moderate amount of danger; but, at that season of

the year especially, a great part of the march would have to be made in

broad daylight, through a district whose population was exclusively

Carlist, and which was occupied by detachments and garrisons of the

Pretender's troops. Indeed the risk was so great and manifest, and the

chances of success apparently so slender, that Cordova, when applied to

by Herrera, at first positively refused to allow him to go on so mad an

expedition. He at last yielded to the young man's reiterated entreaties,

and even permitted Torres to accompany his friend, but refused to give

them any troops of the line, saying, however, that the Mochuelo might

go, if willing. That he was so, the reader, after the glimpse that has

been given of the guerilla's daring character and impatience of

inaction, will have small difficulty in conjecturing. He acknowledged

that the proposed expedition was most difficult and dangerous; but

confident in his own resources, and in the men under his command, he by

no means despaired of its being successful. He should have liked, he

said, to postpone it for two or three days, in order to send out spies

and ascertain the exact position of the Carlist troops; but on learning

from Herrera how urgent it was to lose no time, and how fatal might be

the delay of even a single day, he made no further difficulties, but

agreed to start at once.

Although in the month of July, the night was overcast and dark when the

little band who undertook this perilous service left the town of

Pampeluna, and, passing through the outer fortifications, struck into

the open country. It consisted of four horsemen and two to three hundred

foot soldiers, the latter almost without exception young men between

twenty and thirty years of age, scarcely one of whom but might have been

cited as an example of the highest perfection of hardiness and activity

to which the human frame can be brought by constant exposure to climate,

by habit of exertion and endurance of fatigue. Long-limbed, muscular and

wiry, lightly clad in costumes remarkable for their picturesque and

fantastical variety; unencumbered by knapsacks, or by any baggage save a

linen bag slung across the back, and containing rations for two days;

their long muskets over their shoulders; belts, full of cartridges and

supporting bayonets, strapped tightly round their waists, they strode

over hill and dale at a pace which kept the officers' horses at an

amble. Fine studies were these for a painter desirous of depicting

banditti or guerillas. Their marked features and sunburnt cheeks were

shaded by broad flat caps, from beneath which shining ringlets of black

hair hung down to their bare bronzed necks. Contempt of danger and

reckless daring were legibly written on every one of their countenances,

accompanied, it is true, in some instances, by the expression of less

laudable qualities. In the plain and in a regular action, they might

have been no match for more highly disciplined troops; but it was

evident that as light infantry, and for mountain warfare, their

qualifications were unsurpassed, if not unequalled, by any troops of any

country.

Whilst a few of the guerillas acted as scouts, and, scattering

themselves over the fields on either side of the road which their

comrades followed, kept a sharp look-out for lurking foes and ambushed

danger, the remainder moved onwards in compact order and profound

silence. In front came Herrera and Torres, the former thoughtful and

anxious, the latter sanguine and _insouciant_ as usual, ambling along as

contentedly as if he were riding to a rendezvous with his mistress,

instead of on an expedition whence his return was, to say the least,

doubtful. Velasquez accompanied them, the bridle hooked on to his iron

substitute for a hand, and guiding his horse rather by leg than rein. At

starting, the Mochuelo, who had had little time to mature a plan of

operations, appeared grave and pre-occupied. For a while he rode in rear

of his men, talking in low tones with Paco the muleteer, who accompanied

the party, and with an old grim-visaged Frenchman, a sergeant in his

corps, who, on account of his having but one eye, went by the name of El

Tuerto. The result of his conversation with these two men seemed

satisfactory to him, and, on taking his place at the head of the column,

he told Herrera that he had good hopes of success. Silence, however, was

the order of the night, and he entered into no details. Paco and the

Tuerto kept near him, apparently as guides. The former had testified no

slight surprise on recognising his antagonist in the ball-court, and the

skirmish, in the new character of a commissioned officer; but respect

for the epaulet, and a few friendly words addressed to him by Velasquez,

dissipated his angry feelings, if such indeed he still harboured, and he

marched peaceably along beside the stirrup of his former opponent.

Steadily and silently the little party continued its march, winding like

some dark and many-jointed snake over the inequalities of the ground,

now disappearing in the hollow of a ravine, then toiling its way up

rugged mountain sides. The road had long been abandoned, and only here

and there the adventurous troop were able to avail themselves of a cart

track or country lane, whose deep ruts, however, rendered it but little

preferable to the fields and waste land over which they at other times

proceeded. After leaving the immediate vicinity of Pampeluna, and during

several hours' march, but few words were exchanged between any of the

party, and those few were uttered in a cautious whisper. Although the

pace was a killing one, no man had flagged or straggled; when at last,

after completing a tortuous and rugged descent, the Mochuelo commanded a

halt. The place where this occurred was in a narrow gorge between two

lines of hills, or it should rather be said of mountains; for although

their altitude was only here and there very considerable, their cragged

and precipitous conformation and rocky material entitled them to the

latter denomination. The passage between them continued narrow only for

a few hundred yards, after which, at either of its extremities, the

mountains receded, and the valley opened into plains of some extent. To

the right of the defile was a considerable tract of undulating and

wooded country; the level on the left extended to a less distance,

before the hills, closing in again, restricted it within narrow limits.

The thick clouds which had veiled the sky during the early part of the

night, had now broken and dispersed, the stars shone out and disclosed

the outline of surrounding objects, assuming in the dim light all manner

of fantastic forms. A cool wind, the forerunner of morning, swept across

the valley, bringing pleasant refreshment to the heated soldiery, as

they leaned upon their muskets and waited the orders of their chief. On

either hand videttes were advanced, keeping vigilant watch. El Mochuelo

exchanged a few words with Paco and the Tuerto, and then turned to

Herrera.

"We are now," said the guerilla, "within a short league of the convent.

It is in the valley beyond the mountains in our front. But we are also

within less than an hour of daybreak, and if we execute the surprise

now, our return to Pampeluna will be scarcely possible. The country in

our rear swarms with Carlists; the first shot will bring overpowering

numbers against us, and we shall be cut off. Our march has been rapid

and fatiguing, and we shall have little chance of escape from fresh and

unwearied troops. Hazardous as it may appear to you, Captain Herrera, I

have decided to pass the day in the neighbourhood of this spot, and to

defer our visit to the convent till nightfall. Under cover of the

darkness, and guided by these men," he pointed to Paco and the old

sergeant, "our retreat will be comparatively easy, even should the enemy

get the alarm, which, as we have no resistance to expect at the convent,

I trust may be avoided. What say you to my plan?"

"I am willing," replied Herrera, "to be guided by you in the matter; but

this arrangement strikes me as extremely hazardous. Where can three

hundred men conceal themselves during a whole day, even in this wild and

thinly peopled district, without imminent risk of discovery? Remember

that a glimpse obtained by a passing peasant of but one of our number,

ensures our destruction. The forests and mountain passes are traversed

by woodcutters and shepherds; the chances against us would be

innumerable. Is it not better, without loss of time, to proceed to the

convent, accomplish our object, and cut our way back to Pampeluna?"

"Not one of us would ever enter its gates," answered the Mochuelo. "It

would be certain death to us all. But my plan is not so desperate as it

seems. El Tuerto, here, is well acquainted with these mountains, and has

had many a narrow escape amongst them whilst pursuing a less honest

calling than the present. He has told me of a place of concealment,

where it is scarcely possible we should be discovered. At any rate we

must leave this spot, or some early-rising peasant will stumble upon us.

There is danger here."

At that moment, as if to confirm his last words, the note of a bugle,

sounded apparently at less than a mile off, was borne upon the breeze to

the ears of the adventurers.

"You hear," said the Mochuelo. "We must begone, and quickly. There are

cantonments of the enemy a little to our right. Call in the videttes."

The order was obeyed, and, turning to the left, the guerillas quitted

the defile and entered the smaller of the two valleys connected by it.

Guided by the Tuerto, they presently approached a projecting hill,

jutting out into the valley like some huge buttress placed there to

support the mountain wall. It was of small elevation, but its sides were

too perpendicular to be climbed, although that circumstance was

partially concealed by the trees growing at its base. Its summit also

was covered with trees, and its rocky flanks were clothed with ivy. The

guerillas turned into a wood extending to some distance along the foot

of the mountain, and made their way with some difficulty through the

closely planted trunks and thick brushwood. Presently the sound of

falling water was audible, increasing in loudness as they proceeded,

until its cause became visible in a cascade that splashed down the

mountain side. A rocky pool received the foaming element, and fed a

pellucid stream that soon disappeared amongst the trees, on its way to

irrigate and fertilize the neighbouring fields. The water fell from the

least elevated part of the mountain buttress above described, a height

of seventy or eighty feet.

"This is the place," said El Tuerto to the Mochuelo. The latter nodded,

and again ordering a halt, passed the word for the men to sit down upon

the grass and observe the strictest silence. Divesting themselves of

their belts and muskets, El Tuerto and Paco now approached a lofty tree

growing at a short distance from the cascade, and whose upper boughs

reached to the top of the precipice, and to the astonishment of Herrera

and Torres, and indeed of all who were sufficiently near to distinguish

their movements, began to climb its knotty and uneven trunk. In

obedience, however, to the order for silence, no one asked a question of

the Mochuelo, who alone seemed aware of the meaning of this

manoeuvre. Soon the two climbers reached the uppermost limits of the

gigantic tree, and creeping cautiously along one of them, landed safely

at the top of the precipice. For an instant they were visible like dark

shadows against the starry sky, and then they disappeared amongst the

trees.

Scarcely five minutes had elapsed, when Herrera and Torres, who were

nearest to the torrent, observed, to their great surprise, that the fall

of water seemed of less volume. They watched it, the diminution

continued, and presently its bed remained bare and dry, with the

exception of a slight trickling, which each moment lessened. At the same

instant, Paco and El Tuerto re-appeared on the summit of the precipice,

and began to descend the water-course. Herrera now perceived that the

latter was in fact a rude and irregular staircase, or rather a ladder of

steps cut in the rocky surface, some perhaps naturally indented, but

others evidently chiselled out by the hands of man. By means of these

steps, which afforded a slippery but sufficient footing, it was not

difficult for active men to ascend and descend in perfect safety. To

increase this facility, wooden pegs had in various places been driven

into the interstices of the rock; but when the water flowed, both these

and the steps were so far concealed as not to attract notice.

Whilst Herrera gazed in mute astonishment at this singular staircase,

the Mochuelo approached and tapped him on the shoulder.

"What say you to yonder hiding-place?" said he, pointing up to the

wooden platform above them. "Will they seek us there, think you? Could

we not lie hidden for a week instead of a day?"

"If that be the only road to it," said Herrera, indicating the

water-course, "we need hardly fear intruders. But can it not be

approached from the mountains in the rear?"

"Hardly," answered the Mochuelo, "as you shall see when there is light

enough. We shall be safe there, señor."

"And the horses?" said Herrera.

"Shall be cared for," replied the Mochuelo. "We must risk their loss,

although even that is not probable. But we shall have daylight here

directly. Time is precious."

It was as he said. Already a brightness was visible in the eastern sky,

and the stars in that quarter of the heavens began to fade and

disappear. A word from the Mochuelo brought his men to their feet, and,

slinging their muskets on their backs, they ascended the water-course.

Meanwhile the horses were stripped of their equipments, and, taking hold

of the halters, Paco and El Tuerto led them into the wood. A cord was

lowered from the top of the precipice, and the saddles were drawn up.

The men continued to ascend. Velasquez, on account of his mutilation,

had some difficulty in climbing; but by the aid of a powerful guerilla,

who went behind, and afforded him support, he succeeded in reaching the

top. The Mochuelo, after ascertaining by the report of his sergeants

that all the men who had left Pampeluna with him were present, still

stood with Herrera at the foot of the water-course, waiting for El

Tuerto and Paco, who in a few minutes made their appearance.

"You have disposed of the horses?" said the Mochuelo.

The answer was in the affirmative. The horses had been securely tethered

in the thickest part of the wood, and left with an ample feed of corn

before them. It was most improbable that they should be discovered

during the few hours they must remain there; but even if they were,

their presence in that retired spot, whatever surprise it might awaken,

could afford, owing to the absence of the saddles and trappings, no clue

to their owners. To obviate any risk of their hoof-prints being traced,

Paco had had the forethought to take them into the stream, and lead them

for some distance along its shallow bed.

Upon reaching the top of the precipice, the first care of the Mochuelo

was to assemble his men, and warn them of the necessity of perfect

silence and extreme caution, upon which the lives of all depended. Under

pain of severe punishment, he commanded them to avoid the slightest

noise, and forbade their walking about, or leaving the place he

assigned to them. This was under the shadow of some ancient trees, whose

bushy crowns and branches were mingled and interlaced, so as to form a

roof impervious to the sun, and almost to rain. Amongst them meandered

one of two small streams, which, rising at different points of the

adjacent mountains, flowed down to the platform, and uniting upon it,

dashed over its brink, and formed the waterfall already described. For

the present, at least, there was little need of the Mochuelo's command

to ensure silence. Wearied by their rapid and toilsome march, the

guerillas stretched themselves upon the grass, and seemed disposed to

make amends by a morning nap for the vigilance and fatigues of the

night.

The Mochuelo took Herrera's arm. "I will show you," he said, "that I

have not overrated the security of our hiding-place."

Following the course of the rivulet, he led him to a place where a

contrivance of great simplicity explained the sudden, and, as it had

seemed, miraculous cessation of the waterfall. Just above the confluence

of the two streams, which were of moderate width, and not deep, but

which received, even in the summer months, an abundant supply of water

from the mountain-springs, were a couple of rough-fashioned

sluice-gates, consisting of strong boards, sliding down between grooved

posts, and which the strength of two men sufficed to remove or return to

their places. Above these gates, trenches, now overgrown with grass and

bushes, had been cut; so that when the sluices were closed, and the

confined water rose to a certain height, it found a vent in another

direction, and the original channel remained dry. The gates had been

taken out and concealed amongst the brushwood, where Paco and El Tuerto

had found them, and, by forcing them down the grooves, had stopped the

waterfall. They were now busied in removing them, and the Mochuelo and

Herrera, on approaching the edge of the rock, found the torrent once

more plashing down its accustomed bed, and the strange staircase, by

which their ascent had been accomplished, concealed by its flow.

In reply to Herrera's enquiries as to the original authors of this

curious contrivance, and the manner in which he had discovered it, the

Mochuelo informed him that the Frenchman, Roche, or El Tuerto, as his

Spanish comrades styled him, had, previously to the war, been one of a

band of outlaws, smugglers avowedly, and on occasion, as it was

affirmed, something worse, who for a considerable period had carried on

their illegal avocations in the Navarrese Pyrenees and their contiguous

ranges. Exposed to frequent pursuit, they had discovered and contrived

hiding-places in various parts of the district they infested, and that

now occupied by the guerillas was the one on the ingenuity of which they

most prided themselves. In order to keep it secret, they resorted

thither only in extreme cases, usually contriving to arrive and depart

in the nighttime, and carefully avoided making any of the peasantry

aware of its existence. The scanty population of the district, which

consisted chiefly of rock and mountain, forest and waste land, favoured

the preservation of their secret. At the commencement of the war the

gang broke up, and its members joined various guerilla corps. Roche was

for some time with the Carlists, but finding pay and plunder less

plentiful than hard duty and long marches, he deserted, and put himself

under the orders of the Mochuelo. The latter knew something of his

previous history, and, on leaving Pampeluna, had consulted him as a

person likely to possess valuable information concerning the wild

district whither they were about to proceed.

It seemed probable, from the appearance of the platform, that it had

been unvisited, certainly unfrequented, since the dissolution of the

honourable society to which El Tuerto had belonged. The grass was long

and untrodden; no woodman's axe had been busy with the trees; save foxes

and birds, no living creature had left traces of its presence. Only in

one place Herrera and the Mochuelo discovered a number of sheep bones

scattered amongst the long grass, remnants doubtless of some former

banquet of the smugglers; and not far off, in the hollow of a tree,

serving as a niche, a small plaster figure of the Virgin and child, that

had once been painted, but of which the damp had long since strangely

confounded the colours, told of a lingering devotional qualm on the part

of the wild law-breakers.

Still keeping under shelter of the abundant trees, the Mochuelo led his

companion to the rear of the platform. There the mountains rose in

precipices, and the most careful examination only showed one path, that

being such as few besides a mountain-goat or a chamois-hunter would

willingly have ventured upon, by which the lurking-place of the

guerillas could on that side be approached. At the foot of this path,

concealed amongst the bushes, crouched two sentries. At another point

also, where, from the loftiest part of the platform, a view was obtained

over the tree-tops up the defile between the mountains, other two

watchers were stationed, stretched at full length amongst the fern, and

peering out through laurel bushes, with whose dark foliage their bronzed

physiognomies were confounded beyond a possibility of detection.

Fully satisfied of the security of their position, the Mochuelo and

Herrera returned to their companions. The soldiers were for the most

part asleep; some few, whose appetite was even greater than their

drowsiness, were breaking their fast with black ration-bread, seasoned

with an onion or sausage, and washed down, in the absence of better

beverage, with draughts from the diamond-bright stream that rushed and

tinkled past them. Torres, with his head on his saddle, was soundly

sleeping; his dreams, to judge by the smile on his pleasant countenance,

being of a more agreeable nature than the realities of his position.

Velasquez had followed his example, and snored in a key that almost

induced his chief to awaken him, lest his nasal melody should be heard

at too great a distance.

"Can you depend on your men?" said Herrera to the Mochuelo. "A desertion

would be ruin, and yet the temptation is great. What would the man get

who delivered the dreaded Mochuelo and his band into the hands of the

enemy?"

"Thanks and reward to-day, distrust and disgrace to-morrow," replied the

guerilla. "Even those who profit by treason, hate and despise the

traitor. Besides, most of my fellows have been with the Carlists, and

have little fancy to return thither. At the same time, as the majority

of them are infernal scoundrels, I neglect no precaution. There are only

two ways of leaving this platform without the certainty of breaking

one's neck; the mountain-path, where two of my most devoted followers

are on sentry, and the waterfall, where Paco and Roche have taken the

first turn of guard. You may go to sleep, therefore, in all security,

and it is what I would advise you to do; for if our last-night's work

was severe, you may be sure that our next will be far more so. And so

good-night, or rather good-morning." And, throwing himself on the grass,

the guerilla, accustomed to snatch sleep at all hours, had his eyes shut

in an instant.

Although not less in want of repose, Herrera was hardly in a frame of

mind to obtain it so easily. His reason, as well as the consciousness

that opposition would be unavailing, had induced him to agree to the

delay deemed necessary by the Mochuelo, but he was not the less

impatient and irritated at the inaction to which he saw himself

condemned. If Baltasar had succeeded in leaving Pampeluna, and the

fruitlessness of the minute search made for him caused Herrera to fear

that such had been the case, the twelve hours' delay might frustrate all

his hopes of liberating Rita. In the anticipation of a forward movement

of Cordova's army, it was highly probable that Baltasar would remove her

to some less accessible part of the Carlist country; perhaps, even,

exasperated by the severity with which he had been treated at Pampeluna,

and by the reproaches and menaces of the Count, he might proceed to

extremities, of which Herrera shuddered to think. The fevered and

excited imagination of Luis conjured up the most maddening visions. He

saw Rita dragged half-lifeless to the altar, compelled by atrocious

menaces to place her hand in that of her abhorred kinsman, whilst a

venal priest blessed the unholy union. He heard the cries of the

trembling victim imploring mercy from those who knew not the name, and

calling on him, by whom she deemed herself deserted, for succour in her

extremity. Tortured by these and similar imaginings, Herrera paced

wildly up and down in the gloom and silence of the forest, and accused

himself of indifference and cowardice for yielding to the

representations of the Mochuelo, plausible and weighty though they were,

and for not proceeding at once, alone even, and unaided, to the

assistance of the defenceless and beloved being, the uncertainty of

whose fate thus racked his soul. Cooler reflection, however, came to his

aid, dissipating, or at least unveiling, these phantoms of a diseased

fancy, and convincing him that precipitation could but ruin his last

chance of success. It would indeed, he felt, be impracticable to regain

the Christino lines in broad daylight. Had his own life alone been at

stake, that he had willingly set upon the hazard; or rather he would at

once and joyfully have sacrificed it to restore Rita to the arms of her

father. But the same conflict in which he perished, would also ensure

the return of Rita to her captivity and its terrible consequences.

Moreover, it would have been an ungenerous requital of the promptness

with which the Mochuelo had undertaken a most perilous enterprise,

solely to oblige Herrera, and without a chance of advantage to himself,

had he insisted upon his converting the risk into almost the certainty

of destruction. Patience, then, was the only alternative; and, feeling

the necessity of repose after the fatigues and agitation of the

preceding night, Herrera lay down upon the ground, and physical

exhaustion overcoming mental activity, he sank into an uneasy and broken

slumber.

It was afternoon, and the valley and mountains were glowing and

glittering in the ardent sun-rays, although within the bower of foliage

where the guerillas had established themselves, all was cool and dark,

when the Mochuelo awakened Herrera. With a vague fear of having slept

too long, Luis started to his feet.

"Is it time to move?" he hurriedly demanded.

"Hush!" said the guerilla. "Come with me."

One of the Mochuelo's men stood by: he led the way to that lofty part of

the platform whence a view of the defile was commanded. On approaching

it, the two guerillas threw themselves on their hands and knees, and

making signs to Herrera to imitate them, crept forward till they gained

the bushes fringing the precipice. Through these a small party of

cavalry was visible, riding along the mountain pass. By aid of his

field-glass, Herrera was enabled to distinguish almost the features of

the men. At the head of the detachment rode an officer, whose figure and

general appearance he thought he recognized. A second glance confirmed

his first impression. The leader of the troop was Baltasar de

Villabuena.

Utterly bewildered by what he saw, Herrera turned to the Mochuelo.

"What are they?" he demanded, "and whither going?"

"You see what they are," answered the partisan. "Carlist lancers. They

are going, I fear, to the convent."

"How, to the convent? Does that road lead to it?"

"It does. At some distance up this valley the mountains sink, and there

is a track over them practicable for horsemen; the same which we shall

follow. When they reach the other side of the mountain they are within

ten minutes' ride of the convent."

Herrera remained for a moment as if petrified by what he heard.

"There can be no doubt," he exclaimed, "they go to remove her. Baltasar

is with them. We shall come too late. Mochuelo, you will no longer

refuse to act, and that on the instant. We must surprise and destroy the

detachment, then at once attack the convent and make our way back to

Pampeluna as best we may. If we wait till evening, the expedition might

as well not have been attempted. It will be too late."

For an instant or two the Mochuelo stood silent and thoughtful,

endeavouring to reconcile in his mind compliance with Herrera's

passionately urged wishes, and the dictates of common prudence.

"It is impossible, Captain Herrera," said he. "If there were only one

chance in twenty in our favour I would attempt it, but there would not

be one in a thousand. If we leave this before evening, we shall never

see to-morrow's sun. Much against my will I must refuse your request."

The firm and decided tone of this refusal exasperated Herrera, already

almost frantic at the thoughts of the new peril to which Rita was to be

exposed. He lost all self-command, his lip curled with a smile of scorn,

his look and tone expressed the most cutting contempt as he again

addressed the Mochuelo.

"What!" cried he, "is this the renowned, the fearless guerilla, whose

deeds have made him the dread of his foes and the admiration of his

friends! This the daring soldier whom no peril deters, who now talks of

danger, and calculates chances like a recruit or a woman! Oh, no! It is

not the same, or if it be, his courage has left him, and cowardice has

replaced daring."

On hearing himself thus unjustly and intemperately reproached, the

Mochuelo turned very pale, and his left hand sunk down as though seeking

the hilt of his sabre. His two followers, on sentry among the bushes,

who had not lost a word of the brief dialogue, turned their heads and

glared savagely at the man who dared to accuse their leader of

cowardice. One of them muttered a half-audible oath, and was about to

spring to his feet, but a gesture from the Mochuelo checked him. The

Carlist cavalry had now passed the defile, and were no longer visible on

the platform. The Mochuelo turned away and walked in the direction of

the bivouac, and Herrera mechanically followed him, rage and despair in

his heart. When out of earshot of the sentries the guerilla paused, and,

leaning his back against a tree, folded his arms on his breast. His

features, still pale, had assumed an expression of calm dignity,

strongly contrasting with the hushed and agitated countenance of his

companion.

"Señor de Herrera," said the Mochuelo, "you have surprised me. Before

two of my men you have taxed me with cowardice--fortunately they know me

well enough to despise the accusation, and discipline will not suffer.

Of the outrage to myself I say nothing. I make all allowance for your

excited state. Many would think it necessary to repay your hard words by

a shot or a stab; I can afford to laugh at any who blame my forbearance.

When next we meet the enemy, look where the fire is hottest, and you

will be convinced that the names of coward and of the Mochuelo can never

be coupled."

Touched by this manly address, and already ashamed of the intemperate

words which mental suffering had wrung from him, Herrera held out his

hand to the Mochuelo.

"Pardon me," he said "pardon a man whose agony at seeing all he loves on

earth about to be snatched away, has made him forget what is due to you

and to himself. Misery is ever selfish; but believe me I am not

ungrateful for your willing aid. All that human courage can accomplish I

know you will do. But alas! alas! this fatal though unavoidable delay is

the ruin of all my hopes."

"Perhaps not," said the Mochuelo cheeringly, and cordially pressing

Herrera's hand. "The horses we saw pass must be wearied by their mid-day

march. Unsuspicious of danger, Baltasar will probably remain a while at

the convent. The case is by no means so hopeless as you imagine. At any

rate we will risk sending a scout to keep an eye upon their movements.

For that service Paco is the man."

Within ten minutes after this conversation, Paco left the platform and

commenced the ascent of the mountain. A contribution had been levied

amongst the motley habilimented guerillas to equip him in a manner

unlikely to attract suspicion, and it was in the dress of a peasant of

the province that he departed on his hazardous mission. Herrera would

fain have undertaken it, but for the arguments of the Mochuelo and

Torres, who convinced him how much more effectually it would be

performed by the muleteer. Stationing himself at the foot of the

mountain, he watched Paco, as, with extraordinary daring and activity,

he climbed its rugged sides, availing himself, with intuitive skill and

judgment, of every description of cover, creeping up water-courses and

amongst bushes; and when compelled to expose himself to observation from

the valley in his rear, bounding and striding along as if insensible

alike to fatigue and to the scorching heat of the sun. In half the time

that appeared necessary for the painful ascent, he disappeared over the

summit of the mountain.

An hour elapsed, and Herrera, who had not ceased to watch for Paco's

re-appearance, became impatient and uneasy. The muleteer had been

ordered to go no farther than was necessary to get a view of the

convent, and that, El Tuerto affirmed, he would obtain within a few

hundred yards of the mountain-top. The Mochuelo argued favourably from

his prolonged absence, which proved, he said, that Baltasar's party were

still at the convent, and that Paco was watching their movements. But

when a second hour lagged by with like result, the guerilla, in his

turn, became anxious; whilst Herrera made sure that Paco had ventured

too far, and fallen into the hands of the enemy. In that case the

Mochuela feared that, to save his life, he might betray their

hiding-place; but Luis's assurances of the stanch and faithful character

of the muleteer, partly dissipated his apprehensions. Nevertheless,

additional videttes were posted round the edge of the platform, the

guerillas looked to their arms, and every precaution was taken against a

sudden attack. If discovered, said the Mochuelo, they could none of them

hope to escape; but the natural fortress which they occupied would

enable them to sell their lives at a dear rate.

In this state of suspense we will temporarily leave Herrera and his

friends, to follow in the footsteps of the muleteer. So rapid had been

his ascent of the mountain, that when he reached its summit the Carlists

had not yet completed their circuit, and entered the valley where the

convent stood. With a feeling of huge satisfaction Paco looked down upon

his former prison, and chuckled at the thought that he should soon have

an opportunity of revenging himself for his sufferings within its walls.

To make the most of his time before the appearance of Baltasar, he

hastily descended the naked rock on which he stood, and sought shelter

amongst the bushes and straggling trees clothing the middle and lower

slopes of the mountain. Thence he commanded a near view of the convent.

No change was visible in the grey, ghostly-looking edifice; so still was

every thing about it, that it might have been deemed uninhabited but for

the portress, who sat knitting in the shadow of the gateway, and for the

occasional apparition of some ancient nun, showing her face, yellow and

shrivelled as parchment, at a casement, or flitting with bowed head, and

hands lost in the wide sleeves of her robe, across the spacious and

solitary court. The red moss mantled the old walls, the bright green

creepers dangled from their summits, the gardens and vineyard covering

the slope in front of the convent, teemed with vegetable life. From

where he stood Paco could discover the very point where he had entered

the forest after his escape from the dungeon. As he gazed, it suddenly

occurred to him that the same friendly shelter which had enabled him to

leave the neighbourhood of the convent unperceived, put it in his power

to return thither without detection. Bold to temerity, and forgetful of

the Mochuelo's injunctions to expose himself to no risk of discovery,

Paco no sooner conceived the project than he proceeded to execute it.

The convent, it will be remembered, was situated at the extremity of the

valley; the pass or rather dip in the surrounding hills, by which

Baltasar and his companions would approach it, was to the east of the

building; whereas Paco, by the short cut he had taken, found himself on

the contrary or western side. Concealed amongst the trees, he moved

stealthily but swiftly along, and was within a few hundred yards of the

spot whence he proposed to reconnoitre the enemy's proceedings, when he

heard the jingling noise of cavalry at the trot, and, looking through

the branches, he saw Baltasar and his party sweep round the base of the

little eminence on which the convent stood, and ascend the path leading

to its gate. Baltasar alone entered the court; the troopers, about

thirty in number, halted outside, and remained mounted. Paco plunged

deeper into the forest; five more minutes completed his circuit, and he

found himself, still concealed by the trees, within a few paces of the

convent wall. Opposite to him was the window whence Rita had held her

conversation with the gipsy; below it, Paco saw traces of the loophole

through which he had escaped. The long grass and bushes had been cleared

away, and the rusty grating which Paco had so easily removed was

replaced by solid masonry. At none of the casements on that side of the

convent was any person visible. Both shutters and windows were open; but

Venetian blinds masked the interior of the apartments from the view of

the muleteer, who stood still and listened. Scarcely a minute elapsed,

when a loud noise, as of a door dashed violently open, reached his ears.

This was succeeded by a burst of furious vociferation in a voice which

Paco knew to be that of Baltasar. Although his tones were loud, his

utterance was so rapid and incoherent, the effect apparently of passion,

that only a word here and there was intelligible to the muleteer, and

these words were for the most part execrations. He seemed to lash

himself into the most unbounded fury against some person who had entered

the apartment in his company, and from the epithets he made use of, it

was clear that that person was a woman. At first no reply was made to

his violence, although Paco could distinguish that he put questions, and

became more and more infuriated at the silence of her to whom they were

addressed. Presently there was a momentary pause, and a female voice was

heard. The accents were distinct though tremulous.

"Never!" it said, "never! You may murder me; but that, never!"

A blasphemy too horrible to transcribe, burst from the lips of Baltasar.

A blow followed--a heavy, cruel, unmanly blow; there was a faint cry and

the sound of a fall. Paco's blood grew cold in his veins, he ground his

teeth, and his hand played convulsively with the knife in his pocket. He

looked up at the window as though he would have sprung to the assistance

of the helpless victim of Baltasar's barbarity. Again the room-door

opened, and was again violently slammed. All was now silent in the

chamber.

With heavy heart, and a countenance pale with horror and suppressed

rage, Paco left the spot, and hastened to another, whence he could see

the front of the convent. The Carlist horsemen were filing in at the

gate. Looking around him, Paco selected a lofty tree, easy of ascent; in

an instant he was amongst its branches. Thence he commanded a view of

the interior of the court. Baltasar was there giving orders to his men,

who unbridled and watered their horses at a fountain in the centre of

the court. This done, they proceeded to feed them, and to cleanse the

legs and bellies of the wearied animals from the sweat and dust. Bread

and a skin of wine were presently brought out of the convent; and by

these and other indications, Paco became convinced that a halt of some

duration, for the purpose of rest and refreshment, was intended,

although, from the non-removal of the saddles, it was evident that the

Carlists would not pass the night there. Having now obtained all the

information he could hope for, and far more than he had expected to get,

the indefatigable muleteer set out on his return to the platform.

Meanwhile Paco's prolonged absence had caused Herrera and the Mochuelo

the most serious uneasiness; and as Luis knew him to be incapable of

treachery, and vouched for his fidelity, they could only suppose that he

had been taken prisoner, or had fallen and killed or maimed himself

amongst the precipices he had to traverse. Sunset was near at hand, when

Herrera, who continued to sweep the mountain ridge with his telescope,

saw a man roll off the summit and then start to his feet. It was Paco,

who now bounded down the mountain with a speed and apparent recklessness

that made those who watched his progress tremble for his neck. But the

hardy fellow knew well what he did; his sure foot and practised eye

served him well; and presently, reeking with sweat, and his hands and

dress torn by rocks and brambles, he again stood amongst his friends. He

was overwhelmed with enquiries concerning the result of his excursion,

and gave a brief but lucid account of all he had seen. Only, with a

delicacy and consideration hardly to be expected in one so roughly

nurtured, he suppressed the more painful details, merely saying that he

had heard a voice, which he believed to be that of Rita, in animated

conversation with Baltasar, who seemed endeavouring to persuade her to

something which she steadily refused to do.

"We may yet be in time," exclaimed Herrera, all his hopes revived by the

muleteer's intelligence. And he looked anxiously at the Mochuelo.

"We will move at once," said the latter, replying to his look rather

than to his words. "The sun is low. It will be dark before we reach the

convent."

The flow of the waterfall was again stopped, and with the same caution

that had marked all their movements since they left Pampeluna, the

guerillas descended from their eyrie. Avoiding the open part of the

valley, they kept within the forest, and reached the spot where the

horses were concealed. They had not been meddled with; it was probable,

indeed, that during the whole day Baltasar and his men were the only

persons who had passed through the solitary valley. With strength

restored by their long repose, the guerillas marched rapidly along, and

soon found themselves in the vicinity of the convent. The sun had

disappeared, leaving a red glow in the western sky; here and there a

star shone out, and the heavens were of a transparent blue, excepting in

the wind quarter, where the upper edge of a dense bank of cloud was

visible. This, and the vapours, the result of the day's heat, which

began to rise in the hollows and low grounds, the Mochuelo contemplated

with much satisfaction.

"'Tis a bright evening," he said, "but the night will be dark. The

better for our retreat, Captain Herrera; all is in our favour. Fortune

befriends us."

Halting his men, the guerilla dismounted and advanced on foot till he

came within sight of the convent. By the waning light he distinguished

the figures of two or three soldiers lounging outside the gate. He

returned to Herrera.

"They are still there," said he, "and cannot escape us. We will wait

till it grows somewhat darker, that the surprise may be more complete."

A few minutes were allowed to elapse, minutes that seemed hours to

Herrera's impatience, and then a small party, guided by Paco and under

command of Torres, moved off to gain the rear of the convent. At the

same time the remainder of the guerillas approached the building on the

eastern side, stealing along behind banks and trees. Unperceived they

had commenced the ascent of the uncultivated slope, when their foremost

files stumbled upon a Carlist soldier who had sneaked down to the garden

to make provision of the fruit growing there in abundance. So silent

were the movements of the guerillas, (Herrera, Velasquez, and the

Mochuelo going on foot, whilst their horses were led at some distance in

the rear,) that the Carlist was not aware of their approach till they

were close to him, and he himself, hidden amongst the fruit-trees, had

escaped their notice. He uttered a shout of surprise and terror; it was

his last. A blow from the sabre of Velasquez brought him to the ground;

the next instant three bayonets were in his body.

"Forward!" cried the Mochuelo, who saw that further caution was useless;

and, closely followed by his men, ran at the top of his speed towards

the convent. But the soldier's exclamation had given the alarm to a

second Carlist, who had been waiting his comrade's return from the

orchard. He saw the guerillas rush forward, sprang within the gate, shut

and barred it. The Mochuela came up in time to hear the last bolt drawn.

A great bustle and confusion were now audible in the court; the men

hurrying to their horses, and questioning each other as to the nature of

the alarm. The Mochuelo lost not an instant. Two of his men carried

axes; he took one, Herrera the other, and they dealt furious blows upon

the gate, which shook and splintered under their efforts. The voice of

Baltasar was heard loud in oath, and abusing his men for their cowardly

panic. Not conceiving it possible that a party of Christinos should have

advanced in broad daylight to so great a distance from their lines, he

at first attributed the attack to some roving banditti, who had expected

a rich, or, at any rate, an easy prey in the defenceless convent of

nuns. He advanced to the gate.

"Scoundrels!" he exclaimed,--"What means this violence? Desist, or I

fire upon you!"

A low laugh from the guerillas replied to his menace. With incredible

hardihood, he opened the wicket and looked out. The Mochuelo had

forbidden his men to fire, but nevertheless, at the sight of Baltasar, a

dozen muskets were raised.

"For your lives not a shot!" cried the Mochuelo.

With his axe, Herrera made a furious blow at Baltasar, but the wicket

was too small to admit the weapon, and the Carlist retreated into the

interior of the court. The gate began to yield, fairly hewn in pieces by

the axes; a few more blows and an opening was effected. The guerillas

rushed with fixed bayonets into the court. It was deserted save by the

horses. The doors and windows of the convent were closely shut, and not

a single Carlist was to be seen. Just then several shots, fired in rear

of the building, explained the solitude in its front. The besieged had

endeavoured to escape by the outer windows, but had been prevented by

Torres and his detachment. Foiled in this attempt, Baltasar now showed

himself, raging like a wolf at bay, at a window above the gate of the

convent. Some of his men accompanied him, and fired their carabines at

the assailants. By the Mochuelo's order, the fire was not returned. A

few shots, he thought, might be unheard or pass unnoticed by the Carlist

troops in the vicinity, but the fire of his men would inevitably attract

attention. In silence, therefore, and partly sheltered by a projecting

portico, he and Herrera assailed the convent door with their axes. The

obstacle was a slighter one than that which had already been overcome,

and its demolition seemed likely to be more speedy. There were other

doors in the wings of the convent that would perhaps have been yet more

easily broken down; but in the uncertainty of what the interior

partitions and defences night be, the Mochuelo preferred attacking the

principal entrance. The Carlists continued to fire, and several of the

guerillas were already killed; but soon, in anticipation of their

stronghold being speedily forced, the besieged ceased to defend

themselves, and left the windows to seek concealment from the first fury

of the foe. The door gave way, and the victorious Christinos, eager for

booty, poured into the building. Herrera was the first who entered. He

had ascertained from Paco the part of the convent where he might expect

to find Rita; he darted up the stairs and along a gallery which ran

completely round the first floor. The Mochuelo accompanied him. They

were passing an open window, whence the Carlists had fired, when a loud

shout was uttered by a detachment, who, in obedience to the orders of

their chief, remained formed up in the court. The shout was followed by

a few musket shots. The Mochuelo stopped and looked out: Herrera, all

his thoughts concentrated on one subject, still hurried on, but an

exclamation from his companion arrested his steps.

"Escaped!" cried the Mochuelo.

"Escaped!" repeated Herrera, in his turn looking out; "Who?"

The question was answered by what he saw. Whilst the guerillas in the

court-yard, resting upon their arms, gazed at the convent windows, now

rapidly becoming illuminated, and envied their more fortunate comrades,

who, to judge from the noise within, were using unsparingly their

privileges as victors, a door in one of the projecting wings suddenly

opened, and a man on horseback, with a woman before him on his saddle,

dashed into the court. His spurs plunged in his charger's flanks, he

rode through the astonished soldiers, and out at the gate. There was

still enough light for Herrera to catch a glimpse of his figure before

he disappeared below the brow of the slope. That glimpse told him that

his hopes were again blasted. The horseman was Baltasar. There could be

little doubt as to who was the companion of his flight.

In an instant Herrera was in the court. His horse stood near the gate;

he leaped into the saddle, and galloped madly down the hill. Three or

four of the guerillas had preceded him; but the captured horses of the

Carlists, on which they were mounted, were sorry beasts, and he soon

left them far in his rear. He saw Baltasar galloping at full speed up

the valley, the double burthen apparently unfelt by the vigorous animal

he bestrode. But Herrera also was well mounted, his horse fresh, and he

gained on the fugitive, gradually it is true, but still he gained on

him. Selecting the most favourable ground, and avoiding plantations or

whatever else might impede his progress, Baltasar spurred onwards,

stimulating his steed with his voice, occasionally even striking his

flanks with his sabre-flat. When dashing through the court, his

companion, or, it should rather be said, his captive, had been seen to

struggle, although the thick black veil in which her head was muffled

prevented her cries, if any she uttered, from being audible. She now

lay, as if insensible, on the left arm of the Carlist colonel. Behind

came Herrera bareheaded, with clenched teeth, his drawn sword in his

hand, in readiness to strike the very instant he should come within

reach of the ravisher. Unfortunately the distance between them

diminished but slowly, and Herrera trembled lest superior bone and

endurance on the part of his enemy's charger should yet enable him to

escape; when to his inexpressible relief he saw the horse stop, with a

suddenness that almost threw his rider on his neck, and then, on being

furiously spurred and urged forward, rear, turn round, and oppose all

the resistance of a horse brought to a leap which he is afraid or unable

to take. Whilst galloping down a rough and stony path, on one of whose

sides was a high bank, and on the other an abrupt fall in the ground,

Baltasar had come upon a deep trench or rivulet of considerable width,

and this his horse obstinately refused to cross. Casting a hasty glance

back at his pursuer, who was still far behind, Baltasar turned his

charger, and again rode him at the obstacle. Again the animal shyed, and

refused. His rider uttered a furious oath, and resolutely turned about,

as if resolved to fight now that he could no longer fly. Herrera's heart

beat quick with hope. At length, then, he should rescue and revenge his

Rita. He was within twenty yards of the Carlist, when the latter drew a

pistol and fired at him. His horse received the ball in his breast,

staggered forward, carried on by the impetus he had acquired, and fell,

with his rider partly under him. Before Herrera could extricate himself,

the sound of hoofs was heard, and another horseman galloped down the

lane. Again Baltasar rode at the ditch, but his steed, discouraged and

cowed by his violent treatment, made no effort to cross it. With a

fierce execration, Baltasar threw the woman violently to the ground, and

driving the point of his sword an inch or more into his horse's crupper,

the animal, relieved of part of his load, and maddened by the cruel and

unusual stimulus, cleared the ditch. As he did so, Herrera having

regained his feet, hurried to the unfortunate creature of whom Baltasar

had so brutally disencumbered himself. She lay upon her side, quite

motionless and the veil that wrapped her head was wet with blood.

"Rita!" exclaimed Luis; "Rita!"

Raising her on his arm, he drew the covering from her face. The features

disclosed were entirely unknown to him.

Just then Velasquez came up at speed, and, flying across the ditch,

continued the pursuit.

The person whom Herrera supported in his arms was of middle age, and had

the remains of great beauty, although her countenance was emaciated, and

as pale as the white nun's robe in which she was clad. In falling she

had received severe injury; her temple had struck against a sharp angle

of the granite of which the path was chiefly composed, and blood flowed

in abundance from a deep wound. Her eyes were closed, and her features

wore a suffering expression. Amidst the various and opposite emotions

that agitated Herrera when he found that it was not Rita whom he had

rescued, the dominant impulse was to return immediately to the convent,

there to seek his mistress. Nevertheless common humanity forbade his

abandoning the nun, at least till her senses returned, or till he could

leave her in proper care, and moreover he hoped to obtain from her some

information concerning Rita. Raising her in his arms, he carried her to

the bank of the little stream, laid her gently upon the grass, and,

fetching water in the hollow of his hands, sprinkled it upon her face.

It revived her, she opened her eyes, and by a convulsive movement

assumed a sitting posture, but instantly fell back again. She glanced at

Herrera's uniform in seeming surprise, and gazed around her with a

haggard and terrified look.

"Have no fear," said Herrera; "you are in safety. Do I mistake, or are

you Doña Carmen de Forcadell?"

The nun's lips moved, but no sound escaped then.

"And Rita?" said Herrera, unable to restrain the inquiry, "where is

she?"

"Rita!" repeated the nun in a hollow broken voice, "What of her? Where

am I? how came I here? Oh, oh!" she exclaimed in tones of anguish, "I

remember!"

She put her hand to her head with a suffering gesture; a strange wild

gleam shone in her eyes, her reason seemed departing. Herrera anxiously

watched her. Her features became more composed, and for a moment she

appeared to suffer less.

"And Rita?" he again asked.

She looked him full in the face, the fire of delirium in her eyes.

"Rita!" she repeated. She paused, and then burst out into a scream of

laughter that made Herrera shudder.

"Ha, ha!" she cried, "False! vile! faithless!"----

The laugh died away upon her convulsed lips, a deep sob burst from her

breast, her head fell back. She was a corpse.

Herrera had but just assured himself that life had indeed fled, when he

heard in two different directions the sound of horses' feet, and then

Torres galloped up, followed by three of the guerillas.

"What do you here? The Mochuelo is furious at the delay. You will be

left behind. Where is Rita? Who is this?" cried he, looking at the dead

body of the nun.

Before Herrera could reply, Velasquez cleared the ditch. His face was

covered with blood, his sabre, which dangled from his wrist, showed the

same sanguine signals, and he led Baltasar's horse by the rein.

"Mount!" cried he to Herrera, "and spur, all of you, like devils. We

have been here too long already."

"You overtook him?" cried Herrera, springing into the saddle.

For sole reply, Velasquez raised his crimsoned sword, and dashing away

with the back of his hand the blood that blinded him, and which flowed

from a cut on his head, he set forward at full speed towards the

convent.

The guerillas were already formed up in readiness to depart. The

Mochuelo, chafing with impatience, had ridden a short distance to meet

Herrera and Velasquez.

"By all the saints!" he exclaimed, as they came up, "this delay may cost

us our lives, Captain Herrera. But how is this, you come alone? He has

escaped then, and carried off the lady!"

"It was not her we seek," replied Luis; "she must still be in the

convent."

"Impossible!" said the Mochuelo. "We have rummaged every corner of it."

"She must be there!" cried Herrera. "I will find her."

"We march instantly," said the Mochuelo, laying his hand on Herrera's

bridle. "We have tarried too long."

"Go, then, without me," exclaimed Herrera. And, snatching his rein from

the guerilla's grasp, he spurred his horse up the slope.

"Go with him, Señor Torres," said the Mochuelo. "Every moment is a man's

life. Three minutes more and I march."

Torres rode after his friend.

"And Baltasar?" said the Mochuelo to his lieutenant.

"Lies yonder in the valley," was the reply of Velasquez, as he wiped

his sword on his horse's mane, and returned it to the scabbard. "Wolves'

meat, if they will have him."

The convent, when Herrera and Torres re-entered it, showed abundant

traces of the rough visitors by whom it had recently been occupied.

Doors broken down, windows smashed, the corridors and cloisters

encumbered with broken furniture, and lighted here and there by the

thick wax tapers used at the altar, some of which had fallen from the

places where the guerillas had stuck them, and lay flaming on the

ground, threatening the building with conflagration. Some of the nuns

had shut themselves in their cells, others sat weeping and moping in the

refectory; on all sides were desolation and the sound of lamentation.

Here and there lay the bloody and disfigured bodies of the slain

Carlists. Not one of them had been spared. The chapel had been

ransacked, and although the Mochuelo had forbidden his men to encumber

themselves with plunder, all the smaller and more valuable decorations

of the sacred edifice had been transferred to the haversacks of the

guerillas. He had been more successful in preserving the nuns from ill

usage, although, in moments of license and excitement, even his commands

did not always find obedience. But a few minutes, however, had been

granted to the reckless invaders to complete their work of spoliation,

before he cleared the convent, and, forming up his men outside the gate,

forbade their leaving their ranks. On Herrera's entrance, the terrified

nuns thought that the guerillas were returning, and with cries of terror

fled in all directions. He succeeded in calming their fears, and

enquired for the abbess, although nearly certain that she it was to

whose death he had been witness. None could tell him aught concerning

her; nor was he able, either by threats or entreaties, to obtain any

information with respect to Rita. Several of the nuns knew that she and

her attendant had occupied apartments contiguous to those of the abbess;

but they had none of them been admitted to see her, and knew nothing of

her fate. A rapid search instituted by Herrera and Torres was entirely

fruitless. Already two messengers had been sent by the Mochuelo to

hasten their movements, and at last Torres succeeded in dragging his

friend away. The guerillas had already marched with the exception of a

small party who still waited at the foot of the slope, and now hurried

after the main body.

Whilst traversing in silence and darkness the mountain in rear of the

convent, Herrera was at length able to collect his bewildered thoughts,

and with comparative calmness to pass in review the events of the

evening, and the unsatisfactory results of his ill-fated expedition.

Long used to disappointment, and aware of the difficulties environing

his project, he had approached the convent in no sanguine mood; but

still hopes he had, which were now blighted, and never, he feared, would

be realized. What had become of Rita, and how could he obtain tidings of

her? Had she already been removed from the convent by Baltasar? But why,

then, had he returned thither? His death, at least, was some

consolation. Wherever Rita might be, she no longer had his persecution

to dread. Against Herrera's will, and although he spurned the thought

and blamed himself for entertaining it, even for a moment, the ominous

words, the last the abbess had spoken, still rang in his ears, like the

judge's sentence in those of a condemned criminal. False, vile,

faithless! Could it be? Could Rita, by importunity, intimidation, or

from any other motive, have been induced to listen otherwise than with

abhorrence to Baltasar's odious addresses? Herrera could not, would not,

think so; and yet how was he to interpret the words of the abbess? Were

they the mere ravings of delirium, or had they signification? If Rita

was false, then indeed was there no truth upon earth. Confused,

bewildered, tortured by the ideas that crowded upon his heated brain,

Herrera sat like an automaton upon his horse, unmindful of where he was,

and utterly forgetting the dangers that surrounded him. He was roused by

the Mochuelo from his state of abstraction.

"We shall not reach Pampeluna without a skirmish," said the partisan, in

a low but cheerful and confident tone. "I am much mistaken or the enemy

have got the alarm, and are on the look-out for us."

The prospect of action was perhaps the only thing that could then have

diverted Herrera's thoughts from the painful subject pre-occupying them.

In his galled and irritated mood, driven to doubt of what he never

before had doubted, the idea of something to grapple with, of resistance

to overcome, an enemy to strive against, was a positive relief, and he

answered the Mochuelo quickly and fiercely.

"The better," said he. "Our expedition will not have been entirely

fruitless. Mochuelo, your men are brave and true. Night favours us. Let

the rebels come. We will give then a lesson they shall long remember."

"Nevertheless," replied the guerilla, "I would rather avoid them, for

they are twenty to one. One fight will not settle the matter, even

though we be victors. But they are gathering. Listen!"

Herrera listened, and from various quarters sounds that warned of

approaching danger reached his ears. On one hand, although at a

considerable distance, the clang of a cavalry trumpet was audible; on

the other, church and convent bells rang out a tocsin of alarm. The

sounds were taken up by other bells; in their rear, in front, on all

sides. The Mochuelo rode along the flank of the little column, which in

dead silence, and with rapid steps, followed El Tuerto, who, with Paco

and Velasquez, marched at its head. So dim and shadowy did the dark

figures of the guerillas appear, as they noiselessly strode along, that

they might have been taken for the spectres of the slain, risen from

some bloody battle field, and condemned to wander over the scene of

their former exploits. With words of praise and encouragement the

Mochuelo stimulated their progress.

"Forward, men," he said, "steady and silent! Every moment is worth a

million. There will be work for you before morning, but it is yet too

soon."

Full of confidence in their leader, undeterred by danger, but knowing

the necessity of speed and prudence in their perilous position, the

guerillas pressed on, keeping well together, and at a pace which it

seemed almost impossible they should be able to sustain. They did

sustain it, however; and, thanks to that circumstance, to the darkness,

and to the skilful guidance of El Tuerto, to whom each tree and rock of

that wild district was familiar, the Mochuelo's predictions were but

partially realized. More than once, indeed, the adventurous little band

were within a hair's-breadth of stumbling upon patrols and pickets of

the enemy; more than once, whilst they lay upon their faces in the long

fern, or stood concealed amongst trees, parties of cavalry rode by

within pistol-shot; but nevertheless all encounters were happily

avoided, and it was not till the first grey light of morning, and within

a short league of Pampeluna, that they fell in with a Carlist battalion,

occupied in posting the advanced pickets. Skirmishing ensued, and the

Carlists, superior in number, pressed their opponents vigorously, until

Herrera and the Mochuelo placed themselves at the head of the guerillas

and charged with the bayonet. The Carlists gave way and were pursued for

a short distance, when the Mochuelo, not deeming it prudent to follow

them further, ordered the recall to be sounded. A quarter of an hour

afterwards he and his men were safely under the cannon of Pampeluna.

The morning sun was brightly shining when Herrera entered the town. At

that early hour the streets had few occupants besides the market people,

who walked briskly along, balancing their vegetable stores upon their

heads, and chattering noisely in the Basque tongue; at a stable-door

some Andalusian dragoons groomed their horses, gaily singing in chorus

one of the lively seguidillas of their native province; here and there a

'prentice boy, yawning and sleepy-eyed, removed the shutters from his

master's shop. The dew lay in glistering beads upon the house-tops;

there was a crispness in the air, a cheerful freshness in the appearance

of all around him, that was in jarring discord with Herrera's gloomy

and desponding mood, as, with fevered pulse and haggard looks, he guided

his wearied horse towards Count Villabuena's quarters. He came in sight

of the house; its upper windows had just caught the first sunbeams; the

balconies were filled with plants, whose bright blossoms and fresh

contrasted pleasantly with the ancient stone-work of the heavy façade;

on a myrtle spray, a bird, capriciously deserting the greenwood for the

city, trimmed his feathers and carolled a lively note; every thing about

the dwelling seemed so gay and cheerful, that Herrera involuntarily

checked his horse, and felt inclined to turn back. For the second time a

messenger of evil, how could he break his sad intelligence to the

Count--by what arguments console his heart-broken old man under this new

and bitter disappointment? As he passed the angle of the house, he saw

that the jalousies of Count Villabuena's windows were open; doubtless he

was already up, looking anxiously for the arrival of his daughter;

perhaps, alarmed at the prolonged absence of Herrera, he had not been to

rest. Luis dreaded the effect of his painful tidings upon the Count's

feeble health, and he racked his imagination to devise a way of

gradually imparting them, but it was in vain; for his mere appearance,

unaccompanied by Rita, would be sufficient to make her father conjecture

even worse than the truth.

The family of Basilio, the cloth-merchant, were early in their habits,

and the house was already open. With heavy and reluctant step, Luis

ascended the stairs, and then paused, irresolute and unwilling to enter

the Count's apartment. At last, summoning resolution, he was about to

lift the latch, when it was raised, and Count Villabuena, completely

dressed, and pale as if from a sleepless night, stood before him. He

started on beholding Herrera, and his countenance was lighted up with

joy.

"Thanks be to God!" he exclaimed, clasping his hands with a gesture of

profound piety and gratitude--"thanks be to God, you are safe!"

"Alas!" cried Herrera, "my safety matters little. We have been

unsuccessful; Rita"----

He became suddenly mute, for at that moment the door of an inner room

opened, a voice, long unheard but well remembered, uttered his name, and

Rita, more lovely than ever, tears upon her cheeks and joy in her eyes,

threw herself into his arms.

We will leave to our readers' imagination the transports of the two

lovers, who after so long a separation, and sufferings of so many kinds,

found themselves thus happily, and, as far as one of them at least was

concerned, unexpectedly reunited, and will confine ourselves to an

explanation of the circumstances that led to so fortunate a result. It

may be given in a few words.

Although Baltasar's ascendancy over Doña Carmen, partly the consequence

of former complicity in crime, partly attributable to her dread of his

brutal and violent character, had induced her to accept the custody of

Rita, it was most unwillingly that she had done so, and with the full

determination to protect to the utmost of her power the defenceless

girl, of whom she was compelled to become the jailer. Rita's beauty and

amiable qualities, and the angelic sweetness and patience displayed by

her during the severe illness that followed her arrival at the convent,

soon endeared her to the abbess, who became confirmed in her resolve to

guard her interesting prisoner from harm. More than once, moved by

Rita's tears and entreaties, she was tempted to set her at liberty, but

was deterred by fear of Baltasar. The action of Mendigorria was

fought--news came to the convent that Colonel Villabuena had been

killed. The abbess hesitated no longer, but at once released Rita, who,

accompanied by her waiting-maid, was escorted by a couple of sturdy and

trustworthy peasants to the nearest town. Thence she safely reached the

French frontier, which was at no great distance. Once in France, she

learned to her unspeakable joy, from Spanish emigrants there resident,

that her father still lived, although a prisoner, and that he was then

at Logroño. At all risks she resolved to rejoin him, and proceeding to a

point of the frontier held by the Christinos, she re-entered Spain, and

arrived at Pampeluna twelve hours after Herrera had left it with the

purpose of rescuing her. She had friends in the town whom she hastened

to visit, and by them she was conducted to her astonished and delighted

father.

When Baltasar reached the convent, and found that Rita was no longer

there, his fury was unbounded, and he loaded the abbess with reproaches

and abuse. He became yet more violent when she refused to tell him the

direction in which Rita had gone. Owing to the disturbed state of the

country, and the recent movements of the Christino army, Doña Carmen

could not be certain that her late prisoner had succeeded in leaving

Spain, and she, therefore, resolutely refused to give Baltasar any

information concerning her. It was then that occurred the scene of which

Paco had overheard a part, when Baltasar struck and ill-treated the

unfortunate nun, who with heroic courage remained firm in her refusal,

submitting meekly to his cruelty, and trusting that her sufferings might

be accepted as a partial expiation of her former offences, which she had

long repented, if she could not atone them. Still, however, Baltasar did

not despair of compelling her to reveal what he so ardently desired to

know; and it was doubtless for that reason that he carried her with him

when he fled from the convent. It has already been seen how care for his

own preservation induced him to abandon her, although too late to save

himself. Within a few hundred yards of the place where he had so

brutally thrown her from his horse, he was overtaken by Velasquez, at

whose hand, after a brief but desperate conflict, he met a more

honourable death than he deserved. Upon the following day, his body and

that of his erring but repentant victim were brought to the convent by

peasants of the neighbourhood, and both found sepulture in the chapel.

The convent has since been abandoned and partly pulled down; but the

chapel still stands, and on its paved floor may still be read

inscriptions recording the date and manner of the death of Baltasar de

Villabuena and Carmen de Forcadell.

As if fortune, weary of persecuting Herrera, had on a sudden determined

to favour as much as she had previously slighted him, the same day that

dawned upon his return to Pampeluna brought despatches from Madrid,

announcing his promotion, and granting a free pardon to Count

Villabuena, on the sole condition of his remaining neutral in the

struggle between Carlists and Christinos. It was General Cordova, who,

out of friendship for Herrera, and compassion for the sufferings and

misfortunes of the Count, had exerted his influence, then almost

unlimited, in favour of the latter. To the prescribed condition, Count

Villabuena, already disgusted by the ingratitude of him whom he called

his king, and despairing, since the death of Zumalacarregui, of the

success of the Carlist cause, was without much difficulty induced to

give his adherence.

Less successful were the Count and Rita in prevailing upon Herrera to

leave the service, and, contenting himself with the laurels he had

already won, to retire into private life. Gladly, perhaps, would he have

done so, had he consulted only his inclinations; but he had not

forgotten his pledge to his dying father, never to sheath his sword till

the right cause had triumphed. In common with many of his party, he

believed that triumph to be near at hand. Their recent successes, and

the death of the only man amongst the Pretender's partisans who had

shown military talents of a high order, made the Christinos confident of

the speedy termination of a war which was yet to be prolonged for four

years. And when Herrera, in compliance with the Count's wishes, urged as

entreaties rather than commands, agreed to wait its conclusion before

claiming the hand of his daughter, he little dreamed how many

hard-fought fields he should be present at, how many tearful partings

and joyful meetings would occur, before peace should be restored to

Spain, and Rita could become his wife without risk of finding herself

the next day a widow. From summer to winter, from winter to spring, the

marriage was deferred, until at length the Count was about to withdraw

his opposition, well-founded though it was, and as Herrera felt it to

be, when the convention of Vergara took place, and removed the only

objection to the union of Rita and Luis. By that convention the war was

in fact concluded; for although Cabrera and other chiefs still waved the

banner of rebellion in the mountains of Catalonia and Arragon, there

could now be no doubt of their speedy subjugation. Deprived of the

support of Biscay and Navarre, and especially of the moral weight which

the adherence of those provinces gave to it, the Carlist rebellion was

virtually crushed.

On a bright autumnal afternoon of the year 1839, a travelling carriage,

of form and dimensions by no means incommodious, although its antique

construction, and the tawny tint of its yellow paint, might in London or

Vienna have subjected it to criticism, drove rapidly past the roadside

inn at which our story commenced. As it did so, a young man of military

appearance looked out of the window of the vehicle, and then turning his

head caught the eye of the coachman, who had also glanced at the inn,

and looked round at his master. Both smiled, although with a somewhat

melancholy expression; the driver touched his cap, cracked his long

whip, and the next instant the rapid gallop of the mules had taken the

carriage out of sight of the venta. The driver was Paco the muleteer,

the gentleman was General Herrera; and the sight of the inn, still

shaded by the huge tree in its front, and flanked by the broken wall,

had recalled to their recollection the famous game at ball played by

Paco and Velasquez, and which subsequently cost the one a horse and the

other a broken head. A ball of another description had since proved

fatal to the dragoon. He had fallen in one of the last actions of the

war, fighting gallantly by the side of the Mochuelo, whose fortunes he

had continued to share.

Accompanied by his bride and father-in-law, Herrera was on his way to

the villa near Tudela, now again the property of Count Villabuena.

Desirous to conciliate a nobleman of ancient name and high character,

and out of consideration for the great services which Herrera's zeal and

talents had rendered the cause, the queen's government had some time

previously restored to the Count his confiscated estates. At length the

clouds that had darkened the career of Louis Herrera were entirely

dissipated, and the long perspective of happiness before him appeared

the brighter, when contrasted with the misfortunes and sufferings that

had embittered the early manhood of the Student of Salamanca.

SHAKSPEARE AND THE DRAMA.

A LETTER TO T. SMITH, ESQ., SCENE-PAINTER AND TRAGEDIAN AT THE

AMPHITHEATRE.

MY DEAR SIR--or let me at once break through the formalities of a first

acquaintance, and say, dear Smith;--Dear Smith, I am delighted to have

been at last introduced to a real member of the theatrical profession--a

_bonâ fide_ flesh and blood, silk-stocking'd and tinsel-rapier'd "pride

of Astley's stage." If you unite in your own person the artist and the

player; if you occasionally handle the painter's brush as well as the

field-marshal's truncheon--for have I not seen you lead the British

troops with heroic valour through the awful passes of Cabul, which I had

seen you creating with lamp-black and grey chalks in the morning?--it

will only prove that your genius is universal, or, at least, not limited

to one mode of development; but that, as D'Israeli is an orator and a

statesman, you are a scene-painter and performer. But your qualities are

not of so confined a nature even as this. For have I not seen you, in

the intervals of your possessing the stage, employ your great strength

in pushing forward the ponderous woods of Bondy you have painted? Have I

not seen you dash off dungeon in the Castle of Udolpho with all the

vigour of Rembrandt, roll it forward on the stage with the strength of

Hercules, and then murder the turnkey in it with the power and elegance

of Thurtell? But it is not the multifariousness of your merits that

makes me proud of calling you my friend: no, it is the modesty with

which you bear your honours thick upon you--the ignorance, as it were,

of your own position, as compared with that of others infinitely your

inferiors--that shows you at once the man of genius and the gentleman.

Macready, you acknowledge, is perhaps your superior in such parts as

Lear and Hamlet; but did he ever paint a single side-scene in his life?

Beverley, they say, is equal to Stanfield in the poetry of his

landscapes; and you confess that in his airs and distances he surpasses

your noblest efforts. Ask yourself, my dear friend, if he ever fought a

terrific combat with a sword in each hand, with such courage as I have

seen you display in front of one of your own scenes? Ask him if he ever

painted his mother's cottage in one character, pushed it forward in

another, and poisoned her in it in a third? No, no, dear Smith, do not

try to hide from yourself that there is no man your equal in so many

different walks; that some may approach you in one branch and some in

another; but that, in the combination of high qualifications, you are

yourself your only parallel.

When we had the pleasure to spend an hour or two together after the

play, the last time I was in London, I ventured to make a few remarks on

theatrical subjects that seemed to meet with your approbation; and as,

in the midst of so much hiliarity as was raging round us in the tap-room

of the Ducrow's Head, you may have forgotten the purport of my

observations, I will repeat them here. You were reclining with your back

against the table, and a pewter pot of foaming beer resting on the knee

of the red stocking-breeches in which you had performed the Crimson

Fiend of the Haunted Dell, when, after some preliminary matter, I

expressed an opinion--unusual, I grant, but still conscientiously

entertained--of the immortal Shakspeare, on which you used language

stronger perhaps than the occasion justified, and reminding me, by its

conciseness and power, of some energetic M.P., against which I will

enter a short protest before proceeding further in this letter. No, my

dear Smith, Shakspeare was not "a bloody fool;" I should say he was very

far from it; and you also added, that Fitzball would kick his soul out

of his elbow in less than no time. What Mr Fitzball might be able to do

by dint of great kicking, I have no means of judging; but I have no

intention of placing the two authors in an antagonistic attitude on

the present occasion, and therefore I trust the soul of Shakspeare

will be left in peace.

What I stated was, as a general proposition, that Shakspeare has done

more harm than good to the English stage.

It has always struck me that the phrase, "There is a time for all

things," had a wider meaning than we usually attach to it. I think that

the seed of all discoveries, past and present, was scattered ages

ago--perhaps at the very creation of the world--in the mind of man; that

when it had rested there long enough, and the season of its ripening

came, up grew the stalk and the ear, and the harvest was gathered, and

mankind garnered it up as a provision for them and their heirs for ever.

The sense of beauty lay for generation and generation, germinating in

the intellects and hearts of men; and, when the time came, a whole

harvest of it was gathered at one time in the statues and pictures and

temples of ancient Greece. But it was only the greater and more

flourishing portion of the increase that grew in that birth-place of

gods and heroes. The seed was scattered over a wider surface; and, if we

could recover proofs of it, I should not at all fear to bet you two

half-pints to one, that there were sculptors and painters in Asia and in

Egypt, equal, in their several manners, to Phidias and Apelles. When

printing, in the same way, had lain in furrow the proper time, the first

blades of it began to appear in many regions at the same period. With

steam it is the same; and, when the next invention is brought into

practical use, it will be found that the thought of it had agitated

hundreds of minds by the Rhine, by the Thames, by the Hudson, and

perhaps by the sacred Ganges, or the still more sacred Nile.

I think I hear your deep sepulchral tones in the exclamation of, "All

that 'ere is rubbage--cut it short!" and it is my intention, my dear

Smith, to cut it short at once. When the drama's time was come, the

whole of civilized Europe saw the glorious birth. In Spain and in

England the soil was found most congenial; and the theatre in those

countries took at once its place as the best possible instructor--next,

of course, to the church--and its lessons were inculcated by the

inspired possessors of the art, Lope de Vega and Shakspeare. The

Spaniard was born in 1566--the Englishman two years earlier; so that,

allowing both to have reached the maturity of their powers at thirty

years of age, and to have retained them twenty years, the appointed hour

for the perfection of the drama was the end of the sixteenth century and

the beginning of the next. Now, my dear Smith, cast your luminous eye

over the state of society at that period. Lope was a volunteer on board

of the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare, perhaps, saw Elizabeth ride forth to

review the troops at Tilbury. Middle-aged men, with whom Shakspeare

conversed in his youth, had seen the execution of Anne Boleyn. Old

fellows, with whom both of them associated, had been present at the

Field of the Cloth of Gold. And, above all, they had both of them

watched, but with very different hopes, the ferocious progress of the

Duke of Alva, and heard the echoes of the battle-cry of liberty and

Protestantism beside the ditches and mounds of Holland; and the genius

of these two men bears impress of the awful period in the world's

history which had been reserved for their birth. They were both animated

by the struggle in which the whole earth was engaged. Lope did battle

for the church--the Pope--and, if need be, would have done so--for the

devil, if he had worn a mitre; he wrote plays where the heretics

required an immense quantity of rosin and blue lights to do justice to

their appalling situation. He preached, and prayed, and excommunicated,

and stirred up men's minds to enjoy the splendours of an _auto-da-fé_;

and, for all these, he was honoured by Pope and Cæsar; was created a

knight of Alcantara; and, as the acme to his glory, was made a

_familiar_ of the Holy Inquisition. Shakspeare no less felt the

influence of the time. The old oppressive bonds under which bone and

sinew were compressed in order to make jolly old England a footstool for

the gouty toes of a wicked old man at Rome, (unless you choose rather to

consider him an unfortunate female, clothed in scarlet, and sitting on

seven hills,) had been snapt asunder. Henry VIII. (to borrow your own

classical expression, my dear Smith, as applied to your stage manager,

"the regularest beast as ever was," but the most useful beast mentioned

in any natural history I have ever met with) had determined to sit on

the seven hills himself; and little Edward had built a nice villa on the

sunny slope of one of them; and Mary had tried to tumble it down again;

and Elizabeth had planted round it, and laid out the grounds for

national recreation and use--like the park at Battersea, whenever that

scheme is carried into effect; and all men's minds were in a flurry.

Some drank themselves to death; some took to privateering; and many took

to having visions and dreaming dreams; and, in the midst of it,

Shakspeare rushed in a fury to his pen, and wrote play after play--very

noble, very bright, very wonderful--but mad--decidedly mad--the whole

time. Every body was mad; Essex galloped through London streets,

thinking, by mere dint of hard riding, to rouse the peaceful citizens to

take up arms in his behalf, as if the very stones would rise and

mutiny--a very mad idea, you will grant; Raleigh set off to seize as

much wealth as would have bought the fee-simple of a moderate kingdom,

with scarcely a sufficient force to follow the heroic Widdicombe at the

battle of Waterloo--not a very wise proceeding, you will allow; and the

greatest proof of the universal insanity is, that nobody thought Essex

or Raleigh mad for doing as they did. Nor did the calmest observers--if

there were any "calm observers" in those days--perceive that Shakspeare

was labouring under an access of the most confirmed delirium. They

listened to _Hamlet_, and _Lear_, and _Othello_, and did not discover

that his inspiration was the effect of over-excitement; that his energy

was the preternatural strength bestowed on him by convulsion; and that,

in fact, instead of being a swan of Avon, he was neither more nor less

than a March hare.

Pardon me, my dear Smith, in the escapade in the last page or two--it is

a figurative mode of speech, and you will at once dissect the

_alligator_ through all its scales, and see every thing it is intended

to convey. It was a mad world, my masters; and, as you generally find an

inferior dauber magnify the peculiarities of a great man's style, so as

to give a better idea of his manner than you gather from his own

performances, let us see the prodigious insanity developed in the

imitators of Shakspeare. Never, till I saw the brass knocker on the door

of the Vizier's palace in Timor the Tartar, painted, you told me, by

Wilkins of the _Yorkshire Stingo_, did I know how you produced your

marvellous effects on the door of Billy Button, the tailor of Brentford.

The Vizier's knocker was a caricature; but it showed your style. So,

read the love-scenes of any dramatist during Shakspeare's period--or the

heroic passages of any poetaster copying his manner;--isn't that Bedlam,

my dear Smith? isn't that Hanwell? Read the rhapsodies of Nat Lee--(by a

stretch of truth-speaking which it would be wise to make more

common)--called mad Nat Lee. What do you see in him more indicative of

insanity than in any play of Shakspeare you like to name? Not,

understand me, that Shakspeare was mad according to the standard of

sanity in his own day. Far from it; he was infinitely wise compared to

any man in his century, except, perhaps, Bacon and Burleigh, and retired

to Stratford-on-Avon with a realized fortune equal to twelve or fifteen

hundred a-year. But all mankind run the risk of having a different

standard applied to them from that according to which they were measured

during life. Diocletian was thought an excellent emperor for persecuting

the Christians--we think him a considerable beast for doing so, now.

Cortez was thought the perfect image of a hero for slaughtering the

Mexicans, and the noblest of Christian missionaries for putting the

heretical Montezuma to death--we think Cortez not quite so respectable a

character as Greenacre or Burke. And it is most just that each century

should pass its predecessors in review, and apply its own lights to

bring every feature forward. What progress would there be open to the

human mind if we were for ever to go on viewing incidents exactly as

they were viewed when they occurred? Are we to go on believing Galileo

an infidel, because his discoveries were condemned by his

contemporaries? Are we to think all the butchers, conquerors, and

destroyers of mankind, great men, because their own age was terrified at

their power, and proclaimed them heroes? The time may come when the

great Bunn's efforts to make Drury-Lane into a squeaking, dancing, and

dirty imitation of the Italian Opera, will not be considered conducive

to the triumph of the legitimate English drama. Many things of this

sort, my dear friend, may take place, and most justly; for each present

generation is as the highest court of legislation--it can repeal all old

acts, but it cannot bind its successors. Now, do me the favour to finish

the pot of porter which, in my mind's eye, I see you dandling on your

crossed knee, while your left hand, with easy elegance, is supporting

the bowl of your pipe--and see how these observations apply to

Shakspeare. He has ruined the stage; he has fixed its taste for ever, by

establishing one unvarying standard for plot, language, and

character--and that is his own. There can be no progress--not merely

meaning, by progress, improvement, but, positively, no change. He blocks

up every access to the dramatic Parnassus--he has acquired an entire

monopoly of the heroines in Collins' Ode--and woe to the intruder into

the sacred precincts of his zenana. Well, he _was_ a tremendous Turk,

that old swan of Avon--there is no denying the fact; but what I complain

of is, that no other Leda should be looked at for a moment but only his.

No man can look at the Swan for an instant, and doubt that the king of

gods and men has disguised himself in that avatar of web-feet and

feathers. Jupiter is only enveloped, not concealed; but, at the same

time, is it possible to be blind to the fact, that he has degraded

himself to the habits of the flat-billed bird--that he waddles most

unmercifully when by chance he leaves the lake?--that he hisses and

croaks most unmusical, most melancholy?--and that he gathers all unclean

garbage for his food--newts, and frogs, and crawling worms? In short,

that though, in his pride, and grandeur, and passionate energy, he is

the Tyrant of Olympus, he is, in many other respects, an animal not

greatly to be admired--by no means comparable as a dish at Christmas to

a well-fed goose, or even a couple of ducks. For reading aloud to ladies

after tea, I prefer _Ion_ to _Othello_. And now, my excellent friend, I

will tell you the reason--not why I prefer _Ion_, which, though I have

introduced it in this flippant manner, I consider a very beautiful and

poetical drama--but why no play of Shakspeare is fit to be read to a

party of ladies after tea. It is this--that ladies, in one sense of the

word, were as unknown in Shakspeare's days as tea. There were certain

human beings that wore petticoats, and, in due course of time, fulfilled

the original command, and died; but, shades of Hannah More and Anne

Seward! to call them ladies would be as absurd as to call Dulcinea del

Tobosa a princess of the blood. A friend of mine--a well-known

non-commissioned officer in the Devil's Own--told me this story, which I

mention to you, my dear Smith, in strict confidence, in case the heroine

of the anecdote should find that her confession is made known. An old

lady--properly so called, both as respects the adjective and the noun,

for she was past eighty, and was refined and pure--astonished my friend,

by asking him one day to try and get a volume or two for her of the

works of Assa Behn. He did so--no little wondering at such a choice of

books--and in a day the novel was returned, "I send you back these

volumes," she said, "as I am unable to get through the first. Is it not

strange that I, an old woman, sitting in my own room, am positively

ashamed and disgusted at the scenes and conversations which were read

aloud to me in mixed companies, without a blush or shudder, when I was

eighteen?"

Now, in Shakspeare's time, there was no female in the land that would

have stumbled at the grossest passages in Assa Behn. The tenderness,

delicacy, and beauty of the feminine character were still in the future

tense; and, therefore, it is not a matter of surprise that the female

characters in Shakspeare were original _creations_, and not transcripts

from human life. For the time and the state of society when the plays

were written, they are instances of the most marvellous imagination. But

they were as purely fictitious as Caliban or Ariel. They borrowed from

the infinite riches of the poet their noble or tender thoughts; but

whenever he tried to make them more than abstractions--to unite them to

the sympathies of his audience--or to clothe them in real flesh and

blood--look at the means he takes--listen to the conversations of Miss

Juliet and the songs of Ophelia--and you will perceive what were the

lessons his experience in actual men and women had taught him.

It is impossible, my dear Smith, for a Frenchman to write an English

comedy--and why? Because the turn of his mind, and unacquaintance with

the peculiarities of our dispositions, unfit him for it. But not more

separated from us is the Parisian Feuilletonist by his language and

manners, not to mention the Channel, than the author of Elizabeth's and

James's days by the lapse of two hundred years, and the total alteration

of our modes of thought; and yet how frightfully you would be laughed at

for applying the remark to Shakspeare, though, between ourselves, my

dear fellow, he is the very man to call it forth! Oh, how vividly I can

fancy the exclamations of Jiggles of the Victoria, or Pumpkins of the

Stepney Temple of Thespis! "He is the poet of all time!" says Jiggles,

with a thump on the table that sets all the pewter pots dancing. "Do you

mean, Mr Bobson," cries Pumpkins, with a triumphant curl of his lip, "to

say, that the laws of nature are transitory as the fashion of a coat,

and that what was nature at one period will not be nature at another?"

If he should ask you this question, my dear sir, tell him at once that

that is decidedly your opinion, or, if it is not, tell him that it is

most unquestionably mine; for most assuredly the same train of thought

that would be natural among the chiefs of the Druids, would be most

absurdly out of character if attributed to the bench of Bishops. "Oho!"

exclaims Pumpkins, "what has the bench of Bishops to do with it? We

maintain that Shakspeare, or any one else, having written a play wherein

the sentiments of the Druids were once true to nature, those sentiments

will continue true to nature to the end of time."

By no means, Mr Pumpkins. Certain sentiments were _thought_ true to

nature by the critics and audience at the beginning of the seventeenth

century; but nature, like every thing else, assumes a different

appearance according to the point it is viewed from. At a time when

human life was not very highly valued, and woman's feelings were held in

no reverence or respect, it was, perhaps, thought "natural" that the

Prince of Denmark should stab old Polonius and bully his daughter to

death; but in this nineteenth century of time, no amount of insanity,

real or assumed, will make us think it in accordance with the high and

noble _nature_ of the philosophic prince, either to sneer at the poor

old whiteheaded courtier he has murdered, or taunt the little trusting

girl he has taught to love him. If it were not for the name of

Shakspeare, Hamlet would be set down as nearly the beau-ideal of a

snob--a combination of the pedantry of James and the unmanliness of

Buckingham. Read the play, with this key to the character, and you will

find it quite as true to nature as in the laborious glosses of Schlegel

and Göethe.

If I ever have the honour to meet you again at the Ducrow Arms, I will

enter more fully into this part of my view of the injuries inflicted on

the stage by Shakspeare. It will be sufficient, at the present time, to

condense my meaning into this one remark, that the nature of 1600 is not

necessarily the nature of 1846, and probably is as different as the

statesmanship of Sir Robert Cecil from that of Sir Robert Peel. If there

had been a controller of politicians as powerful as the controller of

the stage, we should have had the right honourable baronet making Popery

punishable with death, dressed in trunk breeches and silver

shoe-buckles--or taking measures to lessen the alarming power of Spain.

You think, perhaps, that I have let you off altogether, because I have

declined enlarging on this particular point; but no, my dear Smith, I

have not had half my say out yet. It is not only that things are

presented to us in Shakspeare's plays in a way that _was_ admirable,

because adapted to the feelings and fancies of the time, when they first

enriched the Globe, but not so admirable now: I have also to find fault

with the manner in which the characters--granting that they are true to

nature--are developed and made palpable to vulgar eyes. The fact is, my

benevolent friend, that every thing is gigantic in his conceptions. He

is like a sculptor who despises the easy flow of the resting figure, and

fills his studio with agonizing athletes--every muscle on the

stretch--the eyeballs projecting, and the hair on end. Even when he

carves a slumbering nymph, her proportions are tremendous--she is like a

sleeping tigress, calm and hushed, but giving evidence of preternatural

strength; her very softness is the softness of melted gold--when it

hardens it will kill like lead; or, if that is a bad image, her very

quiet is the quiet of the sea--let the wind blow, and then----! Don't

you see that Ophelia--Juliet--Imogen--all of them, are endowed with

tremendous _power_, as well as other qualities? And that, as to the

heroes, they are regular volcanoes every one of them? Is not this proved

by the fact, that there is no hero in Shakspeare who does not demand as

much bodily labour from his representative as would tire out a

coal-whipper on the Thames? Is there one leading part in any of his

plays that does not require an enormous outlay of voice? Now, can it be

possible that no deep passion can coexist with a weak thorax? Run over

the principal plays--_Macbeth_, _Richard_, _Romeo_, _Hamlet_ again,

_Lear_--and depend on it, that this loudness of exclamation is not stage

trick; it is part of the development of the character; and therefore I

shall always blame that infernal asthmatical tendency of mine for having

induced Mr Whibbler, of the Whitechapel Imperial, to decline my services

when I offered to act Coriolanus for my own benefit, gratis. The

consequence, however, of this Shakspearian fancy, of placing characters

of passion in positions where they must split the ears of the

groundlings, is, that it has become an English article of faith, that

without some prodigious explosions, calling out the whole strength of

the actor's lungs, the character falls dead. The Indian could not

believe the air-gun had killed the bird, because he did not hear the

report. We have reversed the Indian mode of reasoning, and always

believe it is the noise that kills the bird. Oh, Smith! think of the

bellowings of Sir Giles Overreach--and Barbarossa--and Zanga--and the

diabolical howlings of Belvidera, and Isabella, and the Mourning Bride.

Can people have no passion that don't disturb the whole neighbourhood

with their noise? Can a woman not find out she has been jilted without

risking a bloodvessel? Is this the way they do in common life? I

remember when that girl at Bermondsey hauled me up before David Jardine,

and produced all my letters, and the ring I had given her * * * * she

never spoke above her breath. And I was very glad to hush it up with

four-and-sixpence a-week.

Now the fault of Shakspeare is this, not that he puts tearing, ramping

language in the mouths of his heroes--for in their positions it is the

only language fit to use--but that, in accordance with the bullying,

blustering habits of his day, he has placed every one of his heroes in

such a situation, that blustering and bullying is the only thing he can

do. And therefore every man who writes plays at the present, and at any

future time, must have a hero first-cousin at least to Stentor. Who

would venture to place Louis the Eleventh on the boards? He probably

never spoke louder than a physician at a consultation--no, not when he

confronted the Duke of Burgundy. He would have to glide noiselessly from

scene to scene, a whisper here, a look there, and perhaps a shrug of the

shoulder or scarcely perceptible motion of the hand; yet, all through,

it would be evident that he was the snake on two legs, the anointed

Mephistopheles, the intellect without the feeling--and, with all that,

he could not be the hero of a play. Or, if he was made the hero, he

would be changed from the quiet self-contained character I have

supposed him, to a more _effective_ one. He would have sudden starts of

anger which would not be in keeping; outbursts of fiery imprecation

which would not be in keeping; or, if the poet was much put to it, he

might be shown, answering taunt for taunt, and threat for threat, with

the ferocious Charles, which would certainly not be in such keeping as

he himself was at the fortress of Peronne. So you see the fact of

Shakspeare covering the stage with Titans, and forming them with Titanic

thoughts, and endowing them with Titanic voices, has rendered it

indispensable for all the little fellows of the present time to be

prodigiously Titanic too. Did you ever hear the skipper of a steamer

bellowing and roaring through a speaking-trumpet, when his ordinary

voice could have had no effect amidst the awful noises of a hurricane,

and the sea and the breakers under his lee? Nothing could be fitter than

his attitude on the creaking paddle-box, and the thunderous sound that

issued from the tube. But wouldn't it be absurd for the commander of the

Hugh Frazer, amid the quiet waters of Loch-Lomond, to give orders to the

little boy that holds the helm, or point out the beauties of Inversnaid,

through an instrument that would startle all the cattle on the

surrounding hills? Just so with Shakspeare's kings and lovers. They have

"prave 'ords enough, look you," to fill the biggest speaking-trumpet

that ever was cast; but miserable is it for men who have not such "prave

'ords," to be forced to bellow their little ones through the portentous

instrument which they have not breath enough to fill.

Let me point out, my dear Smith, to your particular notice, a play which

I think you will agree with me illustrates all that I have said. In

_Othello_ you will find the nature of the seventeenth century still

forced upon us in this prodigious power--with which, unless by the magic

of the author's name, we should have no sympathy; and a decided proof of

how nearly allied his genius, like that of every body else worth

mentioning of his day, was to madness.

First, No man of the nineteenth century who knew the noble position in

which civilization and religion have placed woman, would have fixed on

such a subject. In the closet, when you only see the courage, fame, and

dignity of the hero, you can find some excuses for the girl who is won

by these attributes, and bestows her love on the possessor of them,

albeit he is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. But look at him on

the stage--though the best and most intellectual of our actors represent

him, and this I can answer for, as the last I saw in the character was

Macready--your sympathy with Desdemona is at once at an end. The woolly

hair spoils all--the black face separates him as much from the pure and

trusting love of a girl of eighteen, as if he were an ourangoutang. We

agree at once with the sensible old gentleman her father, that no maid

"So tender, fair, and happy,

Would ever have to incur a general mock,

Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom

Of such a thing as he."

The sight of her endearments is nearly as horrid as those of Titania to

Bottom are absurd. They are not paired, and all through the play you

never can get quit of the disagreeable idea of the blubber lips. If he

could be made into a noble statue in mahogany, (not ebony,) a

Christianized Abdel Kader--a _real Moor_ and not a _blackâmoor_--the

matter would be infinitely better; but no--Shakspeare meant him for a

true specimen of the nigger, or why all the taunts about his colour, and

the surprise that was evidently excited among the gossips of Venice by

the match? The very refinement bestowed on Desdemona makes us have

greater horror at her fault, and less sorrow at her griefs. If she had

been a mere domestic piece of furniture, without any delicacy or

sentiment, we should not have been more revolted at _her_ wedding than

at the nuptials of Dyce Sombre. But Desdemona, a gentle lady, married to

a Sambo!--impossible! She was either not the fair and simple creature

she is painted to us, or she did not outrage humanity so abominably as

to follow the example of the brewer's maid in the charming song you

favoured us with in the skittle-ground, of which the burden is--

"She ran away with a black man."

If she did, choking with a pillow is too good for her; she ought rather

to have been done to death in a bag of soot.

But passing over the incongruity of the lovers, is not the whole play

filled with convulsive energies and unhealthy bursts of passion? For my

part--but in this, my dear Smith, I will willingly yield to your better

judgment--I think Iago was intended for the hero of the play. He is the

mainspring of the whole plot; he pulls all the wires; and, to use an

elegant expression of your own, he twists them all round his thumb.

Critically, if superiority in mere intellect and strong self-will, or

even success in the object he designs, constitute a hero, the

clear-witted, audacious, subtle Ancient has entirely the upper hand of

the trusting, hood-winked pigeon, Othello--

"That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

And will as tenderly be led by the nose

As asses are."

The only fault is, that, for a clever fellow, Iago takes too much pains

to _show_ his cleverness. If he does not wear his heart upon his sleeve

for daws to peck at, it must be for two reasons; first, that no

gentleman wears his heart any where but inside of his chest; and

secondly, that hearts are not the favourite food of the bird mentioned;

but he lets slip no opportunity of displaying his wit, ingenuity, and

powers of acting--for Iago is a part in which the actor acts an

actor--and precisely in proportion as he shows he is acting, is he

successful in the character. The usual error is in showing too little of

the actor in his interviews with Cassio and Othello; his friendliness,

sycophancy, and good humour become too real, as if it were the

performer's cue to enact those qualities, whereas he is only to assume

them for the nonce--the real presentment of the man being a malicious,

revengeful, and astute villain. I think, also, my dear fellow, that our

friend Iago is too communicative, not only to such a noodle-pate as

Roderigo, but to the many-headed monster the Pit. He comes forward, and

exactly in the same way as M. Philippe informs his audience--"Now I vill

show you a ver' vonderful trick. I vill put de tea into dis canister--I

vill put de sugar into dat; and I vill put de cream into dis leetle jug,

and den you shall see dat you shall have de excellent cup of tea vidout

any vater." And, by shaking first one canister and then another, out

comes some capital tea, as hot as if you had seen the kettle boiling. So

does the insinuating Iago, and says--"You shall see what you shall see.

I will make Othello jealous of Cassio--I will make Cassio drunk, and get

him into a quarrel on guard--and I will make him apply to Desdemona for

her interest with her husband on his behalf;" and, _presto!_ first one

scene, and then another--Othello gets jealous--Cassio gets drunk--and

Desdemona pleads most innocently for his forgiveness. It strikes me to

be letting an audience too much into the secret. I prefer such a scene

as that in which the Demon of the Blood-red Glen creates an effect by

springing over the foot-lights, and landing (quite unexpected by boxes,

pit, or gallery) on the back of the flying Arabian, completely

apparelled as the American Apollo. I have seen the Kentucky voltigeur

introduce a fancy-dance on two wild steeds, and jump through a fiery

hoop in the character of Shylock; and I confess I liked him better in

those happy days at New York, than since he has proclaimed himself as

the great transatlantic tragedian, and has set up as an infallible

critic because he has proved himself a fallible actor.

And then the death of Desdemona! My dear Smith--I appeal to your own

noble feelings, as a husband and a Christian,--if you thought Mrs Smith

a little too fond of Cassio--or any other lieutenant,--if you even found

she had given him one of your best handkerchiefs to make him a

nightcap--nay, if you had determined even to achieve widowerhood with

your own hands, would you take the instrument Othello uses for the

purpose? I ask you as a man and a gentleman. You would borrow a

pistol--you would take up a knife--you would purchase arsenic--but you

would not undergo the personal fatigue of Burking her in her bed! But it

is not with you I have to do just now. I go back to Shakspeare and his

times--and I maintain that the manner of Desdemona's murder could only

be tolerable in the state of society at the time it was presented. I

suspect the very appliances of the modern stage bring the repulsiveness

of the incident more prominently forward. There is a beautifully

furnished room--a dressing-table beside the bed--nice curtains drawn all

round it--snow-white sheets, and a pair of very handsome bed-room

candles. The bed-room is brought too prominently forward; and when

Desdemona is discovered asleep, it needs all the magic of Shakspeare's

name, and the reverence that his genius has created and maintains, even

upon the shilling gallery, to prevent the tragic interest from turning

into another channel. The contrast is too great between the truthfulness

of the bed-curtains and easy-chair, and the horrid purpose--which ought

to be idealized, and not realized--for which the Moor enters the room.

It is a frightful, blackfaced murderer--designed in the seventeenth

century, and considered true to nature then, coming into the open

daylight of the nineteenth, casting his Elizabethan energies into forms

repulsive to the sentiments of our VICTORIAN time; and we should also

feel, if the play were presented to us for the first time, that an

Othello created by Shakspeare--if he had been left for these latter

times--would not have murdered his wife with a pillow--if he had

murdered her at all--and would not have brought forward on the stage the

bed-room of a jealous husband, with his wife expecting his approach. The

barrenness of the stage in Shakspeare's time was an advantage in a scene

like this;--when people were told to fancy that old bench was a bed, and

that the close-shaved stripling reclining on it was a woman--the

imagination was set down to a feast of its own: the scanty scenery

became an accessory--not a realization--all that was palpable was the

innocence and sacrifice of the heroine--and the awful and inexpressible

struggles of the man.

Do you see what I mean? Do you agree with me that it was a misfortune to

the British drama that the summit of its glory was reached by Shakspeare

so long ago;--a Shakspeare that knew the whole secrets of the human

heart, as the human heart existed before his time--or at least as it was

supposed in his time to exist;--a Shakspeare who was ignorant of the

Great Rebellion--of the Restoration--of the Revolution--of the glorious

First of June--of the Guillotine--of Napoleon--of Trafalgar--of

Waterloo;--a Shakspeare who had never seen a telegraph--a mail-coach--a

steam-boat--a railway. What sort of a man must this have been, that

still maintains possession of the stage--that keeps (as I maintain) the

British taste in a state of almost mediæval roughness, and chains the

dramatic art itself to the slab over his grave? Perhaps, my dear Smith,

the immortal Bunn is right after all. Perhaps, if all managers were to

follow his example for forty years--if for forty years mankind were

condemned to the wilderness of operas, and divertisements, and

farces--we should forget the flavour of the flesh-pots (furnished by

Shakspeare) which has so completely mastered our taste;--some Joshua

would lead us into a chosen land, and feed us with all manner of

delights;--the stage, I mean, would come, like the aloe, to a second

flower, only resembling its ancient crown in its life and beauty, but

smelling of the present time.

For no beer, you will grant, is so pleasant as that which has the froth

on. Its freshness even compensates for its want of strength. But if, in

addition to being fresher by two hundred years than the tap of William

Shakspeare of Stratford, it were as strong--as cunningly mixed of malt

and hops--and had as beautiful a flavour as his had when it was first

brewed--eh! Smith? What do you think, then? Isn't it worth while to live

forty years on the chance? isn't it worth while to be teetotallers in

the meantime? to live upon slops and gruel? Gentlemen, I propose the

health of Mr Lumley and Mr Bunn.

I remain, my dear Smith,

Your admirer and friend,

G. BOBSON.

BIRBONIANA; OR, ITALIAN ANTIQUARIES AND ANTICHITÀ.

"Birbone--a Jew, a cheat, a rogue, a vagabond, a liar, a coiner, an

utterer of all things base and false--an Antiquary!"--BARETTI'S

_Italian Dict_.

"Ah me! it is a dangerous freak,

When men _will_ dabble with Antique."--_Hudibras(?)_

SCENE I.--THE INTRODUCTION.

We will now introduce the reader to an antiquarian scene or two _chez

nous_, transcribed from our journal as we entered them therein at the

time. When it was currently understood throughout Naples--it did not

take long for the report to spread--that we were a professed purchaser

of antiquities, and "at home" to antiquaries, we were besieged all day

and every day by a host of dealers, jewellers and Jews, whom the waiters

were weary of announcing, and were still obliged to announce, who came

with bundles under their arms, filled with things "ugly and old

exceedingly," which they wished to dispose of as bargains, and hoped we

would purchase. They came early in the morning; they braved the fiery

heat of noon; they bided their time whilst we sat at dinner; and, on

returning from our moonlit drive, we are prepared for the announcement

that somebody still waits with something still unshown for us to see.

Sometimes one man will come alone, and if he finds us unassailable or

indifferent, he will take care to return next time in company with an

accomplice,--an honest, plain fellow in his dealings, who, actuated by

feelings of pure humanity, and in pursuance of his sturdy motto of

"_fiat justitia ruat coelum_," will, at the risk of offending his

friend, alter his prices, and propose others vastly more equitable and

advantageous for _us_. Enters one day a brace of these rogues at

breakfast--two such palpable rogues _in face_ that you needed no

proficiency in Lavater to know at once with whom you had to deal. One of

the pair, _par nobile fratrum_, gives a very respectful, the other, what

is meant for a very courtly, bow. "_This gentleman_," says one unknown

individual introducing the other--"_This gentleman_ has just landed from

Sicily, bringing with him a small collection of coins--_vergini

tutti_--all virgins, and on which no amateur's eye has yet rested even

for a moment." "_Non e vero, Cavaliere?_" "_Altro che vero!_" responds

the cavalier. "I, sir," resumes the other, "am, as you have doubtless

perceived, the poor _mezzano_, the mere umpire in this business; _I_

have no interest in the sale of any articles in that gentleman's

pockets; it was by the merest accident that I heard of his arrival an

hour ago; and, as I know he must have something _good_, I pounced upon

him at once--would not give him time even to shave, (_voyez un peu cette

barbe farouche_--it was so), but brought him hither in great haste, lest

others--_vous concevez qu'à Naples_." "To be sure we did; but did not

the Cavaliere understand French?" "Not a word." "What says the Signore?"

interrogates the unshaved Sicilian noble; "_Domanda se lei capisce il

Francese?_" "_Niente_," not a bit of it, returns he, shaking his head

guilelessly. "_Non importa_,--it's of no importance. You, Cavaliere,

will mention your prices to me, I will propose them to this

gentleman--he his; I will then give _my opinion_ as to what is _fair_

between you, and thus we shall, I trust, do a little business to the

satisfaction of both. Signor Cavaliere _s'accommodi_." Thus admonished

of _our_ breach of manners in having kept the Cavaliere standing, we

would fain atone for it on the spot, by begging the "mezzano" also to

take a chair; but he declines it with modest confusion of face. "_Come?

ma che?_" he has no pretension or business to place himself between

"_due illustrissimi signori_," whose poor interpreter he is. We overcome

his scruples, and all sit down, closely packed round a small table;

while the noble dealer was unshrouding what seemed, from the length of

time and material employed upon it, to be a _mummy_, and, from its size,

perhaps a _rat_. We were all eagerness and expectancy, forming, as we

sat, a _capo d'opera_ for Valentine or Caravaggio, well grouped, and

ripe and ready for the canvass. At length the "unwinding bout" draws to

its close; the last wrapping is unwrapped; and a small bronze Venus,

without a shift, falls on her haunches on the table. "What a beautiful

_pezzo_ have we here!" says the umpire, assuming the air of a man well

versed in such matters, and turning her round to admire her proportions;

"and where," asks he, in a manner that showed he had guessed the answer

before receiving it; "where might this have been _dug up_?" "_Nei

contorni di Lentine_," was the ready answer, and so _he_ "had expected

to hear it was; all the best _opere Greche_ now come from that

neighbourhood." We made no remark; there was a pause; we watched the

countenance of the _mezzano_; he seemed to be getting more and more

absorbed in the contemplation of the little Venus, till, after taking

his time, while he appeared oblivious of time, his pent-up enthusiasm at

the sight of charms which rivet his attention, but are beyond his powers

of expression, finds vent in the very convenient formula of "_Pare

impossibile!_" which, in the language of _English_ dilletanteism has no

equivalent; then suddenly recollecting himself, and fearing lest, if he

kept her too long, we might be jealous, he confided her gently to our

hands, and having done so, said a second time, "_Pare impossibile!_" We,

too, turned her round, and (one good turn tending to another) in the

absence of any better occupation at the moment, we turned her round a

second time; and having done so, put her down upon the table, without a

word of comment. It was a tolerably well-shaped little figure, in a very

_green modern gown_, and when _we_ were very green, three years ago, we

had purchased a twin-born sister of hers at Capua, which we now rose to

produce, and placed her side by side the other. Our visitors exchanged

glances; the Cavaliere would have said that _ours_ is a copy--_his_ the

original; but we remind him that a week ago his _model_ did not exist,

from which to have made such a copy; and the _mezzano_, seeing that the

game is up, says his friend must have been imposed upon! that there is

not a more honest man breathing than the Cavaliere! that, in fact, it

has been an awkward affair for _him_! _"Pare impossibile," thought_ we,

that rogues should be so bold! "Had he, the Cavaliere, any thing more to

show?" ask we of the _mezzano_ in French. "To what purpose," answers the

Cavaliere, _suddenly understanding French_; "to what purpose should I

waste that gentleman's time, and _my own_, in the long process of

unwrapping things, which, when unwrapped, he is sure to pronounce

modern?" and the Cavaliere went away in dudgeon, and quite "cavalierly."

It being generally understood that yesterday was to be our last day in

Naples, our friends the _antiquari_ flocked in from all quarters of the

town to pay valedictory visits, and to hope, each man for himself, that

_he_ at least had always given satisfaction in any little business we

might have occasionally transacted together. The visits of that day

began early, and ended--no, they never ended--till next morning after

passing the _barrière_. Coco's black beard, standing at the bedside with

a false "Augustus," was the first object that presented itself on

waking, and the last pull of the bell at night was followed by the

apparition of a mysterious figure in a cloak, with a small sack, full,

not of truffles, but of "Lucernæ," just exhumed, and still smelling

damp, from the lamp-teeming earth of Pozzuoli. All through that day the

dealers seemed to have no other employment upon earth than to wait upon

us, and accordingly backwards and forwards, and up and down stairs they

came and they went, till by mid-day they had permanently established, as

ants do when they forage, two counter-lines of communication between us

and the street, each dealer further imitating the ant community, in

stopping for a moment _en passant_, to touch antennæ, and to exchange

intelligences with his neighbour as he came up. All would kiss our hand

and "augur" us a prosperous journey, and each had some little

confidential revelation to make touching the Don Beppo, the Don

Alessandro, or the Don Carlo whom he had met at the doorway. Grateful

acknowledgments are due, of course, for so many proofs of their esteem;

though their caveats come all too late for us to profit by; and once or

twice, in the dearth of words to tell our feelings, we adopt that

Italian formula for modesty at a pinch, and beseech then, _per carita!_

not to speak so flatteringly of our attainments. At dinner, (an Italian

friend being at table with us,) Don Gaetano Sbano, whom we have not seen

for a twelvemonth, and who has been liberated purposely, as it should

seem, from St Angelo, only just in time to pay his respects before we

leave, stands smilingly behind our chair, talking over imaginary drafts

which he has received upon Roman bankers, in return for a very beautiful

set of objects of _virtù_ with which he has been lately, it seems,

enriching the Roman market!! After discanting on the moonlight beauties

of the Coliseum, and other _moonshine_ subjects which had kept him, he

averred, in Rome a week longer than he intended, he abruptly accosts our

Italian friend, assuring him that _we_ have now become such a knowing

proficient in all the tricks imposed upon travellers, and in all the

various guiles of antiquaries as practised at Naples, that it would be

difficult to impose upon us; and that, in fact, _he_ would back us now

against being cheated by the best of _them_--modest man! he might have

said of _us_, in place of presenting a false lamp of dirty device, which

threw the altering of this pronoun, and the substitution of the right

one, upon the party whom he had been so politely praising. Purposing to

start early next morning, most of our effects, both old and new, were

packed up already; a few of the former, however, still remained out, and

stood on a neighbouring side table. "What a beautiful _Ryton!_" said Don

G. Sbano sauntering across the room, and taking up a finely executed

stag's head in _terra cotta_, that had originally served for a

drinking-cup--a purchase we had that morning made at old Rossi's

curiosity shop. "Beautiful, indeed," replied we carelessly, and then

_sotto voce_ to our friend--"poor Rossi, pleased at our sincere sympathy

at his late sad bereavements--he has lost two charming daughters within

a month--insisted upon transferring it to us quite as a _regallo_ at

twenty piastres,"--these words were spoken in a low tone of voice, but

Don Gaetano made it a point to hear every thing. "Of course we knew,"

_enquired_ he maliciously, "that it was a forgery in all but the lips?"

"And if the lips be true, it by no means follows, Signor, that because

the _lips_ are true, the _vessel_ appended to them must be so." If any

man ought to know about _lying lips_, it was Sbano; so at once admitting

the truth of what indeed there was no gainsaying, we contended that the

indestructibility of the glaze, tested as it had been with aquafortis by

Rossi himself, proved the genuineness of its antiquity--it proved

nothing but that we had something still to learn! The nola varnish was

light as a soap-bubble, but this on the _Ryton_ was thick and

substantial. How he wished we had been to stay another week to have

taught us the difference! and how we wished him gone, lest he should

make some new revelations of a kindred character to the last, and betray

our ignorance in sundry other matters connected with other recent

purchases. The door has scarcely closed upon his coat-tails when in

comes a tall strapping fellow out of breath, who begs to take a chair,

and declares forthwith that he is "tutto bagnato di sudore,"--in our

service, and he hopes it may not be in vain! After administering to him

proper restoratives, (the remains of an _agro-dolce_, and half a bottle

of lachryma,) four battered pieces of lead are presented by him for

inspection, looking very much as if they had just been scraped from the

house-top, but which, when duly put together by our ingenuity, make up

the highly interesting inscription,--"_Imp: Cæs: Vespas: Aug: Pont: Max:

Opt; Princip: P. P._," and are no sooner so collocated than our

new-comer seems enchanted at a discovery which he would have us think as

important as any thing lately done in that way. After the making of

which, he expects that we are to carry over this leaden trophy to

England, and is much mortified accordingly at our disheartening remark,

that "it was so easy to write upon lead!" Upon seeing that we are

indisposed to be cheated, he resolved to humiliate us in the eyes of our

friend, which he does effectually by merely glancing at a small

_urceolus_ with a painting on it, and then proclaiming it to be

"_ristaurata_;" a most ungrateful return, as we think, for our

"_restoration_" of him. He has scarcely vanished when a third party,

"happy to catch us just at dinner-time," is announced; he comes with a

mouthful of lies, and a pocketful of trash, and seeing that we are

beginning to wince, is retiring, but suddenly recollecting himself,

pulls up at the door to ask whether it be true that we have _not_ bought

Coco's _Augustus_, since, if we have been so lucky as to purchase it,

Coco has in that case cheated him by pretending to have received nothing

for it. "Go to ----!" exclaimed we, losing all patience at the ignorance

thus plainly imputed to us, "do you think we were such a fool as to buy

_such a forgery_?" Then comes a very _douce_, quiet-mannered dealer,

wishing, if our friend will excuse him, to have a private interview with

us just for a moment, as he has something confidential to communicate.

"Signor mio," says he, "when we are in privacy," folding his hands over

his breast and looking very contrite, "I am bound to confess to you that

the man whom I have hitherto called 'cousin,' is not such, nor indeed

any relation or connexion of mine! I know you have been cheated _often_,

_sadly_, and _by him_; and, much as it has gone against my heart

whenever I have heard him and his crew plot against your ingenuousness,

I have long intended to be frank with you, as you have always treated me

with frankness. Believe me I have ever opposed your 'ingannazione,'

though without success; and, as I have no other shop in which to put my

_real_ antiques excepting this man's, I am glad to pay ten per cent to

interest him in their sale; but that _terra cotta_ cow that he sold you,

'twas a sad piece of business," and he looked at us as a Mackenzie might

have looked upon some artless victim to man's depravity! Whereupon a new

light seemed all at once to break in upon us, and we resolved to get at

the truth, if we could, by a _ruse_ which should throw him off his

guard; so, in place of appearing put out by the discovery, we merely

said--"Well, if all forgeries were but nearly as well executed as

_that_, who would care to buy antiques at all; and besides, as it _is_ a

forgery, we may have a good chance of _getting some more of the casts to

take home with us_, which we could not have done had the cow been

_ancient_. How beautifully she stood in her horns and hoofs! and how

well must _he_ have studied the antique, who could have conceived and

executed such a cow!" As we had imagined, there was no resisting such an

appeal, and Roderick Dhu stood confessed! He now owns himself an

extensive proprietor in these cows, and says they are by no means his

best productions--offering us the whole dairy at a very moderate price!

Comes Coco, a little later, with a lad who is to be forthwith forwarded

to buy an engraved stone at _Tiano_, where he is to sleep, in order to

meet our carriage to-morrow morning at Calvi, with the jacinth on his

finger! Lastly comes old Bonelli to kiss both cheeks, and to declare

that our loss will be felt by all the _honest_ men in Naples; and that,

as for himself, he does not know what he shall do, he had always such a

pleasure in coming to show us any thing. "It is not _interest_," says

he, putting his hand to his _side-pocket_, "but _affection_," placing it

over his _heart_, "that makes me so loth to lose you--_ah! caro lei!_"

and he kissed us again and withdrew. In the darkness of earliest

morning, while the stars are all glowing, and Aurora is still asleep, we

discern figures in cloaks, sitting over the rippling sea, on the wall of

Santa Lucia, and waiting to show us antiques by moonlight!--and then

comes the _barrière_. And now, gentlemen, we wash our hands of

you--and may you soon be consoled for the loss of us in the

acquisition of some noble lord, with more money to spend amongst you

than we ever had, and more time to devote to your winning manners and

versatile accomplishments. We hope you will speak of us kindly and

considerately; and, whilst you are busy in circulating our memoirs in

the Strada Santa Caterina, the Toledo, and the piazza of the

silversmiths, we are preparing yours, gentlemen, in a work which shall

leave those of Benvenuto Cellini far--very far behind!

We have now given the reader a very brief notice of a scantling of our

antiquarian acquaintance abroad, taking them nearly at random from the

pages of a common-place book, which abounds, we observe, in such

entries. Should he desire to know something more of the craft, we keep a

second batch of introductions by us, which are at his service; but to

give him even the shortest notice, nay, merely to attempt the

_nomenclature_, and furnish a "_catalogue raisonné_" of all that immense

body, would be as wide of our purpose as it would wholly transcend our

powers. Such a task would be as vain as--(but here, after the example of

Boileau, Corneille, and Pope, let us give _our_ paraphrase of the

well-known passage of the bard of Aquinum:--)

"Vain as th' attempt on summer eve to count

What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount.

All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell,

And all the _Beckers_[1] all the rogues shall sell;

How many sick some sapient quack at Rome

Helps--not to England, but their _longer home_;[2]

How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale;

How many Maids their mistress' fame assail;

How many English girls, by foreign arts

Seduced, have smiled on needy '_Knaves of Hearts!_'

Or left our church, in spite of solemn 'caves,'

To score off sins by rosaries and aves!

Number the gnats that cloud the dewy lawn,

Or flitting flies that light the sparkling corn;

Or pirate hawks that haunt Rome's lawless sky,

Or the fell fevers Pontine plains supply;

The locust legions count; or say as soon

What hoarse Cicadæ stun the sultry noon

With ringing dissonance; what flow'rets fair

In early spring inebriate the air:

Or count the gems in every dazzling shower

That Roman rockets detonating pour,

Dropping their liquid light o'er Hadrian's glowing tower:

Or tell what crowds on Easter-day repair

To see their Pontiff-bird, in high-swung chair

Upborne magnificent; when, rising slow,

_Th' emerging figure stands, all white as snow_,

Like some large albatross his arms outspreads,

O'er all that mighty, silent, sea of heads!

Thrice waves his wings, the voiceless blessing sends

Far, far away to earth's remotest ends!

The joyous news th' impatient cannon tells,

Louder and louder, as the discord swells,

Of clashing bands, and shouts, and drums, and loud-tongued bells!"

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Becker, a celebrated coiner from the antique, recently deceased in

Prussia,--_N.B._--His widow carries on the business.

[2] _Quot Themison oegros autumno occiderit uno._ Alas! and there are

many Themisons still in Rome; for whose address _vide_ the Guide-Books.

BIRBONIANA.

In England, we have our trades and our professions;--abroad, all

callings are trades; medicine is a trade; theology a trade; law no

better. With us, the title of professor carries with it something of

rank, being always conferred by authority, and not, as in Italy, a

dignity at once self-imposed and assumed by any party who chooses to

adopt it. Furthermore, at home it must be a grave subject indeed that is

entitled to the honour of being represented by a professor; whilst

abroad, the commonest accomplishments are raised to the dignity which we

restrict to science; and every private teacher of fencing, fiddling,

juggling, and dancing, affixes professor to his card. The art of

cheating, _ingannazione_, seems to be at present the only one in Italy

irrepresented, _eo nomine_, by a teacher. Whether it be that there is

properly no such art, but, as was formerly alleged of rhetoric, that

every man persuades best in the subject of his own craft, the principles

of cheating in like manner vary with the occupation of the cheater; or

because, where all men are more or less proficients, the instructions of

a professor may be dispensed with. Nevertheless, if mere pre-eminence in

the dark dexterity of imposing on one's neighbour deserved this coronal,

whose brows were fitter to wear it than yours, ye professors of natural

history and of _virtù_, with whom _ingannation_ is but a collateral

branch of these your severer studies? The very name of naturalist, which

in England falls so refreshingly on our ears, accustomed as we are to

link with it the memory of such men as White, Ray, Derham, Darwin,

Paley, and a host of others, there, is but too frequently bestowed on a

class of dishonest collectors, who fill their rooms (which they dub

their museum) with a collection of modern mummies, and study nature but

to jocky amateurs in the sale of her specimens! Nor is the man called

_antiquaro_ in Italy, a whit a better representative of him whom we so

designate, than is the _soi-disant_ professor of _taxidermy_ and seller

of embalmed pole-cats of our own naturalist. Not that our thoroughbred

antiquary at home stands high in our classification of English citizens.

It was not as a reward for tracing sites, by following the vestiges of

dry rubbish near a place ending in _chester_, that the mural crown

(probably a chaplet of wallflowers) was devised by the Romans; and we,

too, have a weakness for ranging the precedents of our fellow-citizens

according to their usefulness. We have no sympathy with soulless bodies;

with miserly old men of starved affections, who are too parsimonious

even for the gout; who prefer bronze _puttini_ to babies in flesh, and

marble mistresses to a fond and pleasing wife! But this is their affair,

not ours; if they choose thus to sacrifice to the cold manes of

antiquity the sweetest and most endearing sympathies of life, the

sacrifice and the loss is their own; whilst Englishmen must admit, that

in England at least they form a very learned body, much given up to the

prosecution of curious and prying researches. But in Italy, where all

the world pretend to be antiquaries, the ignorance and incapacity of by

far the larger portion of these pretenders is marvellous. No sooner has

the _adventurer_ who prints himself antiquary, begun to cheat his way on

a little, then he addresses himself boldly to some venal professor of

archæology too poor to refuse the bribe; who for a small consideration

undertakes to decipher his inscriptions for him, to teach him his

history, to furnish him with learned conjectures, and to praise his

goods, which last is generally the only part of these educational

acquirements which he retains, and recollects to profit by afterwards;

his ignorance, in all other matters appertaining to his craft, is

frequently absolute. Yet many of these men live to buy villas, to plant

vineyards, and to show how much more flourishing a thing in Italy

_virtù_ is than virtue. In character, or shall we not rather say in want

of character, they are all alike; and if any act of any of them bears

the external semblance of honesty about it, this is predetermined by

their fear of the _penal_ "code Napoleon" and its consequences, and not

by the code of moral necessity. Let your antiquarian acquaintance be

ever so extensive; be you in habits of pigeon-and-hawk-like intimacy

with scores of them, for years, you shall never meet one--from the

noble, well-lampooned prince of St Georgio, and the courtly Count of

Milan, to the poor starveling old man whose cotton pocket-handkerchief

contains all his stores, with no patent of nobility to stand him in

stead should he be detected in a fraud--one who will not cheat as much

as, and whenever he can. As the King of Naples said of his ministers, in

objecting to change them, _sono ladri tutti_. Woe, then, betide the

simple Englishman to whom some demon has whispered to have a taste, and

who thinks that he cannot better employ the time of his being abroad,

than in making purchases to satisfy it. Much will he have to pay for

each new apprenticeship in each new city where he sojourns for a season,

while he will learn by degrees to distrust the teaching of his volunteer

friends, as to what he may safely purchase, when every new acquisition

is a mistake, and proves the exception to some general rule formerly

taught him. It is only when they turn king's evidence and _peach_, that

they can be safely trusted; and on these occasions he really may pick up

some important hints for his future guidance; the most important of

which is _principiis obstare_, not to begin to buy, or, if he have

bought, to give over buying. How little is it generally known, by those

who don't purchase, what large sums are squandered in Italy upon heaps

of rubbish, palmed off and sold under the imposing names, _roba antica_,

_roba dei scavi_, and the like; and how little seems it known by those

who do, that of all markets for such acquisitions, the worst that an

uninitiated _dilettante_ can have to do with is the Italian! First,

because it abounds more than any other in trash; and secondly, because

when any thing really good comes into it, the dealers take care to put

their price upon it. The much prized and paraded object has in all

probability already been in England, (whence, on the death of its

connoisseur possessor, and the dispersion of his effects, it has again

returned to its natal soil,) and is now, it may be, to be had for twice

or three times as much, as you yourself might have procured it for in

Christie's auction-rooms a few months before, unless you possess an

accurate taste, and an intimate knowledge of what you buy. (Not, depend

upon it, to be acquired, as almost all other knowledge may now be, in

_six lessons_.) You must know that it is quite easy to spend

indefinitely large sums in the accumulation of coarse crockery, broken

glass, bits of mouldings, _scratched_ cornelians, and coins as smooth as

buttons, without being able to pick one pearl from out this ancient

dunghill. The peasant's ignorance, if you are also ignorant, can by no

possibility be turned to your account, and, in fact, turns very much

against it; for there is a prevailing tradition amongst them, that

things very rare and costly, now extant in kings' palaces and great

museums, have been grubbed up by the husbandman's hands; and as he

cannot possibly decide what, in the amateur's mind, constitutes a prize,

every fresh finding that may _possibly_ be such, is put up and priced

accordingly. Now it is a safe rule here never to buy a _may be_,

especially when you have to pay for it as though it were a _must be_;

and if you followed the contadino to the dealer, (who, after you,

becomes his next resource,) you would find that, though the former now

asks pauls for piastres, and is content to substitute baiocchi for

pauls, the dealer is obdurate, and leaves his wares still upon his

hands.

Some, ignorant of the ways of dealers, persuade themselves that if they

go to a well-recommended shop, they may, by paying somewhat higher than

they would elsewhere have done, secure themselves from all risk of

imposition; and this brings us to notice that, in accordance with this

well-known delusion of our countrymen, (for such we believe it to be,)

the "Antiquari" are fond of _dividing themselves_ into three classes,

whereof the first is supposed to consist entirely of _Galant' uomini_,

in which confessedly small class every one would place himself: the

second of _mezzo Galant' uomini_, or _half_ honest men, of whom the

first division reports, that it is a well-dressed, well-spoken, and

well-instituted order, _ma astuto assai_: and a third, which even they

will tell you is their larger body, constituted of a set of ill-dressed,

uneducated, ill-looking, unmannerly fellows, whom it would be unsafe to

meet with an antique ring on your finger after dark, and _without_ the

city walls. Of this _last_ class, number three, class number one is

particularly desirous to impress you with a salutary awe, lest you

should unfortunately become its victim. Its members, so they will tell

you, _have_ occasionally something pretty for sale; but then who, save

themselves and their ally the devil, knows out of what tomb it has been

plucked by night, or what conditions are annexed to its possession; and

whether, after it has been purchased, the police shall not come and

seize both it and its possessor? Thus one class of reputable

_shopkeeping_ rogues speaks of its _peripatetic_ rivals, who, as they do

not _purchase_, can afford to dispose of their things cheaper than those

who have to pay both purchase and warehouse dues, making them very

wrathful in consequence. The _number_ of antiquaries, as compared with

the whole population, would make a far greater statistical return than

most persons are aware of, who believe the race to be confined to that

half-dozen of shopkeepers who write their title over the door; these

being, in fact, but a small fraction of that large community which, like

the beetle called _necrobios_, preys both upon the living and the dead.

Beside the regular shopkeeper, _who sells the whole statue_, and

undertakes excavations on his own account, there is, in the next place,

the stall-keeper, whose commerce is in fragments, and who makes his

small profits upon toes and fingers, (he having received certain of the

unsaleable refuse from some richer antiquary, committed to his charge on

certain conditions, as the oranges that are offered in London in the

streets are consigned by the wealthier to the poorer Jews to traffic

in,) squats himself down in the neighbourhood of some piazza, church, or

other place of public resort, where, under favour of a shower, he is

enabled to dispose of his bits of _rosso antico_, and _pavonazzo_, which

then exhibit all their hues, polished and shining in the _rain_. There

is a third class who have two callings; a principal one--some petty

trade, a tobacconist, a printseller, or a chemist--to which they add

that of odds and ends. These they buy from the peasants on market-days;

and some there are, more active than their neighbours, who make a very

early start to _anticipate_ their arrival; and many a long and weary

mile will they trudge, far, far beyond the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or

the Ponte Molle, before it is day, each striving to outstrip the other,

and to be first to greet the _simple contadini_ on their road Romewards

from Tivoli, Frescati, Valmontone, or Veii. Alas! and notwithstanding

all the pains they take, they frequently make bad purchases, and are

duped by the superior cunning of other antiquaries at a distance, who

have been tampering with the peasants, and have given them counterfeits

to sell. Thus do antiquaries, like whitings, prey upon each other,

illustrating their own proverb, _Mercantia non vuol ni amici ni

parenti_. You become also, after a time, acquainted with a particular

set of dealers, not from themselves, for they have no direct

communication with the part of the town you inhabit, nor yet from the

_shop antiquaro_, who would gladly ignore the existence of such people,

but from certain fellows called _mezzani_ or _go-betweens_, whose office

it is to prowl about in quest of those who frequent old curiosity shops;

whom they will track to their hotels, and fish out presently from

couriers, or waiters, what class of things his Excellency buys. These

men are perhaps the greatest rogues in Christendom; sometimes they take

your side; sometimes gently hint that your most esteemed person is

somewhat hard upon their friend; they wink knowingly when you say

something _meant_ to be smart, and they will expostulate earnestly, and

make it quite a personal affair if their friend protests and refuses to

listen to their instances in your favour. Lastly, when the purchase has

been effected, they will stay to congratulate you on the bargain you are

sure to have made under their auspices; and to announce to you that they

have still some other ignoramuses _in petto_ for your excellency to

pigeon! Even when you don't buy, they suppress their disappointment; or,

showing it, try to convince you it is on your account solely that they

feel it. "You bargained," they tell you, "in style, showing at once your

perfect connoisseurship and tact; and though you were aware yourself

that your offers could not be entertained without a serious loss to the

proprietor, (who had not such articles every day to dispose of,) and

would soon find means of disposing of them, still, as the _donne_ say,

though they cannot _always_ accept, they consider _every offer_ a

compliment." These _mezzani_ get a per centage of eighteen per cent upon

every purchase from the _seller_; and, if you are not aware of this,

they will make a pretty per centage upon you besides. It is amusing to

get access through them into many interiors that you would not else have

heard of, and to have presented to you a new variety of wares, requiring

new vigilance on your part every day. Thus, one man's room (he has been

a soldier under Napoleon, hence his particular line of dealing) might

well be styled a hero's slop-shop, out of whose stores Sir Walter Scott

might have found fitting armour for every one of his heroes, from

Waverley to Quentin Durward. The owner visits _Thrasymene_ every summer,

and pretends that these iron harvests of the field, which he gleans each

year from near the banks of the "Stream of Blood," were sown there in

the time of Hannibal, with whose name he is perfectly familiar; and

should you, on questioning him, make out that he was not quite _au

courant_ as to dates, and not quite certain that every spear-head was as

old as the Punic war; his rule for sale is simple, (viz.) whenever there

appears to be a doubt, to give it not in your favour, but in favour of

his armour. Another man, who only deals in pictures, tries your skill

and knowledge in the _Madonna and Saint line_. This man is a collector

of coins; and woe betide you if you purchase there, and can't make out

the difference between a real Emperor S. C. and a pretender to the

laurel! Do you know any thing of "storied urns and animated busts?"

Then, and not till then, when you are _sure_ you do, visit A----'s

interior, where

--"Curias jam dimidias, humeroque minorem

Corvinum, et Galbam auriculis naroque carentem,"

you may easily find! Lastly, let no cinque-cento object of _virtù_ tempt

you to show your purse till you have taken advice from a learned friend,

to whom such exhibitions are familiar. Considering the vast preliminary

knowledge, both of men and things, necessary to the judicious completion

of each particular purchase, you will, unless you opine, with Hudibras,

that

"The pleasure is as great,

Of being cheated, as to cheat,"

be very slow in making any acquisition of _price_, from such a suspected

source as the cabinet of the antiquary. But if you have unfortunately

been made a dupe of--what remedy? That depends, if you have been led to

purchase any thing under a false impression of its antiquity; and can

_prove_ this. The law itself would step in, in such a case, to repossess

you of your purchase-money. If, indeed, the strong and pervading feeling

amongst the other _antiquari_, as in an _assize of crows_, were not of

itself sufficient to secure the condign punishment of the culprit, which

consists in compelling him to refund. But this redress only extends to

one particular kind of fraud, that, namely, included under the

rhetorical figure called metonymy, (_i.e._ the substitution of one thing

for another,) and does not extend beyond this; so that, though a dealer

were to sell an old hatchet for one hundred pounds, provided it had the

necessary _patina_ upon it to establish its antiquity--this not

constituting a case of cheating, (at least, in the antiquarian sense of

the term,) but merely one of superior tact--brother-dealers might

indeed condole with you in your mistake; but nobody has any right to

interfere!

When you do buy, you must take nothing for granted but that you will be

cheated; and get a written declaration from the dealer, that what he

sells you has been paid for, as genuine, on the score of antiquity.

There are, too easy purchasers, who rest satisfied with the man's word,

(as if a _dealer's_ words were aught but wind, or wind but air,) who

always professes to _believe_ that the object he has for sale is of

_sacrosanct_ antiquity, and the best of its kind, (if an onyx, for

instance, not Oriental only, but _Orientalissimo_,) though he observes,

in a sort of moralizing parenthesis, that he will not vouch for what the

_ignorant_ or the _malicious_ may _say_. Here you must, we fear, range

yourself on the side of malice and ignorance; _non vale niente_, the

object is good for nothing; and if you swallow such a bait, you are a

_bête_ for your pains. _Amici miei_ of Oxford and Cambridge, excuse the

informality of self-introduction; and pray keep your _caution_-money

till you have taken your Master-in-Arts degree _abroad_. If you pay it

on the initiatory matriculation of a first journey, you may depend upon

never getting any of it back; when on having studied anew the "art of

self-defence," to protect you against _another_ art, which you must

_also_ study, in close connexion with the "_belle arti_," you are become

really an adept, and duly qualified for that diploma. Study antiquities

in _public_ museums; so shall you learn to appraise at their true value

the gauds of dealers, which, if you have not educated your taste into a

wholesome fastidiousness, by a diligent study of the _real_ treasures of

antiquity, you may chance to find most dangerously attractive--[Greek:

mêden enarghes en tê psnchê echontes paradeigma, mêde dunamenoi ôsper

grapheis eis to alêthestaton apoblepontes chacheise aei anapherontes te

chai theômenoi hôs oion te, achribestata, ontô dê chai ta upo tôn

chapêlôn hechastote proseiomena orthôs diachrinein aph ôn dê chathaper

oi thallô tini ta probata epagomenoi tous amuetous periagousin].

Then you will hardly be induced to pay much for what you do not set much

store by, merely for the sake of calling it your own. Add to this the

further consideration, that in towns the _Antiquari_ keep their best

things for the resident collectors, so that you never see them; whilst

all hopes of finding sound windfalls on the road you are journeying, are

rendered futile, since Italy is now infested by lines of antiquarian

footpads, who tramp as regularly as a well-organized police, right

across its _instep_ from sea to sea, and measure it lengthways from

Milan to Otranto, sweeping up and carrying away every thing that is

worth the transport. After this, you need hardly feel nervous (as some

we have known were) lest, in the event of falling in with something

exquisitely beautiful, the government should interfere to prevent its

leaving Italy. Such an event not being in question, you need make no

provision to meet it. Of the brigands and brigandage of Italy, the

public has had enough; of her cheats and cheating--her _virtuosi_ and

their _virtù_--nobody has enlightened us. Nor, to say the truth, does

the subject, at first sight, appear to admit of more than a few not very

promising details of a not very pleasing picture of the Dutch

school--the romance of the waylaid carriage in the mountain defile; the

sudden report of fire-arms; the troop of gay-sashed cut-throats in

sugar-loaf hats; the "_faccia à terra!_" the escort to the robber's

cave; the life amongst the mountains; the ransom and the discharge--lend

themselves much more readily to the author's pen, and present themselves

much more forcibly to the reader's fancy, than the details into which we

are about to enter. Still _our_ subject has _its_ interest, both in

having a _practical_ bearing, and in being _new_; and, as we have

adopted it, we must make the best of it. Therefore, we propose to give a

series of _ana_, rambling like our last, (as all "_ana_" claim a right

to be,) but purporting to make some remarks, didactic and miscellaneous,

on coins, gems, marbles, bronzes, _terra cotta_, and glass, each in due

order of succession, our present lucubration confining itself to the

mere introduction of our reader to the _Antiquari_ themselves. Allusion

has already been made to the very large sums wasted every year on the

Continent by our countrymen in pursuit of the "antique," though it might

be difficult to determine to what extent pubic credulity is thus

annually imposed upon; difficult, because self-love is here at variance

with self-interest, (_silencing_ many a victim, who fears, lest if his

mistakes were blabbed abroad, the world might append some more

unflattering name to his own than that of _dupe_;) and difficult again,

because there are gulls that _will not_ be so called; and _gudgeons_ who

_won't_ believe in a pike till he swallows them up alive! Thus, while

the fraud practised is great, the stir it makes, in consequence of these

things, is small; and it becomes, therefore, the more necessary to

apprise amateurs, that the money laid out to _learn_ experience may come

to more than would purchase them a commission in the Guards!

"Not to admire's the simplest art we know,

To keep your fortune in its _statu quo_;

Who holds loose cash, nor _cheques_ his changeling gold,

Buy what he will, is certain to be _sold_."

Much more had we to say in the way of advice to the untutored, but we

refrain, for nobody has given us "salary, or chair;" and who, then, has

given us the right to lecture "_ex cathedrâ_?" We throw out, therefore,

no further "hints to freshmen," but proceed forthwith to describe a few

of the more noted and sly of our antiquarian acquaintances in Italy.

Some years back, we remember, all the English in Rome used to turn out a

fox-hunting; it was considered an exploit, and so perhaps it was, to

kill under the _Arc of Veii_, amidst the moist meadows of the Crembra;

and to teach the Sabine Echo to respond from her hills to the sound of

the British Tally-ho! Now, whilst the followers of the Chesterfield

kennel sought their foxes _without_ the walls, we always knew where to

look for ours _within_; and, whatever _their_ success, _we_ always

_found_; nay, what may sound somewhat paradoxical, but is true

nevertheless, the _more_ we hunted, the _more_ we found. Like their

brothers of the "_brush_," _our_ Reynards were sly fellows too, and

would double and dodge, and get away sometimes, just when we thought

ourselves most sure of coming up with them--a few only we were fortunate

enough to bag, and bring over in _our sack_ (_de nuit_) to England. We

purpose now to turn a few loose for the reader's diversion, apprising

him, however, that they are mostly _very old foxes_; and so cannot _run_

as far or as fast, or yield the same sport, that might have been

expected had they been younger. The greatest age demands respect and

precedency; and, as Venovali is the oldest, we will _dispatch_ him

first. So ho! Venovali!

THE AMERICANS AND THE ABORIGINES.

A TALE OF THE SHORT WAR. PART I.

I tremble for my people, when I think of the unjust acts of which

they have been guilty towards the aborigines.--JEFFERSON.

The numerous romances of Indian life and manners to which, during the

last twenty years, the busy pens of Cooper and of his disciples on both

sides of the Atlantic have given birth, would perhaps make us hesitate

to notice a work of a somewhat similar class, had it not, as we believe,

merits and interest peculiar to itself. The readers of _Blackwood_ who

have followed us through the varied and lively scenes so graphically

depicted by the author of "The Viceroy and the Aristocracy," will, we

are inclined to think, turn with pleasure to a notice of another book by

the same clever writer, one published previously to most of those from

which we have already made extracts, and of which the time, the

characters, and, partially, the scene, are different from those of any

of his other works. In the "Viceroy" are found an exposition of the

sufferings of the Mexican aborigines, and their half-blood descendants,

under the inhuman yoke of their Spanish oppressors. Of the book now

before us, one of the objects seems to be to illustrate the less

sanguinary, but still, in many respects, unjust and cruel treatment

received by the more northerly races of Indians at the hands of the

Americans. Barbarous tribes must recede and disappear before the advance

of civilisation;--doubtless it was not the intention of Providence that

a few scanty hordes of savages should occupy as their hunting grounds

vast tracts of land, which, by the application of industry and art,

would yield sustenance to millions of men. But whether, on the other

hand, the encroaching spirit of the inhabitants of the United States,

that restless, rambling propensity which has driven their settlers

southwards into Mexico, and westward to the Pacific, should be indulged

to the extent of exterminating and dispossessing the original owners of

the territory before the new occupants have real need of it, is a

question admitting of more discussion than we shall here enter upon.

We have already said so much about the author now referred to,

concerning the general scope of his talent, the many beauties and

occasional defects of his writings, that any further preamble would be

superfluous, and we will at once proceed to give specimens of his book.

Upon the road connecting the town of Coosa with Milledgeville, the

capital of Georgia, and near to the spot where, at the present day, a

convenient hotel invites the traveller to repose and refreshment, there

stood, towards the close of the last century, beneath a projecting rock,

crowned with a few red cedars and pine-trees, a rudely constructed, but

roomy block-house. In front of the building, and between two massive

perpendicular beams, connected by cross-bars, swung a large board, upon

which was to be distinguished a grotesque figure, painted in gaudy

colours, and whose diadem of feathers, tomahawk, scalping-knife, and

wampum, denoted the Indian chief. Beneath this sign a row of

hieroglyphical-looking characters informed the passer-by that he could

here find "Entertainment for man and beast." On that side of the house,

or rather hut, next to the road, was a row of wooden sheds, separated

from the path by a muddy ditch, and partly filled with hay and straw.

These cribs might have been supposed the habitations of the cows, had

not some dirty bedding, that protruded from them, denoted them to be the

sleeping apartments of those travellers whose evil star compelled them

to pass the night at the sign of the Indian King. A stable and pig-sty

completed the appurtenances of this backwood dwelling.

It as a stormy December night; the wind howled fiercely through the

gloomy pine-forest, on the skirt of which the block-house stood, and the

rapidly-succeeding crashes of the huge trees, as, with a report like

thunder, the storm bore them to the ground, proclaimed the violence of

one of those tornados that so frequently rage between the Blue Mountains

of Tennessee and the flats of the Mississippi, sweeping with them, in

their passage, trees, houses, and villages. Suddenly, in the midst of

the storm, a gentle tapping was heard at the window-shutter of the

block-house, to which succeeded, after a short interval, a series of

heavy blows, causing the timbers of the dwelling to quiver to their

foundations. Presently the door of the house was partially opened, and a

man's head protruded through the aperture, as if to reconnoitre the

cause of the uproar. At the same moment that this occurred, a tall, dark

figure stepped quickly forward, pushed the door wide open, and, stalking

into the dwelling, took his seat opposite the fireplace, followed, in

deep silence and with noiseless stride, by a line of similar

apparitions. When all had entered, the door was again closed, and a man

of almost colossal frame approached the hearth, where some embers were

still smouldering. Throwing on a supply of wood, he lit one of a heap of

pine splinters that lay in the chimney corner, and then producing a

tallow candle, lighted it, and placed it upon the table. By its

glimmering flame, and that of the reviving fire, the interior of the

hut, fully corresponding with the rough and inartificial exterior,

became visible. In the corner opposite the fireplace was the bar or

counter, behind whose wooden lattice stood a dozen dirty bottles, and

still dirtier jugs and glasses. Below these were three kegs daubed with

blue paint, and marked with the words, French Brandy, Gin, Monongahela.

On one side of the room a pile of deer hides, of beaver, bear, and fox

skins, denoted a frequent intercourse and active trade between the

inmates of the tavern and the red men. Near the skins stood a huge

tester-bed, surrounded by three small bedsteads, and a cradle, or rather

trough, made out of a fragment of a hollow tree, with boards nailed

across the ends. In these receptacles, to judge by the loud snoring that

proceeded from them, the family of the tavern-keeper were enjoying a

deep and uninterrupted repose. The walls of the apartment were of unhewn

tree-trunks, varied only by broad stripes of clay filling the

interstices.

On a stool in front of the fire sat the man who had first entered, a

bloodstained blanket thrown over his whole person, concealing both

figure and face. Behind him about twenty Indians squatted upon the clay

floor, their legs crossed, their faces shrouded in their blankets, the

crimson spots upon which seemed to indicate that the expedition whence

they returned had been other than a peaceful one. Notwithstanding the

presence of these strange guests, the master of the block-house now

busied himself with putting in order the stools and benches which the

intruders, upon their entrance, had unceremoniously knocked over, and

this he did with as cool and sturdy an air as if his nocturnal visitors

had been friends and neighbours, instead of a troop of savages on their

return from some bloody foray, and who might, as likely as not, add his

scalp and those of his family to the other trophies of their expedition.

When he had put the last stool in its place, he sat himself down next to

the Indian who appeared the chief of the band.

After the lapse of about a minute, the latter raised himself up, and

allowed the blanket to slip from over his head, which now appeared bound

round with a piece of calico, fringed with gouts of congealed blood. The

backwoodsman cast a side glance at the Indian, but it was only a

momentary one, and he allowed his gaze to revert to the fire.

"Has my white brother no tongue?" said the Indian at last, in a deep

guttural tone; "or does he wait in order the better to crook it?"

"He waits for the words of the chief," replied the American drily.

"Go, call thy wife," said the Indian, in the same bass voice as before.

The tavern-keeper got up, approached the bed, and opening the curtains,

spoke to his wife, who had listened, with curiosity rather than anxiety,

to what passed. A few sentences were exchanged between them, and the

lady made her appearance, a burly, broad-shouldered dame, with an

expression upon her somewhat coarse features, indicative of her not

being very easily disconcerted or alarmed. An upper petticoat of

linsey-woolsey, adapted both to daily and nightly wear, made her

voluminous figure look even larger and more imposing than it really was,

as with a firm step and almost angry mien she stepped forward by her

husband's side. But the menacing stillness of her visitors, and their

bloody heads and blankets, now fully revealed by the blaze of the fire,

seemed of such evil omen, that the good woman was evidently startled.

Her step, at first quick and confident, began to falter, and with an

involuntary shudder she approached her husband, who had resumed his

seat. A minute passed in gloomy silence. Then the Indian again raised

his head, but without looking up, and spoke in a harsh, severe tone.

"Listen, woman," said he, "to the words of a great warrior, whose hand

is open, and who will fill his brother's wigwam with many deer skins. In

return he asks but little of his sister, and that little she may easily

give. Has my sister," continued he, raising his voice and glancing at

the woman, "milk for a little daughter?"

The backwoodsman's wife stared at her interlocutor in great

astonishment.

"Will she," continued the redskin, "give a share of her milk to a little

daughter, who must else die of hunger?"

The countenance of the woman brightened as she discerned that the Indian

wanted something of her, and that it was in her power to grant or refuse

a favour. She took a step towards him, and impatiently awaited further

explanation of his singular demand. The Indian, without deigning to look

at her, opened the ample folds of his blanket, and drew forth a lovely

infant, wrapped in a pelisse of costly furs. For a few seconds the woman

stood in mute surprise; but curiosity to obtain a nearer view of the

beautiful child, and perhaps also a feeling of compassion and motherly

tenderness, speedily restored to her the use of her tongue.

"Good God!" cried she, stretching out her hands to take the infant;

"what a sweet little darling; and come of good parents too, I'll be

sworn. Only look at the fur, and the fine lace! Did you ever see such a

thing! Where did you get the child? Poor little thing! Feed it? To be

sure I will. This is no red-man's child."

The worthy lady seemed disposed to run on in this way for some time

longer, had not a significant sign from her husband stopped her mouth.

The chief, without vouchsafing her the smallest attention, unfastened

the pelisse of grey fox skin, stripped it off, and then proceeded to

divest the infant of the first of the coats in which it was enveloped,

like a silkworm in its cocoon. But when, after having with some

difficulty accomplished this, a third, fourth, and fifth wrapper

appeared, he seemed suddenly to lose patience, and drawing his knife,

he, with one cut, ripped the whole of the child's clothes from its body,

and handed it over stark naked to the tavern-keeper's wife.

"Incarnate fiend!" screamed the shuddering woman, as she snatched the

infant from his hands.

"Stop!" cried the Indian, his cold and imperturbable gaze fixed upon the

infant's neck, from which a small medal was suspended by a gold chain.

Without uttering a word, the woman stripped the chain over the child's

head, threw it into the face of the savage, and hurried to her bed.

"The devil's in the woman!" muttered her husband, apparently not a

little uneasy at her violence.

"The red warrior," said the Indian, with immovable calm, "will pay with

beaver skins for the milk that his little daughter drinks, but he will

keep what he has found, and the door must open when he comes for the

child."

"That's all very well," said the tavern-keeper, to whom it suddenly

appeared to occur that some farther explanation might not be altogether

superfluous; "and I'll keep the child willingly enough, though, thank

God, I've plenty of my own. But if the parents should come, or the white

father hear of the child, what then? The red chief knows that his hand

reaches far."

The Indian remained for a while silent, and then replied in a

significant tone--

"The child's mother will never come. The night is very dark, the storm

howls in the forest--to-morrow nothing will be seen of the red men's

footsteps. It is far to the wigwam of the white father. If he hears of

the child, my white brother will have told him. It he takes it, then

will the red chief take the scalps of his white brother's children."

"Then take your child back again," said the backwoodsman, in a decided

tone, "I'll have nought to do with it."

The Indian drew his knife, upon which fresh blood-stains were visible,

and cast an ominous glance towards the bed.

"We will take care of it; no one shall hear of it!" screamed the

horrorstruck woman. The Indian calmly replaced the knife in his girdle,

and again spoke.

"The throats of the red men are dry," said he.

A muttering was heard behind the curtains of the bed, sounding not

unlike the Christian wish, that every drop the bloodhounds swallowed

might prove poison to them; the host, however, whose humanity was less

vindictive than that of his wife, hastened to the bar to comply with his

guest's demand. The chief drank a half-gill of whisky at a draught, and

then passed the glass to his neighbour. When a sixth bottle had been

emptied, he suddenly rose, threw a Spanish gold piece upon the table,

opened the curtains of the bed, and hung a string of corals, which he

took from his wampum girdle, round the neck of the child.

"The red men will know the daughter of a warrior," said he, fixing his

eyes upon the infant, which now lay wrapped in flannel upon the bosom of

the hostess. He gave a second glance at woman and child, and then

passing silently out at the door disappeared with his companions in the

darkness.

"The hurricane is over," said the tavern-keeper, who had followed the

Indians with his eyes as they glided like dim shadows to their birch

canoes upon the Coosa.

"In heaven's name! who is that incarnate red devil?" cried his wife,

drawing a deep breath of relief, and shuddering as she spoke.

"Hush, woman!--hold your tongue! till the Coosa's between it and the

redskins. This is no joking matter, I can tell you."

As he spoke he closed the door; and, taking up the light, approached the

bed, where his wife was suckling the child.

"Poor little thing!" said he, "if you could speak you would tell us a

tale that might well make our hair stand on end. This affair may cost us

dear yet; those red devils are come from a scalping expedition; of that

there is no doubt. But in what direction, God alone knows. Well, if it

were only amongst the Spaniards," continued he, glancing alternately at

the child, and at the gold coin in his hand, "I should not much care

about it, but"--

And without finishing the sentence he resumed his place in the bed,

although some hours elapsed before the recollection of the strange scene

that had occurred allowed sleep to revisit his eyelids.

In defiance of the menaces of the savages, Captain John Copeland, the

rough but worthy host of the Indian King, institutes inquiries

concerning the parentage of the infant so unceremoniously imposed upon

him. Various obstacles are thrown in the way of his researches by the

disturbed state of the country, and by the Indians themselves, who

suspect his intentions, and keep a strict watch on his movements; and

when at last a more settled state of things enables him to prosecute his

inquiries, it is with small success, or at least he does not admit that

he has discovered any thing, although he suspects the child, which is a

little girl, to belong to one of the French or Spanish planters on the

Mississippi. Seven years elapse, during which the numbers of the

backwoodsman's family are doubled, and his worldly wealth augments in a

far larger proportion. The shores of the Coosa have become populous and

flourishing, the solitary block-house is now a roomy and convenient

dwelling, situated in the midst of smiling plantations, and Captain

Copeland is well to do, and much respected by his neighbours. One summer

evening, however, the Captain is disturbed at his supper, and his family

frightened from their propriety, by the appearance of a tall gaunt

Indian, who enters the room unannounced, and is recognised by a

missionary there present as Tokeah, the miko or king of the Oconees, the

principal tribe of the Creek Indians. This Tokeah is one of the most

deadly and persevering enemies of the white men, whom he detests with a

bitter hate, because they have driven his nation from its hunting

grounds. He it was who, seven years previously, gave the little girl in

charge to Copeland and his wife; since then he has regularly sent furs

and beaver-skins as payment for her maintenance, and he now comes to

claim her as his property. Resistance to his demand would be in vain,

for he is backed by an imposing force of Indian warriors; the entreaties

of Mrs Copeland and the missionary are insufficient to turn him from his

purpose, and he takes away the child, who has been christened by the

name of Rosa. The third chapter of the book, which we will now extract,

opens, after a second lapse of seven years, at the latter end of the

year 1814.

At the northern extremity of the Sabine lake, and in the midst of the

reed and cypress swamps that extend southwards to the sea, there lies,

between the rivers Sabine and Natchez, a narrow tongue of land, which,

widening in proportion as the rivers recede, forms a gently swelling

eminence, enclosed by the clear and beautiful waters of the two streams.

The latter flow through dark thickets of cypress and palmetto, to the

lake above named, which, in its turn, is united with the Gulf of Mexico,

and it would almost appear as if nature, in a capricious moment, had

chosen thus distinctly to mark the boundary of the two vast countries

which the Sabine severs. On the right bank of that river rises a black

and impenetrable forest, so thickly matted and united by enormous

thorns, that even the hunted deer or savanna wolf will rarely attempt an

entrance. The earth is overgrown by an impenetrable carpet of creeping

plants, under whose treacherous shelter innumerable rattlesnakes,

king's-heads, and copperheads, writhe themselves, or lie coiled up on

the watch for the wild pigeons, mockingbirds, parroquets, and black

squirrels, who share with them the shelter of the thicket. Rarely is the

maze broken by a clearing, and where it is so, is seen a chaos of

mouldering tree-trunks, uprooted by the frequent tornados, and piled up

like some artificial fortification. The wild luxuriance of the place

reaches its acme in the neighbourhood of the cypress swamp, but on the

further side of that it assumes a softer character, and the perplexed

wanderer through these beautiful scenes finds himself on a sudden

transported into one of the most enchanting of Mexican landscapes, where

the myrtle, the stately tulip-tree, and the palma-christi, alternate

with the dark-leaved mangrove, and on the rising grounds the cotton-tree

and sycamore spread their silver-green branches above a sward of the

tenderest verdure. The whole forest is interwoven, like a vast tent or

awning, with the jessamine and the wild vine, which, springing from the

ground, grapple themselves to the tree-trunks, ascend to the highest

branches, and then again descending, cling to another stem, and creeping

from mangrove to myrtle, from magnesia to papaw, from papaw to the

tulip-tree, form one vast and interminable bower. The broad belt of

land, in the centre of which the waters of the Natchez flow, presents to

the beholder a waving and luxuriant field of rustling palmettos,

extending from the forest a full half mile to the stream, in whose

waters the mangrove and cypress dip their drooping foliage.

It was an afternoon of that magnificent latter autumn known as the

Indian summer, and the sun, golden and glorious, as it is only to be

seen in that country and at that season, was declining behind the

summits of the trees which fringe the western shore of the Natchez. Its

beams already assumed that rich variety of tint, so beautiful to behold,

varying from bright green to golden, from purple to orange, as the rays

passed between the leaves of the myrtle, the palma-christi, or some

other variety of the surrounding foliage. Not a cloud was in the

heavens, the air was balm itself, the soft evening stillness was only

now and then broken by some babbling parroquet, by the whistling tones

of the mockingbird, or the sudden rising of a flock of waterfowl,

thousands of which floated on the broad bosom of the Natchez, and

dressed their plumage for their winter flight. Along a narrow path

between the forest and the palmetto field above referred to, a female

figure was seen tripping towards a small opening in the wood, formed by

the uprooting of a mighty sycamore. On reaching the prostrate tree she

leaned against a branch, apparently to take breath. She was a young girl

of about twenty years of age, whose complexion denoted Indian parentage,

but whose countenance had something in the highest degree interesting,

even noble, in its expression. Her forehead was well formed, her black

eyes had an arch, almost a roguish, glance, her finely cut lips, and the

whole contour of her physiognomy, betrayed a frank and joyous

disposition, whilst the slight curve of her Roman nose gave her an air

of decision and self-reliance, with which her bearing and costume

corresponded. This costume was far superior to the usual dress of Indian

girls, and as remarkable for simplicity as for good taste. She wore a

sleeveless calico gown, reaching to the ankles, and her hair, instead of

hanging long and straight down her back, as is customary with Indian

women, was twisted into a knot, and held together on the crown of the

head by an elegant comb. A pair of gold ear-rings, bracelets of the same

metal, and half-boots of alligator's skin and scarlet cloth, completed

her graceful exterior. From her girdle was suspended a pocket knife of

considerable length, and in her hand she carried an empty basket. Her

step could be called neither walking nor running; it was an odd sort of

frisking springing movement. After each ten or twelve paces she stopped,

looked back along the path, and then again sprang forward, again to stop

and look behind her.

"But, Rosa!" cried she at last, as she leaned panting against the

sycamore; "but, Rosa!" she repeated, in the Indian tongue, and in a tone

of slight impatience, retracing her steps, and hurrying to meet another

young girl who now advanced along the winding path, "why do you remain

behind, Rosa?" And so saying, she threw herself upon her knees before

the new-comer, and clasped her arms around her with a rapidity and

suppleness that almost resembled the coilings of a snake.

"Ah, the white Rose!" cried she, in a tone of melancholy reproach; "she

is no longer the same. See, the grass grows upon the path which her foot

used often to press. Why is my white Rose sorrowful?"

The complaining tones of the Indian maiden were so touching, her whole

posture so imploring, love and anxiety were so plainly depicted on her

countenance, that it seemed uncertain whether the interest she took in

her friend had its source in the ties of near relationship, or was

caused by the manifold charms and graces of the young girl whom she now

so tenderly caressed, and who had as yet scarcely emerged from

childhood. This was the same Rosa whose acquaintance we have already

made, seven years previously, at the tavern of the Indian King, and who

now stood in an attitude of enchanting and unstudied grace, her dark

eyes, shaded by their long and silky lashes, alternately reposing their

glances upon her kneeling friend, or gazing out into the distance with a

mournful, pensive look. The gently swelling breast, the cheeks

overspread with the most delicate tint of the rose, the airy and elastic

form, might have belonged to the goddess of love herself, in the days of

her freshest youth; but on the other hand, the childish innocent glance,

the nobly-formed forehead, the rosy mouth, of which the coral lips were

rather indicated than displayed, and an indescribable something in her

whole appearance, gave her an air of purity and dignified modesty

calculated to prevent her beauty from exciting the slightest sensual

thought. Her hair, of a dark gold colour, fell in long tresses around a

snow white and exquisitely moulded neck; a gown of green silk enveloped

her person, and reached to a pair of the minutest feet that ever

supported the form of woman. Her mocassins were similar to those of the

Indian girl, a white silk kerchief veiled her neck, and in her hand she

carried a straw hat.

A tear gathered in the eyes of Rosa as she gazed kindly, but mournfully,

at her friend, and then stooping down she folded her in her arms, and

pressed a kiss upon her lips. For a short time, no sound was audible

save the sobbing of the maidens. At last the Indian spoke, in a

plaintive tone.

"See," said she, "Canondah's bosom is open to the grief of Rosa."

"My dearest Canondah!" exclaimed the beautiful girl thus addressed; and

again a flood of tears gushed from her eyes.

"Oh!" implored the Indian, "tell thy Canondah the cause of this grief.

See," continued she, in tones melodiously mournful, "see, these arms

bore the white Rose when yet she was very little, on these shoulders did

she hang when we crossed the great river, on this bosom did she lie like

a waterfowl that suns itself on the broad mirror of the Natchez. Day and

night, like the doe after his fawn, did Canondah follow the steps of the

white Rose, to shield her from harm; and yet, now that she is a woman,

and has become the white Rose of the Oconees, she shuts her from her

heart. Tell thy Canondah what it is that makes thy bosom heave, and thy

cheek grow pale."

"Does not Canondah know?" replied Rosa in a gentle tone. "Poor Rosa has

good cause to be sad and heavy of heart."

"Is the great chief of the Salt Lake the cause of her grief?"

Rosa shuddered, took a step backwards, and, covering her face with her

hands, sobbed aloud. The Indian girl sprang to her feet, and throwing

her arm round her friend's waist, drew her gently towards a neighbouring

cotton-tree, up which a vine had crept and twined itself, and now

dangled its graceful festoons, tasselled with ripe grapes, from the very

top-most branches. "Sad is the path of an Oconee maiden," said Canondah,

after a long pause, during which she had filled her basket with the

grapes. "Whilst the warriors are absent at the hunting grounds, we sigh

away our days in the wigwam, or labour wearily in the fields. Would that

Canondah were a man!"

"And El Sol?" lisped Rosa with a melancholy smile. "Canondah should not

complain."

The Indian girl placed one hand upon the lips of her friend, whilst with

the other she playfully menaced her.

"Yes," said she, "El Sol is a great chief, and Canondah owes him her

life. She will cook his venison, and sew his hunting shirts, and follow

him with a light heart. Let the white Rose listen to the words of her

sister. Soon will El Sol visit the wigwam of the Oconees, and then will

Canondah whisper softly in his ear. He is a great warrior, and the miko

will hear his words, and return the presents to the chief of the Salt

Lake, and the white Rose shall never see his wigwam."

Rosa shook her head doubtingly.

"Does Canondah know her father so little? The storm may bow the feeble

reed, but not the silver stem of the mighty tree. It may be uprooted,

and broken in its fall, but never bent. The miko," continued she with a

desponding sigh, "sees the chief of the Salt Lake with the eye of a

warrior, not of a maiden. He has promised him Rosa for his wife, but

Rosa would rather die than"--

"No, no," interrupted Canondah, "Rosa must not die. El Sol loves

Canondah, and the miko of the Oconees knows that he is a far greater

warrior than the chief of the Salt Lake. But listen! what is that?"

cried she, "turning her head in the direction of the swamp, whence a

loud splashing was now audible.

"What is it?" repeated Rosa.

"Perhaps an alligator or a bear," replied the Indian girl.

The noise continued, although less loud than before. "Canondah!"

exclaimed Rosa with visible uneasiness, "you will not again hunt the

great water-snake?"

Her words were in vain. With the swiftness of a deer the Indian maiden

sprang through the reeds, and in a moment had disappeared. Rosa had no

choice but to follow. Whilst making her way through the innumerable

stems that barred her passage, she heard a loud cry, but it was not

Canondah's voice. A noise like that of a heavy body falling into the

water, immediately followed, accompanied by a short but violent

splashing and beating in the mud, and then all was again still.

Breathless and terrified, Rosa forced her way through the reeds, and at

length reached the river bank, where she descried her companion standing

among the cypresses and mangroves, which grew down into the water.

"Canondah!" she exclaimed, in a tone of bitter reproach, as her friend

pointed to an enormous alligator that lay beating the mud with its tail

in the agonies of death. "Why do you do these things? Must Rosa lose her

sister, because she foolishly wishes to be a man, and to fight the

water-snake?"

"See there!" replied Canondah, pointing to a deep wound in the neck of

the alligator, and triumphantly waving her bloody knife; "I plunged it

to the hilt in his throat. The daughter of the Miko of the Oconees knows

how to strike the water-snake. But," added she, indifferently, "this one

was young, and already benumbed, for the water begins to be cold.

Canondah is only a weak girl, but she could teach the young white man to

strike the water-snake." As she spoke the last words, she glanced in the

direction of a cypress-tree which sprang out of the shallow water at a

few paces from the bank.

"The young white man?" said Rosa enquiringly.

The Indian girl laid her forefinger significantly upon her lips, washed

the blood from her hands and knife, and approached the tree. Separating

the impending branches with her left hand, she held out her right, open

and with the palm upwards, in sign of friendship, and then pointed to

the shore, towards which she herself slowly advanced. The boughs were

put aside, and a young man appeared, walking cautiously and with

difficulty towards the bank, clutching for support at the reeds that

grew around him. Rosa gazed in astonishment at the stranger.

"How came he here?" said she softly to her friend.

The Indian girl pointed in silence to a boat entangled amongst the

reeds, through which an attempt had evidently been made to force it. The

stranger had now arrived within a few paces of the shore, when he began

to stagger, and Canondah, who hurried to his assistance, was but just in

time to prevent his falling back into the water. Supporting him in her

arms she assisted him to the bank, and the cause of his weakness became

apparent, in a stream of blood that flowed from his leg, severely

wounded by the jaws of the alligator. Canondah hastened to Rosa.

"Your white brother has been bitten by the water-snake," said she, "and

you see that Canondah has only her gown."

Whilst speaking, she untied the silk 'kerchief from her friend's neck,

then stooping down, she gathered, with the quickness of thought, a

handful of a certain herb, broke a young palma christi across her knee,

and took out the delicate, fleshy substance found under the bark of that

tree. Returning to the stranger, she filled the wound with the pith,

overlaid it with herbs, and bound it with the handkerchief. The whole

was the work of an instant, and so rapid and decided were Canondah's

movements, that Rosa's neckerchief was tied round the leg of the

stranger before the blush that its loss occasioned had faded from the

cheek of its owner.

When the bandaging of the wounded limb was completed to Canondah's

satisfaction, she again stepped into the water, and carefully examined

the boat in which the stranger had arrived; then returning to her

patient, she gazed steadfastly at him for a moment, returned a second

time to the boat, and finally, approaching Rosa, whispered in her ear a

few words which brought a paleness like that of death over the young

girl's countenance. In her turn, Rosa gazed earnestly at the stranger,

the contraction of whose features, and the dull glaze that overspread

his eyes, betrayed the highest degree of exhaustion. His ashy-pale

complexion, sunken cheeks, and hollow eyes, bespoke long privations and

severe suffering; he looked more like a corpse thrown up by the waves,

than a living creature. His hair, bleached by the action of seawater,

hung in tangled locks over his neck and forehead, and the original

colour of his apparel could only be guessed at. He appeared very young,

and his features, allowance made for their emaciation, were by no means

disagreeable, as he sat leaning against the trunk of a cypress-tree,

through the branches of which the sunbeams played upon his countenance,

and lit up its suffering expression.

"Our white brother's canoe," said Canondah, "is that of the chief of the

Salt Lake, but he is not one of his warriors."

"He is perhaps what they call a sailor," remarked Rosa.

"No," replied Canondah, in a decided tone. "Look at his hands, they are

small and delicate as those of a girl, though the seawater has stained

them brown."

"He may be a messenger," suggested Rosa doubtfully.

The Indian maiden again shook her head. "See," said she, "he comes from

the great salt lake which drinks the waters of our river, and yet he

knows not how to bring his boat through the thick grass. He took the

water-snake for a rotten tree, and stepped upon it, and it buried its

teeth in his flesh. Thy white brother has fled from the chief of the

Salt Lake."

She spoke these words with as much confidence and decision as if she had

herself accompanied the stranger on his adventurous voyage.

"And will Canondah," said Rosa, "leave her brother to perish of fever in

the cold night air--he who never harmed her or hers?"

"My sister speaks with the tongue of a white, but Canondah is the

daughter of the great Miko," replied the Indian girl, with some severity

of manner. The next moment her countenance again brightened, and she

took Rosa's hand.

"Canondah will listen to the words of her sister," said she, "and will

befriend her white brother. She will take him to the hollow tree."

The two maidens now raised the young man, and each taking one of his

arms, assisted him through the thick growth of reeds. It was a long and

wearisome task, for loss of blood, and previous privations, had rendered

the stranger nearly helpless, and they were hardly able, by the utmost

exertion of their strength, to keep him on his feet and convey him

along. At one moment, when half-way through the palmettos, he seemed

about to breathe his last; his strength left him, and it was only by the

most laborious and painful efforts that the young girls got him over the

rest of the field. Panting and trembling, they at last reached its

extremity, and Rosa sank upon the ground, incapable of further exertion.

By a last effort Canondah drew her burthen out of the palmettos, and

then threw herself down by the side of her friend.

The last rays of the sun still played upon the summits of the loftier

trees, of which the lower branches were dimly seen in the rapidly

thickening twilight, when Rosa approached the Indian maiden, and with

the words, "The sun is low," roused her from her state of exhaustion and

semi-unconsciousness. Canondah sprang to her feet, and the two girls

tripped side by side into the wood, until they at last paused before an

enormous cotton-tree. Several gigantic vines, in whose powerful and

enervating embrace the mighty trunk had perished, still clasped the

magnificent colossus with their shining red tendrils, whilst the

interior of the tree, hollowed by the tooth of time, was of a

fantastical configuration, not unlike a Gothic chapel, and sufficiently

spacious to contain twenty men. The care with which the hollow had been

swept out, and the neighbourhood of a salt spring, showed that it was

used by the Indian hunters as a resting-place and ambush. Canondah

cautiously approached the tree and returned to Rosa with the

intelligence that it was unoccupied. From the branches of a neighbouring

cypress, the two girls now stripped quantities of Spanish moss,

wherewith they speedily composed a soft and luxurious bed in the

interior of the cotton-tree. This done, they rolled blocks of wood and

fragments of trees to the entrance, apparently to form a rampart against

the nocturnal intrusion of bear or panther. These preparations

completed, they returned to the wounded man. Canondah passed her left

arm under his legs, and signed to Rosa to grasp her hand, whilst their

arms should serve as a support to his back. Rosa blushed and hesitated.

"Does the white Rose," said Canondah, "fear to touch her brother, for

whose life she was lately so anxious?"

For sole reply, the young girl took her friend's hand, and raising the

stranger from the ground, they carried him to the hollow tree, and laid

him down upon his mossy couch.

"When the earth is covered with darkness," said Canondah, bending over

him, "Canondah will visit her brother, and pour balsam into his wounds."

But her words were unmarked by the person addressed, who, with the

exception of a faint breathing, gave no sign of life. The two maidens

struck into the path by which they had first approached the river, and

along which we will now precede them in order to introduce the reader

into an entirely new world.

At a short distance from the scene of the adventure above narrated, was

a wide clearing, extending for about three miles along the shore. It had

originally been part of a palmetto field covering the bank of the river

for the breadth of half a mile, at which distance a limit was put to it

by the colossal stems of the aboriginal forest. The clearing had been

made by the burning of the palmettos, in whose place a carpet of

luxuriant grass had sprung up, dotted with groups of magnificent trees,

and intersected by natural hedges of myrtle, mangrove, palm, and tulip

trees, giving to the whole tract of land the appearance of a beautiful

artificial park. Here and there, through the branches of the sycamore

and cotton trees, small swirls of smoke were seen curling upwards,

telling of the presence of man, and on nearer inspection there became

visible, under various of the groups of trees, one or more huts,

surrounded by little plantations of Indian corn and tobacco, and forming

collectively a scattered hamlet of some fifty habitations.