an Italian writer, who says:-" On the last night of his existence he appeared unusually tranquil. He had slept a little; when he awoke, he requested that the curtains of his bed should be drawn aside to contemplate the moon, which, at its full, was advancing calmly in the immensity of the pure heavens. At this solemn hour he seemed desirous to return to Nature all the soft sensations which he was then possessed of; stretching forth his hand towards his enchanted violin to the faithful companion of his travels to the magician which had robbed care of its stings-he sent to heaven with its last sounds the last sigh of a life which had been all melody."

Paganini left by his will, dated 27th April, 1837, his fortune of £80,000 (subject to some legacies) to his natural son, Achilli, who had been legitimized, and who also inherited the title of Baron.

His favourite violin, the Guarneri, which he had presented to him at Leghorn, and which accompanied him in all his travels, he was desirous should not become the property of another artist, and he therefore bequeathed it to Genoa, his native place. This touch of half affection, half professional jealousy, reminds us strongly of the feudal warrior, desiring that his warhorse might be sacrificed on his grave, and his good sword interred with his remains; or of the ancient bard, who, in his last moments, destroyed his harp, so that its strings might not be swept by a less worthy hand.

The death of Paganini was not the last scene in his history. After his decease, doubts were raised as to his religious belief. These appear primarily to have rested upon rumours current among the people, and which were strengthened by his having died without receiving the last rites of the church. The bishop of Nice refused to suffer the corpse to be interred in consecrated ground, and resisted the entreaties of his friends to be allowed to celebrate a solemn service for the repose of his soul. All the bishop would do was to give an authentic act of decease, and allow the removal of the body. This was not deemed satisfactory, and the corpse still remaining unburied at the hospital of Nice, the matter was brought before the courts

of law, but without success. The body was afterwards taken to the country house of Polcevera, near Genoa, formerly the property of Paganini; and finally the bishop of Parma, less scrupulous than he of Nice, was prevailed on to let the corpse be carried into that Duchy, and interred in the church of Villa Gonja. Thus a sepulchre was at last with difficulty accorded to the remains of the celebrated man, whose genius had won for him a world-wide fame. The funeral took place in May, 1845; but in consequence of orders issued by the Government, it was conducted without pomp or ceremony.

SCHLEIERMACHER.

"THE man is departed, from whom will be dated, for the future, a new epoch in theology." In these words of sorrowing reverence did Dr. Neander convey to the University of Berlin the intelligence of Schleiermacher's death; and from the nature of the tribute thus offered to Schleiermacher, it will at once be seen, that the man, whose life we now present, was a theologian. His life runs much into the lives of many other men; and the field of his chosen labours and fame stands in such intimate connexion with other regions of inquiry, that it seems unavoidable we should often have to trench upon domains which lie, if not beyond our own, yet very contiguous to them.

The biography of any man properly begins at his birth. Schleiermacher's is no exception to this rule; and looking over the records, we find that this initial event happened on the 24th of November, 1768; and that Breslau in Silesia was the city where first he breathed. Much might have been interesting and refreshing to us, concerning the manner and circumstances in which he strode up from infancy to manhood, and with what links the chain that binds together these two periods of life, was composed; upon this point the records are wofully scanty, and manifest a stinginess amounting almost to silence. So rigid is this oracle in its dumbness, that we might almost be tempted to fancy Schleiermacher had no boyhood, but marched directly out of his cradle into his study.

Who Schleiermacher's parents were, and what they ever did towards the good and bettering of the universe, beyond presenting such a son to it, is among the things, which the invariable barrenness of the history obliges us to leave unrecorded. One thing we are favoured with, and that is the fact that they were an honest and a devout couple, professing the religious faith and worthily leading the religious life of the Moravian Christians. True to their convictions of parental duties, their son was duly trained to the usages and manner of worship peculiar to that unostentatious but honourable community; and doubtless went with those of his own years to the numerous juvenile services which abound among the Moravians, where he could hear prayers and sermons adapted to his understanding, and where, also, he was taught to sing, "I love my little papa, I love my little mamma, and brother, the little lamb; I love the dear angels, the little church, and my little heart." Doubtless, also, when he had added more years to his age, and his comprehension had become broader and deeper he would frequent the Agapæ, where sweet music was mingled with pious reflections, and sing the hymns whose mystic devoutness was sweet beyond utterance. Thus too he would visit the graveyards, those sacred and sublime enclosures, "God's acres," and join in the solemn chant which attended not the burial, but the "going home to the Lord," of departed brethren. Such is the kind of moral and religious rearing which youth in the Moravian community enjoy; and, without doubt, Schleiermacher had it, and enjoyed it too, in his young days. His own words, in after days, speak most lovingly of such training: "Piety," he says, in his "Discourses on Religion," was the maternal womb in whose sacred obscurity my young life was nourished, and prepared for the world which was as yet closed to it; in this element my spirit breathed, before it had as yet found its particular department in science and in the experience of life; this was my aid, when I began to sift the faith of my ancestors, and to purify my thoughts and feelings from the rubbish of former ages; this remained to me, when even the God and the immortality of my childhood dis

appeared from before the doubting eye; it led me undesignedly into active life; it showed me how I ought to hold myself sacred with my talents and defects, in my undivided existence, and through it alone have I learned friendship and love."

Parental nurture, however, is strengthened and supplemented among the Moravians by some excellent schools; and to one of these, that at Niesky, in Upper Lusatia, Schleiermacher was sent for his boardingschool education. In this place too the "piety," of which he has spoken with such earnest and tender emotion, still breathed all around him, and baptized him with its ambrosial sweetness. Living beyond his school years in the blessed home of piety, and desirous of evermore abiding there, we find him quitting his Niesky school and entering the Moravian Theological Seminary, at Gnadau in Saxony, with the sublime duties of the Moravian ministry before him, and for which he was now a candidate. In this establishment he continued but for a short time, his piety not diminishing aught, but his scientific reflection developing itself wonderfully. He had begun to interrogate his inner self. He sought to know why he engaged in such religious acts; what all these phenomena of religious exercise meant; within himself he found a basis for his religious duties, but one that would remain, whether his religion found expression for itself in the Moravian way or in that of any other religious body. He had in fact begun to philosophise on religion, his religious nature was demanding a field for self-expansion, which he could not find in the very limited and rudimental territory in which the Moravians enclosed themselves. The result of the strugglings of this soul born for freedom with the narrow creed and unsatisfactory prescriptions of the Moravians, was, that he closed his connection with them at the age of eighteen; and in the year 1787, he betook himself to Halle, in whose university he studied under Nösselt, Knapp, Eberhard, and Wolf. In this seat of learning he remained for three years, giving his unembarassed spirit a wide liberty in all the fields of speculation and science. Philology, philosophy, and theology were the subjects that chiefly appealed to and won his

&c.); and at one, I call on M. Veit, where I meet Schlegel, and a reformed preacher, Schlegel's friend. ... In the evening, I walk with Schlegel in the Zoological Gardens, or under the linden-trees, before the house. Sometimes I make small country parties with Schlegel and his friend." This reformed preacher, who had become the friend of Fichte, as well as of Schlegel, was Schleiermacher, and the influence of this intercourse with Fichte was never lost upon the preacher, and did, doubtless, impel him to higher services for his age, than the translation of sermons.

Somewhere about this time Friedrich and Augustus W. Schlegel started a periodical called the "Athenæum." Tiek, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, were constant writers in the same. The aim of this journal was to effect an entire change in the literature of Germany. By a bold and fearless course of polemics, these young literary Ishmaelites published and enforced their undisguised hostility against the mental poverty and Philistinism of the age, aiming their barbed arrows chiefly at Kotzebue and Offland. The time, however, had not yet come for these attacks to take full effect. The hands of the strong writers being turned against every man not of their party, challenged a return of the favour; the periodical did not find remunerating support; and after three years of smart firing, its batteries become silent.

One circumstance, however, closely associated with this Athenæum-sparring must not be omitted, as Schleiermacher was too deeply involved in it. Friedrich Schlegel, in 1799, published his "Lucinde," a work, to take Mrs. Austin's description of it, "of fancy, sentiment, and reflection," in which, however, the very anti-Platonic character of his description of love, occasioned not a little scandal and censure. What the precise object of the author in this equivocal novel was, may admit of question, though, perhaps, it is not unaptly characterised by a German critic as a fantastic and dreamy attempt to exalt and sublimate sensual love. Certain it is that the public in general conceived, and not without some reason that, like Hemse's 'Ardinghello,' it was an elaborate attempt to invest sensuality with grace, and to lavish a

poetical colouring on scenes and incidents of a very questionable character."

The "Lucinde " produced a great sensation in Germany, and was admired and commended by men of the highest eminence, while by others it was as strenuously reprobated. Schlegel himself seems to have felt the justice and the power of the adverse criticism, as he never published the remaining volumes of the novel. The business, however, brought Schleiermacher into hot water, as he had lavished the most extravagant encomiums on the book, in a series of "Coufidential Letters on the Lucinde," which he published in the "Athensum." It seems pretty clear, though, that Schleiermacher was not aware or the dangerous tendency of the book he had so inadvertently belauded. About this there seems to be a moral certainty, as the said letters have not been republished among Schleiermacher's works; doubtless he regarded them as a mistake, and would have them duly forgotten. But some men take a delight in making a man say over again what he has no heart to repeat, yea, even what he has long since recanted and disavowed. So it happened in this case, for shortly after Schleiermacher's death, Karl Gutzkow, a writer and leader in the school known as "Young Germany," raked over the dusty and forgotten pages of the Athenæum, dragged forth these unfortunate letters from the chaff and ruins of the times," and republished them with the intention of vilifying the noble character of their author, and of drawing censure upon him for the long-forgotten aberrations of his youth. Their publication at first created considerable sensation; but the voice of Germany rose indignantly against so base an act of injustice and cowardice towards the honoured and silent dead, and Gutzkow speedily saw his unmanly labour ending in a merited abortion.

Passing by the contributions to the defunct Athenæum, and the whirl of Gutzkow-dust, we come upon the first real product of Schleiermacher, the noble corner-stone of the stately edifice with which his name is associated. At the close of the last century, amid a howling wilderness of perverted genius, and close by heaps of shattered craters and smouldering lava of num