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as she bade me, and followed her in silence, while she went cautiously up to the window, and having examined what was passing within with all the deliberate cunning of a maniac, then gently lifted the latch of the door, which opened into a narrow brickpassage to the left of the kitchen. At the end of it was a short flight of stairs, and these led us into the room where I had before observed the lamp was burning; in the middle of the chamber was a plain deal coffin on tressels, in which lay the corpse of poor Harry, all but the face covered over with a dirty table-cloth. I now saw plainly that the peasants had held their watch below from pure fear of being in the same room with the dead, and a state of partial intoxication might account for their having left the door open,-but to what purpose was this visit of Nancy's? She did not long leave me in doubt.

"Now, Mr. Seymour; you call yourself my father's friend; you have eaten of his bread;-will you see him hung like a thief on a gibbet?"

The strangeness of this appeal startled me so that I knew not well what to answer. She repeated the question while her eyes flashed fire: "Will you see him hung?-hung? -hung?-You understand that word, I suppose."

"My dear Nancy,"

"By God's light, coward, I have a mind to put this knife into you. Don't you see he is their prisonerin chains?-And to-morrow he will be tried and hung-Yes, my poor father will be hung."

And in her changing mood she wept and sobbed like an infant; this however did not last long

"But they shall not-no-they shall not. Here, take this knifeplunge it into him, that they may not have him alive-'tis a hard task for a daughter, and since you are here, take it and stab him as he sleepsmind you do not wake him thoughstab home-no half-work-home to the heart-you know where it is— Here-here."

She placed my hand upon her heart as if to show me where to strike -I drew back shuddering.

"Coward!-But you shall do it-it is a task of your own seeking➡

you came here of your own free will I did not ask you to follow meand you shall do it!"

I knew not what to say or do, and for a moment thought of flinging myself upon her to force away the knife, when I heard a scuffle below. A few blows were exchanged, a single pistol-shot discharged, and immediately after was the tramp of feet upon the stairs. Nancy uttered a loud shriek—

"They are here!"

Scarcely were the words uttered than she rushed up to the coffin, and ere I could prevent her, plunged the knife twice or thrice into the dead body. In the same instant the room was filled with smugglers, headed by young Woodriff, who was astonished, as well he might be, at the extraordinary scene before him.

"Mr. Seymour!-Nance too!Poor girl!-But we have no time for talking, so all hands to work and help bear off the old man to the boat

we'll soon have him in fifty fathoms water out of the reach of these b-d harpies."

"My father!-You shall not take my father from me!"-shrieked the poor maniac.

"Be quiet, Nance !-Gently, lads, down the stair-case-look to our Nance, Mr. Seymour-gently, lads— I'd sooner knock twenty living men on the head than hear one blow given to a dead one."

So saying, and having again briefly entreated my care of his sister, he followed the corpse out, while the unfortunate maniac, quite contrary to my expectations, made no farther opposition. She leant for a time against the window without speaking a word, and, when I tried to persuade her to return, very calmly replied,-" with all my heart. what purpose should I stay here since they have taken my father from me? They'll hang him now, and I cannot help it."

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"My poor girl, your father is dead."

Nancy smiled contemptuously, and, passing her hand across her brow as if exhausted, said, "I am ready to faint; will you be kind enough to fetch me a glass of water."

She did, indeed, seem ready to drop, and I went down into the

kitchen to fetch the water. Seven or eight smugglers were there keeping watch over the peasants, and the sentinel, mistaking me for an enemy, levelled his pistol at my head; but the priming flashed in the pan, and, before he could repeat the attack, an old man, who had often seen me with Frank, stepped between us just in good time to save me by his expla

nation.

Upon telling him my purpose he directed me to the well in the yard, at the same time putting a lantern into my hand with a caution to "look to the rotting tackling."-A caution that was not given without good reason, for the wood-work round the well was so decayed that it would scarcely bear the action of the cylinder.

In a few minutes I had drawn up the bucket, and hastened back to Nancy with a jug full of the water. To my great surprise she was gone, and I now saw-too late indeed,that her request for water was merely a trick to get rid of me, that she might the better escape, though, what her farther object in it might be, I could not possibly divine. It was not long, however, before I learnt this too; for on looking out of the window, I saw her, with the lamp still in her hand, pushing out to sea in a small skiff, that was half afloat,

and held only by a thin cable. How she contrived to throw off the rope I know not, but she did contrive itperhaps she had the knife with her, and cut it. Be this as it may, she was pushing off amidst the breakers that burst about her most tremendously, and kept up a most violent surf for at least half a mile from the shore. Was not this under the idea of rescuing her father?

In an instant I gave the alarm, and the smugglers, leaving the peasants to do their worst, hurried off with me to the beach. Nancy was now about a hundred yards from the shore in the midst of a furious surge, for though it was too dark to see her, the glimmer of the lamp was visible every now and then as the boat rose upon the waters.

"By G-d! it's of no use," said the old smuggler,-" No skiff can get through them breakers."

"Well, but she has." "Not yet, master-see-the light's gone-it's all up with her now."

The light had indeed gone, and not as before to rise again with the rise of the waters. Minute after minute elapsed, and still all was dark upon the waves, and the next morning the corse of Nancy Woodriff was found on the sands, about half a mile from the place where she had first pushed off amid the breakers.

G. S.

THE SICK MAN'S SUMMER EVENING.

Он, life is all so sweet! so sweet!
To feel the living pulses beat!
To drink the air that round us flows!
To gaze upon the sky's deep ocean!
To see the life that round us glows,

And feel that life in us has motion !
All this has been-all this must be ;-
But oh! it will no more for me.

The Spring, with Pleasure by her side,
That pipes the measure of his bride!
The Summer, faint with hot desire!

The Autumn drunk, his rich ales flowing!

The gossip Winter's blazing fire,

With tales of eld, while winds are blowing! All this has been-all this must be ;But oh! it will no more for me,

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Be not alarmed, Mr. Editor;-I am no artist, no professional critic, no established connoisseur; not even an amateur of paintings, except in its primitive sense of an admirer or lover of that art, whose legitimate object is to convey a faithful imitation of pleasing nature. I know little of the masters; care nothing for the schools; and disdain to learn by rote the technical babble about gusto, chiaro-oscuro, handling, tints and half tints, orpiments, pigments, lucid and opaque, carnations, Spanish brown, Venetian red, and Naples yellow but having a practised eye and a fervent feeling for the great original, as executed by the hand of the Creator, I consider myself competent, without other apprenticeship, to form an opinion of any copy modified by the pencil of man. I need not put my eye to school to enable it to judge of resemblances; nor make my heart member of an academy, that it may learn responses to the whisperings of external beauty. Perhaps the critics think otherwise, but they may be very positive and yet very wrong. In the infancy of painting, the artists contented themselves with a simple imitation of nature, and he was the best performer who could produce the cleverest deception. It was reckoned a great triumph when Bucephalus neighed at Alexander's portrait; Zeuxis snapped his fingers at Parrhasius when the birds came to peck at his painted grapes, but confessed himself outdone, when, on offering to remove a curtain that apparently covered a portion of his rival's canvas, he discovered it to be the production of his brush. In the progress of professional ambition, such easy victories are disdained; difficulties are overcome which were before considered insuperable; foreshortening, perspective, composition, light and shade, are scientifically combined; and while nature assumes no position in which she cannot be faithfully reflected, her imitators select none in which she cannot be pleasingly as well as accurately represented. The arts have their de

cline and fall as well as empires; and painting, from this epoch, begins to feel the touches of corruption, until the conquest of technical difficulties is deemed the paramount excellence; subjects are selected, not because they are pleasing, but because they afford an opportunity for display of talent; and it becomes the grand object of an artist to exhibit himself rather than nature. Hence mannerism, and hence the propriety of terming the present era the age of artists rather than the age of the arts.

Literature follows the same course in Lord Byron, for instance, is not nature every where subordinate to self-display? he is his own muse, and drawing upon himself for inspiration, needs no other Pegasus than his favourite hobbyhorse-Egotism. Our musical composers are too busy in exhibiting their science to think of pleasing our ears: Braham forgets the composer, that the singer may manifest his execution; and even our daughters when they come from boardingschool, disdain to recreate us with any simple or pathetic melodies, that they may dazzle and astonish us with the velocity of their fingers in rattling through a difficult piece.

But what has all this to do with Soult and his Murillos?-nothingsave that it occurred to me as I was crossing the Pont Royal on my way to his hotel, and so completely engrossed my attention, that I was nearly run over by a cabriolet.Having finished my exordium, and escaped the wheels, I proceeded to the Fauxbourg St. Germain, and turned into the court-yard of Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, in a corner of which were four stablemen, too busy in tossing up halfpence to bestow even a look upon the visitors. Probably, his Grace has often indulged in a similar recreation, but having tossed up his halfpence to better account, he has found his way into the saloon, and left his competitors in the stable-yard. A groom of the chambers having conducted us through that indispensable ap

pendage to every French mansion, a spacious billiard-room, led us to a small ante-chamber, where we were received with a plain frank courtesy by the Marshal,-a middle-sized, though somewhat corpulent personage of from fifty to sixty years of age, whose dark curling hair rendered somewhat conspicuous the bald patch in the middle of his head, while his sun-burnt complexion accorded well with his dark intelligent eye. His black stock, plain dark coat, and loose blue trowsers, which, capacious as they were, could not hide his bow-legged form, obviously suggested the soldier rather than the courtier, the Marshal rather than the Duke; though if I had encountered such a figure in London, I should rather have guessed him to be an honest East or West India captain. A Frenchman entitled by birth to similar rank and fortune would have been forward, and vain, and loquacious, amid his unmerited distinctions, but methought upon Soult's countenance there sat an air of reserve, and even awkwardness, in doing the honours of his proud mansion, as if he felt conscious that he assimilated not well with its magnificence: I could fancy him saying to himself-Here I stand, a plain soldier of fortune, consenting to use splendidly the wealth which I have acquired, and the greatness which has been thrust upon me, but disdaining to adopt in my own person any of the fopperies of state.

Beside him, in a round, lightcoloured frock-coat descending nearly to his feet, stood a tallish thin figure, whose matted powdered hair, falling over his forehead and ears like the sedge of a river-god, seemed to render still paler his coarse and somewhat pock-marked countenance, which bore an expression of habitual cunning. This was the celebrated Talleyrand. Distrust and subtlety appeared lurking in his peeping eyes, deep set beneath a contracted brow; and though he looked sometimes at the pictures, sometimes at the visitors, his thoughts were not with his looks; his brain was at work, but upon other machinations than the criticising of Murillos. How different the animated physiognomy of that vivacious little baldheaded man, whose sparkling black eye de coys your attention from his dila

pidated mouth and plain features, as it catches with keen enjoyment the beauties of art, and points them out to others with not less eagerness than it discovers them. That is Denon, the Egyptian traveller, now in his eighty-fifth year, whose whole exterior indicates the savant so much more than the soldier, that one is astonished how he could so far have combined the two, as to gallop round the ruins of the great temple at Luxor in an hour.

Accompanied by these personages, and others of less celebrity, we walked through the sumptuous apartments, all decorated in the most costly and elegant manner, although the gold leaf, as usual in this country, had been spread over the cornices, and doors, and ceilings, with somewhat of gilt-gingerbread prodigality. In the last room but one we encountered the state bed, of blue embroidered satin, with rich gold fringe and decorations, the bedstead emblazoned with gorgeous military trophies and devices; the dogs of the fire-places formed so as to represent handsome brass mortars; the walls painted with martial symbols, and every thing in the same warlike consistency, except a white marble console, on which stood a bust of Louis the eighteenth! This incongruity seemed to impart its puzzling contradiction to my own thoughts. Unable to account for the presence of this royal personage either in the copy or the original, I threw back my mind a few years, and found it still more incredible that I myself should be where I then was, courteously received by personages who were figuring in our papers as implacable and eternal enemies, and gazing upon altar-pieces which were then hallowed by the "dim religious light" of Spanish cathedrals, or only uncurtained that they might receive the adoration of kneeling nuns, while sacred music and symphonious hymns floated around them. The past and the present refused to amalgamate in my reveries-all seemed a waking dream-a solecism of fact-a practical impossibility—an anomalous jumble both of time and place.

Roused from this abstraction by the admiration expressed at Murillo's large painting of the Nativity, I proceeded to examine it. Having scarcely any thing in England but the Cot

tage Girls, Gipsy Boys, and other juvenile polissons of this artist, one is prepossessed with the idea that he could not elevate himself to the poetry of painting and the sublime of Scriptural illustration; but if this single picture be not sufficient to remove so erroneous an impression, let the spectator contemplate the Return of the Prodigal Son, by its side; and their combined effect will banish all his scepticism. In that of Our Savour at the Pool of Bethesda, the head of Christ is conceived to have realised that almost unattainable perfection-a happy union of the divine and human expression; while the Angel appearing to St. Peter in his Prison does not lose the celestial beauty in the look of sympathising earnestness with which he is addressing the saint. Almost all the paintings are of large dimensions, and in excellent preservation; and not one can be scrutinised without a conviction that Murillo's great teacher was Nature. The Fairs and Markets

of his master Juan del Castillio were too ignoble for his ambition; he was too poor to go to Italy; and though he had access at Madrid to some of the works of Rubens and Vandyck, he was content with neither a pulpy Venus, nor a full-ruffed portrait, but betook himself to the study of the great goddess. Exhibiting none of that mannerism, self-display, and pedantry to which I alluded in the outset, he blends every thing harmoniously and naturally; and remembering that the object of his art is to please, he lends himself to the expression of amiable and tender sentiments with a felicity in which no artist has exceeded him. Let any unprejudiced person proceed from the annual exposition of the gaudy and theatrical French school at the Louvre to Marshal Soult's gallery of Murillos, and he will at once recognise the superiority of native untutored genius over the imitative pedantic efforts of institutions, schools, and academies.

H.

SONNETS.

TO THE SKY-LARK.

O EARLIEST singer! O care-charming bird!
Married to morning by a sweeter hymn
Than priest e'er chaunted from his cloister dim
At midnight; or veil'd virgin's holier word,
At sun-rise, or the paler evening heard ;-

To which of all heaven's young and lovely Hours, That wreathe soft light in hyacinthine bowers, Beautiful spirit, is thy suit preferr'd?—

Unlike the creatures of this low dull earth,
Still dost thou woo although thy suit be won;
And thus thy mistress bright is pleased ever.
Oh! lose not thou this mark of finer birth;
So may'st thou yet live on from sun to sun,
Thy joy uncheck'd, thy sweet song silent never.

A STILL PLACE.

Under what beechen shade, or silent oak,
Lies the mute Sylvan now,-mysterious Pan?
-Once (while rich Peneus and Ilissus ran
Clear from their fountains)-as the morning broke,
'Tis said, the satyr with Apollo spoke,

And to harmonious strife, with his wild reed, Challenged the god, whose music was indeed Divine, and fit for heaven.-Each play'd, and woke Beautiful sounds to life, deep melodies:

One blew his pastoral pipe with such nice care
That flocks and birds all answer'd him; and one
Shook his immortal showers upon the air.
That music hath ascended to the sun;-

B.

But where the other?-Speak! ye dells and trees!

B.

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