Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE — VOLUME 56, NO. 345, JULY, 1844 ***

BLACKWOOD'S

Edinburgh

MAGAZINE.

VOL. LVI.

JULY-DECEMBER, 1844.

[Illustration]

1844.

* * * * *

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

* * * * *

No. CCCXLV. JULY, 1844. VOL. LVI.

* * * * *

CONTENTS.

CAUSES OF THE INCREASE OF CRIME
THE HEART OF THE BRUCE
MEMORANDUMS OF A MONTH'S TOUR IN SICILY
THE LAST OF THE KNIGHTS
POEMS AND BALLADS OF GOETHE. NO. I.
MY FIRST LOVE.--A SKETCH IN NEW YORK
HYDRO-BACCHUS
MARTIN LUTHER.--AN ODE
TRADITIONS AND TALES OF UPPER LUSATIA. NO. II. THE FAIRY TUTOR
PORTUGAL
MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. PART XII.
THE WEEK OF AN EMPEROR

* * * * *

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 22, PALL-MALL, LONDON.

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS THE UNITED KINGDOM.

* * * * *

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.

* * * * *

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

* * * * *

No. CCCXLV. JULY, 1844. VOL. LVI.

* * * * *

CAUSES OF THE INCREASE OF CRIME.

If the past increase and present amount of crime in the British
islands be alone considered, it must afford grounds for the most
melancholy forebodings. When we recollect that since the year 1805,
that is, during a period of less than forty years, in the course of
which population has advanced about sixty-five _per cent_ in Great
Britain and Ireland, crime in England has increased seven hundred per
cent, in Ireland about eight hundred per cent, and in Scotland above
_three thousand six hundred per cent_;[1] it is difficult to say what
is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the
progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase of the
numbers of the people. Nor is the alarming nature of the prospect
diminished by the reflection, that this astonishing increase in human
depravity has taken place during a period of unexampled prosperity
and unprecedented progress, during which the produce of the national
industry had tripled, and the labours of the husbandman kept pace
with the vast increase in the population they were to feed--in which
the British empire carried its victorious arms into every quarter of
the globe, and colonies sprang up on all sides with unheard-of
rapidity--in which a hundred thousand emigrants came ultimately to
migrate every year from the parent state into the new regions
conquered by its arms, or discovered by its adventure. If this is the
progress of crime during the days of its prosperity, what is it
likely to become in those of its decline, when this prodigious vent
for superfluous numbers has come to be in a great measure closed, and
this unheard-of wealth and prosperity has ceased to gladden the land?

[Footnote 1: See No. 343, _Blackwood's Magazine_, p. 534, Vol. lv.]

To discover to what causes this extraordinary increase of crime is to
be ascribed, we must first examine the localities in which it has
principally arisen, and endeavour to ascertain whether it is to be
found chiefly in the agricultural, pastoral, or manufacturing
districts. We must then consider the condition of the labouring
classes, and the means provided to restrain them in the quarters
where the progress of crime has been most alarming; and inquire
whether the existing evils are insurmountable and unavoidable, or
have arisen from the supineness, the errors, and the selfishness of
man. The inquiry is one of the most interesting which can occupy the
thoughts of the far-seeing and humane; for it involves the temporal
and eternal welfare of millions of their fellow-creatures;--it may
well arrest the attention of the selfish, and divert for a few
minutes the profligate from their pursuits; for on it depends whether
the darling wealth of the former is to be preserved or destroyed, and
the exciting enjoyments of the other arrested or suffered to
continue.

To elucidate the first of these questions, we subjoin a table,
compiled from the Parliamentary returns, exhibiting the progress of
serious crime in the principal counties, agricultural pastoral, and
manufacturing, of the empire, during the last fifteen years. We are
unwilling to load our pages with figures, and are well aware how
distasteful they are to a large class of readers; and if those
results were as familiar to others as they are to ourselves, we
should be too happy to take them for granted, as they do first
principles in the House of Commons, and proceed at once to the means
of remedy. But the facts on this subject have been so often
misrepresented by party or prejudice, and are in themselves so
generally unknown, that it is indispensable to lay a foundation in
authentic information before proceeding further in the inquiry. The
greatest difficulty which those practically acquainted with the
subject experience in such an investigation, is to make people
believe their statements, even when founded on the most extensive
practical knowledge, or the more accurate statistical inquiry. There
is such a prodigious difference between the condition of mankind and
the progress of corruption in the agricultural or pastoral, and
manufacturing or densely peopled districts, that those accustomed to
the former will not believe any statements made regarding the latter.
They say they are incredible or exaggerated; that the persons who
make them are _têtes montées_; that their ideas are very vague, and
their suggestions utterly unworthy the consideration either of men of
sense or of government. With such deplorable illusions does ignorance
repel the suggestions of knowledge; theory, of experience;
selfishness, of philanthropy; cowardice, of resolution. Thus nothing
whatever is done to remedy or avert the existing evils: the districts
not endangered unite as one man to resist any attempt to form a
general system for the alleviation of misery or diminution of crime
in those that are, and the preponderance of the unendangered
districts in the legislature gives them the means of effectually
doing so. The evils in the endangered districts are such, that it is
universally felt they are beyond the reach of local remedy or
alleviation. Thus, between the two, nothing whatever is done to
arrest, or guard against, the existing or impending evils. Meanwhile,
destitution, profligacy, sensuality, and crime, advance with
unheard-of rapidity in the manufacturing districts, and the dangerous
classes there massed together combine every three or four years in
some general strike or alarming insurrection, which, while it lasts,
excites universal terror, and is succeeded, when suppressed, by the
same deplorable system of supineness, selfishness, and infatuation.

[Footnote 2: Table showing the number of committments for serious
crimes, and population, in the year 1841, in the under-mentioned
counties of Great Britain;--

I.--PASTORAL.

Names of Counties. Population Commitments Proportion of
in 1841. for serious crime committments
in 1841. to population.

Cumberland, 178,038 151 1 in 1,194
Derby, 272,217 277 1 in 964
Anglesey, 50,891 13 1 in 3,900
Carnarvon, 81,093 33 1 in 2,452
Inverness-shire, 97,799 106 1 in 915
Selkirkshire, 7,990 4 1 in 1,990
Argyleshire, 97,371 96 1 in 1,010

Total, 785,399 680 1 in 1,155

II.-AGRICULTURAL AND MANUFACTURING.

Commitments Proportion of
Population for serious crime commitments
Names of Counties. in 1841. in 1841. to population.

Shropshire, 239,048 416 1 in 574
Kent, 548,337 962 1 in 569
Norfolk, 412,664 666 1 in 518
Essex, 344,979 647 1 in 533
Northumberland, 250,278 226 1 in 1,106
East Lothian, 35,886 38 1 in 994
Perthshire, 137,390 116 1 in 1,181
Aberdeenshire, 192,387 92 1 in 2,086

Total, 2,160,969 3,163 1 in 682

III.-MANUFACTURING AND MINING.

Commitments Proportion of
Population for serious crime commitments
Names of Counties. in 1841. in 1841. to population.

Middlesex, 1,576,636 3,586 1 in 439
Lancashire, 1,667,054 3,987 1 in 418
Staffordshire, 510,504 1,059 1 in 482
Yorkshire, 1,591,480 1,895 1 in 839
Glamorganshire, 171,188 189 1 in 909
Lanarkshire, 426,972 513 1 in 832
Renfrewshire 155,072 505 1 in 306
Forfarshire, 170,520 333 1 in 512

Total, 6,269,426 12,067 1 in 476

--PORTER'S _Parl. Tables_, 1841, 163; and _Census_ 1841.]

The table in the note exhibits the number of commitments for serious
offences, with the population of each, of eight counties--pastoral,
agricultural, and manufacturing--in Great Britain during the year
1841[2]. We take the returns for that year, both because it was the
year in which the census was taken, and because the succeeding year,
1842, being the year of the great outbreak in England, and violent
strike in Scotland, the figures, both in that and the succeeding
year, may be supposed to exhibit a more unfavourable result for the
manufacturing districts than a fair average of years. From this
table, it appears that the vast preponderance of crime is to be found
in the manufacturing or densely-peopled districts, and that the
proportion per cent of commitments which they exhibit, as compared
with the population, is generally three, often five times, what
appears in the purely agricultural and pastoral districts. The
comparative criminality of the agricultural, manufacturing, and
pastoral districts is not to be considered as accurately measured by
these returns, because so many of the agricultural counties,
especially in England, are overspread with towns and manufactories or
collieries. Thus Kent and Shropshire are justly classed with
agricultural counties, though part of the former is in fact a suburb
of London, and of the latter overspread with demoralizing coal mines.
The entire want of any police force in some of the greatest
manufacturing counties, as Lanarkshire, by permitting
nineteen-twentieths of the crime to go unpunished, exhibits a far
less amount of criminality than would be brought to light under a
more vigilant system. But still there is enough in this table to
attract serious and instructive attention. It appears that the
average of seven pastoral counties exhibits an average of 1
commitment for serious offences out of 1155 souls: of eight counties,
partly agricultural and partly manufacturing, of 1 in 682: and of
eight manufacturing and mining, of 1 in 476! And the difference
between individual counties is still more remarkable, especially when
counties purely agricultural or pastoral can be compared with those
for the most part manufacturing or mining. Thus the proportion of
commitment for serious crime in the pastoral counties of

Anglesey, is 1 in 3900
Carnarvon, 1 in 2452
Selkirk, 1 in 1990
Cumberland, 1 in 1194

In the purely agricultural counties of

Aberdeenshire, is 1 in 2086
East-Lothian, 1 in 994
Northumberland, 1 in 1106
Perthshire, 1 in 1181

While in the great manufacturing or mining counties of

Lancashire, is 1 in 418
Staffordshire, 1 in 482
Middlesex, 1 in 439
Yorkshire, 1 in 839
Lanarkshire, 1 in 832[3]
Renfrewshire, 1 in 306

[Footnote 3: Lanarkshire has no police except in Glasgow, or its
serious crime would be about 1 in 400, or 350.]

Further, the statistical returns of crime demonstrate, not only that
such is the present state of crime in the densely peopled and
manufacturing districts, compared to what obtains in the agricultural
or pastoral, but that the tendency of matters is still worse;[4] and
that, great as has been the increase of population during the last
thirty years in the manufacturing and densely peopled districts, the
progress of crime has been still greater and more alarming. From the
instructive and curious tables below, constructed from the criminal
returns given in _Porter's Parliamentary Tables_, and the returns of
the census taken in 1821, 1831, and 1841, it appears, that while in
some of the purely pastoral counties, such as Selkirk and Anglesey,
crime has remained during the last twenty years nearly stationary,
and in some of the purely agricultural, such as Perth and Aberdeen,
it has considerably _diminished_, in the agricultural and mining or
manufacturing, such as Shropshire and Kent, it has _doubled_ during
the same period: and in the manufacturing and mining districts, such
as Lancashire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, and Renfrewshire, more than
_tripled_ in the same time. It appears, from the same authentic
sources of information, that the progress of crime during the last
twenty years has been much more rapid in the manufacturing and
densely peopled than in the simply densely peopled districts; for in
Middlesex, during the last twenty years, population has advanced
about fifty per cent, and serious crime has increased in nearly the
same proportion, having swelled from 2480 to 3514: whereas in
Lancashire, during the same period, population has advanced also
fifty per cent, but serious crime has considerably _more than
doubled_, having risen from 1716 to 3987.

[Footnote 4: Table, showing the comparative population, and
committals for serious crime, in the under-mentioned counties, in the
years 1821, 1831, and 1841.

I.--PASTORAL

1821. 1831. 1841.
Pop. Com. Pop. Com. Pop. Com.

Cumberland, 156,124 66 169,681 74 178,038 151
Derby, 213,333 105 237,070 202 272,217 277
Anglesey, 43,325 10 48,325 8 50,891 13
Carnarvon, 57,358 12 66,448 36 81,893 33
Inverness, 90,157 ... 94,797 35 97,799 106
Selkirk, 6,637 ... 6,833 2 7,990 4
Argyle, 97,316 ... 100,973 41 97,321 96

II.--AGRICULTURAL AND MANUFACTURING.

1821. 1831. 1841.
Pop. Com. Pop. Com. Pop. Com.

Shropshire, 266,153 159 222,938 228 239,048 416
Kent, 426,916 492 479,155 640 548,337 962
Norfolk, 344,368 356 390,054 549 412,664 666
Essex, 289,424 303 317,507 607 344,979 647
Northumberland, 198,965 70 222,912 108 250,278 226
East Lothian, 35,127 ... 36,145 23 35,886 38
Perthshire, 139,050 ... 142,894 140 137,390 116
Aberdeenshire, 155,387 ... 177,657 161 192,387 92

III.--MANUFACTURING AND MINING.

1821. 1831. 1841.
Pop. Com. Pop. Com. Pop. Com.

Middlesex, 1,144,531 2,480 1,358,330 3,514 1,576,636 3,586
Lancashire, 1,052,859 1,716 1,336,854 2,352 1,667,054 3,987
Staffordshire, 345,895 374 410,512 644 510,504 1,059
Yorkshire, 801,274 757 976,350 1,270 1,154,111 1,895
Glamorgan, 101,737 28 126,612 132 171,188 189
Lanark, 244,387 ... 316,849 470 426,972 513
Renfrew, 112,175 ... 133,443 205 155,072 505
Forfar, 113,430 ... 139,666 124 l70,520 333

--PORTER'S _Parl. Tables, and Census_ 1841.]

Here, then, we are at length on firm ground in point of fact. Several
writers of the liberal school who had a partiality for manufactures,
because their chief political supporters were to be found among that
class of society, have laboured hard to show that manufactures are
noways detrimental either to health or morals; and that the mortality
and crime of the manufacturing counties were in no respect greater
than those of the pastoral or agricultural districts. The common
sense of mankind has uniformly revolted against this absurdity, so
completely contrary to what experience every where tells in a
language not to be misunderstood; but it has now been completely
disproved by the Parliamentary returns. The criminal statistics have
exposed this fallacy as completely, in reference to the different
degrees of depravity in different parts of the empire, as the
registrar-general's returns have, in regard to the different degrees
of salubrity in employments, and mortality in rural districts and
manufacturing places. It now distinctly appears that crime is greatly
more prevalent in proportion to the numbers of the people in densely
peopled than thinly inhabited localities, and that it is making far
more rapid progress in the former situation than the latter.
Statistics are not to be despised when they thus, at once and
decisively, disprove errors so assiduously spread, maintained by
writers of such respectability, and supported by such large and
powerful bodies in the state.

Nor can it be urged with the slightest degree of foundation, that
this superior criminality of the manufacturing and densely peopled
districts is owing to a police force being more generally established
than in the agricultural or pastoral, and thus crime being more
thoroughly detected in the former situation than the latter. For, in
the first place, in several of the greatest manufacturing counties,
particularly Lanarkshire in Scotland, there is no police at all; and
the criminal establishment is just what it was forty years ago. In
the next place, a police force is the _consequence_ of a previous
vast accumulation or crime, and is never established till the risk to
life and insecurity to property had rendered it unbearable. Being
always established by the voluntary assessment of the inhabitants,
nothing can be more certain than that it never can be called into
existence but by such an increase of crime as has rendered it a
matter of necessity.

We are far, however, from having approached the whole truth, if we
have merely ascertained, upon authentic evidence, that crime is
greatly more prevalent in the manufacturing than the rural districts.
That will probably be generally conceded; and the preceding details
have been given merely to show the extent of the difference, and the
rapid steps which it is taking. It is more material to inquire what
are the causes of this superior profligacy of manufacturing to rural
districts; and whether it arises unavoidably from the nature of their
respective employments, or is in some degree within the reach of
human amendment or prevention.

It is usual for persons who are not practically acquainted with the
subject, to represent manufacturing occupations as necessarily and
inevitably hurtful to the human mind. The crowding together, it is
said, young persons, of different sexes and in great numbers, in the
hot atmosphere and damp occupations of factories or mines, is
necessarily destructive to morality, and ruinous to regularity of
habit. The passions are excited by proximity of situation or indecent
exposure; infant labour early emancipates the young from parental
control; domestic subordination, the true foundation for social
virtue, is destroyed; the young exposed to temptation before they
have acquired strength to resist it; and vice spreads the more
extensively from the very magnitude of the establishments on which
the manufacturing greatness of the country depends. Such views are
generally entertained by writers on the social state of the country;
and being implicitly adopted by the bulk of the community, the nation
has abandoned itself to a sort of despair on the subject, and
regarding manufacturing districts as the necessary and unavoidable
hotbed of crimes, strives only to prevent the spreading of the
contagion into the rural parts of the country.

There is certain degree of truth in these observations; but they are
much exaggerated, and it is not in these causes that the principal
sources of the profligacy of the manufacturing districts is to be
found.

The real cause of the demoralization of manufacturing towns is to be
found, not in the nature of the employment which the people there
receive, so much as in the manner in which they are brought together,
the unhappy prevalence of general strikes, and the prodigious
multitudes who are cast down by the ordinary vicissitudes of life, or
the profligacy of their parents, into a situation of want,
wretchedness, and despair.

Consider how, during the last half century, the people have been
brought together in the great manufacturing districts of England and
Scotland. So rapid has been the progress of manufacturing industry
during that period, that it has altogether out-stripped the powers of
population in the districts where it was going forward, and
occasioned a prodigious influx of persons from different and distant
quarters, who have migrated from their paternal homes, and settled in
the manufacturing districts, never to return.[5] Authentic evidence
proves, that not less than _two millions_ of persons have, in this
way, been transferred to the manufacturing counties of the north of
England within the last forty years, chiefly from the agricultural
counties of the south of that kingdom, or from Ireland. Not less than
three hundred and fifty thousand persons have, during the same
period, migrated into the two manufacturing counties of Lanark and
Renfrew alone, in Scotland, chiefly from the Scotch Highlands, or
north of Ireland. No such astonishing migration of the human species
in so short a time, and to settle on so small a space, is on record
in the whole annals of the world. It is unnecessary to say that the
increase is to be ascribed chiefly, if not entirely, to immigration;
for it is well known that such is the unhealthiness of manufacturing
towns, especially to young children, that, so far from being able to
add to their numbers, they are hardly ever able, without extraneous
addition, to maintain them.

[Footnote 5: Table showing the Population in 1801, 1891, and 1841, in
the under-mentioned counties of Great Britain.

Increase in
1801 1821 1841 forty years.

Lancashire, 672,731 1,052,859 1,667,054 994,323
Yorkshire, W.R., 565,282 801,274 1,154,101 588,819
Staffordshire, 233,153 343,895 510,504 277,351
Nottingham, 140,350 186,873 249,910 109,560
Warwick, 208,190 274,322 401,715 193,155
Gloucester, 250,809 335,843 431,383 180,574

2,070,515 2,995,066 4,412,667 2,343,782

Lanark, 146,699 244,387 434,972 288,273
Renfrew, 78,056 112,175 155,072 77,016

224,755 356,562 590,044 365,289

--_Census of_ 1841. Preface, p. 8 and 9.]

Various causes have combined to produce demoralization among the vast
crowd, thus suddenly attracted, by the alluring prospect of high
wages and steady employment, from the rural to the manufacturing
districts. In the first place, they acquired wealth before they had
learned how to use it, and that is, perhaps, the most general cause
of the rapid degeneracy of mankind. High wages flowed in upon them
before they had acquired the artificial wants in the gratification of
which they could be innocently spent. Thence the general recourse to
the grosser and sensual enjoyments, which are powerful alike on the
savage and the sage. Men who, in the wilds of Ireland or the
mountains of Scotland, were making three or four shillings a-week, or
in Sussex ten, suddenly found themselves, as cotton-spinners,
iron-moulders, colliers, or mechanics, in possession of from twenty
to thirty shillings. Meanwhile, their habits and inclinations had
undergone scarce any alteration; they had no taste for comfort in
dress, lodging, or furniture; and as to laying by money, the thing,
of course, was not for a moment thought of. Thus, this vast addition
to their incomes was spent almost exclusively on eating and drinking.
The extent to which gross sensual enjoyment was thus spread among
these first settlers in the regions of commercial opulence, is
incredible. It is an ascertained fact, that above a million a-year is
annually spent in Glasgow on ardent spirits;[6] and it has recently
been asserted by a respectable and intelligent operative in
Manchester, that, in that city, 750,000 _more_ is annually spent on
beer and spirits, than on the purchase of provisions. Is it
surprising that a large part of the progeny of a generation which has
embraced such habits, should be sunk in sensuality and profligacy,
and afford a never-failing supply for the prisons and transport
ships? It is the counterpart of the sudden corruption which
invariably overtakes northern conquerors, when they settle in the
regions of southern opulence.

[Footnote 6: ALISON _on Population_, ii. Appendix A.]

Another powerful cause which promotes the corruption of men, when
thus suddenly congregated together from different quarters in the
manufacturing districts, is, that the restraints of character,
relationship, and vicinity are, in a great measure, lost in the
crowd. Every body knows what powerful influence public opinion, or
the opinion of their relations, friends, and acquaintances, exercises
on all men in their native seats, or when living for any length of
time in one situation. It forms, in fact, next to religion, the most
powerful restraint on vice, and excitement to virtue, that exists in
the world. But when several hundred thousand of the working classes
are suddenly huddled together in densely peopled localities, this
invaluable check is wholly lost. Nay, what is worse, it is rolled
over to the other side; and forms an additional incentive to
licentiousness. The poor in these situations have no neighbours who
care for them, or even know their names; but they are surrounded by
multitudes who are willing to accompany them in the career of
sensuality. They are unknown alike to each other, and to any persons
of respectability or property in their vicinity. Philanthropy seeks
in vain for virtue amidst thousands and tens of thousands of unknown
names; charity itself is repelled by the hopelessness of all attempts
to relieve the stupendous mass of destitution which follows in the
train of such enormous accumulation of numbers. Every individual or
voluntary effort is overlooked amidst the prodigious multitude, as it
was in the Moscow campaign of Napoleon. Thus the most powerful
restraints on human conduct--character, relations, neighbourhood--are
lost upon mankind at the very time when their salutary influence is
most required to enable them to withstand the increasing temptations
arising from density of numbers and a vast increase of wages.
Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion. Isolation
ensures concealment without adding to resolution. This is the true
cause of the more rapid deterioration of the character of the poor
than the rich, when placed in such dense localities. The latter have
a neighbourhood to watch them, because their station renders them
conspicuous--the former have none. Witness the rapid and general
corruption of the higher ranks, when they get away from such
restraint, amidst the profligacy of New South Wales.

In the foremost rank of the causes which demoralize the urban and
mining population, we must place the frequency of those strikes which
unhappily have now become so common as to be of more frequent
occurrence than a wet season, even in our humid climate. During the
last twenty years there have been six great strikes: viz. in 1826,
1828, 1834, 1837, 1842, and 1844. All of these have kept multitudes
of the labouring poor idle for months together. Incalculable is the
demoralization thus produced upon the great mass of the working
classes. We speak not of the actual increase of commitments during
the continuance of a great strike, though that increase is so
considerable that it in general augments them in a single year from
thirty to fifty per cent.[7] We allude to the far more general and
lasting causes of demoralization which arise from the arraying of one
portion of the community in fierce hostility against another, the
wretchedness which is spread among multitudes by months of compulsory
idleness, and the not less ruinous effect of depriving them of
_occupation_ during such protracted periods. When we recollect that
such is the vehemence of party feeling produced by these disastrous
combinations, that it so far obliterates all sense of right and wrong
as generally to make their members countenance contumely and insult,
sometimes even robbery, fire-raising, and murder, committed on
innocent persons who are only striving to earn an honest livelihood
for themselves by hard labour, but in opposition to the strike; and
that it induces twenty and thirty thousand persons to yield implicit
obedience to the commands of an unknown committee, who have power to
force them to do what the Sultan Mahmoud, or the Committee of Public
Safety, never ventured to attempt--to abstain from labour, and endure
want and starvation for months together, for an object of which they
often in secret disapprove--it may be conceived how wide-spread and
fatal is the confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and
insubordination thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a
course of years afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal
commitments, and the number of young persons of both sexes, who,
loosened by these protracted periods of idleness, never afterwards
regain habits of regularity and industry. Nor is the evil lessened by
the blind infatuation with which it is uniformly regarded by the
other classes of the community, and the obstinate resistance they
make to all measures calculated to arrest the violence of these
combinations, in consequence of the expense with which they would
probably be attended--a supineness which, by leaving the coast
constantly clear to the terrors of such associations, and promising
impunity to their crimes, operates as a continual bounty on their
recurrence.

[Footnote 7:

Commitments:--
Lanarkshire. Lancashire. Staffordshire. Yorkshire.
1836 451 2,265 686 1,252
1837[8] 565 2,809 909 1,376
1841 513 3,987 1,059 1,895
1842[9] 696 4,497 1,485 2,598

PORTER'S _Parl. Tables_, xi. 162.--_Parl. Paper of Crime_,
1843, p. 53.]

[Footnote 8: Strike.]

[Footnote 9: Strike.]

Infant labour, unhappily now so frequent in all kinds of factories,
and the great prevalence of female workers, is another evil of a very
serious kind in the manufacturing districts. We do not propose to
enter into the question, recently so fiercely agitated in the
legislature, as to the practicability of substituting a compulsory
ten-hours' bill for the twelve hours' at present in operation.
Anxious to avoid all topics on which there is a difference of opinion
among able and patriotic men, we merely state this prevalence and
precocity of juvenile labour in the manufacturing and mining
districts as _a fact_ which all must deplore, and which is attended
with the most unhappy effects on the rising generation. The great
majority, probably nine-tenths, of all the workers in cotton-mills or
printfields, are females. We have heard much of the profligacy and
licentiousness which pervade such establishments; but though that may
be too true in some cases, it is far from being universal, or even
general; and there are numerous instances of female virtue being as
jealously guarded and effectually preserved in such establishments,
as in the most secluded rural districts. The real evils--and they
follow universally from such employment of juvenile females in great
numbers in laborious but lucrative employment--are the emancipation
of the young from parental control, the temptation held out to
idleness in the parents from the possibility of living on their
children, and the disqualifying the girls for performing all the
domestic duties of wives and mothers in after life.

These evils are real, general, and of ruinous consequence. When
children--from the age of nine or ten in some establishments, of
thirteen or fourteen in all--are able to earn wages varying from 3s.
6d. to 6s. a-week, they soon become in practice independent of
parental control. The strongest of all securities for filial
obedience--a sense of dependence--is destroyed. The children assert
the right of self-government, because they bear the burden of
self-maintenance. Nature, in the ordinary case, has effectually
guarded against this premature and fatal emancipation of the young,
by the protracted period of weakness during childhood and
adolescence, which precludes the possibility of serious labour being
undertaken before the age when a certain degree of mental firmness
has been acquired. But the steam-engine, amidst its other marvels,
has entirely destroyed, within the sphere of its influence, this
happy and necessary exemption of infancy from labour. Steam is the
moving power; it exerts the strength; the human machine is required
only to lift a web periodically, or damp a roller, or twirl a film
round the finger, to which the hands of infancy are as adequate as
those of mature age. Hence the general employment of children, and
especially girls, in such employments. They are equally serviceable
as men or women, and they are more docile, cheaper, and less given to
strikes. But as these children earn their own subsistence, they soon
become rebellious to parental authority, and exercise the freedom of
middle life as soon as they feel its passions, and before they have
acquired its self-control.

If the effect of such premature emancipation of the young is hurtful
to them, it is, if possible, still more pernicious to their parents.
Labour is generally irksome to man; it is seldom persevered in after
the period of its necessity has passed. When parents find that, by
sending three or four children out to the mills or into the mines,
they can get eighteen or twenty shillings a-week without doing any
thing themselves, they soon come to abridge the duration and cost of
education, in order to accelerate the arrival of the happy period
when they may live on their offspring, not their offspring on them.
Thus the purest and best affections of the heart are obliterated on
the very threshold of life. That best school of disinterestedness and
virtue, the _domestic hearth_, where generosity and self-control are
called forth in the parents, and gratitude and affection in the
children, from the very circumstance of the dependence of the latter
on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than destroyed, it is made
the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists only to nourish
the selfish and debasing passions. Children come to be looked on, not
as objects of affection, but as instruments of gain; not as forming
the first duty of life and calling forth its highest energies, but as
affording the first means of relaxing from labour, and permitting a
relapse into indolence and sensuality. The children are, practically
speaking, sold for slaves, and--oh! unutterable horror!--_the sellers
are their own parents_! Unbounded is the demoralization produced by
this monstrous perversion of the first principles of nature. Thence
it is that it is generally found, that all the beneficent provisions
of the legislature for the protection of infant labour are so
generally evaded, as to render it doubtful whether any law, how
stringent soever, could protect them. The reason is apparent. The
parents of the children are the chief violators of the law; for the
sake of profit they send them out, the instant they can work, to the
mills or the mines. Those whom nature has made their protectors, have
become their oppressors. The thirst for idleness, intoxication, or
sensuality, has turned the strongest of the generous, into the most
malignant of the selfish passions.

The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are
not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in
life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating
mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up
utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of
reading or writing, but of ignorance in still more momentous
particulars, with reference to their usefulness in life as wives and
mothers. They can neither bake nor brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit.
The finest London lady is not more utterly inefficient than they are,
for any other object but the one mechanical occupation to which they
have been habituated. They can neither darn a stocking nor sew on a
button. As to making porridge or washing a handkerchief, the thing is
out of the question. Their food is cooked out of doors by persons who
provide the lodging-houses in which they dwell--they are clothed from
head to foot, like fine ladies, by milliners and dressmakers. This is
not the result of fashion, caprice, or indolence, but of the entire
concentration of their faculties, mental and corporeal, from their
earliest years, in one limited mechanical object. They are unfit to
be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any child's mother. We hear
little of this from philanthropists or education-mongers; but it is,
nevertheless, not the least, because the most generally diffused,
evil connected with our manufacturing industry.

But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the
manufacturing and mining districts of the country, is to be found in
the prodigious number of persons, especially in infancy, who are
reduced to a state of destitution, and precipitated into the very
lowest stations of life, in consequence of the numerous ills to which
all flesh--but especially all flesh in manufacturing communities--is
heir. Our limits preclude the possibility of entering into all the
branches of this immense subject; we shall content ourselves,
therefore, with referring to one, which seems of itself perfectly
sufficient to explain the increase of crime, which at first sight
appears so alarming. This is the immense proportion of _destitute
widows with families_, who in such circumstances find themselves
immovably fixed in places where they can neither bring up their
children decently, nor get away to other and less peopled localities.

From the admirable statistical returns of the condition of the
labouring poor in France, prepared for the _Bureau de l'Intérieure_,
it appears that the number of widows in that country amounts to the
enormous number of 1,738,000.[10] This, out of a population now of
about 34,000,000, is as nearly as possible _one in twenty_ of the
entire population! Population is advancing much more rapidly in Great
Britain than France; for in the former country it is doubling in
about 60 years, in the latter in 106. It is certain, therefore, that
the proportion of widows must be greater in this country than in
France, especially in the manufacturing districts, where early
marriages, from the ready employment for young children, are so
frequent; and early deaths, from the unhealthiness of employment or
contagious disorders, are so common. But call the proportion the
same: let it be taken at a twentieth part of the existing population.
At this rate, the two millions of strangers who, during the last
forty years, have been thrown into the four northern counties of
Lancaster, York, Stafford, and Warwick, must contain at this moment
_a hundred thousand widows_. The usual average of a family is two and
a half children--call it two only. There will thus be found to be
200,000 children belonging to these 100,000 widows. It is hardly
necessary to say, that the great majority, probably four-fifths of
this immense body, must be in a state of destitution. We know in what
state the fatherless and widows are in their affliction, and who has
commanded us to visit them. On the most moderate calculation,
250,000, or an eighth of the whole population, must be in a state of
poverty and privation. And in Scotland, where, during the same period
of forty years, 350,000 strangers have been suddenly huddled together
on the banks of the Clyde, the proportion may be presumed to be the
same; or, in other words, _thirty thousand_ widows and orphans are
constantly there in a state deserving of pity, and requiring support,
hardly any of whom receive more from the parish funds than _a
shilling a-week_, even for the maintenance of a whole family.

The proportion of widows and orphans to the entire population, though
without doubt in some degree aggravated by the early marriages and
unhealthy employments incident to manufacturing districts, may be
supposed to be not materially different in one age, or part of the
country, from another. The widow and the orphan, as well as the poor,
will be always with us; but the peculiar circumstance which renders
their condition so deplorable in the dense and suddenly peopled
manufacturing districts is, that the poor have been brought together
in such prodigious numbers that all the ordinary means of providing
for the relief of such casualties fails; while the causes of
mortality among them are periodically so fearful, as to produce a
vast and sudden increase of the most destitute classes altogether
outstripping all possible means of local or voluntary relief. During
the late typhus fever in Glasgow, in the years 1836 and 1837, above
30,000 of the poor took the epidemic, of whom 3300 died.[11] In the
first eight months of 1843 alone, 32,000 persons in Glasgow were
seized with fever.[12] Out of 1000 families, at a subsequent period,
visited by the police, in conjunction with the visitors for the
distribution of the great fund raised by subscription in 1841, 680
were found to be widows, who, with their families, amounted to above
2000 persons all in the most abject state of wretchedness and
want.[13] On so vast a scale do the causes of human destruction and
demoralization act, when men are torn up from their native seats by
the irresistible magnet of commercial wealth, and congregated
together in masses, resembling rather the armies of Timour and
Napoleon than any thing else ever witnessed in the transactions of
men.

[Footnote 10: _Statistique de la France, publiée par le
Gouvernement_, viii. 371-4. A most splendid work.]

[Footnote 11: Fever patients, Glasgow, 1836, 37.

Fever patients. Died.
1836, . . 10,092 . 1187
1837, . . 21,800 . 2180
------ ----
31,892 3367

--COWAN'S _Vital Statistics of Glasgow_, 1388, p 8, the work of a
most able and meritorious medical gentleman now no more.]

[Footnote 12: Dr Alison on the Epidemic of 1843, p. 67.]

[Footnote 13: Captain Millar's Report, 1841, p. 8.]

Here, then, is the great source of demoralization, destitution, and
crime in the manufacturing districts. It arises from the sudden
congregation of human beings in such fearful multitudes together,
that all the usual alleviations of human suffering, or modes of
providing for human indigence, entirely fail. We wonder at the rapid
increase of crime in the manufacturing districts, forgetting that a
squalid mass of two or three hundred thousand human beings are
constantly precipitated to the bottom of society in a few counties,
in such circumstances of destitution that recklessness and crime
arise naturally, it may almost be said unavoidably, amongst them. And
it is in the midst of such gigantic causes of evil--of causes arising
from the extraordinary and unparalleled influx of mankind into the
manufacturing districts during the last forty years, which can bear a
comparison to nothing but the collection of the host with which
Napoleon invaded Russia, or Timour and Genghis Khan desolated
Asia--that we are gravely told that it is to be arrested by education
and moral training; by infant schools and shortened hours of labour;
by multiplication of ministers and solitary imprisonment! All these
are very good things; each in its way is calculated to do a certain
amount of good; and their united action upon the whole will
doubtless, in process of time, produce some impression upon the
aspect of society, even in the densely peopled manufacturing
districts. As to their producing any immediate effect, or in any
sensible degree arresting the prodigious amount of misery,
destitution, and crime which pervades them, you might as well have
tried, by the schoolmaster, to arrest the horrors of the Moscow
retreat.

That the causes which have now been mentioned are the true sources of
the rapid progress of crime and general demoralization of our
manufacturing and mining districts, must be evident to all from this
circumstance, well known to all who are practically conversant with
the subject, but to a great degree unattended to by the majority of
men, and that is,--that the prodigious stream of depravity and
corruption which prevails, is far from being equally and generally
diffused through society, even in the densely peopled districts where
it is most alarming, but is in a great degree confined to the _very
lowest class_. It is from that lowest class that nine-tenths of the
crime, and nearly all the professional crime, which is felt as so
great an evil in society, flows. Doubtless in all classes there are
some wicked, many selfish and inhumane men; and a beneficent Deity,
in the final allotment of rewards and punishments, will take largely
into account both the opportunities of doing well which the better
classes have abused, and the almost invincible causes which so often
chain, as it were, the destitute to recklessness and crime. But
still, in examining the classes of society on which the greater part
of the crime comes, it will be found that at least three-fourths,
probably nine-tenths, comes from the very lowest and the most
destitute. It is incorrect to say crime is common among them; in
truth, among the young at least, a tendency to it is there all but
universal. If we examine who it is that compose this dismal
substratum, this hideous _black band of society_, we shall find that
it is not made up of any one class more than another--not of factory
workers more than labourers, carters, or miners--but is formed by an
aggregate of the most unfortunate or improvident of _all classes_,
who, variously struck down from better ways by disease, vice, or
sensuality, are now of necessity huddled together by tens of
thousands in the dens of poverty, and held by the firm bond of
necessity in the precincts of contagion and crime. Society in such
circumstances resembles the successive bands of which the imagination
of Dante has framed the infernal regions, which contain one
concentric circle of horrors and punishments within another, until,
when you arrive at the bottom, you find one uniform mass of crime,
blasphemy and suffering.

We are persuaded there is no person practically acquainted with the
causes of immorality and crime in the manufacturing districts, who
will not admit that these are the true ones; and that the others,
about which so much is said by theorists and philanthropists, though
not without influence, are nevertheless trifling in the balance. And
what we particularly call the public attention to is this--Suppose
all the remedies which theoretical writers or practical legislators
have put forth and recommended, as singly adequate to remove the
evils of the manufacturing classes, were to be in _united_ operation,
they would still leave these gigantic causes of evil untouched. Let
Lord Ashley obtain from a reluctant legislature his ten-hours' bill,
and Dr Chalmers have a clergyman established for every 700
inhabitants; let church extension be pushed till there is a chapel in
every village, and education till there is a school in every street;
let the separate system be universal in prisons, and every criminal
be entirely secluded from vicious contamination; still the great
fountains of evil will remain unclosed; still 300,000 widows and
orphans will exist in a few counties of England amidst a newly
collected and strange population, steeped in misery themselves, and
of necessity breeding up their children in habits of destitution and
depravity; still the poor will be deprived, from the suddenness of
their collection, and the density of their numbers, of any effective
control, either from private character or the opinion of
neighbourhood; still individual passion will be inflamed, and
individual responsibility lost amidst multitudes; still strikes will
spread their compulsory idleness amidst tens of thousands, and
periodically array the whole working classes under the banners of
sedition, despotism, and murder; still precocious female labour will
at once tempt parents into idleness in middle life, and disqualify
children, in youth, for household or domestic duties. We wish well to
the philanthropists: we are far from undervaluing either the
importance or the utility of their labours; but as we have hitherto
seen no diminution of crime whatever from their efforts, so we
anticipate a very slow and almost imperceptible improvement in
society from their exertions.

Strong, and in many respects just, pictures of the state of the
working classes in the manufacturing districts, have been lately put
forth, and the _Perils of the Nation_ have, with reason, been thought
to be seriously increased by them. Those writers, however, how
observant and benevolent soever, give a partial, and in many respects
fallacious view, of the _general_ aspect of society. After reading
their doleful accounts of the general wretchedness, profligacy, and
licentiousness of the working classes, the stranger is astonished, on
travelling through England, to behold green fields and smiling
cottages on all sides; to see in every village signs of increasing
comfort, in every town marks of augmented wealth, and the aspect of
poverty almost banished from the land. Nay, what is still more
gratifying, the returns of the sanatary condition of the whole
population, though still exhibiting a painful difference between the
health and chances of life in the rural and manufacturing districts,
present unequivocal proof of a general amelioration of the chances of
life, and, consequently, of the general wellbeing of the whole
community.

How are these opposite statements and appearances to be reconciled?
Both are true--the reconciliation is easy. The misery, recklessness,
and vice exist chiefly in one class--the industry, sobriety, and
comfort in another. Each observer tells truly what he sees in his own
circle of attention; he does not tell what, nevertheless, exists, and
exercises a powerful influence on society, of the good which exists
in the other classes. If the evils detailed in Lord Ashley's
speeches, and painted with so much force in the _Perils of the
Nation_, were universal, or even general, society could not hold
together for a week. But though these evils are great, sometimes
overwhelming in particular districts, they are far from being
general. Nothing effectual has yet been done to arrest them in the
localities or communities where they arise; but they do not spread
much beyond them. The person engaged in the factories are stated by
Lord Ashley to be between four and five hundred thousand: the
population of the British islands is above 27,000,000. It is in the
steadiness, industry, and good conduct of a large proportion of this
immense majority that the security is to be found. Observe that
industrious and well-doing majority; you would suppose there is no
danger:--observe the profligate and squalid minority; you would
suppose there is no hope.

At present about 60,000 persons are annually committed, in the
British islands, for serious offences[14] worthy of deliberate trial,
and above double that number for summary or police offences. A
hundred and eighty thousand persons annually fall under the lash of
the criminal law, and are committed for longer or shorter periods to
places of confinement for punishment. The number is prodigious--it is
frightful. Yet it is in all only about 1 in 120 of the population;
and from the great number who are repeatedly committed during the
same year, the individuals punished are not 1 in 200. Such as they
are, it may safely be affirmed that four-fifths of this 180,000 comes
out of two or three millions of the community. We are quite sure that
150,000 come from 3,000,000 of the lowest and most squalid of the
empire, and not 30,000 from the remaining 24,000,000 who live in
comparative comfort. This consideration is fitted both to encourage
hope and awaken shame--hope, as showing from how small a class in
society the greater part of the crime comes, and to how limited a
sphere the remedies require to be applied; shame, as demonstrating
how disgraceful has been the apathy, selfishness, and supineness in
the other more numerous and better classes, around whom the evil has
arisen, but who seldom interfere, except to RESIST all measures
calculated for its removal.

It is to this subject--the ease with which the extraordinary and
unprecedented increase of crime in the empire might be arrested by
proper means and the total inefficiency of all the remedies hitherto
attempted, from the want of practical knowledge on the part of those
at the head of affairs, and an entirely false view of human nature in
society generally, that we shall direct the attention of our readers
in a future Number.

[Footnote 14: Viz., in round numbers--

England, 30,000
Ireland, 26,000
Scotland, 4,000
60,000]

THE HEART OF THE BRUCE.

A BALLAD.

It was upon an April morn
While yet the frost lay hoar,
We heard Lord James's bugle-horn
Sound by the rocky shore.

Then down we went, a hundred knights,
All in our dark array,
And flung our armour in the ships
That rode within the bay.

We spoke not as the shore grew less,
But gazed in silence back,
Where the long billows swept away
The foam behind our track.

And aye the purple hues decay'd
Upon the fading hill,
And but one heart in all that ship
Was tranquil, cold, and still.

The good Earl Douglas walk'd the deck,
And oh, his brow was wan!
Unlike the flush it used to wear
When in the battle van.--

"Come hither, come hither, my trusty knight,
Sir Simon of the Lee;
There is a freit lies near my soul
I fain would tell to thee.

"Thou knowest the words King Robert spoke
Upon his dying day,
How he bade me take his noble heart
And carry it far away:

"And lay it in the holy soil
Where once the Saviour trod,
Since he might not bear the blessed Cross,
Nor strike one blow for God.

"Last night as in my bed I lay,
I dream'd a dreary dream:--
Methought I saw a Pilgrim stand
In the moonlight's quivering beam.

"His robe was of the azure dye,
Snow-white his scatter'd hairs,
And even such a cross he bore
As good Saint Andrew bears.

"'Why go ye forth, Lord James,' he said,
'With spear and belted brand?
Why do ye take its dearest pledge
From this our Scottish land?

"'The sultry breeze of Galilee
Creeps through its groves of palm,
The olives on the Holy Mount
Stand glittering in the calm.

"'But 'tis not there that Scotland's heart
Shall rest by God's decree,
Till the great angel calls the dead
To rise from earth and sea!

"'Lord James of Douglas, mark my rede
That heart shall pass once more
In fiery fight against the foe,
As it was wont of yore.

"'And it shall pass beneath the Cross,
And save King Robert's vow,
But other hands shall bear it back,
Not, James of Douglas, thou!'

"Now, by thy knightly faith, I pray,
Sir Simon of the Lee--
For truer friend had never man
Than thou hast been to me--

"If ne'er upon the Holy Land
'Tis mine in life to tread,
Bear thou to Scotland's kindly earth
The relics of her dead."

The tear was in Sir Simon's eye
As he wrung the warrior's hand--
"Betide me weal, betide me woe,
I'll hold by thy command.

"But if in battle front, Lord James,
'Tis ours once more to ride,
Nor force of man, nor craft of fiend,
Shall cleave me from thy side!"

And aye we sail'd, and aye we sail'd,
Across the weary sea,
Until one morn the coast of Spain
Rose grimly on our lee.

And as we rounded to the port,
Beneath the watch-tower's wall,
We heard the clash of the atabals,
And the trumpet's wavering call.

"Why sounds yon Eastern music here
So wantonly and long,
And whose the crowd of armed men
That round yon standard throng?'

"The Moors have come from Africa
To spoil and waste and slay,
And Pedro, King of Arragon,
Must fight with them to-day."

"Now shame it were," cried good Lord James,
"Shall never be said of me,
That I and mine have turn'd aside,
From the Cross in jeopardie!

"Have down, have down my merry men all--
Have down unto the plain;
We'll let the Scottish lion loose
Within the fields of Spain!"--

"Now welcome to me, noble lord,
Thou and thy stalwart power;
Dear is the sight of a Christian knight
Who comes in such an hour!

"Is it for bond or faith ye come,
Or yet for golden fee?
Or bring ye France's lilies here,
Or the flower of Burgundie?'

"God greet thee well, thou valiant King,
Thee and thy belted peers--
Sir James of Douglas am I call'd,
And these are Scottish spears.

"We do not fight for bond or plight,
Nor yet for golden fee;
But for the sake of our blessed Lord,
That died Upon the tree.

"We bring our great King Robert's heart
Across the weltering wave,
To lay it in the holy soil
Hard by the Saviour's grave.

"True pilgrims we, by land or sea,
Where danger bars the way;
And therefore are we here, Lord King,
To ride with thee this day!"

The King has bent his stately head,
And the tears were in his eyne--
"God's blessing on thee, noble knight,
For this brave thought of thine!

"I know thy name full well, Lord James,
And honour'd may I be,
That those who fought beside the Bruce
Should fight this day for me!

"Take thou the leading of the van,
And charge the Moors amain;
There is not such a lance as thine
In all the host of Spain!"

The Douglas turned towards us then,
Oh, but his glance was high!--
"There is not one of all my men
But is as bold as I.

"There is not one of all my knights
But bears as true a spear--
Then onwards! Scottish gentlemen,
And think--King Robert's here!"

The trumpets blew, the cross-bolts flew,
The arrows flash'd like flame,
As spur in side, and spear in rest,
Against the foe we came.

And many a bearded Saracen
Went down, both horse and man;
For through their ranks we rode like corn,
So furiously we ran!

But in behind our path they closed,
Though fain to let us through,
For they were forty thousand men,
And we were wondrous few.

We might not see a lance's length,
So dense was their array,
But the long fell sweep of the Scottish blade
Still held them hard at bay.

"Make in! make in!" Lord Douglas cried,
"Make in, my brethren dear!
Sir William of St Clair is down,
We may not leave him here!"

But thicker, thicker, grew the swarm,
And sharper shot the rain,
And the horses rear'd amid the press,
But they would not charge again.

"Now Jesu help thee," said Lord James,
"Thou kind and true St Clair!
An' if I may not bring thee off,
I'll die beside thee there!"

Then in his stirrups up he stood,
So lionlike and bold,
And held the precious heart aloft
All in its case of gold.

He flung it from him, far ahead,
And never spake he more,
But--"Pass thee first, thou dauntless heart,
As thou were wont of yore!"

The roar of fight rose fiercer yet,
And heavier still the stour,
Till the spears of Spain came shivering in
And swept away the Moor.

"Now praised be God, the day is won!
They fly o'er flood and fell--
Why dost thou draw the rein so hard,
Good knight, that fought so well?"

"Oh, ride ye on, Lord King!" he said,
"And leave the dead to me,
For I must keep the dreariest watch
That ever I shall dree!

"There lies beside his master's heart
The Douglas, stark and grim;
And woe is me I should be here,
Not side by side with him!

"The world grows cold, my arm is old,
And thin my lyart hair,
And all that I loved best on earth
Is stretch'd before me there.

"O Bothwell banks! that bloom so bright,
Beneath the sun of May,
The heaviest cloud that ever blew
Is bound for you this day.

"And, Scotland, thou may'st veil thy head
In sorrow and in pain;
The sorest stroke upon thy brow
Hath fallen this day in Spain!

"We'll bear them back into our ship,
We'll bear them o'er the sea,
And lay them in the hallow'd earth,
Within our own countrie.

"And be thou strong of heart, Lord King,
For this I tell thee sure,
The sod that drank the Douglas' blood
Shall never bear the Moor!"

The King he lighted from his horse,
He flung his brand away,
And took the Douglas by the hand,
So stately as he lay.

"God give thee rest, thou valiant soul,
That fought so well for Spain;
I'd rather half my land were gone,
So thou wert here again!"

We bore the good Lord James away,
And the priceless heart he bore,
And heavily we steer'd our ship
Towards the Scottish shore.

No welcome greeted our return,
Nor clang of martial tread,
But all were dumb and hush'd as death
Before the mighty dead.

We laid the Earl in Douglas Kirk,
The heart in fair Melrose;
And woful men were we that day--
God grant their souls repose!
W.E.A.

MEMORANDUMS OF A MONTH'S TOUR IN SICILY.

THE MUSEUM OF PALERMO.

The museum of Palermo is a small but very interesting collection of
statues and other sculpture, gathered chiefly, they say, from the
ancient temples of Sicily, with a few objects bestowed out of the
superfluities of Pompeii. In the lower room are some good
bas-reliefs, to which a story is attached. They were discovered
fifteen years ago at _Selinuntium_ by some young Englishmen, the
reward of four months' labour. Our guide, who had been also theirs,
had warned them not to stay after the month of June, when malaria
begins. They did stay. All (four) took the fever; one died of it in
Palermo, and the survivors were deprived by the government--that is,
by the king--of the spoils for which they had suffered so much and
worked so hard. No one is permitted to excavate without royal
license; _excavation_ is, like _Domitian's fish, res fisci_. Even Mr
Fagan, who was consul at Palermo, having made some interesting
underground discoveries, was deprived of them. We saw here a fine
Esculapius, in countenance and expression exceedingly like the _Ecce
Homo_ of Leonardo da Vinci, with all that god-like compassion which
the great painter had imparted without any sacrifice of dignity. He
holds a poppy-head, which we do not recollect on his statue or gems,
and the Epidaurian snake is at his side. Up-stairs we saw specimens
of fruits from Pompeii, barley, beans, the carob pod, pine kernels,
as well as bread, sponge, linen: and the sponge was obviously such,
and so was the linen. A bronze Hercules treading on the back of a
stag, which he has overtaken and subdued, is justly considered as one
of the most perfect bronzes discovered at Pompeii. A head of our
Saviour, by Corregio, is exquisite in conception, and such as none
but a person long familiar with the physiognomy of suffering could
have accomplished. These are exceptions rather than specimens. The
pictures, in general, are poor in interest; and a long gallery of
_casts_ of the _chef-d'oeuvres_ of antiquity possessed by the
capitals of Italy, Germany, England, and France, looks oddly here,
and shows the poverty of a country which had been to the predatory
proconsuls of Rome an inexhaustible repertory of the highest
treasures of art. A VERRES REDIVIVUS would now find little to carry
off but toys made of amber, lava snuff-boxes, and WODEHOUSE'S
MARSALA--one of which he certainly would not guess the _age_ of, and
the other of which he would not _drink_.

LUNATIC ASYLUM.

We saw nothing in this house or its arrangements to make us think it
superior, or very different from others we had visited elsewhere. The
making a lunatic asylum a show-place for strangers is to be censured;
indeed, we heard Esquirol observe, that nothing was so bad as the
admission of many persons to see the patients at all; for that,
although some few were better for the visits of friends, it was
injurious as a general rule to give even friends admittance, and that
it ought to be left discretionary with the physician, _when_ to
admit, and _whom_. Cleanliness, good fare, a garden, and the
suppression of all violence--these have become immutable canons for
the conduct of such institutions, and fortunately demand little more
than ordinary good feeling and intelligence in the superintendent.
But we could not fail to observe a sad want of suitable inducement to
_occupation_, which was apparent throughout this asylum. That not
above one in ten could read, may perhaps be thought a light matter,
for few can be the resources of insanity in books; yet we saw at
_Genoa_ a case where it had taken that turn, and as it is occupation
to read, with how much profit it matters not. Not one woman in four,
as usually occurs in insanity, could be induced to _dress according
to her sex_; they figured away in men's coats and hats! The
dining-room was hung with portraits of some merit, by one of the
lunatics; and we noticed that every face, if indeed all are
_portraits_, had some insanity in it. They have a dance every Sunday
evening. What an exhibition it must be!

MISCELLANEA

That the vegetation of Palermo excels that of Naples, partly depends
on the superior intelligence of the agriculturist, and partly upon
soil and climate: the fruits here are not only more advanced, but
finer in quality. We left a very meagre dessert of cherries beginning
to ripen at Naples; the very next day, a superabundance of very fine
and mature ones were to be had on all the stalls of Palermo. This
must be the result of industry and care in a great measure; for on
leaving that city, after a _séjour_ of three weeks, for Messina,
Catania, and Syracuse, although summer was much further advanced, we
relapsed into miserably meagre supplies of what we had eaten in
perfection in the capital; yet Syracuse and Catania are much warmer
than Palermo.

The vegetables here are of immense growth. The fennel root (and there
is no better test of your whereabouts in Italy) is nearly twice as
large as at Naples, and weighs, accordingly, nearly double. The
cauliflowers are quite colossal; and they have a blue cabbage so big
that your arms will scarcely embrace it. We question, however,
whether this hypertrophy of fruit or vegetables improves their
flavour; give us _English vegetables_--ay, and _English fruit_.
Though Smyrna's _fig_ is eaten throughout Europe, and Roman _brocoli_
be without a rival; though the _cherry_ and the Japan _medlar_
flourish only at Palermo, and the _cactus_ of Catania can be eaten
nowhere else; what country town in England is not better off on the
whole, if quality alone be considered? But we have one terrible
drawback; for _whom_ are these fruits of the earth produced? Our
_prices_ are enormous, and our supply scanty; could we _forget this_,
and the artichoke, the asparagus, the peas and beans of London and
Paris, are rarely elsewhere so fine. To our palates the _gooseberry_
and the _black currant_ are a sufficient indemnity to Britain for the
_grape_, merely regarded as a fruit to _eat. Pine-apples_, those
"illustrious foreigners," are so successfully _petted_ at home, that
they will scarcely condescend now to flourish out of England.
_Nectarines_ refuse to ripen, and _apricots_ to have any taste
elsewhere. Our _pears_ and _apples_ are better, and of more various
excellence, than any in the world. And we really prefer our very
figs, grown on a fine _prebendal_ wall in the close of _Winchester_,
or under _Pococke's_ window in a canon's garden at _chilly Oxford_.
Thus has the kitchen-garden refreshed our patriotism, and made us
half ashamed of our long forgetfulness of home. But there are good
things abroad too for poor men; the rich may live any where. An
enormous salad, crisp, cold, white, and of delicious flavour, for a
halfpenny; olive oil, for fourpence a pound, to dress it with; and
wine for fourpence a gallon to make it disagree with you;[15] fuel
for almost nothing, and bread for little, are not small advantages to
frugal housekeepers; but, when dispensed by a despotic government,
where one must read those revolting words _motu proprio_ at the head
of every edict, let us go back to our carrots and potatoes, our Peels
and our income-tax, our fogs and our frost. The country mouse came to
a right conclusion, and did not like the fragments of the feast with
the cat in the cupboard--

Give me again my hollow tree,
My crust of bread, and liberty."

[Footnote 15:

----_Lactuca_ innatat acri
Post vinum stomacho.--HOR.]

Fish, though plentiful and various, is not fine in any part of the
_Mediterranean_; and as to _thunny_, one surfeit would put it out of
the bill of fare for life. On the whole, though at Palermo and Naples
the pauper starves not in the streets, the gourmand would be sadly at
a loss in his requisition of delicacies and variety. Inferior bread,
at a penny a pound, is here considered palatable by the sprinkling
over of the crust with a small rich seed (_jugulena_) which has a
flavour like the almond; it is also strewn, like our caraway seeds in
biscuits, _into_ the paste, and is largely cultivated for that single
use. The _capsici_, somewhat similar in flavour to the pea, are
detached from the radicles of a plant with a flower strikingly like
the potatoe, and is used for a similar purpose to the jugulena.

This island was the granary of Athens before it nourished Rome; and
wheat appears to have been first raised in Europe on the plains of
eastern Sicily. In Cicero's time it returned eightfold; and to this
day one grain yields its eightfold of increase; which, however, is by
a small fraction less than our own, as given by M'Culloch in his
"Dictionary of Commerce." We plucked some _siligo_, or bearded wheat,
near Palermo, the beard of which was eight inches long, the ear
contained sixty grains, eight being also in this instance the average
increase; how many grains, then, must perish in the ground!

In Palermo, English gunpowder is sold by British sailors at the high
price of from five to seven shillings per English pound; the "Polvere
_nostrale_" of the Sicilians only fetches 1s. 8d.; yet such is the
superiority of English gunpowder, that every one who has a passion
for popping at sparrows, and other _Italian sports_, (complimented by
the title of _La caccia_,) prefers the dear article. When they have
killed off all the robins, and there is not a twitter in _the whole
country_, they go to the river side and shoot _gudgeons_.

The Palermo donkey is the most obliging animal that ever wore long
ears, and will carry you cheerfully four or five miles an hour
without whip or other _encouragement_. The oxen, no longer white or
cream-coloured, as in Tuscany, were originally importations from
Barbary, (to which country the Sicilians are likewise indebted for
the _mulberry_ and _silk-worm_.) Their colour is brown. They rival
the Umbrian breed in the herculean symmetry of their form, and in the
possession of horns of more than Umbrian dimensions, rising more
perpendicularly over the forehead than in that ancient race. The
lizards here are such beautiful creatures, that it is worth while to
bring one away, and, to _pervert_ a quotation, "UNIUS _Dominum sese
fecisse_ LACERTAE." Some are all green, some mottled like a mosaic
floor, others green and black on the upper side, and orange-coloured
or red underneath. Of snakes, there is a _Coluber niger_ from four to
five feet in length, with a shining coat, and an eye not pleasant to
watch even through glass; yet the peasants here put them into their
Phrygian bonnets, and handle them with as much _sang-froid_ as one
would a walking-stick.

The coarse earthen vessels, pitchers, urns, &c., used by the
peasants, are of the most beautiful shapes, often that of the ancient
_amphora_; and at every cottage door by the road-side you meet with
this vestige of the ancient arts of the country.

The plague which visited Palermo in 1624 swept away 20,000
inhabitants; Messina, in 1743, lost 40,000. The cholera, in 1837,
destroyed 69,253 persons. The present population of the whole island
is 1,950,000; the female exceeds the male by about three per cent,
which is contrary to the general rule. It is said that nearly
one-half the children received into the foundling hospital of Palermo
die within the first year.

Formerly the barons of Sicily were rich and independent, like our
English gentlemen; but they say that, since 1812, the king's whole
pleasure and business, as before our _Magna Charta_ times, have been
to lower their importance. In that year a revolt was the consequence
of an income-tax even of two per cent, for they were yet unbroken to
the yoke; but now that he has saddled property with a deduction,
_said_ to be eventually equal to fifteen per cent, if not more; now
that he doubles the impost on the native sulphur, which is therefore
checked in its sale; now that he keeps an army of 80,000 men to play
at soldiers with; now that he constitutes himself the only referee
even in questions of commercial expediency, and _a fortiori_ in all
other cases, which he settles _arbitrarily_, or does not settle at
all; now that he sees so little the signs of the times, that he will
not let a professor go to a science-congress at Florence or Bologna
without an express permission, and so ignorant as to have _refused_
that permission for fear of a political bias; now that he diverts a
nation's wealth from works of charity or usefulness, to keep a set of
foreigners in his pay--they no doubt here remember in their prayers,
with becoming gratitude, "the holy alliance," or, as we would call
it, the _mutual insurance company of the kings of Europe_, of which
Castlereagh and Metternich were the honorary secretaries.

In the midst of all the gloomy despotism, beautiful even as
imagination can paint it, is Palermo beautiful! One eminent advantage
it possesses over Naples itself--its vicinity presents more "drives;"
and all the drives here might contest the name given to one of them,
which is called "_Giro delle Grazie_," (the Ring or Mall of the
Graces.) It has a _Marina_ of unrivaled beauty, to which the noblesse
and the citizens repair and form a promenade of elegant equipages. A
fine pavement for foot passengers is considerately raised three or
four feet above the carriage road; so that the walking population
have nothing to annoy them. The sea is immediately below both, and
you see the little rock-encircled bays animated with groups of those
sturdy fishermen with bare legs; which you admire in Claude and
Salvator, throwing before them, with admirable precision, their
_épervier_ net, whose fine wrought meshes sometimes hang, veil-like,
between you and the ruddy sunset, or plashing, as they fall nightly
into the smooth sea, contribute the pleasure of an agreeable sound to
the magic of the scenery. Some take the air on donkeys, which go at a
great rate; some are mounted on Spanish mules, all mixed together
freely amidst handsome and numerous equipages; and the whole is
backed by a fine row of houses opposite the sea, built after the
fashion of our terraces and crescents at watering-places. And
finally, that blue _æquor_, as it now deserves to be termed, studded
over with thunny boats and coasting craft with the haze latine sail,
that we should be sorry to trust in British hands, is walled in by
cliffs so bold, so rugged, and standing out so beautifully in relief,
that for a moment we cannot choose but envy the citizen of
_Panormus_. But we may not tarry even here; _we have more things_ to
see, and every day is getting hotter than the last.

JOURNEY TO SEGESTE.

Leaving Palermo early, we pass _Monreale_ in our way to the Doric
columns of _Segeste_, and find ourselves, before the heat of day has
reached its greatest intensity, at a considerable elevation above the
plain on which the capital stands, amidst mountains which, except in
the difference of their vegetation, remind us not a little of the
configuration of certain wild parts of the Highlands, where Ben
Croachin flings his dark shadow across Loch Awe. Indeed, we were
thinking of this old and favourite fishing haunt with much
complacency, when two men suddenly came forth from behind the bristly
aloes and the impenetrable cactus--ill-looking fellows were they;
but, moved by the kindest intentions for our safety, they offer to
conduct us through the remainder of the defile. This service our
hired attendant from Palermo declined, and we push on unmolested to
Partenico, our halting-place during the heat of the day. It is a town
of some extent, large enough to afford two fountains of a certain
pretension, but execrably dirty within. Twelve thousand inhabitants
has Partenico, and five churches. Out of its five locandas, who shall
declare the worst? Of that in which we had first taken refuge, (as,
in a snow-storm on the Alps, any _roof_ is Paradise,) we were obliged
to quit the shelter, and walk at _noon_, at _midsummer_, and in
_Sicily_, a good mile _up_ a main street, which, beginning in
habitations of the dimensions of our almshouses, ends in a few huts
intolerably revolting, about which troops of naked children defy
vermin, and encrust themselves in filth. At one door we could not
help observing that worst form of _scabies_, the _gale à grosses
bulles;_ so we had got, it appeared, from _Scylla_ into _Charybdis_,
and were in the very preserves of Sicilian _itch_, and we
prognosticate it will spread before the month expires wherever human
skin is to be found for its entertainment. Partenico lies in a
scorching plain full of malaria. Having passed the three stifling
hours of the day here, we proceed on our journey to _Alcamo_, a town
of considerable size, which looks remarkably well from the plain at
the distance of four miles--an impression immediately removed on
passing its high rampart gate. Glad to escape the miseries with which
it threatens the _détenu_, we pass out at the other end, and zigzag
down a hill of great beauty, and commanding such views of sea and
land as it would be quite absurd to write about. Already a double row
of aloë, planted at intervals, marks what is to be your course afar
off, and is a faithful guide till it lands you in a Sicilian plain.
This is the highest epithet with which any plain can be qualified.
This is indeed the month for Sicily. The goddess of flowers now wears
a morning dress of the newest spring fashion; beautifully _made up_
is that dress, nor has she worn it long enough for it to be sullied
ever so little, or to require the washing of a shower. A delicate
pink and a rich red are the colours which prevail in the tasteful
pattern of her voluminous drapery; and as she _advances_ on you with
a light and noiseless step, over a carpet which all the looms of
Paris or of Persia could not imitate, scattering bouquets of colours
the most happily contrasted, and impregnating the air with the most
grateful fragrance, we at once acknowledge her beautiful
impersonation in that "_monument of Grecian art_," the _Farnese
Flora_, of which we have brought the fresh recollection from the
museum of Naples.

The _Erba Bianca_ is a plant like southernwood, presenting a curious
hoar-frosted appearance as its leaves are stirred by the wind. The
_Rozzolo a vento_ is an ambitious plant, which grows beyond its
strength, snaps short upon its overburdened stalk, and is borne away
by any zephyr, however light. Large crops of _oats_ are already cut;
and oxen of the Barbary breed, brown and coal-black, are already
dragging the simple aboriginal plough over the land. Some of these
fine cattle (to whom we are strangers, as they are to us) stood
gazing at us in the plain, their white horns glancing in the sun;
others, recumbent and ruminating, exhibit antlers which, as we have
said before, surpass the Umbrian cattle in their elk-like length and
imposing majesty. Arrived at the bottom of our long hill, we pass a
beautiful stream called _Fiume freddo_, whose source we track across
the plain by banks crowned with _Cactus_ and _Tamarisk_. Looking back
with regret towards _Alcamo_, we see trains of mules, which still
transact the internal commerce of the country, with large packsaddles
on their backs; and when a halt takes place, these animals during
their drivers' dinner obtain their own ready-found meal, and browse
away on three courses of vegetables and a dessert.

SICILIAN INNS.

"A beautiful place this _Segeste_ must be! One could undergo any
thing to see it!" Such would be the probable exclamation of more than
one reader looking over some _landscape annual_, embellished with
perhaps _a view_ of the celebrated temple and its surrounding
scenery; but find yourself at any of the inexpressibly horrid inns of
_Alcamo_ or _Calatafrini_, (and these are the two principal stations
between Palermo and Segeste--one with its 12,000, the other with its
18,000 inhabitants;) let us walk you down the main street of either,
and if you don't wish yourself at Cheltenham, or some other
unclassical place which never had a Latin name, we are much mistaken!
The "_Relievo dei Cavalli_" at Alcamo offers no _relief_ for you! The
_Magpie_ may prate on her sign-post about _clean_ beds, for magpies
can be made to say any thing; but pray do not construe the "_Canova
Divina_" Divine Canova! _He_ never executed any thing for the _Red
Lion_ of Calatafrini, whose "Canova" is a low wine-shop, full of
wrangling Sicilian boors. Or will you place yourself under the
_Eagle's_ wing, seduced by its _nuovi mobili e buon servizio_? Oh, we
obtest those broken window-panes whether it be not _cruel_ to expose
_new furniture_ to such perils! For us we put up at the "_Temple of
Segeste_," attracted rather by its name than by any promise or decoy
it offers. Crabbe has given to the inns at Aldborough each its
character: here all are equal in immundicity, and all equally without
provisions. Some yellow beans lie soaking to soften them. There is
salt-cod from the north, moist and putrid. There is no milk; eggs are
few. The ham at the Pizzicarolo's is always bad, and the garlicked
sausage repulsive. Nothing is painted or white-washed, let alone
dusted, swept, or scoured. The walls have the appearance of having
been _pawed_ over by new relays of dirty fingers daily for ten years.
This is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places _out_ of
Sicily, and we really do not know its _pathology_. You tread
loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering
the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile
art, certainly not of _Etruscan_ form, which is invariably placed on
the _bolster_ of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted
head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian _locanda_ is plainly out of
question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse
and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:--

"Lodged for the night, O Muse! begin
To sing the true Sicilian inn,
Where the sad choice of six foul cells
The least exacting traveller quells
(Though crawling things, not yet in sight,
Are waiting for the shadowy night,
To issue forth when all is quiet,
And on your feverish pulses riot;)
Where one wood shutter scrapes the ground,
By crusts, stale-bones, and garbage bound;
Where unmolested spiders toil
Behind the mirror's mildew'd foil;
Where the cheap crucifix of lead
Hangs o'er the iron tressel'd bed;
Where the huge bolt will scarcely keep
Its promise to confiding sleep,
Till you have forced it to its goal
In the bored brick-work's crumbling hole;
Where, in loose flakes, the white-wash peeling
From the bare joints of rotten ceiling,
Give token sure of vermin's bower,
And swarms of bugs that bide their hour!
Though bands of fierce musquittos boom
Their threatening bugles round the room,
To bed! Ere wingless creatures crawl
Across your path from yonder wall,
And slipper'd feet unheeding tread
We know not what! To bed! to bed!
What can those horrid sounds portend?
Some waylaid traveller near his end,
From ghastly gash in mortal strife,
Or blow of bandit's blood-stained knife?
No! no! They're bawling to the _Virgin_,
Like victim under hands of surgeon!
From lamp-lit _daub_, proceeds the cry
Of that unearthly litany!
And now a train of mules goes by!

"One wretch comes whooping up the street
For whooping's sake! And now they beat
Drum after drum for market mass,
Each day's transactions on the _place!_
All things that go, or stay, or come,
They herald forth by tuck of drum.
Day dawns! a tinkling tuneless bell,
Whate'er it be, has news to tell.
Then twenty more begin to strike
In noisy discord, all alike;--
Convents and churches, chapels, shrines,
In quick succession break the lines.
Till every gong in town, at last
Its tongue hath loos'd, and sleep is past.
So much for nights! New days begin,
Which land you in another Inn.
O! he that means to see _Girgenti_
Or _Syracuse!_--needs patience plenty!"

Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no
less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds,
cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is
a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed
with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the _Aphides,
Alticæ_, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to
their stalks. _Gramina læta_ after Virgil's own heart, were these.
Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a
botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only
went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place
which demanded _another_ sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without
a veil the _Temple of Segeste_, with one or two glimpses of which we
had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty!
This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here
reigns alone--the only building far or near visible in the whole
horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst
of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing
down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set
off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of
the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There
is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste--its
_theatre_; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing
about it at present, and must leave it in a parenthesis. To our left,
at the distance of eight miles, this hill country of harmonious and
graceful undulation ends in beetling cliffs, beneath which the sea,
now full in view, lies sparkling in the morning sunshine. We shall
never, never forget the impressions made upon us on first getting
sight of Segeste! _Pæstum_ we had seen, and thought that it exhausted
all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple.
Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial
antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of
prey--temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had
fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Pæstum to be probably the
most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less
austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different
charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for
which a reader could certainly not be _prepared_ by description. We
gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable survivor of
2000 years, and of many empires--we _felt_ the vast masses of its
time-tried Doric, and even the wild flowers within its precincts, its
pink valerians; its _erba di vento_, its scented wallflower. The
whole scene kept our admiration long tasked, but untired. A smart
shower compelled us to seek shelter under the shoulder of one of the
grey entablatures: it soon passed away, leaving us a legacy of the
richest fragrance, while a number of wild birds of the hawk kind,
called "chaoli" from their shrill note, issued from their
hiding-places, and gave us wild music as they scudded by!

A few bits of wall scattered over the corn-fields are all that now
remains of the dwellings of the men who built this temple for their
city, and who, by its splendour, deluded the Athenians into a belief
of greater wealth than they possessed.

Our ascent to the theatre, the day after, proved to be a very steep
one, of half an hour on mule-back; in making which, we scared two of
those prodigious birds, the _ospreys_, who, having reconnoitred us,
forthwith began to wheel in larger and larger sweeps, and at last
made off for the sea. We found the interior of the theatre occupied
by an audience ready for our arrival; it consisted of innummerable
_hawks_, the chaoli just mentioned, which began to scream at our
intrusion. The ospreys soon returned, and were plainly only waiting
our departure to subside upon their solitary domain. We would not be
a soft-billed bird for something in this neighbourhood; no song would
save them from the hawks' supper. Having luxuriated on the 24th of
May for full four hours in this enchanting neighbourhood, we were
sorry to return to our inn--and such an inn! We departed abruptly,
and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde
Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall.
Thucydides[16] relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that
the _Trojans_ after losing _Troy_ went first to _Sicily_, and founded
there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first
_Greek_ colony was _Naxos_, also in Sicily, Greeks and Trojans
(strange coincidence!) must have _met again_ on new ground after the
_Iliad_ was all acted and done with, like a tale that is told.

[Footnote 16: _Vide_ THUCYDIDES, Book iv. chap. 15.]

On our return towards Palermo, one of our party having a touch of
ague, we crossed the street to the apothecary, (at Calatafrini, our
night's halt,) and smelling about his musty galenicals, amidst a
large supply of _malvas_ which were drying on his counter, the only
wholesome-looking thing amidst his stores, we asked if he had any
_quinine_. "_Sicuro!_" and he presented us with a white powder having
a slightly bitter taste, which, together with an ounce of green tea,
to be dispensed in pinches of five grains on extraordinary occasions,
comes, he says, from the East. On our observing that the quinine, if
such at all, was adulterated, and that this was too bad in a country
of malaria, where it was the poor man's only protection, he looked
angry; but we rose in the esteem of peasants in the shop, who said to
each other--"Ed ha ragione il Signor." Wanting a little _soda_, we
were presented with sub-carbonate of potash as the nearest approach
to it--a substitution which suggested to us a classical recollection
from Theocritus; namely, that in this same Sicily, 2000 years ago, a
Syracusan husband is rated by his dame for sending her _soda_ for her
washing in place of potash, the very converse of what our old
drug-vender intended to have washed our inside withal.

The Roman Catholic religion patronises painting oddly here; not a
cart but is adorned with some sacred subject. Every wretched vehicle
that totters under an unmerciful load, with one poor donkey to draw
six men, has its picture of _Souls in Purgatory_, who seem putting
their hands and heads out of the flames, and vainly calling on the
ruffians inside to _stop_. We read _Viva la Divina Providenza_, in
flaming characters on the front board of a carriole, while the whip
is goading the poor starved brute who drags it; for these barbarians
in the rear of European civilization, plainly are of opinion that a
cart with a sacred device shall not _break down_, though its owner
commit every species of cruelty.

The next day found us again installed at our old quarters in Palermo,
where, during our brief remaining stay, we visit a conchologist,
before which event we had no notion that Sicily was so rich in
shells. Two sides of a moderately large room are entirely devoted to
his collection. Here we saw a piece of wood nearly destroyed by the
_Teredo navalis_, or sailor's bore, who seems more active and
industrious here than elsewhere, and seldom allows himself to be
taken whole. Out of hundreds of specimens, three or four perfect ones
were all that this collector could ever manage to extract, the
molluscous wood-destroyer being very soft and fragile. His length is
about three inches, his thickness that of a small quill; he lodges in
a shell of extreme tenuity, and the secretion which he ejects is, it
seems, the agent which destroys the wood, and pushes on bit by bit
the winding tunnel. But his doings are nothing to the working of
another wafer-shelled bivalve, whose tiny habitations are so thickly
imbedded in the body of a nodule of _flint_ as to render its exterior
like a sieve, _diducit scopulos aceto_. What solvent can the chemist
prepare in his laboratory comparable to one which, while it dissolves
silex, neither harms the insect nor injures its shell. Amongst the
_fossils_ we notice cockles as big as ostrich eggs, clam-shells twice
the size of the largest of our Sussex coast, and those of oysters
which rival soup-plates. We had indeed once before met with them of
equal size in the lime-beds at _Corneto_. Judging by the _oysters_,
there must indeed have been _giants_ in those days. But this
collection was chiefly remarkable for its curious fossil remains of
_animals_ from _Monte Grifone_. In this same Monte Grifone, which we
went to visit, is one of the largest of the caves of bones of which
so many have been discovered--bones of various kinds, some of small,
some of very large animals, mixed together pell-mell, and
constituting a fossil paste of scarcely any thing besides. None of
the geologists, in attempting to explain these deposits, sufficiently
enter into the question of the origin of the enormous _quantity_, and
_close juxtaposition_, of such heterogeneous specimens.

By eight o'clock we are on board the _Palermo_ steamer, which is to
convey us hence to _Messina_. The baked deck, which has been
saturated with the sun's heat all day, is now cooling to a more
moderate warmth, and soothing would be the scene but for the noise of
women and children. Large liquid stars twinkle here and there, like
so many moons on a reduced scale, over the sea, and the night is
wholly delightful! A bell rings, which diminishes our numbers, and
somewhat clears our deck. The boats which carry off the last
loiterers are gone, shaking phosphorus from their gills, and leaving
a train of it in their tails; and the many-windowed Pharos of the
harbour has all its panes lit up, and twinkles after its own fashion.
Round the bay an interrupted crescent of flickering light is
reflected in the water, strongest in the middle, where the town is
thickest, and runs back; and far behind all lights comes the clear
outline of the darkly defined mountain rising over the city. Our own
lantern also is up, the authorities have disappeared, Monte Pelegrino
begins to change its position, we are in motion, and a mighty light
we are making under us, as our leviathan, turning round her head and
_snuffing_ the sea, begins to wind out of the harbour. A few minutes
more, and the luminous tracery of the receding town becomes more and
more indistinct; but the sky is _all stars_, and the water, save
where we break its smoothness, a perfect mirror. Wherever the paddles
play, there the sea foams up into yellow light and _gerbes_ of
amber-coloured fireballs, caught up by the wheels, and flung off in
our track, to float past with incredible rapidity. Men are talking
the language of Babel in the cabin; there is amateur singing and a
guitar on deck--_Orion_ is on his dolphin--adieu, Palermo!

APPROACH TO MESSINA.

The Italian morning presents a beautiful sight on deck to eyes weary
and sore with night, as night passes on board steamers. We pass along
a coast obviously of singular conformation, and to a geologist, we
suppose, full of interest. We encounter a herd of classical dolphins
out a-pleasuring. We ask about a pretty little town perched just
above the sea, and called _Giocosa_. By its side lies
_Tyndaris_--classical enough if we spell it right. The snow on Etna
is as good as an inscription, and to be read at any distance; but
what a deception! they tell us it is thirty miles off, and it seems
to rise immediately from behind a ridge of hills close to the shore.
The snow cone rises in the midst of other cones, which would appear
equally high but for the difference of colour. _Patti_ is a
picturesque little _borgo_, on the hillside, celebrated in Sicily for
its manufacture of hardware. In the bay of _Melazzo_ are taken by far
the largest supplies of thunny in the whole Mediterranean. From the
embayed town so named you have the choice of a cross-road to Messina,
(twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the
celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose
one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the
first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the
awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to
breakfast--the meal which is associated with that particular hour of
the four-and-twenty to all well regulated _minds_ and _stomachs_--it
consists here of thin _veneers_ of old mahogany-coloured thunny,
varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of
capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a
disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also
fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt
not the old result--_de conviva Corybanta videbis_. (Oh, for muffins
and dry toast!) Never mind, we shall soon be at Messina. And now we
approach a point from which the lofty Calabrian coast opposite, and
the flinty wall of the formidable Scylla, first present themselves,
but still as distant objects. In another half hour we are just
opposite the redoubtable rock; and here we turn abruptly at right
angles to our hitherto course, and find ourselves _within_ the
straits, from either side of which the English and the French so
often tried the effect of cannon upon each other. It is now what it
used to be--fishing ground. The Romans got their finest muræna from
the whirlpools of _Charybdis_.[17] The shark (_cane di mare_)
abounding here, would make bathing dangerous were the water smooth;
but the rapid whirlpools through which our steam-boat dashes on
disdainfully, would, at the same time, make it impossible to any
thing but a fish. A passenger assured us he had once seen a man lost
in the Vistula, who, from being a great swimmer, trusted imprudently
to his strength, and was sucked down by a vortex of far less
impetuosity, he thought, than this through which we were moving. From
this point till we arrived at Messina, as every body was ripe for
bathing, the whole conversation turned naturally on the Messina
shark, and his trick of snapping at people's legs carelessly left by
the owners dangling over the boat's side. We steam up the straits to
our anchorage in about three-fourths of an hour. The approach is
fine, very fine. A certain Greek, (count, he called himself,) a great
traveller, and we afterwards found not a small adventurer, increases
the interest of the approach, by telling us that the hills before us,
bubbling up like blisters on chalcedony, have a considerable
resemblance, though inferior in character, to those which embellish
the Bosphorus and the first view of Constantinople. Inferior, no
doubt, in the imposing accessories of mosque and minaret, and of
cypresses as big as obelisks, which, rising thickly on the heights,
give to the city of Constantinople an altogether peculiar and
inimitable charm. Messina is beautifully land-locked. The only
possible winds that can affect its port are the north-west and
south-east. In summer it is said to enjoy more sea breeze than any
other place on the Mediterranean. Our Greek friend, however, says
that Constantinople is in this respect not only superior to Messina,
but to any other place in the seas of Europe. Pity that the fellows
are Turks! We did not find much to interest us within the walls of
Messina. There was, to be sure, a fine collection of Sicilian birds,
amongst which we were surprised to see several of very exotic shape
and plumage. One long-legged fellow, dressed in a dirty white
Austrian uniform, with large web-feet, on which he seemed to rest
with great complacency, particularly arrested our attention. He stood
as high as the _Venus di Medici_, but by no means so gracefully, and
thrust his thick carved beak unceremoniously in your face. His card
of address was _Phoenicopterus antiquorum_. The ancients ate him, and
he looked as if he would break your nose if you disputed with him. A
very large finch, which we have seen for sale about the streets here
and elsewhere in Sicily, rejoices in the imposing name of _Fringilla
cocco thraustis_. He wears his black cravat like a bird of
pretension, as he evidently is. The puffin (_Puffinus Anglorum_) also
frequents these rocks, though a very long way from the Isle of Wight.
No! Messina, though very fine, is not equal to _Palermo_, with its
unrivaled _Marina_, compared to which Messina is poorly off indeed,
in her straggling dirty commerce-doing quay. We went out to see a
little garden, which contains half a dozen zare-trees and as many
beautiful birds in cages. We are disappointed at the poverty of our
dessert in this region of fruitfulness--a few bad oranges, some
miserable cherries, and that abomination the green almond. We
observe, for the first time, to-day folks eating in the streets the
crude contents of a little oval pod, which contains one or two very
large peas, twice the size of any others. These are the true _cicer_,
the proper Italian pea. Little bundles of them are tied up for sale
at all the fruit stalls, and men are seen all the day long eating
these raw peas, and offering them to each other as sugar-plums.

[Footnote 17: "Virroni muræna datur, quo maxima venit Gurgite de
Siculo: nam dum se continet Auster, Contemnunt mediam tem eraria lina
Charybdim." JUVENAL, _Sat._ v. 99.]

In the Corso we see a kind of temporary theatre, the deal sides of
which are gaudily lined with Catania silk, and on its stage a whole
_dramatis personæ_ of sacred puppets. It is lighted by tapers of very
taper dimensions, and its _stalle_ are to be let for a humble
consideration to the faithful or the curious. It turns out to be a
religious spectacle, supported on the voluntary system--but there is
something for your money. A vast quantity of light framework, to
which fireworks, chiefly of the detonating kind, are attached, are
already going off, and folk are watching till it be completed. Then
the evening's entertainment will begin, and a miser indeed must he
be, or beyond measure resourceless, who refuses halfpence for such
choice festivities. Desirous to make out the particular
representation, we get over the fence in order to examine the figures
of the drama on a nearer view. A smartly dressed saint in a court
suit, but whom mitre and crosier determine to be a bishop, kneels to
a figure in spangles, a virgin as fond of fine clothes as the Greek
Panageia; while on the other side, with one or two priests in his
train, is seen a crowd in civil costume. A paper cloud above,
surrounded by glories of glass and tinsel, is supported by two solid
cherubs equal to the occasion, and presents to the intelligent a
representation of--we know not what! Fire-works here divide the
public with the drum--to one or other all advertisement in Sicily is
committed. A sale of fish and flesh, theatric entertainments,
processions, and church invitations, are all by tuck of drum, or by
squib and cracker. How did they get on before the invention of
gunpowder? If a new coffeehouse is established, a couple of drums
start it advantageously, and beat like a recruiting party up and down
the street, to the dismay of all _Forestieri_. The drum tells you
when the thunny is at a discount, and _fire-works_ are let off at
_fish stalls_ when customers are slack.

An old tower, five miles off, is called the telegraph. People go
there for the panorama at the expense of three horses and two hours;
but you are repaid by two sea views, either of which had been
sufficient. Messina, its harbour, the straits, the opposite coast of
Calabria, Scylla, and _Rhegium_, (famed for its bergamot,) are on the
immediate shore, and a most striking chain of hills for the
background, which, at a greater distance, have for their background
the imposing range of the _Abruzzi_. The Æolian islands rise out of
the sea in the happiest positions for effect. _Stromboli_ on the
extreme right detaches his grey wreath of smoke, which seems as if it
proceeded out of the water, (for Stromboli is very low,) staining for
a moment the clear firmament, which rivals it in depth of colour.
Some of the volcanic group are so nearly on a level with the water,
that they look like the backs of so many leviathans at a halt. The
sea itself lies, a waveless mirror, smooth, shining, slippery, and
treacherous as a serpent's back--"miseri quibus intentata _nites_,"
say we.

JOURNEY TO TAORMINA.

We left Messina under a sky which no painter would or could attempt;
indeed, it would not have looked well on paper, or out of reality.
There are certain unusual, yet magnificent appearances in nature,
from which the artist conventionally abstains, not so much from the
impotence of art, as that the nearer his approach to success the
worse the picture. At one time the colours were like shot or clouded
silk, or the beautiful uncertainty of the Palamida of these shores,
or the matrix of opal; at another, the Pacific Ocean above, of which
the continuity is often for whole months _entire_, was broken into
gigantic continents and a Polynesia of rose-coloured islands that no
ships might approach; while in this nether world the middle of the
Calabro-Sicilian strait was occupied by a condensation of vapour,
(one could never profane them by the term of _sea-mist_ or _fog_,)
the most subtile and attenuated which ever came from the realms of
cloud-compelling Jove. This fleecy tissue pursued its deliberate
progress from coast to coast, like a cortege of cobwebs carrying a
deputation from the power-looms of _Arachne_ in _Italy_ to the rival
silk-looms at Catania. We pass the dry beds of mountain torrents at
every half mile, ugly gashes on a smooth road; and requiring too much
caution to leave one's attention to be engaged by many objects
altogether new and beautiful. The rich yellow of the _Cactus_, and
the red of the _Pomegranate_, and the most tender of all vegetable
greens, that of the young _mulberry_, together with a sweet
wilderness of unfamiliar plants, are not to be perfectly enjoyed on a
fourfooted animal that stumbles, or on a road full of pitfalls. We
shall only say that the _Cynara cardunculus_, (a singularly fine
thistle or _wild artichoke_;) the prickly uncultivated _love-apple_,
(a beautiful variety of the _Solanum_,) of which the decoction is not
infrequently employed in nephritic complaints; the _Ferula_, sighing
for occupation all along the sea-shore, and shaking its scourge as
the wind blows; the _Rhododendron_, in full blossom, planted amongst
the shingles; the _Thapsia gargarica_, with its silver umbel, looking
at a short distance like mica, (an appearance caused by the shining
white fringe of the capsule encasing its seed,) and many other
strange and beautiful things, were the constant attendants of our
march. We counted six or seven varieties of the spurge,
(_Euphorbium_,) each on its milky stem, and in passing through the
villages had _Carnations_ as large as _Dahlias_ flung at us by
sunburnt urchins posted at their several doors. The sandy shore for
many miles is beautifully notched in upon by tiny bays like basins,
on which boats lie motionless and baking in the sun, or oscillate
under a picturesque rock, immersed up to its shoulders in a green
_hyaloid_, which reflects their forms from a depth of many fathoms.
On more open stretches of the shore, long-drawn ripples of waves of
tiny dimension are overrunning and treading on one another's heels
for miles a-head, and tapping the anchored boat "with gentle blow."
The long-horned oxen already spoken of, toil along the seaside road
like the horses on our canal banks, and tug the heavy felucca towards
Messina--a service, however, sometimes executed by men harnessed to
the towing-cord, who, as they go, offend the Sicilian muses by sounds
and by words that have little indeed of the [Greek: Dôriz aoida]. The
gable ends of cottages often exhibit a very primitive windmill for
sawing wood within doors. It is a large wheel, to the spokes of which
flappers are adjusted, made of coarse matting, and so placed as to
profit by the ordinary sea breeze; and, while the _wind_ is thus
_sawing_ his planks for him, the carpenter, at his door, carries on
his craft. We pass below not a few fortresses abutting over the sea,
or perched on the mountain tops. Many of these are of English
construction, and date from the occupation of the island during the
French war: in a word, the whole of this Sicilian road is so
variously lovely, that if we did not know the _cornice_ between
_Nice_ and _Genoa_, we should say it was quite unrivaled, being at
once in lavish possession of all the grand, and most of the milder
elements of landscape composition. It is long since it became no
wonder to us that the greatest and in fact the only, real pastoral
poet should have been a Sicilian; but it is a marvel indeed, that,
having forgotten to bring his _Eclogues_ with us, we cannot, through
the whole of Sicily, find a copy of Theocitus for sale, though there
is a _Sicilian_ translation of him to be had at Palermo. As he
progresses thus delightfully, a long-wished for moment awaits the
traveller approaching towards _Giardini_--turning round a far
projecting neck of land, _Etna_ is at last before him! A
disappointment, however, on the whole is Etna himself, thus
introduced. He looks far below his stature, and seems so _near_, that
we would have wagered to get upon his shoulders and pull his ears,
and return to the little town to dine; the ascent also, to the eye,
seems any thing but steep; nor can you easily be brought to believe
that such an expedition is from Giardini a three days' affair,
except, indeed, that yonder belt of snow in the midst of this
roasting sunshine, has its own interpretation, and cannot be
mistaken. Alas! In the midst of all our flowers there was, as there
always is, the _amari aliquid_--it was occasioned here by the
_flies_. They had tasked our _improved_ capacity for bearing
annoyances ever since we first set foot in Sicily; but _here_ they
are perfectly incontrollable, stinging and buzzing at us without
mercy or truce, not to be driven off for a second, nor persuaded to
drown themselves on any consideration. Verily, the honey-pots of
Hybla itself seem to please these troublesome insects less than the
_flesh_-pots of Egypt.

The next day begins inauspiciously for our ascent to Taormina; but
the attendants of the excursion are already making a great noise,
without which nothing can be done in either of the two Sicilies. A
supply of shabby donkeys are brought and mounted, and, once astride,
we begin to ascend, the poor beasts tottering under our weight, and
by their constant stumbling affording us little inclination to look
about. It takes about three-fourths of an hour of this donkey-riding
to reach the old notched wall of the town. Two Taorminian citizens at
this moment issue from under its arch, in their way down, and
guessing what we are, offer some indifferent coins which do not suit
us, but enable us to enter into conversation. We demand and obtain a
_cicerone_, of whom we are glad to get rid after three hours'
infliction of his stupidity and endurance of his ignorance, without
acquiring one idea, Greek, Roman, Norman, or Saracen, out of all his
erudition. After going through the whole tour with such a fellow for
a Hermes, we come at last upon the far-famed theatre, where we did
not want him. Here, however, a very intelligent attendant, supported
by the king of Naples on a suitable pension of five baiocchi a-day,
takes us out of the hands of the Philistine, and with a plan of the
ground to aid us, proceeds to give an intelligible, and, as appears
to us, a true explanation of the different parts of the huge
construction, in the area of which we stand delighted. He directed
our attention to a large arched tunnel, under and at right angles to
the pulpita, and we did not want direction to the thirty-six niches
placed at equal distances all round the ellipse, and just over the
lowest range of the CUNEI. All niches were, no doubt, for statues;
but these might also have been, it pleases some to suppose, for the
reverberation of applause; and they quote something about
_"Resonantia Vasa"_ from Macrobius, adding, that such niches were
once probably lined with brass. Of bolder speculatists, some believe
the _kennel_ to have been made with a similar intention. Others hold
that it may have been a concealed way for introducing lions and
tigers to the arena! Now, what if it were a _drain_ for the waters,
which, in bad weather, soon collect to a formidable height in such a
situation? Whether for voice, or wild beasts, or drainage, or none of
these objects, there it is. As to the first, we cannot help being
sceptical. Did it ever occur to an audience to wish the noise they
make _greater_, and contrive expedients for _making it so?_

We are here high up amidst the mountains, where, we are to remember,
as the ancients came not to spend, like ourselves, an idle hour, but
to consume most of the day, _shelter_ would be wanted. Two large
lateral spaces, or as it were, side chambers, have received this
destination at the hands of the antiquary, and have been supposed
lobbies for foul weather or for shade at noon. We were made to notice
by our guide, what we should else have overlooked, how the main
passage described above communicates with several smaller ones in its
progress, and that a small stair was a subsequent contrivance or
afterthought meant to relieve, on emergency, the overcharged large
one; its workmanship and style showed it plainly to have been added
when the edifice had already become _an antiquity_. This altogether
peculiar and most interesting building has also suffered still later
interpolations: a Saracenic frieze runs round the wall; so that the
hands of three widely different nations have been busy on the
mountain theatre, which received its _first audience_ twenty-five
centuries ago! The view obtained from this spot has often been
celebrated, and deserves to be. Such mountains we had often seen
before; such a sky is the usual privilege of Sicily; these indented
_bays_, which break so beautifully the line of the coast, had been an
object of our daily admiration; the hoary side of the majestic Etna,
and Naxos with its castellated isthmus, might be seen from _other_
elevated situations; and the acuminated tops of Mola, with its
Saracenic tower, were commanded by neighbouring sites--Taormina
_alone_, and for its _own_ sake, was the great and paramount object
in our eyes, and possessed us wholly! We had been following _Lyell_
half the day in antediluvian remains; but what are the bones of
_Ichthyosauri_ or _Megalotheria_ to this gigantic skeleton of Doric
antiquity, round which lie scattered the sepulchres of its ancient
audiences, Greek, Roman, and Oriental--tombs which had become already
an object of speculation, and been rifled for arms, vases, or gold
rings, before Great Britain had made the first steps beyond painted
barbarism!

The eruptions of Etna have all been recorded. Thucydides mentions one
of them episodically in the Peloponesian war. From the cooled caldron
that simmers under all that snow, has proceeded all the lava that the
ancients worked into these their city walls. The houses of
Taurominium were built of and upon _lava_, which it requires a
thousand years to disintegrate. After dinner we walk to Naxos,
saluting the statue of the patron of a London parish, _St Pancras_,
on our way. He stands on the beach here, and claims, by inscription
on his pedestal, to have belonged to the apostolic times, St Peter
himself having, he says, appointed him to his bishopric. He is patron
of Taormina, where he has possessed himself of a Greek temple; and he
also protects the faithful of Giardini. Lucky in his _architects_ has
been St Pancras; for many of our readers are familiar with his very
elegant modern church in the New Road, modelled, if we have not
forgotten, on the Erechtheum, with its _Pandrosean Vestries_, its
upright tiles, and all the subordinate details of Athenian
architecture. We _met_ here the subject of many an ancient _bas
relief_ done into flesh and blood--a dozen men and boys tripping
along the road to the music of a bagpipe, one old _Silenus_ leading
the jocund throng, and the whole of them, as the music, such as it
was, inspired, leaping about and gesticulating with incredible
activity. It was a bacchanalian subject, which we had seen on many a
sarcophagus, only that the fellows here were not _quite_ naked, and
that we looked in vain for those nascent horns and tails by which the
children of Pan and Faunus ought to be identified. We always look out
for _natural history_. Walking in a narrow street, we saw a tortoise,
awake for the season, come crawling out to peep at the poultry; his
hybernation being over, he wants to be social, and the hens in
astonishment chuckle round him, and his tortoiseshell highness seems
pleased at their kind enquiries, and keeps bobbing his head in and
out of his _testudo_ in a very sentimental manner. Women who want his
shell for _combs_ do not frequent these parts, and so, unless a cart
pass over him as he returns home, he is in clover.

A bird frequents these parts with a blue chest, called _Passer
solitarius;_ he abounds in the rocky crevices. The notes of one,
which was shown to us in a cage, sounded sweetly; but, as he was
carnivorous, the weather was too hot for us to think of taking him
away. We saw two snakes put into the same box: the one, a viper,
presently killed the other, and much the larger of the two. Serpents,
then, like men, do _not_, as the _Satirist_ asserts, spare their
kind. We are disappointed at not finding any coins, nor any other
good _souvenirs_, to bring away with us. The height of Taormina is
sufficient to keep it from fever, which is very prevalent at Giardini
below. Its bay was once a great place for catching _mullet_ for the
Roman market. It seems to have been the _Torbay_ of Sicily. Some fish
love their ease, and rejoice not in turbulent waters. The _muræna_,
or lamprey, on the contrary, was sought in the very whirlpools of
_Charybdis_. The modern Roman, on his own side of Italy, has few
turbot, but very good ones are still taken off Ancona, in the
Adriatic, where the _spatium admirabile Rhombi_, as the reader will,
or ought to recollect, was taken and sent to Domitian at Albano by
_Procaccio_ or _Estafetta_. Juvenal complains that the Tyrrhene sea
was exhausted by the demand for fish, though there was no _Lent_ in
those times. If the Catholic clergy insist that there _was_, we beg
to object, that the keepers thereof were probably not in a condition
to compete with the _Apiciuses_ of the day, who bought fish for their
_bodies'_, and not for their SOULS' SAKE.

CATANIA.

Tum Catane nimium ardenti vicina Typhæo.

After a pleasant drive of twenty miles, we find ourselves at
_Aci-Reale_, where a street, called "Galatea," reminds us
unexpectedly of a very classical place called Dean's Yard, where we
once had doings with _Acis_, as he figures in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.
We were here in luck, and, having purchased some fine coins of
several of the tyrants of Sicily from the apothecary, proceeded on
our way to Catania. In half an hour we reach the basaltic Isles of
the Cyclops, and the Castle of Acis, whom the peasants hereabouts
tell you was their king, when Sicily was under the Saracenic yoke.
The river _Lecatia_, now lost, is supposed formerly to have issued
hereabouts, in the port of Ulysses. Our next move placed us amidst
the silk-slops of Catania. We have hardly been five minutes in the
town, when offers abound to conduct us up Ætna, in whom, as so much
national wealth, the inhabitants seem to take as much interest as in
her useful and productive silk-looms. Standing fearless on the
pavement of lava that buried their ancient city, they point up with
complacency to its fountains above. The mischievous exploits of Ætna,
in past times, are in every mouth, and children learn their Ætnean
catechism as soon as they are breeched. Ætna here is all in all.
Churches are constructed out of his quarried _viscera_--great men lie
in tombs, of which the stones once ran liquid down his flames--snuff
is taken out of lava boxes--and devotion carves the crucifix on lava,
and numbers its beads on a lava rosary--nay, the apothecary's mortar
was sent him down from the great mortar-battery above, and the
village _belle_ wears fire-proof bracelets that were once too hot to
be meddled with. Go to the museum, and you will call it a museum of
Ætnean products. Nodulated, porous, condensed, streaked, spotted,
clouded, granulated lava, here assumes the colour, rivals the
compactness, sustains the polish, of jasper, of agate, and of marble;
indeed it sometimes surpasses, in beautiful veinage, the finest and
rarest Marmorean specimens. You would hardly distinguish some of it,
worked into jazza or vase, from _rosso antico_ itself. A very old and
rusty armoury may, as here, be seen any where; but a row of
formidable shark skulls, taken along the coast, and some in the very
port of Catania, are rarities on which the _ciceroni_ like to
prelect, being furnished with many a story of bathers curtailed by
them, and secure a large portion of attention, especially if you were
just thinking of a dip. A rather fine collection of bronzes has been
made from excavations in the neighbourhood, which, indeed, must
always promise to reward research. A figure of Mercury, two and a
half feet high, and so exactly similar to that of John of Bologna,
that his one seemed an absolute plagiarism, particularly attracted
our attention on that account. The great Italian artist, however, had
been dead one hundred and fifty years before this bronze was dug up.
Next in importance to the bronzes, we esteem the collection of
Sicilian, or Græco-Sicilian vases, though inferior in number and
selectness to those of the Vatican, or Museo-Borbonico. There is also
some ancient sculpture, and some pretty mosaic. Of this composition
is a bathfloor, where a family of Cupids, in the centre of the
pavement, welcome you with a _utere feliciter_, (may it do you good.)
Round the border, a circle of the personified _"months"_ is
artistically chained together, each bearing his _Greek_ name, for
fear of a mistake--names not half so good as Sheridan's translation
of the Revolutionary calendar--snowy, flowy, blowy--showery, flowery,
bowery--moppy, croppy, poppy--breezy, sneezy, freezy. In Catania, we
find no lack of coins, nor of sharp-eyed dealers, who know pretty
generally their value throughout Europe; but, in order to be quite
sure of the price _current,_ ask double what they take from one
another, and judge, by your abatement of it, of the state of the
market elsewhere. Now mind, sir, when they present you the most
impudent forgeries, you are not to get into a passion; but, glancing
from the object to the vender, quietly insinuate your want of
_absolute_ conviction in a _"che vi pare di questa moneta."_ He now
looks at it again, and takes a squint at _you;_ and supposing you
smell a rat, probably replies that certainly he _bought_ it for
_genuine;_ but you _have suggested a doubt,_ and the piece really
begins, even to _him_, to look suspicious, _"anzi à me."_ You reply
coolly, and put it down--"That was just what I was thinking;" and so
the affair passes quietly off. And now you _may_, if you happen to be
tender-hearted, say something compassionate to the poor innocent who
has been _taken in_, and proceed to ask him about another; and when
you see any thing you long to pocket, enquire what can he afford to
let a _brother collector_ (give him a step in rank) have _it_ for;
and so go on feeling your way, and never "putting your arm so far out
that you cannot comfortably draw it back again." He will probably ask
you if you know Mr B---- or C----, (English collectors,) with whom he
has had dealings, calling them "_stimabili signori;_" and, of course,
you have no doubt of it, though you never heard of them before. It is
also always conciliative to congratulate him on the possession of
such and such rare and "_belle cose;_" and if you thus contrive to
get into his good graces, he will deal with you at _fair prices_, and
perhaps amuse you with an account of such tricks as he is not ashamed
to have practised on _blockheads_, who will buy at any cost if the
die is fine. Indeed, it has passed into an aphorism among these
_mezzo-galantuomini_, as their countrymen call them, that a fine coin
is always worth _what you can get for it._

We heard the celebrated organ of St Benedict, which has been praising
God in tremendous hallelujahs ever since it was put up, and a hundred
years have only matured the richness of its tones. Its voice was
gushing out as we entered the church, and filling nave and aisle with
a diapason of all that was soft and soothing, as if a choir of
Guido's angels had broke out in harmony.

A stream of fresh water issues under the old town-wall, and an
immense mass of incumbent lava, of at least ninety feet high, impends
just above its source, the water struggling through a mass of rock
once liquefied by fire, in as limpid a rill as if it came from
limestone, and so excellent in quality that no other is used in
Catania. Women with buckets were ascending and descending to fetch
supplies out of the lava of the dead city below, for the use of the
living town above. Moreover, this is the only point in Catania where
the accident of a bit of wall arresting for some time the progress of
the lava current, has left the level of the old town to be rigidly
ascertained.

Here, as at _Aci-Reale_, balconies at windows, for the most part
supported by brackets, terminating in human heads, give a rich,
though rather a heavy, appearance to the street. Much amber is found
and worked at Catania. It has been lately discovered in a fossil
state, and in contiguity with fossil wood; but we were quite
_electrified_ at the price of certain little scent-bottles, and other
articles made of this production. You see it in all its possible
varieties of colour, opacity, or transparency. The green opalized
kind is the most prized, and four pounds was demanded for a pair of
pendants of this colour for earrings. Besides the yellow sort, which
is common every where, we see the ruby red, which is very rare: some
varieties are freckled, and some of the sort which afforded subjects
for Martial, and for more than one of the Greek anthologists, with
insects in its matrix. _This_ kind, they say, is found exclusively on
the coast of Catania. There are such pieces the size of a hand, but
it is generally in much smaller bits. Amber lies under, or is formed
_upon_ the sand, and abounds most near the _embouchure_ of a small
river in this neighbourhood. Many beautiful shells, fossils, and
other objects of natural history, appear in the dealers' trays; and
polished knife-handles of Sicilian _agate_ may be had at five dollars
a dozen.

THE LAST OF THE KNIGHTS.

DON JOHN AND THE HERETICS OF FLANDERS.

It would almost seem as though chivalry were one of the errors of
Popery; so completely did the spirit of the ancient orders of
knighthood evaporate at the Reformation! The blind enthusiasm of
ignorance having engendered superstitions of every kind and colour,
the blow struck at the altar of the master idol proved fatal to all.

In Elizabeth's time, the forms and sentiment of chivalry were kept up
by an effort. The parts enacted by Sidney and Raleigh, appear studied
rather than instinctive. At all events, the gallant Sir Philip was
the last of English knights, as he was the first of his time.
Thenceforward, the valour of the country assumed a character more
professional.

But a fact thus familiar to us of England, is more remarkable of the
rest of Europe. The infallibility of Rome once assailed, every faith
was shaken. Loyalty was lessened, chivalry became extinct; expiring
in France with Henri IV. and the League--in Portugal with Don
Sebastian of Braganza--and in Spain with Charles V., exterminated
root and branch by the pen of Cervantes.

One of the most brilliant effervescences, however, of those crumbling
institutions, is connected with Spanish history, in the person of Don
John of Austria;--a prince who, if consecrated by legitimacy to the
annals of the throne, would have glorified the historical page by a
thousand heroic incidents. But the sacrament of his baptism being
unhappily unpreceded by that of a marriage, he has bequeathed us one
of those anomalous existences--one of those incomplete destinies,
which embitter our admiration with disappointment and regret.

On both sides of royal blood, Don John was born with qualifications
to adorn a throne. It is true that when his infant son was entrusted
by Charles V. to the charge of the master of his household, Don
Quexada, the emperor simply described him as the offspring of a lady
of Ratisbon, named Barbara Blomberg. But the Infanta Clara Eugenia
was confidentially informed by her father Philip II., and
confidentially informed her satellite La Cuea, that her uncle was
"every way of imperial lineage;" and but that he was the offspring of
a crime, Don John had doubtless been seated on one of those thrones
to which his legitimate brother Philip imparted so little
distinction.

Forced by the will of Charles V. to recognize the consanguinity of
Don John, and treat him with brotherly regard, one of the objects of
the hateful life of the father of Don Carlos seems to have been to
thwart the ambitious instincts of his brilliant Faulconbridge. For in
the boiling veins of the young prince abided the whole soul of
Charles V.,--valour, restlessness, ambition; and his romantic life
and mysterious death bear alike the tincture of his parentage.

That was indeed the age of the romance of royalty! Mary at
Holyrood,--Elizabeth at Kenilworth--Carlos at the feet of his
mother-in-law,--the Béarnais at the gates of Paris,--have engraved
their type in the book of universal memory. But Don John escapes
notice--a solitary star outshone by dazzling constellations.
Commemorated by no medals, flattered by no historiographer, sung by
no inspired "godson," anointed by neither pope nor primate, his nook
in the temple of fame is out of sight, and forgotten.

Even his master feat, the gaining of the battle of Lepanto, brings
chiefly to our recollection that the author of Don Quixote lost his
hand in the action; and in the trivial page before us, we dare not
call our hero by the name of "Don Juan," (by which he is known in
Spanish history,) lest he be mistaken for the popular libertine! And
thus, the last of the knights has been stripped of his name by the
hero of the "Festin de Pierre," and of his honours by Cervantes, as
by Philip II. of a throne.--

Hard fate for one described by all the writers of his time as a model
of manly grace and Christian virtue! How charming is the account
given by the old Spanish writers of the noble youth, extricated from
his convent to be introduced on the high-road to a princely cavalier,
surrounded by his retinue, whom he is first desired to salute as a
brother, and then required to worship, as the king of Spain! We are
told of his joy on discovering his filial relationship to the great
emperor, so long the object of his admiration. We are told of his
deeds of prowess against the Turks at Lepanto, at Tunis against the
Moor. We are told of the proposition of Gregory XIII. that he should
be rewarded with the crown of Barbary, and of the desire of the
revolted nobility of Belgium, to raise him to their tottering throne;
nay, we are even assured that "la couronne d'Hibernie" was offered to
his acceptance. And finally, we are told of his untimely death and
glorious funeral--mourned by all the knighthood of the land! But we
hear and forget. Some mysterious counter-charm has stripped his
laurels of their verdure. Even the lesser incidents of the life of
Don John are replete with the interest of romance. When appointed by
Philip II. governor of the Netherlands, in order that he might deal
with the heretics of the Christian faith as with the faithful of
Mahomet, such deadly vengeance was vowed against his person by the
Protestant party headed by Horn and the Prince of Orange, that it was
judged necessary for his highness to perform his journey in disguise.
Attired as a Moorish slave, he reached Luxembourg as the attendant of
Ottavio Gonzaga, brother of Prince Amalfi, at the very moment the
troops of the king of Spain were butchering eight thousand citizens
in his revolted city of Antwerp!--

The arrival of the new governor afforded the signal for more pacific
measures. The dispositions of Don John were humane--his manners
frank. Aware that the Belgian provinces were exhausted by ten years
of civil war, and that the pay of the Spanish troops he had to lead
against them was so miserably in arrear as to compel them to acts of
atrocious spoliation, the hero of Lepanto appears to have done his
best to stop the effusion of blood; and, notwithstanding the
counteraction of the Prince of Orange, the following spring, peace
and an amnesty were proclaimed. The treaty signed at Marche, (known
by the name of the Perpetual Edict,) promised as much tranquillity as
was compatible with the indignation of a country which had seen the
blood of its best and noblest poured forth, and the lives and
property of its citizens sacrificed without mercy or calculation.

But, though welcomed to Brussels by the acclamations of the people
and the submission of the States, Don John appears to have been fully
sensible that his head was within the jaws of the lion. The blood of
Egmont had not yet sunk into the earth; the echoes of the edicts of
Alva yet lingered in the air; and the very stones of Brussels
appeared to rise up and testify against a brother of Philip II.!

Right thankful, therefore, was the young prince when an excuse was
afforded for establishing himself in a more tenable position, by an
incident which must again be accounted among the romantic adventures
of his life. For the sudden journey of the fascinating Margaret of
Valois to the springs of Spa, on pretence of indisposition, was
generally attributed to a design against the heart of the hero of
Lepanto.

A prince so remarkable for his gallantry of knighthood, could do no
less than wait upon the sister of the French king, on her passage
through Namur; and, once established in the citadel of that
stronghold of the royalists, he quitted it no more. In process of
time, a camp was formed in the environs, and fortresses erected on
the banks of the Meuse under the inspection of Don John; nor was it
at first easy to determine whether his measures were actuated by
mistrust of the Protestants, or devotion to the worst and most
Catholic of wives of the best and most Huguenot of kings.

The blame of posterity, enlightened by the journal of Queen
Margaret's proceedings in Belgium, (bequeathed for our edification by
the alienated queen of Henri IV.,) has accused Don John of blindness,
in the right-loyal reception bestowed on her, and the absolute
liberty accorded her during her residence at Spa, where she was
opening a road for the arrival of her brother the Duke of Alençon. It
is admitted, indeed, that her attack upon his heart met with defeat.
But the young governor is said to have made up in chivalrous
courtesies for the disappointment of her tender projects; and
Margaret, if she did not find a lover at Namur, found the most
assiduous of knights.

Many, indeed, believe that his attentions to the French princess were
as much a feint as her own illness; and that he was as completely
absorbed in keeping at bay his heretic subjects, as her highness by
the desire of converting them into the subjects of France. It was
only those admitted into the confidence of Don John who possessed the
clue to the mystery.

Ottavio Gonzaga, on his return from a mission to Madrid with which he
had been charged by Don John, was the first to acquaint him with the
suspicions to which the sojourn of Margaret had given rise.

"I own I expected to find your highness in better cheer," said he,
when the first compliments had been exchanged. "Such marvels have
been recounted in Spain of your fêtes and jousts of honour, that I
had prepared myself to hear of nothing at headquarters but the silken
pastimes of a court."

"Instead of which," cried Don John, "you find me, as usual, in my
steel jerkin, with no milder music at command than the trumpets of my
camp; my sole duty, the strengthening of yonder lines," continued he,
(pointing from a window of the citadel, near which they were
standing, commanding the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse,) "and my
utmost diversion, an occasional charge against the boars in yonder
forest of Marlagne!"

"I cannot but suppose it more than _occasional_," rejoined Gonzaga;
"for I must pay your highness the ill compliment of avowing, that you
appear more worn by fatigue and weather at this moment, and in this
sunless clime, than at the height of your glorious labours in the
Mediterranean! Namur has already ploughed more wrinkles on your brow
than Barbary or Lepanto."

"Say rather in my _heart_!" cried the impetuous prince. "Since you
quitted me, six months ago, my dear Gonzaga, I have known nothing but
cares! To you I have no scruple in avowing, that my position in this
country is hateful. So long accustomed to war against a barbarous
enemy, I could almost fancy myself as much a Moor at heart, as I
appeared in visage, when in your service on my way to Luxembourg,
whenever I find my sword uplifted against a Christian breast!--Civil
war, Ottavio, is a hideous and repugnant thing!"--

"The report is true, then, that your highness has become warmly
attached to the people of these rebel provinces?" demanded Gonzaga,
not choosing to declare the rumour prevalent in Spain, that an
opportunity had been afforded to the prince by the Barlaimont
faction, of converting his viceroyalty into the sway of absolute
sovereignty.

"So much the reverse, that the evil impression they made on me at my
arrival, has increased a hundred-fold! I abhor them yet more and
more. Flemings or Brabançons, Hainaulters or Walloons, Catholic or
Calvinist, the whole tribe is my aversion; and despite our best
endeavours to conceal it, I am convinced the feeling is reciprocal!"

"If your highness was equally candid in your avowals to the Queen of
Navarre," observed Gonzaga gravely,--"I can scarcely wonder at the
hopes she is said to entertain of having won over the governor of
Mons to the French interest, during her transit through Flanders."

"Ay, indeed? Is such her boast?" cried the prince, laughing. "It may
indeed be so!--for never saw I a woman less scrupulous in the choice
or use of arms to fight her battles. But, trust me, whatever her
majesty may have accomplished, is through no aiding or abetting of
mine."

"Yet surely the devoted attentions paid her by your highness"--

"My highness made them _appear_ devoted in proportion to his
consciousness of their hollowness! But I promise you, my dear
Ottavio, there is no tenderer leaning in my heart towards Margaret de
Valois, than towards the most thicklipped of the divinities who
competed for our smiles at Tunis."

Gonzaga shrugged his shoulders. He was convinced that, for once, Don
John was sinking the friend in the prince. His prolonged absence had
perhaps discharged him from his post as confidant.

"Trust me," cried the young soldier, discerning his misgivings--"I am
as sincere in all this as becomes our friendship. But that God has
gifted me with a happy temperament, I should scarcely support the
disgusts of my present calling. It is much, my dear Gonzaga, to
inherit as a birthright the brand of such an ignominy as mine. But as
long as I trusted to conquer a happier destiny--to carve out for
myself fortunes as glorious as those to which my blood all but
entitles me--I bore my cross without repining. It was this ardent
hope of distinction that lent vigour to my arm in battle--that taught
prudence to my mind in council. I was resolved that even the
base-born of Charles V. should die a king!"--

Gonzaga listened in startled silence. To hear the young viceroy thus
bold in the avowal of sentiments, which of late he had been hearing
imputed to him at the Escurial as the direst of crimes, filled him
with amazement.

"But these hopes have expired!" resumed Don John. "The harshness with
which, on my return triumphant from Barbary, my brother refused to
ratify the propositions of the Vatican in my favour, convinced me
that I have nothing to expect from Philip beyond the perpetual
servitude of a satellite of the King of Spain."

Gonzaga glanced mechanically round the chamber at the emission of
these treasonable words. But there was nothing in its rude stone
walls to harbour an eavesdropper.

"Nor is this all!" cried his noble friend. "My discovery of the
unbrotherly sentiments of Philip has tended to enlighten me towards
the hatefulness of his policy. The reserve of his nature--the
harshness of his soul--the austerity of his bigotry--chill me to the
marrow!--The Holy Inquisition deserves, in my estimation, a name the
very antithesis of holy."

"I _beseech_ your highness!" cried Ottavio Gonzaga--clasping his
hands together in an irrepressible panic.

"Never fear, man! There be neither spies nor inquisitors in our camp;
and if there _were_, both they and you must even hear me out!" cried
Don John. "There is some comfort in discharging one's heart of
matters that have long lain so heavy on it; and I swear to you,
Gonzaga, that, instead of feeling surprised to find my cheeks so
lank, and my eyes so hollow, you would rather be amazed to find an
ounce of flesh upon my bones, did you know how careful are my days,
and how sleepless my nights, under the perpetual harassments of civil
war!--The haughty burgesses of Ghent, whom I could hate from my soul
but that they are townsmen of my illustrious father, the low-minded
Walloons, the morose Brugeois, the artful Brabançons--all the varied
tribes, in short, of the old Burgundian duchy, seem to vie with each
other which shall succeed best in thwarting and humiliating me. And
for what do I bear it? What honour or profit shall I reap on my
patience? What thanks derive for having wasted my best days and best
energies, in bruising with my iron heel the head of the serpent of
heresy? Why, even that Philip, for some toy of a mass neglected or an
ave forgotten, will perchance give me over to the tender questioning
of his grand inquisitor, as the shortest possible answer to my
pretensions to a crown,--while the arrogant nobility of Spain, when
roused from their apathy towards me by tidings of another Lepanto, a
fresh Tunis, will exclaim with modified gratification--'_There_ spoke
the blood of Charles the Fifth! Not so ill fought for a bastard!'"

Perceiving that the feelings of his highness were chafed, the
courtier, as in vocation bound, assured him he underrated the loyalty
towards him of his fellow countrymen of the Peninsula; and that his
services as governor of the Low Countries were fully appreciated.

"So fully, that I should be little surprised to learn the axe was
already sharpened that is to take off my head!" cried Don John, with
a scornful laugh. "And such being the exact state of my feelings and
opinions, my trusty Gonzaga, I ask you whether I am likely to have
proved a suitable Petrarch for so accomplished a Laura as the sister
of Henry III?"--

"I confess myself disappointed," replied the crafty Italian.--"I was
in hopes that your highness had found recreation as well as glory in
Belgium. During my sojourn at the court of Philip, I supported with
patience the somewhat ceremonious gravity of the Escurial, in the
belief that your highness was enjoying meanwhile those festal
enlivenments, which none more fully understand how to organize and
adorn."

"If such an expectation really availed to _enliven_ the Escurial,"
cried Don John recklessly, "your friendship must indeed possess
miraculous properties! However, you may judge with your own eyes the
pleasantness of my position; and every day that improves your
acquaintance with the ill blood and ill condition of this accursed
army of the royalists, ill-paid, ill-disciplined, and
ill-intentioned, will inspire you with stronger yearnings after our
days of the Mediterranean, where I was master of myself and of my
men."

"And all this was manifested to Margaret, and all this will serve to
comfort the venomous heart of the queen mother!"--ejaculated Gonzaga,
shrugging his shoulders.

"Not a syllable, not a circumstance! The Queen of Navarre was far too
much engrossed by the manoeuvres of her own bright eyes, to take heed
of those of my camp."

"Your highness is perhaps less well aware than might be desirable, of
how many things a woman's eyes are capable of doing, at one and the
same time!"--retorted the Italian.

"I only wish," cried Don John impatiently, "that instead of having
occasion to read me those Jeremiads, you had been here to witness the
friendship you so strangely exaggerate! A ball, an excursion on the
Meuse, a boar hunt in the forest of Marlagne, constitute the pastimes
you are pleased to magnify into an imperial ovation."

"Much may be confided amid the splendour of a ball-room,--much in one
poor half hour of a greenwood rendezvous!"--persisted the provoking
Ottavio.

"Ay--_much_ indeed!" responded Don John, with a sigh so deep that it
startled by its significance the attention of his brother in arms.
"But not to such a woman as the Queen of Henri the Béarnais!"
returned the Prince. "By our Lady of Liesse! I wish no worse to that
heretic prince, than to have placed his honour in the keeping of the
_gente Margot_."

Fain would Gonzaga have pursued the conversation, which had taken a
turn that promised wonders for the interest of the despatches he had
undertaken to forward to the Escurial, in elucidation of the designs
and sentiments of Don John,--towards whom his allegiance was as the
kisses of Judas! But the imperial scion, (who, when he pleased, could
assume the unapproachability of the blood royal,) made it apparent
that he was no longer in a mood to be questioned. Having proposed to
the new-comer (to whom, as an experienced commander, he destined the
colonelship of his cavalry,) that they should proceed to a survey of
the fortifications at Bouge, they mounted their horses, and, escorted
by Nignio di Zuniga, the Spanish aide-de-camp of the prince,
proceeded to the camp.

The affectionate deference testified towards the young governor by
all classes, the moment he made his appearance in public, appeared to
Gonzaga strangely in contradiction with the declarations of Don John
that he was no favourite in Belgium. The Italian forgot that the Duke
of Arschot, the Counts of Mansfeld and Barlaimont, while doffing
their caps to the representative of the King of Spain, had as much
right to behold in him the devoted friend of Don John of Austria, as
_he_ to regard _them_ as the faithful vassals of his government.

A fair country is the country of Namur!--The confluent streams--the
impending rocks--the spreading forests of its environs, comprehend
the finest features of landscape; nor could Ottavio Gonzaga feel
surprised that his prince should find as much more pleasure in those
breesy plains than in the narrow streets of Brussels, as he found
security and strength.

On the rocks overhanging the Meuse, at some distance from the town,
stands the village of Bouge, fortified by Don John; to attain which
by land, hamlets and thickets were to be traversed; and it was
pleasant to see the Walloon peasant children run forth from the
cottages to salute the royal train, making their heavy Flemish
chargers swerve aside and perform their lumbering cabrioles far more
deftly than the cannonading of the rebels, to which they were almost
accustomed.

As they cut across a meadow formed by the windings of the Meuse, they
saw at a distance a group formed, like most groups congregated just
then in the district, of soldiers and peasants; to which the
attention of the prince being directed, Nignio di Zuniga, his
aide-de-camp, was dispatched to ascertain the cause of the gathering.

"A nothing, if it please your highness!" was the reply of the
Spaniard--galloping back, hat in hand, with its plumes streaming in
the breeze;--that the Prince's train, which had halted, might resume
its pace.

"But a nothing of what sort?" persisted Don John, who appreciated the
trivialties of life very differently from those by whom he was
surrounded.

"A village grievance!--An old woman roaring her lungs out for a cow
which has been carried off by our troopers!"--grumbled the
aide-de-camp, with less respect than was usual to him.

"And call you that a _nothing_?"--exclaimed his master. "By our lady
of Liesse, it is an act of cruelty and oppression--a thing calculated
to make us hateful in the eyes of the village!--And many villages, my
good Nignio, represent districts, and many districts provinces, and
provinces a country; and by an accumulation of such resentments as
the indignation of this old crone, will the King of Spain and the
Catholic faith be driven out of Flanders!--See to it! I want no
further attendance of you this morning! Let the cow be restored
before sunset, and the marauders punished."

"But if, as will likely prove the case, the beast is no longer in its
skin?"--demanded the aide-de-camp. "If the cow should have been
already eaten, in a score of messes of pottage?"

"Let her have compensation."

"The money chest at headquarters, if it please your highness, is all
but empty," replied Nignio, glancing with a smile towards
Gonzaga,--as though they were accustomed to jest together over the
reckless openness of heart and hand of their young chief.

"Then, by the blessed shrine of St Jago, give the fellows at least
the strappado," cried Don John, out of all patience. "Since
restitution may not be, be the retribution all the heavier."

"It is ever thus," cried he, addressing himself to Gonzaga, as the
aide-de-camp resumed his plumed beaver, and galloped off with an
imprecation between his lips, at having so rustic a duty on his
hands, instead of accompanying the parade of his royal master. "It
goes against my conscience to decree the chastisement of these
fellows. For i' faith, they that fight, must feed; and hunger, that
eats through stone walls, is apt to have a nibble at honesty. My
royal brother, or those who have the distribution of his graces, is
so much more liberal of edicts and anathemas than of orders on the
treasury of Spain, that money and rations are evermore wanting. If
these Protestants persist in their stand against us, I shall have to
go forth to all the Catholic cities of the empire, preaching, like
Peter the hermit, to obtain contributions from the pious!"

"His Majesty is perhaps of opinion," observed Gonzaga, "that rebels
and heretics ought to supply the maintenance of the troops sent to
reduce them to submission."

"A curious mode of engaging their affections towards either the creed
or prince from which they have revolted!" cried Don John. "But you
say true, Ottavio. Such are precisely the instructions of my royal
brother; whom the Almighty soften with a more Christian spirit in his
upholding of the doctrines of Christianity!--I am bidden to regard
myself as in a conquered country. I am bidden to feel myself as I may
have felt at Modon or Lepanto. It may not be, it may not be!--These
people were the loyal subjects of my forefathers. These people are
the faithful followers of Christ."

"Let us trust that the old woman may get back her cow, and your
highness's tender conscience stand absolved,"--observed Gonzaga with
a smile of ill-repressed derision. "I fear, indeed, that the Court of
the Escurial is unprepared with sympathy for such grievances."

"Gonzaga!"--exclaimed Don John, suddenly reining up his horse, and
looking his companion full in the face, "these are black and bitter
times; and apt to make kings, princes, nobles, ay, and even prelates,
forget that they are men; or rather that there be men in the world
beside themselves."--Then allowing his charger to resume its
caracolling, to give time to his startled friend to recover from the
glow of consciousness burning on his cheek,--he resumed with a less
stern inflexion. "It is the vexation of this conviction that hath
brought my face to the meagreness and sallow tint that accused the
scorching sun of Barbary. I love the rush of battle. The clash of
swords or roaring of artillery is music to me. There is joy in
contending, life for life, with a traitor, and marshaling the fierce
battalions on the field. But the battle done, let the sword be
sheathed! The struggle over, let the blood sink into the earth, and
the deadly smoke disperse, and give to view once more the peace of
heaven!--The petty aggravations of daily strife,--the cold-blooded
oppressions of conquest,--the contest with the peasant for his morsel
of bread, or with his chaste wife for her fidelity,--are so revolting
to my conscience of good and evil, that as the Lord liveth there are
moments when I am tempted to resign for ever the music I love so well
of drum and trumpet, and betake myself, like my royal father, to some
drowsy monastery, to listen to the end of my days to the snuffling of
Capuchins!"

Scarce could Ottavio Gonzaga, so recently emancipated from the
Escurial, refrain from making the sign of the cross at this heinous
declaration!--But he contained himself.--It was his object to work
his way still further into the confidence of his royal companion.

"The chief pleasure I derived from the visit of the French princess
to Namur," resumed Don John, "was the respite it afforded from the
contemplation of such miseries and such aggressions. I was sick at
heart of groans and murmurs,--weary of the adjustment of grievances.
To behold a woman's face, whereof the eyes were not red with weeping,
was _something_!"--

"And the eyes of the fair Queen of Navarre are said to be of the
brightest!" observed Gonzaga with a sneer.

"As God judgeth my soul, I noted not their hue or brightness!"
exclaimed Don John. "Her voice was a woman's--her bearing a
woman's--her tastes a woman's. And it brought back the memory of
better days to hear the silken robes of her train rustling around me,
instead of the customary clang of mail; and merry laughs instead of
perpetual moans, or the rude oaths of my Walloons!"

An incredulous smile played on the handsome features of the
Italian.--

"Have out your laugh!" cried Don John. "You had not thought to see
the lion of Lepanto converted into so mere a lap-dog!--Is it not so?"

"As little so as I can admit without the disrespect of denial to your
highness,"--replied Gonzaga, with a low obeisance. "My smile was
occasioned by wonder that one so little skilled in feigning as the
royal lion of Lepanto, should even hazard the attempt. There, at
least--and there alone--is Don John of Austria certain of defeat!"

"I might, perhaps, waste more time in persuading you that the air of
Flanders hath not taught me lying as well as compassion," replied the
Infant; "but that yonder green mound is our first redoubt. The lines
of Bouge are before you."

Professional discussion now usurped the place of friendly
intercourse. On the arrival of the prince, the drums of headquarters
beat to arms; and a moment afterwards, Don John was surrounded by his
officers; exhibiting, in the issuing of his orders of the day, the
able promptitude of one of the first commanders of his time, tempered
by the dignified courtesy of a prince of the blood.

Even Ottavio Gonzaga was too much engrossed by the tactical debates
carrying on around him, to have further thought of the mysteries into
which he was resolved to penetrate.

It was not till the decline of day, that the prince and his _état
major_ returned to Namur; invitations having been frankly given by
Don John to a score of his officers, to an entertainment in honour of
the return of his friend.

Amid the jovialty of such an entertainment, Gonzaga entertained
little doubt of learning the truth. The rough railleries of such men
were not likely to respect so slight a circumvallation as the honour
of female reputation; and the glowing vintage of the Moselle and
Rhine would bring forth the secret among the bubbles of their flowing
tides. And, in truth, scarcely were the salvers withdrawn, when the
potations of these mailed carousers produced deep oaths and
uproarious laughter; amid which was toasted the name of Margaret,
with the enthusiasm due to one of the originators of the massacre of
St Bartholomew, from the most Catholic captains of the founder of the
Inquisition of Spain.

The admiration due to her beauty, was, however, couched in terms
scarcely warranted on the lips of men of honour, even by such
frailties as Margaret's; and, to the surprise of Gonzaga, no
restraint was imposed by the presence of her imputed lover. It seemed
an established thing, that the name of Margaret was a matter of
indifference in the ears of Don John!

That very night, therefore, (the banquet being of short continuance
as there was to be a field-day at daybreak, under the reviewal of the
prince,) Ottavio Gonzaga, more than ever to seek in his conjectures,
resolved to address himself for further information to Nignio; to
whom he had brought confidential letters from his family in Spain,
and who was an ancient brother in arms.

Having made out without much difficulty, the chamber occupied by the
Spanish captain, in a tower of the citadel overlooking the valley of
the Sambre, there was some excuse for preventing his early rest with
a view to the morrow's exercises, in the plea of news from Madrid.

But as the Italian anticipated, ere he had half disburdened his
budget of Escurial gossip, Nignio de Zuniga had his own grievances to
confide. Uppermost in his mind, was the irritation of having been
employed that morning in a cow-hunt; and from execrations on the name
of the old woman, enriched with all the blasphemies of a trooper's
vocabulary,--it was no difficult matter to glide to the general
misdemeanours and malefactions of the sex. For Gabriel Nignio was a
man of iron,--bred in camps, with as little of the milk of human
kindness in his nature as his royal master King Philip; and it was
his devout conviction, that no petticoat should be allowed within ten
leagues of any Christian encampment,--and that women were inflicted
upon this nether earth, solely for the abasement and contamination of
the nobler sex.

"As if that accursed Frenchwoman, and the nest of jays, her maids of
honour, were not enough for the penance of an unhappy sinner for the
space of a calendar year!"--cried he, still harping upon the old
woman.

"The visit of Queen Margaret must indeed have put you to some trouble
and confusion," observed Gonzaga carelessly. "From as much as is
_apparent_ of your householding, I can scarce imagine how you managed
to bestow so courtly a dame here in honour; or with what pastimes you
managed to entertain her."

"The sequins of Lepanto and piastres of his holiness were not yet
quite exhausted," replied Nignio. "Even the Namurrois came down
handsomely. The sister of two French kings, and sister-in-law of the
Duke of Lorraine, was a person for even the thick-skulled Walloons to
respect. It was not _money_ that was wanting--it was patience. O,
these Parisians! Make me monkey-keeper, blessed Virgin, to the beast
garden of the Escurial; but spare me for the rest of my days the
honour of being seneschal to the finikin household of a queen on her
travels!"

Impossible to forbear a laugh at the fervent hatred depicted in the
warworn features of the Castilian captain, "I' faith, my clear
Nignio," said Gonzaga, "for the squire of so gallant a knight as Don
John of Austria, your notions are rather those of Mahound or
Termagaunt! What would his highness say, were he to hear you thus
bitter against his Dulcinea?"

"_His_ Dulcinea!"--ejaculated the aide-de-camp with a air of disgust.
"God grant it! For a princess of Valois blood, reared under the
teaching of a Medici, had at least the recommendations of nobility
and orthodoxy in her favour."

"As was the case when Anna di Mendoça effected the conquest over his
boyish affections, so generously pardoned by his royal brother!--But
after such proof of the hereditary aspirings of Don John, it would be
difficult to persuade me of his highness's derogation."

"Would _I_ could say as much!"--exclaimed Nignio, with a groan. "But
such a cow-hunt as mine of this morning, might convince the
scepticism of St Thomas!"

"What, in the name of the whole calendar, have the affections of the
prince in common with your exploit?" said Gonzaga. "Would you have me
infer that the son of Charles V. is enamoured of a dairy wench?"--

"Of _worse_! of a daughter of the Amalekites!"--cried
Nignio--stretching out his widely booted legs, as though it were a
relief to him to have disburthened himself of his mystery.

"I have not the honour of understanding you," replied the
Italian,--no further versed in Scripture history than was the
pleasure of his almoner.

"You are his highness's _friend_, Gonzaga!" resumed the Spanish
captain. "Even among his countrymen, none so near his heart! I have
therefore no scruple in acquainting you with a matter, wherein, from
the first, I determined to seek your counteraction. Though seemingly
but a straw thrown up into the air, I infer from it a most evil
predilection on the part of Don John;--fatal to himself, to us, his
friends, and to the country he represents in Belgium."

"Nay, now you are serious indeed!" cried his companion, delighted to
come to the point. "I was in hopes it was some mere matter of a pair
of rosy lips and a flaunting top-knot!"

"At the time Queen Margaret visited Namur," began the aide-de-camp--

"I knew it!" interrupted Gonzaga, "I was as prepared for it as for
the opening of a fairy legend--'On a time their lived a king and
queen'--"

"Will _you_ tell the story, then, or shall I?"--cried Nignio,
impatient of his interruption.

"_Yourself_, my pearl of squires! granting me in the first place your
pardon for my ill manners."--

"When Margaret de Valois visited Namur," resumed Nignio, "the best
diversions we had to offer to so fair and pious a princess were,
first a _Te Deum_ in the cathedral for her safe journey; next, an
entertainment of dancing and music at the town hall--and a gallant
affair it was, as far as silver draperies, and garlands of roses, and
a blaze of light that seemed to threaten the conflagration of the
city, may be taken in praise. The queen had brought with her, as with
_malice prepense_, six of the loveliest ladies of honour gracing the
court of the Louvre"--

"I _knew_ it!"--again interrupted Gonzaga;--and again did Nignio
gravely enquire of him whether (since so well informed) he would be
pleased to finish the history in his own way?

"Your pardon! your pardon!" cried the Italian, laying his finger on
his lips. "Henceforward I am mute as a carp of the Meuse."

"It afforded, therefore, some mortification to this astutious
princess,--this daughter of Herodias, with more than all her mother's
cunning and cruelty in her soul,--to perceive that the Spanish
warriors, who on that occasion beheld for the first time the
assembled nobility of Brabant and Namur, were more struck by the
Teutonic charms of these fair-haired daughters of the north, (so
antipodal to all we are accustomed to see in our sunburned
provinces,) than by the mannered graces of her pleasure-worn Parisian
belles."--

"Certain it is," observed Gonzaga, (despite his recent pledge,) "that
there is no greater contrast than between our wild-eyed, glowing
Andalusians, and the slow-footed, blue-eyed daughters of these
northern mists, whose smiles are as moonshine to sunshine!"

"After excess of sunshine, people sometimes prefer the calmer and
milder radiance of the lesser light. And I promise you that, at this
moment, if there be pillows sleepless yonder in the camp for the sake
of the costly fragile toys called womankind, those jackasses of
lovelorn lads have cause to regret the sojourn of Queen Margaret in
Belgium, only as having brought forth from their castles in the
Ardennes or the froggeries of the Low Country, the indigenous
divinities that I would were at this moment at the bottom of their
muddy moats, or of the Sambre flowing under yonder window!"--

"It is one of these Brabançon belles, then, who"--

Gabriel Nignio de Zuniga half rose from his chair, as a signal for
breaking off the communication he was not allowed to pursue in his
own way.--Taking counsel of himself, however, he judged that the
shorter way was to tell his tale in a shorter manner, so as to set
further molestation at defiance.

"In one word," resumed he, with a vivacity of utterance foreign to
his Spanish habits of grandiloquence, "at that ball, there appeared
among the dancers of the Coranto, exhibited before the tent of state
of Queen Margaret, a young girl whose tender years seemed to render
the exhibition almost an indiscretion; and whose aerial figure
appeared to make her sojourn there, or any other spot on earth a
matter of wonder. Her dress was simple, her fair hair streamed on her
shoulders. It was one of the angels of your immortal Titian, _minus_
the wings! Such was, at least, the description given me by Don John,
to enable me to ascertain among the Namurrois her name and lineage,
for the satisfaction (he said) of the queen, whose attention had been
fascinated by her beauty."

"And you proceeded, I doubt not, on your errand with all the grace
and good-will I saw you put into your commission of this
morning?"--cried Gonzaga, laughing.

"And nearly the same result!--My answer to the enquiry of his
highness was _verbatim_ the same; that the matter was not worth
asking after. This white rose of the Meuse was not so much as of a
chapteral-house. Some piece of provincial obscurity that had issued
from the shade, to fill a place in the royal Coranto, in consequence
of the indisposition of one of the noble daughters of the house of
Croy. Still, as in the matter of the cow-hunt, his highness had the
malice to persist! And next day, instead of allowing me to attend him
in his barging with the royal Cleopatra of this confounded Cydnus of
Brabant, I was dispatched into all quarters of Namur to seek out a
pretty child with silken hair and laughing eyes, whom some silly
grandam had snatched out of its nursery to parade at a royal
fête.--Holy St Laurence! how my soul grilled within my skin!--I did,
as you may suppose, as much of his highness's pleasure as squared
with my own; and had the satisfaction of informing him, on his
return, that the bird had fled."--

"And there was an end of the matter?"--

"I hoped so! But I am not precisely the confessor his highness is
likely to select when love constitutes the sin. At all events, the
bustle of Margaret's departure for Spa, the care of the royal escort,
and the payment of all that decency required us to take upon
ourselves of the cost of our hospitality, engrossed my time and
thoughts. But the first time the Infant beset me, (as he has
doubtless done yourself,) with his chapter of lamentations over the
sufferings of Belgium,--the lawlessness of the camp--the former
loyalty of the provinces--the tenderness of conscience of the
heretics,--and the eligibility of forbearance and peace,--I saw as
plain as though the word were inscribed by the burning finger of
Satan, that the turkois eyes and flaxen ringlets were the text of all
this snivelling humanity!'

"Blessings on the tender consciences of the heretics, who were
burning Antwerp and Ghent, and plundering the religious houses and
putting their priests to the sword!" ejaculated Gonzaga.

"The exigencies of the hour, however, left little leisure to Don John
for the nursing of his infant passion; and a few weeks past, I
entertained hopes that, Queen Margaret being safe back at her Louvre,
the heart of the Prince was safe back in its place; more especially
when he one day proposed to me an exploit savouring more of his days
of Lepanto than I had expected at his hands again. Distracted by the
false intelligence wherewith we were perpetually misled by the
Brabançon scouts, Don John determined on a sortie in disguise,
towards the intrenchments of the enemy, betwixt the Sambre and Dyle.
Rumour of the reinforcements of English troops dispatched to the
heretics by Queen Elizabeth at the instance of the diet of Worms,
rendered him anxious; and bent upon ascertaining the exact
cantonments of Colonel Norris and his Scottish companies, we set
forward before daybreak towards the forest of Marlagne, as for a
hunting expedition; then exchanging our dresses for the simple suits
of civilians at the house of the verderer, made our way across the
Sambre towards Gembloux."

"A mad project!--But such were ever the delight of our
Quixote!"--cried Gonzaga.

"In this instance, all prospered. We crossed the country without
obstacle, mounted on two powerful Mecklenburgers; and before noon,
were deep in Brabant. The very rashness of the undertaking seemed to
restore to Don John his forgotten hilarity of old! He was like a
truant schoolboy, that has cheated his pedagogue of a day's
bird-nesting; and eyes more discerning than those of the stultified
natives of these sluggish provinces, had been puzzled to detect under
the huge patch that blinded him of an eye, and the slashed sleeve of
his sad-coloured suit that showed him wounded of an arm, the gallant
host of Queen Margaret! 'My soul comes back into me with this gallop
across the breezy plain, unencumbered by the trampling of a guard!'
cried the Prince. 'There is the making in me yet of another Lepanto!
But two provinces remain faithful to our standard: his highness of
Orange and the Archduke having filched, one by one, from their
allegiance the hearts of these pious Netherlanders; who can no better
prove their fear of God than by ceasing to honour the king he hath
been pleased to set over them. Nevertheless, with Luxembourg and
Namur for our vantage-ground, and under the blessing of his holiness,
the banner under which I conquered the infidel, shall, sooner or
later, float victorious under this northern sky!'

"Such was the tenour of his discourse as we entered a wood, halfway
through which, the itinerary I had consulted informed me we had to
cross a branch of the Dyle. But on reaching the ferry-house of this
unfrequented track, we found only two sumpter-mules tied to a tree
near the hovel, and a boat chained to its stump beside the stream. In
answer to our shouts, no vestige of a ferryman appeared; and behold
the boat-chain was locked, and the current too deep and strong for
fording.

"Where there is smoke there is fire! No boat without a boatman!"
cried the Prince; and leaping from his horse, which he gave me to
hold, and renewing his vociferations, he was about to enter the
ferry-house, when, just as he reached the wooden porch, a young girl,
holding her finger to her lips in token of silence, appeared on the
threshold!"

"She of the turkois eyes and flaxen ringlets, for a hundred
pistoles!"--cried Gonzaga. "Such then was the bird's nest that made
him so mad a truant!"

"As she retreated into the house," resumed Nignio, without noticing
the interruption, "his highness followed, hat in hand, with the
deference due to a gouvernante of Flanders. But as the house was
little better than a shed of boards, by drawing a trifle nearer the
porch, not a syllable of their mutual explanation escaped me.

"'Are you a follower of Don John?'--was the first demand of the
damsel. 'Do you belong to the party of the States?'--the next; to
both which questions, a negative was easily returned. After listening
to the plea, fluently set forth by the prince, that he was simply a
Zealand burgess, travelling on his own errand, and sorely in fear of
falling in (God wot) with either Protestants or Papists, the damsel
appeared to hail the arrival of so congenial an ally as a blessing;
acquainted him with a rash frankness of speech worthy of his own,
that she was journeying from the Ardennes towards the frontier of
Brabant, where her father was in high command; that the duenna her
companion, outwearied by the exercise, was taking her siesta within;
for that her pacing nag, having cast a shoe on reaching the wood, the
ferryman had undertaken to conduct to the nearest smithy the
venerable chaplain and serving-man constituting her escort.

"'Half a league from hence,' said she, 'my father's people are in
waiting to escort me during the rest of my journey.'

"'Yet surely, gentle lady,' observed the prince, 'considering the
military occupation of the province, your present protection is
somewhat of the weakest?'--

"'It was expressly so devised by my father,' replied the open-hearted
girl. 'The Spanish cavaliers are men of honour, who war not against
women and almoners. A more powerful attendance were more likely to
provoke animosity. Feebleness is sometimes the best security.'

"'_Home_ is a woman's only security in times like these!'--cried the
prince with animation.

"'And therefore to my home am I recalled,' rejoined the young girl,
with a heavy sigh. 'Since my mother's death, I have been residing
with her sister in the Ardennes. But my good aunt having had the
weakness to give way to my instances, and carry me to Namur last
summer, to take part in the entertainments offered to the Queen of
Navarre, my father has taken offence at both of us; and I am sent for
home to be submitted to sterner keeping.'

"You will believe that, ere all this was mutually explained, more
time had elapsed than I take in the telling it; and I could perceive
by the voices of the speakers that they had taken seats, and were
awaiting, without much impatience, the return of the ferryman. The
compassion of the silly child was excited by the severe accident
which the stranger described as the origin of his fractures and
contusions; nor need I tell you that the persuasive voice and
deportment of Don John are calculated to make even a more experienced
one than this pretty Ulrica forget his unseemly aspect and indigent
apparel."

"And all this time the careful gouvernante snored within, and the
obsequious aide-de-camp held at the door the bridles of the
Mecklenburgers"--

"Precisely. Nor found I the time hang much heavier than the prince;
for at first mistrustful, like yourself, that the reconnaissance into
which he had beguiled me was a mere pretext, I was not sorry to
ascertain, sigh by sigh, and word by word, the grounds on which he
stood with the enemy. And you should have heard how artfully he
contrived to lead her back to the fêtes of Namur; asking, as with the
curiosity of a bumpkin, the whole details of the royal
entertainments! No small mind had I to rush in and chuck the hussy
into the torrent before me, when I heard the little fiend burst forth
into the most genuine and enthusiastic praises of the royal giver of
the feast,--'So young, so handsome, so affable, so courteous, so
passing the kingliness of kings.' She admitted, moreover, that it was
her frantic desire of beholding face to face the hero of Lepanto,
which had produced the concession on the part of her kinswoman so
severely visited by her father.

"'But surely,' pleaded this thoughtless prattler, 'one may admire the
noble deportment of a Papist, and perceive the native goodness
beaming in his eyes, without peril of salvation? This whole morning
hath my father's chaplain (who will be here anon) been giving
scripture warrant that I have no right to importune heaven with my
prayers for the conversion of Don John:--Yet, as my good aunt justly
observes, the great grandson of Mary of Burgundy has his pedestal
firm in our hearts, beyond reach of overthrow from all the
preachments of the Reformers'"--

"And you did not fling the bridles to the devil, and rush in to the
rescue of the unguarded soldier thus mischievously assailed?"--cried
Gonzaga.

"It needed not! The old lady could not sleep for ever; and I had the
comfort to hear her rouse herself, and suitably reprehend the want of
dignity of her charge in such strange familiarity with strangers. To
which the pretty Ulrica replied, 'That it was no fault of hers if
people wanted to convert a child into a woman!' A moment afterwards
and the ferryman and cortège arrived together; and a more glorious
figure of fun than the chaplain of the heretic general hath seldom
bestridden a pacing nag! However, I was too glad of his arrival to be
exceptious; and the whole party were speedily embarked in the ferry,
taking their turn as the first arrived at the spot, which we twain
abided, watching the punt across the stream, which, in consequence of
the strength of the current, it was indispensable to float down some
hundred yards, in order to reach the opposite shore.

"Hat in hand stood the prince, his eyes fixed upon the precious
freight, and those of Ulrica fixed in return upon her new and
pleasant acquaintance; when, Jesu Maria!--as every thing that is evil
ordained it,--behold, the newly-shod palfrey of the pretty
Brabançonne, irritated, perhaps, by the clumsy veterinaryship of a
village smithy, began suddenly to rear and plunge, and set at
defiance the old dunderhead by whom it was held!--The ass of a
ferryman, in his eagerness to lend his aid, let go his oar into the
stream; and between the awkwardness of some and the rashness of
others, in a moment the whole party were carried round by the eddy of
the Dyle!--The next, and Ulrica was struggling in the waters"--

"And the next, in the arms of the prince, who had plunged in to her
rescue!"--

"You know him too well not to foresee all that follows. Take for
granted, therefore, the tedious hours spent at the ferry-house, in
restoring to consciousness the exhausted women, half-dead with cold
and fright. Under the unguarded excitement of mind produced by such
an incident, I expected indeed every moment the self-betrayal of my
companion; but _that_ evil we escaped. And when, late in the evening,
the party was sufficiently recovered to proceed, I was agreeably
surprised to find that Don John was alive to the danger of escorting
the fair Ulrica even so far as the hamlet, where her father's people
were in waiting."

"And where he had been inevitably recognized!"--

"The certainty of falling in with the troopers of Horn, rendered it
expedient for us to return to Namur with only half the object of his
highness accomplished. But the babble of the old chaplain had
acquainted us with nearly all we wanted to know,-- namely, the number
and disposal of the Statists, and the position taken up by the
English auxiliaries."

"And this second parting from Ulrica?"--

"Was a parting as between friends for life! The first had been the
laughing farewell of pleasant acquaintance. But now, ere she bade
adieu to the gallant preserver of her life, she shred a tress of her
silken hair, still wet with the waters of the Dyle, which she
entreated him to keep for her sake. In return, he placed upon her
finger the ruby presented to him by the Doge of Venice, bearing the
arms of the republic engraved on the setting; telling her that chance
had enabled him to confer an obligation on the governor of the
Netherlands; and that, in any strait or peril, that signet,
dispatched in his name to Don John of Austria, would command his
protection."

"As I live, a choice romance!--almost worthy the pages of our
matchless Boccaccio!" cried the Italian. "A thousand pities but that
the whole batch of Orangeists had been carried down the
Dyle!--However, the enemy's lines lie between them. They will meet no
more. The Calvinist colonel has doubtless his daughter under lock and
key; and his highness has too much work cut out for him by his
rebels, to have time for peeping through the keyhole.--So now,
good-night.--For love-tales are apt to beget drowsiness; and i'faith
we must be a-foot by break of day."

And having betaken himself to the chamber provided for him, Ottavio
Gonzaga lost not an hour or a syllable, in transcribing all he had
learned from the Spanish aide-de-camp; that the state of mind and
feeling of the young viceroy might be speedily laid open to the full
and uncongenial investigation of his royal brother of the Escurial.

Part II.

A fortnight afterwards, was fought that famous battle of Gembloux,
which added a new branch to the laurels of Don John of Austria; and
constitutes a link of the radiant chain of military glories which
binds the admiration of Europe to the soil of one of the obscurest of
its countries!--Gembloux, Ramillies, Nivelle, Waterloo, lie within
the circuit of a morning's journey, as well as within the circle of
eternal renown.

By this brilliant triumph of the royalists, six thousand men-at-arms,
their standards, banners, and artillery, were lost to the States. The
cavalry of Spain, under the command of Ottavio Gonzaga, performed
prodigies of valour; and the vanguard, under that of Gaspardo Nignio,
equally distinguished itself. But the heat of the action fell upon
the main body of the army, which had marched from Namur under the
command of Don John; being composed of the Italian reinforcements
dispatched to him from Parma by desire of the Pope, under the command
of his nephew, Prince Alexander Farnese.

It was noticed, however, with surprise, that when the generals of the
States--the Archduke Matthias, and Prince of Orange--retreated in
dismay to Antwerp, Don John, instead of pursuing his advantage with
the energy of his usual habits, seemed to derive little satisfaction
or encouragement from his victory. It might be, that the difficulty
of controlling the predatory habits of the German and Burgundian
troops wearied his patience; for scarce a day passed but there issued
some new proclamation, reproving the atrocious rapacity and lawless
desperation of the army. But neither Gonzaga nor Nignio had much
opportunity of judging of the real cause of his cheerlessness; for,
independent of the engrossing duties of their several commands, the
leisure of Don John was entirely bestowed upon his nephew, Alexander
Farnese, who, only a few years his junior in age, was almost a
brother in affection.

To him alone were confided the growing cares of his charge--the
increasing perplexities of his mind. To both princes, the name of
Ulrica had become, by frequent repetition, a sacred word; and though
Don John had the comfort of knowing that her father, the Count de
Cergny, was unengaged in the action of Gembloux, his highness had
reason to fear that the regiment of Hainaulters under his command,
constituted the garrison of one or other of the frontier fortresses
of Brabant, to which it was now his duty to direct the conquering
arms of his captains.

The army of the States having taken refuge within the walls of
Antwerp, the royalists, instead of marching straight to Brussels,
according to general expectation, effected in the first instance the
reduction of Tirlemont, Louvain, D'Arschot, Sichem, and
Diest,--Nivelle, the capital of Walloon Brabant, next succumbed to
their arms--Maubeuge, Chimay, Barlaimont;--and, after a severe
struggle, the new and beautiful town of Philippeville.

But these heroic feats were not accomplished without a tremendous
carnage, and deeds of violence at which the soul sickened. At Sichem,
the indignation of the Burgundians against a body of French troops
which, after the battle of Gembloux, had pledged itself never again
to bear arms against Spain, caused them to have a hundred soldiers
strangled by night, and their bodies flung into the moat at the foot
of the citadel; after which the town was given up by Prince Alexander
to pillage and spoliation! Terrified by such an example, Diest and
Leeuw hastened to capitulate. And still, at every fresh conquest, and
while receiving day after day, and week after week, the submission of
fortresses, and capitulation of vanquished chiefs, the anxious
expectation entertained by Don John of an appeal to his clemency
accompanying the Venetian ring, was again and again disappointed!--

At times, his anxieties on Ulrica's account saddened him into utter
despondency. He felt convinced that mischance had overtaken her. All
his endeavours to ascertain the position of the Count de Cergny
having availed him nothing, he trusted that the family must be shut
up in Antwerp, with the Prince of Orange and Archduke; but when every
night, ere he retired to a soldier's rugged pillow, and pressed his
lips to that long fair tress which seemed to ensure the blessings of
an angel of purity and peace, the hopes entertained by Don John of
tidings of the gentle Ulrica became slighter and still more slight.

He did not the more refrain from issuing such orders and exacting
such interference on the part of Alexander Farnese, as promised to
secure protection and respect to the families of all such officers of
the insurgent army as might, in any time or place, fall into the
hands of the royalists.

To Alexander, indeed, to whom his noble kinsman was scarcely less
endeared by his chivalrous qualities than the ties of blood, and who
was fully aware of the motive of these instructions, the charge was
almost superfluous. So earnest were, from the first, his orders to
his Italian captains to pursue in all directions their enquiries
after the Count de Cergny and his family, that it had become a matter
of course to preface their accounts of the day's movements
with--"_No_ intelligence, may it please your highness, of the Count
de Cergny!"

The siege of Limbourg, however, now wholly absorbed his attention;
for it was a stronghold on which the utmost faith was pinned by the
military science of the States. But a breach having been made in the
walls by the Spanish artillery under the command of Nicolo di Cesi,
the cavalry, commanded in person by the Prince Alexander, and the
Walloons under Nignio di Zuniga, speedily forced an entrance; when,
in spite of the stanch resistance of the governor, the garrison laid
down their arms, and the greater portion of the inhabitants took the
oath of fealty to the king.

Of all his conquests, this was the least expected and most desirable;
in devout conviction of which, the Prince of Parma commanded a _Te
Deum_ to be sung in the churches, and hastened to render thanks to
the God of Battles for an event by which further carnage was spared
to either host.

Escorted by his _état major_, he had proceeded to the cathedral to
join in the august solemnization; when, lo! just as he quitted the
church, a way-worn and heated cavalier approached, bearing
despatches; in whom the prince recognised a faithful attendant of his
household, named Paolo Rinaldo, whom he had recently sent with
instructions to Camille Du Mont, the general charged with the
reduction of the frontier fortresses of Brabant.

"Be their blood upon their head!" was the spontaneous ejaculation of
the prince, after perusing the despatch. Then, turning to the
officers by whom he was escorted, he explained, in a few words, that
the fortress of Dalem, which had replied to the propositions to
surrender of Du Mont only by the scornful voice of its cannon, had
been taken by storm by the Burgundians, and its garrison put to the
sword.

"Time that some such example taught a lesson to these braggarts of
Brabant!"--responded Nignio, who stood at the right hand of Prince
Alexander. "The nasal twang of their chaplains seems of late to have
overmastered, in their ears, the eloquence of the ordnance of Spain!
Yet, i'faith, they might be expected to find somewhat more unction in
the preachments of our musketeers than the homilies of either Luther
or Calvin!"

He spoke unheeded of the prince; for Alexander was now engaged apart
in a colloquy with his faithful Rinaldo, who had respectfully placed
in his hands a ring of great cost and beauty.

"Seeing the jewel enchased with the arms of the Venetian republic,
may it please your highness," said the soldier, "I judged it better
to remit it to your royal keeping."

"And from whose was it plundered?" cried the prince, with a sudden
flush of emotion.

"From hands that resisted not!" replied Rinaldo gravely. "I took it
from the finger of the dead!"

"And when, and where?"--exclaimed the prince, drawing him still
further apart, and motioning to his train to resume their march to
the States' house of Limbourg.

"The tale is long and grievous, may it please your highness!" said
Rinaldo. "To comprise it in the fewest words, know that, after seeing
the governor of Dalem cut down in a brave and obstinate defence of
the banner of the States floating from the walls of his citadel, I
did my utmost to induce the Baron de Cevray, whose Burgundians
carried the place, to proclaim quarter. For these fellows of
Hainaulters, (who, to do them justice, had fought like dragons,)
having lost their head, were powerless; and of what use hacking to
pieces an exhausted carcass?--But our troops were too much
exasperated by the insolent resistance and defiance they had
experienced, to hear of mercy; and soon the conduits ran blood, and
shrieks and groans rent the air more cruelly than the previous roar
of the artillery. In accordance, however, with the instructions I
have ever received from your highness, I pushed my way into all
quarters, opposing what authority I might to the brutality of the
troopers."

"Quick, quick!"--cried Prince Alexander in anxious haste--"Let me not
suppose that the wearer of this ring fell the victim of such an
hour?"--

It was in passing the open doors of the church that my ears were
assailed with cries of female distresses:--nor could I doubt that
even _that_ sanctuary (held sacred by our troops of Spain!) had been
invaded by the impiety of the German or Burgundian legions!--As
usual, the chief ladies of the town had placed themselves under the
protection of the high altar. But there, even there, had they been
seized by sacrilegious hands!--The fame of the rare beauty of the
daughter of the governor of Dalem, had attracted, among the rest, two
daring ruffians of the regiment of Cevray."

"You sacrificed them, I trust in GOD, on the spot?"--demanded the
prince, trembling with emotion. "You dealt upon them the vengeance
due?"

"Alas! sir, the vengeance they were mutually dealing, had already
cruelly injured the helpless object of the contest! Snatched from the
arms of the Burgundian soldiers by the fierce arm of a German
musketeer, a deadly blow, aimed at the ruffian against whom she was
wildly but vainly defending herself; had lighted on one of the
fairest of human forms! Cloven to the bone, the blood of this
innocent being, scarce past the age of childhood, was streaming on
her assailants; and when, rushing in, I proclaimed, in the name of
God and of your highness, quarter and peace, it was an insensible
body I rescued from the grasp of pollution!"

"Unhappy Ulrica!" faltered the prince, "and oh! my more unhappy
kinsman!"

"Not altogether hopeless," resumed Rinaldo; "and apprized, by the
sorrowful ejaculations of her female companions when relieved from
their personal fears, of the high condition of the victim, I bore the
insensible lady to the hospital of Dalem; and the utmost skill of our
surgeons was employed upon her wounds. Better had it been
spared!--The dying girl was roused only to the endurance of more
exquisite torture; and while murmuring a petition for 'mercy--mercy
to her _father_!' that proved her still unconscious of her family
misfortunes, she attempted in vain to take from her finger the ring I
have had the honour to deliver to your highness:--faltering with her
last breath, 'for _his_ sake, Don John will perhaps show mercy to my
poor old father!'"--

Prince Alexander averted his head as he listened to these mournful
details.

"She is at rest, then?"--said he, after a pause.

"Before nightfall, sir, she was released."--

"Return in all haste to Dalem, Rinaldo," rejoined the prince, "and
complete your work of mercy, by seeing all honours of interment that
the times admit, bestowed on the daughter of the Comte de Cergny!"

Weary and exhausted as he was, not a murmur escaped the lips of the
faithful Rinaldo as he mounted his horse, and hastened to the
discharge of his new duty. For though habituated by the details of
that cruel and desolating warfare to spectacles of horror--the
youth--the beauty--the innocence--the agonies of Ulrica, had touched
him to the heart; nor was the tress of her fair hair worn next the
heart of Don John of Austria, more fondly treasured, than the one
this rude soldier had shorn from the brow of death, in the ward of a
public hospital, albeit its silken gloss was tinged with blood!--

Scarcely a month had elapsed after the storming of Dalem, when a
terrible rumour went forth in the camp of Bouge, (where Don John had
intrenched his division of the royalist army,) that the governor of
the Netherlands was attacked by fatal indisposition!--For some weeks
past, indeed, his strength and spirit had been declining. When at the
village of Rymenam on the Dyle, near Mechlin, (not far from the ferry
of the wood,) he suffered himself to be surprised by the English
troops under Horn, and the Scotch under Robert Stuart, the unusual
circumstance of the defeat of so able a general was universally
attributed to prostration of bodily strength.

When it was soon afterwards intimated to the army that he had ceded
the command to his nephew, Prince Alexander Farnese, regret for the
origin of his secession superseded every other consideration.

For the word had gone forth that he was to die!--In the full vigour
of his manhood and energy of his soul, a fatal blow had reached Don
John of Austria!--

A vague but horrible accusation of poison was generally
prevalent!--For his leniency towards the Protestants had engendered a
suspicion of heresy, and the orthodoxy of Philip II. was known to be
remorseless; and the agency of Ottavio Gonzaga at hand!--

But the kinsman who loved and attended him knew better. From the
moment Prince Alexander beheld the ring of Ulrica glittering on his
wasted hand, he entertained no hope of his recovery; and every time
he issued from the tent of Don John, and noted the groups of veterans
praying on their knees for the restoration of the son of their
emperor, and heard the younger soldiers calling aloud in loyal
affection upon the name of the hero of Lepanto, tears came into his
eyes as he passed on to the discharge of his duties. For he knew that
their intercessions were in vain--that the hours of the sufferer were
numbered. In a moment of respite from his sufferings, the sacraments
of the church were administered to the dying prince; having received
which with becoming humility, he summoned around him the captains of
the camp, and exhorted them to zeal in the service of Spain, and
fidelity to his noble successor in command.

It was the 1st of October, the anniversary of the action of Lepanto,
and on a glorious autumnal day of golden sunshine, that, towards
evening, he ordered

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