old ballads, and been bound up with all such collections-many poems among which are not one atom better; and, as to his plays, they would perhaps have been bound up with Pericles, Titus Andronicus, the Yorkshire Tragedy, &c.

MRS. ALBION. I can hardly think that. All those pieces contain internal evidence of Shakspeare's mind in isolated passages. Nobody else could have written that appalling domestic sketch called the Yorkshire Tragedy. As to the plays young Ireland said he found, they should never have been bound up with my copy of Shakspeare.

MR. ALBION. You don't know: you might have been cajoled out of sympathy, from some cause or other.

MRS. ALBION. As sacred relics then, like a lock of hair, a mouldy neck-ruff, an old hat, or a bit of the dear old mulberry tree; not as fine bequests of his heart and intellect.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. That's near enough.

MRS. ALBION. Supposing I had done so: but how did young Ireland fare amidst all this popularity of odium?

MR. ALBION. He had run away from his father's house-in fact I think his father had turned him out, or at all events he forbade his return. It was, however, asserted by some very liberal-minded folks that this was only a ruse, and that he was merely the tool of his father all through the affair, the latter having cooked up the MSS. in question. But there are no grounds for this supposition to be deduced from the writings of his father, or his general character, which seems to have been as unlike that of his son as could well be.

MOSES. I wish I had been his father!

ALL (laughing). Ha! ha! ha! No doubt.

MOSES. Or himself either. I would have managed matters better. I would have held my tongue, and enjoyed the joke in all its bearings.

MRS. ALBION. How are we to translate the word enjoyment?' MOSES. As profit,' to be sure; but it seems he had no enjoyment either of the joke or its consequences.

MRS. ALBION. Quite the contrary, it appears. To have made fools of so many learned men, holding an influential position in the literary world,-no matter with how little merit-could hardly turn out otherwise than serious towards the unfortunate perpetrator of the ingenious deception.

MR. ALBION. Mark the consequences. Every subsequent attempt he made in literature was quashed directly it appeared; and he was followed through life with persecution, both in public and private. I do not say his compositions contained anything that could be called fine or original; but they were not examined with any view to discriminate their value or mediocrity--his name alone was a denunciation. His fate, observes one of the newspapers, is a fearful warning to all young aspirants; for he began his career

'with a lie in his mouth.' But the individual application and practical working out of this moral requires the following qualification. He suffered persecution and poverty all his life for a literary hoax committed when a boy; and, now he is dead, certain folks are starting up to insist that he never wrote the papers in question, and that his last declaration, to the effect that he did write them, was dying with a lie in his mouth.'

FATHER ZODIAC. Finding him no longer open to persecution on the first count, the very opposite is now to be brought to bear against him, so as to induce the execration of his memory for falsely pretending to have done that which when alive he paid the penalty for having done. Malignity will thus feed upon the poor man for telling the truth about a lie, and for not having sworn that his lie was the truth.

MR. ALBION. There is another cause for the unmanly exultation, which is not very indirectly shown, at his having died in obscure lodgings in the greatest distress. Since so many men of acknowledged high intellect and morality have died in just the same circumstances, there is a wish to show-putting the exception for the general principle-that his bad conduct induced it, and the ingratitude of the world's common practice of neglect to its noblest benefactors is thus to be flattered with the notion of poetical justice.

MRS. ALBION. But was Ireland without any ability?

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. For my part, I always thought him a very clever fellow.

ANGUS. He mistook extravagance for originality, and wild absurdity for genius, as his romances amply testify. They are outrageous vapidities. He was, however, a man of great general information, and wrote-when not employed in booksellers' piecework-a good, sterling, unaffected prose, very superior to the premature, unpractised, mawkish amateurisms of the host of lady and gentlemen scribblers who are now incessantly taking up their pens.'

MRS. ALBION. What a pity that such a man was not properly applied! How serviceable he might have been to a newspaper, a magazine, or in various useful departments of literature!

MR. ALBION. To obtain these engagements depends as muchgenerally much more-on private interest and acquaintance, where a man has not already a popular position, as on positive ability. But, besides this, nobody could trust Ireland; they knew his love of a hoax, and feared his ingenuity. Independent of his necessities he appears to have had a natural penchant for the thing.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. I can tell you of one which I believe is not at all known or suspected by the public. Some elegant French poems were discovered in manuscript, evidently written by Chatelat to Mary Queen of Scots, and were published as such. The engraving which has so long been about town, of Mary leaning

on one elbow with Chatelat, in a sentimental attitude, playing the guitar and singing to her-a poor concern that has sold very well

has some of these French verses appended to it. Ireland happening one day to be in company with the engraver or painterI forget which-the latter mentioned the subject, and quoted the lines appended to the print, together with some from the other poems, expressing his admiration of Chatelat's refined muse, &c. Whereupon Mr. Ireland, with all the glee of a boy, though about fiveand-forty years of age, cut a caper in the air, and alighting on his feet, and bowing with a delighted look, exclaimed, Sir, I wrote every line of them!'

MRS. ALBION. It is quite clear there was no sense of moral turpitude in his mind or sensation as to the trick. Does not this let us into the secret of his character?

MR. ALBION. No doubt this gives the key to it to a great extent; but if all that I have heard against him be trueMRS. ALBION. Half, dear; say half.

MR. ALBION. If half that I have heard against him be true, it is clear that he had no sense of moral turpitude on various occasions when he ought to have had it. And yet it is very probable that distress of circumstances induced actions at which his better nature revolted.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. No doubt but it was so.
MRS. ALBION. Perhaps he had a family?

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. He had, and something a large one, as commonly happens where means are small. I used frequently to see and converse with him many years ago. He had a cottage a few miles out of town, and as I was installed in a little shooting-box pretty near, we often met; for I was much interested in the various circumstances he detailed of his residence in France during the time of Napoleon. Only two other English families besides his own had remained in Paris, and after the police had ascertained all about them, they were suffered to remain without the slightest molestation. His anecdotes of the Emperor I found interesting, though, upon my soul, sometimes he put my credulity to a very hard test. I do not mean that I think he could have invented anything too fine in sterling intellect or noble humanity-allow me my private opinion of Napoleon, if you please--for that people-chosen dictator; but the said anecdotes were often so strange, that they seemed what Ireland himself would probably have termed them, astonishers!-though he might not have chosen to admit that he had given the finishing touches which produced the effect.

MOSES. He had had enough of confessing.

FATHER ZODIAC. There are a sort of people whose imagination, being unbalanced by a sufficient weight of other powers, has as natural a tendency to hyperbole in speaking of facts, as others who are deficient in imagination have of reducing every sentiment, and

even every poetical idea, to a dry mathematical demonstration. Perhaps this individual was one of the former, and was himself the dupe of his own ungoverned fancies to the same extent that he wished his hearers to be. He deceived others, having first deceived himself; fooling his own reason before he fooled them into belief.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. Why, this, I believe, was really very often the case.

MOSES. But did he ever do so against his own interest? Did he ever lose money by it?

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. Can't say he did. Nor was that at all likely, you may easily suppose.

MOSES. He often gained some end by it then?

MRS. ALBION. He surprised his hearer, gratified his vanity, or amused himself and others: that was his object-do not let us become illiberal.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. He did all that besides, but I am afraid Moses is pretty near the mark.

FATHER ZODIAC. Instinct often acts from foregone conclusions' as well as reason, and perhaps the results are the more practical where a man does not look his own bad motives in the face.

MRS. ALBION. But his family,-his distress for them?

FATHER ZODIAC. That justifies him in the abstract; but civilized society, as it is called, has no practical mercy. Starving merit gets pity when it is dead; and bestowing this, the act of letting starve is unconsciously balanced against the forthcoming sentiment of benevolence, and thus the world cries quits with merit. Virtue, nay, and vice too, are half idealities. If mankind practised half, or a much less part, of what they contemplated practising, there would be no time for sleeping; action would eventually supersede thought; and activity continuing from habit, we should soon become the least rational animals in creation. Wise is the dispensation of our waking dreams; but we should not assume perfection. We have the germ within us of a far better state and condition of society; but we must earn it by correct progression rather than exuberant activity.

MR. ALBION. What sort of man was Mr. Ireland in other respects?

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. A thoroughly agreeable gentlemanlike man, full of pleasant conversation on all topics, and quite as ready to listen to others, even when they did not possess a tithe of his own knowledge of the subject. There was a total absence of all assumption or dogmatism-partly the result of modesty and good nature, and partly from having no very fixed principles, but merely opinions which he most amusingly changed every now and

His modesty and the boyish hilarity of his spirits qualified his occasional extravagance, and rendered him a most entertaining companion. My recollections of him during the brief period of

our acquaintance make me ready to assert, amidst all the charges that can be brought or proved against him, that he was a man of good heart and real humanity, though his conduct and character were flawed and stained by freaks both of nature and circumstance. Half his sins were in his own defence; all of them were on a petty scale; and on the balance being drawn, I think he was more sinned against than sinning.'

MRS. ALBION. Very fair, Harry; very fair.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. He had formed a pretty extensive acquaintance in France, and with many noted characters of the period. Several of these frequently visited at his cottage during the time I knew him. I often used to meet Count de Rure there: a very extraordinary personage. His huge forehead had quite the Elgin-marble character, as to the wear-and-tear appearance of antiquity; while the lower part of his face resembled that of a battered eagle. As to his age, he looked a thousand. His memory and personal recollections, as in the romance of Melmoth, were sometimes appalling, from their immense sweep backward. Nor was his prodigious information confined to political events and characters: literature, sciences, arts, languages, and manufactures, he seemed to have been at their rise, and never to have lost sight of any link in their progress. He went away somewhere all of a sudden, and I never heard any more of him. I should think he was still living, for he always gave me the idea of a being who had contrived, by some occult knowledge added to his practical, to smuggle himself through that period when a very old man has nothing else to do but die.

MRS. ALBION. How I should like to have seen him! perhaps he was a resuscitation of the Magus Zoroaster?

FATHER ZODIAC. I have not the least doubt of it.

SYRIUS (lifting up his head from the grass, and singing.)

But you smiled, Father Zodiac,-why did you smile?
'Twas the dawn of a long-vista'd doubt,

For you know, dear grey Zodiac, when a man once
Is grave-lock'd, he can't well get out.

Sing oh! for the stars,

That creep as they're bid,

And peep down the flaws

Of the solemn pyramid!

MOSES. That old eagle had not lived to know so much for nothing. A rare rich fellow, I warrant.

England just now?

I wonder if he's in

MR. ALBION (laughing). Do you really think that you could get to the blind side of such a man?

MRS. ALBION. Go on with your reminiscences, Harry; you seem to be in good sketching humour.

HARRY OF NEWMARKET. I occasionally met in Clement's Inn, where Ireland had chambers for literary business, the Marquis de