on rising, with one blow he drove me a hundred yards before him. I took to my heels, determined, if possible, to escape this wretched life. The whole country was on foot to pursue me, for I had doubly deserved death; I had bruised a freeman, and was a fugitive slave. But notwithstanding the incredible agility of these people in their native crags, their exact knowledge of the clefts in the hills, the only passes between the eternal snows, and my own ignorance, I utterly baffled their pursuit by my want of weight, and the energy which despair supplied me. Sometimes when they pressed hardest on me, I would leap up a perpendicular crag, twenty feet high, or drop down a hundred. I bent my steps towards the Black Sea, determined, if I could reach the coast, to seek a passage to some port in Cathenoslaw, and retire where I might pass the remainder of my life, under a feigned name, with at least the satisfaction of dying in the dominions of my legitimate sovereign, Alexander.

Exhausted and emaciated, I arrived at a straggling village, the site of the ancient Pityus. This was the last boundary of the Roman power on the Euxine-and to this wretched place state exiles are frequently doomed. The name became proverbial; and, I understand, has been so far adopted by the English, that the word "Pityus" is, to this day, most adapted to the lips of the banished. In a small vessel we sailed for Azof; but when we came off the straits of Caffa, where the waters of the Don are poured into the Euxine, a strong current drove us on a rock, and in a fresh gale the ship went speedily to pieces. I gave myself up for lost, and heard the crew, one after the other, gurgle in the waves and scream their last, while I lay struggling and buffeting for life. But after the first hurry for existence, I found I had exhausted myself uselessly, for my specific gravity being so trifling, I was enabled to lie on the surface of the billows without any exertion, and even to sit upon the wave as securely as a couch. I loosened my neckcloth, and spreading it wide with my hands and teeth, I trusted myself to the same winds that had so often pelted me at their mercy, and always spared me. In this way I traversed the Euxine. I fed on the scraps that floated on the surface--sometimes dead fish, and once or twice on some inquisitive stragglers whose curiosity brought them from the deep to contemplate the strange sail. Two days I floated in misery, and a sleepless night; by night I dared not close my eyes for fear of falling backward-and by day I frequently passed objects that filled me with despairfragments of wrecks; and then I looked on my own sorry craft: once I struck my feet against a drowned sailor, and it put me in mind of myself. At last I landed safe on the beach, between Odessa and Otchacow, traversed the Ukraine, and, by selling the little curiosities I had picked up on my passage, I have purchased permission to reside for the rest of my days unknown and unseen in a large forest near Minsk. Here, within the gray crumbling walls of a castle, that fell with the independence of this unhappy

country, I await my end. I have left little to regret at my native Moscow; neither friends, nor reputation, nor lawful life; and I had failed in a love which was dearer to me than reputationthan life-than gravity itself. I have established an apparatus, on improved principles, to operate on gravity; and I am now employed, day and night, for the benefit, not more of the present generation, than of all of mankind that are to come. In fact, I am laboriously and unceasingly extracting the gravitation from the earth, in order to bring it nearer the sun; and though, by thus diminishing the earth's orbit, I fear I shall confuse the astronomical tables and calculations, I am confident I shall improve the temperature of the globe. How far I have succeeded, may be guessed from the recent errors in the Almanacs about the eclipses, and from the late mild winters.

FROM THE UNIVERSAL REVIEW.

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan. By her Grand daughter, ALICIA LEFANU. 8vo. pp. 448. London. Whittaker. 1824.

IT is notorious that, in this world, ill-luck is a very formidable affair; that nothing adheres more steadily to men, when it has once got hold of them; and that, like the gout, or the asthma, the paternal inheritance often descends to more than the third or the fourth generation. We all know the history of the Stuarts; and to this specimen of royal ill-fortune, the family of the Sheridans might form no inapt counterpart in humbler life. There actually seems to have been some curious destiny inflicted upon them, by which the whole race, in turn, should have prosperity within their grasp, and should with their eyes open, let it slip for ever.

The first public man of this very public family, William Sheridan, was a bishop, holding the united see of Kilmore and Ardagh, in the time of Charles II. It might be presumed that he, at least, was safe; generals and statesmen may topple, but what ill wind can shake the solid tranquillity of the cathedral. Yet fate was busy even with this learned Irish prelate. The Revolution cast out popery, and gave England a constitution. His conscience, and let no man blame the scruples of an honest spirit, short sighted as it was, would not suffer him to take the oaths to the new dynasty, and he was accordingly ejected from his diocese.

The next public man of the line was the bishop's grand-nephew, Dr. Sheridan, Swift's friend, and a schoolmaster in the most palmy state of the profession. The proudest pedagogues of his native Dublin hung their heads before him; he instilled the Typus Barytonorum into the heads of the indigenous nobility without measure; and had to boast of having, in his course, flagellated three-fourths of the bar, the church, and the court of aldermen.

Distinctions of this order, do not drop upon a man like the rain from heaven. There must have been a reason for this supremacy over the rising cuticle of Ireland; and it may well be found, according to the national spirit, in the unwearied pleasantry and unrivalled punning of the Doctor. His "good things," recorded in Swift's Memorabilia, place him immeasurably above the celebrated Dean, in the art of contorting the English language. Swift blazons him as a scholar; and his Latin verses, trivial as such things are to speak to character, in any instance, beyond the age of twelve, yet, as they were adequate to the necessities of the compatriot understanding, were good for all that modern longs and shorts can be good for. The Doctor was now on the royal road to opulence. A grant of a free-school, which Swift obtained for him, through the Primate, was about to fix him in secure wealth. But, at this point, his star grew sullen; he refused the grant; and, from that hour, the world slid from under his feet, he went down still more rapidly than he rose, and, at length, bequeathed nothing but his illluck to his posterity.

Thomas Sheridan, the Doctor's son, became an actor, rapidly rose to the height of popular favour, was manager of a theatre, by which he, in one year, netted ten thousand pounds; was thus, like his predecessor, in sight of solid opulence, contrived to overthrow all his own work, was forced to abandon his profession and his country, and died a dependant on the bounty of the crown.

We all know the history of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, that actor's son, and beyond question, one of the most variously and splendidly gifted men in the memory of British genius. This was he, of whom the panegyric, wasted on Goldsmith, might be truly written; par excellence, the orator, the wit, and the dramatist. A man, whose intellect "touched every style, and adorned all it touched." His early sketches give proof of the eminence to which he might have risen as a poet; his School for Scandal will never have a superior on the stage; and his parliamentary speeches, with all their drawbacks of carelessness, hurry, and party irritation, were the delight of the house, and will live as long as the language.

Pitt's struggles with Fox were those of equal with equal; two mighty minds roused up to put forth all their strength, and, like the champions of Troy and Greece, battling with the eyes of empires upon them, and for nothing less than the fates of empires. Sheridan's indolence rendered his a lighter and more desultory hostility. But, if Pitt dreaded any man, it was Sheridan. The keen pleasantry, the inexhaustible readiness of reply, the wily satire, that struck the great English leader with the pungency of an arrow, through the joints of his "panoply divine," were the severest trial of that majestic temper, made by nature to bear "the weight of mightiest monarchies." But there were times when Sheridan rose into unexpected vigour, and like a checked mountain rivulet, that had hitherto only loitered and babbled away among its VOL. VI. No. 32.-Museum.

T

obscure banks and wild verdure, gathered into sudden volume, and burst down in thunder. His speeches on Hastings's trial, the most generally vaunted of his efforts, are by no means his best; his taste was still immature, he was palpably encumbered by some idle impression of the necessity of inflating his style to the majesty of the place, and after all his heart was not in the cause. But his true displays are to be found in the debates during the French Revolution. His reply to Lord Wellesley's attack on the Brissotins, a reply to a very able antagonist, entrenched too in the right, is a model of dextrous reasoning elevated by bursts of eloquence the richest and most impassioned. When Fox died, Sheridan might have realized the noblest wish of honourable ambition, the first place in the councils of a free country. In public talent he had no competitor among his party, and his party were then masters of the government. This splendid prospect could not have been darkened but by himself. It would be idle, or ungenerous to the memory of a man of genius, to say by what steps the confidence of the nation had been gradually alienated. But it is an honour to the English heart, and should be an eternal lesson to her public men, that no individual will be master of firm, national confidence, who does not bring forward some stronger and clearer claim than mere intellectual supremacy.

The lady, of whose memoirs we are now to speak, the wife of Thomas Sheridan, the actor, was daughter of an Irish prebendary, and grand-daughter of Sir Oliver Chamberlayne, an English ba

ronet.

The Doctor was a man of ability, but an original, and one of his whims was his reluctance to have his daughter taught to read or write. The latter qualification he looked on as merely a stimulant to the hazardous amusement of love correspondence. But nature is not to be controlled by the most whimsical of fathers and prebendaries. Miss Chamberlayne, in the prohibition of external aid, had recourse to domestic. Her elder brother taught her writing, and the rudiments of Latin; and her younger taught her botany, a science by which she converted herself into the young Lady Bountiful of the parish, and before fifteen this active spirit. had enabled an idiot to say his prayers and read, had written a novel on paper meritoriously pilfered from the housekeeper's account books, and had more than emulated the Doctor himself in the composition of two sermons, which were treasured for many an after year among the munimenta of the family.

Doctor Chamberlayne was now in the decline of life, and the reins of authority were of course held with a more relaxed tension. The young people now occasionally stole out to see a play, another of the amusements prohibited by the prebendary. Here Miss Chamberlayne saw the man of her fate. Thomas Sheridan was just twenty-five years of age, handsome, a scholar, a most popular actor, and to crown all, an Irishman. The Irish theatre was at that time an epitome of the nation, and a vast deal of oddity and

amusement was sometimes alloyed by the exhibition of buckism and brutality. A Mr. Kelly, a "gentleman from the county of Galway," a portion of the island still not unproductive of very peculiar specimens of the aboriginal stock, took it into his head to come drunk to the theatre, fall in love with Mrs. Bellamy, the celebrated actress, at sight, and rush after her behind the scenes. This outrage exceeded the usual license, and the lover was repelled for the time. The repulse burned in the bosom of the Galway man, and after the play, he invaded the manager's dressing room, insulted him personally, and was kicked out. Kelly flew to a club of his provincialists, and in the fury of the moment, called all to arms. "Vengeance in procinct" was prepared for Sheridan's next appearance, but on the expected night, the manager, warned by private means, did not appear. The rioters however were not to be totally baffled, and as they could not have the pleasure of immolating the man, they indulged themselves with the havoc of his property. The scenery, the wardrobe, the green-room, and all the more important parts of theatrical equipment were destroyed. But this violence was too gross to escape a re-action. The students of the college, of which Sheridan had been a member, and a large party of the citizens, formed a kind of declared association to protect the manager.

Ireland is proverbially the land of party, and in general, as becomes men of the true, belligerent breed, its quarrels are for nothing. But here was some fair ground for irritation, and "a very pretty quarrel," as Sir Lucius says, they made of it. As all the gentry of Ireland in that rational age wore swords, (all the shopkeepers had done so not long before!) war wanted nothing but the inclination, which was seldom wanting in the blood of Milesius; the students, in default of rapiers, slung the heavy keys of their chambers in their gown sleeves, and this weapon was, from its disguise and the rapidly acquired dexterity of its brandishers, altogether as man-prostrating as the Galway rapier; the citizens, who had neither keys nor swords, soberly accommodated themselves with firelocks, and, at the remotest sight of the Galway physiognomy, regularly loaded with ball cartridge. To give the last human heightening to public virulence, the press, that completer of all frays, plunged into the middle of the tumult, and showered placards, odes, memoirs and libels, on both parties, with its usual bitterness, fluency, sincerity, and profligacy.

It is curious, as a picture of the manners of our renowned, wise, and happy ancestors, to see by what puerilities, nations can be stirred. It may be also no unprofitable lesson to those who rely on the art of managing the multitude, to see with what frightful facility it can be stripped of its moral understanding. Public and personal violences had now risen into such familiarity, that an almost public combination had sentenced Sheridan to death. A horse was even kept in continual readiness to carry off his murderer!

Authority, which had been so dangerously inactive, at length