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inconsiderate benevolence, I be tempted in some such manner to misapply it. To be robbed, would give me as little or less concern.— MARVEL. A man's self is often his worst robber. He steals from his own bosom and heart what God has there deposited, and he hides it out of his way, as dogs and foxes do with bones. But the robberies we commit on the body of our superfluities, and store up in vacant places, in places of poverty and sorrow, these, whether in the dark or in the daylight, leave us neither in nakedness nor in fear, are marked by no burning-iron of conscience, are followed by no scourge of reproach; they never deflower prosperity, they never distemper sleep.'

scuffle in the street, and we close the door. How different the historians of antiquity! We read Sallust, and always are incited by the desire of reading on, although we are surrounded by conspirators and barbarians; we read Livy, until we imagine we are standing in an august pantheon, covered with altars and standards, over which are the four fatal letters that spell-bound all mankind. We step forth again among the modern Italians; here we find plenty of rogues, plenty of receipts for making more; and little else. In the best passages we come upon a crowd of dark reflections, which scarcely a glimmer of glory pierces through; and we stare at the tenuity of the spectres, but never at their altitude. Give me the poetical mind, the mind poetical in all things; give me the poetical heart, the heart of hope and confidence, that beats the more strongly and resolutely under pain; but I would rather hear one than the good thrown down, and raises up fabric twenty. Sorrow is the growth of all seasons; after fabric on the same foundation.-PARKER. did our England, since she first emerged from we had much, however, to relieve it. Never At your time of life, Mr. Marvel?-MARVEL. the ocean, rise so high above surrounding naAt mine, my lord Eishop! I have lived with tions. The rivalry of Holland, the pride of Milton. Such creative and redeeming spirits Spain, the insolence of France, were thrust are like kindly and renovating Nature. Vol-back by one finger each; yet those countries cano comes after volcano, yet covereth she with herbage and foliage, with vine and olive, and with whatever else refreshes and gladdens her, the Earth that has been gasping

under the exhaustion of her throes.'

'Little men in lofty places, who throw long shadows, because our sun is setting.'-(Marvel's definition of the statesmen of his time.)

'I do not like to hear a man cry out with

been. The sword of Cromwell was preceded were then more powerful than they had ever by the mace of Milton-by that mace which, when Oliver had rendered his account, opened to our contemplation the garden-gate of Paradise. And there were some around not unworthy to enter with him. In the compass of sixteen centuries, you will not number on the whole earth so many wise and admirable men as you could have found united in that single 'I have usually found, that those who make day, when England showed her true magnifaults of foibles, and crimes of faults, have tude, and solved the question, Which is most, within themselves an impulse toward worse; one or a million? There were giants in those and give ready way to such impulse whenever days; but giants who feared God, and not they can, secretly or safely. There is a graving the days of the English Commonwealth.) who fought against him.'-(Marvel describity which is not austere nor captious, which belongs not to melancholy, nor dwells in contraction of heart, but arises from tenderness and hangs upon reflection.'

'PARKER. Our children may expect from Lord Clarendon a fair account of the prime movers in the late disturbances.--MARVEL. Usually men, in distributing fame, do as He knew but one party, and saw it only in its old maids and old misers do; they give every gala suit. He despises those whom he left on thing to those who want nothing. In litera- the old litter; and he fancies that all who ture, often a man's solitude, and oftener his have not risen want the ability to rise. No magnitude, disinclines us from helping him if doubt, he will speak unfavorably of those we find him down. We are fonder of warm-whom I most esteem; be it so: if their lives ing our hands at a fire already in a blaze than of blowing one.'

'I know that Milton, and every other great poet, must be religious; for there is nothing so godlike as a love of order, with a power of bringing great things into it.'

'PARKER. When I ride or walk, I never carry loose money about me, lest, through an

*S. P. Q. R.

and writings do not controvert him, they are unworthy of my defence. Were I upon terms of intimacy with him, I would render him a service, by sending him the best translations, from Greek and Latin authors, of maxims left us by the wisest men; maxims which my friends held longer than their fortunes, and dearer than their lives. And are the vapors of such quagmires as Clarendon to overcast the luminaries of mankind? Should a Hyde lift up, I will not say his hand, I will not say his voice, should he lift up his eyes, against a Milton?-PARKER. Mr. Milton would have benefited the world much more by coming

into its little humors, and by complying with | fame that is truly precious. In fame he will it cheerfully.-MARVEL. As the needle turns be happier than in friendship. Were it posaway from the rising sun, from the meridian, sible that one among the faithful of the anfrom the occidental, from regions of fragrancy gels could have suffered wounds and dissoluand gold and gems, and moves with unerring tion in his conflict with the false, I should impulse to the frosts and deserts of the north, so scarcely feel greater awe at discovering on Milton and some few others, in politics, philoso- some bleak mountain the bones of this our phy, and religion, walk through the busy multi- mighty defender, once shining in celestial pantude, wave aside the importunate trader, and oply, once glowing at the trumpet-blast of after a momentary oscillation from external God, but not proof against the desperate and agency, are found in the twilight and in the the damned, than I have felt at entering the storm, pointing with certain index to the pole- humble abode of Milton, whose spirit already star of immutable truth.' reaches heaven, yet whose corporeal frame hath no quiet or safe resting-place here below. And shall not I, who loved him early, have the lonely and sad privilege to love him still? or shall fidelity to power be a virtue, and fidelity to tribulation an offence?'

'PARKER. We are all of us dust and ashes. -MARVEL. True, my lord! but in some we recognize the dust of gold and the ashes of the phoenix; in others the dust of the gate-way and the ashes of turf and stubble. With the greatest rulers upon earth, head and crown drop together, and are overlooked. It is true, we read of them in history; but we also read in history of crocodiles and hyænas. With great writers, whether in poetry or prose, what falls away is scarcely more or other than a vesture. The features of the man are imprinted on his works: and more lamps burn over them, and more religiously, than are lighted in temples or churches. Milton, and men like him, bring their own incense, kindle it with their own fire, and leave it unconsumed and unconsumable; and their music, by day and by night, swells along a vault com

mensurate with the vault of heaven.-PARKER. Mr. Marvel, I am admiring the extremely fine lace of your cravat.'

him little for what he has been doing.-MAR'PARKER. The nation in general thanks VEL. Men who have been unsparing of their wisdom, like ladies who have been unfrugal of their favors, are abandoned by those who the rest. I wish beauty in her lost estate had owe most to them, and hated or slighted by consolations like genius.-PARKER. Fie, fie, Mr. Marvel! Consolations for frailty!-MARVEL. What wants them more? The reed is cut down, and seldom does the sickle wound the hand that cuts it. There it lies, trampled on, withered, and soon to be blown away.

We cannot leave Mr. Landor at a more auspicious time than when these lofty PARKER. Let us piously hope, Mr. Mar- strains of wisdom and humanity are lingerThe author and outpourvel, that God, in his good time, may turn Mr. ing around us. Milton from the error of his ways, and incline er of such, stands apart from ordinary wrihis heart to repentance, and that so he may ters, and will be known, esteemed, and finally be prepared for death.-MARVEL. The listened to, when all the rubbish of light wicked can never be prepared for it, the good and fashionable reading, which has so always are. What is the preparation which choked up our generation, shall have passso many ruffled wrists point out? To gabble ed away. He has himself somewhere fineover prayer and praise, and confession and contrition. My lord! Heaven is not to be won ly said, that the voice comes deepest from by short hard work at the last, as some of us the sepulchre, and a great name has its take a degree at the university, after much ir-roots in the dead body. He is doubtless, regularity and negligence. I prefer a steady for himself, well content to obey that law. pace from the outset to the end, coming in But this Collection of his Writings has recool, and dismounting quietly. Instead of minded us, for our own part, not to wait which, I have known many old playfellows of until deaf the praised ear, and mute the the devil spring up suddenly from their beds, tuneful tongue.' Others, let us hope, will and strike at him treacherously; while he, without a cuff, laughed and made grimaces in follow our example. And thus, while Mr. Landor yet lives, he may hear what is violent and brief in his writings forgivenwhat is wise, tranquil, and continuous, gratefully accepted and may know that he has not vainly striven for those high rewards which he has so frequently and fully challenged. 'Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any— without fame there is none for the best."

the corner of the room.'

'I am confident that Milton is heedless of how little weight he is held by those who are of none; and that he never looks towards those somewhat more eminent between whom and himself there have crept the waters of oblivion. As the pearl ripens in the obscurity of its shell, so ripens in the tomb all the

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From Tait's Magazine.

THE TYRANT'S TOMB.

Ir was a well-known doctrine of the ancient Egyptians, that the soul after death passed through the forms of various animals for a period of three thousand years, at the end of which time it resumed its original habitation. As, however, their ideas of a resurrection went no further than the re-animation of the body, if existing, it became a point of supreme importance that it should be preserved during the interval, as well from the decay of nature, as from the many accidents to which its helpless condition exposed it. As a protection against the former that wonderful people had recourse to their ingenious and skilful method of embalming the dead; and as a defence against the latter, those gigantic structures were erected, many of which still remain after a lapse of far more than three thousand years. It was under a deep impression of this belief that the tyrant Cheops, bitterly detested by his oppressed subjects, built the stupendous pile known as the great Pyramid, within whose innermost recesses, intrenched, as the surveys of science inform us, no less with marvellous cunning than with surpassing strength, he hoped to frustrate the vengeance of his enraged subjects. After its completion, however, either distrusting its security, or having all along intended it merely as a cloak to his real intentions, he gave private instructions to have his body laid in a secret place, around which the waters of the Nile were introduced; and where, for aught we know, he may be reposing to this day. The pyramid, which he originally intended for his sepulchre, is thought to have been forced soon after the death of its founder, and, at all events, was opened at an early period by one of the Caliphs, in search of the treasure it was supposed to contain.

Not less a fortress than a tomb-and built

Hath burst upon thy slumbers. Science, too, The stone from this thy sepulchre hath roll'd, And strives, with all her potent arts can do, To take thee captive in thy last strong hold, And thus to this great riddle find the clue.

Yet stay! for he who rear'd this fortress-tomb,
To shield him in his years of helplessness,
Hath found beneath its giant shade, no room,
Nor sleeps within its stern and strong recess.-
Is this vast pile then neither more nor less
Than a grand juggle? a stupendous cheat?
To make the tide of vengeance vainly beat
A tyrant's master-piece of craftiness?

With idle rage, while he sleeps all the while
On this unyielding rock, and, baffled, foam
Within a humbler but a safer home,
Protected by the waves of friendly Nile,
Like him who to the raging beasts of prey
His garment throws, and steals unseen away?
Well! be it thou hast cheated man-what then?
Awake! for thy three thousand years are past,
Thy long-forgotten shape resume at last-
And rise triumphant from this dreary den!
Rise! to be great among the sons of men.

See how they look with wondering awe upon
Thy very tomb! Rise! visit once again
True though it be that death's decisive day
Thy glorious nation-nay-for that-sleep on!
Dispels all home-yet is there still a way
Ends every struggle-finishes all strife-

To vanquish this last enemy-and life, A life of bliss eternal to provideBut, ah! 'tis not the way which thou hast tried!

REMARKABLE FEAT IN METAL-CASTING.-We have from time to time described the progress made by Mr. Wyatt in casting the stupendous Wellington equestrian group, the largest work in bronze ever executed; and we think one of our latest notices was that of a party of eight having dined conveniently within the cavity of the horse's bind-quarters. But after all that had been done, there came an operation of unexampled extent, difficulty, and uncertainty. This consisted in the uniting together by fusion of the two great divi

More firmly far than towers, a nation's guard; Look on the tyrant's grave-and see how hard It is for man to shield him from his guilt! Vain builder! when the blood that thou hast spilt, Cries from the earth to God-with crafty skill-sions in which the horse had been cast. A few With giant strength-protect thee as thou wilt, The hand of vengeance shall pursue thee still! And yet is somewhat almost of sublime,

In this thy bitter struggle to inherit,
With deadly odds against thee-ruthless time,
And man's revenge-the life thou didst not
merit;

Alone within thy gloomy hold-no room
For one tried friend-'tis the true tyrant's tomb!

Tyrant thou hast but made it over sure:

The day will come when vainly thou shalt call,

And curse the skill that built it too secure,

On this o'erhanging human rock to fall!

And thou hast forged a weapon wherewithal The hand of man may smite thee. Avarice Of later times, that deems no richer prize

Within the shelter of this mighty wall Can be secured, than its own idol, gold,

inches is perhaps the limit hitherto of such a work; but here there must be a girth of molten brass (several tons), to the length of twelve feet, poured into the junction in such a manner as to fuse each adjacent side, and combine the whole into one solid mass. The contrivance of a mould for the reception and application of the run from the furnace was exceedingly ingenious, and, as the experiment turned out, perfectly successful. From the belly to half way up the sides of the horse is as completely united as if it had been cast in one piece; and the upper portion of the body will offer no obstacle like that which has been overcome in the inferior portion of the circle. This splendid undertaking may now, therefore, be deemed to be beyond the reach of danger and so nearly finished, that we trust the public authorities and committee will lose no time in having it erected. The world has nothing of its kind to match this production of art.-Lit, Gaz.

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CHAUCER, according to the account generally received, was born in London in the year 1328, four years after the birth of his great contemporary Wycliffe. A debate has been raised on the subject of his parentage, some maintaining that his father was a knight, others that he was a merchant, and others that he was a respectable vintner who occupied premises at the corner of Kirton-lane, in the city. All the probabilities are on the side of those who argue that the poet's father was a gentleman, a man of courtly station, if not of wealth.

The year of Chaucer's birth was the second year of the reign of the chivalrous Edward III.; and the war which that monarch carried on against David II. of Scotland, the successor of Robert the Bruce, must have been the great topic of the English court during the poet's infancy. This war was followed by another of more importance that undertaken by Edward for the purpose of establishing his pretended right to succeed Charles IV. on the throne of France. The first of Edward's French campaigns was opened in the year 1339; and from that time the war continued to be carried on for many years with little intermission. In 1346 was fought the famous battle of Creci; and ten years afterwards the victory at Creci was followed by that at Poictiers.

In the same year that the battle of Creci was fought, Chaucer is believed to have written his Court of Love,' the first of his longer poems. At this time he was probably in his nineteenth year; and from a passage in the poem in which he describes himself by the name of Philogenet, of Cambridge, clerk,' it appears that when he wrote it he was a student at Cambridge, possibly a member of Clare, then called Soler or Scholar's Hall, with the localities about which he shows himself in his Reeve's Tale to have been well acquainted. VOL. VIII. No. II. 47

At Trompington, not far from Cantabridge There goeth a brook, and over that a bridge, Upon the whiche bridge there stood a mill.'

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Shortly after the composition of the 'Court of Love,' the poet seems to have followed a custom then common, and removed from Cambridge to Oxford, boarding there, perhaps, like the Hendy Nicholas of his Miller's Tale, with some rich gnoof of a carpenter who let lodgings to poor scholars.' At Oxford he became acquainted with the poet Gower, and Gower's friend, the philosophical Strood.' Whether at the same time he formed any acquaintance with Wycliffe, who entered as a commoner at Queen's College in 1340, is more a matter of conjecture than of historical certainty. Without, however, attaching any more value than it deserves, to the very scanty evidence which can be adduced in support of the opinion that Chaucer and Wycliffe became known to each other while students at Oxford, we may allow the imagination of our readers to make its own use of the supposition. In 1348-9, then, let us picture Wycliffe a man not more than twentyfive years of age, but with the face of a hard student, and of an earnest, anxious temperament; and Chaucer, a fair complexioned youth of twenty-one, of genial, all-enjoying disposition, but of modest and diffident manners; a diligent student, too, but more diffuse in his tastes, and with less intensity and strictness of moral feeling than Wycliffe; reading the Scriptures with the literary fervor of a poet, not with the seriousness or docility of a man of God searching after the truth; regarding the world with that clear sunny spirit which reflects what it sees rather than with the severe, scrutinizing eye of a moral teacher groaning over social wrongs. To Chaucer, Wycliffe, we can suppose, would be a strange, almost mysterious man, whose grave, acute, and powerful mind bespoke him the able, honest, and truly consecrated priest. To Wycliffe, Chaucer would be a fresh-hearted and ingenuous youth, whose somewhat quaint and original remarks, as well as the reputed extent of his acquirements, would awaken a stronger feeling of interest than might be thought at all times due to a mere writer of love-verses.

In 1348-9, the terrible pestilence called 'the Black Death' visited England, after sweeping over the greater part of the Continent, carrying off in some countries more than a third part of the inhabitants. For five months the pestilence hung in the at

mosphere of England like a hot and fetid occupations as the Florentines of Boccacvapor; and thousands of purple-spotted cio, at least, we may be sure, in an equally corpses lay putrefying in fields and houses. Epicurian spirit, with literary dainties and The effects produced by these five months luscious love-romances, was the poet of horror on two such minds as those of Chaucer beguiling the time. Ovid's Art Wycliffe and Chaucer must have been of Love and Loris's Romaunt of the Rose widely different. The effect which the were the favorite companions of the young event produced on Wycliffe is happily not poet while the more earnest theologian was a secret. To his pious and earnest spirit, meditating over the apocalypse and the caimbued with the doctrines of prophecy, the balistic utterances of Abbot Joachim. pestilence appeared as one of those vials of God's wrath which were to be poured out in the last days upon the earth. How could he doubt it? Were not sin and wickedness every where abounding-the state, ill-governed-the church, lazy and corrupt the rich, luxurious and tyrannical -the poor, ignorant, brutish, and oppressed? And at a time when all men were disposed to think seriously, was not he, as a minister of God, to seek his explanation of appearances in that volume in which it is foretold how, when the end of the world is approaching, there shall be wars, and famines, and pestilences, and skies streaked with blood, and signs in the air? From a mind full of such feelings the tract entitled "The Last Age of the Church,' the oldest of the pieces attributed to Wycliffe, evidently issued.

For several years Chaucer appears to have led the life of a voluntary student, devouring indiscriminately all the accessible literature of the age, classical, scholastic, and romantic or Provençal. The extent and variety of his reading are proved by the quantity of odd and quaint information which he is in the habit of pouring out upon all subjects in his writings. In this habit of omnivorous reading we discern the nature of the poet or literary epicure pursuing knowledge simply because the love of acquisition is constitutional in him, and not with any immediate purpose in view, such as might be supposed to inspire an ecclesiastic or other special functionary of society at that period with the resolution to go through a course of general study. The spirit which presided over our poet's miscellaneous researches was rather that of the Chaucer, who was in no sense a sceptic, conscious artist, to whom all sources of must have participated in such feelings; language and imagery are precious, than but that he must have whiled away the that of the moralist who prosecutes his five months of pestilence in occupations of studies under the impulse of some special a very different nature from those of Wyc- enthusiasm. We cannot but think that in liffe is evident not less from the known Jankin, the youth of twenty, the fifth husdifference of their characters than from band of the Wife of Bath, who ' sometimes the fact that the composition of Chaucer was a clerk of Oxenford,' and who oftenwhich corresponds most nearly in time with times would preach to his wife out of old Wycliffe's Last Age of the Church' is his Roman gests,' knowing, as she said pathetic poem of Troilus and Cressida.' In the introduction to the Decameron of Than in this world there growen grass or herbs.' Of more proverbs Boccaccio, we have an ideal glimpse into a poet's life during the great plague Chaucer has, with due allowance for the of 1348. The poet there describes himself as forming one of a party of ladies and gentlemen who, while the plague was at its height in Florence, retired to a beautiful From Oxford the tradition is that Chauvilla in the neighborhood of the city, and cer went to Paris. After travelling through there, their ears entertained with the various parts of France and the Netherwarbling of birds, and their eyes with the lands, he seems to have returned to Engverdure of the hills and valleys, with the land about the year 1355, and to have comwaving of corn-fields like the sea itself, menced the study of the law, a friend of with trees of a thousand different kinds, and his editor Speght professing to have seen with a more serene and open sky,' amused the original memorandum which stated themselves talking over a thousand merry that while residing in the Inner Temple, things, singing love-songs, weaving gar-Geoffrey Chaucer was fined five shillings. lands of flowers, and relating pleasant sto- for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleetries. Now, if not literally with the same street.' He soon, however, abandoned the

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difference between a married man and a bachelor, described himself as he used to pass his evenings in his lodging at Oxford.

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