his army, not a man ever ate herrings, pilchards, mack erels, or, in fact, condescended to any thing worse than surloins of beef.

At every step I had to contend for the honor and independence of my islanders; so that early I came to understand the weight of Shakspeare's sentiment

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!"

O reader, do not laugh! I lived forever under the terror of two separate wars in two separate worlds: one against the factory boys, in a real world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit, that were any thing but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute moonshine. And yet the simple truth is, that, for anxiety and distress of mind, the reality (which almost every morning's light brought round) was as nothing in comparison of that dream kingdom which rose like a vapor from my own brain, and which apparently by the fiat of my will could be forever dissolved. Ah! but no; I had contracted obligations to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs, these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings? asks the laborer in "Hamlet; and the answer is, The gravedigger. He builds for corruption; and yet his tenements are incorruptible: "the houses which he makes last to doomsday." ""*

* Hamlet, Act v., scene 1.

Who is it that seeks for concealment ? Let him hide himself in the unsearchable chambers of light,—of light which at noonday, more effectually than any gloom, con

* "Hide himself in — light." — The greatest scholar, by far, that this island ever produced, viz., Richard Bentley, published (as is well known) a 4to volume that in some respects is the very worst 4to now extant in the world — viz., a critical edition of the "Paradise Lost." I observe, in the "Edinburgh Review," (July, 1851, No. 191, p. 15,) that a learned critic supposes Bentley to have meant this edition as a "practical jest." Not at all. Neither could the critic have fancied such a possibility, if he had taken the trouble (which I did many a year back) to examine it. A jest book it certainly is, and the most prosperous of jest books, but undoubtedly never meant for such by the author. A man whose lips are livid with anger does not jest, and does not understand jesting. Still, the Edinburgh Reviewer is right about the proper functions of the book, though wrong about the intentions of the author. The fact is, the man was maniacally in error, and always in error, as regarded the ultimate or poetic truth of Milton; but, as regarded truth reputed and truth apparent, he often had the air of being furiously in the right; an example of which I will cite. Milton, in the First Book of the "Paradise Lost," had said, "That from the secret top

Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire;"

upon which Bentley comments in effect thus: " How!-the exposed summit of a mountain secret? Why, it's like Charing Cross — always the least secret place in the whole county." So one might fancy; since the summit of a mountain, like Plinlimmon or Cader Idris in Wales, like Skiddaw or Helvellyn in England, constitutes a central object of attention and gaze for the whole circumjacent district, measured by a radius sometimes of 15 to 20 miles. Upon this consideration, Bentley instructs us to substitute as the true reading "That on the sacred top," &c. Meantime, an actual experiment will demonstrate that there is no place so absolutely secret and hidden as the exposed summit of a mountain, 3500 feet high, in respect to an eye stationed in the valley immediately below. A whole party of men, women, horses, and even tents, looked at under those circumstances, is absolutely invisible unless by the aid of glasses: and it be comes evident that a murder might be committed on the bare open summit of such a mountain with more assurance of absolute secrecy than any where c'se in the whole surrounding district.

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ceals the very brightest stars, rather than in labyrintns of darkness the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes to abscond from public justice? Let him hurry into the frantic publicities of London, and by no means into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon the analogy of these cases, we may understand that, to make a strife overwhelming by a thousand fold to the feelings, it must not deal with gross material interests, but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and act upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments. Mine, in the present case, rose suddenly, like a rocket, into their meridian altitude, by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a Scotch advocate's reveries.

This advocate, who by his writings became the remote cause of so much affliction to my childhood, and struck a blow at the dignity of Gombroon, that neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania (my brother's kingdom) ever could have devised, was the celebrated James Burnett, better known to the English public by his judicial title of Lord Monboddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often heard, were a race distinguished for their intellectual accomplishments through several successive generations; and the judge in question was eminently so. It did him no injury that many people regarded him as crazy. In England, at the beginning of the last century, we had a saying,* in reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, tha at the creation there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys; and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been said in Scotland about the Burnet.s. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one perished by falling from a precipice,

* Which "saying" is sometimes ascribed, I know not how truly to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

(and, as I have heard, through mere absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her hand,) still survive in the affection of many friends, through the interest attached to their intellectual gifts; and Miss Burnett, the daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the memorials of Burns the poet, as the most beautiful, and otherwise the most interesting, of his female aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo himself trod an eccentric path in literature and philosophy; and our tutor, who spent his whole life in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large family, found, no doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions in Lord M.'s "Dissertations on the Origin of Language;" but to us he communicated only one section of the work. It was a long passage, containing some very useful illustrations of a Greek idiom; useful I call them, because four years afterwards, when I had made great advances in my knowledge of Greek, they so appeared to me.* But then, being scarcely seven years old,

* It strikes me, upon second thoughts, that the particular idiom, which Lord Monboddo illustrated as regarded the Greek language, merits a momentary notice; and for this reason that it lays a part not at all less conspicuous or less delicate in the Latin. Here is an instance of its use in Greek, taken from the well-known night scene in the "Iliad:"

-γηθησε δε ποιμένος ήτορ,

And the heart of the shepherd rejoices; where the verb yyðŋoɛ is in the indefinite or aorist tense, and is meant to indicate a condition of feeling not limited to any time whatever— past, present, or future In Latin, the force and elegance of this usage are equally impressive, if not more so. At this moment, I remember two cases of this in Horace:--

as soon as our tutor had finished his long extract from the Scottish judge's prelection, I could express my thankfu:ness for what I had received only by composing my fea tures to a deeper solemnity and sadness than usual — no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise, I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant. I knew very well the thing called a tense; I knew even then by name the Aoristus Primus, as a resnectable tense in the Greek language. It (or shall we say he?) was known to the whole Christian world by this distinction cf Primus; clearly, therefore, there must be some low, vuigar tense in the background, pretending also to the name of Aorist, but universally scouted as the Aoristus Secundus, or Birmingham counterfeit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to go along with Lord M.'s appreciation of his pretensions, still, had it been possible to meet an Aoristus Primus in the flesh, I should have bowed to him submissively, as to one apparently endowed with the mysterious rights of primogeniture. Not so my brother.

That is — “oftentimes the supreme ruler, when treated with neglect, confounds or unites (not has united, as the tyro might tancy) the impure man with the upright in one common fate."

Exceedingly common is this usage in Latin poetry, when the object is to generalize a remark as not connected with one mode of time more than another. In reality, all three modes of time- past, present, future —are used (though not equally used) in all languages Thus,

for this purpose of generalization.

1. The future; as, Sapiens dominabitur astris;

2. The present; as, Fortes fortuna juvat;

3. The past; as in the two cases cited from Horace.

But this practice holds equally in English: as to the future and the present, nobody will doubt it; and here is a case from the past: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;" not meaning, that in some past time he has said so, but that generally in all times he does say so, and will say so.