could he in all that period find any opportunity for effect ing his escape. During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader imagine the perils of every sort which besieged one so young, so inexperienced, so sensitive, and so haughty; perils to his life, (but these it was the very expression of his unhappy situation, were those least to be mourned for ;) perils to his good name, going the length of absolute infamy since, if the piratical ship had been captured by a British man-of-war, he might have found it impossible to clear himself of a voluntary participation in the bloody actions of his shipmates; and, on the other hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which they frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a Spanish guarda costa, he would scarcely have been able, from his ignorance of the Spanish language, to draw even a momentary attention to the special circumstances of his own situation; he would have been involved in the general presumptions of the case, and would have been executed in a summary way, upon the prima facie evidence against him, that he did not appear to be in the condition of a prisoner; and, if his name had ever again reached his country, it would have been in some sad list of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country; and even these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by the name of pirate, which at once includes them all, and surpasses them all. These were perils sufficiently distressing at any rate; but last of all, came others even more appalling the perils of moral contamination, in that excess which might be looked for from such associates : not, be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless principles adopted into his creed of practical ethics, but that brutal transfiguration of the entire character, which occurs, for instance, in the case of the young gipsy son of - Effie Deans; a change, making it impossible to rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consigning its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself might have lost its horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle, if not forced into the perpetration with his own youthful hands, of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers enfeebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their slumbers by the glare of conflagration reflected from gleaming cutlasses, and from the faces of demons. This fear it was a fear like this, as, I have often thought which must, amidst her other woes, have been the Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal heart, the grief paramount, the 'crowning' grief- the prospect, namely, that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty, to peace and humble innocence; but that his fair cheek would be ravished by vice as well as sorrow; that he would be tempted into cursing, drinking, and every mode of moral pollution; until, like poor Constance with her young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that the royal mother should see her son in the courts of heaven,' she would not know again one so fearfully transfigured. This prospect for the royal Constance of revolutionary France, was but too painfully fulfilled; as we are taught to guess, even from the faithful records of the Duchesse D'Angoulême. The young Dauphin, to the everlasting infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become loathsome for coarse and vulgar brutality, as well as for habits of uncleanliness, to all who approached him one purpose of his guilty tutors being to render royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. And, in fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this purpose, for the moment, and to the extent of an individual case, that, upon that account alone, but still more for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome news with respect to him him whose birth* had drawn anthems of exultation from twenty-five millions of menwas the news of his death. And what else can well be expected for children suddenly withdrawn from parental tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at such an age as from ten to fourteen, an age combining the separate perils of childhood and raw manhood. in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelming as they seemed, were turned aside by some good angel; all had failed to harm him; and he came out unsinged from the fiery furnace. But, I have said that he would not have appeared to any capturing ship as standing in the situation of prisoner amongst the pirates, nor was he such in the sense of being confined. He moved about, when on board ship, in free *To those who are open to the impression of omens, there is a most striking one on record with respect to the birth of this ill-fated Prince, not less so than the falling off of the head from the cane of Charles I. at his trial, or the same King's striking a medal, bearing the image of an oak tree, with this prophetic inscription, 'Seris nepotibus umbram.' At the very moment when, (according to immemorial usage) the birth of a child was in the act of annunciation to the great officers of State assembled in the Queen's bed-chamber, and when a private signal from a lady had made known the glad tidings that it was a Dauphin, (the first child having been a princess, to the signal disappointment of the nation) the whole frame of carved wood-work at the back of the Queen's bed, representing the crown and other regalia of France, with the Bourbon lilies, came rattling down in ruins. There is another and more direct ill-omen, connected, perhaps, with the birth of this prince; in fact, a distinct prophecy of his ruin - a prophecy that he should survive his father, and yet not reign- which seems so overladen with mystery, that one is perplexed in what light to view it; and the more so that the King (Louis XVIII.) who records it, obviously confounds the first Dauphin with the second. dom; but he was watched, never trusted on shore, unless under very peculiar circumstances; and tolerated at all only because one accomplishment made him indispensable to the prosperity of the ship. Amongst the various parts of nautical skill communicated to my brother by his first fatherly captain, was the management of chronometers. Several had been captured, some of the highest value, in the many prizes, European or American. My brother happened to be perfect in the skill of managing them; and, fortunately for him, no other person amongst them had that skill even in its lowest degree. To this one qualification, therefore, (and ultimately to this only,) he was indebted for both safety and freedom; since, though he might have been spared, in the first moments of carnage, from other considerations, there is little doubt that, in some one of the innumerable brawls which followed through the years of his captivity, he would have fallen a sacrifice to hasty impulses of anger or wantonness, had not his safety been made an object of interest and vigilance to those in command, and to all who assumed any care for the general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that he owed to this accomplishment. Still, there is no good thing without its alloy; and this great blessing brought along with it something worse than a dull duty - the necessity, in fact, of facing fears and trials to which the sailor's heart is pre-eminently sensible. All sailors, it is notorious, are superstitious; partly, I suppose, from looking out so much upon the wilderness of waves, empty of all human life; for mighty solitudes are generally fearhaunted and fear-peopled; such, for instance, as the solitudes of forests, where, in the absence of human forms and ordinary human sounds, are discerned forms more dusky and vague, not referred by the eye to any known type, and sounds imperfectly intelligible. And, therefore, are all German coal-burners, wood-cutters, &c., superstitious. Now the sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings, with what seem innumerable human voices such voices, or as ominous, as what were heard by Kubla Khan ' ancestral voices prophesying war;' oftentimes laughter mixes, from a distance, (seeming to come also from distant times, as well as distant places,) with the uproar of waters; and doubtless shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, are at times seen upon the waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in other cases besides the somewhat rare one of calenture. This vast solitude of the sea being taken, therefore, as one condition of the superstitious fear found so commonly among sailors, a second may be the perilous insecurity of their own lives or, (if the lives of sailors, after all, by means of large immunities from danger in other shapes, are not so insecure as is supposed, though, by the way, it is enough for this result that, to themselves, they seem so,) yet at all events the insecurity of the ships in which they sail. In such a case, in the case of battle, and in others where the empire of chance seems absolute, there the temptation is greatest to dally with supernatural oracles and supernatural means of consulting them. Finally, the interruption habitually of all ordinary avenues to information about the fate of their dearest relatives; the consequent agitation which must often possess those who are re-entering upon home waters; and the sudden burst, upon stepping ashore, of heartshaking news in long accumulated arrears - these are circumstances which dispose the mind to look out for relief towards signs and omens as one way of breaking the shock by dim anticipations. Rats leaving a vessel destined to sink, although the political application of it as a name of reproach is purely modern, must be ranked among the oldest of omens; and perhaps the most sober. |