O then to Grantham Church we went where there was blunt galore,
Three hundred pounds in money we got, and plate value of two more;
O what a row the next morning when the parson found it out,
O yes there was a pretty row, how the parson run about.

Then next we robd a horse-dealer, from Buckminster he came,
He was a swaggering horse-dealer, Bob Bartrum was his name,
We robd him of 100 pounds as from a fair he came,

And put a ball right through his hat when going down the lane.

O then to Cotgrave town I went without any more delay,
I am sure this is a roving blade the natives they did say;
From William Hill of Cotgrave two game fouls I did steal,
And fought the cock all for 5 pounds in a pair of silver heels.

This cock he fought at Suiston, an excellent battle to,
He was as black as jet, which a many people knew;
This cock had not fought long my boys before he won the prize,
But then I fought this cock again and he lost both his eyes.

Then I went to Cotgrave back again without either fear or doubt,
And when sitting in a publick house the constable fetched me out;
They said you have stole two fouls my man we very well do know,
And for the same offence six months to Southwell I did go.

So then I thought unto myself here I will not stay,
Then I steerd my course to Nottingham on an unhappy day;
I now had been in Nottingham about nine months, or rather more,
When I went to the horse and trumpet for to pay of a score.

Then as I was a sitting there getting a can of ale,

Who should come in but William Ward and offer two shirts for sale; He asked me for to buy one, I said it was to good,

He sayd if it will not suit you, you perhaps know who it would.

It was on the forest these shirts were hung to dry,

Some scamping blade there came that way and on them cast his eye;"
One of these shirts I sold Ralph Brough as you do know,
And they belonged to Mr. Mills that lived on the Long Row.

It was a short time after Ralph Brough he pawned the shirt,
And through that very action we both got in the dirt;
William Ward he got transported for seven long years,
And I went to the house of correction, that put away my fears.

Then about five years after for murder I got tried,
For murdering William Greendale the people they did say
Some base man and woman tried to swear my life away,
And since they have not prosperd up to the present day.

When I was ranged at the bar along with Adam Wagg,
Some sayd they will get hanged, and some they will get lagd;
But after all this, my boys, nothing could they doo,
There was a flaw in the inditement, and they had to let us go,

And now I am tried again for a trifling thing you know,
But for it across the erren pond for seven years must go;
It is for an old jacket that is nearly worn out,
But if ever I come back again I will that devil clout."

This poem seems unique; the spirit in which it is conceived is much the same as that in which Kara Aly's confessions were delivered to the Captain Isprauwnik-and in some parts there is even a similarity of adventure. To find such a document to relieve the ordinary dulness of a parliamentary report is, of itself, quite refreshing; and, as affording an authentic pendant to the official statements of the Russian police, will, as an illustration of the state of English prisons, be considered I think at once amusing and instructive.

T. E. H.

REVELATIONS OF A

66

CLAIRVOYANT."

I segreti del ciel sol vede

Chi serra gli occhi e crede.

"Il faut à ce que je vois, que je vous lève le voile qui empêche votre cœur de comprendre les sciences; et je vous dirai des choses notables.”

It was a dark, gloomy evening, the sky was overcast with heavy, lurid clouds; scarce a movement of the air was felt even by the trembling aspen. From time to time, a few large isolated drops of rain fell heavily on the opened casement, while low muttering thunder in the distance, gave note of an overcharged atmosphere. The sun had sunk below the horizon, enveloped in a murky bank of vapours, which shortened the twilight, and held forth no promise of a brighter morning. The birds were silent among the trees, (probably because they had gone early to bed,) and all animated nature participated in the heaviness and oppression of the hour. The room in which we were seated harmonized well with the dreariness of the external scene: it was a long, low apartment, canopied by a ceiling of black oak, thickly traversed by huge beams, whose age might have been told by centuries, small, leaded windows of coloured glass seemed to have been formed for the exclusion of light, as Talleyrand's tongue was given him to conceal his thoughts; on one side were chained to their shelves long files of books, of a mysterious smell and complexion; which seemed from their worm-eaten and mouldy condition to have been cast into these fetters, for fear they should walk off, alone and unassisted. On the other side, stood rows of awful vessels, of varied and uncouth shapes, and of a glass whose fabric was anterior in date to the march of mind. Interspersed with these, were tall upright bottles, filled with "all monstrous things," which imagination might, in that dim hour, have seen twisting and writhing in their narrow habitations. So remote were they in form and feature from those commonplace brutes with which the eye of man is familiar, that methought they could not be of the ordinary production of nature; but must have owed their existence to some Germanized Frankenstein, if not to the direct agency of Cacodemon himself. Here and there, astrolabes, and other instruments of ancient date and unknown use, peered forth from their dust, as if in dread of the intrusion of a housemaid. On a high desk, of ancient

mould, stood in the middle of the apartment an huge open volume, which the last solitary ray from a western window had shown thickly set with what appeared to be astrological diagrams, or some other strange and diabolical characters. In an immense cavernous chimney, which yawned as black and as begrimed as the mouth of the infernal regions, simmered a chemical apparatus, heated by a small lambent greenish-blue flame from an ever-burning lamp, which night and day had supplied, for many a long year, a continuity of gentle temperature; and ever and anon, a single bubble extricated itself from the chaotic mass within, and rising to the surface, burst with a slight explosion, and a flashing flickering light, which was instantly exchanged for all but utter darkness.

The personal appearance of him who was beside me, was in perfect keeping with that of the chamber he had chosen for his residence; his body was enveloped in the ample folds of a robe of party-coloured materials, spotted with dirt and stained with droppings from many a chemical compound in form it was so equivocal and undefined, that fancy doubted whether she should call it an Eastern gaberdine, or assign to it a place in creation, in the humbler capacity of a modern European dressing-gown. The old man's feet were clothed in slippers worthy to be called papooshes; his head was covered with a velvet cap, which might have served as the prototype of that well-known headgear, which once ornamented the pericranium of the venerated Dilworth. His ample and flowing beard, like that of the ghost in "Hamlet," was sable silvered," save only where it was stained with Spanish snuff, which had also imparted its own brickdust hue to the nose and upper lip. His chair, of large dimensions, and finely carved in solid oak, had, in all likelihood, served a long line of abbots for the easements of meditation and repose, before Reformation, hesitating between fanaticism and avarice, had doubted whether she should commit it to the flames, or 66 convey "it to her own private use. Rebottomed, new vamped, and varnished, it would have been the pride and the ornament of Wardour-street, or figured with appropriate effect in the Gothic hall of some suburban Palladian villa on the banks of the silver Thames. In this chair, the old man had thrown himself in a position indicative either of profound meditation, or of dreamy reverie. On a low table close beside him, lay his exhausted meerchaum, and an overturned empty can; while an irriguous line of Rhenish, like that drawn by the map-making Æneas upon the table of Dido, showed that time, or something else, had taken from the steadiness of the old gentleman's hand.

It was towards the close of my second year's residence in one of the most Gothic of the universities of Germany, and in the house of the great Professor Von Humbughausen, under whom I had been studying transcendental philosophy, homoeopathic medicine, the unknown tongues, and sundry other of the more abstruse branches of oudenology, that chance or rather shall I say one of those undefinable, inexplicable, mysterious, but not undirected sympathies, which compel men to the fulfilment of their destinies, without in the slightest degree derogating from the full freedom of their free will-had thus brought together the pupil and the teacher, at the termination of a long summer's day of laborious meditation. For more than two hours, silent and immoveable, the professor had sat wrapped and absorbed in the contemplation of his

*

"moi," asking himself an infinite number of questions concerning the nature and operations of the soul; to which his "moi" replied so completely in accordance with his own preconceived notions, as to add, as he afterwards told me in confidence, very materially to his satisfaction with himself, and with his interior counterpart. Neither by look, gesture, nor speech, had he given, during this long interval, the slightest indication that external forms or sounds had interrupted the independent current of his inward thoughts. Had it not been for an occasional long-drawn inspiration, in which the air found its devious way through the cavernous and deep-sounding passages of his nose, a doubt might have arisen whether the worthy philosopher had not made a slight mistake; and, by dint of abstraction, forced its spirit to withdraw itself altogether from the world of the living. The profane, perhaps, might have questioned whether he was simply dead, or only (in their own coarse language) dead drunk; for my own part, better acquainted with his "custom ever of an afternoon," I felt satisfied that the heat of the evening had combined with Hattenheimer and metaphysics to close his eyes in a temporary forgetfulness, and that he was neither really nor metaphorically defunct.

My mind, therefore, perfectly at ease, and left free to pursue its private occupations, had made reiterated and prolonged excursions into the more abstruse realms of science; had travelled over the whole round of philosophical æsthetics, and aesthetical philosophy; had diligently investigated the nature and properties of those essences which float between entity and nonentity, and serve as intermediates, connecting the visible and tangible causes of nature with the great first cause; had sounded the depths of the unimaginable, and pursued the mysterious to the utmost extent of the impossible-when the lovely Fraulein, the noble professor's daughter, entered the chamber with a light, and, spreading before us a frugal supper, (a kartöflen salade and a Dutch herring,) awoke her father to a perception of those coarser elements of nature, which are made known to us, without further ceremony, through the mere organs of sense.

The moderate wants of the body were soon satisfied, and the future mother of philosophers had retired to her chamber for the night, to think over the manly proportions of rival Burschen, leaving us to administer as we best could to the unbounded wants of minds long emancipated from the chains of time, space, and matter. Then it was that the professor, overcome by my importunity, or won by three-and-twenty months of devotion to his person, of waltzing with his daughter, and of unremitting pursuit of his favourite speculations, consented to instruct me in the interior doctrines which lie concealed beneath the surface of the sciences, and which are not to be acquired by the ordinary processes of experiment and ratiocination. Humbughausen was, as he more than once informed

*For charity's sweet sake, gentlest of gentle readers, ask me not to define what this means. If you are a German, or a Germanized French philosophe, you will understand what a "moi" is, as well as I do; that is, not at all. But if you are a plain person, seeing with your eyes, hearing with your ears, and understanding with something else beside your elbows, should not succeed in explaining it to your satisfaction, under "two thick volumes in 8vo.," (as our friend the publisher delights to call them,) which would materially inconvenience the editor of the N. M. M.

me, regularly descended from the gymnosophists of the east, who were so called, not, as some imagine, because they had foresworn the use of inexpressibles, or held with Porus that they were all face, (and certainly it must have required a considerable quantum of that last commodity, to have enabled the Indian to present himself before Alexander, in a condition so steadfastly discouraged by all Christian magistrates). No, it was not on account of their personal nudity, that the gymnosophists obtained their title as a sobriquet, but because, while in steady contemplation of the tips of their noses, they had discovered the naked truth, the truth stripped of all its disfiguring connexions with substratal matter, and divested of all the obligations of reality-a generality, having no servile dependence upon any particulars-they assumed for themselves the glorious appellation as an honorific distinction (superbiam quæsitam meritis), and laid the foundation of that useful and now generally practised maxim, "Give yourself a good name, and few will take the trouble to inquire whether you deserve it."

From the gymnosophists, my guide, philosopher, and friend, derived his lineage through the magi of Persia, the mystagogs of Egypt, the Etruscan augurs, the wise men of the Dom Daniel, and the long line of German sages; from Paracelsus and Vanhelmont to Mesmer and Hahnemann. Whether this was intended in the mere carnal sense, and according to the doctrines of the herald's college, or whether the filiation was purely spiritual, I cannot positively assert; but, as the latter supposition is in better harmony with the professor's habitual modes of thinking, and as such spiritual genealogies are less likely to encounter accidents by the way, I am rather inclined to interpret the matter in that sense. At all events, the spirit of these great fathers of the first philosophy was upon him, and Humbughausen was a concentrated quintessentiality of them all,-one, to whom dreaming was a natural condition; one who, while his external senses were proof against the rudest impressions, could do so much better without them, as to be intuitively conversant not only with all actual, but all possible existence. Omne ignotum, it has been wisely said, pro magnifico est, or, as the algebraists would translate it, the unknown quantities are the puzzlers: judge, then, of the magnificence of that mind which dwelt, as in its pleasantest domicile, in the regions of the incognoscible. How often and how bitterly have I lamented the weakness of even the learnedest language, its inability to sustain the weight of thought which dwells in the crania of teachers like the Doctor! For it has ever happened that the sublimer the mysteries disclosed by an intercourse with the internal man, the more difficult is it to find terms for their external manifestation. The most that such professors can do for their pupils is to put them on the right scent, and to point out the way they should go; to communicate the phantasies they themselves have attained, and confine their formless, boundless ideas within the manacles of verbal definition, is beyond their power. How then am I, a mere sciolist of the school, to communicate to you my readers, who are but so many ignoramuses, the sublime doctrines, which, on this never-to-be-forgotten night, Humbughausen began to pour upon my astonished mind? how reflect those visions of glory with which he inundated my aching sight? Dimly, indeed, and as through a smoked glass will you perceive those truths, which, if we may so speak without impiety, pass all understanding. Let me, however, do my best.