for examinations, things must come out against you. Needs there more to enforce the necessity of your fleeing instantly? If you be in want of money, I can at this moment". He paused, for the lady was beginning again to tremble; and her trembling increased to the most violent heaving of her bosom, till a flood of tears came to her relief, and she gradually grew calm.

"Mr Bucke-generous soldier!" said she then eagerly, with a quivering voice, “mistake me not: arrows and death could not so have moved me: I have wept to find one thoroughly generous man.'

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Had I acted

Lady, praise me not," said Bucke. justly last night, I should have ordered you to be seized immediately, thinking, as I did, that Douglas had been murdered in your house. But I thought if we secured Jenkins it would be better if you escaped; yet I am ashamed of having done so."

"I think, Sir," said the young woman, with a keen glance, "that you have no wish to parade your good qualities; therefore my self-love dares not abate from your praise. Will you accept this ring, as a very slight token that I estimate you aright? I shall have pleasure, whatever be my fate, in She paused.

"Madam-beautiful young creature!" returned Bucke, taking the proffered ring, and kissing it, "I might be allowed to say, perhaps but no, you must flee instantly! Can I help you in this matter? Shall I haste to Dumfries, and have a chaise ready for you?"

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No, Sir," she answered, "your kind services in my behalf are ended. With the assistance of Vaulpas, the rest is easy. Stay, Sir; I thank you still for asking me no questions, as I would scorn to have any farther explanations from you, about those two young men, Jenkins and Douglas. Farewell!" She waved her hand like a queen, and Bucke felt himself constrained instantly to withdraw. And he saw Diana Clement no more.

She fled immediately from this country, and got to Paris in the character of a French lady. Ere long she became a brilliant singer in one of the Parisian opera

houses, and a dictatress in many a coterie of bold freethinkers. After running, however, a brief splendid career, leading captive the proudest nobles by the witcheries of her magnificent spirit, she embraced the Catholic religion, while yet young, became a devotee, and died the Abbess of her convent.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MY LIBRARY.

NONE but a retired Old Bachelor in the country knows the perfect blessedness of his Books. The coming-on of winter, with all its sharp discomforts and sad associations, is to me rather than otherwise the very spring-time of cheerfulness, for the sake of the ruddy flickering gleams of the first evening fire on my old leathern chair of tarnished red morocco, and the walls of my snug little Sanctum, arrayed with the Sages. Here am I: "My mind to me a kingdom is" I say it, or sing it, ex cathedrá.

Over my volumes, and my portfolios of prints, I have caught myself of late at scraps of notes, annotations, and so forth. Thus :

REMORSE.

"Dit the door again, if ye daur!" cried one of our Village mothers angrily to one of her children, a fine little boy, who had played some small mischievous prank, and was making off from her to school. That very day he was accidentally drowned, and so he never darkened his mother's door again. Great and true had been her love to him, as to all her other children; but never, Oh! never, would that angry exclamation of hers out of her mind. What would she give now, had she never uttered it! O! what would she not give, had her last expression to her poor perished boy been one of gentleness and love! She was a heart-broken woman from that hour, going about her house like one in a bewildered dream.

ters.

A broken-down Bagman was one of our Village characOne day, as was much his wont, he was doing a bit of the soft on some feeling occasion. The schoolmaster complimented him on his tender-heartedness. "Wait till my mother die," was the pathetic return, "and you'll see grief in style-grief in style!"

TRUE LOVE.

A gallant young soldier had his affianced bride in our Village. He lost a leg, an arm, and an eye at Waterloo ; besides being otherwise scarred about the face. As soon as he was able to write, he wrote, offering to let the poor girl withdraw her plighted troth, as he was now only a piece of a man. No," was her true-hearted answer, so long as there is as much of you left as will hold your

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soul."

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THE GERMAN HEART.

From the brief notices given by Tacitus of the great German family, living wild in their native woods, the women chaste and the men lovers of justice and freedom, it is evident that even then as savages they were a noble stock. Well has it been for the fortunes of mankind that they burst their bounds, and overran the Roman world. The leading characteristic of the German family, above all other great sections of the human race, is PITY. The exercise of this godlike quality-embracing reverence for the female sex, and all the play of the domestic affections-has given a new tone and temper to the world, wherever the German influence has been felt. Honour to our blue-eyed, fairhaired Saxon fathers! Take Luther as a sample of the true German character: What a lion in his daring; and yet what a woman, what a child, in his ever-flowing tears of tenderness and love!

THE JEWS.

Nothing so remarkably shews the deadness of heart that has come upon the outcast nation of the Jews, as their

total want of music and poetry in their forlorn condition. Who does not remember the pathetic song of Rebecca in Ivanhoe? Yet the whole world of letters for centuries shews us no such hymn, breathed from the sorrowful heart of a real Jewess, mourning over the degradation of her people. The thing is more striking, because originally the Hebrew mind was highly endowed, and gifted especially with sublime powers of poetry. These the Babylonish captivity could not extinguish, but they seem now entirely gone. The habits of life long peculiar to the Jews are certainly destructive of the "vision and the faculty divine;" but it were hard to say whether the mere circumstance of exile from their father-land be favourable, or otherwise, to the development of a poetical spirit among them. It might tame their fire, but should produce intense pathos. Their peculiar habits of life, however, as already remarked, seem to have wholly deadened them to the lofty or tender inspiration of the Muses. What a descent (as remarked by Coleridge) from the "Hear, O Heavens, and give ear, O Earth!" of Isaiah, to the "Old clo?" of a Saffron-Hill Jew old-clothes-man!

MANSIE WAUCH.

Wide, deep, and true is the mirror held up by broadfronted Burns in the very face of Scottish nature and life; and yet he has almost completely missed those many peculiar features of the national character and manners which are brought out so inimitably in Mansie Wauch. Mansie himself is perfect as a portraiture: What an exquisite compound of conceit, cowardice, gossiping silliness, pawkiness, candour, kindly affections, and good Christian principle the whole amalgam, with no violent contrasts, with no gross exaggerations, beautifully blent down into verisimilitude, presenting to us a unique hero at once ludicrous and loveable! And how admirably in keeping with the central autobiographer are the characters and scenes which revolve around his needle! Totally different is the whole delineation from the broad, strong, national characteristics,

rough and ready, hit off by Burns; but yet equally true to nature, and thoroughly Scottish.

Such a shepherd as he of "Ettrick" never fed his flock upon the green hill side. For still, pure, serene, untroubled, entranced, unearthly beauty, there is not only nothing to be compared with his ballad of "Kilmeny," but nothing even like it in any language. The Elysian Fields of the Ancients, as illustrated by that divine creature Virgil, are beautiful indeed; but they correspond with the Heaven of our Christian faith, and have not at all that mysterious connexion with earth, that conception of purity in the flesh-still mortal flesh though abstracted from this mortal world—and that surrender back to the ways of men, of earthly creatures, awhile withdrawn in a happy swoon to some land far off, no man knows where, which are the peculiar charm of the mythology of Fairyland. By what philosophy of sweet and soothing compensation to the human spirit the "silver lining" of this soft creed was sub-induced under the austere terrors of Odin, which wrapped round about with gloom the hearts of northern men, it were interesting to inquire. Beautiful indications, and gleams, and snatches of Fairyland, are given in our old Minstrelsy; but Hogg in his "Kilmeny," laying asleep the senses in " a dream which is not all a dream," has given us the most serenely continuous picture of that ineffable clime, fusing it by a new art of his own with the blissful feelings of feminine purity and innocence-virginity unstained in the thought, and unblemished in the flesh. By this strangely beautiful poem alone, had he written nothing else, our "Shepherd" would for ever have placed himself among the poets,

"Serene creators of immortal things."

MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND MIRABEAU.

What a noble scene for the dramatist would be the secret meeting by night in the Garden of St. Cloud, be