from the hospitals, were laid on the banks of the small river Guayra. They had no shelter but the trees. "Beds, linen to dress wounds, instruments of surgery, medicines, and objects of the most urgent necessity, were buried under the ruins. Everything, even food, was, for the first days, wanting. Water was alike scarce. The commotion had rent the pipes of the fountains; the falling of the earth had choked up the springs that supplied them; and it became necessary, in order to have water, to go down to the river Guayra, which was considerably swollen; and even then the vessels to convey it were wanting." An eye-witness, from whom I obtained an account at the time, said, "Those who were living were employed in digging out the dead, putting them in lighters, and burying them in the sea. When it became so rough as to prevent them being taken off, they made a large fire, and began burning forty at a time. It was shocking," he said, "at the close of day, to see heads, arms, and legs, that had remained unburnt, as the fire died away; and the effluvia was intolerable." The moral and religious effect of these calamities (as described by Humboldt) was rather curious. Some, assembling in procession, sung funeral hymns; others, in a state of distraction, confessed themselves aloud in the streets; marriages were contracted between parties. by whom the priestly benediction had been previously disregarded; and children found themselves suddenly acknowledged by parents to whom they had never before been aware of their relationship; restitutions were promised by persons who were hitherto unsuspected of fraud; and those who had long been at enmity were drawn together by the ties of a common calamity. I am afraid that the virtue which had no purer origin would not be of long duration. The effect upon men's minds during one of the most destructive of the earthquakes in Sicily was of a very opposite description. Amongst the poor wretches who had there escaped, the distinctions of rank and the restraints of law were disregarded; and murder, rapine, and licentiousness reigned amongst the smoking ruins ;-and yet the kind of religion was in both countries the same, and the habits of the people were not widely different. At the town of Concepcion, in Chili, in 1835, Mr. Darwin tells us of a more mixed feeling. "Thieves prowled about, and at each little trembling of the ground (after the fatal shock), with one hand they beat their breasts and cried Misericordia!' and then with the other filched what they could from the ruins." Fifteen or eighteen hours after the great catastrophe at Caraccas the ground remained tranquil. The night was fine and calm, and the peaceful serenity of the sky contrasted strangely with the misery and destruction which lay beneath. Commotions attended with a loud and longcontinued subterranean noise were afterwards frequent, and one of them was almost as violent as that which had overthrown the capital. The inhabitants wandered into the country; but the villages and farms having suffered as much as the town itself, they found no shelter till they had passed the mountains and were in the valleys beyond them. Towards the close of the following month the eruption of the Souffrière in the island of St. Vincent took place; and the explosions were heard on the neighbouring continent, at a distance, in a direct line, of 210 leagues, and over a space of 4000. At the time of the earthquake at Lisbon, shocks were felt in other parts of Portugal, in Spain, and Northern Africa; and its effects were perceptible over a considerable part of Europe, and even in the West Indies. Two of our Scottish lakes (as we have all often read) rose and fell repeatedly on that fatal day; and ships at sea were affected as if they had struck on rocks, the crews in some instances being thrown down by the concussion. I am not aware of any volcanic eruption in the same year; but the great Mexican volcano of Jorullo was then accumulating its subterranean fires; and its first eruption was in 1759. Judging from the past, we might have presumed that the movements which had been recently felt in England were not the effects, but the indications which precede some similar explosion. So far (early in 1854) no such event appears to have occurred; but there have been earthquakes of considerable extent, and of a very serious character. Soon after the shocks which were felt in England, there were violent ones in some of the islands of the Indian Archipelago. An earthquake at Shiraz is said to have involved the entire destruction of the place and of its inhabitants. At Acapulco, in Mexico, the principal buildings were thrown down, and the ground opened in the public square and threw out volumes of smoke. Cumana, on the Spanish Main, was destroyed, and 4000 persons perished amidst all the horrors attendant upon similar events. And, in Greece, the town of Thebes and its neighbouring villages became heaps of ruins; the springs which supplied them with water were stopped; and the inhabitants, struggling both with privation and disease, were in a miserable state of suffering. In our own favoured land, exempt by the blessing of Heaven from so many calamities which are felt elsewhere, earthquakes have never caused destruction of property or life. Mr. Darwin speaks, with almost ludicrous exaggeration, of the disastrous consequences that would follow “if, beneath England, the now inert subterranean forces should exert those powers which most assuredly in former geological ages they have exerted." National bankruptcy-the destruction of all public buildings and records-taxes unpaid-the subversion of the government-rapine, pestilence, and famine-are to follow the first shock; but judging from the fact that, during the last 800 years, fifty shocks, at least, have been harmlessly felt, we may hope, without presumption, that we have as little to apprehend hereafter as we have previously suffered. Even with reference to their most disastrous consequences in other portions of the globe, if we compare them with the various sources of human misery, we shall agree with the historian whom I have already quoted, that "the mischievous effects of an earthquake, or deluge, a hurricane, or the eruption of a volcano, bear a very inconsiderable proportion to the ordinary calamities of war" [or to the horrors of religious persecution]; and that man "has much less to fear from the convulsions of the elements than from the passions of his fellow-creatures." LITERARY LEAFLETS. BY SIR NATHANIEL. No. XXII. TALFOURD'S LAST POETRY* AND PROSE.† "THE Castilian," Sir Thomas Talfourd's last tragedy, is not perhaps so inferior to "Ion," his first, as it is superior to "The Athenian Captive," and "Glencoe," his second and third. Its fitness for the stage is, at the best, doubtful. But it makes highly agreeable" closet-reading. Shakspeare (now for a truism of the biggest!) would have made it something above and beyond the "agreeable." But there have been, and are, other dramatists, of repute withal, in whose hands it would probably be something awkwardly below that mark. The amiable author has produced a tragedy of no very signal pretensions to the sublime in conception, the profound in sentiment, the artistic in construction, the forcible in action, or the original and life-like in impersonation. So far as his characters are real to us, they are so by faith and not by sight; we believe in them as we do in any other set of fictitious agents, in whose doings and destiny we consent to be interested, while perusing the novel or play in which their lot is cast: but our philosophy in so doing is of the Nominalist, not the Realist school; the faith we exercise in their Castilian actuality is conventional only; of the book bookish; and more easily to be dropped with the curtain, at the close of the fifth act, than to be roused into active service with the progress of the first. Nevertheless, interest is excited and maintained-interest of a tranquil, literary nature-in behalf of these dramatis persona, who rather stroll and ruminate than strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and to whom we owe much graceful verse, ennobling thought, and tuneful philosophy. The story of "The Castilian" is founded on a narrative in Robertson's "Charles V.," of the insurrection at Toledo headed by Don Juan de Padilla, against the Emperor's viceroy, the Cardinal Adrian. Padilla is here regarded as a high-minded, pure-hearted, and profoundly religious soldier a man of essentially conservative and loyal sentiments, whom the force of circumstances impels to almost unconscious rebellion. His wife is a woman of "unbounded ambition," refined, however, by an "equally unbounded admiration of her husband." In the third act is introduced the unhappy Joanna, the Emperor's mother, whose sanction to the revolt of the Commons is made available to the fatal purpose of the tragedy that sanction being obtained during what Padilla believes to be a lucid interval on her part, and becoming in effect the seal of his own ruin. It is a highly impressive scene, that in which the queen awakes from her long lethargy to a transient exercise of mental activity -the gradual restoration-the dallying with painful memories-the * The Castilian. An Historical Tragedy. In Five Acts. By T. N. Talfourd. London: Moxon. † Supplement to "Vacation Rambles," consisting of Recollections of a Tour through France to Italy, &c., &c. By T. N. Talfourd. London: Moxon. 1854. There is, however, careful and effective art in the management of the Queen Joanna episode, Act III. brooding over a too-agitating past, while "that way madness lies:" thus she recals her first days of wedded life in Flanders-the three months at Windsor, feted there "by a monarch styled the Seventh Henry"-and the distracting time when, a forsaken and abused wife, she "traversed land and sea to find—to find-a Flemish wanton snaring Philip's soul with golden tresses," and the dark hour when she plucked his corpse from the grave itself, refusing to believe in death where he, her soul's darling, was concerned; and how, by a rare device, she arrayed the dead man, not dead to her, in pompous robes, meet for life in the fulness of life's pride and might, and hid him from all eyes but her own, and carried him by night to Granada How, through each day encamp'd, I curtain'd him, and bore him on by night, so brokenly discourses the distraught queen, on whose wakened spirit Padilla has staked all His life, his honour, his dear country's peace gracing with her title the wild tumults of the crowd, and with it aiming to "make rebellion consecrate"-resolved, too, "while a thread of consciousness within her soul can shape a mandate," to honour it "as law, announced by voice of angel." That spell is soon broken, that charm soon spent. Giron, a rival of Padilla, secures the person of the queen, usurps the command of the insurgents, and involves them, and their cause, in utter confusion. The Regent triumphs, seizes many a noble prisoner, one of them Padilla's only son, and issues an offer Of pardon at the will of him who gives Padilla to the axe and of this offer the father takes advantage to disguise himself, promise the betrayal of the "arch-rebel," procure the enfranchisement of his boy and the forgiveness of Toledo, and then doff the monkish wrappings and stand forth to die, strong in integrity of purpose and assurance of faith. The same mellow even-tide light suffuses the catastrophe as does that of "Ion"—of a calm beauty too refined and "dainty sweet" not to tell in every line of poetical license-but with a softening influence and divine melancholy peculiar to itself. There is nearly the same liberal presence of florid diction, and picturesque description, and glittering imagery, in this as in Talfourd's earlier tragedies. Take an example or two. Of Padilla's trusty old steward, seen in the garden at sunset, an approaching visitor says What! vegetating still with ruddy cheek As twenty summers since-like yonder dial The conceit is pretty of its kind, but it is hardly the sort of fancy that would occur to the visitor; it is rather the simile of a poet in his study, with the garden, dial, setting sun, trusty steward, and well-spoken visitor all duly arranged in his mind's eye. The same speaker finely says, with a view to enlist Padilla in the leadership of the impatient Commons, as the only man in whom the conditions of such leadership are to be found, He who would direct A people in its rising, must be calm Of passion'd millions,-as yon slender moon Padilla fondly pictures his noble boy scaling the mountain heights "with step airy and true," amid crumbling fragments that broke to dust beneath each footstep, till he trod The glassy summit, never touch'd till then Save by the bolt that splinter'd it, serene As if a wing, too fine for mortal sight, Upbore him, while slant sunbeams graced his brow Plied by appeals to take up the cause of the people, and startled by strange revelations of popular suffering and courtly tyranny, Padilla thus expresses the emotions within which constrain him to compliance with the summons without : A new world Of strange oppressions startles me, as shapes Of dim humanity, that clustering hung Along the dusky ridges of the West, Struck Spain's great Admiral* with awe of natures He had no line to fathom. This is not the only allusion to Columbus in "The Castilian." Queen Joanna dreamily recals the glorious time when he and his achievements were the theme of every circle: "Last in vivid speech Told of august Columbus and the birds Of dazzling colours that he brought from realms The veteran Mondeiar, again, speaks of the "age-freighted hours" in which he shared "Columbus' watch upon the dismal sea, |