is the spirit of a god disdainfully subjected to the misfortunes of a man. In reading this wonderful performance, which in pure and sustained sublimity is perhaps unrivalled in the literature of the world, we lose sight entirely of the cheerful Hellenic worship; and yet it is in vain that the learned attempt to trace its vague and mysterious metaphysics to any old symbolical religion of the East. More probably, whatever theological system it shadows forth was rather the gigantic conception of the poet himself, than the imperfect revival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical disguise of any existent philosophy. However this be, it would certainly seem, that, in this majestic picture of the dauntless enemy of Jupiter, punished only for his benefits to man, and attracting all our sympathies by his courage and his benevolence, is conveyed something of disbelief or defiance of the creed of the populace a suspicion from which Eschylus was not free in the judgment of his contemporaries, and which is by no means inconsonant with the doctrines of Pythagoras."

Mr Bulwer justifies this warm eulogium by some beautiful translations. We select his animated version of the exquisite passage so well known to scholars, where Clytemnestra describes to the Chorus the progress of the watch-fires which announced to expecting Greece the fall of Troy; a passage perhaps unrivalled in the classical authors in picturesque and vivid images, and which approaches more nearly, though it surpasses in sublimity, Sir Walter Scott's description of the bale-fires which announced to the Lothians a Warden inroad of the English forces:

"A gleam-a gleam-from Ida's height,
By the Fire-god sent, it came;—
From watch to watch it leapt that light,
As a rider rode the Flame!

It shot through the startled sky,
And the torch of that blazing glory
Old Lemnos caught on high,

On its holy promontory.

And sent it on, the jocund sign,

To Athos, Mount of Jove divine.

Wildly the while, it rose from the isle,

So that the might of the journeying Light
Skimmed over the back of the gleaming brine !
Farther and faster speeds it on,

Till the watch that keep Macistus steep-
See it burst like a blazing Sun!

The warder wakes to the Signal-rays,

And it swoops from the hill with a broader blaze.
On-on the fiery Glory rode-

Thy lonely lake, Gorgōpis, glowed-
To Megara's Mount it came;
They feed it again,

And it streams amain

A giant beard of Flame!

The headland cliffs that darkly down
O'er the Saronic waters frown,

Are pass'd with the Swift One's lurid stride,
And the huge rock glares on the glaring tide,
With mightier march and fiercer power
It gain'd Arachne's neighbouring tower-
Thence on our Argive roof its rest it won,
Of Ida's fire the long-descended Son!

Bright harbinger of glory and of joy!
So first and last with equal honour crown'd,
In solemn feasts the race-torch circles round.-
And these my heralds !-this my SIGN OF PEACE;
Lo! while we breathe, the victor lords of Greece
Stalk, in stern tumult, through the halls of Troy!"

As an example of the defect of which we complained in the early part of this essay of the want of acknowledgment of a Superintending Power, and to avoid the suspicion of injustice in the estimate we have formed of the tendency in this particular of his writings, we shall give an extract. Perhaps there is no event in the history of the world which has been so momentous in its consequences, so vital in its effects, as the repulse of the Persian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and none in which the superintending agency of an overruling Providence was so clearly evinced. Observe the reflections which Mr Bulwer deduces from this memorable event.

“When the deluge of the Persian arms rolled back to its Eastern bed, and the world was once more comparatively at rest, the continent of Greece rose visibly and majestically above the rest of the civilised earth. Afar in the Latian plains, the infant state of Rome was silently and obscurely struggling into strength against the neighbouring and petty states in which the old Etrurian civilisation was rapidly passing to decay. The genius of Gaul and Germany, yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce known, save where colonised by Greeks, in the gloom of its woods and wastes. The pride of Carthage had been broken by a signal defeat in Sicily; and Gelo, the able and astute tyrant of Syracuse, maintained in a Grecian colony the splendour of the Grecian name.

"The ambition of Persia, still the great monarchy of the world, was permanently checked and crippled; the strength of generations had been wasted, and the immense extent of the empire only served yet more to sustain the general peace, from the exhaustion of its forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralysed the East.

"Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and to direct to the arts of peace the novel and amazing energies which had been prompted by the dangers, and exalted by the victories, of war.

"The Athenians, now returned to their city, saw before them the arduous task of rebuilding its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands. The vicissitudes of the war had produced many silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes. Many great fortunes had been broken; and the ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received no inconsiderable shock in the power of new families; the fame of the base-born and democratic Themistocles, and the victories which a whole people had participated, broke up much of the prescriptive and venerable sanctity attached to ancestral names and to particular families. This was salutary to the spirit of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of the great was excited to restore, by some active means, their broken fortunes and decaying influence; the energies of the humbler ranks, already aroused by their new importance, were stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It was the very crisis in which a new direction might be given to the habits and character of a whole people; and to seize all the advantages of that crisis, FATE, in Themistocles, had allotted to Athens a man whose qualities were not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it is indeed the nature and prerogative of free states, to concentrate the popular will into something of the unity of despotism, by producing, one after another, a series of representatives of the wants and exigencies of The Hour-each leading his generation, but only while he sympathises with its will; and either baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in proportion as he excels or he is outshone in genius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the widest range of the legislative power, the most concentrated force of the executive; thus uniting the desires of the greatest number, under the administration of the narrowest possible control; the constitution popular-the government absolute but responsible."

Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen a luminous specimen of the view taken of the most memorable events in history by the Liberal writers. In his reflections on this heart-stirring event, in his observations on the glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despotism by the infant efforts of European freedom, there is nothing said of the incalculable consequences dependent on the struggle; nothing on the evident protection afforded by a superintending Providence to the arms of an inconsiderable Republic; nothing on the marvellous adaptation of the character of Themistocles to the mighty duty with which he was charged, that of rolling back from the cradle of civilisation, freedom, and knowledge, the wave of barbaric conquests. It was FATE which raised him up! We cannot admit the justice of such a view of human affairs. We allow nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another way of expressing the decrees of an overruling, all-seeing, and beneficent Intelligence. We see in the defeat of the mighty armament by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore-in the character of its leaders in the efforts which it made in the triumphs which it achieved, and the glories which it won—

the clearest evidence of the agency of a Superintending Power, which elicited from the collision of Asiatic ambition with European freedom the wonders of Grecian civilisation, and the marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just because we are fully alive to the important agency of the democratic element in this memorable conflict; because we see clearly what inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it is capable of bestowing on mankind; because we trace in its energy in every succeeding age the expansive force which has urged the blessings of civilisation into the recesses of the earth, that we are the determined enemies of those democratic concessions which entirely destroy the beneficent agency of this powerful element, which permit the vital heat of society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of early and cherished vegetation, leave only in its track the blackness of desolation and the ruin of nature.*

* It was impossible that a writer of Sir Edward Bulwer's profound thought and original genius should not unite, in the course of his career, with the great and the good of every other age and country, on so vital a subject as the direction by Providence of human affairs; and accordingly we hail with pleasure evident marks of such a disposition in several of his later works, particularly in the novel of the Caxton Family-one of the most able and original of his many admirable works. We infer from many passages in them, also, that experience has made him less partial to democratic institutions than he was in his earlier years.-[1850.]

THE discovery of the bones of ROBERT BRUCE, among the ruins of Dunfermline abbey, calls for some observations in a Journal intended to record the most remarkable events, whether of a public or domestic nature, which occur during the period to which it refers; and it will never, perhaps, be our good fortune to direct the attention of our readers to an event more interesting to the antiquarian or the patriot of Scotland, than the discovery and reinterment of the remains of her greatest hero.

It is satisfactory, in the first place, to know that no doubt can exist about the remains which were discovered being really the bones of Robert Bruce. Historians had recorded that he was interred "debito cum honore in medio Ecclesiæ de Dunfermline;" but the ruin of the abbey at the time of the Reformation, and the subsequent neglect of the monuments which it contained, had rendered it difficult to ascertain where this central spot really was. Attempts had been made to explore among the ruins for the tomb; but so entirely was the form of cathedral churches forgotten in this northern part of the island, that the researches were made in a totally different place from the centre of the edifice. At length, in digging the foundations of the new church,

* Written on occasion of the discovery of the remains of Robert Bruce in Dunfermline Abbey.