And Marinelli, Marinelli was the last word of the dying Count? In a tone! MAR. In a tone?-Is it not unheard of, upon a tone, heard in a moment of alarm, to ground an accusation against an upright man? CLAUDIA. Ha, this tone, could I only bring it before the judgment!-But, woe is me! I forget my daughter over it.—Where is she?--What? Dead also?-Wherein was it my daughter's fault that Appiani was your enemy? MAR. I can forgive the anxious mother.-Come, madamyour daughter is here; in one of the nearest chambers: and has, I will hope, already fully recovered from her alarm. With the tenderest solicitude the Prince himself is attending her CLAUDIA. Who ?-Who himself? MAR. The Prince. CLAUDIA. The Prince? Do you really say, the Prince?— Our Prince? MAR. Which else? CLAUDIA. O then!-I unhappy mother!—And her father! her father!-He will curse the day of her birth. He will curse me. MAR. In the name of Heaven, madam! What are you thinking of now? CLAUDIA. It is plain!-Is it not?-To-day, in the temple! before the eyes of the Most Pure! in the presence of the eternal God!-the villanous device began; there it broke forth! (towards Marinelli.) Ha, murderer! cowardly, miserable murderer! Not brave enough to do murder with your own hand: but profligate enough, for the satisfaction of another's appetite, to murder!-to have murder done!-Scum of all murderers!-Murderers that have honour will not suffer thee to crawl beneath them! Thou! thou!--For why shall I not in one word vomit forth all my gall into thy face?-Thou! Thou pander! MAR. You rave, my good woman.-But moderate at least this wild outcry, and remember where you are. CLAUDIA. Where I am? Remember, where I am?-What cares the lioness, when they have robbed her of her young, in whose forest it may be she roars? EMILIA, (within.) Ha, my mother! I hear my mother! CLAUDIA. Her voice? That is she! she hath heard me; she hath heard me. And I shall not cry?-Where art thou, my child? I come, I come! (she breaks into the chamber, and Marinelli follows her.) (End of Act III.) NOTES BY THE WAY. WE, who started forth in our notings by the way with the express object of dwelling upon such topics of the day as, during each month, might seem most worthy of a permanent remembrance, and who might now exhibit the vastness of our antiquarian knowledge upon occasion of the Queen's tour among her loyal Scottish subjects, or might moralize upon the fearful fire at Liverpool, sit down quietly to tell a story; and the period thereof is September 1842; the place in which that act was done to which we will allude- the place is Cornwall. And since a story must most undoubtedly possess a name, we will call it —we have racked our brains for a fine name,-nay, let us rather put in capitals the hero's name, VERRAN. It was the close of a bright day last month, when the dew was on the grass, and when the noisy rooks were betaking themselves to bed, and the bright sky was purest blue, spotted by a few islet clouds, on which broke the last waves of the sunbeam; and man gazed with rapture on the blushing west, and was lost in contemplation of the loveliness of heaven; and the first star had lit her silver lamp, and was looking down upon the green earth, beautiful and bright, yet chequered by many a spot of misery. This was the scene above; below, a dreary spot of ground and a few miserable hovels. At the door of one of them stood a squalid man, care speaking from his eye, and he gazed upon the bright star sadly; but in that star the humblest may read love and peace; and through all his poverty it moved him, until he pressed the hand of his sick wife, and turned his head aside lest the star should shine into a tear; as tenderly he pressed his pale wife's hand, as though amid luxury and pomp he had read that love star in an eastern garden. His children were around him, not sporting, frolicking around with laughing eyes, for they were sick and weary; they had been working in the mines all day, and reposed now on the stunted grass, with broken spirits, scarcely daring even to raise their stealthy glances to the face of heaven. And he too was a miner; poor was the pittance that his own exertions raised to nourish a sick wife, to keep death from preying on his children. "Robert," said the pale creature on his arm, "where shall we seek bread now? I have paid, as you bade me, the money that we borrowed; it is all our earnings; until next Saturday we shall have nothing for ourselves, nothing wherewith to feed these starving innocents,-and this is Tuesday." A tear hung on the man's eyelash, but he shook it off, and made no answer, as he fondled a young child, that had crouched fondly at its father's feet. "Surely," continued the woman, "it had been no sin to have been in debt another week?" "The man, my Mary," replied the honest miner, "was as poor as we; our sufferings would have been his had we not paid him; but to-morrow I will go into the town, after my work is done, and seek a new employment. God will help us, my dear girl-whom has the great God ever deserted ?" "To-morrow is my birth-day, father," cried the child, that he had taken to his bosom. "Poor thing!" exclaimed the man," and yet I will not murmur that thou wert born; if thou hast cost me care, thou hast repaid with love; and He knows how dear a thing it is to the poor and the miserable to look in eyes that love, and hear a voice of kindness and affection!" On the morrow early the miner arose, before any were stirring in the wretched hovel, and hastened to his task-work, that he might go in the evening to the town. Many a time his heart filled as he thought of home, and of his children that this day must starve; yet he worked still cheerfully, and his mind was bent upon his evening's work, and he was full of high hopes of success, for he knew that his heavenly Father would not desert those that put their trust in him. Now follows the couclusion. He was called to descend a shaft with one of his companions for the purpose of blasting another portion of the mine. They went together, and the train was set. When they returned, it was found to be ineffectual, and an alteration was required. Once more the two were, as usual, lowered in the basket, and the train was shortened; now, however, it burned with such frightful velocity that in a few seconds it would reach the blast, the explosion would take place; and they would both be shattered by the huge fragments cast around. They called hastily and anxiously to the man above that he would raise them; but his arm was paralysed, and he was not equal to the weight. Still the hissing train was approaching nearer and nearer to the fatal point; wife and children, every bright prospect of that morning's dreams, passed through the mind of the unhappy miner; another moment, and they both are lost! Looking into his companion's face, his heart was wrung by the deep agony he read there; his resolve was taken, and leaping out into the scene of peril, he cried to his companion, "Go on, brother, I shall be in heaven directly! At the moment that the lightened basket rose, the mine exploded, and the huge blocks were hurled in all directions. And Verran was not hurt. It was found on search that the shattered fragments had been cast into every corner of the cavity excepting that in which he lay. And the miners look with reverence upon the Christian hero, considering that it is by the special intervention of Providence he is permitted still to be among them. This is our story; in the principal feature it is truth. We have added to the picture a few of those ties which must bind every man to life; they may be, or may not be, true in this case, but, if there were not these, there were others as great, or even greater, and the main effect remains the same. People are but too apt to forget how many ties there are that bind all men, even the most wretched, to their fellows, and make a life of sorrow dear; upon these then we have dwelt; but the grand action has been left in all its native greatness, without fictitious decoration, without superfluous reflection. The circumstance we have recorded has been the round of every town and country newspaper, under the head of "HEROIC SELF-DEVOTION." We had skipped reading it full a dozen times, until the repetition made us curious; having then read it, we were of opinion that our readers would not greatly be offended if we made it the subject of a note. We consider such an act as this to equal any deed of the Alexanders and Damons and favoured ones of history; but we do not look upon it as a solitary example. We have far too good an opinion of the race among which our lot is cast to think this spirit rare, being warmly convinced of the truth of Gray's opinions, expressed in lines that might very well conclude this article if they were but a little less threadbare. "Sit igitur, judices, sanctum apud vos, humanissimos homines, hoc poëtæ nomen, quod nulla unquam barbaria violavit. Saxa et solitudines voci respondent; bestiæ sæpè immanes cantu flectuntur atque consistunt : nos instituti rebus optimus, non poëtarum voce moveamur?" To contrast these jarring opinions of the philosopher and the orator is of exceeding interest: they afford much room for metaphysical study, but are easily accounted for by him who has considered the constitution of the mind. Philosophy and poetry require understandings of a dissimilar order, though they sometimes exist in combination, and form a conjunction as rich as it is rare. Sir Humphrey Davy was an example of this union, and could discover the beauties with no less facility than the causes of things. He would doubtless have participated in the sentiments which gave birth to the splendid tribute of the illustrious Cicero, to which we respond from a conviction of its correctness, and admire for the extreme felicity of its diction; whilst we are at complete variance with the opinion said to be the discoverer's of the law of gravity; nor will his authority, however indisputable on many matters, take one step in serving to convince us that Shakspere, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Dante and their fellows have written nothing but "ingenious nonsense." The mind laughs involuntarily at the idea. It remembers instantly that it has nowhere seen the image of truth more palpably depicted, the fair face of Nature more extensively unveiled, the strength of passion more intensely pictured, the force of intellect more clearly developed, the harmony of all things more fully demonstrated, and the love of whatsoever is pure and excellent more impressively, independently, and fervently asserted, than in the ornate and rapture-yielding language of the poets. To judge of one man of genius by the estimation in which another holds him, is fallacious to the utmost; for every one thinks most highly of, and is most devoted to, his own department; and many are too prone to despise those pursuits and studies of which they are in ignorance, because they have not taken the trouble to consider them. The poet can best know the merits of the poet; Dryden's is the finest character of Shakspere; and, being himself a master of poetry, he could appreciate the excellencies to which others were blind; but if we would be informed of the value of the Principia, we must not be persuaded to refer to those who are too intently occupied in wooing the Muses to think of the solution of a mathematical problem. W. F. B. MEDON. A DRAMATIC SCENE. By C. H.H. "A sad tale's best for winter." WINTER'S TALE.-ACT II. Scene 1. SCENE.-An Apartment in the Palace. [MEDON, the old king, is, by the death of his wife and infant, and the flight of CREONTES, his son by a former wife, brought to madness.] Enter a DOCTOR of Medicine, and SERVANT. DOCTOR. Is it so, think you? SERVANT. Aye, sir, much I fear it; For since my mistress died, and Medon's son Fled from his aged sire, the good old king, With eyes that scarce distinguish friends from foes, And, but his venerable locks proclaim Old age and grief-worn days, you might believe It were some whining child. DOCTOR. Hath this been noted? SERVANT. Nay, only in the house, sir. Oftentimes |