provocation unresented, and to hold back till the appointed hour is ripe, is infinitely harder than to obey the natural instinct, and to throw oneself, blindly, impulsively, with a wild cry of hatred and despair, into the mêlée. Orange was "the Taciturn," until it was time to make his voice heard; and his tongue, like his pen, was eloquent; then there was no lack of decision and plain-speaking.

The charge of cowardice is still more marvellous, If William was by nature timid and sensitive, as some have affirmed, the constancy of his heroism becomes all the more memorable. There is no nobler spectacle in this world than that of the trembling and shrinking martyr, shivering with terror as the flames gather round the faint limbs, yet to the end constant to her God. Be sure that such an offering is not less acceptable to Him who holds up "the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees," than the confident and unfaltering witness of the strong man, who goes to the stake, with a song of thanksgiving on his lips, and a sense of triumph in his heart. And to assert that the Prince of Orange embarked in the revolutionary war to gratify his cupidity and his ambition, can only be credited by those who believe that to sacrifice place, power, fortune, friends, for a country's freedom, is the token of covetousness, and to refuse with even too constant pertinacity "a kingly crown," the head-mark of ambition. Such charges refute themselves, and may be left to the oblivion they bespeak.

We are not, indeed, solicitous to shew that William was altogether blameless. Happily, few heroes,

beyond the school girl's imagination, are. There may have been a savour of worldliness, and overanxious policy, in that simple disinterestedness, in that lofty patriotism. It may have been so ; yet we care not to amend the verdict. For when we know that a man is essentially heroic and vitally noble, an alloy of weakness, nay, of baseness, does not lessen our regard. "They may sit," says Sir Thomas Browne, "in the orchestra and noblest seats of Heaven, who have held up shaking hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory.”

In fine, the character of "Father William" is one which, in all its aspects, it is pleasant and profitable to contemplate. The lofty and spacious dome of that forehead concealed a profound intelligence; but the heart was meek and tender as a woman's. "There I will make my sepulchre," he said, when for the last time the fugitive and the outlaw returned to the land which he was to save. There he has made his sepulchre-his body is enshrined in its dust, his memory in the hearts of its people. The anointed murderer might thunder the ban against the rebel, might defame his career, and bribe his assassin. But the story was already written. Unnoted by tyrant and bigot, his name had been "enrolled in the Capitol."

YES

There is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

Antony and Cleopatra.

VES! I like the spring time as I like the rosy faces and the rosier hearts of children. Spring is the childhood of the world, and it proves how fresh and healthy the old world must be at heart, that in this its six thousandth spring, or thereby, it is still full of gladness-glad as when the morning stars sang together. One might believe that

the happy carol of their dawn had ere this been tempered by a somewhat "sad astrology." But the weather-beaten, blood-stained, sin-stricken earth, as some please to call it, clearly does not despair of itself. Let who will moan and maunder in disconsolate sonnets, the "life-giving planet remains hale and hearty and hopeful. The most bitter winter experience cannot disenchant it. The lily at my foot is pencilled as delicately and tenderly, I believe, on my conscience, as any

that bloomed on the banks of the blessed rivers, and were plucked by Eve in Paradise.

And no one of the blessed rivers-not even "Pison which compasseth Havilah where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good, and bdellium and the onyx stone"- -was more beautiful than this ragged Scotch stream is today, on this the first morning of our Scottish spring. Is it not a charming picture? Why did not Copley Fielding paint it? Or rather let us hope that M'Culloch, "lord of the mountain and the flood," may stumble on it this summer as he marches to his royalty on Loch Corruskin; or that Waller Paton, in search of the sea-breeze, may one day set up his easel on its daisied banks. Yes, it must have a Scotch annalist-no English artist, good man and true though he be amid the Lincoln flats, could truly explain the wild charm of these wind-swept bents. And, if it please him, let him introduce, in this its most sheltered nook, the sleeping fisher, spread out with ample and lazy limbs in the sunshine, and dimly indicate, by a single masterly touch, "the guardian angel " who hovers over his head, and mingles with his dream. Beautiful the spirit is as Murillo's, only her eyes are blue, and the light golden hair is copied from Titian-Titziano Vicelli, as they called him in Venice.

The vision fades, and his eyelids open upon the common day. But the unearthly music yet rings in his ears, and the only mortal words into which it may be woven are those Keats wrote before he died. Do you remember that last son

net? Let us repeat it solemnly, and let the words wander down with the waters of the river to the sea.

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors,-
No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still, to hear her tender-taken breath
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

How the star-sheen on the tremulous tide, and that white death-like "mask," haunt the imagination ! Had the poet, who felt the grass grow over him ere he was five-and-twenty, been crowned with a hundred summers, could he have done anything more consummate ? I doubt it.

It is a pleasant picture indeed, this river estuary, almost as bright and sunny as the picture in the dream. The stream unrolls itself, snake-like, through the centre of the oozy plain which the tide has dried for the snipe and the sand-lark; on either hand arise the snowy drifts of the sandhills; and midway across the valley which they form, the blue lustrous sea-line runs straight as an arrow. For yonder truly lies that great sea to which men go down in ships from the haven under the hill; to-day it murmurs, it whispers, it caresses, and ever and anon breaks into a loud