leaning on his spade, stood ready to receive us. The church was a little gothic structure of the last century; and its antiquated turret, from which the bell was tolling for the soul of the departed, was time-worn, and clad with ivy to the top. The dates on the moss-covered tombstones referred, in general, to an age gone by, and to persons who had long since "shuffled off this mortal coil," and were now for gotten.

"The breezy call of incense breathing

morn,

The swallow twitt'ring from its strawbuilt shed,

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing born,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed."

The interment was conducted with every mark of sorrow and respect. Indeed, I seldom witnessed a more affecting scene. The funeral service was read by the worthy curate with much solemnity and grace: added to his impressive appearance, there was a tremulous emotion in his voice, which gave the best effect to the beautiful and simple language that he uttered. The spectators were all affected, even to tears; and I observed that the old sexton himself, as he heaped the clay upon the coffin, shared in the general sorrow; but the poor blind mother was the object of undivided pity and attention. She had stood beside the grave in the fixed posture of despair, till she heard the loose earth falling on the coffin, and the solemn words, "dust to dust" met her ear. It was then that "the iron had entered into her soul;" the lethargy of sorrow dissolved as a dream, and she awoke to the heart-rending reality of her desolate condition; but, prepared as I might have been for the burst of sorrow which followed, I was both surprised and shocked when, with an energy of which I thought her feeble frame incapable, she flung herself on the yet unfinished grave, and raising her sightless eyes and her withered hands to Heaven, in the action of prayer, she exclaimed with a fearful earnestness, "May the curse of God light upon you and your's, Jane Merton, for robbing the widow of her son; may misfor

tune make your home desolate, and disease prey upon your heart; may the scourge-"-but the minister of mercy interposed between her and the object of her curse before it was completed; he raised her gently from the ground, and mildly exhorting her to patience, the service being now concluded, he led her away.

It may be naturally supposed, that this unusual termination to the affecting ceremony, raised within me a strong curiosity to learn by what strange fatality the deceased had come by his death. At first I supposed, as I had heard that witches were common in that part of the• country, that the young man had fallen a victim to a spell, and that Jane Merton was the weired woman who had supplied the wicked means. This, to be sure, was not a very probable conjecture, but on inquiry I found that, magic excepted, it did not fall very short of the truth. The following particulars I picked up here and there during my short stay in the village of M

It seemed that the young man, whose interment I witnessed, was of a delicate constitution, and a melancholy turn of mind. From all that I could learn of him, he must have been one of those beings, all soul and sentiment, that we sometimes meet with, who appear to be formed of a finer clay, and to be cast in a more perfect mould than the every-day creatures of the world. He was a wonderful admirer of nature; and his delight was to wander alone in the fields to indulge his meditations. He held but little communication with the young men of the village, yet he was neither dark nor distant; and to his blind mother he was a dutiful and affectionate son. But he seemed to derive his chief pleasure from his lonely musings; perhaps, from the consciousness that he could find no kindred spirit to participate in his feelings. At this period the only daughter of Major Merton, a gentleman of considerable wealth in the neighbourhood, having finished her education at a fashionable boarding-school, returned home. Nature had made her a very lovely young woman; but she was vain, fond of conquest, and possessed very little

feeling. It is true she could weep at a pathetic story, and she was never at a loss for a pretty sentiment; but the current of her mind ran cold, although an occasional sun-beam might seem to light its surface. In an unlucky hour her beauty caught the eye of the too sensitive boy, and he stood mutely gazing at her as she passed him in her father's carriage : he had never seen such loveliness before. She rose to his sight like the beautiful creation of a blissful dream; the realized vision of his brightest imaginings. He had long sighed for an object to which he could turn with confidence, and breathe the hopes and wishes, the fancies and conceptions, with which his soul was teeming, and here he fancied he had found that being. The difference of wealth and station never once occurred; or, if it did, it melted away before the fervour of his hopes. His spirit seemed to receive a new impulse: he became more active and less abstracted; the tide of his thoughts no longer spread itself over the face of nature, to wander unconfined amid its boundless beauties; it narrowed at once and directed its course to one object. He haunted Major Merton's grounds from morning till night, and returned too happy to have snatched a passing glance at the form of his beloved. The young lady, like most young ladies, was not slow in remarking the conquest she had made; and although her ambition suggested that her lover was neither rich nor noble, her vanity was gratified by the mute homage of her lowly swain. There was something she thought delightfully romantic in the matter, and she resolved, pour passer le temps, to favour his addresses. She was deeply read in novels and romances; not the compositions of this description of the present day, in which good sense and propriety are in general to be found, but the loose productions of the French school, which too often find their way into fashionable seminaries. Her maid, too, who shared her entire confidence, was no stranger to intrigue. The affair was conducted with all imaginable secrecy and caution. The usual means were re

sorted to; a note was dropped, and an assignation appointed. But who can paint the raptures of the happy lover, when, trembling, confused, and unable to articulate, he stood. before the object of his love? In short, the poor youth became the dupe to his credulity, and gave up his entire soul to a passion the most delicate and refined. The artful girl, with the aid of her worthless confidant, left no means untried to effect her purpose. She soon observed that her rustic lover was a perfect child of nature, a creature of sentiment and feeling; and she framed her discourse to suit with the turn of his mind. The beauties and the wonders of nature presented an ample field, and her education afforded her the means of discoursing to advantage on these matters. When thus engaged how eagerly would the unenlightened boy" devour her discourse," how fondly drink

"The dear, delicious poison of her, tongue."

At first he was timid, shy, and diffident; but he gradually became. tender, impassioned and eloquent ;.. yet still, in all his words and actions, with the pure feeling inseparable from true love, he preserved the most perfect respect towards the object of his passion. He viewed her as a being of a pure and exalted nature, a bright intellectual spirit, in the light of whose presence it was bliss to stand; the music of whose voice it was rapture to hear. A grove on her father's grounds was the happy place where they met; and here, one evening, the enamoured youth ventured to give vent to his full heart, in a free confession of the passion that swayed his every thought, and gave life and vigour to his mounting hopes. The young lady appeared surprised and offended, she blushed and bit her lips; and then, with a heartless levity, she laughed in his face, and asked him, if he could really suppose that her condescension was ever meant to have such a tendency? She then desired him, since his presumption had led him so far, never more to think of meeting her again; and with the air of offended dignity left him and returned to her home.

The unhappy young man could scarcely credit his hearing; he aphis peared lost and bewildered; heart seemed to sink within him, and a cold chill shot through his frame; he flung himself on the damp earth, where he lay in a state of insensibility till long after midnight, when he arose in a cold shiver, and, rather from habit than choice, he returned to his mother's dwelling,

"In hopeless, helpless, brokenness of heart."

A fever of the brain was the immediate consequence of his damp bed, and the excess of his feelings; and, in his ravings, the frequent repetition of the name of his fair destroyer, but too well disclosed the cause of his disorder. In this state he continued for some time, till the fever gradually abated, and he sunk into a calm; but, though nature had conquered the disease, the poison of despair was not to be eradicated. In time he left his bed,

and he once more wandered in the fields, but it was clear that his reason was impaired; he no longer stood to contemplate the Heavens, "Like some entranced and visionary

seer."

Nor would he stoop, as he was wont

to do, and pluck the wild blossoms that sprung up in his path, to admire the minutenes of their beauty. Pale, wasted, and woe-begone, he strayed from place to place, apparently unconscious that the sun was beaming in the sky, the flowers blooming in his way, and the birds singing around him. It was feared, while he continued in this state that he would have attempted suicide, and some of the young men of the village agreed in turn to watch him at a distance; but although he had witnessed the total wreck of his fondest hopes; though life to him was a cheerless blank, and death the only good he could hope and pray for, his spirit was too weak to contemplate self-destruction; indeed he was hastening to the grave in a way as certain, though less speedy. The essence of life aphis wasted body, till at last a single peared to evaporate by degrees from sigh would seem to be sufficient to

dissolve the union; and so it was.

One calm evening he lay down on the fatal spot where he last saw and, with his arms folded across his the object of his unhappy passion, breast, he breathed his last, as he faintly articulated her name. G. L. A.

W.T.

THE shades of character in individuals are very commonly confounded by the superficial observation which men bestow on each other, and are sometimes, indeed, so intimately blended by the hand of nature, as to escape the scrutiny of the most discerning. To dis tinguish and define these is, therefore, an amusing occupation; and it is from this we learn, how materially the harmony and fair proportions of society spring from the endless variety of tastes and modes of thought. Nothing is more gratifying to a reflecting mind than to see a company composed of men of different ages, habits, pursuits, and education, concentred in one focus of radiation, and all employed in imparting light to each other, and eliciting, every moment, new sparks of thought and sentiment. Universal as is this diversity of opinion, it is not in any province more conspicuous than in literature; and the effect produced from its combination with this, is at once the most curious and amusing. As I have come to the conclusion, that there is no

standard of natural beauty in the female countenance, so nothing is more true than the general absence of any definite standard in the adjudication of intellectual merit. It is this beautiful admixture of the varied colours of sentiment, blended in all the pleasing forms of light and shade, that produces the shining rainbow we so often admire in the moral firmament.

I reside at one of the two largest towns in the county of Lancaster, and ..... am a member of a society, established equally for the cultivation of the belles lettres, and the promotion of friendly feeling, which is diversified with so great a profusion of the variety I allude to, that it cannot fail to shine with harmonised and heightened lustre, when its rays are transferred to the European Magazine. It is a maxim with the writer, that, as there is a mixture of good and evil in the composition of every man, so every character contains distinct propor tions of sense and absurdity, and neither is, at all times, to be confidently pronounced sapient, or ridi