Loafer's' Wardrobe since been changed to a greasy brown. His coat, the donation of some charitable Falstaff, might have been altered to have fitted better, infinitely better. The body hung down some three or four inches below the hips, while the skirt, as he promenaded, almost swept the ground. The sleeves were rolled up at the elbows, much to the prejudice of the appearance of the lining; and the collar behind formed an admirable barricade for the preservation of the latter part of Mr. Tumbler's head. In truth, that gentleman himself was once heard to remark, that it was wastly conwenient as a pillow.' Of his vest we have already spoken; and it needs but to add, that time had somewhat impaired it, and that although but one button graced its ample front, it was still a garment not to be deemed entirely valueless. His pantaloons could not have been derived from the same source as the coat, for they fitted him with a tightness which absolutely jeopardized them at every movement, and gave to his person, as he moved along, the appearance of a huge penguin. His boots were likewise very venerable, and but for the sake of appearances, as John Thomas himself very truly observed, he might as well be entirely bare-footed. The sole of one of them, however, though but partially attached to the upper, was perfect of itself; although the big toe protruded from the breach with an obstinacy truly mortifying to the sensibility of the wearer, who would sit upon a fire-plug, and contemplate it with that humiliation which we are all apt to feel on similar occasions. The sole of the other boot had long since vanished,' as Count Rhodolpho sings in La Somnambula;' and the upper, which was immensely capacious, would sometimes slew so far round, as to disclose to observation the whole of his right foot. This was a matter of more vexation to him than the imperfection of its fellow; for he was often obliged to confine its sides with pieces of twine, in order to keep it in its proper place; an occupation extremely irksome, and but ill adapted to his easy propensities. Mr. Tumbler was not only a lover of music, but was likewise a professor of the divine art. During the delightful summer evenings, he would sit for hours on some cellar-door, producing strains from a jews-harp, whose melody floated enchantingly upon the air, adding still more to the witchery of the time, and causing a secret wish to arise, that it might be evening all the year round. There is a sympathy in music not to be withstood; and when a particular chord is struck, if it find a unison in human feeling, the sternest heart must melt at its thrill. Upon a particular moon-light night, our hero established himself upon a door-sill, and taking out his instrument, commenced the beautiful and pathetic ballad of Lord Lovell and Lady Nancy.' For a while he played on with no more interest than a performer usually exhibits in the execution of a piece. At length, however, he began to revert to the sorrows of the Lady Nancy, and the tears were seen stealing, one by one, down his countenance. Thought begat thought, and sympathy begat sympathy, until Mr. Tumbler, overpowered by his feelings, took the jews-harp from his mouth, and commenced sobbing like a child. For a full half hour he continued to weep, and might have kept on for an hour longer, had not a hardhearted servant girl emptied a bucket of ancient soap-suds upon him, 1837.] The First Crime. 257 from the third-story window. This libation at once cooled his sorrows. Shaking the unpleasing liquid from his garments, he crossed over to the market-house, in order to seek that repose which always waits upon innocence and self-approbation. We come now to one of the darkest passages of our hero's life; an event which we chronicle with a tear; and which nothing but an imperative sense of duty, as faithful biographers, would compel us to narrate. There breathes not the man, no matter where you may seek him, whose career has been, in every instance, one of purity, who can look back upon his past life, without remembering some action that brings a feeling of remorse, and who can declare upon his honor that he has done nothing but what has been perfectly justifiable in the eyes of God and his fellow-men. Why then should it be expected that Mr. Tuinbler should prove an exception to all mankind? It is not to be it ought not to be. Mr. Tumbler was one day passing along the street, when his attention was arrested by a stone jug, which he observed beside an awning-post. He stopped, looked a moment at the vessel, and then at the pavers who were working in the street, and to whom the jug evidently belonged. Mr. Tumbler then reflected a moment, turned about to satisfy himself that no one observed him, picked up the jug, shook it, reconnoitred again, hesitated an instant, and placing it under his coat, leisurely walked on. Unfortunately, however, for his success, the jug was missed. He was seen, suspected, pursued, caught, and taken by the collar before his honor the mayor. That dispenser of justice was induced to believe that he was an old offender; and accordingly ordered his pockets to be examined. But however Mr. Tumbler might have erred, in regard to the abstraction of the jug, he was nevertheless innocent of other crimes of the kind; and nothing rewarded the search, save an onion, and the fragment of a Bologna sausage. He was, however, in consequence of the affair on hand, imprisoned in the city gaol for the space of thirty days; which confinement, we have been informed, he bore with the resig nation of a Christian, and the fortitude of a hero. At length he was released; but he came out an altered man. His spirits had been broken down by the disgrace he had suffered, and he now plunged deeper than ever into dissipation, seeking in its excitement to drive away the memory of the past. Happy, indeed, would it have been, had his sensibilities been less refined; but, like the flower which shrinks from the touch, be avoided all intercourse with his fellow-men, wrapping himself up in the gloom of his own thoughts, neglecting his jews-harp, neglecting himself, and neglected by the world. Not a great while after our hero's release from incarceration, he might have been observed strolling leisurely along the wharf, with the manner of one who has no definite object of pursuit, and who is willing to amuse himself with whatever the time and place might present. As his eye rolled onward, he espied a cask, upon the head of which was written, in large black letters, the word Cogniac.' But he little thought that fatal word was to him what the handwriting upon the wall had been to the mighty Belshazzar. He little thought that the simple word Cogniac' was applied to him, at that moment, in as terrible a warning as was the Mene, mene, tekel, VOL. X. 33 upharsin!' which foretold to the Chaldean king the destruction of his life and empire. He regarded the cask for a moment, and then throwing his right leg over, he mounted it. Seating himself firmly, he looked briefly about him. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he very deliberately drew a large gimlet from his pocket, and commenced boring a hole in one of the staves, gazing over the river the while, as if attracted by some interesting object on the opposite shore. When the perforation was complete, he returned the instrument to his pocket, and took an additional survey of the premises. Seeing that he was not watched by any one, he produced the end of a tin tube- manufactured expressly for such occasions - from beneath his vest, and inserting it in the hole, applied his mouth to the other extremity of the conductor, which protruded from the upper part of the garment, and in this manner commenced extracting the contents of the cask. For the space of an hour, he remained in one position, not even stirring a limb. At length the curiosity of a passer-by was excited by his appearance; and going up to the cask, he was surprised to find a man, as he thought, asleep. The stranger shook him for a moment, as if to awaken him; and when he relaxed his grasp, our hero tumbled to the ground. Astonished that the fall did not rouse him, the stranger stooped down to examine his features. They were fixed and rigid. He took his hand; it was cold as marble. He felt for his pulse; but it had ceased for ever. To make use of a novel phrase, the vital spark was extinguished.' Mr. Tumbler had gone to a land of 'pure spirits;' a place which he often said he longed to visit; since the spirits he was in the habit of imbibing here were generally any thing but pure. Thus died, in the prime of life, John Thomas Tumbler, Jr., a man whom nature had endowed with many excellent qualities, which were, however, all perverted by one vicious and unconquerable propensity. Under more favorable circumstances, he might have proved an ornament to society. Avoided, on all occasions, by the respectable of his species; treated with broad indifference, if not contumely; a subject of jest and ridicule for every body; how can we suppose he could burst these shackles, and soar to distinction? Emulation withered beneath the persecution which attended him through life, and which, we blush to say, did not cease with his death; for the papers, in noticing his demise, merely remarked, with cruel brevity: A loafer was found dead upon the wharf this morning.' DEATH-BED REMORSE. How awful is that hour, when conscience stings And screaming like a vulture in his ears, Tells one by one his thoughts and deeds of shame; And like the torture's rack, the wrestling of his frame! J. G. PERCIVAL. LITERARY NOTICES. MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, Bart. By J. G. LOCKHART. Part Second. pp. 198. Philadelphia: CAREY, LEA AND BLANCHARD. In a notice of the first part of these Memoirs, we expressed an intention of renewing our broken intercourse with them, as they should appear, at intervals. The publication of two additional parts gives us ample scope for selection; and indeed this is all that a reviewer, not inclined to iterate, or 'bestow his tediousness' upon the reader, will be disposed to do. The pages before us are crowded with incidents, and with characteristic sketches of the personal and literary every-day life of their subject; and these, in themselves abundantly attractive, are rendered still more so, as we have already elsewhere remarked, by the pleasant style of the biographer, who will win enduring fame by this contribution to a literature which he had before not a little enriched. Before entering upon our extracts, we cannot avoid remarking, that throughout the minuter history of the illustrious poet and novelist here presented, we are enabled to see the great secret of a literary career, unparalleled since the era of Shakspeare, if he who wrote for all mankind may be said to have had, or to have, an era. He stands forth, in these volumes, a shining example to all authors who would win a permanent hold upon the public regard. He studied humanity, and the works of nature. He did not content himself with portraying the invisible and non-existent, and with conceiving scenes and personages which have no counterparts in nature or in common life. He held rapt intercourse with the mountains, rivers, and vales of Scotland; and he sought the teachings of those natural instructors, the green fields. His ear was ever open to the 'silent voice of Nature, speaking in forms and colors.' The humblest peasant was a picture, and his qualities a study; and the lightest shade of character, in high or low, was not beneath his scrutiny. To this careful perception of nature, in all its forms and phases, he added a course of reading more various and extended, we cannot doubt, than any contemporary on the globe. But, unlike the many who lard their lean books with the fat of other authors, he read only to digest, and to fuse his mind; hence, his resources were never exhausted, even when he was a gray soldier in the literary field, wherein he had borne arms so nobly and so long. How numerous the chaotic fictions, how many the trumpery novels, how large the amount of still-born poetry, now sunk into waste paper and oblivion, which might have been saved to the world, had their producers but followed the example of the author of Waverley! How much worse than useless labor might have been saved to the thousands who, unable to inform have striven to please, and have borne their ponderous loads into the literary mart, and expanded them on the stalls of their hapless publishers! We cannot but hope that, primarily, the publication of these Memoirs will be widely beneficial to novelists and poets, and secondarily, to the reading public; that they will improve the taste of those authors who are content to indulge in superficialities merely; to amuse the imagination, and convey infection to love-sick damsels, without satisfying the judgment, or touching the heart. So mote it be! We commence.our extracts with a brief history of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem which has now kept its place for nearly a third of a century :' "It is curious to trace the small beginnings and gradual development of his design. The lovely Countess of Dalkeith hears a wild rude legend of Border diablerie, and sportively asks him to make it the subject of a ballad. He had been already laboring in the elucidation of the 'quaint Inglis' ascribed to an ancient seer and bard of the same district, and perhaps completed his own sequel, intending the whole to be included in the third volume of the Minstrelsy. He assents to Lady Dalkeith's request, and casts about for some new variety of diction and rhyme, which might be adopted without impropriety in a closing strain for the same collection. Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year or two before, of Coleridge's unpublished Christabel, had fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory; and it occurs to him, that by throwing the story of Gilpin Horner into somewhat of a similar cadence, he might produce such an echo of the later metrical romance, as would serve to connect his Conclusion of the primitive Sir Tristrem with his imitations of the common popular ballad in the Grey Brother and Eve of St. John. A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volunteer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of the bugle; and suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old Border life of war and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his researches on the Minstrelsy' had by degrees fed his imagination, until every the minutest feature had been taken home and realized with unconscious intenseness of sympathy; so that he had won for himself in the past another world, hardly less complete or familiar than the present. Erskine or Cranstoun suggests that he would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the action, after the fashion of Spenser in the Faëry Queen. He pauses for a moment - - and the happiest conception of the frame-work of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poetone that Homer might have envied the creation of the ancient harper, starts to life. By such steps did the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' grow out of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.' "A word more of its felicitous machinery. It was at Bowhill that the Countess of Dalkeith requested a ballad on Gilpin Horner. The ruined castle of Newark closely adjoins that seat, and is now indeed included within its pleasance. Newark had been the chosen residence of the first Duchess of Buccleuch, and he accordingly shadows out his own beautiful friend in the person of her lord's ancestress, the last of the origi nal stock of that great house; himself the favored inmate of Bowhill, introduced certainly to the familiarity of its circle in consequence of his devotion to the poetry of a by-past age, in that of an aged minstrel, 'the last of all the race,' seeking shelter at the gate of Newark, in days when many an adherent of the fallen cause of Stewart - his own bearded ancestor, who had fought at Killiekrankie, among the rest owed their safety to her who 'In pride of power, in beauty's bloom, Had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb.'" The profits, to Scott, from the several editions of this poem were £769. The sales are given as follows: "The first edition of the Lay was a magnificent quarto, 750 copies; but this was soon exhausted, and there followed an octavo impression of 1500; in 1906, two more, one of 2000 copies, another of 2550; in 1807, a fifth edition of 2000, and a sixth of 3000; in 1803, 3550; in 1809, 3000- a small edition in quarto (the ballads and lyrical pieces being then annexed to it,) and another octavo edition of 3250; in 1811, 3000; in 1812, 3000; in 1816, 3000; in 1823, 1000. A fourteenth impression of 2000 foolscap appeared in 1825; and besides all this, before the end of 1836, 11,000 copies had gone forth in the collected editions of his poetical works. Thus, nearly forty-four thousand copies had been disposed of in this country, and by the legitimate trade alone, before he superintended the edition of 1830, to which his biographical introductions were prefixed. In the history of British Poetry, nothing had ever equalled the demand for the Lay of the Last Minstrel." Subsequently to a very interesting account of Scott's partnership with Ballantine, and of his entering actively upon numerous literary projects — including his editions |