from them by torture, thousands of human beings have suffered death in almost every country of Europe, aye, and of America too!

The next chapter gives us a strange, and, as we must begin to acknowledge our growing suspicions, a singularly powerful scene -the confession of old Lise Kolken, who is brought to Pudgla and thrown into prison; but feeling herself dying, sends to pastor Schweidler to hear her confession, and to administer the sacrament to her before death. He finds her lying with a besom for a pillow, as if thereon to ride to hell.' Her confession is one of those wild rhapsodies that crazy old women poured forth with such unaccountable fertility of invention. In the midst of it a small worm, yellow at the tail, crawls under the door of the dungeon. When she saw it, she gave a scream-such as I never heard, and hope never to hear again. For in my youth I saw one of the enemies' soldiers pike a child in the presence of the mother-that was a scream which the mother gave; but that scream was child's play to the scream of old Lise. The worm creeps up her back, and she dies howling the sacrament!' the sacrament!'' She had, however, confessed to being a witch for thirty years; and told all her villainy with the Amtshauptman, whom she likewise accused of having a spirit. Unfortunately, in his distress old Schweidler had brought no witnesses to the confession; no one heard but the villainous beadle, who is sold body and soul to the Amtshauptman.

The next chapter is headed How Satan sifted me as wheat, and how my daughter bravely withstood him.' The poor old man is submitted to the trial which Claudio is subjected to in Measure for Measure;' and, like Claudio, he yields. The villainous Amtshauptman shows him in the distance the funeral pyre on the Streckelberg, on which, at ten next morning, his daughter is to be burned; and quotes divers Scriptures to his devilish purposes.' Maria writes a Latin answer to her father's Latin letter for he is ashamed to write in German-in which she gently rebukes his weakness, and calmly expresses her own determination to die!

The fatal day, the fatal hour approaches, but Maria's calm and gentle protestations of innocence so far convince her godfather, the Pastor Benzensis, that he is even reconciled to her dressing herself for the sacrifice in her silken attire, with the King of Sweden's gold chain round her neck, and flowers in her hair. He consents to administer the Sacrament to old Abraham, his daughter, and the faithful maidservant. One little incident with regard to the latter, adds to the appalling reality of the scene. Old Ilse has spent all her savings in some pounds of flax, which she begs

Maria to bind round her person, because when the last witch was burned she suffered dreadfully from the wet wood of the pile, which would not kindle.'

'But, ere my daughter could thank her, began the awful cry for blood in the Justice Chamber; for a voice cried as loud as it could, "Death to the accursed witch, Maria Schweidler, for she has fallen from the living God." And all the people cried after it, "Death to the accursed witch." When I heard this, I fell against the wall; but my sweet child stroked my cheek with her sweet little hands and spake, "Father, father, bethink thee, did not the people cry, Crucify him, crucify him,' around the sinless Jesus?-Shall we not drink the cup which our heavenly Father hath given us ?" "

6

She is made to repeat her confession-the sentence is read-she mounts the fatal cart with her father and the Pastor Benzensis; she passes on among the grossest insults of all the people, who crowd from every part of the country to the spectacle: and still incidents of strangely mingled beauty, horror, and absurdity, follow each other with the casual and natural sequence of actual life. Maria begins to chaunt her favourite hymn, on the joys of Heaven, attributed to St. Augustine, but really written by Peter Damiani.

'Flos perpetuus rosarum ver agit perpetuum,

Candent lilia, rubescit crocus, sudat balsamum;
Virent prata, vernant sata, rivi mellis influunt,
Pigmentorum spirat odor, liquor et aromatum;
Pendent poma floridorum non lapsura nemorum.
Non alternat luna vices, sol vel cursus siderum,
Agnus est felicis urbis lumen inocciduum.'

The Latin fairly frightens away the rabble, who retire cursing to a respectful distance, and the victim is thus spared their inhuman mockeries and even their attempts to hurt her person. One fellow is so frightened that he falls head over ears into the ditch. Whereupon my poor daughter herself could not help smiling, and asked me if I knew any more Latin hymns, to keep the foolish and filthy-spoken rabble from us. "But dear," said I,

"if I did know any Latin hymns, how could I repeat them now?" My Confrater, the Rev. Martinus, knew one: it was in truth an heretical one; yet as it delighted my daughter above measure, and he repeated several verses three or four times, till she could say them after him, I said nothing. For I have always been very rigid against all heresy: yet I consoled myself that our Lord would pardon her simplicity. And the first line was "Dies iræ, dies illa." The heretical verses were in fact that noble Catholic hymn. And so poor Maria goes on chaunting

Item:

'Judex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet apparebit,
Nil inultum remanebit.

Rex tremendæ majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me, fons pietatis.'

From this point, however, Romance openly asserts her own. Poetical justice, that Dea ex machinâ, so unlike the ordinary justice, we fear, of this world, descends, and gradually dispels every lingering remnant of belief, which we had cherished, in the authenticity of our Amber Witch.' It is a very beautiful little novel, but it is manifestly a novel.

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During the procession a terrific storm comes on, ascribed of course to the hellish influences of the witch; the rabble and the officers of justice, the judges themselves, have no doubt about it. But when at length they arrive at the bridge over the mill-stream, which passes above the mill-race (it is astonishing how we see at once the whole form of the country and the course of the road), the horses and the men begin to stumble on the slippery ground, The driver of the cart, in which the culprit and her father are seated, is thrown, and breaks his leg; every one who endeavours to pass, gets at least one or two falls. The Amtshauptman spurs his horse on, and at the moment there comes a flash of lightning of extraordinary brightness, followed by a clap of thunder as extraordinary; the startled horse backs-the Amtshauptman is seen whirling round on the spokes of the mill-wheel!! All this is afterwards discovered to be a mischievous revenge of the miller's lad, whom the Amtshauptman had ordered a severe flogging, for insulting Maria when they had passed that way before; he had smeared the whole road with tallow and other slippery substances, and thus brought on this part of the catastrophe.

The witch but deserves her burning the more richly. The execution is, therefore, only delayed, not arrested; the procession to the Streckelberg forms again; the storm has but exasperated the rabble, being, as we said, evidently the last convincing proof of poor Maria's diabolic powers: even Pastor Benzensis wavers in his belief in her innocence. As they reach, however, the foot of the Streckelberg, the sun breaks out, and a glorious rainbow, an omen to Maria, if not of hope, of divine mercy, spans the heavens. At that moment a horseman is seen furiously riding up it is at first thought to be the ghost of the Amtshauptman, and the spectators fly on all sides; it is young Rudiger of Nienkirch, with twenty armed followers. He had been shut up by his father, who was alarmed at his attachment to the parson's daughter;

daughter; a cousin had been made to personate him, and to sign the fatal protocol, which denied all knowledge of her, and had so much weight at her trial. In short the whole plot is unravelledskilfully and gracefully enough we will allow-the latter chapters are as pleasingly written as the rest-but the charm is broken; it has ceased to be a true, contemporary, and harrowing record of times past, it has become like other tales of absorbing interest, simply and unaffectedly told (Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Ellen Middleton,' for instance), though one, if we may judge by its impression on ourselves, of surpassing excellence.

Yet we must not omit one crowning touch of character.—The young Rudiger harangues the mob from the cart-not merely denounces the grievous injustice of the sentence against poor Maria, but tries to persuade them not to believe any longer in such absurd nonsense as witchcraft. When I heard this,' says old Abraham, I was astonished, as a conscientious clergyman must be, and got upon the cart-wheel, and whispered to him for God's sake to say no more on this matter, the while the people, if they no longer feared the Devil, would no longer fear the Lord God."

We refrain, not without regret, from trespassing upon the short remaining novel part of the story; we would willingly have extracted the striking picture of the love-lorn Maria sitting on her own funeral pile (the Scheiterhaufen), on the Streckelberg, and reciting Dido's last magnificent words from Virgil-but we must break off.

Since the Amber Witch laid her spell upon us (we cannot say that we are disposed to condemn her therefore to the flames)—we have made further inquisition into the reality of our history. We are glad to find that Germany was at least as much perplexed as ourselves. Some of the journals pronounced boldly for its authenticity: a long controversy was threatened, which was put an end to by a letter from the editor, Dr. Meinhold, which we have read in the Allgemeine Zeitung, plainly and distinctly claiming the authorship. Half the learned and critical world who had been fairly taken in, revenged themselves for their credulity by assuming a kind of lofty scepticism, and refusing to believe the author on his own word. Dr. Meinhold, it seems, is the author of some poems, and we believe other works, which had not made a very strong impression on the public mind, but which we shall look to with much curiosity. Others put on a pious indignation, and were greatly shocked at a respectable clergyman, a doctor in divinity, practising such a deception, more especially as regards themselves, and with so much success. Among these we understand is a poet, who dramatized the Amber Witch, with considerable effect, for the Hamburg theatre. For ourselves, we trust that we

are

are not latitudinarian in the delicate point of clerical veracity; but as we can have no quarrel on this score with Dr. Meinhold, we cannot look with rigour on his asserting this kind of conventional privilege, which use at least has vindicated to the author of clever works.

But we have heard another amusing anecdote. Among Dr. Meinhold's victims were the Tubingen reviewers-either the redoubted Strauss himself, or his faithful and acknowledged followers. These gentlemen, whose training in the infallible Hegelian philosophy has endowed them with an unerring judgment as to the authenticity of every kind of writing; whose well-tried acuteness can detect the myth in every form; who throughout the Gospels can discriminate, from internal evidence, the precise degree of credibility of each chapter, each narrative, each word, with a certainty which disdains all doubt-the school of Strauss pronounced the Amber Witch' to be a genuine chronicle! But worse than this, if Dr. Meinhold (as we understand a very pious and good man) is to be credited, they fell into a trap designedly laid for them. Dr. Meinhold, during his theological studies, was so unphilosophically dissatisfied with the peremptory tone with which this school dealt with the authenticity of the sacred writings, that he determined to put their infallibility to the test. He had written the Amber Witch' some time before, and thrown it aside; he now determined to publish it as a sort of trial of these critical spirits. We wish him joy of his success, and condole with Strauss and Co.!

ART. IX.-1. Railway Reform; its expedience and practicability considered, with a copious Appendix, &c. 2nd and 3rd editions, revised and considerably enlarged. London, 1843.

2. Railways, their Uses and Managements. London, 1842. 3. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., President of the Board of Trade, on Railway Legislation. London, 1844.

4. Report to the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade, on the Statistics of British and Foreign Railways. By M. Laing. London, 1844.

AS

S the first wonder and delight universally created by the celerity, cheapness, and comfort of railway travelling gradually subsided, the impatience and, we fear we must add, the ingratitude natural to all mankind, and especially to John Bull, have begun to exhibit themselves in complaints of its not being more rapid, more cheap, and more comfortable; and the

much