A NIGHT IN THE CATACOMBS.

MY DEAR S -There is nothing more baneful than the influence which privileged nurses and other attendants upon young children exercise over their untutored imaginations, through the medium of superstitious dread. You know that there are few who have suffered more from such cruelty than myself; that from the prime years of my youth I was the victim of a distempered fancy, which I in vain attempted to chasten or correct; and that it was only by a most singular and unexpected accident that I was freed from the reign of terror. But believe you have never been made acquainted with the full detail of that accident; and I therefore send you this account of it, impressed with the deepest gratitude to the providence which turned to so much benefit in my own case, that which, considering the peculiar state and temper of my mind, might have caused insanity or death, and wishing it to become, if possible, as useful to others. Superstition is not, indeed, an epidemic of the present age; yet there may be individuals, who cast their eyes upon my tale, will thank me for its lesson.

I never knew the fostering care of a father; and my mother, except by the boundless affection which I remember in my solitary tears, did not well supply his place. Inheriting a large domain in the wildest district of Wales, I was early taught to attach notions of dignity and importance to myself, and entertained a long train of more interesting thoughts than usually occupy the breast of boyhood. From the indulgence of my guardians to an only son, I was never sent to school, and thus had no opportunity of acquiring the prompt and active spirit that is generated in a public seminary, or that hard, yet brilliant polish of the world, that repels from its surface all assaults of sanguine or romantic feeling. My do mestic tutor enriched my mind with an extensive knowledge of the classics, and imbued it with the deepest ad

me.

miration of their beauties; but he did not apply himself to correct the wild tissue of absurd and superstitious notions which an accurate observer must have detected in my bosom, or the greedy taste for fiction and nervous sensibility of which I myself perceived and lamented the excess. Ever since I could walk I had been under the superintendence of an old nurse attached to the family, whose memory, like that of most of her countrywomen, was well stored with legend and tradition, aud who had secretly acquired an absolute authority over While I was a mere child, she used to frighten me into obedience, if refractory, by threats of supernatural interference and sometimes by devices of so horrible and extraordinary a nature, that I can hardly now recollect them without a shudder. The earnestness and emphasis, moreover, with which she told me tales in which she more than half believed, gave her gradually an entire dominion over my fears and fancy, which she could rouse and regulate at will. Even after I had emerged from the nursery, it used to be my great delight to steal to her apartment in the evening, and sit listening for hours to her ghostly narratives, till my knees shook, and every nerve in my body trembled, in the agitation and overexcitement she produced. It was then almost too much for my courage to hurry through the long passage, lighted by a single central lamp, to the library in our Gothic mansion; and there, when I entered breathless and with a beating heart, I used to find my mother alone, weeping over the correspondence of my poor father in silence, and yielding to the sorrow that finally bowed her to the grave. My sole amusement every night, while thus sitting in the room with her (for we saw no company at all), was in poring with a perpetually increasing interest over all that could most tend to nourish the deleterious passion of my soul. My mother was too much absorbed in her own recollections to pay much attention to my employments or my studies; and her own mind was too much weakened by affliction to have suggested any salutary restoratives to mine.

The agonies I felt at my beloved parent's death, and

for many a wakeful night after she was committed to the tomb, are too sacred to my remembrance to be even now unravelled. I shortly after came of age, and one of the first acts of my majority was a visit to Paris, during the short interval of war afforded by the peace of Amiens, in the hopes of alleviating my anguish. Here, indeed, I saw something of life; but I was too . reserved to enter into intimacy with any of those to whose acquaintance my guardians introduced me. Proud, shy, and sensitive, I was fearful of their penetrating into the weaknesses of my character, which I felt were far from harmonising with the general opinions of mankind; and I fancy they perceived something unfashionably cold and sombre about me, which mutually prevented our knowledge of each other. To the value of even your friendship, my dear S-, I was then insensible,-but you cannot say I have remained so.

In one of my lonely rambles about the wonderful and interesting capital I was now visiting, I joined a crowd of twenty or thirty persons, waiting at the outer door that leads to the upper entrance of the catacombs. I had heard of these extraordinary vaults, but not having passed before the Barrière d'Enfer, I had not inspected them in person. Though I could not help conjecturing that a subterraneous cemetery, where the relics of ten centuries reposed, must be a sight too congenial with the morbid temper of my mind, I had no notion of the actual horrors of that mansion for the dead, or in my then distempered state of feeling I should not have trusted my nerves with the spectacle to be expected. How will the curious tourist of the present day smile as he peruses this confession, if you give my story to the public!-But a few, perhaps, will understand and pity what were my follies. As it was, I provided myself, like the rest, with a waxen taper, and we waited with impatience the appearance of the guide from below with the party that had preceded us. It was about three o'clock of a sultry afternoon, and we were detained so long, that when the door opened at last, we all rushed in, and hurried old Jerome to the task of conducting us,

without giving him time for the necessary precaution of counting our number. I was an utter stranger to all present, and felt at first as if I should have wished to view the sight, towards which we hurried our conductor, with him alone, or at least with fewer and less vociferous companions: but when we had descended many steps into the bowels of the earth, and the cold air from the dwellings of mortality smote my brow, I owned a sensible relief from the presence of the living around me, and was cheered by the sound of their various exclamations. Even with these accompaniments, however, it was with more than astonishment I gazed upon the opening scene; and ever and anon, wrapped up in my thoughts, I anticipated with secret forebodings the horrors I was doomed to undergo.

It would be superfluous to describe what has been described so often, yet none can have received, from a survey of the catacombs, such impressions as my mind was prepared to admit; and few can have retained so vivid and distinct a picture of their appearance as has been branded on my soul in characters not to be effaced. Alas! I entered then with little of that fine exalting spirit so divinely eulogized by Virgil in the motto that is inscribed upon their walls:

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum

Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!”

The interminable rows of bare and blackening sculls the masses interposed of gaunt and rotting bones, that once gave strength and symmetry to the young, the beautiful, and brave, now mildewed by the damp of the cavern, and heaped together in indiscriminate arrangement ;-the faint, mouldering, and death-like smell that pervaded these gloomy labyrinths, and the long recesses in the low-roofed rock, to which I dared not turn my eyes except by short and fitful glances, as if expecting something terrible and ghastly to start from the indistinctness of their distance, all had associations for my thoughts very different from the solemn

and edifying sentiments they must rouse in a well-regulated breast, and, by degrees, I yielded up every faculty to the influence of an ill-defined and mysterious alarm. My eye-sight waxed gradually dull to all but the fleshless skulls that were glaring in the yellow light of the tapers, the hum of human voices was stifled in my ears, and I thought myself alone already with the dead. The guide thrust the light he carried into a huge skull that was lying separate in a niche; but I marked not the action or the man, but only the fearful glimmering of the transparent bone, which I thought a smile of triumphant malice from the presiding spectre of the place, while imagined accents whispered in my hearing, "Welcome to your charnel-house, for this shall be your chamber!" Dizzy with indescribable emotions, I felt nothing but a painful sense of oppression from the presence of others, as if I could not breathe for the black shapes that were crowding near me; and turning unperceived down a long and gloomy passage of the catacombs, I rushed as far as I could penetrate, to feed in solitude the growing appetite for horror that had quelled for a moment the sense of fear, and even the feeling of identity. To the rapid whirl of various sensations that had bewildered me ever since I left the light of day, a season of intense abstraction now succeeded. I held my burning eye-balls full upon the skulls in front, till they almost seemed to answer my fixed regard, and claim a dreadful fellowship with the being that beheld them. How long I stood motionless in this condition I know not-my taper was calculated to last a considerable time, and I was awakened from my trance by the scorching heat of its expiring in my hand. Still insensible of what I was about, I threw it to the ground; and gleaming once more, as if to show the darkness and solitude to which I was consigned, it was speedily extinguished. But, by strong impression on my brain, the whole scene remained distinct; and it was not for some time that my fit of abstraction passed away, and the horrific conviction came upon me, that I was left deserted, as I fancied in my first confusion, by faithless