are nowhere, that I know of, bade to love our neighbours any better, but only as well as ourselves.

Cromwell I did not think very highly of-so highly at least, by any means, as Milton and Cowley thought of him—a man that was surely not less fortunate in his panegyrists than in everything else. His refusing of the crown, when offered him, after the example of Cæsar, shewed a great deal more of caution than courage; nor was it worth while to kill a king and fear to grasp the ready sceptre. I looked upon him as a hateful mixture of religion and roguery: like prayers in adulterous beds. Nor has this generation, I take it, been of a very different way of thinking with regard to the famous Protector-which worse hates his hypocrisy than his violence, and has far more grudged him one head taken with a pretext of law, at Whitehall, than five hundred put to the sword at Tredah.

As I was now getting big and strong, I should most likely, under any circumstances, have come ere very long to a rupture with my uncle! And it turned out an unlucky thing for him, as well as myself, that I did not openly set him at defiance, and go over to Wellingboro' or Northampton, where I might haply have lit upon some one that had known my father, and whom I could have induced to take up my cause and come to some terms about me with my guardian. But it was not to be. The power which brings about such events as lie beyond our own disposing-if, indeed, in the course of things human, there be really any other influence at work than our own free-wills and the free-wills and actions of other people operating upon us and themselves-had other views in store for me.*

*The following curious note, too wild and paradoxical to do much mischief, is taken out, like a previous one, from the context :

“For, surely, a minute superintending Providence, and redressing arm of the Divinity that is almost inextricably linked therewith-supposes but a poor piece of workmanship, in danger of tumbling to pieces but for its maker ever at hand: less artificially wrought than a common clock, that for eight days can dispense with assistance, being once wound up and set agoing;* and must render in some sort invidious and impious that notion of a perpetual motion. We that spring from Adam are but God's younger and less-favoured children, and it was only his eldest-born that was thought worthy to be held up at every step he took, lest he should dash his feet against a stone

'Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus '—

were, to my thinking, quite as wholesome an article of faith as 't is a reasonable rule of poetry; and we are expressly told in scripture that God rested on the seventh day.

* If the author had lived seventy years later, Vaucanson's brazen duck, which digested as well as any human being-and a good deal better than many of us-might have served him, for an illustration, quite as well as his eight-day clock. The Duchess d'Abrantes alludes to it, in her very amusing, if not very authentic, book on the Salons of Paris.-Note by the EDITOR.

Old Hannah's death, which occurred about this time, was the indirect cause of my quitting M-; upon which event, as a pivot, turned all my future fortunes. She had been ailing for some time past; but she was always so given to complaining, whether there was anything the matter with her or not, that neither old Robin nor I took much notice of what she said, though she would tell us, ten times a day, there was something wrong in her inside, and she was sure she should not live long. She proved a true prophet; for she took to her bed one Thursday night and died on Sunday morning. The doctor was sent to, and gave her husband some stuff for her; but she could not keep it on her stomach. The wretch never came near her himself, though he spent the whole of the Saturday afternoon with my uncle; and they both swore, and were very angry with the poor old creature, because she could not come down and boil some water to make punch for them. I went up to her room two or three times myself, to see if I could be of any use to her; but she was quite off her head, and kept mumbling something to herself about "master being angry with her, for somebody had stolen the duck-eggs."

A day or two after her death my uncle rode over to Ecton and engaged a daughter of William Brown's, that had married a child of old Robin's by a former wife, to come and keep house for us.

I saw the girl, for the first time, on the Friday evening following. She was sitting at supper, with her grandfather, when I came in from wandering, as usual, about the lanes and fields. She looked at me with astonishment and almost alarm, so strange and uncouth was my appear

"I remember to have read in Pomponatius, that renowned Professor in Padua, that 'God and Nature will never be wanting when there is a necessity for them '-' Deus et Natura in necessariis non deficientes'—but of that necessity and special occasion He only is judge. The ship that carried Jonah was overtaken by a mighty wind and tempest the terrible winged poursuivants of Heaven not to be run away from; but ordinary storms discriminate not betwixt the righteous and the reprobate, nor do vessels sink or swim, now-a-days, according to the morals of their crews. It were as superstitious to believe the contrary as it was cynical and perverse in Petronius to shipwreck the only honest man that is to be found in all his book, and bring his scoundrels safe to shore. The world will not easily be persuaded, even in matters of fiction, to come over to that opinion of Mr. Dennis 'that it is the duty of a dramatic poet to reward virtue and punish vice' (however agreeable it may be to see it done); for the violating of which rule he falls foul of Mr. Addison, and might, with greater reason, have fallen foul of Shakespeare, as Mr. Cibber has done practically, for the tragical ending of King Lear. Divine justice, in this world, were an argument against a world to come, and our lives complete of themselves; whereas death doth but close, not balance, a man's account. What the epigrammatist indignantly demanded— 'Marmoreo Licinus tumulo jacet; at Cato parvo; Pompeius nullo; credimus esse Deos?'

ance.

She told me afterwards, when we became better acquainted, that she had heard old Robin say his master had a nephew living with him, but had as yet asked no questions about me.

She was a fattish fair-complexioned girl, about my own age, or perhaps a year or two older; with a large face; low brow; great masses of yellow Sicambrian hair, very little troubled by a comb, hanging about her neck and cheeks; and a pair of prominent round grey eyes, that shone out from their sockets like candles in a turnip. Her figure was short and pillar-like, being much of the same thickness throughout; and she was dressed, when she had done her work for the day, in a pink frock and a Joseph, only a little less dirty than the clothes which she had taken off.

The next and succeeding days, when I happened to be in the kitchen, which was not very often except in the evenings, or when the weather was intolerably bad, she would endeavour to enter into conversation with me; but I took little heed of her. I had, in fact, for nearly three years past made so little use of my tongue to anybody that silence had grown into a habit with me-like William of Orange, the taciturn-and talking was a trouble. But it was evident to me that she wanted not, in her gross way, a sort of good-will towards me; for if she chanced, when I came in, to be eating anything-an apple or a crust of bread-she would suspend her munching, and offer me a piece of it. She would save

was a reasonable question in the mouth of one who had no certain knowledge of a future state, but believed the grave to be sin's sanctuary and our crimes to have a common period with ourselves. We live under a different rule, and can afford to dispense with present judgments and a preternatural interposition of Providence, which, if they really existed, might render it difficult to reject the heresy of an opposing evil agency; and that had a chance to be true which Fawkes said of the powder-plot— 'that God would fain have hidden it; only the devil, out of his love of mischief, must needs step in and discover it.'

66

Montaigne has a pat story to the subject-as to what subject, in truth, has he not? -'When Diagoras,' says he, 'surnamed the Atheist, was in the temple of Samothrace, one of the priests, triumphantly pointing to the innumerable votive tablets with which the walls were hung round, put this question to him: 'thinkest thou, O, Diagoras, that the gods have no care for mortals, nor meddle with the course of events, when thou seest how many persons have been miraculously preserved from shipwreck?' 'Il se fait ainsi,' replies the other; 'mais ceulx ne sont pas peincts là qui sont demeurez noyez en bien grand nombre.' What temple would have held the pictures of all those that the gods had let go to the bottom? Some find a stumbling-block in this: where then is the utility of prayer? Truly he hath a high opinion of his own righteousness that does not hold forgiveness of sins, as 't is surely the safest object of our prayers so also to be a sufficient scope for them, were we never to get up from our knees. In ills remediable by art we ourselves are our proper Providence, nor need any Hercules but our own shoulders; in such as lie beyond the reach of it, we could only be helped or healed by

+

me candle-ends to read by when I went up to bed, which was doing me a real service. My food too, thanks to her, was of a better sort and more abundant than it had been in old Hannah's time; and was kept hot, on the hob or trivet, when I returned too late to take my meals with her and her grandfather. As she grew more familiar with me, though the talking was still nearly all on her side, she would begin to abuse my uncle, for his shameful treatment and neglect of me; and say I was his nephew and the son of a great officer, and I should have been sent to a proper school and lived when at home, with him, in the parlour. This was touching a quick place: and sullen and obdurate as I had grown, with a temper hard and black as a flint-stone, and with plenty of fire too, for the matter of that, when struck, in the heart of me, my eyes would shine and glow with hatred; I would grind my teeth one on another, as though I were whetting a knife, and swear to be avenged on him, some day, for all that he had made me suffer. Like Tiberius-his enmities— my wrath was lying all the while, ripening and strengthening in my bosom, to be drawn out, when the time came, with an interest that was worth the waiting for.

One evening, early in the autumn, I came back from a long walk. I had been spending the day in Sywell wood, gathering nuts and lying in the sunshine, cracking them, watching the woolly clouds as they

a miracle, which it is much more the part of presumption than piety to entreat; while as against death, the surest of any, it were just as reasonable a thing to ask for Phaeton's chariot as Elijah's, and to pray for immortality at once as the three lustres of King Hezekiah. When we are come to the pass of saying, with the lover in Mantuan,

'Ite procul, Medici! non sum sanabilis arte'

our stint of time were far better spent in supplicating pardon for our past life than for the tacking-on of a new piece to it.

"In fine, as it is the ancientest so is a wing the aptest emblem of Providence-that eternally overspreads and shadows the world, but never actually touches it."

The saying attributed to Fawkes, in the above note, I met with, by chance, in a curious book entitled "The Tragical History of the Stuarts," written by D. Jones, Gent., 1717 (part ii., p. 274); but which, rare as it is, I suspect not to have escaped the knowledge of Sir Walter Scott. My reason for thinking so is this :-the common version of poor Amy Robsart's death, at Cumnor, is that she was thrown down stairs and had her neck broke; but, as there would have been a sad want of dignity in such an end, Scott, as we all know, has made her perish by falling through a sort of trap, from which the props had, previously, been withdrawn. Now this way of effecting a murder, certainly a very uncommon one, is related minutely in Jones's book as having been had recourse to by the Duke of Buckingham, to get rid of one Butler, a chymist, in the Strand, who was possessed of some very dangerous secrets. The quotation from Pomponatius is to be found in his book "de naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis."-Page 169.-Editor.

drifted, boat-like, through the hollow sky. The heat of the weather, the pithy half-ripe fruit, of which I had swallowed a great quantity, and a brisk walk home again, had combined to make me exceedingly thirsty; and as it happened, there was standing, on the kitchen-table, my uncle's large silver mug, nearly full to the brim of strong March beer. He had been interrupted, while drinking it, by his friend and crony, Barber the horse-jockey, coming in and telling him there was to be a sale at Earl's Barton, where a poor fellow's goods, one Gaudern, had been seized by a scoundrelly bailiff; and some colts were to be had dirt cheap. I took a pull at it, and the girl Sally coming in, at the moment, I handed over the tankard to her, who finished what was left in it at a draught. Whether it was the beer that got into her head, or the sultriness of the weather, or that she needed naturally but little exciting, God knows or his antipode, but no sooner had she done drinking than she flirted in my face the few drops left at the bottom, and burst out a laughing. The next moment her great grey eyes met mine, in a full encounter, sending the blood with a rush through my veins, till my face grew the colour of a peony. What followed I need not dwell upon. It was something as old as Eden: and not at all to be wondered at-for we were both of us young and healthy; giddy with the drink; passionate with the warm weather; and so circumstanced in life as to care nothing, one or the other of us, for the world's opinion about us, but thought only of pleasing ourselves :

"Je n'en dirai plus;

Qui veuille dise le surplus!"

says old Geoffry, the Monk, of Paris.

CHAPTER V.

REVENGE.

'T was now the month of November, 1727. The day had been a true November one: sloppy, raw, cold, and comfortless. A small muggy rain had come drizzling down all the forenoon; but between twelve and one o'clock it had held up for a short time, and there were a few faint watery gleams of sunshine with small patches of a blue sky, quickly hidden again by the hurrying clouds, and then the rain had recommenced, and continued to fall unintermittingly. The drenched and sodden earth, looking as though it had been covered with a month's flood-the bony leafless trees, stretching out their skeleton arms in the air, like so many dead Briareuses the steaming oxen, sheltering themselves where they could find a covert, under any cart-shed or hovel, in the fields or farm-yard, and