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At first, the chieftain to the chime
With lifted hand kept feeble time;
That motion ceased, yet feeling strong
Varied his look as changed the song.
At length, no more his deafened ear
The minstrel melody can hear;

His face grows sharp; his hands are clinched
As if some pang his heart-strings wrenched;
Set are his teeth; his fading eye

Is sternly fixed on vacancy:

Thus, motionless and moanless, drew
His parting-breath stout Roderick Dhu.
Old Allan-bane looked on aghast
While grim and still his spirit passed;
But, when he saw that life was fled,
He poured his wailing o'er the dead.

HISTORY AND TRAVEL.

EDWARD GIBBON.-1737-1794. The stately historian of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

JOHN LINGARD. 1771-1851. The Roman-Catholic author of a learned and valuable "History of England," thirteen vols.

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HENRY HALLAM.-1778-1859. Author of three invaluable historical works, "View of Europe during the Middle Ages," The Constitutional History of England," and "An Introduction to the Literature of Europe."

WILLIAM NAPIER. — 1785-1860. "The Peninsular War," "The Conquest of Scinde," and "The Life of Sir Charles Napier."

WILLIAM ROSCOE.

1753-1831. "The Life of Lorenzo de Medici," and "The Life and Pontificate of Leo X."

Sir JAMES MCINTOSH. 1765-1832. Short "Life of Sir Thomas More," "Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy," and other essays.

THOMAS MCCRIE. 1772-1835. "Life of John Knox," and "Life of Andrew Melville."

JAMES MILL.1773-1836. "History of British India."

DAVID DALRYMPLE. — 1726-1792.

the Accession of the Stuarts."

GEORGE CHALMERS. - 1742-1825.

"Annals of Scotland, from Malcolm III. to

"Caledonia" (antiquities and early history

of Scotland), "Life of Queen Mary,' ""Life of Sir David Lyndsay." WILLIAM MITFORD.-1744-1827. 66

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History of Greece."

History of Austria," "Memoirs of Walpole and

JOHN PINKERTON.-1758-1825. 66 History of Scotland before the Reign of Malcolm III., and under the Stuarts;""The Scythians, or Goths." MALCOLM LAING. 1762-1818. "History of Scotland from 1603 to 1707," Dissertations on the Gowrie Plot and the Murder of Darnley."

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SHARON TURNER.

1768-1847. "History of the Anglo-Saxons," "History of England during the Middle Ages."

PATRICK FRASER TYTLER.

1791-1849. "Universal History," "History of Scotland from Alexander III. to 1603," "Lives of Scottish Worthies," "Life of Raleigh."

James Bruce, Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, Richard Lander, John L. Burckhart, and G. Belzoni, travels in Africa. Edward Clarke, J. Silk Buckingham, Sir John Malcolm, James Morier, Oursly, Sir R. Ker Porter, James B. Frazer, Staunton, Barrow, and Ellis, travels in Asia. Forsyth, Eustace, Mathews, Lady Morgan, Inglis, and others, in Europe. Parry, Ross, Franklin, and Scoresby, polar regions.

NOVELISTS.

MARIA EDGEWORTH. - 1767-1849.

“Belinda,” “Popular Tales," "Tales of

Fashionable Life," and a long list of popular works.
HENRY MACKENZIE.

the World."

- 1745-1831. "The Man of Feeling," and "The Man of

FRANCES BURNEY.-1752-1840. "Eveline," "Cecilia," and "Diary and Letters." JOHN GALT.-1779-1839 The Ayrshire Legatees," "The Annals of the Parish," ," "Sir Andrew Wylie," "The Entail," "The Last of the Lairds," and "Laurie Todd."

FRANCES TROLLOPE. 1790. "The Domestic Manners of the Americans," "The Abbess," "The Vicar of Wrexhill," "The Widow Barnaby,” and “The Ward of Thorpe Combe." The mother of Anthony and Thomas. JOHN MOORE.-1729-1802. 66 Zeluco," ""Edward."

CHARI OTTE SMITH.-1749-1806. "The Old English Manor-House,” “Emmeline."

SOPHIA LEE.-1750-1824, and her sister HARRIET LEE. — 1766-1851. Canterbury Tales and Dramas."

"The

ELIZABETH INCHBALD. - 1753-1821. "A Simple Story,' ""Nature and Art." WILLIAM GODWIN. - 1756-1836. "Caleb Williams," "St. Leon."

ELIZABETH HAMILTON. — 1758-1816. "Cottagers of Glenburnie.”
WILLIAM BEckford. - 1759-1844. "Vatliek, an Arabian Tale.”
ANNE RADCLIFFE.

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1764-1823.

R. PLUMER WARD.-1762-1846.

Vere," "De Clifford."

AMELIA OPIE. - 1769-1853.

"Temper."

"Romance of the Forest," "Mysteries of Udol

66 Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement," "De

"Father and Daughter," "Tales of the Heart,"

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS.-1773-1818. "The Monk," "Bravo of Venice," "Tales of Wonder," "The Castle Specter."

JANE AUSTEN.-1775-1817. "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," "Per

suasion."

MARY BRUNTON.-1778-1818. "Self-Control, 99.66 Discipline."
JAMES MORIER. - 1780-1849. "Hajji Baba," "Zohrab," "The Mirza."
THOMAS HOPE. - Died 1831. "Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek."
MARY FERRIER. — 1782-1854.

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MARY MITFORD.-1789-1855. "Our Village," "Belford Regis."

COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON.

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"The Repealers," "Belle of a Season," "Victims of Society,' Idler in Italy," "Idler in France."

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JANE PORTER.-1776-1850. "Thaddeus of Warsaw," "Scottish Chiefs." THOMAS C. GRATTAN. Born 1796. "Highways and Byways," "Heiress of Bruges," "History of the Netherlands."

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WILLIAM COWPER.

1731-1800.

Author of "The Task," "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," and many minor poems, "John Gilpin," &c.

THE TIME-PIECE.

OH for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
My soul is sick, with every day's report

Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart;

It does not feel for man: the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin

Not colored like his own; and, having power
To enforce the wrong for such a worthy cause,
Dooms and devotes him as a lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else,
Like kindred drops, been kindled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And worse than all, and most to be deplored
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man? And what man. seeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush,
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a slave to till my ground,

To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earned.
No dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Just estimation prized above all price,

I had much rather be myself the slave,
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home. Then why abroad?
And they themselves, once ferried o'er the wave
That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.

Slaves can not breathe in England: if their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free;
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it, then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire, that, where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.

Sure there is need of social intercourse,
Benevolence and peace, and mutual aid,
Between the nations, in a world that seems
To toll the death-bell of its own decease,
And, by the voice of all its elements,

To preach the general doom. When were the winds
Let slip with such a warrant to destroy?
When did the waves so haughtily o'erleap
Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry?
Fires from beneath, and meteors from above,
Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,

Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old
And crazy Earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And Nature with a dim and sickly eye
To wait the close of all? But grant her end
More distant, and that prophecy demands
A longer respite, unaccomplished yet;
Still they are frowning signals, and bespeak
Displeasure in his breast who smites the earth
Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice.
And 'tis but seemly, that, where all deserve,
And stand exposed by common peccancy
To what no few have felt, there should be peace,
And brethren in calamity should love.

Alas for Sicily! rude fragments now

Lie scattered where the shapely columns stood.
Her palaces are dust. In all her streets,
The voice of singing and the sprightly chord
Are silent. Revelry and dance and show
Suffer a syncope and solemn pause,

While God performs upon the trembling stage
Of his own works his dreadful part alone.
How does the earth receive him (with what signs
Of gratulation and delight), her king?
Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad,
Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums,
Disclosing Paradise where'er he treads?
She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb,
Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps
And fiery caverns roars beneath his foot.

The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke;
For he has touched them. From the extremest point

Of elevation, down into the abyss,
His wrath is busy, and his frown is felt.

The rocks fall headlong, and the valleys rise;
The rivers die into offensive pools,

And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross
And mortal nuisance into all the air.

What solid was, by transformation strange
Grows fluid; and the fixed and rooted earth,
Tormented into billows, heaves and swells,
Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl
Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense
The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs
And agonies of human and of brute
Multitudes, fugitive on every side,
And fugitive in vain. The sylvan scene
Migrates uplifted; and, with all its soil
Alighting in far-distant fields, finds out
A new possessor, and survives the change.
Ocean has caught the frenzy, and, upwrought
To an enormous and o'erbearing hight,
Not by a mighty wind, but by that Voice

Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore
Resistless. Never such a sudden flood,

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Upridged so high, and sent on such a charge,
Possessed an inland scene. Where now the throng
That pressed the beach, and, hasty to depart,
Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone,
Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,
A prince with half his people! Ancient towers,
And roofs embattled high, the gloomy scenes
Where beauty oft and lettered worth consume
Life in the unproductive shades of death,
Fall prone: the pale inhabitants come forth,
And, happy in their unforeseen release
From all the rigors of restraint, enjoy
The terrors of the day that sets them free.

Who then, that has thee, would not hold thee fast,
Freedom! whom they that lose thee so regret,
That e'en a judgment, making way for thee,
Seems in their eyes a mercy for thy sake?
Such evil sin hath wrought; and such a flame
Kindled in heaven, that it burns down to earth,
And, in the furious inquest that it makes
On God's behalf, lays waste his fairest works.
The very elements, though each be meant
The minister of man to serve his wants,
Conspire against him. With his breath he draws
A plague into his blood, and can not use
Life's necessary means, but he must die.

Storms rise to o'erwhelm him; or, if stormy winds
Rise not, the waters of the deep shall rise,
And, needing none assistance of the storm,

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