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FREDERICK CARL WILHELM VON SCHLEGEL.

calling upon him to deliver him instantly from thence, by putting into the hands of Louis Brahant, then with him, a large sum for the redemption of Christians then in slavery with the Turks; threatening him at the same time with eternal damnation if he did not take this method to expiate, likewise, his own sins. Louis Brahant, of course, affected a due degree of astonishment on the occasion, and further promoted the deception by acknowledging his having devoted himself to the prosecution of the charitable designs imputed to him by the ghost. An old usurer is naturally suspicious. Accordingly, the wary banker made a second appointment with the ghost's delegate for the next day, and to render any design of imposing upon him utterly abortive, took him into the open | fields, where not a house, or a tree, or even a bush, or a pit were in sight, capable of screening any supposed confederate. This extraordinary caution excited the ventriloquist to exert all the powers of his art. Wherever the banker conducted him, at every step his ears were saluted on all sides with the complaints and groans, not only of his father, but of all his deceased relations, imploring him for the love of God, and in the name of every saint in the calendar, to have mercy on his own soul and theirs, by effectually seconding with his purse the intentions of his worthy companion. Cornu could no longer resist the voice of Heaven, and accordingly carried his guest home with him, and paid him down ten thousand crowns; with which the honest ventriloquist returned to Paris, and married his mistress. The catastrophe was fatal. The secret was afterwards blown, and reached the usurer's ears, who was so much affected by the loss of his money and the mortifying railleries of his neighbours, that he took to his bed and died.

Another trick of a similar kind was played off about sixty or seventy years ago on a whole community by another French ventriloquist. M. St. Gill, the ventriloquist, and his intimate friend, returning home from a place whither his business had carried him, sought for shelter from an approaching thunder-storm in a neighbouring convent. Finding the whole community in mourning, he inquired the cause, and was told that one of the body had died lately who was the ornament and delight of the whole society. To pass away the time, he walked into the church, attended by some of the religious, who showed him the tomb of their deceased brother, and spoke feelingly of the scanty honours they had bestowed on his memory. Suddenly a voice was heard, apparently proceeding from the roof of the choir, lamenting the situation of the defunct

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in purgatory, and reproaching the brotherhood with their lukewarmness and want of zeal on his account. The friars, as soon as their astonishment gave them power to speak, consulted together, and agreed to acquaint the rest of the community with this singular event, so interesting to the whole society. M. St. Gill, who wished to carry on the joke a little farther, dissuaded them from taking this step, telling them that they would be treated by their absent brethren as a set of fools and visionaries. He recommended to them, however, the immediately calling the whole community into the church, where the ghost of their departed brother might probably reiterate his complaints. Accordingly, all the friars, novices, lay-brothers, and even the domestics of the convent, were immediately summoned and called together. In a short time the voice from the roof renewed its lamentations and reproaches, and the whole convent fell on their faces, and vowed a solemn reparation. As a first step, they chanted a De profundis in a full choir: during the intervals of which the ghost occasionally expressed the comfort he received from their pious exercises and ejaculations on his behalf. When all was over, the prior entered into a serious conversation with M. St. Gill; and on the strength of what had just passed, sagaciously inveighed against the absurd incredulity of our modern sceptics and pretended philos ophers, on the article of ghosts or apparitions. M. St. Gill thought it high time to disabuse the good fathers. This purpose, however, he found it extremely difficult to effect till he had prevailed upon them to return with him into the church, and there be witnesses of the manner in which he had conducted this ludicrous deception." Had not the ventriloquist in this case explained the cause of the deception, a whole body of men might have sworn, with a good con science, that they had heard the ghost of a departed brother address them again and again in a supernatural voice.

On the Improvement of Society, Appendix.

FREDERICK CARL WILHELM VON SCHLEGEL,

born at Hanover, 1772, died at Dresden, 1829, was the author of the following excellent works: Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, from the German [by J. G. Lockhart], Edin., 1838, 2 vols. 8vo, new edition, now first Completely Translated, Lond. (Bohn's Stand. Lib.), 1839, post 8vo; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Translated, with a Life of the Author, by

J. B. Robertson, Lond., 1835, 2 vols. 8vo, 2d edit., revised (Bohn's Stand. Lib.), 1846, p. 8vo, 7th edit., 1859, p. 8vo; Lectures on the Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language, Translated by A.J. W. Morrison, Lond. (Bohn's Stand. Lib.), 1847, p. 8vo; Course of Lectures on Modern History, to which are added Historical Essays on the Beginning of our History, and on Cæsar and Alexander, Translated by Lyndsey Purcell and R. H. Whitelock, Lond. (Bohn's Stand. Lib.), 1849, p. 8vo; Esthetic and Miscellaneous Works, etc., Translated by E. J. Millington, Lond. (Bohn's Stand. Lib.). 1849, p. 8vo, new edit., 1860. In German,-Sämmtliche Werke, Wien, Klang, 15 vols. 8vo.

LORD BACON.

The Sixteenth Century was the age of ferment and strife, and it was not until towards the close of it that the human mind began to recover from the violent shock it had sustained. With the seventeenth century new paths of thinking and investigation were opened, owing to the revival of classical learning, the extension given to the natural sciences and geography, and the general commotion and difference in religious belief, occasioned by Protestantism.

The first name suggested by the mention of these several features is Bacon. This mighty genius ranks as the father of modern physics, inasmuch as he brought back the spirit of investigation from the barren verbal subtleties of the schools to nature and experience: he made and completed many important discoveries himself, and seems to have had a dim and imperfect foresight of many others. Stimulated by his capacious and stirring intellect, experimental science extended her boundaries in every direction: intellectual culture-nay, the social organization of modern Europe generally-assumed new shape and complexion. The ulterior consequences of this mighty change became objectionable, dangerous, and even terrible in their tendency at the time when Bacon's followers and admirers in the eighteenth century attempted to wrest from mere experience and the senses what he had never assumed them to possess, namely, the law of life and conduct, and the essentials of faith and hope while they rejected with cool contempt as fanaticism every exalted hope and soothing affection which could not be practically proved. All this was quite contrary, however, to the spirit and aim of the founder of this philosophy. In illustration, I would only refer here to that well-known sentence of his, deservedly remembered by all: "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth

man's [men's] mind about to religion." [Essay XVII. Of Atheism.]

Both in religion and in natural philosophy this great thinker believed many things that would have been regarded as mere superstition by his partisans and admirers in later times. Neither is it to be supposed that this was a mere conventional acquiescence in an established belief, or some prejudice not yet overcome of his education and age. His declarations on these very topics relating to a supernatural world, are most of all stamped with the characteristic of his clear and penetrating spirit. He was a man of feeling as well as of invention, and though the world of experience had appeared to him in quite a new light, the higher and divine region of the spiritual world, situated far above common sensible experience, was not viewed by him either obscurely or remotely. How little he partook, I will not merely say of the crude materialism of some of his followers, but even of the more refined deification of nature, which during the eighteenth century was transplanted from France to Germany, like some dark offshoot of natural philosophy, is proved by his views of the substantial essence of a correct physical system. The natural philosophy of the ancients was, according to a judgment pronounced by himself, open to the following censure,— viz., "that they held nature to constitute an image of the Divinity, whereas it is in conformity with truth as well as Christianity to regard man as the sole image and likeness of his Creator and to look upon nature as his handiwork." In the term Natural Philosophy of the Ancients, Bacon evidently includes, as may be seen from the general results attributed to it, no mere individual theory or system, but altogether the best and most excellent fruits of their research within the boundaries not only of physical science, but also of mythology and natural religion. And when he claims for man exclusively the high privilege, according to Christian doctrine, of being the likeness and image of God, he is not to be understood as deriving this dignity purely from the high position of constituting the most glorious and most complex of all natural productions ; but in the literal sense of the Bible that this likeness and image is the gift of God's love and inspiration. The figurative expression that nature is not a mirror or image of the Godhead, but his handiwork,-if comprehended in all its profundity, will be seen to convey a perfect explanation of the relations of the sensible and super-sensible world of nature and of divinity. It pre-eminently declares the fact that nature has not an independent self-existence, but was created by God for an especial purpose. In a word,

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

Bacon's plain and easy discrimination between ancient philosophy and his own Christian ideas, is an intelligible and clear rule for fixing the right medium between profane and nature-worship on the one hand, and gloomy hatred of nature on the other: to which latter one-sided reason is peculiarly prone; when intent only upon morality, it is perplexed in its apprehensions of nature, and has only imperfect and confused notions of divinity. But a right appreciation of the actual difference between nature and God is the most important point both of thought and belief, of life and conduct. Bacon's views on this head are the more fittingly introduced here, because the philosophy of our own time is for the most part distracted between the two extremes indicated above: the reprehensible nature-worship of some who do not distinguish between the Creator and his works, God and the world: or, on the other, the hatred and blindness of those despisers of nature, whose reason is exclusively directed to their personal destiny. The just medium between these opposite errors that is to say, the only correct consideration of nature is that involved in a sense of intimate connexion of our immeasurable superiority, morally, and to a proper awe of those of her elements that significantly point to matters of higher import than herself. All such vestiges, exciting either love or fear, as a silent awe, or a prophetic declaration, reveal the hand that formed them, and the purpose which they are designed to accomplish.

Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, Lect. xiii.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, baronet, born in Edinburgh, August 15, 1771, attended the Latin, Greek, and Logic classes of the University of Edinburgh in 1783-84; became apprentice to his father as a Writer to the Signet, 1786; was admitted by the Faculty of Advocates to his first trials, 1791, and called to the bar, 1792; Sheriff of Selkirkshire, 1799, and appointed one of the principal Clerks of the Court of Session (of which he did not receive the full endowment until the death of George Horne in 1812) 1806; made a baronet 1820; involved by the failure of Constable & Co. and Ballantyne & Co., in 1826, to the amount of about £147,000, which he had reduced at the time of his death, September 21, 1832, to £54,000, which was soon afterwards discharged. In another place (Allibone's Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, vol. ii., 1971-1975) we have given a detailed bibliographical catalogue of Scott's publica

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tions from 1796 to 1831. Here it will be sufficient to enumerate his principal productions: The Chace, and William and Ellen, 1796; Goetz of Berlichingen, with The Iron Hand, and The House of Aspen, 1799; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802; Sir Tristram, a Metrical Romance, 1804; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Waverley, chapters i.-vii., 1805 (not published until 1814); Ballads and Lyrical Poems, 1806; Marmion, 1808; The Lady of the Lake, 1810; The Vision of Don Roderick, 1811; Rokeby, and The Bridal of Triermain, 1813; Waverley, and The Lord of the Isles, 1814; Guy Mannering, The Field of Waterloo, and (part author of) Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk, 1815; The Antiquary, and Tales of My Landlord, First Series: The Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, 1816; Harold the Dauntless, 1817; Rob Roy, and Tales of My Landlord, Second Series: The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 1818; Tales of My Landlord, Third Series: The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, 1819; Ivanhoe, the Monastery, and The Abbot, 1820; Biographical Prefaces to Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 10 vols. royal 8vo, and Kenilworth, 1821; The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822; Peveril of the Peak, and Quentin Durward, 1823; St. Ronan's Well, and Redgauntlet, 1824; Tales of the Crusaders: The Betrothed, The Talisman, 1825; Woodstock, 1826; The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Chronicles of the Canongate, First Series: The Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, The Surgeon's Daughter, and Tales of a Grandfather, First Series, 1827; Chronicles of the Canongate, Second Series: St. Valentine's Day, or, The Fair Maid of Perth, Tales of a Grandfather, Second Series, and Religious Discourses, by a Layman, 1828; Anne of Geierstein, Tales of a Grandfather, Third Series, and History of Scotland, vol. i., 1829: Tales of a Grandfather, Fourth Series: History of France, History of Scotland, vol. ii., and Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830; Tales of My Landlord, Fourth Series: Count Robert of Paris, Castle Dangerous.

"The great secret of his popularity, however, and the leading characteristic of his poetry, appears to us to consist evidently in this, that he has made more use of common topics, images, and expressions than any original poet of later times, and, at the same time, displayed more genius and originality than any recent author who has worked Review, August, 1810, and in his Contrib. to Edin. Review, edit. 1853, 409, et seq.

in the same materials."-LORD JEFFREY: Edin.

"It is the great glory of Scott that, by nice attention to costume and character in his novels, he has raised them to historic importance without impairing their interest as works of art. Who now would imagine that he could form a satisfactory notion of the golden days of Queen Bess that had not read Kenilworth,' or of Richard Coeur de Lion

and his brave paladins that had not read 'Ivanhoe'?... Scott was, in truth, master of the picturesque. He understood better than any historian since the time of Livy how to dispose his lights and shades so as to produce the most striking result. This property of romance he had a right to borrow. This talent is particularly observable in the animated parts of his story,-in his battles, for example. No man has painted those terrible scenes with greater effect.... It is when treading on Scottish ground that he seems to feel all his strength... 'I seem always to step more firmly,'

he said to some one, when on my own native heather.' His mind was steeped in Scottish lore, and his bosom warmed with a sympathetic glow for the age of chivalry."-WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT: Biogr. and Crit. Miscell., edit. 1855, 284, 285, 286.

See also 54, 130, 139, 606, n., 623, 702; N. Amer. Review, xxxv. 187.

RAVENSWOOD AND LUCY ASHTON.

"Do you know me, Miss Ashton ?-I am still that Edgar Ravenswood, who, for your affection, renounced the dear ties by which injured honour bound him to seek vengeance. I am that Ravenswood, who, for your sake, forgave, nay clasped hands in friendship with the oppressor and pillager of his house, the traducer and murderer of his father."

"My daughter," answered Lady Ashton, interrupting him, "has no occasion to dispute the identity of your person; the venom of your present language is sufficient to remind her that she speaks with the mortal enemy of her father."

"I pray you to be patient, madam," answered Ravenswood; "my answer must come from her own lips.-Once more, Miss Lucy Ashton, I am that Ravenswood to whom you granted the solemn engagement which you now desire to retract and cancel."

Lucy's bloodless lips could only falter out the words, "It was my mother."

"She speaks truly," said Lady Ashton, "it was I who, authorized alike by the laws of God and man, advised her, and concurred with her, to set aside an unhappy and precipitate engagement, and to annul it by the authority of Scripture itself."

"Scripture!" said Ravenswood, scornfully.

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Let him hear the text," said Lady Ashton, appealing to the divine, "on which you yourself, with cautious reluctance, declared the nullity of the pretended engagement insisted upon by this violent man."

The clergyman took his clasped Bible from his pocket, and read the following words: "If a woman vow a vow unto the Lord, and bind herself by a bond, being in her father's house in her youth; and her father hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she hath bound her soul, and her father shall hold his peace at her: then

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all her vows shall stand, and every vow wherewith she hath bound her soul shall stand." "And was it not so even with us?" interrupted Ravenswood.

"Control thy impatience, young man," answered the divine, "and hear what follows in the sacred text :-' But if her father disallow her in the day that he heareth; not any of her vows, or of her bonds wherewith she hath bound her soul, shall stand: and the Lord shall forgive her, because her father disallowed her.'"

"And was not," said Lady Ashton, fiercely and triumphantly breaking in,-" was not ours the case stated in the holy writ?-Will this person deny that the instant her parents heard of the vow, or bond, by which our daughter had bound her soul, we disallowed the same in the most express terms, and informed him by writing of our determination?"

"And is this all ?" said Ravenswood, looking at Lucy. "Are you willing to barter sworn faith, the exercise of free will, and the feelings of mutual affection, to this wretched hypocritical sophistry?"

"Hear him!" said Lady Ashton, looking to the clergyman,-" hear the blasphemer!" "May God forgive him," said Bide-thebent, and enlighten his ignorance."

"Hear what I have sacrificed for you," said Ravenswood, still addressing Lucy, "ere you sanction what has been done in your name. The honour of an ancient family, the urgent advice of my best friends, have been in vain used to sway my resolution; neither the arguments of reason, nor the portents of superstition, have shaken my fidelity. The very dead have arisen to warn me, and their warning has been despised. Are you prepared to pierce my heart for its fidelity with the very weapon which my rash confidence intrusted to your grasp?"

"Master of Ravenswood," said Lady Ash ton, "you have asked what questions you thought fit. You see the total incapacity of my daughter to answer you. But I will reply for her, and in a manner which you cannot dispute. You desire to know whether Lucy Ashton, of her own free will, desires to annul the engagement into which she has been trepanned. You have her letter under her own hand, demanding the surrender of it; and, in yet more full evidence of her purpose, here is the contract which she has this morning subscribed, in presence of this reverend gentleman, with Mr. Hayston of Bucklaw."

Ravenswood gazed upon the deed as if petrified. "And it was without fraud or compulsion," said he, looking towards the clergyman, "that Miss Ashton subscribed this parchment?"

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

"I vouch it upon my sacred character.” "This is indeed, madame, an undeniable piece of evidence," said Ravenswood, sternly; and it will be equally unnecessary and dishonourable to waste another word in useless remonstrance or reproach. There, madame," he said, laying down before Lucy the signed paper and the broken piece of gold," there are the evidences of your first engagement; may you be more faithful to that which you have just formed. I will trouble you to turn the corresponding tokens of my ill-placed confidence,-I ought rather to say, of my egregious folly."

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"Speak," said Rebecca; "I understand thee not."

"Well, then," said Bois-Guilbert, "I will speak as freely as ever did doting penitent to his ghostly father, when placed in the tricky confessional. Rebecca, if I appear not in these lists I lose fame and rank,-lose that which is the breath of my nostrils; the esteem, I mean, in which I am held by my brethren, and the hopes I have of succeedre-ing to that mighty authority which is now wielded by the bigoted dotard Lucas de Beaumanoir, but of which I should make a far different use. Such is my certain doom, except I appear in arms against thy cause. Accursed be he of Goodalricke, who baited this trap for me! and doubly accursed Albert de Malvoison, who withheld me from the resolution I had formed of hurling back the glove at the face of the superstitious and superannuated fool who listened to a charge so absurd and against a creature so high in mind and so lovely in form as thou art!"

Lucy returned the scornful glance of her lover with a gaze from which perception seemed to have been banished; yet she seemed partly to have understood his meaning, for she raised her hands as if to undo a blue ribbon which she wore around her neck. She was unable to accomplish her purpose, but Lady Ashton cut the ribbon asunder, and detached the broken piece of gold which Miss Ashton had till then concealed in her bosom : the written counterpart of the lovers' engagement she for some time had had in her own possession. With a haughty curtsy she delivered both to Ravenswood, who was much softened when he took the piece of gold.

"And what now avails rant or flattery?" answered Rebecca. "Thou hast made thy choice between causing to be shed the blood of an innocent woman, or of endangering thine own earthly state and earthly hopes,what avails it to reckon together?-thy choice is made."

"And she could wear it thus," he said— "No, Rebecca," said the knight, in a softer speaking to himself "could wear it in her tone, and drawing nearer towards her; "my very bosom-could wear it next to her heart choice is NOT made,-nay, mark, it is thine to -even when But complaint avails not," make the election. If I appear in the lists, he said, dashing from his eye the tear which I must maintain my name in arms; and if 1 had gathered in it, and resuming the stern do so, championed or unchampioned, thou composure of his manner. He strode to the diest by the stake and faggot,-for there lives chimney and threw into the fire the paper not the knight who hath coped with me in and piece of gold, stamping upon the coals arms on equal issue, or on terms of vantage, with the heel of his boot, as if to ensure save Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and his minion their destruction. "I will be no longer," he of Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe, as thou well knowest, then said, "an intruder here. Your evil is unable to bear his corslet, and Richard is wishes and your worse offices, Lady Ashton, in a foreign prison. If I appear, then, thou I will only return, by hoping these will be diest, even although thy charms should inyour last machinations against your daugh-stigate some hot-headed youth to enter the ter's honour and happiness. And to you, lists in thy defence." madame," he said, addressing Lucy, "I have nothing farther to say, except to pray to God that you may not become a world's wonder for this act of wilful and deliberate perjury." Having uttered these words, he turned on his heel, and left the apartment.

The Bride of Lammermoor, Chap. xxxiii.

BOIS-GUILBERT AND REBECCA.

"The friend and protector," said the Templar, gravely, "I will yet be,-but mark at what risk, or rather at what certainty, of dishonour and then blame me not if I make my stipulations, before I offer up all that I have hitherto held dear, to save the life of a Jewish maiden."

"And what avails repeating this so often?" said Rebecca.

"Much," replied the Templar; "for thou must learn to look at thy fate on every side." “Well, then, turn the tapestry," said the Jewess, "and let me see the other side."

"If I appear," said Bois-Guilbert, "in the fatal lists, thou diest by a slow and cruel death, in pain such as they say is destined to the guilty hereafter. But if I appear not, then am I a degraded and dishonoured knight, accused of witchcraft and of communion with infidels,-the illustrious name, which has grown yet more so under my wearing, becomes a hissing and a reproach. I lose fame, I lose honour, I lose the pros pect of such greatness as scarce emperors

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