cellars; and the devil of a marchant has sent in an execution, over eleven hundred, for his bill, and no one here strong enough to keep it out; only I oughtn't to be telling you the throuble, my darlint masther, while the weakness is on you.' She might well think of the weakness, and he almost fainting. Where's the boy?' said he again; and by 'the boy' he meant me.' 'He's below,' she said, 'afther hiding some of the plate under the turf-rick, for fear of them vagabonds seeing it.' 'Send him up,' says the master; and though I'd the run of the house all my life, it was the first time I was ever had up before him. He called me to his bedside, he put his hand upon my head, and looked for full five minutes in my face; he then sighed out from the deep of his heart, and turned upon the bed.' May I go, your honour?' I said. 'Ay,' he made answer, do; why should you not go, poor boy? those I trusted in are all gone.' May be your honour would let me try to turn the luck, by staying,' I made answer. He held his hand over the side of the bed; I fell on my knees and kissed it; and I never left him from that day to the day of his death."

The old man, overcome by the full gush of remembrance, laid his head on his hands, and continued silent for some minutes.

"The young gentlemen (he had but the two) were fine, proud, wilful boys; that on the tip top of an English education had been learnt what faults their father had done; and indeed they did pretty much the same themselves, only in a different way, siding with their mother against him and she had none of the great love for her husband which makes people cling to the throuble, sooner than lave the throubled. I'm not going to set up but what the masther was hard to bare with; he certainly was. Yet any way, she soon took herself and her children off to England, to her relations-poor wake lady! The best property that could be sould was sould; and, at last, if it wasn't for the tenants who had been made over with the land to the new proprietors, the house of Mount Brandon would have been badly kept; but they were ever and always sending a pig, or a fat sheep, or something on the sly, to the housekeeper, who knew they war for the masther's use, and he none the wiser. Oh! 'tis untold what I've seen him suffer; trying, in his grey-headed years, to swallow the pride: and when at last we found that some, though they knew he had nothing but his body to give, wanted that to rot in a jail, we were night and day on the watch to keep them out; and one night the masther says, in his strange way that there was no gainsaying, 'It's a fine, clear night, and I should like to walk to the ruin by the side of the monument.' I couldn't tell you how his health had gone, and his strength along with it, every thing but his pride. And the ould housekeeper and myself went along with him; and he romanced so much as we went, first about one thing and then about the other, that I thought the throuble had turned his brain. It was a clear, moon-shiny night, and the stars were beaming along the sky, now in, now out; and he sat down upon an ancient stone, as this might be, and he says,-I remember the very words—

666

'Boy,' says he, the time will be, and that not long off, when what little respect belongs to ould families and ould ruins will be done away entirely; and the world will hear tell of ould customs and the like; but they will look round upon the earth for them in vain-they will be clean gone! If I had my life to begin over again, I'd take great delight in

restoring all them things. It's no wonder I should have sympathy with ruins; I, who have ruined, and am ruined.'

"Sir,' said the old housekeeper, who was hard of hearing, and stupid when she did hear, Sir,' says she, sure Michelawn and the boys might mend the ruins up of this ould chapel, if it's any fancy for it you have.' So he looked at me, and smiled a sort of half smile, could and chilly, without any thing happy in it; like the smile you see sometimes upon the lips of a corpse when the mouth falls a little-a gasping smile. 'Sir,' keeps on the ould silly craythur, come away home, for it isn't safe for you to be any thing like out of the house, which you havn't been for many a long month before."

"True," said he, "true, just let me look here;" and he turned to where the little monument stood to the poor girl's remembrance, and he laid his hand on the marble urn, which was at the top, and drew it back on a suddent, as if he had not thought it would have been so could. He then rooted with his stick among the buttercups and daisies that grew about it; and, with a quick thought, flung off his hat, and fell on his knees upon the grass. As he fell, so four men, vagabonds of the law, sprung on him. Whether he felt their hould or not is between him an heaven; but this I do know, that when I looked in his face, as they held him up off the grass, he was dead. And that was the end of the most beautiful and most accomplished Irishman of the last century.

"It was his end, God help us! And the murdering villians kept possession of the body for debt. The neighbouring gentry would not suffer it, and offered to pay the money; but his ould tenants would not hear of that; they rose to a man, over the estates which had once belonged to him and his, battled the limbs of the law out of possession, and gave the masther the finest wake and funeral that the counthry had seen for fifty years. There was a hard fight betwixt them and the constables when the body was moving, but they bet them off. And then-whew! --who would follow them into the Connamara hills!"

"What became of his sons?"

"They are both dead: nor is there one stone upon another of Mount Brandon."

"But your obligation?"

"Ay! didn't you hear that he wished the ould ruins of ould Ireland looked to?"

"True; but why do you wear no hat?"

"Didn't he, who was so high, so great, die that bitter night, bareheaded."

The old man's eyes were moist with tears.

"One other question, Clooney; the poor girl's child-the baby who wailed beneath his window?"

"Didn't he call me 'boy,' and give me his hand to kiss; and don't I do pilgrimage through the world for the sins of my father and my mother! The poor girl's babby was the only child that loved him!"

We have a great affection for novels-old and new, good, bad, and indifferent-something preferring the old and the good. We can welcome them in all shapes,-in three volumes, in two volumes, in one. All we desire is to have them. If we have a grateful feeling, therefore, on earth, it is for the generous speculator who, to satisfy such as ourselves, publisheth whole libraries; conveyeth novels to us in monthly convoys; ushereth in to us, at stated and not distant intervals, portions of large squadrons of such books, which, in pure love for us, he hath marshalled, ready for introduction, in long array behind. Above all things in the world, we like to reckon on the certainty every month of one of these visiters of some sort or other-an old friend or a new.

Here, then, is the sample of a stock which has exceedingly pleased us-the announcement by a most admired friend, " Mr. Henry Pelham," of a long list of acquaintances who are to arrive in succession after him. Ah! such acquaintances should be welcomed and cherished, for they never change. We may take them with us wherever we go, in the certainty that they will remain the same. Some of them, it is true, we are not sorry at times to lose sight of; but how many stay with us, and we desire to stay, unchanged for ever! There is Parson Abraham Adams, who, to this day, does all sorts of delicious and noble things,—still does he regret the loss of his " Eschylus," forgetting that he could not see to read if he had it; and only this morning we saw him leap out of Peter Pounce's chariot, leaving his hat behind, which Mr. Pounce threw after him with great violence. What a list of such friends and visiters could we recite if it were necessary to call them to the reader's memory! There is "Tom Jones," who calls on us perhaps just after Sir Charles Grandison has gone; and Lady Bellaston, who, it is more than possible, may have met the Miss Marglands on the stairs. There is Pamela, excessively shocked at Squire Western, and unable to get out of his way; and in that corner are clustered together several very pretty and goodhearted girls, Sophia Western, and Sophia Primrose, aye, and our favourite Fanny, and Mrs. Honour herself is in waiting. Nor do these old acquaintances prejudice us against new comers. We have room for them too we trust. Novels, we again say, with all their various creations, are quite a passion with us. Even the worst we have some relish for (we can read them once),-and we can put up with the indifferent. We do not know how many new friends the present library may introduce to us, but we observe some promised whom we are prepared to give a welcome to. Let them flow in upon us! We have little doubt but that we shall find ourselves exclaiming with the poet

"Hic ingentem comitum affluxisse novorum
Invenio, admirans, numerum."

"Comitum novorum," that is, as a friend of ours translated it, "novel" friends.

There is one great advantage attending these libraries-supposing them * Colburn's Modern Novelists, " Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman.”

to be judiciously conducted, and presuming that the very bad will not intrude to try our feelings too severely. The newest faces they introduce to us will probably have some marks upon them to show they have not been unaccustomed to look upon the world. Now this may generally serve as a fair claim upon our notice. For, as Mr. Bulwer says, it is generally the case in the progress of a novel to posterity, as it was with St. Denis when he walked with his head under his arm, "the first step is half the journey." Mr. Colburn, for instance, has, in his time, published a large admixture of bad novels with good. He has had the honour of standing " pledged at the baptismal font " to as capital a set of creations as we can desire to hold our own-but he has also acted sponsor to a number of pretenders, whose small voices we never more wish to hear of. These, however, he judiciously proposes to renounce and deliver up for judgment. He means, as far as possible, to restrict his present publication to the reissue, in a new shape, of such as may now, at last, with a greater or less chance of success, fairly commit their cause to a sort of minor posterity. The purpose is excellent, and cannot be otherwise than successful.

The first volume, at least, is a capital earnest of success. "Pelham," a novel of the best school, which will be read as long as an admirer of wit or a lover of truth remains, with a new and most interesting introduction by the author, with a characteristic likeness of him, and (not least in our regard) a type which is not drizzling to the eye, as many which seem handsome are, but stands out from the page with a neat and compact elegance-" Pelham,” we say, attended thus, has a kind of right to bespeak success for the whole series. His friends "The Disowned," and " Devereux," will not be long, we trust, before they join him. Complete, they shall have a sacred corner on our book-shelves. They shall meet Fielding there, and be within the reach of even greater than Fielding. They shall find themselves, as a reward for their life and knowledge, where memories of Shakspeare may be found.

Mr. Bulwer always uses his imaginative faculty, and his singular knowledge of character, to the very best purpose

"He is a keen observer, and he looks

Quite through the deeds of men ;"

and he has a knowledge which increases the value of this a thousandfold, inasmuch as it directs his observation to the establishment of high results of instruction and of moral profit and advantage. This, indeed, is what all true men of genius accomplish in one way or other. We recollect a passage in which the matter is admirably stated by a somewhat shrewd Dunce-Mr. Dennis-and which we regret being unable, at this moment, to lay our hands on. He says, however, as well as we can remember, that men of genius always excite interest, or curiosity, or passion, in order to satisfy and improve, to delight and to reform the mind, and so to make mankind happier and better. He asserts that they do not prove their genius except by keeping two objects in view, a subordinate and a final one; and that the subordinate one is pleasure, and the final one instruction. Now this is a description of the character of Mr. Bulwer's novels, and the highest eulogium that can be passed on them. Even the short introduction prefixed to this edition of " Pelham" has increased his claims on our respect and attention. So true it

is that the most trifling contributions of a man of genius have value. He is like the lady in the fairy tale, of whom we have just been hearing a most interesting account from a very young friend, who could not open her mouth but out came diamonds and pearls *.

This introduction, in truth, is full of important advice, and of encouragement for all who may adopt it. "For the formation of my story," says Mr. Bulwer, " I studied with no slight attention the great works of my predecessors, and attempted to derive from that study certain rules and canons to serve as a guide; and if some of my younger contemporaries, whom I could name, would only condescend to take the same preliminary pains that I did, I am sure that the result would be much more brilliant. It often happens to me to be consulted by persons about to attempt fiction, and I invariably find that they imagine they have only to sit down and write. They forget that art does not come by inspiration, and that the novelist, dealing constantly with contrast and effect, must, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, be an artist. They paint pictures for posterity without having learnt to draw." Mr. Bulwer impresses also with great earnestness on the mind of the candi. date for literary honour, the necessity which exists for the greatest and most undivided attention to the mere art of composition. It will startle the young genius" who fancies that he has merely to wake up some fine morning, without any previous effort, and find himself on the spot extremely famous-to hear that Mr. Bulwer, a man of a genius as unquestionable as the best that ever adorned this country, has been obliged to purchase the facility of expressing his thoughts by a most laborious slowness in the first commencement, and a resolute refusal to write a second sentence until he had expressed his meaning in the best manner he could in the first. Nor is this all. He will learn, besides, that such labours as these make that well nigh certain which is almost impossible without them; that a man's own exertions are indeed his best patrons; that the public is the only critic that has interest and no motive in underrating him; and that " pride of carving with one's own hands one's own name" is worth all the praise and all the "cheers" of reviewers that ever befooled or misled the world.

Mr. Bulwer's simple and manly statement is indeed a very heavy hit at these gentlemen reviewers. With the honourable exception of three weekly journals, the "Literary Gazette," the "Atlas," and the "Examiner," ," "Pelham" was received with indifference or abuse by all the critics. But Mr. Bulwer indeed explains it. "I knew not a single critic, and scarcely a single author, when I began to write." "I have never received to this day," he proceeds, "a single word of encouragement from any of those writers who were considered at one time the dispensers of reputation. Long after my name was not quite unknown in every other country where English literature is received, the great quarterly journals of my own disdained to recognise my existence." Why the truth is, and Mr. Bulwer knows it, that these reviewers are in the main very sorry fellows. The fact is, men who review books are

We must, however, except the Political writings of Mr. Bulwer,-and express our sincere regret that one so admirably calculated to inform our minds, improve our tastes, and administer to our enjoyment, should descend from the high pedestal on which he stands to struggle in an arena-for the ungraceful and unholy combats in which he is altogether untitted by nature, habit and education.-ED.