accident, but arose from the deliberate contrivance of one great plot. It was this. Being thoroughly acquainted with the dimensions and position of the fort, they believed from the first that it might be so undermined as to afford an egress to seaward, and they lost no time in attempting this plan of escape. While the besiegers lay quietly above them, they were employed in excavating, little by little, a passage to the sea-wall of the fortification, which they might make use of as they had the means. The softness of the rock facilitated their labour, and the progress they made was unexpectedly rapid. Having assured themselves of the practicability of an opening, the next difficulty was how to procure an opportunity of using it. This object was attended with many obstacles. The shell of the outer wall could not be burst through without some noise. By day there would be no chance of getting out unseen; and by night the sound of their operations would be distinctly heard. After long deliberations, the scheme was decided upon which was executed as we have seen. Though actually in great distress, they determined to heighten the appearance of it, and so by degrees bring things to such an extremity that it might appear their pitiable condition drove them to their ultimate act of desperation. For this reason they made such repeated demonstrations of their misery, and finally put the consummation of their rebellious acts upon the pretext of extreme thirst. At the appointed hour they placed themselves at the farther end of their subterranean passage; and having laid a communicating train of gunpowder to the heart of the magazine, they awaited only the first bell of St. John's Church as the signal for the hazardous experiment. At a moment quitting the train, and themselves bursting through the stone partition which bounded their excavation, they were instantly beyond the reach of death, and of suspicion into the bargain. They relied on the effect of their own display of wretchedness to confirm the opinion that this act was the result of despair; and they knew that the blackened tunnel through which they had crawled, would be attributed to the fury of the explosion, and considered as a channel forcibly, but spontaneously burst, by the volcano they had erected. They were hitherto right in their surmises. But beyond this fortune deserted them. They wandered by stealth over the deserted parts of the sea-coast, in vain attempting to procure a boat in which they might pass over to Sicily. Discovered once in a scheme to purloin a speronara* privily, they were in imminent danger of being then delivered up to justice, and were compelled to wait almost hopelessly for a more favourable time. The necessity of lying quite concealed prevented their procuring any but the vilest and least nutritive food. A few vegetables were all they had subsisted upon, but leaves and grass, since the hour of their escape. They bore up, however, manfully, and despite the extreme indigence to which they were reduced, no one committed himself by any unseasonable exposure until the day when one of the least provident, goaded by insufferable pangs of hunger, made the unlucky attempt upon the Maltese priest, which led to their detection.

They were marched into the city, guarded by two lines of troops, and the forlorn aspect they presented will be remembered by many a spectator till his dying day. Even then they were not dejected. Their eyes were all brightness in the midst of their desolation, like a fire in the darkness of night; and the pitiful natives crouched beneath those glances, which told that they were not malefactors, or could not so esteem themselves. In a few hours they were sentenced to the death they had so long succeeded in parrying; and in the last instant of life they manifested the same heroic bearing, which has left in the minds of all who saw them a recollection glowing and full of admiration for the last of Froberg's Regiment.

* Speronara, a little picturesque boat, commonly seen on the channel between the two islands.

TO A LADY, ON THE DEATH OF HER SON.*
THE world, the heartless world, may deem
But lightly of a loss like thine,
And think it a romantic dream

For such an one in grief to pine:
A gentler creed, my friend, is mine,
Knowing what human hearts can bear,
And how a Mother's must enshrine
The object of its love and care.
For was he not, though on him fell

A cloud that wrapt his soul in night,
The tenderest tie, the strongest spell,
That could thy heart to earth unite?
His was a child's endearing right,

By helplessness but made more dear;
Nor can he vanish from thy sight
Unwept by Nature's mournful tear.
But when the bitterness of grief

Hath been allow'd its sacred claim,
What soothing thoughts must yield relief,
And fan a purer, holier flame!
Whatever plans thy heart might frame,
Had he survived thee, for his sake,
Could others have fulfill'd each aim,
Or effort, love like thine would make?
A Mother's heart, and hand, and eye,
Alone could do as thine have done,
And unremittingly supply

The wants and claims of such a Son:
But now thy love its meed hath won,
Thy fond solicitude may cease;
His race of life is safely run,

His spirit fled where all is peace!
And who may tell how bright the ray

Of light and life from Heaven may fall
On minds which, in their mortal clay,

Seem'd bound in dark Affliction's thrall?
Think not that HE who governs all,

Whose power and love no bounds can know,
Would one into existence call

To suffer helpless, hopeless woe.

With humble hope to Him entrust

Thy mourn'd one; in strong faith that He

Can call forth from his slumbering dust

A Spirit from all frailties free;

And yet permit thy soul to see

One who on earth seem'd vainly given,
A form of light, to welcome thee
Hereafter to the joys of Heaven.

BERNARD BARTON.

The unfortunate subject of these verses had lived, or existed, from childhood to manhood, in a state of most pitiable mental and bodily infirmity. To some the death of such a sufferer may seem to claim little sympathy. But the heart of a mother is naturally bound up in that of her child, especially an only one; and no common void must be caused by the removal of such an object of years of anxious solicitude.

SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE.

PART II.

D. You deny, I think, that personal identity, in the qualified way in which you think proper to admit it, is any ground for the doctrine of self-interest?

B. Yes, in an exclusive and absolute sense I do undoubtedly, that is, in the sense in which it is affirmed by metaphysicians, and ordinarily believed in.

D. Could you not go over the ground briefly, without entering into technicalities?

B. Not easily but stop me when I entangle myself in difficulties. A person fancies, or feels habitually, that he has a positive, substantial interest in his own welfare, (generally speaking) just as much as he has in any actual sensation that he feels, because he is always and necessarily the same self. What is his interest at one time is therefore equally his interest at all other times. This is taken for granted as a self-evident proposition. Say he does not feel a particular benefit or injury at this present moment, yet it is he who is to feel it, which comes to the same thing. Where there is this continued identity of person, there must also be a correspondent identity of interest. I have an abstract, unavoidable interest in whatever can befal myself, which I can have or feel in no other person living, because I am always under every possible circumstance the self-same individual, and not any other individual whatsoever. In short, this word self (so closely do a number of associations cling round it and cement it together) is supposed to represent as it were a given concrete substance, as much one thing as any thing in nature can possibly be, and the centre or substratum in which the different impressions and ramifications of my being meet and are indissolubly knit together.

4. And you propose then seriously to take " this one entire and perfect chrysolite," this self, this " precious jewel of the soul," this rock on which mankind have built their faith for ages, and at one blow shatter it to pieces with the sledge-hammer, or displace it from its hold in the imagination with the wrenching-irons of metaphysics?

B. I am willing to use my best endeavours for that purpose.

D. You really ought: for you have the prejudices of the whole world against you.

B. I grant the prejudices are formidable; and I should despair, did I not think the reasons even stronger. Besides, without altering the opinions of the whole world, I might be contented with the suffrages of one or two intelligent people.

D. Nay, you will prevail by flattery, if not by argument.

A. That is something newer than all the rest.

B. “Plain truth, dear A—, needs no flowers of speech."

D. Let me rightly understand you. Do you mean to say that I am not C. D. and that you are not W. B. or that we shall not both of us remain so to the end of the chapter, without a possibility of ever changing places with each other?

B. I am afraid, if you go to that, there is very little chance that "I shall be ever mistaken for you."

But with all this precise individuality and inviolable identity that you speak of, let me ask, Are you not a little changed (less so, it is true,

than most people) from what you were twenty years ago? Or do you expect to appear the same that you are now twenty years hence ?

D. "No more of that if thou lovest me." We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be.

B. A truce then; but be assured that whenever you happen to fling up your part, there will be no other person found to attempt it after you.

D. Pray, favour us with your paradox without farther preface.

B. I will try then to match my paradox against your prejudice, which as it is armed all in proof, to make any impression on it, I must, I suppose, take aim at the rivets; and if I can hit them, if I do not (round and smooth as it is) cut it into three pieces, and show that two parts in three are substance and the third and principal part shadow, never believe me again. Your real self ends exactly where your pretended self-interest begins; and in calculating upon this principle as a solid, permanent, absolute, self-evident truth, you are mocked with a

name.

D. How so? I hear, but do not see.

B. You must allow that this identical, indivisible, ostensible self is at any rate distinguishable into three parts,-the past, the present, and future?

D. I see no particular harm in that.

B. It is nearly all I ask. Well then, I admit that you have a peculiar, emphatic, incommunicable and exclusive interest or fellow-feeling in the two first of these selves; but I deny resolutely and unequivocally that you have any such natural, absolute, unavoidable, and mechanical interest in the last self, or in your future being, the interest you take in it being necessarily the offspring of understanding and imagination (aided by habit and circumstances), like that which you take in the welfare of others, and yet this last interest is the only one that is ever the object of rational and voluntary pursuit, or that ever comes into competition with the interests of others.

D. I am still to seek for the connecting clue.

B. I am almost ashamed to ask for your attention to a statement so very plain that it seems to border on a truism. I have an interest of a peculiar and limited nature in my present self, inasmuch as I feel my actual sensations not simply in a degree, but in a way and by means of faculties which afford me not the smallest intimation of the sensations of others. I cannot possibly feel the sensations of any one else, nor consequently take the slightest interest in them as such. I have no nerves communicating with another's brain, and transmitting to me either the glow of pleasure or the agony of pain which he may feel at the present moment by means of his senses. So far, therefore, namely, so far as my present self or immediate sensations are concerned, I am cut off from all sympathy with others. I stand alone in the world, a perfectly insulated individual, necessarily and in the most unqualified sense indifferent to all that passes around me, and that does not in the first instance affect myself, for otherwise I neither have nor can have the remotest consciousness of it as a matter of organic sensation, any more than the mole has of light or the deaf adder of sounds. D. Spoken like an oracle.

B. Again, I have a similar peculiar, mechanical, and untransferable

interest in my past self, because I remember and can dwell upon my past senstations (even after the objects are removed) also in a way and by means of faculties which do not give me the smallest insight into or sympathy with the past feelings of others. I may conjecture and fancy what those feelings have been; and so I do. But I have no memory or continued consciousness of what either of good or evil may have found a place in their bosoms, no secret spring that touched vibrates to the hopes and wishes that are no more, unlocks the chambers of the past with the same assurance of reality, or identifies my feelings with theirs in the same intimate manner as with those which I have already felt in my own person. Here again, then, there is a real, undoubted, original and positive foundation for the notion of self to rest upon; for in relation to my former self and past feelings, I do possess a faculty which serves to unite me more especially to my own being, and at the same time draws a distinct and impassable line around that being, separating it from every other. A door of communication stands always open between my present consciousness and my past feelings, which is locked and barred by the hand of Nature and the constitution of the human understanding against the intrusion of any straggling impressions from the minds of others. I can only see into their real history darkly and by reflection. To sympathise with their joys or sorrows, and place myself in their situation either now or formerly, I must proceed by guess-work, and borrow the use of the common faculty of imagination. I am ready to acknowledge, then, that in what regards the past as well as the present, there is a strict metaphysical distinction between myself and others, and that my personal identity so far, or in the close, continued, inseparable connection between my past and present impressions, is firmly and irrevocably established.

D. You go on swimmingly. So far all is sufficiently clear.

B. But now comes the rub: for beyond that point I deny that the doctrine of personal identity of self-interest (as a consequence from it) has any foundation to rest upon but a confusion of names and ideas. It has none in the nature of things or of the human mind. For I have no faculty by which I can project myself into the future, or hold the same sort of palpable, tangible, immediate, and exclusive communication with my future feelings, in the same manner as I am made to feel the present moment by means of the senses, or the past moment by means of memory. If I have any such faculty, expressly set apart for the purpose, name it. If I have no such faculty, I can have no such interest. In order that I may possess a proper personal identity so as to live, breathe, and feel along the whole line of my existence in the same intense and intimate mode, it is absolutely necessary to have some general medium or faculty by which my successive impressions are blended and amalgamated together, and to maintain and support this extraordinary interest. But so far from there being any foundation for this merging and incorporating of my future in my present self, there is no link of connection, no sympathy, no reaction, no mutual consciousness between them, nor even a possibility of any thing of the kind, in a mechanical and personal sense. Up to the present point, the spot on which we stand, the doctrine of personal identity holds good; hitherto the proud and exclusive pretensions of self "come, but no farther." The rest is air, is nothing, is a name, or but the common ground of