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anxiety to "do this quickly," has prevented us from "doing it well." We take this opportunity also of expressing our acknowledgments to M. Fauriel for the delightful present he has made us and of congratulating him upon being the first to lay before us the popular poetry of Modern Greece. By embodying in an imperishable form these snatches of songs, he has rendered a lasting service to the cause of the Greeks, and has vindicated the genius, as well as the patriotism, of the people for whom BYRON lived and died. Σ.

THE CAVERN OF THE THREE TELLS.

A Swiss Tradition.

The three founders of the Helvetic Confederacy are thought to sleep in a cavern near the Lake of Lucerne. The herdsmen call them the Three Tells, and say that they lie there in their antique garb, in quiet slumber; and when Switzerland is in ber utmost need, they will awaken and regain the liberties of the land.-See Quarterly Review, No. 44.

OH! enter not yon shadowy cave,

Seek not the bright spars there,

Though the whispering pines, that o'er it wave,
With freshness fill the air.

For there the patriot-three,
In the garb of old array'd,
By their native forest-sea *
On a rocky couch are laid.

The patriot-three that met of yore,
Beneath the midnight sky,

And leagued their hearts on the Grütli shore t

In the name of Liberty!

Now silently they sleep

Amidst the hills they freed,

But their rest is only deep

Till their country's hour of need.

They start not at the hunter's call,

Nor the Lammer-geyer's cry,

Nor the rush of a sudden torrent's fall,
Nor the Lauwine thundering by!
And the Alpine herdsman's lay,
To a Switzer's heart so dear,
On the wild wind floats away,
No more for them to hear.

But when the battle-horn is blown
Till the Schreckhorn's peaks reply,
When the Jungfrau's cliffs send back the tone
Through their eagles' lonely sky;
When spear-heads light the lakes,
When trumpets loose the snows,
When the rushing war-steed shakes
The glacier's mute repose :
When Uri's beechen-woods wave red
In the burning hamlet's light,
Then from the cavern of the dead,

Shall the Sleepers wake in might!

Forest-sea, the Lake of Lucerne, or Lake of the Forest-towns, as the German name implies.

+ The Grütli, a meadow on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne, where the founders of the Helvetic Confederacy held their meetings.

With a leap, like Tell's proud leap,*
When away the helm he flung,
And boldly up the steep

From the flashing billow sprung!

They shall wake beside their forest-sea
In the ancient garb they wore,

When they link'd the hands that made us free,
On the Grütli's moonlight shore;
And their voices shall be heard,
And be answer'd with a shout,
Till the echoing Alps are stirr'd,
And the signal-fires blaze out!
And the land shall see such deeds again,
As those of that proud day,

When Winkelried, on Sempack's plain,
Through the serried spears made way!
And when the rocks came down
On the dark Morgarten dell,

And the crowned helms + o'erthrown
Before our fathers fell!

For the Kühreihen's notes must never sound
In a land that wears the chain,

And the vines on Freedom's holy ground
Untrampled must remain !

And the yellow harvests wave,
For no stranger's hand to reap,
While within their silent cave
The Men of Grütli sleep!

F. H.

WOMEN VINDICATED.

"The treasures of the deep are not so precious

As the concealed comforts of a man

Lock'd up in woman's love."

MIDDLETON.

Ir it be true that the principal source of laughter is the exultation occasioned by a sense of our own superiority over others, we need not wonder that nations and individuals have in all ages been anxious to keep up the materials of risibility by supplying themselves with perpetual butts, collective and single. Athens had not only her Boeotia as we have our Yorkshire for the supply of clowns, but her pedant to stand in the convenient place of our Irishman, and become responsible for all the bulls and blunders which Hierocles or his successors might think fit to father upon him; while no Symposiarch was held to have done his duty in the arrangement of a convivial entertainment unless he had provided an established jester, just as it is deemed indispensable to invite a professed wag and punster to any party of the present day that is meant to be particularly jocund and hilarious. The motley

* The spot where Tell leaped from the boat of Gessler, is marked by a chapel, and called the Tellensprung.

† Crowned helmets, as a distinction of rank, are mentioned in Simond's Switzerland.

Kühreihen, the celebrated Ranz des Vaches.

coloured fools of our royal and noble establishments, as well as the dramatic clowns, which were once essential to every play, have indeed disappeared; but their place has been supplied by amateurs; and the court, theatre, and even our House of Commons, have each their regular buffoons, although the office and name have been ostensibly suppressed. Modern refinement may have introduced some little change in the process; we may laugh more often with the individual at others, than with others at the individual; but still the object is the samepleasant gratification of our egotism, and the exaltation of ourselves by making others appear ridiculous.

-the

There are two whole classes of society who have done such special service to the utterers of bon-mots and composers of epigrams, that amid a dozen standing jokes, either of Joe Miller or his successors, at least three-fourths will be found to be directed against authors and women. Unfortunately for the modern race of wags, both these established and abundant sources, which promised to afford such an inexhaustible supply of small wit, have now become utterly dry and unavailable, for few jokes can be good which involve a contradiction in terms or a manifest untruth. As no point would redeem an epigram which tended to prove Aristides a knave, Lucretia a wanton, or Washington a poltroon, so we can no longer tolerate bald and hacknied jests upon the poverty of authors and Grub-street garreteers, when it is notorious that any man who can write decently is sure of a munificent remuneration; while some have realised fortunes by their pen unprecedented in the literature of any other age or nation. Still less can we endure those trite and flippant attacks upon women which have afforded such a poor pleasure to the profligates and sorry ribalds of more licentious ages, for if our females have not yet fully attained that high and equal station in society to which they are assuredly destined, they have so far found their rank and influence, and established their capacity for the very highest efforts of intellect, that any attempt to revive the defunct jokes upon their inferiority would be reckoned in every enlightened company an evidence of the supremest bad taste, or of the most egregious igno

rance.

With this cherished notion, so fertile in supplying materials to our wittols, has perished the applicability of all those subsidiary jokes upon their frivolity, vanity, love of dress, and loquaciousness, which have afforded subjects to satirists and jesters from the literary days of ancient Athens and Rome down to the present hour. If their love of finery and garrulity ever exceeded the same propensities in men, it was at least a deviation from the ordinary laws of nature, for it is remarkable that in the feathered and animal kingdom, the gawdiest colours and loudest tongues are invariably bestowed upon the male. The peacock and the gentleman pheasant have all the fine clothes and the proud strutting to themselves, and if we may draw any further analogy from a class of creation which we so much resemble in our organization, that man has been designated a "featherless biped," it is worthy of observation that the hen bird invariably sits silently at home attending to her household duties, while the male is dandyfying his plumage, and chattering, crowing, and chirping all day long. So low does this rule extend in the scale of existence, that the shrill incessant cry which sa

lutes us from the earth, like that which twitters from the air, comes from the male grasshopper only. This fact was known to the ancients, but instead of its leading them to distrust, from the analogy that runs through nature's works, the superior loquacity imputed to women, it furnishes Xenarchus, the comic writer, with an additional jest at their expense, by enabling him to exclaim "How happy are the grasshoppers in having dumb wives!"

What nature never intended, however, art may unquestionably produce; and at a time when we educated our females to become puppets, dolls, and playthings, there can be little wonder that the result corresponded with the intention. To keep any particular class in ignorance as an excuse for continuing them in bondage, is a very old expedient of human policy. It pleases the Turks to have slaves in seraglios instead of wives, and they therefore begin with declaring that women have no souls-an assertion which they do their best to confirm by their mode of treatment; but the practice, like every other violation of nature, entails its own abundant punishment, since it compels them to exchange the delights of female society for the solitary joys of chewing opium and -smoking tobacco. For some centuries the Europeans, as an excuse for that truly infernal traffic the slave-trade, thought fit to pronounce that the blacks were naturally an inferior race, incapable of any higher destiny. But lo! we have not only woolly-headed authors who ably vindicate their own cause; but sable high-titled emperors, who, wearing powder and pomatum, crowns, sceptres and ermine, sacrifice their subjects in war, or oppress them in peace, with as much ability as the most civilized and legitimate members of the Holy Alliance; while there are black Dukes of Lemonade, Earls Tamarind, and Counts Malmsey, who pass their lives at St. Domingo in as much vice and idleness as if they formed a portion of the oldest aristocracy in Europe.

It was easy for the artist who had a sign to paint, to represent the man lording it over the lion; but, as the beast justly observes in the fable, "if lions were the painters, the case might be reversed." Men who have for many ages been the writers, have taken good care to assert their superiority by every possible species of attack and ridicule levelled against the women; and if the latter, now that they are fairly competing the palm of authorship with their male rivals, have nobly abstained from every attempt at retaliation, what a proof does it afford of their superior good taste and generosity! What so easy as to launch the light shafts of their raillery against our boobies, chatterboxes, and dandies? What so natural as that they should level their caustic satire against our drunkards, gamesters, and profligates; or more especially, that they should stigmatize and expose our sneering bachelors, who have themselves created that very class of old maids which they pelt with heartless reproaches and pitiful ribaldry? But no, our female writers have disdained the proffered triumph, as if determined to prove the superiority of their hearts at the same moment that they were establishing the equality of their heads. If any one feel disposed to doubt their capacity for achieving this victory, let him recollect that it may be said of woman, as was recorded of Goldsmith, “nil ferè tetigit quod non ornavit;"-that " from grave to gay, from lively to severe,' they have left imperishable evidences of their intellectual power; that

in the light graces of the epistolary stile they are confessedly our superiors; that the most impassioned writer of lyrical poetry, one of the most learned classical commentators, and one of the profoundest and most original thinkers of modern times, have all been women. Malherbe says in his Letters that the Creator may have repented having formed man, but that he had no reason to repent having made woman: most people of sound heads and good hearts (and they generally go together, since virtue is only practical wisdom,) will unite in opinion with Malherbe; and yet how glibly will scribblers, who must know the falsehood of their accusations, fall into this vulgar error of pouring forth their stale flippancies against the sex. There is probably more male impertinence of this sort in print than was ever uttered by the whole of womankind since the transgression of Eve. In a former article upon "The Satirists of Women," the writer has endeavoured to expose the miserable motives by which they have been generally influenced in thus venting their disappointment and malignity; and where such direct personal feelings cannot be traced, we may perhaps be over charitable in assigning their slanders to ignorance, or an overweening conceit of their own epigrammatic smartness. Nothing but the latter can have seduced such a man as Voltaire into the following lines when speaking of women.

"Quelques feintes caresses,

Quelques propos sur le jeu, sur le tems,
Sur un sermon, sur le prix des rubans,
C'eut epuisé leurs ames excedées;

Elles chantaient dejà faute d'idées."

Much may be forgiven a man whom we know to be capable of better things, who perhaps despises the vulgar taste to which he is thus pandering; but who shall absolve the pert-brainless smatterers, "who have but one idea, and that a wrong one;" who have but one little stock of cut and dried jokes of the same anti-feminine tendency, which they vent, usque ad nauseam, in the form of rebus, charade, epigram, and epitaph? A shallow coxcomb of this sort will complacently ask you, "What is the difference between a woman and her glass?" in order that he may anticipate you by exclaiming with an asinine grin-" because one speaks without reflecting, and the other reflects without speaking." Following up the same idea, he will inquire whether you know how to make the women run after you, and will eagerly reply-" by running away with their looking-glasses." He will tell you that Voltaire says "ideas are like beards-men only get them as they grow up, and women never have any," of which only the former clause of the sentence is Voltaire's, that which has reference to women being the addition of some subsequent zany. At the bare mention of the sign of the Good Woman in Norton Falgate he will chuckle with delight; Chaucer's and Prior's objectionable tales he will quote with egregious glee; upon the subject of marriage he is ready with some half dozen of the established bonsmots, and is provided with about the same quantity of epitaphs upon wives-from the

* Madame de Staël.

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