est of all for he was to erect a building on the shore, and every part of it was to be of gold, silver or precious stones, and he was to find all these things by himself. He set out over the bridge with great hope, and on the shore he found all sorts of tools,-axes, hammers, spades, &c., but not the smallest bit of silver or gold, or appearance of a precious stone.

"He was becoming uneasy enough till he caught sight of the black maiden standing partly behind a rock, and beckoning to him. She was concealing herself there from the sight of her mother. He went over and beg ged her help. This time the sorceress was on the watch from her window. When the Count went over to the rock she caught a glimpse of her daughter and himself in conversation, and let such a scream out of her, that sea, and rocks, and all reechoed it, and with her clothes and her hair streaming back in the wind, she got on the bridge, and began to course over it like an arrow.

"The Count gave himself up for lost, but the black maid bade him follow her with all the speed he could muster. So while he thought the hag was just behind him the girl after pronouncing a charm, flung back a small bit of rock, and there before the hag was a gleaming palace whose intricate openings and passages gave her much delay before she could get out on the other side.

“The maid was rousing the Count to still greater speed in order to reach the river on whose farther banks they would be safe from the evil power of her mother, but before they had got over half the way he was terribly dismayed by hearing the loud cursing of the witch and the rustling of her clothes as she was sweeping after them. With every breath he drew he dreaded to feel her hand on his neck, but the maiden stopped, pronounced a magic word, and she became a lake, and the Count was a drake swimming over it.

"Then the angry witch uttered charms to bring thunder and hail down on the runaway, but she could not disturb the water. Then she muttered more charms, and a mountain of sand rose at her feet to dry the lake, but it only pushed the water on. She then flung a shower of golden nuts round the drake thinking to

allure him to eat one of them, but he only tossed them about with his bill, flew along the water backwards and forwards; dived here and there, and mocked the witch in a hundred ways.

"She got so furious and annoyed at seeing her own frightful face reflected in the lake that she determined to try another trick. She went back and hid behind a rock, and the moment the black maid resumed her own shape, and restored the count his own, and both were hastening to the edge of the river, she was after them again with the speed of the wild deer. When she thought she was near enough she was about to cast a dagger at them, but before her rose a chapel, and a monk was standing in the narrow doorway.

"In rage she flung the dagger at him, but had the grief to see it fall at her feet broken in pieces. Her wrath increased, and she uttered a spell to make the earth open, and swallow the building, and then stamped three times with her foot. She saw the earth gape, and heard thunder underground, and hoped that fugitives and chapel and all would soon be swallowed up. But on a sudden all vanished, and she was surrounded by a thick dark wood and the bellowings of buffaloes and bulls, and the howlings of bears and wolves were heard at hand.

"While she was striving to get out through the close dark wood, the black maiden put the young Count to a severe proof for her deliverance. She instructed him what to do, gave him a bow and sheaf of arrows, and vanished. Immediately a furious boar came rushing on him, but he shot an arrow into his brain and down he fell. Out of his jaws leaped a hare, and ran away like the wind, but another arrow stopped his flight. Up in the air rose a dove from the hare's body, and she flew round and round over the young man's head. This was the severest task of all, but he remembered the black maiden's charge, and let fly another arrow. Down she came fluttering, and when he went to take her up he found only an egg. Just then a lammergeier (vulture) was seen darting down on him from the clouds. He waited till the frightful bird came near, and then flung the egg into its

mouth. The bird vanished on the moment, and the fairest young girl in the world was by the young Count's side.

"But the river was yet to be crossed and the terrible witch had just cleared the wood and was racing towards them. He took the maiden on his shoulder and rapidly swam to the other side. The witch attempted to follow, but her magic power ceased at the nigher bank. The waves boiled round her and she perished miserably beneath them.

The Count and the beautiful damsel went forward to his father's house, and spread joy in and about it for days and days. The bride had well earned the happiness she now enjoyed with her bridegroom and the grateful old Count, and never was a bride or wife more beloved by her husband."

If any hard-headed, captious, and intelligent reader lift his hands and exclaim, “How in the name of everything absurd, could such a series of impossibilities as is here tied up together, ever entertain a company of people of ordinary intellect?” let him figure to himself an assemblage of children and uninstructed people, sitting supinely round a wide hearth and determined to enjoy heat and relaxation as long as possible. Their minds in this state are disposed to receive in the most welcome and uncritical fashion everything how wild or wonderful soever. Their bodies are at ease, and the only mental action agreeable for the time is the reception of and consent to every wonder with which the narrator chooses to fill their imaginative faculties. The annoyance felt at the conclusion of a short story is not small. All minds were up to that time in the lazy enjoyment of James Thomson, when the delicious peaches were descending into his mouth and melting down his throat without giving him a shadow of trouble. The story-expecting audience, when the tale was ended, and another had not commenced, were in the same plight as our lazy poet, obliged to migrate to another part of his paradise, and perhaps to raise his hands to the boughs in order to continue his enjoyment. Examination into improbabilities or the absence of causation

would induce trouble and mental fatigue, which taking the inherent comforts of the position into account would be intolerable.

The stories with which the Hungarian shepherds, and hunters, and soldiers entertain each other at their watch-fires, afford most striking example of kicking hills out of the way, and yet stumbling over twigs. We evidently possess only the degraded remains of the original inventions, which were, in all likelihood, skilfully constructed. The narrator probably adjusted the power proper to each demon, witch, or sorcerer, and established consistency among their actions and in the general frame-work of the tale. But the stories in time lost these good properties to a great degree, and the listeners were obliged to content themselves with a succession of wild, and wonderful, and often ill-connected exploits. In these Hungarian fireside narratives we find powerful sorcerers, and witches, and shadowy though powerful influences; such as moon-kings, and serpentkings, and wolf-kings, a sort of pantheistic divinities, potential in the highest degree in some cases, and as impotent as a withered leaf in others. Connected with this defect is a frequent absence of motive, and a want of apparent connexion and proportion between cause and effect.

If it be true that the fireside lore still existing is but a corrupt modification of the history and mythology of prehistoric races, it may be reasonably inferred that when original revelation ceased to be rightly understood or even remembered, it was succeeded by varieties of pantheism or Manichæism. For in all the old fictions that have received no modifications from Christian treatment, we find no trace of belief in an all-powerful superintending Providence. All supernatural powers, except the good genii, consist of malevolent beings, whose sway over mere mortal men and women is great, and would be exerted for their woe, only for the still greater might possessed by their well-disposed rivals, who frequently have a hard struggle before they can defeat the efforts of those baleful influences.

Some happy and peculiarly fitted genius may arise some day to bring the large number of Aryan household stories within moderate limits, by

HABITUAL students of Blackwood's Magazine have for about two years missed, from its pages, a versatile and brilliant mind, whose sense, penetration, and humour, always genial, and occasionally couched in verse, were tinged with peculiarities of character, and now and then sportively, but very effectually, victimised some of the more grotesque and dangerous of our modern speculators. A Church dignitary, who, from conscientious motives, laboured to place the Bible on a par with Joe Smith's romancea naturalist who preferred deriving his genealogy from some tadpole of ancient days to tracing it up to Adam and Eve, and would, respectively, move heaven and earth for the propagation of their notable discoveries, were pretty sure to receive their deserts from the pen of the eminent man whose name heads this article.*

If individuals with a determined turn for money speculation, were capable of being persuaded to moderate their wild desires to bring everything within their grasp, the miracle might be wrought by the perusal of the story of the "Glenmutchkin Railway." If the "Selector of Species" slept soundly for a week after the perusal of the Ode in Blackwood, May, 1861, he must have been possessed of a peculiar set of nerves.

HIS CLAIMS TO THE TITLE OF POET.

Mr. Theodore Martin, the friend of long standing and the collaborateur of Mr. Aytoun, has left in the conclusion of his biography, a very just and carefully-weighed estimate of the powers of his subject. The reader will be interested and informed by some passages from this agreeable analysis.

"Greater poets than Aytoun, and of the present century, too, are now little read-but they are not, there

*

fore, the less great poets. The power which spoke to men's hearts so strongly once remains in their works to speak to them still. So, I believe, will it be with the best of Aytoun's poems. Fashions in poetry may alter, but so long as the themes with which they deal have an interest for his countrymen, his lays will find, as they do now, a wide circle of admirers. His powers as a humorist were, perhaps, greater than as a poet. They have certainly been more widely appreciated. His immediate contemporaries owe him much, for he has contributed largely to that kindly mirth without which the strain and struggle of modern life would be intolerable. Much that is excellent in his humorous writings, may very possibly cease to retain a place in literature from the circumstance that he deals with characters and peculiarities which are in some measure local, and phases of life, and feeling, and literature, which are more or less ephemeral. But much will certainly continue to be read and enjoyed by the sons and grandsons of those for whom it was originally written, and his name will be coupled with those of Wilson, Lockhart, Sidney Smith, Peacock, Jerrold, Mahony, and Hood, as that of a man gifted with humour as genuine and original as theirs, however opinions may vary as to the order of their relative merits."

Instead of wasting ink and paper in arguing that the poetry of Mr. Aytoun possessed fulness, sweetness, strength, perfect rhythm and rhyme, and was distinguished by well-sustained flights into the realms of imagination, Mr. Martin furnishes well-chosen specimens which unmistakably stamp its character. Few endowed with a sense of genuine poetry, could read without delight, such lines as we are about to quote from the Ode on the Marriage of our Prince and Princess:--

"Pass from the earth, deep shadows of the night;

Give place and vantage to the rosy dawn; For now the sullen Winter takes his flight, His dreary robe's withdrawn.

Coy as a maiden moves the wavering Spring

With dainty steps across the emerald lawn,

Her tresses fair with primrose garland plight.

Hark, how the woods and bursting thickets ring

With the glad notes of love and welcoming,

The twitter of delight, the restless call
Of myriad birds that hold their festival,
When leaves begin to sprout and flowers

to blow.

Oh, joyous time,' 'tis thus I hear them sing,

Each to its mate upon the bourgeoning spray,

'Oh, happy time! Winter hath passed away,

Cold, rugged Winter, with its storms and

snow,

And all the sadness of the shortened year. Be glad, be glad the pleasant days are

near,

The days of mirth, and love, and joy supreme,

The long-expected day for which we pined. Flow on, for ever flow, thou wandering stream,

Through tangled brakes and thickets, fast entwined

With the lithe woodbine and the clam

bering rose.

For thee there is no rest,

But we shall build our nest,

In some dim coppice where the violet blows,

And thou shalt sing to us the live-long night

When hushed, and still, and folded in delight,

We pass from waking rapture to repose.'

Even when caricaturing the spasmodic lays of Alexander Smith and Sidney Dobell, by imitating or slightly overcharging passages in their poetry, he could not prevent himself from breaking out into a burst of real poesy not unworthy of the climes and the personages so lovingly recalled, and so inspiring to every soul imbued with classic recollections:

I've leaped into the air, And clove my way through ether like a bird,

That flits beneath the glimpses of the
moon,

Right eastward till I lighted at the foot
Of holy Helicon, and drank my fill
At the clear spout of Aganippe's stream.

I've rolled my limbs in ecstasy along
The self-same turf on which old Homer
lay,

That night he dreamed of Helen and of
Troy ;

And I have heard at midnight the sweet
strains

Come quiring from the hill-top where
enshrined

In the rich foliage of a silver cloud,
The muses sung Apollo into sleep.”

Not less filled with the excellence of old song is the sequel, though tinged with the grotesque and extraVagant character which befitted the object of the lay.

"Then came the voice of universal Pan,The dread earth-whisper booming in mine

ear;

'Rise up, Firmillian! rise in might,' it said.

'Great youth baptized to song, be it thy task,

Out of the jarring discords of the world
To recreate stupendous harmonies,
More grand in diapason than the roll
Among the mountains of the thunder
psalm.

If any comes Between thee and the purpose of thy bent, Launch thou the arrow from the string of might

Right to the bosom of the impious wretch, And let it quiver there. Be great in guilt, If like Busiris thou canʼst rack the heart Spare it no pang. So shalt thou be prepared

To make thy song a tempest, and to shake

The earth to its foundation - Go thy way!'

I woke and found myself in Badajos. But from that day with frantic might I've striven

To give due utterance to the awful shrieks

Of him who first imbued his hand in goreTo paint the mental spasms that tortured Cain !

How have I done it? Feebly. What we write

Must be the reflex of the thing we know;
For who can limn the morning, if his eyes
Have never fooked upon Aurora's face,
Or who describe the cadence of the sea
Whose ears were never open to the waves,
Or the shrill winding of the Triton's horn?
What do I know as yet of homicide?
Nothing. Fool, fool! to lose thy precious
time

In dreaming of what may be, when an act
Easy to plan, and easier to effect,
Can teach thee everything
It is

resolved

I'll ope the lattice of some mortal cage And let the soul go free."