"You should not talk on subjects about which you know nothing, my dear," said her husband. "Your mother would not like depending upon an allowance from me."

Mrs. Perigord felt the truth of this observation, although she could not convince herself why it should necessarily be the case; and accordingly she remained silent.

"Say nothing about it, my dear, to your mother," continued Mr. Perigord, "until her signature is required; in fact, I think I shall contrive so that there shall be no necessity for mentioning it at all, in case of accidents. You must promise me, Lucy, before you go, that you will not name it to her, and especially not to your brother."

"Your wish is enough, my dearest husband," was the reply; "to know it, is as sacred a tie to me as any promise. But since you ask it, I promise you," and so saying, she kissed her husband, and withdrew.

And could she have scanned her heart of hearts, she had discovered secreted there a hidden feeling of relief. As she left the library, she proceeded straight to the drawing room, and not finding any one there, she uncovered her harp, and sang with exquisite feeling, and with a voice of the most rich and thrilling sweetness, the song which had attracted her brother.

CHAPTER IX.

"The world's a labyrinth, where unguided men Walk up and down, to find their weariness."

The Night-Walker, Act iv. Sc. 6.

HARRY SUMNER drank in with intense earnestness every word of the song his sister was so touchingly singing. He thought he had never before heard such eloquent harmonies. The mellow harp tones rippled along with a rich and murmuring melody by the side of her thrilling voice. He was fixed to the spot: fascinated. The air was familiar to him, the words were new and strange. It was only the day before that they had flowed from his sister's pen. Little as she knew or owned it, they were the voice of her own feelings;-those feelings which her mind had clothed with an expression so beautiful. The sparkling and graceful play of the fountain was truly the work of her creative imagination, but the exhaustless jet came bubbling up from the deep well-spring of her heart. Nor were those feelings more her own than they were her brother's. The bright morning of life had begun to be overcast for both. The dew-drops sparkled not the gay glitter of the stream had yielded to a leaden hue-the hope and buoyancy of a dawning east was checked-there was a gloom and a chilland full life appeared to be becoming corpse-like and inanimate. As the music poured into his soul, it seemed to him as though it were issuing thence, and the inmost chords of his heart thrilled and vibrated to their utmost tension. It ended: and when he descended the wide spiral stone staircase, and sallied

"Life is the bitterness of death!"

His thoughts as he rode onwards lingered with the solemn rites of poor Lamb's obsequies, and the affecting circumstances connected with them. The passionate grief of the sister of the departed. His mother's calmer, but unutterable sorrow, the sorrow of one to whom grief was no stranger. The small but significant actions in which it displayed itself-the sitting up night after night in the room of death, and taking all her short intervals of slumber by the coffin's sidethe flowers with which she every day freshly decorated the sleeping body of her son, and that last, last, look before he was hid from her sight until the resurrection day. The abstraction and death-deep silence of his father, as though his son's icy hand had been laid upon his lips and sealed up the current of his words, or as though some hidden barrier had been rudely removed, and the escaping torrent of emotions had choked up the narrow utterance to which they had hitherto been accustomed; the frantic violence with which he had cast himself on the mound of soil which lay beside the yawning grave, ready to be heaped back again on him who was his no more, and beat his head against his hands clutched in one another, and sobbed aloud. "My son! my son! he fancied that he still heard the old man cry, “would that God had taken thee by a lingering illness-that he had given thee to me but for one month; that I might have sat and knelt by thy bedside through the live-long days and through the live-long nights-have embraced thee in a penitent father's arms-implored thy pardon for his savage sternness, and have humbly craved that and that only for thy blessing and thy legacy!" And then Harry Sumner's thoughts as he threaded the crowded and panting streets reverted to the complete change that had come over the old man's whole disposition and demeanour: his exchange of reserve for communicativeness; of distant coldness for cordiality; of the domineering and selfish manner in which he had been accustomed to conduct himself towards his wife and daughter, for an extreme considerateness and gentleness.-And he was conjecturing how far the events, which were in seeming the most cruelly calamitous, might themselves be special interferences of the love and beneficence of Him who orders them, when he found himself entering Mr. Lamb's house, having dismounted from his horse, knocked at the door, and seen it opened in answer, almost unconsciously.

That gentleman's habits had undergone a corresponding change to that which his moral nature had experienced since his return from Oxford. Seven o'clock had been his family dinner hour, and rare indeed were the occasions on which he left his chambers earlier than would allow him time to reach his private residence by that hour. It was now altered to five o'clock, and although it was only a few minutes after half-past four, Mr. Lamb was at home when his son's friend arrived.

The state of calm and chastened sorrow in which he found the three mourners bewildered him with astonishment. When last he had seen them he could scarcely say whether the father's or the sister's grief were the most passionate and vehement. Nor was there a whit the less appearance of despairing anguish in the calmer bearing of the mother. But now, in the subdued melancholy of the three, and especially of Mrs. Lamb and her daughter, there was a resignation, even a hopefulness, which sorely puzzled him. "Can this be the exhaustion of spent emotions?" he said to himself. "No-it cannot be. Their grief appears no less poignant in the resignation to which it has yielded. What can this mean?"

“If you had been a quarter of an hour earlier," said Mr. Lamb, "you would have, met the Rev. Mr. Smith, one of our clergy."

"Mr. Smith!" exclaimed Harry Sumner, "I thought that you and he were not on speaking terms."

"So I thought too," replied Mr. Lamb; "and when his name was announced, actuated by that sort of fatality by which I seem to be urged to repel from me every one most worthy of esteem, I desired my servant to tell him, with my compliments, that I was particularly engaged, and did not wish to be disturbed. You know he is one of those gentlemen who want to empty our pockets, and enslave us all again to a parcel of priests; and I certainly have worried him out of his life ever since he has been in the parish."

Neither Mr. Lamb nor his wife could account for the appearance of deep and earnest interest with which Harry Sumner listened to this information, and then inquired, "if he came in notwithstanding?" "Yes," replied Mr. Lamb; "he sent back a message to the effect that he trusted he should not appear intrusive; that if so he offered the humblest apologies; but that he had heard of the sad bereavement with which it had pleased God to visit us, and trusting I would forget the little misunderstanding which had existed, he had hoped to be permitted to offer us the consolations of religion under our distress." "Of course you admitted him?" inquired Sumner, in a tone of intense interest.

"I cannot make out how I came to do it," he replied; "but certain it is that, whether impatient of the trouble of hesitating, or by a sudden impulse, or from whatever cause, I ordered him to be shown up." "Your enmity, then, is put an end to?" inquired Sumner, eagerly.

"Never-to what I believe to be the principles of those men!" replied Mr. Lamb. "You know I never bore any ill-will to the man himself."

"Pardon me, my dear sir," said Sumner, "but did you not say that you have worried him out of his life ever since he has been in your parish?"

"I have," replied Mr. Lamb; "but that was on account of his principles."

"Well, I must confess," said Harry Sumner, musingly, "I feel prejudiced in favour of principles backed by such a practice."

A short pause followed this observation, which was broken by Mrs. Lamb, who, as well as her daughter, | had maintained a complete silence during this short dialogue between Harry Sumner and her husband.

"Oh, Mr. Sumner!" she exclaimed; "we have been so comforted. I can scarcely describe to you the defects that good man has left behind him. I feel quite another being: I can now almost bear to talk of my poor Arthur with exposure."

Here, however, a flow of tears belied the speaker's assertion.

"He is coming again to-morrow," she continued; "for my dear husband said he was very grateful to him, and told him he should be glad to welcome him to his house at any time.”

66

Why, his manner was so inoffensive, my dear, that I could not resist saying as much," interposed Mr. Lamb.

Harry Sumner's life, up to within the last few weeks, had been spent in the uninterrupted joyousness of youthful excitement. Immediately after he left Winchester he had proceeded on a three years' tour on the Continent, accompanied by a tutor-a clever and gentlemanlike man of about his own age. Well introduced, they found admission into the best circles of society in any neighbourhood they chanced to select for a temporary sojourn. They passed through ever-varying [scenery as they moved from place to place; sometimes wide, flat, and uninteresting; at other times soul-enthralling, bold, luxurious, picturesque, grand, or romantic, as the case might chance to be. Each fresh town they came to differed from those they had already visited; there were new streets, and new-shaped buildings, and new objects, and a new arrangement of old objects, and new faces, and new peculiarities. He never remained long enough in one place to become identified with any of its conflicting interests and feuds; there was, therefore, nothing to check the cordiality with which his many advantages, both of person and position, caused him to be welcomed in all directions. If ever human existence glided smoothly and brightly by, like one prolonged, gay dream, it was those first six years of Harry Sumner's life after leaving school.

Accustomed, from his earliest infancy, to intimate association with two characters very far transcending the ordinary level, his new experience, though it did not exalt his view of human nature, though it even caused him disappointment, did not occasion an entire change. He saw but the smiling, treacherous tranquillity of the surface of society; the clouds had not yet begun to gather, which would quench the excessive light by which he had gazed upon it until then, and enable him to perceive the evil spirits battling in its noisome depths. His manly and generous disposition, joined as it was to genius, and to a vivacity under the complete control of exquisite refinement of feeling, caused him to be the idol of a university coterie, tolerably select considering its extent, and composed of individuals, all of whom were at that time of life at which such qualities as those possessed by Harry Sumner are so peculiarly popular.

Committing himself to the full enjoyment of a society so congenial, it never entered into his thoughts to attempt to stint himself in any of those material pleasures, of the peril of which, even although not indulged in to any gross excess, our youth of the present day are so wholly uninformed. Four or five hours, on most days, appropriated to his books, formed a graceful relief to the monotony of merely sensuous amusements, and added a zest and relish to their enjoyment.

The being did not exist whom he hated-he knew of no one who was his enemy. It is true he had felt that there existed in one or two of his college acquaintances, such as Lionel Roakes and his class, incongruities of taste, and sentiment, and habit, so marked as to preclude the possibility of his linking them to him in the bonds of friendship, but this feeling had not developed into anything like enmity. The only individual towards whom aught resembling such a feeling found a place in his breast was Mr. Perigord; towards whom he could not help recognising, and he scarcely knew why, a deep instinctive aversion-an aversion of which, as the object of it was his sister's husband, he was heartily ashamed. Thus, like the fresh and exulting brightness of spring-tide, had passed the morning of Harry Sumner's life, until the moment of his friend's fearful death, and all its miserable attendant circumstances. Now the bright and sparkling cup of life was dashed with one bitter ingredient: the clear blue above was hung with black a snapped and riven chord sent forth sullen discords jarring with the first melody of perfectly attuned existence. And yet this rude shock to his whole system, intellectual and sensuous, was not without a sweet and inexplicable charm. Not many weeks ago, he would have escaped from such society and such converse as now detained him, at the very first moment good feeling or good manners, or whatever motive it might be that had led him into them, permitted. Now he felt himself singularly fascinated by them, and even reluctant to take his departure. Unconscious of the change in Mr. Lamb's dinner hour, he sat on and on; nor did a single sign of impatience intimate to him that that meal was being retarded. For Mr. Lamb, who a short time since would rather have offended those dearest to him in the world than have waited a quarter of an hour for his dinner, now even shrank from inviting him to partake of it, lest he should hasten the departure of his son's friend.

No sooner, however, did he arise to take leave, than he was pressed to remain and dine with them by Mr. Lamb, in a manner no less hearty and cordial than that in which the request was seconded by Mrs. Lamb and her daughter.

"I would gladly accept your friendly invitation," he said in reply, "but that I am prevented from doing so by an engagement, which I must own to be far less congenial to my present mood and feelings. My brother-in-law has rather a large dinner party to-day. By the bye, he dines an hour and a half earlier than usual, in order that I may accompany my sister to

Covent Garden to see Macready's representation of Hamlet. It now only wants five minutes of the time."

Thus saying, he took a hasty farewell of the mourners, and mounting his horse, was at No. 10, Hyde Park Gardens within a few minutes of the appointed time.

LAWRENCE AND KEMBLE'S HAMLET SHAKSPEARE'S HAMLET-THE WORLD'S HAMLET.

BY MARY COWDEN CLARKE.

THE point of time Lawrence has taken for his beautiful picture is selected with peculiar felicity. It represents the young prince in the Danish churchyard, moralizing upon humanity and death-upon man's career, his aims, his varied tendencies, vanities, follies, ambitions, hopes, and struggles, all here extinguished, and meeting in one common doom. The picture is beautiful in itself, as a work of art-it is well composed, well drawn, and well painted; and it is nobly conceived an impersonation of Shakspeare's intellectual, reflective Hamlet prince of Denmark, no less than as a tasteful portrait of the dignified, elegant actor, John Philip Kemble.

as

Kemble's commanding figure, gentlemanly deportment, and scholarly accomplishments, eminently fitted him for personating the part of the Danish prince; though we can nevertheless readily conceive that his style of acting was too level, too unyielding, too strictly accordant with certain prescribed rules, too uniformly correct, to render him an entirely apt representative of the impressionable, moody, sensitive Hamlet. But who, indeed, should be thoroughly capable of embodying such a conception as the character of Hamlet? Who should be even physically equal to the task of enacting the varied emotion, terror, grief, disappointment, irresolution, reflection, sarcasm, distraction, and terrible struggle that contend in this wounded heart through the five long acts of grand sustained tragedy that Shakspeare has here set forth? It is an analysis of the human heart in all its myriad phases, combined into a single individual instance, as if the bosom-pulses of mankind generally were made to throb in one breast, bared for examination by the poet's master hand. The misgivings, the aspirations, and the sad experiences of a life-time are here crowded into a drama of two or three hours' duration; and can we hope to find any actor of sufficient power to sustain and develop such a condensation of human action and feeling, with every requisite qualification, personal, as well as mental?

But if Kemble's Hamlet was too monotonous, other assumers of the part have erred in an opposite direction. They appear to lose sight of the fact that Hamlet is, above all things, gentlemanly; that is, in the strict sense of the word—he is a gentle man. His essential characteristic is gentleness of soul; however the unhappy circumstances by which he is involuntarily surrounded lead him into occasional harshnesses of demeanour, and wayward petulance. The actors of Hamlet seem to forget that a splenetic rashness is the