that here is a most loyal, affectionate, and upright soul, with whom you have been brought into communion. Can we say as much for all lives of all men of letters? Here is one at least without guile, without pretension, without scheming, of a pure life, to his family and little modest circle of friends tenderly devoted. And what a hard work, and what a slender reward! In the little domestic details with which the book abounds, what a simple life is shown to us! The most simple little pleasures and amusements delight and occupy him. You have revels on shrimps; the good wife making the pie; details about the maid, and criticisms on her conduct; wonderful tricks played with the plum-pudding-all the pleasures centring round the little humble home. One of the first men of his time, he is appointed editor of a magazine at a salary of £300 per annum, signs himself exultingly " Ed. N. M. M.," and the family rejoice over the income as over a fortune. He goes to a Greenwich dinnerwhat a feast and rejoicing afterwards! hand to shake itself with every one present. Whereupon I had to go through the friendly ceremony with as many of the company as were within reach, besides a few more who came express from the other end of the table. Very gratifying, wasn't it? Though I cannot go quite so far as Jane, who wants me to have that hand chopped off, bottled, and preserved in spirits. She was sitting up for me, very anxiously, as usual when I go out, because I am so domestic and steady, and was down at the door before I could ring at the gate, to which Boz kindly sent me in his own carriage. Poor girl! what would she do if she had a wild husband instead of a tame one?" And the poor anxious wife is sitting up, and fondles the hand which has been shaken by so many illustrious men! The little feast dates back only eighteen years, and yet somehow it seems as distant as a dinner at Mr. Thrale's, or a meeting at Will's. Poor little gleam of sunshine! very little good cheer enlivens that sad simple life. We have the triumph of the magazine; then a new magazine projected and produced; then illness and the last scene, and the kind Peel by the dying man's bedside, speaking noble words of respect and sympathy, and soothing the last throbs of the tender honest heart. 66 Well, we drank the Boz' with a delectable clatter, which drew from him a good warm-hearted speech. He looked very well, and had a younger brother along with him. Then we had songs. Barham chanted a Robin Hood ballad, and Cruikshank sang a burlesque ballad of Lord I like, I say, Hood's life even better than H; and somebody, unknown to me, his books, and I wish, with all my heart, gave a capital imitation of a French show- Monsieur et cher confrère, the same could man. Then we toasted Mrs. Boz, and the be said for both of us, when the ink-stream Chairman, and Vice, and the Traditional of our life hath ceased to run. Yes: if I Priest sang the 'Deep deep sea,' in his deep drop first, dear Baggs, I trust you may find deep voice; and then we drank to Procter, reason to modify some of the unfavourable who wrote the said song; also Sir J. Wil- views of my character, which you are freely son's good health, and Cruikshank's and imparting to our mutual friends. What Ainsworth's: and a Manchester friend of the ought to be the literary man's point of honlatter sang a Manchester ditty, so full of tra- our now-a-days? Suppose, friendly reader, ding stuff, that it really seemed to have been you are one of the craft, what legacy would not composed, but manufactured. Jerdan, you like to leave your children? First of as Jerdanish as usual on such occasions-all (and by Heaven's gracious help) you you know how paradoxically he is quite at home in dining out. As to myself, I had to make my second maiden speech, for Mr. Monckton Milnes proposed my health in terms my modesty might allow me to repeat to you, but my memory won't. However, I ascribed the toast to my notoriously bad health, and assured them that their wishes had already improved it-that I felt a brisker circulation-a more genial warmth about the heart, and explained that a certain trembling of my hand was not from palsy, or my old ague, but an inclination in my would pray and strive to give them such an endowment of love, as should last certainly for all their lives, and perhaps be transmitted to their children. You would (by the same aid and blessing) keep your honour pure, and transmit a name unstained to those who have a right to bear it. You would,-though this faculty of giving is one of the easiest of the literary man's qualities you would, out of your earnings, small or great, be able to help a poor brother in need, to dress his wounds, and, if it were but twopence, to give him succour. Is the money which the noble Macaulay gave to the poor | WM. M. THACKERAY. WIFE, CHILDREN AND FRIENDS. [HON. WILLIAM ROBERT SPENCER. Born, 1770. writer of vers de société. Died 1834.] A When the black-lettered list to the gods was presented In vain surly Pluto maintained he was cheated, Let the breath of renown ever freshen and nourish The laurel which o'er the dead favourite bends; Let us drink, for my song, growing graver and graver, To subjects too solemn insensibly tends; Let us drink-pledge me high: love and virtue shall flavour The glass which I fill to wife, children, and friends. BACON'S TRIAL. On the 19th of March the King sent a message to the Commons, expressing his deep regret that so eminent a person as the Chancellor should be suspected of misconduct. His Majesty declared that he had no wish to screen the guilty from justice, and proposed to appoint a new kind of tribunal, consisting of eighteen commissioners, who might be chosen from among the members of the two Houses, to investigate the matter. The Commons were not disposed to depart from their regular course of proceeding. On the same day they held a conference with the Lords, and delivered in the heads of the accusation against the Chancellor. At this conference Bacon was not present. Overwhelmed with shame and remorse, and abandoned by all those in whom he had weakly put his trust, he had shut himself up in his chamber from the eyes of men. The dejection of his mind soon disordered his body. Buckingham, who visited him by the king's order, "found his lordship very sick and heavy.' It appears from a pathetic letter which the unhappy man addressed to the Peers on the day of the conference, that he neither expected nor wished to survive his disgrace. During several days he remained in his bed, refusing to see any human being. He passionately told his attendants to leave him, to forget him, never again to name his name, never to remember that there had been such a man in the world. In the meantime, fresh instances of corruption were every day brought to the knowledge of his accusers. The number of charges rapidly increased from two to The bower where he sat with wife, children, and twenty-three. The Lords entered on the in If the stock of our bliss is in stranger hands vested, Though valour still glows in his life's dying embers, How blest was his home with wife, children, and The soldier whose deeds live immortal in story, Though spice-breathing gales on his caravan hover, friends. The dayspring of youth still unclouded by sorrow, Alone on itself for enjoyment depends: But drear is the twilight of age if it borrow vestigation of the case with laudable alacrity. Some witnessess were examined at the bar of the House. A select committee was appointed to take the depositions of No warmth from the smile of wife, children, and others; and the inquiry was rapidly pro friends ceeding, when, on the 26th of March, the king adjourned the Parliament for three | Peers a letter, which the Prince of Wales weeks. This measure revived Bacon's hopes. He made the most of his short respite. He attempted to work on the feeble mind of the king. He appealed to all the strongest feelings of James, to his fears, to his vanity, to his high notions of prerogative. Would the Solomon of the age commit so gross an error as to encourage the encroaching spirit of Parliaments? Would God's anointed, accountable to God alone, pay homage to the clamorous multitude? Those," exclaimed Bacon, "who now strike at the Chancellor will soon strike at the Crown. I am the first sacrifice. I wish I may be the last." But all his eloquence and address were employed in vain. Indeed, whatever Mr. Montagu may say, we are firmly convinced that it was not in the king's power to save Bacon, without having recourse to measures which would have convulsed the realm. The Crown had not sufficient influence over the Parliament to procure an acquittal in so clear a case of guilt. And to dissolve a Parliament which is universally allowed to have been one of the best Parliaments that ever sat, which had acted liberally and respectfully towards the sovereign, and which enjoyed in the highest degree the favour of the people, only in order to stop a grave, temperate, and constitutional inquiry into the personal integrity of the first judge in the kingdom, would have been a measure more scandalous and absurd than any of those which were the ruin of the house of Stuart. Such a measure, while it would have been as fatal to the Chancellor's honour as a conviction, would have endangered the very existence of the monarchy. The king, acting by the advice of Williams, very properly refused to engage in a dangerous struggle with his people, for the purpose of saving from legal condemnation a minister whom it was impossible to save from dishonour. He advised Bacon to plead guilty, and promised to do all in his power to mitigate the punishment. Mr. Montagu is exceedingly angry with James on this account. But though we are, in general, very little inclined to admire that prince's conduct, we really think that this advice was, under all the circumstances, the best advice that could have been given. On the 17th of April the Houses reassembled, and the Lords resumed their inquiries into the abuses of the Court of Chancery. On the 22nd, Bacon addressed to the condescended to deliver. In this artful and pathetic composition, the Chancellor ac knowledged his guilt in guarded and general terms, and, while acknowledging, endeavoured to palliate it. This, however, was not thought sufficient by his judges. They required a more particular confession, and sent him a copy of the charges. On the 30th, he delivered a paper in which he admitted, with few and unimportant reservations, the truth of the accusations brought against him, and threw himself entirely on the mercy of his peers. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," said he, “descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence." The Lords came to a resolution that the Chancellor's confession appeared to be full and ingenuous, and sent a committee to inquire of him whether it was really subscribed by himself. The deputies, among whom was Southampton, the common friend, many years before, of Bacon and Essex, performed their duty with great delicacy. Indeed, the agonies of such a mind and the degradation of such a name might well have softened the most obdurate natures. "My lords," said Bacon, "it is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." They withdrew; and he again retired to his chamber in the deepest dejection. The next day, the sergeant-at-arms and the usher of the House of Lords came to conduct him to Westminster Hall, where sentence was to be pronounced. But they found him so unwell that he could not leave his bed; and this excuse for his absence was readily accepted. In no quarter does there appear to have been any desire to add to his humiliation. The sentence was, however, severe, the more severe, no doubt, because the Lords knew it would not be executed, and that they had an excellent opportunity of exhibiting, at small cost, the inflexibility of their justice, and their abhorrence of corruption. Bacon was condemned to pay a fine of £40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's pleasure. He was declared incapable of holding any office in the State or of sitting in Parliament; and he was banished for life from the verge of the court. In such misery and shama ended that long career of worldly wisdom | playing upon the Howadji's heart-strings and worldly prosperity. LORD MACAULAY. A CROW THAT FLIES IN HEA VEN'S SWEETEST AIR. Fleetly the Ibis flew. The divine days came and went. Unheeded the longing sunrise, the lingering eve. Unheeded the lonely shore of Nubia, that swept, sakiasinging, seaward. Unheeded the new world of African solitude, the great realm of Ethiopia. Unheeded the tropic upon which, for the first time we really entered; and the pylons, columns, and memorial walls, that stood solitary in the sand. The Howadji lay ill in the cabin, and there is no beauty, no antiquity, no new world, to an eye diseased. Yet illness, said a white-haired form that sat shadowy by his side, hath this in it, that it smooths the slope to death. The world is the organization of vital force; but when a man sickens, the substantial reality reels upon his brain. The cords are cut that held him to the ship that sails so proudly the seas, and he drifts lonely in the jollyboat of his own severed existence, towards shores unknown. Drifts, not unwillingly, as he sweeps farther away, and his eyes are darkened. After acute agony, said still the whitehaired shadow, pausing slowly, as if he, too, were once alive and young; death is like sleep after toil. After long decay, it is as natural as sunset. Yet to sit rose-garlanded at the feast of love and beauty, yourself the lover, and the most beautiful, and hearing that you shall depart thence in a hearse, not in a bridal chariot, to rise smilingly and go gracefully away, is a rare remembrance for any man-an heroic death that does not often occur nor is it to be rashly wished. For the heroic death is the gods' gift to their favorites. Who shall be presumptuous enough to claim that favor? Nay, if all men were heroes, how hard it would be to die and leave them; for our humanity loves heroes more than angels and saints. It would be the discovery of a boundless California, and gold would be precious no more. The shadow was silent, and the Nubian moonlight crept yellow along the wall; then, vaguely and at random, as a dreaming artist touching the keys of an instrument, he proceeded. Yet we may all know how many more the dead are than the living, nor be afraid to join them. Here, in Egypt, it is tombs which are inhabited, it is the cities which are deserted. The great Rameses has died, and all his kingdom-why not little you and I? Nor care to lie in a tomb so splendid. Ours shall be a sky-vaulted mausoleum, sculptured with the figures of all life. No man of mature years but has more friends dead than living. His friendly reunion is a shadowy society. Who people for him the tranquil twilight and the summer dawn? In the woods we knew, what forms and faces do we see? What is the meaning of music, and who are its persons? What are the voices of midnight, and what words slide into our minds, like sudden moonlight into dark chambers, and apprise us that we move in the vast society of all worlds and all times, and that if the van is lost to our eyes in the dazzling dawn, and the rear disappears in the shadow of night our mother, and our comrades fall away from our sides-the van, and the rear, and the comrades are yet, and all, moving for ward like the water-drops of the Amazon to the sea. It is not strange that when severe sickness comes, we are ready to die. Long buffeted by bleak, blue icebergs, we see at last with equanimity that we are sailing into Symmes's hole. The Nubian moonlight crept yellow along the wall, but the monotonous speech of the white-haired mystery went sounding on, like the faint far noise of the cataract below Philæ. Otherwise nature were unkind. She smooths the slope, because she is ever gentle. For to turn us out of doors suddenly and unwillingly into the night, were worse than a cursing father. But nature can never be as bad as man. What boots it that faith follows our going with a rush lantern, and hope totters before with a lucifer? Shrewd sad eyes have scrutinized those lights, and whispered only, "It is the dancing of the will-o-the-wisps among the tombs." It is only the gift of nature that we die well, as that we are born well. It is nature that unawes death to us, and makes it welcome and pleasant as sleep. A mystery! But if you say that it is the dim dream of the future wrought into the reality of faith, that smooths death-then that dream and faith are the devices of nature, like these enticing sculptures upon tomb avenues, to lead us gently down. For I find that all men are cheered by this dream although its figures are as the men. There are gardens and houris, or hunting-grounds and exhaustless deer, or crystal cities where whiterobed pilgrims sing hymns forever-(how. beit, after Egypt no philosophic Howadji will hold that long white garments are of heaven.). The flickering form waved a moment in the moonlight and resumed. study detects in Egyptian sculptures_emblems of our knowledge and our skill. Have you, O Howadji, new ideas, or only different developments of the old ones? As the Ibis bears you southward, are you proud and compassionate of your elders and your masters or do you feel simply that the earth is round, and that if in temperate regions the homely lark soars and sings, in the tropics the sumptuous plumage of silent birds is the glittering translation of that song? Have you mastered the mystery of death -have you even guessed its meaning? Heaven is a hint of nature, and therein Are Mount Auburn and Greenwood truer shall we feel how ever kind she is opening teachers than the Theban tombs ? Nature the door of death into golden gloom, she adorns death. Even sets in smiles the face points to the star that gilds it. She does that shall smile no more. But you group this to all men, and in a thousand different around it hideous associations, and of the ways. But in all lands are seers who would pale phantom make an appalling apparimonopolize the seeing-Bunyan pilots, suretion. Broken columns-inverted torches you will ground in the gloom except you weeping angels and willows are within embark in their ship, and with their trea- the gates upon which you write, "Whoso tise of navigation. Meanwhile the earth believeth in me shall never die." has more years than are yet computed, and ness and knolling bells, weepers and hopethe Bunyan pilots are of the threescore and less scraps of Scripture, these are the ten species. heavy stones that we roll against the sepulchres in which lie those whom you have baptized in his name who came to abolish death. Priests and physicians agree, that at last, all men die bravely, and we are glad to listen. O Howadji, that bravery was ours. We should be as brave as the hundred of any chance crowd, and so indirectly we know how we should die, even if, at some time, death has not looked closely at us over the shoulder, and said audibly what we knew that he held the fee simple of our existence. The Nubian moonlight waned along the wall. We praise our progress, said the white-haired shadow, yet know no more than these Egyptians knew. We say that we feel we are happier, and that the many are wiser and better, simply because we are alive, and they are mummies, and life is warmer than death. The seeds of the world were sown along these shores. There is none lovelier than Helen, nor wiser than Plato, nor better than Jesus. They were children of the sun, and of an antiquity that already fades and glimmers upon our eyes. Venus is still the type of beauty-our philosophy is diluted Platonism-our religion is an imitation of Christ. The forms of our furniture are delicately designed upon the walls of Theban tombs. Thales, after his return from Egypt, determined the sun's orbit, and gave us our year. Severe Black Why should not you conspire with nature to keep death beautiful, nor dare, when the soul has soared, to dishonor, by the em blems of decay, the temple it has consecrated and honored? Lay it reverently, and pleasantly accompanied, in the earth, and there leave it forever, nor know of skulls or cross-bones. Nor shall willows weep for a tree that is greener-nor a broken column symbolize a work completed-nor inverted fame a pure fire ascending. Better than all, burn it with incense at morning-so shall the mortal ending be not unworthy the soul, nor without significance of the soul's condition. Tears, like smiles, are of nature, and will not be repressed. They are sacred, and should fall with flow. ers upon the dead. But forgetting grave. yards and cemeteries, how silent and solemn soever, treasure the dearest dust in sacred urns, so holding in your homes forever, those who have not forfeited, by death, the rights of home. The wan, white-hailed shadow wasted in the yellow moonlight. But all illness is not unto death. Much is rather like dark, stony caves of meditation by the wayside of life. There is no |