"Well said, friend," answered the pacha; "still wilt thou lend thine aid to our faithful servant the kiaya?"

"His humble servant will not hide from his beloved master that the matter may prove intricate."

"Do thy best, friend Muftifiz, do thy best; we place entire confidence in the wisdom of our servants."

We said, in the matter of the Bibi conspiracy, that Muftifiz had learnt how the kiaya was very friendly with the fair Barbarosa. Now this worthy dame, like the rest of her sex, had her little failings-an inordinate vanity and love of adulation. She had married Pupmoud at a time of life when she was scarcely conscious of the importance of the step she took; and in later years discovered it was much against her inclination. Being a remarkably handsome woman, she had been so fortunate, or unfortunate, as the case may be, as to attract the notice of the kiaya, who fed upon her smiles with all the ardour of a thoroughly fascinated man. She felt her strength, and her chains became doubly burdensome to her. What would she not have given to have had it in her power to snap them! But though Pupmoud was but a simple burgess, still he belonged to an influential corporation, in offending which the kiaya would have run great risks, this class being specially favoured by the pacha, who moreover, in cases of matrimonial peccadilloes, was known to exercise great severity. Pupmoud, who did not feel the least flattered by the homage paid to his better half, though compelled to devour his anger in secret, would have risked the salvation of his soul almost for an opportunity to be revenged. This soon occurred. Barbarosa talked in her sleep, and though she made no distinct statement, she said enough to induce her husband to send that anonymous intimation to the pacha of which we have spoken.

One morning that the pacha had listened, through his interpreter, to a glowing account of one of those tremendous battles fought by the North Land savages amongst themselves, and was still wondering how it happened that such raging warfare resulted only in Sergeant Tightstrap's horse being blinded of one eye by an adverse ramrod, which had not been withdrawn from the barrel, and in Private Cookspet having sprained his ankle in leaping into the enemy's trenches, he was informed that his faithful Muftifiz craved a private audience. He commanded that he should be admitted at once.

"Hast discovered anything, friend Muftifiz?" eagerly asked the pacha. "Highness," answered Muftifiz, in a desponding tone of voice, "all other means have failed. I have but one resource left." And he proceeded to inform the pacha that he wished he would have him arrested as the originator of the conspiracy, and express his intention of having him executed in eight-and-forty hours; and perceiving the pacha's undisguised astonishment at such a demand, he added: "Your excellency's faithful servant believes this will be the means of obtaining a solution, and begs your highness will grant his request."

It was therefore agreed between them that it should be as Muftifiz wished—that he should leave the palace, and proceed to his own house; in the mean time, the pacha should give the order for his arrest and execution; but that no one should be allowed to visit him in prison/ without a warrant from the pacha, who, from a hidden place, should watch the interview himself. Accordingly, the next morning it was

generally known throughout the city that Muftifiz had been arrested for conspiracy, and would be executed the following day; but that the pacha, in his great clemency, not wishing to deprive Muftifiz's heirs of his immense wealth, had allowed him to make his will, which gracious condescension he had availed himself of, by bequeathing it all to his fellow-citizen Pupmoud.

Now the kiaya happened to be Muftifiz's debtor to a considerable amount for jewellery bought and monies lent, and he naturally argued that Pupmoud would inherit the credits as well as the real property. He knew that Pupmoud hated him with all an injured husband's strength, hence he drew the conclusion that Pupmoud would not leave a stone unturned to effect his ruin. It was quite out of his power to cancel the debt, and therefore he was at his mercy. Of two evils, he chose what appeared to him to be the lesser. He sought Muftifiz.

As soon as he was introduced, "Vanish!" said he to the janisary who had admitted him. The official closed the door upon him and disappeared. Then addressing Muftifiz, the kiaya said, "I have come to offer thee life." "My life! to me! Tamper not with my misfortunes, your greatness." "Listen to me," continued the kiaya. "I owe thee 10,000 zechins ; dost thou value freedom at that sum ?"

"Can you ask it," answered Muftifiz.

"Wilt thou give me a quittance in good form for that amount, against a warrant that I shall bring thee of pardon, and enjoyment of all thy former rights and privileges ?"

"You jest, greatness," said Muftifiz, with a sickly smile.

"Thou art arrested for conspiracy?" asserted the kiaya. Muftifiz bowed.

"Whether justly or unjustly I will not pretend to say; his sublime highness keeps the matter to himself."

Muftifiz looked surprised.

"But what I have to say to thee, to thee alone," continued the kiaya, going up to him, placing his hand on his shoulder, and lowering his voice, is, that there is a second conspiracy."

"Ah! what says your excellency ?"

"There is a second conspiracy," repeated the kiaya.

"And your greatness has discovered it ?"

"Discovered it! pshaw !" he exclaimed, betrayed by his feelings into a louder tone of voice, "I am the man who pulls the wires, O Muftifiz !"

No sooner had the last words escaped his lips than the end of the cell seemed to disappear as if by magic, and it became filled with soldiers, with the pacha at their head. The kiaya was surrounded in a moment, and whilst he was being held, the pacha, addressing him, said:

66

"O thou wicked man, on whom so many benefits have been bestowed, not content with the indulgence of thy passions, thou hast sought to remedy their evil consequences in the accomplishment of a crime. Let thy end be an example to all men."

At these words the mamalukes plunged their scimitars into the body of the kiaya, who ceased to exist.

"And thou, my faithful servant," resumed the pacha, linking his arm with that of Muftifiz, "thou shalt occupy the post that unworthy man so lately filled, and thy talents and discernment shall aid and enlighten the councils of thy sovereign."

LITERARY LEAFLETS.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

No. XIV.-MRS. JAMESON.

"ACCIDENT first made me an authoress," says Mrs. Jameson, in one of her captivating books. Something higher, deeper, better, qualified her to be an authoress, and ensured for her, as such, a position second to hardly one of her contemporaries in grace of style, correctness, and refinement of taste, keenness of observation, and freshness of thought. Acquaintance with such a writer would have been an invaluable argument and support to Charles Perrault, when he indited his Apologie des Femmes, in answer to Boileau's spiteful satire, and there maintained the supremacy of true womanly opinion in matters of taste, saying, in his preface: "On sait la justesse de leur discernement pour les choses fines et délicates, la sensibilité qu'elles ont pour ce qui est clair, vif, naturel et de bon sens, et le dégoût subit qu'elles temoignent à l'abord de tout ce qui est obscur, languissant, contraint, et embarrassé." Mrs. Jameson stands unsurpassed among the literary women of England for critical culture; for instinctive accuracy of taste, and ability to give a reason for the faith that is in her, with elegance and precision of language. And it is beautiful to mark in this capacious, deep, highly-cultivated and everactive intellect, so utter an absence of, and so hearty a disrelish for, whatever is akin to the satirical and the censorious. This gracious nature holds no tie with carping, crabbed, captious ways and means. "I can smile," she says, "nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision." And she contends that no one human being has been made essentially better by satire, which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities; the spirit of ridicule she abhors, because in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of Christianity-and at the same time she fears it, because wherever it has prevailed as a social fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it has marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of the society thus characterised;-and furthermore, she despises it, as the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. "The spirit of satire, reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me," she says, "twice accursed; evil in those who indulge it-evil to those who are the objects of it." In her every volume the jaded sufferer under literary fever and fretfulness is sure, in Wordsworth's language, of

One enclosure where the voice that speaks

In envy or detraction is not heard ;

Where malice may not enter; where the traces

Of evil inclinations are unknown.

In the writings of women generally is remarked a tone of greater Dec.-VOL. XCIX. NO. CCCXCVI.

2 H

generosity than in those of men: hence, "commend us," says Mr. Gilfillan, "to female critics. The principle nil admirari is none of theirs; and whether it be that a sneer disfigures their beautiful lips, it is seldom seen upon them." The sneer may nevertheless be translated into print, and sometimes is, by those whose lips are innocent of aught but smiles (and kisses)-for in a book, even a beauty may sneer away, if so disposed, without peril to her facial muscles, whatever the peril to her heart; but Mrs. Jameson is incompetent in the art, though her generosity is anything but indiscriminate, anything but common and open to all comers. For, as a veteran authority remarks of another lady-scribe, "on croit sentir" (and the croyance is not mere credulity) "un esprit ferme et presque viril, qui aborde les sujets élevés avec une subtilité raisonneuse, et qui en comprend tous les divers aspects." Whatever else she may be-crotchety, as some allege,-speculative, daring, determined, paradoxical, or what not,—she is not insipid, nor given to platitudinary prosing.

Mrs. Jameson's productions have been too many to allow, in this place, of separate comment,-and too good to be curtly discussed in a hurried summary. Some must, therefore, be pretermitted, and the rest inadequately, but respectfully, "touched upon"-and would that our ordeal by touch could command, as this lady can, the ornavit as an invariable sequent to the tetigit! Greeting with a passing mention her "Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad," "Diary of an Ennuyée," and "Celebrated Female Sovereigns," we come to a full stop, plus a note of admiration, at that ever delightful book, "Characteristics of Women." The success which hailed this choice performance, was, it seems, to the author, "so entirely unlooked for, as to be a matter of surprise as well as of pleasure and gratitude." It was undertaken without a thought of fame or money; it was written out of the fulness of her own heart and soul, and already she felt amply repaid, ere ever a page was in type, by the new and various views of human nature its composition opened to her, and the beautiful and soothing images it placed before her, and the conscious exercise and improvement of her own faculties. The purpose of these volumes is, to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results-not indeed formally expounding the writer's conviction, that the modern social condition of her sex is false and injurious, but implying certain positions of this nature by examples, and leaving the reader to deduce the moral and to draw the inference. The characters best fitted to her purpose she finds among those whom History ignores-women being illustrious in History, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused, or else presented under seemingly irreconcilable aspects*-it is to Shakspeare she turns

*The Duchesse de Longueville being instanced, as one whom History represents, in her relation to the Fronde, as a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity, "bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious;" and, on the other hand, in her protection of Arnauld,-an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness. History, it is contended, provides nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy. Whereas, if Shakspeare had drawn the duchesse's character, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations -since the same being, with the same faculties, and passions, and powers, it surely was.

for characters that combine history and real life, for complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us,-while, in History, certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes or motives, or connecting feelings; and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind is averted in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive and justifiable incredulity. The prevalent idea, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men, Mrs. Jameson assents to at once, if inferiority in power be meant; for she holds that in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society-but, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, she maintains, and goes very far to prove, that Shakspeare's women are equal to his men in truth, in variety, and in power. The classification adopted, in treating of this splendid portrait-gallery, is almost of course arbitrary and open to exception; but the skill displayed in critical interpretation, poetical sympathy, psychological analysis, and studious comprehensiveness, is most excellent. To every diligent student of Shakspeare, the aid of Mrs. Jameson's commentaries is invaluable; to the collector of criticisms on his peerless dramas, her "Characteristics" must no more be overlooked than the contributions of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Lamb, George Moir,t De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge,§ Wilson,|| Knight, Hallam, Fletcher, Campbell, Goethe, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, Ulrici, and others. divides her characters into classes, under the heads of Intellect and Wit -Fancy and Passion-Sentiment and Affection. The historical characters are considered apart, as requiring a different mode of illustration, and their dramatic delineation is illustrated by all the historic testimony.

the industrious author could collect.

The four "representative women" of Intellect-Portia, Isabella, Beatrice, and Rosalind-are delicately discriminated. Portia is intellect kindled into romance by a poetical imagination; Isabel, intellect elevated by religious principle; Beatrice, intellect animated by spirit; Rosalind, intellect softened by sensibility. The wit of the first is compared to attar of roses; of the second (who, however, seems a little out of place in this category), to incense wafted to heaven; of the third, to salvolatile; of the fourth, to cotton dipped in aromatic vinegar. To Portia, Mrs. Jameson assigns the first rank among the four, as more eminently embodying all the noblest and most loveable qualities that ever met together in woman (albeit we must own to some share in Hazlitt's confession that the Lady of Belmont was "no great favourite of his"comparatively, that is, when Imogen, Cordelia, Miranda, and others are remembered). Besides lavish endowments of womanly dignity, sweetness, and tenderness, Portia is here individualised by high mental powers,

* Thus: Juliet is the most impassioned of Shakspeare's "heroines;" but what are her passions compared to those which shake the soul of Othello?" even as the dewdrop on the myrtle-leaf to the vexed sea." Constance, frantic for the loss of her son, is to Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters, as the west wind bowing the aspen tops to the tropic hurricane.

"Shakspeare in Germany," &c.

"On the Knocking at the Door in Macbeth," Life of Shakspeare in Encyclopædia Britannica, &c.

§ "Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentleman," "The Character of Hamlet," &c. In his reviews of Mrs. Jameson, Dies Boreales, &c.