and possibly hearing horses were gone from the house, suspected the truth and followed; they examined this man, who, to his great joy and astonishment, misst his mas ter, and was too cunning for them, that they were gone back before my grandfather came up with him. He immediately quitted the high road, after a warning by so miraculous an escape, and in two days sent back his servant, which was the first notice they had at home of his not having fallen into their hands." Our limits oblige us to cut short, for the present, these interesting extracts; but we intend to resume them in our next, and, after giving the delightful details of the family residence in Holland, we shall introduce a few additional notices which have fal len in our way respecting Sir Patrick's favourite and truly admirable daughter, particularly one or two songs of her composition in the old style of Scottish song-writing. Since the preceding pages were prepared for press, we have been highly gratified to learn, that the whole of Lady Murray's original MS. has been for some time in the hands of a gentleman in this city of distinguished literary abilities, who intends, ere long, to publish it in a separate form. From the classical taste of the individual alluded to, as well as his intimate acquaintance with every period of Scottish history, we feel assured that this little memoir I could not be in better hands; and it can scarcely fail to acquire from his illustrations an additional interest which, perhaps, few other pens could confer. (To be concluded in our next.) RELIQUES FROM THE FIELD OF WATERLOO. MR EDITOR, THE inclosed letter (No. 1.) is the copy of one which I took from the knapsack of a French soldier on the field of Waterloo, a few days after the battle. The "Chanson Nouvelle" is another of the reliques I picked up, and, as far as I know, is unpublished. You will observe that there are some incorrect expressions in the letter, though I have, in some instances, altered the spelling and construction, both of which are very incorrect in the original. Perhaps, however, it might have been more interesting if I had copied it verbatim. If you think it will suit your Magazine, I can furnish you with a great many more from the same place, besides songs and pamphlets. I have several letters also from England and Scotland, which shall be at your service.-I am, Sir, your obedient servant, C. N. Brussels, Jan. 29, 1818. NO. I. De Villerspol, le 7 Juin 1815. Depuis que vous m'avez fait l'honneur et l'amitié de me répondre, mon cœur est dans une joie et un contentment qu'il est impossible de vous exprimer. Vous pou vez être persuader que les jours que se passent me semble des années entières. Oui, mon cher ami, je vous le dit, et je vous le repeter, que jamais je n'aimé auliterated)-qu'il augmentent tous las jours cune personne que vous-( several words obde plus en plus mes amitiés pour vous. Si vous aviez seulement le cœur d'amitié pour moi que j'en ai pour vous, je me croirois la plus heureuse du monde. Rien d'autre chose à vous marquer pour le present, je fini en vous embrassant du plus profond de mon cœur, et je serai toujours, votre cher amie, MARIE JOSEPH NIEUISE. des compliments, de leurs parts, ainsi que Mon pere et ma mere ils vous font bien toute la famille, et j'espere que vous viendrez nous voir sans tarder, pour nous causer un moment ensemble. Vous ferez bien des compliments à Monsieur L- de toutes les familles de Villerspol, ainsi qu'à R. E., et j'espère que vous tout serez encore plus heureux que je croirois de vos nouvelles. A Monsieur M, soldat 25 Regiment de Ligne, St Omer. NO. II. Chanson Nouvelle. Tu le veux donc, ô peine extrême, Il faut obeir à ta voix ; Quoi dit Louise ce matin même, Je me dois plus penser à toi! Mais l'aurore, ma douce amie, Est la compagne de l'amour; Ah! si tu veux que je t'oublie, Permet moi d'attendre le jour. Le jour a remplacé l'aurore Mais vois si je suis malheureux, Une rose qui vient d'eclore, Soudain te rapelle à mes yeux. Enfin, dans chaque fleur jolie, Il me semble toujours te voir; Ah! si tu veux que je t'oublie, Permets moi d'attendre le soir. REMARKS ON THE EARLY ENGLISH POETS. NO. I. CHAUCER. POETRY is not, like the arts and sciences, brought to perfection by the accumulated observations and experiments of ages, but arrives all at once at such excellence, that its earlier professors are seldom surpassed by their successors. In the first stages of society, man imagines rather than observes, and is impelled to action by the strength of his feelings, rather than the conviction of his reason. His soul is acted upon by every impulse from within and from without, and, as he seeks nothing more than to make himself understood, or to kindle the glow of his own bosom in the spirit of those whom he addresses, his language is simple and unaffected,-a mere transcript of his emotions; and the music arising from rythmical arrangement, seems to be as natural to him, as their notes to the birds of song. In this period of his progress, all the elements of poetry exist in his mind in greater vigour than in a state of more refinement. Nothing delights him so much as strong passion, and high excitement, and he fears nothing so much as the want of them; and his words, which are nothing more than an overflow of them, are bold and animated as their prototypes, and are imbued with the very spirit of poetry. He is prone to the marvellous, and receives the most extravagant creations of superstition, not as a matter of mere curiosity, but as an article of firm belief, and the most incredible efforts of heroism as truth; and he relates them with a sacred awe, or an enthusiastic admiration, that are inseparable from the effusions of the genuine bard. His imagination is a mirror, that reflects the glories of earth and sky in the truth and radiance of their originals, and the emotions of his own soul, in the most appropriate forms, and the fittest tints. Perhaps no age is so rude as not to possess poetry, and man never so degraded as to be insensible to its influences; and, if we reflect on his character in these early ages, we shall not find it difficult to account for the fact. Besides the intrinsic merit of the poems of that remote era, we are disposed to give them a larger share of our ad miration than we otherwise should, because we consider them as the productions of the infancy of man; yet, if we take a Homer, or a Dante, or a Chaucer, as examples, we shall see little reason to boast of the improvement of his maturity. Chaucer was one of those great and original minds, who, had there been no poetry in England before his time, would have created the art, and, as it was, he improved it so greatly, as to be justly entitled to the denomination of father of English poetry, which he has universally obtained. He found the English language before it had attained a fixed form,-when the Norman conquest had introduced a large alloy of French words on the pure Saxon of our fathers. Still, however, the Saxon was the predominant, and by far the best, part of it; and, though it was in a state of great simplicity, and hardly subjected to rules, what it wanted in polish, it possessed in energy and strength; and he contributed to its improvement, not only in accuracy of arrangement, but in giving it the flow of harmony necessary to the perfection of verse. of his words have since become obsolete, a few of them unintelligible, and to render the rythm complete, many syllables that are now silent must be pronounced; but, with all the disadvantages under which he laboured, his language is always vigorous and appropriate, often glowing and poetical, and, in many instances, his verses flow with a delightful harmony. Some The early poets have one advantage over their successors, in the whole field of nature being unoccupied, and each of them being permitted to follow his own fancy, and to expatiate in his own favourite region, and to appropriate to himself its unrifled stores, without the palsying effects of treading in the steps of another, or incurring the charge of theft or servility. She is unveiled to them in the beauty of her spring, and their images are brightened by the suns, and freshened by the dews of that sweet season. Chaucer was not only a man who could, by the kindling glance of his eye, catch the glories of the scene before him, and by a stroke of his pencil, represent them in their happiest lights, but he could also look into the human heart, and detect its various workings in the modification of the passions, and the formation of character. None of our poets, except Shakespeare, possessed in so eminent a degree that inagic of genius by which human beings start from the canvass in the attributes and forms of real life, and none of them, except that divinity of poets, has bequeathed to posterity so many portraits of such exquisite truth of resemblance, and of such perfect finish. He is endow ed with a sensibility of spirit that can rise into the sublime, or luxuriate amid the beautiful, or melt with the tender; but its predominant bias is for the humorous, and it is there that its energies are put forth in the consciousness of strength. He loves to watch the progressive beauties of the morning, or to contemplate the calm majesty of the sunset, or, with tumultuous feelings, to look upon the terrors of the tempestuous ocean, or to kindle into enthusiasm at an exertion of lofty virtue; yet he is fonder of merriment than profound emotion, and he wantons in the ludicrous, and cannot quit it till he has fatigued both himself and his reader with laughter. As humour is seldom found among the more polished classes of society, his subjects and characters are generally drawn from the lower or the middle ranks; and he is more at home in describing the Wife of Bath, or the Miller in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, than he should be in a portrait of Princes or Emperors, or, greater than either, men of virtue and genius. He has so generalized nature, as to make each of his characters stand as the representative of a great class, though he possesses a complete individuality. Thus the broad and often indelicate humour of the Wife of Bath, her wandering from house to house in pursuit of idle amusement, her gossipings, her love of conquest, and her address in the attainment of it, and her usurpation of absolute dominion when she has obtained it, are equally applicable to women of the same description in Greece in the days of Aristophanes, and in England in the age of our poet. The creations of his imagination are beings of the same flesh and blood, and spirit, with ourselves; and, in the perusal of his works, we always feel that we are ainid men and women exactly such as we see around us in our intercourse with the world. He not unfrequent ly exhibits scenes over which delicacy would throw a veil, yet in language so simple, that he hardly seems to be conscious that he is saying what ought not to be said. Chaucer was born early in the fourteenth century, and died in the year 1400, at the age of seventy-two. Europe had then seen few specimens of good vernacular poetry, with the exception of Italy, which had had the honour of producing Dante, and Petrarca, and Boccacio, and was even then enriched with the sublime Inferno, and the elegant sonnets of the Lover of Laura, and the inimitable humour of the Decamerone. From this last work our poet seems to have borrowed the idea of his Canterbury Tales. This is his great work, and concerning it we shall say a few words, and make some extracts from it, in corroboration of our opinions. It is, like the Arabian Nights Entertainments and the Decamerone, a series of unconnected tales, formed into one whole by the medium of an interesting drama. A number of pilgrims meet at an inn in London, before they set out on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to visit the shrine of Thomas à Becket. Of this company was Chaucer himself, and the landlord of the hostel, a man of some humour, who offers to accompany them, and makes a proposal, that each pilgrim should by the way tell two tales, and as many on their return; that he should be master of ceremonies, and judge of the merit of the stories; and that he who entertained his fellow pilgrims best should have a supper at their expence. "Lordinges, (quod he,) now herkeneth for the beste ; way, But take it nat, I pray you, in disdain; That is to sayn, that telleth in this cas And for to maken you the more mery, And who that wol my jugement withsay, Shal pay for alle we spenden by the way." This good humoured proposal is readily accepted, and the pilgrims set out on their journey in a beautiful spring morning, under the guidance of their merry host. The character of the pilgrims is described with an admirable truth of painting and force of humour. This part of the poem, the most original and the most difficult in execution, proves that the author possessed a piercing intellectual eye, an extensive knowledge of society, and a discrimination that could distinguish those delicate shades of character that escape the notice of the common observer, with the talent of painting whatever he saw in the true colouring and marked forms which nature herself exhibits. As a specimen, take the character of the Miller. "The miller was a stout carl for the nones, Ful bigge he was of braun, and eik of bones; That proved wel, for over all ther he came, gnarre, Ther n'as no dore, that he n'olde have of Or breke it at a renning with his hede. Upon the cop right of his nose he hade And yet he had a thomb of gold parde. toune." This mode of describing characters before they are introduced into action, is different from that followed by Shakespear and Homer, whose characters are known by their sentiments and actions, but in a poem in which they are rather narrators than actors, it was the only one left to the poet, and he has executed what he has undertaken in an admirable way. The description of the character is always suited to the sphere in which he VOL. II. moves, and the tale to the character. The Knight's tale is of love and chivalry; the Squire's of courts and magic; the Prioress's of sanctity and miracles; the Miller's, whose manners are not the purest, of "harlotrie ;" and the Wife of Bath, in her prologue, gives the character of her five husbands, and insinuates that she is determined to have a sixth with all due speed; and in all the rest the adaptation is equally perfect. Few of the tales in this work are of the author's own invention, but are either translations from the old romances, or have the chief incidents borrowed from them; yet are they narrated with such art, and there is such originality in his manner, and in the incidental remarks and the poetical ornaments, and frequently in additional incidents, that in his hands they may be said to become quite new. The Knight's Tale, which stands first in the volume, was originally a translation from the Theseida of Boclication; but when the author thought caccio, and intended for a separate pubof inserting it in the Canterbury Tales, by means of abridgment and compression, he shortened it, and greatly improved it. Theseus, king of Athens, after the conquest of the Amazons, and having brought home Hippolyte, the queen of these virgin warriors, whom he married, and her sister Emilie, made war on Thebes, which he took, and Palamon and Arcite, who were cousins, and of the royal line, were among the prisoners. They were confined in the same prison, from the windows of which they saw Emilie walking in the palace gardens, and both were enamoured of her. Arcite is released from prison by the interest of Perithous, the friend of Theseus, and is sent to Thebes with injunctions not to return on pain of death. After some years, however, he does return; and in disguise gains admittance at the palace, and is employed as a page of the chamber to Emilie. Meanwhile, Palamon escapes from prison by the favour of the gaoler, and conceals himself in a wood, where he accidentally meets Arcite, and the rivals engage in deadly combat, but are discovered by Theseus, who separates them, and commands that they should return at the end of fifty weeks, and each of them bring with him a hundred knights, who, headed by them, should enter the lists, and that he whose party was victorious, should obtain Emilie to wife. They meet, the conflict is described,-Palamon is made prisoner;-the victorious Arcite, for whom the Princess is destined, receives a mortal wound, of which he soon dies, and Palamon obtains the prize. Such is a short abstract of this tale. The country where the action is represented to have happened is ancient Greece, yet the poet has been guilty of so great an anachronism, as to talk of knights and squires, and to make the manners and the costume of the inhabitants entirely chivalrous. In this poem we hear of lists, and tilts, and tournaments, where they were unknown; but to counterbalance this, the principles of human nature are never violated; and the hopes, and the fears, and the jealousies of love, are faithfully delineated; and it contains much rich and beautiful poetry. Female beauty has seldom been painted with a more sunlight pencil than that of Emilie walking abroad in a May morning, as fresh, and fair, and pure, as that delightful season of the day and year. "Thus passeth yere by yere, and day Till it fell ones in a morwe of May (For with the rose colour strof hire hewe; She gathereth floures, partie white and red, Of the same character is the passage in which the wretchedness of Arcite, pining in the hopelessness of love, is described with such power and ef fect. And the following sketch of morning. "The besy larke, the messager of day, Saleweth in hire song the morwe gray; And firy Phebus riseth up so bright, That all the orient laugheth of the sight, And with his stremes drieth in the grevos The silver dropes, hanging on the leves." But above all, the wonderful de scription of the temple of Mars. "First on the wall was painted a forest, In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best, With knotty knarry barren trees old And dounward from an hill under a bent entree Was long and strete, and gastly for to see. cerne. The dore was all of athamant eterne. Every piler the temple to sustene "Ther saw I first the derke imagining |