the reverse of what ought, in justice, to have done either!'-This exclamation is undoubtedly true;-and from all I have ever seen I fully conincide with my father's belief. I heard him once say I do believe that there never were but two men whom Eveline would have thought worthy of being loved-one still lives, it is Franklin-and the other was Milton.' I agree with him that she might have become attached to such a man as Franklin Milton strikes me as wanting blandness of disposition-but (you will think me very fantastic, dear Edward, but recollect, you begged me to be most minute) I think such a being as, it might be supposed, could be compounded of the best qualities of Franklin and Las Casas, would be nearer the mark than all.

My mother died, as you know, while I was still quite young-and all the recollections of my mental cultivation apply to Aunt Eveline. Slight, indeed, and smattering, is the all I know when I look at her stores of knowledge, which I have had the opportunities of years to contemplate. She avoided, indeed, purposely, many of the stronger and more abstruse studies, for me, which she had herself pursued. Still, even in what she did lead me to, I had ample means of seeing the qualities of clearness, strength, delicacy, and rapidity by which her mind is distinguished ;-yet all these powers, and the acquisitions they had gained for her, were wholly untinged with the slightest touch of pedantry or display.

"But what I value far more than all this is the active excellence of her warm and admirable heart. Oh Edward, if ever you find one trace of sympathy with suffering, or of desire to relieve it, in me, you will owe it to that invaluable woman. I will not speak of the manner in which she devoted her whole life to my parents and myself-or of the love she bore them, and still, thank Heaven, bears to me. I allude now to her kindness, active and real, to the poor. Many and many is the bitter day in winter that I

have known this model of practical good feeling walk out through the snow, and go to the cottage of some sick or suffering villager, who was poor. There have I seen her administer the relief and comforts of medicine, food, religious advice and prayer, or kind and cheerful conversation, as the occasion required. Nothing, indeed, could be more beautiful, or tend more-I feel it now-to teach us what real charity is, than to hear Aunt Eveline talk with the poor. She did not assume interest in their humble matters, as many do,—she felt it ;-she listened to obtain the information she needed, with the utmost patience; she questioned them with clearness, brevity, and kindness mingled; she gave them ber advice in a manner which almost made the people believe the ideas she suggested had originally arisen in their own minds.

"I recollect a remarkable instance of all these qualities. We were caught in a snow-storm one very severe January; we took shelter in a hovel which stood in the corner of a field, close to the road. There we found an old carpenter of the village, who said he was delighted to meet kind Mistress Eveline,' as the elder people always called her, as he had hit, he thought, on a mechanical improvement in one of the tools of his trade, which he longed to explain to her. Off he set into a long explanation, of which I understood not one word, but which Aunt Eveline went along with perfectly. When the old man had been in the full swing of his discourse about a quarter of an hour, the carriage arrived to bring us home, as it had been known which way we had gone. knew my aunt had a severe cold, and I pressed her to go at once. No, she said, she must hear out old Christopher's plan, which seemed to her very ingenious. The conversation lasted half an hour more, about the last three minutes of which she occupied in giving her opinion of the invention. My father afterwards got her to confess that she had given Christopher the one idea which had made all the rest

I

Look on me thus, when hollow Praise
Hath made the weary pine,
For one true tone of other days,

One glance of love like thine!

Look on me thus, when sudden glee
Bears my quick heart along,
On wings that struggle to be free
As bursts of skylark song.

In vain, in vain!-too soon are felt The wounds they cannot flee; Better in child-like tears to melt, Pouring my soul on thee!

Sweet face, that o'er my childhood shone,
Whence is thy power of change,

Thus, ever shadowing back my own,
The rapid and the strange?

Whence are they charm'd-those earnest eyes?

I know the mystery well!
In my own trembling bosom lies
The Spirit of the Spell.

Of Memory, Conscience, Love, 'tis born-
Oh! change no longer, Thou!
Forever be the blessing worn
On thy pure thoughtful brow!

UNTIL my twenty-seventh year I resided in the small cathedral town of Cr in which I was born. My parents-especially my mother-were of a serious cast. She had been educated as a Quaker, but following her own notions as to religion, she in the latter part of her life became attached to the tenets of that sect known by the name of Moravians, and last of all to those which, when held in connexion with the ritual of the church. of England, are termed Evangelical;" or, in dissent from it, "Methodistical."

She was warm and fanciful in her devotional practice; for which the belief as to the palpable and plenary influence of the Holy Spirit upon the human mind, in which she was bred, may help to account. Of these aspirations I, an ardent and sensitive boy, soon learned to partake. My mind was never naturally prone to vice; and my imagination, though forward, was pure. I was brought up by my excellent parents in the practice of virtue; and I loved it. With an outward conduct thus guaranteeing inward persuasions-with professions borne out by an unquestioned and pure, if not altogether unostentatious piety of behavior, what wonder that I soon became a distinguished votary of the peculiar principles to which I had attached myself. It is difficult for a young man to know himself looked up to-be the cause what it may-without his feelings and his conduct being affected by

such homage. Nature had endowed me, if not with eloquence, at least with considerable fluency of speech; and as my natural diffidence-which at first was great-wore away, whether by extempore prayer or seasonable exhortation, the effects I produced exceeded those, the fruits of zeal, of those about me. I became admired as one more than usually gifted, and was gradually exalted into a leader. The occasional tendency to gloom and nervous irritability to which my temperament inclined me, was yet only marked enough to throw no unbecoming seriousness and gravity into the features of so young an apostle. It was strange to see persons of all ages and both sexes admiring at the innate seriousness of so early a preacher, and owning the sometimes really fervid earnestness of my appeals, my warnings or my denunciations. I began more and more to feel myself in a station above that of my fellows, and that I had now a character to sustain before the eyes of men. Young as I was, could it well have been otherwise?

Let me however speak the truth. Spiritual pride at last crept upon me. Devotion by insensible degrees became tainted with self, and the image of God was, I fear, sometimes forgotten for that of his frail and unworthy creature. True it was, I still, without slackening, spoke comfort to the ear of suffering or repentant sin-I still exhorted the weak and strengthened the strong. I still warn

ed the besotted in corruption that the fruits of vice, blossom as she will, are but like those of the shores of the Dead Sea, seeming gay, but only emptiness and bitter ashes. But, alas! the bearer of the blessed message spoke as if the worm that bore, could add grace to the tidings he conveyed to his fellow worm. I was got upon a precipice, but knew it not-that of self-worship and conceit; the worst creature-idolatry. It was bitterly revealed to me at last.

About the year 1790, at the Assizes for the county of which the town of Cr is the county town, was tried and convicted a wretch guilty of one of the most horrible murders upon record. He was a young man, probably (for he knew not his own years) of about twenty-two years of age. One of those wandering and unsettled creatures, who seem to be driven from place to place, they know not why. Without home; without name; without companion; without sympathy; without sense. Hearthless, friendless, idealess, almost soul-less! and so ignorant, as not even to seem to know whether he had ever heard of a Redeemer, or seen his written Word. It was on a stormy Christmas eve, when he begged shelter in the hut of an old man, whose office it was to regulate the transit of conveyances upon the road of a great mining establishment in the neighborhood. The old man had received him, and shared with him his humble cheer and his humble bed; for on that night the wind blew, and the sleet drove, after a manner that would have made it a crime to have turned a stranger dog to the door. The next day the poor old creature was found dead in his hut-his brains beaten out with an old iron implement which he used-and his little furniture rifled and in confusion. The wretch had murdered him for the supposed hoard of a few shillings. The snow, from which he afforded his murderer shelter, had drifted in at the door, which the miscreant, when he fled, had left open, and was frozen red with the blood of his victim. But it betrayed

Up to the hour of condemnation, he remained reckless as the windunrepenting as the flint-venomous as the blind-worm. With that deep and horrible cunning which is so often united to unprincipled ignorance, he had almost involved in his fate another vagrant with whom he had chanced to consort, and to whom he had disposed of some of the blood-bought spoils. The circumstantial evidence was so involved and interwoven, that the jury, after long and obvious hesitation as to the latter, found both guilty; and the terrible sentence of death, within forty-eight hours, was passed upon both. The culprit bore it without much outward emotion; but when taken from the dock, his companion, infuriated by despair and grief, found means to level a violent blow at the head of his miserable and selfish betrayer, which long deprived the wretch of sense and motion, and, for some time, was thought to have anticipated the executioner. Would it had done so ! But let me do my duty as I ought-let me repress the horror which one scene of this dreadful drama never fails to throw over my spirit-that I may tell my story as a man-and my confession at least be clear.

When the felon awoke out of the death-like trance into which this assault had thrown him, his hardihood was gone; and he was reconveyed to the cell, in which he was destined agonizingly to struggle out his last hideous and distorted hours, in a state of abject horror which cannot be described. He who felt nothing-knew nothing-had now his eyes opened with terrible clearness to one object— the livid phantasma of a strangling death. All the rest was convulsive despair and darkness. Thought shudders at it--but let me go on.

The worthy clergyman, whose par