and he sorely trembled to think that some demon, peradventure Sathan himself, had incorporated himself in that now loathed form, to receive his plight and so delude and win his sinful soul. Thenceforward his gaysome heart and right merry cheer did altogether fail him; he 'gan to wail and dump, shunning converse of man, and in lonesome corners would paddle his neck with his hand, saying he could lay his finger in the wound, as if himself had been hanged; and in this wise gat worse and worse, until at the last he went stark distraught and was mewed up in the Spittal for the crazed, where, some three or four weeks thereafter, he gave up the ghost in great wildness and agony of soul." H.

POETRY.

The Editor, though unauthorized to name the author of the following lines, ventures to announce their having been written by Professor EVERITT, of America, and conceives that they do no discredit to that gentleman's respectable name.

DIRGE OF ALARIC, THE VISIGOTH,

Who stormed and spoiled the city of Rome, and was afterwards buried in the channel of the river Busentius, the water of which had been diverted from its course that the body might be interred.

WHEN I am dead, no pageant train

Shall waste their sorrows at my bier,
Nor worthless poinp of homage vain
Stain it with hypocritic tear;
For I will die as I did live,
Nor take the boon I cannot give.
Ye shall not raise a marble bust

Upon the spot where I repose;
Ye shall not fawn before my dust,
In hollow circumstance of woes:
Nor sculptured clay, with lying breath,
Insult the clay that moulds beneath.
Ye shall not pile with servile toil
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil

Lay down the wreck of Power to rest;
Where man can boast that he has trod
On him, that was "the scourge of God."
But ye the mountain stream shall turn,
And lay its secret channel bare,
And hollow, for your sovereign's urn,
A resting-place for ever there:
Then bid its everlasting springs
Flow back upon the King of Kings;
And never be the secret said,
Until the deep give up his head.

My gold and silver ye shall fling

Back to the clods, that gave them birth ;

The captured crowns of many a king,

The ransom of a conquer'd earth;

For e'en though dead will I control
The trophies of the capitol.

But when, beneath the mountain-tide,

Ye've laid your monarch down to rot,

Ye shall not rear upon its side

Pillar nor mound to mark the spot;

For long enough the world has shook
Beneath the terrors of my look;
And now that I have run my race,
The astonish'd realms shall rest a space.
My course was like the river deep,

And from the northern hills I burst,
Across the world in wrath to sweep,
And where I went the spot was cursed,
Nor blade of grass again was seen
Where Alaric and his hosts had been.
See how their haughty barriers fail
Beneath the terror of the Goth,
Their iron-breasted legions quail
Before my ruthless sabaoth,
And low the Queen of empires kneels,
And grovels at my chariot-wheels.
Not for myself did I ascend

In judgment my triumphal car;
'Twas God alone on high did send
The avenging Scythian to the war,
To shake abroad, with iron hand,
The appointed scourge of his command.
With iron hand that scourge I rear'd
O'er guilty king and guilty realm,
Destruction was the ship I steer'd,

And Vengeance sat upon the helm ;
When launch'd in fury on the flood
I plough'd my way through seas of blood,
And in the stream their hearts had spilt
Wash'd out the long arrears of guilt.

Across the everlasting Alp

I pour'd the torrent of my powers,
And feeble Cæsars shriek'd for help

In vain within their seven-hill'd towers;
I quench'd in blood the brightest gem
That glitter'd in their diadem,
And struck a darker deeper die
In the purple of their majesty,
And bade my northern banners shine
Upon the conquer'd Palatine.

My course is run, my errand done,
go to Him from whom I came;

But never yet shall set the sun

Of glory that adorns my name;
And Roman hearts shall fong be sick,
When men shall think of Alaric.
My course is ruu, my errand done-
But darker ministers of late
Impatient round the eternal throne

And in the caves of vengeance wait,
And soon mankind shall blench away
Before the name of Attila.

ARCACHON, IN THE LANDES.

A RAGE for travelling, in all its various modifications, having become, as it were, a component part of English character, it is no wonder that so few spots of this habitable globe are unexplored or undescribed. The thirst of novelty and passion for research have flooded the world like another deluge, and left scarcely a mountain-top inviolate for the ark of a solitary voyager like me to rest on.

It was my lot to be born in a bog, or at least very close upon its borders, where the hoarse gusts of the west wind swept gloomily over a trackless waste, and the only object in perspective was a naked hill, surmounted by a crumbling ruin, and haunted by associations of vague and romantic wildness. I may have thus imbibed from early impression a passion for the less bustling scenes of life, and a hatred of that common-place parade of sight-seeing frivolity, against which one stumbles at every step in cities, great or small.

Epris de la campagne, et l'aimant en poëte,

Je ne lui demandois qu'un desert pour retraite,

Pour

compagnons, des bois, des oiseaux, et des fleurs, Je l'aimois, je l'aimois jusque dans ses horreurs.

It is therefore that I am the very worst of town-going Ciceroni. I never, literally never, pry into palaces, have but little pleasure in a chamber of audience, and never once in my existence was guilty of the indecorum of falling asleep during the debates of a consistory ecclesiastic. But as for winding through a forest, treading a mountain-path, trudging over a moor, or any such uncourtly exercise, I will allow myself to be backed against any one, from the highest of the Himalaya range to the swampiest of the Lincolnshire fens. I had always an especial envy of those whose good fortune enabled them to explore the mysteries of the Desert; the driver Hassan, who saw, and his poet Collins, whose fine mind imagined, the wonders of those trackless wastes; travellers of many a name and nation, who have delighted the world by their relations of those sublimely desolate regions; but above all, the heavenfavoured Colabah, who, wandering over the desert of Aden in search of his lost camel, found himself suddenly at the gates of the celebrated city and garden of Irem, made by King Shedad of the giant tribe of Ad, "the like whereof hath not been erected in the land," and preserved for countless centuries invisible to the common race of men, but sometimes miraculously exposed to the gazing eyes of a chosen believer.†

I

Such were the scenes that I panted to plunge into; but, placed by destiny in remote seclusion from them, I have not yet been allowed to moralize, like Volney, amidst the mouldering monuments of Tadmor, or repose my wearied limbs under the delicious foliage of its grove of palms. But I have availed myself of every domestic recompense. have wandered lonely over Salisbury Plain-lost myself in the level wilderness of the Curragh of Kildare-passed days in the swampy solitudes of the Aberdeenshire moors, with no object of life before my eyes but the feathered tenants against whom I waged war, and no

The Koran, chap. 89.

+ For the adventure of Colabah see d'Herbelot, Bih. Orient. p. 51.

sound of animated thing to greet me, but the crowing of the blackcock, the wild screams of the bittern, or the shriek of the snipes, as they fled from my intrusive steps. I had read of The Landes, or Deserts of Gascony; of their vast pine forests, their uncultured wastes, and moving wonders-the dunes, or travelling sand-hills, and the rude inhabitants clothed in sheep-skins, and stalking on with Patagonian strides, on stilts that raise them to a level with the topmost branches of the trees.

Many vague reflections flitted across my brain, as I took to the road which led in the direction of the Landes. The remote and unfixed antiquity of the town behind me, with its many political vicissitudes and intimate concern with English recollections, all floated together in a bewildering chaos; and I felt, in spite of myself, a national pride and a sort of national inheritance in the place. I then began to look into futurity with about as much rational result as when I pried into the past. From antiquity I wandered to imagination. Generations to come passed before me more rapidly than those which were gone. Empires and nations were upset in quick succession. The town on which I had been speculating was crumbling in decay. The inhabitants were dead-the buildings fallen-the shipping wasted. Volcanoes, deluges, and earthquakes had all been in full play; and, centuries in advance, I had placed myself amidst the desolation-when I was recalled to real sensation by the nature of the soil on which I trod. There never was a more irrefragable touch of the bathos. I was in a moment let down from my sublimities, by the simple and undignified process of the sand working into my shoes! I was in fact in the Landes-the desert-the wilderness the Gallia Sabulosa, if the ghost of Cæsar and the geographers will pardon me the new-made division.

There can be little doubt that this waste tract was once the bed of the sea. So say both theory and tradition. But as to the time of its receding we are deficient in data on which to build, as the waters have left no trace, and history furnishes no record. Extensive pine-woods nearly cover this ocean of sand. Here and there, a hut or a hamlet forms the centre of a patch of green, on which troops of ragged sheep or goats are seen to browse, attended by a being mounted on high stilts, (to keep him out of the sands, which are wet in winter and burning in summer,) covered with a clothing of skins, and looking less like a man than a sheep. The first days of my entering these forlorn and monotonous regions were marked with adventures of no common interest; but these are too long for insertion here, and may possibly form the subject of a regular narration hereafter.

The district of Arcachon, including the little town of La Teste, its capital, is probably one of the most perfect retirements in any part of civilized Europe. Standing on the remote and uncultured border of the Bay of Biscay, it is utterly out of the way of communication with the world; and its name is never heard beyond the edges of the forestwhich surrounds it, except when a maritime report is given of some unhappy vessel beat to pieces by the breakers, which are eternally lashing the desolate sands of its beach. La Teste is very rarely ornamented with the appearance of a stranger: the unbroken intercourse of its inhabitants with one another, gives them that sameness of thought and similarity of expression, which is remarked so often between man

and wife, sufficiently unfashionable to live much together. Their views, both physical and moral, may be said to be bounded on three sides by desert, and on the fourth by the wide-stretching sea. They are either fishermen, or dealers in the products of the pine-woods; and a few leagues, by land or water, seem the limits of their intelligence. The aspect of the place is wild and flat, yet not unpleasing. At that period of the day when the tide is full in, it is delightful to gaze on the placid lake of Arcachon, for such is the name of the horse-shoe excavation, on the deepest ridge of which the town is built. But when the waves recede, and for three miles out nothing is to be seen but a sedgy exposure, it is not easy to imagine a more unattractive landscape. It has none of the sublimities of ocean, for the great Biscayan Gulf is too far out to be visible from this part of the shore. There is, however, one remarkable feature in the prospect, which is not without beautythe accumulation of those sand-heaps far to the right of the lake, which shine in the sun-beams with a dazzling brilliancy, and for a parallel to which we must travel to another portion of the globe. On the left stretches a thick forest, close up to which the waves reach at high tide, when a long circuit must be taken to approach it; but the strand at low water is quite uncovered, and permits those who love the shady solitudes of the wood to reach them by a walk of about half a league.

Separating myself and my adventures (which are, as I before hinted, reserved for another occasion) from the scene around me, I must beg the reader to place himself beside me, in the heart of the forest, and admire the beautiful and simple marble monument erected by the present King of France to the memory of Monsieur Brumontier, the man who, after all the baffled efforts of his predecessors to stop the progress of those moving sand-hills, the fabled accessories of which were more terrible than the winged dragon of Triptolemus, or the flying-horse of Michael Scot, succeeded in giving freedom to the soil and hope to the inhabitants, by the simple expedient of planting those woods, in the heart of which his memory is thus fittingly enshrined. But by far the greatest curiosity of these wilds, and one, indeed, of the greatest any where, is the Chapel of St. Thomas Iliricus, originally built by the contributions of the fishermen of those parts, and dedicated to the Virgin, in gratitude for a miraculous favour conferred upon their neighbourhood in the lifetime of the saint, and somewhat about the year 1521, if the traditionary records of the old people (the only chronicle of the La Testians) be a sufficiently accurate voucher for the date. The venerable Thomas was celebrated, in his time, as a great preacher, and for having exerted his uncommon eloquence against the heretical encroachments, then creeping in upon religion in France; and after sermonizing and anathematizing for some time to little purpose-for the impious work of enlightening the human mind gained ground in spite of his forensic hostility, he resolved on withdrawing from the world, before the vexatious ripening of intellect, which was then in the bud, should overpower, in its blossoming odour, the fragrance of his own sanctity. He, in pursuance of this sage and saintly resolution, turned his steps towards the west.

"The world was all before him where to choose,"