emerged into the broad moonlight, fully prepared to hear my fate from the lips of the passers-by.

Spare me, my beloved friend, the painful recital of all that I was doomed to endure. The women often expressed the deepest sympathy for me a sympathy not less piercing to my soul than the scoffs of the young people, and the proud contempt of the men, particularly of the more corpulent, who threw an ample shadow before them. A fair and beauteous maiden, apparently accompanied by her parents, who gravely kept looking straight before them, chanced to cast a beaming glance on me; but was evidently startled at perceiving that I was without a shadow, and hiding her lovely face in her veil, and holding down her head, passed silently on.

This was past all endurance. Tears streamed from my eyes; and with a heart pierced through and through, I once more took refuge in the shade. I leant on the houses for support, and reached home at a late hour, worn out with fatigue.

I passed a sleepless night. My first care the following morning was to devise some means of discovering the man in the gray cloak. Perhaps I may succeed in finding him; and how fortunate it were if he should be as ill satisfied with his bargain as I am with mine!

I desired Bendel to be sent for, who seemed to possess some tact and ability. I minutely described to him the individual who possessed a treasure without which life itself was rendered a burden to me. I mentioned the time and place at which I had seen him, named all the persons who were present, and concluded with the following directions: He was to inquire for a Dollond's telescope, a Turkey carpet interwoven with gold, a marquee, and, finally, for some black steeds the history, without entering into particulars, of all these being singularly connected with the mysterious character who seemed to pass unnoticed by every one, but whose appearance had destroyed the peace and happiness of my life.

As I spoke I produced as much gold as I could hold in my two hands, and added jewels and precious stones of still greater value. "Bendel," said I, "this smooths many a path, and renders that easy which seems almost impossible. Be not sparing of it, for I am not so; but go, and rejoice thy master with intelligence on which depend all his hopes."

He departed, and returned late and melancholy. None of

Mr. John's servants, none of his guests (and Bendel had spoken to them all) had the slightest recollection of the man in the gray cloak. The new telescope was still there, but no one knew how it had come; and the tent and Turkey carpet were still stretched out on the hill. The servants boasted of their master's wealth; but no one seemed to know by what means he had become possessed of these newly acquired luxuries. He was gratified; and it gave him no concern to be ignorant how they had come to him. The black coursers which had been mounted on that day were in the stables of the young gentlemen of the party, who admired them as the munificent present of Mr. John.

Such was the information I gained from Bendel's detailed account; but, in spite of this unsatisfactory result, his zeal and prudence deserved and received my commendation. In a gloomy mood, I made him a sign to withdraw.

"I have, sir," he continued, "laid before you all the information in my power relative to the subject of the most importance to you. I have now a message to deliver which I received early this morning from a person at the gate, as I was proceeding to execute the commission in which I have so unfortunately failed. The man's words were precisely these: Tell your master, Peter Schlemihl, he will not see me here again. I am going to cross the sea; a favorable wind now calls all the passengers on board; but in a year and a day I shall have the honor of paying him a visit; when, in all probability, I shall have a proposal to make to him of a very agreeable nature. Commend me to him most respectfully, with many thanks.' I inquired his name; but he said you would remember him.”

"What sort of a person was he?" cried I, in great emotion; and Bendel described the man in the gray coat feature by feature, word for word; in short, the very individual in search of whom he had been sent. "How unfortunate!" cried I, bitterly; "it was himself." Scales, as it were, fell from Bendel's eyes. "Yes, it was he," cried he, " undoubtedly it was he; and fool, madman, that I was, I did not recognize him-I did not, and have betrayed my master!" He then broke out into a torrent of self-reproach; and his distress really excited my compassion. I endeavored to console him, repeatedly assuring him that I entertained no doubt of his fidelity; and dispatched him immediately to the wharf, to discover, if possible, some trace of the extraordinary being. But on that very morning many ves

sels which had been detained in port by contrary winds had set sail, all bound to different parts of the globe; and the gray man had disappeared like a shadow.

LORD CASTLEREAGH.

BY LORD BROUGHAM.

[HENRY PETER BROUGHAM, lawyer, agitator, M.P., lord chancellor, and miscellaneous writer, was grandnephew of Robertson the historian; born at Edinburgh in 1778, and died in 1868. He studied at Edinburgh University. He was one of the founders (in 1802) and a voluminous contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and wrote the famous criticism on Byron's " Hours of Idleness," which provoked "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." Always a Liberal, he fought the battles of that party in and out of Parliament with endless zeal and vigor for the long generation of its exclusion from power by the French Revolution; and plead tirelessly for political and legal reform, abolition of slavery, popular education, and the humanization of the laws. He was counsel for Queen Caroline in 1820 against George IV., and was a chief agent in carrying the Reform Bill of 1832. He was lord chancellor 1830-1834. His writings cover almost all possible subjects. The best are his biographical sketches of "Statesmen of the Time of George III.," and "Men of Letters and Science." His speeches were also collected, and he wrote an autobiography.]

OF THE "safe and middling men" described jocularly by Mr. Canning as "meaning very little, nor meaning that little well," Lord Castlereagh was, in some respects, the least inconsiderable. His capacity was greatly underrated from the poverty of his discourse; and his ideas passed for much less than they were worth, from the habitual obscurity of his expressions. But he was far above the bulk of his colleagues in abilities; and none of them all, except Lord St. Vincent, with whom he was officially connected only for a short time, exercised so large an influence over the fortunes of their country. Indeed, scarce any man of any party bore a more important place in public affairs, or occupies a larger space in the history of his times.

Few men of more limited capacity or more meager acquirements than Lord Castlereagh possessed, had before his time ever risen to any station of eminence in our free country ; fewer still have long retained it in a state where mere court intrigue and princely favor have so little to do with men's advancement. But we have lived to see persons of even more obscure merit than Lord Castlereagh rise to equal station in

this country. Of sober and industrious habits, and become possessed of businesslike talents by long experience, he was a person of the most commonplace abilities. He had a reasonable quickness of apprehension and clearness of understanding, but nothing brilliant or in any way admirable marked either his conceptions or his elocution. Nay, to judge of his intellect by his eloquence, we should certainly have formed a very unfair estimate of its perspicacity. For, though it was hardly possible to underrate its extent or comprehensiveness, it was very far from being confused and perplexed in the proportion of his sentences; and the listener who knew how distinctly the speaker could form his plans, and how clearly his ideas were known to himself, might, comparing small things with great, be reminded of the prodigious contrast between the distinctness of Oliver Cromwell's understanding and the hopeless confusion and obscurity of his speech. No man, besides, ever attained the station of a regular debater in our Parliament with such an entire want of all classical accomplishment, and indeed of all literary provision whatsoever. While he never showed the least symptom of an information extending beyond the more recent volumes of the Parliamentary Debates, or possibly the files of the newspapers only, his diction set all imitation, perhaps all description, at defiance. It was with some an amusement to beguile the tedious hours of their unavoidable attendance upon the poor, tawdry, raveled thread of his sorry discourse, to collect a kind of ana from the fragments of mixed, incongruous, and disjointed images that frequently appeared in it. "The features of the clause"-"the ignorant impatience of the relaxation of taxation"-"sets of circumstances coming up and circumstances going down" "men turning their backs upon themselves" "the honorable and learned gentleman's wedge getting into the loyal feelings of the manufacturing classes"-"the constitutional principle wound up in the bowels of the monarchical principle"-"the Herculean labor of the honorable and learned member, who will find himself quite disappointed when he has at last brought forth his Herules" (by a slight confounding of the mother's labor which produced that hero, with his own exploits which gained him Immortality)- these are but a few, and not the richest samples, by any means, of a rhetoric which often baffled alike the gravity of the treasury bench and the art of the reporter, and left the wondering audience at a loss to conjecture how any one could

VOL. XXI. — 14

ever exist, endowed with humbler pretensions to the name of

orator.

Wherefore, when the Tory party, "having a devil," preferred him to Mr. Canning for their leader, all men naturally expected that he would entirely fail to command even the attendance of the house while he addressed it; and that the benches, empty during his time, would only be replenished when his highly gifted competitor rose. They were greatly deceived; they underrated the effect of place and power; they forgot that the representative of a government speaks "as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." But they also forgot that Lord Castlereagh had some qualities well fitted to conciliate favor, and even to provoke admiration, in the absence of everything like eloquence. He was a bold and fearless man; the very courage with which he exposed himself unabashed to the most critical audience in the world, while incapable of uttering two sentences of anything but the meanest matter, in the most wretched language; the gallantry with which he faced the greatest difficulties of a question; the unflinching perseverance with which he went through a whole subject, leaving untouched not one of its points, whether he could grapple with it or not, and not one of the adverse arguments, however forcibly and felicitously they had been urged, neither daunted by recollecting the impression just made by his antagonist's brilliant display, nor damped by consciousness of the very rags in which he now presented himself-all this made him upon the whole rather a favorite with the audience whose patience he was taxing mercilessly, and whose gravity he ever and anon put to a very severe trial. Nor can any one have forgotten the kind of pride that mantled on the fronts of the Tory phalanx, when, after being overwhelmed with the powerful fire of the Whig opposition, or galled by the fierce denunciations of the Mountain, or harassed by the splendid displays of Mr. Canning, their chosen leader stood forth, and presenting the graces of his eminently patrician figure, flung open his coat, displayed an azure ribbon traversing a snow-white chest, and declared "his high satisfaction that he could now meet the charges against him face to face, and repel with indignation all that his adversaries were bold and rash enough to advance."

Such he was in debate; in council he certainly had far more resources. He possessed a considerable fund of plain sense not to be misled by any refinement of speculation, or