Keeper of the King's Conscience, but to reach the bliss. of having in custody so precious a moral sense as that, the aspirant has often to go through a preliminary sacrifice of his own. Bacon had done this without much inward disquiet, and why should not Charles Yorke? Charles, however, was a man of stainless honor as well as splendid talents, and his political connection was with the Rockingham whigs. When Lord Camden, the chancellor in possession, a man who had space in his heart not only for the king's conscience but for a larger one of his own, delivered his celebrated tirade against his colleagues, for their foolish and tyrannical course in American affairs, the Chatham and Rockingham whigs took the ground that there could not be found an eminent lawyer in England to take Lord Camden's place, should the administration dismiss him for his honesty and patriotism; and they denounced beforehand the man who should accept the office as a wretch lost to all shame and self-respect, and a fit object for the scorn of the lowest of mankind. This style of rhetoric, coming from Yorke's own political friends, sorely scared away his ambition; and therefore when Camden was dismissed, and the chancellorship offered to Yorke, he declined the perilous honor he so desired to clutch. The king, however, was determined to have his soul, and obtained it. At a private audience, Yorke

was cajoled into the belief that he could accept the office without any sacrifice of principle, — the entreaties and promises of the king admirably co-operating with his own ravenous hunger for the place to produce such a hallucination in his mind. With the seals in his carriage he drove to his brother's house, where a few prominent whigs had an informal meeting, and to the amazement of them all informed them that he had accepted Lord Camden's office; and he was proceeding to justify his conduct, when he was interrupted by a torrent of reproaches, in which his brother hotly joined, and found himself suddenly transferred from the class of honest men into the class of rats, apostates, and liberticides. Had Yorke possessed the firmness of character proper to his peculiar position, he would have had the usual consolation of trading politicians. Smiling blandly at the railings of the "outs," he would have gone to receive the congratulations of the "ins"; and, possessed of the most honorable and lucrative office in the gift of the crown, would have despised all that the polite scorn of Rockingham and the thundering denunciation of Chatham could urge against him, as he sat on his long-sought and dearly earned woolsack. But Yorke was not a man of such hardy, constitutional, imperturbable effrontery. Shocked and grieved in his inmost soul, he went to his home, passed the night in an

agony of shame, fell desperately sick, and on the third day of his new honors died, it is supposed, by his own hand.

We might extend these remarks to descriptions of other soul-sales, where the value received is notoriety, or fame, or some other phantom having no visible embodiment; but we must conclude. Throughout our observations we have preserved a temper so cool and reasonable, and have traversed regions sacred to rhetorical horse-racing with a gait so staid and mercantile, that we think we have really earned the right to be a little moral at the end. This right, however, we waive, and prefer that the facts and principles we have stated should be tried by their intrinsic merits, without being clouded with any vapors of sensibility. Our own opinion, after a candid examination of the whole matter, is decidedly against the common belief, that there is anything in the world which is equivalent in worth to the value of a soul; and we accordingly believe that all sales, from the commencement of creation to the present enlightened period, have been mistakes. The balance of popular authority, however, is so much against us that we hold the opinion with becoming modesty; and the utmost that we can hope from the publication of this discourse is to furnish maxims which may guide sellers into bargains relatively good. The

dignity of human nature demands that a stop be put to transactions where souls are absolutely thrown away for less than thirty pieces of silver; and we hope at least that there will be established among mankind an esprit de corps, by the healthy operation of which no man will disgrace himself by cutting under the market price, and selling his selfhood for less than its fair commercial value, as established by Act of Congress.

THE TRICKS OF IMAGINATION.

THERE is a power in the human mind, specially indicated in the productions of dramatic genius, by which the mind itself parts, for the time, with its own individuality, informs an imagined character, works under the limitations of the new person it creatively animates, and feels, thinks, and wills from thence. When the power is possessed in its greatest force and flexibility, as in Shakespeare, this movement of Protean intelligence passes rapidly from one character to another, the mind of the creator slipping readily into different moulds, now animating Hamlet, now the grave-digger who "chaffs" him, and going from one to the other, or returning to its own native form, with an alertness which fills every thoughtful critic's mind with as much amazement as admiration. The wonder is, not so much how the poet gets into another nature as how he gets out; not that he can be Lear at one moment, but that he can be the Fool the next; not that he possesses, but that he is not possessed. For Shakespeare, unlike