place in society. The uncertainty that hangs about the circumstances assorts strangely with the wild character of the man.

It appears he was tried by the Dutch authorities at the Cape, and acquitted. He then took a passage in a French vessel to Bombay, but the Vansittart, in which he had come from England to the Cape, had arrived in India before him; information had been given to the British authorities, charging Roche with Ferguson's murder; and Roche was arrested as soon as he landed. He urged his right to be discharged, or at least bailed, on the grounds that there was not sufficient evidence against him; that he had been already acquitted; and that as the offence, if any, was committed out of the British dominions he could only be tried by special commission, and it was uncertain whether the Crown would issue one or not, or if the Crown did grant a commission, when or where it would sit. He argued his own case with the skill of a practised lawyer. The authorities, however, declined either to bail or discharge him, and he was kept in custody until he was sent a prisoner to England, to stand his trial.

An appeal of murder was brought against him, and a commission issued to try it. The case came on at the Old Bailey, in London, before Baron Burland, on the 11th December, 1775. The counsel for Roche declined in any way relying on the formal acquittal at the Cape of Good Hope; and the case was again gone through. The fact of the killing was undisputed, but from the peculiar nature of the proceedings, there could not be, as in a common indictment for murder, a conviction for manslaughter; and the judge directed the jury, if they did not believe the killing to be malicious and deliberate, absolutely to acquit the prisoner. The jury brought in a verdict of acquittal.

The doubt about Roche's guilt arose on the following state of facts: On the evening of their arrival at the Cape, Ferguson and his friends were sitting at tea at their lodgings, when a message was brought into the room; on hearing which, Ferguson rose, went to his apartment, and having put on his sword, and taken a loaded cane in his hand, went out. A friend named Grant followed him, and found Roche

and him at the side of the house, round a corner, and heard the clash of swords, but refused to interfere. It was too dark to see what was occurring; but in a few moments he heard Roche going away and Ferguson falling. Ferguson was carried in, and died immediately. All his wounds were in the left side. The most violent vindictive feelings had existed between them; and there was proof of Roche's having threatened "to shorten the race of the Fergusons." The message, in answer to which Ferguson went out, was differently stated, being, according to one_account," Mr. Mathews wants Mr. Ferguson," and to the other, "a gentleman wants Mr. Mathews." The case for the prosecution was, that this message was a trap to draw Ferguson out of the house, and that on his going out, Roche attacked him; and this was confirmed by the improbability of Roche's going out for an innocent purpose, in a strange place, on the night of his landing, in the dark, and in the neighbourhood of Ferguson's lodgings; and particularly by the wounds being on the left side, which they could not be if given in a fair fight with small swords. Roche's account was, that on the evening of his arrival, he went out to see the town, accompanied by a boy, a slave of his host's; that they were watched by some person till they came near Ferguson's, when that person disappeared, and immediately afterwards, Roche was struck with a loaded stick on the head, knocked down, and his arm disabled; that afterwards he succeeded in rising, and, perceiving Ferguson, drew his sword, and after a struggle, in which he wished to avoid bloodshed, killed his assailant in self-defence. This was, to some extent, corroborated by the boy at the Dutch trial, and by a sailor in England; but both these witnesses were shaken a little in their testimony. According to this account, the message was a concerted signal to Ferguson, who had set a watch on Roche, intending to assassinate him. The locality of Ferguson's wounds was accounted for by his fighting both with cane and sword, using the former to parry. If the second version of the message was correct, it would strongly confirm this account. There was no proof that Ferguson knew any one named Mathews.

WE rejoice that Hood's verses have been collected. The collection, the short preface to these volumes informs us, "is made in fulfilment of his own desire; it was among his last instructions to those who were dearest to him." The injunction only showed a just sense of the rights of his own remarkable and original genius. There is a phrase which seems to have been blown upon by Cockneyism, till one is nervous about using it, and yet, if Cockneyism would have let it alone, it is a pretty and expressive phrase enough; Hood's verses are "refreshing"-specially refreshing to us professional explorers of poetical common-place-refreshing as rural breezes to one "" long in populous city pent," who draws his easy and invigorated breath upon the slope of some heavenkissing Wicklow hill after days and weeks of Sackville-street and Merrionsquare in July.

We wish we had a half-sovereign (for our desires are moderate and reasonable) for every single individual who, opening these two neat little volumes, will give the first utterance to his thoughts in the three simple but weighty monosyllables-"Poor Tom Hood!" For Hood was a universal favourite—a pet of the public. Men would as little have thought of sternly taking Hood to task, as of rebuking the quick-glancing fancies of a bright-eyed thoughtful child. He was one of those whom most of us who had never beheld his face in the flesh, knew, by a sort of indirect intellectual intimacy better than common quaintanceship. How often he came to us 66 as a pleasant thought, when such are wanted!" How often did the care-wrinkled forehead smooth under the passing influence of one of his incomparable fragments of humour, caught in the Poet's Corner of some country newspaper, where the smiling little violet modestly blossomed in the midst of thorny brakes-of pastorals (not of Theocritus, but) of Doctor

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MacHale, of speeches of Mr. Joseph Hume, and dissertations on railroads, and infallible receipts for the bite of a mad dog! And there is something peculiarly pathetic about the death of a humorist-of a humorist true-hearted and blameless as Hood was. Shakspere has embodied and immortalized the feelings of us all in the Yorick scene in Hamlet. Death-grim and ghastly Death-what business had the old scythesman, his crapes and his crossbones-with our Tom Hood? with this fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy❞—his "gibes, his gambols, and his flashes of merriment ?" Could he not have been well contentwe should not have had a word against it to take to himself a score of political economists, and leave us our own Tom Hood? Were there not critics weekly, monthly, quarterly? Had he no nice pickings in the Corn Law League? No Irish repealers under whose loss the world would have been meekly resigned? Were there no profoundly learned Doctors of Laws and of Divinity-no discoverers of" a new system of the philosophy of the human mind"-no grave statisticians powerful in population and poor-laws? or if he must have his "men of wit about town," was Brookes's, indeed, unpeopled of its Whigs, or the Tories of the Carlton all scattered and Peeled? Alas! that that brain-the exquisitely sensitive instrument of delicate thought-should now be formless dust! that tricksy spirit now naked and unbodied-no arch and flexible lip to quiver with the coming jest, no eye to twinkle with the inward joy of drollest fancies!

But Hood was much more than a humorist, he was (and his parting request shows that, with all his unaf fected modesty he knew it), a true and genuine poet. There have been spirits of loftier flight and more enduring wing, natives of the upper element, whose home was the empyrean; with these we dare not rank him; but the

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eagle is not solitary in the heavens ; and if he alone, undazzled by the beam of mid-day, can dare to give the great Sun himself glance for glance, there are other winged creatures who are satisfied to receive his radiance upon their bright and glossy plumage

"Whose dripping wings flash sun-light as they veer," whose nests are not in the pathless crags but deep in the bowery woodlands, where, amid all that sea of waving trees beneath, the winged wandererthe floating flower of the air-drops, with the unerring instinct of love, upon his own expectant home.

It is, indeed, observable that true humour is seldom, if ever, unaccompanied with a deep sense and faculty of the pathetic. This is one of its ordinary practical distinctions from wit. Wit is, in its essence, feelingless ; the pure, intellectual concretion; the icy crystal that glitters and chills. Humour is not the gem so much as the flower, the creature of the rain and the beam-of tears and smiles. Wit is clear and cold as the starry midnight. Humour tender and vague as the moon-lit eve. Wit is of the head; Humour of the heart; angels and devils may be witty-man alone has humour.

With such spirits as Hood and Charles Lamb this was eminently manifested. They were both men of profound feeling, men of a large soul for fellow-man, sighing amid all their smiles, and flowing deep, with all the surface-sparkle of their playfulness. That keen susceptibility of the ludicrous, and prompt inventiveness in all the ways of exciting it, were in them compatible with a very learned spirit of human dealings, and much of the pitying temper that knowledge works in worthy hearts. We do not very well know the precise idiosyncrasy of old Democritus; his hard materialist philosophy does not speak too well for it; but he might have been, for all his perennial grin, as tender-souled a being as ever was his weeping brother sage of Ephesus. Were we (to the unspeakable sorrow of universal literature), far gone in a deep ditch, and both by some metempsychosis contrived in this nineteenth century, to pass by that way, should back Heraclitus to be the first

we

to desert us; he would have too much to do wiping his eyes at our distresses, poor fellow to be able to turn his hands to any other use. The world, which in matters within its own coarse daily ken, is seldom wholly wrong, has always felt it; it distrusts ostentatious mourners; it suspects where tears are so promptly shed that the stream readily overflows only because the channel is shallow; while it is unfortunately but too willing to sympathize with joyous bonhommie, and to give to careless good fellowship all the honours of the heart. The humour, at the same time, of which we now speak is much more than this; so much more, indeed, that your humorist is frequently the least pliable of good fellows; often a proverbial "oddity"-a solitary selfreflective observer-unpopular with the mass whom he makes uncomfortable-dear and precious to the few.

Man alone laughs; for he alone perpetually contrasts his state with a higher ideal the failure with the success, the accidental with the immutable, the false with the real, the is with the ought to be. The brute is too low, the angel too lofty, for that strange mingled emotion of proud sarcastic pleasure which is so appropriate to a medial creature, who, midway between the demon and the demigod, is ever greater and ever less than

himself.

It has often been said—and no man fit to read the book will ever gainsay it that Don Quixote is a work of pathos. Insanity, indeed, can hardly ever raise feelings of the unmingled ludicrous; and still less such insanity as this! Consider it well. A noble-hearted old man, a genuine Spanish gentleman, though, it may be, in somewhat shattered circumstances; with a brain overcharged with visions of ideal perfection, eager after his own fashion, to redress wrongs and restore the balance of the world, sincerer than many of the lights of chivalry he thought to imitate, ever more compassionate, chaste, highprincipled, religious, gallant-it is the very miracle of the author's genius, not so much to have written the book that of all others has made mankind laugh, as with such a hero to have prevented us from weeping. Rabelais, indeed, has little pathos; it is owing

to this very want, almost as much as to his ineffable grossness, that in spite of all that vigour of exulting fancy, rolling and wallowing in its own infinite ocean of mirth, ruling with a conqueror's caprices the whole empire of fun, Rabelais is scarcely, except by curious students, read. Swift-so often compared with Rabelais, and certainly rivalling his filth-does not, whatever Pope may say, sit "in Rabelais' easy chair;" Swift's seat is no easy chair; better name it "the seat of the scornful," the restless couch of a stern and merciless spirit, pouring itself out in those undying works not in self-indulgent merriment but in bitter and burning contempt. Hypocrisy of all kinds Swift had a fearful gift to penetrate and to disgrace; but his scorn is almost as dark and terrible as the hypocrisy itself; which will you have-the tears of the crocodile or the laughter of the hyena? Accordingly, Swift is more of the wit than the humorist; his manufacture is the work of intellect, as clear and keen as a mathematician's; his invention is the servant and instrument of his reason; every thing in his boldest conceptions has its object, and that, for the most part, distinct and decisive. In his very ribaldry, there is no "superfluity of naughtiness;" he discards as an incumbrance the loose vesture of imaginative phraseology and decoration -not because he could not, but would not, adopt it; the poet may come down to the arena in his singing-robes, but Swift strips for the fight. Other men of satirical fancy shoot oftentimes at random, to enjoy their abounding strength; Swift never throws away a shot, he fits his arrow to the bow, eyes his shrinking victim, and cleaves the heart.

There

is a terrible seriousness in his jests. Yet, let no man think to lightly settle the question of the influence of Swift's writings. They tend to make us uncomfortable; but they tend to make us honest. It is not pleasant to gaze on the flayed Marsyas; but the beauty which is skin-deep may the less deceive us after such a sight.

Probably in Sterne-in my Uncle Toby-the perfection of genuine humour was nearly attained; and what a model is that of pathetic nature! How prodigious must have been the

amount of the corruption that spoiled Sterne's heart! Of all the dread phenomena of human perversity, there is none more mournful than the utter separation of the moral imagination from the practical moral belief; or, what is perhaps the truer statement→→ the separation of the moral belief itself from all its designed controul over the life of its possessor. How awful this dwelling of the ONE man in two worlds, without one point of contact between them; the world of imagination of the closet and the desk with its glorious population of ideal excellencies, models of pure and persuasive virtue, beings of thought so real and indestructible, that, clothed in language, they shall live and govern mankind for countless ages-to dwell amid such a society, the gifted freeman of such a City of God, the inward conscience of the genius who creates and beholds them, itself audibly speaking in every such vision that he moulds ;and the world of practical life, mean, ambitious, sensual, selfish-unvisited by one ray of the starry influences of its sister sphere, lower far and more despicable than that of the most illiterate cottager, whose views are bounded by the narrow circle of the fields he tills;-and to think that these currents should twine in subtlest links, each day, each hour, nay, each minute, yet never blend, the lovely creations of fancy still rising in their bright profusion, unsoiled and immaculate, the low and worldly calculations of the same mind, now the schemer for advancement or gain, mingling through that crowd of glorious thoughts unabashed and unrebuked by the high presence in which they move! then the fearful facility with which the habit is acquired; the rapidity with which the divorce is accomplished between the winged imagination and the creeping life, and the arrangement decorously effected that each shall vigorously pursue its own business, in its own proper element, and neither disturb the other.

And

But to our task from this too sad digression!

We are not, then, to wonder that Hood's web of humorous fancies should be interwoven with its thread of pensive thought at times. The peculiar tone of many of his serious poems is, however, worthy of special note.

Those who chiefly know him by his Comic Annuals, and those flashes of occasional mirth with which he was accustomed to illumine the public dulness, will, perhaps, be surprised to learn that his more deliberate genius was mainly conversant with the gloomy and terrible; it is there that Hood showed his real mastery. Yet, after all, reflective readers will not see any absolute novelty in this combination, though it be not often witnessed. Not to speak of instances that readily suggest themselves in poetical history, a curious analogy is furnished by a sister art; for the natural analogies of the different spheres of Art are innumerable; the same imaginative faculty speaks in them all, though it speak different languages. Consider, then, the Gothic Architecture. There we see, in a palmary instance, how kindred are the grand and the grotesque-how the curious extravagance of detail is quite compatible with awfulness of general effect, and even blends with it in heightening harmony. Those hideous gurgoyles-those monsters that grin in everlasting stone, uncouth as if the old bloody idolatry had left its traces in the majestic faith that supplanted it, and the grim genius of Thor and Odin would not be wholly cast out from even the Christian temples of the Teuton; how does this deformity mingle with no unpleasing discord in the visible music of these great creations of medieval art! how does the impassive, immutable ugliness of these forms-hard and horrible as Fate-help out the complete impression of stern, resistless power that speaks in the whole mighty edifice! There is, then, no essential disconnexion between the quaint and the terrible-rather some deep internal sympathy, when the former is kept within its due limits as an accessory. We see them again in close combination, in the supernaturalisms of popular romance in the same regions where Gothic architecture first rose and was matured; its Spirit of the Mine and the Mountain, its Walpurgis Night, the very personification of the arch-Fiend himself in our northern fancies has a sort of horrible drollery. But indeed, to pass from special instances to human nature itself, there is a border-land in all our experience which seems the chance possession, as our fancies alternate, of the ludicrous

and the terrible. Nay, there is a laughter appropriate to wretchedness itself; "moody madness laughs wild amid severest woe." That resolution of the system which belongs alike to extreme joy and extreme misery utters itself alike in both cases; the diapason of human feelings begins and ends on the same note.

With this prelude, our readers may set themselves to "The Dream of Eugene Aram," which stands the first poem in the collection. The murderous tutor records his own nightmare to one of his pupils:

"'Twas in the prime of summer time, An evening calm and cool, And four-and-twenty happy boys Came bounding out of school: There were some that ran and some that leapt,

Like troutlets in a pool.

"Away they sped with gamesome minds,
And souls untouched by sin;
To a level mead they came, and there
They drave the wickets in:
Pleasantly shone the setting sun
Over the town of Lynn.

"Like sportive deer they cours'd about,
And shouted as they ran-
Turning to mirth all things of earth,
As only boyhood can;
But the Usher sat remote from all,
A melancholy man!

"His hat was off, his vest apart,

To catch heaven's blessed breeze: For a burning thought was in his brow, And his bosom ill at ease:

So he lean'd his head on his hands, and read

The book between his knees!

"Leaf after leaf he turn'd it o'er,

Nor ever glanc'd aside,

For the peace of his soul he read that book

In the golden eventide :
Much study had made him very lean,

And pale, and leaden-ey'd.