THE COUNCIL OF FOUR.* THE “Council of Four” is a pretended game at definitions, but it is far too clever a jeu d'esprit not to be at once discerned as an assumed vehicle for the author's playful wit and satire. Take an example or two.

Coat; a check drawn on society by your tailor. Patronage ; condescension instead of justice. Parliament ; wise men who meet in solemn conclave to represent themselves. Time; the scene-shifter to the world's drama. Wages; something which enables a working man to go on working. Palace; the car o. a balloon, whose occupants look down upon those who pay the gas. Pauper; an animal so like a man as to make us feel uneasy. Debt; a slice out of another man's loaf. Contentment; the philosophy of an oyster. Opinion; a grain of gunpowder. History; Young Society sowing his wild oats. Book; brain preserved in ink. Paris; a dancing-master in regimentals. Money; something despised by lovers of sixteen. Liberty ; the power to do as you like

yourself, and to control the actions of others. Malice ; Passion's undying memory. Scholar; one who goes to market with more learning than he can find a market for. Fame; the reverberation caused by something striking upon the empty world. Luxury; the labour of the wealthy. Marriage; going home by daylight after Courtship’s masquerade. Child; God's problem waiting man's solution. Miser ; an amateur pauper. Bachelor; the slave of liberty. Monk; a coward who won't fight. Napoleon ; a naughty boy who was put in a corner because he wanted the world to play with. America ; Young John Bull working with his coat off. Ink; the Black Sea on which thought rides at anchor. Ball-room ; a confined place in which people are committed by fashion to hard labour. Slave; every one who believes himself not free.

There is something Shaksperian in the epigrammatic point and poetical philosophy of some of these definitions.

HOURS OF DAY AND SPIRITS OF NIGHT.+ IF, as we have reason to know, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, deeply gifted are the author and artist of “ Hours of Day and Spirits of Night. A touching and angelic sweetness pervades every poem and almost every illustration. Day breaks with the blythe lark passionately singing in praise to the King of kings. The village chimes then steal upon the air, and the peasant lingers in the throng of those who pray. But the quivering of life into day brings with it melancholy thoughts ; too soon, indeed, for a day just born, a life just entered upon ! Death is seen hovering beneath the fated flower, and voices long hushed are thrilling in the young poet's ear. An old man lies upon the bed of death, and angels bear away gently his tears of penitence. It is noon, and still the clock in the old church tower speaks of the dying. Rest to the weary, and charity still better than rest, claim the early hours of evening, but a waveless sea is the only rest for the mariner, and dreams of death still haunt the poet's fancy at four and five. At six, spirits come forth wandering through earth and air to work out their heavenly mission. They watch for the welfare of the sleeping child--they rouse the gambler to penitence--they reprove the miser, and point to better worlds where fleeting wealth is as nothing. These subjects are picturesquely and pleasingly illustrated. The theme is too melancholy; the mission of heavenly spirits, according to our poet's own showing, should be clung to with a more cheerful faith.

The next sad spot they haste to fill

Is the poet's aching breast,
And they turn his thoughts by their might will,

To the brightest and the best.
The Council of Four; a Game at Definitions. Edited by Arthur Wallbridge,
Author of " Torrington Hall,” &c. John Olivier.

† Hours of Day and Spirits of Night. M. E. T. iny., H. F. T. del. Joseph Cundall.

Dec.-VOL. LXXXI, NO. CCCXXIV.

THE SLAVE CAPTAIN.* THE “ Slave Captain” is a legend of the same epoch as that which the late Dr. Maginn selected for his powerful sketch of the Liverpool merchant, “ John Manesty”—a period when it was said, in a spirit of bitter exaggeration, but not without some truth, that “every Liverpool brick was cemented with African blood.”

The character of the “Guinea captain,” who went to St. Nicholas in order that he might see and be seen by his neighbours, just as people do in the present immaculate times; and who storms and frets at home, like the whole race of domestic tyrants whose perverse irritability cannot bear even the aspect of innocent recreation in their dependents, meets, in the most satisfactory manner possible—without an attempt at a novel trait or peculiarity--the idea which most people would form to themselves of a man brutalised by the most odious of all traffics.

But the pride which Captain Carlos —a name borrowed, we suppose, from that of some furious dog-took in the female branches of his family, was not without its influence in regulating his visits to the then fashionable place of worship in Liverpool (and that city, be it known, still ad mits of fashion in apparently' so purely a spiritual matter as religion), Captain Carlos, though a widower, was favoured—for a guilty man cannot be said to be blessed—with two daughters ; Elizabeth, handsome and vain ; Matilda, pretty and good.

On the occasion of a return from the said St. Nicholas's Church, whose grotesque spire is so familiar to mariners, we are introduced to a fourth personage, destined to play a prominent part in the story.

Following leisurely behind them was a well-dressed young man, who measured his steps to suit the easy pace of the couple in whose progress he seemed to be interested. As they approached their own door the stranger bounded past, and ascending the steps with agility, applied his hand to the knocker, which he thumped right heartily, in order to inform the inmates that the owner of the house and his fair charge had arrived.

“ What! you're here again, are you ?” exclaimed Captain Carlos, his choler rising, and his eyes scowling furiously upon the intruder. “Your impertinence, sir, is unpardonable: I want none of it!" and applying the à posteriori argument with his foot to the stranger's person, he kicked him unceremoniously down the steps. Begone, sir, you're an impostor !"

The stranger, gracefully raising his hat, bowed politely to the young lady, bowed more coldly to her father, and then, like a well-bred spaniel, withdrew!

So much for Miss Elizabeth's lover. Matilda has also her swain, the friend of her intemperate and reckless brother, but himself of a totally opposite character. Frederick Devon, a good son, is naturally a still better man.

One more person in the household remains to be noticed. It is a little girl known as Euphemia, who is at times raised to the dignity of sitting at the family table, at others reduced to the lowest drudgery in the scullery. The history of this child is a singular and profound mystery, and for a long time the whole interest of the narrative rests upon the incomprehensible savageness of the African captain towards this poor unprotected child, and his cowardly persecution of an innocent and defenceless being. In an after part of the legend, by a sudden change of places and personages, always to be avoided in the artistic management of a connected narrative, we are introduced in the West Indies to a fair girl, Isabel by name, the protégée of a Mr. and Mrs. Hardinge, but the long lost daughter of Mr. Austen, half-brother of Captain Carlos. This Isabella has for lover Edward Hardinge, who dies of consumption, and a

* The Slave Captain ; a Legend of Liverpool. By John Dignan, Author of a “Romance of Liverpool Life.” T.C. Newby.

Captain Howard, who lives to win the prize. Matilda Carlos arriving in Jamaica, to wed her worthy Frederick, whose prospects in life are connected with the West Indies, discovers in this maiden, for whom we are apparently in so strange a manner called upon to feel an interest which has been long bestowed upon others, the Euphemia of her young days. An explanation as tedious as a theatrical dénouement, which, instead of being apparent in the drama itself, has to be verbally delivered by four or five different parties, follows; the brunt of which is that Isabella Austen had been intrusted to Captain Carlos, to be educated in England; but as she lay between him and property inherited from a Mr. Millbrook, the father both of his and of Mr. Austen's mother, he had feigned her death, till she was luckily rescued in the last voyage of the well-known clipper Dart, “ the pride of her owner and the scourge of sable humanity.”

The interest of the narrative, halting, and disconnected as it is, is, if any thing, more concentrated in the fate of Elizabeth and her contemptible lover, than in either that of Isabella Austen or of Matilda Carlos. Peter Laurel is in reality a journeyman saddler in the Castle Ditch, Liverpool. His character is well sketched. He was one who lived only for self. He had chalked out a plan to attain distinction, and nothing could divert him from his purpose. Debasingly obsequious in his manners, he regarded a kick, if it promoted his interest, as a compliment, and was one of those accommodating cosmopolites whom you can neither insult nor cast off. Such was the man who had put forth his whole powers to win Miss Carlos. For this purpose, he adorned his external man, to which nature had been kinder than to his moral

person,

in a manner which was the more remarkable, considering his very limited means.

For a long time, the imperious African captain kept the persevering suitor at bay, but at length the indefatigable Peter found an opportunity of befriending the captain when he had been set upon in the streets of Liverpool by some quondam associates, led on by a kind of moral paradox, a conscientious and chivalrous ruffian, yclept Devilskin! Once in the house, Peter Laurel became one of the Laurels of Air-shire, a family impoverished by their devotion to the cause of the Stuarts, and the first of his name engaged in trade. The bait, though coarse enough, took, and the account of the dinner given by Mrs. Blossom for the “ Laurel of Laurel,” is a humorous chapter. It was in vain that Frederick Devon denounced the impostor; that even Tom Carlos is satisfied as to his real condition in life, Elizabeth unites her fate to that of a suitor who would have crawled through the kennel to have obtained his purpose.

Transferring their residence to London, Mrs. Laurel tastes for the first few years of her wedded life, the bitters of a rash marriage and the trials of poverty. But Peter was borne up by the feeling that his destiny was in the ascendant--that he must rise up-nay, he felt that his ambition would never be satisfied till he dispensed justice in the Mansion-house as the chief magistrate of the greatest city of the world. Long and close application to business, combined with some successful speculations, raised the busy and intriguing Peter to the height of his ambition. The “ Slave Captain” himself perishes on reading in the newspaper that Alphonse Duprez, a notorious pirate, the son of Clara Duprez, a native of St. Domingo, by an Englishman named Carlos, had been hung at the yard-arm of the Neptune; and now, says the author,

though scarcely half a century has passed since the Dart rode gaily on the waters of the Mersey, the story of her owner, remembered imperfectly, and by few, may be ranked amongst the Legends of Liverpool.

66

THE MUSICAL BIJOU.*

It & seldom that annuals enhance their claim to a particular designation, by such taste and perfection as is displayed in this instance. The “Musical Bijou” is truly what it calls itself, and that not more by the number, variety, and excellence of its musical pieces, of which there are fifty-two vocal, and twenty-one instrumental, than by the rare and exquisite taste which Mr. Thomas Mackinlay avails himself of all that is most graceful and gorgeous in the illuminations of the middle ages, to embellish his annual offering. The ornamental covers, lettered after the stalls of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, open the way to a frontispiece-border and subject, the character of which is well preserved by Messrs. Hanharts' chromo-lithography. Birds, flowers, and fruit are gracefully grouped around a picturesque boat-scene and landscape. The Harleian collection, and the Douce collection in the Bodleian library, have furnished the chief materials for this and the other beautiful resuscitations of mediæval art.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES. THE Ant Prince !† Truly now that an attenuate and despised insect has been found to afford agents (formic ether, chloroform, or perchloride of formyle) which possess the most wonderful effects upon the human economy, the slightest perfume veiling sense in unconsciousness—rendering the human frame insensible to pain-opening at the same moment a new world for good and for evil, the ant tribe ought to have their prince to keep them in order. The “fyttes” of the Ant Prince of Fanny Steers are, however, so mysteriously satirical as to be beyond our reach, unless the pith is contained in the fact

An Ant for Prince Consort is too un-B-fitting even to name. The Story without an End i owes its success, we suspect, as much to its pretty illustrations as to its literary merits. Thomas Campbell has spoken of it in the highest possible terms, and the history of a drop of water certainly teems with beautiful fancies and pure images, but experience has not shown us that infantine understandings can cope with such subtle poetic imagery.

The author of A Voice from the far Interior of Australia,ş is a queer character. He asserts himself to have been living on the Barwen, 500 miles from the settled districts, a year before Sir Thomas Mitchell discovered it! He has had stockmen and black guides die of thirst, four men killed by his side in battles with the blacks, and has read the burial service over twelve who at different times were assassinated by the aborigines. Truly, if experience of bush-life qualifies a man to give an opinion, the Voice” will at least be listened to.