of age, from a music balcony over the hall in which the intruders are dining, aims an arrow at Colonel Lilburn; he is seized, and carried as a prisoner to London, where he is taken into the presence of the Protector just at the time that the Duke de Crequi and Monsieur Mancini, deputed from Louis XIV., and the Cardinal Mazarine, happen to be approaching his highness to congratulate him upon the successes of the united English and French forces after this the boy is ushered into a spacious and noble library, where he sees Milton, as Latin secretary to the Protector, dictating to Andrew Marvel as his amanuensis. With the Protector, the Duke de Crequi, and Monsieur Mancini, the Colonel dines; upon which occasion Dr. Goodwin, the chaplain, commences prayers, and the celebrated Hugh Peters expounds a text of Scripture; and the lucky foreigners are introduced to the Protectress, to her daughters, the Ladies Faulconbridge and Rich, and the deservedly favourite child of both parents, the Lady Claypole. They are nobly regaled; a long grace is pronounced by Jeremy White, and Dr. Goodwin favours the company. with a second sermon; and then Mr. Milton asserts that psalmsinging is the noblest of all music, and, seating himself at the organ, plays a psalm which had been set to music by his friend, Henry Lawes; and then Mr. Milton executes a lighter measure of the French cast from Matthew Locke's Consort of Pavans, Ayres, Corants, and Sarabands.' Orders having been given for the preparation of a little concert, Davis Mall and Paul Wheeler, two of the best musicians of the day, appear as performers; and the incomparable Balztar of Lubeck gives a solo on the violin. The attendance of James Quin, the bass singer, had been expressly commanded; he is well plied with sack, and pleases his highness so well, that he promises to restore him to his student's place at Christ Church, from which Mr. Quin had been dismissed for intemperance.

While Colonel Lilburn is thus entertained, Master Compton, being conducted to the gate-house prison, finds himself. in company with Hannah Trapnell, the quaker prophetess, and the crazy fanatic James Naylor, and other gaol birds. Escaping to France, he proceeds with his father (who had been enabled to cross the sea by the contrivance of the Marquis, afterwards Duke, of Ormond) to join the king at Bruges, but stops one day at the quarters of Sir Henry de Vic. Sir John is charged by the king with dispatches to the Duke of York at the siege of Dunkirk. Returning to the king, Sir John is introduced to Mynheer Gerhard Douw the artist, who was named at Rome Il Pittore CavaZieresco,' to whom Charles, by good chance, is sitting for his portrait. Anon, he is sent to the post-office, to redeem a packet of

letters

letters intended for the king, among which there is one informing his majesty of the treachery of Captain Manning, who is afterwards pistolled at the gate of a strong castle adjacent to Colen, to which he was sent as a prisoner. Thus ends the first volume.

Sir John and Jocelyn arrive in Paris, and the latter is placed under the care of Sir Richard Browne by his father, who straight returns to Bruges. Jocelyn is instructed in the academy of Monsieur du Plessis. Wandering one morning into the gardens of the Luxembourg palace, he strolls to a pool of water where the Duke of Orleans kept a number of tortoises. A fellow-countryman, a few years younger than himself, had taken up one of these animals to examine it; a French gentleman in splendid clothes arrogantly commanded him to replace it in the water-a quarrel ensues, and Jocelyn trips up the Frenchman, who runs off in a transport of rage, calling for the guards. Mr. Compton is told by an old Frenchman, that his antagonist is the young Duke of Anjou, and is advised to make his escape. The youth whom he had assisted describes himself as James Crofts, son of Lord Crofts, who was in the train of Henrietta Maria;' in the sequel, however, he turns out to be the Duke of Monmouth. With Monmouth, after the restoration, Mr. Jocelyn accompanies the queen-mother to London, on a visit to her son, Charles II. Having, immediately on his arrival at Gravesend, hastened to join his father, who had now been fain to take up his residence at an old moated house in the vicinity of Brambletye, he discovers that the venerable gentleman is kept out of his estate by a rascally Roundhead, and that the king has returned no answer to his applications for redress. He, therefore, determines to go to the court, and personally press his suit for Sir John. He accordingly arrives in London, with letters of introduction to Lord Rochester and the king, and succeeds in the same way that Julian does in Peveril of the Peak; and after obtaining a glimpse of Nell Gwynn, obtains the office of vice-chamberlain to the queen. Here he becomes acquainted with, or is in the company of, or is told stories about, Lady Castlemain, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Ashley, Sir Thomas Killigrew, Lord Lauderdale, Lord Arlington, &c. &c. Lady Castlemain had insisted with the king on being made one of the queen's ladies of the bedchamber; at a grand evening's entertainment given by the queen, her ladyship is presented to her majesty by the king himself; and at this party, Lady Babington is introduced, whose bald, disjointed chat serves as a vehicle for Mr. Smith to tell all he knows, from Evelyn and Pepys, of the names and characters of the courtiers, The queen is indignant at the conduct of her royal husband, and Jocelyn, feeling too strongly for the insult to which his Mis

tress

tress had been exposed, is led into a duel with Bagot, one of the king's cupbearers, in which the latter is dangerously wounded. By the agency of the queen, Mr. Compton is enabled to avoid arrest, and takes refuge at Walthamstow. The pursuers discovering his retreat, he is indebted to Izaak Walton, the author of the Complete Angler,' who happens to be fishing by the river Lea, for the accommodation of the disguise of an angler, till the bailiffs proceed elsewhere in their search. Our hero escapes to Holland, and obtains hospitable reception at the house of Mynheer Adrian Beverning, a merchant, and one of the burgomasters of the city of Rotterdam; whose daughter, Constantia, he discovers to be the very lady whose black eyes had some time before enamoured him at a carousal at Paris, and in whom he, in turn, inspires the tender passion. His stay at the burgomaster's involves in trouble his host, who is suspected of entertaining an English spy. It is, therefore, necessary that he should leave the place, and he is escorted to an uncomfortable habitation on the Rhine, where Valentine Walton, one of the regicides, conceals himself under the name of Strickland, and performs several tricks of somnambulism and hypochondriasis, much to the disturbance of the family and the terror of our hero. But Walton has a daughter, Julia, whose attractions efface the impression made by her friend on the susceptible heart of Jocelyn. A letter from court, however, soon instructs him that he may safely return to England; and so ends the second volume.

Beverning having been of the republican party, at the head of which was the celebrated pensionary De Witt, finds it necessary to emigrate to England, and proceeds to Turret House at South Lambeth, the residence of his friend Mr. Elias Ashmole; whom he has the pleasure to find not only in good health and spirits, but in close confabulation with his intimate associates, Sir Jonas Moore, the mathematician, and the celebrated astrologers, William Lilly and John Booker; the object of their conference being to fix a day for the annual astrologers' feast, of which Ashmole was steward, at Painters' Hall! Returning one afternoon from the play, the worthy burgomaster is taken ill, and shortly afterwards dies of the spotted fever.

Jocelyn finds his way back to England in a fishing-boat, but not before the boat had been brought-to by the Royal Oak, commanded by Sir John Lawson, who, suspecting him for a spy, sends him on board the flag-ship, commanded by the Duke of York! "At the time of Jocelyn's mounting the ladder of the Royal Charles, its illustrious commander was standing on the deck, attended by the Earl of Falmouth, Mr. Boyle, and Lord Muskerry, the latter of whom fortunately knew our hero personally, and gladly vouched

for

for his identity'!! Lord Muskerry charges him with a letter to his wife, and he is allowed to proceed in his fishing-boat. He arrives in London just at the time of the PLAGUE, is infected, and is only saved, by the opportune interference of Constantia, from being smothered by an inhuman nurse. Favourably received at court, he becomes private secretary to the queen. Invited by her majesty to a splendid entertainment, and conceiving that the conversation between Lord Mordaunt and an old lady is not meant to be overheard,

'he mixed himself with the company, anxious to get near the fantastical Duchess of Newcastle, whom he saw at a little distance, attracting all eyes by the preposterous singularity of her dress and discourse. This lady, who had written thirteen volumes upon speculative subjects, was inquiring of Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, who had attempted to show the possibility of a voyage to the moon, where she was to stop and bait, supposing she were to undertake the journey. "Madam," said the Doctor,-(and Mr. Smith might have added that every jest-book repeats the saying,)-" of all people in the world I should least have expected that question from you, who have built so many castles in the air, that you might sleep every night in one of them!"'

Jocelyn now becomes intimate with the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Rochester, and the Duke of Monmouth, and also with Sedley, Etheridge, and Killigrew, and plunges into all the dissolute courses of the time, with the ignorance as well as with the zeal of a novice. He indulges in a liaison with two actresses, and makes no scruple of engaging in improper connexions with the mistresses of his associates to boot. Returning once from Aldersgate-street, he was held in pursuit by two bailiffs; after keeping up a sort of flight through a variety of streets, he at length found himself in the Artillery Walk adjoining Bunhill Fields, and being nearly exhausted with his efforts, turned suddenly up a passage, resolved to seek shelter in the first house that should offer; a side door presenting itself, he pulls the latch and quietly enters a room full of the smell of the Nicotian herb. Here he hears MILTON, in a deep, solemn, and sonorous voice dictating, in the adjoining chamber, a passage in the twelfth book of Paradise Lost; entering the inner apartment, he beholds the poet himself and his two daughters. By this very curious and remarkably ingenious contrivance, the author has been enabled to contrast the two situations of Mr. John Milton, as the inmate of a palace and the ornament of the court, and as living in an obscure retreat in comparative poverty, with no comfort but the muse and a pipe of tobacco. Receiving a large sum of money from an unknown hand, our hero sallied forth to pay his creditors, when, behold, he observed a considerable crowd around the doors of the Banqueting

Banqueting-house, and having learned on inquiry that the king was at that moment touching for the evil, a ceremony which he had never seen, he walked into the palace, and was gratified by a sight of that extraordinary proceeding!-Then follows the FIRE of LONDON. From one of the burning houses, Jocelyn preserves Julia Strickland. But her beauty attracted the notice of King Charles II., who chanced to be passing by, and who conveyed her away in a coach, while they were restoring Mr. Compton, who had been almost suffocated with the smoke, from a state of insensibility. Then succeeds the trial of Valentine Walton, murderer, traitor, and regicide; on which occasion his wife, who is the sister of Oliver Cromwell, acts as counsel. The discovery that Julia is the daughter of a regicide is an almost insuperable obstacle in the mind of Jocelyn to matrimonial union with that young lady; but this is most fortunately removed by an explanation of Mrs. Walton, that she was a foundling; and she is in due time discovered to be the daughter of Sir William Compton, a kinsman of Sir John's. And, after an arrest of Jocelyn, on suspicion of being concerned in a plot for procuring the king's death,—and his rescue by the running of a Dutch boat on board the Tower wherry, which was carrying him from the Tower for examination by the privy council,-Jocelyn and Julia are comfortably settled in life; and the disinterested Miss Constantia Beverning, having made over all her property to Mr. and Mrs. Compton, takes the veil.

We are afraid that we have presumed too much on the patience of our readers, in the outline which we have thus attempted to give of the features of this novel; but we were anxious to do justice to the author, even at the risk of prolixity. Our principal purpose has been to show his very original manner of introducing historical persons and events. But whatever praise may be due to him on the score of originality, we are afraid that we can afford him little on that of propriety. In his desire to emulate the Scottish Novelist, he has evidently mistaken that author's special merit; which, so far from consisting exclusively of antiquarian research, lies, as we before observed, in the peculiar command of a subduing and absorbing eloquence, that, like flame, converts all things into its own substance. He was deceived by the exquisite art of his master, the perfection of which is to conceal itself, and which led an incompetent imitator to attribute his success to anything rather than to the real occasion. We much suspect, that Mr. Smith was animated by a desire to excel his master in this particular-that he thought it possible to display an appearance of more antiquarian research; and indeed he has more of the display-but he has nothing else.

The