The King's College Magazine

cifully interrupt the course of his excesses! But is that love for love? Is that childlike thankfulness for fatherly mildness, if he sacrifices ten years of your life for the wanton humour of a moment; if he stakes on the play of a lustful minute, the fame of his father, that hath kept itself unspotted for seven centuries? Call you that a son? Answer! Call you that a son?

OLD M. An ungentle child! child still!

Ah! but my child still! my

FRAN. A darling, a precious child, whose constant study is to have no father! Oh that you could learn to understand it! that the scales would fall from your eyes! But your forbearance must confirm him in his debaucheries, your aid give them legality. Truly, you will take the curse from his head; on you, father, on you will the curse of damnation fall.

OLD M. Right! quite right! Mine, mine is all the guilt!

FRAN. How many thousands who have drunk deeply of the cup of guilty pleasure have been saved by affliction! And is not the bodily pain that accompanies every excess a finger-mark of the Divine will? And shall man prevent it through his fearful tenderness? Shall the father for ever bury in the ground the pledge that hath been trusted to him? Think, father, if you deliver him up to his misery for some time, must he not either change and become better, or he will ever remain a villain in the great school of misery? and then--woe to the father who by his tenderness hath brought to nothing the counsels of a higher wisdom !—Now, father.

OLD M. I will write to him, that I turn away my hand from him

FRAN. You will do right and wisely therein—
OLD M. That he never come before my eyes—
FRAN. That will have a good effect---

OLD M. (tenderly.) Till he is changed.

FRAN. Right! right! But if he now should come with the cunning of a hypocrite, and by his tears move your pity, and obtain your forgiveness by flattery, and in the morning go away and mock at your weakness in the arms of his paramour! No, father; he will freely return when his conscience hath spoken clearly to him.

OLD M. I will write to him thus on the spot.

FRAN. Hold! yet one word, father! Your anger, I fear, might draw too hard words from your pen, which might break

his heart; and then, do you not think that he would take it for a pardon already, if you should hold him worthy of writing to him with your own hand? Therefore, will it not be better that you should leave the writing to me.

OLD M. Do so, my son.

to him

Ah! it has broken my heart! Write

FRAN. (quickly.) So it stands then?

OLD M. Write to him, that a thousand bloody tears, a thousand sleepless nights-but bring not my son to despair!

FRAN. Will you not lie down, father? It presses hard upon you. OLD M. Write to him, that the fatherly breast-I tell thee, bring not my son to despair.-(Exit, sadly.)

FRAN. (looking after him and laughing.) Comfort thyself, old man! Thou shalt never press him to thy bosom; the way thereto is barred, as heaven from hell. He was torn from thy arms ere thou knewest that thou couldst will it. I must be a pitiful bungler if I could not have gone so far as to separate a son from his father's heart, though he had been bound thereto with iron bands. I have drawn round thee a magic circle of curses, that he cannot spring over. Fortune to thee, Francis! The bosom child is out of the way. I must destroy all these papers, for how easily might any one know my handwriting. (He gathers up the pieces of the torn letter.) And grief will soon remove the old man; and I must tear this Charles out of his heart, if half his life should hang thereby !

I have great right to be angry with nature, and, by mine honour, I will make her pay for it. Why am I not the first-born? Why am I not the only one? Why must she have laid this burden of hatefulness upon me-just on me? Why just to me this Laplander's nose? just to me this Moor's mouth? these Hottentot's eyes? Truly, I believe she has taken the most horrible of all kinds of men, and thrown them in a heap, and made me out of them. Murder and death! Who hath given her the power to grant this to one, and deny it to me! Could any one court her ere he existed? or offend her before he himself was? Why went she so partially to work?

No! no! I do her wrong. She gave us yet feeling minds, set us naked and poor upon the banks of this great ocean, WORLD— swim who swim can, and who is heavy goes down. She gave me nothing; what I will make for myself is my own concern. Every man has a like right to the great and the small; claim is destroyed

by claim, effort by effort, and power by power. Right dwells with the most powerful, and the limits of our power are our laws.

Indeed, there are certain common bounds, which men have concluded to measure the pulse of the world's circulation. Honourable name! truly a valuable coin, with which those can trade well who understand how to lay it out! Conscience,-oh, yes, truly! a capital scarecrow, to frighten sparrows from the cherry-trees!also a well-written bill of exchange, with which the bankrupt gets on a little longer in his need. In fact, very praiseworthy forms, to keep fools in respect, and the mob under the slipper, that the clever may manage them more easily. Without doubt, right merry forms! They seem to me like the fences that my peasants draw very cunningly round their fields, that no hares may get in; yes, truly, no hares! But the gracious lord gives his steed the spur, and gallops over the yielding harvest.

Poor hares! It is a sad thing that there must be hares in this world. But the gracious master wants hares. Then boldly away! He who fears nothing, is not less powerful than he who fears every thing. It is now the fashion to have buckles to your trowsers, that you may make them wider or narrower at your pleasure. We will have a conscience made for us after the newest fashion, that we may tighten it, or lay it aside at our pleasure. So quick! boldly to the work. I will extirpate all around me that prevents my being lord. Lord I must be, that I may get that by force for which goodness fails me !-(Exit.)

(To be continued.)

MEMORY.

OUR pleasure with this fleeting moment dies not
Wherein we call it present. The young bloom
Of summer's best beloved daughters flies not
When they decay, but lives in the perfume
Which their dead buds exhale, if duly treasured
By those whose inmost heart is consecrate
To Nature's worship.-So may joy be measured

By the sweet memories which re-create
Our purest, best delights, and bid them wear
A milder, sadder form than present raptures bear.`

C. C.

THE

KING'S COLLEGE MAGAZINE.

AUGUST, 1841.

CONTENTS.

ELLERTON CASTLE; a Romance. By "FITZROY PIKE.”

CHAP. IV. A Village Priest-Increasing Troubles - The Ghost appears in fleshly person, unfolding a Tale that materially changes the current of our Hero's Life