fittingly encouraged by the Irish Academy-may have had the pernicious effect of leading many persons to indulge a wild and vain wish for the restoration, not alone, of the pious feelings with which the ancient crosses and reliquaries, exhibited-together thumbwith the swords, torques, screws, and other memorials of our ancestors—were regarded, but for the restoration of the feelings by the 'use of the means adopted in these early times. The tastes thus created may seem to find more natural expression and development in Puseyism and ultra-Puseyism, than in the sober forms of worship that give direct utterance to the religious belief of a more educated age. Such is, we fear, the unavoidable consequence of too exclusive an attention to a single pursuit a consequence that must be hazarded, and which, even in the case of the individuals whom we regard as misled, is not unattended with some We believe that the compensations. holy men of old-and they were many -who bore the heavy burthens from which we are released, often sighed in heart for the liberty with which we are blessed, and with which they would not have trifled, as we or some of us who ought to know better, too often do. But whether this be so or not, the effort to restore the devotional feelings of a past age, by endeavouring to restore its manners and customs and outward seeming, is plainly a thing impossible. In an analogous casewhile the sense of honour distinguishes modern society as fully as any in which man has ever lived-it cannot be doubted that the feelings which we believe the institutions of chivalry to have cherished, were rather mocked than assisted by the pageant of a tournament in our day-and we can conceive a pious-minded man, who sympathises with all that is good or true in mediæval forms of worship, shrinking from them with a shudder of heart such as would accompany the thought of attesting his belief in Christianity by undertaking a pilgrimage or preaching a crusade. The state of mind which this antiquarian spirit has led to in England and in Ireland, [expressing itself in both countries in fantastic follies of one kind or other, or what our author considers as such, is not an unfair sub ject for pleasantry. The gravest monk there loses his vocation. But this Mrs. Falcon must be described, and for this purpose we shall avail ourselves, in the first instance, of the ornithological information contained in the motto to the first chapter of the work before us : "Most of the hawks and owls are averse to the trouble of constructing nests for themselves. Thus the brown falcons take possession of the old nests of magpies or squirrels, to which, as far as we can learn, they never add any fresh materials, nor take any pains to repair damages or render them tidy."-Rennie on Bird Architecture. A letter to Mrs. Freeman, Harleystreet, announces the intended arrival of Mrs. Falcon and family from the country, and their wish to take possession of the house of the Freeinans The during their stay in London. Freemans are about leaving town, and the request cannot be decently refused. In a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, and her brother, Mr. Chatworth, we learn that the Falcons contrive to live, for the most part, at other people's expense-that by living in other people's houses they save house rent, servants' wages, poor rates, Falcon himself and assessed taxes. has generally some little agency or temporary employment. From their piratical and predatory habits, Falcon is generally called "the Red Rover," and the lady goes by the name of "the Gipsy." She has all the gipsy peculiarities, the brown complexion, the vagrant habits, and the loose morality still it is impossible for the Freemans to refuse their house, and it, or rather some rooms in it, are at the service of the invaders.The Freemans retire, and the conquering army enters. When they and their goods are safely deposited in Harley-street, and the author has a moment of repose from following the voluble tongue of the lady, he employs it in a description of her person : : She "Nobody who heard or saw Mrs. Falcon, as she stood thus issuing her orders to every body round her, could doubt for a moment that she was commander-in-chief of the squadron. was a woman in the August of her days; brisk and blooming, with black hair and brown complexion, her nose slightly aquiline, her lips small and compressed; her eyes, dark, piercing, bold, practical; her features in general regular and massive, with a free and daring expression, which had a charm of its own for those who like what the French call une beauté insolente. She was above the middle height, and looked even taller than she actually was, in consequence of her remarkably stately and commanding carriage." The picture of Falcon is given in similar detail; it adds, however, little to the view which is first given of him -he is cleverish rather than cleverhe, from time to time, filled several situations-managed lunatic asylumsconducted national schools-audited the accounts of cowpock institutionswas at one time deputy librarian to the British Museum, and was now about to leave a railroad company's employment as inspector, in order to take office as secretary to the Irish branch society for the Conversion of the Polish Jews. "Mrs. Falcon had the usual success that follows the steps of a fine and a clever woman, where she had not the sharpness or the jealousy of her own sex to cope with. Wherever male influence was ascendent, the gipsy was seldom repulsed, and often received with hearty welcome. What man, who had either the eye of a Rubens for florid beauty, or the taste of a Borrow for Zinganee adventure, could contemplate either her person or her character without admiration? In houses where petticoat government was established, she had a more difficult card to play; and she relied, of course, upon her intellectual resources and diplomatic abilities altogether. Lucy, the brown girl, was playful and sprightly, with an agreeable knack of attracting the attention of governesses and masters, wherever she went; by which she not only improved herself, but often gratified the truant young ladies of her acquaintance, who preferred battledore and shuttlecock to counterpoint, or Mrs. Gore's novels to the German grammar." There is but little incident, in the ordinary sense of the word, in this volume and that little is chiefly valuable as illustrating character. Some two or three exceedingly amusing chapters are devoted to shewing how the Falcons live, and all the devices by which they fix themselves on this body for dinner, and that body for lunch-how they manage to drive about with Mrs. so and so's servants and horses. These scenes are, on the whole, lively and well imagined, and remind us of the old Spanish novels, in which the distress always turns on some disappointment or other in the larder, or some device to escape the evils of an enforced fast. Still, of this part of the work there is, perhaps, too much, and we think the author succeeds better in dialogue, than in direct narrative. The Red Rover's mission to Ireland, as secretary to the society for converting the Polish Jews, is likely to prove valuable to him, in more ways than one. His salary he proposes to eke out by writing a work on Ireland; and hence, a visit to Mr. Primer, bookseller and publisher, in Paternosterrow, and proprietor of the Metropolitan Mercury, to which Mr. Falcon had, from time to time, contributed scientific articles, on wooden pavements and the health of the parrots in the Zoological gardens. A bargain is soon struck. Primer, however, insists, as a condition, that it shall be null and void, in case his "commissioner " does not actually, in person, visit Ireland, hear both sides of the question, and see Maynooth and Darrynane Abbey. He has lost money by some very clever tours in Ireland, which disaster he attributes altogether to the authors never having actually seen the country themselves. On the subject of Falcon's qualifications for the task, Primer has no misgivings. For the religious part of his mission, Falcon was unusually well qualified, having graduated in all the schools of theology. His wife asks him what is this new appointment that he has got. "Secretary, my dear, to the Irish Branch Society for the Conversion of the Polish Jews. I have been studying Hebrew,' replied Falcon, with vivacity, dropping a card which was beginning to take the form of a sergeant-major. "Polish Jews!' exclaimed his wife, throwing herself back in her chair, and closing the blue book; and what do you know about the Jews? The notion of your converting Sir Moses Montefiore, or Baron Rothschild! Convert them to what, pray?' "My dear, to Christianity, of course.' "Christianity!-and what do you know about Christianity? "Mr. Falcon ought to have known a great deal about Christianity, for he had been, amongst the other vicissitudes of his life, a temporary member of most of the thousand and one sects into which the religious world is divided; the same rambling propensities which marked his character as a secular personage, having influenced his spiritual estates also, and led him to box the compass of conventicles and churches. He had been a Trinitarian and a Unitarian, in his day; he had been a Baptist for a month, an Anabaptist for a fortnight, and an Antipodobaptist for three days. The Moravians had once seduced him with their love feasts; but, perhaps, their banquets were not as substantial as he had reckoned on, for he soon became cnamoured of Quakerly simplicity, and purchased a brown coat; on which, before the moon filled her horns, he superinduced gilt buttons, having returned in a fit of orthodoxy to the bosom of mother church, where he nestled comfortably for a season, until a casual visit to North Wales revived his desultory tendencies, and made him as nimble a jumper as any Williams, Jones, or Ap-Griffith in the principality. These, too, were but a few of his wanderings in the wide field of religious doctrine. No wonder, then, that he should think it a little hard that Mrs. Falcon should say- What do you know about Christianity?"" But it is time to introduce the representative of the Young Ireland Party. Two Irish law-students are seen walking in St. James's-squarethe younger of the two is Tigernach Mac Morris. "He was tall and slight; his features were handsome and intellectual; his cheek was pale, but it was the paleness of study or temperament, not of disease or dissipation. The expression of his eye, which was dark and bright, was something between melancholy and fierceness; but the most striking of his personal peculiarities was the length and profusion of his hair, which hung in thick shining black ringlets over each temple, while at the same time it fell down in equal plenty behind, upon the collar of his coat, where it was crisped backwards, forming a thick continuous circular curl, like a solid groove of ebony, through which with a bodkin you might have passed a ribbon. In short, his hair, both in its redundance and elaborate arrangement, was almost a feminine feature, and the wind seemed to be toying with it under that impression. Although the day was warm, he wore a dark-green cloak, which he folded ambitiously about him, with a palpable attention to effect; and this unseasonable attire heightened the general air of sentimental ferocity by which he was distinguished, and at which, perhaps, he aimed. Although he was very young, scarcely twenty-three or twenty.four, it was evident that he either was, or considered himself, a personage, with some imposing character to support, or some startling career to run." His companion is a few years older, and is in nothing very remarkable ; he represents moderate opinions, and discusses Irish affairs with moderate good sense. He is of the middle height -moderately well looking-and moderately fat;-a young man, that, if not at the moment, when we find him chatting with Tigernach, yet in some two or three years must become middle-aged Ireland. A few words of their conversation is given, from which we learn our Celtic hero's hatred of all that is Saxon. While they are talking, the Falcons pass, and Emily is struck by the resemblance of Mac Morris to Carlyle's description of St. Just, the revolutionary leader. MacMorris is attracted by the dazzling vision, and gazes on the Saxon maid; "her beauty heightened by the elegant simplicity of her dress, which displayed her figure to the best advantage, while The reviewer of a book like this is very much at the mercy of the author, who seems to have as good a right to assume, as the basis of his fiction, the existence of states of society, and party land-marks, as to create individuals. To be true to the possibilities of nature seems all that we have a right to exact, and whether the artist shall call his imaginary country Bohemia, or Ireland, or Utopia, is all one. We make no inquiry then, whether there be any such party as is called Young Ireland any such man as Daniel O'Connell-in actual being-any such party as repealers-or any such thing as an Union to be repealed. All these things must be regarded as conceded, and no more pledge author or reviewer to any concession of actual fact, than the temporary belief we give to any of the illusions of romance. A man may live happily in Dublin, and never hear anything about them. Our author tells us that Tigernach Mac Morris left one hand unchristened in imitation of his pagan ancestors, in order to give the more deadly blow. This shocks his Puseyite friends, who are for total immersion. We are told that in Dublin, or "Devil-inn," the young Ireland regime had commenced. Campion's division of the Irish into mere Irishe, wilde Irishe, very wilde Irishe, and extreme wilde Irishe, gives the author no class in which to place his young Ireland lads. An oracular passage from Novalis, rendered more oracular by his translator, tells us that "the first man is the first spirit seer. pears to him as spirit. What are child All ap An ren but first men? The fresh gaze of the child is richer in significance, than the forecasting of the most indubitable men ;" and the reign of Young Ireland was the reign of children. "Young Ireland consisted of some half dozen shoots of prodigious verdure, which had recently started from the aged trunk of agitation, like fresh sprouts from a veteran cabbage-stalk.' old chronicler tells of two green children falling from heaven, in the reign of King Stephen. These were but a type of the miraculous greenness of Ireland, in the days of its rejuvenescence. The happy island had its green daughters, reading green books, written by green politicians, with the quills of green geese. In their wild career the green children who fell from heaven, and the boys of whom they were a type, left the old giant of Derrynane a thousand miles behind. He roared for his seven leagued boots, to follow them, but he might as well have attempted to keep pace with a troop of wild horses in the Pampas, or overtake the train of the spectre huntsman. Celtic revolution was the project. The Brehon law was to be restored, and the old religion of the country. "Scythian creeds were to be disentombed ; the Scythian gods invoked again on the ancient cromlechs, and the fires of Baal kindled on the hill tops." Of young Ireland, Tigernach Mac Morris was the youngest. Of green Ireland, Tigernach's years and opinions were the greenest, and he was thus presented to them by nature herself, as their fittest ruler and representative. He, too, had read of the perfidy of England, in employing the magic of Merlin, in the days of old, to rob us of Stonehenge, and he was determined that the ancient monument should be forthwith restored. O'Connell's plans were too slow for his fervid brain. Dan, it is true, insisted also on its restoration. The nation would not be satisfied till it was brought back, but he was for taking it by instalments-a stone a century. A An uncle of Tigernach's is frightened at the lengths to which the young Celt is going, and insists on his remaining in England. The frenzy of young Ireland is not as frantic in money matters as in other things, and "As sure's the devil's in hell, Or Dublin City."-BURNS. VOL. XXVII.-No. 157. F his brother's threat of disinheriting Tigernach, accompanied with a gift of a large sum of money to himself, operates on Tigernach's father, and is not without its salutary effect on the son. The father, however, as soon as he got the cash, begins to enact the part of young Ireland himself, to the grievous mortification of his brother; and this leads the saner brother to contrive, by one plot or another, to get Tigernach wedded to a Saxon maiden, thinking it the best chance of his nephew's giving up his wild projects, which there was some fear might end in his being hanged. The uncle communicates his fears and his plans to Moore, who had already a similar project for his friend, and who was delighted to find him attracted by Emily Falcon. Affairs are in this train when Falcon goes to Dublin; and Mrs. Falcon having heard that her friend Sir Frederick Crozier, the Puseyite, was about to pass a few experimental weeks in an English monastery, which he was endeavouring to establish on Anglican principles, determined on fixing herself there with her daughters. It so happens that, independently of her contrivances for the purpose (which, however, are not wanting), the two Irish students have invitations to St. Ronald's. The phantom church of the Puseyites is a dream as idle and unreal as any of the visions of Tigernach. There is no more reason to suppose these men quite in earnest in their belief, because quite serious in their vocation, than to suppose that a herald gives entire credit to every pedigree registered in his office. The belief of the enthusiast is never an entire belief. Dreams, however vivid, always leave some part of the mind unaffected, so that, even during the illusion, the dreamer is most often conscious of its being but illusive; and the waking dreamer feels as one reading a novel or witnessing a play. Every moment of forgetfulness restores him to the habit of ordinary thought. The Oxford student may buy beads, and missals, and hair shirts, and, like the doctor of physic described of old by Chaucer, may read but little of his Bible; yet with all his efforts he will never be able to feel with the feelings of the olden time, or even with the feelings which he ascribes to the olden time. He will be to borrow a phrase of Sir John Harington's—a "fantastical novelist" after all. Did we give entire credit to the devotional feelings of the restorers of these antifollowing picture of the monastery of quarian fripperies, we should think the St. Ronald's scarcely a fair subject in a work calling itself a comic novel. As it is, we think it as fair ground as the furniture of any other drawing-room :— "It was now the middle of June, and of the many lovely places in Saxon land which were blooming and exulting in the warmth and splendour of the season, not the least charming was the villa of Sir Frederick Crozier, in Hertfordshire, where the mercurial Moore, and the saturnine Mac Morris had each a double invitation. "The hour was about two in the afternoon; the heat excessive; every thing that chirruped, crept, or fluttered, save the grasshoppers and the chilliest flies, had sought shelter from the sun in bush or bower. A spacious glass door admitted a flood of light, softened and made rosy by drapery of that bue, into half-library, half-music room, but was an octagon apartment, which seemed certainly a female sanctuary, for the books belonged to the light troops of literature, and the flowers in the vases, the elegant lumber on the small tables, a piano, a harp, and other details of the furniture, led irresistibly to that conclusion. Amongst the books in glittering bindings which littered the central table, might have bee nobserved the novels of D'Israeli, the poetry of Milnes, the theology of Pusey, and a certain little work as bright and green as a live emerald, with the Irish harp refulgent on the cover. A few pictures of the Italian school (believed originals, probably only good copies) glowed upon the walls; a head of St. Augustine by Guido, a cave by Rosa, and a bridge in Venice by Canaletti. There were also scattered about in graceful anarchy a few bronzes and alabasters, small, but after the antique; and on a fragile little table inlaid with ivory, and upon a prie-dieu beside it, might have been remarked the materials and machinery of dilettani needlework, which betrayed, upon close inspection, the labours of Tractarian fingers; a long narrow scarf, seemingly intended for a stole, or orarium (one of the most ancient vestments of the Christian clergy), had the Greek word Ayo (holy) thrice embroidered on it; and a purse of silk network was partially wrought in old English characters, with the monkish word ELEEMOSYNARIA, upon a hint |