upharsin!' which foretold to the Chaldean king the destruction of his life and empire. He regarded the cask for a moment, and then throwing his right leg over, he mounted it. Seating himself firmly, he looked briefly about him. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he very deliberately drew a large gimlet from his pocket, and commenced boring a hole in one of the staves, gazing over the river the while, as if attracted by some interesting object on the opposite shore. When the perforation was complete, he returned the instrument to his pocket, and took an additional survey of the premises. Seeing that he was not watched by any one, he produced the end of a tin tube- manufactured expressly for such occasions from beneath his vest, and inserting it in the hole, applied his mouth to the other extremity of the conductor, which protruded from the upper part of the garment, and in this manner commenced extracting the contents of the cask. For the space of an hour, he remained in one position, not even stirring a limb. At length the curiosity of a passer-by was excited by his appearance; and going up to the cask, he was surprised to find a man, as he thought, asleep. The stranger shook him for a moment, as if to awaken him; and when he relaxed his grasp, our hero tumbled to the ground. Astonished that the fall did not rouse him, the stranger stooped down to examine his features. They were fixed and rigid. He took his band; it was cold as marble. He felt for his pulse; but it had ceased for ever. To make use of a novel phrase, the vital spark was extinguished.' Mr. Tumbler had gone to a land of pure spirits ;' a place which he often said he longed to visit; since the spirits he was in the habit of imbibing here were generally any thing but pure. Thus died, in the prime of life, John Thomas Tumbler, Jr., a man whom nature had endowed with many excellent qualities, which were, however, all perverted by one vicious and unconquerable propensity. Under more favorable circumstances, he might have proved an ornament to society. Avoided, on all occasions, by the respectable of his species; treated with broad indifference, if not contumely; a subject of jest and ridicule for every body; how can we suppose he could burst these shackles, and soar to distinction? Emulation withered beneath the persecution which attended him through life, and which, we blush to say, did not cease with his death; for the papers, in noticing his demise, merely remarked, with cruel brevity: A loafer was found dead upon the wharf this morning.' DEATH-BED REMORSE. How awful is that hour, when conscience stings And screaming like a vulture in his ears, Tells one by one his thoughts and deeds of shame; And like the torture's rack, the wrestling of his frame! J. G. PERCIVAL. LITERARY NOTICES. MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, Bart. By J. G. LOCKHART. Part Second. pp. 198. Philadelphia: CAREY, LEA AND BLANCHARD. In a notice of the first part of these Memoirs, we expressed an intention of renewing our broken intercourse with them, as they should appear, at intervals. The publication of two additional parts gives us ample scope for selection; and indeed this is all that a reviewer, not inclined to iterate, or 'bestow his tediousness' upon the reader, will be disposed to do. The pages before us are crowded with incidents, and with characteristic sketches of the personal and literary every-day life of their subject; and these, in themselves abundantly attractive, are rendered still more so, as we have already elsewhere remarked, by the pleasant style of the biographer, who will win enduring fame by this contribution to a literature which he had before not a little enriched. Before entering upon our extracts, we cannot avoid remarking, that throughout the minuter history of the illustrious poet and novelist here presented, we are enabled to see the great secret of a literary career, unparalleled since the era of Shakspeare, if he who wrote for all mankind may be said to have had, or to have, an era. He stands forth, in these volumes, a shining example to all authors who would win a permanent hold upon the public regard. He studied humanity, and the works of nature. He did not content himself with portraying the invisible and non-existent, and with conceiving scenes and personages which have no counterparts in nature or in common life. He held rapt intercourse with the mountains, rivers, and vales of Scotland; and he sought the teachings of those natural instructors, the green fields. His ear was ever open to the 'silent voice of Nature, speaking in forms and colors.' The humblest peasant was a picture, and his qualities a study; and the lightest shade of character, in high or low, was not beneath his scrutiny. To this careful perception of nature, in all its forms and phases, he added a course of reading more various and extended, we cannot doubt, than any contemporary on the globe. But, unlike the many who lard their lean books with the fat of other authors, he read only to digest, and to fuse his mind; hence, his resources were never exhausted, even when he was a gray soldier in the literary field, wherein he had borne arms so nobly and so long. How numerous the chaotic fictions, how many the trumpery novels, how large the amount of still-born poetry, now sunk into waste paper and oblivion, which might have been saved to the world, had their producers but followed the example of the author of Waverley! How much worse than useless labor might have been saved to the thousands who, unable to inform have striven to please, and have borne their ponderous loads into the literary mart, and expanded them on the stalls of their hapless publishers! We cannot but hope that, primarily, the publication of these Memoirs will be widely beneficial to novelists and poets, and secondarily, to the reading public; that they will improve the taste of those authors who are content to indulge in superficialities merely; to amuse the imagination, and convey infection to love-sick damsels, without satisfying the judgment, or touching the heart. So mote it be! We commence our extracts with a brief history of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem' which has now kept its place for nearly a third of a century :' "It is curious to trace the small beginnings and gradual development of his design. The lovely Countess of Dalkeith hears a wild rude legend of Border diablerie, and sportively asks him to make it the subject of a ballad. "He had been already laboring in the elucidation of the quaint Inglis' ascribed to an ancient seer and bard of the same district, and perhaps completed his own sequel, intending the whole to be included in the third volume of the Minstrelsy. He assents to Lady Dalkeith's request, and casts about for some new variety of diction and rhyme, which might be adopted without impropriety in a closing strain for the same collection. Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year or two before, of Coleridge's unpublished Christabel, had fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory; and it occurs to him, that by throwing the story of Gilpin Horner into somewhat of a similar cadence, he might produce such an echo of the later metrical romance, as would serve to connect his Conclusion of the primitive Sir Tristrem with his imitations of the common popular ballad in the Grey Brother and Eve of St. John. A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volunteer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of the bugle; and suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old Border life of war and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his researches on the Minstrelsy' had by degrees fed his imagination, until every the minutest feature had been taken home and realized with unconscious intenseness of sympathy; so that he had won for himself in the past another world, hardly less complete or familiar than the present. Erskine or Cranstoun suggests that he would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the action, after the fashion of Spenser in the Faery Queen. He pauses for a moment and the happiest conception of the frame-work of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poetone that Homer might have envied the creation of the ancient harper, starts to life. By such steps did the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' grow out of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.' "A word more of its felicitous machinery. It was at Bowhill that the Countess of Dalkeith requested a ballad on Gilpin Horner. The ruined castle of Newark closely adjoins that seat, and is now indeed included within its pleasance. Newark had been the chosen residence of the first Duchess of Buccleuch, and he accordingly shadows out his own beautiful friend in the person of her lord's ancestress, the last of the original stock of that great house; himself the favored inmate of Bowhill, introduced certainly to the familiarity of its circle in consequence of his devotion to the poetry of a by-past age, in that of an aged minstrel, 'the last of all the race,' seeking shelter at the gate of Newark, in days when many an adherent of the fallen cause of Stewart - his own bearded ancestor, who had fought at Killiekrankie, among the rest - owed their safety to her who 'In pride of power, in beauty's bloom, Had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb.'" The profits, to Scott, from the several editions of this poem were £769. The sales are given as follows: "The first edition of the Lay was a magnificent quarto, 750 copies; but this was soon exhausted, and there followed an octavo impression of 1500; in 1906, two more, one of 2000 copies, another of 2550; in 1807, a fifth edition of 2000, and a sixth of 3000; in 1803, 3550; in 1809, 3000 -- a small edition in quarto (the ballads and lyrical pieces being then annexed to it,) and another octavo edition of 3250; in 1811, 3000; in 1812, 3000; in 1816, 3000; in 1823, 1000. A fourteenth impression of 2000 foolscap appeared in 1825; and besides all this, before the end of 1836, 11,000 copies had gone forth in the collected editions of his poetical works. Thus, nearly forty-four thousand copies had been disposed of in this country, and by the legitimate trade alone, before he superintended the edition of 1839, to which his biographical introductions were prefixed. In the history of British Poetry, nothing had ever equalled the demand for the Lay of the Last Minstrel." Subsequently to a very interesting account of Scott's partnership with Ballantine, and of his entering actively upon numerous literary projects including his editions of the British poets, Ancient English Chronicles, Dryden, commencement of Waverley, etc., - we find the following account of his personal habits of industry: "He rose by five o'clock, lit his own fire, when the season required one, and shaved and dressed with great deliberation for he was a very martinet as to all but the mere coxcomberies of the toilet, not abhorring effeminate dandyism itself so cordially as the slightest approach to personal slovenliness, or even those bed-gown and slipper tricks,' as he called them, in which literary men are so apt to indulge. Arrayed in his shootingjacket, or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner time, he was seated at his desk by six o'clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favorite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvalíation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast between nine and ten, he had done enough (in his own language) to break the neck of the day's work.' After breakfast, a couple of hours more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used to say, 'his own man.' When the weather was bad, he would labor incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to be out and on horseback by one o'clock at the latest; while, if any more distant excursion had been proposed over night, he was ready to start on it by ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study forming, as he said, a fund in his favor, out of which he was entitled to draw for accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness. "It was another rule, that every letter he received should be answered that same day. Nothing else could have enabled him to keep abreast with the flood of communications that in the sequel put his good nature to the severest test; but already the demands on him in this way also were numerous; and he included attention to them among the necessary business which must be despatched before he had a right to close his writingbox, or, as he phrased it, 'to say out damned spot, and be a gentleman.' In turning over his enormous mass of correspondence, I have almost invariably found some indication that, when a letter had remained more than a day or two unanswered, it had been so because he found occasion for inquiry or deliberate consideration." In illustration of the correctness of the remarks which introduce these extracts, we give the following passage from a letter of an early friend of Scott to his biographer. It is unnecessary to say, that it is kindred with numerous others which might be selected : ་ "One of our earliest expeditions was to visit the wild scenery of the mountainous tract above Moffat, including the cascade of the Gray Mare's Tail,' and the dark tarn called 'Loch Skene.' In our ascent to the lake, we got completely bewildered in the thick fog which generally envelopes the rugged features of that lonely region; and, as we were groping through the maze of bogs, the ground gave way, and down went horse and horsemen pell-mell into a slough of peaty mud and black water, out of which, entangled as we were with our plaids and floundering nags, it was no easy matter to get extricated. Indeed, unless we had prudently left our gallant steeds at a farm-house below, and borrowed hill ponies for the occasion, the result might have been worse than laughable. As it was, we rose like the spirits of the bog, covered cap-à-pie with slime, to free themselves from which, our wily ponies took to rolling about on the heather, and we had nothing for it but following their example. At length, as we approached the gloomy loch, a huge eagle heaved himself from the margin and rose right over us, screaming his scorn of the intruders; and altogether it would be impossible to picture any thing more desolately savage than the scene which opened, as if raised by enchantment on purpose to gratify the poet's eye; thick folds of fog rolling incessantly over the face of the inky waters, but rent asunder now in one direction, and then in anotherso as to afford us a glimpse of some projecting rock or naked point of land, or island, bearing a few scraggy stumps of pine-and then closing again in universal darkness upon the cheerless waste. Much of the scenery of Old Mortality was drawn from that day's ride. "It was also in the course of this excursion that we encountered that amusing personage introduced into Guy Mannering as "Tod Gabbie,' though the appellation by which he was known in the neighborhood was 'Tod Willie.' He was one of these itinerants who gain a subsistence among the moorland farmers by relieving them of foxes, pole-cats, and the like depredators -a half-witted, stuttering, and most original creature." The subjoined extract will serve to show the great humility with which Scott bore his literary honors, at a time when he was beleaguered by the importunities of fashionable admirers. His bearing, says Mr. Lockhart, when first exposed to such influences, was exactly what it was to the end. The Border Minstrel is writing from London, whither he had proceeded upon business connected with an important prospective situation as Clerk of the Edinburgh Sessions, a lucrative and desirable station : "It will give you pleasure to learn that, notwithstanding some little rubs, I have been able to carry through the transaction which your lordship sanctioned by your influence and approbation, and that in a way very pleasing to my own feelings. Lord Spencer, upon the nature of the transaction being explained in an audience with which he favored me, was pleased to direct the commission to be issued, as an act of justice, regretting, he said, it had not been from the beginning his own deed. This was doing the thing handsomely, and like an English nobleman. I have been very much fêted and caressed here, almost indeed to suffocation, but have been made amends by meeting some old friends. One of the kindest was Lord Somerville, who volunteered introducing me to Lord Spencer, as much, I am convinced, from respect to your lordship's protection and wishes, as from a desire to serve me personally. He seemed very anxious to do any thing in his power which might evince a wish to be of use to your protegé. Lord Minto was also infinitely kind and active, and his influence with Lord Spencer would, I am convinced, have been stretched to the utmost in my favor, had not Lord Spencer's own view of the subject been perfectly sufficient. "After all, a little literary reputation is of some use here. I suppose Solomon, when he compared a good name to a pot of ointment, meant that it oiled the hinges of the hall-doors into which the possessors of that inestimable treasure wished to penetrate. What a good name was in Jerusalem, a known name seems to be in London. If you are celebrated for writing verses or for slicing cucumbers, for being two feet taller or two feet less than any other biped, for acting plays when you should be whipped at school, or for attending schools and institutions when you should be preparing for your grave, your notoriety becomes a talisman 'an Open Sesame' before which every thing gives way-till you are voted a bore, and discarded for a new plaything. As this is a consummation of notoriety which I am by no means ambitious of experiencing, I hope I shall be very soon able to shape my course northward, to enjoy my good fortune at my leisure." Elsewhere, a friend thus describes his bearing, in the presence of his London entertainers: "Scott,' his friend says, 'more correctly than any other man I ever knew, appreciated the value of that apparently enthusiastic engouement which the world of London shows to the fashionable wonder of the year. During the sojourn of 1809, the homage paid him would have turned the head of any less gifted man of eminence. It neither altered his opinions, nor produced the affectation of despising it; on the contrary, he received it, cultivated it, and repaid it in his own coin. All this is very flattering,' he would say, and very civil; and if people are amused with hearing me tell a parcel of old stories, or recite a pack of ballads to lovely young girls and gaping matrons, they are easily pleased, and a man would be very ill-natured who would not give pleasure so cheaply conferred.' If he dined with us, and found any new faces, 'Well, do you want me to play lion to-day? was his usual question; I will roar, if you like it, to your heart's content.' He would, indeed, in such cases, put forth all his inimitable powers of entertainment; and day after day surprised me by their unexpected extent and variety. Then, as the party dwindled, and we were left alone, he laughed at himself, quoted, 'Yet know that I one Snug the joiner am-no lion fierce,' etc., and was at once himself again. "He often lamented the injurious effects for literature and genius resulting from the influence of London celebrity on weaker minds, especially in the excitement of ambition for this subordinate and ephemeral reputation du salon. 'It may be a pleasant gale to sail with,' he said, 'but it never yet led to a port that I should like to anchor in.'" In relation to the delightful introductory epistles to Marmion, we find the following: "He frequently wandered far from home, attended only by his dog, and would return late in the evening, having let hours after hours slip away among the soft and melancholy wildernesses where Yarrow creeps from her fountains. The lines, 'Oft in my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake,' &c. paint a scene not less impressive than what Byron found amidst the gigantic pines of the forest of Ravenna; and how completely does he set himself before us in the moment of his gentler and more solemn inspiration, by the closing couplet, 'Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude, So stilly is the solitude.' But when the theme was of a more stirring order, he enjoyed pursuing it over brake and fell, at the full speed of his Lieutenant. I well remember his saying, as I rode with him |