We seemed to stand together, I and that shadow, weeping and wailing atheists, terrified by the voice and the darkness of the godless earth. My very soul died within me, as I looked around on the dead ashes-the miry floor-the ropy walls-the vileness, the mouldiness, and the earthinessand felt, that I, with all my unendurable agonies, was only part of that loathsome existence with which I should be blended, and incorporated, and lost for evermore, soon as chance might terminate the foolish mystery called life. "Would you believe it, that my daughter, once so good and beautiful, she who bears the name of her who used to pray with me every night and every morning for forty years, hates these withered hands that laid her into, and lifted her from her cradle, after her mother was taken away? But what is the meaning of the word father, now that there is no God?" A woman seemed to be before us, with a child, almost naked, in her arms. What is a mother; what is a daughter, since there is no God? She held the famished brat to her breast, rather in anger than in love, and poured fierce and wrathful curses on her father's head, for which the grave, she said, had so long been yawning in vain. "Pity your old father," were the words he constantly kept repeating "remember the commandment of God which sayeth, 'honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long on the earth which the Lord thy God hath given thee.'" There was something in the woman's face that terrified me to look on a beauty that remind ed me of some one I had formerly known-and her voice, too, even when pouring out those unnatural curses, seemed not to be her own voice, but one that I had listened to, I knew not when or where, with pleasure and affection. "Take the imp and mumble it into sleep," cried she, flinging her child into the old man's arms, as if it had been a piece of lumber, while he only raised his eyes slightly upwards, and said, "the poor darling alway love its grandfather." "What more than the mother who bore it?" "I wish your husband were come," said the wretched being, as the little baby was crying on his knee. "Call him your son-you old dotard-for he is no husband of

66

mine. I suppose he is at the alehouse with his drabs; and may these arms be withered, if ever again in health or in sickness they lie upon his neck." Just as she finished this sentence, a man came staggering into the glimmering darkness, and then sat down in sullen silence, with a countenance of drunken ferocity. All this while, nobody but the old man spoke to me, or seemed to notice me; and at last, when I was observed by the others, my appearance among them seemed to excite no surprise. The husband and wife continued to glare on each other with eyes of fury and hatred; and the old man, speaking to me as if to a well-known neighbour, said in a voice not meant to be heard by any of his miserable children, "alas! alas! is this the Cottar's Saturday Night !' "I have been at the kirk to night with the committee of reform," cried the husband with an oath, "and a merry meeting we had of it." The old man mildly asked what had been done; and the ruffian answered, we have levelled the old crazy building with the ground-the pews, and lofts, and rafters-the pulpit too, with its sounding-board, where the old hypocrite used to preach salvation to our soulsby the bones of Thomas Paine, they made a glorious bonfire! and turned all the church-yard as bright as daythe manse itself looked red in the blaze. Had the ghosts leapt from their graves, they might have fancied it hell-fire." And here, methought, the drunken Atheist laughed convulsively, as if to suppress the terror that his impiety forced into his own coward heart. "James, James, said the old man, you surely could not injure the minister who baptized you.' no, burning his kirk was enough for him-he stood by all the while, and never uttered a word. We have saved him from henceforth the trouble of preaching. When at last, the great black bible with its clasps went bouncing into the flames; he thought it time to be off, and we gave him three cheers as he turned about at the gate!" "James! you have scattered the stones of the house of God, over the grave of your mother. Where will you bury these bones when your old father dies?" holding up as he spake, his withered hands clasped as it were in prayer or supplication. "A hole dug in the earth is a grave-but we have

"No,

no laws, I believe, against burialgrounds-only we must not call them kirk-yards-for where now are the kirks? This has been a glorious day for Scotland. More than a thousand kirks have crumbled into ashes-and tomorrow, not a bell will be heard singing from Tintock to Cape Wrath!" The blasphemer waxed fiercer and fiercer in my dream, and yelled out in triumph. "At one and the same hour, fire was set to all the houses of God, from sea to sea.-Did he, think ye, tell the storms that blew all day, and are yet bravely blowing, to play the bellows to the fire? No-the winds came without his bidding, and before it is lown again, all the tabernacles of the Lord will be dust, cinders, ashes. Huzza for the downfall of superstition!" Quick are the transitions in dreams. 66 Where is Margaret?" asked the old man; and I knew that he was speaking of his grand-daughter. "She is at Elmwood-and we shall have her to feed no longer.-The old fool there dotes upon her-and if the girl will live with him, why not? She is fifteen years old-and able enough to judge for herself.”—“ God forgive her," cried the startled mother, as nature rose within her hardened heart, at the sin and shame of her child. "Fool, growled the husband, on this very day, were not all the kirks on fire? How long will that senseless word keep stammering on your lips? The girl needs no forgiveness-let her cheat the decrepit miser, and who shall say that she ought not to have plundered his hoards of yellow gold?" "Is the child......my little Margaret-is she has these deaf ears heard aright-is she an harlot, and an adulteress?" And with these words, the old man bowed his head, till the grey locks fell down even unto the very floor. The unnatural son answered not a word, but scowling over the room, which seemed the very cave of famine, fiercely demanded supper, to which demand his wife replied with a loud hysterical laugh," that the glutton at his knee (for the little fearless infant had stolen up to its unhappy father) had swallowed the last handful of meal in the house, and yet look at him, is he not as pale as a corpse?-and a corpse may he soon be, for there is no hunger in the grave!" The father looked at him with a face black with smothered rage while the old man sat still in his chair, with a fixed and rigid

countenance. "What! have you got that accursed book of lies, in your old lean fingers again," cried the savage, starting up furiously, "The word of God, call you it!-will it work miracles, and give us bread ;" and with that he tore it from the old man's breast, and dashed it among the cold ashes of the fire.-"Lies ;-lies;-talk not to me of heaven-and as to hell,what need is there for any other hell than this."-The wife suffered the Bible to lie among the ashes. What a fearful being, thought I, is a woman— and a wife-and a mother-who can scoff at God, and 'her Saviour! With her religion, she has lost also her very human nature. She cares not for the baby that she has suckled-for its father in whose bosom she has lainfor her own father, who would even when she was a child in her cradle, have willingly died for her sake! The death rattle was in the old man's throat. We all stood silent. up the bible upon my knees," were his last words-His daughter seemed to do so in terror-one moment-and it was then plain that he was dead. All this time the roar of wild winds was in my dream, and I thought that ever and anon thick blackness filled the room as if it had been a grave; and then again a ghastly light revealed the distorted countenances of wrath, guilt, and insanity. The beings of my dream waxed yet more fierce and fiendish; and the child that was still standing at its father's knee, I thought was changed into an imp, with a leering and unearthly face, full of devilish malice and ferocity. Its father's eyes fell upon it, during one of those fitful flashes of light that came glimmering over the darkness; and half terrified, half enraged with the hideousness of the changeling, he sprang up, crying,

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"Lift

What, thou accursed brat, art thou grinning in my face," and grasped his child's throat, as if to murder it: the mother uttered a horrid shriek, and I awoke with my heart beating, and the cold sweat pouring down my temples.

There is no happiness equal to that of waking from a horrible dream. In a moment I recollected that I was reposing in the dwelling of peace, innocence, and piety; I arose, and going to the window, beheld the first and tender light of morning gradually unveiling the beauty of one of the most

beautiful vallies of Scotland.

A solitary red-breast was sitting on the apex of the gabel-end of a barn, filled, no doubt, with the riches of harvest, and the cheerful bird was singing to itself in the dawning sunshine. At no great distance, above a grove coloured with all the splendour of autumn, rose up the spire of that kirk, in which, many years ago, I had first joined in the simple services of our religion. While I gazed with calm pleasure over the woods, and hills, and fields, through which my careless childhood had strayed, a tap came to my bed-roomdoor, and an infantine voice, followed by laughter from more than one happy urchin, indistinctly summoned me to join the assembled group in the little parlour below. There I found that happy old man, and his children's children. We all walked together to the kirk; and even if I had been a believer in dreams, that hideous one of the night must have been deprived of all its fearfulness, by the scene I there beheld. All was still, solemn, and devout, in the house of God, while at the same time the congregation all wore a placid air of cheerfulness and contentment. The minister was the same good old man, whom I had been taught to venerate when a boy; the

sacred building, though ancient, was yet unimpaired-and the trees that sheltered it had stood for centuries in their strength and beauty. I felt, as I looked around me, a joyful conviction of the stability of religion, breathed, both from animate and inanimate objects-and all vague fears for my country and its faith died away as soon as I heard,

"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise." When the congregation were dismissed with a blessing by their venerable pastor, I watched, with a cheerful spirit, the various domestic parties as they returned homewards across the fields, and up the hill-sides-and felt what a treasure of supporting and elevating thoughts each heart laid weekly up, within its secret self, against the trials and troubles of life. I accompanied my venerable friend, the clergyman, to his manse; and when, during the course of the evening, I ventured to tell him of my last night's visions, the old man smiled, and said, that he hoped I had seen, even in his little kirk, that day, enough to convince me that the RADICAL'S SATURDAY-NIGHT would never be in Scotland any thing more than-a dream.

EREMUS.

As this exquisite romance belongs to a class generically different from any of the former tales of the same author, it is possible that many readers, finding it does not tally with any preconceptions they had formed, but requires to be read with a quite new, and much greater effort of imagination, may experience, when it is put into their hands, a feeling not unlike disappointment. In all his former novels the characters, both prominent and subordinate, were such as might have been found in actual existence at no far back period; but the era to which Ivanhoe relates is so remote, that the manners are, of course, unlike any thing either the author or the readers of the present times could have had any opportunity of knowing by personal observation. Hence the writer

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not much akin to the spirit of remark or disquisition. Such has been the mastery of the poet-such the perfect working of the spell by which he has carried us with him back into his troubled but majestic sphere of vision, that we feel as if we had just awakened from an actual dream of beauty and wonder, and have some difficulty in resuming the consciousness to say nothing of the more active functions-of our own ordinary and prosaic life. Never were the long-gathered stores of most extensive erudition applied to the purposes of imaginative genius with so much easy, lavish, aud luxurious power-never was the illusion of fancy so complete made up of so many minute elements,—and yet producing such entireness of effect. It is as if the veil of ages had been, in truth, swept back, and we ourselves had been, for a time, living, breathing, and moving in the days of CŒUR DE LIONdays how different from our own! the hot-tempestuous-chivalrous- -passionate fierce Youth of Christendom. Every line in the picture is true to the life—every thing in the words, in the gestures-every thing in the very faces of the personages called up before us, speaks of times of energetic volition uncontrolled action-disturbance-tumult- the storms and whirlwinds of restless souls and ungoverned passions. It seems as if the atmosphere around them were all alive with the breath of trumpets, and the neighing of chargers, and the echo of war-cries. And yet, with a true and beautiful skilfulness, the author has rested the main interest of his story, not upon these fiery externals, in themselves so full of attraction, and every way so characteristic of the age to which the story refers, but on the workings of that most poetical of passions which is ever deepest where it is most calm, quiet, and delicate, and which, less than any other, is changed, even in its modes of manifestation, in conformity with the changes of time, manners, and circumstances. For the true interest of this romance of the days of Richard is placed neither in Richard himself, nor in the knight of Ivanhoe, the nominal hero-nor in any of the haughty templars or barons who occupy along with them the front of

the scene, but in the still, devoted, sad, and unrequited tenderness of a Jewish damsel-by far the most fine, and at the same time the most romantic creation of female character the author has ever formed-and second, we suspect, to no creature of female charac ter whatever that is to be found in the whole annals either of poetry or of

romance.

Wilfrid of Ivanhoe is the son of Cedric of Rotherwood, one of the last of the Saxon nobles, who preserved, under all the oppressions of Norman tyranny, and in spite of all the attrac tions of Norman pomp, a faithful and religious reverence for the customs and manners of his own conquered nation. Wilfrid, nevertheless, has departed from the prejudices of his fa ther and his kindred-he has followed the banner of Coeur de Lion into the Holy Land,

"Where from Naphthaly's desert to Gali lee's wave,

The sands of Semaar drank the blood of the brave"

and he returns from thence covered with all the glory of Norman and Christian chivalry-exhibiting in his own person a specimen, without doubt historically true, of the manner in which-prejudices on both sides being softened by community of dangers, adventures, triumphs, and interests the elements of Saxon and Norman na ture, like those of Saxon and Norman speech, were gradually melted into English beneath the sway of the wiser Plantagenets. This young man, however, has been disinherited by his father Cedric, in consequence of what appears to the old Saxon, his wicked apostacy from the manners of his people. The love which he has conceived and expressed for Rowena, a princess of the blood of Alfred, has also given offence to his father-because it interfered with a plan which had been laid down for marrying this highborn lady to another scion of Saxon royalty, Athelstane, lord of Coningsburgh-which union, as had been fondly hoped, might have re-united the attachments of their scattered and depressed race, and so perhaps enabled their leaders to shake themselves free, by some bold effort, from the yoke of the Norman prince. Ivanhoe, there

VOL. VI.

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