nation was permitted to enjoy these privileges so endeared to its recollection-if the Pyrenees were an impassable barrier-if the Orleans family had obtained an hereditary character for honourable bearing and straight-forward conduct, then we might sorrowfully but submissively see the throne of Spain usurped, for the sake of averting the miseries which are incidental to war. But it is idle to delude ourselves with such vain hopes; the same miserable state of anarchy and confusion has every prospect of being perpetuated, and the jealousies of other nations will now be added to the other elements of discord. It is, therefore, to the Prince d'Asturies that we turn, in the full conviction that, by advocating his rights, Spain will be best securing her happiness and long-cherished constitutional privileges.

HISTORICAL BALLAD S.-No. V.

By Lord John Manners, M.P.

THE DEATH OF PRINCE HENRY PLANTAGENET.

I.

'GIVE me the ring,' in accents weak the dying Henry said,
Then with a mighty effort he upraised himself in bed,
And pressed the precious token of an injured father's love
Fast to his heart and clammy lips that scarcely now could move.

II.

Then to King Henry's mercy he most heartily commends
The rebel Lords of Aquitaine, and all his guilty friends,

And prays him that his knights and squires be paid their wages due

To me they have been faithful aye, albeit false to you.'

III.

'My Lord Archbishop, order now the ashes to be spread,
And put me on the sackcloth, and draw me from the bed,
And lay me on them near the door, for sinner such as I,
Who lived unlike a Christian man, unlike to one should die!'

IV.

His servants, lo! with many tears the shameful halter bring,
And round the neck they tie it of the peniteut young king,
And draw him from his princely couch, and place him on the floor,
Alack! did ever prince die on so sad a bed before?

V.

'Oh, bury me at Rouen; grant me this my last request,
My bones beside my grandfather's* in peace would never rest ;
For he was true and faithful, and a good and loyal son,
And happy was the race, though brief, which in this life he run.'

VI.

The good Archbishop shrives him, and bids him not despair;
He receives the blessed Sacrament, and breathes his parting prayer.
He is dead-alas-the brave young Prince; his soul has passed away,
May God that soul assoilzie in the dreadful Judgment Day!

* Prince Geoffrey Plantagenet, buried at Mans.

A FLOWER FROM JEAN PAUL'S AUTUMN GARDEN.

SHORTLY after the purchase of several new pictures at the National Gallery, I went there with It was his first visit, and I naturally took him to what was generally the most admired. I found he had brought with him an altogether novel principle of criticism; of a Claude, a Correggio, a Leonardo, or a Raphael, he had only one question to ask,-Is this one of the new pictures?' As often as the answer was negative his eye wandered, and all further attempt to interest him in it was useless Rembrandt's Jew's head was more to him than St. Catherine; not because one was familiar to him and the other was not, but because one had hung in the Gallery as many days as the other had years. To be sure his taste was easily gratified, but it was not very wise. We will hope his was an extreme case. Yet something very like his feeling many of us show in the way we judge of translations. We are all in heart monopolists; better pleased with the poorest of our home productions than with the most splendid foreign importations, even though remodelled in however clear and readable characters, expressly for the English market. It may be very good, you hear people say, still it is only a translation; as if they were criticizing the composer, not the wares he brought them to sell. For myself, however, I confess I prefer a sovereign of George the Third to a farthing, or even a shilling with the bran new stamp of 1846; nay, I would sooner have an old Spanish doubloon than either; if it be not passable coin it is easily converted into such; and so I must advise my readers to be better pleased with what they find here prepared for them, than they could be with the most highly spiced composition I could have offered them of my own. They may take my word for it, it is quite infinitely better.

It would be easy for me to write essays on the genius of Jean Paul, whole volumes of them. Perhaps some people might be better pleased if I had offered them one of them now. I have three reasons, however, to me satisfactory, which deter me from doing so, which I hope will be allowed to pass for good.

First, I should only be giving them my judgment of the author, and not the author himself, which is not my present purpose. I want them to form a notion, not of me, but of Jean Paul; and I believe I have given them enough to enable them to form an opinion for themselves, which is far better for them than taking mine.

Second, I could not write a short essay; I would not break a petal off my flower; and there are limits to the patience of a reader, as well as, to the pages of a magazine.

Thirdly, I intend to take an opportunity of doing it another

time; and so, fair reader, I leave you to excuse me, and, when you have finished this paper, to thank me, as you will not fail to do.

When Herder was dying he asked his son for a great thought, to revive him. Alas! what is the common food we provide for our poor sick-bed prisoners, when the grey shadows are lengthening over their lives? Starry images of the glorious heaven? or sickly phantoms of fear and dismay? Surely it is very strange, this whining, and whimpering, of men, round a departing brother. They would be ashamed of it if he were in health. Is it not enough that the man must die, without loading him with the needless burden of consoling their selfish sorrow? I am not speaking now of the cruel torture it was the practice some time since for a foolish class of clergymen to inflict at the last hour of life, prating idly of death-bed conversions, and when perhaps the sinking soul had already began to cast its glance beyond the grave into the world of spirits, branding in dreams of hell upon the brain, which may scathe and burn them even under the coffin lid. But what I complain of is, that there is never to be seen inside a sick room a single face from which the poor sinking soul can gather a light or happy thought. Lawyers, doctors, confessors, formal and businesslike, relations weeping and wailingthe sufferer lies thirsting for a gleam of light, for a spring shower of recollections of his early days to mingle with the struggling anticipations, half dark, half bright, that flit around his departing, yet not a person can be found with power enough over his own selfish sorrows to supply him. The sick bed anticipates the coffin, and only wants the lid. The lying hopes held out of recovery give a false sense of the value of life to him who is to leave it. The bier is made to seem as terrible as the scaffold; and when the eyelids fall, so long as the ear can hear, these discords of life must still pursue it, instead of leaving life to die away, like any echo, into deeper and fainter, yet ever sweeter melody.

And yet men feel they might do better. The smallest drop of true comfort it has been permitted one to shed over a single death-bed, holds a brighter place in our memory than all one has done for the strong and the healthy. Is it because it is the last— it is all one can ever do?

On the whole, however, our departure out of life would be far more painful than our entrance into it, did not our kind mother Nature here, as well as everywhere, find a way to relieve us, and rock her children softly into a trance before she leads them away from one world into another-as the last act is closing an armour of apathy congeals over the breast, and saves the sufferer from the tears of those he is leaving; and some who have been re

covered at the last gasp tell us, that as the moment comes close light dazzling waves of happiness begin to play and float over the brain. I have seen these in the play of the features-I have heard them in the tones of the dying. What they are we cannot tell, for we have none come back from beyond them; yet I think those spasms and struggles we often witness, may not perhaps be signs of pains, but the quivering extacy of the soul, as in some far-off heaven she is set free from the burden of earth, and is putting on her immortality. What a history there must be world wide and world deep of death-beds, yet closed for ever to us till we have past our own!

Mr. Hartmann was the clergyman of the village of Heim. His wife had long been dead, and he now lived alone with his son Godfrey. He was old, but not very old, and strong and vigorous; and in Godfrey he found all that could promise the greatest happiness to what was left to him of life. Godfrey used to fill his place for him in the pulpit; not to relieve him, he did not require that; but the young man had fire in him that would out, and the father found the highest pleasure a father can receive, of learning from his son.

It was a genuine poet's soul that was budding and bursting in young Godfrey. He was not like most of our young poets, a mere offshoot, with here and there a flower, and when these fell off a few poor half-blighted fruits in their place. He was a full, free, growing tree, with bright sweet flowers and bright sweet fruit to crown them, and the buds had been quickened into fuller and fresher life by the genial warmth of a new-born spring of poetry.

The father had, like him, a poet's calling; but he had not, like him, been favoured by the time. Before the middle of the last century, many a noble soul that could have flown was forced to stay, perched on pulpit, and law bench, and professor's chair, because fathers had thought their children would thrive better in the plain or in the valley than in the pointed summit of the muse's mountains. The poet soul, when checked in its growth, and not permitted to throw itself out in external creation, commonly turns its force in upon the heart: the feelings, finding they cannot be uttered, make a voice for themselves in action, and thoughts turn, not into words, but deeds. So that the stuff and matter for a poet may be all given, and yet be dormant all his life, as the butterfly would continue a chrysalis if winter never passed, and summer did not come to break his prison. Something of this kind had befallen old Hartmann; only he had been more fortunate than he might have been. He had his pulpit, and, to the virgin soul of a poet, the pulpit may be as a nun's cell, where the twin sisters Religion and Poetry may dwell together, and lend their light to one another. How fair, how very