continued to mark his progress-his progress!-his retrograde progress in life. He had not been settled in his humble abode beyond the first quarter, making discoveries in science of the most astonishing description, when a railroad between Billingsgate and Blackwall drove him from his home. Private interests must always yield to public advantages. The road went right through Mr. Pooledoune's parlour; but then, when completed, how easy it would be to bring, by its ready means, white-bait from the water-side to the city; and how much toil and expense would be saved to the citizens in having their feed without the trouble of journeying so far for it in the heat of sultry summer. The greatest affliction to the individual was not the deterioration which his fortune again experienced in removing, but a calamity which had almost overwhelmed even his steadfast soul. We have said he was on the point of realising the most amazing discoveries in natural science. By a battery of unlimited galvanic power, continually directed to stones abstracted from St. Paul's Cathedral, Waterloo-bridge, and the Monument, he had ascertained that the church was built of the fur of the pulex, the bridge of butterflies' facets, and the Monument of midges' wings. Indeed he had obtained all these creatures entire and lively, in the course of his experiments upon decomposing the St. Paul pebbles, the Waterloo-bridge granite, and the Monumental free-stone; and the only difficulty which remained for solution was, that above a hundred other unknown and undescribed insects, probably of the antediluvian world, had been produced at the same time, and by the same means. It was hard, but the railroad caused the destruction of this theory; and several of the retorts being broken, the revivification interrupted, the reanimated killed, and the whole process served out, Mr. Pooledoune never enjoyed another opportunity for demonstrating these incomparable results. Thousands of years may elapse before any other experimentalist succeed to such an extent; and millions of men and philosophers of intermediate generations will die meanwhile, ignorant of the prodigious injury done to science and to John Pooledoune by the railroad between Billingsgate and Blackwall. As we descend, we diminish in the eyes of those to whom we were distinguished objects whilst dwelling on the same or a higher elevation: do we not really become less and less? Pooledoune's pursuits continued to be similar in character, in opinions, in expectations; but, ah! how different in worldly esteem! At the Mechanics' Institutes he was no longer promoted to the front-seats,-at the Society of Arts he was no more invited to deliver his sentiments,-his little contribution of insulated facts was unsought by the Statisticals, and the British Association was too far off, with its Edinburgh and Dublin festivities, to meet his conveniency. Yet he devoted himself to the confusion of knowledge; and, in order to obtain larger interest on his fading capital, he dabbled in Mexican and Payous, and Greek loans. Perfecting a fulminating powder to supersede the use of gunpowder, which could not explode except by the touch of a particular preparation, an ounce of it accidentally ignited one day, and blew out his right eye. John's hair grew prematurely grey with such crosses, and he invented a dye to render it beautifully black. Most of those whom he persuaded to give it a trial were turned most curiously grizzle, green, or yellow; but, perhaps from using an inordinate quantity, his own scalp was utterly removed, and his scull rendered as bald and shining as a polished pewter plate, whence the meat had been removed, but not the gravy. He patronised Mechi's razor-strops and Hubert's roseate powder, in consequence of which all the lower features of his face became a mass of purulent offence. He took to an infallible dentifrice, which preserved the enamel, and whitened without injuring the teeth. It was a noble specific, and did not contradict its advertisement: but all John's teeth fell out; and though the enamel was preserved, and they were white, his gums were exposed, empty, and red. He supplied his loss with a set of china ornaments, which made him grin and nod like a Mandarin, but with which he could not eat like a Christian, nor sleep like a savage. John got poorer and poorer, shabbier and shabbier, sicklier and sicklier. He had been blown up by gas, burnt down by steam, ruined by railroads, cursed by every improvement on the whole pack of cards. He was crippled in his limbs, deficient of an eye, disfigured in face and person, and, worse than worst of all, his friends knew that he had but little left, and less to hope for. It was not four years since John Pooledoune had begun his career with a sound constitution, and two-and-thirty thousand pounds of ready money,-worth sixty thousand in any other way! Surely he was the "Victim of Improvement." Nearly at last, when seen in the streets, John would point to his waterproof shoes, and hat the better for being soaked twenty-four hours in a washing-tub; and one noticed that his ugly-looking outer garment was a proof Macintosh, and his patent spectacles set in cases of india-rubber. And even his sorry truckle-bed, to which the late squire of Hurlépoer Hall now nightly sought his obscure and darkling way, was surmounted by a patent tick (it was double tick, for he had it on credit from an old philosophical crony,) filled with hot water, -as had been the brief course of the unfortunate to whom it could afford no rest. Whether from the Macintosh preservative cloak, the waterproof shoes, the water-filled bed, the india-rubber, or the rubs of the weather, we have not ascertained; but poor John caught a horrid cold, and his cough was sadly aggravated by a contrivance in his chimney for consuming its own smoke. This the chimney resolutely refused; and, like all other quarrels, got so incensed that it would not even carry the smoke up. Cold, asthma, suffocation, and starvation, were then the miserable companions of the quondam wealthy John Pooledoune. In the misery of his heart, the wretched man took to drinking. That resource, under any circumstances, must very quickly have brought on the crisis; but, true to the last, John resorted to patent British brandy, and his fate was astonishingly accelerated. One dusky evening, in a state of inebriety, the ragged philosopher walked, or rather staggered out. The cool air breathed upon his fevered brow; he saw the streets illumed with gas, he witnessed the Three under the metamorphoses were called by their acquaintance, the Grey Goose, the Merman, and the Yellow-haired Laddie.-Note, passim. smoke ascending from steam-engines, and, overcome by his emotions, when a Gravesend steamer, having beautifully run down another a hundred yards below, swept into the Adelaide Wharf, he threw himself over London Bridge, and sank in the disturbed bosom of the silver, insulted, and persecuted Thames. Wearily had his life dragged on for many a day, and yet it was doomed to another drag. Before he had been two minutes in the water, this last-mentioned combination of cards, creepers, and hooks, brought him to the surface, having caught him by his bald pate, and he was carried ashore in a sculler. The nearest surgeon being called in, happened to differ from the Humane Society, and hung him up by the heels while he administered stimulants; but John had imbibed so little of the element, that even this treatment did not kill him. But his look was deadly, and he was so debilitated by the medical treatment, that to be restored was impossible; and the parish authorities of Saint, inspecting his sorry equipments, became alarmed lest he should die where he had no business, and put them to the expense of a funeral. He was asked where he lived, in order that he might also die there; and a cart being procured, under the New Poor Law Act, he was carted towards the dismal abode he had indicated. His road lay along the new street to the new bridge; and, about a hundred yards down, in a dark avenue on his left, he could not, though others might see, the once rich and respected tenement of his father, Roger Pooledoune, hosier and citizen of London. The night was frosty and bleak: John's clothes were thin and wet. Had he been taken to an old woman instead of a medical theorist, and dried and cherished even by the commonest fire of the parish workhouse, he would have survived his "accident:" but the law was imperative; he must be moved to his own parish, and he was moved into the parish of Eternity,-the parish which holds the rich and the poor, and Heaven only knows how they are provided for. Before the cart reached the "Union," John Pouledoune was a corpse. On the ensuing day but one, a coroner's inquest sat upon his body, and one or two of the jurors were men who had known him in his prosperity. They could hardly identify the meagre and mutilated remains; but, in tenderness to the officials, who had killed him by doing all for the best, they returned a verdict of" Found Drowned." Not being conchologists, we shall not attempt to describe the shell in which it was pretended that John Pooledoune was buried. In that shell no muscle of his ever reposed; it held a few of the paving-stones of the adjacent lane, which, if John had been alive to submit to his galvanic battery, would have been demonstrated to be composed of bumble bees' sacchyrometers. About the same hour that the stones were interred with the solemn ritual of the church service by the chaplain, the body also furnished the subject of a lecture by the surgeon of the workhouse to the pupils in an adjoining hospital. The scull in particular was singularly formed, at least it was so declared by the phrenologists, who were allowed to claw it, and who clearly showed that the bumps (caused by the watermen's drags) were organs of philoprogenitiveness, amativeness, and destructiveness. In due time a perfect skeleton of John Pooledoune was scraped and prepared, and placed in a glass case in the museum of the hos pital. And thus was fulfilled the Gipsy's prophecy. He was "by curing, slain;" he was "never lost on earth, alive or dead," for he was dragged from the river and preserved in the surgeons' hall; he was "found by numbers" of sensible coroner's inquest men! he is yet in his glass case a "bodiless corpse, the victim of improvement, for ever to improve" the students of anatomy. There was "No hand to close his eyes; No eye to see his grave; He is "dead, resembling Death," yet keeps "his place among the dead and the living." "His end has not been an ending," and every one who inspects the hospital collection may know that "he is and is not !" In a moral magazine such as Bentley's Miscellany it is naturally expected that a useful and instructive inference should be drawn from every tale; and assuredly ours needs little to point it: "May we all be preserved from the fascinations of Gipsies!” THE LEGEND OF MOUNT PILATE. SUPERSTITION is to this day a strong characteristic of the inhabitants of the Alps. A reason for this, is easily found in the various and imposing phenomena of Nature, to which these simple mountaineers are daily and nightly witnesses. A storm, which on the plains would scarcely attract attention, offers at each instant, in these lofty and diversified regions, some new and appalling spectacle. Each clap of thunder finds a thousand echoes, and is reverberated almost to infinity. The lightning's flash plays not only above, but about and underneath the beholder. Here a roaring torrent dashes past him down the precipitous rocks, driving all before it in its impetuous course; there a sudden whirlwind uproots the sturdy monarch of the forest, and bears it aloft, as though it were a feather on the breeze. The heavy cloud, which one moment envelopes the poor shepherd in its vapoury folds, in the next is seen rolling its dense masses over the lower earth, hundreds of fathoms beneath his feet. Nor are the calmer sublimities by which he is at other times surrounded less calculated to speak to his imagination than the loud voice of the bellowing tempest. The plaintive murmuring of the vernal breeze amid the lofty pines; the deep silence of the summer's burning noon; the fantastic changes of the fleecy cloud, whose form is varied by every pinnacle of the mountain; the hollow and mournful moaning of the autumnal gusts as they scatter far and wide the falling leaves; the bright beam of the resplendent moon, across which each jutting crag throws some grotesque shadow; and above all, the mist, which, rising from the plains a mere mass of dull and dank vapour, here first appears to receive life, and takes innumerable shapes and forms, incredible to those who have never witnessed its airy evolutions! These are the ever-varying phantasmata of nature that pass in scenic succession before the eyes of the Alpine peasant, and add fresh fuel to the fire of his superstitious inclinations. It was in scenes of this inspiring character that Ossian saw his shadowy armies, his warrior ghosts, his visionary maids, and heard the wild music of their aërial harps. And although, from the imperfectness of our nature, we are all liable to have "our eyes made the fools of the other senses," yet is it in these cloud-capped regions alone that the illusions are always of a dignified order, and that poetry spreads her veil of enchantment over the dull realities of life. Such was the nature of my reflections after I had retired to rest upon the night before my intended pilgrimage to Mount Pilate; and, having made them, I slept soundly until the bright beams of a July sun darting in at my latticed window gave me notice of the morning's growth. I arose from my bed of leaves and rushes, and, strolling forth into the open air, tasted the delicious sweetness of the hour. Never do I remember a more enchanting prospect than here met my view. It seemed as if Nature had proclaimed a universal holiday. She was abroad in her gala dress; while Spring and Summer, her vernal and blooming handmaids,-the former lingering as though loth to quit her mistress, the latter rushing to anticipate her call,-appeared on either side of her, and strewed her rosy path with freshness and fragrance. The dews of night, glistening in the first rays of the slanting sun, spangled the green carpet of the earth; and the tall pines, ever the first to greet the morning breeze, gracefully bowed their dark heads to welcome day's return. Far across the intervening lake, the flocks and herds were seen winding slowly up the mountain's side in search of their wholesome pasture; while the simple harmony of their bells, mingling with the wild song or whistle of their urchin conductors, came upon my ear over the still waters in distant snatches, and formed, with the loud melody of the feathered minstrels close around me, a rural concert in happiest unison with the scene. A tap on the shoulder from my venerable conductor aroused me from my reverie. Our preparations were soon made; and with a small wallet destined to contain the necessary provision for such a journey, and each a long staff, pointed at one end and hooked at the other, such as is required for the ascent and descent of the precipitous paths we were to tread, we commenced our march. We proceeded first to Brunnen, where we took water upon the fairest of Switzer's lakes, and before sunset arrived at Lucerne, the town from which it takes its name. The next morning we were again afoot betimes, and, as we jogged along, I obtained the result of my companion's long gleanings in this fruitful land of romance and superstition. "First," said he, "with regard to the name of this celebrated mountain. Some have thought that it obtained the designation of Mount Pilate from a tradition of its having been formerly peopled by a band of Roman deserters, who sought refuge among its almost inaccessible rocks, the Latin word pila having been often used to signify a mountain-pass; others, that it is a corruption from pileus, a hat, because its bald summit is often covered by a complete cap of clouds, -and hence the old proverb so often quoted in this country, "Quand Pilate a mis son chapeau, * Its German name is Frakmont, from the Latin words "Mons fractus," an appellation naturally bestowed upon its broken and irregular summit. |