little caverns afford a cool retreat for the sheep, and it is difficult to imagine a more beautiful fore-ground than is formed by the different groups of them in one of these lanes; some feeding on the patches of turf, that in the wider parts are intermixed with the fern and bushes; some lying in the niches they have worn in the banks among the roots of trees, and to which they have made many sidelong paths; some reposing in these deep recesses, their bowers O'ercanopied with luscious eglantine. -Sir Uvedale Price on the Picturesque. Poetry. In Original Poetry, the Name, real or assumed, of the Author, is printed in Small Capitals under the title; in Selections, it is printed in Italics at the end. COUNT GERO OF MONTFORT.1 BY THE REV. HENRY THOMPSON, M. A. CANTAB, Took leave of lordship, towers, and land, And lo! while there he listening stood, A skiff with swelling sail lay nigh; St. Peter's House, that stilly spot The Churchman blest that counsel wise; O, but the Count exulted too! Much mov'd, he spake, "O, couldst thou see, That water gazes up at me, Like mother on her boy! For know, by yonder rocky Horn, On shipboard I myself was born: And as I in this shallop lie, Rock'd on the glittering deep, I feel once more in infancy On cradle couch asleep; My mother's voice is murmuring nigh, Meanwhile the bark drives cheerly on; The Count, with mingling thoughts foredone, And by the rudder's even play, (1) See page 65. And as the light bark sweeps along, He oped his eyes, and cried, "How deep, Stay, shallop, stay! thy course is o'er- The Abbot kneels before him now, By the warbling wave, at first that gave, In gentle peace, secure from harms, Rectory, Wrington, Miscellaneous. "I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own, but the string that ties them."-Montaigne. BEWARE of misapplying Scripture. It is a thing easily done, but not so easily answered. I know not any one gap that hath let in more and more dangerous errors into the Church, than this, that men take the word of the sacred text, fitted to particular occasions, and to the condition of the times wherein they were written, and then apply them to themselves and others, as they find them, without due respect had to the dif ferences that may be between those times and cases and the present.-Bishop Sanderson. AVOID as much as possible multiplicity of business. Never be curious to know what passes in the world, any further than duty obliges you; it will only distract the mind when it should be better employed.--Bp. Wilson. IMPATIENCE is a quality sudden, eager, and insatiable, which grasps at all, and admits of no delay; scorning to wait God's leisure, and attend humbly and dutifully upon the issues of his wise and just providence.—South. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.-Johnson. THOSE who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are for the greater part ignorant of both the character they leave and of the character they assume.-Burke. SKETCH OF THE TRADITIONS OF GERMANY.1 LET him who in youth has travelled through a poetic country say, when in the evening he has seated himself beside a ruined tower to listen to some old peasant telling him the legend of the castle of whose proud structure it was once a part, whether he has not beheld in imagination the battlements once more rising in frowning state, the banner once more floating above the donjon-keep, the steel corselet once more flashing in the court-yard. In the space of one or two centuries, how entire has been the transformation! The Gothic chapel, the marble balconies sunk in gradual dilapidation under the hand of time, or in sudden ruin under that of man, the vast armoury converted into a work-shop, -the steam-boat hissing and whizzing where once was heard only the lute of the lady of the castle, or the harp of the minstrel. But tradition has not yet enrolled amid her records these innovations. With eyes fixed upon the past, she beholds only bye-gone days, and gathers up into the folds of her robe only the treasures of olden times. With one stroke of her wand, she can sweep away all this modern machinery, and revive, by memory's magic, the wizard-spells of the old castle, and call up the genius of the poetic past. And, if there be a country in which we can thus rove at pleasure through the historic legends, the pious illusions. of popular credulity, that country is Germany. There every plain has its genius, every mountain its mysterious cave, every lake its palace of crystal, -there, the fairy still lives, the sylph still waves its golden pinions,there, at nightfall, the waters of the Elbe and the Rhine have still their sighs of love, the leaves rustle to the breath of mountain-spirits, and the castles from their craggy steeps recount their tales of war. Nevertheless, the pitiless hand of industrial improvement has been at work there, as elsewhere, amid those valleys peopled with such charming creations, and the Männlein (the Mannikin, the dwarf) has retreated in terror to its mountains. But turning, for a little while, from the railroad, the steam-engine, the factory, leaving Germany to its new system of excise, to its policemen and its merchants, let us invoke old Teutonia, and with one blast upon the wondrous horn of Tradition, -the Wunder-horn-resounding from the plains of Silesia to the romance-land of Saltzburgh, from the forests of Bohemia to the Thuringian woods-let us call up around us the slumbering crowd of fairies and of sprites. task; for traditions have passed too quickly from one country to another to allow of their route being thus accurately marked out. Essay on English Poetry,-"The migrations of science As Campbell observes in his are difficult enough to be traced, but tradition travels on still lighter wings, and scatters the seed of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided." neither has any one age. They have been formed_sucAnd as no single country has given birth to them, so cessively, and joined on like the several links of a long chain. Whenever the people were much excited by any event, or surprised at any phenomenon, they composed a legend, they invented a mythus. They supplied the place of reasoning by poetry,-of science by imagination. The historic legends of the people rest upon a sure basis, upon undoubted facts: but the facts have been adorned till they are wholly concealed, and all that is left us to lay hold upon is a name, or some characteristic trait of manners. Their marvellous legends spring from that mystic worship of nature, that species of secret pantheism, of which the middle ages have always recognised the principle, without ever formally adopting it as doctrine. The Northerns paid religious veneration to the luminaries, to the elements. The Lithuanians regarded the sun as the father of the earth, the moon as his wife, and the stars as their children. The Germans were wont, as they retired to rest at night, to salute the stars, for to them they were the eyes of Heaven; and they held festivals in honour of the summer and winter solstice. They did homage to the wind, and to the tempest, to animate and inanimate nature. Metals had for them peculiar properties; the rock grew on the mountains, and in the waters depths; the plants contained potent juices, and magic odours; the birds predicted the future, and knew the secrets of men. In one old tradition, a dove guides a traveller to a treasure; | in the Edda, two ravens relate each day to Odin what passes upon earth;-even the frogs had learned in their marshes many a curious secret, and guarded in their deep grottoes caskets of gold and diamonds. In this world of wonders, where each object was thus made instinct with life, and endowed with attributes of power, it is not to be wondered at that mountains so gigantic in their proportions, so wildly irregular in their form, should strike upon the imagination of the men of the middle ages. The people had no very clear idea of what lay behind those curtains of verdure, those immense caverns of stone; and they made of them the abode of fabulous beings, the tombs of their heroes and kings. The Keterberg is filled with gold and silver. The Ruttemberg, from time to time, was the scene of great miracles; amongst many others is the following. Three miners went to work in it for a whole week, and carried with them-the men had faith it must be owned -only, their prayer book, some oil in their lamp, and bread in their wallet for one day. Every morning before going to work, they, kneeling, commended thembeginning to burn low in their lamp, a violent storm suddenly arose. The roof of the cavern in which they were at work is shaken, bursts open the rock, falls in with billows of sand, and the miners are entombed. But God, in reward of their piety, kept an empty space immediately around them, and renewed each day their provision of oil, and their morsel of food. Thus they lived, for seven years, in continual labour to extricate themselves from their prison, and in constant prayer. Their prayers were heard. Once again did they behold the blue sky above their heads, and were given once more to revisit their dear native village. Amongst the traditions general throughout all Germany there are some whose origin is Oriental, some closely linked with those of India and Greece. These emigra ting to the north, have been sung by Odin, and repeated in Scandinavia and in Suabia. Others have come from Provence, and but changed their costume in crossing the Rhine; others, again, have been brought by pil-selves to Providence. One night, just as the oil was grims from the Holy Land, by the soldiers of the crusades. There are many whose origin is uncertain; found equally in the northern and southern provinces of France, in Ireland, and in Denmark, there is nothing to mark precisely the country to which they belong; but the greater part had their birth upon the soil of Germany; and whatever may be their origin, it is a curious thing to study the character of those traditions, to seek under their Germanic garb for the religious symbol or the historic fact they embody. Still more curious would it be to compare them in their numerous coincidences with those of other nations, to trace out their parentage, their successive transformations, and their filiation. But this is a difficult, and often an impossible, (1) Extracted and translated from "Souvenirs de Voyage," by X. Mormier. The Wunderberg is the most wonderful of all these mountains. There are found cities like ours, cloisters and churches, ramparts and palaces constructed by the Männlein (the dwarfs). There Charlemagne reposes in the midst of his bold peers. He is seated with his crown on his head, his sceptre in his hand, and before him a marble table. His white beard falls upon his chest, and is growing continually. When long enough to go three times round the table, the tree of liberty will again flourish upon the hill, the old emperor will come forth from his cavern, and a new era, an endless period of happiness and prosperity, will dawn upon the earth. But, alas! we of this century cannot hope to live to see that happy time, for the beard of Charlemagne is as yet only of sufficient length to go once round the fated table. In the Kiffhausen reposes Frederic Barbarossa, the other great German hero. Many a time has been seen his bald forehead lifted above the rocks, for he often quits his abode to breathe the fresh air. A shepherd who had led his flock to the mountain-top was once lighting his pipe, saying, as he did so, "Frederic, I smoke to thy health." On the instant, the hero appeared to him, and, to reward him for his remembrance of him, led him into a large hall where were a great number of knights. There he displayed to him rich armour, glittering swords, and gave him more gold than would satisfy a prince. Upon the summit of these mountains, and in these vast caves, is the abode of the giants. Nothing can equal the monstrous size and strength of this race, whose creation, says the Edda, was prior to that of the first man. An immense rock that no effort could shake, is to them but a troublesome pebble in their shoe. An island flung into the midst of the ocean, is to them only a handful of earth which they let fall from their lap. When the god Thor, the god of the thunder, was going through Scandinavia, he came one night upon a large tent, where he slept quietly with his companion the next day he perceived that his commodious lodging had been the thumb of a giant's glove. When the valiant Dietrich, of Berne, attacked Siegenot, that giant, to defend himself, tore up by the roots one of the mightiest trees of the forest, and the Heldenbuck (the Book of Heroes) says that since Adam never had existed so strong a man. The grottoes of the hills are occupied by the dwarfs, who have also their cycle of traditions. An old German poem says, that God first created the dwarfs to cultivate the ground; then, the giants to destroy monsters; and, afterwards, the heroes to protect the poor dwarfs from the giants. In the symbolism of the North, the giants represent brute-force, mere matter; and the dwarfs the intellectual faculties, the mental powers. Notwithstanding their diminutive size, they are endowed with great strength. They erect splendid abodes, and in winter they forge metals, and fabricate sharp arrows and brilliant armour. No sword so good as that made by them; no helmet resists, as theirs does, the edge of the sword, the weight of the battle-axe. Whilst they are thus employed, their women spin the finest wool, the most delicate flax. The dwarfs are handsome and graceful, but so small that they can go through a keyhole. They marry, and bring up their children as Christians,-those of the Wunderberg sometimes go to the church at Saltzburgh. They are fond of dancing and music. Often in the fine summer evenings, they set off to dance in the meadows, and next day may be seen in the grass the wide circles they have marked.' They love, also, to walk over the hills, to draw near to men, and to converse with them. They pity all that Suffer, and reward generously any interest evinced in them, or any service rendered to them. Often have they protected the weak, maintained the cause of the oppressed, and woe to him who is guilty of an injustice, if they be called to avenge it. Should any one lose his way near their abode, they come to meet him, and bring him home to the shelter of their rocky roof. One night, a student of Gottingen was surprised by a storm on the hill of Plissas. The rain had soaked (1) The same tradition exists in Normandy. his dress, and the darkness was so great that he could not retrace his way. Suddenly there came up to him a männlein,-a little man, quite grey,-who, taking his hand, led him through a cleft of the rock into a subterranean apartment, luxuriously fitted up, and brilliantly lighted. There was the wife of the männlein, dressed in a robe of silk, richer far than was ever worn by wife of burgomaster; and there were his brothers, and his daughter, with her fair hair falling over her shoulders, and her exquisitely soft blue eye. The student thought her charming, and seeing her surrounded by such riches, would gladly have asked her in marriage, but that he was afraid to lose her on his way home to Gottingen, so infinitely small was she. They sat down to table, conversed on the topics of the day, the wars of Italy, and the death of the emperor; then each one knelt down, and the mistress of the house prayed; and, when the prayer was ended, the young girl took a silver torch, and led the student to the room prepared for him. The next day he left them reluct antly, for the short time he had passed with the family of the dwarf sufficed to make him attached to them. The männlein gave him several precious stones, and the young girl smilingly handed him a cluster of nuts. On his arrival at Gottingen the nuts were so many fine pieces of good gold. From that day the student made many an effort to find the rocky door by which he had entered, but was never able to discover it. Sometimes, too, the dwarfs ask hospitality from men, either because they find themselves too far from home, or because they wish to celebrate some solemn festival in more than ordinary state. One of them came one day to ask of a count, their neighbour, permission to dance in his castle. The count gave permission, and that very night a whole host of dwarfs descended from the hill, and spread themselves over the gardens, through the tufted hedges, and into every apartment of the castle. Some light the fires in the stoves, and prepare the supper; others, bearing garlands of flowers and silken tissues, hasten to decorate the hall. In a moment, the lustres are arranged-the golden torches blazing on the walls, and reflected in the mirrors. The dancers take the hand of their partners, the musicians tune their instruments, and the ball commences. What delight was there!-the whirl, like that of a set of birds taking their flight from the valley-like that of the leaves, the harvest which the wind has been reaping from the forest. The count himself joins in the merry round: they allot to him the tallest of all the dancers, but she whirls so rapidly that he cannot follow her. After the ball, all the tables were covered with embroidered cloths, with gold and silver plate. The dwarfs led the owner of the mansion to the place of honour, and helped him to meats of exquisite flavour, and to wines kept for centuries in marble butts in the mountains. Then all disappeared as if by magic, and the next day two delegates from the kingdom of the dwarfs came to thank the count for the hospitality he had extended to them, and presented him with a sword and a ring, telling him that these two articles would bring him good fortune for ever. Near akin to the family of the dwarfs are the race of Elves; but the latter are of a more refined and poetic nature. They are the brothers of the bright Djinns and of the Peri, brothers to Ariel and to Irilby. Their face is of the hue of the lily, and their vesture is woven of the moon-beams. They inhabit not the dark bowels of the mountains; they float about in the air, and balance themselves like the gilded butterfly on the slender stalk of a plant; a leaf serves them for pavilion, and they can live for a whole day on a little honey extracted from the cup of a flower, or on a dew-drop. The wives of the elves are of beauteous form and lovely face; they dance and sing all night upon the hills, and their voice is so soft, their singing so harmonious, that every passer-by pauses to listen. But none must approach them, none must mingle in their dance, for their look congeals the heart, and their kiss is death. The elves wear little glass slippers. He who could seize upon one of these slippers would be a rich man, for its owner would redeem it at any price. There is another race, kindred with this, but less wandering than the elves, more social than the dwarfs, I mean the race of domestic sprites, who seek for themselves a lodging in the peasant's cot, sleep in the barn, and warm themselves at the family hearth. The Germans call this sprite Kobold: he is the Brownie of Scotland, the Servant of Switzerland, the Trolle of Denmark, the Goblin of Normandy. The kobold is busy and active; he takes care of the horses, cleans the stable, guides the plough, and works at the harvest. If he be given no cause of offence, the masters of the house may take their ease, and the servants sleep in peace, for with the first light of day all the work is done. To secure his services for ever, it is only necessary to put every day a little milk in one corner of the house, and to sweep and keep clean and neat the room he occupies. In proportion as the kobold is zealous and devoted while he is pleased, so is he capricious and vindictive when offended. A young girl had a kobold in her service, and it was a blessing to see how he anticipated all her wishes, how he exempted her from every troublesome task. One day she threw, in joke, some dirt into the cup of milk he was about to drink, and from that moment the kobold forsook her. She is now obliged to get up early, and to go to bed late, to toil incessantly, and yet, all the while, not to see her work advancing. Every day the implacable Kobold puts some fresh obstacle in her way; every day he compels her to endure some new misfortune. She takes up, with the greatest caution, a precious vase, and breaks it ;--she warms water, and burns her fingers ;-she prepares dinner, and puts a double quantity of salt into one dish, and none in the other. When we find fault with our cooks for breaking culinary laws, we are quite wrong, the whole fault may lie with the kobolds. The good Holla is the queen of domestic servants; it is she who encourages the young girls to work, and aids them in their efforts; it is she who comes at night to fill their distaffs with flax, to turn their spindles;-in short, she is the patroness of the German women, retired and modest, industrious, frugal, and contented. The Some parts of Germany admitted another sprite, also called a familiar spirit-spiritus familiaris. He was put into a phial, and there was no more trouble about him. Every wish was carried out by a silent act of volition on his part. But he came from hell, and it was necessary to take good care and keep him in strict durance to the very moment of death, for otherwise he would carry you straight with him into darkness. A most difficult thing it was to get rid of him; the evil spirit had his mission to perform, and that was to take some one to the devil. Throw him into the water, he floats; pound him under a stone, he revives at once; put him into the fire, he comes out more brisk than ever. only method of preventing his return is to put him into another house, or to sell him. A horse-dealer, reduced to poverty by a series of misfortunes, bought one day a little box from a stranger, who handed it to him as a talisman of good fortune, recommending him to keep it secret, and never to open it. From the moment this box came into his possession, the whole aspect of his fortunes changed. He found a treasure; he resumed his business; he undertook some bold and rash speculations, not one failed. But his wife, a pious woman, began to suspect that some kind of sorcery was at the bottom of such wondrous luck. She opened the mysterious box one day, and beheld a great black fly make his escape through the window; a passer-by picked it up. From that hour the fortunes of the horse-dealer rapidly declined, and he became poorer and more wretched than ever. (To be continued.) SOME ACCOUNT OF DR. RADCLIFFE.' DR. JOHN RADCLIFFE, the celebrated physician, whose name is perpetuated by his splendid benefactions to the University of Oxford, was born in Yorkshire, in the year 1650. Though, we are informed, his father was than on the cultivation of letters, yet his son early more intent on the improvement of his paternal acres, showed so much ability, that he resolved on giving him the advantage of a liberal education. From the grammar-school, at Wakefield, where he made great progress, he was sent, at the early age of fifteen, to University college, Oxford; there he took his degree of B.A., in due time, and was made senior scholar of his college; but, as no fellowship became vacant, he removed to Lincoln college, of which he had previously been invited to become fellow. Having decided on the profession of medicine, he now gave himself up to the study of physic, and attended the different courses of anatomy, chemistry, and botany, delivered Arts, in 1672, as it is said, with uncommon applause. in the University. He took his degree of Master of It was his boast, that he did not prepare himself for the practice of the art of healing, by what he considered an useless application to the musty volumes of ancient medical science, but by a careful examination of the most valuable treatises that made their appearance in his own times. His books, while he was a student of medicine, though well chosen, were so few in number, that, being visited by Dr. Bathurst, the Master of Trinity college, and asked by him where was his library, Radcliffe replied by pointing to a few phials, a skeleton, and a herbal, in one corner of his room. He became Bachelor of Medicine in 1675, and immediately began the exercise of his profession in the city of Oxford itself. At his first entrance upon the stage of action, he fell foul of the apothecaries, and experienced no small opposition from some of the most eminent of that calling, who decried his method of practice as being contrary to the one adopted by Dr. Lydal, at that time the most celebrated practitioner in the University. The method of Lydal was slow; that of Radcliffe, expeditious, prompt, and decisive; and his good sense, and superiority of talent, soon became so conspicuous, that his opponents, the apothecaries, were soon obliged to make interest with him,-" to have his prescriptions on their files." His success, as may readily be believed, was not received without feelings of envy, and his rivals maintained that his cures were all guess-work, and affected sarcastically to regret, that his friends, instead of breeding him up to physic, had not made a scholar of him. On the other hand, Radcliffe was not wanting in his nists, whom he bespattered with all sorts of opprobrious own defence, nor sparing of abuse towards his antagonames, and derided, because of the slops, caudles, and diet drinks, with which they drenched their patients. by any empirical boldness, that, at this early period of It was neither, however, by his abuse of others, nor his medical career, he seems to have completely gained the confidence of the public, but by his judicious method of treating the small-pox,-a method, indeed, which Sydenham had introduced into the art of medicine Oxford. It consisted in the employment of the cooling about ten years before Radcliffe established himself in treatment a practice which seems to have been partly suggested by reasoning upon the nature of the disease, and which was amply sanctioned by experience. In (1) Abridged and altered from "Lives of British Physicians." |