vast accomplishments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero, the withering fire of Juvenal, the plastic imagination of Dante, the humor of Cervantes, the comprehension of Bacon, the wit of Butler, the supreme and universal excel5 lence of Shakspeare?

All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of 10 liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst

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of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling; - by the lonely lamp of Erasmus, by the restless bed of Pascal, in the tribune of Mirabeau, in the cell of Galileo, on the scaffold of Sidney.

But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies which took their rise from her have been 20 wealth in poverty, liberty in bondage, health in sickness, society in solitude.

Her power is, indeed, manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles 25 sorrow, or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to 30 abandon to his comrade the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say, that no external advantage is to be 35 compared with that purification of the intellectual eye, which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the

mental world; all the hoarded treasures of the primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man.

Her freedom and her power have, for more than twenty 5 centuries, been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language, into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable.

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And, when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labor 15 to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts, her influence and 20 her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.

XCI.- LOCHIEL'S WARNING.

CAMPBELL.

[In 1745, Charles Edward, grandson of James II, landed in Scotland, and soon gathered around him an army with which he marched into England, in order to regain possession of the throne from which his ancestors had been driven. He was brilliantly successful at first, and penetrated into England as far as Derby; but he was then obliged to retreat, and, after many disasters, his army was entirely defeated by the English, under command of the Duke of Cumberland, at Culloden.

Lochiel, the head of the warlike clan of the Camerons, was one of the most powerful of the Highland chieftains, and a zealous supporter of the claims of Charles Edward. Among the Highlanders are certain persons supposed to

have the gift of second sight; that is, the power of foreseeing future events Lochiel, on his way to join Charles Edward, is represented as meeting one of these seers, who endeavors in vain to dissuade him from his purpose.]

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[SEER, LOCHIEL.]

SEER. Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day

When the Lowlands shall meet thee in battle array!
For a field of the dead rushes red on my sight,
And the clans of Culloden are scattered in fight:
They rally, they bleed, for their kingdom and crown;
Woe, woe to the riders that trample them down!
Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain,
And their hoof-beaten bosoms are trod to the plain.
But hark! through the fast-flashing lightning of war,
What steed to the desert flies frantic and far?
'T is thine, O Glenullin! whose bride shall await,
Like a love-lighted watchfire, all night at the gate.
A steed comes at morning: no rider is there;
But its bridle is red with the sign of despair.
Weep, Albin! to death and captivity led!
O weep! but thy tears cannot number the dead;
For a merciless sword on Culloden shall wave

Culloden, that reeks with the blood of the brave.
LOCHIEL. Go, preach to the coward, thou death-telling

seer;

Or, if gory Culloden so dreadful appear,

Draw, dotard, around thy old wavering sight

This mantle, to cover the phantoms of fright.

SEER. Ha! laugh'st thou, Lochiel, my vision to scorn?
Proud bird of the mountain, thy plume shall be torn :
Say, rushed the bold eagle exultingly forth

From his home in the dark-rolling clouds of the north?
Lo! the death-shot of foemen outspeeding, he rode
Companionless, bearing destruction abroad;

But down let him stoop from his havoc on high !
Ah, home let him speed-for the spoiler is nigh.

* The poetical name of Scotland,

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Why flames the far summit? Why shoot to the blast
Those embers, like stars from the firmament cast?
'Tis the fire shower of ruin, all dreadfully driven
From his eyry that beacons the darkness of heaven.
O, crested Lochiel! the peerless in might,
Whose banners arise on the battlements' height,
Heaven's fire is around thee, to blast and to burn ;*
Return to thy dwelling! all lonely return!

For the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood,
And a wild mother scream o'er her famishing brood!
LOCHIEL. False wizard, avaunt! I have marshalled
my clan ;

Their swords are a thousand, their bosoms are one!
They are true to the last of their blood and their breath,
And like reapers descend to the harvest of death.
Then welcome be Cumberland's steed to the shock!
Let him dash his proud foam like a wave on the rock!
But woe to his kindred, and woe to his cause,
When Albin her claymore indignantly draws;
When her bonneted chieftains to victory crowd,
Clan Ronald the dauntless and Moray the proud;
All plaided and plumed in their tartan array-

SEER. Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day!
For, dark and despairing, my sight I may seal,
But man cannot cover what God would reveal:
'T is the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.
I tell thee, Culloden's dread echoes shall ring
With the blood-hounds that bark for thy fugitive king.
Lo, annointed by Heaven with the vials of wrath,
Behold where he flies on his desolate path!

Now, in darkness and billows, he sweeps from my sight:*
Rise! rise! ye wild tempests, and cover his flight!

Aluding to the perilous adventures and final escape of Charles, after the battle of Culloden.

'Tis finished.

Their thunders are hushed on the moors,
Culloden is lost, and my country deplores.
But where is the iron-bound prisoner? Where?
For the red eye of battle is shut in despair.

Say, mounts he the ocean-wave, banished, forlorn,
Like a limb from his country cast bleeding and torn?
Ah, no! for a darker departure is near;

The war-drum is muffled, and black is the bier;
His death-bell is tolling; O, mercy, dispel

Yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell!
Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs,
And his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims.
Accursed be the fagots that blaze at his feet,
Where his heart shall be thrown ere it ceases to beat,
With the smoke of its ashes to poison the gale —

6 LOCHIEL. Down, soothless insulter! I trust not the

tale.

Though my perishing ranks should be strewed in their

gore,

Like ocean-weeds heaped on the surf-beaten shore,

Lochiel, untainted by flight or by chains,

While the kindling of life in his bosom remains,
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,

With his back to the field, and his feet to the foe!
And, leaving in battle no blot on his name,
Look proudly to heaven from the death-bed of fame.

XCII. - THE EXECUTION OF MONTROSE.

AYTOUN.

[WILLIAM EDMONDSTOUNE AYTOUN was born in the county of Fife, in Scotland, in 1813, and died August 4, 1865. He was called to the Scotch bar in 1840, and in 1845 was elected to the professorship of rhetoric and belles-lettres in the University of Edinburgh, which he held till his death. He was a prominent contributor to "Blackwood's Magazine." The following extract is from the " Lays of the Scotch Cavaliers," a collection of stirring ballads illustrating the history of Scotland.