"Zounds! shake a patient, man-a shake wont do." "No, sir-and so we gave him two." "Two shakes!-odds curse!

"T would make the patient worse." "It did so, sir-and so a third we tried."

"Well, and what then?"-"Then, sir, my master died."

XXXVI.

The Monk and the Jew, or the Catholic Convert.-
ANONYMOUS.

To make new converts truly blest,
A recipe-Probatum est.

Stern winter, clad in frost and snow
Had now forbade the streams to flow;
And skating peasants swiftly glide
Like swallows o'er the slippery tide;
When Mordecai-upon whose face
The synagogue you plain might trace-
Fortune, with smiles deceitful, bore
To a cursed hole, but late skinned o'er ;
Down plumps the Jew; but in a trice,
Rising, he caught the friendly ice:
He gasped; he yelled a hideous cry;
No friendly help, alas! was nigh,
Save a poor monk, who quickly ran
To snatch from death the drowning man:
But when the holy father saw

A limb of the Mosaic law,

His outstretched hand he quick withdrew.

66

For Heaven's sake, help!" exclaims the Jew.

Turn Christian first!" the father cries.

"I'm frozen to death!" the Jew replies.

"Frozen!" quoth the Monk, "too soon you'll know,

There's fire enough for Jews below;

Renounce your unbelieving crew,

And help is near." "I do! I do!"

"Damn all your brethren, great and small."

"With all my heart:

Oh! damn 'em all!

Now help me out." "There's one thing more:
Salute this cross, and Christ adore!"

""T is well;

"There! there! I Christ adore!"
Thus armed, defiance bid to hell!-
And yet, another thing remains,
To guard against eternal pains:
Do you our papal father hold
Heaven's vicar, and believe all told
By holy church?"-"I do, by fate!
One moment more will be too late!
Drag, draw me out-I freeze! I die."
"Your peace, my friend, is made on high;
Full absolution here I give;

Saint Peter will your soul receive.
Washed clean from sin, and duly shriven;
New converts always go to heaven.
No hour for death so fit as this;
Thus, thus, I launch you into bliss."
So said the father,-in a trice
His convert launched beneath the ice!

XXXVII.

The Patriot's Hope.*-EWING.

SIR, our republic has long been a theme of speculation among the savans of Europe. They profess to have cast its horoscope, and fifty years was fixed upon by many as the utmost limit of its duration. But those years passed by, and beheld us a united and happy people; our political atmosphere, agitated by no storm, and scarce a cloud to obscure the serenity of our horizon: all of the present was prosperity; all of the future, hope.-True, upon the day of that anniversary two venerated fathers of our freedom and of our country fell; but they sunk calmly to rest, in the maturity of years and in the fulness of time; and their simultaneous departure on that day of jubilee, for another and a better world, was hailed by our nation as a propitious sign, sent to us from heaven. Wandering the other day in the alcoves of the library, I

* Extract from a speech delivered in the United States senate by the Hon. Thomas Ewing, senator from Ohio, at a period of much excitement.

accidentally opened a volume containing the orations delivered by many distinguished men on that solemn occasion, and I noted some expressions of a few who now sit in this hall, which are deep fraught with the then prevailing, I may say, universal feeling. It is inquired by one, "Is this the effect of accident or blind chance, or has that God, who holds in his hand the destiny of nations and of men, designed these things as an evidence of the permanence and perpetuity of our institutions?" Another says, "Is it not stamped with the seal of divinity?" And a third, descanting on the prospects, bright and glorious, which opened on our beloved country, says, "Auspicious omens cheer us.'

Yet it would have required but a tinge of superstitious gloom, to have drawn from that event darker forebodings of that which was to come. In our primitive wilds, where the order of nature is unbroken by the hand of man; where majestic trees arise, spread forth their branches, live out their age, and decline; sometimes will a patriarchal plant, which has stood for centuries the winds and storms, fall when no breeze agitates a leaf of the trees that surround it. And when, in the calm stillness of a summer's noon, the solitary woodsman hears on either hand the heavy crash of huge, branchless trunks, falling by their own weight to the earth whence they sprung, prescient of the future, he foresees the whirlwind at hand, which shall sweep through the forest, break its strongest stems, upturn its deepest roots, and strew in the dust its tallest, proudest heads. But I am none of those who indulge in gloomy anticipation. I do not despair of the republic. My trust is strong, that the gallant ship, in which all our hopes are embarked, will yet outride the storm; saved alike from the breakers and billows of disunion, and the greedy whirlpool-the allengulphing maelstroom of executive power, that unbroken, if not unharmed, she may pursue her prosperous voyage far down the stream of time; and that the banner of our country, which now waves over us so proudly, will still float in triumph-borne on the winds of heaven, fanned by the breath of fame, every stripe bright and unsullied, every star fixed in its sphere, ages after each of us now here shall have ceased to gaze on its majestic folds for ever.

XXXVIII.

The Public Informer.*-CURRAN.

THE learned gentleman is pleased to say, that the traverser has charged the government with the encourage ment of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and upon the solemnity of your oaths. You are, upon your oaths, to say to the sister country, that the government of Ireland uses no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers. Let me ask you, honestly,-What do you feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict that every man of us, ay, and every man of you, knows by the testimony of your own eyes, to be utterly and absolutely false ?

I speak not now of the public employment of inform ers, with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward; I speak not of the fate of those horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory: I speak of what your own eyes have seen, day after day, during the course of this commission, from the box where you are now sitting: I speak of the horrid miscreants who have avowed, upon their oaths, that they had come from the very seat of government-from the castle, where they had been worked upon by the fear of death, and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows. I speak of the mild and wholesome councils of this government, holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up -a witness.

Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that tomb-after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked, when he entered, how the multitude retired at

* Extracted from a speech delivered to a jury.

The future, till the past be gulfed in darkness,
It is not of my search. My mother earth!

And thou, fresh breaking day! and you, ye mountains!
Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.
And thou, the bright eye of the universe,
That openest over all, and unto all

Art a delight-thou shinest not on my heart.
And you, ye crags, upon whose extreme edge
I stand, and on the torrent's brink beneath
Behold the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs
In dizziness of distance; when a leap,
A stir, a motion, even a breath, would bring
My breast upon its rocky bosom's bed
To rest for ever-wherefore do I pause?
I feel the impulse-yet I do not plunge;
I see the peril-yet do not recede;

And my brain reels-and yet my foot is firm:
There is a power upon me which withholds
And makes it my fatality to live;

If it be life to wear within myself
This barrenness of spirit, and to be
My own soul's sepulchre, for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself-
The last infirmity of evil. Ay,

Thou winged and cloud-cleaving minister,

[An eagle passes.

Whose happy flight is highest into heaven,
Well mayest thou swoop so near me—I should be
Thy prey, and gorge thine eaglets; thou art gone

Where the eye cannot follow thee; but thine
Yet pierces downward, onward, or above
With a pervading vision. Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!

But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit

To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will
Till our mortality predominates,

And men are-what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other. Hark! the note,

[The shepherd's pipe in the distance is heard.