He has not any opinions he has so many: but what he has are al ways your's. He agrees generally with the last speaker.

He

"He would not with a peremptory tone
Assert the nose upon his face his own;
With hesitation, admirably slow,

He humbly hopes, presumes it may be so."

"Knows what he knows, as if he knew it not;
What he remembers seems to have forgot;
His sole opinion, whatsoe'er befall,

Centering at last in having none at all."

Being independent as to property, he may be considered as a kind of amateur toad-eater; a toad-eater, without the venom of one of these reptiles. If his lordship is disposed to be profoundly axiomatical, and says, that mock-turtle is not real turtle, he does not dispute it, but swallows my lord's mock-turtle and his real opinion at the same time. My lady asserts that Chaucer did not write Comus, and he confesses that the strength of her ladyship's assertion has staggered an opinion he had held to the contrary. If his lordship is merely witty, he always laughs in time and in tune. His laugh is loud, long, and peculiar; his acquaintance is therefore much cultivated by "wits among lords," and "lords among wits:" it is something like a chromatic run down the keys of the piano; whether it is to shew the soundness of his teeth, of organ-key whiteness and regularity, or the compass of his voice, or to convince you how wide he could yawn, if forced to it, and thus increase the value of his attention, by betraying how awful and grave-gaping his inattention would be, is perhaps known by himself. It is thought to be very cordial; so it is: there is but one thing I prefer to it, and that is an instrument which is now making under the exclusive patronage of high life, by which laughing is imitated in all its wide varieties, from the laugh obligato or forced, and the laugh reluctant or equivocatory, to the laugh delightful or satisfactory, and the laugh extempore or voluntary: I prefer this, because here I do not despise the man in the instrument.

His other uses are,-to hand young ladies to carriages, and say nothing of their ancles, if they are not to his taste, and as much as he pleases if they are, so that it be not in their mammas' hearing; but it may be as much as possible in the hearing of any rival beauty who cannot boast of the "Milaine foot of fire." He may too, if there is an opportunity, insinuate that the foot of the blue-stocking Lady Sapphira Sapphic, is like a foot of the heroic measure (meaning a Life-guardsman's): this will not displease them, for they utterly abhor Lady Sapphira, because, at her last rout, her grooms squeezed into her room a thin young gentleman, and thereby had a majority of one over the number pressed in at the rout of the countess their mother's the preceding evening. To hand old ladies to their sedans on courtdays, and be as patient as Penelope in compressing them and their hoops into them. To quadrille with young ones, if a younger lord has not come to his time. To sit seriously and at ease with battered beauties and decayed dowagers, in winter-evenings, and look as if he had never been happier; and, if possible, remember the best days of

the dowagers, and forget when the Honourable Miss Tittermouth combed her own hair, and giggled among her own teeth. To wait on lovely countesses at Almack's, between the dances; and serve lemonades, ices, and jellies with a page's precision, and a prince's politeness of back and body. To say handsome things to the ordinary Miss Honourables, and look unutterably handsome things to the beautiful ones. To shop with them at the jeweller's, once in a way; and admire their taste when they prefer French filigree to English reality and sterlingness. At the opera, to cry bravo for weak-voiced elderly lords, when Camporese sings; and clap no louder than the same, when fairy-footed Fanny Bias dances. These are his principal amusements, and, all together, they make up a very harmless sort of nice being, which one can no more object to than one can to honey and bread for breakfast, honey and biscuit for luncheon, honey and French-roll for dinner, honey and ladies'-fingers for tea, and honey and gingerbread for supper, C. S. W. B.

UGOLINO.*

THEN paused the sinner from his foul repast,
And from his mouth the gory remnants cast;
Till, cleansed his lips from clotted blood and hair,
The gloomy tale his accents thus declare:

"Thou ask'st a thing, whose thought to desperate pain
The past recalling, harrows up my brain ;

And, ere my tongue the direful scene unroll,
Remember'd anguish loads my wretched soul.

But should these words, these tears, with guilt and shame
Blast in the realms of day the traitor's name,

Whose hateful scull with ravening tooth I bare-
Nor words this mouth, nor tears these eyes shall spare.
"Who thou may'st be, and through the realms of pain
How thou hast wander'd here, to guess were vain ;
But the sweet accent of my native land

Bespeaks thee born on Arno's flowery strand.
Count Ugolino was my name—my prey
This felon's scull once did a mitre sway;
Ruggiero was he call'd ;-now learn the cause
Of this our doom by Hell's unerring laws.
My faith by him abused-my hapless fate
Consign'd to chains, 'twere needless to relate;
But the dark secrets of that prison drear

Thou hast not heard-and now thou art to hear.
"Full many a moon had shot a silvery dew

Through the small chink that air'd our narrow † mew-
The Tower of Famine, named from me (nor I

The only wretch there doom'd immured to die),

Count Ugolino de' Gherardeschi sought to obtain the sovereignty of Pisa in 1288, and joined Ruggieri degli Ubaldini against Nino di Gallura. The former obtained their object, but afterwards quarrelling, Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino by false representations, and heading the enraged people, they imprisoned him and two of his sons in a tower on the Piazza degli Anzioni, where they were starved to death. The tower has since been called "La torre della fame," The tower of famine.-See Dante, Inferno, Canto 33.

"Muda."-Dante.

When, as I slept, a dream of awful power
Rent the dark veil that shrouds the future hour.
Methought to those fair hills with olives green
Which Pisa's haughty walls from Lucca screen,
Ruggiero, proud in hot and arduous chace,
Held a dark wolf and all his brindled race:
Gualandi, Sismond, Lanfranc led the way,
And fierce and meagre hounds pursued the prey.
Short space the weary brutes have strength to fly;
They faint-they sink-the hunters yell-they die.
Breathless I wake, and hear a feeble scream,-
Oh God! it is my little ones that dream;
I hear them moan, as wrapt in sleep they lie,
And, Father, give us bread,' they faintly cry.
Think, mortal, then what flash'd upon my brain;
And in that thought if thou from tears refrain,
Stern, stern indeed art thou, and pitiless of pain.
And now, our slumbers past, the hour draws nigh
That brings of daily food the scant supply.
Silent we sit, and lost in thoughtful gloom,
In the dark dream each scans the coming doom:
When the drear tower shook with a horrid jar-
It was the clang of bolts and creaking of the bar.
Then all was silent ;-for I did not moan-
Despair and horror froze my soul to stone.
I gazed upon the innocents-and they
Wept sorely-and I heard one falt'ring say
(My little Anseln) Father, look not so-
What ails thee, father?'-in that day of woe
I spake not, wept not-nor in the long night
That follow'd-nor till broke the morning light;
When, as my image in the wretched four,
Paternity's sweet pledge, I saw once more,
In bitterness of grief my very hands I tore;
And they, believing that for want of bread
I gnaw'd my flesh, quick started and said,
Feed on us, father! less will be the pain,-

up

Thou gav'st these wretched limbs, and take them back again.' I then was silent, that I might not wring

Their tender souls with added suffering.

That day in silence, and the next were pass'd

Oh God! Oh God! why were they not the last!
The fourth morn, at my feet, in agony

My Gaddo fell; and Help me, father, why
Dost thou not help me!' was the dying cry
Of that dear child; and thus the other three,
Ere the sixth morn arrived, had ceased to be.
Famine and tears then quench'd the visual light,
And, staggering sightless in the grave of night,
I sought my children-and these fingers stray'd
O'er their cold limbs, and with their features play'd.
Three days I call'd their names-but they were dead;
The fourth in ling'ring pangs the father's spirit fled."
Thus spake the Fiend; and as he spake, his eyes
Shot forth askaunt the wrath that never dies.
With grin malign he clench'd the traitor's head,
And to their vengeful task his teeth indurate sped.

GERMAN POPULAR AND TRADITIONARY LITERATURE,

NO. 11.

THE adventures of Peter Claus, or (according to his new appellation) Rip-van Winkle, diverted our attention from the observations we were about to make in a former Number, on the value of the traditionary tales, which have built themselves upon, and often become the sole preservers of interesting historical fact, as well as the records of ancient manners and superstitions.

Into the clouds of darksome doubt and uncertainty which overhang the early days of Teutonic enterprise, we cannot attempt here to penetrate, though the theme is one on which we often meditate with an interest proportionate to the difficulty and perplexity of the subject. The Goths everywhere, and on every account, excite our most lively curiosity, and command the most respectful attention. Their origin and appearance in Europe, their forms of government and progress in civilization, are all subjects full of speculation to the philosophic historian, for they were the tribes who brought with them, and infused into the western continent, the very stamina of vitality, of prompt, manly principle and action; so that we trace to them, wherever they settled, almost all that is great and characteristic of European pre-eminence. Their institutions so soon moulded themselves into the substantial and enduring principles of order and good government, that we can hardly bring ourselves to believe, that they could ever have been the mere accidental combinations of rude barbarians, the chance-medley of chaotic atoms. We confess that when we think of these things, we are often in good earnest inclined to pin our faith on the flattering accounts which Jornandes gives of the literary and philosophic acquirements of his countrymen in the earliest times; how (at their hours of leisure from the almost perpetual conflicts, which the ambitious policy of Rome was ever provoking) their wise men turned themselves to walk in the paths of philosophy; how one scrutinized the face of the heavens; another explored the nature of herbs and fruits; a third calculated the uses and laws of motion of the moon; and a fourth investigated the rules by which the sun performed his diurnal course, and contemplated the theory of the zodiacal signs. These pursuits, indeed, square little with the pictures of barbarism sketched by Roman pride; though, in the result, we see these barbarians rising in vigour of intellect and solidity of character, and maturing everywhere institutions which have borne the test of time, and withstood alike the encroachments of despotism and democracy, while their classic despisers found their boasted pre-eminence in luxury and elegant refinements, only hurrying them on faster to decay and ruin.

We have before alluded to the popular hymns or songs which, in the earliest ages, commemorated the exploits of the Teutonic warriors, and which, in the days of Charlemagne, were currently known and talked of, as being of the highest antiquity, in the same manner as still earlier documents had been in the time of Tacitus. These, it is true, have perished like their predecessors; but there can be little doubt that

VOL. II. NO. X.

2 A

some of the old heroic poems still in existence are, at any rate, founded on very ancient materials. The circumstantial details of the achievements of Attila and Theoderic have manifestly their foundation in fact ; and in the Scandinavian Sagas we actually find the original songs referred to as then in repute, and considered of historic authority. Thus the Wilkina and Niflunga Saga says, "Worthy of notice are the German songs of the inhabitants of Susa, [the residence of Attila is so called in this Saga] where these actions happened. They shew the garden, the dungeon, &c. and the Munster and Bremen men tell the same facts, without knowing of the other accounts, almost without variation; from which we see the fidelity of the historical poems of the Teutonic language."

It is quite clear that a great mass of poetic literature, of some sort or another, had been, from the remotest antiquity, cultivated among the German tribes; but the degree of perfection to which it had attained before the pieces which have survived to us, is a more doubtful question. We think that it must have reached a very considerable extent of comparative refinement for some time previous to the eleventh century. The poets of the Suabian age, we know, embodied the materials, if they did not actually copy the songs, of ages long gone by; and the elegance of their diction, as well as the artificial, and often very harmonious, scheme of their versification, will (if our wanderings should chance hereafter to lead us thither) give us abundant reason to believe that they are not the characteristics of a people just emerging from positive barbarism.

One of the most prominent and peculiar features of the traditionary tales of Germany, is the repeated allusion to the existence in some remote age of two conflicting races, the one of giant, the other of dwarfish dimensions. The giants are always depicted as making irruptions upon, and generally ejecting, the dwarfs, who, in their turn, are described as fleeing for refuge to holes in the rocks and forests, where they are proscribed as mischievous freebooters, who availed themselves of every opportunity, and even of magical arts, to vex and plunder their conquerors. The historic groundwork of these traditions is evidently of very high antiquity. The dwarfs are very different personages from the pigmies that appear singly in the pages of later romance, as pieces of court furniture, or as the messengers of the courteous knight and his lady. They are here free agents, acting in bodies, forming states, warred on, and warring in return; men who were by no means despicable enemies, and who

"Though they look'd so little, did strong things sometimes."

Wherever or however these tales arose, certain it is, that the feuds between these supposed dwarf and giant tribes have intermingled themselves with every species of popular tradition, from the Eddas and Sagas of Scandinavia to the gossiping stories of the nursery, in which we meet, in various guises, the friend of our youth, Thomas Thumb, and the more imposing personage

"Who sat upon a rock and bobb'd for whale."