"If he would but say he loved me! if he would but

suspense

ease the of my aching heart! But it must come; I know it will; and if that cantankerous toad of a Corny

Barbara Hare stopped. What was that, at the far end of the lawn, just in advance of the shade of the thick trees? Their leaves were not causing the movement, for it was a still night. It had been there some minutes: it was evidently a human form. What was it? Surely it was

making signs to her!

Or else it looked as though it was. That was certainly its arm moving, and now it advanced a pace nearer, and raised something which it wore on its head-a battered hat with a broad brim, a "wide-awake," encircled with a wisp of straw.

Barbara Hare's heart leaped, as the saying runs, into her mouth, and her face became deadly white in the moonlight. Her first thought was, to alarm the servants; her second, to be still; for she remembered the fear and mystery that attached to the house. She went into the hall, shutting her mamma in the parlour, and stood in the shade of the portico, gazing still. But the figure evidently followed her movements with its sight, and the hat was again taken off, and waved violently.

Barbara Hare turned sick with utter terror. She must fathom it; she must see who, and what it was; for, the servants she dared not call, and those movements were imperative, and might not be disregarded. But she possessed more innate courage than falls to the lot of some young ladies.

"Mamma," she said, returning to the parlour and catching up her shawl, while striving to speak without emotion, "I shall just walk down the path, and see if papa is coming."

Mrs. Hare did not reply. She was musing upon other things, in that quiescent, happy mood, which a small portion of spirits will impart to one weak in body; and Barbara softly closed the door, and stole out again to the portico. She stood a moment to rally her courage, and again the hat was waved impatiently.

Barbara Hare commenced her walk towards it in dread unutterable; an undefined sense of evil filling her sinking heart: mingling with which came, with a rush of terror, a fear of that other undefined evil-the evil Mrs. Hare had declared was foreboded by her dream.

1860.

BY NICHOLAS MICHELL.

"TIs past, with all its sunshine and its clouds,
Its pleasure-beaming smiles and bitter tears,
And much Oblivion's curtain darkly shrouds :
Another drop melts in the sea of years;
Another corpse thy mighty churchyard, Time!
Takes to its bosom; let the solemn knell
Boom through the midnight, like a voice sublime,
That to the dead Year cries, Farewell! farewell!
Mourn not its flight; the body may grow old,
But beams unchanged the mind's eternal gold.
The
year had sorrows; backward cast thine eye:
Italia's classic plains are red with gore,

And hearths are desolate, and widows sigh

For valiant hearts that beat and love no more. Hark! the storm maddens round our island-home! Destruction, like a demon, rides the gale,

And hundreds sink in Ocean's greedy foam,

Mocked by the winds their last, sad, drowning wail: Then Science o'er her great ones* drops a tearThese are thy ravages, O perished Year!

Yet, watched by History, Time's dead pilgrim, sleep! Some good, some joy, some blessings didst thou bring;

For this thy memory grateful we will keep,

For this thy dirge with reverence we will ring.

The hour is past-the joyous bells declare
The New Year into life hath bounded now;

His eye is lustrous, and his form is fair,

And Promise, with a halo, wreaths his brow:
Then round his cradle, all good spirits, kneel!
Then ring him in, ye bells, with gladsome peal!
I gaze into the midnight, and the stars

Gleam like bright letters in Fate's book on high;
Oh, that my soul from these low prison-bars
Could read the future in that mystic sky!
But we must trust and hope; and I would weave
A happy destiny for thee, young Year!
No rainbow blessings shining to deceive,

No smiles that halve their empire with the tear:
In vigour, health, and glory, mayst thou grow,
And, like a sun, laugh off each cloud of woe!
May war, with cannon-thunder, ne'er astound thee,
Or harrow thee with groans and pictures sad;
But Peace, and Joy, and Plenty dance around thee-
Sweet bacchant maidens, beautiful as glad.
May human Progress raise her banner high,
And march before thee; Science trim her light,
And flash new wonders on the mind and eye;
May Art and Learning wing a loftier flight;
Prosperity strew thick thy path with flowers,
And wide-spread love crown all thy golden hours!
* Brunel and Stephenson.

NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES,

OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

And make them men of note (do you note, men?).-Love's Labour's Lost, Act III. Sc. 1.

D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,

Balth.

Do it in notes.

Note this before my notes,

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks, Notes, notes, forsooth, and noting!

Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3.

And these to Notes are frittered quite away.-Dunciad, Book I.

Notes of exception, notes of admiration,

Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.-Amen Corner, c. iii.

XXV.-LORD NORTH.

A BETTER-ABUSED man than Lord North was, in his time, never, perhaps, had a seat in the House of Commons, not even on the Treasury bench itself. And yet never, probably, sat there a member in that House, on any of its benches, Treasury or Opposition, back or front, of a more winning personal character; never, on either side of Mr. Speaker, a more amiable, thoroughly likable man.

His position, during the latter years of the American War, was certainly trying in the extreme. It was a false and a fatal position. The Minister was over-persuaded by his importunate master. He continued to act long after he felt himself to be in the wrong. He remained in office to pursue a policy he had learnt to be impolitic. The personal appeals of the King overcame his better judgment, and induced him to retain a post of awful responsibility, and to persevere in a tremendous conflict, when his own views were the other way, and the passionate wish of his heart was to be quit of the business altogether.

Lord Brougham, whose estimate of him is conceived in an unquestionably genial and generous spirit, insists, however, as might be supposed, and, indeed, must be taken for granted, that his American policy "can admit of no defence:" he was long resolved to quit the helm, because George III. required a wrong course to be steered" that helm which he ought to have quitted as soon as his mind was made up to differ with the owner of the vessel, unless he were permitted to follow his own course;' and he was only kept at his post by constant entreaties, by monthly expostulations, by the most vehement protestations, as Lord Brougham rather diffusely words it, "of the misguided Prince against a proceeding which must leave him helpless in the hands of his implacable enemies, and even by promises always renewed to let him go would he but remain for a few weeks, until some other arrangement could be made." The proofs of this statement notoriously exist, "under the hand of the Royal Suitor

to his reluctant servant's grace and favour," whose apparently fixed purposes of retirement he "uses all these expedients to defeat, or at least to destruct and retard, if he cannot frustrate." This importunity, remarks the noble biographer, when brought to bear upon the feelings of so wellnatured a person as Lord North, might easily be expected to produce its intended effect; and the unavoidable difficulty of retreating from a post which, while he held it, had become one of peril as well as embarrassment, doubtless increased the difficulty of abandoning it while the danger lasted.

an army.

A good-natured man is no more fit, says Hazlitt, in his peremptory style, to be trusted in public affairs than a coward or a woman is to lead "In an extreme case, a very good-natured man indeed may try to hang twelve honester men than himself to rise at the bar, and forge the seal of the realm to continue his colleagues a week longer in office. He is a slave to the will of others, a coward to their prejudices, a tool of their vices." According to Hazlitt, spleen is the soul of patriotism and of public good; in which case, a Gifford or a Croker might have suggested that Mr. Hazlitt's patriotism and public spirit must be unbounded. In the instance of Lord North, it may be doubted whether spleen had a local habitation or a name in his entire physique-whether a particle of gall could be detected in his composition. Rare as this particular characteristic may be, Mr. Walter Bagehot treats him as, in the most exact sense, a representative man-although representative of the class most out of favour with the transcendental thinkers who invented the name. "Germans deny it, but in every country common opinions are very common. Everywhere, there exists the comfortable mass; quiet, sagacious, short-sighted, -such as the Jews whom Rabshakeh tempted by their vine and their figtree, such as the English with their snug dining-room and after-dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal; sensible, solid men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid supine instinct; without originality and without folly; judicious in their dealings, respected in the world; wanting little, sacrificing nothing; good-tempered people in a word, 'caring for nothing till they are themselves hurt.' Lord North was one of this class. You could hardly make him angry. 'No doubt,' he said, tapping his fat side, 'I am that odious thing a Minister; and I believe other people wish they were so too.' Profound people looked deeply for the maxims of his policy; and it being on the surface, of course they failed to find it. He did, not what the mind but what the body of the community wanted to have done; he appealed to the real people, the large English common-place herd. His abilities were great; and with them he did what people with no abilities wished to do, but could not do." And then in reference to his now published Letters to the King, showing him to have been quite opposed to the war he carried on; convinced it could not succeed; hardly, in fact, wishing it might; the same critic gives as answer to the query, Why then did he carry it on? that Vox populi, the voice of well-dressed men commanded it to be done; and that Lord North therefore sacrificed cheerfully American people, who

See Lord Brougham's Statesmen of the Time of George III. First Series. "Lord North." †The Round Table: On Good-Nature.

Bagehot's Estimates, Englishmen and Scotchmen.

were nothing to him, to English, who were something, and to a king, who was much.

The reader is possibly familiar with a paragraph in Mr. Forster's Life of Goldsmith, which, after introducing us to North as the son of the princess dowager's intimate friend Lord Guildford, not without allusion to the scandal which had not hesitated to find a reason for his extraordinary resemblance to the King,* as regards clumsy figure, homely face, thick lips, light complexion and hair, bushy eyebrows, and protruding large grey eyes (which, as Walpole says, rolled about to no purpose, for he was utterly shortsighted)-goes on to describe the Minister as an abler man than the King, and with too many good as well as amiable qualities for the service in which he consented to enlist them. "He was a man of very various knowledge; underneath his heavy exterior, singularly awkward manners, and what seemed to be a perpetual tendency to fall asleep, he concealed great promptness of parts, and an aptitude for business not a little extraordinary; while the personal disinterestedness of his character, and the unalterable sweetness of his temper, carried him undoubtedly through more public faults and miscarriages, with less of private hatred or dislike, than fell to any minister's lot before or since his time." If, adds Mr. Forster, he helped to ruin his country, he did it with the most perfect good-humour; and was always ready to surrender the profit as well as the credit of it to "the King's private junto," Jenkinson, Rigby, and Co.

Lord North was born in April, 1733, and was educated at Eton and Oxford (Trinity)-leaving the university with the reputation, his daughter says, of being a very accomplished and elegant classical scholar. After three years spent on the Continent-during which he became familiar with the German, Italian, and French languages, and made himself at home in Vienna, Naples, and Paris-he came back to Englaud, distinguished for l'esprit Européen, and, among other accomplishments, renowned in the best circles for his perfections in the dance. "I have been told," writes his daughter, "that he danced the most graceful minuet of any young man of his day: this, I must own, surprised me, who remember him only with a corpulent and heavy figure, the movements of which were rendered more awkward § and were impeded by his extreme near-sightedness, before he became totally blind. In his youth, however, his figure was slight and slim; his face was always plain, but agreeable, owing to its habitual expression of cheerfulness and good humour; though it gave no indication of the brightness of his understanding." Those coeval veterans in debate, who gazed on the Noble Lord in the Blue Ribbon, would, many of them, be as slow of belief as his own child, as to his sometime agility and lithsome fluency on the ballroom floor. Yet that pudgy, comatose mass of humanity, squatting all

*Mr. Forster appears to have based his description on a passage in Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's Historical Memoirs. See vol. i. of that gossipy work, pp. 478497. Ed. 1815.

Forster's Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, book iii. ch. xviii.

Lady Charlotte Lindsay. See her very interesting letter to Lord Brougham, in Appendix No. II. to the Historical Sketches.

§ Wraxall's description of him in his forty-ninth year, is, that "in speaking, walking, and every motion, it is not enough to say that he wanted grace; he was to the last degree awkward."-Historical Memoirs of My Own Time.