some twenty years after, while she was careened for repairs, and crowded with seamen and people from the shore, admitted too much water into her portholes, and thus in a few moments,

"Kempenfelt went down,

With twice four hundred men."

After the victory of Lord Rodney, in 1782, all the prizes, except one, were lost in a terrible storm, in which, also, two British ships of the line and many merchantmen foundered, with more than three thousand persons. The circumnavigator La Perouse perished, without a trace, till some relics of his vessel were found on an island, to which they had drifted. Falconer, after he had described his own fate in his beautiful poem, "The Shipwreck," embarked for India, and sank in the Eastern seas, where the same fate, covered with the same mystery and silence, awaited afterwards the brave Sir Thomas Trowbridge.

The safer voyages of travellers have yet been fatal to many honoured lives, even since all the advantages of modern discovery. In crossing the Atlantic, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was drowned; and at a later period the accomplished Professor Fisher and the veteran General Lefebvre Desnouettes; and still later, in one of the noblest steam vessels, the comedian Power and a son of the ducal house of Richmond. Lord Royston was lost off Lubeck. The Earl of Drogheda and his son were drowned in the short passage between England and Ireland. In little excursions of pleasure, a gust of wind has overturned the boat which was laden with many hopes and treasures; so sank an eminent admiral, Sir Joseph Yorke, near Portsmouth; so the shining, unhappy Shelley in the Gulf of Spezzia.

There is no river that has not swallowed up its dead. The first Sforza plunged in to rescue a drowning page, was shaken from his affrighted horse, and sank under the weight of his armour. A Duke of Brunswick was overwhelmed by the waters of the Oder, while he endeavoured to save the unfortunate peasantry during an inundation. Mungo Park, attacked by the Africans, leaped into the Niger, and was either drowned, or destroyed by their missiles. The young, gifted, and pious Spencer, was drowned while bathing in the Mersey; it has been the end of many parental anticipations. Wounded and exhausted, Poniatowski was unable to cross the marshy Elster, in the heat of the battle of Leipsic. Many were the columns that, at Blenheim, were driven into the Danube; many the fugitives who sank freezing from the bridge of the Berezina; many the Seiks whom the British cannon impelled into the broad Indus. A thousand Mamelukes sank in the Nile, at the battle of the Pyramids.

Each day and hour, perhaps, brings to some mortal its fatal peril by water. The inexperienced ship-boy, hurled from the yard into the deep, and struggling vainly for a while; the rowers, overset in attempting to pass the surf upon some dangerous bar; the seamen, washed from the deck; the crew, deserting their sinking bark, to be swamped in their frailer boat; the wrecked survivors, clinging to the side of the ship, till, one by one, they are swept away; the fishermen, surprised by the sudden gale, and striving, without success, to reach the shore; the heedless passer along the sands, where the returning tide hems him in; the boy, falling through the ice; the rider, drawn beyond his depth by his horse; these are a portion of the great throng whom

the ocean, with its tributaries, numbers amongst the dead. When it shall give up those whom it buried alive and never restored, they must be an host as numerous, perhaps, as all who, at any one time, float upon its bosom.

XVI.

Death by Poisons.

"The leperous distilment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man,
That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body;
And, with a sudden vigour, it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood."

SHAKSPEARE.

A CHEMICAL process incorporates the fruits of the earth, or the flesh of other animals, with our own, through digestion and assimilation. Another chemical process, when other vegetable or animal substances are introduced, dissolves and destroys the whole system. Like the electric fire, the very touch of prussic acid darts through the human frame one withering flash; and life has departed for ever. The slower and more painful operation of arsenic disturbs and distresses the vital functions, till they cease. Strong narcotics, like laudanum, oppress the brain; and the soul passes away under the thick cloud which envelops the senses and all the intellectual faculties. Conveyed to the blood, also, from without, many substances diffuse a blasting energy, which is mightier than all the resistance of physical life.

These poisons have been employed by the murderer, by the savage warrior, by the public executioner, and by the suicide. But they may also, through various accidents, find entrance within the body, and accom

plish there their terrible work of dissolution. The Emperor John Comnenus was mortally wounded while he was hunting, by a poisoned arrow. A fatal quantity of some powerful drug, of which a little might preserve life, but much must destroy it, has sometimes been administered through the error of a nurse or attendant; and sometimes, that of the apothecary, the friend or the patient himself has substituted a poison for a remedy. Archbishop Stuart, son of the celebrated Earl of Bute, died from swallowing an embrocation which had been given him by mistake for a medicine. The beautiful poetess best known under her maiden name of Landon, appears to have heedlessly used a greater quantity of prussic acid than was her perilous custom, and was found dead, alone, in her chamber, at Cape Coast Castle. An apothecary in one of the Southern States, on the representation that he had perhaps sent a draught which he did not intend, was so confident of his correctness that he offered to swallow the draught, and actually destroyed himself by his rashness.

It is common to hear of those who, having mistaken the poisonous toadstool for the rich mushroom, have brought death into a family at a repast. Children and domestics have lighted upon arsenic which had been carelessly deposited within their reach, and have tasted it fatally, or, perhaps, mingled it accidentally with the food of a household. Diseases in the flesh of animals have been known to cause qualities so poisonous, that those who partook of the flesh, after the animal was slain, have sickened and died.

It has sometimes happened, that very slight wounds have spread, in an inexplicable manner, some strange effect, like that of venom, throughout the system.

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