almost too large to be named come, earlier or later, to their end, by shipwreck. In a single disastrous winter, twenty-five hundred were drowned on the shores of New England. The hurricane sweeps down many a foundering vessel; many are shattered on the breakers; many are drifted hopelessly on the sands; some are broken by the shock of the ice-island; many in the darkness áre driven together in fatal encounter.

When Xerxes assembled his immense fleet at Artemisium, a storm arose which engulphed far more than the Grecian arms could destroy. Prince William, the only son of Henry the First of England, with his sister and a gay train of nobles and courtiers, was drowned in crossing the channel from Normandy: a butcher alone clung to the mast, and was rescued. Returning from the scene of their unworthy attempts to supplant-better men, Bobadilla and Roldan, the adversaries of Columbus, were lost with all their gold. A succession of tempests scattered the great Armada of Spain, and strewed the seas of Britain with foreign dead. The good Sir Humphrey Gilbert sat reading at the stern of his ship, when it was last seen by its companion, as a night of dreadful peril was closing in: "the way to heaven,' cried he, "is as short by sea as by land:" and in the morning his vessel was seen no more. Hudson was turned adrift in a boat, by his mutinous sailors, and so perished. Sir Cloudesly Shovel, with three gallant ships of the line, and their crews, sank by the Scilly Islands. Many lamented Englishmen went down, when James the Second, with Marlborough and a few beside, escaped from his sinking ship. The Prince George, in 1758, took fire at sea, and five hundred perished by the flames or by the waters. Off Portsmouth, the Royal George,

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 Spèzzia.

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