Jane Hardy. By T. S. ARTHUR. London Knight and Sons.

THIS is an American tale, of common materials, we suppose, in this hard, common-place world; although the results may be a little out of the ordinary run. It is the story of a married life, between a man of business, who thought himself very clever, and had a strong opinion of himself and his house-an American Dombey, and a clever and rather fiery woman. A contest, of course, arose for precedence in small matters, which a husband, who wants to live quietly, should always avoid. But John Hardy tolerated no rival near his throne, and Jane Hardy became insane. She was cured by the attention of their daughter. A tale of this nature does not allow extracts; but, when after some years of a better life, Jane Hardy was near to death, she propounds a curious theory, which may be quoted:

"We shall speedily meet again," said the husband, as he sat alone with her, holding her small shadowy hand in his, just as the twilight began to draw its dusky curtains around them. His voice trembled; for he had spoken in answer to ber remark that, in a very little while, she must pass

away.

"I know not how that may be," she said, very quietly, "In the and fixing her large, glittering eyes upon his face. world to which I am going, the laws of association are not as the laws of this world, John."

"Oh, Jane! what am I to understand by this ?" was grier in the tones of his voice.

There

'Only," she replied, "that, in the life to come, spiritual qualities conjoin. They will be near each other who are alike, and those distant from each other who are unlike, in

their life and their affections. The attraction or repulsion will be mutual. But God alone knows our internal states, by which the future is determined. If it is well with us as to these we need have no concern."

Mr. Hardy felt the words of his wife like sharp thrusts of glittering steel. How calmly she spoke! What a placid -almost angelic-expression was in her countenance as she talked of the laws of conjunction and dissociation in the future life-laws which, if they really prevailed, would hold them apart for ever! "I know not how that may be. In the world to which I am going, the laws of association are not as the laws of this world." Such was her calm, eventoned answer to his almost tearfully uttered assurance of a meeting after death. It was thus she removed from under his feet the frail support on which they rested as the waters of sorrow began to roar around him. He covered his face with his hands, and sat silent for many minutes.

"Can you not forgive me the past? Oh, Jane! If, through blind error, I wronged you once, have I not sought in all possible ways to make atonement ?" Mr. Hardy looked up and spoke with a sudden energy.

A shadow dimmed the face of his wife, and tears sprung to her eyes.

"We have both need of forgiveness John," she replied; "I, perhaps, most of all. We cannot conceal from ourselves, if we would, that the current of our lives did not run smoothly at the beginning, nor for a long time afterwards. The cords that bound us together were not silken and light as gossamer to bear, but heavy and galling as links of iron. I blame myself in many things. I was not a true, selfforgetting, loving wife to you, John. I did not make your home a happy one. I struggled, and fretted, and made my

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"For ever, Jane! For ever! Oh, do not say that word! Let me hear your lips recall it !" And Mr. Hardy bent over her with a countenance full of anguish.

"In this world, where hearts are hidden things, and woman must believe where she cannot see-must take loving words and acts in full confidence that they are true words and acts-it too often happens, that her lot is one of wretchedness. The fair exterior of manhood, so attractive in her eyes, often proves to be a false exterior. She finds nothing in his affection or his principles with which she can truly harmonise; and, though she may live with him dutifully, and even in some appearance of love, yet is there no true union of the heart-no marriage in the higher sense."

"With such death is an eternal disjunction. How could it be otherwise in a world where similitude conjoins, and dissimilitude separates? And this law of attraction and

repulsion, my husband," continued Mrs. Hardy, speaking very earnestly, " is a merciful law. If there is an error here, it will not be perpetuated when we pass up higher. Of one thing we may be certain; the quality of our spiritual life in this world, will determine our associations in the life beyond; and in heaven we shall desire none other."

Mr. Hardy had bowed his head while she was speaking. It was some moments before he looked up. When he did so, his face was paler, his eyes were heavy, and his countenance wore a drooping aspect. What sharp arrows of conviction were in the words which had been spoken by his wife! Steadily he gazed into her face, wonderingly and sorrowfully, while every moment the conviction grew stronger that their separation was likely to be an eternal one;-that her pure spirit would ascend higher than he ever could, and claim companionship with spirits of more godlike

nature.

This idea may be more poetical than real. We know that the bad will be separated from others of a different character, and that is all we do know. It gives us no reason to expect a division of the latter into parties formed of similitudes, but as it is a favourite idea with American writers we have copied the passage.

THE LADY MARY SINGLETON DIED at her house, Curzon-street, Mayfair, London, on the 26th May, in the 88th year of her age.

It has fallen to our lot in each of the last two months, to record the decease of some important link between the present and the past generation; this also is not to form an exception to its predecessor. The above lady was the sole representative of one of the most honoured names in history, and of whom history is now the sole memorial, brought as it is before ourselves by statues erected to him, by a grateful people, to whose exertions they are so much indebted for a peaceful possession of the richest empire of the globe.

The Lady Mary Singleton was the only daughter of the great Marquis Cornwallis, who was raised to that dignity for his government of India. Her ladyship and her brother were his sole children. The son died in 1823, having survived his father eighteen years. By his death, the higher title became extinct; the other honours then descended to his father's brother, at whose decease they also lapsed. The name of Cornwallis is now lost, and the only descendants remaining are the nieces of this lady, the daughters of the second Marquis.

Her ladyship, at the early age of sixteen, married Mark Singleton, Esq., whom she survived many years.

SIR WILLIAM LEWIS HERRIES.

THIS gallant officer died on the 3rd ult., at his house, in Bolton-street, Piccadilly, London.

He was the second son of the late Colonel Herries, so well known, years since, by his activity and zeal in raising and disciplining the Volunteers in the early part of the French Revolutionary war; and for which he was deservedly distinguished upon many occasions, by his late Majesty, George the Third. Animated by the example of his father, Sir W. L. Herries joined the regular army in 1801, and from that period was engaged in active services, among the more prominent of which were the expeditions to Buenos Ayres and Walcheren, and the Siege of Flushing. During the Spanish campaign he was present, among other affairs, at the Battle of Vittoria, the Passage of the Bidassoa, the Siege of San Sebastian, and at the sortie from Bayonne. At the last, his active service was brought to a close by the

loss of a leg, in his daring attempt to rescue Sir John Hope. The horse of that commander being wounded fell with his rider, when Sir William Lewis and the present MajorGeneral Moore, rushed through a tremendously heavy fire to save him, but before that could be accomplished, both were wounded, and all three made prisoners. He was subsequently employed as Quartermaster-General in the Ionian Islands, as Comptroller of Army Accounts, and as a Commissioner of the Board of Audit, and retired only in 1854. In addition to his military rank he was C.B., K.C.H., and Colonel of the 68th Foot.

In 1808 his lordship married the Lady Eleanor, the youngest daughter of the seventeenth Earl of Ormonde They had four children, three sons and one daughter. Two of these only survived, namely, the third son and the daughter. The former of these, the Hon. George Ponsonby, succeeds to the titles and estates.

ADMIRAL BOWEN,

DIED at Southampton on the 17th June, in his 30th year of his age.

This distinguished officer entered the navy at an early age, and before he was fourteen, had assisted at the desperate encounter between the Phoenix and the Resolute, when the latter was captured, though carrying ten more guns than her opponent. At seventeen he had obtained his commission as lieutenant, and in 1801, received a gold medal for his gallantry when in command of his ship's launch, the Flora, at the landing of the expedition in Egypt. In 1802, he was made commander, and in that capacity, did much service on the coasts of France and Holland. When in command of the Orestes, armed with fourteen guns, among other exploits, he captured two armed schuyts, and engaged a praam of eighteen guns, bearing the flag of a rear-admira!, in the presence of a flotilla consisting of thirty sail. In 1805, his ship unfortunately grounded off Gravelines, and he was compelled to destroy her, to prevent her falling into possession of the enemy. His services were, however, so fully appreciated, that he was presented with his commission as captain at the commencement of the following year. From that time, to the conclusion of the war, his career was most active, both off the French and the American coasts, where he seriously damaged the enemy, both by sea and land. After being thirty-eight years afloat, he retired from active life, and was rewarded with a good service pension of £300 per annum; passing successively through the intermediate steps he attained the rank of Admiral of the Blue.

DOUGLAS JERROLD.

DURING the last month English literature and politics, have experienced a severe loss in the death of Douglas Jerrold, to whom two of our contributors refer in this No. and therefore we have deferred any other notice of his numerous writings.

GEORGE BRIMLEY, ESQ., M.A.

AT Cambridge, on the 22th of May, in his 37th year, George Brimley, Esq., Librarian of Trinity College.

Thus early has terminated the life of one of the most promising scholars of the day. A native of the town of Cambridge, in which his father holds a high position, he was, perhaps, but comparatively little known by name beyond his own immediate circle, and the university, to which he bade fair to become a very bright ornament. But to many of the metropolitan literary men he was well known and admired, not only for his scholarship, and the great extent of his acquirements, but also for his critical acumen, and pure and finished style of composition, which was remarkable for its perspicuity, and compactness, though wholly free from obscurity.

His only avowed publication, is an essay upon Tennyson, in the first volume of the Cambridge Essays, but it is to be hoped for the sake of literature, that his similar works upos several of our great authors, and his papers upon other subjects will be collected and published, and they will make no small addition to the standard authorities in the various branches of philosophy, science, and poetry.

LUNACY

OUR Scottish poor law has never been just and right. Once, the support of the poor was a duty of the church, and the ecclesiastical almoners were rich. At that time the pauper population were probably numerous; and yet the law afforded no systematic help to them. They wandered from abbey to farm, and from the manor-house to the village; sometimes prosperous when news abounded, and often in want when the borders were at peace, and a strong-willed monarch crushed intestine feuds. They were the newsmen of a distant time, and also transacted, in some measure, the business of modern perambulating libraries, when few could read, and books to be read were equally few.

The professional vagrant of these almost forgotten days must have been a sufferer as the professional merchant extended and multiplied his rounds. The latter class had more independence necessarily, and more respectability. They had two strings to their bow, and conveyed intelligence only as a means of selling goods.

In these times, also, underlying the floating mass of pauperism, a numerous and a comparatively localised and stationary body of lame, and blind, and weak, and "orphaned" persons had claimed the charity of their neighbours. For them the Church was only trustee, but the trustee appropriated gradually, and doled out in charity, the property invested by the charitable for these wretched classes. "Remember the poor, my son," was whispered effectually into the ear of many dying barous, who had been bad, bold men, and now were not unwilling to buy an eternal lease of Heaven, by a slice of the earth, which they could no longer retain. The poor were remembered, and the ecclesiastical body deemed themselves capable to accept, in formá pauperis, and to retain, for their own behoof, the splendid waifs that desperate heirs saw dropping

from a dying man's couch. King James was not the only Scottish gentleman who could say of one or more of his ancestors, that he had been a "sair saunt" for the Crown; substituting the baronetcy or the coronet, or the lairdship, for the crown.

The transfer of property by dying men proceeded until the absolution of a few great personages had cost one-third of Scotland, so that, in one sense, their sins had been evidently numerous and weighty, while to themselves the burden was cheaply cut off; as the payment for deliverance was made in coin that was not current in the land whereto their spirits' flight was bent. "Thy money perish with thee," was not a text recognised in these circumstances, forasmuch as many persons left the world in the calm conviction that they had bought the gift of God, not by all, but by a considerable portion of their capital in bullion or in land.

The proceeding was only one of those ways by which a previous evil was corrected. Nobody is left to doubt that the clan and family lands in Scotland belonged originally to the clans or to the families, and were held upon the elective principle, or that of primogeniture, by the head of the clan or of the family, who was enabled gradually to turn his co-proprietors into tenants, often into serfs, always into vassals. The policy and the power of the church wrested one-third of these lands from the barons, and those portions of the country were better cultivated than the estates still in the possession of private persons. also suppose that, although many abbots sipped their claret in a very luxurious way, yet the poor were really fed by the crumbs which fell from their tables, and often by even more substantial dishes, and that, in other cases, the trusteeship for the poor was discharged in a still more becoming, because a more honest, manner.

We can

The progress of the reformation principles, and

their decisive character, justify the supposition that they were not new but hidden springs of action. The Culdees had been destroyed, but their principles had never been obliterated from the north of Ireland, the islands, and Scotland. Their spirit quietly defied the Pope in great exigencies, telling him that he never had, and possessed not then, any temporal power within the realm of Scotland. That spirit was infused into Sir David Lindesay's poetry, and can be traced in the productions of a still higher author. Thus, when half ruined barons were invited to join the Reformation, they saw in it a popular and a profitable movement, and committed themselves to its demands in their fullest sense.

The Reformed Church was served heir to the privilege of supporting the poor without the property of its predecessor; although the energy of the Reformation was equal to the work, not more by finding the means necessary for the poor than by checking pauperism at its source. For a long period an equivalent to a Maine Liquor Law prevailed in Scotland, for which successive generations have taken ample, and to themselves, destructive revenge. The country, according to Defoe, was wrapped in a moral and religious influence, which made the payments for the poor an easy matter, by leaving them few in number; and rendering their friends and neighbours willing to assist them.

Time passed, and the fervour of the Reformation was lost in the last century; although through the greater part of its years the people almost universally attended the established churches, and their collections, often small, were yet sufficient for the absolute wants of the pauper population, or they were supplemented by the parochial badges-the certificates in metal or tin-that the holder was allowed to seek alms; and they were not often sought in vain.

Towards the close of the last century the number of dissenters from the established church increased, and now they are the majority of the population. The old schemes of supporting the poor have been found insufficient under these circumstances, and a regular assessment has been levied in some parishes for very many years; and in a larger number for a shorter period. A poor rate exists, and has long existed, in all boroughs; but in many rural parishes the heritors have struggled against its enforcement with the anxiety of men in earnest; and the public are indebted for many clearances to their determination against meeting the common fate.

rate-payers consider usually that only one mode of rating should exist over the entire kingdom, and they decline the boon. Of course, only one mode can be adopted in one parish for one year; but it may be changed at any future meeting of the rate-payers.

The old acts of Parliament which provide for the maintenance of the poor, having been drawn with the ordinary ambiguity and verbosity, did not clearly define poverty. The country had, therefore, in the matter of pauperism, to be placed under judge-made law. The judges, with their accustomed esteem for precedents, hold that the Parliament meant to say a certain thing, because diverse judges, long since removed in the ordinary course of nature from seats which, according to that course, if nature had been left to itself, they would have never occupied, decided that such was the meaning of Parliament. Acts of Parliament are of immaterial value even to the legislators themselves, until some of the judges have decided what these statesmen meant by their words. An Act that has received the assent of Queen, Peers, and Commons, next requires a decision to form a precedent tacked to its parchment, and thereafter it can live and work. During the present session of Parliament, some members of the House of Commons have been sadly puzzled to tell, not what they meant by bribery and corruption, for many of their bankers could have told them that one member meant one thousand; another, five thou sand; and a third, ten thousand pounds; but what they said in an Act, that they meant.

It is the same with other acts and bills; they are unintelligible to their authors until the judges interpret them. That was the state of the Scotch poor-law, but at last it settled down into a matured constitution with curious crotchets of its own, holding, in the face of the English and Irish poorlaw, that a few years residence in a parish, constituted a settlement; that each parish should support its own poor, and that able-bodied persons, who, however willing to labour, could not obtain wages, because they could not obtain work, were not entitled to relief, either for themselves or for their children. We describe, of course, the law of a Christian land. We write of statutes passed and upheld by men who believe, who do not profess to believe only, but who absolutely believe, in Him who said, "Forasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."

They state undoubtedly that persons in that situation are the objects of casual charity, and that it should be given both as a duty and as a privilege. Some of them even propose a moral and religious agency, that even in a crowded population might be expected to leave few uncaredfor and unknown; yet, at present, and without that means, a fearful injustice is done. We have

fortune always "favours the larger battalions." The law offers an alternative, but a majority of the

money when they have employment, and be able to meet occasional idleness; but first, before

be "at once" reformed in that manner; for we luxuriate in an abuse, if it be only venerable by years; and the present law has had advocates of the highest intellectual and moral class.

This interpretation of the law is its own Nemesis. Little children, who never had any money to save, suffer from its provisions, unless private benevolence intervenes, and the best way of putting able-bodied persons out of that category is to starve them. The system of rating upon a single parish instead of a union is, when taken in connexion with the short settlements, a premium to the bothy system in rural districts, and the clearances that disgrace them. The authorities of a rural parish provide against the existence of cottages and cottiers to save themselves from poor rates. They cannot accomplish that provision without the aid of the bothy system, an "institution" of the most objectionable chaaacter, common to nearly all large farms in Scotland. The bothies are training schools of vice, where young farm labourers dwell together without any assistance in their cooking or other domestic duties. This arrangement is considered the right arm of high farming; and, if it be so, we have not any objection to see the right arm amputated, and high farming creeping crippled through the land with a stump. Neither high nor low farming has half so much to do with the establishment of bothies, in the place of cottages, as the dread of poor-rates. The landowners of Scotland have been educated into a nervous hatred of pauperism as if it were the plague; and so it is, necessarily, a social disease. Therefore, they push labourer's families into towns, and rejoice like free men when they find that they have been for five years located in one town parish. The rate in Scotch towns is rendered thus often burthensome, while it does not exist in the country parish around these refuges of the poor. The selfishness of this iniquity is transparent, but we cannot overreach the greed of these men with the present law. Let us have a general poor-rate for the kingdom, or for eight or ten large unions of parishes, and the temptation to bothies and clearances will disappear.

The poor-laws, it will now be observed, affect many more persons than those whom they were intended to reach. They act upon the peasantry like the pest; they have become an apology and an instrument of cruel but ingenious expulsion of the population from the land, and they should

The small payments made to support the poor in some parishes were deservedly stigmatised in the House of Commons as disgraceful. One member defended them by assuring his audience that money went far in the parishes where the payments were slight. Charity goes farther, and the secret of living on the scanty help from the parish is that nobody lives thereupon. The dry official crust is supplemented from other quarters, and the support of the poor is not taken from the rich but thrown upon the willing.

The condition of one portion of the Scottish poor has been examined recently by a Government Commission. An American lady had discovered that the treatment of lunatic paupers was most objectionable, and by personal application she persuaded the members of the Cabinet to appoint the Commission. They reported cruelties and negli gence which were not expected to exist in private asylums; and we regret that the evidence collected by them supports their opinion. The people of Scotland have not entirely neglected this class of sufferers. The chartered asylums were built by voluntary payments, and they have cost more than £320,000. The general state of the institutions is good; but they are inadequate for the accommodation of all lunatics. A profession has arisen in Scotland to meet the emergency. A person who had been unsuccessful in many departments became a taverner in his old age-and bestowed upon his house the name of "The Last Shift." In the spirit of that man, a number of persons in one southern county have established lunatic asylums

on, the same principle as other persons have become potato and provision dealers; or on a worse principle, for many of us know a good potato, but there are not many persons capable of managing lunatics. These individuals in the Musselburgh trade take a house which it is hardly necessary to furnish, and circularise the parochial boards for inmates. They require only a license from the sheriff as their qualification. A good natured sheriff cannot refuse permission to one of his subjects to earn an honest livelihood. A license is bestowed. Then boarders are wanted. Competition ensues. A low price is named for the support of the pauper. The parochial boards are delighted at the economy of the proposals; which is taken out of the unfortunate lunatics by these Squeers' for the insane.

No other class are more helpless than those who are deprived of reason. The malady that afflicts them is most mysterious. Who can "minister to a mind diseased ?" Certainly not three-fourths of those who undertake that office. They never contemplate gentle kindnesses to those who sit in the darkness of human reason, but offer to support