ence-to feel as much distressed as she expected about Arthur's temporary withdrawal from his profession. It was only a temporary withdrawal, she hoped. He still wore his clerical coat, and called himself " clergyman" in the Blue Book-and he was doing well, though he was not preaching. The Nonconformist himself naturally was less sober in his thoughts. He could not tell what wonderful thing he might not yet do in this wonderful elevation and new inspiring of his heart. His genius broke forth out of the clouds. Seeing these two as they went about the house, hearing their voices as they talked in perpetual sweet accord, with sweeter jars of difference, surprised the young man's life out of all its shadows-one of them his sister-the other. After all his troubles, the loves and the hopes came back with the swallows to build under his eaves and stir in his heart.

himself to the strange, sweet, unlooked-for strength of her youth to this renewed existinfluence. They went up to London together next day. Sunshine did not disperse them into beautiful mists, as he had almost feared. It came upon him by glimpses to see that fiery sorrow and passion had acted like some tropical tempestuous sun upon his sister's youth; and the face of his love looked back upon him from the storm in which it died, as if somehow what was impossible might be possible again. Mrs. Mildmay, a wandering restless soul as she was, happened to be absent from London just then. Alice was still to stay with her dearest friends. The Nonconformist went back to his little home with the sensation of an enchanted prince in a fairy tale. Instead of the mud-colored existence, what a glowing, brilliant firmament! Life became glorious again under their touch. As for Mrs. Vincent, she was too happy in getting home-in seeing Susan, after all the anguishes and struggles which no one knew of fully but herself, rising up in all the

PYRAMIDS IN TAHITI.-Our repast over, the Tahitian invited me to follow him, and leading the way through an entangled glen, amidst rocks and waterfalls, he came upon an extensive pile of stonework in the form of a low pyramid, having a flight of steps on each side. My surprise was great at the sight of such a structure in an island where the best houses are built of bamboo. I found that on pacing the building it was about two hundred and sixty feet long by about ninety feet broad, and from forty feet to fifty feet high. The foundation of this remarkable structure consisted of rockstones, the steps being of coral, squared with considerable neatness, and laid with the utmost regularity, and the entire mass appeared as compact as if it had been erected by Europeans. The size of many of the blocks is remarkable, but they bear no marks of the chisel, nor is it easy to understand how they were transported by savages, unacquainted with mechanical science, from the seashore to their present position. Who could have raised this imposing mass, was a question that involuntarily arose in the mind. It is scarcely possible that the present race of islanders, or even their ancestors, could have performed such a task. They are unacquainted with mechanics or the use of iron tools to shape their stones with. From all that could be gleaned from the guide and from other natives afterwards, I felt convinced that they knew nothing of its history, for, as it was beyond their comprehension, they naturally said it was built by the gods and was as old as the world.-Colburn's United Service Magazine.

ARCTIC BIRDS BELOW QUEBEC.-The lower St. Lawrence has been visited lately by an extraordinary affluence of birds-ducks, wild geese, and other game. They were left undisturbed, on account of the sportstaen being scarce in that region. They took their departure farther south at the approach of the December snow storms. They have been succeeded by an unprecedented influx of Arctic birds, seldom, if ever, seen in the Province. These are white partridges and white owls. The former are now as abundant at Rimouski, St. Flaire, St. Fabien du Bic, etc., as pigeons are in the spring. The keep together in large flocks, and are easily approached and killed. The white owls are the terror of the smaller birds, which have disappeared at their approach. The farmers have set traps for them, and destroyed a great number. The people think that this extraordinary arrival of Arctic birds forbodes a severe winter.

THE Jews of Hamburg had until now been subjected to the Rabbinical laws of the Talmud, in all questions concerning marriages and suc cessions. That mode of proceeding has just been abolished by the burgesses of Hamburg, the proposal having been made by two leading men of the bar, both Jews. Among European States there now only remain Holland, Denmark, and Turkey, which maintain a similar exception for their inhabitants of the Jewish faith.

Lady Charleville stopped at the place, hunteding;' the times themselves, though' out of up the address, and found "Glorvina" in a joint,' testifying to the pleasant incidents she small lodging in the suburb looking on a recounts and the changes she witnessed. I cabbage garden.

Paradoxical as it may seem, there was as much self-deception as vanity in this. She had fancied herself into the heroine of one of her own romances, with the accessories, and wrote accordingly. The real and the fictitious were so blended in her, that it gradually surpassed her power to separate them. She could not begin a novel without referring to herself, and she could not refer to herself without beginning a novel. When she was about twenty-seven, a lad fell in love with her. She preserved his letters, which are thus endorsed in her own hand :

66 6

Francis Crossley, aged eighteen, chose to fall in love with me, Sydney Owenson, aged eighteen. He was then intended for a merchant, but the Novice of St. Dominic (which he copied out as regularly as written, in six huge volumes) and its author turned his head. He fled from his counting-house, went to India and became a great man.'

"Lady Morgan," adds Miss Jewsbury, "when she endorsed these papers, had of course forgotten her own age. It is so sweet to be 'eighteen.""

It

It is so sweet to be eighteen-therefore stick to it that you were or are eighteen. is so sweet to have a velvet lawn and a conservatory-therefore sink the cabbage-garden, and so on through all the pleasant falsifications of a long life. A train is laid for them at the commencement by putting out what has been termed the eyes of biography -namely, dates :

mean to have none of them."

So

By a stretch of posthumous vanity, she could not bear that even posterity should know her real age-forgetting that, in default of accurate information on this point, a woman is commonly set down as older than she is. If Miss Jewsbury is right in thinking that Lady Morgan was at least six years older than Sir Charles, she must have been born in or prior to 1776. She was equally reluctant to avow her parentage without investing it with a coloring of romance. we are told that her father (an Irish actor and manager of the jolly, rollicking sort) was one of Nature's gentlemen, who, born and bred to better things, took to the stage in a freak, to the scandal of his family, and that her Grandmother Sydney, granddaughter of Sir Malby Crofton, was the Queen of Beauty in Connaught. By dint of expatiating on Mr. Owenson's personal advantages and distinguished manners, she at length becomes actually proud of her ancestry, talks of "my father's house," and attributes her good conduct to her birth-Noblesse oblige. Unluckily, she lets out that she had written a song for the display of his peculiar talents, "all about kisses and whiskey," and she is obliged to own that this exemplary parent, although tenderly attached to his children, was hopelessly unable to provide for them. And here it is that the distinctive excellence of Sydney Owenson's character shines out. She at once resolved to do for herself and family what the father could not or would not do for them. She would attain independence by her own exertions; she would win comfort and competency, perhaps fame and affluence, by her pen. She thus an

"In freeing myself from all dependence on the planets, I take the opportunity to enter my protest against DATES. What has a woman to do with dates? Cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates-new style, old style-precession of the equinox, ill-nounces her resolution to her father:timed calculation of comets, long since due at their stations, and never come! Her poetical idiosyncracy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favor of incidents, and an authority more appropriate to the present pages,-Madame de Genlis,-one of the most eminent female writers of any period, who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age of incident and revolution without any reference to vulgar eras signifying noth

"Mr. O'F- has been here; he has told me all; and I have seen your name on the list of Statutes of Bankruptcy.... Now, for all this, dear sir, we must relieve you from the terrible expense you have been at for our education. Of this I am resolved to relieve you, and to earn money for you, instead of spending the little you will have for some time to come. I will not go to any school-where they can teach me nothing I did not know before! I was at the head of my classes at Madame Terson's, and as for Mrs. Anderson-the vulgar creature!—she

very publisher, Sir R. Phillips, falls into the same strain:

"I hope to maintain your good opinion, and that we shall be as much in love with each other twenty years hence as we are now.

is not worth mentioning. Now, dear papa, I have two novels nearly finished! The first is St. Clair; I think I wrote it in imitation of Werter, which I read in school-holidays, last Christmas. The second is a French novel, suggested by my reading The Memoirs of the Duc de Sully, and falling_very "When you compare me to a Jesuit and a much in love with Henry IV. Now, if I had Jew, you must be acting under the convictime and quiet to finish them, I am sure I tion of the slavery in which I am held by could sell them; and, observe, sir, Miss your fascinations! I would resent such Burney got three thousand pounds for Ca- treatment if experience in such matters had milla, and brought out Evelina unknown to not taught me that in struggling against feher father; but all this will take time. male caprice and despotism, the invariable Meanwhile, I want an asylum both for my-effect is to draw one's chains the tighter and self and Olivia. . . . Well, Dr. Pellegrini to make them still more galling and potent. approves of my intention, which is, simply for the present, to go as instructress or companion to young ladies. My books, against which he says there is nothing but my youth -but that will soon cure itself-wont be ready for a year to come."

"If I buy the poetry without seeing it, it is obvious that affection gets the better of prudence, and that you, and not the poems, are the chief object of my purchase."

Subsequently to the publication of her first novel, she accepted the situation of governess in the family of Mr. Crawford of Fort William, in the north of Ireland, but quitted them some time in 1803, on finding that "the good folks were determined on going for life to Castle Tumble-down"—as she was pleased to christen their mansion. joined her father and sister at Inniskillen, and there finished her novel of The Novice of St. Dominic. When it was fairly copied out, she determined to take it to London her

self:-
:-

She

"In those days the journey was long, and somewhat hazardous for a young girl There was the sea voyage, and the long coach journey afterwards, from Holyhead to London. She had to travel alone, and she had very little money to help her on her

There is no date to this letter; but the next, in which she speaks of herself and sister as just leaving school, is headed St. Andrew Street, 18-, when she could not have been less than twenty-four. The only key to the mystification is that she altered the date, and that her plan was formed some years before. In pursuance of it, she became governess in the family of Mrs. Featherstone, of Bracklin, with whom she remained till April or May, 1801. St. Clair was published at the commencement of that year. Miss Jewsbury's account of it is that it had some success, and in spite of faults and absurdities contained the promise of better things. It was translated into German, with a biographical notice prefixed, in which it was stated that the authoress had strangled herself with an embroidered cambric handkerchief in a fit of disappointed love. No one was less liable to such a catastrophe, although, by her own account, she was annually driving admirers by the score to the verge of suicide. Miss Jewsbury "Her first journey to London was in curious contrast to the brilliant visits she subplaces implicit credence in the bonâ-fide existence of a host of lovers, speaking the gen- into the yard of the Swan with two Necks,' sequently made. When the coach drove uine language of adoration. We have our in Lad Lane, she had not a notion where to doubts; for Lady Morgan lived, breathed, go or what to do next, and sat down upon and had her being in an atmosphere of fac- her small trunk in the yard to wait until the titious gallantry, and liked, to her dying bustle of arrival should have a little subday, to be addressed as the object of devo-sided. Overcome with fatigue and anxiety, tion. The Irishmen of her youth were not slow to gratify her; and no serious inferences can be drawn from the inflated language they employed to make her believe herself the actual Glorvina of her tale. Her

way.

"She used to say to her nieces, in after life, that they-carefully nurtured girls as they were-little knew the struggles and difficulties that she had to encounter in her early days.

she fell fast asleep. For some time no one been her fellow-passenger in the coach saw remarked her-at last a gentleman who had her sitting there, and he had the humanity to commend her himself to the care of the heads of the establishment, begging that

they would take care of her, and see that she was properly attended to.

"The friend who thus unexpectedly interposed on her behalf, was the late Mr. Quentin Dick. It was the beginning of her acquaintance with him."

This is a somewhat apocryphal anecdote, and so is that which Miss Jewsbury relates

in commendation of the book :

"The Novice of St. Dominic was a favorite with Mr. Pitt, and he read it over again in his last illness, a piece of good fortune for a book of which any author might be proud."

We wonder how this curious incident escaped the discriminating inquiries of Earl Stanhope.

Morgan (Lady), writings of, viewed with disgust by English ladies, xxi. 144.” It is hardly credible that any man calling himself a gentleman could have been guilty of such pitiable and persevering malignity.

66

Long before this she had become famous, had run the gauntlet of the gay circles of Dublin, and had caught a passing glimpse of the corresponding sets in London-a privilege for which she was mainly indebted to Lord and Lady Abercorn, with whom, for Her first decided success was The Wild some time prior to her marriage, she was Irish Girl, published in 1806-a national residing as kind of humble companion to novel, in which she managed to interweave the marchioness. Nothing pleased her more, a great deal of curious information, labori- in her old age, than to have it insinuated ously collected, touching the customs, man- that there was something wrong" between ners, and local history of Ireland. She her and the proud marquis; and Miss Jewe justly prided herself on her research, and a bury takes this quite au sérieux, remarking, little too much on her learning, which was a "Altogether, he was about as dangerous smattering at best. But she always took care to avoid anachronisms, as well as scenes or traits out of keeping with the country or the time, such as she incidentally points out in a popular rival, who represented an Italian ordering a hot dinner and a fire in the south of Italy in autumn. Ida of Athens, published in 1818, produced her "First Taste in Criticism," the title of a chapter,

from which we learn that for the "taste

in question—a fierce diatribe in the Quarterly-she was indebted to her charms:

"Croker was one of the Irish crowd of Miss Owenson's adorers, and his vanity led him to believe that his person and address were invincible. Miss Owenson, courted by the most wealthy and accomplished men of Irish society, had no eyes for the briefless barrister; not much patience with his audacities and personalities."

Such was the commencement of a feud which lasted till the death of the aggressor, who certainly had the worst of it, for CounBellor Conway Crawley (in Florence Macarthy), is one of the best satirical portraits in the language, not excepting Rigby (in Coningsby), for which the same original unwittingly and unwillingly sat. A curious mode of attack was put in force against her by the Quarterly. In the Index to the seventeenth volume we find :

a man for a brilliant young woman to be brought near as could easily be found." She had just before remarked, apropos of a loveletter deliberately provoked from Mr. Wallace:

"It was the fashion for all the men to adore her; Sir Charles Ormsby, Lord Guildford, Mr. Archdeacon King, Sir Richard Phillips, even the Marquis of Abercorn; and the crowd of lovers who were always flying Abercorn." about her was the standing joke of Lady

If the Archbishop of Canterbury had been a visitor at Baron's Court or Stanmore Pri

ory, she would have had (i.c., have duly recorded) a flirtation with him. The marriage she reluctantly made with the domestic physician of the establishment suggests a shrewd suspicion that there was more flourish and mockery than earnestness in the proposals of the baronets, king's counsel, archdeacons, and captains. In the autumn of 1811, Lord and Lady Abercorn made up and hurried on a marriage between her and Dr. Charles Morgan, whose letters, during her short absence, express the most ardent and extravagant passion that ever inflamed the breast of an M.D. :

"O God! O God! my poor lacerated mind! but the horrid task is over, and now dearest woman (for such you are and ever