tune, though a very honest and good sort of person, to be devout; and the weakness, like the dead-fly in the apothecary's ointment, imparts a dangerous taint to the whole character. And thus the lesson of the tale runs on. We see in it the secret of the hostility entertained to evangelism by the insurgents of Vaud and Argovia, and which rendered them not less tolerant of a vital Protestantism than even the Jesuits whom they so determinedly opposed. We see in it, too, the grand error of Voltaire repeated,-miserable attempts to create a blank where, in the nature of things, no blank can exist; and an utter ignorance of the great fact, that the religion of the New Testament is the only efficient antidote against superstition, and a widely-circulated Bible the sole permanent protection against the encroachments of an ambitious priesthood. It would be bold to conjecture what the rising crop of opinion, so thickly sown over Europe, is ultimately to produce. There exists a widely-extended belief that Popery, when its final day has come, is to have infidelity for its executioner. Do we see in works such as those of Eugene Sue the executioner in training? Or is the old cycle again to revolve, and the blank formed by infidelity to be filled up by superstition? We would fain see a safer exposé of the Jesuits than the fiction of the insidious novelist,-an exposé at once so just to the order, that they could raise no effectual protest against it, and so true to the interests of religion and the nature of man, that it could contain no elements of re-action favourable to the body it assailed. When are we to have a translation of the "Provincial Letters" at once worthy of Pascal and of the existing emergency October 18, 1855.

THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY.

THE intimation in our last of the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Walter Scott, and the extinction of the Abbotsford baronetcy, must have set not a few of our readers a-thinking. The lesson of withered hopes and blighted prospects which it reads is, sure enough, a common one,- -a lesson for everyday perusal in the school of experience, and which the history of every day varies with new instances. But in this special case it reads with more than the usual emphasis. The literary celebrity of the great poet and novelist of Scotland,the intimate knowledge of his personal history which that celebrity has induced, and which exists co-extensive with the study of letters,-the consequent acquaintance with the prominent foible that stood out in such high relief in his character from the general groundwork of shrewd good sense and right feeling, have all conspired to set the lesson, as it were, in a sort of illuminated framework. Sir Walter says of Gawin Douglas,-in his picture of the "noble lord of Douglas blood," whose allegorical poem may still be perused with pleasure, notwithstanding the veil of obsolete language which mars its sentiment and obscures its imagery,—that it "pleased him more,"

"that in a barbarous age

He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishoprick of fair Dunkeld."

Not such, however, was the principle on which Sir Walter estimated his own achievements or prospects. It pleased him more to contemplate himself in the character of the founder, as seemed likely, of a third-rate border family,—of importance enough, however, to occupy its annual line in the

Almanac,-than that his name should be known as widely as even Virgil's own. And the ambition was one to which he sacrificed health, and leisure, and peace of mind, with probably a few years of life itself, and undoubtedly the very wealth which for this cause alone he so anxiously strove to realize. Never was there one who valued money less for its own sake; but it flowed in upon him; and, save for his haste to be rich that he might be a landholder on his family's behalf, Sir Walter would have died a man of large fortune, quite able to purchase three such properties as that of Abbotsford. And in last week's obituary we see the close of all he had toiled and suffered for, in the extinction of the family in which he had so fondly hoped to live for hundreds of years. One is reminded by the incident of some of the more melancholy strokes in his own magnificent fictions. He describes, for instance, in the introduction to the "Monastery," a weather-wasted stone fixed high in the wall of an ancient ecclesiastical edifice, and bearing a coat-of-arms which no one for ages before had been able to decipher. Weathered as it was, however, it was all that remained to testify of the stout Sir Halbert Glendinning, who had so bravely fought his way to a knighthood and the possession of broad lands, but whose wealth and honours, won solely by himself, he had failed to transmit to other generations, and whose extinct race and name had been lost in the tomb for centuries. Henceforth the honours of the Abbotsford baronetcy will be exhibited on but a hatchment whitened with the painted tears of the herald. A sepulchral tablet in Dryburgh Abbey will form, if not their only record, as in the imaginary case of the knight of Glendinning, at least their most striking memorial.

It is a curious enough fact, that Shakspeare, like Sir Walter Scott, cherished the ambition of being the founder of a family. "All his real estate," says one of his later biographers-Mr C. Knight-" was devised to his daughter,

Susanna Hall, for and during the term of her natural life. It was then entailed upon her first son and his heirs-male; and, in default of such issue, on her second son and his heirsmale; and so on, in default of such issue, to his granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall; and, in default of such issue, to his daughter Judith and her heirs-male. By this strict entailment," remarks the biographer, "it was manifestly the object of Shakspeare to found a family; but, like many other such purposes of short-sighted humanity," it is added, "the object was not accomplished. His elder daughter had no issue, but Elizabeth and she died childless. The heirs-male of Judith died before her. And so the estates were scattered after the second generation; and the descendants of his sister were the only transmitters to posterity of his blood and lineage." We see little of the great poet's own character in his more celebrated writings: he was too purely dramatic for that; and, like the "mirror held up to nature" of his own happy metaphor, reflected rather the features of others than his own. It is, however, a curious fact, that in the portion of his writings which do most exhibit him,—his sonnets, there is no pleasure on which he dwells half so much as the pleasure of living in one's posterity. And, in urging the young friend to whom these exquisite compositions are addressed to marry, he rings the changes on this motive alone throughout twenty sonnets together. We rather wonder how the circumstance should have escaped the thousand and one critics and commentators who have written on Shakspeare; but certain it is, that an intense appreciation of the sort of prospective shadowy immortality that posterity confers on the founder of a family forms one of the most prominent features of the poetry in which he most indulged his own feelings, and that with this marked appreciation the provisions of his will thoroughly harmonize. He tells his friend that the sear leafless autumn of old age, and the

"hideous winter" of death, draw near, when beauty

"shall

be o'ersnowed," and "bareness left everywhere," and that unless the odours of the summer flowers continue to survive, distilled by the art of the chemist, they shall be as if they had never been,-things without mark or memorial.

"Then, were not summer's distillation left

A liquid prisoner, pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distilled, though they the winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet."

And then the poet, with the happy art in which he excelled all men, applies the figure by urging his young and handsome friend to live in his posterity, as the vanished flowers live in their distilled odours; and expatiates on the solace of enduring throughout the future in one's offspring

"Be it ten for one,

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times re-figured thee;

Then, what could Death do, if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair

To be death's conquest, and make worms thine heir."

What strange vagaries human nature does play in even the greatest minds! Shakspeare was thoroughly aware that his verse was destined to immortality. We have his own testimony on the point, to nullify the idle conjectures of writers who have set themselves to criticise his works, without having first taken, as would seem, the necessary precaution of reading them. He tells us in his sonnets, that “not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes," would outlive "his powerful rhime." And again, addressing his friend, he says,

"I'll live in this poor rhime

While Death insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent."