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pursuits, and in the composition or revising of his | Then Freedom gave her last expiring sigh,
numerous publications, till his death, which occurred
in June, 1848.

Such a life of such a man cannot be other than interesting, for it unites the greatest possible range and variety of events with the reflections of a mind of great power, ardent imagination, and extensive erudition. His autobiography, or Mémoires d' Outre Tombe, as it is called, was accordingly looked for with great interest, which has not been sensibly diminished by the revolution of 1848, which has brought a new set of political actors on the stage. Four volumes only have hitherto been published, but the rest may speedily be looked for, now that the military government of Prince Louis Napoleon has terminated that of anarchy in France. The three first volumes certainly disappointed us; chiefly from the perpetual and offensive vanity which they exhibited, and the number of details, many of them of a puerile or trifling character, which they contained. The fourth volume, however, from which the preceding extracts have been taken, exhibits Chateaubriand, in many places, in his original vigor; and if the succeeding ones are of the same stamp, we propose to return to them.

VENICE.

Albion, the Ocean Queen, should not
Abandon Ocean's children in the fall

Of Venice-think on thine, despite thy watery wall.
BYRON.

WHEN empires fade, and dynasties decay,
Let history's page record their fallen sway;
Let kings deplore a prostrate monarch's case,
And statesmen mourn a minister's disgrace:
Leave such to rue the extinction of a throne
Whose crumbling fortunes must involve their own.
But there are cities, in whose rise and fall
Is stamped the common destiny of all-
Whose glories were the glories of the mind,

And, born with Venice, learned with her to die,
And fled from violated rights below
To plead above a prostrate city's woe.
Fled from Thessalian Alpheus' wanton force,
But as, when Arethusa's fountain source
The limpid stream through many a hidden vein
Rose to the earth at Syracuse again,
Thus Venice mocked the spoiler's wasting band,
And springs again upon her island strand.

Say, when the latest Doge, Manini, saw
His country prostrate to the conqueror's law,
In one Lethean ocean swept away,
The historic glories of her ancient sway
And deemed her shore should yet deserted lie,
A second Tyre for fishers' nets to dry-
Or where the unfrequent gondolier would scan,
With careless gaze, Rialto's broken span,
Where sunken shafts and shivered marble piles
Should stand, the relics of her hundred isles-
The crown a Dandoli had worn before-
Say, could the Doge himself-the last who wore
Say, could Manini deem his fallen name*
Should yet wipe out long centuries of shame-
That as with him began her servile state,
So from his sons her second rise should date?
Then should the dragon-teeth of conquest, sown
In well-won fields of glory once her own,
Spring in a night with warrior's serried files,
The iron harvest of her hundred isles.

Ye that at Candia or Lepanto bled-
Shades of the mighty, Venice claims her dead-
Old Contarini and the swarthy Moor,
Immortal chiefs, your laureled swords restore.
While names like these were victory alone,
Shall Venice sue from strangers for her own?
While names like these her annals yet record,
Can Venice crouch before a Croat horde?
Ah! no let desolation rather sweep
Her tarnished trophies to the yawning deep,
Ere Venice lingers an inglorious slave,
Without the nerve to die, the power to save.
-Dublin Univ. Mag.

J. B. H.

That dawned with them, and with their wane de- [ENGLISH REPUGNANCE TO THE CLASSIC SCHOOL OF

clined

Whose beams were like the lunar light to guide
The ebb and flow of learning's sacred tide-
Whose world-wide story spreads through every
clime,

Their scope, the soul; their chronicle, all time.
Who wept when Odoacer's conquering hour
Deposed the minion of prætorian power,
The last degenerate of a dwindled line,
The imperial puppet of the Palatine?
But when, in sandy Afric's arid waste,
The soul of Rome in Cato looked her last,
True as an Indian widow to her lord,
Expiring freedom fell on Cato's sword;
While the same stroke that laid the patriot low,
To freedom dealt the suicidal blow.

'Tis Venice-thus the world has wept for thee,
Cradle thou wert and grave of liberty;
From thy first sires her nourishment she drew,
Born at thy birth, and with thy stature grew;
Thy fostering hand to glory was her guide;
Thy hone her empire, and thy seat her pride;
And when decay had stamped thy brow serene
With age, and shame, and sorrow, Hadrian Queen-
When France, enslaving all in Freedom's name,
Had signed thy doom and her eternal shame-
When the last Doge resigned his ducal throne,
And Mark beheld his winged lion flown-

POETRY.]

WRITING to a Frenchman, (1765,) Horace Walpole says, "All that Aristotle, or his superior commentators, you authors, have taught us, have not yet subdued us to regularity; we still prefer the extravagant beauties of Shakespeare and Milton to the cold and well disciplined merit of Addison, and even to the sober and correct march of Pope. Nay, it was but t' other day that we were transported to hear Churchill rave in numbers less chastised than Dryden's, but still in numbers like Dryden's. Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 26.

[HERVEY'S INFLUENCE UPON PURITAN TASTE.]

"THE celebrated Mr. Hervey succeeded so well in his attempts to unite the flowers of poetry with the thistles of theological controversy in his Dialogues between Theron and Aspasio, as to introduce among the modern Puritans a taste for the gaudy and brilliant in writing, and a fondness for religious books of entertainment, which was unknown to their ancestors."-Monthly Review, vol. 61, p. 95.

*It is a curious coincidence, that the name of the last Doge, Manini, who survived the extinction of Venice at the treaty of Campo Formio, and whose tomb still remains in the Church of the Scalzi, should be the same as that of the first president of the new republic lately estab lished.

From Blackwood's Magazine. NEW LIGHT ON THE STORY OF LADY GRANGE.

of his great mystery, and expose every fragment of it to the admiring crowd. It was but a simple matter in the eyes of those who were concerned in it. The woman was troublesome-her husband was a judge, and therefore a powerful man

BEFORE We offer our readers some new light on this renowned mystery, it is necessary that we should give them, in a sentence, the briefest pos--so he put her out of the way. Nor was he sible outline of the oft-told tale, so far as it has cruel or unscrupulous, according to the morality been hitherto known. John Erskine, Lord Grange, of the circle in which he lived, in the method he a judge of the Court of Session, and a leader of adopted to accomplish his end. He had advisers the ultra-religious party in Scotland, was married about him, who would have taken a shorter and a to the daughter of that Chiesley of Dalry who more effectual plan for ridding themselves of a had shot the Lord President in the High Street troublesome woman, wife or not, and would have of Edinburgh, for giving a decision against him. walked forth into the world without being haunted The marriage was a very unhappy one. The by any dread that rumors of remote captivities pious leader of a religious party was scandalized might rise up to disturb their peace. Indeed, in various ways, obliged to live separate from his when we remember the character of the instruwife, and subjected to many outrages from her. ments to whom Lord Grange committed the kidAt length her death was announced, her funeral napping and removal of his wife, it is only wonwas duly attended, and the widower preserved the derful that they had patience enough to carry out decorous silence of one to whom death has brought so long and troublesome an operation; and that relief from what is generally counted a calamity. they did not, out of regard to themselves and to This occurred in January, 1732. The lapse of their employer, put a violent termination to the nearly nine years had almost consigned the re- career of their troublesome charge, and send her membrance of the unfortunate woman to oblivion, at once to where the weary are at rest. Had this when strange rumors gained circulation, that she been her fate, the affair of Lady Grange would who was believed to be dead and buried was liv- have been one of secondary interest. Such things ing in bondage in the distant island of St. Kilda. were too easily accomplished in those days. The The account she subsequently gave of her adven- chances would have been greatly against a discovtures, bore, that one night in her solitary lodging ery, and if it took place, equally great against the she was seized by some Highlanders, whom she conviction and punishment of the offenders, unless knew to be retainers of Lord Lovat, and conveyed the lady had a more powerful party at her back away, gagged and blindfolded, in the arms of a than the daughter of Chiesley the murderer would man seated in a sedan chair. It appears that she be likely to command. It would have created, so was kept in various places of confinement, and far as it was known, great excitement, and some subjected to much rough usage, in the Low Coun- little horror at the time, but it would have speedtry. At length she was conveyed north-westward, ily sunk to the level of the ordinary contents of towards the Highland line. She passed through the criminal records, and would never have bethe grim solitudes of Glencoe, where recent mur- queathed to the ensuing century an object which der must have awakened in the captive horrible antiquarians have hunted out as religionsly and associations, on to the western part of Lord Lov-zealously as if it had involved the fate of Europe. at's country, where any deed of tyranny or vio- In fact, Lord Grange was what was called in lence might be committed with safety. Thence his day a discreet man." He wished to avoid she was transferred to the equally safe country of scandal, and bore a character for religious zeal, Glengarry, and, after crossing some of the high- which appears to have been on occasion a very est mountains in Scotland, was shipped on the serious burden not easily borne. He dreaded wild Loch Hourn, forever darkened by the shadow scandal and notoriety, and therefore he shrouded of gigantic mountains falling on its narrow waters. his great act of iniquity in the most profound She was kept for some time on the small island of secrecy. Moreover, he kept a conscience-someHeskir, belonging to Macdonald of Sleat, and was thing that, like Rob Roy's honesty, might be afterwards transferred to the still more inaccessible called a conscience "after a kind." He said St. Kilda, which has acquired a sort of celebrity pretty accurately of himself in his Diary—“ I from its connection with her strange history. In have religion enough to spoil my relish and pros1741, when a communication from the captive had, ecution of this world, and not enough to get me through devious courses, reached her friends in Ed- to the next." We may probably believe that, inburgh, an effort was made to release her; but it even if he could have performed the deed with was baffled by her transference to another place of perfect secrecy and safety, so far as this world is confinement, where she died in 1745. concerned, he would not have murdered his wife, Little did the old judge imagine, at the time his conscience recoiling at the dreadful crimewhen he had so successfully and so quietly got rid his fear of the world causing him to shrink from of his domestic curse-when the mock funeral exposure. Urged by these two conflicting motives, had been performed, the family condolences acted he adopted the expedient of the secret removal to over, and the victim safely conveyed to her distant a desolate and distant spot, believing that he had prison, that on some future day the public, frantic with curiosity, would tear to pieces the covering

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surrounded the whole project with a deep and impenetrable cloud of mystery. Never was human

foresight more signally set at naught. It was this a little zeal to peruse the whole series; but, unvery machinery of intense mystery that, by min- less we are greatly deceived, we think we can istering to one of the cravings of the human imag-present our readers with a few plums picked out ination, has made the incident one of the most of the mass, which they may find not unacceptanotorious of human events. It is almost satisfac- ble. And here, by the way, let us observe, how tory to know that this dreaded notoriety visited great a service is done by those who ransack the the hoary tyrant, for after he had for nine years repositories of our old Scottish houses, and make enjoyed in secret the success of his plot, and kept their contents accessible to the public. We are his fair fame with the world, we find him, when convinced that in dusty garrets, in vaults, in musty legal proceedings were commenced against him, libraries, and crazy old oak-chests, there is still an bitterly saying that "strange stories were spread almost inexhaustible wealth of curious lore of this all over the town of Edinburgh, and made the talk description. The correspondence of the old Scotof coffee-houses and tea-tables, and sent, as I have tish families is generally far more interesting than ground to apprehend, to several other places of that of English houses of the same rank. Since Great Britain."* One may notice, too, in the the civil wars of the seventeenth century, England following discontented mumblings, the bitterness may be said to have been internally undisturbed, with which he contemplated the divulging of the and no private papers contain matters of state, secret-it is in a letter to the imprisoned lady's save those of the great families whose ancestors champion, Mr. Hope of Rankeillor. have been high in office. But in Scotland, the various outbreaks, and the unceasing Jacobite intrigues, made almost all the country gentlemen statesmen-made too many of them state offenders. The Essex squire, be he ever so rich, was still but the lord of a certain quantity of timber and oxen, grass and turnips. The Highland laird, be he ever so poor, was a leader of mena person who had more or less the power of keeping the country in a state of war or danger-a sort of petty king reigning over his own people. Hence, while the letters of the last century one might pick up in a comfortable old English mansion, would relate to swing-gates and turnpike roads, game preserves and tithes, those found hidden behind the wainscoat of a gaunt old cheerless Scottish fortalice, would relate to risings at home, or landings from abroad-to the number of broadswords and targets still kept in defiance of the Arms Act-to communications received through French Jesuits, or secret missions across the water."*

Any of the smallest discretion will see what a worthy part he acts towards me and mine, and many others, and even towards the person pretended to be cared for, who, in such an occasion, begins by spreading through Great Britain strange stories, unexamined and unavouched, and not so much as communicated to us concerned; and next, when offered satisfaction. yet proceeds to fix such on public records, and to force others to bring on record sad and proved truths, which he himself knows and formerly has acknowledged to be truths, and that ought forever to be sunk. This cannot be construed to be anything but an endeavor to fix, as far as in him lies, a lasting blot on persons and families. The first was defamation, and the next would be the same, under a cover of a pretended legal shape, but in itself more atrocious. One cannot doubt that this is a serious thing to many more than me, and cannot but be laid to heart.†

The text from which we are at present discoursing, is a bundle of confidential letters from Lord Grange, printed in the Miscellany of the Spalding Club, and not the least valuable and curious of the many contributions made by that useful and spirited institution, to the elucidation of Scottish history and manners. At the foot of the high conical hill of Bennochie, in a small group of forest trees, there nestles one of those

quaint small turreted mansions of old French ar

chitecture so frequently to be seen in the north of Scotland.

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We believe that the passages from these documents, on which we are now to comment, in the first place exhibit to us pretty plainly the motive and, in the second place, prove that he entertained of Lord Grange for the deportation of his wife; designs of a similar character against another female

with whom he was nearly connected.

When Lady Grange's strange history was first communicated to the public, it was believed that

The owner of this mansion was an Erskine; he was related to Erskine of Grange, and it so happened that this relative was the perWe remember once in such a house-it was a rainy son in whose ear he poured his secret sorrows, as day, and for the amusement of the inmates a general rummage was made among old papers-that in a corner a disappointed and morbid politician. Such con- of a press of a law library were found a multitude of letfidential outpourings are not the most interesting ters very precisely folded up, and titled-they had a most business-like and uninteresting appearance, but on being of communications, even when one has the for-examined they were found to consist of the confidential tune to be so far connected with the wailer as to correspondence of the leaders of the Jacobite army in be the chosen vessel into which he 1745. Their preservation was accounted for by the cirthe anpours cumstance that an ancestor of the owner of the house guish of his heart. Some of these letters are was sheriff of the county at the period of the rebellion. portentous-they are absolute pamphlets-in He had seized the letters; but, finding probably that they their spirit as yellow and mildewed with discon- implicated a considerable number of his own relations, be did not consider himself especially called on to invite the tent, as their outward aspect may have been by attention of the law officers of the crown to his prize; the cold damp air of Bennochie, when they were while, on the other hand, the damnatory documents were discovered in the worm-eaten chest. It requires of turning them to use. They are now printed in a subcarefully preserved, lest some opportunity should occur stantial quarto, under the patronage of one of the book

* Miscellany of the Spalding Club, iii., 58. † Ibid. 62-3. | clubs.

the cause of her abduction was not merely her violent temper, but her possession of certain secrets which would enable her to compromise the safety of her husband and his friends, by proving their connection with the Jacobite intrigues of the period. The view more lately taken of the mystery has been that she was merely a mad woman, and that her abduction, with all its laborious mystery, was only an attempt to accommodate the judge with a resource in which Scotland was then deficient—a lunatic asylum for insane relatives. Though, as we shall presently see, his confidential communications give other and darker revelations, this was the light in which Lord Grange wished the matter to be viewed, after his plot had been discovered; and in his controversial letter to Mr. Hope, already referred to, he gives an account of her frantic outbreaks, which certainly affords a picture of one likely to have been a most distressing partner in life to a grave judge, having a few secrets to concoal which required him to be peculiarly circumspect in his walk; and holding a high, but a rather precarious position, in the opinion of the religious world. After stating that she had agreed to a separation, he continues

to refute the supposition that the affair had any
connection with the political intrigues of the pe-
riod." On the contrary, we cannot read the con-
fidential portion of the correspondence without
feeling that it almost conclusively establishes the
fact, that the affair had a "connection with the
political intrigues of the period ;" and that the
reason why so many people of rank and political
influence aided the plot, why the removal was con-
ducted with so much secrecy, and the place of se-
clusion was so remote and inaccessible, was be-
cause Lady Grange was possessed of dangerous
secrets, which compromised her husband and his
friends. The general tone of the letters, and their
many cautious and mysterious, yet unmistakeable,
references to the proceedings of friends across the
water, show that the judge confided to the owner
of the old mansion at the foot of Bennochie some
things which it would be dangerous for an enemy
to know. But we shall cite just one passage,
which we consider sufficient of itself to support
our position. It is taken from a letter dated 22d
March, 1731, just ten months before his wife was
seized and carried off. There is something very
peculiar in the structure of the letter; and, whether
in pursuit of some not very appreciable joke, or to

might take the liberty of opening the packet on its
journey, the writer speaks of himself, during the
most curious and important part of it, in the third
person. Talking of a very difficult and hazardous
project in which he is about to be engaged, he
thus passes a neat commendation on himself—
"But I am sure he never yet was frightened from
what was right in itself, and his duty towards his
friends, by his own trouble or danger, and he
seems as little frighted now, as ever in his life."
He then approaches the subject of his wife's char-
acter and intentions, like a man treading on the
in such a case, there is no bounds set to such mis-
"I have found that,
of a frightful pitfall.
chief, and it is pushed on though it should go the
length of your utter ruin, and of Tyburn itself, or
the Grassmarket"—the one being the place where
the gibbet of London, the other where that of
Edinburgh, stood. From such portentous asso-
ciations he passes immediately to his wife and her
proceedings. To make the passage more distinct,
we fill up the names, of which the letter contains
only the first and last letters; it will be remarked
that he still assumes the third person, and that he
himself is the person about to depart for London.

verge

Then it was hoped that I and the children (who she used to curse bitterly when they went duti-waylay the penetration of any hostile party who fully to wait on her) would be in quiet; but she often attacked my house, and from the streets, and among the footmen and chairmen of visitors, cried and raged against me and mine, and watched for me in the streets, and chased me from place to place in the most indecent and shameless manner, and threatened to attack me on the bench, which, dreading she would do every time I went to it, made my duty there very heavy on me, lest that honorable Court of Session should be disturbed and affronted on my occasion. And not content with these, and odd and very bad contrivances about the poor children, she waited on a Sunday's afternoon that my sister, Lady Jane Paterson, with my second daughter, came out of the Tron church, and on the street, among all the people, fell upon her with violent scolding and curses, and followed her so down Merlin's Wynd, till Lady Jane and the child near the bottom of it got shelter from her and being exposed to the multitude in a friend's house. You also know, and may well remember, that before you and the rest advised the separation, and till she went from my house, she would not keep herself in that part of it (the best apartment) which was assigned her, but abused all in the family, and when none were adverting, broke into the room of ane old gentlewoman, recommended to me for housekeeper, and carried off and destroyed her accompts, &c., and committed outrages, so that at length I was forced to have a watch in my house, and especially in the night time, as if it had been in the frontier of an enemy's country, or to be spoiled by robbers.*

This was doubtless the truth, but not the whole truth. Founding apparently on these statements, which are Lord Grange's vindication of himself, the editor of the collection of letters says "The letters now printed must considerably impair the mystery of the reasons which led to the abduction of Lady Grange. They may be held conclusively

* Miscellany of the Spalding Club, iii., 60.

"Then I am told that Lady Grange is going is it suspected here, nor shall it be till the day to London. She knows nothing of his going, nor before he goes off, and so she cannot pretend it is to follow him. She will certainly strive to get access to Lady Mary Wortley, Lady Mar's sister, (whom she openly blesses for her opposition to our friends,) and to all where her malice may prompt her to hope she can do hurt to us. remember with what lying impudence she threat ened Lord Grange, and many of his friends, with accusations of high treason and other capital

You will

crimes, and spoke so loud of her accusing directly by a signed information to Lord JusticeClerk, that it came to his ears, and she was stopped by hearing he said, that, if the mad woman came to him, he would cause his footmen to turn her down stairs. What effect her lies may have, where she is not so well known, and with those who, from opposition to what Lord Grange is about, may think their interest to encourage them, one cannot certainly know; but if proper measures be not fallen on against it, the creature may prove troublesome; at any rate, this whole affair will require a great deal of diligence, caution, and address."*

He talks of her as mad; and so far as passion and the thirst of vengeance make people mad, she undoubtedly was so. He speaks of her intended accusations as lies-that is, of course, a convenient expression to use towards them. But what is very clearly at the bottom of all the trepidation, and doubt, and difficulty, is, that she might be able, mad and false as she was, to get facts established which called up very ugly associations with Tyburn and the Grassmarket. A minute incident stated in the common histories of the affair, that Lady Grange planned a journey to London for the purpose of taking her accusation to the fountain-head of political power, is confirmed by this extract. It may easily be believed that, among Grange's official colleagues-some of whom had also their own secrets to keep-the lady's frantic accusations met with little encouragement. The Justice-Clerk referred to in the extract, Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, was, like Grange himself, a great professed light of the church, and what sort of interview he would have held with the furious lady, may be inferred from the character given him by a contemporary: "He became universally hated in Scotland, where they called him the curse of Scotland; and when ladies were at cards, playing the nine of diamonds, commonly called the curse of Scotland,' they called it the Justice-Clerk. He was indeed of a hot temper, and violent in all his measures."t

and we find him defeated in his aim, and receiving some very significant hints about the nature of his correspondence.

"Sir Robert told me in wrath that he would have nothing to do with Lord Mar, that he had dealt ill with him, and he should not have his pardon; and he would by no means give me any reason for it, but Lord Townsend did, whom they had stirred up; for he in anger told me Sir Robert had intercepted his letters to me with very odd things in them, injurious to Sir Robert and his friends. Soon after this, Ilay, with cloudy looks, began to make insinuations of some discoveries against me too, and at length told me that Sir Robert said that he had also intercepted bad letters of mine to Lord Mar, but confessed they were not directed to Lord Mar, and neither subscribed by me nor in my hand of write, but that by the contents they knew them to be mine to Lord Mar. I answered that they might assert what they pleased of letters said to be directed to me, and which they owned I had never seen, but that I must know of letters wrote by myself, and that I ever wrote any such was a damned, villanous, malicious lie; and let Sir Robert or any else be the asserter of it, whoever did assert it, was a liar."*

This is a very successful outbreak of virtuous indignation, and does considerable credit to its author, as a pupil of that school of which his dear friend Lord Lovat was the undoubted head.

We cannot help considering that it is a question of some historical interest and importance, whether the abduction of Lady Grange was or was not a measure adopted for political reasons, and that the letters before us, by finally deciding the question, throw an important light on the political state of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. If we suppose that the lady was carried under circumstances of such profound mystery, and by the agency of some conspicuous and distinguished personages, to the distant island of St. Kilda, merely because she was a lunatic who required to be in custody, we only see that many important and sagacious people were taking a very complex and cumbrous method of accomplish

In the old narratives of the affair, it is stated that Grange felt his position to be the more dangerous, as some letters had been intercepted tend-ing what might have been done with ease; for in ing to inculpate him with the Jacobites on the continent. It is singular that this should also be pretty satisfactorily proved by the present correspondence. It will be remembered that Grange was a brother of the Earl of Mar, whose prominence in the affairs of 1715 had driven him into exile. A strong attachment to this unfortunate man is, on the whole, the most pleasing feature in the character of the more cautions and more fortunate judge. It was natural that the brothers should keep up a correspondence, and quite as natural that Sir Robert Walpole should be particularly anxious to discover what they said to each other. Grange conducted some negotiations with the government for his brother's pardon and restoration,

*Miscellany of the Spalding Club, iii., 6. + Houston's Memoirs, 92.

those days, few would have troubled themselves about the wretched woman, if her husband had chosen to keep her in any place of confinement, telling the neighborhood that she was insane. But when we find that the Jacobite party in Scotland were powerful enough to kidnap a person obnoxious to them, and keep her for nine years in a place to which the laws of the realm and the authority of the crown nominally extended, but where their own power was the real operative authority, we have a very formidable notion of the strength and compactness of the Jacobite union during Walpole's apparently powerful ministry.

The correspondence of Lord Grange admits its reader to a species of confidential intercourse with him, which can scarcely be called agreeable. It * Miscellany of the Spalding Club, iii., 34, 35.

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