The injured husband, with the false friend for his second, having discovered their retreat, comes to demand satisfaction. The Man of Ton having provided himself with a second in the person of a French officer, challenges Achates on the ground. "They fired together, and Achates fell,

And brighter burned the fires in inmost hell."

Sharp work and poetical justice. The husband, struck with the event, declines carrying the affair further. Our hero flies to show himself alive to Selina, who knew, in the lonely chamber of her guilt, that her lover was about to expose his life to her husband's vengeance; and the catastrophe is rightly conceived, and ably executed.

"Before the door he paused, but all was still,

And through the grove he heard the babbling rill ;
So still, he heard the ticking of the clock,
And plash of waters dripping from the rock.
'Selina still may sleep,' and on he creeps,-
He gently lifts the latch-'Indeed, she sleeps.
How beautiful she looks!'-her silver skin
Show'd every circlet of the blood within.
Loose and disturbed her unbound hair appears,
And on her cheek the trace of recent tears.
Soft o'er her form the ling'ring zephyr plays ;
'Sleep on, sweet love!'-he sat him down to gaze
Upon her closed lids, whose light divine

Shall bless him when she wakes and brighter shine.
He moved not once, lest, startled, she should hear
That he and happiness were both so near;
And now more near her cheek he drew, to sip—
Heaven's choicest boon-the honey on her lip;
But still he tasted not her balmy breath,—
A rival had been there-that rival-Death!
He starts convulsive from her cold embrace,
And his eye glares upon her ashy face.
'Awake, Selina !—wake, my love! my life!
'Tis Percy calls upon his love-his wife!'
And now his cries, his wailings, rend the air,
And his soul speaks the language of despair.
A moment hopes he-willing to deceive
His sickening soul-still struggles to believe
She sleeps.-Oh! no, no, no !--she is not dead;
Comes death to deck her on her bridal bed?

Hear me, Selina, hear! I have no wife

No love-no friend- -no hope-why have I life?'
The conflict's o'er, his veins to bursting swell,

And on the dead a lifeless load he fell.
Now thronging to his aid the rustics fly;
The gentle priest and skilful leech apply
Their tend'rest care, and long entranced he lay,
Till first a groan, and then a tear found way;

And when at length they raised him from that bed,
The light of reason had for ever fled.

A moment now he smiles-a moment weeps,

And now,--' Be still,' he says, 'be still, she sleeps !'
And then he listening stands, and seems to wait

With patient hope the signal of his fate.
But never comes a change, for his the doom
Of dark oblivion's everlasting gloom.

Alike to him the beams of orient day,
Or when at eve its glories fade away.
The summer's heat he feels not, nor the cold,
And in unconscious misery grows old.
Fix'd is the sum, the measure of the woe,
That suffering nature e'er can undergo.
When horror deepens, and the shudd'ring soul
Would snatch the poniard, drain the poison'd bowl,
Indulgent heaven-for pains we must endure,
Fruits of our follies, wounds beyond a cure,-
In mercy draws the darkest veil between
Our sense of feeling and the cureless scene!

Ears hear no plaints, and eyes with tears grow blind,
And madness casts his pall upon the mind."

We shall never, while we breathe, cut up a sheer blockhead. Stop, gentlemen. There is no rule without an exception, so don't begin sharpening the nebs of your pens-laying out your foolscap—and gurgling out your ink from the big bottle into the small. It is a nerve-shaking business even for a thousand blockheads to draw lots out of a hat, when one slip of paper is marked, "Hanging." No respite-no reprieve to the unhappy devil who fingers his fate. He most certainly shall swing. But our general rule shall henceforth be, to cut up only the clever. We began, last Number, with Mr Robert Montgomery, who will ever, after the punishment we inflicted on him, which was not vindictive, but restorative, and such as brought no dishonour, be considered all over the

island a writer of unquestionable talents. Even so with our present author, who writes like a scholar and a gentleman, and, when the subject admits of it, also absolutely like a poet. We have heard different names mentioned, but we are always reluctant to mention people's names in this Magazine, and therefore shall now say, in the words of Moore, "O breathe not his name!" "Oh no, we never mention him!" in case we should commit some mistake, and "rob Peter to pay Paul."

THE LOVES OF THE POETS.1

[SEPTEMBER 1829.]

AMONG the multitude of sins set down to our score by Whigs and Whiglings, Radicals, and all sorts of other rascals, it has sometimes surprised us that there never has been included brutality to women. We insult men before their faces, and then off and away up to the top of a sixteenth story, where, without many ladders, it is in vain to hope to reach us the trembling coward. We stab men behind their backs, and on turning round, before they breathe their last, to kill their assassin, they have merely time left to see a monster in a mask (us), jinking round a corner. The police are on the unalert; and the murderer makes his escape to that accursed sanctuary -Ambrose's Hotel. It must, we think, be matter of wonder to the wise and candid part of the population of these realms, -if there be any truth in the above charges, that We have hitherto escaped-Hanging. Burke and Hare, Hazlitt says in the Examiner, were, in comparison with us, as pure as snow, or his own reputation; and that Mr and Mrs Stewart should dangle and die for simply poisoning some single halfscore of elderly people addicted to inebriety, while We leap and live like a two-year-old, is to the pious Mr Leigh Hunt a juggle in Providence.

This is one side of the question—the side considered by the Cockneys. Now look at the other, the side contemplated by Christians. Never once, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, did we insult any human creature before his face, and then up to a skylight among a Thread of Tailors. In insulting a human creature we walk up to him behind, and lend him a kick sufficient in America to shove a wooden house across the street. 1 The Loves of the Poets, by Mrs JAMESON. 2 Vols. Colburn.

Head-over-heels goes the numbskull; and how can the most credulous believe for a moment that we do, or the most ingenious contrive to themselves for a moment a reason why we should, run away from the sprawling Jackass? So far from running away, why, we uniformly stop-often to our very great inconvenience to pick him up, and reinstate him on his former level. We do not indeed absolutely help with our own hands —that would be too much to expect to rub him down, but we compassionate him, and advise him, as his best friends, to leave off in future all such evil habits. To aver that we laugh at the plight to which he has, by a long course of obstinate folly, finally brought himself, to the grief and despair, perhaps, of no very disreputable family, is a vile calumny; for though we seldom, indeed never, shed tears at such accidents, we always experience that inward sorrow which the good feel at the miseries even of the most weak and wicked; and sweeter far it is to us to see the Kickee reformed, and thenceforth leading a humble and honest life, than to have to repeat the application, seldom wholly bootless, to his impenitent posteriors.

With regard, again, to stabbing human creatures behind their backs, and then like monsters in masks jinking round corners-all we have to say is this, that it is a d- -d lie. Do you call killing a Cockney before his face (a most absurd one, you may well believe, and not even "rescued by thought from insignificance") stabbing a human creature behind his back? If you do, then pardon us for surmising that you believe the sun sets in the east, and rises from the west in a blaze of glory. After killing a Cockney, why run away, and more especially in a mask? Let the fair deed be perpetrated at noonday, and on a crowded street, not a human creature will seek to detain you; and we need not dwell on the shocking want of feeling, and indeed of common courtesy, that would be exhibited by the Christian who, on extinguishing a Cockney, were to conceal his features from the laudatory eyes of the delighted spectators.

Should the above reasoning be in the slightest degree unsatisfactory to any of our numerous readers from Kirkwall to Cockaigne, let him have the goodness to circulate a lithographic list of the names of the human creatures whom, behind and be