frenzy of attachment to existence, as though each had an ho noured, happy life before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of miserable imprisonment, and then a violent and shameful death. '.i 5 qu boje

Bat the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, when they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father's voice, is past description. After wringing their hands and rushing to and fro as if they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his brother and tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded at the top with spikes and points of iron. And when he fell among the crowd, he was not deterred by his bruises, but mounted up again, and fell again, and, when he found the feat impossible, began to beat the stones and tear them with his hands, as if he could that way make a breach in the strong building, and force a passage in. At last, they clove their way among the mob about the door, though many men, a dozen times their match, had tried in vain to do so, and were seen, in-yes, in the fire, striving to prize it down, with crowbars.

Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison. The women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat their hands together, stopped their ears; and many fainted: the men who were not near the walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, tore up the pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury they could not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and they were near their object. Not one living creature in the throng was for an in.bey des tant still. The whole great mass were mad. a4

A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant. But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and drop from its topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright still, because of the bar, and its having sunk, of its own weight, into the heap of ashes at its foot: There was now a gap at the top now a gap at the top of the doorway, pof through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and dark. Pile up the fire!

ཝཱ ཝཱ

It burnt fiercely. The door was red-hot, and the gap wider. They vainly tried to shield their faces with their hands,

and standing as if in readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen to pass along the roof. It was plain the jail could hold out no longer. The keeper, and his officers, and their wives and children, were escaping. Pile up the fire!

The door sank down again it settled deeper in the cinders tottered-yielded-was down!

As they shouted again, they fell back, for a moment, and left a clear space about the fire that lay between them and the jail entry. Hugh leapt upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of sparks into the air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those that hung upon his dress, dashed into the jail.

The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their track, that the fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about: there was no need of it now, for, inside and out, the prison was in flames.

'BEING A ́HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE, AS WELL AS A HISTORY D
OF THE KINGDOM., (1)

We have sometimes speculated on the question, Whether our literature has gained or lost, in spirit and grace, by the increased zeal in antiquarian investigation which has marked these latter days? The great alteration which it has produced, in the manner in which past events and characters are commonly presented to the reader, cannot fail to have struck the most inattentive. A certain accuracy of costume, and the exhibition of all phenomena with their proper accompaniments

(') The original work closes at the accession of George III.; but there is a Continuation in progress which will include that reign. This article is confined to the original work. It was, we think, set on foot by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, but does not, we believe, form one of its sanctioned publications.

In mentioning this Society, we take the opportunity of expressing our great satisfaction at the recent completion of one of the most valuable of its undertakings— namely, a series of treatises on Political Philosophy, embracing a view of the principles and different forms of Government that have existed in the world; by which one of the greatest blanks in our graver literature has been admirably supplied. We hope to be able, erelong, to give a detailed account of this most important series.

"

of time and place are become absolutely necessary to afford tis pleasure, whether in history or historical fiction: We can no longer tolerate Plantagenet princes and princesses,#in the garb and character of modern courts nor the councillors and chancellors of the middle ages, with their sentiments clothed,, or their motives described, in the diction which belongs to the political philosophy of modern cabinets: all which things no more shocked the prejudices of our ancestors, a few generations ago, than the periwig in which Garrick enacted Macbeth;; As far as picturesque effect, and the minute particularities which give colour to history and fiction are concerned, there is, of course, no ground for quarrel with this progressive 'change in public taste. It is an advance towards truth, just of the same kind as the improvements from the Chinese-Gothic of Strawberry Hill to the designs of Rickford and Barry But when, the matter is a little more deeply enquired into, the question which we proposed at starting, inevitably forces itself upon our mindsult is not only whether there was not more vigour and manliness in the conceptions of less critical days, but whether there was not, in the main, more of substantial truth; alsoronoi Back Kazinoh ai oi! di menorq 99 Wed 16ft The ancients, as we know had little or nothing of what wel now term antiquarian taste. Their delight was to con template Man, the abstract microcosm of qualities and passions belonging to all ages and countries alike, stripped of conventional trappings, and purposely presented to the eye in the simple and majestic nakedness of their own statues. History that is, the history which entered into popular education was with them literally what it has been termed-philosophy teaching by example. A better instance to explain our meaning cannot be found, than in the pages of him who was once the most popular of Grecian writers with the modern worldPlutarch No one who reads that fascinating author, can fail to be struck with the total absence of every thing like historical colouring and costume in his portraits! He never for a moment stops to inform his, reader, that such and such! an action was morally just or injust, according to the notions! prevailing at the time, or in the country where it was per

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formed. He never speaks to us of the spirit of the age of Pericles, or Themistocles, or Fabricius. Throughout the whole of his work, the history of the world appears without any perspective whatever; the most distant and most recent age coloured exactly alike. The general state of mankind and civil society is as completely something assumed and constant, as the composition of the atmosphere is with experimental philosophers. All this, to readers imbued with the modern critical spirit, produces a want of verisimilitude. Their minds are with difficulty interested in the exploits of heroes, when the absence of all local colouring continually gives an ideal, abstract character to both hero and exploit. And the consequence is, if we are not mistaken, that Plutarch is not nearly so popular an author certainly not with the full-grown student, probably not even with the young--as heretofore! It is very difficult to turn to his simple narratives from the disquisitions of Niebuhr and Arnold. It is in vain to represent to ourselves that Plutarch ought to be read as a writer of philosophical romance, and that as such his excellences are unaltered by his want of antiquarian accuracy. The answer is, that half the pleasure they give is derived from confidence in their general truth. When that illusion is destroyed, the beauties of his style may command admiration; but he is too inartificial a writer to excite that sort of interest which we derive from fictitious narrative.

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Or let us turn for a moment to a greater than Plutarch; and consider the light in which the main features of our annals are presented in the historical plays of Shakspeare. There is no colouring of time or place about them. The haughty chiefs in whom his readers, when he constituted half the literature of the many, found their types of heroic majesty→→→ Hotspur and Mowbray, Clifford and Warwick are gigantic images of warriors, unreal as historical portraits, real only as figures of men. Their language and passions are of all ages; their outward characteristics are not distinctly marked as belonging to any. Yet they formed not merely the delight, but the great historical repertory of the ordinary students of former times. Shakspeare's heroes are heroes still; but they