diate dismissal from the attorney's office; And in that instance, in His mercy, God and it was this dismissal that determined had hung the veil. This, at least, we are him to adventure on that sea of wretched-assured of by poor Chatterton's letters to ness in which he was so soon to be a memorable wreck. The brightest interspace in Chatterton's life was that which came between his emancipation from the attorney's desk and the commencement of his brief despair in London. Hope brightened the future to him with a glory which the past had never known. There was a pleasure even in the pain of Bristol leave-takings, for he was going forth to assert for himself a new position amidst new scenes. And, over and above his genius, he was going forth with a courage and a confidence deserving of a better fate. With little but a few guineas, collected for him by subscription, in his purse, the precious burden of his Rowley poems, some manuscripts in modern style, and his high ability and enterprising spirit, he turned away forever from the old acquaintances and haunts of childhood, to seek renown and wealth in a more promising career. It was on the 25th of April, 1770, that Chatterton for the first time set foot in London. Mr. Masson dwells on the minutest incidents—the rambles, and the calls and occupations, the scanty dinners and the busy days of that eventful period in the young adventurer's life. The narrative discloses an amount of energy almost unequalled. Within a few hours of his arrival he had already obtained interviews with the four persons from whom it was most likely that he might obtain some profitable literary employment. "Tired, and yet happy," says Mr. Masson, "the young stranger bent his steps homeward in the direction of Shoreditch." And then foreshadowing the dark catastrophe so near at hand he adds: his mother. They are written, at this period, in an animated, boasting, buoyant, almost happy tone. The first was composed "in high spirits ;" the second tells of his "glorious prospect," and of his possession of that knowledge of the art of booksellers which "no author can be poor who understands;" in the third "matters go on swimmingly," so much so indeed as to give occasion to the triumphant exclamation, "Bravo, hey boys, up we go!" And it is worthy of remark, too, amidst the revelations of these letters, how in the fullness of his own unsubstantial prosperity, the writer's patronage and generosity overflow. His friends are to send to him the effusions they would wish to see in print; his mother is to be remembered out of his own abundance; and his sister is desired to choose the colors of the two silks with which he will present her in the summer. Alas! before the leaves of that coming summer fade, neither silk nor color must that mourning sister wear. The letters we have just referred to carry us onward to the close of the first month of Chatterton's London life-the happiest, probably, in spite of disappointments and anxieties and labors, of any he had ever until then experienced. But in connection with it, the question will suggest itself was the munificence he contemplated fairly warranted by any actual success, or was it merely the delusive expectation of a self-confidence yet sanguine and unharmed? Mr. Masson, who has entered deeply into the inquiry, ascer taining every thing that can be positively known, calculating every certain gain, and conjecturing cautiously where proof is unattainable, adopts the first of these opinions, and concludes that we shall prob"Ah! we wonder if, in passing along Shoe-ably be correct if we say that Chatterton's lane after his interview with Edmunds, brushing with his shoulder the ugly black wall of that workhouse burying-ground on the site of which Farringdon Market now stands, any presentiment occurred to him of a spectacle which, four short months afterwards, that very spot was to witness-those young limbs of his, now so full of life, then closed up, stark and unclaimed, in a workhouse shell, and borne, carelessly and irreverently, by one or two men, along that very wall, to a pauper's hasty grave! Ah! no; he paces all unwittingly, poor young heart, that spot of his London doom, where even I, remembering him, shudder to tears; for God in his mercy, hangs the veil." total receipts during his first two months in London can not have exceeded ten or twelve pounds." This, with his abstemious habits of living and inexpensiveness in regard of amusements, must have been an ample and encouraging, though not certainly a splendid, income. Such as it was, however, a portion of it—and the fact should always be remembered in abatement of our sentence on his manifold sins -was allotted to his mother and his sister in the shape of a snuff-box, fans, and china, as the fashion of the age demanded. Mr. Masson is inclined to attribute somewhat of this liberality to pride, but we confess that on this point alone we love to differ from him. It is certainly a far more pleasant and quite as plausible a supposition, that absence had increased the tenderness of his affection, and prompted an expense he could but ill afford. Two passages in letters to his sister appear, by their unaffected tone of truth, to lend some countenance to our more agreeable view. In the first he says, "Be assured that I shall ever make your wants my wants, and stretch to the utmost to serve you ;" and in the second-written only a month and a few days before his death-he tells her: "I am about an oratorio which, when finished, will purchase you a gown." We can not look upon these affecting passages as written in the language of display or pride. The second of the letters was dated on the 20th of July, and before then the brief and dim success of Chatterton was on the wane. In spite of all his assiduity with editors, he found but little profitable work to do. Accommodating himself, however, readily to this change of circumtances, even while he was the most diligent in striving to prevent it, his cheap amusements were ungrudgingly relinquished, his slender meals reduced, and even his dress-the most cherished of his small indulgences-neglected. But no economy consistent with the barest sustenance of life could meet the need of his expiring means. And no earnest, restless applications to the publishers who had employed him- no efforts to obtain another occupation-no labors with his pen, prolonged through sleepless nights in strange succession-availed him any thing to keep the quickly-coming enemy at bay. Then came the time when nothing but some helping hand, outstretched in pity or in love, might save him. But no gentle mother, proud of the genius of her boy, no good Samaritan, was near. There, in that Brooke-street garret, one of the gifted spirits of the time was fighting out alone, with every odds against him, a last battle which might only end in death. Mr. Masson has dwelt, we think, with much felicity on the signal good which the presence of some generous soul would have effected in that season of the poor youth's emergency, and has rightly chosen Goldsmith as the aptest minister in his imaginary scene. He says: "Precisely at the time when Chatterton was writing his last letters home, and beginning to see want staring him in the face, was this kindBrick court, Fleet street, and all its pleasant est of Irish hearts taking leave for a while of cares. Ah! me! so very kind a heart was that, that one feels as if, when it left London, Chatterton's truest hope was gone. Goldsmith never saw Chatterton; but one feels as if, had he remained in London, Chatterton would have been more safe. Surely-even if by some express electric communication, shot, at the moment of utmost need, under the very stones and pavements that intervened between the two spots the agony pent up in that garret in Brook street, where the gaunt, despairing lad was walking to and fro, would have made itself felt in the chamber in Brick court; the tenant of that chamber would have been seized by a restlessness and a creeping sense of some horror driven, by an invisible power, and by the grace near; he would have hurried out, led, nay, of God, Brick court and Brooke street would have come together! Oh! the hasty and excited gait of Goldsmith as he turned into Brooke street; the knock; the rush up stairs; the garret-door burst open; the arms of a friend thrown around the friendless youth; the gush of tears over him and with him; the pride melted out of the youth at once and forever; the joy over a young soul saved!" But this was not to be: the solitary tenant of that cheerless room had no friend to snatch him from the grim temptations of despair. There is something unspeakably affecting in the detail of the last days of Chatterton's affliction. The very pride with which he confronted the misery of blasted hopes and absolute destitution had something noble in it, not to be observed without a new emotion of distress. The less and less supply of bread, bought stale that it might last the longer; his fiery indignation at the baker's wife who had refused to trust him with one final loaf; his steady punctuality in the payment of his rent, even to the last trying miserable week; his stern rejection of the sixpence proffered by his poor landlady; his firm refusals to accept the meals offered him in charity by her, and by his neighbor, Cross, from whom, at last, the deadly antidote to all his accumulated suffering was bought, not begged-are incidents which take the case of Chatterton out of the category of that guilt which we despise as much as we deplore. Conceive in one glance, of the intelligence, the stubborn, fiend-like pride of the poor youth's nature, the utter discomfiture of his exultant hope of wealth and fame, the irritability of brain induced by injudicious midnight toils, and aggra- | But the omission is of less moment, as the vated to the last extreme by hunger verg- judgments upon Chatterton's merits as a ing on starvation, and you will find poet are, at present, well-nigh unanimous. enough to extenuate, though not to ex- That his acknowledged poems are indicatcuse the act, which has made Chatterton,ive of great ability, and yet greater proforevermore, the dark and glorious type mise; that his Rowley-poems are instinct of ruin and despair. with genius of an order hardly ever equalled by so mere a boy, are positions which the world have pretty much agreed to take for granted now. This element of his youth should always be remembered in our estimate of Chatterton's powers. Reflecting with that memory present to us, and with the memory present, too, of all the adverse influences in the midst of which it was his fate to live and writeupon what he has undoubtedly achieved, we shall be prepared, "with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats," to look back, as Mr. Masson expresses it, "again and again on his brief existence with a kind of awe, as on the track of a heaven-shot meteor earthwards through a night of It was on the night of the 24th of August that the arsenic which Chatterton had purchased in the morning did its deadly work. At a late hour on the next day, as he was not stirring, and no answer was obtained to numerous calls, the door of his room was broken open, and the youth was found, "lying on the bed, with his legs hanging over, quite dead." He died in his eighteenth year, leaving behind him a reputation which has grown, too late, into the renown for genius which he ardently longed for and heartily deserved. We have left ourselves no space to dwell upon the brief and pleasant criticism with which Mr. Masson's narrative closes. | gloom." From Tait's Magazine. DON SEBASTIAN, KING OF PORTUGAL. (Concluded from the Eclectic Magazine for October.) ALL that had taken place seemed to him | as a dream long gone by, or as another life; he recalled to mind that he had been a king, that he had had ministers, courtiers, a grand uncle and a grandmother, that he had commanded an army, that he had been beaten, and that he had been killed; but how he could be now living under a tent, in the midst of horses, fowls, and sheep, this is what he could not imagine. Presently an aged woman, with black eyes and wrinkled hands, brought him some milk; Sebastian asked her where his army was; his ships, his generals, his good horse, and Charles the Fifth's armor? She replied by a gesture which invited him to drink. The advice was right, for the sheep and goats which had been already licking the pot, were ready to dispute its contents with him. The king opened his eyes in astonishment, not knowing what she wished. The old woman placed the jug by his side and went away. What she had foreseen soon happened; a large goat drank up the breakfast in two licks, and not content with this despotic act, he placed his foot | ing him to a stable, in giving him a blow upon the sacred head of his majesty, who, with a switch, and almost a blow with a at this moment, regretted not having his poignard, they followed general right and body guard, or at least his first gentleman local custom. All this was not badly of the chamber. The next morning, in- solved for a legitimate king who had stead of the flourish of trumpets which never beheld any thing except as reflected used to announce his awaking, he heard by his crown. But, as we have already around him only hens clucking to their said, the prince inherited good sense from chickens, and the stamping of numerous his grandmother, and despite of superinbeasts-quiet companions, whose presence tendents and Spanish friends, he had reseemed to announce that a stable was tained some of his intellectual faculties. He henceforth was to be his usual palace. thought that further by discovering himTwice in the day the old woman came self to the Arabs, he should run the risk with milk, which he took care to put out of being given up to the Moors, and masof reach of the goat. One day he made sacred, or perhaps offered at so high a the woman understand that milk did not ransom that his uncle could not or would satisfy him, and she brought him some not pay it; and he decided that it would dates and a thin cake, which seemed to be much better to wait for an opportunity him the best meal he had ever made. of getting himself ransomed at the comThereupon his strength began to return, mon trade price, as a Christian of low and he was able to stand. birth, by some private speculator, than to run away at the risk of another chastise One morning, wishing to breathe the outward air, and find out where he was, he left the tent; the sun had risen, and he beheld around him only a burning sky and a sea of sand. He had walked forward a few steps into the open space, when a ferocious-looking man ran towards him, and applied to his shoulders a switch which he had in his hand. The insulted prince seized the rude fellow, who drew his dagger, and was about to plunge it into him, when the old woman staid his arm, making signs to Sebastian to return to the tent, which he did. However bold and angry one may be, we are never desirous of dying, especially when just recovered from illness. When the prince's anger allowed him to think, his reflections were not agreeable. Nobody likes to be thwarted, least of all a prince who has never been used to it. After giving his back and head a good rubbing, a sure method of obtaining consolation, he guessed that the man who had behaved so unceremoniously could not be his subject; that he himself was not in Portugal, as the aspect of the place had already made him suspect; that neither was he in his camp, for he would not have been treated so cavalierly in the presence of his army; whence he conjectured that he had no longer any soldiers, nor even any subjects, and that possibly he was become a subject himself. At length, by going on from reasoning to reasoning, from consequence to consequence, he concluded that he was a prisoner among the Arabs, and that in confin ment. His wounds were entirely healed. His master, whose ill-humor had passed off, ordered him to aid the old woman in looking after his fellow-lodgers—the goats, camels, and chickens; and to lead them out into the desert. Rightly understood, this is the occupation best suited to a dethroned monarch. The duties of a shepherd have also a kind of royalty, perhaps worth more than the other kind. If A sovereign, particularly of our days, can not dispose of the least of his subjects without thousands and thousands of judicial forms, and a hundred jabberings. he only wants their money, he must ask for it; and if they consent to give it, they insist upon knowing what is done with it. A shepherd meets with no contradiction, has no shackles to get rid of. Does he require clothing? he shears a subject. Is one troublesome? he kills him. Is he hungry? he eats him. No remonstrance is heard. The deceased does not complain, and the rest of the flock rejoice, for their rations are increased. It is true that a shepherd receives no honied speeches from his oxen or his sheep; but what are honied speeches? deceit and falsehood. It is true also that he sometimes has to drive away the wolves; but then he does not see his dogs and rams join with them against him. And wolves are less hurtful than flatterers, detractors, place-hunterscreatures thirsting for man's life and gold, and skilled in depriving princes of reason and perception. Such were the reflections which the King of Portugal made while feeding his animals in the shade, where he could find any, and by the side of the old woman, whom, as we have said, he assisted in the pastoral duties. The good woman's company brought his grandmother, and the advice she had given him, to his remembrance. He now deplored his mistakes and acknowledged that she had spoken rightly. This gives one room to remark that three fourths of the right counsel of this world are given by good women; and that in the rule of conduct, economy, politics, diplomacy, cooking, and medicine, one can not do better than hearken to them. In literature they are not very able, neither do they pretend to be so, for sensible women are modest, and though they generally talk a great deal, it is nevertheless true that they talk only of what they understand. One day, while the prince was guarding his flocks, some Arabs of the marauding tribe, hidden behind a sacred hill, pounced on his two finest camels and led them off. He was running after them, when seeing that other robbers had seized his fattest sheep, he turned to the latter, attacked the thieves, and a great fight with fists ensued. Not having yet quite recovered his strength he was forced to yield; and after having beaten him soundly, the conquerors led away their booty, leaving him lying on the sand. However, he was able to drag himself to the sheepfold, where a furious hyena and same foxes of his acquaintance, were making frightful havoc. The prince's shouts drove away these terrible animals, but too late; half of the sheep were killed, and the rest were lame. He then felt that the shepherd's occupation had also its annoyances, and under present circumstances, he would have preferred to be a king. In the evening, his master, on discovering the state of things, crossed his hands on his breast, saying, "God is God!" and condemned the shepherd, as responsible minister,. to the bastinado, which he received unwillingly enough. The next day, encouraged by the former success, another band attacked the little camp. After a valiant skirmish, the assailants gained the advantage; all was pillaged, and the king, who was part of the booty, was tied to a horse's tail, and obliged to go fifteen miles with three or four human heads hung on the back. His new masters, bandits by profession, were always out marauding. Sebastian's duties were very hard; he served as helper to the asses, and carried the baggage, always getting the largest share of the blows, and the smallest of the food. Thus did he perfect himself in the knowledge of things, and in acquaintance with mankind. He had several times made his owners understand that he wished to be ransomed; but they, rightly enough, not daring to approach the towns, did not seem to pay much attention to his proposition. However, seeing them one day in close conference, he suspected they were talking about him; and it was so. But the Arabs were not agreed among themselves as to what they should do with him. Some wanted to embalm him, bandage him, and put him into a box-in short, to pickle him into a mummy, with a fine manuscript at his feet, in order to sell him to the savans of Europe, who were then beginning to seek after Egyptian antiquities. Others insisted on selling him alive, asserting that if there was not so much profit thus, there would also be less outlay. This opinion prevailed, and on the council breaking up, they washed and shaved him; they then gave him a double meal, and placed him on a dromedary-all attentions to which he was not accustomed, and which seemed to him to promise something favorable. Towards noon they halted at a kind of caravansary or bazaar, where he was offered for sale with several hundred negroes, negresses, and little negroes; a race which was created and placed in the world to be in all countries taken in exchange for gold. As the only white man for sale, he attracted many gazers, but not one bidder, though the valuer charged with the sale made a pompous display of his worth, and recommended him to the customers, warranting him upon his soul as a white of pure breed and of the first quality. At last a Nubian showman bought him on private speculation. Living in a district where white men are rare, he intended to teach him a few tricks, and then exhibit him with some other learned animals of which he had the consignment. The next day he opened his show in a negro village. Immediately abundant receipts in dates and shells proved that his scheme was not a bad one, when the priest of the place, fearing his own trade might suffer, extemporised |