of the obstacles which legislation opposes to it; and in proportion as labour, better directed, obtains a higher remuneration, the laborious classes naturally acquiring wealth and intelligence, the dominating caste loses something of its superiority. Nor is this all; classes who enlighten and strengthen themselves learn the value of those rights which ignorance had caused them to abdicate; in a short time interest prompts their recovery, and as power passes to their side, it becomes more and more difficult for the weakened aristocracy to retain under its yoke subjects eagerly bent on obtaining liberties alike necessary for their moral dignity and the increase of their material well-being."

This was seen in ancient days at Rome. The patricians, in the beginning, governed without control; they alone were considered capable of rule. But the plebeians, at last, becoming rich, intelligent, and educated, forced from the minority those rights which the aristocracy had the absurd preten sion to think inherent. Nobody denies the value of this class in ignorant ages; but mankind would coinmit an act of extreme folly in surrendering their government to an oligarchy because the ancestors of that oligarchy formerly performed great

"How could a monarchical nobility, without the support of territorial wealth, defend its prerogatives, exposed as they are to the hatred of the people and the aggressions of royalty? Fa from having to dread the concentration of property, it is only by availing itself of the advantages attached to opulence that it can keep up an imposing appearance and the safety of the caste depends entirely on the fortunes of its chiefs. Thence originate multitude of laws, made, as jurists tell us, in the view of preserving the name, arms, and splendour of noble families. Thence arose the law of primogeniture, which prevents the dispersion of the estates of each of them; thence came entails, trusts, and lineal distinctions, which insure to these families the irrevocable possession of them. If the nobility had not been firmly intrenched upon a space, the access to which was barred to the rest of society, it would long ago have fallen into obscurity."

Some aristocracies have carried their depredation further. In Poland and in Russia none but nobles could possess land at all; and we see in the present position of these two countries what the unrestrained advantages and pleasures of such an aristocracy are. Of course, the oligarchs have in all these acts an object. But Passy shows the fearful results of the system, while he points out the advantages derived from a partial abandonment of the intolerable injustice:

"Where was the torch of arts and civilisation first relumed? In those countries where servitude disappeared soonest—in the republics of Italy and the free towns of Germany, where men, able to raise themselves to wealth by labour, put forth all the strength of their intellectual and physical faculties; agriculture, science,

the fine arts, trade, manufactures, all flourished anew, all re- ||and for the perpetuation of injustice, antiquated vived under hands freed from the shackles of feudal servitude; ideas, and misery:and the rest of Europe, to become prosperous, had only to follow in the path which they struck out. At the present day we see what are the consequences of the inequalities which exist in the economical and moral condition of nations-misery, ignorance, slavery. Such is still, among those of the Sclavonic race, the sad lot of the people, indifferent to the perfecting of an industry whose fruits would merely serve to increase the pride of their masters. Comfort, education, and liberty are, on the contrary, the boon of those who were once the serfs of the feudal barons. It is because in France, as well as in Germany and England, the nobility not having been able to dispossess entirely the inferior orders, the latter have had in property a base of action, a place of refuge for displaying their industrial powers, and, by the progressive accumulation of commercial riches, raising themselves to better destinies."

In his third chapter, Passy describes the institutions which privilege the aristocracy in the different monarchies of Europe; and though things have changed somewhat since he wrote to us, the theme is still deeply interesting. The Sclavonic system, the Spanish system, are pointed out. In Spain, perhaps, more than anywhere else, the cruel evil of class is apparent. That fine country is perishing a victim of bigotry and feudalism. He then sketches the scheme of entail, that Jesuitical plan for the prevention of the progress of civilisation,

"What is important at present is," says Passy, "to discern the consequences of these institutions; and here there is no room for mistake, so much is their injustice evident and palpable. By confiscating to the profit of a small number of privileged families a vast portion of the social patrimony, not only do those institutions take from the masses the power of arriving at the distinetions and advantages of property, but, moreover, by favouring the gradual concentration of wealth, they operate so as to retain them under the humiliating yoke of misery and vice. There are no means of depriving these laws of so baneful an influence. Could we even succeed, in order to mitigate the evils of the inequality of fortunes, in preventing the union of entailed lands in the same hands, the principle of exclusion would not less exist to the injury of the rest of the community; and never would wealth find its natural level. Thus it is probable, that but for the prejudices and the moral causes which condemn the dominating castes to a ruinous idleness, and militate in favour of the active classes, the whole soil of a country would by degrees have passed into the hands of those who, at liberty to add to the wealth exclusively conferred on them, had no diminution of it to fear."

M. Passy is the first minister of finance in recent times and in European countries who has discussed so fully the topics embraced in his work; and his arguments may meet with more respect, because it has been supposed that he possesses considerable financial talent.

LOVE'S ELOQUENCE.
BY E. H. BURRINGTON,

Author of "Revelations of the Beautiful," &c.

There's not a day of sunshine now
To awaken fay or fairy;
Then meet me with thy brightest brow,

And make it summer, Mary.

The cold hath robbed of half their bliss
The robin and the starling;
Then give me back thy warmest kiss,
Oh, give it back, my darling.

I lean upon thy heaving breast,
Love's own serene dominion,
As sweetly as a babe could rest

Upon an angel's pinion.

And, wordless in thy soft caress,
The heart seems never lonely,
As if the will and power to bless
Exist in silence only.

I would not carelessly invite
One word of joy or sorrow:
Be silent as the stars to-night,
A gossip be to-morrow.
This dreaminess is all divine,

And soul is all acuteness;

Earth breathes in every word of thine,

And heaven lies in thy muteness.

LITERARY REGISTER.

My Uncle the Curate. In Three Vols. London: Chap- the breach as in the observance. It is not the only novel man & Hall.

THE habit is common of using novels as a means of describing social life, social errors, and the manner in which they might be avoided. Ireland has always presented a wide field for these purposes. The novelist is able to indulge his fancy freely without leading any read- || ers out of Ireland to suppose that he is drawing an altogether ideal picture. "My Uncle the Curate" is by the author of the "Bachelor of the Albany," and the "Falcon Family." Its style is not, we think, an improvement on his former works. The narrative is run into three volumes, when it should have been one only. The conventional rule of three volumes, although serviceable to the libraries, and therefore followed by the publishers of novels, is quite as much honoured, often, in

of a similar purport in our possession. We expected, indeed, to have cast two or three of them behind us this month; but we find "the Curate" is likely to occupy our available space, although we have no intention of abridging the tale. It is a common enough story. Two sets of people are introduced; one of whom are good, and the other bad. A medium quality, neither very good nor very bad, are also introduced; and the usual accompaniments of incidental people occur, of whom no means of forming an opinion are given. The novel opens at Cambridge, at the commencement of the long vacation, with a young man, who has comparatively little to spend, and nothing to do. The novelist represents this young gentleman, worth £200 per annum from an Irish property which he had never

seen, as in poverty, and dependent on the bounty of||
an old gentleman, a merchant in the south of Spain, who
was a rejected suitor of Mr. Vivyan's mother—Mr. Vivyan
is the name of the young student--and who ultimately
leaves his fortune to her son. Novelists would take

healthier grounds by telling young gentlemen that they
can enjoy the world, be independent, and save money
on £200 per annum.
We are not to run over all the
labyrinths of this tale; but there are two or three descrip-
tive passages that we may quote. The first relates to
Mr. Vivyan's life at Cambridge, and the hardships of
a single gentleman who, with £200 annually, knows not
where to betake himself :-

"The day was warm, but not sultry, and Vivyan was sitting, or more properly lounging, in a chair too capacious for his size, and too luxurious for his standing, at a small, but very solid, table, close to a tall, narrow window, with an infinity of minute panes. The window stood wide open to admit the genial sunshine and the delicate air. A man is known not better by his companionships than by the arrangements and aspect of his chambers. The disorder of Vivyan's was not inelegant or vulgar, but still it was disorder; there was a negligence that denoted the indolent, or at least the erratic, student; it looked as if there had been a

battle of the books, and the papers had the appearance of having been blown about like the leaves in the Sibylline grotto. There were places for books and papers, but nothing was exactly in its place. An open piano was strewed with French mathematics, easily known by their blue and pink robe de chambre. The floor adjacent was encumbered with a chaos of loose music. A deep, comfortable sofa seemed to be used as a general repository for articles of all sorts, useful and useless, necessities and luxuries, hats, canes, brushes, pamphlets, boxes, umbrellas, and cigars. All looked careless and desultory, a study in a state of siege. The table was a wilderness of writing materials, pens, ink, paper, envelopes, sealing-wax, seals with antique devices dispersed in all directions, like people in a panic; the books were so multifarious as to afford no grounds for concluding, with any confidence, what branch of study was most in cultivation, or what profession, if any, was the student's aim. There were books of mathematics, history, metaphysics, poetry, politics, a work on geology, and a volume of 'Quentin Durward.' You could scarcely decide what was the young man's immediate pursuit. A volume of Hobbes was open before him, but other books were open too; Claudian, Shelly, and a treatise of Conic Sections.' He was reading none of the three, but seemingly watching the swallows as they darted across the window.

eminence, while great abilities, unstrengthened and unsustained by them, are often destined to shame their possessors and disappoint the world. If Vivyan escaped these dangers, it was owing to the force of circumstances. Had he been left to be the architect of his own fortune, it is probable the fabric would never have been raised.

mother early, and his father (an imprudent man) some years pre

"Vivyan was the younger of two brothers; he had lost his

of

A small

vious to the present period. You will easily believe that in point
of fortune he was no Croesus: his havings in money, like his
havings in beard,' were a younger brother's portion.'
Irish property, yielding something under two hundred a-year, had
descended to him from the maternal side-a revenue sufficient,
with sharp economy, to maintain him in the position of a gentle-
man, but totally insuficient to support the expense of the
least costly form of university education. For this advantage,
therefore, Frank was necessarily a dependent upon friendly aid.
Sir Godfrey Vivyan, was a selfish and dissipated man, who, hav-
It was not from his brother, however, he received it: his brother,
ing inherited his father's extravagance along with his estate,
found his available income much too limited to supply his own
frivolous or licentious pleasures. The benefactor of Vivyan was
Ia distant relative, a wealthy merchant resident in the south of
Spain, whom the young man had never so much as seen. It was,
stimulated the munificence of this gentleman. Its origin was of
course, therefore, no feeling of personal affection or esteem that
a more tender, indeed of a romantic nature. In his youth, he had
circumstances had not only prevented their union, but united the
lady to another; time passed away, and with it the first bitterness
of blasted prospects; but what can 'raze out the written troubles'
of the heart-pluck from the memory the rooted sorrow' of
frustrated love and hope blighted? The rapturous fascination of
Mr. Everard's youth continued to be the tranquil charm and in-
nocent solace of his old age. Having heard by report how
strongly Frank resembled his mother, and that he had been left
but poorly provided for, Mr. Everard was irresistibly impelled to
promote his advancement in the only way that seemed open to
him; and he proceeded to the attainment of his object with a
delicacy and frankness that left the young man no alternative but
to accept the kindness ingenuously, or inflict an ungracious wound
through a mistaken feeling of independence."

formed a passionate attachment to Vivyan's mother; inexorable

The description given here looks very like that of an idle young man; not deficient in talent, but greatly wanting in application.

We should confess that the novelist allows the sufficiency of £200 per annum to support a gentleman with economy, "He was not an idler; only a literary truant. Mental rebut not to defray a University education. Well, the latter finement was written on his brow; it spoke in his eye, but the should be made cheaper. A young man may receive a intellect was of an unfixed and airy character. A sheet of paper very excellent education at Trinity College for, we think, that lay there amongst the other straggling leaves let you fully less money. Edinburgh and the Scotch Universities geneinto the story of his mind. It was covered with a maze of cha-rally have turned out some excellent scholars, without in

racters and hieroglyphics, algebraic symbols, Greek verses, geometrical lines, and lines of English poetry, the exactest possible type of the state of intellectual vagrancy.

curring a cost of more than half the money annually.

Mr. Vivyan had a cousin, a young man of a very different character, rich, and not knowing what to do with his money :

"Vivyan had a cousin, named George Markham, four or five years his senior-generous, brave, cordial, and manly-heir to a handsome fortune, and already in the enjoyment of so large an allowance as to place all the pleasures that became a gentleman liberally and lawfully within his reach. Virtuously more than intellectually educated, his tastes were happily innocent and

"A picture stands on the mantel-piece; a green curtain covers it-let us draw it aside-ah! what a face! what supreme beauty! A face that Raphael might have painted. And how like is it to Vivyan! We have said that he was handsome; he must have been so, indeed, to have resembled that lovely portrait. If his features had a fault, it was owing to their resembling their exquisite original only too closely-the style was too delicate and feminine. But then his youth was some excuse; at least it was a fair apology for the smoothness of his upper lip, which was only beginning to be shadowed by the promise of a moustache.healthyHis hair was fair, and where its thick clusters were parted with 'artless heed' in front, they displayed a forehead of brilliant whiteness, and the most intellectual form. His eye was blue, mild, bright, but with something of dreaminess, or languor, in its very brilliancy. It was, however, not the languor of sensuality; nor was that the character of his mouth either, although it was still further, perhaps, from indicating the energetic and heroic qualities. Upon the whole a physiognomist of no very great acuteness might have divined what was indeed the truth, that Frank Vivyan was a young man of great attractions and brilliant parts, but deficient in the hardier qualities of perseverance and self-reliance, which so frequently conduct minor talents to

not of the courtly train,

Or city's practice, but the country's innocence;' he was passionately fond of rural sports, indeed of rural life in every respect, and spent the greater part of every year at his father's seat, a place called Manor Oakham, in the neighbourhood of Southampton, except when he went to Scotland in the grouse season, made a pedestrian tour through the Alps or Pyrenees, or even ranged the world as far as the banks of the Jordan, and the cataracts of the Nile. He was an ardent lover of natural beauty, as most sportsmen are, particularly anglers, and Markham was as renowned with the rod as the gun;-indeed, the books he

was most addicted to, if not the only ones to which he had ever paid much attention, were old Izaak and his fly-book.

Arabella. The present Mrs. Spenser was a discontented, intractable, selfish, and eccentric woman, and had been an invalid, and "Vivyan had not seen or known much of this relation of his a most vexatious one, ever since the birth of her youngest child, until some short time after he was established at Cambridge. An || keeping her bed-room seven or eight months of the year, and accidental circumstance then brought Markham to that part of talking of returning to it the remaining four or five. Her comEngland, and he did not omit paying his fair cousin a visit. No-plaint was one of the non-descript disorders, called nervous, one body was so winsome as Frank Vivyan; he was all openness, benevolence, gentleness, courtesy, and good humour. Markham was charmed with him; he perceived his mental superiority, but the perfect artlessness and modesty, nay the very supineness, of Vivyan's character, prevented that superiority from being disagreeably felt by any body, even by those who were in the position of his intellectual rivals, which was not the case at all with Markham. Frank upon his part was an easy conquest. He gave his cousin his affections almost in the first hour of their acquaintance; and embraced his invitation to Southampton without one thought of Legendre, or Mr. Peters his tutor.

The life to which his cousin introduced him was delightfully idle. All the forms and varieties that ease aud idlesse ever took in a country house were at Vivyan's disposal from cock-crow to sunset. There was not a work on mathematics in the library to

remind him of his deserted studies, or a grave academic face at the table to recall the image of Mr. Peters.

“Markham was not motherless; but his mother, an eccentric woman of fashion, lived entirely between London and Paris; and his father, also an oddity, and an invalid to boot, was drenching himself abroad with all the waters of Germany. The house was thus abandoned to youth, and pleasure, which is youth's business. Vivyan's modes of enjoyment, however, differed in many respects from his cousin's. Markham was active and athletic, full of animal spirits, as eager at everything he engaged in as if his life and fortune were staked on it, habitually an early riser, a man to catch the larks asleep in their nest, and to make chanticleer crow if he neglected his duty. Vivyan, on the contrary, was addicted a little to his couch. He had probably, like most of us, witnessed in his time many more sunsets than sunrises. It is only metaphorically that men in general are much given to worship the rising sun."

part real to nine parts fanciful; the sources of untold profits to doctors, and untold miseries to husbands. If people were harmless in proportion to their imbecility, it would be all well; but the misfortune is, that those who have the least control over themselves, often possess the most powerful and mischievous ascendancy over others. This was remarkably illustrated in the instance of Mr. and Mrs. Spenser. The rector had all the weaknesses of an amiable character, and his wife all the weaknesses of a selfish one. The two sets of weaknesses, united in the bonds of matrimony, made a very uneasy union, and Mr. Spenser would indeed have been very unhappy in his second marriage, only for the extreme placidity of his temper, the society of his daughters, and his passionate love of books."

Mr. Spenser was more decided in his adherence to strictly parochial duties than some of his brethren in the ministry; for not only was it the case then, but it is still true that gentlemen hold benefices and agencies at the same time. The agent for the Marquis of Hertford is also, we think, the rector of a parish, with a large ecclesiastical

income.

After Mr. Spenser we are bound in justice to take Mrs. Spenser:-

"Can you imagine a woman at once handsome and ghastly? Mrs. Spenser's features were good; the complexion actually deathlike; her eyes were black, and brighter than was necessary or agreeable. You would not call her face emaciated; but it was so exceedingly pale, or rather pallid, that she looked more like a person escaped from a cemetery than on the way to it. There was, however, no want of vitality about her; just the reverse: she was only too lively, but it was a liveliness the very reverse of pleasant, the animation of selfishness and irritability. A woman more full of whims, whimsies, humours, crotchets, prejudices,

The two young men agreed to spend the summer in a yachting excursion round the coasts of Ireland and Scot-envies, jealousies, paltrinesses, pettinesses, peevishnesses, narrow

land; but, so far as the book saith, they went no further than Ireland. They had letters from a Lord Bonham to the rector of a parish in Donegal; but as they were almost wrecked in his neighbourhood, the letters were scarcely requisite. This Mr. Spenser, the rector, was a Whig parson, a contributor to the "Edinburgh Review," an Eli to his son, a Socrates to his wife, and a faithful pastor to his parishioners. He lived during the tithe war; but although compelled, by a nervous scold, who was his wife, to leave the parsonage and reside in Dublin, he seems to have been highly popular amongst all classes —a good, easy man, with liberal notions, and more than an average share of talent :

"Mr. Spenser had now been incumbent of the parish of Redcross for about ten years. He came to it shortly after his marriage with his present wife (who was the step-mother of Arabella, Elizabeth, and Sydney), and her eldest child was now entering his eighth year. The benefice was a good one, worth from eight hundred to a thousand pounds per annum, and had been bestowed upon him by its patron, Lord Bonham, a nobleman with whom Mr. Spenser had formed a close friendship, originally at Eton, and subsequently at Cambridge. His lordship's estate, which we have already mentioned, lay in the neighbourhood of Redcross; but there was no mansion upon it, only a shooting lodge, where he occasionally established himself for grouse-shooting or salmonfishing. He offered his agency to his friend along with the parish,|| but although such a union of offices was a common thing in Ireland at the time, Mr. Spenser's strict notions of clerical duty and propriety revolted at it, and he firmly declined this additional proof of Lord Bonham's friendship, although his increasing family rendered an augmentation of income a point of no small importance. The Rector had been more fortunate in his first than in his second

marriage. His first wife was a woman of strong sense, sterling worth, and great personal attractions. The beauties of her mind she transmitted to her daughter Elizabeth; those of her person only to

nesses, and little miseries, caprices, suspicions, and apprehensions of all sorts, never existed; and she was ruthless in inflicting them on every one about her, particularly, of course, upon her devoted husband. Mrs. Spenser was considerate to only one thing in the world, and that was a black-faced pug, who was lying at this moment at her feet, coiled up in a ball, with a collar of red velvet round his neck, embroidered with the name of 'Bijou.

"Calm yourself, Margaret, pray do,' said her husband, in a tone of earnest tenderness, approaching the bed-side, where Rebeeca, her maid, looking frightened and fluttered, was standing all alert, with opiates, salts, tonics, and many more things than she could well hold in her hands, not knowing what might be first called for. Rebecca's face could almost spare a few roses, and presented a lively contrast to Mrs. Spenser's, which resem bled that of a bust in white marble, with two real eyes of unearthly lustre glittering in it.

Calm yourself, Margaret,' repeated the rector, pray do not make yourself uneasy about the chimneys; they have been recently examined by the diocesan architect; believe me they are perfectly secure.'

"Secure, indeed!' she cried; those unnatural eyes glancing back and forwards between the ceiling and the window, as if she was in instant expectation of seeing the chimney topple down, or Boreas making his appearance in person. Secure, indeed! as if any thing could be secure in such a terrific storm!'

"Then she asked whether there was such another climate on the globe, and said she could stand anything-anything but storm; then she was confident the windows would be blown in the very next gust that came; after which she affirmed that her head was splitting, and applied her long white fingers, not unlike icicles, to her temples, as if to keep the pieces together; and when her hands brought a mass of her hair down from underneath her night-cap, perhaps the luckless Rebecca did not come in for a little hurricane to her own share for her negligent pinning!

"Perhaps, my dear, you will be better up,' resumed her hus band, to make a diversion in the maid's favour; but, instead of noticing what he said, she looked at her watch, and inquired pettishly for Miss M'Craken,"

per

There was no danger in the case, it may be observed, but a severe Irish storm of wind and rain, to which sons living in the county Donegal should have been habituated. We are afraid that there are many Mrs. Spensers in this world, who, not having any substantial causes of grief or trouble, make, for themselves and others, sorrow. Mrs. Spenser thought she was ill-acted as if she had been dying—and so she died. She was the perpetual plague of the rector's house, and compelled a sensible man to do most extraordinary and foolish things. A robbery had been committed in the neighbourhood. A tithe proctor had been robbed of his collections, of which a part belonged to Mr. Spenser. His lady became alarmed. The maids wanted a few more young men in the house. They wrought upon her fears, and we have the result in the following passage :—

"All was at sixes and sevens; nothing but running up-stairs and down-stairs; ordering and counter-ordering, mixing draughts, preparing baths, and charging stone bottles with hot water. Every quarter of an hour some new crotchet got possession of Mrs. Spenser's noddle, and at last she sent for her husband, and insisted on his sending to the nearest police-station, and getting an armed party to garrison the parsonage. Mr. Spenser, reminded of Hamilton's Bawn,' suspected shrewdly that either Miss M'Craken or Rebecca had suggested this idea; a dashing green serjeant would be such an agreeable addition to the company in the servants' hall. But there was no use in remonstrance-the rector was compelled to sit down, and in his wife's presence write to the police-oflicer in command (with whom he was acquainted)|| requesting the loan of a couple of his men for a night or two. The request was granted (the county being, in fact, so notoriously tranquil that it mattered little how the police were distributed), and before it was dark, three tall, handsome fellows in dark-green uniforms, with glittering muskets on their shoulders, and short swords by their sides, were marched into the rectory; and wellpleased they were to get into such snug quarters, for they had a capital supper with the domestics, good warm beds to mount guard in, and such fun and flirtation with the house-maids that the noise of the merriment occasionally reached the library and the tea-table."

At another time poor Mr. Spenser was compelled to write for military, when there was no better reason for their presence; but unfortunately he left his letter open, and his mischievous wife added a postscript, suggesting the propriety of sending artillery; so that the rector, one of the most peaceable men in the world, was marked down at the castle as the most bloody-minded rector in Donegal.

The interest of the novel is partly formed from the misdeeds of a Mr. Dawson, the heir of the Castle Dawson property—a person of bad character in every respect, but a Member of Parliament, and a suitor for the hand of one of the rector's daughters, by whom his plea was rejected for that of the stranger, Mr. Vivyan. The description of Castle Dawson is not inapplicable to many Irish proper

ties:

"This and other chat of the same kind, with now and then the stave of a comic song, helped a little to beguile the tediousness of a long ride across moor and mountain; so desolate a track that they passed but one human habitation before they ar rived at Castle Dawson, itself the bleakest abode that ever disheartened a resident proprietor, or justified an absentee. Sydney and the proctor separated at the ruinous gate-house. The latter proceeded to his usual lodging at a small inn hard by; the former trotted up the neglected avenue which led to the house.

the silent clock in the yard, announcing probably the self-same hour which it announced on the day that the bill was filed in the equity suit? But, in its best days, before it fell into the clutches men-all, the Archduke of the furred Law-Cats,' Castle Dawson of the ruthless power so vividly typified by Rabelais in Gripewas a lonely, savage place (the very abomination of desolation), where the owners resided sometimes of necessity, but wherǝ nobody else ever willingly passed two nights in succession. The subpoena there. It was close to the sea, amongst hills that were process-servers demanded double fees for serving a latitat or a barren without being picturesque; wretched crops of oats composed its harvests, stunted cattle showed the indigence of its pastures; in fact, with the exception of a few acres, the grounds were absolutely good for nothing but snipe-shooting, and the soil only fit for

fuel. The word Castle' was an ostentatious misnomer. The house was so called either because there was nothing at all castellated in its structure, or from the adjacent relics of what had, perhaps, formerly been some kind of fortress, which relics (only a few walls, with an arched gateway) had been incorporated into the offices, and now formed in combination with them a rambling extent of buildings in an advanced stage of architectural decay."

The history of the Dawson family is also not an uncommon narrative in several parts of the same country. airs there, and endeavour to establish an ancestry :—— When men gather wealth, they always assume aristocratic

"The story ran, that this enterprising gentleman selected his grandfathers by their noses; and whenever he saw or heard of a portrait with what was called the Dawson nose,' which was somewhat cocked up like himself, he purchased, or gave an order to have it secured for him; and when the picture reached Castle Dawson, it was styled an admiral, a general, an ambassador, or chanced to be dressed. There were some busts, too, amongst the a lord-mayor, according to the costume in which the figure family memorials thus oddly collected; and amongst the number were two which (if you believe your own eyes as well as Mr. Dawson's account of them) established, beyond a doubt, that not only was Mirabeau one of the family, but that it traced its origin

and nose to Socrates himself.

"The majority of pictures in the Dawson gallery, were, as may be imagined, of an order of art not much above sign-painting; but there were some portraits of more value than was generally suspected: there were two Vandykes, two Lelys, one by Reynolds, and another supposed to be a Rembrandt. There was also a development, who might have better passed for Mrs. Woodward's group of characters by Rubens, including a beauty of enormous great-grandmother than Mr. Dawson's, only for the decisive circumstance of the nez retroussé. The whole collection, however, was soon to be brought to the hammer, under an order of a Master

in

Chancery, who, though an old master himself, knew nothing about the old masters of the pencil, and had given no particular directions for the valuation of the pictures by competent judges, nor for their safe custody previous to the sale. Under these circumstances, the idea had occurred to the fertile mind of Sydney Spenser's friend, to turn to his own account the valuable part trash, picked up at the old curiosity shops, at the rate of a guinea of the gallery, substituting for it a corresponding quantity of a portrait. There was also an opportunity for practising the same little artifice with respect to a few hundred pounds' worth of books, which had been collected by his ancestor, merely on library, and that the books ought, at all events, to be superbly the principle that a great house ought to have something like a

bound. Expense had not been spared, so that the books were not only in rich bindings (now, indeed, damaged by damp and neglect), but some of them rare copies of the works of standard authors, including, for example, a splendid quarto edition of Molière, with finely-executed engravings, which had cost forty guineas, and would now, probably, produce a larger sum. The books to be abstracted were, as well as the pictures, to have their places supplied at a moderate cost; and the business which Dudley Dawson had just now in hand, assisted by Messieurs Lamb and Thomson, was to remove this property clandestinely from the house of his father, and transport it to London, to be there disposed of with the privacy suited to a transaction of so delicate a nature."

"It had been in Chancery for fifteen years! Is further description necessary? Do you not see its shattered windows, neglected roof, dilapidated offices, green-white walls, hingeless doors, grass-grown walks, weed-cropped gardens, the stones of the balustrades dislocated as if by an earthquake, the premature There is a place of the same name, Castle Dawson, in havoc of the axe amongst such poor timber as there was, and the north of Ireland, a very beautiful little village, and a