hair shaken down rested in great masses that gleamed golden in the flickering light, her right hand still held the pistol as though it were some love-gage that she treasured close, and the fairness of her face was set calm as death, resolute as steel, even while her eyes burned, and glowed, and dilated with the ardent fire of war, and with a look sweeter than that which swept over him like a sorcery. "Off!" she said, low and eagerly. Every second is life!" While she spoke he was in the saddle; the horses, young and wild, broke away at a touch in a stretching gallop, with the brave hound coursing beside them, mad with the joy of his liberty. The hoofs were noiseless on the moss that was damp and yielding by the moisture from the swamps, and the belt of the cypress screened their flight from the monastery; the monks would search for hours, till their torches flared out, in every nook and cleft of the rocks around, ere ever they would dream that that midnight ride had borne away their prisoner.

Out of the cypress-grove and beyond the beetling wall of the crags the moonlight lay in a broad white sheet, clear and soft as dawn, across the open country; mirrored in the surface of the still lagunes, and scarcely broken by a tree or hut. Afar the still green fields of rye and maize were scarce stirred by a breath, and the twisted boughs of the olives, with their grey silvery foliage, were veiled with a soft mist, the steam of the marshes and the plains. Through the sweet luminous half-light the horses dashed at racing speed, while the water-threaded earth trembled beneath them, and the rank grasses were crushed under their fleet hoofs. They rode as those alone ride behind whom pursues Death, and before whom lies Freedom.

With their slender ears laid and their delicate heads stretched greyhound-like, the horses swept on through the lustrous night, as once down the shore of the Bosphorus Erceldoune had held his assassin in headlong chase. Through the shallow pools, with the water splashed to their girths, and circling away in eddying rings as they broke its slumbering quiet; through the vaporous haze that hung over the black expanse of the morass and the plain till they seemed to hunt down the white wraiths of its smoke that curled and uncurled before them; through the tall reedy grasses that broke as they crushed them, and sent a fresh dreamy odour out on the air as they bowed their broad ribands and their feathery clusters; through the deep, intense silence, till the water-hen flew with a scream from her rest, and the downy owl brushed by with a startled rush, and the landrail woke with his shrill ery from his sleep in the midst of the millet-stalks; through the balmy southern night they rode as those can only ride behind whom yawn a prison and a grave, before whom smile the world and all its liberty.

*

FENIANISM.

WE have yet to learn from what profound source the name at the head of this article is derived. It is not found among the writings of any of the eminent Irish learned of modern times that have fallen in our wayat least, not that we recollect observing. Perhaps it was derived from some one of the thirty males and fifty females whom Noah despatched to people Ireland, and teach their descendants the finest language known to man. According to one account, it was the Phoenician tongue, afterwards a little refined in the Irish, or to another statement, as some of the native historians are more inclined to think, it was the original language of Paradise, slightly altered by change of climate. On this point the reader will do well to consult the native historians of Ireland, with their list of a hundred and seventy-one kings, going back to the Flood, the latest long before the English possession of the island in 1172, and in the sequel of that dynasty to the close alliance of the monarchs of the island with the Pharaohs of Egypt, of course before the Israelitish Joseph drank the wine of Meröe at the royal banquets.

Here we must pause from lack of antiquarian capacity. If we possessed the voluminous ghostly reading of Cardan, or could discuss knotty points in the unknown tongues of the late Scotch preacher Irving, or could converse in the rapping communications of hobgoblin spiritualists, and declare our acceptance of the vulgar appellation, on such authorities we might satisfy the reader, but we confess a want of knowledge to explain a word so consentaneous in its meanings with Irish Chicago patriotism. The language of that virtue is in general exceedingly lucid, coming across the Atlantic still, full of sound and fury.

We are also inclined to think, as do our American friends, that, with a most ferocious intention, Fenianism really possesses but a small degree of power to effect mischief, though quite ready to fight a score of windmills like a certain worthy Don; that it is a thing full of sound and fury, signifying nothing in reality, not for want of malign intention, but owing to the obstacles insurmountable of ignorance and lack of moral force, and its own inveterate imbecility of ratiocination. Ignorance how to carry out the contemplated mischief, and want of adequate power and intellectual resource, are clear. Its projectors have not been able to organise any practicable plan of operations. None of the respectable part of the Irish people, nor the clergy of that people, have sympathy with Fenianism. In the year 1798, the Irish had just grounds of complaint, and men of high consideration had a share in the disturbances. At present, it is the reverse. No Irishman of any respectability has taken the smallest share in support of Fenianism. Party spirit in Ireland has been kept down, and whatever men have been in power of late years, Whig or Tory, since Catholic emancipation, the grievances of Ireland have been considered and greatly reduced. The Church and the land-tenure are the only grievances that remain. In respect to the first, it is false in principle; the religion of a vast majority is the religion of a country. In the

* Vide the native Irish histories.

second case, it does seem intolerable that a farmer with a few hundred pounds, his all in the world, should rent land, expend upon it his little capital, and be evicted at the caprice of the landlord, and thus left penniless in the world at a moment's notice. In England, before it was the custom to give leases, the practice of letting land from year to year prevailed. We knew a baronet who had, with his fathers before him, been four hundred years and more resident on the same property. We asked how a farmer was compensated, for we understood leases were generally given in the present day by most of his neighbours, but not by him. He replied, the outlay was always duly considered, and that in the arrangements there had been few disputes, because both sides acted fairly by custom. In Ireland, however, the power of the landlord was often exercised in the most unjust manner, and the confidence which existed in England between the landlord and tenant was unknown. The truth was, such landlords were often themselves in distress. The large estates held by English landlords there gave no ground for such charges; they were not overwhelmed with debt from their extravagances. The Encumbered Estates Act, so wisely established in Ireland the other day, shows how the tenants must have been pressed by the owners of estates. The profligacy of the Irish landlords aforetime accounted for the burdens upon their estates, and for the pressure it grew into a custom to use for raising money, let who would suffer. If the lives which too many Irish landlords led at the close of the last century, and even later, be considered, it is no marvel that the tenantry suffered. For samples of the mode of life in Ireland in the time past, when many landlords pressed their tenantry into the dust, and no regard was had to moral habitudes, Sir Jonah Barrington, whom we knew personally, has left behind him enough to elucidate this in mischievous print. He hardly thought it would be used to afford a specimen of the manners of a class, which manners, to sustain them, must have reacted fearfully upon the laborious part of the population. On the estate of one English landlord, valued at above a million sterling, not a single complaint was ever heard, while all around the grievances were numerous. We believe the owner never was in Ireland. His motto was that of the revered Mr. Coke of Norfolk, "live and let live." This, however, with too much of the Irish landlordism of the old time, was impossible. The want of forecast and the extravagance prevalent rendered the landlord often exacting in order to exist himself. Yet of these very men of landed property, overburdened with mortgages, and ready to commit the most cruel injustice to their tenantry-of such men were composed the administrators of the law, at least to a certain extent, as justices of the peace, and by such there was jobbery, and tenants were left to get justice how they could, and often not at all. Lord Clare, an arbitrary man, and much disliked in the country, spoke in the past time of the grinding down of the tenantry into dust with great indignation. The grievances of late years have been so reduced in number that the slightest justification for rebellion does not exist. The remnants of past mischiefs only remain, and are no justification for an appeal to violence. Ireland has its fair representation in the imperial parliament.

Now the effect of the past ill conduct of too many landowners, there were reasons for remembering, might not react at the time, because reaction was powerless. It had no means to show itself. A better day

dawned upon Ireland. The miserable tenant evicted found a poor-law at last. Before that, with his wife and half-naked children, taking up his abode in a ditch, with a few miserable rags over them and heather beneath, who either died out from fever and want, or else tramped into some distant spot to add to the suffering prevailing there, being thus flung upon an hospitality that was itself in the depth of suffering, had double reason to complain. Of late years the measures of the government enabled many such distressed persons to obtain support, but they have not forgot-it is not in the nature of things they should forget-all their past sufferings. They hear what their countrymen have been able to do abroad. They toil hard for a little money now they can get work. They save and emigrate. Perhaps some get aid from friends abroad who have preceded them. They leave their native home, though they have work to do. They think past evils may return. They go ignorant and ill calculating as they are, while the love of their native home never forsakes them, because the more untutored the man the dearer is the old hearth to his memory. The green island of his youth comes back upon his mind, and he listens to the plans of those who, under pretence of a similar affection, turn his untutored predilections and his pence to their own purposes by wild bluster and appeals to those sympathies which are a part of our nature. Thus with the unreasoning their countrymen make a market of their feelings, and call it Fenianism.

The advantage of such sympathies with a susceptible and ignorant people in a foreign land, it was not difficult to turn to account. Convicts escaped, like the notorious Mitchel, from penal servitude, and some who were educated plied a part of the press in America against England, and for a considerable time in the South as well as the North did all the mischief they were able between the readers of the journals of the two nations in the way of misrepresentation, prejudice, and falsehood. The Irish are numerous in the American cities, and have distinguished themselves there by local disturbances as remarkably as at home. All the world must remember the Philadelphia riots of the Irish a few years ago, when a number of persons were killed and wounded. At a later period in New York, incited by the notion that if the negroes were freed they would get the work to do in which the Irish were or might be employed, they attacked and most barbarously treated some of those poor creatures through jealousy. The military were obliged to act against them, and bloodshed followed. In the Jerseys they repeated similar outrages, and with similar results.* In fact, they seemed to justify the remark of a

"The animosity of the crowd against the negroes was so great during the culmination of the riots that it even went the length of threatening to set fire to two British vessels in the North river, both of them commanded by negro captains, and manned by negro crews; the one from Belize, and the other from Jamaica. Some of the crew were violently assaulted in the streets, and fled for protection to the office of Mr. Archibald, the British consul. That gentleman, having no adequate means at his disposal, telegraphed to Lord Lyons for a ship of war, and yesterday morning her Majesty's ship Challenger arrived and dropped anchor at the entrance of the Hudson. In the mean time the negroes, all of whom were British subjects, found refuge to the number of seventy-five on board of the French man-of-war the Cardenas, bearing the flag of Admiral Reynaud, who kindly volunteered to give the men shelter until they could be transferred to the more legitimate safeguard of the ship of their own sovereign. It is calculated

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shrewd Yankee, they make very good fellows in the second generation" he meant those who were born in the States of Irish parents.

But the newspapers, both American and English, have recorded these and similar outrages. The present remarks must be confined to the Fenian Society, its branches, and ultimate intentions. These illustrate in a remarkable manner the character of the people thus enrolled, their want of foresight, their ignorance, and their intolerable bluster, which the Americans exactly understand and characterise. It is true the leading members of the body talk largely, and dupe their poorer countrymen out of subscriptions. They are going to fit out ships of war, land an invincible force in Ireland, and no doubt, having subjugated and settled that country, intend to proceed to the conquest of England, proceeding like so many Alexanders to conquer new worlds.

Lord Sidmouth, or "the Doctor," as Canning named him, a favourite minister of George III., used to be kept in old womanly fear by scarecrow plots generally got up by informers. There was one, we remember, in which a formidable band of traitors kept "the Doctor" in terrible alarm. It was headed by a cobbler, six or seven composed the army of rebels, and they had among them one old pistol and a pound of gunpowder in the foot of an old stocking, most probably provided by the informer, or, in the more polite language of the present day, by the "detective." All the machinery of the law was set to work to unravel the plot and punish the traitors. The physical and moral force of England were not to be thought of in those times of ministerial reasoning in small. Just so it is with the Bluebeard Fenians, at whom the Yankees, like men of good sense, are laughing heartily. This great country that stood alone against all Europe in arms for years together is to be severed. We are to be "hung, drawn, and quartered" by an army from a fleet of the newly-discovered Fenian nation, marching in brogues, buttonless at the knees, to humble the pride of England!

It was at Chicago, in the United States, that the leadership of this formidable host was represented by an individual named O'Mahony, a corruption of "My Honey," we take it. Never was there more enthusiasm displayed by some of those least burdened with that substance which phrenologists most covet in examining the human cranium. The speech of this hero, styled the august "Head Centre of the Fenian Forces," assumed that all came from the island, the prime gem of the sea, who were emigrants, had been really expatriated-driven from their country by British oppression! For seven centuries they had been persecuted. Ireland must now meet her enemy in battle array to prevent all the Irish being driven to die in English workhouses. Goods and relics of old Ireland were displayed lately in America, sent over to incite the that nearly six hundred persons were either killed or wounded in the riots. Coroners' inquests have been held upon seventy-six, the great majority of whom were Irish. The number of negroes hanged, beaten to death, or thrown into the river, is estimated at about twenty; but the bodies of five only have been recovered and accounted for. The negro fugitives who encamped on Long Island have for the most part returned; and, as many of these unhappy persons have been reduced to destitution by the destruction of their homes and furniture, and the enforced cessation of their usual labours, a subscription has been commenced in their behalf, which already amounts to a very considerable sum."-American Paper.