soul, burned from the zenith to the ground, and marked its track by forests of flame, and shattered the summits of the hills. Defence was unthought of, for the mortal enemy had passed from the mind. Our hearts quaked for fear; but it was to see the powers of heaven shaken. All cast away the shield and spear, and crouched before the descending judgment.

We were conscience-smitten. Our cries of remorse, anguish, and horror, were heard through the uproar of the storm. We howled to caverns to hide us. We plunged into the sepulchres, to escape the wrath that consumed the living. We should have buried ourselves under the mountains. I knew the cause the unspeakable cause, and knew that the last hour of crime was at hand. A few fugitives, astonished to see one man amongst them not sunk into the lowest feebleness of fear, came around me, and besought me to lead them to some place of safety, if such were now to be found on earth. I told them openly that they were to die, and counselled them to die in the hallowed ground of the Temple. They followed; and I led through streets encumbered with every shape of human sufferings, to the foot of Mount Moriah; but beyond that, we found advance impossible. Piles of clouds, whose darkness was palpable even in the midnight in which we stood, covered the holy hill. Impatient, and not to be daunted by any thing that man could overcome, I cheered my disheartened band, and attempted to lead the way up the ascents; but I had scarcely entered the cloud, when I was swept down by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower around me.

Now came the last and most wonderful sign that marked the fate of rejected Israel. While I lay helpless, I heard the whirlwind roar through the cloudy hill, and vapours began to revolve. A pale light, like that of the rising moon, quivered on the edges of the horizon; and the clouds rose rapidly, shaping themselves into the forms of battlements and towers. The sound of voices was heard within, low and distinct, yet strangely sweet. Still the lustre brightened; and the

airy building rose, tower on tower, and battlement on battlement, in awe that held us mute. We knelt and gazed on this more than mortal architecture, that continued rising and spreading, and glowing with a serener light, still soft and silvery, yet to which the broadest moonlight was dim. At last, it stood forth to earth and heaven, the colossal image of the first Temple-of the building raised by the wisest of men, and consecrated by the Visible Glory.

All Jerusalem saw the image; and the shout that, in the midst of their despair, ascended from the thousands and tens of thousands, told that proud remembrances were there. But a hymn was heard, that might have hushed the world beside. Never fell on my ears, never on the human sense, a sound so majestic, yet, so subduing so full of melancholy, yet of grandeur and command. The vast portal opened, and from it marched a host, such as man had never seen before, such as man shall never see but once again-the guardian angels of the city of David. They came forth gloriously, but woe in all their steps-the stars upon their helmets dim-their robes stained-tears flowing down their celestial beauty. "Let us go hence!" was their song of sorrow. "Let us go hence!" was answered by sad echoes of the mountains. "Let us go hence!" swelled upon the night to the furthermost limits of the land.

The procession lingered long upon the summit of the hill. The thunders pealed, and they rose at the command, diffusing waves of light over the expanse of heaven. The chorus was heard, still magnificent, and melancholy, when their splendour was diminished to the brightness of a star. Then the thunder roared againthe cloudy Temple was scattered on the wind-and darkness, the omen of the grave, settled upon Jerusalem. Croly.

CHARACTER OF RICHARD I.

To a degree of muscular strength, which falls to the lot of few, Richard added a mind incapable of fear.

Hence in the ancient annalists he towers as a warrior above all his contemporaries. Nor was this pre-eminence conceded to him by the Christians alone. Even a century after his death his name was employed by the Saracen cavalier to chide his horse, and by the Saracen mother to terrify her children.

But when we have given him the praise of valour, his panegyric is finished. His laurels were steeped in blood, and his victories purchased with the impoverishment of his people. Of the meanness to which he could stoop to procure money, and the injustices into which he was hurried by the impetuosity of his passions, the reader has found numerous instances in the preceding pages. To his wife he was as faithless as he had been rebellious to his father.

The only benefits which the nation received in return for the immense sums with which it had furnished the king in his expedition to Palestine, for his ransom from captivity, and in support of his wars in France, were two legislative charters. By one of these he established an uniformity of weights and measures throughout the realm: by the other he mitigated the severity of the law of wrecks. Formerly it had been held that by the loss of the vessel the original owner lost all right to his goods, which then became property of the crown. Henry I. had granted that, if any man escaped alive, it should be considered no wreck: Henry II. added that, if even a beast escaped by which the owner might be discovered, he should be allowed three months to claim his property. Richard now enacted, that if the owner perished, his sons and daughters, and in their default his brothers and sisters, should have a prior claim in preference to the crown.

Lingard.

THE WHITE SHIP.

King Henry the First went over to Normandy with his son Prince William, and a great retinue, to have the prince acknowledged as his successor by the Norman

nobles, and to contract the promised marriage between. him and the daughter of the Count of Anjou. Both these things had been triumphantly done, with great show and rejoicing; and the whole company prepared to embark for home.

On that day, and at that place, there came to the King Fitz-Stephen, a sea-captain, and said: "My liege, my father served your father all his life, upon the sea. He steered the ship with the golden boy upon the prow, in which your father sailed to conquer England. I grant me the same office. I have a fair vessel in the harbor here, called the White Ship, manned by fifty sailors of renown. I pray you, sire, to let your servant have the honor of steering you to England!"

beseech you to

"I am sorry, friend," replied the King, "that my vessel is already chosen, and that I cannot therefore sail with the son of the man who served my father. But the prince, with all his company, shall go along with you, in the fair White Ship, manned by the fifty sailors of renown."

An hour or two afterwards, the King set sail in the vessel he had chosen, accompanied by other vessels, and, sailing all night with a fair and gentle wind, arrived upon the coast of England in the morning. While it was yet night, the people in some of the ships heard a faint wild cry come over the sea, wondered what it was.

and

Now the prince was a dissolute, debauched young man of eighteen, who bore no love to the English, and had declared that when he came to the throne, he would yoke them to the plough like oxen. He went aboard the White Ship with one hundred and forty nobles like himself, among whom were eighteen noble ladies of the highest rank. All this gay company, with their servants and the fifty sailors, made three hundred souls.

"Give three casks of wine, Fitz-Stephen," said the prince, "to the fifty sailors of renown. My father the King has sailed out of the harbor.

What time is

there to make merry here, and yet reach England with the rest?"

"Prince," said Fitz-Stephen, "before morning my fifty and the White Ship shall overtake the swiftest vessel in attendance on your father the King, if we sail at midnight."

Then the prince commanded to make merry; and the sailors drank out the three casks of wine; and the prince and all the noble company danced in the moonlight on the deck of the White Ship.

When, at last, she shot out of the harbor of Harfleur there was not a sober seaman on board. But the sails were all set and the oars all going merrily, FitzStephen at the helm.

The gay young nobles, and the beautiful ladies wrapped up in mantles of various bright colors, to protect them from the cold, talked, laughed, and sang. The prince encouraged the fifty sailors to row harder yet, for the honor of the White Ship.

Crash! a terrific cry broke from three hundred hearts. It was the cry the people in the distant vessels of the King heard faintly on the water. The White Ship had struck upon a rock, and was going down!

Fitz-Stephen hurried the prince into a boat with some few nobles. "Push off," he whispered, "and row to the land. It is not far, and the sea is smooth. The rest of us must die."

But as they rowed away fast, from the sinking ship, the prince heard the voice of his sister Marie, the Countess of Perche, calling for help. He never in his life had been so good as he was then. He cried in an agony "Row back at any risk! I cannot bear to leave her!"

They rowed back. As the prince held out his arms to catch his sister, such numbers leaped in that the boat was overset. And in the same instant the White Ship went down.

Only two men floated. They both clung to the main yard of the ship, which had broken from the mast, and now supported them. One asked the other who he