memory and power failing him, and all the beauty of his face gone, although he was scarcely forty years of age.

On the 25th of March, 1833, came the end. That night was to celebrate the reconciliation between the father and son, and for the first and the last time they were to appear on the stage together, Charles playing Iago to his father's Othello. The event created a great excitement among playgoers; the house was crammed. Kean went through the part "dying as he went," until he came to the "Farewell," and the strangely-appropriate words "Othello's occupation's gone." Then he gasped for breath, and fell upon his son's shoulder, moaning," I am dying -speak to them for me!" And so the curtain descended upon him-for ever. He was conveyed to Richmond. "Come home to me; forget and forgive!" he wrote to his wife. And she came. An hour before he died, he sprang out of bed, exclaiming, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and he expired with the dying words of Octavian, "Farewell Flo-Floranthe!" on his

lips. This was the 15th of May, 1833. He was buried in Richmond churchyard.

There is nothing in the theatrical annals of the whole world so romantic and pathetic as the life of this man. His sins were manifold, but his expiation was heavy. We have dwelt in this paper more particularly upon the events of his

early life, in order to soften harsh judgments upon his errors.

"Over the grave of one of the greatest of actors," says Doran nobly, "something may

be said in extenuation of his faults. Such curse as there can be in a mother's indifference hung about him before his birth. A young Huron, of whose tribe he subsequently became a member, could not have lived a more

savage, but certainly enjoyed a more comfortable and better tended, boyhood. Edmund Kean, from the very time of boyhood, had genius, industry, and ambition, but, with companionship enough to extinguish the first, lack of reward to dull the second, and repeated visitations of disappointment that might for brutal despair; he nourished his genius, have warranted the exchange of high hopes maintained his industry, and kept an undying ambition, under circumstances when to do so was a part of heroism. . . . Kean was trained upon blows and curses, and starvation, and the charity of strangers. It was enough to make all his temper convert to fury, and any idea of such a young, unnurtured savage ever becoming the inheritor of the mantle worn by the great actors of old, would have seemed a

madness even to that mother who soon followed him in death, Nancy Carey. But Edmund Kean cherished the idea warm in his bosom, never ceased to qualify himself for the attempt, studied for it while he starved, and when about to make it, felt and said that success would drive him mad. I believe it did, but whether or not I can part from the great actor of my young days only with a tender respect. I do not forget the many hours of bright intellectual enjoyment for which I, in common with thousands, was indebted to him, and, in the contemplation of this actor's incomparable genius, I desire to forget the errors of the man.'

Temple Bar.

GREAT storms may be compared to those waves on a perturbed sea which rise higher than their fellows, because representing in reality the combined mass of several waves. It is not probable that the causes producing storms vary from time to time in energy, except with in very narrow limits. The sun is always pouring forth his heat with unvarying abundance, though as the earth draws slightly nearer to him, or passes slightly farther from him, in traversing her slightly eccentric orbit, she receives a greater or smaller proportion of the heat which he emits. And again, though hour by hour the face of the earth turned sunwards is changing, and though as the

year proceeds she now bows her northern, now her southern regions more fully towards him, yet it is not from changes such as these that great storms proceed. Such changes proceed too slowly and too uniformly to generate of themselves great atmospheric disturbances. It is in the accidental combination of irregular causes of atmospheric disturbance, not in regular variations in the action of the great source of all the atmospheric motions, that destructive hurricanes have their origin. And in this respect great storms may well be compared to those great waves which from time to time overtop their fellows on a storm-tossed For such waves are not produced

sea.

by the action of fiercer blasts than have perturbed the sea around them. Every portion of that sea has been equally disturbed, or nearly so. But it is because in some cases wave-movements chance to be so associated with others that wave-crests coalesce with wave-crests, and hollows with hollows, producing greater disturbance, while in other cases the wave-crests of one set agree with the hollows of another, and vice versa, reducing the disturbance, that waves over the perturbed sea are unequal; and when it so chances that several waves coalesce into one, we have one of those mighty waves which seamen dread. A ship shall have stood for hours the full brunt of a storm, riding over the lesser waves, and reeling indeed before the larger, but rising again after they have passed, when an unlucky chance will bring a wave upon her in, which the waters of many waves are gathered; and at one blow she will be disabled. So with the great storms which are remembered for many years. There has been a stormy season. The winds have now raged for awhile, and have anon lulled; but for weeks there has been no very terrible storm in any part of the wind-swept region; at length, however, it so chances that several storms combining into one within some limited area, a hurricane occurs which carries desolation in its track. Such was the storm which lately destroyed nearly a quarter of a million of lives in India, such the great storm of 1780. And there have been others as terrible, and only less destructive because their chief fury was spent in thinlypeopled regions.

We propose to consider some of the more remarkable storms recorded in the annals of meteorology, and then to inquire how far the evidence seems to suggest either the possibility of anticipating the approach of such great storms, or else of providing measures by which, when they occur in certain regions, their effects may be rendered less disastrous than they have been heretofore.

The most terrible storm which has, perhaps, ever occurred is that which has been called the Great Storm. It occurred, or rather its worst effects were experienced, on October 10, 1780. Generated probably in mid-Atlantic, not far from the equator, it was first felt in Bar

badoes, where trees and houses were blown down. Captain Maury, in his "Physical Geography of the Sea," gives a rather exaggerated account of the effects produced by this storm in Barbadoes, apparently from memory-some of the details being like, but not quite the same as those actually recorded. He says "the bark was blown from the trees, and the fruits of the earth destroyed; the very bottom and depths of the sea were uprooted-forts and castles were washed away, and their great guns carried in the air like chaff." The bark of trees was removed, but, it is believed rather through the effects of electric action than by the power of the wind. Cannon, also, were driven along the batteries, and flung over into the fosse, but not carried in the air like chaff." At Martinique the storm overtook a French transport fleet, and entirely destroyed it. There were forty vessels, conveying 4,000 soldiers, and the Governor of Martinique reported their fate to the French Government in three words-" The vessels disappeared." 9,000 persons perished at Martinique, and 1,000 at St. Pierre, where not a house was left standing. St. Domingo, St. Vincent, St. Eustache, and Porto Rico were next visited and devastated, while scarcely a single vessel near this part of the cyclone's track was afloat on October 11. At Port Royal the cathedral, seven churches, and 1,400 houses were blown down, and 1,600 sick and wounded persons were buried beneath the ruins of the hospital. At the Bermudas, fifty British ships were driven ashore, two line-of-battle ships went down at sea, and 22,000 persons perished.

Perhaps the most remarkable effects of the storm in this portion of its course were those experienced in the Leeward Isles. The hurricane drove a twelvepounder cannon a distance of 400 feet. Those who lived in the Government Building took refuge in the central part, where circular walls, nearly a yard thick, seemed to afford promise of safety. But at half-past eleven, the wind had broken down parts of these walls, and lifted off the roof. Terrified they sought refuge in the cellarage, but before long the water had risen there to the height of more than a yard, and they were driven into the battery, where they placed them

selves behind the heavier cannons, some of which were driven from their place by the force of the wind. When day broke the country looked as if it had been blasted by fire; not a leaf, scarce even a branch, remained upon the trees.

As in great floods a common terror preserves peace among animals which usually war upon each other, so during the Great Storm human passions were for the time quelled by the fiercer war of the elements. Among the ships destroyed at Martinique were two English war-ships. Twenty-five sailors who survived surrendered themselves prisoners to the Marquis of Bouillé, the Governor of the island. But he sent them to St. Lucie, writing to the English Governor of that island that "he was unwilling to retain as prisoners men who had fallen into his hands during a disaster from which so many had suffered."

The Great Storm of 1780 must not be confounded with the storm remembered for many years in Great Britain as the Great Storm. The latter occurred on November 26, 1703, and its worst effects were experienced not as usual in the tropics, but in Western Europe. The reader will remember Macaulay's reference to it in his Essay on the "Life and Writings of Addison." In his famous poem The Campaign, Addison had compared Marlborough to an angel guiding the whirlwind. "We must point out,' writes Macaulay, one circumstance which appears to have escaped all the critics. The extraordinary effect which this simile produced when it first appeared, and which to the following generation appeared inexplicable, is doubtless to be chiefly attributed to a line which most readers now regard as a feeble parenthesis,

Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia passed. Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. The great tempest of November 1703, the only tempest which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this country the occasion of a parliamentary address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down. One prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his pal

ace.

London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of houses, still attested, in all the southern counties, the fury of the blast." He strangely omits to mention one of the most striking events connected with this terrible storm-the destruction of the Eddystone Lighthouse. Winstanley, the architect of the first Eddystone Lighthouse, was confident that it could resist the fiercest storm which ever blew, and expressed a hope that he might be in it when such a storm raged. On November 26, he arrived with a party of men who were engaged to repair the building. The Great Storm soon after began to blow and raged throughout the the night. On the morning of the 27th no trace of the Lighthouse was to be seen.

It is probable that the Great Storm of 1703 owed its destructiveness to the narrow range over which its track extended. As a storm widens in extent it loses in power, much as a river flows more sluggishly where its stream widens than where it has to make its way along a narrow channel. It is for this reason that certain regions suffer more from storms than others. Thus in the West Indies that great storm-breeder the Gulf Stream is at its narrowest. Here, therefore, the whirling storms, generated by the rush toward the channel of rare and warm air above the Gulf Stream, attain their greatest intensity, and have worked most terrible destruction. The Great Storm of 1780 affords an illustration, but many others might be cited. Flammarion relates that rion relates that "at Guadaloupe, on July 25, 1825, solidly constructed houses were demolished, and a new building, belonging to the State, had one wing completely blown down. The wind had imparted such a rate of speed to the tiles that many of them penetrated through thick doors. A piece of deal 39 inches long, 10 inches wide, and nearly 1 inch thick, moved through the air so rapidly that it went right through a palm-tree 18 inches in diameter. A piece of wood about 18 inches wide, and 4 or 5 yards long, projected by the wind along a hard. road, was driven a yard deep into the ground. A large iron railing in front of the Governor's palace was shattered to

pieces. A quantity of the débris from Guadaloupe was carried to Montserrat, over an arm of the ea 50 miles wide. Three twenty-four-pounders were blown from one end of a battery to the other. The vessels which were in the harbor of Basseterre disappeared, and one of the captains, who had escaped, said that his ship was lifted by the hurricane out of the sea, and was, so to speak, "shipwrecked in the air." The last-mentioned event is, however, "rather a large order," as our American cousins would say; probably that captain was too confused by the turmoil going on all round him when his ship was destroyed, to note with strict scientific accuracy what took place. Ships have been carried by the force of a gale upon the crest of a high roller, and have acquired such velocity that they have been flung some distance beyond the range reached by the wave itself. Thus in 1681 an Antigua vessel was carried out of the water to a point ten feet above the highest known tide. But nothing, we believe, has ever yet happened to a ship, even during the fiercest hurricane, which could properly be described in the words used by the Basseterre captain. His description probably bore the same relation to the facts as Maury's account of "great guns carried in the air like chaff." Probably when a storm really blows great guns in this way, it may lift ships out of the sea and shipwreck them in the air; but "in such a" when "we write a never."

The delta of the Ganges is another region where wind-storms acquire unusual intensity because of the way in which their range is narrowed. It seems probable that the whole of this delta forms a region of indraught, and the disposition of the land and mountain ranges helps to intensify the storms generated in the movement of air towards this region, especially in October and November, near the "changes of the monsoons." "During the interregnum," says Maury, "the fiends of the storm hold their terrific sway." Becalmed often for a day or two, seamen hear moaning sounds in the air forewarning them of the coming storm. Then suddenly the winds break loose from the forces which have for a while controlled them, and seem to rage with a fury that would "break up the fountains of the deep." In 1823 a

cyclone about a mile in diameter passed near Calcutta, during which 1,239 fishermen's houses were blown down. It serves to give some idea of the force of the wind to mention that a piece of bamboo was driven through a wall five feet in thickness. In other hurricanes in this region vessels have been carried from the sea far inland, not of course by being flung bodily out of the water, but carried along by the waters which have burst their usual bounds. Although this region has been the scene of many terrible catastrophes, none can be compared for a moment in destructiveness with the storm of October 31st last. "Those who remember," remarks a writer in the Bombay Gazette, "the cyclone which took place more than a dozen years ago will be able to recall vividly to their recollection the dreadful aspects which the storm presented. Houses were blown down, panes of glass were smashed by the atmospheric pressure, ships were lifted bodily out of the water" (again!) " and hurled upon the shore, where they were smashed. Many lives were lost and much property destroyed. But that cyclone was but a pleasant breeze compared with the disastrous storm-wave which has devastated the delta of the Ganges."

The region where the cyclone of last October worked most terrible destruction is the eastern part of the great Ganges delta, where the river Megna (formed by the confluence of the Ganges and the Brahmapootra) pours its waters into the Bay of Bengal. The volume of water carried down by this river is greater than is discharged by any other Asiatic river into the sea, a point which must be remembered in considering the circumstances of the late catastrophe. We have here an enormous estuary discharging nearly 150,000 cubic feet of water per second southwards, between the low-lying districts of Dacca on the west and Bulloah on the east. Farther on it reaches the archipelago of which the three chief islands are Dakhan Shabazpore, Hattiah, and Sundeep, in order eastwards. Opposite the first-named is the district of Backergunge (the Ganges flowing between); opposite the last-named is the district of Chittagong.

On the evening of October 31 nothing suggested danger. "The weather had

been a little windy, hazy, and hot; but there was nothing to excite the suspicions" of the inhabitants of the three islands and the districts surrounding the mouths of the Megna and the Ganges. To use the Lieutenant-Governor's words, "a million or thereabouts of souls retired to rest apprehending nothing." At about eleven o'clock the wind freshened, but not to a noteworthy degree, and "the sleepers slept on." Suddenly, at about midnight, a mighty wave, glittering in the starlight, was seen rushing in landwards, and in a few moments houses and lands were engulfed, and masses of human beings and débris were swept away on the top of the flood." We seem to be reading of one of those mighty waves which have been raised in mid ocean during the throes of some tremendous earthquake: but it was the wind which had driven before it this great mass of water. Driven onwards, it rushed into the estuary of the Megna, spreading over the surrounding shores and over the two eastern islands to a depth of several feet in many places. The worst was yet to come, however. The wave which had come in from the sea had been a long roller, and though it had contracted, increasing in height in so doing, as it rushed into the narrowing estuary, yet it was not until it had passed into the Megna that it acquired its full height. Pressed onwards by the cyclone, it gathered volume, until at length its weight overcame the pressure of the wind, when it swept back in one mighty and deep wave round the western channel, between Dakhan Shabazpore and Backergunge, inundating the island to a depth of twenty feet in many places, and spreading inland over Backergunge to a distance of from six to twelve miles from the shore. It had entered the estuary from the south-east, and now rushed outwards, almost dead against the wind, from the north-east.

A remarkable illustration of the terribly sudden nature of the disaster is afforded by the experience of Mr. Higgins, the Inspecting Postmaster at Noakolly. On the night of October 31st he was in his travelling barge, in a creek near Noakolly, about ten miles from the river Megna. He had gone to bed at eleven without any fear or anxiety whatHis boatman had gone on shore,

ever.

but four native servants were with him on board. Shortly before midnight he was awakened by cry of 'The waters are up! Jumping up, he looked out, and saw a high wave, with its crest and top gleaming in the starlight; it seemed like a flash; in an instant his boats were rising up on high; he fastened on a lifebelt in a few moments; another wave came rolling on, and the barge capsized; he paddled about in the water all the rest of the night with the help of the lifebelt; the native servants clung to spars. Three were saved and one was lost. The water felt warm to the body, but the air was bitterly cold to the head or hands above the surface."

The total destruction of life probably surpassed any which has been produced in the same space of time since the world was peopled. Sir Richard Temple, after a personal inspection of the afflicted districts, has come to the conclusion that not less than 215,000 persons lost their lives. He distributes the fatality as follows:-Backergunge, with the island of Dakhan Shabazpore, possessing a population of 437,000, has lost about a fourth of that number; Noakolly, with a population of 403,000, has lost 90,000; and Chittagong, with a population of 222,000, has lost 20,000. So that, out of a total population of 1,062,000 persons, more than one fifth have perished. To this terrible human mortality must be added a tremendous destruction of animal life, which, as Sir Richard Temple remarks, "though it may not be felt acutely at the present moment, will form a serious obstacle to agricultural operations by the survivors a few months hence." "Well may the Government of India," remarks the Bombay Gazette,

66

express the opinion that the calamity is scarcely paralleled in the annals of history. It will take many years before the afflicted districts will be able to recover from its effects, and it will be a landmark in the history of even this country of great calamities. The swiftness of the catastrophe must have been. terrific, and one may almost gather from Sir Richard Temple's minute that the great waves literally flashed out over the land, and that simultaneously the vast destruction of life was completed... When the sun rose next morning it shone upon a desolate country and a shivering