being detected, disgust with life and horror of death, these were the sentiments which troubled the death bed of the powerful king. The ignorance of physicians in those days was in part betrayed by the belief, that the blood of children could correct the defects of age and the weakness of decrepitude. The monarch, the first who bore the epithet of the most Christian," was so abandoned to egotism, that he allowed the veins of children to be opened, and greedily drank their blood. He believed that it would renovate his youth, or at least check the decay of nature. The cruelty was useless. At last, feeling the approach of death to be certain, he sent for an anchorite from Calabria, since revered as St. Francis de Paule; and when the hermit arrived, the monarch of France begged him to spare his life. He threw himself at the feet of the man, who was believed to be so powerful from the sancity of his character; he begged the intercession of his prayers; he wept; he supplicated; he hoped that the voice of a Calabrian monk would reverse the order of nature; and that the virtues of his intercessor could procure him a respite from death.

66

We find the love of life still more strongly acknowledged by an English poet; who, after declaring life to be the dream of a shadow, a weak-built isthmus between two eternities, so frail, that it can sustain neither wind nor wave," yet avows his preference of a few days', ray, of a few hours' longer residence upon earth, to all the fame which poetry can bestow :

Fain would I see that prodigal,

Who his to-morrow would bestow, For all old Homer's life, e'er since he died, till now!

We do not believe the poet sincere; for one passion may prevail over another, and in many a man's breast the love of fame is at times, if not always, stronger than the love of being. But if those who pass their lives in a struggle for glory, may desire the attainment of their object at any price, the competitors for political power are apt to be doubly enamoured of being. Lord Castlereagh could indeed commit suicide; but it was not from disgust of life; his mind dwelt on the precarious condition of his own elevation, on the unsuccessful policy in which he had involved his contry. He did not love death; he did not contemplate it with indifference; he failed to observe its terrors, because his attention was absorbed by objects which pressed themselves upon his mind with unrelenting force.

The ship of the Marquis of Badajoz, viceroy of Peru, was set on fire by Captain Stayner. The marchioness, and her daughter, who was betrothed to the Duke of Medina-Celi, swooned in the flames, and could not be rescued. The marquis resigned

himself also to die, rather than survive with the memory of such horrors. It was not, that he was indifferent to life; bis mind dwelt upon intolerable griefs; he preferred death, because death was out of sight; because his whole thoughts were absorbed by sorrows that left no room for reflection upon the nature of the event, which alone seemed to promise him a remedy. The natural feelings remained; the love of grandeur; the pride of opulence and power; but their action was for a time impeded.

Madame de Sevigné, in her charming letters, gives the true sensations of the ambitious man, when suddenly called to leave the scenes of his efforts and his triumphs. Rumor, with its wanted credulity, had ascribed to Louvois, the powerful minister of Louis XIV., the crime of suicide. His death was sudden, but not by his own arm; he fell a victim, if not to disease, to the revenge of a woman. In a night, the most powerful man in Europe, one who was passionately fond of place, was summoned from the splendours of his active career The man, whose power extended to every cabinet, whose views embraced the policy of continents, was called away. How much business was arrested in progress!-how many projects defeated! how many secrets buried in the silence of the grave! Who should disentangle the interests, which his policy had rendered complicate? Who should terminate the wars which he had begun? Who should follow up the blows, which be had aimed? Well might he have exclaimed to the angel of death, "Ah, give me but a little time; a short reprieve; spare me, till I can give a check to the Duke of Savoy; a check-mate to the Prince of Orange!" "No! No! You shall not have a single, single minute."-Death is as inexorable to the prayer of ambition, as to the entreaty of despair. The ruins of the Palatinate, the wrongs of the Huguenots, were to be avenged; and Louvois, like Louis XI and like the rest of mankind, was to learn, that the passion for life, whether expressed in the language of superstition, of abject despondency, or of the desire of continued power, could not prolong existence for a moment.

But though the love of life may be declared a universal instinct, though the contempt of death is hypocrisy, it does not follow that death is usually met with abjectness. It belongs to virtue and to manliness to meet the inevitable decree with firmness. It is often met voluntarily; but even then the natural passion is declared. A sense of shame, a desire of plunder, a hope of emolument, these, not less than a sense of duty, are motives sufficient to influence men to meet danger and defy death. Yet the love of life appears in the midst of hardihood.The common hireling soldier bargains to ex

pose himself to the deadly fire of an hostile army, whenever his employers may command it; he does it in a controversy of which he knows not the merits, for a party to which he is essentially indifferent, for purposes which, perhaps, if his mind were enlightened, he would labour to counteract. The life of the soldier is a life of contrast; of labour and idleness; it is a life of routine, easy to be endured, and leading only at intervals to danger. The love of ease, the certainty of obtaining the means of evistence, the remoteness of peril, conspire to tempt a crowd of adventurers, and thus the armies of Europe have never suffered from any other limit, than the wants of the treasury. But the same soldier would fly precipitately from any danger, which he had not bargained to encounter. The merchant will visit the deadliest climates in pursuit of gain; he will pass over regions, where the air is known to be corrupt, and disease to have anchored itself, in the hot, heavy atmosphere. And this he will attempt repeatedly, and with firmness, in defiance of the crowds of corpses, which he may see carried by waggon-loads to the grave-yards. But the same merchant will fly with precipitate panic from his own resi dence in a more favoured clime, should it be invaded by epidemic disease. The same merchant, who would fearlessly meet the worst forms of a storm at sea, and coolly take his chance of escaping the fever as he passed through New Orleans, would shun New York in the season of the cholera, and shrink from any danger which was novel and unexpected differing from the perils which he had prepared himself to disregard. The widows of India ascend the funeral pile with a fortitude which man could never display; and readily, it is said cheerfully and emulously, yield up their lives to a barbarous usage, which, if men were called upon to endure, would never have been perpetuated through successive generations. Yet is it to be supposed, that these unhappy victims are indifferent to the charms of existence, or blind to the terrors of death? Calmly as they may lay themselves upon the pyre, they would beg for mercy, were their execution to be demanded of them in any other way; they would confess their fear of death, were it not that love, and honour, and custom, pronounce their doom.

No class of men in the regular discharge of duty incur danger more frequently than the honest physician. Never recreant to his trust, there is no form of malignant disease, with which he fails to become acquainted; no hospital so crowded with contagious death, that he dares not walk freely through its wards. His vocation is among the sick and the dying; he is the familiar friend of those who are suffering under infectious disease; and he never shrinks from the horror

He

of observing it under all its aspects. must do so with calmness; he may not suffer his equanimity to be disturbed; as he inhales the poisoned atmosphere, he must coolly reflect on the medicines which may mitigate the sufferings that he cannot remedy. Nay: after death has ensued, he must search with the dissecting-knife for the hidden cause and the phenomena of disease, if so by multiplying his own peri's he may discover some alleviation for the afflictions of humanity.— And why is this? Because the physician is indifferent to death? Becauss he is steeled and hardened against the fear of it? Because he despises or pretends to despise it? no means. As a class of men, it is the es pecial business of physicians to value life; to combat death; to cherish the least spark of animated existence. And the habit of caring for the lives of others is far from leading them to an habitual indifference to their The instinct of life displays itself in the physician as in other men; he shuns every danger, but such as the glory of his profession commands him to defy.

own.

By

He

Thus we are led to an explanation of the anomaly of suicide, to reconcile the apparent contradiction of a fear of death, which is voluntarily encountered. It may seem a paradox ; yet the fear of dying has sometimes prompted suicide, and the man, who seeks to destroy himself, at the very moment of perpetrating his crime, fears death, and feels the passion for life. Do you ask for evidence? Menace him with death under a different form from that which he has chosen; and he will fly from it like other men. will defend himself against the hand of the assassin, though he might be ready to cut his own throat; he will, if at sea, and the ship were sinking in a storm, labour with the best to save it from going down, even if he had formed the design to leap into the ocean in the first moment of a calm. Place him in the van of an army, it is by no means certain that he will not prove a coward; tell him the cholera is about to rage, and he will deluge himself with preventive remedies; send him to a house attacked with yellow fever, and he will steep himself in vinegar and carry with him an atmosphere of camphor. It is only under the one aspect, which the mind in some insane excitement has chosen, that the terrors of death do not overpower the sentiment of disgust and disappointment, which may induce him to desire to die, because he has failed of obtaining all the happiness for which he had hoped.

It will not be difficult, then, to set a right value on the declaration of those, who affect for death not indifference merely, but contempt. It is pure affectation, or the indulgence of a Mephistopheles levity: and must excite either compassion or disgust, according as the affectation is marked by the spirit

of foolish scoffing or of human vanity and self-deception. A French moralist tells us of a valet, who danced merrily on the scaffold where he was to be broken on the whoel.We have known an instance of a woman, who was hanged for aiding her paramour to kill her husband. She was a complete sensualist, one to whom life was every thing, and the loss of it the total shipwreck of every thing, a wreck the more absolute, since not even reputation, which woman always values, could be saved. Now this woma", on her way to the gallows, was accompanied by a clergyman of no very great ability; and all along the road, with her death in plain sight, she amused herself in teasing the good mau, whose wits were no match for her raillery. He had been buying a new chaise, quite an event in the life of a humble country man, and when he spoke of the next world, she would amuse herself in praising his purchase. If he deplored her fate and her prospects, she would grieve at his exposure to the inclement weather; and laughed and chatted, as if she had been driving to a wedding, and not to her own funeral. And why was this? Because death was not feared? No; but because death was feared; and feared intensely. They say, that in India the women, who are burned to death on the piles of their deceased husbands, often utter shrieks that would pierce the bearers to the soul; and to prevent the diffusion of a compassion which, if it were to become active, would endanger the reign of superstition, the priests, with the clangour of drums and cymbals, drown the terrific cries of their victims. So it is with those who go to death with merriment. They dread death; and they seek to drown the noise of his approaching footsteps by the sound of their own ribaldry. If the scaffold often rings with a jest, it is because the mind shrinks from the solemnity of death.

Perhaps the most common device for averting the mind from death itself, is in directing all the thoughts to the manner of dying. Vanitas vanitatum! Vanity does not give up its hold; but displays itself even in the last hour. Men desire to pass from life with distinction, to be buried in state; and the last thoughts are employed on the decorum of the moment, or in the anticipation of funereal splendours. It was no uncommon thing among the Romans for a rich man to appoint an heir, on condition that his ob equies should be celebrated with costly pomp. "When I am dead," said an Indian chief, who died at Washington, "when I am dead, let the big guns be fired over me." The words were thought worthy of being engraved on his tomb-stone, but are in no wise remarkable; they are but a plain expression of a very common vanity; the same which leads the humblest to desire that at least a rough stone may be placed at the head of his

grave, and demands the erection of the splendid mausoleums, and costly tombs for the mistaken men,

Who by the proofs of death pretend to live.

Among the ancients, it was not uncommon for an opulent man, while yet in health, to order his own sarcophagus; and now-a-days, men sometimes build their own tombs, for the sake of securing a satisfactory monument. We knew a vain man, who had done this at a great expense; and the motive was so apparent, that men laughed with the sexton of the parish, who wished that the builder might not be kept long out of the interest of his money,

But it is not merely in the decorations of the grave, that this vanity is displayed. Saladin, in his last illness, instead of his usual standard, ordered his shroud to be uplifted in front of his tent; and the herald, who displayed this winding sheet as a flag, was commanded to exclaim aloud: "Behold! this is all which Saladin, the vanquisher of the East, carries away of all his conquests." He was wrong there. He came raked into the world, and he left it naked. Graveclothes were a superfluous luxury, and to the person receiving them, as barren of comfort as his sceptre or his scymitar. Saladin was vain. He sought in dying to contrast the power he had enjoyed with the feebleness of his condition; to pass from the world in a striking antithesis; to make his death scene an epigram. All was vanity.

A century ago it was the fashion for culprits to appear on the scaffold in the dress of dandies. Vanity made it the mode to be hanged in the attire of fops. Some centuries before, it was the privilege of noblemen, if they were worth hanging, to escape the gallows, and perish on the block. Syrian priests had foretold to the emperor Heliogabalus, that he would be reduced to the necessity of committing suicide; believing them true prophets, he kept in readiness silken cords and a sword of gold.

The

Admirable privilege of the nobility, to be beheaded instead of hanged! Enviab'e prerogative of imperial dignity, to be strangled with a knot of silk, or to be assassinated with a golden sword!

Odious! in woollen! 'twould a saint provoke,
(Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.)
No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace
Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face:
One would not sure be frightful, when one's dead,
And-Betty-give this cheek a little red.

The thoughts of vanity, in the example chosen by the poet, extended to appearances after death; vanity is not inactive in the dying hour. But bere we should look for proof to the precincts of courts, to the scene where folly used to reign by prescriptive right; where the ample means of gratification permitted no obstacles to indulgence. The foibles of the poor are bounded by their

poverty; the vices of humble life are concealed in the obscurity of neglect and oblivion. To trace the display of vanity, triumphant in the hour of mortality, observe the voluptuaries, whom the pride of opulence has rendered indifferent to decorum. Enter the palaces, where caprice gives laws and pleasures consume life. The idle fool has leisure for folly; and the fit lasts to the latest moment. Go there, and observe the harlot's euthanasia. The French court was at Choisy, when Madame de Pompadour felt the pangs of a mortal malady. It had been the established etiquette, that none but princes and persons of royal blood should breath their last in Versailles. Proclaim to the gay circles of Paris, that a thing, new and unheard of, is to be permitted! Announce to the world, that the rules of palace propriety and Bourbon decorum are to be broken! Open, ye palace doors, for the king's favourite mistress! Ye chambers, where vice has fearlessly lived and laughed, but not been permitted to expire, be ye now the witnesses of the novel scene!

The marchioness questioned the physicians firmly; she perceived their hesitation; she felt the hand of death; and she determined, says the historian, to depart in the state of a queen. Louis XV., himself not capable of a strong emotion, was yet eager to concede to his dying friend the consolation which she coveted, the opportunity to reign till her last gasp. The courtiers thronged round the death-bed of a woman, who distributed favours with the last exhalations of her breath; and the king hurried to name to public offices the persons whom she recommended with the faltering accents of departing life. The sick chamber was a scene of state; the princes and grandees still entered to pay their homage to the woman, whose power did not yield to mortal disease, and were surprised to find her richly attired. The traces of death in her countenance were concealed by rouge. She reclined on a splendid couch; questions of public policy were discussed by ministers in her presence; she gloried in holding to the last the reins of the kingdom in her hands. Even a sycophant clergy showed respect to the expiring favourite; and felt no shame at sanctioning with their frequent visits the vices of a woman, who had entered the palace only as an adulteress. Having complied with the rites of the Romish church, she next sought the approbation of the philosophers. She lisped no word of penitence; she shed no tears of regret. The curáte left her as she was in the agony: "Wait a moment," said she, "we will leave the house together."

The dying mistress, still able to distribute favours, may insure obedience; the dead are disregarded by the selfish. Hardly had she expired, but the scene changed. Two

domestics carried out her body on a hand-
barrow from the palace to her private home.
The king stood at the window, as her re-
mains were carried by. "The Marchioness
will have bad weather on her journey."
(To be continued.)

THE MIDNIGHT MAIL.
BY MISS GOULD.

"Tis midnight-all is peace profound!
But lo! upon the murmuring ground,
The lonely, swelling, hurrying sound

Of distant wheels is heard!
They come-they pause a moment-when
Their charge resigned, they start, and then
Are gone, and all is hushed again,
As not a leaf had stirred.
Hast thou a parent far away,
A beauteous child to be thy stay
In life's decline-or sisters, they

Who shared thine infant glee?
A brother on a foreign shore?
Is he whose breast thy token bore,
Or are thy treasures wandering o'er
A wide tumultuous sea?

If aught like these, then thou must feel
The rattling of that reckless wheel,
That brings the bright, or boding seal,

On every trembling thread,
That strings thy heart, till morn appears
To crown thy hopes, or end thy fears;
To light thy smile, or draw thy tears,
As line on line is read.

Perhaps thy treasure's in the deep,
Thy lover in a dreamless sleep,
Thy brother where thou canst not weep
Upon his distant grave!
Thy parent's hoary head no more
May shed a silver lustre o'er
His children grouped-nor death restore
Thy son from out the wave!

Thy prattler's tongue, perhaps, is stilled,
Thy sister's lip is pale and chilled,
Thy blooming bride perchance has filled
Her corner of the tomb.
May be, the home where all thy sweet
And tender recollections meet,
Has shown its flaming winding-sheet,

In midnight's awful gloom!
And while, alternate, o'er my soul
Those cold or burning wheels will roll
Their chill or heat, beyond control,
Till morn shall bring relief,
Father in heaven, whate'er may be
The cup, which thou hast sent for me,
I know 'tis good, prepared by Thee,
Though filled with joy or grief!

THE LOST DIAMOND.

BY CAROLINE ORNE.
"Time shall unfold what slaited cunning
hides."-KING lear.

"HAIL, pensive nun, devout and holy?
Hail, divinest melancholy !"

repeated Annette Allison, as she stole to the side of her friend, Cordelia Ruthven, and lightly touched her shoulder.

Cordelia, who had finished her toilet, when she fell into her fit of melancholy musing, at the voice of the lovely Annette, raised her eyes and threw back the long chestnut hair, which, half veiling her face, fell in rich redundancy over the dressing-table on which she was leaning, and made an effort to smile, as she said, "I wish that I might have the privilege of becoming a nun, rather than to fulfil the far more unhappy destiny for which I am reserved."

"Yes, your destlny is unhappy," replied Annette. "What can be more so, than to be the affianced bride of a handsome, amiable, and talented young man of two and twenty, who is, moreover, rich as a Jew. Oh, it is shocking!"

"Yes, I know that Fame says all this of him; but Fame is a lady on whose veracity I can by no means depend. He was fourteen when he left this country for England, and then, I think, he was coarse-looking instead of being handsome. If he has talent, I ain glad for his own sake, but as for the riches he has in prospect, I sicken at the very mention of them. They are the jesses that bind me: it would have been a mercy to have been hooded as well as bound. You know on what condition young Morley is to possess his riches?"

"Thy lovely self, so I have heard, is to be appended to them as a kind of clog; otherwise they will make use of their wings, and flying from his grasp, light into the strong box of a third or fourth cousin, who is already rich enough.'

"And knowing this, can you wonder why I am melancholy? Can I feel myself at liberty to refuse the hand of Morley, when I know that by so doing I shall sink him into poverty? Another consideration weighs heavily on my mind. If he be mercenary, even if he should be disgusted with my person and appearance, when we come to meet, he may disguise his aversion for the sake of securing affluence. My fate will soon be decided, as in his letter he mentioned that he should leave England in a few days."

"It was certainly very odd in old Mr. Morley," said Annette, "to leave his property to his nephew on such conditions, but let us perplex ourselves no more about it now, but finish dressing, or we shall be late to the party."

"That is true," replied Cordelia, beginning to arrange her hair.

"What made you select that simple dress?" inquired Annette. "You forget that Miss Eldron, the rich heiress, who has lately come to reside with her uncle, is to be at Mrs. Forrester's this evening.

sense of her beauty, while in her manners and conversation there is a fascination absolutely irresistible."

"I care not for that," replied Annette. "Give me the sweet star I can gaze at, not the flashing meteor that dazzles and blinds."

Cordelia had just finished entwining a wreath of rose-buds with her beautiful hair, when a letter was handed her. It was directed to N-, her native town, whence it had been forwarded to Mr. Allison's, where she was only on a visit. She changed colour when she saw that it was in the hand-writing of Morley, and with trembling fingers broke the seal. When she had finished reading it, warmly pressing the hand of Annette, she said with much energy, "Now I am free." Annette looked at her inquiringly.

"I will tell you all," said Cordelia, "on our way to Mrs. Forrester's," for Mrs. Allison had just sent to inform them that the carriage was waiting.

Cordelia Ruthven was only four years old, when her mother, whose husband died a few months after the daughter's birth, accepted the hand of Mr. James Morley, a rich widower. He was an Englishman by birth, and, until within a few years previously to his marriage with Mrs. Ruthven, had dwelt in his native land. The customs growing out of an hereditary aristocracy exerted over him their natural influence, not the less so, that he was able to trace his line of ancestry as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. Cordelia was the child of his affections, and at one time he thought of dividing his large property between her and his nephew, Philip Morley, who had accompanied him to America; but the pride of ancestry prevailed, and he ultimately resolved to transmit it undivided and unimpared, to one who bore his name. To gratify both his pride and his love, he fixed upon the expedient of marrying Cordelia to his nephew, and they, children that they were, thought it a mighty fine

one.

Nor did Mr. Morley, in the fulness of his satifaction, dream that they would ever think otherwise. He, however, at the suggestion of his lawyer, rather from any fears entertained by himself, relative to the nonfulfilment of the contract, added a codicil to his will, which transferred the heirship from his nephew to a young gentleman, distantly related to the Morley family, if this, his fa vourite project, should be defeated by fault of either party concerned. Shortly after this arrangement, Cordelia's mother died, and a part of the property, which consequently fell to the daughter, was, by the advice of her step-father, employed to purchase for her a small annuity. The remainder was safely invested, the annual interest of which, added to her annuity, would afford her a comfortable maintenance.