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what would that be to him? For my part, I think," said he, "I should confine my observations to the days of Julius Cæsar or King Alfred."

At another time, when speaking of what was constantly said about him in certain newspapers, he observed: "I notice that about once in every seven years I become the victim of a paragraph disease. It breaks out in England, travels to India by the overland route, gets to America per Cunard line, strikes the base of the Rocky Mountains, and rebounding back to Europe, mostly perishes on the steppes of Russia from inanition and extreme cold." When he felt he was not under observation, and that tomfoolery would not be frowned upon or gazed at with astonishment, he gave himself up without reserve to healthy amusement and strengthening mirth. It was his mission to make people happy.

His life will no doubt be written out in full by some competent hand; but however numerous the volumes of his biography, the half can hardly be told of the good deeds he has accomplished for his fellow-men.

And who could ever tell, if those volumes were written, of the subtle qualities of insight and sympathy which rendered him capable of friendship above most men-which enabled him to reinstate his ideal, and made his presence a perpetual joy, and separation from him an ineffaceable sorrow?

SONG.

Whither, ah! whither is my lost love straying-
Upon what pleasant land beyond the sea?
Oh! ye winds, now playing

Like airy spirits round my temples free,

Fly and tell him this from me:

Tell him, sweet winds, that in my woman's bosom
My young love still retains its perfect power,
Or, like the summer blossom,

That changes still from bud to the full-blown flower,
Grows with every passing hour.

Say (and say gently) that, since we two parted,
How little joy-much sorrow-I have known;
Only not broken-hearted,

Because I muse upon bright moments gone,
And dream and think of him alone.

BARRY CORNWALL.

THREE SONNETS.

I.

TO AILSA ROCK.

Hearken, thou craggy ocean pyramid!

Give answer from thy voice, the sea-fowl's screams!
When were thy shoulders mantled in huge streams?
When from the sun was thy broad forehead hid?
How long is't since the mighty Power bid
Thee heave to airy sleep from fathom dreams-
Sleep in the lap of thunder or sunbeams,
Or when gray clouds are thy cold coverlid?—
Thou answerest not, for thou art dead asleep;
Thy life is but two dead eternities--

The last in air, the former in the deep;

First with the whales, last with the eagle skiesDrown'd wast thou till an earthquake made thee steep; Another cannot wake thy giant size.

II.

GLENCOE.

JOHN KEATS.

Keep silence, lest the rocks in thunder fall;
Keep silence, lest ye wake the hapless dead,
Whose blood is crying from the ground to call
The doom of justice on the murderer's head!
Dark and more dark, ye shades of evening, lower;
Wide and more wide, ye gathering tempests, spread
Thick clouds and waters round the Avenging Power
Whose malison is here! The river moans;
The wind, with deepening sigh from hour to hour,
Saddens the gloom; a curse is on the land;
From every cavern'd cliff sepulchral groans
Appal the desolation; and around,
The melancholy mountains loathe the sun,
And shall, till the career of Time be done.

III.

BEN NEVIS.

We climb, we pant, we pause; again we climb:
Frown not, stern mountain, nor around thee throw
Thy mist and storm, but look with cloudless brow
O'er all thy giant progeny sublime;

While toiling up the immeasurable height
We climb, we pant, we pause: the thickening gloom
Hath pall'd us in the darkness of the tomb:
And on the hard won summit sound nor sight
Salutes us, save the snow and chilling blast,
And all the guardian fiends of Winter's throne,
Such too is life-ten thousand perils past,
Our fame is vapour, and our mirth a groan.
But patience; till the veil be rent away,
And on our vision flash celestial day.

THE LUDDITES.1

The Luddite rioters of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire derived their name from General Lud, their mythical leader, that awe-striking name and title being, however, borne by several of their chiefs at different times and in different districts. The deplorable outrages committed by these men-the breaking into houses to seize fire-arms and obtain money for the purposes of their mischievous and dangerous association-lasted for nearly forty years, during which time, with the exception of a few lulls, the great manufacturing districts were in as disturbed and lawless a state as the Border country when such marauders as Hardriding Dick or William of Deloraine drove honest men's cattle, burned keep-towers, and harried farm-houses.

The

All social diseases have their climax. night, they say, is darkest just before daybreak. To miseries and misfortunes there is a culminating period. It was in 1812 that the Luddites were fiercest, maddest, and most desperate, deriding all philosophy and forgetting all the tenets of political economy in the fierceness of their indignation. Their object was to destroy the new frames which about the end of the last century were introduced ("with power") to finish woollen goods. Up to this time cloth had been finished by a tedious and costly process, a man being required to each machine, and three times the expense being incurred. The machine was a ponderous, unsightly instrument, square at the extremity of the blade, but otherwise not unlike the shears used by sheep-shearers. One blade was passed under the balk cloth to be finished, and the other over it, the latter cropping off the nap of the wool as the blades were dexterously pushed backwards and forwards by the workmen. The men engaged in this primitive occupation were known by the name of croppers. The process was as much behind the age as the Hottentot system of spinning is behind the latest processes of Manchester. The croppers, whose occupation was thus interfered with, became as violent as the silversmiths of Ephesus, and were the chief leaders in the Luddite riots. They were generally of the stubborn, resolute Yorkshire race; ignorant, violent, determined, holding together for good or ill, and resolved to destroy the new frames, which they believed would throw poor men out of work and starve their families.

No Ribbonmen ever banded together with more sullen determination in their movements; their drilling and their attacks were conducted with military precision. Mere agricultural labourers might have shown as much courage, but could not have formed such subtle combinations. Every man had his allotted place by number (as in a regiment) in the musket, pistol, or hatchet companies. The form of initiation was known by the technical name of "twisting in." The oath taken was as solemn and terrible as that used in the secret tribunals of the middle ages. It was as follows: "I,

of my own voluntary will, do declare and solemnly swear that I never will reveal to any person or persons under the canopy of heaven the names of the persons who compose this secret committee, their proceedings, meetings, places of abode, dress, features, connections, or anything else that might lead to a discovery of the same either by word, or deed, or sign, under the penalty of being sent out of the world by the first brother who shall meet me, and my name and character blotted out of existence, and never to be remembered but with contempt and abhorrence; and I further now do swear, that I will use my best endeavours to punish by death any traitor or traitors, should any rise up amongst us, whereever I can find him or them; and though he should fly to the verge of nature, I will pursue him with unceasing vengeance. So help me God, and bless me to keep this my oath inviolable."

At the time of the crisis of disorder in 1812, when the Luddite conspiracy was netting over the greater part of two counties, Enoch and James Taylor constructed the obnoxious frames in their smithy, which stood on what is now the playground of the town-school at Marsden. These enterprising men had begun life as common blacksmiths, but by industry, perseverance, and inventive genius, had become known as skilful machine-makers. The giant hammer used in the Yorkshire smithies was in 1812 playfully known among the grimy artisans who wielded it as "ENOCH;" and when the Luddites made one of their midnight marches to destroy a finishing-frame, the cant saying was-alluding to the firm at Marsden and the hammer that was to crush their work

"Enoch made them, and Enoch shall break them."

Suffering, and believing that they would suffer more, these impetuous men totally forgot that all improvements in a trade tend to enlarge that trade; that all lessenings of cost 1 From Old Stories Re-Told, by Walter Thornbury, in the production of a fabric tend to increase

author of Haunted London, &c. Chapman & Hall.

the sale of that fabric; and that, if the finish ing-machines reduced the number of croppers, the manufacture of them undoubtedly led to the employment of more hammermen. To these truths they were indifferent; all they knew was, that the new frames lessened the immediate work for the croppers, and they were determined not merely to destroy those frames already in use, but to terrify employers from further adopting them.

Yet the croppers themselves, as long as they could get work, were well-to-do men, their wages being twenty-four shillings a week. The Marsden people were, indeed, seldom in distress, for the great cotton trade was already developing, and warp and weft ready for the hand-loom were brought from Lancashire fortnightly and put out to Marsden weavers. But let us be just; the times were hard everywhere, and a shilling did not bring then what it had brought before, and what it brings now. Men worked week in and week out, and only just, after all, kept the wolf from the door. Oh! there was a sharp biting suffering before thoughtful working men could combine in that thirty years' conspiracy that brought many brave lads to the gallows, and sent so many to pine away the rest of their miserable and wasted lives in the dismal restrictions of New South Wales. Time is full of common sense; it brings men to the truth; yet for nearly a whole generation it never stopped these disturbances, erroneous as they were. The man who thinks that these troubles indicated no foregone misery and wrong, would call a dying man's groans and screams mere practical jokes.

The Yorkshire nature is stanch and dogged; it was not going to bear starvation quietly, while proud, arrogant, and often cruel manufacturers were fattening on the very flesh and blood of the workman and his pining children. The poor man had borne the contemptuous denial of his rights, the incessant suspension of the laws of the land, trade monopolies, tyrannical, stupid, and heartless governments, civil and religious disabilities, and unjust and useless wars; but dear bread-that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. The artisan saw only in the new machinery means to still further enrich his oppressors and starve himself. When the rich man can be weary of life, is it to be wondered at that the poor man finds life sometimes intolerable? The panacea seemed to be combination. General Lud got recruits in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Nottinghamshire, and especially in the southwestern districts of Yorkshire. There were

food-riots at Sheffield, Mansfield, and Macclesfield. Food-riots are as certain a proof of something wrong in the body politic, as certain pustules are proofs of small-pox. The stockingweavers in Nottinghamshire began the bad work by holding nocturnal meetings, by forming secret societies, by appointing delegates and local "centres," by extracting black-mail from manufacturers, and requiring implicit obedience in their adherents, after administering an oath. From shattering frames, the Yorkshire men began to talk of upsetting the government. Religion was even pressed into the rioters' service, and a crusading spirit inculcated on those who joined the Luddites. The disorders came to a head in 1812, partly from the lenity shown to Luddite prisoners at the Nottingham assizes in March, and more especially by the dreadful price which provisions had then reached. The poor hardly ever tasted nourishing, flesh-making wheaten bread; tea and coffee were almost unknown; clothing was extravagantly dear; and the workman had to gain strength for the twelve hours' toil in the bad atmosphere of a mill from a paltry meal of porridge. All this was hard to bear even with freedom; but it was intolerable in a country where the intellect and conscience of the nation were enslaved, and where the poor had no other privilege than that of paying an undue share of the taxes levied on them by an enormously wealthy and tolerably selfish landed interest.

The riots soon overran the West Riding, beginning at Marsden. After trying their destructive powers on a small scale there, the frames at Woodbottom and Ottiwells were marked out for destruction, and the lives of their owners, the Armitages and the Horsfalls, were threatened. These gentlemen took prompt and energetic measures for the protection of their property. A bridge over the river at the Woodbottom Mill had an iron gate placed across the centre which could be securely fastened against all invaders. It had iron spikes at the top, and a row of iron spikes down each side. This bridge-with its gateway and protecting spikes-remained in its original integrity until a very recent day.

"At Ottiwells," adds a local authority, "at the upper end of the road fronting the mill, and on an elevation, level with the present dam, a cannon was planted behind a wall pierced with openings three feet high and ten inches wide. Through these apertures the cannon could be pointed so as to command the entire frontage of the mill, and fired upon an approaching enemy. This somewhat primitive

battery still exists, but the artillery disappeared | Cartwright's mill, in the fields of Sir George long ago; and though now walled up, the outlines of the embrasures formerly left for the cannon to be discharged through may yet be distinctly discerned. In addition to these means of defence, the workmen employed at the mills were armed, and kept watch and ward during the night."

Mr. Horsfall, resolute and prompt, was not to be easily frightened, and the Marsden croppers were none of them Luddites. The inhabitants of Marsden and the surrounding villages were also compelled to deliver up all firearms in their possession, until the reign of terror should pass away.

There were both infantry and cavalry in Marsden. The 10th King's Bays, the 15th Hussars, and the Scots Grays, were alternately billeted (at quite inadequate rates) in the town, impoverishing and sometimes ruining the landlords, irritating the high-spirited, oppressing the neutral, and contaminating the whole neighbourhood. These regiments were not allowed to remain long in one place, for fear of the men becoming tainted with Luddite opinions. The soldiers marched every night to the market-place at Marsden, and, having been paraded, were then told off into two divisions, the one to patrol on the road to Ottiwells and Valeside, and the other to spend the night between Marsden, Woodbottom Mill, and Lingards. As their movements were well known, and the clash of their swords and the tramp of their horses' feet were to be heard at a long distance at night, it was easy for the Luddites to steal away behind hedges, crouch in plantations, or take by-roads to their work of destruction. The cats had belled themselves this time, and the mice could play as they liked.

Armitage, at the obelisk (or, as the Luddites quaintly nicknamed it, "the dumb steeple"). When more than a hundred men had assembled, Mellor and Thorpe, the two young leaders, mustered the Luds, and called them over, not by names, but by numbers, in military fashion; there were three companies-the musket, the pistol, and the hatchet companies; the rest carried sledge-hammers, adzes, and bludgeons. They were formed in lines two deep, William Hale (No. 7), a cropper from Longroyd Mill, and a man named Rigge, being ordered by Mellor to go last and drive the Luds up, and see that no coward stole off in the darkness; for there were many Luds who only joined through fear of being assassinated, and had no real heart in the matter. The order to march was at last given; the band proceeded over wild Hartshead Moor, and from thence into a close sixty yards from Rawfold Mill, where the musket-men put on masks, got ready their firearms, and took a draught of rum to cheer them on to the attack. Mellor then formed his company of musket-men into lines of thirteen abreast, and moved on to the doomed mill, followed by Thorpe and his pistol-men.

In the meantime Mr. Cartwright, who had apprehensions of an attack, was asleep in the great stone many-windowed building. The great water-wheels were still; the only sound was the ripple of the water in the mill-dam. The alarm-bell, rising above the roof, stood out dark against the sky. There was no light at any window, and no noise. The five workmen and their allies, the five soldiers, were asleep. The armed men, intent on destruction and ready for murder, to their design stole on like ghosts. Soon after twelve Mr. Cartwright, who had just fallen asleep, was awoke by the gun-violent barking of a large dog kept chained inside the mill for such a purpose.

On the 11th of April fire was set to the powder lying about the West Riding. On that day the croppers at Mr. Wood's mill at Longroyd Bridge, near Huddersfield, were planning a night attack on the mill of a Mr. Cartwright, at Liversedge. The leading conspirator was an impetuous cropper, named George Mellor (twenty-two). His chief lieutenants were Thomas Smith (twenty-three), William Thorpe (twenty-two), and a mean subtle fellow, afterwards an informer, Benjamin Walker (twenty-five). Joshua Dickenson, a cropper, came to the shop on the Saturday before-named, and brought a pint of powder, a bag of bullets, and two or three cartridges, to distribute among the Longroyd Mill men. They met at night, about ten o'clock, when it was not quite dark, about three miles from

The mill-owner leaps out of bed to give the alarm; as he opens his bedroom door he hears twenty or thirty of the three hundred panes of glass on the ground-floor shattered in; at the same time there is a rattle and blaze of musketry at the ground and upper windows; the bullets whistle, and splinter, and flatten against the inner walls. At the same time a score of sledge-hammers are heard working at the chief door, and voices shouting and threatening at the other entrances, and indeed on all sides, except that on which the mill-pool lies.

The hour is come at last. But Mr. Cartwright is Yorkshire too, resolute, bold, and of a good heart. He shouts to his men; they fly to arms, and load and cock their muskets.

He and one or two of his workpeople run to the alarm-bell and pull fiercely at the rope, till it clashes out its summons to the Hussars at Liversedge, and friends near or far.

This drives the Luddites stark staring mad as the firing becomes hotter; and a dozen of them cry out:

"Fire at the bell-rope!" "Shoot away the bell!" "D- that bell! get it, lads!"

(For they knew the soldiers would be on them soon with their sabres if that bell clanged many minutes longer). Presently the bell-rope breaks, and two men are sent up to clash the bell and fire alternately. Cartwright and his men fire from the upper loops of the mill obliquely at the howling crowd that flash off their guns, and ply their hammers, and snap their pistols at the detested mill, where the ten men are glaring at them from under covert. The fire from and against the mill is hot, pelting, and furious.

"Bring up Enoch!" roar stentorian voices. A big hammerman advances to the door, and pounds at it with Enoch as if it were a block of iron.

The rest shout: "Bang up, my lads!" "Are you in, my lads?" with you, lads!" "Devery one!"

"In with you!" "Keep close." "In them! Kill them,

of his hat. The enraged Luddite instantly leans in and fires at where the flash came from, taking the best aim he can. As he said afterwards:

"I was determined to do it, though my hand was shot off for it, and hand and pistol had gone into the mill."

It is very dark: nothing can be seen on either side but the jet of fire upwards and downwards as the besieged fire from behind the paving-stones, and the Luddites from their platoons.

But now from the clamorous crowd outside came groans and screams; and the mob, either intimidated, dreading the coming sabres, or falling short of powder and ball, began to slacken their fire. That gave the mill people fresh courage, for they knew the Luddites were losing heart. Now the firing entirely ceased, except a shot or two at intervals. The wounded men were groaning with pain, and their comrades were trying to carry them off. The Luddites broke and separated towards Huddersfield; one man fell in the mill-dam; others slunk back to the Dumb Steeple Field; a few crept up the beck.

Mr. Cartwright, listening, could hear the heavy groaning of the poor wretches left under the windows wounded, but he was afraid to go out lest it should afterwards be said that he

Mellor then cries, with horrible impreca- had murdered the stragglers in cold blood. tions

The door is opened!"

But it is not. They are wrong this time. Enoch has been hard and heavy at it, it is true; the panels are broken, so that a man's head might go through, but the locks and bolts are not burst yet. The planks are split with hatchets, the malls have broken and chopped it into holes, but the door still keeps faithful and fast. The stone jambs of one entrance are wrenched out, the frameworks are smashed in, still Cartwright and his men keep up their fire from between the flagstones that barricade the upper windows, and some of the Luddites are struck. There is a cry that some one is shot, and a man has fallen on his face. Booth is down, and there is hot blood on Dean's hands. Dean has been shot through the door as he plied his hatchet.

There are only nine panes of glass left in the ground-floor; but Enoch has failed this time. The firing has now gone on for twenty minutes, and still flashes to and fro over the mill-pool, from door to window, and from window to door. A man named Walker is looking in at a broken window when a ball from one of Cartwright's men strikes the edge

Then the victorious defenders rejoiced, but kept the alarm-bell going. On a friend arriving, Cartwright went cautiously out and examined the field of battle, and removed the wounded men to a public-house near. When the day broke, Cartwright went and examined the ruined mill: the windows were destroyed, the doors chopped and broken, the paths to Huddersfield strewn with malls, hatchets, and hammers. There was a Luddite's hat floating in a dismal way about the mill-dam.

That night many glimpses were obtained of the retreating rioters.

Some of the frightened Luddites were soon tracked. On the night of the attack on Rawfold Mill, a man named Brooks, who was wet through and without a hat, called at High Town on a man named Naylor, from whom Mellor, the leading spirit all through this bad affair, borrowed a hat for his coadjutor. the day after, a woman living at Lockwood saw a great many cloth-dressers come to the house of a man named Brook, whom she heard evidently telling 'some sorrowful tale." She could tell that by the motion of his hand. She heard only a few words, and those were:

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"That of all the dismallest dins anybody

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