this, he immediately dismounted, and seated himself on a bank a short distance from us. The conversation now became lively and animated. He manifested the most intense anxiety on every subject relative to the operations before St. Salvador, listened with profound attention to all our details, occasionally interrupting us with an exclamation of haughty importance whenever he supposed our narrative described in too flattering colours the position of the Royalists. He appeared to ridicule the idea of powerful reinforcements being on their way out from the mother country. We told him there was not the slightest doubt on the subject, as a band forming part of the squadron had reached St. Salvador the very morning of our departure: "Besides," added my companion, "if they only throw in provisions, the present garrison will hold out the place to all eternity against the rabble collected on the outside." I shall not easily forget the flash of indignation which in a moment suffused the handsome countenance of the young officer; his dark eyes flashed fire, and his very moustache curled with wrath. "Rabble!" he bitterly exclaimed; "it was such rabble that, on two occasions in North America, obliged the veteran armies of England to lay down their arms. It is such rabble that, on the other side of this Continent, have just achieved, after a hard-fought struggle, their country's independence; and it is such rabble, light as you may hold them, that will, ere long, work a glorious consummation to the noble work in which they are engaged. In the pride of art, and with the true esprit de corps of soldiers, all your prepossessions are engrossed on the side of military organization and discipline, rather than on that of liberty and independence." We disclaimed the imputation, professed ourselves warm admirers of a new order of things, which would wrest so fair a portion of the globe from tyranny and oppression, and give a rapid developement to its immense and varied resources. Our professions appeared to calm the burst of rising anger, for he immediately rallied us on the privations we had undergone; requested to look at our sketches; commended the performance in the most flattering manner, and gave us the names of several spots, which he described as fine subjects for our pencils. Cordially saluting us, he mounted, and rode off. We laughed

heartily at our morning's adventure, and yet could not help remarking, as he rode off, that there was something about this young officer which singularly interested us. He was tall and elegantly formed, and had one of those fine dark animated countenances, shadowed by a profusion of raven locks, which limners love to paint. The air of hauteur which he at first assumed soon wore off, and was succeeded by an open frankness and good-natured brusquerie of manner which insensibly won upon us. His style of interlocution was rapid and comprehensive, and bore with peculiar force on all the leading points of the subjects under discussion. In fact, his conversation throughout powerfully indicated well-cultivated habits both of observation and deduction.

The dawn of the following morning was ushered in by the ringing of bells and the roar of artillery. At an early hour the capital poured forth its population, eager to witness the imposing ceremony of the coronation. All was couleur de rose, excepting the weather, which most provokingly evinced some old prepossessions in favour of the royal cause, for it rained in torrents. It was with some difficulty that we succeeded in making our way through the dense crowd assembled in

the great square, and re-entered the places in the church assigned to the officers of the British squadron. The ceremony I need not describe. There was the glorious pomp and circumstance of military parade; the gorgeous magnificence of the Catholic Church; the strains of solemn music, and the fumes of incense. There were the roar of ordnance, and the deafening shout of a whole people's praise. Amidst the host of contending emotions produced by this imposing spectacle, surprise predominated in the minds of my companion and myself, for in the person of the Emperor Don Pedro, we immediately recognised our interesting acquaintance of the preceding day.

We often afterwards met the Emperor in our rambles. Our salute was always most graciously returned. On one occasion he stopped us, and with an arch smile inquired if we had made any additions to our portfolio. Neither did the dishonouring manner in which my companion had spoken of the Brazilian troops, leave any unfavourable impression on his mind, for he shortly afterwards obtained high rank in the service.

THE SINGING LESSON.

YES, well she profits by her master's skill:
How sweetly her bewitching numbers flow!
Is there not feeling in that gentle trill,

And magic in that cadence soft and low?
And when she sings of Love in flattering tone,
Might we not deem its trials were her own?

See, o'er her seat her young preceptor bends,

He speaks support, her cheek more warmly burns;
And when her sweet and murmur'd song she ends,
With timid, half-averted look, she turns
To meet that dark eye's fond protecting gaze,
And drink the accents of that honey'd praise.

And 'mid the calm domestic circle round,

Not one can read that language of the eyes;
Their thoughts by custom's frozen chains are bound;
They judge the master's and the pupil's ties
By the dull measurement of pedant rules,
Taught in their youthful days at former schools.

And will discovery come, and her stern sire

And haughty kindred scorn her prayer, her sigh?
And will she like a dying swan expire

In her sweet strains of dear-bought melody?
Yes, thus my heart forebodes will close ere long
This peaceful morning scene of Love and Song!

M. A.

GERALDINE OF DESMOND.*

THE authoress of this work has made a high, and in some sort an epic attempt at historic romance, and her subject possesses every requisite for romantic interest. It takes us back, not simply, like the captivating fiction of "Kenilworth," to the days of Elizabeth's reign in England, but to the days of that reign in Ireland, where the drama of life, as we scan it even in the veracious page of history, exhibits to us agents, events, and impassioned scenes, incomparably more complex and impressive than we meet with in the happier annals of contemporary England. Ireland, in spite of all her calamities, had at an early period an image of English commerce, culture, and even chivalry within the Pale; and we are left to infer that, in that portion of the kingdom, there was considerable polish and courtesy of manners as far back as the time of Edward IV., when we find that monarch designating one of the Anglo-Irish nobles as the most perfect gentleman he had ever seen, and saying that "if good breeding and liberal qualities had left the world, they might all be found in the Earl of Ormond." It was to the Pale, however, no doubt, and to a very few of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, that English manners, and even the habitual use of the language, were confined. For those English gentry who had received domains beyond the Pale, though of Norman, and in some instances of royal extraction, yet intermarrying with princely Irish families, and surrounded by Irish retainers, lapsed into the old manners and character-kept their bards or senachies-affected more or less independence-made war on one another, and though never renouncing a vague acknowledgement of England's paramount royalty, assumed in some instances the pride and privileges of sovereignty. For this degeneracy of her Anglo-Irish colonists, England had mainly to thank her own penal and selfish laws, which ruthlessly repelled the natives from participating in their protection, and for a long time made it no capital offence to kill a mere Irishman-as well as that equally cruel and impolitic distinction which was long kept up, between the dignity of English by birth, and English only by blood. The spread of the English language and English modes of thinking, which, if Ireland had not been grossly misgoverned, might have duly prepared her for the light of the reformation, was thus obstructed; and England had only one negative advantage, namely, that the Anglo-Irish beyond the Pale, by falling into barbarism, kept no pace with her in military discipline, and were unequal in the field to her archers and men-at-arms.

Nevertheless, as a mere subject of romance, the aspect of Ireland is heightened in picturesqueness by this barbarism of her population; and what the Irish spirit lacked in skill, it made up in racy strength of character. It was a poor, a savage, and a frightfully calamitous period, beyond doubt; but if we may say it without offence, there have been epochs in the same island when poverty and barbarism, equally painful to the sympathy, had yet an aspect more humiliating to the imagination. The wretched peasant of 1798, leaving his family to spread the manure on his potato-ground with their own hands for want of instruments, and sallying forth with his rags and his pike to insurrection, would furnish but a poor subject for the dramatist, the romancer, or the painter. But an Irish rebellion in the sixteenth century rises at least above monotonous and squalid horror; and no epoch can be found more fraught with those various colourings of human character and manners or those eventful incidents and solemn superstitions which give a melancholy splendour to the picture of national calamity. The Irishman of that period listened to the songs of his forefathers, and to the harps of revered minstrels, in the castle of his chief. He had traditions, whether false or true, of ancient national glory; he had a national costume, and songs of native heroes in his own tongue, that struck the chords of his heart in unison with his national music. He might be sometimes oppressed at home, and

Geraldine of Desmond, or Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth. An Historical Romance. In three volumes.

oftener by ravages from abroad, but still he had a sept and a chief to whom he was tied by the bonds of fellowship. He was the member of a family which-how exaggerated and absurd soever their pride might be—was still a proud family; if he bled in fight, it was not in rabble insurrection, but under that banner of his clan which, in the pithiest, essential spirit of poetical lan guage, was denominated “the sun-burst of battle." Nor were the leading insurgents of Elizabeth's reign spirits of vulgar or common-place metal. The O'Nial was calumniated by her Majesty's parasites as a merely ferocious and habitually drunken barbarian. In their intercourse with him, however, the English found to their cost that his conduct betokened any thing in the world but the sot and the savage. When summoned by Sir Henry Sydney to appear as a culprit in Dublin, the O'Nial had the adroitness to persuade that Governor to come and visit him in his own castle, where he silenced Sir Henry by his logic and eloquence, and preferred a statement of his case that confounded the Council of Dublin. When called by the Queen to London, he came to her Court with a retinue of his body guards; and his gallowglasses, with their saffron-coloured robes and peculiar armour, astonished the eyes of the Londoners, like people come from the ends of the earth.

The Desmond, our authoress's hero, had a similar spirit and destiny. There is something deeply touching in the naked truth of his history-in his declaration that he had been wrung into rebellion by misusage-in his flight, and famine, and wanderings, on the territory which he had ruled as a chief; and in his naming himself to his murderer, as a last though fruitless appeal to his respect and mercy. Yet there was pride in the Desmond's spirit, no less than pathos in his story. When defeated and wounded by the Earl of Ormond's followers, he was borne off the field by some of the victorious tribe. One of his litter-bearers had the cruelty to ask him, "Where now is the great Earl of Desmond?"-"Just where he ought to be," replied the Desmond, "still on the necks of the Butlers."

Menaced and harassed as the Pale had often been by the desultory, and not unjust reprisals of the ancient natives, the Irish septs had too many quarrels among themselves ever to coalesce effectively against the English; and as long as their religion remained the same as ours, their antipathy to the Saxon name was insufficient to give them any formidable union. But when the Reformation was forced upon them by threats and proscriptions; when they were commanded to disbelieve the creed of their forefathers, and to abandon their Irish church, proudly held to be of almost apostolic antiquity, together with tenets which they thought essential to their eternal salvation, it was then that, if in point of action all Irish hands were not united against England, yet in point of sentiment all Irish hearts, with the exception of a few nobles of the Pale, imbibed a consentaneous horror against our country and her Protestantism. And though it is perfectly true that Elizabeth was justified in defending the reformed religion, and in maintaining her regality in Ireland, yet it is equally true that, though right in her general object, she was quite as wrong in her special means of attaining it, as if she had consulted Rome and the Jesuits and the Spaniards for the best means of making Protestantism odious in Ireland; for her enemies could not have conscientiously advised her to a surer method of doing so, than to that system of spoliation and insult which she miscalled her Government. The rebellions of her reign had thus all the bitterness of religious hatred; yet it would be underrating the wrongs of Ireland, to consider those insurrections in the light of mere religious warfare. For the violent extension of English dominion respected the property as little as the creed of the natives. Elizabeth told her nobles that the troubles of Ireland would be the making of their fortunes-and when Sir Henry Sydney and the Perrots attempted to temper their strong measures of suppression with something like a mixture of equity and mercy, she recalled them, rebuked and disgraced them, and sentenced one of the Perrots to death. In framing a work of fiction, equally brilliant and affecting, on the groundJuly.-VOL. XXVI. NO. CIII.

G

work of this tragic period, our authoress has chosen her leading characters from two families, that were alternately the most pre-eminent for several centuries in the history of Ireland. One of these was the Butler family of Ormond, the other that of Desmond, a branch of the Geraldines. The only great circumstance in the tale before us that is unsupported by history, is the mutual attachment between Lord Thurles, son of the former peer, and Geraldine the daughter of Desmond; but this departure from the letter of fact is a legitimate liberty, since we find that the two families had at times had intermarriages, in spite of their bitter feuds. We have felt so much pleasure in being carried along the broad and strong current of this romance, and we are so well aware how much the best-told tale may be marred to a reader's interest by forestalling his acquaintance with its issue, and precluding his suspense and curiosity, that we forbear to epitomize the story of Geraldine, and shall content ourselves with marking out some of the most prominent scenes and portraitures of character, leaving the writer's graphic powers for the most part to speak for themselves, rather than detailing them to the peruser's admiration.

The introductory chapter explains, in ten purely historical pages of great concinnity, the events in Ireland that led to the deeply critical situation of the country in 1565, shortly after the suppression of O'Nial's rebellion, when the contests between the Earls of Desmond and Ormond, and the iniquitous partiality of the English cabinet to the latter, led to important results and to a temporary renewal of civil war.

The former nobleman is thus pourtrayed:

Gerald, sixteenth Earl of Desmond, assumed all the pomp and pride of an Irish chieftain. Descended from a long line of ancestors, who had enjoyed many extraor dinary privileges, and who for centuries had lived in almost regal splendour, he sedulously endeavoured to preserve the peculiar customs of his progenitors uncontaminated by the innovations of modern ages. He delighted to retrace the genealogies of his high lineage, at the same time vaunting the exploits of his heroic predecessors, which the narrations of antiquarian records, the eulogiums of bardic fiction, and the equally romantic traditions of oral testimony had immortalized, either in the symbolizing elements of national mythology...... His personal appearance was most remarkable and imposing. Time had stamped its seal upon his brow, and had blanched to whiteness the venerable locks which, thrown back from his temples, were fastened behind in the national Cooleen, and fell luxuriantly on his shoulders; yet age had failed to quell the spirit of his eye, that flashed with brightness on the slightest irritation. His figure was tall and robust, but eminently graceful and dignified; and were it not for the deep lines impressed on his expansive forehead, the silvery wavings of a beard that fell upon his breast, and a slight bend in the contour of the neck and shoulders, the Earl of Desmond might have passed for one of those heroic warriors, who, in the prime of manhood, seem to want

'Nothing of a God but Eternity,

And a Heaven to throne in.

His dress was arranged with scrupulous attention to the ancient national costume of his country. His head was usually covered with a close green cap, that, surmounted with plumes of the same colour, was studded with Irish diamonds. He wore the Cota, or shirt, made of fine saffron-coloured linen, which was wrapped in large folds upon the bosom, and was only partially concealed by a short purple vest, interwoven with threads of gold. This vest scarcely reached the elbows, and consequently displayed the immense sleeves of the Cota, hanging in loose and graceful draperies from the arm. His shirt was open at his throat, which was adorned with a broad gold collar of exquisite workmanship, splendidly inlaid with jewels. His limbs were clothed with the Truis, or straight Bracce, which formed trowsers and stockings in one, fitted close to the shape, and were made of weft striped with various colours, running in divisions, resembling the Tartan plaid. Over all was thrown the Cocula, or upper garment, a kind of long flowing cloth mantle, which, like the regal robes of the East, was of bright crimson colour, embroidered round the border, and edged with yellow silken fringe. This cloak was clasped at the breast with a large silver embossed fibula or brooch. Round his neck was a massive antique gold chain, and on his feet the Earl wore buskins, or short boots."