that father, that your generous heart defied the peril of this hour. It was to redeem him from the hand of evil, that you abandoned our quiet home! yes, cruel father, here lies the noble being that threw open your dungeon, that led you safe through conflagration, that to the last moment of his liberty only thought how he might preserve and protect you.' Tears at length fell in floods from her eyes. But, said she, in a tone of wild power, he was betrayed; and may the power whose thunders avenge the cause of his people, pour down just retribution upon the head that dared

"I heard my own condemnation about to be pronounced by the lips of my child. Wound up to the last degree of suffering, I tore my hair, leaped on the bars before me, and plunged into the arena by her side. The height stunned me; I tottered forward a few paces, and fell. The lion gave a roar, and sprang upon I lay helpless under him.-I felt his fiery breath-I saw his lurid eye glaring-I heard the gnashing of his white fangs above me.

me.

er his

"An exulting shout arose.-I saw him reel as if struck :-gore filled his jaws. Another mighty blow was driven to his heart. He sprang high in the air with a howl.-He dropped; he was dead. The amphitheatre thundered with acclamation.

tions of the tyrant; and, in concert with Constantius, undertakes a perilous expedition against the Roman power. The capture of Massada, which occupies a considerable space of the second volume, is described with extraordinary graphic ability. We cannot follow the hero through the perilous adventures which succeed this, his great triumph. After two years of captivity he returns to his country, to behold the army of Titus gathered round Jerusalem, for the consummation of that destruction which is without a parallel in the history of the world.

"With Salome clinging to my bosom, Constantius raised me from the ground. The roar of the lion had roused him from his swoon, and two blows saved me. The falchion was broken in the heart of the monster. The whole multitude stood up, supplicating for our lives in the name of filial piety and heroism. Nero, devil as he was, dared not resist the strength of the popular feeling. He waved a signal to the guards; the portal was opened; and my children sustaining my feeble steps, and showered with garlands and ornaments from innumerable hands, slowly led me from the arena.".

Salathiel finally escapes with his brave son-in-law from the persecu40 ATHENEUM, VOL. 9, 2d series.

The whole of the third volume is occupied with the description of that fearful siege, which has furnished such an exhaustless theme to the poet and the divine. Many of the pictures are awfully grand; and we would instance the following description of the return of the Jewish multitude to their walls, after having rushed out upon the Roman camp to revenge the execution of countless victims that were amongst the sacrifices of that fearful retribution with which Titus punished the violation of their word on the part of the besieged.

Wel

"Day-break was now at hand, and the sounds of the enemy's movements: made our return necessary. heaped the last Roman corpse on the pile; covered it with the broken spears, helmets, and cuirasses of ther dead, and then left the care of the conflagration to the wind. From the valley to Jerusalem, our way was crowded with the enemy's posts; but the keen eye and agile vigour of the Jew eluded or anticipated the heavy-armed legionaries, by long experience taught to dread the night in Judea; and we reached the Grand Gate of Sion, as the sun was shooting his first rays on the pinnacles of the temple.

"In those strange and agitated days, when every hour produced some extraordinary scene, I remember few more extraordinary than that morning's march into the city. It was a triumph! but how unlike all

that bore the name! it was no idle, popular pageant; no fantastic and studied exhibition of trophies and treasures; no gaudy homage to personal ambition; no holiday show to amuse the idleness, or feed the vanity of a capital secure in peace, and pampered with the habits of opulence and national supremacy. But it was at once a rejoicing, a funeral, a great act of atonement, a popular preservation, whose results none could limit, and a proud revenge on the proudest of enemies.

"That night hot an eye closed in Jerusalem. The Romans, quick to turn every change to advantage, had suffered the advance of our irregular combatants only until they could throw a force between them and the gates. The assault was made, and with partial success; but the population once roused, was terrible to an enemy fighting against walls and ramparts, and the assailants were, after long slaughter on both sides, drawn off at the sight of our columns moving from the hills. We marched in, upwards of fifty thousand men, as wild and strange-looking a host as ever trod to acclamations from voices unnumbered. Every casement, roof, battlement, and wall, in the long range of magnificent streets leading round by the foot of Sion to mount Moriah, was covered with spectators. Man, woman, and child, of every rank, were there, straining their eyes and voices, and waving hands, weapons, and banners for their deliverers from the terror of instant massacre. Our motley ranks had equipped themselves with the Roman spoils, where they could; and, among the ragged vestures, discoloured turbans, and rude pikes, moved masses of glittering mail, helmets, and gilded lances. Beside the torn flags of the tribes were tossing embroidered standards with the initials of the Cæsars or the golden image of some deity, mutilated by our scorn for the idolater. The Jewish trumpets had scarcely sent up their cho

rus, when it was followed by the clanging of the Roman cymbal, the long and brilliant tone of the clarion, or the deep roar of the brass conch and serpent. Close upon ranks exulting and shouting victory, came ranks bearing the honoured dead on litters, and bursting into bitter sor row; then rolled onwards thousands, bounding and showing the weapons and relics that they had torn from the enemy; then passed groups of the priesthood, for they too had taken the common share in the de fence, singing one of the glorious hymns of the Temple: then again followed litters surrounded by the wives and children of the dead, wrapt in inconsolable grief. Bands of warriors, who had none to care for, the habitual sons of the field; armed women; chained captives; beggars; men covered with the stately dresses of our higher ranks; biers heaped with corpses; wagons piled with armour, tents, provisions, the wounded, the dead; every diversity of human circumstance, person and equipment that belong to a state in which the elements of society are let loose, in that march successively moved before the eye. With the men were mingled the captured horses of the legionaries; the camels and dromedaries of the allies; herds of the bull and buffalo, droves of goats and sheep the whole one mighty mass of misery, rejoicing, nakedness, splendour, pride, humilia tion, furious and savage life, and honoured and lamented death; noblest patriotism, and the most hideous abandonment to the excesses of our nature."

the

The great onset upon the fastnesses of Jerusalem at length takes place. Salathiel is found defending the most sacred part of the Temple, when the last enemy, fire, roared round the sanctuary. He sank, in the hope that death was inevitable-but again he heard the words of terror, "Tarry thou till I come"-and the destroying angel passed him by.

HOW wonderful are the laws that regulate the motions of fluids! Is there anything in all the idle books of tales and horrors more truly astonishing than the fact, that a few pounds of water may, by mere pressure, without any machinery, by merely being placed in a particular way, produce an irresistible force? What can be more strange, than that an ounce weight should balance hundreds of pounds, by the intervention of a few bars of thin iron? Observe the extraordinary truths which Optical Science discloses. Can anything surprise us more, than to find that the colour of white is a mixture of all others that red, and blue, and green, and all the rest, merely by being blended in certain proportions, form what we had fancied rather to be no colour at all, than all colours together? Chemistry is not behind in its wonders. That the diamond should be made of the same material with coal; that water should be chiefly composed of an inflammable substance; that acids should be almost all formed of different kinds of air, and that one of those acids, whose strength can dissolve almost any of the metals, should be made of the self-same ingredients with the common air we breathe; that salts should be of a metallic nature, and composed, in great part, of metals, fluid like quicksilver, but lighter than water, and which, without any heating, take fire upon being exposed to the air, and, by burning, form the substance so abounding in saltpetre and in the ashes of burnt wood: these, surely, are things to excite the wonder of any reflecting mind-nay, of any one but little accustomed to reflect. And yet these are trifling when compared to the prodigies which Astronomy opens to our view: the enormous masses of the heavenly bodies; their immense distances; their countless numbers, and their motions, whose

swiftness mocks the uttermost efforts of the imagination.

-

Electricity, the light which is seen on the back of a cat when slightly rubbed on a frosty evening, is the very same matter with the lightning of the clouds ;-plants breathe like ourselves, but differently by day and by night;-the air which burns in our lamps enables a balloon to mount, and causes the globules of the dust of plants to rise, float through the air, and continue their race ;-in a word, is the immediate cause of vegetation. Nothing can at first view appear less like, or less likely to be caused by the same thing, than the processes of burning and of breathing, the rust of metals and burning, an acid and rust,―the influence of a plant on the air it grows in by night, and of an animal on the same air at any time, nay, and of a body burning in that air; and yet all these are the same operation. It is an undeniable fact, that the very same thing which makes the fire burn, makes metals rust, forms acids, and causes plants and animals to breathe; that these operations, so unlike to common eyes, when examined by the light of science, are the same,-the rusting of metals,the formation of acids,—the burning of inflammable bodies, the breathing of animals, and the growth of plants by night. To know this is a positive gratification. Is it not pleasing to find the same substance in various situations extremely unlike each other ;-to meet with fixed air as the produce of burning,-of breathing,and of vegetation;-to find that it is the choak-damp of mines,-the bad air in the grotto of Naples,-the cause of death in neglected brewers' vats-and of the brisk and acid flavour of Seltzer and other mineral springs? Nothing can be less like than the working of a vast steamengine, and the crawling of a fly

upon the window. We find that these two operations are performed by the same means, the weight of the atmosphere, and that a sea-horse climbs the ice-hills by no other powCan anything be more strange to contemplate? Is there in all the

er.

fairy tales that ever were fancied, anything more calculated to arrest the attention and to occupy and to gratify the mind, than this most unexpected resemblance between things so unlike to the eyes of ordinary beholders?

WH

THAT is low company? All people not in the highest and most select society in a metropolitan city, at the time flourishing in fashionable and philosophic pride? And this in a Christian land—a land not only overflowing with milk and honey, but with the principles of the Reformed Faith, and with much human and divine knowledge! Show us any series of works of genius, in prose or verse, in which man's being is so illustrated as to lay it bare and open for the benefit of man, and the chief pictures they contain, drawn from "select society ?" There are none such; and for this reason, that in such society there is neither power to paint them, nor materials to be painted, nor colours to lay on, till the canvass speaks a language which all the world, as it runs, may read. What would Scott have been, had he not loved and known the people? What would his works have been, had they not shown the manycoloured change of life of the people? What would Shakspeare have been, had he not turned majestically from kings and "lords and mighty earls," to their subjects and vassals and lowly bondsmen, and "counted the beatings of lonely hearts," in the

obscure but impassioned life that stirs every nook of this earth, where human beings abide? What would Wordsworth have been, had he disdained, with his high intellect and imagination, "to stoop his anointed head" beneath the wooden lintel of the poor man's door? His lyrical ballads, "with all the innocent brightness of the new-born day," had never charmed the meditative heart--His "Churchyard among the Mountains" had never taught men how to live and how to die. These are men who have descended from aërial heights into the humblest dwellings; who have shewn the angel's wing equally when poised near the earth, or floating over its cottaged vales, as when seen sailing on high through the clouds and azure depth of heaven, or hanging over the towers and temples of great cities. They would not have shunned a parley with the blind beggar by the way-side; they knew how to transmute, by divinest alchemy, the base metal into the fine gold. Whatever company of human beings they have ever mingled with, they lent it colours, and did not receive its shade; and hence, their mastery over the "wide soul of the world," and their name, magicians.

FEW

NEW men need complain of the want of time, if they are not conscious of a want of power, or of desire to ennoble and enjoy it. Perhaps you are a man of genius yourself, gentle reader, and though not absolutely, like Sir Walter, a witch,

warlock, or wizard, still a poet-a maker-a creator. Think, then, how many hours on hours you have lost, lying asleep so profoundly,

"That the cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more could rouse you from your lazy bed."