church, emulated him in tyranny and cruelty at Treviso. A conspiracy was formed against him, which he discovered and defeated, with the destruction of most of those who were concerned in it.

The affairs of Ezzelino for a time wore a more favorable aspect by his union with the Marquis of Pallavicino, who espoused the imperial party at Cremona, and threatened Brescia. Their united forces routed the army of the Legate, and took him prisoner, and Brescia in consequence fell under their power. Ezzelino gave so much disgust to the marquis, that he left him and returned to Cremona; and Ezzelino remained sole master of Brescia, where he began to exercise his accustomed tyranny. In the mean time the towns in the interest of the church took the alarm, and a new league was formed against the tyrant in 1259, in concurrence with the Marquis of Este, joined by Pallavicino. The expected approach of king Alphonso of Castile, who had been elected king of the Romans, gave him, however, fresh courage; and he found means to engage in his favor several of the principal inhabitants of Milan, who promised to receive him into their city. Collecting as large a force as he was able, he commenced his march towards Milan on a day fixed upon by his astrologers, in whom he always greatly confided. By the rapidity of his motions he was very near surprising that city in the absence of its commander and his forces; but being disappointed in that hope he was reduced to great difficulties. His enemies assembled on all sides and cut off his retreat; and in an action at the bridge of Adda he received a wound in his ancle from an arrow shot from a cross bow that put him to extreme pain. He nevertheless exerted himself to keep his men in order and force a way through the opposing troops, but they soon broke and fled. At length, after attempting with only five followers to make his escape, he was surrounded and obliged to surrender. He was disarmed, placed upon a sorry horse, and conducted to the tent of one of the commanders, where the whole army thronged round to get a sight of him. Cries immediately arose of" Kill him

let the tyrant die!" and he would have been torn to pieces, had it not been for the authority of the Marquis Pallavicino. Ezzelino in the meantime stood with his eyes fixed on the ground, pale and ghastly, yet with a countenance full of rage and disdain, refusing to eat or have his wound dressed. In the middle of the night he was conveyed with a good escort to Soncino, and there was treated with the greatest humanity; but the agitation of his mind, combining with the anguish of his wound, proved fatal to him eleven days after his capture. He died in October 1259, at the age of 65, and was interred in the church of St. Francis at Soncino, the Marquisses of Este and Pallavicino attending upon his obsequies. The news of his death was received with the greatest joy throughout Italy, especially in the Marche of Treviso; and his friends and dependents were soon expelled from all the places in their possession.

The penalty of tyranny fell still more heavily upon his brother Alberico, whose fortune depended upon that of Ezzelino, though they had apparently followed opposite interests. The city of Treviso having asserted its liberty after the death of Ezzelino, Alberico with his whole family withdrew to his strong castle of San Zenone, in the territory of Bassano, which, from its situation and fortifications, was accounted impregnable. Hence for some time he laid waste the surrounding country at his pleasure, till at length the people of the whole Marche assembled with the resolution of extirpating this nest of tyrants. The castle was closely invested, and engines of all kinds were brought up, by which many of the defenders were killed. The Germans

in Alberico's pay, seeing no possibility of relief, finally agreed to deliver up, the castle; upon which Alberico with his family retired to the tower or keep. Here, in the utmost distress of mind, beholding all around him a crowd of enraged enemies thirsting for revenge, he held out three days, in vain attempting to obtain a promise of safety on surrender. At length he was delivered up by his remaining followers, with his family, consisting of his wife, six sons, and two daughters. A gag was put into his mouth, which was taken out to allow him to confess, and then replaced. All his sons were then killed and cut in pieces before his face; his wife and daughters were burnt; and himself tied to a horse's tail, and dragged the whole day through the army, till not a feature of him was discernible. His remains were thrown into the wood to feed the wolves Such, in August 1260, was the final horrid catastrophe of the family of Ezzelino, which for more than fifty years had spread terror and desolation through all this part of Italy, and had even obtained respect among the princes of Europe, whom they emulated in the pomp and prerogatives of sovereignty.

THE PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS.

A modern traveller relates the following extraordinary phenomenon of the locust. We transcribe it in his own words :

"I was one day standing on the great battery, when, casting my eye towards the Barbary coast, I observed an odd sort of greenish cloud making to the Spanish shore; not, like other clouds, with rapidity or swiftness, but with a motion so slow, that sight itself was a long time before it would allow it such. At last, it came just over my head, and interposing between the sun and me, so thickened the air, that I had lost the very sight of day. At this moment it had reached the land; and though very near in my imagination, it began to dissolve, and lose its first denseness; when, all on a sudden, there fell such a vast number of locusts, as exceeded the thickest storm of bail or snow that I had ever seen. All around me was immediately covered with those crawling creatures; and yet they continued to fall so thick, that with my cane I knocked down thousands. It is scarcely imaginable the havoc I made in a very short space of time; much less conceivable is the horrid desolation which attended the visitation of these animalculæ. There was not, in a day or two's time, the least leaf to be seen on a tree, nor any green thing in a garden. Nature seemed buried in her own ruins; and the vegetable world to be supported only to her monument. I never saw the hardest winter, in those parts, attended with an equal desolation. When, glutton-like, they had devoured all that should have sustained them, and the more valuable part of God's creation-whether weary with gorging, or over-thirsty with devouring, I leave to philosophers,-they made to ponds, brooks, and standing pools, and revenged their own rage upon nature upon their own vile carcases; in every one of these you might see them lie in heaps like little hills, drowned indeed, but attended with stenches so noisome, that it gave the distracted neighbourhood too great reason to apprehend yet more fatal consequences. A pestilential infection is the dread of every place, but especially of all parts of the Mediterranean. The priests, therefore, repaired to a little chapel, built in the open fields, to be made use of on such like occasions, there to deprecate the cause of this dreadful visitation. In a week's time, or thereabouts, the stench was over, and every thing of verdant nature in its pristine order!"

EXTRAORDINARY MAGNANIMITY.

An adventurer, who had been in the Spanish service, and who called himself Captain Michau, came to solicit employment of Henry IV. of France. The king was cautioned to beware of a deserter, from a country, which could not but be suspected by every Protestant. Henry was too full of honour to be capable of entertaining suspicions on slight grounds; and paid no regard to this caution. A few days after, as he was hunting, being alone in a retired place, he perceived Michau advancing to him, well mounted, with a brace of pistols in his holsters. Immediately resolving how to act, he stops, and waits his coming up. Upon his approach, Captain Michau,' said he, in a firm tone, alight, let me try if your horse be as good as you pretend.' Michau obeys, and the king mounts. Taking out the two pistols, Have you a design to kill me, captain?' said he : I am assured that you have; now your life is in my power.' He then discharged the pistols in the air, and commanded Michau to follow him. At first he attempted to justify himself; but thinking it the safest way to escape, he set out two days after, and never appeared again.

TURKISH PERFIDY.

No

Dr. Lorenzo Noccrola was a Florentine physician, between seventy and eighty years of age, who had been settled for the last fifty-four years of his life at Constantinople, where he had acquired a great partiality for the Turks, and had long held the post of physician to the seraglio; he was murdered on the night of the nineteenth of January, 1815, with the most atrocious circumstances of perfidy and cruelty; about three in the morning loud cries of murder were heard from the little burying-ground near the British palace: one of our dragomans, who was risen, went with guards and servants to ascertain the cause; he found, stretched under some cypress trees, the poor man murdered, whom to his great horror, he immediately recognized; he had him carried to his (the doctor's) house, and, for the first moment, he was supposed to have fallen by robbers; subsequent examination, however, clearly proved that this could not be; his purse was in his pocket, and his clothes remained untouched, and his shoes as clean as if he had not been abroad; and though he had two large stabs in his throat, no blood had followed the wounds, while there were evident marks of strangulation on his neck. doubt could remain of his having been strangled, and every circumstance betrayed by whose order and by whom. On that morning he had attended the sultan, who had treated him with so much more kindness than usual, that on meeting one of his friends as he came out of the seraglio, he exultingly told him that he had never received such marked distinction as on that day; from the seraglio he went, attended by his Armenian servant, to the arsenal, and the Captain Pacha's, who was, or pretended to be, slightly indisposed, and had in the morning promised to return home to dinner at four o'clock: at the arsenal he was strangled, and at night his body was laid in the burialground by the Captain Pacha's servants, who were instructed to utter the cries of a person being murdered, so as to excite the belief that he was attacked by robbers. The precaution, like all Turkish ones, was imperfect; they neglected to plunder him, and inflicted the wounds after the blood had been congealed by death. Next morning the sultan sent a chivoux to summon him to the seraglio, to attend some women that were ill, and numerous emissaries

from that quarter were hovering about Pera for two or three following days, to learn to what causes his death was attributed; they heard enough to shew them that their miserable pretences were seen through. The captain Pacha, when he saw the European dragomans, wept and wailed most bitterly, and said he should never be happy again. He acted very well, and, indeed, might have felt some compunction, for he had no quarrel with Lorenzo, and was, probably, forced by the sultan to perform his part in the tragedy. Lorenzo's servant was never seen again; but a body was seen floating in the port, which was strongly suspected to be his; no man dared examine it, for it would be death to look closely into the measures of government. No certain cause of this horrid treacherous murder was ever discovered; but as Lorenzo had been in the habit of recommending other practitioners to the sultan, and had lately refused to introduce to his notice an Arab, who had applied to him on his settling at Constantinople, it was confidently believed that this man, in revenge, had accused him to the sultan of carrying on political intrigues, of which the unsupported suspicion alone is, to this hasty and bloody-minded sovereign, ample reason for the infliction of death. The horror of this deed was increased by ingratitude: for Lorenzo had once diverted sultan Selim from putting to death the present sultan when a royal prisoner, many years ago, in order to prevent disturbances by removing a possible competitor for the throne.

STORY OF MACPHERSON.

It was about the year 1805, that Major Macpherson and a few gentlemen of his acquaintance, with their attendants, went out to hunt in the middle of that tremendous range of mountains which rise between Athol and Badenoch. Many are the scenes of wild grandeur and rugged deformity which amaze the wanderer in the Grampian deserts; but none of them surpass this in wildness and still solemnity. No sound salutes the listening ear, but the rushing torrent or the broken eldrich bleat of the mountain goat. The glens are deep and narrow, and the hills steep and sombre, and so high that their grizzly summits appear to be wrapped in the blue veil that canopies the air. But it is seldom that their tops can be seen; for dark clouds of mist often rest upon them for several weeks together in summer, or wander in detached columns among their cliffs: and in winter they are abandoned entirely to the storm. Then the flooded torrents and rushing wreaths of accumulated snows spend their fury without doing harm to any living creature; and the howling tempest raves uncontrolled and unregarded.

Into the midst of this sublime solitude did our jovial party wander in search of their game. They were highly successful. The heath cock was interrupted in the middle of his exulting whirr, and dropped lifeless on his native waste; the meek ptarmigan fell fluttering among the grey crusted stones, and the wild roe foundered in the correl. The noise of the sportsmen awakened those echoes that had so long remained silent; the fox slid quietly over the hill, and the wild deer bounded away into the forests of Glendee from before the noisy invaders. In the afternoon they stepped into a little bothy, or resting place that stood by the side of a rough mountain stream, and having meat and drink, they abandoned themselves to mirth and jollity.

This Major Macpherson was said to have been guilty of some acts of extreme cruelty and injustice in raising recruits in that country, and was on that

account held in detestation by the common people. He was otherwise a respectable character and of honourable connexions, as were the gentlemen who accompanied him.

When their hilarity was at the highest pitch, ere ever they were aware, a young man stood before them, of a sedate, mysterious appearance, looking sternly at the Major. Their laughter was hushed in a moment, for they had not observed any human being in the glen, save those of their own party, nor did they so much as perceive when their guest entered. Macpherson appeared particularly struck, and somewhat shocked at the sight of him; the stranger beckoned to the Major, who followed him instantly out of the bothy. The curiosity of the party was aroused, and they watched their motions with great punctuality; they walked a short way down by the side of the river, and appeared in earnest conversation for a few minutes, and from some involuntary motions of their bodies, the stranger seemed to be threatening Macpherson, and the latter interceding; they parted, and though then not above twenty yards distant, before the Major got half way back to the bothy, the stranger guest was gone, and they saw no more of him.

But what was certainly extraordinary, after the dreadful catastrophe, though the most strict and extended inquiry was made, neither the stranger, nor his business could be discovered. The countenance of the Major was so visibly altered on his return, and bore such evident marks of trepidation, that the mirth of the party was marred during the remainder of the excursion, and none of them cared to ask him any questions concerning his visitant, or the errand he came on.

This was early in the week; and on the Friday immediately following, Macpherson proposed to his companions a second expedition to the mountains. They all objected to it on account of the weather, which was broken and rough; but he persisted in his resolution, and finally told them that he must and would go, and those who did not choose to accompany him might tarry at home. The consequence was, that the same party, with the exception of one man, went again to hunt in the forest of Glenmore.

Although none of them returned the first night after their departure, that was little regarded, it being customary for the sportsmen to lodge occasionally in the bothies of the forest; but when Saturday night arrived, and no word from them, their friends became dreadfully alarmed. On Sunday, servants were dispatched to all the inns and gentlemen's houses in the bounds, but no accounts of them could be learned. One solitary dog only returned, and he was wounded and maimed. The alarm spread: a number of people, and in the utmost consternation, went to search for friends among the mountains. When they reached the fatal bothy (dreadful to relate!) they found the dead bodies of the whole party lying scattered about the place. Some of them were considerably mangled, and one nearly severed in two. Others were not marked by any wounds, of which number I think it was said the Major was one, who was lying flat on his face. It was a scene of woe, lamentation, and awful astonishment, none being able to account for what had happened: but it was visible it had not been effected by any human agency. The bothy was torn from its foundations, and scarcely a vestige of it left; its very stones were all scattered about in different directions; there was one huge cornerstone in particular, which twelve men could scarcely have raised, that was tossed to a considerable distance, yet no marks of either fire or water were visible. Extraordinary as this story may appear, and an extraordinary story it certainly is, I have not the slightest cause to doubt the certainty of the