coasts. Among these was conspicuous the owner of an ancient edifice on the coast of Glamorganshire named Dunraven castle, the last of the name of Vaughan who possessed it, prior to its purchase by the Wyndham family. The transfer of the property is recorded by Grose, in his Antiquities to have been occasioned by a wildly singular and terrible catastrophe, arising out of his adoption of this horrid artifice, and which it is my business to record under the name which the awed moralists of the country assigned to this tragic retribution of heaven-" God's judgment against Wreckers."

Some twenty and more years prior to the event alluded to above, a shipwreck happened on the beach of rocks directly under the precipice that uplifts high above, but not above the reach of the surf of an ever-agitated sea, the then old and dreary fortress of Dunraven. This residence, known in Welsh history by the name of Dindryfan, probably the oldest in Wales, backed by bold but barren heights, commanding the noblest sea-views with rocky scenery, and crowning a sea-promontory, is one of strikingly desolate yet grand effect. It is ascertained that the famous Caractacus, of British and Roman celebrity, lived here, as did afterwards the lords of Glamorgan, and previously several of the reguli of the country. A present of the "castle and manor of Dunraven" from William de Londres to his butler, who had defended it from the attacks of the Welsh, is said to have given rise to the family of the Butlers of South Wales; the said domestic becoming by knighthood Sir Arnold Butler. From this family it passed to that of the Vaughans, and, after several generations, to the individual here referred to, its last possessor of that name.

On the occasion of the disaster just named, the heroic exertions of a young man to save the crew of the ship that lay beating to pieces near land were great and successful. Fastening a rope round his body, at the greatest risk of life, he swam out with it through a tremendous surf, rather swept by, than swimming upon, the recoil of the monstrous wave, thus conveying the means of rescue to the sufferers.

The exultation and shouts of the men, the tears and smiles of the women which greeted his safe return, produced in his fine intellectual countenance a reflected delight as in a glass; tears of pleasure and generous pride, which started to his dark eyes, replied to that tenderer gratulation of the sex whose fears for us come with such delicious flattery to

the heart's core, while those of our own sex penetrate no deeper than the mind. He was in the very May of life, basking in the sunshine of earthly prosperity. His ready risking of that life hence showed the nobler. The cheek of the young philanthropist glowing equally with emotion and violent exertion; the successive salvation of life after life, in the persons dragged ashore, through his single feat, with the accompanying hurras of the crowd; above all, his beautiful young wife, clasping him, and reproaching him tenderly with tears, frowns, and kisses blended, for his rash self-devotion: these, together, formed a picture highly affecting. Perhaps it was the happiest of all the days of the life of that young man past or to come. This distinguished youth was Mr. Walter Vaughan, lord of the manor of Dunraven; and this incident is recorded only because it gave the colour to his future existence;-what colour remains to be seen?

If he who but preserves a plant by culture of seed, or scion, imbibes a fondness for such mimic creative art, much more may the saving of a sentient being be supposed to foster in a generous nature, a sort of rage for the preserving human life, the fine passion of a saviour of its kind; and such was the effect of this incident on the enthusiast nature of Mr. Vaughan. The salvation of his fellow-creatures from that dreadful element, for ever roaring at the foot of his ancestral tower, and lashing the land whence it drew like some fateful monster its annual victims, became indeed a passion to him, and set his inventive faculties on the stretch, till perhaps the pride of the pursuit a little outstripped the philanthropy of its source. But, reserving this and other traits of his character for a brief retrospect, I at once advance to the distant stage of his life for which it became memorable.

Twenty years have passed away. He who, returning after long interval to his schoolboy haunts, finds his friend, who has been, to his memory, in absence, living on, a phantom, still in the freshness of face and heart, grown into the careworn, stern, withered man of the world, out of the smoothbrowed smiling schoolboy; finds the prosperous farmer, that he left healthy and happy among his children in his own hay-fields, a lone surviving pauper, a tottering paralytic, under the workhouse wall; the laughing girl, grown into the faded wife of many troubles; the wife, from the prime of life, passed into decrepid widowhood or the grave: he who

comes thus suddenly as it were on the work of time's destruction, experiences a sort of shock of melancholy. The mighty change, presented without gradations to his senses, overwhelms the mind. Yet, could bosoms be laid bare and visible as those human features their indices, perhaps more 'strange defeatures" would be found "written" there, than even on the withered face of the well-remembered schoolboy, or the momento mori half-dead form of the ruddy farmer, found crawling by his living grave, without wife or child; changes sadder than all that years can effect on the forms or fortunes of the happy, the beautiful, and the for

tunate.

In that second and distant stage of existence in which Mr. Vaughan is next to be depicted, we find him a widower with four children; a hermit and a misanthrope, "steeped in poverty to the very lips," his mansion ruinous and stripped by creditors, his only domicile one turret in the left wing, hanging like a balcony over the chaotic scene of rocks along the water's edge, where thickly strewn fragments of crags lay like a quarry, whence stones have been hewn. The old man, his only domestic, having occupied a rank as high as that of bard in the flourishing time of Dunraven, would not forsake his master in his adversity, nor the children who had hung on the notes of his harp with such delight, and so often ridden on his back. The single other servant, an old female, being crabbed and displeasing to the young, the old bard added the duty of a nurse to his other duties, gratuitous as they were; for the wife of Mr. Vaughan had left him a child now but four years of age. The eldest son, under the decline of his hereditary prospects, had been constrained to go out to an uncle settled as a merchant abroad; a cruel necessity to the father, whose keenest grief in life had been parting from him on the quay where he embarked, and seeing him wave his handkerchief in the sea-distance, as if to a lover, to him his father. At that time his heart was unseared; and he now retained all the melting tenderness of that moment at his heart's core, under the ice which subsequent events had formed round it, preventing all future impressions. Thus his favourite firstborn kept that original hold on his mind which the novelty of the first parent feeling gave him; and the grand object of Vaughan's wishes was now so far to retrieve the family fortune as to redeem from mortgage even a humble home and competence for his son, that he might return home, and

find a refuge at least, on his return; some domicile less comfortless than the old grey and lone tower abutting over a stormy shore, which alone was left habitable to himself.

The usual retreat of Mr. Vaughan and Ieuan, the old servant, was as singular as their own decayed figures. Wild and ruinous in aspect, they made of a grand and rude colonnade of marine rocks, wave-worn, a sort of sea-side arbour, (to use a misnomer,) which, with its ragged roof and trailing rock-plants above, and floor of sea-weeds, and not unfrequently, after a midnight shipwreck, a ghastly halfdressed corpse of some swimmer found washed thither, bore a kind of affinity to the two inmates, the one old, the other in perhaps a sadder period of life, on the borders of old age, with all the feelings of life's prime, and nothing to feed on but memory and a guilty conscience. They sate on the skeleton of a boat of singular make, there rotting; a life-boat, the invention of Vaughan, and fruit of many years of thought and labour. Many other unfinished contrivances, all tending to the salvation of life in shipwreck, hung suspended on natural spikes of the interior rock. The old harp, with its faded gilding and tarnished strings, stood propped against the rude flat slab, like a broken tomb, which formed their table; and on it the harper used to play the old pathetic Welsh airs to his master, especially those with which he had often lulled to sleep the injured heir of his house and heart's love, while yet a little fair boy, led by the hand, and sleeping on a knee. The three other children of the decayed squire played about the beach in sight, grew almost amphibious in their intimacy with the great deep, picked pebbles and shells, and clambered the cliffs for nests, returning to that magnificent shallow cavern where the father loved to sit; shutting out the world he hated, as, like a hermitage, it seemed to do. But though lassitude and loathing of the world were the chief feelings which drew him to that wild and echoing recess in the long summer day, another and darker motive operated to detain him there at nightfall; when gathering mists, and waves running mountain high, almost reaching his resting-place, threatened a dismal night of almost certain destruction to any mariners who, unacquainted with that iron-bound shore, might be then within reach of its dreadful conflicting tides and sunken rocks. Then his eyes, now sunk hollow and malignantly mournful, rolled with almost a devouring intensity on the horizon, if a single devoted sail shewed its speck

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white against the background of inky sky, on the edge of the floor of the tumultuous sea. To him, that gathering double-night of storm and darkness was not a threatening but promising spectacle. Alas! for man, the wonderful, the double-natured! It was for wrecks that the eye and mind's eye of the " poor lord of Dunraven," as he was now called, turned with such cruel eagerness;-" corruptio optimi pessima," holds good as a rule in morals as well as philosophy. The fine enthusiasm of young Vaughan, which might, if it had met the fostering it deserved, have enrolled his name on the list of the "worthies of Wales," had lain pent in his bosom, till it corrupted and became a very gangrene, infecting the whole moral man with its poison. It were long to follow through all its stages the moral death and decay of a fine character, quite to its living burial in the villain and misanthrope. His natural ardour of temperament first found food in benevolence. Partial success with a lifeboat, of his own contrivance, fired him with a stronger rage for life-preserving arts. He bent all his genius, for he had genius, though undisciplined, to perfecting sundry inventions, relative to saving lives at sea, prevention of fire on board of vessels, preservation from wrecks, and from the seascurvy; he studied all nautical sciences, and did not despair of finding the longitude, though "missed on" by so many. His light was seen as frequently as an astronomer's, at a late hour, in his turret set apart for experiments-now his sole habitable portion of Dunraven. But when the local fame of his talents and success inspired him with the ardent confidence of national honours, he failed utterly to engage the government in patronising him, though his genius met with full acknowledgment. Vaughan relieved his chagrin by exchanging his studious for convivial habits, to the joy of his wife, who loved his society, and thus obtained a much larger share of it than his philosophical pursuits allowed before. But a strong vanity at the bottom of his character made this change fatal to him. His new ambition was to be lauded as the most hospitable of Welsh modern chieftains, and his ever-open doors at last led to their premature closure. Gaming, first resorted to as a means of redeeming his fortunes, quickly gave to them the finishing stroke. In fact, his mind and heart, which nature had inclined to the calm region and delicious atmosphere of elegant philosophy and philanthropic aspirations, had been as it were wrecks lying like the sail-less hulk on a foreign water, without aim or hope in his bosom, in the uncongenial