ing-and saw them file past the windows before they were halfdrilled. "Sir Giles," said he, they're the only cavalry we have that can ride." And there's no better judge and no better soldier for a young man than Humphrey, whom I love as my own They'll win your old father his peerage yet before I've done with em. Fill me out the claret, my darling, and we'll drink a health to Lady Grace!'

son.

She did as she was desired, and he could not have accused her of paleness now. Was it the anticipation of her exalted rank that thus brought the blood in a rush to Grace's cheeks?

Ay! if worst comes to worst,' proceeded the old knight, after a hearty pull at the claret, the rebels will be glad to come to terms. I am an old man now, sweetheart, and I want to live at peace with my neighbours. When I've had these new levies in a good rousing fire once and again, and seen the knaves hold their own with Cromwell and his men in iron, I shall be satisfied for my part. Besides, we fight unincumbered now; the Queen's safe enough down in the West. I heard from Mary this morning by Jermyn, who travelled here post with de spatches; and the Queen'

'From Mary!' interrupted Grace, her eyes sparkling and her face flushing once more; what says she? Does she talk about herself? -does she give you any news?'

She spoke in a sharp quick tone; and the slender fingers that rested on her father's glass clasped it tight round the stem.

'She writes mostly of the Cause, as is her wont,' replied Sir Giles, not noticing his daughter's eagerness. They have hopes of more men and horses down in the West. Ay, there is a talk too of foreign assistance; but for my part I put little faith in that. The Queen's household is much diminished,that's a good job at least. I read my Bible, Grace, I hope, like a good Christian, and I believe every word in it, but I have never yet seen that "in the multitude of counsellors there is safety." Howsoever, there is but little pomp now in the Queen's

court at Exeter. Mary only mentions herself and Mrs. Kirke, and Lady Carlisle, whom I never could abide; and Dormer and Bosville as gentlemen of the chamber; and that is all.'

Grace's breath came quick and short. She was still on her father's knee, but in such a posture that he could not see her face. She would have given much to be able to ask one simple question, but she dared not-no, she dared not. She held her peace, feeling as if she was stifled.

The Queen were best on the Continent,' pursued Sir Giles,' and Mary seems to think she will go ere long, taking her household with her. God be with them! England is

well rid of the half of them.'

Grace laughed such a faint, forced, miserable laugh. Poor Grace! the blow had been long coming, and it had fallen at last. Of course he would accompany his Royal mistress abroad; of course she would never, never see him again; of course he was nothing to her, and amidst all his duties and occupations she could have no place in his thoughts. The pertinacity with which she dwelt upon this consolatory reflection was sufficiently edifying; and of course she ought to have foreseen it all long ago, and it was far better that she should know the worst, and accustom herself to it at once. Oh, far better! A positive relief! And the poor face that she put up to kiss her father when he wished her 'Goodnight,' looked whiter and more drawn than ever; the footfall that he listened to so wistfully going up the stairs dwelt wearily and heavily at every step. Sir Giles shook his head, finished his claret at a draught, and betook himself too to his couch; but the old Cavalier was restless and uneasy, his sleep little less unbroken than his daughter's.

Alas, Gracey!-she was his own child no more. He remembered her so well in her white frock, tottering across the room with her merry laugh, and holding his finger tight in the clasp of that warm little hand; he remembered her a slender slip of girlhood, galloping on her pony with a certain graceful

1859.]

timidity peculiarly her own, her long dark ringlets floating in the breeze, her bright eyes sparkling with the exercise, and always, frightened or confident, trusting and appealing to Father' alone. He remembered her, scores and scores of times, sitting on his knee as she had done this evening, nestling her head upon his shoulder, and vowing in her pretty positive way-positive always and only with him-that she would never marry and leave him, never trust her old father to any hands but her own; she was sure he couldn't do without her, and if he wasn't sure he ought to be!

And now somebody had come and taken away all this affection from him that he considered his by right; and she was no longer his child-his very own-and never would be again. Sir Giles could not have put his thoughts explicitly into words, but he had a dim consciousness of the fact, and it saddened while it almost angered him. Though he slept but little he was up and astir long before daybreak; and the God bless thee, Gracey!' which was always his last word at parting with his daughter, was delivered more hoarsely and solemnly than his wont. The pale face with its red eyelids haunted him as he rode; and except once to give a beggar an alms, and once to swear testily at his best horse for a stumble, Sir Giles never uttered a

41

syllable for the first ten miles of his journey.

And Grace, too, in the train of her kinsman, Lord Vaux, travelled wearily back to his house at Boughton, which she considered her home. Faith, riding alongside of her, to cheer her mistress's spirits, forgot her own griefs-for Faith too had lost a lover-in sympathy for the lady's meek uncomplaining sadness.

It's all along of the Captain!" thought Faith, whose own affairs had not dimmed the natural sharpness of her sight; it's all along of the Captain, and he ought to be ashamed of himself, so he ought!'

Faith, like the rest of her class, was not particular as to the amount of blame she laid upon the absent; and with the happy impartiality of her sex, invariably considered and proclaimed the man to be in the wrong. In this instance she condemned Humphrey without the slightest hesitation. It was clear he had left her young mistress without distinctly promising marriage, and when she contrasted such lukewarm negligence with the ardent passages of leave-taking that had been reciprocated by Dymocke and herself, she could scarcely contain her indignation. If Hugh had used me so,' thought Faith, and the colour rose to her cheeks as she dwelt on the possible injustice, as sure as I've two hands I'd have scratched his eyes out!'

A

THE advances made during the last fifteen or twenty years in almost every branch of human knowledge have been so great as to occasion serious inconvenience to the writers of extensive works, particularly when their volumes appear at an interval of a year or more. writer on astronomy, chemistry, or any other scientific subject, must expect to have to modify or even to contradict in his latter volumes many of the statements made in the earlier ones, and may esteem himself fortunate if he is not obliged to recast them entirely. It does not appear, that this has been so much the case with those writers who have addressed themselves to modern history; at least we have not heard that either Lord Macaulay or Mr. Prescott (whose death we have had so recently to lament) have in their later researches found reason to recal, or even to alter, any of their former opinions or accounts. Fresh materials are however so rapidly accumulating, State-paper offices and other hitherto neglected repositories of historical documents are now being so carefully ransacked, that it cannot be but many new facts must come to light with important bearing on many received theories and opinions on these subjects.

If there was one subject on which we might have supposed that all further information was denied us, it would be the history of those distant ages of the world, the very record of whose existence has hitherto been preserved only by the incidental allusions of the Sacred volume, and whose events have been till lately only commemorated by shapeless mounds and unintelligible sculptures. We could hardly expect to have the ransacking of a Chaldean State-paper office. A romantic novel of the times of the Pharaoh who exalted Joseph would seem as likely a discovery as that of Hermes

Trismegistus himself in propriâ persona. And yet something very like both has been obtained. The mounds of Birs Nimroud are yielding up to Layard, Rawlinson, and other indefatigable inquirers their long buried treasures of Assyrian and Babylonian annals. For the novel we must refer our readers to an interesting and agreeable article in the last number of the Cambridge Essays.t

The learned and laborious author of the work at the head of our list, of which the third and penultimate volume has just appeared, seems in his own opinion to have reaped all the benefit without suffering any of the inconveniences of that advance in historical knowledge of which we have been speaking. All recent discoveries and elucidations, and they have been numerous, appear to have confirmed the learned Baron in the hypotheses he had formed and the conclusions he had adopted; or if they have had influence at all, it has been in the way of extending whatever was paradoxical in his views, and causing him to form further hypotheses and come to fresh conclusions of a startling and singular description.

Earlier Egyptian history is an extremely dry subject. The general reader who embarks upon it finds himself immediately involved in a maze of Sothiac cycles, Phoenix years, the great and lesser Panegyries, and other astronomical and chronological terms of a very alarming appearance. About as interesting and agreeable to contemplate as the scaffolding of a modern building, they fulfil the same functions to the historical edifice, and cannot be taken down till the foundations are secure, which is far from the case at present. We will, therefore, pass very cursorily over the subject of Baron Bunsen's two earlier volumes, which comprise what he calls the Old Empire, last

Mr. Poole is of opinion that the 1st dynasty is contemporaneous with the 3rd; the 2nd with the 4th, 5th, 9th, and 11th; and the 6th with the 10th and 12th; aview which is entirely different to that of the Baron, who does not believe in contemporaneous dynasties as a general rule, but believes with Syncellus, that the thirty dynasties of Manetho, from Menes to the Persian conquest, can be formed into an intelligible series, lasting about 3555 years.

Let us pause a moment here, and consider what these materials, with 1 Dynasty-Merovingians

Carlovingians Capetian Valois

Bourbon

&c.

Bonaparte Bourbon

are sculptured on existing monuments are still better authority. A king may often represent upon the buildings he erects what is historically false he may carve a glorious victory on the walls of his palace, when he really suffered an ignominious defeat; but still the fact of there being such a representation, is very good evidence of the existence of the king whose deeds it celebrates. We may safely take it for granted that monarchs in those days seldom took the trouble of glorifying any one but themselves, and perhaps their own immediate predecessors.

We therefore think that while very little reliance can be placed on the ingenious arrangements which Baron Bunsen and others have made of the earlier Egyptian annals, which rest so much on Manetho's lists alone, and of which the Pyramids are almost the sole historical monuments, somewhat more respect is due to his New Empire, which commences with the eighteenth dynasty. His historical account of it has been very carefully and laboriously compiled; and a short abstract will be interesting.

The New Empire, then, commenced at the period when Egypt emerged from her long night of subjection to the hated race of the Shepherd Kings. The deliverer of his country, and the first king of his line, was Amosis. Under him the seat of the native power seems to have been Thebes, while the intruders were still established at Memphis and Lower Egypt. Their hold, indeed, had lasted too long to be easily shaken off. Amosis was once successful in driving them from their capital, but troubles breaking out in Ethiopia, he was forced to abandon it; and the Shepherds retained it throughout the remainder of his reign, and that of his successor Tuthmosis. Tuthmosis II. finally succeeded in expelling them from Memphis, but the contest was not over, for they retired to the fortified city of Avaris, where they long resisted the utmost efforts of the Egyptians. The reign of Tuthmosis III., the most celebrated of the kings of his race, now succeeded. In his long and glorious reign, he at last drove out the invading Shep

herds, and in twelve campaigns carried the terror of his arms over Asia Minor as far as Mesopotamia. The chief of Carchemish, and the Hittites, then in possession of Palestine, were vanquished. This conqueror is supposed by Sir G. Wilkinson to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus; but the Baron considers him the king who eighty years previously commenced the harsh servitude related in Holy Writ. His severities were continued by his successors, Amenophis II., Tuthmosis IV., Amenophis III., and Horus, who all distinguished themselves more by their buildings than their battles.

Great, however, as was the glory of this dynasty, it was exceeded by that of the nineteenth, or the Ramses, which followed it. Sothis, the second king of this line, erected the most magnificent apartment in the world, the great hall at Karnak, upon the walls of which are portrayed in long processions the numerous nations he subdued. Amongst them figure the tribes of Ethiopia and Nubia, the Berbers of North Africa, the Shepherds or Philistines, so lately the conquerors of Egypt; people from Cyprus and Mesopotamia; and many tribes whose local habitation it is impossible to fix. This inference, however, the Baron draws from the multitude of names all from a limited tract of country, bounded in fact by Mesopotamia to the north, and Ethiopia to the south-that no great kingdom had begun to exist in those regions, and that consequently the conquests of Sothis were anterior to the rule of the Israelites in Palestine. There was no nation capable of bringing together a force which could resist these incursions, even Nineveh and Babylon were made tributary without any difficulty; for it was not till one hundred and twenty years later that Ninus laid the foundation of the great Assyrian Empire.

Ramses II., the son of Sothis, is perhaps, after Sesostris, with whom he is sometimes improperly confounded, the most celebrated of Egyptian kings; but in point of fact his renown is owing to his father's exploits, and the prosperous state in which he inherited the kingdom. Indeed, he was far from warlike himself, and his campaigns