his "Saul and the Witch of Endor;" and, soon after, he attained the great object of his ambition, the painting an altar-piece in the church of San Giovanni de' Fiorentini. His feelings at this period are vividly described in the following letter: "Sonate le campane !-Ring out the chimes!-At last, after thirty years existence in Rome, of hopes blasted, and complaints reiterated against men and gods, the occasion is accorded me for giving one altar-piece to the public. The Signor Filippo Nerli, the Pope's Depositario, resolved upon vanquishing the obstinacy of my destiny, has endowed a chapel in the church of San Giovanni de' Fiorentini, and in despite of the stars themselves, has determined that I shall paint the altar-piece. It is five months since I began it, and I had only laid it aside with the intention of taking it up after Lent, when the occurrence of the festa, which the Florentines are obliged to celebrate here in this church, on the canonization of the Santa Maddelina de' Pazzi, has forced me to continue to work at it, and to shut myself up in my house, where, for this month and half, I have been suffering agonies lest I should not have my picture finished in time for their festival. This occupation has kept me not only secluded from all commerce of the pen, but from every other in the world; and I can truly say, that I have forgotten myself, even to neglecting to eat; and so arduous is my application, that when I had nearly finished, I was obliged to keep my bed for two days; and had not my recovery been assisted by emetics, certain it is, it would have been all over with me, in consequence of some obstruction in the stomach. Pity me then, dear friend, if, for the glory of my pencil, I have neglected to devote my pen to the service of friendship." This is a most animated picture of genius excited by encouragement and the love of fame, even beyond the considera. tion of all personal wants and enjoyments; of the frail physical force giving way under the exertions of intellectual energy, and of the mind surviving all the subor dinate agents and corporal faculties, which were to assist in realizing its powerful combinations! Salvator, stretched on his couch, within sight of his unfinished altar-piece-almost reduced to death by his efforts to procure immortality,-at a moment, too, when that great meed was already well won,-is an image to which all young artists, all aspiring geniuses, should turn their mind's eye; as the zealous in faith gaze devoutly on the pictured martyrs, whose glory has been the purchase of their sufferings and their sacrifices. But the sun of Salvator was has tening to his setting. His weak and delicate temperament gave way be fore the anxiety for reputation, and the petty criticisms which even the highest genius must lay its account with. Physical infirmities crept fast upon him,-his habits changed with his health, he deserted society,he confined himself to his home,he no longer attempted to paint, but amused himself with sketching carilabours, the pencil dropt from his catures. At last, even in these slight hand; his thoughts would no longer remain fixed on any subject, and he yielded to the presentiment that his end drew near. The physician who attended him, after disguising for a few days the extent of his danger, at last announced that recovery was hopeless; and Rosa received the intelligence without apprehension. We quote Lady Morgan's account of the closing scene: Life was now wearing away with such obvious rapidity, that his friends, both clerical and laical, urged him, in the most strenuous manner, to submit to the ceremonies and forms prescribed by the Roman Catholic Church in such awful moments. How much the solemn sadness of those moments may be increased, even to terror and despair, by such pompous and lugubrious pageants, all who have visited Italy-all who still visit it, can testify. Salvator demanded what they required of him? They replied," in the first instance, to receive the sacrament, as it is administered in Rome to the dying." "To receiving the sacrament," says his confessor, Baldovini, “he shewed no repugnance (non se mostrò repugnante); but he vehemently and positively refused to allow the host, with all the solemn pomp of its procession, to be brought to his house, which he deemed unworthy of the divine presence. He objected to the holy ostentation of the ceremony, to its éclat, to the noise and bustle, and smoke and heat, it would create in the close chamber of the sick. He indeed appears to have objected to more than it was discreet to object to in Rome; and all that his family and his confessor could extort from him on the subject was, that he would permit himself to be carried from his bed to the parish church, and there, in the humility of a contrite heart, would consent to receive the sacrament at the foot of the altar. As immediate death might have been the consequence of this act of indiscretion, his family, who were scarcely less interested for a life so precious than for the soul which was the object of their pious apprehensions, gave up the point altogether; and from the vehemence with which Salvator spoke on the subject, and the agitation it had occasioned, they carefully avoided renewing a proposition, which had rallied all his force of character and volition to their long-abandoned post. The rejection of a ceremony, which was deemed in Rome indispensably necessary to salvation, and by one who was already stamped with the church's reprobation, soon took air; report exaggerated the circumstance into a positive expression of infidelity; and the gossipry of the Roman ante-rooms was supplied for the time with a subject of discussion, in perfect harmony with their slander, bigotry, and idleness. "As I went forth from Salvator's door," relates the worthy Baldovini, “I met the Canonico Scornio, a man who has taken out a licence to speak of all men as he pleases. And how goes it with Salvator?' demands of me this Canonico. 'Bad enough, I fear.' Well, a few nights back, happening to be in the anteroom of a certain great prelate, I found myself in the centre of a circle of disputants, who were busily discussing whe ther the aforesaid Salvator would die a schismatic, a Huguenot, a Calvinist, or a Lutheran ?' He will die, Signor Canonico,' I replied, when it pleases God, a better Catholic than any of those who now speak so slightingly of him!'-and so I pursued my way." This Canonico, whose sneer at the undecided faith of Salvator roused all the bile of the tolerant and charitable Baldovini, was the near neighbour of Salvator, a frequenter of his hospitable house, and one of whom the credulous Salvator speaks, in one of his letters, as being "his neighbour, and an excellent gentleman." On the following day, as the Padre sat by the pillow of the suffering Rosa, he had the simplicity, in the garrulity of his heart, to repeat all these malicious insinuations and idle reports to the invalid: -"but," says Baldovini, “as I spoke, Rosa only shrugged his shoulders." Early on the morning of the 15th of March, that month so delightful in Rome, the affectionate and anxious confessor, who seems to have been always at his Baldovini followed the sanguine boy to his father's chamber. But, to all appearance, Salvator was suffering great agony. "How goes it with thee, Rosa ?" asked Baldovini kindly, as he approached him. "Bad, bad!" was the emphatic reply. While writhing with pain, the sufferer, after a moment, added,-" To judge by what I now endure, the hand of death grasps me sharply." In the restlessness of pain, he now threw himself on the edge of the bed, and placed his head on the bosom of Lucrezia, who sat supporting and weeping over him. His afflicted son and friend took their station at the other side of his couch, and stood watching the issue of these sudden and frightful spasms in mournful silence. At that moment a celebrated Roman physician, the Doctor Catanni, entered the apartment. He felt the pulse of Salvator, and perceived that he was fast sinking. He communicated his approaching dissolution to those most interested in the melancholy intelligence, and it struck all present with unutterable grief. Baldovini, however, true to his sacred calling, even in the depth of his human affliction, instantly dispatched the young Agosto to the neighbouring Convent della Trinità, for the holy Viaticum. While life was still fluttering at the heart of Salvator, the officiating priest of the day arrived, bearing with him the holy apparatus of the last mysterious ceremony of the Church. The shoulders of Salvator were laid bare, and anointed with the consecrated oil; some prayed fervently, others wept, and all even still hoped; but the taper which the Doctor Catanni held to the lips of Salvator, while the Viaticum was administered, burned brightly and steadily! Life's last sigh had transpired, as Religion performed her last rite. Between that luminous and soul-breathing form of genius and the clod of the valley, there was now no difference; and the "end and object" of man's brief existence was now accomplished in him, who, while yet all young and ardent, had viewed the bitter perspective of humanity with a philosophic eye, and pronounced even on the bosom of pleasure, "Nasci pœna Vita labor-Necessè Rosa," and then to resign his own; Oliva, mori." On the evening of the day of the 15th of March, 1673, the all that remained of the author of Regulus, of Catiline, and of the Satires of the gay Formica, the witty Coviello!of the elegant compo ser, and greatest painter of his time and country of Salvator Rosa! was conveyed to the tomb, in the church of Santa Maria degli Angioli alle Terme, that magnificent temple! unrivalled even at Rome in interest and grandeur, and which now stands as it stood when it formed the Pinacotheca of the Therma of Diocletian! There, accompanied by much funeral pomp, the body of Salvator lay in state: the head and face, according to the Italian custom, exposed to view. All Rome poured into the vast chreum. ference of the church to take a last view of the painter of the Roman people! the "Nostro Signor Salvatore" of the Pantheon: and the popular feelings of regret and admiration were expressed with the usual bursts of audible emotion, in which Italian sensibility on such occasions loves to indulge. Some few there were, who gathered closely and in silence round the bier of the great master of the Neapolitan school; and who, weeping the loss of the man, forgot for a moment even that genius which had already secured its own meed of immortality. These were Carlo Rossi, Francesco Baldovini, and Paolo Oliva, of whom each returned from the grave of the friend he loved, to record the high endowments and powerful talents of the painter he admired, and the poet he revered. Baldovini retired to his cell, to write the "Life of Salvator to his monastery, to compose the epitaph which is still read on the tomb of his friend; and Carlo Rossi, to select from his gallery such works of his own beloved painter as might best adorn the walls of that chapel now exclusively consecrated to his memory. The work concludes with a view of the merits of Salvator as a painter, a poet, and musician ;-in all of which, except the first, his merits are much over-rated. We have left ourselves no room for general remark; and indeed the character of Lady Morgan's writings is already so well known, as to re quire no comment. In point of style and taste, we think the present work less objectionable than any of her's that have preceded it, and regret that passages such as the following should occasionally deform its general spirit and eloquence. "From such phenomena, (volcanic,) which, in their destructive sweep, and mystic reproductions, regard not human interests, man first borrowed his faith of fear, his God of wrath, the unremitting torture of ages, and fires of eternal punishment!-the purgatory of our Church, and the hell of all!"—And we leave it to Lady Morgan to decide, whether a lady does not lose in moral character, more than she gains in classical reputation, by lauding Boccaccio, and quoting Petronius Arbiter! PHRENOLOGY AS OLD AS THE CREATION. THE discoveries which every successive century is gradually unfolding, are of the most astonishing description. What would Friar Bacon have said, had he lived to see so many of his own prophecies accomplished-had he witnessed the battles of Borodino and Waterloo, conducted in such a thundering style, by means of that composition of nitre, charcoal, and sulphur, which he had himself discovered? Knowledge," the great author of the "Novum Organum" instructs us to consider, in all cases, as "power ;" and, surely, in no one instance has this aphorism been more fully and powerfully verified than in this. A handful of comminuted powder is thrust into a tube, and it becomes suddenly so instinct with "power," as to upturn thrones, scatter kings like stubble over the world, and impart a new aspect to the whole political arrangements of civilized life. "Knowledge is power;" it exhibits itself in Navigation, in the Steam-engine, in the Printing-office, in Mathematics, Chemistry, Ethics, and Phrenology. In every one of these, and in various other departments of art and science, the present age has exhibited immense improvements. Ships now sail several points nearer the wind than they did in Bacon's time,-boats move through the water impelled by fire,-Neptune and Vulcan, in the language of mythology, have 1824. mutually embraced each other, the altitude of the Lomond Hill, and of Largo Law in Fife, have been accurately ascertained by a trigonometrical survey,-water has lately been ignited in a chemical class-room,-men have discovered that gratitude is a duty, and that the human skull is the fountain of all thought, and of all feeling; in other words, that when a man's brains are out, he must cease, not only to execute his professional labours, perceive" distinctly. but even to see, hear, taste, smell, or in any manner Most of our improvements, both in Ethics and in Morals, are of German origin. From thence we learnt, that robbery and murder are only other names and appellations for heroism and magnanimity,-that incontinence and sensual indulgence are graceful and interesting, particularly in females, -together with all the glories and the blessings of the transcendental philo sophy. From thence, likewise, we learned only a few years ago, that artifice by which the poems of Homer, or Hume's History of England, might be got by heart in the course of an evening; and now we are taught that our heads are constructed like Solomon's chandeliers, with knobs upon "knobs," each emitting light in its own particular adjustment. A man may be in possession of a thing long before he discovers even the fact of the possession, much less the use of it. Cowper lived till he was fifty-two before he wrote verses. I never knew precisely the use of nails to my finger ends, till they had been of service to me in clinging to a steep, in order to prevent preciitation; and the tailor has put an odd pocket into my breeches, of which I have not even yet discovered the advantage. In the same manner have men lived since the period of the creation, in the possession, and under the influence and impulse of mental "knobs;" and yet I will venture to assert, that in many instances, even the possession, and, in still more, the influence of these knobs, has been but very indistinctly and imperfectly ascertained. Yet there are, it must be confessed, scattered over the whole ancient history, so far as it is known, of our race, certain symbolical and more direct intimations, which render it at least extremely probable that "Phrenology" is fully as old as the creation. It is quite true, and we cannot, and do not mean to deny it, that Spurzheim is of posterior date, and that the Phrenological Society has been instituted since the Flood; but this is the age of systems, and clubs, and founders; whereas, in the days of our forefathers-I mean in those of our antediluvian progenitors in particular-things were left very much to their own bearing and level, without any propping from the combined wisdom and influence of societies. I shall, however, be able, I hope, to satisfy every man whose "knobs" are of the proper size, position, and projection, that the Phrenologist of modern times is only the systematizer and reviver of a doctrine with which " Adam," at least, if not Eve likewise, was acquainted, and upon which, in all probability, he continued in the great outline of his life to act. Two of the most prominent "knobs" specified in Spurzheim are those of "locality" and "language." Now, of both of these, our original progenitor, whether he knew of it or not, must have been eminently possessed. His dwelling peaceably, and for such a length of time, in a paddock or garden, over the limits of which he was not suffered, and had no inclination to pass*, is a sufficient evidence of the first position,-whilst his naming all the different varieties of creatures that inhabit the air or the earth, (not less, assuredly, if we are to credit Naturalists, than 100,000,) is a pretty tolerable proof of the second. Bless me, what bumps there must have been on each side, immediately over Adam's nose, precisely at number twenty-four, and how his eyes must have projected like those of a lobster, which are said to be stuck upon the extremities of his cerebral claws! A cast of Adam's skull would be a great deal more interesting and instructive than even that of George Buchanan, which is so religiously preserved, and attentively exhibited, by the "sub-sub-librarian," in the University of Edinburgh. After the discoveries at Stockdale, in Yorkshire, I shall despair of nothing of "As when a prowling wolf," &c. &c. • Vide Milton, Book xiv. line 183. the antediluvian kind; and perhaps some fortunate traveller may yet be destined to bring us, from one of the clay-banks of the Euphrates, the very identical skull of the very identical Adam. We shall know it by the "projections" above alluded to, and by that "philoprogenitiveness" which has been so productive. By the bye, might not a hint be taken from what has been now advanced, of a somewhat curious and practical application? You are placed, for example, in a charnel-house, or in a church-yard, and various skulls are lying, or cast up before you; and you know, at the same time, that a Newton, a Bacon, a Shakespeare, a Spurzheim, a Combe, or a Mackenzie, have been buried in the neighbourhood, and you wish to know which of the skulls before you belonged to the noted character you are thinking of, and inquiring after. This is the problem; now for the solution. Every notable person is notable for some prominent "bump," whether it be "ideality," "self-esteem," or "philoprogenitiveness;" very well, to work you go, and turning over, and inspecting every head, you at last make your selection, under a moral certainty of being right. You cannot, in fact, be wrong, if you can only find means of summoning under your inspection "the whole given skulls" of the burial-ground. Verbum sat. I am confident this suggestion may yet be of service, and that whatever may be the obstinacy and obduracy of the present generation, future ages will fully appreciate its value! But to return to our serious investigation. One of the first transactions which is recorded of our race is the death of Abel by the parricidal hand of his brother and upon this wicked and murderous brother a mark is set, by the hand of God himself. About this mark there has, as usual, been a great variety of opinions amongst divines; but all are agreed, that it was placed upon the head; a very wonderful and striking admission certainly, when we consider that these divines had no knowledge whatever of "Phrenology." Is there one, however, that does not now immediately see the nature of this mark, and recognise here, not only the existence of the "knobs," as in the case of Adam, but likewise the knowledge of their use and meaning, which had by this time been attained? The flood of Noah did indeed, in all probability, when it covered up the hyenas in the den of Stockdale, likewise overwhelm and extinguish this discovery. Alas! what has not the flood of Noah, and of Mahomed, and of Alaric, and of Odoacer buried up! but we may see clearly, for all this, that the stamp which was set upon Cain's head was neither more nor less than the bump of "destructiveness," a large protuberance hanging over each ear of Cain, like a windgall, or cerebral goitre; and who would be hardy enough to incur the resentment of the murderer, with such an admonitory exhibition before him? Cain might have travelled, not only into Nod, but into Dublin, Chatham, or even Alsatia itself, with this protection. "Probert and Thurtell" would have fled before him. He would appear in the attitude and expression of an Irish bullock, from above each car of which a large excrescence protrudes; thus, even in the brute creation, intimating the application of the doctrines of Spurzheim. And what, after all, is the origin of those horns," as we term them, and what is their character? Are they not manifestly extravagant bumps of "destructiveness," this faculty run mad, and often shooting and branching out into a most alarming "head of horns?" What a mercy it is that, when the disposition is savage and brutal, when the tendency to hurt, and to gore, and to destroy, is strong, there should be an outward and an ostensible warning, a "knob," as it were, cornuted into elongation, and bent into menace! Although the human race, and the male part of them in particular, are not positively, in any instance which has come under our knowledge, furnished with what may ac tually be termed horns; yet every body, and every married man in particular, knows, or may easily learn, what "horns," when applied to the human head, mean; and every man thus furnished will scarcely spare the use of them in inflicting punishment upon her who has been kind enough. to furnish him with so dangerous a weapon. All such horned animals, even in the symbolical sense of the term, are truly and notoriously dangerous; |