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OFF. Assure yourself 'twas a concerted strata- Just as the Abbey steeple toll'd the knell,

gem.

Montgomery's been at Holyrood for months,
And can have sent no letter-'twas a plan
On
you and on your dollars, and a base one,
To which this Ranger was most likely privy;
Such men as he hang on our fiercer barons,
The ready agents of their lawless will;

Boys of the belt, who aid their master's pleasures,
And in his moods ne'er scruple his injunctions.
But haste, for now we must unkennel Quentin;
I've strictest charge concerning him.

SER. Go up, then, to the tower. You've younger limbs than mine-there shall you find him

Lounging and snoring, like a lazy cur
Before a stable door; it is his practice.

[The OFFICER goes up to the Tower, and
after knocking without receiving an
answer, turns the key which MARION
had left in the lock, and enters; ISABEL,
dressed as if for her dance, runs out
and descends to the Stage; the OFFICER
follows.

OFF. There's no one in the house, this little

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you,

The merry old man, with the glistening hair;
He left the tower at midnight, for my father
Brought him a letter.

SER.
In ill hour I left you,
I wish to Heaven that I had stay'd with you;
There is a nameless horror that comes o'er me.—
Speak, pretty maiden, tell us what chanced next,
And thou shalt have thy freedom.

ISA. After you went last night, my father Grew moody, and refused to doff his clothes, Or go to bed, as sometimes he will do

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I'm right glad to see them, Be they whoe'er they may, so they are mortal; For I've contended with a lifeless foe, And I have lost the battle. I would give A thousand crowns to hear a mortal steel Ring on a mortal harness.

AUCH. How now !—Art mad, or hast thou done the turn

The turn we came for, and must live or die by? PHI. 'Tis done, if man can do it; but I doubt

When there is aught to chafe him. Until past❘ If this unhappy wretch have Heaven's permission

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Or heard naught of them since?

Isa. Seen surely nothing, and I cannot think That they have lot or share in what I heard. I heard my mother praying, for the corpse-lights Were dancing on the waves; and at one o'clock,

To die by mortal hands.

AUCH. Where is he?-where's MacLellan? PHI. In the deepBoth in the deep, and what's immortal of them Gone to the judgment-seat, where we must meet them.

AUCH. MacLellan dead, and Quentin too?-So be it

To all that menace ill to Auchindrane,
Or have the power to injure him!-Thy words
Are full of comfort, but thine eye and look

Have in this pallid gloom a ghastliness,
Which contradicts the tidings of thy tongue.'

PH. Hear me, old man.-There is a heaven above us,

As you have heard old Knox and Wishart preach,
Though little to your boot. The dreaded witness
Is slain, and silent. But his misused body
Comes right ashore, as if to cry for vengeance;
It rides the waters like a living thing,

Erect, as if he trode the waves which bear him. AUCH. Thou speakest phrensy, when sense is most required.

PHI. Hear me yet more!-I say I did the deed With all the coolness of a practised hunter When dealing with a stag. I struck him over

board,

And with MacLellan's aid I held his head
Under the waters, while the Ranger tied
The weights we had provided to his feet.
We cast him loose when life and body parted,
And bid him speed for Ireland. But even then,
As in defiance of the words we spoke,
The body rose upright behind our stern,
One half in ocean, and one half in air,
And tided after as in chase of us.3

AUCH. It was enchantment!-Did you strike at it ?

PHI. Once and again. But blows avail'd no more Than on a wreath of smoke, where they may break The column for a moment, which unites And is entire again. Thus the dead body Sunk down before my oar, but rose unharm'd, And dogg'd us closer still, as in defiance. AUCH. 'Twas Hell's own work! PHI. MacLellan then grew restive And desperate in his fear, blasphemed aloud, Cursing us both as authors of his ruin. Myself was wellnigh frantic while pursued By this dead shape, upon whose ghastly features The changeful moonbeam spread a grisly light; And, baited thus, I took the nearest way1 To ensure his silence, and to quell his noise;

1

2

"This man's brow, like to a title leaf,
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume;
Thou tremblest; and the whiteness in thy cheek
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand."

2d King Henry IV.
"Walks the waters like a thing of life."
BYRON The Corsair.

This passage was probably suggested by a striking one in Southey's Life of Nelson, touching the corpse of the Neapolitan Prince Caraccioli, executed on board the Foudroyant, then the great British Admiral's flag-ship, in the bay of Naples, in 1799. The circumstances of Caraccioli's trial and death form, it is almost needless to observe, the most unpleasant chapter in Lord Nelson's history:

"The body," says Southey, "was carried out to a considerable distance and sunk in the bay, with three doubleheaded shot, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, tied to

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its legs. Between two or three weeks afterwards, when the King (of Naples) was on board the Foudroyant, a Nea olitan fisherman came to the ship, and solemnly declared, that Caraccioli had risen from the bottom of the ses, and was com ing as fast as he could to Naples, swimming half eat of the water. Such an account was listened to like a tale of ide credulity. The day being fair, Nelson, to please the King, stood out to sea; but the ship had not proceeded far before a body was distinctly seen, upright in the water, and approaching them. It was recognized, indeed, to be the corpse of Caraccioli, which had risen and floated, while the great weights attached to the legs kept the body in a position Like that of a living man. A fact so extraordinary astonished the King, and perhaps excited some feelings of superstitions fear, akin to regret. He gave permission for the body to be taken on shore, and receive Christian burial."-Life of Nelson, chap vi.

4 MS.-" And, baited by my slave, I used my dagger.”

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Not prone and weltering like a drowned corpse,
But bolt erect, as if he trode the waters,
And used them as his path.

FOURTH VIL.
It is a merman,
And nothing of this earth, alive or dead.

[By degrees all the Dancers break off
from their sport, and stand gazing to
seaward, while an object, imperfectly |
seen, drifts towards the Beach, and at
length arrives among the rocks which
border the tide.

Had placed her hands upon the murder'd body, His gaping wounds,' that erst were soak'd with brine,

Burst forth with blood as ruddy as the cloud
Which now the sun doth rise on!

PEA. What of that?

SER. Nothing that can affect the innocent child, But murder's guilt attaching to her father, Since the blood musters in the victim's veins At the approach of what holds lease from him Of all that parents can transmit to children.

THIRD VIL. Perhaps it is some wretch who needs And here comes one to whom I'll vouch the cir

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Within a flight-shot square, will teach you how in Sir George of Home, who had not dared to say so.

war

We look upon the corpse when life has left it.

[He goes to the back scene, and seems at tempting to turn the body, which has come ashore with its face downwards. Will none of you come aid to turn the body? ISA. You're cowards all.-I'll help thee, good old

man.

[She goes to aid the SERGEANT with the body, and presently gives a cry, and faints. HILDEBRAND comes forward. All crowd round him; he speaks with an expression of horror.

SER. "Tis Quentin Blane! Poor youth, his gloomy bodings

Have been the prologue to an act of darkness;
His feet are manacled, his bosom stabb'd,
And he is foully murder'd. The proud Knight
And his dark Ranger must have done this deed,
For which no common ruffian could have motive.
A PEA. Caution were best, old man-Thou art
a stranger,

The Knight is great and powerful.

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DUN. "Tis Heaven, not I, decides upon your guilt. A harmless youth is traced within your power, Sleeps in your Ranger's house-his friend at midnight

Is spirited away. Then lights are seen,
And groans are heard, and corpses come ashore
Mangled with daggers, while (to PHILIP) your ȧag-

ger wears

The sanguine livery of recent slaughter:
Here, too, the body of a murder'd victim
(Whom none but you had interest to remove)
Bleeds on the child's approach, because the daughter
Of one the abettor of the wicked deed.
All this, and other proofs corroborative,
Call on us briefly to pronounce the doom
We have in charge to atter.

AUCH. If my house perish, Heaven's will be done!
I wish not to survive it; but, O Philip,
Would one covid pay the ransom for us both!

PHI. Father, 'tis fitter that we both should die, Leaving no heir behind.—The piety Of a bless'd saint, the morals of an anchorite, Could aot atone thy dark hypocrisy, Or the wild profligacy I have practised. Run'd our house, and shatter'd be our towers, And with them end the curse our sins have merited !

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The House of Aspen.

A TRAGEDY.

ADVERTISEMENT.

made any attempt to gain the honor of the buskin The German taste also, caricatured by a number Turs attempt at dramatic composition was exe- of imitators who, incapable of copying the sublimcuted nearly thirty years since, when the magnifi- ity of the great masters of the school, supplied its cent works of Goethe and Schiller were for the place by extravagance and bombast, fell into disfirst time made known to the British public, and repute, and received a coup de grace from the joint received, as many now alive must remember, with efforts of the late lamented Mr. Canning and Mr. universal enthusiasm. What we admire we usually Frere. The effect of their singularly happy piece attempt to imitate; and the author, not trusting of ridicule called “The Rovers," a mock play which to his own efforts, borrowed the substance of the appeared in the Anti-Jacobin, was, that the Gerstory and a part of the diction from a dramatic man school, with its beauties and its defects, passed romance called "Der Heilige Vehmé" (the Secret completely out of fashion, and the following scenes Tribunal), which fills the sixth volume of the "Sawere consigned to neglect and obscurity. Very gen der Vorzeit" (Tales of Antiquity), by Beit lately, however, the writer chanced to look them Weber. The drama must be termed rather a rifa- over with feelings very different from those of the cimento of the original than a translation, since the adventurous period of his literary life during which whole is compressed, and the incidents and dia- they had been written, and yet with such as perlogue occasionally much varied. The imitator is haps a reformed libertine might regard the illeignorant of the real name of his ingenious contem-gitimate production of an early amour. There is porary, and has been informed that of Beit Weber is fictitious.1

something to be ashamed of, certainly; but, after all, paternal vanity whispers that the child has a resemblance to the father.

The late Mr. John Kemble at one time had some desire to bring out the play at Drury-Lane, then To this it need only be added, that there are in adorned by himself and his matchless sister, who existence so many manuscript copies of the followwere to have supported the characters of the un- ing play, that if it should not find its way to the happy son and mother: but great objections ap- public sooner, it is certain to do so when the author peared to this proposal. There was danger that can no more have any opportunity of correcting the main-spring of the story,--the binding engage- the press, and consequently at greater disadvantage ments formed by members of the secret tribunal,— than at present. Being of too small a size or conmight not be sufficiently felt by an English audi- sequence for a separate publication, the piece is ence, to whom the nature of that singularly mysent as a contribution to the Keepsake, where its terious institution was unknown from early association. There was also, according to Mr. Kemble's experienced opinion, too much blood, too much of the dire catastrophe of Tom Thumb, when all die on the stage. It was, besides, esteemed perilous to place the fifth act and the parade and show of the secret conclave, at the mercy of underlings and scene-shifters, who, by a ridiculous motion, gesture, or accent, might turn what should be grave into farce.

The author, or rather the translator, willingly acquiesced in this reasoning, and never afterwards

1 George Wächter, who published various works under the pseudonym of Veit Weber, was born in 1763, and died in 1837. -ED.

demerits may be hidden amid the beauties of more valuable articles."

ABBOTSFORD, 1st April, 1829.

DRAMATIS PERSONE

MEN.

RUDIGER, Baron of Aspen, an old German warrior.
GEORGE OF ASPEN,
HENRY OF ASPEN,
sons to Rudiger.

2 See Life of Scott, vol. ii. pages 18, 20, 72; IL 2; ix. 208.

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RUD. A plague upon that roan horse! Had he not stumbled with me at the ford after our last skirmish, I had been now with my sons. And yonder the boys are, hardly three miles off, battling with Count Roderic, and their father must lie here like a worm-eaten manuscript in a convent library! Out upon it! Out upon it! Is it not hard that a warrior, who has travelled so many leagues to display the cross on the walls of Zion, should be now unable to lift a spear before his own castle gate!

and more, since that cursed fall! Neither hunting, nor feasting, nor lance-breaking for me! And my sons-George enters cold and reserved, as if he had the weight of the empire on his shoulders, utters by syllables a cold "How is it with you?" and shuts himself up for days in his solitary chamberHenry, my cheerful Henry—

ISA. Surely, he at least

RUD. Even he forsakes me, and skips up the tower staircase like lightning to join your fair ward, Gertrude, on the battlements. I cannot blame him; for, by my knightly faith, were I in his place, I think even these bruised bones would hardly keep me from her side. Still, however, here I must sit alone.

ISA. Not alone, dear husband. Heaven knows what I would do to soften your confinement.

RUD. Tell me not of that, lady. When I first knew thee, Isabella, the fair maid of Arnheim was the joy of her companions, and breathed life whereever she came. Thy father married thee to Arnolf of Ebersdorf-not much with thy will, 'tis true(she hides her face.) Nay-forgive me, Isabella— but that is over-he died, and the ties between us, which thy marriage had broken, were renewedbut the sunshine of my Isabella's light heart returned no more.

ISA. (weeping.) Beloved Rudiger, you search my very soul! Why will you recall past times-days of spring that can never return? Do I not love thee more than ever wife loved husband?

RUD. (stretches out his arms-she embraces him.) And therefore art thou ever my beloved Isabella. But still, is it not true? Has not thy cheerfulness vanished since thou hast become Lady of Aspen? Dost thou repent of thy love to Rudiger? Is. Alas! no! never! never!

RUD. Then why dost thou herd with monks and priests, and leave thy old knight alone, when, for the first time in his stormy life, he has rested for weeks within the walls of his castle? Hast thou committed a crime from which Rudiger's love cannot absolve thee?

ISA. O many! many!

RUD. Then be this kiss thy penance. And tell me, Isabella, hast thou not founded a convent, and endowed it with the best of thy late husband's lands? Ay, and with a vineyard which I could have prized as well as the sleek monks. Dost thou not daily distribute alms to twenty pilgrims? Dost thou not cause ten masses to be sung each night for the repose of thy late husband's soul? ISA. It will not know repose.

RUD. Well, well-God's peace be with Arnolf

Isa. Dear husband, your anxiety retards your of Ebersdorf; the mention of him makes thee ever recovery. sad, though so many years have passed since his death.

RUD. May be so; but not less than your silence and melancholy! Here have I sate this month,

ISA. But at present, dear husband, have I not

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