Samaritan Woman. Ecco quì quella meschina, Maestà, Eccomè quì! A voi rendo, e sommo onor, O mia figlia, tale adesso Piuì che mai vì vo chiamar, Samur. (with hesitation.) Siete Dio omnipotente, Christ. (aside.) Ab eterno già sapea E pero vi mandai là; Fin dall' ora vi sceglica A bandir la verità. Samar. O Signor, io mi arrossisco Di vedermi in tanto onor; Qual io sono a dimostrar Opra fu della mia man A voi m'offro e dono intanto Vi gradisco, si, vi accetto, Si, già accetto il vostro amor, E gradito e sol diletto Essere vuo dal vostro cuor. Si sarete sposo mio, Christ. Io in voi, Samar. Christ. Serbaremo eterna fede. And so ends this interlude. When it is performed on the Corso, every woman present joins her voice to that of the representative of the Samaritan. Themelody is equally agreeable to the worldly, as to the religious fair, and each finds something in the words which renders her willing to dwell upon them. "Such interludes," observes my author, "cannot be without their effect in rendering religion a popular thing." I cannot say that the species Of Patriarch old, while pillowed on a stone, SONNET. WILD is the Lake, dark in autumnal gloom, The shades of autumn fitfully illume, The plaintive winds now swelling in a stream From the full floating cloud capricious showers, As, with an infant's playfulness, repair C. L. Perchance, has somewhat of the flush of health, Has strength of muscle and the swelling limb So man is pitied not; though if he smile, His words are like the sound of crazy bells His accents, unaccountably impelled, Say, fared it so with Thee? Then be at peace! And may the God the fortitude who gave C. L. LINES Written in consequence of hearing of a Young Man that had voluntarily starved himself to Death on Skiddaw; and who was found, after his Decease, in a Grave of Turf piled with his own Hands. WHAT didst thou feel, thou poor unhappy Youth, Ere on that sod thou laid'st thee down to rest? -Ah! little know the children of the world What some are born to suffer! Did some dread And perilous recollection blast thy mind? Did fierce remorse assail thee? Wert thou torn With fatal incommunicable thoughts? Of eyes, or ears, or touch of other men. And the internal world should be at war; power, Your rocks from a submarine crater arose, And fell in a chaotic shower. Or if ye once fenced that magnificent isle, Whose beauty the pages of Plato disclose Where Happiness shed its retributive smile On bowers of eternal repose. Oh! whether a remnant of Eden or Hell, Look well, ye rude cliffs, to your perilous trust; Remember there now is confined in your dell The fiend of war, famine, and lust. And in the deep dell tho' a paradise bloom, Though Nature in fulness of beauty be there; To him bloom and beauty are horror and gloom, And peace but remorse and despair. For fires more intense than the flames of your birth In his bosom of baffled malignity rage; What does not man endure? Yet Man, And, to satiate his rancour, the desolate earth even then, Were now too contracted a stage! Though guarded by dragons, your apples of gold, Were once by the craft of a pirate purloined, And poets have chanted, and chroniclers told Of the woes which they wrought to mankind. The woes which they wrought were but showers of the spring To the wild wintry tempest of vengeance and Which, if the foul Vulture recover his wing, Then look, ye dark cliffs, to your ominous trust; For if he escape ye, by force or by guile, The tempest he wings, in its very first burst, Will wither thy desolate isle. Deserted and loathed by the rest of the earth, Foul creatures of carnage shall herd o'er your dell, And the curse of mankind will attribute your birth To a penal eruption of Hell. H. G. THE KING'S CRUTCHES, AND THE ROYAL VISION. [Of the two following pasquinades on the late French Ministry, the first was published in the New Times, so long ago as February 1818; and we are chiefly induc ed to reprint it on account of the sagacity with which it foretold, that "the Duke of Richelieu would be dismissed as soon as the army of occupation was removed;" that "M. Laine was too honest to remain long in such an administration of affairs;" and that Mole, at that time the creature of De Caze, would soon set up for himself." All this has come to pass, and M. de Caze has found a new ministry of more devoted and more contemptible creatures even than the former. He has "found in the lowest depth a lower still."] The King's Crutches. "UNEASY, alas! lies the head which is crown'd!" But how shall he get there? In vain would he ask They're men, who unbiassed by danger or pelf, The Jacobin tribe half his wishes would meet, What then could his much-puzzled Majesty do, Richelieu'st just awaked from his Tartary trance, It is hoped that it is not too great a poetic license, to place the fabulous garden of the Hesperides in St Helena. All writers admit that it was in an island of the Atlantic. †M. de Richelieu left France a boy, and returned an old woman. All the prime of his life he spent as Governor of Odessa, in Crim-Tartary, and he came to Paris with the rest of the Cossacks. We presume that he will be removed with the Russian army of observation, of which he is an essential part. Though a lawyer, Laine is a good sort of man, Poor Gouvion St Cyrt is the next-I'd as soon To Molét is given the care of the sea, Corvetto,§ the raven who feeds on finance, De Caze, Page and Clerk to old Dame Bonaparte, Pasquier, who was in the first Act of the Piece, A little Commis in Napoleon's Police, M. Laine, a lawyer of Bordeaux.-As President of the Deputies he opposed Bonaparte before his first fall; and on the King's first fall followed him to Ghent: these two brilliant actions he has contrived to obscure by a crowd of little weaknesses, meannesses, and vanities, which have procured him the situation he fills in the Government, and lost him that which he held in the world. + Marsha! Gouvion St Cyr, like most dull men, has a kind of reputation, because nobody envies him. Admitting that St Cyr means well, his advancement to the ministry is the strongest proof of the contempt of his colleagues for his understanding. An able man who meant well would ruin them all. + Matthew Molé.-This man is at present a creature of De Caze's, but by-and-by will set up for himself. He is chiefly remarkable for having been Bonaparte's Grand Judge and Minister of Justice, and for prostituting in 1810 that character to destroy what little remained of freedom in the French Legislative Body, and to defeat the election, as President, of his present colleague, M. Lainé. Is it not a monstrous, and almost incredible scandal, to see Bonaparte's slavish Grand Judge become Louis's liberal Minister of Marine? A lawyer turned sailor is not a stranger metamorphose, than the tool of a despot who affects liberality of principle. § Corvetto (a little raven), one of Bonaparte's Council of State, and now the King's Minister of Finance-a mere man of straw-and therefore placed at the head of that empty system, called French Finance. His worthy rival, the Duke of Gaete, was Bonaparte's last Minister of Finance, and will probably be the King's next. || De Caze, a Gascon lawyer, who was private Secretary to old Mrs Bonaparte. "The lame and impotent conclusion" of this stanza, is closely borrowed from the account which all the journals in Paris were forced to publish the other day of De Caze's heroic opposition to Bonaparte; and which, after all, consisted simply in his "going to his countryhouse." De Caze is the King's favourite; or, as it was formerly called, the King's minion, and deserves to be so. In his elevation, however, he does not belie his early education; in public affairs he is still a clerk, and in private society has all the little merits of a page. Pasquier was the Prefect of Police to Bonaparte, and would have hanged any one who had behaved to Napoleon as he himself did to Louis-but Louis is forgiving as well as discerning: and as he made the Imperial Grand Judge, Royal Minister of Marine-so he has made the Imperial Police Magistrate, the Royal Grand Judge. It is by these men, and these measures, that France, we are told, is to be saved! |