"May the good Lord bless and repay ye, ma'am'-and send ye a safe journey to the far-off place where I hear ye be a going!"

"Yes, I shall go if I am well enough," replied Maria. "It is from there that I shall send you home some money from time to time as I can. Have you been well lately ?"

"As well as pretty nigh clamming 'll let me be, ma'am. Things has gone hard with me: many a day I've not had as much as a mouldy crust. But this 'll set me up again, and; ma'am, I'll never cease to pray for ye."

"Don't spend it in-in-you know, Mrs. Bond," Maria ventured timidly to advise, in a lowered voice.

Mrs. Bond shook her head and turned up her eyes by way of expressing a very powerful negative. Probably she did not feel altogether comfortable in the subject, for she hastened to quit it. "Have ye heard the news about old Jekyl, ma'am ?"

"No. What news ?"

He

"He be dead. He went off at one o'clock this a'ternoon. fretted continual after his money, folks says, and it wore him down to a skeleton. He couldn't abear to be living upon his sons, and Jonathan, he don't earn enough for himself now, and the old 'un felt it."

Somebody else was feeling it. Fretting continually after his money!-that money which might never have been placed in the bank but for her! Poor Maria pressed her fingers upon her aching forehead: and Mrs. Bond plunged into another item of news. "Them Hardings be bankrups."

"Harding the undertaker ?" cried Maria, quickly.

They be, ma'am. The shop were shut up as close as a dungeon when I come by it just now, and a man, what was standing there a staring at it, said as he heered it 'ud go hard with 'em. There ain't nothing but trouble in the world now, maʼam, for some."

No, nothing but trouble for some: Maria felt the truth to her heart of hearts. The remembrance of the interview she had held with Mrs. Harding, and what had been said at it, was very present to her.

Perhaps it was well that a divertisement occurred. Miss Meta, who had been up-stairs with Margery to have her things taken off, came in in her usual flying fashion, went straight up to the visitor, and leaned her pretty arm upon the snuffy black gown.

"When shall I come and see the parrot ?"

"The parrot! Lawks bless the child! I haven't got the parrot now, I haven't had him for this many a day. I couldn't let him clam," she continued, turning to Maria. "I was a clamming myself, ma'am, and I sold him, cage and all, just as he stood."

"Where is he ?" asked Meta, looking disappointed.

Where he went," lucidly explained Mrs. Bond. "It were the lady up at the tother end o' the town beyond the parson's what bought him, ma'am. Leastways her daughter did: sister to her what was once to have married Mr. Godolphin. It's a white house." Lady Sarah Grame's," said Maria. "Did she buy the parrot?" "Miss did; that cross-looking daughter of her'n. She see him as she was a going by my door one day, ma'am, and she stopped and

looked at him, and asked me what I'd sell him for. Well, on the spur o' the moment I said five shilling; for I'd not a halfpenny in the place to buy him food, and for days and days he had had only what the neighbours brought him-but it warn't half his worth. And miss was all wild to buy him, but her mother wasn't, she didn't want screeching birds in her house, she said, and they had a desperate quarrel in my kitchen afore they went away. Didn't she call her mother names! She's a vixen, that daughter, if ever there were one. But she got her will, for an hour or two after that, a young woman come down for the parrot with the five shillings in her hand. And there's where he is."

"That

"I shall have twenty parrots when I go to India," struck in Meta. "What a sight o' food they'll eat!" ejaculated Mrs. Bond. there one o' mine eats his fill now. I made bold one day to go up and ask after him, and the two young women in the kitchen took me to the room to see him, the ladies being out, and he had got his tin stuffed full o' seed. He knowed me again, he did, and screeched out to be heerd a mile off. The young women said that what with his screeching and the two ladies quarrelling, the house weren't a bearable sometimes."

Meta's large eyes were wide open in wondering speculation. “Why do they quarrel ?" she asked.

"The one what

"'Cause it's their natur," returned Mrs. Bond. had the sweet natur was took, and the two cranky ones was left. Them young women said that miss a'most druv t'other, my lady, mad with her temper, and they expected nothing less but there'd be blows some day. A fine disgraceful thing to say o' born ladies, ain't it,

ma'am ?"

Maria in her delicacy of feeling would not endorse the remark of Dame Bond. But the state of things at Lady Sarah Grame's was perfectly well known at Prior's Ash. Do you remember an observation made by Mr. Snow to Thomas Godolphin, when he was speaking of Lady Sarah's cruel unkindness to Ethel ? "She'll be brought to her senses, unless I am mistaken: she has lost her treasure and kept her bane. A year or two more, and that's what Sarah Anne will be."

It was precisely what Sarah Anne Grame had become-her mother's bane. A miserable bane! to herself, to her mother, to all about her. And the "screeching" parrot had only added a little more noise to an already too noisy house.

Mrs. Bond curtseyed herself out. She met Margery in the passage, and stopped to whisper.

"I say! how ill she do look!”

"Who looks ill ?" was the ungracious demand.

Mrs. Bond gave her head a nod sideways towards the parlour door. "The missis. Her face looks more as if it had got death writ in it, nor voyage going."

66

Perhaps you'll walk on your road, Dame Bond, and keep your opinions till they're asked for," was the tart reply of Margery.

But in point of fact the ominous words had darted into the faithful servant's heart, piercing it as a poisoned arrow. It seemed such a confirmation of her own fears.

SIR WILLIAM WALLACE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

THE last generation of the Reading Public was, for the most part, content-comfortably and sentimentally content-to take on trust, as a trustworthy piece of portraiture, Miss Porter's patriotic presentment of Wallace Wight. A rather gushing, very Grandisonian personage he turned out, under her manipulation. A grandiloquent exemplar of all the virtues; almost too much of a good thing, and that good thing too good to be true. But people believed in him as an authentic impersonation, and not merely a band-box hero of circulating-library prowess, of Minerva Press proportions. Since then a generation has arisen, of iconoclastic tendencies, in matters at least of hero-worship and historical romance. And a public has been won to read, if not won over to implicitly believe in, the reactionary strictures on Wallace Wight of philoPlantagenet Mr. Clifford, and of sundry his abettors in the periodical press. Mr. Clifford, in his zeal for the Greatest of All the Plantagenets, makes no scruple of bracketing Wallace with Nana Sahib. And he is backed in the main, as regards this seemingly audacious analogy; this apparently paradoxical parallel, by that outspoken and independent authority which Mr. Bright, in his displeasure, was pleased to call the Saturday Reviler; and Mr. Thackeray, the Superfine Review.

The confederate Scottish Chiefs in general, and Wallace of Ellerslie in particular, as portrayed by popular Miss Porter, [may remind us of what a contemporary French critic says of Marmontel's polite perversion of Belisarius, and of Florian's mincing misrepresentation of Gonzalvo,— "Lisez le Bélisaire de M. de Marmontel, et le Gonzalve de M. de Florian; l'un, général du moyen-âge; l'autre si redoutable à ses propres troupes, qu'il punissait de mort la plus légère faute de discipline, sont devenus des héros aussi aimables que Richelieu ou Lauzun."*

Said Sir Walter Scott to the Ettrick Shepherd one morning, soon after the first appearance of the "Scottish Chiefs," "I am grieved about this work of Miss Porter. I cannot describe to you how much I am disappointed. I wished to think so well of it; and I do think highly of it as a work of genius. But, Lord help her! her Wallace is no more our Wallace than Lord Peter is, or King Henry's messenger to Hotspur. It is not safe meddling with the hero of a country, and, of all others, I cannot bear to see the character of Wallace frittered away to that of a fine gentleman."†

But the Porter point of view became the popular standpoint whence to measure the inches of Wallace's stalwart stature, and to judge what manner of man he was.

Ye generous spirits that protect the brave,

And watch the seaman o'er the crested wave,
Cast round the fearless soul your glorious spell,
That fired a Hampden and inspired a Tell-

* Etudes sur l'Antiquité, par Philarète Chasles.
† Hogg's Private Life, &c., of Sir W. Scott. (1834.)

Why left ye Wallace, greatest of the free,
His hills' proud champion-heart of liberty-
Alone to cope with tyranny and hate,

To sink at last in ignominious fate?

Sad Scotia wept, and still on valour's shrine

Our glistening tears, like pearly dewdrops, shine,
To tell the world how Albyn's hero bled,

And treasure still the memory of her dread.*

Who does not perceive in this effulgence of Sad Scotia's glistening tears on valour's shrine, this decking of Albyn's hero with pearly dewdrops, the inspiration of Miss Porter's genius, and acquiescence in her portraiture as worthy of all acceptation? From another source was Thomas Campbell inspired when he wrote those justly admired stanzas on William of Ellerslie, as one who

1

-strode o'er the wreck of each well-fought field,
With the yellow-haired chiefs of his native land;
For his lance was not shivered on helmet or shield,
And the sword that was fit for archangel to wield
Was light in his terrible hand.†

If one touch of nature makes the whole world kin, so one touch of kindred makes the whole Scotch nature clannish. He were no Scotsman, Scotchmen will assure you, whose pulse beat not quicker at sound of Wallace's name. Their poets, accordingly,-or there would be no poetry in them,-have ever swept the lyre with new energy when Wallace was the theme. The strain we hear is in a higher mood, whenever his memory is its burden. Not to lose ourselves darkling in the backward abysm of time with Blind Harry, mark how Thomson turns a poor parenthesis even into a glowing panegyric, when describing "a manly race, of unsubmitting spirit, wise, and brave;

Who still through bleeding ages struggled hard

(As well unhappy Wallace can attest,

Great patriot-hero! ill-requited chief!")‡

Or how Burns, in perhaps the most spirited stanza of one of his most spirited pieces, exclaims, all aglow with fervid conviction,

At Wallace' name what Scottish blood

But boils up in a spring-tide flood!
Oft have our fearless fathers strode

By Wallace' side,

Still pressing onward, red-wat shod,

Or glorious dy'd.§

And is not the closing stanza of Burns's purest, best-reputed, most sacred poem, an apostrophe to Heaven that

*The Tower of London, A Poem. By Thos. Roscoe. Part I.

†The Dirge of Wallace (only to be found, unless recently, in foreign editions of Campbell's poems-the poet refusing it a place in the London editions, as a too juvenile and rhapsodical affair to range wilh his maturer and well-pruned works).

The Seasons, Autumn.

§ Lines to W. S-, Ochiltree, 1785.

-pour'd the patriotic tide

That stream'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart;
Who dar'd to nobly stem tyrannic pride,

Or nobly die, the second glorious part!*

Nor are Southron bards deficient in powers of Wallace-worship. Wordsworth glowingly records

66

How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name

Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,

All over his dear country; left the deeds

Of Wallace, like a family of ghosts,

To people the steep rocks and river-banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul
Of independence and stern liberty.†

Gratingly and freezingly, after such homage from the South, must come
to every Northern ear and heart the style of a fellow-countryman so un-
genuine, so ungenial, so ungenerous, comparatively if not absolutely
speaking, as David Hume. He talks, with even pulse and in coldly
critical tones, of "one William Wallace"-of "this man, whose valorous
exploits are the object of just admiration, but have been much exagge-
rated by the traditions of his countrymen." He pictures him as a fugi-
tive homicide, betaking himself to the woods, and offering himself as a
leader to all those whom their crimes, or bad fortunes, or avowed hatred
of the English, had reduced to a like necessity. At the same time,
David pays tribute to the physical endowments and metaphysical distinc-
tions of this man of men-duly taking cognisance of not only his
'gigantic force of body," but of his "heroic courage of mind," his "dis-
interested magnanimity"-" with incredible patience, and ability, to bear
hunger, fatigue, and all the severities of the seasons;" whence the facility
and speed with which he acquired, "among those desperate fugitives,
that authority to which his virtues so justly entitled him." But this is
not the Wallace Wight of antique tradition and of latter-day romance.
It is not the chevalier sans reproche as well as sans peur, of the story-
books old and new. It is not Miss Porter's ante-dated Grandison. Nor
is it Mr. Savage Landor's sententious hero,§-of whom, debating in
imaginary conversation with the first Edward, Mr. Wilson Croker scep-
tically remarked, that we almost imagine ourselves in the company of
some venerable stoic, or some Christian martyr, so patient is he, so for-
giving. "Few have a right to punish, all to pardon." A cast of thought
like this who would expect, asks Mr. Croker, "from the rude, ruthless,
and baffled champion of the independence of a dark and barbarous
country? It is still less likely to have proceeded from the Scotch
Guerilla chieftain than from the haughty Plantagenet, to whom such
sentiments are so foreign, that he cannot even understand the language
of his philosophical contemporary."||

*The Cottar's Saturday Night.

†The Prelude.

As to Wallace's knighthood, we are informed by Thomas of Walsingham that he was knighted by a Scotch earl, on being elected leader of the insurrection against Edward I. Scotis vero cito sibi [Wilhelmo Waleys] consentientibus et ipsum eorum ducem constituentibus, militiæ donatus est cingulo a quodam comite regionis illuis. (Hist. Angl., p. 90.)—See Mr. Francis M. Nichols's "Inquiry" on Feudal and Obligatory Knighthood, p. 24.

ก Imaginary Conversations, "William Wallace and King Edward I.”

Quarterly Rev., vol. lviii.