death, foretold, as it is said, by himself on | 1484, by the inquisitors Jacob Sprenger, and the previous day. one who called himself Henricus Institor.

Strange to say, accused witches fared bet-Reginald Scott, Dr. Cotta, and Thomas Ady, ter before the Spanish tribunals than else- were among the few that had sufficient sense where. Their revelations were rightly judged to see through the general delusion under to be the result of their own diseased imaginations. One woman gave a circumstantial account of her ride to the meeting, and the orgies there witnessed and shared, but a crony of her own proved, that after anointing her stick, she had lain down on her own hearth and dreamed the rest.

The terrible Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches," was put forth in

which their contemporaries labored, and courage to publicly express their convictions in writing. While lamenting the hard treatment experienced by the accused, we must take into account the general disregard of life which distinguished the witch period, and that many, very many, of those burned, deserved hanging, at least, for real crimes.

A BALLAD ON A BISHOP.

THE Bishop of Rochester thinks it's the ticket
To hinder his clergy from playing at cricket;
That parsons should bowl well, or make many
notches, ter-

Rific appears to the Bishop of Rochester.

The Bishop of Rochester's awfully skeared

But the wisdom of Solomon backed by young
Sirach

Would never have moved the inflexible hierarch
The bishop, whose name is both Wigram and
Cotton,

The latter well rammed in his ears must have
gotten,

For in periods as swollen as elephantiasis

At the thought of the clergymen wearing the He turns Mr. Davies slap out of the diocese.

beard:

"With how little of wisdom in state or in creed
The world may be governed," said Axel the
Swede,

And this bishop, who useth episcopal pen so,
Owns he doesn't know Hebrew, but censures
Colenso.

His brother, the Bishop of Punchester, waits

To angle, though Peter, I know, was a fisher-To see how he'll get out of Davies's Straits;

But wishes that Pam had been rather more wary
When Vaughan tacked a nolo to e-piscopari.

-Punch.

SHAKSPEARE ON THE COPPERHEADS. To the Editors of the Evening Post:

The following extract from "Coriolanus " has a direct application :

"WHAT Would you have, you curs, That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights

you,

The other makes you proud. He that trusts to
you,

Where he should find you lions finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese; you are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,

Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is,
To make him worthy whose offence subdues him,
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves
greatness

Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man's appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favors swims with fins of lead,
And hews down oaks with rushes." PER SE.

Other sisters have loved their brothers, and

living thing but the birds." M. de Guérin, | Eugénie's father, lost his wife when Eugénie it is not her affection for Maurice, admirable was thirteen years old, and Maurice seven: as this was, which alone could have made he was left with four children, Eugénie, Eugénie de Guérin celebrated. I have said Marie, Erembert, and Maurice-of whom that both brother and sister had genius: M. Eugénie was the eldest, and Maurice was the Sainte Beuve goes so far as to say that the youngest. This youngest child, whose beauty sister's genius was equal if not superior to and delicacy had made him the object of his her brother's. No one has a more profound mother's most anxious fondness, was com- respect for M. Sainte Beuve's critical judgmended by her in dying to the care of his ments than I have; but it seems to me that sister Eugénie. Maurice at eleven years old this particular judgment needs to be a little went to school at Toulouse; then he went to explained and guarded. In Maurice's spethe Collège Stanislas at Paris; then he be- cial talent, which was a talent for interpretcame a member of a religious society, which ing nature, for finding words which incomM. de Lamennais had formed at La Chênaie parably render the subtlest impressions which in Brittany; afterwards he lived chiefly at nature makes upon us, which brings the inParis, returning to Le Cayla at the age of timate life of nature wonderfully near to us, twenty-nine, to die. Distance, in those days, it seems to me that his sister was by no means was a great obstacle to frequent meetings of the his equal. She never, indeed, expresses herseparated members of a French family of nar- self without grace and intelligence; but her row means. Maurice de Guérin was seldom words, when she speaks of the life and apat Le Cayla after he had once quitted it, pearances of nature, are in general but inthough his few visits to his home were long tellectual signs; they are not like her brothones; but he passed five years—the period er's-symbols equivalent with the thing symof his sojourn in Brittany, and of his first bolized. They bring the notion of the thing settlement in Paris-without coming home at described to the mind, they do not bring the all. In spite of the check from these ab- feeling of it to the imagination. Writing sences, in spite of the more serious check from the Nivernais—that region of vast woodfrom a temporary alteration in Maurice's re- lands in the centre of France-" It does one ligious feelings, the union between the brother good," says Eugénie, "to be going about in and sister was wonderfully close and firm. the midst of this enchanting nature, with For they were knit together, not only by the flowers, birds, and verdure all round one, tie of blood and early attachment, but also by under this large and blue sky of the Niverthe tie of a common genius. "We were," says nais. How 1 love the gracious form of it, Eugénie," two eyes looking out of one fore- and those little white clouds here and there, head." She on her part brought to her love like cushions of cotton, hung aloft to rest the for her brother the devotedness of a woman, eye in this immensity!" It is pretty and the intensity of a recluse, almost the solici- graceful, but how different from the grave and tude of a mother. Her home duties pre-pregnant strokes of Maurice's pencil: "I vented her from following the wish, which have been along the Loire, and seen on its often arose in her, to join a religious sisterhood. There is a trace—just a trace-of an early attachment to a cousin; but he died when she was twenty-four. After that, she lived for Maurice. It was for Maurice that, in addition to her constant correspondence with him by letter, she began in 1834 her journal, which was sent to him by portions as it was finished. After his death she tried to continue it, addressing it" to Maurice in Heaven." But the effort was beyond her strength; gradually the entries became rarer and rarer; and, on the last day of December, 1840, the pen dropped from her hand: the journal ends.

banks the plains where nature is puissant and gay; I have seen royal and antique dwellings, all marked by memories which have their place in the mournful legend of humanity-Chambord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux; then the towns on the two banks of the river,- Orleans, Tours, Saumur, Nantes; and, at the end of it all, the ocean rumbling. From these I passed back into the interior of the country, as far as Bourges and Nevers, a region of vast woodlands, in which murmurs of an immense range and fulness" (ce beau torrent de rumeurs, as, with an expression worthy of Wordsworth, he elsewhere calls them) "prevail and never

cease."

Words whose charm is like that of | good? Everything is green, everything is in

the sounds of the murmuring forest itself, bloom, all the air has a breath of flowers.

and whose reverberations, like theirs, die away in the infinite distance of the soul. Maurice's life was in the life of nature, and the passion for it consumed him; it would have been strange if his accent had not caught more of the soul of nature than Eugénie's accent, whose life was elsewhere. "You will find in him," Maurice says to his sister of a friend whom he was recommending to her, “you will find in him that which you love, and which suits you better than anything else-l'onction, l'effusion, la mysticité." Unction, the pouring out of the soul, the rapture of the mystic, were dear to Maurice also; but in him the bent of his genius gave even to those a special direction of its own. In Eugénie they took the direction most native and familiar to them; their object was the religious life.

How beautiful it is! well, I will go out. No, I should be alone, and all this beauty, when one is alone, is worth nothing. What shall I do then? Read, write, pray, take a basket of sand on my head like that hermitsaint, and walk with it? Yes, work, work! keep busy the body which does mischief to the soul! I have been too little occupied today, and that is bad for one, and it gives a certain ennui which I have in me time to ferment.'

"A l'enfant il faut sa mère,
A mon ame il faut mon Dieu."

A certain ennui which I have in me: her wound is there. In vain she follows the counsel of Fénélon: "If God tires you, tell Him that he tires you." No doubt she obtained great and frequent solace and restoration from prayer: "This morning I was suffering; well, at present I am calm, and this I owe to faith, simply to faith, to an act of And yet, if one analyzes this beautiful and faith. I can think of death and eternity most interesting character quite to the bot- without trouble, without alarm. Over a tom, it is not exactly as a saint that Eugénie deep sorrow there floats a divine calm, a de Guérin is remarkable. The ideal saint is suavity which is the work of God only. In a nature like Saint François de Sales or Fén- vain have I tried other things at a time like élon; a nature of ineffable sweetness and se- this: nothing human comforts the soul, nothrenity, a nature in which struggle and revolting human upholds it :— is over, and the whole man (so far as is possible to human infirmity) swallowed up in love. Saint Theresa (it is Mdlle. dẹ Guérin herself who reminds us of it) endured twenty Still the ennui reappears, bringing with it years of unacceptance and repulse in her hours of unutterable forlornness, and making prayers; yes, but the Saint Theresa whom her cling to her one great earthly happiness Christendom knows is Saint Theresa repulsed-her affection for her brother-with an inno longer; it is Saint Theresa accepted, re-tenseness, an anxiety, a desperation in which joicing in love, radiant with ecstasy. Mdlle. there is something morbid, and by which she de Guérin is not one of these saints arrived is occasionally carried into an irritability, a at perfect sweetness and calm, steeped in jealousy, which she herself is the first, inecstasy; there is something primitive, indom- deed, to censure, which she severely reitable in her, which she governs, indeed, but presses, but which nevertheless leaves a sense which chafes, which revolts; somewhere in of pain. the depths of that strong nature there is a struggle, an impatience, an inquietude, an ennui, which endures to the end, and which leaves one, when one finally closes her journal, with an impression of profound melancholy. "There are days," she writes to her brother, "when one's nature rolls itself up, and becomes a hedgehog. If I had you here at this moment, here close by me, how I should prick you! how sharp and hard! " "Poor soul, poor soul," she cries out to herself another day, "what is the matter, what would you have: Where is that which will do you

Mdlle. de Guérin's admirers have compared her to Pascal, and in some respects the comparison is just. But she cannot exactly be classed with Pascal, any more than with Saint François de Sales. Pascal' is a man, and the inexhaustible power and activity of his mind leave him no leisure for ennui. He has not the sweetness and serenity of the perfect saint; he is, perhaps, " der strenge, kranke Pascal,-the severe, morbid Pascal” -as Goethe (and, strange to say, Goethe at twenty-three, an age which usually feels Pascal's charm most profoundly) calls him; but

the stress and movement of the lifelong con- science for you to resist this impulse, and I flict, waged in him between his soul and his make it one for you not to follow it." And she reason keep him full of fire, full of agitation, says of herself, on one of her freer days: "It and keep his reader, who witnesses this con- is the instinct of my life to write, as it is the flict, animated and excited; the sense of for- instinct of the fountain to flow." The charm lornness and dejected weariness which clings of her expression is not a sensuous and imagto Eugénie de Guérin does not belong to Pas-inative charm like that of Maurice, but rather cal, Eugénie de Guérin is a woman and an intellectual charm; it comes from the longs for a state of firm happiness, for an texture of the style rather than from its eleaffection in which she may repose: the in- ments; it is not so much in the words as in ward bliss of Saint Theresa or Fénélon would the turn of the phrase, in the happy cast and have satisfied her; denied this, she cannot flow of the sentence. Recluse as she was, rest satisfied with the triumphs of self-abase- she had a great correspondence: every one ment, with the sombre joy of trampling the wished to have letters from her; and no wonpride of life and of reason underfoot, of re- der. ducing all human hope and joy to insignificance; she repeats the magnificent words of Bossuet, words which both Catholicism and Protestantism have uttered with indefatigable iteration: "On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le néant—at the bottom of everything one finds emptiness and nothingness," but she feels, as every one but the true mystic must ever feel, their incurable sterility.

She resembles Pascal, however, by the clearness and firmness of her intelligence, going straight and instinctively to the bottom of any matter she is dealing with, and expressing herself about it with incomparable precision; never fumbling with what she has to say, never imperfectly seizing or imperfectly presenting her thought. And to this admirable precision she joins a lightness of touch, a feminine ease and grace, a flowing facility which are her own. "I do not say," writes her brother Maurice, an excellent judge, that I find in myself a dearth of expression but I have not this abundance of yours, this productiveness of soul which streams forth, which courses along without ever failing, and always with an infinite charm." And writing to her of some composition of hers, produced after her religious scruples had for a long time kept her from the exercise of her talent; "You see, my dear Tortoise," he writes" that your talent is no illusion, since after a period I know not how long of poetical inaction, a trial to which any half-talent would have succumbed, it rears its head again more vigorous than ever. It is really heart-breaking to see you repress and bind down, with I know not what scruples, your spirit, which tends with all the force of its nature to develop itself in this direction. Others have made it a case of con

To this strength of intelligence and talent of expression she joined a great force of character. Religion had early possessed itself of this forec of character, and reinforced it : in the shadow of the Cevennes, in the sharp and tonic nature of this region of southern France, which has seen the Albigensians, which has seen the Camisards, Catholicism too is fervent and intense. Eugénie de Guérin was brought up amidst strong religious influences, and they found in her a nature on which they could lay firm hold. I have said that she was not a saint of the order of Saint François de Sales or Fénélon; perhaps she had too keen an intelligence to suffer her to be this, too forcible and impetuous a character. But I did not mean to imply the least doubt of the reality, the profoundness, of her religious life. She was penetrated by the power of religion; religion was the masterinfluence of her life; she derived immense consolations from religion, she earnestly strove to conform her whole nature to it; if there was an element in her which religion could not perfectly reach, perfectly transmute, she groaned over this element in her, she chid it, she made it bow. Almost every thought in her was brought into harmony with religion; and what few thoughts were not thus brought into harmony were brought into subjection.

Then she had her affection for her brother: and this, too, though perhaps there might be in it something a little over-eager, a little too absolute, a little too susceptible, was a pure, a devoted affection. It was not only passionate, it was tender, pliant, and self-sacrificing to a degree that not in one nature out of a thousand- of natures with a mind and will like hers-is found attainable. She thus