shuddering; 'the soldiers lie grovelling under them like crushed reptiles. The besieged have the better.’ 'St. George strike for us!' exclaimed the knight; 'do the false yeomen give way?' "No!' exclaimed Rebecca, they bear themselves right yeomanly. The Black Knight approaches the postern with his huge axe; the thundering blows which he deals, you may hear them above all the din and shouts of the battle. Stones and beams are hailed down on the bold champion: he regards them no more than if they were thistle-down or feathers!' 'By St. John of Acre,' said Ivanhoe, raising himself joyfully on his couch, methought there was but one man in England that might do such a deed!' "The postern gate shakes,' continued Rebecca-'it crashes-it is splintered by his blows-they rush inthe outwork is won. Oh God! they hurl the defenders from the battlements-they throw them into the moat. O men, if be indeed men, spare them that can resist no longer! 'The bridge-the bridge which communicates with the castle-have they won that pass?' exclaimed Ivanhoe. 'No,' replied Rebecca; 'the Templar has destroyed the plank on which they crossed; few of the defenders escaped with him into the castle-the shrieks and cries which you hear tell the fate of the others. Alas! I see it is still more difficult to look upon victory than upon battle.' 'What do they now, maiden?' said Ivanhoe; 'look forth yet again-this is no time to faint at bloodshed.' 'It is over for the time,' answered Rebecca; 'our friends strengthen themselves within the outwork which they have mastered, and it affords them so good a shelter from the foemen's shot that the garrison only bestow a few bolts on it from interval to interval, as if rather to disquiet than effectually to injure them." 'Our friends,' said Wilfred, 'will surely not abandon an enterprise so gloriously begun and so happily attained. O no! I will put my faith in the good knight whose axe hath rent heart-of-oak and bars of iron. Singular,' he again muttered to himself, "if there be two who can do a deed of such derring-do! A fetterlock, and a shackle-bolt on a field_sable-what may that mean? Seest thou nought else, Rebecca, by which the Black Knight may be distinguished?' 'Nothing,' said the Jewess; all about him is black as the wing of the night raven. Nothing can I spy that can mark him further; but having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes to the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength-there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.'-Ivanhoe. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE OF CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, BUNYAN AND SCOTT I. CHAUCER I TAKE unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare. II. SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare is the Spinozistic deity-an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience: he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakespeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakespeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed— epigrams with the point everywhere; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakespeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakespeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistitch or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse. III. BUNYAN The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian-and let me assure you, that there is great theological acumen in the work— once with devotional feelings-and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours. IV. SCOTT Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious opposites in this :-that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree, called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations—just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle in Herodotus, as any one can. When I am very ill indeed I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then read. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can't bear the open page.-Table Talk. ON PRECISION IN THE USE OF TERMS. I adverted in my last lecture to the prevailing laxity in the use of terms: this is the principal complaint to which the moderns are exposed; but it is a grievous one in as much as it inevitably tends to the misapplication of words, and to the corruption of language. I mentioned the word 'taste,' but the remark applies not merely to substantives and adjectives, to things and their epithets, but to verbs: thus, how frequently is the verb 'indorsed' strained from its true signification, as given by Milton in the expression, "And elephants endorsed with towers.' Again, 'virtue' has been equally perverted: originally it signified merely strength; then it became strength of mind and valour, and it has now been changed to the class term for moral excellence in all its various species. I only introduce these as instances by the way, and nothing could be easier than to multiply them. At the same time, while I recommend precision both of thought and expression, I am far from advocating a pedantic niceness in the choice of language: such a course would only render conversation stiff and stilted. Dr. Johnson used to say that in the most unrestrained discourse he always sought for the properest wordthat which best and most exactly conveyed his meaning: to a certain point he was right, but because he carried it too far, he was often laborious where he ought to have been light, and formal where he ought to have been familiar. Men ought to endeavour to distinguish subtly, that they may be able afterwards to assimilate truly.-Lectures on Shakespeare. ROBERT SOUTHEY 1774-1843 A LOVE STORY WHEN Deborah was about nineteen, the small-pox broke out in Doncaster, and soon spread over the surrounding country, occasioning everywhere a great mortality. At that time inoculation had very rarely been practised in the provinces; and the prejudice against it was so strong, that Mr. Bacon, though convinced in his own mind that the practise was not only lawful, but advisable, refrained from having his daughter inoculated till the disease appeared in his own parish.... But when the malady had shown itself in the parish, |