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office of governor to the province. It is the custom, that whenever the vendétta alla morte-revenge even to death-is to be carried out, the party avenging himself shall give his adversary timely notice by throwing a bullet into his window, that he may either make immediate compensation or prepare himself for death. The new governor had already received two interesting notices of this kind, and his predecessors had all been put out of the way by this summary mode of obtaining an imaginary justice.

Next came Castel Doria, more relics of the by-gone glories of the house of Doria, almost impregnable in its high, isolated, rocky position; the mineral baths, with their reception-rooms of boughs and twigs, and forests of cork-tree and oak, ultimately led the way to the headlands and islands, of which latter Magdalena and Caprera are the largest. The last is inhabited by Ilvese, a distinct race from the Sardes, and who contribute the greater part of the fifteen sailors and two officers, the quota furnished

by Sardinia to the royal navy. La Magdalena was Nelson's favourite

harbour, and the existence of which led him to covet so much the possession of Sardinia, which in a military and naval point of view, he considered to be far superior to Malta.

From Parao to Terranova Mr. Tyndale says his route lay over mountains and valleys through a continuous wilderness of forests and flowers. "Theocritus," he says, "may proclaim his native country to have been Flora's peculiar garden; and our early ideas are by his idyls and the praises of other poets, prejudiced in favour of Sicily; but any traveller who has visited both islands, would decidedly give a preference to Sardinia." Terranova, ancient Olbia, is in a state of decay, its harbour gradually becoming a lagoon, its walls and towers crumbling down, and its inhabitants (about 2000 in number) suffering from intemperie. Crossing the wild ranges of Monte Nieuddu, or Nero, so-called from the dark mantle of ilex, cork, and oak trees with which it is clothed, our traveller passed through Monti and Ala, villages inhabited by peasants in a state of great moral and physical degradation. To the west, and more in the centre of the island, was the fantastic ridge of Monte Lerno, rising to an elevation of 3586 feet, and covered with forests, richly stocked with deer, muffloni (long-horned wild sheep), boars, quails, partridges, and woodcocks.

A steep descent led by Budduso and Osidda to Benetutti, where are some renowned mineral waters, but the village is poor and sickly. This central tract is called the Goceano and Monte Rasu, its highest peak, attains an elevation of 4093 feet. In this district is also the secluded Castello di Goceano, the scene of many romantic incidents, related at length by Mr. Tyndale. The whole district is much affected by intemperie, and the general character of the people is lawless, fierce, and vindictive. Our traveller crossed the mountains by the Ozieri road, which, after passing several solitary churches and some villas, descended into the town of Oziesi, which has a population of about 8000 agriculturists and shepherds. The Oziesi are said to be a strong and healthy race, well to do in the world, and free from intemperie, one of the many instances, that where the country is cultivated and drained, that complaint is not prevalent.

Previously to visiting the southern parts of the island, Mr. Tyndale returned to Sassari, from whence he repaired by the Scala di Ciocca,

1005 feet high, and the Campeda plain, to the town of Macomer in the Monte Muradu, whence he proceeded by the wild and mountainous province of Barbagia (not without meeting banditi on his way) to Ogliastra, and he returned again to Macomer before visiting the fertile districts of Oristano, from whence a low, fertile, thickly populated and cultivated valley crosses the whole width of the island to Cagliari. During this extensive journey a great number of Noraghe, Tamuli, Sepolture, Perda lunga, and other monuments of olden time, were explored in a manner that cannot fail to prove of great value to future archæological inquiries. Into these matters, however, as well as into the author's interesting descriptions of towns, villages, and churches, and the objects of art which these contained; as well as of mountains and woods, stagni with their innumerable flocks of water birds, and the grottos and caverns which he met with in his way, it is impossible for us to enter. Mr. Tyndale's work is a complete epitome of knowledge, historical and antiquarian, geographical and philosophical, commercial and statistical, as far as refers to Sardinia. On such leading questions it will be necessary to refer to the book itself; but we hope we have given such a notion of his wanderings, as will serve to lay open to the curious a comparatively new country, peaceful and accessible, with proper precautions; neither expensive, nor dangerous, and yet replete with the most extraordinary resources to the sportsman, the antiquarian, the merchant, the artist, or the naturalist; with something, indeed, for every denomination of traveller, except the irascible, who had better not venture among people who have been, from time immemorial, in the habit of resenting insults in a most formidable manner.

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT.

BY CYRUS REDDING, ESQ.

Ar length One-eight-four-eight is noted
Among the dead things of the past,
To dim oblivion's realm devoted,
Its reckoning duly drawn and cast:
"Twill no more whisper of our age,
For it had lived the allotted date;
No action of earth's pilgrimage
Will mark again One-eight-four-eight.

"Pass, Greybeard, pass! the proper term
Takes thee to where the bygone go,
We see in thee of hope no germ,
Thou wert a fool to linger so!
Thank heaven decrepid thou art gone,
To us thou camest far too late,
Faster we trust next year will run-

Farewell defunct One-eight-four-eight!"

Thus the short-sighted feed on hope,
Till youth, its cycle run, repeats
Its wonder how it once gave scope

To dreams that proved successive cheats;
Blissful illusions of young eyes,

With eyes mature that cannot mate: Alas! as brief their destinies

As thy short reign, One-eight-four-eight!

The wise may pray for brighter days

Of thy successor's promis'd hours,

They fain would hope true freedom's gaze

May charm to peace earth's anarch powers

Then his, like thine, will not in vain

Pass to that bourne where reckless fate,

All but thy shadows that remain,

Has sent thee now, One-eight-four-eight!

Then let the earth go bowling on
In annual gambol as of yore,
Whether its cirque be come or gone,
Useless the game it played before
Of crime, ambition, error, pain—
Our plaister gods, too, small and great,
They'll give us nausea o'er again

Just as with thee, One-eight-four-eight.

Our heroes will be just as little,
Our kinglings will be just as wise,
Our mobs as barbarous to a tittle,
Our witlings of as small a size-
Such repetitions, good and bad,

Can give the future little weight,
To make us on thy child look glad,
Judged by its sire, One-eight-four-eight.

Such still the tale of parted time

Such still our hope's most cherish'd dream;

By man in every land and clime,

"The lesson read is read the same,

While joy and love, were this not so,

Might now so well our being cheat,

That unalloyed with care and woe

Thee we might mourn, One-eight-four-eight.

"Go, hypochondriac rhymer," cry

The cherub bands of thoughtless youth"Though such may be our destiny, Why tell us the ungentle truth!

'Tis better scent the rose, nor know

A doom from whence there's no retreat,

So we'll even trip it as we go

Over thy dust, One-eight-four-eight."

THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES.*

BY DUDLEY COSTELLO.

[Although the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine has consented to insert the following notice of the work on which he has for some time been engaged, and has now completed, he cannot but feel, however earnestly he may have laboured to perfect his romance, that the criticism of Mr. Costello is unquestionably too partial. He believes, nevertheless, that it was written in an earnest and honest spirit, after a careful consideration of the subject, and he has therefore not thought it wrong to give admission to the opinions expressed by so old and valued a contributor.]

THE practice of the art which bears the name of Magic, or Witchcraft, has subsisted under two very different aspects.

In the East, where it originated, it bore the impress of that grandeur and sublimity which universally attaches to Oriental history and tradition. In the West, where it lingered long and, happily, at last expired, it was stamped by every crime that degrades human nature. In the former instance, it was the companion or the representative of Science, and was looked upon as the expression of the highest intelligence; in the latter, it found its home chiefly among the most ignorant and the least educated (though votaries of a superior degree were, occasionally, not wanting), and its professors, instead of reaping honour and reward, were held up to obloquy and condemned to the most ignominious fate.

The Magician of the East was a sage who, often uniting the functions of the priest or monarch, compelled the reverence of the multitude who feared his power; the Witch of the West, on the contrary, was, for the most part, a sordid, miserable outcast who, it is true, inspired fear, but that fear was ever accompanied by the deepest abhorrence. The attributes of the one were lofty, and even beneficent; those of the other, vile and hateful. Magic, the fruit of study, might, in a word, be considered the pursuit of the great-Witchcraft, the resource of evil passions, that of the vulgar. And this distinction prevailed in Europe, into which the occult lore of the East penetrated through various channels. The crusaders and the travellers of the middle ages brought back with them from Egypt, from Syria, from Persia, and from Arabia, the germs of much of that knowledge which, originally looked upon as magic, laid the foundation of nearly all we have subsequently known of real science. The men of study from the times of Abelard and Roger Bacon, down to those of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, enjoyed the reputation, amongst the common people, of being able to exercise a sovereign will over the beings of a world beyond the present ken; of possessing a power over life and death, and of being able to control the destinies of man and the agency of the elements that surround him.

The knowledge of the unlearned who, from different motives, sought to achieve a similar reputation, sprang from remoter sources; the superThe Lancashire Witches. A Romance of Pendle Forest. By William Harrison Ainsworth, Esq. 3 vols., post 8vo. Henry Colburn.

stitions of the North furnished the principal materials of the art of witchcraft, intermingled, however, with traditions from other lands, which gradually found their way into the popular belief. These materials they combined for purposes of their own. The aim of their ambition was not the principle which seeks to evolve discoveries of utility by the exercise of intellect, but how best to acquire the means of avenging themselves upon the world for the wretched condition in which it was their lot to be placed. Witchcraft furnished them with these means. The preparatory study was not difficult; indeed, it was reduced almost to a simple act of volition. The performance of a grotesque ceremony, in which there were always many ready actors, was the chief condition which the neophyte was called upon to fulfil.

To those whose worldly position was as miserable as can well be supposed, who experienced every privation, mental and physical, that man can endure, and whose religion was based only on superstitious observances on which no light was shed by the spiritual guide, "to lure to higher worlds and lead the way," there was little, in the dread alternative which they accepted, to deter them from embracing the present good which they believed to be within their reach. That alternative was the renunciation of a faith uncheered by hope, and the rejection of which cost them nothing in comparison with the prospect it opened of gratifying the animal tendencies for which they almost wholly lived, and of exercising a sway, which made them not only the masters of their own class, but the avengers of that class on all above them. The idea of illimitable power, as they understood it, though it went for little more than the capacity to be mischievous, was of far greater value in their eyes than any benefit they might derive from the patient endurance of suffering or wrong, and heavy as were the penalties of the bond into which they entered, they readily subscribed to them. Those penalties were eternal, but their souls were to them as nought, and they bartered their only possession with as much eagerness as the African or Australian savage exchanges objects of real value for such only as please the eye. There was, of course, delusion throughout the whole transaction, but of the two parties concerned, one at least was in earnest. The deformed, poverty-stricken serf grasped at any, the slightest chance that seemed to offer a means of escape from the tyranny of his fellow-men, and gladly compounded, for the unrestrained exercise of a capricious and malevolent will, by the relinquishment of an uncertain future. Not all amongst the voluntary herd of the disciples of witchcraft were dupes, but they had purposes of their own to serve by their adherence to the order. The power to obtain which they, in imagination, sold themselves, was at first sight chimerical, but substantial results ensued from the general belief that they really possessed it, and with terror as their weapon they gained, to a great extent, the domination they originally aimed at. But the majority were not of this description; they were gulled by ridiculous ceremonials, their excited imaginations accounted for much that sober reason denied,-they made themselves "les fanfarons de leurs propres crimes," exulting in the actual possession of qualities ascribed to them, however impossible, and carried this exultation so far as to yield themselves willing victims to a persecution which invested them with præternatural attributes. The sum and substance of all is, that witchcraft became a thing of universal belief, not only with the

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