forting her until she assured her that the lame bird had arrived at the utmost term of a hen's existence. "Noo ye see, Miss Christie," she insisted, "a hen gangin six year auld is just the same thing as a body o' ninety; mair be token that she wanted a leg, an' was aye obligated to gang whirring alang wi' her wings to keep hersel' steady; noo ye ken, ma lamb, that sae muckle exertion maun hae spent her strength, an' its only a wonder that she leeved sae lang; an' for that she was behadden to the care ye took o' her. Noo that she's fairly deed, the best thing ye can do is to gie her a dacent burial, an' mak' Donald, an' Oscar, an' the dalls a' cum to the funeral, an' I'll dig her a bit grave, puir thing! an' mak' her a winding-sheet o' ain o' your auld daidlies.' This hint was forthwith acted upon; the dolls were quickly arrayed in a kind of motley mourning, Donald and Oscar had a bit of black ribbon put round their necks, and all being collected round the bower-beside which Nanny had dug a grave-poor Cripple Littie was consigned to her last cold nest, on which Christine planted a small tuft of violets to mark the spot where lay her dead favourite, and, before long, began to experience the consolation which never fails to attend well-performed duties—whether towards man or beast—in a world where all is transient and changing. Spring and summer fleeted by, and autumn again came round, but, alas! for poor Christine, it likewise brought Mr. John Douglas with his wife and family to Scotland. The eldest son had gone into the Guards, the second had been sent to an English academy, the two elder daughters were under the superintendence of a strict governess at home, and the youngest boy and girl-about the same age as their little aunt were partly in the nursery, and partly in the schoolroom with their masters and their sisters' tutoress. It was decided that the family were to fix themselves in Edinburgh, and after some communication by letter between Mr. Macintosh and Mr. Douglas, it was settled that Christine was to quit the beloved scenes of her infancy for her brother's abode, and partake of the benefits of the education his children were receiving, "until he and Mrs. Douglas should decide what was the most prudent plan to adopt with regard to her." With inexpressible anguish the affectionate child heard that she was doomed to quit her hitherto happy home, her dear Nanny, her pets, her bower, and, last of all, her uncle, aunt, and cousin. But the sentence was pronounced; there was no remedy; and the unhappy little girl was taken more dead than alive to Perth by the weeping Nanny, where she was recommended to the particular attention of the guard of the mailcoach, by him to be consigned to one of her brother's servants, who was to meet her at the coach-office in Edinburgh. ABOUT THE COMING MAN FROM NEW ZEALAND. A FORECAST SHADOW (AND IRREPRESSIBLE BORE). BY FRANCIS JACOX. * MISS EDEN'S "Up the Country" has supplied the critics with one more parallel passage to the famous one in Macaulay about the New Zealander in days to come, in silent session on a broken arch of the ruins of London Bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. The Indian letters of Lord Auckland's lively sister, although only now published, were written, we are reminded, three years or more before the New Zealander (by this time voted a bore) appeared full-grown in the Edinburgh Review, and made such a sensation in the House of Commons; nor, it is contended, was Miss Eden at all likely to have seen the fugitive pieces in which Macaulay was gradually polishing him up to his present perfection. To her therefore is accorded at least half of the credit of the notion. Here is Miss Eden's version of that Coming Man: “ Perhaps two thousand years hence, when the art of steam has been forgotten, and nobody can exactly make out the meaning of the old English word 'mail-coach,' some black governor-general of England will be marching through its southern provinces, and will go back and look at some ruins, and doubt whether London was ever a large town, and will feed some white-looking skeletons and say what distress the poor creatures must be in; they will really eat rice and curry; and his sister will write to Mary D. at New Delhi, and complain of the cold, and explain to her with great care what snow is, and how the natives wear bonnets," &c. &c.,these pleasantries being à propos of Miss Eden's sojourn with her brother, the Governor-General, at Kynonze, a great place for ruins, and supposed to have been the largest town in India in the old time, and the most magnificent. In the first really noteworthy review ever published by Macaulay,‡ then in his twenty-fifth year, may be seen the original draft of his New Zealander-a sketch afterwards filled up, as the editor of his Miscellanies reminds us, in the review of Mrs. Austin's translation of Ranke; which passage was at one time "the subject of allusion, two or three times a week, in speeches and leading articles."§ In the peroration of the Mitford paper, a period in the world's history is forecast when civilisation and science shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when "the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labour to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest * Up the Country: Letters written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. By the Hon. Emily Eden. Bentley. 1866. † Saturday Review, xxii. 210. On Mitford's History of Greece, contributed to Knight's Quarterly Magazine in 1824. § Preface to Miscellanies, p. viii. temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts."* The after application of the passage was to the possibility of that Church of Rome which was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, still existing, ages hence, in undiminished vigour, "when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."t Here we have the passage in its completest form and best apparel, point device, a triumph of condensed, picturesque, suggestive imagery. How favourite a topic the germ of this full-blown flower must have been to the reviewer's fancy, is plain from the fact that in yet another of his reviews, that on Mill's Essay on Government, and bearing date 1829, occurs the following note of interrogation: "Is it possible that, in two or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities-may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?" But it was not until a full decade later that this comparatively vague and abstract vision was consolidated into the concrete particulars of New Zealander, broken arch of London Bridge, and ruins of St. Paul's. It is a common-place with the moralists, the moralising over the evanescence of great cities. Byron says (not that Byron was conventionally a moralist), in one place, -I've stood upon Achilles' tomb, And in another: The town was enter'd. Oh Eternity!— "God made the country, and man made the town," Of his opinion, when I see cast down Rome, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Nineveh- To deem the woods shall be our home at last.§ Goldsmith's travelled Chinese, meditating in and upon London after midnight, when all that mighty heart (as Wordsworth says) is lying still, speculates on a possible time coming when this temporary solitude may be made continual, and the city itself, like its inhabitants, fade away, and leave a desert in its room. He bethinks him of other cities, great as this, that once triumphed in existence and promised themselves immortality; cities, nevertheless, of some of which posterity can hardly trace the site. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others; and as he beholds, he learns wisdom, and feels the transience of every sublunary possession. "Here," he cries, "stood their citadel, now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every * Miscellanies, vol. i. pp. 179-80. Essay on Ranke, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1840. Nov.-VOL. CXXXVIII. NO. DLI. U noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruin.”* And is London Bridge-once at least already "broken down," in the old song that nobody sings now-to be thus doomed, thus to decay and dislimn, till there remain but one broken arch for the New Zealander to sit upon, while he sketches the ruins of Wren's monument? Is the day, one day to dawn when it shall be "forfairn" enough, decaying and waxing old enough (now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away), to take up its parable, in tetchy, querulous defiance, with that other Auld Brig, of Burns's biggin', so to speak, and declaim against a new-fangled critic, Conceited gowk! puff'd up wi' windy pride! This mony a year I've stood the flood and tide; I'll be a Brig when ye're a shapeless cairn!† Horace Walpole's letters contain more than one passage which Lord Macaulay may have read, marked, learnt, and inwardly digested, before he shaped his prevision of the New Zealander into epigrammatic completeness. In one epistle to Sir Horace Mann, written while the House of Commons was tossed on the troubled sea of Indian affairs, Walpole says: "We beat Rome in eloquence and extravagance, and Spain in avarice and cruelty: and, like both, we shall only serve to terrify schoolboys, and for lessons of morality. Here stood St. Stephen's; here young Catiline spoke; here was Lord Clive's diamond-house; this is Leadenhall-street, and this broken column was part of the palace of a company of merchants who were sovereigns of Bengal!" There is nothing more like, he adds (referring to the age of Catiline and Cæsar, with its results), than two ages that are very like; which is all he supposes Rousseau to mean by saying, "give him an account of any great metropolis, and he will foretel its fate."§ More than two years later Walpole refers the same correspondent to the same authority, when he asks, "Do you think Rousseau was in the right, when he said that he could tell what would be the manners [and therefore the fate] of any capital city, from certain given lights? I don't know what he may do on Constantinople and Pekinbut Paris and London! . . Don't tell me I am grown old and peevish and supercilious. . . The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra; but am I not prophesying, contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau? Yes; well, I will go and dream of my visions."|| A year or two later, again, we find Horace of London dilating to Horace of Florence on the rapid growth of the Great Metropolis ("London could put Florence into its fob-pocket"), and wondering how long this exuberance of opulence is to last. "The East Indies, I believe, † Burns, the Brigs of Ayr. * Citizen of the World, letter cxvii. Meaning, from the context, Charles James Fox, then amazing the House by his speeches after nights of riot and excess. § Walpole to Mann, April 9, 1772. Same to same, Nov. 24, 1774. will not contribute to it much longer. Babylon and Memphis and Rome, probably, stared at their own downfal. Empires did not use to philosophise, nor thought much but of themselves. Such revolutions are better known now, and we ought to expect them-I do not say we do. This little island will be ridiculously proud some ages hence of its former brave days, and swear its capital was once as big again as Paris, or what is to be the name of the city that will then give laws to Europe-perhaps New York or Philadelphia."* Another year or two gone, and we have Walpole writing to Mason, that London will be the storehouse hereafter, whence declamations shall be drawn on the infatuation of falling empires. Nations at the acme of their splendour, or at the eve, of their destruction, he goes on to remark, are worth observing. "When they grovel in obscurity afterwards, they furnish neither events nor reflections; strangers visit the vestiges of the Acropolis, or may come to dig for capitals among the ruins of St. Paul's; but nobody studies the manners of the pedlars and banditti, that dwell in mud-huts within the precincts of a demolished temple."† It is to Mason that Walpole writes on a previous occasion, discussing the literary schemes and doings of them both, "I approve your printing in manuscript, that is, not for the public, for who knows how long the public will be able, or be permitted to read? Bury a few copies against this island is rediscovered. Some American versed in the old English language will translate it, and revive the true taste in gardening; though he will smile at the diminutive scenes on the little Thames when he is planting a forest on the banks of the Oronoko." In a not unlike vein of humour, Southey recreates himself with the fancy that "The Doctor" may haply outlive not only such transitory things as Lord Castlereagh's Peace, Mr. Pitt's reputation (he throws Mr. Fox's into the bargain), Mr. Locke's Metaphysics, and the Regent's Bridge in St. James's Park; not only even the eloquence of Burke, the discoveries of Davy, the poems of Wordsworth, and the victories of Wellington; but perhaps also the very language in which it is written; "and, in Heaven knows what year of Heaven knows what era, [it may] be discovered by some learned inhabitant of that continent which the insects who make coral and madrepore are now, and from the beginning of the world have been, fabricating in the Pacific Ocean. It may be dug up among the ruins of London, and considered as one of the sacred books of the sacred Island of the West" -for Dr. Daniel Dove is too true a patriot not to hope that some reverence will always be attached to what he calls "this most glorious and most happy island," when its power and happiness and glory, like those of Greece, shall have passed away.§ Gibbon incidentally remarks, in his chapter on the early history and pre-historic times of Britain, that if, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of Scotland's existence, the opposite extremes of savage and civilised life: "Such reflections tend to *Walpole to Mann, July 17, 1776. †To Rev. William Mason, May 12, 1778. 8 The Doctor, interchapter ii. |