knows it, will patronize; anon that there are some four millions of Freemasons, spread over Europe, all sworn to exterminate Priest and King, wherever met with: in vain! they will not acquit him, as misunderstood Theophilanthropist; will not emit him, in Pope's pay, as renegade Masonic Spy: "he can't get out." Donna Lorenza languishes, invisible to him, in a neighbouring cell; begins at length to confess! Whereupon he too, in torrents, will emit confessions and forestall her: these the Inquisition pocket and sift (whence this Life of Balsamo); but will not let him out. In fine, after some eighteen months of the weariest hounding, doubling, worrying, and standing at bay, His Holiness gives sentence: The Manuscript of Egyptian Masonry is to be burnt by hand of the common Hangman, and all that intermeddle with such Masonry are accursed; Giuseppe Balsamo, justly forfeited of life, (for being a Freemason,) shall nevertheless in mercy be forgiven; instructed in the duties of penitence, and even kept safe thenceforth and till death,-in ward of Holy Church. Illstarred Acharat, must it so end with thee! This was in April, 1791.

niel's? For the rest, the Thing represented on these pages is no sham, but a Reality; thou hast it, O reader, as we have it: Nature was pleased to produce even such a man, even so, not otherwise; and the Editor of this Magazine is here mainly to record (in an adequate manner) what she, of her thousandfold mysterious richness and greatness, produces.

But the moral lesson? Where is the moral lesson? Foolish reader, in every Reality, nay in every genuine Shadow of a Reality, (what we call Poem,) there lie a hundred such, or a million such, according as thou hast the eye to read them! Of which hundred or million lying here (in the present Reality,) couldst not thou, for example, be advised to take this one, to thee, worth all the rest Behold, I too have attained that immeasurable, mysterious glory of being alive; to me also a Capability has been intrusted: shall I strive to work it out (manlike) into Faithfulness, and Dồing; or (quacklike) into Eatableness, and Similitude of Doing? Or why not rather (gigman-like, and following the " Ill- following the "respectable," countless multitude)—into both? The decision is of quite infinite moment; see thou make it aright.

But in fine, look at this matter of Cagliostro (as at all matters) with thy heart, with thy whole mind; no longer merely squint at it with the poor side-glance of thy calculative faculty Look at it not logically only, but mystically. Thou shalt in sober truth see it (as Sauerteig asserted) to be a "Pasquillant verse," of most inspired writing in its kind, in that same

He addressed (how vainly!) an appeal to the French Constituent Assembly. As was said, in Heaven, in Earth, or in Hell there was no Assembly that could well take his part. For four years more, spent one knows not how,-most probably in the furor of edacity, with insufficient cookery, and the stupor of indigestion, the curtain lazily falls. There rotted and gave way the cordage of a tough"Grand Bible of Universal History;" wonheart. One summer morning of the year 1795, the Body of Cagliostro is still found in the prison at St. Leo; but Cagliostro's Self has escaped,-whither no man yet knows. The brow of brass, behold how it has got all un-taloned roots are with the fair boughs, and their lackered; these pinchbeck lips can lie no more: Cagliostro's work is ended, and now only his account to present. As the Scherif of Mecca said, "Nature's unfortunate child, adieu !"

drously and even indispensably connected with the "Heroic" portions that stand there; even as the all-showing Light is with the Darkness wherein, nothing can be seen; as the hideous

leaves and flowers and fruit; both of which, and not one of which, make the Tree. Think also whether thou hast known no Public Quacks, on far higher scale than this, whom a Castle of St. Angelo never could get hold of; and how, as Emperors, Chancellors, (having Such, according to our comprehension there- found much fitter machinery,) they could run of, is the rise, progress, grandeur, and deca- their Quack-career; and make whole kingdoms, dence of the Quack of Quacks. Does the reader whole continents, into one huge Egyptian ask, What good was in it, Why occupy his Lodge, and squeeze supplies, of money or time and hours with the biography of such a blood, from it, at discretion? Also, whether miscreant? We answer, It was stated on the thou even now knowest not Private Quacks, very threshold of this matter, in the loftiest innumerable as the sea-sands, toiling half-Cagterms, by Herr Sauerteig, that the Lives of all liostricålly, of whom Cagliostro is as the Eminent Persons (miscreant or creant) ought | ideal type-specimen? Such is the world. Unto be written. Thus has not the very Devil derstand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold his Life, deservedly written not by Daniel De- on thy way through it, with thy eye on higher foe only, but by quite other hands than Da-loadstars!

DEATH OF THE REV. EDWARD IRVING.

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1835.]

| lanthropism, and the Revolution of Three Days! He might have been so many things; not a speaker only, but a doer; the leader of hosts of men. For his head (when the FogBabylon had not yet obscured it) was of strong far-searching insight; his very enthusiasm was sanguine, not atrabiliar; he was so

EDWARD IRVING's warfare has closed; if not in victory, yet in invincibility, and faithful endurance to the end. The Spirit of the Time, which could not enlist him as its soldier, must needs, in all ways, fight against him as its enemy: it has done its part, and he has done his. One of the noblest natures-a man of antique heroic nature, in questionable modern garni-loving, full of hope, so simple-hearted, and ture, which he could not wear! Around him made all that approached him his. A giant a distracted society, vacant, prurient; heat force of activity was in the man; speculation and darkness, and what these two may breed: was accident, not nature. Chivalry, advenmad extremes of flattery, followed by madder turous field-life of the old Border (and a far contumely, by indifference and neglect!-these nobler sort) ran in his blood. There was in were the conflicting elements; this is the re-him a courage dauntless, not pugnacious; sult they have made out among them. The hardly fierce, by no possibility ferocious: as voice of our "son of thunder," with its deep of the generous war-horse, gentle in its tone of wisdom, (that belonged to all articulate-strength, yet that laughs at the shaking of the speaking ages,) never inaudible amid wildest spear.-But, above all, be what he might, to dissonances, (that belonged to this inarticulate be a reality was indispensable for him. In his age, which slumbers and somnambulates, simple Scottish circle, the highest form of which cannot speak, but only screech and gib-manhood attainable or known was that of ber,) has gone silent so soon. Closed are Christian; the highest Christian was those lips. The large heart, with its large Teacher of such. Irving's lot was cast. For bounty, where wretchedness found solacement, the foray-spears were all rusted into earth and they that were wandering in darkness the there; Annan Castle had become a Town-hall; light as of a home, has paused. The strong and Prophetic Knox had sent tidings thither: man can no more: beaten on from without, Prophetic Knox-and, alas, also Skeptic undermined from within, he must sink over- Hume,--and (as the natural consequence) wearied, as at nightfall, when it was yet but Diplomatic Dundas. In such mixed inconthe mid-season of day. Irving was forty-two grous element had the young soul to grow. years and some months old: Scotland sent him Grow nevertheless he did (with that strong forth a Herculean man; our mad Babylon vitality of his); grow and ripen. What the wore him and wasted him, with all her en- Scottish uncelebrated Irving was, they that gines; and it took her twelve years. He have only seen the London celebrated (and sleeps with his fathers, in that loved birth- distorted) one can never know. Bodily and land: Babylon with its deafening inanity rages spiritually, perhaps there was not (in that Noon; but to him henceforth innocuous, unheed-vember, 1822,) a man more full of genial ed-for ever.

Reader, thou hast seen and heard the man (as who has not?) with wise or unwise wonder; thou shalt not see or hear him again. The work, be what it might, is done; dark curtains sink over it, enclose it ever deeper into the unchangeable Past.-Think (if thou be one of a thousand, and worthy to do it) that here once more was a genuine man sent into this our ungenuine phantasmagory of a world, which would go to ruin without such; that here once more, under thy own eyes, in this last decade, was enacted the old Tragedy (and has had its fifth-act now) of The Messenger of Truth in the Age of Shams,-and what relation thou thyself mayest have to that. Whether any? Beyond question, thou thyself art here; either a dreamer or awake; and one day shalt cease to dream.

This man was appointed a Christian Priest; and strove with the whole force that was in him to be it. To be it: in a time of Tithe Controversy, Encyclopedism, Catholic Rent, Phi

energetic life in all these Islands.

the

By a fatal chance, Fashion cast her eye on him, as on some impersonation of NovelCameronianism, some wild product of Nature from the wild mountains; Fashion crowded round him, with her meteor lights, and Bacchic dances; breathed her foul incense on him; intoxicating, poisoning. One may say, it was his own nobleness that forwarded such ruin: the excess of his sociability and sympathy, of his value for the suffrages and sympathies of men. Syren songs, as of a new Moral Reformation, (sons of Mammon, and high sons of Belial and Beelzebub, to become sons of God, and the gumflowers of Almack's to be made living roses in a new Eden,) sound in the inexperienced ear and heart. Most se. ductive, most delusive! Fashion went her idle way, to gaze on Egyptian Crocodiles, Iro quois Hunters, or what else there might be, forgot this man,-who unhappily could not in his turn forget. The intoxicating poison had been swallowed; no force of natural health could cast it out. Unconsciously, for most

part in deep unconsciousness, there was now | within. The misguided noble-minded had the impossibility to live neglected; to walk on now nothing left to do but die. He died the the quiet paths, where alone it is well with us. death of the true and brave. His last words, Singularity must henceforth succeed Singu- they say, were: "In life and in death, I am the larity. O foulest Circean draught, thou poison Lord's."-Amen! Amen! of Popular Applause! madness is in thee, and death; thy end is Bedlam and the Grave. For the last seven years, Irving, forsaken by the world, strove either to recall it, or to forsake it; shut himself up in a lesser world of ideas and persons, and lived isolated there. Neither in this was there health: for this man such isolation was not fit; such ideas, such persons.

One light still shone on him; alas, through a medium more and more turbid: the light from Heaven. His Bible was there, wherein must lie healing for all sorrows. To the Bible he more and more exclusively addressed himself. If it is the written Word of God, shall it not be the acted Word too? Is it mere sound, then; black printer's-ink on white rag-paper? A half-man could have passed on without answering; a whole man must answer. Hence Prophecies of Millenniums, Gifts of Tongues,whereat Orthodoxy prims herself into decent wonder, and waves her Avaunt! Irving clave to his Belief, as to his soul's soul; followed it whithersoever, through earth or air, it might lead him; toiling as never man toiled to spread it, to gain the world's ear for it,-in vain. Ever wilder waxed the confusion without and

One who knew him well, and may with good cause love him, has said: "But for Irving, I had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with: I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever (after trial enough) found in this world, or now hope to find.

"The first time I saw Irving was six-andtwenty years ago, in his native town, Annan. He was fresh from Edinburgh, with College prizes, high character, and promise: he had come to see our Schoolmaster, who had also been his. We heard of famed Professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole Wonderland of Knowledge: nothing but joy, health, hopefulness without end, looked out from the blooming young man. The last time I saw him was three months ago, in London. Friendliness still beamed in his eyes, but now from amid unquiet fire; his face was flaccid, wasted, unsound; hoary as with extreme age: he was trembling over the brink of the grave. Adieu, thou first Friend; adieu, while this confused Twilight of Existence lasts! Might we meet where Twilight has become Day!"

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE.

CHAPTER I,

AGE OF ROMANCE.

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1837.]

"The

ture-masters, and the tongues of innumerable old women, (named "force of public opinion;") by prejudice, custom, want of knowTHE age of Romance has not ceased; it never ceases; it does not, if we will think of ledge, want of money, want of strength, into, the meager Pattern-Figure that, in these say, it, so much as very sensibly decline. passions are repressed by social forms; great created Man," all but abnegating the character days, meets you in all thoroughfares; a "godpassions no longer show themselves?" Why, of Man; forced to exist, automatized, mummythere are passions still great enough to re-wise, (scarcely in rare moments audible or plenish Bedlam, for it never wants tenants; visible from amid his wrappages and cereto suspend men from bed-posts, from improved-ments,) as Gentleman or Gigman;* and so drops at the west end of Newgate. A passion ments,) as Gentleman or Gigman that explosively shivers asunder the Life it selling his birthright of Eternity, for the three took rise in ought to be regarded as considerable: more, no passion, in the highest hey-day of Romance, yet did. The passions, by grace of the Supernal and also of the Infernal Powers, (for both have a hand in it,) can never fail us. And then as to “social forms," be it granted that they are of the most buckram quality, and bind men up into the pitifullest, straitlaced, common-place Existence, you ask, Where is common-place Existence, you ask, Where is the Romance? In the Scotch way one answers, Where is it not? That very spectacle of an Immortal Nature, with faculties and destiny extending through Eternity, hampered and bandaged up, by nurses, pedagogues, pos

daily meals, poor at best, which time yields: tragical, if we had eyes to look at it? The -is not this spectacle itself highly romantic, high-born (highest-born, for he came out of Heaven) lies drowning in the despicablest puddles; the priceless gift of Life, which he can have but once, for he waited a whole Eternity to be born, and now has a whole Eternity waiting to see what he will do when born,-this priceless gift we see strangled slowly out of him by innumerable packthreads; and there

''

what do you mean by respectable? He kept a Gig."-"I always considered him a respectable man.Thurtell's Trial.

remains of the glorious Possibility, which we fondly named Man, nothing but an inanimate mass of foul loss and disappointment, which we wrap in shrouds and bury underground, surely with well-merited tears. To the Thinker here lies Tragedy enough; the epitome and marrow of all Tragedy whatsoever.

But so few are Thinkers? Aye, Reader, so few think; there is the rub! Not one in the thousand has the smallest turn for thinking; only for passive dreaming and hearsaying, and active babbling by rote. Of the eyes that men do glare withal so few can see. Thus is the world become such a fearful confused Treadmill; and each man's task has got entangled in his neighbour's and pulls it awry; and the Spirit of Blindness, Falsehood, and Distraction (justly named the Devil) continually maintains himself among us; and even hopes (were it not for the Opposition, which by God's Grace will also maintain itself) to become supreme. Thus, too, among other things, has the Romance of Life gone wholly out of sight: and all History, degenerating into empty invoice-lists of Pitched Battles and Changes of Ministry; or, still worse, into "Constitutional History," or Philosophy of History, or "Philosophy teaching by Experience," is become dead, as the Almanacs of other years, to which species of composition, indeed, it bears, in several points of view, no inconsiderable affinity.

bran. In our England especially, which in these days is become the chosen land of Respectability, Life-writing has dwindled to the sorrowfullest condition; it requires a man to be some disrespectable, ridiculous Boswell before he can write a tolerable Life. Thus, too, strangely enough, the only Lives worth reading are those of Players, emptiest and poorest of the sons of Adam; who nevertheless were sons of his, and brothers of ours; and by the nature of the case, had already bidden Respectability good-day. Such bounties, in this, as in infinitely deeper matters, does Respectability shower down on us. Sad are thy doings, O Gig; sadder than those of Juggernaut's Car: that, with huge wheel, suddenly crushes asunder the bodies of men; thou, in thy light-bobbing Long-Acre springs, gradually winnowest away their souls!

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:

Depend upon it, for one thing, good Reader, no age ever seemed the Age of Romance to itself. Charlemagne, let the Poets talk as they will, had his own provocations in the world: what with selling of his poultry and potherbs, what with wanton daughters carrying secretaries through the snow; and, for instance, that hanging of the Saxons over the Weser-bridge, (thirty thousand of them, they say, at one bout,) it seems to me that the Great Charles had his temper ruffled at times. Roland of Roncesvalles, too, we see well in thinking of it, found rainy weather as well as sunny; knew what it was to have hose need darning; got tough beef to chew, or even went dinnerless; was saddlesick, calumniated, constipated, (as his madness, too clearly indicates ;) and oftenest felt, I doubt not, that this was a very Devil's world, and he (Roland) himself one of the sorriest caitiffs there. Only in long subsequent days, when the tough beef, the constipation, and the calumny, had clean vanished, did it all begin to seem Romantic, and your Turpins and Ariostos found music in it. So, I say, is it ever! And the more, as your true hero, your true Roland, is ever unconscious that he is a hero: this is a condition of all true greatness.

"Of all blinds that shut up men's vision," says one," the worst is self." How true! How doubly true, if self, assuming her cunningest, yet miserablest disguise, come on us in neverceasing, all-obscuring reflexes from the innumerable selves of others; not as Pride, not even as real Hunger, but only as Vanity, and the shadow of an imaginary Hunger, (for Applause ;) under the name of what we call "Respectability!" Alas now for our Historian: to his other spiritual deadness (which, however, so long as he physically breathes cannot be complete) this sad new magic influence is added! Henceforth his Histories must all be screwed up into the "dignity of 'History." In our own poor Nineteenth Century, the Instead of looking fixedly at the Thing, and writer of these lines has been fortunate enough first of all, and beyond all, endeavouring to to see not a few glimpses of Romance; he see it, and fashion a living Picture of it, (not a imagines this Nineteenth is hardly a whit less wretched politico-metaphysical Abstraction of romantic than that Ninth, or any other, since it,) he has now quite other matters to look to. centuries began. Apart from Napoleon, and The thing lies shrouded, invisible, in thousand- the Dantons, and Mirabeaus, whose fire-words fold hallucinations, and foreign air-images: (of public speaking) and fire-whirlwinds, (of what did the Whigs say of it? What did cannon and musquetry,) which for a season the Tories? The Priests? The Freethink- darkened the air, are, perhaps, at bottom but ers? Above all, what will my own listening superficial phenomena, he has witnessed, in circle say of me for what I say of it? And remotest places, much that could be called rothen his Respectability in general, as a literary mantic, even miraculous. He has witnessed gentleman; his not despicable talent for phi- overhead the infinite Deep, with greater and losophy! Thus is our poor Historian's faculty lesser lights, bright-rolling, silent-beaming, directed mainly on two objects; the Writing hurled forth by the Hand of God; around him, and the Writer, both of which are quite extra- and under his feet, the wonderfullest Earth, neous; and the thing written of fares as we with her winter snow-storms and her summer see. Can it be wonderful that Histories spice-airs, and (unaccountablest of all) himself (wherein open lying is not permitted) are un-standing there. He stood in the lapse of Time; romantic? Nay, our very Biographies, how he saw Eternity behind him and before him. The stiff-starched, foisonless, hollow! They stand all-encircling mysterious tide of FORCE, thouthere respectable; and what more? Dumb idols; with a skin of delusively painted waxwork; and inwardly empty, or full of rags and

sandfold, (for from force of Thought to force of Gravitation what an interval!) billowed shoreless on; bore him too along with it--he