afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury-lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle it remains. "No more I know, I wish I did, And I would tell it all to you;

For what became of this poor child

There's none that ever knew."

WORDSWORTH'S THORN.

Our whole information* is derived from the following words

“Prior.—Where is thy child?

Clotil. (Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!

Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?

Prior. (who will not, the reader may observe, be dis-
appointed of his dose of scolding)

It was to make (quere wake) one living cord o'th'heart,
And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.

Where is thy child?

Imog.-(with a frantic laugh)

The forest-fiend hath snatched him

He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare

thro' the wizzard woods."

Now these two lines consist in a senseless

* The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and

plagiarism from the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gipsey incantations, puns on the old word Mair, a Hag; and the no less senseless adoption of Dryden's forest-fiend, and the wizzard-stream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterises the spreading Deva, fabulosus Amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to any thing she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack O'Lanthorn-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours. Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected knights of St. Anselm (all in complete armour,) and so, by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed, and it is indeed so outré, that a number of the audience imagined a great secret was to come out, viz. : that the Prior was one of the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to

third acts but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate?

be his son. Imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, viz. in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain, this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination, this monster whose best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning jack ketch to himself, first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim

"I died no felon's death,

A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul!—"

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONCLUSION.

It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which like the two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phænomena of Time: and the perception and acknowledgement of the proportionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognize the effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid

atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful.It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring chearfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the presumption that whatever our fancy (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory) has not made or cannot make a picture of, must be nonsense,hence, I say, the Mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are enduring-an eternity without time, and as it were below it-God