cultivated in England, and he heard the well-remembered lines

"Ah, blessed Mary! hear me sighing!
On this cold stone mean labours plying;
Yet Rathmore's heiress might I name me ;
And broad lands, rich and many, claim me."

He listened attentively, and heard the whole song of Mary Cruys. He looked stealthily round the crag, and saw a young female in the garb of a peasant, pale and sorrowful, but very handsome. She was resting a bucket of water on a stone; her face was turned towards him, and notwithstanding the change from childhood to womanhood, he recognised the long-lost Kate Plunket, and at once perceived that, placed in similar circumstances with her ancestress, she was applying to herself, as justly she might, the old ancestral ditty. Thus, after the lapse of two centuries, the lay of Mary Cruys was again sung on English ground by an ill-fated Irish girl, the second dispossessed heiress of Rathmore, the lineal descendant of the first.

The officer gently approached; and, accosting the maiden in Irish, to her joyful surprise told her that he recognised her, and expressed so much sympathy for her bereavement that he won her good opinion; and she imparted to him that, immediately on the slaughter of her father and brothers, the faithful old nurse, alarmed for her nurseling's safety, hurried her away to the coast, where, under feigned names, they embarked for England. After landing at a northern port, they moved far into the country, to seek a solitude where they might live unmolested. Their sole means of subsistence had been their own industry. The old woman had recently died; and now she, the daughter of a time-honoured house, stood alone in the world, friendless, helpless, and poor.

The Irish maiden and the English officer often met again. He declared himself her lover in all honour, attracted by her beauty and her sorrows. He was (says tradition) a handsome man, and of pleasing address; and he found favour in Kate Plunket's admiring eyes and grateful heart. They were married, and she was rescued from destitution and menial toil; but, unlike her prototype and progenitrix, she never became possessed of Rathmore.

And here we shall be expected to say of this romantically-united couple, in the conventional phrase of story

tellers, "they lived happily together all the days of their lives." But we are not writing fiction; we are but chronicling what tradition affirms to be truth. And tradition has preserved a rumour so disheartening that we would omit it, but that it is so true to human nature we should not feel justified in the suppression. Reluctantly we add the rumour- that, in wedding Kate Plunket, the English officer, who did then feel attachment for her, cherished some latent hope that she might yet obtain the estates to which, on the failure of her brothers, she was heiress, and might thus react the whole part of her ancestress. But finding his hope vain, disappointment soured and changed him. He soon perceived faults in his wife to which he had previously been blind-not in her person, temper, or disposition, they were above censure, but in the rustic, unpolished habits and manners which, he complained, she had contracted in her peasant life, and from her plebeian companion, the poor old nurse. In this respect Mary Cruys had been more fortunate, for she had the advantage of the society of an accomplished mother. Kate Plunket's husband began to feel ashamed of her, to watch every word and gesture of hers with prejudice, and to chide her for them with moroseness.

It is the cunning of evil to hide itself where least suspected, among good intentions, till it gains time to mar them. Amiable as were the feelings of this officer at first, the small leaven of covetousness that was suffered to mingle with them, soon leavened the whole. Kate Plunket found it impossible to please him; and at length, for their mutual peace sake, they separated. A provision was, however, made by him for this woman of sad vicissitudes; and wherever she ended her days, let us hope it was in a quiet haven, where she found consolation from One more just, more merciful, and more stable in his ways than man.

Some kinsman of the last Plunket long lingered about Rathmore, perhaps in the vague idea of substantiating some claim; for in an inquisition held at Trim, 1691, it appears that one Angel (Angelo?) Plunket, who forfeited his lands of Scurlockstown (near Kells) for adherence to James II., was then resident at Rathmore. The last person who, by pedigree, was considered to be head and representative of

the Plunkets of Rathmore, was concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1798. He escaped to Belgium, where his posterity still reside.

To conclude the story of Rathmore. About 1654, the estate was obtained by purchase from Government by Mr. John Bligh, citizen of London, in whose descendants it continues vested. He died 1666. His broken tomb, with his arms and a Latin inscription, is in the ruined church beside the south wall. It was in the time of his son and heir, Thomas, that the castle was destroyed by a fire originating in the kitchen. The eldest son of the said Thomas was created first Earl of Darnley. The monument of General Bligh, brother of the first earl, is just over the broken

tomb of his grandfather, John Bligh. It is a white marble tablet, recording the services of the deceased in the British army at Dettingen, Fontenoy, Val, and Mell. He died 1775, aged 80. He used to take great pleasure in the memory of Dettingen. At his residence, Brittas (near Nobber, once a seat of the Cruys family), he planted a field with groups of trees representing the disposition of the troops he commanded at Dettingen. It is still called "The Soldier's Field."

And here we conclude our subjectobserving that, in recording the history of the Plunkets of Rathmore, it is impossible not to recall, hacknied though it be, the trite saying, "Sic transit gloria mundi.”

M. E. M.

ANOTHER Volume of the works of De Quincey has just appeared, calculated to strengthen the claim which, as in our April number we sought to impress upon our readers, their author has to hold high rank among that class of intellectual men who, from one cause or another, have preferred exercising their talents in the wide field of periodical literature to formally illustrating some one subject in elaborate works. It may humble the pride of those who have adopted the latter course, seemingly the more ambitious, to remember that almost all which is permanent in our prose literature has had its origin in what is called occasional writing that the Addisons, the Swifts, the Johnsons, the Goldsmiths, have in this way produced their best works; that in the generation immediately before that to which De Quincey is now communicating his collected works, the case was not essentially different. Lamb, Southey, Coleridge, and Jeffrey, have left us nothing in prose which does not seem at least to have grown out of the exigencies of the moment. It was the

same

case with the great German writers who most influenced the public mind with them, if possible, more than in England. We do not know any one prose work of Schiller's which was not written for one of the periodi

cals which he conducted. The correspondence between him and Goethe shows how entirely Goethe's prose works, even his more ambitious novels, grew out of the demands upon him to supply his proportion of matter to such publications. In France, in Scotland, and in Germany, the professorial system of teaching secures a good deal of this "easy writing," which, no doubt, is often "damned hard reading," but still it aids in forming a healthy public opinion, and every now and then a good book turns up.

De Quincey's is far from a professorial tone; still there is rather more about him than we quite like of the lecturer something that if not pedantry, has the worse fault of immature and ambitious scholarship. He is more than a learner- less than one who has thoroughly learned: hence the parade of doubtful derivations; hence the odd claims affirming his originality in matters familiarly known to all men. The new information which De Quincey would give us is often founded on total or partial mistake. Now and then he throws light from some old lexicon on passages that schoolboys or even schoolmasters had, some thirty or forty years ago, been in the habit of mistranslating. He is, no doubt, a man of very extensive reading, if not of very accurate information.

or,

The new volume of his works. rather, of "Selections Grave and Gay" from his works is entitled "Miscellanies, chiefly Narrative," and consists of six articles, the names of which are "The Spanish Military Nun," "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant," "System of the Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse's Telescopes," "Joan of Arc," "The Casuistry of Roman Meals," and "Modern Superstition.' The volume which immediately preceded this in the order of publication, entitled "Autobiographical Sketches," contained, besides two papers more immediately connected with the residences of his family in his own early manhood, the following-" Early Memorials of Grasmere," "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," "William Wordsworth," and "Robert Southey." Of the papers connected with his family, we gave in a former article some account. Those which relate to the poets of the lake circle are of more general interest, and we are glad to find them printed in a way which, if it does not give them a more extensive circulation than they obtained through Tait's Magazine, where they first appeared, will at least introduce them to another class of readers; while in the course of our article we shall make such selections as are best fitted to give our readers a faithful representation of the book. We must state that this often becomes very difficult from the difliuseness of Mr. De Quincey's style. There is nothing that he can write about which does not bring to his mind, by some accident of association, a hundred other things, and then comes parenthesis within parenthesis of thought; and it would be well that the involutions of language always followed or expressed those of thought, but, on the contrary, he rolls his ball of worsted along the ground, allowing the yarn to evolve for ever. The total absence of any control over what presents itself to his mind, makes his style, in spite of numberless thoughts all seeking for utterance, often exceedingly wearisome. With infinitely less knowledge, with a thousand times less of talents and of genius, he would have been a more effective writer; he would then have entire command over his faculties; and the subordinate powers, instead of each in its turn claiming rule, would have been held under due discipline, and been usefully ministerial. It will

not do for a writer of any class to endeavour to startle and surprise his readers with displays of artificial fireworks and untimely exhibitions of skill; to tell us in an essay on the planetary system how much better he knows the way of writing an epic poeni than Homer, or a tragedy than Shakspeare, though, somehow or other, he has never thought of exemplifying his doctrine by accomplishing the feat. In Mr. De Quincey's papers about Wordsworth and the other poets, the best parts are the narrative. We wish that we had skill enough to separate them altogether from his speculations, either on subjects of poetical criticism or his general views of society. His descriptions of scenery are also occasionally very beautiful.

We have read more than once, and each time with increasing pleasure, his description of Easedale, which he connects with a tragic narrative of a family lost in the snow:

"The little valley of Easedale is, on its own account, one of the most impressive solitudes amongst the mountains of the Lake district, and I must pause to describe it. Easedale is impressive as a solitude, for the depth of the seclusion is brought out and forced more pointedly upon the feelings by the thin scattering of houses over its sides, and over the surface of what may be called its floor. These are not above six at the most; and one, the remotest of the whole, was untenanted for all the thirty years of my acquaintance with the place. Secondly, it is impressive from the excessive loveliness which adorns its little area. This is broken up into small fields and miniature meadows, separated, not -as too often happens, with sad injury to the beauty of the lake country-by stone walls, but sometimes by little hedgerows, sometimes by little sparkling, pebbly becks,' lustrous to the very bottom, and not too broad for a child's flying leap; and sometimes by wild self-sown woodlands of birch, alder, holly, mountain ash, and hazel, that meander through the valley, intervening the different estates with natural sylvan marches, and giving cheerfulness in winter, by the bright scarlet of their berries. It is the character of all the northern English valleys and it is a character first noticed by Wordsworth-that they assume, in their bottom areas, the level, floor-like shape, making everywhere a direct angle with the surrounding hills, and definitely marking out the margin of their outlines; whereas the Welsh valleys have too often the glaring imperfection of the basin shape, which allows no sense of any flat area, or valley surface: the hills are already commencing at the

very centre of what is called the level arca. The little valley of Easedale is, in this respect, as highly-finished as in every other; and in the Westmoreland spring is the most verdant that it is possible to imagine. But there is a third advantage possessed by this Easedale above other rival valleys, in the sublimity of its mountain barriers. In one of its many rocky recesses is seen a 'force' (such is the local name for a cataract), white with foam, descending at all seasons with considerable strength, and, after the melting of snows, with an Alpine violence. Follow the leading of this 'force' for threequarters of a mile, and you come to a little mountain lake, locally termed a 'tarn,' the very finest and most gloomily sublime of its class. And far beyond this'enormous barrier,' that thus imprisons the very winds, tower upwards the aspiring heads (usually enveloped in cloud and mist) of Glaramara, Bow Fell, and the other fells of Langdale Head and Borrowdale. Easedale, in its relation to Grasmere, is a chamber within a chamber, or rather a closet within a chamber - a chapel within a cathedral - a little private oratory within a chapel."-pp. 104107.

In 1807 De Quincey first met Cole. ridge. He had before known of him as the author of the "Ancient Mariner," which was first printed with the poems which Wordsworth published in 1799 under the title of "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge's name was not given in the volume, and De Quincey did not learn it for some years. It became, however, known to him through publications of Southey's, and he sought out with enthusiasmi every thing he could find of his. At last he was told of the poet as one who had given his whole mind to metaphysics and psychology-"which," says De Quincey, happened to be my own absorbing pursuit." A personal acquaintance was now anxiously desired by our author, but Coleridge was at Malta, and to Malta De Quincey thought of going; but Coleridge returned, and his admirer instantly made a pilgrimage to his place of residence. It happened that at this time Coleridge's head-quarters were at the house of Mr. Poole, at Nether Stowey, among the When De Quantock Hills. Quincey arrived he found that Coleridge was away on a visit of a few days, and he remained till his return. Poole took him to see Wordsworth, whose acquaintance he thus made, and on their return they had a good deal of conversation about Coleridge.

Among other things discussed between them were Coleridge's claims to originality, with respect to which it would seem grave doubts were entertained by his friends. It seems plain that he now and then communicated to Poole and others matters which they had not heard before, but which, from the very nature of the subjects, must have been assumed to be known to every regularly educated man. To state a man's own peculiar conceptions, it may be often necessary to commence by stating something which is not in any way peculiar. Of Coleridge's originality, in the true sense of the word, there can be no doubt; there is just as little that his friends now and then ascribed to him, as if he had originated it, much that he was the first to communicate to them, and this without there being on either side any moral fault. De Quincey seems to have thought that Coleridge wished to be thought to have originated some of the trifles for trifles after all they were - which Poole regarded with admiration; and this view is amusingly expressed:

"Did the reader ever see Milton's account of the rubbish contained in the Greek and Latin fathers ?-or did he ever read a statement of the monstrous chaos with which an African Obeah man stuffs his enchanted scarecrows? or, to take a more common illustration, did he ever amuse himself by searching the pockets of a child-three years old, suppose when buried in slumber after a long summer's day of out-o'-doors intense activity? I have done this; and, for the amusement of the child's mother, have analysed the contents, and drawn up a formal register of the whole. Philosophy is puzzled, conjecture and hypothesis are confounded, in the attempt to explain the law of selection which can have presided in the child's labours: stones remarkable only for weight, old rusty hinges, nails, crooked skewers, stolen when the cook had turned her back, rags, broken glass, tea-cups having the bottom knocked out, and loads of similar jewels, were the prevailing articles in this proces verbal. Yet, doubtless, much labour had been incurred, some sense of danger, perhaps, had been faced, and the anxieties of a conscious robber endured, in order to amass this splendid treasure. Such in value were the robberies of Coleridge; such their usefulness to himself or anybody else; and such the circumstances of uneasiness under which he had committed them."-pp. 152, 153.

While Coleridge was away, Lord Egmont called with a present of snuff for him. He pressed on Poole to try

and engage Coleridge in the creation of some "monumental work that might furnish a sufficient arena for the display of his various and rare accomplishments," and he suggested a history of Christianity. But at any rate," he added, "let him do something, for at present he talks very much like an angel, and does nothing at all. What a pity if this man were to vanish like an apparition; and you, I, and a few others, who have witnessed his grand bravuras of display, were to have the usual fortune of ghostseers, in meeting no credit for any statements that we might vouch on his behalf."

From something Lord Egmont said, De Quincey learned that Coleridge was at Bridgewater; and that though he had appointed to return to Poole, his habits of procrastination were such that they could not make any guess when they might see him. The OpiumEater now for the first time learned that Coleridge, too, took opium. This accounted for all his irregularities. To write to him would have been worse than foolish, for he never opened a letter; so De Quincey took his leave of Poole, and made his way to Bridge

water:

"I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge was visiting, and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing, and gazing about him, a man whom I will describe. In height, he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was, in reality, about an inch and a-half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were large, and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognised my object. This was Coleridge. examined him steadfastly for a minute or more; and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn-door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him. He started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose, or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to

I

either of us. There was no mauvaise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked, that it might be called gracious. The hospitable family with whom he was domesticated were distinguished for their amiable manners and enlightened understanding; they were descendants from Chubb, the philosophic writer, and bore the same name. For Coleridge they all testified deep affection and esteem-sentiments in which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share, for in the evening, when the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with him; and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much interrupted in one hour's space as Coleridge, on this occasion, by the courteous attentions of young and old.

"All the people of station and weight in the place, and apparently all the ladies, were abroad to enjoy the lovely summer evening, and not a party passed without some mark of smiling recognition; and the majority stopping to make personal inquiries about his health, and to express their anxiety that he should make a lengthened stay amongst them. Certain I am, from the lively esteem expressed towards Coleridge at this time by the people of Bridgewater, that a very large subscription might in that town have been raised to support him amongst them, in the character of a lecturer or philosophical professor."-pp. 156-7.

De Quincey tells us that in the commercial towns of England he has met more taste and information, and more natural eloquence in conversation on literary topics, than in places professedly learned. He ascribes this to the better division of time in such places. The day is given to business; the hours which are not employed in business given to the enjoyments of society. Mere literary men meet with the feeling of having a character to sustain; and this occasions either pretension or reserve, each almost equally destructive of all comfort in intercourse :

"Coleridge led me to a drawing-room, rang the bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me that there would be a very large dinner party on that day, which, perhaps, might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I was too anxious to see him under all aspects, to think of declining this invitation. That point being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of