The sun rose upon the blue and tideless sea, and poured its flood of glory over the valleys; but all was terror and consternation in the Abbey of St. Nicholas. Never before had the danger, from which they had just been delivered, so closely threatened its inmates. Never before had they been compelled to tremble for themselves; and when at length the clouds rolled away from the overcharged and heavy atmosphere, and the loud voice of the threatening crater was once more hushed, the superior remembered Father Dominic, and took his way to the upper cemetery to ascertain his fate.

There was no need now for the saintly superior to cumber himself with the ponderous keys which had been essential to the ingress of his victim; a higher hand than his own had thrown open the prison doors which he had secured so jealously. The pulse of the proud monk quickened; and visions of the vengeance of a powerful family,

tardily awakened to human affections by the awful result of an undue and disproportioned punishment, hastened his steps. His suspense was brief.

Amid the scattered ruins that cumbered the necropolis through which he sought to pass, and at the foot of the lava-circled crucifix, he detected three kneeling figures. He approached in wonder. The time-worn effigies of the attendant saints were familiar to his eye-but whence came the third? He drew nearer cautiously: a human form, encrusted with lava and clothed in the robes of the order was before him. He bent down to convince himself that he did not dream; and in the next instant he met the fixed and widely-opened eyes of his victim-the betrayed of the Lady Estrella-the accused of the Father Francesco-the son of the haughty Duce di Father Dominic, the Benedictine of Mount Etna.

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THE feeling, so general among professional men, that the leisure, which a release from active duty gives, should not be squandered in idleness or desultory exertion, but that a debt is due by the successful practitioner to the profession, which has rewarded him with exemption from care in the evening of life, and perhaps with opulence, has been the source in which some very valuable books have had their origin. With the best of such books. this volume is assuredly to be reckoned. The great value of the work consists in this, that the cases stated are such as occurred in Dr. Cheyne's own practice, or the particulars of which he had ascertained on the fullest evidence, and that the conclusions to which he has arrived, whether they seem sufficiently proved or not by the arguments he has advanced, are to be regarded as those which a man of great good sense and remarkable practical talent has derived from actual experience. It is not possible, perhaps, for any man to write on the class of subjects here discussed, without having his language more or less coloured with that of the speculations of his own day, and our author has adopted as the basis of his remarks, the doctrine, that the mind, whatever unity of essence it may have, operates as though it were an aggregate of distinct faculties. This theory has at all events the authority of popular language in its support; and whether it be true or not answers sufficiently the purposes of arrangement. The fact of one faculty being active and ready for vigorous exertion, when others are jaded or torpid, and the phenomenon of insanity confined to one mental endowment, while the mind is in other respects sane, are mentioned by Dr. Cheyne, among other considerations, as inclining him rather to the opinion, that the separate faculties of the mind

are essentially distinct, than that they are but varied conditions or operations of one simple subsistence, to which latter alternative it is but fair in the outset to apprise our readers that we lean.

The volume commences with an account of the author's life, drawn up by himself in October, 1835, a few months before his death, "in the hope," to use the language of his editor, "of interesting those who, in seeking to attain in his own profession a similar eminence with the writer, might desire to learn the means which in his case led to the accomplishment of that end."

John Cheyne was born at Leith in February, 1777. His father was a surgeon, and succeeded an uncle who pursued the same profession at the same place, where he had acquired the name of "the friend of the poor." His grandfather and great-grandfather were of the same profession. "My mother," says Dr. Cheyne, "was an ambitious woman of honourable principles, continually stimulating her children to exertion, and intently occupied with their advancement in life.'

In his tenth year, young Cheyne was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, and at once placed in a class for which he was in no way prepared. This led him often to feign sickness, that he might stay from school. His master was a vain and passionate man; "when he found that we had been idle, he would flog a whole form, till he became pale and breathless and unable to proceed, and then he would throw himself into his chair, rail at our ingratitude and magnify his own merit, till the paroxysm ended in a conviction that he was the most learned, virtuous, and wise man of his age; certain it is that my impatience to escape from his rule knew no bounds, and that during my whole life he has