observed to continue quite irreproachable-when he was seized by a severe chronic disease, which disabled him for a whole winter, and left him, at the return of spring, without a penny in his pocket, or a pupil in his academy. His life, after this disaster, was one unbroken scene of distresses, pecuniary and otherwise, and, but for the slender succour which was occasionally rendered to him by the good will, rather than the ability, of his poor neighbours, he must have died of hunger. The unfortunate always herd with the unfortunate; the unfortunate are to the unfortunate almost a sole refuge and shelter; the unfortunate alone can judge of and feel for the unfortunate; while no other can properly be to them either a companion, or a benefactor, or a judge. Inglis, while deserted by a wife, the crumbs of whose luxury would have been to him an ample furnishing, and overlooked by all men who were once his equals, found in those who were nearly as destitute as himself, the only friendship he ever experienced, the only true sympathy for his condition, the only alms that any one would give. Blessings, double blessings, be on the generous poor!

It happened in the revolutions of life, that an intimate friend of the writer of this narrative became acquainted with the story and circumstances of the unfortunate Inglis, and was able to do something for the alleviation of his many troubles. He found him to be, upon the whole, a man of an inoffensive character, of some acuteness of mind, and more than the average of information, but outworn with past excesses, and the attrition of a perpetual grief. He spoke little of his misfortunes or of his family; but one day, being rather more depressed than usual, and the cause being asked, he said he had just heard that his second son, whom he had not seen for many years, was about to come to the capital, for the purpose of studying for the bar; and being certain that the young man would be there without ever inquiring for his father, or perhaps being aware of his existence, he had experienced more than usual dis

tress of mind from the consideration of his extraordinary circumstances. My friend could not help acknowledging, that, even after enduring so much, a new circumstance, involving so unnatural an association of ideas, might well be expected to give him additional uneasiness.

This ill-used man at length died in a humble lodging, where he existed solely upon charity; and his wife, being written to on the occasion, replied by the simple transmission of a sum of money sufficient to bury him and discharge his little debts. No notice was taken of the event by his family. His widow wore her usual gay dresses; his children were not even informed of their loss; his name was "never heard."

God, however, in due time, seemed (as far as mortals might be permitted to interpret his decrees) to manifest his sense of this unholy violation of one of his earliest and most solemn injunctions. The children, in whom the mother and grandfather took so much delight, were one after another snatched away by the various diseases of childhood and youth, till not one was left to console their age, or inherit the wealth which had so absurdly been hoarded for them. The loss, it may well be supposed, was mourned with tears of double bitterness, for it was impossible to take such a calamity as an occurrence altogether within the ordinary course of nature. The lady was so much exhausted by her exertions for her children, that she took ill immediately after the death of the last, and mental anguish aiding in the progress of her malady, she did not live many weeks. Bisset, who apparently had never thought it possible that he could be predeceased by his daughter and so many blooming children, was, by this event, struck with a kind and degree of grief altogether foreign to his nature. He yet survives-but only as a spectacle to excite the pity of those who know him. Palsied, fatuous, and blind, he is nothing but a living block; nor can all his gold, immense as it is in amount, reflect one consoling ray on his decline. His wealth, which, if well used, might have spared him the

life of the only being he ever loved, and kept other hearts besides from breaking, will speedily be dispersed among a number of distant relatives, who neither care for its present owner, nor will be advantaged, perhaps, by its possession.

LONG LIVERS.

HUMAN life is not so short, but that very distant ages, or ages at least very different in character from each other, are sometimes strangely connected by the existence of an individual of the species. The progress of civilisation, and the improvement of all the arts of life, is in this country so rapid, that no one who has survived to even middle life can fail to observe the great difference between his early and his latter days. How greatly, however, is the wonder increased, when we find persons who can look back for the better part, if not the whole of a century, and describe a state of things as having obtained in their young days, which is so entirely unlike any thing we now see around us, that it appears like a chapter of ancient history, narrated by an eye-witness, who has, by some strange chance, survived the general wreck! At the present time, for instance, there must be individuals alive, who, in the midst of all the enlightenment, and all the conveniences and appliances, for which the age takes so much credit— in this age of intellect, in short-recollect a time when there was no intellect, or at most very little, and when men of course lived a very strange sort of life. We are accustomed to regard the question of the Stuart dynasty as altogether a seventeenth century question-a thing quite foreign to our feelings and associations: yet people must still live, who not only recollect the pretensions of that family being defended by a respectable party, but saw a prince of the line invade the country, and, with a band of

primitive people, who still kept alive manners, dress, and language, that had existed since before the days of the Romans, sweep through the island almost from end to end, in quest of the throne. We look upon Sir Robert Walpole as a man of quite a different day from this; and certainly one who was born in 1676, and suffered imprisonment in the Tower as an unruly member of parliament in Queen Anne's time, is entitled to be so considered. Yet, if I am not mistaken, a daughter of his, Lady Katherine Walpole, appeared in our newspaper obituaries only about two Her father died in 1745. Our own present years ago. Duke of Montrose is but the grandson of a man who bore the family honours in the year 1684, in the reign of King Charles the Second-nearly one hundred and fifty years ago-though it is curious, that, during the thirty-four preceding years, the same number of generations had borne them. What a difference between the circumstantial world of the grandfather and that of the grandson! Persons yet alive may recollect old Countess Margaret of Roxburghe, whose husband was drowned in the Gloucester frigate, coming down to Scotland with the Duke of York in 1682! She died so lately as 1753, a widow of seventy-one years. I have heard that Sir Ilay Campbell, who died in 1811, had conversed with an ancestor who had witnessed the execution of Charles the First; the space between the death of the monarch and that of the gentleman who had seen the witness of his execution, was a hundred and sixty-two years. Sir Walter Scott's mother, who died in 1820 or 1821, had spoken to a woman who recollected seeing Oliver Cromwell when in Scotland

-or rather his nose, for she remembered nothing else about him. This was still more wonderful than the case of Sir Ilay Campbell, for the space between Cromwell's last departure from Scotland to fight the battle of Worcester in August 1651, and the death of the lady whose friend had seen him, was a hundred and seventy years! Such facts, though quite within the range of nature, and perhaps oc

curring not unfrequently, strike the mind with a kind of wonder-for they bring together into one idea, two ideas remotely different, and for a moment clasp the associations of a rude and unsettled age with those of one in every respect orderly and refined. It soothes us, moreover, with a pleasing notion of the extent of what we generally complain of as too short, namely, human life, and affords the encouraging idea that man or his immediate children may witness more of the effects of his own good work than is generally expected.

In the above instances, I have alluded to the phenomena which two long lives occasionally present. There are cases, however, in which one produces wonders almost as great. When George IV. visited Scotland, one of the individuals who came to bid him welcome and kiss his hand, was Patrick Grant, a Braemar Highlander, who had fought against his dynasty at Falkirk and Culloden, and been present at the melancholy embarkation of the defeated Chevalier for France. The old man remarked, with a tact worthy of a court, that he was perhaps the last of his majesty's enemies now alive. The king gave him a pension, which he enjoyed till his death, in February 1824, aged 111 years, when three pipers marshalled him to the grave, playing a tune which had been a favourite with his brethren insurgents in 1745. This civil war is still, on account of the curious contrast which it presents to the present state of things, a subject of constant allusion and recollection in Scotland. I may therefore refer to one or two other lives by which its wonders have been, as it were, brought into the presence of the existing generation. A venerable lady, Mrs K. of C., who died last year, and till her last displayed an almost juvenile vivacity and cheerfulness, remembered having been put into mourning for her cousin, a young gentleman of Prince Charles's army, who fell in the manner of the unfortunate Balmawhapple (though in no other respect did he resemble that personage), in the pursuit which followed the victory at Prestonpans. A distinguished ex-judge of the Court of