afford a melancholy interest, through the frequent mention of names gracious to the recollection by their association with our earliest pleasures. The dropping off of actor after actor, as it stands recorded in Mr. Kelly's page, affords food for much melancholy reflection. All biography ends in a tragedy; but that of an actor is peculiarly sombre in its close. The strong contrast of the brilliant triumphs and gay dissipations of youth, with the decrepitude, dependence, and abandonment of old age, furnishes a better lesson on the world's vanity and the flight of time, than the most wearisome homily that it was ever our misfortune to listen to. Poor Mich, it must be owned, makes a terrible hash of his French and Italian, if the printer be not more to blame than he; and has fallen into some ludicrous mistakes about persons. He makes Mad. Albani to be the Pretender's daughter instead of his wife. These, however, are trifles which those who know better may correct, and those who do not will not be led into any serious error by them. One thing is commendable, that there is not a single ill-natured phrase in the whole book. We shall be very much mistaken if these volumes do not become a favourite, and take their place in Theatrical Libraries, beside the Davies's, the Cibbers, the Murphys, and other established historians of "the brief chroniclers of the times." A LETTER TO THE BELLS OF A PARISH CHURCH IN ITALY. FOR God's sake, dear bells, why this eternal noise? Why do you make this everlasting jangling and outcry? Is it not enough that the whole village talk, but you must be talking too? Are you the representative of all the gossip in the neighbourhood? Now, they tell me, you inform us that a friar is dead: now you jingle a blessing on the vines and olives, "babbling o' green fields:" anon you start away in honour of a marriage, and jangle as if the devil were in you. Your love of information may be generous where there are no newspapers; but when you have once informed us that a friar is dead, where is the necessity of repeating the same intelligence for twelve hours together? Did any one ever hear of a newspaper which contained nothing from beginning to end but a series of paragraphs, informing us that a certain gentleman was no more? Died yesterday, Father Paul- and so on from nine in the morning till nine at night? It is like a piece of cut-glass with a thousand faces in it, turned into a sound. You shall have some information in return, very necessary to be known by all the bells in Christendom. Learn then, sacred, but at the same time thoughtless tintinnabularies, that there are dying, as well as dead, people in the world, and sick people who will die if they are not encouraged. What must be the effect of this mortal note unceasingly reiterated in their ears? Who would set a whining fellow at a sick man's door to repeat to him all day long, "Your neighbour's dead ;-your neighbour's dead." But you say, "It is to remind the healthy, and not the dying, that we sound; and the few must give way to the many." Good: it delights me to hear you say so, because every thing will of course be changed in the economy of certain governments, except yourselves. But in this particular instance allow me to think you are mistaken. I differ from a belfry with hesitation. Triple bob majors are things before which it becomes a philosophic inquirer to be modest. But have we not memorandums enough to this good end? Have we not coughs, cold, fevers, plethoras, deaths of all sorts occurring round about us, old faces, churchyards, accidents infinite, books, muskets, wars, apothecaries, kings? Is not the whole nation swallowed up in grief when a minister dies? Does not even a royal old lady die now and then? You remind the sick and the dying too forcibly: but you are much mistaken if you think the healthy regard your importunity of advice in any other light than that of a considerable nuisance. They may get used to it; but what then? So much the worse for your admonitions. In like manner they get used to a hundred things which do them no sort of good; which only tend to keep their moods and tempers in a duller state of exasperation. Pray think of this. As to the bell-ringers, whom I should be unwilling to throw out of bread, they might be given some office in the state. Then the marriages. Dear bells, do you ever consider that there are people who have been married two years, as well as two hours. What here becomes of your maxim of the few giving way to the many? Have all the rest of the married people, think you, made each other deaf, so that they cannot hear the sound? It may be sport to the new couple, but it is death to the old ones. If a pair or so love one another almost as much as if they had never been married, at least they are none the better for you. If they look kindly at one another when they hear the sound, do you think it is not in spite of the bells, as well as for sweetness of recollection? In my country it is bad enough. A bell shall go for hours telling us that Mr. Ching is dead. "Ring, ring, ring-Ching, Ching, Ching-Oh Ching!-Ah Ching!Ching, I say-Ching is gone-Gone, gone, gone-Good people, listen to the steeple-Ching, Ching, Ching." 66 Ay," says a patient in his bed, "I knew him. He had the same palsy as I have." 66 Mercy on us," cries an old woman in the next house, "there goes poor Mr. Ching, sure enough." "I just had a pleasant thought," says a sick mourner, that bell! that melancholy bell!" " and now "The bell will go for me, mother, soon," observes a poor child to its weeping parent. "What will become of my poor children?" exclaims a dying father. It would be useful to know how many deaths are hastened by a bell: at least how many recoveries are retarded. There are sensitive persons, not otherwise in ill health, who find it difficult to hear the sound without tears. What must they feel on a sick bed! As for the unfeeling, who are the only persons to be benefited, they, as I said before, care for it no more than the postman's. But in England we can at least reckon upon shorter bell-ringings, and upon long intervals without any. We have not bells every day as they have here, except at the universities. The saints in the protestant calendar are quiet. Our belfries also are thicker; the clappers do not come swinging and flaring out of window, like so many scolds. Italians talk of music; but I must roundly ask, how came Italian ears to put up with this music of the Chinese? Every thing in its proper place. In China, I doubt not, you are a just relief to the monotony of the people's feelings, neither more nor less than you ought to be. Those fat, little, bald-headed, long-gowned, smirking, winking-eyed, smoked-faced gentlemen, who follow one another over impossible bridges on tea-cups, must be grateful for any information you choose to give them. But you belong to that corner of earth exclusively, and ought all to return thither. I am loth to praise any thing Musulman in these times; but to give the Turk his due, he is not addicted to superfluous noise. His belfry-men cannot deafen a neighbourhood all day long with the death of an Imaun, for they are themselves the bells. Alas! why do not steeples catch cold, and clappers require a gargle? Why must things that have no feeling-belfries, and one's advisers-be exclusively gifted with indefatigability of tongue? Lastly, your tunes! I thought, in Italy, that any thing which undertook to be musical, would be in some way or other truly so-harmonious, if not various; various and new, if not very harmonious. But I must say our bells in England have double your science. I once sang a duet with St. Clement's Church in the Strand. Indeed, I have often done it returning from a symposium in the Temple. The tune was the hundred and fourth psalm. I took the second. And this reminds me that our English bells have always the humanity to catch a cold now and then, or something like it. They will lose two or three of their notes at a time. I used to humour this infirmity in my friend St. Clement's, as became an old acquaintance, and always waited politely till he resumed. But in Italy the bells have the oddest, and at the same time the most unfading and inexorable hops of tunes, that can be imagined. Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, One might suppose that the steeple, in some unaccountable fit of merriment, struck up a country-dance, like that recorded in Mr. Monk Lewis's account of Orpheus: While an arm of the sea, To a fair young whale advances s; And making a leg, Says, "Miss, may I beg Your fin for the two next dances ?" I used to wonder at this, till one day I heard the host announced in a procession by as merry a set of fiddles, as ever played to a ship's company. The other day a dead bishop was played out in church to the tune of Di piacer. But I forget I am writing a letter; and luckily my humour, as well as my paper, is out. Besides, the bells have left off before me; for which I am their Much obliged, exhausted humble servant, SKETCHES OF THE IRISH BAR.-NO. XI. An Irish Circuit.* THE profusion of crime periodically appearing upon the Irish calendars, wears, it must be admitted, a very tremendous aspect; quite sufficient to deter the British capitalist from trusting his wealth within its reach. Yet, from the observations I have had an opportunity of making, I am greatly inclined to think that instances of pure, unmitigated, unprovoked invasion of life and property would be found (every requisite comparison being made) to be, upon the whole, less frequent than in England. The hardened, adroit, and desperate English felon, embracing and persevering in crime as a means of bettering his condition, is a character that, with the exception of two or three of the capital towns, has few counterparts in Ireland. The Irish peasantry have unquestionably increased in fierceness within the last twenty or thirty years; yet, as far as outrages upon property for the sake of gain are concerned it is never the genius of a people so poor and contented with so little, and that little so easily procured, to become gratuitous thieves and highwaymen. They have too little taste for even the necessaries of life to risk their necks for its luxuries. At seasons of unusual pressure, and under circumstances of peculiar excitement, they are less abstinent; but even then they violate the laws in numbers and as partisans, and their murders and depredations have more the character of a political revolt than of a merely felonious confederacy. In truth it may be almost said, that in the southern districts of Ireland, the only constituted authentic organ of popular discontent is midnight insurrection. If rents are too high, if the tithe-proctor is insatiable, if agents are inexorable and distrain with undue severity, the never-failing Captain Rock instanter takes the field with his nocturnal forces, issues his justificatory manifestoes, levies arms and ammunition upon the gentry, burns a few obnoxious tenements, murders a police-magistrate or two, and thus conveys to the public his dissatisfaction with a state of things, which (supposing them possible to exist in any quarter of England) would be bloodlessly laid before the nation for reprobation and redress, in a series of well-penned letters to the editor of the Morning Chronicle. There is, however, one particular felony, always figuring conspicuously upon an Irish calendar, which I rather fear that a genuine son of St. Patrick has a natural predisposition to commit for its own sake. Irishmen the most sensitive for the honour of their country, must, I think, admit, that among them a youthful admirer of the fair sex, with a hot-spring of true Milesian blood in his veins, is disposed to be rather abrupt and peremptory towards the object of his adoration. And yet among all the various cases that are tried at an Irish assizes, those in which "ladies are recommended to leave the court" are perhaps the most perplexing to a judge and jury. If, on the one hand, the Hibernian lover be often hasty and irregular in his style of courtship; on the other, the beauties of the bogs (let Mr. O'Connell deny it as he will) are sometimes frail ;--and, besides, the charge is in itself so easily made and so difficult to refute-still it may in any given case be true; and the witnesses depose to their wrongs in such heart-rending accents, and * Continued from page 402. 2 L VOL. XIV. NO. LX. weep and sigh and faint away so naturally-but then so many instances occur in which all this turns out to be imposture; and the complainant has always so many motives to swear to her own purity through thick and thin, and the boundary between importunacy and felony is so undefinable, and she is in general so ready to consent that, after all, the affair shall terminate, like a modern comedy, in a marriage, for in nine cases out of ten it is almost impossible to divine whether the real object of the prosecutrix is the prisoner's life, or his hand and fortune. The party accused (whenever in point of fact he can do so) suspects it to be the latter; and it is often amusing enough to watch his deportment, as influenced by that impression, throughout the progress of his trial. At first he takes his station at the bar with the confident and somewhat swaggering air of a man determined not to be bullied by a capital prosecution into a match against his taste. It is in vain that the prosecutrix apprises him by her softened and half-forgiving glances, and her tender reluctance to swear too hard at first, that if he says but the word she is ready " to drop the business," and fly into his arms. In vain his friends and hers endeavour to impress upon him the vast difference in point of comfort and respectability between life with a wife and home, and the premature abridgment of his days upon a gibbet. "No; his mind is made up, and he'll run all chances; and if she only tells the whole matter just as it happened and might happen to any body, not a hair of his head has cause to be afeard." This lasts for a time; but as the case in its progress begins to wear a serious aspect, and the countenance of his attorney to assume along with it a disastrous gravity, wondrous is the revolution of sentiment that is gradually but rapidly produced. She upon whom a little while ago he frowned in scorn, on a sudden begins to find favour in his sight. With every step that her gentle hand conducts him towards his doom, he becomes more conjugally inclined. The more the thickening danger compels him to reconsider his determination, the more clearly he sees that after all it will be better to receive his "death from her eyes" than from her tongue; until at length being fairly led to the foot of the gallows, with the rope, in such cases the most potent of love-chains, fast about his neck, he announces himself the repentant lover, tenders the amende honorable, and is transferred with all convenient speed from the impending gripe of the hangman to the nuptial clasp of a young and blooming bride. Such matches can hardly be said to be "made in heaven;" yet I have never heard that they turn out less prosperously than others. The wife is all gratitude and pride for having been "made an honest woman;" the husband is usually bound over at the time of the marriage to keep the peace towards the mistress of his soul; and with these collateral securities for domestic bliss, they generally contrive to live on, and defy Mr. Malthus, with as much harmony as if their fates had been united by a less circuitous process.* There is a difference of opinion among the judges as to the expediency of permitting a prosecution to be stopped in the manner above described. The question is full of difficulty; but all things considered, it would probably be more salutary, to let the law in every instance take its course. If an indulgence, which originated in humanity, often saves a court and jury from a distressing duty, it, on the other hand, has a tendency to encourage interested prosecutions, and also to render the actual commission of the crime more frequent, by holding out to offenders the possibility of such a means of escape in the last resort, |