and covering his face with his hands, rested his head on the edge of it. For a brief space he seemed to be engaged in prayer, during which he sobbed audibly, but soon recovering himself he rose, and folding his arms across his breast, sat down slowly and deliberately on the banquillo, facing the firing party with an unshrinking eye. He was now told that he must turn his back and submit to be tied like the others. He resisted this, but on force being attempted to be used, he sprung to his feet, and stretching out his hand, while a dark red flush passed transiently across his pale face, he exclaimed, in a loud voice, "Thus, thus, and not otherwise, you may butcher me, but I am an Englishman and no traitor, nor will I die the death of one." Moved by his gallantry the soldiers withdrew, and left him standing. At this time the sun was intensely hot, it was high noon, and the monk who attended Mr S held an umbrella over his head; but the preparations being completed, he kissed him on both cheeks, while the hot tears trickled down his own, and was stepping back, when the unhappy man said to him, with the most perfect composure," Todavia padre, todavia, mucho me gusta la sombra." But the time had arrived, the kindhearted monk was obliged to retire. The signal was given, and they were as clods of the valley"Truly," quoth old Splinter, "a man does sometimes become a horse by being born in a stable." Some time after this we were allowed to go to the village of Turbaco, a few miles distant from the city, for change of air. On the third morning after our arrival, about the dawning, I was suddenly awakened by a shower of dust on my face, and a violent shaking of the bed, accompanied by a low grumbling unearthly noise, which seemed to pass immediately under where I lay. Were I to liken it to any thing I had ever experienced before, it would be to the lumbering and tremor of a large waggon in a tempestuous night, heard and felt through the thin walls of a London house.Like-yet how fearfully different. In a few seconds the motion ceased, and the noise gradually died away in hollow echoes in the distanceVOL. XXIX. NO, CLXXXI. whereupon ensued such a crowing of cocks, cackling of geese, barking of dogs, lowing of kine, neighing of horses, and shouting of men, women, and children, amongst the negro and coloured domestics, as baffles all description, whilst the various white inmates of the house (the rooms, for air and coolness, being without ceiling, and simply divided by partitions run up about ten feet high) were, one and all, calling to their servants and each other, in accents which did not by any means evince great composure. In a moment this hubbub again sank into the deepest silenceman, and the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, became mute with breathless awe, at the impending tremendous manifestation of the power of that Almighty Being in whose hands the hills are as a very little thing-for the appalling voice of the earthquake was once more heard growling afar off, like distant thunder mingling with the rushing of a mighty wind, waxing louder and louder as it approached, and upheaving the sure and firm.set earth into long undulations, as if its surface had been the rolling swell of the fathomless ocean. The house rocked, pictures of saints fell from the walls, tables and chairs were overturned, the window frames were forced out of their embrazures and broken in pieces, beams and rafters groaned and screamed, crushing the tiles of the roof into ten thousand fragments. In several places the ground split open into chasms a fathom wide, with an explosion like a cannon shot; the very foundation of the house seemed to be sinking under us; and whilst men and women rushed like maniacs naked into the fields, with a yell as if the Day of Judgment had arrived, and the whole brute creation, in an agony of fear, made the most desperate attempts to break forth from their enclosures into the open air, the end wall of my apartment was shaken down; and falling outwards with a deafening crash, disclosed, in the dull grey mysterious twilight of morning, the huge knarled trees that overshadowed the building, bending and groaning, amidst clouds of dust, as if they had been tormented by a tempest, although the air was calm and motionless as death. 3 s THE LORD ADVOCATE ON REFORM. IT has long been a questio vexata with moralists, whether greatness of mind be most severely tried by prosperity or adversity. We have now the finest opportunity afforded us that ever befell philosophers of lulling it into perpetual peace. For we, who a few months ago were sitting like a bright young bridegroom blackbird on the topmost twig of the tree of felicity, making the woods ring with our song, are now sitting like an old sick widower crow at its foot, incapable even of a caw, and deepening the gloom with that of our disshevelled plumage that bears tokens both of Erebus and Friesland. "Surely you don't say so?" whispers, with the sweetest of all susurrus, the Pensive Public. "Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen !" continueth she the silver-trumpet-tongued; and responsing," Christopher is himself again!" we spring suddenly to our feet, and exult to feel, what all the world sees, that still doth our "stature reach the sky!"-that even in these days there are giants. One thing at least is already manifest, (and our enemies, we do hope, will not fail bitterly to abuse us for it,) that our high opinion of ourselves is not lowered by the Decline and Fall of that Tory Empire of which we yet are the head. Perhaps Decline and Fall are words too Gibbonian for the occasion; and we should be speaking more correctly, perhaps, were we to say, the Dismemberment or Partition of Toryland. Those provinces which had been wrested from us by the Radicals, our valour has already more than half-rescued from their gripeand we fear not but that the issue of this opening campaign will be the restoration to us, their lawful monarch, of the other provinces now in the possession of the Whigs. And thus the Empire will, as of old, maintain the balance of power in Europe, and put an end for ever to that kicking of the beam so offensive to the ear of blindfolded Justice. Our high opinion of ourselves, we say, has not been lowered; and pray why should it? It has-pardon the expression-been highered; and when we look around us on the general madness, and listen to its ra vings, you can have no conception of the united sense of glory and of gratitude which lifts us up above-but not aloof from-that unhappy mass of mankind. "The general madness sayest thou, friend?" quoth a Quaker. "Yea, verily, the general madness," is our prompt reply; and we are prevented but by our unconquerable courtesy from adding, that of all the insane now shouting under the epidemic, Broadbrim himself is the most conspicuously absurd, bawling for reform in a garb that holds the prophetic soul of the wide world "dreaming of things to come," at such defiance as, had she any sense of the ludicrous, would long ere now have made her split her sides with inextinguishable laughter. Whatever, then, be the true nature of the predicament in which wewho seem to be in what Brother Jonathan would call a pretty considerable minority-are now placed,—and whatever the feelings which now agitate our secret hearts,-you see we are resolved at least to put on a cheerful phiz, and not to die either of the dumps or the mumps, or any other of the dismals. Such is the natural and acquired obstinacy-or, in other words, the heroic hilarity of our hearts, that a thousand times rather would we be what we are, a poor placeless Tory, who came into this world with a wooden ladle in his mouth, than any one of the devil's dozen of my Lord Grey's rich kith and kin Whigs, who are now revelling in place or pension, and who, to the astonishment of their respective accoucheurs, made their successful debut on the stage of life each with a silver spoon in his sucking organ. We know that the downfall of Christopher North would rejoice the savage souls of the British Jacobins now, as intensely as the downfall of Paris rejoiced the savage souls of the French Jacobins at the Revolution. If things keep progressing, we shall not be at all surprised to find ourselves, on some fine sunny summer morning-guillotined. Let all then who love us and themselves prevent things from progressing; and thus the properties and persons of Tories-that is, all those blessings that make life desirable-and all those Christians who are worthy of enjoying them-may be preserved inviolate-in bright succession-in secula seculorum. What are the Tories about? Answer that question they who can; for it is one of the few to which we must pause for a reply. Where is the Tory-Press? The only one we know is in Messrs Ballantyne's printing-office, and even now the happy engine has the ever-young and blooming Maga in his arms. He cannot contain himself in his ecstasy; but tells the secret of their loves to the whole court by a clanking and creaking that disturbs the peace, and threatens to shake the foundation of the establishment. What a contrast he to the lazy lubber in the adjacent chamber, shamming sleep with old faded Blue and Yellow at his back, who, dying of vexation, solicits in vain one feeble pressure once a-quarter! Were there a few more such nymphs as Maga in the world, and a few more such patent presses, soon would Toryism flourish like a green bay-tree, while the Loves and Graces, the Sciences and the Virtues, would lead choral-dancers round its trunk, and duly Morn and Eve celebrate beneath its shade their blameless orgies. The whole island would be a perfect Picardy; and one continuous Noctes Ambrosianæ (grumble not at the grammar) rule the year, that would not then miss the unneeded sun, and forget the dull day in those ineffable nocturnal splendours. What are the Tories about? we again ask, and again pause for a reply. Where are their pens that used to be like poniards? Why sleep the assassins? Has death dethroned the Old Man of the Mountain? Extinguished are the royal race of Tory Anonymi-the viewless spirits who for ages have kept the golden rim that rounds the temples of our King from being torn from his forehead, and trampled under reforming and revolutionary feet? We call on them to UNFURL THEIR STANDARDS. One, however glorious, is not enough. Let them "Post to their revenge." Roar every John Bull as if he were of Bashan. Be every banner-staff of Ebony-difficult to bend and impossible to break-true Blackwood; tempered be every blade in the Thames, the Tweed, or the Shannon-the charge be with heads of columns-Christopher North Generalissimo of the allied armies-and our power shall level their long array like a storm laneing a forest. We have for a long time past been sick of being never abused. What can everybody mean by nobody cursing Blackwood? The time was'tis like the indistinct memory of a dream-a dream too like that of a region supposed by some to lie in the bowels of the earth, long to last on its surface-when all of woman born seemed to have entered into a solemn league and covenant to make Maga a monster. The Gentleman in Black, in their imagination, was a beauty to the Lady in Brown. Horns she had not, nor yet a tail; but such a face-such a headand such a tongue in it! Why, the Fates, the Furies, the Harpies, and the Gorgons, in the world's diseased fancy, made but one Venus, Love's goddess on Mount Ida, in comparison with Maga, a hell-cat from the kingdom of Pluto, who, at the instance of Proserpine, (jealous,) had expelled her for sake of the peace of his doleful dominions. But now we could shed tears to think of it, fast as " Arabian trees their medicinal gum"-we are, alas ! looked on as human; our infernal is lost in our earthly; nay, some charitable single souls, if not whole sects, have publicly hinted their suspicions that we may be Christians; and one spirit beyond the present age--for which the future will vote him canonization-has boldly declared, that not only have we a soul to be saved, but that saved it is, and that in due time we shall go to heaven. All this is mortifying exceedingly; yet mourn we not as those who have no hope. The bloody old Times may yet fall foul on us; the foggy Morning Chronicle yet shower its cold blash of sleet in our faces; the Herald cease the paltry sidewind war of the interpolation of our articles, and boldly proclaim our general infamy; the Globe, and all which it inherit, doom us, like Bellerophon, to "roam forlorn that sad Aleian field;" the Luminary, whom nobody must dare to call false, strike us with a coup de soleil; the Atlas, whose place must be no sinecure, 982 The Lord Advocate on Reform. make us an exception, and drop us from his world-supporting shoulder into a sea of penal fires; that lynxeyed Minos, the Examiner, pry into our very heart, visited, as he once generously admitted it to be, with occasional gleams of feeling," and sift our chaffy consciences, "destitute," as he once justly asserted them to be, of " principles, and leave us not the likeness of a dog or a Diogenes; while the Spectator, who, t'other day, perspicuously expressed his wonder, and obscurely his disappointment, that the Edinburgh mob did not roll the seventeen citizens, who elected Mr Dundas member of the city instead of Mr Jeffrey, in the kennel all the way down that magnificent inclined plane ycleped Leith Walk, and then cleanse them in the surgy Thetis, will, we would fain hope, with an intelligent countenance, stand smiling by, while a pulk or puke of Whigs, and a rag of Radicals, assailing Christopher in a fine fit of heroic patriotism akin to that which they felt who of yore exclaimed, "Oh! for a single hour of great Dundee!" attempt-perhaps to their own discomfiture-to drown the "old man eloquent" in the sea of oblivion. Yes! we trust to Providence that there is " a braw time coming," and that we shall yet escape on wings from beneath the intolerable weight of almost universal and grievous praise, up into the troubled air of general and gross abuse, in which we shall career like an eagle among the murky clouds. How often we have compared ourself to an eagle-and yet every time with a new and various twinkle of our wing-so dissimilis, but not impar sibi, is genius-it is not for us, but for the admiring world, to attempt in vain to enumerate. In our hands well fareth it with eagle as with ship. Within the last two months, in and out of Pratement-we beg pardon for that lapsus lingua-Parliament-some grosses of times hath the state been figured by a ship. Sir James Graham, most elegant of land-lubbers, was succeeded in that image by Sir Joseph Yorke-Heaven hold his honest soul! for he was himself, [June, among the number-when we heard and many eyes wept-our own the gallant old admiral had gone down, and that his "last sea-fight was o'er!" Not a fresh-water sailor, in prate or print, in House, magazine, or review, ship. Lord pity their squeamish stobut must have a shy, forsooth, at the machs, and sea-sick souls! Not one of them all know the meaning of topher North, who was once captain "abaft the binnacle" but old Chrisof the fore-top (we have run a rig Arethusa," when she sailed with or two in our time) 66 on board the Seymour, Old Mick as we used to that ere bloody Frenchman," and call him, till the day we "floored then Old Nick, ever after- a noble nickname-as we come right afore the wind, goose-wing fashion, with the best Forty-four in tow at our starn that ever left Brest; and had why, then we should have prevented she not struck when almost sinking, that, d'ye see, by blowing the sheer pher, we say, took up the image-for hulk out of the water-Old Christohad he not many a time and oft admired the sea-nymph herself smiling a-top the cut-water-and with "a sailor's zest, a painter's eye, and a poet's who has too high a heart often to let fancy" (so said of our picture one his politics, though" blowing a gale," disturb the calm sea of literature) he launched the "SHIP OF THE STATE," manned, masted, rigged her; and then, having gotten her guns all to look straight out of the port-holes, we let slip our cable-seas running sing our anchor-and as "five huntoo fresh to be bothered with raiwhy-dang it-the Old Boy laid her dred men on our decks did dance," as ever you saw a wild-swan on his up to the wind's eye, close-hauled way from Norroway beating up again' her at ten knots snoring through the an unexpected sou'wester, and sent swell like a sea-serpent.-Hurrah, for the Arethusa! only be abused " along the line of Not a doubt of it. We shall not approachable point of contentment; limitless desires," almost to the unbut we see, or think we see, the dawn of promise of a general massacre of Maga and her contributors. For who are likely now to be our ene "A frigate tight and brave, as ever stem- mies? High Whigs and low Whigs med the dashing wave;" -Radicals and root-and-branchers all will soon be upon us, their ranks swelled by Tory trimmers, those avowed traitors who will also act as spies, divulge our camp, and by secret paths shew approaches to our position. But, after all, 'tis impregnable; and, whatever be the issue of the war, this is certain sure-that as soon as these our old friends are taken prisoners, which they will be some hour or other by a charge of cavalry that comes and goes like the lightning, we shall have infinite satisfaction in putting them to death with the most exquisite tortures, in sight of both armies enjoying a truce for sake of the spectacle. 'Twill be a delightful holiday. There you will see them-their ears and noses having first of course been cut off or slit-hanging with their heads downwards on a-- -But we must not anticipate. Suffice it to say, that they shall be gibbeted in a style that would please Tiberius, were the old gentleman alive; for the invention of a new pain surely shews the same genius, and deserves the same reward, as the invention of a new plea sure. Pleasant, indeed, it is, far beyond our feeble powers of expression, to think of the variety of hostile feelings of which we shall be the object. Variety is, if not the soul, certainly the solace of life. Some will despise us, and we shall feel flattered by their contempt. True that 'twill be all pretence-but we shall not the less enjoy the folly because steeped in falsehood-for there is both preserve and pickle in lye. Others will seek to humble us into the worm-holes of the earth, by assuming ignorance, not only of our attributes, but of our being; and we think we see the ninny, with such hauteur curling on his lip as you might suppose Byron's to have shewn, had Byron become a Bauldy, and discovered that his egg was rotten, and hear him asking, "Christopher North? Ah! who is he, pray? I never heard of him before"-when click from behind comes the crutch on the deafest side of his empty knowledge-box; and though the blow be somewhat broken by the ear, it almost, at one and the same time, communicates and takes away the desired information. Others, again, though armed against us with dag and daggersword and spear-shield and buckler-pistol, musket, rifle, carabine, and blunderbuss-horrent with all the points of war-keep stealing from bush to bush-like hungry wild beasts in thickets-awatch for the moment when within shot our back is turned, to nail us from afar; for these are the pale sons of fear-and bite their lips and thumbs at us in the cruelty of cowardice, which, were we dead and cold, would fain lap our coagulated heart's-blood. (And, last of all, lo! those who hate us with such a perfect hatred, that at the very thought of us their black bile boils-at the sight of us their livers quiver like a shrivelled hemlock-leaf and the wretched Whigs-if such compact be not sworn already on other grounds-would sell their souls to Satan, so that we were but 66 dead. Sincerity, thou first of virtues!" for thy sake, we almost love them that hate us-for in that, if in nothing else, sincere are their souls as Venetian glass-like it, too, clearly seen through-and like it at the touch of their own poison, see how they fall into shivers! We are doomed to be in perpetual opposition. Long, long ago, when "her auld cloak was new," Maga was the most ministerial of monthlies-she basked in the smiles of Premiers-lauded was she by First Lords of the Treasury; and Majesty itself shook its royal sides, to the genuine doric of Sir A. Barnard, one of the brightest and bravest of men, reading aloud to Great George's ear the Noctes Ambrosianæ. Loyal is she still, though the times are changed; and renewing her oath of fealty, she lays our crutch and knout at the foot of the throne. Let our king but say the word—and both shall flourish. On that crutch the House of Hanover shall yet leanfor Blackwood is the bold Brunswicker who rejoices in the name of William. And as for the other instrument, let his Majesty but give us |