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This gifted actress, in the morning of her day, had no monitor to direct her course, and heard no other voice than that of flattery. The young beauty consequently imbibed a love of display which became her characteristic through life. Those who should have taught her to avoid temptation led her to its fearful brink, covering the abyss with a gilded and a glossy web. Hence, in after days, came rumors of failings to which the world too freely listened. Of those failings we will speak gently, remembering her early training, and knowing that the narrow tomb is now her home. With great endowments, and with lavish praise constantly ringing in her ear, she knew nothing of affectation. Her generosity and kindliness of heart was frequently exhibited, and received its reward in affectionate and unwearied attention in her own hour of suffering, over which Providence kindly spread the healing wing which hid her from our sight. We owe her much for refined entertain

judged as an English, French, or Italian are indebted for the great improvement comic actress, or as a charming natural in our scenic representations, her talent for vocalist; and blended with her former dramatic effect exercising an influence efforts was an indescribable fascination not which will long be observable upon our easily to be shaken from remembrance. stage. Time, as was once observed by an admirer, appeared for many years to stand still, gaz ing upon her attractions; and so gently did the great despoiler of beauty deal with her in face, figure, and voice, that there is scarcely a female on record who so long retained unimpaired her professional fame. Acting and singing with her was an impulse; she had none of the learning of a school, but trusted to her own innate feeling and taste, her performances receiving a considerable charm from the melody of her voice. The stage has heard no such voice since the days of the splendidly-gifted Jordan, whose joyous tones imparted a warmth around, whilst her laugh was the most enlivening thing in nature. The lower notes of the Vestris were of a richness rarely surpassed, and the symphony to one of her songs created in her audience a manifest gratification. It may be questioned whether she was equal to the personation of the higher class of theatrical heroines, requiring for their due embodiment an intellectual subtlety; but for the vaudeville and the ex-ment, and shall often think of her, travaganza, with which her name is so intimately associated, she possessed every graceful accomplishment, and was the very spirit of this species of light comedy. To her sumptuous fancy and refined taste we

"Kindly and gently, but as of one

For whom 'tis well she's fled and gone;
As of a bird from a chain unbound,
As of a wanderer whose home is found-
So let it be!"

From the Gentleman's Magazine.

CHATTERTON.*

IN that portrait-gallery of illustrious writers to which Mr. Masson has introduced us, we turn from the likenesses of

"Essays, Biographical and Critical, chiefly on English Poets. By David Masson, A.M., Professor of English Literature in University College, London." (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 8vo.)

men as admirable as Shakspeare, Swift, and Goethe, as honorable as Wordsworth and De Quincey, to look with an interest no familiarity abates upon a new delineation of the "marvellous boy." It is evident that Mr. Masson himself has labored on this portraiture most lovingly and well. He could not otherwise have given us so

faithful and complete a likeness of the young poet in his sullenness and pride, and kindliness and grief, or have surrounded him with a group of accessories so picturesque in themselves, and so useful in illustrating and bringing out in bolder prominence the subject of his picture.

It is, indeed, in this accessory matter that much of the strength of Mr. Masson's biography consists. A mass of curious information, diligently gathered from obscurest publications, is happily made use of to throw light upon the times through which the narrative extends, and particularly upon those circumstances of the times which had the most bearing on the individual history of Chatterton. Mr. Masson has contrived to levy subsidies of this kind from the most unpromising sources, and to use his materials with a rare constructive skill. He leaves, in fact, nothing now to be inquired into concerning the external influences, whether of events or persons, which can be supposed to have had much to do with the wayward and precocious growth of the poet's mind. Taken as it stands on Mr. Masson's pages, the life of Chatterton is indeed a strange and tragical tale. There was no genial childhood in it-no seasons of dependence and delight, however brief, to usher in the storm and darkness of his passionate youth. From first to last there was a morbid element in his mental nature, and ingrained ambition, and reserve, and pride, fearfully at war with all enjoyment or repose. At little more than seven years of age we have this account of him:

or two, and you may see him, whilst still a Blue-coat boy in Colston's school, writ ting verses and lampoons for a provincial journal, imposing on the pewterer, Burgum, an antique-looking pedigree ascending through an illustrious line to one of the knightly followers of the Norman, and making his first essay in those ancient poems which still command the admiration and the wonder of whoever reads them. Or wait again a year or two, and you may see him, an apprentice now to the attorney, Lambert, hoaxing Bristol antiquaries with an elaborate record of the opening of their ancient bridge; boldly manufacturing Rowley poems in abundant measure; collecting knowledge and especially antiquarian knowledge, from every source that was not sealed against him; corresponding, upon equal terms, with Horace Walpole; contributing to one of the London magazines; and, finally, walking often in a moody state about the neighborhood of St. Mary's Church, "with a brain consciously the most powerful in Bristol," whilst he was yet sent down to feed with servants in his master's kitchen.

But the inward strife of these important years is never to be seen or known. The mortifications which so proud a nature could not fail to encounter amongst purseproud and illiterate citizens, and the bitter, constantly recurring sufferings of a penniless state, were evils not to be repelled by any means at Chatterton's command. The powers he was conscious of were, perhaps, imperfectly recognized; the poverty he bore about with him was a condition only too palpable to all; and it is easy to "Generally very sullen and silent, he was conceive how a spirit infinitely more paliable to sudden and unaccountable gifts of weep-tient than his might have found cause to ing, as well as of violent fits of rage; he was groan under the indignities to which such also extremely secretive, and fond of being alone; a contrast must be sure to doom him. It and on Saturday and other holiday afternoons, when he was at liberty to go home from school, it was quite a matter of speculation with his mother, Mrs. Chatterton, and her acquaintances, what the boy could be doing sitting alone for hours, as was his habit, in a garret full of all kinds of out-of-the-way lumber."

This riddle, that the kind-hearted mother and her gossips could not solve, has no obscurity about it now. Unconsciously to herself, in that back street of Bristol, she had given birth to a young eagle, who was even then pining and preparing for the atmosphere and habits of his kind. Wait a year or two, and you may see him try his wing in perilous flights; wait a year

was, in fact, the refusal of a loan of money, at a critical time, that brought about the circumstances under which the mournful drama of poor Chatterton's existence closed. Intervening scenes of overpowering interest there were, but it was this refusal-whatever else, had this been wanting, might by possibility have proved as fatal-which looms out in the distance as the unmistakable cause. The connecting links are evident enough. It was this that gave occasion to a deliberate design of self-destruction, which had more than once suggested itself to the unhappy boy's mind before; it was the accidental discovery of this design that led to his imme

diate dismissal from the attorney's office; And in that instance, in His mercy, God and it was this dismissal that determined had hung the veil. This, at least, we are him to adventure on that sea of wretched-assured of by poor Chatterton's letters to ness in which he was so soon to be a memorable wreck.

The brightest interspace in Chatterton's life was that which came between his emancipation from the attorney's desk and the commencement of his brief despair in London. Hope brightened the future to him with a glory which the past had never known. There was a pleasure even in the pain of Bristol leave-takings, for he was going forth to assert for himself a new position amidst new scenes. And, over and above his genius, he was going forth with a courage and a confidence deserving of a better fate. With little but a few guineas, collected for him by subscription, in his purse, the precious burden of his Rowley poems, some manuscripts in modern style, and his high ability and enterprising spirit, he turned away forever from the old acquaintances and haunts of childhood, to seek renown and wealth in a more promising career.

It was on the 25th of April, 1770, that Chatterton for the first time set foot in London. Mr. Masson dwells on the minutest incidents—the rambles, and the calls and occupations, the scanty dinners and the busy days of that eventful period in the young adventurer's life. The narrative discloses an amount of energy almost unequalled. Within a few hours of his arrival he had already obtained interviews with the four persons from whom it was most likely that he might obtain some profitable literary employment. "Tired, and yet happy," says Mr. Masson, "the young stranger bent his steps homeward in the direction of Shoreditch." And then foreshadowing the dark catastrophe so near at hand he adds:

his mother. They are written, at this period, in an animated, boasting, buoyant, almost happy tone. The first was composed "in high spirits ;" the second tells of his "glorious prospect," and of his possession of that knowledge of the art of booksellers which "no author can be poor who understands;" in the third "matters go on swimmingly," so much so indeed as to give occasion to the triumphant exclamation, "Bravo, hey boys, up we go!" And it is worthy of remark, too, amidst the revelations of these letters, how in the fullness of his own unsubstantial prosperity, the writer's patronage and generosity overflow. His friends are to send to him the effusions they would wish to see in print; his mother is to be remembered out of his own abundance; and his sister is desired to choose the colors of the two silks with which he will present her in the summer. Alas! before the leaves of that coming summer fade, neither silk nor color must that mourning sister wear.

The letters we have just referred to carry us onward to the close of the first month of Chatterton's London life-the happiest, probably, in spite of disappointments and anxieties and labors, of any he had ever until then experienced. But in connection with it, the question will suggest itself was the munificence he contemplated fairly warranted by any actual success, or was it merely the delusive expectation of a self-confidence yet sanguine and unharmed? Mr. Masson, who has entered deeply into the inquiry, ascer taining every thing that can be positively known, calculating every certain gain, and conjecturing cautiously where proof is unattainable, adopts the first of these opinions, and concludes that we shall prob"Ah! we wonder if, in passing along Shoe-ably be correct if we say that Chatterton's lane after his interview with Edmunds, brushing with his shoulder the ugly black wall of that workhouse burying-ground on the site of which Farringdon Market now stands, any presentiment occurred to him of a spectacle which, four short months afterwards, that very spot was to witness-those young limbs of his, now so full of life, then closed up, stark and unclaimed, in a workhouse shell, and borne, carelessly and irreverently, by one or two men, along that very wall, to a pauper's hasty grave! Ah! no; he paces all unwittingly, poor young heart, that spot of his London doom, where even I, remembering him, shudder to tears; for God in his mercy, hangs the veil."

total receipts during his first two months in London can not have exceeded ten or twelve pounds." This, with his abstemious habits of living and inexpensiveness in regard of amusements, must have been an ample and encouraging, though not certainly a splendid, income. Such as it was, however, a portion of it—and the fact should always be remembered in abatement of our sentence on his manifold sins -was allotted to his mother and his sister in the shape of a snuff-box, fans, and china, as the fashion of the age demanded. Mr.

Masson is inclined to attribute somewhat of this liberality to pride, but we confess that on this point alone we love to differ from him. It is certainly a far more pleasant and quite as plausible a supposition, that absence had increased the tenderness of his affection, and prompted an expense he could but ill afford. Two passages in letters to his sister appear, by their unaffected tone of truth, to lend some countenance to our more agreeable view. In the first he says, "Be assured that I shall ever make your wants my wants, and stretch to the utmost to serve you ;" and in the second-written only a month and a few days before his death-he tells her: "I am about an oratorio which, when finished, will purchase you a gown." We can not look upon these affecting passages as written in the language of display or pride.

The second of the letters was dated on the 20th of July, and before then the brief and dim success of Chatterton was on the wane. In spite of all his assiduity with editors, he found but little profitable work to do. Accommodating himself, however, readily to this change of circumtances, even while he was the most diligent in striving to prevent it, his cheap amusements were ungrudgingly relinquished, his slender meals reduced, and even his dress-the most cherished of his small indulgences-neglected. But no economy consistent with the barest sustenance of life could meet the need of his expiring means. And no earnest, restless applications to the publishers who had employed him- no efforts to obtain another occupation-no labors with his pen, prolonged through sleepless nights in strange succession-availed him any thing to keep the quickly-coming enemy at bay. Then came the time when nothing but some helping hand, outstretched in pity or in love, might save him. But no gentle mother, proud of the genius of her boy, no good Samaritan, was near. There, in that Brooke-street garret, one of the gifted spirits of the time was fighting out alone, with every odds against him, a last battle which might only end in death.

Mr. Masson has dwelt, we think, with much felicity on the signal good which the presence of some generous soul would have effected in that season of the poor youth's emergency, and has rightly chosen Goldsmith as the aptest minister in his imaginary scene. He says:

"Precisely at the time when Chatterton was writing his last letters home, and beginning to see want staring him in the face, was this kindBrick court, Fleet street, and all its pleasant est of Irish hearts taking leave for a while of cares. Ah! me! so very kind a heart was that, that one feels as if, when it left London, Chatterton's truest hope was gone. Goldsmith never saw Chatterton; but one feels as if, had he remained in London, Chatterton would have been more safe. Surely-even if by some express electric communication, shot, at the moment of utmost need, under the very stones and pavements that intervened between the two spots the agony pent up in that garret in Brook street, where the gaunt, despairing lad was walking to and fro, would have made itself felt in the chamber in Brick court; the tenant of that chamber would have been seized by a restlessness and a creeping sense of some horror driven, by an invisible power, and by the grace near; he would have hurried out, led, nay, of God, Brick court and Brooke street would have come together! Oh! the hasty and excited gait of Goldsmith as he turned into Brooke street; the knock; the rush up stairs; the garret-door burst open; the arms of a friend thrown around the friendless youth; the gush of tears over him and with him; the pride melted out of the youth at once and forever; the joy over a young soul saved!"

But this was not to be: the solitary tenant of that cheerless room had no friend to snatch him from the grim temptations of despair.

There is something unspeakably affecting in the detail of the last days of Chatterton's affliction. The very pride with which he confronted the misery of blasted hopes and absolute destitution had something noble in it, not to be observed without a new emotion of distress. The less and less supply of bread, bought stale that it might last the longer; his fiery indignation at the baker's wife who had refused to trust him with one final loaf; his steady punctuality in the payment of his rent, even to the last trying miserable week; his stern rejection of the sixpence proffered by his poor landlady; his firm refusals to accept the meals offered him in charity by her, and by his neighbor, Cross, from whom, at last, the deadly antidote to all his accumulated suffering was bought, not begged-are incidents which take the case of Chatterton out of the category of that guilt which we despise as much as we deplore. Conceive in one glance, of the intelligence, the stubborn, fiend-like pride of the poor youth's nature, the utter discomfiture of his exultant hope of wealth and fame, the irritability of brain induced

by injudicious midnight toils, and aggra- | But the omission is of less moment, as the vated to the last extreme by hunger verg- judgments upon Chatterton's merits as a ing on starvation, and you will find poet are, at present, well-nigh unanimous. enough to extenuate, though not to ex- That his acknowledged poems are indicatcuse the act, which has made Chatterton, ive of great ability, and yet greater proforevermore, the dark and glorious type mise; that his Rowley-poems are instinct of ruin and despair. with genius of an order hardly ever equalled by so mere a boy, are positions which the world have pretty much agreed to take for granted now. This element of his youth should always be remembered in our estimate of Chatterton's powers. Reflecting with that memory present to us, and with the memory present, too, of all the adverse influences in the midst of which it was his fate to live and writeupon what he has undoubtedly achieved, we shall be prepared, "with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats," to look back, as Mr. Masson expresses it, "again and again on his brief existence with a kind of awe, as on the track of a heaven-shot meteor earthwards through a night of gloom."

It was on the night of the 24th of August that the arsenic which Chatterton had purchased in the morning did its deadly work. At a late hour on the next day, as he was not stirring, and no answer was obtained to numerous calls, the door of his room was broken open, and the youth was found, "lying on the bed, with his legs hanging over, quite dead." He died in his eighteenth year, leaving behind him a reputation which has grown, too late, into the renown for genius which he ardently longed for and heartily deserved.

We have left ourselves no space to dwell upon the brief and pleasant criticism with which Mr. Masson's narrative closes.

From Tait's Magazine.

DON

SEBASTIAN, KING OF PORTUGAL.

(Concluded from the Eclectic Magazine for October.)

horse, and Charles the Fifth's armor? She replied by a gesture which invited him to drink. The advice was right, for the sheep and goats which had been already licking the pot, were ready to dispute its contents with him.

ALL that had taken place seemed to him | army was; his ships, his generals, his good as a dream long gone by, or as another life; he recalled to mind that he had been a king, that he had had ministers, courtiers, a grand uncle and a grandmother, that he had commanded an army, that he had been beaten, and that he had been killed; but how he could be now living under a tent, in the midst of horses, fowls, and sheep, this is what he could not imagine. Presently an aged woman, with black eyes and wrinkled hands, brought him some milk; Sebastian asked her where his

The king opened his eyes in astonishment, not knowing what she wished. The old woman placed the jug by his side and went away. What she had foreseen soon happened; a large goat drank up the breakfast in two licks, and not content

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