THE IMMURED ONE. (Concluded from our last Number.)

CHAPTER II.

"As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,

Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed."-SHAKSPEARE.

In the year 1400, when the cities of Italy were laid desolate by a dreadful plague, Florence became in a peculiar degree the object of its visitation; unlike the cholera of the present day, the commencement of the malady was scarcely perceptible; many of the most eminent physicians disbelieving its existence in the city, and even when the deaths had averaged three hundred a day, practitioners were found obstinate enough to deny that the disease was an unusual one. Although the filteenth century had not arrived at the refinement of a board of health;' although journals were yet undreamed of, the piazzas, which in Italy supply the absence of Sunday newspapers and tea parties, amply made up for the want of official information upon the subject which engrossed the attention of the Florentines! The details which were the subject of discussion to the animated groups, who daily assembled after sun-set to enjoy the freshness of the evening breeze, were, to be sure, none of the most accurate; marvellous anecdotes were bandied about, with a facility that told much for the imagination of the narrators. I think it is Hoffman who says, that in his time, the devil was to be seen walking publicly in the streets of Berlin: according to the testimony of several respectable citizens, his Satanic Majesty seemed to have been affected with a similar penchant for promenading in the streets of Florence!

But in spite of all that the Tuscan gossips could say or do, the mortality increased from day to day; funerals were to be seen issuing from every street; the aristocratics and wealthier

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portion of the community fled to their country houses; the public buildings were turned into hospitals; deep and yawning pits were dug for the reception of the dead; those of the authorities who dared to remain at their posts, became the victims of their courage and humanity; the physicians perished; the hospital attendants were swept off by the pestilence; the once lively and animated city became silent and desolate, and grass grew thickly in the streets of Florence.

But many weeks intervened between the commencement of the pestilence, and the deplorable consequences I have just now related. At first there were considerable doubts as to the identity of the disease with the plague; and even when the alarming mortality had dispelled all question on the subject, the rapid transfer of property which took place, the sudden accession of younger brothers and poor relations to wealth, by the death of those who, in the common course of nature, would have rendered their "post obits" of doubtful value, were the occasion of a degree of bustle and "empressement" in the city, which, like artillery on the battle field, served to deaden the attention of the inhabitants to the work of death which was going on around them. It is observed by the historians of the period, that banquets, tournaments, and other pageants, were never so frequent or so magnificent in Florence, as shortly after the appearance of the plague within its precincts.

It was about this period that Fianceschi thought proper to make his rash, and ill-advised attack upon the mansion of Marcellino; the ill success of his attempt has been already described, as well as the self-possession with which Agolanti conducted himself throughout the transaction. The equani'mity of the accepted wooer, however, was destined to expe rience a severe shock upon his return from the outer gate, which he had been occupied in securing against any retrograde movement on the part of his adversaries. Ginevra, who had remained unnoticed in the agitation of the late conflict, was discovered to be in a state of insensibility; upon being removed to her chamber, she was assailed by a succession of hysterical attacks, and, in a very short space, to the inexpressible grief of her parents and relatives, who stood

round her couch, lay apparently lifeless before them. Had Ginevra been one of us, she would have probably figured as a case of cholera in one of our daily reports; but the then prevalent disease being plague, she was of course pronounced to be stricken thereby, and treated accordingly. The city authorities, now thoroughly alarmed, had become exceedingly strict in all matters connected with the public health; persons even of the highest rank were, upon being attacked, conveyed to the hospitals appointed for the reception of plague patients, and where the progress of the disease was too rapid to admit of such removal, the immediate interment of the corpse was enforced in the most rigorous manner; in the present instance, the melancholy event took place about sun-rise, and it was scarcely noon when the long funeral procession of Ginevra Marcellino entered the ancient cemetery of the cathedral of Florence.

It was evening, and the wounded cavalier lay groaning and tossing upon a couch which might have contented even a Sybarite; but the fever and irritation, the effects of his recent wound, rendered Fianceschi as fastidious a recumbent as the hero of the ruffled rose-leaf. The apartment was spacious and well arranged; the walls were covered with French draperies representing the loves of the heathen mythologies; Venus made love to Adonis, Apollo ran after Daphne, and Diana descended from Olympus to meet Endymion; the corners were occupied by Grecian statues of marble and bronze; in sculptured niches reposed the laurelled busts of the ancestors of the Conte Fianceschi, lamps of opaque crystal shed a tempered light, around, and, from an alabaster vase, which stood upon a marble slab at the lower end of the apartment, ascended a steaming vapour, filling the room with delicious perfume the floor-cloth was of the thickest velvet; the hangings were of the richest satin. But Fianceschi saw nothing of this; the opium which his bewildered physician had administered, chiefly with the view of ridding himself for a space of so outrageous a patient, had obscured his perception without diminishing his sensation, and the lever, which seemed to feed upon his vitals, was still predominant above the ghastly visions that appeared to flit, before his aching eye-balls.

:

Some hours of the night had now passed away, and the dismal cemetery looked yet more ghastly by the light of an April moon. The vault in which Ginevra lay extended in an open coffin, was large and ancient; it had been constructed by one of her old Roman ancestors, and after the Roman fashion the walls had been raised to a considerable height above the level of the churchyard, in the form of a tower. Although the remaius of the Marcellini were used, from time immemorial, to be deposited in that place, the vault was not nearly full, the work of decomposition had gone on well, and the heap of bones that lay piled up at the further end, showed into how small a compass a long line of ancestors may be compressed, and furuist.ed a practical illus. tration of Juvenal's "expende Annibalem." A may of moonshine from the dilapidated roof tell upon the face of Ginevra, as she slowly awakened from the death-like trance into which she had fallen. When she opened her eyes the sounds of the conflict of the preceding evening were ringing in her ears, and the moon's pallid ray seemed to flash. before her confused vision, like the rapier of Francesco Agolanti. But her uncertainty was of short duration; the noisome smell, the ghastly remnants of mortality, which were exhibited to great effect by the imperfect light, aud, above all, the dank, uuwholesome vapours of the place, against which her funeral garinent, was an insufficient protection, quickly brought our heroine to a sense of her

situation. The scene would have been an invaluable one to a cynic philosopher-he might have moralized and sneered at his species without interruption-but Ginevra, being of an. other school, felt more anxious to make her escape than to in. dulge in speculations on human nothingness. Pursuing, then, the suggestions of her untutored reason, she hastily ascended the tottering steps leading to the narrow entrance of the time-worn turret, the iron door of which had been carefully locked by Agolanti himself, who, at the request of the afflicted Marcellino, had officiated as chief mourner on the late melancholy occasion. It was well for Ginevra that the Italians were then, as now, the most execrable constructors of locks in the civilized world-had it been otherwise, she would have passed a very uncomfortable evening in her subterranean abode as it was, with the assistance of a fragment of the upper step, which lay invitingly at hand, she found no great difficulty in forcing back the bolt and emerging once again into the upper world. In sunny Italy an April night is sometimes quite as cool as one in the same month in foggy England. Ginevra drew her slight garment about her, hastily took the road named, from her adventure, the Via della morte, and, passing through the lane that lies at the rear of the Via Calzajoli, with unsteady steps approached the mansion of her father.

The Marchesa had retired to her couch some time, ere the knocking at the gate attracted her attention. She dreaded lest the disturbance, unusual at so late an hour, might awaken her husband, who lay buried in that profound slumber, which is so often the effect of violent grief. Hurrying to the window, she was greeted by the view of her daughter, who stood shivering beneath: the horror of the old lady at so unexpected an apparition, was of the first magnitude; she was enveloped in the bed-clothes in a moment, and lay for many hours marvelling at the unquiet nature of her daughter's spirit, and vowing sundry additional, masses for the repose of the same.

Finding her summons quite disregarded, and feeling naturally very impatient of standing in the cold, Ginevra bethought her of one of her uncles who lived on the Corso Adimari, not far off. Old Bernardo Amieri, however, when he found out who the applicant was who stood knocking at his portal, became very much of the opinion of the Marchesa, and, taking counsel of two confessors who resided in the house, proceeded to assail his unfortunate niece with such a d luge of holy water from the casement as quickly obliged her to départ from the premises

Disappointed in her second experiment, Ginevra could now think of nothing better than applying to her affianced bridegroom, Francesco Agolanti. The reception she met with was characteristic with his usual mixture of caution and boldness, he unbolted the door with his left hand, holding his trusty rapier firmly grasped in the right; then, seeing the pa lid figure of his betrothed before him, he gruffly bade her go to the devil, adding that she had given him enough of trouble while she was alive, and, by way of closing his argument, shut the door in her face.

Reduced to despair, and overcome by the variety of misclances she had experienced, the unhappy lady sank down beneath the small piazza of St. Bartholomew, and there endeavoured to resign herself to the fate she now believed to be inevitable. In these afflicting circumstances, the image of Fianceschi recurred to the memory of the forlorn outcast: she contrasted his devoted and honest affection with the selfish terror and sullen brutality with which she had been greeted elsewhere.

Fianceschi's ménage was at no time remarkable for its

regularity; and the present occasion, from the illness of the master, it was in a more disorganized state than usual; the servants had adjourned to a distant part of the mansion to enjoy an uninterrupted carouse, leaving the various entrances, which in those unsettled times ought to have been carefully secured, invitingly open for the benefit of those who might be inclined to enter.

Ginevra found little difficulty in gaining the interior of the palace, nor in reaching, which she accidentally did, the chamber in which Fianceschi lay suffering from the effects of his wound: his astonishment at beholding the object of his late enterprise at his bed-side, may be easily conceived. The tidings of her supposed decease had not yet reached him, and he knew not how to account for the unexpected visitation. When he heard the hurried narrative of her sufferings from Ginevra's lips, his wonderment knew no bounds, while, in spite of his self-gratulation, he was not sparing of his strictures upon the conduct of Agolanti and the other parties. Hastily summoning the duenua who presided over his establishment, he commended the worn-out sufferer to her care, and enjoining the strictest secresy to all present, rested upon his couch with a feeling of satisfaction which contributed more to his convalescence than all the ptisanes and soporifics that Signore Quachanini had administered.

But if I were to detail the recovery, and subsequent secret marriage of Ginevra and Fianceschi, the rapturous astonishment of old Marcellino at the re-appearance of his muchlamented child, and the anger of Agolánti against himself and every one else for the absurd manner in which he had lost his bride; were I to detail, I say, circumstantially, how the good Marchese became reconciled to his son-in-law, and coustituted him his heir-how Agolanti equipped a brigantine for a piratical cruize in the Mediterranean, where he was slain by some Algerines, who looked upon him as an interloper-and how Fianceschi ultimately became a great man, and sat in the council chamber of the Grand Duke-I should far exceed the limits prescribed to me by a tyrannical editor, and might exhaust that stock of patience on the part of my readers, which, I doubt not, has been freely drawn upon on former occasions.

THE POETICAL PEDLAR!

Since rhymes, like stay-laces, in pairs Are made by each pedlaring elf,

I'll set up a basket of wares

And tag ends of verses myself.

I'll sentiment serve by the ounce,
And tears, seal'd like otto of roses,
My pathos in boxes, like pounce,
Condolence in rings set like posies.

You shall flattery have in the gross,
And praise may in packets be bought,
Adulation I'll sell by the dose;
Commendation shall e'en go for naught.

I'll have Epigrams labell'd and laid,
Assorted, for all kinds of use,
And rhymesters may purchase my aid,
Who have vainly entreated the muse,

G. C.

New similes, mingled like drugs

In some chymist's retort or alembic; Pierian Spring Water in jugs,

And the classical grog dithyrambic.

But Sonnets, those old-fashioned wares,
And songs ready woven in verses,
I'll sell them like apples and pears,

So loosen the strings of your purses.

For Epics a warehouse I've got

Where in bale they await the trunkmaker; There elegies, epitaphs rot,

At a discount with each undertaker.

As to riddles, enigmas, charades,

They're gone out with our grandmama's ruffles: Nought will do now but rhyme marmalades, Merry-thoughts dress'd with tropes 'stead of truffles.

Conceits like bon-bons now are sold,

Puns in packets like Waterloo crackers;— Melpomene's knell has been toll'd

And Pegasus sent to the knacker's.

Of all the choice pastry of verse,

Puff effusions and tart lucubrations, Impromptus, as pine-apple terse,

And sweet capillaire conversations;

Ic'd compliments, sugar'd bon-mots,

Quince repartees, speeches they stuff With minc'd meat quotations,-God knows Of such viands I've got quantum suff.

Each album is now a ragout,

Fricassee, or an olla pudrida, Where the Epicure sates his haut gout, And each Damsel by turns is a feeder;

Where ladies are suffered to draw

On our brain-banks for long-winded centos

So for Albums and Scrap-books, Hurrah!

And the science of Rifacimentos!

THE MODERN THEOPHRASTUS.

No, 5.

THE PUNSTER

Is a modern Procrustes, for ever stealing subjects, and stretching the members of language, or cutting them short, according to the absurd exigencies of his own standard. Peradventure he may be likened unto Chance, for you never know where to have him-his shapes being like those of Proteus, so many shifts. If you ask him for bread he will give you a stone, which, by the hocus pocus of language, he will change into bread. His words are the weapons of Lilli

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put a series of needles, irritating, incessant. With a pun he would solace the perishing, and to the heaviest afflictions he would apply the lightest of treatment.

He delighteth to ruffle into a laugh the surface of a grave discourse. The topic that he handles he makes ducks and drakes of, as do boys with pebbles on the brink of a pool; and causes the said topic to sink uselessly amongst the last eddying ripple thus produced.

He is very selfish, and in all his transmutations, still alter ipse.

His piercing gibes, like the worm of a screw, penetrate the material of your soundest argument. His vocation is equivocation: he playeth, at hide and seek, and hunt the slipper, with many-shifting words.

Your Punster is the froth of society, even as your rogue is He makes its scum. He is a prevaricator without cause. extremes meet, and associates the sublime with the ridiculous. With him language is no entire mirror for the reflection of clear thoughts, but a broken one, with its pieces brought into uxta position, and exhibiting every image in distortion—or at best it is a kaleidoscope, in lieu of a window.

eye

in

is

'gens He breaks butterflies on a wheel, and makes a " gens" out of animalculæ and reptiles. His mind's ever full of motes. He is the engineer of Folly, and the artilleryman of Momus. It is his joy to make a sport of language-to play at odd or even with it, or to ride it as a hobby-"ludere par impar, equitare in arundine longo."

The Punster is a jack o'lantern, a will o'the wisp,-mislea ling honest folks into perplexities. The merest trifle shall suffice his slender wit for exercise-nay, it danceth, as hanging meu are affirmed to do, upon nothing. If he do get the ascendant in a company, he straightway becometh the Lord of Misrule. His philosophy denies the momentum of heavy bodies, and laughs at the centre of gravity. He sophisticates simplicity, and converts all nature into art. He may be styled the mocking bird of the animal implume. He concerns himself not with the true nature of language, but with its resources for perversion: not with its quintessence, but its quaint essence.

Such is the Punster, and by these tokens shall ye know him
D.

A SIMILE.

As on the ev'ning of a stormy day
The setting sun more gloriously gilds

With his rich light the mountain's streaming sides,
The dropping trees, the bright and plashy meads,
And fallows, whose broad furrows float with rain;
Making the sullen day glad with his beams,
And shaming off the spongy threat'ning clouds
That blot the deep'ning azure of the sky;
So, o'er the close of sad affliction's life,
Fate-buffeted, and steep'd in sorrows floods,
Expos'd to winds of dread adversity,
The cheering rays of fair reward descend,
Bright'ning resplendently the sombre scene;
And in the shroud of Honour, golden-lin'd,
Enfold the faint limbs of the dying man;
Crowning his snowy locks with em'rald wreaths,
While praises sweet embalm his honor'd name.

WALTONIAN WEAKNESSES.

Night's candles were burnt out, and jocund day Stood tip-toe on the misty mountains top"would I, perilling life and limb-drop from a low back window, and hie with the rude implements of my craft to some shaded and sequestered brook, where lurked those tritons of the minnows which school-boys call "cock_salmon." Against these robin red-breasts of the stream, would I ply my ait till the first morning bell summoned me home to prayers, and, if discovered, to punishment.

Oh halcyon days of my piscatory life! Many a time have I since wetted-in deep and rapid river, clear and cool lake, in well stored mill stream and in mountain burn,-but never did I feel greater happiness in the capture of jack, trout, or salmon, than when I plied with success my humble snares, and caught the tiny produce of the village brook. Sweet were those stolen pleasures.

My next step towards becoming a thorough-paced angler, was accompanying a piscatory party to Thames Ditton, on a gudgeon-fishing expedition Pleasant and merry was the day-the sport was capital-and at evening, while the elders of the party, tired with their crusade against the finny tribe, quaffed the grape's best blood, and toasted the memory of the great founder of their art-I strolled along the bank, rod in hand, and lost in a dream of enjoyment, now gazed with vacant and wondering eye at the gay king-fisher, as ever and anon he skimmed over the bosom of the Thames, dipping in frolic sport, his Jacob's coat into the cool refreshing stream --and now meditated upon the transitory nature of all earthly greatness, as I watched the beams of the descending sun falling upon the antique pile, whose name is ever coupled with that of the wily Cardinal who for so long a time ruled England's destinies. A beauteous scene at sun set is Hampton Court, with its stately antique style of building and the huge trees which surround it, a fitting accompaniment to so courtly a pile. A beauteous scene it is, indeed, and with its history is a meet subject for a contemplative man's recreation.

But I must pass over my various studies in the fisher's art. I took my degrees, and found much amusement and no little profit in my endeavours to attain them. But I was born to be a fisherman, or fishing was destined, by some strange and fortunate fatality, to be my prime delight; for I am not one who measure the value of a day's fishing by the sport which I have had; give me but pleasant scenery, a pleasant compinion, or a pleasant fancy; and the day is marked in the journal of my memory, as one of true enjoyment. But I have declared that my passion for fishing was a weakness, and yet

have not proved, or attempted to prove my assertion. I have left untouched my loss of a wife with twenty thousand pounds, by neglecting to accompany my intended to the Opera, and starting by the mail to E for a day's trout fishing; my losing the secretaryship at one of the colonies; by going for a day's Jack fishing to Marlow, instead of place fishing in Downing-street; and my having an ounce of lead inipelled into my knee-pan, for having accepted an invitation to dine with an Irish friend, and absented myself from his table, to go and fish with a Scotch one. I have, as yet, told nought of this; and now I have not room. 1 will therefore close with a little anecdote, which will serve to impress upon the mind of the juvenile angler, the propriety of his making himself acquainted with the produce of any piece of water in which he thinks of fishing, before he begins to fish in it. -The observation of this rule will save him much disappointment. But to my story:It was, I think, in the year 1819, that from too close application to an enquiry which I was then prosecuting, I fell into so great a state of debility and excitement, as to be ordered by my physician to leave town nightly to sleep. I accordingly engaged country lodgings, and booked in yself regularly in the first coach for London, that business might be attended to. The first morning, as the coach crossed a common, I descried an old man fishing at a pond at a short distance from the road-I envied him. The next morning I looked enviously to see if he was there again. And there I saw him, and every morning for a month together. Here was temptation too strong for resistI determined accordingly to be stirring with the laik on the following morning, and to treat myself with an hour or two's fishing, and then to walk on to town.

ance.

At day-break accordingly I arose, dressed, collected my tackle, looked at my baits, and started with a southerly wind and a drizzling rain, to the destined spot. As the clock struck six, I commenced operations. Half-past six, no luck -rain as before. Seven-weather and fortune still the same; and so they continued till my tempter, the fisherman, made bis appearance, at about eight o'clock.

He was an old man, who must have weathered sixty summers; a healthy and patient-looking old man. That he was an experienced fisher, his garb was sufficient evidence; more especially his thick-soled and well greased boots, the oilskin covering to his hat, and the dark oil-skin cape for his shoulders. He looked a little fidgetty when he arrived, at finding his favourite station occupied by a stranger, and returned my bow, I thought, somewhat distantly. He was accompanied by an old worn-out spaniel, who instantly threw himself down as guardian of the tackle, and spoil, when there was any.

It is not considered polite among fishermen to begin talking with others who may be engaged in the sport; but my ill-luck prompted me to ill manners, and I was anxious to vent my disappointment. I approached the stranger accordingly, and announced that, in spite of the favourable state of the morning, I had been without any success. "Glad of it, Sir," was his candid, if not courteous answer. A blunt old gentleman! thought I, so I'll e'en pursue the conversation. "What baits do you use here, Sir?"-" Don't know, Sir." "A funny fisherman," thought I: but my speculations were interrupted by the yellings of the old spaniel, who sought thus to inform his master that he had placed his thickly booted foot upon one of his canine companion's unprotected paws. The old gentleman heeded not the cries of the dog; in fact, as he told me afterwards, he was a leetle deaf, an acknowledgment which sufficiently explained his apparently strange answers. We fished on, but our luck was

not improved by the union. At last I vented my grief to my companion, with all the elevation of voice which my lungs permitted. This is very unlucky, Sir"-here I stopped to inflate my lungs-and then continued, "I have been fishing here these three hours, and not caught a fish." "Three hours!" shouted the old man, as if he wished to hear his own answer as well as myself" Three hours! Why, Sir, I've fished here every morning for these three years, and never had a nibble."

FLOWERS.

I love flowers-so much so, that my enthusiastic admiration of them, created by their natural beauty, and cherished by their poetical relations, may truly be called a passion. I know those from whose minds all unkindly feelings are banished by the presence of children,-flowers have the samé effect with me; while, if children cross me in my gloomy moments, they suggest painful ideas of future misery, contrasting with their present happiness; but flowers-beautiful flowers, created by all-bounteous nature, not to meet our wants, but to supply us with gratification, soothe by their gentle influence the ruffled feelings, and fill the mind with gratitude and veneration: as Chaucer has said long since of theswete air of the eglenten"

"There is no hert (I deme) in such despair,
Ne yet with thoughtis forward and contraire
So overlaid, but it should have some bote
If it had ones felt this savour sote."

Whether they derive this influence from awakening within us the recollections of our youthful days, when we rambled with light and careless hearts over the verdant sward, and gathered, every one according to his fancy, of the bright and varied gems, which, glittering in the splendour of a noon-day sun, forined a rich and brilliant carpet for our infant feet, till, tired even with our pleasures, we returned laden with our fragrant spoil of violets, harebells, and forget-me-nots, to say nothing of the humbler portion of our gleanings—

"These, though mean, the flowers of waste,
Planted here in nature's haste,
Display to the discerning eye
Her loved, wild variety-"

and poured them, with all the fullness of infant generosity. as a tribute of affection into the lap of some delighted sister or favorite cousin, who, thanking us with a kiss, made us happy for the remainder of the day; or whether they act as a spell upon the mind to renew in it, fresh as when newly born, those touches of affection which our greatest poets have always delighted in discovering and drawing from the beautiful creations of Flora-it were perhaps hard to determine, but we cannot deny that they do possess the power of luiling to rest all unkind emotions, and of attuning our minds to appreciate the worth of Shakspeare's benevolent creed-—“find good in every thing" a power which must make them, independently of their abstract beauty, deserved favorites with every one.

Bacon says of a garden, “it is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man." His observation applies equally to such few flowers as we, who are doomed to pass our lives in the confines of the metropolis, cultivate as fitting and grateful substitutes for the endless variety which at nature's bidding, spring forth