66 knowing one," and a slight curving of the corners of the mouth that showed his ability to enjoy, while his own demeanour made every acute observer sure of his ability to perpetrate, a joke. Now and then, when his lips parted, and he ran his fingers through his hair with a languid expression, it was evident he was eager to be at work in his vocation-that of a practical joker! The other was a dapper young man, although different in appearance, yet with features which indicated that his mind was well fitted to be a successful co-partner with his mate, and a dry pun or a gravely-delivered witticism was frequently worked off with an air of philosophy or unconcern that gave him at once the credit of being a first-rate wit. Supper on the table, these two individuals were not dull, as a couple generally will be at table, but made mirth and laughter and wit their companions; and as wine, in his parti-coloured, flowing robes, presided, there was a set-out" fit for a prince and his associates. The young men ate and drank and were right merry, when the old family clock whirred and whizzed as the hammer on the bell struck one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve! The elder looked up to the old monitor before him, stuck his elbow on the table, and looked again steadily for a minute, and then laughed out heartily, awakening the waiter, who was just dosing by the window-sill.

"What in the name of Momus are you laughing at?" asked the dapper youth, as he cast his eyes now over the table, now over and around himself, to ascertain where the zest of the joke was concealed. The elder winked slyly, and yawning lazily, slowly raised the forefinger of his right hand, and applied his thumb gracefully to The dapper man understood the hint.

his nose.

"Oho! I understand. No-you don't come over this child! Waiter, another bottle of champagne !"

The servant left the room, and our heroes, inclining themselves over the table, held a long conversation in a low tone, when the elder of the two raised his voice, and with an air of satisfaction exclaimed:

"Clocks always go it!"

Then both cautiously rose from their chairs, and advancing to the clock, turned the key of the door, and looked within, the elder in a half-inquiring, half-decided manner, saying

"Won't it?"

The waiter was on the stairs, and they returned to their seats in a trice, as if nothing had happened-both scolding the waiter as he entered, for being so lazy on his errand.

Having heard the clock strike one, they were shown to their beds, where they talked in a subdued tone, and finally sunk to sleep. In the morning they were early up, and ordered their horse to be harnessed and brought to the door. Descending the stairs they asked for their bill, and with becoming promptitude paid the amount due to the keeper. The elder, perceiving the landlord through the window, placed his arms upon the bar, and in a serious tone inquired of the waiter if he would dispose of the old clock. The young man hesitated he knew not what to answer. The old clock seemed to him such a miserable piece of furniture that he had an impression that it might as well be his as his employer's, yet he could not comprehend why such a person should want such a hideous article. While he was attempting to reply, the good-natured landlord entered, and the question was referred to him for an answer.

"I wish to purchase that old clock up stairs; will you sell it?" asked the elder, while the younger lighted a cigar, and cast his eyes over the columns of a newspaper which lay upon the table. The landlord, who had set no great value upon the clock, except as an heir-loom, began to suspect that it might possess the virtues of Martin Heywood's chair, and be filled with coin; and almost involuntarily, the three ascended to the room which contained it.

"The fact is," said the elder, "I once won twenty pounds with a clock like that!"

"Twenty pounds!" ejaculated the landlord.

"Yes! You see there was one like it in a room down in Essex, and a fellow bet me he could keep his forefinger swinging with the pendulum for an hour, only saying Here she goes, there she goes.' He couldn't do it. I walked the money out of him in no time."

"You did? You couldn't walk it out of me. I'll bet you ten pounds I can do it on the spot!"

"Done!" cried the "knowing one."

The clock struck eight, and with his back to the table and the door, the landlord popped into a chair—

Here she goes, there she goes!" and his finger waved in curve, his eyes fully fixed on the pendulum. The fellows behind him interrupted-"Where's the money? Plank the money."

The landlord was not to lose in that way. His forefinger slowly and surely went with the pendulum, and his left disengaged his purse from his pocket, which he threw behind him upon the table. All was silent, the dapper man at length exclaimed

"Shall I deposit the money in the hands of the waiter?" "Here she goes, there she goes," was the only answer.

One of the wags left the room. The landlord heard him go down stairs; but he was not to be disturbed by that trick.

Presently the waiter entered, and touching him upon the shoulder, asked— -, are you crazy? What are you doing?"

"Mr. B

"Here she goes, there she goes!" he responded, his hand waving the forefinger as before.

The waiter rushed down stairs; he called one of the neighbours and asked him to go up. They ascended, and the neighbour, seizing him gently by the collar, in an imploring voice said—

Mr. B

sit here?"

do not sit here. Come, come down stairs; what can possess you to

"Here she goes, there she goes!" was the sole reply, and the solemn face, and the slowly-moving finger, settled the matter. He was mad.

"He is mad," whispered the friend, in a low voice, "We must go for a doctor."

The landlord was not to be duped; he was not to be deceived, although the whole town came to interrupt him.

"You had better call up his wife," added the friend.

66

"Here she goes, there she goes!" repeated the landlord, and his hand still moved on. In a minute his wife entered full of agony of soul. My dear," she kindly said, "look on me. It is your wife who speaks!"

"Here she goes, there she goes!" and his hand continued to go, but his wife wouldn't go; she would stay, and he thought she was determined to conspire against him and make him lose the wager. She wept, and she continued

"What cause have you for this? Why do you do so? Has your wife

"Here she goes, there she goes!" and his finger seemed to be tracing her airy progress, for anything she could ascertain to the contrary.

"My dear," she still continued, thinking that the thought of his child whom he fondly loved, would tend to restore him, "shall I call up your daughter?"

"Here she goes, there she goes!" the landlord again repeated, his eyes becoming more and more fixed and glazed, from the steadiness of the gaze. A slight smile, which had great effect upon the minds of those present, played upon his face, as he thought of the many unsuccessful resorts to win him from his purpose, and of his success in baffling them. The physician entered. He stood by the side of the busy man. He looked at him in silence, shook his head, and to the anxious inquiry of the wife, answered

"No, madam! The fewer persons here the better. The maid had better stay away; do not let the maid—”

"Here she goes, there she goes!" yet again, again, in harmony with the waving finger, issued from the lips of the landlord.

"A consultation, I think, will be necessary," said the physician. "Will you run for Dr. A-???

The kind neighbour buttoned up his coat and hurried from the room.

In a few minutes Dr. A

with another medical gentleman, entered.

"This is a sorry sight," said he to the doctor with him.

"Indeed it is, sir," was the reply. "It is a sudden attack, one of the-"

"Here she goes, there she goes!" was the sole reply.

The physicians stepped into a corner and consulted together.

"Will you be good enough to run for a barber? We must have his head shaved and blistered," said Dr. A-.

"Ah, poor dear husband," said the lady; "I fear he never will know his miserable wife."

"Here she goes, there she goes!" said the landlord, with a little more emphasis,

and with a more nervous yet determined waving of the finger in concert with the pendulum; for the minute hand was near the twelve-that point which was to put ten pounds into his pocket, if the hand arrived at it without his suffering himself to be interrupted.

The wife, in a low, bewailing tone, continued her utterances

"No! never; nor of his daughter."

"Here she goes, there she goes!" almost shouted the landlord, as the minute-hand advanced to the desired point.

The barber arrived; he was naturally a talkative man, and when the doctor made some casual remark, reflecting upon the quality of the instrument he was about to use, he replied

"Ah ha! Monsieur, you say very bad to razor-tres beautiful-eh ?-look-lookvery fine, is n't she?"

"Here she goes, there she goes!" screamed the landlord, his hand waving on-on, his face gathering a smile and his whole frame in readiness to be convulsed with joy. The barber was amazed. "Here she goes, there she goes!" he responded, in the best English he could use. "Vare? vare sall I begin? Vat his dat he say?"

"Shave his head at once!" interrupted the doctor, while the lady sank into a chair.

"Here she goes, there she go-!" for the last time cried the landlord, as the clock struck the hour of nine, and he sprang from his seat in an ecstacy of delight, screaming at the top of his voice, as he skipped about the room

"I've won it !-I've won it!"

"What?" said the waiter.

"What?" echoed the doctors.

"What?" re-echoed the wife.

66

Why, the wager-ten pounds!" But, casting his eyes around the room, and missing the young men who induced him to watch the clock, he asked

"Where are those young men who supped here last night? eh? quick where are they?"

66 They went away in their phaeton nearly an hour ago sir!" was the reply of the waiter.

The truth flashed like a thunderbolt through his mind. They had taken his pocket-book with twenty-one pounds therein, and decamped-a couple of swindling sharpers, with wit to back them!-The story is rife on all men's tongues in the neighbourhood where the affair occurred, and "the facts are not otherwise than here set down;" but we regret that the worthy landlord, in endeavouring to overtake the rascals, was thrown from his own vehicle, and so severely injured as to be confined to his room at the present moment, where he can watch the pendulum of his clock at his leisure.

It is said that other incidents connected with this affair have transpired, and that they are incorporated in a Farce which may be immediately expected at one of the theatres.-NOUS VERRONS.

Literature.

From a clever periodical, published in New York, called Arcturus, we select the subjoined notice of an American work, as it was published almost simultaneously with Mr. Campbell's Life of Tasso published here, and may therefore be interesting to most of our readers.

Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso: by Richard Henry Wilde. New-York: Alexander V. Blake2 vols. 12 mo.

In the eloquent words of our author's exordium-" There is scarcely any poet whose life excites a more profound and melancholy interest than that of Torquato Tasso. His short and brilliant career of glory captivates the imagination, while the heart is deeply affected by his subsequent misfortunes. Greater fame and greater misery have seldom been the lot of man, and a few brief years sufficed for each extreme, an

exile even from his boyhood, the proscription and confiscation suffered by his father deprived him of home and patrimony. Honour and love, and the favour of princes, and enthusiastic praise dazzled his youth. Envy, malice, and treachery tedious imprisonment and imputed madness-insult, poverty, and persecution clouded his manhood. The evening of his days was saddened by a troubled spirit, want, sickness, bitter memories, and deluded hopes; and when at length a transient gleam of sunshine fell upon his prospects, death substituted the immortal for the laurel crown."

Such is an outline of the life of the poet which forms the subject of Mr. Wilde's investigation. In pursuing them he has adopted the track indicated, though not followed out to its full extent, by Guingene, Rossini, and the later biographers, and has sought for elucidation of the doubtful events of Tasso's life in the ample store of materials contained in his correspondence and minor poems, or Canzoniere. These last form a vast collection of lyrical pieces, and though obscured by the superior splendour of the Gierusalemme, they are (like the sonnets of Shakspeare) of the highest value in his personal and mental history. The greater portion are evidently the undisguised outpourings of soul wrung from him in the various phases of mental conflict; they display most vividly the alternate tortures and triumphs, the throes and gusts of passion, that rent the soul of Tasso till his apparent madness testified that treachery and malice had done its work. We will briefly indicate the results arrived at by our author after a diligent comparison of these and every other accessible source of information.

The LOVES of Tasso have always been regarded as mysteriously connected with the series of events that embittered his life. The person to whom the first fruits of his genius were dedicated, was Laura Peperara, a noble lady of Mantua, seen by Tasso during an interval of his youthful studies. The feeling with which she inspired him, seems rather to have been an exercise of the imagination in the idealization of a favourite object-than a deeply-seated sentiment of the heartthough sixty poems remain to attest his devotion, three others yet extant, on Laura's weding, prove that the fertility of his fancy was not impaired by that event. The introduction of our poet to the court of Alphonso, Duke of Ferrara, was the turning point of his life. In his twenty-second year, of noble family—his father a poet of no inconsiderable renown, and his own fame preceding him as the author of Rinaldo, (a poem that contains the germs of his immortal epic)--he was immediately admitted to a familiar intercourse with the duke and his sisters, with the younger of whom, Leonora, then in her twenty-ninth year, the fate of Tasso became inextricably connected. The portrait of the gentle Leonora has descended to us without shade, and spotless; we are indebted for it to the pen of her lover, without whom her history would have been confined to the two lines of the annalist that record her birth, origin, and death, but

"Such are the proud manacles of verse

That make men rise up from the drowsie hearse,"

we can trace love's chronology through all its changes of melancholy, anxiety, despair, and ever-renewing hope. That the man high in favour with her brother, and whose fame rang through Italy, should have caused emotion in the breast of Leonora, in spite of the difference of rank, that made a union between them impossible, is a supposition far from discreditable to her. That very difference may have rendered her more incautious in her approval of the perpetual incense offered at the shrine of her beauty, while her constant refusal of all offers of marriage must have kept alive the expiring flame of the poet, struggling against hope or expectation of sucThis was the spring-tide of Tasso's genius. Leonora's eyes rained influence on his pen. For her were breathed the pastoral, silver-toned warblings of the Aminta; and high, beneath her kindling glance, swelled the stream of song, that told of her ancestral glories and

cess.

"The sacred armies and the godly knight,

That the great sepulchre of Christ did free."

A more abiding passion never dwelt in the heart of man. It may be traced "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream," influencing every movement of his after-life. When its existence is assumed, many of the obscurer passages in the life of Tasso are capable of explanation. Without it, his whole career is an aimless and purposeless existence. Its details must be sought in the pages now open before us.

After a passing glance towards the other love passages imputed to Tasso, in which his unwavering loyalty to Leonora is cleared and asserted, we arrive at the vexed questions of his MADNESS and IMPRISONMENT. Here all is uncertainty, and it is impossible to plant a firm footstep amidst the doubts of biographers, and the discrepancies of contemporary documents. The reality of his madness has been advocated and denied with equal fervour. Passages from his writings, in confirmation of either hypothesis, are brought forward by their respective partisans. Whatever colour of truth may have existed for the temporary confinement of Tasso, under the plea of insanity, its continuance for the same cause is shown to be utterly untenable, by an examination of the works he produced while in prison; and a deeper reason must be sought in the offended pride of his implacable patron. His detention was indeed a season of remarkable mental activity, during which he diligently revised and defended his poems, besides using the most strenuous exertions to procure his release. From hence is dated his celebrated canzone to the Princesses, (Leonora and her sister,) wherein he endeavours to move their compassion for his forlorn condition.

When at length the release of Tasso could no longer be denied to indignant Italy, he left his prison a feeble and a broken man. The loadstar of his life had died during his confinement. A few years, embittered by sickness, poverty, loss of memory, melancholy, and despair, were all that remained to him to him whose spirit soared through darkness and tribulation, to the conception of the Christian epicwho, when the hour of faith in chivalry was past, and the time of mockers and scorners come, with a felicity beyond Homer, grappled with the heroic age of Christendom, and made its free imaginings and deeds of high emprize an inheritance and a possession for all the believers in that holy religion that bound up the hearts of their forefathers, as it were one man, through the endurance of a common peril, to the attainment of an inalienable and deathless renown.

Unpublished Work by Washington Irving.

In relation to painting, Congress has pursued a wise course. The panels of the rotunda are to be filled by American painters. But in literature, on the other hand, while our press teems with republications of the flimsiest English productions— books which look as if they had been written by contract at so much the thousand superficial feet-Washington Irving, it is understood, has had lying by him for some time a most valuable MS., whose publication is deferred because there is no adequate security for literary property; and Prescott's private fortune alone enabled him to put forth his admirable history in a becoming form. Yet no people vaunt more than we do of our distinguished men ; few read more, newspapers included; and none assert higher claims to intelligence, or assume to be greater patrons of art and literature.—From an Article by R. H. Wilde, in the Knickerbocker Magazine.

A volume of Poetry entitled Ahasuerus, by a son of President TYLER, is in press, in New York city.

Wealth and Worth; or Which makes the Man? an American Family Tale, published in the series of Miss Sedgwick's minor writings; but not announced as by her, has been published by the Harpers, in 1 vol. 18mo.

Also, from the same press, The History of Philosophy, being the work adopted in the Colleges and High Schools of France; translated from the French with additions, by C. S. HENRY, D. D., of New York, in 2 vols. 18mo.

Messrs Wiley and Putnam announce the republication of Carey's translation of Dante.

Messrs. Appleton of New York announce the republication, in serial form, of LOVER'S Handy Andy.