able to attain thereto; and I inclined to the sombre conclusion, that in this world the wise and virtuous man was often less fortunate, and generally less happy, than the fool. FREELY GIVE. "Freely ye have received, freely give."-Matthew x. 8. "It is more blessed to give than to receive."-Acts xx. 35. Give! as the morning that flows out of heaven; Give, as He gave thee, who gave thee to live. Pour out thy love, like the rush of a river, Look to the life that was lavished for thee! Fairest the vines that on ruin will cling. Almost the day of thy giving is over; Thou shalt know God, and the gift that he gave. THE FOIL. If we could see below, The sphere of virtue, and each shining grace, As plainly as that above doth show; This were the better sky, the brighter place. God hath made stars the foil To set off virtues; griefs to set off sinning. PLAYS AND PURITANS. BY CHARLES KINGSLEY. The Puritans held too exclusively to one pole of a double truth. They did so, no doubt, in their hatred of the drama. Their belief that human relations were, if not exactly sinful, at least altogether carnal and unspiritual, prevented their conceiving the possibility of any truly Christian drama, and led them at times into strange and sad errors, like that New England ukase of Cotton Mather's, who punished the woman who should kiss her infant on the Sabbath-day. Yet their extravagances on this point were but the honest revulsion from other extravagances on the opposite side. If the undistinguishing and immoral Autotheism of the playwrights, and the luxury and heathendom of the higher classes, first in Italy and then in England, were the natural revolt of the human mind against the Manichæism of Popish monkery, then the severity and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality: a protest for man's God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer brutality. While Italian prelates have found an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however extravagantly, that there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias and Machiavels, Stuarts and Fletchers, have surely a right to a fair trial. If they went too far in their contempt for humanity, certainly no one interfered to set them right. The Anglicans of that time, who held intrinsically the same anthropologic notions, and yet wanted the courage and sincerity to carry them out as honestly, neither could nor would throw any light upon the controversy; and the only class who sided with the poor playwrights in asserting that there were more things in man, and more excuses for man, than were dreamt of in Prynne's philosophy, were the Jesuit Casuists, who, by a fatal perverseness, used all their little knowledge of human nature to the same undesirable purpose as the playwrights; namely, to prove how it was possible to commit every conceivable sinful action without sinning. No wonder that in an age in which courtiers and theatre-hunters were turning Romanists by the dozen, and the priest-ridden Queen was the chief patroness of the theatre, the Puritans should have classed players and Jesuits in the same category, and deduced the parentage of both alike from the father of | ties" rise in his heart, while he was lies. But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, narrow, inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been, credat Judæus. There were sour and narrow men enough among them; so there were in the opposite party. No Puritan could have had less poetry in him, less taste, less feeling, than Laud himself. But is there no poetry save words? no drama save that which is presented on the stage? Is this glorious earth, and the souls of living men, mere prose, as long as "carent vate sacro," who will, forsooth, do them the honour to make poetry out of a little of them (and of how little)! by translating them into words, which he himself, just in proportion as he is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual? Was there no poetry in these Puritans, because they wrote no poetry? We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet homedrama, love-poetry of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of everyday human life? Take the most commonplace of them: was Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby, of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his father had thought fit to give him an ugly and silly name, the less of a noble lad? Did his name prevent his being six feet high? Were his shoulders the less broad for it, his cheeks the less ruddy for it? He wore his flaxen hair of the same length that every one now wears theirs, instead of letting it hang half-way to his waist in essenced curls; but was he therefore the less of a true Viking's son, bold-hearted as his searoving ancestors who won the Danelagh by Canute's side, and settled there on Thoresby Rise, to grow wheat and breed horses, generation succeeding generation in the old moated grange? He carried a Bible in his jack-boot: but did that prevent him, as Oliver rode past | him with an approving smile on Naseby-field, thinking himself a very handsome fellow, with his mustache and imperial, and bright-red coat, and cuirass well polished, in spite of many a dint, as he sate his father's great black horse as gracefully and firmly as any longlocked and essenced cavalier in front of him? Or did it prevent him thinking too, for a moment, with a throb of the heart, that sweet Cousin Patience far away at home, could she but see him, might have the same opinion of him as he had of himself? Was he the worse for the thought? He was certainly not the worse for checking it the next instant, with manly shame for letting such "carnal vani the Lord's work" in the teeth of death and hell: but was there no poetry in him then? No poetry in him, five minutes after, as the long rapier swung round his head, redder and redder at every sweep? We are befooled by names. Call him Crusader instead of Roundhead, and he seems at once (granting him only sincerity, which he had, and that of a right awful kind) as complete a knight-errant as ever watched and prayed, ere putting on his spurs, in fantastic Gothic chapel, beneath "storied windows richly dight." Was there no poetry in him, either, half an hour afterwards, as he lay bleeding across the corpse of the gallant horse, waiting for his turn with the surgeon, and fumbled for the Bible in his boot, and tried to hum a psalm, and thought of Cousin Patience, and his father, and his mother, and how they would hear, at least, that he had played the man in Israel that day, and resisted unto blood, striving against sin and the Man of Sin? And was there no poetry in him, too, as he came wearied along Thoresby dyke, in the quiet autumn eve, home to the house of his forefathers, and saw afar off the knot of tall poplars rising over the broad misty flat, and the one great abele tossing its sheets of silver in the dying gusts, and knew that they stood before his father's door? Who can tell all the pretty child-memories which flitted across his brain at that sight, and made him forget that he was a wounded cripple? There is the dyke where he and his brothers snared the great pike which stole the ducklings-how many years ago? while pretty little Patience stood by trembling, and shrieked at each snap of the brute's wide jaws; and there, down that long dark lode, ruffling with crimson in the sunset breeze, he and his brothers skated home in triumph with Patience when his uncle died. What a day that was! when, in the clear, bright winter noon, they laid the gate upon the ice, and tied the beef-bones under the four corners, and packed little Patience on it.How pretty she looked, though her eyes were red with weeping, as she peeped out from among the heap of blankets and horse-hides, and how merrily their long fen-runners whistled along the ice-lane, between the high banks of sighing reed, as they towed home their new treasure in triumph, at a pace like the racehorse's, to the dear old home among the poplar trees. And now he was going home to meet her, after a mighty victory, a deliverance from Heaven, second only in his eyes to that Red Sea one. Was there no poetry in his heart at that nets about Venuses and Cupids, love-sick shepherds, and cruel nymphs? And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of Longfellow's "Evangeline" itself, in that thought? Did not the glowing sunset, and the reed-beds which it transfigured before him into sheets of golden flame, seem tokens that the glory of God was going before him in his path? Did not the sweet clamour of the wild-trip round the old farm next morning; when fowl, gathering for one rich pæan ere they sank into rest, seem to him as God's bells chiming him home in triumph, with peals sweeter and bolder than those of Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house? Did not the very lapwing, as she tumbled softly wailing before his path, as she did years ago, seem to welcome the wanderer home in the name of Heaven? Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan, yet did not her cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl's, as she saw far off the redcoat, like a sliding spark of fire, coming slowly along the strait fen-bank, and fled upstairs into her chamber to pray, half that it might be, half that it might not be he? Was there no happy storm of human tears and human laughter when he entered the courtyard gate? Did not the old dog lick his Puritan hand as lovingly as if it had been a Cavalier's? Did not lads and lasses run out shouting? Did not the old yeoman father hug him, weep over him, hold him at arm's length, and hug him again as heartily as any other John Bull, even though the next moment he called all to kneel down and thank Him who had sent his boy home again, after bestowing on him the grace to bind kings in chains and nobles with links of iron, and contend to death for the faith delivered to the saints? And did not Zeal-forTruth look about as wistfully for Patience as any other man would have done, longing to see her, yet not daring even to ask for her? And when she came down at last, was she the less lovely in his eyes because she came, not flaunting with bare bosom, in tawdry finery and paint, but shrouded close in coif and pinner, hiding from all the world beauty which was there still, but was meant for one alone, and that only if God willed, in God's good time? And was there no faltering of their voices, no light in their eyes, no trembling pressure of their hands, which said more, and was more, ay, and more beautiful in the sight of Him who made them, than all Herrick's Dianemes, Waller's Saccharissas, flames, darts, posies, love-knots, anagrams, and the rest of the insincere cant of the court? What if Zeal-forTruth had never strung two rhymes together in his life? Did not his heart go for inspiration to a loftier Helicon, when it whispered to itself, "My love, my dove, my undefiled, is but one," than if he had filled pages with son Zeal-for-Truth, after looking over every heifer, and peeping into every sty, would needs canter down by his father's side to the horse-fen, with his arm in a sling; while the partridges whirred up before them, and the lurchers flashed like gray snakes after the hare, and the colts came whinnying round, with staring eyes and streaming manes, and the two chatted on in the same sober business-like English tone, alternately of "The Lord's great dealings" by General Cromwell, the pride of all honest fenmen, and the price of troop-horses at the next Horncastle fair? Poetry in those old Puritans? Why not? They were men of like passions with ourselves. They loved, they married, they brought up children; they feared, they sinned, they sorrowed, they fought-they conquered. There was poetry enough in them, be sure, though they acted it like men, instead of singing it like birds.-Miscellanies. THERE'S MAGIC IN THAT LITTLE BY REV. J. M'GEORGE. And make grief's phantoms fly. When fortune hides her fickle face, When sunshine friends turn cold away, When youth's bright hopes, by gaunt despair I will not curse my lot, if thou There's magic in that little song; It soothes each stormy passion down,- Fantastic on my memory throng; I am a child again when thou Dost sing that little song. GRAVE DOINGS. [Samuel Warren, D.C.L, Q.C., born in Denbigh shire, 1807. Educated at the Edinburgh University, at first with a view to the medical profession, but subsequently entered the Inner Temple, and was called to the bar in 1837. He became Recorder of Hull, 1852, and M.P. for Midhurst in 1856, re-elected in the following year, and resigned his seat in 1859, upon being appointed one of the two Masters in Lunacy. He has published a number of legal works, and contributed many miscellaneous articles to Blackwood's Magazine. His principal works in fiction are: The Diary of a Late Physician (from which we quote); Ten Thousand a Year: Now and Then; and The Lily and the Bee, an apologue of the Crystal Palace in unrhymed verse. Sir Archibald Alison, in his History of Europe, says: "Mr. Warren has taken a lasting place among the imaginative writers." He died in 1877.] and soon as her friends were apprised of her situ- " "Well-we'll troy that, measter," replied the elder, while his Herculean fist oscillated somewhat significantly before my eyes. The poor girl was removed accordingly to her father's house, which was at a certain village about five miles from London, and survived her arrival scarcely ten minutes! We soon contrived to receive intelligence of the event; and as I and Sir's two dressers had taken great interest in the case throughout, and felt intense curiosity about the real nature of the disease, we met together and entered into a solemn compact, that, come what might, we would have her body out of the ground. A trusty spy informed us of the time and exact Sir—our determination about the matter, he patted me on the back, saying, “Ah, my fine fellow!-IF you have SPIRIT enough— dangerous," &c. &c. Was it not skilfully said? The baronet further told us, he felt himself so curious about the matter that if fifty pounds would be of use to us in furthering our purpose, they were at our service. It needed not this, nor a glance at the éclat with which the successful issue of the affair would be attended among our fellow-students, to spur our resolves. My gentle reader-start not at learning that I have been, in my time, a RESURRECTIONIST. Let not this appalling word, this humiliating confession, conjure up in your fancy a throng of vampire-like images and associations, or earn your "Physician's" dismissal from your hearts and hearths. It is your own groundless fears, my fair trembler!—your own superstitious prejudices-that have driven me, and will drive many others of my brethren, to such dreadful doings as those hereafter detailed. Come, come-let us have one word of reason between us on the abstract question-place of the girl's burial; and on expressing tɔ and then for my tale. You expect us to cure you of disease, and yet deny us the only means of learning how! You would have us bring you the ore of skill and experience, yet forbid us to break the soil or sink a shaft! Is this fair, fair reader? Is this reasonable? What I am now going to describe was my first and last exploit in the way of body-stealing. It was a grotesque if not a ludicrous scene, and occurred during the period of my "walking the hospitals," as it is called, which occupied the two seasons immediately after my leaving Cambridge. A young and rather interesting female was admitted a patient at the hospital I attended; her case baffled all our skill, and her symptoms even defied diagnosis. Now, it seemed an enlargement of the heart-now, an ossification-then this, that, and the other; and at last it was plain we knew nothing at all about the matter-no, not even whether her disorder was organic or functional, primary or symptomatic-or whether it was really the heart that was at fault. She received no benefit at all under the fluctuating schemes of treatment we pursued, and at length fell into dying circumstances. As The notable scheme was finally adjusted at my rooms in the Borough. M-and E--, Sir's dressers, and myself, with an experienced "grab"-that is to say, a professional resurrectionist-were to set off from the Borough about nine o'clock the next evening-which would be the third day after the burial-in a glass coach provided with all "appliances and means to boot." During the day, however, our friend the grab suffered so severely from an overnight's excess as to disappoint us of his invaluable assistance. This unexpected contretemps nearly put an end to our project; for the few other grabs we knew were absent on professional tours! Luckily, however, I bethought me of a poor Irish porter-a sort of "ne'er-do-weel" hanger-on at the hospital-whom I had several times hired to go on errands. This man I sent for to my rooms, and, in the presence of my two coadjutors, persuaded, threatened, and bothered into acquiescence, promising him half-a-guinea for his evening's work-and as much whisky as he could drink prudently. As Mr. Tip-that was the name he went by had some personal acquaintance with the sick grab, he succeeded in borrowing his chief tools; with which, in a sack large enough to contain our expected prize, he repaired to my rooms about nine o'clock, while the coach was standing at the door. Our Jehu had received a quiet douceur in addition to the hire of himself and coach. As soon as we had exhibited sundry doses of Irish cordial to our friend Tip -under the effects of which he became quite "bouncible," and ranted about the feat he was to take a prominent part in-and equipped ourselves in our worst clothes, and white topcoats, we entered the vehicle-four in number -and drove off. The weather had been exceedingly capricious all the evening-moonlight, rain, thunder, and lightning, fitfully alternating. The only thing we were anxious about was the darkness, to shield us from all possible observation. I must own that, in analyzing the feelings that prompted me to undertake and go through with this affair, the mere love of adventure operated quite as powerfully as the wish to benefit the cause of anatomical science. A midnight expedition to the tombs!-It took our fancy amazingly; and then Sir's cunning hint about the "danger"—and our "spirit!" The garrulous Tip supplied us with amusement all the way down-rattle, rattle, rattle, incessantly; but as soon as we had arrived at that part of the road where we were to stop, and caught sight of church, with its hoary steeple glistening in the fading moonlight, as though it were standing sentinel over the graves around it, one of which we were going so rudely to violate-Tip's spirits began to falter a little. He said little-and that at intervals. To be very candid with the reader, none of us felt over much at our ease. Our expedition began to wear a somewhat hairbrained aspect, and to be environed with formidable contingencies which we had not taken sufficiently into our calculations. What, for instance, if the two stout fellows, the brothers, should be out watching their sister's grave? They were not likely to stand on much cere mony with us. And then the manual difficulties! E- was the only one of us that had ever assisted at the exhumation of a body and the rest of us were likely to prove but bungling workmen. However, we had gone too far to think of retreating. We none of us spoke our suspicions, but the silence that reigned within the coach was tolerably significant. In contemplation, however, of some such contingency, we had put a bottle of brandy in the coach pocket; and before we drew up, had all four of us drunk pretty deeply of it. At length the coach turned down a by-lane to the left, which led directly to the churchyard wall; and after moving a few steps down it, in order to shelter our vehicle from the observation of highway passengers, the coach stopped, and the driver opened the door. To be sure I But there was movements as "Come, Tip," said I, "out with you." "Get out, did you say, sir? will-Och! to be sure I will." small show of alacrity in his he descended the steps; for, while I was speaking I was interrupted by the solemn clangour of the church clock announcing the hour of midnight. The sounds seemed to warn us against what we were going to do. "Tis a cowld night, yer honours," said Tip, in an under tone, as we successively alighted, and stood together, looking up and down the dark lane, to see if anything was stirring but ourselves. "Tis a cowld night-and-andand," he stammered. "Why, you cowardly old scoundrel," grumbled M--, "are you frightened already? What's the matter, eh? Hoist up the bag on your shoulders directly, and lead the way down the lane." "Och, but yer honours-och! by the mother that bore me, but 'tis a murtherous cruel thing, I'm thinking, to wake the poor cratur from her last sleep." He said this so querulously, that I began to entertain serious apprehensions, after all, of his defection; so I insisted on his taking a little more brandy, by way of bringing him up to par. It was of no use, however. His reluctance increased every moment-and it even dispirited us. I verily believe the turning of a straw would have decided us all on jumping into the coach again, and returning home without accomplishing our errand. Too many of the students, however, were apprised of our expedition, for us to think of terminating it so ridiculously. As it were by mutual consent, we stood and paused a few moments, about half-way down the lane. M—— whistled with infinite spirit and dis |