countered a human being. Bread and meat were wrapped up in the cloth Bertha had given her; but her agitation, she maintains, took away the sense of hunger and the desire for sleep, unless, when utterly worn out, she dropped almost insensible on the ground. At sunrise on the fourth day she reached the edge of the forest, which was here bounded by a high road. Here she met another girl, carrying a carpet-bag. Neither could make herself intelligible by speech, but the strange girl gave Caroline to understand by signs that she must accompany her. They reached a broad river, spanned by a bridge, near which stood several houses. Caroline was alarmed at the unaccustomed spectacle of so great a body of water and hesitated to cross, till her companion took her by the hand and led her over. They soon arrived at another cluster of houses, one of which the stranger entered to procure provisions, while Caroline waited at a little distance. The same thing happened several times in the day, throughout the whole of which they continued walking. None of the people they met addressed them. At length, about sunset, they entered a cottage in a hamlet, where they found a solitary woman. Here they partook of some soup, and Caroline went to bed with the strange girl, who had previously made her exchange her delicate shift for one of coarser material. Caroline, who had always been accustomed to wear a nightdress, complied without remonstrance or suspicion; but what was her consternation to find, when she awoke on the following morning, that her companion and her clothes had disappeared together! The woman dressed her up in old garments, gave her some bread and soup, put a few coppers into her hand, and leading her away into a field, abandoned her to her destiny. This, after two more days and a night spent in the open air, threw her into the way of the burgomaster of Weisskirchen, who found her in a cottage, rejecting the food and alms tendered her by the charitable inmates, and passionately asking for Bertha. He sheltered her in his house for the night, and on the following morning brought her before the magistrates of Offenbach.

It may have occurred to the reader that it was just as well for the success of this strange narrative that it was not recounted to Inspector Field or Inspector Whicher, and still, with every allowance for the inexperience and good-nature of the rural magistracy of Offenbach, the story itself is hardly so strange as the unquestioning belief which, after a brief pause of incredulity, every one seems to have accorded to it. There is this almost infallible indication of falsehood, that while the general outline appears sufficiently coherent and plausible, the particular incidents are continually affording materials for criticism. There is nothing improbable in young children being kidnapped, and kept in confinement; but authentic narratives of this description are rarely encumbered with so many unaccountable details. It is not necessary or possible to do more in this place than to hastily run over Caroline's story, touching lightly on some of the most questionable portions. We are asked, then, to believe that two persons, not apparently of unsound mind, were so bent on de

priving a little girl of her liberty as to subject themselves, the one to share her captivity for sixteen or seventeen years, the other to a constant residence in the vicinity of her prison. Kaspar Hauser was more wary: he did not say that his gaoler passed his own time in the dark room where, according to his assertion, he was himself confined; nor, had he done so, would his tale have received such general credence. It will not be supposed that these persons undertook the charge of Caroline without some understanding as to the way in which she was to be disposed of on arriving at maturity, or on the very possible event of Bertha's death or illness. They must have foreseen that they could not detain her for ever; they evidently neither meant to take her life nor to restore her to her parent: it follows that their intention always was to turn her adrift. Why, then, delay for sixteen years, at the utmost risk and inconvenience, what might have been far more safely done at the very period of the abduction from her mother's roof? We are not informed whether they constructed their extensive and complex subterranean residence themselves, with the assistance of confederates, or whether they found it ready to their hands,— either supposition presents formidable difficulties. The description of this dwelling itself appears to us exactly such as would naturally be given by an ingenious but uneducated impostor, who had never seen or imagined any sort of abode but an ordinary house, and could only frame her fiction after the pattern supplied by her experience. It is, in fact, neither more nor less than a house built in, instead of upon, the ground, on a scale which would have required an army of conspirators to carry out, and involving, we suspect, decided engineering impossibilities in the support of the roof. At all events it is impossible to credit Caroline's distinct assertion that no damp ever found an entrance, and several other portions of her story appear equally ill-fitted to sustain examination. Though described as in the midst of a lonely forest, her residence must evidently have been near some village or town, since it appears that Eleazar, using no vehicle, was able to bring at one time sufficient provisions to last four inmates for a fortnight; it was also, as appeared on Caroline's removal from it, within a walk of a post-station on a high road. Setting aside the improbability of Eleazar's having been able to make so many expeditions without attracting notice, it appears very improbable that in all the sixteen years no one from the town or the highway should ever have chanced upon the spot, and beyond improbability that he should have done so without discovering the cavern, not to speak of the likelihood of his finding Bertha and Caroline at their recreation in the open air. It is obvious that their comings and goings must have worn a very perceptible track in the grass, and equally so that, even if we can suppose the glass windows to have escaped observation, the smoke from the chimney (which must have existed, though we cannot find that Caroline mentions it) must have been ascending in summer frequently, in winter continually. Caroline's narrative of her arrival at Offenbach also teems with improbabilities: the journey of many days on a high road without

encountering town or village; the lengthened period she represents herself as having spent without food; her encounter with the strange girl so suspiciously distant from her own cottage, but so providentially appearing on the scene at the right moment to relieve our heroine of every thing that could have tested the truth of her story by affording a clue to her identification. It must also appear very strange that, on finding herself deserted, she should have plunged into the wood in quest of Bertha, who, according to her own account, had followed the carriage along the road. This we pass by; but Caroline's piebald dialect is too curious a phenomenon to dismiss without remark. It was, as we have seen, a corrupt Hungarian, interspersed with manufactured and exotic words, and taught her, as she maintains, by her nurse. It seems, then, that Bertha must have been an accomplished linguist, and a great inventor in language; and, as it does not appear that she ever varied her diction or her idiom, she must have prepared her unknown tongue with deliberation, and practised it with assiduity. Her motive for such elaborate toil is less transparent than Caroline's for imputing it to her. By pretending ignorance of the language spoken by those about her, an impostor would gain time to look around, to perfect herself in her story, to observe the characters she had to deal with, and frame her tale and her demeanour accordingly. By employing a foreign tongue she at once excited additional interest, gratified the self-importance of those who found themselves able to communicate with her, and escaped the danger of self-betrayal, to which an assumed ignorance of all languages would have continually exposed her; while the affectation of a corrupt speech, both served to veil the real imperfection of her acquaintance with her pretended mother-tongue, and at the same time enabled her to evade inconvenient questions, and render conversation as difficult as suited her purpose. The terms, however, which she is incidentally mentioned as having forgotten and replaced by Bertha's jargon, are precisely those which she ought to have retained correctly, if at all. For example, she must have heard the words denoting "uncle" and "aunt" very often at home; from Bertha seldom or never. Yet the terms she employs ("ongkar," "xantlu") bear no resemblance whatever to the Hungarian equivalents, but are most suspiciously like the French "oncle" and "tante." This might have led the authorities to suspect in their protégée a young person of more extensive literary attainments than her native modesty permitted her to acknowledge, and we would almost venture to wager that the adventures of Kaspar Hauser at one time occupied an honourable place in her little library. The resemblance between her story and his is sufficiently striking, and not least in the temporary acceptance of each. Kaspar Hauser, as is well known, became a sort of public institution at Nuremberg; the most renowned jurist of the day was among his disciples, and the citizens would as soon have allowed you to question the antiquity of their ramparts as the truth of his pretensions. There are indications of a similar feeling at Offenbach; to this extent at least, that the authorities evidently considered Caroline's presence as re

flecting credit on their town, and would have felt much the same towards the sceptic who should have endeavoured to reduce the mysterious foundling to the dimensions of a common impostor, as the housekeeper at Holyrood towards the commercial traveller who wanted to test the virtues of his patent soap on the stains left by the murder of Rizzio. Thus the excellent Herr Eck stumbles at nothing; and the acuteness which should have been employed in the examination of Caroline's narrative is entirely expended in anticipating possible objections, and demolishing them before they are made. For example, he writes a long and inconclusive note to reconcile Caroline's incautious assertion, that she saw neither moon nor stars between her abandonment in the wood and her arrival at Offenbach, with the undeniable fact of her journey and exposure having taken place between the new moon and the full; how they should have escaped her attention in the first five years of her life, or how, having seen them, she could have forgotten them, he does not attempt to explain. An admirable man, clearly a grain of the salt of the earth, he accepts Caroline's amiability as a sufficient guarantee for her truthfulness. The patrons of the miscalled Female Jesuit were similarly confiding on similar grounds, and her story at least involved no impossibilities. It is hardly necessary to remark that the most refined deception is in no way incompatible with a placid and affectionate temper, and that in very many instances impostors have proved in reality as blameless as their dupes, being simply the victims of an uncontrollable monomania. Generally, indeed, this morbid secretiveness has occurred in conjunction with a no less abnormal development of the acquisitive faculty, finding a vent in petty thefts, the detection of which has discredited the whole story. This, if we remember rightly, was the case with the Female Jesuit. The mental constitution of Caroline would appear to be more fortunately organised, and, up to the publication of Herr Eck's memoir, her conduct, so far as it had fallen under his observation, must be admitted to have been wholly irreproachable.

His pamphlet bears date 1856, and no further particulars respecting Caroline have reached us. Perhaps the deception of her narrative has been made evident, perhaps its truth has been established, to the confusion of all sceptics. More probably than either, affairs remain in statu quo, and Caroline, it may be in the married state, continues to set an example of domestic excellence to all the fair sex in the two Hesses. We cannot doubt that, whether she be an impostor or not, the excitement and entertainment she has occasioned have amply compensated the good people of Offenbach for the trifling cost of her maintenance; and we should be really sorry could we imagine these remarks arriving among them, to perturb with unkind suspicions a state of things equally agreeable and advantageous to both parties. In the hope that this will not be the case, we have ventured to relate a story which appears to us equally interesting whether regarded as a passage from the romance of real life, or from the annals of ingenious and successful imposture.

R. G.

Donne the Metaphysician.

FOR the sake of the gushing young Minerva who has written to me on the subject of my Temple Bar articles, I almost regret that I am united in tender bonds of wedlock to Daphne. The little odoriferous pink roseblossom, delicately embroidered with elfin caligraphy, which flutters before me as I write, can only have emanated from the taper fingers of youthful loveliness; and (as Dryden said, when the exercise of constantly turning his coat had made him corpulent)

"Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,

The power of beauty I remember yet."

Of course I am ineligible; but I hope, for the sake of the youngest contributor to these pages, that Minerva is a spinster; and that, moreover, she has not yet taken to blue stockings, which ruin the ancles, or to spectacles, which distort the vision. Tasso, Spenser, and Herrick have all told us, and in identical language, to gather the rosebuds early in life, because Time flies; and I hope that my fair correspondent will look elsewhere for a congenial partner. Nulla retro via. At the same time, I thank Minerva for writing to me, because she has kindly suggested an introduction to my paper on Dr. Donne the Poet. She finds fault with me, she says, because I sound the praises of Bishop Corbet, who was a "tippler," in much the same way as I sound the praises of Mr. Herbert, who was almost a saint. She considers me in error for recording Richard Norwich's drinking-bouts; and she emphatically affirms that the Bishop had better have been left in oblivion.

You see, I feel the greatest possible relish for literary antiquities of all kinds; while for poetical antiquities I feel an absolute enthusiasm. As a boy, I ate Parnassian fruit with Erato, just as Buonaparte ate Corsican cherries with Madame Colombier. I like to scramble over those dry lingual moats which environ the old castle of Antiquarianism; and I am happier than Mr. Gigadibs when I gain the pleasant sober-coloured chambers within. It is the rarest treat in the world to rummage in those strange corners and dusty crannies; to study the venerable portraits, and to listen to the low Memnonian music which stirs so mysteriously about the shadowy rooms; and ultimately, to make my way to the still older watch-towers above, where the Spirit of the Past stands always, like the watchman in the Agamemnon, and casts her long moveless shadow over the wide plantains of literature lying underneath. In the course of my peregrinations, I have stumbled over such relics as John Ford's melancholy hat, the goblet in which Thomas the Rhymer pledged convivial Dunbar, and the golden scroll with Withers' "nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo" blazoned on it. Do you mean to tell me, Miss Minerva, that these little relics do not help me to comprehend the men who wore them, and the times in which those men lived and breathed? Is it nothing to know