A long time-or it seemed long-of agonised doubt; suspense; hope; and they saw it clearly. A vessel of some sort was bearing direct towards them. The lady walked away, and aroused Lord Byron from his heavy sleep.

"You have borne up better than any of us," she said, "though I do believe your nonchalance was only put on. But you must not pretend now to be indifferent to joy."

"Is anything making for the island?" he inquired. But he spoke with great coolness. Perhaps that was "put on too.

"Yes. They are coming to our rescue.'

"You are sure of this?" he said.

"A

"Had I not been sure, you should have slept on," was her reply. vessel of some description is bearing direct towards us." He started up, and, giving her his arm, proceeded to join the rest. It was fully in view now. And it proved to be a galley of six oars, the gallant Cyclops steering. So he and his barrel were not turned over and drowned then! No; the distance and their fears had deceived them. The current had borne himself and his cask towards an inhabited island, lying in the direction of Ragusa. A terrible way off, it seemed to him, but the adventurous gondolier reached it with time and patience, greatly astonishing the natives with the novel style of his embarkation. Obtaining assistance and provisions, he at once proceeded on his return, to rescue those he had left behind.

The galley was made fast to the shore-faster than the gondola had been; and Cyclops, springing on land, amidst the thanks and cheers of the starving group, proceeded to display the coveted refreshments. A more welcome sight than any, save the galley, that had ever met their

eyes.

"We

"Oh God be thanked that we have not to die here!" murmured the countess to Lord Byron. "Think what a horrible fate it would have been-shut out from the world!" "For me there may be even a worse in store," he answered. were a knot of us here, and should at least have died together. be that I shall yet perish a solitary exile, away from all." "Do put such ideas away," she retorted. "It would be a sad fate, that, to close a career such as yours."

It may

"Sad enough, perhaps : but in keeping with the rest," was his reply, a melancholy smile rising to his pale features, as he handed her into the boat, preparatory to their return.

Up to a very recent period, there was an old man still living in Italy, a man who, in his younger days, had been a gondolier. His name-at any rate, the one he went by-was Cyclops. It was pleasant to sit by his side in the open air, and hear him talk. He would tell you fifty anecdotes of the generous English lord, who lived so long, years ago, at Ravenna. And if he could persuade you to a walk in the blazing sun, would take you to the water's edge, and display, with pride and delight, a handsome gondola. It was getting the worse for wear then, in the way of paint and gilding, but it had once been the flower among the gondolas of the Adriatic. It was made under the orders of Lord Byron, and when presented to Cyclops was already christened-THE CASK,

LITERARY LEAFLETS.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

No. XII.-PROFESSOR R. C. TRENCH.

THE Church hath its poets, as the world hath, and Professor Trench is of them. Perhaps the most Wordsworthian of them. His strains have not the melodious chime of Keble's "solemn church music," as Thackeray reveringly characterises the "Christian Year;" nor have they the glistening decorations of Milman, or the sonorous dignity of Croly, or perhaps the gentle tenderness of Moultrie, or the cathedral awe and dim religious light of Isaac Williams. But they have depth without bathos, while the vastly more popular verses of Robert Montgomery have bathos without depth; and if inferior in picturesque diction and vivid suggestiveness to the best things of Charles Kingsley, they have none of that " Keepsake" prettiness, and "Annual" efflorescence, which mark the lyrics of the Dale and Stebbing order. "Justin Martyr," and "Poems from Eastern Sources," " Sabbation," ," "Honor Neale," and other his more elaborate metrical essays, are dear to a select audience of thinking hearts-they are truthful and refined, the effusions of a benign, spiritual naturehealthy and pure in tone, and, though pensively attuned to the still sad music of humanity, they are inspired with the gladdening, elevating evangelism of Christianity. Mr. Trench has his mannerisms, and now and then his seeming obscurities, which pertain, however, only to the surface of his composition. Thus, in his "Century of Couplets," will be found, as the terse requirements of the subject might imply, many a line that asks to be scanned as well as read-scanned for the sake both of sense and metre; and though the result will prove that the poet has thought himself clear, it may sometimes leave doubts as to the delicacy of his ear. This defect in the matter of rhythmical beauty, is more patent in the blank verse of his longer pieces, which usually wants relief and colour-albeit Christopher North has praised it as excellent of its kind. Mr. Trench is probably most effective in stanzas of the description we are about to quote-where some historic incident or biographic tradition is graphically told, and made the text of a quietly emphasised memento, addressed to the universal conscience. The following lines were suggested by a passage in Elphinstone's "History of India :"

Lo! an hundred proud pagodas have the Moslem torches burned,
Lo! a thousand monstrous idols Mahmoud's zeal has overturned.
He from northern Ghuznee issuing, thro' the world one word doth bear,-
"God is ONE; ye shall no other with the peerless One compare!"
Till in India's furthest corner he has reached the costliest shrine
Of the Brahmin's idol-tending—which they hold the most divine.
Profits not the wild resistance; stands the victor at the gate,
With this hugest idol's ruin all his work to consummate.
Ransom vast of gold they offer, pearls of price and jewels rare,
Will he hear their supplication, and that only image spare.

Then he answered: "God has armed me, not to make a shameful gain,
Trafficking for hideous idols, with a service false and vain ;

"But to count my work unfinished, till I sweep them from the world:
Stand and see the thing ye sued for, by this hand to ruin hurled."

High he reared his battle-axe, and heavily came down the blow:
Reeled the abominable image, broken, bursten, to and fro;

From its shattered side revealing pearls and diamonds, showers of gold;
More than all that proffered ransom, more than all a hundred fold.
Thou too, Heaven's commissioned warrior to cast down each idol throne
In thy heart's profaned temple, make this faithful deed thine own.
Still they plead, and still they promise, wilt thou suffer them to stand,
They have pleasures, they have treasures, to enrich thee at command.
Heed not thou, but boldly strike them; let descend the faithful blow;}
From their wrecks and from their ruin first will thy true riches flow.
Thou shalt lose thy life and find it; thou shalt boldly cast it forth;
And then back again receiving, know it in its endless worth.

Professor Trench excels in this species of didactic symbolism, which indeed is characteristic of all his writings, prose and verse—be it lecture or lyric, sermon or song.

His collection of "Sacred Latin Poetry" is tasteful and comprehensive -though it omits the thrilling Stabat Mater, and certain other rhymed Latin hymns which are, rightly or wrongly, objectionable to Protestant students of hymnology. Some of these can, however, be as ill-spared in such a collection as the lovely Consolator optime, or the sublime Dies ira. But this little volume is too rich with sweet concords to allow of critical discords, harsh and grating, and not of ample power to subdue its attraction.

Of Professor Trench's theological writings this is not the place to speak, except en passant. His Hulsean Lectures, and his Notes on the Miracles and on the Parables of the New Testament, are held in high esteem within and without the pale of his own Church. He belongs to the Coleridgean school of divines, if such a description is allowable in reference to a group of pastors and teachers representing somewhat diverse as well as divers opinions-comprehending an Arnold and a Hare, Kingsley and Maurice, Derwent Coleridge and Arthur Stanley. His every work is pervaded by true earnestness, instinct with spiritual thought, and animated by a refined, chastened, effective eloquence. His weak side is a rather crotchety fancy and love of analogy.

"The Study of Words" is a right winning little volume, designed to awaken attention to the riches that lurk in language. It is marked by extensive reading and a genial spirit of investigation; but its chiefest value lies in its suggestiveness-its provocative, stimulant, "educational" tone. Perhaps it is a little open to objection on the side of its frequently sermonising, and Sunday didactic manner; sometimes haling in rather irrelevant matter, and verging on a disposition to prose in the way of "practical inferences from this subject." This is explicable, by the fact that the book consists of a series of lectures delivered before the pupils of a diocesan training school; and although we could have wished to see them printed in a revised form, others may (indeed others do) find an additional value in the characteristic to which we have taken exception. So let that pass. The book is a jewel of a book-not spoilt in the setting. Its subject, what has been called "fossil poetry." For, says Emerson,

as

the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin." Hence the value of a book which is framed to remind us of this nobility of pedigree, and with the lofty sanctify the low, and, as it were, recal the baptismal time of these garment-soiled, time-stricken words, when the fresh dew of their morning-tide was upon them, and they were pledged to a vocation long since neglected or forgotten. Winged words deserve scrutiny in their flight. "On words," says Landor, "rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck ineradicably in a million hearts . On a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness."+ Alluding to Emerson's expression, Mr. Trench happily observes that language may be, and indeed is, "fossil poetry"-but is also, and with equal truth, fossil ethics, or fossil history. He calls it the embodiment, the incarnation of the feelings, thoughts and experiences of a nation, often of many nations, and of all which through centuries they have attained to and won-standing like the pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these, and even itself a great element of that advance. He calls it the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. He reserves the dictum which pronounces words the wise man's counters and the fool's money; for in words he descries a reality, a living power, not merely an arbitrary symbolism; to his eye they are not like the sands of the sea, innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world until now.

And thus he regards language as a moral barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation's life. "To study a people's language will be to study them, and to study them at best advantage, where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are.' It will bear the stamp of national frivolity, shallowness and triviality, or of high sentiment and superiority to everything mean and base. And though it may be lost labour to seek for the parentage of all words, yet all have an ancestry, or descent of some kind. "There is no word which is not, as the Spanish gentleman loves to call himself, an hidalgo, the son of somebody"-so that, when a word entirely refuses to give up the secret of its origin, it can be regarded in no other light but as a riddle which no one has succeeded in solving, a lock of which no one has found the key-but still a riddle which has a solution, a lock for which there is a key, though now, it may be, irrecoverably lost.

* Emerson's Essays. Second Series. ("The Poet.") † Imaginary Conversations (Lucian and Timotheus).

Among words which are but of yesterday, and yet with a marvellous rapidity have forgotten the circumstances of their origin, Mr. Trench refers to the terms, Roundheads, Cannibal, Huguonots, Canada, and a word which the Anglo-Americans might be supposed quite able to explain, since it plays so prominent a part in their elections,-viz. Caucus.

To be indifferent to the Study of Words is like "incurious dulness" to the image and superscription of ancient coins; current words being like current coinage, with this addition in the latter case, that each piece of money passing through our hands has something of its own characteristic and note-worthy-one, stamped with some striking maxim, another with some important fact, another with some memorable date-some pieces being works of finest art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of immortal sage or heroic king-others again being the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame.

Great are the curiosities of etymology. We remember to have seen an incredulous smile excited by Professor Maurice on the faces of a group of listeners, when he mentioned, as an instance of this curiosity, the radical identity of the Greek hylè (vλn) and the English savage; although he had but to supply the few and satisfactory links of relationship to convince the most sceptical. Even within the compass of our mother-tongue, the relationships of words are often unsuspected. Thus Mr. Trench shows how from the one Anglo-Saxon word to sheer, comes a family so seemingly unrelated as shire, shore, share, sheers, shred, sherd. The multiform usages of the word post may be brought to a common centrepost being the Latin positus, "that which is placed"—and thus a piece of timber is "placed" in the ground, and so a post-a military station is a "post," for a man is "placed" in it, and must not quit it without orders -to travel "post," is to have certain relays of horses "placed" at intervals, so that no delay on the road may occur-the "post"-office is that which avails itself of this mode of communication-to "post" a ledger is to "place" or register its several items. We are reminded that "heaven" is only the perfect of to heave, being properly the sky as it is raised aloft; the "smith" has his name from the blows he smites on the anvil; "wrong" is the perfect participle of to wring,-that which is wrung or wrested from the right; the "brunt" of a battle is its heat, where it burns the most fiercely; the "haft" of a knife is that whereby you have or hold it; the "left" hand is the hand we leave, inasmuch as for twenty times we use the right hand, we do not once employ it. In the section entitled "On the History in Words," we find numerous interesting results of philological study, tending to show how far such a study may go in helping to reproduce the past history of England-for instance, while the statelier superstructure of the language (almost all articles of luxury, all that has to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment) is Norman throughout, the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life (the great features of nature, all the prime social relations), is Saxon-the stable elements of Anglo-Saxon life, however overlaid for a while, still making good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language. A suggestive history in words is pointed out in miscreant, a term applied by the Crusaders to the Mahometans, and meaning at first simply a misbeliever, and then as applicable to the royal-hearted Saladin as to the most infamous wretch that fought in his armies;-in saunter, and saunterer, derived from "la Sainte Terre," whither wended at last every idler that liked strolling about better than performing the duties of his calling ;-in poltroon, the supposed derivative from pollice truncus, one who has deprived himself of his thumb, to