Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

But what shall we say to Ode XXVIII. -Ανε ζωγραφων αριστε,

Best of painters, shew thy art,
Draw the mistress of my heart.

Of this Ode, which is so exquisitely beautiful in the Greek metre, the following extract from this translator's version, affords a favourable specimen :

Come, master of the art divine!
Delineate thou the glowing line;
O, master of the Rhodian art,
Thy peerless genius here impart;
Paint thou, as I describe my fair,-
My blooming maid demands thy care.
First let her jetty ringlets flow
In sweet suffusion round her brow;
Let them exhale the rich perfume,
If so thy pencil can presume;
Then paint her iv'ry forehead so,
And shade her cheeks' celestial glow
Beneath her silken, sable tresses,

That love may revel in caresses, &c.

Ode LII. "On the Wine Press," has the following beautiful lines:

Sweet to the swain at early morn,

Who wanders, near the glist'ning thorn;
The op'ning rose-bud, set in dew,

Arrests his course, and charms his view;

His fost'ring hand will gently move,
And lightly raise the flower of love.

CAMBYSES.

CAMBYSES was a king of Persia, and the son of Cyrus the Great. He conquered Egypt, and was so offended at the superstition of the Egyptians, that he killed their god Apis, and plundered their temples. When he wished to take Pelusium, he placed at the head of his army a number of cats and dogs; and the Egyptians refusing, in the attempt to defend themselves, to kill animals which they reverenced as divinities, became an easy prey to the enemy. Cambyses afterward sent an army of 50,000 men to destroy the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and he resolved to attack the Carthaginians and Ethiopians. He killed his brother Smerdis from mere suspicion, and flayed alive a partial judge, whose skin he nailed on the judgment seat, and appointed his son to succeed him, telling him to remember where he sat. He died of a small wound which he had given himself with his sword, as he mounted on horseback; and the Egyptians observed that it was the same place on which he had wounded their god Apis, and that therefore he was visited by the hands of the gods. His death happened 521 years before Christ. He left no issue to succeed him, and his throne was usurped by the magi, and soon after ascended by Darius.-Herodot. Justin.

THE CATACOMBS OF PARIS.-VAULT AT BORDEAUX.

THE receptacles for the dead, prepared by the care and industry of our pious ancestors, may well arrest our attention. The mummies of Egypt, embalmed for many ages, present a solemn but a useful lesson to the mind. To contemplate the remains of a princess of the house of Pharaoh, while it carries us back to the most remote antiquity, and conjures up to us the shades of ancient Egypt, "Parent of arts and arms," will also furnish the understanding with a proper impression of the fallacy of earthly grandeur, and the instability of human pursuits. These reflections, apparently so trite, so often repeated, and so usually disregarded, may yet have their weight, and exert their influence, at due times and seasons. At no time does the human heart feel this influence more forcibly, than at the sight of the frail relics of mortality, preserved in charnel-houses or Catacombs, the retiring rooms of death. In England these collections are not so frequent. The French nation, greatly to their honour, and with a true classical taste, have preserved the remains of their ancestors for a succession of ages. "The Caveau of the tower of the church of St. Michael at Bordeaux, contains" says a recent intelligent traveller, "eighty-four remains of human forms in a state of curious preservation. They are not embalmed; they are not enclosed in cases; they are not even inhumed; but they are arranged all round the cave against the wall, and are supported in a gentle inclined position, merely by the natural limbs which are knit together with surprising facility. Some of them, as recorded by tradition, were 500 years old, none of them less than 150. They seem to have owed their preservation to the peculiar nature of the spot where they were deposited, and not to any auxiliary means whatever. They furnish an appalling scene; but it is one also which, if properly viewed, can scarcely fail to produce a useful effect. The impression which it makes, after half an hour's contemplation, can never be forgot."-The Catacombs of Paris, for their singular construction, and for moral purposes, well deserve the attention of the curious stranger. They were originally formed from the stone quarries, which undermine Paris to a vast extent, and the collection was first made in the year 1786, when the bones found in the cemetery of the Innocents, and those in other religious houses that were suppressed, were brought hither, when the place was consecrated. At that time the bones were thrown in promiscuously through an aperture; but in 1811 the arrangement of them was undertaken by M. Hericart de Thury. An open staircase in the vicinity of the buildings in the barrier d'Enfer, on the west side of the road to Orleans, leads to these abodes of death; it descends ninety feet. On entrance, the stranger is struck with the appalling inscription on one side of Arretez mortals! C'est l'Empire de la mort, while on the other he beholds Has ultra metas requiescunt, beatam spem expectantes. "Beyond these posts they rest, in a blessed expectatation." The interior of these vaults presents a curious and awful spectacle. Long galleries and rooms present themselves in every direction, ornamented by bones, laid in geometrical order. Squares, parallelograms, and rhomboids are disposed at due distances, and altars appear of crossbones, and skulls, piled together. Walls are also erected, some sixteen feet deep and ten high, arranged most curiously in rows of bones, with all the neatness of mason work; rows of sculls forming the intersections. Bodies, in number, equal to four times the population of Paris, are here

deposited. As they decay, they are closed up in vaults with monuments, and cleanliness and neatness of arrangement are every where observed. In another part there is a collection of deformed skulls and fractured limbs; and at the extremity of these vaults of death, there is a well of pure water, which contains fish of the trout species, that sport undisturbed by the remains of myriads of former lords of the creation. The moral lesson which this interesting spectacle reads to every mind, is sufficiently obvious and forcible. A recent observer of the Catacombs impressively remarks" Who can view with indifference the assemblage of so many ages, as powerless and inanimate, as he himself will one day be. It is there that the true difference between life and death may be seen ; it is there that man may be convinced how unimportant an object he is in the creation; and it is there that he may learn that his years are but as units, in the record of time."

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE.

PARIS.-A mummy has recently arrived at Bruges, taken from one of the pyramids of Egypt. It appears to be that of a princess of the race of Pharaoh, who probably died about 3700 years ago. It is still in the case

which contained it in the pyramid. The cover represents a female of extraordinary stature, in the Egyptian costume: The colours are vivid, and in good preservation. The same case also contained an embalmed cat-whose attendance indicates the high rank of the personage embalmed.

There has lately appeared a Poem by a Mr. Favry, called "Caledonie," ou "La guerre Nationale." The Editor of the Constitutionel, in reviewing it, expresses his surprise that the author did not fix upon some event in the history of his own country to commemorate, rather than a foreign one. One of our young poets, M. Victor Hugo, has published a volume of Odes, some of which are well written, but he seems to have an excessive fondness for strange words and phrases.

Sgricci, the Italian improvisatore, is to improvise publicly in a few evenings, a tragedy in five acts; and M. Eugene de Pradel, a young poet, will, it is said, improvise a tragedy in five acts first, and directly afterward an opera in three acts.

Young Lyst has given his first public concert at the Italian Theatre, which was crowded with spectators: the talent of this young lad is astonishing, and all the professors are delighted with him. He is only twelve years old, but his execution and composition are thought to surpass that of the greatest masters of the age.

M. Siennet, author of the tragedy of Cloris, and of some few other poems, has recently published a work called "Trois Dialogues des morts," et" trois Epitres."

Count Platoff, a rich Russian senator, and a great patron of the arts, has just published an account of a journey in some parts of France,

ROME, The Chevalier Tambroni died last month; he was born at Bologna, and had been for some years intended for a place at the imperial picture gallery, at Vienna; but never received the decree of his appointment. The last summer, he discovered the ancient city of Bovilla. The Giornale Accadico loses, by his death, one of its chief contributors.

S. Salmanli has been invited to Dresden, for the purpose of cleaning the finest paintings in the gallery, which stand much in need of it. It is said, that he is to leave Rome early in the spring.

THE HOLLOW OAK-THE HAUNT OF DEMONS.
(A Welsh Legend.)

WHO has not heard of the renowned Sir Owen Glyndwr, the son of Gryffydd Fychan, by the lady Elena, of royal blood? She was eldest daughter of Thomas ap Llewelyn ap Owen, by his wife Elinor Goch, or Elinor the red, daughter and heiress to Catherine, one of the daughters of Llewelyn last prince of Wales, and wife to Philip ap Ivor of Iscoed. And who has not heard how, on the night of his nativity, his father's horses were found standing in the stables up to their bellies in blood; and how the deathless bard Jolo Goch was wont to sing of a glorious star which appeared in the firmament, to mark the great deeds of Glyndwr?

The aforenamed bard, with others of his order, was invited by Sir Owen to make a sanctuary of Sycharth, the seat of that hospitable knight and well was it for him that he courted the favour of Jolo and his companions in minstrelsy. For they celebrated the glories of Sycharth, the castle and seat of the chieftain; and full well did they sing of the grandeur of its apartments, and the thickness of its walls, and its towers, and its battlements. But for Jolo, who could know at this day that it had a gate-house without, and that it was surrounded by a moat; that within it there were nine halls, each furnished with a wardrobe filled with the suits of his retainers: that on a verdant bank near to the castle there stood a house all made of wood, supported on posts, and covered with tiles, containing four VOL. I. 10.-Second Edition.

L

[ocr errors]
[graphic]

apartments, and each apartment divided into two, for the lodgment and entertaining of the guests of the said Sir Owen: that there was a church in the form of a cross with divers chapels therein, and that in every chapel the relics of saints were kept? And cheerily Jolo Goch did chant of the park, the warren, the pigeon-house, and of the heronry which supplied the knight and his noble guests with game for the sport of falconry: of the mill, the orchard, and the vineyard, and of the fishpond filled with pike and gwyniads. Nor did the bard forget the wine, the ale, the braget, and the white bread; nor his good friends the cook and his helpers, the turnspits and serving-men; nor that the house did need neither porter, nor locks, nor bolts, for the doors were always open, and no one could ever hunger or thirst in Sycharth: neither was he unmindful of the fair lady of the house, and her offspring; for after that he had tuned his harp in praise of Sir Owen, and that which I have just above rehearsed, thus would he break forth:

A Gwraig orau o'r gwragedd,
Gwynn y myd, o'i Gwin a'i medd.
Merch eglur, Llin marchawglyw,
Urddol, hael, o reiol ryw.
A'i blant, a ddeuant bob ddau
Nythod têg o bennaethau !*

Now ever since the reign of England's first Edward, Wales had been united unto that kingdom. But the Welsh accounted this a perfect slavery: for they were forced to receive laws and customs from a conquering nation, which they had long contended with for their freedom; and whatever came from their conquerors they did look upon with suspicion, and they could not love the same. The reign of King Henry the Fourth did begin with a conspiracy, which shewed that the English were not contented with the revolution which had just before come to pass in their country: and in this reign did Sir Owen stir up his brave countrymen to shake off the yoke of their oppressors. He first declared his design in the year 1400, while Henry waged war against Scotland. The Welsh having such a commander, took arms on a sudden, and so firm a hold did Glyndwr obtain on the hearts and confidence of his countrymen, that they called him their sovereign, and he took upon himself the title of Prince of Wales. The king being at that time in Scotland, the Earl of March, who sojourned at his seat at Wigmore, assembled the nobles about him, to oppose Sir Owen: then did that valiant chieftain not only guard against the attacks of the English, but he advanced to the borders of their own country, and defied them to come out, and give him battle; and then the Earl of March seeking to repel him, was routed and taken prisoner. But Glyndwr maintained his daring, and often did he insult the English, and they durst not oppose him; and his followers became the terror of all who refused to make common cause with them. Then in the year after, Henry entered Wales at the head of a great army, but the Welsh retired to their mountains, and he destroyed the abbey of Ystrad Fflur in Cardiganshire, and ravaged the country; yet was

*His wife, the best of wives!

Happy am I in her wine and metheglin.
Eminent woman of a knightly family,
Honourable, beneficent, noble.
His children come in pairs;

A beautiful nest of chieftains.

« AnteriorContinuar »