"Be persuaded for once, now, I beg! Oh dear, dear, what a night it is tooit pours with rain, and blows a perfect hurricane! You'll be wet and catch cold, rely on it. Come now, won't you stop and keep me company to-night? That's a good girl!"

"Some other night will do as well for that, you know; for now I'll go to Mrs. P's, if it rains cats and dogs. So up-up-up I go !" singing jauntily

"Oh she shall dance all dress'd in white,
So ladylike."

Such were, very nearly, the words, and such the manner in which Miss Jexpressed her determination to act in defiance of her mother's wishes and entreaties. She was the only child of her widowed mother, and had, but a few weeks before, completed her twentysixth year, with yet no other prospect before her than bleak single-blessedness. A weaker, more frivolous and conceited creature never breathed-the torment of her amiable parent, the nuisance of her acquaintance. Though her mother's circumstances were very straitened, sufficing barely to enable them to maintain a footing in what is called the middling genteel class of society, this young woman contrived by some means or other to gratify her penchant for dress, and gadded about here, there, and everywhere, the most showily dressed person in the neighbourhood. Though far from being even pretty-faced, or having any pretensions to a good figure, for she both stooped and was skinny, she yet believed herself handsome; and by a vulgar, flippant forwardness of demeanour, especially when in mixed company, extorted such attentions as persuaded her that others thought so.

For one or two years she had been an occasional patient of mine. The settled pallor, the tallowiness of her complexion, conjointly with other symptoms, evidenced the existence of a liver complaint; and the last visits I had paid her were in consequence of frequent sensations of oppression and pain in the chest, which clearly indicated some organic disease of her heart. I saw enough to warrant me in warning her mother of the possibility of her daughter's sudden death from this cause, and the eminent peril to which she exposed herself by dancing, ate hours, &c.; but Mrs. -'s remonstrances, gentle and affectionate as

they always were, were thrown away upon her headstrong daughter.

It was striking eight by the church clock, when Miss J-, humming the words of the song above mentioned, lit her chamber-candle by her mother's, and withdrew to her room to dress, soundly rating the servant-girl by the way, for not having starched some article or other which she intended to have worn that evening. As her toilet was usually a long and laborious business, it did not occasion much surprise to her mother, who was sitting by the fire in their little parlour, reading some book of devotion, that the church chimes announced the first quarter past nine o'clock, without her daughter's making her appearance. The noise she had made over-head in walking to and fro to her drawers, dressing-table, &c. had ceased about half an hour ago, and her mother supposed she was then engaged at her glass, adjusting her hair, and preparing her complexion.

"Well, I wonder what can make Charlotte so very careful about her dress to-night!" exclaimed Mrs. J——, removing her eyes from the book, and gazing thoughtfully at the fire; "Oh! it must be because young Lieut. N— is to be there. Well, I was young myself once, and it's very excusable in Charlotte-heigho!" She heard the wind howling so dismally without, that she drew together the coals of her brisk fire, and was laying down the poker when the clock of church struck

the second quarter after nine.

"Why, what in the world can Charlotte be doing all this while?" she again inquired. She listened-" I have not heard her moving for the last three quarters of an hour! I'll call the maid and ask." She rung the bell, and the servant appeared. "Betty, Miss Jis she?"

is not gone yet,

again, but unsuccessfully as before. She became a little flustered; and after a moment's pause, opened the door and entered. There was Miss J- - sitting at the glass. "Why, la, ma'am !" commenced Betty in a petulant tone, walking up to her, "here have I been knocking for these five minutes, and"

Betty staggered horror-struck to the bed, and uttering a loud shriek, alarmed Mrs. J-, who instantly tottered up stairs, almost palsied with fright. Miss J-- was dead!

I was there within a few minutes, for my house was not more than two streets distant. It was a stormy night in March; and the desolate aspect of things with out-deserted streets-the dreary howling of the wind, and the incessant pattering of the rain-contributed to cast a gloom over my mind, when connected with the intelligence of the awful event that had summoned me out, which was deepened into horror by the spectacle I was doomed to witness. On reaching the house, I found Mrs. J- in violent hysterics, surrounded by several of her neighbours who had been called in to her assistance, I repaired instantly to the scene of death, and beheld what I shall never forget. The room was occupied by a white-curtained bed. There was but one window, and before it was a table, on which stood a looking-glass, hung with a little white drapery; and various paraphernalia of the toilet lay scattered about-pins, brooches, curling papers, ribands, gloves, &c. An armchair was drawn to this table, and in it sat Miss J. stone-dead. Her head rested upon her right hand, her elbow supported by the table; while her left hung down by her side, grasping a pair of curling - irons. Each of her wrists was encircled by a showy gilt bracelet. She was dressed in a white muslin frock, with a little bordering of blonde. Her face was turned towards the glass, which, by the light of the expiring candle, reflected with frightful fidelity the clammy fixed features, daubed over with rouge and carmine-the fallen lower jaw and the eyes directed full into the glass, with a cold dull stare, that was appalling. On examining the countenance more narrowly, I thought I detected the traces of a smirk of conceit and self-complacency, which not even the palsying touch of Death could wholly obliterate. The hair of the corpse, all smooth and glossy, was curled with elaborate precision; and the skinny sallow neck was encircled with a string of glistening pearls. The ghastly visage of Death thus leering through the tinselry

of fashion-the " vain show" of artificial joy-was a horrible mockery of the fooleries of life!

Indeed it was a most humiliating and shocking spectacle. Poor creature! struck dead in the very act of sacrificing at the shrine of female vanity! She must have been dead for some time, perhaps for twenty minutes, or half an hour, when I arrived, for nearly all the animal heat had deserted the body, which was rapidly stiffening. I attempted, but in vain, to draw a little blood from the arm. Two or three women present proceeded to remove the corpse to the bed, for the purpose of laying it out. What strange passiveness! No resistance offered to them while straightening the bent right arm, and binding the jaws together with a faded white riband. which Miss J— had destined for her waist that evening.

On examination of the body, we found that death had been occasioned by disease of the heart. Her life might have been protracted, possibly for years, had she but taken my advice, and that of her mother. I have seen many hundreds of corpses, as well in the calm composure of natural death, as mangled and distorted by violence; but never have I seen so startling a satire upon human vanity, so repulsive, unsightly, and loathsome a spectacle, as a corpse dressed for a ball!

LIFE

Blackwood's Magazine.

The Selector;

AND

LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

OF BRUCE, THE AFRICAN TRA-
VELLER.

By Major F. B. Head.

THIS is a somewhat bulky volume (No. 17) of the Family Library; and consists of one of the most interesting Memoirs in the whole compass of British adventure. Throughout the work we are happy to perceive that Major Head (himself no shrinking adventurer) has laboured to substantiate many of Bruce's statements in his "Travels," upon which error and prejudice had thrown much obloquy and discredit.Among these attempts at proof, we particularly notice the story of cutting steaks from a living cow, which, being too long for our present purpose, must stand over for our next No. "It was," as Major Head observes, "upon this fact that Bruce's reputation split, an

sunk like a vessel which had suddenly struck upon a rock;" so that the fact itself is worthy of quotation to refresh the memories of some readers, and its substantiation worthy of the attention of all.

Meanwhile we extract the "publication of Bruce's Travels," the fate of which will show the reader how difficult it is to stem the tide of popular prejudice when it has once set in against persevering merit: -

"After having enjoyed nearly twelve years of quiet domestic happiness, Bruce lost his wife she died in 1785, leaving him two children, a son and a daughter. Thus deprived of his best friend and companion, he became restless and melancholy. The love of solitude,' he very justly says, 'is the constant follower of affliction. This again naturally turns an instructed mind to study.'These feelings Bruce's friends strongly encouraged, and they used every endeavour to rouse him from his melancholy, and persuade him to occupy his mind in the arrangement and publication of his travels.

"My friends unanimously assailed me,' he says, in the part most accessible when the spirits are weak, which is vanity. They represented to me how ignoble it was, after all my dangers and difficulties, to be conquered by a misfortune incident to all men, the indulging of which was unreasonable in itself, fruitless in its consequences, and so unlike the expectation I had given my country by the firmness and intrepidity of my former character and behaviour.

"Others, whom I mention only for the sake of comparison, below all notice on any other account, attempted to succeed in the same design by anonymous letters and paragraphs in the newspapers; and thereby absurdly endea voured to oblige me to publish an account of those travels, which they affect ed at the same time to believe I had never performed.

"It is universally known,' states the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, that doubts have been entertained, whether Mr. Bruce was ever in Abyssinia. The Baron de Tott, speaking of the sources of the Nile, says-A traveller named Bruce, it is said, has pretended to have discovered them. I saw at Cairo the servant who was his guide and companion during the journey, who assured me that he had no knowledge of any such discovery.'

"To the persuasions of his friends Bruce at last yielded, and as soon as he resolved to undertake the task, he per

ap

formed it with his usual energy and ap plication. In about three years he submitted the work, nearly finished, to his very constant and sincere friend, the Hon. Daines Barrington. In the meanwhile his enemies triumphantly maintained a clamour against him—and in his study he was assailed by the most virulent accusations of exaggeration and falsehood—all descriptions of people were against him; from Dr. Johnson, the great lexicographer, and moralist of the day, down to the witty Peter Pindar; heavy artillery as well as musketry were directed against Bruce at Kinnaird.

"When Bruce's work was completed, just before it was printed, and while public attention was eagerly expecting it, Johnson translated and published the travels in Abyssinia of the Jesuit Jereme Lobo. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, it is stated that Johnson had declared to Sir John Hawkins,_' that when he first conversed with Mr. Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, he was very much inclined to believe that he had been there, but that he had afterwards altered his opinion!' In Johnson's preface, accordingly, he evidently at the expense of Bruce's reputation, extols the Portuguese traveller, as one who has amused his reader with no romantic absurdities or incredible fictions. He appears by his modest and unaffected narrative to have described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to have consulted his senses, not his imagination. He meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rock without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.'

"These round, rigmarole sentences were rolled against Bruce, a man who had patiently visited three quarters of the globe, by Johnson, one of the most prejudiced men of his age, who, himself a traveller, had not temper enough to travel in a hack-chaise to Aberdeen!

"Peter Pindar amused all people (except Bruce) by his satirical flings, one of which was

'Nor have I been where men (what loss alas!) Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass.'

knowledge of the world, can even be termed improbable. We do not allude to the corroborations which his statements have received from the writings of Jereme Lobo, Paez, Salt, Coffin, Pearce, Burckhardt, Browne, Clarke, Wittman, Belzoni, &c.; for, whether these men support or contradict, their evidence would be only, say ten to one, for him or against him-which, after all, is no certainty-but we appeal unto Cæsar,' we appeal to our present knowledge of the world upon which we live.

"Bruce has stated that men eat raw flesh in Abyssinia; we know that men in other countries eat raw fish-blubber, and even eat each other; we ourselves eat the flesh of oysters raw. Bruce's statement, therefore, is not and never was improbable.

"Bruce has given a picture of the profligacy of the Abyssinians, which, from its disgusting features, we have purposely withheld (to a well-constituted mind such details are only disgusting); yet it can very easily be shown that it is not at all improbable. In northern countries, a female possesses personal attractions at an age in which she is also endowed with mental accomplishments; she has judgment as well as beauty, ballast as well as sail, and, like the orange-tree, she thus bears fruit and flowers on the same stem; but, in the precocious climate of Abyssinia, this is not the case; and it surely need only be hinted, that there children of ten years of age are women, to explain what must be the sad effects of human passions working in such an uneducated, and, consequently, irrational state of society. There is no one of Bruce's assertions which may not, by similar reasoning, be supported; but the public, instead of judging, at once condemned him; his statements were only compared with the habits and customs of England-which, at that time, were as narrow and as harsh as the bed of the tyrant Procustes ;-and because the scenes which Bruce described differed from those chez nous, they were most unreasonably and most unjustifiably discredited.

"However, Bruce's Travels were disbelieved in toto, and it was even proclaimed from the garret that he had never been in Abyssinia at all! Dr. Clarke says 'Soon after the publication of his Travels to discover the sources of the Nile, several copies of the work were sold in Dublin as waste paper, in consequence of the calumnies circulated against the author's veracity.'

"There is something so narrow-minded, and, what is infinitely worse, so lowminded, in unjustly accusing an honest servant of exaggeration, that to do Bruce justice, to repel the attack of his enemy, it is absolutely necessary to show how little this country was entitled to pronounce such a verdict.

"When Bruce published his Travels, British intellect had marched exactly. half-way from the Mississippi and South Sea schemes of the year 1720 towards the equally ruinous speculations of the year 1825, which, as we all know, proceeded from the same disreputable parents-had the same pedigree, the same sire, and the same dam-being got by Fraud out of Folly. The first of these bubbles had burst, the others were not yet blown; and thus, between these two bundles of hay, stood that 'Public Opinion' which obstinately condemned Bruce-that incredulity of the credulous.

"Bruce's great object in travelling to such remote countries had been honestly to raise himself and his family in the estimation of the world. This reward, to which he was so justly entitled, was not only withheld from him, but he found himself absolutely lowered in society, as a man guilty of exaggeration and falsehood. Under such cruel treatment, nothing could be more dignified than his behaviour. He treated his country with the silent contempt which it deserved-he disdained to make any reply to the publications which impeached his veracity; and when his friends earnestly entreated him to alter, to modify, to explain, the accounts which he had given, he sternly replied, in the words of his preface.... What I have written I have written !'

6

"To his daughter alone, his favourite child, he opened his heart. Although she was scarcely twelve years of age when he published his Travels, she was his constant companion; and he used teach her the proper mode of pronouncing the Abyssinian words, that he might leave,' as he said, 'some one behind him who could pronounce them correctly.' He repeatedly said to her, with feelings highly excited, 'I shall not live to see it, but you probably will, and you will then see the truth of all I have written thoroughly confirmed.' In this expectation, however, it may here be observed, Bruce was deceived."

Perhaps there is rather too much gasconade in certain portions of Major Head's volume: his enthusiasm is, however, always generous and honourable to his heart.