The poet's own plans for future life were in some degree affected by those of his relatives. About the middle of September he returned home, again to mingle in a hundred little matters of local interest, which his good nature did not permit him to decline. The postmaster of Sheffield had just died, and Montgomery sought to have his daughter appointed. There were so few decent situations to which females could be properly appointed, that he thought it desirable not to lessen the number, and his experience led him to think that the charge of a local post-office might be even better given to a woman than to a man. When he published a newspaper, he employed as his agents the managers of the local post-offices-the women always paid him--he never lost a penny by them, while he could not say the same of the men. His protegee on this occasion succeeded.

The name of Dr. Urwick of Dublin occurs in a letter to Dr. Railles, of Liverpool, and is mentioned in a tone of affectionate respect with which many will cordially sympathise. "Twice," says Montgomery, "I adventured through the sea of Liverpool-for to me the town with its high-ways and bye-ways was as pathless and bewildering as the great deep itself towards your chapel, and by enquiring at every corner or open door, I reached the spot in safety. On the first occasion you were absent, but your pulpit was well occupied by good Dr. Urwick of Dublin, and an excellent discourse he delivered."

An account of some high words between two clergymen is mentione 1. Montgomery said, "I dare say both were to blame-but 1 know whose opposition I would prefer to have encountered. Mr. is very quiet in his manner, but his words strike you like cannon balls; there is no turning them aside. Mr.

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the other hand is quick and voluble, but his words make no more impression than a shower of rain on a goose's back."

An odd incident occurred about this time to Montgomery. A lady and gentleman drove up to Montgomery's house. The gentleman stated that he called to executed a commission from his deceased brother, who had at one time submitted some manuscript poems to Montgomery, by

whom he was dissuaded from pub lishing them. He often said he owed a debt of obligation to Montgomery, and, when dying, directed that after his interment a handsome silver inkstand should be purchased and presented to the poet. The ink-stand bore the inscription, from T. E. to J. M.

A visit from the American poet, Bryant, gave pleasure to Montgomery; but Mr. Holland's record of the conversation, at which he was present, while it gives us a favourable impression of Bryant, is too long for extract, and does not well admit of abridgment. The anxiety of the Americans to see all our notabilities is pretty often exemplified in these volumes, and of the strange accounts of our distinguished men published in the American newspapers, we have one amusing specimen. An article appeared in "the Boston Atlas," entitled, "The two Montgomeries, James and Robert," in which the writer describes himself as having been introduced to James at Bristol. James, speaking of Mrs. Hemans, is made to say, that he had from her some of the most delightful letters ever penned, and that she was ready-made angel." Miss Jane Porter is described as having been at a party in Bristol, and invited for the purpose of meeting Montgomery.She is described as "thin, pale, and very old-maidish." Montgomery had never had any letters from Mrs. Hemans never said she was "a ready-made angel"-never met Miss Jane Porter except once in Londor, and then thought her not only " fine, but a lovely woman." The next place in which this writer says he met Montgomery was at Olneywhere he showed all Cowper's haunts.. Montgomery was never at Olney. Two years pass, and the writer now visits Montgomery, who tells him of his house having been robbed of a silver ink-stand, the gift of the ladies of Sheffield. The thief, when he saw Montgomery's name on the ink-stand, was stung with remorse, and remem bering that he had been taught some of Montgomery's verses when a child, returned the property. Of all this there was not a word true; but in addition to all this, he represents Montgomery as taking him to hear a lecture of Ebenezer Elliott's, the

a

corn-law rhymer, after which they returned to Elliott's, who spoke through the evening on subjects of general literature. Not one word of truth in the entire.

Mr. Wyse, son of the British Minister at Athens, was one of Montgomery's visitors. Hartley Coleridge, whom he met at Wordsworth's, gave him as a letter of introduction the following sonnet which strikes us as of great beauty :

Poets there are whom I am well content

Only to see in mirror of their verse— Feeling their very presence might disperse The glorious vision which their lines present. But never could my shaping wit invent

An image worthy of a Christian bard,
Such as thou art--but ever would discard
Conceit too earthly and irreverent
To be thy likeness; therefore I regret

That fate or fault, or whatsoe'er it be,
Hath made thy holy lineaments as yet
A vague imagination unto me.

I more should love and better understand Thy verse, if I could hold thee by the hand.

We have said that these volumes are too many. Considered as the biography of James Montgomery, they no doubt are; but it must be remembered that they contain a portion of what may properly be called his works-which, unless in this way preserved, would be wholly lost. What estimate of his powers may be formed in future days it would be hazardous to predict. There can be little doubt that upon his own times few writers have been more influential, and no doubt that his talents were at all times conscientiously exerted for good.

Engraved portraits of Montgomery and his friends are given as frontispieces with the volumes-and there are vignettes in the title pages, of the places where he resided,

THE superstition of Fortune belongs to the romance of our nature, in one of its primeval and simplest forms. As old as the buman heart, it is nearly as interesting; and if not the most beautiful exercise of the imagination, is certainly one of the most picturesque. It may be true, or it may be false; but adhering to us in every stage of life and social progress, it is at all events nature, and must put in its lot of truth or falsehood with all our other instincts.

When our reveries carry us (as sometimes the more charming of them will) to the first-remembered springs of our intellect, there are few of us who do not recall some vague confidence in an unknown force, bound to supply us with results quite independently of the law of cause and effect; and some of us, the more imaginative, will even recollect with a Walter Scott, how a marble or knotted string, a particular point in the ring, or special place in the class, became converted into a temporary amulet, under the dim influences opened to us by our first glimpse at the Great Unknown.

Aud, absurd as this seems, where the man of genius better protect

ed from the weakness? Cæsar appeals to his Fortune as a charm against the hurricane. The stern Marius uses his masculine reason but to distinguish the portents that are to save him from peril. Mahomet is all fate; Bonaparte all star and destiny. Cromwell confides in September three; Louis Napoleon in December two; and that wonderful man, SYLLA, who owned a nature of less weakness than any of them, deliberately willed to be known not as "Magnus" like Pompey, nor the laurelled Dictator like Caesar, nor as King or Emperor like Cromwell or Bonaparte, but simply "FELIX," the favoured child of Fortune.

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What then is it--this vague influence, so poetic, so historical, which, believed so naturally, exists so allpervadingly, and is found equally powerful at the two extremes of human thought? What is the idea, or, rather, what are the ideas we form on what we thus variously express as chance, fatality, fortune, and destiny?

Looking for our answer to the more remarkable illustrations supplied us by history, or our own ob servations, it would seem that the

only uniform characteristic of the superstition is the acknowledgment of some vague, exterior, irresistible influence everywhere present, and everywhere forcing more or less of the world's experience in courses of its own. Everything else offers but modes or accidents in its development, referring now to the nature of the interposition, now to the means by which it is indicated or secured.

One of the most common notions which thus originate, is that which supposes good or ill fortune to follow some special individuality, radiating to these for themselves, to those for others, like light as it happens to fall on dark or polished surfaces.

The founder of the Rothschild family was accustomed to attribute much of his wonderful success to his principle of having no man in his service whose career had been marked by a series of ill-luck.

It was a similar belief in the time of Law, that turned the Parisian's hump into a writing-desk for the use of superstitious speculators many a disappointed hope of fortune on one side helping to construct the reality of fortune on the other.

This personal influence, especially accredited to women, must have been associated by the Romans with Volumnia, the mother of Coriolanus, when they erected a Temple in her honour to the Fortune of Woman-a gallant thing enough in the old senators, and which would have been all in their favour, if, in permitting but the newly married to worship there, they had not left our wisdom galled with the doubt whether the brides had the privilege, as most or least needing the benefits of the institution.

Thus again, the imperial fortunes of the great Corsican have been thought to have come and gone with the rare graces of his first wife-the second of the two Creoles raised from a private station to the sovereignty of France at its grandest epochs. As the marriage secured him the Italian campaign, with its brilliant recompences; so Wagram, that won him his divorce, won him also the end of his prosperity. The last of the victories which carried a gain with it, the roar of its ten thousand cannon but struck the hour when the mightjest of modern monarchies was to be

gin its march of disasters, nor end till its wonderful chieftain had reached the fabulous denouement of a Promethean chain on the bleakest islet of the Atlantic! And when the historians tell us that, after putting away from his throne and bosom the gentle partner of so astounding a fortune, he gave the rest of the day to write out that enthralment of Spain which was to be his own divorce from greatness, who does not see Fortune peeping over his shoulder, and laughing her best at the fine sport of such an engineer, so hoisted, and by such a petard?

Among the rare celebrities possessing this felicity in their own persons, there occur to us for the moment but Goethe as a literary man, and Augustus Cæsar as a public character; the first enjoying a leisure as glorious as it was useful for half a century, the second surviving for a still longer period so unvarying a career of successful greatness during the stormiest era in the world's history, that his personal Fortune became elevated by the Romans into a deity, giving to their oaths the most solemn of their sanctions.

The instances of persons whose influences have been wholly unfortunate to themselves and those surrounding them, are more numerous as more remarkable; Agrippina, for example, to Germanicus; Lady Macbeth to the Shakespearean hero; Margaret to Henry the Sixth; Henrietta Maria to Charles the First, and Marie Antoinette to Louis the Sixteenth; women of personal qualities so like, and the evil genius of husbands so similarly distinguished by character and fortunes, that it would cost nothing to suppose the same brace of souls had been fated to play nearly the same role on different scenes under successive transmigrations. According to Napoleon, whose personal experience must often have brought this subject under the study of his penetrating genius, they belong to "a class of persons who always destroy those to whom they are attached, whether from want of tact or of good fortune it does not signify."

Akin to them, but with influences less out of their own personal sphere, were Nicias, Mary Stuart, James the Second and his descendants, and (with Homer, Dante, Socrates, Co

lumbus, Bernard Palissier, Walter Raleigh) probably a majority of the great minds who have aspired to help the world to better things.

Among the decided instances of this class the unlucky par excellence -and who by their very name appear to short-sighted people to controvert the theory of eternal justiceI may recall a worthy Irishman, living in a comparatively private station, who insists, with Napoleon, that he was born from all eternity for an unusual succession of adversities, he has been so carefully pre-hardened against their influences. Though he has gone through an unprecedented series of little Marengos and Waterloos, in which the victories have been ever on the other side, he has yet a smile of sympathy for others' woe, and a ready jes for his own.

If I may credit to the letter his own statement, his first good fortune was his appointment, after infinite intrigues, to the secretaryship of an hospital. But the war came, and the building got no further than the first floor. Just as he had the reversion of an Irish borough, the vacancy came; but the borough was already in schedule A, by a majority small as its own constituency. Starting prac tice as a surgeon, he already counted on a small income as chiropodist to a gouty general, but the patient's age and infirmities entitling him to an active command, he left his legs on the battle-field, and with them the corn-crop our friend was to have lived

on.

A bishop had some curious infirmity, which became the touchstone of professional skill: at the moment he ought to have felt cured secun lem artem, he died. An admiral owed him a debt that was to clear the next quarter's bills: a day before that fixed for the payment, he was sent on foreign service and never returned. Had he two patients to operate on, either of whom would have made his fortune?-One died the morning half London was met to witness his triumph; the other, more provoking still, got well. Did he marry a rich

wife -One trustee went into the Gazette, the other for good reasons travelled to foreign parts, and the journal that announced his ruin had been paid by him the day before to advertise his first blessing of twins. Was a fortune left him?-It was spent

about a legal point that had no precedent, and which, therefore, visited all the courts to establish one. Had he made a fortune himself ?-The day he was to realize his shares fell, and be-. fore he could sell, were worth no more than the advances he had raised on them. And in this way unworthy fate went on pursuing the poor fellow, until, resolved on withdrawing himself wholly from her European support, at last he settled somewhere in Massachusetts as an ice merchant; my last news going no further than to his being "burnt out" under clear circumstances of spontaneous combustion.

But, passing from these elucidations of personal luck, let us say a word on that odder form of the superstition which associates fortune with things or acts in themselves indifferent. Such are amulets, Augustus wearing some portion of a sea-calf; Charlemagne, and, after him, Louis Napoleon, some trinket of hidden value; the Turks using minerals in association with Solomon; the sailors, who fear shipwreck in the company of an ecclesiastic, expecting to escape it when armed with a child's caul; and so on, through infinite varieties; as though faith, all potent alone, shed its virtue on things the most inert that fell under its shadow.

But not only have we good or ill fortune, but these are supposed to have some power of prefiguring themselves things in appearance the most trivial being invested with the faculty of becoming their portents.

The Romans degraded a priest, because at a solemn moment his mitre fell and unmade a dictator, because a rat squeaked while they were making out his appointment. Caesar crossed the Rubicon because he saw a fine figure of a man on the opposite bank; his nephew felt assured of winning the battle of Actium, because he met a peasant of the name of Nicolaus mounted on an ass. Wolsey foresaw his own fall in that of his crosier-head: Sejanus foretold his doom from seeing a flight of crows: Dr. Johnson preferred not to go under a ladder: Montaigne not to put on the left stocking first; and hundreds of persons get a day's unhappiness if they see the new moon through glass, meet a magpie in one position rather than another, or en

counter any other of the thousand illomens traditional fancy has invented against us.

But though prophecies, like nice customs, curt'sied to great monarchs, the most direct of them have at times been construed with impunity into the ordinances of a silly destiny, which might be satisfied to the ear without much attention to the hope. Alexander was held to have untied the Gordian knot with a slice of his sword; and Julius Cæsar to have fulfilled the promise that a Scipio should always be conqueror in Africa, by putting a low man of that name in nominal command of the army.

But if auguries were thus the law of the future and the religion of the present, they seem to have stood on wholly different footings when considered as part of a systematic faith, or simply as individual experiences. Cicero, who laughs with his brother augurs at the institution, submits with all heathendom to the authority of isolated manifestations. Even the incredulous Epicurus, who believed the world a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, recommended the neglect of auguries, not because of their vanity, but because the philosopher should be above the precautions they suggest.

Yet, while mastering some of the details of this curious worship, the old question remains, what is Fortune? And what is the possible value of the presages with which we surround her? The facts, it must be admitted, are sufficiently dark, but the explanations of the old authorities leave them darker still.

Horace, who dedicates an ode to her praise, tells us she is preceded by stern Necessity, armed by all its dread appliances, but accompanied by meekeyed Hope and white-robed Fidelity -a picture rather than an explana tion.

heaven, and there worshipping her as a divinity.

Say the best of all these opinions, what are they but a veiled atheism, except for a half truth generalized as usual into a whole falsehood?

It is true enough, no doubt, that we often interpose chance and fortune, because we fail to discern the links between the common series of causes and effects; but conceding all we may for the power of strong volition and persistent energy, we must yet go further, very much further, for a consistent theory of human affairs.

The world is not all ourselves, nor even all we see, and our lives depend for their character on influences which, so far from commanding, we can often not scan. The world raises and the world crushes, alike giving and alike taking away with no nice discernment of our qualities, either moral or physical. As on one side, "the eighteen on whom fell the tower of Siloam were by no means sinners above those dwelling in Jerusalem," so, on the other," of the many lepers in Israel only one, and he a Syrian, was cured." It may be the most mysterious of our dispensations, but it is not the less a dispensation, that "the race shall not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong."

But as even in the first scene of a true drama, there exists a sure, if unseen, approximation to justice, though the actual incident be but the triumph of vice; so may we be certain that in the great play of lifelife taken as a whole--the tendencies of success are toward virtue. We have all so instinctive a leaning to some such theory, that it seems like the voice of nature proclaiming a truth to us beyond the reach of our reasonings. Charles V., in his older wickedness, reproached fortune with favourThe latter days of Louis XIV. and Napoleon Bonaparte found her as adverse as more innocent years had found her favourable.

young.

We love in lotteries to stake our ventures under the names of children; and, watching small gambling among respectable people, who has not been prone to think that the greater luck was the part of the young, the simple, and the virtuous, rather than of the old, the crafty, or the