Magazine; and in 1840 he entered upon a more serious undertaking-founding the Art Union, a title afterwards changed to the Art Journal. Of this periodical Mr. Hall has continued to be the chief spirit for now nearly forty years, and, in its pages, has done incalculable service to the cause of art in the United Kingdom. To her husband's journal Mrs. Hall contributed "Midsummer Eve," a fairy tale (republished in 1847), in which there is a skilful mingling of the picturesque legendary lore and the comicalities of real life in Ireland. In the same journal also appeared "Pilgrimages to English Shrines," a series of "pleasant illustrated sketches of the homes and haunts of genius and virtue in our own land." This work was published in its collected form in 1850. Mrs. Hall's pen had meantime been busy in other works. In 1840 appeared a new series of Irish portraits under the title Tales of the Irish Peasantry. In 1841-43 was produced from the combined pens of herself and her husband an interesting work, Ireland: its Scenery, Character, &c. In 1845 appeared a novel, The White Boy; in 1857, A Woman's Story; Can Wrong be Right? in 1862; The Fight of Faith, a story of Ireland, in 1868–9. ful "Marian Raymond," and "The Trials | Campbell as the editor of the New Monthly of Lady Montague." In both the moral is the sad one that loving and noble natures are powerless to check the follies or elevate the characters of worthless and weak beings to whom their fate has strongly attached them. In the first a proud, beautiful, high-minded woman finds that the lover of whom she had dreamed as perfection, and to whom she was united after years of separation and the death of a first and worthless husband, has been transformed by a soldier's life and bad surroundings to a dissipated, sensual, unprincipled fellow; and the end of her girlish dreams of perfect happiness is early death from a broken heart. In the second story the loving sufferer is a mother; and the worthless persecutor a son, who ends a life of follies and vices in a street row. Uncle Horace came next, and then followed, perhaps, Mrs. Hall's most powerful work. This was Lights and Shadows of Irish Life (published in 1838). The tales here told are-as the title implies-descriptive of the brighter and the darker sides of Irish life -of the passionate affections of home, the gay hearts, and also the dark passions of Irish men and women. There is a story in the chapter headed "Ruins,”-it is the story we quote of the desolation brought on an Irish home by the seduction of a peasant girl by the squire, which is very powerful, and cannot be read without keen excitement. The character of the seducer, too, is delineated with great skill, and is one of the best descriptions in Irish literature of the bad and good sides of the Irish squire. Foolish, improvident, and vicious, Terence O'Toole yet attracts by his kindliness of heart, his high spirit, his unbending pride; and the story of the heavy retribution he paid for the sin of his youth is deeply moving. The tale is also remarkable for giving a picture of the extraordinary relations which used to exist between the Irish tenant and landlord. Another story in this series was produced on the stage under the title of The Groves of Blarney, and proved highly successful. The French Refugee, a shorter piece, had been brought out in 1837, and was received with much favour. Marian, or a Young Maid's Fortune, was published in 1840, and at once became popular. It has passed through several editions, and has been translated into German and Dutch. Meantime, the literary fortunes of Mr. Hall had been influencing strongly those of his wife. In 1830 he had succeeded the poet Long as is this list, it gives but a faint idea of the indefatigable industry of Mr. and Mrs. Hall. A writer has recently calculated that the two have had some share in the production of no less than 500 volumes! We have mentioned already several of their joint productions: to those we may add, The Book of the Thames and The Book of South Wales. It is much to the credit of both Mr. and Mrs. Hall, that, notwithstanding their severe literary labours, they have found time to take an active part in the chief philanthropic movements of the time. Mrs. Hall was the originator of the fund in honour of Miss Florence Nightingale; it was in her drawing-room that the first subscription was commenced; and the result of the labours of herself and her husband was a fund amounting to £45,000. They have also assisted in founding the Hospital for Consumption, and other useful institutions. The cause of temperance has found most earnest and untiring advocates in Mr. and Mrs. Hall; and they have written many tales and sketches in which the evils of intemperance have been graphically portrayed. In 1874 came the fiftieth anniversary of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Hall; and the "golden wedding" was made the occasion of a remarkable testimony to the esteem in which they are held. Subscriptions amounting to £1500 were quickly raised, and presented to the veteran writers; as was also an album, containing five hundred letters from persons of all ranks and nations testifying to their worth. Mrs. Hall is in the receipt of £100 a year from the civil list, and the Queen has expressed her esteem for our gifted countrywoman by presenting her with portraits of herself and the Prince Consort. One of the most recent acts of Mr. and Mrs. Hall has been to help in celebrating the centenary of Moore, of whom they were in their early days | intimate friends. They also paid further honour to the memory of the national poet by erecting by subscription a window in Bromham Church, where he is buried.] AN IRISH TRAGEDY. (FROM "LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF IRISH LIFE." 1) [This is the story of an old man whom Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall during a tour found wandering about in Ireland.] "The four winds of heaven have been blowing upon my head these sixty years," said an old beggar to me, "until they have hardly left a gray hair to cover it." Clooney Blaney passed his latter years in migrating from parish to parish, and from ruin to ruin; he was fond of the "ould places;" though, unlike the "Old Mortality" of the great master spirit of our age, he had no desire to restore inscriptions or preserve monuments, he took much pleasure in patching up holes in crumbling walls, and spent the long days of summer, bareheaded, as indeed he always was, within their precincts. Of all the ruins in my neighbourhood he seemed most to delight in those of the seven castles of Clomines. Whether it was that they afforded him more extensive wandering room, being scattered some on the very brink of the Scar, some far in the green and beautiful meadow, I know not; but I have often seen Clooney's bald head peeping above the gigantic trees of ivy that waved their sombre shining leaves in the gay sun, and heard the clatter of his trowel in the gray twilight of evening, as he pattered with the mortar or wet clay to "steady," as he used to say, "the stones-poor things!" Clooney could not bear to see the stone of a ruin displaced. "It was weary work for those who put them there, and why should their spirits be bothered 1 By permission of the authoress. by letting go to destruction what we'll never build the like of again?" I met him, or rather saw him once, seated on the bridge of Tintern-not the Monmouthshire Tintern, but its Irish namesake. "I'm lookin at that fine ould place with a glad heart, lady," said Clooney: "I've been outside every taste of that beautiful abbey this morning, and sorra as much as the paring of your nail out of place: all the stones firm, and the ould ancient mortar as firm as the stones; my eyes never ache looking at a fine even wall, and it's a good thing to see so holy a building so looked after; the pigs and the rooks are the worst enemies I have: the pigs do be always rooting at my walls, and the crows-ah! it's they're the bad stone-masonsit takes all the little thrifle I begs, and all the lime I gathers, to stop up the holes of them big black birds. It's a fine thing to keep a vow." "Is it true, as I have heard, that you have taken an obligation on yourself never to wear a hat, and to wander over Ireland until your death, repairing the ruins of your country?" "It is, ma'am," replied Clooney, "every word of it true: but if you plaze I'd rather not tell it to you here, for the people do be passing: so we'll go across the bohreen and into the meadow by the strame, and there, if you wish, I'll tell you every word of my history: not that there's much in the differ between it and any Irish history going, they're too much alike, that's the worst of them." I followed Clooney, and as the old man trudged on before, I could not avoid registering in my memory the picture he presented; the few hairs which, according to his own observation, "the winds had left to cover his bare head," when unmoved by the air, fell over his shoulders in two or three long thin and then twisting into elfin locks at either tresses, now floating around him like a halo, side of his bald crown: slung across his shoulder blue, red, or gray stuff; and his sturdy staff, was his begging bag, patched with pieces of from the top of which, suspended by a string, hung his trowel, was a genuine shillala, armed with a ferule, so that it might serve either for climbing or fighting; he was firm and erect in his carriage, and as he wended his way, first removing a car which was turned up upon its wheels to stop a gap, then striking his staff firmly into the ground, as if he delighted to see how deep it would go, as a specimen of the strength of his arm-it was impossible not to see in him the wreck of much bodily and mental power; and I called to mind sundry stories of poor Clooney which represented him at once eccentric and superior to his associates, if indeed the peasants, among whom he only passed occasionally, deserved to be so called. The very air seemed weighed nearer to the earth by sadness. As I looked upon the sky its blue clear canopy grew gray and dim, and the stream murmured hoarsely amongst the sedges. Clooney was seated on a block of red granite, probably one that had not been needed for the completion of the bridge; he had unslung his wallet, and placed it by his side on the ground, his staff and trowel resting on it. I could hardly tell what made old "Gray Jacket," his sobriquet amongst the peasantry, so interesting to me at that moment: I suppose it was his being so admirably in keeping with the scene-the turrets of Tintern Abbey to the right just peering amid the trees; one arch of the old bridge we had stood upon seen above the swelling hill, and looking more calmly beautiful than ever it had looked before-at least to me- —with its fringe of blossoming wall-flowers, and its patches of moss, green, gray, and brown, Nature's own cunning embroidery: then, from far away, the boom of the fearful ocean came upon the ear, and I saw over the cliffs which skirted its shores the wavering and shining wings of the snowy seagulls, as they hovered for a moment in mid air, and then disappeared into the bay. So still, so calmly still was the scene, that I felt startled when Clooney's voice exclaimed, "There's a soft seat for you, lady dear, upon the stump of that ould tree, and you have no occasion to fear toads or sarpints, or anything of that sort; I dare say you know why your self;" and the old man smiled half in jest, half in earnest, at the allusion the Irish are so fond of making to the powers of Saint Patrick. "Were you ever in Connamara, Dick Martin's kingdom, as I've heard it called lately, though that same gentleman's dead this good while?" "Never." | take delight in what they're used to. To my thinking it used to be the joysomest place in the wide world. Well, lady, I was born and bred up just on the borders of Connamara, and had the run of the house of one Terence O'Toole." "O'Toole of Mount Brandon!" I exclaimed. "Mount Brandon was its English name, to be sure; but the gentleman was beyond your memory, died before your time." "He did; but I have often heard of both his talents and eccentricities. So you were really brought up by Terence O'Toole—by a man whose ancestral property extended to thousands upon thousands of green and fertile acres, whose power was that of a despot over his tenantry, and who died--Do, Clooney, tell me how he died?" "Avich! how fond people are to know how people die, and yet, to my thinking, people's deaths have a sort of relationship with their lives; your quiet careful men die in their beds, while others, great, good, and of high blood, maybe have no bed to die on. Well, lady, I have heard tell that Terence O'Toole was in his youth the handsomest man ever born in Ireland, and that's saying a bould word: he carried everything before him in college with his head, and everything out of it with his sword or pistol, for he had a dead thrust with the one, and a dead bullet with the other; he never put up with an affront, nor ever gave the wall to an inferior-or a superior; he was the devil for making love, which gave him some trouble in Ireland, but in far countries none at all, for there, I heard say, it's the ladies make love to the gentlemen: he was always the finest-bred man in the company, mighty civil and courteous, and Christian-like too, for whenever he shot a man in a jewel1 he would always kneel down by the side of the corpse and ax its forgiveness, which the whole country considered very condescending in the same gentleman: he was also the finest dancer in France, and the best singer in Rome, when he was there--one who knew, said that a French queen, who was afterwards beheaded, was deeply in love with him. In the thick of his young days his father died, and left him a power of land and a power of debts, but he didn't think it behouldin' him to mind either the one or the other, though, like a thrue patriot, he gave up all foreign company-keep "An more's the shame an' the pity," he replied, "for Connamara flogs the Lakes, and the Giant's Causeway, and the caves of Mitchelstown, for bare grandeur; it's a wonderful place entirely; so desolate, so lonely-looking, with nothing to disturb the clouds but an eagle flying through them; and the 'sough' of the wind among the rocks is like the moaning of dead thousands: it's a wonderful distric' intirely-ing, and resolved to spend his money like a and forrinners, to look at it, would think there prince in his own counthry. So fond was he could be but small pleasure in living in such a place: but it's very quare to see how people 1 Duel. of Mount Brandon, that he wouldn't be in Parliament, and was quite satisfied with returning the members without thinking of being a member himself: he made it a boast too that not a member should ever spend a farthing in trating the men, only all at his expense. A six weeks' election was nothing in those times, open house for all comers and goers, whisky on draft for the poor, and claret | on draft for the rich; nothing but feasting and fighting. Ah! Ireland will never see such times again!" "I hope not!" I ejaculated, as the vision of duels and shillalas rose before me, "I hope not!" I think Clooney looked at me reproachfully; I am not quite certain, but I think he did. "Those were his young days," he continued, "and I suppose he thought they could never have an end; and, to be sure, every one in the counthry thought it high time for him to marry, but he did not think so himself, for his eye was set on a farmer's daughter on the estate, a young and beautiful girl, who loved him as no one ever loved him before or since. She proved that--by bearing shame for his sake; and God knows, the memory of that poor girl's love is tould by the ould people of Connamara to this day, the same as they'd tell of a ghost, to warn their daughters from danger. Her father was a could, proud man, of an ancient family, and she was the only dote, and proud he was of the admiration bestowed upon her by high and low; though little he thought what was to follow: but when it was made plain to him, he said no hard word to her, but he took her hand, and walked her out of their house, and took the key out of the door, and nine straws out of the thatch, and he left her weeping in a neighbour's house, and went up to the Mount, which was thronged with company, and walked straight into the hall, where they were at their wine after dinner; and the masther never saw him till he stood at the foot of his table, white as a sheet, and his teeth chattering. And the ould man laid the key of the farm and the nine straws upon the table without a word; and, having done that, he knelt down upon his bended knees, and he riz his long lean arms above his white head, and he cursed Terence O'Toole, with a curse that came slow and heavy from his lips, and that no one in all that grand company had power to stop; and when he had finished cursing, he turned his back upon them all, and stalked right away without another word or a sign. It struck the masther, that if he acted so, he might ill use the poor girl, upon whom his heart had been set; and as soon as he could he got away to see after her. He heard that she had been taken suddenly in her trouble in the neigbour's house, and that now she had a babby on her bosom. Well, to be sure, he ordered everything for her like a lady, and went home, consoling himself for the sin, with thinking of all the good he would do for her, and for every one else; and how he would get her proud father over. But before the morning broke he was waked by the small cry of a babby under his window, and he called up the ould housekeeper, for his heart mistrusted, and she took it in; and there was a taste of a note from the grandfather pinned on its breast; and when he read the note (no one ever saw that scrap from that day to this) he flew to the cabin she'd been in, and there was the woe of the world; for the ould man had first stole away the babby, coaxed the stupid woman that had charge of it to let him have it to show its father; come back in no time, and, while the nurse slept, rolled his poor, feeble, helpless girl up in the blanket as she lay, and carried her, God knows where. Well, to be sure, O'Toole roused the counthry, and, for that the snow lay deep on the ground, they tracked the old man's steps to the border of a broad lake, and there, lady, the mark of the feet ended; but the ice of the water was broken, and destroyed at the edge, and under it!” "Good God!" I exclaimed, petrified with horror. "Ay, sure enough, lady, the proud ould man had buried his own and his child's dishonour under that ice!" He paused, and then continued. "The gentleman took no pains to hide his sorrow; and the monument to her memory was put up of beautiful white marvel; and some talked of her end, but more talked of O'Toole's generosity." The world, I thought to myself, was the same then as it is now. "I have heard tell," recommenced Clooney, "that the masther was never to say like himself afther that day; he took on more than ever with the fighting and the drinking, and seemed for a time to love nothing but the hounds. But a talk of great trouble came over the place, and the great gentleman was afraid to go off his own land for fear of being took; and then came a dissolate of Parliament, and he was advised to go in, and so he did; and promised the gentleman he had got in before, a situation. Well, he went off in great grand style to Dublin, where the Parliament was then; and |