purpose of keeping these latter until Jellala- | tribes had barricaded the pass. All was over.

bad should have been evacuated. He demanded The army of Cabul was finally extinguished in that General Elphinstone, the commander, that barricaded pass. It was a trap; the British with his second in command, and also one were taken in it. A few mere fugitives escaped other officer, should hand themselves over to from the scene of actual slaughter, and were him as hostages. He promised if this were on the road to Jellalabad, where Sale and his done to exert himself more than before to re- little army were holding their own. When strain the fanatical tribes, and also to provide they were within sixteen miles of Jellalabad the army in the Koord Cabul Pass with pro- the number was reduced to six. Of these six, visions. There was nothing for it but to sub-five were killed by straggling marauders on mit; and the English general himself became, the way. One man alone reached Jellalabad with the women and children, a captive in the to tell the tale. Literally one man, Dr. Bryhands of the inexorable enemy. don, came to Jellalabad out of a moving host which had numbered in all some sixteen thousand when it set out on its march. The curious eye will search through history or fiction in vain for any picture more thrilling with the suggestions of an awful catastrophe than that of this solitary survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse, as he appeared under the walls of Jellalabad, to bear the tidings of our Thermopyle of pain and shame.

Then the march of the army, without a general, went on again. Soon it became the story of a general without an army; before very long there was neither general nor army. It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere horrors. The straggling remnant of an army entered the Jugdulluk Pass-a dark, steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable toilers found that the fanatical, implacable

EDMUND JOHN ARMSTRONG.

BORN 1841 - DIED 1865.

[Edmund John Armstrong was born in Dublin on the 23d July, 1841. As a child he showed remarkable precocity, and began to write poetry while still a boy. He entered Trinity College in 1859, and commenced his College career with a series of brilliant successes; but from a neglected cold and excessive physical exertion he ruptured a bloodvessel in the lung in the spring of 1860, and was obliged to betake himself for rest to the Channel Islands. His health being restored, he made a long pedestrian tour in France in 1862, during which he collected the material for The Prisoner of Mount St. Michael, a poem which has been highly praised by the Edinburgh Review, both for the treatment of the story and the remarkable ease and power of the blank verse. In the same year he returned to Dublin, and, recommencing his University studies, and entering the intellectual societies of the College, won much distinction as an essayist, and in 1864 was awarded the gold medal for composition in the Historical Society, and elected president of the Philosophical Society. In the winter of 1864, a severe congestion having attacked the lung which had been so seriously injured by the accident of 1860, he was unable to shake it off, and died

on the 24th February, 1865. A selection from his poems was published in the autumn of 1865, as a memorial of him, by the Historical and Philosophical Societies and several eminent friends, and was well received by the press, and warmly praised by some of the most distinguished writers of the day. He was also the author of Ovoca, an Idyllic Poem, and other poetical works, a second edition of which, with his Life and Letters, and Essays and Sketches, was published in London in 1877.

A life thus brief can only be spoken of as to its promise: there can be little doubt that Armstrong, if granted greater length of days, might have attained to high poetic excellence. He had a bright fancy, keen sensibility, and, as has been said already, a command of easy and flowing blank verse which was remarkable in one so young.]

MARY OF CLORAH.1

In the dewy April weather,
When the tufts were on the heather
And the feathery larch was green,

1 This and the following extracts are by permission of the author's representatives.

And I have never broken vows
Ha! there's a sadness on your brows-
I never saw that gloom before.

"Ah me! you loved me, then? O, why Did you not trust me? I would die

To save those saddened eyes from tears. Your doubts have made a young man old. Such love as mine may not be told,

Nor will it fade with lapse of years."

She broke in weeping, "Woe is me!
They said you died in Italy.

...

Such sound of wordless pain as ever flows
Around the eddying darkness and the fires
Of Tophet from the spirits of the fallen,
Gushed from my lone and desolated heart.
Anon I found my wavering course had strayed,
Unguided by the broken helm of will,

To the wet strand left naked by the sea.
A dark thought seized my brain and sent its
shock

Through all the stagnant courses of my blood.
I knew the quicksands of St. Michael's bay,
The cheating tombs that swallow up alive
So many souls-what if they sank with me,

My mother almost starved" then, wild And buried me for ever with my curse?
With love and the keen agony

PREAMBLE. The narrator of the following history perished on the scaffold on the morning on which he penned its closing lines. He sketched it hurriedly, under the influence of agonizing passions and still more agon

izing fears, during the three days previous to his death,

while awaiting the summons of the executioner in the solitude of the condemned cell. The victim of the treachery of her whom he loved, his mind is for a time wholly unable to realize her duplicity, and he would fain convince himself of her purity by believing that he is the dupe of an illusion. As the hours roll on, and as he recapitulates one by one the incidents of his history, he begins to apprehend more clearly the character of the woman who has destroyed him; and at the last, after a great struggle, he learns to pardon her, looking back upon the past as from another world, and accepting his

destiny as a blessing rather than a curse.

The gloomy superstitions and the peculiar habits of the Bretons have been made familiar to the public through the works of MM. de la Villemarqué and Souvestre. The

prisoner, a Breton by birth, but a man of good parentage and average education, appears to have retained throughout his life the dark, romantic tone of thought which essentially distinguishes the native of Brittany even at the present day. The Breton character, with its deep passions and its habitual melancholy, its superstitious terrors and its strong religious bias, exhibits itself in his thought and actions, and gives a colour to his expressions, written down hastily in the intervals of despair

and hope, which seem to have possessed him alternately during the closing hours of his life.

The woods were wrapt in midnight when I rose,
And staggered-where I knew not. Chains of lead
Pressed on my spirit, and the chill of woe
Made mute my tongue, and only a low wail,

No trace would tell it to the prying world;
The tide of morn would wash my tracks away,
Leaving the image of the ebbing wave;
So would my memory fade from lips of men.
The impulse mastered me. I trod the beach
With clenched teeth and hands. My pulses beat
In tumult with the might of my resolve.
My feet were treading on the skirts of Death
Ere terror stayed them. God, I thank Thee now!
Thou madest my curse a blessing. Better here,

Far better here to die a felon's death
(If so be I may grasp the gift, and go
Washed white in deep repentance) than to have

The way

I communed with my lonely soul, and said:
"I am not weak, to offer thus my cheek
To the smiter, and then turn aside and mourn;
Nor yet so strong as to forbear revenge,
To sheathe the dagger in its silken sheath
When I might sate its hungry edge.
Divides in twain-to slay or to be slain.
I will rise, and turn,
To die—I dare not.
And front the waste, alone with my despair;
So perish, if I perish." Wrestling thus,
A quick resolve flashed on me, blinding me—
To fly those woods to be for ever haunted
By terrible suggestions, which might swoop
Upon me, unaware, or weak with doubt,
And drive my feet to evil. Wherefore there
I bade my shores farewell.

From day to day

I wandered, with a sense of dullest pain
Around, before, above me-like a ghost
That clings to him whose hands with guilt are red,
The vampire of his soul. Through Normandy

The bosomed vales sprinkled with buds and bells, Thy vines and orchards, O beloved France!

GEORGE FRANCIS ARMSTRONG.

At

out of the remnant of his broken fortunes. Milan Ugone is taken by the hand by an English nobleman, to whose daughter, the lady Adelaide, he becomes affianced. Returning in high hope and joyful expectation to the villa by the lake, Ugone witnesses the blight of Francesco's noble though boyish love for the worldly-minded and

fickle Marina, and finds Cecilia in the arms of Count Rocco. He restrains his anger to save his sister from more dishonour. Count Rocco manages

[Mr. G. F. Armstrong was born in Dublin | father had contrived to buy back before his death county in May, 1845, and educated at Trinity College. Returning from a tour in Normandy, whither he had accompanied his brother Edmund, he gained, in 1864, the highest distinctions in English verse. In 1866 the gold medal for composition was awarded to him in the Historical Society; and in the following year his essays won the gold medal of the Philosophical Society, of which he was twice elected president. Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic, appeared in 1869, and in 1870 Ugone, a tragedy, which had been suggested by his travels and residence in Italy. In the following year he was appointed Professor of History and English Literature in Queen's College, Cork. In 1872 he was presented with the degree of M.A. in Dublin University, revisited Italy and Switzerland, and published the first part of The Tragedy of Israel, "King Saul," together with new editions of his former works. In 1874 appeared "King David," and in 1876 "King Solomon," the second and final parts of The Tragedy of Israel. In 1877 he brought out the Life, Letters, and Essays of his brother, and a new edition of the Poems of the latter, the first edition having appeared under his editorship in 1865.

All these works have received an equally favourable reception from the chief organs of criticism. Ugone-from which we quote-in particular displays a dramatic vigour, poetic passion, and pathos, which speak for the possession of the true poetic inspiration.]

UGONE'S LAST HOURS.

with crafty devices to alienate him temporarily
from Adelaide by causing doubts of her fidelity to
be sown in his mind; and he prevails upon Cecilia
to fly to him. He seduces her, and in her shame
and despair she drowns herself in the lake. Ugone
is present when her body is discovered; and when
it is brought home he swears that he will avenge
her. He finds Rocco in a wood by the lake side,
pursues him, and kills him. He has been fol-
lowed by Francesco (lately risen from a bed of
sickness), who suspects his purpose; and, as he
enters his boat to fly, Francesco jumps in along
with him, and insists on accompanying him. They
cross the lake to Baveno, and arrive at night at
Domo D'Ossola, where the following scene opens.]

Night. A room in an Inn at Domo D'Ossola.
Lightning and thunder at frequent intervals.
UGONE asleep on a couch. FRANCESCO sitting
watching.

Fran. Poor fallen king of men, my own Ugone,
Thou on whose shoulder I have laid my head
How many a time, when tears o'erran my face,
And the child's heart within me ached for grief,
Touched by the world's indefinite agonies,
Liest thou thus?... O, blind my eyes, great

Heaven!

I cannot watch the dear beloved face,
And think upon his ruin. . . . Brother, brother...
I cannot call thee "brother". . wreck of glory,
My pride that is my shame, my loathed love,
I cling to thee as the lorn widow clings
To the dead ghastly flesh that was her lord's;
She loves the body for the soul it held,
As I thee love for thy wrecked majesty,
Though horrible as that. . . sleep on, sleep on.
(Thunder heard.)

[The ruin of Ugone's father and the downfall of his house have been brought about by the machinations of Count Teodulfo and his natural son and soi-disant nephew, Count Rocco. The deaths of his father and mother have left Ugone guardian and sole support of his younger brother Francesco, a precocious but delicate boy, and his sister Cecilia, a beautiful girl just emerging from childhood. Ugone, a noble and gifted youth, who endeavours . . . The thunder's come at last; I felt its coming. to combine the pursuit of art with the humble toil As we drew near the village, all the road by which he is forced to earn his bread, resides Smelt as of sulphur-something in the soil from necessity chiefly at Milan, while Francesco Drawn by the sultry air. Footsore, and weak and Cecilia live with an old domestic in a decayed Nigh unto death, I longed for rain and storm. villa on the shores of Lago Maggiore, which their | If there be any in pursuit, he'll steal