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, 1 This and the following extracts are by permission of the author's representatives. Mary, like the young Aurora, Shone amid the woods of Clorah; Pride was in her stately mien. O, her laugh was like the runnel 'Mid the glistening moss and fern; But it hushed the stock-dove sighing, And it set the cuckoo flying, And it scared the lonely hern. She was all alone, sweet Mary, Through the woods at break of morn, When a year had fled, the weather And the feathery larch as green; Was no more what she had been. O'er her little babe her laughter Then she murmured, "Baby mine, Sleep, my darling little boy; "Ah, methinks thine eyes of blue Closed beneath those silken lashes, "Would that I had never strayed, "Then I saw him, as a dream, Of the roaring mountain river. "Then he turned, and took the breath From my breast that shook beneath Those steadfast eyes; he smiled, and then I was bold, and broke the spell, And passed on proudly . . . well, ah! well, I learned to love that smile again! "Ah me, I never broke the spell! My love is more than I can tell; ... It burns, it scorches . yet I know This should not be: my babe, I wrong Thy father, but I am not strong Worn weaker by this hidden woe. "I never broke my marriage vows; And if my heart be with another, I've striven this wrongful love to smother. I am rebuked. I dare not dwell In fancy on the baleful spell That turns me false to thee, sweet dove. "Well I love thee, little child, Soothing with thy glances mild All my trouble. Thou wilt be My help, my angel; thou wilt make Thy father kind for thy sweet sake, And charm away his cruelty." Laughing lightly, lightly sighing O'er the babe all calmly lying In her arms, she showered kisses On its tender mouth and brows; And she felt a lover's vows Were not worth a mother's blisses. Then a step within the wood And she clasped her infant tight: A man of noble gait was he, And his frown became him well He strode on with passion pale, When he touched her trembling arm. "I loved you with all truth; my love Is registered in Heaven above; I would have made you wife, I swore, And I have never broken vows "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! ... Such sound of wordless pain as ever flows To the wet strand left naked by the sea. Through all the stagnant courses of my blood. My mother almost starved" then, wild And buried me for ever with my curse? 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, No trace would tell it to the prying world; Far better here to die a felon's death The way I communed with my lonely soul, and said: From day to day I wandered, with a sense of dullest pain I wandered, aimless, hopeless, seeking rest, All the vales, more Not caring much to find it. And, weak and pale with suffering, viewed once The bosomed vales sprinkled with buds and bells, Thy vines and orchards, O beloved France! The snowy blossoms of the orchard-fields, The quiet loveliness of copse and grange, On through the blossomed valleys wearily I dragged my solitary way, and passed To pass pain, Scourging the bases of the crags with surf, PILGRIMS. Wild blows the tempest on their brows Lit by the dying sunset's fire; While round the brave ship's keel and o'er the bows So, in the roar and hiss of the vexed sea, gleam Of the waters that coil o'er the decks black and riven, While hither and thither through chink and through seam The foam of the green leaping billows is driven. and fro From the crest to the trough of the flickering wave, Where the waters are curved like the crags of a cave That drip with red brine in the vapours of gold From the doors of the sunrise in hurricane rolled. The sea-birds are screaming, The lightning is gleaming, The billows are whirling voluminously; They twist and they fold, Amid the loud rattle Of ocean and sky, While the terrible bell of the thunder is tolled And the fiends of the storm ride by; Till the buffeting blast Is hushed to a whisper at last; And the soft low cry of the white seamew, 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 Night. A room in an Inn at Domo D'Ossola. Fran. Poor fallen king of men, my own Ugone, Heaven! I cannot watch the dear beloved face, [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 |