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Is not this death? Our boy, they tore me from him:
Buried they him?

AYL.

Alas, I know not. [She faints.] Faint not!

'Tis I-'tis Aylmere holds thee, Mariamne!

MAR. I see thee not, nor hear thee.-Bless thee! Bless thee!

[Dies.]

AYL. Look up, love! Wife! My Mariamne! Cold!

Dead! dead! [Weeps.]

[He rises-sinks again-is caught and supported.]

Why should I weep? Go I not with her?

Is Atlas' burthen on me? Say struck home!
The charter-is it come?

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Say hath slain all! I come, my Mariamne! [He sinks upon her body. A distant shout.

Another and nearer.

AYLMERE partly

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[“A cry without, "The charter! the charter!" MOWBRAY rushes in, bearing the charter,

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[AYLMERE starts up with a wild burst of exultation, rushes to him, catches the charter, kisses it, and clasps it to his bosom.]

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Robert Hinckley Messinger.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1811. DIED at Stamford, Conn., 1874.

A WINTER WISH.

[First printed in the "New York American," 26 April, 1838.]

Old wine to drink, old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to converse with.-Alfonso of Castile.

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And ripened 'neath the blink
Of India's sun!

Peat whiskey hot,

Tempered with well-boiled water!

These make the long night shorter,

Forgetting not

Good stout old English porter.

Old wood to burn!

Ay, bring the hill-side beech

From where the owlets meet and screech,

And ravens croak;

The crackling pine, and cedar sweet;

Bring too a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug 'neath the fern;

The knotted oak,

A fagot too, perhap,

Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,

Shall light us at our drinking;

While the oozing sap

Shall make sweet music to our thinking.

Old books to read!

Ay, bring those nodes of wit,

The brazen-clasped, the vellum writ,
Time-honored tomes!

The same my sire scanned before,

The same my grandsire thumbed o'er,
The same his sire from college bore,

The well-earned meed

Of Oxford's domes:

Old Homer blind,

Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by

Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie;

Mort Arthur's olden minstrelsie,

Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay!
And Gervase Markham's venerie-

Nor leave behind

The holye Book by which we live and die.

Old friends to talk!

Ay, bring those chosen few,

The wise, the courtly, and the true,

So rarely found;

Him for my wine, him for my stud,

Him for my easel, distich, bud

In mountain walk!

Bring Walter good,

With soulful Fred, and learned Will,
And thee, my alter ego (dearer still

For every mood).

These add a bouquet to my wine!
These add a sparkle to my pine!

If these I tine,

Can books, or fire, or wine be good?

Wendell Phillips.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1811. DIED there, 1884.

THE WISDOM OF ANCIENT DAYS.

[From his Lecture on "The Lost Arts." First delivered in 1838-39.-The Lost Arts. 1884.]

TAKE the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty, or form, we are borrowers.

You may glance around the furniture of the palaces in Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use; and, when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will take you into the museum of Naples, which gathers all remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of these modern forms of art or beauty or use that was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of beauty to the antique.

Take the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written his fortyodd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two-thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched, ready made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them before from the East. Cinderella and her slipper is older than all history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came.

All the boys' plays, like everything that amuses the child in the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show you that they came somewhere from the banks of the Ganges or the suburbs of Damascus. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunlop, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. If this were my topic, which it is not, I might tell you that even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. Even the tale which

either Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: "My dear friend, I would write you in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder, reading every word." ("No, you lie: I've not read a word you have written!") This is an Irish bull, still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best,-of the man who said, "I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle." That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it from the Egyptian hundreds of years back.

There is one story which it is said Washington has related, of a man who went into an inn, and asked for a glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wineglass about half the usual size; the tea-cups also in that day were not more than half the present size. The landlord said, "That glass out of which you are drinking is forty years old."— "Well," said the thirsty traveller, contemplating its diminutive proportions, "I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw." That story as told is given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventyfive years before Christ was born. Why! all these Irish bulls are Greek, -every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes, and looked into the glass to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman who met a friend who said to him, "Why, sir, I heard you were dead."—" Well," says the man, "I suppose you see I'm not.""Oh, no!" says he, "I would believe the man who told me a good deal quicker than I would you." Well, those are all Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel character, come from Athens.

Our old Boston patriots felt that tarring and feathering a Tory was a genuine patent Yankee fire-brand,-Yankeeism. They little imagined that when Richard Coeur de Lion set out on one of his crusades, among the orders he issued to his camp of soldiers was, that any one who robbed a hen-roost should be tarred and feathered. Many a man who lived in Connecticut has repeated the story of taking children to the limits of the town, and giving them a sound thrashing to enforce their memory of the spot. But the Burgundians in France, in a law now eleven hundred years old, attributed valor to the East of France because it had a law that the children should be taken to the limits of the district, and there soundly whipped, in order that they might forever remember where the limits came.

In Boston, lately, we have moved the Pelham Hotel, weighing fifty thousand tons, fourteen feet, and are very proud of it; and since then we have moved a whole block of houses twenty-three feet, and I have no doubt we will write a book about it: but there is a book telling how Domenico Fontana of the sixteenth century set up the Egyptian obelisk at Rome on end, in the Papacy of Sixtus V. Wonderful! Yet the Egyptians quarried that stone, and carried it a hundred and fifty miles, and the Romans brought it seven hundred and fifty miles, and never said a word about it. Mr. Batterson of Hartford, walking with Brunel, the architect of the Thames tunnel, in Egypt, asked him what he thought of the mechanical power of the Egyptians; and he said, "There is Pompey's Pillar: it is a hundred feet high, and the capital weighs two thousand pounds. It is something of a feat to hang two thousand pounds at that height in the air, and the few men that can do it would better discuss Egyptian mechanics."

Take canals. The Suez Canal absorbs half its receipts in cleaning out the sand which fills it continually, and it is not yet known whether it is a pecuniary success. The ancients built a canal at right angles to ours; because they knew it would not fill up if built in that direction, and they knew such an one as ours would. There were magnificent canals in the land of the Jews, with perfectly arranged gates and sluices. We have only just begun to understand ventilation properly for our houses; yet late experiments at the Pyramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the most perfect and scientific manner.

Again cement is modern, for the ancients dressed and joined their stones so closely, that, in buildings thousands of years old, the thin blade of a penknife cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a knowledge of steam. A painting has been discovered of a ship full of machinery, and a French engineer said that the arrangement of this machinery could only be accounted for by supposing the motive power to have been steam. Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville says there was no social question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt.

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Well," say you, "Franklin invented the lightning-rod." I have no doubt he did; but years before his invention, and before muskets were invented, the old soldiers on guard on the towers used Franklin's invention to keep guard with; and if a spark passed between them and the spear-head, they ran and bore the warning of the state and condition of affairs. After that you will admit that Benjamin Franklin was not the only one that knew of the presence of electricity, and the advantages derived from its use. Solomon's Temple, you will find, was situated on an exposed point of the hill: the temple was so lofty that it was often

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