them-it is perfectly astonishing what rude acts polite persons will sometimes perform -from the hand of his friend, and flung them into the fire. "Heavens and earth, sir! what do you mean by such conduct?" said Sir Harry, at the same time snatching them from the flames. "These ivory slates are dear to me as existence. I must say that I consider such conduct very ungenerous, ungentlemanly-" One angry word produced another, and much was said which it would ill befit me to repeat. The next morning, even before the dawn of day, Lord Charles Villiers had quitted Beauclerc Hall without bidding a single farewell either to its lady or its master. "There!" exclaimed the baronet, placing the fashionable Post in Lady Frances's hand at the breakfast-table one morning, about three months after the above scene had taken place; I knew how it would be. A pretty fool that noble friend of mine, Lord Charles Villiers, has made of himself! I never knew one of these absurdly particular men who did not take the crooked stick at last.-By Jove, sir," to his son, "you shall marry before you are five and twenty, or you shall be disinherited! The youthful mind is ever pliable, and the earlywed grow into each other's habits, feelings and affections. An old bachelor is sure either to make a fool of himself or be made a fool of. You see, His Lordship's wife has publicly shown that she certainly did not possess the last of his requisites-fidelity--by eloping with her footman. I will journey up to town on purpose to invite Lord Charles here and make up matters; he will be glad to escape from the desagremens of exposure just now, as he is doubtless made a lion of for the benefit-as Sir Peter Teazle has it-of all old bachelors.' ANNA MARIA FIELDING (Mrs. S. C. Hall). IMITATION OF CATO'S SPEECH IN LUCAN. CONS ONSULT a holy man! inquire of him! Wherefore? What should I inquire? Must I be taught of him that guilt is woe? That innocence alone is happiness? That martyrdom itself shall leave the villain The villain that it found him? Must I learn That minutes stamped with crimes are past recall? That joys are momentary and remorse Eternal? Shall he teach me charms and spells To make my sense believe against my sense? Shall I think practices and penances BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. CHRISTOPHER MARLOW. different countries, "calls up spirits from HRISTOPHER MARLOW the vasty deep" and revels in luxury and splendor. At length the time expires, the bond becomes due, and a party of evil spirits enter, amid thunder and lightning, to claim his forfeited life and person. Such a plot afforded scope for deep passion and variety of adventure, and Marlow has constructed from it a powerful though irregular play. Scenes and passages of terrific grandeur and most thrilling agony are intermixed with low humor and preternatural machinery often ludicrous and grotesque. The ambition of Faustus is a sensual, not a lofty, ambition. A feeling of curiosity and wonder is excited by his necromancy and his strange compact with Lucifer, but we do not fairly. sympathize till all his disguises are stripped off and his meretricious splendor is succeeded by horror and despair. Then, when he stands on the brink of everlasting ruin, waiting for the fatal moment, imploring yet distrusting repentance, a scene of enchaining interest, fervid passion and overwhelming pathos carries captive the sternest heart and proclaims the full triumph of the tragic poet. was the son of a shoemaker, and was born at Canterbury, Kent, in 1562. He was educated at Bennet College, Cambridge, and took his master's degree in 1587. He had, however, previous to this commenced his career as a dramatist and written his tragedy of Tamberlaine the Great, which was successfully brought upon the stage and long continued a favorite. Though there is in the play much rant and fustian, still it has passages of great beauty and wild grandeur, and the versification justifies the compliment afterward paid by Ben Jonson in the words "Marlow's mighty line." His finely modulated and varied blank verse, observable even in this early play, is one of his most characteristic features. The success of Tamberlaine induced Marlow to commence the profession of an actor, but he was soon incapacitated for the stage by accidentally breaking his leg. Marlow's second play, The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, exhibits a far wider range of dramatic power than his first. The hero studies necromancy, and makes a solemn disposal of his soul to Lucifer on condition of having a familiar spirit at his command and unlimited enjoyment for twenty-four years, during which period Faustus visits Before 1593, Marlow produced three other dramas, the Jew of Malta, the Massacre of Paris, and an historical play, Edward the Second. The last of these is a noble drama. and contains a number of ably-drawn characters and splendid scenes. His life was as wild and irregular as were his writings. He was even accused of atheistical opinions, but there is no trace of this in his plays. He came to an early and singularly unhappy end. He was attached to a lady who favored another lover, and, having found them in company together, in a frenzy of rage he attempted to stab the man with his dagger. His antagonist seized him by the wrist and turned the dagger so that it entered Marlow's own head in such a manner that, notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be resorted to, he shortly after died of his wounds. The last words of Greene's address to him a year or two before are somewhat ominous: "Refuse not, with me, till this last point of extremity; for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited." Marlow's fatal conflict is supposed to have taken place at Deptford, as he was buried there on the 1st of June, 1593. was the son of James Knowles, who enjoyed in his day considerable reputation as a teacher of elocution and was the author of a dictionary of the English language. The son was born at Cork, in Ireland, in 1784. When he was eight years old, his parents moved to London, where he received a good education. Very naturally, he turned to the stage, and made his first appearance as an actor in Dublin. At no time did he excel in the histrionic art. He became, like his father, a teacher of elocution, especially in Belfast and Glasgow, and began to write plays, which his intimate knowledge of the stage enabled him to make very effective. First among these was Caius Gracchus, in 1815. 1815. It gave, though well received, no earnest of his great success in Virginius, which appeared in 1820. Of his thirteen plays, this was not only the best, but far surpassed all the others. Among these were HIS lady, a daughter of William Inge-eida in 1840. He also wrote a novel enThe Hunchback in 1832 and John of ProTH low, was born at Ipswich, England, in 1830, and is known as both a story-teller and a poet. She wrote a volume of stories (Tales of Orris) which was published in 1860. This was followed by The Round of Days, a poem, and later by A Story of Doom and a novel entitled Off the Skelligs. The work-or, rather, poetical conceit--by which she is best known is The Song of Seven, depicting the joys and sorrows which are encountered in our journey through life at periods of seven years' interval. Later, Miss Ingelow wrote a volume entitled Studies for Stories. ABRAHAM MILLS, A. M. JEAN INGELOW. titled George Lovell (1845). In 1852, after many "compunctious visitings of conscience," he abandoned the stage and playwriting and became a Baptist preacher and a religious dinal Wiseman in a paper called The Idol polemic. He answered the writings of CarDemolished by its own Priest. He died in 1862, at Broadstairs. Some of his plays appear upon the stage, although their literary merit is not great. still OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW LIMITED. THE power of our Supreme Court is great and its sphere is vast, but there are limits to its power and its sphere. According to the words of the Constitution, "the judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under the Constitution, the laws of the United States and treaties," but it by no means follows that the interpretation of the Constitution which may be incident to the trial of these "cases" is final. Of course, the judgment in the "case" actually pending is final, as the settlement of a controversy, for weal or woe to the litigating parties, but as a precedent it is not final even in the Supreme Court itself. When cited afterward, it will be regarded with with respect as an interpretation of the Constitution, and, if nothing appears against it, of controlling authority; but at any day, in any litigation, at the trial of any "case," it will be within the unquestionable competency of the court to review its own decision, so far as it establishes any interpretation of the Constitution. But if the court itself be not constrained by its own precedents, how can the co-ordinate branches of the government, who are respectively under oath to support the Constitution, and who, like the court itself, may be called within their respective spheres incidentally to interpret the Constitution, be constrained by them? In both instances the power to interpret the Constitution is simply incident to other principal duties, as the trial of "cases," the making of laws or the administration of government, and it seems as plainly incident to a "case of legislation or of administration as to one of the "cases" of litigation. And on this view I shall act with entire confidence under the oath which I have taken. For myself, let me say that I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect, but I am too familiar with the history of judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a full share of human frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanction. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment. It was a judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave, which arrested the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles and sent him. in bonds from Judea to Rome, which in the name of the old religion adjudged the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death. in all its most dreadful forms, and which afterward, in the name of the new religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun. It was a judicial tribunal which in France during the long reign of her monarchs lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief Reign of Terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessary of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry VIII., from the unjust divorce of his queen to the beheading of Sir Thomas More, which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley and John Rogers, which after elaborate argument upheld the fatal tyranny of ship-money against the patriot resistance of Hampden, which in defiance of justice and humanity sent Sidney and Russell to the block, which persistently enforced the laws of conformity that our Puritan Fathers persistently refused to obey, and which afterward, with Jeffreys on the bench, crimsoned the pages of English history with massacre and murdereven with the blood of innocent women. Ay, sir, and it was a judicial tribunal in our own country, surrounded by all the forms of law, which hung witches at Salem, which affirmed the constitutionality of the Stamp Act while it admonished jurors and the people" to obey. Of course the judgments of courts are of binding authority upon inferior tribunals and their own executive officers whose virtue does not prompt them to resign rather than aid in the execution of an unjust mandate. Over all citizens, whether in public or private station, they will naturally exert, as precedents, a commanding influence: this I admit. But no man who is not lost to self-respect and ready to abandon that manhood which is shown in the Heaven-directed countenance The whole dogma of passive obedience must be rejected, in whatever guise it may assume and under whatever alias it may skulk, whether in the tyrannical usurpations of king, Parliament or judicial tribunal. The rights of the civil power are limited; there are things beyond its province; there are matters out of its control; there are cases in which the faithful citizen may say-ay, must say "I will not obey." No man now responds to the words of Shakespeare: "If a king bid a man be a villain, he is bound, by the indenture of his oath, to be one." Nor will any prudent reasoner who duly considers the rights of conscience claim for any earthly magistrate or tribunal, howsoever styled, a power which in this age of civilization and liberty the loftiest monarch of a Christian throne, wearing on his brow "the round and top of sovereignty," dare not assert. CHARLES SUMNER. THACKERAY. will voluntarily aid in enforcing a judgment WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACK which in his conscience he believes to be wrong. Surely he will not hesitate to obey God rather than man" and calmly abide the perils which he may provoke. Not lightly, not rashly, will he take the grave responsibility of open dissent; but if the occasion requires, he will not fail. Pains and penalties may be endured, but wrong must not be done. "I cannot obey, but I can suffer," was the exclamation of the author of Pilgrim's Progress when imprisoned for disobedience to an earthly ERAY-so named after his grandfather-shares with Charles Dickens the highest place among the novelists of his time, and has, in the opinion of many of the best critics, no superior in his art within the entire range of English literature. Scholarship-or, rather, scholarly and literary tastes-were his by inheritance; he came of a family of schoolmasters and clergymen. His father, Richmond Thackeray, held a post in the civil service of India, and the son, William, was born at Calcutta in |