Life, however, still smiled upon her. Domestic happiness, friendship, independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers; and she flung them all away.

great part of Shakspeare? Only one must not say so. But what think you? What? Is there not sad stuff? What? What?"

The next day Frances enjoyed the privilege of listening to some equally valuable criticisms uttered by the queen touching Goethe and Klopstock, and might have learned an important lesson of economy from the mode in which her majesty's library had been formed. "I picked the book up on a stall," said the queen. "Oh, it is amazing what good books there are

understood from these words that her majesty was in the habit of exploring the booths of Moorfields and Holywell Street in person, could not suppress an exclamation of surprise. "Why," said the queen, "I don't pick them up myself. But I have a servant very clever; and, if they are not to be had at the booksellers, they are not for me more than for another." Miss Burney describes this conversation as delightful; and, indeed, we cannot wonder that, with her literary tastes, she should be delighted at hearing in how magnificent a manner the greatest lady in the land encouraged literature.

Among the distinguished persons to whom Miss Burney had been introduced, none ap-on stalls!" Mrs. Delany, who seems to have pears to have stood higher in her regard than Mrs. Delany. This lady was an interesting and venerable relic of a past age. She was the niece of George Granville Lord Lansdowne, who, in his youth, exchanged verses and compliments with Edmund Waller, and who was among the first to applaud the opening talents of Pope. She had married Dr. Delany, a man known to his contemporaries as a profound scholar and an eloquent preacher, but remembered in our time chiefly as one of the small circle in which the fierce spirit of Swift, tortured by disappointed ambition, by remorse, and by the approaches of madness, sought for amusement and repose. Dr. Delany had long been dead. His widow, nobly descended, eminently accomplished, and retaining, in spite of the infirmities of advanced age, the vigour of her faculties and the serenity of her temper, enjoyed and deserved the favour of the royal family. She had a pension of three hundred a year; and a house at Windsor, belonging to the crown, had been fitted up for her accommodation. At this house the king and queen sometimes called, and found a very natural pleasure in thus catching an occasional glimpse of the private life of English families.

The truth is, that Frances was fascinated by the condescending kindness of the two great personages to whom she had been presented. Her father was even more infatuated than herself. The result was a step of which we cannot think with patience, but which, recorded as it is, with all its consequences, in these vol umes, deserves at least this praise, that it has furnished a most impressive warning.

A German lady of the name of Haggerdorn, one of the keepers of the queen's robes, retired about this time; and her majesty offered the vacant post to Miss Burney. When we con sider that Miss Burney was decidedly the most popular writer of fictitious narrative then living, that competence, if not opulence, was within her reach, and that she was more than usu ally happy in her domestic circle, and when we compare the sacrifice which she was invited to make with the remuneration which was held out to her, we are divided between laughter and indignation.

In December, 1785, Miss Burney was on a visit to Mrs. Delany at Windsor. The dinner was over. The old lady was taking a nap. Her grandniece, a little girl of seven, was playing at some Christmas game with the visitors, when the door opened, and a stout gentleman entered unannounced, with a star on his breast, and "What? what? what?" in his mouth. A cry of the king" was set up. A general What was demanded of her was, that she scampering followed. Miss Burney owns that should consent to be almost as completely she could not have been more terrified if she separated from her family and friends as if had seen a ghost. But Mrs. Delany came for- she had gone to Calcutta, and almost as close ward to pay her duty to her royal friend, and a prisoner as if she had been sent to jail for a the disturbance was quieted. Frances was libel; that with talents which had instructed then presented, and underwent a long exami- and delighted the highest living minds, she aation and cross-examination about all that should now be employed only in mixing snuff she had written and all that she meant to write. and sticking pins; that she should be sum The queen soon made her appearance, and his moned by a waiting-woman's bell to a waitingmajesty repeated, for the benefit of his consort, woman's duties; that she should pass her the information which he had extracted from whole life under the restraints of paltry etiMiss Burney. The good-nature of the royal quette, should sometimes fast till she was ready pair might have softened even the authors of to swoon with hunger, should sometimes stand the Probationary Odes, and could not but be till her knees gave way with fatigue; that she delightful to a young lady who had been should not dare to speak or move without conbrought up a tory. In a few days the visit sidering how her mistress might like her words was repeated. Miss Burney was more at ease and gestures. Instead of those distinguished than before. His majesty, instead of seeking men and women, the flower of all political par for information, condescended to impart it, and ties, with whom she had been in the habit of passed sentence on many great writers, Eng-mixing on terms of equal friendship, she was lish and foreign. Voltaire he pronounced a to have for her perpetual companion the chief monster. Rousseau he liked rather better. keeper of the robes, an old hag from Germany "But was there ever," he cried, "such stuff as of mean understanding, of insolent manners,

HORATIUS.

THERE can be little doubt that among those parts of early Roman history which had a poetical origin was the legend of Horatius Cocles. We have several versions of the story, and these versions differ from each other in points of no small importance. Polybius, there is reason to believe, heard the tale recited over the remains of some Consul or Prætor descended from the old Horatian patricians; for he evidently introduces it as a specimen of the narratives with which the Romans were in the habit of embellishing their funeral oratory. It is remarkable that, according to his description, Horatius defended the bridge alone, and perished in the waters. According to the chronicles which Livy and Dionysius followed, Horatius had two companions, swam safe to shore, and was loaded with honours and rewards.

two old Roman lays about the defence of the bridge; and that, while the story which Livy has transmitted to us was preferred by the multitude, the other, which ascribed the whole glory to Horatius alone, may have been the favourite with the Horatian house.

The following ballad is supposed to have been made about a hundred and twenty years after the war which it celebrates, and just before the taking of Rome by the Gauls. The author seems to have been an honest citizen, proud of the military glory of his country, sick of the disputes of factions, and much given to pining after good old times which had never really existed. The allusion, however, to the partial manner in which the public lands were allotted could proceed only from a plebeian; and the allusion to the fraudulent sale of spoils marks the date of the poem, and shows that the poet shared in the general discontent with which the proceedings of Camillus, after the taking of Veii, were regarded.

These discrepancies are easily explained. Our own literature, indeed, will furnish an exact parallel to what may have taken place at Rome. It is highly probable that the me. The penultimate syllable of the name Porsemory of the war of Porsena was preserved by na has been shortened in spite of the authority compositions much resembling the two ballads of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assign which stand first in the Reliques of Ancient Eng-ing any ground for his opinion, that Martial lish Poetry. In both those ballads the English, was guilty of a decided blunder in the line, commanded by the Percy fight with the Scots, commanded by the Douglas. In one of the ballads, the Douglas is killed by a nameless English archer, and the Percy by a Scottish spearman in the other, the Percy slays the Douglas in single combat, and is himself made prisoner. In the former, Sir Hugh Montgomery is shot through the heart by a Northumbrian bowman: in the latter, he is taken, and exchanged for the Percy. Yet both the ballads relate to the same event, and that an event which probably took place within the memory of persons who were alive when both the bal-der; for he gives us, as a pure iambic line, lads were made. One of the minstrels says:

"Hanc spectare manum Porsena non potuit." It is not easy to understand how any modern scholar, whatever his attainments may be,and those of Niebuhr were undoubtedly im mense,-can venture to pronounce that Marhe must have uttered and heard uttered a tial did not know the quantity of a word which hundred times before he left school. Niebuhr seems also to have forgotten that Martial has fellow culprits to keep him in countenance. Horace has committed the same decided blun

"Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenæ manus."

Silius Italicus has repeatedly offended in the same way, as when he says,

"Cernitur effugiens ardentem Porsena dextram ;" and again,

"Clusinum vulgus, cum, Porsena magne, jubebas.”

The other poet sums up the event in the fol- A modern writer may be content to err in such owing lines:

company.

Niebuhr's supposition that each of the three defenders of the bridge was the representative of one of the three patrician tribes is both ingenious and probable, and has been adopted

It is by no means unlikely ha. there were in the following poem.