No. 130.

on the smooth turf; the ivied arches of the bridge stretched their gaps of light, strongly contrasted with their ebon buttresses, across the sparkling Derwent, and the solitary night prowler, dissatisfied with the utter stillness and loneliness, which might have seemed his safe guard, looked up, suspiciously, ever and anon, at the clear serene luminary, as if in her broad eye he beheld at once a witness and a judge!

And thus amidst profound silence, which was dreadful to him, and beneath a splendid moonlight, which he hated, this bad man approached the shadowy precincts of the dark hushed wood, and mounting the long steps of the sombre water-tower, whose lofty bulk still hid the rising moon, he touched the spring of the ponderous and iron-banded portal, which heavily and groaningly unfolded, awakening and redoubling a long dismal echo through the deep abysm of the pile. A strong flood of moonlight from the panelless orifice of a large round window high up on the opposite side, almost dazzled him at first, with its ghastful radiance, and when his eye

became accustomed to it, his villanous heart was by no means cheered by the spectacle of a hideous gulf, whose gigantic hollows were partly revealed in revolting distinctness, and partly left to imagination, that excellent exaggeration of horror. Giles Darrell, however, was too well marled in guilt's brazen hardihood to start at shadows, and before he proceeded to descend the inner flight of steps, he unveiled his lantern, and produced, instantaneously, a wide, strong, and clear light, which shewed him, at once, the mighty cubits of the watertower in all their grim dimensions.

What makes Giles Darrell start? is it fear lest the depth below should swallow up the monster of wickedness, or the heights above tumble down and bury him? No! it is that to the keenest investigation of his eye, aided by the deep darting radiance of his lamp, his victim is invisible-his brother is not there!

In an agony of exasperation he rushed down the stairs, and, just as he had accomplished half of the descent, an explosion, as of thunder, rebellowed

through the hollow building; it was from the sudden closing of the door by which he had entered the water-tower, and whose opening Giles Darrell too well knew could only be achieved from without! Abandoning, for the moment, every other thought, he rushed with frantic haste up the steps to the fatal door, and, setting down his lantern, assayed, with trembling fingers, the treacherous spring, in vain; he then tried force, but, after a few false attempts of impotent rage, the massive portal with its oaken planks and iron studs, convinced him, that even inanimate things might be almost as remorseless as a bad man's covetousness and lust.

Fury now seemed to possess him wholly; well did he deem it impossible that his brother could have gone far; and abandoning his milder purpose, he snatched up the lamp, drew his dagger, and once more rushed down the steps, resolved that Sir Constantine at least should not escape him; aud having despatched and concealed him, (which he judged would be no difficult task,) he purposed awaiting in the tower till fortune should suggest some means of deliverance, to which he was the more encouraged, as the basket he brought with him contained viands, which, duly managed, might at least last him several days, and it was more than probable, that, long ere that period, some of his forest associates would come to his deliverance; and then it was but a specious tale to those of Darkelms, and all would be right again: but now Constantine must, inevitably, be put out of the way; and with his mind bent up to this resolve, Giles Darrell, lamp and dagger in hand, rushed into the vaulted passage at the bottom of the water-tower.

As he traversed its low-browed and narrow shaft he was suddenly arrested, by observing that, at a certain point, the roof rose abruptly to a considerable height, resembling a large kitchen chim ney, or rather the interior of a church steeple, while the light of his lantern just reached high enough to shew him what appeared to be a door; it was, however, too far from the ground to admit the idea of Sir Constantine having effected his escape by that outlet, and Master Giles was just on the point of renewing his search, when an extraordinary noise, like the roar of many waters was suddenly heard above; in another instant, the floodgate, (for such it was,) flew up its grooves, and a ter

rific volume of water, foaming, boiling, and bellowing, leaped down through it, with such violence, that it was only a blind instinctive effort of self preservation that hurried the astounded Giles back into the water-tower, and he was half way up its steep stairs before his scattered senses could rally from their bewilderment sufficiently to ascertain the nature and extent of this new horror. His situation was indeed fearful; the lantern had been dropped and extinguished in his sudden panic; and he was now once more abandoned to his old scarecrow the moonlight. The roar and rush of the water below was most appalling. For some time, such was the partial darkness in which this tremendous cistern was involved, it was only by the increased violence of the cataract that uttered its menacing roar from the distant vault, like the howls of a wilderness of hyænas, and by the heavy boom with which the surging flood thundered against the black walls of the water-tower, that Darrell knew the water was gradually and rapidly rising.

But at last the cruel, the avenging moonlight shewed the pent-up wretch the certain approach of his destruction, by touching the sullen tides, as they swelled upward, with her silver light, as if she met them with welcome, saluting and inviting them to devour the villain, who had profaned and violated her reign by his nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, Giles Darrell was more than half punished. There is ever something peculiarly gloomy, if not appalling to the eye, in the appearance of a body of water, pent up and roofed in, be the place ever so familiar, and the light ever so clear. But to behold it in all the exaggerated ghastliness of night and moonlight, gradually advancing to what he knew to be his certain death; overflowing step after step of a barricaded tower, from which he had ascertained the impossibility of escape, was an infliction (it must be confessed) commensurate even to Giles Darrell's multiplied enormities. The fury of the flood-gates in the vault, which still maintained their deafening hurly-burly, was awfully contrasted with the tremendous tranquillity in which the watery monster, now halfway up the water tower, and weltering in the moonlight, strode towards its paralysed victim. It had attained within two steps of that on which Giles sate, with clenched hands, meditating by one desperate plunge to terminate his hor

rible suspense, when the heavy sound of the descending flood-gates was heard from the vault; the roar of waters gave place to a death-like silence; the floods ceased to rise; still and silent the moonlight fell on them as upon a steel mirror : Giles Darrell was safe-but the nature of his sufferings through all that night may neither be expressed nor conceived. When the chaplain and two of the domestics from Darkelms came at sunrise the next morning to release him, all reproach and sarcasm died within their hearts, when they discovered that, from a raven black, Giles Darrell's hair had become white as December's snow! Camphill, Nov. 24th, 1836.

THE ABBE GALIANI.

AN impertinent Frenchman of the last century seriously puts this question: "Can a German possibly have wit?" With better reason, some people may ask, "Was their ever a witty political economist ?" We can answer in the affirmative:-there once was one. Ferdinando Galiani was not more distinguished in his day by his many excellent writings, chiefly on subjects connected with what we now call political economy, than he was by the readiness and playfulness of his wit and his exquisite humour. Unfortunately, the best of his sayings perished with him, or with his contemporaries and associates.

He was born at Chieti, the capital of the province of Abruzzo, in the kingdom of Naples, at the end of the year 1728, and came into the world sadly deformed. He went through his studies in the city of Naples, where, from his early youth, his gay and facetious spirit made his society to be much courted. At that time the Neapolitans had a number of poetic academies and hackneyed literary societies, which did a great deal of harm to poetry and literature, and finished, like the Arcadia of Rome, by becoming thoroughly ridiculous. The Abbé's brother, the Marquis Galiani, who had distinguished himself by a translation of Vitruvius, had to deliver in one of these academies an oration on the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary; but, being unexpectedly obliged to set off on a journey, he begged the Abbé to supply his place. The Abbé accordingly composed a panegyric on the Virgin in the usual forms; but when he presented himself among the academicians, the president, a certain Neapolitan advocate,

called John-Anthony Sergio, (whose name has been preserved from oblivion solely by Galiani's witty revenge) sternly forbade him to recite it. All those pedantic and puerile conclaves were open to ridicule on a hundred sides; but a lucky coincidence afforded Galiani a most stinging point.

It was the tiresome custom of the academies to publish cumbrous collections of prose and verse at the death of every grand or titled personage. A simple cavalier might get off with a duodecimo, a baron with an octavo, but when you came to marquises, dukes and princes, (particularly if they died rich,) nothing less than a quarto would suffice; and as for princes and princesses of the blood-royal, kings, queens, emperors and empresses, a folio, full of sighs and tears, eulogiums and comparisons, was considered a light weight to lay upon their tombs. There was no possibility for a person of any fortune or name, or fame of any kind, to escape and go quietly and modestly to the grave, without their shades being made to blush at the hyperboles and extravagant eulogiums of these shameless incorporated poetasters. A hundred sonnets, to say nothing of elegies and eclogues, often arose out of the demise of an antiquated maid-of-honour; and we have seen an equal number devoted to the memory of the king's first fiddler. In order not to be taken unawares, or to be pressed for time, these academicians were accustomed to prepare beforehand, and there was scarcely one among them but (like the Persian poet in Anastasius) could at any moment have said to his friends or patrons, "Gentlemen! you may all die perfectly easy; I have an epitaph for every one of you ready in my pocket."

A few days after Galiani's quarrel with the president John-Anthony, who was one of the most prolific of these panegyrists of little-great people, the Jack-Ketch of Naples chanced to die; and this event furnished the Abbé with the opportunity of revenging himself, and exposing an absurd custom at the same time.

Having set diligently to work, Galiani soon produced a volume under the following title: "Various Compositions for the Death of Dominick Jannacone, Hangman of the Grand Court of the Vicaria; collected and published by John- Anthony Sergio, Neapolitan advocate.'

The humorous imitations of style, the general felicity of this piece of

burlesque, filled all Italy with laughter; and, if it did not destroy, it tended to diminish the academical nuisances de scribed above.

Among his numerous studies Gliani turned his attention to mineralogy and volcanoes; and having formed a complete collection of the stones, lava, and other volcanic materials ejected during different eruptions by Mount Vesuvius, he packed it up as a present for the Pope, and being miserably poor at the time, he wrote on the large chest, "Beatissime Pater, fac ut lapides isti panes fiant."

The Pope thus addressed was Benedict the Fourteenth, better known among us by his family name Ganganelli. Like several other of the Roman pontiffs, he was a wit himself, and a warm admirer of wit in other men, and he performed the miracle asked of him" (as the Italian biographers say), by giving Galiani a canonry worth four hundred ducats a-year.

His admirable talent for business as well as for conversation, recommended Galiani to a congenial spirit, the witty Marquis of Caraccioli, at whose request (in 1765) the Abbé was sent to Paris in quality of secretary of embassy.

In the absence of the ambassador, Galiani presented himself alone at the court of Louis the Fifteenth. In stature he was a dwarf, and a prominent hump did not add to the beauty of the Abbé's person. The ill-bred courtiers of that base-minded vulgar king burst out into loud laughter at his appearance; but Galiani, without being at all disturbed by this, said to Louis, Sire, vous voyez à présent l'échantillon du secrétaire, le secrétaire vient après.

The readiness of his repartees, his searching sarcasms, the originality and comprehensiveness of his mind, soon made the Abbé one of the lions of Parisian society, and brought him acquainted with all the most celebrated French philosophers, economists, and wits of that period; among whom it was found that, though speaking a foreign language, he could beat most of the beaux esprits who used their own.

Not long after, he shewed that he could write French even better than he spoke it, and that he could be as witty with his pen as with his tongue. The French economists having got up a furious contest on the question of the liberty or restriction of the corn-trade, Galiani entered the arena incognito; and, in a little work in the form of a

dialogue, contrived, not only to treat the solemn subject in a more correct and convincing manner than any of his contemporaries, but to render it amusing and attractive to all the world by the gaiety and wit with which, to the surprise of everybody, he invested its usually repulsive dryness. For several weeks, all Paris could talk of nothing else, but it was never suspected at the time that so much wit and such French could proceed from any one but a Frenchman. Voltaire, who was certainly a great judge of wit, says of these Corn Dialogues, in a letter to Diderot, "Dans ce livre il me semble que Platon et Molière se soient réunis pour composer l'ouvrage On n'a jamai.

raisonné ni mieux, ni plus plaisam ment.. Oh le plaisant livre, le charmant livre, que Les Dialogues sur le Commerce des Blés!"

Frederick the Great of Prussia, was equally enchanted with the wisdom and spirit of the Dialogues; but Galiani, who had thrown them off, currente calamo, almost without an effort, used to wonder that people should find them so extraordinary. The little humpbacked Abbé became a star of the first magnitude even in the eyes of the ladies of beauty, rank, and fashion; and it was in speaking of him that the Duchess of Choiseul used to say, "En France il y a de l'esprit en petite monnoie, et en Italie en lingots."

When interrogated by a great talker, who wanted to know how it was that he had so much wit constantly at command, the Abbé lifted his shoulders and said, "I don't know that I have what you give me credit for, but if I have any wit, it is because I don't seek for it."

In the correspondence of Grimm, the quondam friend of Rousseau, frequent mention is made of Galiani, who was held in singular estimation by the society of the Baron d'Holbach, and the other scientific and literary coteries which Grimm most frequented.

On returning to his native country, in 1770, the witty Abbé was made counsellor of the chamber of commerce; and he was afterwards promoted to a high post in the finance department. He had a good hearty relish for life, and lived prosperously and happily; but this did not hinder him from dying cheerfully. When his last moment was approaching, he took leave of his friends with these words: "You must excuse me, gentlemen, but the dead have sent me a card of invitation for their conversazione."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF DOMENICHO FONTANA,

ARCHITECT TO POPE SIXTUS V.

WHEN this Italian architect and engineer made his appearance in the arena, upon which Le Bramante, San-Gallo, Vignole, Palladio, the great Michael Angelo, and so many other men of genius had reared their ever-memorable monuments, not only did he shew himself worthy to walk in their steps, but displayed his capacity to achieve a name by a talent peculiar to himself for the erection of obelisks. He was born at the village of Mili, near the lake of Como, in 1543. The study of geometry facilitated his first progress in his favourite pursuits, and at the age of twenty, he repaired to Rome, where his brother was already exercising the profession of an architect. Domenicho, whilst engaged in studying the precious remains of ancient art and the chefs d'œuvres of the great modern masters, was not long in establishing a commendable reputation for himself. The Cardinal Montalto chose him for his architect, and under his auspices he commenced the erection of a chapel in Santa Maria Majora, as well as that of a small palace, in the garden of that basilica. Montalto, following the example of many other prelates and Italian princes, was desirous of attaching his name to works of an imposing character. He was anxious that Fontana should spare no expense in the execution of his plans, and he was obeyed; but Montalto, afterwards so famous as Sixtus V, was born in the bosom of indigence. He found it necessary, in order to support his rank, to have recourse to the pensions which Gregory XIII had from time to time granted him. This pontiff dissatisfied, and perhaps jealous of the magnificence which the cardinal affected in the construction of these edifices, ceased to furnish him with money; and the labours of Fontana might have been interrupted, had he not felt himself piqued to finish them at his own expense, devoting to that purpose one thousand Roman crowns, the result of his savings.

He had good cause to facilitate himself upon having thus preferred the attachment of his patron and love of fame to calculations of self-interest: Montalto shortly succeeded to the pontifical throne, and confirmed him in the title of his architect; and the completion of his chapel as well as that of the palace was not long delayed. Fontana constructed another immediately after, for

the same pontiff, near the thermæ of Diocletian, transformed by Michael Angelo into a church for the brethren of the Chartreux. The cupola of St. Peter's church was not yet finished; Sixtus the Fifth was anxious that Fontana and Jacques della Porto, an architect equally skilful, should take upon themselves a work which could not fail to bestow lustre upon his pontificate; but first of all, the pope judged that an obelisk would form an imposing decoration for the area necessary to be traversed before the spectator reached that temple, which in magnificence far surpassed every other throughout the world. Near to the old sacristy of this edifice, had been half buried amidst heaps of crumbled fragments and rubbish, one of those monuments consecrated according to a somewhat doubtful (hieroglyphic) tradition, to the son of Sesostris, and transported to Rome under Caligula. This obelisk was of red granite, hewn from the mountains in the neighbourhood of Thebes in Egypt, and taking in the entire apex, presented a length of 111 palms; its breadth at the base, twelve; and eight at the summit. More than one pope, before Sixtus V, had had the intention of causing its transportation to the centre of that area; but the project failed being carried into execution, in consequence of the parties agitating it being unable to agree upon the method necessary to be employed; and more especially, because they had been frightened at the difficulty of its transportation, and the immense expense necessarily demanded. Sixtus the Fifth, determining to surmount all these obstacles, addressed himself to the task in a solemn manner as it were, and summoned the collective intelligence of the most skilful mathematicians, engineers, and architects of Europe. They were to the number of five hundred, it is said; and each of them tendered, in demonstration of his method, a model, plan, or treatise at the very least. Their opinions, as may be imagined, were very much divided. Fontana was one of those who presented a model. The obelisk, half sunk in the earth, was still somewhat erect, grand question consisted in ascertaining whether a trial should be made to transport it thus, after freeing it from that by which it was encumbered, or whether they should begin by bringing it entirely down. Fontana was of this latter opinion. He maintained, contrary to the general opinion, that it was more convenient to transport the obelisk in a horizontal

The