rize the apprehension of any culprit who had found shelter in such a spot; and this, as may be supposed, was only resorted to in the case of very atrocious crimes. That of witchcraft, however, ranked among the number, and the decree is accordingly procured against the unhappy refugee. News of this fact is conveyed, by the contrivance of the priest, to a sort of Parisian Alsatia, where all the thieves, rogues, beggars, gipsies, and other vagabonds of the capital have their residence, and where the heroine herself had fixed her abode, previous to her apprehension. As she is decidedly a favourite among the population in that quarter, a unanimous resolution is made to deliver her from Nôtre Dame the night before the decree is to be put in execution, and the cathedral is accordingly besieged by torch-light. Quasimodo, unfortunately, mistakes the object of the attack, and believing he has to a do with the enemies instead of the friends of the Esmeralda, he sets about a vigorous defence of his citadel. Loose stones and beams he hurls down in profusion upon the mob, to the death of many, the maiming of many more, and the full indulgence of M. Hugo's partiality for descriptions of corporeal pain and suffering.

During the hurry and tumult of the siege, the priest, in disguise, has conveyed away the object of the attack in a boat, and he carries her to the Place de la Greve, where he discovers himself, and (at the foot of the stationary gibbet) renews his vows of love and his offers of protection to her. The pursuers are heard near at hand, and death awaits her if she still spurns him. Nevertheless, her aversion overcomes her fear; he is again rejected with scorn, and he revenges himself by dragging her to the front of the sachette's cell, and leaving her in the gripe of the recluse, whose hatred of gipsies is a sufficient guarantee that she will not suffer the victim to escape. Long before this happens, the reader has discovered that the Esmeralda is no other than the lost child of the recluse, and is prepared to see the whole power of the author developed in the scene where the recognition is made by the mother. A more grievous disappointment we never recollect to have met with; the description is of the very last degree of feebleness. But the recognition is made; and the recluse, dashing asunder the cross bars of her cell with the stone that serves her for a pillow, draws her persecuted daughter into the aperture, in the hope of screening her from her pursuers. The attempt is fruitless; the armed troop arrives; the broken bars are remarked, and after a pathetic detail of the despairing mother's alternate menaces and entreaties, we find them both dragged by main force (no strength can separate them) to the foot of the gibbet. The recluse expires before her daughter can be raised to the fatal beam.

The scene now changes, and we are transported to the roof of Nôtre Dame, whither the priest had ascended, to witness from a distance the result of his cruel treachery to the Esmeralda. Day is just beginning to dawn; and the description of the calm and tranquil prospect that presents itself to the eye from the elevated summit of the cathedral, is not only beautiful in itself, and evidently a picture drawn, not from fancy, but observation-the observation of a poet, too but is introduced in this place with great skill, to heighten by contrast the effect of what follows.

Paris, and especially the Paris of that time, seen in the fresh light of a summer's dawn from the towers of Notre Dame, was a magnificent and beautiful spectacle. The weather was like July, the sky was perfectly serene; a few lingering stars were quenching their lights in different quarters, and one remained shining very brilliantly towards the east, in the brightest part of the heavens. The sun was just on the point of appearing; Paris was beginning to stir. Eastwards, a white and pure light threw the outlines of all its houses into strong relief; and the giant shadow of the steeples projected itself over all the roofs from one end of the great city to the other. Some quarters of the town were already beginning to speak and send forth sounds; here the stroke of a bell, there the blow of a hammer, and further on the harsh rattling of a cart rolling along the street; the smoke of some chimneys was already bursting forth here and there over the immense surface of roofs, as if through the fissures of a great vol

canic stratum. The river, which dashes its waters against the arches of so many bridges, and the banks of so many islets, was striped with folds of silver. Around the city, on the outside of the ramparts, the view was lost in a great circle of fleecy mists, through which the indefinite line of the plains, and the graceful swelling of the hills, could be indistinctly made out. All sorts of floating vapours were dispersing themselves over the half-awakened city. Towards the east, the morning wind was driving across the heavens a few white tufts of cloud, torn from the misty fleece of the hills.

Outside the balustrade of the tower, precisely under the spot where the priest had stopped, projected one of those fantastically carved spouts of stone, which juts out along the sides of Gothic edifices; and from a crevice of this gutter, two beautiful wall flowers in full bloom, shaken, and rendered, as it were, living by the breath of the wind, were wantonly bowing one to the other. From aloft above the towers, far towards the sky, was heard the chirping of little birds; but the priest neither heard nor saw anything of all this. He was one of those men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers; in that immense horizon, which opened so many aspects around him, his contemplation was concentrated on one single point. Quasimodo turned to ask him what he had done with the gipsy; but the Archdeacon seemed at that moment to be out of the world; he was visibly in one of those violent moments of life, when the earth might have given way under his feet, and he would not have felt it. His eyes invariably fixed on a certain spot, he remained silent and motionless, and this silence and this immobility had a something in them so fearful, that the savage ringer shuddered before, and dared not encounter them. He only followed (and this was still a mode of questioning the Archdeacon) the direction of his looks; and in this manner the eye of the unhappy deaf man fell on the place de la Grève. He thus beheld what the priest was looking upon. The ladder was raised near the stationary gibbet; there was an attendance of the populace in the square, and a great number of soldiers. A man was dragging along the pavement something white, to which something black was clinging. This man stopped at the foot of the gibbet; here something passed that Quasimodo did not see clearly, not that his single eye had lost its keenness of sight, but there was a knot of soldiers that prevented him from distinguishing every thing. Besides, at that moment the sun shone forth, and such a flood of light burst above the horizon, that it seemed as if all the points of all the buildings in Paris, steeples, chimneys, and gable-tops, had taken fire at once.

Meanwhile, the man set about mounting the ladder; Quasimodo then saw him again distinctly he carried a woman on his shoulder, a young girl dressed in white: this young girl had a halter about her neck. Quasimodo recognized her; it was herself. The man arrived at the top of the ladder, and arranged the knot of the halter. Here the priest, in order to see better, placed himself on his knees, on the balustrade. On a sudden, the man abruptly pushed away the ladder with his foot, and Quasimodo, who for some moments past had not drawn a breath, saw the unfortunate girl dangle at the end of the rope, two fathoms above the pavement, with the man crouching down upon her, his feet on her shoulders. The cord twisted round several times, and Quasimodo beheld horrible convulsions all down the gipsy girl's body. The priest, on his part, with outstretched neck, and eyes starting from their sockets, watched the frightful group of the man and the girl of the spider and the fly. At the moment when the whole was most dreadful to behold, a demon's laugh, such a laugh as can only come from one who has ceased to be a man, burst forth on his livid face. Quasimodo did not hear this laugh, but he saw it. The ringer drew back a few steps behind the Archdeacon, and suddenly rushing with fury upon him, with his two huge hands he pushed him into the abyss over which he was leaning.

The priest cried out " Damnation !" and fell.

The spout beneath him stopped him in his fall; in desperation, he clung to it with his hands, and just as he opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he saw the fearful and avenging figure of Quasimodo pass on the brink of the balustrade above his head; seeing this he remained silent. The abyss was beneath him; a fall of more than two hundred feet, and the pavement. In this terrible situation the Archdeacon said not a word, gave not a groan; he only writhed on the spout, with surprising efforts to raise himself up, but his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet scratched against the blackened wall, without making good their footing. Those persons who have ascended the towers of Nôtre Dame, are aware that there is a projection of the wall immediately underneath the balustrade, it was on the inward inclination of this projection, that the wretched Arch

deacon exhausted himself. He had not to do with a perpendicular wall, but with a wall that receded from him.

Quasimodo would only have had to stretch forward his hand to save him from the precipice; but Quasimodo did not even look at him, he looked at la Gréve he looked at the gibbet he looked at the gipsy girl. The deaf ringer had placed his elbows on the balustrade at the spot where the Archdeacon had stood the moment before; and there, not lifting his eye from the only object he had any consciousness of, he remained mute and motionless, as if thunderstruck, and a long torrent of tears fell silently from that eye, whence, till then, but one single tear had ever flowed. The Archdeacon panted, his bald forehead streamed with perspiration, his nails bled upon the stone, his knees were grazed bare against the wall; he could hear his cassock, which had caught to the spout, crackle and give way at every shock he gave. To crown all, this spout was terminated by a leaden pipe, which bent under the weight of his body, and he felt it slowly yielding to his weight. The unfortunate man could not but be certain that when his hands would be broken with fatigue, his cassock completely torn, and the lead bent down, he must fall, and terror chilled him to the heart. Sometimes he cast his eyes wildly upon a sort of platform, made by the sculpture, about ten feet lower down, and from the depth of his agonized soul, he demanded of heaven that he might be suffered to finish his life, were it to last a hundred years, on this space of two feet square. Once he looked down upon the abyss beneath him, when he raised his head, his eyes were closed, and his hair stood bristling erect.

:

There was something awful in the silence of these two men. Quasimodo continued weeping and looking towards le Gréve, while a few feet under him, the Archdeacon was in this frightful state of agony. Finding that all his efforts did nothing but weaken the frail support which remained for him, he had made up his mind to struggle no more. There he was, clinging to the spout, scarcely drawing his breath, not stirring, not moving, but with that mechanical convulsion of the body which we feel in a dream, when we think we are falling; his fixed eyes opened wide, with a diseased, a terrified glare. Little by little, meanwhile, he was losing ground; his fingers slipped upon the stone; he felt more and more the weakness of his arms and the weight of his body; the bending of the lead that supported him inclined every moment still further in the direction of the abyss beneath him he could see, and a fearful sight it was for him, the roof of Saint Jean le Rond, as small as a card bent in two. He looked upon the motionless statues of the tower one after the other, all suspended, like him, over the yawning depth, but without fear for themselves or pity for him. Everything was of stone around him; before his eyes the gaping monsters, beneath, at the foot of the cathedral, the pavement; above his head, the weeping figure of Quasimodo. In the close, stood a few groups of idlers, who were coolly trying to guess what madman could be amusing himself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them say, for their voices came up clear and sharp to his ear, " Why, he must break his neck." Foaming in a complete delirium of terror, he at length became conscious that all was useless. Nevertheless, he gathered together whatever strength he was still master of, for a last effort. He stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall with his two knees, fastened both his hands in a slit of the stone, and was just on the point of getting a hold for one foot, when the struggle he was making caused the end of the leaden pipe he was supported by, to bend abruptly down, and with the same motion his cassock was ripped up. Finding, therefore, every thing give way under him, and having no longer a hold but by his two stiffened and failing hands, the wretched man shut his eyes, and let go the spout. He fell!-Quasimodo looked at him as he was falling.

A fall from so great a height is seldom perpendicular; he first launched into the air, his head was undermost, and his hands were stretched forth; he afterwards turned several times round, and, finally, the wind drove him on the roof of a house; here began the fracturing of the unfortunate priest's body, but he was not dead when he landed there. The ringer beheld him still trying to clutch the coping with his nails, but the plane was too much inclined, and he had no strength left; he slid rapidly along the shelving roof, like a loosened tile, and fell with a bound upon the pavement. There he stirred no more.

By this time we should have thought our author had made us sup sufficiently full of horrors. He, however, is of a contrary opinion, and he finishes his book with a short chapter, which would pretty clearly prove to us, had not we already arrived at the conviction, that whatever of natural genius he

may possess, he has still much to acquire before he can hope to be complimented on his good taste. The title of this chapter is "The Marriage of Quasimodo." The disconsolate ringer, it appears, absconded from his post on the same day that the priest and the gipsy had met their end, and nothing was known of him till about eighteen months afterwards, when, on the opening of the public charnel-house, two skeletons were discovered, one of which clasped the other in strict embrace. These were the skeletons of the Esmeralda and Quasimodo. The idea is, in itself, both unnatural and disgusting; and if any thing can add to the flagrant bad taste of such a conception, it would be the dash of coarse levity imparted to it by the title of the chapter.

Indeed, if we were called upon to name the qualification in which M. Hugo has shewn himself most deficient throughout this work, we should immediately pronounce the word-judgment; or call it, if you will, taste, tact, discrimination, or any thing else that conveys nearly the same notion.

We are the more particular in expressing our conviction that the failing of M. Hugo, and others of the hyper-tragical school, is attributable entirely to a deficiency in sound judgment, because we are aware there are those who never hesitate to ascribe the peculiar tone of such gloomy pictures as those he has so liberally presented us with, to the temperament and character, or-we like a hard word—the idiosyncracy of the author. Now this, with great deference and respect (be the same said) to that numerous class of persons who are, or may be, comprised under the generic appellation of twaddlers, we happen to know, by means of numerous instances that have come within our own observation, to be egregious nonsense. An eminent comic actor, whom we could name, never appears in a private party but his melancholy presence operates as a wet blanket thrown upon the cheerfulness of the company; while your tragedian, on the other hand, after drawing floods of tears, even from the upper gallery, shall retire to a convivial symposium, and keep the table in a roar, not of grief, but of mirth. It is just the same thing with authors, in nine cases out of ten. They play their part before the public, and appear in the character they think likely to be the most successful. One of the most pathetic tales we ever recollect to have read, was written by a gentleman of some fourteen or sixteen stone weight—a man intended by nature to grow fat, since she had gifted him above ordinary men, with that easy and imperturbable spirit of enjoyment which does more towards increasing the respectability-whereby we, of course, mean the weight and size of the corporeal frame, than all the oil-cake or the turtle with which ox or alderman was ever brought up to the Smithfield standard. Nay, we do, at this present writing, rejoice in the acquaintance of a right worthy wight, whose soul is contained within a body of, we care not to specify how many feet girth round the waistband, and whom nobody ever yet saw out of good-humour, except when some tardy, or inattentive, companion might chance unconsciously to retard the wonted pace of the bottle, as it circulated round the table-and who, nevertheless, scarcely ever takes up his pen to compose, in prose or verse-for though dwelling in the Boeotian region of Suffolk, he is himself no Baotian, and does the one and the other, often and well-but straightway he falls unwittingly into the pathetic vein, and will draw you tears from very stocks and stones. Now, judging from these and many more examples we wot of, we are by no means inclined to suppose, that because M. Hugo may have talked to us of gibbets, and racks, and cells, and dungeons, and woes beyond human endurance, all ending in violent death, that he is therefore a morose, or a sulky, or a gloomy, or a cruel, or a bloodthirsty man. We will uphold, on the contrary, that he is, and indeed must of necessity be, of most amiable character, agreeable disposition, and pleasant companionship. Nay, we will even go so far as to guarantee that he is in a great degree free from the curse of his tribe, that is, of the genus irritabile, and will take, in as good part as we bestow, the candid and free, but not therefore unfriendly or disparaging, remarks we have ventured to make upon his novel of Nôtre Dame de Paris.

THE LEYDEN PROFESSOR AND THE LIVING MUMMY.

Or all the quiet towns reposing in the brightness of a Dutch sun, Leyden is the fairest and the quietest. Seldom is the stillness of her broad and poplar-planted streets disturbed by sounds more startling than the music of a wandering barrel-organist, or the measured tread of some stately dignitary of the university passing from one class-room to another, and heavy with the weight of learning. She is an alma mater worthy of the gravity of Holland, and the genius loci is distinctly visible throughout. The very canals look more unconscious of motion, and more impressed with the propriety of silence, than anywhere else. On the poorest house the fact of "lodgings to be let," is indicated by the classical phrase " Cubicula locanda ;" and the old lady who conducts you through the apartments, has an air about her, as if she were well versed in Herodotus, and not unacquainted with the doctrines of Pythagoras. Even the man who sells roasted chestnuts at the corner of the street, looks as if he were a decayed scholar; and such is the influence of that erudite atmosphere, you cannot help addressing him with considerable trepidation, lest a subdued smile should rise to his lips at your ignorance of philology, betrayed during the transaction of purchasing from him a few stivers worth of his fruit. Calm, and stately, and solemn, are the students; and yet more calm, more stately, and more solemn are the professors: to them the rest of the living and busy world is a nonentity, or a vague and far off dream. It is with the past alone that they are conversant;-the languages, the modes of thinking, the habits, and the events of the past. Of the present they know nothing, or only enough to teach them to despise it. Wrapped up in the mantle of antique lore, they are like reanimations of the long-buried dead, moving about in the sunshine of the actual world, but with memories brooding upon departed ages, and a total apathy towards the things with which they are now surrounded. The business of my story makes it necessary for me to bring my reader into more immediate contact with one of these strange individuals, as he existed in the town of which I speak about a century ago.

Elevated on a small platform, and comfortably deposited in an oldfashioned, high-backed, venerable-looking elbow chair, sat Tobanus Eleazar Von Broech, at one end of the theatrum anatomicum, or hall of anatomy, in the university of Leyden. He was in the act of holding forth, in very Ciceronian and full-mouthed latinity, to some thirty or five-and-thirty grave and Dutch-built alumni. Professor Tobanus Eleazar Von Broech was a man who was generally believed to have more knowledge in his little finger than the Bodleian library has on all its shelves. He was about five-and-fifty years of age, and of the middle height;-the obesity of his person, though not remarkable for a Dutchman, was such as in any other country would have been thought considerable. He wore an ample bushy brown wig; but what principally distinguished him from his brother professors, was a pair