it ; and in the struggle of rage, while yet both his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, he hurls the inkstand at the intruder. "Some weeks after, perhaps, during which interval he had often mused on the incident, undetermined whether to deem it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he discovers for the first time the dark spot on his wall, and receives it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of the event having actually taken place." After It is related in the biography of Saint Catherine of Sena, that one day while she was praying to God to give her a new heart, her "Eternal Spouse came to her, opened her side, removed her heart, and carried it away with Him. So literally was this done, that for several days she declared herself to be literally without a heart. Impossible, objected common sense and physical science. With God nothing is impossible, answered the saint. some days, He to whom she was spiritually "married," returned to her, bearing in his hand, "what seemed a human heart, red and shining;" and having again opened her side, He put the new heart in, and closed the aperture. "And as a proof of the miracle, there remained evermore in her side, the scar, as she herself, and her female companions, often assured Father Raymond." How St. Catherine of Alexandria (third century) was convinced of her divine betrothal by the ring on her finger, after the visions, may be read in the ninth chapter of Mr. Peacock's Gryll Grange. If we may credit the biographer of Mrs. Fitzherbert, that lady was finally impelled to accept the hand of the Prince of Wales by an unroyal if not unlikely stratagem. Four gentlemen arrived at her house in the utmost consternation, to tell her that H.R.H. had stabbed himself, that his life was in imminent danger, and that only her immediate presence would save him. After a deal of persuasion she was induced to go to Carlton House, with the Duchess of Devonshire in company. She found the prince pale, and covered with blood. He told her that nothing would induce him to live unless she promised to become his wife. So she promised. "Mrs. Fitzherbert being asked by me," writes her biographer, "whether she did not believe that some trick had been practised, and that it was not the blood of his royal highness, answered in the negative; and said, she had frequently seen the scar, and that some brandy-and-water was near his bedside when she was called to him on the day he wounded himself." One would fain hope it need not imply an evil heart of unbelief to be sceptical as to the genesis of the scar, though one can at once, and ex animo, assent and consent to the brandy-and-water. H.R.H., by all accounts,-at any rate by some accounts, had a genuine kindness for that stimulant; not but that he liked it better without the water. The story of the lunatic patient who swallowed. the poker—all but a bit—at Dr. Fox's asylum near Bristol, has, in the course of it, a turn which looks temptingly like an example of Smith's logic. Dr. Fox one morning found one of his patients unusually dejected, and another in the same room unwontedly excited. What was the matter? the doctor asked. Matter! cried the excited one-why, he has done for himself; he (the depressed one) has been and swallowed the poker. Was that all? Well, then, as that was quite out of the question, the doctor would ask Penseroso himself what ailed him. Penseroso thereupon endorsed the statement of his fellowwho next detailed the circumstances of the ferrivorous feat. Dr. Fox showed by his manner that he gave no credit to the tale; so the narrator added, "O, you can see that it is true, for there is the rest of the poker." There, sure enough, in the grate, was the rest of the poker. And if the story did but rest here, it might serve our purpose pleasantly enough. But no such thing; the man had done what he alleged; and a deal of drastic stuff it cost the physician to exhibit and the poker-patient to take, before the iron was recovered-in an almost digested condition, deeply honeycombed by the gastric juices. Not Samuel Butler himself, surely, ever contemplated this sort of ensample of his Hudibrastic reflection, "Ah me, what perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron !" Peiresc, hearing of a Tarragonese shepherd who had fallen into a sloe-tree, a sharp point of which ran into his breast, took root, grew up, and in due time bare both blossoms and fruit,-" would never be quiet," says his biographer, Gassendi, “ till Cardinal Barberino procured the Archbishop of that place to testify the truth of the story; and Putean the knight received not only letters testifying the same, but also certain branches thereof, which he sent unto him." So far as the branches thereof went, let us hope the knight, in an age of faith, was not disposed, as we might be, to class them in the same category with the Cade bricks and chimney. When Johnson and Boswell made an excursion to Bristol, they consorted with "George Catcot, the pewterer," as acute a logician as Smith the Weaver, in his arguments for the authenticity of old Rowley. "Honest Catcot," says Boswell, "seemed to pay no attention whatever to any objections, but insisted, as an end of all controversy, that we should go with him to the tower of the church of St. Mary, Redcliff, and view with our own eyes [italics in orig.] the ancient chest in which the manuscripts were found. To this Dr. Johnson good-naturedly agreed; and, though troubled with a shortness of breathing, laboured up a long flight of steps, till we came to the place where the wondrous chest stood. There,' said Catcot, with a bouncing confident credulity, there is the very chest itself! After this ocular demonstration [again Boswell's italics], there was no more to be said." No more to be said. So thought honest Catcot; and so, too, thought Samuel Johnson-with a difference. What further proof needed France, of the sublime story of the sinking the Vengeur-the deathless suicidal Vengeur, "in a mad whirlwind of fire, and shouting, and invincible despair," as Mr. Carlyle phrases it, going down into the ocean depths,-than that wooden Model of the ship, solemnly consecrated in the Pantheon of Great Men, which beckoned figuratively from its peg, " Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante." Doubts were indeed more than once started by sceptics, even among the French. But the "solemn Convention decrees," and notably the wooden " Modèle du Vengeur" hanging visibly there, the "glory of France," what Frenchman could gainsay or resist? "Such doubts were instantly blown away again," in the presence of proof patriotic and demonstrative like that. Seeing is believing. So men saw the wooden Model, and believed. An attaché to Lord Strangford's embassy at Constantinople describes his having witnessed a rising of a Greek suburb, on the discovery in the Bosphorus of the corpse of a lad who had been missing for some days. The body-which was found tied hand and foot, and stabbed in various parts-was that of a Greek merchant's son; and "the Greek population unhesitatingly regarded him as having fallen a victim (la riguardò indubitatamente) to the Jews, whose Passover had taken place a few days before." Therefore deny it not. There is a passing reference to Smith the Weaver's grand finale of a Q. E. D., in Mr. de Quincey's picturesque monograph on the Spanish Military Nun, Catalina de Erauso,-that strange eventful history, in which, as narrated with his abrupt transitions and alternations of impassioned earnestness and gleeful |