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gained, and do not overlook the important matter in which we require the aid of this holy man. I die with impatience to witness the effects of his melody on the distracted mind of the Begum, to whose presence I will instantly introduce him; and if he succeeds in restoring tranquillity to her breast, and hope to mine, he shall name his own reward, even if the towers of Maugree formed part of his demand."

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My reward," exclaimed the Yogie with dignity, and elevating his hands on high in pious fervour, "is not in the power of mortal to bestow. To heaven alone I look for the accomplishment of my wishes."

THE JEWISH CAPTIVES IN BABYLON.*

BY MRS. CRAWFORD.

How can we sing the songs we sung
In Zion's palmy bowers?

Our golden harps, so proudly strung
In Salem's princely towers,
Hang mutely on the willows now,
Where Judah's daughters keep
The sabbath of their woe, and bow
Their wreathless brows, to weep.

Our scatter'd tribes, o'er many lands,
Are still but one great fold;
More dear to us Judean sands,
Than flowery realms of gold:
Our spirits pine for spicy gales,
From Solyma the blest;
Our lips repeat the mystic tales
Of Prophets long at rest.

A lonely and a stricken race,
With all the world our foe,
Jehovah's love in frowns we trace,-
Still o'er us hangs His bow:
We know that His Almighty hand
Our Salem will restore,

And Judah's sons possess the land
Their fathers held of yore.

* To a beautiful air by a Nobleman.

NETJA.

A STORY OF THE BELGIAN PROVINCES.

BY MRS. GORE.

THE present aspect of the cities of Belgium supplies almost as interesting an annotation to our historical records of the Middle Ages, as the ruins of the Coliseum and Capitol afford to the more majestic annals of the Roman Empire; and so subsidiary has been for centuries past the existence of the Netherlands, that but for the quaint splendour of Bruges, Ghent, and other obsolete capitals of the Low Countries, we should find it hard to credit that the flower of European chivalry once concentred itself among those gloomy flats of Western Flanders, which, to an unaccustomed eye, appear at best a wellcultivated swamp. That the order of the Golden Fleece, still so memorably honoured by the aristocracies of Europe, should have originated in a district thus unambitious and obscure, would appear incredible, but for the gorgeous tombs bequeathed by the House of Burgundy, its creators, to the cathedral of Bruges; and the curious archives enriching the kingdom which has arisen upon the ruins of the extinguished duchy.

Of the remarkable cities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, still flourishing in the north of Europe, this same capital of Western Flanders is the most curious. Like the House of Bourbon under the schooling of the Revolution, "elle n'a rien appris, ni rien oublié.” Rouen, its only rival as regards the importance of her gothic monuments and historical associations, derives from her commercial resources a degree of prosperity and activity, tending to modernize the antique quaintness of the old Roman capital; while Bruges appears to exist in a stagnant atmosphere of humid dulness, endowed with conservative properties of a peculiar kind. The usual wear and tear of life have no influence in a spot so paralysed by inertion. The lazy canals stagnate in their channels;-the unfrequented streets are voiceless as those of Herculaneum or any other city of the dead. The very air appears less buoyant than elsewhere; and a moral mildew pervades the whole character of the place.

Extending over a considerable tract of ground, intersected by canals, (from the numberless bridges over which is derived its name of Brugge, or Bruges,)-the corn-mills supplying the population are perched upon the small embankment surrounding the town under the dignified name of ramparts, as if to catch the breezes from the coast, the only winds of heaven that visit that tranquil spot too roughly. Yet even the sails of the windmills appear to turn more leisurely at Bruges than in any other region deriving its daily bread from similar means and appliances; and after four-and-twenty hours spent in perambulating the dreary maze of the tortuous streets, enlivened only by a few gloomy-looking Flemish women, wandering silent and sad under the

hoods of their cloaks of black merinos, the stranger expects to find his hair grown grayer as by the lapse of a year or two.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a city more replete with interest for the eye of the historian. Nay, the monuments of Bruges are in many instances as beautiful as they are curious; and the carved chimney-piece of the old palace, now a public tribunal, is one of the finest and most celebrated specimens extant of the art which England did not learn to prize till centuries after the execution of this masterpiece, from the hand of Gibbons and his pupils.

The venerable mansion in the grand square, exhibited to the admiration of travellers as the residence of Charles II. in his boyhood, and the still more curious old house adjoining, the habitation for centuries past from sire to son of a " DIAMANT-ZETTER," or jeweller, who takes pride in preserving the old structure in its original condition, would satisfy the curiosity of the antiquary in any other town than that containing the famous Prinzenhof; in a portion of which still standing, unchanged and entire, were celebrated the nuptials of Charles of Burgundy with Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV. Nay, it is recorded, on sufficient authority, that in this singular specimen of the domestic architecture of the middle ages, Edward III. was entertained and lodged, when invited into the Low Countries by the faction of Jaques van Artevelde.

In visiting almost any other city of equal antiquity, involuntary incredulity takes possession of the mind. We examine the monuments of past ages with a sort of grudging faith. But the quaintness of Bruges carries conviction on the very surface. No need to grope into foundations or verify archives, in order to attain perfect faith in the authenticity of its dates. We have not to revert to former centuries; they seem to be about us at every turn; nor would it much startle us to behold the grand square filled with pursuivants and pages, with lists set out for one of those princely jousts by which the earlier dukes of Burgundy used to assemble at their court the chivalry of Brabant and Hainault, with princely visitors from all the countries in the world. While leaning over the balcony of the old belfry, we can almost fancy the terrified suite of Mary of Burgundy spurring back towards the palace, from the disastrous hawking party, in the course of which a fall from her palfrey produced the death of one of the fairest princesses and richest heiresses in Europe,-at an age and occupying a position nearly parallel with those of the present sovereign of our own country; nor is it difficult to imagine the young prince, her grandson, (afterwards renowned in history under the name of Charles V.) enjoying in his good city of Bruges those homely pleasures and pastimes, which for a time so absorbed his youthful ambition as most injuriously to delay his departure from the Netherlands for his fairer kingdom of the south.

Some portion of the indelibility of these characteristics is doubtless attributable to the ultra-catholic spirit bequeathed to the Belgian provinces by the domination of Spain and Austria. Priestcraft is still in the ascendant; benumbing the faculties and stagnating the industry of the inhabitants. But the dulness and desertion of the city, apparently abandoned by its population, is of course the consequence of

subsiding from the capital of a wealthy duchy into a mere provincial town; the want of local attraction, and the pernicious influence of the miasma of the neighbouring marshes, having begun to be felt by the Flemings themselves the moment the city ceased to be a seat of government, comprehending the various pleasures and profits of a court. After the first gratification of his curiosity, the stranger who visits Bruges is pretty sure to inquire, what can have become of the hundred thousand souls wanting to give life and animation to a mere city of the dead?

It is not that London itself is devoid of monuments and associations of equal antiquity. But after viewing the ancient effigies of our early sovereigns in Westminster Abbey, we turn from the grave of a Plantagenet to that of Canning, Pitt, or Fox ;-and even from the turrets of Lambeth Palace look out upon the modern manufactories, penitentiaries, and bridges, evincing our progress in national prosperity and social civilization. But from the ancient, damp, and desolate church, created at Bruges a thousand years ago by the Count Adorni, (after two pilgrimages to the Holy Land to secure its facsimilitude to the chapel of the sepulchre of Christ,) we emerge into a street where the monk still trails his sandal, and the Beguine steals along under her hood; till we almost expect to meet old Froissart himself,—(a native of these provinces,)-ambling upon his canonical mule towards the gates of the Prinzenhof! Even the occupation of the French, which in almost every other city has left traces of the imperial eagle, and on Brussels itself has conferred a thousand civic benefits of an ineffaceable nature, did nothing to destroy the characteristics of the metropolis of a sovereign who, in the fifteenth century, while England was comparatively a pauper, bequeathed to his successors a personalty valued at three millions of golden crowns!

From such high-sounding words, what a falling off to the obscure insignificance of a provincial town, which even the transit of a railroad has failed to arouse from its leaden slumber! What a change comes over the spirit of our dream while contemplating the peaked roof of the old house on the quay of the Brugschen Canal, inhabited by Gabriel Zoon, the rich brewer of Bruges;-whose brewery and compting houses occupy the adjoining premises of the old convent of the Ursulines, the curious gardens of which, surrounded by a lofty wall, connect the house of business with the private residence of the proprietor, a man in his climacteric, or "by'r lady inclining to threescore," taciturn and undemonstrative, like the generality of Flemings, who loved but two things in this sublunary world,-his money and his flowers,-money being the business, and flowers the pleasure of his days.

Yet Gabriel Zoon was happy in an only son,-a fine young man, one of the finest in Bruges,-whom all beside himself delighted to honour, the apprentices in the brewery no less than his grander fellow-citizens of the town council. But this popularity might be the very cause of the old brewer's harsh and graceless deportment towards him. Old Gabriel might not be altogether pleased to behold the golden opinions of the place so lavished on his son, while he remained at hand to claim the share more grudgingly accorded. Or, like other

tyrants, he was perhaps jealous of the heir to whom all his ducats and hyacinths, his florins and tulips, his crowns and auriculas, must devolve, when he was consigned to his family grave in the church of St. John Nepomucenus. Such, at least, was the view of his churlishness taken by his friends when, instead of keeping Emmanuel in his sight, as the only living thing akin to him, or likely to warm the lazy current of his blood, he caused him to be educated in a strict college at Louvain; and, now that he had attained his twenty-second year, and was one of the finest young men in Bruges, to despatch him to Brussels for the completion of his law-studies, with a view to his exercise of that learned profession, instead of the more homely but scarcely less thriving trade of his forefathers. For the Zoons had been busy at the mash-tub for a period of nearly two centuries, in a country where beer is the universal potation;-weak for the poor, to whom the brackish springs of the country convey ague, to the utter discredit of teetotalism; and strong, for such of the rich as do not prefer strong waters to even Faro and Lembük. The hideous basrelief over their archway of entrance, the masterpiece of some Brugschen carver or sculptor of the seventeenth century, representing a group of wooden-limbed individuals engaged in the various processes of brewing, had witnessed the egress of as many hogsheads of malt liquor from the vats of the Zoons, as would have floated the whole country between the city endykement and the frontier.

Frequent discussions consequently arose between the domino-players and beer-drinkers of the well-frequented cafés of the place, whether it were not a proof of ingratitude on the part of old Gabriel to vary the career of his posterity from the line in which his noble fortune had been amassed; or of becoming pride, in striving to make a scholar and a gentleman, and probably at some future time a man having authority, of his only son, instead of limiting his ambitions to the superintendence of a brewhouse and its plebeian registers. With the usual stolidity of their phlegmatic race, these worthies usually left upon the field a drawn battle; protesting, with cautious discernment, that "time would show;" that if Emmanuel Zoon came to be a great lawyer, and in process of time a king's proctor or judge of assize in the public tribunal of the city, they would admit that his father had done wisely in his generation; but that if, on the contrary, he came to be only one of the thousand Flemish advocates without cause or client, it would be clear as the glass of faro on the table beside them, that he had better have stuck to the tub. "No brewer beyond his malt!" was the verdict of Gabriel Zoon's venerable neighbour, Peter Persyn,-in whose family hosiery was as much an inheritance as hops in that of the Zoons. "And I feel strongly suspicious that my friend Gabriel will live to repent having left this lad of his to the mere idleness of study."

For amid the industrious and operative population of Bruges, study passed for leisure. With them, a book was a pastime for holidays, and learning too resultless a luxury for the work-a-day world;—and not one of them but regarded the curer of stockfish or currier of hides as a wiser and better man, than the idle fellow of a librarian in charge of the curious old library wherewith the houses of Burgundy and Austria endowed the city, which they could not also endow with a taste for

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