law to his purpose; he had a body of trained clergymen to act as spies on the last moments of condemned criminals, to entrap them under the cloak of friendship into admissions and confessions, which were afterwards adduced as valid evidence against their real or supposed accomplices and associates. But this wickedness, of which we neither deny nor palliate the extent, was purely professional; it may have been cruel, but it was not corrupt; it arose more from a perverted sense of duty than a deliberate sacrifice of principle. In the Overbury case, his great anxiety was to have every one of the accused executed, and he would not have spared the King himself had he been professionally employed against him. Even in modern times we have seen among lawyers instances of criminal devotion to a client, extending not only to the suppression of what was true, but even to the direct suggestion of what was absolutely false, and, what is worse, was designed to implicate an innocent person.

Such an excuse-confessedly a very lame one-may be made for Coke, but nothing whatever can be said in favour of the conduct of Bacon. It was a compound of meanness and duplicity to which the annals of turpitude may vainly be searched for a parallel, save in those pages which record the life of Bacon himself. He was ready to hunt Somerset to the death to gratify the new favourite, his patron Villiers, who was naturally anxious to remove so formidable a rival; and at the same time he gratified the King by leaving loop-holes in the evidence, to which might be suspended plausible pretences for pardon. His tortuous windings in this double path are revealed in his own letters, published in the volume before us, and they exhibit a double-faced system of fraud and treachery which could only have been conducted by a great man, but which could only have been contrived by a great villain.

It is universally known that James dared not execute Somerset ; though at his arrest he had imprecated the vengeance of heaven on himself and family if he ever consented to pardon the fallen favourite! What was the nature of the guilty secret which gave the fallen minister so much power over his worthless master? The price of the pardon is said to have been a casket of letters and other papers which Somerset is said to have placed in sure hands for the purpose of being published, if the law had been permitted to take its course. Our belief is, that more than one atrocity was exposed to the risk of detection; each theory that has been proposed has so much probability in its favour that we are inclined to accept them all. Mr. Amos has elaborately shown that the evidence adduced against Somerset, notwithstanding all the unfair practices of the crown lawyers, is far from being conclusive of his guilt, and at the same time establishes the intense anxiety evinced to procure his condemnation. He also records the countless artifices induced to entrap him into a confession after his conviction, and the efforts made by the King to get him to acknowledge his guilt as the Countess had done. A belief in his innocence cannot therefore be assigned as a motive for the pardon. Hume speaks of "the King's lingering affection for his favourite:" the very contrary feeling was shown by the pardon including the Countess, whom Somerset had begun heartily to detest as the cause of his fall and subsequent sufferings. Nothing then remains but the possession of some guilty secret to account for the pardon, and that secret is a mystery of some revolting iniquity into which we shall not attempt to penetrate.

THE PARTING OF THE EARTH.

TRANSLATED FROM SCHILLER

BY LORD NUGENT.

"TAKE ye the Earth!” cried Jove, as from high heaven To Man he spake; "Yours shall it ever be, "For an enduring heritage 'tis given,

"Take it ;-but see ye share it brotherly!"

Then hastened each to seize, with busy hand,
As each, or young or old, his choice had made;
The Rustic tilled and reaped the teeming land-

The Young Lord hunted through the greenwood shade.

With the world's wealth the Merchant filled his store,
The Abbot's cellars yawned for generous wine;
The public pass the King stood guardian o'er,

Bridges and roads,-"The Toll," he cried, "is mine!"

Division made,-then late, and listlessly,

From some far realms the charmed Poet came,

Alas! what heritage or hope had he ?—

All owned some present master's earlier claim.

"Ah, woe is me !-Alone of all, must I
"Forgotten be?-And I thy truest son!"
Thus 'gan he wail, loudly and mournfully,

And cast him down before Jove's star-girt throne.

"Tranced in the land of dreams if thou didst stay,"
Replied the God, "complain not then of Me-
"Where wast Thou?-others won the Earth away."
Father," the Poet said, "I was with Thee!"

'Still, on thy face was turned my raptured gaze, "Still to thy heaven's own harmony mine ear;"Pardon the wandering Spirit, that, in the blaze

Dazzled, hath lost all home and portion here."

"List, then," said Jove, "the Earth is others' fee,"The Pasture, Forest, Mart, no more are mine.

"But, in my Heaven would'st Thou abide with Me,

Mount, son-the realms of light and song are thine."

635

NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE END OF BIRKENHEAD.

BY ALBERT SMITH.

THERE is a delicious feeling of approaching enterprize always experienced upon emerging from the terminus of a long railway into a strange town. The utter uncertainty as to the direction you must take,—the eager curiosity with which you approach the corner of every street, almost regarding it as you would do the green curtain of a theatre that will presently discover some new scene to you,-the idea that all the shops, and houses, and people have sprung into existence that very moment, and that they had no being before you saw them, but have been conjured up to greet you-a somewhat conceited thought, the entirely different appearance of the place to what you had determined it ought to have, in your own mind, before you saw it, and consequently the greater novelty,-all these things make a first visit to anywhere sufficiently exciting.

But when this feeling of strangeness lasts beyond the first impression, it is apt to get tiresome; and especially so to a Londoner, who can scarcely comprehend being in a large place that he does not know the minute anatomy of at least in his own country. Abroad, he never ventures out, if an utter stranger, without a guide or a map; and indeed seldom desires to see more than the places whose locale is sufficiently conventional to be discovered without much difficulty, putting aside the chance of his not knowing the language indigenous to the country. But when he comes to a large place of which there is as yet no popular map, and whose outskirts are rising up in the night, like Aladdin's palace, quicker than even the aborigines can follow the names that indicate their sites, his case is somewhat perplexing.

Everybody has heard of Birkenhead,―originally a little nucleus of life, which has been shooting out in all directions, like a crystal forming on the disc of a microscope, until its diameter has come to be a very fair walk for an appetite,—on the Cheshire side of the Mersey. It so happened, that, a short time since, being at Liverpool, we determined upon paying a visit, before leaving for town by the half-past-four express, to a cousin, a young architect, located in the before-mentioned rising town-a follower of the large permanent encampment there setting up, with whom we had passed through all the constructive stages of infantile mud, Ramsgate sand, toy-shop bricks, dissected barns, little theatres, rabbit-hutches, and rustic verandahs, to those wilder castellated buildings of maturer age, which, in the spirit of true opposition as regards freedom, the French give to Spain, and we to the air. At last we parted. He took to building magazines in stories; we, to constructing stories in magazines; and when, after a long separation, we found that we were at Liverpool, and that he, as his card informed us, was at "St. Michael's Terrace, Birkenhead," we determined to call upon him.

"Terrace"-it was a grand word: there would be little difficulty in finding it. "St. Michael's," too, sounded well. Had it been Prospect Terrace," or "Albert Terrace," or "Brown's Terrace," we should have mistrusted it; but "St. Michael's Terrace" conjured up

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at once images of terraces known to the great world,—of the terrace at Windsor Castle, when the band is playing, and the tall mustachios of the Life Guards are out for a stroll, of Connaught Terrace, wherein drawing-rooms light up so well, and cornets-à-piston sound so silvery amidst the wax-lights-pure patrician wax-lights, not Price doing duty for them-in the Bridal waltz,-that one above all others for deux temps, cinq temps, or we doubt not any time at all that could be invented by the most frantic professor;-even of the terrace on the Adelphi drop-scene, where the cavalier of the middle ages is supposed to be singing to his lady, who is, in turn, supposed to be listening to him inside the window ;-or of another terrace we know, where there are some inmates who would have driven all the cavaliers of the Middle Ages into the wildest tomfooleries of chivalry, but the name of which we do not tell, for fear the public should flock to see it too eagerly. All these associations put us quite at rest about the practicability of readily finding out St. Michael's Terrace.

In the pride of our heart, having, in the language of the Neapolitan fisherman" beheld how brightly broke the morning,"we left the George's Pier, Liverpool, on board the odd steamer which conveys anybody who "don't care two pence" (paid for the journey) to Woodside, on the other shore of the Mersey, which is to Birkenhead what Bankside is to the Borough. The steamer was a curious affair. It had all sorts of strange decks and seats, and a rudder and wheel at either end, so that it could "go ahead" or take "half a turn astarn" with equal facility; and the engine was directed upon deck. Two iron bars kept oscillating from out the hatches, as if a gigantic metal lobster was imprisoned below, and these were his feelers: by them was the machinery governed. The journey occupied two or three minutes,-literally no time, in the amusement derived from the panorama of docks, ships, buildings, and flashing water around us.

On landing at Woodside, we were too proud just at present to ask our way, so we followed the throng up what appeared the principal thoroughfare, and at last coming to a division of roads, thought it time to inquire after St. Michael's Terrace. To this end, we placed our faith in the intelligence of a contiguous baker, who, in return, "thought he knew the name, but couldn't exactly say whereabouts it was,-not for a certainty, except that it wasn't within a goodish bit of his shop; but he reckoned the policeman opposite might know." With that irritable feeling always provoked by a person, who, upon being asked the way to anywhere, never puts you out of your misery at once, but, after keeping you in suspense for some time, at last confesses "he's a stranger in these parts," we left the shop somewhat discourteously, and attacked the policeman. The policeman's answer was frank and decisive he had never heard of no such place at all; but added that there was a map in the market, a little way off. And so we turned towards the market.

Birkenhead will, without doubt, some day be a great town; but at present it is rather suggestive than imposing. The grand thoroughfares are simply marked out by a kerb and a gutter; and marvellous traps are laid to catch foreign pedestrians, fashioned like that which Jack laid for the Cornish giant, by covering sticks over a deep hole, which let you fall into embryo areas and dust holes. The sticks in this case are planks, and they tip up sideways like a beetle-trap, when you tread on them. Everything is new,-new door-steps, new slates,

new shutters; and where there are no houses, they are preparing to build them. Deep foundations are dug here and there, and about, which form into ponds for the ducks to dabble in; ground is partitioned off, and traces of the old localities are rapidly disappearing. Now and then a bit of primæval hedge, black and stunted, stares up in amazement at the improvements around it; and a piece of old wall, that hemmed in some garden of the middle ages, finds itself in the centre of an intended square; but beyond this, there is little to recognise the former spot by.

We contrived to find the market-place,-a nice building, by the way, resembling a railway terminus pulled out like a telescope, with fountains, and stalls, and edibles, and, we should suppose customers, only we could not have been there at the proper time to meet them. But there must have been people to buy things somewhere, because there were shops, with cloth caps at sixpence, and stout men's highlows in the windows; and even note paper and envelopes. At the end of the market-place we found the map; it was, if we remember aright, a manuscript one; and the authorities had blockaded all approach to it with large forms and tables. But our situation was somewhat desperate. We were not to be stopped by trifles; and we climbed over all the obstacles until we got close enough to it. There were all sorts of names of existing and intended streets, but not the one we wanted and getting down again at the peril of our neck, we vandyked along the central avenue, asking every stall-keeper on each side, and with the same ill-luck. At last we were directed to apply at the Parish Office; and this appeared the best chance yet: it must be a strangely desolate place that rate-collectors did not know of. But that knowledge, even here, was somewhat hazy; they certainly had heard of such a place, although they did not know at which point of Birkenhead it was situated. But they rather thought it was at the end of Grange Lane.

The end of Grange Lane! There was desolation in the very name. It told of dreary coppices and quags-of water-courses and lonely paths of moated granges without even a Mariana to be aweary in them. Our spirits sank within us; but we thanked the gentlemen in the office for the sympathy they evinced in our tale of distress, and having had our route pointed out to us on another map, evidently the fellow to the one in the market-place, we set off again upon our weary pilgrimage. At the corner, a boy-the only one in sight,-was standing on his head with his feet against the wall, apparently for lack of better employment. We gently knocked him over to ask if we were right, intending to give him a penny. But the acerbity of his "Now then-you jest do that again-that's all," stopped our mouth, and we went on until we saw the shop of John Power, a licensed victualler, invitingly open. We entered, and humbly made the old enquiry.

"Parthrick!" cried the individual we applied to, with a strong Hibernian accent.

"Sirr!" replied a hamper in the corner of the shop.

"Which is Michael's Staircase ?" said the first speaker; at least we thought so, and we mildly suggested St. Michael's Terrace.

"Oh, your sowl-it's all the same, and he knows it, you'll see," continued the man. "Where is it?"

"Down by the hotel," answered the hamper; and then the lid rose, and a head appeared from it, and went on; "Keep right away from