With wounds received from sacred steel, MARRIAGE OF HONORIUS AND MARY. Shall kisses from your lips surprise! FROM THE LATIN OF CLAUDIUS. PRINCE! whose splendor glows more Than stars that beam with brilliant light, What creature wears such hideous mien Translation of A. HAWKINS, F. H. S. * A descendant of Hippolytus, restored to life by Esculapius. (See Virg., Æn. vii. 761.) EVERT AUGUSTUS DUYCKINCK. HIS versatile and useful writer conjunction with Cornelius Mathews, a monthly magazine entitled Arcturus: A Magazine of Books and Opinions. It was published until 1842. In 1847 he issued a weekly journal called The Literary World, from which he withdrew for a short period, but returned again, with the collaboration of his brother, George L. Duyckinck, and continued his connection with it until its discontinuance, in 1853. Immediately after that he entered with his brother upon the preparation of the Cyclopædia of American Literature, which was completed and issued in 1856, in two octavo volumes. This excellent work, which has been largely commended and widely useful, occupied a place until then vacant, and is invaluable as a book of reference. In the same year he published The Wit and Wisdom of Sidney Smith. This volume, although ephemeral in its nature, was well received at a time when the sayings of the great English humorist were on every tongue. Upon the death of his gifted brother, in 1863, Mr. Duyckinck published a memoir of him. In 1865 he issued a History of the Civil War in America (1861-65), in three volumes. In 1866 he gave to the world a new edition of the Cyclopædia, with a large and valuable supplement, and also a National Portrait-Gallery, in two volumes. His pen was always busy. In 1870 appeared his History of the World from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, and in the next year (1871) A Memoir of the Rev. Dr. Francis Hawks. After a life of unusual literary labor, and while yet in his prime, Mr. Duyckinck died, in 1878. He was one of those industrious men who strive to be rather useful than famous, and his Cyclopædia of American Literature, after receiving the high commendations of such men as Irving, Bancroft and Prescott, remains to later scholars a treasurehouse of facts, specimens, opinions and critical notices of our best authors, and has conduced to make the literature of our country known and appreciated. NEAL MALONE. FROM TRAITS AND STORIES OF THE IRISH PEASANTRY. THERE never was a greater-souled or doughtier tailor than little Neal Malone. Though but four feet four in height, he paced the earth with the courage and confidence of a giant; nay, one would have imagined that he walked as if he feared the world itself was about to give way under him. Let none dare to say in future that a tailor is but the ninth part of a man: that reproach has been gloriously taken away from the character of the cross-legged corporation by Neal Malone. He has wiped it off like a stain from the collar of a second-hand coat; he has pressed this wrinkle out of the lying front of antiquity; he has drawn together this rent in the respectability of his profession. No! By him who was breeches-maker to the gods—that is, except, like Highlanders, they eschewed inexpressibles-by him who cut Jupiter's frieze jocks for winter, and eke by the bottom of his thimble, we swear that Neal Malone was more than the ninth part of a man. Setting aside the Patagonians, we maintain that two-thirds of mortal humanity were comprised in Neal, and perhaps we might venture to assert that two-thirds of Neal's humanity were equal to six-thirds of another man's. It is right well known that Alexander the Great was a little man, and we doubt whether, had Alexander the Great been bred to the tailoring business, he would have exhibited so much of the hero as Neal Malone. Neal was descended from a fighting family who had signalized themselves in as many battles as ever any single hero of antiquity fought. His father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were all fightingmen, and his ancestors in general, up, probably, to Con of the Hundred Battles himself. No wonder, therefore, that Neal's blood should cry out against the cowardice of his calling; no wonder that he should be an epitome of all that was valorous and heroic in a peaceable man; for we neglected to inform the reader that Neal, though "bearing no base mind,” never fought any man in his own perThat, however, deducted nothing from his courage. If he did not fight, it was sim son. ply because he found cowardice universal. No man would engage him; his spirit blazed in vain; his thirst for battle was doomed to remain unquenched except by whiskey, and this only increased it. In short, he could find no foe. He has often been known to challenge the first cudgel-players and pugilists of the parish, to provoke men of fourteen stone weight, and to bid mortal defiance to faction heroes of all grades, but in vain. There was that in him which told them that an encounter with Neal would strip them of their laurels. Neal saw all this with a lofty indignation; he deplored the degeneracy of the times, and thought it hard that the descendant of such a fighting family should be doomed to pass through life peaceably, whilst so many excellent rows and riots took place around him. It was a calamity to see every man's head broken but his own—a dismal thing to observe his neighbors go about with their bones in bandages, yet his untouched, and his friends beat black and blue, whilst his own cuticle remained undiscolored. "Blur-an'-agers!" exclaimed Neal, one day, when half tipsy in the fair; "am I never to get a bit of fightin'? Is there no cowardly spalpeen to stand afore Neal Malone? Be this an' be that, I'm blue-mowlded for want of a batin'. I'm disgracin' my relations by the life I'm ladin', Will none o' ye fight me aither for love, money or whiskey-frind or inimy, an' bad luck to ye? I don't care a traneen which, only out o' pure frindship let us have a morsel o' the rale kick-up. 'tany rate. Frind or inimy, I say agin, if you regard me; sure that makes no differ, only let us have the fight." This excellent heroism was all wasted: Neal could not find a single adversary. Except he divided himself like Hotspur and went to buffets one hand against the other, there was no chance of a fight-no person to be found sufficiently magnanimous, to encounter the tailor. On the contrary, every one of his friends-or, in other words, every man in the parish-was ready to support him. He was clapped on the back until his bones were nearly dislocated in his body, and his hand shaken until his arm lost its cunning at the needle for half a week afterward. This, to be sure, was a bitter business—a state of being past endurance. Every man was his friend, no man was his enemy. A desperate position for any person to find himself in, but doubly calamitious to a martial tailor. Many a dolorous complaint did Neal make upon the misfortune of having none to wish him ill, and what rendered this hardship doubly oppressive was the unlucky' fact that no exertions of his, however offensive, could procure him a single foe. In vain did he insult, abuse and malign all his acquaintances; in vain did he father upon them all the rascality and villany he could think of. He lied against them with a force and originality that would have made many a modern novelist blush for want of invention, but all to no purpose. The world for once became astonishingly Christian; it paid back all his efforts to excite its resentment with the purest of charity; when Neal struck it on the one cheek, it meekly turned unto him the other. It could scarcely be expected that Neal would bear this. To have the whole world in friendship with a man is, beyond doubt, rather an affliction. Not to have the face of a single enemy to look upon would, decidedly, be considered a deprivation of many agreeable sensations by most people, as well as by Neal Malone. Let who might sustain a loss or experience a calamity, it was a matter of indifference to Neal; they were only his' friends, and he troubled neither his head nor his heart about them. There is no man without his trials, and Neal, the reader perceives, was not exempt from his. What did it avail him that he carried a cudgel ready for all hostile contingencies, or knit his brows and shook his kippeen at the fiercest of his fighting friends? The moment he appeared they softened into downright cordiality. His presence was the signal of peace; for, notwithstanding his unconquerable propensity to warfare, he went abroad as the genius of unanimity, though carrying in his bosom the redoubtable disposition of a warrior, just as the sun, though the source of light himself, is said to be dark enough at bottom. It could not be expected that Neal, with whatever fortitude he might bear his other afflictions, could bear such tranquillity like a hero. To say that he bore it as one would be to basely surrender his character; for what hero ever bore a state of tranquillity with courage? It affected his cutting out; it produced what Burton calls "a windie melancholie," which was nothing else than an accumulation of courage that had no means of escaping, if courage can without indignity be ever said to escape. He sat uneasy on his lap-board. Instead of cutting out soberly, he flourished his scissors as if he were heading a faction; he wasted much chalk by scoring his cloth in wrong places, and even caught his hot goose without a holder. These symptoms alarmed his friends, who persuaded him to go to a doctor. Neal went, to satisfy them; but he knew that no prescription could drive the courage out of him that he was too far gone in heroism to be made a coward of by apothecary stuff. Nothing in the Pharmacopoeia could physic him into a pacific state. His disease was simply the want of an enemy and an unaccountable superabundance of friendship on the part of his acquaintances. How could a doctor remedy this by a prescription? Impossible! The doctor, indeed, recommended blood-letting, but to lose blood in a peaceable manner was not only cowardly, but a bad cure for courage. Neal declined it he would lose no blood for any man until he could not help it; which was giving the character of a hero at a single touch. His blood was not to be thrown away in this manner; the only lancet ever applied to his relations was the cudgel, and Neal scorned to abandon the principles of his family. His friends, finding that he reserved his blood for more heroic purposes than dastardly phlebotomy, knew not what to do with him. His perpetual exclamation was, as we have already stated, "I'm bluemowlded for want of a batin'." They did everything in their power to cheer him with the hope of a drubbing, told him he lived in an excellent country for a man afflicted with his malady, and promised, if it were at all possible, to create him a private enemy or two, who, they hoped in Heaven, might trounce him to some purpose. This sustained him for a while, but as day after day passed, and no appearance of action presented itself, he could not choose but increase in courage. His soul, like a swordblade too long in the scabbard, was beginning to get fuliginous by inactivity. He looked upon the point of his own needle and the bright edge of his scissors with a bitter pang when he thought of the spirit rusting within him; he meditated fresh insults, studied new plans and hunted out cunning devices for provoking his acquaintances to battle, until by degrees he began to confound his own brain and to commit more grievous oversights in his business than ever. Sometimes he sent home to one person a coat with the legs of a pair of trousers attached to it for sleeves, and despatched to another the arms of the aforesaid coat tacked together as a pair of trousers. Sometimes the coat was made to button behind instead of before, and he frequently placed the pockets in the lower part of the skirts, as if he had been in league with cut-purses. This was a melancholy situation, and his friends pitied him accordingly. "Don't be cast down, Neal," said they; your frinds feel for you, poor fellow!" "Divil carry my frinds!" replied Neal. "Sure there's not one o' yez frindly enough to be my inimy. Tare-an'-ounze! what'll I do? I'm blue-mowlded for want of a batin”.” Seeing that their consolation was thrown away upon him, they resolved to leave him to his fate; which they had no sooner done than Neal had thoughts of taking to the Skiomachia as a last remedy. In this mood he looked with considerable antipathy at his own shadow for several nights, and it is not to be questioned but that some hard battles would have taken place between them were it not for the cunning of the shadow, which declined to fight him in any other position than with its back to the wall. This occasioned him to pause, for the wall was a fearful antag |