flying in flocks, they are apt to perch capriciously, crowding on the heads of some poor wights until there is not an inch of room left on their unlucky crowns, and taking no more notice of others, who offer as good resting places for the soles of their feet, than if they had no existence. And so with the same individual object of their plural visitations or prolonged neglect. For years he is clear of them, and then all at once the arrears are to be paid up, and the billows of woe work double tides. Isabella of Castile entered upon a thronging series of heavy domestic calamities with the death of her mother in 1496, after which year successive griefs befel her with little intermission, till her health and strength gave way, if not her heart broke. Of Frederick the Great, after having to retreat before Marshal Daun and to raise the siege of Prague, Macaulay observes that it seemed that the king's distress could hardly be increased. Yet at this moment another blow not less terrible than that of Kolin fell upon him," the Hastembeck defeat and Closter Seven treaty; while, that nothing might be wanting to his distress, he lost his mother just at this time, and he appears to have felt that loss more than was to be expected from the hardness of his character. “In truth, his misfortunes had now cut to the quick." How runs the song of Hiawatha ?

"Never stoops the soaring vulture

On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching

From his high aërial look out,

Sees the downward plunge, and follows;
And a third pursues the second,
Coming from the invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture,
Till the air is dark with pinions.

So disasters come not singly;
But as if they watched and waited,
Scanning one another's motions.
When the first descends, the others
Follow, follow, gathering flockwise
Round their victim, sick and wounded,

First a shadow, then a sorrow,

Till the air is dark with anguish."

Nor is this Longfellow's only illustration of the adage. Ursula, in the Golden Legend, has

". . . mark'd it well, it must be true,
Death never takes one alone, but two!
Whenever he enters in at a door,
Under roof of gold or roof of thatch,
He always leaves it upon the latch,
And comes again ere the year is o'er.
Never one of a household only !"

A stanza in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage records that now has stern Death taken all of the poet's there was left to take, and all in quick succession :

"The parent, friend, and now the more than friend:

Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,

And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.”

Few as were the ties by which his affections held, whether within or without the circle of relationship, Byron was doomed, his biographer relates, in 1811, within a short space to see the most of them swept away by death; six between May and August of that year. Besides the loss of his mother, he had to mourn over the untimely fatalities that carried off, within a few weeks of each other, two or three of his most loved and valued friends. "In the short space of one month," he says, “I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable.”1 Sir Walter Scott writes to his eldest son in

66

1819 a train of most melancholy news"; his mother stricken with fatal paralysis, and in the same week his uncle and aunt, Dr. and Miss Rutherford, dead; "happy in this, that

"Some curse

1 His letter to Mr. Scrope Davies of August 7 begins: hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house (Newstead Abbey); one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch." This was Matthews, the idol of his admiration at Cambridge, who was drowned while bathing in the Cam.

neither knew of the other's dissolution."l In that dark year for him and his house, 1826, we find Sir Walter a deeply embarrassed man, all alone at Abbotsford, and brooding over the impending loss of his darling grandchild, Johnnie Lockhart ("the bitterness of this impending calamity is extreme"), and the newly announced death warrant by Dr. Abercrombie of Lady Scott, "the faithful and true companion of my fortunes, good and bad. A new affliction where there was enough before. Really these misfortunes come too close upon each other." The elder Montague, in Romeo and Juliet, answers his prince's summons to tidings of fresh disaster with an

"Alas, my liege, my wife is dead to-night;

What further woe conspires against my age?"

The exposed corpse of his only son is the too obvious response. Juliet herself had already been moved to the lament that

Was woe enough, if it had ended there;

Or, if sour woe delights in fellowship,

And needly will be ranked with other griefs

Why followed not when she said, Tybalt 's dead,
Thy father or thy mother, nay, or both?"—

a bitterness somewhat in the strain, under constraint, of the despairing rustic in Wordsworth, whose treasures

"-dwindled, dwindled, one by one;

Till he could say that many a time
He wished they all were gone;
Reckless of what might come at last
Were but the bitter struggle passed."

1 To his brother in Canada Sir Walter writes later on the same subject: "It is a most uncommon and afflicting circumstance that a brother and two sisters should be taken ill the same day, that two of them should die without any rational possibility of the survivance of the third, and that no one of the three could be affected by learning the loss of the other."

Scott's sense of humour was sensibly touched by the style of a woman in Fife, who, summing up the misfortunes of a black year in her history, said: "Let me see, sirs; first we lost our wee callant, and then Jeanie, and then the gudeman himsel died, and then the coo died too, puir hizzey! but, to be sure, her hide brought me in fifteen shillings."

Wordsworth's Solitary among the Mountains, type of recluse despondency, had once been all too happy. But suddenly, from some dark seat of fatal power, was urged a claim that shattered all: "Our blooming girl, caught in the gripe of death, with such brief time to struggle in as scarcely would allow her cheek to change its colour, was conveyed from us to inaccessible worlds:

"With even as brief a warning-and how soon,

With what short interval of time between,

I tremble yet to think of our last prop,
Our happy life's only remaining stay.

The brother followed; and was seen no more!"

For the partner of his

Anon the childless man was a widower. life, thus bereaved, fell into a gulf obscure of silent grief and keen heart anguish, of itself ashamed, yet obstinately cherishing itself: "And, so consumed, she melted from my arms, and left me on this earth disconsolate." Sorrow upon sorrow. As with the prophet's burden of woe, for one who thought to be and claimed to be prosperous for ever, and to see no sorrow: But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood." 'H dè övтws Xýpa kaì peμovwμevn,—only not in the apostle's sense, or at all after the apostle's own mind.

SEER

SONS OF ELI, SONS OF SAMUEL.

I SAMUEL ii. 12; viii. 3.

EER though he was, one may doubt whether it fell within the previsions of Eli, with those wicked sons of his, to foresee a like family trial for the future of his young successor, Samuel. The child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli, and was commissioned to denounce vengeance on the house of Eli, for the iniquity of his sons, because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not. With fear and trembling the child Samuel, after night-long hesitation and

delay, made known to Eli the message of doom. Submissively the old man bowed to the Divine decree: "It is of the Lord; let Him do what seemeth Him good." Time rolled on. Eli had long been in his grave, after he had judged Israel forty years, and this but to see the glory departed from Israel, in that the ark of God was taken at the last. Time rolled on; and it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel. Joel and Abiah, thus made judges in Beersheba, do not indeed wear the shameless front of Hophni and Phineas. But they took not after their sire, nor cared to trace his steps and follow his example. For we read that "his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment." How far Samuel, like Eli, was responsible for the ungodliness of his family, may be an open question. But at any rate, in his case too, as in Eli's, there was the sorrow, if not the sin.

That is an expressive passage in the opening narrative of the book of Job, which tells how the man of Uz, in his anxiety for the well being and well doing of his children-seven sons and three daughters-used to rise up early in the morning, and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, "It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." Thus did Job continually.

That the wise man, preeminently so called, should have had, for son and successor to the throne, a foolish Rehoboam, is a moral, if not a marvel, for all time. Marvel it scarcely can be called, being as it is a commonplace experience in all times. 'Tis true 'tis pity; pity 'tis 'tis true. But oh the pity of it!

The sons of Aaron are Nadab and Abihu, and them a fire is sent out from the Lord to devour. And Aaron holds his peace. The model man of righteousness idealised by the prophet, walking in all God's statutes and keeping His judgments, is by the prophet made presumably, or very possibly, if not all too probably, the father of a robber and a shedder of blood; of an adulterer, oppressor, spoiler, cruel usurer, and abominable idolater.

Southey begins a chapter of the Doctor with a series of