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of Rouen ordained that the king should be interred at Caen, in the church of St. Stephen, which he had built, and royally endowed. But even now there was no one to do the last honours: his sons, his brothers, his relations, were all absent, and of all the conqueror's officers and rich vassals, not one was found to take charge of the obsequies. At length a poor knight, named Herluin, who lived in the neighbourhood, charged himself with the trouble and expense of the funeral "out of his natural good nature and love of God." This poor and pious knight, engaging the proper attendance and a waggon, conveyed the king's body to the banks of the Seine, and thence to the city of Caen.

NOTES.-1086.-In the twentieth year after the battle of Hastings. William was now fifty-nine years old (born, 1027). Philip.-"The Fair," died 1108. Mantes. A town on the Seine, thirty miles from Paris. Rouen. Then the capital of Normandy, on the Seine, sixty-eight miles from Paris. Population now 101,000. Robert.-Fought with his father for Normandy; got it at William's death; was driven out in 1105 by Henry, his brother, then King of England, who took him prisoner, and confined him for twenty-eight years in

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COMPOSITION.-Put pronouns in the place of nouns repeated in the following:-Hunt knew a great many books, and you could not visit Hunt's house without finding Hunt with a book in Hunt's hand, unless Hunt was writing. Hunt depended on the London Library, for Hunt's own collection was not large, but most of Hunt's books were sterling.

TO THE NIGHT.-Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, an English poet, of great genius, was born in 1792. He was the son of Sir Timothy Shelley. Of a dreamy, mystical nature, living in an ideal world, he early caught the infection of French opinions then much in vogue, and drew great dislike on himself and much harsh treatment by his avowal of them. He was a man of very pure life and loving nature, and had he lived would, in all probability, have risen above his early strange opinions. But he was drowned in his thirtieth year, off Italy, in 1822.

SWIFTLY walk over the western wave,
Spirit of night!

Out of the misty eastern cave,

Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,-
Swift be thy flight!

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray
Star-inwrought!

Blind with thine hair the eyes of day,
Kiss her until she be wearied out,

Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand-
Come, long sought!

When I arose and saw the dawn,
I sigh'd for thee;

When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,

And the weary Day turn'd to his rest
Lingering like an unloved guest,
I sigh'd for thee.

Thy brother Death came, and cried
"Wouldst thou me?"

My sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmur'd like a noon-tide bee,
"Shall I nestle by thy side?
Wouldst thou me ?" and I replied
"No, not thee!"

"Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon-

Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon

I ask of thee, beloved Night—
Swift be thy approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!"

ZINGIS AND TIMOUR.-John Henry Neuman.
(1163-1227, and 1335-1405.)

Dr. Newman, an eminent writer on theology, general literature, and history, was born in London, in 1805. At Oxford he led the rising "Tractarian" movement. In 1845 he entered the Roman Catholic Church.

THESE two extraordinary men rivalled or exceeded Attila in their wholesale barbarities. Attila vaunted that the grass never grew again after his horse's hoof; so it was the boast of Zingis, that when he destroyed a city, he did it so completely that his horse could gallop across its site without stumbling.

He depopulated the whole country from the Danube to the Baltic in a season; and the ruins of cities and churches were strewed with the bones of the inhabitants. He allured the fugitives from the woods, where they lay hid, under a promise of pardon and peace; he made them gather in the harvest and the vintage, and then he put them to death. At Gran, in Hungary, he had three hundred noble ladies slaughtered in his presence. But these were slight excesses compared with other of his acts. When he had subdued the northern part of China, he proposed, not in the heat of victory, but deliberately in council, to exterminate all its inhabitants, and to turn it into a cattle-walk; from this project indeed he was diverted, but a similar process was his rule with the cities he conquered. Let it be understood, he came down upon cities living in peace and prosperity, as the cities of England now, which had done him no harm, which had not resisted him, which submitted to him at discretion on his summons. What was his treatment of such ? He ordered out the whole population on some adjacent plain; then he proceeded to sack their city. Next he divided them into three parts: first, the soldiers and others capable of bearing arms; these he either enlisted into his armies, or slaughtered on the spot. The second class consisted of the rich, the women, and the artisans; these he divided amongst his followers. The remainder, the old, infirm, and poor, he suffered to return to their rifled city. Such was his ordinary course; but when anything occurred to provoke him, the most savage excesses followed. The slightest offence, or appearance of offence, on the part of an individual, sufficed for the massacre of whole populations. The three great capitals of Khorasan were destroyed by his orders, and a reckoning made of the slain: at Maru were killed 1,300,000; at Herat, 1,600,000; and at Neisabour, 1,747,000; making a total of 4,647,000 deaths. Say these numbers are exaggerated fourfold or tenfold; even on the last supposition you will have a massacre of towards half a million of helpless beings. After recounting such preternatural crimes, it is little to add that his devastation of the fine countries between the Caspian and the Indus, a tract of many hundred miles, was so complete, that six centuries have been unable to repair the ravages of four years.

Timour equalled Zingis, if he could not surpass him, in barbarity. At Delhi, the capital of his future dynasty, he massacred 100,000 prisoners, because some of them were seen

to smile when the army of their countrymen came in sight. He laid a tax of the following sort on the people of Ispahan, viz., to find him 70,000 human skulls to build his towers with; and, after Bagdad had revolted, he exacted of the inhabitants as many as 90,000. He burned, or sacked, or razed to the ground, the cities of Astrachan, Carisme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Brousa, Smyrna, and a thousand others. We seem to be reading of some antediluvian giant, rather than of a mediæval conqueror.

NOTES.-Attila, King of the Huns, a branch of the Mongol Tartars. Along with his brother, whom he afterwards murdered, he began his reign in A.D. 433. His rule extended from the frontier of Gaul to that of China, over all the northern nations. In 445-450 he ravaged the countries between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and spent the remaining years of his life (450-453) in desolating Western Europe. He was defeated at the great battle of Chalons-on-the-Marne, in Gaul. From 250,000 to 300,000 men fell in this awful struggle, but it saved the civilization of Europe. Attila died (A.D. 453) of the bursting of a blood-vessel on the night of his last marriage. His vast empire broke up at his death. Zingis, or Genghis Khan.-The son of a petty Tartar chief of Central Asia. In 1205 he invaded China, and from that time to his death, in 1227, roamed with his armies, conquering and desolating Northern China, Persia, and Tartary. He is computed to have destroyed upwards of 5,000,000 men in these awful wars. It was the son of Genghis Khan, Batu, and his grandson, by whom Poland, Hungary, and great part of Germany, were desolated. Khorasan.-A

province of Persia. Maru, Herat and

Neisabour.-Were the three capitals of Khorasan. Caspian (Sea).- North of Persia. Indus.-The great river which flows along the western side of Upper India, forming its boundary, and falling into the Arabian Sea. Timour.-A Mongol Tartar, like Zingis, called Timur lang or Tamerlane, that is Timour the Lame. He was a successor of Zingis, whose kingdom, which had fallen to pieces, he determined to restore. Delhi. -An Indian city, the capital of the Mongol dynasty of Indian emperors, which Timour founded and which reigned over all India from 1519 till the close of the last century; nominally, indeed, till after the Indian mutiny, in 1857. Astrachan.-A city, now in Russia in Asia, on the Volga, fifty miles north of the Caspian Sea. Carisme.Capital of a province lying south of the Sea of Aral. Ispahan.-Formerly the capital of Persia, south of the Caspian. Bagdad.-On the Tigris, capital of the Empire of the Caliphs. Aleppo.-A city of Syria. Damascus. Ditto, ditto. Brousa. A city of Asia Minor, sixty miles from Constantinople. Smyrna.A city of Asia Minor, on the Gulf of Smyrna. It has a great trade in silks, carpets, fruit, &c. Population, 160,000.

COMPOSITION.-Write out a list of the verbs in the first paragraph, with as many synonyms of each as you can give.

HENRY VIII.-J. L. Sanford.

An historical writer of great merit.
His " History of Henry VIII.'s
Time," has been very recently published.

THE basis of the healthy physique. from this to a great

character of Henry is his powerful and From this sprang his vigour of mind: extent was drawn his moral nature, and by a reference to this his excellences and deficiencies, both mental and moral, can be best explained. With Henry VII. the case

had been different; the basis of his character was intellectual, and his frail bodily constitution only modified and hampered a powerful intellectual organisation. But the younger Henry felt, thought, and acted, as a strong and healthy, a consciously strong and healthy, and, therefore, a self-confident and selfreliant, man would naturally do. He had the magnanimity as

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Henry VIII. on his way to meet Francis I. (1520.)

well as the pride, the self-respect as well as the vanity and ostentation, of a magnificent bodily organisation. His acts and thoughts, both good and evil, seemed to possess a certain robustness, and his intellectual and moral perceptions to have something physical and bodily in their composition. The weaker and thinner fibres of human nature seemed to be strengthened and widened in him by this physical inter

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