promise of Matilda's hand after his first campaign; he fought his way to rapid promotion-married his lovely bride---lived with her through six years of a soldier's stormy life, and closed one of the most envied of existences on the bloody ridges of St. Jean, leading on his regiment to the avenging charge which redeemed the slaughters of Ligny. His wife mourned him with all the ardent tenderness of a woman, but resisted the overwhelming pressure of her griefs with the better firmness of a Christian; and as a mother, in the education of two noble boys, proved herself worthy to have loved and mourned a warrior like Rosowsky.

AILEEN ASTORE.

TO THE EDITOR.

"Dear Sir, Trinity College, Dublin, Jan. 9, 1827. "What will become of poor Ireland?" asks a writer in this month's Blackwood, in a tone in which the malice of the monk, and the vehement acrimony of the renegade, struggle with alternate success for the mastery. A senator, Sir Joseph Yorke, has furnished a ready answer to the question---" put her under "water for twenty-four hours." This certainly would be a Lethean remedy for her misfortunes. Would that its sapient promulgator would apply it. What a saving of ink! What a saving of paper! What repose to our eyes and ears! Why have not the Westminster Reviewers advocated it? or the Edinburgh, or the Quarterly? Surely it possesses at least the merit of being, to use their own " philo"sophical" language, "a physical check upon superabundant "population." Perhaps they think it not very practicable. Can the march of a few miles of water be a matter of difficulty to the leaders and great mechanists of the "March of mind?" or perhaps they think that, as in other inundations, the worthless straws only would float and be saved, while the solid and the valuable would sink irrecoverably to the bottom. A great moral deluge, an Alpheic torrent over the "sister isle," is indeed devoutly to be wished for; such an one as by sweeping away the Augean filth of centuries of misrule, of legalized plunder, of all-pervading corruption, of the effect of deep-rooted superstition and persecuting fanaticism, and of the remorseless and unpunishable oppression of the powerful, might silence the offensive blurtings of mushroom Catholic demagogues, and the demoniac yellings of Orange harpies over their cannibal prey, for ever.

Attached as I am from feeling and conviction to our own excellent Protestant form of religion, I need not, while stigmatizing an article that disgraces its truly "talented" (an ungrammatical phrase of Ebony's own) vehicle, deprecate the idea of my opinions of Ireland's diseases, their cause and remedy being identical with those of either of the parties that distract this unhappy country. By no means, my sole end would be to awaken the attention of the people of England to the real condition of Ireland, and to caution them against adopting the interested assertions of either party without inquiring into their validity. I am sure, did they once possess a per

fect knowledge of the real state of the case, the proper and most healing remedy would be speedily forthcoming. Policy and justice demonstrate the necessity of that remedy emanating from England, if it meant to make Ireland virtually an integral portion of the empire. Every true patriot here wishes it to thus emanate, and hails with delight the unequivocal symptoms of the attention of the English people being earnestly directed towards the condition of their Irish brethren, feeling sanguine as to its beneficial consequences.

I have been led away, like most of my countrymen, into the hot-bed of politics, from my immediate object, the communicating a simple and true story, interesting, as I take it, in itself, and in some degree illustrative of the Irish character, at least of one feature of it---its devotion to the fair sex. I leave it to wiser heads to explore the philosophy of the connection of the Roman Catholic religion with chivalry and deification of female excellence, and content myself with remarking, that the two most essentially chivalrous people in Europe are Roman Catholics---the Spaniards, and their reputed descendants, the Irish. Both are admittedly courageous to rashness, adventurous, patient of fatigue and hunger, punctilious of honor, apt to take offence, and quick to avenge it: but in no respect do they more resemble each other, or surpass either nations, than in their idolatry of the female sex, that first and finest qualification of a true knight-errant. We degenerate moderns may ridicule the excess of this latter feeling, yet we cannot but view it a romance of the heart, in which the wisest perhaps might love to wander. When we see with what deep awe and rapturous affection the Irish peasant almost kneels before the living shrine of beauty, as if a superior being were smiling upon his loneliness, with what silent veneration he listens to her behests, and with what recklessness of danger, privation, life itself, he endeavours to perform them, it is enough to make us ashamed of that cold, unchivalrous, gross sense of the beautiful, which teaches us civilized people to see nothing in the perfection of a lovely woman, but incentives to voluptuous passion; which far, far wide of the enthusiastic feeling that reigns in the contemned peasant's bosom, inclines us to debase her to a mere animal, rather than exalt her into a still diviner creature.

Aileen Astore, i. e. 66 darling Ellen," was the last descendant of a long line of Milesian princes, and the niece of the last occupant of an old castle, whose ruins are still in existence near my native village. Oftentimes when a boy, have I stood gazing at the "Crow's "Castle," with that undefined sense of terror and wonder, and melancholy, so inimitably described by the author of the Sketch Book. These emotions were much more painful whenever I ventured into a little glen that lies near the castle, called, in the vernacular tongue, Glen-a-oude, i. e. the " Glen of the Grave," from its having been the burial place of Aileen. It is a beautiful valley, and has been considered as holy ground since the remains of the lovely maiden have been deposited in it. The peasantry never enter it, but upon the anniversary of her death, when a procession of their most beautiful virgins visit the grave, and deck it with all the shortest-lived flowers they can get, hanging white garlands upon the willow, and placing a

bunch of vale lily upon the head-stone, emblems of the purity and shortness of her life. The stoutest boy of the village would not visit Glen-a-oude alone; and whenever my school-fellows and I ventured into its still solitude, not a sound-not even a whisper, escaped from our lips, and we moved slowly along with the gravity of mutes at a funeral pageant. Her spirit, we firmly believed, to haunt the place she loved to wander in when living, and we held it a kind of sacrilege to intrude on its privacy, except for the purpose of beseeching its protection, or paying it honor. She is still supposed by the peasantry of the district to watch over their interests with her former solicitude; and her memory is as dear to them, as if her influence had made them as really prosperous, as they are truly miserable. One of their common sayings will best illustrate their belief of her presence and power amongst them. Whenever they wish a person the height of good luck, they exclaim-" the shadow "of Aileen Astore be night and day upon you;" and though no happy result follows the wish, it is ascribed to the unworthiness of either the wisher or the object, and never to the impotency of the invoked spirit. My grandmother was a contemporary and near relative of Aileen; and I have heard my nurse ascribe the beauty, kindness of disposition, and sweetness of manners, for which my venerable relative was proverbially remarkable, to the circumstance of her having had "Aileen Astore's kiss on her forehead," and never to any moral or personal endowments.

Aileen was but seventeen, when, without a friend in the wide world to whose protection she could repair, she was left the sole mistress of her solitary castle and its surrounding barren acres. Defenceless as was her condition, the blessed virgin herself was not more secure from rapine and outrage, for she was born of an ancient race, and was beautiful and good. Her security lay in the respect and love of the peasantry around her: she was their petty queen, their saint, their guardian angel, ther paragon of excellence, the very idol of their soul and affections, their morning prayer, and their nightly blessing. They adored, they worshipped her; they swore in her name. They would have surrendered every thing they had or hoped for in this world, to purchase her a moment's comfort. In her case, Burke's celebrated metaphor would have been tame prose; for her poor tenantry and neighbours would have her happy, proudlygloriously happy, to die at her feet in defending her. And yet she was far from able to make any of them richer or happier, and could neither assist them in poverty, or protect them in danger; and there is not a single act of her's, traditional or otherwise, that I could ever get the remotest glimpse of, by which she can be said to have rendered their condition a whit more favorable than if they never had enjoyed her patronage. Whence then this extraordinary devotion in her favor! The source of all this enthusiasm, the origin of her surname, and the secret of her deification, would seem at this distance of time, to consist in nothing more than two very simple qualities, which she had the good fortune to possess-beauty and goodness—

VOL. II.

2 T

to which may be added, her ancestral claims upon their respect and affection. To all my enquiries after what she was, what she did, or how she merited such love and veneration, the only answer was, that she was very good, and very young, and very lovely, and very beautiful. However little satisfactory this may appear to you an Englishman, it is considered as fully sufficient by her warm hearted and fanciful Milesian countrymen.

The remainder of this young creature's life, which was that of a voluntary recluse, I shall give in the words of a poetical friend, who, about two years ago, visited the scene in my company, and who has since favored the world with an account of,* as it somewhat appeared to him, this strange other Wild Irish Girl.- -" Whether from a natural melancholy of disposition, the delicacy of her health, or the retired mode of existence to which she had been so long accustomed, Aileen was seldom to be found beyond the precincts of her own immediate demesne. She had either forgotten the world, or feared to enter it alone and unprotected. The narrator of her history boldly asserted, however, that it was her disdain of society, the very best of which in the island was beneath her dignity as a princess (for such he considered her) to consort with, that kept her in retirement. He had often seen her in his youth, and if his eulogies on her person and manners did not hundred-fold her deserts, queens were certainly alone fit to be her companions. Her complexion was more delicate than the bloom of the apple blossom, her skin was whiter than the feathers under the wing of a dove, her hair was long and dark like the train of a storm, and her eyes were as mildly bright as the lover's star; such were a few of the images by which he endeavoured to convey some faint idea of Aileen Astore's beauty. Then her voice was as sweet as the music of a running stream, and when she touched her harp, the notes were as fine as arose from the mermaid's lyre when she goes smoothly sounding along the waves of a summer sea; not a bird would attempt to sing when she was speaking, but the wild throstle has been heard in his leafy bower imitating her voice after she had stopped, and vainly striving to equal its melody. Our narrator's encomiums on her kindness of manner, and benevolence of disposition, though uttered with no less enthusiasm, seemed to partake somewhat more of truth, and to flow less from his imagination than his heart. So that, upon the whole, it was not difficult to collect from his description, after all due allowance had been made, that Aileen was probably a very beautiful girl, and certainly a very amiable one.

After her uncle's death, she became more reserved than before. The walks were now confined to the green and little glen (before mentioned), in which she spent most of her time. The glen became a sacred retreat, into which no other person dared to intrude, and over which no one dared to look. From this circumstance it was * Aileen Astore is the subject and title of one of the tales of the "Labors of Idleness; or, Seven Nights' Entertainments, by Guy Penseval," a work which bears even on its defects the impress of high poetical genius, and which contains more fancy, feeling, nerve, and sense, than is to be met with in any similar publication we have for a long time read.

impossible to know how she amused herself so long there. Some persons thought that she was employed in communing with the spirits who were under her influence; but as this favored too much of the forbidden arts, it was at length concluded that her hours were devoted to prayer and intercessions for the people. Whatever it was that engaged her, it seemed to be an office of much difficulty to so tender a frame; she was observed always to return more wearied in spirit, more pensive and drooping. Her countenance, however, still retained its placid, though uncheerful, smile; her manners were as gentle as ever; and her accents grew even sweeter and sweeter as they became more feeble. She was evidently waning into a spirit; and the light coffin, which was borne to the grave in the glen by four slender girls of her own years, told how little of earth was about her when she died.

It was remarkable that, although no person had entered the glen but herself till her bier was carried thither, the grotto was found ready prepared for her interment, a grave having been scraped out, a small head-stone provided, the willow planted, and the lilies sown. (All these are described in a preceding part of the narrative.) The two domestics, an old man and his wife, had received orders where and how she was to be buried; the ground had been once dedicated to a chapel, where some of the ancient possessors of the castle had been deposited, though their tombs were then scarcely visible, and the place for some centuries back had been disused for that purpose. But Aileen, with a passion for solitude, which pursued her even to death, had fixed upon that spot to shelter her remains for the very reasons that her predecessors had deserted it, because it was remote, secluded, and undisturbed. There is something, beyond doubt, against which the sensitive mind revolts, and which must have been especially disagreeable to a girl of Aileen's refinement of feeling, in the common practice of crowding a small space of ground with tombs and tomb-stones, where, instead of a peaceful retreat after the voyage of life, your dust is exposed to the profane hoof of every unmannerly clown who chooses to trample upon it; and your birth, death, and character, to the gaze of a whole village every holiday. There seems to have been a peculiar delicacy in Aileen's choice of a burial-place so lonely and sequestered; perhaps she dreaded that, at some future time, if interred in an orthodox parish church-yard, when the area was full, and a space wanted for some unwieldy corpse, her little coffin would be violated, and her slender bones rudely scattered about, for any vile hand to touch, or any inquisitive eye to examine. Considering it philosophically, the dread is ridiculous; a modern Cicero would adduce ten thousand arguments to prove it so. considering it as Aileen, who was no philosopher, but a timid girl, most probably did, it is expressive of an innate modesty, which no lover of the sex would wish to see replaced by a more Stoical contempt for posthumous exposure."

But

Aileen's request was complied with to the letter. Four young girls bore her to the grave, all clad in virgin white, and strewing Howers before them. The whole peasantry of the neighbourhood, those who had owned her a mistress or acknowledged her as a friend, followed, in tears and silence, her remains to the grave. They laid