a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a windfall.  Among them, as the devil would order, was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which they had all of them heard of, but which most of them had never seen.  I think it could not have been published long.  Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of any thing national in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the “Tempest” from Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said “the Bermudas ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day.”  So Nolan was permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on deck smoking and reading aloud.  People do not do such things so often now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so.  Well, so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the others; and he read very well, as I know.  Nobody in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and border chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago.  Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began without a thought of what was coming: 

  “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
  Who never to himself hath said”—­

It seemed impossible to us that any body ever heard this for the first time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still unconsciously or mechanically: 

  “This is my own, my native land!”

Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on: 

    “Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
  As home his footsteps he hath turned
    From wandering on a foreign strand?—­
  If such there breathe, go, mark him well.”

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on: 

  “For him no minstrel raptures swell;
  High though his titles, proud his name,
  Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
  Despite these titles, power, and pelf,
  The wretch, concentered all in self;”—­

and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room.  “And by Jove,” said Phillips, “we did not see him for two months again.  And I had to make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his Walter Scott to him.”

[1]See page 195.

  FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

  [From Marco Bozzaris.]