The embassy returned to Thebes armed with | Polynices, the younger son, from Thebes; a knowledge of the fatal secrets connected his return with a confederate band of princes with Edipus, but under some restraints of for the recovery of his rights; the death of prudence in making a publication of what so the two brothers in single combat; the pubdreadfully affected the most powerful per- lic prohibition of funeral rites to Polynices, sonage in the state. Perhaps in the whole as one who had levied war against his native history of human art as applied to the evo- land; and the final reappearance of Antigone, lution of a poetic fable, there is nothing more who defies the law, and secures a grave to exquisite than the management of this crisis her brother at the certain price of a grave to by Sophocles. A natural discovery, first of herself these are the sequels and arrears of all, connects Edipus with the death of Laius. the family overthrow, accomplished through That discovery comes upon him with some the dark destiny of Edipus. surprise, but with no shock of fear or remorse. That he had killed a man of rank in a sudden quarrel, he had always known; that this man was now discovered to be Laius, added nothing to the reasons for regret. The affair remained as it was. It was simply a case of personal strife on the high road, and one which had really grown out of aristocratic violence in the adverse party Edipus had asserted his own rights and dignity only as all brave men would have done in an age that knew nothing of civic police. It was true that this first discovery-the identification of himself as the slayer of Laius-drew after it two others, viz., that it was the throne of his victim on which he had seated himself, and that it was his widow whom he had married. But these were no offences; and, on the contrary, they were distinctions won at great risk to himself, and by a great service to the country. Suddenly, however, the reappearance and disclosures of the shepherd who had saved his life during infancy, in one moment threw a dazzling but funereal light upon the previous discoveries that else had seemed so trivial. In an instant everything was read in another sense. The death of Laius, the marriage with his widow, the appropriation of his throne-all towered into colossal crimes, illimitable, and opening no avenues to atonement. Edipus, in the agonies of his horror, inflicts blindness upon himself; Jocasta commits suicide; the two sons fall into fiery feuds for the assertion of their separate claims on the throne, but previously unite for the expulsion of Edipus, as one who had become a curse to Thebes. And thus the poor heartshattered king would have been turned out upon the public roads, aged, blind, and a helpless vagrant, but for the sublime piety of his two daughters, but especially of Antigone the elder. They share with their unhappy father the hardships and perils of the road, and do not leave him until the moment of his mysterious summons to some ineffable death in the woods of Colonus. The expulsion of And now, having reviewed the incidents of the story, in what respect is it that we object to the solution of the Sphinx's riddle? We do not object to it as a solution of the riddle, and the only one possible at the moment; but what we contend is, that it is not the solution. All great prophecies, all great mysteries, are likely to involve double, triple, or even quadruple interpretations each rising in dignity, each cryptically involving another. Even amongst natural agencies, precisely as they rise in grandeur, they multiply their final purposes. Rivers and seas, for instance, are useful, not merely as means of separating nations from each other, but also as means of uniting them; not merely as baths, and for all purposes of washing and cleansing, but also as reservoirs of fish, as high-roads for the conveyance of commodities, as permanent sources of agricultural fertility, &c. In like manner, a mystery of any sort, having a public reference, may be presumed to couch within it a secondary and a profounder interpretation. The reader may think that the Sphinx ought to have understood her own riddle best; and that, if she was satisfied with the answer of Edipus, it must be impertinent in us at this time of day to censure it. To censure, indeed, is more than we propose. The solution of Edipus was a true one; and it was all that he could have given at that early period of his life. But perhaps, at the moment of his death amongst the gloomy thickets of Attica, he might have been able to suggest another and a better. If not, then we have the satisfaction of thinking ourselves somewhat less dense than Edipus; for, in our opinion, the full and final answer to the Sphinx's riddle lay in the word CEDIPUS. Edipus himself it was that fulfilled the conditions of the enigma. He it was, in the most pathetic sense, that went upon four feet when an infant; for the general condition of helplessness attached to all mankind in the period of infancy, and which is expressed symbolically by this tion? This wrath, how came it to sink so low as to collapse at the echo of a word from a friendless stranger? Mysterious again is the blind collusion of this unhappy stranger with the dark decrees of fate. The very misfortunes of his infancy had given into his hands one chance more for escape; these misfortunes had transferred him to Corinth, and staying there he was safe. But the headstrong haughtiness of youthful blood causes him to recoil unknowingly upon the one sole spot of all the earth where the co-efficients for ratifying his destruction are image of creeping, applied to Edipus in a far more significant manner, as one abandoned by all his natural protectors, thrown upon the chances of a wilderness, and upon the mercies of a slave. The allusion to this general helplessness had besides a special propriety in the case of Edipus, who drew his very name (viz., Swollen-foot) from the injury done to his infant feet. He again it was that, in a more emphatic sense than usual, asserted that majestic self-sufficientness and independence of all alien aid, which is typified by the act of walking upright at noonday upon his own natural basis. Throw-waiting and lying in ambush. Heaven and ing off all the power and splendor borrowed from his royal protectors at Corinth, trusting exclusively to his native powers as a man, he had fought his way through insult to the presence of the dreadful Sphinx; her he had confounded and vanquished; he had leaped into a throne-the throne of him who had insulted him, without other resources than such as he drew from himself, and he had in the same way obtained a royal bride. With good right, therefore, he was foreshadowed in the riddle as one who walked upright by his own masculine vigor, and relied upon no gifts but those of nature. Lastly, by a sad but a pitying image, Edipus is described as supporting himself at nightfall on three feet; for Edipus it was that by his cruel sons would have been rejected from Thebes with no auxiliary means of motion or support beyond his own languishing powers; blind and broken-mesis-that vast procession of revelation hearted, he must have wandered into snares and ruin; his own feet must have been supplanted immediately but then came to his aid another foot, the holy Antigone. She it was that guided and cheered him, when all the world had forsaken him; she it was that already, in the vision of the cruel Sphinx, had been prefigured dimly as the staff upon which Edipus should lean, as the third foot that should support his steps when the deep shadows of his sunset were gathering and settling about his grave. earth are silent for a generation; one might fancy that they are treacherously silent, in order that Edipus may have time for building up to the clouds the pyramid of his mysterious offences. His four children, incestuously born, sons that are his brothers, daughters that are his sisters, have grown up to be men and women, before the first mutterings are becoming audible of that great tide slowly coming up from the sea, which is to sweep away himself and the foundations of his house. Heaven and earth must now bear joint witness against him. Heaven speaks first: the pestilence that walketh in darkness is made the earliest minister of the discovery-the pestilence it is, scourging the seven-gated Thebes, as very soon the Sphinx will scourge her, that is appointed to usher in, like some great ceremonial herald, that sad drama of Ne - all and retribution which the earth, and the graves of the earth, must finish. Mysterious also is the pomp of ruin with which this revelation of the past descends upon that ancient house of Thebes. Like a shell from modern artillery, it leaves no time for prayer or evasion, but shatters with the same explosion all that stand within its circle of fury. Every member of that devoted household, as if they had been sitting-not around a sacred domestic hearth, but around the crater of some surging volcano In this way we obtain a solution of the alike, father and mother, sons and daughters, Sphinx's riddle more commensurate and are wrapt at once in fiery whirlwinds of symmetrical with the other features of the ruin. And amidst this general agony of story, which are all clothed with the gran- destroying wrath, one central mystery, as a deur of mystery. The Sphinx herself is a darkness within a darkness, withdraws itself mystery. Whence came her monstrous into a secrecy unapproachable by eyesight, nature, that so often renewed its remem- or by filial love, or by guesses of the brainbrance amongst men of distant lands, in and that is the death of Edipus. Did he Egyptian or Ethiopian marble? Whence die? Even that is more than we can say. came her wrath against Thebes ? This How dreadful does the sound fall upon the wrath, how durst it tower so high as to heart of some poor, horror-stricken crimmeasure itself against the enmity of a na-inal, pirate, or murderer, that has offended 66 by a mere human offence, when, at nightfall, tempted by the sweet spectacle of a peaceful hearth, he creeps stealthily into some village inn, and hopes for one night's respite from his terror, but suddenly feels the touch and hears the voice of the stern officer saying, Sir, you are wanted." Yet that summons is but too intelligible; it shocks, but it bewilders not; and the utmost of its malice is bounded by the scaffold. "Deep," says the unhappy man, "is the downward path of anguish which I am called to tread; but it has been trodden by others." For Edipus there was no such comfort. What language of man, or trumpet of angel, could decipher the woe of that unfathomable call, when, from the depth of ancient woods, a voice that drew like gravitation, that sucked in like a vortex, far off yet near, in some distant world, yet close at hand, cried, Hark, Edipus King Edipus! come hither, thou art wanted!" Wanted! for what? Was it for death? Was it for judgment? Was it for some wilderness of pariah eternities? No man ever knew. Chasms opened in the earth; dark, gigantic arms stretched out to receive the king; clouds and vapor settled over the penal abyss; and of him only, though the neighborhood of his disappearance was known, no trace or visible record survived, neither bones, nor grave, nor dust, nor epitaph. Did the Sphinx follow with her cruel eye this fatal tissue of calamity to its shadowy crisis at Colonus? As the billows closed over her head, did she perhaps attempt to sting with her dying words? Did she say, "I, the daughter of mystery, am called; I am wanted? But, amidst the uproar of the sea, and the clangor of sea-birds, high over all I hear another, though a distant summons. I can hear that thou, Edipus, the son of mystery, art called from afar: thou also wilt be wanted." Did the wicked Sphinx labor in vain, amidst her parting convulsions, to breathe this freezing whisper into the heart of him that had overthrown her? Who can say? Both of these enemies were pariah mysteries, and may have faced each other again with blazing malice in some pariah world. But all things in this dreadful story ought to be harmonized. Already in itself it is an ennobling and an idealizing of the riddle, that it is made a double riddle; that it contains an exoteric sense obvious to all the world, but also an esoteric sensenow suggested conjecturally after thousands of years-possibly unknown to the Sphinx, and certainly unknown to Edipus; that this second riddle is hid within the first; that the one riddle is the secret commentary upon the other; and that the earliest is the hieroglyphic of the last. Thus far as regards the riddle itself; and, as regards Edipus in particular, it exalts the mystery around him that in reading this riddle, and in tracing the vicissitudes from infancy to old age, attached to the general destiny of his race, unconsciously he was tracing the dreadful vicissitudes attached specially and separately to his own. THE HUNGARIAN CROWN. THE Hangarian crown, it is generally believed, Kossuth has taken with him in his flight; if so, it has for a second time crossed the frontiers of Turkey. The past history of this crown is a curious one, and as full of vicissitudes as the lives of some of those who have worn it. The Magyars attach a superstitious value to the relic of their ancient monarchy; there is a legend that it was wrought by the hands of angels for St. Stephan, who was crowned in it in 1001; history, with a more limited faith, records that it was sent as a present to Stephan by Pope Sylvester the Second. In 1072 Duke Geisa received from the Greek Emperor a golden circlet or royal band for his brow; when he was afterward made King of Hungary he joined this circlet to the diadem, so that the crown is really composed of two kingly emblems united. When the race of the Arpads became extinct, in 1301, there was a double election to the vacant throne; one party chose Robert of Anjou and Naples, the other Wenzel, the younger, of Bohemia. The cause of the latter did not prosper, and his affairs were taking an unfortunate turn, when his father, Wenzel, King of Bohemia, marched an army to Ofen, and carried off his son and the crown with him to Prague. The Hungarians then definitively elected Otto, of Bavaria, and old Wenzel, for reasons not stated, gave up the crown to him. Otto to take possession of his kingdom had to ride incognito through Austria, carrying the crown as a "property" with him. It was packed in a little cask, and hung at the saddle-bow of a German Graf, who discovered, one morning at daybreak, that he had lost his precious charge during the night. The party had then arrived at Fischerment, below Vienna, where they were about to cross the Donau; they retraced their steps, and, by great good luck, found cask and crown again. In 1307 Otto went to Siebenburgen, on a visit to the Waywode Ladislas, intending to win him over to his party; he must have failed signally in his attempt, for the old Waywode seized the Crown, and made the King a prisoner. After some time, he saw fit to let Otto go, but kept firm possession of the diadem for three years. In 1310, on threats of war and extermination, he gave it up. For more than a century after this its history is a blank; but in 1439, on the death of the Emperor Albrecht IV., there was again a double election, the two rivals being Wladislaw, of Poland, and Ladislas, the infant son of Albrecht. The Empress resolved to have the child crowned, and for that purpose the diadem was stolen from the Castle of Wissegrad by one of her maids of honor, who undertook the task, and succeeded. In 1441, the Empress made a less dignified use of it,she pledged it to the Emperor Frederick IV. for 2000 gulden. It was redeemed by Mathias Corvinus, and taken back to Wissegrad; from hence, after the battle of Mohac, it was again stolen, and again by a woman, in order to crown John Zapolya. Zapolya gave it in charge to Preny, who delivered it up to Ferdinand I.; he was crowned with it in 1527, and then it fell into the hands of the Turks. As Solyman returned from the siege of Vienna, he publicly exhibited the crown to his army in Ofen, but told his soldiers that it was that of the renowned Persian ruler Nushiryan: he then sent it back to his protégé Zapolya, on whose death it was again given up by his widow to the Emperor Ferdinand. Rudolph II. sent the crown to Prague; Mathias II. brought it back to Presburg, where, in 1619, it was seized by Bethlem Gabor; on the conclusion of the peace of Nikolsburger, he gave it up to Ferdinand II. The Emperor Joseph had it brought to Vienna; Leopold sent it again to Hungary, where it remained till the taking of Pesth by Windischgrätz, when it was removed by Kossuth, and has ever since been kept at the seat of the Hungarian Government; that being broken up and dispersed, the crown has resumed its wanderings. As to what has become of it, there are many rumors; it is said to be buried in a secret place. According to others, Kossuth has it in his personal possession, and by this time the diadem, that was the gift of a Pope to a saint, has been stripped of its jewels to go as bribes to the Mohammedan, and the gold has terminated an almost sacred existence of eight centuries as ignominiously as a mere piece of stolen plate in the melting pot of a Jew!-Times' Correspondent. From Fraser's Magazine. THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.-NO. II. M. THIERS' ACCOUNT. WHEN Napier has to relate the deeds of French generals and French armies, with whom it had been his lot to be engaged, there is no niggard praise bestowed upon them. Willingly, nay eagerly, he gives them their full meed of approbation; brings out in bold relief all that deserves admiration, whether it be mere soldierly daring or the high excellence of consummate generalship. This praise is bestowed not merely on Napoleon, whose genius may be supposed to have dazzled the judgment, and to have won upon the chivalrous spirit, of the gallant historian, but to all who deserve it. He deals as frankly and liberally with the lieutenants, as with their great chief himself. And this surely is the spirit in which such a history ought to be written. Let us not add to the inevitable miseries of warfare the bitterness of a deadly vendetta, or the mean, shuffling envy and hate of low and pettifogging partisan politicians; but let the same chivalry be found in the historian who records noble deeds as in warriors who perform them. The last months of Nelson's career exhibited such a combination of patriotic devotion, of utter forgetfulness of himself in the pursuit of what he deemed his country's good; such energy, sagacity, and daring, as ought to extort praise and not merely praise, but respect and admiration, from any enemy, but above all from a gallant and noble enemy. And a high-minded, generous historian, no matter of what country, would be scrupulously careful and eager to set forth the great deeds of such a man, because they do honor, not to one country, but to all; not to one profession or order of men, but to mankind. What, then, shall we think of an historian, speaking of him merely as an artist, who in the description of Trafalgar omits all mention of that one event of the many that occurred on that terrible day, which peculiarly gives it a great moral interest for ages yet to come -we mean, of the celebrated signal with which Nelson led his countrymen to battle, and which gave to every man's actions that day the impulse which an exalted patriotism could alone impart? Why does M. Thiers record the stirring proclamations of Napoleon to his soldiers? He does so, because he wishes to describe the spirit which actuated the thousands whom that mighty chief led to war. He desires to record the skill with which Napoleon brought moral influences to work for him, and made himself the idol of the people and of the army. Among the means he employed, were the remarkable proclamations which he from time to time addressed to his soldiers, and through them to France. In these his genius often shone out with extraordinary brightness and vigor; and M. Thiers does Napoleon but bare justice when he carefully records some of the more remarkable of these very striking productions. The celebrated signal made by Nelson as he bore down upon his enemy was a happy stroke of genius also, and of the same character as that shown by Napoleon in the more stirring of his proclamations. But it was in one thing superior to them-it was wholly unpremeditated, but was suggested by a thorough knowledge of the character of the people whom he addressed. It was simple, brief, and touched a chord, at that moment tuned to fine issues. It roused his fleet; it stirred up the nation; and will be handed down from generation to generation of Englishmen-keeping them under its spell a great, because a united people. Was this an incident to be passed over in contemptuous silence by one who calls himself a statesman, and aspires to the character of a philosophic historian? Passed over because an English sailor was to derive honor from it! and because depreciating English sailors is just now an easy means to win popular favor for political adventurers in France! Nelson possessed more than any other English commander the happy art of in |