faces, dashed with an air of rustic aristocracy, chatted with each other, apparently much after their usual fashion; though they were not altogether without uneasiness, both on account of the state of things out of doors, and of the character of the crowd which filled the court, and assumed every moment a more and more threatening aspect. The few officials present, though they displayed much of their habitual reliance on the law, could not but be aware that the whole country was in a ferment, and that, in the natural course of things, all the mal-contents hated them. Every now and then fresh numbers were added to the colliers who stood or sat listening to the accusation of their comrade. At first they expressed their disapprobation by low murmurs, which the magistrates thought it best not to notice; but at length, as one witness proceeded with his deposition, several voices exclaimed at once

"Thee art a liar, and hadst better mind thyself."

At this the presiding magistrate stopped the proceedings, and said that if any such indecent interruptions were again attempted he should be obliged to clear the court. At first that intuitive respect for authority, which is stronger, perhaps, in this country than anywhere else in the world, and may be said to supply the best possible proof of the sterling worth of our institutions on the whole, restrained the insolence of the audience; they relapsed into silence, and the examination of the culprit proceeded. Indignation, however, in the breast of the populace, like a storm, acquires strength by its own continuance. The interruptions became louder and more frequent, and the threats of the men in authority more emphatic. But the colliers, seeing that they had nothing to dread but threats, there being as yet no military in the place, by degrees assumed a different tone, and vociferated, all at once, to the magistrates, that if they did not act with more respect for justice and more consideration for the humble and oppressed, they would drag them from their seats and pitch them to a fiery locality familiar to those who go down into the pit.

It is a rare thing indeed in this country to behold the poor brought into direct collision with the rich; though everything, perhaps, indicates the tendencies of society to move in that direction. The frame and out-works of our oligarchy are so ancient, and rendered so venerable by habit, that it is a sort of secret article of faith, even with the most incensed and disaffected among the poor, that there exists some element of greatness in the aristocracy and gentry of the country, against which it is a sort of sin to lift a hand. This sentiment has been weakened much of late, but it is not yet eradicated; and at the time of which I speak it was exceedingly prevalent and powerful. But when the passions of large class have been roused, they speedily silence their habitual scruples. During their whole lives, perhaps, the colliers now assembled in the court-house had scarcely dared tɔ look a magistrate in the face; they now, however, confident in their numbers, not only ventured to bandy words with them, but actually leaped over the seats, filled the space appropriated to witnesses and culprits, and, climbing into the sanctum sanctorum of justice before the men of authority could effect their escape, took up their station between them and the doors, and shouted, with the most horrible oaths and imprecations, that if they did not proceed in a proper way with the examination of the man before them, not one of them should escape alive out of that place. Magistrates and country gentlemen are often deficient in enlarged views of politics and human nature, but seldom in courage; and on the present occasion they displayed no lack of it; they stayed the proceedings at once, and one of them standing before the rest, set the whole rabble at defiance, saying they might take his life, but should never terrify him into doing anything inconsistent with his honour. He was a fine hale country squire, about three-score years of age, with a comely countenance shaded by white hair, and a muscular figure which promised to hold out a tough contest with time. He had scarcely uttered the last word, however, before a man with a mask on his face shot up from amid the crowd, stood in front of the magistrates' seat, and drawing from his sleeve a small glittering dagger, plunged it into the speaker's heart. His spouting blood fell upon the assassin, who sunk again

amid the crowd and disappeared. Two or three of the gentlemen, regardless of their own safety, leaped from the bench, in the hope of securing the murderer, but though no obstruction was offered to their progress, their efforts were unavailing. Returning to their friend, they found him in his last agonies, unable to speak, although conscious of his impending fate. In a few minutes he was a corpse, and the court-house nearly empty; the rabble had taken to flight, together with nearly all the limbs of the law and their satellites.

I have related this circumstance exactly as it occurred, without any of that pomp and solemnity which are usually made in narratives of this kind to attend upon the violent extinction of life. But except the single act of blood, there was nothing tragic in the whole affair. It was a vulgar, coarse, unromantic crime, inspired by no great revenge, and perpetrated for no great end. The colliers, goaded almost to madness by their hardships and privations, and through their ignorance left entirely at the mercy of their worst passions, had determined amongst themselves to form a society of assassins, for the purpose of taking off all those, high or low, who might appear to stand in the way of what they regarded as the bettering of their condition. Nothing is easier than to sophisticate ignorant persons; having passed their whole lives in an atmosphere of prejudice, and been possessed by false notions of everything, it requires no great skill to give these false notions a systematic form, and impregnate them with the leaven of iniquity, because they who are slaves to the floating and fantastical opinions in vogue, no matter what station in society they occupy, have in reality no firm basis on which to place their virtue, if they possess any. Inherited dogmas and ideas do little towards strengthening the character, or purifying and elevating the heart. The man who is worth anything makes his own morality, which he builds not out of traditional maxims, but of fixed and everlasting principles, as extensive in their operation as the utmost range of the system of which he himself forms a part. But no amount of education that can be imparted to the humbler classes will ever, it is to be feared, enable them to do this. They must take their morality more or less on trust. Among the latter, however, at the time of which I am speaking, there was scarcely any morality at all-save of that rude and coarse kind which depends as much on fear of the laws as on the habits and practices of society. If they did certain things they knew or believed they should be hanged, and therefore in general they did not do them. If they did certain other things experience had taught them they should outrage that gross modification of public opinion which existed in their class, therefore they abstained from them. Further than this, they had no glimmering of ethics.

Few, perhaps, have remarked how difficult it is to produce any permanent conviction in the minds of the ignorant and vulgar, who contemplate everything external to themselves from a point of view so low, and through an atmosphere so dense and obscure, that they scarcely see anything in its true light. They who stand loftiest among us, and look at the intellectual and moral world through the most transparent medium, often arrive, nevertheless, at erroneous conclusions, because of the complexity of the subject, the multiplicity of relations, and the disturbing influences of passion and sentiment which occasionally warp the tendencies even of the brightest and noblest minds. In what worse than Egyptian darkness, therefore, must the poor and uneducated live. Necessity reconciles them to many acts in their nature objectionable or equivocal. Without being, perhaps, conscious of it, they are often guilty of meanness, of fraud, of dishonesty, and many other vices. Instinct teaches them to bestow soft and extenuating names on their delinquencies; while, on the other hand, being possessed by some share of the national unenlightened conscience, they attach notions of guilt and impropriety to actions altogether innocent in themselves. To communicate with them for the purpose of correcting their habits or notions becomes consequently an affair of extreme nicety, because you have not only to teach them, but to convince them also that they require teaching, and that in what you propose you have really their good at heart. It is among the chief

misfortunes of persons who have been much ill treated either by individuals or the world that they cannot easily be made to believe that any one feels for them or wishes them well, or would be at the pains to do anything for their sake. They attribute every appearance of friendship to a sinister motive, and imagine you affect to sympathise with them to answer some end of your own-in which they firmly believe, though they cannot discover it.

For these and many other reasons, the colliers have always remained immersed in moral darkness, which renders them easy to be misguided, but exceedingly impracticable when the object is to set them right. Nevertheless, when the magistrate had been assassinated, and they began to observe the effect which the crime produced, they felt greatly startled, especially as their ringleader hinted on the necessity of assassinating one or two of the witnesses who had been brought forward to substantiate the guilt of one of their number, accused of arson. The men that same evening were found dead in a lane, where they lay weltering in their blood; and no clue could at first be discovered, leading to the detection of the murderers.

Meanwhile the greater part of Northumberland, Durham, and several of the neighbouring counties was shaken by the effects of the strike. The colliers diligently collected arms, and meeting in immense numbers, drilled themselves at night upon the moors. The fear of the law appeared to have lost its efficacy. Even the presence of the military, who poured daily into the North, as into an enemy's country, with baggage, ammunition, and artillery, failed to produce the usual results. The movement went on increasing, and was strengthened by the persuasion, which nothing but stupendous ignorance could have generated, that it would be practicable for the working classes to seize upon the property of the wealthy and appropriate it to themselves. To give a colour to the proceeding, the leaders of the insurrection-for in reality it amounted to that--had continually in their mouths declamations on the subject of liberty; so that narrowminded politicians among the oligarchy, or such as were interested in propogating a false belief, dexterously confounded the projects of these benighted and insane levellers with the tendencies of liberal opinions in general, and pretended that their partial outbreak was a natural and necessary consequence of the opinions propagated by liberal writers through the press.

But although this view of the matter was false, there still existed unquestionable causes of alarm. The insurgents had been taught, through no one knew what agency, to believe in the lawfulness of assassination. Secret societies meeting sometimes in remote and desolate places, as in the beer-shop and ruined windmill above described; sometimes in the ale-houses and crowded streets of the towns, drew up the muster-rolls of death, distributed daggers, and coolly inculcated the principle that to assassinate a rich man was to remove a public enemy consequently, a virtuous rather than a vicious action. Still, to the credit of the educated classes be it spoken, there took place no instance of pusillanimous flight. The gentry firmly stood their ground-confronted the dangerreasoned, when opportunity offered, with their misguided neighbours; and sought to impress them with the belief that their past neglect and oppression ought rather to be attributed to the operation of general laws, acting alike on all classes, for the preservation of barbarism, than to any tyrannical propensities in the possessors of property. Even the murder of the magistrate, though reports of it spread like wild-fire, mixed up with innumerable exaggerations, produced no difference in their conduct. They seemed ready to brave the assassin's dagger, or any other form of peril to which the circumstances of the times might give birth, rather than ignobly abandon their posts, as persons have at various times done in other parts of the empire, where the consciousness of some deserving may possibly inspire more craven thoughts. An excited populace is terrible, but may often be successfully encountered by a frank and manly courage, upheld by the consciousness of rectitude-as was proved again and again by incidents which would all deserve to be narrated, were it my object to give here a complete history of the strike.

MY MOTHER'S GRAVE.

BY AUGUSTA M. HUTTMANN.

I'VE brought fresh flowers to deck thy lonely grave,
And shed their sweetness to the murmuring wind,
That sighs above thee, Mother! They'll flourish here,
In the green sod, upon thy gentle breast,

As thou didst in the summer of thy days.

But oh! when winter's chilling winds sweep by
They cannot brave the fury of the storm;
But passing in their loveliness away
They'll perish, e'en as thou.

*

I love to kneel beside thee when the night

Doth spread its star-gemmed mantle o'er the earth-
When the last hum of busy life is hushed,
And all is still,-save the soft lullaby
Of the night-wind, so musical and low;
For mingled with its quaint wild music come
The voices of the dead that sleep around:
Mournfully sweet their long-lost murmurs fall
Upon my heart. But when my dreamy eyes
Are lifted upward, with the vain, wild hope
That those I loved on earth are hovering near,
All that their anxious gaze can rest upon
Are the stars, beaming in the far-off sky-
As if they mirrored those sweet eyes that made
The sunlight of our home-and the dark trees
That shadow thy still grave.

Mother, forgive me! Sorrow should not come

Where thou dost dwell. Yet I have brought it there,
For thou wilt pity me; so sad and lone-
So young in years-so very old in grief.

I ask no sympathy from human kind:

They know me not; but, Mother, wert thou here
The passionate love that burns within my breast
Would all gush forth on thee-within thy heart
I'd find a resting place; and with thy love
The deep pure joys of heaven would be mine.
But this is idle, Mother! We shall meet

In the fair world where tears may never come;
I soon shall look upon thy angel face,

And hear the voice that was my music speak.
My days are numbered. When the snow-drops peep
From their white cov'ring, and the fresh green leaves
Put forth their beauty to the spring's warm breath,
I shall sleep with thee. It is young to die;
But not a sigh for earth, a wish for life,
Rises within me. Nothing that the world,
Rich though it be in beauty, can afford,
Can waken one regretful tear to dim
The rapture of that hour. There are none
Of those sweet ties it rends the heart to break
To bind me to the earth. One only prayer
Shall hover on my lips when death is there :
It is, that some kind hand will give to me
A grave beside thee, Mother.

A PAPER ON PANTOMIMES.

BY MORRIS BARNETT.

PANTOMIMES are as natural to the Christmas holidays as plum pudding and mistletoe. We could almost as soon spare the former as the latter. The dark magician and the beneficent fairy are as necessary to perfect this peculiar season as snapdragon and the yule log. We confess our love for pantomimes and plum puddings. We have no especial affection for minced pies, they having somewhat of a foreign air about them, and lacking the good old English substantiality. Yet these be good things too, in their way, and may not be despised. We do not know whether we do not prefer the spicy elder wine and exciting rumpunch to the tawny wine of Oporto, and the golden grape of the far-famed Xeres. And so do we also prefer the rollicking Clown with his chalked visage, and the spangle-clad Colombine, to the long-sleeved Pierrot and pert femme-dechambre, the "Columbine" of the Italian comedy. Pantomimes reach very far back-almost as far as the years beyond the flood. The old Greeks were great adepts in the science of human telegraphy; and as we are too late this month to reflect the high-ways and bye-ways of the instant new year's annuals in our “Theatrical Mirror," we shall take a backward glance, and gossip a little of the antiquity, the medieval state, and modern improvements in this special amusement of the present season.

The genuine comic pantomime is a thing purely English-the tricks are of English invention and indeed the entire arrangement is of unmistakable English growth. Nothing exactly like it is to be seen-or has been seen—in Europe, Africa, or Asia. No; we are proud to say that the Christmas comic pantomime is our own, and is as natural to Englishmen as grumbling, foggy weather, trial by jury, and the liberty of the press.

The MIMES, or Latin MIMI, was a name common to a certain species of dramatic poetry, to the authors who composed them, and the actors who played them. The word comes from the Greek μpéopai, to imitate. We do not mean that the mimes were the only pieces which represented the actions of man, but that they imitated them in a more detailed and more expressive manner. Plutarch distinguishes two sorts of mimitic pieces: the one decent, of which the subject was as unobjectionable as was the style in which they were acted; and these approximated somewhat to our notion of comedy. The other was obscene and indecent-buffoonery and the grossest obscenity were their especial characteristics. Sophron, of Syracuse, who lived in the time of Xerxes, was the inventor of polite mimicry, to which he afterwards added moral lessons. Plato took great pleasure in reading the mimes of this author. But scarcely was the Greek stage formed ere it was deemed no longer imperative to amuse the people with farces, and with actors whose performances represented the vices in their most disgusting phases.

The mimes were also numerous amongst the Romans, and formed the fourth division amongst their comedies: the actors were distinguished by their imitation of the licentious manners of the times, as may be seen by the verse of Ovid :—

"Scribere si fas est imitationes turpie Mimos."

They performed without shoes or stockings. This gave rise to their being sometimes denominated as the unshod, instead as was usual amongst the other three divisions, wearing the embroidered sandal, as the tragedians did the cothurnus. The mimes had their heads shaved, as the modern Clown-their dresses were of different colours, as our Harlequins-this was called panniculus cimtumculus. They also appeared at times in magnificent habits, and robes of purple. But this was with the single object of raising the mirth of the commonalty, by the contrast of the senator's robe with the shaven crown and the

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