Grizel Cochrane.

"The Rose is fairest when 'tis budding new,

And Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears; The Rose is sweetest wash'd with morning dew, And Love is loveliest when embalm'd in tears."

SCOTT.

Grizel Cochrane.

IF Heroism be admirable when, brandishing a falchion like Joan d'Arc, it rushes on at the head of armies, to deeds which shall immortalize its name, how much more highly should we estimate it when, without any of the excitement derivable from numbers, with no incentive furnished by the hope of creating for itself a reputation and a glory, it engages single-handed in the cause of love, and that love the purest and the most unselfish peculiar to our being, the love of the child to the parent!

Filial affection ought to be spontaneous, instinctive, though it is not less enjoined by the law of God, than by that of nature and of man. Some cases, it is true, exist, where the impulse can scarcely flourish in all its fulness and intensity, on account of unworthiness in its object. This is a sad sight; but sadder still is the truth, that characters there are in which this species

of affection appears to have been an ingredient altogether omitted, and whence no amount of care, or devotion, is capable of eliciting its development. Indeed, while the absence of the principle is productive of one of the most repellent phases of moral perversion, its exemplification is so evidently marked as a direct emanation from the Divine hand, that no picture can be more inexpressibly beautiful than one (which, after all, represents the performance of a simple duty), the elastic form of youth, sacrificing its own pleasures, denying its own impulses, and bending to sustain the steps of that age whose prime has been devoted, for the sake of the once tender offspring, to a far more anxious task.

The action which raised the fair young Scottish maiden, who is the object of the present sketch, from obscurity, to place her a bright beacon in the starry sky of female devotedness, was dictated by the same beautiful and tender emotion of filial regard, which illustrated sweet Margaret Roper, in her successful enterprise at London Bridge. Miss Cochrane was a young and delicate woman, nurtured in luxury and ease; her manners appear to have been unobtrusive, her diffidence considerable; indeed, the character of the Scottish damsel was peculiarly retiring and quiet; yet she hesitated not to assume the garments of the other sex, to sustain the fear of loaded fire-arms, unprotected, and to encounter, with her fragile strength, the fearful odds of combat with a powerful and irritated man.

While she was yet a child, the father of our heroine, Sir John Cochrane, second son of the first earl of Dundonald, had become deeply involved in the insurrections which shook Scotland to the centre; and by the time she had attained her sixteenth year, his deliberations upon the unhappy prospects of his native land, had resulted in a determination to fly the scene of disaster and oppression, and seek an adopted country, which would at least permit the free exercise of conscientious faith, denied him by his own. To America the steps of the prospective exile tended, and in the year 1683, Sir John found himself in the streets of London, whither he had gone to arrange the preliminaries of a voyage to South Carolina, where the formation of a colony had been planned by himself and some companions, to be immediately carried into execution.

But the intentions of the patriotic emigrant were destined to be frustrated. In London he met with many dear friends: Algernon Sidney, the son of the earl of Leicester, Lord William Russell, the heirapparent to the earldom of Bedford, John Hampden, grandson of the patriot, and others as eminent. With these stanch advocates of religious liberty the Scottish baronet lingered, until he found himself forgetful of the distant home he had sighed for, on the American shore, and again deeply interested in questions, whose importance indeed could scarcely be overestimated, or their results too ardently discussed.