duct had alienated all his friends, and left him entirely destitute, till Hudson took him into his house, and got him a place in his ship. This Henry Greene "stood upright and inward with the master, and was a very serviceable man every way;" but the favour shown to him, and which was thought scarcely merited, alienated the minds of several of the officers. In spring the fowls disappeared, and serious distress began to be felt from the want of provisions. Hudson's exertions to obtain a supply, and to divide equally what they had, seem to have been unwearied; but a diversity of opinion began to prevail as to the measures which ought to be pursued. At length a conspiracy was formed, at the head of which Greene placed himself, for the detestable purpose of putting out Hudson, with all the sick and disabled men, on board the shallop, while the rest should sail home in the ship. Pricket, the narrator, against whom strong suspicions have been entertained, avers most positively, that he remonstrated in the strong est manner against this design, though he agreed to remain neutral, on condition of not being included in the proscription. Greene first informed him of the design, swearing there was no other remedy; that he would rather be hanged than starved; and that he would "cut his throat that went about to disturbe them. Presently came Ivet, who, because he was an ancient man, I hoped to have found some reason in him, but he was worse than Henry Greene. After him came John Thomas and Michael Perse, as birds of one feather; but, because they are not living, I will let them go." At night, Greene held the Captain in conversation till the plot was ripe, when Hudson, coming out of the cabin, was seized by two sailors, while another bound his arms behind him. Inquiring what this meant, he was told that he should know when he was in the shallop. "Then was the shallop haled up to the ship, and the poore, sicke, and lame men were called upon to get out of their cabins into the shallop." Some dispute arose as to the selection, but it was at length settled, and Hudson, with his companions, were abandoned on this terrible shore. They were never more seen or heard of; but the situation in which they were left could leave no room for doubt as to their fate.— "Never, perhaps," says Forster, was the heart of man possessed with ingratitude of a blacker dye than that of the infamous villain Greene. Hudson had saved this wretch from perdition, had received him with the utmost kindness into his own house, and had, but with too much weakness, taken his part, when he had been guilty of the grossest misdemeanours,-notwithstanding which, this outcast of society had the wickedness to stir up the rest of the crew against their commander, and to expose his benefactor and second father, without clothes, arms, or provisions, to the open sea, in an inhospitable climate, inhabited only by savage beasts, and men still more savage."-The mutineers now proceeded to ransack every corner of the vessel, as if it had been given up to plunder; and they then endea voured to work their way out of the bay through the ice, which bore a worse appearance than any they had yet dealt with. But if ever the hand of Providence visibly interposed, it was against this guilty crew, who were soon destined to perish by a fate still more horrible than that which their guilty hands had inflicted. Having come to a coast which appeared to abound with fowl, they were invited by the savages, in a manner apparently very friendly, to come on shore. A boat with six men, accordingly, landed, without arms or precautions of any kind. Several began to collect herbs, while others were showing to the people "looking-glasses, Jews' harps, and bels.” In an instant they were attacked in the most furious manner. Henry Greene and another were killed on the spot, and two more died afterwards. Pricket, after a desperate struggle, and many wounds, succeeded in wresting the weapon from the savage who had attacked him, and turned it against himself. The loss of these four, however, "the onlie lustie men in all the ship," increased the difficulty of navigating; and the length of the voyage, joined to their "evil steerage," reduced them, before they reached England, to the last extremities of famine. Ivet, the chief ringleader next to Greene, died of want, and only the opportune appearance of the coast of Galloway saved the rest from the same fate. (To be concluded in our next. ) FEMALE AUTHORS OF SCOTLAND. No. I. REMARKS ON THE PLAYS ON THE PASSIONS, BY JOANNA BAILLIE. THESE Plays have now been before the public twenty years. The author has informed us, in an introductory discourse, in which she has given a luminous explication of the laws of the drama, that they were intended for the stage. As few of them, however, have been brought upon the stage at all, and these have not kept their place there long, it will be the object of this paper to examine wherein lies the fault,-whether with the public, or the directors of our theatrical entertainments, or in the dramas themselves. Joanna Baillie was one of the earliest of the luminaries who have adorned this age of poets; and, splendid as the march of some of them has been, she is not yet, perhaps, surpassed in many of the most unequivocal attributes of poetical excellence. We know not if there be a sex in soul, but in the perusal of these plays we remark much of the energy and sublimity that have been thought to belong to one sex, with the delicacy and purity peculiar to the other. The living poets have, with a few exceptions, written from the fancy rather than the imagination and the heart. They seem to have forgotten that" the proper study of mankind is man ;" and have fetched their subjects from the land of fairies, or witches, or apparitions, or demons, rather than from the habitations of man, or, when they have deigned to introduce him into their pictures, it has been with a view of illustrating some factitious state of society, in which he had deviated as far from nature as possible. They are always in extremes. With them passion is the hurricane of the soul, or a sentimental babyism that is perpetually puling to the moonlight. Joanna Baillie has risen above all these faults, and does not owe one iota of her glory to sacrificing to a false taste, to which fashion has given currency; and her characters are always, in general, na tive, and do not seek to attract notice by the singularity of their costume,-by rusty helms, or antique armour, nor by eccentricity in their actions, nor by an overstrained strength of passion, or the whine of simplicity. She is above such affectations, and has VOL. II. risen into fame by the fidelity of her delineations of human character, and the manly energy of her poetry, relieved, as it is, by a sweetness and a tenderness truly feminine. The Greek tragedians have reared a goodly structure from the simple elements of man, that will probably outlive, not only the beautiful marble which the genius of their sculptors has inspired with life and passion, but all the other glories of their country, Homer alone excepted. The Romans, whatever may be their claim to literary distinction, in other respects, have no tragedy; and the French, with all their boasting on the subject, have copied the Greek tragedy in its faults, rather than its spirit; and to such a slavish length have they carried their imitation, that there is little original in their tragic drama, but its insipidity, and its absolute destitution of poetry and nature. In passing, we can only bow in reverence before the throne of Shakespeare, and mark the glance of that eye that scans the heavens and the earth, and the universe of man, which he pictures on a canvas of celestial texture, and in the hues of Eden. Some of his contemporaries, and one or two of his successors, would have exalted any other nation to the pinnacle of dramatic glory, but in the splendour of his reputation, every other fame is obscured; and while his name is pronounced as that of a tutelary deity, in the cottage, and in the palace, and in the dwellings of all the intermediate classes, we seldom think even of Otway, but when we' go to the representation of Venice Preserved. Joanna Baillie, though certainly far beneath Shakespeare, may bear no unfavourable comparison with any other dramatist of this country. The question again recurs, why are her plays not added to the stock of the English stage? This we are now to consider, and we shall do so as candidly and as dispassionately as we can. With all our deference to her name, and all our admiration of her genius, we cannot help thinking that the plan of devoting a play exclusively to one passion is unfortunate, as it not only narrows the limits of dramatic representation, but otherwise subjects her to great inconvenience. It is true, that, in some of our best tragedies, one passion is predominant, and its excess leads to the catastrophe, as the jea 3 x lousy of Othello, and the ambition of Lady Macbeth; but no one, except our author, ever thought of giving, in the form of a drama, an anatomical analysis, a philosophical dissection of a passion. Her highly poetical mind and fine conception of human character, and her glorious clevation of moral sentiment, would have risen above every difficulty but this. To make this plain by an example in Othello, though jealousy is the poisoned fountain from which all the calamities of the piece flow, we never think of it abstracted from the character of the Moor, It is the consummate art and villany by which Iago kindles up in his generous and unsuspecting mind the fires that are to consume him, and his giving to "trifles light as air" the hues of importance, and his well feigned friendship, while he is seeking his undoing-it is the terrible workings, and the overwhelming eruptions of this volcanic passion, and the powerful sympathy we feel for the gentle and the pure Desdemona, that form the charm of this great drama, and the passion is interesting only as it influences the fortunes of the prime actors. In Miss Baillie the characters and the incidents are merely a mirror in which to contemplate the passions, or rather a microscope, by means of which she seems to think that she has brought within the sphere of our vision things too minute for the naked intellectual eye. This is, we think, the radical defect of her plays, and casts an air of restraint and formality over the whole of her performances; yet there are in them many delightful redeeming qualities, and we shall have much more pleasure in dilating on these than in the discovery of faults, where there is so much to admire. As far as we remember, the best plays, ancient and modern, are founded either on historical facts, or on legends, which, in all probability, had their origin in real events, that had undergone considerable changes by the inaccuracy, or even the genius of the narrators. This is to follow the order of nature, and in this case the action is seldom confined to the developement of one passion. All the Greek, and the greater number of Shakespeare's tragedies, have been so constituted. Miss Baillie's plan was therefore a bold innovation on a long and universally established practice; but it is time to think of its execution. Independently of this fundamental mistake, we think she has sometimes erred in the delineation of her characters, and the developement of her fables. In De Montfort, where the passion that is to be illustrated is hatred, she seems to have been so engrossed with her favourite system, as to attend neither to consistency of character nor probability of incident. It is merely an outline, sketched by a bold and masterly hand certainly, but it wants the filling up, and the symmetry, as a whole, that gives the likeness to nature. If it were possible (and for the honour of human nature we trust it is not) that deadly hate could find a place in such a mind as De Montfort's;-that he should be gentle, and amiable, and benevolent to all but one man, and that the very thought of him should transform him into a fiend ;-that he should be so bereft of all good feelings as to assassinate the man who had twice spared his life;-there is no good cause assigned for this terrible outrage on humanity. A school-boy rivalship, a taunt, a sneer, are the front of Revenvelt's offending. Base and flagitious as men often are, we have never heard of a murder proceeding from such a cause; and we are confident that such a union never existed in the same mind (at least in a state of sanity) as in this fiction of Miss Baillie's imagination. Again, to appeal to Shakespeare, which is, in truth, to recur to nature, in Othello, the change from the devotion of love to the frenzy of jealousy, is as sudden as the flash of lightning, yet instantanecus as it is, it is in the natural current of events. In such a character as the Moor, the scion of a semi-barbarous land, the passions are in the fiercest extremes; love is the adoration due to a divinity, and jealousy is a fiery tempest, that passes over its object to its destruction; and in this very instance Shakespeare has displayed the triumph of his genius in not omitting a single circumstance that could operate on such a mind, and in the natural and easy transition from love to jealousy, and from jealousy to madness, and from madness to murder. It is the want of a proper soil in which to plant such a passion, and the culture necessary to its growth. (if we may be allowed such an expression,) of which we complain in De Montfort; we are told, indeed, that it has sprung up and thriven, but we do not see it possible. We are aware that we are here treading on dangerous ground, and that we have against us the authority of one of the ablest living dissectors of human passion ; but though Godwin has run into the same radical error with MissBaillie, he has, with infinitely more skill, traced the passion through a series of events that give it the colouring of probability. Of this character we must say, though the sentence may seem to be harsh, that, if the author would make it a puppet for her favourite passion to speak through, she ought at least to have made it speak aright. At the same time we must admit, that this defect is not nearly so obvious in the reading, as in the representation; and we cannot forget, that, when we went to the Edinburgh theatre to witness its first representation here, full of enthusiastic admiration from its perusal, how painfully we were struck with this sin against truth and consistency. It was this that shed a haze over the whole performance, that not even the glorious character of Jane De Montfort, walking like an angel of light amid the darkness, nor even the sun of Miss Baillie's genius, could dissipate. the passion were equal to the production of the consequences that follow from it, it is not sufficiently accounted for, and the mind turns in incredulity from love, at sight, as the origin of such calamities. Here again the evil arises from the system; for the author has thought of the passion, and nothing but the passion, nor has she even deemed it necessary to assign a good cause for its production, and to it she has sacrificed probability and nature. From this fundamental blunder nothing can be conceived more insipid than Basil in love, yet the genius of Miss Baillie has, in some degree, redeemed this by the energy she has given him in quelling the mutiny, and the great interest she has thrown around the wreck of a noble mind. For these reasons, we cannot help lamenting that ever Miss Baillie thought of fettering herself by a false system, instead of looking into life, and drawing her subjects thence unshackled by prepossessions of any kind. There was in the idea a certain air of originality that was seductive to an ardent and ingenious mind, and she incautiously followed its splendour, not considering whither it would lead her. In her preface, she even boasts of it; and, as it is the only claim she makes on our approbation, we regret that we cannot grant These remarks apply more or less it; yet, in these dramas, there is to all the Plays on the Passions. In much left for us to admire. Basil, where the passion is love, similar errors are committed. It is not very likely that a soldier, in the full career of military glory, should have been so much thrown off his guard by one glance of a beautiful woman, and so bewitched by her presence, as to risk even the possibility of being absent from a battle, in which he was to add the last leaf to his laurel wreath-a dereliction of duty which he knew would plunge him in irremediable infamy; yet this must either be supposed to be natural, or the groundwork of the tragedy be condemned. Here the author seems to have been aware of the inadequacy of the cause to the effect, for she has made the father of the lady, who was secretly hostile to the cause in which Basil was to fight, form a plot to detain him, yet he only urges his daughter to use the whole influence of her charms for that purpose. Besides this, though In an age of great poets, she has acquired, by ker dramatic writings, a distinguished station in the literature of her country, yet we are almost tempted to wish that she had written epic rather than dramatic poetry, for which her powers of description, and the loftiness of her conceptions, have eminently qualified her. If a tragedy written for the stage is not received there with an enthusiasm of delight, or if the applause is bestowed on any thing foreign to the characters and their fortunes, the author may be said to have failed in his aim. Miss Baillie's ambition was the stage, this she has herself told us, and, indeed, we believe it is the aim of every person who writes a drama, whatever name he choose to give it,she has submitted to the judgment from which there is no appeal; every thing has been done for her that the talents of the most distinguished ac tors could achieve ;-a Siddons and a Kemble have been enlisted in her cause; she has been heard with favour and applause, and partiality has even turned aside the edge of criticism;-her plays have had their run, yet have they been quietly laid aside on the shelves of the prompter, and we now hear of them as a part of our acted drama, no more than if they had never enjoyed a stage existence. This is a death-blow to the hopes of the candidate for dramatic glory, and perhaps more mortifying than the tumultuous condemnation of a first night, where a few noisy and malicious people may prevail over the good sense of the more judicious part of the house. The fault in this case cannot be with the public, for they had read the Plays on the Passions with feelings of delight, before any of them were acted, and went to the representation with partiality in their favour;-it can hardly be with the managers of our theatres, for it is likely that they will bring the plays most frequently forward that draw the fullest houses. There is then only one other alternative, and in it we fear that we shall find the cause. These dramas possess poetical merit of so extraordinary a kind, and in many instances dramatic merit too, that we cannot help regretting the cause deeply wherever it may lie. No species of literature is so constantly under the eye of the public as the acted drama :-every London apprentice has Shakespeare by heart; nor is there any which is in so great danger of being forgotten as an unacted play. Ford and Massinger were till lately left to the obscurity of black letter, and the libraries of the curious. Yet if this admirable woman has failed in aught, she has failed where few but Shakespeare have succeeded. If she has not always been faithful even to the delineation of her favourite passions, and has not always made men and women pass in review before us in the unquestionable attributes and the universal features of nature, if there is often wanting a link in that mysterious chain, that leads men as by the irresistible impulse of fate to the perpetration of crimes; yet has she exhibited many fine conceptions of character, and many scenes truly dramatic,-of an elevating energy, or a melting tenderness. If she had never portrayed another character than Jane De Montfort,-and never written another scene than that betwixt her and De Montfort, after the perpetration of the murder of Revenvelt, these alone would have raised her to a high rank among the dramatists of her country. She has here finely conceived and beautifully expressed the purity and the ardour of sisterly affection,-all those holy ties that link the heart of a sister to a brother, and which not even infamy and crime can dissolve. In this character every lineament is so completely filled up, all the most amiable feelings of our nature flow so spontaneously,—it exhibits such a lofty moral tone in union with such tenderness, and there is withal so little of effort in its production, that we are confident that it is not the offspring of the imagination, but the unstudied effusion of her own spirit. Who would not venerate such a character as Jane De Montfort, and if in this beautiful portrait Miss Baillie has unawares perhaps drawn herself, who would not erect a shrine alike to her virtues and her X. genius? GEOLOGICAL NOTICES. MR EDITOR, It was announced, some time ago, in a contemporary periodical work, that a celebrated supporter of the Huttonian theory of the earth had acknowledged the existence of stratified granite. This is true; yet I hope it is no impeachment of the able observer's discernment to say, that it is possible he may be mistaken. The truth is, that geologists at this day have no distinct definition of the word stratum, while, at the same time, they use the word bed, both as synonymous, and as something different. The distinction between these was clear enough in my younger days, before geological war began; but, in the confusion of battle, the distinction seems to have been lost. I believed the distinction to be this, that stratum was used to express a mass of rock, the internal structure of which indicated a certain regularity in the arrangement of its materials, sometimes parallel, or nearly so, to the planes which form the sides of the mass, and always in the same general direction; that a bed had all the |