had made use of the military chest, of which he had charge as commissary, for the purpose of increasing his own property-(a state offence for which there is no pardon in Austria)—and that the Lord of Shad papers in his possession affording sufficient evidence of the fact.

"To return, however, to my beloved. The resistance which she made to his proposals irritated her father to such a degree, that at last he barbarously shut her up in a castle near Tirnau. This dreadful stroke dissipated in a moment all the delightful visions of happiness which till then had presented themselves day and night to my heated imagination. My friend and hostess endeavoured to give me all the consolation in her power, and I myself strove for a time to revive my withered hopes, with the idea, that it was impossible that a father so fond of the daughter who adored him, could ever have the heart to sacrifice her. But in a few days I received a letter from him, in which he implored me by the affection which he had showed me in the bosom of his family, and if I did not wish to see them all ruined, to write to the object of my love, and relieve her from the promise she had given me, that she might thus be at liberty to marry another. I had scarcely read the letter through, when in a fit of mingled sorrow and indignation, I seized a pen, and inclosed to him a letter for the unfortunate being in whom all the joys and hopes of my life had been centered, giving him in it the melancholy and disinterested proof of my love which he required, by renouncing my claim to her person.

"The violence of the mental struggle which I experienced in bringing myself to make this renunciation, affected my health more than I imagined. I left the house of the friend whom I had known at Vienna, to prosecute the labours of my office; and here I will describe to you another scene of Hungarian hospitality, which, even after what I have already mentioned, will appear almost incredible to those who have never experienced it. My first day's journey was to a little town in which there was but one inn, opposite which was a mansion belonging to a noble family. I went, as a matter of course, to the inn; but the landlady told me that she had received positive orders not to take in any officer, but to send him to the house in front of us. I accordingly entered it with my baggage, and was attended by the servants with the greatest care. Hearing, however, that there was no one at home but the lady of the house, I immediately desired them to convey me to some other quarter. Upon this a young and handsome female made her appearance, and without farther ceremony ordered the servants to unpack my things. She told me that her parents were absent upon a short journey, but would return again at night. As they did not, however, arrive at the time she expected, she herself did the honours of the house with the utmost grace and modesty. Hearing that it was my intention to continue my journey the next morning, she would not allow the servants to prepare breakfast for me without being present herself at the same time. I had scarcely left her, unable to thank her sufficiently, when the fever which had been gradually creeping upon me, seized me suddenly with such violence as to deprive me of my senses. At the end of twenty days I recovered them again, and found myself in bed, but unable to move. My servants, upon my recognizing them, informed me that when the delirium produced by the fever

seized me on the road, they had immediately conveyed me back to the town where I had slept the preceding night; and that both the young lady and her parents had continued to watch by my bedside, till, in consequence of the want of proper medical attendance, and of hearing me from time to time mention the word Tunfkirchen, they had caused me to be removed with the greatest care to the town of that name, in which I then found myself.

"By degrees I recovered my strength, and, during the period of my convalescence, received my appointment to the rank of captain, which, if it had arrived sooner, would have made me happy, and saved the life of my beloved, who by this time found herself in the power of the odious barbarian who had forced her to become his wife.

"After an interval of several months, and when I least expected it, I received a letter from her younger sister, in which she told me that a fever had attacked her sister with such violence that the physicians despaired of her life; that her husband had gone away, and left her in this deplorable state; and she entreated me, by the love which I had shown her to the last, to come and see her before she died, promising that the interview between us should take place in the presence of the physician and of her sister, that so all ground for slander might be avoided. I set off instantly; and upon my arrival was met by the friend and foster-nurse of my unhappy love, with a face bathed in tears. To describe in language the scene which ensued, though graved with a pencil of fire upon my soul, has ever been beyond my power.

"Five months afterwards death set its seal to the separation which the vanity of a barbarian had effected. He himself was soon after brought to the grave by his excesses; but, as if he could not cease, even in death, to persecute the unhappy family whose most precious jewel he had sullied with his brutal breath, the papers by means of which he had forced a father to ruin his child, were left by him to be exposed to the examination of the Government,-with such baseness had he preserved them to the very last, for the purpose of domineering over the family into which he had married! The consequence was, that the wretched father of my beloved was thrown into a prison, and his whole property confiscated. His wife died of a broken heart; and the younger sister, the generous friend of my youth, took the resolution of retiring to a convent, from which she afterwards sent me information of the death of her father, who had been unable to survive the pressure of so many calamities.

"For several years I continued to hear at intervals from this amiable creature. Suddenly, however, the correspondence ceased; and I have no doubt that death had then snapped the last branch of the tree, under whose shadow I had fondly looked forward to the enjoyment of a happiness that would know no bounds. Behold, my friend, the deceitfulness of human hopes in the old, infirm, and solitary being, whose melancholy tale is now told!"

LETTER FROM THE GENTLEMAN PRESERVED IN ICE.

To the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine.

SIR, The journals have expressed so surprising a degree of incredulity respecting my story, as related by the French papers, and have spoken so contemptuously of the mendacity of their Continental colleagues, that I feel myself called upon, as a lover of truth, to come forward in their defence; and at the same time to assert my own claims to life, from which the inconceivable scepticism of the age is but too much inclined to oust me. I throw myself, therefore, upon your generosity to give insertion to this letter in your valuable miscellany, in order that I may not, after having taken so much trouble to come back into the world, be driven again out of it by a set of puny dialectitians, who take their own narrow conceptions as a measure of the universe and its powers, and hardily deny every thing which they have not wit enough to comprehend. That a man, after lying one hundred and seventy and odd years, preserved in ice, should, on being thawed, come to life again, was not, I admit, very common at the period of my ante-glacial existence; and I am inclined to believe that it is an event by no means usual in this present more enlightened age,-if, at least, I may judge from the foolish wonder my recent adventure seems to have excited. But the rarity of an event is a very poor argument against its absolute possibility; and I humbly presume to express a hope that as soon as I shall have run the rounds of London, as the reigning lion of the ensuing winter-an event upon which I think I may count, unless superseded by some new musical composer or New Zealand cannibal-I may thenceforward be believed on my word, and that none will be so presumptuous as to deny to my face that I am alive, or dispute the possibility of a fact, of which they have my most satisfactory testimony. To those esprits forts, however, who would doubt even the evidence of their senses, who admit nothing which cannot be proved, and who prefer an analogy to an experimental demonstration, I would recall the numerous well-authenticated toads, which have passed through much longer periods in a state of suspended animation,-imbedded in rocks,-to say nothing of the tena. city of life exhibited by seeds and eggs and surely it is not arrogating too much to myself, to presume that a man can do as much as a toad. To those of a more religious turn of mind, I might mention the legend of the Seven Sleepers; but that was a miracle, and I pretend to nothing more than is in the course of nature. Really, it is very hard that some folks may be permitted to live in an oven, and superintend the baking of their own dinner, while others are denied the right to survive a short nap in the snow. Not, however, that it signifies very much. Let the newspapers say what they please, they shall not talk me out of an adventure, which I feel much too agreeable to resign for the pelting of such " paper bullets of the brain:" and now that I am once more well warmed to the subject, it is not, I can assure them, their cool impudence that will freeze me back into my avalanche. Only, once for all, I should be glad to set the matter right with the judicious, at whose head I willingly place the editor of the New Monthly Magazine. You, Mr. Editor, who are, I dare say, of too philosophical

a turn of mind to be startled at a man's being preserved in ice, more than a salmon, merely because you had never heard of such a thing before-are, no doubt, very curious to learn some particulars of the phænomena which accompanied my thaw. Although, therefore, I mean to publish a detailed narrative of this part of my auto-biography, or rather authi-biography, in two volumes quarto, hot-pressed, with views taken on the spot, yet I will not grudge to put down for your satisfaction some "reminiscences," which, while they amuse you, will assist in dissipating the reluctance of the incredulous in believing that I am I. You must know then, that when I first sank into the avalanche, I found the circumstance perfectly overwhelming; and I was by no means satisfied with " the nature of things," which coupled a fall of snow, with my fall down a precipice. However, having had my education in a public school, I was tolerably used to cool tricks; and so, as is usual with frost-bitten persons, I soon felt an irresistible tendency to sleep come over me, and I lost all consciousness of surrounding circumstances. My next recollection is of a vague and obscure sense of being, accompanied by an intolerable prickling heat of the skin, analogous to the well-known sensation of the foot being asleep. By-andby succeeded pains in the ears and eyes, a sound of rushing waters, and a flashing of lights; then a general stiffness and soreness of the joints, from which, as the newspapers have truly informed you, I have not yet quite recovered. At last, my intellectual faculties returning, my consciousness became thoroughly awakened, and I found myself in bed, in the back one-pair-of-stairs room of a Swiss cottage, whereof the hangings were green, and the counterpane of patch-work,-as any body may witness who will take the pains to go so far and inspect them. To the return of my thorough self-possession, nothing contributed more than an intense and painful sense of hunger, which now supervened. Considering how long it was since my last meal, this did not afterwards so much surprise me; but at the time I could not but think it odd : for my sleep, long as it was, having been perfect and dreamless, I could not of course take any count of the lapse of time; and, on awakening, concluded that I had slept only for a few hours. In this notion I was confirmed by the familiarity of the objects with which I was surrounded; for I need not tell you, Mr. Editor, that the honest inhabitants of the Swiss valleys have made no changes, either in their houses or clothing, since the time of my unlucky-or shall I call it lucky?-tumble. Judge, then, of my astonishment when I afterwards was made acquainted with my real position, which happened on the second day of my palimbiosis. The physician had strictly ordered that I should not be allowed to speak, or to be spoken to; partly from apprehension of the effects of a surprise, and partly because this is the routine practice in all interesting cases, as laid down in the most approved novels. So, as the good woman of the cottage was occupied in preparing chocolate for my breakfast, and moreover had been dumb from birth, I had leisure to throw my eyes round the room; where, close to my bedside, on a small table, I discovered a French newspaper, which the worthy son of Hippocrates had accidentally left behind him. I took it up, and, glancing my eye over the first page, read the date 1826! "Oh! a false print,' quoth I, hurrying on to the column headed " Angleterre," with the most intense curiosity to learn how Cromwell had been getting on, since the

last post, with his newly-founded republic. The paragraph commenced with-" His Majesty the King of England is gone this day to Virginia Water:" or, if my memory does not deceive me, it ran "à l'Eau de Virginie." Nothing could be more perplexing. Next followed a speech on some project for a corn-law, by a "Sur Leather Breech," as the ignorant French journalist travestied the name. This was more puzzling still for while the allusions were all new and unintelligible to me, the ideas were precisely those most in vogue with statesmen and economists at the time of the avalanche. In the speeches of several other members, mixed up with some inexplicable references to a sort of raw-head and bloody-bones, called O'Connell, blazed forth a zeal against Popery, precisely similar to that which maddened my quondam contemporaries of 1640; insomuch that, while I was in an entire new world as to the facts debated, I seemed capable of assigning each speech to some particular advocate " of the good old times" in the long parliament. One thing only was strange-that I knew none of the names of the speakers; and, therefore, I concluded that an election had occurred since the last post; though I wondered that my letters had said nothing on the subject, more especially as my father, who was a good churchman, was, as in duty bound, too apt to interfere on similar occasions, and to call out "the church is in danger," till the hustings rang again. Of all the speakers, no one pleased me more than a member of the Upper House, who was described as speaking from a woolsack; for there was not one novelty of thought in all his discourse, nor a single idea to which I was not perfectly au fait ;--for any thing that appeared to the contrary, he might have lived two hundred years ago. "What a clever fellow this must be !" thought I.-Turning at length from these debates to certain passages of real life, I was at once lost and bewildered in a succession of events, of which I could make neither head nor tail, and which made me doubt of my very identity. The ascent of a balloon and a meeting of the Institute; the South American republics and the destruction of power-looms; a letter from the United States, and the progress of a steam-boat up the Rapids, the sum-total of the debt of England, and the details of a crim. con. action, confirmed me in the notion either that I was mad, or that the French had hit upon a new species of mystification, in the form of a journal, in which I knew not whether to admire the ingenuity of the inventions, or the absurdity of the trick. By degrees, the truth at length burst upon me; though, to say the truth, it required all the gravity of the doctor, and all the solemnity of his assertion, to make me believe the story; and to convince me "how much more elder" was I "than my years." The position, you will own, was embarrassing; for, however useful I might have been to Mr. Godwin in sparing him much tedious research for his "History of the Commonwealth," I was perfectly unfit to converse with any other rational being, from my ignorance of subsequent events, When I asked about Cromwell, people answered about Bonaparte; when I was anxious to know something of Bradshaw, the papers were full of Baron Seguier; and when I was curious concerning the fate of Charles, no one could talk of any thing but the trial of Ouvrard. Fortunately the patience of my kind physician was equal to his humanity; and in the course of a few weeks conversation, he gave me such a sketch of modern history, as served, if not to place me on a level