o the
beautiful and magnificent in nature, was abundantly ministered to by the
surrounding country. We are told that he had been by some odd chance
taught his alphabet, and his first lesson in "reading made easy," out of
a black-letter Bible! That accident may have had its share in forming
his taste for old-fashioned literature. But he was an attorney's clerk!
The very name of a lawyer's office seems to suggest a writ of ejectment
against all poetical influences in the brain of his indented apprentice.
Yet Chatterton's anomalous genius was in all likelihood fostered by that
dark, yet subtle atmosphere. His duty of copying precedents must have
initiated him in many of the astute wiles and twisted lines of reasoning
that lead to what is termed sharp practice, and so may have confirmed
and aided his propensities to artifice; while the mere manual operation
tutored his fingers to dexterity at quaint penmanship. He had much
leisure too; for it is recorded that his master's business seldom
occupied him more than two hours a-day. He was left to devote the rest
of his time unquestioned to all the devices of an inordinate
imagination.

After all, it is no unreasonable charity to believe, that what was
unworthy and unsound in his character, and probably in his physical
temperament, might, under more auspicious circumstances of condition and
training, have been kept in check till utterly expelled by the force of
his own maturer mind. In weighing his faults against his genius and its
better fruits, it should never be forgotten that when he terminated his
existence he was only seventeen years and nine months old.

"More wounds than nature gave he knew,
While misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own."[39]

May we not even dare to hope, then, though he "perished in his pride,"
that he is still a living genius, assoiled of that foul stain of
self-murder, and a chartered spiritualized melody where want and trouble
madden not?

[39] T. Warton's "Suicide."

* * * * *

IGNACIO GUERRA AND EL SANGRADOR;

A TALE OF CIVIL WAR.

On a June evening in the year 1839, four persons were assembled in the
balcony of a pleasant little villa, some half-league from the town of
Logrono in Navarre. The site of the house in question was a narrow
valley, formed by a double range of wood-covered hills, the lower limbs
of a mountain chain that bounded the horizon so