A CAST FOR A CROWN.* OH ! for the days

when we were young enough to thoroughly enjoy a story made up of dwarfs, alchemists, lovely golden-haired ladies, and equally lovely, but dark-minded ladies with black tresses ; a story placed in the reign of Charles IL, but which dis- dains to make use of either the Plague or the Fire of London ! A story which hurries along with such breathless rapidity that you seem to be always shooting the piers of dangerous old London Bridge ; and wherein captives confined in the Tower dangle in mid-air out of the windows, and one scientific man blows up another by putting a surreptitious bag of gunpowder into his cellar, so that a strange low rumbling noise being heard, "in another second the floor heaved and cracked, and burst upwards, and a volume of smoke and flame rushed forth. Merlin and

• A Cast for a Cram. A Dramatic Story. By Harry Mild. London : Rickard Bentley.

Isabelle were thrown senseless on the ground ; and tables, and chairs, and benches ; crucibles, alembics, and retorts ; vessels, bottles, and liquids ; all lay broken and overthrown upon the rent- up floor."—N.B., observe the effective use of triplets in the above sentence.

Who is Merlin ? Who is Isabelle? Merlin is an old man, with a "pale, thin, thoughtful face, and broad, high forehead, with snow-white locks." He passes days and nights in melting leaden bullets and Spanish doubloons together, seasoned with all the refined ingredients of the alchemist's art. " Already his studies and his day-dreams had consumed half his lifetime,—years and years had passed, his black hair had become grey, his plump rosy cheeks had become pale and sunken, his health had become feeble, his firm step uncertain and faltering, yet hope had not abandoned him." Isabelle is a lovely girl of sixteen, who shares his home, and is supposed to be his daughter. Is she his daughter? No ! Her mother died in Paris—poisoned—but that is a bagatelle of of the past, thrown in by the way. Her father? Well !—he was a tall, dark, handsome man, whom the nurse Margaret never saw but once. A profound mystery hangs over her parentage, and Merlin, called in (medically) to assist the dying mother, bears away the babe.

But Merlin and Isabelle do not live alone. Two inmates share their dwelling. Old Margaret and Zermat. Zermat is a dwarf, " crook-backed, spindle-legged, and his features moulded in almost fantastic ugliness. His eyes eloquently gleaming with intelligence, seemed bestowed by nature as a recompense for the clumsy mould- ing of his figure." Zermat is the villain of the piece. Why are dwarfs so often villainous? Only Sir Walter Scott and Dickens have dared to express their confidence in wee folks' goodness, and Dickens' dwarf was a lady. In any case, Zermat was very bad indeed ; of course, he was in love with Isabelle, and detested by her as soon as she found it out, which she did not till well into the third volume.

But there is a female villain, who is the worst of the two.

Lady Claire St. Hilaire is a dame of Seville, but having lived much in France, we are led to suppose that she had enjoyed the acquaintance of Madame de Brinvilliers. She is fond of ad- ministering little potions, which only happen to be clear water, because Merlin, of whom she buys them, detects her fell design.

She visits him in disguise, and tells him that it is to end the life of a sick friend, " sick of a disease that must kill him in so many 'hours," and would it not be an act of kindness to shorten his suffering? Merlin agrees, gives her a dose which he professes to be a cup of cold poison, charging her twenty doubloons for the benefit of his melting-pot. Moreover, he fixes his penetrating eyes upon her, and says, "Madame, you are in disguise!" It needs not to say that Charles the King was in love with Lady Claire ;

of course he was! nor that she meditated to poison the Queen ; of course she did I Nor that when Merlin is in the Tower, Zermat

decoys Isabelle away into Kent,—what more natural ? Nor that the nephew of the Earl of Draconbury starts up in the nick of time, and rescues the maid,—he was sure to be in the road when wanted.

Zermat's punishment is exceedingly well described. In a dark

night be is tied into a boat from which the cleaning cork (9.un- romantic detail) has been removed, and the said boat, being some-

where on the river below Gravesend, is shoved off well from the shore, and being taken by the tide is drifted into the middle of the stream and down towards the sea. "Its outline soon merged into a shadowy mass and became more indistinct every moment to the eyes of the three men, who stood watching the living bier from the shore ; but the yells, oaths, and maniacal ravings of the doomed man within it were heard long after the fatal skiff was lost in the gloom of the night. They stood some time listening to the terrible shrieks of the dwarf. Suddenly they ceased. He has become resigned to his fate,' said Stephen. He has gone under,' said the boatman."

Enter on the scene the Earl of Draconbury himself and his stern Puritan sister Rebecca ; Sir Gilbert Dubois, who lives in a moated house ; and Lady Dubois, who lets out her wicked husband's prisoners. One lady, who stalks across the scene in a serge dress, with long, white hair banging down, has been shut up for fif- teen mortal years in a room on a level with the moat. People in those days went grey, but we hear nothing of rheumatism. Who was the lady in serge ? Why, Isabella's mother, who had not been poisoned after all. Who was her father? CHARLES IL I The monarch rides up to Draconbury Hall just in time to meet the lady in serge, and to exclaim :—

" Annette ! Is it possible ! Alive ! Then I have been cruelly de-

ceived Oh, Annette, why did you leave so,—without even saying where I would find my child ? " She is there !' said Annette. ' Most gracious Sovereign,' said the Earl, 'this dear girl is your daughter: 'God have mercy on me ! ' said the Bing, placing his hand over his heart, and leaning on the table for support. 'Come hither, child, come hither."

Isabelle steps forward, pale as death, her large, blue eyes gazing with astonishment and awe upon the monarch, when—hush ! ha! uttering a sharp cry of pain she fell on the floor ; at the same time the report of a pistol resounded through the hall. " Hell's dan:Tna- tion ! " shouted the King, " is the place accursed ? My girl, my girl ; she is dying!" Ralph Draconbury, who it needs not to say was one of the company, and would doubtless have immediately received his bride at the hands of the king, rushes to the window through which the shot bad been fired, shouting,—what do you think ? " The dwarf, the dwarf !" Yes ! Zermat was one of those people whom ropes won't hang, fire won't burn, and water won't drown. He had been picked up in the river by a hired boat, just as his own was sinking. Hence the cessation of his cries ; and hence his fatal appearance on the scene just when everybody for the first time for fifteen years were happy and comfortable together. It is always so.

The only other bit we have space to quote is the death of Lady Claire St. Hilaire. The enlightened reader will understand that she had been more or less at the bottom of all the misfortunes of the book. Brought face to face with the King, she tried to come over him with her sweetest smiles, saying in a fascinating tone, " What, Charles ! are you to be an accuser also ?" Then getting angry, she burst out, " Poison ! Well, I did poison your wife, my Lord of Draconbury, but I thought she was the King's mistress." " Charles," she said, turning to the King, "as I have loved you above all the world, even better than myself, so I now hate you

with the same intensity You think to try me by jury, your boasted English fashion,—to make me a spectacle for a gaping crowd,—I defy you. Curse you, curse you all—heaven—hell—the universe ! Farewell ! " And then, hastily swallowing a small substance, she stood resting her hands on the table, look- ing at the others with a fiendish, cunning expression. They all viewed her with horror. Presently her face became flushed, her cheeks became swollen, and her lips were purple. Her eyeballs were terribly dilated with a horrible expression. Those features, lately so beautiful, were transformed into the face of a demon. Her breath became heavy and short. Rapidly her face, neck, bosom, and hands assumed a black hue, and in a few

moments she fell on the floor a corpse. God Almighty save us,' said the King, rushing from the apartment, followed by all." And no wonder ! say we. It was enough, as the French say, to make a body " prendre ses jambes k son con."

Do not think, kind reader, that we merely desire to make fun of this book. It is decidedly clever in its way ; contains more dramatic situations than we ever found stuffed into three volumes before ; would make a splendid melodrama, illustrated by the scene of Old London before the Fire ; and the chief sensation it leaves on our mind is one of regret that we are no longer fifteen years old, and can no longer sit huddled up in a a corner reading .4 Cast for a Crown, and accepting its remarkable pictures of human existence as "la veritd vraie."