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the sword Macabuin, he was so highly offended that he despatched his hammerman, Hiallus-nanurd, who had only one leg, having lost the other when assisting in making that great sword, to the Castle of Peel, to challenge King Olave, or any of his people, to walk with him to Drontheim. It was accounted very dishonourable in those days to refuse a challenge, particularly if connected with a point of honour. Olave, in mere compliance with this rule, accepted the challenge, and set out to walk against the one-legged traveller from the Isle of Man to the smithy of Loan Maclibhuin, in Drontheim. They walked o'er the land, and sailed o'er the sea; and so equal was the match that, when within sight of the smithy, Hiallus-nanurd, who was first, called to Loan Maclibhuin to open the door, and Olave called out to shut it. At that instant, pushing past him of the one leg, the king entered the smithy first, to the evident discomfiture of the swarthy smith and his assistant. To show that he was not in the least fatigued, Olave lifted a large forge hammer, and, under pretence of assisting the smith, struck the anvil with such force that he clave it, not only from top to bottom, but also the block upon which it rested. Emergaid, the daughter of Loan, seeing Olave perform such manly prowess, fell so deeply in love with him that, during the time her father was replacing the block and the anvil, she found an opportunity of informing him that her father was only replacing the studdy to finish a sword he was making, and that he had decoyed him to that place for the purpose of destruction, as it had been prophesied that the sword would be tempered in royal blood, and in revenge for the affront of the cook's death by the sword of Macabuin. Is not your father the son of old Windy Cap, King of Norway?' said Olave. 'He is,' replied Emergaid, as her father entered the smithy. Then (cried the King of Man, as he drew the red steel from the fire) the prophecy must be fulfilled!' Emergaid was unable to stay his uplifted hand till he quenched the sword in the blood of her father, and afterwards pierced the heart of the one-legged hammerman, who he knew was in the plot for taking his life."

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Such a dramatic legend would be nothing without a conclusion, with a marriage tacked to it. Accordingly, the legend of the cook and the one-legged hammerman terminated conjugally. Emergaid married with alacrity the royal murderer of her father: just as Chimene, but with more show of reluctance, espoused the valiant Cid, who very properly slew that tedious and rude old gentleman, Don Gomez, the lady's sire. As for the Manx legend, we suppose there is a moral to it, if it could be found for the seeking. To our thinking the chief instruction conveyed by it is, that cooks should not go to sleep by the kitchen fire; and that, if they do, it is perfectly impossible for them to calculate the consequences. At the same time, every cook who falls asleep is not to suppose, on awaking, that the the first step has been made towards the marriage of a king with a monarch's grand-daughter.

The headlands of the isle commemorate in this manner many

VOL. XXIV.-A A

events and incidents of the past. Thus, Spanish Head records the visit and the wreck of a portion of that invincible armada which issued so gloriously from Spain never to return, and which flung itself and its cargo of warriors, priests, torturers, and weapons, as trophies, on the shore of the land of that people which they came to subdue to Spain, convert to Rome, and to put to the cruel question or to the death endured by martyrdom. To the shores of Man the division of the armada, which rushed upon the coast to meet destruction, conveyed the progenitors to which is owing that breed of tailless cats which is peculiar to the island. The Shetlanders ascribe their celebrated ponies to a similar circumstance-viz., the wreck of a division of the demon fleet, and the coming ashore of a few Spanish jennets, the sires and dams of that shaggy-maned race on which our young nobility first learn to acquire a seat and find a home in the saddle. The jennets of Spain, from which our Shetland ponies are descended, are said to be themselves the offspring of the winds. It is a legend, perhaps, to characterize their once famed swiftness. However this may be, Virgil records this descent from fabulous sires; and Horace and Silius tell us that their blood was the favourite beverage of the wild and valorous Concani. The Tartars, we may add, of this day, do the same; and more, a Tartar "not only rides but eats his horse." The horses of Diomedes, on the other hand, eat men, as did those of Glaucus, who fed upon their master. The horses of King Duncan, it will be remembered, foreshadowed the king's death by devouring one another, very much, as old Ross says

to the amazement of mine eyes That look'd upon't."

King William's Bank is as another page in a dread journal, recording a fearful escape from death. The ship which conveyed the hero, whose crusade against popery has rendered him so distasteful to Tractarian writers, had here well nigh made wreck of Cæsar and his fortunes. The monarch was on his way to Ireland and the Boyne. Had his career been stopped for ever on this bank, the whole present condition of the world might never have been. The victory of Boyne Water influenced the events of the entire of Europe. Had it not been given to poets to sing that triumph, there perhaps would have been no pretender-Charles Stuart would not have turned sot-England might have been preserved to the unhappy race whom Tractarians deplore, and Mr. Oakeley might have been born a Papist instead of having become one by force of development.

The exploits and the death of Thuròt, the French buccaneer,

have their memento on the north of the island. About the middle of last century the name was a sound of uneasiness to all the families dwelling on our coasts. Trained to smuggling, and well acquainted with every inlet where contraband goods could be run, he was a man to be feared by exposed districts. In 1759 he was so well appreciated by his own government that they gave him the command of a squadron of five ships, with which he invaded Ireland and plundered Carrickfergus. The English, however, were soon at his heels, and Captain Elliot, with three vessels, finally came to close quarters with him off the north coast of the Isle of Man. The marauding French commodore was defeated, with immense loss on his own side, and with little on the side of his conquerors. He himself was slain by a grape-shot while endeavouring to animate his crew to a last effort. He had no sooner fallen than his own men flung him overboard and surrendered. The waves bore his body to Scotland, casting it ashore on the Mull of Galloway. In the grave-yard of Kirkmaiden, within sound of the mysterious voices of the ocean, sleeps the fierce sea-captain of Dunkirk. The bowsprit of his own vessel, the Bellish, struck off during the action, was washed ashore near Bishop's Court. In memory of the action Bishop Hildersley raised it as a trophy of victory on Mount Eolus, a little above the garden of his episcopal residence.

We must now close with regret the interesting volume before us, and that without noticing many details of importance on which we would fain have tarried. For the history, fortunes, and prospects of King William's College, we must refer our readers to Mr. Cumming himself. Like reference we must make with regard to the Manx herring-fishery, and to all who are curious therein. The Manx language, of which some curious illustrations and a clever analysis are given, must even, and with many other subjects, reckon in the same category. Above all, we must leave untouched the geological portion of the volume. This portion, scientific as the subject is upon which it treats, is popularly written, and will tend to make geologists of readers who deeply declined the study of the oldest book in nature before they opened the one presented to them by the learned Vice-Principal of King William's College, Castletown. We must, perforce, be silent on this matter for want of room, we are compelled to refrain from writing on lithology, from discussing granite bubbles, or touching upon schistose formations. We leave unquestioned the matters of the Paleozoic, the Devonian, or any other geological period: we may not enjoy leisure in beds of carbon, trap, or limestone; nor refresh our

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The Church, the Kingdom, and the Isle of Man. selves with dips into glacial deposits: we may, however, find space to say that, with regard to the question touching the encroachments of land or sea-v -whether the land has gone down or the sea come up--Mr. Cumming, in treating of certain coast aspects on one side of the island, says, that no geologists will subscribe to the supposition of the sea coming up. It has now become an axiom, he tells us, that nothing is so stable as the sea and nothing so unstable as the land; and, like a good man, who does not remain satisfied with letting assertion stand for argument, he proceeds to prove what he advances. For the nature and details of the proof we must refer our readers, once more, to the pages which Mr. Cumming has written for their profit and pleasure. To show how well, how skilfully, how suggestively, the reverend and learned author can write upon subjects of rare philosophy-and how cleverly he can find sermons in and make sermons out of stones-we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of making this final extract: he is speaking of the great gravel platform which once united Man to the other islands forming our triple kingdom, and these to Europe :

"In speaking (he says) of the destruction of this great gravel platform, nothing has as yet been said of the time taken up in its formation. We have not spoken of the years during which the different pebbles, of which it is in great part composed, were being rolled about and rounded in their present shape, after they were broken off from their parent rock, and exposed to the action of the tides upon the coast...... Many of them existed as pebbles in an older formation (the boulder clay) out of which they were washed, and sifted, and sorted, ere they were distributed as layers in the more recent drift...... The rock itself, from which they were originally broken, was once a bank of sand or mud, which had been formed by quiet deposit of layer upon layer at the bottom of the sea before it was consolidated, and then heaved up to become a coast line, and again exposed to the breakers......Wave upon wave broke upon that first granite mass which appeared above the primæval ocean, and so wore it away, particle after particle, to form the first sedimentary deposit. We can measure our own age and the age of our most lasting works by the grains of sand which run through our hour-glasses; but, to measure the age of those very sands, we must apply cycles made up of the revolutions of the sun itself about the faroff centre of our sidereal system."

After this extract, it were superfluous to say that the tendency of the volume is to raise the mind of the reader from contemplating the creation to reverence the Creator. We need add nothing to this; for we could give no higher eulogy to a volume proceeding, as this does, from the pen of a scholar and a gentleman, a philosopher and a Christian.

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ART. IV.-A Pilgrimage to Rome: containing some Account of the High Ceremonies, the Monastic Institutions, the Religious Services, the Sacred Relics, the Miraculous Pictures, and the General State of Religion in that City. By the Rev. M. HOBART SEYMOUR, M.A. London: Seeleys, 1848, pp. 623, 8vo.

WE now fulfil the pledge given to our readers at the close of the last number of our journal, of introducing them to the knowledge of Mr. Seymour's deeply interesting "Pilgrimage to Rome," which was published as our last sheet was going to press.

Having spent many years in Ireland as a "working curate,” Mr. Seymour had ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the doctrines and practices of popery in that priest-enslaved country. Being desirous of investigating that unscriptural and antiscriptural system of error and superstition, as it actually exists at Rome, he spent several months in that city, where he enjoyed peculiar advantages for surveying the various phases which popery assumes. The result of his observations is delivered in the present volume.

Mr. Seymour entered Italy by way of Switzerland, of the scenery and religious state of which country he has given some valuable descriptions; and his careful examination of the condition of the Protestants and Papists enables him to confirm the remark which has often been made by observant travellers, viz., "that in all the comfort, the independence, and the education which constitute modern civilization, the cantons which are Protestant are far in advance of those that are Roman Catholic."

On leaving Switzerland, Mr. Seymour visited the celebrated cathedral of Milan, in which are deposited the relics of Carlo Borromeo, one of the canonised saints of the Romish Church.

"And if in his life he loved not the pomps and vanities' of the world, he has at least in his death as ample a share as the most ambitious could desire. The poor fleshless skeleton, there waiting till the resurrection-morning, will arise, clothed in the richest costume of silver and gold, with rings, and chains, and crosier studded with the most brilliant and precious gems, enshrined in a case of chrystal of incalculable costliness. There the eyeless skull-the noseless face-the grinning mouth exhibits a ghastly sight-a hideous and loathsome and sickening spectacle, mocking the gorgeous and splendid trappings in which the skeleton is arraved. Multitudes kneel and pray to this ghastly spectacle, which seems to mock the eyeless skull with such pompous pageantry" (p. 51).

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