r infant, whose mental restlessness began in the cradle, although his
character and destiny seem to have been comprehended by the father. The
priest, however, remains cold and indifferent throughout, never once
seeking to render the two beings, whom he had himself united in a
sacramental bond, intelligible to each other, nor to save the
unfortunate boy brought to him for baptism, the sole fruit of this
unhappy marriage.

Our author also stigmatizes the whole medical art of our day as a
science of death and moral torture. While the anguished father tries to
penetrate the decrees of Providence, and in his agony demands from God
how the innocent and helpless infant can have deserved a punishment so
dreadful as the loss of sight, the doctor admires the strength of the
nerves and muscles of the blue eyes of the fair child, at the same time
announcing to his father that he is struck with total and hopeless
blindness. Immediately after the declaration of this fearful sentence,
he turns to the distressed parent to ask him if he would like to know
the name of this malady, and that in Greek it is called [Greek:
amaurosis]

Indeed, through the whole of this melancholy scene, only one human being
manifests any deep moral feeling--a woman, a servant! Falling upon her
knees, she prays the Holy Virgin to take her eyes, and place them in the
sightless sockets of the young heir, her fragile but beloved charge.
Thus it is a woman of the people who, in the midst of the corrupt and
dissolving society, alone preserves the sacred traditions of sympathy
and self-sacrifice.

The cruel tyranny of Pancratius and the mob, is also full of important
lessons. From it we gather that despotism does not consist in the fact
of the whole power being vested in the hands of one or many, _but in the
truth that a government is without love for the governed, whatever may
be its constitutional form_. One or many, an assembly of legislators or
a king, an oligarchy or a mob, may be equally despotic, if love be not
the ruling principle.

With these few remarks, some of them necessary for a full comprehension
of this subtile and many-sided Polish drama, we leave the reader to the
pleasant task of its perusal.

He will find a full and eloquent criticism, in which its faults and
beauties are ably discussed, in a course of 'Lectures on Sclavonic
Literature,' delivered by the Polish poet Mickiewicz, before the College
of France. Most of the above remarks have be