elen Maria Williams, whose muse, half
English, half French, has published poems, sonnets, and other pieces of
verse, besides several political and historical works. This superior woman,
at the same time that she gave birth, under the influence of sensibility
and fancy, to works of inspiration, portrayed the details of the events of
the French revolution, in the centre of which she threw herself, in 1792,
from pure enthusiasm for liberty.--_Foreign Quarterly Review._

* * * * *

AMERICAN LAW.

"No commentator," says Judge Hall, in his Letters from the West, "has
taken any notice of _Linch's Law_, which was once the _lex loci_ of
the frontiers. Its operation was as follows:--When a horse thief, a
counterfeiter, or any other desperate vagabond, infested a neighbourhood,
evading justice by cunning, or by a strong arm, or by the number of his
confederates, the citizens formed themselves into a "_regulating company_,"
a kind of holy brotherhood, whose duty was to purge the community of its
unruly members. Mounted, armed, and commanded by a leader, they proceeded
to arrest such notorious offenders as were deemed fit subjects of
exemplary justice; their operations were generally carried on in the night.
Squire Birch, who was personated by one of the party, established his
tribunal under a tree in the woods, and the culprit was brought before him,
tried, and generally convicted; he was then tied to a tree, lashed without
mercy, and ordered to leave the country within a given time, under pain of
a second visitation. It seldom happened that more than one or two were
thus punished; their confederates took the hint and fled, or were
admonished to quit the neighbourhood."

* * * * *

MONUMENTAL ALTERATION.

The following odd story is related respecting a monument in a chapel,
adjoining _Stene_, a fine family seat in the north:--The sculptor, in that
vile taste which seems to have originated in an unhappy design of making
every thing connected with the grave revolting to our feelings, had
ornamented this monument with "a very ghastly, grinning alabaster skull;"
and the bishop one day expressed a wish to his domestic chaplain, Dr. Grey,
that it had not been placed there. Grey, upon this, sent to Banbury for
the sculptor, and consulted with him whether it was not possible to
convert it into a soothing, instead of a painful object. After some
consideration, the a