er'd, and then fell;
With gasps and glaring eyes he lay,
And reeking limbs immoveable,
His first and last career is done!
On came the troop--they saw him stoop,
They saw me strangely bound along
His back with many a bloody thong:
They stop, they start, they snuff the air,
Gallop a moment here and there,
Approach, retire, wheel round and round,
Then plunging back with sudden bound,
Headed by one black mighty steed,
Who seem'd the patriarch of his breed,
Without a single speck or hair
Of white upon his shaggy hide;
They snort, they foam, neigh, swerve aside.
And backward to the forest fly,
By instinct, from a human eye.
They left me there to my despair,
Link'd to the dead and stiffening wretch,
Whose lifeless limbs beneath me stretch,
Believed from that unwonted weight,
From whence I could not extricate
Nor him nor me--and there we lay,
The dying on the dead!
I little deem'd another day
Would see my houseless, helpless head.

BYRON.

[Notes: _Mazeppa_ (1645-1709) was at first in the service of the King
of Poland, but on account of a charge brought against him suffered the
penalty described in the poem. He afterwards joined the Cossacks and
became their leader; was in favour for a time with Peter the Great; but
finally joined Charles XII., and died soon after the battle of Pultowa
(1709), in which Charles was defeated by Peter.

_Ukraine_ ("a frontier"), a district lying on the borders of Poland and
Russia.

_Werst_. A Russian measure of distance.]

* * * * *

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.

We make our first introduction to Wedgwood about the year 1741, as the
youngest of a family of thirteen children, and as put to earn his bread,
at eleven years of age, in the trade of his father, and in the branch
of a thrower. Then comes the well-known small-pox: the settling of the
dregs of the disease in the lower part of the leg: and the amputation of
the limb, rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such
palpable occasion to record our obligations to the small-pox. But, in
the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease, which came to him as
a two-fold scourge, was probably the occasion of his subsequent
excellence.