Then she once more ascended the cart, which drove away with her, this time at a brisk trot instead of a funeral pace, whilst I went to the council-house to hang Engolf.... The body remained hanging till sunset, then I took it down, laid it in the coffin, and went my way home.” “There was revel and jubilee in the house. With song and dance, and play, and flowing jugs, the servants celebrated the headsman’s wedding day. And when the hour came, I led Elizabeth to her chamber, drew my father’s sword from its scabbard, and placed it in the bridal bed between her and myself. There it has ever since remained.” With this singular and thoroughly German incident, the headsman’s memoirs, as conveyed in autobiographical form, conclude, although we may presume the greater portion of the other volumes to be derived from similar records, moulded into a different shape by Mr Chézy. The second volume consists of one long narrative, entitled “Hildebrand Pfeiffer,” a story of the seventeenth century. An executioner plays an important part in it, but is not the hero of the tale, as in Benz’s narrative. Hildebrand Pfeiffer is a man of five-and-thirty, of handsome face and person, who has studied long and successfully at Heidelberg, Prague, and Paris, and has learnt surgery at Cologne, where we now find him. Possessed by the demon of pride and ambition, he sees no better way of attaining the brilliant position he covets, than through the medium of the philosopher’s stone, at whose discovery he ardently labours under the guidance of Doctor David da Silva, or Master Wood, as the vulgar translated his Portuguese name—a learned physician and ex-teacher at the high school, to whom Hildebrand serves as assistant and amanuensis. Besides dabbling in white magic, the old Jew-leech is shrewdly suspected of dealing in the blacker sort, but this does not prevent scholars flocking to gather wisdom from his lips, and sick persons sending for him so often as their fears of death prevail with their avarice to pay his heavy fee. And he has long been left unmolested to his mysterious pursuits, when, in an evil hour, he sends his old servant, in company with a young maiden, to gather mandragora at the gallows’ foot. The plant is to be employed in some alchemical conjuration, and is valuable only if gathered at the witching hour by a perfect virgin. The one selected is Adelgunde, a beautiful girl, who loves Hildebrand, and is beloved by him. Unfortunately, upon the night selected for plucking the mystical mandrake, the headsman and his assistants repair to the place of execution to inter the corpse of a suicide, and there detect and seize the two women, the elder of whom throws the blame of her unholy proceedings upon Da Silva and Hildebrand. There is, perhaps, rather too much of witchcraft in the volume, but some of the incidents are very wild and original. With more skill and care, and power of description, Mr Chézy might have constructed a three volume romance of a striking