High mass! The stall'd and banner'd quire-- White canons--priests in quaint attire-- The unfamiliar prayer: The fumes that practised hands dispense, The tinkling bells, the jingling pence, The tax'd but welcome chair: The beams from ruby panes that glow, Of rhythmal chant the ebb and flow: The organ, that from boundless stores Its trembling inspiration pours O'er all the sons of care; Now joyous as the festal lyre, When torch and song and wine inspire; Now tender as Cremona's shell, When hush'd orchestras own the spell And watch the ductile bow-- Now rolling from its thunder-cloud, Dark peals o'er that retiring crowd, And now has ceased to blow. CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND. INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS--AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH. The sunshine and the green leaves embrace not all that we should know of physical nature. Storm and darkness have their signs, which we do well to study; and in the tempests of the tropics, or the long winter darkness of the poles, we have types of the character of different sections of the globe, more marked than the varying warmth of the sun, or the character of the vegetation--but not perhaps so pleasing. Even so, the storm and darkness of the human soul--the criminal nature of man, provide their peculiar food for the thinker and inquirer. The annals of virtue have their own elevations and delights; but those of vice are no more to be passed over than the dark and stormy hours in the history of each revolution round the sun. "While some affect the sun, and some the shade," there may even be those whose most deeply cherished associations are with these unlit hours--who prefer the night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer view--like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes: the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The _ordinary_ vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy. It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved