"Their gaiety was at its height, when suddenly the sound of a distant bell stole with milky gentleness on the ear. In an instant all present fell on their knees, and, with their arms devoutly crossed upon their breasts, raised, in heavenly unison, their hymn of votive praise to the Virgin." Here endeth the first chapter of the "Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell." As "a satire on the literary absurdities of the day," to quote its author, this capital fooling could not be surpassed; indeed, to those who remember, as the present writer can distinctly, the effusions in prose and verse--or, as Jerrold called it, "prose and worse"--that more or less filled the pages of the Keepsakes, the Books of Gems and Beauty of a long bygone time, the "Monster of the Deep Dell" is scarcely a caricature. But I have not yet done with him. The second chapter is devoted to an account in Grabalotti language of the early life and loves of the interesting bandit: "Rino Grabalotti is my name," he says. "Italy is my nation; the Deep Dell is my dwelling-place, and--but no! never shall monkish cant pollute the lips to baleful imprecation attuned for ever. Let the blue and hideous glare of the lightning, and the ghastly gleam of the hag-ridden meteor, illumine the deeds of my doing. Growl, ye thunders! Roar, ye tempests! Yell, ye fiends, and howl in hideous harmony a prelude to my tale!" He then proceeds to inform the artist (who, with an eye for copy, ventures to hint "that an outline of his history would be interesting") that he was the son of a priest, and born in Naples; and naturally much annoyed by the scandalous irregularity of his birth, he devotes his life to robbing and murdering as many of his fellow-creatures as good fortune places in his hands in the practice of his profession. But I anticipate. Grabalotti declines to say much about his infancy; he seems to have been pretty often reminded of the scandal of his birth, and as often he registered a vow that, sooner or later, he would close for ever the mouths of the slanderers. "It was in my sixteenth summer," he continues, "that I really began to live. Though in years a boy, I was in all else a man. Passion hurtled in my darkening eye, and plunged my heart in lava. I loved; what Italian at my age does not? Yes; I--the ruthless, the scathed, the smouldering, the sanguinary, the Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell--I, even I, gasped with tortuous anguish in the maddening transports of Cupid." Giulia is the name of the fair creature who has caused the eruption of this volcanic passion; and on what the bandit-lover calls "an evening of rosy gladness," he seeks his fair enslaver's window, guitar in hand. But the voice, "which was the best at a barcarole of any in Naples," had raised a very few love notes, when a rough voice exclaims: "'What dost thou here, spurious offspring of sacrilege?' accompanying the inquiry by an equally rough salutation from behind (oh, madness!)--'begone!'