He received the announcement philosophically, and after naming a few things for which he expressed a desire to live, he said to the judge--about the last thing he said on earth, "Yes; for these things I should like to live; but--but--judge--(they had many a time read the poet together)--I shall see--Burns!" Socrates, upon receiving sentence of death, said, amongst other things, to his judges, "Is this, do you think, no happy journey? Do you think it nothing to speak with Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod?" "Shakespeare's Joan of Arc," says Hayward, "is a mere embodiment of English prejudice; yet it is not much further from the truth than Schiller's transcendental and exquisitely poetical character of the maid. The German dramatist has also idealized Don Carlos to an extent that renders recognition difficult; and he has flung a halo round William Tell which will cling to the name while Switzerland is a country or patriotism any better than a name. Yet more than a hundred years ago the eldest son of Haller undertook to prove that the legend, in its main features, is the revival or imitation of a Danish one, to be found in Saxo Grammaticus. The canton of Uri, to which Tell belonged, ordered the book to be publicly burnt, and appealed to the other cantons to cooperate in its suppression, thereby giving additional interest and vitality to the question, which has been at length pretty well exhausted by German writers. The upshot is that the episode of the apple is relegated to the domain of the fable; and that Tell himself is grudgingly allowed a commonplace share in the exploits of the early Swiss patriots. Strange to say, his name is not mentioned by any contemporary chronicler of the struggle for independence. Sir A. Callcott's picture of Milton and his Daughters, one of whom holds a pen as if writing to his dictation, is in open defiance of Dr. Johnson's statement that the daughters were never taught to write. There is the story of Poussin impatiently dashing his sponge against his canvas, and producing the precise effect (the foam on a horse's mouth) which he had been long and vainly laboring for; and there is a similar one told of Haydn, the musical composer, when required to imitate a storm at sea. He kept trying all sorts of passages, ran up and down the scale, and exhausted his ingenuity in heaping together chromatic intervals and strange discords. Still Curtz (the author of the libretto) was not satisfied. At last the musician, out of all patience, extended his hands to the two extremities of the keys, and, bringing them rapidly together, exclaimed, 'The deuce take the tempest; I can make nothing of it.' 'That is the very thing,' exclaimed Curtz, delighted with the truth of the representation. Neither Haydn nor Curtz had ever seen the sea. Sir David Brewster, in his life of Newton, says that neither Pemberton nor Whiston, who received from Newton himself the history of his first ideas of gravity, records the story of the falling apple.