“Light! give me more light,” is the cry of the dying woman in “The Dead Secret,”—whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is “light!” the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness closes about him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he moves uneasily. “Not that,” he murmurs, “light to the last!” And putting forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to Burley’s room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage lattice—not the miserable ray lit by a human hand—but the still and holy effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep—calmly, and the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death sometimes leaves; “and still they were turned towards the light; and the light burned clear.” Which things are an allegory. Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day” he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only. The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’” John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William, ‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time before.” _THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND._ PROVERBS xviii. 24.