remembered to his friends in the council, mounted the scaffold with firmness, and gave the signal to the executioner. The moment that the drop fell, a howl of sorrow and despair rose from the innumerable spectators. Hundreds turned away their faces from the polluting sight, fled with loud wailings towards the Hoogley, and plunged into its holy waters, as if to purify themselves from the guilt of having looked upon such a crime. These feelings were not confined to Calcutta. The whole province was greatly excited; and the population of Dacca, in particular, gave strong signs of grief and dismay.-MACAULAY.

Ex. 1.-Write an outline of the above narrative.

Ex. 2.-Write out the narrative from your own outline.

SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THE FATHER OF
FREDERIC THE GREAT.

PART I.

FREDERIC, surnamed the Great, son of Frederic William, was born in 1712 It may safely be pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of will. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature or to the strange training which he underwent. The history of his boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist

the parish workhouse, Smike at Dotheboy's Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown. The nature of Frederic William was hard and bad, and the habit of exercising arbitrary power had made him frightfully savage. His rage constantly vented itself to right and left in curses and blows. When his majesty took a walk, every human being fled before him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menagerie. If he met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home and mind her brats. If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer, and enforced this pious advice by a sound caning, administered on the spot. But it was in his own house that he was most unreasonable and ferocious. His son Frederic and his daughter Wilhelmina, afterwards Margravine of Baireuth, were in an especial manner objects of his aversion. His own mind was uncultivated. He despised literature. He hated infidels, papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and

to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play blackgammon for three-halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand. Ex. 3.-Make an abridgment of the above.

Ex. 4.-Write out the narrative in full from your own abridgment.

PART II.

The Prince Royal showed little inclination either for the serious employments or for the amusements of his father. He shirked the duties of the parade; he detested the fume of tobacco; he had no taste either for backgammon or for field sports. He had an exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. But the offences of his youth were not characterised by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however, transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults but those to which he was himself inclined, and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven for his brutality by holding the softer passions in detestation. The Prince Royal, too, was not one of those who are content to take their religion on trust. He asked puzzling questions, and brought forward arguments which seemed to savour of something different from pure Lutheranism. The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or atheist his majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederic William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred. The flute was broken; the French books were sent out of the palace; the Prince was kicked, and cudgelled, and pulled by the hair. At dinner the plates were hurled at his head; sometimes he was restricted to bread and water; sometimes he was forced to swallow food so nauseous that he could not keep it on his stomach.

Ex. 5.-Write the outline of the above passage.

Ex. 6.-Write out the narrative from your own outline.

themselves gyered bobins from persons ality w And irl strains He examined the wild will be ea: fiz he was never for a moment ire from the suspicion that some fand might be pracThen he read the letters divided them into several

pasceta, and dignited his pleasure, generally by a mark, often by two of tree T la now and that by some caring epigram. By eight he hill generally finished this part of his task. The as pratiq terai was then in attendance and received instructions for the day as to all the military arrangements of the kingdom. Then the king went to review iis guards, not as kings ordinarily review tlidir guardy, but with the minute attention and severity of an old drili-sergeant. In the meantime the four cabinet secretaries, had been exployed in answering the letters on which the king that morning had signified his will. These unhappy men were forced to work all the year round like negro slaves in the time of the sugar crop. They never had a holiday. They never know what it was to dine. It was necessary that, before they stirred, they should finish the whole of their work. The king, always on his guard against treachery, took from the heap a handful of letters at random, and looked into them to see whether his instructions had been exactly followed. This was no bad security against foul play on the part of the secretaries; for, if one of them were detected in a trick, he might think himself fortunate if he escaped with five years' imprisonment in a dungeon. Frederic then signed the replies, and all were sent off the same evening. – MACAULAY.

E. 7. Make an abridgment of the above passage.

Ex. 8. Write out the narrative from your own abridgment.

BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA.

THEN (after the taking of Fort William, Calcutta, in 1756) was committed that great crime, memorable for its singular atro

city, memorable for the tremendous retribution by which it was followed. The English captives were left to the mercy of the guards, and the guards determined to secure them for the night in the prison of the garrison, a chamber known by the fearful name of the Black Hole. Even for a single European malefactor, that dungeon would, in such a climate, have been too close and narrow. The space was only twenty feet square. The air-holes were small and obstructed. It was the summer. The prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. The gaolers in the meantime held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time before the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up on each side the heaps of dead corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously and covered up.-MACAULAY.

Ex. 9.-Make an abridgment of the above passage.

Ex. 10.-Write out the narrative from your own abridgment.

PHILIP II. OF SPAIN.

THE empire of Philip II. was undoubtedly the most powerful and splendid that ever existed in the world. In Europe, he ruled Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands on both sides of the Rhine, Franche Comté, Rousillon, the Milanese, and the two Sicilies. Tuscany, Parma, and the other small states of Italy, were as completely dependent on him as the Nizam and the Rajah of Berar now are on the East India Company. In Asia, the King of Spain was master of the Philippines and of all those rich settlements which the Portuguese had made on the coast of Calabar and Coromandel, in the peninsula of Malacca, and in the Spice Islands of the Eastern Archipelago. In America, his dominions extended on each side of the equator into the temperate zone. There is reason to believe that his annual revenue amounted,

in the season of his greatest power, to a sum near ten times as large as that which England yielded to Elizabeth. He had a standing army of 50,000 excellent troops, at a time when England had not a single battalion in constant pay. His ordinary naval force consisted of one hundred and forty galleys. He held, what no other prince in modern times has held, the dominion both of the land and of the sea. During the greater part of his reign, he was supreme on both elements. His soldiers marched up to the capital of France; his ships menaced the shores of England.

It is no exaggeration to say that, during several years, his power over Europe was greater than even that of Napoleon. The influence of the French Emperor never extended beyond high-water mark. The narrowest strait was to his power what it was of old believed that a running stream was to the sorceries of a witch. While his army entered every metropolis from Moscow to Lisbon, the English fleets blockaded every port from Dantzic to Trieste. Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, Guernsey, enjoyed security through the whole course of a war which endangered every throne on the continent. The victorious and imperial nation which had filled its museums with the spoils of Antwerp, of Florence, and of Rome, was suffering painfully from the want of luxuries which use had made necessaries. While pillars and arches were rising to commemorate the French conquests, the conquerors were trying to manufacture coffee out of chicory and sugar out of beet-root. The influence of Philip on the continent was as great as that of Napoleon. The Emperor of Germany was his kinsman. France, torn by religious dissensions, was never a formidable opponent, and was sometimes a dependent ally. At the same time, Spain had, what Napoleon desired in vain, ships, colonies, and commerce. She long monopolised the trade of America and of the Indian Ocean. All the gold of the West, and all the spices of the East, were received and distributed by her. During many years of war, her commerce was interrupted only by the predatory enterprises of a few roving privateers. Even after the defeat of the Armada, English statesmen continued to look with great dread on the maritime power of Philip.-MACAULAY.

Ex. 11.-Write the outlines of the above.

Ex. 12.-Write out the passage in full from your own outline.

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

In the wildest parts of Scotland the "Pilgrim's Progress" is the delight of the peasantry. In every nursery the "Pilgrim's