But you fair star! as first created shine,
  In never fading immortality! 
  Like vice, from virtue’s glance, yon clouds retire,
    Before the smile of one benignant ray,
  Sleepless and sad, my soul would fain aspire,
  Promethean like, to snatch ethereal fire,
    And draw relief from thee! bright harbinger of day!

JNO.  JONES.

* * * * *

THE SKETCH-BOOK

* * * * *

SCHINDERHANNES, THE GERMAN ROBBER.

At the commencement of the French Revolution, and for some time after, the two banks of the Rhine were the theatre of continual wars.  Commerce was interrupted, industry destroyed, the fields ravaged, and the barns and cottages plundered; farmers and merchants became bankrupts, and journeymen and labourers thieves.  Robbery was the only mechanical art which was worth pursuing, and the only exercises followed were assault and battery.  These enterprises were carried on at first by individuals trading on their own capital of skill and courage; but when the French laws came into more active operation in the seat of their exploits, the desperadoes formed themselves, for mutual protection, into copartnerships, which were the terror of the country.  Men soon arose among them whose talents, or prowess, attracted the confidence of their comrades, and chiefs were elected, and laws and institutions established.  Different places of settlement were chosen by different societies; the famous Pickard carried his band into Belgium and Holland; while on the confines of Germany, where the wild provinces of Kirn, Simmerm, and Birkenfield offered a congenial field, the banditti were concentrated, whose last and most celebrated chief, the redoubted Schinderhannes, is the subject of this brief notice.

His predecessors, indeed, Finck, Peter the Black, Zughetto, and Seibert were long before renowned among those who square their conduct by the good old rule of clubs; they were brave men, and stout and pitiless robbers.  But Schinderhannes, the boldest of the bold, young, active and subtle, converted the obscure exploits of banditti into the comparatively magnificent ravages of “the outlaw and his men;” and sometimes marched at the head of sixty or eighty of his troop to the attack of whole villages.  Devoted to pleasure, no fear ever crossed him in its pursuit; he walked publicly with his mistress, a beautiful girl of nineteen, in the very place which the evening before had been the scene of one of his criminal exploits; he frequented the fairs and taverns, which were crowded with his victims; and such was the terror he had inspired, that these audacious exposures were made with perfect impunity.  Free, generous, handsome, and jovial, it may even be conceived that sometime he gained the protection from love which could not have been extorted by force.