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《伊利亚随笔续集》


 PREFACE

    TO THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA

    BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA

    This pentleman, who for some months past had been in a deing way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.

    To say truth, it is time he were gohe humour of the thing, if there was ever mu it, retty well exhausted; and a two years and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

    I am now at liberty to fess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friends writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you -- a sort of unlicked, indite things -- villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; aer it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strao him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances) -- where uhe first person (his favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlore of a try-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and es -- in direct opposition to his own earl<var></var>y history.

    My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not like him, hated him; and some, who once liked him afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little  what he uttered, and in whos<bdi>99lib.</bdi>e presence. He observed her time nor place, and would een out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist lie would pass for a freethinker; while the other fa set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his ses. Few uood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite uood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure -- irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. -- He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; a, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could uand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joio an ie impediment of speech, forbade him to be all orator; and he seemed determihat no one else should play that part when he resent. He etit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good pany, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, an<code>9９ｌｉｂ.</code>d be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, be would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but imes out of ten, he trived by this device to send away a whole pany his enemies. His ceptions rose kihan his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused  to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his panions for some individuality of character which they maed. -- Henot many persons of sce, and few professed literati, were of his cils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uain fortune; and, as to such people only nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) ine, he passed with most of them freat miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His <footer>9９ｌｉｂ.</footer>intimados, to fess a truth, were in the worlds eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society; and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stu -- but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were sdalised (and offences were sure to arise), he could not help it. When be has been remonstrated with for not making more cessions to the feeling of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever cede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry -- as the friendly vapour asded, how his Prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which toied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!

    I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age and while he preteo g to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Disc with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburbareat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial mao him. &quot;They take me for a visiting governor,&quot; he muttered early. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he approached o that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, a a wary eye upon the advances of age that should s<footer></footer>o entitle him. He herded always, while it ossible, with people youhan himself. He did not  to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resehe impertinenanhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.

 BLAKESMOOR IN H----HIRE

    I DO not knoleasure more affeg than te at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and plations on the great and good, whom we fan succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, inpatible with the bustle of modern occy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us betweeering ay and a crowded church. Iter it is <samp></samp>ce but some present human frailty -- an act of iion on the part of some of the auditory -- or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher -- puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the plad the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? -- go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some try church: think of the piety that has khere -- the gregations, old and young, that have found solation there -- the meek pastor -- the docile parishioner. With no disturbiions, no cross flig parisons, drink iranquillity of the place, till thou thyself bee as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

    Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I rised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down: still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnifice could not have been crushed all at oo the mere dust and rubbish which I found it.

    The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to -- an antiquity.

    I was asto the indistin of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bouhe court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses ence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious.

    Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.

    Had I seen these brid-mortar k their process of destru, at the plug of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary  that ever hau about me -- it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a pannel of the yellow room.

    Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magi it, The tapestried bed-rooms -- tapestry so much better than painting -- not ad merely, but peopling the wainscot -- at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender ce in a momentary eye-enter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally -- all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana, and the still more provoking, and almost ary ess of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.

    Then, that haunted room -- in whirs. Battle died -- whereinto I have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear, and a sneaking curiosity, terror-taio hold unication with the past. -- How shall they build it up again?

    It was no old deserted place, yet not so loed but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing -- even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumblihers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the ra will of every apartment, knew every nook and er, wondered and worshipped everywhere.

    The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. Se a passion for the place possessed me in those years that, though there lay -- I shame to say how few roods distance from the mansion -- half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bouo the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strid proper prects, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me, and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Initus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects -- and those at not great distance from the house -- I was told of such -- what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden? So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawhought, still closer the feny chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cture of those excluding garden walls. I could have excla<var></var>imed with that garden-loving poet --

    Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,

    Curl me about, ye gadding vines,

    And oh so close your circles lace

    That I may never leave this place

    But, lest your fetters prove too weak,

    Ere I your silken bondage break,

    Do you, O brambles  me too,

    And, courteous briars, nail me through!

    I was here as in a loemple. Snug firesides -- low-built roof-parlours te by ten -- frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home -- these were the dition of my birth -- the wholesome soil which I lanted i, without impeat to their te lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the trasting acts of a great fortune.

    To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been behe pr<tt></tt>ide of ary may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of aors; and the coat less antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbrays or DeCliffords pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do i them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trent to their swords?  it be hacked off as a spur ? or torn away like a tarnished garter?

    What, else, were the families of the great to us? leasure should we take iedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass mos? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a ate and correspo elevation?

    Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished `Scut that hung upoime-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood p upon thy mystic characters -- thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic &quot;Resurgam&quot; -- till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my m eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.

    This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable ge of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.

    Who it was by dying that had earhe splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-staiold that its subject was of two turies back.

    And what if my aor at that date was some Damoetas feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lin -- did I in less ear vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud Aegon ? -- repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.

    If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to plain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a rifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe vanity.

    I was the true desdent of those old W----s; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.

    Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone iving them in fancy my own family name, one -- and then another -- would seem to smile, reag forward from the vas, the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the va their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity.

    That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb -- that huhe great bay window -- with the bright yellow H----shire hair, and eye of watchet hue -- so like my Alice! -- I am persuaded she was a true Elia -- Mildred Elia, I take it.

    Mioo, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars -- stately busts in marble ranged round: of whose tenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowniy of Nero, I remembe?r, had most of my wonder but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the ess of death, yet freshness of immortality.

    Mioo, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, ohe terror of luckless poacher, or self-fetful maiden -- so on sihat bats have roosted in it.

    Mioo -- whose else ? -- thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristiate to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretg still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the tre, Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.

    Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope -- a germ to be revivified.

 POOR RELATIONS

    A POOR Relation -- is the most irrelevant thing in nature, -- a pieperti corresponden odious approximation, -- a haunting sce, -- a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity, -- an unwele remembrancer, -- a perpetually recurring mortification, -- a drain on your purse, -- a more intolerable dun upon your pride, -- a drawback upon success, -- a rebuke to your rising, -- a stain in your blood, -- a blot on your scut, -- a rent in yarment, -- a deaths head at your ba, -- Agathocles pot, -- a Mordecai in yate, -- a Lazarus at your door, -- a lion in your path, -- a frog in your chamber, -- a fly in your oi, -- a mote in your eye, -- a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends, -- the ohing not needful, -- the hail in harvest, -- the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.

    He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you &quot;That is Mr. ----.&quot; A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to despair of eai. He eh smiling, and -- embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about diime -- wheable is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have pany -- but is io stay. He filleth a chair, and your visiters two children are aodated at a side table. He never eth upon open days, when your wife says with some c<big></big>omplacy, &quot;My dear, perhaps Mr.---- will drop in to-day.&quot; He remembereth birth-days -- and professeth he is fortuo have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small -- yet suffereth himself to he importuned into a slice against his first resolutioicketh by the port -- yet will he prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think &quot;they have seen him before.&quot; Every one speculateth upon his dition; and the most part take him to be a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian o imply that his other is the same with our own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual depe; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state thas a t. He is a wuest than a try tenant, inasmuch as he brih up  -- yet `tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that yuests take him for one. He is asked to make o the whist table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and -- resents bei out. When the pany break up, he proffereth to go for a coach -- ahe servant go. He recollects yrandfather; and will thrust in some mean, and quite unimportant ae of -- the family. He k when it was not quite so flourishing as &quot;he is blest in seeing it now.&quot; He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth -- favourable parisons. With a refleg sort of gratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture; and insults you with a special endation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more fortable about the old tea-kettle -- whiust remember. He dare say you must find a great venien having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth ~if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did not know till lately, that sud-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable; his pliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a er, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.

    There is a worse evil uhe sun, and that -- a is female Poor Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well; but your i she-relative is hopeless. &quot;He is an old humourist,&quot; you may say, &quot;and affects to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks would take them to he. You are fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one.&quot; But in the indications of female poverty there  be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. &quot;She is plainly related to the L----s; or what does she at their house?&quot; She is, in all probability, your wifes cousin. imes out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is somethiween a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to he repressed sometimes -- aliquando sufflaminandus erat -- but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped -- after the gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honour of taking wih her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former -- because he does. She calls the servant Sir; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The childrens goverakes upoo correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord.

    Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvao which this chimeriotion of affinity stituting a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady of great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him &quot;her son Dick.&quot; But she has wherewithal in the end to repense his indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been her seeming business, and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dicks temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dicks buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W---- was of my own standing at Christs, a fine classid a youth of Promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its actuality was inoffe was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a dista only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday ireets of this sneering and pryiropolis. W---- went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholars life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introdu, wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitown (worse than his school array) g to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect; and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no disendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, whisult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youths finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits on him, to soothe and to abstract. He was alm<s>９9lｉｂ?</s>ost a healthy man; when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a sed and worse malignity. The father of W---- had hitherto exercised the humble profession of housepai N----, near Oxford. A supposed i with some of the heads of the colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the tenance of the young man, the determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with our Uies, the distaween the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called -- the trading part of the latter especially -- is carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W----`s father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W---- was a little, busy, ging tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to any-thing that bore the semblance of a gown -- iive to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously dug. Such a state of things could not last. W---- must ge the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; ahe sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they  bear, sure the dereli; he ot estimate the struggle. I stood with W----, the last afternoon I ever saw him, uhe eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High. street to the back of ***** college, where W---- kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and more reciled. I veo rally him -- finding him in a better mood -- upon a representation of the Artist Eva, which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused to he set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge of gratitude to his saint. W---- looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, &quot;knew his mounted sign -- and fled.&quot; A letter on his fathers table the  m, annouhat he had accepted a ission in a regiment about to embark for Pal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian.

    I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so emily painful; but this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much matter fic as well as ic associations, that it is difficult to keep the at distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my fathers table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed i black, of a sad yet ely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity; his words few or none; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little ination to have done so -- for my cue was to admire in silence., A particular elbow chair ropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his ing. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been<bdi></bdi> schoolfellows a world ago at Lin, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I ko be a place where all the money was ed -- and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twihemselves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur ied him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in aernal suit of m; a captive -- a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wo the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in aed towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument, toug their youthful days. The houses of the a city of Lin are divided (as most of my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distin formed an obvious divisioween the boys who lived above (however brought together in a on school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain; a suffit cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mountaineer; and would still maintain the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the above Boys (his own fa) over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his porary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic -- the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out -- and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the ree (so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who sed to insist upon advantages, generally trived to turn the versation upon some adroit by-endation of the old Minster; in the general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill, and the plainborn, could meet on a ciliating level, and lay down their less important differences. Only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the thought that came over me: &quot;Perhaps he will never e here again.&quot; He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable itant of his visits. He had refused, with a resistance amounting tour -- when my aunt, an old Linian, but who had something of this, in on with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season -- uttered the fol<u>.</u>lowing memorable application -- &quot; Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day.&quot; The old gentleman said nothing at the time -- but he took occasion in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened betweeo utter with an emphasis which chilled the pany, and which chills me now as I write it -- &quot;Woman, you are superannuated.&quot; John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasiohe offence. He died at the Mint (Anno 1781) where he had long held, what he ated, a fortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpehis was -- a Poor Relation.

 STAGE ILLUSION

    A PLAY is said to he well or ill acted in proportion to the sical illusion produced. Whether such illusion  in any case be perfect, is not the question. The  approach to it, we are told, is, wheor appears wholly unscious of the prese<bdo>?９9ｌｉｂ?</bdo>nce of spectators. In tragedy -- in all which is to affect the feelings -- this undivided attention to his stage business, seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians; and while these refereo an audience, in the shape of rant or se, are not too frequent or palpable, a suffit quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatiterest may be said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, iain characters in edy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or whivolve some notinant to the moral se is not a proof of the highest skill in the edian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit uanding with them; and makes them, unsciously to themselves, a party in the se. The utmost y is required in the mode of doing this; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession.

    The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to plate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward doo the life upon a stage would produything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannisters cowards. Could any thing he mreeable, mor<tt></tt>e pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even iremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for? We saw all the on symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the c khe teeth chattering; and could have sworn &quot;that man was frightened.&quot; But we fot all the while -- or kept it almost a secret to ourselves -- that he never once lost his self-possession; that he let out by a thousand droll looks aures -- meant at us, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the se, that his fiden his own resources had never once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward? or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist trived to palm upon us instead of an inal; while we secretly ived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a menuine terfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to he itants of cowardi real life, could have given us?

    Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable oage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rat藏书网her than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our passion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money bags and parts? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character -- the self-closeness with whi real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men -- evaporates. The miser bees sympathetic; i.e. is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality.

    Spleen, irritability -- the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produly pain to behold in the realities, terfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the ic appeo them, but in part from an inner vi that they are being acted before us; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by being done uhe life, or beside it; not to the life. When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed?, or only a pleasant terfeit, just enough of a likenise, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of reality?

    edians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more ear or true than the manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything before the curtain into his edy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the Personae Dramatis. There was as little liween him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually sidered, his execution was masterly. But edy is not this unbending thing for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious ses. The degrees of credibility demao the two things may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any otle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are tent with less than absolute truth. `Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We fess we love in edy to see an audieuralised behind the ses, taken in into the i of the drama, weled as by-standers however. There is something ungracious in a ic actor holding himself, aloof from all participation or  with those who are e to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his owold of it; but an old fool in farce may think he sees something, and by scious words and looks express it, as plainly as he  speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an imperti in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the se, rove of the pt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant imperti of edy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise mi>?</a>rth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of pt expressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion ic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dissatisfa and peevishness as is sistent with the pleasure of edy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in ear, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone whi the world must necessarily provoke a duel; his real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other character (which to re ic demands an antagonist icality on the part of the character opposed to it), and vert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a dht piepertinendeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in ear upon any unworthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wren the farce of Free and Easy.

    Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that ic ag at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstra from all refereo an audience, which is exacted of it; but that in some cases a sort of promise may take place, and all the purposes of dramatic delight attain by a judicious uanding, not too openly announced, between the ladies alemen -- on both sides of the curtain.

 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON

    JOYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown? to what genial region are we permitted to jecture that thou hast flitted.

    Art thou sowing thy WILD OATS yet (the harvest time was still to e with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus? or art thou enag Rove<q>９9lｉｂ?</q>r (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams?

    This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in truth any thing but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this body to be er than a ty gaol, forsooth, of some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. Thou k better than to be in a hurry to cast off those gyves; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshly te. It was thy Pleasure House, thy Palace of Daint藏书网y Devices; thy Louvre, or thy White Hall.

    What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now? or when may we expect thy aerial house-warming?

    Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now ot I intelligibly fancy thee iher.

    Is it too much to hazard a jecture, that (as the sen admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom Babes) there may exist -- not far perce from that storehouse of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions -- a LIMBO somewhere for PLAYERS? and that

    Up thither like aerial vapours fly

    Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things

    Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame?

    All the unaplishd works of Authors hands,

    Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixd,

    Damnd upoh, fleet thither----

    Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery----

    There, by the neighb moon (by some not improperly supposed thy Regent Pla upoh) mayst thou not still be ag thy managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and still a Manager.

    In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding posthumous empire.

    Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump oh) circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is Fye on sinful Phantasy.

    Magnifit were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT William Elliston! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven.

    It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst ferry Over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawling &quot;Sculls, Sculls:&quot; to which, with waving hand, and majestic a, thou deig no reply, other than in two curt monosyllables, &quot;No: Oars.&quot;

    But the laws of Plutos kingdom know small differeween king, and cobbler; manager, and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were termin<bdo></bdo>ant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some retly departed dle-snuffer.

    But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes, and private vanities! what denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered liner!

    s, sceptres; shield, sword, and trun; thy own ation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property mans wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy); the judges ermihe bs wig; the snuff-box a la Foppington -- all must overboard, he positively swears -- and that a mariner brooks no denial; for, sihe tiresome monodrame of the old Thra Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals,

    Aye, now `tis done, You are just boat weight; pura et puta anima.

    But bless me, how little you look!

    So shall we all look -- kings, and keysars -- stript for the last voyage.

    But the murky rogue pushes off, Adieu, pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade! with my parting thank<mark>..</mark>s for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or domestic,

    Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his two brethren the heavy dars -- ho Rhadamanth, alartial to players, weighing their parti-coloured existence here upoh, -- making at of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy real life as we call it, (though, substantially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury,) as but of so many echoe<samp>.</samp>s, natural repercussions, as to he expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy sedary or mock life, nightly upon a stage -- after a le castigation, with rods lighter than those Medusean ris, but just enough to &quot;whip the offending Adam out of thee&quot; -- shall courteously dismiss thee at the right hand gate -- the O. P. side of Hades -- that ducts to masques, and merry-makings, iheatre Royal of Proserpine

    PLAUDITO, ET VALETO.

 ELLISTONIANA

    My acquaintance wi<var>..</var>th the pleasant creature, whose loss we all deplore, was but slight.

    My first introdu to E., which afterwards ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a ter of the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame -- to auspicate, I suppose, the filial , a a going with a lustre -- was serving in person two damsels fair, who had e into the bbr></abbr>shop ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but iy to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some ference. With what an air did he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion upon the worth of the work iion, and laung out into a dissertation on its parative merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals! his ented ers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in edy ag the shop-man. So Lovelace sold his gloves in High Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he trived to carry  away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he had so generously submitted to; and from that hour I judged him, with no after repentao be a person, with whom it would be a felicity to be more acquainted.

    To dest upon his merits as a edian would be superfluous. With his blended private and professional habits alone I have to do; that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of every day life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and dining-parlours, a up the play when the play was ended. -- &quot;I like Wrench,&quot; a friend was saying to him one day, &quot;because he is the same natural, easy creature, oage, that he is off.&quot; &quot;My case exactly,&quot; retorted Elliston -- with a charming fetfulness, that the verse of a proposition does not always lead to the same clusion -- &quot; I am the same person off the stage that I am on.&quot; The infere first sight, seems identical; but exami a little, and it fesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other always, ag.

    And in truth this was the charm of Ellistons private deportment. You had a spirited performance always going on before your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel which he honours by his sleeping in it, bees ipso facto for that time a palace; so whereever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, a up his portable playhouse at ers of streets, and in the market-places. Upon fli pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme ced to be passiohe green baize carpet edy spontaneously rose beh his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles alainted -- in thought. So G. D. aloetises. I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors -- and some of them of Ellistons own stamp -- who shall have agreeably been amusing you in the part of a rake or a b, through the two or three hours of their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families, servants, &amp;other shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds aiments, till it eves with yearnings of universal sympathy; you absolutely long to go home, and do some good a. The play seems tedious, till you  get fairly out of the house, and realise your laudable iions. At length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of all that is amiable in humas steps forth -- a miser. Elliston was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfa? why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaong his private circles? with his temperament, his animal spirits, his good-nature, his follies perce, could hbbr></abbr>e do better thaify himself with his impersonation? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or b, oage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character preseo us in actual life? or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the impersonation? Could the man Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, and `scape goat trickeries of his prototype?

    &quot;But there is something not natural in this everlasting ag; we want the real man.&quot;

    Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you ot, or will not see, under some adventitious trappings, whievertheless, sit not at all insistently upon him? What if it is the nature of some men to he highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in players. Cibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanburgh could add to it.

    &quot;My ceit of his person,&quot; it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord Ba, -- &quot; was never increased towards him by his place or honours. But I have, and do reverence him for the greatness, that was only proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that bad been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that heaven would give him strength; freatness he could not want.&quot;

    The quality here ended was scarcely less spicuous in the subject of these idle reminisces, than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagihat an ued elevation to the dire of a great Londore, affected the sequence of Elliston,, or at all ged his nature, knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortuo enter him near St. Dunstans Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), on the m of his ele to that high office. Grasping my hand with a look of significe, he only uttered, -- &quot; Have you heard the news? then with another look following up the <u></u>blow, he subjoined, &quot;I am the future Manager of Drury Laheatre.&quot; -- Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for gratulation or reply, but mutely stalked away, leavio chew upon his new-blown dig leisure. In faothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his great style.

    But was he less great, (Be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity that supported in the ruins of Carthage the sular exile, and more retly transmuted for a more illustrious exile, the barren stableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in melancholy after-years, again, muear the same spot, I met him, when that sceptre had beeed from his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the small Olympic, his Elba? He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnifitly distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnifitly sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in the more liberal rese of depreciations doo his more lofty intellectual pretensions, &quot;Have you heard&quot; (his ary exordium) -- &quot;have you heard,&quot; said he, &quot;how they treat me? they put me in edy.&quot; Thought I -- but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal interruption -- &quot;where could they have put you better ?&quot; Then, after a pause -- &quot;Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,&quot; -- and so agaialked away, her staying, nor g for, responses.

    O, it was a rich se, -- but Sir A---- C---- ,the best of storytellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it -- that I was wito, iarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throhat Olympic Hill was his &quot;highest heaven;&quot; himself &quot;Jove in his chair.&quot; There he sat in state, while before him, on plaint of prompter, was brought for judgment -- how shall I describe her ? -- one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses -- a probationer for the town, iher of its senses -- the pertest little drab -- a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamps smoke -- who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a &quot;highly respectable&quot; audience, had precipitately quitted her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.

    &quot;And how dare you,&quot; said her Manager -- assuming a sorial severity which would have crushed the fidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices -- I verily believe, he thought her standing before him -- &quot; how dare you, Madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties?&quot; &quot;I was hissed, Sir.&quot; &quot;And you have the presumption to decide upoaste of the town ?&quot; &quot;I dont know that, Sir, but I will and to be hissed,&quot; was the subjoinder of young fidence -- when gathering up his features into one signifit mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation -- in a lesson o have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him -- his words were these: &quot;They have hissed me.&quot;

    `Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to Ly trembling under his lao persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace. &quot;I too am mortal.&quot; And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a proper uanding with the faculties of the respective recipients.

    &quot;Quite an Opera pit,&quot; he said to me, as he was courteously dug me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.

    Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he pronouhe latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us iemple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre ba, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare,  that for my own part I e but of one dish at dinner. &quot;I too never eat but ohing at dinner &quot; -- was his reply -- then after a pause &quot;<samp></samp>reing fish as nothing.&quot; The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory ests, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving O pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with siderate tendero the feelings of his sty but weliertainer.

    Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and not lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy bringing up! aiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, eg the man with the boy, took thee ba thy latest exercise of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, uhe roofs builded by the munifit and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silehis crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise.

 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING

    To mind the inside of a book is to eain ones self with the forced product of another mans brain. Now I think a man of quality a.９9ｌib?nd breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.

    -- Lord Foppington in the Relapse.

    AN ingenious acquaintany own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his inality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must fess that I dedicate no insiderable portion of my time to other peoples thoughts. I dream away my life in others speculations. I love to lose myself in other mens minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I ot sit and think. Books think for me.

    I have nnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I  read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I ot allow for such.

    In this catalogue of books which are no books -- biblia a-biblia -- I re Court dars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound aered at the back, Stific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertsoie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which &quot;lemans library should be without :&quot; the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jealeys Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I  read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.

    I fess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate octs. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kied play-book, then, opening what &quot;seem its leaves,&quot; to e bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find -- Adam smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclopaedias (Anglias or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would fortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.

    To be strong-backed a-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Magnifies after. This, when it  be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with Russia backs ever) is our e. A Shakespeare, or a Milton (uhe first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them fers no distin. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so on), strao say, raises no sweet emotions, no tig sense of property in the owhomsons Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dogs-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearanay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not fet kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old &quot;Circulating Library&quot; Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight! -- of the loress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-w mantuamaker) after her long days needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enting tents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better dition could we desire to<s>9９lｉｂ?</s> see them in?

    In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes -- Great Natures Stereotypes -- we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be &quot;eterne.&quot; But where a book is at oh good and rare -- where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes,

    We know not where is that Promethean torch

    That  its light relumine&quot; --

    such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess -- no casket is riough, no g suffitly durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.

    Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose-works, Fuller -- of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizehemselves (nor possibly ever will) iional heart, so as to bee stock books -- it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the oions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a unity of feeling with my trymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best, which have been ofteumbled about and handled. -- On the trary, I ot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the curreions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of uhing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the  fashion to modern sure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever being popular ? -- The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fashioed, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear -- the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By ----, if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both entator aon fast iocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets.

    I think I see them at their work -- these sapient trouble-tombs.

    Shall I be thought fantastical, if I fess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear -- to mi least -- than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in on discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

    Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes sermons ?

    Milton almost requires a solemn serviusic to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.

    Winter evenings -- the world shut out -- with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Wiale --

    These two poets you ot avoid reading aloud -- to yourself, or (as it ces) to some single person listening. More than one -- and it degees into an audience.

    Books of quiterest, that hurry on for is, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to eveter kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

    A neer, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the  (to save so mudividual time) for one of the clerks -- who is the best scholar -- to ence upoimes, or the icle, ae its entire tents aloud pro bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers shops and public-houses a fellow will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he unicates as some discovery. Another follows with his sele. So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient no one in the pany would probably ever travel through the tents of a whole paper.

    Neers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappoi.

    What aernal time that gentleman in black, at Nandus, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, &quot;the icle is in hand, Sir.&quot;

    ing in to an inn at night -- having ordered your supper -- what  be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some fuest -- two or three numbers of the old Town and try Magazine, with its amusie-d-tete <dfn></dfn>pictures&quot; -- The Royal Lover and Lady G----;&quot; &quot;The Melting Platonid the old Beau,&quot; -- and such like antiquated sdal? Would you exge it -- at that time, and in that place -- for a better book?

    Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did nret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading -- the Paradise Lost, or us, he could have read to him -- but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.

    I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading dide.

    I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been oected -- by a familiar damsel -- reed at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading -- Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determio read in pany, I could have wished it had been any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and -- went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to jecture, whether the blush (for there was oween us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.

    I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I ot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinners-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the m, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstra beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular tacts. An illiterate enter with a porters knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.

    There is a class of street-readers, whom I ever plate without affe -- the pentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls -- the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expeg every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, a uo deny themselves the gratification, they &quot;snatch a fearful joy.&quot; Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, wheallkeeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfa which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralised upon this subje two very toug but homely stanzas.

    I saw a boy with eager eye

    Open a book upon a stall,

    And read, as hed devour it all;

    Which wheall-man did espy,

    Soon to the boy I heard him call,

    &quot;You, Sir, you never buy a book,

    Therefore in one you shall not look.&quot;

    The boy passd slowly on, and with a sigh

    He wishd he never had been taught to read,

    Then of the old churls books he should have had no need.

    Of sufferings the poor have many,

    Whiever  the rinoy:

    I soon perceivd another boy,

    Who lookd as if hed not had any

    Food, for that day at least -- enjoy

    The sight of eat in a tavern larder.

    This boys case, then thought I, is surely harder,

    Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,

    Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat:

    No wonder if he wish he neer had learnd to eat.

 THE OLD MARGATE HOY

    I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Uies. o these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin trives to wheedle me on three or four seasons to a watering place. Old attats g to her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary pe Hastings -- and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many circumstances bio make it the most agreeable holyday of my life. We had her of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in pany.

    I fet thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weatherbeaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough aodation -- ill exged for the foppery and fresh-water niess of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou ittedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou we swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patiehy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of o with sulphureous smoke -- a great sea-chimera, eying and furnag the deep; or liker to that fire-god parg up Sder.

    I fet thy ho, yet slender crew, with their coy relut responses (yet to the suppression of anything like pt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement? `Specially  I fet thee, thou happy medium, thou shade e between us and them, ciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, fortable ambassador between sea and land whose sailor-trowsers did not more vingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter aprohem, with thy -fingered practi thy ary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore -- a master cook of Eastcheap? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, ariner, attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations -- not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the oer-washing billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowiher) how did thy offiinisterings, still catering for our fort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial versation, alleviate the closeness and the fi of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little !

    With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose discourse iy might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish plexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you  swallow at a time -- the `nibbling pickpockets of your patience -- but one who itted dht, day-light depredations upon his neighbours faith. He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty thh-paced liar, and plu oo the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his pany. Not many riot many wise, or learned, posed at that time the on stowage of a Margate packet~ We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied~ There might be an exception or two among us, but I s to make any invidious distins among such a jolly, panionable ships pany, as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must he ceded to the Genius Loci. Had the fide<bdo></bdo>nt fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with oher element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from thy memory much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been Aid-de-camp (among other rare acts and fortuo a Persian prince, and at one blow had stri off the head of the King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Princes daughter. I fet what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, bining with the loss of his sort, was the reason of his quitting Persia; but with the rapidity of a magi he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the fidence of great ladies. There was some story of a Princess -- Elizabeth, if I remember -- having intrusted to his care araordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion -- but as I am not certain of the name or circumsta this distance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I ot call to mind half his pleasant wonders but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not unon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the &quot;ignorant present.&quot; But when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his ret reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as &quot;the Colossus iion had beeroyed long since:&quot; to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to cede thus much, that &quot;the figure was indeed a little damaged.&quot; This was the only oppositio with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, or he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more placy than ever, firmed, as it were, by the extreme dour of that cession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, whie of our own pany (havihe voyage before) immediately reising, and pointing out to us, was s<q>藏书网</q>idered by us as no ordinary seaman.

    All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It was a lad, appare<u></u>ntly very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile: and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by act, and they seemed not to  him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring and when some of us pulled out our private stores -- our eat and our salads -- he produone, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintah him, which he seemed her to court nor dee, we learhat he was going tate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, &quot;he had no friends.&quot; These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea, cooperating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adveo me -- that had bee up in populous cities for many months before, have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon.

    Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwele parisons), if I endeavour to at for the dissatisfa which I have heard so many persons fess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given -- referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preceptions of them -- scarcely goes deep enough into the questiohe same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression: enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappoi. -- Is it not, that iter we had exited to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain passable by the eye, but all the sea at oHE ENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH! I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He es to it for the first time -- all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life, -- all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romand poetry; crowding their images, aing straributes from expectation. -- He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast tis it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner

    For many a day, and many a dreadful night,

    Incessant lab round the stormy Cape;

    of fatal rocks, and the &quot;still-vexed Bermoothes;&quot; of great whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the u depths: of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible oh --

    Be but as buggs thten babes withal,

    pared with the creatures in the seas entral;

    of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of ented isles; of mermaids grots --

    I do not assert that in sober ear he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is uhe tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with fused hints and shadows of all these; and wheual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic coast -- a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him -- what  it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive eai? Or if he has e to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing parable to the vast oer-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement ? -- Who, in similar circumstances, has not beeed to exclaim with Charuba, in the poem of Gebir,

    Is this the mighty o I -- is this all?

    I love town, or try; but this detestable que Port is her. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls &quot;verdure to the edge of the sea.&quot; I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I ot stand all day on the naked beach, watg the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would faiire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with s, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, aerogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the O. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair ho fishing town, and no more, it were something with a few straggling fishermens huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces bee the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only hohief. He robs nothing but the revenue, -- an abstra I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boa<bdi></bdi>ts, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfa. I  even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurreo watch their illicit trymen -- townsfolk or brethren perce -- whistling to the sheathing and uhing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who uhe mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a fo show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the visitants from town, that e here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish da these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What  they want here? if they had a true relish of the o, why have they `brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these sty book-rooms -- marine libraries as they entitle them -- if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book &quot;to read strater in ?&quot; what are their foolish cert-rooms, if they e, as they would faihought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretention. They e, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers; but I have watched the better sort of them -- now and then, an ho citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their tenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, pig up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things; but, in a poor week, imagination slas: they begin to discover that cockles produo pearls, and then -- O then ! -- if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know they have not the ce to fess it themselves) how gladly would they exge their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their aced Twiham meadows!

    I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated abines of this place, enced by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy betweeo return the visit, and e up to see -- London. I must imagihem with their fishing tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it e among

    The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street.

    I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects,  feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-p?9９ｌib?laces. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exge these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis.

 THE CONVALESCENT

    A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, uhe name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of refleg upon any topic fn to itself. Expeo healthy clusions from me this month, reader; I  offer you only sick mens dreams.

    And truly the whole state of siess is such; for what else is it but a magnifit dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to iotal oblivion of all the works which are going on u? To bee insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?

    If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords, it there! what caprices he acts without troul! how king like he sways his pillow tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and l, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.

    He ges sides oftehan a politi. Now he lies full length, then halflength, obliquely, transversely, head a quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.

    How siess enlarges the dimensions of a mao himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only<big></big> duty. `Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. asses out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.

    A little while ago he was greatly ed in the event of a law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this mans errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to e oerday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him uand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word &quot;friend,&quot; and the word &quot;ruin,&quot; disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any thing but how to get better.

    What a world of fn cares are merged in that abs sideration!

    He has put orong armour of siess, he is ed in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, urusty lod key, for his own use only.

    He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearh over himself; his bowels are eveed within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.

    He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little stratagems and ar<q></q>tificial alleviations.

    He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fi, into as many distindividuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates -- as of a thing apart from him -- upon his poor ag head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to he removed without opening the very scull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He passionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and ９9lｉb.ender heart.

    He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none  so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths, and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he  pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.

    To the worlds business he is dead. He uands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering ceit of some such thing, when the doakes his daily call: and even in the lines of that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely ceives of himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of rustling -- is no speculation which he  at preseertaihinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow.

    Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upo, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he  just ehe pressure of jecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking &quot;who was it?&quot; He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his snty.

    To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. pare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served -- with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better -- and you will fess, that from the bed of siess (thro me rather call it) to the elbow chair of valesce, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition.

    How valesce shrinks a man back to his pristiature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the familys eye? The se of his regalities, his si, which was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despoticies -- how is it reduced to a on bed-room! The trimness of the very bed has somethiy and unmeaning about it. It is mad, every day. How uo that wavy, many-furrowed, oic surface, which <s>藏书网</s>it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a serviot to be thought of at oftehan three or four day revolutions, wheient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the enents of unwele ness, and decies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for ahree or four days respite, to flou out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid.

    Hushed are those mysterious sighs -- those groans -- so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quehe riddle of siess is solved; and Philoctetes is bee an ordinary personage.

    Perhaps some relic of the sick mans dream of greatness survives iill lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too ged with every thing else!  this be he -- this man of news -- of chat -- of ae -- of every thing but physi this be he, who so lately came betweeient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, ereg herself into a high mediating party ? -- Pshaw! `tis some old woman.

    Farewell with him all that made siess pompous -- the spell that hushed the household -- the desart-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers -- the mute attendance -- the inquiry by looks -- the still softer delicacies of self-attention -- the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself -- world-thoughts excluded -- the man a world unto himself -- his owre --

    What a speck is he dwindled into !

    In this flat s of valesce, left by the ebb of siess, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting -- an article. In Artiortis, thought I; but it is something hard -- and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption -- the puffy state of siess -- in which I fess to have lain so long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypodriac afflatus is subsiding; the acres, whi imagination I had spread over -- for the sick man swells in the sole plation of his single sufferings, till he bees a Tityus to himself -- are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, yo></a>u have me once again in my natural pretensions -- the lean and meagre figure of your insignifit Essayist.

 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS

    SO far from the position holding true, that great wit (enius, in our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliah insanity, the greatest wits, on the trary, will ever be found to he the sa writers. It is impossible for the mind to ceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to he uood, mas itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportioraining or excess of any one of them. &quot;S a wit,&quot; says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

    &quot;----did Nature to him frame, As all things but his judgment overcame,

    His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,

    Tempering that mighty sea below.&quot;

    The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a dition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominio. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He asds the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos &quot;and old night.&quot; Or if; abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a &quot;human mind untuned,&quot; he is tent awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timoher is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, -- he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good serva suggesting saner sels, or with the ho steward Flavius reending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will he found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her sistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sn directress, even when he appears most to betray a her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Prot?99lｉb?eus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wo themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to Europeaure. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differehat if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existehey lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and sistency. Their imaginations are not active -- for to be active is to call something into ad form -- but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental halluations were discoverable only ireatment of subjects out of nature, or transding it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature -- show more of that insequence, which has a natural alliah frenzy, than a great genius in his &quot;maddest fits,&quot; as Withers somewhere calls them. eal to any ohat is acquainted with the on run of Lanes novels, -- as they existed some twenty or thirty years back, -- those sty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, -- whether he has not found his brain more &quot;betossed,&quot; his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more founded, among the improbable events, the i is, the insistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue where the persons shall be a Llendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the se only alterween Bath and Bond-streets more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the produs we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are her of this world ..nor of any other ceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive : -- we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasy only christened. In the poet we have names whinounce fi; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their &quot;whereabout.&quot; But in their inner nature, and the law of their speed as, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The ourns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By what subtile art of trag the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and bees the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours -- with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertily, in the same stream -- that we should be at one mome<cite>.9９lib?</cite>nt in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the  at the fe of the Cyclops, in a palad yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgme all the time awake, aher able nor willing to detect the fallacy, is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his widest seeming. aberrations.

    It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the minds ceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort -- but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has beeertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnifit vision, rebi in the m, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, a so coherent, while that faculty assive, when it es under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlihat we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster fod. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, ahe waking judgment ratifies them.

 CAPTAIN JACKSON

    AMONG the deaths in our obituary -- or this month, I observe with  &quot;At his cottage oh road, Captain Ja.&quot; The name and attribution are on enough; but a feeling like reproach persuades me, that this could have been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who so<s>?</s>me five-and-twenty years ago rented a te, which he leased to dignify with the appellation here used, about a mile from Westbreen. Alack, how good men, and the good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of some such sad memento as that whiow lies before us!

    He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance. ely girls they were too.

    And was I in danger of fetting this man ? -- his cheerful suppers -- the one of hospitality, when first you set your foot itage -- the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. -- Altheas horn in a poor platter -- the power of self-entment, by which, in his magnifit wishes to eain you, he multiplied his means to bounties.

    You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag -- cold savings from the fone meal -- remnant hardly suffit to send a mendit from the door tented. But in the copious will -- the revelling imagination of your host -- the &quot;mind, the mind, Master Shallow,&quot; whole beeves were spread before you -- hebs -- no end appeared to the profusion.

    It was the widows cruse -- the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen nor helping diminish it -- the stamina were left -- the elemental boill flourished, divested of its acts.

    &quot;Let us live while we ,&quot; methinks I hear the open-handed creature exclaim; &quot;while we have, let us not want,&quot; &quot;here is plenty left;&quot; &quot;want for nothing &quot; -- with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old itants of smoaking boards, a-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wifes plate, or the daughters, he would vey the rema rind into his own, with a merry quirk of &quot;the he bone,&quot; &amp;c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table distins, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt.  his guest uests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were vere hospitibus sacra. But of ohing or ahere was always enough, and leavings: only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings.

    Wine he had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember -- &quot; British beverage,&quot; he would say! &quot;Push about, my boys;&quot; &quot;Drink to your sweethearts, girls.&quot; At every meagre draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the tre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table ers. You got flustered, without knowing wheipsy upon words; and reeled uhe of his unperf Baalian encements.

    We had our songs -- &quot; Why, Soldiers, Why &quot; -- and the &quot;British Grenadiers &quot; -- in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their proficy was a nightly theme -- the masters he had given them -- the &<mark></mark>quot;no-expence&quot; which he spared to aplish them in a sce &quot;so necessary to young women.&quot; But then -- they could not sing &quot;without the instrument.&quot;

    Sacred, and by me, o-be violated, Secrets of Poverty Should I disclose your ho aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnifice? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand aral thumbs ; dear, cracked spi of dearer Louisa ! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin apanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who noly listening to cherubiotes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakehy time-shaken chords respoo the twitterings of that slender image of a voice.

    We were not without our literary talk either. It did end far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go upon. Itage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had pehe greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present ihat I could discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem iion. But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the ae ressed into the at of the family importa diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the poets study window), opening upon a superb view as far as to the pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his ow gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of vanity shall I call it ? -- in his bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he <mark>?9９liｂ.</mark>took it all in, and unicated rich portions of it to his guests. It art of his largess, his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnifice.

    He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes -- you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say &quot;hahe silver sugar tongs;&quot; and, before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of &quot;the urn&quot; for a tea kettle; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it; he her did one nor the other, but by simply assuming that everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on, he seemed to live ohing. He had a stock of wealth in his mind; not that which is properly termed tent, for in truth he was not to be tai all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnifit self-delusion.

    Enthusiasm is catg; and even his wife, a sober native of North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the tinual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet young women; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the prepoing opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded not for any half hether, did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was ing the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination jured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realised themselves; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably.

    It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish to vey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature described the circumstances of his own wedding-day I faintly remember something of a chaise and four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that m to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I fet which. It so pletely made out the stanza of the old ballad --

    When we came down through Glasgow town,

    We were a ely sight to see;

    My love was clad in black velvet,

    And I myself in cramasie.

    I suppose it was the only occasion, upon which his own actual splendour at all corresponded with the worlds notions on that subject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they ced to be transported in less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fanot as a humiliating trast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one days state. It seemed an &quot;equipage etern&quot; from whio power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him.

    There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon i circumstao bull and swagger away the sense of them before strangers may be not always disendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even wheed, have more of our admiration than pt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while -deep in riches, is a strain of stitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Ja.

 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN

    Sera tamen respexit

    Libertas. -- Virgil.

    A Clerk I was in London gay.

    -- OKEEFE.

    IF peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life -- thy shining youth -- in the irksome fi of an office; to have thy prison days prolohrough middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived tet that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.

    It is now six and thirty years siook my seat at the desk in Ming-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours a-day attenda a ting-house. But time partially reciles us to anything. I gradually became tent -- doggedly tented, as wild animals in cages.

    It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the musid the ballad-singers -- the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day sauhrough the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful -- are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over -- No busy faces to recreate the idle man who plates them ever passing by -- the very face of business a charm by trast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhapp<var>..</var>y tenances -- or half-happy at best -- of emancipated `prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a days pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but fortable.

    But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alo me up through the year, and made my duraolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent iless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome ao find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, ting upon the fifty-oedious weeks that must intervene before suother snatch would e. Still the prospect of its ing threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom.

    Indepely of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in the lines of my tenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides my day-light servitude, I served ain all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my ats, and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospeancipatioed itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.

    My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me uporouble legible in my tenance; but I did not know that it had raised the suspis of any of my employers, when, oh of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L----, the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I holy made fession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid I should eventually be obliged tn his service. He spoke some words of course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week I remained lab uhe impression that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this mahe most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about eight oclock) I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought, now my time is surely e, I have done for myself, I am going to he told that they have no longer occasion for me. L---- I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, -- when to my ut<s></s>ter astonishment B---- , the eldest partner, began a formal harao me on the length of my services, my very meritorious duct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that? I protest I never had the fideo think as much). He went on to dest on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted !) and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my aced salary -- a magnifit offer! I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was uood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home -- for ever. This noble -- be gratitude forbids me to ceal their names -- I owe to the kindness of the most munifit firm in the world -- the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosa, and Lacy.

    Esto perpetua!

    For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too fused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the dition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years fi. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time iernity -- for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to their ary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are suffit; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my dition. I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old tra holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but dle-light Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in by-gone winters. I walk, read or scribble (as now) just whe seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it e to me. I am like the man

    ----Thats born, and has his years e to him,

    In some gree.

    &quot;Years,&quot; you will say! &quot;what is this superannuated simpleton calculating upon? He has already told us, he is past fifty.&quot;

    I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will fiill a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man  properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other peoples time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My te years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preg thirty. `Tis a fair rule-of-three sum.

    Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the e of my freedom, and of wbbr>9９ｌib?</abbr>hich all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since I quitted the ting House. I could not ceive of it as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated -- being suddenly removed from them -- they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friends death:

    ---- `Twas but just now he went away;

    I have not since had time to shed a tear;

    Ahe distance does the same appear

    As if he had been a thousand years from me.

    Time takes no measure iy.

    To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go among them once or twice sio visit my old desk-fellows -- my co-brethren of the quill -- that I had left below iate militant. Not all the kindness with which they received me could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought they went off but faintly. My old desk; the peg there I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I k must be, but I could not take it kindly. D----l take me, if I could not feel some remorse -- beast, if I had not, -- at quitting my old peers, the faithful partners of my toils for six and thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and drums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been sed then after all? or was I a coward simply ? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also know, that these suggestions are a on fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite reciled to the separation. Farewell, old ies, yet not for long, fain and again I will e among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell Ch----, dry, sarcastid friendly! Do----, mild, slow to move, alemanly! Pl----, officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! -- and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion fresham or a Whittington of old, stately House of merts; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where dles for one half the year supplied the place of the suns light; uhy tributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell! In thee remain, and not in the obscure colle of some wandering bookseller, my &quot;works!&quot; There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful! My mantle I bequeath among ye.

    A fht has passed sihe date of my first unication. At that period I roag to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was parative only. Something of the first flutter was left; an uling sense of y; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaced light. I missed my old s, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I oor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolutiourned upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my own master. It is natural to me to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself at eleven oclo the day in Bond-street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in a m. Was it ever otherwise? What is bee of Fish-street Hill? Where is Fenchurch-street? Stones of old Ming-lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I ihe gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is ge time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I veo pare the ge in my dition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in a mao me. I have lost all distin of season. I do not know the day of the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its refereo the fn post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the  Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights sensations. The genius of each day on me distinctly during the whole of it, affeg my appetite, spirits, &amp;c. The phantom of the  day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor<samp></samp> Sabbath recreations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white? What is gone of Black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself -- that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it -- is melted down into a week day. I  spare to go to churow, without grudging the huge tle which it used to seem to cut out of the holyday. I have Time for everything. I  visit a sick friend. I  interrupt the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I  insult over him with an invitation to take a days pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May-m. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poes, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and g; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round -- and what is it all for? A man ever have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life plative. Will no kindly earthquake e and swallow up those accursed ills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down

    As low as to the fiends.

    I am no longer ******, clerk to the Firm of &amp;c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already e to be known by my vat fad careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed paor with aled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my ood parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a neer, it is to read the state of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING

    IT is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the geyle in writing. We should prefer saying -- of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing  be more uhan the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is disible in both writers; but in the o is only insinuated gracefully, iher it stands out offensively. The peer seems to have written with his et on, and his Earls mantle before him; the oner in his elbow chair and undress. -- What  be more pleasant than the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, penned by the latter in his delightful retreat at Shehey st of Nimeguen, and the Hague. Scar authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Francisco de Melo, a &quot;Pal Envoy in England,&quot; tells him it was frequent in his try for men, spent with age or other decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. &quot;Whether su effect (Temple beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or by approag he sun, which is the fountain of light a, when their natural heat was so far <tt>藏书网</tt>decayed: or whether the pieg out of an old mans life were worth the pains; I ot tell: perhaps the play is not worth the dle.&quot; -- Monsieur Pompone, &quot;French Ambassador in his (Sir Williams) time at the Hague, &quot;certifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any man in Frahat arrived at a hundred years of age; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other tries; and moralises upoter very sensibly. The &quot;late Robert Earl of Leicester&quot; furnishes him with a story of a tess of Desmond, married out of England in Edward the Fourths time, and who lived far in King Jamess reign. The &quot;same noble person&quot; gives him an at, how such a year, in the same reign, there went about the try a set of morrice-dancers, posed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe; and how these twelve, oh another, made up twelve hundred years. &quot;It was not so much (says Temple) that so many in one small ty (Herefordshire) should live to that age, as that they should be in vigour and in humour to travel and to dance.&quot; Monsieur Zulichem, one of his &quot;colleagues at the Hague,&quot; informs him of a cure for the gout; which is firmed by another &quot;Envoy,&quot; Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried it. -- Old Prince Maurice of Nassau reends to him the use of hammocks in that plaint; having been allured to sleep, while suffering u himself, by the &quot;stant motion or swinging of those airy beds.&quot; t Egmont, and the R<u>.9９ｌib.</u>hinegrave who &quot;was killed last summer before Maestricht,&quot; impart to him their experiences.

    But the rank of the writer is never more ily disclosed, than where he takes frahe pliments paid by fo his fruit-trees. For the taste and perfe of what we esteem the best, he  truly say, that the French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally cluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in Fran this side Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they have eat in Gasy. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for ier kind and the blue, we ot e he warm climates, no more than in the Frontignauscat grape. His e-trees too, are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau, or what he has seen sin the Low tries; except some very old ones of the Prince es. Of grapes he had the honour ing over four sorts into England, which he ees, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty ong some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as well as several persons of quality; for he ever thought all things of this kind &quot;the ohey are made the better.&quot; The gardery with which he asserts that `tis to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches rapes, hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the furthest northwards; and praises the &quot;Bishop of Mu Cosevelt,&quot; for attempting nothing beyond cherries in that cold climate; pleasant and in character. &quot;I may per藏书网haps&quot; (he thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) &quot;be allowed to know something of this trade, since I have so long allowed myself to be good for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, without often looking abroad to see how other matters play, what motions iate, and what invitations they may hope for into other ses. For my own part, as the try life, and this part of it more particularly, were the ination of my youth itself, so they are the pleasure of my age; and I  truly say that, among many great employments that have fallen to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them, but have often endeavoured to escape from them, into the ease and freedom of a private se, where a man may go his own way and his own pace, in the on paths and circles of life. The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen, which I thank God has befallen me; and though among the follies of my life, building and planting have not been the least, and have e more than I have the fideo owhey have been fully repensed by the sweetness and satisfa of this retreat, where, since my resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have passed five years without ever once going to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and have a house there always ready to receive me. Nor has this been any sort of affectation as some have thought it, but a mere want of desire or humour to make so small a remove; for when I am in this er, I  truly say with Horace, Me quoties reficit, &amp;c.

    &quot;Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives,

    What does my friend believe I think or ask?

    Let me yet less possess, so I may live,

    Whateer of life remains, unto myself.

    May I have books enough; and one years store,

    Not to depend upon each doubtful hour:

    This is enough of mighty Jove to pray,

    Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.&quot;

    The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordio nature and tenderness, has seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses; which, it is obvious to remark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding essayists. &quot;Who would not be covetous, and with reason,&quot; he says, &quot;if health could be purchased with gold? who not ambitious, if it were at the and of power, or restored by honour? but, alas! a white staff will not help gouty feet to walk better than a on e; nor a blue riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of g them; and an ag head will be no more eased by wearing a , than a on nightcap.&quot; In a far better style, and more accordant with his own humour of plainness, are the cludiences of his &quot;Discourse upory.&quot; Temple took a part in the troversy about the a and the modern learning ; and, with that partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, whose state es had left him little leisure to look into modern produ, while his retirement gave him occasion to look back upon the classic studies of his youth -- decided in favour of the latter. &quot;Certain it is,&quot; he says, &quot;that, whether the fieress of the Gothic humours, or noise of their perpetual wars, frighted it away, or t? the unequal mixture of the modern languages would not bear it -- the great heights and excellency both of poetry and music fell with the Roman learning and empire, and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that before attehem. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be fessed to be the softest and sweetest, the most general and most i amusements of on time and life. They still find room in the courts of princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions aurbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is her agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affes. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or eai of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to their charms, would, I think, do well to keep their own sel, for fear of reproag their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their natures, if not of their uandings, into question. While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these two eais will do so too; and happy those that tent themselves with these, or any other so easy and so i, and do not trouble the world or other men, because they ot be quiet themselves, thoug<var></var>h nobody hurts them.&quot; &quot;When all is done (he cludes), human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humoured a little, to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.&quot;

 BARBARA S-----

    ON the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I fet which it was, just as the clock had strue, Barbara S-----, with her aced punctuality asded the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the , and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend ourday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim.

    This little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the bes which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have takeo have been at least five years older.

    Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children were wao fill up the se. But the manager,  a diligend adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-sequence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied Richard with infaulan the Duke of York and iurn had rebuked that petulance when she rince of Wales. She would have dohe elder child in Mortons pathetic alter-piece to the life; but as yet the &quot; Children in the Wood&quot; was not.

    Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a childs use, she kept them all; and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in costliest Morocco, each single -- each small part making a book -- with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &amp;c. She had stiously kept them as they had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. They were precious to her for their affeg remembrangs. They were her principia, her rudiments; the elementary atoms; the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfe. &quot;What,&quot; she would say, &quot;could Indian rubber, or a pumice stone, have done for these darlings?&quot;

    I am in no hurry to begin my story -- indeed I have little or o tell -- so I will just mention an observation of hers ected with that iing time.

    Not long before she died I had been disc with her on the quantity of real preseion which a great tragic performer experiences during ag. I veo think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequeition those feelings must bee deadened i measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a Present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what urely meical. With much delicacy, avoiding to instan her self-experience, she told me, that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porters IsabelIa, (I think it was) when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears e trig from her, which (to use her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back. I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter; but it was some great actress of that day. The name is indifferent; but the fact of the scalding tears ..I most distinctly remember. I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure that an impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more thaain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not preve oime of life from adopting it. I have had the honour (I must ever call it) oo have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have versed as friend to friend with her aplished husband. I have been indulged with a classical fereh Macready; and with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Matthewss, when the kind owo remue me for my love of the old actors (whom he loves so much) went over it with me, supplying to his capital colle, what alohe artist could not give them -- voice; and their living motion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I have supped with -----; but I am growing a b.

    As I was about to say -- at the desk of the then treasurer of the old Bath theatre -- not Diamonds -- presented herself the little Barbara S-----.

    The parents of Barbara had been iable circumstahe father had practised, I believe, as an apothecary iown. But his practice from causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way tn -- or perhaps from that pure infelicity which apanies some people in their walk through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence -- was now reduced to nothing. They were in fa the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who knew and respected them ier days, took the little Barbara into his pany.

    At the period I enced with, her slender earnings were the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some mortifying circumstances. Enough to say, that her Saturdays pittance was the only ce of a Sundays (generally their only) meal of meat.

    Ohing I will only mention, that in some childs part, where iheatrical character she was to sup off a roast fowl (O joy to Barbara!) some ic actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty in the misguided humour of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (O grief and pain of heart to Barbara!) that when he crammed a portion of it into her mouth, she was obliged sputteringly to reject it; and what with shame of her ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed spectators were totally uo prehend, mercifully relieved her.

    This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturdays payment.

    Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical people besides herself say, of all me calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for ats, paid away at random, kept scary books, and summing up at the weeks end, if he found himself a pound or so defit, blest himself that it was no w<bdo>?9９ｌib.</bdo>orse.

    Now Barbaras weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. By mistake he popped into her hand a -- whole one.

    Barbara tripped away.

    She was entirely unscious at first of the mistake: God knows, Ravenscroft would never have discovered <var>.</var>it.

    But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight of metal pressing her little hand.

    Now mark the dilemma.

    She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those about her she had imbibed no trary influence. But then they had taught her nothing. Poor mens smoky s are not alorticoes of moral philosophy. This little maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed principle. She had heard hoy ended, but never dreamed of its application to herself. She thought of it as something which ed grown-up people -- men and women. She had never knowation, or thought of spariance against it.

    Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and explain to him his blunder. He was already so fused with age, beside a natural want of punctuality, that she would have had some difficulty in making him uand it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money! and then the image of a larger allowance of butchers meat oable  day came across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened But then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good-natured, had stood her friend behind the ses, and even reended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came staring upohe figures of her little stogless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her ow white cotton stogs, which her situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard straining and ping from the family stock, and thought how glad she should be to cover their poor feet with the same -- and how then they could apao rehearsals, which they had hitherto been precluded from doing, by reason of their unfashioire -- ihoughts she reached the sed landing-place -- the sed, I mean from the top -- for there was still another left to traverse.

    Now virtue support Barbara!

    And that never-failing friend did step in -- for at that moment a strength not her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to her -- a reason above reasoning -- and without her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to move) she found herself transported back to the individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in sileook back the refureasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages; and from that moment a deep peace fell upon her heart, and she khe quality of hoy.

    A year or twos unrepining application to her professihtened up the feet, and the prospects, of her little sisters, set the whole family upon their legs again, and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place.

    I have heard her say, that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification to her, to see the ess with which the old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her such mortal throes.

    This ae of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty.seven years of age (she died soon after); and to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes veo think her ied for that power of rending the heart in the representation of flig emotions, for whi after years she was sidered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons.

    [Footnote] * The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she ged, by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, and a third time a hen I knew her.

 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY IN A LETTER TO R.S., ESQ.

    Though in some points of doe, and perhaps of discipline I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never e to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion of irrevereiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself excluded; turned out like a dog, or some profane person, into the on street９９ｌｉｂ?, with feelings not very genial to the place, or to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music.

    You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young years, on which your purest mind feeds still -- and may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and graceful blending ever with the religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your aors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called iion through these practices -- to speak aloud your sense of them; o desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the det, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must it an injury against his family ey, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decies, which you wish to see maintained in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object of iion to the poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their attendan the worship every minute which they  bestow upon the fabri vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, Sir -- a hint in your Journal would be suffit to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we  remember them when we were boys. At that tin,e of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrao so much refle had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver -- If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we c99liｂ?ainly should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against se) as whees stood open, as those of the adjat Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the moht us, for a shorter or loime, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves deteg the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now  a person firance (out of service time) uhe sum of two shillings. The rid the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie iwo short words. But you  tell them, Sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse inpetent to this demand. -- A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to Sa<samp>藏书网</samp>int Pauls. At the same time a detly clothed man, with as det a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same indulgehe price was only two-pence each person. The poor but det maated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, aurned away relutly. Perhaps he wished to have seeomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But iate of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the try (no man  do it more impressively); instruct them of what value these insignifit pieohese minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free t<bdo>.</bdo>o all? Do the rabble e there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you  do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no lohe rabble.

    For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well-attested charge of violation adduced, has been -- a ridiculous dismemberment itted upon the effigy of that amiable spy, Major Andre. And is it for this -- the wanton mischief of some schoolboy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom or the remote possibility of such a mischief  again, so easily to he prevented by stationing a stable within the walls, if the vergers are inpetent to the duty -- is it upon such wretched pretehat the people of England are made to pay a new Peters Pence, so long abrogated; or must tent themselves with plating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know any thing about the unfortunate relic? --

 AMICUS REDIVIVUS

    Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

    Closd oer the head of your loved Lycidas?

    I not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a m visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right hand path by which he had entered -- with staff in hand, and at noon day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.

    A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness su unreserved motion towards self-destru in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation.

    How I found my feet, I know not. sciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand uhat wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I -- freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises.

    And here I ot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to unicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or nonapplication, of salt, &amp;c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of flig judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the sel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on, -- shall I fess ? -- in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions -- and mine had not been insiderable -- are only followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution.

    Monoculus -- for so, in default of catg his true name, I choose to desighe medical gentleman eared -- is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of on surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstrus, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant abis outwardly. But though he deeth not altogether these drier extins, his occupatioh for the most part to water-practice; for the venience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters he grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middletons-Head, he listeo detect the wrecks of drowned mortality -- partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot -- and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, <q></q>are ordinarily more vely to be found at these on hostelries, than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported, he  distinguish a plume at a half furlong distance; and  tell, if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, inally of a sad brown, but which, by time, and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy -- after a suffit application of warm blas, fri, &amp;c., is a simple tumbler, or more, of the purest ac, with water, made as hot as the valest  bear it. Where he fih, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he desdeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing  be more kind or encing than this procedure. It addeth fideo the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, eevish invalid  refuse to pledge him iion? In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarough to sustain life, is tent to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives of others -- his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a  upon him, for the price of rest the existence of su invaluable creature to society as G. D.

    It leasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear abse seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and i life. Sitting up in my couch -- my couch whiaked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly vala some price, and heh be a state-bed at Colebrooke, he discoursed of marvellous escapes -- by carelessness of nurses -- by pails of gelid, ales of the boiling element, in infancy -- by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics -- by dest of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke -- by studious watgs, indug frightful vigilance -- by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. -- Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of tin<bdi></bdi>g of songs long ago -- ends of deliverance-hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but ing up now, when his heart was made tender as a childs -- for the tremor cordis, irospect of a ret deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, ag upon an i heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, iter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers.

    Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton -- what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now wo turies, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river -- liquid artifice -- wretched duit! heh rank with als, and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your sal<mark></mark>utary waters sparkling through greefordshire, and cultured Enfield parks ? -- Ye have no swans -- no Naiads -- no river God -- or did the benevolent hoary aspey frie ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?

    Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some sonan it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture ? -- or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and heh to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?

    And could such spacious virtue find a grave

    Beh the imposthumed bubble of a wave?

    I protest, Gee, you shall not ve again -- no, not by daylight -- without a suffit pair of spectacles -- in your musing moods especially. Your absenind we have borill your presence of body came to be called iion by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we  help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!

    I have nothing but water in my head o nights sihis frightful act. Sometimes I am with Claren his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and g out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), &quot;I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah.&quot; Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save.  follow -- a mournful procession -- suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of relut gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue -- strained Lazari -- Plutos hall subjects -- stolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion -- or is it G. D. ? -- in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which<u></u> Ma (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched oh are straio drown dht, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death.

    And, doubtless, there is some noti that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable prects. When a soul knocks owice, at deaths door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be siderable; and the grim Feature, by modern sce so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.

    A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts -- poet, or historian -- of Gre or of Roman lord to  with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected -- him Tyrwhitt hoped to enter -- him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upoh,* with  airs prepared to greet --; and, patron of the gentle Christs boy, -- who should have been his patron through life -- the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable Aesculapian chair, to wele into that happy pany the matured virtues of the man, whose tender ss in the boy he himself upoh had so prophetically fed and watered.

    * GRAIUM tantum vidit.

 SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY

    SYDNEYS Sos -- I speak of the best of them -- are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his positions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, suring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), &quot;vain and amatorious&quot; enough, yet the things in their kind (as he fesses to be true of the romance) may be &quot;full of worth and wit.&quot; They savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the ohsman. But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he posed the Arcades. Wheional struggle was to begin, he beingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify, he could speak his mind freely to Prihe times did not call him to the scaffold.

    The Sos which we ofte call to mind of Miltohe positions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very hey-day of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies -- far-fetched ceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, t home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifi self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers -- or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum praecordia frigins, must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our recolle that we were once so -- before we  duly appreciate the glorious vanities, and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some ated the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Sistress; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side; and that the poet came not much short of a religious inde, when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl: --

    Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes)

    Obtigit aetheriis ales ab ordinibus.

    Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major,

    Nam tua praesen<bdo>９９ｌib?</bdo>tem vox sonat ipsa Deum?

    Aut Deus, aut vacui certe meia coeli,

    Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens;

    Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda

    Sensim immortal assuescere posse sono.

    QUOD SI CTA QUIDEM DEUS EST, PER CTAQUE FUSUS,

    IN TE UNA LOQUITUR, CAETERA MUTUS HABET.

    This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some dour of stru (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered, if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure, Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions.

    With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies;

    How silently; and with how wan a face!

    What! may it be, that even in heavenly place

    That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries?

    Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

    judge of love, thou feelst a lovers case;

    I read it in thy looks; thy languisht grace

    To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.

    Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,

    Is stant love deemd there but want of wit?

    Are beauties there as proud as here they be

    Do they above love to be loved, a

    Those lovers s, whom that love doth possess?

    Do they call virtue there -- ungratefulness?

    The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulhere a virtue?

    e, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,

    The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,

    The poor mah, the prisoners release,

    The indifferent judge between the high and low,

    With shield of proof shield me from out the prease

    Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw,

    O make ihose civil wars to cease:

    I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.

    Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed,

    A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light,

    A rosy garland, and a weary head.

    And if these things, as being thine by right,

    Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,

    Livelier than elsewhere, Stellas image see.

    III

    The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness

    Bewray itself in my loled eyes,

    Whehose same fumes of melancholy rise,

    With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess.

    Some, that know how my spring I did address,

    Deem that my muse some fruit of knowledge plies,

    Others, because the prince my service tries

    Think, that I think state errors to redress,

    But harder judges judge, ambitie,

    Sce of itself, still climbing slippery place

    Holds my young brain captivd in gold cage.

    O fools, or over-wise! alas, the race

    Of all my thoughts hath her stop nor start,

    But only Stellas eyes, and Stellas heart.

    IV

    Because I oft in dark abstracted guise

    Seem most alone iest pany,

    With dearth of words, or answers quite awry,

    To them that would make speech of speech arise,

    They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies,

    That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie

    So in my swelling breast, that only I

    Fawn on myself, and others do despise,

    Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul possess,

    Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass:

    But one worse fault -- Ambition -- I fess,

    That makes me oft my best friends overpass,

    Unseen, unheard, -- while thought to highest place

    Bends all his powers, even unto Stellas grace.

    V

    Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance,

    Guided so well that I obtaihe prize,

    Both by the judgment of the English eyes

    And of some sent from that sweet enemy -- France,

    Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,

    Townsfolk my strength, a daintier judge applies

    His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise;

    Some lucky wits impute it but to ce;

    Others, because of both sides I do take

    My blood from them, who did excel in this,

    Think Nature me a man of arms did make.

    How far they shot awry! the true cause is,

    STELLA lookd on, and from her heavenly face

    Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

    VI

    In martial sports I had my ing tried,

    Ao break more staves did me address,

    While with the peoples shouts (I must fess)

    Youth, luck, and praise, even filld my veins with pride --

    When Cupid, having me (his slave) descried

    In Marss livery, prang in the press,

    &quot;What now, Sir Fool!&quot; said he; &quot;I would no less:

    Look here, I say.&quot; I lookd, and STELLA spied,

    Who hard by made a window send forth light.

    My heart then quakd, then dazzled were mine eyes;

    One hand fot to rule, thother to fight;

    Nor trumpets sound I heard, nor friendly cries.

    My foe came on, ahe air for me --

    Till that her blush made me my shame to see.

    VII

    No more, my dear, no more these sels try;

    O give my passions leave to run their race;

    Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace;

    Let folk oer-charged with brain against me cry;

    Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye;

    Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace;

    Let all the earth with s ret my case --

    But do not will me from my love to fly.

    I do not envy Aristotles wit,

    Nor do aspire to Caesars bleeding fame;

    Nht do care, though some above me sit;

    Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame,

    But that whice may win thy cruel heart:

    Thou art my wit, and thou m藏书网y virtue art.

    VIII

    Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is,

    Schoold only by his mothers tender eye;

    What wohen, if he his lesson miss,

    When for so soft a rod dear play he try?

    A my STAR, because a sugard kiss

    In sport I suckd, while she asleep did lie,

    Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this.

    Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble I.

    But no `scuse serves; she makes her wrath appear

    Iys throne -- see now, who dares e near

    Those scarlet judges, threatning bloody pain?

    O heavnly Fool, <var>?</var>thy most kiss-worthy face

    Anger is with such a lovely grace,

    That angers self I needs must kiss again.

    IX

    I never drank of Aganippe well,

    Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit,

    And Muses s with vulgar brains to dwell;

    Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit.

    Some do I hear of Poets fury tell,

    But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it;

    And this I swear by blackest brook of hell,

    I am no pickpurse of anothers wit.

    How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease

    My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow

    In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?

    Guess me the cause -- what is it thus ? -- fye, no.

    Or so ? -- much less. How then ? sure thus it is,

    My lips are sweet, inspired with STELLAs kiss.

    X

    Of all the kings that ever here did reign,

    Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name,

    Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain --

    Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame.

    Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame

    His sires revenge, joind with a kingdoms gain;

    And, and by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame,

    That balance weighd what Sword did late obtain.

    Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so `fraid,

    Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions paws

    That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid.

    Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause --

    But only, for this worthy knight durst prove

    To lose his  rather than fail his love.

    XI

    O happy Thames, that didst my STELLA bear,

    I saw thyself, with many a smiling line

    Upon thy cheerful face, Joys livery wear,

    While those fair plas on thy streams did shine;

    The boat for joy could not to dance forbear,

    While wanton winds, with beauty so divine

    Ravishd, stayd not, till in her golden hair

    They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine.

    And fain those Aeols youth there would their stay

    Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly,

    First did with puffing kiss those locks display.

    She, so dishevelld, blushd; from window I

    With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace,

    Let honours self to thee grant highest place!

    XII

    Highway, siny chief Parnassus be;

    And that my Muse, to some ears not u,

    Tempers her words to trampling horses feet,

    More soft than to a chamber melody, --

    Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me

    To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet,

    My Muse and I must you of duty greet

    With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.

    Be you still fair, honourd by public heed,

    By no enent wrongd, nor time fot;

    Nor blamd for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed.

    And that you know, I envy you no lot

    Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,

    Hundreds of years you STELLAS feet may kiss.

    Of the foing, the first, the sed, and the last so, are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of &quot;learning and of chivalry, -- &quot;of whiion, Spenser has entitled Sydo have been the &quot;president,&quot; -- shihrough them. I fess, I  see nothing of the &quot;jejune &quot;or &quid&quot; in them; much less of the &quot;stiff&quot; and &quot;cumbrous &quot; -- which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuo the trumpet; or tempered (as himself: expresses it) to &quot;trampling horses feet.&quot; They abound in felicitous phrases --

    O heavnly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy lips

    8th So

    -------Sweet pillows, sweetest bed;

    A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;

    A rosy garland, and a weary head.

    2nd So

    -------That sweet enemy, -- France --

    5th So,

    But they are not ri words only, in vague and unlocalised feelings -- the failing too much of some poetry of the present day they are full, material, and circumstantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon a thi of dainty words, but a transdent passion pervadi<u></u>ng and illuminating a, pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of poraries and his judgment of them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them; marks the when and where they were written.

    I have dwelt the longer upon what I ceive the merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &amp;c., (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just) are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has ceived an actal prejudice against. Milton wrote Sos, and was a kinghater; and it was genial perhaps to sacrifice a courtie<q></q>r to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble images, passions, ses, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the character which his poraries have left us of the writer. I ot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish nobleman in his i hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him; and I repose upon the beautiful lines in the &quot;Friends Passion for his Astrophel,&quot; printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others.

    You knew -- who knew not Astrophel?

    (That I should live to say I knew,

    And have not in possession still!) --

    Things know me to renew --

    Of him you know his merit such,

    I ot Say -- you hear -- too much.

    Within these woods of Arcady

    He chief delight and pleasure took;

    And on the mountain Partheny,

    Upon the crystal liquid brook,

    The Muses met him every day,

    That taught him sing, to write, and say.

    When he desded down the mount,

    His personage seemed most divine:

    A thousand graight t

    Upon his lovely chearful eyne.

    To hear him speak, and sweetly smile,

    You were in Paradise the while,

    A sweet attractive kind of grace;

    A full assurance given by looks;

    tinual fort in a face,

    The lis of Gospel books --

    I trow that tnance ot lye,

    Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.

    *****

    Above all others this is he,

    Which erst approved in his song,

    That love and hht agree,

    And that pure love will do n.

    Sweet Saints, it is no Sin or blame

    To love a man of virtuous name.

    Did never Love so sweetly breathe

    In any mortal breast before:

    Did never Muse inspire beh

    A Poets brain with fiore.

    He wrote of Love with high ceit,

    Ay reard above her height.

    Or let any ohe deeper sorrows (grief running inte) in the Poem, -- the last in the colle apanying the above, -- which from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brookes, -- beginning with &quot;Silence augmeh grief,&quot;and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such abs and fous could have been that thing which Lord Oxford termed him.

 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

    DAN STUART oold us, that he did not remember the he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the M Post neer stood then just where it does now -- we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more -- with its gilt-globe-topt front fag that emporium of our artists grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same abstih Daniel.

    A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one of the fiempered of Editors. Perry, of the M icle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight oher, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for both these gentlemen.

    It is soothing to plate the head of the Gao trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river;

    With holy revereo approach the rocks,

    Whence glide the Streams renowned in a song.

    Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrims explorator ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holybbr></abbr>day (a &quot;whole days leave&quot; we called at Christs Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well-provisioher for su uaking, to trace the current the New River -- Middletonian stream ! -- to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we ence our solitary quest -- for it was essential to the dignity, of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam oe. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn; endless hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, relut to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sue down somewhere by Bowes Farm, ottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet aplished; sorely vinced in spirit, that that Bru enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders.

    Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the trag of some mighty waters up to their shallow fohan it is to a pleased and did reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the Aeneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on.

    In those days every M Paper, as an essential retaio its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke -- and it was thought pretty high too -- was Dan Stuarts settled remuion in these cases. The chat of the day, sdal, but, above all, dress, furhe material. The length of nraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must he poignant.

    A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily ing up at the juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a &quot;capital hand.&quot; O the ceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming e of the lady that has her sitting upon &quot;many waters.&quot; Then there was the collateral topic of ancles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of toug that nice brink, a umbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something &quot;not quite proper;&quot; while, like a skilful posture-master, balang betwixt des and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hairs-breadth deviation is destru; h in the fines of light and darkness, or where &quot;both seem either;&quot; a hazy uain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off his expet auditory with &quot;Whoop, do me nood man!&quot; But, above all, that ceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astraea -- ultima Coelestum terras reliquit -- we pronounced -- in revereo the stogs still -- that MODESTY TAKING HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER AST TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING Ihis might be called the ing ceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days.

    But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the tra mode which had so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, a us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none, methought, snant, so invitatory of shrewd ceits, and more than single meanings. Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily secutively for a fht would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fht, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were straio do, was a little harder execution. &quot;Mah forth to his work until the evening &quot; -- from a reasonable hour in the m, we resume it was meant. Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till five every day iy; and as our evening hours, at that time Of life, had generally to do with any thing other than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes -- our supplementary liveli<big>藏书网</big>hood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese -- was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Mans Land) may be fitly denominated No Mans Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a halfs duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast.

    Oh those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were pelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed -- for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated he lark ofttimes in her rising -- we liked a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effemiimes, and to have our friends about us -- we were not stellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless -- we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken rees at Mount Ague -- we were right toping Capulets, jolly panions, we and they) -- but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance -- to be ated to rouse ourselves at the destestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her annouhat it was &quot;time to rise;&quot; and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearo amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all suseasonable rest-breakers in future -- &quot;Facil&quot; and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the &quot;desding&quot; of the ht, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get up, as he goes on to say,

    -- revradus, Superasque evadere ad auras --

    and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended -- there was the &quot;labour,&quot; there the &quot;work.&quot;

    ian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this y exercised upon us. Half a dozes in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they e into our head. But when the head has to go out to them -- when the mountain must e to Mahomet --

    Reader, try it for once, only for one short t></a>welvemonth.

    It was not every week that a fashion of pink stogs came up; but mostly, instead of it, sed, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be torted into the risible; some feature, upon whiile could play; some flint, from whio process of iy could procure a distillation. There they lay; there your appoiale of brick-making was set before you, whiust finish, with or without straw, as it happehe craving Dragon -- the Public -- like him iemple -- must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him.

    While we were wringing our coy sprightliness for the Post, and writhing uhe toil of what is called &quot;easy writing,&quot; Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like service for the &quot;Oracle.&quot; Not that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a sprightly air about them, it was suffit. He carried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one, was not seldom palmed upon his employers food jest; for example sake -- &quot; Walkierday m casually own Snow Hill, who should we meet but Deputy Humphreys! we rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We do not remember ever to have seen him look better.&quot; This gentleman, so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, from some peculiarities in gait esture, was a stant butt for mirth to the small paragraph-mongers of the day; and our friend thought that he might have his fling at him with the rest. We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary renter, which he told with tears of satisfa in his eyes, and chug at the anticipated effects of its annou  day in the paper. We did not quite prehend where the wit of it lay at the time; nor was it easy to be detected, whehing came out, advantaged by type aer-press. He had better have met any thing that m than a on cil Man. His services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his Paragraphs of late had been defit in point. The one iion, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the se, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity, and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow the clusion was not judged altogether to ao the magnifit promise of the premises. We traced our friends pen afterwards in the &quot;True Briton,&quot; the &quot;Star,&quot; the &quot;Traveller,&quot; -- from all which he was successively dismissed, the Proprietors having &quot;no further occasion for his services.&quot; Nothing was easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, there stantly appeared the following -- It is not generally known that the three Blue Balls at the Pawnbrokers shops are the a arms of Lombardy. The Lombards were the first money-brokers in Europe.&quot; Bob has done more to set the public right on this important point of blazonry, than the whole College of Heralds.

    The appoi of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the ey of a M Paper. Editors find their own jokes, or do as well without them. Parsoe, and Topham, brought up the set  of &quot;witty paragraphs,&quot; first in the &quot;World.&quot; Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Or<bdo>藏书网</bdo>acle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away; and it would be difficult to discover in the Biographer of Mrs. Siddons, any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the e of the preseury. Even the prelusive delicacies of the present writer -- the curt &quot;Astraean allusion &quot; -- would be thought pedantid out of date, in these days.

    From the office of the M Post (for we may as well exhaust our Neer Reminisces at once) by ge of property in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying exge! to the office of the Albion Neer, late Rackstrows Museum, i-street What a transition -- from a handsome apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver-inkstands, to an office -- no office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters of which it seemed redolent -- from the tre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity aion! Here in murky closet, ie from its square tents to the receipt of the two bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together at oime, sat in the discharge of his orial funs (the &quot;Bigod&quot; of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick.

    F., without a guinea in his pocket, and havi not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might and, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless  -- for it had been sinking ever sis e, and could now re upon not more than a hundred subscribers resolutely determine upon pulling down the Gover in the first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated Demo about borrowing seven shilling pieces, and lesser , to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we attached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write treason.

    Recolles of feelings -- which were all that now remained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we erred in the pany of some, who are ated very good men now -- rather than any tendency at this time to Republi does assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, sonant in no very uoo the right ear fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than reend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so ing a periphrasis -- as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly -- that the keen eye of an Attorney General was insuffit to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, indeed, when we sighed for our mentleman-like occupation uuart. But with ge of masters it is ever ge of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers -- when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our Pen, aimed at Sir J---s M----h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronou, (it is hardy worth particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at one of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying,  of the  Lawyers. It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan. Stuart made that curious fession to us, that he had &quot;never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.&quot;

 BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODU

    HOGARTH excepted,  we produy one painter within the last fifty years, or sihe humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story imaginatively? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him -- not to be arranged by him? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically , that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has imparted to his positions, not merely so much truth as is enough to vey a story with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep the subject so treated distin feature from every other subject, however similar, and to on apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate pla no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in modern art -- we will not demand that it should be equal -- but in any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the &quot;Ariadne,&quot; iional Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, repeopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonio<mark>..</mark>us version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it tributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presend new offers of a god, -- as if unscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some uning pageant -- her soul undistracted from Theseus -- Ariadne is still pag the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.

    Here are two points miraculously iting; fierce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with the acts of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadwo stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have beeory of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid act of a flattering offer met with a wele acceptahe broke for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.

    We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael ii. It is the Presentation of the new-boro Adam by the Almighty. A faire<dfn></dfn>r mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters subordio the ception of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary produ. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with temperiain raptures of ubial anticipation, with a suitable aowledgement to the Giver of the blessing, in the tenance of the first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child maween the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, sidering the awful presehey were in, would have taken care to subtraething from the expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual ohis would be as much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last years show, has been enced to look for. It is obvious to hint at a lower expressio in a picture, that for respects of drawing and c, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-f walls, in which the raptures should be as y-he gratitude as one, or perhaps Zero! By her the one passion nor the other has Raphael expouhe situation of Adam. Singly on his brow sits the abs sense of wo the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-scious of his art, in whieither of the flig emotions moment how abstract -- have had time t up, or to battle for indeastery. -- We have seen a landscape of a justly admired eri which he aimed at deliing a fi, one of the most severely beautiful in antiquity -- the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. ----- justice, he bad painted laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that  a &quot;still-climbing Hercules&quot; could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No ventual porter could keep his keys better than this custos with the &quot;lidless eye&quot; He not only sees that none do intrude into that Privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that  Hercules aut Diabolus by any manner of means . So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are snug enough. But here the artists ce seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to fort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, acc to the approved etiquette at a court of the eenth tury; giving to the whole se the air of a fete champetre, if we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is bee of the solitary mystery-the

    Daughters three,

    That sing around the golden tree ?

    This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject.

    The paintings or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of a modern artist, have been urged as objes to the theory of our motto. They are of a character, we fess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder workmanship -- Assyrian ruins old -- restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving ceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examihe point of the story in the &quot;Belshazzars Feast.&quot; We will introduce it by an apposite ae.

    The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic layed off. The guests were seled admiring; the ba profuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and oriental; the eye erfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia iower for this especial purpose, itself a tower! stood spicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. * * * * the then admired court Chaplain, roceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered in goldeer-

    &quhtohquake--Swallow-up-alive!&quot;

    Imagihe fusion of the guests; the Gees and garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion! The fans dropt, and picked up the  m by the sly court pages. Mrs. Fitzwhats-her-name fainting, and the tess of * * * * holding the smelling bottle, till the good-humoured Prince caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh dles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley, of t Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself had furhen imagihe infinite applause that followed, the mutual rallyings, the declarations that &quot;they were not much frightened,&quot; of the assembled galaxy.

    The point of time in the picture exactly ao the appearance of the transparen the ae. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm; the prettinesses heightened by sternation; the courtiers fear which was flattery, and the ladys which was affectation; all that we may ceive to have taken pla a mob hton courtiers, sympathising with the well-acted surprise of their sn all this, and no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort of sternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild geese at the report only of a gun having gone off!

    But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal ay for the preservation of their persons,such as we have wit a theatre, when a slight alarm of fire has been given -- ae expo of a supernatural terror? the way in which the finger of God, writing judgments, would have bee by the withered sce There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is disturbed, restless, a upon escape. The other is bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz, in the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it ihoughts of the Tema the bell of his chamber, or to call up the servants? But let us see iext what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar sternation.

    From the words of Da appears that Belshazzar had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are geously eed, with the prihe kings es, and his wives. Then follows --

    &quot;In the same hour came forth fingers of a mans hand, and wrote ainst the dlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the kings palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the kings tenance was ged, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees smote one against another.&quot;

    This is the plai. By no hint  it be otherwise inferred, but that the appearance was solely fio the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who merely uakes for the interpretation of the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lord are simply said to he astonished; i.e. at the trouble and the ge of tenan their sn. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King of Egypt. &quot;Then was the part of the ha from him [the Lord] and this writing was written.&quot; He speaks of the phantasm as past.

    Then what bees of this needless multiplication of the miracle? this message to a royal sce, singly expressed -- for it was said, &quot;thy kingdom is divided,&quot; simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it her directly nrammatically?

    But admitting the artists own version of the story, and that the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers -- let it have been visible to all Babylon -- the knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and his teroubled, even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and their tenances, as of an individual maroubled; bowed, bent down, so they would have remained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of struggling with that iable judgment.

    Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a &quot;Marriage at a,&quot; by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture and colour of the wedding garments, the ring glittering upon the brides fingers, the metal and fashion of the wis; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a &quot;day of judgment,&quot; or in a &quot;day of lesser horrors yet divine,&quot; at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the immediate se, as the actual eye of a or patient in the immediate se would see, only in masses and indistin. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a ladys magazine, in the criticised picture,-- but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical sce, and studied diversities of posture in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo, -- have no business in their great subjects. There was no leisure of them.

    By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true clusions; by not showing the actual appearahat is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous a. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen -- houses, ns, architectural proportions, differences of publid private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some fusion truly, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment, which reduces fusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to plate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with antiquarian ess the pots and pans of Pompeii.

    &quot;Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.&quot; Who, in reading this magnifit Hebraism, in his ception, sees aught but the heroi of Nun, with the out-stretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been scious of this array at the interposition of the synic miracle? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the &quot;Belshazzars Feast&quot; no ignoble work either -- the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into ae of the day; and the eye may &quot;dart through rank and file traverse&quot; for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed followers, which is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but a, where only it is to be found if anywhere,  be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transding the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes in the great picture at Aeins. It seems a thiween two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with nerehending gratitude at sed life bestowed. It ot fet that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as the are in design and hue -- for it is a glorified work -- do not respond adequately to the a -- that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the i? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they see them? or  the mind in the ception of it admit of suing objects?  it think of them at all? or what associating league to the imagination  there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a prebbr>藏书网</abbr>sential miracle?

    Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, ht not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a -- Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think -- for it is long since -- there, by no process, with mere ge of se, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her owiful in volution and distortion, lio her atural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either -- these, animated brahose, disanimated members -- yet the animal aable lives suffitly kept distinct -- his Dryad lay -- -an approximation of two natures, which to ceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.

    To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial prehension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present subjects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some and Past or Future. How has Raphael -- we must still linger about the Vati -- treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in his &quot;Building of the Ark?&quot; It is in that scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade thahe Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardi modern art. As the Fren, of whom Ces friend made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and uto; so from this subjeere meiise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of iure with any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depot at Chatham would he the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the shipyards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for instrus, when he imagihe Building of the Vessel that was to be servatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. Iensity of the a, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy presce, giving dires. And there are his agents -- the solitary but suffit Three hewing, sawing, every oh the might and earness of a Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than teical guidance; giant-muscled; every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibellht in fire -- Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyra, So work the workmen that should repair a world!

    Artists again err in the founding of poetic with pictorial objects. Iter, the exterior acts are nearly every thing, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othellos color -- the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff -- do they haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our ceptions oime for y-hat we are lost in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealised and ened hopelessly in the grovelliers of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote -- the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse -- has never preseself, divested from the unhallowed apa of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosihat man has read his book by halves; he has laughed mistaking his authors purport, which was -- tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions) in the shallow hope of exg mirth, would have joihe rabble at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see that terfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality. scious of the heroiside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered person assing, would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, an the &quot;strange bedfellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?&quot; Shade of Cervantes! who in thy Sed Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehehat he would spoil their pretty -works, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in ats like these: &quot;Truly, fairest Lady, Actaeon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty: I end the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offers; and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may and me: for my profession is this, To shew myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be; and if those s, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather thahem: and (he adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this h e to your hearing.&quot; Illustrious Romancer! were the &quot;fine frenzies,&quot; which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Sed Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Servio be monstered, and shown up at the heartless bas of great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, whi thy First Part misleads him, always from within, into half-ludicrous, but more than half-passionable and admirable errors, not infli enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should soothe it? Why, Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wan not have eo play the pranks on his fled wits, which thou hast made thy Quixo<dfn></dfn>te suffer in Duchesses halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.*

    In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most mate artist in the Book way that the world hath y<big></big>et seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the . If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we ined to laugh; or not, rather, to indulge a trary emotion? Cervantes, stung, perce, by the relish with which his Reading Public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his poraries. We know that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually happen to him -- as afterwards it did to his scarferior follower, the Author of &quot;Guzman de Alfarache &quot;-that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious Sed Part: and judging, that it would be easier for his petitor to out -- bid him in the icalities, than in the romance, of his work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity -- the madness at sedhand -- the tagion, caught from a stronger mind ied -- that war between native ing, and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto apanied his master -- two for a pair almost -- does he substitute a dht Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following a fessed Madman; and  at oime to lay, if not actually laying hands upon him! From the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is bee a -- treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accly.

    * Yet from this Sed Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected; the waiting-women with beards, &amp;c.

 REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEARS COMING OF AGE

    The Old Year being dead, and the New Year ing of age, which he does, by dar Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentlemans body, not<bdi></bdi>hing would serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all the Days in the year were ihe Festivals, whom he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. They had been eime out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and good cheer for mortals below; and it was time they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them, whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the obje was overruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to e with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks home at night.

    All the Days came to their day. Covers were provided for three hundred and sixty-five guests at the principal table; with an occasional knife and fork at the sideboard for the Twenty-Ninth of February.

    I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hours; twelve little, merry, whirligig footpages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters.

    Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail fellow Day, well met -- brother Day -- sister Day, -- only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat sful. Yet some said, Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came, some in green, some in whit -- but old Lent and his family were not yet out of m. Rainy Days came in, dripping; and sun-shiny Days helped them to ge their stogs. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for ay Day came late, as he always does and Doomsday sent word -- he might be expected.

    April Fool (as my young lords jester) took upon himself to marshal the guests, and wild work he made with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have found out any given Day in the year, to erect a scheme upon -- good Days, bad Days, were so shuffled together, to the founding of all sober horoscopy.

    He had stuck the Twenty First of Juo the Twenty Sed of December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was certed) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayors Days. Lord! how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him -- to the great greasing ariment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccupd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but e to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, sorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess, and no dish fentl></a>eman. Then he dipt his fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles.

    At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping the Sed of September to some cock broth, -- which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant -- so there was no love lost for that matter. The Last of Lent unging upon Shrovetides pancakes; which April Fool perceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry-day.

    In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems, being a sour puritanic character, that thought nobodys meat good or sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calfs head, which he had had cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon intily; but as it lay in the dish, March Mahers, who is a very fine lady, and subject to the megrims, screamed out there was a &quot;human head in the platter,&quot; and raved about Herodias daughter to that degree, th<q></q>at the obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed; nor did she recover her stomach till she had gulped down a Restorative, fected of Oak Apple, which the merry Twenty Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose.

    The Kings health* being called for after this, a notable dispute arose betweewelfth of August (a zealous old Whig ge>９９ｌｉb?t>woman,) and the Twenty Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp,) as to which of them should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upoter, affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate BIRTHDAY) had scarcely a rag, &amp;c.

    [Footnote] * The late King.

    April Fool, being made mediator, firmed the right iro form of words to the appellant, but decided for peace sake that the exercise of it should remain with the present possessor. At the same time, he slily rouhe first lady in the car, that an aight lie against the  for bi-geny.

    It beginning to grow a little duskish, dlemas lustily bawled out fhts, which posed by all the Days, who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady was observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself.

    May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in a  speech proposing the health of the founder, ed her goblet (and by her example the rest of the pany) with garlands. This being dohe lordly New Year from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returhanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy fathers late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if any thing was found unreasonable) in their rents.

    At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily looked at each other, and smiled; April Fool whistled to an old tune of &quot;New Brooms;&quot; and a surly old rebel at the farther end of the table (who was discovered to no other than the Fifth of November,) muttered out, distinctly enough to he heard by the whole pany, words to this effect, that, &quot;when the old one is gone, he is a fool that looks for a better.&quot; Which rudeness of his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion; and the male-tent was thrust out ned heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a boutefeu and firebrand as he had shown himself to be.

    Order beiored -- the young lord (who to say truth, had been a little ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as few, a as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire wele; and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor Twenty Ninth of February, that had sate all this while mumce at the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good pany before him -- which he drank accly; , that he had not seen his ho fay time these four years, with a number of endearing expressions besides. At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlor which had been assigned him he stationed him at his own board, somewhere between the Greek ds and Latter Lammas.

    Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his eyes fast stu his head, and as well as the ary he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce, and was followed by the latter, who gave &quot;Miserere&quot; in fiyle, hitting off the mumping notes ahened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite humour. April Fool swore they had exged ditions, but Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave, and Sunday held her fan before her face, that she might not be seen to smile.

    Shrove-tide, Lord Mayors Day, and April Fool,  joined in a glee --

    What is the properest day to drink? in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden.

    They  fell to quibbles and drums. The question being proposed, who had the greatest number of followers -- the Quarter-Days said, there could be no question as to that, for they had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But April-Fool who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some pretensions to the lady besides, as being<s>?９9ｌｉｂ?</s> but a cousin once removed, --clapped and hallod them on, and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the Ember-Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame, and all was in a ferment: till old Madam Septuagesima (who boasts herself the Mother-of-the-Days) wisely diverted the versation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could re when she was young, and of one Master Rogation-Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to her, but she kept him at a distance, as the icle would tell -- by which I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gohe good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood -- which plainly showed her old head to be a little better than crazed and doited.

    Day being ehe Days called for their cloaks and great coats, and took their leaves. Lord-Mayors-Day went off in a Mist, as usual, Shortest-Day in a deep black Fog, that t the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils -- so wat are called in heaven - saw Christmas-Day safe home-- they had beeo the business bore. Anil -- a stout, sturdy patrole, called the Eve-of-St.-Christopher -- seeing Ash-Wednesday in a dition little better than he should be -- een whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old-Mortificatio floating home, singing --

    Os back do I fly,

    and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober, but very few Aves or Peiaries (you may believe me) were among them. Lo-Day set off westward iiful crimson and gold -- the rest, some in one fashion, some in another, but Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in one of the prettiest silver twilights a Lovers Day could wish to set in.

 THE WEDDING

    I do not know when I have beeer pleased than at being invited last week to be present at the wedding of a friends daughter. I like to make o these ceremonies, which to us old people give back our youth in a manner, aore ayest season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappois, in this point of a settlement. On these occasions I am sure to be in good-humor for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey-moon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friends family. I feel a sort of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the season. I am inducted into degrees of affinity, and, in the participated socialities of the little unity, I lay down for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humour so far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going on in the house of a dear friend. But to my subject. ---

    The union itself had been loled, but its celebration had be<mark>.</mark>en hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasoate of suspense in the lovers, by some invincible prejudices which the brides father had unhappily tracted upon the subject of the too early marriages of females. He has beeuring any time these five years -- for to that length the courtship has been protracted -- upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have pleted her five and tweh year. We all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had abated of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered on, till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these overstrained notions, joio some serious expostulations on that of his friends, who, from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not promise ourselves many years enjoyment of his pany, and were anxious t matters to a clusion during his life-time, at length prevailed, and on Monday last the daughter of my old friend, Admiral ---, having attaihe womanly age of een was ducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J---, who told some few years older.

    Before the youthful part of my female readers express their indignation at the abominable loss of time occasioo the lovers by the preposterous notions of my old friend, they will do well to sider the reluce which a fond parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this poiween child and parent, whatever pretences of i or prudence may be held out to cover it. The hard-heartedness of fathers is a fiheme for romance writers, a sure and moving topic, but is there not something unteo say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is sometimes in to tear herself from the parental stock, and it herself te graftings? The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to be an only child. I do not uand these matters experimentally, but I  make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in unparallel subjects, which is little less heart-rending than the passion which we more strictly christen by that name. Mothers scruples are more easily got over, for this reason, I suppose, that the prote transferred to a husband is less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. Mothers, besides, have a trembling fht, which paints the inveniences (impossible to be ceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon their child. Mothers instinct is a surer guide here, than the cold reasonings of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices, by whie wives push orimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, however approving, shall eain with parative indifference. A little shamelessness<mark></mark> on this head is pardonable. With this explanation, forwardness bees a grace, and maternal importunity receives the name of a virtue. -- But the parson stays, while I preposterously assume his office. I am preag, while the bride is ohreshold.

    Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage refles which have just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of application to the young lady, who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a ge in her dition, at a mature and petent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all parties. I only <bdo>..</bdo>deprecate very hasty marriages.

    It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gohrough at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeuerwards, to which a select party of friends had been invited. We were in church a little before the clock struck eight.

    Nothing could be more judicious raceful than the dress of the bride-maids -- the three charming Miss Foresters -- on this m. To give the bride an opportunity of shining singly, they had e habited all in green. I am ill at describing female apparel, but, while she stood at the altar iments white and did as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in robes, such as might bee Dianas nymphs -- Foresters indeed -- as such who had not yet e to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their fathers sake, and live altogether so happy with their remaining parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of suinterrupted and provoking home-fallant girls! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia!

    I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I ot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. I was never cut out for a publiary. Ceremony and I have long shaken hands, but I could not resist the importunities of the young ladys father, whose gout unhappily fined him at home, to act as parent on this occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous occurred to me at this most serious of all moments -- a sense of my unfito have the disposal, even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson -- and the rectors eye of Saint Mildreds in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke -- on me in an instant, s my incipieo the tristful severities of a funeral.

    This was the only misbehavior which I  plead to upon this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony by one of the handsome Miss T---s, be ated a solecism. She leased to say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride in blaow black has been my ordinary apparel so long -- indeed I take it to be the proper e of an author -- the stage sans it -- that to have appeared in some lighter colour would have raised more mirth at my expehan the anomaly had created sure. But I could perceive that the brides mother, and some elderly ladies present (God bless them!) would have been well tent, if I had e in any other colour than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds being io the lis wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because &quot;he had no other.&quot; This tolerably reciled the elders. But with the young people all was merriment, and shakings of hands, and gratulations, and kissing away the brides tears, and kissings from her iurn, till a young lady, who assumed some experien these matters, having worn the nuptial bands some four or five weeks lohan her friend, rescued her, archly , with half an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she would have &quot;no.&quot;

    My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occasion -- a striking trast to his usual  of personal appearance. He did not once shove up his borrowed locks (his  ever at his m studies) to betray the few grey stragglers of his owh them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful satisfa. I trembled for the hour, which at length approached, when after a protracted breakfast of three hours -- if stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, boes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, etc.  deserve so meagre an appellation -- the coach was announced, which was e to carry off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as  has sensibly ordained, into the try, upon which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us return to the assembled guests.

    As wh９9lｉb.en a well-graced actor leaves the stage,

    The eyes of men

    Are idly bent on him that enters ,

    so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the chief performers in the ms pageant had vanished. old his tale. None sipt her glass. The poor Admiral made an effort -- it was not much. I had anticipated so far. Even the infinity of full satisfa, that had betrayed itself through the prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wao something of misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leaves or stay. We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying aure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise like to have brought me into disgra the fore-part of the day, I mean a power, in any emergency, of thinking and givio all manner of strange nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sn. I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the m bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the better part of the pany to a late hour: and a rubber of whist (the Admirals favourite game) with some rare strokes of ce as well as skill, which came opportunely on his side -- lengthened out till midnight -- dismissed the old gentleman at last to his bed with paratively easy spirits.

    I have been at my old friends various times since. I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease, nowhere, where harmony is sely the result of fusion. Every body is at cross purposes, yet the effect is so much better than uniformity. tradictory orders, servants pulling one way, master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse, visitors huddled up in ers, chairs unsymmetrised: dles disposed by ce, meals at off hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preg the former, the host and the guest ferring, yet each upon a different topic, eaderstanding himself, her trying to uand or hear the other, draughts and politics, chess and political ey, cards and versation on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or ihe wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most perfect cordia discors you shall meet with. Yet somehow the old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to &quot;make his destiny his choice.&quot; He bears bravely up, but he does not e out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as sea songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold ahts. We all miss a junior prese is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up, and keeps green, the paternal roof. Old and youo have an i in her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily is married.

 THE CHILD-ANGEL, A Dream

    I ced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the ht, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the &quot;Loves of the Angels,&quot; ao bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innumerable jectures, and, I remember, the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, &quot;what could e of it.&quot;

    I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out -- but to some celestial region. It was not the real h<var></var>eaveher -- not the dht Bible heaven -- but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor human fancy may have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption.

    Methought -- what wild things dreams are! -- I resent -- at what would >..</a>you imagine? -- at an angels gossiping.

    Whe came, or how it came, or who bid it e, or whether it came purely of its own head, her you nor I know -- but there lay, sure enough, ed in its little cloudy swaddling bands -- a Child-Angel.

    Sun-threads -- filmy beams -- ran through the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watg when the new-born should open its yet closed eyes, which, when it did, first one, and theher -- with a solicitude and apprehensio not such as, stained with fear, dims the expanding eye-lids of mortal infants, but as if to explore its path in those its uary palaces -- what ainguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages! Nor wahere to my seeming -- O the inexplicable simpleness of dreams ! -- bowls of that cheeriar,

    -- which mortals caudle call below --

    Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, -- stri in years, as it might seem, -- so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to terfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet, with terrestrial child-rites the young present, which earth had made to heaven.

    Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony as those by which the spheres are tutored, but, as loudest instruments oh speak oftentimes, muffled, so to aodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the A sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions -- but forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a wo was to see how, as years went round in heaven -- a year in dreams is as a day -- tinually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting the perfegeliutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering -- still caught by angel hands -- for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven.

    And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge-Urania, because its produ was of earth and heaven.

    And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces: but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility, and it went with a lame gait, but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grad swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelis, and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one.

    And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling them to degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth-born, and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is, to know all things at ohe half-heavenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its uanding, so that Humility and Aspiratio on even-paced in the instru of the glorious Amphibium.

    But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breath?he air of that super-subtle region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever.

    And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured ae by turns in the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this greeh from which it came: so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upoertai of the neted.

    And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upoh, and still goes lame and lovely.

    By the banks of the river Pison is seen, loting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child, but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts its lis, heless, a correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom I saw above, and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is as a.. shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this correspondency is not to be uood but by dreams.

    And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that ohe angel Nadir, being exiled from his plaortal passion, upspringing on the wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable laeared for a brief instant in his statio９９ｌib?n, and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely -- but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison.

 A DEATH-BED, In a letter to R. H. Esq. of B.

    I called upon you this m and found that you were goo visit a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor N.R. has lain dying now for almost a week, such is the penalty we pay for having ehrough life a strong stitution. Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me through his plazed eyes, but the group I saw about him I shall not fet. Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his Wife, their two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert, looking doubly stupified. There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach<bdi>..</bdi> out a hand to Mrs. R. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time it must be all over with him. In him I have a loss the world ake up. He was my friend, and my fathers friend, for all the life that I  remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships sihose are the friendships, which outlast a sed geion. Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was still the child he knew me. To the last he called me Jemmy. I have o call me Jemmy now. He was the last link that bouo B____. You are but of yesterday. In him I seem to ></a>have lost the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Lettered he was not, his reading scarcely exceeded the Obituary of the old Gentlemans Magazio which he has never failed of having recourse for these last fifty years. Yet there was the pride of literature about him from that slender perusal, and moreover from his office of archive-keeper to your a city, in which he must needs pick up some equivocal Latin, which, among his less literary friends, assumed the air of a very pleasary.  I fet the erudite look with which, having tried to puzzle<u></u> out the text of a Black-lettered Chaucer in your Corporation Library, to which he was a sort of Librarian, he gave it up with this solatory refle -- &quot;Jemmy,&quot; said he, &quot;I do not know what you find in these very old books, but I observe, there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them.&quot; His jokes (for he had some) are ended, but they were old Perennials, staple, and always as good as new. He had one Song, that spake of the &quot;flat bottoms of our foes ing over in darkness,&quot; and alluded to a threatened invasion, many years since blowhis bbr></abbr>he reserved to be sung on Christmas Night, which we alassed with him, and he sang it with the freshness of the impendi. How his eyes would sparkle when he came to the passage:--

    Well still make em run, and well still make em sweat,

    In spite of the devil and Brussels Gazette!

    What is the Brussels Gazette now? I cry, while I ehese trifles. His pirls who are, I believe, pact of solid goodness, will have to receive their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home in a petty village in ---shire, where for years they have been struggling to raise a Girls School with no<bdo></bdo> effect. Poor deaf Robert (and the less hopeful for being so) is thrown up a deaf world, without the fort to his father on his death-bed of knowing him provided for. They are left almost provisionless. Some life assurahere is, but I fear, not exceeding ---. Their hopes must be from your corporation, which their father has served for fifty years. Who or what are your Leading Members now, I know not. Is there any, to whom without impertinence, you  represent the true circumstances of the family? You ot say good enough of poor R., and his poor wife. Oblige me and the dead, if you .

 OLD CHINA

    I have an almost feminine partiality for old a. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the a-closet, a for the picture gallery. I ot defend the order of preference, but by saying, that we have all some taste or other, of too a a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I  call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not scious of a time when a jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.

    I had nhen -- why should I now have? -- to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that uhe notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspectives -- a a tea-cup.

    I like to see my old friends -- whom distance ot diminish -- figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics) yet on terra firma still -- so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, has made t up beh their sandals.

    I love the men with womens faces, and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions.

    Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handio a lady from a salver -- two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! Ahe same lady, or another -- for likeness is identity on teacups -- is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored oher side of this calm garden river, with a dainty ming foot, whi a right angle of ince (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead -- a furlong off oher side of the same straream!

    Farther on -- if far or near  he predicated of their world -- see horses, trees, pagodas, dang the hays.

    Here -- a cow and rabbit cout, and co-extensive -- so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fihay.

    I ointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old fashioned enough to drink uill of an afternoon) some of these speiracula upon a set of extra-ordinary old blue a (a ret purchase) which we were now for the first time using; and could not help remarking, how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort -- when a passiiment seemed to over-shade the brows of my panion. I am quick at deteg these summer clouds in Bridget.

    &quot;I wish the good old times would e again,&quot; she said, &quot;when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean, that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state &quot; -- so she leased to ramble on, -- &quot;in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to get you to sent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the mohat we paid or it.

    &quot;Do you remember the brown suit, whiade to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare -- and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which yed home late at night from Barkers in t-garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not e to a determination till it was en oclock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late -- and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the reli his dusty treasuries and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome -- and when you prese to me -- and when we were expl the perfeess of it (collating you called it -- and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break -- was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or  those  black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have bee rid finical, give you half the ho vanity with which you flau about in that over-worn suit -- your old corbeau -- for four or five weeks lohan you should have doo pacify your sce for the mighty sum of fifteen -- or sixteen shillings was it ? -- a great affair we thought it then -- which you had lavished on the old folio. Now <big>.?</big>you  afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.

    &quot;When you e home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christehe `Lady Blanch; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money -- and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture -- was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into aghis, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?

    &quot;Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potters Bar, and Waltham, when we had a holyday -- holydays, and all other fun, are gone, now we are rich -- and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our days fare of savory cold lamb and salad -- and how you would pry about at noon-tide for some det house, where we might go in, and produce our store -- only paying for the ale that you must call for -- and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth -- and wish for suother ho hostess, as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a fishing -- and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would loingly upon us -- but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a days pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way -- and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense -- which, after all, never has half the relish of those ce try snaps, when we were at the mercy of uain usage, and a precarious wele.

    &quot;You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but i. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the battle of Hexham, and the surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood -- when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery -- where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me -- and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me -- and the pleasure was the better for a little shame -- and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our pla the house, or what mattered it where we were sittinbbr>..</abbr>g, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria. You used to say, that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially -- that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going -- that the pa there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, oage -- because a word lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such refles we soled our pride then -- and I appeal to you, whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and aodation, than I have done sin more expeuations in the house? The getting in indeed, and the crowding up those inve staircases, was bad enough, -- but there was still a law of civility to women reised to quite as great aent as we ever found iher passage -- and how a little difficulty overe heightehe snug seat, and the play, afterwards! Now we  only pay our money, and walk in. You ot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then -- but sight, and all, I think, is goh our poverty.

    &quot;There leasure iing strawberries, before they became quite on -- in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear -- to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat  we have now? If we were to treat ourselves now -- that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor  get at, that makes what I call a treat -- when two people living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like; while each apologises, and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now -- what I mean by the word -- we never do make much of ourselves.  the poor  do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty.

    &quot;I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet -- and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December to at for our exceedings -- many a long face did you make over your puzzled ats, and in triving to make it out how ent so much -- or that we had not spent so much -- or that it was impossible we should spend so muext year -- and still we found our slender capital decreasing -- but thewixt ways, and projects, and promises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future -- and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now,) we pocketed up our loss, and in clusion, with `lusty brimmers (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to wele in the `ing guest. Now we have no reing at all at the end of the old year -- no flattering promises about the new year doier for us.&quot;

    Bridget is so sparing of her speeost occasions, that whes into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had jured up out of a clear ine of poor -- hundred pounds a year. &quot;It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake <bdo>??</bdo>the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much tle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened, and knit our pact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficy which you now plain of. The resisting power -- those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances ot straiten -- with us are long since passed away. peteo age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked : live better, and lie softer -- and shall be wise to do so -- than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return -- could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a-day -- could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I young to see them -- could the good old one shilling gallery days return -- they are dreams, my cousin, now -- but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa -- be once more struggling up those inve stair-cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of pallery scramblers -- could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours -- and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed wheopmost stair, quered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre dowh us -- I know not the fathom lihat ever touched a dest so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had or the great Jew R----- is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little ese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house.&quot;

 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD

    Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortuheir sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is aowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force  oblige a man to raise his glass to his head against his will. Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies.

    Alas! The hand to pilfer, and the too bear false witness, have no stitutional tendency. These are as indifferent to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they  be brought off without a murmur. The itg finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar  with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which it has been aced to scatter their pernicious traries. But when a man has itted sot-----

    Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, ahy ge riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of passion, how much of human allowahou mayest virtuously mih thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a ma not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle.

    Begin a reformation, and  will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire? what if the whole system must undergo a ge violent as that which we ceive of the mutation of form in some is? what if a process parable to flaying alive be to be gohrough? is the weakhat sinks under such struggles to be founded with the pertinacity which gs to other vices, which have induo stitutional y, no e of the whole victim, body and soul?

    I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one evening,-- though the poisonous potion had long ceased t back its first entments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it,-- in the violence of the struggle, and the y he has felt of getting rid of the preseion at any rate, I have known him to scream out, or cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him.

    Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no ;puling apology to make to mankind. I see then all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am atable for the woe that I have brought upon it.

    I believe that there are stitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scary excesses  hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wiaken in ever so plentiful a measure,  do no worse injury than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them his discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, wh his strength with them, and ing off foiled from the test, would fain persuade them hat such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the vivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life.

    Twelve years ago I had pleted my six-and-tweh year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty mu solitude. My panions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused.

    About that time<dfn></dfn> I fell in with some panions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunke seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or asses for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a larger share then my panions. Enced by their applause, I set up for a professed joker! i who of all men am least fitted for su occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experie all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in my speech!

    Reader, if yifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tig relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of versation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly yreatest destru. If you ot crush the power of fancy, or that within you whiistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, -- but not as I do now, with tears trig down your cheeks.

    To be an object of passion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stated at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you ot be witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty whio premeditation  give; to be spurred on to efforts whid in pt; to be set on t provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice; to swallhts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors; te miserable morrows fhts of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it ba little insiderable drops ing applause,-- are the wages of buffoonery ah.

    Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all es which have no solider fastening than this liquid t, more kind to me than my own taste or peion, at length opened my eyes to the supposed quality of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample retribution for any supposed iy that I may have been guilty of towards them.

    My  more immediate panions were and are persons of sutrinsid felt worth, that though actally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the thio do ain, I should have the ce to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the be. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of panionship; and the slightest fuel which they unsciously afforded, was suffit to feed my old fires into a propensity.

    They were no drinkers, but one, from professional habits, and another, from a  derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backslidient. The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to ute. He beats us at barter; and whehink to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, tis odds but that he puts the trick upon us of two for ohat (paratively) white devil of tobaccht with him in the end seven worse than himself.

    It were impertio carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wihrough stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling positions which, uhe name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water tinually, until they e o none, and so to  all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus.

    I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service which I have paid, the slavery which I have vowed to it. Here, when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started up; how it has put upon personal claims, and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the ey-er of some inn in &quot;Joseph Andrews&quot; or Piscator in the &quot;plete Angler&quot; breaks his fast upon a m pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. Hoe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realise it,-- how then its asding vapours curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand deliinisterings versant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turo a ive relief, theo a restlessness and dissatisfa, theo a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands fessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself lio it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone-----

    Persons not aced to examihe motives of their as, to re up the tless nails that rivet the s of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have fessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which, in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, s down many a poor fellow, of ninal indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot?

    I have seen a print after Cio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound to the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repug the same instant of time is applying a so his side. In his face is feeble delight, the recolle of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bohe springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering stantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preg a-all this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own dition.

    Of that there is no hope that it should ever ge. The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening ses of life or the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to uand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going dorecipice with open eyes and a passive will,-- to see his destru and have no power to stop it, ao feel it all the way emanating from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, a not to be able tet a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins:-- could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last nights drinking, and feverishly looking for this nights repetition of the folly; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered,-- it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantliation; to make him clasp his teeth

    and not undo em

    To suffer WET DAMNATION to run thro em.

    Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be the fihing you would have us to uand, if the forts of a cool braio be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders, in your instahat you do not return to those habits from which you would ihers o swerve? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it not worth rec?

    Rec!-- Oh if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the  clear spring could slake as which summer suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I  sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innoly makes me sid faint.

    But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinend the excess which kills you? For your sake, reader, and that you may tain to my experience, with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, hat I  find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less firmed-for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), iage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is suffit to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken  all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own trial. He will e to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through intoxication: for it is a fearful truth that the intellectual faculties, by repeated acts of intemperance, may be driven from their orderly sphere of a, their clear daylight ministries, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint maions of their departing energies, upourning periods of the fatal mado which the owe their devastation. The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good.*

    [Footnote] * When poor M-------- painted his last picture, with a pencil irembling hand, and a glass of brandy and water iher, his fingers owed the parative steadiness with which they were eo gh their task, in an imperfect mao a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and his kin so terribly.

    Behold me, then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and decay. Hear me t my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup.

    Twelve years ago, I ossessed of a healthy frame of mind <samp></samp>and body. I was rong, but I think my stitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it ossible to be. I scarew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches.

    At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the m, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of a song to wele the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretg out the hours of recumbeo their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked.

    Life itself, my waking life, has much of the fusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble upobbr>.9９lib.</abbr>n dark mountains.

    Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as something of y to be gohrough, and therefore best uaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of discements, and am ready to give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing ceit of incapacity The slightest ission given me by a friend, or any small duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &amp;c., haunts me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much the springs of a are broken.

    The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare not promise that a friends honour, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of moral a are deadened within me.

    My favourite occupations in times past now cease to eain. I  do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstray dition e long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at e of thought, which is now difficult to me.

    The noble passages whierly delighted me in history or poetic fi, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable.

    I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or  is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterioration.

    These are some of the instances, ing which I  say with truth, that it was not always so with me.

    Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is this disclosure suffit?

    I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to sult by these fessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I end them to the readers attention, if he finds his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am e to. Let him stop in time.

 POPULAR FALLACIES I.-THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWA

    This axiom tains a principle of pensation which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to diaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour -- in the same vocabulary. The ic ?９９lｉｂ.ers, with their poetical justice, have tributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hect fellow exposed aen upoage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some peoples share of animal spirits is notoriously low aive. It has not strength to raise a vapou<u>..</u>r, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no art of valour. The truest ce with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But front one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his fiden the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest inoffensive deportment does not [p 253] necessarily imply valour; her does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hi wanted modesty -- we do not mean him of Clarissa -- but who ever doubted his ce? Even the poets -- upon whom this equitab<mark></mark>le distribution of qualities should be most binding -- have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the &quot;Agonistes,&quot; is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singl<q></q>y before him -- and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character thaher of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate preeminence: -- &quot; Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson.&quot; This was true distributive justice.

 POPULAR FALLACIES II. -- THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVE

    The weakest part of mankind have this saying o in their mouth. It is the trite solation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estabbr>99ｌib?</abbr>te, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues of this world -- the prudenter part of them, at least -- know better; and, if the observationbbr>9９lｉｂ?</abbr> had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distins of the fluctuating and the perma. &quot;Lightly e, lightly go,&quot; is a proverb, which they  very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manot by rapine or chiery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thiefs hand that grasps it. Church land, alieo lay uses, was formerly denouo have this slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to postpohe prophecy of refuo a late posterity.

 III. -- THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST

    The severest exa surely ever ied upon the self-denial of poor human nature! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of it; to sit esurient at his own table, and end the flavour of his venison upon the absurd strength of his oug it himself. On the trary, we love to see a wag taste his own j９９ｌｉｂ.oke to his party; to watch a quirk, or a merry ceit, flickering upon the lips some seds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy [p 254] -- begotten of the occasion; if he that utters it hought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled with it; and any suppression of suplace we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply, but that your pany is weak or foolish enough to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? Thi藏书网s is exactly the humour of the fileman in Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself to &quot;see nothing siderable in it.&quot;

 IV. -- THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. -- THAT

    A speech from the poorer sort of people, which always indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny, is that which galls and exasperates them t<q>..</q>o use this language. The forbearah which it is usually received, is a proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one another mrossly -- He is a poor creature. -- He as not a rag to cover -- -- &amp;c.; though<mark></mark> this last, we fess, is more frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, shouldbbr></abbr> not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics -- as, to tell him his father was hanged -- his sister, &amp;c. -- , without exposing a secret, which should be kept snu<u></u>g between them; and doing an affront to the order to which they have the honour equally to belong? All this while they do not see how the wealthier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both.

 V. -- THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH

    A smooth text to the latter; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upo to a fooli<var>?</var>sh squire to be told, that he -- and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the inality of sin in any sense. But me such implicit sheep as this es to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle, than the apprehension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on that score: they may even take their fill of pleasures, where they  fin<q></q>d them. The Genius [p 255] of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of iion but it  trade upoaple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an inal. Who taught the Poor to steal, to pilfer? They did not go to the great for sasters in these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be -- no copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said to take after their masters and mistresses, when they succeed to their reversionary eats. If the master, from indisposition or some other cause,  his food, the servant dines notwithstanding.

    &quot;O, but (some will say) the force of example is great.&quot; We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head, that she would put up with the calls of the most imperti visitor, rather tha her servant say she was not at home, for fear of teag her maid to tell an untruth; and this in the very face of the fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the greatest liars upon the earth withou藏书网t teag; so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two words of secutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go for nothing: example must be every thing. This liar in grain, who never opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, which she (pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from a form of words -- literally false, but essentially deceiving no one -- that under some circumstances a fib might not be so exceedingly sinful -- a fi, too, not at all in her own way, or ohat she could be suspected of adopting, for few servant-wenches care to be deo visitors.

    This word example reminds us of another fine word which is in use upon these occasions -- encement. &quot;People in our sphere must not be thought to give encement to such proceedings.&quot; To such a frantic height is this principle capable of being carried, that we have known individuals who have thought it within the scope of their influeo san despair, and give eclat to -- suicide. A domesti the family of a ty member lately deceased, for love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; and great i <u></u>was used in his behalf, upon his recovery, that he might be permitted to retain his place; his word being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to promise for him, that the like should never happen again. His master was inable to keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she &quot;could not think of encing any such doings in the ty.&quot; [p 256]

 VI. -- THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST

    Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round Guildhall, who really believes this saying. The ior of it did not believe it himself. It was made in revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the pala<tt></tt>te, whiows better things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is suffit, that from the superflux there is usually somethi for the  day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a tendenake us underva<q></q>lue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not health; riches ot purchase every thing: the metaphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheeps back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome ex></a>etion of an oyster. Heoo, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres -- a sophistry so barefaced, that eveeral sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws assuming to inculcate tent, we verily believe to have been the iion of some ing borrower, who had designs upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, which he could only hope to carry by force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of the artful metonyme whivelops it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing fn tries, independence, hearts ease, a mans own time to himself, are not much -- however we may be pleased to sdalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.

 VII. -- OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALL

    Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite clusion. Temper, indeed, is  of truth; but warmth and earness are a proof at least of a mans own vi of the rectitude that which he maintains. ess is as often the result of unprincipled indiffereo t９9lib?h or falsehood, as of a sober fiden a mans own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lins Inn -- we have seldom known this s.９9ｌｉb.ewd little fellow engaged in argument where we were not vinced he had the best of it, if tongue would but fairly have seded him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hether, writhing and lab to be delivered of the point of d>..</a>ispute -- the very [p 257] gist of the troversy knog at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron-grating still obstructed its deliverance -- his puny frame vulsed, and face reddening all over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it ..as moved all to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to he calm (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the <mark></mark>argument  from him in the opinion of all the bystanders, who have gone away clearly vihat Titubus must have been in the wrong, because he was in a passion; and that Mr. -----, meaning his oppo, is one of the fairest, and at the same time one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing.

 VIII. -- THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUS

    The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A  is sometimes as difficult to explain to a fner as a pun. What would bee of a great part of the wit of the last age, i<bdi>..</bdi>f it were tried by this test? How would certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have souo a Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to translate th<mark></mark>em? Senator urbanus, with Curruca to boot for a synonime, would but faintly have dohe business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough to render; it is too much to expect us to<mark></mark> translate a sound, and give a version to a jihe Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious sounds in another language for it. To Latinise a pun, we<bdo></bdo> must seek a pun in Latin, that will ao it; as, to give an idea of the double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practi the old monkish doggerel. Dennis, the fierces.. oppugner of puns in a or modern times, professes himself highly tickled with the &quot;a stick&quot; chiming to &quot;ecclesiastic.&quot; Yet what is this but a species of pun, a verbal sonance?

 IX -- THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST

    If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but es bounding into the presence, and does not show the less ></dfn>omic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg -- all the [p 258] better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at oime or other been at a party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious ceits, every man tributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day; after making a poor word run the gauill it is ready to drop; after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of similar sounds; after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop further -- suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a er, who was never preo the trade, whom the pany for very pity passed over, as we do by a known po<cite></cite>or man when a money-subscription is going round, no one calling upon him for his quota -- has all at one out with something so whimsical, yet so perti; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad at the same time, -- that it has proved a Robin Hoods shot; -- any thing ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being perfe all its parts. What it gains in pleteness, it loses in naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most eaining are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swifts Miscellanies.

    An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: &quot;Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?&quot;

    There is no exg this, and ing it. A man might blur ten s>..</a>ides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not siderable. It is only a urn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very on, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by oleman to a a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take iality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the oopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the ihough rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and iricable irrelevancy of the sed; the place -- a public street, not favourable to frivolous iigations; the affrontive quali<big></big>ty of the primitive inquiry (the oion) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the urn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected [p 259] to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most tries sidered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,which the fellow was beginning to uand; but then the wig again es in, and he  make nothing of it: all put together stitute a picture: Hogarth could have made it intelligible on vass.

    Yet  of ten critics will pronouhis a very bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the cluding member, which is its very beauty, and stitutes the surprise. The same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona;* because it is made out in all its parts and leaves nothing to the imagination. We veo call it cold; because of thousands who have admired it, it would he difficult to find one who has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside,) we must pronou a mo of curious felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to be true,<u>..</u> it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One ot help suspeg that the i was ied to fit the li would have beeer had it been less perfect. Like some Virgiliaichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Via was enough in sce; the Cremonae, afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun; and we have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a sed time; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided.

 X. -- THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES

    Those who use this proverb ever have seen Mrs. rady.

    The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshly te which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable mansion.

    All whily proves that the soul of Mrs. rady, in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture.

    To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser, platonizing, sings

    ----- &quot;Every Spirit as it is more pure,

    And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

    *Swift

    [p 260]

    So it the fairer body doth procure

    To habit in, and it more fairly dight

    With cheerful grad amiable sight.

    For of the soul the body form doth take:

    For soul is form, and doth the body make.&quot;

    But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. rady.

    These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very  stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever : --

    &quot;Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind

    Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd

    Either by ce, against the course of kind,

    Or through unaptness in the substance found,

    Which it assumed of some stubbround,

    That will not yield unto her forms dire,

    But is performd with some foul imperfe.&quot;

    From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody like Mrs. rady.

    The spirit of this good lady -- her previous anima -- must have stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious odity of clay fround, as the poet calls it, le mind -- and sure hers is one of .９９lｉb.he ge -- ever had to deal with.

    P upon her inexplicable visage -- inexplicable, we mean, but <var>??</var>by this modification of the theory -- we have e to a clusion that, if one must be plain, it is better to be plain all over, than, amidst a tolerable residue of features, to hang out ohat shall be exceptionable. No one  say of Mrs. radys tehat it would be better if she had but a  is impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of her own sex baffled iempt at a sele. The tout ensemble defies particularising. It is too plete -- too sistent, as we may say -- to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip -- and there a  -- out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challehe mi oisseur t<q>.99lｉb.</q>o cavil at any part or parcel of the tenan question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are vihat true ugliness, han is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that too it reigns without a petitor. No one ever saw Mrs. rady, without pronoung her to be the plai woman that he ever met with in the course of his life. The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in your existence ever after. Ylad to have seen it -- like Stonehenge. No one  pretend tet it. No one ever apologised to her for [p 261] meeting her ireet on such a day and not knowihe pretext would he too bare. Nobody  mistake her for another. Nobody  say of her, &quot;I think I ave seen that faewhere, but I.. ot call to mind where.&quot; You must remember that in such a parlour it first struck you -- like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had picked it up. You wondered more when it began to move its lips -- so mildly too! No one ever thought of askio sit for her picture. Lockets are for remembrance; and it would be clearly superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, once seen, ever he out of it. It is not a mean face either; its entire inality precludes that. her is it of that order of plain faces which improve upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordinary people, by an unwearied perseveran good offices, put a cheat upon our eyes: juggle our senses out of their natural impressions; a us upon disc good indications in a tenance, which at first sig<mark>..</mark>ht promised nothing less. We detect gentleness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. rady has done you a service, her face remains the same; when she has done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to double the number, still it is that individual faeither  you say of it, that it would be a good face if it was not marked by the small pox -- a pliment which is always more admissive than excusatory -- for either Mrs. rady never had the small pox; or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its ows fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her token; that which she is known by.

 XI. -- THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE M

    Nor a ladys age in the parish register. We hope we have more delicacy than to do either: but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Rozinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, whom leman could think of setting up in his stables? Must I, rather than not be obliged to my friend, make her a panion to Eclipse ht-foot? A hiver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm his spavined article upon us food ware. An equivalent is expected iher case; and, with my own good will, I would no more be cheated out of my thanks, than out of my money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage <bdi></bdi>you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humour of never refusing a present, to the very point of absurdity -- if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mistaken delicacy, and real good-nature. [p 262] Not an apartment in his fine house (and he has a true taste in household decorations), but is stuffed up with some preposterous print or mirror -- the worst adapted to his pahat at may he -- the presents of his friends that know his weakness; while his noble Vandykes are displaced, to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds his at iowing them here gratis. The good cre..ure has not the heart to mortify the pai the expense of an ho refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex o the same time) to see him sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable family, in favour to these adopted frights, are sigo the staircase and the lumber-room. In like manner his goodly shelves are one by oript of his favourite old authors, to give place to a colle of presentation copies -- the flower and bran of moderry. A presentation copy, reader -- if haply you are yet i such favours -- is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours which does sell, iurn. eak to experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death -- we are willing to aowledge, that in some gifts there is sense. A duplicate out of a friends library (where he has more than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favours, short of the peiary -- a thing not fit to be hi amolemen -- which fer as much -- grace upon the acceptor as the offerer; the kind, we fess, which is most to our palate, is of those little ciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a hamper -- little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine -- though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter that it be home-made. We love to have our friend in the try sitting thus at our table by proxy; to apprehend his presehough a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, -- whose goodly aspect reflects to us his &quot;plump corpusculum;&quot; to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him aiding down ioast peculiar to the latter; to corporate him in a slice of terbury brawn. This is io have him within ourselves; -- to know him intimately: such participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these siderations we should be sorry if certairictive regulations, which are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry of this try, were en<tt>.t>tirely done away with. A hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. Caius ciliates Titius (knowing his gout) with a leash of partridges. [p 263] Titius (suspeg his partiality for them) passes them to Lucius; who in his turn, preferring his friends relish to his own, makes them over to Marcius; till in their ever widening progress, and round of unscious circum-migration, they distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We are well disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens -- inpalpable to the palate -- which, uhe names s, lockets, keep-sakes, amuse some peoples fancy mightily. We could never away with these iible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship.

 XII. -- THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HO

    Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes: the home of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak to presently. Crowded places of cheap eai, and the benches of ale-houses, if they could speak, might bear mournful testimony to the first. To them the very poor mas for an image of the home, which he ot find at home. For a starved grate, and a sty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depth of winter always a blazih, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he  afford to spend. He has panions which his home denies him, for the very poor man has no visitors. He  look into the goings on of the world,<mark>..</mark> and speak a little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All is, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and ect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the abs sideration of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and imperti. At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butchers meat before the on bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a er, where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has sight of the substantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. He takes an i in the dressing of it; and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning tet at home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what children? Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, image to themselves some  tented family like that which [p 264] they go home to. But look at the tenance of the poor wives who folloersecute their good man to the door of the public-house, which he is about to enter, when something like shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, every versable li has been long effaced by misery, is that a face to stay at home with is it more a woman, or a wild cat? alas! it is the face of the wife of his youth, that once smiled upon him. It  smile no longer. What forts  it share? what burthens  it lighten? Oh, `tis a fihing to talk of the humble meal shared together! But what if there be no bread in the cupboard? The i prattle of his children takes out the sting of a mans poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features in that dition, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old o us once, do n up their children; they drag them up. The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature refleg person. No one has time to da, no ohinks it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humour it. There is o kiss away its tears. If it cries, it  only be beaten. It has beeily said that &quot;a babe is fed with milk and praise.&quot; But the aliment of this poor babe was thin, unnourishing; the return to its little baby-tricks, and efforts to eention, bitter ceaseless ation. It never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a strao the patient fohe hushing caress, the attrag y, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper offhand trivao divert the child; the prattled nonsense (best seo it), the wise impertihe wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passion of young wonder. It was never sung to -- no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. It had no young dreams. It broke at oo the iroies of life. A child exists not for the very poor as an object of dallia is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes io labour. It is the rival, till it  be the co-operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace; it never makes him young again, with recalling his young times. The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a dition rather above the squalid beings which we have been plating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer [p 265] holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficy at school. It is of mangling and clear-starg, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should he the very outps of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy provide has e to he a woman, before it was a child. It has learo go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the home of the very poor is no home?

    There is yet another home, which we are straio deny to be o has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside veniences, of which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is -- the house of the man that is ied with many visitors. May we he branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times exge their dwelling for our poor roof! It is not of guests that we plain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; droppers in, as they are called. We sometimes wonder from what sky the fall. It is the very error of the position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium -- a plaguy suburban mid-space -- fitted to catch idlers from town or try. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in lass to re upon, and we ot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The growing infirmities of age mahemselves in nothing more strongly, than in an ie dislike of interruption. The thing which we are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have her muowledge nor devices; but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to<q></q> eise in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We ot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter ood time with a friend, who gives us in exge his own. Herein is the distin between the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes yood time, and gives you his bad in exge. The guest is domestic to you as yood cat, or household bird ; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at our window, and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturband victuals spoiled. The inferior funs of life begin to move heavily. We ot coct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty [p 266] we  eat before a guest; and never uood what the relish of public feasti. Meats have no sapor, nestion fair play, in a crowd. The ued ing in of a visitant stops the mae. There is a punctual geion who time their calls to the precise e of your dining-hour -- not to eat -- but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. ain show their genius, as we have said, in knog the moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar passionating sneer, with which they &quot;hope that they do not interrupt your studies.&quot; Though they flutter off the  moment, to carry their impertio the  student that they  call t<big></big>heir friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves, and, with Dantes lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-exteh its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. &quot;It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship,&quot; says worthy Bishop Taylor, &quot;to spend it upon imperti people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but ever ease my loads.&quot; This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and m calls. They too have homes, which are -- no homes.

 XIII. -- THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG

    &quot;Good sir, or madam, as it may be -- we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We long have known your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you o us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. We  have no reserve towards a person of your open and ure. The frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have been long looking for such a friend. Quick -- let us disburthen our troubles into each others bosom -- let us make our single joys shine by reduplication -- But yap, yap, yap! -- what is this founded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the blu, just in the fleshy part of my leg.&quot;

    &quot;It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test -- Test -- Test!&quot;

    &quot;But he has bitten me.&quot;

    &quot;Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me.&quot;

    Yap, yap, yap! -- &quot;He is at it again.&quot;

    &quot;Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to he kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself&quot; [p 267]

    &quot;But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting?

    &quot;Invariably. `Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-ditioned animal. I call him my test -- the touchstone by which I try a friend. No one  properly be said to love me, who does not love him.&quot;

    &quot;Excuse us, dear sir -- or madam aforesaid -- if upon further sideration we are obliged to dee the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs.&quot;

    &quot;Mighty well, sir -- you know the ditions -- you may have worse offers. e along, Test.&quot;

    The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, iercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these e appehey do not always e in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friends friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship -- not to speak of more delicate correspondences -- however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some imperti clog affixed to the relation -- the uood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but e to us with a mix.ure; like a schoolboys holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful panion is **** if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him; like some of those double births, which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old &quot;Athenian Oracle,&quot; where Swift enced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to prehend. When **** es, poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself -- what a three hours chat we shall have! -but, ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to over-lay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom e alois hard when a blessing es apanied. ot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother? or know S藏书网ulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playiions? my friends brethren of y be mine also? must we be hand in glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico printer, because W. S., who is [p 268] her, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortuo claim a on pareh them? Let him lay down his brothers; and `tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balahe cessio F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys -- things between boy and manhood -- too ripe for play, too raw for versation -- that e impudently staring their fathers old friend out of tenance; will her aid, nor let alohe ferehat we may oneet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the diseate of bachelorhood.

    It is well if your friend, or mistress, be tent with these icular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging clusions upon your stancy; they must not plain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent matches iime, if she insisted upon all, that loved her, loving her dogs also.

    An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Della Crus memory. In tender youth, he loved and courted a modest appao the Opera, in truth a dancer, who had won him by the artless trast between her manners and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some rude act into that exotid artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth was she less genuine and sihan she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for appearance sake, and for due honour to the brides relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of her friends and ki the approag solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be ceded; and in this solicitude for ciliating the good will of mere relations he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have &quot;killed the flock of all affes else The m came; and at the Star and Garter, Rid -- the place appointed for the breakfasting -- apanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforts the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches -- the whole corps du ballet -- French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seihe Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and sed Buffa were there; and Signor Sc-----, Signora Ch----- , and Madame V-----, with a tless cavalcade beside of chorusers, figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry afterward [p 269] declared, that &quot;then for the first time it st<dfn>藏书网</dfn>ruck him seriously, that he was about to marry -- a dancer.&quot; But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride -- handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest -- preseo him as her father -- -- the gentleman that was to give her away -- no less a person than Signor Delpini himself -- with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour! -- the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the  sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after soled himself with a more genial mat the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended  father, and a bevy of painted Buffas for bridesmaids.

 XIV. -- THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK

    At recise mihat little airy musi doffs his night gear, prepares to tune up his unseasoins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere humaleman -- that has no orchestra busio call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises -- we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour, at which he  begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in ear, requires another half hood sideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see as they say, only fetting up. But, haviempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assis<cite>..</cite>t at those ceremonies, we fess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the suns courtiers, to attend at his m levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, ot up with the sun (as `tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole days pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headachs; Nature herself suffitly declaring her sense of our presumption, in aspiring tulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break of day excursions. It is flattering<s></s> to get [p 270] the start of a lazy world; to quer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, tent to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to rebihe wandering images, whiight in a fused mass preseo snatch them from fetfulness; to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a fone vision to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act ain, wi<big></big>th firmer he sadder noal tragedies; t into day-light a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to handle and examihe terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual unications, to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial fetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significe as our waking s; or rather to import us more nearly as more nearly roach by years to the shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the worlds business; we have doh it; we have discharged ourself of it. Why should we get up? we have her suit to solicit, nor affairs to mahe drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothio expect<cite>..</cite>, but in a short time a sick bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never mu the world. Disappoi early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The mighty ges of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are posed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of muisfa, we tract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introdu to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thro<bdi>..</bdi>wn. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that y; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first ing among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark panionship. [p 271] Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell ihe alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already, how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we g to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have bee familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of half-roach to incorporeal being. We ohought life to be something; but it has unatably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?

 XV.-THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB

    We could never quite uand the philosophy of this arra, or the wisdom of our aors in sending us for instru to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he . Man found out long sixes. -- Hail dle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the ki luminary of the three if we may not rather style thee their radiay, mild vice-roy of the moon ! -- We love to read, talk, sit silen<bdo>..</bdo>t, eat, drink, sleep, by dlelight. They are every bodys sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household pla. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our aors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fasthey must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbours cheek to be sure that he uood it? This ats for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlanternd nights. Jokes came in wi<s></s>th dles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of ce carving they must have made of it ! -- here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horses shoulder -- there another had scooped his palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mares milk. There is her good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilised times, has never experiehis, when at some eic table he has enced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally,  you tell pork from vea<df</dfn>l in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the dle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, hut he knows it only by an infereill the restored light, ing in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both sehe full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes! [p 272] -- There is absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a dle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam e about you, h and teazing, like so many c<tt></tt>oquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstras. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light, we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the iial Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the suns light. They are abstracted works --

    &quot;Things that were born, when  the still night,

    And his dumb dle, saw his ping throes.&quot;

    Marry, daylight -- daylight might furnish the images, the crude material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mihor hath it), they must be tent to hold their inspiration of the dle. The mild internal light, that revealbbr></abbr>s them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Miltons M Hymn on Paradise, we would hold a good wager, e midnight; and Taylors richer description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humble lucubrations, tune our best measured ces (Prose has her ces) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier wat, &quot;blessing the doors;&quot; or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar System.

    -- Betty, bring the dles.

 XVI.THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE

    We grant that it is, and a very serious one -- to a mans friends, and to all that have to do with him; but whether the dition of the man himself is so much to be deplored, may admit of a question. eak a little to it, being ourself but lately recovered -- we whisper of it in fidence, reader -- out of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing? The vi which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries -- for they were mere fancies -- which had provoked the humour. But the humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted -- we know how bare we lay ourself in the fession -- to be abandoned all at oh the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have been imaginary; and for our old acquaintance, [p 273] N-----, whom we find to have been a truer friend thaook him for, we substitute some phantom -- a Caius or a Titius -- as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied reses on. It is mortifying to fall at once from <samp>?</samp>the pinnacle of ; to the idea of having been ill-used and aciously treated by an old friend. The first thing to aggrandise a man in his own ceit, is to ceive of himself as ed. There let him fix if he . To undeceive him is to deprive him of the most tig morsel within the range of self-plao flattery  e near it. Happy is he who suspects his friend of an injustice; but supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a spiracy to depress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we sing not to the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world ts joy -- at enduring satisfa in the depths, where the superficial seek it not, of distent. Were we to recite one half of this mystery, which we were let into by our late dissatisfa, all the world would be in love with disrespect; we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and s and acies would be the only matter for courtship. Uo that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the e. The first sting of a suspi is grievous; but wait -- out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm and hoo be extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day -- having in his pany ohat you ceived worse than ambiguously disposed towards you, passed you ireet without notice. To be sure he is something shhted; and it was in your power to have accosted him. But facts and sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the sce of dissatisfa. He must have seen you; and S-----, ith him, must have been the cause of the pt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. Go home, and make the worst of it and you are a made man from this time. Shut yourself up, and -- rejeg, as ao your peace, every whispering suggestion that but insihere may be a mistake -- reflect seriously upon the many lesser instances which you had begun to perceive in proof of your friends disaffe towards you. None of them singly was much to the purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive; and you have this last affront to ch them. Thus far the process is any thing but agreeable. B></a>ut now to your relief es in the parative faculty. You jure up all the kind feelings you have had for your friend; what you have been to him, and what you would have been to him, if he would have suffered you; how you defended him in this or that place; and his good name -- his literary reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your own! Your heart [p 274] spite of itself, yearns towards him. You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you? do you not yet begin to apprehend a fort? some allay of sweetness iter waters? Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them, who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water? Begin to think that the relation itself is insistent with mortality. That the very idea of friendship, with its po parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself, as the only possible friend in a world incapable of that <cite></cite>munion. Now the gloom this. The little star of self-love twihat is to ence you through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in general, (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity) reflect with what strange injustice you have beeed in quarters where, (setting gratitude and the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras,) you pretended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the very idea ht and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it, till you have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere: the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every moment in your own ceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world -- this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery -- these the true -- PLEASURES OF SULKINESS. We profess no more of this gra than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our<dfn>?９９ｌib.</dfn> study. roceeded to the penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where the sideration of be fot is about te in the meditation of general injustice -- when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend, whose not seeing of us in the m, (for we will now fess the case our own), an actal ht, had given rise to so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon , he bad brought in his hand the identical S-----, in whose favour we had suspected him of the acy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both was victive of the injurious nature of the suspi. We fahat they perceived our embarrassment; but were too proud, or something else, to fess to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the dition of the ient in Argos: [p 275]

    Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos,

    In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatro --

    and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the friendly hands that cured us

    Pol me occidistis, amici,

    Non servastis, ait; cui sic extorta voluptas,

    Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error.

 I.-THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD

    <strong>I.-THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD </strong>

    This axiom tains a principle of pensation which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to diaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour -- in the same vocabulary. The ic writers, with their poetical justice, have tributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hect fellow exposed aen upoage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some peoples share of animal spirits is notoriously low aive. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no art of valour. The truest ce with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But front one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his fiden the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-pe<bdo></bdo>rformance. A modest inoffensive deportment does not [p 253] necessarily imply valour; her does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hi wanted modesty -- we do not mean him of Clarissa -- but who ever doubted his ce? Even the poets -- upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding -- have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the &quot;Agonistes,&quot; is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has mad..e him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him -- and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character thaher of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate preeminence: -- &quot; Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson.&quot; This was true distributive justice.

    <strong>II. -- THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS </strong>

    The weakest part of mankind have this saying o in their mouth.<cite>?９９ｌiｂ.</cite> It is the trite solation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues of this world -- the prudenter part of them, at least -- know better; and, if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distins of the fluctuating and the perma. &quot;Lightly e, lightly go,&quot; is a proverb, which they  very well afford to lea<q></q>ve, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manot by rapine or chiery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thiefs hand that grasps it. Church land, alieo lay uses, was formerly denouo have this slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to postpohe prophecy of refuo a late posterity.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》