天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》 《伊利亚随笔》 THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE READER, in thy passage from the Bank - where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburbareat northerly, -- didst thou never observe a melancholy looking handsome, brid stone edifice, to the left -- where Threadneedle- street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnifit portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or ers-out -- a desolation something like Balcluthas. This was once a house of trade, -- a tre of busy is. The throng of merts was here -- the quick pulse of gain -- and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and ittee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers -- directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather cs, supp massy silver inkstands long since dry -- the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; -- huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; -- dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,-- and soundings of the Bay of Panama! -- The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, flagration: -- with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal, -- long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE. [Footnote] * I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. -- Ossian. Such is the SOUTH SEA-HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I k, -- a magnifit relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take franted, has not freshe. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but ht geions have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Annes reign; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would bee the puny faodern spiraplating the Titan size of Vauxs superhuman plot. Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silend destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living erce, -- amid the fret and fever of speculation -- with the Bank, and the `ge, and the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business -- to the idle and merely plative,to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quie.99lib.t -- a cessation -- a ess from business -- an indolence almost cloistral -- which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at evehey spoke of the past -- the shade of some dead atant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living ats and atants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degee clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubriterlag their sums in triple niations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers with pious sente the beginning, without which ious aors never veo open a book of business, or bill of lading -- the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library, are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I look upon these defunct dragons with placy. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our aors had every thing on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any thing from Hereum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gorograde. The very clerks which I remember in the South Sea-House-I speak of forty years back-had an air very different from those in the public offices that I have had to do with sihey partook of the genius of the place! They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelenerally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reasoioned before. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and, not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a on stock. Hehey formed a sort of Noahs ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat -- and not a few among them had arrived at siderable profi the German flute. The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had something of the choleriplexion of his trymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Macies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his ter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fin九九藏书gers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypodry ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his being one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Aons at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-kno at the door with the stroke of the clonoung six, ic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelladdened with his presehen was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history ! His tryman, Pennant himself in particular, could not be more eloquent than he iion to old and new London -- the site of old theatres, churches, streets goo decay -- where Rosamonds pond stood -- the Mulberry-gardens -- and the duit in Cheap -- with many a pleasant ae, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, -- the worthy desdants of those heroifessors, who, flying to this try, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the viity of the Seven Dials! Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, i men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual desding attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in verse, you felt straio the height in the colloquy. The ference over, you were at leisure to smile at the parative insignifice of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its inal state of white paper. A sug babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her dest, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I hhly uood, -- much less explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, -- to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomass stoop. This was the thought -- the se -- the bright solitary star of your lives, -- ye mild and happy pair, -- which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attais: and it was worth them all together. You insulted h it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen. Of quite aamp was the then atant, John Tipp. He her preteo high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an atant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest atant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vat hours. He sang, certainly, with other han to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very substantial appeo them, were enough to enlarge a mans notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now) resounded fhtly to the notes of a cert of "sweet breasts," as our aors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras -- chorus singers -- first and sed violoncellos -- double basses -- and clarios who ate his utton, and drank his punch, and praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely oral, were banished. You could not speak of any thing romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A neer was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man sisted in writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balan the pany藏书网s books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25l. 1s. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them iy) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stifling days when South Sea hopes were young -- (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate ats of the most flourishing pany in these or those days) : -- but to a genuine atant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fraal farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like iy. With Tipp form was every thing. His life was formal. His as seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world: he lagued with incessant executorships accly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whhts he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that eheir is to his prote. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity -- (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) something which, in revereo thg dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroiature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a suffit measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantid the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when somg supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mouhe box of a stage-coa his life; or leaned against the rails of a baly; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked dorecipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it: her was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom on qualities bee unon? I fet thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South Sea House? who never e thy offi a m, or quittedst it in mid-day -- (what didst thou in an office ?) -- without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are inct, or survive but in twotten volumes, which I had the good fortuo rescue from a sta99lib?ll in Barbi, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days -- thy topics are staled by the "new-bauds" of the time -- but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in icles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rogham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and ton, and the war whided iearing from Great Britain her rebellious ies, -- and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Rid, -- and such small politics. - A little less facetious, and a great deal more Obstreperous, was fitling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was desded, -- not in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a little of the sinister bend) from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; aain family features not a little saned the opinioainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited mu Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uo the fine old whig still living, who has represehe ty in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in Gee the Seds days, and was the same who was summoned before the House of ons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess of Marlbh. You may read of it in Johnsons Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to distehe rumour. He rather seemed pleased whe was, with all gentleness, insinuated. But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. - Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sa, mild, child-like, pastoral M -- ; a flutes breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst t that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lehan for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M --, the unapproachable churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter : -- only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, ciliatory, swan-like. - Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private -- already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent ; -- else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the question, and bought litigations ? -- and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity on might have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen -- with what deliberation would he wet a wafer ! -- P> But it is time to close -- nights wheels are rattling fast over me -- it is proper to have doh this solemn mockery. Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while -- peradvehe very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastisubstantial like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece : -- Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past. OXFORD IN THE VACATION Casting a preparatla the bottom of this article -- as the wary oisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to sult the quis sculpsit in the er, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet -- methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia? Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-fotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since goo decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college -- a votary of the desk -- a notched and cropt scrivener -- ohat sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill. Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I fess that it is my humour, my fancy -- in the forest of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation -- (and ter than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies) -- to while away some good hours of my time in the plation of indigos, cottons, raw silk, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place * * * * * * and then it sends you home with sucreased appetite to your books * * * * * not to say, that your outside she>?99ｌib?ets, and waste ers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sos, epigrams, essays -- so that the very parings of a ting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the m among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. -- It feels its promotion. * * * * * * * So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, promised in the dession. Not that, in my anxious detail of the many odities ial to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a ing carper might be able to pi this Josephs vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, tret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those solatory iices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons, -- the red-letter days, now bee, to all is and purposes, dead-letter days. There aul, and Stephen, and Barnabas - "Andrew and John, men famous in old times " we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at school at Christs. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett Prayer Book. There huer in his uneasy posture -- holy Bartlemy iroublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagi. I hohem all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot -- so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred -- only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon -- clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make up one paudy-day between them -- as an ey unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholars and a clerks life -- "far off their ing shone." -- I was as good as an almana those days. I could have told you such a saints-day falls out week, or the week after. Peradvehe Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity would, on six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not be thought tn the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a of such long standing, methinks, if their Holihe Bishops had, in decy, been first sounded -- but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority -- I am plain Elia -- no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher -- though at present ihick of their books, here in the heart of learning, uhe shadow of the mighty Bodley. I here play the gentlema the student. To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academistitution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Uies. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I take my walks ued, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman oner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am mulike that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers iacles, drop a bow or curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I be tent to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor. The walks at these times are so mues own -- the tall trees of Christs, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting oo slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Beress (that should have been ours) whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kits, kit fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four turies ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the mea minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple. Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity -- then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veion; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses * are we, that ot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing! [Footnote] * Januses of one face. -- Sir Thomas Browne. What were thy dark ages? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the m. Why is it that we ever hear mention of them without an apanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our aors wao and fro groping! Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves - What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to hao profahe leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-sted cs is fragrant as the first bloom of those stial apples which grew amid the happy orchard. Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. Those variae lees, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and ule my faith. I am no Herean raker. The credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G. D. -- whom, by the way, I found busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long p, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I loo new-coat him in Russia, and assign him his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula. D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No insiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is ed in journeys between them and Cliffords-inn -- where, like a dove on the asps , he has long taken up his unscious abode, amid an ingruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he sits, "in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not -- the winds of litigation blow over his humble chambers -- the hard sheriffs officer moves his hat as he passes -- legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him -- hinks of violence or injusti you would as soon "strike an abstract idea." D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years, in an iigation into all atter ected with the two Uies; and has lately lit upon a MS. colle of charters, relative to C--, by which he hopes to settle some disputed point --particularly that long troversy between them as to priority of foundation. The ardor with which he engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the encement it deserved, either here, or at C--. Your caputs, and heads of colleges, care less than any body else about these questions. -- teo suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the venerable gentlewomens years, they rather hold such curiosities to be imperti -- unreverend. they have their good glebe lands in manu, and care not much to rake into the title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for D. is not a man to plain. D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. A priori it was not very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would have dohe same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Cliffords-inn, or iemple. In addition to a provoking short-sightedness (the effect of late studies and watgs at the midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. He made a call the other m at our friend M.s in Bedford-square; and, finding nobody at home, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters me his name in the book -- which ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of the untimely or unfortunate visitor -- and takes his leave with many ceremonies, and professions ret. Some two or three hours after, his walkiinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again, and again the quiet image of the fire-side circle at M.s -- Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her side -- striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (fetting that they were "certainly not to return from the try before that day week") and disappointed a sed time, inquires for pen and paper as before: again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his sed name (his re-script) his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly enter his own duplicate ! -- The effect may be ceived. D. made many a good resolution against any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them torously For with G. D. -- to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally entering thee, he passes on with no reco藏书网gnition or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised -- at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor -- or Parnassus -- or co-sphered with Plato -- or, with Harrington, framing "immortal ohs" -- devising some plan of amelioration to thy try, or thy species -- peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy, to be doo thee thyself, the returning sciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. D. is delightful any where, but he is at the best in such places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton, at Scarbh, or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him "better than all the waters of Damascus. -- On the Muses hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains; and when he goes about with you to show you the halls and colleges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at the House Beautiful. CHRISTS HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO IN Mr. Lambs "Works," published a year or two since, I find a magnifit eulogy on my old school*, such as it was, or noears to him to have beeween the 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own standing at Christs was nearly corresponding with his; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has trived t together whatever be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. [Footnote] "Recolles Of Christs Hospital" I remember L. at school; and well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distin which was deo us. The present worthy sub-treasurer to the Iemple explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a m, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf -- our crug moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smag of the pitched leathern jack it oured from. Our Mondays milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of "extra-ordinary bread and butter," from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesdays mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant -- (we had three banyan to four meat days in the week) was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of gio make it go down the mlibly) or the fragrant amon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth -- our sty mutts on Fridays -- and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, ouesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion -- he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskiiknown to our palates), cooked iernal kit (a great thing), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt! I remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens ministered to the Tishbite); and the tending passions of L. at the unfolding. There was love for the bringer; shame for the thing brought, and the manner of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, stro of the passions!) predominant, breaking dowony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troubling over-sciousness. I oor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could re upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forotice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, sooired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, oer ahey all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) e back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upo e in Wiltshire! To this late hour of my life, I trace impressio by the recolle of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day-leaves, when, by some strange arra, we were turned out, for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. I remember those bathing.excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he -- for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care for such water-pastimes -- How merrily we would sally forth into the fields; and strip uhe first warmth of the sun; and wanton lik?e young da the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were pennyless (our sty m crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying -- while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings -- the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them -- How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoig, half-relut, that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired! It was worse in the days of wio go prowling about the streets objectless -- shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little y, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions iower -- to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. L.s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any plaint which he had to make was sure of being atteo. This was uood at Christs, and was an effectual s to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-siing to call to recolle. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights -- and this not once, but night after night -- in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking after we were goo bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the you children of us slept, answerable for an offehey her dared to it, nor had the power to hinder. -- The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow; and, uhe cruelest penalties, forbad the indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and the days sports. There was one H--, who, I learned, in after days, was seen expiating some maturer offen the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fang that this might be the planter of that name, who suffered -- at Nevis, I think, or St. Kits, some few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument ing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a red hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us, with exag tributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, which, incredible as it may seem, with the ivance of the nurses daughter (a young flame of his) he had trived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must cry roast meat -- happier than Caligulas minion, could he have kept his own sel -- but, foolisher, alas! than any of his species in the fables -- waxing fat, and kig, in the fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good fortuo the world below; and, laying out his simple throat, blew such a rams horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jericho) set cealment any lo defiahe t was dismissed, with certain attentions, to Smithfield; but I never uood that the patron underwent any sure on the occasion. This was iewardship of L.s admired Perry. Uhe same facile administration, L. have fotten the punity with which the nurses used to carry aenly, in open platters, for their own tables, o of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron had been seeing scrupulously weighed out for our dinners? These things were daily practised in that magnifit apartment, which L. (grown oisseur since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings "by Verrio, and others," with which it is "hung round and adorned." But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little solatory to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried away before our faces by harpies; and ourselves reduced (with the Trojan in the hall of Dido) To feed our mind with idle portraiture. L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef boiled; as it down to some superstition. But these unorsels are never grateful to young palates (children are universally fat-haters) and in strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a goul, and held in equal detestation. -- suffered uhe imputation. ---- `Twas said He ate strange flesh. He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the remnants left at his table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit me) and, in an especial mahese disreputable morsels, which he would vey away, aly stow itle that stood at his bed-side. None saw whee them. It was rumoured that he privately devoured them in the night. He was watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some reported, that, on leave-days, he had beeo carry out of the bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the accursed thing. jecture was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would lay with him. He was exunicated; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that ive punishment, which is mrievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was observed by two of his school-felloere determio get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building, such as there exist spes of in cery-lane, which are let out to various scales of pauperism with open door, and a on staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which ened by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspi was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secured their victim. They had him ioils. Accusation was formally preferred, aribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward (for this happened a little after my time), with that patient sagacity which tempered all his duct, determio iigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentehe result was, that the supposed mendits, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of -- , an ho couple e to decay, -- whom this seasonable supply had, in all probability, saved from mendicy; and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds! -- The governors on this ocuch to their honour, voted a present relief to the family of ---, and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to --, I believe, would not be lost upon his auditory. -- I had left school then, but I well remember -- . He was a tall, shambling youth with a cast in his eye, not at all c藏书网alculated to ciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a bakers basket. I think I heard he did not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by the old folks. I odriac lad; and the sight of a boy iers, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was ly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven; and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told he had run away. This was the punishment for the first offence. -- As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a bla -- a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted -- with a peep of light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter whht him his bread and water -- who might not speak to him ; -- or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost wele because it separated him for a brief interval from solitude: and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition io his time of life, might subject him to.* This was the penalty for the sed offence. -- Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the degree? [Footnote] * One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accly, at length vihe governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with. -- This fancy of dungeons for children rout of Howards brain; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks, I could willingly spit on his statue. The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire -- all trace of his late "watchet weeds" carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, resembling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. With his pale an frighted features, it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall (L.s favourite state-room), where awaited him the whole number of his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was theh to share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible. These were governors; two of whom, by choice, or charter, were always aced to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia; not to mitigate (so at least we uood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gase, aer Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. The sc was, after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictor apahe criminal quite round the hall. We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting -- circumstao make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the baotty and livid. After sc, he was made over, in his Sao, to his friends, if he had any (but only such pates were friendless), or to his parish officer, who, to enhahe effect of the se, had his station allotted to him oside of the hall gate. These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general mirth of the unity. lenty of exercise and recreation after school hours; and, for myself, I must fess, that I was never happier, than ihe Upper and the Lrammar Schools were held in the same room; and an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their character was as different as that of the inhabitants owo sides of the Pyrehe Rev. James Boyer was the Upper Master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that portion of the apartment, of which I had the good fortuo be a member. We lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an acce, rammar, for form; but, for any trouble it gave us, we might take two years iing through the verbs depo, and awo in fetting all that we had learned about them. There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not lear, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod and in truth he wielded the e with no great good will -- holding it "like a dancer." It looked in his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority; and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle his own peaor perhaps set any great sideration upon the value of juveime. He came among us, now and then, but often staid away whole days from us; and when he came, it made no differeo us -- he had his private room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being beholden to "i Greece or haughty Rome," that passed current among us -- Peter Wilkins -- the Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle -- the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy -- and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for meic or stific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military over that laudable game "Frend English," and a huher such devices to pass away t.99ｌib.he time -- mixing the useful with the agreeable -- as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us. Matthew Field beloo that class of modest divines who affeix in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is generally found to he the predominating dose in the position. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levee when he should have been attending upon us. He had for many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or five first years of their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phaedrus. How things were suffered to go on thus, I ot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delica interfering in a provi strictly his own. I have not been without my suspis, that he was not altogether displeased at trast we preseo his end of the school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more recile us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us; his storms came near, but ouched us; trary to Gideons miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry. His boys turned out bbr>.the better scholars; we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils ot speak of him without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance of Field es back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and i idleness, and Elysiaions, and life itself a "playing holiday." [Footnote] * Cowley. Though suffitly removed from the jurisdi of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said)藏书网 to uand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as sel pipes. He would laugh, ay, aily, but then it must be at Flaccuss quibble about Rex -- or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of Terence -- this, which at their first broag could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle. -- He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, u, angry , denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his m appearan his passy, or passionate wig. No et expounded surer. -- J. B. had a heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me? " -- Nothing was more on than to see him make a head-lory into the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, "Ods my life, Sirrah," (his favourite adjuration) "I have a great mind to whip you," then, with as sudden a retrag impulse, fling bato his lair -- and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally fotten the text) drive headlong out again, pieg out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devils Litany with the expletory yell -- "and I WILL, too." -- In his gentler moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time; a paragraph, and a lash between; whi those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veion for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. [Footnote] * In this and every thing B. was the antipodes of his co-adjutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fan the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his, uhe name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is not yet fotten by the iclers of that sort of literature. It ted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their san. -- B. used to say of it, in a way of half-pliment, hail-irony, that it was too classical for representation Once, and but ohe uplifted rod was known to fall iual from his hand -- when droll squinting W -- having been caught putting the inside of the masters desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not desig, to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing had been forewarhis exquisite irreition of any law a to the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was unavoidable. L. has give to B.s great merits as an instructor. Ce, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and ample en ohe author of the try Spectator doubts not to pare him with the ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we ot dismiss him better than with the pious ejaculation of C. -- when he heard that his old master was on his death-bed -- " Poor J.B. ! -- may all his faults be fiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities." Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. -- First Gre of my time was La Pepys Stevens, ki of boys and men, since Co-grammar-master (and inseparable panion) with Dr. T-----e. What an edifying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of their predecessors! -- You never met the one by the street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate sub-appearance of the enerally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession and when, in advanced age, one found it veo retire, the other was not long in disc that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which, at thirteen helped it to turhe Cicero De Amicitia, or some tale of Antique Friendship which the you even then was burning to anticipate! Co-Gre with S. was Th----- , who has since executed with ability various diplomatis at the Northern courts. Th----- was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks. -- Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critid is author (besides the try Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. -- M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) suffitly justifies the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hht not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic dios with a reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers watered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild, and unassuming. o M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Abinal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a pale, studious Gre. -- Then followed poor S-----, ill-fated M----- of these the Muse is silent. Finding some of Edwards race Unhappy, pass their annals by. e bato memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery n before thee -- the dark pillar not yet turned -- Samuel Taylor Ce -- Logi, Metaphysi, Bard -- How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportioween the speed the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reg Homer in his Greek, or Pindar -- while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the ats of the inspired charity-boy ! -- Mahe "wit-bats," (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller,) between him and C. V. Le G-----," which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man of war; Master Ce, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C. V. L., with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quiess of his wit and iion." Nor shalt thou, their peer, be quickly fotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy ition of some poigna of theirs; or the anticipation of some more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of thine owinct are those smiles, with that beautiful tenance, with which (for thou wert the Nireus formosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, insed by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly verted by thy angel-look, exged the half-formed terrible "bl--," fentler greeting -- "bless thy handsome face!" folloho ought to be now alive, and the friends of Elia -- the junior Le G------ and F----- ; who impelled, the former by a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense of -- ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning -- exged their Alma Mater for the camp; perishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of Salamanca : -- Le G----- , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured; F----- dogged, faithful, anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old Roma about him. Fine, fraed Fr-- , the present master of Hertford, with Marmaduke T-----, mildest of Missionaries -- and both my good friends still -- close the catalogue of Gres in my time. THE TWO RACES OF MEN. The human species, acc to the best theory I form of is posed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these twinal diversities may be reduced all those imperti classifications of Gothid Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upoh, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distins. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, is disible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive snty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious; trasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other. Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages -- Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele -- our late inparable Brinsley what a family likeness in all four! What a careless, evement hath your borrower! what rosy gills! what a beautiful relian Provideh he ma, -- taking no more thought than lilies! What pt for money, -- ating it (yours and mine especially) er than dross What a liberal founding of those pedantic distins of meum and tuum! or rather, what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective! What near approaches doth he make to the primitive unity, to the extent of one half of the principle at least! -- He is the true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be taxed;" and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted betwixt the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jeaid it tribute-pitta Jerusalem! -- His exas, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air! So far removed from your sour parochial or state-gatherers, -- those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of wele in their faces! He eth to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; fining himself to season. Every day is his dlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the leormentum of a pleasant look to your purse,which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind tended! He is the true Propontic whiever ebbeth! The sea which taketh handsomely at each mans hand. In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honour, struggles with destiny; he is i. Lend therefore cheerfully, O man ordaio lend -- that thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly penny, the reversion promised. bi preposterously in thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives! -- but, when thou seest the proper authority ing, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. e, a handsome sacrifice! See how light he makes of it! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. Refles like the foing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who departed this life on Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a desdant from mighty aors of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his as aiments he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life he found himself ied with ample revenues; which, with that noble disiedness which I have noticed as i in men of the great race, he took almost immediate measures eo dissipate and bring to nothing: for there is somethiing in the idea of a king holding a private purse; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment; getting rid of the cumbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) To sla virtue, and abate her edge, Than pro. her to do aught may merit praise, he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, "borrowing and to borrow!" In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under tribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated: -- but having had the honour of apanying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintah us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was leased to express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no way discert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them; and, with us, seemed pleased to be "stocked with so fair a herd." With such sources, it was a wonder how he trived to keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money kept lohan three days stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him -- as boys do burrs, or as if it had been iious, -- into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, -- inscrutable cavities of the earth ; -- or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a rivers side under some hank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no i -- but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagars offspring into the wilderness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to tribute to the deficy. Fod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, opeerior, a quick, jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with grey (a fides). He anticipated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times have disposable in his pocket, whether it is not mnant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower), who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he expeothier; and, therefore, whose preceived notions and expectations you do iy so much less sho the refusal. When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart: his swell of feeling: how magnifit, how ideal he was; how great at the midnight hour; and when I pare with him the panions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the soci..ety of lenders, and little men. To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased iher covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon: I mean our borrowers of books--those mutilators of colles, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is berbatch, matchless in his depredations! That foul gap itom shelf fag you, like a great eyetooth knocked out -- (you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!)--with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed puardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bourae, choid massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,-- Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs, -- itself an Ascapart! -- that berbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I fess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the title to property in a book (my Boure, for instance), is i ratio to the claimants powers of uanding and appreciating the same." Should he go on ag upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe? The slight vacuum in the left-hand case -- two shelves from the ceiling -- scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser -- was whilom the odious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was ihe first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties -- but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself -- Just below, Dodsleys dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria bona is! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priams refuse sons, whees borrowed Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state.There loitered the plete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side. -- In yonde藏书网r nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate. One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at aime, sea-like, he throws up as ri equivalent to match it. I have a small under-colle of this nature (my friends gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has fotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory as mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are wele as the true Hebrews. There they stand in jun; natives, and naturalised. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. -- I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ulemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make oy meal on your viands, if he give no at of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importuo carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrioble Margaret Newcastle? -- knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst urn over one leaf of the illustrious folio -- what but the mere spirit of tradi, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend? -- Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the Galli land -- Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sexs wonder!-- hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all panies with thy quips and mirthful tales? -- Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part-French, better-part Englishwoman! -- that she could fix upon no other treatise to hear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook -- of whio Fren, nor woman of Fraaly, land, was ever by nature stituted to prehend a tittle! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude? Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate colle, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these preSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the inals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I sel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C. NEW YEARS EVE EVERY man hath two birth-days; two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that whi an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observahis of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who refleothing at all about the matter, nor uand any thing in it beyond cake and e. But the birth of a New Year is of an ioo wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indiffere is that from which all date their time, and t upon what is left. It is the nativity of our on Adam. Of all sounds of all bell -- (bells, the musiighest b upon heaven) -- most solemn and toug is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a tration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed lected in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a porary, when he exclaimed I saw the skirts of the departing Year. It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to he scious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my panions. affected rather to ma an exhilaration at the birth of the ing year, than aender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who - Wele the ing, speed the parting guest. I am naturally, beforehand, shy of ies: new books, new faces, new years, -- from some mental twist which makes it difficult. io face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I pluone visions and clusions. I enter pell-mell with past disappois. I am armour-proof against old discements. I five, or overe in fancy, old adversaries. I play ain for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for whi99ｌib.ch I once paid so dear. I would scarow have any of those untoward acts as of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the is of some well-trived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my golde years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W--n , than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, ahout the idea of that specious ue. In a degree beh manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love? If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective -- and mine is painfully so -- have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious * * * addicted to * * * * : averse from sel, her taking it, nor it: -- * * * besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not: I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou st be willing to lay at his door -- -- -- but for the child Elia -- that "other me," there, in the back-ground -- I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master -- with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid geling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medits. I lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christs, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. -- God help thee, Elia, how art thou ged! Thou art sophisticated. -- I know how ho, how ceous (for a weakling) it was -- hious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, -- and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being! That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospeay be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learo project myself enough out of myself: and having no offspring of my own to daily with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader -- (a busy man, perce), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-ceited only, I retire, imperable to ridicule, uhe phantom cloud of Elia. The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. -- In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed t a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce ceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reing that ed me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June propriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I fess a truth ? -- I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to t the probabilities of my duration, and te at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more t upon their periods, and would fain lay my iual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not tent to pass away "like a weavers shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity: a at the iable course of destiny. I am in love with this greeh; the face of town and try; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am tent to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. -- Any alteration, on this earth of mine, i９9lｉｂ? or in lodging, puzzles and disposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A ate of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juieats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and dle-light, and fireside versations, and i vanities, as, and irony itself -- these things go out with life? a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him? And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge e to me, if it e at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading? Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which poio them here, -- the reisable face -- the "sweet assurance of a look" -- ? In wihis intolerable disination to dying -- to give it its mildest name -- does more especially haunt a me. In a genial August nooh a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, -- that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the ticles : -- I am none of her minions -- I hold with the Persian. Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore. -- I have heard some profess an indiffereo life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port e; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death -- -- -- but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instao be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and founding Positive! Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfa hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors ih," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows ? -- or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear? " -- why, to e, must Alice W--n be a goblin? More than all, I ceive disgust at those imperti9９liｂ? and misbeing familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturih his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly he." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imagi. In the mean-time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years Days are past. I survive, a jolly didate for 1821. Another cup of wine -- and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully ted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with ged notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attuo its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. - THE NEW YEAR. Hark, the cock crows, and yht star Tells us, the day himselfs not far; And see where, breaking from the night, He gilds the western hills with light. With him old Janus doth appear, Peeping into the future year, With such a look as seems to say, The prospect is not good that way. Thus do we rise ill sights to see, And `gainst ourselves to prophesy; When the prophetic fear of things A more tormenting mischief brings, More full of soul-tormenting gall, Than direst mischiefs befall. But stay ! but stay! methinks my sight, Better informd by clearer light Diss sereneness in that brow, That all tracted seemd but now. His reversd face may show distaste, And frown upon the ills are past; But that which this way looks is clear, And smiles upon the New-born Year. He looks too from a place so high, The Year lies open to his eye; And all the moments open are To the exact discoverer. Yet more and more he smiles upon The happy revolution. Why should we then suspect or fear The influences of a year, So smiles upon us the first morn, And speaks us good so soon as born? Plague ont! the last was ill enough, This ot but make better proof; Or, at the worst, as we brushd through The last, why so we may this too; And then the in reason shoud Be superexcellently good: For the worst ills (we daily see) Have no more perpetuity, Than the best fortuhat do fall; Which als us wherewithal Loheir being to support, Than those do of the other sort: And who has one good year in three, A repi destiny, [p 32] Appears ungrateful in the case, As not the good he has. The us wele the New Guest With lusty brimmers of the best; Mirth always should Good Fortu, And renders een Disaster sweet: And though the Priurn her back, Let us but line ourselves with sack, We better shall by far hold out, Till the Year she face about. How say you, reader -- do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the co? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? --passed like a cloud -- absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry -- washed away by a wave of genuine Heli, your only Spa for these hypodries -- And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters! MRS. BATTLES OPINIONS ON WHIST A CLEAR fire, a hearth, and the rigour of the game." This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, o her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half and half who have no obje to take a hand, if you want oo make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game, and lose ahat they while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and lay ahese insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thh-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave, no cessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor. ever passed it over in her adversary without exag the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; aher showed you her cards, nor desired to see ours. All people have their b]ind side -- their superstitions: and I have heard her declare, uhe rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit. I never in my life -- and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it -- saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play: or snuff a dle in the middle of a game; for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or ived at, miscellaneous versation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-tury te was at the airs of a youleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand, and who, in his excess of dour, declared, that he thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind! She could not hear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, sidered in that light . It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, -- and she did it. She u her mind afterwards -- over a book. Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in oints it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but I suppose they came too late to be ied among his ingenious notes upon that author. Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uainty and quick shifting of partners -- a thing which the stancy of whist abhors -- the dazzling supremad regal iure of Spadille -- absurd as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces; -- the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone --above all, the overp attras of a Sans Prendre Vole, -- to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approag, in the tingencies of whist ; -- all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young ahusiastic. But whist was the solider game : that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the ce-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually ging postures and exions; bitter foe, to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratg in a breath -- but the wars of whist were parable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great Frend English nations. A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage -- nothing superfluous. No flushes -- that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being set in -- that and one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without refereo the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things. -- Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be marshalled -- o take the field ? -- She even wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, would have stript it of some appendages, which, iate of human frailty, may be venially, and even endably allowed of. She saw no reason for the deg of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ? Why two colours, when the mark of the suits would have suffitly distinguished them without it? -- "But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason -- he must have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic tries, where the musid the paintings draw in many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualizing would have kept out. -- You, yourself, have a pretty colle of paintings -- but fess to me, whether, walking in yallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters ie-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with a delight, at all parable to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court cards? -- the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession -- the gay triumph-assuring scarlet -- the trasting deadly-killing sables -- the `hoary majesty of spades -- Pam in all his glory! -- "All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degee intambling. -- Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (o natures), fittest arena for those courtly batants to play their gallant jousts and turneys in ! -- Exge those delicately-turned ivory markers -- work of ese artist, unscious of their symbol, -- or as profanely slighting their true application as the arra Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess) -- exge them for little bits of leather (our aors money) or chalk and a slate!" - The old lady, with a smile, fessed the soundness of my logid to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself ied for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of the fi Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence -- this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death. The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to fess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say, -- disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "go " -- or "thats a go." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. I onew her to forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake), because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring "two for his heed." There somethiremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. Piquet she held the best at the cards for two persons, though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms -- such as pique -- repique -- the capot -- they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would argue thus -- Cards are warfare; the ends are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport: when single adversaries enter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight; with spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker on be ied, except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck bbr>sympathetically, or for your play. -- Three are still worse; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and tradictory is, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infras of them, as in tradrille. -- But in square games (she meant whist) all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is aplished. There are the iives of profit with honour, on to every species -- though the latter be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those ames, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors rality or some i beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold -- or even an ied bystander wit, but because your partner sympathises in the tingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their disgrace, as the jun doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) ylories. Two losing to two are better reciled, thao one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the els. War bees a civil game. -- By such reasonings as these the old lady was aced to defend her favourite pastime. No i could ever prevail upoo play at any game, where tered into the position, for nothing. ce, she would argue -- and here again, admire the subtlety of her clusion! -- ce is nothing, but where something else depends upon it. It is obvious, that ot be glory. What rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a huimes together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake was depending? -- Make a lottery of a huhousand tickets with but one fortunate number -- and ossible principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain that number as many times successively, without a prize ? -- Therefore she disliked the mixture of backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reag. Played flory, they were a mere setting of one mans wit, -- his memory, or bination -- faculty rather -- against anothers; like a mogagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. -- She could not ceive a game wanting the spritely infusion of ce, -- the handsome excuses of good fortuwo people playing at chess in a er of a room, whilst whist was stirring in the tre, would inspire her with insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue, (and I think in this case justly) were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-tests in no instance ally with the fancy. They reje and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for subatants. To those puny objectainst cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must -- always trying to get the better in something or other -- that this passion scarcely be more safely expehan upon a game at cards: that cards are a temporary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but play at being mightily ed, where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we are as mightily ed as those whose stake is s and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting; much ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means for disproportioned ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than many of those more serious games of life, which men play, without esteeming them to be such.- With great defereo the old ladys judgment on these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in siess, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget -- Bridget Elia. I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a tooth-ache or a sprained ancle, -- when you are subdued and humble, -- ylad藏书网 to put up with an inferior spring of a, There is such a thing in nature, I am vinced, as sick whist. - I grant it is not the highest style of man -- I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle -- she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise. At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, e in as something admissible. -- I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior i. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her) -- (dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?) -- I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play; I would be tent to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over: and, as I do not much relish appliances, it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. A CHAPTER ON EARS. I have no ear - Mistake me not, reader, -- nor imagihat I am by nature destitute of those exterior tendages, hanging ors, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. -- I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those duits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exaess, in those ingenious labyrinthine is -- those indispensable side-intelligencers. her have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which strained him to draw upon assurance -- to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the pass of my destiny, that I ever should be. When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will uao mean -- for music. -- To say that this heart never melted at the course of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. -- "Water parted from the sea" never fails to move it strangely. So does "In Infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentle-woman -- the ge, sure, that ever merited the appellation -- the sweetest -- why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S----, ohe blooming Fanheral of the Temple who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that abs se, which was afterwards destio overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W----n. I even think that seally I am disposed to harmony. But anically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary ers; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspi, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way on my friend A.s piano, the other m, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlor, -- on his return, he leased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspis had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched a superior refi, soon vinced him that some being, -- teically perhaps defit, but higher informed from a principle on to all the fis, -- had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friends peion, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny. Stifically I could never be made to uand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how oe should differ from another. Much less in voices I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thh bass I trive to guess at, from its being superemily harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarow what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as juring as Baralipton. It is hard to stand alone -- in an age like this, -- (stituted to the quid critical perception of all harmonious binations, I verily believe, beyond all preg ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magifluences of an art, which is said to have su? especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. Yet rather thahe did current of my fessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am stitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenters hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unected, u sounds are nothing to the measured maliusic. The ear is passive to those sirokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to . To music it ot be passive. It will strive -- mi least will -- spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully p upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, a rid of the distrag torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the uending assemblage of ho on-life sounds; -- and the purgatory of the Enraged Musi bees my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (..that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watg the faces of the auditory i (what a trast to Hogarths laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affeg some faiion, -- till (as some have said, that our occupations in the world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that -- -- Party in a parlour, All silent, and all damned! Above all, those insufferable certos, and pieusic, as they are called, do plague ater my apprehension. -- Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by uted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon hoo an intermiedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and straio keep pace with it; to gaze oy frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to i extempore tragedies to ao the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime -- these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a cert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable:-- afterwards followeth the languor, and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the ings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches -- "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, ais gratissimus error. A most inparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, ag an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagihey act, or that they see done. -- So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in suplations, and fanta99ｌｉb?ical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them -- winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the se turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, endure no pany, think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspi, subrusticus pudor, distent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they think of nothing else: tinually suspeg, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; whiow, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they avoid, they ot be rid of it, the ot resist." Something like this "se-turning" I have experie the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov--; who, by the aid of a capital an, himself the most finished of players, verts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens*. [Footnote] * I have been there, and still would go; Tis like a little heaven below.--Dr. Watts When my friend ences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradveruck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of ion into my young apprehension -- (whether it be that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself doves wings --or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best se his mind) -- a holy calm pervadeth me. -- I am for the time --rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. But when this master of the spell, not tent to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, impatient to overe her "earthly" with his "heavenly," -- still p in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German o, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphied, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a tless tribe, whom to attempt to re up would but plunge me again in the deeps,I stagger uhe weight of ha藏书网rmony, reeling to and fro at my wits end; -- clouds, as of frankinse, oppress me -- priests, altars, sers, dazzle before me -- the genius of his religion hath me ioils -- a shadowy triple tiara is the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous -- he is Pope, -- and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, -- tri-eted like himself! -- I am verted, a a Protestant -- at once malleus hereti, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies tre in my person -- I am Mar, Ebion, ahus -- Gog and Magog -- what not? -- till the ing in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and, a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reciles me to the rationalities of a purer faint aores to me the geerrifying aspey pleasant- tenanced hosts and hostess. ALL FOOLS DAY THE pliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you -- and you --and you, Sir -- nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upoter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same -- you uand me -- a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least putation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry -- we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day -- a us troll the catiens -- duc ad me -- duc ad me -- how goes it? Here shall he see Gross fools as he. Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please; it hides my bauble. And now each maride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part, _______The crazy old church clock, And the bewildered chimes. Good master Empedocles, you are wele. It is long since you went a salamander gathering downa. Worse than samphire-pig by some odds. `Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha! brotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disied sect of the turists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, most A Grand! You have claim to a seat at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nun on the low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up yarlid onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Mo on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ? -- cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have anlobe, round as an e, pretty moppet! Mister Adams -- odso, I honour your coat -- pray do us the favour to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop -- the twenty and sed in your portmahere -- on Female Intinence -- the same -- it will e in most irrelevantly and impertily seasoo the time of the day. Go Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. - Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that lemahe tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late. -- Ha! Cokes, is it you ? -- Ague-cheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. -- Master Shallow, your worships poor servant to and. -- Master Silence, I will use few words with you. -- Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. -- You six will engross all the poor wit of the pany to-day. -- I know it, I know it. Ha! ho R--, my fine 藏书网old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-hreadbare as thy stories -- what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate ? -- Thy ers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago. -- Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradvehou st hawk a volume or two. -- Good Granville S---, thy last patron, is flown. King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead. - heless, noble R --, e in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada: for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the endation of wise sentehou art nothing inferior to those aplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I fet thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two a spinsters -- when I fet the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile -- as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the minor of courtesy could have given his invidious prefereween a pair of so goodly-propertied aorious-equal damsels. . . . . . To desd from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools Ba beyond its appropriate day, -- for I fear the sed of April is not many hours distant -- in sober verity I will fess a Truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool -- as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables -- not guessing at their involved wisdom -- I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, thaertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the hard sure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and -- prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their petitors -- I felt a kindliness, that almost amouo a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. -- I have never made an acquaintance sihat lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I vee an ho obliquity of uanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall it in your pany, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the sa9９liｂ?藏书网s fident, and he Who makes religion mystery! Admirations speakingst tongue! Leave, thy desert shades among, ?9９lib.Reveres hallowed cells, Where retired devotion dwells! With thy enthusiasms e, Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!* [Footnote] * From " Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleo, 1653. _________ Reader, wouldst thou know what true pead quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the solatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, a apanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in tenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in posite : -- e with me into a Quakers Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, desd not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithd self-mistrusting Ulysses. -- Retire with me into a Quakers Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is endable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert, pared with this place? what the ununig muteness of fishes? -- here the goddess reigns and revels. -- "Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-founding uproars more augment the brawl -- nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds -- than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. ion itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds, whi imperfect solitude ot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man eh by himself. The perfect is that which he sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly uand this principle, when they retired iian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one anothers want of versation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of inunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by -- say, a wife -- he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral unication? -- there be no sympathy without the gabble of words? -- away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stri; Or under hanging mountains, Or by the fall of fountains; is but a vulgar luxury, pared with that which those enjoy, who e together for the purposes of more plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt." -- The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, -- sands, ighings, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings-- but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fround -- Silence -- the eldest of things -- language of old Night -- primitive Discourser -- to which the i decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranquillity! Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! vocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to cil, and to sistory -- if my pe of you lightly -- as haply it will wander -- yet my spirit hath the wisdom of your , when sitting among you i peace, whie out-welling tears would rather firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of yinnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. -- I have withat, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the i soldiery, republi or royalist, sent to molest you -- for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and off-sc of churd presbytery. -- have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed iion of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would reend to you, above all churarratives, to read Sewels History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affeg than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspi of alloy, no drop of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that mujured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth,) -- James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with atience, he endured even to the b through of his toh red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given- way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still -- so different from the practice of your on verts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they ever get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in roportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits aloermine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. ain I have watched, when my thoughts should have beeer engaged, in which I could possibly deteothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce troversial ws. -- If the spiritual pretensions the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preag. It is seldom ihat you shall see o up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally a, voice is heard -- you ot guess from art of the meeting it proceeds -- with a low, buzzing., musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the dition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty.-- The men, for what I observed, speak seldomer. Only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian asm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit -- I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable -- he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his ko fail -- his joints all seemed loosening -- it was a figure to set off against Paul Preag -- the words he uttered were few, and sound -- he was evidently resisting his will -- keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the worlds orators strain for theirs. "He had been a Wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking ingruity of the fusion -- uanding the term in its worldly acceptation -- with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities -- the Jocos Risusque -- faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. -- By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he uood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tohat unruly member, ha?s strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to siess of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go a yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed er of a bench, among the gentle Quakers! Their garb and stillness joined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like -- as in the pasture -- "forty feeding like one." - The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and liness io be something more than the absence of its trary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they e up in bands to their Whitsun-ferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER MY reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. Ihing that relates to sce, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or try gentlemen, in king Johns days. I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor form the remotest jecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemens Land. Yet do I hold a correspondeh a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terrae Initae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charless Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness -- and if the sun on some portentous moro make his first appearan the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and ology I possess some vague points, such as one ot help pig up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a icle, even of my own try. I have most dim apprehensions of the freat monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest jectures i, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I uood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the sed. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a strao the shapes aure of the orees, herbs, flowers -- not from the circumstany being town-born -- for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it in "on Devons leafy shores," -- and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, meic processes. -- Not that I affect ignorance -- but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such et curiosities as it hold without ag. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed pany; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the bei alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man, that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. - In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-?lookileman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting dires (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be her his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his versation to me; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success -- to all which I was eo retury satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years daily practice of riding to and fro iage aforesaid -- when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that m in Smithfield? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was obliged to return a cold ive. He seemed a little mortified, as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just e fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to pare notes on the subject. However he assured me that I had lost a fireat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We were noroag Norton Falgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little i, as the nature of my m avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the raw material; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was being oate of the India market -- when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a "wide solution." My panion saw my embarrassment, and, the almshouses beyond Shoreditch just ing in view, with great good-nature aerity shifted his versation to the subject of public charities; which led to the parative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastistitutions, and charitable orders; -- but, findiher dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up; and, the try beginning to open more and more upon us, as roached the tur Kingsland (the destiermination of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advang some queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any further apprehensions. My panioi9９ｌｉｂ?ng out, left me in the fortable possession of my ignorance; and I heard him, as he went off, putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston; and which, my friend assured him, had gohrough five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upohat my panion was a saster; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. He was evidently a kied man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not appear that he took any i, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergy-man. The adventure gave birth to some refles on the differeween persons of his profession in past and present times. [Footnote] *Urn Burial. Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues; the breed, long siinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres: who believing that all learning was tained in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of desions, jugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; renewing stantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood; rehearsing tinually the part of the past; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Flori and their Spici-legia; in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some untoward Tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a Damaetas! With what a savour doth the Preface to Colets, or (as it is sometimes called) Pauls Acce, set forth! "To exhort every man to the learning of grammar, that ih to attain the uanding of the tongues, wherein is tained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labour; for so much as it is known, that nothing surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect, whereas the foundation and ground-work is ready to fall, and uo uphold the burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (parable to those which Milton eh as "havihe usage to prefix to some solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycurgus") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for ity, expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about grammar-rules with the severity of faith-articles ! -- "as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the king majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the invenience, and favourably providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be diligently drawn and so to be set out, only everywhere to be taught for the use of learners, and for the hurt in ging of saisters." What a gusto in that which follows: "wherein it is Profitable that he orderly dee his noun, and his verb." His noun! The fine dream is fading away fast; and the least of a teacher in the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules. The modern saster is expected to know a little of every thing, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of any thing. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omnist. He is to know something of pics; of chemistry; of whatever is curious, or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind; an insight into meics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, &c. botany, the stitution of his try, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by sulting the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib. All these things -- these, or the desire of them -- he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or sauhrough green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him, is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every occasion -- the season of the year -- the time of the day -- a passing cloud -- a rainbow -- a waggon of hay -- a regiment of soldiers going by -- to inculcate something useful. He receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instru. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He ot relish a beggar-man, ipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing es to him, not spoiled by the sophistig medium of moral uses. The Universe -- that Great Book, as it has been called -- is to him io all is and purposes, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys. -- Vacations themselves are o him, he is only rat?her worse off than before; for only be has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times; some cadet of a great family; some ed lump of nobility, entry; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartleys Orrery, to the Panopti, or into the try, to a friends house, or to his favourite watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome panions frown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side, than oher. -- Even a child, that "plaything for an hour," tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies -- as I now hearken to them by fits, sp on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my suburbareat at Shacklewell -- by distance made more sweet -- inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so -- for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far uhe harsh prose-ats of mans versation. -- I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own -- not, if I know myself at all, from any siderations of jealousy or self-parison, for the occasional union with such minds has stituted the fortune and felicity of my life -- but the habit of too stant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses inal thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another mans mind, even as you lose yourself in another mans grounds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The stant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am vio imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each mans intellectual frame. - As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upwards, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a saster ? -- because we are scious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He es like Gulliver from among his little people, and he ot fit the stature of his uanding to yours. He eet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teag, that he wants to be teag you. One of these professors, upon my plaining that these little sketches of mine were any thing but methodical, and that I was uo make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me ihod by which youlemen in his seminary were taught to pose English themes. -- The jests of a saster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is uhe restraint of a formal and didactive hypocrisy in pany, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He o more let his intellect loose in society, thaher his inations. -- He is forlorn among his co-evals; his juniors ot be his friends. "I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profession, writing to a friend respeg a youth who had quitted his school abruptly -- "that your nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my?９9liｂ. situation are more to be pitied, than well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, sequently, ardently affeate hearts, but we ever hope to share an atom of their affes. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings, my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, return after some years absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys; the house is a se of happiness; I, only, am sad at heart -- This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years -- this young man -- in the eight long years I watched over him with a parents ay, never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He roud, when I praised; he was submissive, when I reproved him; but he did never love me -- and what he now mistakes fratitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasaion, which all persons feel at revisiting the se of their boyish hopes and fears; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were aced to look up to with reverence. My wife too, "this iing correspo goes on to say, "my once darling Anna, is the wife of a saster.-- When I married her -- knowing that the wife of a saster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death -- I expressed my fears, that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What wonders will not womans love perform ? -- My house is managed with a propriety and de, unknown in other schools; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper aodation; and all this performed with a careful ey, that never desds to meanness. But I have lost my gentle, helpless Anna ! -- Whe down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am pelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrows task. Her heart and her features are ged by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the masters wife, and she looks up to me as the boys master; to whom all show of love and affe would be highly improper, and unbeing the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and I reproach her for it? " -- For the unication of this letter, I am ied to my cousin Bridget. VALENTINES DAY Hail >to thy returniival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen! Immortal Go-between! who and what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a ypifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfe in union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, With thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, a lawn sleeves? Mysterious personage! like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the dar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the signer of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate; nor who hated all mothers, en; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou est attended with thousands ahousands of little Loves, and the air is Brushd with the hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy pretors; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beh a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what aent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrit of porters, ariment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so on as the heart, -- that little three-ered exponent of all our hopes and fears, -- the bestud bleedi; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for plag the head-quarters aropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the trary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?" But has settled these things, and awarded the seat of seo the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in i a knock at the door. It "gives a very echo to the throne where Hope is seated." But its issues seldom ao this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see es. But of all the clamorous visitations the welest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that annouhe fatal entrance of Dun, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, fident, aing ohat brih good tidings. It is less meical than on other days; you will say, "That is not the post, I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens -- delightful eternal on-places, which "having been will always be" whio school-boy nor san write away; having your irreversible throne in the fand affes -- what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fanot without verses - Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such deviot over abundant in sense -- young Love disclaims it, -- and not quite silly -- somethiween wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the Shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia. All Valentines are not foolish; and I shall not easily fet thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B. -- E. B. lived opposite a young maiden, whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C--e-street. She was all joyousness and innoce, and just of ao enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappoi of missing oh good humour. E. B. is an artist of no on powers; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at the bottom of many a well executed vige in the way of his profession, but no further; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation; and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just before Valentines day three years since. He wrought, unseen and unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the fi gilt paper with borders -- full, not of os aless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar.) There yramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not fot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos and fanciful devices, such as beseemed, -- a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentines eve he eo the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice--(O igrust!) -- of the on post; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the -- m, he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, uhe happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as oer ohe pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover; or, if she had, none she khat could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God-send, as our familiarly pious aors termed a be received, where the beor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would dood for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a spe of E. B. and his modest way of doing a cealed kindness. Good-morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia; and er wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are tent to rank themselves humble dios of old Bishop Valentine, and his true church. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES I am of a stitution so general, that it sorts and sympathizeth with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncra any thing. Those national repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch -- Religio Medici. That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstra, versant about notional and jectural essences; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have overlooked the imperti individualities of such poor cretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wo, that in the genus of animals he should have desded to distinguish that species at all. For myself-earth.hound aered to the se of my activities, -- Standing oh, not rapt above the sky, I fess that I do feel the differenankind, national or individual, to an uhy excess. I look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when o bees indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices -- made up of likings and dislikings -- veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I feel for all indifferently, but I ot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English wont that expresses sympathy will better explain my meaning. I be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another at ot be my mate or fellow. I ot like all people alike. * [Footnote] * I would be uood as fining myself to the subjeperfect sympathies To nations or classes of men there be no diretipathy. There may *be individuals born and stellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere ot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and believe the story of two persoing (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. -- We by proof find there should be `Twixt man and man su antipathy, That though he show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury, either find a blemish in his fame, Nht in face or feature justly blame, challenge or accuse him of no evil, Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. The lines are from old Heywoods "Hierarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious story in firmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an ie antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King. -- The cause which to that apelld him Was, he neer loved him since he first beheld him. I have been trying all my life to like Sen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They ot like me -- and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one a first sight. There is an order of imperfetellects (under which mine must be tent to rank) whi its stitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than prehehey have no preteo much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to fess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are tent with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them -- a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure -- and leave it to knottier heads, more robust stitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their versation is accly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be tent to let it pass for what it is worth. They ot speak always as if they were upon their oath -- but must be uood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. The seldom wait to mature a proposition, but een bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full developement. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is stituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth -- if, ihey do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of cloark>. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints gests any thing, hut unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and pleteness. He brings his total wealth into pany, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He oops to catch a glittering something in your preseo share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You ot cry halves to any thing that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His uanding is always at its meridian -- you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. -- He has no falterings of self-suspi. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-sciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo ceptions, have no pla his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox -- he has no doubts. Is he an infidel -- he has her. Between the affirmative and the ive there is no border-land with him. You ot hover with him upon the fines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You ake excursions with him -- for he sets yht. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He ot promise, or uand middle as. There be but a right and a wrong. His versation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemys try. "A healthy book" -- said one of his trymen to me, who had veo give that appellation to John Buncle, -- "did I catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man ih, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see hoithet be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of i expressions before a Caledonian. Clap ainguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had exami minutely, I veo ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish goes by among my friends) -- when he very gravely assured me, that "he had siderable respey character and talents" (so he leased to say), "but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The misception staggered me, but did not seem much to discert him. -- Persons of this nation are particularly bond of affirming a truth -- whiobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth bees equally valuable, whether the proposition that tains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to bee a subject of disputation. I resent not long si a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happeo drop a silly expression (in my South British way).hat I wished it were the father instead of the son -- when four of them started up at oo inform me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could ceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, heir love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily fihe passage to the margin. The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another! -- In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his trymen by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his patriot, even more than he would your pt of him. The latter he imputes to your "imperfect acquaintah many of the words which he uses;" and the same objeakes it a presumption in you to suppose that you admire him. -- Thomson they seem to have fotten. Smollett they have her fotten nor fiven for his deliion of Rory and his panion, upon their first introdu to our metropolis. -- Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Humes History pared with his tinuation of it. What if the historian had tinued Humphrey ker? [Footnote] * There are some people who think they suffitly acquit themselves, aertain their pany, with relating facts of no sequenot at all out of the road of suon is as happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the mi circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as at aure peculiar to that try, would be hardly tolerable. -- Hints towards an Essay on versation. I have, in the abstrao disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, pared with which Stonehenge is in its nohey date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I fess that I have not the o eheir synagogues. Old prejudices g about me. I ot shake off the story of Hugh of Lin. turies of injury, pt, and hate, on the one side, -- of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, oher, between our and their fathers, must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I ot believe it run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as dour, liberality, the light of a eenth tury, close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere genial to me. He is least distasteful on `ge -- for the mertile spirit levels all distins, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly fess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has bee so fashiohe reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Churd Synagogue kissing and geeing in aostures of an affected civility. If they are verted, why do they not e over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If they sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery? I do not uand these half vertites. Jews christianizing -- Christians judaizing -- puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B----- would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine s in his face, whiature meant to be of ---- Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He ot quer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. -- has a strong expression of sense in his tenance, and it is firmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is use. He sings with uanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the as, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not ever-sensible tenances. How should they ? -- but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a mans visage. I never heard of an idiot being horn among them. -- Some admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it -- but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the Negro tenance you will ofte with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderowards some of these faces -- or rather masks -- that have looked out kindly upon one in casual enters ireets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls -- these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them -- because they are black. I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I vee the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrehe sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I ot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated -- with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, sdal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste do without. I should starve at their primitive ba. My appetites are too high for the salads which (acc to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited To sit a guest with Da his pulse. The i answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they are miven to evasion and equivog than other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of itting themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The of res to an oath ireme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be fessed) to introduto the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth -- the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the on proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the sce by an oath be but truth, so in the on affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and ceded upoions wanting this solemn ant. Somethihan truth satisfies. It is on to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorreess and iency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary versation; and a kind of sedary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth -- oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distin. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, be forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed -- and how far a sciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produdireswers, and a diverting of the question by ho means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presenind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all tingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness -- if it did not seem rather an humble and secular s of that old stock ious stancy, whiever bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, ave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, urials and rag examinations. "You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing posure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. -- I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up iraitest non-ity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends fihemselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my panions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money, and formally te -- so much for tea -- I, in humble imitation, tendering mine -- for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible -- and now my sce, which the whimsical se had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their duct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his neighbour, "Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?" and the questioed as a soporifiy moral feeling as far as Exeter. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS We are too hasty whe down our aors in the gloss for fools, for the monstrous insistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to dete historialy, as ourselves. But when ohe invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decy, of fitness, or proportion -- of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd -- could they have to guide them in the reje or admission of any particular testimony? -- That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images ed before a fire -- that was lodged, and cattle lamed -- that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest-or that spits ales only danced a fearful-i vagary about some rustics kit when no wind was stirring -- were all equally probable where no law of agency was uood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the floomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of i eld -- has her likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fet the devils market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wo so much, that he should e sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. -- That the intercourse e all between both worlds erhaps the mistake -- but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving oested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or by which a dream may be criticised. I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our aors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holdiributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headbh serving, a warrant upon them -- as if they should subpoena Satan! -- Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be veyed away at the mercy of his eo an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiesce is i analogy to the noance of witches to the stituted powers. -- What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces -- or who had made it a dition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait -- we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that try. From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with, good store. But I shall mention the act which directed my curiosity inally into this el. In my fathers book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds -- one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomons temple, delied with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot -- attracted my childish attention. There icture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall e to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes -- and there leasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infiraining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it sisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the obje appeo each story, and the solution of the obje regularly tacked to that. The obje was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of a or modern iy, drawn up with an almost plimentary excess of dour. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon is dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But -- like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser -- from the womb of those crushed errors young dragos would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint Gee as myself to vanquish. The habit of expeg objes to every passage, set me upon starting more objes, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a scepti long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and siy of impression, aurned into so many historic or ologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but -- the hing to that -- I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. o making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the mans weakness, but the childs strength. 0,> how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a sug -- I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with sufit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a brea its ingenious fabric-driving my insiderate fingers right through the twer quadrupeds the elephant, and the camel -- that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows he steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was heh locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objes and solution gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned sin any force to trouble me. -- But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, whio lock or bar could shut out, and which was destio try my childish nerves rather more seriously. -- That detestable picture! I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh hth year of my life -- so far as memory serves in things so long ago -- without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel --(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy -- but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow -- a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book ermitted me, I dreamed waking over his deliion, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, oer the chamber where I slept, without my face turo the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. -- Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes aloo go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm -- the hoping for a familiar voice -- when they wake screaming -- and find o soothe them -- what a terrible shaking it is to their poor he keeping them up till midnight, through dle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, -- would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. -- That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams -- if dreams they were -- for the se of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have e self-pictured in some shape or other - Headless bear, black man, or ape -- but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. -- It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They at most but give them a dire. Dear little T.N. who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition -- who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story -- finds all this world of fear, from which he has been sidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thiing fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, is to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. Gons, and Hydras, and Chimeras -- dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition -- but they were there before. They are transcripts, types -- the archetypes are in us, aernal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking seo be false, e to affect us at all? -- or -- Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not? Is it that we naturally ceive terror from such objects, sidered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? -- O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body -- or, without the body they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante -- tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorg demons -- are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him - Like ohat on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having ournd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread*. [Footnote] * Mr, Ces A Mariner That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual -- that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upoh -- that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy -- are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane dition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence. My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I fess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will e and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I ot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seemih of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon -- their churches, palaces, squares, market- places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight -- a map-like distiness of trace -- and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. -- I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells -- my highest Alps, -- but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my roaming reition; and I have again and again awoke with iual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyhought I was in that try, but the mountains were gohe poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Ce, at his will jure up ies, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes -- when I uster a fiddle. Barry wall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in noal visions, and proclaiming sons born to une -- when my stret藏书网aginative activity hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light -- it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, withi to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I on the o billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the ary train sounding their chs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ihea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-rougho a sea-calm, and theo a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gehames, which landed me, in the wafture of a lucid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the souls creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of being a poet, his first question would be, -- "Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friends theory, that when I feel that idle veiurning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing. MY RELATIONS I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may at it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity -- and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Brownes Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a pass of time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be fotten, wheh lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and ma sensibly see with what a fa no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself." I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She ofteo say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved; and, whehought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mothers tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason ot altogether approve. She was from m till night p ood books, aional exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas Kempis, in Staranslation; and a Roman Catholic prayer Book, with the matins and plines regularly set down, -- terms which I was at that time too young to uand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily ing their Papistical tendency; ao church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfa the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open one day -- it was in the infancy of that heresy -- she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and freque at intervals some time after. She came not for doal points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her stitution, which I have above hi, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind -- extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence -- else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a a basin of fair water. The odour of those tender vegetables to this day es back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recolles. Certainly it is the most delicate of ary operations. Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none -- to remember. By the uncles side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any -- to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a fort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her! -- But I have cousins, sprinkled about ifordshire -- besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par excellehese are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years; aher of them seems disposed, in matters of advid guidao waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture fers. May they tiill in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, ay-three, years old (I ot spare them sooner), persist iing me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother! James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, whiot every criti pee; or, if we feel, we ot explaihe pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire -- those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grad talent. J. F. then -- to the eye of a on observer at least -- seemeth made up of tradictory principles. ９9ｌiｂ?-- The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence -- the phlegm of my cousins doe is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new proje his brain, J. E. is the systematic oppo of innovation, and crier down of every thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fiions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romanti others; and, determined by his own sense ihing, ends you to the guidance of on sense on all occasions. -- With a touch of the etri all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that you should not it yourself by doing any thing absurd or singular. On my oting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so -- for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice colle), uhe pretext of buying only to sell again -- that his enthusiasm may give no encement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Dominio hang still by his wall? -- is the ball of his sight much more dear to him? -- or icture-dealer talk like him? Whereas mankind in general are observed to their speculative clusions to the bent of their individual humours, his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his stitution. He is ceous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. -- He has been preag up to me, all my life, the doe of bowing to the great -- the y of forms, and mao a maing on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I discover, -- and has a spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience -- extolling it as the truest wisdom --and to see him during the last seven mihat his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin --and Art urned out a more elaborate orator than he display himself to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet, and tentedness iate, whatever it may be, that laced in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstrug manner, at the foot of John Murrays street -- where you get i is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath pleted her just freight -- a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness,--- "where could we be better than we are, thus sitting, thus sulting?" --"prefers, for his part, a state of rest to lootion," -- with an eye all the while upon the an -- till at length, waxing out of all patie your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstra the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determio get out, if he does not drive on that instant." Very quick at iing an argument, or deteg a sophistry, he is incapable of attending you in any uing. Indeed he makes wild work with logid seems to jump at most admirable clusions by some process, not at all akin to it. sonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upoain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason; and woh how man came first to have a ceit of it -- enf his ion with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him -- when peradvehe moment his lungs shall crow like ticleer. He says some of the best things in the world -- and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds -- What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be ged into frivolous Members of Parliament! His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous -- and in age he discovereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who meet Time half-way. I am for no promise with that iable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. -- It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May m, to meet him marg in a quite opposite dire, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye -- a Claude -- or a Hobbima -- for much of his enviable leisure is ed at Christies, and Phillipss -- or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with business which he must do -- assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands -- wishes he had fewer holidays -- and goes off -- Westward Ho! -- ting a tuo Pall Mall -- perfectly vihat he has vinced me -- while I proceed in my opposite dire tuneless. It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best -- plag it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of yht to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective -- though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much mreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasoimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present! -- The last is always his best hit -- his "thia of the minute." -- Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I known to e in -- a Raphael ! -- keep its asdancy for a few brief moons -- then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, theo the dark parlour, adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive l ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall -- sigo the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain aratti -- which things when I beheld musing upon the ces and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upoered dition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the Sed - -- set forth in pomp, She came adorned hither like sweet May. Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day. With great love for you, J. E. bath but a limited sympathy with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at asses in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very lively edian -- as a piece of news! He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, knowio be a great walker, in my own immediate viity -- who have hauhe identical spot any time these twenty years ! -- He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of seal. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively -- aeth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A stitutional aess to this class of sufferings may in part at for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial prote. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his t for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind -- the never-failing friend of those who have o care for them. The plation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that "all for pity he could die." It will take the savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that "true yoke-fellow with Time," to have effected as much for the animal, as he bath done for the Negro Creation. but my untrollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which demand cooperation. He ot wait. His amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent societies, and binations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal stantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving,while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the Relief of -----, because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. I shall always sider this distin as a patent of nobility in the Elia fami..ly! Do I mention these seeming insisteo smile at, or upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the uanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid -- With all the strangenesses of this stra of the Elias -- I would not have him i or tittle other than he is; her would I barter or exge my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and every way sistent kinsmahing. In my , reader, I may perhaps give you some at of my cousin Bridget -- if you are not already surfeited with cousins -- and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in searore cousins - Through the green plains of pleasafordshire MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations tet, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable fort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash kings offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habit -- yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather uood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and plaihat I was altered. We are both great readers in different dires. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange poraries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our on reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil acts. The fluctuations of fortune in fi -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to i, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of on sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I pardon her blio the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, toug the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last tury but one -- the thrioble, chaste, and virtuous, -- but again somewhat fantastical, and inal-braind, generous Margaret Newcastle. It has bee of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she her wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her uanding. We are both of us ined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this --- that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of vi, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, fet does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in pany: at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully uanding its purport -- which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presenind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the sce, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. Her education in youth was not much atteo; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of aplishments. She was tumbled early, by act or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much sele or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their wedlock might not be diminished by it; but I answer for it, that it makes (if the worst e to the worst) most inparable old maids. In a season of distress, she is the truest forter; but ieazing acts, and minor perplexities, which do not9９lib? call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfa. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but best, when she goes a journey with you. We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to heat up the quarters of some of our less-knowions in that fine try. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farmhouse, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I just remember havihere, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, uhe care et; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joiehat we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmothers sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the ty, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed sihe visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of persons ied Mackery End -- kindred or strange folk -- we were afraid almost to jecture, but determined some way to explore. By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recolle, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though I had fotten it, we had never fotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I khe aspect of a place, which, whe, O how u was to that, which I had jured up so many times instead of it! Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the "heart of June," and I could say with the poet, But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation ! Bridgets was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old acquaintance again -- some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the se soon re-firmed itself in her affe -- and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown) -- with a breathless impatience nition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years. The only thi was to get into the house -- and that was a difficulty whie singly would have been insurmountable; for I am terribly shy in making myself known ters and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, strohan scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soourned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Wele. It was the you of the Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had beistress of the old mansion. A ely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the ty. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all -- more ely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget pointe藏书网d out to her, climbing a style. But the name kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those sleies, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, iy, homely, lovifordshire. In five minutes we were as thhly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up together; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians should call one ao have seen Bridget, and her -- it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grad dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmers wife, which would have shined in a palace -- or so we thought it. We were made wele by husband and wife equally -- we, and our friend that was with us -- I had almost fotten him -- but B. F. will not so soon fet that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far distant shores where the Kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our ing; and, after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me fet with what ho pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing. -- With what corresponding kindness we were received by them also -- hets memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recolles of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own -- and to the astou of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there, -- old effaced images of more than half-fotten e>9９lib?s and circumstaill crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon e out upon exposure to a friendly warmth, -- when I fet all this, then may my try cousins fet me; and Bridget no more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge -- as I have been her care in foolish manhood since -- in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago about Mackery End, ifordshire. MODERN GALLANTRY In paring modern with a manners, leased to pliment ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this principle actuates our duct, when I fet, that in the eenth tury of the era from which we date our civility, we are but just beginning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping females in publi on with the coarsest male offenders. I shall believe it to be iial, when I shut my eyes to the fact, that in England womeill occasionally -- hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across the kennel; or assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering fruit, whie unlucky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refi, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed -- when I shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain -- when I shall no longer see a woman standing up i of a Londore, till she is sid faint with the exertion, with men about her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her distress; till ohat seems to have more manners or sce than the rest, signifitly declares "she should be wele to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that ri藏书网der, in a circle of their own female acquaintance, and you shall fess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury. Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influeng our duct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day es, I shall never believe this boasted point to be any thing more than a ventional fi; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their at equally. I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fis of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse plexions as to clear -- to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed pany advert to the topic of female old age without exg, and intending to excite, a sneer: -- when the phrases "antiquated virginity," and such a one has "overstood her market," pronounced in good pany, shall raise immediate offen man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken. Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, mert, and one of the Directors of the South-Sea pany -- the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare entator, has addressed a fine so -- was the only pattern of sistent gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, aowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my position. It was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a mert, he was the fi gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distin. But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casu藏书网alties of a disadvantageous situation. I have seen him stand bare-headed -- smile if you please -- to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street -- in such a posture of unforced civility, as her to embarrass her in the acceptanor himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the on acceptation of the word, after women: but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood. I have seen him -- nay, smile not --tenderly esc a market-woman, whom he had entered in a shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a tess. To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an a beggarwoman) with more ceremony than we afford to show randams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded theill bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks. He was never married, hut in his youth he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan Winstanley -- old Winstanleys daughter of Clapton -- who dying in the early days of their courtship, firmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speech -- the on gallantries -- to which kind of thing she had hitherto maed nnance -- but in this instah no effect. He could not obtain from her a det aowledgment iurn. She rather seemed to resent his pliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her ess of yesterday, she fessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown pliments; that a young laced in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to her; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insiy, with as little injury to her humility as most young women: but that -- a little before he had enced his pliment -- she had overheard him by act, in rather rough language, rating a young woman, who had nht home his cravats quite to the appoiime, and she thought to herself, "As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a young lady -- a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune, -- I have my choice of the fi speeches from the mouth of this very fileman who is c me -- but if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one (naming the milliner), -- and had failed ing home the cravats to the appointed hour -- though perhaps I had sat up half the night to forward them -- what sort of pliments should I have received then? -- And my ride came to my assistance; and I thought, that if it were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might have received handsomer usage: and I was determined not to accept any fine speeches, to the promise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my stro claim and title to them." I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover; and I have sometimes imagihat the unon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the as and behaviour of my friend towards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its happy in to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. I wish the whole female world would eain the same notion of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something of the spirit of sistent gallantry; and no longer withe anomaly of the same man -- a pattern of true politeo a wife -- of cold pt, or rudeness, to a sister -- the idolater of his female mistress -- the disparager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or unfortunate -- still female -- maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever dition placed -- her handmaid, or depe -- she deserves to have diminished from herself on that score; and probably will feel the diminution, when youth, ay, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attra. What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after i.t, is first -- respect for her as she is a woman; -- ao that -- to be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon her female character as upon a foundation; ahe attentions, io individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and ors -- as many, and as fanciful, as you please -- to that main structure. Let her first lesson -- with sweet Susan Winstanley -- to reverence her sex. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, iemple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said -- for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places? -- These are of my oldest recolles. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot. There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The whi Themmes brode aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, Till they decayd through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot iropolis. What a transition for a tryman visiting London for the first time -- the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by ued avenues, into its magnifit ample squares, its classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, fronting, with massy trast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful -office Row (play kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twiham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astou of the young urs, my poraries, who, not being able to guess at its redite maery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondeh the fountain of light! How would the dark lieal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an eva cloud -- or the first arrests of sleep! Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived! What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of unication, pared with the simple altar-like structure, and sile-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate iions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its tinua spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after su, of temperance, and good-hours. It was the primitive clock, the he of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers t by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more toug than tombstones. It retty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his poetry was, of a witty delicacy. They will not e in awkwardly I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden ses: What wondrous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head. The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine. The arine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness. The mind, that o, where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transding these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all thats made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountains sliding foot, Or at some fruit-trees mossy root, Casting the bodys vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Thes and claps its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. How well the skilful gardner drew, Of flowers and herbs, this dial new! Where, from above, the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodia: And, as it works, the industrious bee putes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be red, but with herbs and flowers? [Footnote] * from a copy of verses entitled "The Garden." The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile! Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from their i-wanton lips, in the square of Lins-inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children ohey are awakening images to them at least. Why must every thing smaan, and mannish? Is the wrown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the childs heart left, to respond to its earliest entments? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less gothi appearance? or is the splutter of their hot rhetorie half so refreshing and i as the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered? They have lately gothicised the entrao the Iemple-hall, and the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is bee of the winged horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italiahe end of the Paper-buildings? -- my first hint of allegory! They must at to me for these things, which I miss so greatly. The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful! It is bee on and profahe old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. We walk oerms with their successors. The roguish eye of J----ll, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a strao vie a repartee with it. But what i familiar durst have mated Thomas try ? -- whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lions, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, iible from his way as a moving n, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff aggravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestiostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it uhe mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye inal, and by adjuncts, with buttons of a obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership in on. In politics Salt was a whig and try a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out -- for try had a rough spinous humour -- at the political federates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom of the latter like on-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent disment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition of moestamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily ha over with a few instrus to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the light of natural uanding, of which he had an unon share. It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a minute -- i and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast application in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he fot his sword -- they wore swords then -- or some other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was any thing which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it. He was to di a relatives of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her execution ; -- and L. who had a wary fht of his probable halluations, before he set out, schooled him with great ay not in any possible mao allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injun. He had not beeed in the parlour, where the pany was expeg the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in the versation ensuing, he got up, looked out of windoulling down his ruffles -- an ordinary motion with him -- observed, "it was a gloomy day," and added, "Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit person to be sulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, but in the ordinary ies and embarrassments of duct -- from foranirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among the female world, -- was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have died for love of him -- I suppose, because he rifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly on attentions. He had a fine fad person, but wanted methought, the spirit that should have shown them off with advao the women. His eye lacked lustre. -- Not so, thought Susan P----; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening time, unapanied, wetting the pavement of B----d Row, with tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that day -- he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for the last forty years -- a passion, which years could inguish or abate; nor the long resolved, yet gently enforced, puttings off of uing bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished purpose. Mild Susan P----, thou hast now thy friend in heaven! Thomas try was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed his youth in tracted circumstances, which gave him early those parsimonious habits whi after-life never forsook him; so that, with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him he was master of four or five huhousand pounds; nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite the pump in Serjeants-inn, Fleet-street. J., the sel, is doing self-imposed penan it, for what reason I divi, at this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, as he said, "the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had his within- door reasons for the preference. Hic cursus et arma fuere. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks -- a hoarder rather than a miser -- or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, which ot exist without certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true miser, but ot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of the pence, he is often eo part with the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000 l. at on his life-time to a blind charity. His house- keeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came in an$ who went out of his house, but his kit ey was never suffered to freeze. Salt was his opposite in this, as in all -- never knew what he was worth in the world; and having but a petency for his rank, which his i habits were little calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had ho people about him. Lovel took care of every thing. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his "flapper," his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without sulting Lovel, or failed in any thing without expeg and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost too mu his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have fotten for a moment that he was a servant. I khis Lovel. He was a man of an incible and losing hoy A good fellow withal, and "would strike." In the cause of the oppressed be never sidered inequalities, or calculated the number of his oppos. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him; and pommelled him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female -- an occasion upon whio odds against him could have prevehe interference of Lovel. He would sta day bare-headed to the same person, modestly to excuse his interference -- for L. never fot rank, where somethier was not ed. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garricks, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which firms it), possessed a fiurn for humorous poetry -- o Swift and Prior ---- moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small et toys, to perfe; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and ceits, and was altogether as brimful ueries and iions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, ho panion as Mr. Isaac Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness -- "a remnant most forlorn of what he was, "yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes -- "oage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lin to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years absence, in his smart new livery to see her, and she blessed herself at the ge, and could hardly be thought to believe that it was "her own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad sed-childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the other of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers. With try, and with Salt, in their walks upoerrace, most only Peter Pierson would join, to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm in arm in those days -- "as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets," -- but general with both hands folded behind them for state, or with o least behind, the other carrying a e. P. was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing mad. He had that in his face which you could not term unhappiness; it rather implied an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his sourness) that of reat philanthropist. I know that he did good acts, but I could never make out what he was. porary with these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington -- another oddity -- he walked burly and square -- in imitation, I think, of try -- howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. heless, he did pretty well, uporength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the at of his years treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench: "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardewenty shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." o him was old Barton -- a jolly ion, who took upon him the of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine -- answering to the bination rooms at college -- much to the easement of his less epicureahren. I know nothing more of him. -- Then Read, and Twopenny -- Read, good- humoured and personable -- Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous is upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, which erformed by tree steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk; the jump paratively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learhis figure, or what occasio, I could never discover. It was her graceful in itself, nor seemed to ahe purpose aer than on walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cats ears extremely, when any thing had offended him. Ja -- the omnist Ja he was called -- was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He was the Friar Ba of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage, of the cook applying to him, with muality of apology, or instrus how to write down edge bone of beef in his bill of ons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided the raphy to be -- as I have given it -- fortifying his authority with suatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet perversely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblaween its shape, and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had almost fotten Mingay with the iron hand -- but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some act, and supplied it with a grappling hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute, before I was old enough to reasoher it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loudtalking person; and I reciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power -- somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelos Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the e of the reign of Gee the Sed, closes my imperfect recolles of the old benchers of the Iemple. Fantastis, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half- uood appearances, why es in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright loomy, that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me -- to my childish eyes -- the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, -- extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling,in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of i or wholesome superstition -- the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital -- from every-day forms edug the unknown and the unon. In that little Goshen there will be light, when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, redug childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. P.S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor! This gentleman, R. N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady in child-bed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he hhly recovered. In what a new light does this place his reje (O call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P----, unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy airing character -- Heh let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact -- verisimilitudes, not verities -- or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such ho icler as R. N., and would have doer perhaps to have sulted that gentleman, before he sent these indite reminisces to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer -- who respects his old and his new masters -- would but have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, peradventure, of the lise which Magazines have arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman`s -- his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having been long fio the holy ground of ho Urbans obituary. May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those ns of unenvied flattery! -- Meantime, O ye New Benchers of the Iemple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the ki of humaures. Should infirmities over-take him ---- he is yet in green and vigorous senility -- make allowances for them, remembering that "ye yourselves are old." So may the Winged Horse, our a badge and isaill flourish so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate your churd chambers! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks! so may the fresh- coloured and ly nursery maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing curtsy as ye pass, reductive of juve emotion! so may the younkers of this geion eye you, pag your stately terrace, with the same superstitious veion, with which the child Elia gazed on the Old Worthies that solemhe parade before ye! GRACE BEFORE MEAT THE of saying grace at meals had, probably, its in in the early times of the world, and the huate of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was more than a on blessing; when a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deers oats flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the mrace. It is not otherwise easy to be uood, why the blessing of food -- the act of eating -- should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving ao it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence. I own that I am disposed to say grace upoy other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakspeare -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen? -- but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall fine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; ending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and per part heretical, liturgy, now piling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug gregation of Utopian Rabelaesian Christians, no matter where assembled. The form then of the beion before eating has its beauty at a poor mans table, or at the simple and unprovocative repasts of children. It is here that the race bees exceedingly graceful. The i man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the ception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have ehe proper end of food -- the animal sustenance -- is barely plated by them. The poor mans bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial. Again, the plai diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the mind most free for fn siderations. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinand institution of eating; when he shall fess a perturbation of mind, insistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When I have sate (a rarus hospes) at rich mens tables, with the savoury soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the introdu of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous asm upon you, it seems impertio interpose a religious se. It is a fusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The inse which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportioween the end and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks -- for what ? -- for having too much, while so many starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce sciously perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others -- a sort of shame -- a sense of the co-presence of circumstances whihallow the blessing. After a devotional to on for a few seds, hoidly the speaker will fall into his on voice, helping himself or his neighbour, as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man ocrite, or was not most stious in the discharge of the duty; but he felt in his .inmost mind the inpatibility of the se and the viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. I hear somebody exclaim, -- Would you have Christians sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver? no -- I would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves with delicacies for which east a are ransacked, I would have them postpoheir beion to a fitter season, when appetite is laid; wheill small voice be heard, and the reason of the grace returns -- with temperate diet aricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil khe harpy-nature better, whe into the mouth of Celaeno any thing but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferiratitude: but the proper object of the grace is sustenanot relishes; daily bread, not delicacies; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or posure, I wonder, a city chaplain pronounce his beion at some great Hall feast, when he knows that his last cluding pious word -- and that, in all probability, the sacred name which he preaches -- is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to eheir foul ies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those Virgilian fowl! It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little cloude９９lｉb?d, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar sacrifice. The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the ba which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, provides for a temptation in the wilderness: A table richly spread in regal mode, With dishes piled, as of sort And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore, Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained Pontus, and Lue bay, and Afric coast. The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the reendatory preface of a beion. They are like to he shraces where the devil plays the host. -- I am afraid the poet wants his usual de in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole ba is too civid ary, and the apas altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy se. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend jures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presehemselves ? -- He dreamed indeed, -- As appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, natures refreshment sweet. But what meats? -- Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood, And saw the ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing, even and morn; Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought: He saw the prophet also how he fled Into the desert, and how there he slept Under a juhen how awaked He found his supper on the coals prepared, And by the angel was bid rise a, And ate the sed time after repose, The strength whereof sufficed him forty days: Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, Or as a guest with Da his pulse. Nothing in Milton is finelier fahaemperate dreams of the divine Huo which of these two visionary bas, think you, would the introdu of what is called the grace have been most fitting ai? Theoretically I am no eo graces; but practically I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and tinuing the species. They are fit blessings to be plated at a distah a being gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. The Quakers who go about their business, of every description, with more ess than we, have more title to the use of these beory prefaces. I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and sensual than ours. They are her gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay, with indifference, ess, and ly circumstahey her grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I agi a surplice. I am no Quaker at my food. I fess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unorsels of deers flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affeg not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character iastes for food. C---- holds that a man ot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the dey first innoce, I fess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gehoughts. I am impatient and querulous under ary disappois, as to e home at the dinner hour, for instance, expeg some savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted -- that o of kit failures -- puts me beside my tenour. -- The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have doer to postpone his devotions to a seasohe blessing might be plated with less perturbation? I quarrel with no mans tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity aing. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace racefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish -- his Dagon -- with a special secration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the bas of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly aowledged, refe of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxurious they bee of dissonant mood, less timed and tuo the ocethinks, than the noise of those better befitting ans would be, which childreales of, at Hogs Norto too long at our meals, or are too curious iudy of them, or too disordered in our application to them, ross too?９9lｉb? great a portion of those good things (which should be on) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never settled question arise, as to who shall say it; while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some uest belike of authority from years ravity, shall be -- bandying about the office between them as a matter of pliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders? I once drank tea in pany with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, whom it was my fortuo introduce to each other for the first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverelemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say any thing. It seems it is the with some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made ahat it was not a known in his church: in which courteous evasioher acquiesg food manners sake, or in pliah a weak brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived altogether. With irit mi?9９lｉｂ.ght not Lu have paiwo priests, of his religion, playing into each others hands the pliment of perf or omitting a sacrifice, -- the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his inse, with expet nostrils h over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper. A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid, ot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigrammatiess with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned frace used to inquire, first slyly leering dowable, "Is there no clergyman here?" -- signifitly adding, "thank G---." Nor do I think our old form at school quite perti, where we were used to preface our bald bread and cheese suppers with a preamble, eg with that humble blessing a reition of bes the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non tunc illis erat locus. I remember we were put to it to recile the phrase "good creatures," upon which the blessied, with the fare set before us, wilfully uanding that expression in a low and animal sense, -- til some one recalled a legend, which told how in the golden days of Christs, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious beor, iserating the decies, rather than the palates, of the children, uted our flesh farments, and gave us -- horresco referens -- trowsers instead of mutton. MY FIRST PLAY AT the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at present for arao a printing-office. This old doorway, if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrao Old Drury -- Garricks Drury -- all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking some forty years from off my shoulders, recurring to the evening when I passed through it to see my first play. The afternoon had bee, and the dition of oing (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. With what a beati did I watch from the window the puddles, from the stillness of which I was taught tnosticate the desired cessation! I seem to remember the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to annou. We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil shop (now Daviess) at the er of Featherstone- building, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John Palmer, the edian, whose gait and bearing he seemed to copy; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was also known to, and visited by, Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a b-school at Bath -- the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. -- From either of these exions it may be inferred that my godfather could and an order for the then Drury-laheatre at pleasure -- and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsleys easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole remuion which he had received for many years nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre -- and he was tent it should be so. The honour of Sheridans familiarity -- or supposed familiarity -- was better to my godfather than money. F. was thbbr>９９lib.e most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandiloquent, yet courteous. His delivery of the o matters of fact was Ciian. He had two Latin words almost stantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilmans lips!), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versa -- but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro -- in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, licized, into something like verse verse. By an imposing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrews has to bestow. He is dead -- and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous talismans ! -- slight keys, and insignifit to outward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises!) and moreover, that by his testamentary benefice I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own -- situate he road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, ifordshire. When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor desded upon me, and I strode (shall I fess the vanity?) with larger paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its odious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky are was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian restore it. In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the unfortable m.9９ｌiｂ?anager who abolished them ! -- with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the door -- not that which is left -- but between that and an inner door ier -- O when shall I be su expet again ! -- with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house apa in those days. As near as I recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, "Chase some es, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play;" -- chase pro chuse. But whe in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed -- the breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowes Shakspeare -- the tent se with Diomede -- and a sight of that plate always bring ba a measure the feeling of that evening. -- The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, protected over the pit; and the pilasters reag down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling -- a homely fancy -- but I judged it to be sugar-dy -- yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified dy -- The orchestra lights at length arose, those "fair Auroras!" Ohe bell sounded. It was t out yet once again -- and, incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort nation upoernal lap. It rang the sed time. The curtain drew up -- I was not past six years old -- and the play was Artaxerxes! I had dabbled a little in the Universal History -- the a part of it -- and here was the court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of the past I took no proper i iion going on, for I uood not its import -- but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Geous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time; and the burning idol of their devotion almost verted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more thaal fires. It was all entment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. -- Harlequins Invasion followed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his owo be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. The play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some sery, very faint traces are left in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime, cal]ed Luns Ghost -- a satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Riot long since dead -- but to my apprehension (too sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud -- the father of a line of Harlequins -- transmitting his dagger of lath (the woodere) through tless ages. I saw the primeval Motley e from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge; for, I remember, the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson Crusoe followed; in which an Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as iory. -- The ery and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have passed out of my head. I believe, I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me thee with devout meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round Church (my church) of the Templars. I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I agaiered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never ding in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to e again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, thater does from six. In that interval what had I not lost! At the first period I knew nothing, uood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all - Was nourished, I could not tell how - /BLOCKQUOTE> I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone -- The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawween two worlds, the unfolding of which was t back past ages, to present "a royal ghost," -- but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience fiven time from certain of their fellow-men who were to e forward and pretend those parts. The lights -- the orchestra lights -- came up a clumsy maery. The first ring, and the sed ring, was now but a trick of the prompters bell -- which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voio hand seen uessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those mauries -- of six short twelve- months -- had wrought in me. -- Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifferent edy, as it gave me time to crop some u藏书网nreasonable expectations, which might have interfered with the genuiions with which I was soon after eo enter upon the first appearao me of Mrs. Siddons in IsabelIa. parison arospe soon yielded to the present attra of the se; and the theatre became to me, upon a ock, the most delightful of recreations. DREAM-CHILDREN; A Reverie CHILDREN love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the ception of a traditireat-uncle, randame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about, me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a huimes bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the se -- so at least it was generally believed in that part of the try -- of the tragits which they had lately bee familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the ey-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich Person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern iion in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mothers looks, too teo be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, hious and how good their great. grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by every body, though she was not ihe mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (a in some respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) itted to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoining ty; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, a up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ors stripped and carried away to the owners other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some oo carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "that would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a course of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman; so good ihat she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer -- here Alices little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted -- the best dancer, I was saying, in the ty, till a cruel disease, called a cer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but she said "those is would do her no harm;" and hhtened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good ious as she -- a I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eye-brows and tried to look ceous. Then I told how good she was to all her grand-children, having us to the great-house in the holydays, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the Twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding almost rubbed out -- sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would e -- and how the arines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, -- and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among ?he old melancholy-lookirees, or the firs, and pig up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at -- or in lying a out upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me -- or basking in the ery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the es and the limes in that grateful warmth -- or in watg the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway dower in silent state, as if it mocked at their imperti friskings, -- I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, arines, es, and such like on baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, whiot unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then in somewhat a more heighteone, I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand-childre in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L----, because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary ers, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the ty in a mobbr>rning, and join the hunters when there were any out -- a he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be alent up within their boundaries -- and how their uncle grew up to mae as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of every body, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame- footed boy -- for he was a good bit older than me -- many a mile when I could not ain; -- and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember suffitly how siderate he had been to me when I was lame- footed; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distahere is betwixt life ah; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for we quarreled sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he their poor uncle must have beehe doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a g, and asked if their little m which they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them, some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W---n; and, as much as children could uand, I explaio them what ess, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens -- when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-prese, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew faio my view, reg, and still reg till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen iermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upohe effects of speech; "We are not of Alior of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice called Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upoedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name" ------ and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unged by my side -- but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS In a Letter to B.F. Esq. at Sydney, New South Wales My dear F. -- When I think how wele the sight of a letter from the world where you were born must be to you in that strange oo which you have been transplanted, I feel some punctious visitings at my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a corresponde our distahe weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to ceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that ohoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity: and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowes superscriptions, "Alder to Strephon, in the shades." Cowleys Post-Angel is no more than would be expedient in su intercourse. One drops a packet at Lombard- street, and iy-four hours a friend in Cumberlas it as fresh as if it came i is only like whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the man at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of versation, if you khat the dialogue exged with that iing theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet fht I know, you may be some parasangs hat primitive idea -- Platos man -- than we in England here have the honour to re ourselves. Epistolary matter usually priseth three topiews, se, and puns. Iter, I include all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion, nonseriously. -- And first, for news. Ihe most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be true. But what security I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before you get it unatably turn into a lie? For instanutual friend P. is at this present writing -- my Now -- in good health, and enjoys a fair share of worldly reputation. Ylad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. But at this present reading -- your Now -- he may possibly be in the Bench, oing to be hanged, whi reason ought to abate something of your transport (i.e. at hearing he was well, &c.), or at least siderably to modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d---d realities. You naturally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday m with you, and 1823. This fusion of tehis grand solecism of two presents, is in a degree on to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or the Devises, that I was expeg the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would be over, yet there would be for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental palate, which would give rational encement for you to foster a portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my iion to produce. But ten months hence your envy or yobbr>?ur sympathy would be as useless as a passio upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un-essence herself, but (what is harder) one ot venture a crude fi for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I put upon you some three years since -- - of Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid! I remember gravely sulting you hoere to receive her -- for Wills wife was in no case to be rejected; and your no less serious replication iter; how tenderly you advised an abstemious introdu of literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within the sphere of her intelligence; your deliberate judgment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and mops, could with propriety be introduced as subjects; whether the scious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a worse look thaaking of them casually in our way; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs William Weatherall being by; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Wills wife, by treating Becky with our ary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There were difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer, uo the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo! while I was valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie -- children not his own, or w after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not three days sio the ission of a matrimony, which I had only jured up for your diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs Cotterels maid. But to take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from me must bee history to you; which I her profess to write, nor indeed care藏书网 much for reading. No person, under a diviner, with any prospect of veracity duct a corresponde su arms length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus interge intelligeh effect; the epoch of the writer (Habbakuk) falling in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel); but then we are no prophets. Then as to se. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot; or sent off in water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all eats. I have often smiled at a ceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream -- was it ? or a rock ? -- no matter -- but the stillness and the repose, after a weary jouris likely, in a languid moment of his lordships hot restless life, so took his fancy, that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a se, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passiiment it came to be an act; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England; who was there, some desperate sealists excepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pe, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon? ceive the se boarded up, freighted, e the House (startling the tide-waiters with the y), hoisted into a ship. ceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians -- a thing of its delicate texture -- the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about ses) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus sn to the devisers purpose!) but it has happily evaded a fishy mation. Trace it then to its lucky landing -- at Lyons shall we say ? -- I have not the map before me -- jostled upon four mens shoulders -- baiting at this town -- stopping to refresh at tother village -- waiting a passport here, a lise there; the san of the magistra this district, the currence of the ecclesiasti that ton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk se, into a feature of silly ride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few ses, my dear F., I am afraid we set down, in the sailors phrase, as quite seaworthy. Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though ptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle -- your puns and small jests are, I appreheremely circumscribed in their sphere of a. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up a beyohey will scardure to be transported by hand from this room to the . Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the by-standers or this last, is the fine slime of Nilus -- the melior lutus, -- whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal geion. A pun hath a hearty hind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you o more transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you send a kiss, -- Have you not tried in some instao palm off a yesterdays pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered? Not but it was o his hearing, but it did not seem to e new from you. It did not hit. It was like pig up at a village ale-house a two days old neer. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merdise above all requires a quick return. A pun, and its reitory laugh, must be stantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moments interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friends face as from a mirror. Who would sult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve-months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy? I age to myself whereabout you are. When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkinss island es ae. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an ho man! You must almost have fotten how we look. And tell me, what your Sydes do? are they th**v*ng all day long? Merciful heaven! roperty stand against such a depredation! The kangaroos -- your Abines -- do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore-puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind- shifters as the expertest lootor in the y. -- We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray, is it true that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils their sing ? -- It must look very odd; but use reciles. For their ssion, it is less to be regretted, for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater art of them, vile plagiarists. -- Is there much differeo see to between the son of a th**f, and the grandson? or where does the taint stop? Do you blea three or in feions? -- I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic voyages be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. -- Do you grow your own hemp ? -- What is your staple trade, exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your lock-smiths, I take it, are some of yreat capitalists. I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used to exge good-morrows out of our old co?ntiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare-court iemple. Why did you ever leave that quiet er ? -- Why did I ? -- with its plement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first lady-birds! My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of lish letters before they reach you. But while I talk, I think you hear me, -- thoughts dallying with vain surmise - Aye me! while thee the seas and sounding shores Hold far away. e back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me. e, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left children have bee sage matrons, while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W -- r (you remember Sally W -- r) called upon us yesterday, an aged e. Folks, whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out, -- I stood ramparted about with so mahy friends. The departure of J. W., tws back corrected my delusion. Sihen the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS I like to meet a sweep -- uand me -- not a grown sweeper -- old ey-sweepers are by no means attractive -- but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek -- such as e forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should I pronouhem, in their aerial asts not seldom anticipating the sun-rise? I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks -- poor blots -- i blaesses - I reverehese young Afris of our own growth -- these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of eys), in the nipping air of a December m, preach a lesson of patieo mankind. When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witheir operation! to see a chit no bigger than ones-self enter, one knew not by rocess, into what seemed the fauces Averni -- to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling c?99lｉb?averns, horrid shades -- to shudder with the idea that "now, surely, he must be lost for ever! " -- to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light -- and then (O fulness of delight) running out of doors, to e just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished on of his art victorious like some flag waved over a quered citadel! I seem to remember haviold, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not mulike the old stage dire in Macbeth, where the "Apparition of a child ed with a tree in his hand rises." Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him two-pence. If it be starviher, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual apa) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. There is a position, the ground-work of which I have uood to be the sweet wood `yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the a luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it; for myself, with every defereo the judir. Read, who hath time out of mi open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this "wholesome and pleasant beverage, on the south side of Fleet-street, as thou approachest Bridge-street -- the only Salopian house, -- I have never yet adveo dip my own particular lip in a basin of his ended ingredient -- a cautious premonition to the olfactories stantly whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, dee it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise not uninstructed iical elegances, sup it up with avidity. I know not by articular ation of the an it happens, but I have always found that this position is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young ey-sweeper --- whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous cretions, which are sometimes found (in disses) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners or whether Nature, sensible that she had mioo much of bitter wood i of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the senses of a young ey-sweeper vey a delicate excitement parable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the asding steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestiimals -- cats -- when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy inculcate. Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salopion house; yet he it known to thee, reader -- if thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact -- he hath a race of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispehe same savoury mess to humbler ers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard- handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the ma discerting of the former, for the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relumined kit- fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to dissipate his ht vapours in mrateful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth; but the artisan stops to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. This is Saloop -- the precocious herb-womans darling -- the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to t-gardens famed piazzas -- the delight, and, oh I fear, too often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldest thou haply enter, with his dim visage pe over the grateful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter (an added halfpenny) -- so may thy ary fires, eased of the oer-charged secretions from thy worse-placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin -- so may the desding soot aint thy costly well-ingredienced soups -- nor the odious cry, quick-reag from street to street, of the fired ey, ihe rattling engines from ten adjat parishes, to disturb for a casual stillation thy pead pocket! I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or splashed stog, of a gentlema I ehe jocularity of a young sweep with something more than fiveness. In the last winter but one, pag along Cheap-side with my aced precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my ba an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enough -- yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened -- when the roguish grin of one of these young wits entered me. There he stood, pointi with his dusky fio the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the ers of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot- inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth -- but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pye-man -- there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever -- with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth -- for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no mali it -- that I could have been tent, if the honour of a gentleman might e, to have remained his butt and his mockery till midnight. I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fi of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket, presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to "air " them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fileman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I fess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of nobility -- and, doubtless, uhe obsg darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, ale ditions, derived from lost ary, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature appres of these tender victims give but too mucement, I fear, to destine, and almost infantile abdus; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, so often disible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be ated for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions; many noble Rachels m for their children, even in our days, tehe fact; the tales of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune, out of many irreparable and hopeless defiliations. In one of the state-beds at Arundel castle, a few years sinder a ducal opy -- (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a oisseur) encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry ets inwoven -- folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Asius was discovered by ce, after all methods of search had failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost ey-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow founded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly eys, by some unknoerture had alighted upon this magnifit chamber; and, tired with his tedious explorations, was uo resist the delicious i to repose, which he there saw exhibited; so, creepiween the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept. like a young Howard. Such is the at given to the visitors at the Castle. -- But I ot help seeming to perceive a firmation of what I have just hi in this story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child of that description, with whatever weariness he might be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty, as he would be taught to expect, to uhe sheets of a Dukes bed, and deliberately to lay himself dowween them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far above his pretension -- is this probable, I would ask, if the great power of nature, which I tend for, had not been maed within him, prompting to the adventure? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full sciousness, of his dition in infancy, when be was used to be lapt by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper inabula, aing-place. -- By no other theory, than by this se of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, any other system, so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable sleeper. My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor gelings, he instituted an annual feast of ey-sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about the metropolis, fining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and be good-naturedly wi; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens rovidentially discovered in time to be no ey.sweeper (all is not soot which looks so), was quoited out of the preseh universal indignation, as not having on the wedding garment; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The place chosen was a ve spot among the pens, at the north side of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable hub-hub of that vanity; but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a ely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour. James White, as head waiter, had charge of the first table; and myself, with our trusty panion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was clambering and jostling, you may he sure, who should get at the first table -- for Rochester in his maddest days could not have dohe humours of the se with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the honour the pany had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), that sto and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing "the gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the cave, while hundreds of grinnih startled the night with their brightness. O it leasure to see the sable younkers li the uneat, with his more unctuous sayings -- how he would fit the tit bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors -- how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it "must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit fentlemaing" -- how he would reend this slice of white bread, or that piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a care of crag their teeth, which were their best patrimony, how genteelly he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if it were not good, he should lose their ; with a special reendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts -- " The King," -- the "Cloth," -- which, whether they uood or not, was equally diverting and flattering; -- and for a iiment, whiever failed, "May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" All these, and fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than prehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and prefag every se with a "Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which rodigious fort to those young orphans; every now and then st.uffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the eai. Golden lads and lasses must, As ey-sweepers, e to dust - James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died -- of my world at least. His old ts look for him among the pens; and, missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for ever. A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPO The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation -- your only modern Alcides club to rid the time of its abuses -- is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags -- staves, dogs, and crutches -- the whole mendit fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the ers of streets and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighi." I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this imperti crusado, or bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species. Muight be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our on nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so muearer to the being a man, than to go in livery. The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from king turned saster, do we feel any thing towards him but pt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same passionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an obolum? Would the moral have been mraceful, more pathetic? The Blind Beggar in the legend -- the father of pretty Bessy -- whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs ot so degrade nor attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shihrough the disguisements -- this noble Earl of wall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, aed on the fl green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary -- would the child and parent have cut a better figure, doing the honours of a ter, or expiating their fallen dition upohree-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board? In tale or history ygar is ever the just antipode to your King. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, op till they have brought down their hero in good ears and the wallet. The depth of the dest illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which be preseo the imagination without offehere is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer "mere nature;" and Cresseid, fallen from a princes love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whitehan of beauty, supplig lazar alms with bell and clap-dish. The Lu wits khis very well; and, with a verse policy, when they would express s of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen. How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had deed his affes upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad," where King Cophetua wooes the beggar maid? Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with pt. No one properly ns a beggar. Poverty is a parative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbrice." Its poor rents and ings-in are soon summed up and told. Its preteo property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every sful panion weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man reproaches poor man ireets with impolitition of his dition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally parative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of parison. He is not uhe measure of property. He fessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No owitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for preo wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his te. No man sues him. No mao law with him. If I were not the indepe gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retaio the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicad true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar. Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggars robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court m. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His e hath undergone less ge than the quakers. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearahe ups and downs of the world him no longer. He alone tih iay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The fluctuations of agricultural or ercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but ge his ers. He is not expected to bee bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe. The Mendits of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I o more spare then, than I could the Cries of London. No er of a street is plete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as oral as the Signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry - --- Look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to lihe wall of Lins Inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their faithful Dog Guide at their feet, -- whither are they fled? or into what ers, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun-warmth? immersed between four walls, in what withering poor-house do they ehe penalty of double darkness, where the k of the dropt halfpenny no more soles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger? Where hang their useless staves? and who will farm their dogs Have the overseers of St. L --- caused them to be shot? or were they tied up in sacks, and dropt into the Thames, at the suggestion of B--- , the mild rector of -- -? Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vi Bourne, most classical, and at the same time, most English, of the Latinists -- who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliahis dog and man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the Epitaphium in em, or, Dogs Epitaph. Reader, peruse it; and say, if ary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm ood to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thhfares of a vast and busy metropolis. Pauperis hic iri requiesco Lyciscus, he９９ｌib?rilis, Dum vixi, tutela vigil enque seae, Dux caeco fidus: nec, me dute, solebat, Praetenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua lo Iam explorare viam; sed fila secutus, Quae dubierent passus, vestigia tuta Fixit inoffenso gressu; gelidumque sedile In nudo nactus saxo, qua praetereuntium Unda frequens fluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. Ploravit nec frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter, Queis corda et mentem i natura benignam. Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile, Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustula amice Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei Taedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. Hi mores, haec vita fuit, dum fata si, Dum neque languebam morbis, neerte sea; Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cascum Orbavit dominum prisci sed gratia facti a i, longos deleta per annos, Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, Etsi inopis, non ingratae, munuscula dextrae; Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque emque Quod memoret, fidumque em dominumque benignum. Poor Irus faithful wolf-dog here I lie, That wont to tend m..y old blind masters steps, His guide and guard: nor, while my service lasted, Had he occasion for that staff, with which He now goes pig out his path in fear Over the highways and crossings; but would plant, Safe in the duy friendly string, A firm foot forward still, till he had reachd His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide Of passers by in thickest fluence flowd: To whom with loud and passionate laments From morn to eve his dark estate he waild. Nor waild to all in vain: some here and there, The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. I mea his feet obsequious slept; Not all-asleep in sleep, hut heart and ear Prickd up at his least motion; to receive At his kind hand my ary crums, And on portion in his feast of scraps; Or when night warnd us homeward, tired and spent With our long day and tedious beggary. These were my manners, this my way of life, Till age and slow disease me overtook, And severd from my sightless masters side. But lest the grace of so good deeds should die, Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost, This sleomb of turf hath Irus reared, Cheap mo of no ungrudging hand, And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, In long and lasting union to attest, The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his ely upper half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a mae of wood; a spectacle to natives, tners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like plexion, and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the stific, a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The on cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, ay heart, of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him; for the act, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an Anteus, and to su fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before ahquake, and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a taur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan troversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift with yet half of the body- portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting; ahrew out yet a jolly tenance upon the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he driven this out of door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not tent to exge his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his a one of those houses (ironically christened) of Corre. Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, which called fal interfereo remove? or not rather a salutary and a toug object, to the passers-by in a great city? -- Among her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights -- endless sights -- is a great city; or for what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturae, indeed, but) Actium? What if in forty-and-two years going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds -- whom had he injured ? -- whom had he imposed upon? The tributors had eheir sight for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven -- shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion -- he was eo retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a dish of hot meat aables, as the charge was gravely brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of ons ittee -- was this, or was his truly paternal sideration, which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and is insistent at least with the exaggeration of noal ies which he has been slandered with -- a reason that he should be deprived of his chosen, harmless, nay edifying, way of life, and be itted in he for a sturdy vagabond? -- There was a Yorice, whom it would not have shamed to have sate down at the cripples feast, and to have thrown in his beion, ay, and his mite too, for a panionable symbol. "Age, thou hast lost thy breed." - Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers calumnies. One was much talked of in the public papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised with the annou of a five hundred pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a strao. It seems that in his daily m walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms by the way-side in the Bh. The good old beggar reised his daily beor by the voily; and, when be died, left all the amassings of his alms (that [p 120] had been half a tury perhaps in the accumulating) to his old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up peoples hearts, and pennies, against giving an aims to the blind ? -- or not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upoher? I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun -- Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him? Perhaps I had no small ge. Reader, do not be frighte the hard words, imposition, imposture -- give, and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upoers. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) eained angels. Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) es before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwele truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he preteh, give, and under a persoher of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an i bachelor. When they e with their terfeit looks, and mumping tohink them players. You pay your moo see a edian feighings, which, ing these poor people, thou st not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG MANKIND, says a ese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hi by their great fucius in the sed chapter of his Muations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was actally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having go into the woods one m, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age only are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the flagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fiter of new-farrowed pigs, han nine in number, perished. a pigs have beeeemed a luxury all over the east from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was imost sternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the te, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any st whic藏书网h he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? -- not from the burnt cottage -- he had smelt that smell before -- ihis was by no means the first act of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his her lip. He knew not what to think. He stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crums of the scorched skin had e away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the worlds life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted -- crag! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so muow, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow uanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogues shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tig pleasure, which he experienced in his lions, had rendered him quite callous to any inveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, being a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. "You graceless whelp, what have you got there dev? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with ys tricks, and be hao you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what -- what have you got there, I say ?" "O father, the pig, the pig, do e and taste how he burnt pig eats." The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig. Bo-bo, whose st was wonderfully sharpened since m, soon raked out an, and fbbr>?９９ｌiｂ?airly rending it asuhrust the lesser half by main forto the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste -- O Lord," -- with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abomihing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crag scorg his fingers, as it had done his sons, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In clusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbours would certainly have stohem for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. heless, straories got about. It was observed that Ho-tis cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoo take their trial at Pekin, then an insiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He ha, and they all ha, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, -- to the surprise of the whole court, towns- folk, strangers, reporters, and all present -- without leaving the box, or any manner of sultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, wi the ma iniquity of the decision: and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordships town house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every dire. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very sce of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this of firing houses tiill in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the y of ing a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a tury or two later, I fet in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, cludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, make their way among man-kind. Without plag too implicit faith in the at above given, it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any ary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate -- princeps obsoniorum. I speak not of yrown porkers -- things between pig and pork -- those hobbydehoys -- but a young and tender sug -- under a moon old -- guiltless as yet of the sty -- with ninal speck of the amor immunditiae, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet ma -- his voice as yet not broken, but somethiween a childish treble, and a grumble -- the mild forerunner, or praeludium, of a grunt. He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our aors ate them seethed, or boiled -- but what a sacrifice of the exteriument! There is no flavour parable, I will tend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crag, as it is well called -- the very teeth are io their share of the pleasure at this ba in overing the coy, brittle resistance -- with the adhesive oleaginous -- O call it not fat -- but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it -- the tender blossoming of fat -- fat cropped in the bud -- taken in the shoot -- in the first innoce -- the cream and quintessence of the child-pigs yet pure food -- the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna -- or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosia, or on substance. Behold him, while he is doing -- it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorg heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! -- Now he is just doo see the extreme sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes -- radia? jellies -- shooting stars - See him in the dish, his sed cradle, how meek he lieth wouldst thou have had this i grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often apany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal -- wallowing in all manner of filthy versation -- from these sins he is happily snatched away - Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care - his memory is odoriferous -- no curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank ba -- no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages -- he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure -- and for such a tomb might be tent to die. He is the best of Sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transdent -- a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-sced person would do well to pause -- too ravishing for mortal taste, she wouh and excoriateth the lips that approach her -- like lovers kisses, she biteth she is a pleasure b on pain from the fieress and insanity of her relish -- but she stoppeth at the palate -- she meddleth not with the appetite -- and the coarsest hunger might barter her sistently for a mutton chop. Pig -- let me speak his praise -- Is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the critiess of the palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. Uo mankinds mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably iwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little meaend, all around. He is the least envious of bas. He is all neighbours fare. I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an i in my friends pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfas, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chi (those "tame villatic fowl"), s, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upoongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear," give every thing." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate -- It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of s this kind at sy good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet-meat, or some hing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over Londe) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a terfeit). I had no peo sole him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very bry of charity, school-boy-like, I m?t>ade him a present of -- the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfa; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a strahat I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man fht I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I -- I myself, and not another -- would eat her nice cake -- and what should I say to her the ime I saw her -- how naughty I was to part with her pretty present -- and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recolle, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last -- and I blamed my imperti spirit of aims-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished o see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor. Our aors were ni their method of sacrifig these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete . The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards iing and dulcifying a substanaturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious while we n the inhumanity, how we sure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto - I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omers, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellatioremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intehan any possible suffering we ceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death ?" I fet the decision. His sauce should be sidered. Decidedly, a few bread crums, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you ot poison them, or make them strohan they are -- but sider, he is a weakling -- a flower. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS THE casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day -- I know not by what ce it reserved so long -- tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts iwelfth Night, at the old Drury-laheatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is somethioug in these old remembrahey make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill -- not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the se when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore -- names of small at -- had an importance, beyond what we be tent to attribute now to the times best actors.-" Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore. "What a full Shakspearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the geor! Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in Alls Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts -- in which her memory now chiefly lives -- in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ohere is no giving an at how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following lio make up the music -- yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grad beauty -- but, when she had declared her sisters history to be a "blank," and that she "old her love," there ause, as if the story had ended -- and then the image of the "worm in the bud" came up as a new suggestion -- and the heightened image of Patieill followed after that, as by some growing (and not meical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines - Write loyal tos of ned love -- Hollow your o the reverberate hills - there was no preparation made in the foing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetori her passion or it was natures oworic, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law. Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She articularly excellent in her unbending ses in versation with the . I have seen some Olivias -- and those very sensible actresses too -- who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie ceits with him in dht emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with y. Her fine spacious person filled the se. The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misuood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points. Of all the actors who flourished in my time -- a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader -- Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroiceptions, the emotions sequent upon the prese of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm -- the rarest faculty among players. hat I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspurs famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Veian indiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, hut no way embarrassed by affectation; and the thh-bred gentleman permost in every movement. He seized the moment of passion with the greatest truth; like a faithful cloever striking before the time; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trid artifice. He seemed e upoage to do the poets message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the se do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have sed to mountebank it; arayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious ag. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his a could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His fessions in soliloquy alo you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own disment so much greater than that of the Moor-who only stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine A, and a quantity of barreors, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the character, natural to a general sciousness of power; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and ot tain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery -- as is on with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a maing his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at bei into the secret; but a mate villairapping a ure into toils, against whio disment was available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part of Malvolio, iwelfth Night, erformed by Bensley, with a riess and a dignity, of which (to judge from some ret castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it nation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He bees ic but by act. He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified, sistent, and, for pears, rather of aretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have worn his gold with honour in one of our old round-head families, in the service of a Lambert, or a lady Fairfax. But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and falls in the unequal test. Still his pride, or his gravity, (call it which you will) is i, and native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but her buffoon nor ptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, aplished. His careless ittal of the ring to the ground (which he was issioo restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His diale all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education. We must not found him with the eternal old, low steward of edy. He is master of the household to a great Princess; a dignity probably ferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insignifit? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face -- of what ? -- of being "sick of self-love," -- but with a gentleness and siderateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and wheake into sideration the unprotected dition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled m would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kio look to it -- for Sir Toby had dropped all suice respects at the buttery hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessiimable qualities, the expression of the Duke in his ao have him reciled, almost infers. "Pursue him, areat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of s and darkness, a sort of greatness seems o desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises gallantly upon his straw.* There must have been some shadow of worth about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour -- a thing of straw, or Ja office -- before Fabian and Maria could have ventured sending him upon a c-errand to Olivia. There was some sonancy (as he would say) in the uaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. Bensley, accly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the b. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it on aion. He was magnifit from the outset; but when the det sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his ceit of the tesss affe, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold ! what a dream it was! you *. What is the opinion of Pythagoras ing wild fowl? Mal. That the soul of randam might haply inhabit a bird. . What thihou of his opinion? Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no rove of his opinion. were ied with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed! you had no room for laughter! if an unseasonable refle of morality obtruded itself it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of mans nature, that lay him open to such frenzies -- hut in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted -- you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth ah the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the ceit of such a ladys love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking to have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O! shake not the castles of his pride -- e for a seasht moments of fidence -- "stand still ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivias lord -- but fate aribution say no -- I hear the mischievous titter of Maria -- the witty taunts of Sir Toby -- the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight -- the terfeit Sir Topas is unmasked -- and "thus the whirligig of time," as the true hath it, &qus in his revenges." I fess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind iterest. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who came o the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it suffitly grotesque; but Dodd was it, as it came out of natures hands. It might be said to remain in puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of aealing slowly over his tenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight ception -- its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with expression. A glimmer of uanding would appear in a er of his eye, an for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in unig it to the remainder . I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty years ago that walking in the gardens of Grays Inn -- they were then far fihan they are now -- the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green kles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves of the terrace -- the survivor stands gaping aionless as if it remembered its brother -- they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not fotten have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing -- Ba has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks--taking my afternoon sola a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a ely sad personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air ament, I judged to he one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be iations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I assing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect whie is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an ination to greet him, than any positive motion of the body to that effect -- a species of humility and will-worship which I observe, imes out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to -- when the face turning full uporangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close iion I was not mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful tenance be the same vat face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had never seen without a smile, nised but as the usher of mirth; that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences? Was this the face -- still of thought and carefulness -- that had so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows? Was this the face -- manly, sober, intelligent, which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upoh a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upoh a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors -- your pleasant fellows particularly -- subjected to and suffering the on lot -- their fortuheir casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the se, their as to be ameo poetic justily. We hardly ect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fior took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some months; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of res daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many sid some real vanities -- weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre -- doile penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries, -- taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too long -- and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying he "put on the weeds of Dominic." * If few remember Dodd, ma living will not easily fet he pleasant creature, who in those days ehe part of the to Dodds Sir Andrew. -- Richard, or rather Dicky Suett -- for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation -- lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender y９９lｉb?ears were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period -- his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was "cherub Dicky." What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exge the holy for the profaate; whether he had lost his good voice (his best reendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to laething, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to "erce with the skies " -- I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular dition, and bee one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart -- kind and thereflad -- be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he ied himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfa to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice -- his white stole, and albe. The first fruits of his secularization was an e upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he enced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old mens characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable. He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a wele perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note -- Ha! Ha! Ha ! -- sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, fn to his prototype of, -- O La! Thousands of *Dodd was a man of reading, a at his death a choice colle of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu whio length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and reising Dodd the day i Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preg evening with a "Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all discerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half.rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an "Away, Fool." hearts yet respond to the chug O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathewss mimicry. The "force of nature could no further go." He drolled upoock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. Care, that troubles all the world, was fotten in his position. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spiders strings, which served him (iter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, "thh brake, thh briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools aers. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tohis last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the tre; with idlest rhymes tagging ceit when busiest, singing with Lear iempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. Jack Bannister and he had the fortuo be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this : -- Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole sce stirred with Bannisters performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood -- but Dick seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of love, too young to know what sce is. He put us into Vestas days. Evil fled before him -- not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, -- but because it could not touch him, any more than a on-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, wheh came himself, not iaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, her varying his aced tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph -- O La! O La! Bobby! The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) only played Sir Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggeriility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of reter memory) who was his shadow ihing while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards -- was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little off the more or less makes a differen these things. When you saw Bobby in the Dukes Servant,* you said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant. When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lad of quality who fahe handsome fellow in his top-knot, and had bought him a ission. Therefore Ja Dick Amlet was insuperable. [Footnote] * High Life Below Stairs. Jack had two voices, -- both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his sedary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his o was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis personae were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the ses in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audiehis secret correspondeh the pany before the curtain (which is the bane ah edy) has aremely happy effe some kinds of edy, in the more highly artificial edy of greve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to ses of i) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface -- the villain of artificial edy -- even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shod not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his father - Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee. Ben. Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all. -- Well, father, and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val? Sir Sampson. Dick! body o me, Dick has beehese two years. I writ you word when you were at Leghorn. Ben. Mess, thats true; Marry, I had fot. Dicks dead, as you say -- Well, and how ? -- I have a many questions to ask you - Here is an instance of insensibility whi real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful seles and specious binations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it her did, nor does wound the moral se all. For what is Ben -- the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us -- but a piece of satire -- a creation of greves fancy -- a dreamy bination of all the acts of a sailors character -- his pt of money -- his credulity to women -- with that necessary estra from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce su halluation as is here described. We hink the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor es, and instead of the delightful phantom -- the creature dear to half-belief -- which Bannister exhibited -- displays before our eyes a dht cretion of a ing sailor -- a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar -- and nothing else -- when instead of iing it with a delicious fusedness of the head, and a veering ued goodness of purpose -- he gives to it a dht daylight uanding, and a full sciousness of its as; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone -- we feel the discord of the thing; the se is disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain but in the first or sed gallery. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY THE artificial edy, or edy of manners, is quite extin our stage. greve and Farquhar show their heads on seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times ot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional lise of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fi, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profliga a son or ward in real life should startle a parent uardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatiterests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours duration, and of no after sequence, with the severe eyes whispect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personae!, his peers. We have been spoiled with -- not seal edy but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all dev drama of on life; where the moral point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old edy) we reise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, -- the same as in life, -- with an i in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we ot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to promise or slumber for a moment. What is there transag, by no modification is made to affect us in any other mahan the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side s to the theatre with us. We do not go thither., like our aors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to firm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to desd twice to the shades. All that ral ground of character, which stood between vid virtue; or whi fact was indifferent to her, where her properly was called iion; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning -- the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry -- is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the is of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, . We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread iion from the sic representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our ahat our morality should not take cold, we it up in a great bla surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine. I fess for myself that (with no great delinqueo answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict sce, -- not to live always in the prects of the law-courts, -- but now and then, for a dream-whim or so, to imagine a world with no meddliri -- to get into recesses, whither the hunter ot follow me - -----------Secret shades Of woody Idas inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove -- I e bay cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more tentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of greves -- nay, why should I not add even of Wycherleys -- edies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never ect those sports of a witty fan any shape with a to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, it ot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenbian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, els. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad ? -- The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in, their proper element. They break through no laws, or stious restraints. They know of hey have got out of Christendom into the land -- what shall I call it ? -- of cuckoldry -- the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative se of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers oage. Judged morally, every character in these plays -- the few exceptions only are mistakes -- is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of greve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his ses, -- some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted, -- not only any thing like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness ood feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wo the strange power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of iing you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing -- for you her hate nor love his personages -- and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you ehe whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distin or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the imperti Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, whiow are none, because we think them? none. Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherleys dramas, are profligates and strumpets, -- the business of their brief existehe undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of a, or possible motive of duct, is reised; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings, -- for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated -- for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained, -- for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affes are disquieted, -- no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder, -- for affes depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is her right n, -- gratitude or its opposite, -- claim or duty, -- paternity or sonship. Of what sequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all ed about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froths, or Sir Paul Pliants children. The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as uned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, art against the puppets, and quite as impertily. We dare not plate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our bical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the ce to imagine a state of things for which there is her reward nor punishment. We g to the painful ies of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams. Amidst the mortifying circumstatendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Sdal in its glory. This edy grew out of greve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the seal edy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it tinues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice -- to express it in a word -- the dht acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of scious actual wiess, -- the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, -- which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs clude the present geion of play-goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely fess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages,like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittao a poor relation, ingruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to joiificial with the seal edy, either of which must destroy the other -- but over these obstrus Jacks manner floated him, so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy pliance of Charles gave you iy any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get bato the regions of pure edy, where no oral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character teracted every disagreeable impression whiight have received from the trast, supposing them real, betweewo brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter leasay, the former a no less pleasant poetical foi..l to it. The edy, I have said, is ingruous; a mixture of greve with seal inpatibilities: the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the mate art of Palmer to recile the discordant elements. A player with Jacks talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealise, and so to make the character fasating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are trasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Pauls Church-yard memory -- (an exhibition as venerable as the adjat cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former, -- and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting fork is not to be despised, -- so finely trast with the meek plat kissing of the rod, -- taking it in like honey and butter, -- with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his la with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower ? -- John Palmer was twi actor in this exquisite part. He laying to you all the while that he laying upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a se before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers oage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half-reality, the husband, was over-reached by the puppetry -- or the thin thing (Lady Teazles reputation) ersuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not ed in it. Poor Jack has past from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this e of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have past current in our day. We must love or hate -- acquit or n -- ensure or pity -- exert our detestable bry of moral judgment upohing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a dht revolting villain -- no promise -- his first appearance must shod give horror -- his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers weled with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could e, or was meant to e of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real ting person of the se -- for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulteriitimate ends, but his brothers professions of a good heart tre in dht self-satisfaust be loved, and Joseph hated. To balane disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no lohe ic idea of a fretful old bachelor bride-groom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to any body oage, -- he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury -- a person towards whom duties are to be aowledged -- the genuine crim- antagonist of the villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his sufferings under his unfortuch must have the dht pungency of life -- must (or should) make you not mirthful but unfortable, just as the same predit would move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious ses which give the play its name a, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree, and Sir Benjamin -- those poor shat live but in the sunshine of your mirth -- must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. dour -- htful! bee a hooded serpent. Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd -- the and butterfly of the School for Sdal -- in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of edy, in this latter part -- would fo the true sic delight -- the escape from life -- the oblivion of sequences -- the holiday barring out of the pedant Refle -- those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world -- to sit instead at one of our modern plays -- to have his coward sce (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals -- dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be -- and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justiotional benefice, lives saved without the spectators risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing? No piece erhaps, ever so pletely cast in all its parts as this managers edy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the inal Charles, had retired, when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recolles edy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts assport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he ma, only served to vey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkliences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered ea succession, and ot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue -- the dialogue of greve or of Wycherley -- because none uood it -- half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recolle, faultless. He flagged sometimes iervals ic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxiies edy have not been touched by any since him -- the playful court-bred spirit in which he desded to the players in Hamlet -- the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard -- disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors -- but they were the halting-stones aing-places of his tragedy -- politic savings, aches of the breath -- husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an eist -- rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful thaernal tormenting unappeasable vigilahe "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashioragedy. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN NOT many nights ago I had e home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by juring up the most opposi藏书网te associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do. --------There the antic sate Mog our state - his queer visnomy -- his bewildering e -- all the strahings which he had raked together -- his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket -- Cleopatras tear, and the rest of his relics -- OKeefes wild farce, and his wilder entary -- till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its ow, inviting the sleep whi the first insta had driven away. But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did Ibbr> fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dang before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, e when you have been taking opium -- all the strange binations, which this stra of all strange mortals ever shot his proper teo, from the day he came issioo dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost fotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two sihere was exhibited a Hallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In riess and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former. There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a o is!) of Liston; but Munden has hat you properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unatable warfare with yravity, suddenly he sprouts out airely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a edian, as a pany. If his name could be multiplied like his te mig.ht fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces: applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denotiain modifications of the human tenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used fs, aches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or e forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry -- in Old Dornton -- diffuse a glow of se which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has e in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellen other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Muands out as single and unapanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strao tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end with himself. any man wonder, like him? any man see ghosts, like him? ht with his own shadow -- " sessa " -- as he does in that strangely-ed thing, the Cobbler of Preston -- where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him throw, or ever attempted to throreternatural i over the o daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his ception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeias chair. It is ied with stellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, plated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He uands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands w, amid the on-place materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him. A BACHELORS COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED AS a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to yself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am. I ot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency tthen me in those anti-social resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more substantial siderations. What ofte offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a different description; -- it is that they are too loving. Not too loviher: that does not explain my meaning. Besides, why should that offehe very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each others society, implies that they prefer one ao all the world. But what I plain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you ot be in their pany a moment without being made to feel, by some i hint or open avowal, that you are not the object of this preferenow there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken franted merely; but expressed, there is much offen them. If a mao accost the first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or riough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman uands this as clearly as if it were put into words; but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man,the ladys choice. It is enough that I know I am not: I do not want this perpetual reminding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made suffitly mortifying; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is brought out to insult me, may actally improve me; and in the rich mans houses and pictures, -- his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives: it is throughout pure, unrepensed, unqualified insult. Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the ing of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the be, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces. Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire plad satisfa which beam in the tenances of a new-married couple, -- in that of the lady particularly: it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world: that you have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none; nor wishes either, perhaps: but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken franted, not expressed. The excessive airs which bbr>those people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to uand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we who have not had the happio be made free of the pany: but their arrogance is not tent within these limits. If a single person presume to offer his opinion in their presehough upon the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an inpetent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of the Jest was, had not ged her dition above a fht before, in a question on which I had the misfortuo differ from her, respeg the properest mode of breeding oysters for the London market, had the assurao ask with a sneer, how su old Bachelor as I could pretend to know any thing about such matters. But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these creatures give themselves when they e, as they generally do, to have children. When I sider how little of a rarity children are, -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them, -- that the poorest people only have them in most abundance, -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, -- how ofteurn out ill, a the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, whid in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, &c. -- I ot for my life tell what cause for pride there possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, ihat were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so on - I do not advert to the i merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But ho are not their natural-born subjects, should be expected t our spices, myrrh, and inse, -- our tribute and homage of admiration, -- I do not see. "Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children:" so says the excellent offi our Prayer-book appointed for the churg of women. "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:" So say I; but then do him discharge his quiver upon us that are onless ; -- let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double-headed: they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other. As for instance, when you e into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their i caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. Oher hand, if you find them more than usually engaging,if you are taken with their pretty manners, a about in earo romp and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room: they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. -- does not like children. With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. I could five their jealousy, and dispeh toying with their brats, if it gives them any pain; but I think it unreasoo be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion, -- to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine, or ten, indiscrimio love all the pretty dears, because children are so engaging. I know there is a proverb, "Love me, love my dog:" that is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog or a lesser thing -- any inanimate substance, as a keep-sake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where arted when my frie aon a long absence, I make shift to love, because I love him, and any thing that reminds me of him; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy give it. But children have a real character and an essential being of themselves: they are amiable or unamiable per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either in their qualities. A childs nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appeo another being, and to be loved or hated accly: they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. O! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age, there is something iender years of infancy that of itself charms us. That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the dai. -- I was always rather squeamish in my women and children. But this is not the worst: one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they plain of iion. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,if you did not e in on the wifes side, -- if you did not sneak into the house irain, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, -- look about you -- your tenure is precarious -- before a twelve-month shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I rely, whose friendship did not eer the period of his marriage. With some limitations they ehat: but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not sulted, though it happened before they knew him, -- before they that are now are man and wife ever met, -- this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentitimacy, must he brought into their office to be amped with their currency, as a sn Prince calls in the good old mohat was ed in sn before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty pieetal as I am in these new mintings. Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husbands fidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is one of the ways -- they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose -- till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excresces of uanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist, -- a fellow well enough to have sorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has ofte been put in practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attat founded oeem which he has ceived towards you; by never-qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who uands well enough that it is all done in pliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much dor, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking doeg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate esteem, -- that "det affe and plat kindness" towards you, where she herself join in sympathy with him without much stretd violeo her siy. Another way (for the ways they have to aplish so desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of i simplicity, tinually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If aeem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignan your versation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. -- as a great wit." If, oher hand, it was for some supposed charm in your versation that he first grew to like you, and was tent for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, "This, my dear, is yood Mr. ----." One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husbands old friend, had the dour to fess to me that she had often heard Mr. -- - speak of me before marriage, and that she had ceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations; for from her husbands representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fiall, officer-like looking man (I use her very words); the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was did; and I had the civility not to ask her iurn, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal aplishments for her husbands friends which differed so much from his own; for my friends dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no m..ore than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or tenance. These are some of the mortifications which I have entered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To ee them all would be a vain endeavour: I shall therefore just gla the very propriety of which married ladies are guilty, of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versa -- . I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the ht two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. -- did not e home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would he guilty of the impoliteness of toug one in his?t> absehis was reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an iion to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love aeem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavors to make up by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters bae, and withstood her husbands importuo go to supper, she would have acted acc to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and de: therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I lying to with great good will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and reended a plate of less extraordinary goose- berries to my unwedded palate in their stead. her I excuse the wanton affront of - But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations. Let them amend and ge their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their o the terror of all such desperate offenders in future.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》