AN AUTHOR'S MIND;

THE BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES:

"A BOOKFUL OF BOOKS, " OR "THIRTY BOOKS IN ONE. "

EDITED BY

M. F. TUPPER, ESQ. , M. A. 

"En un mot, mes amis, je n'ai entrepris de vous contenter tous engénéral; ainsi, une et autres en particulier; et par spécial, moymême. "--PASQUIER. 

 HARTFORD: PUBLISHED BY SILAS ANDRUS & SON. 1851. 

ANNOUNCEMENT. 

BY THE EDITOR. 

The writer of this strange book (a particular friend of mine) came to mea few mornings ago with a very happy face and a very blotty manuscript. "Congratulate me, " he began, "on having dispersed an armada ofhead-aches hitherto invincible, on having exorcised my brain of itslegionary spectres, and brushed away the swarming thoughts that used topersecute my solitude; I can now lie down as calmly as the lamb, andrise as gayly as the lark; instead of a writhing Laocoon, my just-foundHarlequin's wand has changed me into infant Hercules brandishing hisstrangled snakes; I have mowed, for the nonce, the docks, mallows, hogweed, and wild-parsley of my rank field, and its smooth green carpetlooks like a rich meadow; I am free, happy, well at ease: argal, an thoulovest me, congratulate. "

Wider and wider still stared out my wonder, to hear my usually soberfriend so voluble in words and so profuse of images: I saw at once itwas a set speech, prepared for an impromptu occasion; nevertheless, ashe was clearly in an enviable state of disenthraldom fromthoughtfulness, I graciously accorded him a sympathetic smile. And thenthis more than Gregorian cure for the head-ache! here was an anodyneinfinitely precious to one so brain-feverish as I: had all this pleasureand comfort arisen from such common-place remedials as a dear younglover's courtesy or a deceased old miser's codicil, I should long agohave heard all about it; for, between ourselves, my friend was neverknown to keep a secret. There was evidently more than this in thediscovery; and when my curiosity, provoked by his laughing silence, wasnaturally enough exhibiting itself in a "What on earth----?" he brokeout with the abruptness of an Abernethy, "Read my book. "

Well, I did read it; and, in candid disparagement, as amicably bound, can readily believe what I was told afterwards, that, to except a verysmall portion of older material, it had been at chance intervals rapidlythrown off in a couple of months, (the old current-quill style, ) chieflywith the view of relieving a too prolific brain: it appeared to me amere idle overflowing of the brimful mind; an honest, indeed, but oftenuseless exposure of multifarious fancies--some good, some bad, and not afew indifferent; an incautious uncalled-for confession of a thousandthoughts, little worth the printing, if the very writing were not indeedsuperfluous. Nevertheless, with all its faults, I thought the book anovelty, and liked it not the less for its off-hand fashion; it hadsomething of the free, fresh, frank air of an old-school squire atChristmas-tide, suggestive as his misletoe, cheerful as his face, andcareless as his hospitality. Knowing then that my friend had been morethan once an author--indeed, he tells us so himself--and perceiving, from innumerable symptoms, that he meditated putting also this beforethe world, I thought kindly to anticipate his wishes by proposing itspublication: but I was rather curtly answered with a "Did I supposethese gnats were intended to be shrined in amber? these mere minnows tobe treated with the high consideration due only to potted char and whitebait? these fleeting thoughts fixed in stone before that Gorgon-head, the public? these ephemeral fancies dropped into the true elixir ofimmortality, printer's-ink? these----" I stopped him, for this othermighty mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite--"Yes, I did. " Aninvoluntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause proceeded thus:first, a promise not to burn the book; then a Bentley to the rescue, with accessory considerations; and then, the due administration of alittle wholesome flattery: by this time we had obtained permission, after modest reluctance pretty well enacted, to transform the deformityof manuscript into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, thismuch gained, our author would not yield to any argument we could urgeupon the next point, viz: leave to produce the volume, duly fatheredwith his name. "Not he indeed; he loved quiet too well; he might, it wastrue, secretly like the bantling, but cared not to acknowledge it beforea populous reading-world, every individual whereof esteems himself andherself competent to criticize!" Mr. Publisher, deeply disinterested, ofcourse, bristled up at the notion of any thing anonymous; and the onlyalternative remaining was the stale expedient of an editor; that editor, in brief, to be none other than myself, a very palpable-obscure: and letthis excuse my name upon the title-page. 

Now, as editor, I have had to do--what seems, by the way, to be regardedby collective wisdom as the best thing possible--nothing: my authorwould not suffer the change of a syllable, for all his seemingcarelessness about the THING, as he called it; so, I had nomore for my part than humbly to act the Helot, and try to set decentlyupon the public tables a genuine mess of Spartan porridge. 

M. F. T. 

_Albury, Guildford. _

AN AUTHOR'S MIND:

THE

BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES. 

A RAMBLE. 

In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars allabroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret isaccounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact, clear to the perceptions of all it may concern, "This book deservesrichly of the Sosii. " And that for the best of reasons: it is not only abook, but a book full of books; not merely a new book, but alittle-library of new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest ofepitomized authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescentpost-octavos. It is not--O, mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by the way, gentle ladies, these were worshipful booksellers of old, the Murrays andthe Bentleys of imperial Rome, )--it is not the dull concreted elongationof one isolated hackneyed idea--supposing in every work there _be one_, a charitable hypothesis--wire-drawn, and coaxed, and hammered throughthree regulation volumes; but the scarcely-more-than-hinted abstractionsof some forty thousand flitting notions--hasty, yet meditative Hamlets;none of those lengthy, drawling emblems of Laertes--driven in flocks tothe net of the fowler, and penned with difficult compression withinthese modest limits. So "goe forth, littel boke, " and make thyself afriend among those good husbandmen, who tend the trees of knowledge, andbring their fruit to the world's market. 

Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself: herebeginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;ease from thoughts--thoughts--thoughts, which never cease to make one'shead ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night andreveries by day, (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion'schildren, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army, )harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, adefinite life; ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum ofaërial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O, happy unimaginablevacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O, mentalholiday, now as impossible to me, as to take a true school-boy'sinterest in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind--and rememberalways, friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanitymerely the well playing of my _rôle_--such a mind is not a sheet ofsmooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions; noempty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting: it is a painful pressure, constraining to write for comfort's sake; an appetite craving to besatisfied, as well as a power to be exerted; an impetus that longs toget away, rather than a dormant dynamic: thrice have I (let me confessit) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a realauthor--real, because for very peace of mind, involuntarily; but stillthe vessel fills; still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a betterharvest, seeds of foreign growth; still those Lernæan necks sproutagain, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, andcontrovert--to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly, it wereenviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive; to be fitted with acolander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaïdes might notkeep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday toramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have oftencost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out ofa man--fret, wear, worry him; to be irritable, is the conditional taxlaid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagerymakes him hasty, quick, nervous as a haunted hunted man: minds ofcoarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate atexture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in atougher scabbard; the river, not content with channel and restrainingbanks, overflows perpetually; the extortionate exacting armies of theIdeal and the Causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make apatriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace: I writethese things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase;I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with thepriests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental nurselings; a direresolve has filled me to effect a premature destruction of the literarypopulace superfoetating in my brain--plays, novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics andrhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators ofmaltreated Aristotle: I will exhibit them in their state chaotic; I willaddle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp; I will reveal, andsecrets shall not waste me; I will write, and thoughts shall not battenon me. 

The world is too full of books, and I yearn not causelessly to add morethan this involuntary unit: bottles, bottles--invariable bottles--wasthe one idea of a most clever Head at Nieder-Selters; books, books--accumulating books--press upon my conscience in this literaryLondon: despairing auctioneers hate the sound, ruined publishers dreadit, surfeited readers grumble at it, and the very cheese-monger beginsto be an epicure as to which grand work is next to be demolished. Friendships and loves tremble at the daily recurrence of "Have you readthis?" and "Mind you buy that;" wise men shun a blue-belle, sure thatshe will recommend a book; and the yet wiser treat themselves tosolitary confinement, that they may not have to meet the last new batchof authors, and be obliged to purchase, if not to peruse, theirnever-ending books. I fear to increase the plague, to be convicted anabettor of great evils, though by the measure of a little one. I aminfected, and I know it: but for science-sake I break the quarantine, and in my magnanimity would be victimized unknown, consigning to aspeedy grave this useless offspring, together with its too productiveparent, and saving of a race so hopeless little else than theirprëdetermined names--in fact, their title-pages. 

But is that indeed little? Speak, authors with piles of ready-writtencopy, is not the theme (so often carried out beyond, or beside, or evenagainst its original purpose) less perplexing than the after-thoughtthesis? Bear witness, readers, bit by a mysterious advertisement in the'_Morning Post_, ' are names, indeed, not matters of much weight? Pressforward, Sosii aforesaid, and answer me truly, is not a title-page thebetter part of many books? Cheap promises of stale pleasure, false hopesof dull interest, imprimaturs of deceived fancy, lying visions of thefuture unfulfilled, title-pages still do good service to the causeof--bookselling. 

And, to commence, let me elucidate mine own--I mean the first, the headand front of this offending phalanx--mine own, _par excellence_, '_AnAuthors Mind_:' such in sooth it shall be found, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse; not of selfish, but of common application; notso much individually of mine own, as generically of authors; a medleyof crudities; an undigested mass, as any in the maw of Polypheme; afermenting hotchpotch of half-formed things, illustrative, among othermatters, of the Lucretian theory, those close-cohering atoms; a farragoof thoughts, and systems of thoughts, in most admired disorder, whichwould symbolize the Copernican astronomy, with its necessary clash ofwhirling orbs, about as well as the intangible chaos of Berkeleyanmetaphysics. 

So much then on the moment for the monosyllable "Mind;"--whereoffolloweth, indeed, all the more hereafter; but--"An author's?"--whatauthor's? You would see my patent of such rank, my commission to wearsuch honourable uniform. Pr'ythee be content with simple assurance thatit is so; consider the charm of unsatisfied curiosity, and pry not; letme sit unseen, a spectator; for this once I would go _in domino_. Heretofore, "credit me, fair Discretion, your Affability" hath achievedglory, and might Solomonize on its vanity at least as well as poordiscomfited, discovered Sir Piercie Shafton: heretofore, I have stoodforth in good causes, with helm unbarred, and due proclamation of name, style, and title, an avowed author; and might sermonize thus uponsuccess, that a little censure loseth more friends than much praisewinneth enemies. So now, with visor down, and a white shield, as a youngknight-candidate unknown, it pleases my leisure to take my pastime inthe tourney: and so long as in truthful prowess I bear me gallantly andgently, who is he that hath a right to unlatch my helmet, or where isthe herald that may challenge my rank? Nevertheless, inquisitive, consider the mysteries that lie in the Turkish-looking _sobriquet_ of"Mufti;" its vowels and its consonants are full of strict intention Inever saw cause why the most charming of essayists hid himself in"Elia, " but he may for all that have had pregnant reasons; even so, (butthat slender wit could read my riddle, ) you shall perhaps find faultwith my Mussulman agnomen; still you and I equally participate in thisshallow secret, and within so brief a word is concealed the key tounlock the casket that tempts your curiosity: however, the less said ofso diaphanous a mystery, the better. 

And let me remark this of the mode anonymous; a mode, indeed, topurposes of shame, and slander, and falsity of all kinds too oftenprostituted for the present, bear with it; sometimes it is well to godisguised, and the voice of one unseen lacks not eager listeners; weaddress your judgment, unbiased by the prejudice or sanction of a name:we put forth, lightly and negligently, those lesser matters whichopportunity hath not yet matured; we escape the nervous pains, theliterary perils of the hardier acknowledged. Only of this one thing besure; we--(no, I; why should unregal, unhierarchal I affectpluralities?)--I hope to keep inviolate, as much when masked as whenavowed, the laws of truth, charity, sincerity, and honour; and, although, among my many booklets, the grave and the gay will be found innear approximation, I trust--will it offend any to tell them that Ipray?--to do no ill service at any time to the cause of that truereligion which resents not the neighbourhood of innocent cheerfulness. Ishow you, friend, my honest mind. 

I by itself, I; odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, mostinsignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane;they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with yourpresence. Still, world, hear me; mercifully spare a poor grammarian thepenance of perpetual third persons; let an individual tender conscienceescape censure for using the true singular in preference to thatimposing lie, the plural. Suffer a humble unit to speak of himself as I, and, once for all, let me permissively disclaim intentional self-conceitin the needful usage of isolated I-ship. 

These few preliminaries being settled, though I fear little to thesatisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed--further topreliminarize; for you will find, even to the end, as you may have foundout already from the beginning, that your white knight is mounted ratheron an ambling preambling palfrey, than on any determinate charger;curveting and prancing, and rambling and scrambling at his own unmanagedwill: scorning the bit and bridle, too hot to bear the spur, careless oflisting laws, and wishing rather playfully to show his paces, than totilt against a foe. 

An author's mind, _quà_ author, is essentially a gossip; an oral, ocular, imaginative, common-place book: a _pot pourri_ mixed from the_hortus siccus_ of education, and the greener garden of internal thoughtthat springs in fresh verdure about the heart's own fountain; a compoundof many metals flowing from the mental crucible as one--perchance a basealloy, perchance new, and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass ofCorinth; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber of manyspiritual essences that combine, as by magnetism into some strange andnovel substance; a mixture of appropriations, made lawfully a man's ownby labour spent upon the raw material; corn-clad Egypt rescued from aburnt Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile--the black forest ofpines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, andculture--the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized atlength by the spark Promethean. 

And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and my title? '_AnAuthor's Mind_' is first in the field, and, as with root and fruit, musttake precedence of its booklets; bear then, if you will, with thisdesultory anatomization of itself yet a little longer, and then in goodtime and moderate space you will come to the rudiments--bones, so tospeak--of its many members, the frame-work on which its nerves andmuscles hang, the names of its unborn children, the title-pages of itsown unprinted books. 

Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case may be--forfolly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus-head, and Minerva's birdseems sometimes not ill-fitted with the face of Momus--these and theirthousand intermediates have tried in all ages to define that quaintenigma, Man: and I wot not that any pundit of literature hath bettersucceeded than the nameless, fameless man--or woman, was it?--or haplysome innocent shrewd child--who whilom did enunciate that MAN IS AWRITING ANIMAL: true as arithmetic, clear as the sunbeam, rationalas Euclid, a discerning, just, exclusive definition. That he is "capableof laughter, " is well enough even for thy deathless fame, O Stagyrite!but equally (so Buffon testifies) are apes and monkeys, horses andhyenas; whether perforce of tickling or sympathy, or native notions ofthe humorous, we will not stop to contend. That he actually is "ananimal whose best wisdom is laughter, " hath but little reason in it, Democrite, seeing there are such obvious anomalies among men as suicidaljesters and cachinating idiots; nevertheless, my punster of Abdera, thywhimsical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to sinkin the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular thought, thefashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: crow, an thou wilt, jollyold chanticleer, but remember thee thou crowest on a dunghill; man isnot a mere merry-andrew. Neither is he exclusively "a weeping animal, "lugubrious Heraclite, no better definer than thy laughter-loving foe:that man weeps, or ought to weep, the world within him and the worldwithout him indeed bear testimony: but is he the only mourner in thisvalley of grief, this travailing creation? No, no; they walk lengthilyin black procession: yet is this present writing not the fit season forenlarging upon sorrows; we must not now mourn and be desolate as a poorbird grieving for its pilfered young--is Macduff's lamentable cry forhis lost little ones, "All--what, all?" more piteous?--we must nowindulge in despondent fears, like yonder hard-run stag, with terror inhis eye, and true tears coursing down his melancholy face: we must notnow mourn over cruelty and ingratitude, like that poor old worn-outhorse, crying--positively crying, and looking imploringly for mercifulrest into man's iron face; we must not scream like the wounded hare, norbeat against our cage like the wild bird prisoned from its freedom. Moreover, Heraclite, even in thine own day thou mightest well have heardof the classic wailings of Philomel for Atys, or of consumptive Canens, that shadow of a voice, for her metamorphosed Pie, and have known thatvery crocodiles have tears: pass on, thy desolate definition hath notserved for man. 

With flippant tongue a mercantile cosmopolite, stable in statistics andlearned in the leger, here interposes an erudite suggestion: "Man is acalculating animal. " Surely, so he is, unless he be a spendthrift; buthe still shares his quality with others; for the squirrel hoards hisnuts, the aunt lays in her barley-corns, the moon knoweth her seasons, and the sun his going down: moreover, Chinese slates, multiplyingrulers, and, as their aggregated wisdom, Babbage's machine, will stoutlycontest so mechanical a fancy. Savoury steams, and those too smellingstrongly of truth, assault the nostrils, as a Vitellite--what a name ofhungry omen for the imperial devourer!--plausibly insinuates man to be"a cooking animal. " Who can gainsay it? and wherewithal, but withdomesticated monkeys, does he share this happy attribute? It is true, the butcher-bird spits his prey on a thorn, the slow epicurean boaglazes his mashed antelope, the king of vultures quietly waits for agamey taste and the rapid roasting of the tropics: but all this care, all this caloric, cannot be accounted culinary, and without a question, the kitchen _is_ a sphere where the lord of creation reigns supreme:still, thou best of practical philosophers, caterer for dailydinners--man--MAN, I say, is not altogether a compact of ediblecommons, a Falstaff pudding-bag robbed of his seasoning wit, a merecongeries of food and pickles; moreover, honest Gingel of "fair" famehath (or used to have, "in my warm youth, when George the Third wasking, ") automatons, [pray, observe, Sosii, I am not pedant or wiseacreenough to indite _automata_; we conquering Britons stole that word amongmany others from poor dead Greece, who couldn't want it; having made itours in the singular, why be bashful about the plural! So also ofmemorandums, omnibuses, [you remember Farren's _omni_BI!]necropolises, gymnasiums, eukeirogeneions, and other unlegaciedproperty of dear departed Rome and Greece. All this, as you see, is clearly parenthetical;] well, then, Gingel has automatons, that willserve you up all kinds of delicate viands, pleasant meats, andchoice cates by clock-work, to say nothing of Jones' patentall-in-a-moment-any-thing-whatsoever cooking apparatus: no mineApiciite, Heliogabalite, Sardanapalite, Seftonite, Udite, thou ofextravagant ancestry and indifferent digestion; little, indeed, as youmay credit me, man is not all stomach, nor altogether formed alone forfeeding. Remember Æsop's parable, the belly and the members; and, abovethem all, do not overlook the head. 

What think you then of "a featherless biped?" gravely suggests a rustyPlinyite. Absolute sir, and most obsolete Roman, doubtless you never hadthe luck to set eyes upon a turkey at Christmas; the poor bare _bipesimplumis_, a forked creature, waiting to be forked supererogatively; ay, and _risibilis_ to boot, if ever all concomitants of the hearty oldfestival were properly provocative of decent mirth. Thus then return weto our muttons, and time enough, quotha: literary pundit, (whose is thenotable saying?) thy definition is bomb-proof, thy fancy unscaleable, thy thought too deep for undermining; that notion is at the head of thepoll, a candidate approved of Truth's most open borough; for, in spiteof secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (asuseless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, andcoronation armour)--in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enoughof saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their ownall-conquering quills--in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to myfaults in ratiocination a little blind, for very cheerfulness, ) inspite, I say, of copying presses, manifold inditers, and automatonartists, MAN IS A WRITING ANIMAL. 

Wearily enough, you will think, have we disposed of this one definition:but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist ofParnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale ofThessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man, " recreating himselfby gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, mycasual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted inleisure, courteously consider that we may not travel well together: atthis station let us stop, freely forgiving each other for mutualmisliking; to your books, to your business, to your fowling, to yourfeasting, to your mummery, to your nunnery--go: my track lays away fromthe highroad, in and out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossyrocks, green hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hidingriver-gods; I meet not pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns justdropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noondaythirst with fiery drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the coldbrook, drink to its musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of aworking-day world, but flit upon the pleasant places of one made up ofholidays. 

A truce to this truancy, and method be my maxim: let us for a momentlink our reasonings, and solder one stray rivet; man being a writinganimal, there still remains the question, what is writing? Ah, there'sthe rub: a very comfortable definition would it be, if every pen-holderand pen-wiper could truly claim that kingship of the universe--thatimagery of his Maker--that mystical, marvellous, immortal, intellectual, abstraction, manhood: but, what then is WRITING? Ye tons ofinvoices, groaning shelves of incalculable legers, parchment abhorrencesof rare Charles Lamb, we think not now of you; dreary piles ofunhealthy-looking law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medicalexperiences, plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborationsof learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnumbered, inall stages of cacography, both physical and metaphysical, alack! most ofyou must slip through the meshes of our definition yet unwove; poordeciduous leaves of the forest, that, at your best, serve only--it isyet a good purpose--to dress the common soil of human kindness, withoutattaining to the praise of wreaths and chaplets ever hanging in theMuses' temple; flowers withered on the stalk, whose blooming beauty nolover's hand has dropped upon the sacred waters of Siloa, like theHindoo's garland on her Ganges; prolix, vain, ephemeral letters(especially enveloped penny-posters)--and sparing only some few redolentof truth, wisdom, and affection--your bulky majority of flippant trash, staid advices, dunnings, hoaxings, lyings, and slanderings, degrade youto a lower rank than that we take on us to designate as "writing. "

And what, O what--"how poor is he that hath not patience!"--shall wepredicate of the average viscera of circulating libraries?--abominableviscera!--isn't that the word, my young Hippocrates?--A parley--aparley! and the terms of truce are these: If this present pastime ofmine (for pastime it is, so spurn not at its logic, ) be mercifullylooked on by you, lady novelists and male dittoes--yet truly there aregiants in your ranks, as Scott, and Ward, and Hugo, and Le Sage, towering above ten thousand pigmies--if I be spared your censureswell-deserved, interchangeably as toward your authorships will Iexercise the charitable wisdom of silence: a white flag or a whitefeather is my best alternative in soothing or avoiding so terrible ahost; and verily, to speak kinder of those whose wit, and genius, andgraphic powers have so smoothed this old world's wrinkled face of care, many brilliant, many clever, many well-intended caterers to publicamusement, throng your ill-ordered ranks: still, there are numbered toyour shame as followers of the fool's-cap standard, the huge corruptingmass of depraved moralists, meagre trash-inditers, treacherousscandal-mongers, men about town who immortalize their shame, and thedull, pernicious school of feather-brained Romancists: and take thissentence for a true one, a _verum-dictum_. But enough, there are others, and those not few, even far less veniable; ye priers into familysecrets--fawning, false guests at the great man's open house, eagerlyjotting down with paricidal pen the unguarded conversation of thehospitable board--shame on your treason, on its wages, and its fame! yecountless gatherers and disposers of other men's stuff; chiels amang ustakin' notes, an' faith, to prent 'em too, perpetually, withoutmitigation or remorse; ye men of paste and scissors, who so oftenfalsely, feebly, faithlessly, and tastelessly are patching into aHarlequin whole the _disjecta membra_ of some great hacked-upreputation; can such as ye are tell me what it is to write? Writing isthe concreted fruit of thinking, the original expression of newcombinations of idea, the fresh chemical product of educationalcompounds long simmering in the mind, the possession of a sixth sense, distinguishing intelligence, and proclaiming it to the four winds;writing is not labour, but ease; not care, but happiness; not the pettypilferings of poverty, but the large overflowings of mental affluence;it begs not on the highway, but gives great largess, like a king; itpreys not on a neighbour's wealth, but enriches him; it may light, indeed, a lamp, at another's candle, but pays him back with brilliancy;it may borrow fire from the common stock, but uses it for genial warmthand noble hospitality. 

Remember well, good critic, (for verily bad there be, ) my purposes inthis odd volume--this queer, unsophisticate, uncultivated book: to emptymy mind, to clear my brain of cobwebs, to lift off my head a porters'sload of fancy articles; and as in a bottle of bad champaign, the firstglass, leaping out hurryskurry, at a railroad pace boiling a gallop, carries off with it bits of cork and morsels of rosin, even such is thefirst ebullition of my thoughts: take them for what they are worth, andblame no one but your discontented self that they are no better. Do yousuppose, keen sir, that I am not quite self-conscious of theirshallowness, utter contempt of subordination and selection, their emptyreasoning and pellucid vanity?--There I have saved you the labour of asentence, and present you with a killing verdict for myself. After alittle, perhaps, your patience may find me otherwise; of clearer flow, but flatter flavour: these desultorinesses must first of all beimmolated, for in their Ariel state they vex me, but I bind them downlike slaving Calibans, by the magic of a pen; and glad shall I be tovictimize my monsters, eager to dissipate my musquito-like tormentors;yea, I would "take up arms against a sea"--["Arms against a sea?"dearest Shakspeare, would that Theobald, or Johnson's stock-butt, "theOxford Editor, " had indeed interpolated that unconscionable image! Ithas been sapiently remarked by some hornet of criticism, that"Shakspeare was a clever man;" but cleverer far must that championstand forth who wars with any prospect of success upon seas; perhapsXerxes might have thought of it--or your Astley's brigand, whorushes sword in hand on an ocean of green baize. Who shall cure me ofparentheses?]--well, "a sea of troubles, [thoughts trouble us more thanthings--I sin again; close it;] and by opposing, end them;" that is, bysetting forth these troublous thoughts opposite, in stately black andwhite, I clip their wings, and make them peck among my poultry, and notswarm about my heaven. But soon must I be more continuous; turn over tomy future title-pages, and spare your objurgation; a little more of thismedley while the fit lasts, and afterward a staid course of betteraccustomed messes; a few further variations on this lawless theme ofauthorship, and then to try simpler tunes; briefly, and yet to begrandiloquent, as a last round of this giddy climax, after noisyclashing Chaos there shall roll out, "perfect, smooth, and round, " greenyoung worldlets, moving in quiet harmony, and moulded with systematicskill. 

As an author, meanwhile, let man be most specifically characterized: areal author, voluntary in his motives, but involuntary as regards hisacts authorial; full of matter, prolific of images and arguments, teeming, bursting, with something, much, too much, to say, and wellwitting how to say it: none of your poor devils compulsory frompoverty--Plutus help them!--whose penury of pocket is (pardon me) toooften equitably balanced by their emptiness of head; and far less one ofthe lady's-maid school, who will glory in describing a dish of cutletsat Calais, or an ill-trimmed bonnet, or the contents of an old maid'sreticule, or of a young gentleman's portmanteau, or those rare occasionsfor sentimentality, moonlight, twilight, arbours, and cascades, in themoderate space of an hour by Shrewsbury clock: but a man who has itweightily upon his mind to explain himself and others, to insist, refute, enjoin: a man--frown not, fair helpmates; the controversial pen, as the controversial sword, be ours; we will leave your flower-beds andsweeter human nurseries, despotism over cooks and Penelobean penanceupon carpet-work; nay, a trip to Margate prettily described, easylessons and gentle hymns in behalf of those dear prattlers, and for themore coerulean sort, "lyrics to the Lost one, " or stanzas on a sicklygeranium, miserably perishing in the mephitic atmosphere of routs--thesewe masculine tyrants, we Dionysii of literature, ill-naturedly haveaccounted your prerogatives of authorship. But who then are Sévigné andSomerville, Edgeworth and De Staël, Barbauld and Benger, and Aikin, andJameson, Hemans, Landon, and a thousand more, not less learned, lessaccomplished, nor less useful? Forgive, great names, my half-repeatedslander: riding with the self-conceited _cortège_ of male critics, myboasted loyalty was well-nigh guilty of _lèze majesté_: but I repudiatethe thought; my verdict shall have no reproach in it, as my championshipno fear: how much has man to learn from woman! teach us still to look onhumanity in love, on nature in thankfulness, on death without fear, onheaven without presumption; fairest, forgive those foolish and ungallantcalumnies of my ruder sex, who boast themselves your teachers--makingyet this wise use of the slander: never be so bold in authorship, as tohazard the loss of your sweet, retiring, modest, amiable, naturaldependence: never stand out as champions on the arena of strife, but ifyou will, strew it with posies for the king of the tournament; it illbecomes you to be wrestlers, though a Lycurgus allowed it, and Atalanta, another Eve, was tripped up by an apple in the foot-race. So digressing, return we to our author; to wit, a man, _homo_--a human, as they say inthe west--with news of actual value to communicate, and powers of pencompetent to do so graphically, honestly, kindly, boldly. 

Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in boasting ourselvesfar better than our fathers, still, great was the wisdom of ourancestors: and that time-tried wisdom has given us three things thatmake a man; he must build a house, have a child, write a book: and ofthis triad of needfuls, who perceives not the superior and innatemajesty of the last requisite?--"Build a house?" I humbly conceive, andsteal my notion from the same ancestral source, that, in nine cases outof ten, fools build houses for wise men to live in; besides, if housesbe made a test of supreme manhood, your modern wholesale runner-up oflath and plaster tenements, warranted to stand seven years--providedquadrilles be excluded, and no larger flock of guests _than six_ bepermitted to settle on one spot--such a jackal for surgeons, such areprobate provider for accident-wards as this, would be among ourheroes, a prize-man, the flower of the species. "Children" too?--veryhappy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations--God bless them all, andscatter those who love them not!--but still for a proof of more thanaverage humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beatus here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus. But as to "books"--common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon, courteous sir, most rare--at least in my sense; I speak not of flatcurrent shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heednot the dull thousands of minted gold and silver, but the choicecoin-sculptures of Larissa and Tarentum. There do indeed flow hourly, from an ever-welling press, rivers of words; there are indeed shoalingus up on all sides a throng of well-bound volumes--novels, histories, poems, plays, memoirs, and so forth--to all appearance, books: but if by"books" be intended originality of matter, independent arguments, waterturned wine, by the miracle of right-thinking, and not a merere-decantering of dregs from other vessels--these many masqueradedforms, these multiplied images of little-varied likenesses, theseProtean herds, will not stay to be counted, nor abide judgment, norbrook scrutiny, but will merge and melt by thousands into the one, orthe two, real, original, sterling books. We live in a monopolylogue ofauthorship: an idea goes forth to the world's market-place well dressedfrom the wardrobe of some master-mind; it greets the public with acaptivating air, and straightway becomes the rage; it seems epidemical;it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political economy, acookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a religious experience, anabstract _ism_, or a concrete _ology_; till the poor worn-out, dissipated shadow of a thought looks so feeble, thin, fashionablyaffected and fashionably infected, that its honest, bluff old father, for very shame, disowns it. Thus has it come to pass, that one or twominds, in this golden age of scribbling, have, to speak radically, beenthe true originators of a million volumes, which haply shall have sprungfrom the seed of some singular book, or of books counted in the dual. 

Indignant authors, be not merciless on my candour: I confess too muchwhereof I hold you guilty; I am one of yourselves, and I question notthat few of you can beat me in a certain sort of--I will say, unintended, plagiarism; you are thieves--patience--I thieve fromthieves; Diogenes cannot see me any more than you; you copy phrases, Iam perpetually and unconsciously filching thoughts; my entomologicalnetted-scissors, wherewith I catch those small fowl on the wing, arealways within reach; you will never find me without well-tenantedpill-boxes in my pocket, and perhaps a buzzing captive or two stuck inspinning thraldom on my castor; you are petty larceners, I profess thelike _métier_ of intellectual abstractor; you pilfer among a crowd ofvolumes, manuscripts, rare editions, conflicting commentators, and yoursuccess depends upon rëusage of the old materials; whereas I sit aloneand bookless in my dining-parlour, thinking over bygone fancies, rëconsidering exploded notions, appropriating all I find of lumber inthe warehouse of my memory, and, if need be, without scruple, quietlydigesting, as my special provender, the thoughts of others, originatedages ago. 

Is it necessary to remind you--dropping this lightsome vein for aprecious moment--that I am penning away my "crudites, " off-hand, at thetop of my speed? that my set intention is, if possible, to jot downinstanter my heavy brainful, and feel for once light headed?--I stick tomy title, '_An Author's Mind_, ' and that with a laudable scorn ofconcealment, and an honest purpose not to pretend it better or wiserthan it is; then let no one blame me on the score of my fashion ofspeech, or my sarcasms mingled with charity; for consistency with mewere inconsistent. 

Neither let me, poor innocent, be accused of giving license to what apalled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for the thousandthtime a _cacoethes_; word of cabalistic look, unknown to Dr. Dilworth. Truly, my masters, though disciple I be of venerable Martinus theScribbler; though, for aught I know, himself in progress oftransmigration; still, I submit, my cornucopia is not crammed withleaves and chopped straw; and if, in utter carelessness, the fruit ispoured out pell-mell after this desultory fashion, yet, I wot, it _is_fruit, though whether ripe or crude, or rotten, my husbandry takeslittle thought: the mixture serves for my cider-press, and, fermentationover, the product will be clarified. Judge me too, am I not consecutive?I've shown man to be a writing animal; and writing, what it is and isnot; and meanwhile have been routing recreatively at pen's point whims, and fancies, and ideas, and images, pulled in manfully by head andshoulders: and now--after an episode, quite relevant and quiteHerodotean, concerning the consequences of a bit of successfulauthorship on a man's scheme of life, to illustrate yet more the"author's mind"--I shall proceed to tell all men how many books I might, could, should, or would have written, but for reiterated and legitimated_buts_, and how near of kin I must esteem myself to the illustrious J. Of nursery rhymes, being, as he is or was, "Mister Joe Jenkins, whoplayed on the fiddle, and began twenty tunes, but left off in themiddle. " Moreover, no one can be ignorant of the close consanguinityrecognised in every age and every dictionary between I and J. But nowfor the episode:

If ever a toy were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: theshowy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, withhere and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively the field ofvision; the trifling touch that will disenchant the fairest patterns;the slightest change, as in chemical arithmetic, that will make thewhole mixture a poison or a cordial. A man is vexed, the nerve of hisequanimity thrillingly touched at the tender elbow, and forthwith hiswhole wholesome body writhes in pain; while, to speak morally, thoseuseful reminders of life's frailty, the habitual side-thorns--spurs ofdiligence, incentives to better things--are exaggerated into sixfoldspears, and terribly stop the way, like long-lanced Achæans: a carelessfit succeeds to one of spleen, and vanity well spangled, pretty baubles, stars and trinkets and trifles, fill their cycle, to magnetize withfolly that rolling world the brain: another twist, and love is lordparamount, a paltry bit of glass, casually rose-coloured, shedding itswarm blush over all the reflective powers: suddenly an overcast, forthat marplot, Disappointment, has obtruded a most vexatiously reiteratedmorsel of lamp-black: again Hope's little bit of blue paint makes azurerainbows all about the firmament of man's own inner world; and at lastan atom of gold-dust specks all the glasses with its lurid yellow, andhaply leaves the old miser to his master-passion. So, ever changing dayby day, every man's life is but a kaleidoscope. Stay; this simile issomewhat of the longest, but the whim is upon me, and I must have myway; the fit possesses me to try a sonnet, and I shall look far for afairer thesis; he that hates verse--and the Muses now-a-days are tooold-maidish to look many lovers--may skip it, and no harm done; but oneor two may like this stave on

LIFE. 

 I saw a child with a kaleidoscope, Turning at will the tesselated field; And straight my mental eye became unseal'd, I learnt of life, and read its horoscope: Behold, how fitfully the patterns change! The scene is azure now with hues of Hope; Now sobered gray by Disappointment strange; With Love's own roses blushing, warm and bright; Black with Hate's heat, or white with Envy's cold; Made glorious by Religion's purple light; Or sicklied o'er with yellow lust of Gold; So, good or evil coming, peace or strife, Zeal when in youth, and Avarice when old, In changeful, chanceful phases passeth life. 

It is well I was not stopped before my lawful fourteenth rhyme by yonderprosaic gentleman, humbly listening in front, who asks, with somewhat ofmalicious triumph, whereto does all this lead?--Categorically, sir, [there is no argument in the world equal to a word of six syllables, ]categorically, sir, to this: of all life's turns and twists, few thingsproduce more change to the daring _debutant_ than successful authorship;it is as if, applying our simile, a fragment of printed bookishnessamong those kaleidoscopic morsels, having worked its way into the fieldof vision, had there got stereotyped by a photogenic process: in fact, it fixes on it a prëdestinated "author's mind. "

An author's mind! what a subject for the lights and shadows ofmetaphysical portraiture! what a panorama of images! what a whirlingscene of ever-changing incidents! what a store-house for thoughts! whata land of marvels! what untrodden heights, what unexplored depths of anever-undiscovered country! That strange world hath a structure and afurniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted with rarecreatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; forms of otherspheres lie buried in its lias cliffs; seeds of unknown plants, relicsof unlimnèd reptiles, fragments of an old creation, the ruins of afanciful cosmogony, lie hid until the day of their requiral beneath itsfertile soil: and then its lawless botany; flowers of glorious hue hungupon the trees of its forests; luscious fruits flung liberally among themosses of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere; unanchoredwater-lilies dancing in its bright cascades; and this, too, a world, aninner secret world, peopled with unthought images, specimens of apeculiar creation; outlandish forms are started from its thickets, thedragon and the cherub are numbered with its winged inhabitants, andherds of uncouth shape pasture on its meadows. Who can sound its seas, deep calling unto deep? who can stand upon the hill-tops, heightbeckoning unto height? who can track its labyrinths? who can map itscaverns? A limitless essence, an unfailing spring, an evergreenfruit-tree, a riddle unsolved, a quaint museum, a hot-bed of inventions, an over-mantling tankard, a whimsical motley, a bursting volcano, afull, independent, generous--a poor, fettered, jealous, Anomaly, such--bear witness--is an author's mind. O, theme of many topics! chaosof ill-sorted fancies! Let us come now to the jealousies, the real orimaginary wrongs of authorship: hereafter treat we this at lengthier;"for the time present"--I quote the facetious Lord Coke, when writing onthat highly exhilerating topic, the common-law--"hereof let this littletaste suffice. " Is it not a wrong to be taken for a mere book-merchant, a mercenary purveyor of learning and invention, of religion andphilosophy, of instruction, or even of amusements, for the soleconsideration of value received, as one would use a stalking-horse forgetting near a stag? this, too, when ten to one some cormorant on thetree of knowledge, some staid-looking publisher in decent mourning, iscomplacently pocketing the profits, and modestly charging you with loss?and this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibilityon some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, evenif he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearlsunprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for Imust not say like swine, ) would sooner crush an acorn? to know yourestimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident ofsuccess, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as an animalwho must necessarily be living on his wits in some purlieu, answering tothat antiquated reproach, a Grub-street attic; or suspected amonggentler company in this most mercantile age for a pickpocket, a pauper, a _chevalier d'industrie_? And then those hounds upon the bleedingflanks of many a hunted author, those open-mouthed inexorable critics, (I allude to the Pariah class, not to the higher caste brethren, ) howsuddenly they rend one, and fear not! Only for others do I speak, and inno degree on account of having felt their fangs, as many have done, mybetters; gentle and kind, as domesticated spaniels, have reviewers ingeneral been to your humble confessor, and for such courtesies is hetheir debtor. But who can be ignorant how frequently some hapless writeris impaled alive on the stake of ridicule, that a flagging magazine maybe served up with _sauce piquante_, and pander to the world for itswaning popularity by the malice of a pungent article? who, while as arule he may honour the bench of critics for patience, talent, andimpartiality, is not conusant of those exceptions, not seldom ofoccurence, where obvious rancour has caused the unkindly condemnation;where personal inveteracy aims from behind the Ajax shield of anonymousreviewing, and shoots, like a cowardly Teucer, the foe fair-exposedwhom he dares not fight with?--But, as will be seen hereafter, Itrespass on a title-page, and here will add no more than this: Is it nota wrong of double edge, that while the world makes no excuse for thewrithing writer, on the reasonable ground that after all he may beinnocent of what his critics blame him for, the same good-natured world, on almost every occasion of magazine applause, believes either that theauthor has written for himself the favourable notice, or that pecuniarybribes have made the honest editor his tool? Verily, my public, thou artnot generous here; ay, and thou art grievously deceived, as well assordid: for by careless praise, causeless censure, credit given forcorrupt bribery, and no allowance made for unamiable criticisms, poormaltreated authors speak to many wrongs: and of them more anon. 

What moreover shall we say of chilling friendships, near estrangements, heartless lovers loitering behind, shy acquaintance dropping off?Verily, there is a mighty sifting: you have dared to stand alone, haveexpounded your mind in imperishable print, have manifested wit enough tooutface folly, sufficient moral courage to condemn vice, and more thanis needful of good wisdom to shame the oracles of worldliness: and sosome dread you, some hate, and many shun: the little selfish asterisksin that small sky fly from your constellatory glories: you areindependent, a satellite of none: you have dared to think, write, print, in all ways contrary to many; and if wise men and good be loud in theirapplause, you arrive at the dignity of manifold hatreds; but if thoseand their inferiors condemn, you sink into the bathos of multipliedcontempts. Of other wrongs somewhen and where, hereafter; meanwhile, abetter prospect glows on the kaleidoscopic field--a flattering accessionof new and ardent friends: "Sir, " said an old priest to a young author, "you have made a soft pillow for your head when it comes to be as whiteas mine is;" a pretty saying of sweet charity, and such sink deep: asfor the younger and the warmer, being mostly of the softer sex, somewill profess admiring sensations that border not a little on idolatries;others, gayer, will appear in the dress of careless, unskillfuladmiration; not a few, both men and women, go indeed weakly along withthe current stream of popularity, but, to say truth, look happiest whenthey find some stinging notice that may mortify the new bold candidatefor glory; while, last and best, a fewer, a very much fewer, dohandsomely the liberal part of friends, commending where they can, objecting where they must, sincere in sorrow for a fault, rejoicingwithout envy for a virtue. 

Many like phenomena has authorship: a certain class of otherwisehumanized and well-intentioned people begin to regard your scribe as amonster--not a so-called "lion" to be sought, but some strange creatureto be dreaded: Perdition! what if he should be cogitating a novel or aplay, and means to make free with our characters? what if that libellouscöpartnership of Saunders and Ottley is permitted to display our faultsand foibles, flimsily disguised, before a mocking world? Disappointedmaidens that hover on the verge of forty, and can sympathize withJephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fearthat a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerablebachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by thediligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric flingin the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque;table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiffintends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinklingstars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whosevery trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away beforesome prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another pridedthemselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance asthe eye of a basilisk. Then, again, those casual encounters of witlingsin the world authorial, so anticipated by a hostess, solooked-forward-to by guests! In most cases, how forlorn they be! howdull; constrained, suspicious! like rival traders, with pocketsinstinctively buttoned up, and glaring each upon the other with mostuncommunicative aspects; not brothers at a banquet, but combatants andwrestlers, watching for solecisms in the other's talk, or toiling todrag in some laboured witticism of their own, after the classicalprecedent of Hercules and Cerberus: those feasts of reason, how vapid!those flows of soul, how icily congealing! those Attic nights, how dimand dismal! Once more; and, remember me, I speak in a personatedcharacter of the general, and not experimentally; so, flinging selfaside, let me speak what I have seen: grant that the world-without crowna man with bays, and lead him to his Theban home with tokens ofrejoicing; is the victor there set on high, chapleted, and honoured asNemean heroes should be or does he not rather droop instantly again intothe obscure unit among a level mass, only the less welcome for havingstood up, a Saul or a Musæus, with his head above his fellows? Verily, no man is a proph--Enough, enough! for ours is a prerogative, a gloriouscalling, and the crown of barren leaves is costlier than his of Rabbah;enough, enough! sing we the praises, count we well the pleasures offervent, overflowing authorship. There, in perfect shape before theeyes--there, well born in beauty--there perpetually (so your fondnesshopes) to live--slumbers in her best white robe the mind's own fairestdaughter; the Minerva has sprung in panoply from that parental achinghead, and stands in her immortal independence; an Eve, his own heart'sfruit, welcomes delighted Adam. You have made something, some good work, bodily; your communion has commenced with those of times to come; yourmind has produced a witness to its individuality; there is a tabletsacred to its memory standing among men for ever. 

A thinker is seldom great in conversation, and the glib talkers who havesilenced such a one frequently in clamorous argument, founder in hisdeep thoughts, blundering, like Stephanos and Trinculos--(let Caliban beswamped;) such generous revenge is sweet: a writer often unexplained, because speaking little, and that little foolishly mayhap, and lightlyfor the holiday's sake of an unthoughful rest, finds his opportunitiesin printing, and gives the self-expounding that he needs; suchheart-emptyings yield heart-ease: an author, who has done his good workwell--for such a one alone we speak--while, privately, he scarce couldhave refreshed mankind by petty driblets--in the perpetuity, publicity, and universal acceptation of his high and honourable calling, does goodby wholesale, irrigates countries, and gladdens largely the large heartof human society. And are not these unbounded pleasures, spreading overlife, and comforting the struggles of a death-bed? Yes: rising asEzekiel's river from ankle to knee, from knee to girdle, from girdle tothe overflowing flood--far beyond those lowest joys, which many wisehave trampled under foot, of praise, and triumph, and profit--theauthorship of good, that has made men better; that has consoled sorrow, advanced knowledge, humbled arrogance, and blest humanity; that has sentthe guilty to his prayers, and has gladdened the Christian in hispraises--the authorship of good, that has shown God in his loveliness, and man in his dependence; that has aided the cause of charity, andshamed the face of sin--this high beneficence, this boundlessgood-doing, hath indeed a rich recompense, a glorious reward!

But we must speed on, and sear these hydra-necks, or we shall have asmany heads to our discourse, and as puzzling, as any treatise of thePuritan divinity. Let us hasten to be practical; let us not so longforget the promised title-pages; let it at length satisfy to show, morethan theoretically, how authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teemingprojects, and then casts out its half-made progeny; how scraps of papercome to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts, thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibylline leaves;how stores of mingled information gravitate into something of order, each seed herding with its fellows; and how every atom of mixed metal, educationally held in solution by the mind, is sought out by a keenprecipitating test, gregariously building up in time its own truecrystal. 

Hereabouts, therefore, and hereafter, in as frank a fashion asheretofore, artlessly, too, and, but for crowding fancies, briefly shallfollow a full and free confession of the embryo circulating library nowin the book-case of my brain; only premising, for the last of all lasttimes, that while I know it to be morally impossible that all should bepleased herewith, I feel it to be intellectually improbable that any onemind should equally be satisfied with each of the many parts of aperformance so various, inconsistent, and unusual; premising, also, thatwherein I may have stumbled upon other people's titles, it isunwittingly and unwillingly; for the age breeds books so quickly, that aman must read harder than I do to peruse their very names; and premisingthis much farther, that I profess to be a sort of dog in the manger, neither using up my materials myself, nor letting any one else do so;and that, whether I shall happen or not, at any time future to amplifyand perfect any of these matters, I still proclaim to all bookmakers andbooksellers, STEAL NOT; for so surely as I catch any one thusbehaving--and truly, my masters, the temptation is but small--I willstick a "_Sic vos, non vobis, _" on his brazen forehead. 

Wait! there remaineth yet a moment in which to say out the remnant of mymind, "an author's mind, " its last parting speech, its dying utterancesbefore extreme unction. I owe all the world apologies; I would pray acatholic forgiveness. Authors and reviewers, critics, and theundiscriminating many, fair women, honest men, I cry your pardonsuniversally! I do confess the learning of my mind to lie, strangely andPisa-like, inveterately as at Welsh Caérphilli, out of the perpendicularof truth; it is my disposition to make the most of all things, for goodor for evil; I write, speak, and think, as if I were but an unhallowedspecial pleader; I colour highly, and my outlines are too strong; I amguilty on all sides of unintentional misstatements, consequent on thepowerful gusts of feeling that burst upon my irritable breast; my heartis no smooth Dead Sea, but the still vexed Bermoothes: therefore I wouldprint my penitence; I would publish my confessions; I would not hide myhumbleness; and it pleases me to pour out in sonnet-form myunconventional

APOLOGY TO ALL. 

 --For I have sinn'd; oh! grievously and often; Exaggerated ill, and good denied; Blacken'd the shadows only born to soften; And Truth's own light unkindly misapplied: Alas! for charities unloved, uncherish'd, When some stern judgment, haply erring wide, Hath sent my fancy forth, to dream and tell Other men's deeds all evil! Oh, my heart! Renew once more thy generous youth, half perish'd; Be wiser, kindlier, better than thou art! And first, in fitting meekness, offer well All earnest, candid prayers, to be forgiven For worldly, harsh, unjust, unlovable Thoughts and suspicions against man and Heaven!

Friends all, let this be my best amendment: bear with the candour, homely though it may be, of your author's mind; and suffer its furtherrevelations of unborn manuscript with charitable listening; for theywould come forth in real order of time, the first having priority, andnot the best, ungarnished, unweeded, uncared-for, humbly, and withoutany further flourish of trumpets. 

 * * * * *

Serjeant Ion--I beg his pardon, Talfourd--somewhere gives it as hisopinion, that most people, in any way troubled with a mind, have at sometime or other meditated a tragedy. Truly, too, it _is_ a fine vehiclefor poetical solemnities, a stout-built vessel for an author's graverthoughts; and the bare possibility of seeing one's own heart-stirringcreation visually set before a crowded theatre, the preclusive echoesof anticipated thundering applause, the expected grilling silenceattendant on a pet scene or sentiment, all the tangible, accessories ofpainting and music, clever acting and effective situation, and beyondand beside these the certain glories of the property-wardrobe, make mostyoung minds press forward to the little-likely prize of successfultragedy. That at one weak period I was bitten, my honesty would scorn todeny; but fortunately for my peace of mind, "Melpomene looked upon mewith an aspect of little favour, " and sturdy truth-telling Tacitus mademe at last but lightly regardful of my subject. Moreover, my Pegasus wasvisited with a very abrupt pull-up from other causes; it has been myfatality more than once or twice, as you will ere long see, to drop uponother people's topics--for who can find any thing new under thesun?--and I had already been mentally delivered of divers fag-ends ofspeeches, stinging dialogues, and choice tit-bits of scenes, (all ofwhich I will mercifully spare you, ) when a chance peep into Johnson's'_Lives of the Poets_' showed me mine own fine subject as the work ofsome long-forgotten bard! This moral earthquake demolished in a momentmy goodly aërial fabric; the fair plot burst like a meteor; and anafter-recollection of a certain French tragedy-queen, Agrippina, showedme that the ground was still further preoccupied. But it is high time totell the destined name of my abortive play; in four letters, then, NERO;

A CLASSICAL TRAGEDY:

IN SEVEN SCENES. 

And now, in pity to an afflicted parent, hear for a while hisoffspring's Roscian capabilities. First of all, however, (and you knowhow I rejoice in all things preliminary, ) let me clear my road byexplanations: we must pioneer away a titular objection, "in sevenscenes, " and an assumed merit, in the term "classical. " I abhorscene-shifters; at least, their province lies more among pantomimes, farces, and comedies, than in the region of the solemn tragic muse; herincidents should rather partake of the sculpture-like dignity of_tableaux_. My unfashionable taste approves not of a serious story beingcut up into a vast number of separate and shuffled sections; and thewhistle and sliding panels detract still more from the completeness ofillusion: I incline as much as is possible to the Classic unities oftime, place, and circumstances, wishing, moreover, every act to be ascene, and every scene an act; with a comfortable green curtain, thatcool resting-place for the haggard eye, to be the grass-like drop, mildly alternating with splendid crime and miserable innocence: awaywith those gaudy intermediates, and, still worse, some intruded ballet;bring back Garrick's baize, and crush the dynasty of head-aches. 

But onward: let me further extenuate the term, seven scenes; theutterance seven "acts" would sound horrific, full of extremities ofweariness; but my meaning actually is none other than seven acts of onescene each: for the number seven, there always have been decent reasons, and ours may best appear as we proceed, less than a brief seven seeminginsufficient, and more, superfluous; again, so mystical a number has astaid propriety, and a due double climax of rise and fall. Now, as toour adjective "classical:" Why not, in heroic drama, have somethinga-kin to the old Greek chorus, with its running comment upon motives andmoralities, somewhat as the mighty-master has set forth in his trulypatriotic '_Henry the Fifth?_'--However, taking other grounds, theepithet is justified, both by the subject and the proposed unmodernmethod of its treatment: but of all this enough, for, on secondthoughts, perhaps we may do without the chorus. 

It is obvious that no historical play can strictly preserve the trueunity of time; cause and effect move slower in the actual machinery oflife, than the space of some three hours can allow for: we mustunavoidably clump them closer; and so long as a circumstance might aswell have happened at one time as at another, I consider that the poetis justified in crowding prior events as near as he may please towardsthe goal of their catastrophe. If then any slight inaccuracy as to datesarrests your critical ken, believe that it is not ignorantly careless, but learnedly needful. One other objection, and I have done. No man isan utter inexcusable, irremediable villain; there is a spot of light, however hidden, somewhere; and, notwithstanding the historian's picture, it may charitably be doubted whether we have made due allowance for hismost reasonable prejudice even in Nero's case. Human nature has producedmany monsters; but, amongst a thousand crimes, there has proverbiallylingered in each some one seedling of a virtue; and when we consider thecorruption of manners in old Rome, the idolatrous flatteries hemming inthe prince, the universal lie that hid all things from his betterperceptions, we can fancy some slight extenuation for his mad career. Not that it ever was my aim, in modern fashion, to excuse villany, or togild the brass brow of vice; and verily, I have not spared my odioushero; nevertheless, in selecting so unamiable a subject, (or ratheremperor, ) I wished not to conceal that even in the worst of men there isa soil for hope and charity; and that if despotism has highprerogatives, its wealth and state are desperate temptations, whosedangers mightily predominate, and whose necessary influences, if quiteunbiased, tend to utter misery. 

Now to introduce our _dramatis personæ_, with their "cast, "--for bettereffect--rather unreasonably presumed. _Nero_--(Macready, who wouldimpersonate him grandly, and who, moreover, whether complimented or notby the likeness, wears a head the very counterpart of Nero's, as everyNumismatist will vouch, )--a naturally noble spirit, warped by sensualityand pride into a very tyrant; liberal in gifts, yet selfish in passion;not incapable of a higher sort of love, yet liable to sudden changes, and at times tempestuously cruel. _Nattalis_--(say Vandenhoff, )--hisfavourite and evil genius, originally a Persian slave, and still wearingthe Eastern costume: a sort of Iago, spiriting up the willing Nero toall varieties of wickedness, getting him deified, and otherwisemystifying the poor besotted prince with all kinds of pleasure andglory, to subserve certain selfish ends of rapine, power, andlicentiousness, and to avenge, perhaps, the misfortunes of his owncountry on the chief of her destroyers. _Marcus Manlius_--(who betterthan Charles Kean?--supposing these artistic combinations not to bequite impossible, )--a fine young soldier, of course loving the heroine, captain of Nero's body-guard, chivalrous, honourable, noble, andfaithful to his bad master amid conflicting trials. _PubliusDentatus_--(any _bould_ speaker; besides, it would be rather too much toengage all the actors yet awhile;)--a worthy old Roman, father of theheroine. _Galba_, the chief mover in the catastrophe, as also the openerof its causes, an intriguing and fierce, but well-intentioned patriot, who ultimately becomes the next emperor. With _Curtius_ a tribune, senators, conspirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c. And so, afterthe ungallant fashion of theatrical play-wrights, as to a class inferiorto the very &c. Of masculines--(of less intention withal than one ofthose &cs. Of crabbed Littleton, like an old shoe fricasséed intosavourings of all things by its inimitable Coke, )--come we to thewomen-kind. _Agrippina_, (one of the school of Siddons, ) empress-mother, a strong-minded, Lady-Macbeth sort of woman, and the only person in theworld who can awe her amiable son. _Lucia, _ (_you_ cannot be sparedhere, clever Helen Faucit)--the heroine, secretly a Christian affiancedto Manlius; a character of martyr's daring and woman's love. _Rufa_, ahaggard old sibyl, with both private and public reasons for detestingNero and Nattalis: and all the fitting female attendants to conclude thelist. 

Each scene, in which each act will be included, should be pictorially, so to speak, a _tableau_ in the commencement, and a _tableau_ ofsituation in the end. Let us draw up upon scene _the first_. Back-ground, Rome burning; in front, ruins of fine Tuscan villa, stillsmoking; and a terminal altar in the garden. Plebs. Running to and fro, full of conventional little speeches, with goods, parents, penates, andother lumber, rescued from the flames; till a tribune, (hight Curtius, )in a somewhat incendiary oration concerning poor men's calamities, andagainst the powers that be, sends them to the capital with a processionof flamines Diales and vestals, dirging solemnly a Roman hymn [some "_AdCapitolium, Ad Jovis solium_, " and so forth] to good music. At theend of the train come in Publius and Lucia, to whom from oppositehurriedly walks Galba, full of talk of omens, direful doings, patriotism, and old Rome's ruin. To these let there be added--to speakmathematically--open-hearted Manlius; and let there follow certaindisceptatious converse about Nero, Manlius excusing him, extenuating hisvices by his temptations, giving military anecdotes of his earliervirtues, and in fact striving to make the most of him, a very gentlemonster: Galba throwing in, sarcastically, blacker shadows. Afterdisputation, the father and lovers walk off, leaving Galba alone for amoment's soliloquy; and, from behind the terminal altar, unseen Sibylhails him Cæsar; he, astonished at the airy voice so coincident with hisown feelings, thinks it ideal, chides his babbling thoughts, and soforth: then enter to him suddenly chance-met noble citizens, burnt outof house and home, who declaim furiously against Nero. Sibyl, stillunseen from behind the altar, again hails Galba as future Cæsar; who, nolonger doubting his ears, and all present taking the omen, they conspireat the altar with drawn swords, and as the Sibyl suddenlypresides--_tableau_--and down drops the soft green baize. This firstact, you perceive, is stirring, introductory of many characters; and thepicture of the seven-hilled city, seen in a transparent blaze, mightgive the followers of Stanfield a triumph. 

_Second_: The senate scene, producing another monstrous crime of Nero's, also inaccurately dated. In the full august assembly, Nero discoveredenthroned, not unmajestic in deportment, yet effeminately chapleted, andholding a lyre: suppose him just returned from Elis, a pancratist, theworld's acknowledged champion. Nattalis, ever foremost in flatteries, after praising the prince's exploits in Greece, avows that, like Parisin Troy, and Alexander at Persepolis, Nero _had_ gloriously fired Rome;he found it wood, and wished to leave it marble; (so, the catafalque atthe Invalides of the twice-buried Corsican;) in destroying, as well asblessing, he had asserted his divinity; any after due allusions toPhoenixes, and fire-kingships, and _coups-de-soliel_ falling from thesame Apollo so great upon the guitar, Nattalis moves that Nero should beworshipped, and calls on the priest of Jupiter to set a good example. None dare refuse, and the senate bend before him; whereupon enter, inclerical procession, augurs, and diviners, men at arms with pole-axes, and coronaled white bulls, paraded before sacrifice: all this panderingto present love of splendour and picturesque effect. In the midst ofthese classical preparations, enters, with a bevy of attendants, thehaughty queen-like Agrippina, whom Nero, having sent for to complete histriumph, commands to bend too; but she stoutly refusing, and taking himfiercely to task, objurgating likewise Rome's degenerategray-beards--great bustle--senate broken up hurriedly--and she, with a"_feri ventrem_, " dragged off to be killed by her son's order. Neroalone with Nattalis by imperial command; his momentary compunctionnullified by the wily Iago, who turns off the subject smoothly to a newobject of desire: Publius was the only senator not in his place, andPublius has a daughter, the fairest in Rome, Lucia--had not the emperornoticed her among Agrippina's women? Nero, charmed with any scheme ofnovelty that may change remorseful thoughts, is induced, nothing loth, to attempt the subtle abduction of the heroine; a body-guard, headed asalways by Manlius, ready in the vestibule to escort him, and exit. Nattalis, alone for a minute, betrays his own selfish schemes concerningLucia, who had refused him before, and alludes to his secret reasons forurging on the maddened Nero to the worst excesses. 

_Third scene_ (or part, or _act_, if it must be so), expounds, infitting contrast to the foregoing, the tender loves of Lucia andManlius; a gentle home-scene, a villa and its terraced gardens: also, asLucia is a Christian, we have, poetically, and not puritanically, aninsight into her scruples of conscience as to the heathenism of herlover: and also into _his_ consistent nobility of character, not willingto surrender the religion of his fathers unconvinced. To them rushes inPublius, who has been warned by friend Galba of the near approach ofNattalis and a guard, to seize Lucia for disreputable Nero: no possibleescape, and all urge Lucia to imitate Virginia, Lucretia, and others oflike Dian fame, by cowardly self-murder; she is high-principled, andwon't: then they--the father and lover--request leave to kill her;conflicting passions and considerable stage effect; Lucia, who with calmcourage derides the dastard sacrifice, standing unharmed between thoseloving thirsty swords: in a grand speech, she makes her quiet departurea test of Manlius' love, and her ultimate deliverance to be a proof tohim that her God is the true God, the God who guards the innocent. Manlius, struck with her martyr-like constancy, professes that if indeedshe is saved out of this great trouble, he will embrace her faith, renounce his own, and so break down the of wealth and rank, are alikethrown away upon Publius; at last, the prince promises; and whenPublius, after a burst of earnest eloquence, proclaims the new pleasureto consist in _showing mercy_, Nero's utter wrath, his hurricane ofhate, revoking that hasty promise, and hurrying away old Publius to dieat the same stake with his daughter. 

_Seventh_: the catastrophe scene lies in the Coliseum amphitheatre; (Imean the older one, anterior to Vespasian's:) bloody games picturedbehind, and those "human torches" at fiery intervals. Nero, enthroned inside front, surrounded by a brilliant court, amongst whom are some ofthe conspirators: at other side Publius and Lucia, tied at one stake inwhite robes, back to back, to die before Nero's eyes, Manlius andsoldiers guarding them: he, Manlius, having nobly resolved to testmiraculous assistance to the last, but now tremblingly believing thechance of a Providence interfering, since Lucia's escape from Nero atthe golden house. Just as the emperor, after a sarcastic speech, characteristically interlarded with courtier conversation, is commandingthe fagot to be lighted, and Lucia's constant faith has bade Manlius _doit_--a rush of Nattalis with attendant conspirators and Rufa the Sibyl, up to Nero; Nattalis strikes him, but the sword breaks short off on thehidden armour; Nero's majestic rising for a moment, asserting himselfCæsar still, the inviolable majesty;--suddenly stopped by a centripetalrush of the conspirators; who kill him, (after he has vainly attemptedin despair to kill himself, ) and Galba sits on the throne, while Nero, unpitied and unhelped, gasps out in the middle his dying speech. Meanwhile, at the other side, Manlius has killed Nattalis for histreachery, cut the bonds of Publius and Lucia, and all ends in moraljustice for the triumph of good, and the defeat of evil; Manlius andLucia, hand in hand, Publius with white head and upraised hands blessingthem, Nero, a mangled corpse, Nattalis in his dying agonies persecutedby the vindictive Rufa, and Galba hailed as Cæsar by the assembledRomans. So, upon a magnificent _tableau_, slowly falls the lawnycurtain. 

Patient reader, what think you of my long-winded tragedy? No quibblingabout Nero having really died in a drain, four years after the murder ofAggrippina; no learned disquisitions, if you please, as to his innocenceof Rome's fire, a counterpart to our slander on the Papacy in the matterof London's; spare me, I pray you, learned pundit, your suspicions aboutGalba's too probable _alibi_ in Spain. Tell me rather this: do I falsifyhistory in any thing more important than mere accidental anachronismsand anatopisms? do I make an untrue delineation of character, blackeningthe good, or white-washing the wicked? Do I not, by introducing Nero'sthree greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely acceleratethe interval between causes and effect? And is not tragic dignityjustified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, theexit of the last true Cæsar of the Augustan family? For all the rest, good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain--such is myweakness--whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad withflesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me asa '_Midsummer Night's Dream_, ' destroying my quiet with involuntaryshreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious, albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not bethrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on myhearth, and not hurl it away like a _bonum waviatum_; a little moreboiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forthspontaneously as lava. What if this book be, after all, a sort ofpilot-balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind blows--a feeleras to which and which may please? Whether or not this be so, I willstill confess on, emptying my brain of booklets, and, if by happypossibility I can keep my secret, shall hear unsuspected, friend, _your_verdict. 

 * * * * *

I must rather hope, than expect, that my next bit of possible authorshipis not like the last, a subject forestalled. Scribbling as I find myselffor very listlessness in a dull country-house, there's not a publisher'sindex within thirty miles; so, for lack of evidence to the contrary, Imay legitimately, for at least a brief period of self-delusion, imaginethe intoxicating field my own. And yet so fertile, important, interesting a subject, cannot have been quite overlooked by the corps ofprofessed literary labourer's: the very title-page would insure fivethousand readers (especially with a Brunswicker death's-head andmarrow-bones added underneath). 

OPIUM;

A HISTORY;

standing alone in single blackiness: Opium, a magnificent theme, warranted to fill a huge octavo: and certain, from sheer variety ofinformation, to lead into the captivity of admiring criticism minds ofevery calibre. Its natural history, with due details of all manner ofpoppies, their indigenous habitats, botanical characters, ratios ofincrease, and the like; its human history, discovery as a drug; how, when, where, and by whom cultivated; dissertations as to the possibilityof Chaldean, Pharaonic, Grecian, or Roman opium eating, with mosterudite extracts out of all sorts of scribes, from Sanchoniathon down toJuvenal, on these topics; its medicinal uses, properties, accidents, andabuses; as to whether it might not be used homoeopathically or ininfinitesimal doses, to infuse a love of the pleasures of imaginationinto clodpoles, lawyers' clerks, and country cousins; its intellectualpossibilities of usefulness, stimulating the brain; its moral ditto, allaying irritability; together with a dreadful detail of its evils inexcess, idiotizing, immoralizing, ruining soul and body. Plenty of stoutunquestionable statistics, from all crannies of the globe, tocorroborate all the above to the extreme satisfaction of practical men, with causes and consequences of its insane local popularity. All this, moreover, at present, with especial reference to China and the East;added to the moral bearings of the Opium-war, and our nationalresponsibilities relative to that unlucky traffic. The metaphysicalquestion stated and answered, whether or not prohibition of any thingdoes not lead to its desire; showing the increasing appetency of thosesottish Serics for the forbidden vice, and illustrating Gay's fable ofthe foolish young cock, who ne'er had been in that condition, but forhis mother's prohibition: moreover, how is it, that so captivating aform of intoxication is so little rife among our drunken journeymen?queries, however, as to this; and whether or not the humbug ofteetotalism (a modern speculation, got up by and for the benefit ofgrocers and sugar-planters on the one side, schismatics and conspiringdemagogues on the other, ) has already substituted opium-eating, drinking, or smoking, for the wholesomer toddies, among factory folk andthe finest pisantry. Millions of anecdotes regarding Eastern Rajahs, Western Locofocos, Southern Moors, and North-country Muscovites, as tothe drug in its abuses: strange cures (if any) of strange ailments ofmind or body by its prudent use: how to wean men and nations from thosedeleterious chewings and smokings; with true and particular accounts ofsuch splendid self-conquests as Coleridge and De Quincey, and--shall Iadd another, a living name?--have attained to. Then, again, what a fieldfor poetical vagaries, and madnesses of imagination, would be affordedby the subject of opium-dreams! Now, strictly speaking, in order tohallucinate honestly, your opium-writer ought to have had somepractical knowledge of opium-eating: then could he descant with theauthority of experience--yea, though he write himself thereby down anass--on its effects upon mind and body; then could he tell of luxuriesand torments in true Frenchified detail; then could he expound its painsand pleasures with all the eloquence of personal conviction. But, as tosuch real risk of poisoning myself, and of making I wot not how actual amooncalf, of my present sound mind and body, I herein would reasonablydemur: and, if I wanted dreams, would tax my fancy, and not myapothecary's bill. Dreams? I need not whiff opium, nor toss off laudanumnegus, to imagine myself--a young Titan, sucking fiery milk from thepaps of a volcano; a despot so limitless and magnificent, as to spurnsuch a petty realm as the Solar System, with Cassiopeia, Boötes, and hisdog, to boot; an intellect, so ravished, that it feels all flame, or amass of matter so inert, that it lies for ages in the silent depths ofocean, a lump of primeval metal: Madness, with the red-hot iron hissingin his brain: Murder, with the blood-hound ghost, over land, over sea, through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silentlyin horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that HolyEye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense ofexcruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, withoutwill or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble:flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies--O, that universalcrash!--greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations of theassembled dead--that hollow, far-echoing, malicious laughter--thathurricane-sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like atoad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, hunted, hooted;to eat off one's own head with its cruel madly crunching under-jaw;to--but enough of horrors: and as to delights, all that Delacroixsuggests of perfume, and Mahomet of Houris, and Gunter of cookery, andthe German opera of music: all Camilla-like running unexertive, all thatsea unicorns can effect in swift swimming, or storm-caught condors inthings aërial; all the rapid travellings of Puck from star to star, system to system, all things beauteous, exhilarating, ecstatic--ages ofall these things, warranted to last. Now, multiply all these severalalls by forty-nine, and the product will serve for as exaggerated astatement as possible of opium pandering to pleasure; yes, byforty-nine, by seven times seven at the least, that we be not accused ofextenuating so fatal an excitement; for it is competent to conceiveone's self expanded into any unlimited number of bodies, seven sevensbeing the algebraic _n_, and if so, into their huge undefinedaggregate; a giant's pains are throes indeed, a giant's pleasures indeedflood over. But, we may do harm to morality and truth, by falsely makingmuch of a faint, fleeting, paltry, excitation. The brain waltzingintoxicated, the heart panting as in youth's earliest affection, themind broad, and deep, and calm, a Pacific in the sunshine, the bodylapped in downy rest, with every nerve ministering to its comfort; whatmore can one, merely and professedly of this world of sensualism--anopium-eater for instance--conceive of bliss? Such imaginative flights asthese, with its pungent final interrogatory, suggestive to man'sselfishness of joys as yet untried, might tempt to tamper with the deardelight; whereas the plain statement of the most that opium couldminister to happiness, as contrasted with those false vain views of it, remind me of Tennyson's poetical '_Timbuctoo_, ' gorgeous as a newJerusalem in Apocalyptic glories, and the mean filth-obstructed kraalsdotted on an arid plain, to which, for very truthfulness, his soaringfancy drops plumbdown, as the shot eagle in '_Der Freischutz_. '

Let this then serve as a meagre sketch of my defunct treatise on opium:think not that I love the subject, curious and fertile though it be;perhaps, philosophically regarded, it is not a better one than _gin_;but ears polite endure not the plebeian monosyllable, unless indeed witha rëduplicated _n_, as Mr. Lane _will_ have it our whilom genie shouldbe spelt: accordingly, I magnanimously give up the whole idea, and amliberal enough, in this my dying determination, to sign a codicil, bequeathing opium to my executors. 

 * * * * *

Novelism is a field so filled with copy-holders, so populously tenantedin common, that it requires no light investigation to find a siteunoccupied, and a hero or heroine waiting to be hired. Nevertheless, Iseem to myself to have lighted on a rich and little-cultivated corner;imagining that the subject is a good one, because still untouched, founded on facts, and with amplifiable variations that border on theprobable. He that lionizes Stratford-on-Avon, will remember in one ofthe Shakspearian museums of that classic town, the pictured trance ofhapless

CHARLOTTE CLOPTON, as it was limned in death-seeming life. He will be shown the tombs ofher ancient family in Stratford church, and the door of that fatalvault; he will hear something of her noble birth--her finecharacter--her fascinating beauty--her short, innocent, eventfullife--her horrible death. Consider, too, the age and locality in whichshe lived, Elizabethan, Shakspeare's; the great contemporary charactersthat might be casually introduced; the mysterious suicide, in that dimdreadful pool at the end of the terraced walk among the cropped yews, ofher poor only sister, Margaret; equalled only in the miserable interestby that of Charlotte herself. And then for a plot: some darkly hintedparricide of years agone, in the generation but one preceding, has droptits curse upon the now guiltless, but, by the law of Providence, still-not-acquitted family; a parricide consequent on passionate love, differing religions, and the Montague-and-Capulet-school of hatingfeudal fathers--Theodore Clopton having been a Catholic, Alice Beauvoira Protestant; an introductory recountal of old Beauvoir's witheringcurse on the Clopton family for Theodore's abduction of his daughter, followed by the tragic event of the father and son, Cloptons', mutualhatred, and the former found in his own park with the broken point ofhis son's sword in him, the latter flying the realm: the curse has sleptfor a generation; and now two fair daughters are all that remain to thehigh-bred Sir Clement and his desponding lady, on whom the Beauvoirdescendant, a bitterest enemy, takes care to remind them the hoveringcurse must burst. This Rowland Beauvoir is the villain of the story, whose sole aim it is, after the fulfilment of his own libertine wishes, to see the curse accomplished: and Charlotte's love for a certain youngSaville, whom Beauvoir hates as his handsome rival in court patronage, as well as her pointed refusal of himself, gives new and present life tohis ancestral grudge. The lovers are espoused, and to make Sir Clement'sjoy the greater, Saville has interest sufficient to meet the oldknight's humour of keeping up the ancient family name, by getting itadded to his own; so that the Beauvoir hatred and parricidal curse seemlikely to be frustrated. But--the first hindrance to their union is poorsister Margaret's secret and infatuated love for that scheming villainRowland, her then too probable seduction, melancholic madness, andsuicide: successively upon this follow the last illnesses and deaths ofthe heart-broken old people, whom Rowland's dreadful ubiquity terrifiesin their very chamber of disease; and as the too likely consequence ofsuch accumulated sorrows on a creature of exquisite sensibility, Charlotte, the only remaining heiress of that ancient lineage, gradually, and with all the semblance of death, falls into her terribletrance. Rowland, who, through his intimacy with Margaret, knows all thesecret passages and sliding panels of the old mansion, and who therebygets mysterious admission whenever he pleases, comes into that silentchamber, and finds Saville mourning over his dead-seeming bride: she, all the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness;and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the cursecomplete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mindover apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed eyes, and gives aninvoluntary groan: having thus to all appearance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble-white, more corpse-like, more entranced than ever. Then, after long lingering, draws on the horrible catastrophe: acatastrophe, alas! as far at least as regards the heroine, _quite true_. Fully aware of all that is going on--the preparations for burial, themisery of her lover, the gratified malice of her foe--she is placed inthe coffin: the rites proceed, her heart-stricken espoused takes hislast long leave, she is carried to the grave, locked in the family vaultunder Stratford church, and there left alone, fearfully buried alive!And then, after a day or two, how shrieks and groans are heard in thechurch-yard by truant school-boys, and are placed to the account of thecurse: how, at last, her despairing lover demands to have the vaultopened; and the wretch Rowland--partly from curiosity, partly frommalice--determined to be there to see. As they and some church-followerscome near the door of the vault, they hear knockings, and desperateplunges within; Saville swoons away, the crowd falls back in terror, andthe hardened Rowland alone dares unlock the door. Instantly, in hershroud, mad, starved, with the flesh gnawed from her own fair shoulders, rushes out the maniac Charlotte: in phrensied half-reason she has seizedRowland by the throat, with the strength of insanity has strangled him, and then falls dead upon the steps of the vault! Of Saville--who, ashaving swooned, is spared all this scene of horror, and who leaves thecountry for ever--little or nothing is more said: and Clopton Hallremains a ruin, tenanted by ghosts and bats. 

P. S. If thought fit, after the fashion of Parisian charcoal-burners inill-ventilated bed-rooms, Charlotte may have recorded her experiences inthe vault, by writing with a rusty nail on the coffin-plates. 

Now, the gist of this Victor-Hugo tale of terror is its general truth: atrue end of a truly-named family, in its own neighbourhood, and longsince extinct: the house, now rëbuilt and rëstyled--the vault--thepicture of that poor unfortunate, (how unsearchable in real life oftenare the ways of Providence! how frequently the innocent suffer for theguilty!)--the gloomy well--and something extant of the story--remainsstill, and are known to some at Stratford. To do the thing graphically, one should go there, and gain materials on the spot: and nothing couldbe easier than to mix with them fifteenth-and-sixteenth-centurycostumes, modes of thought, and historical allusions; accessories of thehumorous, if the age demands it, might relieve the pathetic; Charlotte'sown innocence and piety might be made to soften her hard fate, with theassurance of a better life; Saville might become a wisely-resignedrecluse; and while the sins of the fathers are not gently, thoughjustly, visited on the children, the villain of the story meets his fullreward. 

Behold, then, hungry novel-monger, what grist is here for the mill!Behold, Sosii, what capabilities of orders from every library in thekingdom!--As doomed ones, and denounced ones, and undying ones, andunseen ones, seem to be such taking titles, what think you of the_Buried-alive-one_!--is it not new, thrilling, terrible? Who is he thatwould pander to the popular taste for details of dreadful, cruel, criminal, and useless abominations? "Should such a one as I?" Inemptying my head of the notion, I have ministered too much already: butthe sample of henbane is poured out, an offering to the infernal manes, and poisons no longer the current of my thoughts. Thy ghost, poorbeautiful Charlotte! shall not be disturbed by me; thy misfortunes sleepwith thee. Nevertheless, this tale about a more amiable Charlotte thanWerter's, so naturally also falling into the orthodox three-volumemeasure, is capable of being fabricated into something of deep, romantic, tragical interest; such a character, in such circumstances, insuch an age, and such a place: I commend it to those of the Anglo-Gallicschool, who love the domestically horrible, and delight in unsunnedsorrows: but, I throw not any one topic away as a waif, for the casualpasser-by to pick up on the highway. Shadows, indeed, are flung upon thewaters, but Phulax still holds the substance with tenacious teeth. 

Stop awhile, my dog and shadow, and generously drop the world a morsel;be not quite so bold when no one thinks of robbing you, and spare yourgasconade: the expediency of a sample has been cleverly suggested, andWE _ego et canis meus_, royal in munificence, do graciouslyaccede. Will this serve the purpose, my ever-pensive public? At anyrate, with some aid of intellect in readers, it is happily an extractwhich explains itself--the death of poor infatuated Margaret: we willsuppose preliminaries, and hazard the abrupt. 

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"That bitter speech shot home; it had sped like an arrow to her brain:it had flown to her heart like the breath of pestilence: for Rowland tobe rough, uncourteous, unkind, might cause indeed many a pang; but suchconduct had long become a habit, and woman's charitable soul excusedmoroseness in him, whom she loved more than life itself, more thanhonour. But now, when the dread laugh of a seemingly more righteousworld was daily, hourly, to be feared against her--when the cold fingerof scorn was preparing to be pointed at her fading beauty, and heraltered form--now, when indulgence is most due, and cruelty has a stingmore scorpion than ever--to be taunted with that once-kind tongue withhaving rightfully inherited _a curse_--to be told, in a sort of fiendishtriumph, that some ancient family grudge, forsooth, against her father'sfame, certainly as much as the selfish motives of a libertine professed, had warped the will of Rowland to her ruin--to know, to hear, yea, fromhis own lips, that the oft-repented crime of her warm and credulousyouth--of her too free, unsuspicious affection--had calmly beencontrived by the heart she clung to for her first, her only love--herewas misery, here was madness!

"Rowland, at the approach of footsteps, had hastily slunk away behindthe accustomed panel, and alone in the chamber was left poor Margaret:his last sneering speech, the mockery of his sarcastic pity, were stillhaunting her ear with echoes full of wretchedness; and she had utteredone faint cry, and sunk swooning on a couch, when her sister entered. 

"Charlotte, gentle Charlotte, had nothing of the hardness of a heroine;her mind, as her most fair body, was delicate, nervous, spiritualized;but the instinct of imperious duty ever gave her strength in the day oftrial. Long with an elder sister's eye had she watched and feared forMargaret; she had palliated natural levity by evident warmth ofdisposition, and excused follies of the judgment by kindness of theheart. Charlotte was no child; in any other case, she had been keener ofperception; but in that of a young, generous, and most loving sister, suspicion had been felt as a wickedness, and had long been lulledasleep: now, however, it awaked in all its terrors; and, as Margaret layfainting, the sorrowful condition of one soon to be a mother who neverwas a wife, was only too apparent. She touched her, sprinkled water onher pale face, and, as the fixed eyes opened suddenly, Charlotte startedat their strange wild glare: they glittered with a freezing brilliancy, and stared around with the vacuity of an image. Could Margaret be mad?She bit her tender lips with sullen rage, and a gnashing desperation;her cheek was cold, white, and clammy as the cheek of a corpse; herhair, still woven with the strings of pearl she often wore, hung downloose and dishevelled, except that on her flushing brow the crisp curlsstood on end, as a nest of snakes. And now a sudden thought seemed tostrike the brain; her eyes were set in a steady horror; slowly, withdread determination, as if inspired by some fearful being, other thanherself, uprose Margaret; and, while her frightened sister, shuddering, fell back, she glided, still gazing on vacancy, to the door: so, like aghost through the dark corridor, down those old familiar stairs, andaway through the Armory-hall; Charlotte now more calmly following, forher father's library, where his use was to study late, opened out of it, and surely the conscience-stricken Margaret was going in her penitenceto him. But, see! she has silently passed by; her hand is on the lock ofthe hall-door; with one last look of despairing recklessness behind her, as taking an eternal leave of that awe-struck sister, the door turnsupon its hinge, and she, still with slow solemnity, goes out. Whither, oh God!--whither? The night is black as pitch, rainy, tempestuous; theold knight's guests at Clopton Hall have gladly and right wiselypreferred even such questionable accommodation as the blue chamber, thedreary white apartment looking on the moat--nay, the haunted room of theparricide himself--to encountering the dangers and darkness of anight-return so desperate; but Margaret, in her gayest evening attire, near upon so foul a midnight in November, stalks like a spectre down thesplashy steps. Charlotte follows, calls, runs to her--but cannot rescuefrom some settled purpose, horribly suggested, that gentle fearfulcreature, now so changed. Suddenly in the dark she has lost her. Whichway did the maniac turn?--whither in that desolate gloom shall Charlottefly to find her? Guided by the taper still twinkling in her father'sstudy, she rushes back in terror to the hall; and then--Help, help!--torches, torches! The household is roused, dull lanterns glanceamong the shrubberies; pine-lights, ill-shielded from wind and rain bycap or cloak, are seen dotting the park in every direction, and danceabout through the darkness, like sportive wild-fires: Sir Clement inmoody calmness looks prepared for any thing the worst, like a man whoanticipates evil long-deserved; the broken-hearted mother is on herknees at the cold door-steps, striving to pierce the gloom with hereyes, and ejaculating distracted prayers: and so the live-longnight--that night of doubt, and dread, and dreariness--through bitterhours of confusion and dismay, they sought poor Margaret--and found hernot!

"But, with morning's light came the awful certainty. At the end of aterraced walk, mournfully shaded by high-cropped yews, stood an arbour, and behind it, half-hidden among rank weeds, was an old half-forgottenfountain; there, on many a sultry summer night, had Rowland met withMargaret, and there had she resolved in terrible remorse to perish. Withthe seeming fore-thought of reason, and the resolution of a phrensiedfortitude, she had bound a quantity of matted weeds about her face, andtwisted her hands in her fettering garments, that the shallow pool mightnot in cruel kindness fail to drown her; she lay scarcely half immersedin those waters of death; a few lazy tench floating sluggishly about, appeared to be curiously inspecting their ghastly, uninvited guest; andthe fragments of an enamelled miniature, with some torn letters in thehand-writing of Rowland Beauvoir, were found scattered on theoverflowing margin of the pool. "

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Well, unkindly whelp, if your bone has no pickings better than this, nota cur shall envy you the sorry banquet. Yet, had my genius been bettereducated in the science of French cookery, this might have been servedup with higher seasoning as a savoury _ragout_: but you get it insimplicity, scarce grilled; and in sooth, good world, it is easier tosneer at a novel than to imagine one; and far more self-complacency maybe gained by manfully affecting to despise the novelist, than by addingto his honours in the compliment of humble imitation. 

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Things supernatural have every where and every when exercised mortalcuriosity. Fear and credulity support the arms of superstition, fierceas city griffins, rampant as the lion and the unicorn; and forasmuch asno creature, Nelson not excepted, can truly boast of having never knownfear, and no man also--from polite Voltaire, shrewd Hume, LeviathanHobbes, and erudite Gibbon, down to the most stultifiedVan-Diemanite--can honestly swear himself free from the influence ofsome sort of faith, for thus much the marvellous and the terrible meetwith universal popularity. Now, one or two curious matters connectedwith those "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt ofin your philosophy, " which have even occurred to mine own self, (whereof, to gratify you, shall be a little more anon), have heretoforeinduced me to touch upon sundry interesting points, which, like pikemenround their chief, throng about the topic of

THE MARVELLOUS. 

A book, so simply titled, with haply underneath a gigantic note ofadmiration between two humble queries ?!? would positively, my worthypublisher, make your worship's fortune. For it should concern ghosts, dreams, omens, coincidences, good-and-bad luck, warnings, and truevaticinations: no childish collection, however, of unsupported trumpery, but authenticated cases staidly evidenced, and circumstantiallydetailed; no Mother Goose-cap's tales, no Dick the Ploughman's dreams, no stories from the '_Terrific Register_, ' nor fancies of hystericalfemales in Adult asylums; even Merlin witch-finders, and Taliesinsshould be excluded: and, in lieu of all such common-places, I shouldpropose an anecdotic treatise in the manner scientifical. Macnish's'_Philosophy of Sleep_, ' Scott's '_Demonology_, ' treatises onApparitions, and many a rare black-letter alchemical pamphlet, mightlend us here their aid; the British Museum is full of well-attestedghost-stories, and there are very few old ladies unable to add to thesupply: then, this ghost department might be climaxed by the author'sown experience; forasmuch as he is ready to avouch that a person's fetchwas heard by many, and seen by some, in an old country-house, a hundredmiles away from the place of death, at the instant of its happening. 

As to omens, aforesaid witness deposes that the sceptre, ball, and crosswere struck by lightning out of King John's hand, in the Schoolsquadrangle at Oxford, immediately on the accession of William theReformer; and all the world is cognusant that York Minster, the RoyalExchange, and the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire near aboutthe commencement of open hostility, among ruling powers, to our church, commerce, and constitution; and I myself can tell a tale of no less thaneight remarkable warnings happening one day to a poor friend, who diedon the next, which none could be expected to believe unless I deliveredit on oath as having been an eye-witness to the facts. Dreamsalso--strange, vague, mysterious word; there is a gloomy look in it, adreary intonation that makes the very flesh creep: the records of publicjustice will show many a murder revealed by them, as instance the RedBarn; more than one poor client, in the clutch of a "respectable"attorney, has been helped to his rights by their influence; fromAgamemnon and Pilate, down to Napoleon, the oppressors of mankind havein those had kindly warning. Dreams--how many millions false andfoolish, for the one proving to be true!--but that one, how clear, determinate, and lasting, as ministered by far other agency thanimagination taking its sport while reason slumbers! Who has not tales totell of dreams? A warning not to go on board such and such a ship--whichfounders; a strange unlikely scene fixed upon the mind, concerningfriends and circumstances miles away, exactly in the manner and at thetime of its occurrence; the fore-shown coming of an unexpected guest;the pourtrayed visage of a secret enemy: these, and others like these, many can attest, and I not least. And of other marvels, though here leftunconsidered, yet might much be said: truths so strange, that the pagesof romance would not trench on such extravagance; combinations sounlikely, that thrice twelve cast successively by proper dice, were butprobability to those. Thus, in authorial fashion, has the marvellousdwelt upon my mind; and thus would I suggest a hand-book thereof tocatering booksellers and the insatiable public. 

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Against bears in a stage-coach, pointers in a drawing-room, lap dogs ina _vis-à-vis_, and monkeys in a lady's boudoir, my love of comfort andpropriety enters strong protest; an emancipated parrot attracts mysympathy far less than bright-eyed children feeding their testy pet, forI dread the cannibal temptation of those soft fair fingers, when broughtinto collision with Polly's hook and eye; gigantic Newfoundlandersdragging their perpetual chains, larks and linnets trilling the faintsong of liberty behind their prison bars, cold green snakes stewing in aschool-boy's pocket, and dormice nestling in a lady's glove, summon myantipathies; a cargo of five hundred pigs, with whom I had once thehonour of sailing from Cork to London, were far from pleasant as_compagnons de voyage_; neither can I sleep with kittens in the room. Nevertheless, no one can profess truer compassion, truer friendship (ifyou will) for the animal creation: often have I walked on in weariness, rather than increase the strain upon the Rosinantes of an omnibus; andmy greatest school scrape was occasioned by thrashing the favoured scionof a noble house for cruelty to a cat. Such and such-like--for we learnfrom Æsop (Fable eighty-eight, to wit) that trumpeters deserve to beunpopular--is my physical zeal in the cause of poor dumb brutes: nor ismy regard for them the less in matters metaphysical. Bishop Butler, wemay all of us remember, in 'THE _Analogy_' argues that theobjector against a man's immortality must show good cause why thatwhich exists, should ever cease to exist; and, until that good cause beshown, the weight of probability is in favour of continual being. Now, for my part, I wish to be informed why this probability should not beextended to that innocent maltreated class, whom God's mercy made withequal skill, and sustains with equal care, as in the case of man, and--dare we add?--of angels. Doth He not feed the ravens? Do the younglions not gather what He giveth? Doth a sparrow fall to the groundwithout Our Father? and is not the unsinning multitude of Nineveh'syoung children climaxed with "much cattle?" It is true, there may bemighty difference between "the spirit of a man that goeth upward, andthe spirit of a beast that goeth downward in the earth:" but mark this, there _is_ a spirit in the beast; and as man's eternal heaven may lie insome superior sphere, so that temporarily designed for the lower animalsmay be seen in the renovated earth. It is also true, that St. Paul, arguing for the temporal livelihood of Christian ministers from the typeof "not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn, " asks, "Doth Godcare for oxen?"--or, in effect, doth He legislate (I speak soberly, though the sublime treads on the ridiculous, ) for a stable?--and theimplication is, "To thy dutiful husbandry, O man! such lesser cares areleft. " Sorry, righteously sorry, would it make any good man's heart tothink that the Creator had ceased to care for the meanest of hiscreatures: in a certain sense

 "He sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall;"

and, assured that carelessness in a just Creator of his poor dependentcreatures must be impossible, I submit that, critically speaking, somelaudable variation might be made in that text by the simpleconsideration that [Greek: melei] is not so strictly rendered "care for"as [Greek: kedetai]. Scripture, then, so far from militating against thepossible truth, that animals have souls, would seem, by a side-longglance, to countenance the doctrine: and now let us for a passing momentturn and see what aid is given to us by moral philosophy. 

No case can be conceived more hard or more unjust than that of asentient creature (on the hypothesis of its having no soul, noconscience, necessarily quite innocent), thrown into a world of crueltyand tyranny, without the chance of compensation for sufferingsundeserved. Neither can any good government be so partial, as (limitingthe whole existence of animals to an hour, a day, a year, ) to allow oneof a litter to be pampered with continual luxuries, and another to betortured for all its little life by blows, famine, disease--and in itslingering death by the scientific scalpels of a critical Majendie or acold-blooded Spallanzani. Remember, that in the so-called parallel caseof partialities among men--the this-world's choice of a Jacob, thethis-world's rejection of an Esau--the answer is obvious: there are twoscales to the balance, there is yet another world. Far be it from us tothink that all things are not then to be cleared up; that the innocentlittle ones of Kedar and the exterminated Canaanites will not then beheard one by one, and no longer be mingled up indiscriminately in anoverwhelming national judgment; that the pleas of evil education andexample, of hereditary taint and common usage, will be then thrown asideas vain excuse; and that eventual justice will not with facility explainevery riddle in the moral government of God. But in the case of soullessextinguished animals, there is, there can be no compensation, noexplanation; whether in pain or pleasure, they have lived and they havedied forgotten by their Maker, and left to the casual kindness orcruelty of, towards them at least, irresponsible masters. How differentthe view opened to us by the possibility of soul being apportioned invarious measure among the lower animals: there is a clue given "tojustify the ways of God to"--brutes: we need not then consider, with acertain French abbé, that they are fallen angels, doing penance fortheir sins; we need not, with old Pythagoras and latter Brahmins, account them stationed lodges, homes of transmigration for the spiritsof men in process of being purged from their offences: we need notregard them as Avatars of Vishnu, or incarnations of Apis, visibledeities craving the idolatries of India and Egypt. The truth commendsitself by mere simplicity: nakedness betrays its Eve-like innocence ofguile or error: those living creatures whom we call brutes and beasts, have, in their degree, the breath of God within them, as well as Hishandiwork upon them. And, candid theologian, tell me why--in thatMillenium so long looked-for, when, after a fiery purgation, this earthshall have its sabbath, and when those who for a time were "caught upinto the air, " descending again with their Lord and his ten thousandsaints, shall bodily dwell with others risen in the flesh for that happyseason on this renovated globe--tell me why there should not be sometithe of the animal creation made to rise again to minister in pleasure, as they once ministered in pain? And for the rest, the other nine, whathinders them from tenanting a thousand happy fields in other of thelarge domains of space? What hinders those poor dumb slaves fromenjoying some emancipate existence--we need not perhaps accord themmore of immortality than justice, demands for compensation--for adefinite time, a millennium let us think, in scores of those millionorbs that twinkle in the galaxy?

 Space stretches wide enough for every grain Of the broad sands that curb our swelling seas, Each separate in its sphere, to stand apart As far as sun from sun. 

Shall I then say what hinders?--the littleness of man's mind, refusingpossibility of room for those countless quadrillions; and theselfishness of his pride, scorning the more generous savage, whosedoctrine (certainly too lax in liberality) raises the beast to a levelwith mankind, and

 "Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company. "

Truly, the Creator's justice, and mercy, and the majesty of his kingdom, give hope of after-life to all creation: Saint Antony of Padua did wastetime in homilizing birds, beasts, and fishes; but may they not findblessings, though ignorant of priests?--And now, suffer me, in mycurrent fashion, to glance at a few other considerations affecting thistopic. It will be admitted, I suppose, that the lower animals possess, in their degree, similar cerebral or at least nervous mechanism withourselves; in their degree, I say; for a zoöphyte and a caterpillar havebrains, though not in the head; and to this day Waterton does not knowwhether he shot a man or a monkey, so closely is his nondescript linkedwith either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orangoutang. Brutes are nerved as we are, and uncivilized man possessesinstincts like them: all we can with any show of reason deny them ismoral sense, and in our arbitrary refusal of this, and our summarydisposal of what we are pleased to term instinct, we take credit toourselves for exclusive participation in that immaterial essence whichis called Soul. But is it, in candour, true that brutes have no moralsense? Obviously, since moral sense is a growing thing, and ascending inthe scale of being, and since man is its chief receptacle on earth, weought to be able to take the best instances of animal morals from thosecreatures which have come most within the influence of human example; aspets of every kind, but mainly dogs. Does not a puppy, that has stolen asweet morsel from some butcher's stall, fly, though none pursue him? Isa fox-hound not conscience-stricken for his harry of the sheep-fold? andwho will deny some sense of duty, and no little strength of affection, in a shepherd's dog? Have not Cowper's now historic hares displayed aneducated and unnatural confidence; and many a gray parrot, thoughlimited in speech, said many a witty thing?--Again, read some commoncollection of canine anecdotes: What essential difference is therebetween the affectionate watch kept by man over his brother's bed ofsickness, and that which has been known of more than one poor cur, whosesolicitude has extended even to dying on his master's grave? Thesoldier's faithful poodle licks his wounds upon the stormy battle-field;and Landseer's colley-dog tears up the turf, and howls the shepherd'srequiem. What real distinction can we make between a high sense of dutyin the captain who is the last to leave his sinking ship, and that inthe watchful terrier, whom neither tempting morsels nor menaced blowscan induce to desert the ploughman's smock committed to his care? Oncemore: Who does not recognise individuality of character in animals? Adog, or a horse, or a tame deer, or, in fact, any domesticated creature, will act throughout life, in a certain course of disposition, at leastas consistently as most masters: it will also have its whims and ways, likings and dislikings, habits, fears, joys, and sorrows; and, verily, in patience, courage, gratitude, and obedience, will put its monarch tothe blush. 

But upon this theme--meagre as the sketch may be, fanciful, illogical--my cursory notions have too long detained you. I had intendedbarely to have introduced a black-looking Greek composite, serving forname to an unwritten essay which we will imagine in existence as

PSYCHOTHERION, AN INCONCLUSIVE ARGUMENT ON THE SOULS OF BRUTES;

And my thoughts have run on thus far so little conclusively (I humblyadmit to you), that we will, to save trouble, leave the riddle asunsolved as ever, and gain no better advantage than thus having looselyadverted to another fancy of your author's mind. 

 * * * * *

Not yet is my mind a simple freeman, a private, unincumbered, individualself-possessor: its slaves are not yet all manumitted; I lack notsubjects; I am no lord of depopulated regions; albeit my aim is indeedakin to that of old Rufus, and Goldsmith's tyrannical Squire of Auburn;I wish to clear my hunting-grounds, to make a solitude, and call itpeace. Slowly, but still surely, am I working out that will. Meanwhile, however, there is no need to advertise for heroes; they are only toorife, clinging like bats to the curtains of my chambers of imagery, orwith attendant satellites hanging in bunches, as swarming bees abouttheir monarch, to the rafters of my brain. Selection is the hardestdifficulty; here is the labour, here the toil; because for justselection there should be good reasons. Now, amongst other mymultitudinous authorial projects, this perhaps is not the worst; namely, by a series of dissimilar novels, psychological rather than religious, and for interest's sake laid in diverse ages and countries, toillustrate separately the most rampant errors of the Papacy. Forexample, say that Lewis's '_Monk_' is a strong delineation of the evilsconsequent on constrained and unchosen celibacy; though its colouring bemeretricious, though its details offend the moralities of nature, stillit is a book replete to thoughtful minds with terrible teaching--be nothigh-minded, but fear. In like manner, guilty thoughts dropped uponinnocent young hearts in that foul corner, THE CONFESSIONAL, might make a stirring tale, or haply a series of them: the cowledhypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is all innocence; hisschemes of ambition, or avarice, or lust, slowly elaborated by thefiend-like purposes to which he puts his ill-used knowledge of the humanheart; his sacrilegious violation of the holy grievings made by mistakenpenitence. History should bring its collateral assistance: the MediceanQueens, Venice, bloody Spain, hard-visaged monks calmly directing theengines of torture, the poison of anonymous calumny, and dread secretsmore dreadfully betrayed, could furnish much of truthful precedent. Thebad obstructions placed between the sinner and his God by selfishpriestcraft; the souls that would return again, like Noah's weary dove, enticed by ravens to forsake the ark, mate with them, and feed on theirbanquet of corruption; the social, religious, philosophic, and eternalharms brought out in full detail; the progress of this world's misery inthe lives of the confessing, and of studious crime in the heart of theabsolver: a scene laid among the high Alps, and the sunny plains theytopple over; the time, that of some murderous Simon de Montfort; theactors, Waldensian saints, and demon inquisitors; the prominentcharacters, a plausible intriguing friar, (as of old a monk of Cluni, )whose ambition is the popedom, and whose conscience has no scrupleabout means, bloody, bad, vindictive, atheistic; and then his victims, ayouth that he trains from infancy to the sole end of poisoning, subtlyand slowly, all who stand in his path; a girl who loves this youth, andwho, flying from the foul friar in the day of temptation, betakes her tothe mountains, and ultimately saves her lover from his terribledestination in guilt, by hiding him in her own haven of refuge, thepersecuted little church; and with these materials to work upon, I needhardly detail to you an intricate plot and an obvious _dénouement_. 

This class of theme, it is probable, has exercised the talents of many;but as the evils of confessing to deceitful man, and of blind trust inhis deleterious advice, have not specifically met my eye, the subject isnew to me, and may be so to others. Still, I stay not now further toenlarge upon it; I must press on; and will not cruelly encourage thebirth of thoughts brought forth only to be destroyed, like fatherSaturn's babes--the anthropophagite. 

A good reason for selection at last presents itself. Sundry collateralancestors of mine [every body from Cain downwards must have hadancestors; so no quibbling, please, nor quarrelling about so exploded anabsurdity as family-pride, ] were lucky enough in days lang syne toappropriate to themselves, amongst other matters, a respectableallowance of forfeited monastic territory; and I know it by this token:that in yonder venerable chest of archives and muniments, rest in theirown dust of ages, duly and clearly assorted, all those abbey deeds fromthe times of Henry Beauclerc. Here's a fine unlooked-for opportunity ofmaking dull ancestral spots classic ground, famous among men; here's achance of immortalizing the crumbling ruins of an obscure, butinteresting, abbey-church; here's a fair field for dragging in all thatone knows or does not know, all that parchments can prove, or fancy caninvent, of redoubtable or reprobate progenitors, and investing the placeof their possessions with a glory beyond heraldry. Much is on my mind ofthe desperate evils consequent on the Romish rule of idol-worship: andwhy not lay my scene on the wild banks of the Swale, among the bleak, rough moors that stand round Richmond, and the gullies that run betweenthe Yorkshire hills? Why not talk about those names of gentle blood, familiar to the ear as household words, Uvedale and Scrope, Vavasour andRatcliffe? Why not press into the service of instructive novelism truthsstranger than fiction, among characters more marked, and names of highernote, than the whole hot-pressed family of the Fitzes?

All this might be accomplished, were it worth the worry, in

THE PRIOR OF MARRICK. 

And now for a story of idolatry. It seems an absurdity, an insanity; itis one--both. But think it out. Is it quite impossible, quiteincredible? Let me sketch the outline of so strange infatuation. Ourprior was once a good man--an easy, kind, and amiable: he takes the cowlin early youth, partly because he is the younger son of an unfightingfamily, and must, partly because he is melancholy, and will. Andwherefore melancholy? There was brought up with him, from the verynursery, a fair girl, the weeping orphan of a neighbouring squire, whohad buckled on his harness, and fallen in the wars: they loved, ofcourse, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: theywere too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter;still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needfulto each other, or more united. But--a hacking cough--a hectic cheek--awasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers ofdeath, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower:henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was--so thought he, asmany do--his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his presentsorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time, the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy atRome--true-healing godliness--alleviates his grief, and makes him lesssad, but not wiser; years pass, the desire of prëeminence in his ownsmall world has hitherto furnished incentives to existence, and he findhimself a prior too soon; for he has nothing more to live for. Yes:there is an object; the turmoil of small ambition with its petty caresis past, and the now motiveless man lingers in yearning thought on theonly white spot in his gloomy journey, the green oasis of his desertlife, that dream of early love. He has long loved the fair, quiet imageof our Lady of Marrick, unwittingly, for another Mary's sake;half-oblivious of the past in scheming for the present, he has knelt atmidnight before that figure of the Virgin-mother, and knew not why hetrembled; he thought it the ecstacy of devotion, the warm-gushing floodof calmness, which prayer confers upon care confessed. But now, he seesit, he knows it; there is, indeed, good cause: how miraculously thewhite marble face grows into resemblance with _hers!_ the same saintedlook of delicate unearthly beauty, the same white cheek, so still andunruffled even by a smile, the same turn of heavenly triumph on the lip, the same wild compassion in the eye! Great God--he loves again!--thatstaid, grave, melancholy man, loves with more than youthful fondness;the image is now dearer than the most sacred; there is a halo round it, like light from heaven: he adores its placid, eternal, changelessaspect; if it could move, the charm would half dissolve; he loves it--asan image! And then how rapturously joins he with the wondering choir ofmore stagnant worshippers, while they yield to this substantial form, this stone-transmigration of his love, this tangible, unpassionate, abiding, present deity, the holy hymns of praise, due only to the unseenGod! How gladly he sings her titles, ascribing all excellence to her!How tenderly falls he at her feet, with eyes lighted as in youth! Howearnestly he prays to his fixed image--_to_ it, not _through_ it, forhis heart is _there_! How zealously he longs for her honour, her worshipamong men--hers, the presiding idol of that Gothic pile, the hallowedLady, the goddess-queen of Marrick! Stop--can he do nothing for her, canhe venture nothing in her service? Other shrines are rich, other imagesdecked in gold and jewels; there is yet an object for his useless life, there are yet ends to be attained, ends--that can justify the means. Helongs for wealth, he plots for it, he dares for it: he plans lyingmiracles, and thousands flock to the shrine; he waylays dying men, and, by threatened dread of torments of the damned, extortionizes conscienceinto unjust riches for himself; he accuses the innocent, and reaps thefine; he connives at the guilty, and fingers the bribe. So wealth flowsin, and the altar of his idol is hung with cloth of gold, her diadem isalight with gems, costly offerings deck her temple, bending crowds kneelto her divinity. Is he not happy? Is he not content? Oh, no: aninsatiate demon has possessed him; with more than Pygmalion's insanity, he loves that image; he dreams, he thinks of that one unchanging form. The marvelling brotherhood, credulous witnesses of such deep devotion, hold him for a saint; and Rome, at the wish of the world, sends him, asto a living St. Eustatius, the patent of canonization: they praise him, honour him, pray to him; but he contemptuously (and they take it forhumility) spurns a gift which speaks of any other heaven than thepresence of that one fair, beautiful, beloved statue. A thought fillshim, and that with joy: he has heard of sacrifices in old time, immolations, offerings up of self, as the highest act of a devoutworshipper; he cares not for earth nor for heaven; and one night, in hisenthusiastic vigils, the phrensy of idolatry arms that old man's ownweak hand against himself, and he falls at the statue's feet, self-murdered, _its_ martyr. 

Here were scope for psychology; here were subtle unwindings of motive, trackings of reason, intricate anatomizations of the heart. All ages, before these last in which we live, have been worshippers, even toexcess, of "unknown gods, " "too superstitious:" we, upon whom the endsof the world are fallen, may be thought to be beyond a danger into whichthe wisest of old time were entrapped: we scarcely allow that theBrahmin may, notwithstanding, be a learned man and a shrewd, when we seehim fall before his monster; we have not wits to understand how theBabylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman dynasties could be so besotted. For this superior illumination of mind, let us thank not ourselves, butthe Light of the world; and, warned by the history of ages, let usbeware how we place created things to mediate between us and the mostHigh; let us be shy of symbolic emblems--of pictures, images, observances--lest they grow into forms that engross the mind, and fillit with a swarm of substantial idols. 

Now, this tale of the '_Prior of Marrick_' would, but for the presentpremature abortion, have seen daylight in the form of anauto-biography--the catastrophe, of course, being added by somebrother-monk, who winds up all with his moral: and to get at thisauto-biographical sketch--a thing of fragments and wild soliloquies, incidentally laying bare the heart's disease, and the poisonousbreathings of idolatrous influence--I could easily, and after the truenovelist fashion, fabricate a scheme, somewhat as follows: Let me gogayly to the Moors by rail, coach, or cart, say for a sportsman'spastime, a truant vicar's week, or an audit-clerk's holiday: I drop uponthe ruined abbey, now indeed with scarcely a vestige of its formerbeauty remaining, but still used as a burial-place; being a bit of anantiquary, I rout up the sexton, (sexton, cobbler, and generalhuckster, ) resolved to lionize the old desecrated precinct: I find thesexton a character, a humourist; he, cobbler-like, looks inquisitivelyat my caoutchouc shooting-shoes, and hints that he too is an artist inthe water-proof line; then follows question as how, and rejoinder asthus. Our sexton has got a name among his neighbours for his capitaldouble-leather brogues, warranted to carry you dry-shod through a river;and, warmed by my brandy-flask and _bonhomie_, considering me moreoverlittle likely to set up a rival shop, cunningly communicates his secret:he puts parchment between the leathers--Parchment, my good man? wherecan you get your parchment hereabouts? I spoke innocently, for I thoughtonly of ticketing some grouse for my friends southward: but the questionstaggered my sexton so sensibly, that I came to the uncharitableconclusion--he had stolen it. And then follows confession: how, amongthe rubbish in a vault, he had found a small oak chest--broke itopen--no coins, no trinkets, "no nothing, "--except parchment; a lot ofleaves tidily written, and--warranted to keep out the wet. A fewshillings and a tankard make the treasure mine, I promising as extra tosend a huge bundle of ancient indentures in place of the preciousmanuscript. Thus, in the way of Mackenzie's '_Man of Feeling_, ' webecome fragmentary where we fear to be tedious; and so, in a goodhistoric epoch, among the wars of the Roses, surrounded by friars andnuns, outlaws and border-riders, chivalrous knights and sturdy bowyers, consign I to the oblivescent firm of Capulet and Co. My happilydestroyed '_Prior of Marrick_. '

 * * * * *

A crank boat needs ballast; and of happy fortune is it for a dispositiontowards natural levity, when educational gravity has helped to steadyit. Upon the vivacious, let the reflective supervene: to the gay, sufferin its season the addition of the serious. Amongst other wholesometopics of of meditation--for wholesome it is to the healthy spirit, although of some little danger to the presumptuous and inflated--thestudy of the sure word of Prophecy has more than once excited thewriting propensity of your author's mind. On most matters it has been myfate, rather from habits of incurable revery than from any want ofopportunities, to think more than to read; and therefore it is, withvery due diffidence, that as far as others and their judgments areconcerned, I can ever hope to claim originality or novelty. To my ownconscience, however, these things are reversed; for contemplation hasproduced that as new to my own mind, which may be old to others deeperread, and has thought those ideas original, which are only so to its ownfancy. Very little, then, must such as I reasonably hope to add onProphetical Interpretation; the Universal Wisdom of two millenariescannot be expected to gain any thing from the passing thought of ahodiernal unit: if any fancies in my brain are really new, and hithertounbroached upon the subject, it can scarcely be doubted but that theyare false; so very little reliance do principles of catholicity allow tobe placed upon "private interpretations. "

With thus much of apology to those alike who will find, and those whowill not find, any thing of novelty in my notions, I still do notwithhold them. By here a little and there a little, is the general mindinstructed: it would be better for the world if every mighty tome reallycontributed its grain. 

The prophecies of Holy Writ appear to me to have one great peculiarity, distinguishing them from all other prophecies, if any, real orpretended; and that peculiarity I deferentially conceive to be this:that, whereas all human prophecies profess to have but one fulfilment, the divine have avowedly many true fulfilments. The former may indeedlight upon some one coincidence, and may exult in the accident as aproof of truth; the latter bounds as it were (like George Herbert'ssabbaths) from one to another, and another, through some fortycenturies, equally fulfilled in each case, but still looking forwardwith hope to some grander catastrophe: it is not that they are looselysuited, like the Delphic oracles, to whatever may turn up, but thatthey, by a felicitous adaptation, sit closely into each era which theArchitect of Ages has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to aloose bag, which would hold and involve with equal ease almost anycircumstance; biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into which alone, though not all similar in perfection, its own true casts will fit: oragain, in another view of the matter, accept this similitude: let theAll-seeing Eye be the centre of many concentric circles, beholdingequally in perspective the circumference of each, and for accordancewith human periods of time measuring off segments by converging radii:separately marked on each segment of the wheel within wheel, in the wayof actual fulfilment, as well as type and antitype, will appear itssatisfied word of prophecy, shining onward yet as it becomes more andmore final, until time is melted in eternity. Thus, it is perhaps notimpossible that every interpretation of wise and pious men may alike beright, and hold together; for different minds travel on the differentperipheries. So our Lord (to take a familiar instance) speaks of hissecond advent in terms equally applicable to the destruction of onecity, of the accumulated hosts at Armageddon, and of this materialearth: Antiochus and Antichrist occur prospectively within the same pairof radii at differing distances; and, in like manner and varyingdegrees, may, for aught we can tell, such incarnations of the evilprinciple as papal Rome, or revolutionary Europe, or infidelCosmopolitism; or, again, such heads of parties, such indexes of thegeneral mind, as a Cæsar, an Attila, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a--whoeverbe the next. So also of hours, days, years, eras; all may and do cöexistin harmonious and mutual relations. Good men, those who combine prayerwith study, need not fear necessary difference of result, from holdingdifferent views; the grand error is too loosely generalizing; a littlecircle suits our finite ken; we cannot, as yet, mentally span theuniverse. These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce alikely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given entertainment, andwhich, with others of a similar sort, were once to have come forth in anessay-form, headed

THE SEVEN CHURCHES;

moreover, for aught that has come across my reading, to be additionallystyled '_A New Interpretation, for these Latter Days_. ' Without desiringto do other than quite confirm the literal view, as having relatedprimarily to those local churches of old times, geographically in AsiaMinor; without attempting to dispute that they may have an individualreference to varieties of personal character, and probably of differentChristian sects; I imagine that we may discover, in the Apocalypticprospect of these seven churches, an historical view of Christianity, from the earliest ages to the last: beginning as it did, purely, warmly, and laboriously, with the apostolic emblematic Ephesus, and to end withthe "shall He find faith on earth" of lukewarm Laodicea: thus Smyrnawould symbolize the state of the church under Diocletian, the"tribulation ten days:" Pergamus, perhaps the Byzantine age, "whereSatan's seat is" the Balaam and Balak of empire and priesthood;Thyatira, the avowed commencement of the Papacy, "Jezebel, " &c. ; Sardis, the dreary void of the dark ages, the "ready to die;" Philadelphia, therise of Protestantism, "an open door, a little strength;" and Laodicea, (the riches of civilization choking the plant of Christianity, ) itsdecline, and, but for the Founder's second coming, its fall; if, indeed, this were possible. 

The elucidation of these several hints might show some strikingconfirmations of the notion; which, as every thing else in this book, would humbly claim your indulgence, reader, for my sketches must berapid, and their descriptions brief. Concurrently, however, with this, (which I know not whether any prophetic scholiasts have mentioned ornot, ) there may be deduced a still further interpretation, equally, asfar as I am concerned, underived from the lucubrations of others. Thisother interpretation involves a typical view of the generalcharacteristics of Christendom's seven true churches, as they are to befound standing at the coming of their Lord; the Asiatic seven may beassimilated, in their religious peculiarities, with the nationalProtestant churches of modern Europe: what order should be preserved inthis assimilation, unless indeed it be that of eldership, it might bedifficult to decide; but, excluding those communities which idol-worshiphas unchurched, and leaving out of view such anomalies as Americapresents, having no national religion, we shall find seven true churchesnow existing, between which and the Asiatics many curious parallelsmight be run: the seven are, those of England, Scotland, Holland, Prussia, perhaps Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany. Without professing tobe quite confident as to the list, the idea remains the same: it is buta light hint on a weighty subject, demanding more investigation than myslender powers can at present compass. It is merely thrown out asundigested matter; a crude notion let it rest: if ever I aspire to thedignity and dogmatism of a theological teacher, it must be after moreand deeper inquiry of the Newtons, Faber, Frere, Croly, Keith, and otherlearned interpreters, than it is possible or proper to make in a hurry:volumes have been, and volumes might be again, written for and againstany prophecy unfulfilled; it is dangerous to teach speculations; for, iffound false, they tend to bring holy truths into disrepute. Let me thenput upon the shelf, as a humble layman should, my hithertounaccomplished prophetical treatise; and receive its mention for littlemore than my true revelation of another phase of authorship. 

 * * * * *

And many like attempts have been hazarded by me in the mode theological;though, from some cause or other, they have mostly fallen abortive. Weremention here made of the more completed efforts of your author's mind, in this walk of literature, or of others, it might too evidently laybare the mystery of my mask; a piece of secret information intended notas yet to be bestowed. But this book--purporting to be the medley of mymind, the _bonâ fide_ emptying of its multifarious fancies--must ofnecessity, if honest, pourtray all the wanings and waxings of anever-changing lunar disposition: so, haply you shall turn from a play toa sermon, from a novel to a moral treatise, from a satire or an epigramto a religious essay. Such and so inconsistent is authorial man. Herethen, in somewhat of order, should have followed lengthily various otherwritings of serious import, half-fashioned, and from conflicting reasonsleft--perhaps for ever--half-finished. But considering the crude andapparently careless nature of this present book, and taking into accountthe solemn and responsible manner in which such high topics oughtinvariably to be treated, I have struck out, without remorse or mercy, all except a mere mention of the subjects alluded to. The contiguity oflighter matter demands this sacrifice; not that I am one of those whodeem a cheerful face and a prayerful heart incongruous: there is dangerin a man, however religious, when his brow lowers, and his cheek isstern; so did Cromwell murder Charles; so did Mary (though bigoted, sincere, ) consign Cranmer to the flames and Jane to the scaffold:innocence and mirth are near of kin, and the tear of penitence is nostranger to the laughter-loving eye. But I ramble as usual. Let itsuffice to say, that in accordance with common prejudices, I suffer mymind to be shorn of its consecrated rays; for albeit my moral censor hasspared the prophetical ideas, and one or two other serious sobrieties, on the ground that, although they are mere hints, they are at all eventshints of good, still more experimental and more hazardous pieces ofbiblical criticism have been not unwisely immolated. The full cause ofthis will appear in the mere title of the first of these half-attemptedessays, viz:

THE WISDOM OF REVISION;

whereof my predication shall be simply and strictly _nil_. 

The next piece of serious study, as yet little more than a root in mymind, was to have fructified in the form of

HOMELY EXPOSITIONS, or domestic readings in Scripture for daily use in family worship, withan easy, sensible, useful sort of commentary; a book calculatedexpressly for the understandings, wants, vices, temptations, andpeculiarities of household servants, and quite opposed to the usualplans of injuriously raising doubts to lay them, of insisting uponobsolete Judaisms, of strict theological controversy, of enlarging tosatiety on the meaning of passages too obvious to require explanation, and ingeniously slurring over those which really need it; indeed, ofpursuing the courses generally adopted by the mass of commentators. 

A further notion extended to

LAY SERMONS, whereof are many written: their principal peculiarities consist in beingeach of a quarter-hour length, as little as possible regarding Jews andtheir didactic histories, and, as much as might be, crowding ideas, andimages, and out-of-the-way knowledge of all sorts, into the good serviceof illustrating Gospel truths. 

Another religious essay has been relinquished, although to a greatdegree effected, from the apprehension that it may suggest matterfanciful or false: also, in part, from the material being perhaps of tooslender a character to insist upon. Its name stood thus, SCRIPTURAL PHYSICS;

being an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Holy Writ in matters ofnatural science; for example, cosmogony, geology, the probable centre ofthe earth, the vitality and circulation of the blood, hints of magnetismand electricity, a solar system, a plurality of worlds, the earth'sshape, inclined axis, situation in space, and connection with otherspheres, the separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics, much of recondite natural history:--all these can be easily proved to bealluded to in detached, or ingeniously compared, passages of the HebrewScriptures. It is very likely, however, that Huntington has anticipatedsome of this, although I have never met with his writings; and a greatdeal more of it is mentioned in notes and sermons which many have reador heard. Until, therefore, I become surer of neither invading theprovinces of others, nor of detracting from their wisdom, let thoseill-written fancies still lie dormant in my desk. 

A fifth tractate on things theological, still in the egg state, was tohave been indued with the rather startling appellation of

AN APOLOGY FOR HEATHENISM;

especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth to tell, is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed amongthe moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to havemany objects of veneration than none, and that, although idol-worship isa dreadful sin, still it is not so utterly hopeless as actualungodliness. That, among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicatedthe true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more modernunworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the difference inpunishments comparing that of their criminalities. Showing also that, however corrupted afterwards by impure rites and fatuous iniquities, heathenism was, in its most ancient form, little more than thehieroglyphic dress of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazenserpent, by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after themanner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent withphilosophy and religion; by the way, in which Egyptian priests satisfiedso good and shrewd, though credulous, a mind as that of Herodotus; byHesiod's '_Theogony_;' by the practical testimony of the whole educatedworld in earliest times to the deep meaning involved in idolatrousrites; by the mysteries of Eleusis in particular; by the characters ofall most enlightened heathens--as Cicero, Socrates, andPlato--(half-convinced of the Godhead's unity, and still afraid todisavow His plurality, ) contrasted with those of the school of Pyrrho, and Lucretius, and the later Epicureans. The possibility of earlyallusions to the Trinity, as "Let us make man, " _etc. _, having led tothe idea of more than one God; and if so, in some sort, its veniality. 

All the above might be applied with some force, and, if so, with nolittle value, to modern false semblances of religion, and non-religion;to Roman Catholicism, with its images, its services in an unknowntongue, its symbols, its adoption of heathen festivals, its actualplacing of many Gods in the throne of One; to Mammonism, as practicallya religion as if the golden calf of Babylon were standard at Cornhill;to Voluptatism--if I may fabricate a name for pleasure-hunters, following still, with Corybantic fury, the orgic revels of Osiris orAstarte: in brief, to all the shades of human heresy, on this side or onthat of the golden mean, the worship of one true God, as revealed to usin His three mysterious characters. 

But, query? Has not all this, and the very title, for any thing I know, been done already by another, by a wiser? and, if so, by whom?--Speak, some friend: it is the misfortune of mere thinkers (and this presentamygdaloid mass, this breccia book, exemplifies it well) to stumblefrequently upon fancies too good not to have been long ago appropriatedby others like-minded. A read, or heard, hint may be the unerring clue, and we vainly imagine some old labyrinth to be our new discovery:education renders up the master-key, and we come to regard ancienttreasuries as wealth of our own amassing, from which we deem it ourright to filch as recklessly as he from the mint of Croesus, who sofilled his pockets--ay, his mouth--that we read he [Greek: hebebusto]. Who, in this age of literature, can be fully condemned, or heartilyacquitted of plagiarism? An age--and none so little in advance or inarrear of it as I--of easy writing and discursive reading, of ideasunpatented, and books that have outlived copy-right. But this hasdetained us long enough: for the present, my brain is quit of itsheathenish exculpations: let us pass on; many regiments are yet to bereviewed; their uniforms [_Hibernicè_] are various, but their flag isone. 

A last serious subject--(they grow tedious)--is a fair field foringenious explanation and Oriental poetry, THE SIMILES OF SCRIPTURE:

(of course "similes" is an English word: the author of a recent '_Essayon Magna Charta_' has been _learned_ enough to write it "similæ, " forwhich original piece of Latinity let him be congratulated; I safelyfollow Johnson, who would have roared like a lion at "similia;" and, though Shakspeare does write it "similies, " it may stoutly be contendedthat this is of mixed metal, and that Matthew Prior's "similes" is thepurer sample: all the above being a praiseworthy parenthesis. )

The similes of Scripture, then, were to have been demonstrated apt andhappy: for there is indeed both majesty, and loveliness, and propriety, and strict resemblance in them. "As a rolling thing before thewhirlwind, "--"as when a standard-bearer fainteth"--"as the rushing ofmighty waters, "--"as gleaning grapes when the vintage is done, "--"as adream, "--"as the morning dew, "--"as"--but the whole book is a garden ofsimilitudes; they are "like the sand upon the sea-shore for multitude. "It is, however, too true, that often-times the baldness of translationdeprives poetry, Eastern especially, of its fervour, its glow, its gush, and blush of beauty: to quote Aristotle's example, it too frequentlyconverts the rosy-fingered Morn into the red-fisted; and so the poetryof dawning-day, with its dew-dropped flowers, its healthy refreshment, its "rosy-fingers" drawing aside the star-spangled curtain of night, falls at once into the low notion of a foggy morning, and is suggestiveonly of red-fisted Abigails struggling continuously with the deposits ofa London atmosphere. In like manner, (for all this has not been anepisode beside the purpose, ) many a roughly rendered similitude ofScripture might be advantageously vindicated; local diversities andOrientalisms might be explained in such a treatise: for example, in the'_Canticles_, ' the "beloved among the sons, " is compared with anapple-tree among the trees of the wood:" now, amongst us, an apple-treeis stunted and unsightly, and always degenerates in a wood; whereas theEastern apple-tree, probably one of the citron class, (to be morecorrect, ) may be a magnificent monarch of the forest. "Camphire, " to aWestern mind, is not suggestive of the sweetest perfume, and perhapsthe word may be amended into the marginal "cypress, " or cedar, or someother: as "a bottle in the smoke, " loses its propriety for an image, until shown to be a wine-skin. "Who is this that cometh out of thewilderness, like pillars of smoke?"--probably intending theswiftly-rushing columns of _sand_ flying on the wings of the whirlwind. "Thine eyes are like the fish-pools in Heshbon, " might well be softenedinto fountains--tearful, calm, resplendent, and rejoicing; and inshowing the poetic fitness of comparing the bride to a landscape, itmight clearly be set out how emblematic of Jewish millennial prosperityand of Christian universality, that bride was; while comparisons of alike un-European imagery might be taken from other Eastern poets, whowill not scruple to compare that rare beauty, a straight Grecian nose, with a tower, and admire above all things the Cleopatra-coloured hairwhich they call purple, and we auburn. Very much might be done in thisvein of literature, but it must be by a man at once an Oriental scholarand a natural poet: the idioms of ancient and modern times should bemore considered, and something of apologetic explanation offered to anEnglish ear for phrases such as "the mountains skipping like rams, " "thehorse swallowing the ground with fierceness, " and represented as beingafraid as a grasshopper. " A thousand like instances could be displayedwith little searching; let the above be taken as they are meant, forgood, and as of zeal for showing the best of books to the bestadvantage: but it will appear that this essay trenches on the former oneso slenderly hinted at, as '_The Wisdom of Revision_, ' therefore hasbeen stated too much at length already. Let it then rest on the shelftill a better season. For this time, good reader, I, following up theobject of self-relieving, thank you for your patience, and will turn toother themes of a more sublunary aspect. 

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One of the most natural and indigenous productions of a true author'smind, is, by common consent, an epic poem: verily, a wearisome, unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writing. Nevertheless, let my candourhumbly acknowledge that, for the larger canticle of two mortal days, Iwas brooding over, and diligently brewing up, a right happy, capital, and noble-minded thesis, no other than

HOME. 

Alas, for the epidemy to which, few can doubt, ideas are subject! Alas, for the conflict of prolific geniuses, wherewith the world's quiet isdisturbed! not impossibly, this very book now in progress of inditingwill come to be classed as a "Patch-work, " an "Olla Podrida, " a "Bookwithout a name, " or some other such like _rechauffée_ publication;whereas I protest its idea to be exclusively mine own, and conceivedlong before its seeming congeners saw the light in definiteadvertisements--at least to my beholding. And similarly went it with mypoor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings, and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditativelay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array ofmetrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me inblack and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's '_Home, anEpic_. ' So, as in the case of '_Nero_, ' and haply of other subjects, hadit come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another falsestart; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have beenself-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, theflag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly intothe pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and allthose pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such asubject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame, besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, _if_ only one could manage itwell enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, andAkenside. Well, it was a mental mortification; for I am full of moralland-marks, and would not (poetically speaking) for the world moverooted termini into other people's grounds. Whether the field has beenwell or ill preoccupied I wot not, having neither seen the poem norheard its maker's name: therefore shall my charity hope well of it, andmourn over the unmerited oblivion which generally greets modernpoetry--yea, upon its very natal-day. Nevertheless, as an upright manwill never wish barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determineat all times to claim independently his own: to be robbed, and notresent it (I speak foolishly), is the next mean thing after pilferingitself; and rash will be thy daring, O literary larcener! (can suchthings be?) if thou art found unpermissively appropriating even suchsorry spoil as these poor seedlings of still possible volumes. 

Prose and verse are allowed to have some disguising differences, atleast in termination; and as we must not--so hints the publictaste--spoil honest prose, bad as it may be, with too much intermixtureof worse verse, it will be prudent in me to be sparing of my specimens. Yet, who will endure so _staccato_ a page of jerking sentences as aconfirmed synopsis?--"Well, any thing rather than poetry, " says theworld; so, for better or worse, I will jot down prosaically a few of myall but impromptu imaginings on Home. 

After some general propositions, it would be proper to indulge theorthodoxy of invocation; not to Muses, however, but to the subjectitself; for now-a-days, in lieu of definite deities, our worship hasregard to theories, doctrines, and other abstract idolisms: andthereafter should follow at length an historical retrospect of domesticlife, from the savage to the transition states of hunters and warriors;Nimrods and New Zealanders; Actæons and Avanese, Attilas, Roderics, andall the Ercles' vein or that of mad Cambyses, Hindoos and Fuegians, Greece, Egypt, Etruria, and Troy, in those old days when funds and taxeswere not invented, but people had to fight for their dinner, and betheir own police: so in a due course of circumconsideration to moremodern conditions, from ourselves as central civilization, to CochinChina, and extreme Mexico, to Archangel and Polynesia. 

Divers national peculiarities of the _physique_ of homes; as, Tartars'tents, Esquimaux snow-pits, Caffre kraals, Steppe huts, South-seapalm-thatch, tree-villages, caves, log-cabins, and so forth. Then, awide view of the homes of higher society, first Continental, afterwardsBritish through all the different phases of comfort to be found inheath-hovels, cottages, ornées, villas, parsonage-houses, squirealities, seats, town mansions, and royal palaces. Thus, with a contrastive peepor two about the feverish neighbourhood of a factory, up this mustyalley, and down that winding lane, we should have considered briefly allthe external accidents of home. The miserable condition of the homeless, whether rich or poor; an oak with its tap-root broken, a house onwheels, a boat without a compass, and all that sort of thing: togetherwith due declamation about soldiers spending twenty years in India, shipwrecked Robinson Crusoes far from native Hull, cadets going outhopelessly forever, emigrants, convicts, missionaries, and all otherabsentees, voluntary or involuntary. Tirades upon abject poverty, wantonaffluence, poor laws, mendicancy, and Ireland; not omitting somethrilling cases of barbaric destitution. 

Now come we lawfully to descant upon matters more mental andsentimental--the _metaphysique_ of the subject--the pleasures and painsof Home. As thus, most cursorily: the nursery, with its dear innocentjoys; the school-boy, holiday feelings and scholastic cruelties; thedesk-abhorring clerk; the over-worked milliner; the starving family offactory children, and of agricultural labourers, and of workers in coalmines and iron furnaces, with earnest exhortations to the rich to pourtheir horns of plenty on the poor. England, once a safer and a happierland, under the law of charity: now fast verging into a despoticcentralized system, kept together by bayonets and constables' staves. Home a refuge for all; for queens and princes from their cumbrous state, as well as for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of love, and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confidence, religion, open-heartedness, communion of interest, absence of selfishness, and soon: the honoured father, due subordination, and results; the lovingwife, obedient children, and cheerful servants. Absolute, though mostkind, monarchy the best government for a home; with digressions aboutAustria and China, and such laudable paternal rule; and _contra_, bittercastigation of republican misrule, its evils and their results, forwhich see Old Athens and New York, and certain spots half-way betweenthem. 

The pains of home: most various indeed, caused by all sorts of oppositeharms--too much constraint or too little, open bad example or impossiblegood example, omissions and commissions, duty relaxed by indulgence, andduty tightened into tyranny; but mainly and generally attributable tothe non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. The spoiledchild, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked passions, dissipation, crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, as former friends, relatives, flatterers, and busy parasites, undermining that bond of confidencewithout which home falls to pieces; the gloomy spirit of reserve, discouraging every thing like generous open-heartedness; menialinfluences lowering their subject to their own base level; discords, religious, political, and social; the harmful consequence ofover-expenditure to ape the hobbies or grandeur of the wealthier;foolish education beyond one's sphere, as the baker's daughter takinglessons in Italian, and opera-stricken butcher's-boys strumming theguitar; immoral tendencies, gambling, drinking, and other dissipations;and the aggregate of discomforts, of every sort and kind; with cures forall these evils; and to end finally by a grand climax of supplication, invocation, imprecation, resignation, and beatification, in the regularcrash of a stout-expiring overture. 

It's all very well, objects reader, and very easy to consider this done;but the difficulty is--not so much to do it, answers writer, as toescape the bother of prolixity by proving how much has been done, andhow speedily all might be even completed, had poor poesy in theseticketing times only a fair field and no disfavour; for there is at handgood grist, ready ground, baked and caked, and waiting for its eaters. But in this age of prose-devouring and verse-despising, hardy indeedshould I be, if I adventured to bore the poor, much-abused, uncomplaining public with hundreds of lines out of a dormant epic; thevery phrase is a lullaby; it's as catching as a yawn; well will it befor me if my thread-bare domino conceals me, for whose better fame couldbrook the scandal of having fathered or fostered so slumbering anembryo?--Let then a few shreds and patches suffice--a brick or two forthe house: and verily I know they will, be they never so scanty; forwhat man of education does not now entertain a just abhorrence of theMuses, the nine antiquated maiden aunts destined for ever to bepensioned on that money-making nice young man, Mammon's greatheir-at-law, Prose Prose, Esq. ?

With humblest fear, then, and infinite apology, behold, in all soberseriousness, what the labour of such a file as I am might betimes workinto a respectable commencement; I don't pretend it _is_ one; but_valeat quantum_, take it as it stands, unweeded, unpruned, uncared-for, unaltered, Home, happy word, dear England's ancient boast, Thou strongest castle on her sea-girt coast, Thou full fair name for comfort, love, and rest, Haven of refuge found and peace possest, Oasis in the desert, star of light Spangling the dreary dark of this world's night, All-hallowed spot of angel-trodden ground Where Jacob's ladder plants its lowest round, Imperial realm amid the slavish world, Where Freedom's banner ever floats unfurl'd, Fair island of the blest, earth's richest wealth, Her plague-struck body's little all of health, Home, gentle name, I woo thee to my song, To thee my praise, to thee my prayers belong: Inspire me with thy beauty, bid me teem With gracious musings worthy of my theme: Spirit of Love, the soul of Home thou art, Fan with divinest thoughts my kindling heart; Spirit of Power, in pray'rs thine aid I ask, Uphold me, bless me to my holy task; Spirit of Truth, guide thou my wayward wing; Love, Power, and Truth, be with me while I sing. 

_V'la_: my consolation is that somewhere may be read, in hot-pressedprint, too, many worse poeticals than these, which, however, ninereaders out of ten will have had the worldly wisdom to skip; and thetenth is soon satiated: yet a tithe is something, at least so think themodern Levites; so, then, on second thoughts, a victim who is so good alistener must not be let off quite so cheaply. However, to vary a littlethis melancholy musing, and to gild the compulsory pill, Reserve shallbe served up sonnet-wise. (P. S. I love the sonnet, maligned as it isboth by ill-attempting friend and semi-sneering foe: of course, in ourepic, Reserve ambles not about in this uncertain rhyme, but duly stalksabroad in the uniform dress; iambically still, though extricated fromthose involutions, time out of mind the requisite of sonnets. ) Standforth to be chastised, unpopular

RESERVE. 

 Thou chilling, freezing fiend, Love's mortal bane, Lethargic poison of the moral sense, Killing those high-soul'd children of the brain, Warm Enterprise and noble Confidence, Fly from the threshold, traitor--get thee hence! Without thee, we are open, cheerful, kind; Mistrusting none but self, injurious self, Of and to others wishing only good; With thee, suspicions crowd the gloomy mind, Suggesting all the world a viperous brood That acts a base bad part in hope of pelf: Virtue stands shamed, Truth mute misunderstood, Honour unhonoured, Courage lacking nerve, Beneath thy dull domestic curse, Reserve. 

Without professing much tendency to the uxorious, all may blamelesslyconfess that they see exceeding beauty in a good wife; and we need neverapologize for the unexpected company of ladies: at off-hand then letthis one sit for her portrait. Enduring listener, will the followingserve our purpose in striving worthily to apostrophize

THE WIFE. 

 Behold, how fair of eye, and mild of mien, Walks forth of marriage yonder gentle queen: What chaste sobriety whene'er she speaks, What glad content sits smiling on her cheeks, What plans of goodness in that bosom glow, What prudent care is throned upon her brow, What tender truth in all she does or says, What pleasantness and peace in all her ways! For ever blooming on that cheerful face Home's best affections grow divine in grace; Her eyes are ray'd with love, serene and bright; Charity wreathes her lips with smiles of light; Her kindly voice hath music in its notes; And heav'n's own atmosphere around her floats!

Thus, wife-like, for better or worse, is the above _portrait charmant_consigned to the dingy digits of an unidistinguishing printer's-devil;so doth Cæsar's dust come to stop a bung-hole. One morsel more, aboutchildren, blessed children, and for this bout I shall have tiltedsufficiently in the Muses' court; or, if it must be so said, unhandsomecritic, stilted to satiety in false heroics: stay--not false; judge me, my heart. Suppose then an imaginary parent thus to speak about his

INFANT DAUGHTERS. 

 Oh ye, my beauteous nest of snow-white doves, What wealth could price for me your guileless loves? My earthly cherubim, my precious pearls, My pretty flock of loving little girls, My stores of happiness with least alloy, My treasuries of hope and trembling joy! Yon toothless darling, nestled soft and warm On a young yearning mother's cradling arm; The soft angelic smiles of natural grace Tinting with love that other little face; And the sweet budding of this sinless mind In winning ways, that round my heart-strings wind, Dear winning ways--dear nameless winning ways, That send me joyous to my God in praise. 

Enough! not heartlessly, but to shame the heartlessness of YOUR_ennui_, let me veil those holiest affections; yes, even at the risk ofleaving nominatives widowed of their faithful verbs, will I, untilrequired, epicise no more. Let these mauled bits be intimations of whata little care might have made a little better. Gladly will I keep allthe remainder in a state quiescent, even to doubling Horace's wholesomeprescription of nine years: for it is impossible but that your ferventpoet, in the heat of inspiration, (credit me, lack-wits, there is such athing, ) should blurt out many an unpalatable bit of advice, rebuke, orvirtuous indignation against homes in general, for the which sundryconscience-stricken particulars might uncharitably arraign him. Butdivers other notions are crowding into the retina of my mind's-eye: Imust leave my epic as you see it, and bid farewell, a long farewell, to'_Home_. ' Still shall my egotism have to appear for many weary pages amost impartial and universal friend to the world of bibliopolists; Icater multifariously for all varieties of the literary profession:booksellers at least must own me as their friend, though the lucky purseof Fortunatus saves me from being impaled upon the point of poorGoldsmith's epigram, and I leave to [----] the questionable praise ofbeing their hack. For Bentley and Hatchard, alike with Rivington andFrazer, for Colburn and Nisbet, as well as Knight, Tilt, Tyas, Moxon, and Murray, I seem to be gratuitously pouring out in equal measure myversatile meditations; at this sign all customers may be suited; only, shop-lifters will be visited with the utmost rigour of that obnoxiousmonosyllable. --Well, poor Epic, good night to you, and my benison onthose who love you. 

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To any one, much in the habit of thoughtful revery, how veryunsatisfactory those notions look in writing. He can't half unravel thechaotic cobwebs of his mind; as he plods along penning it, a thousandfancies flit about him too intangibly for fixed words, and hisever-teeming hot imagination cannot away with the slow process ofconcreted composition. For me, I must write impromptu, or not at all;none of your conventional impromptus, toils of half-a-day, as littleinstantaneous as sundry patent lights; no working-up of laboriousepigrams, sedulously sharpened antitheses, or scintillative trifles, diligently filed and polished; but the positive impromptu of longing tobe an adept at shorthand-writing, by way of catching as they fly thoseswift-winged thoughts; not quick enough by half; most of those brightcolours unfixed; most of those fair semi-notions unrecorded. To saynothing of reasons of time, there being other things to do, and reasonsof space, there being other things to write. And thus, good friend, affectionately believe the best of these crude intimations of thingsintellectual, which the husbandry of good diligence, and the goldenshower of Danæ's enamoured, and the smiles of the Sun of encouragementmight heretofore have ripened into authorship; nay, more, perhaps maystill: believe, generously, that if I could coil off quietly, likeunwrapped cocoons, all these epics, tragics, theologies, pathetics, analytics, and didactics, they would show in fairer forms, andbetter-defined proportions: believe, also, truly, that I could, if Iwould, and that I would, if the game were worth its candle. 

But, sooth to say, the over-gorged public may well regard thatsmall-tomed author with most favourable eye, who condenses himselfwithin the narrowest limits; a _diable boiteux_, not the huge spirit ofthe Hartz; concentrated meat-lozenges, not _soup maigre_; pocket-pistolsof literature, not lumbering parks of its artillery. Verily, there is amightier mass of typography than of readers; and the reading world, fromvery brevity of life, must rush, at a Bedouin pace, over the illimitableplains of newspaper publication, while the pyramids of dusty folio areleft to stand in solitary proud neglect. The cursory railroad spirit isabroad: we abhor that old painful ploughing through axle-deep ruts: thefriend who will skate with us, is welcomer than he who holds us freezingby the button; and the teacher, who suggestively bounds in his balloonon the tops of a chain of arguments, is more popular in lecturing thanhe of the old school, who must duteously and laboriously struggle up anddown those airy promontories. 

I love an avenue, though, like Lord Ashburton's magnificent mile ofyew-trees, it may lead to nothing, and therefore have not expunged thisunnecessary preface: rather, will I bluntly come upon a next subject, another work in my unseen circulating library, THE SEVEN SAYINGS OF GRECIAN WISDOM, ILLUSTRATED IN SEVEN TALES. 

Cordially may this theme be commended to the more illuminatingbooksellers: well would it be greeted by the picture-loving public. Itmight come out from time to time as a periodical, in a classicalwrapper: might be decorated with the sages' physiognomies, copied fromantique gems, with the fancied passage in each one's life that provokedthe saying, and with specific illustrations of the exemplifying story. There should be a brilliant preface, introducing the seven sages to eachother and the reader, after the ensample of Plutarch, and exhausting allthe antiquarianism, all the memoirism, and all the varia-lectionism ofthe subject. The different tales should be of different countries andages of the world, to insure variety, and give an easier exit to_ennui_. As thus: Solon's "Know thyself" might be fitted to an Easternfavourite raised suddenly to power, or a poor and honest Glasgow weaverall upon a day served as heir to a Scotch barony, when he forthwithfalls into fashionable vices. Chilo's "Note the end of life" mightconcern the merriment of the drunkard's career, and its end--deliriumtremens, or spontaneous combustion: better, perhaps, as less vulgarian, the grandeur and assassination of some Milanese ducal tyrant. The"Watch your opportunity" of Pittacus could be shown in the fortunes ofsome Whittington of trade, some Washington of peace, or some Napoleon ofwar. Bias's uncharitable bias, believing the worst of the world, mightseem to some a truism, to others a falsehood, according as their fellowshave served them well or ill; but a brief history of some hypocrite'slife, some misanthrope's experience, or some Arabian Stylobatist'sresolve to be perched above this black earth on a column like a stork, might help to prove that "the majority are wicked. " As for Periander'saphorism, that "to industry all things are possible, " pyramid-buildingold Egypt, or the Druids of Stonehenge, or Scottish proverbialperseverance in Australian sheep rearing and Canadian timber clearing, will carry the point by acclamation. Cleobulus, praising "moderation inall things, " would glorify a moral warning of universal application, asto pleasures, riches, and rank; or especially perhaps as preferring truetemperance before its modern tee-total false pretences; or lauding someRichard Cromwell's choice of a quiet country life, before the turbulenthonours of a proffered Protectorate; while Thales, with his all but oldEnglish proverb of "more haste, less speed, " would apply admirably toSultan Mahmoud's ruinous reforms; or to the actual injury gulled Britainhas done to the condition of negroes in general by a vastly tooprecipitate abolition of the slave-trade: a vile evil, indeed, but acancer of too long creeping to be cured in a day, a rottenness toodeeply seated in the frame-work of the world to be extirpated by suchcaustic surgery as fire and sword; or to be quacked into health bypatent gold-salve. 

Seven such tales, shrewdly setting out their several aims, andillustrative of good moral maxims which wise heathens live by, would (Itrow and trust) be somewhat better, more original--ay, and moreentertaining, too--than the common run of magazine adventures. It maynot here be fair to particularize further than in the way of avowing myunmitigated contempt for the exploits of highwaymen, swindlers, menabout town, and ladies of the _pavé_. I protest against gilding crimes, and palliating follies. Serve the public tables with better food, goodPandarus. Those commentators on the Newgate calendar, thosebringers-into-fashion of the mysteries of vice, must not be quiteacquitted of the evils they have caused: brilliancy of dialogue, andgraphic power of delineation, are only weapons in a madman's hand, ifthe moral be corrupting and profane. To cheerful, hearty, care-dispelling humour, to such merry faces as Pickwick andCo. --inimitable Pickwick--hail, all hail! but triumphs of burglary, andescapes of murderers, aroint ye!

Why then should I throw this cargo overboard?--Friend, my ship is toofull; _if_ I could only do one thing at a time, and could finish itwithin the limits of its originating fit, these things all might be lessabortive. But I doubt if my glorification of Greek aphorisms everreaches any higher apotheosis than the airy castles sketchily builtabove. 

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Similar in idea with these last tales, but essentially more sacred as tocharacter, would be an illustrative elucidation of the seven lastsayings of our Blessed Lord, when dying in the crucifixion. The RomishChurch, in some of her imposing ceremonies, has caused the sayings to beexhibited on seven banners, which are occasionally carried before theholy cross: from this I probably derived the idea of detaching thesesentences from the frame-work of their contexts, and regarding them insome sort as aphorisms. For a name, not to be tautologous, should beproposed a Græco-Anglicism, THE HEPTALOGIA;

OUR SAVIOUR'S SEVEN LAST SAYINGS. 

The addition of "hagia" might be rather too Attic for English ears; andI know not whether "the Sacred Heptalogia" would not also be toomystical. This series of tales is capable of like illustration with thelast, except in the matter of portraits, unless indeed some eminentfathers of the church, or some authenticated enamels, gems, or coins, (if any, ) displaying our Lord's likeness, served the purpose; and ofcourse the character of the stories should not be much in dissonancewith the sacredness of the text. The first might well enforceforgiveness of enemies, especially if their hatred springs frommisapprehension. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do:"many a true story of religious persecution, as of Inquisitorialtorture, exacted by sincere bigotry, and endured by equally sincereconviction, would illustrate the prayer, and the scene might be laidamong Waldensian saints and the friars of Madrid. The second tale mightenlarge upon a promised Paradise, the assurance of pardon, and theefficacy of repentance: the certainty of hope and life beingco-extensive, so that it might still be said of the seeming worst, thebrigand and the blasphemer, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise;"a story to check presumption, while it encourages the humility ofpentitent hope; the details of a prodigal's career and his return, saya falsely philosophizing German student, or the excesses of some notungenerous outburst of youthful wantonness; haply, a fair and passionateNeapolitan. The third might well regard filial piety: "Behold thyson--behold thy mother:" illustrated perhaps by a slave scene inMorocco, or the last adieus between a Maccabæan mother, and her noblechildren rushing on duteous death; or the dangers of a son, during theReign of Terror, protecting his proscribed parents; or allusive to thecase of many razed and fired homes in the Irish rebellion. The fourth, necessarily a tale of overwhelming calamity ultimately triumphant, "MyGod, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"--the confidence of _my_ Godstill, even in His recognised judgments trusted in as merciful: thehistory of many an unrecorded Job; a parent bereaved of his fair dearchildren; an aged merchant beggared by the roguery of others, and hisvery name blamelessly dishonoured; the extremity of a martyr'ssufferings; or some hunted soul's temptation. The fifth, "I thirst;"which might be commented on, either morally only, as referring to athirst after religion, virtue, and knowledge--or physically also, insome story of well-endured miseries at sea on a wrecking craft; or ofChristian resignation even to the horrible death of drought among thetorrid sands of Africa; or some noble act, like that of Sir PhilipSidney on the battle-field, or David's libation of that desired draughtfrom the well of Bethlehem. I need not remark that all these sayingsmight primarily be applied to their Good Utterer, if it seemed moreadvisable to shape the publication into seven sermons: but this, it willat once be perceived, is not the present object; the word "sermons" hasto most men a repulsive sound, and a tale, similar in disguised motive, may win, where an orderly discourse might unhappily repel: a teacher'sbest influences are the indirect: like the conquering troops atCulloden, his charge will be oblique; his weapon will strike theunguarded flank, and not the opposing target. The sixth, "It isfinished;" perhaps, not only as a fact on the true, the necessary valueof the Christian scheme of redemption being so completed; but, moregenerally, to display the evils and dangers of leaving mental, spiritual, or even worldly good designs unfinished: a tale of naturalprocrastination conquered, difficulties overcome, prejudices brokendown, and gigantic good effected: a Russian Peter, a literary Johnson, amissionary Neff, a Wesley, or a Henry Martyn. The seventh, descantingupon noble patience, and agonies vanquished by faith, the death andglorious expectance of a martyr, the end of one of Fox's heroes;"Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. " Of necessity in theseChristian tales there would be more of sameness than in those heathen;because it would be improper and impolitic, with such theses, to entermuch into the lower human passions and the common events of life. But myintentions of further proceeding in this matter have, as at present, very sensibly subsided; for many wise and many good might reasonablyobject to making those holy last dying words mere pegs to hang moraltales upon. The idea might please one little sect, and anger half theworld; I care not to behold it accomplished, and question my owncapabilities; only, as it has been an authorial project heretoforeconceived by me, suffer it to boast this brief existence. 

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It is scandalously reported of some folks that they are not musical, acalumny that has been whispered of myself: and, though against my ownconvictions, (who will confess he "has not music in his soul?") I partlyacquiesce; that is to say--for, of such a charge, self-defence claims toexplain a little--although I _am_ charmed with all manner of music, still for choice I prefer a German chorus to an Italian solo, and anEnglish glee to a French jig. Accordingly the operatic world have everyreason to despise my taste: especially if I add that Welsh songs, andScotch and Irish national melodies--[where are our Englishgone?]--rejoice my heart beyond Mozart and Rossini. And now this nextlittle notion is scarcely of substance sufficient to assume the garb ofauthorship: it is little more than a passing whim, but I choose for thevery notion's sake to make it better known. Except in a very fewinstances--as Haydn's '_Seasons_, ' e. G. --Oratorios, from someconventional idea of Lent, we may suppose, seem obligated to concernmatters sacred. Of course, every body is aware of the prayerful meaningof the name; but we know also that a madrigal has long ago put off itsmonkish robe of a hymn to the Virgin, and worn the more laic habit of alove song. Now, it is a fact, that very many good men who delight inHandel's melody, and of course cannot object to psalms and anthems, entertain conscientious objections to hearing the Bible set to music ina concert-room; and sure may we all be, that, unless the whole thing beregarded as a religious service, (in a mixed gay company who think ofsound more than sense, not very easy, ) the warbling of sacred phrases, and variations on the summoning trumpet, and imitated angelic praise, and the unfelt expressions of musical repentance, and unfearingdespondency of guilt in recitative, are any thing but congenial to amind properly attuned. I hope I am neither prudish, nor squeamish, norsplenetic, but speak only what many feel, and few care to express. Now, the cure in future for all this would be very simple: Why not have somelay oratorios? Protestants have appropriated the madrigal, and listen, delighted with its melody, without the needless offence of seeming tocountenance idolatry; why should they not have solemn music, new orancient as may be adapted, administering to their patriotism, or theirtragic interests, or historic recollections, without grating againsttheir feelings of religious veneration?--To be specific, let me suggesta subject, and show, for the benefit of any Pindar of this day, itsmusical capabilities: we are, or ought to be as Englishmen, all stirredat the name of

ALFRED;

and he would minister as well to the harmonies of an oratorio as Abel, or Jephtha, Moses, or St. Paul--nay, as the Messiah, or the last dreadJudgment. Remember, our Alfred was a proficient himself, and spied theDanish forces in the character of a harper. What scope were here forgentle airs, and stirring Saxon songs! He harangues his patriot band, and a manly Phillips would personify with admirable taste the trulyroyal bard: he leaves Athel-switha his wife, and a fair flock ofchildren in sanctuary, while he rushes to the battle-field: thechurchmen might receive their queenly charge with music: the Danes riotin their unguarded camp with drinking-snatches, and old-country-staves:a storm might occur, with elemental crash: the succeeding silence ofnature, and distant coming on of the patriot troops at midnight; theirwar-songs and marches nearer and nearer; the invaders surprised in theircamp and in their cups; the hurlyburly of the fight--a hail-stone chorusof arrows, a clash of thousand swords, trumpets, drums, and clatteringhorse-hoofs; a silent interval, to introduce a single combat betweenAlfred and Hubba the Dane, with Homeric challenges, tenor and bass; therouted foe, in clamorous and discordant staccato; the conquerorspressing on in steady overwhelming concord; how are the mightyfallen--and praise to the God of battles!

Most briefly, then, thus: there is religion enough to keep it solemn, without being so experimental as to intrude upon personal prejudice. Thenotion is too slight, and too slenderly worked out, even for admissionhere, if I were not still, my shrewd and mindful reader, sedulouslyendeavouring to get rid of all my brain-oppressing fancies: and this, happening to come uppermost as I write, finds itself caught, to mycomfort. It is commended, if worth any thing, to the musical proficient:for I might as well think of adding a note to the gamut as of trying tocompose an oratorio. 

 * * * * *

The authorial mind is infinitely versatile: books and book-making areindeed its special privilege, forte, and distinguishing peculiarity; butstill its thoughts and regards are ever cast towards originality ofidea, though unwritten and unprinted, in all the multitudinousdepartments of science and of art. Thus, mechanical invention, chemicaldiscovery, music as above, painting as elsewhere, sculpture as below, give it exercise continually. The authorial mind never is at rest, butalways to be seen mounted and careering on one hobby-horse or other outof its untiring stud. If the coin of some rude Parthian, or thefragments of some old Ephesian frieze, serve not as a scope for itspresent ingenuities, it will break out in a new method of graftingraspberries on a rosebush, in the comfortable cut of a pilot-coat, orthe safest machinery for a steamer. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_ is a ruleof moderation it repudiates; incessant energy provokes unabatedmeddling, and its intuitive qualities of penetration, adaptation, andconcentration, are only hindered by the accidents of life from carryingany one thing out to the point at least of respectable attainment. Lookat Michael Angelo; poet, painter, sculptor, architect, and author: andif indeed we are not told of Milton having modeled, or Horace havingbuilt up other monuments than his own imperishable fame, still nothingbut manual habit and the world's encouragement were wanting to perfect, in the concrete, the conceptions of those plastic minds. Who will denythat Hogarth was a novelist and play-wright, if not indeed aheart-rending tragedian? Who will refuse to those nameless monasticarchitects who planned and fashioned the fretted towers of Gloucester, the stern solidity of Durham, the fairy steeple of Strasburg, or thedelicate pinnacles of Milan, the praise due to them of being genuinepoets of the immortal Epic? Phidas and Praxiteles, Canova andThorswaldsen, are in this view real authors, as undoubtedly as Homer orDante, Sallust or Racine; and to rise highest in this argument, theheavens and the earth are but mighty scrolls of an Omniscient Author, fairly written in a universal tongue of grandeur and beauty, of skill, poetry, philosophy, and love. 

But let me not seem to prove too much, and so leap over my horse insteadof vaulting into the saddle: though authorship may claim thusextensively every master-mind, from the Adorable Former of all thingsdown to the humblest potter at his wheel fashioning the difficultellipse; still, in human parlance, must we limit it to commonacceptations, and think of little more than scribe, in the name ofauthor. Nevertheless, let such seeds of thought as here are carelesslyflung out, nurtured in the good soil of charity, and not unkindly forcedinto foolish accusations of my own conceit, whereas their meaning isgeneral, (as if forsooth selfishly dibbled in with vain particularity, and not liberally broadcast that he may run that reads, )--let such crudeconsiderations excuse my own weak and uninjurious invasion of theprovinces of other men. The wisdom for social purposes of infinitesimaldivision of labour, may be proved good by working well; but its loweringinfluences on the individual mind cannot be doubted: that an intelligentman should for a life-time be doomed to watch a valve, or twistpin-heads, or wind cotton, or lacquer coffin-nails, cannot be improving;and while I grant great evil in my desultory excesses, still I may makesome use of that argument in the converse, and plead that it is good toexercise the mind on all things. Thus, in my assumed métier ofauthorship, let notions be extenuated that popularly concern it little, and yield admittance to any thought that may lead to that Atheniandesideratum, "some new thing. "

While the echoes of the name of Alfred still linger on the mind, and ourpatriotism looks back with gratitude on his thousand virtues unsulliedby a fault, (at least that History, seldom so indulgent, hasrecorded, )--while we reflect that in him were combined the wise king, the victorious general, the enlightened scholar, the humble Christian, the learned author, the excellent father, the admirable MAN inall public and private relations, in domestic alike with social duties, I cannot help wishing that forgetful England had raised somearchitectural trophy, as a worthy testimonial of Alfred the noble andthe good. Whether Oxford, his pet child--or Westminster Hall, as mindfulof the code he gave us--or Greenwich, as the evening resting-place ofthose sons of thunder whom the genius of Alfred first raised up to manour wooden walls--should be the site of some great national memorial, might admit of question; but there can be none that something of thekind has been owing now near upon a thousand years, and that it willwell become us to claim boastingly for England so true, so glorious ahero. With a view to expedite this object, and strictly to bear upon thetopic in author-fashion, it has come into my thought how much we want a

LIFE OF ALFRED:

my little reading knows of none, beyond what dictionaries have gatheredfrom popular history and vague tradition, rather than manuscripts of oldtime, and Asser, the original biographer. Of this last work, writtenoriginally in Saxon, and since translated into Latin, I submit that apopular English version is imperatively called for; a translation from atranslation being never advisable, (compare Smollett's Anglo-Gallifieddilution of '_Don Quixote_, ') the primary source should be againconsulted; and seeing that profound ignorance of the ancient Saxoncoupled with, as now, total indifference about its acquisition, place mein the list of incapables, I leave the good suggestion to be used bypundits of the Camden or Roxburghe or other book-learned society. If itmay have been already done by some neglected scribe, bring it to thelight, and let us see the bright example set to all future ages by thatearly Crichton; if never yet accomplished, my zeal is over-paid shouldthe hint be ever acted on; and if, which is still possible, an Englishversion of the life of Alfred should be positively rife and common amongthe reading public, your humble ignoramus has nothing for it but to praypardon of its author for not having known him, and to walk softly withthe world for writing so much before he reads. 

But this is an accessory--an episode; I plead for a statue to KingAlfred: and--(now for another episode; is there _no_ cure for thesedesperate parentheses?)--_apropos_ of statues, let me, in the simpleuntaught light of nature, suggest a word or two with regard to somerecent under-takings. Notwithstanding classical precedents, whereof morepresently, it does seem ridiculous to common sense, to set a man like ascavenger-bird at Calcutta, or a stork at Athens, or a sonorous Muezzin, or a sun-dried Simeon Stylites, on the top of a column a hundred feethigh: sculpture imitates life, and who would not shudder at such anunguarded elevation? sculpture imitates life, and who can recognise acountenance so much among the clouds? Again for the precedents: Ipresume that Pompey's pillar, (which, indeed, perhaps never had anything on its summit except some Egyptian emblem, as the cap and throneof higher and lower Egypt, or a key of the Nile as likely as any thing, )is the most notable, if not the first, of solitary columns: now, Pompey, or, as some prefer, Diocletian, and others Alexander Severus, had that fine pillar ferried over from the quarries of Lycian Xanthus;at least, this is a good idea, seeing that near that place still liethree or four other columns of like gigantic dimensions, unfinished, andbelieved to have been intended to support the triglyph of some newtemple. Pompey's idea was to fix the pillar up as a sea-mark, for eitherentering the harbour of Alexandria, or to denote shallows, anchorage, orthe like; but apart from this actual utility, and apart also from itsacknowledged ornament as a sentinel on that flat strand, I take it to bean architectural absurdity to erect a regular-made column with little ornothing to support: an obelisk now, or a naval trophy, or a towerdecorated with shields, or a huge stele or cippus, or a globe, or apyramid, or a Waltham-cross sort of edifice, (of course all thesesupporting nothing on their apices, ) in fact, _any thing but_ aCorinthian or Tuscan, or other regular pillar, seems to be permissable;but for base, shaft, and capital to have nothing to do but lift atelescopic man from earth's maternal surface, does look not a littleunreasonable; and therefore as much out of taste, as for the marble archat Buckingham Palace to spend its energies in supporting a flag-staff. 

The magnificent column of Trajan is exempted from this hasty bit ofcriticism, (as also of course is its modern counterpart, Napoleon's, )because it is, both from decoration and proportions, out of therecognised orders of architecture; it partakes rather of the characterof a triumphal tower, than of one among many pillars separated chieflyfrom the rest; the man is a superlative accessory, a climax to hispositive exploits; he does not stand a-top, as if dropt from a balloon, but like a gallant climber treading on his conquests: and, as toPhocas's column at Rome, I shall only say, that it illustrates mymeaning, except in so far as an immense base to the super-imposedstatuere deems it from the jockey imputation of carrying too light aweight. Now, with respect to the Nelson memorial, your meddlesome scribehad an unexhibited notion of his own. Mehemet Ali is understood to havegiven certain two obelisks respectively to the French and Englishnations: the Parisians appropriated theirs, and have set it up, thorn-like, in their midst, perhaps as an emblem of what Africanconquest has been in the heartside of France; but we English, lessimaginative, and therefore less antiquarian, have permitted our _petitcadeau_ to lie among its ruins of Luxor or Karnac, unclaimed andunconsidered. 

Nelson of the Nile might have had this consecrated to his honour: andif, as is probable, it be of insufficient elevation, I should haveproposed a high flight of steps and a base, screened all round byshallow Egyptian entrances, with an Etruscan sarcophagus just within theprincipal one, (Egypt and Etruria were cousins germane, ) and analto-relievo of Nelson dying, but victorious, recumbent on the lid: theglobe and wings, emblems alike of Nelson's rapidity, his universal fame, and his now-emaciated spirit, might be sculptured over each entrance; asphinx, or a Prudhoe lion, being allusive to England as well as Egypt, should sit guardiant at each corner of the steps; and the threeremaining doorways would be represented closed, and carved externallywith some allegorical personations of Nelson's career, of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. This, then, had it been strictly in mymétier, (a happy métier mine of literary leisure, ) should have been mylimnèd outline for the Nelson testimonial: the real interesting antiqueneedle, rising from the midst of its solid Egyptian architecture, andpointing to the skies; not a steeple, however, but merely the obeliskraised upon a heavy base, only hollowed far enough to admit of aninterior alto-relievo. 

It is probable that the exhibition of designs, which an _alibi_prevented me from seeing, included several obelisks; but thepeculiarities I should have insisted on, would have been first to makegood use of the real thing, the rarely carved old Egypt's porphyry; and, next, to have had our hero's likeness within reasonable distance of theeye. 

But to return from this other desperate digression: Alfred, the greatand wise, deserves his Saxon cross; or let him lie enshrined in a groveof florid Gothic pinnacles, a fretted roof on clustered columnsreverently keeping off the rain; or, best of all, let him stand majesticin his own-time costume, colossal bronze on a cube of granite, and soput to shame the elegancies of a Windsor uniform, and the absurdity ofsticking heroes, as at St. George's, Bloomsbury, and elsewhere, on thesummit of a steeple. So, friend, let all this tirade serve to introducea most unlikely and chaotic treatise on

NATIONAL MEMORIALS. 

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Politics are a sore temptation to any writer, and of dalliance with aDelilah so seductive it is futile to declare that I am innocent. Myprinciples positively are known to myself; which is a measure ofself-knowledge, in these any-thing-arian days, of that cabinetcoin-climax the "8th degree of rarity;" and that those choiceprinciples may not be concealed from so kind an eye as yours, friendreader, hear me profess myself honestly--if you approve, orshamelessly--if you _will_ so think it--"a rabid Tory!" At least, bysuch a nomenclature sundry veracious journals, daily leaders of thepublic opinion, would call me, were such a groundling as I prominentenough to attract their indignation; and, from all that can be gatheredfrom their condemnatory clauses against others like minded, I have nolittle reason to be proud of the title. For, on collation of suchclauses with their causes, I find, and therefore take (under correctionalways) the rabid Tory to be--a temperate lover of order, whom hismother has taught to "fear God, " his father to "honour the king, " andhis pastor to "meddle not with them who are given to change. " A rabidTory, in matters of national expenditure, remembers to have heard an oldunexploded proverb, "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth, andthere is that withholdeth what is due, but it tendeth to poverty;" andhe is by no means sure that a certain mismanaged nation is notimmolating her prosperity to what actuaries would call economicalprinciples. A rabid Tory is bigoted enough to entertain a ridiculousfear of that generation abstraction, Catholic Rome, whom further he issufficiently vulgar-minded to consider as a lady of easy virtue arrayedin the colours of a cardinal: he thinks one Luther to be somewhat morethan a renegade monk; and is childish enough to venerate, when a man, the same Liturgy which his grandmother had taught him when a boy. Forother matters, the higher born, the better bred, the more classicallyeducated, and the more extensively possessed of moneys and lands ourhonest-spoken Tory may be, ten to one the more is he afflicted with thisrabbies: and his mad propensities become positively criminal, when, as amagistrate or a captain of dragoons, he thinks himself bound inhonourable duty to quell the enthusiasm of some disinterested patriots, whose innocent wishes rise no higher than to subvert the existing orderof things, to secure for themselves a reasonable share of parks, palaces, and pocket-money, and (as the very justifiable means for sohappy an end) manfully to sacrifice in the temple of Freedom the rogueswho would object to being robbed, and the tyrants who would be bloodyenough to fight for life and liberty. 

A rabid Tory--you see it is a pet name of mine--feels no little contemptfor a squeezable character; and he is well assured, from history as wellas on his own conviction, that the noble army of martyrs lived and diedupon his principles: whereas the retrograde regiment of cowards, whomthe wisdom of providing for personal safety has in battle induced to runaway, _relictis non bene parmulis_--the clamorous cohort of bullies, whom the necessities of impending castigation have sensibly induced toeat their words--the volunteer company of light-heeled swindlers, whomnature instructs that they must live, and honesty has neglected toinform how--every one, in short, whose grand maxim (_quocunque modorem_) is temporizing expediency, and with whom the cogent argument "youshall" has more force than the silly conscience-whisper of "youought, "--contributes to swell the band which the professor of Toryism, the abstracted follower of principles and not of men, has the honour ofbeholding in the angle of his diagram, inscribed "contradictory. " Notthat your true Tory believes so ill of _all_ his adversaries; there aresome few geese among the cranes; an Abdiel here and there, who has longfelt irksome in the host, but for false shame is there still; sundrymen, having ambitious or illuminated wives, and too amiable, or tooprudent, to attempt a breach of peace at home; some thronging theopposite benches, because their fathers and grandfathers topographicallyoccupied those same seats--a decent reason, supposing similarity ofplaces and names, to insure similarity of principles and practice; andsome--I dislike them not for honesty--confessing and upholding therepublican extremes, upon a belief that all short of these are but anunsatisfactory part of a great and glorious experiment. Now, the rabidTory prefers an open foe to a false friend; but your go-between, yourmidway sneak, your shuttlecock, your perjured miser who will swear toany thing for an extra per centage--all these are his detestation: andalthough he will readily acknowledge some good and some wise in theadversary's ranks, still he recognises that tri-coloured banner as theone under which all naturally fight, who are poor in both worlds--- withneither money nor religion. Thus much of my reasonable rabies. 

One may hate principles without hating men; and for this sentiment wehave the Highest Example. Things are either right or wrong; if right, do; if wrong, forbear: nothing can be absolutely indifferent, and to doa little actual evil in order to compass great hypothetical good, isfalse morality, and, therefore bad government. Why should not honestyand plain-dealing be as inviolable publicly as privately? Why be guiltyof such mean self-stultification as to say one thing and do another? Itis criminal in rulers to give a helping hand to the evil which they deemunavoidable; let them, in preference, cease to rule, and imitate thenoble threat of that king for half a century whose conscience bade himabdicate rather than do wrong. 

But to come abruptly on a title-page: often-times, in readingdeleterious leading articles in wrong-sided newspapers, have I longed toset before the world of faction

A MANUAL OF GOOD POLITICS, which indeed has already been half-done, if decently begun besynonymous. With this view has my author's mind heretofore thought overmany scriptural texts, characters, doctrines, and usages; yet, let mefreely confess the upshot of those efforts to be little satisfactory:for I fear much, that though there be grounds enough to go upon for onewho is already fixed in right political principle, [orthodoxy being, asis common among arguers, _my_ doxy, ] there may not be sufficient so toreason from as to convince the thousands, ready and willing to gainsaythem: and Locke's utter annihilation of poor ridiculous well-intentionedFilmer, makes one wary, of taking up and defending a position so littletenable, as, for instance, Adam's primary grant for the foundation ofabsolute monarchy, or of attempting to nullify natural freedom by thedubious succession of patriarchal power. At the same time, (competencyfor so great a task being conceded--no small supposition, by the way, )much remains to be done in this field of discourse; as, the fearfulexample made of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, for conduct very analogouswith numberless instances of modern Liberalism; the rights of rulers, aswell as of the governed; of kings, as well as people; the connexionsubsisting now, as through all former ages, between church andstate--well indeed and deeply argued out already by such great minds asColeridge and Gladstone, but perhaps, for general usefulness, requiringa more brief and popular discourse; the question of passive obedience;the true though unfashionable doctrine of man's general depravityinvalidating the consignment of power to the masses; and so forth. Thereare, however, if Scripture is to be held a constitutional guide, someexamples to a certain extent contrary to the argument: as, electivemonarchy in the case of Saul; non-legitimate succession in families evenwhere election is omitted, as in the case of Solomon; and, honestly tosay it, many other difficulties of a like nature. In fact, upon thewhole, this distinction might be drawn; that although the Bible at largefavours what we may, for shortness' sake, term Conservative politics, still it would not be easy to deduce from its page as code of rules, sonecessarily of a social, temporary, and accidental nature: The principleis given, but little of the practice; the seed of true and undefiledreligion produces among other good fruit what we will call Conservatism, but we must be very microscopic to detect that fruit in the seed: ofthis admission let my _Liberal_ adversary make--as indeed he will--themost; but let him remember that truth has always been most economicallydistributed. It is a material too costly to be broadcast before swine;and in slender evidence lurks more of moral test, than in stoutarguments and open miracles. At any rate, as unfitted for the task, Ileave it. For any thing mine un-book-learned ignorance can tell, thevery title may be as old as Christianity itself; it is a good name, anda fair field. 

This manual was commenced in the form of familiar letters to a radicalacquaintance, whom I had resolved to convert triumphantly; but JohnLocke disarmed me, without, however, having gained a convert: he made medrop my weapon as Prospero with Ferdinand; but the fault lay withFerdinand, for want of equal power in the magic art. 

 * * * * *

"MEASURES, NOT MEN" is, as we have hinted already, theground-work of a true Tory's political creed; and measures themselvesonly in so far as they expound and are consistent with principles. A manmay fail; the stoutest partisan become a renegado; and the pet measureof a doughtiest champion may after all prove traitorous, unwise, unworthy: but principle is eternally an unerring guide, a master towhose words it is safe to swear, a leader whose flag is never lowered incompromise, nor sullied by defeat. Defalcations of the generallyupright, derelictions of duty by the usually noble-minded, shake notthat man's faith which is founded on principle: for the cowardice, orrashness, or dishonesty of some individual captain, he may feel shame, but never for the _cause_ in which such hold commissions; he may oftenfind much fault with _soi-disant_ Tories, but never with the 'ism theyprofess. We over-step their follies; we disclaim their corruptions; wedate above their faults; we wash our hands of their abuses. Anabstracted student in his chamber, building up his faith from thefoundations, and trying every stone of the edifice, takes little heed ofwho is for him, and who against him, so Conscience is the architect, andthe Master of the house looks on approving. A man's mind is but onewhole; be it palace or hovel, feudal stronghold or Italian villa, it isall of a piece: a duly subordinated spirit bears no superstructure ofthe Radical, and the friable soil of discontented Liberalism, is toosandy a foundation for ponderous fanes of the religious. 

I rejoice in being accounted one of those unheroic, and therefore moreuseful, members of society, who profess to be by no means ambitious ofreigning. A plain country gentleman, with a mind (thank Heaven!) well atease, and things generally, both external and internal, being in hiscase consentaneous with happiness, would appear to have reached the acmeof human felicity; and no one but a fool cares, in any world, toexemplify the dog's preference for the shadow. Unenvious, therefore, ofroyalty, and fully crediting that _never-quoted_ sentiment ofShakspeare's "Uneasy, " &c. , my motto, within the legitimate limits ofright reason, and in common with that of some ridiculed philosopher ofRoundhead times, is the prudent saying, "Whoever's king, I'll besubject!"--ay, and for the masculine I place the epicene. While, however, in sober practice of right subordination, and under existingcircumstances of just rule, we gladly would amplify the maxim, (as incourtesy, gallantry, loyalty, and honest kind feeling strongly bound, )still in mere speculation, and irrespectively of things as they are, ourabstract musings tended to approve the original word in its unextendedgender. Every one of Edmund Burke's school would honour the ensign ofDivine vice-regency wherever he found it; but, apart from thisuninquisitive respect, he will claim to be reasonably patriotic, patriotically rational; habit encourages to practice one thing, buttheory may induce to think another. Now, little credence as sounenlightened so illiberal an integer as I give to an equalization inthe rights of man, certainly on many accounts my blindness gives less tothe rights of women with man, and very far less to those rights overman: it might be inconvenient to be specific as to reason; but theworking of an ultra-republican scheme, in which females should ballot aswell as males, would briefly illustrate my meaning. Barbarism makesgentle woman our slave; right civilization raises her into a lovinghelpmate; but what kind of wisdom exalts her into mastery?

Readily, however, shall sleep in dull suppression sundry comments on acertain Rhenish law, whereof my author's mind had at one time studiouslycogitated a grave and wholesome homily. For our censor of the press, onestrait-laced Mr. Better Judgment, has, "with his abhorred shears, "clipped off the more eloquent and spirited portion of a trenchantargument concerning--the revealed doctrine of a superior sex, the socialevils of female domination, church-headships considered as to type andantitype, improper influences, necessary hindrances, anomalous example, feminine infirmities, and an infinitude more such various objectionsspringing out of this fertile subject. Thereafter might have come thehistorical view, evils and perils, for the majority of instances, following in the wake of such mastery. However, to leave thesequestionable matters quiescent, the principles of passive obediencemildly interpose, forbidding to stir the waters of commotion, althoughwith healing objects, for the sake of an abstract theory; there isill-meant change enough afloat, without any call for well-intentionedmeddlers to launch more. So, judicious after-thought resolves rather tostrengthen too-much-weakened authority, in these ungovernable times, than attempt to prove its weaknesses inherent; to look obstinately atthe golden side only of the double-wielded shield: instead of pickingaway at a soft stone in constitutional foundations, our feeble wishmagnanimously prefers to prop it and plaster it, flinging away thatinjurious pick-axe. The title of this once-considered lucubration is fartoo suggestive to carping minds of more than the much that it means, tobe without objection: nevertheless, I did begin, and therefore, alwaysunder shelter of a domino, and protesting against any who would move mymask, I confess to

WOMAN, A SUBJECT:

it was a mere speculative argument; a flock of fancies now roamingunregarded in some cloudy limbo. Let them fly into oblivion--"black, white, and gray, with all their trumpery. "

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Notwithstanding these present hostile argumentations, politics are to mewhat they doubtless are to many others, subjects and disquisitionslittle short of hateful; perpetual mulligatawney; curried capsicums; avery heating, unsatisfactory, unwholesome sort of food. How manypleasant dinner-parties have been abruptly broken up by the introductionof this dish! How many white waistcoats unblanched by projectilewine-glasses on account of this impetuous theme! How many little-civilwars produced from the pips of this apple of contention! Yes, I hate it;and for this cause, good readers, (who may chance to have been usedscurvily, some six pages back, in respect of your opinions, honest asmy own, though fixed in full hostility--and so, courteously be entreatedfor your pardons, ) for this cause of hate, I beseech you to regard me assacrificing my present inclination to my future quiet. We have heard ofwomen marrying men they may detest, in order to get rid of them: evenwith such an object is here indited the last I ever intend to say aboutpolitics. The shadows of notions fixed upon this page will cease tohaunt my brain; and let no one doubt but that after relief from thesepent-up humours, I shall walk forth less intolerant, less unamiable, less indignant than as heretofore. But, meanwhile, suffer with allbrevity that I say out this small say, and deliver my patrioticconscience; for many a head-ache has obfuscated your author's mind inconsequence of other abortive bits of political common-place. Everysuccessive measure of small triumphant Whiggery, every piece of what myview of the case would designate non-government or mis-government, haspinched, vexed, bruised, and stung my fervent country's love day by day, session after session. Like thousands of others, I have been a greyhoundin the leash, a bolt in the bow, longing to take my turn on the arena:eager as any Shrovetide 'prentice for a fling at negligence, peculationand injustice, and other the long black catalogue of British injuries. Socialism, Chartism, Ribandism; Spain, Canada, China; freed criminals, and imprisoned poverty; penny wisdom, and pound folly; the universalcentralizing system, corrupting all generous individualities: patriotismridiculed, and questionable loyalty patted on the back; vice in fullpatronage, and virtue out of countenance; Protestantism discouraged, Popery taken by the hand; Dissent of _any_ kind preferred to soberOrthodoxy; and, fitting climax, all this done under pretences of perfectwisdom, and most exquisite devotion to the crown and theconstitution:--these things have made me too often sympathize in ColonelCrockett's humour, tiger-like, with a dash of the alligator. Accordinglylet me not deny having once attempted a bitter diatribe, in petto, surnamed

FALSE STEPS;

BRITAIN'S HIGHROAD TO RUIN;

a production of the pamphlet class, and, like its confraternity, destined at longest to the life ephemeral. But, to say truth, I foundall that sort of thing done so much better, spicier, cleverer, innumberless newspaper articles, than my lack of the particular knowledgerequisite, and my little practice in controversy, could have managed, that I wisely drew in my horns, sheathed my toasting-iron, and decidedupon not proceeding political pamphleteer, till, on awaking some finemorning, I find myself returned to parliament for an immaculateconstituency. 

Patient reader, of whatever creed, do not hate me for my politics, nordespise the foolish candour of confession. Henceforth, I will nottrouble you, but abjure the subject; except, indeed, my sturdy friend"the Squire, " soon to be introduced to you, insists upon hisafter-dinner topic: but we will cut him short; for, in fact, nothing canbe more provoking, tedious, useless, and causative of ill-blood, thanthis perpetual intermeddling of private ignoramuses, like him and me, with matters they do not understand, nor can possibly ameliorate. 

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A poet is born a poet, as all the world is well aware; and yourthorough-paced lawyer is not less born a lawyer; while the junction ofthese two most militant incompatibles clearly bears out the hackneyedquotation as above, with the final misfit, that is, "_non fit_. " Yourpoetaster at the bar is that grotesque ideal, which Flaccus thought sofunny that his friends _must_ laugh; (although really, Romans, it _is_possible to contemplate a sort of sphinx figure, "a human head to ahorse's neck, " and so on, varied plumes and all, without much chance ofa guffaw;) and yonder sickly-looking clerk, perched upon his high stool, penning "stanzas while he should engross, " is the lugubrious caricatureof Apollo on his Pegassus, with Helicon for inkstand. 

It may be nothing extraordinary that, jostled in so wide a theatre asours of the world, chance-comers should not, at once or at all, comfortably find their proper places; but that wise-looking chaperons, having with prospective caution duly taken a box, should by maliceprepense thrust all the big people in front, and all the little folksbehind, is rather hard upon the latter, and not a little foolish initself. Even so in life: who does not wish a thousand times he couldhelp some people to change places? Look at this long fellow, fit forFrederick of Prussia's regiment of giants: his parents and guardianshave bent him double, broken his spirit, and spoiled his paces, bycramming him, a giraffe in the stable, between that frigate's gun-decksas a middy: while yonder martial little bantam, by dint of exaggeratedheels, and exalted bear-skin, peeps about among his grenadiers, much asBrutus and Cassius did with their collossal Cæsar. So also of minds:look at brilliant Burns, the exciseman; and quaintly versatile Lamb, thecommon city clerk: Look at--had you only patience, you should haveexamples by the gross; but, to make a shorter tale of it, (I presumethis shows the etymology of cur-tail, ) just think over the pack of youracquaintance, and see if you could not shuffle those kings, queens--yes, and knaves too--more to your satisfaction, and their own advantage: atleast, so most folks imagine, silly meddlers as they are; for, afterall, what with human versatility, and the fact of a probationary state, and the influence of habit, and the drudging example set by others, things work so kindly as they are, that, notwithstanding misfits, thewiser few must be of Pope's mind, "whatever is, is right;"--ay, that itis. 

A year or two ago--if your author is little better than one of thefoolish now, what in charity must he have been then?--I took it upon meto indite an innocent, stingless satire, whereof for samples take thefollowing. Skip them one and all; you will, if you are wise, for theybear the ban of rhyme, are peevish, dull, ill-reasoned; but if you arenot wise, (and, strange to say, malicious people tell me there are manysuch, ) you may wish to see in print a metred inconclusive grumble. Takeit, then, if you will, as I do, merely for a change; at any rate, yourmanciple has furnished this buttery of yours with ample choice ofviands; and omnivoracious as man may be--gormandizing, with gusto, fatmoths in Australia, cockchafers at Florence, frogs in France, and snailsin Switzerland, equally as all less objectionable meats, drinks, fruits, roots, composites, and simples--still, in reason, no one can be expectedor expect himself to like every thing: have charity, for what suits notone man's taste may please the palate of another; so hear mecomplacently turn

"KING'S EVIDENCE, "

and give heed to certain confessions, extorted under the _peine forte etdure_ of a whilom state legal. Yet, when I come to consider of this, (_mihi cogitanti_, as school themes invariably commenced, ) it strikes mymemory that all confessions, short of the last dying one, are weak andfoolish impertinence; whether Jean Jacques or Mr. Adams thought so, orcaused others to think so, are separate topics beside the question: formyself, I will spare you a satire dotted with as many I's as an Arguspheasant; and, without exacting upon good-nature by troublesomecontributions, will hazard a few couplets concerning Blackstone'scast-off mistress, the Law. One word more though: undoubting of thineamiability, friend that hast walked with me hitherto in peace, I will betame as a purring cat, and sheathe my talons; therefore are you stillunteased by divers sly speeches and sarcastic hints, of and concerninginnumerable black sheep that crowd about a woolsack; especially ofcertain "highly respectables, " whom the omnipotence of parliament (noless power presumably being competent) commands to be accounted"gentlemen. " Should then my meagre sketches seem but little spiteful, accord me credit for tolerance at the expense of wit, (yea, in mine owngarbled satire, hear it Juvenal!) and view them kindly in the same lightas you would sundry emasculated extracts from a discreet FamilyShakspeare. Indignation ever speaks in short sharp queries; and it iswell for the printer's pocket that the self-experience hereof wasconsidered inadmissible, for a new fount of notes of interrogation musthave been procured: as it is, we are sailing quietly on the DidacticOcean, and have, I fear, been engaged some time upon topics actionableon a charge of _scandalum magnatum_. Hereof then just a little sample:let us call it '_A Judgment in the Rolls Court_;' or in any other; Icare not. 

 Precedent's slave, this mountebank decides As great Authority, not Reason, guides. "'Tis not for him, degenerate wight, to say Faults can be mended at this time of day, For Coke himself declared--no matter what-- Can Justice suffer what Lord Coke would not? And if 1 Siderfin, p. 10, you scan, Lord Hoax has fixed the rule, that learned man: I cannot, dare not, if I would, be just, My hands are tied, and follow Hoax I must; That _very_ learned Lord could not be wrong. Besides, in fact, it has been settled long, For the great case of Hitchcock versus Bundy Decided--(Cro. Eliz. Per Justice Grundy), That [black was white];--and so, what can I say? Landmarks are things must not be moved away: I cannot put the clock of Wisdom back, And solemnly pronounce that black _is_ black. Though plaintiff has the right, I grant it clear, I must be ruled by Hoax and Hitchcock here: Equity follows, does not mend the laws: Therefore declare, defendant gains the cause. "

Then, as virtuously bound, Indignation interrogates sundryejaculations; or, if you like it better, ejaculates sundryinterrogations: as thus, take a brace:

 If right and reason both combine in one, Why, in God's name, should justice not be done? If law be not a lie, and judgments jokes, Why not _be just_, and cut adrift Lord Hoax?

After a vast deal more in this vein of literature--for you perceive mypresent purpose is dissection in part of this ancient rhyme--we arriveat a magnanimous--

 No! Right shall have his own, put off no longer By rule of Former, or by whim of Stronger; Nor, because Jack goes tumbling down the hill, Shall precedent create a tumbling Jill. Public opinion soon shall change the scene, And wash the Law's Augæan stable clean; Sweep out the Temple, drive the sellers thence, And lead, in novel triumph, Common Sense. 

Verily, this is of the dullest, but it is brief: endure it, and pray youconsider the deadliness of the topic, and the barbarous crueltywherewith courtesy has clipped the wings of my poor spite. Let us turnto other title-pages; assuring all the world that no specific mountebankhas been here intended, and that nothing more is meant than a nervelessblow against legal cant, quainter than Quarles's, and against thatwell-known species of Equity, which must have been so titled from likeantiquated reasons with those that induced Numa and his company to calla dark grove, lucus. 

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How many foes, in this utilitarian era, has that very unwarrantablevice, called Poetry! All who despise love and love-making, all whoprefer billiards to meditation, all who value hard cash above mentalriches, feel privileged to hate it; while really, typographers, theillegible diamond print in which you generally set it up, whether inbook, or newspaper, or handbill, or magazine, induces many anindifferent peruser to skip the poem for the sake of his eye-sight. Ipresume that the monosyllable, rhyme, comprehends pretty nearly all thatthe world at large intends by poetry; and, in the same manner as certaincritics have sneered at Livy--no, it was Tacitus--for commencing hiswork with a bad hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn awhole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of harbouring adistich. But poetry, friend World, means far other than rhyme; itsetymology would yield "creation, " or "fabrication, " of sense as well assound, and of melody for the eye as well as melody for the ear. So did[_epoiese_] Milton; and so did not---- Well, I myself, if you will. Yet, in fact, there are fifty other kinds of poetries, beside the poetry ofwords: as the poetry of life--affection, honour, and hope, andgenerosity; the poetry of beauty--never mind what features decorate theDulcinea, for this species of poetry is felt and seen almost only infirst love; the poetry of motion, as first-rates majestically sailing, furiously scudding waves, bending corn-fields, and, briefly, all thingsmoveable but railway-trains; the poetry of rest, as pyramids, a tropicalcalm, an arctic winter, and generally all things quiescent but aslumbering alderman; the poetry of music, heard oftener in a countrymilkmaid's evening song, than in many a concert-room; the poetry ofelegance, more natural to weeping willows, unbroken colts, flames, swans, ivy-clad arches, greyhounds, yea, to young donkeys, than to those_pirouette_-ing and _very_ active _danseuses_ of the opera; the poetryof nature, as mountains, waterfalls, storms, summer evenings, and allmanner of landscapes, except Holland and Siberia; the poetry of art, acqueducts, minarets, Raphael's colouring, and Poussin's intricatedesigns; the poetry of ugliness, well seen in monkeys and Skye terriers;and the poetry of awkwardness, whereof the brightest example is Mr. Trans-Atlantic Rice. And, verily, many other poetries there be, as ofimpudence (for which consult the experience of swindlers); of prose, (for which see Addison); of energy, of sleep, of battle and of peace:for it is an easy-seeming artfulness, the most fascinating manner ofdoing as of saying, complication simplified, and every thing effected toits bravest advantage. Poetry wants a champion in these days, who willsave her from her friends: O, namby-pamby "lovers of the Nine!" yourinnumerous dull lyrics--ay, and mine--your unnatural heroics--I too havesinned thus--your up-hill sonnets--that labour of folly have I known aswell--in brief, your misnamed poetry, hath done grievous damage to thecause you toil for. Yet I would avow thus much, for I believe it: as anaverage, we have beaten our ancestors; seldom can we take up a paper ora periodical which does not show us verses worthy of great names; theage is full of highly respectable, if not superlative poetry; and trulymay we consider that the very abundance of good versification haslowered the price of poets, and therefore, in this marketing world, hasrobbed them of proper estimation. Doubtless, there have been mighty menof song higher in rank, as earlier in time, than any now who dare to trya chirrup: but there are also many of our anonymous minstrels, with whomthe greater number of the so-called old English poets could not withadvantage to the ancients justly be compared. Look at '_Johnson'sLives_. ' Who can read the book, and the specimens it glorifies, withoutrejoicing in his prose, and thoroughly despising their poetry?--With afew brilliant exceptions, of course, (for ill-used Milton, Pope--andshall we in the same sentence put Dryden?--are there, ) a more wretchedset of halfpenny-a-liners never stormed mob-trodden Parnassus. Thepoetry of Queen Anne's time and thereabouts, I judge to have been at thelowest bathos of badness; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome flattery oftitles, and foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses: poor weakhobbling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated byfalse rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary Alexandrines;ill-selected subjects, laboured, indelicate, or impossible similes, passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons dull as lead. Yet these (manyexceptions doubtless there were, and many redeeming _morceaux_ even inthe worst, charitable reader, but as of the rule we speak not falsely), these are the poets of England, the men our great grandfathers delightedto honour, the feared, the praised, the pensioned, and those whom wetheir children still denominate--the poets! Praise, praise your stars, ye lucky imps of Fame! who could tolerate you now-a-days?--You lived ingolden times, when Dorset, Harley, Bolingbroke, Halifax, and Company, gave away places of a thousand a-year, as but justly due to any man whocould pen a roaring song, fabricate a fulsome sonnet, or bewail inmeagre elegiacs the still-resisting virtue of some persecuted Stella!Happy fellows, easy conquisitors of wealth and fame, autocrats ofcoffee-houses, feted and favoured by town-bred dames! In those good oldtimes for the fashionable Nine, an epic was sure to lead to aMinistry-of-State, and even an epigram produced its pension: to be apoet, or reputed so, was to be--eligible for all things; and thefortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might have governed Europewith his metrical protocols. But these halcyon times are of thepast--and so, verily, are their heroes. Farewell, a long farewell, children of oblivion! farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King, Pomfret, Phillips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very smallthings, just rose, as your Leviathan biographer so often testifies, "toa degree of merit above mediocrity:" ye who--but (Candor and goodCharity, I thank you for the hint, ) limited indeed is my knowledge ofyour writings, ye long-departed poets, whom I thus am base enough topilfer of your bays; and therefore, if any man among you penned aught ofequal praise with "_My Mind to me a Kingdom is_, " or "_No Glory I covet, no Riches I want_, " humbly do I cry that good man's pardon. Believe thatI have only seen the château of your fame, but never the rock on whichit rested; and therefore candidly consider, if I might not with reasonhave accounted it a castle in the air?

Now, after this wholesale species of poetical massacre, this rifling ofold Etruscan tombs of their honourable spoil, a very pleasant ninnywould that poetaster stand forth, whose inanely conceited daringexhibited specimens from his own mint, as medals in fit contrast withthose slandered "things of base alloy. " No, as with politics, so withpoetry; in public I abjure and do renounce the minx: and althoughprivately my author's mind is so silly as to doat right lovingly on suchan ancient mistress, and has wasted much time and paper in her praise orservice, still that mind is sufficiently self-possessed in worldlyprudence, as to set seemingly little store on the worth of anacquaintance so little in the fashion. Therefore I disown and disclaim

A VOLUME OF POETICS, ill-fated offspring of a foolish father; miscellaneous collection ofoccasionals and fugitives, longer or shorter, as the army of Bombastes. Poetical as in verity I must confess to have been, (using the word"poetical" as most men use it, and the words "have been" in the sense ofTroy's existence, ) there must have lingered in me, even at thathallucinating period, some little remnant of prosaic wisdom; for it isnow long since that I consigned to the most voracious of elements allthe more love-sick rhythmicals, and all the more hateful satiricals. Now, I will maintain that act of incremation to be one of true heroism, nearly equal to the judgment of Brutus; nor less is it matter ofrighteous boasting to have immolated (warned by Charles Lamb's ghost)divers albuminous preparations, which to have to do, were, Clio knows, little pleasure, and to have done, we all know, as little praise. Suchlight follies are like skeins of cotton, or adjectives, or babies, unfitto stand alone; haply, well enough, times and things considered, buttotally unworthy to be dragged out of their contexts into theimperishability of print; it is to take flies out of treacle, and embalmthem in clear amber. As to sonnets, what real author's mind will not, if honest, confess to the almost daily recurrence of that symptom of hisdisease? With mine, at least, they have increased, and are increasing;yea, more--as a certain statesman suggested of Ireland's multitudinous_pisantry_, or as tavern patriots declare of the power of thecrown--they ought to be diminished. Nevertheless, resolutely do I hopethat some of these at least are little worthy of the days of good QueenAnne. 

In matters of the sacred muse, lengthily as others have I trespassedheretofore; the most protracted _fytte_, however, made a respectableinroad on a new metrical version of the '_Psalms_, ' attempting at anyrate closer accuracy from the Hebrew than Brady's, and juster rhymesthan Sternhold's: but this has since been better done by another bard. On the whole budget of exploded poeticals is now legibly inscribed "tobe kept till called for, " a period rather more indefinite than thepromise of a spendthrift's payment. Let them rest in peace, thoseunfortunate poetics!

There are also in the bundle, if I rightly do remember me, sundrymetricals of the humorous sort, which may be considered as really_waste-failures_ as any tainted hams that ever were yclept Westphalias. For of all dreary and lugubrious perpetrations in print, nothing can bemore desolate than laboured witticism. A pun is a momentary spark droptupon the tinder-box of social intercourse; and to detach such a sentencefrom its producing circumstances, is about as efficacious a method ofproducing laughter, as the scintillatory flint and steel struck upon wetgrass would be of generating light. Few things are less digestible thanabortive efforts at the humorous; the stream of conversation instantlyfreezes up; the disconcerted punster wears the look of his well-knownkinsman, the detected pickpocket; and a scribe, so mercilessly suicidalas regards his better fame, deserves, when a plain blunt jury comes tosit upon the body, to be found in mystical Latin, _felo de se_, or inplain English "a fellow deceased. "

"There shall come in the last days, scoffers;" those same last days inwhich "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. " Itis true that these phrases (quoted with the deepest reverence, thoughfound in lighter company) are forcibly taken from their context; butstill, the judgment of many wise among us will agree that they present aremarkable coincidence: in this view of the case, and it is a mostserious one, the concurrent notoriety of humour having just arisen likea phoenix from its ashes, of railroads and steamboats having partiallyannihilated space, and of the strides which education, if not intellect, has made upon the highroad of human improvement, assumes an importancegreater than the things themselves deserve. To a truly philosophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep, papillæ on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will findthe veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deridethe notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-booksof sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popularviews taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of eviland of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thickupon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, areflying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, andof a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, andwise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence a state of theuniversal mind degenerated and diseased. Still, let us not be toosevere; and, as to individual confessions, let not me play thehypocrite. Like every thing else, good in its good use, and evil only inabuse of its excesses, humour is capable of filling, and has filled, nolightly-estimable part in the comedy of temporal happiness. What a goodthing it is to raise an innocent and cheerful laugh; to inoculatemoroseness with hearty merriment; to hunt away misbelieving care, if notwith better prayers, at the lowest with a pack of yelping cachinations;to make pain forget his head-ache by the anodyne of mirth! Truly, humourhas its laudable and kindly uses: it is the mind's play-time afteroffice-drudgery--an easy recreation from thought, anxiety, or study. Only when it usurps, or foolishly attempts to usurp, the office of morethan a temporary alleviation; when it affects to set up as an atheisticpanacea; when it professes to walk as an abiding companion, lighting youon your way with injurious gleams (as that dreadful figure in Dante, wholanterns his path by the glaring eyes of his own truncated head); andwhen it ceases to become merely the casual scintillation, the flitting_ignus fatuus_ of a summer evening--then only is wit to be condemned. Often, for mine own poor part in this most mirthful age, have I had

HEARTY LAUGHS, IN PROSE AND VERSE;

but take no thought of preserving their echoes, or of shrining them inthe eternal basalt of print, like to the oft-repeated cries of Lurley'shunted in-dweller. The humorous infection caught also me, as a thinginevitable; but the case, I wot, proved an unfavourable one: and whodare enter the arena of contention with these mighty men of Momus, theseacknowledged sages of laughter, (pardon me for omitting some fiftymore, ) so familiar to the tickled ear, as Boz, and Sam Slick, Ingoldsby, and Peter Plymley, Titmarsh, Hood, Hook; not to mention--(but thatartists are authors)--laughter-loving Leech, Pickwickian Phiz, andinimitable Cruikshank? Nevertheless, let a tender conscience penitentlyask, is it quite an innocent matter to lend a hand in rendering the agemore careless than perchance, but for such ministrations, it would ceaseto be? Is it quite wise in a writer, by following in that wake, to bereputed at once to help in doing harm, and help to do harm to his ownreputation? There are professors enough in this quadrangle of thecollege of amusement, popular and extant in flourishing obesity, withoutso dull a volunteer as Mr. Self intruding his humours on the world: andsurely the far-echoing voices of a couple of cannons, thundering theirmirth throughout Europe from the jolly quarters of St. Paul's, may wellfrighten into silence a poor solitary pop-gun, which, as the frog withthe bull, might burst in an attempt at competition, or, like Bottom'sNumidian lion, could imitate the mighty roar only as gently as yoursucking-dove. 

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Grapho-mania, or the love of scribbling, is clearly the greatdistinguishing characteristic of an author's mind; pen and ink are toit, what bread and butter are to its lodging-house the body: observe, wedo not hazard a remark so false as that the one produces theother--their relations are far from being mutual; but we only suggestthat the mind, as well as the body, hobbles like a three-leggedOEdipus, resting on its proper staff of life. And what can be moreprovocative of scribbling than travel? How eagerly we hasten to describeunheard-of adventures, how anxiously record exaggerated marvels! toprove some printed hand-book _quite wrong_ in the number of steps up around-tower: or to crush, as a wicked vender of execrable wines, theonce fair fame of some over-charging inn-keeper! Then, again, howpleasant to immortalize the holiday, and read in after-years the storyof that happy trip langsyne; how pleasant to gladden the kind eyes offriends, that must stay at home, with those wonder-telling journals, andto taste the dulcet joys of those first essays at authorship. A greatcharm is there in jotting down the day's tour, and in describing themountains and museums, the lakes and lazzaroni, the dishes and disastersthat have made it memorable: moreover, for fixing scenery on the mentalretina, as well as for comparison of notes as to an _alibi_, for dulyremembering things heard and seen, as well as for being humbled inhaving (as a matter inevitable) left unseen just the best lion of thewhole tour, journals are a most praiseworthy pastime, and usually rankamong the earliest efforts of an embryo author's mind. 

It is a thing of commonest course, that, in this age of inveteratelocomotion, your present humble friend, now talking in this candidfashion with your readership, has been every where, seen every thing, and done his touristic devoirs like every body else about him: also, asa like circumstance of etymological triviality, that he has severally, and from time to time, recorded for self-amusement and the edificationof others all such matters as holiday-making school-boys andboarding-misses, and government-clerks in their swift-speeding vacation, and elderly gentlemen vainly striving to enjoy their first fretfulcontinental trip, usually think proper to descant upon. Of suchmanuscripts the world is clearly full; no catacomb of mummies morefertile of papyri; no traveller so poor but he has by him a packet ofprecious notes, whereon he sets much store: every tourist thinks he canreasonably emulate clever Basil Hall, in his eloquent fragments ofvoyages and travels; and I, for my part, a truth-teller to my owndetriment, am ashamed to confess the existence of

A DECADE OF JOURNALS;

which of olden time my _cacoethes_ produced as regularly as recurred thesummer solstice. Unlike that of Livy's, I am satisfied that this poorDecade be irrevocably lost; but, for dear recollection's sake of daysgone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation. Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-sidewanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, _à laRoscoe_, be set forth. But--what conceivable news can be told at thistime of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded British isles?Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to thetop of Egyptian pyramids or the bottom of Polish salt-mines, myauthorship would long since have publicly declared, in common with manya monkey, that it had "seen the world. " As things are, to Bruce, Buckingham, Belzoni, and that glorious anomaly, the blind brave Holman, let us leave the harvest of praise, worthy to be reaped as their own bymodern travellers. 

 * * * * *

More, yet more, most exemplary of listeners; and a web or webs of veryvarious texture. Let any man tell truths of himself, and seem to beconsistent, if he can. From grave to gay, from simple to severe, is theline most expressive of such foolish versatility as mine; _varium etmutabile semper_, to one thing constant never. I have heard, or read, among the experiences of a popular preacher, that one of his mostvexatious petty temptations, was the rise of humorous notions in hismind the moment he stepped into the pulpit; and it is well known thatmany a comic actor has been afflicted with the blackest melancholy whilesupporting right facetiously his best, because most ludicrous character. Let such thoughts then as these, of the frailties incident to man, serveto excuse the present juxtaposition of fancies in themselvesdiametrically opposite. 

It is proper to preamble somewhat of apology before announcing the nextpresumptuous tractate; presumptuous, because affecting to advise somethousands of men whose office alike and average character are sacred, and just, and excellent. Why then intrude such unrequired counsel? Readthe next five pages, and take your answer. Zealously inflamed for thecause of truth, if not also charitably wroth against sundry lukewarmcumber-earth incumbents, and certainly more in love with theChurch-of-England prayer-book than with her no-ways-extenuated evils ofomission or commission, I wrote, not long since, [and truly, not longsince, for few things in this book can boast of higher antiquity than amost modern existence, some things being the birth of an hour, some of aday, a week, or a month; and not more than one or two above a twelvemonth's age. --Alas, for Horace's forgotten counsels!--alas, for Pope'sand Boileau's reiterated prescription of revisal for--_morbleu etparbleu_--nine years!] I wrote then a good cantle of an essay addressedto the clergy on some matters of judicious amelioration, which we willcall, if you please--and if the word hints be not objectionable--

LAY HINTS. 

Now, as to the unclerical authorship of this, it is wise that it be doneout of métier. Laymen are more likely to gain attention in thesematters, from the very fact of their influence being an indirect one, speaking as they do rather from the social arm-chair, the high-stool ofthe counting-house, or the benches of whilom St. Stephen's, than _excathedrâ_ as of office and of duty. 

It would be a fair exemplification of the stolid prowess of a Quixotetilting against, yea, stouter foes than wind-mills, were I to havecommenced with an attack upon external church architecture: this topiclet us leave to the fraternity of builders; only asking by what rule oftaste an obelisk-like spire, is so often stuck upon the roof of aGrecian temple, and by what rule of convenience gigantic columns socommonly and resolutely sentinel the narrowest of exits and entrances. Let us be more commonly contented, as well we may, with our grand, appropriate, and impressive indigenous kind of architecture--Gothic, Norman, and Saxon: the temple of Ephesus was not suitable to be fittedup with galleries, nor was the Parthenon meant to be surmounted by asteeple. But all this is useless gossip. 

Similarly Quixotic would be any tirade against pews, those petstrongholds of snug exclusive selfishness; bad in principle, asperpetually separating within wooden walls members of the samecommunion; unwholesome in practice, confining in those antre-likeparallelograms the close-pent air; unsightly in appearance, as any onewill testify, whose soul is exalted above the iron beauties of a plainconventicle; expensive in their original formation, their fittings andrepairs; and, when finished, occupying perhaps one-fourth of the area ofa church already ten times too small for its neighbouring population. Fixed benches, or a strong muster of chairs, or such modes ofcongregational accommodation as public meeting-rooms and ordinarylecture-rooms present, seems to me more consistent and more convenient. But all this again is vain talking--a very empty expenditure of words;we must be satisfied with churches as they are; and, after all, let mereadily admit that steeples are imposing in the distance, and of use asbelfries; (probably of like intent were the strange columnar towers ofIreland;) and with regard to pews, let me confess that practice findsperfect what theory condemns as wrong, so--let these things pass. 

Nevertheless, let me begin upon the threshold with the extortionate andabominable race of pew-women, beadles, clerks, vergers, bell-ringers, and other fee-hungry ravens hovering around and about almost everyhallowed precinct: pray you, reform all that, and copy railroadcompanies in forbidding those begrudged gratuities to mendicant andever-grumbling menials. Next, give more sublunary heed, we beseech you, to the comforts or discomforts incidental to doors, windows, stoves, paint, dust, dirt, and general ventilation; consider the cold, fevers, lumbagos, rheums, life-long aches, and fatal pains too often caughthelplessly and needlessly by the devout worshipper in a town or countrychurch. Look to your organist, that he wot something of the value oftime and the mysteries of tune; or, if a country parson, drill cleverlythat insubordinate phalanx of _soi-disant_ musicians, a rusticorchestra; and exclude from the latter, at all mortal hazards, thehuntsman's horn, the volunteer fiddle, and the shrill squeaking of thewry-necked pipe. Much is being now done for congregational psalmody; butwhen will country folks give up their murderous execution of thefugue-full anthem, and when will London congregations understand thatthe singing-psalms are not set apart exclusively for charity-children?When shall Bishop Kenn's '_Awake my soul_, ' cease to be our noondayexhortation; and a literal invocation for sweet sleep to close oureye-lids no longer be the ill-considered prelude to an afternoondiscourse? Take some trouble to improve and educate, or get rid of, ifpossible, your generally vulgar, illiterate, ill-conditioned clerk;insist upon his v's and h's: let him shut up his shoe-stall; and raisein the scale of society one of the leaders of its worship: as, atpresent, these stagnant, recreant, ignorant clerks are sadstumbling-blocks; no help to the congregation, and a nuisance to itsminister. In reading--suffer this foolishness, my masters--fight againstthe too frequent style of dogged, dormant, dull formality; we take youfor earnest living guides to our devotion, not mere dead organs of anoft-repeated service; quicken us by your manner; a psalm so spoken isbetter than the sermon. In more fitting places has your author long agodelivered his mind concerning matters of a character more directlysacred than shall here find room; as, the sacrament with its holymysteries, and the many things amendable in ordinary preachments; butfor these my unseasonable Wisdom shrouds itself in Silence: therefore, to do away with details, and apply a general rule, above all things, andin all things, strive by judicious acquiescence with human wants, andlikings, and failings too, if conscientiously you can, as well as byspirited and true devotion, to break down the sluggish mounds of needfuluniformity, and to build up round the church a rampart of good sense:and so, Heaven bless your labours! A word more: if it be possible, takeno fees at a baptism, and let it not be thought, by either rich or poor, that an entrance into Christ's fold must be paid for; no, nor at aburial; but let the service for the Christian dead be accorded freely, without money and without price. To a wedding, the same ideas are notperhaps so closely applicable; therefore we will generously suffer thatyou keep your customs there; but on the introduction of a little one tothe bosom of the church, or restoring the body of a saint to Him whomade it of the dust, nothing can be more repulsive to right religiousfeelings than to be bothered by a fee-seeking clerk, thrusting in yourface an itching palm: to the poor, these things are more than a mereannoyance; they amount to a hardship and a hindrance; for such demandsat such seasons are often nothing less than a bitter extortion upon theself-denial of conscientious duty. 

More might be added; but enough, too much has been alluded to. Nothingwould strengthen the bulwarks of our Zion more than such easy reforms asthese: recent happy revivals in our church would thus be moresolidified; and where, as now, many have been lulled to slumber, manygrieved, many become disgusted or Dissenters, our sons and our daughterswould grow up as the polished corners of the temple, and crowds wouldthrong the courts of our holy and beautiful House. 

Suffer thus far, clerical and lay, these crude hints: in all things haveI studied brevity, throughout this little bookful; therefore are youspared a perusal of my reasons, and so be indulgent for their absence. I"touch your ears" but lightly; be you for charity, as in old Rome, myfavourable witnesses. 

 * * * * *

My before-mentioned Censor of the press had a very considerable mind todock all mention of the following intended _brochure_. But I answered, Really, Mr. Judgment, (better or worse, as occasion may register yourAgnomen, ) you must not weigh trifles in gold-assaying scales; be not soparticular as to the polish of a thumb-nail; endure a little incoherentpastime; count not the several stems of hay, straw, stubble--but sufferthem to be pitch-forked _en masse_, and unconsidered: it is theirprivilege, in common with that of certain others--lightnesses that frothupon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship'sclassicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, thatif friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of theantiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So givethe colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this samecolt, as straying without a responsible rider, is indeed liable to beimpounded by any who can catch him; but still, if he be found to havedone great damage to his master's character, or to a neighbour's fences, the estray shall rather be abandoned than acknowledged. Let then thisunequal work, this ill-assorted bundle of dry book-plants, thisundirected parcel of literary stuff, be accounted much in the samesituation as that of the wanton caitiff-colt, so likely to bait a-pound, and afterwards to be sold for payment of expenses, in true bailiff-senseof justice. And let thus much serve as discursive prolegomena to anotion, scarcely worth recording, but for the wonder, that no professedwriter (at least to my small knowledge) has entered on so common-sense afield. Paris, I remember, some years ago was inundated with copies of atreatise on the important art of tying the cravat; every shop-windowdisplayed the mystic diagrams, and every stiff neck proclaimed itspopularity. This was my yesterday's-conceived precedent for entertainingthe bright hope of illuminating London on the subject of shaving:

ANTI-XURION;

A CRUSADE AGAINST RAZORS, should have been my taking title; and perchance the learned treatisemight have been characteristically illustrated with steel cuts. Shavingis a wider topic than most people think for; it is a species of insanitythat has afflicted man in all ages, deprived him of nature's bestadornment in every country under heaven. So contradictorily too; asthus: the Spanish friar shaves all but a rim round his head, which rimalone sundry North American aborigines determine to extirpate; JohnChinaman nourishes exclusively a long cue, just on that same inch ofcrown-land which the P. P. Sedulously keeps as bare as his palm: all theOrientals shave the head, and cherish the beard; all the Occidentalsimmolate the beard, and leave the honours of the head untouched. Then, again, the strange successive fashions in this same unnatural, unneedfuldepilation; look at the vagaries of young France: not to descend also tosavage men, and their clumsy shell-scrapings; and to devote but littletime to the voluminous topic of wigs, male and female, cavalier andcaxon, Marlborough and monstrous maccaroni--from the plaitedAbsalom-looking periwig of a Pharaoh in the British Museum, toTruefitt's last patent self-adjuster. Of all these follies, and theirroot a razor, might we show the manifest absurdity: we might argue uponEastern stupidity as caused by thickness of the skull, such thicknessbeing the substitute for thatchy hair suggested by kind ill-used Natureas the hot brain's best protection: we might reason upon the averagesheepishness of this peaceful West, as due to having shorn the lion ofhis mane, Phoebus of his glory, man of his majestic beard. Then themartyrdom it is to many! who stoically, day after day, persist inscratching to the quick their irritable chins, and after all to littlebetter end than the diligent earning of tooth-aches, ear-aches, colds, sore throats, and unbecoming blank faces. Habit, it is true, makes usdeem that a comfort, and our better halves (or those we would fain haveso) think that a beauty, which our forerunners of old time would haveheld a plague, a disgrace, a deformity, a mortification: prisonedpaupers in the Union think it an insufferable hardship to go bearded, and King David's ambassadors would have given their right eyes _not_ tohave been shaved; so much are we the slaves of custom: Sheffield also, it is equally true, is a town that humane men would not wish to ruin; byrazors they of Sheffield live, and shaving is their substance. But, asin the case of the smoother and softer sex, we are convinced that thewand of fashion would presently convert their heterodox anti-barbalprejudices: so, in the case of harder-ware Sheffield, while we hope tolive to see razors regarded as antiquarian rarities, (even as awatchman's rattle, or the many-caped coats of the semi-extinct class_Welleria coachmanensis_ are now some time become, ) still we desire allpossible multiplication to the tribe of trimming scissors. Like Ireland, we shout for long-denied justice; give us our beards. That reasonableindulgence shall never be abused; our Catholic emancipation of moustacheand imperial, whisker and the rest, shall not be a pretence for lion'smanes, or the fringe of goats and monkeys: we would not so far followunsophisticated nature as to relapse into barbarous wild men; butdiligently squaring, pointing, combing, and perfuming those naturalmanly decorations, after the most approved modes of Raleigh, Walsingham, and Shakspeare, and heroical Edward the Black Prince, and venerableapostolic Bede, we will encroach little further than to discard ourcomfortless starched collars and strangling stocks, to adopt once morein lieu thereof open necks and vandyke borders. 

Of course, (here, priest-like, we take our ell, ) there must follow uponthis a grand and glorious revolution in male attire. This presentclose-fitting, undignified set of habiliments, which no chisel dareimitate--this cumbersome, unbecoming garb--might, should, ought to be, and would be, superseded by slashed gay jerkins, and picturesque nethergarments: cap and feather throwing into shade the modern hat, ugliestof all imaginable head-dresses; and in lieu of the smock-frockMacintosh, or coarse-featured bear-skin, Ciceronian mantles flowing fromthe shoulders, or lighter capes of the elegant olden-time Venitian. Byway of distinguishing the now confused classes of society, my radicalreform in dress would go to recommend that nobles and gentry wear theirown heraldic colours and livery buttons; and humbler domesticatedcreatures walk, as modest gentlefolks do now, in what sundry havepresumed to call "Mufti. " To be briefer; in dress, if nothing more, letus sensibly retrograde to the days of good Queen Bess: I will not say, copy a Sir Piercie Shafton, who boasts of having "danced the salvage manat the mummery of Clerkenwell, in a suit of flesh-coloured silk, trimmedwith fur;" neither, under these dingy skies, would I care to walk abroadwith Sir Philip Sidney in satin boots, or with Oliver Goldsmith in apeach-coloured doublet: but still, for very comfort's sake, let us breakour bonds of cloth and buckram, and, in so far as adornment isconcerned, let us exchange this staid funeral monotony for the gallantgarb of our ancestors, the brave costumes of our Edwards and the bluffKing Hal. 

Behold, too scornful friend, how my Tory rabies reaches to the wardrobe. The modern dress of illuminated Europe has, in my humble opinion, gonefar to weaken the old empire of the Porte, to denationalize Egypt, todegenerate the Jews, to mammonize once generous Greece, and carryrepublican equality into the great prairies of America: it is theundistinguishing, humiliating, unchivalrous livery of our coldcosmopolites. But enough of this: pews and spires are to my Quixotismnot more unextinguishable foes, than coats, cravats, waistcoats, andunnameables. 

And now an honest word at parting, about such trivialities ofauthorship. Why should a poor shepherd of the Landes for ever wear hisstilts? Or a tragic actor, like some mortified La Trapist, never beallowed to laugh? Or Mr. Green be denied any other carriage than thewicker car of his balloon? Even so, dear reader, pr'ythee suffer aserious sort of author sometimes to take off his wig and spectacles, andcondescend to think of such minor matters as the toilet and itsstill-recurring duties. And, if you _should_ find out the veritable nameof your weak confessing scribe, think not the less kindly of his gravervolumes; this one is his pastime, his holiday laugh, his purposelytruant, lawless, desultory recreance: impute not folly to the face ofcheerfulness; be charitable to such mixtures of alternate gayety andsoberness as in thine own mind, if thou searchest, thou shall find; letme laugh with those that laugh, as well as sympathize with weepers; andcavil not at those inconsistencies, which of a verity are man's rightattributes. 

 * * * * *

Ideas lie round about us, thick as daisies in a summer meadow. For myown part, I know not what a walk, or a talk, or a peep into a book maylead me to. Brunel hit upon the notion of a tunnel-shield, from thecasual sight of a certain water-beetle, to whom the God of Nature hadgiven a protecting buckler for its head. Newton found out gravitation, by reasoning on the fall of an apple from the tree. Almost everyinvention has been the suggestion of an accident. Even so, to descendfrom great things to small, did a solitary stroll in most-EnglishDevonshire hint to me the next fair topic. It was while wandering aboutthe Pyrenean neighbourhood of Linton and Ly'mouth not many months ago, that my reveries became concentrated for divers hallucinating hours on avery pretty book, with a very pretty title. And here let me remarkepisodically, that I pride myself on titles; what compositors call"monkeyfying the title-page" is known to be a talent of itself, and onemoreover to which in these days of advertisements and superficialitiesmany a meagre book has owed its popular acceptance. The titles ofgenerations back seemed not to have been regarded honest, if they didnot exhibit on their face a true and particular table of contents;whereas in these sad times, (with many, not with me, ) mystery is a goodrule, but falsehood is a better. Again, those honest-speaking authors ofthe past scrupled not to designate their writings as '_A Most EruditeTreatise_' on so-and-so, or a '_A Right Ingenious Handling of theMysteries_' of such-and-such, whereas modern hypocrisy aims atunder-rating its own pet work; and more than one book has been ruined inthe market, for having been carelessly titled by the definite THE; asif, forsooth, it were the world's arbiter of that one topic, self-constituted pundit of, e. G. , title-pages. And this word brings meback: consider the truly English music of this one:

THE SQUIRE, AND HIS BEAUTIFUL HOME, a fine old country gentleman, pleasantly located, affluent, noble-minded, wise, and patriotic. This was to have been shown forth, inwish at least, as somewhat akin to, or congenerous with '_The Doctor_, &c. , '--that rambling wonder of strange and multifarious reading: or'_The Rectory of Valehead_, ' or '_Vicar of Wakefield_, ' or '_The FamilyRobinson Crusoe_, ' still unwrecked; or many another hearty, cheerful orpathetic tale of home, sweet home: and yet as to design and executionstrictly original and unplagiaristic. The first chapters (simple healthywriting, redolent of green pastures, and linchened rocks, and dew-droptmountains, ) might introduce localities; the beautiful home itself, anElizabethan mansion, with its park, lake, hill and valley scenery; apeep at the blue mile-off sea, brawling brooks, oak-woods, conservatories, rookery, and all such pleasant adjuncts of that mostfortunate of pleasure-hunters, a country squire, with a princelyrent-roll. Then should be detailed, circumstantially, the lord of thebeautiful home, a picture of the hospitable virtues; the wife of thebeautiful home, a portraiture of happy domesticity, admirable also as amother, a nurse, a neighbour, and the poor's best friend: children mustabound, of course, or the home is a heaven uninhabited; and shrewd hintsmight hereabouts be dropped as to the judicious or injudicious inmatters educational: servants, too, both old and young, with discussionson their modern treatment, and on that better class of bygones, whomkindness made not familiar, and the right assertion of authorityprovoked not into insolence; whose interest for the dear old family wasnever merged in their own, and whose honesty was as unsuspected as thatof young master himself, or sweet little mistress Alice. 

After all this, might we descant upon the squire's characteristics. Takehim as a politician: liberal, that is to say, (for his frown is on me ata phrase so doubtful, ) generous, tolerant, kind, and manly; but none ofyour low-bred slanderers of that noble name, so generally tyrants athome and cowardly abroad--mean agitating fellows, the scum of disgorgingsociety, raised by turbulence and recklessness from the bottom to thesurface: oh no, none of these; but, for all his just liberality, anhonest, honourable, loyal, church-going, uncompromising Tory: with adetail of his reasons, notions, and practices thereabouts, inclusive ofhis conduct at elections, his wholesome influence over an otherwiseunguided or ill-guided tenantry, and as concerning other miscalledcorruptions: his open argumentation of the representative doctrine, thatit ought to stop short as soon as ever the religion, the learning, andthe wealth of a country are fairly represented; that in fact the poorman thinks little of his vote, unless indeed in worse cases looking fora bribe; and that the principle is pushed into ruinous absurdities whenthe destitution, the crime, and the ignorance of a nation demand theirproper representatives; that, almost as a consequence of human averagedepravity, the greater the franchise's extension, the worse in all waysbecome those who impersonate the enfranchised; and so, after duecondemnation of Whiggery, to stultify Chartism, and that demoralizinglie, the ballot. Then as to the squire's religion; and certainconfabulations with his parson, his household, his harvest-hometenantry, and local preachers of dissent and schism; his creed, practice, and favourable samples of daily life. Moreover, our squireshould have somewhat to tell of personal history and adventures; a youthof poor dependence on a miser uncle; a storm-tost early manhood, consequent on his high uncompromising principles; then the miser'sdeath, without the base injustice of that cruel will, which aneleventh-hour penitence destroyed: the squire comes to his property, marries his one old flame, effects reformations, attains popularity, happiness, and other due prosperities. Anecdotes of particular passages, as in affliction or in joy; his son lamed for life, or his house halfburnt down, his attack by highwaymen, or election for parliament. Thesquire's general confidence in man, sympathy with frailties, and successin regenerating long-lost characters. His discourse on field sports, displaying the amiable intellectuality of a Gilbert White as opposed tothe blood-thirsty Nimrodism and Ramrodism of a mad Mytton. A marriage; afuneral; a disputed legacy of some eccentric relative; with itsagreeable concomitants of heartless selfish strife, rebuked by thesquire's noble example: the conventicle gently put down by dint ofgradual desertions, and church-going as tenderly extended; vestrydemagogues and parochial incendiaries chastised by our squire; anddivers other adventures, conversations, situations, and conditions, illustrative of that grand character, a fine old English gentleman, allof the olden time. 

Altogether, if well managed, a book like this would be calculated to dosubstantial good in these days of no principle or bad principle. Acaptivating example well applied--witness the uses of biography--isinfectious among the well-inclined and well-informed. But--but--but--Ifancy there may exist, and do exist already, admirable books of justthis character. I have heard of, but not seen, '_The Portrait of aChristian Gentleman_, ' and another '_of a Churchman_:' doubtless, these, combined with a sort of Mr. Dovedale in that clever impossible'_Floreston_, ' or an equally unnatural and charming Sir CharlesGrandison, with a dash of scenery and a sprinkle of anecdote, wouldmake up, far better than I could fabricate, the fair fine character thatonce I thought to sketch. Moreover, to a plain gentleman, living in thecountry, of perfectly identical ideas with those of the squire on allimaginable topics, gifted too (we will not say with quite his princelyrent-roll, but at any rate) with sundry like advantages in the way ofdecent affluence, pleasant scenery, an old house, a good wife, and fairchildren--with plenty of similar adventures and circumstantials--and thenecessary proportion of highwaymen, radicals, rascals, and schismaticsdotted all about his neighbourhood, the idea would seem, to say theleast, somewhat egotistic. But why may not humble individualities begeneralized in grander shapes? why not glorify the picture of a cottagewith colouring of Turner's most imaginative palette? An author, like anartist, seldom does his work well unless he has nature before him:exalted and idealized, the Roman beggar goes forth a Jupiter, andcountry wenches help a Howard to his Naiads. Nevertheless, let theSquire and his train pass us by, indefinite as Banquo's progeny: let hisbeautiful home be sublimely indistinct; even such are Martin's ætherialcities: the thought shall rest unfructified at present--a mummied, vitalseed. The review is over, and the Squire's troop of yeomanry notrequired: so let them wait till next year's muster. 

 * * * * *

Few novelties are more called for, in this halcyon age of authorship, this summer season for the Sosii, this every-day-a-birth-day for somefive-and-twenty books, than the establishment of a recognised literarytribunal, some judgment-hall of master spirits, from whose calm, unhurried, unbiased verdict, there should be no appeal. Far, very far beit from me to arraign modern reviewers either of partialities orincapacity; indeed, it is probable that few men of high talent, character, and station, have not, at some time or other, temporarily atleast contributed to swell their ranks: moreover, from one they havetreated so magnanimously, they shall not get the wages of ingratitude;they have been kind to my dear book-children, and I--_don't be socurious_--thank them for their courtesy with all a father's feelingtoward the liberal friends of his sons and daughters. Speakinggenerally, (for, not to flatter any class of men, truly there are roguesin all, ) I am bold to call them candid, honest, clever men; quitesuperior, as a body, to every thing like bribery and corruption, and, with human limitations, little influenced by motives, either ofprejudice or favour. For indefatigable industry, unexampled patience, and powers of mind very far above what are commonly attributed to them, I, for my humble judgment, would give our periodical journalists theirhonourable due: I am playing no Aberdeenshire game of mutual scratching;I am too hardened now in the ways of print to be much more thanindifferent as to common praise or censure; that honey-moon is over withme, when a laudatory article in some kindly magazine sent a thrill fromeye to heart, from heart to shoe-sole understanding: I no longer feelrancorous with inveterate wrath against a poor editor whose faintpraise, impotent to d---, has yet abundant force to induce a heartyreturn of the compliment: like some case-hardened rock, so little whileago but soft young coral, the surges may lash me, but leave no mark; thesun may shine, but cannot melt me. Argal, as the clown says, is myverdict honest: and further now to prove it so, shall come thelimitations. 

With all my gratitude and right good feeling to our diurnal andhebdomadal amusers and instructors, I cannot but consider that gazetteand newspaper reviewers are insufficient and unsatisfactory judges ofliterature, if not indeed sometimes erring guides to the public taste;the main cause of this consisting in the essential rapidity of theircomposition. There is not--from the multiplicity of business to be gotthrough, there cannot be--adequate time allowed for any thing likejustice to the claims of each author. Periodicals that appear at longerintervals are in all reason more or less excepted from this objection;but by the daily and weekly majority, the labours of a life-time arecursorily glanced at, hastily judged from some isolated passage, summarily found laudable or guilty; and this weak opinion, stronglyenough expressed as some compensation in solid superstructure for thesandiness of its foundations, is circulated by thousands over allcorners of the habitable world. To say that the public (those so-calledreviewers of reviews, but wiser to be looked on only as perusers, )balance all such false verdicts, might indeed be true in the long run, but unfortunately it is not: for first, no run at all, far less a longone, is permitted to the persecuted production; and next, it isnotorious, that people think very much as they are told to think. Now, Ihave already stated at too much length that I have no personalities tocomplain of, no self-interests to serve: for the past I have been wellentreated; and for the future, supposing such an unlikelihood as morehypothetical books, I am hard, bold, sanguine, stoical; while, as forthe present, though I refuse not my gauntlet to any man, my visor shallbe raised by none. But I enter the list for others, my kinsmen incomposing. Authors, to speak it generally, are an ill-used race, becausejudged hastily, often superciliously, for evil or for good. It isimpossible for the poor public, (who, besides having to earn dailybread, have to wade through all the daily papers, ) from mere lack ofhours in the day, to entertain any opinions of their own about a book orbooks: the money to buy them is one objection, the time to read themanother; to say less of the capacity, the patience, and the will. Without question, they are guided by their teachers; and the grand faultof these is, their everlasting hurry. 

At another necessary failing of reviewers I would only delicately hint. The royal We is very imposing; for example, the king of magazines, No. 134, (need I name it?) informs us, p. 373, "We happen to have now inwear a good long coat of imperial gray, " &c. ; and some fifteen lineslower down, "We are now mending our pen with a small knife, " and soforth: now all this grandiloquence serves to conceal the individual; andto reduce my other great objection to a single letter, let us onlyrecollect that this powerful, this despotic We, is, being interpreted, nothing but an I by itself, a simple scribe, a single and plebeiannumber one. A mere unit, an anonymous, irresponsible unit, dissects in aquarter of an hour the grand result of some ten years; and thismomentary influence on one man's mind, (perhaps wearied, or piqued, orbiased, or haply unskilled in the point at issue, but at all eventsinevitably in a hurry to jump at a conclusion, ) this light accidentalimpression is sounded forth to the ends of the earth, and leads publicopinion in a verdict of thunder. And as for yon impertinentparenthesis--or pertinent, as some will say--give me grace thus blandlyto suggest a possibility. The mighty editorial We, upon whoseauthoritative tones the world's opinion will probably be pivoted--whosepen by casual ridicule or as casual admiration makes or mars the fortuneof some pains-taking literary labourer--whose dictum carelesslydispenses local honour or disgrace, and has before now by sharpsarcasms, speaking daggers though using none, even killed more than oneover-sensitive Keats--this monarchic We is but a frail mortal, liable atleast to "some of the imperfections of our common nature, gentlemen, "as, for example, to be morose, impatient, splenetic, and the more ifover-worked. Neither should I waive in this place, in this my rostrum ofblunt, plain speech, the many censurable cases, unhappily too wellauthenticated, where personal enmity has envenomed the reviewing penagainst a writer, and stabs in the dark have wounded good men's fame. Neither, again, those other instances where reviewers, not beingomniscient, (yet is their knowledge most various and brilliant, ) havingbeen from want of specific information incompetent to judge of thematters in question, have striven to shroud their ignorance of thegreater topic in clamorous attacks of its minor incidents; burrowinginto a mound if they cannot force a breach through the rampart; andmystifying things so cleverly with doubts, that we cannot see theblessed sun himself for very fog. 

Now really, good folk, all this should be amended: would that theWE were actually plural; would that we had a well-selectedbench of literary judges; would that some higher sort of Stationers'Hall or Athenæum were erected into an acknowledged tribunal of anauthor's merits or demerits; would that, to wish the very least, thewholesome practice of a well-considered imprimatur were revived! Letfamous men, whose reputation is firm-fixed--our Wordsworths, Hallams, Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like--decide in the case ofat least all who desire such decision. I suppose, as no one in theseselfish times will take trouble without pay, that either the judgesshould be numbered among state pensioners, or that each work socalmly examined must produce its regular fee: but these areafter-considerations; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea forcalm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain-child. Letall those members of the tribunal, deciding by ballot, (here in anassembly where all are good, great, and honest, I shrink not from thatword of evil omen, ) judge, as far as possible, together and notseparately, of all kinds of literature: I would not have poetssentencing all the poetry, historians all the history, novelists all thenovels, and theologists all the works upon religion; for humanity is atthe best infirm, and motives little searchable; but let all judgeequally in a sort of open court. The machinery might be difficult, and Icannot show its workings in so slight an essay; but surely it is astrange thing in civilization, and a stranger when we consider whatliterature does for us, blessing our world or banning it--it is a wonderand a shame that books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon thewaters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, your presentmuttering, Utopian! Arcadian! Formosan! to be not ill-founded: thesketch is a hasty one; but though it may have somewhat in common withthe vagaries of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and that king inimpudence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, that manyan ill-used author wants protection, and that society, for its own sakeas well as his, ought to supply a court for literary reputation. Somepoor man the other day, and in a reputable journal too, had fivenew-born tragedies strangled and mangled in as many lines: we need notsuppose him a Shakspeare, but he might have been one for aught ofevidence given to the contrary; at any rate, five at once, five mortaltragedies, (so puppy-fashion born and drowned, ) must, however carelesslyexecuted, have been the offspring of no common mind. Again, how often isnot a laborious historiographer, particularly if of contrary politics, dismissed with immediate contempt, because, perchance, in his three fullvolumes, he has admitted two false dates, or haply mistakes thechristened name of some Spanish admiral! Once more, how continually arenot critical judgments falsified by the very extracts on which theyrest! how often the pet passage of one review is the stock butt ofanother! Here you will say is cure and malady together, like viper's fatand fang: I trow not; mainly because not one man in a thousand takes thetrouble to judge for himself. But it is needless to enumerate suchinstances; every man's conscience or his memory will supply exampleswholesale: therefore, maltreated authors, bear witness to your ownwrongs: jealously regarded by a struggling brotherhood, cruelly baitedby self-constituted critics, the rejected of publishers, the victimizedby booksellers, the garbled in statement, misinterpreted in meaning, suspected of friends, persecuted by foes--"O that mine enemy would writea book!" It is to put a neck into a noose, to lie quietly in the groveof Dr. Guillot's humane prescription: or, if not quite so tragical asthis, it is at least to sit voluntarily in the stocks with Sir Hudibras, and dare the world's contempt; while fashionable--or unfashionableidiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinnerinvitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)--thinkthemselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but notyet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in his novel may bean old acquaintance, or one epithet in a long poem may be weak, indelicate, tasteless, or foolish, or one philosophical fact in an essayis misstated, or one statistical conclusion seems to be exaggerated. Itis perfectly paltry to behold stupid fellows, whose intellects againstyour most ordinary scribe vary from a rush-light to a "long four, " ascompared with a roasting, roaring kitchen-fire, affecting contemptuouslyto look down upon some unjustly neglected or mercilessly castigatedlabourer in the brick-fields of literature, for not being--can he helpit?--a first-rate author, or because one reviewer in seven thinks hemight have done his subject better justice. Take my word for it--ifindeed I can be a fair witness--the man who has written a book, is abovethe unwriting average, and, as such, should be ranked mentally abovethem: no light research, and tact, and industry, and head-and-handlabour, are sufficient for a volume; even certain stolid performances inprint do not shake my judgment; for arrant blockheads as sundry authorsundoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but the average)unwriting man is an author's intellectual inferior. All men, howeverwell capable, have not perchance the appetite, nor the industry, nor theopportunity to fabricate a volume; nor, supposing these requisites, themoral courage (for moral courage, if not physical, must form part of anauthor's mind, ) to publish the lucubration: but "I magnify mine office"above the unnumbered host of unwriting, uninformed, loose, unletteredgentry, who (as full of leisure as a cabbage, and as overflowing withredundant impudence as any Radical mob, ) mainly tend to form by theirmasses the average penless animal-man, who could not hold a candle toany the most mediocre of the Marsyas-used authors of haply this week'sjournals. Spare them, victorious Apollos, spare! if libels that diminishwealth be punishable, is there no moral guilt in those legalized libelsthat do their utmost to destroy a character for wisdom, wit, learning, industry, and invention?--Critical flayer, try thou to write a book;learn experimentally how difficult, yet relieving; how nervous, yetgladdening; how ungracious, yet very sweet; how worldly-foolish, yetmost wise; how conversant with scorn, yet how noble and ennobling anattribute of man, is--authorship. 

All this rhetoric, impatient friend--and be a friend still, whetherwriter, reviewer, or unauthorial--serves at my most expeditious pace, opposing notions considered, to introduce what is (till to-morrow, orperhaps the next coming minute, but at any rate for this flittinginstant of time, ) my last notion of possible, but not probable, authorship: a rhodomontade oration, rather than an essay, after my owndesultory and yet determinate fashion, to have been entituled--so is itspelled by act of parliament, and therefore let us in charity hoperightly--to have been entituled then, THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL;

A COURT OF APPEAL AGAINST AMATEUR AND CONNOISSEUR CRITICISMS:

and (the present being the next minute whereof I spake above) there hasjust hopped into my mind another taking title, which I generouslypresent to any smarting scribe who may meditate a prose version of'_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_'--_videlicet_, ZOILOMASTRIX. 

 * * * * *

At length then have I liberty to yawn--a freedom whereof doubtless myreaders have long been liverymen: I have written myself and my inkstanddry as Rosamond's pond; my brain is relieved, recreated, emptied; I gono longer heavily, as one that mourneth; and with gleeful face can Iassure you that your author's mind is once again as light as his heart:but when crowding fancies come thick upon it, they bow it, and break it, and weary it, as clouds of pigeons settling gregariously on atrans-Atlantic forest; and when those thronging thoughts are comfortablyfixed on paper, one feels, as an apple-tree may be supposed to feel, allthe difference between the heavy down-dragging crop of autumn and thewinged aërial blossom of sweet spring-tide. An involuntary author, justeased for the time of ever-exacting and accumulating notions, cansympathize with holiday-making Atlas, chuckling over a chance so luckyas the transfer of his pack to Hercules; and can comprehend the reliefit must have been to that foolish sage in Rasselas, when assured that heno longer was afflicted with the care of governing a galaxy of worlds. 

Some people are born to talk, with an incessant tongue illustratingperpetuity of motion in the much-abused mouth; some to indite solidcontinuous prose, with a labour-loving pen ever tenanting the hand; butI clearly was born a zoölogical anomaly, _with a pen in my mouth_, asort of serpent-tongue. Heaven give it wisdom, and put away its poison!

Such being my character from birth, a paper-gossip, a writer from thecradle, I ought not demurely to apologize for nature's handicraft, norexcuse this light affliction of chattering in print. --Who asks you toread it?--Neither let me cast reflections on your temper or yourintellect by too humble exculpation of this book of many themes; or mustI then regard you as those sullen children in the market-place, whompiping cannot please, and sorrow cannot soften?

And now, friend, I've done. Require not, however shrewd your guess, myacknowledgment of this brain-child; forgive all unintended harms; supplywhat is lacking in my charities; politically, socially, authorially, think that I bigotize in theoretic fun, but am incarnate Tolerance forpractical earnest. And so, giving your character fairer credit than if Ifeared you as one of those captious cautious people who make a manoffender for an ill-considered word; commending to the cordial warmth ofHumanity my unhatched score and more of book-eggs, to perfect which Ineed an Eccaleobion of literature; and scorning, as heartily as anySioux chief, to prolong palaver, when I have nothing more to say; sufferme thus courteously to take of you my leave. And forasmuch as LordChesterfield recommends an exit to be heralded by a pungent speech, letme steal from quaint old Norris the last word wherewith I trouble you:"These are my thoughts; I might have spun them out into a greaterlength, but that I think a little plot of ground, thick-sown, is betterthan a great field, which for the most part of it lieth fallow. "

APPENDIX. 

AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 

It will be quite in keeping with your author's mind, and consistentlycharacteristic of his desultory indoles--(not indolence, pray you, goodAnglican, albeit thereunto akin, )--if after having thus formally takenhis _congé_ with the help of a Petronius so redoubtable as Chesterfield, he just steps back again to induce you to have another last ramble. Now, the wherefore of this might sentimentally be veiled, were I but littlehonest, in professed attachment for my amiable reader, as though withRomeo I cried, "Parting in such sweet sorrow, that I could say farewelltill it be morrow;" or it might be extenuated cacoethically, as though anew crop of fancies were sprung up already, an after-math rank and wild, before the gladdening shower of commendation has yet freshened-up mybrown hay-field: or it might be disguised falsely, as if a parcel ofprecious MSS. Had been lost by penny-postage, or stolen in the purlieusof Shoe-lane; but, instead of all these unworthy subterfuges, the truthshall be told plainly; we are yet too short by a sheet (so hints ourpublishing Procrustes) of the marketable volume. Accordingly, whether ornot in this booklet your readership has already found seed sufficientfor cyclopædias, I am free to admit that the expectant butter-man atleast has not his legitimate post-octavo allowance of three hundredpages; and to fill this aching void as cleverly and quickly as I can, ismy first object in so rapid a return. That honesty is the best policy, deny who dare?

Still it is competent for me to confess worthier objects, (although, inpoint of their arising, they were secondary, ) as further illustrative ofmy '_Author's Mind_' shown in other specimens; for example, alinsey-woolsey tapestry of many colours shall be hung upon the end ofthis arcade; the last few trees in this poor avenue shall bear theflowers of poetry as well as the fruit of prose; my swan (O, dub it nota goose!) would, like a _prima-donna_, go off this theatre of fancy, singing. And again, suffer me, good friend, to think your charity stillwilling to be pleased: many weary pages back, I offered you to part withme in peace, if you felt small sympathies with a rambler so whimsicaland lawless; surely, having walked together kindly until now, we shallnot quarrel at the last. 

Empty, however--empty, and rejoicing in its unthoughtful emptiness--haveI boasted this my head but a page or two ago; and that boast, for allthe critic's sneer, that no one will deny it, shall not be taken from meby renewal of determined meditations; now that my house is swept andgarnished, I would not beckon back those old inhabitants. Neither let meheed so lightly of your intellect, as to hope to satisfy its readingwith the scanty harvest of a _soil effete_; this license of writing upto measure shall not show me sterile, any more than that emancipationshall, by indulgence of thought, be disenchanted. And now to solve theproblem: not to think, for my mind is in a regimen of truancy; not tofail in pleasing, if it be possible, the great world's implacablepalate, therefore to eschew dilution of good liquor; and yet to renderup in fair array the fitting tale of pages: well, if I may notmetaphysically draw upon internal resources, I can at least externallyand physically resort to yonder--desk; (drawer would have savoured ofthe Punic, which Scipio and I blot out with equal hate;) for therein lie_perdus_ divers poeticals I fain would see in print; yea, start not at"poeticals, " carp not at the threatening sound, for verily, even ascarp--so called from _carpere_, to catch if you can, and the Saxon capp, to cavil, because when caught they don't pay for mastication--even ascarp, a muddy fish, difficult to hook, and provocate of hostilecriticism, conceals its lack of savour in the flavour of port-wine--evenso shall strong prose-sauce be served up with my poor dozen of sonnets:and ye who would uncharitably breathe that they taste stronger ofLethe's mud than of Helicon's sweet water, treat me to a better dish, orcarp not at my fishing. 

Imagination, as I need not tell psychologists by this time, is mytyrant; I cannot sleep, nor sit out a sermon, nor remember yesterday, nor read in peace, (how calm in blessed quiet people seem to read!)without the distraction of a thousand fancies: I hold this an infirmity, not an accomplishment; a thing to be conquered, not to be coveted: andstill I love it, suffering those chains of gossamer to wind about me, that seductive honey-jar yet again to trap me, like some poor insect;thus then my foolish idolatry heretofore hath hailed

IMAGINATION. 

 My fond first love, sweet mistress of my mind, Thy beautiful sublimity hath long Charm'd mine affections, and entranced my song, Thou spirit-queen, that sit'st enthroned, enshrined Within this suppliant heart; by day and night My brain is full of thee: ages of dreams, Thoughts of a thousand worlds in visions bright, Fear's dim terrific train, Guilt's midnight schemes, Strange peeping eyes, soft smiling fairy faces, Dark consciousness of fallen angels nigh, Sad converse with the dead, or headlong races Down the straight cliffs, or clinging on a shelf Of brittle shale, or hunted thro' the sky!-- O, God of mind, I shudder at myself!

Now, friend reader, you have accustomed yourself to think that everything in rhyme, _i. E. _, poetry, as you somewhat scornfully call it, must be false: and I am sorry to be obliged to grant you that a leaningtowards plain matter-of-fact, is no wise characteristic of metricalenthusiasts. But believe me for a truth-teller; that sonnet (did youread it?) hints at some fearful verities; and that you may furtherapprehend this sweet ideal mistress of your author's mind, suffer me tointroduce to your acquaintance

IMAGINATION PERSONIFIED. 

 Dread Monarch-maid, I see thee now before me, Searching my soul with those mysterious eyes, Spell-bound I stand, thy presence stealing o'er me, While all unnerved my trembling spirit dies: Oh, what a world of untold wonder lies Within thy silent lips! how rare a light Of conquer'd joys and ecstasies repress'd Beneath thy dimpled cheek shines half-confess'd! In what luxuriant masses, glossy bright, Those raven locks fall shadowing thy fair breast! And, lo! that bursting brow, with gorgeous wings, And vague young forms of beauty coyly hiding In thy crisp curls, like cherubs there abiding-- Charmer, to thee my heart enamour'd springs. 

Such, then, and of me so well beloved, is that abstracted Platonism. Butverily the fear of imagination would far outbalance any love of it, ifcrime had peopled for a man that viewless world with spectres, and theMedusa-head of Justice were shaking her snakes in his face. And, by wayof a parergon observation, how terrible, most terrible, to the guiltysoul must be the solitary silent system now so popular among those coldlegislative schemers, who have ground the poor man to starvation, andwould hunt the criminal to madness! How false is that politicalphilosophy which seeks to reform character by leaving conscience cagedup in loneliness for months, to gnaw into its diseased self, rather thansurrounding it with the wholesome counsels of better living minds. It isnot often good for man to be alone: and yet in its true season, (parsimoniously used, not prodigally abused, ) solitude does fairservice, rendering also to the comparatively innocent mind preciouspleasures: religion prësupposed, and a judgment strong enough of muscleto rein-in the coursers of Imagination's car, I judge it good advice toprescribe for most men an occasional course of

SOLITUDE. 

 Therefore delight thy soul in solitude, Feeding on peace; if solitude it be To feel that million creatures, fair and good, With gracious influences circle thee; To hear the mind's own music; and to see God's glorious world with eyes of gratitude, Unwatch'd by vain intruders. Let me shrink From crowds, and prying faces, and the noise Of men and merchandise; far nobler joys Than chill Society's false hand hath given, Attend me when I'm left alone to think. To think--alone?--Ah, no, not quite alone; Save me from that--cast out from earth and heaven, A friendless, Godless, isolated ONE!

But of these higher metaphysicals, these fancy-bred extravagations, perhaps somewhat too much: you will dub me dreamer, if not proser--orrather, poet, as the more modern reproach. Let us then, by way ofclearing our mind at once of these hallucinations, go forth quickly intothe fresh green fields, and expatiate with glad hearts on thesefull-blown glories of

SUMMER. 

 Warm summer! Yes, the very word is warm; The hum of bees is in it, and the sight Of sunny fountains glancing silver light, And the rejoicing world, and every charm Of happy nature in her hour of love, Fruits, flowers, and flies, in rainbow-glory bright: The smile of God glows graciously above, And genial earth is grateful; day by day Old faces come again with blossoms gay, Gemming in gladness meadow, garden, grove: Haste with thy harvest, then, my softened heart, Awake thy better hopes of better days, Bring in thy fruits and flowers of thanks and praise, And in creation's pæan take thy part. 

How different in sterner beauty was the landscape not long since! Theenergies of universal life prisoned up in temporary obstruction; everyblack hedge-row tufted with woolly snow, like some Egyptian mothermourning for her children; shrubs and plants fettered up in glitteringchains, motionless as those stone-struck feasters before the head ofGorgon; and the dark-green fir-trees swathed in heavy curtains ofiridescent whiteness. Contrast is ever pleasurable; therefore we needscarcely apologize for an ice in the dog-days--I mean for this presentunseasonable introduction of dead

WINTER. 

 As some fair statue, white and hard and cold, Smiling in marble, rigid, yet at rest, Or like some gentle child of beauteous mould, Whose placid face and softly swelling breast Are fixed in death, and on them bear imprest His magic seal of peace--so, frozen, lies The loveliness of nature: every tree Stands hung with lace against the clear blue skies; The hills are giant waves of glistering snow; Rare and northern fowl, now strangely tame to see, With ruffling plumage cluster on the bough, And tempt the murderous gun; mouse-like, the wren Hides in the new-cut hedge; and all things now Fear starving Winter more than cruel men. 

Ay, "cruel men:" that truest epithet for monarch-man must be the tangentfrom which my Pegasus shall strike his hoof for the next flight. Whodoes not writhe while reading details of cruelty, and who would notrejoice to find even there somewhat of

CONSOLATION?

 Scholar of Reason, Grace, and Providence, Restrain thy bursting and indignant tears; With tenderest might unerring Wisdom steers Through those mad seas the bark of Innocence. Doth thy heart burn for vengeance on the deed-- Some barbarous deed wrought out by cruelty On woman, or on famish'd childhood's need, Yea, on these fond dumb dogs--doth thy heart bleed For pity, child of sensibility? Those tears are gracious, and thy wrath most right Yet patience, patience; there is comfort still; The Judge is just; a world of love and light Remains to counterpoise the load of ill, And the poor victim's cup with angel's food to fill. 

For, as my Psycotherion has long ago informed you, I hope there is somesort of heaven yet in reserve for the brute creation: if otherwise, inrespect of costermongers' donkeys, Kamskatdales' gaunt starved dogs, theGuacho's horse, spurred deep with three-inch rowels, the angler's worm, Strasburgh geese, and poor footsore curs harnessed to ill-balancedtrucks--for all these and many more I, for one, sadly stand in need ofconsolation. Meanwhile, let us change the subject. After a dose of cruelcogitations, and this corrupting converse with Phalaris and Domitian, what better sweetener of thoughts than an "olive-branch" in the watersof Marah? Spend a moment in the nursery; it is happily fashionable now, as well as pleasurable, to sport awhile with Nature's prettiestplaythings; the praises of children are always at the tip of my--pen, that is, tongue, you remember, and often have I told the world, in allthe pride of print, of my fond infantile predilections: then let thislittle Chanson be added to the rest; we will call it

MARGARET. 

 A song of gratitude and cheerful prayer Still shall go forth my pretty babes to greet, As on life's firmament, serenely fair, Their little stars arise, with aspects sweet Of mild successive radiance: that small pair, Ellen and Mary, having gone before In this affection's welcome, the dear debt Here shall be paid to gentle Margaret: Be thou indeed a pearl--in pureness, more Than beauty, praise, or price; full be thy cup, Mantling with grace, and truth with mercy met, With warm and generous charities flowing o'er; And when the Great King makes his jewels up, Shine forth, child-angel, in His coronet!

And while hovering about this fairy-land of sweet-home scenery, andconfessing thankfully to these domestic affections, your author knowsone heart at least that will be gladdened, one face that will bebrightened by the following

BIRTH-DAY PRAYER. 

 Mother, dear mother, no unmeaning rhyme, No mere ingenious compliment of words, My heart pours forth at this auspicious time: I know a simple honest prayer affords More music on affection's thrilling cords, More joy, than can be measured or express'd In song most sweet, or eloquence sublime. Mother, I bless thee! God doth bless thee too! In these thy children's children thou _art_ blest, With dear old pleasures springing up anew: And blessings wait upon thee still, my mother! Blessings to come, this many a happy year; For, losing thee, where could we find another So kind, so true, so tender, and--so dear?

Is it an impertinence--I speak etymologically--to have dropped thatsonnet here?--Be it as you will, my Zoilus; let me stand convicted ofhonesty and love: I ask no higher praise in this than to have pleased mymother. 

 * * * * *

Penman as I am, have been, and shall be, innumerable letters have grownbeneath my goose-quill. Who cannot say the same indeed? For in thesepatriotic days, for mere country's love and post-office prosperity, every body writes to every body about every thing, or, as oftenerhappens, about nothing. Nevertheless, I wish some kind pundit wouldinvent a corrosive ink, warranted to consume a letter within a weekafter it had been read and answered: then should we have fewer of thoseephemeral documents treasured up in pigeon-holes, and docketedcorrespondence for possible publication. Not Byron, nor Lamb, nor West, nor Gray, with all their epistolary charms, avail to persuade myprejudice that it is honest to publish a private letter: if written withthat view, the author is a hypocrite in his friendships; if not so, thedecent veil of privacy is torn from social life, confidence is rebuked, betrayed, destroyed; and the suspicion of eaves-droppings and casualscribblings to be posthumously printed, makes silence truly wisdom, andgrim reserve a virtue. This public appetite for secret information, and, if possible, for hinted scandal--this unhallowed spirit of outwardcuriosity trespassing upon the sacred precincts of a man's owncircle--is to the real author's mind a thing to be feared, if he isweak--to be circumspectly watched, if he is wise. Such is the presenthunger for this kind of reading, that it would be diffidence, notpresumption, in the merest school-boy to dread the future publication ofhis holiday letters; who knows--I may jump scathless from the Monument, or in these Popish times become excommunicated by special bull, or flyround the world in a balloon, or attain to the authorship of fortyvolumes, or be half-smothered by a valet-de-place, or get indicted forinveterate Toryism, or any how, I may--notwithstanding all presentobscurities that intervene--wake one of these fine mornings, and findmyself famous: and what then? The odds at Tattersall's would be twelveto one that sundry busy-bodies, booksellers or otherwise, would scrapetogether with malice prepense, and keep _câchet_ for future print, amultitude of careless scrawls that should have been burnt within an hourof the reading. Now, is not this a thing to be exclaimed against? And, utterly improbable on the ground of any merit in themselves as I shouldjudge their publication (but for certain stolidities of the same sort, that often-times have wearied me in print), I choose to let my author'smind here enter its eternal protest against any such treachery regardingprivate

LETTERS. 

 Tear, scatter, burn, destroy--but keep them not; I hate, I dread those living witnesses Of varying self, of good or ill forgot, Of altered hopes, and withered kindnesses. Oh! call not up those shadows of the dead, Those visions of the past, that idly blot The present with regret for blessings fled: This hand that wrote, this ever-teeming head, This flickering heart is full of chance and change; I would not have you watch my weaknesses, Nor how my foolish likings roam and range, Nor how the mushroom friendships of a day Hastened in hot-bed ripeness to decay, Nor how to mine own self I grow so strange. 

So anathema to editors, maranatha to publishers of all such hypotheticalpost-obits!

 * * * * *

Every one can comprehend something of an author's ease, when he sees hismanuscript in print: it is safe; no longer a treasure uninsurable, nolonger a locked-up care: it is emancipated, glorified, incapable of realextermination; it has reached a changeless condition; the chrysalis ofillegible cacography has burst its bonds, and flies living through theworld on the wings of those true Dædali, Faust, and Gutenberg: thetransition-state is passed: henceforth for his brain-child set free fromthat nervous slumber, its parent calmly can expect the oblivion of nomore than a death-like sleep, if he be not indeed buoyed up with certainhope of immortality. "'Tis pleasant sure to see one's self in print, " isthe adequate cause for ninety books out of a hundred; and, though zealmight be the ostentatious stalking-horse, my candour shall give nobetter excuse for the fourteen lines that follow; they require but thispreface: a most venerable chapel of old time, picturesque and full ofinterest, is dropping to decay, within a mile of me; where it is, andwhose the fault, are askings improper to be answered: nevertheless, Icast upon the waters this meagre morsel of

APPEAL. 

 Shame on thee, Christian, cold and covetous one! The laws (I praise them not for this) declare That ancient, loved, deserted house of prayer As money's worth a layman landlord's own. Then use it as thine own; thy mansion there Beneath the shadow of this ruinous church Stands new and decorate; thine every shed And barn is neat and proper; I might search Thy comfortable farms, and well despair Of finding dangerous ruin overhead, And damp unwholesome mildew on the walls: Arouse thy better self: restore it; see, Through thy neglect the holy fabric falls! Fear, lest that crushing guilt should fall on thee. 

I fear much, poor book, this finale of jingling singing will jar uponthe public ear; all men must shrink from a lengthy snake with a rattlein its tail: and this ballast a-stern of over-ponderous poetry maychance to swamp so frail a skiff. But I have promised a dozen sonnets inthis after-thought Appendix; yea, and I will keep that promise at allmortal hazards, even to the superadded unit proverbial of dispensingFornarinas. Ten have been told off fairly, and now we come upon the gaycourt-cards. After so much of villanous political ferment, societyreturns at length to its every-day routine, heedful of other oratorythan harangues from the hustings, and glad of other reading thanfigurative party-speeches. Yet am I bold to recur, just for a thought ortwo, to my whilom patriotic hopes and fears: fears indeed came firstupon me, but hopes finally out-voted them: briefly, then, begin upon theworst, and endure, with what patience you possess, this creaky stave ofbitter

POLITICS. 

 Chill'd is the patriot's hope, the poet's prayer: Alas for England, and her tarnish'd crown, Her sun of ancient glory going down, Her foes triumphant in her friends' despair: What wonder should the billows overwhelm A bark so mann'd by Comus and his crew, "Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm?" Yet, no!--we will not fear; the loathing realm At length has burst its chains; a motley few, The pseudo-saint, the boasting infidel, The demagogue, and courtier, hand in hand No more besiege our Zion's citadel: But high in hope comes on this nobler band For God, the sovereign, and our father-land. 

That last card, you may remember, must reckon as the knave; andtherefore is consistently regarding an ominous trisyllable, which rhymesto "knavish tricks" in the national anthem; our suit now leads us inregular succession to the queen, a topic (it were Milesian to say asubject) whereon now, as heretofore, my loyalty shall never be foundlacking. In old Rome's better antiquity, a slave was commissioned towhisper counsel in the ear of triumphant generals or emperors; and, inold England's less enlightened youth, a baubled fool was privileged toblurt out verities, which bearded wisdom dared not hint at. Now, I boastmyself free, a citizen of no mean city--my commission signed by duty--mycounsel guarantied by truth: and if, O still intruding Zoilus, theliberality of your nature provokes you to class me truly in the familyof fools, let your antiquarian ignorance of those licensed Gothamitesblush at its abortive malice; the arrow of your sarcasm bounds from mytarget blunted; pick up again the harmless reed: for, not to insist uponthe prevalence of knaves, and their moral postponement to merelack-wits, let me tell you that wise men, and good men, and shrewd men, were those ancient baubled fools: therefore would I gladly be thought oftheir fraternity. 

But our twelfth sonnet is waiting, save the mark! Stay: there ought tointervene a solemn pause; for your author's mind, on the spur of theoccasion, pours forth an unpremeditated song of free-spoken, uncompromising, patriotic counsel; let its fervency atone for itspresumption

 Bold in my freedom, yet with homage meek, As duty prompts and loyalty commands, To thee, O, queen of empires! would I speak. Behold, the most high God hath giv'n to thee Kingdoms and glories, might and majesty, Setting thee ruler over many lands; Him first to serve, O monarch, wisely seek: And many people, nations, languages, Have laid their welfare in thy sovereign hands; Them next to bless, to prosper and to please, Nobly forget thyself, and thine own ease: Rebuke ill-counsel; rally round thy state The scattered good, and true, and wise, and great: So Heav'n upon thee shed sweet influences!

And now for my Raffaellesque disguise of a vulgar baker's twelve, thelargess muffin of Mistress Fornarina: thirteen cards to a suit, andthirteen to the dozen, are proverbially the correct thing; but, as inregular succession I have come upon the king card, I am free toconfess--(pen, why will you repeat again such a foolish, staleJoe-Millerism?)--the subject a dilemma. Natheless, my good nature shallgive a royal chance to criticism most malign: whether candouracknowledge it or not, doubtless the author's mind reigns dominant inthe author's book; and, notwithstanding the self-silence of blindMæonides, (a right notable exception, ) it holds good as a rule that themajority of original writings, directly or indirectly, concern a man'sown self; his whims and his crotchets, his knowledge and his ignorance, wisdom and folly, experiences and suspicions, therein find a placeprepared for them. Scott's life naturally produced his earlier novels;in the '_Corsair_, ' the '_Childe_, ' and the '_Don_, ' no one can mistakethe hero-author; Southey's works, Shelley's, and Wordsworth's, are fullof adventure, feeling, and fancy, personal to the writers, at leastequally with the sonnets of Petrarch or of Shakspeare. And as withinstances illustrious as those, so with all humbler followers, theskiffs, pinnaces, and heavy barges in the wake of those gallant ships:an author's library, and his friends, his hobbies and amusements, business and pleasure, fears and wishes, accidents of life, andqualities of soul, all mingle in his writings with a harmonizingindividuality; nay, the very countenance and hand-writing, alike withchoice of subject and style and method of their treatment, illustrate, in one word, the author's mind. These things being so, what hinders itfrom occupying, as in honesty it does, the king's place in this pack ofsonnets? Nevertheless, forasmuch as by such occupancy an ill-temperedsarcasm might charge it with conceit; know then that my humbler meaninghere is to put it lowest and last, even in the place of wooden-spoon;for this also (being mindful of the twelve apostle-spoons from old timeantecedent) is a legitimate thirteener: and so, while in extricating mymuse from the folly of serenading a non-existent king, I have candidlyavowed the general selfishness of printing, believe that, in thisavowal, I take the lowest seat, so well befitting one of whom it mayungraciously be asked, Where do fools buy their logic?

List, then, oh list! while generically, not individually I claim forauthorship

THE CATHEDRAL MIND. 

 Temple of truths most eloquently spoken, Shrine of sweet thoughts veiled round with words of power, The '_Author's Mind_, ' in all its hallowed riches, Stands a cathedral: full of precious things; Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken, Cloister, and aisle, dark crypt, and aëry tower: Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches, And secret stores, and heap'd-up offerings, Art's noblest gems, with every fruit and flower, Paintings and sculpture, choice imaginings, Its plenitude of wealth and praise betoken: An ever-burning lamp portrays the soul; Deep music all around enchantment flings; And God's great Presence consecrates the whole. 

Now at length, in all verity, I have said out my say: nor publisher norprinter shall get more copy from me: neither, indeed, would it beforehave been the case, for all that Damastic argument, were it not thatmany beginnings--and you remember my proverbial preliminarizing--should, for mere antithesis' sake, be endowed with a counterpoise of manyendings. So, in this second parting, let me humbly suggest to gentlereader these: that nothing is at once more plebeian and unphilosophicalthan--censure, in a world where nothing can be perfect, and where apathyis held to be good-breeding; _item_, (I am quoting Scott, ) that "it ismuch more easy to destroy than to build, to criticise than to compose;"_item_, (Sir Walter again, _ipsissima verba_, in a letter to MissSeward, ) that there are certain literary "gentlemen who appear to be asort of tinkers, who, unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for_menders_ of them, and often make two holes in patching one;" _item_, that in such possible cases as "exercise" for "exorcise, " "repeat" for"repent, " "depreciate" for "deprecate, " and the like, an indifferentscribe is always at the mercy of compositors; and lastly, that if it is, by very far, easier to read a book than to write one, it is also, by atleast as much, worthier of a noble mind to give credit for goodintentions, rather than for bad, or indifferent, or none at all, evenwhere hyper-criticism may appear to prove that the effort itself hasbeen a failure.