- an indescribable impulse urged him to rush towards the room in which the body of his daughter lay. He passed along the lobby; the door of the chamber was open; the Hungarian dog lay dead at the threshold; the corpse was gone. PROPOSALS FOR AN ENTIRE CHANGE IN THE NATURE OF THINGS. "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt !" "And 'tis the sad complaint, and almost true, Cowper. THE Assyrians say they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth. But the Moguls laugh at the Assyrians, whom they consider extremely modern upstarts. The Chinese, on their part, turn up their noses at both the Assyrians and the Moguls, believing their own celestial ancestors to have had possession of the world several millions of years before any other nation was heard of. It is a difficult point; - I shall not attempt to settle it. But whichever be the most ancient people in existence, no one will deny that the world taken as a whole is far past the meridian of life; or, to speak plainly, that it has fallen long since into its dotage. The natural consequence is, that of all creations under the sun, it has be come the most insufferably tiresome, monotonous, and disagreeable. It is continually assuming, nevertheless, the airs of a coquette of threescore and ten, and seems anxious to impress us with the idea, that, phoenix-like, it can renew its youth when it pleases; but its efforts are, to the last degree, feeble and futile. It is liable, no doubt, to the influence, of certain laws, which it is pleased to term laws of change, but which, from the undeviating regularity of their operation, might quite as well be called laws of uniformity. Is not the rotation of the seasons, for example, just as certain as the succession through different generations of the same vegetable and animal productions? Was not every natural phenomenon which we now see, seen by men and women who lived before Agamemnon? and all that we now fear, hope, suffer, or delight in, was it not by them acknowledged to possess a similar power? Things have stood in the same relation to each other, and produced exactly the same effects, from the day on which Jeroboam was defeated at Jezreel, down to the very hour of my present writing, which is between the hours of twelve and one of Friday the 14th of August, eighteen hundred and thirty. The only relief from this monotony consists in meeting now and then, not with a new existence, but simply a new combination. If we go into a far country, we may see mountains grouped as we never saw them before; but they are still mountains. If we possess what has been denominated genius, we may arrange thoughts and feelings somewhat differently from those who have preceded us, but the individual thoughts and feelings are as old as the moon and stars. Compare Homer's battles with those of Virgil or Ariosto, or Camoens, or Milton, or Voltaire, and how is it that you are able to distinguish them?—only by the words in which they are described, not by the deeds that are done, or the emotions which those deeds inspire. The soldier who fell at Waterloo died exactly as the soldier who fell at Troy. He may not have been apparelled after the same fashion; his language may have been less ancient, and a bullet instead of a javelin may have gone through his heart, but he had the same appetites, passions, propensities, and the same connections with life. Drawing from the same originals, how can the artist avoid painting the same portraits? Nor has mankind been condemned to fare upon the crambe repetita only once or twice, or a hundred times. The same perpetually recurring banquet has been invariably re-cooked for the children, which their fathers had feasted before. Other covers may have been put upon the dishes; a philanthropic Ude may have discovered a new sauce; an ingenious Mrs. Glass may have sug gested a fresh garnish, but as soon as the food itself reached the palate, the awful certainty of its personal indentity was ascertained, and hope sank into despair. Originality, in the strict sense of the word, is like "holy Alchemy;" he who seeks it will only be goaded into madness by his unprofitable labours. Not a single remnant has been left throughout all the moral and intellectual world. As for the sentiments and passions, they have been harped on to such a degree, that one is almost tempted to think it would have been better if there had never been any such things at all. What, for instance, in the whole of space has been more utterly exhausted than love? Who does not shudder to think of the unwearying cruelty with which poets and novelists, and people of that sort, have persecuted the firmament of heaven to represent blue eyes? What an interminable consumption has there been of the raw material the west wind - to be manufactured into sighs! What a tremendous run upon every green bank for roses, to be changed into the favourite currency of blushes! How many myriads of heads of hair have been made out of sunbeams! What a waste of pearl, to secure a sufficient supply of that staple commodity, teeth! Beauty itself, even though it had not been thus bedaubed and painted by weak minds, must have ceased to please, or almost to |