"The fact is, Hill, that the register of your birth was destroyed in the great fire of London, and you take advantage of that accident to conceal your real age." But Hook went much further, by suggesting that he might originally have been one of the little Hills recorded as skipping in the Psalms. No counter-statement, that might at least reduce him to the level of Jenkins or old Parr, was ever made by the ruddy patriarch. Perhaps he did not know his real age-at all events, he never told it; nor could others supply the information which he himself would not or could not furnish, for the Mæcenas of Queenhithe not being "atavis edite regibus," like his namesake of Rome, there were no known relations, dead or living, who could throw any light upon this chronological mystery. It has been stated, on what authority I know not, that he was only eighty-three when he died. Incredible as it may sound, our original Paul Pry must have undergone a nearly unquestioning existence of several weeks' duration, for though he was literally a mono-linguist, not speaking a word of any language but his own, he once travelled as far as Naples, unaccompanied by any other interpreters than his own energy and When asked, after his return, what had enabled him to make his way through France without difficulty, he answered, perseverance. "Francs and fingers! I had only to hold up a piece of money and point, and the whole country and every thing it contained instantly became mine. Talk French, indeed! pooh, pooh! I know better-don't tell me; if I had chosen to learn, in six weeks I would have undertaken to speak the language ten times better than the natives; yes, sir, fifty times, a hundred times better. But I would not pay them the compliment. I hate French." Nor did Latin names find much favour with him, for in alluding to his excursions from Naples, he would talk of his visits to the buried city of Pompey-ey-i-i, laying a vehement emphasis on the last two vowels, and sympathetically enlarging his eyes as if they were so many incontestible proofs of his assertion. Whatever might have been the doubts as to his birth, there could be none as to his death, and I can answer for one individual-doubtless there were many more, by whom that announcement was received with unfeigned regret. To the foibles of Tom Hill none could be blind; they were too glaring; his importunate cross-questioning, and the indiscreet gossiping which sometimes compromised himself and others, combined with his blustering manner, tended, in his latter life, to prevent any great increase in the circle of his acquaintance; but no one could deny that he was a kind-hearted, friendly man, ever ready to do a good service, and still social in his disposition, though his narrow circumstances would not allow him to renew the hospitalities of his earlier years. Great was my pleasure, in my infrequent visits to the metropolis, when I found my old friend in his lofty book lair, and could not only be placed au courant as to all the tittle-tattle of the passing day, but could conjure up, through the sympathy of our memories, the years that had long rolled away, and recall the deceased or surviving friends who had helped to wing the hours in our numerous merry meetings at Sydenham. Of these associates my next paper will still further indulge in the remembrance. SCHWERTING, DUKE OF SAXONY. PARAPHRASED FROM KARL EBERT. BY A. LODGE, ESQ. DUKE SCHWERTING in his banner'd hall sits at the festal board; A guest was there ;-'tis Denmark's king: all round in mute amaze "How now, Sir Duke! what boots the jest"-broke out the frowning Dane- "Sir King, with our old Saxon saw my answer well is told; : "You need, methinks, to burst our bonds, and proud in freedom rise, He spoke, and lo! in swarthy file, slow pacing from the door, Soon from beneath strange sounds confused the monarch's ears engage, The King would fly, but Schwerting's hand and voice his steps refrain; If thou canst quell yon wasting foe whose arms so brightly shine, And now thro' all the lofty dome the scorch'd and stifling air The Saxons kneel in suppliant guise, and hymn the throne on high, Awake! proud conqueror-mighty Lord! thou craven heart, and see STREET HARMONIES AND DISCORDS. SPRING STREET CRIES. It is some solace to me, the denizen of a narrow street, no longer looking on the face of nature for the index of her daily doings, learning, literally, the primrose time of the year from the sweet evidence of wood paths and hedge-rows-recognising her first timid steps in the scattered handfuls of pelucid snowdrops, and the impromptu clusters of pink and blue hepaticas, that in their eagerness to greet her, have risen to the sunny borders without their leaves. It is some solace in the absence of these simple remembrancers — wayfaring flowers and their cultivated sisters of the parterre-to find, upon the city pavement vocal substitutes, sounds that serve me for signs and for seasons. To hear the approach of Spring, since I can no longer see it, is better than not to be reminded of Spring at all, so I always note, after the middle of March, the cries that day by day proclaim its coming. I do not regard your "Spring watercresses" as any better than a cheat. We hear it soon after Christmas, certainly before Old Ladytide, when the vernal season begins, and long ere the roscid fingers of Spring have pranked the running streams with verdure. It is that softest and most poetic of all street cries, "Sweet primroses!" that fairly wakens within us the sense of her presence, carrying us in spirit to the sylvan places made luminous with the white track of their countless blossoms. Earth-born stars! flowery constellations! stretching through the shadowy woods a terrestrial milky way, and with pale, appealing eyes, lifting upwards the grateful thoughts which this outpouring of efflorescence for no apparent purpose but that of ornament creates in us. Most poetic is the cry, though the vendor be no rosy fingered flower-girl, with sun-touched cheek, dewy lip, and laughing eye, but a bowed, feeble-voiced old man, tottering, as his short steps bear him along the pavement, and hardly equal to the weight of the flat basket before him. Into the crowded courts he carries his fresh burden of green roots and pallid flowers, and forthwith old wrinkled crones gather round him at the door-steps, and babble of green fields and of the pleasant time of youth, when under wood-boughs, where primroses carpetted the earth as thickly as the winter leaves had done, they wove the flowers in their then bright hair, with fingers smooth and shapely. Through the close, fetid lanes and alleys you may hear his pandian cry. Young girls spring forth at the sound, and his course may be tracked through these places and the humble back streets, by the blacking-pots in area and attic-windows, in which a solitary root is seen for day or two afterwards struggling to live, or rather dying slowly, despite the care of the poor sempstress to whose lowly room that little nest of leaves, with its one open flower and two-folded buds, gives so much of pure beauty-constituting an ornament infinitely more effective, though she does not think so, than the tinselled things upon the chimneypiece that cost six times as much! 66 Sweet primroses!"-the little children clap their hands and the bigger ones gaze wistfully as their soft and alas dying breaths are wafted by them. Now the grey prophet of the Spring halts at the corner of the street, where the gin-palace spreads its snare each way, catching at the second door the wretch who has managed to escape the temptation of the first, and amidst the human ghouls who haunt these graves of home, affection, and life's highest interests, whose lips are red with the blood of their wasting children, even they start at the sound, and gaze (who shall say with what awakenings?) upon the basket of the primrose-gatherer. This cry is prelusive of Spring. Henceforth on sunny mornings you will hear the responsive, half beseeching, half-persuasive inquiry," Any flowers to-day?" sounding at one and the same time from both sides of the street, while the red-elbowed bouquetière, holds up her shallow pannier, full of paper-frilled flower-pots, and lets the fresh-blown beauty of the plants plead for themselves. Here comes one, like Flora, crowned with flowers, her basket a very cornucopia of bright colours, the painted tulip, the broad leaved arum, with its massive foot-stalk, and towering chalice not yet unfolded-valley-lilies with their papery blossoms tremulously cowering within their sheath-like leaves, and hyacinths, "purple, and white, and blue,” or tinted pink, or steeped in rose colour, whose waxen bells chime to the city clerk, of far-off flower-beds, or the southern windows of his childhood's home. A little later, and there comes the sprightlier cry of the barrow-boy, "all a-growing and a-blowing!" or just as eloquent of Spring, "musk, a penny a root," and instantly a desire for floral culture seizes upon the proprietors of back-yards and front borders, of hanging gardens on the leads, and flower-boxes in balconies, and where a hand's width of sterile heavy clay existed yesterday, an extemporaneous parterre appears to-day. Nay, I have witnessed the conversion of a tea-chest to the purposes of an arboretum, and have seen a dilapidated packing-case basking on the roof, the repository of half-a-dozen stunted shrubs, two roots of bachelor's buttons, a polyanthus, a wall-flower, and a ten-weeks stock, besides a plant or two of London pride, and a sprig of southern-wood, the crowning glory of its attic possessor. Far be it from me to mock that element of beauty in the soul, however humbly shadowed forth, that can solace itself even amidst indigence, with the grace and perfume of a flower. Simultaneous with these prognostics of the Spring, is heard the sister sound of " ornaments for your fire-stoves!" a cry of the same genius as those which have preceded it, born of sunshine, and of the desire for cleanliness, which epidemically seizes on every housewife about the coming of Easter; and traffickers in coloured straw, flag-like screens of tissue paper, and ornamental baskets for the fire-place, make the pavement gay with their frail, bright-hued wares. But except in households, where the seasons are managed as systematically as a certain Professor's great coat, who, whatever might be the weather, annually divested himself of it on the 20th of April, and as punctually got into it again on the first day of September; except where fires are extinguished chronologically, and the inmates sit with cold hearth stones by a similar rule; the cry is an anticipation rarely responded to till Whitsuntide be past. Amongst the street signs of the vernal season, the foot passengers on one particular Saturday will perceive, it may be at the corner of a street, beside the basket of a vendor of water-cresses, or heaped on the pavement where a blind girl sits feeling flowers into nosegays, bundles of willow twigs, with their downy yel low palms, filling a little space around themselves with an odour soft as that of fragrant coltsfoot. Better than the golden numbers, to tell when Easter falls, are these same gatherings of sallow slips. It is the eve of Palm Sunday when they appear, and being the earliest blossoming tree, these branches are worn by the devout Catholic, or purchased by numbers of the working classes of all sects, in honour of the Eastern strewings and hosannas, which the day commemorates in the Church. About this time, the street markets and other portions of the pavement are gay with flaunting sheaves of the amber jonquill, for which moist meads and shadowy dells have been rifled, and redolent of the rich-hued and fragrant wall-flower, never so abundant and delicious as in the tearful month of April. Already the cry of "sweet primroses!" has given place to that of" violets!" and at every corner a little corbeille of the flowers that withered for Ophelia when her father died, are projected towards you, -blue clusters, each in its rim of snowy paper, and so fresh and plentiful, that the very winds in Oxford-street and Regent-street are violet-scented. A little later in the season, when the purple haze of the blue-bell spreads through our English lanes odours delicious as the hyacinth meadows of Haerlem, the basket of the primrose gatherer is seen filled with these and bunches of the freckled cowslip, and thus between the marshes and the woods, nature, more generous than humanity, helps the superannuated to sweeten his morsel of pauper bread with a free trade, whose only tax is labour. It is a pity that the itinerant vendors of gold and silver fish, do not come into the category of vernal street-cries. It is the noon of summer when one hears them, when the pavement shines white with dog-day heat, and their globes of limpid water, filled with a spangled freight have an illusion of coolness about them in itself, an inducement to purchase. As yet this craft is by no means common. I have not heard more than half a dozen times the plaintively intonated, "Buy my gold and silver fish!" with which its followers proclaim their calling-and the whole thing, from the hand-net no bigger than a punch-ladle, to the glittering merchandise, darting hither and thither, like imprisoned sunbeams in their crystal sphere, is pretty-ornamental, and new. For myself, however, I must confess I have no pleasure in captive fish, any more than in caged birds. Apropos of the latter, ignorance, cruelty, and cupidity, among them, have induced a branch of traffic, which though, for very shame's sake, it finds no place in our street-cries, has identified itself with those spots of the pavement, which the poverty-stricken sellers of herbs and wild flowers have appropriated to themselves, and there, any day in May, you will hear the hungry twitter of gasping, scarce fledged birds, whole basketfuls of which are exposed in their pretty moss-woven nests, to the ogre gaze of multitudes of boys, whose desire of possession makes horrid war with the conscious want of pence. Except to make the pittance of poverty change hands, by cozening halfpence from half-starved children, there is no shadow of rationality in the undertaking. Too young to make the matter of rearing them even a possibility-the most inveterate bird-fancier is never tempted into purchasing the poor little creatures. The stratagem only succeeds with children, and with those, as a matter of course, of the lowest class-and for such motives, to shut the heart to the voice of nature in lonely places, even when uttered in the language of birds, to |