COLLOQUY IV.

TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON.

"I am become A NAME:

I am a part of all that I have met:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."-TENNYSON.

It would be a mode of procedure quite un-English, to enter upon several consecutive colloquies without commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, a compliment can be paid to the climate of his country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to provoke undue contumely also from a people incontinently prone to grumble among themselves at much that invigorates their individual constitution and national. Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical production, called English weather, we owe an im

mense amount of thanksgiving to that more dauntless class of Nature's minstrels, who, leaving gentler poets to sound their pæans to the praise of stars and zephyrs, proclaim the sterner merits of hail, snow, wind, storm, and vapour. And, chiefly because eccentric and halfanomalous, among this "dauntless" band, let us elect the mild Cowper, for himself and clan, as the recipient of our gratulations. It is pleasure, slightly tinged with pity, to accompany the valiant valetudinarianbold in seclusion, timid in the shock of men-while he scourges the "pleasant vices" of the herd, which he," a stricken deer," had quitted;-right comfortable is it to see him putting upon his country a commanding aspect which he could not put upon himself; and to hear him thus venting the healthy vigor of his English heart, before one of the gloomiest of national pictures

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Though thy clime

Be fickle, and thy year most part deformed
With dripping rains, or withered by a frost,
I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies
And fields without a flower, for warmer France
With all her vines, nor for Ausonia's groves
Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bowers."

Now in the creed of one at least (and of the least) of his compatriots, of few pleasanter sensations is this cold hut of human clay susceptible, than when the

genial sun melts all the heart within it into a gaîté so diffusive, that after inundating all its environs with its flood of joy, it extends a lavish flow of compassion to those misjudging masses abroad, who imagine the Indomitable Isle to be enveloped in perpetual brouillards. If Variety be "the very spice of life," as some have chosen to denominate it, then life in England is surely highly flavoured, elementally: still there are who complain fastidiously that the element is not to their taste; and the aërial ragout is taken with especially-wry faces by nervous elderlings subject à l'ennuyeuse maladie, ce de conserver la santé par un trop grand régime.* In the course of a brief professional career, I have advocated more dispiriting causes than that which now, without con-si-de-ra-tion of any kind, I have undertaken on behalf of the climate of my country. Addressing, of course, a discriminating jury, I contend, of course with deference, that to an English subject on whose amiable temperament the evidence of sociality has a soothing effect, and who (perchance not caring " to unsphere the spirit of Plato,") may, in the lower walks of practical philosophy, be placidly making the best of his condition at all times and in all places,-to such an

* La Rochefoucauld.

one it cannot be merely reconciliatory, it is more a matter of active rejoicing, that the Four Seasons which preside over his country's year, and exercise extensive influence on his country's weal, should present, as they do, a truly edifying example of good fellowship in their intercourse with each other. Now this disposition is rarely found in a limited coterie, where separate interests strongly prevail, and jealousy is prompt to rise at officious intermeddling. Our Seasons maintain a most cordial intimacy, exchanging visits en déshabille; and that lively movement of barometrical mercury at which a maledictory man might rail, the complacent jury I have the honor to address would delight in, as an indubitable token that one of the subdominant triad was passing compliments with the regnant Season. Where, too, in this "low-thoughted" sphere, a small number of functionaries attain alternatively a chief and brief authority, their individual period of pre-eminency is very nicely marked:-our British Seasons scorn a duration of presidency so accurately defined;-there is a noble free-and-easiness in each one's entrance upon empire, and exit from it, that expands the ideas to reflect upon. And in this their habit of frequent intervisitation, the more sanguine of the panel before