There was a frankness in my uncle Toby,-not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature:-To this, there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate, to come and take shelter under him; so that, before my uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards himThe blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart-rallied back!-the film forsook his eyes for a moment-he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby's face-then cast a look upon his boy.-And that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken!

Nature instantly ebbed again—the film returned to its place—the pulse fluttered-stopped-went on-throbbed -stopped again-moved-stopped. Shall I go on ?No! Sterne.

The Distressed Father.

HENRY NEWBERRY, a lad of thirteen years, and Edward Chidley, aged seventeen, were fully committed for trial, charged with stealing a silver tea-pot from the house of a gentleman, in Grosvenor-place. There was nothing extraordinary in the circumstances of the robbery. The younger lad was observed to go down into the area of the house, whilst his companion kept watch, and they were caught endeavouring to conceal the tea-pot under some rubbish in the Five-fields: but the case was made peculiarly interesting by the unsophisticated distress of Newberry's father.

The poor old man, who it seems had been a soldier, and was at this time a journeyman pavier, refused at first to believe that his son had committed the crime imputed to him, and was very clamorous against the witnesses; but, as their evidence proceeded, he himself appeared to become gradually convinced. He listened with intense anxiety to the various details; and when they were finished he fixed his eyes in silence, for a second or two, upon his son; and turning to the magistrate, with his eyes swimming

in tears, he exclaimed-" I have carried him many a score miles on my knapsack, your honour!"

There was something so deeply pathetic in the tone with which this fond reminiscence was uttered by the old soldier, that every person present, even the very gaoler himself, was affected by it. "I have carried him many score miles on my knapsack, your honour," repeated the poor fellow, whilst he brushed away the tears from his cheek with his rough unwashed hand, "but it's all over now!-He has done-and-so have I!"

The magistrate asked him something of his story. He said he had formerly driven a stage-coach, in the north of Ireland, and had a small share in the proprietorship of the coach. In this time of his prosperity, he married a young woman with a little property, but failed in business, and, after enduring many troubles, enlisted as a private soldier in the 18th, or Royal Irish Regiment of Foot; and went on foreign service, taking with him his wife and four children. Henry (the prisoner) was his second son, and his "darling pride." At the end of nine years he was discharged, in this country, without a pension, or a friend in the world; and coming to London, he, with some trouble, got employed as a pavier, by "the gentlemen who manage the streets at Mary-la-bonne."-" Two years ago, your honour," he continued, my poor wife was wearied

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out with the world, and she deceased from me, and I was left alone with the children; and every night, after I had done work, I washed their faces, and put them to bed, and washed their little bits o' things, and hanged them o' the line to dry, myself for I'd no money, your honour, and so I could not have a housekeeper to do for them, you know. But, your honour, I was as happy as I well could be, considering my wife was deceased from me, till some bad people came to live at the back of us, and they were always striving to get Henry amongst them; and I was terribly afraid something bad would come of it, as it was but poorly I could do for him; and so I'd made up my mind to take all my children to Ireland.-If he had only held up another week, your honour, we should have gone, and he would have been saved. But now!

"

Here the poor man looked at his boy again, and wept: and when the magistrate endeavoured to console him by observing that his son would sail for Botany Bay, and probably do well there; he replied, somewhat impatiently,

"Aye, it's fine talking, your worship; I pray to the great God he may never sail any where, unless he sails with me to Ireland!" and then, after a moment's thought, he asked, in the humblest tone imaginable, "Doesn't your honour think a little bit of a petition might help him?"

The magistrate replied, it possibly might; and added, "If you attend his trial at the Old Bailey, and plead for him as eloquently in word and action as you have done here, I think it would help him still more.'

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Aye, but then you wont be there, I suppose, will you?” asked the poor fellow, with that familiarity which is in some degree sanctioned by extreme distress; and when his worship replied that he certainly should not be present, he immediately rejoined, "Then-what's the use of it? There will be nobody there who knows me; and what stranger will listen to a poor old broken-hearted fellow, who can't speak for crying?"

The prisoners were now removed from the bar, to be conducted to prison; and his son, who had wept incessantly all the time, called wildly to him, "Father, father!" as if he expected that his father could snatch him out of the iron grasp of the law: but the old man remained rivetted, as it were, to the spot on which he stood, with his eyes fixed on the lad; and, when the door had closed upon him, he put on his hat, unconscious where he was; and, crushing it down over his brows, he began wandering round the room in a state of stupor. The officers in waiting reminded him that he should not wear his hat in the presence of the magistrate, and he instantly removed it: but he still seemed lost to every thing around him; and, though one or two gentlemen present put money into his hands, he heeded it not, but slowly sauntered out of the office, ap. parently reckless of every thing.

Mornings at Bow-street.

On Shakspeare.

THE four greatest names in English poetry are almost the four first we come to-Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no others that can really be put in competition with these. The two last have had justice done them by the voice of common fame. Their names are blazoned in the very firmament of reputation; while the two first (though "the fault has been more in their

stars than in themselves that they are underlings") either never emerged far above the horizon, or were too soon involved in the obscurity of time. The three first of these are excluded from Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (Shakspeare, indeed, is so from the dramatic form of his compositions); and the fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome.

In comparing these four writers together, it might be said, that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the poet of romance; Shakspeare, as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton, as they ought to be. As poets, and as great poets, imagination— that is, the power of feigning things according to nature,was common to them all: but the principle, or moving power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit, or inveterate prejudice; in Spenser, novelty, and the love of the marvellous; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with every variety of possible circumstances; and in Milton, only with the highest. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakspeare, every thing.

It has been said by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguished from the other dramatic writers of his day, only by his wit; that they had all his other qualities but that; that one writer had as much sense, another as much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same depth of passion, and another as great a power of language. This statement is not true; nor is the inference from it well founded, even if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware, that, upon his own showing, the great distinction of Shakspeare's genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not its differing from them in one accidental particular. But to have done with such minute and literal trifling.

The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare s mind, was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds--so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like

any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past," and present:-all the people that ever lived, are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,' are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement; and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives-as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies "nodded to him, and did him curtesies;" and the night-hag bestrode the blast, at the command of “his so potent art." The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for, if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing, in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, "subject to the same skyey influences,”—the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents, which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of his own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden