"mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly end in vexation of spirit;" but was too tender-hearted to chastise, and, like Southey's, "never consumed birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How strongly some oddities protest against oblivion! Poor M-! never shall I forget the "anger, insignificantly fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risibility, with difficulty suppressed, the culprit it was intended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember those quiet bubblings from thy natural fount of humour, whose current the cares of a contentious wife and seven clamorous bantlings had not sufficed entirely to dam. M- astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, by presenting himself at my chambers. London has always a choice collection of comicalities in human shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, and the worthy dominie of D—(in the far west) was no mean metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the vast city, "whose streets," quoth he, " are verily interminable, presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke." M. was an amateur of lowly pretensions on the violin; and in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to but one assuaging influence-sleep. M. had a tune on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity -There is balm (said he) in Gilead! Conscious of his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his accompanying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiognomical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gravity were strangely mingled, "Of a verity, Mr. C., yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the years of my experience, I ever heard produced by Birch!*" The season of boyhood is certainly as swift of wing as the seasons which succeed it—ay, by the light of Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that Spring of the seasons of the soul-its first love. Before I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as 66 a Dreamer among men, Indeed an idle Dreamer," I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all * It was the cantatrice of that name who sung. previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressione monotony, "Ah, happy years! who would not be again a boy?" Let all on the side male who cannot plead guiltless of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrement; and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unintelligible fancies from "The Childe," who, were the state of childhood again their own, would not appear as boys, either by creation or by choice, let us embrace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine who are they that—were the change optional-would antedate their lives agreeably to their longings. Not the youth who is professing love, nor the maiden who is pondering upon marriage. The youth might who has gone before the priest, and finds himself nearer purgatory than paradise; and so might a wife wedded "by attorneyship," or the mother of a thankless child. Not the youth who is advancing to manhood and to great possessions-to the freedom of majority and the unrestrained right to do as he likes with his own. Such a 66 major" might who has gained discretion and lost his domain; and so might a young man made old by excesses; so might a saint in an outburst of innocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair. So might he who hath seceded from vice, and is troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed by the heart he may have broken. So might he to whom the moral aspect of the time is "dark as Erebus," and who is discontented at everything. But so would not he who knows that progressive privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in its order: that intellectual advancement, founded upon holy Truth, is the superworthy aim, congenial element, and noblest safeguard of the soul-its fitting discipline, in the twilight-hour of its terrestrial sojourn, for the cloudless immutable meridian of its celestial exaltation. It is a work of considerable difficulty—which increases daily to keep one's footing on the road to Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. And of the crowd which enter for the race, how few attain the goal-of the countless array of com petitors, how scanty are the gifted with the garland! That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto legal eminency, is especially notorious for its tortuosity and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and chief baron in nocturnal visions (which befriend*), has, in the reality of broad day, found himself still below the bar, and there not seldom unlike the disputative angels-" in wandering mazes lost." With all my respect for that learned body to which my sire supplied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, I did not suddenly burn to be esteemed a Daniel in judgment, nor was I sensible of any instantaneous exhilaration from inspiring ether oracularly rarified, nor was I roused to emulation by the conflict of the courts. A simple summary of the subjects with which it was necessary to be conversant, convinced me that Cromwell had singularly fallen upon truth when he said, that, “there being so many law-books of great bulk, so many old musty records and reports, as that after the time spent in school-learning, the rest of the time of the flower of a man's life would be little enough to read them over and peruse them." Vigilantibus non dormientibus subserviunt leges, should be "Night visions may befriend,... Our waking dreams are fatal."-Night Thoughts. |