doating old man, unwedded, and the birds you see around me are some of my fondlings-my adopted children." A tone of voice, soft, and touched with the gentlest trill, (not dissimilar to that which, about nine years ago, distinguished the Bishop of Winchester's,) and the peculiar visual expression I have mentioned, gave wondrous effect in speech to what may appear tame in transcript. His eye!-it was nearly tantamount to another tongue, the mind's interpreter by an optical language. And his voice, though not naturally powerful, was capable of inflexions so nice and gifted with intonations so musical, that, together, he spake and looked an expiring subject into vivid life again: and, making every object he alluded to, live in description, there breathed from him, as he pleaded his concern for his feathered family, such ineffable fondness, that in the purity of his affection you admired it the more for its simplicity, and felt the effect of its eloquence to be a new estimation of canaries. The sanctum in which he was seated, was surrounded with book-shelves, fitted under, and forming an additional support to, his progenitors on the canvas. On one side of the apartment were arranged the works of prose authors, the back of each serving as a remembrancer of reputation, either time-honored or cotemporary: and the opposite compartment was filled with the works of poets, chiefly British. A volume of the Faery Queene, another of Racine, Chalmers' Tron Church Sermons, and Les Oraisons Funèbres de Bossuet, were lying on the table. We discoursed for a brief space upon current topics, and the circumstance of our rencontre. He told me of his peculiarities of taste and sentiment, "which are not either peculiarities, I trust," said he, in summing them up, "since my best hope is in Religion, my warmest aspiration for my fellows' good, and my chief pleasure in Poetry-which is to Nature (which is all, save GOD!) as the handmaid of a lovely regal maiden, who indicates, and calls upon you to admire, the charms of her sovereign mistress." I availed myself of a momentary cessation to glance at the books before him. "To use a phrase familiar to you," said he, "I have been turning to each of these works for a refresher. My memory, which I kept tolerably 'schooled and exercised' in youth, plays the truant in mine age, now I am gray-headed;' and, faithful from period to period, has not fidelity which can abide a paragraph. A lady of my acquaintance has made my cottage eloquent to-day with the praises of Mlle. Rachel: her name recalled the Hermione of Racine's Andromaque, whom I heard and saw at the Théâtre Français. The Englishman's World-painter, glorious Will himself, and in his own language, often dwindles into doggrel in attempting to jingle; but the French tragedial rhyme is intolerable. What sympathy can one feel for sentiment, that should move with the majesty and ease of a monarch, stalking on stilts, and rescued from a monotonous twang only by manifest effort?" C.-Little, indeed; though the first-class artistes `avoid with much dexterity the gulf which yawns at the close of each couplet! This difficulty and, to us, defect, displays in full-relief the scarecrow which Milton designates the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.' E-True. 6 You have seen Rachel then? C.-I have, but not as Hermione. E.-She is the reigning déesse with our fickle friends, whose fashion it is intensely to idolise, or to dispatch, unaneled, au diable. Each line here suggests Poetry in a palsy, and occupies nearly as long in reading, as the birth, progression, and decay of an affaire du cœur—an amour éternel in the Centre of Civilisation. Nevertheless, here are lines which seem to rise from the page with the nerve of a giant refreshed. Where shall we alight upon a scene of conflict more fiery and impetuous than this, where every little word on the tongue of a French girl becomes a stiletto!— "Ne vous suffit-il pas que je l'ai condamné? Sorry justification enough for requiring Orestes to add to his character of miserable that of murderer; but Rachel, once seen hurling this passion-poisoned shaft, in fitful vengeance, at her unhappy suitorhe sighing like furnace-can never be forgotten. It is indelible as the recollection of a lightning-flash which in youth may have blasted a human creature on your right-hand, and swept by you scatheless— horrified but unhurt. I have never before recognised so forcibly as now I do, in this reminiscence, the strength of this sentence of Madame de Stael:*— "Tant d'individus traversent l'existence, sans se douter des passions et de leur force, que souvent le théâtre révèle l'homme à l'homme, et lui inspire une sainte terreur des orages de l'âme.” C.-An axiom whose base, alas! appears to be un * Sur" La Déclamation." D settling! But you have, there, French eloquence of another order—a style which, partial as I am to poetry in my proper tongue, claims pre-eminent admiration in the Gallic. What an avalanche of the elements of oratory, what facile flow of language, what graphic delineation, what sonorous adjective-aid, what mellifluous cadence, conspire, in presence of a lofty ambassador in things divine, to sink (pour le moment) the terrestrial; to make "the merry-hearted sigh;" and to win, from fair aspirants after bliss, the homage of a fervent "C'était magnifique!" on their return from the mass to attire for the masquerade! E-Ay, the preacher's end and aim, conviction, is, I fear, a fruit rarely found in profusion; yet, as it regards the discours, many an epic poem has been pronounced from a French pulpit. That which Coleridge is reported to have said of Taylor, that he seldom wrote prosaically excepting in rhyme, applies antithetically with equal justice to the more intellectual of the priesthood of France-their sermons are Poetry, dismounted from the stalking-horse on which it paces the stage. Here, for instance, in Bossuet's Oraison Funèbre de la Reine de la Grande-Bretagne, is an exordium of grandeur, worthy to be admired of all men, and to sink into the hearts of princes: "Celui |