strating with them for not coming and having their hairs combed.

Most people are astonished, perhaps, as they advance beyond the period of youth and middle life, at not finding themselves still older; and, if they took wise advantage of this astonishment, they would all live to a much greater age. It is equally by not daring to be too young, nor consenting to be too old, that men keep themselves in order with Nature, and in heart with her. We kill ourselves before our time with artificial irregularities and melancholy resentments. We hasten age with late hours, and the table, and want of exercise; and hate it, and make it worse when it comes, with bad temper and inactive regrets.

A boy of ten thinks he shall be in the prime of life when he is twenty, and (as lives go) he is so; though, when he comes to be twenty, he shoves off his notion of the prime to thirty, then to thirty-five, then to forty; and when, at length, he is forced to own himself no longer young, he is at once astonished to think he has been young so long, and angry to find himself no younger. This would be hardly fair upon the indulgence of Nature, if Nature supplied us with education as well as existence, and the world itself did not manifestly take time to come to years of discretion. In the early ages of the world, the inability to lead artificial. lives was the great cause of longevity; as in future ones, it is to be hoped, the appreciation of the natural life will bring men round to it. It would have put the pastoral, patriarchal people sadly out, to keep late hours at night, and to sit after dinner "pushing about" the milk!

Nature, in the mean time, acts with her usual goodnatured instinct, and makes the best of a bad business; rather, let us say, produces it in order to produce a better, and to enable us to improve upon her early world. She has even something good to say in behalf of the ill-health of modern times and the rich delicacy of its perceptions: so that we might be warranted in supposing that she is ever improving, even when she least appears to be so; and that your pastoral longevity, though a good pattern in some respects for that which is to come, had but a poor milk-and-water measure of happiness, compared with the wine and the intellectual movement of us intermediate strugglers. At all events, the measure, somehow or other, may be equal, and the difference only a variety of sameness. And there is as much comfort in that reflection, and a great difficulty solved in it. Only Nature, after all, still incites us to look forward; and, whether it be for the sake of real or of apparent change, forward we must look, and look heartily, taking care to realize all the happiness we can as we go. This seems the true mode of keeping all our faculties in action, — all the inevitable thoughts given to man, of past, present, and future; and, with this grave reflection, we conclude our present dance under Mr. Wilson's patronage, gravely as well as gayly recommending his very useful art to all lovers of health, grace, and sociality.

Why do not people oftener get up dances at home, and without waiting for the ceremony of visitors and the drawback of late hours? It would be a great addition to the cheerfulness and health of families.

115

TWELFTH NIGHT.

A Street Portrait. - Shakespeare's Play. - Recollections of a Twelfth Night.

HRISTMAS goes out in fine style,

with

Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else, and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and last, not least, the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat, but so fine to look at, useful because it is perfectly useless except for a sight and a moral, all conspire to throw a giddy splendor over the last night of the season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colors like a prince.

And not the least good thing in Twelfth Night is, that we see it coming for days beforehand in the cakes that garnish the shops. We are among those who do not "like a surprise," except in dramas (and not too much of it even there, nor unprepared with

expectation). We like to know of the good things intended for us. It adds the pleasure of hope to that of possession. Thus we eat our Twelfth-cake many times in imagination before it comes. Every pastrycook's shop we pass flashes it upon us.

"Coming Twelfth-cakes cast their shadows before;'

if shadows they can be called, which shade have none; so full of color are they, as if Titian had invented them. Even the little ragged boys, who stand at those shops by the hour, admiring the heaven within, and are destined to have none of it, get, perhaps from imagination alone, a stronger taste of the beatitude than many a richly fed palate which is at the mercy of some particular missing relish, — some touch of spice or citron, or a "leetle more " egg.

We believe we have told a story of one of those urchins before; but it will bear repetition, especially as a strong relish of it has come upon us, and we are tempted to relate it at greater length. There is nothing very wonderful or epigrammatic in it; but it has to do with the beatific visions of the pastry-shops. Our hero was one of those equivocal animal-spirits of the streets, who come whistling along, you know not whether thief or errand-boy, sometimes with bundle and sometimes not, in corduroys, a jacket, and a cap, or bit of hat, with hair sticking through a hole in it. His vivacity gets him into scrapes in the street, and he is not ultra-studious of civility in his answers. If the man he runs against is not very big, he gives him abuse for abuse at once; if otherwise, he gets at a convenient distance, and then halloos out, “ Eh,

stupid!" or, "Can't you see before you?" or, "Go, and get your face washed!" This last is a favorite saying of his, out of an instinct referable to his own visage. He sings "Hokee-pokee" and a "Shiny Night," varied occasionally with an uproarious "Rise, gentle Moon!" or, "Coming through the Rye." On winter evenings, you may hear him indulging himself, as he goes along, in a singular undulation of howl, a sort of gargle, as if a wolf were practising the rudiments of a shake. This he delights to do more particularly in a crowded thoroughfare, as though determined that his noise should triumph over every other, and show how jolly he is, and how independent of the ties to good behavior. If the street is a quiet one, and he has a stick in his hand (perhaps a hoop-stick), he accompanies the howl with a run upon the gamut of the iron rails. He is the nightingale of mud and cold. If he gets on in life, he will be a pot-boy. At present, as we said before, we hardly know what he is; but his mother thinks herself lucky if he is not transported.

Well, one of these elves of the pavé-perplexers of lord-mayors, and irritators of the police was standing one evening before a pastry-cook's shop-window, flattening his nose against the glass, and watching the movements of a school-boy who was in the happy agony of selecting the best bunn. He had stood there ten minutes before the boy came in, and had made himself acquainted with all the eatables lying before him, and wondered at the slowness and apparent indifference of jaws masticating tarts. His interest, great before, is now intense. He follows the