Ill news for the youthful poetaster, here membrance that kindly intercession on behalf is the packet handed back to him, unopened. of Samuel Johnson, then thirty, and comIll news, ah me! too, for the world at large. paratively obscure, spontaneously made by The Doctor is to ill to read anything. Alexander Pope, then fifty-one, and in the full meridian glory of his reputation. It imparts-the memory of that genial act, an act worthy of the literary brotherhood-an additional pathos to the sorrowful death-scene five years afterwards, when the great poet, prematurely decrepit at the age of fifty-six, sat silently, with his mind wrecked, propped up with pillows, slowly dying! And when, leaning over the back of his arm-chair,

The disheartening message, we are to told by the sympathising commemorator of the inci dent, is accepted by the stripling of eighteen, in his utter despondency, as a. merely mechanical excuse. But, alas! the cause was too true; and a few weeks after, on that bed beside which the voice of Mr. Burke faltered, and the tender spirit of Bennet Langton was ever vigilant, the great soul of Johnson quitted earth. At the moment, how-weeping over the friend already taken from ever, when the young, eager face of the Jew him, though still alive, Henry, Lord Bolingpoet turns from the door, clouded by the first broke sobbed out, through his tears, in broken anguish of his sudden and scarcely anticipated accents: disappointment,-there, breathing heavily and painfully in the curtained room up-stairs, lies, still in life, the Oracle of his Generation. Miss Burney is waiting anxiously for news of him in the quiet parlor, and the figure of Langton is softly creaking down the staircase, to sadden her with the last whispered bulletin.

"O great God, what is man!"

Remembering which woeful death-scene that was to be, I like to tarry a while over the thought of that fraternal plea, but one brief lustre earlier (five short years!), that unsolicited good service, by which the renowned author endeavored, as it were by stealth, to aid the unknown writer, then struggling manfully to fame, through many dismal misfortunes.

STEP THE THIRD. A.D. 1739. JOHNSON expired soon afterwards in that same year, at the age of seventy-five, on STEP THE FOURTH. A.D. 1700. the 13th of December; and I am naturally reminded of a notable incident occurring five ANOTHER interval has sped by, an interval and forty years before the date of the one of full forty years, when I lounge back at last mentioned. I am in a picturesque corner a stride into Will's Coffee House and the year of a famous grotto,-a small study or rather of grace 1700, simultaneously. As I am folsnuggery, very cosily furnished. It is the lowing our own diminutive Alexander the 1st of August in the year of grace 1739. A Great into that far-famed haunt of the wits poor little pale-faced crooked man is seated and witlings, I am ashamed to confess it, I immediately before me, huddled up in a observe that my little Guide upon Town is dressing-gown, leaning over a table, scrib- positively but just in his teens, and conse bling. A glance over his shoulder shows me quently in his outward man (or rather, it that what he has been writing is just finished. should be said, boy) appears to be more It is a courtly letter from Alexander Pope, than ever a whipper-snapper. I should be addressed to my Lord Gower, commending still more ashamed to confess it, that his one Mr. Samuel Johnson, who hath recently visiting Will's Coffee House in this is (his Lordship is informed by his correspon- regarded by many as an incident, to say the dent) penned an ingenious poem on London: least of it, extremely questionable, if not an and for which aforesaid bard of the capital, occurrence, the record of which must be proMr. Pope thinks my Lord might perhaps, nounced (as some assert) absolutely apocry without much effort, materially advancing the phal -BUT-that I have long since doggedly young man's fortunes thereby, obtain a and deliberately made up my mind to swaldegree, at his Lordship's leisure, from one of low henceforth, without any further qualms the rival universities. Generously thought of suspicion, every one of those dear little of, O noble heart in the stunted frame! but dubious episodes that lend a charm to our thought of, as it happens, in this instance national annals, impart a zest to biography, somewhat ineffectually. However fruitlessly and suffuse a fascination over all kinds of written, it is pleasant to recal to one's re- literary and historical reminiscences.

way

Don't tell me they are impossible. I reply remarks, in his earliest epistle to Mr. Wychthey are delightful, and, so replying, pin my erley, "It was certainly a great satisfaction faith to them, one and all, with the most to me to hear you at our first meeting doing implicit credulity. It may be that Sir Isaac justice to our dead friend Mr. Dryden. I Newton never had a pet dog of any kind was not so happy as to know him: Virgilium whatever; yet, in spite of that newly dis- tantum vidi." Mark the solemn Latin as covered and perfectly indisputable truth, I severation or averment: "But I have seen cherish still, with the most obstinate and Virgil!" It is as explicit as possible-"I unshakeable fidelity, my old schoolboy belief was not so happy as to know him: but I have in that world-famous anecdote about the tiny seen him!" After which, I am Mr. Ruffspaniel Diamond and the ruined manuscript head's most obedient: placing my hand in calculations. It may be, again, that the oak his confidingly, even though it be with eyes is never known to be in leaf at the time of still closely blindfolded. For, observe, as year when King Charles the Second is so glorious John died at the ripe age of seventy very erroneously supposed to have hid him- breathing his last upon Mayday, 1700; self among its branches after the battle of glorious Alexander, if he saw him at all Worcester. Possibly! I won't deny it yet (and he says he did, most distinctly and hide himself among those green oak boughs deliberately), must perforce have seen him at I am incorrigibly satisfied he did, never- the early part of that year, when he (Alextheless. The particular tree he climbed ander) was still only in his tender childhood: must have been, I will admit, a phenomenon and further, as our English Virgil was indi among its species: burgeoning miraculously at a season unknown before or since to the naturalist, but burgeoning then-I am quite sure of it-luxuriously! Magnificently verdant in foliage, from the cracks in its. gnarled and burly trunk up to the minutest skyward twig, and full of shining oak apples as the pride of a Kent orchard is of golden pippins in October. And so, Woodman, Niebuhr! lay your axe of incredulity to any tree but that; administer your poisoned bolus of Fact to any dog but Diamond. Under the shadow of that oak I must still read Boscobel. For the frolics of that mischievous rascal of a spaniel I must still have an eye, as I turn the oracular pages of the Novum Organum!

putably dying through all the previous March
and April, being confined a close prisoner
during the whole of those two spring months
within the privacy of his house in Gerard
Street, it follows that the reputed interview
at Will's Coffee House must equally perforce
have taken place at the very latest, during
the previous February. Scarcely a dozen
years therefore have elapsed since the child-
beau before us-
s-fastidiously clad à la mode,
and tripping eagerly across the threshold of
the famous rendezvous-breathed his first
breath on the twenty-first of May, 1688, in
that dwelling in Lombard Street, where his
father then, light of hand and ready of
whip, drove a thriving trade as a linen mer
chant.

Wherefore, that Pope did go to Will's, After the little red heels and the toy cane, when only a little boy of twelve, I am reso- into the old wainscotted public room of the lutely bent upon believing, down to the very great coffee-house of Covent Garden! A end of the chapter. What though the state-cursory glance is sufficient to take in every ment of the child-poet's visit to the old coffee- detail of the peculiar scene-familiar as his house rests almost exclusively upon the asser- own haunt, to every reader of Captain Steele's tion of Mr. Ruffhead, his biographer? As Spectator. Nothing, however, remains audidoubly corroborative of the probable veracity ble in all the hubbub and gossip, nothing of which assertion howbeit, hath not Sir visible among all the moving lights and shad Charles Wogan written distinctly (in a letter ows, but what at once fixes the attention of which may be found at page twenty-one of our boy-introducer. Mr. Dryden yondervolume eighteen of Sir Walter Scott's edi- scrooping his chair round upon the bare tion of the works of Swift): "I had the boarding of the floor so as to have his foot honor of bringing Mr. Pope from our re- more easily upon the fender, and get altotreat in the forest of Windsor to dress à la gether at a cosier angle in the time-honored mode, and introduce at Will's Coffee-house? chimney-corner, where for so long he has While Mr. Pope himself no less distinctly sat enthroned the master of the gay revels of

20

L

conversation. Wigged and ruffled, brave in | slobbering over the gold dishes (with the velvet and gold-lace as becomes them both juices of the food he masticates, running in in their contrasting characters-I like to unseemly fashion out of the corners of his think of them thus as they momentarily con- ungainly mouth upon his dribbled beard), front each other, with their keen eyes meet- and sundry of the guests at his regal board, ing casually but searchingly: the eyes of the right honorables and right reverends. It is fragile child and of the fast-failing septuagen- not the babble of king and bishops, however, I am now watchfully observing; it is rather the shrewd listening face of one spare and delicate youth, easily discernible the among bystanders.

arian.

STEP THE FIFTH. A.D. 1680. PERADVENTURE another score of years may have slipped by, and I have probably fixed my staff, at the next stride, upon a juttingpoint in 1680, when I find myself still stand ing by Mr. Dryden's elbow-he has just completed his half-century-listening with him to "our famous Waller "-then but some

The countenance of Waller at sixteen, as

Aubrey has described it: with a "fair thin full eye, popping out and working; his face skin; his hair frizzed, of a brownish color;

somewhat of an olivaster "-Waller, in short, as he was, before he saw that "sleepy eye" four years short of eighty as he chats pleas that spoke for him at least, anything but the antly in a cluster of wits, about his own "melting soul:" the languishing glance of varied literary experiences. A fragment of the blond and voluptuous Sacharissa. Not, this sparkling small-talk Mr. Dryden subsequently preserves in his Preface to the however, now to the damask cheek of beauty Fables, where he relates having overheard or to the chiming cadence of her silver voice Mr. Waller attribute the smoothness of his are Waller's senses wakened, as I observe him numbers to the suave and harmonizing influ-leaning by the gorgeous buffet of Whitehall. ence of the Tasso done into English verse by Mr. Fairfax. While the courtly lyrist is discoursing with a negligent drawl in his tone, I note how vigilantly attention is awakened in at least one listener; I see it on that mobile brow and on those nervous lips, so vividly and instantly impressionable.

Rather than that, they are fixed meditatively upon the drivelling of the Grotesque yonder, lolling in the state chair and spluttering over the crisp ruff and the jewels of sovereigntythat farcical pedant-king, whose incongruous fantastic burlesque between two bloody and reign is, as it were, nothing better than a affecting tragedies. A laughable interlude STEP THE SIXTH. A.D. 1621.. played out upon the great stage of history by AN adventurous movement gives me at one a low comedian, the very type of the king of bound a new foothold sixty years further extravaganzas: by one whose offspring and back, namely, in 1621: when I am at the successor was nevertheless afterwards to die elbow, no longer of Waller's listener, but of upon a scaffold outside that very banquetWaller as a listener. He himself has not hall; whose own immediate progenitors were lived long enough to wither into greyness already prematurely slain, the one by the and wrinkles. He is, on the contrary, in the headsman's axe, the other by the hand of the fresh bloom of sixteen, jauntily attired, as be- midnight assassin. This gobbling farceur, comes a courtier, making. one in a brilliant however, talking perilous nonsense, now in gathering of attendants grouped about the 1621, to two of the lords spiritual of his dais in the banqueting-chamber of Whitehall. realm-sire and son, midway between destiHis Majesty Jamie the Sixth of Scotland, nies so evil doomed-has no relish whatever James the First of England, according ng to taken from the viands upon his platter by the kingly wont in those days, holds high revel, shadowy ghosts of two grimly memories, or comparatively in public, in the presence of by the spectral phantom of one momentary his lieges. A customary royal dinner this is, presentiment. Guttling his food with a zest, in the mere manner of it; but, in the curious the King plays the fool according to habit in converse it elicits, one in many ways really his accustomed though unconscious capacity extraordinary. A contest of gibe and repar- as his own jester, what time Mr. Edmund tee faithfully recorded upon our national Waller-the down not yet upon his lipsannals by every subsequent historian. A toys with the tassel of his orange doublet wit-combat between the anointed clown there, and hearkens sagaciously.

1

STEP THE SEVENTH. A.D. 1566. little infant he held at the moment in his arms, as he sat by the bedside, and bending down, kissed it tenderly upon the forehead.

of re

IN a twinkling I have strode, at a single pace, forty-five years further onward into the past, and am peering curiously, upon a summer's day of 1566, through a tapestried FOLLOWING a very natural sequence porch of an ante-room into a sleeping-cham-collections, I pass, still as from stepping-stone ber in what was, even then the time-worn and to stepping-stone, across an an interval of some war-worn Castle of Edinburgh. James Stu- four-and-twenty years, from the birthplace of art has happily not yet developed from the James to that of his young mother, the radibaby-prince into the full-grown kingly pun- ant and unfortunate Queen of Scots; paus chinello. He is indeed but newly-born hav- ing upon the 8th of December, 1542, at the ing first opened his eyes to the light on the door of another royal bed-chamber; the room 19th of June, only a few days previously. in which the thrice widowed Mary began her The apartment-since screened off into a woeful life of love in the palace of Linlith very cupboard, and displayed thus to wonder- gow. Here in truth at last pausing! Fo ing sight-seers as the birthplace of the first the date alone without one syllable of illus sovereign of the United Kingdom of England trative comment, is of itself, indeed, suffi and Scotland-presents to view, as I gaze ciently suggestive. Suggestive-how sugge into it, a domestic group, pathetic in its way, tive! of the first tender budding of the beau and singularly beautiful. The handsome and tiful passion- flower, sown, so to speak, by a youthful ne'er-do-weel, Henry, the Lord storm-blast between the chinks of a moulder Darnley, King (consort) of Scots-sullen and ing rampart, stained with the blood and passionate by turns, through all his wayward blackened with the thunder of battle. married life-has unexpectedly come to visit his queen-wife during one brief lucid interval of compunction; apparently intent only upon consoling her under the depressing influence of her recent pangs by this unwonted evidence of tenderness: in reality eager to see with Link by link the chain of memories might his own eyes and hold within his own arms be strung together, readily enough, indef the offspring of their ill-fated nuptials. Anitely onward, from generation to genera contemporary chronicler tells full sadly the tion: connecting the age of Victoria not less tale of the notable interview with its slight easily with that of Boadicea, than the former but touching incidents-how Mary, lovelier is here brought, by eight paces within view of than ever in her maternal prostration, her an epoch positively beyond that of Elizabeth. delicate complexion flushing as she spoke, Enough. I am suddenly recalled from swore a great oath as to the child's legiti- 1542 to this present year of our Lord 1857, macy, calling God to witness the truth of her as by a jerk, startling me from my meditative asseveration: her eyes of witchery in a blaze, recollections. The glass-doors of the Comher fair right hand pointing steadfastly from mons have swung-to, and I kick off my Shoes her couch to Heaven! How Darnley, thrilling of Swiftness and subside into mere Welling to the words then uttered, yearned over the tons.

And that date, has it not brought us (let it be remembered distinctly by no more than an eighth step) to a period removed from the Actual Present by a lapse of more than Three Centuries?

What practice is here alluded to by the hi

LIGHTS OFFERED AFTER CHILDBIRTH.-Hume,
A.D. 1087, speaking of the misunderstanding torian?
between William the Conqueror and Philip of
France, says:

[It was formerly a general custom for wome "William, who was become corpulent, had in England to bear lights when they were been detained in bed some time by sickness; churched a custom which probably originated upon which Philip expressed his surprise that, in the offerings of candles always made on the his brother of England should be so long in festival of the Purification, which was com being delivered of his big belly. The king sent monly called Candlemas Day from the light him word that, as soon as he was up, he would which were then distributed and carried about present so many lights at Notre Dame, as in procession. See Brand's Popular Antiqu would, perhaps, give little pleasure to the King tics, ii. 43. et seq. eq. ed. 1849.]-Notes and of France; alluding to the usual practice at Queries. Shoupsadia that time of women after childbirth.

" —PATH THROUGH THE SNOW. 735 And a little shadow comes and goes