is their termination, we suppose, that has made us serious. Sitting up at night also is a great inducer of your moral remark; and if we are not so pleasant as we intended to be, it is because some friends of ours, the other night, were the pleasantest people in the world till five in the morning.

CHAPTER III.

Fine days in January and February.

WE speak of those days, unexpected, sunshiny, cheerful, even vernal, which come towards the end of January, and are too apt to come alone. They are often set in the midst of a series of rainy ones, like a patch of blue in the sky. Fine weather is much at any time, after or before the end of the year; but, in the latter case, the days are still winter days; whereas, in the former, the year being turned, and March and April before us, we seem to feel the coming of spring. In the streets and squares, the ladies are abroad, with their colors and glowing cheeks. If you can hear anything but noise, you hear the sparrows. People anticipate at breakfast the pleasure they shall have in "getting out." The solitary poplar in a corner looks green against the sky; and the brick wall has a warmth in it. Then in the noisier streets, what a multitude and a new life! What horseback! What promenading! What shopping, and giving good day! Bonnets encounter bonnets:-all the Miss Williamses meet all the Miss Joneses; and everybody wonders, particularly at nothing. The shop-windows, putting forward their best, may be said to be in blossom. The yellow carriages flash in the sunshine; footmen rejoice in their white calves, not dabbed, as usual, with rain; the gossips look out of their three-pair-of-stairs windows; other windows are thrown open; fruiterers' shops look well, swelling with full baskets; pavements are found to be dry; lap-dogs frisk under their asthmas; and old gentlemen issue forth, peering up at the region of the north-east.

Then in the country, how emerald the green, how open-looking the prospect! Honeysuckles (a name alone with a garden in it) are detected in blossom: the hazel follows; the snowdrop hangs its white perfection, exquisite with green; we fancy the trees are already thicker; voices of winter birds are taken for

new ones; and in February new ones come-the thrush, the chaffinch, and the wood-lark. Then rooks begin to pair; and the wagtail dances in the lane. As we write this article, the sun is on our paper, and chanticleer (the same, we trust, that we heard the other day) seems to crow in a very different style, lord of the ascendant, and as willing to be with his wives abroad as at home. We think we see him, as in Chaucer's homestead :

He looketh, as it were, a grim leoùn;

And on his toes he roameth up and down;
Him deigneth not to set his foot to ground;
He clucketh when he hath a corn yfound,
And to him rumen then his wivès all.

Will the reader have the rest of the picture, as Chaucer gave it? It is as bright and strong as the day itself, and as suited to it as a falcon to a knight's fist. Hear how the old poet throws forth his strenuous music; as fine, considered as mere music and versification, as the description is pleasant and noble.

His comb was redder than the fine corall,
Embattled as it were a castle wall;

His bill was black, and as the jet it shone ;
Like azure was his leggès and his tone;
His nailès whiter than the lily flower,
And like the burned gold was his colour.

Hardly one pause like the other throughout, and yet all flow. ing and sweet. The pause on the third syllable in the last line but one, and that on the sixth in the last, together with the deep variety of vowels, make a beautiful concluding couplet; and indeed the whole is a study for versification. So little were those old poets unaware of their task, as some are apt to suppose them; and so little have others dreamt, that they surpassed them in their own pretensions. The accent, it is to be observed, in those concluding words, as coral and color, is to be thrown on the last syllable, as it is in Italian. Colòr, colòre, and Chaucer's old Anglo-Gallican word, is a much nobler one than our modern one color. We have injured many such words, by throwing back the accent.

We should beg pardon for this digression, if it had not been part of our understood agreement with the reader to be as desultory as we please and as befits Companions. Our very enjoyment of the day we are describing would not let us be otherwise. It is also an old fancy of ours to associate the ideas of Chaucer with that of any early and vigorous manifestation of light and pleasure. He is not only the "morning-star" of our poetry, as Denham called him, but the morning itself, and a good bit of the noon; and we could as soon help quoting him at the beginning of the year, as we could help wishing to hear the cry of primroses, and thinking of the sweet faces that buy them.

CHAPTER IV.

Walks home by night in bad weather. Watchmen.

THE readers of these our lucubrations need not be informed that we keep no carriage. The consequence is, that being visitors of the theatre, and having some inconsiderate friends who grow pleasanter and pleasanter till one in the morning, we are great walkers home by night; and this has made us great acquaintances of watchmen, moon-light, mud-light, and other accompaniments of that interesting hour. Luckily we are fond of a walk by night. It does not always do us good; but that is not the fault of the hour, but our own, who ought to be stouter; and therefore we extract what good we can out of our necessity, with becoming temper. It is a remarkable thing in nature, and one of the good-naturedest things we know of her, that the mere fact of looking about ns, and being conscious of what is going on, is its own reward, if we do but notice it in good-humor. Nature is a great painter (and art and society are among her works), to whose minutest touches the mere fact of becoming alive is to enrich the stock of our enjoyments.

We confess there are points liable to cavil in a walk home by night in February. Old umbrellas have their weak sides; and the quantity of mud and rain may surmount the picturesque. Mistaking a soft piece of mud for hard, and so filling your shoe with it, especially at setting out, must be acknowledged to be "aggravating." But then you ought to have boots. There are sights, indeed, in the streets of London, which can be rendered pleasant by no philosophy; things too grave to be talked about in our present paper; but we must premise, that our walk leads us out of town, and through streets and suburbs of by no means the worst description. Even there we may be grieved if we will. The farther the walk into the country, the more