luxurious chambers in the Albany,-the brilliant talk of Melbourne-House dinners,-and the sarcastic tittle-tattle of Lydia White's soirées. He sailed for the West Indies in November, 1815. November 19. (Sunday.) At one this morning, a violent gust of wind came on; and, at the rate of ten miles an hour, carried us through the chops of the channel formed by the Scilly Rocks and the Isle of Ushant. But I thought that the advance was dearly purchased by the terrible night which the storm made us pass-the wind roaring, the waves dashing against the stern, till at last they beat in the quarter gallery; the ship, too, rolling from side to side, as if every moment she were going to roll over and over! Mr. J was heaved off one of the sofas, and rolled along till he was stopped by the table. He then took his seat upon the floor as the more secure position; and, half an hour afterwards, another heave chucked him back again upon the sofa. The captain snuffed out one of the candles, and both being tied to the table, could not relight it with the other: so the steward came to do it; when a sudden heel of the ship made him extinguish the second candle, tumbled him upon the sofa on which I was lying, and made the candle which he had brought with him fly out of the candlestick, through a cabin window at his elbow; and thus we were all left in the dark. Then the intolerable noise! the cracking of bulkheads! the sawing of ropes! the screeching of the tiller! the trampling of the sailors! the clattering of the crockery! Every thing above deck and below deck, all in motion at once! Chairs, writing-desks, books, bundles, fire-irons and fenders, flying to one end of the room; and the next moment (as if they had made a mistake) flying back again to the other with the same hurry and confusion! Confusion worse confounded!' Of all the inconveniences attached to a vessel, the incessant noise appears to me the most insupportable! As to our live stock, they seem to have made up their minds on the subject, and say with one of Ariosto's knights (when he was cloven from the head to the chine), " or convien morire." Our fowls and ducks are screaming and quacking their last by dozens.'-Lewis, P. 9. Contrast with this what follows, when the gale has abated— I understand that in these latitudes nothing can be expected but heavy gales or dead calms, which calms are by far the most disagreeable of the two: the wind steadies the ship; but when she creeps as slowly as she does at present (scarcely going a mile in four hours), she feels the whole effect of the sea breaking against her, and rolls backwards and forwards with every billow as it rises and falls. In the meanwhile, everything seems to be in a state of the most active motion, except the ship. While we are carrying a spoonful of soup to our mouths, the remainder takes the "glorious golden opportunity" to empty itself into our laps, and the glasses and salt-cellars carry on a perpetual domestic warfare during the whole time of dinner, like the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Nothing is so common common as to see a roast goose suddenly jump out of its dish in the middle of dinner, and make a frisk from one end of the table to the other; and we are quite in the habit of laying wagers which of the two boiled fowls will arrive at the bottom first. 'N.B. To-day the fowl without the liver wing was the favourite, but the knowing ones were taken in; the uncarved one carried it hollow.'-Ibid. p. 15. We turn a leaf or two, and light on this agreeable medley of gossip : 6 Reading Don Quixote this morning, I was greatly pleased with an instance of the hero's politeness, which had never struck me before. The Princess Micomicona having fallen into a most egregious blunder, he never so much as hints a suspicion of her not having acted precisely as she has stated, but only begs to know her reasons for taking a step so extraordinary. "But pray, Madam," says he, "why did your ladyship land at Ossuna, seeing that it is not a seaport town?" "The 'I was also much charmed with an instance of conjugal affection, in the same work. Sancho being just returned home, after a long absence, the first thing which his wife, Teresa, asks about, is the welfare of the ass. "I have brought him back," answers Sancho, "and in much better health and condition than I am in myself.” Lord be praised," said Teresa, "for this his great mercy to me!"' 'I had no idea of the expense of building and preserving a ship: that in which I am at present cost 30,000l. at its outset. Last year the repairs amounted to 14,000l.; and in a voyage to the East Indies they were more than 20,000/. In its return last year from Jamaica it was on the very brink of shipwreck. A storm had driven it into Bantry Bay, and there was no other refuge from the winds than Bear Haven, whose entrance was narrow and difficult; however, a gentleman from Castletown came on board, and very obligingly offered to pilot the ship. He was one of the first people in the place, had been the owner of a vessel himself, was most thoroughly acquainted with every inch of the haven, &c. &c., and so on they went. There was but one sunken rock, and that about ten feet in diameter; the captain knew it, and warned his gentleman-pilot to keep a little more to the east-ward. My dear friend," answered the Irishman, now do just make yourasy; I know well enough what we are about; we are as clear of the rock as if we were in the Red Sea, by Jasus ;-upon which the vessel struck upon the rock, and there she stuck. The captain fell to swearing and tearing his hair. "God damn you, sir! didn't I tell you to keep to eastward? Dam'me, she 's on the rock!" "Oh! well, my dear, she's now on the rock, and, in a few minutes, you know, why she'll be off the rock: to be sure, I'd have taken my oath that the rock was two hundred and fifty feet on the other side of her, but————” -"Two hundred and fifty feet! why, the channel is not two hundred and fifty feet wide itself! and as to getting her off, bumping against this rock, it can only be with a great hole in her side." "Poh! now, self 66 bother, bother, my dear! why sure- "Leave the ship, sir; dam'me, sir, get out of my ship this moment!" Instead of which, with the most smiling and obliging air in the world, the Irishman turned to console the female passengers. "Make yourselves asy, ladies, pray make yourselves perfectly asy; but, upon my soul, I believe your captain's mad; no danger in life! only make yourselves asy, I say; for the ship lies on the rock as safe and as quiet, by Jasus, as if she were lying on a mud bank!" Luckily the weather was so perfectly calm, that the ship having once touched the rock with her keel bumped no more. It was low water; she wanted but five inches to float her, and when the tide rose she drifted off, and with but little harm done. The gentleman-pilot then thought proper to return on shore took a very polite leave of the lady-passengers, and departed with all the urbanity possible; only thinking the captain the strangest person that he had ever met with; and wondering that any man of common sense could be put out of temper by such a trifle.'-Ibid. p. 20. sers. The Journal is every now and then enlivened with a snatch of rhyme-and not a few of the little pieces thus introduced will, we are sure, be made prize of forthwith by the musical compoWhat a sweet thing would not Mrs. Arkwright or Mr. Moscheles make of The Helmsman!—for theirs surely is the art, so beautifully described by Mr. Coleridge, of music curling round and round the meaning like honeysuckle, until at last it overtops it.' Hark! the bell! it sounds midnight!-all hail, thou new heaven! While o'er the full moon, as they gently are driven, So smooth glides the bark, I perceive not her motion, "Tis so sad.... 'tis so sweet.... and some tones come so swelling, So right from the heart, and so pure to the ear,— That sure at this moment his thoughts must be dwelling Oh may she, who now dictates that ballad so tender, Pure, tranquil, and bright, over-silvers the seas!'—p. 29. These verses have certainly a very graceful rhythmical movement, and justify so far Sir Walter Scott's eulogy of the Monk's ear; though, if we had been to class it with the most delicate of the time, we should have thought of Moore, or his friend the elder bard we have just been quoting, rather than even of Lord Byron. Next comes a new view of our old acquaintance, John Shark's' amiable character: As I am particularly fond of proofs of conjugal attachment between animals (in the human species they are so universal that I set no store by them), an instance of that kind which the captain related to me this morning gave me great pleasure. While lying in Black River harbour, Jamaica, two sharks were frequently seen playing about the ship; at length the female was killed, and the desolation of the male was excessive: "Che faro senz' Eurydice?" What he did without her remains a secret, but what he did with her was clear enough; for scarce was the breath out of his Eurydice's body, when he stuck his teeth in her, and began to eat her up with all possible expedition. Even the sailors felt their sensibility excited by so peculiar a mark of posthumous attachment; and to enable him to perform this melancholy duty the more easily, they offered to be his carvers, lowered their boat, and proceeded to chop his better half in pieces with their hatchets; while the widower opened his jaws as wide as possible, and gulped down pounds upon pounds of the dear departed as fast as they were thrown to him, with the greatest delight and all the avidity imaginable. I make no doubt that all the while he was eating, he was thoroughly persuaded that every morsel which went into his stomach would make its way to his heart directly! "She was perfectly consistent," he said to himself; "she was excellent through life, and really she's extremely good now she's dead!" and then, "unable to conceal his pain," "He sigh'd and swallow'd, and sigh'd and swallow'd, And sigh'd and swallow'd again." I doubt whether the annals of Hymen can produce a similar instance of post-obitual affection. Certainly Calderon's "Amor despues de la Muerte" has nothing that is worthy to be compared to it; nor do I recollect in history any fact at all resembling it, except perhaps a circumstance which is recorded respecting Cambletes, King of Lydia, a monarch equally remarkable for his voracity and uxoriousness; and who, being one night completely overpowered by sleep, and at the same time violently tormented by hunger, ate up his queen without being conscious of it, and was mightily astonished the next morning to wake with her hand in his mouth, the only bit that was left of her. But then, Cambletes was quite unconscious what he was doing; whereas the shark's mark of attachment was evidently intentional.'p. 32-34. This is the last extract we shall make from the voyage. Let us now suppose Mr. Lewis safely landed on the coast of Jamaica— where, of course, nothing but sights and sounds of woe and cruelty can await him : January 1, 1816.-At length the ship has squeezed herself into this champagne bottle of a bay! Perhaps, the satisfaction attendant upon our our having overcome the difficulty, added something to the illusion of its effect; but the beauty of the atmosphere, the dark purple mountains, the shores covered with mangroves of the liveliest green down to the very edge of the water, and the light-coloured houses with their lattices and piazzas completely embowered in trees, altogether made the scenery of the bay wear a very picturesque appearance. And, to complete the charm, the sudden sounds of the drum and banjee called our attention to a procession of the John-Canoe, which was proceeding to celebrate the opening of the new year at the town of Black River. The John-Canoe is a merry-andrew dressed in a striped doublet, and bearing upon his head a kind of pasteboard house-boat, filled with puppets, representing, some sailors, others soldiers, others again slaves at work on a plantation, &c. Nothing could look more gay than the procession which we now saw with its train of attendants, all dressed in white, and marching two by two (except when the file was broken here and there by a single horseman), and its band of negro music, and its scarlet flags fluttering about in the breeze, now disappearing behind a projecting clump of mangrove trees, and then again emerging into an open part of the road, as it wound along the shore towards the town of Black River. 66 Magno telluris amore Egressi optatâ Tröes potiuntur arenâ." I had determined not to go on shore, till I should land for good and all at Savannah la Mar. But although I could resist the "telluris amor," there was no resisting John-Canoe.'-p. 50-52. Nor was the John-Canoe affair the only sickly attempt of these poor oppressed creatures to disguise their misery. Other mockeries were, it seems, a-foot. It seems that, many years ago, an admiral of the red was superseded on the Jamaica station by an admiral of the blue; and both of them gave balls at Kingston to the "Brown Girls;" for the fair sex elsewhere are called the "Brown Girls " in Jamaica. In consequence of these balls all Kingston was divided into parties: from thence the division spread into other districts; and ever since, the whole island, at Christmas, is separated into the rival factions of the Blues and the Reds, who contend for setting forth their processions with the greatest taste and magnificence. This year, several gentlemen in the neighbourhood of Black River had subscribed very largely towards the expenses of the show; and certainly it produced the gayest and most amusing scene that I ever witnessed, to which the mutual jealousy and pique of the two parties against each other contributed in no slight degree. The champions of the rival Roses,-the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, -none of them could exceed the scornful animosity and spirit of depreciation with which the Blues and the Reds of Black River examined the efforts at display of each other. The Blues had the advantage beyond a doubt; this a Red girl told us that she could not deny; but still, "though the Reds were beaten, she would not be a Blue |