keys on the eve of exhalation; but whether the end of an ass, like the end of Edipus, is a thing forbidden to our actual knowledge; or whether, for some other reason which we confess ourselves unable to discover, we are, we must allow, unable to substantiate our impression by proof positive, though we have not unfrequently watched, from morn to dewy eve, in fond anticipations of success. Nevertheless, till we have satisfactory demonstration of their mortality, we shall hold to our exhalation theory, empty as it may appear. At any rate it is, as Shelley says,

"A modest creed, and yet Pleasant, if one considers it;"

inasmuch as its tendency is to throw around the long-eared tribe a sort of charm-to invest them with somewhat of a poetical interest, of which, Heaven knows, they stand in sufficient need; but which, we believe in our conscience, and which we hope, before we have done, to prove, they deserve in a far greater degree than the world allows them to enjoy.

The deeming a donkey an object to be contemned, we take to be as decided a vulgar error as any which Sir Thomas Brown, long ago, so laboriously combated. We have not the slightest sympathy with that ridicu lous old Dogberry in his indignation at the epithet bestowed upon him; we do not see any disgrace, even in "as pretty a piece of man's flesh as any in Messina," being "written down an ass;" though, of course, we cannot be surprised that his vulgar soul should have adopted a vulgar prejudice. The marvel to us is rather how the prejudice ever entered into any soul at all; its existence is a psychological curiosity; - and like us, when west and astonished at that mystery of mysteries-a reel within a bottle" we wonder how the devil it got there." We should like to know by what right Æsop, and Gay, and all the fablemongers, from Jotham upwards, have pitched upon one unhappy animal, and made him a mock, and a byword, and a laughing-stock for all succeeding generations to crack their "fool-born jests" upon. Now, in a goose there really is something ridiculous; his very waddle is vain glorious; he stretches out his head,

and elevates its antipodes with all the pride of a peacock; his hiss is most superlatively self-complacent and contemptuous-it is eloquent of irrepressible misanthropy; a child can see through gh his pretensions to dignity; his folly breaks out in the very means which he takes to hide it. But an ass; pshaw! there is no deceit about an ass; he stands before us even as nature made him, rough, homely, and honest; he pretends not to beauty which he does not possess; he makes no ostentatious display of his sagacity; he is content to slip through existence as peaceably and silently as we will let him; he wants but little, and he gets it; he can teach as many lessons as the ant, and he finds, if possible, fewer disciples. Yes! the world may sneer as it likes, but an ass is no fool; we rather take him for a philosopher. How many requisites for greatness does he not possess? Urge him, scold him, beat him, kick him-the Man of Uz himself was not more enduring ! He looks at you all the while, as much as to say, "I can't help it, so you must go on as long as you please, though you must be aware this sort of treatment isn't, by any means, gen. tlemanlike." Does he feel it repugnant to the dictates of his concience to take some particular course? only observe his unswerving strength of purpose! He cares not for the "vul tus instantis tyranni;" he blenches not from his fixed resolve for threats or thumps; he yields not to the more insidious attacks of persuasion and blandishment; and, by a miserable perversion of epithets, his resolution is stigmatized as stubbornness, his conscientious scruples degraded into obstinate perversity. He is abstemious, partly it must be owned, by obligation; but he suffers compulsion with such an unaffected good grace, that nature must have as much to do with the matter as necessity. He will eat any thing and every thing, a thistle or a macaroon; and, if we mistake not, there is somewhere or other on record a certain noodle, who departed this life in a guffaw, occasioned by seeing his ass composedly appropriate some figs laid by for his own private consumption. Is there any pride about a donkey? Not a scruple, not the infinitesimal particle of a grain; only satisfy him that the path you wish him to take is the path of duty, and what burden will he refuse to bear? Carrots or children, soot-bags or spinster, -'tis all one to Jack. He trudges on in the same unmurmuring fashion, with an occasional swish of the tail, and a constant drooping of the head, poring upon the ground on which he treads, as intensely as the most zealous stone-smiter that ever wandered over the country, hammer in hand, in the wake of Dr Buckland. No waster of time is he (we mean the ass, not the professor) in gaping and staring about him. Leave him to himself for hours if you will, and at your return fear not to miss him. There he stands, motionless as a statue; he has been in a brown study the whole time, revolving in his meditative soul things human and asinine; chewing the cud of fancy, which for him, we fear, possesses nought but bitterness.

We pity an ass so deeply that we almost suspect we love him. But then his bray! No, we cannot for the life of us get over that. The squeaking of an ungreased waggon-wheel-the shovelling up of cinders under the grate-an amateur fiddler-a professional bagpiper-a cat in a gutterthe roaring of a spoiled child in a passion-the voice of a bumbailiffsounds all, and especially the last, to agonize man's tortured ear and shuddering frame-are " musical as is Apollo's lute," in comparison with the uplifted voice of a jackass. Were we over so partial, we could here nothing extenuate; were we ever so spiteful, we could hardly be suspected of setting down aught in malice. We never could discover that it has even the single argument of utility to allege in its defence-it is the most unmeaning gratuitous piece of discord in nature! There the rascal stands-not another ass within a mile of him with his head for once stuck up in the air, bellowing away for no earthly object that we can perceive, save his own will, and, we were going to add, pleasure, but we doubt if even the strongest self-admiration could go so far as that. Nature, when she moulded his ears, must have counterbalanced the excess of length by the deficiency of delicacy, or he could never fail of being scared, like Fear, "at the sound himself had made." We do not feel quite sure that a spirit of revenge, however uncongenial to his nature generally, is not at the bottom of the matter; and

that, painful as it must be to his own feelings, he cannot resist availing himself of this his only means of wreaking upon mankind his multifarious wrongs and persecutions.

We were saying, or going to say, how much we commiserated a donkey, when the bare mention of his voice sent us flying off at a tangent, much as the reality is wont to do when it strikes upon our unlucky tympanum. And, truly, if he be not a pity-deserving object, we know of nothing which is so. It seems to us to be a notion inherent in the mind of the many, that it is not only allowable, but an absolute matter of obligation and duty, to abuse, cuff, kick, lası, spur, and otherwise maltreat a jackass ad libitum, which said ad libitum, in the case of the unhappy sufferer under consideration, means always ad infinitum. One can't turn him out for an hour on a common, be it ever so wide, or up a lane, be it ever so retired, but two or three imps of boys, who can see opportunities for mischief even through a millstone, are sure to spy him out, and then his torments begin. Three or four of the villains at least on his back at once, shouting at him like young Stentors, whacking him with sticks purloined from the nearest hedge, drumming upon his helpless ribs with their hobnailed heels, till perchance, at last, some one more exquisitely mischievous than his fellows, seizes an opportunity of inserting beneath his unguarded tail a furze bush plentiful in prickles, whereby stung at once to frenzy, with one irresistible plunge he lays his tormentors sprawling on their mother earth, and rushes off, alas! hugging closely, in his ignorance, the invisible cause of his anguish.

Look at him in the hands of the chimney-sweeper in the country-look at him in the cart of the costermonger in the town-look at him in the donkey race at a country fair, and observe the intense zeal with which he is bela.. boured on such interesting occasions, when no jockey is permitted to ride his own "hanimal!" Look at him, above all, on Blackheath, or Hampstead Heath, or any other heath in the environs of the metropolis !-look at him at Margate, Ramsgate, or any other marine emporium of shrimps and yellow slippers, to which, thick-crammed in emulous steamboats, the sons

and daughters of Cockaigne make their hebdomadal resort from the clamour of Cheapside, and the suffocation of St Mary-Axe! Count, if you can, the unceasing detachments of enterprising Amazons whom he is destined daily to initiate into the delights and dangers of donkey-womanship! Admire their innocent wonder at his un

willingness to go; and how calmly and placidly they listen to the thickdescending strokes of the driver's cudgel, never dreaming, merciful

souls! that the said strokes can be in the slightest degree unpleasant! How they squeak, and giggle, and scream, with interestingly-assumed terror, when at last the ill-fated wretch is goaded into a pace bearing a distant resemblance to a trot; and how they not unfrequently contrive to lose their balance, and tumble off, to the now real dismay of themselves, the infinite delight of the attendant, and the sole and serious inconvenience of the donkey, whose misfortune it is to expiate, by a world of hard names, and still harder belabouring, the awkwardness of his fair and floundering burden.

Most sincerely, we repeat, do we compassionate him; and, thank goodness, we do not stand alone in our pity, ay, and-for why should we not speak it boldly ? in our love for donkeys! No, we have many an honoured name to enrol in our "band of brothers," even without being obliged to have recourse to the lists of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty; though we fear there may be here and there among us an enemy in the camp under the guise of a friend a wolf or two in sheep's clothing. For instance, there is a minstrel, and a minstrel, too, of no mean popularity, who sings in one of those simple and touching ballad strains to which the people most

love to hearken

nial of the anticipated imputation would have been weak and powerless, contrasted with the indignant interrogation,

"Oh! if I had a donkey wot wouldn't go, Do you think I'd wallop him?"

The poet has not stopped to pick his words he has scorned to sacrifice

feeling at the shrine of elegance-he speaks in the unmeasured, off-hand, heart-gushing language of honest sincerity. Mark, too, how he answers his own question,-.

"Do you think I'd wallop him? Oh!no! no!"

Was there ever any thing more en. thusiastic?- No circumlocution-no beating about the bush: in one moment, with a single syllable, he sets us at ease as to his sentiments on the subject, and then, and not till then, he shows, us in bold, broad, and beautiful outline, the kindly course of treatment he would adopt, if he were blest enough to possess a donkey, and that not only a simple donkey, but-(a temptation by which the patience even of Job was unassailed)-a donkey, "wot wouldn't go."

"I'd give him some hay, and I'd cry, 'gee woh!"

Good food and kind words! Donkeylovers as we are, we could not find in our heart to utter so much as one syllable in defence of the ill-conditioned ass that could remain insensible to the blandishments of such a master! "Well now," we think we hear some

good, kind, simple, unsuspicious soul exclaim, " Surely you don't mean to tell us there is any wolf in sheep's clothing here!" We would gladly think so we would give any thing to be able to think so we have set out every argument we could muster in favour of the sincerity of the poet; and we, who have convinced others, are ourselves, after all, unconvinced. We may be uncharitable-we would fain hope we are so-but, in spite of our teeth, we are still unsatisfied. In the gorgeous dreams of Fairyland, which we would give worlds to believe true, there is ever an intrusive, halfwaking sort of consciousness, that the flowers on which we tread, the palaces in which we revel, the delights in which we are lapped, are but an unreal and fleeting mockery. And somewhat thus is it here. We are delighted with the kind-heartedness of the minstrel-we surrender ourselves, as we read, to the delight of sympathizing with him; and yet all the while, we hardly know why, we are unable to persuade ourselves that he is really and actually in earnest. We almost hate ourselves for our own suspicions, but we cannot succeed in banishing them. We could not be induced to trust that man on a donkey of ours, with a crab-tree cudgel in his fist, by the richest bribe that could be laid before us. We could almost swear, that as soon as ever he got out of our sight, he would be found, in zealous imitation of the wretch whom, in a following verse of his lay, he stig. matizes with so much apparent earnestness, and giving the lie to his professions, by "walloping his hanimal with all his means." We may be thought to strain a point or two in de fence of our own prejudices, but we can not help fancying that the active verb "wallop" (which, it will be observed, is twice employed in the course of the lyric) comes rolling off the tongue with such gout, and seems so habitual to the mouth of the minstrel, as to give some ground (though it must, in common fairness, be confessed but a slight one) for supposing him not entirely inexperienced in the practice which it repre

sents.

But the unmasking a hypocrite, beneficial as it doubtless is to the public at large, is but an uncongenial field for the labours of the philanthropist, and we turn gladly to the "good men and true." There is a calmness and an innocent simplicity about Coleridge's " Lines to a young Ass," which convince us at once that they have their source in the heart. We see him, in

fancy, patting the head, and clapping the "ragged coat" of the unlearned juvenile, and tenderly enquiring the reason of a despondency so unnatural and unwonted in the lightsome season of youth; and we think his attributing it to filial pain at seeing his maternal parent

"Chain'd to a log within a narrow spot." one of the most exquisite touches we ever met with. The boldness, too and the magnanimity which he displays in venturing, "spite of the world's scorn,” to acknowledge his fraternal relationship to the sufferer, are beyond all praise. Indeed, throughout the address, we do nothing but envy the man who could write and feel it; and by no means the least when he affirms that, could he place the subject of his song in that station in society of which he conceives him to be worthy, his very bray would sound in his, the poet's, ears most "musically sweet." Certes the much enduring Ithacan, who heard unmoved the song of the Sirens, (we say it advisedly, for the strapping to the mast was of his own free-will,) was a fool to him who could listen with positive pleasure to the braying of a jackass!

Talking of Ulysses very naturally puts us in mind of "the blind old man whom the muse inspired to sing his wanderings; and, for the confusion of those who laugh at asses, we cannot resist quoting a passage, and that, too, thanks to the untranslateability of Homer, in the original. The son of Telamon, he of the sevenfold shield, is, by his unassisted prowess, keeping at bay whole hosts of Trojans, vainly furious at the impotence of their attacks. "Even as when," says the bard-but we said it should be in Greek

"Helvellyn," and bid us match it elsewhere among the inferior creation if we can! We accept the challenge, and claim the right to appear by our champion. Stand forth, William Wordsworth, and tell us how an ass could be as fond and as faithful how he could stand over the drowned corpse of his late lord, sorrowing, solitary, starving,

and motionless, save that, at the rude assault of the wandering Potter, he once or twice

"Upon the pivot of his skull
Turn'd round his long left ear,"

reiterated thumps,

"He gave a groan, and then another, Of that which went before the brother, And then he gave a third."

The

His every gesture says imploringly, "Jump up Peter, my boy!" as plainly as the pigs, which run about ready roasted in Connecticut with knives and forks stuck between their ribs to

Grunt the brother of groan! world has not been favoured with such a genealogical morceau since the Greek of old proclaimed dust to be "the thirsty sister of mud!" We mean to say that no man ever had a more beautiful and adequate conception of the moral dignity of an ass, than Wordsworth. That particular specimen of the breed who figures at this moment before us, deserves to be commented upon in nothing less than "whole volumes in folio," had we but leisure to fill them. Truly he is a most Christianlike ass! He is beaten (or, as our former friend would phrase it, "walloped") very heartily-and does he kick? Not he! His "shining hazel-eye" turns upon his persecutor only

"One mild, reproachful look,

A look more tender than severe."

Does he bear malice? Not a whit:Peter sets to work to haul out the dead body, and all his wrongs are forgiven in a moment!

"The little ass his neck extends, And fondly licks his hands!"

He "looks on," and his very silence is eloquent: he wants only the faculty of speech, which was given to his ancestor of old, to cry" Pull away, Peter!" The camel, it is said, is taught to go down on his knees to enable his rider to mount with greater ease. This is certainly sensible enough; but our friend the ass beats him hollow, for he does it of his own accord. A common-minded lookeron-a man who calls " a yellow primrose" a yellow primrose and nothing more, might have thought he merely meditated a roll, just to stretch his limbs after standing for four consecutive days in the same unaltered posi

tion

-" an evil cotter,

And a polygamic potter") villainously abused, maltreated, beaten, and knocked down-a more aggravated case of assault and battery was never laid before a jury and he rises at length from the ground, with manifold bumps and bruises-bones shaking and aching, and, as we afterwards learn, a considerable contusion on the occiput. He rises like-we would give you till the Greek Kalends to guess what-he rises

"like a tempest-shattered bark,
That overwhelm'd and prostrate lies,
And, in a moment, to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge!"

Glorious indeed! We never to this day see a jackass under process of belabouring, without being reminded of our fifteenth cousin the Middy, and the Thunder-and-Lightning man-ofwar in a white squall in the Bay of Biscay! Lastly, what a picture is the meeting of the ass and his young mas

ter! The love of man to beast was surely never painted in such glowing colours. The youth has been wandering over the country for three days, at the very least, to find his father, and his search has been in vain: -he

is approaching his home, sad, sorrowful, and ignorant of his sire's fate as when he left it, and suddenly his eye lights upon the returned ass.

Of

course his father has returned alsothere can be no doubt about the mat

ter_it would only be losing time to enquire he can see him at any time in the course of the evening-and,