maʼam-Heaven forgive me for swearing!-do you call it malice to hang a rascal who commits forgery? If he were my own son, he should swing for it! But, pshaw! what an old ass am I to be talking in this way! The poor rogue 's dead-lucky for him; and so, if you'll give your daughter to Master Edward, I'll stand a couple of thousands, prompt payment, just to set the young folks going. What's better, I'll fling these papers into the fire;-they 're an ugly epitaph for him that 's gone, and no particular credit to his family that's living." This was indeed touching a tender point; and, after some discussion, the old lady was fain to give her consent to her daughter's marriage; whereupon the citizen, with great glee, tossed all the documents into the fire. The papers had only just begun to blaze, when a loud "hurrah!" was shouted from the next room, and in rushed a young man in a military cloak. "Merciful powers!" exclaimed the old lady," the spirit of my son ! " "The devil a bit!" replied the citizen; "never saw more solid bone and muscle in all my born days." A few words now sufficed to explain the whole mystery. On the morning of the duel he had been carried from the field by a friend, who had sought him out to warn him that the officers of justice were close upon his heels for the forgery; and, finding that life still remained in the bleeding body, he lost no time in adopting the necessary measures for his safety on the one hand, and his restoration on the other. On his recovery, Frank not only felt the prudence of his friend's precautions at the time, but resolved still to favour the report of his own death; and in this cautious plan he persisted, till, weary of a life of such constant restraint and anxiety, he determined to see his sister in private, and consult her on the best means of pacifying the angry silversmith. For this purpose, he had stolen in at the window when the house seemed quiet and there was no light abroad to betray him, and ensconced himself snugly in her chamber. Here, with his usual propensity to mischief, a sudden whim took him to play the part of his own ghost, the consequences of which went far beyond what he had intended. Emma, as we have already seen, fainted at the sound of his voice, but not before her cries had alarmed the house, so that he was fain to make a rapid retreat to prevent discovery. Need we say that the old lady forgave her son as a matter of course? that, equally as a matter of course, the silversmith was never heartily reconciled to Master Frank till he heard of his being killed by a thrust from a French bayonet in one of King William's continental campaigns? Or is it necessary to tell our sagacious readers that Emma and Edward were married, and enjoyed his especial favour; but still not so much so as their eldest-born, who was christened after him, and at his death was found to have inherited the greater part of his very handsome fortune? 393 THE PEDLAR POET. BY GEORGE RAYMOND. "Doubtless, the pleasure is as great Of being cheated, as to cheat."-BUTLER. PREPARING to quit the agreeable village of Ryde, for Gosport, there to meet, for the last time, my friend C., before his departure for India, and having some twenty minutes yet at my disposal, I turned into the public room of the Pier Inn, where the boatman had already deposited my small portmanteau. The "coffee-room," so termed, was a small, dirty, ill-furnished apartment; yet evidently much in request, from the multitude of coats, capes, packages, umbrellas, and all the paraphernalia incidental to travelling, which occupied the four chairs, about as many pegs, and precisely as many corners, which the parlour contained. It was, perhaps, a place of refuge rather than refreshment; visitors using it, as I myself had done, merely for the accommodation of embarking; though "Good entertainment and neat wines" was the inscription over the door as money-lenders advertise "Honour and secrecy." Here was apparel sufficient to equip a whole parish; to "stuff out the vacant garments with their forms," would have been to raise no contemptible body of special-constables: but, there they hung, like the garments in Prospero's cell, and in a place, to me, almost as deserted. No one, in fact, was present, but an elderly gentleman, seated near the window, intently bending over certain papers scattered before him in Sibylline confusion. Though glowing with the fervid nature of his study, which betrayed itself in the full veins of his temples, yet, at the shortest possible intervals, he raised his sharp, penetrating eyes so full upon me, that, but for the more absolute demands on his attention, I felt he would have addressed me. If he had any interest in me, it was faint indeed to the curiosity I felt respecting him; and, taking up an eggy, obsolete newspaper, I retired to an opposite part of the room, where, under the masked battery of "Petty Sessions," I could make my observations more leisurely but a certain elevation of eyebrow, accompanied by a smile which would have humanized a Gorgon, assured me "there was not the least reason in the world for all that ceremony." He was an expansive, full-blown man, of about sixty years of age, whose grapestained cheeks threatened as many fountains of wine as played upon Ludgate Hill at the coronation of Edward IV. With the exception of a small grey curl which drooped over each ear, his head was perfectly bald, the highly-polished hue of which might have been an invaluable sign in a druggist's window, or advertised the nocturnal accoucheur to the dimmest eyesight. He was clad in entire black; but, like a bronze figure, his edges and protuberances bore a rusty tint, harmonizing unquestionably with the antique. His neckcloth, of feather-bed dimensions, might have served an ordinary body for repose; under which a capacious, but coarse frill, like the pasteboard wings of a pantomime deity, flapped, expanded, and collapsed. One moment he would turn over his mystic leaves with the rapid finger of a banker's clerk, and at another fix his eye on 2 E VOL. XIII. some feature of his work with the stedfast penetration of a clockmaker. By the magic of his quill the paper was now enfeoffed with some rich fancy, whilst he patted his forehead, in token of approbation at the effort of his brain. What could this man be? An attorney? No! here was no cold routine-no heartless technicality. His eye implied something more aërial than settlements; more lively than wills; and much more unusual than writs. A divine? No! Far more of the Epicurean was he than the Stoic; dealing more in the metaphysical than the revealed. His discourse was neither fashioned to order, nor cut to time; no tithe irritation corrugated his brow ; and his preferment was far above all danger of sequestration. It suddenly occurred to me he might be one of those trading patriots whom the new political atmosphere had at this time engendered, like the stercorant flight of ladybirds, which occasionally incrust whole acres with vermilion. Perhaps, thought I, he is plunged into one of those sloughs which, Voltaire remarks, soon send your Englishman raving. He no sooner gets a twist in the head," says he, "than he falls to studying the Apocalypse; and the fruits of his labour usually are, either a learned treatise to prove the Pope is Antichrist, or else an epistle to the King, offering himself as prime minister." But it was now quite clear that within the space of one minute he would address me; when, laying his hands with benedictory pressure on his words, more golden than those of Pythagoras, he said, in a tone milder than a moonbeam, "Beautiful weather, sir!" To which I immediately responded, "Most beautiful!” "It is gorgeous weather!" continued he, at the same time consigning two lines to utter annihilation by a most unequivocal dash of his damnatory quill. "It is heliochrysus!” "It is indeed, just-what you have said," again I answered. "It is an Aganippedean day!" continued he; which latter Hellenism he most strikingly enforced by throwing himself back with considerable violence in his chair, and elevating each arm at a right-angle to his body; the one hand retaining a trembling manuscript, and the other a large, untrimmed goose-quill. "Sir! it is poetry itself!" Delighted to have met, at last, a word I somewhat comprehended, I immediately replied, "And yet, a true poetic spirit is equally enamoured of the elemental strife!" During the fleeting interval I was speaking, I perceived his eyeballs, like those in the mask of a pantomime, dancing and shifting after the wildest fashion, and, seizing my hand, he exclaimed, "Sir, you have a soul-you have a soul! Poetry is the only divination we have of the empyrean state! it is a blessed revelation of a spiritual existence. Science has its laws, philosophy its limits, and there is a boundary-wall to the bold march of metaphysics; but poetry is lawless, illimitable, and unfathomable,-a world without end. 'Clowns for posterity may cark and care, He ended; but, to my poor thinking, far more from want of breath than words; and, casting his body on the chair, and his eyes on the ceiling, he sat for some time motionless and possessed. For myself, "obstupui." I gazed with the full wonder of What next? and stared at the apparition before me with the same sensations that a child does on the magic of a harlequinade. His features somewhat loosened from their tragic tension, and his lips once again irradiated in one of those witching smiles that first charmed me, as he gently murmured, 66 You will think me, sir, an enthusiast; be it so. Most men are rabiate on some subject; but the sentence of poetry, like love, is a seraphic malady. Poetry is the madness of angels; and the discord of Heaven is more dulcet than the order of earth. By the favour of Heaven, all poets are madmen; and we may say, with a slight mutation, 'Quem Deus vult inspirare priùs dementat.' There could be no doubt my friend was one of Heaven's special favourites, and I now ventured to observe to him, "Recollecting, good sir, what you lately noticed, that most men were mad on some subject, and that madness is symptomatic of inspiration, I am inevitably brought to a conclusion that mankind is, in fact, a race of poets." At these words he started up, like a black monk from a toy snuffbox, and folding his arms as a true denizen of Bedlam, or, in other words, a poet, ejaculated, "Ho! ho! then you are he who would handle this matter analytically, philologically, corollarylistically. Poetry, sir, abhors reason as Nature a vacuum, and shrinks from a syllogistic approach as at the touch of a torpedo. Poetry is an empyrenean catachresis." Yet, spite this ebullition, in which he had bespattered me with such disdain, he had too much of the milk of human kindness to cast me off entirely; in sooth, his nature bathed and sported in emollients, and, taking my hand affectionately, he said, "Bear with me, my friend! believe me, sir, the sentiments you have expressed on this religion of my soul I truly venerate. I see, sir, you will be gathered, at last, amongst the children of the Muse.". After a short pause, which he occupied by playfully poising his mysterious papers, he said, as though at the sharp spur of the moment, "What may be your impression on the genius of Menander ?" This was, indeed, a blow! For me, who in school-days had been whipped to the alternate feet of strophe and antistrophe, in the Greek chorus of my own howling, and at last pronounced but a dull boy, to be challenged on the genius of Menander by this citizen of ether, was indeed staggering. But, to my great relief, raising his eyes with the timidity of a dryad, he said, "Perhaps I may meet your forgiveness should I unfold to you the sudden impression which has this moment seized me on my accidental proposition? Menander, and, if I bear my recollection freshly, Philemo, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philippedes, were lights which blazed amidst the latest illuminations of expiring Athens! - but, ah! the divine fragments of Menander! Terence, you know, avowedly appropriated him; the everlasting poet was born at Athens no matter; educated in the school of Theophrastus-but let that pass. By the way, as I have named Theophrastus the Peripatetic, I should mention he was not an Athenian, as vulgarly supposed; and this was singularly discovered by his pedantic adherence to the Attic dialect; but no matter. Menander's muse endeared him to the starry Glycera, his mistress. Pliny calls him, you are aware, Omnis luxuriæ interpres ;' and even Plutarch is candid enough to admit it. But alas! alas! sir, his untimely death!-Ovid, you will recollect, alludes to it in his Ibisdrowned in the Piraæan harbour, Comicus ut liquidus periit dum nabat in undis.'" If only so lately I had been staggered by a burst of enthusiasm, I was now positively capsized by this explosion of learning. I gazed on him as the breathing lore of all the Platonists, nor held him less than the brazen head which responded the decrees of Fate to Friar Bacon. The giant was in repose; and I had opportunity for a moment's reflection. Menander!-the divine Menander! Still, I confess, there appeared a kind of à propos de rien in so direct a challenge as Menander's muse; but then he talked of his sudden impressions and playful recollections. Perhaps the "Leander," then at anchor in the Channel, might have suggested this "first-rate " in the Castalian stream. To one conclusion, however, I was brought; namely, that while he was a poet as well as a madman, he was, unquestionably, a scholar as well as a poet. I now ventured to observe, "Truly, as you have said, sir, Pliny styles the bard Omnis luxuriæ interpres,' and a pretty sentiment it is. Does it not remind you of the address to Titus, Delicia humani generis? Which, think you, is the happier of the two?" I had no sooner uttered these words, than another of those sudden suggestions appeared to have laid hold of him; for he turned immediately to his papers, and, resuming his pen, complaisantly shook his head, as though he would have said, "Another time we will resume this most interesting debate." But, on a second attempt at pressing my question, up he jumped, as though at a sudden cry of "Fire! and thrusting his head through the open window, remained for a few minutes in communion only with the stars. As I could view him in no way but with admiration, I could take, consequently, no objection to the strange position he had just assumed respecting myself; but anon seating himself again at the table "As I have observed," said he, " you will deem me an enthusiast— I am so. We cannot greatly admire, without some slight promptings to imitate. I have here endeavoured," he continued, carelessly tossing and shuffling his mass of manuscripts, "to show my devotion to the Muse by lisping her numbers. To say the truth, I have before me a little poetic garland, woven from my summer-dreams, which I intend presently to offer to the world, illustrated by a delicate vignette, which I entitle 'Anthophoros,' and which I think you will allow tasteful. But, between ourselves, sir, the degenerate 'Row' is a melancholy truth in the eternal history of literature. Your Dodsleys, Lintots, Tonsons, where are they now? Alas! not with us. Who occupy their places? -a corrupt and servile crew, pandering to the unhealthy appetite of the day; and the world, sir, coarsely feeding, as Mr. Fielding remarks, on bullock's liver and Oldmixon, has lost its relish for turtle and Swift. For the future," continued he, in a still more confidential manner, "my intention will be to publish by subscription. I have already a list of noble names, more striking than the catalogue of Homer's ships, and longer than the roll of Juan's mistresses. Look, sir,-behold!" opening, at the same time, a greasy red leather manual, |