Shame on us, sluggards of the South! Although the Scottish breezes have hardly yet been warmed by the sun, and the panting buds and blossoms have scarcely burst their cerements, the country-folks have been out by moonlight waiting the arrival of May-morning, and singing, in the silent woods, Cunningham's May-eve, or Kate of Aberdeen.

"The silver moon's enamour'd beam
Steals softly through the night,
To wanton with the winding stream,
And kiss reflected light.

"To beds of state go, balmy Sleep!
('Tis where you've seldom been,)
May's vigil while the shepherds keep
With Kate of Aberdeen." &c. &c.

Nay, if ye will not obey my summons, I shall class ye with the superannuated, to whom a contemporary writer refers in his description of Spring:

"O how delightful is the bursting spring,

When the warm blood leaps nimbly through the veins,
And with the budding forth and blossoming

Of fields and groves, methinks the soul attains
Fresh life and greenness, wantons in the breeze,
Sings with the birds, and with the waving trees
Dances in unison. The spring-time gushes
In us as in the lusty grass and bushes;
And the same hand that o'er the meadow showers
King-cups and daisies, daffodils and pansies,
Garlands the human heart with all the flowers
Of love, hope, rapture, and poetic fancies.
If, when all nature feels this pregnant thrilling,
To its delicious promptings thou art mute,
Be sure that age begins, with touches chilling,

To freeze thy sap and wither up thy root."*

Let those who are willing to enroll themselves in this class, keep their May-day in London; for even in its murkiest precincts the penetrating voice of nature is heard, and answered on that auspicious morn with ghastly smiles and a lugubrious hilarity. To what do its festivities amount? This is the solitary jubilee of those wretched boys who climb up our dark suffocating chimneys at the risk of limb and life; whose ribands and tinsel, and forced unnatural gambols, do but impress upon our minds, with a more painful intensity, their ordinary state of privation, suffering, and squalor. Reader! compare these rejoicings, and their heart-rending associations, with the extracts you have been perusing, and the genial, exhilarating, and ennobling impressions

• Amarynthus the Nympholept.

with which they spontaneously connect themselves; and if (having the power to escape) you are still found within the bills of mortality, I can only say you have no right to be there, for you must be more or less than a mortal.

But what will Dr. Killjoy say? What will the world think, if a man of my religious character is seen- -? O, Sir, I cry your mercy. You are, perhaps, one of the saints; one of those who make religion a matter of public form and observance between man and man, rather than a governing principle, or silent communion between your own heart and its Creator. You have no idea of devotion, except in the House of God; and give me leave to add, that even there you have very little notion, except of the House itself. You have converted the accessary into the principal; the stimulant of inspiration into the inspirer. Your spiritual conceptions are essentially material; your imagination is of brick and mortar, and has built up the type into the archetype; you know nothing of the Deity but by symbols. Has not your own poet Cowper declared, that "God made the country, man the town!" and think you he is more likely to be found in a temple built by hands, than in the midst of his own glorious and imperishable works? Was this most beautiful earth and its nagnificent canopy made for brutes to gaze at? Was the sun set in a blaze that it might light oxen and sheep to the pond; or the moon hung on high for dogs to howl at? Is no celestial spiration, no pious enthusiasm to be awakened when we "look hrough Nature up to Nature's God?" You may, for once, beieve Shakspeare, when he assures you that there are

"Sermons in stones, books in the running brooks

And good in every thing."

Well, then, since you are inexorable, let me appeal to the rave-looking gentleman by your side, with a bill of lading in ne hand, Lloyd's list in the other, and moving his lips in some eep calculation to himself.

Do you mean me, Sir? I would attend you with pleasure if thought it would give me a good appetite for my dinner; but ou must know that I cannot possibly be absent from 'Change. -I am quite aware of that;-but how do you mean to manage fter your death? or do you imagine that the grim king will put p his scythe in its scabbard, and walk down stairs again, if you ssure him that you are positively engaged to meet your broker t four o'clock? How you must envy the statue of Charles the econd, which keeps its happy station night and day, holidays nd Sundays! Why, the pauper who scrapes the mud off the igh road is less of a drudge than you, who are incessantly craping up gold. His body is not half so much exposed to nnoyance as your mind; and when his day's labour is done,

and his appetites satisfied, he falls asleep without thinking of the morrow; whereas your head is perpetually at work; you can hardly sleep from the fear of losing what you have got; and so far from your cravings being appeased by plenty, you are everlastingly hungering and thirsting for more.

There you are mistaken; for as soon as I have completed a plum, I mean to retire to my box in the country.

My most solvent friend, you may deceive yourself, but you cannot deceive me. You will no more be satisfied with one plum in your second childhood, than you were in your first;there is but one box to which you will ever retire, and into that you will be screwed down, narrow as it is, with all your Consols and Reduced, and your villa at Mile End; ay, and your Bankstock and exchequer-bills into the bargain: so you may as well make holiday while you can, and follow me into the green lanes and fresh-smelling groves.

But I don't want to see any trees; it was only last Wednesday week that I got down to Mile End time enough to walk round my own plantations with a lantern, when I saw ever so many, some of them twenty feet high.

Nay, then, you may well be sick of the country, and can have no possible occasion to go a-Maying.-Gentle maiden, you, at least, will not refuse me when I assure you that, whatever the ancients may have said to the contrary,* May is Love's own month. Was not " Zephyr with Aurora playing, as he met her once a-Maying," when he became the happy father of Mirth? "Love whose month is ever May," is a phrase of Shakspeare's, no uninitiated investigator of the human heart; but he meant the May of the country, not the season of fashion and dissipation in London, where the young men are too much absorbed by ambition or avarice to feel any kindly expansion of the affections. Will you not join in our rural rambles?

Why really, Sir, it would be so excessively vulgar to leave London until after the coronation, that————

Come with me, and you shall see the same ceremony in a hall fifty times more lofty and magnificent than that at Westminster, and painted as well as illuminated by the hand of Heaven. Ay, and we will show you a queen too, which you cannot behold at the royal pageant; and the gems of her crown, of Flora's own manufacture, shall be more curious and beautiful than all the jewellers of Europe can produce; and our musicians shall hover

It was formerly considered inauspicious to marry in this month, to which Ovid alludes in his Fasti:

"Nec viduæ tædis eadem, nec virginis apta
Tempora; quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit:
Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
Mense malum Maio nubere vulgus ait.'

over us upon wings; and our feast

-But hark! the cuckoo

calls us; and I cannot wait a moment longer. If you wish to share our festival, follow me into the warm thick-flowering meadows or the budding copses.

H.

?

MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY GRATTAN.

It is not our intention to write a detailed life of the subject of this memoir; such an undertaking would far exceed the limits, not merely of our usual articles, but of our magazine itself. We must content ourselves with a mere sketch of his extraordinary character, and of the events with which he was connected. The public life of Mr. Grattan is, in fact, the history of his country during that period-the only period during which her history is worth recording-during which the mind, in some degree, emerges from savage barbarism and feudal outrage into the atmosphere of dawning civilization. Before the æra which Mr. Grattan originated, the annals of his country are not only a disgrace to its natives but to human nature-savage chieftains and rebellious slaves rendered her fields little less than the transcript of their crimes, and her story the story of a people unable or unwilling to sway their own sceptre, and yet too froward or too proud to obey it in the hands of others: in the words of Mr. Grattan himself, they were "bad subjects and worse rebels."

Henry Grattan was born in the city of Dublin in the year 1751. He was grandson to the old companion of Dean Swift, to the readers of whose life we have no doubt the Latina Grattanica is amiliar. His father was a barrister, respectable certainly, if not eminent, who at the close of his career had risen to considerable practice, and at length obtained the recordership of the city of Dublin, an office at that time of some rank and trifling emolunent. The patrimony which his son inherited was inconsiderale, so inconsiderable indeed as to render the choice of a profesion indispensable; and after some deliberation that of the bar vas fixed upon. He was accordingly, with that view, enrolled mongst the members of Trinity College, Dublin, and soon enered into youthful competition with a fellow student, who was lestined afterwards to become almost as remarkable as himself, and whose, not merely rivalry, but animosity, terminated only with his life. We allude to the late Lord Clare, at that time Mr. Fitzgibbon. Mr. Grattan became very distinguished at Trinity College; he obtained nearly all its honours, and forms an exception to the career of almost all the students at that University who have shed any lustre on their country. Even in his own time Burke and Goldsmith had just passed away, without having, during their whole collegiate existence, let fall one spark

indicative of their future brilliancy. This University, always "silent," bigoted, and servile, made but an ungrateful return to the pupil who had endeavoured to rescue her name from a proverbial degradation. Mr. Foster, the last speaker of the last parliament of Ireland, was also one of his contemporaries. In the year 1772 he was called to the Irish bar, with which, in a short time, he became disgusted. It is a general remark, that those men who have most successfully advocated the cause of humanity and justice in the forum, have seldom, if ever, in the senate sustained their forensic reputation. The Curran of the House of Commons was certainly not the Curran who at the bar wielded, as he chose, the passions of his auditory; and the coronet, beneath whose shade Lord Erskine sits, is not illumined by one ray which shone upon his brow during the triumphs of Hardy and of Tooke. Mr. Grattan, on the other hand, was an example, that the talent which shines in parliament may remain in eclipse at the bar. He did nothing-he attempted, and he failed. He had not, indeed, an opportunity of addressing a jury, but he did argue one or two law questions, and argued them badly. His mind towered above the little details of special pleas and demurrers-his eye was too bright for the moles of black letter-his spirit could not stoop to the arts of pettifogging traders, and in place of quoting others he became an authority himself. After wandering his allotted period amongst the idlers and the bustlers of the profession, he relinquished the "legal frippery" for ever, and prepared to spend the remainder of his days in the philosophic retirement which his patrimony allowed. During this retirement he became acquainted with a very powerful and popular nobleman, the late Lord Charlemont, a man who blended a love of the arts, of literature, and of politics. A strange and rare combination! but in him they certainly were united. Lord Charlemont was at the head of the liberal politicians of Ireland, but his liberality was constitutional-it took no tinge from rebellion, and the pride of birth mingled, but not austerely, with the familiarity of his patriotism. "Formed," as Mr. Grattan said of him, "formed to unite aristocracy and the people-with the manners of a court and the principles of a patriot-with the flame of liberty and the love of order-unassailable to the approaches of power, of profit, or of titles, he annexed to the love of freedom a veneration for order, and cast on the crowd that followed him the gracious shade of his own accomplishments, so that the very rabble grew civilized as it approached his person." Such an acquaintance, at such a time, must have been equally acceptable to both parties-to him who wanted a profound, brilliant, playful companion, and to him who wanted a powerful and a generous patron a patron who had the rare talent of appearing to receive a