money for a new sensation is the general cry. Hence has arisen a cus-tom with those who have no intrinsic attractions of their own, of drawing society about them, by converting their salons into ménageries, in which all manner of lions are collected and paraded for the public amusement and edification, which strut their hour on the stage, coming like shadows, and so departing; to be succeeded in their turn by other beasts newer and rarer, and therefore more attractive.

To define what constitutes "a lion," would be about as easy a task as to describe the colours of a chamelion. The elements of lionism are of necessity evanescent, as they are various. Provided the thing be not common-place and familiar, there is scarcely a particular that will not constitute its owner a lion. The nearest approach, therefore, that can be made towards precision, is to state that a lion is-whatever society chooses to adopt for one. Under the sanction of that great authority, the merest jackass in nature may arise to leonine celebrity: and hence, probably, the origin of the fable. Had Esop's lion not brayed, he might have continued a lion to the end of the chapter; and so too might ours, if they could abstain from being too demonstrative in their way, make their angel visits few and far between, and take care to get out of town whenever they see themselves in danger of being superseded by something more taking and transmutative than themselves. Without this foresight the throne of lionism is more subject to frequent and sudden revolutions than that of France; and nothing is more common than to see the lion of yesterday, reduced to the jackass of to-day. Whatever, then, be the accidental quality which equips a man with the mane and tail, and qualifies him to grin at the unicorn in the king's arms, novelty is essential to the transformation. Few lions survive the season; and they even who have established the most enduring claims to that social étut, are never "rampant" for more than the first year. We look, for instance, upon Mr. Moore, as being, by his poetic reputation, his agreeable talent, and his exhilarating powers of conversation, about as lasting a lion as any the age has produced; but he knows life too well, to enter into useless competition with a Turk, an Osage, or an Ashantee, at the moment when they burst on the delighted gaze of the town, in all the radiant brilliancy of a first arrival. Thus it is that one lion supersedes another, velut unda supervenit undam; that inferior claims, if unworn, are more powerful than the highest, when once they have become the worse for the wear; and that without reference to the kind or the degree of personal merit, in the matter of lionism," the last fool is welcome as the former."

It is with human, as with leonine laws, they do not admit of a dense population, and are anything but gregarious. A lion "bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne," and, if he knows his own interest, will always avoid the haunts of those ladies who have a morbid ambition of assembling the species in numbers. The danger of neglecting this precaution was finely illustrated in the case of the Scientific Association. Never were so many, or such fierce lions collected in one arena as there are at its meetings! Chemists, astronomers, geologists, botanists, mechanicians, entomologists, make each their separate claim on public admiration; but, mark the end of it. These multitudinous lions, each individually so distinguished, so delightful, so talented, so

very nice, jumbled together in the crowd, were vulgarized, nullified, neutralized till they became as common as an egg a penny, and as little estimated as if they had been only men of worth and ability. Lions, we know, are proverbially the "monarchs of the wood;" what an absurdity, then, to revolutionize them into a republic ! Neither, on the other hand, does the proprietor of the menagerie gain anything by such a violation of natural habits, by turning his lions into puppy dogs, in order to parade them in masses. The world, even of professed and professional admirers and starers par excellence, have only a certain quantum of wonder and astonishment to employ. The whole stock of their little souls is not too much to bestow upon a single well-conditioned lion; but when it is simultaneously called upon by several, the material is so utterly exhausted, that amusement is brought to a stand still; and the end and purpose of the congregation is completely defeated.

In this respect, the present generation labours under an embarras de richesse. Lions are as familiar in the streets of London, as they were in the Capitol the night before Cæsar fell. We have them of all nations, Italians, Poles, Russians, Persians, and Hindoos; to say nothing of opera singers, actors, painters, improvisatori, expounders of hieroglyphics, American poets, Polar voyagers, and princes in search of the crown matrimonial. The earliest lion upon record in London society was Dr. Johnson, and he long reigned alone; or if haply any leo minorum gentium thrust his rival head into good company, the bluff old lexicographer roared so loudly and so long, that the intruder could not obtain a hearing. If, however, Leo the First were to come to life, and roll and growl his way once more into our hyper-lionized companies, he would be driven from his throne by the mass, and would not be even primus inter pares, nor count as a star of no more than the ordinary magnitude. This modern multiplicity of lions is in a great degree a result of the opening of the Continent. Among our earliest recollections of lionism we remember the advent of Mr. Otto, the French ambassador from Buonaparte, who was a lion of the first water (never mind the confusion of metaphor) and reigned alone. In those days, too, even musical lions were solitary, or at best hunted only in couples. Catalani, accordingly, in those days was more ran after than an incognito emperor would be now. Lords were her linkboys, and duchesses her handmaids; whereas, in these degenerate times, Grisi might catch cold (the worst calamity which could happen to a singer), for want of an assistant to hand her a shawl, unless some old-fashioned fanatico came to her aid, and that not out of admiration for the lion, but in pure sympathy and affection for the talent of the sufferer. The first outbreak of a bevy of lions was at the commencement of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, when the emissaries from the revolted Cortes came by the hackneycoach load to our parties, and brought liberality and mustachios into fashion; then followed a Greek invasion, which swept all before it. But the greatest remained behind, and the victorious sovereigns, after the entry into Paris, made prouder conquests in their leonine character in England, than they could boast in all their previous campaigns. They had moreover the wisdom to take themselves off again, before they had exhausted the sight-seeing capability of his Majesty's lieges, and made themselves quite as common as the twopenny-postman.

For a

time the exiled Poles ruled the roast, their gallantry and their unprecedented misfortunes being powerfully backed by the variety of their elegant accomplishments, and (in most cases) by the high aristocracy of their birth; but they have had their day. Faction seized on them as a convenient tool, and they who affect to think the welfare of Europe dependent on the imperial knout, forgetful of all chivalrous, generous and British feelings, have transferred their affections to the subjects of the conqueror.

Of the isolated individuals who have figured as lions, and have strutted their hour on the stage of fashion, the list is too long for formal enumeration, and we shall content ourselves with writing down a few only, as they rise upon the recollection, without order or regard to chronology. The earliest we recollect was Merlin, the proprietor of a mechanical museum, the wonder and delight of our schoolboy eyes. He was the inventor of that modern utility, a one-horse covered carriage (for such a one he made), and drove himself from within, the reins passing through two holes in the front of the body for that purpose. By the splashboard was a common horsewhip, which he plied pro re nata (as the doctors phrase it) by means of a spring. There was also an adometer attached that had a very magical appearance. On fifty-two Sundays in every year was it the wont of this venerable lion to drive up and down and about the park and west end of the town, by way of a vagrant advertisement of his own museum. Thus, in all probability, he became the great original of our modern advertising caravans, and of those humbler machines in human form, who perambulate our streets with an inscription board hung before and behind over their shoulders, "like an herald's coat without sleeves."

Occupying the same site, and nearly his contemporary, roared the illustrious Marten Von Buchell, leonine for his beard, his large spectacles, his low, rounded crowned hat, and his white pony carefully marked with regular spots of paint. This whimsical quack, so pre-eminently a lion himself, was also in possession of another lion, for some time in great estimation among the idlers of the town. This was no less than his own wife, comfortably dead, embalmed secundum artem, and quietly disposed under a glass case.

Another famous lion, well worthy record, was Colonel Hanger; but he has himself chronicled his own roarings. We think we see him, now, seated also on a pony (though that was not painted), with a thundering Irish shillelah in his hand, and slowly perambulating Pall-Mall and St. James's-street, at the top of which latter highway it was his custom ever of an afternoon to take his stand as the sun sank in the west, with the said shillelah carried bolt upright-a well-known signal, like the broom at the mast-head, that he was not disposed of for the evening, and as yet had not received an invitation for that day's dinner. Quaint and copious was his converse, and careful (as the Americans say) were his oaths; he had a regular four hundred horse power of swearing; but he was, we believe, a harmless man, who caricatured rather than exceeded the vices of his

age.

The history of poor Byron's lionship lives in all our memories. He was not only a lion himself, but a cause of lionism in many others, who clung to the mantle of his reputation for a share of his notoriety, or

(worse still) persecuted and ill treated him for the same purpose. Never did lion pay a severer price for his sovereignty, nor throw it aside with more indignation, when experience had opened to him the elements of which it was composed. The lion indeed has long been dead, but the poet will live contemporaneously and ubiquitously with the English language; and when the passions of society shall have changed their direction, and "hypocrisy and nonsense" have been shamed to silence, the memory of the man will be redressed and go down to posterity as of one more sinned against than sinning.

It will not be expected from us that we should touch on the living lions of the day. It is our boast, that in our wildest whims we are not personal; much less are we disposed to trifle with feelings in these our graver lucubrations. Suffice it to say, that as society increases in riches and in numbers, as the business of life multiplies and its pleasures abound, individuals cease to rely on themselves for amusement, the public taste becomes frivolous, Shakspeare is deserted for "the musical glasses," for incomprehensible dumb show and horse pageantry, and the relish for lions becomes more excessive, and therefore less discrimi nating. Lions, therefore, are a rapidly degenerating breed, simply because lion hunters are becoming more vapid and foolish. In many cases they are reduced to be mere gazing blocks, like the poor Persians of last year, who had not a word (of English) to throw at a dog; and whose entire intercourse with the spectators consisted in looking unutterable things at the ladies, who looked unutterable things at them in return.

But something too much of this.

If our readers think we have dwelt

too long on a trifle, we beg them to remember that if truth is one, and wisdom simple, folly is infinite, and therefore prolix.

MARTIAL IN LONDON.

General Phipps's Birth-Day, April 7, 1837.
Too soon, by a month, you were born upon earth,
Folks allege-ne'er heed what they say;
Tho' tear-dropping April lays claim to your birth,
With you to extinguish her sadness by Mirth,
She comes as the Herald of May.

The Unsuccessful Candidate.

No mortal, of voters, e'er met with a rummer set;
Your hopes at Bridgewater met with a summerset.
Return the electors your thanks for their bounty,
You're out for the borough, but in for the county.

J. S.

We must allow the Indian fleet to pursue its way to the Cape with every variety of wind and weather. Some had parted company; but the rendezvous was Table Bay, from which they were again to start together.

Philip Vanderdecken was soon able to render some service on board. He studied his duty diligently, for employment prevented him from dwelling too much upon the cause of his embarkation, and he worked hard at the duties of the ship, for the exercise procured for him that sleep which otherwise would have been denied.

He was soon a favourite of the captain's, and intimate with Hillebrant the first-mate; the second-mate, Struys, was a morose young man, with whom he had little intercourse. As for the supercargo, Mynheer Jacob Jansz Von Stroom, he seldom ventured out of his cabin. The bear Johannes was not confined, and therefore Mynheer Von Stroom confined himself; hardly a day passed that he did not look over a letter which he had framed upon the subject, all ready to forward to the Company, and each time that he perused it he made some alteration, which he considered would give additional force to his complaint, and would prove still more injurious to the interests of Captain Kloots.

In the meantime, in happy ignorance of all that was passing in the poop-cabin, Mynheer Kloots smoked his pipe, drank his schnapps, and played with Johannes. The animal had also contracted a great affection for Philip, and used to walk the watch with him.

There was another party in the ship whom we must not lose sight of— the one-eyed pilot, Schrifton, who appeared to have imbibed a great animosity to our hero, as well as to his dumb favourite the bear. As Philip held the rank of an officer, Schrifton dare not openly affront him, but he took every opportunity of annoying him that he dared to do, and was constantly inveighing against him with the ship's company. To the bear he was more openly inveterate, and seldom passed it without bestowing upon it a severe kick, accompanied with a horrid curse. Although no man on board appeared to be fond of this man, everybody appeared to be afraid of him, and he had obtained a control over the seamen which appeared unaccountable.

Such was the state of affairs on board the good ship Ter Schilling, when in company with two others; she lay becalmed about two days' sail to the Cape. The weather was intensely hot, for it was the summer in those southern latitudes, and Philip, who had been lying down under the awning spread over the poop, was so overcome with the heat that he had fallen asleep. He awoke with a shivering sensation of cold over his whole body, particularly at his chest, and half opening his eyes he perceived the pilot, Schrifton, leaning over him, and holding between his finger and his thumb a portion of the chain which had not been concealed, and to which was attached the sacred relic. Philip closed them again to ascertain what were the man's intentions; he found that he

*Continued from page 40, No. cxcvii.