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and that these mental hallucinations were are at home, and upon acquainted ground. discoverable only in the treatment of subjects The one turns life into a dream; the other out of nature, or transcending it, the judg- to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of ment might with some plea be pardoned if every-day occurrences. By what subtle art it ran riot, and a little wantonised: but of tracing the mental processes it is effected, even in the describing of real and every-day we are not philosophers enough to explain, life, that which is before their eyes, one of but in that wonderful episode of the cave of these lesser wits shall more deviate from Mammon, in which the Money God appears nature-show more of that inconsequence, first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a which has a natural alliance with frenzy,- worker of metals, and becomes the god of all than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as the treasures of the world; and has a Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal daughter, Ambition, before whom all the to any one that is acquainted with the com- world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian mon run of Lane's novels, as they existed fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate some twenty or thirty years back,-those washing his hands vainly, but not impertiscanty intellectual viands of the whole female nently, in the same stream-that we should reading public, till a happier genius arose, and be at one moment in the cave of an old expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge whether he has not found his brain more of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his at once, with the shifting mutations of the sense of when and where more confounded, most rambling dream, and our judgment yet among the improbable events, the incoherent all the time awake, and neither able nor incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no- willing to detect the fallacy,-is a proof of characters, of some third-rate love-intrigue that hidden sanity which still guides the poet where the persons shall be a Lord Glenda- in the wildest seeming aberrations. mour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street-a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless stream of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive:-we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort-but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.

CAPTAIN JACKSON.

AMONG the deaths in our obituary for this suades me, that this could have been no other month, I observe with concern " At his cot- in fact than my dear old friend, who some tage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, The name and attribution are common which he was pleased to dignify with the enough; but a feeling like reproach per- appellation here used, about a mile from

Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, leavings: only he would sometimes finish the and the good turns they do us, slide out of remainder crust, to show that he wished no memory, and are recalled but by the surprise savings. of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us!

Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of He whom I mean was a retired half-pay wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I officer, with a wife and two grown-up daugh-remember-"British beverage," he would ters, whom he maintained with the port and say! "Push about, my boys; ""Drink to notions of gentlewomen upon that slender your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre professional allowance. Comely girls they draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All were too. the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements.

And was I in danger of forgetting this man ?—his cheerful suppers-the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's horn in a poor platter-the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties.

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold savings from the foregone meal—remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will-the revelling imagination of your host-the "mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you-hecatombsno end appeared to the profusion.

It was the widow's eruse-the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it-the stamina were left-the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents.

"Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed creature exclaim; “while we have, let us not want," "here is plenty left;" "want for nothing"-with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were verè hospitibus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and

We had our songs-" Why, Soldiers, why,” and the "British Grenadiers "—in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme-the masters he had given them-the " no-expense" which he spared to accomplish them in a science “so necessary to young women.” But thenthey could not sing "without the instrument."

Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice.

We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present

in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realised themselves; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably.

inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever persuaded, not for any half hour together to have met with the poem in question. But did they ever look their own prospects fairly that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the poet's study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of -vanity shall I call it ?-in his bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence.

It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature described the circumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a chaise-and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so completely made out the stanza of the old ballad

When we came down through Glasgow town,
We were a comely sight to see;
My love was clad in black velvet,
And I myself in cramasie.

He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes-you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say, "Hand me the silver sugar tongs; " and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, I suppose it was the only occasion upon he would disturb and captivate your imagin- which his own actual splendour at all correation by a misnomer of " the urn " for a tea-sponded with the world's notions on that kettle; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. subject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor by what ever humble vehicle they chanced ones divert you from it; he neither did one to be transported in less prosperous days, nor the other, but by simply assuming that the ride through Glasgow came back upon everything was handsome about him, you his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but were positively at a demur what you did, or as a fair occasion for reverting to that did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to one day's state. It seemed an equipage live on, he seemed to live on everything. He etern" from which no power of fate or fortune, had a stock of wealth in his mind; not that once mounted, had power thereafter to diswhich is properly termed Content, for in lodge him. truth he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion.

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There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before Enthusiasm is catching; and even his strangers, may not be always discommendable. wife, a sober native of North Britain, who Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have generally saw things more as they were, was more of our admiration than contempt. But not proof against the continual collision of for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to his credulity. Her daughters were rational play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in and discreet young women; in the main, poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all perhaps, not insensible to their true circum- the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of stances. I have seen them assume a thought-constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over ful air at times. But such was the pre- fortune, which was reserved for my old friend ponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am Captain Jackson.

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IF peradventure, Reader, it has been thy and little tradesfolks, with here and there a lot to waste the golden years of thy life-thy servant-maid that has got leave to go out, shining youth-in the irksome confinement who, slaving all the week, with the habit has of an office; to have thy prison days pro- lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free longed through middle age down to decrepi- hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness tude and silver hairs, without hope of release of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in or respite; to have lived to forget that there the fields on that day look anything but are such things as holidays, or to remember comfortable. them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.

It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a-day attendance at the counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content-doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers-the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful-are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over-No busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by-the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances-or half-happy at best-of emancipated 'prentices

But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years

of age, and no prospect of emancipation that I accepted their proposal, and I was told presented itself. I had grown to my desk, that I was free from that hour to leave their as it were; and the wood had entered into service. I stammered out a bow, and at just my soul. ten minutes after eight I went home-for ever. This noble benefit-gratitude forbids me to conceal their names- -I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world-the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy.

Esto perpetua!

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible in my countenance; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when, on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L, the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly For the first day or two I felt stunned, inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my honestly made confession of my infirmity, felicity; I was too confused to taste it sinand added that I was afraid I should even- cerely. I wandered about, thinking I was tually be obliged to resign his service. He happy, and knowing that I was not. I was spoke some words of course to hearten me, in the condition of a prisoner in the old and there the matter rested. A whole week | Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' I remained labouring under the impression confinement. I could scarce trust myself that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about eight o'clock) I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L, I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me,—when to my utter astonishment B, the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted!), and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary-a magnificent offer! I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood

with myself. It was like passing out of
Time into Eternity-for it is a sort of Eter-
nity for a man to have his Time all to him-
self. It seemed to me that I had more
time on my hands than I could ever manage.
From a poor man, poor in Time, I was
suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I
could see no end of my possessions; I wanted
some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage
my estates in Time for me. And here let
me caution persons grown old in active busi-
ness, not lightly, nor without weighing their
own resources, to forego their customary
employment all at once, for there may be
danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know
that my resources are sufficient; and now
that those first giddy raptures have subsided,
I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessed-
ness of my condition. I am in no hurry.
Having all holidays, I am as though I had
none. If Time hung heavy upon me, I could
walk it away; but I do not walk all day
long, as I used to do in those old transient
holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the
most of them. If Time were troublesome,
I could read it away; but I do not read in
that violent measure, with which, having no
Time my own but candlelight Time, I used
to weary out my head and eyesight in by-
gone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as
now), just when the fit seizes me.
longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to

me.

I am like the man

I no

that's born, and has his years come to him, In some green desert.

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