XIII.-THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME AND LOVE
MY DOG.

visitants; droppers in, as they are called. the moment you have just sat down to a We sometimes wonder from what sky they book. They have a peculiar compassionate fall. It is the very error of the position of sneer, with which they "hope that they do our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calcu- not interrupt your studies." Though they lated, being just situate in a medium-a flutter off the next moment, to carry their plaguy suburban mid-space-fitted to catch impertinences to the nearest student that idlers from town or country. We are older they can call their friend, the tone of the than we were, and age is easily put out of book is spoiled; we shut the leaves, and its way. We have fewer sands in our glass with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see ❘ It were well if the effect of intrusion were them drop in endlessly succeeding imperti- simply co-extensive with its presence, but it nences. At our time of life, to be alone mars all the good hours afterwards. These sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the scratches in appearance leave an orifice that refreshing sleep of the day. The growing closes not hastily. "It is a prostitution of infirmities of age manifest themselves in no- the bravery of friendship," says worthy thing more strongly, than in an inveterate Bishop Taylor, "to spend it upon impertinent dislike of interruption. The thing which we people, who are, it may be, loads to their are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. families, but can never ease my loads." This We have neither much knowledge nor de- is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, vices; but there are fewer in the place to and morning calls. They too have homes, which we hasten. We are not willingly put which are no homes. out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to economise in that article. We bleed away our moments now "GooD sir, or madam-as it may be-we as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear most willingly embrace the offer of your to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted friendship. We have long known your exinto by moths. We are willing to barter our cellent qualities. We have wished to have good time with a friend, who gives us in you nearer to us; to hold you within the exchange his own. Herein is the distinction very innermost fold of our heart. We can between the genuine guest and the visitant. have no reserve towards a person of your This latter takes your good time, and gives open and noble nature. The frankness of you his bad in exchange. The guest is do- your humour suits us exactly. We have mestic to you as your good cat, or household been long looking for such a friend. Quick bird; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at-let us disburthen our troubles into each your window, and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we can eat before a guest; and never understood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour-not to eat-but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show "But do you always take him out with their genius, as we have said, in knocking you, when you go a friendship-hunting?"

other's bosom-let us make our single joys
shine by reduplication-But yap, yap, yap!
what is this confounded cur? he has
fastened his tooth, which is none of the
bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg."
"It is my dog, sir. You must love him
for my sake. Here, Test-Test-Test!"
"But he has bitten me."

"Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are
better acquainted with him. I have had
him three years. He never bites me."
Yap, yap, yap!" He is at it again."

Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself."

"Invariably. "Tis the sweetest, prettiest, uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. best-conditioned animal. I call him my test | Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'Tis hard -the touchstone by which to try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not love him."

-

when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother; or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing relations? - must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common parentage with them? Let him lay down his brothers; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys: things between boy and manhood-too ripe for play, too raw for conversation-that come in, impudently staring their father's old friend out of countenance; and will neither aid nor let alone, the conference; that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood.

It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog.

The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship-not to speak of more delicate correspondence-however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation the understood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful companion is * if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him; like some of those double births which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old "Athenian Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother An excellent story to this moral is told of peeping out at his shoulder; a species of Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. In tender fraternity, which we have no name of kin youth he loved and courted a modest apclose enough to comprehend. When * panage to the Opera-in truth a dancer,— comes, poking in his head and shoulder into who had won him by the artless contrast your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, between her manners and situation. She surely you have now got him to yourself-seemed to him a native violet, that had been what a three hours' chat we shall have! transplanted by some rude accident into but ever in the haunch of him, and before that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in his diffident body is well disclosed in your truth, was she less genuine and sincere than apartment, appears the haunting shadow of she appeared to him. He wooed and won the cousin, overpeering his modest kinsman, this flower. Only for appearance' sake, and and sure to overlay the expected good talk for due honour to the bride's relations, she with his insufferable procerity of stature, and craved that she might have the attendance

But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your constancy; they must not complain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all, that loved her, loving her dogs also.

of her friends and kindred at the approaching for a mere human gentleman-that has no solemnity. The request was too amiable orchestra business to call him from his warm not to be conceded and in this solicitude bed to such preposterous exercises-we take for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have "killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came: and at the Star and Garter, Richmond-the place appointed for the breakfasting-accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches-the whole corps du ballet-French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and Signor Sc-, and Signora Ch—, and Madame V-, with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes! at the sight of whom Merry afterwards declared, that "then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he was about to marry-a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride-handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest-presented to him as her father-the gentleman that was to give her away-no less a person than Signor Delpini himself—with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour!-the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted buffas for bridemaids.

ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their Ar what precise minute that little airy dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them musician doffs his night gear, and prepares too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are to chew the cud of a foregone vision: to not naturalists enough to determine. But collect the scattered rays of a brighter

XIV. THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.

phantasm, or act over again, with firmer We feel attenuated into their meagre nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to essences, and have given the hand of halfdrag into day-light a struggling and half way approach to incorporeal being. We vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine once thought life to be something; but it the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have has unaccountably fallen from us before its too much respect for these spiritual com- time. Therefore we choose to dally with munications, to let them go so lightly. We visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to are not so stupid, or so careless as that light us to. Why should we get up?

Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form

or

LAMB.

or

of them. They seem to us to have as much XV.-THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE
significance as our waking concerns:
rather to import us more nearly, as more WE could never quite understand the
nearly we approach by years to the shadowy philosophy of this arrangement, or the
world, whither we are hastening. We have wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for
shaken hands with the world's business; instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A
we have done with it; we have discharged sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but
ourself of it. Why should we get up? we to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can.
have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to Man found out long sixes,-Hail, candle-
manage. The drama has shut in upon us at light! without disparagement to sun
the fourth act. We have nothing here to moon, the kindliest luminary of the three-
expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and if we may not rather style thee their radiant
a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death deputy, mild viceroy of the moon !-We love
by such shadows as night affords. We are to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by
already half acquainted with ghosts. We candle-light. They are everybody's sun and
were never much in the world. Disappoint- moon. This is our peculiar and household
ment early struck a dark veil between us planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial
and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed
grey before our hairs. The mighty changes
of the world already appear as but the vain
stuff out of which dramas are composed.
We have asked no more of life than what
the mimic images in play-houses present us
with. Even those types have waxed fainter.
Our clock appears to have struck. We are
SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane
satisfaction, we contract politic alliances
with shadows. It is good to have friends at
court. The abstracted media of dreams
seem no ill introduction to that spiritual
presence, upon which, in no long time, we
expect to be thrown. We are trying to
know a little of the usages of that colony;
to learn the language, and the faces we shall
meet with there, that we may be the less
awkward at our first coming among them.
We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as
knowing we shall soon be of their dark com-
panionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams.
We try to spell in them the alphabet of the
invisible world; and think we know already,
how it shall be with us. Those uncouth
shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and
blood, affrighted us, have become familiar.

nights must our ancestors have spent,
wintering in caves and unillumined fast-
nesses! They must have lain about and
grumbled at one another in the dark. What
repartees could have passed, when you must
have felt about for a smile, and handled a
neighbour's cheek to be sure that he under-
stood it? This accounts for the seriousness
of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast
(try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the
tradition of those unlantern'd nights. Jokes
came in with candles. We wonder how they |
saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How
did they sup? what a melange of chance
carving they must have made of it!-here |
one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted
a horse's shoulder-there another had dipped
his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey,
when he meditated right mare's milk. There
is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco.
Who, even in these civilised times, has never
experienced this, when at some economic
table he has commenced dining after dusk,
and waited for the flavour till the lights
came? The senses absolutely give and take
reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal
in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from

pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes !-there is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phœbus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works

of the man himself is so much to be deplored may admit of a question. We can speak a little to it, being ourselves but lately recovered-we whisper it in confidence, reader,—out of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing? The conviction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries-for they were mere fancies-which had provoked the humour. But the humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lastedwe know how bare we lay ourself in the confession-to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have been imaginary; and for our old acquaintance N-, whom we find to have been a truer friend than we took him for, we substitute some phantom-a Caius or a Titius—as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea of having been ill-used Things that were born, when none but the still night, The first thing to aggrandise a man in his and contumaciously treated by an old friend.

And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes.

own conceit, is to conceive of himself as Marry, daylight-daylight might furnish the neglected. There let him fix if he can. To images, the crude material; but for the fine undeceive him is to deprive him of the most shapings, the true turning and filing (as tickling morsel within the range of selfmine author hath it), they must be content complacency. No flattery can come near it. to hold their inspiration of the candle. The Happy is he who suspects his friend of an mild internal light, that reveals them, like injustice; but supremely blest, who thinks fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and sun-shine. Night and silence call out the undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we starry fancies. Milton's Morning Hymn in sing not to the profane) far beyond the Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was reach of all that the world calls joy-a deep, penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich enduring satisfaction in the depths, where description of a sun-rise smells decidedly the superficial seek it not, of discontent. of the taper. Even ourself, in these Were we to recite one half of this mystery, our humbler lucubrations, tune our best--which we were let into by our late dismeasured cadences (Prose has her cadences) satisfaction, all the world would be in love not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar System.-Betty, bring the candles.

XVI.—THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE.

WE grant that it is, and a very serious one-to a man's friends, and to all that have to do with him; but whether the condition

with disrespect; we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous; but wait-out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day,-having in his company one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed towards