sagacity, and doubtless appreciated these new-born professions at their proper value; but the slight has sunk barbed into the nature that never forgives, where it will fester and rankle until time shall give its poison an opportunity of being infectious. It gives one, however, but a poor opinion of humanity to see the very same persons who, without having done her any service, persecuted the Queen for her official favours, bellowing, before her corpse was cold, in the train of her antagonists. Such were the parties who alternately misgoverned and disturbed Ireland at the moment of his Majesty's arrival; and it requires but little skill to foresee that their suspension of hostilities, or rather their sudden and miraculous unanimity, is not to be calculated on for any great duration. The interests of some, and the personal affection of others, for the King, produced the demonstration; but it is at best only the "mala sarta amicitia." If a stranger to Ireland requires any proof of this, he will find it in the hollow and heartless acclamations which have hailed the arrival of some of the King's attendants. If there ever was a measure which before temporarily united the opposing factions, it was the measure of the UNION. They poured upon it their unanimous execration, denounced it as a calamity which laid their independence in the dust, and through each succeeding year have held it up as the bane of their prosperity, and the annihilation of their name. And yet, in twenty years after it passed-even in that very city which it had chiefly prestrated, whose mansions it had untenanted, whose merchants it had impoverished, whose streets it had depopulated, and whose splendour, as the seat of legislation, it had eclipsed for ever-even there, the reviled author of that measure was so hailed by the plaudits of radical consistency, that if he did not altogether supersede the Sovereign, he may, at least, now with truth exclaim "Divisum imperium cum Jove-habui !—” It is scarcely possible to conceive this adulation to be sincere, and its offering is an omen of no auspicious import. When a people become either so desperate, or so shameless, as to fling off the principles of which they have been violent in the profession, and transform all at once the object of their denunciations into the god of their idolatry; however it may expose themselves, it most assuredly cannot impose upon the world. It manifestly reduces them to this dilemma, either that their clamour has been ill founded, or that their devotion is insincere; and in either case, their claim upon respect or credulity is the same. Such violent conversions in politics are seldom pure, and quite as seldom permanent. It is scarcely possible to believe, that the men who are bending the pliant knee upon the pier at Dunleary, are the same men who, in 1812, made Clarendon Street Chapel ring with the "witchery resolutions." Yet their personal identity is certainbut the object of their caprices is transformed: power has touched it with an Ithuriel spear, and deformity has become divine. However, Sir, even confiding in, which I do not, the superlative raptures which have arisen from the royal visit, it appears to me impossible that all their prospective visions can be realized. Ireland may have been flattered by the King's attention, but the King cannot have been informed by such a journey. It is not amid the parade of a triumphal entry, or at corporation shows and college dinners, that the wants and interests of such a country are to be learned. Dublin, all beauty without, and all poverty within-like the statue in Lucian, with its polished surface of Parian splendour and its interior filled with rags and wretchedness, is but a deceitful specimen of the state of Ireland, particularly when she is blazing in the transient rays of an imported Court, and peopled with the train of foreign Ambassadors. To know Ireland, the monarch should have gone unattended through its provinces -he should have seen its "deserted villages"-its roofless manufactories-its shipless harbours-its ragged, dispirited, discouraged peasantry, surrendering to the agent of some absentee landlord the worthless pittance which the tithe-proctor had spared, and taking refuge from thought in eternal intoxication;-he should have seen the adverse bigots, waging their impious battle over the polluted altars of a common faith-he should have gone into the crowded prisons and into the continual barracks, and cursed the instruments, and wept over the victims of coercion he should have asked whether the stations under him, from the highest to the lowest, were distributed according to merit, or interest, or corruption--he should have inquired why it was, that all the names of which the country can be proud--the Burkes, the Goldsmiths, the Moores, with a long train of etceteras in arts, and arms, and politics, have been obliged to migrate into distant lands, leaving the honours and emoluments of their own to those who have less spirit and more subserviency. He should have done this to know even something of Ireland-and, when all this knowledge was acquired, amply sufficient would then remain behind to satisfy curiosity during the next promised triennial visitation. If the royal affection for Ireland is as sincere as it appears to be, and indeed there can be no reason to doubt it, these inquiries once acted on would produce to the country results the most beneficial, and to the King himself reflections the most delightful. EUDOXUS. TO THE TURQUOISE. IN sunny hours, long flown! how oft my eyes L. THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.* IN this book-making age, when every traveller's tour is ingeniously expanded into a goodly quarto, of which the mite belonging really to the author himself is completely hid in the mass of compilation and transcription in which it is enveloped, we hail with pleasure the appearance of a modest unpretending little volume, like that which is the subject of the present article. The author of Notes on the Cape has been content to give us the wheat without the usual make-weight of chaff; and we wish all travellers would follow his example. He tells us what he saw, what he heard, and what he thought, and all this in a very lively and entertaining manner; so that while we cre collecting a considerable stock of information respecting the country which he visited, we are amused with the spirit and vivacity of his sketches, and delighted with the originality of thought and the poetical feeling which often distinguish his descriptions. The charm of a book of travels is, when it records the first impressions made upon a man of feeling and intelligence, who has the power of describing what he sees, and expressing what he feels, in a lively and unaffected style; and much of this charm will be found in the work before us. We have been too much entertained with it to object very seriously to an occasional pruriency of phrase which a revisal might easily correct, or to the too general prevalence of a tone of sarcastic bantering, which still more requires to be softened and subdued. If, however, the author is sometimes flippant, he is never dull; and the faults of flippancy generally carry their own excuse along with them. The volume commences with the author's arrival at the Cape :" "On the morning of the 1st of January, 1820, we arrived at this new Land of Promise; a date too memorable to be easily forgotten, as being the first day of a new year dawning upon me in a new quarter of the globe. After a long and protracted voyage, where the eye has been accustomed to range at large over the blue expanse of waters, without one object to diversify and break the sameness of the view, the first appearance of the land is really dazzling. Its outline, shape, and colour, are more vivid and distinct, more intensely present to us than at any other moment of our lives; and we gaze at it with an ardour that those only can conceive, who have experienced this long and unnatural separation. The sea, after all, is not our element; we are intruders upon the secrets of the mighty deep, and we feel that our arrival at the shores of mother earth, though in a foreign and unknown clime, is, as it were, a return to home. At day-break the land of the Cape of Good Hope was a speck upon the horizon, that, slowly rising from its bed of waters, gracefully unfolded its dusky form, and stood at length displayed in wild and naked majesty. The Table Mountain, with its fleecy canopy of clouds, is the most remarkable feature in the scene; but it would be vain to attempt a picture of the whole of this lofty promontory, which stretches its rugged arms into the sea, and, frowning like a mighty giant upon the sons of other climates, that pour in upon his Cyclopæan dominions, seems an appropriate introduction to the wilds of Southern Africa." Notes on the Cape of Good Hope, made during an excursion in that colony in the year 1820. MELANCHOLY. "Gode il cor di trattar le sue ferite." MONTI. I HAVE been mightily puzzled to find out what there is in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, that could have induced Johnson to forego for it, in particular, the habitual comfort of his morning's nap The sentence in which he records this, has led thousands of pensive gentlemen to purchase the book: it is in every library with its leaves seldom cut half through Democritus Junior's string of impertinencies to the reader. The reason is, that melancholy wants more to be fed than analyzed: it is a natural craving, and demands nourishment instead of medicine. To prescribe antidotes for it, as for poison, is the very way to convert it into the evil they would g avoid. Johnson was a great empiric in mental subjects: he was always doctoring his disposition, and, being a strenuous assertor of the power of the will, was fain to have himself a machine-resistless and obedient to the direction of pure intellect. Even the most subtle operations of the mind-literary compositions, for instancehe would have to depend upon resolution alone, independent of health, weather, or any other external causes. It is very likely that this sentiment, dogmatically and determinately felt as it was by him, might have had the effect of producing a habit of mind calculated to corroborate the truth of the opinion. Besides, his clear and compact body of thought was one from which a thread of speculation might be woven at any time. He had no "half-perceptions," none of the intuitive penetration, the second sight in metaphysics, which is not to be elicited but at happy intervals. His reflections were part of a solid mass of coarse but sterling sense-ready to be cut out into syllogisms at any time. But of the elegant, the fine, the airy truths, which are struck out like sparks in momentary collision, he knew nothing. He was independent of inspiration, and therefore might contemn and make light of those poetic gleams of intelligence, the mollia tempora, and the casualties, on which genius, proud and mighty as it is, must in a great measure depend. He endeavoured to be as despotic over himself as he was over others, and chid his rebellious feelings in the same authoritative tone that he used to his living antagonists. But those proved more stubborn were not to be brow-beaten-"naturam expellas furcâ;" and a melancholy, which he was compelled to own constitutional, overcame all his theory. It was doubtless in pursuit of this self-hostility (for the pugnacious philosopher could not but dispute with himself, when a more convenient opponent did not offer) that he gave up his morning's sleep to the study of Burton. It is not likely that he gained from the perusal any remedy, or alleviation of his disease, beyond what the necessary occupation afforded, since it continued to oppress him to his latest hour. And any pleasure he derived from it, was perhaps owing more to his own eagerness on the subject of which it treats, than to any power of wit or eloquence in the author. The having conquered a long and perplexing work is generally attended with a proud feeling of self-complacency, which, I cannot help thinking, forms the greatest part of the pleasure so copiously drawn by the tasteful from the much-lauded productions of our Montaigne I can admire, for, though not above all pedantry, he was above that of logic, of definition, and division. His thoughts flow naturally, and however discursive, draw the reader unconsciously with them; his quotations come from his memory, not from his common-place book; in short, if we can call any author friend, it is Montaigne. But reading Burton I can compare to nothing but walking on the edge of a saw; no one thought is linked to another by the natural association-all is abrupt, angular, unnatural. Critics say, that to enjoy and judge rightly of an author, we should place ourselves in the circumstances of his age and timethat over Homer we should be Grecian, over Virgil, Roman. To such a classic change of character I have no objection; but really that we should become monks and pedants in order to enjoy an old gentleman, however witty and humorous he may be, is too revolting a request upon our powers of diversity. But above all, it is most unreasonable to demand this of the melancholy reader, who is possessed with a feeling directly hostile to all scholasticism and dantic wit; to such a feeling I can imagine nothing so disgusting as the mixture of philosophy and buffoonery, which is palmed on it as its kindred. Melancholy is essentially anti-dramatic, and cannot by any means be made to step out of itself. Nature is conformed to it, not it to nature; all objects that come within its sphere of vision become assimilated, and assume its colours. The gayest, the gladdest, and the brightest, take a sombre hue in its presence; and the gaiety of human life is to it but the saddest of sorrows. To such a feeling, the page of fretful reasoning and piecemeal analysis must be the height of impertinence. The mind in its buoyant mood may look into it as a curiosity, and be amused by its extravagance. But to admire it-to hold it up as a wonderful production of genius to make it the companion of the lonely hour, is the effect of something beyond pure taste. What shall we say to the impertinent casuist, that intrudes "Where heavenly pensive Contemplation dwells, pe |