which it wrings out delirious and passionate outcries at the very moment when you are lauding your coolness and magnanimity.

And now, before parting with you for a month, allow me to return you my best thanks, for the very kind and condescending permission which, in a late Number of the Examiner, you gave me to come forward and avow myself. This was more than kindit was generous. I need fear nothing from you-so you inform me. But it would seem as if there were some other formidable Champion into whose hands you would wish slyly to deliver me. Of him, as of you, my contempt is perfect. As you got him to praise you and your verses in the Edinburgh Review, so may you get him at small cost to defend you in a Sunday Newspaper. But let him have a cooling draught before he enters the lists. I observed him lately breaking all the laws of chivalry, by using foul language to some humble squire who had spied a pimple on his nose. Give him a visor and send him forth to the battle. Choose for his shield-bearer the flower of the Cockney youth. Have warm possets and salves ready against his return from the combat, and one or two of your own "Nepheliads" to bring some "bubbling freshness" to his green wounds. Let this man of steel come at his leisure. You at least are disposed of. True that you called out a foul blow," but it has been decided against you by impartial umpires, and it is evident that you have not weighed your metal before you rushed into the battle. Your imprudence has been great; had it not been the offspring of so much conceit I should have disdained to punish it. The die is cast. It is now too late to talk of retreating.

And now, for the present, I know not that I have much more to add. That you have been irritated to a state of lunacy by my Critiques on the Cockney School of Poetry, of which you are the founder, is proved by your raving and incoherent denials. You, who have libelled so many men, ought not to have considered yourself sacred from the hand of vengeance. Above all persons living, you, the Editor of the Examiner, who have so often run. a muck, stabbing men, women, and children, should, if unable to defend yourself when the avenger came, have

had the sense and fortitude at least to endure punishment with decent composure. But your whole mind seems to be one universal sore of vanity, and the pinch of a finger and thumb causes you to shriek out, as if you were broken on the wheel, and to burst into insane invectives with the very avowal of silence on your pale quivering lips. Silent you cannot remain; and when you speak out against me, what is it you say? Nothing. Your abilities, which on some subjects are considerable, then utterly desert you; and instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedge-hog, that has crawled out into the "crisp" gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble prickles of your hunch'd-up back to the kicks of one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.

The question at issue between Leigh Hunt and Z. is not to be decided by raving on your side, or contempt on mine. It is to be decided by that portion of the public who have read your works, and, if need be, the charges I have brought against them. You alone, of all the writers in verse of the present day, of any pretensions, real or imaginary, to the character of poet, have been the secret and invidious foe of virtue. No woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read "The Story of Rimini" without the flushings of shame and self-reproach. A brother would tear it indignantly from a sister's hand, and the husband who saw his wife's eyes resting on it with any other expression than of contempt or disgust, would have reason to look with perplexing agony on the countenances of his children.

You may, henceforth, endeavour to remain silent, and it may be well for you that you do so. But I shall hereafter have much to say to you. Your vulgar vanity, your audacious arrogance, your conceited coxcombry, your ignorant pedantry,-all the manifold sins and iniquities of Cockneyism lie spread before me as in a map; and I will not part with your Majesty till I have shewn your crown, which you imagine is formed of diamonds and pearls, to be wholly composed of paste and parchment, and

glass-beads; your robes to be worthless as old rags from St Giles'; your sceptre to be a hollow-hearted and sapless broom-stick, which no hawker could vend without dishonesty; and your throne itself, though glittering with gew-gaws, to be no better than a broken-armed kitchen-chair, and worthy to be the seat of that "Washerwoman, whose charms you, in the "Round Table," have, like a fitting knight, so chivalrously celebrated.

"

I shall probe you to the core. I shall prove you to be ignorant of all you pretend to understand. I shall shew that you have written verse for these ten years without ever having had one glimpse of what true poetry is; that you have been a weekly babbler about patriotism and freedom, and yet, all the while, the most abject slave that ever bowed himself to clear the path before the idol-chariot of anarchy. I shall shew the world to what a low pass the spirit of England is reduced, when any of her children can stoop to be instructed by one who has not a single iota of the English character within him; one who is in his religion as base and cold as a second-hand sceptic of the Palais Royal; who, in his politics, mingles the vulgar insolence of a Paine with the weakness of a mountebank and theatrical notable; whose perceptions of moral truth have been embalmed in strains that night be cheered from a Venetian Gondola, but which have had no effect in England, except that of heaping an already contemptible name with the blackest infamy of voluntary pandarism and coveted humi

liation.

The advantage which I have over you, Mr Hunt, is indeed a very considerable one. You should have reflected better before you thus compelled and invited me to make my most of its power. I have the established sentiments of national honour on my side. There is not a man or a woman around us, who venerates the memory of a respectable ancestry, or the interests of a yet unpolluted progeny, that will not rejoice to see your poison neutralized by the wholesome chemistry of Z. There is not a single mother of a seduced daughter, or a single father of a profligate son, or a single repentant victim of sophistical vice, that does not lavish the foulest of execrations on your devoted head. Even VOL. III.

in those scenes of wickedness, where alone, unhappy man, your verses find willing readers, there occur many moments of languor and remorse, wherein the daughters of degradation themselves, toss from their hands, with angry loathing, the obscene and traitorous pages of your Rimini. In those who have sinned from weakness or levity, the spark of original conscience is not always totally extinguished. To your breast alone, and to those of others like you, the deliberate, and pensive, and sentimental apostles of profligacy, there comes no visiting of purity, no drop of repentance. Your souls are so hardened, that the harlot deity, who is worshipped by others with their senses alone, claims and receives from you the prostration and slavery of intellect. Alas! that where pity is so much the predominant feeling, I should be forced, by the stubbornness of the offender, to array myself in the externals of severity. Confess only that you have done wrong,-make a clear breast of it,-beg pardon of your God and of your country for the iniquities of your polluted muse, and the last to add one pang to the secret throbbings of a contrite spirit, shall be

Z.

genuity. Some of them appear to have offended against, and others to have belonged to, the sacred body, from the indecencies and blasphemies, or from the churches and belfries, which they have scratched upon the walls. The reader may not object to see a specimen of the records prompted by so terrific a solitude. As nearly as they could be copied by more than one pencil, four of them are as follows:

1

"Trust no other,
Not even your brother

Can give thee assistance.-
Here goes! keep your distance!
James Craigie."

"Speak no word; Hold in your breath; Press hard

For life or death.

John Buchan of the College Kirk."
3

Friends and foes may say as they please,
So help me God! I shall here have my ease.

4

Pauperibus æque prodest, locupletibus æque, Eque neglectum pueris senibusque nocebit.

Th. Lamb. Stud. Log. 1817.

For a more scientific and statistical view of this subject, see the leading article of Constable's Scotch Magazine for March.

STANZA 2.

"She looks like old Cybele on Mount Ida, Rising with her tiara of proud towers." An old writer, describing the appearance of the old town of Edinburgh, has made use of the above image, which could not be poetical were it not true,-as Boileau's "creaking lyre, that whetstone of the teeth, monotony in wire," has it" Rein n'est beau que le vrai."

STANZA 2.

Mother of lawyers, writers, clerks, and

wh-es."

This line alludes to a very curious old rhyme which the author of Childe Harold and another English gentleman, the writer of this notice, heard when they were rowed to Pettycur with two singers, one of whom was a chairman, and the other a fisherman. The former placed himself at the bow, the latter at the stern of the boat. A little after leaving the pier of Leith they began to sing, and continued their exercise until we arrived off Inchkeith. They gave us, among other essays, "The Death of Sir Patrick Spence," and "Wat ye wha's in yon town," and did not sing English but Scotch verses. The chairman, however, who was the cleverer of the two, and was frequently obliged to prompt his companion, told us that he could translate the original. He added, that he could sing almost three hundred stanzas, but had not spirits (fuirntosh was the word he used) to learn any more, or to sing what he already knew, A man must have idle time

on, his hands to acquire or to repeat; 66 and, said the poor fellow," look at my breeks and at me; I am starving." This speech was more affecting than his performance, which habit alone can make attractive. The recitative was shrill, screaming, and monotonous, and the fisherman behind assisted his voice by plugging his finger into one side of his mouth, and making his cheek sound" buck" as he drew it out. The chairman used a quiet action, something like the regular jolt of a chair; but he became too much interested in his subject altogether to repress his vehemence. The verses to which my noble friend so elegantly alludes are the following: "Glasgow for bells, Linlithgow for wells,

Edinburgh for writers and wh-es."

Many, amongst the lower classes, these men informed us, are familiar with this interesting and most comprehensive stanza, which, for rapid sketching, is equal to any thing in our language.

STANZA 4.

"Provostless city."

Vates, I remember being taught at Harrow (I owe all to the benevolent birch of Dr Joseph Drury), signifies a prophet as well as a poet. It is in the former character that I speak here. Edinburgh has still her Provost and her Bailies, but how long?" All the law proceedings on this interesting question, as well as every scrap that has been spoken or written on the subject of the new buildings on the Bridge of Sighs, shall ap pear in the historical illustrations. "Brodie."

Thanks to the acumen of the Scotch, we know as little of Brodie as ever. The hypothesis which carried many along in its current, viz. that he is still alive, is run out; and we have thus another proof that we can never be sure that the paradox, the most singular, and therefore having the most agreeable and authentic air, will not give way to the established ancient prejudice.

It seems however certain, in the first place, that although Brodie was born, lived, and was hanged, we have no proof that he was buried. The Grey-friars and the Westkirk may indeed resume their pretensions, and even the exploded Calton-hill may again be heard with complacency. That deliberate duties were performed round a carcase deposited in one of these three places of interment, twelve hours after the execution, we have incontestible proofs, but who knows whether it was not the body of one who died of the plague, or of the typhus feyer? Did any one see the mark of the rope round the neck? There was indeed a false key and a forged note thrown into the grave along with it; but that may have been done out of mere malice. It does not appear that even Bailie Johnston could bring ocular proof (though he were to produce the skeleton) that this was the identi

cal Brodie.

Secondly, Brodie was very tender of his life, and very prudent in his schemes; and it is well known that he had contrived some little machinery, by which the alternate risings and fallings of the rope might be obviated, and even the first hangman of the age be deceived. Brodie's love of life was certainly not Platonic. The happiness which he longed to possess did not lie in another world, and that he looked upon any such vain expectation as either too shadowy, too much of mind, and too little of matter, for his taste, may be perhaps detected in at least six places of his own letters. In short, his love for life was neither Platonic nor poeti cal,-and if, in one passage (he understood

Italian, for he lived much with fiddlers) he speaks of "amore veementissimo ma unico ed onesta," he confesses, in a letter to a friend, that it was guilty and perverse, that it absorbed him quite, and mastered his heart.

"Thomas Muir.”

Thomas Muir retired to Fontainbleau immediately on being carried into France, after his unsuccessful attempt to escape from Botany Bay to America, and, with the excep

tion of his celebrated visit to Paris in company with Tom Paine, he appears to have passed his last years in that charming solitude. He was in a state of great pain from his wound for some months previous to his death, but was at last, one morning, found dead in his library chair, with his hand resting upon "The Rights of Man." The chair is still kept among the precious relics of Fontainbleau; and from the uninterrupted veneration that has been attached to every thing relative to this great man, from the moment of his death to the present time, it has a better chance of authenticity than even the chair on which the great Napoleon, at the same place, signed his first abdication, and which has been waggishly termed his Elba-chair.

STANZA 8.

"Oh, for one hour of him who knew no feud, Th' octogenarian chief, the kind old Sandy Wood!"

The reader will recollect the exclamation of the Highlander, “Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" Sandy Wood (one of the delightful reminiscences of old Edinburgh) was at least eighty years of age when in high repute as a medical man, he could yet divert

himself in his walks with the "hie schuil laddies," or bestow the relics of his universal benevolence in feeding a goat or a raven. There is a prophecy of Meg Merrilies, in which these ancients are thus alluded to. "A gathering together of the powerful shall be made amidst the caves of the inhabitants of Dunedin,-Sandy is at his rest: they shall beset his goat, they shall profane his raven, they shall blacken the buildings of the infirmary: her secrets shall be examined: a new goat shall bleat until they have measured out and run over fifty-four feet

nine inches and a half."-After having reigned more than thirty years at the head of his profession, he died full of years and honours, and was buried. Strangely enough must it sound, that though there are still many excellent medical practitioners in Edinburgh of the name of Wood (not to mention the rebel quack apothecary who migrated to Manchester, and called himself Dr Lignum), there is not one Sandy among them,

As these notes would run out to much too great a length for the poem to which they are appended, it is proposed to publish the remainder in two large quarto volumes, on the model of Dr Drake's Shakspeare and his times. H.

SOME REMARKS ON W'S ACCOUNT OF THE KRAKEN, COLOSSAL CUTTLEFISH, AND GREAT SEA SERPENT.

MR EDITOR,

I AM a sea-faring man, and have, in my time, seen sights, the mention of which would appear incredible to a mere landsman, but I confess that your learned correspondent W. makes me stare at his apparently well-authenticated stories of sea monsters, hitherto supposed to have only lived in the imagination of poets, or the superstitious fancy of ancient historians.

And first, If such a sea monster as the kraken do really exist,—a monster resembling a floating island, with numerous arms, equal in length and size to the masts of ships,-of such immense size, that the Norwegian fishermen, (but no other,) do constantly endeavour to find out its resting place, (which they know, it is said, by the shallowness of the water,) to catch the fishes that lie round it, as a bank,— I say, if such a monster has been playing its accustomed pranks, during unnumbered years, is it not very remarkable, that not one out of seven hundred British ships, (exclusive of foreigners,) which have crossed and recrossed every part of the North Sea, even to polar regions, perhaps four, or even six, times in one year, should have all been so extremely unfortunate, (or, I ought rather to say, forships run upon this mass, it would tunate; for, had any one of these have been fatal as a rock,) as never to have seen one of such sea monsters, This is of itself, in my opinion, a sufficient refutation of all the narratives of early voyagers,-the fictions record