the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause: simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader- (a busy man perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.

set up my tabernacle here. I am content to evils, like humours, run into that capital stand still at the age to which I am arrived; plague-sore. I have heard some profess an I, and my friends: to be no younger, no indifference to life. Such hail the end of richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be their existence as a port of refuge; and speak weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, of the grave as of some soft arms, in which as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, wooed death but out upon thee, I say, puzzles and discomposes me. My house- thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, hold-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to not rooted up without blood. They do not six score thousand devils, as in no instance willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as of being staggers me. an universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive!

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself - do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, the recognisable face-the "sweet assurance of a look?"

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying to give it its mildest name - does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, - that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles: -I am none of her minions- I hold with the Persian.

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Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows? —or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?"-why, to comfort me, must Alice W- -n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "Such as he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the mean time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years' days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine-and while that turncoat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton.

THE NEW YEAR.

HARK, the cock crows, and yon bright star
Tells us, the day himself's not far;
And see where, breaking from the night,
He gilds the western hills with light.
With him old Janus doth appear,
Peeping into the future year,
With such a look as seems to say,
The prospect is not good that way.
Thus do we rise ill sights to see,
And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy;
When the prophetic fear of things
A more tormenting mischief brings,
More full of soul-tormenting gall
Than direst mischiefs can befall.

But stay! but stay! methinks my sight,
Better inform'd by clearer light,
Discerns sereneness in that brow,
That all contracted seem'd but now.
His revers'd face may show distaste,
And frown upon the ills are past;

But that which this way looks is clear,
And smiles upon the New-born Year.
He looks too from a place so high,

The year lies open to his eye;
And all the moments open are

To the exact discoverer.

Yet more and more he smiles upon
The happy revolution.

Why should we then suspect or fear
The influences of a year,

So smiles upon us the first morn,
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Plague on 't! the last was ill enough,
This cannot but make better proof;
Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through
The last, why so we may this too;
And then the next in reason should
Be superexcellently good:

For the worst ills (we daily see)
Have no more perpetuity

Than the best fortunes that do fall;
Which also bring us wherewithal
Longer their being to support,
Than those do of the other sort:

And who has oue good year in three,

And yet repines at destiny,
Appears ungrateful in the case,
And merits not the good he has

Then let us welcome the New Guest

With lusty brimmers of the best:
Mirth always should Good Fortune meet,

And renders e'en Disaster sweet:
And though the princess turn her back,
Let us but line ourselves with sack,
We better shall by far hold out,
Till the next Year she face about.

How say you, reader- do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected? Passed like a cloud-absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries - And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them to you all, my masters!

MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST.

passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) “like a dancer." She sate bold upright; and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind side-their superstitions; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that hearts was her favourite suit.

"A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the | took, and gave, no concessions. She hated rigour of the game." This was the celebrated favours. She never made a revoke, nor ever. wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them.

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul, and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thoroughpaced partner, a determined enemy. She

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I never in my life and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it- saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards; and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand; and who, in his excess of

candour, declared, that he thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do,- and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards over a book.

Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author.

darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath; - but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations.

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbagenothing superfluous. No flushes — that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up :- that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things. - Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have an uniformity of array to distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be marshalled · never to take the field? - She even wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably, allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps?-Why two colours, when the mark of the suits would have sufficiently distinguished them without it?—

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners a thing which the constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille-absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces;-the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone; above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans "But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably Prendre Vole,-to the triumph of which there refreshed with the variety. Man is not a is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, creature of pure reason — - he must have his in the contingencies of whist;-all these, she senses delightfully appealed to. We see it would say, make quadrille a game of captiva- in Roman Catholic countries, where the tion to the young and enthusiastic. But music and the paintings draw in many to whist was the solider game: that was her worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsenword. It was a long meal; not, like qua- sualising would have kept out.-You yourself drille, a feast of snatches. One or two have a pretty collection of paintings-but rubbers might co-extend in duration with an confess to me, whether, walking in your evening. They gave time to form rooted gallery at Sandham, among those clear friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the She despised the chance-started, capricious, ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. with an elegant delight, at all comparable The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, to that you have it in your power to exreminded her of the petty ephemeral em- perience most evenings over a well-arranged broilments of the little Italian states, depicted assortment of the court-cards?—the pretty by Machiavel: perpetually changing postures antic habits, like heralds in a procession-the and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared gay triumph-assuring scarlets-the contrast

ing deadly-killing sables-the 'hoary majesty | repique-the capot-they savoured (she of spades'- Pam in all his glory!— thought) of affectation. But games for two, "All these might be dispensed with; and or even three, she never greatly cared for. with their naked names upon the drab paste- She loved the quadrate, or square. She board, the game might go on very well, would argue thus:- Cards are warfare: the pictureless. But the beauty of cards would ends are gain, with glory. But cards are be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all war, in disguise of a sport: when single that is imaginative in them, they must adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a too palpable. By themselves, it is too close dull deal board, or drum head, to spread a fight: with spectators, it is not much them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet bettered. No looker-on can be interested, (next to nature's), fittest arena for those except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair courtly combatants to play their gallant of money; he cares not for your luck sympajousts and turneys in!- Exchange those thetically, or for your play.-Three are still delicately-turned ivory markers-(work of worse; a mere naked war of every man Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, against every man, as in cribbage, without -or as profanely slighting their true appli- league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and cation as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman contradictory interests, a succession of heartthat turned out those little shrines for the less leagues, and not much more hearty goddess)-exchange them for little bits of infractions of them, as in tradrille.—But in leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and square games (she meant whist), all that is a slate!"possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, common to every species

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence: -this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death.

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,-disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "Go" or "That's a go." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-dollar stake) because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring "two for his heels." There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born.

though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold—or even an interested-bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime.

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. Piquet she held the best game at the cards Chance, she would argue—and here again, for two persons, though she would ridicule admire the subtlety of her conclusion;— the pedantry of the terms-such as pique-chance is nothing, but where something else