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procured him from many the title of the modern Æsop. One evening he was rattling and sparkling away, with the least crooked leg of the two thrown over the other (a piece of pardonable policy), when the conversation happened to turn upon dancing. A wag in the company, who knew his good humor, asked him "if he was fond of the amusement?" "Yes," he replied, "and mean to subscribe to the winter-balls." "What! with that leg?"-" Ay, with this leg; and, notwithstanding your sneering, I'll bet you a rump and dozen, there's a worse leg in the room."-" Done, done!" cried a dozen voices. Amyas shook the hands of each. "Now," said his antagonist, with a smile of confidence, "come forward, gentlemen, and let Mr. Griffiths point out such another limb as that." "Here it is," he replied; and throwing off his left leg, raised his right in the air, immeasurably more hideous than the other. A general laugh was the result, and the society decided he had fairly

won his

wager.

THE TWO

(6 WAT TYLERS." Mr. Tyler had a brother Watkins, who commanded in a corps of volunteers, and was invariably present in our boxes. This gave rise to a droll coincidence Cherry was playing Lingo in the "Agreeable Surprise one evening; and when he came to the question to Cowslip-" You never heard of the great heroes of antiquity, Homer, Heliogabalus, Moses, and Wat Tyler?" the audience laughed loudly, and turned their eyes upon Captain Wat Tyler in the boxes. Cherry was known to be in the habit of introducing jokes of his own; and the gallant officer concluding this to be such a one, left his seat when the act was over and went behind the scenes, where he desired Dick Row, our prompter, to let him look at the book. He was greatly agitated, and Row in an instant surmised the cause. "Sir," said he, as the captain turned over the leaves hurriedly, his face

burning, and throat choking with indignation, "Mr. Cherry spoke the author."-" Indeed, sir!" replied the son of Mars; "I'm afraid not, sir-I'm afraid not; and by St. Patrick and the seven holy stars! if he dared to—I—eh—” At this moment he had found the right place, and the words met his eye: his features instantly relaxed into a comical smile, and, looking at Row, he exclaimed, "By the powers! there's two of us, sure enough! Mr. Cherry, sir, was correct, and I beg you ten thousand pardins for this intrusion:" saying which he returned the book, made an elegant bow, and retreated.

GENIUS ON THE WING.

Galway, when representing the Player King (in Hamlet), stepped forward to repeat the lines

"For us, and for our trage-dy,

Here stooping to your clemen-cy,
We beg your hearing patient-ly."

Here he should have rested with Spakspeare; but genius was on the wing, and he could not bring the eagle-bird to earth; therefore he continued

"And if on this we may rely,

Why, we'll be with you by and by."

At which Whitely, who lay on the ground, as Hamlet, snarled out, loud enough to be heard by all the audience

"And if on pay-day you rely,
Take care I stop no sala-ry."

Thus justifying the rhyme by a very serious reason.

WEEKS AND HIS "WOE."

An old gentleman in the company by the name of Weeks, who played the Friar in Romeo and Juliet (and whose body seemed to resemble a Norwegian deal, never fit for use till it had had a good soaking), on arriving at the concluding speech, which, as it contained a moral, was never omitted in the country,

"From such sad feuds what dire misfortunes flow,"

espied a carpenter behind the scenes, the tankard, and Weeks slowly artivery cautiously, but decidedly, ap- culatedproaching a tankard of ale, with which he had been solacing himself

"Whate'er the cause

"the sure effect is

during the evening, in order, as he (Here the fellow raised his hand) used to say, "to get mellow in the character." The tankard was placed in a convenient niche, with a good draught at its bottom; and whenever he was on, his eye would glance off, to watch over its safety. Being a little tipsied, he was somewhat stupefied at the treachery of the varlet; and fixing his eyes, cata-mountain like, on him, momentarily forgot his audience in himself, who interpreting this as a piece of deep acting, began to applaud. The carpenter was now within a step of

The knight of the hammer had clenched the pewter-Weeks at the same instant staggered off, wrenching the jeopardised liquid from his grasp, the friar tucked it under his arm, and popping his head on at the wing, with a significant nod, shouted the last word, "woe!" at which the curtain fell, amidst a roar of laughter -a termination very rarely contem plated to the "Tragedy of Tragedies."

THE HOW" AND THE "WHY."

I AM any man's suitor,

If any will be my tutor :
Some say this life is pleasant,
Some think it speedeth fast.
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future-

In eternity no past.

We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die,
Who will riddle me the how and the why?
The bulrush nods unto its brother,

The wheat-ears whisper to each other:

What is it they say? What do they there?

Why two and two make four? Why round is not square ?

Why the rock stands still, and the light clouds fly?

Why the heavy oak groans, and the white willows sigh?

Why deep is not high, and high is not deep?

Whether we wake, or whether we sleep?

Whether we sleep, or whether we die?
How you are you?

Who will riddle me the how and the why?

The world is somewhat, it goes on somehow;
But what is the meaning of then and now ?

I feel there is something; but how and what?
I know there is somewhat, but what and why?
I cannot tell if that somewhat be 1.

The little bird pipeth "Why, why!"
In the summer-woods when the sun falls low;
And the great bird sits on the opposite bough,
And stares in his face and shouts "How, how!"
And the black owl scuds down the mellow twilight,
And chants "How, how!" the whole of the night.

Why the life goes when the blood is spilt?
What the life is? Where the soul may lie?
Why a church is with a steeple built,
And a house with a chimney-pot?

Who will riddle me the how and the what?

Who will riddle me the what and the why?

SINGULAR SMITH.

MR. JOHN SMITH is now a bachelor, on the young side of forty. He is in the prime of that happy period, ere the freedom of single blessedness has deteriorated into formality, that "last infirmity of noble" bachelors. Caps have been, and are now, set at him; but he is too shy a bird to be caught in nets of muslin, or imprisoned by the fragile meshes of Mechlin lace. Widows wonder that he does not marry; wives think he should; and several disinterested maiden ladies advise him to think seriously of something of that sort; and he, always open to conviction, promises that he will do something of that kind. In fact, he has gone so far as to confess that it is melancholy, when he sneezes in the night, to have no one, night-capped and nigh, to say "God bless you !" If the roguish leer of his eye, in these moments of compunction, means anything, I am rather more than half inclined to doubt his sincerity. One argument which he urges against committing matrimony is certainly undeniable-that there are Smiths enough in the world, without his aiding and abetting their increase and multiplication: he says he shall wait till the words of Samuel, "Now there was no Smith found throughout all Israel," are almost applicable throughout all England and then he may, perhaps, marry. 66 Smiths," as he says, are as plentiful as blackberries. Throw a cat out of every other window, from one end to the other of this metropolis, and it would fall on the head of one Smith. Rush suddenly round a corner, and knock down the first man you meet, he is a Smith; he prostrates a second, the second a third, the third a fourth ..... the ninth a tenth-they are all and severally Smiths."

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I am indeed afraid that he is irrecoverably a bachelor, for several reasons which I shall mention. He is, at this time, "a little, round,

oily man," five feet and a half in his shoes; much given to poetry, pedestrianism, whim, whistling, cigars, and sonnets; "amorous," as the poets say, of umbrageousness in the country, and umbrellas in the town ; rather bald, and addicted to Burton ale; and a lover of silence and afternoon siestas-indeed, he is much given to sleep, which, as he says, is but a return in kind; for sleep was given to man to refresh his body and keep his spirits in peace; indulgences these which have anything but a marrying look so that no unwilling Daphne has lost a willing Damon in my duodecimo friend. It is too manifest that he prefers liberty, and lodgings for a single gentleman, to the Hail, wedded love!" of the poet of Paradise-a sort of clergyman "triumphale" to which his ear is most unorthodoxically deaf when time is called. He has even gone so far as to compare good and bad marriages with two very remarkable results in chemical experiment, by which, in one instance, charcoal is converted into diamond, and in the other, diamond is deflagrated into charcoal. The fortunate Benedict marries charcoal, which, after a patient process, proves a diamond; the unfortunate husband weds a diamond, which, tried in the fire of adversity, turns out charcoal. Yet he is not unalive to those soft impressions which betoken a sensitive nature. He has been twice in love; thrice to the dome of St. Paul's with the three sisters Simpson, and once to Richmond by water with a Miss Robinson, in May, that auspicious month, dedicated to love and lettuces. These are perhaps the only incidents in his uncheckered life which approach the romantic and the sentimental; yet he has passed through the ordeal unsinged at heart, and is still a bachelor. He was, at one time, passionately partial to music and mut

ton-chops, muffins and melancholy, predilections much cultivated by an inherent good taste, and an ardent love of the agreeable; yet he has taken to himself no one to do his mutton and music, no one to soften his melancholy and spread his muffins. It is unaccountable; the ladies say so, and I agree with them. I have mentioned "the things he is inclined to;" I must now specify" those he has no mind to." His antipathies are tight boots and bad ale-two of the evils of life (which is at best but of a mingled yarn) for which he has an aversion almost amounting to the impatient. His dislike to a scold is likewise most remarkable, perhaps peculiar to himself; for I do not remember to have noticed the antipathy in any one beside. A relation is, to be sure, linked to a worthy descendant of Xantippe; and this perhaps is the key to his objections to the padlock of matrimony.

It is the bounden duty of a biographer (and I consider this paper to be biographical) to give in as few words as possible, the likeness of his hero. Two or three traits are as good as two or three thousand, where volume-making is not the prime consideration. He is eccentric, but without a shadow of turning. He is sensitive to excess; for though no one ever has horsewhipped him, I have no doubt if either A or B should, he would wince amazingly under the infliction, and be very much hurt in his feelings. Indeed, he does not merit any such notice from any one; for he has none of that provoking irascibility generally attendant on genius (for he is a genius, as I have shown, and shall presently show.) He was never known to have been engaged in more than one literary altercation; then he endeavored, but in vain, to convince his grocer, who had beaten his boy to the blueness of stone-blue for spelling sugar without an h, that he was assuredly not borne out in his orthography by Johnson and Walker.

To sum up the more prominent points of his character in few words. As he is a great respecter of himself, so he is a great respecter of all persons in authority: his bow to a beadle on Sundays is indeed a lesson in humility. Being a sincere lover of his country, he is also a sincere lover of himself: he prefers roast-beef and plum-pudding to any of your foreign kickshaws; and drinks the Colonnade champagne when he can, to encourage the growth of English gooseberries smokes largely, to contribute his modicum to the home-consumption; pays all government demands with a cheerfulness unusual and altogether perplexing to tax-gatherers; and subscribes to a poor hospital (two guineas annually-nothing more.) In short, if he has not every virtue under heaven, it is no fault of Mr. Smith. The virtues, he has been heard to say, are such high-priced luxuries, that a man of moderate income cannot afford to indulge much in them.

These are Mr. John Smith's good qualities: if he has failings, they "lean to virtue's side," but do not much affect his equilibrium : he is a perpendicular man in general, and not tall enough in his own conceit to stoop when he passes under Temple Bar. If he is singular, he lays it to the accident of his birth: he was the seventh Smith of a seventh Smith. This fortuitous catenation in the links of the long chain of circumstance, which has before now bestowed on a fool the reputation of "a wise man," only rendered him, as he is free to confess, an odd man. His pursuits have indeed of late been numerous beyond mention, and being taken up in whimsies, ended in oddities. As I have said, he wrote verses, and they were thought by some people to be very odd and unaccountable. He lost a Miss who was dear to him, in trinket expenses more especially, through a point of poetical etiquette certainly very unpardonable. In some and

addressed to that amiable spinster and deep-dyed bas bleu, he had occasion to use the words one and two, and either from the ardor of haste, or the inconsiderateness of love, or perhaps from the narrowness of his note-paper, he penned the passage thus:

"Nature has made us 2, but Love shall make us 1;

1 mind, 1 soul, 1 heart," &c. This reminded the learned lady too irresistibly of a catalogue of sale1 warming-pan, 2 stoves, 1 stewpan, 1 smoke-jack, &c. and she dismissed him in high dudgeon.

MR. SHELLEY.

THIS unfortunate gentleman was undoubtedly a man of genius-full of ideal beauty and enthusiasm. And yet there was some defect in his understanding, by which he subjected himself to the accusation of atheism. In his dispositions he is represented to have been ever calm and amiable; and but for his metaphysical errors and reveries, and a singular incapability of conceiving the existing state of things as it practically affects the nature and condition of man, to have possessed many of the gentlest qualities of humanity. He highly admired the endowments of Lord Byron, and in return was esteemed by his Lordship; but even had there been neither sympathy nor friendship between them, his premature fate could not but have saddened Byron with no common sorrow.

Mr. Shelley was some years younger than his noble friend; he was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring, Sussex. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Eton, where he rarely mixed in the common amusements of the other boys; but was of a shy, reserved disposition, fond of solitude, and made few friends. He was not distinguished for his proficiency in the regular studies of the school; on the contrary, he neglected them for German and Chemistry. His abilities were superior, but deteriorated by eccentricity. At the age of sixteen he was sent to the University of Oxford, where he soon distinguished himself by publishing a pamphlet, under the absurd and world-defying title of

The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled the University.

This event proved fatal to his prospects in life; and the treatment he received from his family was too harsh to win him from error. His father, however, in a short time relented, and he was received home; but he took so little trouble to conciliate the esteem of his friends, that he found the house uncomfortable, and left it. He then went to London, where he eloped with a young lady to Gretna Green. Their united ages amounted to thirty-two; and the match being deemed unsuitable to his rank and prospects, it so exasperated his father, that he broke off all communication with him.

After their marriage the young couple resided some time in Edinburgh. They then passed over to Ireland, which, being in a state of disturbance, Shelly took a part in politics, more reasonable than might have been expected. He inculcated moderation

About this time he became devoted to the cultivation of his poetical talents; but his works were sullied with the erroneous inductions of an understanding which, inasmuch as he regarded all the existing world in the wrong, must be considered as having been either shattered or defective.

His rash marriage proved, of course, an unhappy one. After the birth of two children, a separation, by mutual consent, took place, and Mrs. Shelley committed suicide.

He then married a daughter of Mr. Godwin, the author of Caleb

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