kept so religiously while the large knife goes its round; and the glistening eyes which feed beforehand upon the huge slices, dark with citron and plums, and heavy as gold. And then, when the "characters" are drawn, is it nothing to watch the peeping delight which escapes from their little eyes? One is proud, as king; another stately, as queen; then there are two whispering grotesque secrets which they cannot contain, (these are Sir Gregory Goose and Sir Tunbelly Clumsy.) The boys laugh out at their own misfortunes, but the little girls, (almost ashamed of their prizes,) sit blushing and silent. It is not until the lady of the house goes round, that some of the more extravagant fictions are revealed. And then, what a roar of mirth! Ha, ha! The ceiling shakes, and the air is torn. They bound from their seats, like kids, and insist on seeing Miss Thompson's card. Ah! what merry spite is proclaimed, what ostentatious pity! The little girl is almost in tears; but the large lump of allotted cake is placed seasonably in her hands, and the glass of sweet wine, "all round," drowns the shrill urchin laughter, and a gentler delight prevails.

-I am not one of those who love to breed up children seriously, or to make them moral rather than happy. Let them be happy, (innocently,) and the other will follow of course. A good example is a good thing. Give them that, and spare your precept.-Oh! I like to see the pleasures of children. They enjoy to-day, and care not for to-morrow. Their path is strewed with roses; the heaven is blue above them, and life is a gay race which all feel sure to win. Some indeed there are, outcasts of fortune, who have to make their way over the rough stones and barren places, beggars from their birth. It pains me to see those many little faces, frost-nipped, which are pressed, (with flattened noses,) against pastry cooks' windows,

Lazarites at the rich men's tables. I do not enjoy their famished looks and roving eyes, and watering mouths half opened. Oh! no: I pity those poor denizens of the streets, inheritors of the cold air. They have no privilege, but to askand be refused: no enjoyment, save hungry idleness: no property. Or rather they are "tenants in common" with the bird of passage, and the houseless dog; they have the fierce sun or the inclement sky; nothing further. Their "liberty" is without even its "crust."

Once-(let me have leave to tell this: it is my only tolerable action,) I made a happy heart on a day of feasting. This was on a Christmas Day, many years ago. I was walking briskly to my coffee-house dinner. Every body looked full of gaiety; and I myself trod like Diomed. There was scarcely a beggar in the streets. Yet was there one, a pale slight little woman who lingered about the opening doors in Greek-street. She might have been the widow of a country clergy

man.

Her face was thin and hunger-pinched. Her eyes were dull; and there was the shining

mark of a tear, (like a cicatrice,) which traversed one of her cheeks from top to bottom. She crept slowly along the pavement, and now and then she sighed; but she did not beg. She must have been very cold; for her tattered black weeds were not enough with all her care, and shifting them from shoulder to shoulder, to fence off the nipping wind. I turned my head aside as I passed, (a week's begging would have done me good then,) lest I should be beguiled into giving. She did not even look at me; but kept her eyes on the ground as though she were searching for the raw vegetables which servants cast into the street. I walked on twenty-fifty-a hundred yards. I was uncomfortable-I looked back, and there was the pale widow-beggar still dragging her weak steps along. She met nothing but the blast which made her tatters shake. She staggered -I thought she must have fallen. There was no standing this: so I went back and gave hersomething; no matter what, not much, nor too little; enough to satisfy both her and myself.— Some years have passed by since this happened; but I have often seen her in my fancy since. There she is sad, drooping, shivering, her thin arms exposed to the frosty wind. I hear again her quick cry, (it brought tears into my eyes,) and that frightful burst and chuckle, scarcely speech, which filled her throat when she saw my gift. She trembled as though she had been palsy-struck, and looked. All this I saw and heard in a moment, for in a moment I was gone. I could never meet her again.

O gay and gaudy time! and shall I ever grow too old for thee? Shall I ever hate thy mirth, and wish thee gone, thou bright land-mark of the year? Oh! thou art not like other feasts ending with the day; but thy merriment reacheth through the wakeful night. Thy mistress is the moon, and thou thyself art gaily mad, wisely unreasonable, lunatic. Other feasts are good, but thou art royal! They have their chairmen, their jesters, their jacks in the green; but thou treadest on crowned heads; the phantasms of Momus are thy fellows: Wit whispereth in thine ear; Care boweth down before thee; and if Ill-humour for a moment come, he is quickly put to flight, and Sorrow is drowned in wine.

But of all the feasts and gay doings which I have known, none were like that one "Twelfth Night" which I passed at L- -'s house some five or six years ago. That was a night! O Jupiter! O Bacchus! There was too much mirth. The muscles were stretched and strained by laughing. Our host was a right merry man,-a man of humour, of good nature, of high animal spirits, fantastic. He could make "the table" ring and roar beyond any one I ever knew. His jokes would not bear a strict glance, sometimes; but they were better than wit, which is too serious. Wit

gets one thinking, but L- did not do this. He laughed; he talked; he told comical stories; he mimicked friend and foe, (good naturedly ;) he spoke burlesque in verse; he misplaced epithets; he reconciled contradictions; he tacked extremities to each other-the grave and the gay-sense and nonsense. He had drawn "the king," and was as absolute as a Fate. He ordered things impossible. He insisted that black was white, and he insisted that others should think so too. Oh! there was no withstanding him, he was so pleasant a potentate:-he said something-nothing -and looked round for the boisterous homage of his neighbours, and received it smiling and content.

That night we had songs, English and Italian; we had mistletoe, (there were ladies under it)— we had coffee, and wines, and Twelfth Night characters. We had a supper, where joke and hospitality reigned. And there were cold meats and salads, and pies, and jellies, and wines of all colours, mocking with their lustre the topaz and the ruby; and there were pyramids of fruit, and mountains of rich cake, all decked with sprigs of holly and laurel. And we had a huge "wassail bowl:"-One? We had a dozen, brimming and steaming, and scented with cloves and cinnamon. We ate, and we drank, and we shouted. One sang, and another spoke, (like a parliament orator,) and one gave an extravagant toast; and a fourth laughed out at nothing, and one cried, from very pain, that he could "laugh no more;" and instantly a fresh joke was started, and the sufferer screamed with delight, and almost rolled from his chair. The cup of mirth was brimming. It went round and round again, and every one had his fill. This was no meagre shadowy banquet, no Barmecide feast,―no card party, coldly decorous, (where you lose your money and pay for the candles.) It was a revel and a jollity. Though our mirth was becoming, it raged and was loud like thunder. It lasted from nine o'clock at night, till early breakfast, (eight o'clock,) in the morning, and it still lives in my recollection, as the brightest day, (or night,) of the calendar.

THE OLD MARGATE HOY.

I AM fond of passing my vacations, (I believe I have said so before,) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me once in three or four seasons to a watering place Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing

dreary penance at-Hastings !-and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at-Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in company.

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations-ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam packet? To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke—a great sea-chimæra, chimneying and furnacing the deep; or liker to that sea-god parching up Scamander.

Can I forget thy honest, and slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses, (yet to the suppression of any thing like contempt,) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement. 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land !-whose sailor trowsers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore-a master cook of Eastcheap? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations--not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o'er-washing billows drove us below deck, (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing weather,) how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of thy else, (truth to say,) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little cabin !

With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as from Thames to the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assu

rance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating half story-tellers, (a most painful description of mortals,) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time-the nibbling pickpockets of your patience-but one who committed downright, day-light depredations upon his neighbour's faith. He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty thorough-paced liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unfledged Londoners, (let our enemies give it a worse name,) as Thames or Tooley-street at that time of day could have supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's company, as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself, the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with every thing unfamiliar about us, and the time and place dis. posed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been aid-de-camp, (among other rare accidents and fortunes,) to a Persian prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the king of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the prince's daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting Persia; but with the rapidity of a magician he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a princess-Elizabeth, if I remember, having entrusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion-but as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave it to the royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the "ignorant present." But when, (still hardying more and more

in his triumphs over our simplicity,) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as "the Colossus in question had been destroyed long since:" to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much, that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency than ever,--confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of our own company, (having been the voyage before,) im. mediately recognising, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman.

All this time sate upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile; and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whis

pered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when some of us pulled out our private stores-our cold meat and our salads-he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, "he had no friends."

These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before,--have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintery hours to chew upon.

Will it be thought a digression, (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons,) if I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt, (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion,) at the sight of

the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given-referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them-scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression; enlarging themselves, (if I may say so,) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment.-Is it not, that in the latter we had expected to behold, (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably,) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST of the EARTH!-I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen, (as I then was,) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to it for the first time-all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life,—all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry; crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation.--He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner

For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;

of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Bermoothes ;" of great whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths; of fishes, and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth-

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral; of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots.

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen, (in tame weather too most likely,) from our unromantic coasts--a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him--what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him,

nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement?-Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir,

Is this the mighty ocean!-is this all?

I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the waterbrooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this islandprison. I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something-with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Mescheck; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue,-an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beech, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen-townsfolk or brethren perchance-whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses, (their only solace,) who under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare, in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to say they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want here? If they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why

pitch their civilized tents into the desert? What mean these scanty book-rooms-marine libraries, as they entitle them-if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretension. They come, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers; but I have watched the better sort of them-now and then, an honest citizen, (of the old stamp,) in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up cockleshells, and thinking them great things; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens; they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and then -O then!--if I could interpret for the pretty creatures, (I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves,) how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows!

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see-London. I must imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it not excite among

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard

street.

I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis,

A VISION OF HORNS.

My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in all times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honourable badge, of married men. Moses' horn, the horn of Ammon, of Amalthea, and a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity. Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in this fashion.

Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the Cornhill, (as it might be termed,) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each other, as they may do in our streets, with care, (the care of making a penny,) written upon their foreheads; and something else, which is rather imagined, than distinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own friends and fellowtownsmen.

In my first surprise I supposed myself gotten into some forest-Arden, to be sure, or Sherwood; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me, (especially as there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them,) whether it might not be the children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found myself strangely, (as it will happen in dreams,) at one and the same time in an unknown country, with known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces, but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. ****'s Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off-you know Dick's way to a customer-and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly; but, instead of apology, he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say "it is the custom of the country," and passed on.

I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always admired as a pattern of a wife, and do indeed take Dick and her to be a model of conjugal agreement and harmony,when I felt an ugly smart in my neck, as if something had gored it behind, and turning round, it was my old friend and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant, had thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power of offending.

Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged to walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London streets; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of umbrellas poking in one's face.

I soon found that these towns-folk were the civilest, best-mannered people in the world, and that if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to their blindness. They do not know what dangerous weapons they protrude in front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their neighbours' fore heads, if they are as small as motes, but their own beams they can in nowise discern.

There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered-he has simply, (I speak of him at home in his own shop,) the smoothest forehead in