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employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to water-practice; for the convenience of which he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and night from his little watch-tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality-partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot-and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and vials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance; and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy, after a sufficient application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler, or more, of the purest cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth confidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, MONOCULUS is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives of others-his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him for the price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to society as G. D.

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch-my

couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook,-he discoursed of marvellous escapes-by carelessness of nurses-by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy-by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics-by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke-by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance-by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of chanting-of songs long ago-ends of deliverance-hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a child's-for the tremor cordis in the retrossect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danser, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tendermess, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers.

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton-what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this city, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river-liquid artifice-wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling_through green Hertfordshire and cultured Enfield parks? Ye have no swans-no naiads-no river-god-or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?

Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture?—or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?

"And could such spacious virtue find a grave
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave?"

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again-no, not by daylight-without a sufficient pair of spectacles-in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in ques

tion by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fy, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!

I have nothing but water in my head o'nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful, (that is, to me,) "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow-a mournful procession-suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet hue-constrained Lazari-Pluto's half-subjectsstolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion-or is it G. D. ?-in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern god of sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharves where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death.

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet or historian-of Grecian or of Roman lore-to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected-him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter -him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet —; and, patron of the gentle Christ's boy-who should have been his patron through life-the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable Esculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.

* GRAIUM tantum vidit.

SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY.

SYDNEY'S Sonnets-I speak of the best of them-are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are, in truth, what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work, (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application,) "vain and amatorious" enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." They savour of the courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the commonwealths-man. But Milton was a courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify he could speak his mind freely to princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold.

The sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton

were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fan cies-far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for true love thinks no labour to send out thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the beloved. We must be lovers-or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum præcordia frigus, must not have so damped our faculties as to take away our recollection that we were once so-before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear author of the Schoolmistress; for passions that creep and whine in elegies and pastoral ballads. I am sure Mil

ton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum when he could thus apostrophize a singing-girl :

"Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes)
Obtigit ætherins ales ab ordinibus.
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major,
Nam tua præsentem vox sonat ipsa Deum?
Aut Deus, aut vacui certè mens tertia cœli
Per tua secretó guttura serpit agens;
Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda
Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono.

QUOD SI CUNCTA QUIDEM DEUS EST, PER CUNCTAQUE FUSUS,
IN TE UNA LOQUITUR, CETERA MUTUS HABET."

This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some candour of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the lover would have been staggered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions.

I.

"With how sad steps, oh moon, thou climb'st the skies;
How silently; and with how wan a face!

What! may it be, that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case;
I read it in thy looks; thy languisht grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, oh moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but tant of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet

Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess?

Do they call virtue there-ungratefulness !"

The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue

II.

"Come, Sleep, oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of wo,

The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;

With shield of proof shield me from out the prease*

Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw;
Oh make in me those civil wars to cease:
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so

* Press.

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