of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that "Party in a parlour, All silent, and all DAMNED!" Above all, those insufferable concertos and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and imbitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime--these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablestexecuted pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable—afterward followeth the languor and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos ; or, like the comings-on of melancholy described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches: "Most pleasant is it to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, between wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose and strongly imagine they act, or that they see done. So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years, in such contemplations and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them-winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they, being now habited to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." : Something like this " SCENE-TURNING" I have experienced at the evening parties at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov- -; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens.* When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five-andthirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension (whether it be that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself doves' wings-or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)—a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time Rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth." But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive-impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly"-still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin seated, ride those Arions, Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps-I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end; clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me-priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me-the genius of his religion hath me in her toils-a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous-he is pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she pope too--tri-coroneted like himself! I am converted, and yet a Protestant; at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus-Gog and Magog-what not?-till the coming in of the friendly supper tray dissipates the figment, and a draught * I have been there, and still would go; "Tis like a little heaven below. Dr. WATTS. of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith and restores to me the genuine unterrifying as. pects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. ALL FOOLS' DAY. THE Compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you-and you-and you, sir-nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same—you understand me--a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to day, shall meet with no wiseacre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry-we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day-and let us troll the catch of Amiens-duc ad me—duc ad me-how goes it? "Here shall he see Gross fools as he." Now would I give a trifle to know, historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little farther, if you please; it hides my bawble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you for my part, "The crazy old church clock, And the bewildered chimes." Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander gathering down Ætna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustaches. Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old freemason, and prince of plasterers at Babe. bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have a claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the levei of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled. to call your top workmen to their nunchion on the low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears? cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet! Mister Adams-'odso, I honour your coat-pray do us the favour to read us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipsop the twenty-and-second in your portmanteau there— on Female Incontinence-the same-it will come in most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day. Good Master Raymond Lully, you look wise. Pray cor rect that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late. Ha! Cokes, is it you? Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command. Master Silence, I will use few words with you. Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. You six will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. I know it, I know it. Ha! honest R, my fine old librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not overnew, threadbare as thy stories: what dost thou Hitting about the world at this rate? Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bedrid, have ceased to read long ago. Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two. Good Granville S- thy last pa tron, is flown. "King Pandion he is dead, Nevertheless, noble R come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsterswhen I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile-as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidious preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritorious-equal damsels. To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools' Banquet beyond its appropriate day-for I fear the second of April is not many hours distant-in sober verity I will confess truth to thee, reader. I love a fool-as naturally as if I were a kith and kin to him. When a child, with childlike apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those parables-not guessing at their involved wisdom -I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that uilt his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more :autious neighbour; I grudged at the hard censure pronounced apon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and-prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors-I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. I have never made an acquaintance since that lasted, or a friendship that answered, with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a drachm of folly in his mixure, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is observed, "that the foolisher the fowl or fish-woodcocks, dotterels, codsheads, &c., the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some |