انشاه "Nor have I comrades near, nor do I In dances with the youths, but evermore, The heavy murmur of the windy sea." Poor Hero! What a hopeless, despairing existence these four simple lines portray! The rough winds her only visitants; the waters lapping on the stones the only familiar sounds that break upon her ear. We can fancy we can see her gazing vacantly on the lowering sky, or, it may be, sending her wandering thoughts along the Mysian plains toward the peaked tops of Gargarus, and musing on the clanging fights that had raged around it, and "the tale of Troy divine." We can see her turning sadly to her loom again, to add one more shade to the starting muscles of Enceladus, or one more bickering thunderbolt to the armed hand of Olympian Jupiter. Perhaps she is counting the hours to the next festival of Venus, the only epoch in her dreary existence; or, perhaps, shuddering at the thought of a visit from her cold, stern father, who frets away his short half-hour in chidings, or in peevish complaints of the rough Argestes, and then wraps round him his magisterial robes and leaves the poor maiden to solitude and tears. Who can wonder that Leander was to her a realisation of the brightest vision that ever scaled her sea-worn prison? And now the great festival of Venus is at hand. From every city and island, from Cythera, from Cyprus, from the plains of Hæmonia, and from the heights of Libanus, come troops of youths and maidens to pay their vows to Cytherea. And who was the brightest star among them? Musæus shall describe her in his own sunny language: Hero was pacing through the temple courts, Darting a sparkling radiance from her brow, Like to the rising, silver-cheeked moon: rose Twain colour'd bursts its cup: well might you say A plain of roses Hero's limbs appear'd. Roses did seem to shine beneath the feet Of the white-kirtled maid, and from her breast Graces did stream."-Verses 55-63. Well might such beauty as this elicit from the young pilgrims of Greece invocations as earnest and wishes as ardent as Museus has put into the mouth of some love-lorn youth among the crowd of worshippers! Still fair Hero paced onward, as yet "in maiden meditation fancy free." But among that bright-eyed, long-haired band there was one who was stricken to the inmost heart; it was a case of love at first sight with a vengeance, for our poor Leander is suddenly in a most alarming state. We have quoted the lines descriptive of his first seizure, and refer our reader back again to the conflicting clements that raged within the poor youth of Abydos. Marlow, in his first sestyad, reasons most quaintly upon Leander's sudden overset, and concludes with a very laudable query: "It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is overruled by fate; When two are stripped long ere the race begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win. And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect; Bravo, Kit! You would have not been the last at Sestos if you had lived in the old days of Greece! But what course does our lovesmitten Leander take? Does he gaze away his soul, and so wend his way back to dreary Abydos? Not a bit of it; he thinks it no use to waste his time in idle-minded oglings, and so, like a bold man as he was, he storms the fortress, and, trusting to a pair of very wicked eyes, he walks right up to the young priestess. And what does Hero do? Is not the audacious Abydenian repelled with a frown, as stern as that of cloud-collecting Jupiter? Alas, no! We are bound to take the word of Musæus,— "And she, when she beheld his artful In silence veil her lovely countenance, This was, at any rate, a bad beginning, for Leander does not appear to have been in any way at a loss how to interpret the motions of the young maiden : : "He glow'd within Because she understood and would not spurn Ilis passion."-Verses 107-108. This skirmishing of eyes still goes on till "shady Hesper" rises, and the "azure-skirted mists" are veiling the temple gardens in a genial obscurity. Leander seizes the opportunity, and makes his proposal with a degree of winning grace and modest assurance that would have shamed the most practised carpetknight in Europe. And now, gentle reader, for a veritable proposal in the old Ionian style : "Gently he press'd her rosy-finger'd hand, Heaving a long-diawn sigh. She si- As if indignant, snatch'd it back again; Leading her toward the temple's last recess. chattering gynæconitis at Sestos. So she rallies, and has recourse to threats, though they were, after all, as our knowing grammarian remarks, only "such threats as women love to use":- Stranger! thou'rt mad! How dar'st thou, hapless man, Drag off a maiden thus? Nay, drop my And seek some other path, or justly dread How admirably this conveys all "He kiss'd the maiden's soft and fra grant neck, And thus address'd her."--Verse 133. Forthwith comes a torrent of vows, and prayers, and pleas of justification. Was a priestess to know better than the goddess whom she served ? Arcadian Atalanta fled from Milanion, and how Aphrodite punished her! How impious it would be to anger the goddess in her own precincts! Alas! Hero, it is now nearly all over with you! "She fix'd her eyes in silence on the ground, Hiding her shame-flush'd cheek; and She scraped the surface of the ground, Verses 160-163. one another, till at last Hero, How exquisitely is all this told, and how artfully does Leander commence his siege! The sigh is intended to express all the suffering his mischievous eyes could not; and then when poor Hero is just ready to capitulate, he does not shock her, as an underbred Cockney would, by an offer of his arm, but leads her by And so they stood silently gazing at her light, floating peplum, as if, forsooth, he dare not again touch that same rosy hand he so audaciously seized at the outset of the parley. And all this time we have been leaving the fair Sestian to herself. She slowly follows, perhaps thinking of her sea-beaten tower and gloomy father, and all her dreary maidenhood. Still, must she fall such an easy victim to Abydenian impudence? Is she, like an over-mellow apple, to drop unsolicited—she, a priestess of dangers, and impossibilities; but Amathusian Venus? That must never be whispered of her in any "Dropping the dew of blushes from her brow."-Verse 173, commences her second harangue, but with as little success as her first. Here she takes a different tack; she feels now that it is all over with her; all that is left is her honest pride; she is a maiden of high degree, and will not be won like any light-o'love, so she talks of her parents, of melancholy life, she has not a word then her thoughts soon revert to her polo. Est aliud lumen multo mihi certius istis, Non erit in tenebris, quo duce, noster amor." Euge poeta! And so turning back to Musæus, we read Leander's last touch of flattery. Hero has asked him his name; he gives it, with no trumpery title attached; he is no Proxenus of this place, or Harmost of that, he is Leander, "the husband of the garlanded Hero." And so at last they finally agree upon future meetings. She is to hold the torch, he to breast the waves. They part, she to her tower, while Leander (as Jean Paul has it) is "left alone with the night." However Leander is a fine, practical, business-like fellow; he examines his ground, takes landmarks, and so sails back to Abydos. The wished-for time of meeting * Line 258. draws near; Leander goes down to the beach, and for one short moment, as he gazes into the blackness of the night and hears the cold, plunging waters, he trembles, the flesh yields for a second, but the spirit burns as bright as the torch that is now streaming across the Hellespont. How different is the Leander of Musæus from the Leander of Ovid! ling, who trembles at every gale :— The latter hero is but a poor weak "Ter mihi deposita est in siccâ vestis arenâ. Ter grave tentavi carpere nudus iter." And so he tosses himself into the cold flood and the dead night; "Himself the rower, passenger, and bark.' While he is thus beating aside the waters, let us for a moment look at Hero. There she stands on her airy tower, like the evening star, shading her torch from the rude wind with her outspread mantle,* until at length her bold lover touches the shores of Sestos. This is, perhaps, the only place where Ovid excels Museus; he represents Hero as running to the beach to meet him. The old crone tries to keep her young charge back, but she will greet her lover on the very margin of the sea. All goes on well for a time; Hero escapes the notice of her parents, and the bold sailor crosses the deep every night. But the laughing summer passes away, and the tempests of winter thunder across the narrow strait, sounding bodefully in the ears of the lovers: "But when the time of hoary winter The word in the original is dits. All commentators, except Kromayer, have made a needless fuss about it. The shore is called dixfas because the sea divides it from the opposite coast. VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCVI. G G The youth was driven onwards; till his limbs Did fail him, and his ever-moving hands Sunk feebly. Down his throat the water gush'd Spontaneous, and he drank the brackish wave. Meanwhile a cruel wind beat out the torch, And with it sad Leander's life and love." Verses 313-329. Poor Hero stands on the opposite shore full of distracting fears, the extinguished torch in her hand, dabbled with the drifting rain, and deafened with the tumult of waters beneath her. So she stands, heartbroken, till the next morning discloses to her, at the very base of her tower, the pale, bruised, and lifeless body of Leander. "When at her feet she saw her lover's corpse Torn by the rocks, she rent her flower'd robe, And with a rushing sound from off the *Georgics, iii. 259. DINING OUT. STRANGE as it may seem, "yet pity 't is 't is true," you cannot get a chop or a steak at a tavern in London west of Temple Bar that's worth eating. The science of cooking chops and steaks begins at Aldgate, and ceases at the Cock and the Rainbow by Temple Bar, where Shire Lane divides the City from the shire. Heaven knows the man (a clergyman, we are told) was not far wrong who confined his catalogue of questions to the new she-cook that came to him, to the simple but important one of, "Can you boil a potato well?" fancying, we suppose, and rightly, that a woman who could do this well had got beyond the mere first rudiments of her art, and was, withal, likely to improve. He had, however, done better, we have often thought, had he asked her in addition, if she understood and could cook a chop or a steak to the satisfaction of one whose taste was fostered before the gridiron at "Joe's" in the City, and the box by the fire at the Cock near Temple Bar. The least hesitation had been favourable; a ready admission that she could, a sure sign that she knew "nothing at all about the matter." There are two things we never wish to have for dinner at home, or at a friend's house-A CHOP AND A STEAK. Chops at home are generally too tallowy, too raw, or ill cut, or done over bad fire; in short, any thing but what they ought to be; and then your home-cooked steaks stick in your teeth with toughness, and trouble you for a whole evening; or they are too slowly done, or too hurriedly done, or too near when done to a 66 gassy" flame; or, perhaps, it was the butcher's fault, perhaps they were badly cut, or the meat was too newly killed; fresh from the back of an Abyssinian beast described by Bruce in his clever and entertaining Travels. It really seems a hard case that a man cannot have a chop or a steak tolerably cooked at his own home. Harder still, perhaps, that he cannot at a London club. Your west-end cooks confine their labours and attention, and devote the whole of their skill to "kickshaws," and things that provoke you to eat, and merit and demand your approbation while at table. All well enough in their way; wonders in art, the result of a long life of attentive observation, but really not to be preferred, any one of them singly, to a chop or a steak at Joe's in Finch Lane, or Colnett's at the Cock near Temple Bar. Different tastes incline to different objects: "Hard task to hit the palate of such guests, When Öldfield loves what Dartineuf detests." There are few things better than a chop or a steak when cooked by the cunning tongs of our friend at Joe's, or watched over by the judicious eye of Colnett's City Soyer." 66 A man may spend the period of an apprenticeship in London, and really not know half-a-dozen good taverns where he can get a chop or a steak cooked to perfection, and at a reasonable cost. We have even met with men who have lived in London for a much longer period of time, as raw on the subject as the last arrival in London from the tinmines of Cornwall, or the dreary wastes of Dartmoor and Hay Tor. You cannot get a chop at Stevens's or Long's in Bond Street, equal in quality or flavour to a chop at the Cock in Fleet Street, or a steak at the Reform Club or the Clarendon equal in excellence to a steak at "Joe's" in Finch Lane; or those which masterpieces in their way "Ben," mine host of the Cheshire Cheese, snatches with a cunning hand from a clean gridiron over a clear fire in Wine Office Court in Fleet Street. A man wants a good appetite to enjoy a steak to perfection; he must be in full health; and what's more, in good spirits. There is no enjoying a steak in the middle of the day; eat it, and you are fit for nothing but Five o'clock's your supper after. the time, we contend, the best adapted for a tavern dinner. Only be sure of an appetite. Spare no exertion to acquire it. Remember the story told by Pope: "There was a Lord Russell, who, by living too luxuriously, had quite spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, |