melancholy comfusion of sounds, very awful and incomprehensible to the travellers below, who could only proceed on a very narrow path on the edge of the lake, and under the side of this gloomy rock. "This singular spot has too many minute beauties to be pictured in description. All its terrors, and all its beauties, however, conspire to give it the air of a nook, separated by surrounding barriers for some purpose of enchantment. "It did not require a belief in fairies to look round for them in this romantic scene. If one had merely heard of them, an involuntary operation of fancy would summon them to a place so suited for their habitation." "The fairy mounts, or little regularly formed cones, which abound so much in the Highlands, have been, from time immemorial, accounted the abode of fairies. In some places, as at the foot of the mountain Corryarick, on the south side, a large space of ground is entirely covered with them. These are most regularly formed of equal size, and covered with the bilberry and fox-glove. "This, it is to be remarked, is a place famous for the perishing of travellers in the snow. "All along that road, numbers of these conical hillocks are seen rising in dry gravelly ground, and thickly covered with heath; whereas, at Lochan Uvie, they rise at a broader base, with a conical summit, to the height of eight or ten feet, and are covered with diminutive birch. The perfect regularity of their form, their resemblance to each other, and the light foliage constantly playing round them, gives a singular and fantastic appearance to the scenery. "Here the fairies are supposed to dwell, and the children's nursery tales are full of wonders performed by the secret dwellers of these tomhans, or fairy hillocks. 66 "I knew myself an old gentleman, who, though nervous, and a little inclined to the visionary, was "much too wise to walk into a well," and travelled, bought, and sold, like other people. "He was also much too wise to travel by night. In the day, however, he frequently passed the road I have been describing. "Far from human dwellings, near the foot of Corryarick, he used to hear, in passing near these tomhans, the fairies turning their bread on the girdle, and find the smell of the oatcakes they were toasting waken appetite very forcibly. This I believe that he believed; yet I believe, at the same time, that if he had as many things to think back on, and anticipate, as people who live in the world, he would not have heard so well what was going on in these hillocks. "He was, indeed, the only person I ever knew admitted to so near a cognizance of the domestic economy of these fantastic sprites; and, to say truth, his own friends were wont to smile at his details with complacent but suspicious silence. "But the youths, who were accustomed to lead, during the spring months, a wild and solitary life, tending cattle among the hills of that dreary district, were often, as they said, cheered by the music of small sweet pipes, issuing from these awe-inspiring hillocks. These impressions are early given, and deeply fixed by little songs which the children learn almost in infancy, of which the mystic intercourse betwixt fairies and the children of mortality are the subject. These hold the same place with them, that Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-killer do with our children; with this difference, that our nursery tales of wonder have also something of the ludicrous mingled with them. "Our children learn very soon to regard with ridicule and contempt, the objects of terror-mingled wonder, by which their imaginations were first excited. "Not so the little Highlander! There was something like music which Collins gives to Despair, in the tales he first heard, conveyed in strains, of whose expression one might truly say, "By fits 'twas sad, by starts 'twas wild.” "One of these, which I have heard children at a very early age sing, and which is just to them the Babes in the Wood, I can never forget. The affecting simplicity of the tune, the strange wild imagery, and the marks of remote antiquity in the little narrative, gave it the greatest interest to me, who delight in tracing back poetry to its infancy. "A little girl had been innocently beloved by a fairy, who dwelt in a tomhan near her mother's habitation. She had three brothers, who were the favourites of her mother. She herself was treated harshly, and tasked beyond her strength: Her employment was to go every morning and cut a certain quantity of turf from dry heathy ground, for immediate fuel; and this with some uncouth and primitive implement. "As she passed the hillock which contained her lover, he regularly put out his hand with a very sharp knife, of such power, that it quickly and readily cut through all impediments. She returned cheerfully and early with her load of turf; and, as she passed by the hillock, she struck on it twice, and the fairy stretched out his hand through the surface, and received the knife. The mother, however, told the brothers, that her daughter must certainly have had some aid to perform the allotted task. They watched her, saw her receive the enchanted knife, and forced it from her. They returned, struck the hillock, as she was wont to do, and when the fairy put out his hand, they cut it off with his own knife. He drew in the bleeding arm in despair, and supposing this cruelty was the result of treachery on the part of his beloved, never saw her more." Mr Kirk's tract then treats of THE MEN OF SECOND SIGHT, who, he says, "do not discover strange things when asked, but at fits and raptures, as if inspired with some genius at that instant, which before did not lurk in or about them. Thus, I have frequently spoken to one of them, who, in his transport, told he cut the bodice (of a fairy) in two with his iron weapon— at other times he out-wrestled some of them." Certain solemnities are observed at investing a man with the privileges of the whole mystery of this second sight. He must run a tedder of hair (which bound a corpse to the bier) about his middle, and, bowing down his head, look through his legs backwards, until he see a funeral advance, and cross two marches. If, during this ceremony, the wind change, he is in peril of his life. The usual method for a curious person to get a transient sight of this otherwise invisible scene, is to put his left foot under the wizard's right foot, and the seer's hand on the inquirer's head, who is to look over the wizard's right shoulder, and " then he will see a multitude of wights, like furious hardie men, flocking to him hastily from all quarters, as thick as atoms in the air." This power of second sight is native in some, and descended from their ancestors, and " acquired as an artificial improvement of their natural sight to others." My Lord Talbot, in his "Letter to the Honourable Robert Boyle, on the Predictions made by Seers," (appended to Mr Kirk's tract) says, that sometimes people come to it in age, who had it not when young, nor could any tell by what means produced. It is a trouble to most of them who are subject to it, and they would be rid of it at any rate, if they could. The sight is of no long duration, only continuing so long as they can keep their eyes steady without twinkling." "That which generally is seen by them, are the species of living creatures, and of inanimate Things, which was in Motion, such as Ships, and Habits upon Persons. They never sie the Species of any Person who is already dead. What they foirsie fails not to exist in the Mode, and in that Place where it appears to them. They cannot well know what Space of Time shall interveen between the Apparition and the real Existence: But some of the hardiest and longest Experience have some Rules for Conjectures; as, if they sie a Man with. a shrowding Sheet in the Apparition, they will conjecture at the Nearness or Remoteness of his Death by the more or less of his Bodie that is covered by it. They will ordinarily sie their absent Friends, tho' at a from America to Scotland, sitting, standing, great Distance, sometymes no less than or walking in some certain Place; and then they conclude with a Assurance that they will sie them so and there. If a Man be in love with a Woman, they will ordinarily sie the Species of that Man standing by her, and so likewise if a Woman be in love; and they conjecture at their Enjoyments (of each other) by the Species touching (of) the Person, or appearing at a distance from her (if they enjoy not one another.) If they sie the Species of any Person who is sick to die, they sie them covered over with the shrowding sheet." My Lord Talbot concludes his account of the seers by asserting, that "severals who did see the second sight when in the Highlands or Isles, yet when transported to live in other countries, especially in America, they quite lose this qualitie, as was told me by a gentleman who knew some of them in Barbadoes, who did see no vision there, although he knew them to be seers when they lived in the Isles of Scotland." If any person doubts of the existence of second-sight men, let him read Theophilus Insulanus, whose treatise is appended to Mr Kirk's Secret Commonwealth. Upwards of fourscore well authenticated instances of their power are therein given. After studying them, our readers, so far from laughing at Dr Johnson for his credulity on this subject, will rather wonder how any suspicion could ever have entered his mind of the truth of the manifold wild stories recorded of the Highland Seers.* But it is....... (Cetera desunt.) Mr Kirk says, "Doth not Satan interpose, in such cases, by many subtile unthought insinuations, as to him who let the Fly or Familiar go out of the box, and yet found the fly of his own putting in as serviceable as the other would have been." In an account of the murder of Archbishop Sharpe, it is mentioned, that from a box, found in his pocket, flew out a large bee-a circumstance which Mr Kirkpatrick Sharpe says he does not understand. Does this throw any light on it? THE SCOTCHMAN IN LONDON. No I. THERE is an amiable vanity about artists which opens their study doors to all visitants, and not only welcomes them to view works of finished beauty and excellence, but conducts them into the shady recesses of their shops, where they are called upon to admire brushes and modelling tools, and praise portfolios of rude and imperfect outline, and applaud a lump of clay before it has assumed "the port of Neptune, or the girth of Mars."Artists possess a greater consciousness of genius than poets, who never exacted praise for what they have blotted, nor have called on the world since the time of Milton to worship unfinished verse, because the bards were nothing pleased with what they had done. To this habit of praise we are, however, indebted for much amusement, and we appprehend the titled and the polite owe more of their "pleasant drowsyhed" and political stupor to morning wanderings among sculptors clay, and painters portfolios, than to all the productions of living poetsfrom those of the mere metre balladmonger up to those who run so smooth on the even road of blank verse. To share in those high delights, I have been tempted to saunter among the studies of artists, and truly I have felt much more delight and edification than I can hope to communicate by description to your readers. High names attracted first, and I called on a sculptor who came forth to receive me clad in a gown smeared with the clay of a dozen attempts to celebrate the heroes of Gazettes Extraordinary. His hands were also covered with this professional dough; for as bears lick their deformed cubs into their own shape with their tongues, so sculptors scratch their clay into human resemblance with their claws. I was conducted into his study, which resembled the land of the Cimmerians from the scantiness of light, and a den of the anthropophagi from the broken and torn members of human figures with which the floor was covered. In this dark domain it was some time before all its curious contents became visible; my conductor said he wished always to meditate and model in a kind of twilight; it engendered sublime ideas, and there was a grandeur in the indistinctness which it spread over all his productions. He made his study windows of horn like those of Phidias; for he wished to see all things through a Greek medium. When a great monument came into market, and he modelled for nothing else, he carefully dismissed all remembrance of the subject from his mind, the gross mortal matter subsided, and the pure ethereal essence rose; this he took care to seize and embody as it floated before him. By this process the subject was spiritualized; the Greeks made their heroes into gods when they died; he did the same for the thankless moderns. He admired all that was of Greek origin, and had employed much of his time in rendering obscure, by classical designs, every ancient and luminous poem. He had fashioned many gods, and also beings which he called allegorical; he had made a larger and a smaller piece of clay which he called Hercules fondling Hebe; it resembled the lion laying his gentle claw on the neck of the most magnanimous kid. Dress was an abomination, and veiled all that was lovely and divine in sculpture. Other artists loved gentlemen leathered and spurred, and buried generals on the field of battle without pulling off their boots. He loved the beauty of unincumbered nature; his ideas had been adopted by ladies of eminent rank; and he admired the gentlemen of the Highland districts in Caledonia, who had not suffered certain parts of their freeborn bodies to be wrapt up and swaddled. Eve, he was certain looked much handsomer in the sight of man before the adventure of the sinful fig-leaf. It was nonsense to heed the temperature of climates; he despised it himself, and shewed me a naked Hannibal crossing the Alps up to the ancles in snow.— He talked of the royal academy, the institution was unprosperous, students went there to mimic the Greek predilections of the lecturer, to make mouths at Phidias, and puns upon Praxitiles. They had not the studious spirit of Grecian youths, and knew little of Greek sculpture, though its history had been impressed on their minds in three lectures out of six. He applauded a certain artist who caused all his pupils to wear shoes resembling the Lacedemonian sandal, but this, he was sorry to find, helped little to reclaim vagrant attention, impart sense, or elevate the grovelling intellect of their cloudy and comfortless region to the sublime pitch of Grecian excellence. He had conceived some mighty national designs, and would disclose them to mankind when their actions were worthy of them. The present was an undeserving age; nothing was passable but what was well dressed; public taste was become tyrannical, and insisted that Englishmen should neither wear Greek faces nor gowns, and the million had lavished more admiration upon the simple representation of a domestic calamity, than on all the sublime fictions of modern art. Our private monuments had sunk from their stilted allegorical elevation to the low eminence of coif-clad dames and snooded damsels; from the dark sublimity of personification, to the palpable grossness of forms of flesh and blood, and our public monuments were become mere paragraphs of Gazettes, so many rank and file in boots, and so many battalions in pantaloons. English sculpture was sinking with public taste; he had long preached without success to support it; eloquence had a better fate in the days of Phidias; we were grown as bad as the Romans who lavished their talents in sculpturing corpulent senators or hordes of barbarians from the Rhine and the Danube. You are now taking leave, said he, as he bestowed a parting bow, of the last of ancient English sculptors. I had next the good fortune to find out the abode of a youthful sculptor, who had commenced his career under most favourable auspices, having invented a new dress for Minerva, and a new labour for Hercules. This had attracted the envy of his brother artists. He conducted me to his repository of designs, and showed me a monument in memory of a man who had perished in battle. The design was a mixed allegory; substance was mingled with shadow and shadow with substance; human beings shook hands with their personified virtues; and the dying hero was attended by the forms of his own valour and wisdom. This he reckoned the reconcilement of ancient and modern art. The ideas of VOL. VI. the ancient sculptors were amazingly limited; by confining their talents to the mere body they prisoned their faculties in an 66 augre bore." He had cleared his way through this ancient mist, and made both soul and body visible; other artists concealed the virtues and the soul in the mortal frame; he dislodged them, and thus multiplied the resources of art. This he conceived was a new idea in sculpturein which new ideas were much wanted -and it was left to his talents to render it popular and permanent. He directed my attention particularly to the figures of Valour and Wisdom. The latter had always been represented in matron-like robes, and nothing had ever appeared naked about the former but his sword-this had made a moody poet sing, "By valour's armed and awful side." The main beauty in his invention was ther poetry or prose; he sheathed his a happy deviation from all rules in eiwisdom in complete steel, and to valour he said as the poet said to Venus, "Thy best armour is thy nakedness," and sent him to battle like an ancient Caledonian. I also saw a sketch for a national work, in which I recognized something like an outline of the field of Waterloo. The genius of Wellington was stalking before the Duke himself, laying waste the ranks of Napoleon, who was hurried from the encounter by flight and fear. What I principally admired was a cartridge-box belonging to the 42d Regiment slung across the shoulders of the gigantic figure. From this the artist drew my attention to the perilous situation of the Marquis of Anglesey, who was writhing under the pangs of amputation, though performed by the fair hands of a female angel. I parted with this ingenious young gentleman, and went to the shop of another artist, who had rendered his name lastingly famous, by figuring Britannia mounted on a sea-horse, which was harnessed to an Indian canoe. He introduced me to the vicinity of a mountain mass of clay, which bore a faint resemblance to humanity, but more from substance than form. This the artist said was a figure of St George mauling the great dragon with a crucifix. When it was finished he would allow the world to find out the meaning-mankind had a particu I lar facility in wringing a meaning from the most perverse designs, and in this pursuit artists had most liberally indulged them. He meant it darkly to typify the total destruction of French power, at least a gentleman who usually interpreted the meaning of his designs had put this construction on it; but for himself he had not made up his mind on the matter; he felt himself in the situation of the Scottish bard, "Perhaps it might turn out a sang, Perhaps turn out a sermon." London was much too limited for the extent of his design, and he had to combat the perverse ignorance of his neighbours as well as overcome the sad taste of the present generation. He had resolved to cut the horse and dragon out of the earth under the figure of the Saint, but an adjoining proprietor had interfered lest his house should be undermined; but he would make the Saint fight the monster on foot, and this would make an agreeable variety. He had proposed to one of the committees which conduct matters of public taste to carve two of the loftiest Welch mountains into statues of Wellington and the Regent; but an eminent grazier from Smithfield had opposed him, lest London should lose its hopes of Welch mutton for the coming year. Their helmets might have been walled cities, and flocks might have continued to graze on their ample sides. These stupendous con ceptions were crushed from the taste of the age for trifles. He was compelled to forsake Plinlimmon and stand by St George. He had done much for the sculpture of the present age, and had been repaid with neglect. He seduced Mercury from the service of the heathen, and placed him on British pay; and he brought Apollo and his lyre to charm a man whom all the poetry of mere mortals could neither elevate nor delight. He presented a new helmet to Britannia, which made her a goddess as good as new, and he gave her a thunderbolt well worth a forest of her old spears. In spite of all these high services, however, the world had sadly neglected him; his place was become as a desert, and the grass on his premises, seldom trodden by the foot of man, grew with a most mortifying diligence and luxuriance. As he proceeded, a lump of clay, which for some time had resisted every attempt of the artist to fashion it into a head of St George, dropped from the summit, and buried my declaiming conductor in a mass, out of which I found it difficult to extricate him. Having rescued him from this imminent peril, from materials which, in the metaphysical language of Cowley, threatened to become both his death and monument, I departed with the belief, that though dwarfish in stature he stalked a giant in his own esteem. Boriana; or, Sketches of Pugilism. BY ONE OF THE FANCY. No IV. BROUGHTON and Slack were men of principle and integrity, as well as genius and talent, and when defeated, they were entitled to say, "all is lost except our honour." The muse of history has no cause to blush for them; they lie buried in the great road, not the cross-ways of fame, and from their tombs, "siste viator," calls the traveller to solemn thought and loftiest meditation. Such ever is the destiny of Virtue, against whom Misfortune contends in vain, and on whose crown of imperishable laurels Time himself laments to find his scythe fall impo tent and edgeless. But Bill Stevens the Nailer was not a pugilist of this kidney. "His conquests," says Mr Egan," at one time were so numerous, that he sat down like the great Alexander, weeping that he had no more heroes to overcome. But gold, powerful gold, seduced him from his honesty, and ever afterwards, as he most justly deserved to be, he was without a friend to back him." The Nailer had not worn the crown above a twelvemonth and a day, when it was knocked off his brows by George Meggs, a Bristol collier. "Stevens scarcely |