All the dwellers upon earth, Parthiaus, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or the other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious; contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other.

66

Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages -Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele, our late incomparable Brinsley-what a family likeness in all four!

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower! what rosy gills! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest-taking no more thought than lilies! What conterapt for money-accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum! or rather what a noble simplification of language, (beyond Tooke,) resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective! What near approaches doth he make to the primitive community! to the extent of one half of the principle at least!

He is the true taxer who “calleth all the world up to be taxed;" and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted between the Auş ustan majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute pittance at Jerusalem! exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air! so far removed from your sour parochial or state gatherers-those inkhorn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their faces! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; confining himself to no set season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant look to your purse— which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind contended! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth! The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honour, struggles with destiny; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, oh man ordained to lend-that thou lose not in the end, with thy wordly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not prepos terously in thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives! but, when thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were halfway. Come, a handsome

sacrifice! See how light he makes of it! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy.

Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who departed this life on Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant from mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample revenues; which, with that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of the great race, he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing; for there is something revolting in the idea of a king's holding a private purse; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment; getting rid of the cumber some luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings)

แ

"To slacken virtue and abate her edge,

Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,"

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, "borrowing and to borrow!"

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it has been calculated that he laid a tithe part of the inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated: but having had the honour of accompanying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems these were his tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends, (as he was pleased to express himself,) to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be "stocked with so fair a herd."

With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money kept longer than three days, stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away, (for he was an excellent tosspot,) some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him—as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious-into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes-inscrutable cavities of the earth

or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest-but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wildnerness, while It was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with gray (cana fides.) He anticipated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorizing reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue, (your bastard borrower,) who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you that he expects nothing better; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal.

When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart; his swell of feeling; how magnificent, how ideal he was; how great at the midnight hour; and when I compare with him the companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of lenders and little men.

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books-those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his

depredations.

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye tooth knocked out―(you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!) with the huge Switzerlike tomes on each side, (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing,) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventuræ, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre-Bellarmine and Holy Thomas) showed but as dwarfs -itself an Ascapart! that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the title to propertv in a book, (my Bonaventure, for instance,) is iu exact

ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and apprecia ting the same.” Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case-two shelves from the ceiling-scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser-was whilom the commodious resting place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties --but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself. Just below, Dodsley's Dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the fates borrowed Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. There loitered the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some streamside. In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower volume, with "eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate.

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sealike, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under collection of this nature, (my friend's gatherings in his various calls,) picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take in these orphans, the twice deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. I charge no warehouse room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and abjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle ?-knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio-what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend? Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the Gallican land

'Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness,

A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt,

Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder!"

-hadst thou not thy play books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies with thy quips and mirthful tales? Child of the greenroom, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part French, better part English woman!-that she could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook -of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a tittle! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude?

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overflows to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C.—he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his-(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals)-in no very clerkly handlegible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in pagan lands. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, uor thy library, against S. T. C.

NEWYEAR'S EVE.

EVERY man has two birthdays: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he terms his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birthday has nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a new year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common

Adam.

Of all sound of all bells-(bells, the music nighet bordering upon heaven)-most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never hear it without a gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images