perhaps join them. All this is so like what passes in the novel, that I fancy myself a sort of second Mr. Smith, and am not quite easy at it!" This was mentioned to the fair Authoress, and she was delighted to find that her characters were so true, that an actual person fancied himself to be one of them. The resemblance, however, was only in the externals; and the real modesty of the individual stumbled on the likeness to a city coxcomb!

It is curious to what a degree persons, brought up in certain occupations in a great city, are shut up from a knowledge of the world, and carry their simplicity to a pitch of unheard-of extravagance. London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded any thing to be met with in Shakspeare or Ben Jonson, or the old comedy. For instance, the following may be taken as a true sketch. Imagine a person with a florid, shining complexion like a plough-boy, large staring teeth, a merry eye, his hair stuck into the fashion with curlingirons and pomatum, a slender figure, and a decent suit of black-add to which the thoughtlessness of the school-boy, the forwardness of the thriving tradesman, and the plenary consciousness of the citizen of London-and you have Mr. Dunster before you, the fishmonger in the Poultry. You shall hear how he chirps over his cups, and exults in his private opinions. "I'll play no more with you," I said, "Mr. Dunster-you are five points in the game better than I am." I had just lost three half-crown rubbers at cribbage to him, which loss of mine he presently thrust into a canvass pouch (not a silk purse) out of which he had produced just before, first a few halfpence, then half a dozen pieces of silver, then a handful of guineas, and lastly, lying perdu at the bottom, a fifty pound bank-note. "I'll tell you what," I said, "I should like to play you a game at marbles”—this was at a sort of Christmas party or Twelfth Night merry-making. "Marbles!" said Dunster, catching up the sound, and his eye brightening with childish glee, "What! you mean ring-taw?" "Yes." "I should beat you at it, to a certainty. I was one of the best in our school (it was at Clapham, Sir, the Rev. Mr. Denman's, at Clapham, was the place where I was brought up)-though there were two others there better than me. They were the best that ever were. I'll tell you, Sir, I'll give you an idea. There was a water-butt or cistern, Sir, at our school, that turned with a cock. Now suppose that brass ring that the windowcurtain is fastened to, to be the cock, and that these boys were standing where we are, about twenty feet off-well, Sir, I'll tell you what I have seen them do. One of them had a favourite taw (or alley we used to call them)—he 'd take aim at the cock of the cistern with this marble, as I may do now. Well, Sir, will you believe it? such was his strength of knuckle and certainty of aim, he 'd hit it, turn it, let the water out, and then, Sir, when the water had run out as much as it was wanted, the other boy (he'd just the same strength of knuckle, and the same certainty of eye) he 'd aim at it too, be sure to hit it, turn it round, and stop the water from running out. Yes, what I tell you is very remarkable, but it's true. One of these boys was named Cock, and t' other Butler." "They might have been named Spigot and Fawcett, my dear Sir, from your acconnt of them." "I should not mind playing you at fives neither, though I 'm out of practice. I

think I should beat you in a week: I was a real good one at that. A pretty game, Sir! I had the finest ball, that I suppose ever was seen. Made it myself, I'll tell you how, Sir. You see, I put a piece of cork at the bottom, then I wound some fine worsted yarn round it, then I had to bind it round with some packthread, and then sew the case on. You'd hardly believe it, but I was the envy of the whole school for that ball. They all wanted to get it from me, but lord, Sir, I would let none of them come near it. I kept it in my waistcoat pocket all day, and at night I used to take it to bed with me and put it under my pillow. I couldn't sleep easy without it."

The same idle vein might be found in the country, but I doubt whether it would find a tongue to give it utterance. Cockneyism is a ground of native shallowness mounted with pertness and conceit. Yet with all this simplicity and extravagance in dilating on his favourite topics, Dunster is a man of spirit, of attention to business, knows how to make out and get in his bills, and is far from being hen-pecked. One thing is certain, that such a man must be a true Englishman and a loyal subject. He has a slight tinge of letters, with shame I confess it-has in his possession a volume of the European Magazine for the year 1761, and is an humble admirer of Tristram Shandy (particularly the story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, which is something in his own endless manner) and of Gil Blas of Santillane. Over these (the last thing before he goes to bed at night) he smokes a pipe, and meditates for an hour. After all, what is there in these harmless half-lies, these fantastic exaggerations, but a literal, prosaic, Cockney translation of the admired lines in Gray's Ode to Eton College :—

"What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle's speed
Or urge the flying ball?"

A man shut up all his life in his shop, without any thing to interest him from one year's end to another but the cares and details of business, with scarcely any intercourse with books or opportunities for society, distracted with the buzz and glare and noise about him, turns for relief to the retrospect of his childish years; and there, through the long vista, at one bright loop-hole, leading out of the thorny mazes of the world into the clear morning light, he sees the idle fancies and gay amusements of his boyhood dancing like motes in the sunshine. Shall we blame, or should we laugh at him, if his eye glistens, and his tongue grows wanton in their praise?

None but a Scotchman would-that pragmatical sort of personage, who thinks it a folly ever to have been young, and who, instead of dallying with the frail past, bends his brows upon the future, and looks only to the main chance. Forgive me, dear Dunster, if I have drawn a sketch of some of thy venial foibles, and delivered thee into the hands of these Cockneys of the North, who will fall upon thee and devour thee, like so many cannibals without a grain of salt!

If familiarity in cities breeds contempt, ignorance in the country breeds aversion and dislike. People come too much in contact in town; in other places they live too much apart, to unite cordially and easily. Our feelings, in the former case, are dissipated and exhausted by being called into constant and vain activity; in the latter, they rust and grow dead VOE. VI. No. 32.-1823.

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for want of use. If there is an air of levity and indifference in London manners, there is a harshness, a moroseness, and disagreeable restraint, in those of the country. We have little disposition to sympathy, when we have few persons to sympathize with: we lose the relish and capacity for social enjoyment, the seldomer we meet. A habit of sullen

ness, coldness, and misanthropy, grows upon us. If we look for hospitality and a cheerful welcome in country places, it must be in those where the arrival of a stranger is an event, the recurrence of which need not be greatly apprehended, or it must be on rare occasions, on "some high festival of once a year." Then indeed the stream of hospitality, so long dammed up, may flow without stint for a short season; or a stranger may be expected with the same sort of eager impatience as a caravan of wild beasts, or any other natural curiosity, that excites our wonder and fills up the craving of the mind after novelty. By degrees, however, even this last principle loses its effect: books, newspapers, whatever carries us out of ourselves into a world of which we see and know nothing, becomes distasteful, repulsive; and we turn away with indifference or disgust from every thing that disturbs our lethargic animal existence, or takes off our attention from our petty local interests and pursuits. Man, left long to himself, is no better than a mere clod; or his activity, for want of some other vent, preys upon himself, or is directed to splenetic, peevish dislikes, or vexatious, harassing persecution of others. I once drew a picture of a country life: it was a portrait of a particular place, a caricature if you will, but, with certain allowances, I fear it was too like in the individual instance, and that it would hold too generally true. See ROUND TABLE, vol. ii. p. 116.

If these, then, are the faults and vices of the inhabitants of town or of the country, where should a man go to live, so as to escape from them? I answer, that in the country we have the society of the groves, the fields, the brooks, and in London a man may keep to himself, or choose his company as he pleases.

It appears to me that there is an amiable mixture of these two opposite characters in a person who chances to have passed his youth in Lon don, and who has retired into the country for the rest of his life. We may find in such a one a social polish, a pastoral simplicity. He rusticates agreeably, and vegetates with a degree of sentiment. He comes to the next post-town to see for letters, watches the coaches as they pass, and eyes the passengers with a look of familiar curiosity, thinking that he too was a gay fellow in his time. He turns his horse's head down the narrow lane that leads homewards, puts on an old coat to save his wardrobe, and fills his glass nearer to the brim. As he lifts the purple juice to his lips and to his eye, and in the dim solitude that hems him round, thinks of the glowing line

"This bottle's the sun of our table”—

another sun rises upon his imagination; the sun of his youth, the blaze of vanity, the glitter of the metropolis, "glares round his soul, and mocks his closing eye-lids." The distant roar of coaches is in his ears the pit stare upon him with a thousand eyes-Mrs. Siddons, Bannister, King, are before him-he starts as from a dream, and swears he will to London; but the expense, the length of way, deters him, and he rises the next morning to trace the footsteps of the hare

that has brushed the dew-drops from the lawn, or to attend a meeting of Magistrates! Mr. Justice Shallow answered in some sort to this description of a retired Cockney and indigenous country-gentleman. He "knew the Inns of Court, where they would talk of mad Shallow yet, and where the bona robus were, and had them at commandment: ay, and had heard the chimes at midnight!"

It is a strange state of society (such as that in London) where a man does not know his next-door neighbour, and where the feelings (one would think) must recoil upon themselves, and either fester or become obtuse. Mr. Wordsworth, in the preface to his poem of the "Excursion," represents men in cities as so many wild beasts or evil spirits, shut up in cells of ignorance, without natural affections, and barricadoed down in sensuality and selfishness. The nerve of humanity is bound up, according to him: the circulation of the blood stagnates. And it would be so, if men were merely cut off from intercourse with their immediate neighbours, and did not meet together generally and more at large. But man in London becomes, as Mr. Burke has it, a sort of "public creature." He lives in the eye of the world, and the world in his. If he witnesses less of the details of private life, he has better opportunities of observing its larger masses and varied movements. He sees the stream of human life pouring along the streets-its comforts and embellishments piled up in the shops-the houses are proofs of the industry, the public buildings of the art and magnificence of man; while the public amusements and places of resort are a centre and support for social feeling. A playhouse alone is a school of humanity, where all eyes are fixed on the same gay or solemn scene, where smiles or tears are spread from face to face, and where a thousand hearts beat in unison! Look at the company in a country theatre (in comparison), and see the coldness, the sullenness, the want of sympathy, and the way in which they turn round to scan and scrutinize one another. In London there is a public; and each man is part of it. We are gregarious, and affect the kind. We have a sort of abstract existence; and a community of ideas and knowledge (rather than local proximity) is the bond of society and good-fellowship. This is one great cause of the tone of political feeling in large and populous cities. There is here a visible body-politic, a type and image of that huge Leviathan the State. We comprehend that vast denomination, the People, of which we see a tenth part daily moving before us; and by having our imaginations emancipated from petty interests and personal dependence, we learn to venerate ourselves as men, and to respect the rights of human nature. Therefore it is that the citizens and freemen of London and Westminster are patriots by prescription, philosophers and politicians by the right of their birthplace. In the country, men are no better than a herd of cattle or scattered deer. They have no idea but of individuals, none of rights or principles and a king, as the greatest individual, is the highest idea they can form. He is "a species alone," and as superior to any single peasant, as the latter is to the peasant's dog, or to a crow flying over his head. In London the king is but as one to a million (numerically speaking), is seldom seen, and then distinguished only from others by the superior graces of his person. A country 'squire or a lord of the manor is a greater man in his village or hundred !

THE NAPOLEON MEMOIRS.*

In a former number, in taking a review of "Las Cases' Journal," we slightly glanced at the first part of these Memoirs, of which important production four parts are now published-two dictated to General Gourgaud, and more immediately and strictly historical-two more dictated to the Count de Montholon, entitled "Historical Miscellanies," containing notes and observations upon several modern French publications which reached Napoleon at St. Helena, and gave false or imperfect views of his personal conduct, or of the political and military events of his reign.

When Napoleon, having ceased in 1814 to be Emperor of France, was about to depart for the Island of Elba, his farewell promise to the remnant of his old companions in arms who witnessed that extremity of his fortune, was, that he would prepare a record of the great transactions they had achieved together. The events that so rapidly ensued interfered with the design,-but the final and not inglorious struggle to be once again the foremost man of the world having failed, and he himself doomed to a sentence that extinguished every hope, he no longer deferred its execution. On the passage to St. Helena he commenced the present work, and was constantly occupied upon it during the six years that he continued to hold out against the miseries of exile, and the climate, and the governor of St. Helena. The quantity of matter condensed in these volumes is so great, and the subjects so various, that it would be quite impossible, in such a notice as the present, to give any thing like a perfect analysis of their contents. A large space is dedicated to accounts of battles, with minute and elaborate critical remarks upon military evolutions, which we profess our incompetency to appreciate, or at all times to follow-though, doubtless, this portion of the work will be deemed by many to be the most interesting and instructive; we shall therefore confine our extracts and observations to such passages as serve to illustrate the character and policy of this extraordinary man, who, by the force of his genius and ambition, raised himself (he repeatedly asserts "without a crime") from the station of a military adventurer to be the imperial chief, the creator and director of the most formidable combination of political resources that modern Europe has seen confederated against the stability of hostile thrones and institutions.

One of the first great events recorded in these volumes is the Revolution which placed Napoleon at the head of the French government-the celebrated scene of the 18th and 19th Brumaire. It is given in that minute detail which always imparts so much light and interest to the narrative of a great transaction.

He was in Egypt when information of the increasing inefficiency and unpopularity of the existing government reached him. The men whom the accidents of the Revolution had called to rule the affairs of France were distrustful of each other, and had lost all public confidence and respect. The French people felt that they were misgoverned, and were prepared by that impression, and by their recent familiarity

* Memoirs of the History of France during the Reign of Napoleon, dictated by the Emperor at St. Helena, &c. 2 Livraisons, consisting of 4 volumes.