this manner he led me through the length of the whole walk, fretting at his absurdities, and fancying myself laughed at not less than him by every spectator.

When we were got to the end of the procession, Hang me,' said he, with an air of vivacity, I never saw the Park so thin in my life before; there's no company at all to-day. Not a single face to be seen.' No company interrupted I peevishly; 'no company where there's such a crowd! why, man, there's too much. What are the thousands that have been laughing at us but company?' La, my dear!' returned he, with the utmost good-humour, you seem immensely chagrined: but, hang me, when the world laughs at me, I laugh at all the world, and so we are even. My Lord Trip, Bill Squash the Creolian, and I sometimes make a party at being ridiculous; and so we say and do a thousand things for the joke. But I see you are grave, and if you are for a fine grave sentimental companion, you shall dine with me and my wife to-day; I must insist on 't. I'll introduce you to Mrs. Tibbs, a lady of as elegant qualifications as any in nature; she was bred, but that's between ourselves, under the inspection of the Countess of All-night. A charming body of voice; but no more of that, she will give us a song. You shall see my little giri, too, Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Tibbs, a sweet pretty creature; I design her for my Lord Drumstick's eldest son, but that's in friendship, let it go no further; she's but six years old, and yet she walks a minuet, and plays on the guitar immensely already. I intend she shall be as perfect as possible in every accomplishment. In the first place, I'll make her a scholar: I'll teach her Greek myself, and learn that language purposely to instruct her; but let that be a secret.'

Thus saying, without waiting for a reply, he took me by the arm, and hauled me along. We passed through many dark alleys and winding ways; for, from some motives to me unknown, he seemed to have a particular aversion to every street. At last, however, we got to the door of a dismal-looking house in the outlets of the town, where he informed me he chose to reside for the benefit of the air.

We entered the lower door, which ever seemed to lie most hospitably open; and I began to ascend an old and creaking staircase, when, as he mounted to shew me the way, he demanded whether I delighted in prospects, to which answering in the affirmative, Then,' says he, I shall show you one of the most charming in the world out of my windows; we shall see the ships sailing, and the whole country for twenty miles round, tip-top quite high. My Lord Swamp would give ten thousand pounds for such a one; but, as I sometimes pleasantly tell him, I always like to keep my prospects at home, that my friends may see me the oftener.'

By this time, we were arrived as high as the stairs would permit us to ascend. till we came to what he was facetiously pleased to call the first-floor down the chimney, and knocking at the door, a voice from within demanded: Who's there?' My conductor answered that it was he. But this not satisfying the querist, the voice again repeated the demand; to which he answered louder than before; and now the door was opened by an old woman with cautious reluctance.

When we were got in, he welcomed me to his house with great ceremony, and, turning to the old woman, asked where was her lady? 'Good trotli,' replied she, in a peculiar dialect, she's washing your two shirts at the next door, because they have taken an oath against lending out the tub any longer.' 'My two shirts!' cries he, in a tone that faltered with confusion, what does the idiot mean?" I ken what I mean well enough,' replied the other; she's washing your two shirts next door, because'Fire and fury! no more of thy stupid exclamations,' cried he, Go and inform her we have got company. Were that Scotch hag to be for ever in the family, she would never learn politeness, nor forget that absurd poisonous accent of hers, or testify the smallest specimen of breeding or high life; and yet it is very surprising too, as I had her from a parliament man, a friend of mine, from the Highlands, one of the politest men in the world; but that's a secret.'

We waited for some time for Mrs. Tibb's arrival, during which interval I had a full opportunity of surveying the chamber and all its furniture; which consisted of four chairs with old wrought bottoms, that he assured me were his wife's embroidery, a square table that had once been japanned, a cradle in one corner, a lumbering cabinet in the other; a broken shepherdess, and a mandarin without a head, were stuck over the chimney; and round the walls, several paltry unframed pictures, which he observed were all his own drawing. What do you think, sir, of that head in a corner, done in the manner of Grisoni? There's the true keeping in it; it's my own face, and though there happens to be no likeness, a countess offered me a

hundred for its fellow; I refused her, for, hang it, that would be mechanical, you know.'

The wife at last made her appearance, at once a slattern and a coquette; much emaciated, but still carrying the remains of beauty. She made twenty apologies for being seen in such odious dishabille, but hoped to be excused, as she had staid out all night at the gardens with the countess, who was excessively fond of the horns. And, indeed, my dear,' added she, turning to her husband, his lordship drank your health in a bumper.' 'Poor Jack,' cries he, a dear good-natured creature; I know he loves me; but I hope, my dear, you have given orders for dinner. You need make no great preparations neither; there are but three of us; something elegant, and little will do; a turbot, an ortolan, or a'- Or what do you think, my dear,' interrupts the wife, 'of a nice pretty bit of ox-cheek, piping hot, and dressed with a little of my own sauce.' 'The very thing,' replies he, it will eat best with some smart bottled beer; but be sure to let 's have the sauce his grace was so fond of. I hate your immense loads of meat; that is country all over; extreme disgusting to those who are in the least acquainted with high life.'

By this time my curiosity began to abate, and my appetite to increase; the company of fools may at first make us smile, but at last never fails to render us melancholy. I therefore pretended to recollect a prior engagement, and after having shewn my respect to the house, according to the fashion of the English, by giving the old servant a piece of money at the door, I took my leave. Mr. Tibbs assured me that dinner, if I staid, would be ready at least in less than two hours.

On the Increased Love of Life and Age.

Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living. Those dangers, which, in the vigour of youth, we had learned to despise, assume new terrors as we grow old. Our caution increasing as our years increase, fear becomes at last the prevailing passion of the mind, and the small remainder of life is taken up in useless efforts to keep off our end, or provide for a continued existence.

Strange contradiction in our nature, and to which even the wise are liable! If I should judge of that part of life which lies before me by that which I have already seen, the prospect is hideous. Experience tells me that my past enjoyments have brought no real felicity, and sensation assures me that those I have felt are stronger than those which are yet to come. Yet experience and sensation in vain persuade; hope, more powerful than either, dresses out the distant prospect in fancied beauty; some happiness in long perspective, still beckons me to pursue; and, like a losing gamester, every new disappointment increases my ardour to continue the game.

Whence, then, is this increased love of life, which grows upon us with our years? whence comes it, that we thus make greater efforts to preserve our existence at a period when it becomes scarce worth the keeping? Is it that nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enJoyments; and, as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imagination in the spoil? Life would be insupportable to an old man who, loaded with infirmities, feared death no more than when in the vigour of manhood; the numberless calamities of decaying nature, and the consciousness of surviving every pleasure, would at once induce him, with his own hand, to terminate the scene of misery; but happily the contempt of death forsakes him at a time when it could only be prejudicial, and life acquires an imaginary value in proportion as its real value is no more.

Chinvang the Chaste, ascending the throne of China, commanded that all who were unjustly detained in prison during the preceding reigns should be set free. Among the number who came to thank their deliverer on this occasion there appeared a majestic old man, who, falling at the emperor's feet, addressed him as follows: Great father of China, behold a wretch, now eighty-five years old, who was shut up in a dungeon at the age of twenty-two. I was imprisoned, though a stranger to crime, or without being even confronted by my accusers. I have now lived in solitude and darkness for more than fifty years, and am grown familiar with distress. As yet, dazzled with the splendour of that sun to which you have restored me, I have been wandering the streets to find out some friend that would assist, or relieve, or remember me; but my friends, my family, and relations are all dead, and I am forgotten. Permit me, then, O Chinvang, to wear out the wretched remains of life in my former prison; the walls of my dungeon are to me more pleasing than the most splendid palace: I have not long to live, and shall be unhappy except I spend

the rest of my days where my youth was passed-in that prison from whence you were pleased to release me.'

The old man's passion for confinement is similar to that we all have for life. We are habituated to the prison, we look round with discontent, are displeased with the abode, and yet the length of our captivity only increases our fondness for the cell. The trees we have planted, the houses we have built, or the posterity we have begotten, all serve to bind us closer to earth, and imbitter our parting. Life sues the young like a new acquaintance; the companion, as yet unexhausted, is at once instructive and amusing; its company pleases, yet for all this it is but little regarded. To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend; its jests have been anticipated in former conversation; it has no new story to make us smile, no new improvement with which to surprise, yet still we love it; destitute of every enjoyment, still we love it; husband the wasting treasure with increasing frugality, and feel all the poignancy of anguish in the fatal separation.

6

Sir Philip Mordaunt was young, beautiful, sincere, brave, an Englishman. He had a complete fortune of his own, and the love of the king his master, which was equivalent to riches. Life opened all her treasures before him, and promised a long succession of future happiness. He came, tasted of the entertainment, but was disgusted even at the beginning. He professed an aversion to living, was tired of walking round the same circle; had tried every enjoyment, and found them all grow weaker at every repetition. If life be in youth so displeasing,' cried he to himself, what will it appear when age comes on? if it be at present indifferent, sure it will then be execrable.' This thought imbittered every reflection; till at last, with all the serenity of perverted reason, he ended the debate with a pistol! Had this self-deluded man been apprised that existence grows more desirable to us the longer we exist, he would have then faced old age without shrinking; he would have boldly dared to live, and served that society by his future assiduity which he basely injured by his desertion.

A General Election (about 1760).

The English are at present employed in celebrating a feast which becomes general every seventh year; the parliament of the nation being then dissolved, and another appointed to be chosen. This solemnity falls infinitely short of our [Chinese] feast of the lanterns, in magnificence and splendour; it is also surpassed by others of the east in unanimity and pure devotion; but no festival in the world can compare with it for eating. Their eating, indeed, amazes me; had I five hundred heads, and were each head furnished with brains, yet would they all be insufficient to compute the number of cows, pigs, geese and turkeys, which upon this occasion die for the good of their country.

To say the truth, eating seems to make a grand ingredient in all English parties of zeal, business, or amusement. When a church is to be built, or an hospital endowed, the directors assemble, and instead of consulting upon it, they eat upon it, by which means the business goes forward with success. When the poor are to be relieved, the officers appointed to dole out public charity assemble and eat upon it: nor has it ever been known that they filled the bellies of the poor till they had previously satisfied their own. But in the election of magistrates, the people seem to exceed all bounds; the merits of a candidate are often measured by the number of his treats; his constituents assemble, eat upon him. and lend their applause, not to his integrity or sense, but to the quantities of his beef and brandy.

And yet I could forgive this people their plentiful meals on this occasion, as it is extremely natural for every man to eat a great deal when he gets it for nothing; but what amazes me is, that all this good living no way contributes to improve their goodhumour. On the contrary, they seem to lose their temper as they lose their appetites: every morsel they swallow, and every glass they pour down, serves to increase their animosity. Many an honest man, before as harmless as a tame rabbit, when loaded with a single election dinner, has become more dangerous than a charged culverin. Upon one of these occasions I have actually seen a bloody-minded manmilliner sally forth at the head of a mob, determined to face a desperate pastry-cook, who was general of the opposite party.

But you must not suppose they are without a pretext for thus beating each other. On the contrary, no man here is so uncivilised as to beat his neighbour without producing very sufficient reasons. One candidate, for instance, treats with gin, a spirit

of their own manufacture; another always drinks brandy imported from abroad. Brandy is a wholesome liquor; gin a liquor wholly their own. This then furnishes an obvious cause of quarrel, whether it be most reasonable to get drunk with gin, or get drunk with brandy? The mob meet upon the debate; fight themselves sober; and then draw off to get drunk again, and charge for another encounter. So that the English may now properly be said to be engaged in war; since, while they are subduing their enemies abroad, they are breaking each other's heads at home.

NOVELISTS.

The decline of the tragic drama was accompanied by a similar decline of the heroic romances, both being in some measure the creation of an imaginative and chivalrous spirit. As France had been the country in which the early romance, metrical or prosaic, flourished in greatest strength, it was from the same nation that the second class of prose fictions, the heroic romances, also took its rise. The heroes were no longer Arthur or Charlemagne, but a sort of pastoral lovers, like the characters of Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia, who blended modern with chivalrous manners, and talked in a style of conventional propriety and decorum. This spurious offspring of romance was begun in the seventeenth century by an author named Honore d'Urfé, who was followed by Gomberville, Calprenede, and Madame Scudery. D'Urfé had, episodically, and under borrowed names, given an account of the gallantries of Henri IV.'s court, which rendered his style more piquant and attractive; but generally, this species of composition was harmless and insipid, and its productions of intolerable length. The Grand Cyrus' filled ten volumes! Admired as they were in their own day, the heroic romances could not long escape being burlesqued. The poet Scarron, about the time of our commonwealth, attempted this in a work which he entitled the 'Comique Roman,' or Comic Romance,' which detailed a long series of adventures, as low as those of Cyrus were elevated, and in a style of wit and drollery of which there is hardly any other example. This work, though designed only as a ludicrous travesty of the romantic tales, became the first of a class of its own, and found followers in England long before we had any writers of the pure novel.

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Mrs. Aphra Behn amused the public during the reign of Charles II. by writing tales of personal adventure similar to those of Scarron, but loosely constructed. She was followed by Mrs. Manley, whose works are equally personal and equally licentious. Other models were presented in the early part of the century by the French novelist Le Sage, whose 'Gil Blas' and 'Devil on Two Sticks,' imitating in their turn the fictions of certain Spanish writers, consist of humorous and satirical pictures of modern manners, connected by a series of adventures. In England, the first pictures of real life in prose fiction were given by Defoe, who, in his graphic details, and personal adventures, all impressed with the strongest appearance of truth or proba

bility, has never, in his own walk, been excelled. That walk, however, was limited; of genuine humour or variety of character he had no conception; and he paid little attention to the arrangement of his plot. The gradual improvement in the tone and manners of society, the complicated relations of life, the growing contrast between town and country manners, and all the artificial distinctions that crowd in with commerce, wealth, and luxury, banished the heroic romance, and gave rise to the novel, in which the passion of love still maintained its place, but was surrounded by events and characters, such as are witnessed in ordinary life, under various aspects and modifications. The three great founders of this improved species of composition-this new theatre of living and breathing characters-were Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, who even yet, after the lapse of more than a century, have had no superiors.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON was born in Derbyshire in 1689, and was the son of a joiner, who could not afford to give his son more than the ordinary elements of education. In his seventeenth year, he was put an appentice to a printer in London, served seven years, and was afterwards five or six years a compositor and corrector of the press. He then set up for himself in a court in Fleet Street, whence he removed to Salisbury Court. He became master of an extensive business, and printer of the Journals of the House of Commons. In 1754 he was chosen master of the Stationers' Company, and in 1760 he purchased a moiety of the patent of printer to the king, which greatly increased his emoluments. He was a prosperous and liberal manmild in his manners and dispositions—and seems to have had only one marked foible—excessive vanity. From a very early period of his life, Richardson was a fluent letter-writer; at thirteen he was the confidant of three young women, whose love correspondence he carried on without any one knowing that he was secretary to the others. Two London publishers having urged him, when he was above the age of fifty, to write them a book of familiar letters on the useful concerns of life, he set about the composition of his 'Pamela,' as a warning to young people, and with a hope that it would turn them into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance writing.' The work as first published in two volumes was written in two months, and published in 1740, with such success, that five editions were exhausted in the course of one year.

'It requires a reader,' says Sir Walter Scott, 'to be in some degree acquainted with the huge folios of inanity over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep, ere he can estimate the delight they must have experienced from this unexpected return to truth and nature.' 'Pamela' became the rage of the town; ladies carried the volumes with them to Ranelagh Gardens, and hold them up to one another in triumph. Pope praised the novel as likely to do more good than