"Lord who?" says Uncle Ben, a leetle bit madded and wondered. 66 Why, Lord Bellamont, to be sure," answered the strunnge sailor," the English Governor of New England, and Admiral of the seas about it, under King William the Third." "Governor and Admiral in your teeth!" says my Uncle Ben again; for now his pluck was up, and there warn't no daunting him then; "what have we to do with the old country, your kings, or your governors? this is the Free City of Boston, in the Independent United States of America, and the second Year of Liberty, Seventy-seven, I reckon. And as for your William the Third, I guess he was dead long before I was raised, and I'm no cockerell. I'll tell you what it is, now, my smart fellow, you've got pretty considerably drunk in that rum cask, if you've been there ever since them old ancient days; and, to speak my mind plain, you're either the Devil or Captain Kidd. But I'd have you to know, I'm not to be scared by a face of clay, if you were both; for I'm an old Kentuck Rowdey, of Townfork by the Elkhorn; my breed's half a horse and half an alligator, with a cross of the earthquake! You can't poke your fun at me, I calculate; and so, here goes upon you for a villain, any way!" My Uncle Ben's pluck was now all up; for pretty considerably madded he was, and could bite in his breath no longer; so he flew upon the strannge Sailor, and walked into him like a flash of lightning into a gooseberry-bush, like a mighty, smart, active man as he was. Hold of his collar laid my Uncle Ben, and I reckon they did stoutly struggle together for a tarnation long time, till at last the mariner's coat gave way, and showed that about his neck there was a halter, as if he had been only fresh cut down from the gibbet! -Then my Uncle Ben did start back a pace or two, when the other let fly at him with a pretty considerable hard blow, and so laid him right slick sprawling along upon the ground. Uncle Ben said he never could guess how long they all laid there; but when they came to, they found themselves all stretched out like dead men by the niggers of the house, with a staved rum cask standing beside them. But, now-mark you this well-on one of the head-boards of the barrel was wrote, "W. K. The Vulture. 1701," which was agreed by all to stand for William Kidd, the Pirate. And July White, Uncle Ben's woolly-headed old nigger, said that he was once a loblolly-boy on board that very ship, when she was a sort of pickarooning privateer. Her crew told him that she sailed from the old country the very same year marked on the cask, when Kidd was hanged at Execution-Dock, and that they brought his body over to be near the treasure that he buried; and as every one knows that Kidd was tied up twice, why, perhaps, he never died at all, but was kept alive in that mighty elegant rum cask, till my Uncle Ben let him out again, to walk about New-York and Boston, round Charles Bay and Cape Cod, the Old Sow and Pigs, Hellegat, and the Hen and Chickens. There was a fat little Dutch Parson, who used to think that this story was only a mighty smart fable, because nobody could remember seeing the Pirate besides Uncle Ben; and he would sometimes say, too, that they were all knocked down by the rum, and not by the Captain, though he never told Uncle Ben so, I calculate; for he always stuck to it handsomely, and wouldn't 'bate a word of it for nobody. "Jonathan W." says When Uncle Ben had finished, he says, he, "I'll tell you what it is: I'll take it as a genuine favour if you'll pay Major Hickory for the sangaree and the toddy, and we'll be quits another day." And so I paid for it every cent; but would you believe it? though I've asked him for it a matter of twenty times, and more than that, Uncle Ben never gave me back the trifle that he borrowed of me from that day to this! INVITATION. COME уe, come ye, to the green, green wood; The squirrel is feasting on blossom and bud, Here ye may sleep In the moss so deep, While the moon is so warm and so weary, And sweetly awake As the sun through the brake Bids the fauvette and white-throat sing cheery. The quicken is tufted with blossom of snow, Peeps over her nest, In the midst of the crab-blossoms blushing; And the call of the pheasant Is frequent and pleasant, When all other calls are hushing. HOWITT. LITERARY MISERIES. "I'll print it, And shame the rogues."-PoPE. My friend Fosbrook,-Dick Fosbrook,-for the abbreviation which his good-fellowship had won for him at Westminster and Cambridge did not desert him upon his entrance into the real man and woman world of society,-was a very excellent personage. He was something more substantial than a mere "good fellow ;" he was a well-informed, sensible man, with more originality of talent than a reserved disposition permitted to rise to the surface. His shyness at length took refuge behind a title-page; that which he found no courage to say, he resolved to write. "Some sin, his parents' or his own," indeed, had dipped him in ink very early in life; his infant elegy upon his mother's favourite tabby had been wept over by every maiden aunt of the house of Fosbrook: his translations had been applauded by Busby; his prize-poems had been printed at Cambridge; he had lodged in the same house with Lord Byron; his grandmother was a Hayley; his bankers, Rogers, Towgood, and Co. Such a concatenation of impulses was irresistible, and Dick Fosbrook became an author! One fatal and highly unpoetical stumble befell him upon the very brink of Helicon. He married!-neither a muse, nor a Madame Dacier; but a very pretty girl,-reasonably rich, and unreasonably silly;—a professional alliance, however, for she was the daughter of a master in Chancery, and was already at the bar. The duties of his legal vocation did not at present interfere with his homage to the Nine; or, as his wife persisted in calling them, the foolish virgins. He wrote, he published, and wrote and published again; and if "the learned world said nothing to his paradoxes," he was equally taciturn as to the amount of the printer's bill, which he annually pocketed with a genuine Christmas groan! He flattered himself he wrote for immortality; that post- obit bond, the dishonouring of which falls so lightly on our feelings!and his wife and her relations, who regarded authorship as a lawless and cabalistic calling, inimical to the interests of church and state, and an increasing family, exulted in the premature deaths which unfailingly awaited his literary progeny. I dined with him once or twice at this period of his domestic felicity and public misfortunes, and I never beheld a happier or more contented man; he laughed at my bad jokes upon withered laurels, and Lethe, and the stream of Time; he told me that the indulgent public was a dunce, sans ears, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing ;" while his wife, half aside, whispered to me that the ingratitude of this senseless dunce had nearly alienated his mind from his former unprofitable studies. "Sur ces entrefaites," my own equally profitless pursuits led me to the Continent; and in the course of the three years I was vagabondizing through Italy, an incidental paragraph in Galignani's Journal bore honourable mention of "Mr Fosbrook, the popular author!" "Poor Dick!" said I, involuntarily, "no relation of thine, I fear!" Yet 'twas the same,-the very Dick I knew! One of his least meritorious works had made what is called a hit; he was now the "darling of the Muses ;" and what is better still, of the booksellers; one of the literary ephemera, basking in the transient sunshine of modern fame. Soon afterwards I landed at Dover, and after the due proportion of wrangling at the Custom-house, and grumbling at the divers instalments of tough beef-steaks and muddy wine, wherewith Messrs Wright defy the patience of the returning exile, I arrived in town, -heard the muffin-bell once more-that "Squilla di lontano Che paja 'l giorno pianger che si muore!" and deposited myself and my yellow valet, Gioacchino, in an hotel in Brook-street. The next day I wandered to my old club, which was grown as fine and uncomfortable as " Ninette a la cour;" heard my contemporaries observe, as they glanced towards a mirror, that I was miserably altered; lost my way in a wilderness of new streets, and my footing in a plunge through the puddles of a Macadamized square; and just as I was recovering my equilibrium of body, if not of temper, I perceived a lank, rueful visage, gazing sympathizingly upon my mischance. 'Twas a strangely familiar face,-'twas Fosbrook's; not Dick's, but the "popular author's!" His dolorous physiognomy expanded into smiles on this unexpected recognition. He took my arm, and my way onwards, and we turned literally and figuratively to the passages of our youth, till he almost became Dick again by the force of reminiscence. Nay! had it not been for the deferential salutation of two wise men, two very learned pundits, and the raised hats of a bustling Westminster-ward Member or two, whom we met scuffling down Regent-street, his popularity and his authorship would have been forgotten between us. "Dine with me to-morrow," said he at parting, "we shall be alone, and can gossip over our Trinity days." "With all my heart," I answered. At five,-in Gower-street?" "No, no! at seven, in Curzon-street;" but the words came not trippingly from his tongue. The morrow came, and I was delighted to find that, among the various removes of the day, dear Old Bond-street had not changed its town residence, although "almost ashamed to know itself;" and as I re-paraded my daily walks and ancient neighbourhood, I was startled by the sight of poor Fosbrook's face frowning in all the panes of the print-shops. There, at least, he was no Dick of mine; for his worthy countenance was distorted into a most cynical sneer, and he looked as blue and yellow as an Edinburgh review. Rain came on, and I was driven to the cruel refuge of a morningvisit; when, having excused myself from an impromptu dinner invitation, through my "pre-engagement to my friend Mr Fosbrook," "The popular author?"—I was amused to find that even to be his friend was a rising point in the thermometer of fashion; and my intervention was humbly prayed to render him my friend's friend too. Poor Fosbrook! I remember the time when I scarcely contrived to procure a third man to make up dummy whist with him; he was considered a chartered bore, by right divine, and according to the most approved authorities! It was, however, with a feeling nearly amounting to respect for his new honours, that I trod lightly upon the creaking step of my hackney-coach at the door of his new mansion, and was ushered by a sulky butler into a very literary-looking drawing-room. Over the marble sphinxed chimney-piece hung a fine portrait of its master, in oils, and by Lawrence! and over a buhl secretaire, a spirited sketch by Hayter-being the original of the authorial print of the Bond-street windows. Poor Fosbrook! I remember the time when a paltry profile was the only copy of his countenance ! Several proofs of splendid new engravings were "ordered to lie on the table," beside a few presentation copies of the latest works of the day. "Are they good for any thing ?" said I to Dick, who found me with a volume in my hands. "I really cannot take upon me to say," he replied gravely, and with the air of a man who is afraid of committing himself. "One of the worst consequences of scribbling ourselves is, that we have no leisure to look over these light productions, which are sometimes far from unamusing." "We"-thinks I to myself, editorial; while Richard (I will never Dick him any more) turned to the final page of the several works, and determined their length as the standard of their merits. A very light production now entered the room-Mrs Fosbrook; looking as dressy as the frontispiece of La Belle Assemblee." But if her gown were couleur de rose, her brow was black as Ere |