CHILDREN'S YOUTHFUL PASTIMES. The fleecy shower is falling fast, They don their shubes, their waists they gird, Across the blank, snow-mantled mead. Of the disputed field the lords. Thus they sport with joyous screaming, Till, through the evening window gleaming, The taper summons them away From the frolic brief of day. Then, like coursers in the race, They homeward urge their gambol chase, To outstrip each other trying, And winter's frosty breath defying. Through the drear region of snow 'tis thus That sport the hardy sons of Russ; And while in frolic mood they play, Deem winter genial as May. THE SPANISH SERENADE, From the Russian of Pushkur. Zephyrs of eve Sport, thro' the air, Of Guadulquivér. Then Lady fling thy veil aside, Nor let it shroud thy beauty's pride; Who has been termed by his countrymen the Russian Bloomfield, is a peasant selftaught poet. A volume of miscellaneous pieces by him was published at St. Petersburg, in 1826; since which a second edition has appeared. As may be expected, they are full of localities that render it difficult for those who are unacquainted with the habits of the Russian to enter sufficiently into their spirit, or comprehend the allusions made in them. The above has been selected as free from all obscurity. Lo! yon silver orb invites thee, Love entreats thee :-shine, oh shine, THE FLAUNTONVILLES. BY S. S. "Another, and another, and another."-BYRON. dancing, that she might favour him "I knew one of these unhappy women," said Brancepeth, "who really did her duty to her six girls in a most exemplary manner, and to but little purpose at last-nay, don't curl your lip, Melbourne, she was neither my mother, nor my grandmother-no, as I hope for long life and merry mornings, neither kith nor kin to the Brancepeths. "There is not a watering-place in Britain, where the librarian has not inserted the name of Mrs. Flauntonville in his books: not a mile of fashionable sea-sand which has not borne the impress of the tight slipper of some one of the Misses Flauntonville. The lady herself had been a beauty, a country beauty; her father had the command of several votes in his county, and the little Amelia ate in with her bread and butter, the might, majesty, and mysticism of a member!" She learnt to recite, in order that she should deliver some toleraby bad verses, written by a relation of the family, to congratulate his return for the county: she studied "Mr. Flauntonville made four very bad speeches in the house, became the father of six daughters, and died. As the girls rose a spoke on the wheel of attraction, so did their mother descend one: every year which rounded the forms of the daughters, squared the contour of the mamma's figure, and by the time the young ladies had commenced rouge, Mrs. Flauntonville's face was a complete map of fashion, with the high roads to ruin-ugliness and death, crossing each other at every angle; but what with screwing, padding, and bolstering, the ci-devant beauty still contrived a very effective figure, and held herself as erect as though she had swallowed an arrow, partly to preserve her perishing figure, and partly, it may be, as a pattern for her young folks. "How the several Misses Flauntonville danced, sung, recited, and sentimentalized! Miss Alexandrina was a merry little blonde (fortunately for her, as blondes generally wear well), with large blue eyes, a small waist, and pretty loveable little hands and ancles; she was the Terpsichore of the family; her mamma must have spread her bread and butter with quicksilver instead of sugar, for she was always in motion; her indefatigability would have grown into the proverb of a country town, but Alexandrina never remained long enough in one place to become subject for a saw.' She waltzed, she quadrilled, she reeled (for par parenthèse, she had a spice of the romp in her), she scrambled through sandbanks and up rocks and over ditches; and finally, at the glowing age of forty-two, she eloped with a French ballet-master, and made her debut as Psyche, in a toetorturing composition of her light-heeled husband. "Miss Euphrosine was a brunette, and certainly a beauty; her eyes were like kennel coal, black and sparkling, and ever ready to emit light and life. She was a walking peerage; could give genealogies, dates, and possessions; never read poetry which was not written by a lord, and recited with emphasis (not discretion) from Lord Thurlow and Don Juan. When in a garrison town, which, from her mother's arrangements, sometimes accidentally happened, she always quadrilled or quoted with fieldofficers, unless noble blood or high prospects dignified the inferior ranks. She was anecdotical to an excess, but always aristocratically; told excellent stories at second hand, with a slight alteration in the personal pronouns, and always preferred persons who were baptized by surnames to those who only bore Christian ones; she despised your Johns, and Georges, and Thomases, and exclaimed with Madame de Genlis- L'a sent la canaille!' while she dwelt complacently on Spencers and Leicesters, and revelled amid Courteneys, and Stanhopes, and Burlingtons. She was a year younger than her sister, and espoused, three years before Alexandrina's dereliction, an emigrant Marquis, who, on the restoration, conducted her in triumph to the place of his nativity, where she broke her heart on discovering that his father swayed the fortunes of a wineshop. After these two unfortunate continental exportations, Mrs. Flauntonville laid her express commands on the four remaining spinsters, that come what would, ay, even though it should be old maidenism itself, they would never "seriously incline" to a foreigner, at any rate beneath the rank of an am bassador or a plenipotentiary; and she then began, like the baffled spider, whose web has been broken through by two unlucky flies, to repair the damages which her intricate respectability had sustained, by forswearing all communion with Columbine, and refusing to receive the little grandson of the Marquis de Chateau Margot; thus leaving him to encounter the perils of Popery, and the dispension of vin ordinaire. "Miss Seraphina was the third daughter of the defunct member; always wore black, ate dry bread for breakfast, never took any thing but vegetables when she dined out, wore her hair en Madonna, to give a poetical expression to her countenance; the said hair was auburn, and her eyes hazel, and each fine of their kind, but they were her all of beauty, if I except a sweet, a stranger would almost have said a sad smile, which at intervals played over her face. She read Spenser's Faërie Queene in bed every night, until Mrs. Flauntonville discovered that it spoilt her complexion, and never allowed her above an inch and a half of taper. Her hair, glowing and luxuriant as it was, would never curl; but Seraphina, nevertheless, wore it in all its length upon her shoulders, and it must be confessed that the effect leant rather to the poetical than the rational. This lover of the Muses had Byron by heart; entered into all the agonies of Parisina, and sympathized with Gulnare; wept over the illstarred fortunes of Zuleiga, and sang the Hebrew melodies to her guitar: doted on Coleridge, extasiated at the name of Moore, and kept a journal. She was by far too sentimental for an old maid; and a young ensign, whose heart her sighs and sonnets had perforated through and through like a bombarded city, romantically retired to a sequestered village on a month's leave-entered her name and his own in the book of bans -went thrice to church in an agony of adoration to hear them coupled together drew on his agent for an advance of pay-carried off his Dulcinea by moonlight in a post-chaise and four-married her in the month of December, attired in spotless muslin, and brought her back in all the fulness of success to his barrack-room! For a short time she was believed in the regiment to be his mother, but she played bride so prettily in white feathers and muslins, that they were at last convinced. Poor Seraphina! her single room is divided by a large screen, papered with the leaves of her precious journal; and her husband stands the last but one on the list of his regiment. She might just as well have married a foreigner, for her mother has never looked at her since. "Dorabella Cecilia, the next daughter, was just one of those women to whom the description of neither 'plain or pretty' applied exactly: she had fine teeth, but her mouth was too large; a well-shaped nose, but infinitely too much of it; clear, pleasing gray eyes, but no eyelashes; her person was well moulded, but too fleshy; she looked as if she had been on visiting terms with Mr. Daniel Lambert. There was a qualifying but' attached to every thing praiseable in Dorabella Cecilia—she had a smart foot, but her leg was a model of substantiality; a plump little hand, but an arm as red as-but enough of this: you may readily imagine from this slight sketch what Dorabella Cecilia was, and what she was not. She had her particular department in the family scina; she sang very sweetly, but she never remembered the whole of any one song which she attempted; she told facetious little stories, but nine times out of ten she missed the point of her own tale; yet she did it so good-humouredly, laughed so heartily and readily at her own deficiencies, and endeavoured so unaffectedly to please, that in spite of the family ban, every body liked her. Mrs. Flauntonville, however, never had any hopes of such an unfashionable being, and yet she was more fortunate than her sisters, for she married an old, gouty, country squire, who in his short intervals of ease called his Dora the best of wives, and in those of torment, cursed her sisters for husband-hunting jades, and her mother for an old, withered, made-up, mad woman! "Aspasia was now the only hope of Mrs. Flauntonville's heart; she was slight, well formed, fair of feature, elegant of address, and refined alike in tastes, habits, and partialities; but there was a sad, a deadly blight over all this bright blossoming; she was blue, blue, deep blue! She wrote sonnets, essays, elegies-had once sent an article to a leading periodical, which had not been inserted, and dabbled in metaphysics! What could be done with such a creature? Aspasia would neither flower muslin, or net purses; neither enter into small talk, or play loo: who would marry a blue? the golden hair might gleam like sunbeams, the clear brown eyes sparkle like diamonds-what availed it? She was a precieuse; and every man does not think like the ingenious author of the Honey Moon,' on the subject of female wits. In vain did Mrs. Flauntonville tutor, torture, and terrify; Aspasia promised to play unsophistication and simplicity; but some unlucky contretemps always betrayed the cheat; and at seven-and-thirty, Miss Aspasia Flauntonville is still unmarried, and to be seen seated among periodicals, new novels, essays on all sorts of incomprehensibilities, and scraps of paper crossed and recrossed, with her own effusions, prosaical, and poetical. "Jemima, the youngest, was a tall, bony woman, with sunburnt cheek, and red hair; there was no making any thing fashionable of her, and Mrs. Flauntonville in despair, gave her carte blanche to carve out her own fortunes. No one had ever paid Jemima any attention, and her mother prognosticated that no one ever would; but the worthy old lady had been in error two or three times on such subjects; she was wrong again here. Jem, as she had always been called in the family, made a decided conquest one evening, in getting out of a hackneycoach (for Mrs. Flauntonville's carriage was already full to overflowing, and the young lady did not choose to be lurched,' as she expressed it, on that account), when she battled with the driver about an odd sixpence, and vowed, by Jingo! that she would have him up to Essex Street the very next morning. Even at this moment did she make a conquest: a gaunt man of six feet and upwards, as she told the story, doffed beaver to her, and despatched the coachman. Jemima made an offer of a seat in her mother's box, and it was accepted. Mr. Chaseall called the next day, to inform his new acquaintance that he had settled the Jarvey;' and this sentimental beginning produced a wedding in the family; the gentleman was won by the circumstance of Jemima's having suffered his favourite setter to tear her gown nearly off her back without a remark: and the lady, by the knowledge that he had a famous stud, and a capital pack. Jemima's bridal attire was a habit and beaver, and her first entertainment, a hunting-dinner; she was the delight of all the grooms and whippers-in for miles round, and might have been so still, had she not one day, in taking a leap, lost her saddle, and broken her neck; her worthy lord and husband followed close behind her, but with better success, exclaiming, as he cleared the leap, Poor Jem, she'll be distanced this time any how!' distanced she was sure enough; but I think of the two, I should have preferred her broken neck to her sister's broken heart. Poor Mrs. Flauntonville fulfilled her duty towards her girls, according to her own acceptation of the term; she gave them all possible opportunities of doing well, and was always in good humour with them before company; but you see it availed them nothing, and she now remains a finger-post for all intriguing mothers, and establishment-seeking daughters, to warn them from the bad taste, and worse fortune of the path which she herself trod." "But where is the old lady now, Brancepath?" "Nay, nay, that were to tell talesyou have heard her history; and trust me, Melbourne, that with your face, your figure, and your fortune, you will meet with some of the family before you die!" ALL ANNO 1831. Magnus ab integro sæculorum nascitur ordo. Su brandisci la lancia di guerra, Nel cammino che'l Tempo ti segna, Oh! se compi quell' opra sublime L'ANNO GRANDE DEL SACRO RISCATTO, Glorioso per lauri mietuti, Ammirato per fulgidi rai, Tua foreira l'Umana Ragione, A que' detti, che l'eco ripete, In gran cerchio la Gallia già spazia, Dalle cime dell' Alpi nevose, Cingi l' elmo, la mitra deponi, L'iperborea nemica grifagna Che due rostri ti figge nel seno, Ti divora, ti lania, ti sbrana, Vive faci d' esempj brillanti, Ti percuoton da lunge gli sguardi ; Chi ti batte con verga di ferro Ove sono, domanda taluno, I nipoti de' Scipj. de' Bruti? Non in altro che in pietre spezzate, |