of lilac that I used to send as a present to my partner? or of times still longer past-the Court of Louis XIV. the Duke de Nemours and the Princess of Cleves? or of the time when she who was all grace moved in measured steps before me, and wafted me into Elysium? I know not how it was, but it came over the sense with a power not to be resisted,

like the sweet south,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

I mention these things to shew, as I think, that pleasures are not
"like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;

Or like the snow-fall in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm."

On the contrary, I think they leave traces of themselves behind them, durable and delightful even in proportion to the regrets accompanying them, and which we relinquish only with our being. The most irreconcilable disappointments are, perhaps, those which arise from our obtaining all we wish.

The Opera figurante despises the peasant girl that dances on the green, however much happier she may be, or may be thought by the first. The one can do what the other cannot. Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power; and this is one great source of self-congratulation, if not of self-satisfaction. This, however, is continually increasing, or at least renewing, with our advances in skill and the conquest of difficulties; and, accordingly, there is no end of it while we live, or till our faculties decay. He who undertakes to master any art or science has cut himself out work enough to last the rest of his life, and may promise himself all the enjoyment that is to be found in looking down with self-complacent triumph on the inferiority of others, or all the torment that there is in envying their success. There is no danger that the machine will ever stand still afterwards. Mandeville has endeavoured to shew that if it were not for envy, malice, and all uncharitableness, mankind would perish of pure chagrin and ennui; and I am not in the humour to contradict him. The same spirit of emulation that urges us on to surpass others, supplies us with a new source of satisfaction (of something which is at least the reverse of indifference and apathy) in the indefatigable exertion of our faculties, and perception of new and minor shades of distinction. These, if not so delightful, are more subtle, and may be multiplied indefinitely. They borrow something of taste and pleasure from their first origin, till they dwindle away into mere abstractions. The exercise, whether of our minds or bodies, sharpens and gives additional alacrity to our active impressions, as the indulgence of our sensibility, whether to pleasure or pain, blunts our passive ones. The will to do, the power to think, is a progressive faculty, though not the capacity to feel. Otherwise the business of life could not go on. If it were necessity alone that oiled the springs of society, people would grow tired and restive; they would lie down and die. But with use there comes a habit, a positive need of something to keep off the horror

of vacancy. The sense of power has a sense of pleasure annexed to it, or, what is practically tantamount, an impulse, an endeavour, that carries us through the most tiresome drudgery or the hardest tasks. Indolence is a part of our nature too. There is a vis inertia at first, and a difficulty in beginning or in leaving off. I have spun out this essay in a good measure from the dread I feel of entering upon new subjects. This reasoning is necessary to account for the headstrong and incorrigible violence of the passions where the will is once implicated. So in ambition, in avarice, in the love of gaming and of drinking (where the strong stimulus is the chief excitement), there is no hope of any termination, of any pause or relaxation; but we are hurried forward, as by a fever where all sense of pleasure is dead, and we only persevere as it were out of contradiction, and in defiance of the obstacles, the mortifications, and privations we have to encounter. The resistance of the will to outward circumstances, its determination to create its own good or evil, is also a part of the same constitution of the mind. The solitary captive can make a companion of the spider that straggles into his cell, or find amusement in counting the nails in his dungeon door, while the proud lord that placed him there feels the depth of solitude in crowded ball-rooms and hot theatres, and turns with weariness from the scenes of luxury and dissipation. Defoe's romance is the finest possible exemplification of the manner in which our internal resources increase with our external wants.

Our affections are enlarged and unfolded with time and acquaintance. If we like new books, new faces, new scenes, or hanker after those we have never seen, we also like old books, old faces, old haunts,

"Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness may grow."

If we are repelled after a while by familiarity, or when the first gloss of
novelty wears off, we are brought back from time to time by recurring
recollections, and are at last wedded to them by a thousand associations.
Passion is the increased irritation of the will from indulgence or op-
position imagination is the anticipation of unknown good: affection
is the attachment we form to any object from its being connected with
the habitual impression of numberless sources and ramifications of
pleasure. The heart is the most central of all things. Our duties also
(in which either our affections or our understandings are our teachers)
are much the same, and must find us at our posts. If this is ever
difficult at first, it is always easy in the end. The last pleasure in life
is the sense of discharging our duty.

Our physical pleasures (unless as they depend on imagination and opinion) undergo less alteration, and are even more lasting than any others. They return with returning appetite, and are as good as new. We do not read the same book twice two days following; but we had rather eat the same dinner two days following than go without one. Our intellectual pleasures, which are spread out over a larger surface, are variable for that very reason, that they tire by repetition, and are diminished in comparison. Our physical ones have but one condition for their duration and sincerity, viz. that they shall be unforced and natural. Our passions of a grosser kind wear out before our senses; but in ordinary cases they grow indolent and conform to habit instead of becoming impatient and inordinate from a desire of change, as we are satisfied with more moderate bodily exercise in age or middle life than we

are in youth. Upon the whole, there are many things to prop up and reinforce our fondness for existence after the intoxication of our first acquaintance with it is over; health, a walk and the appetite it creates, a book, the doing a good-natured or friendly action, are satisfactions that hold out to the last; and with these, and any others to aid us that fall harmlessly in our way, we may make a shift for a few years after we have exhausted the first transports of an eager and enthusiastic imagination, and without being under the necessity of hanging or drowning ourselves as soon as we come to years of discretion.

TO THE YEAR ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND

TWENTY-FOUR.

THOU portion of the perish'd past,
Upon the shoreless ocean cast
Of gone eternity!

I see remote thy lessening sail
Move on before the steady gale

That bears thee far from me;
But I regard thee as a friend

Laid where all mortal friendships end,
And will not hail the new-born year,
Ungratefully, while thou art near.

Thou wert my own-I grasp'd thee all-
Now Memory can only call

Her retrospects of thee

And she has stored up much for thought,
From thy revolving seasons taught,

And man's society,

To profit, please, regret, enjoy,
In meditation's high employ,
If thy successor lead me not
Where Memory is herself forgot!
Thou art a thing of shadows now—
A land of hills, whose lofty brow
Has melted in blue air,
With every scene and landscape fled ·
Thou 'rt gone with ages vanished
Our fathers told not where ;
For thou wert but a fancied space,
A step in Time's eternal race

Dream'd of by man, as vainly he
Thought to mete out infinity!

I never wish'd thee fast to fly-
Youth might; but Hope no more my eye
With gaudy hues can cheat;
For I have lived enough to know
A chequer'd life of weal and woe
Is all allow'd by Fate:

And I would travel with my kind
Throughout the path for man desigu❜d-
Not that my ties to life are great,
For I have found it desolate.

How many a cheek of rosy hue-
How many an eye of beauty, too,
Hast thou seen chill in dust!

The great, the eloquent, the sage,
Genius with its undying page,
The vicious, and the just!

The knell of death proud names has rung,
And thou hast seen them laid or flung
In land or ocean-seen end there
Their tale-all they have been, and are!
With heedless souls not fast enough
Thy moments flew, and smooth or rough
They hurried thee away,-

When the full sum of all their time,
From age back to their fleeting prime,
Was but one little day ;-

In which, while some had ages spent,
And rear'd a deathless monument,
Others had never lived an hour,
But pass'd away like summer shower.

The consciousness with thee t' have been-
The value of thy bygone scene,

The present time beguile,

And stamp thy value, parted year!

For in the past alone appear

Things that make reason smile

All that can strew its path with flowers ;-
Can reason build on coming hours?
As well a palace think to rear
Upon a sunbeam in mid air!

Oh, there is sadness round thy flight!
With thee were cover'd o'er in night,
To wither where they lay,

A thousand sweets affection shew'd,
A thousand little flowers that strew'd
Deliciously thy day-

Too frail and gentle to survive,
Too lovely long on earth to thrive-
Having exhausted round thy urn
The fragrance that shall ne'er return!
Regret, and thought, and hope, and fear,
Such as attend the dying year,

Have waited upon thee;

For who could see thee die, nor feel
That thou wert link'd to his own weal
By closest sympathy?

That part of his own breath was gone-
He had less time to live upon-

That every moon thou wheel'det away
Bore him still nearer t'wards decay!

Farewell, thou evanescent beam!
Thou seemest now a baseless dream
Of vapour, sun, and shade—
The parted name of nothingness —
Again farewell! Oft shall I press
Imagination's aid

To call thee back to me, and tell
Of scenes my heart shall cherish well-
Not leaving thee neglectedly

Like things forgotten where they die!

A VISION OF JUDGMENT, IN PROSE.

It was ten o'clock of the morning, the third day of term, and not a phantom, or rather not a substance, (for phantoms came and went in abundance,) of a client or a fee! I consulted with myself-a most unprofitable consultation, by the by, for a practising barrister-what to do? Should I go to Westminster,-sit for hours of dead monotony on a back seat in the King's Bench, playing off a cognoscent air of legal gravity upon the attornies, pending motions for new trial in Stumps v. Jumps and Co., unrelieved even by a passing gleam of superior sense or sarcasm from Brougham or Scarlet; who, on common occasions, are very prudently but common men. There are two things for which I have a particular dislike-quackery and ennui; I accordingly ruled the point against going to Westminster. The next question was how to kill the time in chambers. I looked round for something to amuse myself with. My table was strewed with law tomes, some of which lay gracefully recumbent, in a certain half-open half-shutting negligee-not unlike Madame reclining unzoned, in her bergère, of a morningso as to give signs (the books I mean) of having been pored over con amore. There were besides a few briefs, in causes long defunct, carefully arranged, and so religiously undisturbed as to be a little dustcovered. Two friends of mine observing this latter phænomenon, a few days before, complimented me on my industry and prospects of success. "I see," said one, who is a classic wit and a fine gentleman about town,- "I see you have not forgotten our old theme of collegiate exercise, non sine pulvere palmam," delicately rubbing off at the same time a little dust which his glove had contracted from too incautiously placing his hand upon the papers.- "No," observed the other, a notorious punster-" he keeps those briefs to throw dust in the eyes-no uncommon mode of getting on at the bar in these times, witness and and Co." The names are omitted, out of delicacy. The reader, indeed, can be at no loss for the means of filling up the blanks at his own discretion. It may be easily imagined that I was not in a disposition to "consult the books" or derange the briefs. I was in a half-desponding, half-castle-building state of mind,-a sort of poeticometaphysical, or it may be termed, Don Juan-reading humour. Don Juan! what mournful reminiscences in the name! Why did not Death innocently gorge himself on an Emperor, or an alderman-upon whole hecatombs of Turks, Tartars, tyrant minions, or crouching slaves-and spare Byron? But to resume: having already imbibed Don Juan to satiety, I looked about for something else; and was just taking down my old friend Candide, when my eyes were caught by a parcel which lay unopened. It contained two fresh-looking volumes, with a note from Mrs. recommending them to my perusal as the work of a learned judge. How is it, said I, that women will affect studies with which they have no proper concern? And who would have expected this confounded piece of Staelism*, from one who has so much wit and taste as Mrs. ? I opened the book, and was not a little surprised by the title, viz. "The Devil's Elixir." I passed in review the different

• The word is now somewhat stale (I disclaim a pun) but brief and expressive.