66 as well as better volumes, and is always worth something; while a loose dog's-eared volume is of no use to man or baste," being good for nothing on the "floor of God's creation," as Paddy has it. If "early genius" stand in need of incorporated assistance, to wing its airy flight, the printing society by itself is but one wing; and the most promising volatile never was able to soar without the aid of two. But if my project be adopted, I do not despair of seeing "merry England" a complete nation of rising geniuses, and of viewing the whole population on the wing like the people of Peter Wilkins's island; so that Diogenes would have more difficulty in finding amongst us a virgin muse" than a man. So I beg you will take this into serious consideration, if you have any regard for your attached admirer and friend M. OLD PAGES AND OLD TIMES. NO. IV. WHATEVER may have been the increase in the salary of our civic chief magistrate, or the aggrandisement of the City over which he presides, certain it is, that the glories of his state establishment have for many years been lamentably on the wane. The City-laureate, whose duty it was to sing the splendours of the Lord Mayor's show, has been long suppressed:-the City fool had already preceded him in abolition, though the duties continue to be divided among the court of aldermen: the kennel and the great hunting establishment in Finsbury would be forgotten, but that their memory is preserved in the name of the sole remaining officer-Mr. Common Hunt:--and the annual show itself has dwindled to a sorry tattered remnant of former magnificence. Within these few years, we remember to have seen stout wooden booths, forming a double row down the middle of Cheapside, within which sate the common councilmen smoking their pipes, with their wives and daughters beside them, and the procession moving along in slow pomp before them. But alas! "The glories of our civic state Are shadows, not substantial things :" the booths and the greater part of the procession have passed away, leaving no more traces behind them, than the smoke of the pipes when it mingled with the air. The City Waits would be hardly known to linger out their declining days, but for their annual application for Christmas boxes, an appeal which few perhaps would resist, if, like the writer of this article, they had been repeatedly awakened from their dreams in the dead silence of night by the melodious swellings of music, confounding their waking impressions with the wild visions of sleep, as if under the influence of some dulcet enchantment. Youthful reveries of lovers' serenades, the midnight hour, the season hallowed by religion, all combined to render the visit of these invisible musicians inexpressibly delightful to the mind of the writer. Had the mystery been dissolved by his seeing them, the charm would probably have been broken; for they are no longer "the topping tooters of the town," nor do they present themselves in uniform, or boast the gowns, silver chains, and salaries, which by the following extract from an old perio dical, they appear to have enjoyed at the latter end of the century before the last. "We blundered on in pursuit of our night's felicity, but scarce had walked the length of a horse's tedder, e'er we heard a noise so dreadful and surprising, that we thought the devil was riding a hunting through the City, with a pack of deep-mouthed, hell-hounds to catch a brace of tally-men for breakfast. At last bolted out from the corner of a street, with an Ignis Fatuus dancing before them, a parcel of strange hobgoblins, covered with long frize rugs and blankets, hooped round with leather girdles from their croopers to their shoulders; and their noddles buttoned up into caps of martial figure, like a Night Errant at tilt and turnament, with his wooden head lockt into an iron helmet: one armed, as I thought, with a lusty faggot-bat, and the rest with strange wooden weapons in their hands. Of a suddain they clap'd them to their mouths, and made such a frightful yelling that I thought the world had been dissolving. Under these amazing apprehensions, I asked my friend, what was the meaning of this infernal outcry. Why these,' says he, are the City Waites who play every winter's night through the streets. These are the topping tooters of the town, and have gowns, silver chains, and sallaries for playing Lilly Burlera to my Lord Mayor's horse through the City. Marry, said I, if his horse liked their music no better than I do, he would soon fling his rider for hiring such bug-bears to affront his ambleship."" Such of our readers as are in the habit of recreating themselves or their children with the pantomimic humours of Sadler's Wells, may contrast its present with its former state, when it was merely an eating house, where the guests were entertained with organs and fiddles. The following is extracted from an old pamphlet entitled "A.walk to Islington, with a description of New Tunbridge Wells, and Sadler's Musick House. London, printed in the year 1699. Being surfeited now with this dull recreation, We enter'd the house, were conducted up-stairs, While laughing and toying with their Joans and their jugs, Sat puffing tobacco in their mistress's faces." When the meanest of the King's subjects may travel to Windsor as fast as himself, galloping through the once formidable defile of Slough, without other evidence of its former bad ways, than what is retained in its name; when the citizen who leaves town in an opposite direction, may take a comfortable nap as he lolls towards Stratford in his sleek vehicle, neither of them would easily credit the sufferings endured by our ancestors, when they desperately braved the perils of a similar undertaking. We know that Queen Elizabeth often stuck fast in the mud upon her different progresses in the country; but that we may be fully aware how much we ought to thank heaven for Macadamised roads and well-poised stages, we should peruse the following account of a trip from Stratford to London so late as the time of King William. "When our Stratford Tub, by the assistance of its carrionly tits of different colours, had out-run the smoothness of the road, and entered upon London stones, with as frightful a rumbling as an empty hay cart, our leathern conveniency being bound in the braces to its good behaviour, had no more sway than a funeral Hers, or a country waggon, that we were jumbled about, like so many peas in a child's rattle, running at every kennel jolt a great hazard of a dislocation. This we endured till we were brought within White Chappel Bars, where we lighted from our stubborn caravan, with our elbows and shoulders as black and blew as a rural Joan that had been under the pinches of an angry fairy. Our weary limbs being rather more tired than refreshed by the thumps and tosses of our ill-contrived engine, as unfit to move upon a rugged pavement, as a gouty sinner is to hault o'er London Bridge with his boots on. For my part,' said 1, if this be the pleasure of riding in a coach thro' London streets, may those that like it enjoy it, for it has so loosened my joints in so short a passage, that I shall scarce recover my former strength this fortnight; and indeed of the two, I would rather chuse to cry mous-traps for a livelyhood, than be obliged every day to be drag'd about town under such uneasiness; and if the Quality's coaches are as troublesome as this, I would not be bound to do their penance for their estates.' You must consider,' says my friend, you have not the right knack of humouring the coaches motion, for there is as much art in sitting a coach finely, as there is in riding the great horse; and many a younger brother has got a good fortune by his graceful lolling in his chariot, and his genteel stepping in and out, when he pays a'visit to her ladyship. There are a great many such qualifications among our true French-bred gentlemen, besides the smooth dancing of a minuet, the making of a love song, the neat carving up a fowl, or the thin paring of an apple."" Old plays and novels have ennobled the Mall and St. James's Park with such pleasant associations, that in spite of its dismantled and sombre appearance, its neglected decaying trees, its time-worn broken benches, and melancholy looking stagnant canal, we can find in its forlorn walks more food for pleasant thought than in the greener and more fashionable promenades of its rival parks. Charles the Second, as Colley Cibber tells us in his Apology-"even in his indolent amusement of playing with his dogs and feeding his ducks in St. James's Park, which I have seen him do, made the common people adore him, and consequently overlook in him what in a prince of a different temper they might have been out of humour at." Upon this spot formerly stood Duck Island, which was erected into a sort of jurisdiction, that it might afford a handsome revenue to M. de St. Evremond; and the place where numerous birds were suspended from the trees in cages, is still known by the name of the Bird-cage Walk. In reading the 'following description of sylvan scenery, embellished with the meanders of a "fluminous labyrinth," it is difficult to persuade ourselves that the writer has fallen into such a pastoral enthusiasm in delineating the beauties of St. James's Park. "From thence we walked up to a canal where ducks were frisking about, and standing upon their heads, showing as many tricks in their liquors as a Bartholomew fair tumbler. Said 1 to my friend, his Majesty's ducks are wondrous merry;' he replying-well they may, for they are always tippling.' We then took a view of the famed figure of a gladiator, which indeed is well worthy of the place it stands in, for the exactness of its proportion, and the true placing and expression of the exterior muscling veins and arteries. Behind this figure, upon the foot of the pedestal, my friend and I sat down to please our eyes with the prospect of the most delightful aqueduct, and to see its feathered inhabitants the ducks, divert us with their sundry pastimes. We arose from thence and walked up by the decoy, where meanders glid so smoothly beneath their osier canopies, that the calm surface seemed to express nothing inhabited this watery place but peace and silence. I could have wished myself capable of living obscure from mankind in this element, like a fish, purely to have enjoyed the pleasure of so delightful a fluminous labyrinth, whose intricate turnings so confound the sight, that the eye is still in search of some new discovery, and never satisfied with the tempting variety so artificially ordered in so little a compass. of "We turned up from thence into a long lime-tree walk, where either art or nature had carefully preserved the trees in such exact proportion to each other, that a man would guess by their appearance, they all aspire in height, and spread in breadth to just the same dimensions, and confine the leaves and branches to an equal number. The termination of this delectable walk was in a knot of lofty elms, by a pond side, round some of which were commodious seats for the tired ambulators to refresh their weary pedestals. Here a parcel of old worn-out cavaliers were conning over the civil wars, and looking back into the history of their past lives to moderate the anxiety and infirmity age with a pleasing reflection of their youthful actions. Among the rest a country curmudgeon was standing with his back against a tree, leaning forward on his oaken companion, his staff, and staring towards the top of a high adjacent elm. 'Pray,' said I, 'friend, what is it you are so earnestly looking at? Who answered me-at yonder bird's-nest. I further asked him'what bird's nest is it?' Who replied- what a foolish question you asken me! Why, did you ever know any thing but rooks build so near the King's palace?'-whose innocent return put my friend and I into a laughter. I asked if he did not think they were very noble trees. Yes, zure,' said he, if the King's trees should not be noble, pray whose should?' 'I mean,' said 1, dont they thrive and spread finely? They have nothing else to do,' says he,' as I know on: every thing thrives that stands upon crown land, zure.' For the present we shall conclude our citations from old periodicals, with an article from the Country Journal, or the Craftsman of Saturday, May 20, 1732. It would have been of special service to M. Polydori, had he prefixed it to his Tale of the Vampyre, which it was attempted to palm upon us as Lord Byron's. "Extract of a private letter from Vienna. "We have received certain advice of a sort of prodigy lately discovered in Hungary, at a place called Heyducken, situate on the other side of the Tibiscus, or Teys; namely of dead bodies sucking, as it were, the blood of the living; for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are filled with blood. The fact at first sight seems to be impossible, and even ridiculous, but the following is a true copy of a relation attested by unexceptionable witnesses, and sent to the Imperial Council of War. "Madreyga in Hungary, January 7th, 1932. Upon a current report that in the village of Madreyga, certain dead bodies (called here Vampyres) had killed several persons by sucking out all their blood, the present enquiry was made by the honourable commander-in-chief; and Captain Goschutz of the Company of Stallater, the Haderagi Bariacrar, and the senior Heyduke of the village, were severally examined; who unanimously declared that about five years ago, a certain Heyduke named Arnold Paul, was killed by the overturning of a cart-load of hay, who in his life-time was often heard to say that he had been tormented near Caschaw, and upon the borders of Turkish Servia, by a Vampyre; and that to extricate himself he had eaten some of the earth of the Vampyre's graves, and rubbed himself with their blood. "That twenty or thirty days after the decease of the said Arnold Paul, several persons complained that they were tormented, and that in short he had taken away the lives of four persons. In order therefore to put a stop to such a calamity, the inhabitants of the place, after having consulted their Haderagi, caused the body of the said Arnold Paul to be taken up, forty days after he had been dead, and found the same to be fresh and free from all manner of corruption; that he bled at the nose, mouth and ears, as pure and florid blood as ever was seen; and that his shroud and winding sheet were all over bloody; and lastly, his finger and toe nails were fallen off and new ones grown in their room. "As they observed from all these circumstances that he was a Vampyre, they according to custom drove a stake through his heart, at which he gave a horrid groan, and lost a great deal of blood. Afterwards they burnt his body to ashes the same day, and threw them into his grave. "These good men say further, that all such as have been tormented or killed by the vampyres, become vampyres when they are dead; and therefore they served several other dead bodies as they had done Arnold Paul's for tormenting the living. 66 Signed, Batruer, First Lieutenant of the Regiment of Alexander. SONNET. To the Mocking-Bird.* WING'D mimic of the woods! thou motley fool, Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe; And sighing for thy motley coat again. We conjecture that this comes from a transatlantic friend, and should be glad to have more of his correspondence. |