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THE

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

JANUARY 1, 1828.

ORIGINAL PAPERS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE,

SIR, I have a singular facility at composing, but I hate the mechanical process of writing-it is so troublesome! Strong motives, however, will vanquish strong antipathies; and my natural tendency to inertness yields to the impulse of getting rid of a greater annoyance by the endurance of a less. Such is the philosophy of the present epistle. But to come to the point, without farther preface. The person who has the honour of addressing you is the last representative of the family of the Lazenby's (or Lazybees) of Snug-borough, Bedfordshire. Dutch by descent, and phlegmatic by temperament, our family possesses no gratuitous activity; and the enterprise of commerce, which brought us to England, diminishing with the necessity in which it arose, expired with my great grandfather. For myself, the heir to the moderate income and moderate views of my immediate progenitors, I improved on their natural tendency to repose, by selling our small landed property in Bedfordshire, and placing the proceeds in the funds, thus sparing myself all farther trouble of receiving rents and keeping accounts. All my family had lived in ease and died of apoplexy. Such was the family abhorrence of all the chances and changes of this transitory life, that even the colour of my Dutch great-grandsire's family coat (a bottle green) has never been changed by any one of the four generations (myself included) which have succeeded him. I came into the world the victim of a vis inertiæ, for which I am as little accountable as for my stature and complexion; and the lazy "blood" which had in my race" crept through sluggards ever since the flood," is an answer to all the reproaches launched against me by kind friends or by malignant enemies, (the slaves of a circulation something quicker than my own,) who talked of "the highest natural endowments rendered unavailable by consummate indolence." What jargon! Notwithstanding this corporeal indolence, my intellectual activity is very considerable. My world is all within-and a very busy world it has been. Even in the go-cart, which I occupied like a cage, in what ruminations did I not indulge on the rattle that lay motionless in my listless grasp! At school, where I was so often punished for "my idleness," what a life of labour did I not lead —what sums did I not work, while spinning my humming-top, (my favourite amusement)—and what problems did I not solve from Euclid, while standing motionless with the bandeau of blindman's buff upon my eyes! At college I obtained the reputation of a clever idle fellowbookworm, whose assiduity would never turn to any other account

Jan. 1828.-VOL. XXII. NO. LXXXV.

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66

than his own amusement. Insensible, however, to that weathercock thing called public opinion, the fluctuations of which are sources of perpetual anxiety to those who care for them, I continued to study, to lounge, and to enjoy, utterly careless of the on-dits of my college chums, or the admonitions of my college tutors. With a taste for literature, that amounted almost to a passion, and hating all the professions, liberal and illiberal, I soon made my election in favour of a life of literary leisure; and anxious to partake of the intellectual resources of the capital, without its bustle, I resolved on settling in the vicinity of London, beyond the reach of its noise and turmoil, and within the reach of its bookshops and libraries. In my twenty-second year, therefore, I removed from my rooms in Cambridge, to a small house in Church-lane, Kensington, flanked on one side by the church-yard, on the other by the quiet dwelling of an old Quaker lady, and commanding, in front, a view of the high dead walls of Kensington-gardens, surmounted by the dusky foliage of the high old trees, which I beheld budding and withering for ten successive years, nor ever changed, nor wished to change, my place." The few friends whom I thought it worth the trouble to retain, did not spare me on the worn-out subject of my inveterate indolence; for it is the vulgar error, even of the wise, to make money the stamp of utility, and to suppose, because a man does not consider life as a tread-mill, and convert himself into a dray-horse, that he is therefore an idle man, as if the term activity was only applicable to the inferior and animal faculties of the human species. The fact is, that he who is frequently stigmatized as indolent, is the most laborious of human beings; for what are the pirouettes and entrechats of "Les dieux de la danse," or the rapid movements of a runner to a bank, a commercial traveller, or a messenger to a cabinet minister, compared to the activity of him, who, seated in his easy chair, his slippered feet resting on the fender, his eyes fixed on nothing at all, sends forth his excursive thoughts over half the universe, nay over "the great globe itself," and having occupied the world of space with his mental creations, only brings back his " thick coming fancies" to work and recombine them upon objects directly within the sphere of his own immediate perceptions? With what strenuous idleness have I not laboured the powers of my imagination upon a single coal, in the front bar of my grate; now beholding in its dim red lustre "one entire and perfect chrysolite;" and now, by a rapid decomposition, the carbonic mass broken up into elements of a chaotic world, till, suddenly assuming the form of my own red night-cap, it gradually ramified into those grotesque particles which image the old woman's beauideal of the "Great Unknown," with hoofs and horns and saucer eyes; the whole phantasmagoric appearance terminating in a grand explosion, giving me a better view of Vesuvius burying under its showers of fire Pompeii and Herculaneum, than I have ever seen exhibited in the best and most splendid Panorama. But the arduous dreams of my winter's fire-side are nothing to the reveries of my summer lounges in Kensington Gardens, or other "realms of peace" and sameness, reveries which send me "from Indus to the Pole," and alternately drive me from an iceberg in the frozen regions to the burning sands of ArabiaPeæa.

Many a long summer's evening have I passed on the bank of some motionless pond, stretching "my listless length along," and, appa

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