been" at a feast of learning, and stolen the scraps." A well-woven sentence will "turn forth its silver lining" as gracefully as the cloud in Comus. There is a species of quotation, too, which has been and continues much in fashion among men of great and little genius, but on which I forbear in this place to dwell. It consists in omitting the inverted commas. Specimens of this sin of omission will be largely remembered. To adduce instances, would be to reprint one-half the books that have ever been written.

To public speakers quotations are of incalculable importance; they are as pillows of down to the overspurred and fainting faculties; they add a fluency to the most polished expression; they rush upon the ear like the eloquent arguments of old and beloved friends. Danger is, however, sometimes mixed up with the delight. I remember having once half mistaken a very specious doctrine for sound theology, simply because the accomplished divine recited a passage in Milton, which I had made as it were my own by frequent repetition.

A notice of the authors most eligible for quotation must be reserved for another opportunity. All writers are by no means alike in this respect. Pope (it may be remarked by the way) abounds in quotable things, chiefly from his habit of making every line rest on its own merits—a circumstance that accounts, in its turn, for the strong resemblance his couplets bear to each other. Of Shakspeare, not a line but has been repeatedly, and will continue to be cited, as a commentary on the great and various volume of human nature. this spirit, the unannounced author (not Sir Walter) of a fashionable, but acute and intellectual novel, with an extensive and available reading, selects from this one

In

grand authority the mottoes for every chapter of his work. It is a compliment to the divine poet, worthy of the writer in question.

And here I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example. Hogarth must be singularly tempting he is full of little bits. that would quote with a tickling effect. In music we are somewhat more fortunate, when the ear and throat happen to go (if I may say so) hand in hand. But let us be thankful that with books we can always make retirement, and produce and replant in the world the golden fruit of adventure. We can, besides, introduce ourselves, material and immaterial, to an imaginative reader, in a scrap of antique verse: it is the most philosophic, as well as cheapest of portraitures-it saves one a fortune in drawings from busts and engravings upon steel. Such is my regard for these scraps (which are what the Biographer of Sheridan would designate as "fossils of thought"), that I had meditated an article of rather than on quotations-one composed purely of isolated lines, wherein the sound and sense should blend with each other as colours meet in a rainbow. Something of the kind remains to be tried; but the experiment is a delicate one. It is to construct a cabinet of inlaid and curious workmanship-the forming a multitude of precious links into one matchless chain. Delight would, however, more than recompense the labour; we should gather the richest images from a hundred different points, and with conscious fingers,

"Feel music's pulse in all her arteries."

At all events, the pleasure of simply quoting would be something, while the beauty of the links themselves would atone for an occasional deficiency of connexion. For, as I have remarked, the lustre of quotations gives a clearness and a colour to the blankest page; or to use a figure of Cowley's,

"So lilies in a glass inclose,

The glass will seem as white as those."

In a well-penned essay, they are as "sweets to the sweet" to an inelegant one they will lend a grace, though they cannot animate it into beauty. They may, in this respect, be likened to the dolphins that are said to have brought to shore the dead body of Hesiod: they saved from the deep what, after all, was only lifeless clay.

£. s. d.

"These three,

Three thousand confident, in act as many."-SHAKSPEARE.

LET not the reader anticipate a bill of parcels, or an article on the Currency Question,-things which will be herein treated with a philosophic indifference bordering on the magnanimous. I should as soon think of sitting down to get the Laureat's Vision by heart, or to turn an act of parliament into Anacreontics, as of seeking to obtain the countenance of the King's lieges by apostrophizing that of his Majesty, of the dispantalooned St. George, of his steed or of the dragon, as they appear (or disappear) on certain pieces of gold, of which Mr. Cobbett and his readers only know the exact importance and appropriation. Yet professing an enthusiastic and enlightened ignorance

of all figures (those of rhetoric, the amount of the national debt and the number of years necessary to the elucidation of a suit in Chancery, excepted)—I nevertheless proceed to celebrate the various and wonderworking merits of the celebrated trio above, with an intensity of veneration that would do honour to a loancontractor. Nor, it must be premised, is a perception of the sublime and beautiful in their composition and arrangement necessarily based on a Ready-reckoner. Let us, for a moment, rise superior to the omnipotency of ruled account-books, and tables of multiplication : or rather let us make ourselves wings of bonds and of bank-notes, flying to the uttermost treasuries of metaphor, and bidding defiance to vulgar-fractions in the very security of our paper-pinions.

If all the languages of this glorified and gossipping world were condensed into one little lexicon, and all its word-makers and philologists jumbled into one mountainous Samuel Johnson, it would still be difficult to point out any three letters so mysteriously imbued with the qualities of good and evil—so pregnant with matter-of-fact and metaphysics, with fortunes and misfortunes, as the golden text above-written. The "milk of human kindness," and the hemlock draught of discord and passion, are by turns distilled into the bosom of society through the fine but indestructible filaments of these simple initials. What, in art or nature, in history rational or romantic, may be likened unto them! We may search the map of magic, and the tables of science; the lines of a philosopher's face, and those of a poet's volume; but we shall scrutinise in vain: we shall find no indication of a spirit so full of vital breath and meaning-so visible, so potent, and so instantaneously familiar to the business and bosoms of all. The three heads of Cerberus hang abashed and

impotent before this more terrible triumvirate: on the other hand, the Graces themselves appear heavy and misshapen, compared with the gentle aspects and fairylike proportions of these little alphabetical creatures. They are the only genuine "veni, vidi, vici," of human action and triumph; all others are counterfeit. Had Cæsar dated his despatches from Lombard-street, he would have seen and done honour to the distinguishing force of sentiment that characterises the greatest and most convincing relics of his land and language. As evidence of the eloquent harmony that naturally belongs to them, it should not be forgotten that they are indebted for their untranslated beauty to the same tongue in which Cicero pleaded and Maro sang. It may on the other side be argued, that they form a sort of Holy Alliance in letters, to the exclusion and debasement of many honourable conjunctions, and virtuous words in full; that they look like the basis of a system for cutting short our venerable and voluminous mode of speech, and making telegraphs of human tongues,—in short, to make us talk and write in initials (heavy days for orators and editors!) to depopulate our fruitful polysyllables, and establish a race of interjections,— and all this to afford free scope for the despotic and despicable vanity of a few legitimate head-letterssuper-royal finger-posts to the science and syntax of the alphabet. They would, however, be more properly compared to a King, Lords, and Commons, pouring a profusion of splendid images and noble impressions into the empty pockets of mankind, and having each its period to mark the abbreviation of absolute power. But say they are a monstrous combination of enigmas, -an hieroglyphical epitaph on the tomb of social intercourse and natural simplicity of mind and manners, the death-warrant of faith, and of that