distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostleries than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance; and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy-after a sufficient application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth confidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, MONOCULUS is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavor to save the lives of others, his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to society as G. D. It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch, my couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honored with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, he discoursed of marvellous escapes - by carelessness of nurses by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy, — by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in school-boy frolics - by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke, by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance, by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of chanting of songs long ago ends of deliverance hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a child's, for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton - what a spark you were like to have extinguished forever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river, liquid artifice, wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abys - sinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? - Ye have no swans no Naiads -no river God, or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters? - Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture? — or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN? And could such spacious virtue find a grave I protest, George, you shall not venture out again no, not by daylight — without a sufficient pair of spectacles, — in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favor of sprinkling only! I have nothing but water in my head o'nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful, (that is, to me,) "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow mournful procession - suicidal faces, saved against their a will from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet hue, constrained Lazari, - Pluto's half-subjects, stolen fees from the grave, bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion or is it G. D.?-in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharves where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death. And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispos sessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus. A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet, or historian of Grecian or of Roman lore,—to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labors of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected, him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter,him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet; and patron of the gentle Christ's boy,who should have been his patron through life, the VOL. III. *GRAIUM tantum vidit. 23 mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his venerable Esculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. best of them— They fall below SYDNEY'S Sonnets - I speak of the are among the very best of their sort. the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work, (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application,) "vain and amatorious " enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." They savor of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the CommonwealthsBut Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French man. |