ing deadly-killing sables-the 'hoary majesty of spades'- Pam in all his glory!— repique- the capot - they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two "All these might be dispensed with; and or even three, she never greatly cared for with their naked names upon the drab paste- She loved the quadrate, or square. She board, the game might go on very well, would argue thus:- Cards are warfare: the pictureless. But the beauty of cards would ends are gain, with glory. But cards are be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all war, in disguise of a sport: when single that is imaginative in them, they must adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a too palpable. By themselves, it is too close dull deal board, or drum head, to spread a fight: with spectators, it is not much them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet bettered. No looker-on can be interested, (next to nature's), fittest arena for those except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys in!-Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers-(work of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, -or as profanely slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess) exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate!" The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence: this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death. The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,-disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "Go"-or "That's a go." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-dollar stake) because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring "two for his heels." There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. of money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for your play.-Three are still worse; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille.-But in square games (she meant whist), all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, common to every species though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold-or even an interested-bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime. No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. Piquet she held the best game at the cards Chance, she would argue-and here again, for two persons, though she would ridicule admire the subtlety of her conclusion:-the pedantry of the terms-such as pique-chance is nothing, but where something else With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget-Bridget Elia. depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot illusion, we are as mightily concerned as be glory. What rational cause of exultation those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. could it give to a man to turn up size ace a They are a sort of dream-fighting; much hundred times together by himself? or before ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; spectators, where no stake was depending? mighty means for disproportioned ends; -Make a lottery of a hundred thousand quite as diverting, and a great deal more tickets with but one fortunate number and innoxious, than many of those more serious what possible principle of our nature, except games of life, which men play, without stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain esteeming them to be such.that number as many times successively, without a prize? Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for I grant there is something sneaking in it; glory, they were a mere setting of one man's but with a tooth-ache, or a sprained ankle, wit,- his memory, or combination-faculty when you are subdued and humble, — you rather against another's; like a mock- are glad to put up with an inferior spring of engagement at a review, bloodless and profit- action. less. She could not conceive a game wanting the sprightly infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people playing I grant it is not the highest style of man at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist-I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battlewas stirring in the centre, would inspire she lives not, alas! to whom I should her with insufferable horror and ennui. apologise. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and At such times, those terms which my old Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue, (and I think in this case justly,) were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for such combatants. There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. friend objected to, come in as something admissible. I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)-(dare I tell thee, how foolish I am?)-I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play: I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over: and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. A CHAPTER ON EARS. I HAVE no ear.— Mistake me not, reader — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.- -I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets those indispensable sideintelligencers. Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be. me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour,—on his return he was pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being-technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny. -- When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean-for music. Scientifically I could never be made to To say that this heart never melted at the understand (yet have I taken some pains) concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul what a note in music is; or how one note self-libel. "Water parted from the sea" never should differ from another. Much less in fails to move it strangely. So does "In voices can I distinguish a soprano from a infancy." But they were used to be sung at tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instru- I contrive to guess at, from its being ment in vogue in those days) by a gentle- supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I woman-the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation the sweetest-why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple-who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the dayspring of that absorbing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite for Alice W―n. tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton. It is hard to stand alone in an age like this,-(constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I I even think that sentimentally I am dis- verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, posed to harmony. But organically I am since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,) to incapable of a tune. I have been practising remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to "God save the King" all my life; whistling the magic influences of an art, which is said and humming of it over to myself in solitary to have such an especial stroke at soothing, corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell elevating, and refining the passions.-Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice I have experienced something vastly lulling of music. The ear is passive to those single and agreeable: - afterwards followeth the strokes; willingly enduring stripes while it languor and the oppression. — Like that dishath no task to con. To music it cannot be appointing book in Patmos; or, like the passive. It will strive mine at least will comings on of melancholy, described by spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; Burton, doth music make her first insinualike an unskilled eye painfully poring upon ting approaches: "Most pleasant it is to hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian such as are melancholy given to walk alone Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest water, by some brook side, and to meditate places of the crowded streets, to solace upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, myself with sounds, which I was not obliged which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, to follow, and get rid of the distracting and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomtorment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! | parable delight to build castles in the air, to I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite of honest common-life sounds; and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done.. So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them-winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at the last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden and they can think of nothing else; Above all, those insufferable concertos, and continually suspecting, no sooner are their pieces of music, as they are called, do plague eyes open, but this infernal plague of melanand embitter my apprehension.-Words are choly seizes on them, and terrifies their something; but to be exposed to an endless souls, representing some dismal object to battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying; their minds; which now, by no means, no to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon Something like this SCENE TURNING" honey, to an interminable tedious sweet- I have experienced at the evening parties, ness; to fill up sound with feeling, and at the house of my good Catholic friend strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on Nov; who, by the aid of a capital empty frames, and be forced to make the organ, himself the most finished of players, pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, .converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his Party in a parlour All silent, and all DAMNED. 66 week days into Sundays, and these latter which, in triumphant progress, dolphininto minor heavens.* seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end; - clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me- priests, altars, censers, dazzle before When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some fiveand-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecu-me- the genius of his religion hath me in tions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's her toils — a shadowy triple tiara invests the wings or that other, which, with a like brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenumeasure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth ous- he is Pope, and by him sits, like as by what means the young man shall best in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too,cleanse his mind) — a holy calm pervadeth tri-coroneted like himself! I am converted, me. I am for the time and yet a Protestant; — at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus - Gog and But when this master of the spell, not Magog-what not?-till the coming in of content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes the friendly supper-tray dissipates the fig on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than ment and a draught of true Lutheran beer lies in her capacity to receive, impatient to (in which chiefly my friend shows himself overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly," no bigot) at once reconciles me to the ration- still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh alities of a purer faith; and restores to me waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or the genuine unterrifying aspects of my from that inexhausted German ocean, above pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. - -rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. ALL FOOLS' DAY. THE Compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you and you — and you, Sir-nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same- - you understand mea speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultus Translate me that, and take the sum. I have been there, and still would go; |