grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed 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 with unfading chaplets crown that is, to me), "I sink in deep waters; the the palace must be considerable; and 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- -a mournful procession - suicidal faces, saved against their 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. lore-to bilking Charon of his fare. At their head the half-finished love-labours of their unArion or is it G. D. ?-in his singing gar-wearied scholiast. Him Markland exments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, pected him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter and votive garland, which Machaon (or - him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then airs prepared to greet ; and patron of follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the the gentle Christ's boy, who should have half-drenched on earth are constrained to been his patron through life-the mild drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foretwice acts her muddy death. most 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. 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 GRAIUM tantum vidit. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 66 SYDNEY'S Sonnets-I speak of the best of them are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of selfapproval, 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 savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But 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 match may testify he could speak his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold. The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies-far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in selfdepreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers-or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum præcordia frigus must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our recollection that we were once so- before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Schoolmistress; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl: Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) Nam tua præsentem vox sonat ipsa Deum? IN TE UNA LOQUITUR, CÆTERA MUTUS HABET. This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some candour of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions. I. With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies; The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue? II. Come, Sleep, O Sleep the certain knot of peace, The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness Of all my thoughts have neither stop nor start, IV. Because I oft in dark abstracted guise Seem most alone in greatest company, With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, To them that would make speech of speech arise; They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie So in my swelling breast, that only I Fawn on myself, and others to despise Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass; But one worse fault- Ambition I confess, That makes me oft my best friends overpass, Unseen, unheard while Thought to highest place Bends all his powers, even unto STELLA's grace. V. Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, VI. In martial sports I had my cunning tried, When Cupid having me (his slave) descried * Press. In Mars's livery, prancing in the press, My heart then quaked, then dazzled were mine eyes; VII. No more, my dear, no more these counsels try; Nor do aspire to Cæsar's bleeding fame; VIII. LOVE still a boy, and oft a wanton, is But no 'scuse serves: she makes her wrath appear IX. I never drank of Aganippe well, Nor ever did in shade of Temple sit, But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it; X. Of all the kings that ever here did reign, XI. O happy Thames, that didst my STELLA bear, XII. Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be; By no encroachment wrong'd nor time forgot; Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnets, are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical.. The spirit of "learning and of chivalry," of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the "president,"-shines through them. I confess I can see nothing of the “jejune” or "frigid" in them; much less of the "stiff" and "cumbrous"-which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to "trampling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — O heav'nly Fool, the most kiss-worthy face- -Sweet pillows, sweetest bed; words, but a transcendent passion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them; marks the when and where they were written. I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c. (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just) are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote sonnets, and was a king-hater; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble images, passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer, I cannot think with the "Critic," that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him; and I repose upon the beautiful lines in the "Friend's Passion for his Astrophel," printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others. You knew-who knew not Astrophel? NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. DAN STUART once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way, that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the "Morning Post" newspaper stood then just where it does now Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river, With boly reverence to approach the rocks, but, above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant. A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.'s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a "capital hand." O the conceits which we varied upon red in all its Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian prismatic differences! from the trite and Pilgrim's exploratory ramblings after the obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember costume of the lady that has her sitting on one fine summer holyday (a "whole day's upon "many waters." Then there was the leave" we called it at Christ's hospital) sal- collateral topic of ankles. What an occasion lying forth at rise of sun, not very well pro- to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of visioned either for such an undertaking, to touching that nice brink, and yet never trace the current of the New River-Middle- tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approxitonian stream!—to its scaturient source, as mating something "not quite proper;" while, we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. like a skilful posture-master, balancing be Gallantly did we commence our solitary twixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps quest for it was essential to the dignity of the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviaa DISCOVERY, that no eye of schoolboy, save tion is destruction; hovering in the confines our own, should beam on the detection. By of light and darkness, or where "both seem flowery spots, and verdant lanes skirting either;" a hazy uncertain delicacy; AutoHornsey, Hope trained us on in many a lycus-like in the Play, still putting off his baffling turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as expectant auditory with “ Whoop, do me no it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had harm, good man!" But, above all, that dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot conceit arrided us most at that time, of their nativity revealed; till spent, and and still tickles our midriff to remember, nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we where, allusively to the flight of Astræa sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm near-ultima Cœlestum terras reliquit — Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed nounced labours only yet accomplished; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some. established name in literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the Eneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke and it was thought pretty high too was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these crses. The chat of the day, scandal, - - we pro in reference to the stockings still - that MODESTY, TAKING HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT ΤΟ THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the crowning conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days. But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us. The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none methought so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings. Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily, consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and |