rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth." But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive,-impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly,"--still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German occan, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphinseated, 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 wit's end;-clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me-priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me--the genius of his religion hath me in her toils -a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous-he is Pope, -and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too,-tri-coroneted like himself! I am converted, 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 Magog--what not?-till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalties of a purer faith: and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. 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 me-a 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 wiseacre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberrywe will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day—and let us troll the catch of Amiens— duc ad me—duc ad me—how goes it? "Here shall he see Gross fools as he." Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please; it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you for my part, -The crazy old church clock, Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down Etna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, wnat a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nuncheon on the low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fishstreet Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears?— cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as orange, pretty moppet! Mister Adams'odso, I honour your coatpray do us the favour to read us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipsop-the twenty and second in your portmanteau there-on Female Incontinence the same-it will come in most irrelevantly and impertinently scasonable to the time of the day. Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error.- Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late. Ha! Cokes, is it you?-Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command. Master Silence, I will use few words with you. Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. You six will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. I know it, I know it. the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is observed, "that the foolisher the fowl or fish,woodcocks,-dotterels,-cods'-heads, &c. the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some of the Ha! honest R―, my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over new, threadbare as thy stories: what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate?-Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago. Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradven-kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darture, thou canst hawk a volume or two. Good Granville S, thy last patron, is flown. "King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead." Nevertheless, noble R, come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-appareled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters-when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile--as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidious preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritoriousequal damsels. To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools' Banquet beyond its appropriate day, for I fear the second of April is not many hours distant-in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool-as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables -not guessing at their involved wisdom-I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and-prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors-I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. I have never made an acquaintance since that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had 1ot some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit your company, the more tests he giveth you, t he will not betray or overreach you. I love lings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys?-Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. A QUAKER'S MEETING. Still-born Silence! thou that art Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!* READER, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, and gular, yet not without some to keep thee in coun yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; sin tenance; an unit in aggregate; a simple in com posite:-come with me into a Quaker's Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth, shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses.-Retire with me into a Quaker's Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes?-here the goddess reigns and revels. "Boreas, and Cecias, and Argestes loud,” do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl-nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds-than their op *From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653. ( posite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quaker's Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by-say, a wife-he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?-can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?-away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters, or side-aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken: "Or under hanging mountains, is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt." The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spiritsoothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quaker's Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruined sides of kings-" but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground-SILENCE-eldest of things-language of old Night-primitive Dis courser to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. "How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranquillity!" Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory!-if my pen treat of you lightly-as haply it will wander-yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewsbury. I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you---for ye sat betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and offscouring of church and presbytery.-I have seen the reeling searuffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the judge and the jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth) -James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifulest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!--so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. and love the early Quakers. Get the writings of John Woolman by heart; How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sat visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard-you cannot guess from what part of the meeting proceeds with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," | THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have observed, speak seldomer. Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipped in iron mail.” His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable -he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail-his joints all seemed loosening-it was a figure to set off against Paul preaching-the words he uttered were few, and sound-he was evidently resisting his will-keeping down his own wordwisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. "He had been a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession-understanding the term in its worldly acceptation-with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levites-the Jocos Risus-que-faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word. having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. Oh when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like-as in the pasture "forty feeding like one." The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the Franklins, or country gentlemen in king John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as au thentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Dieman's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terra Incognitæ. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles' Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness; and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I verily believe, that while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have "small Latin and less Greek.” I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers-not from the circumstance of my being town-born; for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it "on Devon's leafy shores," and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanical processes. Not that I affect ignorance; but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a téte-à-tête there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible well-informed man, who does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike of Kingsland, (the destined termination of his journey,) he put a home-thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out something about the panorama of those strange regions, (which I had actually seen,) by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any further apprehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance; and I heard him, as he went off, putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston; and which, my friend assured him, had gone through five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my compan ion was a schoolmaster; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. He was evidently a kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining in formation at any rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-col oured coat which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some reflections on the difference between persons of his profession in past and present times. In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions, (while the steps were adjusting,) in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his conversation to me; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success-to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid, when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to compare notes on the subject. However, he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Falgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the raw material; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India market, when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a "wide solution."* My companion saw my embarrassment, and the almshouse beyond Shore-kings; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, ditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities; which led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders;but finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up; and, the country beginning to open * Um Burial. Rest to the souls of those fine old pedagogues; the breed, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres; who believing that all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, and qespising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood; rehearsing continually the part of the past; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping harvest of their golden time, among their Flori and their Spicilegia; in Arcadia still, but but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some untoward tyro, serving for the refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damætas! With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth! "To exhort every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labour; for so much as it is |