sand eight hundred pagodas or temples, where are continually sacrificed a great number of birds and beasts, all wild, which they hold to be a more acceptable offering than the tame ones, according to the assertion of their priests, who thus pass upon them a great abuse for an article of faith. This city has moreover twelve hundred canals, made by the kings and people of former days, which are three fathoms deep and twelve broad, traversing the streets in every direction, over which are bridges built upon arcades, with columns at each end, and benches for the passengers. Four fairs every day are held in the different quarters, where we saw an immense abundance of silks, brocades, cloth of gold, linen and cotton goods, skins of martens and ermines, musk, aloes, fine porcelain, gold and silver plate, pearls, gold in ingots and dust, and such like articles, whereat we were all much astonished. should want words were I to attempt a description of the quantities of the other things, such as metals of all sorts, coral, cornelian, crystal, quick➡ silver, vermilion, ivory, cloves, nutmegs, mace, ginger, tamarisks, cinnamon, pepper, cardamoms, borax, flower of honey, sandal, sugar, fruits, conserves, venison, fish, flesh, and fowl, as well as fruits and vegetables of every variety. There are one hundred and sixty meat markets, not only provided with the customary flesh, but with that of horses, buffaloes, the rhinoceros, tigers, lions, dogs, mules, asses, chamois, otters, and zebras, every sort being eaten in this country. There are also immense cellars filled with hams, smoked meats, pigs, boars, and birds of every description; all which I only record to show how liberally God has supplied the wants of these poor blind infidels, in order that his name may be glorified for ever." Chap. 106. S. CHARLIE STUART. A FEW lines of the following song have found a sanctuary among Hogg's Reliques of Jacobite Poetry; it has never before appeared in a perfect THE OLD ACTORS. I Do not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In dreams I often stretch and strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I once saw in Peeping Tom. I cannot catch a feature of him. He is no more to me than Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and still more Dodd, were near being lost to me, till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other day at Mr. Mathews's gallery at Highgate; which, with the exception of the Hogarth pictures, a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most delightful collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in their single persons, and in grouped scenes, from the Restoration-Bettertous, Booths, Garricks, justifying the prejudices which we entertain for them the Bracegirdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Cibber has described them-the Woffington (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous-the Screen Scene in Brinsley's famous comedy, with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon, whom I have not seen, and the rest, whom having seen, I see still there. There is Henderson, unrivalled in Comus, whom I saw at second hand in the elder Harley Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio-Holman, with the bright glittering teeth in Lothario, and the deep paviour's sighs in Romeo-the jolliest person ( our son is fat") of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy-and Pope, the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth and Lord Townley. There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity-Wroughton, who in Kitely seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had personated Alexander-the specious form of John Palmer, with the special effrontery of Bobby-Bensley, with the trumpettongue, and little Quick (the retired Dioclesian of Islington) with his squeak like a Bart'lemew fiddle. There are fixed, cold as in life, the immoveable features of Moody, who, afraid of o'erstepping nature, sometimes stopped short of her-and the restless fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such fears, not seldom leaped o' the other side. There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore, names of small account in those times, but which, remembered now, or casually recalled by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations, can "drown an eye unused to flow." There too hangs (not far removed from them in death) the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by age, but which, in her better days, must have competed with the silver tones of Barry himself, so enchanting in decay do I remember it-of all her lady parts exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth touched heaven!) of O'Keefe, when she played it to the "merry cousin" of Lewisand Mrs. Mattocks, the sensiblest of viragos-and Miss Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to the verge of ungentility, with Churchill's compliment still burnishing upon her gay Honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters, and Sedgwick, and Kelly, and Dignum (Diggy), and the bygone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady Loverule; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family, and (Shakspeare's woman) Dora Jordan; and, by her, two Antics, who in former and in latter days have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs; whose portraits we shall strive to recall, for the sympathy of those who may not have had the benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate Collection. MR. SUETT. O for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling as himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, comedian! Richard, or rather Dicky Suettfor so in his lifetime he was best pleased to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation-lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were set apart and dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that periodhis pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was "cherub Dicky." What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John," with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies”—I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart-kind and therefore glad-be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice-his white stole, and albe. The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable. He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the mat ter. He was known, like Puck, by his note-Ha! Ha! Ha!-sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype, of O La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin GoodFellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery hatch. Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this :-Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral, pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood-how dearly beautiful it was!--but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him→ not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,--but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph-O La! -O La! Bobby! MR. MUNDEN. Not many nights ago we had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when we retired to our pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by us, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain we tried to divest ourselves of it by conjuring up the most opposite associations. We resolved to be serious. We raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do. There the antic sate Mocking our statehis queer visnomy-his bewildering costume-all the strange things which he had raked together-his serpentine rod swagging about in his pocket -Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics-O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary-till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. But we were not to escape so easily. No sooner did we fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed us in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before us, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium-all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when we awoke! A season or two since there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. We do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former. wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. We should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or come forth a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. We have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry-in Old Dornton--diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man ; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. We have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in what has been truly denominated the "sublime of farce," Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end, with himself. Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow-sessa-as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobler of Preston-where his alternations from the Cobler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him, or as if Thalaba were no tale! Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a supernatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with conThere is one face of Farley, one stellatory importance. You could face of Knight, one face (but what a not speak of it with more deference, one it is!) of Liston; but Munden if it were mounted into the firmahas none that you can properly pin ment. A beggar in the hands of down, and call his. When you think Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rosé he has exhausted his battery of looks, the Patriarch of Poverty. So the in unaccountable warfare with your gusto of Munden antiquates and engravity, suddenly he sprouts out an en- nobles what it touches. His pots and tirely new set of features, like Hydra. his ladles are as grand and primal as He is not one, but legion. Not so the seething-pots and hooks seen in much a comedian, as a company. If old prophetic vision. A tub of buthis name could be multiplied like his ter, contemplated by him, amounts countenance, it might fill a play-bill. to a Platonic idea. He understands He, and he alone, literally makes a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He faces: applied to any other person, stands wondering, amid the commonthe phrase is a mere figure, denoting place materials of life, like primeval certain modifications of the human man, with the sun and stars about countenance. Out of some invisible him. ELIA. THE MEMOIR OF A HYPOCHONDRIAC. I WILL now beg you to accompany me on a somewhat less painful journey. And do not think that this is foreign to the subject. The pleasures of a Hypochondriac are generally the cause of his pains. They are the stirps from which his hydraheaded visions spring. They are the trunk of a tree which yields no blossom;-only leaves, upon which our melancholy sins are written-only fruit, like that which grows (or grew) on the Dead Sea shore, full of dust and bitter ashes! There is a poem by Mr. Charles Lamb (entitled Hypochondriacus), which gives an account of some of the familiars who wait upon the melancholy man: Fierce Anthropophagi, What scared Saint Anthony, Doubts diabolical: This is the dark side of the catalogue. Let us turn over for a while to a sunnier page; we must return to the shadows again. I have "all my life long" had some one main pursuit,-an amusement. Throughout a large and varying circle the tyranny of my imagination spread; but it had its limits, like the ocean. I had bright as well as interlunar nights, stormy days and serener hours; some of the benefit, as well as all the disadvantage of the seasons. I had always some reigning pleasure, which was like a separate being, concurrent and co-existent with the other, as hope may live with fear. My imagination was gloomy; but sometimes, as the dark cloud is enlightened and made beautiful by the iris, it took a gentler colour from the things around me: it shrank before my strenuous exertions: it was influenced deeply by my pursuits. I have heard much of what is called "constitutional" melancholy. My belief is that Hypochondriasis may be almost always overcome by exertion. It may, perhaps, exist to such a degree as totally to weigh down the mind of the sufferer; but it must then be termed-insanity. This state is very rare, and needs never be apprehended. It is true, that most instances of suicide have been accompanied by extreme melancholy; but this has almost universally arisen from external causes, as the death of friends, or the loss of fortune. No man's imagination is naturally morbid, except where he inherits the seeds of insanity. On the contrary, it is originally healthy, and enables its possessor to fight up against a legion of terrors. It is elastic, like the mind,--like the body, and bends to accident and circumstance ;-or rather it takes an impression readily, like water, and loses it as soon. speak now of its purer state. When it is diseased, it becomes rigid, obstinate, and retentive; its domain is a region haunted by foul shapes, let loose from the caverns and dark recesses of the brain,-a turbulent element, fierce and unmanageable. And all this is (generally speaking) produced by-excess. Excess of stu dy or amusement,-of exercise or indolence, of eating, drinking, watching, sleep,-too much care, too much neglect, all generate, or bring to its terrible maturity the Hypochondria.— Were I a king, I would have written in golden letters on my halls and chambers, where I ate, and slept, and held counsel, the despised, but excellent word-" MODERATION." I have all my life long had some one main amusement. This has been either poetry, painting, music; or, (deserting art for science) I have betaken myself to the noble science of "self-defence;" or I have followed the theatre with its gaudy allurements, or encountered the blythe perils of the chase. Without these helps, these anodynes, what resistance could I have made to the |