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cheval or à la chasse, the state of the
weather prevented the execution of
the sentence. Night and morning
did I consult the barometer-(a Dol-
lond suspended in the salle à manger)
-which for two whole days pointed
steadfastly to "much rain." My sleep
was tranquil, my spirits were buoy
ant. On the third day, to my great
consternation, the faithless index wa
vered towards "changeable." My
visits to the instrument now became
more frequent, and had I had "Ar-
gosies at Sea," I could not have
watched its variations with a more
feverish anxiety. On one of these
occasions I was roused from my
musings by a tap on the back. It
was from the hand of Monsieur de
V. “Ah! mon cher," said he,
"I don't wonder at your impatience;
but fine weather is returning, and
then we'll make up for lost time
nous nous amuserons bien, allez." The
fine weather did indeed return! The
barometer had now reached "fair,"
and was rapidly approaching towards
"set fair." Something was necessary
to be done, and that speedily. But
what? I could not always affect a
sudden attack of spasms, nor dared
1 repeat my unintended joke of mis
taking a hat for a partridge; 1 could
not reasonably hope for the arrival
of a letter from Paris always at the
critical moment; and should I con-
tinue to treat Madame Saint V
like a child, by allowing her to win
every game at billiards, my com-
plaisance would become an offence.

would be, should I boldly venture
it? In the event of its being dis-
credited, should I shoot a favourite
dog, or maim my friend, or one of
my friend's friends, to prove its vera-
So desperate a case would
city?
warrant the application of a violent
remedy. I left my room without
having brought my mind to a deci-
sion, unless the gloomy resolution of
running the hazards of the day is
On my way to
worthy the term.
where the party was assembled, I
passed the garde-de-chasse: he was
occupied in cleaning my Manton: I
beheld it with such feelings as I
should have entertained had I been
condemned to be shot with it. The
garde bowed to me with marked
respect: Monsieur l'Anglais had been
mentioned to him as a marvellous
fine shot, and he accorded me a
fitting share of his estimation.

"Le voila-allons-vite-partons,” was the cry the instant I was perceived by Monsieur de V. There was no mention of Hector; that was something; shooting was to be the amusement of the day. The patent, improved, double-barrelled Manton was given to me, and I received it almost unconscious of what I was about.

"just as

We had just reached the Perron, the double flight of steps leading into the court-yard, when a thought flashed across my mind, as it were by inspiration. I pounced upon it with a sort of desperate avidity, and, as if delay would have diminished its force, I as hastily "I am not dis gave it utterance. On the first morning of fair wea→ "Parbleu!" ther, I arose with a heavy heart. All posed to shoot to-day; I've just a night had I tossed about in my bed, whim to go a fishing.' said Monsieur De V unable to imagine a decent excuse for withdrawing myself from my you will, my dear; in the country sporting friends. To confess my utter liberté entiére: I'll give you my own incompetency (apparently the most tackle." Accordingly he resentered rational way of putting an end to the house, and presently returned my torments,) I felt to be impossible; with two or three rods, and different I was ashamed-laugh, reader, if kinds of lines, hooks, floats, &c. you please, but I was ashamed to do." There," said he, "you may now so. Besides, the character of a keen angle for what fish you choose, and had been you'll find abundance of all sorts, and expert sportsman thrust upon me, and, as matters great and small, in the canal." My stood, my most solemn protestations delight at this relief is not to be dethat I was unentitled to any sort of scribed. I knew as little about anclaim to it would have been disbe- gling as about shooting, but (thought lieved, and, most likely, attributed I) by fishing, or seeming to fish, I am in no danger of compromising my to an overstrained and affected mo desty. Yet something must be done, reputation; I have seen many an and, humiliating as such an avowal angler, and expert ones too, sit, from

morning till night, bobbing into a pond, and after all return with an empty basket, their skill suffering no stain from their want of success. I have merely to say, as I have heard them say, "Curse 'em they won't bite." But my delight was of short duration. Conceive my horror and consternation, when I heard Monsieur De V call out to the cook, "Monsieur Goulard, you need not fricassée the hare to-day, Monsieur P.* is going to fish; so you'll dress a pike or two à la maître d'hotel, make a matelote of some of his carp, and fry the rest." Here was dinner for a party made to depend upon the rather uncertain result of my first attempt at angling! The misfortune was of my own seeking, and there was no escape. Monsieur De V recommended me to take Etienne, the gardener's son, with me, to help me in unhooking the large fish, else, said he, " as they are in such quantities, and bite so fast, you'll very soon be fatigued." We separated: he and the rest to shoot hares and -partridges, I to catch pike and carp.

Now was I once again left without any of those excuses for failure, which, like an indifferent workman, I might have derived from the badness of my tools. Hector was the best horse in France; my gun was a patent improved doubled barrelled Manton; and my fishing-tackle, plague on it! perfect and complete. To add to my distress, the fish abounded; they had the reputation of biting well, and be hanged to them! and the only thing an angler could complain of was, that they bit so fast as to destroy the pleasure of the sport. On my way to the canal I endeavoured to reason myself into composure. "Surely there can be no great difficulty in what I am now about to perform: I have but to bait my hook, throw it into the water, and the instant a fish bites at it, pull him out." From a sort of misgiving, however, which my best arguments failed to conquer, I thought it prudent to dismiss Etienne, desiring him to leave the basket (and they had furnished me with one sufficiently capacious to contain Falstaff), telling him I would call him in the event of my hooking any fish beyond my strength to manage. Monsieur De V-- had

not deceived me. Scarcely had I thrown my bait into the water ere it was caught at: I drew in my line and found my hook void. A second, and a third, and a twentieth, and a fiftieth experiment succeeded in precisely the same manner. I no sooner renewed my bait than it was purloined with perfect impunity. Had the cursed fry passed by it without deigning to notice it, I might have consoled myself with examples of similar occur rences; but to catch it, and give me fair notice of their intention to abscond with it by a gentle tug at my line, was provoking beyond bearing; it would have exhausted the patience of Izaak Walton himself. Notwithstanding my regard for Monsieur De V, I began to tire of feeding his fishes; and suspected that I must be cutting a ridiculous figure in the eyes of the finny tribe; in short, that they were making what is vulgarly termed a dead set against me. I varied my manner; I increased, I diminished, the quantity of my bait; I tried different sorts; now and then I tempted them with the bare hook; but all was to no purpose. After four hours of unrewarded efforts (in the course of which time I was once on the point of calling Etienne to assist me in pulling in what proved to be a tuft of weeds), I had the mortification to find dangling at the end of my line a wretched, miserable little gudgeon, two inches long, which had caught itself-I have not the vanity to suppose I caught it upon my hook.

Though in itselt

worse than nothing, I received it as a promise of better fortune, and threw the tiny fish into my huge basket, whence, to say the truth, it looked an epigram at me. But this was the beginning and the ending of my prosperity. At the expiration of another four hours I was joined by Monsieur De V. On looking into the basket, he said that I had done right in sending the others up to the house. I assured him that THE FISH he detected at the bottom was the only one I had caught. He burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, saying, he saw through the jest at once: that I was a farceur, and had thrown all the large fish back again into the canal as fast as I had drawn them out, for the sake of the carica

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ture of so small a fish in so large a basket. I insisted that that one fish was the sole result of my day's labour. No, no. The English were expert anglers: the canal was abundantly stocked, I had exhausted all my bait, and he was certain of the trick. Goulard was ordered to cook the hare. The plaisanterie of my one little gudgeon in the huge basket was frequently repeated in the course of dinner, and applauded as a most humourous jest. One of the party, however, observed, that though he admired the joke, he thought a matelote de carpe would have been a better; and proposed that, as I had deprived them of a service of fish, I should be punished by the deduction of half an hour from my next day's ride, which time I should occupy in providing fish for the dinner.

Already was I suffering by anticipation the morrow's torments, when a servant entered with a bundle of newspapers and letters just arrived from Paris. Among them was a letter for me. I read it, and, affecting considerable surprise and concern, declared that I must leave Vilette early the next morning on business which

would admit of no delay. Entreaties that I would stay but to enjoy one day's shooting-one day's trial of Hector —were unavailing,-I was resolved. But it was not without great difficulty that I succeeded in resisting Monsieur De V's pressing offer to lend me Hector, to carry me back to Paris, which mode of conveyance, he assured me, would save me much time, though I should even sleep one night on the road, as Hector would fly with me like an eagle.

The next morning I took my departure, after having passed a week in unspeakable torments,, where I had expected to spend a month in tranquillity and repose: and by one of those whimsical chains of circumstances, to which many persons, with a certain prejudice in their favour, have been indebted for the reputation of possessing great talents, without ever having given any distinct manifestation of them, I left behind me the reputation of being the most expert horseman, the surest shot, the best and politest billiard player, and the most dexterous angler, that had ever visited Vilette.

P.*

ON THE SUPPLEMENTAL ILIAD OF QUINTUS CALABER.

A POET who takes up the tale left unfinished by another poet does a very impolitic thing. If he wishes to hit upon an expedient whereby every spark of original invention might be smothered, before it could make even an effort to sparkle into notice, he certainly cannot do better: if he desires to give fancy free scope, or, what is vulgarly, but expressively, called fair play, he cannot do worse. Whence arose the lumbering epics of all ages and nations, with their cargo of ready-made Gods who quarrel, and Mercuries who limp through the air on everlasting uninteresting messages; whence, but from the unlucky idea, that every poet was to work after a grand model?-Lucan, who merely showed disrespect to the nod of old Jupiter and the quaking of the spheres when the battle of Pharsalia was about to be fought, is very grudgingly admitted into the rank of epic poets

by-schoolmasters and Dryden, the lyrical and satiric poet, who threatened us with an epopca in which he designed to introduce the guardian angels of kingdoms as proxies for the old gods and goddesses, was seriously angry with Blackmore for pillaging his idea. How much finer a poem would Virgil have written, if, instead of dogging the steps of Homer, he had left Troy alone, and taking up some of the interesting epochs and shining characters of actual Roman history, had indulged that his native vein of the sentimental and the pathetic, which flows so freely in his episode of Dido!

I cannot help wishing that Quintus Calaber had done the same. He resembles in his genius Virgil, whom apparently he had read, (as he had also read Ovid) more than Homer, whom he professed to copy. He has some ingenuity of thought, an ele

gant imagination, and much tenderness: but he is under the disadvantage of having to continue a story; and the poem has something the air of an Annual Register: he has also obliged himself to continue the said story in the manner of the preceding portions of it; and to write as if he were passing on the world Homeric papers that had been buried in a chest. He therefore finds it highly necessary to have "skill in surgery,' and to display his knowledge of anatomy (that undeniable quality in the composition of a great epic poet), by describing how this man was speared through his stomach, the food issuing with his blood, and that other had the pupil of his eye divided, the spearhead coming out at his left ear. He also throws off similitudes as a juggler draws party-coloured ribbons out of his mouth. Some of these comparisons are not without poetic novelty; others have the languor of repetition; and, as often happens with imitators, he has sometimes copied Homer's similes when they are least felicitous. He compares the captive Trojan dames to grunting pigs; and the Trojans to geese in a pen: not very complimentary parallels, according to modern notions; and his distressed ladies frisk and bellow like a cow that has lost her calf. This criticism, however, is about as venturous as a man's dancing in wooden shoes between eggs, for the first time. The superstition about Homer is flogged into us: no wonder that the impression is lasting. Perrault, the architect of the Louvre, and the inventor of the stories of Blue Beard and Puss in Boots,(clarum et venerabile nomen!) felt very much inclined to think, that he had more invention than Homer: he wrote the "Parallel between the Ancients and

Moderns," in which he gave the preference to Fairy tales over the Iliad and Odyssey: and for this Boileau thought him, not a bad critic merely, but a very bad sort of man. The fact is, he was now and then right. It is amusing to observe how Boileau sometimes sets about defending Homer's similes: he fights for them pedibus et unguibus; as if the greatest master of human passion who ever lived (Euripides, perhaps, and Shakspeare certainly excepted), would lose anything in rational estimation by the detection of a clumsy similitude! It seems that Perrault, in his " Dialogues," made one of his interlocutors observe, "Talking of comparisons, they tell me Homer compares Ulysses turning himself in his bed to a black pudding being broiled on a gridiron." At this Boileau, with dilated nostrils, which, like those of Virgil's horse, "roll collected fire," takes down the chevalier, by superciliously assuring him, that "in the time of Homer, there were neither black puddings nor ragouts." (So much the worse, I think, for the time of Homer!) But "the truth is,"-he proceeds to say, and the admirer of the ancients must be gasping for the climax of the defence" he compares Ulysses turning in his bed, and burning with impatience to glut himself with the blood of Penelope's wooers, to a hungry man, who busies himself (bustles, perhaps s'agite) in cooking over a great fire the bloody and unctuous paunch of an animal, with which he burns to satiate his appetite, turning it incessantly from one side to the other." He then goes on to assure the chevalier that "with the ancients the belly of certain animals was one of their most delicious viands: that the sumen, that is to

* If the reader is not familiar with a book something similar in our language, "Wotton on Ancient and Modern Learning," he will do well to make acquaintance with it.

+ The reader may like to see the passage: Od. 20, 24.

He turn'd from side to side:

As when some hungry swain o'er glowing coals

A paunch for food prepares, from side to side

He turns it oft, and scarces abstains the while,

So he from side to side roll'd pondering deep.-CowPER.

That Pope should substitute "savoury cates," was to be expected: but I rather marvel that Cowper should have left out the blood and grease, which so much excite the admiration, and so happily elicit the gastronomic erudition of Boileau.

say, the paps of a sow, was among the Romans reckoned exquisite, and had even been forbidden by an old Censorian law as too luxurious. These words, full of blood and fat, which Homer has used in speaking of the paunch of animals, and which are so just in reference to this part of the body, have given occasion to a wretched translator to suppose that Homer spoke of a black pudding!" Reflections sur Longin.

How does this mend the matter? It is plain that Boileau is not se much offended at the supposed wrong application of the comparison, as at the thing compared. He has a notion that a black pudding (which the unfortunate Frenchman no doubt imagined to be a concise and tasteful metonymy for the paunch full of blood and fat) is beneath the dignity of epic poetry; but he means to contend that nothing can be more majestical than the comparison of Ulysses, and his desired object of vengeance, to a bloody and greasy paunch, or the paps of a sow. After all, Perrault is right in his construction, and Boileau wrong; for the longing of the hungry man is only thrown in parenthetically as an incidental circumstance, and the comparison is undeniably of the tossing of Ulysses to the turns of the broil.

Working after Homer, Quintus has naturally attained to more boldness of circumstance than we find in Virgil; but he sometimes betrays the injudicious exaggeration of an imitator. Virgil has not ventured to describe the minute details into which Quintus has chosen to enter, when painting the consternation and outrage which attend the midnight storm of Troy; but Virgil has avoided the occasional coarseness of particulars which Quintus appears to confound with natural simplicity. The thirteenth book of the Supplemental Iliad has, however, this advantage over the second book of the Eneid, that it is dramatic instead of narrative. Virgil, indeed, could not in this instance have avoided narration, though, like Racine his imita

tor, he is too prone to tedious sto ries; but, notwithstanding the beauty of some passages, and the sublimity of others (especially that of ap parent dire facies), the languor of narrative poetry enfeebles the spirit, and deteriorates the interest.

As to the personal identity of QUINTUS CALABER, Something must be said: but that something must be almost nothing. The manuscript was discovered by Cardinal Bessarion, in the church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto, in Calabria. It was superscribed Quintus Calaber: yet Rhodoman determines that the author belonged to Smyrna, the ancient maritime town of Ionia: because in the twelfth book, the poet, previously to invoking the aid of the muses in enumerating the heroes who enter the wooden horse, indicates his "feeding goodly sheep in the fields of Smyrna; or, in prose terms, keeping an academy of promising young gentlemen. He therefore will have it that the name is not properly Quintus, but Cointus; and he leaves Calaber to shift for itself. Induced by the temerity of this conclusion, editors and critics have set up a fashion of nicknaming QUINTUS CALABER Cointus Smyrnæus. Now mark how a plain tale shall put them down." Plutarch, speaking of Quintus Flaminius, calls him KorOV

Xapiviov: and Appian styles Quintus Valerius Κοιντον Ουαλέριον. In the name of Quinctilian, and Gellius, and Macrobius, and all philologists that ever wrote, must Flaminius therefore cease to be Quintus, and must Valerius become Oualerius? And as to Smyrnæus, of what value is the boasted internal evidence for this? A certain Dausqueius* (“these rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek;" I wish I knew who he was,) asks Rhodoman the question, "whether no man born elsewhere could feed sheep, if it pleased heaven, at Smyrna?" and whether "the Germans who made a campaign in Holland were therefore converted into Dutchmen?"

QUINTUS CALABER (for so let us

* This is the authorized commentating language. A Mr. Shaw having edited some classic author, was mentioned by some German critic under the designation of “ quidam Shavius." The unlucky Shaw seems no less hidden under a bushel than the inscru table Dausqueius.

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