Acceptable? Oh Father! leave it not
For lack of moisture yet to fall away!"

We have now reached the close of the" Birth-Day," and of this Number of Maga, which we are confident will be felt to be a delightful one, were it but for our profuse quotations from this delightful poem. It has already had a pretty wide circulation; but in a few days hence it will have been perused by thousands and tens of

thousands, in our pages-and by and by the volume itself will find its way into many a quiet "homestead" seldom visited by books. The plan of the poem might be extended so as to include another season-or age of life. Yet is it now a whole; and we believe that it is best it should remain in its present shape. Let us hope erelong to have another volume.

It has long been an absurd custom of the most celebrated periodicals to throw off with a flaming article, intended to set the Thames, the Clyde, and the Liffey on fire, but adapted to give the world an idea of the distinction between light and heat. What an intense blaze of cold! The inexperienced spectator, purposing to become a peruser, blinks to the glare, and at the same time shivers in ague testifying to some scores of degrees below the freezing point. For a while he suspects that summer is setting in with its usual severity, and attributes the death-like chill to the inclemency of the season; but he soon discovers how groundless are such suspicions, for it is spring; the thermometer is marked as high as zero, and the earth comfortably clothed with snow. Ne vertheless, his teeth chatter in his head, and his head is that of a Mandarin. He thinks of the year of the Great Frost, and curses the price of coals. All the while, the article is within a few inches of his " innocent nose," at which the drop has become an icicle, and as he "blows his nail," he mutters of emigration. Angrily he eyes the window, but there is no broken pane; so far from sitting on the door, he has for an hour been sitting into the fire, as we say in Scotland; though the fire looks as if it could roast an ox, it feels as if it would freeze a walrus; the temperature of an ice-house is genial in com

VOL. XLI. NO. CCLVIII.

parison; a bottle in a wine-cooler, to his imagination, appears an inhabitant of the torrid zone. The circulation of the blood, long languid, now ceases; ensues that fatal drowsiness, precursor of death; the periodical drops from his hand-and in a few minutes he revives, with the sensation of his feet being embedded in a lump of ice-for his soles are on the Leading Article, and if he hasten not to remove them, his feet will be frost-bitten, and the unfortunate man a lamiter for life.

There is no exaggeration in this picture. All we mean to say is, that Leading Articles are so elaborate, as to be unreadable; and that you never see one without the paper-folder lying nearer the beginning than the middle, its progress having been stopt by sleep-like a scythe left in a matted swathe by swinkt mower now lying on his face beneath a neighbouring tree. We know more than one man who has penetrated into the interior of Africa, and not more than one man who has eaten a rotten egg, but we know no man who has ever read through a Leading Article. Were any man to say so, we should not scruple to think him a liar of the first magnitude; but Mendez Pinto himself, were he alive, would not venture to go that length with the gullibility of the public; and were we with our own eyes to see a man achieve what at present we believe to be an impossibility, we

2F

should thenceforth regard him in the same light as a Unicorn, an animal long supposed to be fabulous, but who, nevertheless, does exist, even to the satisfaction of Swainson.

The fact is, that the chief fault for they have many-of all articlesfollowers as well as leaders-and it is a bad one-is, that they all smell so strong of the lamp. Few smells more generally disgusting than that of lamp oil, except perhaps it be that of gas. A tallow candle stinks but when it dies, and carries our sympathies along with it; but those other burners stink always, and the article that smells of them is a_polecat-nay, sometimes a skunk. But your article written off hand, with a flowing finger, by waxlight, or fire-light, or day-light speak not of civet-breathes as if the leaves were wafted on

"Sabæan odours from the spicy shores Of Araby the Blest!"

What an aroma from OUR TWO VASES! It is as if "an angel shook his wings.'

And now we must let you into a little secret. A few years ago some experienced cracksmen broke into the Premises, No. Forty-five, George Street, and logically drew from them a conclusion in the shape of THE BALAAM BOX. You know it was many times the size of the Chest in which were found the Scottish Regalia, and the villains had to break a Hole in the Wall large enough to admit a Horse and Cart. 'Twas a stormy midnight, and they got clear off. The effects of this audacious burglary have been ever since manifest on our Periodical Literature. So low a value did we put on the Contents, that they were insured against all accidents by earth, air, fire, and water, at the Equitable, at a premium of Five Shillings per

ton.

But that we disdained to com

pound felony, we might have had the whole returned for a sum short of a ransom-except a score or two that had been speedily put to press. But the letter was evidently written by a rejected contributor on a great scale, and we allowed him to set up as an Editor. He selected his articles with judgment, and disguised them with skill;

"But they were old and miserably poor," and the Periodical over which he presides has from the hour of its birth

been giving up the ghost. All along too he has been a distributor to many Magazines; and nothing but a sense of shame can have prevented hosts of literary men from bringing actions against him, or at least from applying for injunctions. Should they adopt legal proceedings, we can confidently swear to several Leading Articles that had lain so long there that they looked as if they had been born in the Balaam Box. As for the Balaam Box itself a rumour has lately begun "to prate of its whereabouts;" and we are about to take steps to have it ascertained, whether or no it be at this hour used by a certain Minister of the Church of Scotland-who many years ago was Moderator-as his Girnaland it is capacious of Twenty Chawder. Its name and nature changed, the Balaam Box is the Balaam Box no more-and the reason why it is not now filled to the lid with as fine oatmeal as ever was shown in sample is that the Moderator-for once a Moderator always a Moderator-is such a man as Gray had in his mind when he wrote that noble line"Large was his bounty as his soul sincere

ing, into the Highlands. and has emptied it, from floor to ceil

And how now do we dispose of unaccepted Articles-for we reject none? They are once a-week devoured by a quick fire-and their spirits go roaring up the chimney in disdainful thunder at their own doom, illumining the mirk with repeated showers of evanescent stars. An accepted Prose Article is a Phoenix. We do not mean that it rises out of its own ashes merely that it is" a secular bird of ages. have golden store; for almost all the But of accepted Poetry we

Poets on our establishment are old or dead-and we rejoice to welcome from afar the offerings of the young Sons of Song. Therefore we have placed OUR TWO VASES sent us by the late Sir William Gell, from Herculaneum, one on each side of the fire-place in our Sanctum (before which sits sometimes yet to midnight a semicircle of grey-haired survivors, like those Roman Fathers whom the Gauls of old believed to be so many old demigods), and all poetry that pleases us on a glance, we therein deposit-the Classical in CLIO, the Miscellaneous