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"I wish I ne'er had seen your face;

But, now, a long farewell!
For you will be my death ;-alas!
You will not be my Nell!"

Now when he went from Nelly Gray, His heart so heavy got

And life was such a burthen grown, It made him take a knot!

So round his melancholy neck
A rope he did entwine,
And, for his second time in life,
Enlisted in the Line!

One end he tied around a beam,
And then removed his pegs,
And, as his legs were off,-of course,
He soon was off his legs!

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A dozen men sat on his corpse,

To find out why he died

And they buried Ben in four cross-roads, With a stake in his inside!

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M

FANCY-PORTRAITS.

ANY authors preface their works with a portrait, and it saves the reader a deal of speculation. The world loves to know something of the features of its favourites ;-it likes the Geniuses to appear bodily, as well as the Genii. We may estimate the liveliness of this curiosity, by the abundance of portraits, masks, busts, china and plaster casts, that are extant, of great or would-be great people. As soon as a gentleman has proved, in print, that he really has a head, a score of artists begin to brush at it. The literary

Sir Walter is eternally

lions have no peace to their manes. sitting like Theseus to some painter or other ;-and the late Lord Byron threw out more heads before he died than Hydra. The first novel of Mr Galt had barely been announced in the second edition, when he was requested to allow himself to be taken "in one minute; -Mr Geoffrey Crayon was no sooner known to be Mr Washington Irving, than he was waited upon with a sheet of paper and a pair of scissors.

The whole world, in fact, is one Lavater :- it likes to find its prejudices confirmed by the Hooke nose of the Author of Sayings and Doings-or the lines and angles in the honest. face of Izaak Walton. It is gratified in dwelling on the repulsive features of a Newgate ordinary; and would be disappointed to miss the seraphic expression on the Author of the Angel of the World. The Old Bailey jurymen are physiognomists to a fault; and if a rope can transform a malefactor into an Adonis, a hard gallows face as often brings the malefactor to the rope. A low forehead is enough to bring down its head to the dust. A well-favoured man meets with good countenance; but when people are plain and hard-featured, (like the poor, for instance,) we grind their faces; an expression, I am convinced, that refers to physiog nomical theory.

For my part, I confess a sympathy with the common failing. I take likings and dislikings, as some play music,-at sight. The polar attractions and repulsions insisted on by the phrenologist, affect me not; but I am not proof against a pleasant or villainous set of features. Sometimes, I own,

I

am led by the nose (not my own, but that of the other party) --in my prepossessions.

My curiosity does not object to the disproportionate number of portraits in the annual exhibition,-nor grudge the expense of engraving a gentleman's head and shoulders. Like Judith, and the daughter of Herodias, I have a taste for a head in a plate, and accede cheerfully to the charge of

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the charger. A book without a portrait of the author, is worse than anonymous. As in a churchyard, you may look on any number of ribs and shin-bones, as so many sticks merely, without interest; but if there should chance to be a skull near hand, it claims the relics at once,-so it is with the author's head-piece in front of his pages. The portrait

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