the postillions touching their horses, whirled the equipage out of sight in a moment: the rest of the company followed in their splendid vehicles, and a few seconds left the street to the quiet possession of two or three knots of gossippers that had been gazing on the scene.

"Captain Atherstone's extreme felicity of appearance speaks little in favour of his feelings-to say nothing of his honor," rather spitefully remarked Miss Tabitha Winterton, putting down her tortoise-shell spectacles, as she retired from an opposite window, whence she had enjoyed a full and undisturbed view of the spectacle," the Lady Eleanor is much to be pitied-very much indeed. I heard, on undoubted authority, that the Captain has positively broken the heart of a young lady to whom he paid his addresses in the country, but shamefully deserted, as it is credibly reported, at the instance of Mrs. Col. Atherstone -a designing woman I am told. I suppose the immense fortune and the really personable appearance of Lady Eleanor allured him. Well! well! who could have expected otherwise? there is no truth in man, nor ever was since the days of Adam, and Miss Weaner, or Warner, ought to have known so. Indeed it was confided to me by a particular party, that an unpleasant entanglement"-The spinster, who while speaking had been tapping her snuff-box, was here interrupted by an arch burst of merriment from her niece, a sprightly girl of seventeen, with a merry black eye, skin like alabaster, and curls of dark chesnut sporting upon her brow. "Hush! hush! aunt! you frighten me-this is absolute defamation of character; besides you will actually corrupt the innocence of my ideas. And have you really not heard the story? Dear me! and so romantic as it is! Why I thought you knew it-all the world does, for nothing else has been spoken of these three weeks." "Eh!-why?-what?-what is the girl talking about?" rather nervously inquired the amazed Miss Tabitha, piqued that she should be found minus in the multiplying rumours of the beau-monde, and forgetting that she had but the day prior arrived in London from her evergreen cottage in Suffolk.

"My dear sister," replied Mrs. Fitzgerald, smiling placidly, "Louisa alludes to the now well-known fact that the deceived Miss Werner, and the Lady Eleanor, the Irish heiress, are identically one and the same, and that the double disguise was, at Mrs. Atherstone's instigation, successfully assumed by her Ladyship, with a view to cure the volatile Captain of his blind idolatry of beauty."

Only think, aunt," added Louisa, " only think of her Ladyship, one of the richest heiresses in Ireland, young, beautiful, and witty, passing first for a fool in her own proper person, and really disgusting the Captain by her pretended imbecility; then throwing off the simpleton and taking the mask of years and ugliness, yet, with all this, fascinating him into absolute matrimony by her sweetness and intelligence."

"Good heart!" exclaimed the wondering Miss Tabitha, dropping her rappee on her brown satin gown-" why the girl was crazed!"'

"Not exactly aunt," rather coolly responded Louisa, sympathetically espousing the cause of the bride, "not exactly: Lady Eleanor fell in love with the Captain from a portrait she saw in Miss Alabaster's painting-room, and she felt an interest in consequence. Then her cousin and Colonel Atherstone assisted her, and do you know they say that when the Captain was in London last year, Lady Eleanor was all the time at the Abbey in Devonshire, planning her disguises as Miss Werner, and trying experiments with false eye-brows and walnut-juice." "And did the Dowager know this?" inquired Miss Tabitha.

"Not a word of it while it was going on-was n't that capital? Lady

Eleanor was on a visit you see, but when she did, she was in a tremendous passion, it is said, but at length forgot and forgave, and came post from Ireland to the wedding."

"And the Lady Eleanor did this to convince a good-for-nothing man of his folly!" said Miss Tabitha, elevating her hands and eyes.

"Aye and to win him, my good aunt," sportively rejoined Louisa. "Oh! shocking!" screamed the spinster, sinking upon the sofa, and covering her face with her fingers-"it's an awful world we live in !"

PARAPHRASE OF THE 137TH PSALM.

By our feet where the waters of Babylon swept
In their majesty on to the sea,

Overwhelm'd by our sorrow, we sat down and wept,
When we thought, Holy Sion, of thee.

And we mournfully gazed on our harps as they hung
(O! how oft had they join'd in our prayer,)
In the silence of sadness, neglected, unstrung,
On the willows that shaded us there.

For the men who to slavery led us away

Made a mock at the sorrows we bore;

And they taxed us for mirth, and said, "sing us a song,
Such as rung in your Sion of yore."

Oh! how shall we sing in the land of the foe,
The glad strains that in Sion we poured?
Or how shall we bid the same melody flow
That thy courts have re-echoed, O Lord?

If I ever forget thee, O Salem, that hour
May the Lord in his wrath take away
From my right hand, accursed and wither'd, the power
On the harp of my fathers to play.

Cleave my tongue to the roof of my mouth whensoe'er

Holy Salem! I think not on thee:

Yea! if ever my heart's dearest pleasure appear

Than Jerusalem dearer to me.

Lord, remember how Edom triumphantly cried

In the day when Jerusalem fell

"Root her out, root her out, of her beauty and pride
Leave not e'en her foundations to tell."

To thee, daughter of Babylon, wasted away
With thy grief, may it ever be thus-

May'st thou see the man blest who shall fully repay
Thee the wrongs thou hast heaped upon us.

Yea! for ever and ever his name shall be blest,
Who shall laugh at the mother's deep groans,

When he dashes the babe from her nourishing breast,
And it dies at her feet on the stones.

GODFREY GRAFTON.

FINE ARTS.

MR. EDITOR,-As the greater portion and the conclusion of the following rhymes relate to ancient and modern art, to anti-modern connoisseurs, and to the patronage of British genius, British excellence in the arts, and British artists, I think we may, without impropriety, class this under the above head. A rhapsody being "a discourse or poem, consisting of a number of parts joined together, without any necessary dependence or natural connection;" you will perceive I have not exceeded the established license. The two first characters, "GOOD RONALD" and "DESMOND," are not grouped together, nor connected, in these verses, with the third, or with any story. Their outlines are from report only, and are, necessarily, sketched in freely, and left unfinished, with touches of imagination founded in probability and mingled with reality. The malady of the one and the dangerous injury sustained by the other, from the fall of his horse, almost immediately within my view, are facts, and I am happy to learn both are in a fair way of recovery. The foreground of the scenery is from nature; but the distances are composition.

It is only a trite repetition to quote from Horace that painting is mute poetry. Pictures, which only please the eye by technical excellence and correct truth, but do not move the heart and purify the spirit, are not of this high description. They may be good or excellent prose, and I prize them in proportion to their peculiar beauties, as such, but they have not the

"Thoughts that breathe and words that burn,"

of true poetry. The view of a fine collection of paintings, by a good light, has the same effect on the feelings and imagination as a perusal of Homer or Milton. It fills the mind with an exalted opinion of human capacity, and a flow of noble and elevated sentiments. Virgil introduces paintings in the temple at Carthage, and, among the heroes represented, Eneas finds himself;-at the sight, all the signal events of the war and subversion of Troy, are recalled to his mind and pictured in his imagination. The historical pencil of Raphael, Giulio Romano, N. Poussin, or of that great modern, Etty, in his Judith, and other sacred subjects, exercises the same power as the historical pen of Montesquieu or Gibbon. Under its influence the stream of time rolls back, and we are transported to the early post-diluvian and heroic ages; or, the world before the flood. The soul is inflamed and lifted up to an admiration of all that is great and good, by a crowd of memorable recollections. In these spirit-stirring and golden moments, we behold, in fancy, the resurrection of nations long turned to dust, and enter into communion with their best and bravest spirits. We, then, cannot help falling into the opinion of the traveller Niebuhr, with some reasonable qualifications: "It is true that we have many decisive proofs of the existence of

* Of these "decisive proofs," it is but justice to the reader to observe that Mr. Niebuhr has not produced any. Between "decisive proofs" and strong grounds for conjecture or belief, there is a material difference in arriving at a conclusion. Of the existence of many great and powerful nations prior to the Egyptians, and of their having utterly perished, there are reasonable grounds for belief; but none to imagine any of them more enlightened. The Egyptians inherited the wisdom of the earlier nations, and continued their improvements and inventions in the arts and sciences, until the subversion of their Empire by Cambyses.

other nations in the remote ages of antiquity, as powerful as the Egyptians, and even more enlightened-yet, of these nations no vestige remains; their buildings and other public works are totally effaced. The country, which they cultivated and embellished is, at present, a barren desert, destitute of every remain that might mark its ancient state, and inhabited, or rather ravaged, by wandering barbarians."-(Travels through Arabia and other Countries in the East. Vol. I. sect. v. chap. 1.) It is not possible to contemplate the wonders of creation without an awful sense of the Creator, nor to behold the beauties of nature with true feeling, without thereby acquiring a more refined taste and a keener relish for the beauties of art. On the ramble in the country, which called forth these detached rhymes, my mind was warmed by the mild splendour of a fine day and the surrounding prospects, just before I entered the truly classical temple of taste, in which the fine pictures adverted to, are collected. I was, just then, in a mood to enjoy them. But, instead of looking at art through the medium of nature, and forming their taste by the latter, too many persons of otherwise highly cultivated minds, are so corrupted by the false principles and jargon of virtu, disseminated by a certain class of talkers on the arts, that they constantly look at nature through the medium of old pictures. This mistaken practice is not confined to amateurs. Many artists of great merit in other respects, grow up in this error. They form their system of colouring on the landscapes of the old masters, which either represent the arid scenery of the East, or of which, in their European views, the darker shades, in the course of centuries, have acquired a blackness and absorbed the finer qualities of the vivid colours. In the greater number of those pictures the demi-tints and lights also, are changed to a dark imbrowned tone, in general harmony with the shadows, but proportionally at the expense of the truth and freshness of nature in the original state of the colouring when first painted. It is also to be recollected, that many of the old masters painted on canvass primed with a very dark ground, which, in a few years, impaired the clearness and brilliancy of their works. When a few artists, who have thus turned their backs upon nature, and adopted the colouring of old pictures, are in the habit of much association together, they keep each other in countenance, and, like persons companioning in the plague, their amendment is almost hopeless. Hence it is that we see so many landscapes, which have been sketched and painted from views in England and Ireland, and profess to be English or Irish views, without a particle, or very little, of the verdure, which characterises the local colouring of the champaign and woodland scenery in these islands. These leather-coloured English and Irish landscapes are so frequently obtruded on the public, that instances here are unnecessary.

But to return to the subject immediately under notice. In my observations on the magnificent paintings by the old masters, no more than the general spirit of the impression produced by a rapid glance at the whole is implied, without any intention to particularize separate pictures. It is only a very faint abstraction of the sublime associations of thought which arose at the moment. The admiration and delight, with which I viewed the master-pieces of art, were mingled with melancholy ideas of so many conquerors and generations in the grave, the might and grandeur of their innumerable myriads lost in the darkness of eternity. But there was a consolation in the reflection that if dynasties and nations have perished and are nameless, the great painters of the 15th and 16th centuries, whose works were before me, are immortalized by their genius. It would require more than a month to make anything like an exact reference, however brief, to so many fine productions.

NO. VI.

31

The selection of works by living British artists does honour to the taste and patriotism of the munificent collector. There are three by Wilkie, Roberts, and Fraser, which alone would stamp a high character on any British collection. In an exhibition of modern art, by a provincial Institution, they would draw crowds of visitors, and contribute greatly to overcome anti-modern prejudice. This would redound so much to the honour of the British school, and accord so well with the public spirit of this liberal patron of native genius, that I cannot help cherishing a sanguine hope on this point, although I do not venture to give it utterance. There are, also, some capital specimens by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Northcote, and other deceased British artists in the chambers. I hope the splendid example, at the conclusion of the rhymes, will not be wholly lost on some of those, who possess the means of following so laudable a pattern.

THE LESSON-A RHAPSODY,

BY WILLIAM CAREY,

Composed after a ramble in the country, with alterations and additions.

Reader, think this a sally of invention,

Or rhapsody of laudable intention;
In homely metre, fashion'd to the season,

And rhymes, in humble fellowship with reason;
In which some truth and fiction mix together,
Like cloud and sunshine in unsettl'd weather.-
But let the Muse proceed, without explaining,
And, in the end, you cannot miss her meaning.

The persons and the place I mystify,
Lest some misjudging Cynic raise a cry,
"Oh, ho! this servile drudge is paid to write;
And well he plays the fawning parasite;
Corruption is the all-subduing vice;
The poet and the patriot have their price.
Iron may fetter;-but a stronger hold
Confines the willing slave in links of gold."

Truth may be calm-and brief is my reply--
The imputation, justly, I deny.

Applausive verse, to no one name assigned,
Like fragrant odours wafted by the wind,
Or largess cast amid the scrambling crowd,
Belongs to none, though trumpeted aloud.
No friend of candour will my motive blame,
I hold the example up-but not his name.
Would any greedy Sycophant for pay,
By such omission, do his claim away?
Would any vain Mock-Patron, in his pride,
Be, by a disappointment, gratified?
Or, inconsistently, his gold dispense,

For an omission, felt as an offence?

Think not my Muse would stoop to flatter Vice;

Or, for her just applause, accept a price;
Or, like a Minion, prostitute her lays,
In pompous Vanity and Folly's praise:

Do not, the sweetest of her pleasures, wrong;
To honour worth, the glory of her song;