mour did " Young Harry with his beaver up," with great spirit. P. S. The Lord Mayor wants a new robe sadly.

Wednesday.-Existed through the day-lived at night-for Kean played Othello! He is himself again-What calm and lofty grandeur—what towering and tender passion—what natural but terrible pride, love, and remorse were there!—I have never seen him play better-If he lacked some of his wonted physical force, he had, if possible, more of the ideal. P. S. A certain Mr. Ryder mistook Iago for a swaggering, dirty, fat, unshaven, illdressed, lazy bravo-with a bad memory; and fell into the error of conceiving a Newcastle burr to be melodious-a melo-dramatic swing and stride to be graceful-and a shake of his head to be sagacious! Boddie, too, was at fault-Roderigo was not an absolute idiot, only a silly fop: he need not want originals to study from-He is clever, though. Mrs. Pindar was worth the murdering-See Blackwood on that art.

Thursday.-Mr. Campbell's day of inauguration-wait to see what the journals say.- -Evening. Lear and Kean. The curse was magnificently given-and, oh! how touching was the passage, "How sharper," &c. Kemble's, as a whole, was more sustained -Kean's more brilliant; if the one made you sad throughout, the other thrilled you in isolated passages till tears came. Some bad taste in an interpolation-made amends for by an omission. Verb. sap.

Friday.-Kean again. Sir Giles. Old Massinger would almost have been terrified at the incarnation of pride, cunning, malice, and hate, which he conceived, and Kean to-night exhibited.

Saturday.-Sir Edward Mortimer has to speak much bad blank verse-if ten-syllable lines, that halt terribly, but not from their burden of meaning, are so,-yet we saw the noble being Godwin's genius conceived, rather than the shadow of it Colman tried to appropriate. It was a piece of dreamy grandeur, that yet inspired our love, as well as swayed our homage. Memo. Why is the author of "Caleb Williams" left to pine in the back parlour of a dingy shop in Newgate - Street? and Mary Woolstonecraft, his wife, obliged to retail sixpenny toy-books to Common Councilmen's children?-Mr. Kean repeated the address he had the night before delivered in his Indian garb, as a Turon chief. The little man becomes any costume that does not hide his ever-glancing eye -even though it comprises a nose-jewel, like Alanienouidet's-but 'twould have been as well had he not worn it while he delivered verses that, though but so-so, were all the smoother that one Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem in heroic measure, called "The Traveller." Yet it had pretty lines, such as,

"Haply an envious cloud passed o'er my day,

"And venomed tongues would talk my name away!"

And where he said of Great Columbia

"Great let me call her, for she sheltered me."

and said that

www.w." Tribes called savage o'er my accents hung,
"When Shakspeare's magic lay inspired my tongue!"

The elocution of the speaker was exquisite, in spite of the affectation of calling the Swan of Avon Shakspeare; and even on the repetition of the piece, the very actors crowded the stage doors to hear the lesson in their art from its greatest living master.. Read the Times report and Free Press observations on Thursday's proceedings in the College Hall-very good.

Sunday. Mr. Campbell was in the College Chapel at divine service. Memo. The Professors' bench sadly in want of Bibles. The Lord Rector had to use one-that was not quite so handsome as his gown. Surely the afternoon sermon was not preached at

any one?

His

Monday.-A square-built Frenchman, with a courtly name, exhibited feats of strength before me to-night at the Theatre that -made me ask if my eyes were not given to fibbing. attitudes were classical,—and his frame a study for the sculptorpainter and anatomist. During the war, it was customary to talk of the French as spindle-shanked frog-eaters. Captain Clias, the gymnast of the Military Academy, and M. De Cour of tonight, gave these prejudices the lie, in as far as they were generally applied to the nation. Simon Byrne should try a fall with the latter. His strength of arm is incredible. What would Major Longbow have made of his feats!

He would have asserted that he

held the Regent's bomb on his little finger, and placed the Achilles astride over the deltoid muscle!-Miss Pearson personated a part for the first time ;-sang delightfully-spoke timidly-and looked prettily, in a bewitching white dress with pink trimmings.

Vine Tavern, Monday Evening.

I WRITE you this, if not from under my own fig-tree, at least beneath a vine that, if I may judge from that in the crystal before me, as well as in my head and my stomach, is worthy of all commendation for its fruit. The fact is, I met Will and some others of the like kidney, just as I had alighted from the gig of a kind friend, after a pretty long drive—and I was over-persuaded to heat myself and this house, in preference to going to Hope-Street; so, as the packet must go by Lyon at six to-morrow, you will even pardon the shortness of the letter, for the place in which it was written-a place worthy of holding a symposium in, or concocting a Noctes. Methinks you ask, where the deuce was you driving to, who are no knight of the whip? It's a secret, but I'll tell you. The Shaws Water was that day to make its first call at the town of Greenock, in passing from the mountain tarn, Mr. Mennons has happily called "a little Caspian," in the hills, (named after you, I suppose, Loch Thom,) towards the sea-and I went

down to see its marriage with the Clyde, and all the pretty girls of Greenock who were to turn out, and, like sea nymphs, welcome the fresh-water naiads of the back settlements. It was an imposing sight-as the work is a gigantic and noble one-worthy of even the nation that made aqueducts wherever they planted their eagles. The day was delightful, and it was an interesting thing to see at "twilight's latest hour," the husbandman and his team in the furrow, making up by perseverance for a late springtime. But I hear my cronies asking what I'm about-and John answering that the oysters will be in a minute; so, like the young lady that went up to London in a smǎck, I'll be off in a smāck, and in a few minutes there will be as little vestige of me in "No. 9," as there is now of Oliver Cromwell's camp in our Green, where its mounds have stood for generations, but can only now be seen in Henderson's sketch of them. Of literary news I have none-saving that

"6 a select number of young gentlemen' are to sing and recite in the Lyceum one of these evenings, and a similar melange is to be given under magisterial patronage too-for, what think you? "the benefit of the Calton burying-ground"! Of course colds and stomach complaints are to be furnished gratis to the auditory! In a moment, Will. The wax, John. Addio !

www

The Maximist. No. II.

C. H.

Friendship as often freezes in the atmosphere of apathy, as consumes in the blaze of anger.

To estimate the value of the time which a visitor bestows upon us, it is necessary to know how he else would have been able to spend it.

The secret of being truly eloquent, is to combine the greatest possible amount of intensity with as much as will amalgamate with it of the most rigid simplicity.

A good essay might be written upon the circumference of the ancles of those ladies of Greenock who are "native, and to the manor born;" and yet there would be worse employments for a geometrician than measuring the arc of their circle.

Impromptu, on seeing, to the east of Glasgow, the fine Rainbow of Monday, 9th April, the day of Mr. Campbell's arrival.

Beneath thy span, first of the year, he comes

Who hymned thy glories, radiant bow of heaven!

Conquerors may wake their homes with trump and drums;
Thy arch is to the Poet's triumph given!

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

A Scribe is good, but would require to be transposed as well as transcribed.-K. is beautiful, if original.-It is impossible to guard against such impositions as Alexis seems to have suffered by.

Printed by James Curll, 55, Bell-Street, and sold by all Booksellers.
PRICE THREEPENCE.

No. XII-SATURDAY, 5th MAY, 1827.

Original.

REMINISCENCES OF DRIDDLE, THE PYEPOET. No. I.

MY DEAR ANT.-William Driddle was the founder and_sole_representative of a great school of poetrythe Pye-Crust one. The Lake, Leg-of-Mutton, Cockney, and Satanic schools have had each their numerous disciples. He was himself alone. Let me describe him. When I first met his gaze, he was about sixty-five, and at the door of his pastry-shop. The situation and the crisis were both interesting. It was a summer evening, but his locks were wintry. His window and his words were full of good things; and his lips played gracefully in one eternal smack, as he uttered the one, and seemed to be fresh from tasting the qualities of the other. Picture a man whose face was furrowed as coarsely as an illploughed croft-rough as a stubble-field shorn by contract-with a mouth in its middle like the cavernous entry to Erebus, having here and there a yellow spectral tooth, sentinelling its gateway; and above it a pair of twinkling eyes, glancing with the ember flashes of green, through the modest veil of gray rheum that hung from their corners with fists like seal's flappers, and feet of a hippopotamus, and unmentionables of dirty drab and daily diminishing longitude from their waisting, and you may have the outlines of Willie Wag, as he facetiously named himself. Yet these feet had climbed Parnassus these paws penned the lofty inspirations of poesy-and these breeches held in their pockets the sybilline leaves which confer on those who inscribe them-immortality! It is in vain to say these were greasy; his verses indeed made them smooth, but it was the fingers of devoted admirers that, in the lapse of time, imprinted them with precocious marks of antiquity. William was not a voluminous writer. The lioness has few cubs. Neither did he fill the shops of snuff-dealers with his unsold productions. He probably never penned above fifty sheets, nor printed above fifty copies of what he had penned. His

productions are now Rarissima. Often, indeed, he threatened to astonish the world with his posthumous productions, even before his death, but, if he ever wrote more than he printed-his friends do him injustice in withholding them. Those that the world and the few on whom he bestowed them, have been favoured with, we shall delightedly dwell upon in No. II. of these Reminiscences.

"A FOND ADORER OF DEPARTED FAME."

LEAVES FROM A LOUNGER'S NOTE-BOOK. No. II.

GREEK and Roman story does not offer more glorious examples of devoted valour, and heroic daring, than has been repeatedly displayed by our private soldiers and sailors. What a soul had O'Laverty, who, faithful to his country, in the moment of expiring nature, secreted the dispatches with which he was entrusted, in the gash that his life was ebbing through! What a mind and nerve had Appleford -and Dougal-and Death! The ancients seem frequently to have had an eye to posterity, and a desire of display in their distinguished actions. Those of the individuals named, are only a few preserved, as if by chance, of many thousands that must have occurred and passed unnoticed. They were not performed in the front of gazing crowds and marshalled myriads; but were achieved by the actor without a thought of ever being recorded.

Read Drake's "Amusements in Spring." Dr. Drake is what the French happily term a literateur. Uniting in his own person a portion of the abilities and acquirements of an antiquary, critic, poet, and philosopher, he, without distinguishing himself highly in either of these capacities, proves, in all his works, a well-bred and accomplished gentleman. His productions have about them all the domestic air of fireside disquisition, and are impregnated with an atmosphere of stately gentility, acquired in the recesses of the massive bureau, in which they have all doubtless taken up their abode for a short time, till they had accumulated sufficiently to form a volume.

Seldom original, never profound, he is always pleasing. The perusal of his works call forth little intellectual exertion; fitted for the parlour window, or garden seat, they are equally well suited to the languor occasioned by extreme heat, or the distaste for abstraction and solitariness