6

Goldsmith is said to have gone and repeated the pun at another table in this fashion :-" John should take those pease, I think, to Hammersmith." "Why so, Doctor ?" "Because that is the way to make 'em green." Now our friend would give the blunder with this sort of additional dressing: "At sight of the dishes of vegetables, Goldsmith, who was at his own house, took off the covers, one after another, with great anxiety, till he found that pease were among them; upon which he rubbed his hands with an air of infinite and prospective satisfaction. You are fond of pease, Sir?' said one of the company. 6 company. Yes, Sir,' said Goldsmith, particularly so:-I eat them all the year round;-I mean, Sir, every day in the season. I do not think there is any body so fond of pease as I am.' 'Is there any particular reason, Doctor,' asked a gentleman present, why you like pease so much, beyond the usual one of their agreeable taste? -No, Sir, none whatsoever :-none I assure you' (here Goldsmith shewed a great wish to impress this fact on his guests): 'I never heard any particular encomium or speech about them from any one else but they carry their own eloquence with them: they are things, Sir, of infinite taste.' (Here a laugh, which put Goldsmith in additional spirits.) But, bless me he exclaimed, looking narrowly into the pease: I fear they are very ill-done: they are absolutely yellow instead of green' (here he put a strong emphasis on green); on green); and you know, pease should be emphatically green :-greenness in a pea is a qua

lity as essential, as whiteness in a lily. The cook has quite spoilt them :-but I'll give the rogue a lecture, gentlemen, with your permission.' Goldsmith then rose and rang the bell violently for the cook, who came in, ready booted and spurred. Ha!' exclaimed Goldsmith, those boots and spurs are your salvation, you knave. Do you know, Sir, what you have done? No, Sir.'- Why, you have made the pease yellow, Sir. Go instantly, and take 'em to Hammersmith.' To Hammersmith, Sir ?' cried the man, all in astonishment, the guests being no less so please Sir, why am I to take 'em to Hammersmith?"— Because, Sir,' (and here Goldsmith looked round with triumphant anticipation) that is the way to render those pease green.""

There is a very humorous piece of exaggeration in Butler's Remains,-a collection, by the bye, well worthy of Hudibras, and indeed of more interest to the general reader. Butler is defrauded of his fame with readers of taste who happen to be no politicians, when Hudibras is printed without this appendage. The piece we allude to is a short description of Holland :—

A country that draws fifty foot of water,
In which men live as in the hold of nature;
And when the sea does in upon them break,

And drowns a province, does but spring a leak.

*

That feed, like cannibals, on other fishes,
And serve their cousin-germans up in dishes.
A land that rides at anchor, and is moored,
In which they do not live, but go aboard.

We do not know, and perhaps it would be impossible to discover, whether Butler wrote his minor pieces before those of the great patriot Andrew Marvell, who rivalled him in wit and excelled him in poetry. Marvell, though born later, seems to have been known earlier as an author. He was certainly known publicly before him. But in the political poems of Marvell there is a ludicrous character of Holland, which might be pronounced to be either the copy or the original of Butler's, if in those anti-Batavian times the Hollander had not been baited by all the wits; and were it not probable, that the unwieldy monotony of his character gave rise to much the same ludicrous imagery in many of their fancies. Marvell's wit has the advantage of Butler's, not in learning or multiplicity of contrasts (for nobody ever beat him there), but in a greater variety of them, and in being able, from the more poetical turn of his mind, to bring graver and more imaginative things to wait upon his levity.

He thus opens the battery upon our amphibious neighbour :

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the off-scouring of the British sand;
And so much earth as was contributed

By English pilots, when they heaved the lead;
Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell,
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell.

Glad then, as miners who have found the ore,

They, with mad labour,* fished the land to shore;
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth, as if it had been of ambergreece;
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away;
Or than those pills which sordid beetles rowl,
Transfusing into them their dunghill soul.

He goes on in a strain of exquisite hyperbole

How did they rivet with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles;
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their wat❜ry Babel far more high

To catch the waves, than those to scale the sky.
Yet still his claim the injured ocean layed,
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played;
As if on purpose it on land had come
To shew them what's their Mare Liberum ;†
A dayly deluge over them does boil;
The earth and water play at level-coyl;
The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as at meat, but as a guest:
And oft the Tritons, and the Sea-nymphs, saw
Whole shoals of Dutch served up for cabillau.
Or, as they over the new level ranged,

For pickled herrings, pickled Heeren changed.

Dryden afterwards, of fighting for gain, in his song of "Come, if you dare.”

The Gods from above the mad labour behold.

† A Free Ocean.

Nature, it seemed, ashamed of her mistake,

Would throw their land away at duck and drake:
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
For as with Pigmys, who best kills the crane,
Among the hungry he that treasures grain,
Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns,
So rules among the drowned he that drains.
Not who first sees the rising sun, commands;
But who could first discern the rising lands;
Who best could know to pump an earth so leak,
Him they their lord and country's father speak;
To make a bank was a great plot of state ;-
Invent a shovel, and be a magistrate.

We can never read these and some other ludicrous verses of Marvell, even when by ourselves, without laughter.

XIII.-GILBERT! GILBERT!

THE sole idea generally conveyed to us by historians of Thomas à Becket is that of a haughty priest, who tried to elevate the religious power above the civil. But in looking more narrowly into the accounts of him, it appears that for a considerable part of his life he was a merry layman, was a great falconer, feaster, and patron, as well as man of business; and he wore all characters with such unaffected pleasantness, that he was called the Delight of the Western World.