matters, as becomes them, should be touched on reverently. Hood was, nevertheless, a good as well as a great man; and his free, blunt, direct verses, sprung from no want of due reverence for things holy. But how many are there who seize with avidity on whatever has the remotest appearance of justifying their bold-not to say loose sentiments; who delight to pick up any sarcasm or ridicule to throw it in the teeth of those they are pleased to dub "fanatics" and "bigots;" the liberalized censors being, in truth, all the while as great bigots as the individuals they condemn. The sentiments of the "Ode," however, are generally so just and striking, and clothed in such forcible and graphic language, is almost to expiate the drawbacks we have indicated.

We cannot forbear transcribing the poet's description of himself. It may be termed his moral portrait. Contrasting himself with the hypocrite, he says

"Of such a character, no single trace
Exists, I know, in my fictitious face;

There wants a certain cast about the eye,

A certain curling of the nose's tip,

In scorn of all that is beneath the sky

In brief, it is an aspect deleterious,

A face decidedly not serious;

A face profane, that would not do at all,

To make a face at Exeter Hall!

"Well! be the graceless lineaments confest,
I do enjoy this bounteous, beauteous earth,
And dote upon a jest

"Within the limits of becoming mirth.'
No solemn, sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious;
Nor study, in my sanctum supercilious,

To frame a Sabbath bill or forge a bull;-
I pray for grace-repent each sinful act-
And love my neighbour far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract,
That's turned, by application, to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven;
All creeds I view with toleration thorough,
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As anybody's rotton borough."

In reference to religion, he has the following

"With sweet, kind natures, as in honeyed cells,
Religion lives and feels herself at home;

But only on a formal visit dwells,

Where wasps, instead of bees, have formed the comb."

With every respect to the outward forms of religion, when combined with its spirit, he contrasts the self-righteous Pharisee, whose only piety is a rigid observance of ordinances, times, and places, with the humble, but large soul, that sees and communes with God in all his works; that can raise for itself a temple in the desert, and can send forth as pure and holy a hymn of praise, from the solitude of the mountain-side, as from

the stately cathedral, with the swelling notes of the deep-toned organ
rolling on the ear.

"Thrice blessed rather is the man with whom
The gracious prodigality of nature,
The balm, the bliss, the beauty, and the bloom,
The bounteous providence in every feature,
Recal the good Creator to his creature,-
Making all earth a fane, and heaven its dome.
To his tuned spirit, the wild heather-bells
Ring sabbath knells," &c.

Passing from these graver themes, we alight on some of the poet's humorous effusions-humorous in ideas and language,—but fraught with deep moral lessons. Though calculated to awaken mirth from their mere drollery, one important aim seems to be kept in view in all; the wit is made subservient to morality-is designed to make us both wiser and better. Though free and playful as the mountain breeze, it is equally healthy; no pestilential contaminating elements are mixed up with it; it communicates to the intellect and the morals an exhilerating and elevating influence. Looking to the many temptations that the possession of such an exquisite wit must have subjected him to, does it not redound to the credit of the gifted dead, that we never find it made the pander of vice, the handmaid of scurrility, or the feather that winged the dart of undeserved, revengeful ridicule.

The longest humorous piece in the collection is one entitled, "Miss Kilmansegg, and her precious leg." The command of language, felicity of illustration, and the appropriateness and pungency of the wit displayed in this production, are really wonderful. It seems as if knocked off at a single sitting, so warm, fresh, vigorous, and life-like, is every line. Like the gushing of the mountain stream, on it dashes-leaping, rushing, sparkling in the sun's rays, impelled on its now calm, now boisterous path, by the inexhaustible reservoir whence it springs.

The subject of the poem may be considered a felicitous comment and satire on the absurd world-worship of wealth, and the unhappy conse quences that thence result in many individual instances. The heroine is a wealthy heiress, the daughter of a man who

"Had rolled in money, like pigs in mud,

Till it seemed to have entered into his blood

By some occult projection;

And his cheeks, instead of a healthy hue,
As yellow as any guinea grew,

Making the common phrase seem true

About a rich complexion."

The poet traces the hopeful heiress through the various stages of birth, christening, education, courtship, marriage, misery, and death. By an accident, described in graphic terms, she loses one of her legs, and determines to rest satisfied with nothing short of a solid gold substitute. On this the story hangs, and the poet makes it the medium of his sentiments on mammon-worship. When the amiable young lady is fitted with this valuable appendage, it becomes, of course, the cynosure of wondering eyes.

Like many other large owners of the yellow metal, she is soon beset by a host of suitors; the courtship of the tender inamoratos being more directed to the leg than to the lady. Wood and cork are suggested as likely materials to supply the place of the unfortunate limb. But no

"She couldn't, she shouldn't, she wouldn't have wood,

Nor a leg of cork if she never stood;

And she swore an oath, or something as good,

That the proxy limb should be golden.

"A wooden leg! what a sort of a peg

For your common Jockies and Jennies;
No, no! her mother might worry and plague,
Weep, go down on her knees, and beg,
But nothing would move Miss Kilmansegg,
She could, she would, have a golden leg,
If it cost ten thousand guineas.

"Wood, indeed, in forest or park,
With its sylvan honours, and feudal bark,
Is an aristocratical article;

But split, and sawn, and hacked, about town,
Serving all needs of pauper and clown,
Trod on, staggered on, wood cut down,
Is vulgar fibre and particle!

"And cork-when the noble cork tree shades
A lovely group of Castilian maids,

"Tis a thing for a song or a sonnet;
But cork as its stops the bottle of gin,
And bungs the beer, the small beer in;
It pierced her heart like a corking pin
To think of standing upon it."

In the progress of the poem, the bard, among some cutting strictures on incidental subjects, has a fling at a not uncommon kind of vanity-"legworship"-much in fashion among dandies and other exquisites. He

says,

"Supposing the trunk and limbs of man,
Shared on the allegorical plan,

By the passions that mark humanity,
Whichever might claim the head or heart,
The stomach, or any other part,

The legs would be seized by vanity.
"There's Bardus-a six-foot column fop,
A light-house without any light atop,

Whose height would attract beholders,
If he had not lost some inches clear,
By looking down at his kerseymere,
Ogling the limbs he holds so dear,

Till he got a stoop in his shoulders.
"Talk of art, or science, or books,
And down go the everlasting looks,
To his pedestal beauty so wedded;
Try him wherever you will, you find
His mind in his legs, and his legs in his mind;
All prongs and folly-in short, a kind
Of fork that is fiddle-headed."

Conducting Miss Kilmansegg to her couch, after the racketting and rioting of a great feast and ball, at which she had "come out," and where, of course, the leg had excited unbounded admiration and cupidity, the poet thus takes occasion to apostrophize the bed :—

"To the happy, a first-class carriage of ease,
To the land of nod, or where you please;
But, alas! for the watchers and weepers,
Who turn, and turn, and turn again,
But turn, and turn, and turn, in vain,
With an anxious brain,

And thoughts in a train

That does not lie upon sleepers.

"And, oh! when the blessed diurnal light,
Is quenched in the providential night,

To render our slumber more certain;

Pity, pity, the wretches that weep,

For they must be wretched who cannot sleep,
When God himself draws the curtain."

Among the many suitors for the hand, or rather for the leg, of the wealthy heiress, the fortunate besieger is a foreign count. A count, of course, merely by his own account.

"A foreign count, who came incog,
Not under a cloud, but under a fog,

In a Calais packet's fore-cabin;

With eyes as black as the fruit of the thorn,
And his hooky nose, and his beard half-shorn,
Like a half-converted Rabbin.

"And because the sex confess a charm,

In a man who has slashed a head or an arm,

Or has been a throat's undoing;

He was dressed like one of the glorious trade,

At least when glory is off parade,

With a stock and a frock well trimmed with braid,

And frogs that went a wooing."

And then-and the following notable accomplishments have turned the heads, and won the hearts of many a giddy girl—

"And then--and much it helped his chance-
He could sing, and play first-fiddle, and dance;
Perform charades and proverbs of France;
Act the tender, and do the cruel;

For among his other killing parts,
He had broken a brace of female hearts,
And murdered three men in a duel."

Ere the honeymoon is at the full, the golden-legged lady finds to her sad experience that the fellow is a cold, heartless schemer, with as little title to the name of gentleman as to that of count. Love for her he had never felt, and the real object of his villany once secured, the married life of "Miss Kilmansegg" is one of unmitigated misery. Such a result, in a greater or less degree, cannot fail to flow from all matches where mere gold, or external appearance alone, without reference to mental and moral qualities, form the motive influence of the unions. The following moral closes the poem :

"Gold, gold, gold, gold!

Bright and yellow, hard and cold;
Molten, graven, hammered, and rolled;
Heavy to get and light to hold;
Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold;
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled ;

Spurned by the young, and hugged by the old,
To the very verge of the church-yard mould;
Price of many a crime untold;
Good, or bad, a thousand fold,
How widely its agencies vary;

To save, to ruin, to curse, to bliss,
As even its minted coins express,

Now stamped with the image of good Queen Bess,
And now of a bloody Mary."

THE MEMORIAL STONES OF RENFREWSHIRE.

SECOND REVERIE.

OUR day dreams amongst the Stones of Renfrewshire resemble somewhat Harvey's Meditations amongst the Tombs. But ours are the tombs of events, not of individuals. A grandeur invests their melancholy with more expansive interest, than could ever attach to the "sisti viator" of ancient urns, or the "memento mori" of modern head-stones. They rather seem to shout aloud

"Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust;"

and the prominent position which these public monuments of the past have received at the hands of those who erected them, is generally well calculated to arrest the roving eye, by a breach in the continuity of the landscape, so as to provoke the inquiries which it is their object to suggest. It is singular with what felicity the intuitive concurrence of men and nations has been given to the recognised form and character of inanimate objects best calculated to represent particular feelings. Two of our poets have evinced a beautiful perception, for instance, of the appropriateness of church-spires. Wordsworth says

"And spires, whose silent finger points to heaven,"

an

and Coleridge, in "The Friend," (No. 14, p. 223,) observes, that " instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars; and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sunset, appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward." It was certainly reserved for these poets to discover the meaning of mankind in giving this expression of sentiment to church-spires. At an humble distance, the kindred idea expressed by the erection of sepulchral tumuli, pillars, and crosses, may be also conceived to have been unconsciously entertained by generations, and left to some future "prophet of the past" to divine. It is, how