of Haroun el Raschid, which were so well accompanied with pantomimic gesture, and so deliberately recited, that I could follow him through the whole with great ease and pleasure. To this succeeded songs, in which both myself and servant bore a share, the latter singing in Greek, and I in Italian, which they thought were the learned languages of the country from whence we came. Among the Arabs, one sang in Turkish, and the rest in Arabic. Ya Leila! Leila! tahly ya Leila!' was thrice repeated. 'O Night! Night! Hasten! O Night! for thou art the Friend of Love! Yes! darkness is the lover's heaven,' etc. Another, which I had not heard before, was rapturously applauded; it was from a newly-married virgin to her spouse. And the group of females who sat aloof upon the furnace, not daring to lift their veils, or join among the rest of the party, were yet suffered to express their shouts of approbation and of praise. Next followed a conversation by the fingers, in much the same way as I have seen it practised in England, the changes of their positions bearing a fancied resemblance to the shape of the alphabetic characters. It was exercised with great skill, and our amusement was considerably heightened by a third person's interpretation of this mystic discourse.

Under the hope that more novelties might be presented to us by the women's singing, I ventured to ask the Sheick whether such a favor might not be permitted. He expressed his surprise at the question, and added that such a proposition, coming from any other than a stranger to their customs, would be received with a very bad grace. He told us, then, a story of an intrigue being discovered, which originated in what he termed the indelicacy of a female singing, the subject of her strains having made such an impression upon a male hearer, as to inspire him with a passion for her, which ended in the discovery of their amours, and the private strangling of both.

Thus employed, dividing our time between picking the cotton, hearing tales and songs, and filling our pipes in the intervals of conversation, the midnight stole upon us unperceived, before even any of the visitors began to retire. They excused their long stay, by saying, that as strangers sojourned among them but seldom, it was allowable for them to make a jubilee of the occasion. On the breaking up of the assembly, therefore, which was done more suddenly than it had been formed, we began to think of arrangements for sleeping, which I should have been content to have done upon the mat on which we had passed the evening; but as the Sheick had ordered it otherwise, we were obliged to comply with his wish, and for this purpose we retired to a small room within, about ten feet by seven, having no other aperture than the door of entrance through which we were obliged to stoop almost double. The alleged reason for his preferring this for our use, was its superior warmth, from it being much smaller in size, and having a furnace yet retaining the heat of the fire by which the cakes of our evening meal were baked. I could not persuade him of the superior freshness of the outer part, and our danger of suffocation here; they knew of no distinction between a freer circulation of air and a sharper cold, any more than they could separate the idea of cold from that of extreme pain; and as to my

sleeping on the outside alone, allowing them to follow their own choice for themselves, every one objected to this. I tried every mode of persuasion in vain, and a mat being spread out upon the furnace, we stripped to lay down, five in number, in a room ten feet by seven, lying in a row, with our heads toward the inner wall, and our feet hanging over the edge of the furnace, which was elevated nearly three feet from the ground, and had a space between it and the outer wall, of about two feet wide, for the purpose of tending the fires with fuel.

The Arabs stripped off even their shirts, and rolled themselves in their blue Melyahs, a practice I adopted also myself, having left off the use of flannel next the skin, after the bath at Balbeis; and so excessive was the heat of this literal oven, that I could have stripped my skin off too, if possible, to refresh myself. We had scarcely lain down, before three females came in, whom we could but faintly perceive, from the glimmer of the expiring lamp that was yet burning, and who, without a stretch of imagination, from their hooded dresses, veiled faces, and stolen manner of entrance, looked like the flitting beings of another world. They sank upon the ground without a whisper, and must have literally lain on one another, as they occupied only the narrow space between the furnace and the wall.

The repose of the weary is certainly enviable, and the art or faculty of enjoying that repose, in spite of every obstacle that may attend it, is a desirable qualification, which some of the party possessed a larger share of than myself; for an hour had not elapsed, before most of them were snoring, while the united torments of rats and mice, which ran across us in troops, to nibble the fragments of the last baked cakes, the bugs and fleas that were like crawling hosts, collected to devour our bodies, and the buzzing mosquitoes, enjoying free access to every vein, kept me not only awake, but employed too, throughout the night, which, short as it was, in the number of its hours, was to me the longest in duration, and most weary in its progress, that I ever remember to have counted.

MADRIGAL.

ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG WIDOW. FROM THE PORTUGUESE.

VOL. XI.

WHY art thou clothed in sad array

For him whose days are done,

Yet dost no sign of grief display

For those thy lightning-glances slay?

Though he thou mournest be but one,

More than a thousand they!

Thou bendest on the lover's prayer
The tearless eye of scorn,

And while thou dost, with cruel care,
The illusive guise of feeling wear,

Though Pity's garb thy breast adorn,
She never enters there!

43

LIFE.

WHAT is life at the best?-a weak bubble, a dream-
Evanescent as vanishing spray;

Now the hue of the rose, now the lily's pale crest,
Or a leaf from its stem fall'n away;

And Death takes the trophy to wear in his breast,
A frail, shatter'd wreck, on Time's turbulent stream!

What though beauty appear in its plumage of gold,
And dazzle with glittering sheen;

As the bow fadeth fast from the storm-girdled cloud,
And the Iris no longer is seen,

So the princes of earth but inherit a shroud,
To the gay all unsightly, and sad to behold.

Neither genius nor worth can a temple upraise,

To withstand the all-with'ring decay;

As the meteor its course through the heavens doth trace,
Then passes for ever away;

So the fire of the mind soars aloft for a space,
But its light is soon lost in eternity's maze.

A. M. M.

EUGENIUS STRUGGLE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE FOSTER MOTHER,'

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On the 17th of May, 18-, chance gave me the particulars of the following memoir, and the cognomen of the occupier of a spacious attic in Westminster, its title. EUGENIUS STRUGGLE, at once the sport and child of misfortune, for twelve months on that very day, had manfully endured 'the whips and scorns of time.' At an early period of his existence, he had discovered flashes of a genius in his mind, which at the age of fourteen, blazing forth in five lines, acrostically inscribed to the fair object of his ardent affection, rooted the conviction in his breast, that he was not of an age, but for all time.' Unhappily for Eugenius, neither his relations nor friends were as quick-sighted as himself; and despite his assurances, that his talents were of too high a class to be wasted on the attainment of the arts and mysteries of trade, his father, deaf to the voice of genius, and blind to its incipient sparks, apprenticed him to a cabinet-maker. Chisels are keen-edged tools, and saws have many teeth; but dull is the incision of the sharpest chisel feeble the stroke of the longest saw-compared with the acute cut to the pride, and laceration of the feelings, that this step occasioned Eugenius. Nevertheless, though the spirit was any thing but willing, the flesh was by no means weak; and he whose ideas soared to the achievement of laurels that should wreath his fame, when his material and mortal parts had returned to dust, was obliged to take time by the forelock, and reverse the position of affairs, by turning his hand to work, and his mind to saw-dust. Still, where there's a will, there's away; and as Eugenius was the only child of a man who, although possessed of none of the refined genius of his son, was not without a considerable share of what is very aptly called this world's goods,

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our hero resolved to keep alive the half-strangled infant of his brain, so that, when arrived at man's estate, and the end of his time, he might follow the bent of his destiny; not doubting that though it would be much against the will of his father while living, he should be independent by his will at his death, which nevertheless Eugenius was the last in the world to desire, sooner than a good old age should lead to, and for two plain reasons: in the first place, because he loved his father as dearly as a son could, and secondly, because, after all, the property to which he was heir would at best be but a slight augmentation to the wealth of which, of course, he would have possessed himself, by his literary labors, long ere his father was gathered to his fathers.

Up at five, to breakfast at seven, to work again till dinner time at one, and from two till six, when labor ceased for half an hour, to afford time for what Eugenius, (as he wished it to be understood,) sarcastically called the common sacrifice to the Chinese nymph of tears; who, however, being originally intended to represent green tea, was not quite as aptly named as truth would have dictated, or our poet desired. However, granting that the tea was not green, for which, except by the faintness of the color of its decoction, it could never have been mistaken, it was the welcome Lethe in which he lost the fatigues of the day, and which tranquillized and prepared his mind for the wasting of the midnight oil, or rather, I should say, the nocturnal rushlight, by whose rays he prepared leaves that should one day, and thence for ever, compose a wreath that, coupled with the name of Eugenius Struggle, should hang high in the temple of the trumpet-goddess. There, in all the elysium of literary lumber, which was made to adorn his chamber by the strewing about of sonnets, odes, tragedies, comedies, tales, anecdotes, and a hundred other miscellanies, which, in whole or extracts, had drawn tears and roars of laughter from many a reader of the Casket,' the Mirror,' and the Penny Magazine,' there was his wont to sit, 'to fame a martyr, to his muse a slave,' as he said of himself in the 'Sentimental Songster,' till daylight warned him that he had often not more than an hour in which to subdue by sleep the high-flown workings of his lofty mind, ere the fifth stroke of St. Giles's clock, or his master's cane, would rouse him to the labor, not that love delights in,' or 'that physics pain,' but which, notwithstanding its nauseousness, was a dose that once a day he was obliged to take, and which generally took him all day long.

But before we quit the scene of his temporary happiness for that where he and sorrow sat, that curiosity being probably felt by my readers, which in me was insatiable with less than a perusal of his lucubrations, I will transcribe for their edification some of those of his pieces which I read so much to my own.

I have already remarked, that Eugenius's first poem was inscribed to her who was for a twelve month after, the only heroine of his brain. No name but hers would rhyme in his imagination; and for the versification of his tragics, it had indeed been blank, if 'Nancy' had not graced his every page. Now I trust it will not be thought that our hero was vain, because he not only professed that he could do, but actually did, what the immortal Charles Dibdin had

not done, although he had written more about Nancy than any other known author, up to that time, which was, to rhyme with that name with as much if not more facility than with any other; while his predecessor, in several hundred songs, in fact in all he had written of the name, which was that of his wife, (with only one exception, which occurs in his song called 'Nancy's the Name,' in which he versifies with the word pansy, at the same time confessing his inability to find another, and the difficulty he experienced in racking his brains for that,) was put to his non plus. In vindication of Eugenius, I insert the verse on which he hinges his triumph. It runs thus:

'I once of my mind box'd the compass around,

For a rhyme to the name of my love,
And for a long spell naught but fancy I found,
That notion of sounds would approve.

At last, avast heaving, I cried, soft and slow,
There's a flower, and they call it a pansy,

But the true name, d'ye mind me, is heart's ease, and so
'Tis the best rhyme that can be for Nancy.'

Now with what justice Eugenius contended that even that second rhyme was a make-shift, a lame adoption of an exploded name for the real word, I shall leave my readers to decide, and lay before them the selections I made from his works, the first of which is the acrostic referred to in the commencement of my narrative. Certain it is, that even the quotation I am about to make, is a plain evidence that our young friend did not arrogate more than he substantiated. But to the proof:

'ACROSTIC.

'No angel from heaven, no creature on earth,

A h, no! nor of dark necromancy,

No odds if tall, short, thin, or lusty in girth,

Can equal your beauty, your talent, and worth,
You exquisite angel, my Nancy!'

Such is the first dash into poetry, the first ebullition of incipient genius, from the pen of one whose reputation I would not have hazarded by publishing for the first time the unrestrained effort of an ardent boy's imagination, were I not satisfied that my readers would sooner patronize, than harshly criticize, a young beginner. Those who are unwilling or incapable of deciding upon peculiar talent, may perhaps blame Eugenius for the conclusion he came to, relative to his, considering the displeasure it occasioned his father; but then that father was one of the very class of people I have named; and again, it so happened, that his son was a fatalist; and with the prejudices of such an one, would he argue upon the rectitude of the opinion he had espoused and cherished, with regard to the course toward which he should apply his mind; and the conviction he entertained of his fitness for the pursuit he had adopted, is plainly discernible in the following passage from one of his early tragedies, entitled, The Flinty Heart; or None so Blind as Those who Wont See.' The reader may clearly trace in the character of Pauloni, an evident portraiture of the author himself; while that of Lady Nancy admits of no question, as to whom it is indebted for its original. The scene is described as a rocky cave, at the end of a subterraneous passage;