Alexander was very fond of this horse, and built a city in his honour. In fact he petted him almost as much as Caligula did his favorite steed Jacitatus, which was regaled with gilded oats, served from a costly table, inhabited a kind of palace, and only died too early for his fame, since his royal master had determined to elevate him to the consulship. Though a horse has never arrived at any official dignity, yet he was the means of investing Darius with the purple. The anec. dote is too trite to be repeated.

One of the hardest-riding horsemen upon record, is Mazeppa; though the fact that the condemned page was an involuntary rider, detracts from the interest. The ingenious O'Dogherty has drawn a somewhat curious parallel between Mazeppa and John Gilpin, from which we are to conclude that the critic imagines Lord Byron to have pilfered the idea of his tale from the immortal poem of poor Cowper. Undoubtedly, Gilpin's ride was the most desperate. Mazeppa was bound to his steed, while John must have found it very difficult to keep his seat. Then Mazeppa was not annoyed by

"These troublesome disguises that we

He rode in buff, while Gilpin had hat, cloak, and wig to care for. Mazeppa, with the exception of that ugly wood he threaded, had before him an open course, while Gilpin ran the risk of encountering some vehicle upon the road as a tax-cart, vis-à-vis, landau, carriage, barouche, sulkey, jarvey, buggy, whiskey, fly, stanhope, or postchaise. But it is encroaching on the province of O'Dogherty to pursue the parallel further.

If there be a romance of the turf

and a romance of the field, there is surely a romance of the road. The knights of the pad have had their chroniclers, and the history of the highway its Herodotus. It is very difficult not to sympathise with the daring equestrian feats of the heroes of Hounslow, particularly in these days, when such romances as Paul Clifford have invested highwaymen with peculiar interest, and thrown around the memory of Du Val and his compeers the soft light of poetry and feeling.

It must surely be very unpleasant to be stopped upon a lonely road, and have one's purse demanded, at the peril of one's life; but that is a very different affair from sitting in the stage. box and listening to the honied accents of Macheath, or lounging at home upon a sofa and reading of Dick Turpin. Long before it was fashionable to admire burglars and highwaymen, long before housebreaking was thought romantic, and swindling rendered poetical, I remember to have read with avidity the life of Richard Turpin-Esquire. I suppose I admired him for his horsemanship. What, then, was my delight when I found him "worked up” into Ainsworth's romance of Rookwood, and made a hero in thought and deed? Whatever be the defects of Rookwood, literary and moral, the description of Turpin's mare, Black Bess, and her death-ride from London to York in a single night, are certainly highly beautiful and poetical, and evidently written with enthusiasm. the following is not poetry, what is it?

If

"Let the lover his mistress's beauty rehearse,

And laud her attractions in languishing

verse;

Be it mine, in rude strains, but with truth, to confess

The love that I bear to my bonny Black Bess.

From the West was her dam, from the

East was her sire; From the one came her swiftness, the

other her fire;

No peer of the realm better blood can

possess,

Than flows in the veins of my bonny Black Bess.

Look, look! how that eye-ball grows bright as a brand!

That neck proudly arches, those nostrils expand!

Mark that wide-flowing mane, of which each silky tress Might adorn prouder beauties, but none like Black Bess.

Mark that hide, sleek as velvet, and dusky as night, With its jet undisfigured by one lock of white;

That throat branched with veins

prompt to charge and caress— Now is she not beautiful, bonny Black Bess?

Over highway and by-way, in rough and smooth weather,

Some thousands of miles we have journied together;

Our couch the same straw, and our

meal the same mess;

No couple more constant than I and

Black Bess.

By moonlight, in darkness, by night and by day,

Her headlong career there is nothing can stay;

She cares not for distance, she knows not distress :

Can you show me a courser can match with Black Bess?"

An Irishman, Jerry Sullivan, had the faculty of taming horses by a whisper, which, for aught I know, belongs exclusively to Irishmen. As soon as Jerry approached a horse, he would fix his gaze steadily upon him, and then, getting near the animal, bring his lips in contact with his ear, and, apparently, whisper some cabalistic words. The horse would shudder violently, and then follow and obey Sullivan with all the docility of a dog. Probably the power of Sullivan consisted as much in his look as his voice: but perhaps, after all, it was courage that did it. Jerry once tamed a refractory race-horse on the Curragh of Kildare, in the presence of thousands of spectators.

But I have already transgressed the limits proposed to myself, and fear that the patience of my readers must be wearied. I have but one word to say to the ladies, and then, addio! Do not, lovely and gentle creatures, do not give up the exercise of riding. Relinquish every other amusement in preference to that. If you knew how beautiful you look, managing your spirited nags, with your light veils floating on the wind, and your fine countenances lit up with animation, and glowing with exercise, you would never enter a carriage. Do not, I beseech ye, suffer riding to become unfashionable. Pace along Rotten

Row and win all hearts in your quiet career; gallop along the country roads, and thus delight yourselves; so may health, beauty and love, attend you!

COMMONPLACES.

THERE is one enjoyment allotted to men, which I do not remember ever to have seen enumerated in a catalogue of those blessings for which man is beholden to his Creator; I mean the great men that have been among us ;— poets, to expand the soul and raise and hallow its aspirations, to soothe the heart to virtue, or fire it with a noble flame of holy passion ;-moralists, to shape and show to feeble men the road to truth, and historians to illustrate their precepts;-philosophers to show us our own souls, and divines to teach us how to save them.

One who has spent, and, he would hope, not altogether unprofitably, many a busy day and many a shortening night, in the company of such; who has sought from them--and he has found it-relief from those sorrows that do aye spring up in the fullest fountains of the world's sweetest joys, and those, not less bitter because im

aginary and self-raised, disquietudes of the soul, may perhaps give to this a magnitude not to be allowed by all; yet, if asked whither he looks for the happiness he hopes below, he would point, with Cowley, to his books.

If I have no palaces of cedar, heaped with jewels and refulgent with gold, yet have I temples for the soul, shining with pure altars and vocal with heavenly music: temples, with which Solomon's, in its brightest glory, may not be compared. If the voice of eastern singers and the heart-piercing melody of lute and tabret come not to my ear, yet are my walls, else dumb and silent, alive with a chorus of far sweeter sounds; and, in the intervals of self-speaking reflection, I listen to a rich symphony of soul-harmony. If for me no vaults cover from the eye of grasping theft, diamonds and splendid rubies, yet I have all around me "mental monuments," that like the tombs of eastern princes, are heaped

high with more dazzling jewels. 'Tis true I have no titled ancestor to thank for broad lands about me, but I claim the exalted privilege of thanking the Almighty that he has created a Milton, a Shakspeare, and a Pope.

In fine, I may have sorrow behind me and fear before me, and care and penury and neglect around me, but I have also MY BOOKS. I have not wealth and palaces and precious stones, nor the voice of music and the sound of dancing, but I have MY BOOKS.

The art of becoming great consists not in working personally, but in setting other people to work for you. This was well understood by De Retz, Mirabeau and Napoleon. These men remind one of that picture of a commonwealth in the titlepage of Hobbes's Leviathan, which is one large man composed out of many small men.

It is the difficulties and injuries which poets have met with, that have given rise to their finest effusions; like brooks whose sweet murmur is produced by the obstructions they en

as a business it is distressing. The laurel is a fine ornament, a bitter and baneful aliment.

In the calendar of happiness, time is reckoned in minutes; in that of unhappiness, it is reckoned in days.

Love is the perception of another's individuality.

There never existed a man that did not say, in the course of his life, one brilliant thing.

To succeed, it is necessary to have the air of succeeding.

There is nothing so indicative of semi-civilisation, as the practice of carrying arms. In the earliest period of Athenian history, the arms of the citizens were always deposited in the public arsenals when there was no war, and the dress of the Romans in peace was descriptive of their orderly habits-gens togata. In the nineteenth century of the Christian era, freest country under the sun, we do things differently.

and in the

There is a period in every person's life when his existence drags heavily, when the weary-footed hours seem as if they were leaden-heeled, when the morning is greeted with a sigh, and night looked for as a relief. Unless some new excitement, some stirring incentive to fresh exertion be made the soul's tenement, and man beor found, ennui takes possession of comes a suicide or an hypochondriac.

The voluptuary and the moralist have both sought arguments for their peculiar doctrines, from the shortness of life; and Holy Scripture has been cited to justify many an act of cruelty and wrong. The perversions of the best things can be turned into the worst, as in the most wholesome roots and herbs there is some component part which can be extracted and subtilised into a deadly poison.

It is true that habit and custom blunt enjoyment, but it is equally true that they create an appetency for it. L'appetit vient en mangeant, is a familiar French proverb; for instance, those who are in the habit of frequenting theatres, find a difficulty in weaning themselves from their customary recreation.

One

IN a remote region in the northern part of England, the people still cherish an attachment to old usages and sports, and hold the observance of Christmas, May-day, and other time-honoured festivals, a sacred obligation. village, in particular, is famous for its May-day sports, which, as the curate is a little, withered antiquary, are conducted with great ceremony and fidelity to old authorities. The May-pole is brought home, garlanded, and decked with ribbons, to the sound of pipe and tabor, surrounded by a laughing throng of sturdy yeomen and buxom maidens. It is erected on the great green, in the centre of the village, to the universal delight of old and young, and the dancing commences round it with great glee.

VOL. I. (19.)

It was a delightful spring, that of 17, and a softer sky never before smiled upon the village-green of R-, upon the first of May; and among the merry damsels dancing round the May-pole, no heart was happier and no step was lighter than that of Margaret Ellis, who, for the first time, joined in the sports of the day. She was a child of May, and this was the sixteenth anniversary of her birth. day. A gay brunette, her sparkling eyes had all the fire and the mirth of the sunny and passionate south,

U

while no lighter or more delicate foot than her's could have been found upon the margin of the Seine. A rich bloom mantled on her cheek, her lips were fresh and red, and her regular teeth, displayed as she panted in the dance, were white as unsullied snow. A tight little boddice, and a milkwhite frock, set off the charms of her person in the best manner. Then there was an air of gaiety and innocence about her which delighted every good-natured observer; and all the villagers allowed that Margaret Ellis deserved the tiara of flowers that crowned her Queen of the May. She blushed at the tokens of good-will and approbation, as she placed her hand in that of a young and rustic stranger, who led her off trumphantly at the head of the dancers. The youth was fairhaired, ruddy, athletic, and active; and those who saw them in the dance, could not help acknowledging that they were a lovely pair.

There was one who regarded them with eyes of jealous displeasure. This was a man of forty, of a handsome face and figure, but swarthy, dark-haired, and melancholy. He bent over the seat upon which old Farmer Ellis and his dame were seated, and whispered, "Do you know the young man who is dancing with your daughter?"

"Ah! he be a right good young mon, I warrant me," said the dame. "He do come fra the next county. William Evans, he calls himself."

"He calls himself!-umph!" muttered the person who had first spoken. "But what do others call him? Who knows anything about him? Who can vouch for his character? I would not suffer a daughter of mine to be gadding about, and dancing with a stranger."

66

64

Whoy, for the matter o' that," 'said Farmer Ellis ; you were nought but a stranger yourself, when you first did come to see us, Maister Pembroke. We didn't know you were the sexton of St. Hubert's. And yet you turned 'out a right good friend to me, mon; for when ye first knew me, things "were going deadly cross wi' me. What wi' the rot among my sheep, and the murrain among my cattle, I were all but ruined. Short crops and a hard land

lord, are bitter bad things. But you were the salvation of me, and I'll work my figures to the bone, but what you shall have your own again, John Pembroke."

"There is one way in which you can liquidate your debt." "Name it, Maister Pembroke," said the farmer, eagerly.

"No matter," muttered the sexton, and a hollow sigh escaped his lips. "I had an idea, but it is gone. Touching the stranger, in whom you both repose such confidence, in what manner does he earn his daily bread?" Whoy," said the farmer, "in the way that Adam did, mon. He do say he is a gardener."

66

"A likely tale !" ejaculated the sexton. "Look at his hands. Why, his fingers are delicate and white. Your gardener has horny fingers, and a palm of iron."

"Dang it! so they be!" cried Ellis. "Well, I never noticed that afore. Whoy, dame, he may be an impostor. And though he be so cruel koind and deadly fond of the girl now, he may forsake-may-"

"Look at them, now,' "said the sexton of St. Hubert's. "See how he grasps her hand; and how, as he whispers his soft, insinuating flattery in her ear, she blushes and smiles upon him. Confusion !"

66

Whoy, John!" exclaimed Dame Ellis; "what would the rector say to hear thee? Thou art surely distraught."

And now, as Margaret, flushed and panting with exercise, was suffering her partner to lead her toward her seat, her father beckoned her to approach.

"Come hither, girl," said he. The smiling maiden obeyed. "Margaret," said the old man," thou knowest I love thee. I ha' always been cruel koind to thee, and so has thy mother, girl. If any harm was to happen to thee, I should take it desperately to heart. I should, indeed. It would kill thy father, Margaret. Now, William Evans may be a good young man, and he may not; but we must beware of strangers. Wait till we have tried him a bit. Many a handsome nag turns out a vicious one. So it be my pleasure, and the dame's, that thou