be absorbed in grief, and almost a prey to fear. Meanwhile the courser with Erminia stray'd Through the thick covert of a woodland shade* Her trembling hand the rein no longer guides, And through her veins a chilling terror glides. By winding paths her steed pursu'd his flight, And bore at length the virgin far from sight. As, after long and toilsome chace in vain, The panting dogs unwilling quit the plain, If chance the game their eager search elude, Conceal'd in shelter of the favouring wood: So to the camp the Christian knights return, While rage and shame in every visage burn. Still flies the damsel, to her fears resign'd, Nor dares to cast a transient look behind. All night she fled, and all th' ensuing day, Her tears and sighs companions of her way: But when bright Phoebus from his golden wain Had loos'd his steeds, and sunk beneath the main, A sound, that calls again her sighs and tears: But soon her plaints are stopp'd by vocal strains, Mix'd with the rural pipes of village swains. She rose, and saw, beneath the shady grove, An aged sire that ozier baskets wove; His flocks around him graz'd the meads along, Three boys, beside him, tun'd their rustic song. Scar'd at th' unusual gleam of armour bright, The harmless band were seiz'd with sudden fright, But fair Erminia soon dispels their fears; From her bright face the shining helm she rears, And undisguis'd her golden hair appears. Pursue your gentle tasks, with dread unmov'd, O happy race! (she cry'd) of Heaven belov'd! Not to disturb your peace these arms I bear, Or check your tuneful notes with sounds of war. Book VII. DESCRIPTION OF A FISH RESEMBLING A MAN. IT WAS TAKEN BY FISHERS, AT OREFORD, IN SUFFOLK, IN THE SIXTH YEAR OF KING JOHN'S REIGN. IN Hollingshed's Chronicle is the following curious account : * See the Embellishment, illustrative of the above, page 161. In this sixt yeare of King John's raigne at Oreford in Suffolk, as Fabian hath it, (although I thinke he be deceiued in the time) a fish was taken by fishers in their nettes as they were at sea, resembling in shape a wild or sauage man, whom they presented unto Sir Bartholemew de Glanuille, knight, that had then the keeping of the castell of Oreford in Suffolke. Naked he was, and in all his limmes and members resembling the right proportion of a man. He had heares also in the usual parts of his body, albeit that on the crown of his head he was balde: his beard was side and rugged, and his breast verie harie. The knight caused him to be kept certaine days and nightes from the sea. Meate set afore him he greedily deuoured, and eate fishe both raw and sodden. Those that werd rawe he pressed in his hands tyll he had thrust out all the moysture, and so then he did eate them. Hee would not, or could not utter any speeche, although to try him they hung him uppe by the heeles, and him to his couche at the setting of the myserably tormented him. He would get sunne, and ryse agayne when it rose.. One day they brought him to the hauen, and suffered him to go into the sea, but to be sure he should not escape from them, they set three ranks of mightie strong nettes before him, so to catche him againe at their pleasure (as they ymagined) but he streyght wayes dyuing down to the bottome of the water, gotte past all the nettes, and comming uppe shewed himselfe to them againe, that stoode wayting for him, and dowking dyuerse tymes under water and coming up agayne, hee behelde them on the shore that stoode still looking at him, who seemed as it were to mocke them for that he had deceived them, and gotte past theyr nettes. At length, after hee had thus played him a great while in the water and that there was no more hope of hys returne, he came to them againe of hys owne accorde, swimming through the water, and remayned wyth them two monthes after. But finally, when he was negligently looked to, and nowe seemed not to be regarded, hee fledde secretelye to the sea, and was neuer after seene nor heard of. LOVE'S HOW D'YE DO. When but a thoughtless merry girl, There is a pleasure in the evening hour, Now the cool gentle breeze, in sportive play This is the hour of love When, seated on some happy chosen spot, Youths sigh long sentences of warm affection, And maidens hear, enraptured, all they wish: The hour of peace when he, whose well-tried mind Yet so it is; for when 'tis held ON THE BIOGRAPHY OF EMINENT POETS. THE biography of Great Poets seems to be demanded by nature-especially of those who have steeped their poetry, not only in the light of inspiration, but in the heat of their own hearts. We cannot dissever them from the glories by which they are made immortal. we know that they could not have lived always in that excited and exalted state of soul in which they emanated their poems. Yet That We desire to know the min the ebb of their thoughts and feelings, when they are but as mere men. We do not doubt that we shall love and esteem them when the lyre is laid aside, the inspired fit passed away-and that even then, with the prose of life, they will be seen mingling poetry. Such a man was Cowper-and of all we have been let know of the "Bard of Olney," from let the most mournful or afflicting anechimself or others, we would not willingly dote die; for while " we hold each strange tale devoutly true," we feel towards the object of our esteem, our love, and our pity, 66 thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." another hand should have suddenly lifted up or rent away the veil that hid the agonies of a mind still beautiful in all its most rueful afflictions, we might not have been able to endure, and might have turned away from the spectacle, as from one that we felt our eyes were not privileged to behold; but the veil was withdrawn at times by the sufferer himself, who, while he implored mercy from his Creator, was not loath to receive the pity of his fellow creatures-feeling, except indeed in the deepest, and most disastrous, and most despairing darkness of his spirit: that all their best sympathies were with him, and that he needed not to fear too rude or too close a gaze into his mysterious miseries, from eyes which he had often filled with the best of tears, and when mirth visited his melancholy, with the best of smiles too, although the hour and the day had come at last, when smiles were not for him, nor, as he thought, for any creature framed of the clay. Yet is his entire character, disturbed and distracted as it is seen to be, in beautiful and perfect consistency with all his poetry. But the sweet bells were out of tune, and jangled, may the strings of the heart were broken or the keys reversed, and the instrument that once discoursed such excellent music, at last jarred terribly its discord, and it was well when it was heard to sound no more. Of our Great Living Poets it might not, perhaps, be becoming in us now to speak, in these unpremeditated and imperfect effusions, but we trust that the world will one day or other have the biographies, of such men, for example, as Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth. Why should the friends who have been honoured with their closest friendship, and who survive them, be afraid or unwilling to speak, with that sacred reserve that will be imposed on them by the reverence of their own spirits? Such recital will strengthen the cause of virtue, by shewing that her ways are ways of pleasantness, and that all her paths are peace. The same harmony that pervades the great works of their genius will be found to have pervaded their life and all its actions-the same order and the same calm. Though much will have to be unrevealed, it will only be because there is much of what is good and best that can have no other abiding place but in the memory of sons and daughters, and friends that are as sons and daughters;-but much may, and ought to be, and will be revealed, showing the links that connect the lofty with the low, and bind together, in a chain that may be made visible to all eyes, all the children of humanity. The land that loves them living will desire when they are dead, to have the lineaments of their characters in imperishable portraiture, drawn by hands whose skilful touch is guided by the heart of affection; nor need such hands tremble in telling the truth-and nothing but the truth. But among Great Poets, there have been, and will be again, men with minds often sorely troubled and distracted by the passions God gave them, by the adverse aspect of fortune,-and by "the influence of malignant star." That often sorely troubled and distracted mind has spoken in their poetry, and in their practice; and thus they have themselves made the whole world the confident of the darkest secrets of their spirits. Such a man in some measure, was Burns; such a man, in full measure, was Byron. It would, in such circumstances, be most absurd to say, that all other tongues should be silent on all those topics on which their own had so eloquently and passionately descanted; but still, as they were witnesses against themselves, and likewise their own inexorable judges, calling on their own consciences to exe "Thoughtless follies laid them low, And stain'd their name." Nay, their brethren owed them more than both justice and mercy-pity, pardon, commiseration, and, without insult or injury to virtue, immortal fame. Such has been the doom, the destiny, If his vices were the fate of Burns. drawn in deepest shadows, his virtues were drawn in brightest sunbeams; and over the gloom, and over the glory, there was the light of genius. Therefore his country is neither afraid nor ashamed to see his character reflected with all its stains and all its purity in his works; but she looks on it steadily, though mournfully, with pardon, pity, and pride,—and her heart and her eyes fill as she gazes on his pale marble bust. She will suffer no one now to preach and moralize over his errors, except from his lips she hears "The still sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power, To soften and subdue." His faults and frailties, errors and vices, were all far more than redeemed, had they been many times greater than they were, by his generous and his noble virtues; and it is felt now over all Scotland, and in every land trodden by the feet of her sons, that the bad belonging to the character of a great man, may without danger be buried in his grave; from whence it will never cease to send up admonitary whispers ; and that it is true wisdom and true religion to elevate the good into the light, and hold it for ever there, as an encouragement and an example. With higher and brighter intellectual powers certainly, but as certainly with deeper and darker moral transgressions, the same fate may be predicted for Byron. Not even the magic of his genius could ever transform vice, in all its most alluring or gorgeous adornments, into the fair apparition of Virtue, who is seen to be Virtue still, "Though some few spots be on her flowing robe, Of stateliest beauty." The strong and severe moral sense of the English nation will not suffer itself to be long deluded by the "false glitter" of imagination, substituted for the true lustre of virtue. Christianity so clears the eye that looks into the human heart, that as in the darkest and remotest recesses nothing can escape its ken through obscurity, so neither is its visual nerve ever long made" dark with excessive bright.' Thus the only high poetical criticism must be in the light of Christianity; for it deals with the manifestations, the phenomena of a nature which can only be understood in that light-else confounding and inexplicable. Byron's soul struggled in and against that light; yet had he not been born in a country where in many a temple that light is worshipped, he had never been the great Poet that he was-nor breathed so often those magnificent strains that, issuing from his better and inner nature, "Do shame the wisdom of the Sadducee." As for his life, it cannot either in its brighter or darker lineaments be concealed, for it is emblazoned both in its shame and glory. But severely as it will be judged by his fellow men, too often shocked by his recklessness and his profligacy, who is there who feels, in awe and dread, that he has himself a soul to be saved, who will not compassionately seek and search, -though of such quest he finds no end, and leaves off aghast and troubled, for the causes of the evil he deplores,- -causes which might, for aught he knows, if rightly understood, involve the fearful palliation of madness, or something incomprehensibly akin to madness, transmitted, perhaps in his very blood, and meeting with congenial passions all borrowing from it a more fearful force, till he who was possessed by them appeared, in his progress along the paths of this world and this life, alternately like an angel, and like a demon? Be that as it may, this is certain, that the mind of this country will never endure that such a being as Byron shall, after death, be pictured as one of the meanest and basest of mankind-but whether the wretch that makes the impotent effort; and were it possible to preserve his name from the oblivion to which nature has doomed it, would brand upon it ineffaceably the same epithets, that when affixed to the word BYRON," fall crumbling off like filth dried by the wind, of fac-similes, whose manners are wound up and regulated into a mechanical uniformity where fashion coldly and unfeelingly frowns down all that projects into relief, or shoots out beyond her tame, insipid level. It is thus that the generous outbreakings of nature, which constitute what you call emphatically a character, are rebuked and chilled. The growth of the individual man is lost in the generic man. But at the Steaks you will meet with real incarnations of the humours that inspired Jonson, Fielding and Smollett. There the whims and eccentricities, that take a man out of a class and render him an individual, luxuriate in contempt of that conventional despotism, that has deadened elsewhere the motley carnival of life down to a cold and dull monotony. Can the force of original humour go farther than it does in that excellent patriarch of the sublime society Jack Replevin? What can surpass the incessant volubility of that harmless prattle? From what undefined, undefinable quality of his heart, does it happen that Jack has never been felt as a bore ?-that he is scarcely considered to be tedious? Yet the vibration of his tongue is unintermitted. You will hear him before he enters the room, or even as he is alighting from his hack ney-coach. Ten to one he is engaged in a colloquy (if colloquy it can be called, when one of the parties has only to listen) with the coachman himself, albeit the fellow is of a tribe somewhat controversial, and who are not often disposed to give up their share in the dialogue. Yet it avails him nothing he is quite baffled-all his efforts to be heard are fruitless-and his remark or his abuse, whatever it be, expires in a despairing grin upon his lips. Jack is now ascending the stairs that lead to our snug refectory in Arnold's theatre, perhaps recapitulating to himself the debate with the hackney-coachman, for he is still talking. "It would be a nice question," said Arnold, when Jack's voice was heard as usual on the staircase, "if an unlucky stumble were to throw Replevin from the top to the bottom, whether the thread of his verbosity would be snapped by the accident? I would bet," said he," that Jack's tongue would be going on all the same, like Orpheus's as his head rolled down the Hebrus.' But our amiable Gratiano, with all this redundancy, does not deal merely" in nothings.' His reasons, if you will take the trouble of sifting them, will be found to bear a fair proportion to the chaff with which they are intermingled. Under his verbosity is a solid layer of sense, plain and practical, of inestimable value in the conduct of your affairs, or in teaching you how to conduct them yourself. This habit of talk has never been thwarted; for some of his friends deem it to be constitutional, and if it were checked, that his life would be endangered by the revulsion. In the mean while, the tones of his voice are soft and mellifluous, and in the fullest speed of his tongue he gives you no interruption, whether you choose to converse or to muse over your own matters. How difficult would it be, how grand a triumph of art, to transfer to the canvass, the mellowed complacency of Jack's countenance, beaming with smiles like the face of the summer ocean, as he is prosing to his unhearing audience,— nothing displeased with their attention, and taking a calm revenge by a double portion of prolixity! -'s Our brother Lonsdale, an artist of no mean celebrity, has failed in that portrait, which hangs in our salon with those of several other worthies of the sublime society. The hand of our excellent brother has proved itself more at home in other countenances-those more especially upon which nature has expended less of character and expression. For this reason, the kit-cat resemblance of our brother the High-Bailiff of Westminster, is a miracle of identity. Nor could he well err; having little more to copy than a wide Finlandish expanse,—a dead sea of visage on which not a ripple plays, not a shadow is reflected. In like manner, the ingenious Kneller of our club has most cunningly designed all that the graphic art could pourtray of brother starched, but simpering features; for there he "hangs in chains," as Arnold remarked, in allusion to the civic paraphernalia in which he is represented, of which the chain is a most conspicuous ornament. It was in allusion also to the toga in which he is painted, that Brougham, being asked whether he thought it a likeness, remarked that it could not fail of being a likeness, "there was so much of the fur about it." In such portraitures, in which little more is required than the duplicate of a common face, the artist has done wonders, for his resemblances are perfect. It is in the intellectual likeness, in those nice touches and gentler intimations of the pencil, that present you with an index of the character,-in those countenances where it peeps forth from the eyes, though faintly and almost imperceptibly, as the first gleam from the lattice of the morn-the callida junctura of the living principle with the mass that it vivifies and informs-it is here that brother Lonsdale has "come badly off." Hence the picture of our royal brother, which graces our little gallery of kit-cats, |