Sundays, when he snuffs it in with the country air some little way out of town, in a retired friend's garden, at whose domicile he and his better half have been to dine; and when he has sat for a couple of hours consecutively without having a summons to the counter, or any other interruption to call him on his feet; delightful to him then seems that brief interval of repose; it is not leisure, but a foretaste of it, of what in all its largeness he thinks he shall one day enjoy. He feels like the Irishman who, after admiring the flavour which one quince imparted to an apple-pie, wished for a pie made of all quinces. With renewed energy he opens his shop on the Monday morning, and experiences double pleasure in pursuing his business in the prospect of leaving it off.

This then, is, after all, the end for which he strives, and pants, and toils; this is to be the purchase of his frugality and the crown of his industry; for this he labours to make himself honoured in his avocation; it matters not what it is; a man, if he is only weighing out plums and sugar, looks respectable, for he is dispensing comforts and necessaries to his fellow-creatures; he feels it and is happy.

Talk of the dignity of human nature-they are maintaining it best whose occupations are the most useful; it is only the needless that is contemptible, and that fears being regarded as such. It would be difficult to convince a butcher that he is an object of ridicule among people who want meat, or a baker with those who want bread, or a shoe-maker with those who want shoes. He knows that none dream of deriding his useful toils; there is a selfcomplacency in the consciousness of their service, and of the sorry figure the world would cut without them. And with this assurance of his importance to communities blue devils are banished from his firmament, and he leads a life to be envied by all the discontented on the face of the earth.

But the evil has been begun within him; he may not rest here; he progresses to a time to which he looks forward with as reasonable a delight as the child to the end of the rainbow, where he expects to find silver spoons, and by and by leaves off businessleaves the source of his importance, his gains, his interests, and his pleasures, and retires. A house is chosen, taken, painted, papered; accounts are closed, furniture is removed, all is bustle, confusion, and anticipation-visions of snuguess, and competence, and repose.

At length the change is completed; the sensation of novelty wears off. The neighbours are content to leave him to the quiet he sought, and he stands alone to contemplate the effects of his new position. Fancy our man of bustle and business now. Milton makes pleasure to rhyme with leisure, most sweetly, and soothly too; but if our shopkeeper had been told by any that they would as certainly agree in his experience, he could not have been more deluded in

the exchange. He looks round him to find that as the place of the dead is filled up, so is his; he has superannuated himself too soon; he is sole spectator of his own nothingness. His former consideration, and importance, and respectability, where are they? He is lost, and not missed; he has nothing to do, and if he has anything to say, has no one to say it to. The customers who once made his shop like a levee, and him the centre of jests and repartee, and odds and ends of talk of all kind, have deserted him for his successor wherefore should they come to him? he has nothing to serve or to dispense-his occupation's gone.

But he has leisure-yes, truly, to find that too much of a good thing is perhaps worse than too little; he has more than Galileo when he invented the cycloid, or Newton when he perfected his theory of lights and colours; but he feels what they never feltcrushed by its superabundance; its load is oppressive; he groans beneath it, is stifled, stunned, bewildered; and ten to one in the course of the day if he knows whether he is on his head or on his legs.

This lasts while he is a neophyte; by and by he sees the necessity of making some effort to rid himself of his loads of time, and more than all to rescue himself from utter nonentity, that men may not pass by him as if they were walking over his grave. He can no longer endure the weight of the worst of wearinesses-that of having nothing to do; he feels that leisure cannot, like gold, be kept in money bags-on something it must be spent. Yet in abjuring everything to which habit and circumstance have for so many years confined his intelligence, he has wofully diminished his resources of employment. We will suppose him of too harmless a nature to busy himself in being an oppositionist at vestry meetings and other parish affairs, so on gardening he will almost invariably decide. The slip before and behind his house his wife freely allots to him, and these particular spots of earth are given over to a series of experiments, torturings, and forcings-the results of the combined intelligence of the cultivators of the soil for fifty miles round. There, then, is the place for the sight of giant cabbages, trees grafted to bear all sorts of fruit on one stem, cucumbers kept to be admired till too tough for the table, and vegetable marrows and pumpkins of grotesque shape and enormous size. It is worthy of note how much our friend regards rarity and fame in his collection; how he descants on this flower of an uncommon sort, or another with an unpronounceable name, and how every gooseberry and currant slip can boast of an ancestry from kinds which gained prizes at some neighbouring show.

These curiositics of horticulture answer the double purpose of occupying his leisure and alluring his neighbours to gossip over their attractions. Should they fail of serving both these desideratums, our ex-shopkeeper, if a man of any invention or persever

ance, will make some more decided attempt. Then the organ of eccentricity, albeit it slumbered behind the counter, will have full scope for development.

We have seen in one good old worthy's garden, vanes constructed of tin sportsmen, with awful-looking guns and dogs, sufficient to have been distributed over twenty parishes for the instruction of their inhabitants in the way the wind lay. In another, a stupid figure dressed in as complete a suit of its exulting owner's as the ghost Hamlet saw was in the armour of his Majesty of Denmark. Marvellous have been the pains taken to give the life touches to this man of straw, and if allowed to remain above ground after its maker, is quite likely to be taken by his heirs for his veritable self revisiting his potato ground. We pass over the monstrosities of grottos, and arbours, and pagodas, and poles with stuffed monkeys on the top for frightening birds. These last may seem to have an ostensible use, but the first and chiefest is the interest they have for all the strangers in the village. A proud and happy man is our friend, if while standing at his garden gate of an evening, a neighbour walks up with a request to see one of his wonders, or even accepts the oft-proffered invitation so to do. While exhibiting them his eye glistens at the praise of a child, and his ear drinks in every expression of admiration and astonishment; he hears himself extolled as a genius, and believes it, too, as firmly and fully as the greatest that ever breathed.

Yet these are but transient distinctions, and despite them he is not altogether right. There are still so many hours in the morning, in which he is the victim of leisure; he is tempted to prolong his time of sitting at breakfast, and to take lengthy naps after dinner; he grows dyspeptic, feels a fulness in his head, and a dimness in his eyes, and an increasing disinclination for exertion. He complains of being obliged to take more doctor's stuff in one month than he used once to swallow in twenty years. He is afraid of drafts, nails list to his doors, and lays sand bags at the windowframes, although once when ice was forming everywhere, he could brave the blast coming in at the ever-opening door, and stand, glowing with exercise, rapidly and merrily dispensing the creature comforts of merry Christmas. Now throughout the day he complains; towards evening he rallies, for then perhaps some neighbour, released from his engagements, drops in and talks over old times. The next morning he feels the same oppression; people are busy round him; they have no time to make calls, or spend an hour or two discoursing. Vacant leisure becomes a burden he cannot support; he is as totally unacquainted with his malady as unable to remedy it, and drops into the grave some ten years sooner than he would have done, borne down by maladies engendered by Leaving off Business.

M. R.

IS THERE NO MEMORY IN THE GRAVE?

BY MRS. EDWARD THOMAS.

On some fond breast the panting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

THE Sorrow'd dead in the sepulchre sleep!
Oh! are they, then, unconscious of the tears
Grieving survivors o'er their mem❜ry weep,
While hope no more with flatt'ring promise cheers?
The body slumbers-yea, but sleeps the spirit?
Sure through the grave's dark aperture doth stream
The light eternal which it MUST inherit?
The God enkindled ray to 'lume their dream?
Mysterious questions! waiting for reply;
Perplexing thoughts, which puzzle still the brain,
But to be solved in heaven. Philosophy,
Them to unravel, tasks itself in vain.

The tomb is God's dread secret, which he keeps
Inviolate, to be reveal'd alone

When He arouses everything that sleeps
By the last trump's reverberating tone.
Then whether of our anguish conscious are
Departed friends, or unacquainted they,
Let their remembrance be the eastern star
To guide us where, benign, a Saviour lay—
Not in a manger, but Jerusalem,
The New Jerusalem, for Him design'd,
Crown'd by his Father with THAT diadem
That signals Christ, Redeemer of mankind.
Let us so live as if each act of ours

Gray.

Could pain or joy to buried friends impart ;
Let conscience exercise restraining powers,
Whisp'ring, "Each crime committed wrings their heart!"
Let, too, the tomb propound its solemn sere,
"Repent while thou art spar'd, and pardon crave
For thy misdeeds, repent in TIME, lest fear
Of Heaven's vengeance follows to the grave
Where no repentance is, where as the tree
Is fell'd it lieth mould'ring to decay,
Until the storm-blast of eternity
Sweepeth it terribly in wrath away."

Then weep the dead; oh! with the dead commune,
Familiar grow with churchyards-homes for all-
Ay, e'en the homeless. Ah! how opportune
Must come to shelter them, death's friendly pall!
Look on the narrow crypt, how small the space!
How dark, how dismal, for lost souls to grope!
Yet radiant with the beams of heavenly grace
For those who sleep, to wake with Christ in hope!
The glorious waking of the GOOD and JUST!
The aspiration piety inspires.

Oh! be it mine, and yours, who in the dust
Feel still thine ashes keep religious fires!

ODDITIES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

No I.

UNDER this title we propose to present the readers of the METROPOLITAN with specimens of the drolleries of the American press. The daily journals of our own country have long made the English public familiar with those smart sayings which are known by the name of "Jonathanisms;" but with the oddities of American periodical literature the English public are comparatively unacquainted. In our present number we shall give three specimens. The first is entitled

FLOGGING AN EDITOR.

"Some years ago, a populous town, located towards the interior of Mississippi, was infested by a gang of black-legs, who amused themselves, at times when they could find nobody else to pluck, by preying upon each other. A new importation of these sporting gentry excited some alarm among the inhabitants lest they should be overrun. They determined, therefore, upon their expulsion. A poor country editor, who was expected by virtue of his vocation to take upon himself all the responsibilities from which others might choose to shrink, was peremptorily called upon by his patrons '—that is, those who paid him two dollars a year for his paper, and, therefore, presumed they owned him, soul and body-to make an effort towards the extermination of the enemy. The unfortunate editor said at once that he would indite a 'crusher,' one that would undoubtedly drive the obnoxious vermin into some more hospitable region. And when his paper appeared it was a 'crusher,' sure enough. In the course of his observations he gave the initials of several of the fraternity, whom he advised to leave the town as speedily as possible if they had the slightest desire to save their bacon.

"The next morning, when the poor scribe was comfortably seated in his office, listlessly fumbling over a meagre parcel of exchanges, he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently an individual, having accomplished the ascent, made his appearance. His first salutation was slightly abrupt.

"Where's the editor of this dirty, lying paper?"

"Now, aside from the rudeness of this opening interrogatory, there were other considerations that induced the editor to believe there was trouble on foot. The personage who addressed him bore a cowhide in his hand, and, moreover, seemed to be exceed