Imatges de pàgina
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honouring charms; just such a garment of glossy ivy and gold gilliflower as might add a grace to their ornaments without concealing their proportions; and just such an assemblage of gleaning orchards as might cheer, without insulting their gloom.

From beneath the tinging foliage of the May oak, I beheld this manor-house on the south-west. From this spot its appearance is peculiarly magnificent and imposing; broad meadows of the most luxuriant verdure, studded here and there with an enormous oak or elm, whose tender foliage hung like a green mist upon their huge and snaky boughs, formed the foreground. From this pleasant champagne, a verderous mound swept upwards somewhat abruptly, till its ridge was crested and canopied by an umbrageous file of old and sweeping trees. This fine broidery of foliage spread from north to south, to the extent of several hundred yards, appears co-extensive with the western front of the castle. In the centre is the great tower, rising with its tall chimnies and ogee windows over the trees; to its right and left, the huge and lofty elms spread over the walls, scarce permitting a glance of rampart or window; while at the northern and southern extremities of this grand arcade of building, the jealous trees discontinue their shelter, and the time-worn mansion is more fully disclosed; the corner or chapel tower being open to view from base to battlement, gleaming over the huge boughs. This manor-house has received the two melancholy but grand distinctions of feudal history imprisonment and siege. The hapless Mary Stuart was its royal thrall for some time, and was removed in consequence of the attempt at her rescue by the gallant Leonard D'Acre;-it was garrisoned by the cavaliers; beleaguered, gallantly defended, and finally dismantled, by the Lord Protector.

To be continued in our next.

PLAGIARISM OF CELEBRATED
AUTHORS.

FOR THE OLIO.

It has perhaps been justly said by Bruyere, that "we are come into the world too late to produce any thing new-that nature and life are pre-occupied, and that description and sentiment have been long exhausted." We shall however be drawing the line of originality till narrower, when we

show that the very masters of literature have been content to borrow plumes from each other. He who is but a novice in the art of composition must be expected occasionally to imitate those whom he has studied, and there is even a sort of modesty in receiving aid from those whom we acknowledge as our superiors; but where an author of established reputation usurps that honour which is due to others, it is fairly a deceit upon the public, and it then becomes a mere act of justice to assign "each bird of the muses his proper feather." As being one of our superior prose-writers, and as one who is looked upon as very original withal, let us take the author of "Tristram Shandy" as an example: -This very interesting production, which was his best as well as most voluminous work, is indebted for its main features to other heads than that of its professed author, and any one who has read the "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus," in Swift's Miscellanies, must admit that Sterne is indebted to that satire for his general plan; his principal character of Mr. Shandy is the very counterpart of "Cornelius Scriblerus." Then, as for Uncle Toby, who does not recognize in him the character of Commodore Trunnion in "Peregrine Pickle ?" The Sentimental Journey has also some borrowed ornaments both of incident and expression; the story of Maria bears a wonderful resemblance to the history of Dorothea in Don Quixote; and some of those beautiful images in "The Captive," and elsewhere, such as, I saw the iron enter into his soul," are from "The Anatomy of Melancholy."

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As one of our most elegant poets let us look a little at Pope; the smoothness of his verse who can deny, but his claim to originality of sentiment has been more than once called in question. It has been observed by Dr. Watts, "that there is scarcely a happy combination of words, or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language, which he has not inserted into his great work of the Iliad." How he obtained a knowledge of so many beauties of speech can only be solved by the supposition, that he gleaned from authors of every description, and kept a regular note-book of what he considered brilliant, or suspected might be useful. It is certainly recorded in his life that when "Bishop Hall's Satires" were shewn him in his later years, he regretted he had not met with them earlier. In the Dunciad, the hint

is confessedly from Dryden's "Mac Flecnoe;" though it should also be added, he has considerably improved and enlarged upon it. Again, "Windsor Forest" borrows its design from "Cooper's Hill," and even the composition bears frequent evidence of its author having paid some attention to "The Park" by Waller. It will be but fair, however, to give a specimen of this great writer's habit of borrowing. He seems, on whatever subject he was writing, to have directed his attention to whatever others had said previously on the same topic; this was no doubt convenient, but it was so dangerous that it is wonderful so acute a man should have laid himself so open to exposure. Thus, in his Epitaphs he has many neat compliments and elegant encomiums which had been published before, though principally by obscure poets. The following is from Crashaw:

This modest stone, what few vain marbles can, May truly say, Here lies an honest man.' Pope.

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His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great admiral, were but a wand.
Milton. P. L.
His spear the trunk was of a lofty tree,
Which nature meant some tall ship's mast
should be.-Cowley.

Beauty is nature's coin, must not be hoarded;
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers in the stalk with languish'd head.
Milton.-Comus.

Beauty within itself should not be wasted; Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime,

Rot and consume themselves in little time. Shak.-Venus and Adonis.

The elegant author of "The Seasons" must have supposed the public to be very superficially acquainted with the Bible, for he has obviously taken the story of Lavinia from the Book of Ruth. Ruth has an aged female relative with whom she resides, and they are so reduced in circumstances, that Ruth is compelled to go and glean in the fields of a rich man hard by; this man sees her accidentally in the field, falls in love with, and eventually marries her. The reader is well aware that the story

is exactly similar in Thomson's Sea

sons.

Prior is another standard author, whose praise must be rather that of correctness than of any great invention; his larger efforts at composition are made up of common-places, and he has been accused of poaching for prey among very inferior authors, both of the French and English School. We give an instance where he has borrowed an illustration from a not very well known poetical history :

Your music's power your music must disclose, For what light is, 'tis only light that shows. Prior.

For nought but light itself, itself can show, And only kings can write what kings can do. Alleyne.

From Prior, Canning seems to have modelled one of his own lines. In the "Henry and Einma," Prior says of Emma's waist, that it is

Fine by degrees and beautifully less. False by degrees, and exquisitely wrong. Canning. Canning might have remembered at least, that the public were acquainted with Gray's Elegy as well as himself, when he wrote this couplet :

Of tender tears a plentiful supply,
And pour them in the brook that babbles by.

And so, too, might Byron have remembered that Mr. Canning's productions were but fresh in the memory of the public, when he introduced these lines into his Hours of Idleness; he says, speaking of Granta's sons :Where on Cam's sedgy banks supine they lie, Unknown, unhonour'd live, unwept for, die. Byron.

Thy sons, sad change, in abject bondage sigh, Unpitied toil, and unlamented die. Canning. In Childe Harold he has this expression in one of the stanzas, which looks a little like Shakspeare:

It is enough, in sooth, that once we bore
These fardels.

For who would fardels bear?-Hamlet.

To bring this trick of plagiarism still nearer our own times, who, that has seen or read Mr. Sheridan Knowles' new Play, does not recognize in "The Hunchback" the "Black Dwarf," by the author of the Waverley Novels?

Even some of our oldest sayings and proverbial expressions, which from their very antiquity as well as simplicity, might be supposed to be completely original, are to be traced up to times more ancient than their own. The fol

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lowing doggerel rhymes have been for centuries repeated in this country :

He that fights and runs away, May live to fight another day; But he that doth in battle fall, Can never live to fight at all, For the publication of this same valorous sentiment, its original author was banished from Sparta, in the infancy of that state. The Greek lines may be thus rendered :

Let who will boast their courage in the field,
I find but little safety in my shield;
For he that fights and runs in time, may save
A life that valour will not from the grave;
Another buckler he can soon regain,
But who can get another life again?

Plutarch.

to

But it must not be supposed that this propensity is common English authors only. If we turn to our Gallic or even our German neighbours, it is the same; even Voltaire, that idol of Frenchmen, had more cunning than genius, and he exercised his ingenuity in all the regions of knowledge rather to cull old ideas than to build new ones upon them. "His real claims to invention," observes D'Israeli," are as moderate as his size and variety are astonishing." In short the art of this celebrated man lay principally in cooking up the thoughts of others, so agreeably as he has done; he could finish up into perfect shape the embryo ideas he met with, he varnished them over with the magic of his style, and finally managed to breathe over them that warm glow of colouring which none knew better how to impart. F.

to sleep in a close vault under the vestry, or at least in a church-yard surrounded by houses, which the unhallowed disturbers of the dead cannot invade.

They are miserable places the church-yards of London. Trees there are none, there is nothing green but the weeds, and on an average there is not more than one tombstone to a hundred graves; all is waste and desolation. For ourselves we hope, of course, to die in some quiet cottage far away from the eternal din of this overgrown city, with a woodbine peeping in at the casement, a pot of roses in the window-ledge, and the reader will guess the rest. However, sooner than be consigned to one of these horrible receptacles, we should prefer being handed over to the lecturer aforesaid, or, packed in a hammock, with a round shot for our ballast, consigned to the great deep-the vast tomb of many of England's best and bravest.

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We have said that there are no trees in the London church-yards; but five or six must be excepted, and these are in the heart of the city. They have, however, no churches they are the burial grounds belonging to churches destroyed in the great fire;' from these some beautiful elms send up their branches to gladden the eye of the cockney, whose vision, wearied with the interminable rows of dingy fronted houses, rests with rapture on a bit of green leaf. The citizen will recognize the places to which we allude.*

We cannot trust ourselves to say much of the epitaphs to be found in the

CHURCH-YARDS AND EPITAPHS. church-yards of London. There are, of

FOR THE OLIO.

WE remember seeing some three years ago, a prospectus of a burial company, which undertook to furnish in due time a proper place for interment in the vicinity of London; something that should eclipse the far-famed burial ground of the Parisians, but the project seems to have vanished into air. John Bull did not appear to disrelish the idea of sleeping in the neighbourhood of yew trees and weeping willows and cypresses, and all those poetical adjuncts which make a country churchyard coveted by the sentimental; but then John evidently thought on the body-snatchers, and the sacks, and the go-carts, which were to transport his corpus at dead of night, to the lecturer's table and the dissecting knife; so it would seem that he made up his mind

course, plenty of dutiful sons, tender mothers, affectionate daughters, &c. &c. Then there is that beautiful and oftquoted stanza, which may be found all over England no doubt, but in a cockney church-yard at least fifty times over:

' Affliction sere long time she bore,
Physicians were in vain ;

Till God did please, and death did seize,
And eased her of her pain.'

Or this :

'Weep not for me, my parents dear,
I am not dead, but sleeping here;
Free from sorrow, free from pain,
Till Christ shall raise me up again.'

This wretched trash would excite but little surprise in the burial grounds of

The churchyards alluded to are those of St. John the Baptis', in Walbrook; St. Bennet in Pancras lane to which it gives a name St.

Mary Bothaw, Dowgate Hill, and one or two others in that neighbourhood

some of our religious sects, but it is really astonishing that it is permitted by clergymen of the established church; for, be it remembered, all epitaphs are first submitted to the curate or vicarIt is time these fooleries (to call them by no harsher name) were abolished, or, as the intercourse between this country and France has so much increased, we may expect to see, before long, our tombstones covered with representations of tears like a swarm of tadpoles. We would recommend to some pious young gentleman (and we have such an one in our eye), to set up as a writer of epitaphs; the thing would take, and if he perform his work in a proper manner, we promise him that he will soon make a fortune.

WARSAW.

C. A.

THERE are said to be ten thousand Jews in Warsaw; but their number may really be esteemed much higher; for though some of them, by way of speculation, pretend to be converted to Christianity, they secretly adhere to the Hebrew faith.

The Franciscan street in Warsaw is like those busy districts occupied by the Jews in Frankfort, Prague, Rome, Amsterdam, and Leghorn. In short, wherever the Jews congregated together they are characterized by the same peculiarities, viz, uncleanliness, and the love of finery, avarice, and dishonesty: while the persecutions and insults to which they are exposed render them real objects of pity.

What the Miodova and Senator streets are to the fashionable classes in Warsaw, the Franciscan street is to the lower classes.--However, there is nothing from the finest Ternaux or Thibet shawl which the Jews of the Franciscan street cannot produce to their customers when asked for.

The Russian soldiers may frequently be seen when occasionally they obtain a few hours' leave, moving to and fro in the busy fair of the Franciscan street, where they spend a portion of their pay in the purchase of little articles of which they stand in need. They wander about looking earnestly at every thing, and when they see any object they would wish to purchase, they anxiously reflect whether it is conform able to "regulation."

If they wish to purchase thread, for example, the lancers of the Constantine regiment, want only blue and red; the

cuirassiers only white and yellow, and the Grodno hussars only yellow and dark red ;-and as soon as a Jew spies a soldier, he seems to read in his countenance what he was looking for:whether thread, pipe-clay, blacking, or soap. In the Franciscan street, many an unlucky wight purchases a good flogging for himself, as for instance in the case of the gloves, the seams of which were sewed on the wrong side. And yet the poor soldiers are obliged to purchase many things out of their own pay, as the "crown allowance" is insufficient for them.

On leaving the Franciscan street, and passing the cloister of the Minimes facing the lunatic hospital, we arrive at the barracks of the fourth regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel Boguslavski. This is the Grand-Duke's favourite regiment, on account of the admirable style in which it performs its exercise: of which certainly none but those who have seen it can form any idea.

Near these barracks, which are divided into two parts, is the jail, whose inmates, except the fact of their wearing chains, are not under greater restraint than the Polish officers. As to common soldiers, their situation is infinitely more miserable than that of felons.

A little further on are the crown barracks, which contain the regiment of Lithuanian grenadiers, the Polish infantry Guards and other troops.

The immediate vicinity of the city is not unlike the Campagna di Roma.The beautiful ruins, to be sure, are wanting; for in Warsaw the only ruins are the broken spirits of the people.

A very high windmill forms a conspicuous object in the scene, and near it there is a second pontoon bridge across the Vistula, which was constructed in 1829 for the entrance of the Emperor Nicolas as King of Poland. There is also a spring which supplies the inhabitants of Warsaw with excellent water.

From the new town, which we have just been exploring, we will proceed to the old town which formerly included the whole of Warsaw, as is obvious from the name of one of the principal streets, Podval, (under the wall) which runs parallel with the Ulica Modova. The old town contains a fine marketplace. The streets in this part of Warsaw are, for the most part, narrow, and the houses, which are exceedingly old, have many of them a very bad reputation.

Continuing our course through the old town, we arrive in the Palace

square, in which stands a marble column with the statue of King Sigismund. From this square a street runs into the Cracow suburb, beyond which it extends about half a mile under the name of the New World, and leads to St. Alexander's church, already mentioned. Forming an angle with Cracow suburb, the Senator street communicates with the square of the new theatre. On the other side of the square, the Electoral street which is about half a mile long, terminates with the Volaer Rogatka, on the boundary line of the semicircle of Warsaw.

The old theatre is situate in the Kraczinski square, at the end of the Francis

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CURIOUS FISH.-A friend and myself were bathing one morning on the sands at Portobello, and had determined to swim out to a certain rock. He generally took the lead; and while following, I was suddenly struck as by an electric shock. I then discovered that I had swam on a gelatinous substance about three feet in diameter, which proved to be a fish surrounded by stings. In a moment it covered or enwrapped me, so that every part of my body was stung; and I could only disengage my self by tearing the animal from me piecemeal, at the peril of my hands, which were just as if I had poured vitroil upon them. With great difficulty I swam back towards the shore; but I had not strength enough to dress; and was afterwards led home. The intense agony, which I can only compare to the being stung by thousands of wasps, continued for about eight hours. Several of these creatures are seen on the sands left by the tide, for about a month in the year; and 1 observed that no horse would tread on one, nor would children touch it except with a stick. Witherspin's Journal.

Table Talk.

SEVERITY OF KING JOAM.-This monarch reigned in Portugal, about the commencement of the 15th century. The jealousy of the Portuguese monarch was such, that the man who ventured into the private apartments of even the ladies of honour subjected himself to the capital penalty. Joam had a chamberlain, by name Fernando Alfonses,

to whom he bore great attachment. This man fell violently in love with Dona Beatrix de Castro, a young attendant on the Queen, and was successful in his suit. But the lady, who had more passion than virtue, allowed him to pay her stolen visits within the forbidden precincts; and though they escaped for some days the notice of the king, accident or jealousy at length betrayed them. The king sent for the culprit, reminded him of the penalty he had incurred, and ordered him to see his mistress no more. His elemency -the effect of his attachment for the chamberlain, and perhaps of a natural reluctance to shed blood for such an offence, was lost on the other; the crime was repeated, the offender arrested, and consigned to the charge of the corregidor. He found means, however, to escape, and took sanctuary in a church; but he was dragged from thence by the incensed monarch, was condemned, and publicly burned. The partner of his guilt was permitted to live; a punishment which, if she had any sense of shame left, Joam rightly considered as superior to that of his chamberlain. But this barbarous execution filled the court with horror; and for this reason, perhaps, never was repeated.

CREMONA VIOLINS.-By those who are conversant with the power of musical instruments, the following observations will be fully understood. The violins made at Cremona, about the year 1660, are superior in tone to any of a later date, age seeming to dispossess them of their noisy qualities, and leaving nothing but the pure tone. a modern violin is played by the side of one of these instruments, it will appear much the louder of the two, but on receding 100 paces, when compared with the other, it will scarcely be heard.

If

BORING FOR WATER IN EGYPT.Two labouring men who had been employed near London in boring for water, were taken to Egypt, by Mr. Briggs, who was once consul at Cairo. They were employed to bore for water in the Desart. At about 30 feet below the surface they found a stratum of sandstone; when they got through that,_an abundance of water rose. In the Desart of Suez, a tank, capable of holding 2000 cubic feet of water, has been made, and by this time probably many others have been formed. Thus Egypt and Arabia may soon become civilized and partially fertile.

POWERS OF THE HUMAN EAR.-The

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