it creates its own symptoms, or holds them more remotely from external causation. Perhaps it is utterly impossible for beings of exalted sensibility to carry on to the grave the delusions of life, and to avoid a con viction of the worthlessness of the mass of mankind and of the insipidity of the bulk of existence. A contented disposition is the gift of Nature; and it should seem that it is a boon often bestowed as a compensation for the absence of splendid talents and a creative genius. It occurs at least too frequently, that where the imaginative faculties take the lead, fancy delights to dip her pencil in the gloomiest colours. C. MIND AND BODY. Veluti in Speculum. SAYS Mind to Body t'other day. That youthful face, which bloom'd as sleek The crow's fell foot hath set its sign Beside that eye which dimly twinkles; Gadzooks, my friend, you 're getting wrinkles! That form which ladies once could praise, At sight of that dismantled top, My very heart, I must confess, aches: You now are balder than Lord Essex. Since Wayte's decease your teeth decline:- Behold! your cheeks are quite bereft Of their two laughter-nursing dimples, Stop, stop, cries Body-let us pause The sword, you know, wears out the sheath, And when volcanoes rage beneath, The surface must be torn and shatter'd. Have not your passions, hopes, and fears, To cause the ravage you're declaring? If you yourself no symptoms show If yet to sordid sins unknown, No avarice in your breast has started: You still are young, and o'er my face Expression is the face's soul, The head and heart's joint emanation; Free from the body's devastation. If you're still twenty, I'm no more :- Voltaire was young at eighty-four, And Fontenelle at near a hundred! H. BOND-STREET IN SEPTEMBER. ROUSSEAU says, that all great cities are alike; as far as my own observation extends I can confirm the remark, and yet the portrait which they exhibit is one which our first parents could hardly have been brought to comprehend. Even if that primitive pair could have contemplated the many myriads that were to descend from them, and spread over the face of the earth, they could never have imagined that in various parts of its surface a million of beings would be, huddled together in one narrow voluntary prison of stone and brick, so confined that they were born and died, lived, fed, and slept, in successive layers or stories from the cellar to the garret, obtaining that accommodation for the functions of existence by mounting above one another's heads, which could never have been afforded by the superficial extent of the ground they occupied. Thousands of hecatombs of animals, brought weekly from the surrounding country for the support of this multitude, and the whole condensed population, with all the animal remains, plunged into the earth within the straitened enclosure of the walls, age upon age, generation upon generation, laid over one another until the entire mass upon which the city stands becomes a putrescent abyss of corruption and adipocire, like that extracted from the cemetery of the Innocents at Paris! Such are the prominent features in which all great cities resemble one another; and they are quite sufficient to make me thank Heaven that I live not immured within any such pestiferous enclosure, where the very complexion of the inhabitants seems a reflection from the pale flag of Death which is perpetually shaking before their eyes. Notwithstanding the family likeness perceptible in all those enormous mounds and accumulations of brick and bones, flesh and furniture, men and mortar, beasts and buildings, which constitute a city; and the similarity of habits and appearances, generated by all such multitudinous congregations, there is a sufficient diversity in the appearance of each individual capital when viewed under different circumstances and seasons. Perhaps no place in the world offers so striking a contrast to itself as London in and out of the season. I speak of London, I put entirely out of view those industrious and When useful classes who, living in the terra incognita eastward of the Bar, labour unintermittingly for the gratification of the westward population, and of course present a monotonous activity all the year round: but who that has ever seen Bond-street in all its gaiety and glitter, in its days of clattering hoofs and sparkling equipages, when its centre forms an endless line of moving magnificence, and its gorgeous shops on either side reflect an ever-changing galaxy of belles and exquisites, would recognise the same place in the latter end of September, deserted, silent, spiritless, "so dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone," that it makes one "as melancholy as a gib-cat, or a lugged bear," to take the same walk for five minutes, which a few months before would in less space of time have evaporated the densest spleen, and possessed us with all bright, joyous, and spiritual fancies? The ghost-looking house-pain ters whom one encounters here and there with their poisoned visages; the scaffoldings under which one is so often obliged to pass at the risk of lime in your eyes, and the certainty of it upon your clothes, if you are so fortunate as to escape a brickbat upon the head; the dismantled shops, and the hot, dusty, empty street, as if they were not sufficiently miserable objects in themselves, complete the prostration of our spirits by recalling their past cheerfulness, and so aggravate their present gloom. Innumerable associations connected with Bond-street lift it, in its time of glory, so completely out of its materiality that we never think of it as a mere street, and in the season of its thick throngs we have no time to compare the ideal with the real, by subjecting its buildings to the matter-of-fact judgment of the eye. One might, indeed, lose that useful organ in the process, for those members of the Pococurante society-the porters, reck not if with the sharp angles of their humeral freightage they reduce us all to a Cyclopean community: and, moreover, one's optics are kept in such perpetual activity in catching the salutations of the smiling beauties who whisk by in their vehicles, in nodding to Lord A- and Sir Harry B-, or in cutting old General C 9 or any other established bore, that he who should be caught gazing upwards at the houses would infallibly be set down for a rustic star-gazer, if he were not knocked down for a London somnambulist. Last month, however, in the solitude and vacancy of the footpath, I thought I might safely venture to look upwards and contemplate the street in its architectural character, when, O heavens! what a bright web of association, what a tissue of Corinthian imaginations was instantly dissolved and frittered away. It was as if I gazed upon the corpse of one whom I had known in all the bloom and beauty of vitality. An ugly, irregular, desolate, dingy, beggarly, old-fashioned succession of brown-brick tenements, stretched before me, like Fal staff's ragged regiment, forming a mean and pitiful contrast with the swaggering looks and undue pomposity of the shops. As there was at that moment no delusion of fashion to redeem the inconsistency, I amused myself with calculating how the real features of this celebrated street would affect the novel-reading misses and bonnet-buying spinsters of the country, who from the frequent reference to this scene of action in newspapers and romances have been accustomed to invest it with something of a romantic and magnificent character. To add to my annoyance, it was one of those close, damp, sultry days, expressively termed muggy by the Londoners, and as my lungs panted under the hot moisture of the atmosphere, I echoed the ejaculation of the worthy farmer dying of an asthma-"If once I can get this plaguy breath fairly out of my body I'll take deuced good care it shall never get in again." As I thought of the buoyant and elastic breezes which I ought at that moment to have been enjoying in Gloucestershire, under my favourite clump of aspens, whose ever-fluttering leaves at once shaded me from the sun, and supplied me with the music of a perpetual waterfall, I felt in all its intensity the sentiment of Dante— "Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria." But perhaps the most pitiable and lugubrious of all the spectacles encountered at the West end in this season of emigration, are the disconsolate wights who being unable to procure an invitation to the country, and without money to get conveyed thither condemn themselves to a daily imprisonment, and steal forth in the dusk like the lightshunning bat, or the bird of Minerva, or rather, like ghosts of them selves, to haunt the spots which they loved in their days of fashion. A man must have a character to lose before he will thus submit to realise the Heautontimorumenos of Terence; but it is so easy to acquire the reputation of being "an idle fellow about town, visiting in all the genteel circles," that few West-endians and Bond-street loungers think themselves exempt from the observances which this state imposes. No condition is more sternly, more inexorably exacted by Fashion, than an absence from London in September, and it must be confessed that the wretches who are unable to comply with this mandate have at least grace enough to feel the full infamy of the stigma that attaches to their delinquency. No pickpocket has a quicker eye for a Bow-street officer, no spendthrift dandy has a keener perception of an approaching bailiff, than these victims of fashion have of an advancing acquaintance, if they are compelled to run the gauntlet of recognition beneath the garish eye of day. Reading him as far off as if he were a telegraph, they prepare all their wiles, doubles, and escapes, sometimes stealing into a shop, or bolting down a street or even a blind alley, or facing right about, so that if the enemy can even swear to their backs, he may not be able to aver that he has seen their faces in London, when its purlieus are under the ban and interdict of Fashion. With a malicious pleasure I have occasionally amused myself in counteracting all these manoeuvres and devices by running down a side street, getting a-head of the game, and encountering him in front when he thought I was far behind; or by managing to run plump up against him at a corner, that I might observe the various degrees of self-possession and impudence with which the different culprits carried the thing off. Some were overwhelmed with instant shame, gave me a confused nod, and hurried on to avoid all interrogation; but the generality adopted the approved method of conscious guilt by becoming the attacking parties, and starting off into exclamations and surprises. "What, Harry Seven Oaks in London! Credat Judæus Apella!"— then the eyes are rubbed, and after an incredulous stare the party continues-" It is Harry, by Heaven!-why, my dear fellow, have you forgotten that this is September?-what would they say were I to mention this at H- House, or Lord S―'s, or the Marchioness of D's?" Now it is clear, that a man who attacks you in this way, and even hints at betraying you to your noble friends, cannot himself be in the same predicament. He must be a mere accidental traveller over the forbidden ground; at all events, he wishes you to infer it, but for fear you should not have ingenuity enough to draw that conclusion, he takes care to add, that he is a mere bird of passage, having only arrived that morning from Cheltenham or Harrogate, and intending to set off next day for Dawlish or Sidmouth. Joe Manton, and his fellowgunsmith Egg, have as many charges to endure as their own fowlingpieces, for several of my acquaintance have declared that after writing repeated letters without effect, they had been obliged to run up to London to reclaim their guns, which had been left to be repaired; never failing to add, in a tone of indignant reproach— "and you know pheasant shooting begins in ten days!" One friend had thrown himself into the London mail upon learning the dangerous illness of an uncle, from whom he had considerable expectations, and whom he accused of a scandalous want of consideration for falling sick at the time of the County races. Another, who was the indisputable author of some very ingenious charades in rhyme, informed me with a significant look, that a letter from his quiz of a bookseller had compelled him to run up to make certain preliminary arrangements for the publishing season. A third poor fellow, who began to walk rather limpingly as he specified his disaster, was under the necessity of coming all the way from Scarborough to consult Astley Cooper, respecting the old wound he received at Talavera; and a fourth, after frankly stating that he had never left London, declared, that he was so tired of all the bathing-places and the different nobleman's seats of which he had the run, that he was determined, for once and away, to pass an autumn in London, out of fun and novelty, and just to see what the thing was like. Love of the country is with me a passion which has sprung up as the others subsided; perhaps a certain age is necessary for its full and sufficing fruition, before one can feel assured that if we walk out into the fields, look forth upon the green earth, the blue sky, and the flashing waters, and so put ourselves in communion with Nature and the unseen spirit of the universe, we shall infallibly tranquillize our bosoms, however agitated, by imparting to them the blandness and serenity of the surrounding landscape. If we become less social as we advance in life, we certainly sympathize more with nature, a substitution of which few will find reason to complain. The coxcombs of whom I have been writing had none of this feeling; they loved London rather than the country, yet they hated it so much when it was under the |