helped twice to cheese, by way of something to do. Went half-price to the theatre, and encored the passage- "What lost Mark Antony the world? a woman!" Nudged Mrs. Samuel Snacks, and whispered in her ear, that even a woman was better than a wife-Or a husband either, said she.-One never knows the value of an object until it be lost, said I ;—Then, I hope you will soon give me an opportunity of knowing yours, said she. Mem. That's what I call gratitude!

Friday, 19th.-Received three letters of congratulation on my marriage. Fancy they were meant as sneers, and wrote, in reply, that I was as well as could be expected. Lounged at the Library, and met, on my return, the long Irishman in earnest conversation with my wife. How could Mrs. Samuel Snacks imagine that it was possible to be jealous of such a wretch? Had a quarrel with her about him, (not that I think him worth quarrelling about,) and rushed in a rage to the theatre. Mem. I forgot to mention that Mrs. Samuel Snacks went with me.

·Saturday, 20th.-Another quarrel, as usual. Astonishing Mrs. Samuel Snacks can't keep her temper. Threatened to fling the blue sugar-basin at my head. What a vixen ;—but it's no use, I see clearly how it is; I'm a wretch for life. Received, in this alarming state, a letter of condolence from Tomkins. Replied, by return, as follows:"Dear Tom,-If you have not already done a marriage, avoid it like the Devil: hanging is a mere joke to it." Put my note in the post, and went to bed literally distracted. Mem. The cursed sea makes such a row under one's windows, there's no sleeping for it.

Sunday, 28th.-Went to church, by way of penance. Returned home, filled (thank God) with Christian meekness, and met the long Irishman chatting, as usual, with Mrs. Samuel Snacks. Cursed like a coal

heaver, and told her to pack up, as I intended to pack off for London. Quite sick of Ramsgate, of myself, and even of life. Quere. Is there no gentleman who would be good enough to blow out another unhappy gentleman's brains? Received two more letters of congratulation on my marriage, and had serious thoughts of sending a challenge in reply. Walked along the sea-shore, and saw a man who looked as miserable as myself. Concluded that he was just married.

N.B. Is it not a shocking thing, that a gentleman of my years should be thus tortured? But I'll not stand it; damme, I'll run off to the Continent-shoot-drown-poison, or hang myself in my garters, as an awful warning to bachelors. Said so to Mrs. Samuel Snacks, and was thanked in reply, for my kind intentions. What a brute! but the Eton Latin Grammar is right, after all,-and thus ends the Honeymoon of that superlative wretch, SAMUEL SNACKS.

WRITTEN UNDER AN EPITAPH IN D-D CHURCH.

GOOD reader, in spite of this lying,

The man, whether living or dying,

Show'd no single feature of heart or of mind,

That could make his departure a loss to mankind,

Or could lessen the chance of his frying.

AMUSEMENTS IN WINTER AMONG THE MOUNTAINS OF WALES.

No. II.

THE INTERPRETER OF DREAMS.

CARDANUS declared, that he learnt the Latin language in a dream! Dogs, cats, pigs, hens and horses, are well known to dream. In reference to this circumstance, LUCRETIUS

Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt

In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque sæpe,

Et quasi de Palma summas contendere vires.-Lib. iv.

I once met an INTERPRETER of DREAMS-all of which

without a gloss or comment,

He could unriddle in a moment.-Butler.

He had published a Treatise on the subject; and to judge from his manners and conversation, he really believed what he wrote. A few of his general rules he did me the honour to select.

"To dream you see an Angel is good; but if converse with one, it is an evil."

you dream that you

"To dream you bathe in a clear fountain, denotes joy; but if in a muddy one, a false accusation."

"To dream you have a long bushy beard, proves you will one day be a lawyer, an orator, an ambassador, or a philosopher.'

"To dream you have a black face, is a sure sign of living to a great age."

"To dream of being ridden by a night-mare, indicates that you will be domineered over by a fool."

"To dream of seeing an execution, signifies a clear conscience." "To dream of gathering up silver, denotes loss and deceit."

"To dream that we carry wood upon our backs, denotes servitude if we be rich; and honour if we be poor."

Such were some of the settled opinions of this eminent successor of the ancient Magi. "Now," said I, "if you can interpret the following dream, I shall be infinitely obliged to you.-I thought I was standing on a precipice, overlooking the waterfall in the neighbourhood of Ffestiniog. The Irish Sea stretched itself to the west, and barren mountains to the east, with Snowdon rising in the north, presenting altogether a magnificent scene. The moon rose gloriously over Cader Idris. Soon I was struck with wonder and admiration, to see the transparent part of the moon separate itself from the dark part; one fell gradually towards the lake of Bala, the other towards the Irish Sea. At length the bright part assumed a rising attitude, and remounted the meridian, while the dark portion fell beyond the earth into space, and was seen no more. disk now increased in brilliancy every moment, and rose higher and higher; when obscuring the constellation of Orion, a multitude of smaller moons emanated from the larger one, like stars, in circular divisions, when they all rose into the regions of space, till they became too small for the eye to discern them!

The

"Now," said I," tell me the force and meaning of this dream."- "It is, of all dreams I have interpreted," returned he with solemnity, "the most extraordinary—it is even sublime; but I cannot choose to tell you what it means "—and with this I was obliged to be satisfied. Some short time afterwards, however, he made bold to tell me that I should lose all my children, one by one; and their mother with the last; with whom they would ascend to heaven, at the same moment. But the learned disciple of JUNIANUS MAJUS carefully suppressed all knowledge he might possess, in respect to the hope I expressed, that I might be permitted to attend them. “All this, sir," concluded he, will happen to you in the course of two years." Five years have elapsed, however, since this awful prognostication; and, thank heaven! we are all alive; and, as far as I can judge, likely to live. Some wise man, fully equal in point of ability to my worthy friend above alluded to, assured Voltaire, that he would die at the age of thirty-five; but that poet, critic and historian, if I mistake not, reached the age of ninetyone !

One reason, why dreams are so little understood, arises out of their being permitted to be fugitive. Give them body, by reducing them to record, and something, after a long series of years might, possibly, be elicited relative to the construction of the human mind. It would be well, therefore, were eminent men, of different ages, to record their dreams, as well as their remarks, relative to the impressions which those dreams make upon their nerves, as well as their results.

Hitherto dreams have been left to the industry and chicanery of the most insidious of all mercenary impostors. The most voluminous writer on this subject in ancient times, was ARTEMIDORUS of Ephesus, who lived in the reign of Antoninus Pius; ALEXANDER (ab Alexandro) too relates many remarkable particulars relative to the art which JUNIANUS MAJUS of Naples pretended to possess. SANNAZARIUS was a pupil of his; and that poet declares, in respect to him, that he surpassed all the augurs of ancient Rome. But the most curious book, on this subject, is that rendered into Latin from the Greek, whence it had been translated from the Arabic,. on the art of interpreting dreams, according to the doctrine of the Indians, Persians, and Egyptians.

LOCKE assures us,* that he once knew a man, who was bred a scholar, and had no bad memory, who told him that he never dreamed in his life, till he had a fever in the 26th year of his age. HERODOTUS and PLINY speak of a whole people in Africa, who never knew what dreaming meant. They never dreamed; nor could they be persuaded to believe, that others did. How many do we meet, in all conditions of life, who reason in the same manner upon other subjects, and upon the same foundation!-Both Herodotus and Pliny, were given a little to the marvellous; and I can scarcely believe it possible, that Nature should have denied to a whole people, what she has given to "dogs, cats, pigs, hens, and horses."

Since I am upon the subject of dreams, I shall make a reference, or two, to the dreams of the poets. That of Romeo has amused me more than a thousand times.

66

I dreamt my lady came, and found me dead;
(Strange dreams, that give a dead man leave to think!)
And breathed such life, with kisses on my lips,

That I revived, and was an emperor.

The dream of Eneas, in the second book of Virgil, is a masterpiece; so, also, is that of Shakspeare, where he describes the false, fleeting, perjured" Clarence :-but they are too familiar to be quoted. That recorded in FERREIRA'S "Inez de Castro," however, is so little known, and is, besides, so finely told, that I shall close this paper with a translation of it.

O fearful night!-how heavy hast thou been;

How full of phantoms, of strange grief and terror!
Methought, so hateful were my dreams, the object
Of my soul's love for ever disappeared
From these fond eyes.-Methought, I left for ever.
And you, my babes, in whose sweet countenances,
I see the eyes and features of your father;
There you remained, abandoned by your mother.

Oh fatal dream, how hast thou moved my soul!
Even yet I tremble at the direful vision,
And lowly thus beseech the eye of Heaven
To turn such portents from me.

FERREIRA, Inez de Castro.-Roscoe.

THE MEETING AT TWILIGHT.

THE dews are falling fast and the day is off the sky,

And the western clouds like shadows have assumed a deeper die;
The flocks have sought the fold, there is silence on the lea,
Then Alice, sweetest Alice-why come you not to me?

I look around o'er heath and hill, but no one is in sight,
I hear the village clock announce the coming hour of night,
Gloom gathers fast around, the wind blows chilly o'er the lea,
Then Alice, sweetest Alice-why come you not to me?

You know, you feel how well I love, you see it in my eyes,
You hear it in my faltering voice, you breathe it in my sighs,
You tell it by my nightly stroll along this silent lea
Then Alice, sweetest Alice-why come you not to me?

Doth sorrow-that despotic lord of all beneath the sky-
Hang out his raven banner in thy dim and darkened eye?
Doth illness weigh thy gentle heart?-then come not o'er this lea-
creep into my bosom, love: its warmth shall shelter thee.

Or

If I thought I e'er must see the hour when we should meet no more,
When death should pale that pretty face I've kissed so oft before,
The world-the laughing world, that now is sunniness and glee,
When thou wert gone, sweet Alice, would be all a blank to me.
For dearer than her first-born to the mother's beating breast,
When with looks of perfect happiness she watches o'er his rest,
And dearer than their native home to exiles on the sea,
'Mid the uproar of the mighty waves-art thou, sweet girl, to me.
Then come, my love; beneath yon elms your presence I await,
Already, hark! the village clock has struck the hour of eight;
Already-but methinks I hear light footsteps o'er the lea,
And yonder gleams a fairy form--she comes, she comes to me !
MAGNET, VOL. IV. PART XXIII.

L

OLD SCENES REVISITED.

No. I.

How oft, when childhood threw its golden ray

Of gay romance o'er every happy day,

Here would I run-a visionary boy.-H. K. WHITE.

WHILE a veil is cast over the future, and the present is unregarded, the hallowed recollections of the past are capable of furnishing us with matter for the most delightful meditations. The hurry and bustle of real life will not allow many to indulge in the visionary retrospections of yore, the concerns of the present obliterate the features of the past, and before the combined influence of time and interest, they wither and decay. Here and there, however, we meet with one who lingers pensively over the years that are gone, and in fond lookings back on the past, reenjoys the pleasures of his childhood. Such persons are poets, though they may be altogether unacquainted even with the commonest laws of versification-a confirmation that

Many are poets who have never penn'd
Their inspirations, and perchance the best.

We know that a powerful imagination, like the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, can transport its possessor to the most remote regions of the earth; or, like the wand of a magician, people the present with the shadows of the past, and make the dead shake hands with the living. But without being endowed with this strong "plastic power" (to use a favourite term of a favourite author), the generality of mankind are capable of being affected by some peculiar circumstance, which is to them what imagination is to the bard, or the talisman to the enchanter-since the effects produced are the same. Something of this power is felt by the mind, upon a visit to the scenes of our childhood, after a many years absence, and when perhaps we had been to all appearance parted for ever;" at least, it is so, if the youthful recollections which, upon a solitary ramble among those hallowed spots, came over my mind, like the returning tide,

Telling of twenty years that I had spent,

Far from my native home!

66

"I hate the man," said Sterne, "who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and say it is all barren!" This was not my case; on turning from the high-road, the first field I entered presented to my mind a rich harvest of recollections. The years of careless youth came back with a vividness baffling all efforts of my descriptive pen. Every thing around me spoke of mirth and joyous revelry. I heard the boisterous' shouts of my earliest playmates, as they urged each other on in the noisy but innocent sports:-yonder is the brook over which they strove to hurl the flying ball. Those hedges too, famed for their linnet and their goldfinch nests! alas, many a scolding have they occasioned