scious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in our way; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs. William Weatherall being by; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There were difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo! while I was valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, jealous possibly of any liechildren not his own, or working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, which I had only conjured up for your diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from me must become history to you; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much for reading. No person, under a diviner, can with any prospect of veracity conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus interchange intelligence with effect; the epoch of the writer (Habbakuk) falling in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel); but then we are no prophets.

Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot; or sent off in water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream-was it? or a rock?-no matter-but the stilness and the repose, after a weary journey 'tis likely, in a languid mo

ment of his Lordship's hot restless life, so took his fancy, that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an act; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his Lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surry, in Dorset, or in Devon? Conceive the sentiment hoarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House (startling the tidewaiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians a thing of its delicate texture-the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's purpose!) but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing at Lyons shall we say?-I have not the map before me -jostled upon four men's shoulders -baiting at this town-stopping to refresh at t'other village-waiting a passport here, a licence there; the sanction of the magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite sea-worthy.

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the by-standers: or this last is the fine slime of Nilus-the melior lutus, whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present earkissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss,Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days old newspaper.

You

have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merchandise above all requires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be coinstantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve-months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy?

I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man! You must almost have forgotten how we look. And tell me, what your Sydneyites do? are they th**v*ng all day long? Merciful heaven, what property can stand against such a depredation! The kangaroos-your Aborigines-do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore-puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony.

We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray, is it true that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning?-It must look very odd; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part of them, vile plagiarists.-Is Is there much difference to see to between the son of a th**f, and the grandson? or where does the taint stop? Do you bleach in three or in four generations?-I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. Do you grow your own hemp? What is your staple trade, exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your lock-smiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists.

I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare-court in the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet corner?Why did I ?-with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smokedyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first lady-birds! My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us, a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you. But while I talk, I think you hear me, -thoughts dallying with vain surmise

shores

Aye me! while thee the seas and sounding Hold far away.

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left children have become sage matrons, while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W-r (you remember Sally W-r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks, whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out, I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The departure of J. W. two springs back corrected my delusion. Since then the old di

vorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine.

Something of home matters I could add; but that, with certain remembrances, never to be omitted, I re

serve for the grave postscript to this light epistle; which postscript, for weighty reasons, justificatory in any court of feeling, I think better omitted in this first edition.

London, March 1, 1822.

ELIA.

Sleep thou in peace, my sable Selima, rest and be thankful, for thou wert born in an enlightened age, and in a family of females, and elderly gentlemen. Well is it for thee, that thou wert not cotemporary with the pious Baxter, that detester of superstition; or the learned Sir Thomas Brown, the exploder of vulgar errors; or the great Sir Matthew Hale, whose wholesome severities against half-starved sorceresses, so aptly illustrated his position, that Christianity is "parcel of the common law of England." 1." Rest, I say, and be thankful, for the good old times had been bitter times for thee.

Why should colour excite the malignant passions of man? Why will the sole-patentee of reason, the soi disant Lord of Creation, degrade himself to the level of the Turkey-cock, that is filled with rage and terror at a shred of scarlet? What is a huean absorbed or reflected ray, or, as other sages tell, a mere extended thought-that we should love or hate it? Yet such is man, with all his boasted wisdom. Ask why the Negro is a slave? He's black, not like a Christian. Why should Bridget's cat be worried? Why, to be sure, she's black, an imp of darkness, the witch's own familiar; nay, perhaps, the witch herself in disguise: a thing most easily put to proof; for if you knock out Grimalkin's eye, Bridget will appear next day with only one: maim the cat, its mistress halts; stab it, she is wounded. Such are the dangers of necromantic masquerading, when the natural body is punished with the stripes inflicted on the assumed one: and this was once religion with royal Chaplains, and philosophy with the Royal Society!

These superstitions are gone: this

VOL. V.

baseless fabric of a vision is dissolved; I wish that it had left not a wrack behind. But when Satan disappears, an unsavoury scent remains behind him; and from the carcass of buried absurdity, there often proceeds an odour of prejudice-the more distressing, because we know not whence it comes. Neither elderly ladies nor black cats are now suspected of witchcraft; yet how seldom are they fully restored to their just estimation in the world.

Be it perverseness, or be it pity, or be it regard for injured merit, I confess myself an advocate for the human tabbies, so famed for loquacity, and for their poor dumb favourites in black velvet.

Whether it be true, that Time, which has such various effects on divers subjects, which is so friendly to wine, and so hostile to small-beer, which turns abuse to right, and usurpation to legitimacy, which improves pictures while it mars their originals, and raises a coin no longer current to a hundred times the value it ever went for; - whether this wonder-working Time be able to deface the loveliness of woman, shall be a subject for future inquiry. But, my pretty Selima; thou, that like Solomon's bride, art black, but comely; thee, and thy kind-the sable order of the feline sisterhood, I would gladly vindicate from those aspersions, which take occasion from the blackness of thy coat to blacken thy reputation.

Thy hue denotes thee a child of night; Night, the wife of Chaos, and being a female, of course the oldest female in being. How aptly, therefore, dost thou become the favourite of those ladies, who, though not so old as night, are nevertheless in the evening of their days. Thou dost

Y

express thy joy at the return of thy mother, even as the statue of Memnon at the approach of her rival, frisking about in thy mourning garb by moonlight, starlight, or no light, an everlasting merry mourner; and yet a mute in dress, and silence too, not belying thy name by volubility.

How smooth, how silky soft are thy jetty hairs! A peaceful multitude, wherein each knows its place, and none obstructs its neighbours. Thy very paws are velvet, and seem formed to walk on carpets of tissue. What a pretty knowing primness in thy mouth, what quick turns of expression in thy ears, and what maiden dignity in thy whiskers. Were it not for thine emerald eyes, and that one white hair on thy breast, which I abstain from comparing to a single star, in a cloudy sky, or a water lily lying on a black lake, (for, in truth, it is like neither,) I should call thee nature's monochrom. And then the manifold movements of thy tail, that hangs out like a flag of truce, and the graceful sinuosity of thy carriage, all bespeak thee of the gentle kind. False tokens all: thou can'st be furious as a negro despot; thy very hairs, if crossed, flash fire. Thou art an earth-pacing thunder-cloud, a living electric battery, thy back is armed with the wrath of Jove.

Hence do thy enemies find occasion to call thee a daughter of darkness, clad in Satan's livery-a patch on the fair face of nature; and therefore, an unseemly relic of a fashion, not only unbecoming in itself, but often perverted to the purposes of party.

Yet, my Selima, if thy tribe have suffered much from the follies of mankind, they have profited by them also. If the dark age looked black upon them; if the age of black arts, black friars, and black letter set them in its black-book, and delivered over their patronesses to the blackness of darkness; yet time hath been when they partook of the honour and worship paid to all their species, while they walked in pride at the base of the pyramids, or secreted their kittens in the windings of the labyrinth. Then was their life pleasant, and their death as a sweet odour.

This was, indeed, common to all thy kind, however diversified by

colour, or divided by condition.Tabby and tortoise-shell, black, white, and grey, tawny and sandy, gib and grimalkin, ye were a sacred race, and the death of one of ye was mourned as a brother's-if natural; and avenged as a citizen's-if violent: and this in the cradle of the sciences, (so called, I presume, because the sciences were babies there,) and in spite of the 700,000 volumes of Alexandria.

Yet I cannot but think that the wise Egyptians distinguished black with peculiar reverence. We know that their religion, like their writing, was hieroglyphical; that their respect for various animals was merely symbolical; that under the form of the ox, they gratefully remembered the inventor of agriculture, and adopted a beetle as the representative of the sun. Now, of how many virtues, how many powers, how many mysteries may not a black cat be an emblem? As she is cat, of vigilance; as she is black, of secresy; as both, of treachery, one of the greatest of political virtues, if we judge from the high rewards continually given, and daily advertised for it. Again, we know the annual circle, and the signs by which it was measured, was another object of idolatry; but one ample half of time is typified by a black cat.

But should these deep speculations be deemed mystical by the present age, which, if it be an age of light, is certainly an age of lightness, it may, at least, be admitted, that the Egyptians would prefer their own colour, and we are assured by Volney and others, that they were not only black, but literally negroes.

As for the esteem they entertained for cats in general, we may account for it on the supposition, that they were delivered, at some period of their history, in an extraordinary raordina manner, from a swarm of rats, either national or political. And that the agents of this deliverance were represented under the feline figure, which may be plausibly considered as a bodily representative of the spirit of reform.

After all, Selima, I doubt whether thou hast lost as much by never being worshipped as thou hast gained by living in a Christian country.