While bound in shallows thou shalt sigh in vain ;

For ne'er that tide shall flow for thee again!'

We envy Mr. Canning the hearty laugh he must have had at the following passage:

Canning! while myriads wait on thy resolves,

Come, be the centre round which earth revolves!

Come, be the guardian spirit of the storm!--
'Mid Europe's noblest rise the foremost form,
Not like th' Athenian in the pictur'd strife,
But in the very crowd and heart of life!

Come! smile 'mid envious taunts, and bitter spleen,
Firm to thy purpose, and, while firm, serene :
Appear, while woes and perils start around
From ev'ry side, like some opposing mound,
Or rocky isthmus, which the indignant main,
Raging on either hand, assaults in vain!

Come! raise the structure of man's weal on high ;
Yoke beauteous order to fair liberty;

And lift to heav'n, with undisputed claim,

On Europe's love, the fabric of thy fame.'

He would not flatter, honest soul! but he has unfortunately hit upon the course pursued by parasites: he happens to praise all those who have any thing to give; while his abuse or his scorn are unsparingly dealt upon those who are not 'i' the giving vein ;'

See, then, what various toils thy mind demand,
And ask thy saving or directing hand :-

The glorious chance, the great occasion, see-
Earth looks to England-England looks to thee !
Yet hard thy task-for thou must fret and fume,
Night after night, at stale advice from Hume-
Must baffle rivals-manage friends-conceal
The mischief made by well-intended zeal—
Must spur the dull, the fiery must restrain :—
"Tis thus, methinks, with e'en the wrongs of Spain
All feel with Spain-with Spain-regret, rejoice,
And millions speak with one indignant voice:
There too, where silent rows attentive sit
To drink thy words of eloquence and wit,
Not Brougham, though loudest, fiercest in debate,
Pours singly forth the torrent of his hate;
Nor Whigs alone the stern invective cheer,
Or shout at Tierney's jests th' applausive
But sober Bankes, as still to shame advance
Through conquest or defeat the hosts of France,
Lifts 'gainst oppressive force his voice on high,
And saintly Wilberforce gives back the cry;
While gallant Wortley, foe to factious art,
Vents the warm feelings of a British heart!
Yet 'tis not thine, though despots all abhor,-
Precipitate to plunge a realm in war;

"hear;"

'Tis thine, while peace with honour may accord,

To guard our peace ;-should kings no choice afford,

Then in the scales must England cast the sword.'

We think abusing his rival-his respected rival, Mr. Broughamis not the way to win such a temper as we would fain believe Mr. Canning possesses. We conclude with a most amusing passage:

The foremost figure on ambition's height,
Whom all must gaze on with intensest sight,
Canning! thou stand'st the mark for ev'ry dart-
Envy and slander-att'ry-alice-art-
Begirt with thousand libellers and spies,
And foes avow'd, and hidden eneu.ies.
Yet let the zealot raise his shout insane,
And hireling scribblers swell the cry amain ;
While loftier rivals cheer th' impatient pack,
With hint oblique, and indirect attack :—
Let foul-mouth'd spouters in the senate chafe-
For in the senate it is very safe-

While skulking scoundrels, whom 'twere vain to seek,
Publish their nameless lics from week to week:

Let the young fry, who turnedly disport

In club-rooms, college-halls, or inns of court,
Who know affairs-and whisper in your ear

Some wondrous secret which the world might hear;
Who with a sapient nod, or scornful smile,
Utter their dogmas in most pompous style;
Who, with important tone and sage grimace,
Deal out their desperate loads of common-place,
And give, on ev'ry scheine, begun or plann❜d,
Opinions monstrous wise-at second hand:
Let these all these-howe'er events may run-
Most kindly show how things should have been done.
Let malice choose thee for its constant mark,
And calumny stab boldly in the dark :-
Sad charge, which genius ever must defray!
Hard tax, which talent must to dulness pay-
Success to disappointment, wit and sense
To foil'd attempts and angry turbulence !—
Yet, still unmov'd midst clamours loud and long-
The jest of fools, the menace of the throng-
Th' insidious rival's treachery of praise,

The prying foe with ever-watchful gaze

The friends, who injure thee a thousand ways,

Not link'd by love or sympathy to thee,

But the stern bonds of strong necessity;

Who dread that sense, in worthiest words array'd,

Must cast their puny honours in the shade.

Midst compliments that mock and, worse than blame
In any shape, th' applause that would defame ;-
Still-nor involv'd in mazes of intrigue,

Nor chain'd by int'rest in some hurtful league
Thy fate-thyself-upon the country throw,
Careless who else may be thy friend or foe!
Scorn the weak, wavering, undecided part;
But act the very dictates of thy heart!
If difficulties come-as come they may-
As come they must-thou shalt not shrink away,
And aggravate their load against a future day;
But firm, at once, or in the conflict fall-
Or fairly meet-and bravely conquer all:
Till bigotry shall weep o'er errors past,
And stern intolerance, blushing, yield at last―
And anarchy turn pale, and faction pine-
Struck dumb and wither'd by one word of thine.'

Guns, drums, trumpets, blunderbuss, and thunder! Who could think that he who is so angrily loud against weekly newspaper editors was himself one; that he is one of the young fry' he so eloquently describes; that, having quitted the college hall,' he is waiting to be called to the bar in an inn of court; and that this boy-dictator has thus designated himself under his own hand?

6

We have finished our disagreeable task if the poetry should answer its end, Horace's maxim of Non homines, non dii, will not be worth two straws, for this is mediocrity in its worst shape; and, if Mr. Canning can be so gulled by a device gross as a mountain, open, palpable,' as to extend his patronage to the author, then the minister is not the man we take him for.

REGINALD DALTON.

6

BY THE AUTHOR OF VALERIUS, AND ADAM BLAIR.

ANOTHER Volume has recently issued from the press of Mr. Blackwood, bearing the above title. It is by the best of the three indus trious persons who have of late adopted this style of composition; and it is also better than any of his former productions. Perhaps one reason, and not the least, for our liking it, is that it contains less Scotch than we have of late been drenched with from the manufactory of Edinburgh, Scotch brogue and Scotch characters have so beset us, that our daily thoughts were polluted and our nightly dreams troubled with them; we hegan to wish there was such a by-law in the Row as exists in the direction of the Bank of England, viz. that no Scotchman should be admitted. It may be want of taste (which defect we pray may never be removed), but we have no predilection for the chaste Doric of the Land of Cakes. We cannot understand Scotch humour (Scotch wit is a thing the existence of which is yet to be proved), except that it is so low as to be intolerable in our less fortunate and more southern land; and, to crown all, we have no reverent notion of The Modern Athens,' as Edinburgh is called by those good-natured friends who ridicule while they affect to praise. We cannot therefore but feel sensibly relieved that there is a comparatively small portion of Scotch in this novel.

Its best character is its simplicity; the style is unpolished, and sometimes laboured; the comic parts are rude, clumsy, and pointless, and the interest is feeble. These are its faults. On the more favorable side we must say that the story is ingeniously told; some of the characters are agreeably sketched; the consequences of youthful dissipation, of hot blood and college irregularities, are displayed, but not in such a light as to enforce that which was evidently the design of the author, a contempt and disgust for them: the hero gets too easily out of his scrapes. Still we think that the book may do good in this respect; and, as this is its aim, we regret it has not been done better. We proceed to give our readers a sketch of the tale. The hero is the only child of the Vicar of Lannwell, a widower of scanty fortune, but the next heir after the death of a sickly lady to the large estates of his ancestors. It is impossible not to contrast this character with the Vicar of Wakefield, and it is unlucky for the author that we are compelled to do so. The Vicar, having been in early life rejected by the

lady whom we have mentioned, married the daughter of a small farmer in the neighbourhood of his vicarage. She died soon after giving birth to Reginald; and her death was believed to have been hastened by the disappearance of her younger sister. It is after many years that the Vicar, whom the rejection of his suit had induced to withdraw from all intercourse with his family, meets his former love, Miss Barbara Dalton, now of course not young, with her father and his sister, a very comfortable old maiden lady. Reginald is now about to go to college, and visits the hall of his ancestors on his road. His father cautions him against indulging any hope that these possessions may one day be his, Miss Dalton, in whom the right of disposing them is vested, after her father's death, being entirely under the influence of her half-brother, Sir Charles Catline, to whom the Vicar has a dislike— a thing so uncommon with a man of his mild temper, that Reginald's curiosity is excited to learn the cause of this feeling. His companion to college is Mr. Frederick Chisney, a rattle-brained young man, who undertakes to initiate him. Among the passengers on the journey is a Mr. Ralph Macdonald, a Scotch attorney, by whom, on stopping at the inn at Oxford, he is introduced to a Mr. Keith, a Popish priest, whom he afterwards rescues in a riot in the streets. This old gentleman is living in great retirement, and has under his care a beautiful young orphan, a Miss Ellen Hesketh, with whom the hero falls in love.

The description of the college habits of Oxford is true, and we dare say may prove amusing to many readers, because they have never been described in this manner before: the rows between gown and town, the bacchanalian parties, and all the wild revels in which those Oxonians who have money enough indulge, are painted with considerable unction, but evidently by the same hand as the Noctes Ambrosianæ of Blackwood's Magazine. The best specimen of this style is to be found in the following extract: it is a fine gourmand rhapsody; and, from its insulated nature, will serve admirably for an extract, as well as because it is really one of the most ingenious things in the work:

"From the days of Athenæus to those of Dr. Johnson," says the philosophic D'Israeli," the pleasures of literature have ever been heightened by those of the table ;" and indeed, long before I read the sentence, it had often struck me, that such a man as D'Israeli himself might compose a very edifying octavo On Books and Cooks, or the Connexion between the Love of Learning and the Love of Eating.' A great Encyclopædia Sale-Dinner' in The Row, by Cruikshanks, would certainly form the most appropriate of frontispieces.

"Our ingenious and estimable "detector curiositatum" might begin with the ancients. The Mæonian has, from time immemorial, been christened "Vinosus Homerus ;" but the delight with which he seizes upon every opportunity of singing solid dinners and savoury suppers might have safely warranted an epithet of more extensive meaning. Pindar's charioteering heroes always go home to a smoking table, when the race is over; Euripides half tempts one to sympathize even with the barbarous raptures of the cannibal Polyphemus; the great Kitchener himself might borrow a thousand phrases depictive of the most fervid, and at the same time refined, gluttonous enjoyment from Aristophanes Lucian cannot allude to such subjects-he pauses in

:

his most aerial flight, and expatiates ;-nay, even Plato himself commences many of his most sublime Dialogues with elaborate and con amore descriptions of the delicious shell-fish which were consumed ere the conversation had leisure to flow. It is the same with all the Romans worth mentioning. That man is little to be envied who can read Horace with a dry mouth; Cæsar, as Cicero commendingly observes, "Post cœnam evomere solebat, ideoque largius edebat:" Juvenal never denounces a luxury until he has made one wish to have dined with the sumptuous subject of his satire; and as for Petronius, the most learned Petronius, does not that one simple, nervous, exquisite, and conclusive expression, "Gula ingeniosa mihi et docta," show how well he merited to be reverenced as the "Arbiter Elegantiarum," by the eating as well as the reading public of his elegant time?

"The Spaniards have got the character of being the most abstemious of European peoples; but their books are enough to prove that this is quite a mistake. All their vocabulary is saturated with an intense exalted spirit of gormandizing; and every one must feel, upon the very threshold, how much more is expressed in their stately, solemn, and musical golotoneria, than in the coarse and cacophonous term which our own language has borrowed from it. In Lazarillo de Tormes, there is a whole page upon one slice of bacon. The rigid and austere style of the author of Guzman d'Alfarache is at once swelled and softened when a luscious melon, or a cold partridge-pastry, is the theme. Cervantes, had he not been a keen lover of good things, could never have thrown so pathetic an interest over the abstracted dainties of the Governor of Barataria; doubtless his own soul breathes in the eloquent eulogies of the rich Camacho's wedding-feast, and still more so in Sancho's solitary adorations of the never-to-be-forgotten leveret-pie. There are no entertainments on record more delicious than the little Florentine suppers sketched by Boccaccio and his followers. Berni is more than himself when he paints the luxury of eating a nice dish alone and in bed; and whenever there is a tid-bit in Ariosto, it seems to refresh himself as much as his heroes.What ideas of passionate ecstatic devouring does not the very name of Rabelais recall! Moliere-that name, too, is enough. A weekly dinner at M. Conrart's was the origin of the Academie Française ! Le Sage (see Dr. King's Anecdotes) was the most delicate of epicures. The whole of the French literature of the last age is woven through and through with petits soupers, as well as petites maisons. Fontenelle, when his friend, who liked butter to his asparagus, fell down in an apoplexy just as dinner was announced, ran, the first thing," to the head of the stair-case, and screamed, "toute a l'huile !-toute a l'huile !" The suppers of Julie and St. Preux are as voluptuous as any other incidents in their history; and yet imagination yields the pas to fond memory, where Rousseau confesses those with which the Warens nurtured himself,

"When first he sigh'd in woman's ear

The soul-felt flame,

And blush'd at every sip to hear

The one loved name."