was once persuaded to angle at Laleham, and the hook stuck in my memory for years afterwards; nor am I now without a twinge of selfreproach as I record it. Old Isaac Walton, however, must share the blame his pastoral lines first induced me to try a fishing-rod; but I cannot understand how a man so sensible to the inanimate beauties of nature, can have been so unfeeling towards her sentient productions. My scruples upon these points are the result of circumstances, not principles; early opportunity would probably have seared all these sympathies, and I therefore claim no merit for a sensitiveness which, after all, many will, perhaps, deem morbid and fastidious. There are virtues of necessity, and constitutional virtues, such as temperance in men of delicate health, upon which we should be cautious not to pique ourselves; for there is little merit where there is no self-denial to endure, and still less where there is no possibility of sinning. Some people have a virtuous organization, and are physically moral. No; I withdrew myself into rural shades from more powerful, and I hope more noble impulses, from a conviction that they are favourable to peace, to health, to virtue; as well as from an ardent enthusiastic love of nature in all her attitudes and varieties of scenery and season. Burns, in one of his letters, records the peculiar delight he experienced in strolling along the borders of a wood on a gusty autumnal day. I could not understand this when I first read it, but I have felt it since; and I have never experienced any sorrow, or annoyance, that I could not mitigate, if not subdue, by looking upon the smiling face of external nature, or contemplating her charms as reflected in the lucid pages of Shakspeare, or listening to her voice as attested in the melodious inspiration of Comus and Lycidas. But let me not anticipate: these are mental luxuries which belong rather to a following period, and the mention of them reminds me that it is time to proceed to that division of my existence which extends From Forty to Sixty. For the first time in my life I found myself blessed with tranquillity and leisure, and I seized the propitious opportunity for establishing an inquisition into my own mind. Self-scrutiny, in the hurly-burly of business I had little inclination to practise, though I knew that the storms of that period had not passed over me without some devastation of the domain: but halcyon days were come, and I sallied boldly into my own heart to clear away the rubbish and eradicate the weeds. There was enough to do. My temper, though not soured, was no longer sweet. It was neither white wine nor vinegar. I was never sulky, but occasionally testy and irritable; unduly annoyed with trifles, peevish at any disturbance of my regular habits. Politics moved me at times to acerbity and exasperation, though I had no interest in their juggles beyond an intense and passionate hatred of tyranny, hypocrisy, and usurpation. Fortified with the foreknowledge that age has a powerful tendency to render us cold, suspicious, and narrow-minded, I set myself at work to discover whether any symptoms of this senile infection were yet perceptible. By nature I knew that I was cordial and confiding; but I knew also, that these qualities had occasioned me to suffer somewhat in purse, and I suspected that they might have impoverished my disposition. Examination confirming my suspicions, I endeavoured to make a new adjustment, grounded upon what was due to myself as well as others; but I rather think that in forming my balance I leant strongly to the former of the two parties, for after this period I do not find many losses to record. As to the little overflowings of my temper, if I could not reduce them altogether, I at least brought them down to low-water mark, and more I would not attempt, remembering the couplet of Dryden Reaching above our nature does no good, We must fall back to our old flesh and blood." Impeccability I left to the fanatics, who would fain be as outrageous saints as they once were sinners. It is astonishing how much good may be effected, how much bitterness mollified, how much latent happiness developed by this species of self-inspection, pursued with candour and governed by philosophy. The mind is autocratic, and can create itself, so far at least as concerns temper and capacity for receiving and communicating pleasure. Among the changes of mode and habit which I have recorded of this period, I find, that after all my denunciations against it as a frivolous waste of time, I fell into the practice of playing whist, which I have continued to this day, not however as a gambler or professed tactician, but rather for society and relaxation, preferring my own family or neighbours, however inexpert, to the regular practitioners. I only state this trifle to accompany it with the remark, that my own detected inconsistencies made me more indulgent than I had hitherto been to the vacillations of others. My Journal assures me that I have grieved in spirit more often than was becoming, when my dinner was not dressed to my liking; and that a disposition was creeping on me to attach too much importance to the refection of the animal system. A writer of no mean celebrity has maintained that the brains are in the stomach, and Persius talks of the "magister artium, ingenîque largitor venter;' but rather than " make a god of my belly," I would have realized the fable of Menenius Agrippa, and set all the members of my body in mutiny against it until it was starved into submission. This vice of age I crushed as soon as it was hatched. I eat to live, but am in no danger of living to eat.-By the same memorial I find, that as I approached fifty I more than once felt a disposition to sneak over my birth-day without notice; but I soon got ashamed of this weakness, and have celebrated it ever since with due festivity, giving all notoriety to my age, that the malicious accuracy of the world might flap my ears should I attempt to relapse into obliviousness. There is no harm in availing ourself of others' littlenesses to prevent our own. Poor humanity! how inconsistent art thou in the treatment of thy natal day. What assemblage of friends, what merry-making and bumpers to the health of the chubby and bedizened child :—what shouting, what roasting of oxen, and out-pouring of ale, among the young heir's tenants, when "Long expected one-and-twenty, happy year, is come at last :" how duly are all the family circled round the plenteous board as this revolving day rolls us up the hill of life; and as we begin to descend it, how gradually and imperceptibly does the celebration die away, till it passes over in silence, unrecorded, except in the consciousness of the aging individual, or the spiteful whispers of his associates. Some times it is noticed only to be falsified, as in the case of Lady L whose husband always inquires on her birth-day how old she will please to be on the following year. Sometimes the party stands doggedly at bay against time, like old C, who having arrived at eighty, refused to go any farther, and has remained there ever since, as if he could alter the hour by stopping the clock, or arrest the great wheel by refusing to count its rotations. A little boy of mine once lowered the index of a barometer to "much rain"-ran into the garden, and was astonished to find it as fine as ever. Old C―, in his second childhood, is not much more reasonable. My impertinent Chronicle assures me also that about the same period I detected myself in little paltry acts of stinginess, grudging half-pence, and looking suspiciously after "candle-ends and cheese-parings," though I never dreamt of making any alteration in my establishment; so true is Swift's remark, that five pounds a-year would save any man from the reputation of being a niggard. This propensity is of a very encroaching character: it is a sort of dry-rot, which, if it once gain admission, will creep along the beams and rafters of your mind, till the whole fabric is corroded. Much trouble did it cost me to eradicate this weed; and often have the latent seeds sprung up afresh, and demanded all my vigilance to prevent their gaining possession of the premises. Exercise for the body, occupation for the mind-these are the grand constituents of health and happiness; the cardinal points upon which every thing turns. Motion seems to be a great preserving principle of nature, to which even inanimate things are subject; for the winds, waves, the earth itself, are restless, and the wafting of trees, shrubs, and flowers, is known to be an essential part of their economy. Impressed with this truth, I laid down a fixed rule of taking several hours exercise every day, if possible, in the open air, if not under cover; and to my inflexible adherence to this system do I attribute my remarkable exemption from disease, as well as from the attacks of low spirits, or ennui, that monster who is ever prowling to waylay the rich and indolent. "Throw but a stone the giant dies." What exercise is to the frame, occupation is to the mind. I portioned out my hours so as not to leave a moment unemployed: I commenced a systematic course of reading, and became pretty regularly engaged in composition, that most delightful of all recreations, so absorbing that it renders us unconscious of the lapse of time, so soothing that it lulls to rest all the sorrows of the heart. Never was I so busy as when I became an idle man; never was I so happy as when I was thus busy. Fortunately, I had success enough in my writings to give an interest to the pursuit, without arriving at that distinction which is apt to engender bitterness. Satisfied with the delight of composition, I cared little about present, and less about future fame. Fontenelle declared, that if he were dying, and knew that his desk contained papers which would render his memory infamous, he would not walk across the room to burn them. Had they no family or friends to be affected by their posthumous reputation, perhaps many men would be equally indifferent. TIME. A Canzone from the Italian of Torquato Tasso. "Donne voi che superbe." DAMES that in the dazzling glow And your souls too proudly soaring, Time, imperial Time, am I, Time, your lord and enemy, Time, whose passing wing can blight, While I speak, the moments fly, Creeps into your sparkling eyes, On I fly; I speed away, On, for ever and for aye- Soon shall come that fatal hour Soon, like captives, shall ye learn Ways less wild, and laws more stern; Whom the All-creating Hand Framed ere earth itself was planned, Up, and still untiring hold Your triumphant course of old, And still your rapid cars be driven O'er the boundless path of Heaven! ON THE GREEN-ROOM OF THE FRENCH THEATRE. THE world progresses somewhat like a snail: it makes an immense journey of some inches during the day, and falls back at night to its original position, that it may set out with the same vigour on the same path the next morning. Both animals leave behind them vestiges of their travel-the one its slimy, the other its inky annals; and it is hard to say which, in its proper proportion, is the more lasting, or the more perishable. Look at the history of revolutions, their commencement, and termination at the very point whence they set out.-Does not this universe resemble a slate, on which some Tyro of a spiritual order, mightier than ours, has been learning his arithmetic, drawing thereon huge sums in multiplication and division, and anon blotting all out in an instant with his fore-finger and spittle? But a truce with simile:What have all these upsets and overthrows of nations left us? They have left to us essayists the neatest heads of chapters ;-to chronologists the most convenient epochs imaginable. There is no knowing what history would do without them: they are its goals and starting-posts, and resemble the ancient temple on Cape Colonna-once the mighty object of worship and witness of great events, now but a beacon to guide the solitary mariner. : Every one that wishes to take a survey of France, political or literary, places himself in the year 1789, and casts his view over the preceding or the subsequent age, as circumstances induce him. We shall do both, merely throwing a glance back, but thenceforward giving |