country. Perhaps he goes to the wars-fights-bleedsand returns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once more, blending in his imagination the battles of his own regiment, in Egypt, or Spain, or at Waterloo, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian sung, lies contented by the door of the same shieling, restored and beautified, in which he had dreamt away the summers of his youth.

To return to birds in cages;—they are, when well, uniformly as happy as the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no, to burst out into song, to hop about so pleased and pert,-to play such fantastic tricks like so many whirligigs, to sleep so soundly, and to awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other sentimentalists, that his starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very gamecock at the hand inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it, that starling had not the slightest idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly. Look at canaries, and chaffinches, and bullfinches, and "the rest," how they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you have a duet, or a trio. We can imagine no more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life than that of a goldfinch in a cage, in spring, with his wife and his children. All his social affections are cultivated to the utmost. He possesses many accomplishments unknown to his brethren among the trees;--he has never known what it is to want a meal in times of the greatest scarcity; and he admires the beautiful frost work on the windows when thousands of his feathered friends are buried in the snow, or what is almost as bad, baked up into pies, and devoured by a large supper party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and flirtation by such viands, and, remorseless, swallow dozens upon dozens of the warblers of the woods.

Ay, ay, Mr. Goldy! you are wondering what I am now doing, and speculating upon me with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if you would know the subject of my lucubrations. What the wiser or better wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor thrusts his inquisitive nose within the wires-or when a strange cat glides round and round the room, fascinating thee with the glare of his fierce fixed eyes;—but what is all that to the woes of an editor?-Yes, sweet simpleton! do you not know that I am the editor of Blackwood's Magazine-Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that very man,—that self-same much-calumniated man-monster and Ogre.There, there!-perch on my shoulder, and let us laugh together at the whole world.

COTTAGES.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1829.)

HAVE you any intention, dear reader, of building a house in the country? If you have, pray, for your own sake and ours, let it not be a cottage. We presume that you are obliged to live, one half of the year at least, in a town. Then why change altogether the character of your domicile and your establishment? You are an inhabitant of Edinburgh, and have a house in the Circus, or Heriot-Row, or Abercromby Place, or Queen Street. The said house has five or six stories, and is such a palace as one might expect in the City of Palaces. Your drawing-rooms can, at a pinch, hold some ten score of modern Athenians-your dining-room might feast one half of the contributors to this Magazine-your "placens uxor" has her boudoir-your eldest daughter, now verging on womanhood, her music-room-your boys their own studio-the governess her retreat-and the tutor his den -the housekeeper sits like an overgrown spider in her own sanctum-the butler bargains for his dim apartment -and the four maids must have their front-area-window. In short, from cellarage to garret, all is complete, and number forty-two is really a splendid mansion.

Now, dear reader, far be it from us to question the propriety or prudence of such an establishment. Your house was not built for nothing-it was no easy thing to get the painters out the furnishing thereof was no trifle-the feu-duty is really unreasonable, and taxes are taxes still, notwithstanding the principles of free trade, and the universal prosperity of the country. Servants are wasteful, and their wages absurd-and the whole style of living,

with long-necked bottles, most extravagant. But still we do not object to your establishment,-far from it, we admire it much-nor is there a single house in town where we make ourselves more agreeable to a late hour, or that we leave with a greater quantity of wine of a good quality under our girdle. Few things would give us more temporary uneasiness, than to hear of any embarrassment in your money concerns. We are not people to forget good fare, we assure you; and long and far may all shapes of sorrow keep aloof from the hospitable board, whether illuminated by gas, oil-lamp, or candle.

But what we were going to say was this-that the head of such a house ought not to live, when ruralizing, in a cottage. He ought to be consistent. Nothing so beautiful as consistency. What then is so absurd as to cram yourself, your wife, your numerous progeny, and your scarcely less numerous menials, into a concern called a cottage? The ordinary heat of a baker's oven is very few degrees above that of a brown study, during the month of July, in a substantial, low-roofed cottage. Then the smell of the kitchen! How it aggravates the sultry closeness! A strange, compounded, inexplicable smell of animal, vegetable, and mineral matter! It is at the worst during the latter part of the forenoon, when every thing has been got into preparation for cookery. There is then nothing savoury about the smell,-it is dull, dead,—almost catacombish. A small back kitchen has it in its power to destroy the sweetness of any cottage. Add a scullery, and the three are omnipotent. Of the eternal clashing of pots, pans, plates, trenchers, and general crockery, we now say nothing; indeed, the sound somewhat relieves the smell, and the ear comes occasionally in to the aid of the nose. Such noises are Godsends; but not so the scolding of the cook and butler, at first low and tetchy, with pauses, then sharp, but still interrupted,-by and by loud and ready in reply,-finally a discordant gabble of vulgar fury, like maniacs quarrelling in bedlam. Hear it you must, you and all the strangers. To explain it away is impossible; and your fear is, that Alecto, Tisiphone, or Megæra, will come flying into the parlour with a bloody cleaver, dripping with the butler's brains. During

the time of the quarrel, the spit has been standing still, and a jigot of the five-year-old black-face burnt on one side to a cinder." To dinner with what appetite you may.”

It would be quite unpardonable to forget one especial smell which irretrievably ruined our happiness during a whole summer,-the smell of a dead rat. The accursed vermin died somewhere in the cottage; but whether beneath a floor, within lath and plaster, or in roof, baffled the conjectures of the most sagacious. The whole family used to walk about the cottage for hours every day, snuffing on a travel of discovery; and we distinctly. remember the face of one elderly maiden lady at the moment she thought she had traced the source of the fumée to the wall behind a window-shutter. But even at the very same instant we ourselves had proclaimed it with open nostril from a press in an opposite corner. Terriers were procured, but the dog Billy himself would have been at fault. To pull down the whole cottage would have been difficult, at least to build it up again would have been so; so we had to submit. Custom, they say, is second nature, but not when a dead rat is in the house. No, none can ever be accustomed to that; yet good springs out of evil, for the live rats could not endure it, and emigrated to a friend's house, about a mile off, who has never had a sound night's rest from that day. We have not revisited our cottage for several years; but time does wonders, and we were lately told by a person of some veracity, that the smell was then nearly gone,—but our informant is a gentleman of blunted olfactory nerves, having been engaged from seventeen to seventy in a soap-work.

Smoke too! More especially that mysterious and infernal sort, called back-smoke! The old proverb, "No smoke without fire," is a base lie. We have seen smoke without fire in every room in a most delightful cottage we once inhabited during the dog-days. The moment you rushed for refuge even in a closet, you were blinded and stifled; nor shall we ever forget our horror on being within an ace of smotheration in the cellar. At last, we groped our way into the kitchen. Neither cook nor jack was