Accordingly, whatever rank such writings may hold in the literature of a country, we doubt if they ever will be domesticated by the firesides of that peasantry, whose character and occupation it is their ambition to describe.

If this article be getting tedious, (and if it had not been doing so, we should not have shoved it away to the other side of the table for these last two hours, while we discussed twin-tumblers,) any reader of common sense knows how to make it short enough. Shut the magazine,— stretch out your pretty little feet, my dear,-lean back your head, don't mind though the comb fall out, and let your auburn tresses salute the floor behind the sofa,-shut your eyes, and your mouth also, and may you dream of your lover! Mayhap he is not far off, but come gliding into the room, and breathes a faint fond kiss over thy forehead. He blesses this long, sleepy leading article; and, at every unawakening kiss, means to become a subscriber,-yea, a contributor.

Meanwhile, we are off to Westmoreland to speak of cottages. Often and often have we determined to accept Mr. Blackwood's very gentlemanly offer of five hundred for a Guide to the Lakes. Gray the poet touched some of the scenes there with a pencil of light; but his are but sketches, and few in number. Old West was not a little of an enthusiast, and something more of an antiquary. But we suspect he was shortsighted, and wore spectacles. He had a fancy too that there were only a few points, or stations, from which a country could be satisfactorily looked at; and during all the intervening distances, the worthy priest whistled as he went for want of thought. His style, like a beetle, wheels its drowsy flight, and each paragraph reads like a bit of a sermon. Besides, the whole character of the country is greatly changed,-and that for the better, -since his time, notwithstanding the disappearance of some old familiar faces. The captain who "rambled for a fortnight," was a half-pay coxcomb, and ought never to have had his name printed any where but in the army list. He would fain be thought too a man of gallantry, and confabulates with every shepherdess he meets, as if she had been a Manchester spinning-jenny. It was lucky for him

that some Rowland Long did not kick him out of the county. Then came poor Green,—a man of taste, feeling, and genius, but as ignorant of the art of bookmaking, as if he had lived before the invention of printing. But his work is a mine, and out of it a Grub Street journeyman might manufacture a guide without leaving the sound of Bow-bell. He was followed by Mr. Wordsworth, who, instead of a guide, presented the world with a treatise on the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful. It is needless to say, that his treatise overflows with fine and true thoughts and observations; nor does any man living better understand, or more deeply feel, the characteristic qualities of the scenery of Westmoreland. Yet it is somewhat heavy, even as a philosophical essay. For a guide, Mr. Wordsworth takes up a formidable position,-namely, on a cloud floating midway between the Great Gable and Scawfell. As maps are not uncommon, bird's-eye views of this kind are unnecessary; and when we write our guide, we shall stick to terra firma.

We have qualifications for such a task, which neither Green nor Wordsworth possessed. We are non-residents -absentees. Had we lived twenty long years on the banks of Windermere, or Grassmere, or Keswick, or Ullswater, an impartial and reasonable work could no more have been expected from us, than it has been produced by either of the aforesaid gentlemen. Stationary inhabitants get insensibly embued with all manner of prejudices, and forget entirely the general sympathies of the circulating population. They are apt to think that nobody can understand their scenery but themselves; and laugh in your face should you happen to deliver a heterodox opinion about a crag or a coppice, a flood or a fell. You must walk the valleys in leading-strings-lift up your eyes only when ordered—and not venture even an exclamation till privileged by your guide's ejaculatory "glorious!" Birds of passage, like us, wish to enjoy unfettered the few months we can pass in that climate; and absurd as it may seem to these very imperative ornithologists, we wing our way at our own sweet will, over hill and dale, and perch at night wherever we find a pleasant shelter, in

grove or single tree. This we have done for many summers, and frequently following, and as frequently deviating from, the sage advice of Messrs. Wordsworth and Southey, Professor Wilson, Mr. De Quincey the celebrated opiumeater, Mr. Hartley Coleridge, the gifted son of a gifted father, mild and mineralogical, Mr. Maltby, and our hospitable and intelligent friend, Robert Partridge, Esq., of Covey Cottage,-why, we have made ourselves as thoroughly acquainted with that county as any mother's son of them all; while, having no private pique, prejudice, or partiality whatever to gratify in regard to any mountain, lake, tarn, force, gill, or bowder-stone, we hold ourselves as the whole world must do, far better qualified than any one of those gentlemen to be the Historian of the Lakes.

A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any resemblance to a Scotch one. A Scotch cottage (in the Lowlands) has rarely any picturesque beauty in itself-a narrow oblong, with steep thatched-roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends. Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer, to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few tall pines on the other, no-it is a grove of sycamores,-there, about a hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level, peeps out from its cheerful seclusion, that prettiest of all hamlets-Braithwaite-Fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan-yet it has many hazels-a few bushes-here and there a holly -and why or wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A

wreath of smoke is always a feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire, since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in flame-a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare dinner, and last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious gridiron. Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire along with me, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping roofs. Dear -dear is the thatch to the eyes of a son of Caledonia, for he remembers the house in which he was born; but what thatch was ever so beautiful as that slate from the quarry of the white moss? Each one-no-not each one-but almost each one of these little overhanging roofs seems to have been slated, or repaired at least, in its own separate season, so various is the lustre of lichens that bathes the whole, as richly as ever rock was bathed fronting the sun on the mountain's brow. Here and there is seen some small window, before unobserved, curtained perhaps-for the statesman, and the statesman's wife, and the statesman's daughters, have a taste—a taste inspired by domestic happiness, which, seeking simply comfort, unconsciously creates beauty, and whatever its homely hand touches, that it adorns. There would seem to be many fireplaces in Braithwaite-Fold, from such a number of chimneypillars, each rising up to a different altitude from a different base, round as the bole of a tree-and elegant, as if shaped by Vitruvius. To us, we confess there is nothing offensive in the most glaring white roughcast, that ever changed a cottage into a patch of sunny snow. Yet here that grayish tempered unobtrusive hue does certainly blend to perfection with roof, rock, and sky. Every instrument is in tune. Not even in sylvan glade, nor among the mountain rocks, did wanderer's eye ever behold a porch of meeting tree-stems, or reclining cliffs, more gracefully festooned, than the porch from which now issued the fairest

of Westmeria's daughters. With one arm crossed before her eyes in a sudden burst of sunshine, with the other Ellinor Inman waves to her little brother and sisters among the bark-peelers in the Rydal woods. The graceful signal is repeated till seen, and in a few minutes a boat steals twinkling from the opposite side of the lake, each tug of the youthful rowers distinctly heard through the hollow of the vale. A singing voice is heard-but it ceases—as if the singer were watching the echo-and is not now the picture complete? So too is our article.