How it ever is cleared for the race that takes place at five, or how the horses ever gallant figures that they make! There! were great vans, too, full of handsome girls-thirty, or more together, perhaps go through the race, without going over the and the broadsides that were poured into, and poured out of these fairy fire-ships, splashed the air with flowers and bonbons for ten minutes at a time. Carriages, delayed long in one place, would begin a deliberate engagement with other carriages, or with people at the lower windows; and the spectators at some upper balcony or window, joining in the fray, and attacking both parties, would empty down great bags of confétti, that descended like a cloud, and in an instant made them white as millers. Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colors on colors, crowds upon crowds, without end. Men and boys clinging to the wheels of coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and diving in among the horses' feet to pick up scattered flowers to sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest, generally) in fantastic exggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through enormous eyeglasses, and always transported with an ecstasy of love, on the discovery of any particularly old lady at a window; long strings of Policinelli, laying about them with blown bladders at the ends of sticks; a wagon-full of madmen, screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full of grave Mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals with pigs' faces, and lions' tails, carried under their arms, or worn gracefully over their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colors on colors, crowds upon crowds, without end. Not many actual characters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering the number dressed, but the main pleasure of the scene consisting in its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety; and in its entire abandonment to the mad humor of the time—an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o'clock, when he is suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the whole business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound, and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street. people, is more than I can say. But the carriages get out into the by-streets, or up into the Piazza del Popolo, and some people sit in temporary galleries in the latter place, and tens of thousands line the Corso on both sides, when the horses are brought out into the Piazza-to the foot of that same column which, for centuries, looked down upon the games and chariot-races in the Circus Maximus. At a given signal, they are started off. Down the live lane, the whole length of the Corso, they fly like the wind riderless, as all the world knows: with shining ornaments upon their backs, and twisted in their plaited manes and with heavy little balls stuck full of spikes, dangling at their sides, to goad them on. The jingling of these trappings, and the rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the dash and fury of their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very cannon that are fired-these noises are nothing to the roaring of the multitude: their shouts: the clapping of their hands. But it is soon over-almost instantaneously. More cannon shake the town. The horses have plunged into the carpets put across the street to stop them; the goal is reached; the prizes are won (they are given, in part, by the poor Jews, as a compromise for not running foot-races themselves); and there is an end to that day's sport. But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last day but one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height of glittering color, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that the bare recollection of it makes me giddy at this moment. The same diversions, greatly heightened and intensified in the ardor with which they are pursued, go on until the same hour. The race is repeated; the cannon are fired; the shouting and clapping of hands are renewed; the cannon are fired again; the race is over; and the prizes are won. But, the carriages: ankle-deep in sugar-plums within, and so beflowered and dusty without, as to be hardly recognizable for the same vehicles that they were, three hours ago: instead of scampering off in all directions, throng into the Corso, where they are soon wedged together in a scarcely-moving mass. For the diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the Carnival, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers, like what are called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily on every side, "Moc- | immense extinguishers like halberds, and coli, Moccoli! Ecco Moccoli!"-a new suddenly coming down upon glorious torchitem in the tumult; quite abolishing that es; others, gathered round one coach, and other item of "Ecco Fióri! Ecco Fior-r sticking to it; others, raining oranges and -r!" which has been making itself audi-nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or ble over all the rest, at intervals, the whole day through. regularly storming a pyramid of men, holding up one man among them, who carries As the bright hangings and dresses are one feeble little wick above his head, with all fading into one dull, heavy, uniform which he defies them all! Senza Moccolo! color in the decline of the day, lights begin Senza Moccolo! Beautiful women, standflashing here and there: in the windows, ing up in coaches, pointing in derision at on the house-tops, in the balconies, in the extinguished lights, and clapping their carriages, in the hands of the foot passen- hands, as they pass on, crying, "Senza gers: little by little gradually, gradually: Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!" low balconies more and more: until the whole long street full of lovely faces and gay dresses, strugis one great glare and blaze of fire. Then, gling with assailants in the streets; some every body present has but one engrossing repressing them as they climb up, some object; that is to extinguish other people's bending down, some leaning over, some candles, and to keep his own a-light; and shrinking back-delicate arms and bosoms every body, man, woman, or child, gentle--graceful figures-glowing lights, flutterman or lady, prince or peasant, native oring dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoforeigner, yells and screams, and roars in-lo, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o! when in the cessantly, as a taunt to the subdued, "Sen-wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest za Moccolo, Senza Moccolo!" (Without ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings a light! Without a light!) until nothing is from the church steeples and the Carnival heard but a gigantic chorus of those two is over in an instant put out like a taper, words, mingled with peals of laughter. with a breath! The spectacle, at this time, is one of the There was a masquerade at the theatre most extraordinary that can be imagined. at night, as dull and senseless as a London Carriages coming slowly by, with every one, and only remarkable for the summary body standing on the seats or on the box, way in which the house was cleared at holding up their lights at arms' length, for eleven o'clock: which was done by a line greater safety; some in paper shades; some of soldiers forming along the wall, at the with a bunch of undefended little tapers, back of the stage, and sweeping the whole kindled altogether: some with blazing company out before them, like a broad torches; some with feeble little candles; broom. The game of the Moccoletti (the men on foot, creeping along, among the word, in the singular, Mocoletto; is the wheels, watching their opportunity, to make minutive of Moccolo, and means a little a spring at some particular light, and dash lamp or candle-snuff) is supposed by some it out; other people climbing up into car- to be a ceremony of burlesque mourning riages, to get hold of them by main force; for the death of the Carnival: candles being others, chasing some unlucky wanderer, indispensable to Catholic grief. But whethround and round his own coach, to blow out er it be so, or be a remnant of the ancient the light he has begged or stolen some- Saturnalia, or an incorporation of both, or where, before he can ascend to his own have its origin in any thing else, I shall alcompany, and enable them to light their ex-ways remember it, and the frolic, as a briltinguished tapers; others, with their hats liant and most captivating sight: no less off, at a carriage-door, humbly beseeching remarkable for the unbroken good humor some kind-hearted lady to oblige them with of all concerned, down to the very lowest a light for a cigar, and when she is in the (and among those who scaled the carriages, fullness of doubt whether to comply or no, were many of the commonest men and blowing out the candle she is guarding so boys) than for its innocent vivacity. For, tenderly with her little hand; other people odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so at the windows, fishing for candles with full of thoughtlessness and personal display, lines and hooks, or letting down long wil-it is as free from any taint of immodesty as low-wands with handkerchiefs at the end, any general mingling of the two sexes can and flapping them out, dexterously, when the bearer is at the height of his triumph; others, biding their time in corners, with possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a whole year. From Blackwood's Magazine. THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Lives of Men of Letters and Science who traits. London: Colburn. LORD BROUGHAM has resumed his memoirs of the eminent writers of England; and every lover of literature will feel gratified by this employment of his active research and of his vigorous pen. costume. His rise was the work of the royal will-his fall is equally the work of the royal will. Having no connexion with the national mind, he has no resource in the national sympathies. He has been a royal instrument: when his edge becomes dull, or the royal artificer finds a tool whose fashion he likes better, the old tool is flung by to rust, and no man asks where or why; his use is at an end, and the world and the workman, alike, "knoweth it no more." But, in England, the condition of public the creation of the national will, and neilife is wholly different. The statesman is ther in office, nor in opposition, does the nation forget the product of its will. The minister is no offspring of slavery, no official negro, made to be sold, and, when sold, separated from his parentage once and for ever. If he sins in power, he is at worst One of the most striking distinctions of but the Prodigal Son, watched in his caEnglish public life from that of the Conti-reer, and willingly welcomed when he has nent, is in the condition of statesmen after abjured his wanderings. Instead of being their casual retirement from power. The extinguished by the loss of power, he often Foreign statesman seems to exist only in more than compensates the change, by the office. The moment that sees him "out revival of popularity. Disencumbered of of place," sees him extinguished. He is the laced and embroidered drapery of oflost as suddenly to the public eye, as if he fice, he often exhibits the natural vigor and were carried to the tomb of his ancestors. proportion of his faculties to higher advanHe retires to his country-seat, and there tage; cultivates his intellectual distinctions subsides into the garrulous complainant with more palpable success; refreshes his against the caprices of fortune, or buries strength for nobler purposes than even his calamities in the quiet indulgence of those of ambition; and, if he should not his appetites; smokes away his term of exert his renewed popularity for a new years, subsides into the lean and slippered pantaloon, occupies his studies with the Court Gazette, and his faculties with cards; and finally deposited in the family vault, to continue the process of mouldering which had been begun in his arm-chair, to be remembered only in an epitaph. France, at the present day, alone seems to form an exception. Her legislature affords a new element in which statesmanship in abeyance can still float: the little vessel is there at least kept in view of mankind; if it makes no progress, it at least keeps above water; and, however incapable of reaching the port by its own means, the fluctuations of the national surge, sometimes so powerful, and always so contemptuous of calculation, may at some time or other carry the craziest craft into harbor. But the general order of continental ministers, even of the highest rank, when abandoned by the monarch, er was the ruin of fortune. The Dives are like men consigned to the dungeon. had been suddenly transformed into the They go to their place of sentence at once. Lazarus; the purple and fine linen were The man who to-day figured in the highest "shreds and patches," and not even the robe of power, to-morrow wears the prison dogs came to administer to his malady. conquest of power, only substitutes for place the more generous and exalted determination of deserving those tributes which men naturally offer to great abilities exerted for the good of present and future generations. We must allude, for the national honor, to this characteristic of English feeling, in the changes of public men. On the Continent, the hour which deprived a statesman of office, at once deprived him of every thing. All the world ran away from him, as they would from a falling house. The crowded antechamber of yesterday exhibited nothing to-day but utter solitude. The fallen minister was a leper; men shrank from his touch: the contagion of ill-luck was upon him: and every one dreaded to catch the disease. It was sometimes even worse. The loss of pow But, among us, the breaking up of a cabinet often only gives rise to a bold and brilliant opposition. It is not like the breaking up of a ship, where the wreck is irreparable, and the timbers are shattered and scattered, and good for nothing; it is often more like the breaking up of a regiment in one of our colonies, where the once compact mass of force, which knew nothing but the command of its colonel, now takes, each man his own way, exhibits his own style of cleverness; instead of the one manual exercise of musket and bayonet, each individual takes the axe or the spade, the tool or the ploughshare, and works a new fertility out of the soil, according to his own "thews and sinews." was of throwing a splendor over his native soil. This neglect is known and suffered in no other province of public service. The soldier, the sailor, the architect, the painter, are all within sight of the most lavish prizes of public liberality. Parliament has just given titles and superb pensions to the conquerors of the Sikhs. The India Company has followed its example. We applaud this munificent liberality in both instances. Two general officers have thus obtained the peerage, with £7000 and £5000 a-year. They deserved these rewards. But the whole literary encouragement of the British empire, with a revenue of fifty-two millions sterling, is £1200, litThe moral of all this is that the distin- tle more than the tenth part of the pensions guished author of these Memoirs is now allotted to those two gallant men. £1200 devoting himself to a career of literature, for the whole literary encouragement of to which even his political services may England! There can be no greater scanhave been of inferior utility. He is recall- dal to the intellectual honor of the couning the public memory to those eminent try. The pettiest German principality achievements, which have so powerfully ad- scarcely limits its literary encouragement vanced the mental grandeur of our era; to this sum. We doubt whether Weimar, and, while he thus gives due honor to the between literary offices and pensions, did labors of the past, he is at once encour- not give twice the sum annually. But aging and illustrating the nobleness of the named in competition with the liberality course which opens to posterity. But of the leading sovereigns, it is utterly Lord Brougham's influence cannot be con- mean. Louis XIV., two hundred years tented, we should hope, with merely specu- ago, allotted 80,000 francs a-year to his lative benefits; it is for him, and for men like him, to look with interest on the struggles of literary existence at the hour; to call the attention of government and the nation to the neglects, the narrowness, and the caprices of national patronage; to demand protection for genius depressed by the worldliness of the crowd; to point out to men of rank and wealth a path of service infinitely more honorable to their own taste, and infinitely more productive to their coun- But if we are to be answered by a class, try, than ribands and stars; than the tink-plethoric with wealth and rank; that liteling of a name, than pompous palaces, or rature ought to be content with living on picture galleries of royal price; to excite its own means; must not the obvious answer our nobles to constitute themselves the be-Is the author to be an author, down to true patrons of the living genius of the his grave? Is there to be no relaxation of land, and disdain to be content with either his toil? Is there to be no allowance for the offering of weak regrets, or the tribute the exhaustion of his overworked faculties? of worthless honors to the slumberers in for the natural infirmities of years? for the the grave. A tenth part of the sums em- vexations of a noble spirit compelled to subployed in raising obelisks to Burns, would mit to the caprices of public change? and have rescued one-half of his life from pov-with its full share of the common calamierty, and the other half from despair. The ties of life, increasing their pressure at single sum which raised the monument to once by an inevitable sense of wrong, and Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, would have by a feeling that the delight of his youth saved him from the final pressure which must be the drudgery of his age? When broke his heart, elastic as it was, and the great Dryden, in his seventieth year, dimmed his intellect, capable as he still was forced, in the bitterness of his heart, to forty members of the Academy, a sum equivalent in that day, and in France, to little less than £5000 a-year in our day, and in England. Frederick II. gave pensions and appointments to a whole corps of literary men. At this moment, there is scarcely a man of any literary distinction in Paris, who has not a share in the liberal and wise patronage of government, either in office or public pension. 1 exclaim, "Must I die in the harness!" his language was a brand on the common sense, as well as on the just generosity, of his country. We now abandon the topic with one remark. This want of the higher liberality of the nation has already produced the most injurious effects on our litera ture. omist, reserving ourselves for sketches of their career, as our space may allow. have been the work of men who never wrote a book. In fact, the inventor is generally a man of few words; his disciples, or rivals, or imitators, are the men of description. The inventor gives the idea, the follower gives the treatise; but the inventor is the philosopher after all. The question, however, with Sir Joseph Banks is, whether he was any more an inventor than a writer. It does not appear that he was either. Of course, he has no right to rank among men of science. But he had merits of his own, and on those his distinctions ought to have been placed. He was a zealous, active, and influential friend of philosophers. He gave them his time, he received them in his house, and he assisted their progress. He volunteered to be the protector of their class; he sympathized with their pursuits; and while adding little or nothing to their discoveries, he assisted in bringing those discoveries before the world. He loved to be thought the patriarch of British science; and, like the patriarch, he retained his authority even when he was past his labor. If he filled the throne of science feebly, none could deny that he filled it zealously. The. true definition of him was, an English gentleman occupying his leisure with philosophical pursuits, and encouraging others of more powerful understanding to do the same. Lord Brougham commences his life of Sir Joseph Banks by a species of apology, for placing in the ranks of philosophers a man who had never written a book. But no one has ever doubted that a man may All the great works of our ancestral lite- be a philosopher, without being an author. rature were the works of leisure and com- Some of the greatest inventions of philosoparative competence. All the great dra-phy, of science, and of practical power, matic poetry of France was the work of comparative competence. Its writers were not compelled to hurry after the popular tastes; they followed their own, and impressed its character upon the mind of the nation. The plays of Racine, Corneille, Molière, and Voltaire, are nobler trophies to the greatness of France than all the victories of Louis XIV., than Versailles, than all the pomps of his splendid reign. Louis Philippe has adopted the same munificent policy, and it will be followed by the same honor with posterity. But, in England, the keeping of a stud of race-horses, the building of a dog-kennel, or the purchase of a foreign picture, is ignominiously and self ishly suffered to absorb a larger sum than the whole literary patronage of the most opulent empire that the sun ever shone upon. We recommend these considerations to Lord Brougham: they are nobler than politics; they are fitter for his combined character of statesman and philosopher they will also combine with that character another which alone can give permanency to the fame of any public manthat of the philanthropist. His ability, his knowledge of human nature, and his passion for public service-qualities in which his merits are known to Europe-designate him as the founder of a great system of public liberality to the enterprise of genius. And when party is forgotten, and cabinets have perished; when, perhaps, even the boundaries of empire may have been changed, and new nations rise to claim the supremacy of arts and arms; the services of the protector of literature will stand out before the eye with increased honor, and his name be rescued from the common ruin which envelopes the memory of ostentatious conquerors and idle kings. The present volume contains biographies of Johnson, Adam Smith, Lavoisier, Gibbon, Sir Joseph Banks, D'Alembert. We shall commence with the lives less known to the generality of readers than those of our great moralist and great political econ Sir Joseph Banks was of an old and wealthy family, dating so far back as Edward III.; first settled in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and afterwards in the county of Lincoln. He was born in London in January, 1743. At the age of nine he was sent to Harrow, and at thirteen to Eton, where the tutors observed, as has happened in many other instances, that he was fonder of play than of books. In about a twelvemonth, however, he became studious, though not to the taste of his schoolmasters. The origin of this change was described by himself in a letter to Sir Everard Home, as accidental. One afternoon he had been bathing with some of the Eton |