Justice, humanity, temperance are positive qualities; the courtesies and little civil offices of life, had I been master of the ceremonies to that court, should have sat above the salt in preference to a mere negation. I confess there is something wonderfully refreshing, in warm countries, in the act of ablution. Those Mahometan washings -how cool to the imagination! but in all these superstitions, the action itself, if not the duty, is voluntary. But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils-positively burking you, under pretence of cleansing-substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two-making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn (for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness), could this be true religion?

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. I am always disposed to add, so are those of grandmothers. Mine-the print has made her look rather too young-had never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a chit then; and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and I was complaining of it to her, the old lady deliberately pounded two ounces or more of the finest loaf-sugar that could be got, and making me hold open the eye as wide as I could (all innocent of her purpose), she blew from delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into the part afflicted, saying, "There, now the fly is out!" 'Twas most true: a legion of blue-bottles, with the prince of flies at their head, must have dislodged with the torrent and deluge of tears which followed. I kept my own counsel, and my fly in my eye when I had got one, in future, without troubling her dulcet applications for the remedy. Then her medicine case was a perfect magazine of tortures for infants. She seemed to have no notion of the comparatively tender drenches which young internals require: her potions were anything but milk for babes. Then her sewing up of a cut finger, pricking a whitloe before it was ripe, because she could not see well, with the aggravation of the pitying tone she did it in !

But of all her nostrums (rest her soul!), nothing came up to the Saturday night's flannel, that rude fragment of a Witney blanket (Wales spins none so coarse), thrust into the corners of a weak child's eye, with soap that might have absterged an Ethiop, whitened the hands of Duncan's she-murderer, and scoured away original sin itself. A faint image of my penance you see in the print—but the artist has sunk the flannel-the age, I suppose, is too nice to bear it : and he has faintly shadowed the expostulatory suspension of the razorstrap in the hand of my grandfather, when my pains and clamours had waxed intolerable. Peace to the shades of them both! And if their well-meaning souls had need of cleansing when they quitted earth, may the process of it have been milder than that of my old purgatorial Saturday night's path to the Sabbatical rest of the morrow!

NEPOS.

THE REYNOLDS GALLERY.

THE Reynolds Gallery has, upon the whole, disappointed me. Some of the portraits are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged gentlemen) were born a little too late to remember, but about whom we have heard our fathers tell stories till we almost fancy to have seen them. There is a charm in the portrait of a Rodney or a Keppel which even a picture of Nelson inust want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspection from the best likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne Clarke, but Kitty Fisher is a considerable personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly remind us of modes which we can just recall; of the forms under which the venerable relationship of aunt or mother first presented themselves to our young eyes; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods! Mercy on us! what a load of head-ornaments seem to have conspired to bury a pretty face in the picture of Mrs. Long, yet could not! Beauty must have some "charmed life" to have been able to surmount the conspiracy of fashion in those days to destroy it.

The portraits which least pleased me were those of boys, as infant Bacchuses, Jupiters, &c. But the artist is not to be blamed for the disguise. No doubt the parents wished to see their children deified in their lifetime. It was but putting a thunderbolt (instead of a squib) into young master's hands, and a whey-faced chit was transformed into the infant ruler of Olympus,-him who was afterward to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another good boy pleased his grandmamma with saying his prayers so well, and the blameless dotage of the good old woman imagined in him an adequate representative of the infancy of the awful prophet Samuel. But the great historical compositions, where the artist was at liberty to paint from his own idea the Beaufort and the Ugolino-why, then, I must confess, pleading the liberty of table-talk for my presumption, that they have not left any very elevating impressions on my mind. Pardon à ludicrous comparison. I know, madam, you admire them both; but placed opposite to each other as they are at the gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with the other, they did remind me of the famous contention for the prize of deformity mentioned in the 173d number of the "Spectator." The one stares and the other grins; but is there common dignity in their countenances? Does anything of the history of their life gone by peep through the ruins of the mind in the face, like the unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distortions of the Laocoon? The figures which stand by the bed of Beaufort are indeed happy representations of the plain, unmannered old nobility of the English historical plays of Shakespeare; but, for anything else, give me leave to recommend those macaroons.

After leaving the Reynolds Gallery (where, upon the whole, I received a good deal of pleasure), and feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be a portrait of Francis the First by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a difference! It is but a portrait, as most

of those I had been seeing; but, placed by them, it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses's rod the other rods. Where did these old painters get their models? I see no such figures, not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the attributes, of John the Baptist. A more than martial majesty in the brow and upon the eyelid; an arm muscular, beautifully formed; the long, graceful, massy fingers compressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed Una; the picture altogether looking as if it were eternal, combining the truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble.

Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England, must have been a stupendous genius. I scarce can think he has had his full fame,—he who could paint that wonderful personification of the Logos, or third person of the Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possession of Mr. Troward of Pall Mall, where the hand was, by the boldest license, twice as big as the truth of drawing warranted; yet the effect, to every one that saw it, by some magic of genius was confessed to be not monstrous, but miraculous and silencing. It could not be gainsaid.

ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.

A CORRESPONDENT, who writes himself Peter Ball or Bell,-for his handwriting is as ragged as his manners,-admonishes me of the old saying that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Beil clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question (see postscript to my "Chapter on Ears"), I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly, that Elia there expresseth himself ironically as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rodomontade to suspect me for an alien or believe me other than English.

To a second correspondent, who signs himself "A Wiltshire Man," and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my "Christ's Hospital," a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage, I must confess that the term

"native town," applied to Calne, primâ facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So, by the word "native,” I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born, or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry, chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably that they and it became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet "twice born." But, not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was delivered, for by either birth he may probably be challenged for a Theban,-in a strict way of speaking, he was a filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius alvi; for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous "Wiltshire Man."

To "Indagator," "Investigator," "Incertus," and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth,— as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish,— to all such churchwarden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him. Modo me Thebis, Modo Athenis.

THE GENTLE GIANTESS.

THE Widow Blacket of Oxford is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the maid's aunt of Brentford who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders; and as she stoopeth in her gait,1 Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo Er pitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignum) Insuitur femori.

with as few offences to answer for in her own particular as any one of Eve's daughters, her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her waist-or what she is pleased to esteem as such-nearly up to her shoulders; from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse in mountainous declivity emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys who follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person is a burthen to herself no less than to the ground which bears her. To her mighty bone she hath a pinguitude withal, which makes the depths of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually renteth a cool cellar where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two doors in north and south direction, and two windows fronting the rising and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I owe a painful faceache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught sitting by her one day in last July at this receipt of coolness. Her fan in ordinary resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth continually on the alert to detect the least breeze. She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden-chair. She setteth out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which she keepeth up till you are both wellbreathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is up again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth; her movements, on these sprightly occasions, being some thing between walking and flying. Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward ostrich-fashion. In this kind of relieved marching, I have traversed with her many scores of acres on those well-wooded and well-watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather situated between the frontiers of that and 's College (some litigation latterly about repairs has vested the property of it finally in's), where, at the hour of noon, she is ordinarily to be found sitting, so she calls it by courtesy,but, in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous settlement; as both those foundations-who, however, are good-natured enough to wink at it-have found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a book, blessed if she can but intercept some resident Fellow (as usually