effect. It is worn exactly as the common dress, but is doubled about the body. The men also wear a hat in the shape of a cone, with a string that fastens under the chin. These people have a horrid custom of flattening the heads of infants. When a child is born, they lay it in a small canoe or cradle made for that purpose; they then fix a pad on the forehead and bind it tight down, and keep it so till it broadens the face and forces the eyes out, giving them a most ferocious appearance. When the child screams with pain, they loosen the bandage and hold it to the breast; the flatter the head is, the greater the beauty in their estimation. Polygamy is allowed, and they keep three or four wives; they are not jealous, and so far from being at all delicate, they allow their women to go on board ship, and remain for weeks, taking care, however, to be well paid beforehand. Their mode of burying the dead is to fasten them in a small canoe with all their property, and hang the vessel up between two trees or stakes; they then cover them with mats. "My prettiest boy, wilt go with me? Thy life shall be pleasure and revelry ; With sweetest of flowers I'll dress thy head, "My father, dear father, and dost thou not hear As their dry leaves in murmurs thus answer the breeze." "Come with me, come with me, thou prettiest boy, "Oh, father, dear father, look yonder, where lo! Through the ancient willows which droop o'er the stream." "Young urchin, I love thee, then haste to obey : The father was troubled, and hurrying wild, MR. EDITOR, CANT. "Gratiano says an infinite deal of nothings, Do you wish to know what cant is? "Tis what Hamlet studied, 'Words, words, words,'-not Wordsworth (as a gentleman of my acquaintance would say, who has the gift of making the very worst puns possible,) for there is no worth in them. They stand for no ideas, or rather stand for all. They are expressions to let, and are taken into the service of those muddy conceptions, that are beyond the reach of all ordinary language. Were writing and speaking confined to their legitimate ends, there would be no such thing; but where quill and tongue go for the writing and speaking sake, there is no way of getting over the breaks, the puzzles, and the dubiosities, of meaning, without a copious vocabulary of cant. It is like its parent-a manyheaded monster; and from the cobbler to the king, each calling hath its stock. With but this difference between the kinds, that the more vulgar are the more expressive-nothing being so dull, so stupid, and utterly fade as the cant of high life. The only person free from this habit, and independent of this auxiliary, is the citizen of the world; but he is almost an imaginary being. We are a universe of tradesmen, and all delve at something; there are labourers in the palace, as well as in the vineyard. We are each surrounded with our little atmosphere, of which the atoms are mighty to us: the objects with which we are there conversant, are ever present to our senses, become a part and parcel of our minds, and when we take distant and more general views of things, we tacitly refer them to, and illustrate them by those lesser objects, which are hourly before our eyes. Hence the expressiveness of the vulgar, who apply the homely and the tangible, where the learned and fashionable use the affected and ideal.Cant with the vulgar is metaphor; with others, conceit-as a term of reproach, indeed, it should be applied only to the latter. Those who lay most claim to be considered citizens of the world, are travellers; yet among this class are to be found the oldest and most egregious of canters-from Sir John Mandeville to Tom Coryatt, and from the muchabused author of the Crudities to any one you please. Travel, I fear, wears out more shoes than prejudices :—as the greatest and most startling novelty to the voyager is the language and strange sounds of foreign countries, he catches words first, and leaves ideas to follow at their leisure-often omits them altogether, by particular desire. Much in the same way with all of us, when we travel into life and knowledge: we are taught vocabularies— made to repeat whole dictionaries by rote-learn explanations ten times more formidable than what they explain, ignotum per ignotius, and get our ideas of things by the same method that, folks say, lawyers get to heaven. No wonder if we cant and babble nonsense. We are taught dead languages and dead sciences, and are left to catch the living principles, the vital knowledge of humanity, from unmeaning conversation, and from the worthless stray volumes on the subject which We are left may fall into our hands. for all this discipline-this nurture of the soul, in boyhood and youth to sanguine fancy and untempered passion; and, as years roll on, are compelled to learn from that hard, cold teacher, Experience, the futility of former hopes and old ideas. We are led thus to judge of things that are to be, by the things that were to be: we learn the vanity of hope, but,in learning the harsh lesson, we lose the mental strength, the independent, self-subsisting spirit, which might have enabled us to do without it. Thus cheated of the future, we turn our views upon the past-our reflections upon ourselves. We consider our race of existence as run; and, with the spiritual pride of beings that have fulfilled their period of existence, we turn philosophers, and speculators, and teachers. Our feelings and perception, dormant upon one another, lie rankling and rotting into morbidity and corruption. Ever contemplating our own confused minds, and their more confused copies of things, we grow dizzy, as we flatter ourselves we grow wise. A haze spreads itself between us and the world of intellect; yet we talk on, as if the objects were as distinct as ever. The crazed mind, from which has been blotted every idea, clings in vanity and dotage to the words, and the sounds, with which it has been familiar; and in pleasing and happy self-delusion takes sound for sense, and cant for philosophy, like Lear with his straw sceptre, it is every inch a king.' is often the primates of intellect who are thus visited; but it is some consolation to them, that the world can scarce perceive their aberrations-there is no measure by which they can be meted. If their effusions be unmeaning, a spirit still glows through them, which affrights the vulgar from questioning, and makes them esteem it profane to attempt unveiling the nothingness that is enshrined within. There is generally a slight glimmer throughout that looks like Platonicism, and is more striking from the surrounding darkness. With the vulgar reverence for obscurity, we are at first more inclined to attribute the unintelligibility of a work to our own dulness than to that of the author, till we take up books of philosophy and perspicacity united, which shake our worshipful opinions of the obscure. "The works of Des Cartes," says Le Clerc, "were the first books that brought Mr. Locke (so he himself told me) to the study of philosophy: for though he did not assent to the truth of all his notions, he found that he wrote with great clearness, which made him think that it was the fault of the authors, rather than his own, that he had not understood some other philosophi cal books." If we proceed from hence to poetry, we shall find cant more at home: it is here in its original signification of song, and not inexpressively derived, bearng as it does, even in its most prosai taste, such a resemblance to those popular snatches of tune, which "We whistle as we go, for want of thought.” There are many who could no more live without the favourite tune or favourite line of the hour, than they could without the morning newspaper; it is to them just what tobacco is to the poor artizan a soothing employment, a gentle opiate, "To steep the senses in forgetfulness." We are such unspiritual beings, that thought requires some mechanical accompaniment; some people, even of intellectual habits, cannot raise an idea while they sit―their minds won't go without their legs. We know an author who regularly destroys a pair of gloves-literally eats them-for every song he writes; and another, who always sits down to a lathe, as a preparative for composition. For those whose cogitations do not tend paperwards, a tune is the simplest spell of the kind, at once soothing and exciting. But we have heard or read somewhere, that medical men look upon a person's having one of these snatches continually in his head, as a symptom of some disorder. I have not had much experience in this line, but I have found, that people thus affected are generally very much inclined to commit verse. The The fashionable catch the air from the last opera, and the expression from Boxiana or Cribb's Memorial. Savoyards have been a national benefit in this way, and have furnished matter for humming to all the boys about town: this humming is at first an accompaniment, and afterwards a substitute for thought. out the music, are the thousand species Exactly the same, but withof expressions, adages, and illustrations, which on their first application, no doubt, meant something, but which have long since laid aside the useful property of meaning. Those sweet words are to the author what the favourite tune is to the saunterer-a stopgap in cogitation and in sentences. A reader may be puzzled to find out the association; but the difficulty is solved, when he learns, that, like the Pax vobiscum of Wamba, it is a passe partout. Cant is the epidemic of periodical essayism (we have no doubt of this very page practising what it preaches; but with a "mi ignosco meis vitiis," it is very allowable. Who could be for ever writing sense? or who would, when nonsense will do better? A lively gentleman, with a stock of egotism, and the old dramatists common-placed, will write more popular essays in a week than Bacon and Clarendon excogitated in a year.Cant is current coin, as Langland would say; sense is your heavy ingot, that nobody will carry, or take the trouble of assaying. Wisdom will not be listened to, unless ushered in by nonsense; and the only way to convey instruction is par parenthèse, surrounding it with drollery, like the knowing fellow's mode of passing a bad guinea, "Slip it between two halfpence, and it will pass without challenge." There are some species of cant extremely amusing, from the impudence with which it is endeavoured to pass them for something better: they stare you in the face, like a lawyer of empty bag, with most vacuous importance. Of these the most insignificant are the most barefaced-witness the dash, and the letter I. Of the pages of modern composition they have more than onehalf in their own possession, yet the sum of their signification is nothing. How is it that our ancestors were content with colon and semicolon, and yet contrived to be abundantly witty? That the dashless Addison was facetious, elegant, philosophic-all in the way of plain punctuation? But taste is changed: we read, think, and talk hurry-skurry, and should never get to the end of a speech or paragraph without the assistance of -, parenthesis, and quotation : Hail, thou inscrutable prosaic Muse, Where'er thou dwell'st,-in would-be poet's dream, Or essayist's, or preacher's sonorous theme; Welcome to all, 'tis hard for thee to choose. And yet I ween, ne'er did thy wing delay To visit with thy sage and sapient store In all thy temples been, and sung the Pæan, MOUNT ETNA AT DAY-LIGHT. ANXIOUS expectation more than doubled the time in which we waited for the appearance of the sun; but we felt none of those unpleasant sensations in a difficulty of respiration, which are said to arise from the tenuity of the atmosphere, and of which many travellers have complained at this amazing altitude the mind seems more affected than the body; the spirit appears elevated by the change, and dismissing those cares and passions which disturb its serenity below, rises from the contemplation of this sublime scenery to the adoration of its divine Architect. At length faint streaks of light shooting athwart the horizon, announced the approach of the great luminary of day; and when he sprang up in splendid majesty, supported, as it were, on a throne of golden clouds, that fine scriptural image of the giant rejoicing to run his course, flashed across my mind. As he ascended in the sky his rays glittered on the mountain tops, and Sicily became gradually visible, expanded like a map beneath our eyes. This effect is most extraordinary; nearly all the mountains of the island may be descried, with cities that surmount their summits; more than half the coast, with its bays and indentations, and the promontories of Pelorus and Pachynum, may be traced, as well as the course of rivers from their springs to the sea, sparkling like silver bands which encircle the valleys and the plains. We were unable to distinguish Malta, though I do not, on this account, doubt the relation of others who profess to have done so the Lipari isles were very much approximated to view by the refreshing power of the atmosphere, as also was the Calabrian coast. The sides of Etna itself are covered with beautiful conical hills, from which ancient lavas have issued; their exhausted craters are now filled with verdant groves of the spreading chesnut, exhibiting the most sylvan scenes imaginable: on the plain be low, these cones would be lofty mountains; here they appear but excrescences that serve to vary and beautify the ground.-Hughes's Travels in Sicily, just printed. Reminiscentia, OR, ORIGINAL ANECDOTES OF REMARKABLE CHARACTERS. MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI. THIS of Michel Angiolo, with his superb offering, was read amongst the subscribers. "La cui memoria volle ornare con un magnifico sepolero, siccome costa da una supplica a Leon X. Ivi l'Academia Medicea richiede le ossa del divino poeta; fra 'soscrittori si legge il nome di Michel Angiolo e la sua offerta.” "Dante of the arts," (Il dante delle belle arti) the pride of sculpture, of painting, and of architecture, possessed also a singular talent for poetry, and his mottos have been considered equal with those of the Greek authors we read of in Dati, as possessing all the acumen of wit and the fire His sculpture. It may be accountof imagination. Lorenzo the Magnifi- ed,perhaps, a propitious occurrence for cent, the patron of all that is splendid the future excellence of Buonarroti, in design, of extensive in execution, was that Dominico Ghirlandaio, the master so well pleased and convinced of this, of this angel in sculpture, not less than that he took Buonarroti into his own in painting, jealous of the too visible house, made him the confidant of the superiority of his splendid genius in the learned, the friend of Poliziano, and latter art, succeeded in his endeavours even the companion of his own sons. to direct his uncommon disposition toMichael Angelo derived the most inval- wards the former. Whoever has seen uable advantage from such distinguish his Moses at the sepulchre of Julius the ed protection, and divided his studies Second, at St. Pietro in Vincoli at between the antient marbles with which Rome, his Christ at the Minerva, or the house of Lorenzo then abounded, his Pieta at the Vatican, to say nothing and the composition of sonettos. He of those statues which Florence posseswas most particularly partial to that ses of him at St. Lorenzo, and the varisongster of hidden learning, Dante, and ous palaces of the sovereign, must conhas celebrated many of his sublime im- fess with Condivi and others, that, howages in a code which has perished to ever towering upon the summit of the the heavy loss of the art. Gori says in three arts, his chisel is still preferable his illustration of the life of Condivi, to his pencil. Herein, indeed, he apthat the soul of Michel Angiolo was pears certainly to have exerted himso much enraptured with the almost in- self the most to the purpose, and to comprehensible effusions of the divine have laid the foundation of his neverpoet, that he not only wished to adorn dying fame. It would be too much to his memory with a magnificent sepul- follow Vasari, who speaking of the chre, as appears from a supplication great David, placed near the old palace, made to Leo the Tenth, but also when (Palazzo Vecchio) of Florence, says, the Medicean Academy demanded the "that it took away the reputation from bones of the illustrious bard, the name all antient or modern statues, Greek or |