orator; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine times out of ten, he contrived by this device to send away a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested.-Hence, not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society; and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him-but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry-as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist! I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. BLAKESMOOR IN HSHIRE. this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to—an antiquity. I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence ? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious. I Do not know a pleasure more affecting house with which I had been impressed in than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty-an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory-or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher-puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness?-go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves the cool aisles of some country church: at their process of destruction, at the pluckthink of the piety that has kneeled there- ing of every panel I should have felt the the congregations, old and young, that have varlets at my heart. I should have cried found consolation there-the meek pastor-out to them to spare a plank at least out of the docile parishioner. With no disturbing the cheerful store-room, in whose hot windowemotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee. Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me-it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a panel of the yellowroom. Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road! Why, every plank and panel of that house to look upon the remains of an old great for me had magic in it. The tapestried bedrooms tapestry so much better than garden walls. I could have exclaimed with painting-not adorning merely, but peopling that garden-loving poet the wainscots-at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally-all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Acteon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire-sides-the low-built roof-parlours ten feet by ten-frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home-these were the condition of my birth-the wholesome soil which I was Then, that haunted room-in which old planted in. Yet, without impeachment to Mrs. Battle died-whereinto I have crept, their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to but always in the daytime, with a passion of have had glances of something beyond; and fear; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, to hold communication with the past.-How at the contrasting accidents of a great forshall they build it up again? It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing-even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere. tune. To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as these who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter? What else were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay-I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion -half hid by trees what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminfor me; and not till late in life, curiosityished 'Scutcheon that hung upon the prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. stood poring upon the mystic characters— Variegated views, extensive prospects-and thy emblematic supporters, with their prothose at no great distance from the house-phetic "Resurgam" - till, every dreg of I was told of such-what were they to me, peasantry purging off, I received into myself being out of the boundaries of my Eden ?- Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my So far from a wish to roam, I would have morning eyes; and of nights hast detained drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my steps from bedward, till it was but a step my chosen prison; and have been hemmed from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. Mine, too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars-stately busts in marble Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not ;-ranged round; of whose countenances, but its fading rags, and colours cobwebstained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder: but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damætas-feeding flocks-not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln-did I in less Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its earnest vindicate to myself the family trap-one chair of authority, high-backed and pings of this once proud Ægon? repaying by wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, a backward triumph the insults he might or self-forgetful maiden- -so common since, possibly have heaped in his life-time upon that bats have roosted in it. my poor pastoral progenitor. If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. I was the true descendant of those old W-s ; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one and then another-would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. The Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb-that hung next the great bay window-with the bright yellow H-shire hair, and eye of watchet hue-so like my Alice!-I am persuaded she was a true Elia-Mildred Elia, I take it. Mine, too,-whose else?-thy costly fruitgarden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery. Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol-worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope-a germ to be revivified. POOR RELATIONS. A POOR Relation—is the most irrelevant | drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun thing in nature,-a piece of impertinent upon your pride,-a drawback upon success, correspondency, -an odious approximation, —a rebuke to your rising,—a stain in your -a haunting conscience, a preposterous blood,-a blot on your 'scutcheon,—a rent in shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our your garment,- -a death's-head at your banprosperity, an unwelcome remembrancer,- quet,-Agathocles' pot,-a Mordecai in your a perpetually recurring mortification,-a | gate, a Lazarus at your door,—a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber,—a fly in mean and quite unimportant anecdote-of your ointment,-a mote in your eye,-a the family. He knew it when it was not triumph to your enemy, an apology to your quite so flourishing as "he is blest in seeing friends, the one thing not needful,—the it now." He reviveth past situations, to hail in harvest,-the ounce of sour in a institute what he calleth-favourable compound of sweet. parisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture; and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea- | kettle-which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, yon dismiss his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances. He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That is Mr. ———.” A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and at the same time seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and-embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and-draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time-when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company —but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side-table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says, with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps Mr. - will drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days-and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small-yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a There is a worse evil under the sun, and slice, against his first resolution. He sticketh that is-a female Poor Relation. You may by the port-yet will be prevailed upon to do something with the other; you may pass empty the remainder glass of claret, if a him off tolerably well; but your indigent stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle she-relative is hopeless. "He is an old to the servants, who are fearful of being too humourist," you may say, "and affects to go obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The threadbare. His circumstances are better guests think "they have seen him before." than folks would take them to be. You are Every one speculateth upon his condition; fond of having a Character at your table, and the most part take him to be-a tide- and truly he is one." But in the indications waiter. He calleth you by your Christian of female poverty there can be no disguise. name, to imply that his other is the same No woman dresses below herself from caprice. with your own. He is too familiar by half, The truth must out without shuffling. "She yet, you wish he had less diffidence. With is plainly related to the Ls; or what half the familiarity, he might pass for a does she at their house?" She is, in all casual dependant; with more boldness, he probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times would be in no danger of being taken for out of ten, at least, this is the case.-Her what he is. He is too humble for a friend; garb is something between a gentlewoman yet taketh on him more state than befits a and a beggar, yet the former evidently client. He is a worse guest than a country predominates. She is most provokingly tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her -yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, inferiority. He may require to be repressed that your guests take him for one. He is sometimes-aliquando sufflaminandus erat— asked to make one at the whist table; but there is no raising her. You send her refuseth on the score of poverty, and soup at dinner, and she begs to be helpedresents being left out. When the company after the gentlemen. Mr. requests the break up, he proffereth to go for a coach-honour of taking wine with her; she and lets the servant go. He recollects hesitates between Port and Madeira, and your grandfather; and will thrust in some chooses the former-because he does. She |