to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now You had your education at Westminster; can a person find entrance (out of service and doubtless among those dim aisles and time) under the sum of two shillings. The cloisters, you must have gathered much of rich and the great will smile at the antithat devotional feeling in those young years, climax, presumed to lie in these two short on which your purest mind feeds still-and words. But you can tell them, sir, how may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong much quiet worth, how much capacity for in you, and gracefully blending ever with enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, the religious, may have been sown in you may coexist, especially in youth, with a among those wrecks of splendid mortality. purse incompetent to this demand. A You owe it to the place of your education; respected friend of ours, during his late visit you owe it to your learned fondness for the to the metropolis, presented himself for architecture of your ancestors; you owe it admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical decently clothed man, with as decent a wife establishment, which is daily lessened and and child, were bargaining for the same called in question through these practices-indulgence. The price was only two-pence to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to see maintained, in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject,-in vain such poor, nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, sir,-a hint in your Journal-would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver !-If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission For forty years that I have known the (as we certainly should have done) would Fabric, the only well-attested charge of the sight of those old tombs have been as violation adduced, has been a ridiculous impressive to us (while we have been dismemberment committed upon the effigy weighing anxiously prudence against senti- of that amiable spy, Major André. And is ment) as when the gates stood open as those it for this-the wanton mischief of some of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as each person. The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boydays. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble. school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom-or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are themselves with contemplating the ragged incompetent to the duty-is it upon such Exterior of their Cathedral? The mischief wretched pretences that the people of was done about the time that you were a England are made to pay a new Peter's scholar there. Do you know anything about Pence, so long abrogated; or must content the unfortunate relic ? AMICUS REDIVIVUS. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions-and mine had not been inconsiderable—are commonly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. I Do not know when I have experienced a | on,-shall I confess ?-in this emergency it stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend, G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path by which he had entered-with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but in the broad, open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation. How I found my feet I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders; and I-freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises. And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or non-application, of salt, &c., to the person of the patient. Life, meantime, was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed MONOCULUS for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared—is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too-wilful application of the plant cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to waterpractice; for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where day and night, from his little watchtower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality— partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot-and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge, at half a furlong distance; and can tell if it be casual or a case of impending danger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended coming up now, when his heart was made over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but tender as a child's—for the tremor cordis, in which, by time and frequency of nightly the retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy-after a sufficient application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton-what a case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he spark you were like to have extinguished for condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, by his own example, the innocuous nature of for now near two centuries, would hardly the prescription. Nothing can be more kind have atoned for what you were in a moment or encouraging than this procedure. It washing away. Mockery of a river-liquid addeth confidence to the patient, to see his artifice-wretched conduit! henceforth rank medical adviser go hand in hand with him- with canals and sluggish aqueducts. Was it self in the remedy. When the doctor for this that, smit in boyhood with the exploswalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, MONOCULUS is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives no Naiads-no river God-or did the of others his pretensions so moderate that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to society as G. D. rations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?—Ye have no swans benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters ? Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture?—or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN ? And could such spacious virtue find a grave It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch-my couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, he discoursed of marvellous escapes by carelessness of nurses-by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy-by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics-by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance-by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of I have nothing but water in my head the learned head.-Anon, he would burst out o'nights since this frightful accident. Someinto little fragments of chanting-of songs times I am with Clarence in his dream. At long ago-ends of deliverance hymns, not others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, remembered before since childhood, but and crying out to his good brother Hopeful I protest, George, you shall not venture out again-no, not by daylight—without a sufficient pair of spectacles-in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only! GG A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal (that is, to me), "I sink in deep waters; the the palace must be considerable; and the billows go over my head, all the waves go grim Feature, by modern science so often over me. Selah." Then I have before me dispossessed of his prey, must have learned Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I by this time to pity Tantalus. cry out too late to save. Next follow-a mournful procession-suicidal faces, saved against their will from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, indications. From their seats of Asphodel with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet hue-constrained Lazari - Pluto's half-subjects-stolen fees from the gravebilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion or is it G. D. ?-in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death. And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at Death's door, the sensation aroused within arose the gentler and the graver ghostspoet, or historian-of Grecian or of Roman lore - to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected-him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle Christ's boy,-who should have been his patron through life-the mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his venerable Esculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered. • GRAIUM tantum vidit. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. SYDNEY'S Sonnets-I speak of the best of them-are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of selfapproval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), "vain and amatorious" enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." They savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify he could speak his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold. The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies-far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in selfdepreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers—or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum præcordia frigus must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our recollection that we were once so-before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Schoolmistress; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl : Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. IN TE UNA LOQUITUR, cætera MUTUS HABET. This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some candour of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions. I. With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies; The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue ? II. Come, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, I will good tribute pay if thou do so. III. The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness IV. Because I oft in dark abstracted guise Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, VI. In martial sports I had my cunning tried, When Cupid having me (his slave) descried * Press. |