dulness in a Master of a College makes him a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for fitter to manage secular affairs." revenge."

old gate still surviving, out of which the city is run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her mother."

Henry de Essex." He is too well known in our English Chronicles, being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was a fierce battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex animum et signum simul abjecit, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the doing, of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the king, and he himself, partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of his life."*Worthies, article Bedfordshire.

the condition of Sir Edward. This accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put a period to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of his life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a duel; and no wonder that one's conscience loathed that whereof he had surfeited. He refused all challenges with more honour than others accepted them; it being well known, that he would set his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any man alive."— Worthies, article Lincolnshire.

Decayed Gentry." It happened in the reign of King James, when Henry Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, that a labourer's son in that country was pressed into the wars; as I take it, to go over with Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester requested his son might be discharged, as being the only staff of his age, who by his industry maintained him and his mother. The Earl demanded his name, which the man for a long time was loath to tell (as suspecting it a fault for so poor a man to confess the truth), at last he told his name was Hastings. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl,' we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all spring from the same Sir Edward Harwood, Knt.-" I have read root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be of a bird, which hath a face like, and yet pressed.' So good was the meeting of will prey upon, a man: who coming to the modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honwater to drink, and finding there by reflec- ourable person, and gentry I believe in both. tion, that he had killed one like himself, And I have reason to believe, that some who pineth away by degrees, and never after-justly own the surnames and blood of Bohuns, wards enjoyeth itself. Such is in some sort, Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their own extractions,) are hid in the heap of common people, where they find that under a thatched cottage which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded castle, contentment, with quiet and security."— Worthies, article Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes. Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman.— "Thomas Curson, born in Allhallows, Lombard-street, armourer, dwelt without Bishops

• The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been pronounced impossible: it has given an interest and a holy character to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of poor Henry de

Essex. The address with which the whole of this little story is told is most consummate: the charm of it seems

to consist in a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently opposed, and the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept :-"Betwixt traitor and coward"—" baseness to do, boldness to deny"-" partly thrust, partly going, into a convent "-" betwixt shame and sanctity." The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partnership with the writer,-his judgment is exercised in settling the preponderance, he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.

+I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more awful and affecting story, and moralising of a story, in Natural History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural History where poets and mythologists found the Phoenix and the Unicorn, and "other strange fowl," is nowhere extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar

Errors; but the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its probabilities, would have shown that the truth of the fact, though the avowed object of his search was not so much the motive which put him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical analogies,-those essential verities in the appli cation of strange fable, which made him linger with such reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular tradition; and not seldom to conjure up a superstition, that had been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities of burial.

people) be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight, scent, at a dead carcass) to ungrave him. Accordingly to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors,

gate. It happened that a stage-player bor rowed a rusty musket, which had lain long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the standers by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which he suspected not to be charged. Oh the difference of divers men in the tenderness of their consciences! some are scarce touched Doctors, and their servants, (so that the with a wound, whilst others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor armourer was highly afflicted therewith, though done against his will, yea, without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate to pious uses: no sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he posted with it in his apron to the Court of Alder men, and was in pain till by their direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and other parishes, and disposed of some The concluding period of this most lively narrative hundreds of pounds accordingly, as I am I will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest concredibly informed by the then church wardens ceptions I ever met with. One feels the ashes of Wickof the said parish. Thus as he conceived him-liffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, Com

self casually (though at a great distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of Constance.-" Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body after so many years. But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dying an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this charitable caution,-if it may be discerned from the bodies of other faithful

remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands,) take what was left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by. Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, A von into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over."* - Church History.

missaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all the world over."

Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that

stops a beer barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at

least; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,-a diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or influence.

I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,
To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor

into something to be actually realised in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly

natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit: and so is a "head" turned into "waters."

ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY.

ONE of the earliest and noblest enjoy-riot and extravagance, ending in the one with ments I had when a boy, was in the contem- driving the Prodigal from the society of men plation of those capital prints by Hogarth, into the solitude of the deserts, and in the | the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, which, other with conducting the Rake through his along with some others, hung upon the walls several stages of dissipation into the still of a great hall in an old-fashioned house in more complete desolations of the mad-house, -shire, and seemed the solitary tenants in the play and in the picture, are described (with myself) of that antiquated and life- with almost equal force and nature. The deserted apartment. levee of the Rake, which forms the subject Recollection of the manner in which those of the second plate in the series, is almost a prints used to affect me has often made me transcript of Timon's levee in the opening wonder, when I have heard Hogarth de- scene of that play. We find a dedicating scribed as a mere comic painter, as one of poet, and other similar characters, in both. those whose chief ambition was to raise a The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress laugh. To deny that there are throughout is perhaps superior to the last scenes of the prints which I have mentioned circum- Timon. If we seek for something of kindred stances introduced of a laughable tendency, excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes would be to run counter to the common of Lear's beginning madness, where the King notions of mankind; but to suppose that in and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire their ruling character they appeal chiefly to to produce such a medley of mirth checked the risible faculty, and not first and foremost by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; to the very heart of man, its best and most where the society of those "strange bedserious feelings, would be to mistake no less fellows" which misfortunes have brought grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth the Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, destitute state of the monarch; while the which they have been likened to, as they are lunatic bans of the one, and the disjointed strong and masculine Satires) less mingled sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of with anything of mere fun, were never the other, so wonderfully sympathise with written upon paper, or graven upon copper. that confusion, which they seem to assist in They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches the production of, in the senses of that in Timon of Athens. "child-changed father."

I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered, — “Shakspeare:" being asked which he esteemed next best, replied, "Hogarth." His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at,-his prints we read.

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake's Progress, we find the same assort ment of the ludicrous with the terrible, Here is desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a building; -and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into In pursuance of this parallel, I have some-idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times entertained myself with comparing the times never having been strong, we look Timor of Athens of Shakspeare (which I upon the consummation of their decay with have just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's no more of pity than is consistent with a Progress together. The story, the moral, in smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller both is nearly the same. The wild course of that has gone out of his wits (and truly he

appears to have had no great journey to go finest representation of a virtuous death-bed to get past their confines) for the love of surrounded by real mourners, pious children, Charming Betty Careless,-these half-laugh- weeping friends,—perhaps more by the very able, scarce-pitiable objects, take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing to the general notion of its subject :—