Bad pathos, in a little journey of about a hundred and went into the inn; if you sallied out to remiles? Outside her door, however, there awaited port progress, after waiting twenty minutes, no me some silly creatures, women of course, old signs appeared of any stir about the stables. The and young, from the nursery and the kitchen, most choleric person could not much expedite who gave and who received those fervent kisses, preparations, which loitered not so much from which wait only upon love without awe and with- any indolence in the attendants as from faulty out disguise. Heavens! what rosaries might be arrangements and total defect of foresight. The strung for the memory of sweet female kisses, pace was such as the roads of that day allowed; given without check or art, before one is of an never so much as six miles an hour, except upon age to value them! And again, how sweet is the a very great road; and then only by extra paytouch of female hands as they array one for a ment to the driver. Yet even under this comjourney! If anything needs fastening, whether paratively miserable system, how superior was by pinning, tying, or any other contrivance, how England, as a land for the traveller, to all the perfect is one's confidence in female skill; as if rest of the world, Sweden only excepted. by mere virtue of her sex and feminine instinct, as were the roads, and defective as were all the a woman could not possibly fail to know the best arrangements, still you had these advantages; and readiest way of adjusting every case that no town so insignificant, no posting-house so so. could arise in dress. Mine was hastily completed litary, but that at all seasons, except a contested amongst them; each had a pin to draw from her election, it could furnish horses without delay, bosom, in order to put something to rights about and without license to distress the neighbouring my throat or hands; and a chorus of "God farmers. On the worst road, and on a winter's bless hims" was arising, when, from below, young day, with no more than a single pair of horses, Mephistopheles murmured an impatient groan, you generally made out sixty miles; even if it and perhaps the horses snorted. I found mywere necessary to travel through the night, you self lifted into the chaise: counsels about the could continue to make way, although more night and the cold, flowing in upon me, to which slowly; and finally, if you were of a temper to Mephistopheles listened with derision or aston- brook delay, and did not exact from all persons ishment. I and he had each our separate cor- the haste or energy of Hotspurs, the whole sysner; and, except to request that I would draw tem in those days was full of respectability and up one of the glasses, I do not think he conde- luxurious ease, and well fitted to, renew the scended to address one word to me until dusk, image of the home you had left, if not in its elewhen we found ourselves rattling into Chester- gancies yet in all its substantial comforts. What field, having barely accomplished four stages, or cozy old parlours in those days! low-roofed, forty or forty-two miles, in about nine hours. glowing with ample fires, and fenced from the This, except on the Bath or great north roads, blasts of doors by screens, whose foldings were, may be taken as a standard amount of per- or seemed to be, infinite! What motherly landformance, in 1794, (the year I am recording,) ladies! won, how readily, to kindness the most and even ten years later. In these present hur- lavish, by the mere attractions of simplicity and rying and tumultuous days, whether time is really youthful innocence, and finding so much interest of more value, I cannot say; but all people on in the bare circumstance of being a traveller at the establishment of inns, are required to sup- a childish age! Then what blooming young pose it of the most awful value. Nowadays, handmaidens, how different from the knowing no sooner have the horses stopped at the gate- and worldly demireps of modern high roads! way of a posting house, than a summons is pass- And sometimes grey-headed faithful waiters, ed down to the stables; and in less than one how sincere and how attentive, by comparison minute, upon a great road, the horses next in with their flippant successors, the eternal "Comrotation, always ready harnessed, when expecting, sir," "Coming, sir," of our improved generaing to come on duty, are heard trotting down the yard. "Putting to," and transferring the luggage, (supposing your conveyance a common post chaise,) once a work of at least twenty minutes, is now easily accomplished in three. And scarcely have you paid the ex-postillion before his successor has mounted; the ostler is standing ready with the steps in his hands, to receive his invariable sixpence; the door is closed; the representative waiter bows his acknowledgment for the house, and you are off at a pace never less than ten miles an hour; the total detention at each stage not averaging above four minutes. Then (i. e. at the latter end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century,) half an hour was the minimum of time spent at each change of horses. Your arrival produced a great bustle of unloading and unharnessing; as a matter of course you alighted | tion. Such an honest, old butler-looking servant waited on us during dinner at Chesterfield, carving for me, and urging me to eat. Even Mephistopheles found his pride relax under the influ ence of wine; and when loosened from this restraint, his kindness was not deficient. To me he shewed it in pressing wine upon me, without stint or measure. The elegancies which he had observed in such part of my mother's establishment, as could be supposed to meet his eye on so hasty a visit, had impressed him perhaps favourably towards myself: and could I have a little altered my age, or dismissed my excessive reserve, I doubt not that he would have admitted me, in default of a more suitable comrade, to his entire confidence for the rest of the road. Dinner finished, and myself at least, for the first time in my childish life, somewhat perhaps over charged with wine, the bill was called for-the waiter paid in the lavish style of antique England-and we heard our chaise drawing up under the gateway-the invariable custom of those days, by which you were spared the trouble of going into the street, stepping from the hall of the inn, right into your carriage. I had been kept back for a minute or so by the landlady, and her attendant nymphs, to be dressed and kissed; and, on seating myself in the chaise which was well lighted with lamps, I found my lordly young principal in conversation with the landlord, first upon the price of oats, which youthful horsemen always affect to inquire after with interest, but secondly, upon a topic more immediately at his heart-viz., the reputation of the road. At that time of day, when gold had not yet disappeared from the circulation, no traveller carried any other sort of money about him; and there was consequently a rich encouragement to highwaymen, which vanished almost entirely with Mr Pitt's act of 1797, for restricting cash payments. Property which could be identified and traced, was a perilous sort of plunder; and from that time the free-trade of the road almost perished as a regular occupation. At this period it did certainly maintain a languishing existence; here and there it might have a casual run of success: and, as these local ebbs and flows were continually shifting, perhaps, after all, the trade might lie amongst a small number of hands. Universally, however, the landlords shewed some shrewdness, or even sagacity, in qualifying according to the circumstances of the inquirer, the sort of credit which they allowed to the exaggerated ill-fame of the roads. Returning on this very road, some months after, with a timid female relation, who put her questions with undisguised and distressing alarm, the very same people, one and all, assured her that the danger was next to nothing. Not so at present: rightly presuming that a haughty cavalier of eighteen, flushed with wine and youthful blood, would listen with disgust to a picture too amiable and pacific of the roads before him, Mr Spread-Eagle replied with the air of one who feared more than he altogether liked to tell, and looking suspiciously amongst the strange faces lit up by the light of the carriage lamps-"Why, Sir, there have been ugly stories afloat; I cannot deny it : and sometimes, you know, Sir," winking sagaciously, to which a knowing nod of assent was returned," it may not be quite safe to tell all one knows. But you can understand me. The forest, you are well aware, Sir, is the forest: it never was much to be trusted, by all accounts, in my father's time, and I suppose will not be better in mine. But you must keep a sharp look out: and, Tom," speaking to the postilion, "mind, when you pass the third gate, to go pretty smartly by the thicket." Tom replied in a tone of importance to this professional appeal. General valedictions were exchanged, the landlord bowed, and we moved off for the forest. Mephistopheles had his travelling case of pistols: eso he began now to examine; for sometimes, said he, I have known such a trick as drawing the charge whilst one happened to be taking a glass of wine. Wine had unlocked his heartthe prospect of the forest and the advancing night excited him-and even of such a child as myself, he was now disposed to make a confidant. "Did you observe," said he, "that ill-looking fellow, as big as a camel, who stood on the landlord's left hand?" Was it the man, I asked timidly, who seemed by his dress to be a farmer? "Farmer, you call him? Ah! my young friend, that shews your little knowledge of the world. He is a scoundrel, the bloodiest of scoundrels. And so I trust to convince him before many hours are gone over our heads." Whilst saying this, he employed himself in priming his pistols: then, after a pause, he went on thus :-" No, my young friend, this alone shews his base purposes -his calling himself a farmer. Farmer, he is not, but a desperate highwayman, of which I have full proof. I watched his malicious glances, whilst the landlord was talking; and I could swear to his traitorous intentions." So speaking, he threw anxious glances on each side as we continued to advance: we were both somewhat excited; he by the spirit of adventure, I by sympathy with him--and both by wine. The wine, however, soon applied a remedy to its own delusions: three miles from the town we had left, both of us were in a bad condition for resisting highwaymen with effect-we were fast asleep. Suddenly a most abrupt halt awoke us-Mephistopheles felt for his pistols-the door flew open, and the lights of the assembled group announced to us that we had reached Mansfield. That night we went on to Newark, at which place about forty miles of our journey remained. This distance we performed, of course, on the following day, between breakfast and dinner. But it serves strikingly to illustrate the state of roads in England, whenever your affairs led you into districts a little retired from the capital routes of the public travelling that, for one twenty-mile stage, viz. from Newark to Sleaford, they refused to take us forward with less than four horses. This was neither a fraud, as our eyes soon convinced us, (for even four horses could scarcely extricate the chaise from the deep sloughs which occasionally seamed the road for tracts of two or three miles in succession,) nor was it an accident of the weather. sons the same demand was enforced, as my female protectress found in conducting me back at a fine season of the year, and had always found in traversing the same route. The England of that date (1791) exhibited many similar cases. At present there is but one stage in all England, where a traveller, without regard to weight, is called upon to take four horses; and that is at Ambleside, in going by the direct road to Carlisle. The first stage to Patterdale lies over the mountain of Kirkstone, and the ascent is not only toilsome, (continuing for above three miles, with occasional intermissions,) but at times is carried over summits too steep for a road by all the rules of engineering, and yet too little In all sea frequented to offer any means of repaying the cost of smoothing the difficulties. It was not until after the year 1815 that the main improvement took place in the English travelling system, so far as regarded speed. It is, in reality, to Mr M'Adam that we owe it. All the roads in England, within a few years, were remodelled, and upon principles of Roman science. Frommere beds of torrents, and systems of ruts, they were raised universally to the condition and appearance of gravel walks in private parks or shrubberies. The average rate of velocity was, in consequence, exactly doubled-ten miles an hour being now generally accomplished, instead of five. And at the moment when all further improvement upon this system had become hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us by railroads; which again, considering how much they have already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more astonishing to our preconceptions. One point of refinement as regards the comfort of travellers remains to be mentioned, in which the improvement began a good deal earlier, perhaps by ten years, than in the construction of the roads. Luxurious as was the system of Eng. lish travelling at all periods, after the general establishment of post-chaises, it must be granted that, in the circumstance of cleanliness, there was far from being that attention, or that provision for the traveller's comfort, which might have been anticipated from the general habits of the country. I, at all periods of my life, a great traveller, was witness to the first steps and the whole struggle of this revolution. Maréchal Saxe professed always to look under his bed, applying his caution chiefly to the attempts of robbers. Now, if at the greatest inns of England you had, in the days I speak of, adopted this Maréchal's policy of reconnoitring, what would you have seen? Beyond a doubt you would have seen what, upon all principles of seniority, was entitled to your veneration, viz., a dense accumulation of dust far older than yourself. A foreign author made some experiments upon the deposition of dust, and the rate of its accumulation, in a room left wholly undisturbed. If I recollect, a century would produce a stratum about half an inch in depth. Upon this principle, I conjecture that much dust which I have seen in inns, during the first four or five years of the present century, must have belonged to the reign of George II. It was, however, upon travellers by coaches that the full oppression of the old vicious system operated. The elder Scaliger mentions, as a characteristic of the English in his day, a horror of ablution in cold water. Nowhere could he and his foreign companions obtain the luxury of cold water for washing their hands, either before or after dinner. One day he and his party dined with the Lord Chancellor; and now, thought he, for very shame they will allow us some means of purification. Not at all: the Chancellor viewed this outlandish novelty with the same jealousy as ments. TYPOGRAPHY. So many fine things have been printed of late about the wonders of printing, that it is very well the types do not understand what they are made to say about themselves, or they would perhaps stammer in the utterance of their selfcommendation, and, betwixt vanity and modesty, wriggle themselves into pie. Only conceive what would be the consequence if every letter in a whole fount were suddenly endued with life, and intelligence, and knowledge of its own power! Why little Ruby, and less Pearl, and least Diamond, would not condescend to acknowledge their namesakes in the regal diadem ! Minion would grow great in his own opinion, as little folks generally are. Primer would be primer, and more pragmatical than the mistress of an infant school; and as for Pica, how it would chatter, to find itself more oracu. lar than the doves of Dodona-wiser than the speaking bird of the Arabian Tales-stronger than the rock-more influential than the Simong, which conferreth sovereignty on whomsoever its shadow passeth over-and in power and spirit more enduring, and perpetually revivescent, than the Phoenix, the secular bird of ages! Ah! if these little pieces of metal knew their own importance, they would never submit to the vile drudgery they are too often put to. I am afraid, too, there would be divisions among themselves; the small letters would combine against the Capitals, and the operative consonants rise up and expel the aristocracy of vowels, as was actually the case with regard to the Hebrew alphabet. It would be worse than Lucian's lawsuit of the letters. he sat down to celebrate her charms. But suppose the same Sonnet printed, on hot-pressed paper, smoother than ought but her cheek-in Miller's or Wilson's types, and on sweet ladylike Pearl that is to the eye what Love's softest whisper is to the ear! By the way, amatory poetry should never be printed in a great masculine bully of a type, like the name of a third-rate London star in the play-bill of a fourth-rate provincial theatre, attended with a body-guard of notes of admiration, as stiff and no-meaning as the scene-shifters and porters who are to usher him on the stage, for this night only! No-look how these typefounders, in their beautiful Books of Specimens, have typified some of the sweetest of Moore's Melodies, distinct and clear as Kean's asides, which were heard in the one shilling gallery of old Drury, and yet seemed as if they were not meant to be heard at all-" the visible utterance of unconscious thought." Most assuredly, there is a physiognomy in everything. Even as the old physician fancied that every herb of the field and every tree of the forest was divinely impressed with its own peculiar signature, revealing to what member its medicinal virtues were applicable-so is every other work of nature and of intellect; (and what is intellect but the essential spirits of nature sublimed to consciousness?)-so, too, is every hourly and momentary issue of habit, and of what men call chance, inscribed with a character-a type-which all may not be capable of reading, but which to those who can read it, conveys most certain intelligence. A man's expression, for instance, is not to be found solely, as Mr Shandy would have it, in his nose; nor, as Gall and Spurzheim maintain, in the prominences and declivities of his cranium; nor, as Lavater, with greater approximation to truth, has assumed, in his facial angle ;-there is a meaning in all these things; so is there in his voice, his gait-the hanging of his coat-laps― his hat (especially, if he be a poor poet)—his hand-writing (if he can write, and has not been instructed by a fashionable caligraphist)—in his laugh, his cough, his manner of taking snuff or smoking a pipe-wiping his spectacles, if he uses them-and, in fact, in everything he does. Take me quietly to a man's bedside when he is asleep, and I will form a good diagrosis of his character by his snore. Now, since all other things, and man himself, have their appropriate sig Well, then, it is, that these great instructors of mankind know as little of what they are talking about, as a musical snuff-box of the tune that it plays as a cold beauty of the madness she occasions--as the Apollo Belvidere could do of the passion of the poor crazy Provençal girl, who died for love of the insensate statue,-as the reflection of Narcissus in the cool stream, of the impracticable longing wherewith the selfenamoured substance pined away to a shadow. Little can they know-little can any human being, but a young author, apprehend of the strange, the troublesome delight, wherewith a maiden poet gazes on his first printed sonnet! How can their heartless metallic bodies-(the exact elements of which I know not-only suppose that lead and brass enter largely into the composition, as into that of most great speakers)—natures, would it not be inconsistent, if a printed By how can they, or any one of their number, from A to Z, feel anything of such a matter? Did you ever see a Sonnet in manuscript? Jove, it is ugly even in its author's eyes! Such pot-hooks and hangers! The very word Love (sure to occur thrice at least) looking most unlovely. "Sonnet to Maria." Why, poor Maria looks as if she was broken on the wheel, or as if her admirer had a "wee drap in his ee" when book, which, after all, is the only express image of himself that a man can leave behind him, should be utterly without physiognomy? And yet such is the case with a book printed in a dull, muddy, everyday-looking type, which has either no expression, or an expression which grossly belies the author, unless the author happens to be a blockhead. But any person looking over the Books of Spe cimens above mentioned, may select a type exactly suitable to the matters he has to communicate. There is the full, sonorous Small Pica for sermons-a size neither obtrusively large nor bashfully diminutive, for history, essays, novels, and epic poetry; the most delicate Italics for sly hints and inuendos; and all shades of love type, from the firm language of hope, to the smallest sigh of despair. I should not forget that in the selections great taste has been exercised to accommodate every author with the type best suited to his style; and the arrangement, on the whole, is good; though some people whom they may have to care for-though I do not-might purse up their mouths to find Don Juan and Tom Moore flanked on each side by a chapter of the Bible. THE GOOD OLD TIMES. THE bright Old Times are gone, all gone! When Fancy could find, in her midsummer wander- A host of beings as airy as dreams, The dear old days of Goodfellow ;— When the glance of the milkmaid at ev'n would greet The green little elves with their twinkling feet; While Mab, from her grasshopper steed in the sky, The world's dreamy hour of childhood;- C. And, beautiful rainbow! thou wast a proud arch, Where the latest departed to glory might march. The dreams were ennobling: why, Truth, did thy rayChase the time-honoured visions away, away? The gallant Old Times are gone, all gone!. When the prophet-bard flung o'er the chords he had strung, The light of his spirit's revealing; The simple Old Times, when the green laurel leaf, And lured to honour, hearts gallanter far, Than e'er throbbed under the diamond star. But chivalry's melted, like stars from the day, And the minstrel and knight are away, away! The merry Old Times are gone, all gone! The days of poor grandpapa's notions ;Why the world's turn'd wise, and we've broke the old skies, And they say we're to bridge the old oceans, And to climb the wild path of the thunder, and sweep, Out-stemming the eagle, the night heaven's deep. Now, we stand on the land-mark of ages, and cast A farewell on the winds to the shades of the past. Fare ye well! fare ye well! and God speed ye away, To Limbo, your dwelling, for ever and aye. P. THE FISHER. From the German of Goethe. THE waters swell-the waters roll, With tranquil heart, and feelings cool, His angle-rod he eyed: And as he sits and watches there, And from the heaving wave, lo! where She sang to him, she spake to him :- Ah! knew'st thou how the fishes live, Thou wouldst this moment downward dive, The blessed sun, doth he not lave- And rise, fresh-breathing of the wave, Allures thee not the sky so clear, The deep and humid blue; Nor thine own face-to venture here The waters swell the waters roll, Upon his heart a languor stole, As at his true love's smile. THE KING IN THULE. (Sung by Margaret in the tragedy of Faust.) THERE was a King in Thule, To whom, when near her grave, He had no greater treasure; And when that he was dying, He told his cities upNone to his heir denying ;But not so with the cup. He sat by knights surrounded The old toper, ere he parted, Drank a last draught of life's glow; Then his hallow'd cup he darted Into the flood below. He saw the splashing beaker Sink deep into the main ; His eyes grew weak and weaker ;He ne'er drank drop again. T. J. A. |