We rarely notice re-publications; but a new edition of The Works of Henry Mackenzie, Esq.," with a Critical Dissertation on the deservedly popular tales of the author, by Mr. Galt, has just appeared, of so superior character that we cannot refrain from recommending it very warmly to the notice of our readers. One handsome pocket volume, with vignette and frontispiece, elegantly engraved from designs by Uwins, comprizes "The Man of Feeling," ," "Ra Roche," "Nancy Collins," "Louisa Venoni," "Albert Bane," "Sophia M- ""Father Nicholas,' "The Man of the World," " Julia de Rubigné,"&c. Another little work to which we earnestly solicit the attention of such of our fair friends as have the care of the rising generation, is Mary Ann Rundall's "Sequel to the Grammar of Sacred History." This volume embraces "A Paraphrase on the Epistles and Gospels for every Sunday throughout the Year, with Explanatory Notes;" "A Simple Illustration of the Liturgy," and "A Paraphrase on the Church Catechism." Mrs. Rundall very sensibly observes, that "this simple illustration of the church service, by displaying the beautiful arrangement of its several parts, and showing how admirably it is contrived for public use, may perhaps excite an interest that has hitherto been unfelt." Sayings and Doings.-Such is the popu larity of this work, that the entire Second Edition was subscribed off among the London Booksellers. The celebrated French naturalist, Cuvier, has dissected an insect not an inch long, in which he reckons four hundred and ninetyhundred and ninety-four pair of nerves, four pair of muscles, connected with four and forty thousand artennæ. A new Romance from the great Wizard of the North.-The story is Scottish, and the incidents it includes, are supposed to have happened about the year 1760. Four thousand copies of the work were bespoke on one occasion. We sincerely lament to announce the death of that intrepid traveller Belsoni, at Benin in Africa, from severe fever. He was on his route to Timbuctoo, and had every thing arranged, which promised him the completest success. (New Mon.) SUPPOSED TO BE SUNG BY THE WIFE OF A JAPANESE Who had accompanied the Russians to their country. I look through the mist, and I see thee notAre thy home and thy love so soon forgot? Sadly closes the weary day, And still thy bark is far away! The tent is ready, the mats are spread, The saranna is pluck'd for thee, Alas! what fate has thy baidare† led So far from thy home and me? Has my bower no longer charms for thee?Where the purple jessamines twine Round the stately, spreading, cedar tree, And rest in its arms so tenderly, As I have reposed in thine. In vain have I found the § sea-parrot's nest, And robb'd of its plume her glittering breast, Thy mantle with varied hues to adorn,Thou hast left me watchful and forlorn! * Saranna is the bread-fruit of the Japanese. Baidare, the Japanese boat. Purple jessamine, Bignoria grandiflora, is a climbing plant, native of Japan; flowers purple. They ornament their parkis (mantles) and all their dresses with the feathers of the sea-parrot, storm finch, and mauridor. Dost thou roam, amid the eagle flocks Return!-the evening mist is chill, I shall never behold thy return again! RETURN me that salute again, If thou of such a coldness art, I value not the trifle-vain To me, unless with all the heart ΤΟ Thou gavest it, as first indeed I thought,— I would as lieve a marble lip As ber's who suffer'd me to sip And could not feel a mutual bliss, Whose soft salute is yielded void of sense, A reckless act of cold indifference. One lovely fair as thou may'st be, That feels no pleasure, but receives The proffer'd gift in apathy, Heedless of him who takes or gives, Never can raise a hope or wish in me, Or gain an hour my love's idolatry. What can I think that gift is worth That to another means the same, In scenes of passion or of mirth,— (New Mon.) How can I trust where nothing to me tells That says, whene'er I snatch a kiss,— "This is thine only, I control To all but thee the sign of bliss ; "To others I may yield a form Given but at custom's silly call; To thee I give affection warm, The virgin's faith, her love, her all; And when thine image brightens in mine eyes, The lifestream quickens, and I breathe in sighs." Then, lady, take my kiss again : The alabaster stone May beauty show in semblance fair, But 'tis in form alone : There is no life, no passion dwelling there, (New Mon.) THE PIRATES' SONG. UNMOOR our bark upon the wave- Her lofty prow that shall defy The tempest and the shore, We are a band of iron souls No fear can ever tame ; 32 ATHENEUM VOL. 1. 2d series. We'll bear our deeds to both the Poles, We'll crest the white waves gallantly, Unmoor and sail, the breeze is full, Her anchor's up, her head is round, Huzza! she sweeps her gallant way, SIR, IT ON DRESS. To the Editor of the European Magazine. T being evident to me, from your writings, that you are a man of erudition and taste, and acquainted with the history of ancient and modern times, I take the liberty of addressing you, through the medium of the Magazine, which you so ably conduct, on a subject which, light as it may appear, at first sight, is very important to society, namely, that of dress: I say important, because any occupation, employment, or pursuit, which engrosses a huge proportion of a man's time, ought certainly to be a matter of moment. Indeed, the present one is not only a matter of many moments, but of many hours to the higher classes, and fills up a great part of life in our younger days; so much So, that if we were to calculate the hours devoted to eating and drinking, to sleep, and to the toilet, how little of life would remain for any other purpose; and if we superadd to this, the time dedicated to pleasure, many men might be said not to live at all, at least so far as rational life is implied, or an existence honourable to themselves and beneficial to society. But that is not the object of the present enquiry, which is merely to seek for information as to the possibility of inventing some costume, or style of manly dress, which might unite grace, convenience, uniformity, and nationality, and not leave our youth and their purses a prey to whim, novelty, folly, and a conspiracy of their tradesmen to make them more and more ridiculous. There are general rules of comfort and of ornament that must always be the same, yet they are daily varying, from the cupidity of the tailor, the hatter, the boot-maker, &c., and from the insatiability of vanity, which is always essaying some new whim to gain notoriety, to provoke emulation, to acquire imitation, and to launch into expense. For instance, it is as necessary that the body should be kept warm, as it is that it should be screened from indelicate exposure; and becomes equally proper that the quantum of heat and of covering should be proportioned to the climate and moral habits of the country. For example, the same quantity of wearing apparel would not suit the climate of India and that of Russia, and what might be necessary in the one would be an incumbrance in the other; neither can we feel easy with precisely the same clothing at Christmas and in the dog-days. Nevertheless we see hourly anomalies in dress as little suitable or seasonable as these, nay, far more ridiculous; but self-love and use, which is termed second nature (however unnatural), blind us in this respect; for when we look at the full-bottomed wigs, the roomy skirts, the long flapped waistcoats, and laced suits of our great grandfathers, the scarlet embroidered frocks, gold-laced beaver, and couteau de chasse, worn by them as a morning dress, we cannot refrain from laughter, and we think that they looked like mountebanks, or actors prepared for a scenic representation. Yet an old gentleman of those days, with a bluish coloured silk coat, and a green and gold waistcoat, like a gravel walk and a grass plat, smallclothes to match the coat, and the silk stockings brought up above the knees, his steel hilted rapier by his side, and a feather in his hat, would have been convulsed with laughter at the appearance of a modern macaroni, with a hat upon his head like a parachute, his neck in the stocks, from the semi-strangulation of a cravat, a shirt collar like the winkers of a horse, the neck's covering secured by a Tyburn tie, or a bowline knot, the pattern of the neckerchief being taken from a boxer, and his great coat looking as if it were stolen from a blanket warehouse, or made to imitate the dog whose name it bears, a poodle Benjamin. These contrasts are as distant from each other as the Equator and the Pole; the one sins by over-dressing the gentleman, the other by under dressing the fellow; the former fits the drawing-room, the latter savours of the stable; no wonder that our dandies are going to rack! These extremes, however, seem to be the effect of time, but those of affectation are compassed in the moment; one day we meet all ages, sizes, and conditions, with their throats in the pillory, with a thing like a pillow or a bol ster under their chins; and in a trice the fashion goes out, and our bucks are half squeezed to death, of their own accord, by a thing as tight as a cord and as thin as a sheet of paper, which supplants a wrapping affair more like the sheet of a bed, from its width and dimensions. These are contrasts so great, that the one must certainly be wrong if the other be right: but it requires very little pains to prove that both were preposterous in the extreme. One year our people of bon ton are collared by the tailor so highly, that one might ask them temperately what made their collar (not choler) rise thus? Another year the standing collar is banished, and its substitute is so shaped and cut down, that you see our fops smiling over these oval concerns, like a bumpkin grinning through a horse collar at a fair. One season loose habits of all kinds are the go (and I wish they were gone), another season produces them so inconveniently tight, that what formerly had all the form and compearance of a man, as my aunt Deborah would say, is now quite similar to the other sex about the waist. "He looks so very like a waiting gentlewoman, the corset fopling is so girt in, that it is a hundred to one but he will miss stays in going about." Powder, pomatum, black pins, and ribbon, were the follies of our forefathers; starch, oil, and whalebone, are those of their progeny. The fribble today would not wear an enormous queue for all the world: the beau of the olden times would have felt degraded to the level of a worker at the hulks, to have been thus cropped and shorn of his hairy honours. In former times, the tailors laced their customers with gold: now a lordling is laced by his own man, who tags after him with a yard of silk or tape, to keep up his ap pearance in the world. The fashion of one time is to have tight pantaloons, so as to make the wearer look like a piece of statuary: the order of the day another time, is to have Cossacks, Tartars, and I know not what all, as voluminous as a lady's petticoat, plaited I never see this word on paper but I think of the simplicity of a Highlander, who said to a proud upstart, who was talking of his forefathers, Eh! man, had you really four fathers?" round the middle in the same gentlewomanlike manner, and pointed down at the bottom, so that the Exquisite is so lost in his inexpressibles, so contracted above the hip, and so bustled out below it, that a greenhorn, à la mode, whose tiny growth upwards is but a mere sprout compared with the biforked amplitude downwards, looks not unlike a twin radish: (Ogemini! I think I hear you say), but I mean a radish of a double conformation, under ground, whilst its little green head is, like the Exquisite's nothing in comparison to it Then again we see men padded and puffed about the chest, however empty their chest may be at home, puckered and tumefied about the shoulders, stuffed and cottoned about the collar, and made the most of in this part of the body, whilst the coat is cut off behind, and narrowed into something resembling a bird's tail, or that of a sprat, so that old Horace would have applied his remark to our sex, had he seen this finish off, instead of describing a certain end of the lady: Desinet in piscem, mulier formosa superne: our modern gentleman is certainly as queer a fish as that. It must be allowed that these changeful monstrosities are not stranger than having the pigeon's wing curls at a man's ear, a bag, to catch nothing, at his back, or a thing twisted up like a knocker to a man's head, as if it were placed there to enquire whether the upper story was furnished, or unfurnished. And it cannot be denied that the natural, unpowdered hair, in the Roman style, is less artificial and more in barmony with a manly person, than a fine cauliflower peruke, or a mountain of dark false hair, with appendages over the shoulders, and sausage curls behind, which make the grave wearer look like an owl in an ivy-bush. The tunic, too, is an easy dress: but all starching and stiffening, all bolstering up, except in the way of credit, all imitations of female attire, together with numerous amplifications, or unseemly cur-tailings in dress, are odious and insufferable; is it not possible to assume a style of dress suited to the rank and nation of the wearer? There are professional dresses, graceful enough in their kind, the military, the peer's robes, college gowns, the clothing of the bar, pulpit, and the civic chair; and there are dresses confined to countries, which have a powerful effect; not to mention those which are exploded, there yet exist the Turkish, the Albanian, the Hussar, the Highland, and others, and, therefore, might uot some costume be hit upon of Anglican invention? But this I leave to your superior judgment: at present we see a confusion of the turpis honesta, so that it is difficult to distinguish the man of the fancy from the man of fashion, the groom from his master, except from his behaviour, and not always from that. We have heard so much of the simplex munditiis, for the fair sex, and the assertion of Thomson, that "Nature needs not the foreign aid of ornament,” that I should like to meet, in our own sex, with something simple and elegant, natural and graceful, without foreign fopperies, and the constant resorting to la Mode de Paris for a new cut, which I would cut altogether. I have not troubled you with the making up of a coxcomb for appearance in public, the chin tuft, or mustachio of one who is not obliged to wear it, the prolific crop, raised from bear's-grease, on the cheek, the false front, nor of a double-faced Janus, but of a bare-faced genius, the glass of a man who could distinguish a bailiff or a creditor half a mile off without it, the two false calves of a false calf who wears them, the twelve-inch spurs of a foot passenger on life's path, the waistcoating a fellow up so, to make him look stout, that, when he undresses, it is like peeling an onion, the oils and unguents, the paintings and perfumes, the finishing touch of the comb, brush and pencil, which leaves us to say of the other component parts, "The rest is all but leather and prunella." Nor have I ventured to intrude into the lady's dressing-room, like a certain uncourteous Dean, there to expose her weakness or her want of consistency, or taste: I merely address you on this subject for information's sake, and because it strikes me that one who can give so complete a dressing to the Reviewers and other scribblers of the periodical press, might be able to dress our male fashionables better than they are at present. I remain sir, Your very humble servant. (Lond. Lit. Gaz.) LINES WRITTEN BY THE SEASIDE. ONE evening as the Sun went down, And such a blaze o'er ocean spread, I was not lonely-dwellings fair Were scatter'd round and shining there ; Gay groups were on the green, Of children, wild with tameless glee, And on the sea, that look'd of gold, The breezy murmur from the shore- I look'd-I listened-and the spell Of music and of beauty fell So radiant on my heart, That scarcely durst I real deem 'Twas sunset in the world around— 'Twas sunset in the soul; Nor grief, nor mirth, was burning there, But musings sweet and visions fair In placid beauty stole. But moods like these, the human mind, As dews upon the drooping flower, But though all pleasures take their flight, For many an after year; This sunset, that dull night will shadeThese visions, which must quickly fade-Will half immortal memory braid For me, when far from here! |