more. Such were the tales buzzed in the ears of the Count by the villagers as he endeavoured to rouse them to the rescue of the princess and her train from their perilous situation. The daughter seconded the exertions of her father with all the eloquence of prayers, and tears and beauty. Every moment that elapsed increased her anxiety until it became agonizing. Fortunately, there was a body of gens-d'armes resting at the village. A number of the young villagers volunteered to accompany them, and the little army was put in motion. The Count having deposited his daughter in a place of safety, was too much of the old soldier not to hasten to the scene of danger. It would be difficult to paint the anxious agitation of the young lady while awaiting the result. The party arrived at the inn just in time. The robbers, finding their plans discovered, and the travellers prepared for their reception, had become open and furious in their attack. The Princess's party had barricadoed themselves in one suite of apartments, and repulsed the robbers from the doors and windows. Caspar had shown the generalship of a veteran, and the nephew of the Princess the dashing valour of a young soldier. Their ammunition, however, was nearly exhausted, and they would have found it difficult to hold out much longer, when a discharge from the musquetry of the gens-d'armes gave them the joyful tidings of suc cour. A fierce fight ensued, for part of the robbers were surprised in the inn, and had to stand siege in their turn; while their comrades made desperate attempts to relieve them from under cover of the neighbouring rocks and thickets. I cannot pretend to give a minute account of the fight, as I have heard it related in a variety of ways. Suffice it to say, the robbers were defeated; several of them killed, and several taken prisoners; which last, together with the people of the inn, were either executed or sent to the galleys. I picked up these particulars in the course of a journey which I made some time after the event had taken place. I passed by the very inn. It was then dismantled, excepting one wing, in which a body of gens-d'armes were stationed. They pointed out to me the shot-holes in the windowframes, the walls, and the pannels of the door. There were a number of withered limbs dangling from the branches of a neighbouring tree, and blackening in the air, which I was told were the limbs of the robbers who had been slain, and the culprits who had been executed. The whole place had a dismal, wild, forlorn look. "Were any of the Princess's party killed ?" inquired the Englishman. "As far as I can recollect, there were two or three." "Not the nephew, I trust," said the fair Venetian. "Oh no; he hastened with the Count to relieve the anxiety of the daughter by the assurances of victory. The young lady had been sustained throughout the interval of suspense by the very intensity of her feelings. The moment she saw her father returning in safety, accompanied by the nephew of the Princess, she uttered a cry of rapture and fainted. Happily, however, she soon recovered, and what is more, was married shortly after to the young cavalier, and the whole party accompanied the old Princess in her pilgrimage to Loretto, where her votive offerings may still be seen in the treasury of the Santa Case." EPIGRAM S. To Climene. Thy ivory teeth, thy auburn hair, And thou wert charming couldst thou buy A ray for thy lack-lustre eye. To a beautiful Girl. Oh cruel girl! I did but steal one kiss, And you have stolen away my heart for this. WE THE WISHING-CAP. No. I. A PROPOSAL TO THE INHABITANTS OF THE METROPOLIS. HAT I have to propose to the consideration of the inhabitants of the Metropolis is the institution of certain grounds and enclosures for the purpose of restoring the manly games of their ancestors. By manly games, I mean those that are properly called so, such as golf, tennis, cricket, prison-base, &c.; not cock-fighting, nor even boxing; which latter is an invention of the idle to show their valour by proxy. The best thing to be said for boxing is, that it cultivates a sense of justice in the streets, and reminds the little boys of the necessity of keeping themselves active and vigourous. Boxing, however, is rather the result than the cause of a turn for fair play, which has long manifested itself in the British community. Its advocates have yet to show that its tendency to assist a spirit of this sort is not over-balanced by the excitement it furnishes to safe and cowardly spectators. A regular boxing holiday which draws after it, like a dusty comet, all the blackguards and bullies in the neighbourhood, is a meteor of very doubtful import; a very questionable encouragement to public spirit. The drinking and other bad habits, which generally illustrate the lives of boxers and their abettors, are no testimonies to the goodness of this mode of education. The spectators do not advance their health : and the boxers themselves are trained into an unnatural pitch of vigour, which does not last, and which only tempts them to shorten their lives by alternate excesses of regimen and debauchery. Even the race is not carried on like that of our horses. Boxers are not There is a golf-club, which meets at Blackheath, and is composed, I believe, of Scotchmen. It Ben Jonson. the fathers nor the sons of boxers. If we could all of us attain to the honest fists of Parson Adams and Tom Jones, it would be much better. But how are we to set about it? Not by unnatural modes of life. We must rouse up other elements of health than these. When we have recovered something of the Parson's true love of manliness and simplicity, we shall be able to fight our own battles without the help of boxers and brandy-bottles. It is what the boxers at present do not do themselves; nor what their spectators, for the most part, would venture to do at all. Cock-fighting is so despicable an amusement, and so plainly open to all the objections against boxing, without having anything to say for itself, that I need not add a word on the subject. Cruelty and cowardice notoriously go together. In cock-fighting they are both at their height. If anybody remains to be convinced, let him look at Hogarth's picture of it, and the faces concerned. Would the gambler in that picture, the most absorbed in the hope of winning, ever forget his own bones, as he does those of the brave animals before him? I allow that cock-fighting has been in use among nations of great valour, our own for one; but it was the barbarous and not the brave part of the national spirit that maintained it, and one that had not yet been led to think on the subject. Better knowledge puts an end to all excuses of that sort. When Roger Ascham (who saw nothing in romances but " open manslaughter and bold baudry") grew old and feeble, he changed his love for archery into a passion for this sneaking amusement. I never heard but of one im is a very masculine gaine, not lightly to be entered aginative person who was a cock-fight upon by those whose muscles have been sedentary, lest, as the poet says -Vinegar proclaim their loud disgrace. Exercises of this nature are the only advantage which Scotland has over us, and the disgrace ought to be done away. er; and such an odd imagination is his, and so strange are the ends which these cock-fighters come to, that he is now a professor in a Scotch university. This, it must be confes sed, is a saving grace beyond old Roger Ascham. There is still a cock-pit somewhere in Westminster. There is also, what many of our readers will be surprised to hear of, a bear-garden, eminently blackguard. But to return to our subject,-1 say little about the ancients, though they abounded in gymnastic example. Examples drawn from the Greeks and Romans, unless impressed upon us in a very early and particular manner, have little effect. They are consider ed rather as things done in books, than by men. I will only make two or three observations: 1st. That neither the Greeks nor Romans were fond of exercise by proxy, the former being a nation of wrestlers and dancers, and the second the gladiators of the world: 2d. That the Greeks were much the handsomer and more intellectual people, and, with the exception of Sparta, were as content with the exercises that kept them healthy and lively in a state of peace, as they were ready to fight bravely when patriotism required it: 3d. That the wits and philosophers of Greece, some of whom were its great est captains (as Epaminondas and Xenophon) were remarkable for a tranquil health and longevity, confessedly owing to that study of body as well as mind, which they made a part of the business of their lives. Plato speaks with astonishment of the newly-invented terms of vapours and other mysteries, which some physicians had brought up in his time. In the age of Homer, our niceties of temperament appear to have been so unknown, that he represents Diomed and Ulysses, after the heat of action, as standing in a draught of wind to cool themselves. These were soldiers; but Plato was a man of letters and a metaphysician; professions, which are held to be particularly injurious to the stomach; and are so, in our present sedentary modes of life. The history of England will suffice for Englishmen. It is remarkable, that the period the most eminent among us both for manly exercises and a long state of peace, was during the reign of the Tudors and James the First. The court was then given to tilts and tournaments, the gentry to the sports of the field, the citizens to archery, the peasantry to the games which are now confined to children and all classes to bowls, tennis, and dancing. At the same time, as good things have a propensity to go together, music was cultivated by both sexes, to a degree which this musical age would be sur prised at; and ladies gradually ac quired the art of being at once housewifely and booklearned; points in which they afterwards fell off on the arrival of French coquetry. Eliza beth, besides her books and her “ heavenly virginals," kept herself in heart and good countenance with "dancing.” The Reformation set men a thinking, and the Revolution followed; very useful to complete us as minds as well as bodies, and to put an end to all star-chambers and bloody bigotries; but mind itself still remains to be completed, and to finish its duty by a return to the proper cultivation of body; and then we should unite the advanta ges of the two periods. The Puritans, in their saturnine reflection, thought it necessary to oppose the sports and pastimes of the age, as worldly vanities, which was a great blow to the corporeal part of us. Lux ury had already prepared the way it by the introduction of coaches, as well as by her other usual tendencies. Charles the Second followed with his peruke and French fashions; and though he was fond of exercise and began by resuming some of the old sports, debauchery soon counteracted their good effects. severer court under James, the second revolution which followed his attempts to introduce popery, and the AntiGallican spirit which arose in opposi tion both to the former tastes and to the power of Louis the 14th, all tended to introduce a better system of manners; but trade had now began to occupy our day-light, and lead us into sad hours; the logical and critical fac ulties were exercised almost exclusively, and peace with France ensuing, and every body being bent on the im provement of his "sense," the effect was consummated by an universal ab for The show of a sorption in the lesser morals,-in the acquirement of estates and gentilities, -in the study of being agreeable in rooms, and witty in coffee-houses. We were to be English in our virtues, but French in our tastes and a compromise between these two strangers took place, which existed up to the period of the French revolution, and still colours the manners and criticism in vogue. The characters of the successive princes contributed to the universal defection from exercise. William the Third, a hero in the field, was a queazy consumptive invalid in his own chamber. Anne was fat and burly, like her grandfather Clarendon. Lord Lanesborough, the old gentleman mentioned by Pope as "dancing in the gout," waited upon her on the death of her husband, to advise her Majesty to rouse up her spirits by his Lordship's favourite exercise. The announcement of his business must have been very ludicrous, unless he was a man of address; but he had a reason in his boasting of legs. If precedent was required, he might have quoted, besides Elizabeth, the example of Charles the Second's wife, Catharine of Braganza, who by means of an unconquerable spirit of dancing bore up against an evi! which would have been thought greater by most women than that of a husband's death; to wit, his neglect and infidelity. The House of Brunswick succeeded, all stayers at home and card-players, with the exception of the late King, whose temperance and exercise deserved a better end than his parents had provided for him. We still have the advantage of our neighbours in point of bodily vigour; partly from our mode of subsistence, partly because we retain enough moral vigour from our ancestors, and value ourselves on maintaining our superiority. Bnt no gallant person who was at Waterloo will deny, that how ever we astonished Napoleon by holding out as we did, and forcing him to lose the fruits of his conduct, we ourselves could have spared a few of the charges which the French persisted in making, and did not altogether find them as inferior as we expected. The Revolution had put a spirit into their arms, which the "beaux chevaliers” of the Grand Monarque, with all their gallantry, would have envied. Napoleon gave that title to one of our regiments as they were forming for battle, and lamented that he should be oblig ed to cut it to pieces. The consciousness that suggested the lamentation, might have taught him to spare it. He argued too royally. He took us for the servants of a monarchy like that of old France; and forgot that the same liberty which was new in that country, and none the better for his deserting it, was, notwithstanding its corruptions, a long habit with us. But the French people have upon the whole made a great advance in physical energy. The race is improved. A manlier system of education has been introduced; feudality is at an end; the French peasant now values himself, not as the slave of a great nation; and we may remark, that the most inconsiderate extoller among us of" the good old times" in France (which we used to laugh at so much formerly) has long ceased to say anything about "ragged elbows" and "wooden shoes." Now the French are not disposed to relax any of their endeavours to render themselves a match for Englishmen. Let us smile if we will at their endeavours; but let us smile with reason; and do, in the mean time, all we can to keep a head of them. There is a cricket-ground at Paddington, and a squalid five's court in St. Martin's-lane. This is the present amount of our establishments in behalf of health and vigour. The cricket-ground is good, but a mere nothing to our wants. The five's-court is like an out-house in a dream, or Daniel's den without the lions. We ought at least to have a score of cricket-grounds about the suburbs. There should also be grounds for tennis five's-courts, a decent number; and running, wrestling, and all other honest exercises ought to be encouraged, wherever they can. we have muddle-headed card-rooms, and places aptly called Hells, where people learn to be callous or misera Instead of these, ; ble, and pick one another's pockets: to which they have lately added the accomplishment of cutting one anothers throats. Think of the difference of frequenting these places, or even the most virtuous tavern extant, without a proper security against gout and indigestion, and of coming home fresh and breathing from the racket-ground, with a hand as firm as iron, clear temples and body, and an appetite which can afford to enjoy itself.* Some patriotic persons, Mr. Pennant among them (who was of civic origin, and a good specimen of the British gentleman) have attempted to restore the practice of archery. It is a good attempt; and all exercises, of whatever kind, are better than none; and if archery is not made a toy of by its revivers (as one is apt to imagine in these times) it is stout work. What I have just said, was only upon that presumption. Pardon me, soul of Robin Hood; and ye tall and sturdy bows, not to be looked down upon, which of old The strong-arm'd English spirits conquer'd France. We have still riding and dancing among our amusements: but both are pursued in a very modern way, the latter often perniciously. The rich have the advantage of riding for an appetite. It is a pity they do not do it oftener, instead of taking to their carriages. Dancing is kept up too late at night, and in suffocating rooms. Dancing on a green is to some purpose. At evening it might oftener be resorted to with great advantage, by almost all persons in doors, without preparation, and the moment they rise from their work. But no exer cise can dispense with the necessity of exercise in the open air. ours, for many generations must suffer for the want of it, wherever it takes place to any great extent. The constitution's ruined for life, and the feeble progenies that result, are innume rable in these sedentary times. And recollect, that plant what principles we may, and take care as we think fit of our own wordly success and that of our offspring, nature insists that the bodies in which she puts us shall be the medium of every perception we have; so that we colour it with darkness or cheerfulness accordingly. I have omitted hunting: I confess I do not willingly speak of it, unless it be hunting the fox, and then only in case of necessity. It prevails to no such extent as to affect my argument: nor can I think that any mode of doing ourselves good is to be recom mended, if it be unjust to others, and can be supplied by a choice of so many amusements, at once manly and innocent. One thing I must mention; namely that this is no party matter. Our muscles are not Whigs and Tories, Our stomachs (God knows) are no Radical Reformers. All parties are interested in it; nor do I despair before long of hearing that some steps have been taken in consequence of this suggestion; not because it has been well argued, but because the suggestion has been made. Should any one be induced by what is here said to take steps in the matter, I exhort him to consider himself as under one of the most honourable impulses of his life. of If it lay in my power to begin, I would not hesitate a moment, nor sit down to dinner, from week's end to week's end, without conquering a good digestion for it, racket in hand, every day I was in town. The gentlemen of the city can raise excellent troops We, and horse, and do anything else they have a mind to,which money can effect: why do they not make a transition from the field of Waterloo to exercises worthy of gallant men? A pair of stays is another thing, when it pinches the sides of a Sir Philip Sydney. shapes be secured, and stays be war ranted by this handsomest of all modes; and let at the same time half the indigestions of the city retire at one blow of the racket. * Laws must be made against gambling ; but it is much easier to prevent it in such games, than at any other. The player soon gets an interest in the game itself, and the cheerfulness of his blood stands him instead of the paltry excitements of the dice-box. To play for a trifle might be allowed. It gives the mind's eye another mark to aim at ; but this is easily regulated. A good player will chiefly play for hon our. Let |