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Flight I.

bour gossips, starting from their gingerbread and whisky stands, and clustering round him, astounded the ears and senses of the ill-starred aggressor! A tangle-knot of adders, with all its heads protruded towards him, would not have been more terrific. Reeling with surprise and shame, with the look and gesture of a child, that, having whirled till it was giddy-blind, is now trying to stop itself, he held out his purse, which the grinning scold with one snatch transferred to her own pocket. At the sight of this peaceoffering, the circle opened, and made way for the young man, who instantly pursued his course with as much celerity as the fulness of the street, and the dread of a second mishap, would permit. The flame of Irish wrath soon languishes and goes out, when it meets with no fuel from resistance. The rule holds true in general. But no rule is of universal application; and it was far from being verified by the offended principal in this affray. Unappeased, or calling in her fury only to send it out again condensed into hate, the implacable beldam hobbled after the youth, determined that though she herself could not keep up with him, yet that her curses should, as long at least as her throat and lungs could supply powder for their projection. Alternately pushing her limbs onward, and stopping not so much to pant as to gain a fulcrum for a more vehement scream, she continued to pursue her victim with "vocal shafts," as Pindar has it, or ὡς πρῖνος ἐμπρησθεις i. e. spitting fire like a wet candle-wick, as Aristophanes !

And well if this had been all-an intemperance, a gust of grazy cankered old age, not worth recording. But, alas! these jets and flashes of execration no sooner reached the ears of the fugitive, but they became articulate sentences, the fragments, it seemed, of some old spell, or wicked witchrhyme :

Ay!-run, run, run,
Off flesh, off bone!

Thou Satan's son,

Thou Devil's own!
Into the glass
Pass

The glass! the glass,
The crystal glass!

Though there is reason to believe that this transformation of sound, like the burst of a bomb, did not take ef

fect till it had reached its final destination, the youth's own meatus auditorius; and that for others, the scold's passionate outcry did not verbally differ from the usual outcries of a scold in a passion: Yet there was a something in the yell and throttle of the basket-woman's voice so horrific, that the general laugh, which had spread round at the young man's expense, was suspended. The passengers halted, as wonder-struck; and when they moved on, there was a general murmur of disgust and aversion.

The student MAXILIAN-for he it was, and no other, who, following his nose, without taking counsel of his eyes, had thus plunged into conflict with the old woman's wares-though he could attach no sense or meaning to the words he heard, felt himself, nevertheless, seized with involuntary terror, and quickened his steps, to get as soon as possible out of the crowd, who were making their way to the pleasure-gardens, the Vauxhall of the Irish metropolis, and whose looks and curiosity converged towards him. His anxious zig-zag, however, marked the desire of haste, rather than its attainment: and still as he pushed and winded through the press of the various gay parties, all in holiday finery, he heard a whispering and murmuring, "The poor young man! Out on the frantic old hag!" The ominous voice and the wicked looks which the beldam seemed to project, together with the voice and we are all, more or less, superstitious respecting looks→→ had given a sort of sentimental turn to this ludicrous incident. The females regarded the youth with increasing sympathy: and in his well-formed countenance, (to which the expression of inward distress lent an additional interest,) and his athletic growth, they found an apology, and, for the moment, a compensation, for the awkwardness of his gait, and the more than most unfashionable cut of his clothes.

It can never be proved, that no one of the Seven Sleepers was a tailor by trade; neither do I take on myself to demonstrate the affirmative. But this I will maintain, that a tailor, disenthralled from a trance of like duration, with confused and fragmentary recollections of the fashions at the time he fell asleep, blended with the images hastily abstracted from the dresses that

passed before his eyes when he first reopened them, might, by dint of conjecture, have come as near to a modish suit, as the ambulatory artist had done, who made his circuit among the recesses of Macgillicuddy's Reeks, and for whose drapery the person of our luckless student did at this present time perform the office of Layman.* A pepper-and-salt frock, that might be taken for a greatcoat,-but whether docked, or only out-grown, was open to conjecture; a black satin waistcoat, with deep and ample flaps, rimmed with rose-colour embroidery; green plush smallclothes, that on one limb formed a tight compress on the knee joint, and on the other buttoned midway round the calf of a manly and well-proportioned leg. Round his neck a frilled or laced collar with a ribbon round it, sufficiently alien indeed from the costume below, yet the only article in the inventory and sum total of his attire that harmonized, or, as our painters say, was in some keeping with the juvenile bloom, and mark, gentle Reader! I am going to raise my style an octave or more]-and ardent simplicity of his face; or with the auburn ringlets that tempered the lustre of his ample forehead !-Like those fleecy cloudlets of amber, which no writer or lover of sonnets but must some time or other, in some sweet Midsummer Night's Dream of poetic or sentimental sky-gazing, have seen astray on the silver brow of the celestial Dian! Or as I myself, once on a time, in a dell of lazy Sicily, down a stony side + of which a wild vine was creeping tortuous, saw the tendrils of

the vine pencilling with delicate shadows the brow of a projecting rock of purest Alabaster, that here gleamed through from behind the tendrils, and here glittered as the interspace.

Yes, gentle Reader !-the diction, similes, and metaphors, of the preceding paragraph, are somewhat motley and heterogene. I am myself aware of it. But such was the impression it was meant to leave. A harmony that neither existed in the original, nor is to be found in any portraiture thereof, presents itself in the exact correspondence of the one to the other. My friend Panourgos, late of the Poultry Counter, but at present in the King's Bench,- -a descendant of the Rabelaisean Panurge, but with a trick of Friar John in his composition-acted on this principle. He sent an old coat to be dyed; the dyer brought it home blue and black: he beat the dyer black and blue: and this, he justly observed, produced a harmony. Discordia concors!—the motto, gentle Reader! prefixed by the masters of musical counterpoint, to the gnarled and quarrelsome notes which the potent fist of the Royal Amazon, our English Queen Bess, boxed into love and good neighbourhood on her own virginals. Besides, I wished to leave your fancy a few seconds longer in the tyring-room. And here she comes! The whole figure of the student-She has dressed the character to a hair. You have it now complete before your mind's eye, as if she had caught it flying.

And in fact, with something like the feeling of one flying in his sleep,

The jointed image, or articulated doll, as large, in some instances, as a full-grown man or woman, which artists employ for the arrangement and probation of the drapery and attitudes of the figures in their paintings, is called Layman. POSTSCRIPT. Previously to his perusal of the several particulars of the student's tout-ensemble, I am anxious to inform the reader, that having looked somewhat more heedfully into my documents, I more than suspect that the piece, since it came from the hands of the Sartor of Macgillicuddy, had been most licentiously interpolated by genii of more mischievous propensities-the boni socii of the Etruscan and Samothracian breed; the "Robin Good Fellows" of England; the "Good Neighbours" of North Britain; and the "Practical Jokers" of all places, but of special frequency in clubs, schools, and universities.

The author asks credit for his having, here and elsewhere, resisted the temptation of substituting "whose" for "of which"-the misuse of the said pronoun relative "whose," where the antecedent neither is, nor is meant to be represented as, personal or even animal, he would brand, as one among the worst of those mimicries of poetic diction, by which imbecile writers fancy they elevate their prose-would, but that, to his vexation, he meets with it, of late, in the compositions of men that least of all need such artifices, and who ought to watch over the purity and privileges of their mothertongue with all the jealousy of high-priests, set apart by nature for the pontificate. Poor as our language is, in terminations and inflections significant of the genders, to destroy the few it possesses, is most wrongful.

the poor youth neither stopped nor stayed, till he had reached and pass ed into the shade of the alley of trees that leads to the gardens-his original destination, as he sallied forth from his own unlightsome rooms. And scarcely, even now, did he venture to look up, or around him. The eruption from the basket, the air-dance of cakes and apples, continued still before his eyes. In the sounds of distant glee he heard but a vibration of the inhuman multitudinous horse-laugh (ávápiðμar yedaoma) at the street corner. Yea, the restrained smile, or the merry glance of pausing or passing damsel, were but a dimmer reflection of the beldam's haggish grin. He was now at the entrance gate. Group after group, all in holiday attire, streamed forward. The music of the wind instruments sounded from the gallery; and louder and thicker came the din of the merry-makers from the walks, alcoves, and saloon. At the very edge of the rippling tide, I once saw a bag-net lying, and a poor fascinated haddock with its neb through one of the meshes: and once from the garrison at Villette, I witnessed a bark of Greece, a goodly Idriote, tall, and lustily manned; its white dazzling cotton sails all filled out with the breeze, and even now gliding into the grand port, (Porto Grande,) forced to turn about and beat round into the sullen harbour of quarantine.Hapless Maxilian! the havens of pleasure have their quarantine, and repel with no less aversion the plague of poverty. The Prattique boat hails, and where is his bill of health? In the possession of the Corsair. Then first he recovered his thoughts and senses sufficiently to remember that he had given away-to comprehend and feel the whole weight of his loss. And if a bitter curse on his malignant star gave a wildness to the vexation, with which he looked upward,

Let us not blame him: for against such

chances

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Hapless Maxilian! hard was the struggle between the tears that were swelling into his eyes and the manly shame that would fain restrain them. Whitsunday was the high holiday of the year for him, the family festival from which he had counted and chronicled his years from childhood upwards. With this vision before him, he had confined himself for the last four or five weeks to those feasts of hope and fancy, from which the guest is sure to rise with an improved ap petite: and yet had put into his purse a larger proportion of his scanty allowance than was consistent with the humblest claims of the months ensuing. But the Whitsunday, the alba dies, comes but once a-year-to keep it, to give it honour due,-he had pinched close, and worked hard. Yes, he was resolved to make much of himself, to indulge his genius, even to a bottle of claret, a plate of French olives, or should he meet, as was not improbable, his friend, Hunshman, the Professor of Languages-i. e. a middle-aged German, who taught French and Italian: excellent, more. over, in pork, hams, and sausages, though the anti-judiac part of the concern, the pork shop, was ostensibly managed by Mrs Hunshman, and since her decease, by Miss Lusatia, his daughter-or should he fall in with the Professor, and the fair Lusatia, why then, a bowl of Arrack punch, (it is the ladies' favourite, he had heard the Professor say, adding with a smile, that the French called it contradiction)—Yes, a bowl of punch, a pipe-his friend, a townsman and maternal descendant of the celebrated Jacob Behmen, had taught him to smoke, and was teaching him Theosophy-coffee, and a glass of Inniskillen to crown the solemnity. In this broken and parenthetic form did the bill of fare ferment in the anticipator's brain and in the same form, with some little interpolation, by way of gloss, for the Reader's information, have we, sacrificing elegance of style to faith of History, delivered it.

Maxilian was no ready accountant; but he had acted over the whole expenditure, had rehearsed it in detail, from the admission to the concluding shilling and pence thrown down with an uncounting air for the waiter. Voluptuous Youth!

But, ah! that fatal incursion on the

B

apple-basket-all was lost! The brimming cup had even touched his lipsit left its froth on them, when it was dashed down, untasted, from his hand. The music, the gay attires, the tripping step and friendly nod of woman, the volunteer service, the rewarding smile-perhaps, the permitted pressure of the hand felt warm and soft within the glove-all shattered, as so many bubbles, by that one malignant shock! In fits and irregular pulses of locomotion, hurrying yet lingering, he forced himself alongside the gate, and with many a turn, heedless whither he went, if only he left the haunts and houses of men behind him, he reached at length the solitary banks of the streamlet that pours itself into the bay south of the Liffey. Close by, stood the rude and massy fragment of an inclosure, or rather the angle where the walls met that had once protected a now deserted garden,

“And still where many a garden-flower

grew wild."

Here, beneath a bushy elder-tree, that had shot forth from the crumbling ruin, something higher than midway from the base, he found a grassy couch, a sofa or ottoman of sods, overcrept with wild-sage and camomile. Of all his proposed enjoyments, one only remained, the present of his friend, itself almost a friend-a Meerschaum pipe, whose high and ample bole was filled and surmounted by tobacco of Lusatian growth, made more fragrant by folded leafits of spicy or balsamic plants. For a thing was dear to Maxilian, not for what it was, but for that which it represented or recalled to him: and often, while his eye was passing, "O'er hill and dale, thro' CLOUDLAND,

gorgeous land!"

had his spirit clomb the heights of Imaus, and descended into the vales of Iran, on a pilgrimage to the sepulchre of Hafiz, or the bowers of Mosellara. Close behind him plashed and murmured the companiable stream, beyond which the mountains of Wicklow hung floating in the dim horizon: while full before him rose the towers and pinnacles of the metropolis, now softened and airy-light, as though they had been the sportive architecture of air and sunshine. Yet Maxilian heard not, saw not-or, worse still,

He saw them all, how excellently fairHe saw, not felt, how beautiful they were.

The pang was too recent, the blow too sudden. Fretfully striking the firespark into the nitred sponge, with glazed eye idly fixed, he transferred the kindled fragment to his pipe. True it is, and under the conjunction of friendlier orbs, when, like a captive king, beside the throne of his youthful conqueror, Saturn had blended his sullen shine with the subduing influences of the star of Jove, often had Maxilian experienced its truth-that

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eye a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of
size-

In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's
trim bole,

His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.
MSS.

But the force and frequence with its successive volumes, were better suitwhich our student now commingled ed, in their effects, to exclude the actual landscape, than to furnish tint or canvas for ideal shapings. Like Discontent, from amid a cloudy shrine of her own outbreathing, he at length gave vent and utterance to his feelings in sounds more audible than articulate, and which at first resembled notes of passion more nearly than parts of speech, but gradually shaped themselves into words, in the following soliloquy:

"Yes! I am born to all mishap and misery!-that is the truth of it!-Child and boy, when did it fall to my lot to draw king or bishop on Twelfth Night? Never! Jerry Sneak or Nincompoop, to a dead certainty! When did I ever drop my bread and butter-and it seldom got to my mouth without some such circuit but it fell on the buttered side? When did I ever cry, Head! but it fell tail? Did I ever once ask, Even or odd, but I lost? And no wonder ; for I was sure to hold the marbles so awkwardly, that the boy could count them between my fingers! But this is to laugh at! though in my life I could never descry much mirth in any laugh I ever set up at my own vexations, past or present. And that's another step-dame trick of Destiny! My shames are all immortal! I do believe, Nature stole me from my proper home, and made a blight of me, that I might not be owned again! For I never get

older. Shut my eyes, and I can find no more difference between eighteen me and eight me, than between to-day and yesterday! But I will not remember the miseries that dogged my earlier years, from the day I was first breeched! (Nay, the casualties, tears, and disgraces of that day I never can forget.) Let them pass, however school-tide and holiday-tide, school hours and play hours, griefs, blunders, and mischances. For all these I might pardon my persecuting Nemesis! Yea, I would have shaken hands with her,

as forgivingly as I did with that sworn familiar of hers, and Usher of the Black Rod, my old schoolmaster, who used to read his newspaper, when I was horsed, and flog me between the paragraphs! I would forgive her, I say, if, like him, she would have taken leave of me at the School Gate. But now, vir et togatus, a seasoned academic-that now, that still, that evermore, I should be the whipping-stock of Destiny, the laughing-stock of Fortune."

[WE must take Mr COLERIDGE as he chooses to offer himself. We certainly expected to have had a great deal more of this article for the present Number, when we sent the MS. to our Printer; but we suppose it may very safely be taken for granted that nobody will complain of us for opening our monthly sheets with a fragment indeed-but such a fragment as we are sure nobody but Mr Coleridge could have written.

In case there should be any reader of ours unfortunate enough never to have read Mr Coleridge's FRIEND, we strongly advise him to betake himself to that singular Storehouse of scattered genius, and make himself master of the beautiful letters in which the early history of Idoloclastes Satyrane's mind is displayed. He will then come with infinitely more advantage to the Historie and Gests of Maxilian, and their rich Prologomena.

Mr Coleridge will be behaving himself "something amiss," if we have not the continuation of these "Select Chapters" ere next month.

C. N.]

SONNET.

HAST thou, in feverish and unquiet sleep,
Dreamt that some merciless dæmon of the air
Raised thee aloft, and held thee by the hair,
Over the brow of a down-looking steep,

Gaping below into a chasm so deep,

That by the utmost straining of thine eye,
Thou canst no base, no resting-place descry;
Not even a bush to save thee, should'st thou sweep
Adown the black descent-that then the hand
Suddenly parted thee, and left thee there,
Holding but by the finger-tips, the bare
And jagged ridge above-that seems as sand,
To crumble 'neath thy touch ?--If so, I deem
That thou hast had rather an ugly dream.

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