fairer portion of the creation to their festal assemblies, they might have suppressed as useless one half, at least, of their table code. Their banquets would not have been probably so learned and instructive, but would certainly have been more gay, graceful, and agreeable. In this point, I think, we have another decided superiority over our predecessors of Greek and Roman lineage, and are, at least as far as concerns sociability, wiser in our generation than the wise ones of antiquity. D. S. LONDON LYRICS. St. James's Park. 'Twas June, and many a gossip wench, Boys, nursemaids sat, a varying race; In years they seem'd some forty-four, Was one, and one was Mrs. Burns. They talk'd of little Jane and John, And hoped they'd come before 'twas dark, And thought it strange, since flour was down, They said last Monday's heavy gales Then tried to count the iron rails This 'larum sedulous to shun, I donn'd my gloves, to march away, When, as I gazed upon the one, "Good Heavens !" I cried, “tis Nancy Gray." 'Twas Nancy, whom I led along The whiten'd and elastic floor Though sadly alter'd, I knew her, While she, 'twas obvious, knew me not; But mildly said, "Good evening, Sir," And with her comrade left the spot. "Is this," I cried, in grief profound, All that remains at forty-four? But, ere I enter'd Cleveland-row, แ Time, at whose touch all mortals bow, By her you plainly were not known; Then, while you mourn the alter'd hue Of Nancy's face, suspect your own The Newspaper. CURES for chilblains, corns, and bunnions, Young man absent from his own house, Deals, Honduras, Ponticherry, Treadmill, Haydon, Tom and Jerry. Pall-Mall, Allen, chairs and tables, Smithfield, price of veal and mutton, Yearly meeting, lots of Quakers, Freehold farm of forty acres ; Duke of Angouleme, despatches, Thatch'd-house tavern, glees and catches; Coburg, wonderful attraction, Plunket, playhouse, Orange faction, Consols eighty and a fraction. Sales of sail-cloth, silk and camblet, Kean in Shylock, Young in Hamlet; Kemble's statue, Hone's petition; Jerry Bentham's lucubrations, Wapping Docks choke full of barter, SYMPHATHIES AND PREJUDICES. "You are not young; no more am I go to, then, there's sympathy. You are merry, so am I; ha! ha! then there's more sympathy. You love sack, and so do 1; would you desire better sympathy?" Merry Wives of Windsor. In moral, as well as physical anatomy, there are diseases that baffle the sagacity of the dissector. Many of our sympathies, and most of our prejudices, are among the number. Of one thing, however, we may be sure, namely, that the latter are the less dangerous of the two; and it may be well to bear that in mind when attempts at remedy have succeeded to efforts of discovery. This may startle my female readers, to whom sympathy, and sympathies, and sympathizing, are words that sound so sweetly, and to whose ears "antipathy" is so loathsome. But let them beware of their favourites, for there is almost always a serpent under the roses. Sympathy and antipathy may be called, in comparison with other qualities, the poetry of sensation. They are quite imaginative, vague, and unreal; a sort of inspiration, out of all subserviency to rules or reasoning; finding objects without search; and developing themselves in the most unaccountable ways, in beings the least likely to possess them, and on occasions which set conjecture and calculation at defiance. Let us see what we can make out as to the nature of these opposite qualities of sympathies and antipathies, the origin of which defies our speculation. We should, perhaps, begin with antipathies, as of least importance, for their worst effects are rarely of more than negative tendency. Sympathies, on the contrary, lead to absolute and positive ill when injurious at all. A man who feels a natural aversion to eels, spinach, parsnips, Jews, Frenchmen, &c. is, ten to one, deprived of a participation in a very good thing, or of an acquaintance with many a good fellow. But he or she whose sympathies lead him or her to favourite viands, liqueurs, or persons, run risks—which I need not enlarge on. And I must be here understood as not confounding sympathy, in this sense, with compassion-that "sympathy with other's woe," one of the most exquisite feelings of our nature; but as taking the word in its metaphysical meaning, as the secret and involuntary spell which draws us towards objects, in the same proportion and with the same force that antipathy turns us from them. As to the reasonableness of the one or the other, that is out of the question, they being quite beyond the influence of the will or the understanding. I shall, however, give sympathy the precedence in my desultory remarks, because it is the most common, and I believe, with all its faults, the most natural to mankind. Material or physical sympathies may be classed under various heada -general and particular, direct and indirect. Among the former are the relative movements of all the parts of the earth, keeping the whole in harmony, and those which act upon human beings in the mass, and are common to all. The latter include the connexion between the sun, the earth, and other planets; persons attached to each other by some violent passion, such as love, et cetera, et cetera. I am not about to inflict on my readers an astronomical or metaphysical treatise, and shall content myself, on the subject of general sympathies, with citing the most extraordinary instance of them that has ever come to my knowledge, either by reading or experience. "The sweating sickness," a remarkable pestilent distemper, which broke out in England in the year 1551, was attended, as we are told, with some symptoms and circumstances, the belief in which requires such a fund of credibility or gullibility, that I beg to quote my authority, and regret that I cannot at this moment confront him with any of the historians but Hume, who is silent on the subject. "What was more particular was, that no foreigners, though conversant in the most infected places, were seized with it; and also that the English in foreign countries were seized with it at the same time that their native country was infected at home." Without commenting on the tautology or the pleonasms of this sentence, I leave to my readers to form their judgment of the veracity of that prince of lexicography, N. Bailey óλoyos, who thus speaks in his Dictionary, third edition, with additions, 1787. "It is not necessary nor convenient to dwell on the nature of direct sympathies, passing from one body to another without any intermediate conductor; but of those which may be called indirect, or distant, I am furnished, in the sublime study of animal magnetism, with a valuable instance, gravely cited by a certain Monsieur Tardy de Montravel, in a letter to M. de Puysegur, the celebrated operator in this art. I shall translate the passage. About three months ago (the letter bears date Dec. 11th 1785) Mademoiselle M **** being in a state of somnambulism, I asked her if she could imagine any method for putting herself in sympathy with a sick person at a considerable distance from her, and whom she had never seen. 6 'I see nothing for it,' said she, but to make the sick person wear, for eight or ten days, a piece of thick glass, about two inches square, on the pit of his or her stomach; then to send it to me, that I may wear it the same length of time, on the same place. I think that will do the business.' Two months afterwards the Duchess of, living twenty-five leagues from the residence of Mademoiselle M****, having heard of the cures which I performed by means of magnetism, asked me some information respecting this science. Having given her some general details on the subject, which I considered useful in all cases, I desired her to place on her stomach such a bit of glass as was indicated by Mademoiselle M****, and to send it to me in the proper time. On the 8th of last month Madame la Duchesse placed, as was prescribed, a bit of looking-glass, wrapped in linen, with the quicksilver well scraped off. She wore it night and day until the 19th, when I having received it from her, sent it immediately to my patient Mademoiselle M ****, who wore it on the pit of her stomach from the 21st until the 29th. She, being in a state of somnambulism on the 30th, detailed to me every particular of the illness of the Duchess, whom she saw almost as perfectly as if she was touching her.'" The letter does not, unfortunately, state the result of this sympathetic communication upon the Duchess; but tells us that poor Mademoiselle M ****, in addition to her other symptoms, became, from the moment she put the fatal piece of glass on her stomach, subject to the very same species of sufferings in her nerves and joints that had before afflicted her Grace, which proves what I stated in the beginning of this paper on the dangers of sympathy, particularly to the sex which is the most fair and most susceptible. But I will not press into the service any more of the manifold aids of animal magnetism. I may on some future occasion return to that particular branch of my subject more in detail; and I will therefore for the present avoid all farther consideration of the embarrassing topic of physical sympathies. There is no knowing where it might lead one; and it would be unwise to go voluntarily into a labyrinth for which, at the best, there is no clew, I therefore turn to those moral wonders, continually exhibiting their self-acted miracles in almost every individual of our species. And here I should have been as much confounded as before, had I been thrown, in the enquiry, entirely upon my own resources; but, luckily for me, I have just stumbled over a book "learned in those mysteries," and attributed to a nobleman whose judgment and acumen have enabled him to write on the subject in a somewhat different style, but in a manner quite as successful as that of Locke himself. Following a train of reasoning, meant to prove that "the imagination of one man has a direct atmospheric influence upon the imagination of another," the author proceeds in the thread (rather tangled to be sure) of his argument, and exclaims: "An unfortunate person is he who hath come into contact with more persons antipathetic to him than sympathetic, and whose imaginations have worked in a malignant mood towards him, We say we like or dislike such a person, for they have such or such qualities: that is, the love or hatred is in proportion to the harmony which subsists between the parties; and the harmony depends on the degree of sympathy or antipathy they possess for each other, founded entirely upon their respective configurations, their nervous systems, and their inclinations, acting on each other through the medium of the imagination: so that our love or hate is as much out of our power, and as little voluntary, as our catching any other infection. Some men are of such a texture that they are accessible more to the one affection than to the other; but every moral affection may be traced to a physical and necessary cause."-Life and Opinions of Sir Richard Maltravers, vol. i, pp. 194, 195. Now, without combatting this last assertion, or pretending to understand what precedes it, I will venture to express a wish that Sir Richard had made an effort at explaining the physical cause which governs our arbitrary likings and dislikes, instead of contenting himself with the assertion that such exists. For my part, I confess that the metaphysics of Maltravers leave me as much in doubt |