the planet's vigorous youth; they belong to an order of things different from the present.

But there is nothing in nature, however green and fresh, or perpetually reproduced, which may not be rendered antique by poetry and superstition. Is not the very ground of Palestine and Egypt hoary? Are not the Nile and Jordan ages upon ages older than Little Muddy River, or Great, Big, Dry River, or Philosophy, Philanthropy, and Wisdom Rivers, which unite to form Jefferson River? (It is a burning shame that those Yankees should be permitted to nickname God's glorious creatures after this fashion.) The Jesuits have done something for the Orellana ; but even Mississippi (notwithstanding Mr. Law and his scheme) is yet in its minority. By the way, bubbles and stock-jobbing have nothing antique about them.

Something of this hallowed character invests every plant and animal to which a superstition has attached. The fancies of old poets; love-charms and magic incantations; the dreams of alchymy and astrology; the rites of obsolete religions; the strange fictions and unutterable compounds of the old medicine; the dark tales of philtres and secret poisons; more than all, fireside tradition have given to many an herb, and bird, and creeping thing, a stamp and odour of auld lang syne. Gems always remind me of the enchanted rings and amulets of romances, of Gyges and the Barmecides, and those marvellous crystals, in whose transparent water necromancers beheld "the face of things that is to be." The pansy

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is still sacred to Oberon and Titania; the mistletoe is not of our generation; the mandrake is a fearful ghost of departed days; the toad is the most ancient of reptiles, and the raven is a secular bird of ages." But this imputation of antiquity belongs not to every flower that has been sung in past ages. If they were celebrated merely for beauty or fragrance, or even for such fanciful associations as might occur to any poet at any time, it does not make them antique. The rose and the lily have been time immemorial the poet's themes, yet they are not antiquities: their loveliness has no more relation to one age than another. The catholic religion is an antiquity; and this makes it, with all its imperfections, a gentlemanly mode of faith. It respects other antiquities. The Puritans, on the other hand, who, not to speak it profanely, were not gentlemen, had an odd perverse antipathy to everything that reminded them of times when they were not. They would not have spared a Madonna of Raphael, and [would have] plastered a conventicle with the Venus de Medicis.

A smack of the antique is an excellent ingredient in gentility. A gentleman, to be the beau idéal of his order, should live in an old house, (if haunted, so much the better,) well stocked with old books and old wine, and well hung with family portraits, and choice pieces of the old masters. He should keep all his father's old servants, (provided they did not turn modern philosophers,) and an old nurse, replete with legendary lore. His old horses, when past labour, should roam at large in his park; and his super

In

annuated dogs should be allowed to dose out their old age in the sun or on the hearth-rug. If an old man, his dress should be forty fashions out of date at least. At any rate, his face should have something of the cavalier cut, a likeness to the family Vandykes; and his manners, without being absolutely antiquated, should show somewhat of an inherited courtesy. all, he should display a consciousness, that he is to represent something historical, something that is not of to-day or yesterday,-a power derived from times of yore. How venerable is the escutcheon of an ancient family! How richly it glows in the window of their parish church! the stained light which gleams through it is reflected from distant centuries. How awful are its griffins and wiverns! How mysterious the terms of heraldry, gules, azure, or-dexter and sinister! Apply the same to the newly purchased coat of a new gentleman, and they are rank jargon, and the coat itself an unmeaning daub.

Yet antiquity is not always genteel. The Jewish nation is the greatest antiquity upon earth. It is a remnant of a dispensation that has passed away. The law and the prophets are their family history. Their rites and customs, their food, their daily life, are derived from times long anterior to all records but their own. But, alas! it is not good for nations to be antiquities. They cannot but fall to ruin; and a human ruin is not a ruined temple.

The Gypsies, as a relic of the old Nomadic life, may be regarded with somewhat similar, but less melancholy feelings. We know not that they were

ever better than they are, though certainly the tide of society is daily leaving them farther behind. In the list of retrograde nations, we may mention the Abyssinians. All their laws, customs, and forms declare that they must once have been a civilised people. At present they seem to be barbarians, with a few antique traditions of civilisation,-like Indians, armed with the weapons, and clothed in the garments of some murdered European crew.

An antiquity, in short, to conclude instead of beginning with a definition, is not that which is merely old, but that which has outlived its time,— which belongs to another state of society, another age of man or nature, than that in which it is contemplated. It must not be of the essence of universal nature, for she is ever renewing, nor of pure reason, for that is eternal. Neither must it be a mere whim,

an arbitrary fancy or fashion, having no ground in either; but it must be a mode, an emanation of nature, —a form she has assumed and laid aside.

A PREFACE THAT MAY SERVE FOR ALL

MODERN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.

IF to be original it were necessary to be new, originality is at an end. Not only all the sense in the world is pre-occupied, but all the nonsense likewise. There is not a simile, however devoid of similitude,

-a paradox, however outrageous,- -a pun, how execrable soever, but may be found in works that were extant long before the oldest man living was thought of. All the originality that a modern work can possibly attain is the originality of a quilted counterpane, in which old shreds and remnants assume a novel appearance from ingenious juxtaposition. I dare say, by-the-bye, this comparison has been made. use of before in some book which I never read.

It would be impossible, even for an opium-eater, to conceive a superstition which has not been the sober belief of some tribe or other; nor could the genius of absurdity, personified in the shape of a fancy dress-maker or dandy tailor, invent an absolutely new fashion.

Even if originality were possible, it would not be desirable; for it must of necessity be false. There was a time, perhaps, when golden lands and fortunate