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All affectation but creates disgust,

And even in speaking we may seem too just.

4. In vain for them the pleasing measure flows,
Whose recitation runs it all to prose;
Repeating what the poet sets not down,
The verb disjoining from its friendly noun,
While pause, and break, and repetition join
To make a discord in each tuneful line.

5 Some plăcid natures fill the allotted scene
With lifeless drōne, insipid and serene;
While others thunder every couplet o'er,
And almost crack your ears with rant and roar.

6. More nature oft and finer strokes are shown
In the low whisper than tempestuous tone:
And Hamlet's hollow voice and fixed amaze
More powerful terror to the mind conveys,
Than he, who, swollen with big impetuous rage,
Bullies the bulky phantom off the stage.

7. He who in earnest studies o'er his part
Will find true nature cling about his heart.
The modes of grief are not included all

In the white handkerchief and mournful drawl
A single look more marks the internal woe
Than all the windings of the lengthened O!
Up to the face the quick sensation flies,
And darts its meaning from the speaking eyes;
Love, transport, madness, anger, scorn, despair,
And all the passions, all the soul is there.

LLOYD

LXVIII.

THE RETURN OF THE DOVE.

1. THERE was hope in the Ark at the dawning of day,
When o'er the wide waters the Dove flew away,
But when ere the night she came wearily back
With the leaf she had plucked on her desolate trek
The children of Noah knelt down and adored,
And uttered in anthems their praise to the Lord
O, bird of glad tidings! O, joy in our pain!
Beautiful Dove! thou art welcome again.

2 When Peace has departed the care-stricken breast,
And the feet of the weary one languish for rest;
When the world is a wide-spreading ocean of grief.
How blest the return of the Bird and the Leaf!

Reliance on God is the Dove to our Ark,
And Peace is the olive she plucks in the dark.
The deluge abates, there is sun after rain —
Beautiful Dove! thou art welcome again!

MACKAY.

LXIX. THE COMPLAINT OF A STOMACH.

1. BEING allowed for once to speak, I would fain take the oppor tunity to set forth how ill, in all respects, we stomachs are used. From the beginning to the end of life, we are either afflicted with too little or too much, or not the right thing, or things which are horribly disagreeable to us; or are otherwise thrown into a state of discomfort. I do not think it proper to take up a moment in bewailing the Too Little, for that is an evil which is never the fault121 of our masters, but rather the result of their misfortunes; and indeed we would sometimes feel as if it were a relief from other kinds of distress, if we were put upon short allowance for a few days. But we conceive ourselves to have matter for a true bill against mankind in respect of the Too Much, which is always a voluntarily-incurred evil.

2. What a pity that in the progress of discovery we can not establish some means of a good understanding between mankind and their stomachs; for really the effects of their non-acquaintance are most vexatious. Human beings seem to be, to this day, completely in the dark as to what they ought to take at any time, and err almost as often from ignorance as from depraved appetite. Sometimes, for instance, when we of the inner house are rather weakly, they will send us down an article that we only could deal with when in a state of robust health. Sometimes, when we would require mild semi-farinaceous or vegetable diet, they will persist in all the most stimulating and irritating of viands.

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3. What sputtering we poor stomachs have when mistakes of that kind occur! What remarks we indulge in, regarding our masters! "What's this, now?" will a stomach-genius say; ah, detestable stuff! What a ridiculous fellow that man is! Will he never learn? Just the very thing I did not want. If he would only send down a bowl of fresh leek soup, or barley broth, there would be some sense in it:" and so on. If we had only been allowed to give the slightest hint now and then, like faithful servants as we are, from how many miseries might w have saved both our masters and ourselves!

4. I have been a stomach for about forty years, during all of which time I have endeavored to do my duty faithfully and puno

tually. My master, however, is so reckless, that I would defy any stomach of ordinary ability and capacity to get along pleas antly with him. The fact is, like almost all other men, he, in his eating and drinking, considers his own pleasure only, and never once reflects on the poor wretch who has to be responsible for the disposal of everything down stairs. Scarcely on any day does he fail to exceed the strict rule of temperance; nay, there is scarcely a single meal which is altogether what it ought to be, either in its constituents or its general amount. My life is therefore one of continual worry and fret; I am never off the drudge from morning till night, and have not a moment in the four-and-twenty hours that I can safely call my own.

EI

5. My greatest trial takes place in the evening, when my master has dined. If you only saw what a mess this said dinner is, soup, fish, flesh, fowl, ham, curry, rice, potatoes, table-beer, sherry, tart, pudding, cheese, bread, all mixed up together. I am accustomed to the thing, so don't feel much shocked; but my master himself would faint at the sight. The slave of duty in all circumstances, I call in my friend Gastric Juice, and to it we set, with as much good-will as if we had the most agreeable task in the world before us. But, unluckily, my master has an impression very firmly fixed upon him that our business is apt to be vastly promoted by an hour or two's drinking, so he continues at table amongst his friends, and pours me down some bottle and a half of wine, perhaps of various sorts, that bothers Gastric Juice and me to a degree which no one can have any conception of.

6. In fact, this said wine undoes our work almost as fast as we do it, besides blinding and poisoning us poor genii into the bargain. On many occasions I am obliged to give up my task for the time altogether; for while this vinous shower is going on I would defy the most vigorous stomach in the world to make any advance in its business worth speaking of. Sometimes things go to a much greater length than at others; and my master will paralyze us in this manner for hours, - not always, indeed, with wine, but occasionally with punch, one ingredient of which the lemon is particularly odious to us ministers of the interior. All this time I can hear him jollifying away at a great rate, drinking healths to his neighbors, and ruining his own.

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7. I am a lover of early hours as are my brethren generally. To this we are very much disposed by the extremely hard work which we usually undergo during the day. About ten o'clock, having, perhaps, at that time, got all our labors past, and feeling fatigued and exhausted, we like to sink into repose, not to be again disturbed till next morning at breakfast-time. Well how it may be with others I can't tell; but so it is, that

my master never scruples to rouse me up from my first sleep, and give me charge of an entirely new meal, after I thought I was to be my own master for the night. This is a hardship of the most grievous kind.

ΕΙ

8. Only imagine an innocent stomach-genius, who has gathered his coal, drawn on his night-cap, and gone to bed, rung up and made to stand attention to receive a succession of things, all of them superfluous and in excess, which he knows he will not be able to get off his hands all night. Such, O mankind, are the woes which befall our tribe in consequence of your occasionally yielding to the temptation of "a little supper." I see turkey and tongue in grief and terror. Macaroni fills me with frantic alarm. I behold jelly and trifle follow in mute despair. O that I had the power of standing beside my master, and holding his unreflecting hand, as he thus prepares for my torment and his

own!

9. Here, too, the old mistaken notion about the need of something stimulating besets him, and down comes a deluge of hot spirits and water, that causes every villicle in my coat to writhe in agony, and almost sends Gastric Juice off in the sulks to bed Nor does the infatuated man rest here. If the company be agreeable, rummer will follow upon rummer, while I am kept standing, as it were, with my sleeves tucked up, ready to begin, but unable to perform a single stroke of work.

10. I feel that the strength which I ought to have had at my present time of life has passed from me. I am getting weak, and peevish, and evil-disposed. A comparatively small trouble sits long and sore upon me. Bile, from being my servant, is becoming my master; and a bad one he makes, as all good servants ever do. I see nothing before me but a premature old age of pains and groans, and gripes and grumblings, which will, of course, not last over long; and thus I shall be cut short in my career, when I should have been enjoying life's tranquil evening, without a single vexation of any kind to trouble me.

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11. Were I of a ran'corous temper, it might be a consolation to think that master my the cause of all my woes. must suffer and sink with me; but I don't see how this can mend my own case; and, from old acquaintance, I am rather disposed to feel sorry for him, as one who has been more ignorant and imprudent than ill-meaning. In the same spirit let me hope that this true and unaffected account of my case may prove a warning to other persons how they use their stomachs; for they may depend upon it that whatever injustice they do to us in their days of health and pride will be repaid to themselves in the long-run, friend Madam Nature being an inveterately accurate accountant who makes no allowance for revokes or mistakes.

our

CHAMBERS.

LXX. THE PERMANENCE OF WORDS.

EI

1. AN eloquent but extravagant writer has hazarded the assertion that "words are the only things that last forever." Nor is this merely a splendid saying, or a startling paradox," that may be qualified by explanation into commonplace; but with respect to man and his works on earth it is literally true. Temples and palaces, amphitheatres and catacombs, monuments of power, and magnificence, and skill, to perpetuate the memory, and preserve even the ashes, of those who lived in past ages, must, in the revolutions of mundane events, not only perish themselves by violence or decay, but the very dust in which they perished be so scattered as to leave no trace of their material existence behind.

2. There is no security beyond the passing moment for the most permanent or the most precious of these; they are as much in jeopardy as ever, after having escaped the changes and chances of thousands of years. An earthquake may suddenly ingulf the pyramids of Egypt, and leave the sand of the desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea-shore. A hammer in the hand of an idiot may break to pieces the Apollo Belvidere, or the Venus de Medici, which are scarcely less worshipped as miracles of art in our day than they were by idolaters of old as representatives of deities.

3. Looking abroad over the whole world, after the lapse of nearly six thousand years, what have we of the past but the words in which its history is recorded? What beside a few mouldering and brittle ruins, which time is imperceptibly touching down into dust,— what, beside these, remains of the glory the grandeur, the intelligence, the supremacy, of the Grecian republics, or the empire of Rome ? Nothing but the words of poets, historians, philosophers, and orators, who, being dead, yet speak, and in their immortal works still maintain their dominion over inferior minds through all posterity. And these intellectual sovereigns not only govern our spirits from the tomb by the power of their thoughts, but their very voices are heard by our living ears in the accents of their mother-tongues.

4. The beauty, the eloquence, and art, of these collocations of sounds and syllables,70 the learned alone can appreciate, and that only (in some cases) after long, intense, and laborious investigation; but, as thought can be made to transmigrate from one Dody of words into another, even through all the languages of

William Hazlitt See Index.

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