RUPERT'S MARCH. BY G. W. THORNBURY. CARABINE slung, stirrup well hung, Flash all your swords, like Tartarian hordes, As we, galloping, sing our mad Cavalier lays. Ring the bells back, though the sexton look black, Defiance to knaves who are hot on our track. "Murder and fire!" shout louder and higher; We'll remember Edgehill and the red-dabbled Froth it up, girl, till it splash every curl, We never may taste of to-morrow night's sup. (Those red ribbons glow on thy bosom below Like apple-tree bloom on a hillock of snow.) No, by my word, there never shook sword Glitters more bright than this blade to the eye. Well, whatever may hap, this rusty steel-cap Will guard me from rapier as well as from cold; Here is a dint from the jagg of a flint, But this stab through the buff was a warning more rough, When Coventry city arose in a huff; They were twenty to one, our poor rapier to gun, one; And I saved the old flag, though it was but a rag, And the sword in my hand was snapped off to a jagg. The water was churned as we wheeled and we turned, And the dry brake to scare out the vermin we burned. We gave our halloo, and our trumpet we blew; With a mock and a laugh won their banner and Of all their stout fifty we left them but two; staff, And trod down the cornets as threshers do chaff. For treason has always some mischief to hatch; In spite of the sneers, and the curses and frowns, See black on each roof, at the sound of our hoof, Butt-end to the door, one hammer more, Saddle-bags fill, Bob, Jenkin, and Will, rill. That maiden shall ride for to-day by my side, Does Baxter say right, that a bodice laced tight And I met with this gash when we rode with a By the arm of a lover to be oft embraced. crash Into Noll's pikes on the banks of the Ash. No jockey or groom wears so draggled a plume As this that 's just drenched in the swift-flowing Froom. Red grew the tide ere we reached the steep side, Pistolet crack flashed red on our track, Down on your knees, you villains in frieze, A draught to King Charles, or a swing from those trees; Blow off this stiff lock, for 't is useless to knock, The ladies will pardon the noise and the shock. (From this bright dewy cheek, might I venture to speak, I could kiss off the tears, though she wept for a week.) Now loop me this scarf round the broken pikestaff, "T will do for a flag, though the Crop Heads may laugh. Who was it blew? Give an halloo, And hang out the pennon of crimson and blue; Fire the old mill on the brow of the hill, Now look to your buff, for steel is the stuff Ere the stars glimmer out we will wake with a shout The true men of York, who will welcome our rout. We'll shake their red roofs with our echoing hoofs, And flutter the dust from their tapestry woofs; And the Minster shall ring with our "God save the king," And our horses shall drink at St. Christopher's spring; We shall welcome the meat, and the wine will taste sweet, When our boots we fling off, and as brothers we meet. - New Monthly Magazine. THE COMIC ARTIST. BY T. WESTWOOD. I.. A WITTY picture! What a merry soul Famine, sat next his heart, devoured his breath ;. LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 610.-2 FEBRUARY, 1856. From Bentley's Miscellany. idlest fancies profitable, and its keenest satire indulgent: a playfulness, of which Wordsworth and Plato are proposed as the finest and highest examples in the one case, unmixed with satire, the perfectly simple effusion of that spirit "Which gives to all the self-same bent, Whose life is wise and innocent;" You BACON's words make an apt motto for "Friends in Council," the spirit of them being notably embodied in the form of that charming book. "It is good, in Discourse, and Speech of Conversation," saith the philosopher, "to vary and intermingle Speech of the present Occasion with Arguments; in Plato, and, adds Mr. Ruskin, “in a very Tales with Reasons; Asking of Questions wise book of our own times, not unworthy with Telling of Opinions; and Jest with of being named in such companionship, Earnest: For it is a dull Thing to Tire, and Friends in Council,' mingled with an exas we say now, to Jade, anything too far." Milverton's essays are never allowed to tire, quisitely tender and loving satire." can see how satirical the essayist might be, or jade, anything too far: at the first pos- in many an instance where he allows himself sibility of quid nimis, his two friends in council haste into the rescue, and change the only to be gently ironical. There is often a monologue into a mixed mode of cheery con- reflections on man and manners—as where strong dash of the Thackeray essence in his verse-like those other friends in council, the essayist, contrasting life as it is in novels one of whom tells us how, on summer days with life as it is out of them, says that in in the woods, the latter, real life, nothing is tied up neatly, but all in odds and ends, and that no third volume turns up to make things straightmany an Augustus marrying many a Belinda, and, instead of being happy ever afterwards, For we can fancy a real likeness to exist finding in each successive period of their between the colloquies on paper of these existence its own new growth of trials and Worth Ashton worthies, and those of actual troubles. Or where Milverton mentions his vivâ voce fact, so tenderly recorded in our meeting at a country inn with a book of laureate's verse; between the matter and prize-fighters' memoirs, and describes them manner peculiar to the collegian's conferen- as sad chronicles, told with much earnestces, and that characteristic of our fictitiousness: how Jim This was stout-hearted and "Friends in Council," who, in effect, seem skilful too, but thought he could do more to us now to "they glanced from theme to theme, "talk as once they talked Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old they walked," beside the river's wooded reach, or elsewhere. This composite order in the structure of his later works gives them a marked superiority, cateris paribus, in point of interest and popular effect, over the earlier "Essays written in Intervals of Business." Mr. Helps is one of those writers whose frequent playfulness is, to quote the "Oxford Graduate," never without such deep love of God, of truth, and of humanity, as shall make even its lightest words reverent, its LIVING AGE. VOL. XII. 17 DCX. than he could- and Tom That could have done anything but that he was fond of something else and Sam the Other, who could beat all the world, had somebody at home whom he was more afraid of than all the world: the book being dismissed with the remark, that it was very like reading of great conquerors and mighty kings, only that author's satire is seen and felt in such rethe names were shorter. The quality of the marks as that on the exact proportion of a man's ignorance of a subject, to the noise he makes about it at a public meeting; or the sententious counsel to prefer tallow-boiling as a profession to literature-"it is better to "Stones of Venice," vol. III provide the fuel for the lamp than those when he was too wearied in body and mind productions which are said to smell most of to attend to it, or to anything." To every it; or his fling at those coarse, complacent such passage we may justly apply a distinpeople of the world who " pronounce not guished critic's note of admiration : "Il only upon the influx and efflux of tea, coffee, n'y a pas une affectation, pas un effort: sugar, and gold (in which, by the way, their ce sont des circonstances toutes simples, sendicta are generally wrong)," but also on the ties par une âme vive; et rien n'est plus ebb and flow of the passions or the affec- éloquent." tions- and who, seven hundred years ago, Of the three "Friends" who walk and after the first crusade, would have pro- talk and take sweet" Council" together, nounced, with a wave of the hand after din- Ellesmere is the man of most individuality. ner, that there never could be such another He is a rough, slovenly-dressed, out-spoken, adventure again, as the first had by no George Warrington sort of a man, cynical of means been found to pay;—or, once more, speech and kind of heart, impatient of shams, the expression of his quiet disdain for the and no way regardful of appearances. When wordy revolutionists of 1848, and their issu- he goes out to dinner, his reflection is, ing edicts upon the settlement of all human" What a sacrifice of good things, and of affairs, public and private, with a rapidity the patience and comfort of human beings, and want of thought which, he says, would a cumbrous modern dinner is;" and his be shameful if applied to the regulations of inevitable longing on such occasions is, to a kennel of hounds men (he calls them) get up and walk about. His friends wonder "of glittering words, false axioms, inappro- what he would have done, with that satirical priate antitheses, and general inflation of turn of his, in old persecuting times · - what mind." His turn for humor is of a genu- escape his sarcasm would have found for ine English sort. It is his own observation, itself: some orthodox way, one of them sugthat nothing corrects theories better than gests, who questions Ellesmere's inclination that sense of humor in which Englishmen for martyrdom: to which Ellesmere replies, excel: "an Englishman sees easily the ab- that certainly he has no taste for making surdity which lurks in any extreme propo- torches for truth, or being one - preferring sition;" and the essayist's own writings humane darkness to such illumination; but exemplify the assertion. In pathos, again, he that, at the same time, as he for himself repeatedly, though most unobtrusively, shows well and truly says, one cannot tell lies; himself an approved good master. Witness and if one had been questioned about the the little episode relating to Ellesmere's dead- incomprehensibilities which men in former and-gone nephew, and that of his German days were so fierce upon, one must have protégée, or the reverie picturing forth a descendant's life-history, or the sick-bed scene where a fallen woman lies, steeped in misery and degradation, but thinking of her mother's gentle assiduities in some of the ailments of her childhood, or the allusion to one of those vast bereavements which seem a tearing away of part of a man's very soul: "when he thought each noise in the house, hearing noises that he never heard before, must be something they were doing in the roomthe room where lay all that was mortal of some one inexpressibly dear to him; when he awoke morning after morning to struggle with a grief which seemed as new, as appalling, and as large as on the first day; which, indeed, being part of himself, and thus partaking of his renovated powers, rose equipped with what rest, or alacrity, sleep had given him; and sank, unconquered, only 66 shown that one disagreed with all parties." El been called, a Diogenes with the heart of a Saint John. Like some other great lawyers of past and present days Erskine, Brougham, and Wilde, for instance-he is very fond, Mil- If Ellesmere's character is traced in bold verton tells him, "of live creatures of all sharp strokes, that of Dunsford is happily kinds men, women, and children ex- shaded with delicate nuances and quiet tints, cepted" - and is ever making purchases at very effective in their way. He likes to listen Hungerford market, in his walks home from rather than to talk; and by his own account, Westminster to his chambers; now a New- when anything apposite does occur to him, it foundland puppy of remarkable sagacity, is generally the day after the conversation which forthwith gets the upper hand of takes place. But we feel his presence "in Rollo; now a peacock of imperial presence Council" throughout; and when he does and intense self-complacency; pigeons, guinea speak, it is with a benignant sagacity, a melpigs, curious fowls of various kinds, a jack-low good sense, and often a lambent irony, daw of mark and likelihood, and a hedgehog that add materially to the interest of the which he calls "his learned friend," but debate. On a hot day, when the Friends which his associates call Snoozelem. His are all of them lying about in easy attitudes maxim is, Love me, not only love my dog, on the grass, Dunsford with his gaiters forms but my pig, my guinea-pig that is to say, a prominent as well as a most picturesque my pigeons, and my hedgehog. And when figure. He sometimes puts a question that Milverton, in one of the colloquies, expresses requires a stout quarto volume with notes to his wish to see an opportunity of self-develop- answer. In matters of controversy, he selment extend to animals, Ellesmere says: dom wants more than a slight pretext for "Mine does not 'extend' to animals: it going over to the charitable side of things. begins there, I don't know whether it goes His sister manages his Worth Ashton home on. Benevolence, you know, is not my for him, and does not leave him much to do forte." Benevolence is his forte though, as regards the management of himself; but and beneficence too. As for his faithful he is tolerant of petticoat government, and Rollo, it is fine to observe the entente cordiale checks the first risings of discontent with the between them to overhear the master's memento, "But I must not complain, as it half asides, muttered in piquant ridicule of is a great thing to be loved and cared for by something in the essay or the debate, and anybody." He is no white-livered milksop, supposed to be meant for the favorite's rough though. He is prompt to glow with enthuand ready ear-and to see that favorite siasm at a generous thought or deed, and to come bounding to him, nearly upsetting him boil with indignation at a base or cruel one. thereby, in the intent of coming to shake When one of Milverton's essays refers to bands, as the way of dogs is, with his Slavery as "the enduring perplexity of the wisest men," the good, mild pastor interposes Ellesmere, then, is "not a bad fellow," a protest: "Strike out that word 'endursays Milverton, "at least not so bad as he ing,' Milverton; endure it cannot, endure it a remark properly enough resented shall not" to be hailed by Milverton with by Ellesmere, who vows it is very spiteful to a delighted "Well done, my dear Dunsford! represent him as having less spite than was I have seen for some time that you have been supposed, "wearing me about you like a at boiling point, quite ready to go out in a tame serpent with the poison taken out of boat by yourself and attack a slaver (some him." Whether working a problem in boy- one did the other day); or to set up an hood, or cogitating a quæstio vexata in man- academy for Negro boys in a slave state, hood, "I very seldom," says Ellesmere, perhaps the more dangerous thing of the come to the same results as anybody else." two." And if Dunsford now and then says So sarcastic is he, that the gentle Lucy won- something that, by its simplicity and conders when anything in nature will give fiding innocence, elicits from Ellesmere the occasion to Mr. Ellesmere to say anything exclamation: "My dear Dunsford, what an good-natured of man: when she knows him invaluable creature you are, how charmingly wetter, she will find the rugged cynic has a you are imposed upon;" on the other hand heart tender as her own; for he is like what he sometimes drops a sage remark that one of our queerest and best of essayists has prompts Milverton to say: "I cannot help mouth. seems |