"To be sure it will; and you will exhibit your better nature by the warmer regret. We cannot, one of us, yield the body up to the mind, much less to the spirit, without a pang. To fall back upon reflective counterparts of the actualities of physical enjoyments, is to resign the visible world for the invisible-to become blind that we may see."

"How do you manage, Twiller, when you are forced to proclaim your sentiments, one way or the other?"

To say the truth, I have not yet been put to the proof, in a mixed company; and I foresee that it will be a struggle. I shall have all the young against me, Eusebius !"

"A formidable phalanx!"

"And nothing but wrinkles, and gout, and crutches, and crochets on my side."

"Yes, and the liberal and generous soul which applauds the motive, even in declining to imitate the act."

"Even that is uncertain, unless I must exclude myself from the class. Well do I remember the mingled emotions of contempt and dislike with which I used, in my youth, to contemplate a certain eccentric cousin of mine who had thought proper to abandon the sports of the field. It is very alarming, Eusebius, to think that one may actually beget the same feelings in unknown quarters. That noble scion of a noble house, what is it that I now honour his self-sacrifice with approving tears? I dare say he himself experienced all this diffidence and misgiving and apprehension which I now encounter. Did they protect him? Let my own conscience answer that question!"

Here Twiller was obliged to pause. And Eusebius Bland felt that it would be unbecoming in him to break in upon that pause.

At length Twiller resumed,—

"You will, John Twiller; but nobody else would. As for me, I humbly confess

"Then, suppose I were on a visit. A fine morning-the setters whining barrels squibbing-a party of friends talking cheerily about meRollo looking beseechingly in my face-I have a stiff leg, a pain in my back, a head-ache-a letter to write. Can't go. Well, the next time. Yet, after all, these excuses, too, are criminal, and won't always serve.

The sin lies in the killing, I suppose," suggested Bland, musingly, though it is only the incident, not the object, of the sport."

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"True; but as an incident it is equally wrong. One sometimes is tempted to wish that there were fossil pterodactyls in the air, to skim over the stubble on their stony wings, and be brought down by duck-shot. Shooting these would be innocent, I suppose.'

After all," said Bland, "may it not be a question for a casuist to decide, how far we are not justified in adopting a vicious system which we find universal, for the sake of conformity and peace? Here is the universal usage; the genius of our national character. Nobody dreams of seeing cruel pleasure in a day's sport. Healthy, invigorating, developing all manly and British qualities as it does, is the system to be denounced, because it causes, as one of its accessorial necessities, suffering to animals, which animals, be it remembered, are articles of human consumption, as sheep and oxen are? God forbid, Twiller, that I should lightly advocate the continuance of abuses, because they are general. You know my sentiments on the slave question. But I cannot shut my eyes to an opposite danger, to which all these exceptions are liable. You may narrow too rigidly the confines of admissible amusements. You may

contract the common by enclosure, until you drive trespassers into other people's preserves. What is an active young man to do to amuse himself?"

"Very true, Bland; that is the hardest question of all. Some substitute must be provided as an outlet for that exuberance of spirits which now goes off in detonations about the fields."

"And such you cannot find. I have often looked for it, fruitlessly."

"Perhaps, after all, Eusebius, we ought to take our pattern from Him who was himself the pattern of all virtue, and who, while he kept himself clear of offence, left things as he found them-war, slavery, public extortion; but preached, both by precept and example, doctrines subversive of these evils."

"Then we must, in any case, put by our own rods and guns?"

"As for me, my dear Eusebius, my heart has much to do with the matter. I must respect the prejudices of others; and I must respect my own humility. I would overlook with affectionate resignation the im, pulses of my children and friends in the questionable direction, and unceasingly inculcate and illustrate the blessed duty of making friends with all animated beings about us, participating in their joys and sympathising in their sufferings as far as possible, so as to beget feelings calculated by a general tendency to promote the effects I dare not hope directly to produce. Even this is hard. See what I have lost to-day, in the loss of the society of these two poor sleeping boys! Will it not be dangerous to relinquish such a hold?-to forego the natural opportunities of free

hearted conversation and instruction to be found in the fields?"

The hour for returning had now arrived. The boys were roused; coats buttoned on, and leave-takings gone through; but not before a promise had been extorted from their host to return the visit as soon as possible, accompanied, as the boys insisted he should be, by the dogs. To this Bland demurred, seeming determined to make some immediate demonstration on the subject of sporting; perhaps not sorry to shew the father what his notions had brought upon him. But at last, sorely pressed, he made a sort of compromise, by promising to fetch over a brace of greyhounds, which, although these dogs are generally made subservient to sporting purposes, were, with him, house-pets.

And now, as they were in the act of parting, Eusebius Bland seemed shaken and distressed,-Twiller was serious, the boys were tired and silent. Clouds had obscured the declining sun-the day had changed.

As the Twiller party sat together in the van, Demophon and Rollo seemed anxious to speak. At last, the former abruptly told his father that he meant to give up shooting; Rollo instantly announced the same intention.

and

ARACHNISMS.

How long is it to be, one may reasonably ask in some prospective apprehension, before such words as surveillance and espionage come to be accounted English? Before, instead of printing them in this appropriate Italian type, our compositor would naturally set them up in plain, like "omnibus" or "opprobrium," as vulgar tongue?

Verily, things are converging so strongly and swiftly to some great executive centre, that one begins to feel uncomfortably on the confines of a vast national mäelstrom, or on the outer skirt of some gigantic cobweb, in the midst of which lurks that horrible spider, Secret Irresponsible Authority! my walks

"Where'er I take abroad," I always meet the rural policeman; "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow ;" and he, as often and as certainly, meets me, the fast antagonist of all his adjectives. Yea, and far more surely than that I make

VOL. XLIX.NO. CCLXXXIX.

a note of him, he (to his inspector) makes a note of me. I more than suspect that Æsop's rides are gazetted on the files of the Home Office; and that, if he were amiably to invite (as he is very likely to do) Kossuth or Orsini, or any other such noble refugee to dinner, W 75 would be deputed to worm out of cook and butler all our generous toasts and speeches, and to lay a full and particular account thereof before some prying chief commissioner.

But is not this spy-police possibility a terrible one for a people, whose boast it is that they "never, never shall be slaves?"-that, under the meek guise of the Peeler, we may anon feel the strong and secret hand of your Austrian despots and your Neapolitan sbirri ! This modern

system of centralization is as destructive to individual liberty as the spider to the fly; quite antagonistic to our whilome boast, representative rule; quite opposite to Alfredian selfgovernment, and not half so much dreaded as it should be.

G

My children [if, as aforesaid, there were yet a Mrs. 4. may come to live in a very mesh of paid informers, with the Bastille for barracks. My grandchildren may come to long for their ancestors' free times, when constables were created locally, and a network of policemen did not overlay the land.

I declare even now one may hardly talk with four friends at the corner of a street without being ordered to move on; and being ignominiously collared, cuffed, cribbed, cabined, and confined, ay, and pulled up before Mr. Magistrate if we won't; and then forsooth publicly scolded and shamed, and bade to go about our business humbly, and obey in all things an irresponsible tyrannical police! Proh pudor! Isn't this enough to blanch the rubicund cheek of John Bull with rage, and excite Paddy into the volcanics?

Now, listen to a learned fable: short, fortunately.

A certain little houseleek (a native of congenial Italy, in 1699, as Loudon testifies, p. 194, Hortus Britannicus), once fell in love with a spider; and, as lovers will, too intimately encouraged its caresses. The consequence of which indiscretion is, that to this hour the Sempervivum Arachnoideum is covered with a vegetable cobweb.

Ask your nearest botanical friend how truly this perennial rockplant is ---or is nigh and soon about to be the type of Great Britain and Ireland under our new spy-system.

to be a dreadful inconvenience. Just when family meetings and social greetings enjoin on every one a more specific hilarity, when also the rigorous season urges most open-house benevolence, and when religion brings her best anniversary of beneficence to men; at such a time intrude unseasonably and unreasonably in whole flocks these unwelcome true Christmas woodcocks, long bills, hindering digestions, cooling friendlinesses, and quenching all manner of liberalities.

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Why let them out at merry Christmas? Why not in drear mid-January rather? Or, better still, why not work mother church's maxim fully out, and be careful to owe no man anything" after Advent Sunday? Who doesn't wish at Christmas that all his bills were paid a month ago? And wherefore delay those inevitable payments? If not shot down in the first wheel, they're off straight for the wilderness; and thereabouts is ruination-" tohu-va-bohu."

I'm resolved, if only I can flush my woodcocks timely-that is, if my sufferer-tradesmen will but send them in-to bring them down on their first still sweep, and so have all clear for hospitalities and charities and openheartedness by Christmas.

Now, if it hadn't been for that early December canter over Wademoss, I question if this good resolve had come into me (thanks, Brenny, for yonder flushed woodcock!) And let all mankind beside follow my example; for another year, at all events, as this Christmas is past.

THE MUSHROOM-LILY.

A carriage-load of lady visitors drove up the other day, just as I was mounting Brenda; of course delaying my ride, but, by way of compensation, shortening their visit. It was a begging visit; and therefore so far demanding compensation. With many apologies and protestations, my fair friends had brought a brace of albums for Æsop to extemporize therein and I have half suspected sometimes [see "Fish-hooks" anon] that these compliments are in the nature of a challenge; for I remain a bachelor. But be this as it may,-and it must be confessed that in point of

good looks they might easily do better-I am naturally shy of such compliments, and always beg off if I can; in the present instance unsuccessfully, for I felt myself obliged to improvise the following invention :

A Queen (bowing to the fairest of my exactors) commanded a trouba dour to sing: now the troubadour was hoarse, and his guitar jingly, and his fancy somewhat bedimmed by the fact of an execution in his house; and altogether he couldn't on the instant string rhymes and quavers together, even though a Queen commanded: (another bow,-and evidently I was producing a sensation; my auditory hung upon my words.)

"But, might it please your Majesty," croaked the unmusical trouba dour, "to permit me to write something in prose in your Majesty's album"-presuming its royal existence; "I think I could obey you on the instant."

was

The Queen accorded a gracious smile: the velvet volume brought in: and the troubadour with a cold wrote as follows:

"A gardener wanted a lily at Christmas, to offer to his fair young mistress at her bridal: so he put the poor bulb into a hot-bed, and tried to quicken out of time its torpid energies by artificial suns and showers : then the lily-root whispered from beneath its blanket, panting with forced heat-'Alas, I cannot flower until June; my season is at midsum mer, good master.' But a pert little fungus, starting up on a sudden, called out, 'Here am I, my master: did you want a flower in a hurry?'"

The awkward troubadour had evi dently committed himself; for the Queen frowned as she read what he had written notwithstanding, the incapable poet had done his best.

"And a very good best, too," encouragingly chorussed my fair friends. (How is it possible for my modesty to set down all their flatteries? for there was much more in the note of admiration-line added by the owner of that album). Still, the second ruthless creature (with Brenda waiting all the while!) had another album to be blotted; and, all in wrath and haste, I dared to write thus further:

"It is too bad to bother a man for poetry when his favorite mare is

catching cold at the door: she longs to be off, and so does he."

I wanted to see the latter-end of my fable come true, as to the Queen's frown and I succeeded: like the disconcerted troubadour, I had spoilt a page in a velvet volume. And the ladies suddenly remembered they had to call elsewhere.

Nevertheless, thought I, as I trotted off after handing my tormentors into their britska, there is a good deal to be said about doing things in season: and even the fungus didn't come amiss-for the occasion was seasonable to him. The genuine article of intellect has its special times for root-making, leaf-growing, and flowering. The sham of genius, tact, can imitate at any time; but it is a cast only, and lacks the living transparency of marble. I know, as you know, if anything of this you do know, there are early-morning pillowreveries when one longs for a spiritual secretary to fix the flying fancies; there are noon-tide keen inventions and ascertained philanthropic plans; there are midnight arguments, and strong-winged flights of mind. Furthermore, there have been seasons wherein thought would only naturally crystallize in rhyme-form; and others when, as now, it could only do that by an effort. The lily has its season, so has the fungus: let them both, according to their natures, live their little day.

IN HARNESS.

Tight-girthed, sharply curbed-up, close-blinkered, buckled, and bound, and strapped in all directions; with a heavy load, screaming axles, working against Time, and with hard old Needs-must for a driver,--how scant and spare the chances for the spirited young dare-devil Free-will!

Talk of conduct and character and responsibilities, judge keenly and closely of some poor fellow as you will and do,--but by all means let it be after taking due account of all his accidents and circumstances. What chances are left to him to show his paces, or to prove his many unappre ciated points, harnessed and hindered and driven to death as he is?