Mr Christopher," answered her papa; "they'll no make an ill match, after a'," said he, as Miss Jean and I were arranged back to back; " but let them please themselves." The young lady seemed not much displeased with the arrangement which had been chalked out for her; and as we stood back to back, I thought I felt her press her head gently to mine, as much as to say, "Christopher, what do you say to all this?" Miss Jean, though a very good girl, happened to be rather dumpy for my taste in female beauty; and I cannot but say, if the old people had thought it proper, that I should have preferred Miss Margaret for my proffered partner in life, as she was both younger and taller, and in my apprehension much prettier than her sister. However, I had by some accident put up my hand to feel our difference in height, which was asserted by Mr Callimanky to be a "scrimpit quarter," by his sister to be "little more than a handbreadth," and by Mrs Callimanky to be "just a nail," and the young lady, probably to ascertain the same fact, reached up her hand at the same moment. Aunty Betty, who had now completely recovered from the spasm occasioned by the button, and who, it was reported, was to leave her pose to Miss Jean, should she die unmarried, observed the occurrence with woman's keen eye for observation, and immediately called the attention of the company to the incident, by crying aloud, See, they're joining hands already! Gudewife, we maun hae a glass o' your best to the health of the young couple." Miss Callimanky's hand and mine were withdrawn in confusion; she blushing like a rose, and my face (for I blushed too) like a full-blossomed carnation. Cake and wine were produced; the healths of the day went round, with pointed allusion to the projected alliance; and I was not allowed to depart without a promise to come up exactly at three, and tak a slice o' beef, and taste the goose and the apple-pye, which were the eatable attractions of the day. I escorted the

Misses M'Guffie home, and though they did not venture openly to say anything to the disadvantage of my proffered spouse, they pretty broadly insinuated, in a general way, that "handless taupies, wha couldna set their hands to a turn, but play upon pianos, and read Shakespeare's novels and Smollett's plays, might do very weel for a gentleman o' fortune," but were not likely to contribute much to the happiness of those to whom domestic econo my was an object worth caring for.

I returned to my dinner as invited; the Misses M'Guffie came to tea at six, and we passed a very amusing evening "gieing guesses," expounding riddles, in music, singing, and dancing. Time slipped away so unperceivedly, that I was not aware it was ten o'clock, till Mrs Callimanky, upon the striking of that hour in St Giles's, gave us the hint to depart by saying, "Now, sirs, there's nane o' you to gang away ye'll just stay and tak a rizzered haddie." I was proof, however, against the temptation; and having deposited the M'Guffies in Baillie Fife's Close, I closed the celebration of Christmas by going home.

In the country the same day was held much in the same manner, but there all work was suspended, and the ceremonies began by a public breakfast, supported by lunches and drams in the forenoon, and terminated by a dinner and dance, at which Christmas ale (generally brewed for the purpose) was not spared. Some traits of religious feeling, however, still mix with the observance of Christmas in the country; and it is a received opinion among the simple inhabitants, that at twelve o'clock on Christmas eve, all the bees in the hives may be heard singing the advent of the Saviour of the world. Naturalists say, that this will or will not happen, as the temperature is high or low; but one almost regrets the investigations which dissipate a superstition so amiable, as that of believing that all nature expresses her gratulations at an event which is of importance to man alone.

BETWEEN thirty and forty years ago, the Della Crusca school was in great force. It poured out monthly, weekly, and daily, the whole fulness of its raptures and sorrows in verse, worthy of 66 any person of quality." It revelled in moonlight, and sighed with evening gales, lamented over plucked roses, and bid melodious farewells to the last butterfly of the season." The taste prevailed for a time; the more rational part of the public, always a minority, laughed and were silent; the million were in raptures, and loud in their raptures. The reign of "sympathy" was come again, poetry, innocent poetry, had at length found out its true language. Milton and Dryden, Pope and the whole ancestry of the English Muse, had strayed far from nature. They were a formal and stiff-skirted generation, and their fame was past and forever. The trumpet of the morning paper, in which those inventions rich" were first promulgated, found an echo in the more obscure fabrications of the day, and milliners' maids and city apprentices pined over the mutual melancholies of Arley and Matilda. At length, the obtrusiveness of this tuneful nonsense grew insupportable; a man of a vigorous judgment shook off his indolence, and commenced the long series of his services to British literature, by sweeping away, at a brush of his pen, the whole light-winged, humming, and loving population. But in this world folly is immortal; one generation of absurdity swept away, another succeeds to its glories and its fate. The Della Crusca school has visited us again, but with some slight change of localities. Its verses now transpire at one time from the retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs; sometimes they visit us by fragments from Venice, and sometimes invade us by wainloads from Pisa. In point of subject and execution, there is but slight difference; both schools are "smitten with nature, and nature's love," run riot in the intrigues of anemonies, daisies, and buttercups, and rave to the "rivulets proud, and the deep blushing stars." Of the individuals in both establishments, we

are not quite qualified to speak, from the peculiarity of their private habits; but poor Mrs Robinson and her correspondents are foully belied, if their moral habits were not to the full as pure as those of the Godwinian colony, that play "the Bacchanal beside the Tuscan sea." But we must do the defunct Della Crusca the justice to say, that they kept their private irregularities to themselves, and sought for no reprobate popularity, by raising the banner to all the vicious of the community. They talked nonsense without measure, were simple down to the lowest degree of silliness, and "babbled of green fields" enough to make men sicken of summer, but they were not daring enough to boast of impurity; there was no pestilent hatred of every thing generous, true, and honourable; no desperate licentiousness in their romance; no daring and fiendlike insult to feeling, moral ties, and Christian principle. They were foolish and profligate, but they did not deliver themselves, with the steady devotedness of an insensate and black ambition, to the ruin of society.

We have now to speak of Mr P. B. Shelley and his poem. Here we must again advert to the Della Crusca. One of the characteristics of those childish persons was, the restless interest which they summoned the public to take in every thing belonging to their own triviality. If Mrs Robinson's dog had a bad night's repose, it was duly announced to the world; Mr Merry's accident in paring his nails solicited a similar sympathy; the falling off of Mrs R.'s patch, at the last ball, or the stains on Mr M.'s fulldress coat, from the dropping of a chandelier, came before the earth, with praise-worthy promptitude. All within their enchanted ring was perfection; but there the circle of light and darkness was drawn, and all beyond was delivered over to the empire of Dulness and Demogorgon. The New School are here the humble imitators of those original arbiters of human fame.

The present story is thus:-A Mr John Keats, a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy

trade of Cockney-poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses, much neglected by the public. His vanity was probably wrung not less than his purse; for he had it upon the authority of the Cockney Homers and Virgils, that he might become a light to their region at a future time. But all this is not necessary to help a consumption to the death of a poor sedentary man, with an unhealthy aspect, and a mind harassed by the first troubles of versemaking. The New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the Quarterly Review.-"O flesh, how art thou fishified!"-There is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review-for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been inflicted at least as long since. We are not now to defend a publication so well able to defend itself. But the fact is, that the Quarterly finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners and of masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote indecently, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities. He selected from Boccacio, and, at the feet of the Italian Priapus, supplicated for fame and farthings.

"Both halves the winds dispersed in

empty air."

Mr P. B. Shelly having been the person appointed by the Pisan triumvirate to canonize the name of this apprentice, nipt in the bud," as he fondly tells us, has accordingly produced an Elegy, in which he weeps "after the manner of Moschus for Bion." The canonizer is worthy of the saint.-"Et tu, Vitula !"-Locke says, that the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every three sentences. Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove, from the present Elegy, that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of every three. A more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred, or, as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas,leaving about five readable lines in the entire. It thus commences:

Now, of this unintelligible stuff the whole fifty-five stanzas are composed. Here an hour-a dead hour too-is to say that Mr J. Keats died along with it! yet this hour has the heavy business on its hands of mourning the loss of its fellow-defunct, and of rousing all its obscure compeers to be taught its own sorrow, &c. Mr Shelley and his tribe have been panegyrized in their turn for power of language; and the man of "Table-talk" swears by all the gods he owns, that he has a great command of words, to which the most eloquent effusions of the Fives Court are occasionally inferior. But any man may have the command of every word in the vocabulary, if he will fling them like pebbles from a sack; and even in the most fortuitous flinging, they will sometimes fall in pleasing though useless forms. The art of the modern Della Cruscan is thus to eject every epithet that he can conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon, and throw them out to settle as they will. He follows his own rhymes, and shapes his subject to the close of his measure. He is a glutton of all names of colours, and flowers, and smells, and tastes, and crowds his verse with scarlet, and blue, and yellow, and green; extracts tears from every thing, and makes moss and mud hold regular conversations with him. "A goosepye talks," it does more, it thinks, and has its peculiar sensibilities,—it smiles and weeps, raves to the stars, and is a listener to the western wind, as fond as the author himself.

On these principles, a hundred or a hundred thousand verses might be made, equal to the best in Adonais, without taking the pen off the paper. The subject is indifferent to us, let it be the "Golden age," or "Mother Goose,"-"Waterloo," or the " Wit of the Watchhouse,"—"Tom Thumb,” "Thistlewood." We will undertake to furnish the requisite supply of

or

blue and crimson daisies and dandelions, not with the toilsome and tardy lutulence of the puling master of verbiage in question, but with a burst and torrent that will sweep away all his weedy trophies. For example-Wontner, the city marshal, a very decent person, who campaigns it once a year, from the Mansion-house to Blackfriars bridge, truncheoned and uniformed as becomes a man of his military habits, had the misfortune to fracture his leg on the last Lord Mayor's day. The subject is among the most unpromising. We will undertake it, however, (premising, that we have no idea of turning the accident of this respectable man into any degree of ridicule.)

O WEEP FOR ADONAIS, &c.

O weep for Wontner, for his leg is broke, O weep for Wontner, though our pearly

Haughty Geranium, in your beaupots set, Were then your soft and starry eyes unwet? The pigeons saw it, and on silver wings Hung in white flutterings, for they could not fly,

Hoar-headed Thames checked all his crystal springs,

Day closed above his pale, imperial eye, The silken Zephyrs breathed a vermeil sigh.

High Heavens! ye Hours! and thou Üra-ni-a!

Where were ye then? Reclining languidly Upon some green Isle in the empurpled Sea,

Where laurel-wreathen spirits love eternally.

Come to my arms, &c.

We had intended to call attention by italics to the picturesque of these lines; but we leave their beauties to be ascertained by individual perspicacity; only requesting their marked admiration of the epithets coquetting, fond, fearless, and Laughty, which all tastes will feel to have so immediate and inimitable an application to mignionet, hyacinths, myrtles, and geraniums. But Percy Byshe has figured as a sentimentalist before, and we can quote largely without putting him to the blush by praise. What follows illustrates his power over the language of passion. In the

In charnel pits! Poh! I am choak'd!
There creeps

A clinging, black, contaminating mist
About me, 'tis substantial, heavy, thick.
I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another,
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves
My flesh to a pollution," &c. &e.

So much for the history of "Glue” and so much easier is it to rake together the vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism, than to paint the workings of the mind. This raving is such as perhaps no excess of madness ever raved, except in the imagination of a Cockney, determined to be as mad lections of the shambles. as possible, and opulent in his recol

In the same play, we have a specimen of his "art of description." He tells of a ravine

"And in its depths there is a mighty Rock, Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustain'd itself with terror and with toil! Over a gulph, and with the agony With which it clings, seems slowly coursing down;

Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour, Clings to the mass of life, yet clinging leans,

And leaning, makes more dark the dread

abyss

In which it fears to fall. Beneath this

size of despair! Soul becomes substan tial, and darkens a dread abyss. Such are Cockney darings before" the Gods, and columns" that abhor mediocrity. And is it to this dreary non

sense that is to be attached the name of poetry? Yet on these two passages the whole lauding of his fellow-Cockneys has been lavished. But Percy Byshe feels his hopelessness of poetic reputation, and therefore lifts himself on the stilts of blasphemy. He is the only verseman of the day, who has dared, in a Christian country, to work out for himself the character of direct ATHEISM! In his present poem, he talks with impious folly of" the envious wrath of man or GOD!" Of a "Branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain's or CHRIST'S."

Offences like these naturally come before a more effective tribunal than that of criticism. We have heard it

mentioned as the only apology for the predominant irreligion and nonsense of this person's works, that his understanding is unsettled. But in his Preface, there is none of the exuberance of insanity; there is a great deal of folly, and a great deal of bitterness, but nothing of the wildness of his poetic fustian. The Bombastes Furioso of these stanzas cools into sneering in the preface; and his language against the death-dealing Quarterly Review, which has made such havoc in the Empire of Cockaigne, is merely malignant, mean, and peevishly personal. We give a few stanzas of this performance, taken as they occur. "O weep for Adonais! He is dead! Weep, melancholy mother, wake and weep; Yet wherefore? quench within their burning bed

For whom should she have wak'd the sullen year?

To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both, Thou, Adonais; wan they stand, and sere, Amid the drooping comrades of their youth, With dew all turn'd to tears, odour to sighing ruth."

Here is left, to those whom it may concern, the pleasant perplexity, whether the lament for Mr J. Keats is shared between Phoebus and Narcissus, or Summer and Autumn. It is useless to quote those absurdities any farther en masse, but there are flowers of poesy thickly spread through the work, which we rescue for the sake of any future Essayist on the Bathos. Absurdity.

The green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprison'd flowers out of their

trance awake.

An hour

fair

knife, Invulnerable nothings!

Where lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love, and life, contend in it-for what Shall be its earthly doom-The dead live there,

And move, like winds of light, on dark and stormy air.

Who mourns for Adonais-oh! come forth, Fond wretch! and know thyself and him

aright,

Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth!