all know how he lives. He writes for bread, and gets it short weight; for money, and gets the wrong change;--for the Present, and he is pirated;-for the Future, and his children are disinherited for his pains. At last, he sickens, as he well may, and can write no more. He makes his will, but, for any literary property, might as well die intestate. His eldest son is his heir, but the Row administers. And so he dies, a beggar, with the world in his debt. Being poor, he is buried with less ceremony than Cock Robin. Had he been rich enough, he might have bought a "snug lying in the Abbey" of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, who even then, true to the same style of treatment, would put him, were he the greatest and best of our Poets-as the mother puts the least and worst of her brats-into a Corner!

PROSPECTUS OF HOOD'S MAGAZINE.

WHATEVER may be thought of Dr. Dickson's theory, that the type of disease in general is periodical, there can be no doubt of its applicability to modern literature, which is essentially periodical, whether the type be long primer, brevier, or bourgeois. It appears, moreover, by the rapid consumption of monthlies, compared with the decline of the annuals, that frequent fits of publication are more prevalent and popular than yearly paroxysms.

Under these circumstances, no apology is necessary for the present undertaking; but custom, which exacts an overture to a new opera, and a prologue to a new play, requires a few words of introduction to a new monthly magazine.

One prominent object, then, of the projected publication, as implied by the sub-title of "Comic Miscellany," will be the supply of harmless "Mirth for the Million," and light thoughts, to a public sorely oppressed-if its word be worth a rush, or its complaints of an ounce weight-by hard times, heavy taxes, and those “eating cares " which attend on the securing of food for the day, as well as a provision for the future. For the relief of such afflicted classes, the editor, assisted by able humorists, will dispense a series of papers and woodcuts, which, it is hoped, will cheer the gloom of Willow Walk, and the loneliness of Wilderness Row-sweeten the bitterness of Camomile street and Wormwood street-smoothe the ruffled temper of Cross street, and enable even Crooked Lane to unbend itself! It is hardly necessary to promise that this end will be pursued without raising a maiden blush, much less a damask, in the nursery grounds of

modesty or trespassing, by wanton personalities, on the parks and lawns of private life. In a word, it will aim at being merry and wise, instead of merry and otherwise.

For the sedate, there will be papers of a becoming gravity; and the lover of poetry will be supplied with numbers in each number.

As to politics, the reader of HoOD'S MAGAZINE will vainly search in its pages for a panacea for agricultural distress, or a grand Catholicon for Irish agitation; he will uselessly seek to know whether we ought to depend for our bread on foreign farmers, or merely on foreign sea-fowl; or, if the repeal of the Union would produce low rents and only three quarter days. Neither must he hope to learn the proper terminus of reform, nor even whether a finality man means Campbell's last man, or an undertaker.

A total abstinence from such stimulating topics and fermented questions is, indeed, ensured by the established character of the editor, and his notorious aversion to party spirit. To borrow his own words, from a letter to the proprietors," I am no politician, and far from instructed on those topics which, to parody a common phrase, no gentleman's newspaper should be without. Thus, for any knowledge of mine, the Irish prosecutions may be for pirating the Irish melodies; the Pennsylvanians may have repudiated their wives; Duff Green may be a place, like Goose Green; Prince Polignac a dahlia or a carnation, and the Duc de Bordeaux a tulip. The Spanish affairs I could never master, even with a Pronouncing Dictionary at my elbow; it would puzzle me to see whether Queen Isabella's majority is or is not equal to Sir Robert Peel's; or, if the shelling the Barcelonese was done with bombs and mortars, or the nutcrackers. Prim may be a quaker, and the whole civil war about the Seville Oranges. Nay, even on domestic matters, nearer home, my profound political ignorance leaves me in doubt on questions concerning which the newsmen's boys and printers' devils have formed very decided opinions; for example, whether the corn law league ought to extend beyond three miles from Mark Lane

or the sliding scale should regulate the charges at the glaciarium-what share the Welsh whigs have had in the Welsh

riots, and how far the Ryots in India were excited by the slaughter of the Brahmin Bull. On all such public subjects I am less au fait than that Publicist the Potboy, at the public. house, with the insolvent sign, The Hog in the Pound."

Polemics will be excluded with the same rigor; and especially the Tractarian schism. The reader of HOOD'S MAGAZINE must not hope, therefore, to be told whether an old Protestant church ought to be plastered with Roman cement; or if a design for a new one should be washed in with Newman's colors. And most egregiously will he be disappointed, should he look for controversial theology in our Poets' Corner. He might as well expect to see queens of Sheba, and divided babies, from wearing Solomon's spectacles!

For the rest, a critical eye will be kept on our current literature, a regretful one on the drama, and a kind one for the fine arts, from whose artesian well there will be an occasional drawing.

With this brief explanatory announcement, HoOD'S MAGAZINE AND COMIC MISCELLANY is left to recommend itself, by its own merits, to those enlightened judges, the reviewers; and to that impartial jury-too vast to pack in any case-the British public.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE;

A ROMANCE.

"A jolly place, said he, in days of old,

But something ails it now: the spot is curst."

HARTLEAP WELL, BY WORDSWORTH.

PART I.

SOME dreams we have are nothing else but dreams,
Unnatural and full of contradictions;

Yet others of our most romantic schemes
Are something more than fictions.

It might be only on enchanted ground;
It might be merely by a thought's expansion,
But in the spirit, or the flesh, I found
An old deserted mansion.

A residence for woman, child, and man,
A dwelling-place-and yet no habitation;
A house-but under some prodigious ban
Of excommunication.

Unhinged the iron gates half open hung,
Jarr'd by the gusty gales of many winters,
That from its crumbled pedestal had flung
One marble globe in splinters.

No dog was at the threshold, great or small;
No pigeon on the roof-no household creature-
No cat demurely dozing on the wall—
Not one domestic feature.