not the deadly stings and matured malignancy of the elder evils, but are more fretful, teazing, irritating, and annoying; and are that set of imps that are perpetually pestering men in middling circumstances, or rather, on the borders or confines thereof, but whom an increasing deficiency of, and an increasing necessity for, the circulating medium, is gradually dragging down to that class of "despisable vagabonds," as Cooper's houskeeper calls them-the poor. Be not afraid ye men of millions; I am not about to make any draughts upon your sympathy; I am not about to attempt to draw, a-la-Banim, any fearful, loathsome, haggard picture of poverty and its effects. Such pictures do little good, and much harm. They have the tendency to sear and render callous the feelings, rather than excite pity, or open the well-springs of divine charity. Besides, the superlative is not my line; the positive or comparative is quite high or low enough for one who neither deals in celestial bliss nor ineffable woe, but is content to peddle in the small ware of mere troubles and inconveniences. To want money is to want "honour, love, obedience, troops of friends;" it is to want respect and sympathy, and the ordinary courtesies of society, besides, occasionally victuals. The possession or non-possession of it makes the difference whether life has to be an enjoyment or a task; whether it has to be a walk over a smooth, verdant lawn, amid fragrant flowers, and aromatic shrubs, and all things that minister pleasure to the senses; or a wearisome up-hill journey through thorns and briars, and other ungracious impediments. It makes the difference whether you have to go bounding exultingly along like the free, full-blooded courser, or wend your way wearily and slow like the laden and despised pack-horse.

To want money, in a high state of civilization, is to be a kind of slave; it is, at least, to be dependent on the whims and caprices of others, instead of indulging in all the pleasant eccentricities or originalities to which your temperament may prompt you; it is to have to rise soon when you wish to lie late, and go to bed early in order to be enabled so to do; it is to have to live in unwholesome and anti-respectable neighbour hoods, and mix in daily communion with people whose ways are not your ways; it is to be a drudge, a hack, a machine, worked for the profit and advantage of others until the springs are

broken; it is to be omitted in family celebrations, and roam about invitationless at Christmas; it is to have to put up with equivocal nods and recognitions in the streets-to have your friends look into print-shop windows as you approach, and suddenly bring their admiration of the engraver's skill to a period as soon as you have passed by; it is to feel all delicate sensibilities, all free generous feelings, all aspiring thoughts checked and crushed within you by a petty but overbearing necessity; it is to have to suffer the greatest misfortunes and the most contemptible vexations; to have family affections and social friendships uprooted and destroyed, and to be obliged to be uncomfortably careful of coats, hats, and other habiliments. It is to live "a man forbid;" or it is to become an exile from your native land—a wanderer in foreign and unhealthy climes, hunting for the yellow indispensable, until you are of the colour of the metal you are in quest of; until the temper becomes soured, the feelings deadened, the heart indurated, ' and the liver in an improper state. How beautifully has Leyden portrayed his own fate and feelings, and those of thousands of others, in that pure gem of poetry, the "Address to an Indian Gold Coin"

"For thee-for thee, vile yellow slave! I left a heart that loved me true; I cross'd the tedions ocean wave, To roam in climes unkind and new; The cold wind of the stranger blew Chill on my wither'd heart-the grave, Dark and untimely, met my view And all for thee! vile yellow slave!" To lack money is to lack a passport or admission ticket into the pleasant places of God's earth-to much that is glorious and wonderful in nature, and nearly all that is rare, and curious, and enchanting, in art; or if you do travel about in a small way, it is to have that most miserable, rascally, intrusive, and disagreeable of all companions-economy, yoked to you; to be under a continual restraint from his presence; to feel unable to give your mind cheerfully and freely up to the scene before you; and in the contemplation of a magnificent view, or a piece of hoar antiquity, to have the wretch whisper in your ear the probable cost of your pleasurable sensations; it is to have a continual contest carried on in your sensorium between pleasure and prudence; it is to submit to small inconveniences and petty insults at inns for the accommodation of travellers, where above all places on earth the men of money shine out with the most resplen

dent glory, and the unmonied become the most truly insignificant; it is, in fact, to have all your enjoyments diminished and annoyances aggravated; to have pleasure almost transmuted into pain, or at least, to have "such shadow of vexation" thrown over it as materially to change its complexion; and when all is over-journey done and expenses paidit is to feel a sort of mean remorse as you reckon up your past expenditure, and ponder over the most probable remedial ways and means for the future.

The two things most difficult of discovery, next to the passage round the north pole, are talent in a poor man and dulness in a rich one; therefore, to want money, is to want wit, humour, eloquence, in fact capacity of every kind, or, at the best, if they be not altogether denied, to have such a duty levied upon them-such an oppressive drawback— that the rich man with inferior wares, is able to beat the poor one whenever they come into competition. For instance, the most casual observer of men and manners mast have noticed that in company a joke from a man of 5000l. per annum, elicits more admiration, and produces infinitely more hilarity and good humour, than ten equally as good from a man worth 5007. Oh! it is perfectly wonderful, the raciness and point that an abundance of temporalities impart to a rather dull saying. Besides, a jest from a man in the receipt of a contemptible income, by some strange fatality changes its nature, and becomes little better than sheer impertinence. It is that sort of thing which grave gentlemen and prudent matrons designate by the word "unbecoming." Now all this, though visible to the meanest capacity, might puzzle a philosopher; he would be as unable to comprehend it as he would the curious sympathy which exists between sterling wit and superfine cloth, that mutually assist and set off each other. Many a quaint conceit and rare piece of pleasantry has altogether lost its effect and fallen pointless in consequence of the speaker's garments not being of that texture, or possessed of that freshness which is altogether desirable. The moral, good reader, to be deduced from all this is -that you be not petulant and acrimonious because these things are so, but that, if endowed with a "money-making disposition," you assiduously cultivate it, and then you will not need care whether these things are so or not.

The want of money too, I am inclined to think, produces physical changes which

His

have not as yet been sufficiently noticed by the faculty. It causes a gradual and considerable accumulation of bile, which lies lurking in the system, until the incivilities of friends, or the importunities of creditors, cause it to become completely vitiated or inspissated; after which a man, especially one predisposed to melancholy and contemplation, looks at every thing on earth through a pair of yellow spectacles. The unhappy patient becomes saturated, body and mind, with jaundice; he shuns the society of his fellow men, buttons his coat up to his chin, pulls his hat over his eyes, deposits his hands in the pockets of his smallclothes, and takes extraordinarily long walks into the country. But even the fair face of nature becomes changed; the barrenness of his pockets throws a sterility over the landscape, deducting "the glory from the grass and splendour from the flower." The blossoming of the earth is no longer pleasant to his sight, or the music of the merry warblers of the woods delightful to his ear. "heart is out of joint," and all nature seems to be filled with unpleasing comparisons between his own state and hers. He stalks about with lowering brow and upturned lip, an unpleasant discord amid the universal harmony and fitness of things. At this juncture, let intelligence arrive of a heavy legacy left him by some appropriately defunct distant relative-and lo! the change! It is as a dark cloud passing from the sun. Monsieur Il Penseróso becomes L'Allegro in a twinkling. He draws his hands from the extensive vacuum in which they have been dangling, takes the yellow spectacles from his eyes, raises the hat from his brow, unbuttons his coat, and turns, with a feeling of leisurely enjoyment, to welcome the fresh spring breeze. The song of birds and the odour of flowers are again grateful to his senses. rivulet ripples once more pleasantly to his ear, and the cheerful song of the lark finds a corresponding echo in his own bosom. He indulges no longer in speculations on the vanity and insufficiency of things, but hies homeward cheerful, free, enfranchised, independent. He orders an approved cookery book, lies a bed and studies it, and marvels, in a short time, how melancholy ever gained a footing in this mighty pleasant world. Oh money, money!-marvellous indeed are the changes thou canst produce. Would that I were a Bank Director!

The

WILLIAM Cox.

DRAMATIC ANACHRONISMS.

BY J. FITZGERALD PENNIE.

(For the Parterre.)

A curious article, of great length, might be written on the glaring anachronisms of our dramatic poets. Out of the thousand and one which might be collected, we shall give the following striking specimens.

The scene of "The Queen of Corinth," a tragic comedy, by Beaumont and Fletcher, is of course laid in Greece, and something of the manners of the ancient Grecians is given in the following lines :

"MERIONE. All I remember is only this, going to Vesta's temple to give the goddess my last virgin prayers.'

But in Act 3, scene 1, we have a most egregious anachronism.

"NEANTHES.-A plague on him for a fustian dictionary! On my conscience this is the Ulyssean traveller that sent home his image riding upon elephants to the Great Mogul."

This Ulyssean traveller was Thomas Coryate, who pilgrimized on foot more miles than any person, either before or after him, has done. He travelled to the East Indies on foot, and died at Surat in 1617. The work to which the dramatist alludes, was entitled "Thomas Coryate, Traveller for the English Wits, greeting. From the Court of the Great Mogul, resident at the town of Asmere, in Easterne India. Printed by W. Jaggard and Henry Featherston, 1616." It has in the frontispiece, a representation of the author riding on an elephant.

The era of Rowe's "Royal Convert," was about twenty years after the conquest of Kent, by Hengist, ages before the Saxons were christianized, and when they were as utterly ignorant of the Greek and Roman Mythology, as they were of the inhabitants that dwelt in the moon. Yet Rowe, forgetful of all propriety, seems to have wished to make his Anglo-Saxons as learned as himself, by putting in their mouths the following absurd allusions:

"Whate'er the poets dreamt of their Elysium,

Or what the saints believe of the first paradise,

When nature was not yet deformed by winter,

But one perpetual beauty crowned the year,

Such have we found them still, still, still

the same.

"Wherefore wait the priests, And suffer Hymen's holy fire to languish? No more, my sister, let the gownmen talk, And mark out right and wrong." Does not the turtle

When Venus and the coming spring invite,

Choose out his mate himself?" "Art thou not pleased

To see the tyrant beauty kneel before thee,

Unasked, a prize for which like Grecian Helen,

The great ones of the earth might strive."

The Hamlet of Shakspeare, is allowed to be the Amleth of Saxo Grammaticus, the celebrated historian of Denmark. This Amleth was the ninth king of the Cimbri, and the birth of Christ is supposed to have taken place just after the reign of Frotho, the twenty-third king of that portion of Scandinavia. But whether this chronology be exactly correct or not it matters little, as the Danes were not converted to Christianity till the tenth century; yet our immortal poet gives the following lines to Marcellus, one of the characters in his Hamlet.

"And why such daily cast of brazen

cannon,

And foreign mart for implements of war; Why such impress of shipwrights whose sore task

Does not divide the Sunday from the week?"

"It faded on the crowing of the cock, Some say that ever 'gainst that season

comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long,

And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad."

"Sleeping within mine orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole."

That Danish kings planted gardens and orchards and slept in them, at the period of the supposed action of this play, no one can believe. It is utterly out of keeping with the manners of those Scandinavian savages; nor is it less absurd to make Hamlet's father an orthodox Roman Catholic, and a describer of the punishments of purgatory. "I am thy father's spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of

nature,

Are burnt and purged away."

After this comes the wild Pagan Dane's deep regret for the loss of the last rights of the Romish church. "Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's

hand

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousell'd, unanointed, and unknell'd."

For so we read the line, written, unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd;" a line which has hitherto puzzled all Shakspeare's commentators, and which must ever remain unintelligible nonsense, unless our reading be correct. The housel, (from the old Saxon word husel), or sacrement, extreme unction, and the tolling of the knell, being the last rites of the ancient church, Hamlet's father,

represented as a good Catholic, might reasonably regret their loss by his sudden, secret, and violent death. The passing knell was originally the signal for all who heard it, to pray for the soul of some departing neighbour, and was not rung after death, as the custom is in the present day.*

Beaumont snd Fletcher, in their

"Island Princess," lay the scene in India, and make the king, governor, and princess, Mahometans. It is well known that the religion of this sect is strictly of the Unitarian creed, as far as respects the Deity. "There is one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet," is a sentence eternally in the mouths of his believers. Yet our authors make this Moorish princess to say,

"The sun and moon we worship, those are heavenly,

And their bright influence we believe." Amusia.-I looked you should have said, make me a Christian,

I looked you should have wept, and knelt, and wept, Washed off your rust of ignorance with

waters

Pure and repentant from those eyes; I looked

Ye should have brought me your chief god ye worship,

He that you offer human blood and life to, And made a sacrifice of him to memory; Beat down his altars, ruined his fair temples.

* En passant, we cannot forget to remark that the introduction of a set of players, at the court of a wild and ferocious king of Denmark, even anterior to the Christian era, was

never equalled for its improbability, by any poet of an age before or since the days of Shakspeare.

before it,

Your altars and your temples shake to nothing!"

How such scholars as Beaumont and Fletcher could be so ignorant of the religion of the Mahometans, as to make them worshippers of images and false gods, and sacrificers of human victims is somewhat surprising; but that such was the fact, the above quotations clearly prove, and a reference to the play itself will prove it still more forcibly.

In Shakspeare's Cymbeline, we find the following lines:

"She hath been reading late The tale of Tereus; here the leaf's turned down Where Philomel gave up I have enough." "The chimney

Is south the chamber, and the chimney-
piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves -

-the roof o' th' chamber, With golden cherubims is fretted"

Posthumus meets at Rome, in the house of his friend Philario, with a Dutchman, a Frenchman and a Spaniard in the days of Cymbeline, who we find in Scene I. Act III. was the nephew of Cassibelan.

"Famous in Cæsar's praises, no whit less

Than in his feats deserving it." That the ancient Britons of this period, had either chimneys, ornamented with sculptured mantelpieces of exquisite workmanship, or ceilings fretted with Hebrew cherubim, or mythological romances written on leaves like a modern

book, to be dogeared at pleasure, no one in the present day believes. But we might swell this article by quoting similar absurd anachronismis from almost every Dramatic poet in the English language; we shall however, give at present, only two or three other specimens, and the next shall be from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Queen of Corinth."

NEANTHES " He looks as like a fellow that I have seen accommodate gentlemen with tobacco in our theatres.

"strokes his beard Which now he puts in the posture of a T, The Roman T: your T beard is the fashion,

And two-fold doth express th' enamoured courtier,

As full as your fork-craving traveller."

The idea of tobacco being smoked in the classical theatres of Greece, can only be matched by the preposterous whim of supposing the fashionable English beards of our authors' time, worn by the beaus of Greece, while the ridicule attempted to be thrown on the introduction of the use of forks into this country, in a play, the scene of which lies in ancient Greece, out-herods Herod. As a parallel to this nonsense, we shall quote two other passages from the same drama.

"and now of late He did enquire of Ephesus for his age, But the church-book being burnt with Dian's temple, He lost his aim."

"Has he familiarly Disliked your yellow starch, or said your doublet

Was not exactly Frenchified ?"

Warburton says, yellow starch was invented by one Turner, a tire-woman, who afterwards was amongst the miscreants concerned in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, for which she was hanged at Tyburn, and would die in a yellow ruff of her own invention; which made yellow starch so odious, that it immediately went out of fashion.

If we go back to the old Romances of the Middle Ages, such as Kyng Alesaunde, Richard Cœur de Lion, Amadis de Gaul, Troilus and Cressid, The Chronicle of the Cid, the Geste of Kyng Horn, Iwain and Gawin, and a thousand others of the Norman-Anglo poets, and the celebrated Troubadours, we shall find the confusion of chronology, manners, and customs still more remarkable. But it must be acknowledged that the poets have not erred more glaringly in these things, than the most celebrated painters of a more refined and critical age

Titian, in a picture of the Presentation of Christ to the Jews, introduced Spanish pages, and over the shields of the Roman soldiers has placed the Austrian eagle. Tintoretto, in a painting on scripture history, has armed the Jewish soldiers with firelocks and fusees; and Paul Veronese has introduced Switzers, Levanters, and other modern costumes into Our Lord's Supper. He has so offended against good taste and history, in these anachronisms, that his paintings have been justly called "the beautiful masquerades." To these may be added, the splendid and enchanting creations of the pencil of Martin, whose eastern architecture has no more affinity to the Babylonian, than it has to the Chinese, as may be clearly perceived from the drawings of the remains of the Casa or palace, amidst the mounds of ancient Babylon, whose still-existing ruins closely resemble those of a Norman baronial castle.

After all, none of these anachronisms equal that of the Spanish painter, who in his picture of the sacrifice of Isaac, represents Abraham about to shoot his son on the altar with a horse-pistol, or those of Brughel in his celebrated Adoration of the Magi, in which the Ethiopian king, dressed in a surplice and boots with spurs, brings for a present the golden model of a modern ship!

RESULT OF SUPERSTITIOUS TERROR.

The following distressing incident occurred some time ago to a couple of ladies, sisters, members of a respectable family in Norfolk.

One night the door of their sleeping room opened, and by the sound of light footsteps they were convinced of the entrance of some person into the chamber. At the same time the curtains at the foot of their bed were hastily undrawn, and a female figure resembling that of a servant who happened to be ill in the house, appeared, and throwing up her arms, with a groan or strange guttural sound, immediately vanished. Exceedingly alarmed, the ladies sought only to shut out from their sight a repetition of the vision by concealing their heads beneath the bed clothes: and so they lay till next morning; when, upon rising, they were shocked to behold lying cold and dead, at the feet of their bed, the unfortunate invalid, who, without doubt, finding herself worse in the night, had made her way into the ladies' chamber, and there, unable to ask for the medicine, or assistance she required, expired in the attempt.