1 A CITY SHOWER. AREFUL observers may foretell the hour CARE (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower: While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. Meanwhile the south, rising with dappled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swill'd more liquor than it could contain, 'Twas doubtful which was rain, and which was dust. Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs, The leather sounds; he trembles from within. Swift. PASTORAL DUTIES AND DELIGHTS. METHINKS it were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain; To sit upon a hill, as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run : How many years a mortal man may live. When this is known, then to divide the times: So many hours must I take rest; So many days my ewes have been with young; So minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, Ah! what a life were this! how sweet-how lovely! To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep, Is far beyond a prince's delicates, When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him. Shakespeare. TH THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. DOCTOR JOHNSON, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of the "Pilgrim's Progress." That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories. In the wildest parts of Scotland the "Pilgrim's Progress" is the delight of the peasantry. In every nursery the "Pilgrim's Progress" is a greater favourite than "Jack the Giant Killer." Every reader knows the straight and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought. All the stages of the journey, all the forms which cross or overtake the pilgrims, giants, and hobgoblins, ill-favoured ones and shining ones, the tall, comely, swarthy, Madam Bubble, with her great purse by her side, and her fingers playing with the money, the black man in the bright vesture, Mr Worldly Wiseman and my Lord Hategood, Mr Talkative and Mrs Timorous, all are actually existing beings to us. We follow the travellers through their allegorical progress with interest not inferior to that with which we follow Elizabeth from Siberia to Moscow, or Jeanie Deans from Edinburgh to London. Bunyan is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors, men are mere personifications. We have not a jealous man, but jealousy; not a traitor, but perfidy; not a patriot, but patriotism. The mind of Bunyan, on the contrary, was so imaginative that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. A dialogue between two qualities, in his dream, has more dramatic effect than a dialogue between two human beings in most plays. . . . The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of |