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tinuing obstinately foul, I went on shore in the pilot-boat and landed at Portsmouth at the same hour the next morning. The sea was smooth and the sail pleasant. We came round the Needles, and up the Solent or West Channel of the Isle of Wight, and as we kept close in shore all the way, the transition from a sea voyage to my land journey up to London was broken by thus coasting along this beautiful island. And so ends this tedious journal of a voyage of 131 days at sea!

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The boundless ocean! If it be meant to give the effect of a view of sea without shore," it is quite a mistake to describe it, as the boundless ocean. It appears to be completely bounded; and that too at the very short distance of three or four miles, all around. The melancholy main is in my mind the happiest

epithet that poetry has ever applied to the sea.

Where all above is sky, and ocean all around,

sounds very sublime till you get on board of ship; and then reality gives you a small circle of a dozen tiers of waves all around, capped with a low dome of sky, about the size of St. Paul's Cathedral; for it is a very just observation of Dr. Reid, that "when the visible horizon is terminated by very distant objects, the celestial vault seems to be enlarged in all its dimensions." It must therefore follow that when the horizon is bounded by a circle of waves three miles off, the zenith shuts down over our heads into a smaller segment of a sphere than that of an apparent he misphere. But enough of the sea.

Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, ch. vi. § 22.

B. F.

ELEGY.

A SHADOW on my spirit fell,

When my hush'd footstep from thee pass'd;
And sad to me thy mild farewell,

To me, who fear'd it was thy last;

And when I saw thee next, a veil
Was drawn upon thy features pale.

They strew'd thee in thy narrow bed
With roses from thy own loved bowers :
In melting anguish Memory fled

Back to thy valued rural hours;
And saw thee gentle gliding round,
Where all to thee was Eden ground.

The God, whose presence met thee there,
Was with thee in thy slow decays;
He answered to her dying prayer,
Whose life had been a hymn of praise:
Thy God was nigh-thy Shepherd-God,
With comfort of his staff and rod.

I lay thee where the loved are laid:

Rest-till their change and thine shall come;
Still voices whisper through the shade;
A light is glimmering round the tomb;
The temple rends! the sleep is ended-
The dead are gone, the pure ascended!

THE PORTRAIT PAINTER. Sono Pittore!-Sal. Rosa.

I SHALL not begin par le commencement, for I have an antipathy to straight lines. It has always been my custom to open a book in the middle, that I may have the pleasure of torturing my brains to find out what the probable beginning may have been: the words, " In a rich and beautiful valley, situated in the province of "The ele

gant De Mowbray received a fashionable education at -;" put me into an agony of impatience. I prefer such openings as, "And so you are really not going to-day;" but then is sure to follow, "said the lady so and so," and the story goes on as quietly as if it had any other beginning. Indeed any thing matter of fact makes me insufferably nervous, and I had rather receive any kind of answer than a direct one; for which reason an Irishman is my delight.

This peculiarity may account for my declining to inform the reader who I am, what is my age, sex, or what circumstances gave rise to my present pursuit. We are apt to suppose the feelings of others similar to our own; and as I have acknowledged my preference for darkness rather than light, I choose to conclude, that all to whom I introduce myself are of my way of thinking. I therefore intend to give them leave to stumble to their heart's content without affording them assistance-a kindness I should prize extremely in my own person.

I am a portrait-painter, so much I condescend to mention-whether I paint in allegory, or in very truth, whether I am actually a spoiler or adorner of ivory or canvas, or with a visionary pencil trace unsubstantial forms, I shall not satisfy the public.

Whether I am a portly citizen, with such a face as smiles from the walls of Somerset-House, or a shadowy grey gentleman, such as startles us to look on in the pages of Peter Schlemihl; whether I amA clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, SEPT. 1824.

or a "learned pundit," I shall not satisfy the public.

Whether I have "wandered o'er the earth," and describe scenes that I have really witnessed; or have never quitted the noise and bustle of a smoky city, and describe from hearsay, I shall not satisfy the public.

Why should I? Who satisfies the public now-a-days? Who puts his name to a novel or a poem? Even though every one knows who is the author, does not every one love still to fancy himself wandering in a labyrinth of doubt, and exclaim, "oh! let me be deceived!" Long live the known Unknowns, great, and little! Long live doubt and perplexity!— Where is mystery may be impartiality.

When ye doubt, the truth not knowing, Believing the best, good may be growing; In judging the best no harm at the least, In judging the worst no good at the best.

Heywood.

The first person who placed himself under my care, with the fond hope of being rendered immortal by my art, was an old gentleman of goodly presence, with a red round face totally innocent of expression, small grey eyes, and broad bald forehead. His family, under whose hands he seemed to suffer a patient martyrdom, insisted on my being left entirely alone with him, for fear of the attention of either being diverted from the destined point. We took our stations and a dead silence

ensued.

When all was prepared I looked up and beheld the poor man screwed into an upright position, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, his hands meeting, and his thumbs twirling in the most exact time, his mouth pursed up, his eyes half closed, and his whole body motionless, saving the before-mentioned rotatory members: appalled at such an appearance, I endeavoured by conversation on various subjects to draw him from his perpendicular; but he had received his lesson, and he knew the consequences of disobedience: he S

sometimes, indeed, relaxed from his direct line, and now and then his feature distended into a smile-in such a sort! I began to despair,-I invoked the shade of Sir Joshua, I apostrophized the genius of Sir Thomas, I trusted to the next sitting, when the novelty of the operation having worn off, he might be induced to forget his predicament. The next sitting he went to sleep! I should have been reduced to wretchedness but for the animation caused by his waking apologies: a dead white wall glimmered opposite, he fixed his eyes in its direction, and soon his gaze emulated its brilliancy and meaning. At last I entreated the company of his family: his wife came, and under her auspices the business was completed. She began, in order to entertain us, a history of the letting of her first and second floors and fore parlour, of the washing of her window-curtains, of the hatred she bore to all lodgers of French or other foreign growth,-of the spoiling of her best rug by the French lady's saucepans being placed thereon." For them folks,' said she, "cooks their vittals upstairs, and puts down their pots and pans all over the room. Nasty creturs! but they don't know no better, it's the way all over France. I soon got them out, and then comes an old Hingy gentleman; he plagues my life out; but his money is sure, and so we bears his whims."

The specimens I gleaned of the character of this India gentleman amused me. He is accustomed to remain in London a short time every year, and this house is his residence during that period. He reads the newspaper, and now and then an Asiatic Journal, but no other printed thing ever encumbers his table. His whole employment is listening to what passes in the house, his door being always ajar that he may catch the slightest sound: no sooner is any bell rung than his peals louder, and he darts forward to intercept the servant, that he may be first attended, that he may know why the bell was rung, that his orders may supersede any others: the questions, "Who knocked at the door? Who came in? Who dines at home? What are they doing below? How do

they spend the evening?" following thick and fast. He dines always at home, fearing, if he accepts any invitation, that he shall be obliged to return it; he keeps no servant, to save expense; he eats all day long, and yet pretends every half hour to be fainting for want of nourishment, and dying for lack of attendance; he starts at the least noise, and ringing violently, desires that some one may be sent to stay with him.

His nephew called to take leave of him as he was going to college, and he offered him a shilling, and was offended at its being declined. He sits for hours gazing at some gold coins and ill-set jewels which he possesses, and after carefully replacing them in security, yawns, sighs, and sleeps through the day. This man has a large fortune, is a bachelor, lives unloving and unloved, mercenary, capricious, selfish, and ridiculous.

My patient friend's picture being completed, I proceeded next to the portrait of his daughter, a young lady of some beauty, of which she was fully conscious. She has filled several situations as governess, and her qualifications for such an undertaking raised in my mind reflections on the extraordinary unfitness of the greatest part of the numerous race of teachers for the important charge consigned to them.

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Having seated herself at her "Arp," that I might judge of the effect, she condescended to warble, in a loud voice, the following strain, the words and air of which, though not new, she told me she particularly admired, and indeed poetry in general she "was partial to.' Of her power of giving proper expression to the music, from thoroughly understanding the words, she gave me this specimen.

SONG.-(Rosina).

See the rosy moon happeering

Pants with gold the verdure lawn,
Bees on banks their time disporting,
Sup on sweets and ale of morn!

Then she obliged us with "Dy Piasir," and "Tooky Assendy," and "Portray chermong; the accompaniment far less intolerable, it must be acknowledged, than what it accompanied.

Her costume gave me infinite trouble, in consequence of her mother's indecision, as to whether she should be represented in her own character at her Arp, with her last ball dress of pink satin, with blue and yellow roses-" all the fashion now, I assure you, a mixture of colours;" or in some fancy character, such as Mary Magdalen, or Juliet, or Eloisa with her beads, or Elvina,

in " Shakspeare's play of the Distracted Daughter;" 'twas settled at length, and she lives in canvas, and looks pink, with her loved Arp, in a large gilt frame, beside her peaceful and much-enduring papa.

My next sitter was the wife of an Honourable, whose whole family by turns I was so much honoured as to be allowed to represent.-I shall proceed to give a sketch of them. P. P.

SCHILLER'S LIFE AND WRITINGS.
(PART III concluded.)

FROM HIS SETTLEMENT AT JENA TO HIS DEATH (1790-1805).

AT Weimar his present way of life letters or visited his friends. His was like his former one at Jena: his evenings were very often passed in business was to study and compose: the theatre; it was the only public his recreations were in the circle of place of amusement which he ever his family, where he could abandon visited; nor was it for the purpose himself to affections, grave or trifling, of amusement which he visited this: and in frank and cheerful intercourse it was his observatory where he with a few friends. Of the latter he watched the effect of scenes and sihad lately formed a social club, the tuations, devised new schemes of meetings of which afforded him a art, or corrected old ones. To the regular and innocent amusement. He players he was kind, friendly: on still loved solitary walks in the nights, when any of his pieces had park at Weimar he might frequently been acted successfully or for the first be seen wandering among the groves time, he used to invite the leaders of and remote avenues, with a note- the company to a supper in the book in his hand; now loitering Stadthaus, where the time was spent slowly along; now standing still; in mirthful diversions, one of which now moving rapidly on: if any was often a recitation, by Genast, of one appeared in sight, he would the Capuchin's sermon in Wallendart into another alley, that his stein's Camp. Except on such rare dream might not be broken. "A occasions, he returned home directly favourite resort," we are told, "was from the theatre to light his midnight the thickly-overshadowed rocky path lamp, and commence the most earnwhich leads to the Römische Haus, a est of his labours. pleasure-house of the Duke's, built under the direction of Goethe. There he would often sit in the gloom of the crags, overgrown with cypresses and boxwood, shady hedges before him, not far from the murmur of a little brook, which there gushes in a smooth slaty channel, and where some verses of Goethe are cut upon a brown plate of stone, and fixed in the rock." He still continued to study in the night: the morning was spent with his children and their mother, or in pastimes such as we have noticed; in the afternoon he revised what had been last composed, wrote

The assiduity with which he struggled for improvement in dramatic composition had now produced its natural result: the requisitions of his taste no longer hindered the operation of his genius; art had at length become a second nature. A new proof at once of his fertility and of his solicitude for farther improvement appeared in 1803. The Braut von Messina was an experiment; an attempt to exhibit a modern subject and modern sentiments in an antique garb. The principle on which the interest of this play rests is the fatalism of the ancients; the plot is of

extreme simplicity; a chorus also is introduced, an elaborate discussion of the nature and uses of that accompaniment being prefixed by way of preface. The experiment was not successful with a multitude of individual beauties this Bride of Messina is found to be ineffectual as a whole: it does not move us; the great object of every tragedy is not attained. The chorus, which Schiller, swerving from the Greek models, has divided into two contending parts, and made to enter and depart with the principals to whom they are attached, has in his hands become the medium of conveying many beautiful effusions of poetry; but it retards the progress of the plot; it dissipates and diffuses our sympathies; the interest we should take in the fate and prospects of Manuel and Cæsar, is expended on the fate and prospects of man. For beautiful and touching delineations of life; for pensive and pathetic reflections, sentiments, and images, conveyed in language simple, but nervous and emphatic, this tragedy stands high in the rank of modern compositions. There is in it a breath of young tenderness and ardour mingled impressively with the feelings of gray-haired experience, whose recollections are darkened with melancholy, whose very hopes are chequered and solemn. The implacable Destiny which consigns the brothers to mutual enmity and mutual destruction, for the guilt of a past generation, involving a mother and a sister in their ruin, spreads a sombre hue over all the poem: we are not unmoved by the characters of the hostile brothers, and we pity the hapless and amiable Beatrice, the victim of their feud. Still there is too little action in the play; the incidents are too abundantly diluted with reflection; the interest pauses, flags, and fails to produce its full effect. For its specimens of lyrical poetry, tender, affecting, sometimes exquisitely beautiful, the Bride of Messing will long deserve a careful perusal; but as exemplifying a new form of the drama, it has found no imitators, and is likely to find none.

The slight degree of failure or miscalculation, which occurred in the present instance, was next year a

bundantly redeemed. Wilhelm Tell, sent out in 1804, is one of Schiller's very finest dramas; it exhibits some of the highest triumphs which his genius combined with his art ever realized. The first descent of Freedom to our modern world, the first unfurling of her standard on that rocky fortress, the pinnacle of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it deserved. There is no false tinsel decoration about Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory sentimentality. All is downright, simple, and agreeable to nature; yet all is adorned and purified and rendered beautiful without losing its resemblance. An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over it; we are among honest, inoffensive, yet fearless peasants, untainted by the vices, undazzled by the theories of more complex and perverted conditions of society. The opening of the first scene sets us down among the Alps. It is "a high rocky shore of the Lüzern Lake, opposite to Schwytz. The lake makes a little bight in the land, a hut stands at a short distance from the bank, the fisher-boy is rowing himself about in his boat. Beyond the lake on the other side, we see the green meadows, the hamlets and farms of Schwytz lying in the clear sunshine. On our left are observed the peaks of the Hacken, surrounded with clouds; to the right and far in the distance appear the glaciers. We hear the rance des vaches, and the tinkling of cattle-bells." This first impression never leaves us; we are in a scene where all is grand and lovely; but it is the loveliness and grandeur of unpretending, unadulterated nature. These Switzers are not Arcadian shepherds, or speculative patriots; there is not one crook or beechen bowl among them, and they never mention the social contract or the rights of man. They are honest people driven by oppression to assert their privileges; and they go to work like men in earnest, bent on the despatch of business, not on the display of sentiment. They are not philosophers or tribunes; but frank, stalwart landmen: even in the field of Rutli, they do not forget their common feelings; the party that arrive first indulge in a harmless ebullition

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