confirmation of what we have already said of the influence of the theatrical profession on a young female. In the midst of our amusement at the following scene-surgit amari aliquid-we are pained at seeing a gifted young woman exposed to such personal contact with a vulgar stranger: :

Young called, and stayed about an hour with us. At halfpast five, took coffee, and off to the theatre. The play was Romeo and Juliet; the house was extremely full: they are a delightful audience. My Romeo had gotten on a pair of trunk breeches, that looked as if he had borrowed them from some worthy Dutchman of a hundred years ago. Had he worn them in New York, I could have understood it as a compliment to the ancestry of that good city; but here, to adopt such a costume in Romeo, was really perfectly unaccountable. They were of a most unhappy choice of colours, too,dull, heavy-looking blue cloth, and offensive crimson satin, all bepuckered, and be-plaited, and be-puffed, till the young man looked like a magical figure growing out of a monstrous, strange-coloured melon, beneath which descended his unfortunate legs, thrust into a pair of red slippers, for all the world like Grimaldi's legs en costume for clown. The play went off pretty smoothly, except that they broke one man's collar-bone, and nearly dislocated a woman's shoulder by flinging the scenery about. My bed was not made in time, and when the scene drew, half a dozen carpenters in patched trowsers and tattered shirtsleeves were discovered smoothing down my pillows, and adjusting my draperies. The last scene is too good not to be given verbatim :Rise, rise, my Juliet,

Romeo.

And from this cave of death, this house of horror,

Quick let me snatch thee to thy Romeo's arms!

(Here he pounced upon me, plucked me up in his arms like an uncomfortable bundle, and staggered down the stage with me)Juliet. (aside.) Oh, you've got me up horridly!--that'll never do; let me down, pray let me down.

Romeo. There! breathe a vital spirit on thy lips,

And call thee back, my soul, to life and love! Juliet. (aside.) Pray, put me down!-you'll certainly throw me down if you don't set me on the ground directly!

In the midst of "cruel, cursed fate," his dagger fell out of his dress; I, embracing him tenderly, crammed it back again, because I knew I should want it at the end.

Romeo.

Tear not our heart-strings thus !

They crack they break!-Juliet! Juliet! (dies.)

Juliet. (to corpse.) Am I smothering you?

Corpse (to Juliet.) Not at all; could you be so kind, do you think,

as to put my wig on again for me ?-it has fallen off.

Juliet. (to corpse.) I'm afraid I can't, but I'll throw my muslin veil over it. You've broken the phial, haven't you?

(Corpse nodded.)

Juliet. (to corpse.) Where's your dagger?

Corpse.

Corpse. (to Juliet.) 'Pon my soul, I don't know.'-vol. ii. pp. 112

114.

The description of that grave assembly, the Senate of the United States, and a speech of its most eloquent member, is worth contrasting with what was the British Parliament :

'We went first into the senate, or upper house, because Webster was speaking, whom I especially wished to hear. The room itself is neither large nor lofty; the senators sit in two semi-circular rows, turned towards the president, in comfortable arm-chairs. On the same ground, and literally sitting among the senators, were a whole regiment of ladies, whispering, talking, laughing, and fidgeting. A gallery, level with the floor, and only divided by a low partition from the main room, ran round the apartment: this, too, was filled with pink, and blue, and yellow bonnets; and every now and then, while the business of the house was going on, and Webster speaking, a tremendous bustle, and waving of feathers, and rustling of silks, would be heard, and in came streaming a reinforcement of political beauties, and then would commence a jumping up, a sitting down, a squeezing through, and a how-d'ye-doing, and a shaking of hands. The senators would turn round; even Webster would hesitate, as if bothered by the row; and, in short, the whole thing was more irregular, and unbusiness-like, than any one could have imagined.'-pp. 121-122.

Our final extract shall be the last page of her book-the visit to Niagara :

'When we were within about three miles of the Falls, just before entering the village of Niagara, [i. e., we presume, Mr. Butler] stopped the waggon; and then we heard distinctly, though far off, the voice of the mighty cataract. Looking over the woods, which appeared to overhang the course of the river, we beheld one silver cloud rising slowly into the sky, the everlasting incense of the waters. A perfect frenzy of impatience seized upon me: I could have set off and run the whole way; and when at length the carriage stopped at the door of the Niagara house, waiting neither for my father, D——, nor — I rushed through the hall, and the garden, down the steep footpath cut in the rocks. I heard steps behind me; was following me; down, down I sprang, and along the narrow footpath, divided only by a thicket from the tumultuous rapids. I saw through the boughs the white glimmer of that sea of foam. "Go on, go on; don't stop!" shouted -; and in another minute the thicket was passed; I stood upon Table Rock. seized me by the arm, and without speaking a word, dragged me to the edge of the rapids, to the brink of the abyss-I saw Niagara. Oh, God! who can describe that sight?'

This is undoubtedly clever and striking. The representation of the constant mist which arises from this stupendous fall, as the everlasting incense of the waters, appears to us one of the most beautiful allusions we ever met-daring, indeed, but appropriate - then the rapidity-the frenzy of her impatience suddenly

checked

checked into a prostrate inability to tell what she sees, is very fine. Yet true to her second nature, Mrs. Butler maintains to the last the character with which she set out. The stupendous magníficence even of Niagara does not quite sober her habitual intoxication-she has still a silver cloud,' and she drops the curtain like a German dramatist, with an oath and an attitude.

We should be very much mortified, if the views we have taken, or the extracts we have made, should prevent any one from reading this work. We have, we believe, suggested all that can be objected to it, but we have not, and within our limits could not, indicate a hundredth part of the amusement it will afford; above all, we feel that we have given a very inadequate idea of that solid good sense, and those sound principles of social and moral life, which lie at the bottom of the whole work, though they are too often concealed or obscured by the exuberant vegetation of the rank soil and hot sky of the profession with which Mrs. Butler has become so entirely assimilated and so absolutely identified.

ART. III.-The Last Essays of Elia. London. 12mo. 1833.

A MELANCHOLY title for a living man to affix to a work ;and how soon was the implied presage made good in death! The last enemy has been dealing wrathfully with the great authors of our day; they have been shot at like marks,-cut off like overtopping flowers,-till the two or three that survive seem solitary and deserted, their fellows strown around them,-themselves memorials at once and specimens of a by-gone or a fast receding age. Long may those remain to us that do remain ! We have sore need of them all to stem the muddy current of vulgar authorship that sets so strongly upon us,-and to vindicate literature from the mountebank sciolism of science in caricature. We forgive all differences of opinion, overlook all animosities of party,Tros Tyriusve, we regard it not,-may we but find in a writer a due sense of the dignity and lofty uses of his vocation, and the manliness to abate no jot of its rightful claims to superiority over the penny-diffused quackery of these our times.

Charles Lamb was not the greatest, nor equal to the greatest, among his famous contemporaries, either in splendour or in depth; but he was, perhaps, the most singular and individual. He was one of nature's curiosities, and amongst her richest and rarest. Other men act by their faculties, and you can easily distinguish the predominance of one faculty over another: A.'s

genius is greater than his talent, though that is considerable; B.'s talent is beyond his genius, though that be respectable ;-we dissect the author, take so much of him as we like, and throw the rest away. But you could not so deal with Lamb. He was all-compact-inner and outer man in perfect fusion,-all the powers of the mind, the sensations of the body, interpenetrating each other. His genius was talent, and his talent genius; his imagination and fancy one and indivisible; the finest scalpel of the metaphysician could not have separated them. His poems, his criticisms, his essays,-call them his Elius, to distinguish them from anything else in the world,-these were not merely written by Lamb,-they were and are Lamb,—just the gentle, fantastic, subtle creature himself printed off. In a library of a thousand volumes you shall not find two that will give you such a bright and living impress of the author's own very soul. Austin's, Rousseau's, all the Confessions on record, are false and hollow in comparison. There he is, as he was, the working or the superannuated clerk,-very grave and very wild,-tender and fierce at a flash,-learned enough, and more so than you thought,-yet ignorant, may be, of school-boy points, and glorious in his ignorance,-seeming to halt behind all, and then with one fling overleaping the most approved doctor of the room; witty and humorBut Lamb's wit requires a word or two of analysis for itself. Wit is not humour, nor is humour wit. Punning is neither, and the grotesque is a fourth power, different from all. Lamb had all these, not separately each as such, but massed together into the strangest intellectual compound ever seen in man.

ous.

And even besides these he had an indefinable something,—a Lambism,about him, which defied naming or description. He stammered,the stammer went for something in producing the effect; he would adjure a small piece for the nonce,-it gave weight;—perhaps he drank a glass of punch; believe us, it all told. It follows that Lamb's good things cannot be repeated.

But a small part,-and that not the best,-of Lamb's writings, will ever be genially received out of England. If we were to confine him even to London,-the olden, playgoing London,—we should not do him wrong in respect of some of his happiest efforts.

He was born in Crown-Office Row, in the Temple, and he loved London to his heart ;-not the West End, understand;he cared little for Pall-Mall; May Fair was nothing to him. Give him the kindly Temple with its fair garden, and its church and cloisters, before they were lightened of their proper gloominess. He sorely grudged the whitewashing spirit of the modern masters of the Bench. Why gothicise the entrance to the Inner Temple hall, and the library front? What is become,' he says, of the

winged horse that stood over the former?-a stately arms! And who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of Paper Buildings?—my first hint of allegory! They must account to me for these things which I miss so greatly.'

Lamb loved the town as well as Johnson-but he had a keen eye, and loved the country too; yet not absolutely the country at large; but so it were suburban, within dim sight of St. Paul'stranscending a stone's throw the short coach and the omnibus. He had seen Cumberland and Westmoreland; but Hornsey satisfied his soul. And who may not-if his spirit be but tuned arighttake his full measure of delight in the quietude and natural imagery of the humblest rural district? If ambition or depraved appetite pervert him not, trees and fields, flowers and streams-the most ordinary of their kind—may waken all the sensibilities of his deepest life, and steep them in Paradise. No man ever had a livelier apprehension of the charms of this our earthly existence than Lamb; he clung to upper air; he could not bring himself to contemplate death with that calm expectancy of soul which he venerated in his friend Coleridge. The most deeply pathetic, the most singularly characteristic of all Charles Lamb's effusions, is the essay on New Year's Eve in the first volume of Elia. Take this passage, which we dare will be new to thousands of our readers :say

'The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the old year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.-In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to rouse hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth?—I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle. Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draft of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived,--I and my friends; to be no younger, no

richer,