With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget-Bridget Elia. depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot illusion, we are as mightily concerned as be glory. What rational cause of exultation those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. could it give to a man to turn up size ace a They are a sort of dream-fighting; much hundred times together by himself? or before ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; spectators, where no stake was depending? mighty means for disproportioned ends -Make a lottery of a hundred thousand quite as diverting, and a great deal more tickets with but one fortunate number-and innoxious, than many of those more serious what possible principle of our nature, except games of life, which men play, without stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain esteeming them to be such.— that number as many times successively, without a prize? Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one man's wit, his memory, or combination-faculty rather against another's; like a mockengagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the spritely infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue, (and I think in this case justly,) were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for such combatants. To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards that cards are a temporary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but play at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a tooth-ache, or a sprained ankle, when you are subdued and humble,-you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. I grant it is not the highest style of man -I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battleshe lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise. At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as something admissible.-I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)-(dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?)-I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play: I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over: and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. 2 A CHAPTER ON EARS. I HAVE no ear.Mistake me not, reader-nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.-I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets-those indispensable sideintelligencers. Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be. When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean-for music. To say that this heart never melted at the concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. "Water parted from the sea" 'never fails to move it strangely. So does "In infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman-the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation-the sweetest-why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple-who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the dayspring of that absorbing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite for Alice W————n. I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour,—on his return he was pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being-technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts-had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny. Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, brimisnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton. It is hard to stand alone in an age like this,-(constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to | the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions.-Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive-mine at least will spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds;-and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion-till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where soníe of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that -Party in a parlour All silent, and all DAMNED. and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime- - these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable: afterwards followeth the languor and the oppression.-Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches :-"Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done. So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them-winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at the last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden and they can think of nothing else; continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension.-Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweet- I have experienced at the evening parties, ness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, Something like this " SCENE TURNING " at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter which, in triumphant progress, dolphininto minor heavens.* tions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)-a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, When my friend commences upon one of with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, those solemn anthems, which peradventure and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in reckon up would but plunge me again in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five- the deeps,-I stagger under the weight of and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' and putting a soul of old religion into my end;-clouds, as of frankincense, oppress young apprehension (whether it be that, in me—priests, altars, censers, dazzle before which the Psalmist, weary of the persecu-me- -the genius of his religion hath me in her toils-a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous-he is Pope,-and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too,— tri-coroneted like himself!—I am converted, and yet a Protestant ;-at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person::-I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus-Gog and But when this master of the spell, not Magog-what not?-till the coming in of content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figon, in his power, to inflict more bliss than ment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer lies in her capacity to receive,-impatient to (in which chiefly my friend shows himself overcome her "earthly" with his " heavenly," no bigot) at once reconciles me to the ration-still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh alities of a purer faith; and restores to me waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or the genuine unterrifying aspects of my from that inexhausted German ocean, above pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. -rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. ALL FOOLS' DAY. THE Compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What! man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry —we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day-and let us troll the catch of Amiens-duc ad me-duc ad me—how goes it? Here shall he see Many happy returns of this day to youand you-and you, Sir-nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same-you understand mea speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of Now would I give a trifle to know, histhose sneakers. I am free of the corpora- torically and authentically, who was the tion, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultus Translate me that, and take the sum. I have been there, and still would go; greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please: it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give your worship's poor servant to command. you, for my part, -The crazy old church clock, Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down Etna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean ? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nuncheon on the low grounds of Shinar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. -Master Silence, I will use few words with you. Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere-You six will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. I know it, I know it. Ha! honest R- -, my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not overnew, threadbare as thy stories :—what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate?— Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago.-Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two.-Good Granville S- thy last patron, is flown. King Pandion, he is dead, Nevertheless, noble R- come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters-when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile-as it Mister Adams'odso, I honour your Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his coat-pray do us the favour to read to us hero; and as if thousands of periods must that sermon, which you lent to Mistress revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could Slipslop the twenty and second in your have given his invidious preference between portmanteau there on Female Inconti- a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritnence the same-it will come in most orious-equal damsels. irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears?-cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet! To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools' Banquet beyond its Good Master Raymund Lully, you look appropriate day, for I fear the second of wise. Pray correct that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late.-Ha! Cokes, is it you?—Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you.-Master Shallow, April is not many hours distant-in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool-as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables-not guessing at the involved wisdom-I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his |