able assembly, that in the wars of Spaine he saw a seamonster with the face and body like a man, but below the belly like a fish, brought thither from the farthest shores of Mauritania. It had an old countenance; the hairs and beard rough and shaggy; blew of colour; and high of stature; with finnes between the arms and the body. These were held for gods of the sea, and propitious to sailors! ignorance producing admiration, and admiration superstition. However, perhaps they erre not, who conceived them to be onely Divells, assuming that form, to nourish a false devotion." *

Mr. Wordworth's wish, in certain "moods of the mind," is natural and touching; but we believers of the Muses' "train " are startled, when a great poet, even for a moment, seems to lose sight of those final wonders, which it is poetry's high philosophic privilege to be forever aware of. The deities of past ages are alive still, as much as they ought to be; the divinity that inspires their conception is always alive, and he evinces himself in a thousand shapes of hope, love, and imagination; ay, and of the most commonplace materiality too, which, to beings who beheld us from afar, would be quite as good proof of the existence of things beautiful and supernatural, as Galatea, with all her nymphs, would be to one of us. Let the reader fancy a world, which had but one-half the lovely things in it which ours possesses, or but imagination enough to conceive them, and then let him fancy what it would think of us, and of our right to hope for other things supernatural, and to be full of a noble security against all nullification.

* Sandys' "Ovid,” fol., p. 19.

But to return from these speculations, fit as they are for the remoteness and universality of the seas. We have nothing to do here with Nereus, Proteus, and other watery deities, whose form, though they could change it, was entirely human; neither have we any concern with deities in general, however mixed up with animal natures, unless, like the Triton, they have survived to modern fable, and thus remain tangible. Tritons have been seen in plenty in latter times. Ariosto found them on the shores of romance: they figure in the piscatory dialogues of his countrymen; and our own later poets have beheld them by dozens, whenever they went to the sea-coast, just as other men see fishermen and boats. In the pretty drama entitled "Alceo," written by a promising young poet of the name of Ongaro, who died early, and which the Italians call the Aminta bagnato (Amyntas in the water), a Triton performs the part of the Satyr in Tasso.

Our great poet of romance makes express mention of a Sea-Satyr. It is in that "perilous passage " of the last canto of Book the Second, in the perusal of which our imagination becomes as earnest and childlike as the poet's own look of belief. We should lay the whole of it before our readers, had we quoted it twenty times; in the first place, because it contains a list of sea-monsters, and therefore falls in with our subject; and secondly, because we cannot help it. Sir Guyon, with his friend the Palmer, has just passed a dreadful whirlpool: –—

"The heedful boteman strongly forth did stretch
His brawnie armes, and all his bodie straine,
That th' utmost sandy breach they shortly fetch,
Whiles the dredd daunger does behind remaine.
Suddeine they see, from midst of all the maine,
The surging waters like a mountaine rise,

And the great sea, puft up with proud disdaine,
To swell above the measure of his guise,
As threatning to devoure all that his powre despise.

"The waves came rolling, and the billows rore
Outragiously, as they enraged were,

Or wrathfull Neptune did them drive before
His whirling charet for exceeding feare;
For not one puffe of winde there did appeare;
That all the three thereat were much afrayd,
Unweeting what such horrour straunge did reare.
Eftsoones they saw an hideous hoast arrayd
Of huge sea-monsters, such as living sence dismayed:

"Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,

Such as dame Nature's self mote feare to see, Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects From her most cunning hand escaped bee: All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee; Spring-headed hydres, and SEA-SHOULDERING WHALES, Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee, Bright scolopendraes, arm'd with silver scales,

Mighty monoceros with immeasured tayles:

"The dreadful fish, that hath deserv'd the name

Of Death, and like him lookes in dreadfull hew;
The griesly wasserman, that makes his game
The flying ships with swiftness to pursew;
The horrible Sea-Satyre, that doth shew
His fearefull face in time of greatest storme;
Huge ziffiius, whom mariners eschew

No lesse than rockes, as travellers informe;
And greedy rosmarines, with visages deforme:

"All these, and thousand thousands many more,
And more deformed monsters, thousand fold,
With dreadfull noise, and hollow rombling rore,
Came rushing, in the fomy waves enroll'd,
Which seem'd to fly, for feare them to behold;
Ne wonder, if these did the knight appall;

For all that here on earth we dreedfull hold,
Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall,
Compared to the creatures in the seas entràll."

There is little doubt that Spenser got some of these monsters out of the natural history of Gesner, the Buffon .of his time, and that in a plate of one of his old folio volumes (now before us) is to be seen the identical "fearful face" shown by the poet's "horrible sea-satyr" in "time of greatest storme," the one consequently which the poet himself saw. It is a pity we cannot give it here. The commentators should add it to their notes in the next edition.* With most of Spenser's sea-monsters we have nothing further to do in this article; but the "sea-satyr' is directly to our purpose; and so is the "griesly wasser`man,” ¿. e. waterman, or man of the sea; a very different personage from your "waterman above bridge." Gesner's " sea-satyr," or 'pan," is taken from an account given by Battista Fulgoso, who says that, in the time of Pope Eugenius the Fourth, it was taken on the coast of Illyria, while endeavoring to drag a boy away with it to its native element. It had a humanish kind of head and body, with a skin like an eel's, two horns on its forehead, a finger and thumb only on each hand, a couple of webbed feet, a great fish's tail, and wings like a bat! Such, at least, is the figure to be collected from the description and plate together.

66

Gesner has two whole chapters upon Wassermen; that is, Tritons and Men of the Sea; for, "the Germans call all such creatures wassermen, or seemen." Of these watermen and seamen, one of whom an accommodating figure is given, agreeable to his designation (with a caution

Gesner was evidently
In one of his plates

* "Conradi Gesneri Historia Animalium," p. 1197. Milton's as well as Spenser's authority for his animals. (p. 138) is the whale mistaken for an island, which the former speaks of,

'With fixed anchor in his scaly rind."

on the part of the writer against having too much faith in him), is called the Monk. The account of it is taken from the work on fishes by Rondelet; who says that the picture was sent him by Margaret, Queen of Navarre. The head is quite human, and has the clerical tonsure! The rest is a compromise between fish-scales and church vestments. This reverend fish was taken in a drag of herrings, and lived only three days, during which it said nothing, "with the exception of uttering certain sighs, indicative of great sorrow and distress." *

Another writer, quoted in the same place, says that the sea-monk is sometimes visible in the British Channel. "He has a white skin on his cranium, with a black circle round it, like a monk newly shaven. He fawns upon people at sea, and entices them into the water, where he satiates himself with their flesh." This species, we suppose, became extinct at the abolition of the monasteries.

But the monk has also a Bishop, of whom a figure is likewise given, very episcopal, and as if in the act of giving a charge to his clergy. He has a scaly mitre, a cloak, and an aquiline nose. If the metempsychosis were believed in, it would be difficult not to suppose him an actual bishop, who had been turned into a fish for eating too much turbot. It was caught in 1531, and sent to the King of Poland, to whom it made signs, "apparently indicative of a vehement desire of being returned to the ocean, into which, without further delay, it was accordingly thrown." "I omit other particulars," says Rondelet, "because I hold them to be feigned, for such is the vanity of mankind that, not content with truths sufficiently marvellous in themselves, they are for adding wonders to them of

* Gesner, p. 521.