neously converted into smoke and ashes! This, as Cowley would have said, is to put out the fire of genius by that of the torch; to extinguish the light of reason in that of its own funeral pyre; to make matter once more triumph over mind. Possibly, however, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty, limited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which leaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. Half our epic poems are modifications of Homer, though none are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindarics, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world.

An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an author, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none; though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a deser

tion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an alphabious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial of L., or attain an immortality of zig-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as an impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents entrusted to one little hieroglyphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop. Compared to this ignoble imprisonment, how light the punishment of the negligent Sylph, who was threatened to

Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,

Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,

While, clogg'd, he beats his silken wings in vain.

So gross are my perceptions, that my mind refuses to take cognizance of these Magazine sprites, in their alphabetical and shadowy state. I animate these monthly apparitions, put flesh and blood around the bones of their letters, and even carry my humanity so far as to array them in appropriate garments. I have an ideal (not always a beau ideal) of every one of the contributors to the New Monthly, as accurate, no

cess.

doubt, as the notion which Lavater formed of men's
characters from their autograph. Sometimes, how-
ever, this Promethean art has been a puzzling pro-
One Essayist, wishing to immortalize himself,
like the Wat-Tylericide Mayor of London, by a
dagger, assumed that note of reference as his sig-
nature, and occasioned me infinite trouble in provid-
ing a sheath of flesh. Another, who now honourably
wields the sword of justice in the land of the convict
and the kangaroo, used to distinguish his well-written
papers by three daggers at once, taxing my imagina-
tion to the utmost by this tripartite individuality,
and making expensive demands upon the wardrobe
of
my brain. A third held out a hand at the bottom
of his page, beckoning me to its welcome perusal-a
symbol which my eye (if the catachresis may be al-
lowed) was always eager to grasp and shake, and to
which my fancy affixed a body with as much con-
fidence as he who conjured up a Hercules from a foot.
But the most bewildering of these contractions of
humanity was the subscription of a star; for, after
man had become sidereal and accomplished his apo-
theosis, it seemed somewhat irreverend to restore him
to his incarnate state.

"This raised a mortal to the skies,
That drew an author down."

I brought down these Astræi from their empyrean, remodelled their frames, gave them a suit of clothes for nothing, and had before my mind's eye a distinct presentment of their identity.

66

Even when we assume a literary individuality somewhat more substantial than this fanciful creation; when one is known, propriâ personâ, as the real identical Tomkins, who writes in a popular magazine under the signature of any specific letter, to what does it amount ?—an immortality of a month, after which we are tranquilly left to enjoy an eternity-of oblivion. Our very nature is ephemeral: we come like shadows, so depart." From time to time some benevolent and disinterested compiler endeavours to pluck us from the Lethean gulf, by republishing our best papers under the captivating title of "Beauties of the Magazines," "Spirit of the modern Essayists," or some such embalming words; but alas! like a swimmer in the wide ocean, who attempts to uphold his sinking comrade, he can but give him a few moments' respite, when both sink together in the waters of oblivion. We know what pains have been taken to appropriate Addison's and Steele's respective papers in the Spectator, distinguished only by initials. Deeming my own lucubrations (as what essayist does not?) fully entitled to the same anxious research, I occasionally please myself with dreaming that some future Malone, seated in a library, as I am at this present moment, may take down a surviving volume of the New Monthly, and, naturally curious to ascertain the owner of the initial H, may discover, by ferreting into obituaries and old newspapers, that it actually designates a Mr. Higginbotham, who lies buried in Shoreditch church. Anticipating a handsome monument with a full account of the author, and some pathetic verses by a poetical

friend, he hurries to the spot, and after an infinity of groping, assisted by the sexton's spectacles, discovers a flat stone, which, under the customary emblems of a death's head and cross bones, conveys the very satisfactory information that the aforesaid Mr. Higginbotham was born on one day and died upon another. Of all the intervening period, its hopes and fears, its joys and miseries, its verse and prose, not an atom farther can be gleaned. And this it is to be a writer of Ephemerides! Verily, the idea is so disheartening, that I should be tempted to commit some rash act, and perpetrate publication on my own account, but that I have before my eyes the fate of certain modern Blackmores, impressing upon me the salutary truth, that if we must perish and be forgotton, it is better to die of a monthly essay than an annual epic.

UGLY WOMEN.

"Un homme rencontre une femme, et est choqué de sa laideur; bientôt, si elle n'a pas de prétentions, sa physionomie lui fait oublier les défauts de ses traits, il la trouve aimable, et conçoit qu'on puisse l'aimer; huit jours après il a des espérances, huit jours après on les lui retire, huit jours après il est fou." De l'Amour.

THE ancient inhabitants of Amathus, in the island of Cyprus, were the most celebrated statuaries in the world, which they almost exclusively supplied with gods and goddesses. Every one who had a mind to