should be so much good writing abroad! In the most obscure publications one encounters prose and verse that would have established a first-rate reputation fifty years ago. At that happy period it was easy to be a Triton among the minnows; now-a-days one actually runs a risk of being a minnow among the Tritons. This comes of universal education. What an awful responsibility attaches to Lancaster and Dr. Bell!-it would have been but decent in them to caution their scholars not to write so well, and interfere in this scandalous manner with the regular practitioners. For my own part, were it not that it would look like an affectation of singularity, now that every body is an author, I would leave Apollo to dry up my ink, cut my pen into a tooth-pick, forswear essaywriting, cease to publish, and float down the stream of life

"Like ships transported with the tide, Which in their passage leave no print behind."

"A wise man," says Lord Chesterfield, "will live at least as much within his wit as his income:" I am determined to do both, and keep my good things to myself, for I am fairly tired of alembicizing my intellect, and as an earnest of my sincerity I thus crumple up the sheet on which I have been scribbling, and cast it into the grate.

P. S. Guess my amazement, most unexpected reader, when I found, upon my accidentally calling in Conduit-street, that the preceding paper, was actually set up in the press! My servant having had

directions to preserve the least scrap enriched with my invaluable lucubrations, had found and brought it to me for orders; and on my pettishly exclaiming that he might throw it to the devil, the blockhead, mistaking my meaning, conveyed it, as he had done many others, to the printer's devil. I have only had time to give it the title it now bears, and to add this explanatory postscript, which enables it to make its own apology.

THE FLOWER THAT FEELS NOT SPRING.

FROM the prisons dark of the circling bark
The leaves of tenderest green are glancing;
They gambol on high in the bright blue sky,
Fondly with Spring's young Zephyrs dancing,
While music and joy and jubilee gush

From the lark and linnet, the blackbird and thrush.

The butterfly springs on its new-wove wings,

The dormouse starts from his wintry sleeping;
The flowers of earth find a second birth,

To light and life from the darkness leaping ;
The roses and tulips will soon resume
Their youth's first perfume and primitive bloom.

What renders me sad when all nature glad
The heart of each living creature cheers?

I laid in the bosom of earth a blossom,

And water'd its bed with a father's tears;
But the grave has no Spring, and I still deplore
That the flow'ret I planted comes up no more!

That eye, whose soft blue of the firmament's hue
Express'd all holy and heavenly things,-
Those ringlets bright, which scatter'd a light

Such as angels shake from their sunny wings,That cheek, in whose freshness my heart had trustAll-all have perish'd-my daughter is dust!—

Yet the blaze sublime of thy virtue's prime,
Still gilds my tears and a balm supplies,
As the matin ray of the god of day

Brightens the dew which at last it dries:Yes, Fanny, I cannot regret thy clay,

When I think where thy spirit has wing'd its way.

So wither we all-so flourish and fall,

Like the flowers and weeds that in churchyards wave; Our leaves we spread over comrades dead,

And blossom and bloom with our root in the grave;Springing from earth, into earth we are thrust, Ashes to ashes and dust to dust!

If death's worst smart is to feel that we part
From those whom we love and shall see no more,

It softens his sting to know that we wing

Our flight to the friends who have gone before;
And the grave is a boon and a blessing to me,
If it waft me, O Fanny, my daughter, to thee!

ROUGE ET NOIR.

"Could I forget

What I have been, I might the better bear
What I am destined to. I'm not the first

That have been wretched-but to think how much
I have been happier!”

SOUTHERN.

NEVER shall I forget that accursed 27th of September it is burnt in upon the tablet of my memory; graven in letters of blood upon my heart. I look back to it with a strangely compounded feeling of horror and delight;—of horror at the black series of wretched days and sleepless nights of which it was the fatal precursor; of delight at that previous career of tranquillity and self-respect which it was destined to terminate-alas, for ever!

On that day I had been about a fortnight in Paris, and in passing through the garden of the Palais Royal had stopped to admire the beautiful jet-d'eau in its centre, on which the sun-beams were falling so as to produce a small rainbow, when I was accosted by my old friend Major E- of the Fusileers. After the first surprises and salutations, as he found that the business of procuring apartments and settling my family had prevented my seeing many of the Parisian lions, he offered himself as my Cicerone, proposing that we should begin by making the circuit of the building that surrounded us. With its history,

and the remarkable events of which it had been the

scene, I was already conversant; but of its detail and appropriation, which, as he assured me, constituted its sole interest in the eyes of the Parisians, I was completely ignorant.

After taking a cursory view of most of the sights above ground in this multifarious pile, I was conducted to some of its subterraneous wonders,-to the Café du Sauvage, where a man is hired for six francs a night to personate that character, by beating a great drum with all the grinning, ranting, and raving of a madman ;-to the Café des Aveugles, whose numerous orchestra is entirely composed of blind men and women;-and to the Café des Variétés, whose small theatre, as well as its saloons and labyrinths, is haunted by a set of Sirens not less dangerous than the nymphs who assailed Ulysses. Emerging from these haunts, we found that a heavy shower was falling; and while we paraded once more the stone gallery, my friend suddenly exclaimed, as his eye fell upon the numbers of the houses-" one hundred and fifty four !-positively we were going away without visiting one of the" gaming-houses was the meaning of the term he employed, though he expressed it by a word that the fashionable preacher never mentioned to "ears polite."-" I have never yet entered," said I, "a Pandemonium of this sort, and I never will:-I refrain from it upon principle ;- Principiis obsta;' I am of Dr. Johnson's temperament-I can practise abstinence, but not temperance; and every body knows that prevention is better than cure.' "Do you remember," replied E--," what the same

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