ful, and we need not fear that death shall tear her from us-we look upon an immortal countenance. A morning thus dedicated is an act of the purest piety; it is offering to the Deity a heart made happy by the contemplation of his works; and if I can prevail upon a single reader to detach himself for a time from crowds and enthralments, and betake himself to the sunny meadows or the green twilight of the woods, I shall felicitate myself on not having quite unprofitably employed the morning of" To-day."

SPORTING WITHOUT A LICENCE.

THERE's a charm when Spring is young,
And comes laughing on the breeze,
When each leaflet has a tongue,

That is lisping in the trees,
When morn is fair, and the sunny air
With chime of beaks is ringing,
Through fields to rove with her we love,
And listen to their singing.

The sportsman finds a zest,

Which all others can outvie,

With his lightning to arrest

Pheasants whirring through the sky;
With dog and gun, from dawn of sun
Till purple evening hovers,

O'er field and fen, and hill and glen,
The happiest of rovers.

The hunter loves to dash

Through the horn-resounding woods,

Or plunge with fearless splash

Into intercepting floods;

O'er gap and gate he leaps elate,

The vaulting stag to follow, And at the death has scarcely breath To give the hoop and hollo!

By the river's margin dank,

With the reeds and rushes mix'd,
Like a statue on the bank,
See the patient angler fix'd ;
A summer's day he whiles away
Without fatigue or sorrow,
And if the fish should baulk his wish,
He comes again to-morrow.

In air let pheasants range,
'Tis to me a glorious sight,
Which no fire of mine shall change
Into grovelling blood and night :
I am no hound, to pant and bound
Behind a stag that's flying;
Nor can I hook a trout from brook,
On grass to watch its dying.

And yet no sportsman keen
Can a sweeter pastime ply,
Or enjoy the rural scene,
With more ecstasy than I ;
There's not a view, a form, a hue,
In earth, or air, or ocean,
That does not fill my heart, and thrill
My bosom with emotion.

O clouds that paint the air!

O fountains, fields, and groves! Sights, sounds, and odours rare, Which my yearning spirit loves; While thus I feel, and only steal From visions so enchanting, In tuneful lays to sing your praise— What charm of life is wanting?

ON PUNS AND PUNSTERS.

"The gravest beast is an ass; the gravest bird is an owl; the gravest fish is an oyster; and the gravest man a fool." JOE MILLER.

GRAVITY, says Lord Bolingbroke, is the very essence of imposture. A quack or a pretender is generally a very grave and reverend signior; and though I would not venture to assert that the converse of this proposition is invariably true, I must confess, that as I am apt to doubt the virtue of an obtrusive Puritan and rigourist, so am I marvellously prone to suspect the wisdom of your serious and solemn Precisian. While the shallow pedant endeavours to impose upon the world by a serious and pompous deportment, minds of a superior order will be often found abandoning themselves to playfulness and puerility. Plato, after discoursing philosophy with his disciples upon the promontory of Sunium, frequently indulged the gaiety of his heart by relaxing into a vein of the most trivial jocoseness; but once seeing a grave formalist approach in the midst of their trifling, he exclaimed," Silence, my friends! let us be wise now; here is a fool coming." This man's race is not extinct. Reader! hast thou not sometimes encountered a starched-looking quiz, who seemed to have steeped his countenance in vinegar to preserve it from the infection of laughter ?—a per

sonage of whom it might be pronounced, as Butler said of the Duke of Buckingham, that he endures pleasures with less patience than other men do their pains ?-a staid, important, dogged, square-rigged, mathematical-minded sort of an animal? Question him, and I will lay my head to yours (for I like to take the odds), that whatever tolerance he may be brought to admit for other deviations from the right line of gravity, he will profess a truculent and implacable hatred of that most kind-hearted, sociable, and urbane witticism, termed-A PUN.

Oh the Anti-risible rogue! Oh the jesticide-the Hilarifuge! the extinguisher of "quips and cranks and wanton wiles ;"-the queller of quirks, quiddets, quibbles, equivocation, and quizzing! the gagger of gigglers! the Herod of witlings, and Procrustes of full-grown Punsters! Look at his atrabilarious complexion; it is the same that Cæsar feared in Brutus and Cassius: such a fellow is indeed fit for treasons, stratagems, and plots; he has no music in his soul, for he will not let us even play upon words. Will nothing but pure wit serve thy turn, most sapient Sir? Well, then, set us the example—

"Lay on, Macduff,

And damn'd be he that first cries, Hold! enough!"

How,-dumb-founded? Not quite;-methinks I hear him quoting Dr. Johnson's stale hyperbole" Sir, the man that would commit a pun would pick a pocket ;" to which I would oppose an equally valid

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dictum of an illustrious quibbler-" Sir, no man ever condemned a good pun who was able to make one.” I know not a more aggrieved and unjustly proscribed character in the present day than the poor painstaking punster. He is the Paria of the dining-table; it is the fashion to run him down: and as every dull ass thinks that he may have a kick at the prostrate witling, may I be condemned to pass a whole week without punning, (a fearful adjuration !) if I do not show that the greatest sages, poets, and philosophers of all ages, have been enrolled upon this proscribed list!

Even in Holy Writ, whatever might have been the intention of the speaker, there is authority for a play upon words equivalent to a pun. When Simon BarJona, for his superior faith, received the name of Peter, (which in Greek signifies a stone or rock,) the divine bestower of that appellation exclaimed," I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church," &c. Homer has made the wily Ulysses save his life by means of a pun. In the ninth book of the Odyssey, that hero informs the Cyclops that his name is Noman; and when the monster, after having had his eye put out in his sleep, awakes in agony, he thus roars to his companions for assist

ance:

"Friends! No-man kills me. No-man in the hour
Of sleep oppresses me with fraudful
If No-man hurt thee, but the hand divine

Inflict disease, it fits thee to resign.

power.

To Jove, or to thy father Neptune pray,
The brethren cried, and instant strode away."