water" which is salt." By an accident almost as sudden as his shipwreck, he was saved, and after having been tossed from wave to wave, finally landed in India. Here, far away from all friends, he wore away his youth. Law and traffic-good fortune and bad -health and sickness came on him by turns, but he bustled through them all; till at last, with a light heart, and a--pocket pocket full of gold rupees, he set sail again for "the Land of Cakes."-And now? Is he dead?-No, reader, he still lives, fresh and frolicsome, chirping like a bird in his lusty winter. You may see him (unless he be altered) at Will's or the Cider Cellar, with a glass of brandy and water and his cigar, making the midnight echoes ring with songs which were considered matchless fifty years ago. Should you feel any doubt about him, you will know him by his Scotch accent, his rosy good-humoured face, and his 66 Igad, Sir," which I hold to be above imitation. He will not despise your company (if it be good for anything), nor your admiration, if kept within reasonable limits. For my own part, I am content to exchange a compliment or two with him occasionally. He has been pleased to say something civil regarding my productions. Once, indeed, he added a wish that I would make a sketch of him in one of my leisure moments. I promised the old gentleman that I would do so-and here it is! [W.]

Dibbs, who follows our old gentleman, as he ought to do, has still less in him of the ideal. He is not a boy to "let the liquid ruby flow;" but he could uncork a bottle of good prose port, and was a topping hand at a pot of porter. There Romans, Divesii,-as Horace and though every learned person may not. of that family. He is one of the fellows who hung up the pipes and lyres too soon, being anxious to steal off to the contubernium.

were Dibbses among the Shakspeare well knew, Some of the Davuses were

DIBBS, THE WAITER.

DIBES was a monstrous blockhead, though small; being of no large circumference, and barely five feet high. He had a little round head which shone like a ball, over which some weak hair straggled, a large mouth, and a couple of eyes like bullets. He

loved idling, gossiping, eating, drinking (especially drinking) and romancing, beyond any one I ever knew-though he lied so in-. differently that his countenance perpetually betrayed him. He possessed the art of mistaking, and of never finding what he sought for, to a degree that is scarcely credible. He was a paradoxical perfection; having arrived, if I may say so, at a full stunted growth. both of mind and body. He was not wanting in any point, but was as complete in his way as a dwarf-oak or a gooseberry-bush. You never wished him to be handsomer, or bigger, or betterexcept perhaps when he waited on you.-Dibbs had, moreover, his good qualities. He was sometimes willing, and sometimes (when the public-house was not in the way) expeditious. He could tie a knot (he called it a weaver's knot'-not a Gordian)-could beat carpets, or boys-expel children from the gutter, rats from a house, paupers from a parish, and so forth. His sole ambition was to be beadle of the parish. I imagined at first that he had been attracted by the cocked hat (an awful symbol), but I discovered afterwards that it was the dignity only which affected him. "It was a 'sponsible place," as he used to say "and Mr and Mr who had been in office a matter of fifteen years, had brought up their families respectably.”

Besides these accomplishments, Dibbs had one or two defects. He was (like many persons below the rank of philosopers) a little sullen, and terribly obstinate when he was in the wrong; and he was seldom in the right. He had so little genius for figures, that he would for ever cast up the bill incorrectly; though it was observed that the error was always in his own favour. He had been ostler, gardener, sailor, porter, constable, and door-keeper at a Methodist chapel, and ended by being familiar with his betters on the strength of his mistress's larder. If you praised Dibbs, he admitted his merits. If you joked on him, he looked perplexed: (he did not understand jokes.) But if you abused him outright, he shone full upon you:-he had then a fine sullen dogged drunken look, that Hogarth himself could never have painted. The pig that will go backwards, the little black-polled bull that goes all ways and confounds even the drover, the ass that will go neither

one way nor t'other-all similes fail! This sturdy stupidity, inaccessible to argument and apology, formed his character. His head was as thick as a wall by nature; and with this armour of angry obstinacy about it, nothing in the world could touch him.— Yet Dibbs had his use, like other animals :-he could draw a cork, froth a tankard, make toast, and tea, and excuses (for himself or another) and turned a beef-steak to perfection.

REMBRANDT AND VANDYKE.

[W.]

Among painters, at least among Flemish painters, Rembrandt and Vandyke may be considered as having each attained the highest step in their several departments of art,-the imaginative and the real. For the former, in his higher works was undoubtedly a most imaginative painter. He did not indeed embody the "ideal" in the many faces and figures which he completed; but he let in a flood of light and darkness upon our senses, which has oftener startled imagination from her trance, and sent the human mind into speculation and thinking, than possibly any other painter upon record. He has no grace of figure; no beauty of aspect; no fine drawing; and often but little pretensions to colour: and yet by the mere dint of his wonderful chiaro-scuro, he absolutely chains us to his productions. He is like some dark necromancer, from whose spells arise terrible phantasmas,-shapeless things from which daylight shrinks, after having glanced on them for a moment. Whatever may be the mere subject of his labours, all are tinged by the same awful mist of his imagination, and come out like black and fatal secrets half revealed, such as we behold in dreams. We look upon the gloomy fictions of Rembrandt, seeking no interpretation even when we understand them not; but content ourselves with contemplating them as we would some spectral appearance, or some mystery of night and darkness, which daylight and impertinent investigation seem (and but seem) to destroy. Vandyke, on the other hand, sate at the right-hand of Nature, transcribing whatever she placed before him with unrivalled fidelity. He was, if I may venture to say so, almost too real; that is to say, he copied what he saw at the moment, and nothing more. It was

otherwise with Michael-Angelo, Raffaelle, Correggio, Leonardo, and, I will presume to say, Titian. Each of these great painters, it is true, obtained all their materials from nature; but they combined and reproduced them. And thus it was, also, with the grand Flemish genius, Rembrandt.

The following extract from the letter of a friend of mine (dated Gottingen) will show the effect of Rembrandt's and Vandyke's pictures upon a highly poetic temperament. It is an eloquent tribute to the two Flemings, and conveys an admirable idea of the peculiar powers of the artists.

"Here are plenty of sights of all sorts—a picture-gallery containing some most extraordinary great historical pictures of Rembrandt. In his pictorial creations, methinks this Flemish wonder never got further than Fiat Lux. In man and woman making he must have received instructions from some of Nature's worst journeymen. Here is one, a Sampson (or Simpson, as the Germans call the poor gate-carrier) betrayed to the Philistines. You stand at the mouth of a great dark wide cave, through which comes an overflow of torch-light glancing and resting on Philistines' heads and beards. The wild beast of Israel is at bay on the foreground; but then he is the strangest chaos of wild legs and arms!-One, a dodo-like member, he thrusts into your eye, and the rest are in a state of mutiny against nature and their proprietor. He would have been wiser had he called it a picture of Menenius's fable of The Rebellion against King Belly. There are many wonderfully mysterious heads of his, which look more like evanescent revelations of people that shall be born, than representations of what men have been. They look out at you as if they were going to dive again into their cloudy elements, and as if they could not last an instant. And they are amazingly contrasted with some of Vandyke's clear and real people, who stand and sit about the walls quietly but quite alive and knowing that they are so, only they choose to be pictures a little longer." [W. P.]

SONNETS.

NOON.

How all the spirits of Nature love to greet,
In mystic recognition from the grass,
And cloud, and spray-a warm and vivid class-
The eagle-tiring Noon: around whose feet
The glories of the brimfull summer meet;
That reeling Time beholds his sober glass
Turn to a goblet-and the sands that pass
Seem drops of living wine. Oh! this is sweet
To see the heavens all open, and the hood

Of crystal Noon flung back:-the earth meanwhile
Filling her veins with sunshine-vital blood
Of all that now from her full breast doth smile
(Casting no shadow) on that pleasant flood

Of light, where every mote is some small minstrel's isle.

To one that marks the quick and certain round
Of year on year, and finds how every day
Brings its gray hair, or bears a leaf away
From the full glory with which life is crowned,
Ere youth becomes a shade and fame a sound;
Surely to one that feels his foot on sand
Unsure, the bright and ever-visible hand
Of Time points far above the lowly bound
Of pride that perishes; and leads the eye
To loftier objects and diviner ends-
A tranquil strength, sublime humility,
A knowledge of ourselves, a faith in friends,

A sympathy for all things born to die,

With cheerful love for those whom truth attends.

These two sonnets are from a Correspondent, who describes himself as young." They are very clever. There is a turn in some of the lines, that, reminds us of the late Mr Keats. The enthusiasm of our Correspondent has a look with it, that, unfortunately for the world, is thought to belong peculiarly to youth; but we cannot wish him a greater wisdom, than to hope he may always retain it. The preservation of this sacred fire, for life, among a small number of men would suffice to produce a blaze of warmth and truth, that should make this earth of ours a golden planet. We shall be happy to hear from the writer again, and to accept the favours he speaks of.

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