Snuff, treacle, tops, he spurn'd them all, Is it that addled brains perchance, Or is it that a heated brain, When it is rubb'd against the grain, Like a cat's back, though dark as charcoal, Will in the gloom appear to sparkle? Whatever was the cause, the fact is, That Muggs conceived his call was true; And so began to read and practise, 'Twas his first care his voice to muffle, While to prevent the sneers and sniggers Of those who look for learned theses, He studied metaphors and figures, Tropes, similes, and catachreses, That both Quintilian and Longinus Should over-reach or undermine us. So qualified and recommended, "Viler than vilest of vile sinners! Sup on your reprobate Welsh rabbit ; Ye who love skittles, bowls, and dice, And make disorder'd nights of vice Your regular and daily habit :What! will ye still, ye heathen, flee From sanctity and grace, Until your blind idolatry Shall stare you in the face? Will ye throw off the mask, and show Thereby the cloven foot below? Dobut remember you must pay What's due to you on settling day; For Heaven's eye, it stands to sense, Can never stomach such transgressions; Nor can the hand of Providence Wink at your impious expressions.The profligate thinks vengeance dead, And in his fancied safety chuckles,— But Atheism's hydra head Shall have a rap upon the knuckles ;— At this display of declamation, Whereat our Muggs with anger fumed, In vain exalts its wicked horn, And turns its back upon my speech ;— They did seem anxious to prevent 'em, To stop our ranting Boanerges, DEATH-POSTHUMOUS MEMORIALS— CHILDREN. DEATH hath not any appalling concomitants, either as a "thin melancholy privation, or more confounding positive." He is the sleeping partner of life, to whom we give ourselves up every night without any compunctious visitings: we know not, when we enter them, that the sheets of our bed shall not prove our winding sheets, yet our hearts quake not. We walk arm-in-arm with him, almost every hour; and when his gentle hand draws the curtain around us, and covers us up in our narrow bed, what is it but to fall asleep, and to have a little longer to wait for the daylight? As I return to my sequestered quiet cottage, after the bustle of a day in London, and a glimpse at the pageantry of the theatre; so, after the great drama of life, shall we return to the tranquil non-existence from which we started ;-we had our turn, and must make room for others. Ay, but to die, and go we not where,— Shakspeare, with his usual insight into human nature, has put the cowardly speech of which this is the commencement, with all its monstrous notions of the Deity, and its abject and grovelling conclusion, into the mouth of Clodio, a dastard, who would purchase a pittance of life with his sister's dishonour.-Well might she exclaim O you beast! O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch ! Yet there is some force in the earnestness with which he urges the uncertain nature of death. "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.”— And yet, after all, it is the love of what we are going from, more than the fear of what we are going to, that makes us draw back our foot when the grave opens beneath it. Three-fourths of mankind, in their last moments, seem more anxious to be recorded in this world than favoured in the next; and many masses ostensibly ordered for the repose of the soul have really proceeded from a desire for perpetuating some remembrance of the body. No one likes to drop into the earth, like a pebble into the ocean, and let the waves of eternity close over him, without some record or memorial. We wish to keep up some connexion with mortality, however slight; and we stretch back our shadowy arms from the tomb to snatch at a phantom. Hence all our posthumous vanity and monumental earth-clinging,-from the dateless pyramids, down to the recent will of Mrs. Mary Hoggins, of St. Olave, Southwark, who bequeaths to the parish ringers a leg of mutton and trimmings, FOR EVER, for ringing a peal of triple-bob-majors on the anniversary of her birth." In commemorating its donor, the leg of mutton cannot fail more egregiously than the pyramids, which have entombed the names as well as the bodies of their builders :-" they've been so long remembered they're forgot"-or, if Cheops and Cephrenes be indeed their founders, what have they perpetuated? An empty word, a sound, which we cannot incorporate in flesh and blood; no, nor even in bones and dust, for Cambyses and Belzoni were both forestalled. The monarch's sarcophagus was found empty, while the bones of the sacred bull were still whole and recognizable. What a satire on human ambition !— Of the Mausoleum, one of the seven wonders of the world, not an atom remains :-we know nothing of him, who for so many centuries was its solitary tenant, while the name of the Queen who built it is familiar |