dered as intruding upon the haunts of the immortals. It appears strange that advantage has not been taken of this species of illusion to enhance the attractions of other celebrated statues, by surrounding them with correspondent associations. Connoisseurs, it may be said, experience too intense a delight in the prodigies of art to require any stimulus to their admiration; but the most vivid imaginations cannot embody all the picturesque of a subject at one moment; and if they could, they should recollect that men of more sluggish faculties, or less cultivated taste, cannot indulge in such delicious reveries without the aid of ocular excitement. The Baths of Apollo form also an extensive play of waters; but fortunately they were not working at the time we beheld them :-I say fortunately, for I should have been sorry indeed had their noisy spouting banished the impressive, heartfelt silence of the spot; or substituted for those delicious visions which wafted us back through nymphs and fauns, and Thessalian woods, to the banks of the Peneus, any reminiscences connected with Louis Quatorze, the Bois de Boulogne, and the banks of the Seine. Yet such a revulsion were we doomed to experience; for we found that the group before us was in fact a species of apotheosis of Louis the Fourteenth, represented under the figure of Apollo, while the attendant nymphs drying his feet, anointing his hair, and performing other menial offices, were portraits of his six mistresses! One knows not which is most fulsome and revolting the weak and unmanly vanity of the monarch, or the crawling profligacy of the women who could suffer themselves to be handed down to posterity in such mutually disgraceful characters; yet this shameless and boastful trifling is perpetually thrust into the face of the world as if it were a virtue, almost every nymph in the gardens being the bust of a mistress, and almost every god a likeness of the monarch. This is legitimacy with a vengeance; and the advocates of that doctrine who are of opinion that, after impoverishing his people by boundless extravagance, a rectilinear king may corrupt them by publishing his seraglio in marble, and that he may not only be despotic himself, but put lettres de cachet in the power of his numerous concubines, should certainly make a point of visiting Versailles. Could we trace that hidden relationship which sows in one age the seeds of the events that are to grow up in another, we might probably establish an unbroken connexion between the building of this palace and the destruction of the Bastille. These occurrences are action and re-action; cause and effect: and when certain writers lament (as they may well do) the outrages of the Revolution, it would be but fair to extend their sympathy a little farther back, and bewail those long-existing outrages of despotism by which it was generated. The Trianons present nothing particularly deserving notice after the splendours of Versailles; although the greater one, built for Madame de Maintenon, has the same pretension to pomp, saloons, and picture galleries, all at a humble distance from the gorgeous prototype. The celebrity of the little Trianon arises from its delightful gardens, assuming to be laid out in the English style, and, with certain exceptions, not undeserving that proud distinction. Delille, however, the poet of the gardens, could find nothing better to say of them than to compare them, with true French politesse, to Marie Antoinette Semblable à son auguste et jeune Deité, A Parisian's notions of the pastoral very seldom range beyond the Court and the metropolis. Fatigued with gazing upon stone buildings and glaring statues, I wandered into an unfrequented part of these delicious groves, to recreate my aching eyes with the sight of verdant lawns and the pleasant green light that oozes through boughs and leaves; and never have I felt the bewitching power of Nature with more intense enjoyment than in the few exquisite minutes passed amid the silent shades of the little Trianon. Contrast imparted an irresistible charm to the beauties of the scene, which melted the soul like the first meeting with those we love after a long separation. Seated under the shade of a chesnut-tree, I saw across the green sward before me a beautiful cluster of foliage, consisting of aspens, acacias, limes, and white ash trees; and as their light feathery boughs kept undulating in the wind, I could hardly help fancying that they did it on purpose to engage my attention to the rustling of their leaves, whose sound seemed to reproach me gently for my long secession from the worship of Nature; and at last, with more vivacious music, to welcome me back to her sylvan dominions. In the enthusiasm of the moment, I made a mental vow of future fealty and devotion; and in the stern necessity that invariably starts up to dissipate all the day-dreams of romance, and illusions of fancy, I answered the impatient summons of our guide, and got quietly into the carriage that reconducted us along dusty roads to the hermitage of-the Chaussée d'Antin at Paris. When again alone, I seriously doubted whether I had done right in withdrawing myself from the welcome of the woods; for never had the iron tongues of Bow bells rung out a more distinct summons to Whittington, than did the silver voices of the leaves pour into my ear as I listened to their song; and I amused myself with conjecturing what rural honours "Jove in his chair, of the sky Lord Mayor," would have showered down upon me, had I yielded to the invitation of the French Dryads and Hamadryads. I had not yet settled whether I should have been converted into a silk-stocking Faunus, leading out his Dryope to perform pirouettes and entrechats on a smooth grass-plot-or a royal huntsman, such as I had seen at Versailles, with a monstrous cocked hat, a sword by his side, and red velvet inexpressibles,-when in this pleasing uncertainty I fell fast asleep. REFLECTIONS ON PLUM-PUDDING, BY A POOR GENTLEMAN. MR. EDITOR,-For the sake of giving harmonious clearness to this Essay, let me describe the circumstances that have induced me to send it. This is beginning ab ovo, or from the egg; but what then? is a fresh egg an unimportant ingredient in a plum-pudding? I must also speak of myself. But be so good, Sir, as to respect me; for though poor, I am a gentleman. I am no admirer of such vulgar plumpuddings as are doled out to the unwashed artificer from the common cook's shop or the wheelbarrow. No, Sir, I love only such as breathe, like Milton's music," a steam of rich distilled perfumes." Such were those which were once revealed to me from beneath the silver cover of my friend;-but he is gone, and with him the days of pleasurable and pudding recollections-perhaps never to return. I live genteely in an attic lodging up three pair of stairs, and support myself and a grey cat in a state of honourable independence and sleekness-(I apply the sleekness to my cat, and not myself.) Necessity, however, drove me lately to make a sly attempt at employment from a bookseller. I called on Messrs. Blank and Blank (well may I call them blank, for they sent me away very blank, and I could have piously tossed them in a blanket.) I inquired about literature, and how authors contrived to live. "On bullock's liver," said the bookseller. "We have two hundred sermons a year from the Reverend Hum Drum, and fifty volumes of history from Dr. Dryrott, warranted to us better than Hume's or Robertson's, at the rate of a halfpenny a paragraph. High feeding, Sir, makes authors abdominous and stupid. What clever selling elegies Boyce would have written, with his hand stuck through a hole in the blanket, had you kept him from porter. But we are liberal, Sir,-nobody more so." I thought to myself, there is no plumpudding to be found here; and went home chop-fallen, to dine on a solitary chop. But the thoughts of plum-pudding still haunted me. Next morning came the red-cheeked and curly-pated butcher's boy to my door, and hinted his expectation of a Christmas-box by a message desiring to know if I wanted any suet for a Christmaspudding; for that the apothecary over the way had bespoken nine pounds of suet for the aforesaid dish. "Go," said I, "boy, learn of the apothecary's cook how many guests are to consume this pudding, and be assured of thy Christmas-box." He returned 'like lightning-Cook was positive that the dining-room could dine only eighteen persons. Now then began I to reflect. Nine pounds of suet, suppose as many of flour, and twice as many of fruit, besides etceteras. Here is half a pound of suet to each particular stomach, without reckoning other things. Let me call upon you, Mr. Editor, by all that is dear to you in Christmas revels, to reflect on the sublime and beautiful conception of this apothecary's plum-pudding. What "double double toil and trouble" to his cook, and what clanging of pestles and future employment for his prentices, thus providently stored up by his hospitality in the bowels of his friends and customers!-I meant to have written a long Essay on the subject; but hope that what I have written will bring me a sum sufficient to save me from the horrors of spending Christmas without a pudding. And with respectful compliments from my grey cat, which a punning friend calls a cat of praise-worthy humour, (or laudable pus,) I remain your respectful humble servant, LORENZO LANKSIDES. My dear C LETTER FROM INDIA. Calcutta. Or all the miseries of human life, none, I find, are sooner forgotten than those endured on ship-board. The shore is such a healing balsam, that a four-and-twenty hours' application effaces almost every scratch. Though I may be said to be still dripping with the salt spray, and to have the sound of waters still "ringing in my ears," yet all the crosses and accidents of my voyage are fast fading away; or, if they are in part remembered, it is only to hug myself, and think how much more agreeable is my present situation than tumbling in the Bay of Bengal. Besides, there is the satisfaction of recounting these things. In contemplating the dangers and sufferings that are past, we are apt to give ourselves credit for a certain degree of fortitude which makes the recollection of them very delightful; we forget all the wry faces that were made at the time, and look most valiantly upon the perils that are no more. My days at sea passed away in a sort of reverie. I have most imperfect and indistinct recollections of all that was said, or done, or thought, during that period: there was neither mile-stone nor prospect to mark the way, nor incidents to note the time; and really if I were not positively assured by the concurrent testimony of most respectable witnesses, I am inclined to think I should dispute both. A thought, a single thought you know, "is capable of years ;" and vice versa, a long life may be lived in a day. Hence some divines have charitably inferred, in their dark metaphysics, that the dying sinner may be actually suffering the torture of ages in his expiring agony. If you ask me for my adventures on my way hither, I can only say, that I have eaten, drunk, and slept that I have sat for hours and days watching the sea and the clouds, and speculating upon porpoises and flying-fish-" et præterea nihil." If it were possible to give utterance to the wayward fancies that have occupied my attention" thick as the motes that people the sun's beam," they would sound more like the day-dreams of a feverstricken man than the cogitations of a rational being. Upon turning over the leaves of my journal, (a morocco-bound book of considerable thickness, bought in England expressly for the purpose of noting down strange incidents and useful observations,) I find only one note in these few words: "Crossed the line, Nov.-." As an exception, however, to the general monotony of this voyage, I have some reason to remember one or two events, the first of which took place at Madeira about twelve days after leaving the Land's End. It was late in the evening when we made that island; and orders were given for the ship to stand off and on during the night, in order that we might land early on the ensuing morning. Unhappily, these orders were injudiciously obeyed; the wind failed during the night, and at daybreak we found ourselves becalmed within five miles of shore. It was Sunday; the convent bells tolling for mass were distinctly heard, but we waited in vain for a breeze, till at two o'clock our patience being exhausted, the jolly-boat was hoisted out and we crowded into her to the number of sixteen, including the captain and four boys at the oar. Every body who has been at Madeira must recollect the Lew rock, a high craggy point which is severed from the main land, and is used as a signal-fort; upon reaching which we were met by the custom-house boat with an officer on board, who demanded 66 our Bill of Health." With this we were unfortunately not provided, and in consequence were ordered to remain in our boat close under the Lew rock till our case could be represented on shore, and permission sent off for us to land. Here we staid for some hours in a most disagreeable state of suspense. In the mean time the day was wearing fast away, and no answer arrived. The sky became overcast with clouds that swept across the face of the heavens-the air grew chilly-the wind rose, and instead of the smooth glittering surface over which we had glided in the morning, the sea was broken up into billows that began to show their curling heads. The captain grew impatient to rejoin his ship, having made no arrangements for passing the night on shore; and after venting his discontent in a volley of oaths and grumbling, he gave the order to "shove off." As we were doing this the sentry from the top of the rock, whose form was half hid in the approaching darkness, was observed waving his hand with violence, and bending his body in the act of calling to us; but his signs were not understood; his voice was drowned in the wind and the roaring of the sea. As I gazed upon this man, a chilling and foreboding anxiety came over me, and his unintelligible sounds fell upon my ear like the mysterious warning voice of the Prophet. His meaning was too soon apparent. From his lofty position he could see the approaching storm, which was hid from us. We had scarcely cleared the rock when we found ourselves in a tumbling sea that was rising every moment with the wind, and soon became formidable to our small and crowded boat. The sun was just sinking amidst a thick bank of clouds (and you will recollect there is no twilight in this latitude) the tops of the hills and back part of the island, which had been shut out from our view while under the lee of the land, now showed themselves covered with clouds, and every thing gave token that the squall would increase into a violent gale. We were at once aware of our danger -we had no sail-the boys were exhausted with their exertions during the heat of the day, and in such a sea we could not relieve them. We would gladly have put back; but it was impossible. The wind and waves drove us rapidly from the shore. Our ship was tacking about in the distance, half her mast just visible above water;-if we missed her-beyond was the ocean -night and storm. We were most of us landsmen; but we should not have felt so much alarm had our captain betrayed less symptoms of apprehension. I sat near him, and could see his countenance change as he looked from the sea to the sky. His boisterous overbearing accent of command sunk into a tone of familiar entreaty, as he encouraged the boys at the oar; and told plainly of the fearful equality to which danger levels all distinctions. His face grew very pale, and he exclaimed-"I would give one hundred guineas, gentlemen, if we were safe at yonder ship!" This was not comforting. In the mean time the sea was every moment rising, and looked tremendous-every wave covered us with spray; but we contrived to break its violence by fastening an oar astern, an expedient commonly resorted to in such cases; and two of our party were sent forward to trim the boat-one of these was my brother, |