thought nothing of stopping the Thespian waggon on the highways of Parnassus. The French dramatists are similarly waylaid by our scouts from the green-room,—and the plunder is awful! What is Talleyrand about, that he cannot protect the property of the French? Perhaps he is better employed?

I am an old man, and have read a great deal in my time-being of a quiet disposition, and having always had a taste for books, which I consider a great blessing; but latterly I find that I may dispense with further perusal of printed volumes, as, unfortunately, memory serves me but too well; and all I read now strikes me as but a new version of what I had read somewhere before. Plagiarism is so barefaced and so universal, that I can't stand it no longer: I have shut up shop, and won't be taken in no more. Quære peregrinum? ciamo. I'm sick of hashed-up works, and loathe the baked meats of antiquity served in a fricassee. Give me a solid joint, in which no knife has been ever fleshed, and I will share your intellectual banquet most willingly, were it but a mountain kid, or a limb of Welsh mutton. Alas! whither shall I turn? Let me open the reviews, and lo! the critics are but repeating old criticisms; let me fly to the poets, 'tis but the old lyre with catgut strings; let me hear the orators," that's my thunder!" says the ghost of Sheridan or the spectre of Burke; let me listen to the sayers of good things, and alas for the injured shade of Joe Miller! I could go through the whole range of modern authors (save Scott, and a few of that kidney), and exclaim, with more truth than the chieftain of the crusaders in Tasso

"Di chi di voi non so la patria e 'l seme?
Qual spada m' è ignota? e qual saetta,
Benchè per l' aria ancor sospesa treme,
Non saprei dir s'è Franca, o s'è d'Irlanda,
E quale appunto il braccio è che la manda ?"

Gerusal. Liber. canto xx. st. 18.

To state the simple truth, such as I feel it in my own conviction, I declare that the whole mass of contemporary scribblement might be bound up in one tremendous volume, and entitled "Elegant Extracts;" for, if you except the form and style, the varnish and colour, all the rest is what I have

known in a different shape forty years ago; and there is more philosophy than meets the vulgar eye in that excellent song on the transmutation of things here below, which perpetually offer the same intrinsic substance, albeit under a different name:

"Dear Tom, this brown jug, which now foams with mild ale,
Was once Toby Philpot, a merry old soul," &c. &c.

This transmigration of intellect, this metempsychosis of literature, goes on silently reproducing and reconstructing what had gone to pieces. But those whose memory, like mine, is unfortunately over-tenacious of its young impressions, cannot enjoy the zest of a twice-told tale, and consequently are greatly to be pitied.

It has lately come out that " Childe Harolde" (like other naughtychildren whom we daily read of as terminating their "life in London " by being sent to the "Euryalus hulk,") was given to picking pockets. Mr. Beckford, the author of "Vathek," and the builder of Fonthill Abbey, has been a serious sufferer by the Childe's depredations, and is now determined to publish his case in the shape of "Travels, in 1787, through Portugal, up the Rhine, and through Italy;" and it also appears. that Saml. Rogers, in his "Italy," has learned a thing or two from the "Bandits of Terracina," and has dévalisé Mr. Beckford aforesaid on more than one occasion in the Apennines. I am not surprised at all this: murder will out; and a stolen dog will naturally nose out his original and primitive master among a thousand on a race-course.

These matters may be sometimes exaggerated, and (honour bright) far be it from me to pull the stool from under every poor devil that sits down to write a book, and sweep away, with unsparing besom, all the cobwebs so industriously wover across Paternoster Row. I don't wish to imitate Father Hardouin, the celebrated Jesuit, who gained great renown among the wits of Louis XIVth's time by his paradoxes. A favourite maggot hatched in his prolific brain was, that the Odes of Horace never were written by the friend of Mecenas, but were an imposture of some old Benedictine monk of the twelfth century, who, to amuse his cloistered leisure, personated Flaccus, and under his name strung together those lyrical effusions. This is maintained in a large folio, printed

at Amsterdam in 1733, viz. "Harduini Opera Varia, eudoHoratius." One of his arguments is drawn from the Christian allusions which, he asserts, occur so frequently in these Odes: ex. gratia, the "praise of celibacy;"

for the elm-tree used to be married to the vine; not so the sycamore, as any one who has been in Italy must know. The rebuilding of the temple by Julian the Apostate is, according to the Jesuit, thus denounced:

"Sed bellicosis fata Quiritibus

Hâc lege dico, ne nimiùm pii,
Tecta velint reparare Troja."

Lib. iii. Ode 3.

Again, the sacred mysteries of the Lord's Supper, and the concealed nature of the bread that was broken among the primitive Christians:

"Vetabo, qui Cereris sacrum

Vulgârit arcana, sub iisdem

Sit trabibus, fragilemve mecum

Solvat phaselum" (ie. the bark of Peter).

Lib. iii. ode 2.

And the patriarch Joseph, quoth Hardouin, is clearly pointed out under the strange and un-Roman name of Proculeius, of whom pagan history says naught:

For the rest of Hardouin's discoveries I must refer to the work itself, as quoted above; and I must in fairness add, that his other literary efforts and deep erudition reflect the highest credit on the celebrated order to which he belonged -the Jesuits, and, I may add, the Benedictines being as distinct and as superior bodies of monastic men to the remaining tribes of cowled coenobites as the Brahmins in India are to the begging Parias.*

Father Hardouin, who died at Paris 3rd Sept. 1729, was one of the many high ornaments of the society and the century to which he

There is among the lyric poems of the lower Irish a very remarkable ode, the authorship of which has been ascribed to the very Rev. Robert Burrowes, the mild, tolerant, and exemplary Dean of St. Finbarr's Cathedral, Cork, whom I am proud to call my friend: it refers to the last tragic scene in the comic or melodramatic life of a Dublin gentleman, whom the above-mentioned excellent divine accompanied in his ministerial capacity to the gallows; and nothing half so characteristic of the genuine Irish recklessness of death was ever penned by any national Labruyère as that incomparable elegy, beginning

"The night before Larry was stretched,

The boys they all paid him a visit," &c.

Now, were not this fact of the clerical authorship of a most sublime Pindaric composition chronicled in these papers, some future Hardouin would arise to unsettle the belief of posterity, and the claim of my friend Dean Burrowes would be overlooked; while the songster of Turpin the highwayman, the illustrious author of "Rookwood,"* would infallibly be set down as the writer of "Larry's" last hornpipe. But let me remark, en passant, that in that interesting department of literature "slang songs," Ireland enjoys a proud and lofty pre-eminence over every European country: her musa pedestris, or "footpad poetry," being unrivalled; and, as it is observed by Tacitus (in his admirable work "De Moribus Germanorum") of the barbarians on the Rhine-the native Irish find an impulse for valorous deeds, and a comfort for all their tribulations, in a song.

belonged. His Collection of the Councils ranks among the most elaborate efforts of theological toil, "Concil. Collect. Regia," 15 vols. folio, Paris, 1715. The best edition extant of the naturalist Pliny is his (in usum Delphini), and displays a wondrous range of reading. He was one of the witty and honest crew of Jesuits who conducted that model of periodical criticism, the "Journal de Trévoux." Bishop Atterbury of Rochester has written his epitaph;

"Hic jacet Petrus Harduinvs,

Hominum paradoxotatos, vir summæ memoriæ,
Judicium expectans."

PROUT.

*Prout must have enjoyed the gift of prophecy, for "Rookwood' was not published till four months after his death at Watergrasshill Perhaps Mr. Ainsworth submitted his embryo romance to the priest's inspection when he went to kiss the stone.-O. Y.

Many folks like to write anonymously, others posthumously, others under an assumed name; and for each of these methods of conveying thought to our fellow-men there may be assigned sundry solid reasons. But a man should never

be ashamed to avow his writings, if called on by an injured party, and I, for one, will never shrink from that avowal. If, as my friend O'Brien of the Round Towers tells me, Tom Moore tried to run him down in the "Edinburgh Review," after holding an unsuccessful negotiation with him for his services in compiling a joint-stock history of Ireland, why did not the man of the paper bullet fire a fair shot in his own name, and court the publicity of a dirty job, which done in the dark can lose nothing of its infamy? Dr. Johnson tells us that Bolingbroke wrote in his old age a work against Christianity, which he hadn't the courage to avow or publish in his lifetime; but left a sum of money in his will to a hungry Scotchman, Mallet, on condition of printing in his own name this precious production. "He loaded the pistol," says the pious and learned lexicographer, “but made Sawney pull the trigger." Such appear to be the tactics of Tommy in the present instance: but I trust the attempt will fail, and that this insidious missile darted against the towers of O'Brien will prove a "telum imbelle, sine ictu."

The two most original writers of the day, and also the two most ill-treated by the press, are decidedly Miss Harriet Martineau and Henry O'Brien. Of Miss Martineau I shall say little, as she can defend herself against all her foes, and give them an effectual check when hard-pressed in literary encounters. Her fame can be comprised in one brief pentameter, which I would recommend as a motto for the title-page of all her treatises:

"Femina tractavit 'propria quæ maribus.""

But over Henry O'Brien, as he is young and artless, I must throw the shield of my fostering protection. It is now some time since he called at Watergrasshill; it was in the summer after I had a visit from Sir Walter Scott. The young man was then well versed in the Oriental languages and the Celtic: he had read the "Coran" and the "Psalter of Cashil," the "Zendavesta" and the " Ogygia," "Lalla