smoke must be a very principal ingredient in most of those delightful scents you have so poetically described, and with the peculiar merit of poetry, at a moment when by the suspended state of your odorative faculty you are under the necessity of taxing your invention for the examples and very luckily too, for many a fume will pass very glibly upon the imagination which would throw the perceptive organ into convulsions, if exposed in all its nudity to actual contact with the real subject. You urge a continuation, but a continuation from this quarter would be like that described in Hudibras, a fustian continuation of a satin cloak, such as you will see it, if it should survive the perils of parturition, to which indeed it is not yet arrived. But why so suicidically resolve to lay down the pen? There is indeed (as Mr. H. tells me) classical authority for it-"Victor cestus astemque repono"-but all that is Latin, and I don't understand a word of it, tho' I am told it means "I shall leave off merely because I can do better than any body else." Poets to be sure, are much obliged to you for so magnanimous an exertion of self-denial, but if you expect thanks as encouragement for it from any other quarter, I can only predict for you a woeful disappointment. "I have delivered your message to Mr. H. about April day, but he says (he understands the learned to place the Hooly as according with our May-day, and he believes they have no occasion in India to set apart a particular day in the year for the manufacture of the commodity so plentifully fabricated in England on that anniversary -but the origin of it he imagines to exist in the visible and notorious partiality of the inhabitants of this philosophical island for their own knowledge, wisdom and sagacity: which, that it may not quite overbloat, and perhaps burst them, our provident ancestors consecrated one day to the sole inculcation of the Pythagoric lesson of 'Nocie teipsum'-allowing them to be as learned, as sensible and as profound as they pleased for 364 days in the year. This is his opinion of the matter. But mine is somewhat more charitable, for I conceive that the true pith and intent of the solemnity consists in shewing them that they are naturally so wise, knowing, and experienced, that to bring them down to the common level of the world, it is necessary to have one day in the year solemnized by the ceremony of making them fools for which there could be no reason or use at all, if they were so already. Your most kind and entertaining letter however did not arrive till the second of April and consequently found us ready-made tho' what you say of two letters, when I positively have written but one, seems calculated to give us the finishing stroke. As the anonymous author of the motley fragments on which you have bestowed so liberal and so prodigal an encomium is seriously desirous to preserve the most rigorous incognito-it it impossible to describe, from authority, the extravagant self applauses which he will undoubtedly feel at being the subject of such exalted panegyric, whenever it reaches his ears; which undoubtedly tingle at this moment, however distant they may be, at the repetition of them-by my perusal of your letter. "And now, my dear Sir, accept my adieu. You have grieved me so much by your's to the muse, that I can no longer smother my concern, I am, my dear Sir, Postcript. "No playful message come! "We really cannot make out what gate is not to be named." The "Nose-of-proof" verses produced a reply apparently from Mrs. Halhed, and in her hand writing; but it is easy to see who stood behind her chair. This was followed by an extension of the idea on Mr. Halhed's part, which we must waive for the present. Mr. Hastings having come to London on business was not able to see his friends the Halheds, but wrote to Mrs. Halhed a letter dated, 6, Portugal Street. He alludes to his harvest-" the blessed occupation of an unthinking mind"-as being uncommonly abundant-and such as he hopes it may have proved throughout all England. "They (the crops) appeared so on each side of the road as I passed from Daylesford to London. It was not always so, as it appears by the following humble apostrophe to Mr. Pitt, written, I forget when: “ My harvests drench'd by nightly rains decay: "Pray shew these, with my love, to Mr. Halhed." Then follow these lines as a P. S. "Once when my fellow tillers of the land At length Mr. Halhed bethought himself of applying to one no less distinguished for true genius, than for the brilliance of his Parliamentary career-Mr. Canning. His application was in the following terms: "No. 17, Pall Mall, 11th September, 1808. "RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR,-Among the crowd of unhappy beings whose aggregate composes the commonwealth of wretchedness, there is not perhaps an individual with sufferings so truly acute, and distress so unutterable as the decayed gentleman. Such is the person who now ventures to obtrude himself upon your notice. Possessed of considerable property, but all locked up in France from the very commencement of our hostilities with that country, all his other means having gradually melted away during this terrible interval, he is now reduced to the necessity of seeking from his exertions that maintenance which he has been used to derive from his fortune. If there exists at present, or should providentially occur, any opening though which the services of such a man might be rendered useful at once to Government and to himself, I most anxiously solicit the preference, and with the only merit of conciseness in my importunities, well knowing the value of every moment to you, but with unfeigned admiration of your talents and the sincerest respect for your character, I hasten to subscribe myself, Right Hon'ble Sir, To the Right Hon'ble GEO. CANNING, } N. B. HALHED." On the 14th of the same month-he writes for the first time, for years, to Mr. Hastings-direct; and in his own hand writing. Sclerocardia, shadows out London-and there are voluminous productions of Mr. Halhed's pen under the title of a "Sclerocardian," that is of an inhabitant of the hard hearted city, he himself being, we now scarcely add, one of the kindest hearted men in the world. In a vien of irony he condemns the Bank paper system of the day, to which on principle he was always opposed. The rest of the allegory, and its application to Mr. Canning will be obvious to the reader. Extract from the Memoirs of a Sclerocardian. "This was the period of projects and paradoxes. Among the former one, the principal was that of a society who manufactured every possible species of commodity by means of a well, in which by an apparatus contrived to imitate mastication they reduced the most worthless materials into a homogeneous pulp resembling chyle: which when properly dried in moulds prepared for the purpose, and by the help of other supplementary processes-became an indisputable suc cedaneum for all the productions of nature and art. A palace or an elephant, a windmill or a pack of hounds, a fleet of ships or a set of horses were alike instantaneously conjured up by this miraculous invention. No attention was paid to the different bulk or value of the articles required: the pieces of substitutable pulp, although not distinguishable to vulgar intellect by any discrimination of size, figure or proportion, were at all times precisely commensurate with the substances into which they were to be commuted: one of them by a single flirt of the finger became a leg of mutton, another a house and park, and a third a diamond necklace, a gold watch or a shewy equipage. Everything cognizable by all or any of the five predicables had its representative in this novel species of chylification: it seemed like witchcraft, and was indeed not a little indebted to the black art for its success. It was said that scarcely a fine woman in the whole precinct but had her exact equivalent, perfect as a facsimile, in this manufacture, and that the original and the model were at all times interchangeable. "Elated both with their talents, and with the wonderful encouragement they enjoyed, the projectors even went further; and did actually modify their protean material so as to make it a regular and admitted substitute for invisible and impalpable objects. Nothing, for instance, was more frequent than a pulpified oath, a promise or an alibi: thousands were manufactured (as it was currently reported) in the shape and sound of a monosyllabic affirmative, and some, though rarely, were detected as the representatives of a surly No.-Votes indeed were so customarily created by this artificial manipulation, that at length it became impossible to distinguish the genuine from the factitious. Souls also were an article in which they drove a prodigious trade, equal at least in quantity to those produced by the clumsy method of parturition. In short the transmutations and metamorphoses effectuated by this ingenious knot of manufacturers, extended to all persons, parties and professions, to all existences physical and metaphysical, and seemed co-extensive with all sublunary space in the opinions of those who were bewitched by the hocus-pocus of this extraordinary legerdemain. "These arts of imitative sophistication quickly diffused themselves like wild-fire; and the great Club of pulpification presently generated an innumerable hord of affiliated societies in the country-provinces, who masticated in their turn stacks of wheat and chambers of malt, coal, lime and iron, salt, clay, gravel and dung, with the same facility as other more dainty or more portable commodities. But the evils introduced by this universal practice of substitution, the overthrow of every rational estimate of proportional values, the confusion of all sound ideas of right and wrong, and the amalgamation of all moral principles with the poisonous qualities of avarice and prodigality, appertain rather to the philosophical examiner, than the mere superficial annalist of passing events." "On turning over a great number of thick-scrawled but undecy, pherable pages, we at length stumbled upon the following sentence which was tolerably legible, but we shall not vouch for the accuracy of our transcript. 66 6 The Reis Effendi of the Sultan of Sclerocardia strolling one day in the bazar of the metropolis, Satanapûra, entered into a knicknackatory or shop of haberdashery of hardware: where after cursorily admiring the gold snuff-boxes and filigree toothpick cases, the painted fans and glittering trinkets exhibited in the windows, his notice was attracted by an old box that stood in a neglected corner of the repository-which seemed although now besprent with dust and cobwebs, to have once been well-shaped and not without ornament; curiosity led him to peep into it, and he found in it a variety of instruments like carpenter's tools-the iron part all rusty by neglect, and the wood work wormeaten and decaying. No wonder he turned away his eyes with contemptuous indifference from so despicable a piece of antiquity, when just as he popped down the lid, he caught a glimpse of what had formerly been gilding, on the handle of a chisel. This led him to interrogate the toyman as to the original destination of that dirty box: who replied, that it was formerly the tool-chest of a famous Basha of Hastinapûr in Bangdèsa-who had often expressed his satisfaction both at the quality and edge of the instruments it contained, and had himself worked them with acknowledged success-but that since he had quitted the viceregal musnud, and buried himself in the civilization of a colony of gruntisqueakian savages, the chest had remained half buried in filth and obscurity, and the tools been consigned to inaction and rust. On this, the State minister, whose name was Abukanyanga Beg, paused a moment, and told the shopman to clean it up a little, and he would consider about the purchase, if it might be had cheap." "And now my dearly-beloved friend and patron, you see me once more-proprio pollice and no longer in the borrowed plume of my dear amanuensis. As I broke my ten years fast on your excellent Daylesford-butter and French roll, in Portugal Street lately, so now I break the dozen-year-silence of my pen, by addressing myself to you with a thousand and a thousand acknowledgments-warm from the heart-for all the fervour of your friendship and all the steadiness of your attachment. During near fourteen years of my voluntary imprisonment your constant kindness and unwearied attention has so far enabled me to subsist, partly on hope, and partly, like a bear in a cave, by sucking my paws. But though I am by some folks thought to have outjob'd Job, I must honestly confess I cannot outstarve starvation: seeing therefore this said bladder-bellied fiend gaining upon me with hasty strides I have at length, a few days since you left town, mustered up a little courage, and demanded of him as of any other ghost what he had to say? He answered me out of the Stratford rubric, that he should certainly "sit heavy on my soul to-morrow"-if I did not turn to, and repent of my long inactivity this very day. As the threats of a spectre may, for ought I know, be as formidable in purpose as in opinion, and not wishing to risk the last thin integument of my ribs on the experiment of braving him I instantaneously determined to take up my mattock and go into the market, to be hired by the first lord of a vineyard who should be in want of a labourer, and I have offered my services to the great Abukanyanga Beg abovementioned; but whether he has seen or heard of my application-and what may be the consequence I will most obstinately reserve to a future opportunity, when MARCH, 1856. G |