nished it from his Court.

We may judge of the

degree of familiarity allowed by this solemn personification of stiffness and etiquette, when it is recorded that Racine died of chagrin because the monarch took no notice of his profound bow as he marched through the room called the Bull's Eye, at Versailles.

"To content and fill the eye of the understanding the best authors sprinkle their works with pleasing digressions, with which they recreate the minds of their readers:" so says Dryden; and if it be admitted that what the best writers do, the worst may attempt, I may, perhaps, stand excused for having so long wandered from the "Last of the Fools." His title, however, would not allow me to take him first; and having ended every thing else, it is high time that I should begin to notice my subject. Be it known, then, to all admirers of the motley coat, that although the office and dignity of Court fool were abolished by Louis Quatorze, his successor had the good sense to be fond of fools, and re-appointed an honorary jester, on whom he conferred at the same time a post and a pension. Louis the Fifteenth died in 1774; but in the warm and genial airs of summer, when the swallows are skimming along the ground, and the butterflies are fluttering overhead, the "Last of the Fools," who has so often played his antics before the monarch when Versailles was in its glory, is still occasionally seen toddling along the sunny side of its streets, or tottering forth from one of the portals of the palace, as if he had stepped out of some grave of the last century, or walked down from the framework of some

ancient picture. His whole appearance presents a singular compound of contradictions and anomalies. Old and decrepit as he is, he endeavours to preserve a youthful jerk in his short steps, to give the skirts of his coat a swing as if he still retained his elasticity of walk, and to crawl along with the jauntiness of his juvenile foolery. His carriage is not more inconsistent with his own age than his dress is with that of the world. He wears in public a complete Court suit, the remains, apparently, of former splendour; his venerable white locks arranged in the antique stile by a coiffeur, a black silk bag behind, and his hat always in his hand or carried beneath his arm. With a bustling inanity in his motions, and a bantering or sheepish smile upon his features, he gazes at the passengers, makes them a most gracious bow, or salutes them with a grimace, as the humour strikes him; and then half hobbles and half flourishes away with a grave enjoyment of the stranger's utter amazement. Casual encounterers of this unique character, judging from the expression of his countenance and the buffoonery of his actions, might set him down for a natural simpleton: but this would be an egregious mistake; he is by no means deficient in understanding, only he has played the fool until he cannot be serious; use has become nature to him, and he has run his first and second childhood all into one. His “gentle dulness ever loves a joke;" and much of his drollery, it must be confessed, savours of superannuation. Thus, when he is introduced to a new acquaintance, he will simper and smirk so as to dis

play his two rows of false teeth in their whitest and most adolescent attitude; anon he turns his back, whips the whole ratelier out of his mouth, and comes mumbling and mowing in all the childishness of toothless senility. Sometimes he asks his friends to dinner, always taking care to add—" Mais vous prendrez le hasard du pot"-you must take pot-luck; which he does not stipulate in the vain ostentation of Gripe,

"Who asks to pot-luck and displays a grand treat,

'Tis to choke us with envy, not tempt us to eat ;"

66

but that he may have a literal excuse for depositing upon the table certain porcelain vases, much more commonly seen in dormitories than in dining-rooms. From time to time he places a huge portfolio under his arm, totters into a stage-coach, and betakes himself to the Stock Exchange at Paris, where so strange an apparition, exclaiming, Spanish bonds! Spanish bonds!" soon brings all the bulls and bears to his side; with whom he discourses in a tone of infinite gravity touching Spanish, Neapolitan, and French stock; attempts, of course, no transaction; and returns to his friends at Versailles, exclaiming, "Eh bien! j'ai fait toutes mes affaires à la Bourse, et sans risque c'est le seul moyen." After which he rubs his hands with an air of infinite self-gratulation. That he should be an inveterate punster is one of the charters by which he held his office; and not even royal authority can tempt him to violate it. His quibbles are sometimes bad enough to be good; which is the

less wonderful, as all his impromptus are profoundly studied. After cautiously laying the train of a pun, he makes a visit for the express purpose of its explosion, remains till he can signalize his departure by a second, and renews the same process when he is prepared with a third.

Other drolls and buffoons may easily exceed him in humour; but the preposterousness in this instance consists in the anachronism of the whole personage, in the official character of his folly, and the strange jumble of boyish and frolicksome levity with decrepitude and old age. To see a man with one foot in the grave cutting capers with the other, making a mockery of the world which he must so shortly quit, and jingling his bells when his fellow-ancients are counting their beads, may be supposed a melancholy spectacle; but there is so much naïveté and genuine benevolence in his aspect, apparently so sincere a conviction that he is labouring in his vocation, and cannot employ his residuum of life better than in contributing to the innocent amusement of others, that, far from having the heart to quote against him-" How ill grey hairs become a fool and jester !" one feels tempted to wish that the day may be still remote when the sculptor shall be called upon to execute his orders by inscribing upon his tombstone-" Here lies the last of the Fools!"

MARSHAL SOULT, AND HIS MURILLOS.

An older and a better soldier none.

Your gallery

I have pass'd through, not without much content.

SHAKSPEARE.

I AM no artist, no professional critic, no established connoisseur; not even an amateur of paintings, except in its primitive sense of an admirer or lover of that art, whose legitimate object is to convey a faithful imitation of pleasing nature. I know little of the masters; care nothing for the schools; and disdain to learn by rote the technical babble about gusto, chiarooscuro, handling, tints and half tints, orpiments, pigments, lucid and opaque, carnations, Spanish brown, Venetian red, and Naples yellow: but having a practised eye, and a fervent feeling for the great original, as executed by the hand of the Creator, I consider myself competent, without other apprenticeship, to form an opinion of any copy modified by the pencil of man.. I need not put my eye to school to enable it to judge of resemblances; nor make my heart member of an academy, that it may learn responses to the whisperings of external beauty. Perhaps the critics think otherwise, but they may be very positive and yet very wrong. In the infancy of painting, the artists contented themselves with a simple imitation of nature, and he was the best performer who could produce the cleverest deception. It was reckoned a great