line and enchanting colours in contemplating the manners of our ancestors, and believe their conceptions to be perfectly correct. They gaze so long at the rainbow-hued vapoury forms of fiction, that these become in their eyes embodied realities. They live in a sort of reverie, a dreamy abstraction from all present truths, and, hoping little from the future, they for ever brood over the impossible past. They move and breathe in our times, but their heated fancies are filled with the freebooters, dungeons, towers, dames, and foray-hunting lords, who are in their view the very beau idéal of human virtue. They invest their imaginary characters with every attribute that can confer honour on human nature, and place them in triumphant contrast with the world around. The worst is, they are seldom aware of the inconsistencies their illusions exhibit. In woman, for example, the utmost delicacy, grace, and refinement, are mingled up with the savage times of feudalism, and modern ideas of what constitutes the superlative of feminine attractions, are displayed in pictures of remote barbarism. All the characteristic elegance of modern times and manners is carried back to the filthy and smoky halls of our forefathers. But what is the fact? The ladies of the olden time naturally partook of the coarseness of their age. They breakfasted at six o'clock in the morning upon coarse beef, and that salted, during one-half of the year; and there being no agricultural societies and oil-cake then in fashion, it was doubtless not deficient in toughness. Their drink at the same meal was home-brewed and potent strong-beer. They worked hard in their household; and but few of them, any more than their lords and masters, at one period of our history at least, were proficients in the useful acquirements of reading and writing. The boisterous revelry of the hall, and the drunken broils of the household, vulgar jests and rough familiarities, were common to them. Few of the sex in the present day, even among the lower classes, exhibit a more masculine character than the ancient dames of high birth did. Even so late as the reign of James II. the court was so unpolished and ill-mannered, "that the ladies, even the Queen herself, could hardly pass the King's apartment without receiving some affront." In the ecstatic view of those who admire the "good old times," the ladies were all softness and gentleness, they possessed every accomplishment-they were all Juliets and Ophelias. As it was in respect to the female sex, it was with most other matters; but to go farther into manners, would require great space, and close and attentive reading, far beyond what I could bestow upon it.

Another cause of complaint with the lovers of the "good old times" is the immorality and irreligion of the present period; not but that there is a sufficient mass of wickedness of every species at present, as well as in days of yore, that may justly form a subject for lamentation. But the question is not whether the present age is spotless, but whether the past exceeded it in virtue. Bright and noble characters have been sprinkled here and there in all ages, but at no period was there a greater number among the mass more moral or more rationally religious than now. Hypocrisy and cant are rife; but let us examine whether these vices in religion were not far overbalanced by the grovelling and swinish superstitions that formerly enchained the mind, and led the multitude captive to a blind and servile obedience, that made the worship of the Deity an obligation of fear, and even arrayed the parent

of man in the terrible garb of vengeance, for the neglect of some miscalled religious form, by which monks and friars, "black, white, and grey," or their mitred superiors, lost some temporal advantage. In the "good old times" rational religion was rarely known; all belonging to it was dictated by others. It was too much the instrument of designing or mistaken men, who rendered the doctrines of Christianity obscure, believed persecution was doing God service, and confused their own brains, and the faculties of all around them, by ridiculous disquisitions upon points of doctrine, while they neglected the simple and clear precepts which involved its great essentials. Persecution was deemed a religious duty, and the different Christian sects nourished the most baleful hatred towards each other. Now we see charity widely diffused among all orders of Christians, though some still exist in each who love persecution, because it savours of the "good old times." We no longer see bishops sitting in judgment, and condemning to the fire those who will not yield assent to some incomprehensible creed; but churchmen mingle with schismatics in promoting together the essentials of religion. Have modern times no advantage here?

Benevolence and charity are now more extended than ever. The order and decencies observed in society, the ornaments and luxuries of life, exceed what the most imaginative persons of old could have dreamed to be possible. Refinement is not more superior to barbarism than is our present state to that of our forefathers. It is the ignorant and wilfully blind who do not see this, as well as those who prefer the past from mere feverishness, because they have determined that nothing in modern days is, or can be, as they wish it. Excepting two or three literary giants, who appeared in early times, not less the astonishment of their own age than ours, many writers who were deemed phenomena then, are now only read with a smile of astonishment that they ever could have been esteemed. The vilest ballad-writer of the present day is far superior to them. A brilliant light now and then appeared in a world of darkness, that we find illuminated with accumulating splendours. Literature is more diffused; our literary spirit is become more liberal; and with the exception of one or two publications of acknowledged bad character, preserves a tone of moderation in argument and of mildness in discussion, which shows that writers would much rather gain a point by reason than end an argument by vituperation; the ultimate certainty of conviction being now only reserved to the rule of good sense. The character of our present literature is, as a whole, as high as it ever was before, and its beneficial effects on society are more obvious.

How mighty is our national strength compared to that in the "good old times," in spite of numerous causes, originating in too fondly clinging to ancient prejudices, that have but tended to hamper it. Formerly our display of power was more in appearance than in reality. We exhibited an imposing front to an enemy, but we had no reserve; all our resources were at once in the field of view. Like the soldiers of Cadmus, they now seem to grow up from the earth; they multiply with our necessities, and increase in proportion to our wants. The island that a short time ago had an army of but a few thousands of men, on whose first combat its fate depended, lately exhibited a million in arms, and bribed with her wealth nearly all the civilized nations in the world. Add to this our astonishing mechanical inventions,

our progress in the fine arts, in the sciences, in public education, in liberality of opinion, and the principles of rational liberty, and then turn to the vaunted "good old times" with what appetite we may.

To examine and minut ly enumerate our advantages under the foregoing heads would require a bulky volume, but it would be a lasting monument of triumphant fact over bald assertion and wearisome tautology. Let us justly appreciate the real benefits our ancestors possessed, at their due value, and we shall find what is the real worth of the "good old times." We shall find ourselves very unwilling to exchange ours for those of Henry VIII.—the dungeon and the block; for those of Mary, with the rack and the faggot; for those of the heroic and splendid Elizabeth, with all her talents; for the James or the Charles, or the remoter eras of seignorage and vassalage, of intestine broils, maddening factions, desolation, and civil war. It may be very well for Mr. Irving and others to invoke the names of brave men who sealed the cause of liberty or religion with their blood-who braved the red torture of martyrdom and bearded a tyrant in his strong hold; but while we admire these glorious instances of the mind's victory over nature, what more can they be to us than subjects of admiration? In these much-abused modern times we have no demand for similar auto da fés. Persecution dare not now pile her faggots in Smithfield, nor a king of England tax his subjects without the aid of a parliament. We can have no martyrs now even in bravado, and there is nothing that can warrant our making the country's "chivalry to leap," by displaying our "death-despising" prowess. It is the glory of modern times that similar exhibitions exist no longer, nay, that it is impossible they ever should exist again. Whatever religious intolerance and arbitrary usages remain, they are among the relics of the "good old times," and form the scandal of ours. Were there a necessity for men to show examples of constancy and bravery, they would not be now found wanting. Men can die at present as bravely as heretofore, either in the field or on the scaffold, and would smile as contemptuously at the burning stake as a victim of the fiendish Mary, bare their wrists before a bloody judge as coolly as Sidney, or sell their lives as dear in a good cause as any among their ancestors.

Glory then be to the progress of the human mind, to the enlargement of liberal opinion, to the march of freedom! Let the advocates of old times, the sighers after martyrdom, the lovers of civil desolation, the admirers of feudal chieftains, and the advocates of old abuses, indulge a little longer in their mistaken notions, invest the attributes of the past in modern virtues, and supply themselves with unsubstantial arguments to cavil at substantial benefits. They will, by and by, see their error. They will in the end discover that they have been in a reverie, in which they have mistaken the images of fancy for real objects, and reasoned upon them as if they had been correct. Some of these lovers of the "good old times" are to be pitied rather than severely censured. There are others, however, who are too obstinate and ignorant ever to perceive the truth; who know no criterion of the merit of a thing but its age, who combat reason with usage, common sense with the most cobweb sophistry, and the cause of freedom with the arm of power. These must be left as incorrigible, to the contempt of the present age and the scorn of posterity! Y. I.

TO THE EVENING STAR.

From the Spanish of Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola.

"Pura luciente estrella."

O FAIR and goodly Star

Upon the brow of night,

That from thy silver car

Shoot'st on the darken'd world thy friendly light;

Thy path is calm and bright

Through the clear azure of the starry way,

And from thy heavenly height

Thou see'st how systems rise and pass away—

The birth of human hopes, their blossom, and decay.

Oh! that my spirit could

Cast off its mould of clay,

And with the wise and good

Make wings unto itself and flee away;

That with thy bright array

We might look down upon this world of woe,

Even as the God of day

Looks on the restless ocean-flow,

And eyes the fighting waves that pant and foam below.

Nor slothfully to lie

Like the dull pools in stagnant marshes bred,

Where waving weeds are rank, and noxious tendrils spread.

PHILOSOPHY ON THE ROAD. THE YACHT CLUB.

"Navibus atque

Quadrigis petimus bene vivere."

HORAT.

THE Comparison of life to a voyage is a mere common-place; but if it has not the advantage of novelty, it cannot be refused the merit of truth. There is, in fact, no simile that runs more upon all-fours. Shakspeare has told us, that "all the world's a stage ;" but if he had said that the world was a stage-coach, he would have been nearer his mark. For not to insist upon the fact that each day of our "journey through life" is a post towards death (a verity perhaps too trite to mention), what can be more like the passive condition of a traveller on a journey, than the way in which we are hurried through existence, each in his own tourbillon of circumstance and condition as in a carriage, with the passions for coachmen, which drive us at the rate and in the direction they please: and in this last particular, the simile is the more perfect, inasmuch as we change the driver at almost every stage, and never part with him till we have paid a good smart buona mano for his whipmanship. A prosperous life may be compared to a journey on the Bath-road, while a struggling existence is all "up-hill work." The humbler classes are the outside passengers, exposed to all the pitiless pelting of life's storms, and all the perils of the road, while the happier few resemble the "insides," warm, snug, safe, and at their ease. A more extended view of the conditions of society shews some men as travellers in a post-chaise, some in their own coronetted travelling-chariots, and but too many, God help them! trudging through the mire on foot, bespattered by the wheels of their more fortunate fellow-citizens, and happy to escape being trodden under their horses' feet, and a coroner's inquest. Some few have the luck to pass free from all the more serious accidents of the journey, while others are upset on the road, and are sent into the next world with a broken neck, or a concussion of the brain. Some go the whole journey, and some are only "booked" for a certain place on the road, where they are set down to make room for other passengers.

But if life be like a journey, it is not surprising that a journey should be the very image of life; and so indeed it is. the same "pleased alacrity and cheer of mind," looking forward to We begin both with every fresh post as a difficulty surmounted, a source of new sensations, or at worst as a step towards our object; and we finish both with the same sense of lassitude, if not of disgust, with this only difference, that very few can make up their minds to the anticipation of being "put to bed with a shovel," with the same pleasure that they look forward to a warming-pan, and a smart chambermaid to tuck them up for the night, at the "Three Crowns," or the "Bird and Baby." In life and on a journey we are equally not masters to choose our own company, being in both cases alike compelled to associate with those who are booked for the same coach. In both cases, likewise, we are equally under the necessity of making the best of the lot which chance has given us; and nothing can more strongly resemble the manner in which shyness ripens into acquaintance, and acquaintance into intimacy through the jolting of the leathern conveniency, than the friendships of the world in general.

In friendship, as in all the rest, we are the dupes of our own amour