or is the fashion to pay for the cards that are played with, and as it was the fashion to pay for your dinners, and as it is going to be the fashion to play at écarté, that the hostess may cheat her guests out of money enough to pay for the lights and the cakes.

And because all society is reduced to the simple element of an annual crowd, it is the fashion to have folding doors, and to spoil the only two rooms of a miserable house, spoiling our own comfort all the year round that we may accommodate-"whereby they may be thought to be accommodated"-our friends, once in the year, with the opportunity of breaking their carriages and wishing the assembly and the assemblier at Öld Nick.

And it is the fashion to build churches; and most abominable are those churches. Because why?-because other fashions have crept in to religion. Such as-discovering that the Pope is desirous of excommunicating kings, and that Prince Hohenloe cures toothach and epilepsy "point blank five hundred miles;" that morality is a crime, "yea a crime my brethren;" that we must prostrate our reason and believe in Calvin or Huntington; that Dr. Hawker is either Moses or Elias; and that it is impossible for any person to be saved unless he follows Irving, or else Chalmers, or else Dr. Collyer, or else somebody else; and that if he follows the wrong luminary he is a lost sinner, it being at the same time made and provided, that nobody can agree which is the right one.

And so there is a fashion in preaching, and grace, and salvation, and eternal life; but the worst of it is, that with less prudence than the fair, who all wear the same bonnet when it is in vogue, there are so many different coiffures that no one can get his head into the real, right, orthodox cap.

As to blacking, it is undetermined whether the fashion of the veritable cirage Anglaise, il vero lucido Inglese, lies with Warren, or Hunt, or Day and Martin: but it is certainly the fashion now to think that commerce ought to be free, that Mr. Malthus is in the right, that Mr. Macculloch is a greater œconomist than Mr. Ricardo, that the bullion question is unintelligible, that the state of the country is a paradox, that the Niger is either the Nile or is not the Nile, that chimney-sweeping is a very dirty trade, and Mr. Thomas Wallace, aided by Mr. John Hall, a very clever man.

Further, the fashion of joint-stock companies is becoming daily subject to increasing dubiety, and even the Duke of Wellington has become rather unfashionable, as, apparently, the same is about to happen to Mr. Wilberfore, and Mr. Macaulay, and Tom Campbell, and even to the Great Unknown. And also to the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly Review, under the laziness of the one editor, and the incapacity of the other, and to The Modern Athens in spite of Sir George Mackenzie, and Dr. Brewster, and Sir James Hall, and Mr. Lockhart, and Blackwood himself-the oral, the elegant, the instructive, the modest Blackwood, and terer Professor Wilson, who, in professing Moral Philosophy, geniously contrived to separate the morals from the philo

Will war ever go out of fashion; and scandal and backbiting?— Yes, with eating and drinking; or at the Millenium. Or puffing? -At the same epocha.

We want a fashion-setter here; that is certain. In the mean time it is in vain that Miss is the most beautiful, the most graceful, the most captivating, of her sex: she has not been puffed at Almack's; she is not the fashion. It is in vain that the "Fancy" levels the peer and the highwayman; it is the fashion. It is in vain that "liberty and property for every huzza!" are but words; they are the fashion. It is in vain that the object of law is to refuse justice: it is the fashion to say otherwise. It is in vain that Mr. Martin makes laws against bull-baiting; it is the fashion. It is in vain that wealth is not virtue: it is the fashion; that an Englishman and an English Miss cannot walk; it is the fashion: that Walter Scott, baronet, is writing balderdash for money; he is the fashion: that we tell France she will be overturned by the Jesuits; they are the fashion: that the opera is detestable, and the ballet worse: they are the fashion: that nonsense verses are useless, and Westminster an abuse; they are the fashion: that moustaches are dirty things, and routes a nuisance, and the pianoforte a pest, and Mr. Hayter a bad painter,-they are the fashion, the fashion, the fashion.

This is the magic word which answers all inquiries, silences all objections, erects all idols-erects and deposes them. And this is that sublime invention, by which Europe is distinguished from the East. China has but one fashion; it has no fashion: therefore, it is the eternal, as it is the Celestial Empire. Permanence, even in dress, is permanence: it acts on the empire as it does on the quality of a shoetie: the fashion of revolution, which revolves caps and bonnets, revolves empires also. When the East has fallen, it has been by changing its dress. Rome fell when she became fashionable and changing. Had she kept the toga, the red harlot would never have sat in the chair of the Cæsars. It is enoughwe have done. [London Mag.

SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM.

SONNET.

To my Melancholy.

COME, thou sweet mistress of my evening hours,
Companion of my walk! that otherwise
Were lonely;-let us wander through the tow'rs
Of this grey pile, and hear the fitful sighs,

The mournful breeze, heave through its wasting walls!
Hark! 'tis the surge of time's eternal billow,
That on the ear so sad and solemn falls!

They hear it not, the sleepers, they whose pillow,
Dreamless and cold, lies deep beneath the soil.
Would we were with them, pale-eyed Melancholy!
Free from the weight, the burden of life's toil,

Far from deceit, from insult, and from folly;
Bonded no more by life's affection chain-
Reckless of all as of the wind and rain!

Lond. Lit. Gaz.

SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM.

THE SORROWS OF ** ***

The most

I AM the most unfortunate of an unfortunate race. wretched of the wretched who have no rest for the soles of their feet. Mistake me not-I am no Jew,-would I were but the meanest amongst the Hebrews!-but my unhappy despised generation labours under a sterner, though a similar, curse. We are a proverb and a bye-word-a mark for derision and scorn, even to the vilest of those scattered Israelites. We are sold into tenfold bondage and persecution. We are delivered over to slavery and to poverty-we are visited with numberless stripes.No, tenderhearted Man of Bramber! we are not what thy sparkling eyes, would seem to anticipate,-we are, alas! no negroes,-it were a merciful fate to us to be but Blackamoors. They have their snatches of rest and of joy even-their tabors, and pipes, and cymbals-we have neither song nor dance-misery alone is our portion-pain is in all our joints-and on our bosoms and all about us, sits everlasting shagreen.-Dost thou not, by this time, guess at my tribe

Dost thou not suspect my ears?

I am indeed, as thou discernest, an inferior horse-a Jerusalem colt; but why should I blush to "write myself down an ass?" My ancestors at least were free, and inhabited the desert!-My forefathers were noble,-though it must rob our patriarchs of some of their immortal bliss, if they can look down from their lower Indian heaven on their abject posterity!

lot

Fate,-I know not whether kindly or unkindly,-has cast my upon the coast. I have heard, there are some of my race who draw in sand-carts, or carry panniers, and are oppressed by those Coptic vagabonds, the Gypsies,-but I can conceive no oppressions greater than mine.-I can dream of no fardels more intolerable than those I bear; but think, rather with envy, of the passiveness of a pair of panniers, compared to the living burdens which gall and fret me by their continual efforts. A sand-bag might be afflictive, from its weight-but it could not kick with it, like a young lady. I should fear no stripes-from a basket of apples.-A load of green peas could not tear my tongue by tugging at my eternal bridle. All these are circumstances of my hourly afflictions,when I am toiling along the beach-the most abject, and starved, and wretched of our sea-roamers-with one, or perhaps three, of my master's cruel customers, sitting upon my painful back. It may chance, for this ride, that I have been ravished from a hasty breakfast-full of hunger and wind-having at six o'clock suckled a pair of young ladies, in decline,-my own unweaned shaggy foal remaining all the time unnourished (think of that, mothers!) in his sorry stable. It is generally for some child or children that I am

saddled thus early-for urchins fresh from the brine, full of spirits. and mischief,--would to Providence it might please Mrs. Dthe Dipper, to suffocate the shrieking imps in their noisy immersion! The sands are allowed to be excellent for a gallop-but for the sake of the clatter, these infant demons prefer the shinglesand on this horrible footing I am raced up and down, till I can barely lift a leg. A brawny Scotch nursery wench, therefore, with sinews made all the more vigorous by the shrewd bracing sea air, lays lustily on my haunches with a toy whip-no toy however in her pitiless "red right hand:" and when she is tired of the exercise, I am made over to the next comer. This is probably the Master Buckle-and what hath my young cock, but a pair of artificial spurs or huge corking-pins stuck at his abominable heels.No

-gentle knight comes pricking o'er the plain.

I am now treated, of course, like a cockchafer-and endeavour to rid myself of my tormentor; but the bruteling, to his infernal praise, is an excellent rider. At last the contrivance is espied, and my jockey drawn off by his considerate parent-not as the excellent Mr. Thomas Day would advise, with a Christian lecture on his cruelty-but with an admonition on the danger to his neck. His mother too kisses him in a frenzy of tenderness at his escape -and I am discharged with a character of spitefulness, and obstinacy, and all that is brutal in nature.

A young literary lady-blinded with tears, that make her stumble over the shingles-here approaches, book in hand, and mounts me, with a charitable design, as I hope, of preserving me from a more unkindly rider. And, indeed, when I halt from fatigue, she only strikes me over the crupper, with a volume of Duke Christian of Lunenburg-(a Christian tale to be used so!)— till her concern for the binding of the novel compels her to desist. I am then parted with as incorrigibly lazy, and am mounted in turn by all the stoutest women in Margate, it being their fancy, as they declare, to ride leisurely.

Are these things to be borne?

Conceive me, simply, tottering under the bulk of Miss Wiggins, (who some aver is "all soul," but to me she is all body,) or Miss Huggins-the Prize Giantesses of England; either of them sitting like a personified lumbago on my loins!-Am I a Hindoo tortoise -an Atlas? Sometimes, Heaven forgive me, I think I am an ass to put up with such miseries-dreaming under the impossibility of throwing off my fardels-of ridding myself of myself-or in moments of less impatience, wishing myself to have been created at least an elephant, to bear these young women in their "towers," as they call them, about the coast.

Did they never read the fable of "Ass's Skin," under which covering a princess was once hidden by the malice of fairy Fate? If they have, it might inspire them with a tender shrinkVOL. VII. No. 42.-Museum.

3 T

ing and misgiving, lest, under our hapless shape, they should peradventure be oppressing and crushing some once dear relative or bosom-friend, some youthful intimate or school fellow, bound to them, perhaps, by a mutual vow of eternal affection. Some of us, moreover, have titles which might deter a modest mind from degrading us. Who would think of riding, much less of flagellating the beautiful Duchess-or only a namesake of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire? Who would think of wounding through our sides, the tender nature of the Lady Jane Grey? Who would care to goad Lord Wellington, or Nelson, or Duncan?-and yet these illustrious titles are all worn,-by my melancholy brethren. There is scarcely a distinguished family in the peerage-but hath an ass of their name.

Let my oppressors think of this and mount modestly, and let them use me-a female-tenderly, for the credit of their own feminine nature. Am I not capable, like them, of pain and fatigue -of hunger and thirst? Have I, forsooth, no rheumatic achesno cholics and windy spasms, or stitches in the side-no vertigoes -no asthma-no feebleness or hystericks-no colds on the lungs? It would be but reasonable to presume I had all these, for my stable. is bleak and damp-my water brackish and my food scanty-for my master is a Caledonian, and starves me.-I am almost one of those Scotch asses that "live upon a brae!"

Will you mention these things, honourable and humane Sir,* in your place in parliament?

Friends of humanity!-Eschewers of West Indian sugar!Patrons of black drudges,-pity also the brown and grizzle-grey! Suffer no sand-that hath been dragged by the afflicted donkey. Consume not the pannier-potato-that hath helped to overburthen the miserable ass! Do not ride on us, or drive us or mingle with those who do. Die conscientiously of declines-and spare the consumption of our family milk. Think of our babes, and of our backs. Remember our manifold sufferings, and our meek resignation-our life-long martyrdom, and our mild martyr-like endurance. Think of the "languid patience" in our physiogno

my!

I have heard of a certain Freneh Metropolitan, who declared that the most afflicted and patient of animals was "de Jōb-horse" -but surely he ought to have applied to our race the attributes and the name of the man of Uz! [London Mag.

Martin is the gentleman addressed, we presume.