selves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room,) and is enjoying, with a relish that seems to fill all the capacities of his soul, the slender joke, which that facetious wag, his neighbour, is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has made as round as rings-does it shock the "dignity of human nature" to look at that man, and to sympathize with him in the seldom-heard joke which has unbent his care-worn, hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles from it? or with that full-hearted cobbler, who is honouring with the grasp of an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the license of the time has seated next him.

I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as this, or the Enraged Musician, or the Southwark Fair, or twenty other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency. There is the petrifying sneer of a demon, which excludes and kills love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man, which implies and cherishes it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a hearty laugh at the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of the amiable? That tumultuous harmony of singers that are roaring out the words, "The world shall bow to the Assyrian throne," from the opera of Judith, in the third plate of the series, called the Four Groups of Heads, which the quick eye of Hogarth must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred oratorios in this county, while "Music yet was young, when we had done smiling at the deafening distortions which these tearers of devotion to rags and tatters, these takers of hea ven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of the occupations of angels, are making-what unkindly impression is left behind, or what more of harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The conceited, long-backed sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of a Raphael or Corregio (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into has something of the Corregiesque in it) is contemplating the picture of a bottle which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of Beer Street-while we smile at the enormity of the selfdelusion, can we help loving the good humour and self-compla cency of the fellow? would we willingly wake him from his dream?

"

I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy-water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face-they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that tædium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett or Fielding.

POETRY,

LINES BY LORD BYRON.

NOT PUBLISHED IN ANY EDITION OF HIS POEMS.

[The occasion of these lines was this: The Regent had collected a gallery of the portraits of the principal living British beauties, executed by a distinguished female artist. One of these, Lady Jersey, lately happened to fall under the displeasure of the prince, and her picture was ignominiously dismissed from the collection.]

When the vain triumph of th' imperial lord
Whom servile Rome obeyed, and yet abhorr'd,
Gave to the vulgar gaze each glorious bust,
That left a likeness of the brave and just;
What most admir'd each scrutinizing eye,
Of all that deck'd the passing pageantry,
What spread from face to face that wond'ring air?
The thought of BRUTUS, for he was not there.
That absence prov'd his worth; that absence fix'd
His mem❜ry on the longing mind unmix'd,

And more decreed his glory to endure
Than all a gold Colossus could secure.

If thus, fair Jersey, our admiring gaze
Search for thy form in vain, and mute amaze,
Amidst those pictur'd charms, whose loveliness,
Bright though they be, thy own had rendered less;
If he, THAT VAIN OLD MAN, whom truth admits,
*Heir of his father's *

*

*

If his corrupted eye and wither'd heart
Could with thy gentle image bear to part,

• Probably the blank is to be thus supplied :
"Heir of his father's throne and shatter'd wits."

*

That tasteless shame be his, and our's the grief,
To gaze on beauty's band, without its chief:
Yet comfort still one selfish thought imparts,
We lose that portrait, but preserve our hearts.
What can his vaunted gallery now disclose?
A garden, with all flowers except the rose:
A fount, that only wants its living stream;
A night, with every star, save Dian's beam;
Lost to our eyes the present forms shall be
That turn from tracing them to dream of thee.
And more on that recall'd resemblance pause
Than all he shall not force on our applause.

Long may thy yet meridian lustre shine,
With all that virtue asks of homage, thine:
The symmetry of youth, the grace of mien,
The eye that gladdens, and the brow serene,
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,

Which shades, yet shows, that forehead more than fair,
Each glance that wins us, and the life that throws
A spell that will not let our looks repose,

But turn to gaze again, and find anew

Some charm that well rewards another view;
These are not lessen'd, these are still as bright,
Albeit too dazzling for a dotard's sight;
And these must wait till every charm is gone;
To please the paltry heart that pleases none:
That dull cold sensualist whose sickly eye
In envious dimness pass'd thy portrait by,
Who rack'd his little spirit to combine

Its hate of freedom's loveliness and thine.

DOMESTIC LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

DURING the last year the Massachusetts Historical Society have published two vols. 8vo. of about 300 pages each, being the first and second volumes of a new series of their collections. They are printed in an unostentatious manner, and, like the former volumes, consist of republications of scarce old tracts, together with various original papers; the whole forming a curious miscellany of information on many points of the natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history of the United States, and especially of New England.

The following are the principal articles of the first volume. A discourse by the Hon. John Davis, delivered on the anniversary commemoration of the first landing at Plymouth; this is a brief, but very pleasing, sketch of the history and characters of the venerable fathers of Massachusetts, neither aspiring to the rhetorical pomp of formal declamation, nor descending into the minuteness of mere antiquarian detail. A narrative of Bacon's and Ingram's rebellion in Virginia, in 1675, from an old manuscript-exceedingly amusing from the quaintness and antiquated affectation of its style. An account of the fires in Boston and its vicinity since 1701, arranged in chronological order, and drawn up with whimsical minuteness. A paper, written in 1773, on the state of religious liberty in New-York; an unpleasant memorial of the angry feelings and bitter controversial spirit of those times. A history of medical science in Massachusetts, by Dr. Bartlett, containing a minute account of the medical institutions, &c. of that state. Topographical sketches of several townships of Massachusetts. A sensible paper on the cultivation of the oak for ship timber, by the late Gen. Lincoln. A sketch of the early ecclesiastical history of Massachusetts by the late Dr. Elliot of Boston, embracing that period in which the infant colony was agitated by a controversy between the strict congregational party and that leaning towards presbyterianism. This is followed by a memoir of the life and character of Dr. Elliot, a pleasing tribute to the memory of an amiable, modest, and learned man, who has deserved well of the literature of his country. His eulogist styles him the "Jortin of New England"— this coming, as it does, from a scholar and a man of taste, is high praise indeed. The moderation, the candour, the various scholarship, the unstudied pleasantry, the mitis sapientia of Dr. Jortin, have justly gained him one of the most enviable reputations which can be acquired by genius and learning. The volume also contains a sensible and polite letter from Bishop Watson, and some short biographical sketches of the Rev. Charles Morton, Rev. John Lathrop, the late Gov. Sullivan, Rev. Wm. Emerson, and Isaac Lothrop, Esq.

The second volume begins with an elaborate report on the present state of the Indians of the western parts of the United States, judiciously compiled from various authentic sources. It is followed by a