once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes of Alice W-n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old

rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love?

the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause: simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader-(a busy man perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by If I know aught of myself, no one whose them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. mind is introspective—and mine is painfully-In those days the sound of those midnight so-can have a less respect for his present chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in identity, than I have for the man Elia. I all around me, never failed to bring a train know him to be light, and vain, and humour- of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I some; a notorious * * *; addicted to :then scarce conceived what it meant, or averse from counsel, neither taking it nor thought of it as a reckoning that concerned offering it ;- .*** besides; a stammering me. Not childhood alone, but the young buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare man till thirty, never feels practically that not I subscribe to it all, and much more he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if than thou canst be willing to lay at his door need were, he could preach a homily on the -but for the child Elia, that "other me," fragility of life; but he brings it not home to there, in the back-ground - I must take himself, any more than in a hot June we can leave to cherish the remembrance of that appropriate to our imagination the freezing young master-with as little reference, I days of December. But now, shall I confess protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and- a truth ?—I feel these audits but too powerforty, as if it had been a child of some other fully. I begin to count the probabilities of house, and not of my parents. I can cry my duration, and to grudge at the expendiover its patient small-pox at five, and ture of moments and shortest periods, like rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor misers' farthings. In proportion as fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, years both lessen and shorten, I set more and wake with it in surprise at the gentle count upon their periods, and would fain lay posture of maternal tenderness hanging over my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I great wheel. I am not content to pass away know how it shrank from any the least" like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable how art thou changed!-Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was-how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give

the

draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would

set up my tabernacle here. I am content to evils, like humours, run into that capital stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.-Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, the recognisable face-the "sweet assurance of a look ?"

plague-sore.-I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death-but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as an universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive!

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such

so shall

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! | bed-fellows ?-or, forsooth, that " must I part with the intense delight of the fairest face appear?"-why, to comfort having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? me, must Alice W-n be a goblin? More Must knowledge come to me, if it come at than all, I conceive disgust at those impertiall, by some awkward experiment of intuition, nent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed and no longer by this familiar process of upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead reading? man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "Such as he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the mean time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years' days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine-and while that turncoat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton.

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying to give it its mildest name- -does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy. and spectral appearances,-that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles: -I am none of her minions-I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial

THE NEW YEAR.

HARK, the cock crows, and yon bright star
Tells us, the day himself's not far;
And see where, breaking from the night,
He gilds the western hills with light.
With him old Janus doth appear,
Peeping into the future year,
With such a look as seems to say
The prospect is not good that way.
Thus do we rise ill sights to see,
And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy;
When the prophetic fear of things
A more tormenting mischief brings,
More full of soul-tormenting gall
Than direst mischiefs can befall.

MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST.

candour, declared, that he thought there was darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching no harm in unbending the mind now and in a breath ;-but the wars of whist were then, after serious studies, in recreations of comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, that kind! She could not bear to have her rational, antipathies of the great French and noble occupation, to which she wound up English nations. her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards over a book.

Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author.

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbagenothing superfluous. No flushes—that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up :-that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things.-Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have an uniformity of array to distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be marshalled-never to take the field?

She even wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably, allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ?-Why two colours, when the mark of the suits would have sufficiently distinguished them without it ?—

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners a thing which the constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille-absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces;-the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone; above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans "But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably Prendre Vole,-to the triumph of which there refreshed with the variety. Man is not a is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, creature of pure reason-he must have his in the contingencies of whist;-all these, she senses delightfully appealed to. We see it would say, make quadrille a game of captiva- in Roman Catholic countries, where the tion to the young and enthusiastic. But music and the paintings draw in many to whist was the solider game: that was her worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsenword. It was a long meal; not, like qua-sualising would have kept out.-You yourself drille, a feast of snatches. One or two have a pretty collection of paintings-but rubbers might co-extend in duration with an confess to me, whether, walking in your evening. They gave time to form rooted gallery at Sandham, among those clear friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel: perpetually changing postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared

ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court-cards ?—the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession-the gay triumph assuring scarlets-the contrast

ing deadly-killing sables-the 'hoary majesty repique-the capot they savoured (she of spades '-Pam in all his glory!—

"All these might be dispensed with; and with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys in!-Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers-(work of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, -or as profanely slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess)-exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate!"

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence: —this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death.

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,-disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "Go" or "That's a go." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-dollar stake) because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring "two for his heels." There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born.

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms-such as pique

thought) of affectation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would argue thus :-Cards are warfare: the ends are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport: when single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight; with spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for your play.-Three are still worse; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille.-But in square games (she meant whist), all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, common to every species

though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold-or even an interested-bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime.

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. Chance, she would argue—and here again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion ;chance is nothing, but where something else