fear of her children—and, in a word, the whole creation in anxiety and dismay. The righteous were employed in prayers and thanksgivings, and the ungodly in framing shifts and evasions to extenuate their crimes. The guardian angels were near on the one side, to acquit themselves of their duties and commissions; and on the other were the accusing demons, hunting for more matters of charge and aggravation against offenders."

The concluding sentence of this awful scene is quite characteristic of Quevedo, who never fails to usher in, or close the most solemn matter, with a joke:

"The Ten Commandments had the guard of a narrow gate, which was so strait, that the most mortified body could not pass it without leaving a good part of his skin behind him.”

His humorous style is various, reminding us at times of different writers that came after him, who either borrowed directly, or were accidentally thrown upon similar trains of fanciful association. The familiar joke of the patient's dying of two doctors and an apothecary, which we imagined to have belonged either to Moliere or Le Sage, was first started by Quevedounless some more erudite detector of plagiarisms can discover a more ancient proprietor.

"You must understand,' says Death, that though distempered humours make a man sick, it is the physician that kills him. So that, when a man is asked what such and such a one died of, he is not presently to make answer, that he died of a fever, a pleurisy, the plague, or the palsy, but that he died of the doctor." "

The following passage brings to our recollection the playful style prevailing in some papers of the Spectator:

"Somebody plucking me behind, I turned my face upon the most meagre, melancholy wretch that ever was seen. For pity's sake,' says he, and as you are a good Christian, do but deliver me from the persecution of these impertinents and babblers that are now termenting me, and I shall be eternally obliged to you;' at the same time casting himself at my feet, and crying like a child. And what art thou?' said I, 'for a miserable creature I am sure thou art.' 'I am,' says he, an ancient and an honest man, although defamed with a thousand reproaches. Some call me Another, and others, Somebody; and, doubtless, you cannot but have heard of meas Somebody says, cries one that has nothing to say for himself. The Latins call me Quidam, and make good use of me to fill up lines and stopgaps. When you go back again into the world, I pray do me the favour to own that you have seen me, and to justify me for

Milton, a few years after, made a fine use of this sentiment:

"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat

Sighing through all her works gave signs of wo,
That all was lost- 33

PARADISE Lost.

one that never did, and never will, either speak or write any thing, whatever some tattling idiots may pretend. When they bring me into quarrels and brawls, I am called, forsooth, a certain person; in their intrigues, I know not who; and in the pulpit a certain author; and all this to make a mystery of my name, and lay all their fooleries at my door. Wherefore, I beseech you, lend me all the assistance in your power;' which I promised to do, and so this phantom withdrew."

If our friend Moore were in the kingdom, we should have got him to versify the following, which wants nothing but rhyme and a lively air, arranged by Stevenson, to appear all his own. An apparition of the "days of old" is describing to Quevedo the increasing petulance and insubordination of modern young ladies:

"Will you see a mother now teaching her daughter a lesson of good government? Child,' says she, you know that modesty is the chief ornament of your sex; wherefore, be sure, when you come into company, that you do not stand staring the men in the face, as if you were looking babies in their eyes; but rather look a little downward, as a fashion of behaviour more suitable to the obligations of your sex.' 'Downward!' says the girl: Madam, I must beg to be excused. This was well enough in the days of old, when the poor creatures knew no better. Let the men look downward towards the clay of which they were made; but man was our original, and it becomes us to keep our eyes upon the matter from which we came.""

If we had found the next extract in Sir Thomas Browne, we should not have thought it out of place. In the leading idea we recognise the propensity to draw topics of instruction from the grave, and to point a moral sentiment with fine-drawn metaphysical acumen, which peculiarly designates the manner of that writer. Quevedo is conversing with Death, who is fantastically described as a female apparition, of a thin and slender make, laden with crowns, garlands, sceptres, scythes, sheep-hooks, pattens, hob-nailed shoes, tiaras, straw hats, mitres, caps, embroideries, silks, skins, wool, gold, lead, diamonds, pearls, shells and pebbles, decked in all the colours of the rainbow; with one eye shut, the other open; old on one side, young on the other :

"I told her, says he, that, under correction, she was no more like the Deaths I had seen, than a horse is like a cat. Our Death,' I said, 'was represented with a scythe in her hand, and a carcase of bones, as clean as if the crows had picked it.'- Yes, yes,' said she, turning short upon me, I know that very well: but your designers and painters are a parcel of blockheads. The bones you talk of are the dead, or, in other words, the miserable remainders of the living: but let me tell you, you yourselves make your own Death, and that which you call Death is but the period of your life, as the first moment of your birth is the beginning of your existence: and actually you die living, and your bones are no more than what Death has

spared and committed to the grave. If this were rightly understood, every man would find a memento mori, or a Death's head, in his own looking-glass, and consider every house with a family in it, but as a sepulchre filled with dead bodies: a truth you little dream of, though within your daily view and experience. Can you imagine a Death elsewhere, and not in yourselves? Believe it, you are greatly mistaken; for you yourselves are skeletons, before you know any thing of the matter."

We have left ourselves little space to notice Quevedo's other popular pieces. There is the Curious History (containing nine nocturnal adventures) of an intractable young Spaniard, Don Diego, surnamed Love-night, who had taken an unaccountable pique against the sun; and, in defiance of the sage remonstrances of his friend Amazor, delighted to mope, like an owl, in some darksome retreat through the day, and to sally forth every night into the streets of Madrid in search of romantic encounters, duly accoutred, against both sexes, with a sword and a guittar. The several scenes in which this extravagant fancy involved him, are related with much spirit, and the arrangement of the incidents managed with all the appropriate bustle and perplexity of Spanish plots. We have also (to omit some more desultory efforts of Quevedo's humour) a longer and more connected tale, entitled the "Pleasant History of the Life and Actions of Paul the Spanish Sharper, the pattern of rogues and mirror of vagabonds." It abounds with wit, though the pleasantry and details have frequently more strength than delicacy. It would, in truth, have astonished us, that a man of Quevedo's rank and acquirements should have squandered his genius upon such subjects as the vices of the refuse of Spanish society, did we not recollect the danger, in his day, of intermeddling with the irregularities of more polished offenders. We shall offer one specimen of his powers of descriptive caricature. The young Paul is sent to a seminary in Segovia, kept by "Master Cabra," where a scene of starvation opens upon him, exceeding all that has been ever recorded or invented of cheap Yorkshire boarding-schools. If any of our readers have languid appetites, we would prescribe this chapter for them, as a more infallible whetter than the strongest bitters. We happened to read it for the first time before dinner, and we thought the hour would never arrive. The proprietor of this asylum of penury and famine is thus introduced:

"The master was a skeleton, a mere shotten herring, or like a long slender cane with a little head cut upon it; and red-haired, so that no more need be said to such as know the proverb, "that neither cat nor dog of that colour are good;" his eyes almost sunk into his head, as if he looked through a perspective glass, or the deep windows in a linen-draper's shop; his nose turning up, and somewhat flat, for the bridge was carried away by an inundation of cold rheum,

for he never afforded himself a more costly malady. His beard had lost its colour, for fear of his mouth, which, being so near, seemed threatening to devour it for mere hunger. His teeth had, many of them, forsaken him for want of employment, or were banished as idlers. His neck was as long as a crane's, with the gullet sticking out, as if it had been compelled to come abroad in search of sustenance: his arms withered: his hands like a bundle of twigs; each of them, when pointing downwards, looking like a fork, or a pair of compasses. He had long slender legs. He walked leisurely; and if ever he chanced to move any faster, his bones rattled like a pair of snappers. His voice was weak and hollow: his beard bushy and long; for, to save charges, he never trimmed it, pretending it was so odious to him to feel the barber's hands all over his face, that he would rather die than endure it. One of the boys cut his hair. In fair weather he wore a thread-bare cap. His cassock, some said, was miraculous, for no man could tell its colour: some seeing no sign of hair upon it, concluded it was made of frog's skin; others said it was a mere shadow, or phantom; near at hand it looked somewhat black, and at a distance bluish. He wore no girdle, cuffs, or band; so that his long hair and scanty short cassock made him look like the messenger of death. Each shoe might have served for an ordinary coffin. As for his chamber, there was not so much as a cobweb in it, the spiders being all starved to death. He put spells upon the mice, for fear they should gnaw some scraps of bread he kept. His bed was on the floor, and he always lay upon one side, for fear of wearing out the sheets. In short, he was the superlative degree of avarice, and the very ne plus ultra of want. Into this prodigy's hands I fell."

Quevedo has been celebrated for the surprising extent and variety of his acquirements. He was familiar with the Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French languages. We are informed that he was intimately acquainted with the classical writers of antiquity; well read in the history of nations; versed in the philosophy, rhetoric, and divinity of the schools; skilled in mathematics, astronomy, and geography; tinctured with astrology and alchymy; conversant with the best productions of French and Italian literature; and perfectly master of his own Castilian tongue. He was, in a word, one of the recorded prodigies of learning. Such prodigies are rare in the present age, and we are not sure that the age is the worse for it. Incessant readers, as far as our humble observations have gone, are seldom great thinkers. It is a sign of a wise mind to discover betimes within how small a compass may be contained all that it is essential or possible for man to know. The celebrated Hobbes, who had no appetite for books, used to observe, that had he read more, he should have known less; but he was a deep and assiduous student of his own thoughts; and he prepared the way for Locke, an achievement of more lasting glory, than if he had

written an hundred treatises "De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis."

We are also rather prone, it strikes us, to give old writers an inordinate degree of credit for the quantity of erudition spread over their works. A good thought costs more time and labour than a chapter of quotations and learned allusions. Place a common writer in a good library, to compose a dissertation on any subject; and with the help of a steady ladder, if he be an active able-bodied man, he will contrive to draw off as much learning in a week, as shall appear the product of a long and studious life. And even in those cases, where, by habits of incessant acquisition, the mind becomes so saturated with know. ledge that, in writing or conversation, it is perpetually dripping away from over-abundance, the intellectual labour of such accumulation is by no means more wonderful than what we daily witness in the ordinary labours of the more active professions. What treasures of universal learning, for example, might not any of our eminent barristers have amassed, if they had devoted to general subjects the time and thought which they sacrifice to the business of their clients! What thousands and tens of thousands of printed volumes might be formed out of the cases and the piles of affidavits submitted, during their professional career, to Erskine or Romilly, over every dull particular of which they were condemned to ponder with as much intense deliberation as the most laborious investigator of literature and science! What prodigies of book-learning ever kept their faculties more highly or continuously strained than these, or any other leader in Westminster Hall; who, besides the solitary drudgery of the closet, have to pass their days in court, where every power must be for ever on the alert, to detect intechnicalities, to fence with witnesses, to puzzle or persuade phlegmatic jurors, and to harangue, with extemporaneous ardour, upon every possible topic in the circle of human concerns-from the ignoble items of a tradesman's bill, up to the wrongs of violated majesty, or the more tender grievances of disappointed love. When we think upon these things, and upon the ceaseless and exhausting labours of the other intellectual callings of the present time, we are obliged, we must confess, to regard with comparatively small admiration, or surprise, all the boasted examples of extensive erudition.

Some of the ablest men that we know agree with us in these opinions. Their libraries are small, consisting of the few great authors who thought originally, and are models in their kind. We recommend to our readers to follow their example, and to be severely fastidious in the selection of their literary favourites, provided the "New Monthly" be one of the number.