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Alone he stood amid those ruins old,
His treasury of sweet care and pleasant pain;
The hemlock crush'd defined the body's mould
Of one who long and restless there had lain;
His vest was beaded with the dew of dawn,
His hand fresh blooded, and his sword fresh drawn !

The eastern star, a crystal eye of gold,
Full on the statued form of beauty shone,
Now prostrate, powerless, featureless and cold,
A simple trunk of deftly carven stone:
Deep in the grasses that dismembered head
Lay like the relics of the ignoble dead.

But Beauty's namesake and sidereal shrine,
Now glided slowly down that pallid sky,
Near and more near the thin horizon line,
In the first gust of morning, there to die,-
While the poor knight, with wilder'd steps and brain,
Hasten'd the glimmering village to regain.

With few uncertain words and little heed
His followers' anxious questions he put by,
Bidding each one prepare his arms and steed,
For "they must march before the sun was high,
And neither Apennine nor Alp should stay,
Though for a single night, his homeward way."

On, on, with scanty food and rest he rode,
Like one whom unseen enemies pursue,
Urging his favourite horse with cruel goad,
So that the lagging servants hardly knew
Their master of frank heart and ready cheer,'
In that lone man who would not speak or hear.

Till when at last he fairly saw behind
The Alpine barrier of perennial snow,
He seem'd to heave a burthen off his mind,-
His blood' in calmer current seemed to flow,
And like himself he smiled once more, but cast
No light or colour on that cloudy past.

From the old Teuton forests, echoing far,
Came a stern welcome, hailing him, restored
To the true health of life in peace or war,

Fresh morning toil, that earns the generous board;
And waters, in the clear unbroken voice

Of childhood, spoke-" Be thankful and rejoice!"

Glad as the dove returning to his ark,
Over the waste of universal sea,

He heard the huge house-dog's familiar bark,
He traced the figure of each friendly tree,
And felt that he could never part from this,
His home of daily love and even bliss.

And in the quiet closure of that place,
He soon his first affection link'd anew,
In that most honest passion finding grace,
His soul with primal vigour to endue,
And crush the memories that at times arose,
To stain pure joy and trouble high repose.

Never again that dear and dangerous land,
So fresh with all her weight of time and story,
Its winterless delights and slumbers bland,
On thrones of shade, amid a world of glory,
Did he behold: the flashing cup could please
No longer him who knew the poison lees.

So lived he, pious, innocent, and brave,
The best of friends I ever saw on earth:
And now the uncommunicable grave
Has closed on him, and left us but his worth;
I have revealed this strange and secret tale,
Of human fancy and the powers of bale.

He told it me, one autumn evening mild,
Sitting, greyhair'd, beneath an old oak tree,
His dear true wife beside him, and a child,
Youngest of many, dancing round his knee,-
And bade me, if I would, in fragrant rhymes
Embalm it, to be known in after-times.

Of a similar character to the above is the tale of the young knight, who, unconsciously or daringly, placed his ring on the finger of a statue of Venus, and returning to repossess himself of it, found the finger bent, and the hand closed. In the old ver sion of this, which is to be seen in Book iii. sect. 8, of the Jesuit del Rio's Magical Disquisitions (Venetiis, 1616), the phantom goddess ever comes between him and the bride he takes soon after this adventure, and is only banished through the mediation of a priest, named Palumnus, himself most skilled in necromancy. The knight receives a parchment from

him, which, at midnight, in a meeting of cross roads, he forces upon Venus, who passes by with a solemn but hurrying train of attendants, and when she receives it, cries-" Cruel Priest Palumnus! art thou never content with the harm thou hast done? but the end of thy persecutions cometh, cruel Priest Palumnus." The knight recovers his ring, and is freed from the enchantment; but the priest dies in dreadful agony the third day afterward. Eichendorf in German, and Lord Nugent in English, have built stories on this foundation, and the plot of the familiar Opera of Zampa, by Herold, is slightly varied from it.

SONNET.

ENGLAND has felt of old a tyrant's sway.
The rightful blood of long-descended kings
Has trodden underfoot as abject things
A people's liberties. Through dark dismay
Where chaos brooded, Cromwell won his way
To power supreme, uplifted on the wings
Of a bold spirit; nor dishonour brings
His rule, who taught the factious to obey
And foes to fear us. But O! when till now

Was England mastered by a low-born slave
False and faint-hearted; on whose sordid brow
Shame sits enamoured; who would dig a grave
For all she venerates, and has breathed a vow
To hate her sons as cowards hate the brave?

SOME ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF. BY THE IRISH OYSTER-Eater.

FASCICULUS THE ELEVENTH.

"By my troth I care not-a man can die but once-we owe God a death; I'll ne'er bear a base mind: au't be my destiny, so, an't be not, so. No man's too good to serve his prince, and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."-SHAKSPEARE.

"WONDERFUL are the works of nature," as Mick Montague observed to me, on emerging from the puppetshow.

So they are, to be sure-and so is the far-famed city of Westminster.

The far-famed city of Westminster, as every fool knows, has a famous abbey. Now this famous abbey, in days of yore, was a sanctuary for thieves, robbers, murderers, and other pious reprobates, who took to their heels as soon as pursued by the myrmidons of the law; and, once they laid violent hands upon the hem of some old monk's garment, or got into the sanctuary, as this sink of perdition was called, they were forthwith as safe as the church, and snapped fingers at the constable-provided always they had money wherewith to fee the monks, in default of which they were incontinently pushed out of the sanctuary, and delivered over to the officers of justice. This refuge of atrocious criminals tended, no doubt, greatly to the honour and glory of God, and materially enhanced, in those days, the respectability of Westminster.

There was another class of semiclerical scamps, who flourished in these days, and in this neighbourhood, called Palmerins, or Palmers, most reverend rascals, who, with a scrip on their shoulders, a scallop in their hats, and peas (boiled) in their shoes, went blackguarding round the country, under pretence of selling Saracen's heads, cut off in the Holy Land, and other relics-begging, moreover, what they could beg, borrowing what they could borrow, and stealing what they could steal; and this they did, as all scamps of their persuasion do, for the love of God.

The sanctuary has been abolished the monks have been sent to the treadmill-the most dreadful punishment that could possibly be inflicted upon their reverences and the palmerins have gone to a tropical climate, which I only indicate as the antipodes of the

Holy Land; nor would any body be a whit the wiser concerning the palmers, or palmerins, were not the hamlet, or collection of houses appropriated peculiarly to them, called and known as Palmerin's or Palmer's Village to this very day.

Of all the human burrows in and about London, there is not one comparable, in its way, to Palmer's Village, into which I followed my fair little guide, under an archway not much more than four feet high, close to the mouth of which stood a steamengine of peculiar, and to me incom. prehensible, construction - the engineer uttering at intervals a short and rapid guttural sound, which I then conceived to be a warning to passengers to avoid the engine, but which more matured experience has informed me is simply an announcement to the nobility, gentry, his friends, and the public, that his steaming apparatus contains "baked taters, a halfpenny a piece-all hot-all hot!"

For the information of the curious in such matters, who may be induced by my description to essay the wonders of Palmer's Village, I take the liberty to observe, that, at the further end of the tunnel, or archway, aforesaid, is a step, over which new comers are apt to break either their shins or noses, which accident is facetiously called by the villagers paying your footing. When your footing is thus paid, by your footing being lost, you emerge into an alley or avenue, fifteen inches wide, or thereabouts, affording room for one person, and no more, to pass along, and fenced on either side with old barrel staves, broken iron hoops, and rotten paling of every variety of scantling. Within the fence, on either side this pathwhich, I should have observed, is neither paved, nor flagged, nor bituminized, but simply one aboriginal puddle from end to end-are arranged the gardens of the respective tenements, two or three palings being

omitted from the line of palisade for the convenience of pigs and tenantry. No gardens, I am sure, from the hanging gardens of Babylon, to the gindrinking gardens of White Conduit House, can exhibit in the same space (two yards square each) the variety of ingenious devices that ornament the gardens of Palmer's Village. A bit of any thing green is the only deficiency observable, but this is supplied by a curious artistical arrangement of puddleholes, dung-heaps, cabbage stalks, brick-bats, and broken bottles. The tenements attached are like nothing on the face of this world but themselves a sort of half-breed between hovel and wigwam, with the least trace of cottage running in the blood. There are two stories, with two windows to each, in the face of these extraordinary village edifices-the window containing, on an average, three old hats, one flannel petticoat, and two patched panes of glass-each; there was also to each house a doorway, and some had an apology for a door.

You are not to suppose that there exists only one avenue through Palmer's Village, or one only straggling street of the tenements above mentioned. There are as many avenues, lanes, holes and bores, as there used to be in the catacombs-houses huddled upon houses, without regard to discipline or good order; in short, were I a magistrate, I should feel inclined to read the riot act, Palmer's Village being strictly within the spirit and meaning of that enactment-a neighbourhood tumultuously assembled!

The houses, individually, look as if they deserved to be fined five shillings every man jack of them, for being drunk. They had evidently been up all night, and wore an intoxicated and disorderly look, which no well-regulated and respectable tenement would disgrace himself by being seen in. Stooping under the rotten paling, I was at length received into one of the most taterdemalionized mansions, and, having picked my way up a worn-out stair to the two-pair back-a miserable place, wherein a counterpane of patchwork, spread over a little straw upon the ground, a broken chair, a stool, three bars of nail rod stuck in the chimney by way of grate, with a bit of the same material to serve for poker, a frying pan, a salt herring and a half, perforated through the optics, upon a

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXXXIII.

nail, a tea kettle, and a smoothingiron, made up the ostensible furniture of the apartment. I sat down, while the little girl proceeded to get a light, upon the patch-work quilt, which served admirably as an ottoman, and began to meditate in what particular line of life I should proceed to make my fortune in splendid London. That I should make my fortune, and that in less than no time, I never doubted-as who ever did, who has read, with the attention it deserves, the interesting history of Whittington and his Cat? The lady of the house, having packed up her China oranges, and other foreign fruits, and also having disposed of the last of her stock of roasted chesnuts, at a dreadful sacrifice, "to close sales," came home at last, bringing our intended supper, consisting of a pound and a half of live eels—in her pocket, and dispatched little Bridget upon an errand, for a ha'p'orth of loose sticks and a quarter of a hundred of coals. Loose sticks, I may as well apprise the ignorant reader, are neither more nor less than the ligneous relics of the woodcutter, after making up his tidy bundles for sale. This refuse is offered to the poor at the close of the day's work, and sold, as every earthly good gift is in London, from principalities and territories, down to the sediment of their cisterns and the dirt of their streets-from turtle and turbot, to stale sprats and stinking mackerel-from pine-apples and truffles, at half a-guinea an ounce, to chickenweed and turnip-tops, at a farthing the fistful.

The coals and loose sticks having been procured without much difficulty

there being, in truth, no difficulty whatever, in this metropolis, in procuring any thing you may want, if you have money ready in your hand to pay for it, civility only excepted the frying-pan was put in requisition, the live eels, seeing that their variegated contortions procured them no respite, submitted quietly to be fried out of existence. A quart of small beer was sent for, and the little party, the live eels alone excepted, began to show that animated twinkle of the eye, and gratified expansion of countenance, that not unusually is expressed upon the physiognomy of a hungry customer, who expects something good, and knows where to put it. The eatables being at length discussed, first being

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fairly and jealously apportioned, by our hospitable entertainer, in four nearly equal portions, or "halves," which were consumed in much less time than I take to tell it. Bridget-little Bridget, I should say, that young lady's admirable mother being known in Palmer's Village as "the Bridget"having begun to put away, and the couple of plates and brace of saucers, which had stood us instead of a service of plate, having been washed, the elder Bridget, gazing at me with an expression of countenance, such as one puts on when regarding some rare and curious animal new caught, broke out in full flood with

"Arrah! now, Lord have mercy upon us, what brought you here at all, alannah?"

"I came here to get something to do," said I" to better myself."

"To better yerself? An' is it fallin' down dead in the could streets wid the hunger ye call betterin' o' yerself? Have ye ever a trade, honey?"

"The devil a trade," said I, with as much carelessness as I could assume.

"Nor no money?"

"Not a cross," replied I, diving into my penniless pockets, after the manner of the factory-boy.

"Nor any body to look to yees?" enquired the lady of Seville.

"Nobody but myself."

"Oh! wirra-oh! wirra-oh! wirrasthrue-my poor boy-my poor boy!" began the Cork woman, wringing her hands, poking down her head between her knees, moving her person backwards and forwards with a motion not at all unlike a bumboat rolling at anchor, and commencing one of those unearthly and barbarous yells, which the learned and cultivated old Irish let out at times of distress and lamentation; a practice which, in this poor woman's case, was really indicative of concern, and therefore less abhorrent to my feelings than the hired yells of the mercenary savages who follow funerals, proclaiming to the ears of the whole country round that they are neither more nor less than wild beasts howling in the wilderness.

My landlady kept undulating, howling, and wirrastruing, for at least an hour by Westminster clock-a most satisfactory expression, no doubt, of her desire for the success of a young Irish adventurer, but not quite so gra

tifying to my feelings, howled over in this manner, as if I had been no better than a lost mutton.

When her lungs were quite gone, and she had arrived at that state of pulmonary exhaustion which the faculty are in the habit of expressing scientifically by the strictly profes sional periphrasis of "bellows to mend," the orange-woman expressed a decided opinion, that a little drop of cream of the valley would do her all the good in the world, enquiring of your humble servant in the same breath, whether I had ever, in my life, tasted cream of the valley. I revolved in my own mind all the lacteous modifications that had ever traversed my œsophagus, as, for instance, curds and whey, strawberries and cream, pedlar's cream, iced cream, cream cheese, milk punch, Glasgow ditto, sack posset all other milks and creams, moreover, whereof the dairyman knows less than the perfumer, such as cold cream, milk of roses, and the likeIrish white wine I thought of, and buttermilk-but was at last fairly driven to confess that I was innocent of the flavour of cream of the valley.

"Arrah, do ye know, at all at all, what it is, ye gommaugh ?" enquired the orange-woman, indignantly.

"No, indeed, ma'am," replied I, abashed at the limited extent of my lacteous information.

"Why thin," said my hostess, rapturously-" 'tis nothing at all but the sweetest of mountain dew, wid roses and lilies in it!"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed I, licking my lips; "then it must be nectar, indeed.'

Little Bridget was quickly dispatched for a quartern of this precious fluid, and returned in less than five seconds-live where you will in London, the public-house is always next door but two-ushering in a rather elderly lady, with a compressed lip and severe eye-a lady formally introduced to me as Mrs Spikins, what lived in the two-pair front, and took in washing. Little Bridget set about scouring the chair for the accommodation of this lady, who amused herself, in the interval, in discussing the cream of the valley with our hostess, that very discussion being, to say the truth, the sole purpose she had in view -for I could not help wondering that the preliminary screaming and howl

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