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the idea of doing so now for the first time. A gleam of satisfaction shot across the countenance of Mrs Mary Popkins as we pronounced the word "never," the meaning of which, new as it was to us, we could not for an instant mistake. Mrs Popkins had caught a greenhorn-and visions of candle-ends, ounces of butter, fragmentary loaves, lumps of coal, and unlocked cupboards, were floating in rich profusion across her lively imagination. We may live, thought we, to disappoint you yet, old dame-we had not a scout for four years at Oxford without learning a trick or two.

"Well, Mrs Popkins," said we aloud, "we shall send in our furniture to-night, and we shall sleep here to-morrow.'

"Bless my heart, sir," said Mrs Popkins, "begging your pardon for the expression, I shall hardly have time to get the chambers thoroughly cleaned out." As, however, we thought that whether Mrs Popkins had time or not, the chambers stood a very poor chance of undergoing such an unwonted operation, we refused to alter our resolution-possessed ourselves of the keys-and strolled off to our club, to read the Times, discuss chops and corn-laws, yawn, put our hands in our breeches-pockets, and stare out of the bow-window.

We have ever, till lately, been accustomed to entertain a reasonably good opinion of our own capacities; but, alas! we have almost begun to fear that we must be possessed of an obtuseness of perception far beyond that which falls to the lot of ordinary dullards; for we are utterly unable to discover the truth of an opinion which appears to be entertained by every man, woman, and child of our acquaintance, and which has been unceasingly drummed into our ears from the very moment of our taking possession to the present. For the life and soul of us, we cannot find out that we are dull and miserable; but every body affirms that we must be so, and "what every body says must be true," is an axiom old enough to have grown by this time "something musty." That the world, however (uncommon as the case may be), is sincere in its opinion, we cannot for an instant permit ourselves to doubt. The pity we meet with is astonishing; the sym

pathy overpowering. Old ladies of seventy-two turn up the whites of their eyes, and express their decided conviction that we must be "dismal beyond every thing." Facetious fathers of families perpetrate most self-satisfactory witticisms about blue devils, bedposts, garters, and coroners' inquests. The moustachioed and "imperial"-led loungers of Regent Street, are of opinion that it must be "deyvilish slow." The nice, delightful, talented young men, who hold an undisputed pre-eminence in quadrilles and small talk, are unalterably convinced that we must find it a "tremendous bore:" and the nice young ladies, who delight in the aforesaid nice young men, are perfectly unable to conceive how we can possibly endure such a melancholy, hermit-like state of existence. We have given up the unprofitable labour of opposing our own judgment to so universal an opinion; firstly, because we never found any body to allow that we ourselves could know any thing at all about the matter; and secondly, because we abominate arguments :-so we leave the world to "write us down" as miserable as it pleases, without caring to plead "not guilty" to the indictment.

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We are, to speak the truth, lovers of solitude, though far from being haters of society. We can laugh with the loudest, and crowd it with the most fashionable. We can dance with the daughter-discuss fashions and scandal with mamma-dilate upon horses and tailors with the brother (or rather we are a good listener on such subjects, which, as it serves both to cover ignorance and flatter vanity, is far more agreeable to both parties). debate politics with papa-and play a rubber, if need be, with any old grandam in the three kingdoms. We will even confess to a kindly and affectionate regard for an occasional good dinner, despite of the dictum which we found the other morning in Montaigne, that "the young man who pretends to a palate for wine or sauces, ought to be whipped;" for, much as we reverence the old Gascon in a general way, we cannot bring ourselves to believe that we deserve to undertake a pilgrimage at the cart's tail for so amiable and social a weakness. We have no objection, we said, to a dinner: but still more to our liking

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is what our continental neighbours call a "petit souper," the "champagneand-a-chicken' style of thing, of which Lady Mary Wortley Montague writes with such goût-the noctes cænæque Deûm. the happy hours of mirth and Miltons, song and Sillery, laughter and lobster-salad, which in our Oxford days--Bah! we shall be taken for regular roysterers, and Heaven knows that, now-a-days at any rate, we are innocent of the charge, "We are not now as we were then". but our memory played us a slippery trick, and we were for the moment once more in our old rooms in the big quadrangle of - College. But now, our organ of gregariousness, or whatever the bump is called, develops itself only by fits and starts, prominent for a week, and impalpable for a twelvemonth. We have learned to grow careless of society without degenerating into an absolute Timon, and to love solitude without becoming a thick-and-thin disciple of Zimmerman.

Dull? how should we be dull ?— What! with our fire blazing, and our lamp trimmed-our kettle singing on the hob, three good cups of Twining's best brewing at our elbow, and the last number of Blackwood in our hand? We envy not the man who would feel mopish in such society. Do us the favour to cast your eyes round our room, too-find you there any lack of companions? Mark yon phalanx of bards posted in that lefthand corner-yon corps of classics to the right that close and compact battalion of historians in the centre; observe, too, yon little band, the cherished "Immortals" of our literary host-wise Bacon, and quaint old Bur. ton, and eloquent Sir Thomas Browne, the fascinating Michael de Montaigne, and the incorrigible side-shaker Rabelais; Sterne, variable as an April day-like it, too, delightful in every change and dear old Charles Lambe, with his merriment, and his wisdom, and his kind-heartedness! Dull, indeed!-Mercy upon us! what shall we hear of next! Listen, ye whose happiness lies in a perpetual squeeze, to the words of him who stands foremost in that bright array-"For a crowd is not company-and faces are but a gallery of pictures-and talk is but a tinkling cymbal in which there is no love."

But we are perverse beings; and,

little as we care about society when left to ourselves, we would not for worlds be positively debarred from it. We are independent Britons, and hate compulsion;-in two words (which, by the way, generally means about a dozen), we are waxing old-bachelorish-somewhat selfish if you will have it so and we like our own way-and that's the reason we took our chambers. Somewhere or other-we think in the pages of " Maga the Queenly" -but we have a sad head, and cannot be positive-we remember to have read a song, written after our own heart, by a minstrel who must have lived in chambers, with such a hearty spirit did he sing of his own happiness. The burden of his strain has been many a time on our lips in our most particularly easy moments, and from our inmost heart have we echoed the wish

"Oh! that kaisar or king the peace could find

Of four stone walls, and a cheerful mind!" But happy as we are ourselves, we very much fear that we must be a positive nuisance to our inferior and opposite neighbours; for we are of a most unquiet temperament, and have in us the very spirit of unrest. Sometimes we pace our narrow domains, like a "perturbed spirit," for a whole evening through; sometimes we sing ; sometimes we read aloud, partly because we think we remember the better for it, and partly-out with it, vanity!-because we have a notion that our reading is not to be sneezed at; very, very seldom are we perfectly quiet. We have not the slightest doubt that, in the private judgment of Mrs Popkins, we are irremediably insane. We know no richer treat than to note the look of mingled wonder, compassion, and apprehension with which she regards us, whenever she happens to catch us in what we overheard her one morning denominate, "our tantrums "-to observe with what care she lays our breakfast knife at the farther end of the table, that she may escape before we clutch it. We cannot even take up the poker to stir the fire in her presence, without calling up to her timorous imagination all the fearful stories of shattered skulls and scattered brains which fill the pages of the Newgate Calendar, and make pale the students of the Terrific

Register. The very slam (Johnson pronounces the word low-but we can't help it-will he find us one more expressive ?)-the very slam of the door, as she leaves us for the morning, bespeaks a thanksgiving for her temporary escape. Her whole life is nothing but a series of unexpected reprieves.

We are, too, to our shame be it spoken, sadly given to what Scott calls "bedgown and slipper tricks." We love, when we settle ourselves for the evening, to kick our boots to one end of the room, and fling our coat to the other; to envelope ourselves in our "robe de matin ;" thrust our weary toes into the last new pair of slippers wrought for our especial wearing by-never mind whom ; wheel our easy chair full in front of the fire; set our feet each upon its peculiar hob; fold our arms, and resign ourselves to all the luxuries of a brown study. Most devoted lovers are we of that dabbling with visionary bricks and mortar, called "castlebuilding"'-a very Alnaschar in chambers; and, to enjoy it in its full perfection, we know no better recipe than that which we have just written. Many an evening hour do we thus while away-and, alas! not a few morning ones into the bargain. It is a sort of intellectual intoxication from which we recover with a sigh, but, thank Heaven! without a headache.

We recollect reading somewhere, in somebody's reminiscences of Percy Bysshe Shelley, of the extreme delight with which he was wont to expatiate, while yet a sojourner on the shores of the classic Isis, on the comforts of what is called, in the language of the 66 gens togata," an "oak;" that is in order that we may not be unintelligible to the unacademic public-a thick, strong outer door, universally painted black, and ungarnished either with handle or knocker, against which, when closed, the most beloved friend and the most detested dun may alike kick, thump, and anathematize in vain. Truly it was a blessing, even in those days when we were much less given to trimming the solitary lamp and wasting the midnight oil than we now are; when we dwelt among those of our own years and our own tastes men of our own souls, now widely parted from us by time and space, which obstinately refuse to be annihi

lated, even by the balloons and railroads of the nineteenth century. But now-now that we are in London, where the whole end and scope of human existence is to make every thing out of every body--where each man's hand is against his neighbour's pocket, and each man's tongue crieth "give, give," as unceasingly as the two daughters of the horse-leechnow it is, indeed, inestimable. Cheap tailors, and manufacturers of improved steel pens, with polysyllabic names, may indeed cram our letter-box with puffs and circulars, but they neither grieve our eyes nor vex our heart. Furniture-brokers, men of lounging chairs and library tables, and they of "Israel's scattered race," whose traffic lies in decayed habiliments, ascend our stairs but to tramp down again unprofited; and economical tea- dealers leave their cards in vain.

There is a thorough independence in this mode of life which we prize beyond measure ; · no gossipping neighbours to watch our out-goings and in-comings-to number our downsittings and up-risings ;-no code of domestic law save our own good will and pleasure-a most un-Medic-andPersian legislator;-no chidings for coffee grown cold, and legs of mutton done to rags. Do we chance to feel convivially disposed, and let the stars "begin to pale their ineffectual fires" before we turn our thoughts bed-ward? There is no drowsy domestic kept up to grumble at our long-protracted absence. Are we, as saith the bard of the Seasons, " falsely luxurious," and indulge in a more than usually extended snooze? There are no household arrangements to be interrupted by our somnolence. but the "blessed sun himself” to rebuke us, and he does it with such warmth, and yet with such gentleness, that we are always thoroughly ashamed of our own laziness, and register a most serious resolution to "reform it altogether." But alas! man is weak, and bed is pleasant; "a little more sleep and a little more slumber" has been the cry of other voices besides that of the hero of "the sluggard;" the very Druid, from whose animated appeal to early rising we have just quoted, was wont to let the noonday beam surprise him between the sheets.

We have none

There is a stillness, too, about us

which is most refreshing, after the turmoil and din of the crowded thoroughfares which surround us at so slight a distance. The iron tongue of a neighbouring clock, and the voice of an antiquated watchman corroborating its announcements, are the only sounds which break our evening still. ness. Here, and alas! here only, does that venerable and ill-used race of men exist in undiminished dignity-here only do they gossip-here only do they tread their peaceful rounds, till, unable any longer to resist the influ ence of the narcotic deity, they coil themselves up in the warmest corner of some secluded staircase, to dream of the days when Peel ate pap, and the new police were unimagined.

Often, when we have closed our books for the night, do we throw open our window, and, gazing around on the many cells of the great legal hive in which we are but a drone, busy ourselves in picturing to our mind's eye the various occupations of their tenants. That light on the left gleams from the chambers of an eminent lawyer, who, on the verge of the grave, and wealthy as the most grasping avarice could wish, is yet ever to be found poring over his musty parchments, with as deep and anxious an interest as though they were the indentures of his own salvation, instead of the melancholy records of some client's ruin. In yonder garret wakes a young student, without wealth, without friends, with nothing but his own ardent aspirations to support him; sacrificing youth, and health, and happiness, in the pursuit of honours which he is never destined to attain-of that wealth which, if it come at all, will come only when all the treasures of the fabling East would be but a pro

fitless burden-a splendid mockery! A merry writer has spoken but a melancholy truth when he says, " I would rather hear many a legend with a terrific-sounding name, than the true history of one old set of chambers."

Could we be mistaken? We thought we heard the chorus of a song. Ah! there is a merry party "rousing the night with a catch" in yonder corner. Gay, careless souls-choice spirits all fellows of infinite jest and excellent fancy systematical eschewers of Coke upon Littleton, whose impudence or whose interest may yet instal them in some snug sinecure, when the lonely student is at rest in his unnoticed and untimely grave. But the night-breeze comes chillingly off the river-nay, yonder bell warns us that it is already morning. We will watch no longer.

To bed, then, to rest undisturbed by the scratchings and nibblings of the crafty rat or timorous mouse-what should such things do here?—unwaked by the discordant love-tale of the amorous grimalkin, who chooses, like Philomel, the still calm hour of night to "unburthen her full soul,"-unwearying wanderer of housetops, unshrinking traveller of gutter and parapet, doomed to wail beneath the trysting chimney the absence of the fickle and perfidious tom. "To sleepperchance to dream"- lapped in Elysian visions of admiring judges and overpowered jurymen, envious leaders, enraptured juniors, and ecstatic attorneys, silk gowns, and special retainers. Alas! but in a few short hours to be recalled by the voice of Mrs Mary Popkins, to the unwelcome but irresistible conviction that we are only

ONE OF THE BRIEFLESS.

THE LIFE OF A SPECULATIVE GERMAN.

In the first volume of the Denkwürdigkeiten und Vermischte Schrif ten of Varnhagen Von Ense, published at Mannheim in 1837, is contained a memoir of the philosopher, and physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, of which we propose to give our readers an outline, in the hope that a picture of a course of life, and of habits of thought which may be new to many of them, will be neither uninteresting nor uninstructive. There are limits to the fusion of national characteristics, and the mutual understanding which civilisation tends to produce; and to see the cities of many men is no longer to learn their thoughts. In the days of Ulysses, the peculiarities of foreigners lay upon the surface, and a few days or hours enabled him to understand the easy and hospitable Phoenicians, the hungry Læstrygones, whose giant queen his messengers saw, κατὰ δ ̓ ἔφυγον αὐτὴν, and the danger o the dreamy land where

Round about the keel, with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed, melancholy Lotus-eaters

came.

Like a wise man, he took strangers as he found them; and, in truth, there was no difference between himself and those whom he met with, so wide or so puzzling as the gulf which separates the mind of the bookish German thinker from that of the plain Englishman. In this country we are wont to live and exert ourselves in various ways, to infer consequences from certain admitted premises, and even, if such is our fate, to write in prose or verse; but it must be confessed, that we do these things without comprehending them in a systematic classification according to the powers on which they depend, or looking into ourselves for the forms under which we act and think. Of the few who may at present study philosophy in England, we do not speak; but it is certain, that, in educated society and in general literature, no traces are to be found of the vast revolution in philosophy, which, from the time of Kant, has penetrated the whole framework of life and language in Germany. Philosophy has indeed there created

a language of its own--a vast magazine of formal terms, under which every particular may be included; so that all may write if they cannot think scientifically, or with a show of science. And genuine thought is, as might naturally be expected, far more common than with us. Knowledge is, to a German scholar, the great object of life; cogitat, ergo est, if, indeed, existence may, in all cases, be predicated of him; for he has a self-reproducing consciousness, first of his being, then of his consciousness of being, again of his cognizance of this consciousness, and so on for ever; perhaps it would be safer to say simply cogitat; while our beloved countryman, who never doubts that he is, or speculates upon who he is that doubts not, may be contented to abandon the premise, and take up the simple inference est. Which is better, the form without matter, or the matter without form, the active blind, or the far-sighted cripple, we are not called upon to judge, though we might suggest, with Æsop, the advantage of a combination of faculties and reciprocal counteraction of defects at present, we proceed without further preface to the biography of a man, who seems to have lived only to speculate, and to practise the results of speculation.

The memoir before us is an autobiography with a supplement, preface, and dedication to Hegel, by Varnhagen Von Ense, who anticipates a preliminary objection, which probably few of our readers would think of making. After remarking that the philosophy of Kant, in Erhard's days the brightest light existing, has now [Varnhagen is writing about the year 1824] been altogether extinguished in science, as well as in its influence on life, he proceeds thus,

"It will be suspicious to call back the attention of an advanced generation of high claims and rich endowments to an earlier step of knowledge, of which the majority is generally little willing to retain the remembrance or recognise the value, unless assistance is sought through the medium of a justifying criticism." The philosophy of Kant, then, was obsolete fifteen years ago; while with us, at the

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