TO MY HONOURED KINSMAN, JOHN DRYDEN, OF CHESTERTON, IN THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON, ESQ. [John Dryden, born in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, 1631; died in London, 1st May, 1700. His first poem of any importance was written on the occasion of Cromwell's death, and appeared in 1658. He wrote a number of plays, The Wild Gallant being the first. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy contained the first acknowledgment, after the Restoration, of Shakspeare's supremacy. He was sometime laureate, but was dispossessed of that office at the Revolution, and Shadwell, whom he had bitterly satirized, was appointed in his stead. He wrote a great deal of prose and verse, original and translated. Of his works the most widely known in modern times are Absalom and Achitophel, a political and controversial poem, first published in 1681; The Hind and the Panther, a controversial poem in defence of the Romish Church, 1687; and Alexander's Feast, which is regarded as one of the grandest compositions in lyric poetry.] How bless'd is he, who leads a country life, Promoting concord, and composing strife, Lord of yourself, uncumber'd with a wife; He to God's image, she to his was made: So, farther from the fount, the stream at random stray'd. How could he stand, when put to double pain, Not that my verse would blemish all the fair; No porter guards the passage of your door; So may your stores, and fruitful fields increase; With crowds attended of your ancient race, Thus princes ease their cares; but happier he, So lived our sires, ere doctors learn'd to kill, Fate fastens first, and vindicates the prey. What help from art's endeavours can we have! But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples every grave; And no more mercy to mankind will use Than when he robb'd and murder'd Maro's muse. Wouldst thou be soon despatch'd, and perish whole! Trust Maurus with thy life, and M-lb-rn with thy soul. By chase our long-lived fathers earn'd their food; Toil strung the nerves, and purified the blood; But we, their sons, a pamper'd race of men, Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten. Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught. The wise, for cure, on exercise depend; The tree of knowledge, once in Eden placed, Draws physic from the fields, in draughts of vital air. You hoard not health, for your own private use; But on the public spend the rich produce. When, often urged, unwilling to be great, Your country calls you from your loved retreat, And sends to senates, charged with common care, Which none more shuns; and none can better bear. Where could they find another form'd so fit, To poise, with solid sense, a spritely wit! Were these both wanting, (as they both abound) Where could so firm integrity be found? Well-born, and wealthy; wanting no support, Nor grudging give, what public needs require. Good senators, (and such as you,) so give, Observe the war, in every annual course; What has been done, was done with British force. Namur subdued, is England's palm alone; The rest besieged; but we constrain'd the town: Even victors are by victories undone; peace. A patriot, both the king and country serves; Of each, our laws the certain limit show, Some overpoise of sway, by turns they share; Patriots, in peace, assert the people's right; O true descendant of a patriot line, 'Tis so far good as it resembles thee: No porter guards the passage of your To admit the wealthy, and exclude th For God, who gave the riches, gave the To sanctify the whole, by giving part Heaven, who foresaw the will, the me. OF CHESTERTON, IN THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON, ESQ. And to the second son, a blessing bro The first-begotten had his father's sha But you, like Jacob, are Rebecca's heir So may your stores, and fruitful fi And ever be you blessed, who live to As Ceres sow'd, where'er her chariot As Heaven in deserts rain'd the bre So free to many, to relations most, You feed with manna your own Ian With crowds attended of your an You seek the champaign sports, or With well-breathed beagles you su Even then, industrious of the com And often have you brought the w To suffer for the firstlings of the Chased even amid the folds; and Like felons, where they did the This fiery game, your active yout Not yet by years extinguish'd, th You season still with sports your For age but tastes of pleasures, The hare, in pastures or in plain Emblem of human life, who r And, after all his wandering w His circle fills, and ends where Just as the setting meets the ri Thus princes ease their cares Who seeks not pleasure thron Than such as once on slippery And chasing sigh to think th So lived our sires, ere doct And multiplied with theirs, The first physicians by deba Excess began, and sloth su Pity the generous kind their To search forbidden truths; To which, if human science The doom of death, pronou In vain the Leech would in Fate fastens first, and vind What help from art's end Gibbons but guesses, nor l But Maurus sweeps whole ally such as npanionship ne dim idea prescient of predict with of the humhese terrible t some comns upon our t have been, urning blesspremise that, one sect of ly whatsoever s not a single es its particuDortion of the siderable porvetous are we so dissatisfied es of life, and Is all, that in noods we revel utterable, and om our little and condole credulous conh of our comrld-wide, spiriinnumerable r with detailed e never-ending our little platr the edge peer the dark, outer fying lenses of herein, or seem orms of physical that we should made us in the ble sadness of it general though e satisfaction. ld stand together r's tail off, it was e old philosophers eographically, and ions of perfect hapnow-a-days for such pulling down our reater ones: we are efore a golden image, the plain of Babylon: lgar and ignoble phipposing we could give for the considera THE PHILOSOPHY OF SORROW. [D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, of Cumberland parentage and connections, born April, 1829, on the river Derwent in Tasmania; graduated at Cambridge, 1852, elected in the same year to a classical mastership in the Edinburgh Academy, and nominated in 1864 to the professorship of Greek in the Galway College of the Queen's University, Ireland. He has successfully employed his pen in prose and verse, and his writings present us with profound thought in simple and attrac tive language. He is the author of Nursery Nonsense, or Rhymes without Reason; Fun and Earnest, or Rhymes with Reason; ancient Leaves, or Renderings of Greek and Latin Authors in English Verse: Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster—a delightful book, full of suggestive thought; Sales Attici, or the Wit and Wisdom of Athenian Drama; Wayside Thoughts, A Collection of Lectures; and Scala Nova, or a Ladder to Latin. He has also contributed to Macmillan's Magazine; and for the interesting series of miscellaneous sketches published by Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh, under the title of Odds and Ends, he wrote the Wayside Thoughts of an Asophophilosopher, from which we take the following essayette.] For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, Listen! how the rain is pattering against the window-panes! and how the rain drives down the smoke!-and this is spring weather; the season belauded by our old poets, in phrases borrowed from southern singers and suited only to southern climes. I wish we had one of the old conventional fellows here; with permission to treat him as we thought fit. It would be a pleasure to stick him in the water-butt, and watch him from behind the window-blinds. But, after all, this weather is better than what an east wind brings; the wind as cold and cutting as ill-natured wit; the wind that blows with such a penetrative cheerlessness, that, while your sunny-side is baking, your shady side is down at zero. You are, beneath its influence, a walking allegory of French toast: you have your nose equatorially at home, and your nadir in a Siberian exile. So it is: no blessings come unmixed: from the cup of enjoyment we never drink pleasure neat. The sweet, delicious wind that blows from the warm west, too often deluges us and our new hats with rain; and, if the sun shine brightly overhead, it is too often through the icy windmedium, that comes surcharged with rheumatism and bad temper from the uncomfortable east. But what does it matter to be kept indoors? Could we walk abroad, should we in an afternoon's ramble cast eyes upon a single happy face? Let us take a long retrospect of our own lives, and try to recall a week of uninterrupted happiness. If he is to be pitied that has no such green oasis to look back upon, how much more pitiable the wretch that looks back upon the pleasant spot and knows it may never be revisited! Let the rain fall. 'Tis a good thing to be kept indoors. Let us be idle for a day, and hold aloof from the busy, restless world. Let us strip off our work-a-day clothes, and bare us to the skin, and wallow in luxurious laziness. Let the rain fall. We are thrown upon an unquiet age of competitive rivalry: we keep the bow eternally on the stretch: we are in a continuous state of training: we have ceased to perspire, from the lack of superfluous flesh and comfortable fat. We are eliminating all lymphatic temperaments from out the population: ere long there will not be a man among us to weigh fifteen stone. Plethora and apoplexy are waxing rare: not a bad thing of itself: but in their stead have come heart-disease and a spectral troop of shadowy nervous maladies. We begin life as our fathers ended it. We start our house-keeping with the luxuries that to them were the well-won rewards of half a century's unambitious toil, We are uncontentable hangangerels. We are uneasy dogs, for ever on the wrong side of the door. But wherefore all this discontent, and hurry, and pressing forward? Were it not a pleasure to pause awhile; to stand at case; to lie upon our oars, and hear the rippling of the water; to spin, like a top, in a dizzy, quasi-motionless, sound sleep? were it not sweet to leave behind us the busy factory, the humming town, the many-languaged harbour; and to loll at ease upon one's solitary sofa; or, better still, on the green grass of beautiful Dalmeny; and to listen with ear and soul to listen? And to what? Why, to the birds, or to anything. Heaven knows what music we should hear! The school-boy longs for the holidays; the maiden for her bridal morn; the student for his fellowship; the father for the manhood of his boys. To reach a distant bourn, we are ever ready to leap the interval; forgetting that the interval may be a momentous fraction in our little life-total. It may be, indeed, that all intervals of life are not equally valuable. What infinitesimal price should we set upon a year of hobbydyhoyhood? What imagination could appraise an hour spent rapturously in speaking and listening to love-nonsense? It is also possible that the speed as well as |