than, throwing down my money and seizing offence that was not capital: however, as soon my hat, I hastily sought the open air. as the jury had brought in their verdict, 'Oh I was once a good deal amused with hearing | Rhadamanthus seized hold of the black cap, the chit-chat of two young gentlemen of the and was pulling it over his terrific brows, when long robe. You must know that I had a sort the officer of the court interfered, 'My lord! of cousin seven times removed, who used to my lord! the offence isn't a capital one.' reside in a court in the Middle Temple. Poor yes! very true,' said his lordship, 'but-butfellow! he could play the violin beautifully; you know, it's a good thing to terrify the but as for Coke and Selden, and such people prisoner a little.' Very ingenious that of his -he troubled them not. Well, sir, I occa- lordship. But why don't you laugh, Styles?" sionally visited my young relation, and by his kind offices with the very precise lady who holds the key of the Temple gardens, I was admitted whenever I chose to walk in that green retreat. I had seated myself, one warm summer's evening, on one of the benches at the back of the western alcove, when two learned young friends meeting at the entrance and ad- | journing into the arbour, I had the good fortune to be an auditor of the following dialogue. "What, Styles, my good fellow! Why, I didn't know you were back from sessions. How did you get on?"-"Infernally, infernally! Only got four soup-tickets at , and a single prosecution at Do you know of a small set of sky-parlours to let, for, by heavens, I shall be ruined!"-"What, you are determined then to rise in your profession! ha, ha, not so bad!"—"Why, you see, my dear Vidian, I don't make quite enough to pay Danby for dressing my wig, which is rather distressing. But come let's sit down." (Here the learned gentlemen seated themselves.)—“By-the-by, Styles, have you heard of Gillebrand's nonsuit? -all owing to bad spelling. He put an s too much in the plaintiff's name, which has cost that unfortunate gentleman about one hundred and twenty pounds. Good fun that -Gillebrand argued, that it was idem sonans, but the judge would not believe him "And for ever must he dwell In the spirit of that spell. "In fact, my dear Vidian, I am not altogether in a laughing mood. There is a cursed fellow of a tailor in New Bond Street, who threatens to maintain assumpsit against me for goods sold and delivered-then the stablekeeper in Carey Street presented me the other day with a Declaration, in which I find that I am charged with the hire of fifty horses, fifty mares, fifty stanhopes, fifty tilburys, and fifty dennets: and to crown all, a well-dressed man who resides in Chancery Lane has got a present for me, which you and I know by the name of a Special Original. Oh what a special fool was I to give those bills to that rascal Samuels! Heigh oh! all my perambulations are now confined to this lawyer's paradise. I have instructed the angel at the gate stoutly to deny admittance to all suspicious strangers, which she promises me.”—“I am really sorry, Styles, that I can't accommodate you with a hundred or two, or any fractional part thereof; for though my grandfather died the beginning of the year, yet I plead riens par descente. Walter, you know, is heir in tail, secundum formam doni, being filius primogenitus; and to tell you the truth, I am somewhat in the shallows myself. I confess I have of late been studying the law of Debtor and Creditor, which appears to me to require amendment exceedingly. Such have been my professional studies. In my hours of relaxation I have been conjugating the verb to dun-no, the passive, to be dunned But come, cheer up, my good fellow, and show-I am dunned, I was dunned, I shall be that you have some of the blood of the Styles '2 in your veins. I dare say if you can't get upon the bench, you may get into it-Not so bad, eh? Oh, have you heard the new anecdote of Mr. Justice Spark, which is flying about the Temple? I told it myself to nine men this morning. You must know that when the learned judge was on his last circuit, an unfortunate dog was tried before him for some 1 Upon inquiry, I find that soup tickets are vocabula artis, signifying briefs given indiscriminately by the town-clerks, &c. at sessions. 2 The genealogical tree of this noble family may be seen fully set out in the second volume of Blackstone's Commentaries. dunned-I am about to be dunned. But see, they have opened the gates to the public-good number to-night-that's a gentleman like-looking fellow that's coming towards us-who is he?" "Good God! don't you know? Call a boat and help me into it-I must get into Surrey-" Here the two friends, brushing hastily past me, called a boat, and as the tide was high, they easily got into it: the stranger all the while approaching with rapid strides Poor Styles sat dejected in the boat; but Vidian politely bowed, and "hoped he should be better acquainted with the gentleman." There is a peculiar richness and high flavour in the confidential communications of a couple of merchants. "Cottons look lively.' But ashes are very black."-"Pray do you hold much rum?"-"Dreadful storm last nightPoor Jones! he underwrote £7000 last weekI met him this morning looking very ill-said he couldn't sleep last night for the wind. By the way, have you heard that K--has been flying kites lately?"-"Yes, I fear he will be illustrated by the King's Printer, poor K——!” Poetry There is no small-talk more necessary in the present age than the Literary, which is essentially requisite at all routs, conversaziones, balls, dances, tea-drinkings, and petit soupers. I believe there is not the difficulty in this branch of the art which is generally thought to exist. There is a certain set of names and phrases which may be eternally varied, and from which the most elegant literary conversation may be framed. For the benefit of my readers, I shall present them with a catalogue of the materials, which I once made for my own use. -novels-heart-imagination-distinctionseverer sciences-ancients-chivalry-Waverley-beauty-truth-nature-sublimity simplicity-attractive-brilliant-elegantLord Byron-power-pathos-passion-sentiment-sensibility-sweetness-Thyrza-Haidee-Thyrza!— enchanting - lovely - Don Juan-dark-depraved-perversion-abuselike the splendours of the infernal regionspoetical yourself!-a sonnet-a stanza-scribble versee-Richardson--Miss Austin-Captain Wentworth-Clarissa-persuasion-Eliza Rivers-hateful young clergyman-quite differ with you-Isabella-heart-weep-tearsDon Carlos-German-Goethe-languagesItaly-scenes of antiquity-associationsCicero "Sunny Florence' - Rossini - Di tanti palpiti-ah!-Scotch airs-Burns-Allan Cunningham-magazines- New Monthly excellent-wit-politeness-fancy-depth superior Quarterly Edinburgh - Madame de Stael-arm-beauty-eyes. Such are the subjects upon which I usually attempt to ring the changes, when any fair nymph is unfortunate enough to be introduced to me at a ball; and here let me mention one very great advantage at such places. According to the modern fashion, you are compelled to change your partner every quadrille, so that you may repeat what you have already said to the former lady, observing whether she is sufficiently distant not to hear you. At a dinnerparty you can seldom repeat yourself thus. But as, in case I proceed, there may be considerable danger of my playing the same trick with the reader, I shall make a timely retreat, and bid him farewell!-New Monthly Mag. CRUISING.1 What are the days but islands, That flows about them all? There, when the moon is risen, The peaceful waters glisten; But yonder plashing-listen! It is the souls that fall. The little boats are skimming, Apart from fleet and shore. There not an oar is dippingWith just a cable's slipping Glides out the phantom shipping That wanders evermore. Every day's an island, That looks upon the sea. How many are the islands, The roving vessels find? As each is left behind. The sailors long to tarry- They touch and go ashore. With songs of wistful pleading They follow fate unheeding, And with the tide's receding Are drifting as before. But sometime, in the sailing, Of land upon the lee; CARL SPENCER. 1 From Harper's (New York) Magazine. A SONG IN GOLD. Some men have the spirit of music in their brains. If they sit still and think, their thoughts seem to dissolve into soundless music. | Such men become great composers. But they are few. You could almost count them upon your fingers and thumbs. Many years ago there was a youth named, 1 Franz, who lived with his master, a goldsmith, in a little village which nestled at the foot of a great hill, as if for protection. Beyond the village lay pleasant meadows, through which the brooks glided like singing serpents. Farther on were the blue hills, where none but charcoal-burners and the birds lived. They were high, wooded hills, and over them were but few roads. These were rough and rutty; the charcoal-burners had made them for their waggons. Few people cared to visit the hills, for the ascent was not of the easiest, and besides, what was there to tempt the curious? The world is busy and time is short. So few people ever went up into the hills, save now and then some one who had business to transact with the charcoal-burners. Those who lived in the village or in the farm-houses which stood in the pleasant meadow-lands knew and cared little what the blue hills might hide in their forest crowns. his spectacles at the apprentice, and wonder from what recess in his brain he spun out his golden fancies. Old Karl used to enjoy asking himself such questions, although it was very certain he could never answer them; for he was a thoughtful man, fond of discussing curious problems like this, and was for ever trying to get at the kernel and reason of things. Upstairs, over his shop, he had a very low but wide room, with its back windows buried in the leaves of some fragrant trees which his own hand had planted, and its front windows looking out across the meadows and to the blue hills beyond. In that room he had more books than I should care to enumerate. There were great worm-eaten folios which one could not well hold on his knees, and there were curious old volumes, bound in parchment, and printed in the bastard Latin of the middle ages, and fat little volumes that you might easily carry in your pocket. They lay in unregenerate confusion on the table, the chairs, and the floor. Sometimes old Karl would sit there all night vexing his brain over the recondite things of which these volumes treated. Strange volumes some of them were; for he had old Abbot Trithemius, and Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. He had Delrio, too, the grim demonologist, and Paracelsus, and Cardanus and Agrippa. There, too, were old Weckerus with his Book of Secrets, and Reuchlin the cabalist, and many other writers of strange things, in all of whom old Karl delighted, for he thought that by their aid he might at last come to the pith and kernel of things. If you wanted to read of wonders you should have climbed up into old Karl's bookYou could have read yourself blind and crazy with them there. room. Now the work that came from the goldsmith's shop was known far and wide, not only in the great city which lay scarcely a score of miles from the village, but throughout the length and breadth of the land. It commanded the best of prices, and was, you might say, standard. Everybody knew that the old goldsmith was as conscientious as his apprentice was wonderful, so that the little village workshop came into great repute, and the demand for its productions far exceeded the supply. Now old Karl, the goldsmith, kept his little shop in the village, and had no other help than Franz, who was a strong, handsome youth, full of vigour and life, and gifted with an industry that was next to tireless. Every morning he was up with the birds, and you could see him at his bench, even before the market waggons came into the streets from the surrounding country, and hear him singing too; for he always sang over his work, and perhaps that was one reason why he was always pleasant-faced and bright-eyed, for singing goes with the blithe heart and healthful soul. Besides this, Franz was a perfect gem of a goldsmith. The line of beauty must have existed somewhere in the convolutions of his brain. He fashioned the most delicate, filmy webs of gold, and twisted them into a thousand beautiful devices, and snarled them about ex- One bright morning, just as the sun shot its quisite little vases of glass that looked as if slanting rays through the early mists, Franz they were made of congealed light. In fact, sat at his bench singing a merry carol and he created such marvels of design and artistic working away at a fruit-piece which had been beauty that one might have said they were promised for a wedding-gift. He had risen notations of music in gold-music posed and that morning even before the sun, even before fixed in some blessed paralysis. Old Karl used the crows came from the forest-crown of the often to pause in his own work to look over, blue hills and descended into the meadows for food, for the piece had been guaranteed for a certain hour, and many finishing touches had yet to be given. He was plying his burnisher merrily enough when the door of the shop opened and a stranger entered. "Greeting to you, Master Goldsmith," cried the newcomer. "One might say that you get to work thus early that you may fashion the sunshine into your piece. A broad bar of it lies now across your bench. May you grow rich, gold-worker, for you are an early and sturdy worker." "Easier wished than realized," laughed Franz. "Riches don't come for the wishing, especially to apprentices. You had better go talk to Master Karl if the profits of my labour is the only subject that you have in mind. And as for other subjects, I can only say my time is precious. So if I can serve you I will listen. If not" "You want to be left alone. Well, I can talk just as well while you work." Back and forth flew the burnisher, and Franz bent over his bench again. He took the stranger for an idler, and did not care to waste further time on him. But the visitor did not allow himself to be thus rebuffed. "As for Master Karl," he said, "I know him to be a patient, worthy man and an excellent goldsmith, but he cannot do the work which I require. Fifty years ago the case might have been different. I require now a young heart and lisson fingers. In short, I require you. If you serve me well, if you accomplish my work, I will pay you handsomely. I will cover your hand three deep with gold pieces; and, more, I guarantee that Master Karl shall allow you to retain them as the legitimate fruits of a genius which is assuredly not in its apprenticeship. What say you, Franz?" "So much gold? Mine?" Franz dropped his burnisher, and the lovely fruit-piece almost tumbled to the floor. "Yours!" replied the stranger, with gravity. "And what I say I mean. Listen, Franz. I live in Germany, and there I secured one of the best of your works. When I return I must take with me the newest and the best-something more wonderful than anything you have heretofore made." "And should I fail" "Not the sight of a coin shall you get, and I am not quite sure that I shall not take you by the ears for trifling with me." "But why should I fail? Is it anything so very difficult of execution? You may have seen my Lorelay candelabrum." The visitor nodded and smiled. "It almost made the master's fortune for him. Is it anything more difficult than that?" should I pay you a thousand "Yes. That was the singer. I wish the song. Write me a song in gold, Franz, and receive a thousand pieces for your genius." "Give me your idea." "Pooh!" cried the stranger. "I have none. If I had, why pieces of gold? Look to the resources of your genius for it. You have made the Lorelay a singer in gold. I want you now to make me a song in gold. I want no vulgar design, no commonplace trick of the goldsmith's art. Give me music in gold. I have no clearer understanding of my own idea than this. I cannot express it otherwise. Now, will you execute the work for me? Yes, or no, for I must be gone. Like yourself, I have no time to spare. Is it yes?" Determination stood Franz instead of inspi ration. "I will assume the task!" he answered, boldly. "In a year from to-day," said the stranger, "bring the work to me, and may Heaven and your fortunate star assist you in the undertaking!" He threw his card on the bench, waved his hand, and left the shop abruptly. The card bore no less a name than that of No matter whom. Who can carve for me in gold a singing thought? Who can fashion therein a succession of beautiful sounds? A visible presentment of melody? The façade of the cathedral of Rheims is, they say, frozen music; but it does not suggest a song. That was a happier thought of his who called it a poem in stone. But it is not such frozen music, or music thus molten into gold, that I demand. I ask something more. A person deprived of hearing will watch the lips of a speaker and from their motion understand what is spoken; nay, will, when a word is withheld, apprehend from the mere formation and lines of the lips what that word would have been had it been uttered. So you can imagine a carven face whose lips should, by their position, suggest a word, or even a phrase, just as the face in the wondrous Laocoon suggests an expression of unutterable woe. Just so must this work in gold suggest the song, so that one might look upon it and have the music bubble from his lips. You see, therefore, how almost hopeless was the task which Franz had imposed upon him. When old Karl heard of the undertaking he went nearly insane. He buried himself among 'his books and read through I know not how many thousand pages of horrible Latin and Greek stuff, with the vague hope that, while fumbling amidst all this rubbish, he might by good fortune come upon some happy inspiration, or some approximation of the idea for which both were now so sedulously seeking. Alas! the books availed him not. The oracles were dumb, and would not be propitiated. The longer he read, the duller grew his brain, and the more hopeless became his quest; until at length, in sheer desperation, he commanded Franz never again to revert to the subject in his hearing, and thenceforth discharged it from his mind. Franz, meanwhile, acted more wisely, but with no better success. He cudgelled his brain night and day, drew design after design in an aimless, unintelligent way, and even fell to dreaming over the matter at night. But all in vain. Each fresh idea was found, upon examination, to embody nothing of value, and after months of patient toiling in the generation of successive delusions, each as worthless as its predecessor, Franz was nearly ready to exclaim that he had undertaken a fool's task which could by no possibility result otherwise than in shamefaced failure. Impressed with such an idea he ceased to give the subject other than desultory thoughts, and applied himself once more to the routine of ordinary business. There are fearful stories told of men who have been buried in trances, and to such graves their friends, warned by some horrible inspiration, have returned again and again, with bated breaths and finger on lip, to see if the dead have moved in their coffins. Franz had buried his idea, to be sure, yet had a vague presentiment, compounded half of hope, half of desire, that its inhumation had been premature. And so he returned to it again and again, and as frequently turned his back upon it, but never without an uneasy sense that some little vitality was still remaining. One evening he grew so nervous from mentally rehearsing his ill fortunes that, with a hope of diverting his mind, he went up into the book-room, where old Karl was, as usual, buried to the ears in one of his ponderous volumes. "Well, master," said Franz, "your books don't help one much when he is in search of practical ideas, do they?" "If you mean by that such fool's-errand ideas as those of your patron with the thousand pieces of gold-they don't? The best book to look for such things in is this," retorted the master, rather sharply; for he always grew cross-grained and red in the face when he thought of the time that he had wasted in the matter. And so saying, he tossed a little book across to Franz. That's a volume of pious legends and monkish miracles," he said, grimly. "If a miracle's what you want, you'll find plenty of them there." And he dropped his face so suddenly that it almost seemed as if he had split open the great volume on his knees with his nose, and buried his head to the helve in it. "That's all that I'll get out of you to-night," grumbled Franz, as he turned over the pages of the little miracle-book, in a listless, discontented way. He thought that he might as well be doing that as moping down-stairs in the shop, and thinking over his defeats. At length here a word and there a word attracted his attention, until, without knowing it, he had quite lost himself in THE LEGEND OF ABBOT ERRO. Old Abbot Erro, of Armentaria, sat with his face bowed above the Sacred Book. It was far into the night. Again and again be had turned the hour-glass, again and again had addressed himself to his studies. He had sat from the time when the sun sank like a blazing world behind the purple hills; and now the thin, tremulous moon hung like a sickle among the ungarnered fields, wherein the stars lay sown like burning seeds. Constellation after constellation had swung up upon Polaris, the glittering pivot of the heavens, and already had Ursa Major swam half his circuit in the circle of perpetual apparition. Still, Abbot Erro bent painfully above the pages of the Sacred Book, with bitten lip, his deep, solemn eyes fixed upon the mysterious lines which had caused him so much doubting solicitude: "A thousand years in Thy sight are but se yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." The divine soul within the good man accepted the hidden truth, while his mind, trained in the sophistries and casuistries of the schools, questioned, if it did not deny. He could not understand how, even to Omnipotence, the slow, orderly advance of ten centuries, of three and thirty generations of human life, could be merged into moments. Finite reason rebelled against the infinite thought; and, siek at soul. the good abbot sighed, and, closing the volume fastened its brazen clasps. But the doobt haunted him. He could not sleep, he could not rest. When the sun arose Abbot Erro, still pa dering upon the mystic words, passed out from the gardens of the monastery. The fresh |