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then thrown into the back-ground-or a jail, by the fickleness of taste and some new favourite; to be full of enthusiasm and extravagance in youth, of chagrin and disappointment in after-life; to be jostled by the rabble because you do not ride in your coach, or avoided by those who know your worth and shrink from it as a claim on their respect or their purse; to be a burden to your relations, or unable to do any thing for them; to be ashamed to venture into crowds; to have cold comfort at home; to lose by degrees your confidence and any talent you might possess; to grow crabbed, morose, and querulous, dissatisfied with every one, but most so with yourself; and plagued out of your life, to look about for a place to die in, and quit the world without any one's asking after your will. The wiseacres will possibly, however, crowd round your coffin, and raise a monument at a considerable expense, and after a lapse of time, to commemorate your genius and your misfortunes!

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The only reason why I am disposed to envy the professions of the church or army is, that men can afford to be poor in them without being subjected to insult. A girl with a handsome fortune in a country town may marry a poor lieutenant without degrading herAn officer is always a gentleman; a clergyman is something Echard's book On the Contempt of the Clergy is unfounded. It is surely sufficient for any set of individuals, raised above actual want, that their characters are not merely respectable, but sacred. Poverty, when it is voluntary, is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect. What are the begging friars? Have they not put their base feet upon the necks of princes? Money as a luxury is valuable only as a passport to respect. It is one instrument of power. Where there are other admitted and ostensible claims to this, it be comes superfluous, and the neglect of it is even admired and looked up to as a mark of superiority over it. Even a strolling beggar is a popular character, who makes an open profession of his craft and calling, and who is neither worth a doit nor in want of one. The Scots are proverbially poor and proud: we know they can remedy their poverty when they set about it. No one is sorry for them. The French emigrants were formerly peculiarly situated in England. The priests were obnoxious to the common people on account of their religion; both they and the nobles, for their politics. Their poverty and dirt subjected them to many rebuffs; but their privations being voluntarily incurred, and also borne with the characteristic patience and good-humour of the nation, screened them from contempt. I little thought, when I used to meet them walking out in the summer evenings at Somers' Town, in their long great-coats, their beards covered with snuff, and their eyes gleaming with mingled hope and regret in the rays of the setting sun, and

regarded them with pity bordering on respect, as the last filmy vestige of the ancient regime, as shadows of loyalty and superstition still flitting about the earth and shortly to disappear from it for ever, that they would one day return over the bleeding corpse of their country, and sit like harpies, a polluted triumph, over the tomb of human liberty! To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is perhaps to some temperaments a consummation devoutly to be wished. There is all the subdued splendour of external rank, the pride of self-opinion, irritated and goaded on by petty privations and vulgar obloquy to a degree of morbid acuteness. Private and public annoyances must perpetually remind him of what he is, of what his ancestors were (a circumstance which might otherwise be forgotten); must narrow the circle of conscious dignity more and more, and the sense of personal worth and pretension must be exalted by habit and contrast into a refined abstraction-" pure in the last recesses of the mind "-unmixed with, or unalloyed by "baser matter!"-It was an hypothesis of the late Mr Thomas Wedgewood, that there is a principle of compensation in the human mind which equalizes all situations, and by which the absence of any thing only gives us a more intense and intimate perception of the reality; that insult adds to pride, that pain looks forwards to ease with delight, that hunger already enjoys the unsavoury morsel that is to save it from perishing; that want is surrounded with imaginary riches, like the poor poet in Hogarth, who has a map of the mines of Peru hanging on his garret walls; in short, that "we can hold a fire in our hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus "—but this hypothesis, though ingenious and to a certain point true, is to be admitted only in a limited and qualified sense.

There are two classes of people that I have observed who are not so distinct as might be imagined-those who cannot keep their own money in their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other people's. The first are always in want of money, though they do not know what they do with it. They muddle it away, without method or object, and without having any thing to show for it. They have not, for instance, a fine house, but they hire two houses at a time; they have not a hot-house in their garden, but a shrubbery within doors; they do not gamble, but they purchase a library, and dispose of it when they move house. A princely benefactor provides them with lodgings, where, for a time, you are sure to find them at home: and they furnish them in a handsome style for those who are to come after them. With all this sieve-like economy, they can only afford a leg of mutton and a bottle of wine, and are glad to get a lift in a common stage; whereas with a little management and the same disbursements, they might entertain a round of company

and drive a smart tilbury. But they set no value upon money, and throw it away on any object or in any manner that first presents itself, merely to have it off their hands, so that you wonder what has become of it. The second class above spoken of not only make away with what belongs to themselves, but you cannot keep anything you have from their rapacious grasp. If you refuse to lend them what you want, they insist that you must; if you let them have any thing to take charge of for a time (a print or a bust) they swear that you have given it them, and that they have too great a regard for the donor ever to part with it. You express surprise at their having run so largely in debt; but where is the singularity while others continue to lend? And how is this to be helped, when the manner of these sturdy beggars amounts to dragooning you out of your money, and they will not go away without your purse, any more than if they came with a pistol in their hand? If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power, for you necessarily feel some towards him; and since he will take no denial, you must comply with his peremptory demands, or send for a constable, which out of respect for his character you will not do. These persons are also poor-light come, light go-and the bubble bursts at last. Yet if they had employed the same time and pains in any laudable art or study that they have in raising a surreptitious livelihood, they would have been respectable, if not rich. It is their facility in borrowing money that has ruined them. No one will set heartily to work, who has the face to enter a strange house, ask the master of it for a considerable loan, on some plausible and pompous pretext, and walk off with it in his pocket. You might as well suspect a highwayman of addicting himself to hard study in the intervals of his profession.

There is only one other class of persons I can think of, in connexion with the subject of this essay-those who are always in want of money from the want of spirit to make use of it. Such persons are perhaps more to be pitied than all the rest. They live in want, in the midst of plenty-dare not touch what belongs to them, are afraid to say that their soul is their own, have their wealth locked up from them by fear and meanness as effectually as by bolts and bars, scarcely allow themselves a coat to their backs or a morsel to eat, are in dread of coming to the parish all their lives, and are not sorry, when they die, to think that they shall no longer be an expense to themselves according to the old epigram:

"Here lies Father Clarges,

Who died to save charges!"

WM. HAZLITT.

WYOMING.

BY AN AMERICAN POET.

"Dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St Preux, mais ne les y cherchez pas."

THOU Com'st, in beauty, on my gaze at last,
"On Susquehannah's side, fair Wyoming!"
Image of many a dream, in hours long past,
When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring

Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young eyes,

As by the poet borne, on unseen wing,

I breathed, in fancy, 'neath thy cloudless skies,
The Summer's air, and heard her echoed harmonies.

I then but dreamed :-thou art before me now,

In life, a vision of the brain no more.

I've stood upon the wooded mountain's brow,
That beetles high thy lovely valley o'er :

And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore,
Within a bower of sycamores am laid;

And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore

The fragrance of wild flowers through sun and shade,
Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head.

power

Nature hath made thee lovelier than the
Even of Campbell's pen hath pictured: he
Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour
Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery

With more of truth, and made each rock and tree
Known like old friends and greeted from afar :

And there are tales of sad reality,

In the dark legends of thy border war,

With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude's are.

But where are they, the beings of the mind,

The bard's creations, moulded not of clay,

Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned

Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave-where are they?

We need not ask. The people of to-day

Appear good, honest, quiet men enough,

And hospitable too-for ready pay,

With manners, like their roads, a little rough,

And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.

Judge Hallenbach, who keeps the toll-bridge gate,

And the town records, is the Albert now

Of Wyoming; like him, in church and state,

Her Doric column; and upon his brow

WYOMING.

The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow,
Look patriarchal, Waldegrave 'twere in vain
To point out here, unless in yon scare-crow
That stands full-uniformed upon the plain,

To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain.

For he would look particularly droll

In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume,"
And be the wonder of each Christian soul,

As of the birds that scare-crow and his broom.
But Gertrude, in her loveliness and bloom,
Hath many a model here; for woman's eye,
In court or cottage, wheresoe'er her home,
Hath a heart-spell too holy and too high
To be o'er-praised even by her worshipper-Poesy.

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There's one in the next field-of sweet sixteen-
Singing and summoning thoughts of beauty born
In heaven with her jacket of light green,
"Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,'
Without a shoe or stocking-hoeing corn.
Whether, like Gertrude, she oft wauders there,
With Shakspeare's volume in her bosom borne,
I think is doubtful. Of the poet-player

The maiden knows no more than Cobbett or Voltaire.

There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old,
Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped

Upon their day of massacre. She told

Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept,

Whereon her father and five brothers slept

Shroudless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave,
When all the land a funeral mourning kept.
And there, wild laurels, planted on the grave

By Nature's hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave.

And on the margin of yon orchard hill

Are marks where time-worn battlements have been;
And in the tall grass traces linger still

Of "arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin."

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Five hundred of her brave that valley green Trode on the morn in soldier-spirit gay: But twenty lived to tell the noon-day sceneAnd where are now the twenty? Passed away. Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle day? F. G. HALLECK,

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