"At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound, &c." perhaps the two finest descriptions of the effect of music in our own, or any other language.

The address of Comus to the lady affords in itself a clear proof, that Milton did not intend that the enchanter should work the lady to his will by arguments which would have prevailed with most of her sex. He did not need to be informed of the easiest way to a woman's heart, when Satan was to tempt Eve by flattery and " glozing" words. Comus uses false reasoning, artfully coloured to look like truth. There is no attempt to move the passions of his victim; the poet's object being clearly to operate by the nobler faculty of man, and abandon natural passion. Having invested his characters with something above human frailty, he carried them through their parts on the same elevation; an altitude congenial to the sublimity of his genius, that was soon after to lead him to still loftier heights. In this view most objections made to Comus fall to the ground. I am the more anxious to press the subject in this point, because the time when the influence of nature's truth has held its widest dominion, is in the present day, and it is more than ever necessary to do away from the works of our sublimest poet what may at first sight appear to run counter to nature, and to show, that what might have seemed to do so, in Comus in particular, was the result of his aspirations to tread in more exalted paths than other mortals. The world of Milton was wholly intellectual; his mind pried into unearthly mysteries; its contemplations were in other spheres wild and gigantic. The usual characteristics of mortality were too common-place for his pictures; he sought to create as well as develope, to astonish as well as attract, to instruct as well as delight. His march was above humanity altogether; it was out of the track of human footsteps; and the scenes of earth only served him for comparisons by which to make intelligible the objects in his own limitless universe. Comus is surrounded with unearthliness; its poetry sustains this character in a way that, if the author did not intend should be the case, and it is probable he did not, speaks the bent of his genius, and the solitary grandeur in which it towers above all competitors for the laurel of immortality. It is redolent with images, of passing excellence, simplicity, and beauty-"Leucothea's lovely hands" "Thetis tinsel-slippered feet"-"Sabrina with chaste palms moist and cold;" and a hundred of those striking features, which image an original being to the imagination, without elaborating stature and complexion, buckle and clasp, casque, corslet, and robe, as is the fashion in more recent poetry :-it is the dash of a great artist's pencil, that gives the lineaments of the figure to the life, far more effectively than the finished and high-worked miniature. They must indeed be dead to the music of the sweetest song of the poet, who do not confess his power in Comus-whose feelings do not thrill with delight at its highly wrought passages, while its closing lines

Mortals that would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free,
She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her

shew what I would most insist upon, that Milton's object in Comus

was to personify virtue by characters superior to impulses prompted by common passion; and that with this object, he gave them an action inconsistent in a great degree with real life, but in unison with the peculiar character of his genius-a measure, that while it effected his object, rendered the poem inferior in interest to one founded on human fallibility. For the purest of mankind only was Comus written, and it can only be enjoyed to the full extent of its excellencies by the " heart."

pure in

Y. J.

ING.

PLAIN PREACHING.

A PRIEST-not such as Hogarth drew
With paunch rotund and visage red,
And eyes that glistering like dew
Protruded fatly from his head-
Yet still with look canonical,

Though feminine as any Molly,
Prank'd out in dandihood withal

To the top pitch of fashion's folly:

Full to the throat of Greek and college,

And words 'twould break the jaw to speak 'em,
Though he at best could only squeak'em,
While doling forth his stock of knowledge :-
Asked to ascend a country rostrum,

And "hold forth" to the congregation;
Up-mounted to his proper station,
Carrying his black morocco nostrum

:

Fill'd with fine sentences omnigenous,
Words ne'er to man nor jay indigenous,
And moral axioms gleaned from heathen scribe,
Displayed his white hand decked with rings,
His cambric handkerchief, and things
That trap the eyes and hearts of lady-tribe.
He was the pink of parsons, essenced o'er
With nard and perfumes from a foreign shore.
He spoke of "theism," the "cosmogony”—
Of vice, that "autocrat pestiferous,"
Of" Hyperborean blasts frigoriferous,"
And how, "disjunct" from home and prog any,
The " boding fowls" the prophet fed,
While "scistose rocks" composed his bed.

The pulpit's owner was a man of worth

Whe loved, as Vicars should, his congregation,

And well he knew no mortal power on earth

Could make it comprehend his friend's oration-
Zounds, thought he, college men in this our day
Are sadly gone from good old rules astray,

I'll ne'er ask Finnikin to preach again-
The farmers stare; even Miss Deborah Screw,
Through all the parish noted as a "blue,"
To understand will find no little pain.
The service o'er, the Vicar freely spoke,
"My brother Finnikin, it was no joke

For country folk to sit and hear your lecture

You are too learned for my parish,
My people's eyes were all vagarish

While striving your hard phrases to conjecture.
There seem two modes of College teaching,
If I might judge from this your preaching:

Mine for the world, your's for the college bred."-
Why surely, my dear reverend brother,

They are not fools," replied the other,

"I used the tongue vernacular,

My words would suit Sam. Johnson's ear-
I precedent can plead."

"I use plain words among plain men,"
The Vicar quick replied again,
"I'll prove my course is just-
There's Hodge, my carter-Hodge, I say,
Tell me, what's the cosmogony,

D'ye know, man?"-" I2, I trust.'
"I thought he knew, my reverend friend,"
Said Finnikin.-"Stay, hear the end,"

The Vicar said, and shook his snowy wig.
"What is it, Hodge?"-" Why, Sur, I know
Az how 'tis zomething that do grow,
I thinks, inzide a pig!"

THE LEPRECHAUN, OR GOLD GOBLIN.

*

"Ireland hath been always accounted a land of wonders."-BURTON. "CLEAVE to the staunch oak, my son," said Jasper Trevenny to a youth who stood by his side in a dillosk-gatherer's hut. "Cleave to a tight ship, my boy, as long as the wind blaeth, and while she lives upon the waters, she'll aye be a mauther to thee. Pine not upon a down pillow ashore wi' pale maids and wrinkled beldames bewailing about thee;-but when thee diest, die like a true heart-the white foam for thy winding sheet, the roaring voice of the ocean for thy deathlament, and a noble bark for thy coffin. What can mate with the great sea? Look thee, my son, it's beautiful at all times-when it beats against the beach-rocks that hem it in, foaming and raging like a madman wi' his fetters, as well as when the waves be one and all asleep, moving as gently as slumbering babies wi' the broad moon poring like a fond mauther above 'em. What though thee diest, as the Hollanders had like to ha' died an hour aback, in a cockle-shell smack? Even then, thee goest out of the world like a man. You shall hear, brethren," continued the stout Cornish mariner raising his voice as the dilloskers gathered around him. "The brig was scudding away like a sea-bird afore the breeze, and we afearing nought, though 'twas dark as death, having those aboard that knew the course as well as the way to their hammocks, and warranted coming 'thwart o' little 'pon that tack, while the wind spoke Nor' about. Anon the forward look-out, a whistling time after he'd howled out his dismal 'All's well,' jumped upon the cable-coil and shouted wi' all his breath, 'Vast! avast! mates,

The occupation of these people is gathering the edible sea-weeds laver and dillosk, both of which are boiled for use, but a portion of the latter is often dried in the sun, until it assumes a fine ruddy complexion, when it is esteemed a luxury,

helm a-lee and about ship!-a sail a-head here, all hands, yohoy!' Reuben roared, but 'twas too late. A sloop of a thing, wi' all aboard snoring under hatches, lay just neast our bows. We crushed upon her about midships, and rode her down awfully-most awfully, by G-d. A demurrage, for a second, succeeded the shock, and then on we went again as if nought had mattered. She proved to be a Dutch swab, lurking in yander seas for fish-or something richer mayhap. To put about, or bring to, in time for help, was impossible-moreover every sand in the glass was gold to us. But the yawl was out, and three hearties, with the captain himself, and my fool of a boy here, wer' aboard her in a snatch. It got light in the nick, the moon having struck out from her black cloudy harbour into the broad blue sea of Heaven. We tugged aback wi' heart and sinew, but all was quiet and silent above and about the place where she went down, as a grave at midnight, and nought visible but the trailing feather o' foam which the strong brig left astern. I thought I heard a deep screech in the waters 'below us 'twas fancy mayhap, but it hit me hard like a bullet. "Twas just as if my heart heard it afore my ear. It reminded me against my will o' the night when my old father sunk abaft the keel (as we say), long ago. Presently up shot a cask and a few spars, then a shoal of hake, skate, and your beggarly ling, some gasping, others quite dead wi' their white bellies and glazed eyes glittering in the moonlight. We heard a dash and a splutter windward, and upon looking about, to our awful wonder, eyed a little out-o'-sorts creature kicking and spluttering amid another troop o' floating milk-bellies, and laying among 'em wi' his arms, like a windmill in a hurricane. His face was lean, hard, and tawny. It looked like old gold horribly tarnished by time, but age could not wrinkle it. Sometimes he stood aloft, and clamouring kneedeep about in the sea; then he sunk fathoms, and we saw nought of him for a time again. We were one and all mortally gallied at the sight, but the captain. The yawl lay like a log upon the waters, while we stood to glowy at the wonder. Anon, however, the captain doffed woollens, and, dashing among the pieces of wreck that now covered the sea's face, grappled the tawny one, and towed him manfully alongside. Upon hauling him aboard, smite me, cousins, but there was a most enormous Hollander hanging by his legs, and he came up, clumsily wriggling in the wake, like a thumping chub at the tail of a fisherboy's muckworm, ha! ha! But I must tellee, the whole crew (three Dutchmen and a black boy) was saved by line or spar, and preciously swabbed was the captain about it; howsomever, just as we'd hove in sight of your blazing hearth, he tacked about, and bore away like a Geneva pink that has run full upon a king's ship in a fog."

As Jasper Trevenny concluded his tale, the dillosk-gatherers were summoned to front about to the hearth, by the deep voice of their patriarch and Brehon King, old Fergus Consadine the wise. The Cornishman, who had entered the hut with his boy to seek refreshment after landing the Hollanders, now beheld for the first time, as the dilloskers opened on either side, the gaunt old monarch of the beach. Although reposing on the oak-log, which had been the throne of his predecessors for ages, it was plain, that, when erect, he towered far above even those of surpassing stature who gathered around him. His huge legs, encased in dark brown leather trowsers instead of the custo

mary hose, wandered along the floor, seeming like the main roots of a giant oak in its senility, than the limbs of a man. His mantle of yellow frieze*, curiously embroidered at the edges, was thrown entirely from one shoulder, so as to reveal the bandel cloth vest, and studded bark belt beneath it, and streamed down in great plenitude of fold to the base of his oaken throne. His long hair was turned back in the ancient Glibb or Cooleen fashion, and surmounted by a burred or conical woollen cap: moreover, it was of so peculiar a complexion and wavy a nature, as (like the bard's of old) to be compared to a living stream of milk. His large features, worn as they were by time and mischance, bore an imposing similarity to a mouldering ruin of which sufficient masses remain to shew what it had been in the days of its glory. The transient smile upon the one, as the passing sunbeam upon the other, illumined but to expose. dried dillosk-weed, mingled with old laver, encircled his brows, and A wreath of the red sunwhile his bony left hand wandered lovingly among the light tresses of a sleeping girl, he supported its fellow on one of the bends of a huge black staff, warped and scotched by nature or art into the figure of a snake. This was the Brehon King's sceptre, the symbol of his authority, and all in his domains paid implicit obedience to the laws mulgated by him who wielded it, for the time being, on the oaken log proof ages. Tradition and legend were fertile in its honour, but neither Bard nor Shanaghos could narrate the story of its mysterious origin. The general belief was, that it had been vital, and would again resume its pristine nature, to the infinite peril of man, if ever the old Tanistry laws and Brehon Kings should be banished from Erin.

66

My sons," said old Fergus to his attentive dilloskers, "you have heard enough from the Sassenach, to put every young limb among you in motion. Far be it from one who sits on the oak of old times, to rise up against the festivals which our fathers rejoiced in and honoured-above all, so sacred a one as that of the Wren on the holy tide of Saint Stephen-may the Bancointhat wail over poor Onagh, the dear child of my child, when I do so! But, my sons, the honours of the day are done-you have ensnared the kingly little Wren on the brown furze-you have enthroned him in the green holly bush, set off with white love-knots and the fair tresses of your most comely virgins; you have carried him far and near in glory and state, and lastly, raised him above your broad board while feasting on what men have bestowed on you, as homage and gift to the king of all birds. 'Tis now near unto morning, and the reign of the Wren is over. boys. Misfortune has come upon a crew of strangers on your coast. Bestir yourselves, They are now, perhaps, watching with eager eyes for the remains of

*The choice colour of the old Irish.

The praises of the dead are sung prior to interment by the Bancointha or Cointaghaun, who is hired by the friends of the deceased for that purpose. milar custom prevails among the Greeks. Les pleureuses publiques are mentioned A siby Pouqueville, in his Voyage en Morée, and there seems to be but little difference between their occupation and the Bancointha's. The whole ceremony of a burial, as described by him, approaches remarkably near to a rural wake and funeral in Ireland.

The Wren feast is still kept up in Munster with the ceremonies detailed by the Brehon.