would be told that calves grow up to be cows or bulls, with great big horns, which they gore people with, and toss them over hayricks and houses. I would repeat the story of Tom Thumb, who was devoured by a cow, and I would choose from the Scripture lessons, the passage about the "bulls of Basan."

But there is no better way of communicating useful knowledge than by pictures. Riding and hunting I would recommend to the tastes of young gentlemen by a complete series of those pleasing pictures which we see in the windows of the print-shops, where sensible men in red coats are exhibited in every variety of position into which that engaging quadruped, the horse, can manage to pitch his rider; some twirling on the sharp points of paling, like weathercocks on steeples; others on seeming expeditions of discovery to the moon; others descending like meteors or rocket-sticks; here a gay equestrian topsy-turvy in the mud, and only distinguishable by the playing of his boots and spurs amongst the reeds and bulrushes; there a gallant horseman inextricably committed to a thickset hedge, like the "man of Thessaly," who "scratched out his eyes," in the ballad. Down in the abysses of a quarry-hole, never again to see the light of day, would I show another lover of the chase; and if all this failed to instil sportsmanlike tastes into my young audience, I would despair of my school ever producing a Bellerophon or a Castor!

We see what influence habit and education have in cherishing the fashionable vice of courage. The children of brave parents are apt to be brave, as those of dissipated parents are apt to be profligate. A boy sees his father mount a horse, and he desires to ride. He sees his father shoulder a musket, and he grows up stupidly insensible to the perils of artillery, and all the villanies of saltpetre. Conceive the effect upon the plastic mind of infancy produced by seeing a father, a guardian, or a tutor, taking a bull by the horns, or remaining cool and collected in a thunderstorm. Many a man hunts, shoots, skates, drives, or goes a yachting, merely because he has seen his sire hazard his life and limbs by the same indiscretions.

The daughters of women who behold mice and spiders without falling into "asterisks," are equally unconcerned when they see mice and spiders. If a mother sees a flash of lightning without screaming, we cannot wonder if her girls call it a "pretty phenomenon," and read books on electricity. Now courage is bad enough in men, but in the sex it is intolerable. I will not say it unsexes a woman, because that it misbecomes both sexes, being nothing else, when seriously considered, than a criminal disregard for life, and a flat rebellion against the first law of nature. In men, however, the failing is so common that we contemplate it with less repugnance; we can tolerate a gallant duke, but a gallant duchess is not to be borne. The court etiquette of England very properly requires every lady to show "the white feather" at the Queen's drawing-rooms.

Half the pains taken to make men indifferent heroes would make them thorough cowards. No man of sense would blush to own himself a coward, if the world could be brought to renounce its absurd notions of glory and honour. When we see honour "setting a leg," we shall aspire to possess it. When we see departed heroes "in their glory," we like to leave them "alone" in it. The truth is, that the quality July.-VOL. LXV. NO. CCLIX.

z

called cowardice is really moral intrepidity. We mean true, consistent cowardice, for there is a great deal of spurious cowardice as well as spurious valour extant.

"He that fights and runs away," is a milk-and-water character, which we despise extremely; if he is cowardly for running, he is brave for fighting; he spoils his poltroonery by his hankerings after warlike honours. He only deserves the name of coward, who is a coward at all times and in all places; by land and by sea, by day and by night, having fear always in his heart, and the "grisly shade" of "Daunger" before his eves for ever.

We have known many dastards, but one only was perfect. Education conspired with native instincts to make him the pattern and model of poltroons. I remember a frog scaring him one day out of his wits; a young frog, little more than a tad pole; had the frog wielded a rush like his warlike ancestors in Homer's times, my friend would certainly have given up the ghost. His own shadow frightened him ten times a day, and I have seen him grow pale at the clattering of his own boots upon the pavement. If the iron heel struck a spark out of a flint, he looked as if it had been an eruption of Etna. He pretended not to fear white mice in boxes, or canary-birds in cages, but in truth, there was nothing in animated nature from the tiger down to the midge, that had not at one time or another made his teeth chatter. For riding, he never had the pluck to mount a hobby-horse, and as to the chase, a hare might have hunted him.

He read one day in a Penny Magazine of those aerolites, or stones that fall from the sky, once or twice in five hundred years. From that hour he never enjoyed a walk in the open air, for fear of aerolites. He knew the number of houses, and had made a calculation of the number of tiles upon all the roofs of London, so as to know to a mathematical nicety the number of risks he ran of a fractured skull when obliged to go abroad on a gusty day. How he ever effected a crossing at a great thoroughfare is to me incomprehensible; for he was just the man to stand for twenty-four hours waiting, like the clown in Horace, for the stream of cabs, coaches, and omnibuses, to pass by. On board of a steamer he never ventured. Somebody talked to him of the safety-valve. He replied that every boiler that ever burst had been provided with that treacherous apparatus.

I firmly believe he would not have crossed from Dover to Calais in a life-boat, commanded by Lord Nelson, or by Noah himself. Such an eye as he had for a danger! In an ice-house he would have feared being roasted alive, and in an oven apprehended the horrors of a polar winter. A granary would not have dispelled his dread of famine, or a residence in an exhausted receiver abated the alarm with which every puff of wind shook him. He forbad the word " safe" to be mentioned in his presence. He sneered at safes of all kinds, even "Chubb's patent iron," which he tremulously remarked were good for nothing in earthquakes. His death (for he has ceased to tremble) was curious and characteristic; the reflection in his looking-glass of the shadow of a very thin man, who happened to pass before his door, threw him into a state of extreme nervous debility, during which the echo of the barking of a little dog which had been bought at a Dutch toy-shop to amuse a dare-devil child of a year old—

Sine diis animosus infans

produced a violent paroxysm of terror which frightened him into the other world.

The bulk of his property is bequeathed to trustees for the foundation of an asylum for fifty gentlemen of tried and unimpeachable pusillanimity, and bearing the name of Craven. The institution is to be called the Retreat" and surrounded with aspens.

My friend has also left behind him some literary memorials, chiefly fugitive pieces. His verses run well and his prose is nervous; but I respect his ashes too much to become his critic, for he never could abide a Review, although the name of Hide Park pleased him.

A DISCOVERY.

Ir is it is!-by Heaven it is!
Her very form so faultless all,
The very golden curls from this
I see upon her shoulders fall,
From underneath the bonnet small,
Whose airy grace I know so well.

Oh-there's an instinct magical,

Would, were I blind, her presence tell.
But who is he of youthful mein,
That arm-enclasping leads her slow
Adown the river's margin green,

Whose winding waters westward flow,
Receiving all the golden glow
Within their far receding brinks,
Of autumn's evening sun that low
In all his cloudy splendour sinks.
How deeply self-engrossed they walk,
How fondly wrapt in converse sweet,
Of that bright scene he seems to talk,

As sauntering slow with lingering feet,
In words half-whispered, soft, and meet
For loving lip or loving ear;
His arm-how close she clings to it
And upward looking seems to hear,
Are these the vows-is this the plight
She sobbed upon my beating breast,
As on that soul up-treasured night,

Her gentle heart to mine I press'd;
And all my passion dreams confess'd,

And could have well gone wild with joy,
To hear love's fondest thoughts express'd
By those sweet lips of wont so coy?
With urgent speed I'll round the wood,
And through the fields by winding ways,
Then up the bank in sober mood,

Walking I'll meet them face to face.

No word I'll utter but I'll raise

My eye to hers like Indian spell,

And concentrate in one dark gaze,
Rage-hate-upbraiding-love-farewell!

R. D.

Cursu superare canem.-HOR. lepus loquitur.

IN a retired lane near the foot of Highgate Hill stood, and perhaps now stands, a snug little red-brick edifice, bearing upon its face a black board and white letters, which told all passers-by that its builder wished it to be known as "Belle-vue Cottage.' A more appropriate title could not have been conferred upon it, as the only view that could be obtained from its windows was of a large nunnery-like building, which was used as a "seminary for young ladies."

The arrangements of Belle-vue Cottage appeared to have been designed upon the plan of a tea-caddy; sugar-basin in the middle, and tea on each side. The door of the house occupied the place of the sugar-basin, the parlour and drawing-room of the souchong and hyson. In the roof-the top of the caddy-were two little sleeping-rooms, and the kitchen was hidden from public view by being erected immediately behind the main building.

This cottage, as the most grandiloquent of all auctioneers would describe it," stood in its own grounds, surrounded with evergreens of luxuriant growth, and exotics whose blooms wafted the gales of Araby to the olfactories of its happy occupants." In plain English, it boasted of an eighth of an acre of cabbage-garden, and one sixtieth of an acre of pleasure-grounds, in which grew, or rather tried to grow, one dwarf laurustinus and a stunted holly-bush, each having a little circular border immediately under the dining and drawing-room windows entirely to itself. So much for the luxuriant evergreens.

The exotics consisted of half a dozen weak, straggling geraniums, which looked as if they had been confined to their bedrooms all the winter in a deep decline; so pale, so weakly, so consumptive did they appear. The odours inhaled by its happy occupants proceeded from two boxes of mignionette, and a deep-green, muddy ditch which separated the domains of Belle-vue from the turnpike-road.

The occupier of this cottage was one Mr. Nicholas Smoothly; a smart, dapper little man who always appeared as neat as if he had just been unpacked from a milliner's bandbox.

He held a situation" in the Bank of England-that is, he was a clerk in the Bank. I used the former mode of describing his occupation, because clerks in the Bank, in these fastidious days, deem it the more genteel one.

Nicholas was the most regular of men; indeed his movements varied so little, that all his neighbours set their clocks and watches by them.

He rose punctually at six, summer and winter, breakfasted at seven, and at half-past set out, with his neat brown silk umbrella obscured in a gingham envelope, for his walk to the Bank. He dined at "the Cock" precisely as the clock of that excellent chop and soup house struck one, and was seen entering his garden-gate by means of his latch-key exastly at half-past five. The potboy from Mother Redcap's brought a pint of porter at eight; and when the neighbours saw the candle extinguished in his bedroom-window, they knew it was ten o'clock by St. Paul's.

The only variation observable in these regular movements, was on the days which schoolboys used to call red-letter days, and which our almanacs tell us are holidays at the Bank. On these days, which have frequently called forth naughty words from persons, who not having consulted their almanacs, or having no almanacs to consult, have come up to London to do business at the Bank, and found the doors of that handsome edifice closed against them-on these days, I say, Nicholas Smoothly rose half an hour earlier, and if it was summer-time, sallied forth with a rush-basket in one hand, and a fishing-rod in the other, towards the seven ponds at Hampstead, or the New River at Hornsey. If it was winter, he appeared with a long bellmouthed flint-and-steel fowling-piece, and took the field against the fieldfares and redwings which frequented the hedge-rows in his neigh

bourhood.

Whether the angle or the gun was the companion of his walks, the everlasting brown-silk umbrella in its gingham envelope was never left behind-it was slung over his right shoulder, and fastened under his left-arm by a black-silk ribbon.

Now though your catchers of salmon and trout, and your shooters of grouse and black-cock may smile at Mr. Smoothly's ideas of sport, I can venture to affirm that he enjoyed his diversions more than they do, for confinement gave an additional relish to them; and if he returned home with half a dozen roach, perch, or gudgeons, or a couple of redwings or larks, he felt as proud of his day's amusement as if he had bagged his fifty brace of birds, or landed a salmon of twenty pounds weight. He did not, like a selfish gourmand, feast upon his game himself, but carried them to town the following morning, to show them to his brother clerks, as a proof of his skill, and of his respect for mine host of the Cock, upon whom he invariably bestowed them.

For some years Mr. Smoothly thus pursued the even tenour of his way. His old housekeeper considered herself easily stationed for life. She made his breakfast, gardened during the midday hours, and got the tea ready at half-past five. She did the needlework of the house until supper-time came, and then joined her master, and listened to his remarks on the news of the day which he had been absorbing from the newspaper, which at half-price he brought home daily, and which was the only extravagant outlay of which he was guilty. In this idea of being comfortably settled for life, she was most disagreeably disappointed.

Opposite to Belle-vue Cottage, as I have said, was a large building dedicated to the instruction of young ladies in all the arts and sciences which are considered necessary to ensure the scholars helpmates meet for themselves.