of his will there is regard-to every appeal, acquiescence; and how can either teeth or temper maintain a purity against indulgences, dispensed with freer hand than that of pope of Rome in direst poverty? Much less to be expected then, from such matriculation, is any premature penchant for those interesting studies and that agreeable discipline adjudged by lord Eldon to be essential to such as hope to live by the law.

My forensic future was proverbial in my boyhood, and numberless were the exhortations to learning and docility to which it supplied a text. "I heard them, but I heeded not." The pedagogue to whose training I was entrusted at a later stage, mourned over my "mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly end in vexation of spirit;" but was too tender-hearted to chastise, and, like Southey's, "never consumed birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How strongly some oddities protest against oblivion! Poor M-! never shall I forget the " anger, insignificantly fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risibility, with difficulty suppressed, the culprit it was intended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember those frequent, quaint, and quiet bubblings from a natural fount of humour, whose current the cares of a con

tentious wife and seven clamorous bantlings had not sufficed entirely to dam.

M- astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, by presenting himself at my chambers. London has always a choice collection of comicalities in human shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, but the worthy dominie of D- (in the far west) was no mean metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the city, "whose streets," quoth he," are verily interminable, presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke.” M— was an amateur, of lowly pretensions, on the violin ; and in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to but one assuaging influence-sleep. M— had a tune on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity; "There is balm (said he) in Gilead." Conscious of his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his accompanying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiognomical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gravity were strangely mingled, "Of a verity, Mr. C., yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the years of my experience, I ever heard produced by a Birch!*"

* In allusion to the cantatrice of that name, who sung.

The season of boyhood I think to be as swift of wing as those which succeed it;—aye, by the light of Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that Spring of the seasons of the soul-its first love. Before I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as

66 a Dreamer among men, indeed

An idle Dreamer,"

I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressione monotony,

"Ah, happy years! who would not be again a boy?"

Let all on the side male who cannot plead guiltless of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrement; and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unintelligible fancies from "The Childe," who, were the state of childhood again their own, would not appear as boys, either by creation or by choice, let us embrace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine who are they that—were the change optional-would antedate their lives agreeably to their longings.

Not the youth who is professing love, nor the maiden who is pondering upon marriage.

The youth might who has gone before the priest, and found himself nearer purgatory than paradise; and so might the mother of a thankless child.

Not the youth who is coming simultaneously to the estates of manhood and of money—to the liberty of full age and the legacies of fond ancestors.

The heir might who has gained discretion and lost his domain; and so might a young man made old by excesses; so might a saint in an outburst of innocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair.

So might he who hath seceded from vice, and is troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed by the heart he may have broken.

So might he to whom the moral condition of the time is "dark as Erebus," who believes that atrocities accumulate, and who is discontented at everything.

But so would not he who knows that progressive privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in its order: that our intellectual advancement, founded upon holy Truth, is the supereminent aim, element, and safeguard of the soul-our greatness here, and qualification for hereafter!

It is a work of considerable difficulty-which increases daily to keep one's footing on the road to Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the

D

struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. And of the crowd which enter for the race, how few attain the goal of the countless array of competitors, how scanty are the gifted with the garland! That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto legal eminency, is especially notorious for its tortuosity and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and chief baron in nocturnal visions, which befriend,* has found himself bewildered below the bar even, and in a like predicament with the disputative angels," in wandering mazes lost." With all my respect for that learned body to which my sire supplied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, I did not suddenly burn with the ambition to signalise myself in the profession: I felt no instantaneous exhilaration from the study of equity, nor was I roused to emulation by the conflict of the courts. A simple summary of the subjects it was necessary to know, convinced me that Cromwell had singularly fallen upon truth when he said, that "there being so many law-books of great bulk, so many old musty records, reports, and book-cases, as that after the time spent in school-learning, the rest of the time of the flower of a man's life would be little enough to read them over

# 66 Night visions may befriend,.

Our waking dreams are fatal."—Young.