Pores o'er the forms heraldic labours tend,
Or pens a prosing letter to a friend :
For Anno Domini writes A. U. C.,
Or heads his letter with a kind S. D.
In fancy o'er the Via Sacra walks,
Or with a Pliny or a Strabo talks;
At Horace' Villa culls his early beans,
Or in Etruscan kettles boils his greens.

With rising pride he views his swelling store
Or wonders never mortal owned before;
Strange relics of all tribes that spoke or speak—
Assyrian, Turkish, Jewish, Roman, Greek.
Busts, statues, images, involved in dust,

Swords, helmets, javelins, precious in their rust;
Black-letter books, some grass from Trojan's park,
An ephod, and a piece of Noah's ark.
Whatever useless rarity you name

Of ancient date, look here, you find the same:
These he collects, these gathers night and day,-
For these, pounds, shillings, pence, he flings away;
And though reputed in his senses sound,

He for a Roman penny gives a pound.

But say what prize, what treasure meets his sight Unseen before-what promise of delight?

A shield of price! with rust corrosive traced,
The true ærugo of an antique taste.

"And whence," he cries, "the gift? What gen'rous friend

Has fate propitious tempted this to send?

Say, say from whom ?" his rapture stays his breath;
Brief the reply" From me it comes," quoth DEATH.
He starts-he sees upon the shield his name,
And feels a tremour stealing through his frame;
Beholds the grinning messenger with fear,
And grieves to find ANTIQUITY too near;
He drops the shield with fearful import rife,
And quits at once his treasures and his life.

CHEVIOT TICHBURN.

ANTIQUARIAN RESEARCHES.

"A plague," says Time to Thomas Hearne,
"Whatever I forget you learn."

OUR poetical contributor has taken a view of the Antiquary under the idea of what Doctor Johnson calls "Curiosity in Excess," where straws and trifles occupy that time which might be more seriously or advantageously employed. But this spirit of imagination may be pardoned in a stranger to the pleasures of virtu, when one of its most ardent votaries indulged in the ridicule of a profession he both followed and admired. But Grose, while caricaturing pretensions to connoisseurship, did not consider that a handle might be made of this satire to draw down the contempt of some, ignorant of the pleasure and advantage of antiquarian research; in which there is more than is dreamt of, in the philosophy of many, who wonder that men should be found to puzzle themselves about the past, when there is so much to be done with the present.*

*Under the head MISCELLANEA CRITICA in Blackwood's Magazine for September, 1826, is an article which prominently introduces

The labours of the Antiquary serve to trace things up to their source,—to throw light upon the old for the improvement of the new,-to show the advance

the subject we are now attempting to illustrate, and from which we beg to be allowed to glean a few sentences. It thus begins:-" "One use of Poetry is to nurse in us the feeling of the Beautiful. Another, among many others, to cherish, or produce, the love of ANTIQUITY." After showing how "essentially poetical" are the manners and transactions of past ages, and what a high-wrought interest the Poet feels in the “remembrance of long-buried generations of our kind," the writer thus proceeds:—

"If there be in the Past, as such, the natural aptitude here supposed for affecting the Imagination, the affection will be enhanced by intercourse with that Art, which not only especially awakens this Faculty, but greatly delights to lay open, and draw forth, these particular sources of its pleasure." And how this is effected, we learn from the following sensible observations:-" In the extension of our sympathy with human kind, taking in that portion which may least require it, indeed, the dead-but, further, those living, in whom the old times imaged, live yet :-In the wider field put under the dominion of thought; since that which we learn to love we then first understand:In the solemnity added to our meditations on man's nature :-In loftier, calmer, juster views of human affairs :-In increased love of our country, itself ancient :-Lastly-among a high-cultivated people a consideration of no slight importance-In the ampler materials placed under the hand of those inventive, beautiful Arts, which are much of the brightness, and give much of the happiness, of distinguished civilization :—if it may not seem too much arguing in a circle, to say that Poetry is useful, by enlarging its own powers.-What is this Love of ANTIQUITY? Not the coldly-curious taste, sometimes seen, of research into parts of knowledge from most minds hid by rareness, or separated by want of evident, common, compelling interest,—but a feeling placed half in imagination, half in our social nature, by which we accept our union of brotherhood with our kind, take concern in them, most distantly divided from as by time, and confess a title to

in some, and the failure of others towards that perfection, which is the ultimate aim of art, science, and literature.

There is, besides what belongs to the useful and important in antiquarian researches, an innocent pleasure and a harmless gratification, that perhaps more exclusively belong to the collector of antiquities than to most other pursuits.

By the aid of his treasures, he can call up past ages, and as it were make them refund the riches they had secreted. His minerals, his fossils, and his gems, discover in part the organization of the material world; his coins and medals connect many links in the chain of history that would otherwise be lost. His ambition raises no armies to disturb the peace or destroy the happiness of mankind; his triumphs are not sprinkled with blood, nor is his path to fame washed with the tears of the widow or the orphan a more perfect tome, a more rare example

affect us, in their MEMORY, by whatever shapes of matter it may be borne.

"Men, for the most part, love the Present. The joy given them in the consciousness of their living being, is of the hour, the moment : which it fills with animating, sparkling, fires. But the urn of the Past they can believe to contain only extinct and cold ashes,-misjudging, nor aware how even in our ashes live their wonted fires.'"