a neat cotton gown and black bonnet lined with pink. | By some unaccountable stupidity the young woman was placed next to her own brother, a tall sheepish loat of eighteen, while the bridegroom stood on the opposite side of the room, lost amongst a throng of ali people and bridesmaids, where he stood twirling his hat and looking as if he was marvelling what he came there for. This arrangement had the effect of producing some ridiculous confusion. The clergyman, mistaking the bridesman for the bonny bridegroom, proceeded with great solemnity to exhort the young people on their duties, and by-and-by to scold the aforesaid lout for his backwardness in making the proper responses; matters had gone as far as that most important question "Wilt thou take this woman," &c., when the embarrassment of the parties increased to a ludicrous degree. Nancy cast an imploring look at her lover, but finding the minister was growing positive, and convinced by this time that all was not right, she began to blush deeper than ever, and at last stammered out,

"Bless ye, zur, but that an't he that should be married to I. That's brother!"

true love glancing over their faces. I felt melancholy as I contemplated the sorrowful faces of the bride and the mother who stood near her; and argued but little for her happiness, when I saw the air of indifference with which the husband left his newly-made wife to tread her way through the deep miry streets alone; while he stalked on at a quick pace before her, apparently unmindful of her, for he never once turned his head to see how she made her way along the wet rough road.

I remember, a few months before my own marriage, I found a wedding-ring lying on the threshold of the church porch at Waltham Abbey. I tried, without effect, to discover the owner of the lost ring;-the curate could throw no light on the mystery,—the clerk of the parish only answered, with a facetious wink and nod,-"Oh! well, Miss, I suppose it is a sign you won't be long without a ring on your finger. You may say, you are already provided for;" and he cast a sly glance towards the curate as he spoke, who chanced to be a single man, and one of the beaux of the place, and who, I dare say, was as much annoyed as myself at this witticism of the clerk's. The sexton, with a grave shake of his head, on being shown the ring, observed,-" She was a careless wife that dropped that ring; depend upon it, her husband will have little good of her."

Having said this, she danced across the room, and, pulling her discomfited spouse elect by the sleeve, shoved him into the place her brother occupied, and stuck herself by his şide, with an air of self-satisfaction at her own management that caused even the grave The history of the lost ring haunted my imagination features of the matron of the house to relax into a for a long time. I often wondered if it had been smile, and brought my risible muscles into play more dropped accidentally by some faithful wife, who would decidedly than strict decorum warranted. I had, in long deplore its loss, and vainly seek it. Or had it trath, much ado not to laugh outright;—I only needed, been cast away in high disdain by some indignant and I assure you, one glance from your own mischievous heart-wounded bride? I could suppose a highblack eye to have set me off-the scene was so truly spirited young woman treated in the contemptuous comical; for the clergyman, who was a little deaf at manner of the bride whose nuptials I witnessed, times, grew confused, and could not at first compre-tearing the fetter from her finger, and casting it from hend where the mistake lay. And then the poor her in bitterness of spirit. brother of the bride looked so rueful at being nearly fcreed into a marriage with his own sister, and cast such sheepish looks at a tall, gawky lass opposite to him, dizened out in a fine green-striped gauze frock, (some second-hand piece of ball finery,) with flounces innumerable, a dirty splashed dimity petticoat, short enough to display thick homespun worsted stockings, and clouted shoes, inch thick with mud.

"Lawk, zur! vy, it's zuch a toime zince voife and I ztood up together afore the parzon to be married, that I vholly vorgot all about un," said the old man but I promize your vurzhip I'll remember better next toime."

Methought his old dame looked a little sour at this declaration of her simple spouse, though, I am sure, he meant no offence to his worthy partner.

So ended the first wedding; and, as soon as they had departed, in came the second couple. They were not quite such a set of ninnies as the former party; but the bride looked sad, and the groom grave; and they were united without a gleam of the sunshine of

There is an evil that is not of unfrequent occurrence in this country, and is a source of much domestic infelicity, besides having a demoralizing tendency. It is this: Many men coming to the colony, having previously deserted their wives, or been deserted by them, pass themselves off for unmarried persons; and, after having induced some unconscious or thoughtless girl to marry them, forsake their victim, on the plea of illegality in the marriage. I have met with instances in which the young women, with blind infatuation, refused to listen to the warning of friends, and have shut their eyes to proofs of the most startling nature; and there are not wanting instances of clandestine marriages where you would least expect to hear of such romantic proceedingsamong the humbler class of settlers.

It is not very long ago since a farmer in a neighbouring township, early one morning, saw at his door a steed waiting with a side-saddle, and found to his utter astonishment it was to convey away his eldest daughter,-his housekeeper and handmaid, for he was a widower. The bride was all dressed for a start, when her angry sire intercepted her on her way to her lover. The bonny bridegroom contrived, how

1

young ladies to be wooed and won. I must confess | posed them to be confined to the feminine gender, I am rather an advocate for early marriages, while the when they became insupportable in old English villages, young heart's affections are warm and untainted by they were liable to an ignominious ducking in a horse interested motives; while they are yet unspotted by pond. You do not alter the character by changing the world, or corrupted by the worldly and mercenary the gender, or giving it the use of type or the freedom spirit that now walks this fair earth amidst the of the London Press. The more conspicuous the haunts of fashion and wealth. There is a spring and stage the greater the nuisance. We can only see a elasticity in the youthful mind that leads it to con- difference in degree between the virago who annoys a form to circumstances, however adverse they may be, village, or the self-styled philosopher who bores the which enables the young wife and mother to struggle world with his fault-finding: if the one should be more cheerfully against trials which would break the dipped in a puddle, the other should be drowned in spirit of those more advanced in age. Her hope is the Atlantic. more lively, she looks forward to those years to come when the trouble and sorrow of youth shall have disappeared or been overcome, and she does not despond. The bright light of youth and health and joy gilds the edges of the dark cloud that hovers over her; she hopes to emerge from its obscurity like the moon walking in light in the clouded sky.

Whatever may be the arguments used by the wise and prudent against early marriages in Britain, I uphold them as wise and prudent measures in British America; and so, wishing the single married and the married happy, I close my chapter on Weddings in the Backwoods.

A TRANSATLANTIC OPINION OF THOMAS
CARLYLE.

(ENDORSED BY MANY ON THIS SIDE THE WATER.) THE chief defect of Thomas Carlyle is his lack of practicality when writing on practical subjects. In a world constructed on different principles he might be a very available man; but the planet Earth has been set spinning in space, subject to certain conditions on the part of its mixed population, which, upon the whole, merely for the sake of existence, it is as well, perhaps, to obey. In fact, under obedience to the great laws of the universe, there is considerable social trimming and shifting of position to be done before the complicated mechanism of society can move at all. Pure autocratic humanity is at the mercy of inferior powers. We live dependent upon our own weaknesses or infirmities, and upon the weaknesses or infirmities of others. We are sophisticated; and to accomplish any good in the world we must remember this, else we are apt to dwell in abstractions, to be mere isolated speculators upon human affairs, arrogating some diviner intelligence than the working men around us; while thinking we are gods, accomplishing ourselves in the purest vices of devils, unmitigated selfishness. The moralist separating himself from the problems of active life, with their relative conditions, becomes simply a grumbler. In this world we must do the best we can, and take what we can get; for the greatest misery is to do nothing, and to receive something is essential to life. The common sense of mankind has bestowed a vulgar epithet upon the philosophers whose chief occupation is railing at the world, even from the steps of the temple. They are Croakers, Scolds; and at common law, which sup

Now Carlyle, a Scotchman, of very proud and lofty instincts, undoubtedly, is not exempt from a certain resemblance to the communis rixatrix of Blackstone. He is for ever huffing and snarling at the world, quarrelling with everything but his bread and butter. The politics of the world are all wrong; the kings are wrong; the democrats are wrong; civilization is all on the wrong track,—its manufactures, railways, its thousand means; the Church is all wrong,―a mere shabby priesteraft, a system of fraud and delusion.

Now it is very easy to get one's opinions unsettled upon any of the positive institutions of the world, and we are willing to admit the constant law of change which governs them, but, for the time being, they are our homes and shelter; and a wise man, we think, will accomplish his reforms through them, not waste his efforts in unprofitably railing against them.

Take the representative system in politics, to which the world is universally tending in some democratic form: it calls for the wisest counsel, the best head, and the purest aims to guide it. It is worse than idle at this time to prate of the superiority of a strong usurpation of a kingeraft, or talk of a theocracy. Undoubtedly, you may find virtues in the latter systems, and evils in the existing ones, and you may ring the changes to the end of time. As there is a vice of too much confidence in forms, there is equal evil in a contempt for them. It is a grand defect of the railer in snatching after some imaginary good to lose the benefit in his way. So Carlyle attacks the Church of England as an undisguised mass of insincerity, though he cannot discover a real evil which is not denounced by its liturgy and pulpits daily. The difference between the two is that the Church is a uniform, steady, both conservative and reforming institution, striking at the roots of abuses as they arise, constantly invigorating society, involving the truest and purest system of ethics, and the highest culture of the individual, while the new philosophers who affect to see the world from a loftier point of view, are driven about in a sea of uncertainty, without guide or landmark, save their individual will. If it rested with these various opponents of Christianity, how long should we see marriage preserved, or the Family, or the State, or a Church? What would be the state of the world under their government or no government of individual intuitions?

In writing this we are by no means desirous of undervaluing the force and literary ability of Carlyle's

style, or even of his pungent and frequently wellapplied satire; but we would warn our readers against the direct destructive tendencies of his writings. That he is not an ordinary vulgar destructive matters little; or that he has certain far-fetched substitutes, in his own mind, for he gives us nothing definite in his writings, to propose for what he would destroy; he may be on that account the more dangerous. He deals with truths to be sure, but truths are keen edged weapons, which may wound the handler; and the most treacherous falsity, perhaps, is a misapplied truth.

YOUNG'S BERANGER.'

To reproduce the lyrics of Beranger in English verse, is a hard task; as hard as the translation of the "Pickwick Papers " into French prose, or Burns's Songs or Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes into French poetry. It is a difficult matter for any one who has not been born and bred under the same sunshine with the author of the "Roi d'Yvetôt " and " Le Violon Brisé," by any process so thoroughly to acclimate himself to his peculiaritics of style and felicitous idioms of expression, as to understand their full sense and spirit, much more to clothe them in a foreign dress. It is as hard a matter to make English verse of his songs as it would be to make an Englishman of Beranger himself, that Poet of Grisettes, of La Grande Nation, of French Democracy and Parisian gaiety, folly and love au Sixième. Classic authors of almost any country, who indulge in an elaborate style, and write for posterity and academic honours, for aught that appears to the contrary in their works, might easily be translated, physically and bodily, as well as in their writings, into foreign parts, without doing much violence to their habits of thought or nationality of association. But Beranger out of France,-away from the vineyards and the vintagefrom the tri-colour-from the village feltes of Passy and Tours-from the bachelor convivialities of Pariswould be Beranger no longer. His nationality and his individuality are the life of his poetry and his poetic fame. At home he is universally known; abroad, hardly at all; nor can his genius be properly estimated from the point of view which our standards of criticism adopt in judging of the merits of works of poetic art.

In fact, there was hardly ever an author whose literary eminence has been so entirely owing to his popularity, in the strictest sense of that much abused term, as Beranger. Without a liberal education, without literary connexions, or any profound study or appreciation, apparently, of the resources of poetry, his natural wit, his lively perceptions of the ludicrous, his strong sympathies with humanity, as such, irrespective of caste or class, and his vivid imagination, have infused into his lyrics the truest poetic spirit,

(1) Beranger: Two Hundred of his Lyrical Poems done into English Verse." By William Young. New York: Putnam.

1850.

and made them genuine, powerful productions of genius. Their appeal is not to the judgment of critics, but to the sensibilities of every man who reads them. This is a test to which few poets would choose to bring their works; but with Beranger it has been the only test to which he has cared to bring his. He sings to amuse himself, to entertain the public, to please the people; and, strange to say, he succeeds not only in amusing himself, but also in entertaining the public, and pleasing everybody. To object to his morals, or rather his want of them-to criticise his style, or rather his neglect of style-to lament that he should have wasted his life in writing so much that is witty, and so little that is wise-all this makes him none the less the most popular song-writer of the present age.

In spite of his popularity at home, all the greater since the last Revolution, which the whole political tendency of his writings helped to bring on, Beranger has been but little studied or appreciated out of France. One principal reason has been the extreme difficulty, already adverted to, of adapting inflexible English to the necessities of his peculiar and very independent style, which generally derives half its in the vernacular, which it is almost impossible to point and beauty from the use of happy expressions render effectively in a foreign tongue. The few translators who have ventured on the work hitherto, have succeeded very imperfectly, and none have attempted more than partial selections. We remem:-one by her but three volumes of such translations :William Anderson, published in Edinburgh; one from the press of Pickering, by the "Author of the Exile of Idria," a poem which never took refuge, to our knowledge, in this country; and another, a Philadelphia collection, issued in a neat volume, in 1844, by Carey and Hart.

In point of fulness and faithfulness the present translations by Mr Young far surpass the previous attempts. He has laboured evidently to reproduce Beranger as he really is; and to present the poems which have made him famous, as nearly as possible, as The work shows much diligence, they really are.

discrimination, and poetic power. It is uniformly
careful in execution, and in the main very successful.
By way of comparison with its predecessors, take
that charming song, "Ma Vocation," which opens
with this simple, compact, and touching stanza :-
"Jeté sur cette boule,

Laid, chétif et souffrant ;
Etouffé dans la foule,
Faute d'être assez grand;
Une plainte touchante

De ma bouche sortit,

Le bon Dieu me dit: "Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!"

This the author of the "Exile of Idria" expands into English verse as follows:

"Squalid, faint, and suffering, hurl'd
Up and down this wheeling world,
Crush'd amongst the crowd of men,
Myself too weak to press again;