fashion. It is the fashion to learn to be alternately slave and tyrant; and therefore my lord must fag for the tailor, or the tailor for my lord-it is all one. It is the fashion to ruin the morals, and therefore it is proper to spend money at Eton and Harrow. It is the fashion to go to Oxford, and therefore to Oxford we go; it is the fashion to suppose we learn Greek, and therefore we suppose it.

But these are of the permanent fashions; like the Court of Chancery: as in some other cases, we adhere to the bad and renounce the good. It is a misfortune that smoking and drinking punch are out of date: for since fashions must change, it would be better to change Greek than punch, and Oxford than smoking. We would even consent to take back again hair-powder, or the duty on malt, in exchange. But, perhaps, the fashion of fourteen years' flogging upwards from the lowest form to the highest, will yet change; and then it will be the fashion to learn to swarm a pole, jump a ditch, and walk upon a rope.

There are hopes of any reformation when comedy has given place to elephants and monkeys, and a bowery and flowery walk in Kensington Gardens to a dusty dirty parade among horses and carriages, when the typography of Fust is revived in the shape of stereotype, and a man dare not drink porter after his cheese.

If there is a fashion in poetry and bonnets, so there is too in physic. And why not in physic as well as in eating. It is now the fashion of Sangrado; and why not?—since it all proceeds on the facile principle of imitation; the monkey principle. It is much easier, here too, to follow than to guide: it saves thinking. There is but one receipt, and any man can follow it-bleeding and hot water, hot water and bleeding

seignare, purgare, iterum purgare et seignare." Calomel and salts— Cheltenham. We are all too full, and must be depleted; blood is a poisonous substance; it must be let out. And then there is the last new remedy:-Croton one year, barytes another, muriatic baths, prussic acid-champooing, or rhatany-root; just as Lord Harborough's beard succeeds to Lord Petersham's whiskers.

It is the fashion too for the plague and the typhus not to be contagious, and it is the fashion to have the tic-douloureux, and bile-and to cultivate conversation and society by crowding three hundred people into the room that might hold twenty. As it was, or is the fashion to pay for the cards that are played with, and as it was the fashion to pay for your dinners, and as it is going to be the fashion to play at écarté, that the hostess may cheat her guests out of money enough to pay the lights and the cakes.

for

And because all society is reduced to the simple element of an annual crowd, it is the fashion to have folding doors, and to spoil the only two rooms of a miserable house, spoiling our own comfort all the year round that we may accommodate-"where by they may be thought to be accommodated "our friends, once in the year, with the opportunity of breaking their carriages and wishing the assembly and the assemblier at Old Nick.

And it is the fashion to build churches; and most abominable are those churches. Because why?-because other fashions have crept in to religion. Such as-discovering that the Pope is desirous of excom→ municating kings, and that Prince Hohenlohe cures toothach and epilepsy "point blank five hundred miles;" that morality is a crime, "yea a crime my brethren; that we must prostrate our reason and believe in Calvin or Huntington; that Dr. Hawker is either Moses or Elias; and that it is impossible for any person to be saved unless he follows Irving, or else Chalmers, or else Dr. Collyer, or else somebody else; and that if he follows the wrong luminary he is a lost sinner, it being at the same time made and provided, that nobody can agree which is the right one,

And so there is a fashion in preaching, and grace, and salvation, and eternal life; but the worst of it is, that with less prudence than the fair, who all wear the same bonnet when it is in vogue, there are so many different coiffures that no one can get his head into the real, right, orthodox cap.

As to blacking, it is undetermined whether the fashion of the veritable cirage Anglaise, il vero lucido Inglese, lies with Warren, or Hunt, or Day and Martin: but it is certainly the fashion now to think that commerce ought to be free, that Mr. Malthus is in the right, that Mr. Macculloch is a greater œconomist than Mr. Ricardo, that the bullion question is unintelligible, that the state of the country is a paradox, that the Niger is either the Nile or is not the Nile, that chimneysweeping is a very dirty trade, and Mr. Thomas Wallace, aided by Mr. John Hall, a very clever man.

Further, the fashion of joint-stock companies is becoming daily subject to increasing dubiety, and even the Duke of Wellington has become rather unfashionable, as, apparently, the same is about to happen to Mr. Wilberforce, and Mr. Macaulay, and Tom Campbell, and even to the Great Unknown. And also to the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly Review, under the laziness of the one editor, and the incapacity of the other, and to The Modern Athens in spite of Sir George Mackenzie, and Dr. Brewster, and Sir James Hall, and Mr. Lockhart, and Blackwood himself-the moral, the elegant, the instructive, the modest Blackwood, and his caterer Professor Wilson, who, in professing Moral Philosophy, has ingeniously contrived to separate the morals from the philosophy.

Will war ever go out of fashion; and scandal and backbiting?—Yes, with eating and drinking; or at the Millenium. Or puffing?-At the same epocha.

We want a fashion-setter here; that is certain. In the mean time it is in vain that Miss — is the most beautiful, the most graceful, the most captivating, of her sex: she has not been puffed at Almack's; she is not the fashion. It is in vain that the " Fancy" levels the peer and the highwayman; it is the fashion. It is in vain that " liberty and pro

perty for ever huzza!" are but words; they are the fashion. It is in vain that the object of law is to refuse justice: is is the fashion to say otherwise. It is in vain that Mr. Martin makes laws against bullbaiting; it is the fashion. It is in vain that wealth is not virtue: it is the fashion; that an Englishman and an English miss cannot walk; it is the fashion: that Walter Scott, baronet, is writing balderdash for money; he is the fashion: that we tell France she will be overturned by the Jesuits; they are the fashion: that the opera is detestable, and the ballet worse: they are the fashion: that nonsense verses are useless, and Westminster an abuse; they are the fashion: that moustaches are dirty things, and routes a nuisance, and the pianoforte a pest, and Mr. Hayter a bad painter,-they are the fashion, the fashion, the fashion.

This is the magic word which answers all inquiries, silences all objections, erects all idols-erects and deposes them. And this is that sublime invention, by which Europe is distinguished from the East. China has but one fashion; it has no fashion: therefore, it is the eternal, as it is the Celestial Empire. Permanence, even in dress, is permanence: it acts on the empire as it does on the quality of a shoetie: the fashion of revolution, which revolves caps and bonnets, revolves empires also. When the East has fallen, it has been by changing its dress. Rome fell when she became fashionable and changing. Had she kept the toga, the red harlot would never have sat in the chair of the Cæsars. It is enough we have done.

THE SORROWS OF ** ***.

The most

I AM the most unfortunate of an unfortunate race. wretched of the wretched who have no rest for the soles of their feet.— Mistake me not-I am no Jew,-would I were but the meanest amongst the Hebrews!—but my unhappy despised generation labours under a sterner, though a similar, curse. We are a proverb and a bye-word— a mark for derision and scorn, even to the vilest of those scattered Israelites. We are sold into tenfold bondage and persecution. We are delivered over to slavery and to poverty-we are visited with numberless stripes.No, tender-hearted Man of Bramber! we are not what thy sparkling eyes would seem to anticipate,—we are, alas! no negroes,it were a merciful fate to us to be but Blackamoors. They have their snatches of rest and of joy even-their tabors, and pipes, and cymbals —we have neither song nor dance-misery alone is our portion-pain is in all our joints-and on our bosoms, and all about us, sits everlasting shagreen.-Dost thou not, by this time, guess at my tribe

Dost thou not suspect my ears?

I am indeed, as thou discernest, an inferior horse-a Jerusalem colt ; but why should I blush to "write myself down an ass ? ” My ancestors at least were free, and inhabited the desert!-My forefathers were noble, though it must rob our patriarchs of some of their immortal bliss, if they can look down from their lower Indian heaven on their abject posterity!

Fate, I know not whether kindly or unkindly,-has cast my lot upon the coast. I have heard, there are some of my race who draw in sand-carts, or carry panniers, and are oppressed by those Coptic vagabonds, the Gypsies,-but I can conceive no oppressions greater than mine. I can dream of no fardels more intolerable than those I bear; but think, rather with envy, of the passiveness of a pair of panniers, compared to the living burdens which gall and fret me by their continual efforts. A sand-bag might be afflictive, from its weight-but it could not kick with it, like a young lady. I should fear no stripes-from a basket of apples.-A load of green peas could not tear my tongue by tugging at my eternal bridle. All these are circumstances of my hourly afflictions, when I am toiling along the beach-the most abject, and starved, and wretched of our sea-roamers-with one, or perhaps three, of my master's cruel customers, sitting upon my painful back. It may chance, for this ride, that I have been ravished from a hasty breakfast -full of hunger and wind-having at six o'clock suckled a pair of young ladies, in declines,―my own unweaned shaggy foal remaining all the time unnourished (think of that, mothers!) in his sorry stable. It is generally for some child or children that I am saddled thus earlyfor urchins fresh from the brine, full of spirits and mischief,- would to Providence it might please Mrs. D the Dipper, to suffocate the shrieking imps in their noisy immersion! The sands are allowed to be excellent for a gallop-but for the sake of the clatter, these infant. demons prefer the shingles-and on this horrible footing I am raced up and down, till I can barely lift a leg. A brawny Scotch nursery wench, therefore, with sinews made all the more vigorous by the shrewd bracing sea air, lays lustily on my haunches with a toy whip-no toy however in her pitiless "red right hand :" and when she is tired of the exercise, I am made over to the next comer. This is probably the Master Buckle-and what hath my young cock, but a pair of artificial spurs or huge corking-pins stuck at his abominable heels.-No

---gentle knight comes pricking o'er the plain.—

I am now treated, of course, like a cockchafer-and endeavour to rid myself of my tormentor; but the bruteling, to his infernal praise, is an excellent rider. At last the contrivance is espied, and my jockey drawn off by his considerate parent-not as the excellent Mr. Thomas Day would advise, with a Christian lecture on his cruelty-but with an ad

monition on the danger to his neck. His mother too kisses him in a frenzy of tenderness at his escape-and 1 am discharged with a character of spitefulness, and obstinacy, and all that is brutal in nature.

A young literary lady-blinded with tears, that make her stumble over the shingles-here approaches, book in hand, and mounts me,→ with the charitable design, as I hope, of preserving me from a more unkindly rider. And, indeed, when I halt from fatigue, she only strikes me over the crupper, with a volume of Duke Christian of Lunenburg-(a Christian tale to be used so!)-till her concern for the binding of the novel compels her to desist. I am then parted with as incorrigibly lazy, and am mounted in turn by all the stoutest women in Margate, it being their fancy, as they declare, to ride leisurely.

Are these things to be borne?

Conceive me, simply, tottering under the bulk of Miss Wiggins, (who some aver is "all soul," but to me she is all body,) or Miss Huggins-the Prize Giantesses of England; either of them sitting like a personified lumbago on my loins!-Am I a Hindoo tortoise-an Atlas ? Sometimes, Heaven forgive me, I think I am an ass to put up with such miseries-dreaming under the impossibility of throwing off my fardels—of ridding myself of myself-or in moments of less impatience, wishing myself to have been created at least an elephant, to bear these young women in their " towers," as they call them, about the coast.

Did they never read the fable of "Ass's Skin," under which covering a princess was once hidden by the malice of fairy Fate? If they have, it might inspire them with a tender shrinking and misgiving, lest, under our hapless shape, they should peradventure be oppressing and crushing some once dear relative or bosom-friend, some youthful intimate or school-fellow, bound to them, perhaps, by a mutual vow of eternal affection. Some of us, moreover, have titles which might deter a modest mind from degrading us. Who would think of riding, much less of flagellating the beautiful Duchess—or only a namesake of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire? Who would think of wounding through our sides, the tender nature of the Lady Jane Grey? Who would care to goad Lord Wellington, or Nelson, or Duncan ?—and yet these illustrious titles are all worn,-by my melancholy brethren. There is scarcely a distinguished family in the peerage-but hath an ass of their

name.

Let my oppressors think of this and mount modestly, and let them use me a female-tenderly, for the credit of their own feminine nature. Am I not capable, like them, of pain and fatigue-of hunger and thirst? Have I, forsooth, no rheumatic aches-no cholics and windy spasms, or stitches in the side-no vertigoes—no asthma-no feebleness or hystericks-no colds on the lungs ? It would be but reasonable to presume I had all these, for my stable is bleak and damp -my water brackish and my food scanty-for my master is a CaledoSEPT. 1825.

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