44

SOUTHEY'S TALE OF PARAGUAY.

Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;

And sure a willing ear she well might deign

To one whose tales may equally engage

The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.

"But of his native speech because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;

A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen

By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,1
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great Empress Queen.

"Little he deem'd when with his Indian band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A Poet then unborn, and in a land
Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take up from thence his moralising lay,
And shape a song that, with no fiction drest,
Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,
And sinking deep in many an English breast,
Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest.”

North. Very bad-very bad.

Tickler. I offer to read you for a rump and dozen. Sir, which of us call you bad-the poet or the spouter?

North. Both, both—bad, bald, mean, and miserable! Tickler. Bald!-Can't help that. Would you have me wear a wig?-But here's at it again.—(Reads.)

"The Moon had gather'd oft her monthly store
Of light, and oft in darkness left the sky,
Since Monnema a growing burthen bore
Of life and hope. The appointed weeks go by;
And now her hour is come, and none is nigh
To help but human help she needed none.
A few short throes endured with scarce a cry,
Upon the bank she laid her new-born son,

Then slid into the stream, and bathed, and all was done.

1 Dobrizhoffer's History of the Abipones, was translated into English by a daughter of S. T. Coleridge.

WHAT DRIVEL IT IS.

"Might old observances have there been kept,
Then should the husband to that pensile bed,
Like one exhausted with the birth have crept,
And laying down in feeble guise his head,
For many a day been nursed and dieted
With tender care, to chiding mothers due.
Certes a custom strange, and yet far spread
Through many a savage tribe, howe'er it grew,
And once in the old world known as widely as the new.

"This could not then be done; he might not lay
The bow and those unerring shafts aside :
Nor through the appointed weeks forego the prey,
Still to be sought amid those regions wide,
None being there who should the while provide
That lonely household with their needful food;
So still Quiara through the forest plied

His daily task, and in the thickest wood

Still laid his snares for birds, and still the chace pursued."

45

North. Conceived and brought forth in the true spirit of a howdie!'

"Then slid into the stream, and bathed, and all was done!"

Tickler. Look at the passage, North, with your own eyes. You see it so do I. Shall I ring the bell for Ambrose and other witnesses?

North. "What is writ is writ." But oh! how unlike the spirit of Byron! It is indeed pitiable.

Tickler. What the devil are you whimpering at?—Not a poet living who has not indulged in his drivel.

North. Oh! not surely to that degree!

Tickler. Yes; beyond the superlative. Then hear the people in Parliament. What ludicrous pomposity in the enunciation of old, decrepid, emaciated truths, walking arm-in-arm with skeleton falsehoods! Are there, I ask you, six men in the House of Commons who could support a part in our Noctes Ambrosiana?

North. I intend shortly to try. We shall then see of what metal they are made.

Tickler. Who are the first men in England ?-The spirits of the age?

1 Howdie-midwife.

46

PRE-EMINENCE OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

North. I know none superior to our two selves. The world tires speedily of everything set before it, except The Magazine. All the other periodicals seem to sicken their subscribers. To conduct the state is, I verily believe, much easier than to conduct Ebony. The state goes on of itself. All that the ministry is expected to do, is not to stop the state. But we carry the Magazine on. A national bankruptcy would be nothing in comparison to our stopping payment.

Tickler. I know not whether your death, or that of the Great Unknown, would most fatally eclipse the gaiety of nations.

North. Mine.

Tickler. List!-I hear Mullion, Hogg, and ODoherty.

(Door burst open, and they enter.)

(OCTOBER 1825.)

North. Let us have some sensible conversation, Timothy. At our time of life such colloquy is becoming.

Tickler. Why the devil would you not come to Dalnacardoch ?1 Glorious guffawing all night, and immeasurable murder all day. Twenty-seven brace of birds, nine hares, three roes, and a red deer, stained the heather on the Twelfth, beneath my single-barrelled Joe-not to mention a pair of patriarchal ravens, and the Loch-Ericht eagle, whose leg was broken by the Prince when hiding in the moor of Rannoch. North. Why kill the royal bird?

Tickler. In self defence. It bore down upon Sancho like a sunbeam from its eyrie on the cliff of Snows, and it would have broken his back with one stroke of its wing, had I not sent a ball right through its heart. It went up, with a yell, a hundred fathom into the clear blue air; and then, striking a green knoll in the midst of the heather, bounded down the rocky hill-side, and went shivering and whizzing along the black surface of a tarn, till it lay motionless in a huge heap among the water-lilies.

North. Lost?

Tickler. I stripped instanter-six feet four and three quarters in puris naturalibus-and out-Byroning Byron, shot, in twenty seconds, a furlong across the Fresh. Grasping the bird of Jove in my right, with my left I rowed my airy state towards the spot where I had left my breeches and other habiliments. Espying a trimmer, I seized it in my mouth, and on relanding at a small natural pier, as I hope to be shaved, lo! a pike of twenty-pound standing, with a jaw like an alligator,

A shooting quarter in the highlands of Perthshire, occupied in the summer of 1825 by some friends of Professor Wilson.

F

48

SPORT AT DALNACARDOCH.

and reaching from my hip to my instep, smote the heather, like a flail, into a shower of blossoms.

North. Was there a cloud of witnesses?

Tickler. To be sure there was. A hundred stills beheld me from the mountain-sides. Shepherd and smuggler cheered me like voices in the sky; and the old genius of the solitary place rustled applause through the reeds and rushes, and birch-trees among the rocks-paced up and down the shore in triumph

1

North. What a subject for the painter! Oh! that Sir Thomas Lawrence, or our own John Watson, had been there to put you on canvass! Or, shall I rather say, would that Chantrey had been by to study you for immortal marble!

Tickler. Braced by the liquid plunge, I circled the tarn at ten miles an hour. Unconsciously I had taken my Manton into my hand-and unconsciously reloaded—when, just as I was clearing the feeder-stream, not less than five yards across, up springs a red-deer, who, at the death of the eagle, had cowered down in the brake, and wafted away his antlers in the direction of Benvoirlich. We were both going at the top of our speed when I fired, and the ball piercing his spine, the magnificent creature sunk down, and died almost without a convulsion.

North. Red-deer, eagle, and pike, all dead as mutton!

Tickler. I sat down upon the forehead, resting an arm on each antler-Sancho sitting with victorious eyes on the carcass. I sent him off to the tarn-side for my pocket-pistol, charged with Glenlivet, No. 5. In a few minutes he returned, and crouched down with an air of mortification at my feet.

North. Ho! ho! the fairies have spirited away your nether integuments!

Tickler. Not an article to be seen!-save and except my shoes-Jacket, waistcoat, flannel shirt, breeches, all melted away with the mountain dew. There was I like Adam in Paradise, or,

"Lady of the Mere,

Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance."

North. Did not the dragon-flies attack you-the winged ants-and the wasp of the desert?

1 Sir Thomas Lawrence died in 1830.

2 Afterwards Sir John Watson Gordon, President of the Royal Scottish Academy.