son do you mean?"" The divine Richardson."-" Divine! Oh! a clergyman-I really cannot tell. You had better inquire of the bookseller of that name over the way." Here, upon our heroine's mentioning that the dead man she meant was the immortal author of Clarissa, the bookseller was casually enabled to put her upon the proper scent, by informing her that the deceased lay buried in the parish church of Saint Clement Danes, in the Strand. Back through Temple-bar incontinently drove the enamoured pilgrim;-invoked the sexton from his glass of brandy and water;-aided by a lantern (it was now dark) found the sacred sepulchre,- -a flat stone, close to the parish pump, green with age, and muddy with Sabbath pedestrians;—and, falling prostrate upon the cold marble, had reason to congratulate herself, when she arose, on not having paid her respects to the divine Richardson in her best apparel. This calamity, as the Coronation-herald said to George the Third, cannot happen again. No more huddling of poor dead folks together, like people in the pit on the late re-opening of Drury-lane Theatre. They will, hereafter, have the satisfaction of sleeping in a bed wide as that of Ware, or that of honour in which latter, according to sergeant Kite," several hundred people may sleep together without feeling each other." But I detain you too long from a description of this recent London cemetery. Over its eastern gate is inscribed in gilt characters, "Mount Rhadamanth, or The new Père la Chaise." On my first entrance, I was agreeably surprised to find so much good taste exhibited in the laying out of the graves. The good old regular jog-trot of "Affliction sore long time I bore," "An honest man, a husband dear, and a good Christian, slumbers here;" or, Adieu, dear partner of my life," rhyming to a dead certainty with "wife;" were utterly abolished. A pale-looking man, in black, indeed informed me that the Trustees of the Establishment had determined to discard not only bad poetry, but fiction, from their monumental inscriptions. "Indeed!" said a man in striped trowsers beside me, "then how will they ever get good poetry? fiction is the soul of it." "Excuse me, Sir," said he in sables; "elegiac poetry should confine itself to fact: 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum,' is an antiquated axiom, which the biographer of Doctor Young very properly expelled, and introduced 'nil nisi verum' in its place. No man, Sir, can be buried here without producing a certificate of his character while in the land of the living if that have been good, we allow his relations to blow a trumpet over his grave; if bad, they must pen an elegiac satire, or say nothing and this rule is especially enforced when the epitaph is expressed in the first person singular. It is a little too bad, when etiam mortuus loquitur,' to find a sepulchre giving vent to a falsehood."—"Now, here, gentlemen," said our guide, addressing a party of about half a dozen who had by this time entered the cemetery, "here is an instance of what I mentioned. This is the monument of Sir Giles January, citizen and goldsmith. At the mature age of sixty-one, he married Miss Myrtilla May, aged nineteen. In two years, he died of a swan-hopping dinner, caught at the Castle at Richmond. Consequently, at the period of his exit, he was sixty-three, and his Partner twenty-one. Now, Sirs, 'in the olden time,' this monumental stone would have talked of' partner dear, slumber here; mutual love, heaven above; heart from heart, 'forced to part;' and 'all that sort of thing. To all which averments, gentlemen, the Trustees of Mount Rhadamanth entertain only one objection; namely, that not one syllable of them would have been true. Step this way, Sir, if you please: you, Madam, had better stand upon that flat stone on the right: and now let us see what the gentleman has to say for himself." I glided, ghost like, between a young woman in a lilac bonnet, and a swarthy man in green spectacles, and read what follows: I left a wife, when dead and gone, While mine, alas! were sixty-three. How could old Shakspeare write such stuff? "Upon my word," cried a youngster, decorated with an eyeglass and a sky-blue cravat, "that dead man is a mighty sensible fellow. Should any thing happen to me, I shall be proud of his better acquaintance- My will is proved and that's enough.'-Capital. 'Multum in parvo.' Stop! I'll pop it down in my pocket-book: it will make an excellent addition to my sister Morgan's album :-Quite a hit!-she's at this moment in mourning, as black as a crow, for old Marmaduke Morgan, her Indigo-grinding husband, who left her fifteen hundred a-year sole executrix too: what has she to do with sables? Stay! who weds the second kills the first.' Egad! I don't remember that in Shakspeare: I'll take my oath it's neither in the Honey Moon nor Venice Preserved." The agent of the trustees of Mount Rhadamanth now led us up a sloping and rather circuitous path, pleasantly shaded by willow and cypress trees; during our progress through which we caught glimpses of divers grave-stones, bearing the customary English decorations, namely, bald-pated old men with scythes, skulls with cross bones, hour-glasses, and cherub heads with full-blown cheeks. "To confess the truth, gentlemen," said our guide, "the Arts have not hitherto made much progress in England. We could not, at the outset of the establishment, positively object to these hacknied ornaments; but they do us little credit: our comfort is that they stand sentinels over personages whom Nature manufactured when she made a Grose'-mere John Wilsons of this parish; and Martha Wadesons of that parish, and George Simpsons of t'other hamlet; very respectable people in their line, but not calculated to confer much credit upon the new Père la Chaise." At this moment, I observed that the young woman in the lilac bonnet had, with two female companions, stept over three ignoble graves, and was busied in decyphering the inscription upon a very smart monument of yellow and green marble. "Ah! ladies," ejaculated the man in black, "that is worthy your notice that is the tomb of Miss Fanny Flight; a celebrated beauty in her day: the green and yellow marble denotes the melancholy cause of her demise.' "No doubt," interrupted the youth with the blue cravat, "And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument,' As Ben Jonson says. Egad! I thought I should whip in something at last." The guide looked a reproof at the impertinence of the stripling; and to a question from one of the ladies, as to what caused her death, answered, "A lover, madam." "Oh, sir, a rejection, I suppose." "No, madam, an offer: nothing more I assure you." "Die of an offer?" "Yes, of an offer; read the epitaph: the lady, after death, confesses her errors with as much readiness as she denied them during her life." The partner of partners, the belle of the ball, And caring for none, though I smiled upon all, The parson, the merchant, the limb of the law; The merchant ran off with the niece of a Jew, And the squire" stole away " from the Village Coquette; A wharfinger's daughter at Stratford-le-Bow. I shudder'd-I sicken'd-I paid Nature's debt, "Hah! lively and lyrical enough," cried the quoter of Ben Jonson; "she seems to have died like the swan, with a song in her beak.” "What!" exclaimed a pale-looking girl, who walked arm-in-arm with her of the lilac bonnet, "died because she was courted by the apothecary? Impossible." "It is too true, I assure you," said the man in green spectacles. "I knew Miss Flight perfectly well: I once asked her to dance myself, but my green spectacles were an insurmountable obstacle: though I believe my evening coat had a black velvet collar; I rather suspect that helped to alienate her: at all events she told me she was engaged :-there her conduct was indefensible :-but, as 'touching the apothecary,' I think she was quite right. To be courted by an apothecary is a very serious matter. It is quite enough to kill any decent young woman. In every village within seven miles of the metropolis, there is a race of birds, a race of beasts, and one bat." "One bat? Lard! what has that to do with it?" said young Eye-glass. “I will explain," continued the narrator: "The esquire, the merchant, the justice of the peace, and, in some few cases, the attorney, being the upper folks, I call the birds. The butcher, the blacksmith, the exciseman, the tailor, and the gingerbread-baker, being the lower folks, I denominate the beasts. The apothecary flutters between both: he feels the pulse now of the merchant's lady, and now of the gingerbread-baker's wife is a little above par in the back parlour of the butcher, and decidedly below par in the drawing-room of the esquire-I, therefore, call him the bat. Miss Flight never could have married him: that was out of the question: so, her ammunition being all exhausted, and the birds not having been brought down, she did, what Bonaparte should have done at Waterloo-she quitted Love's service in disgust, and 'boldly ventured on the world unknown.'” At this moment, our sibyl in black looked down a by-path; and, observing two women in deep mourning, made a motion to the party to stand aside, and let the mourners pass. This hint was decorously complied with. The sisters-such they evidently were-seemed to be between thirty and forty years of age, and with faces hid in deep black veils, hastily passed the party, and walked towards the gate of the cemetery. "Ah!" cried the guide, when they were out of hearing, "that is a lamentable case. Those are two maiden sisters. Their means are but small, and of course they lead but solitary lives. They had taken a beautiful little girl under their production, in whom all their affections were centered. She, poor thing, was taken off last month by a fever. They never pass a day without coming to her grave. I see they have gone through the gate; so we may venture to look at it." The monument was an humble one, and the inscription was as follows: Sacred To the memory of The 4th of September, 1822, Affliction's daughters saw this flower arise, By them 'twas raised-by them 'tis planted here, And bloom eternal in a happier sphere. SONNET. I SAW a happy bride-within a home Of wedded bliss ;-she smiled on one who loved Nor shed on all around a tenderer light. Her passing griefs were breath'd in happy sighs, A few short years, I pass'd that house again- M. THE ADVANTAGES OF NONSENSE. "Dulce est desipere." HORACE. MR. EDITOR-I have long been impressed with a conviction which every day's observation and experience of life tends to confirm of the vast and immeasurable superiority for all purposes, whether of utility or of amusement, of prudence or pleasure, which nonsense possesses over sense. I have long thought (and if I can overcome certain prejudices of education, and certain inveterate sensible habits in which you ridiculously persist, I intend to make you think too) that, under all circumstances, and in all seasons, the merits of that dull and impertinent quality called sense have been much, very much over-rated-and that, at least, in the present day, with our infinitely extended lights, advancement, and civilization, and philosophy, it is a quality as out of place and as obsolete as any of the most absurd notions of our ancestors, which we moderns reject as old-fashioned, and for which none but drivellers retain any respect. In short, as it would be the acme of absurdity for you to keep amanuenses to copy out the ten thousand copies of your Magazine, which I presume you sell, instead of employing the able successors of Caxton, in Dorset-street-for me to poison my hall with oil-lamps instead of using modern gas-for either of us to talk about the extended plain of the earth, since Sir Isaac Newton taught us better to read a word of Pope, since Mr. Sey has settled it that he is no poet; or to believe a word of Cobbett, when all the world knows him to be a bouncer by profession; so I hold, that any one is equally behind-hand with the spirit of the present age, who suffers himself, in the nineteenth century, to be a dupe to the long-exploded humbug of good sense. The fact is, Sir, the world have long ago imperceptibly and silently disabused themselves of this mistake; and though, perhaps, I may be the first open and professed advocate of nonsense, (certainly the first, whether open or concealed, in your pages) yet, in truth, I am only preaching a doctrine which our friends and acquaintances are perpetually practising, and still more recommending and illustrating by their writings. Now, Sir, imprimis, a few words of the advantages of nonsense in the abstract. Why, really the difficulty is to find any advantage or benefit in sense. It is a toiling, drudging, stupid, dull, splenetic, and churlish quality-wading and sweating through life with a load of care on its back, and a thoughtful melancholy on its brow-fastidious in its opinions-anxious about every thing-striving after unattainable improvements-souring its temperament with learned discussions and philosophical humbugsan enemy to enjoyment—a marplot of fancy-a blighter of gaiety-a destroyer of love-a damper of conviviality-in short, a gloomy, perverse, gnomish sprite, that thrusts its dry visage and croaking voice mal à propos into all the brightest scenes and most enjoyable moments of life. While my friend Nonsense, with gay and laughing aspect, trips lightly over the surface of things; enjoys them all-flowers and weeds, ore and dross, wine and lees; is never unhappy; never out of countenance; never thinks, and is therefore never perplexed; never feels, and therefore knows not grief; makes friends easily, and loses them lightly; succeeds in love; is caressed by the world; and received as a most fashionable, entertaining, and inoffensive companion at all the |