ful of air, which they are now taking as from the bellows of a furnance, for push, dart, dive, and get along they must. Here is a little party going to a concert; they are in capital time, but they cannot help panting and toiling on their way, not forgetting to throw upon each other the sole blame of the unfortunate lateness. This young gentleman in his new cabriolet-perhaps you are of opinion that a tender Jew is to lend him some more money this morning, as he drives at such a pace. No such thing; he has nothing on earth to do but what he is doing; the day is his own; the world is all before him, and so are the foot-passengers-who, for their parts, see him coming, and will cross for the pleasure of taking their chance of being run over.

"See, too, this simple old lady; how kindly she holds her pocket open to be picked, and how anxious she seems to part with the contents of her purse, and the gold pencil-case-appealing, not to the expertness, but really to the common politeness of thieves-in whom every instinct of the gentleman must be dead, if they could remain insensible to the challenge.

"And just cast an eye into that shop; see, behind the counter, how the jeweller is doing his utmost to persuade his customer to swindle him to the extent of a hundred and fifty pounds more; how little his thoughts turn upon any point but that of sending the costly commodities before him to the house of any gentleman who will be so obliging as to give his consent, and leave his address. If he can but obtain permission to send them home to somebody, if he can only get them out of his keeping, out of his shop, his object is attained, and for once, the smile on his face is the true index of his heart. Ah! the cautious customer yields; with a profound knowledge of his art, he had doubted long and decided; doubted again, and declined; then consented to take the articles at a slightly reduced figure; and, lest he should change his mind again, the happy jeweller will take care that they shall be at his lodgings before he can get home. Oh, charming faith-the tradesman's true friend; how it helps him off with his stock !"

"Faith, Sir First of April!" exclaimed I-" come, this is blindness and folly. The tradesman's a fool!"

"Your born brother, sir-"

"In fact these people are all monstrous fools!"

"Your own blood relations, you must recollect, and what they are to-day, they never fail to be every day of the year-fools all! Tantarara, fools all!" And the shapeless, shifting, volatile sprite began to chirrup like a bird in the sunshine.

As I turned to look at him, endeavouring to get a more settled idea of his form, the clear brightness which had filled and lit up all the scene to its remotest corners, disappeared, clouds obscured the blue April sky, and a deep gloom crept over every thing.

"Here's weather!" cried I, just as Young April had cried before me, when the blue and golden light broke upon us.

"How long will it last?" rejoined the now almost invisible sprite, in my own words. I felt the retort as a rebuke, and my feeling was immediately divined.

"How inconsistent you April Fools are!" said my spirit-visiter. "When the gladness of heaven comes upon the world, when the air is April.-VOL. LXX. NO. CCLXXX.

2 Q

balm, the sky brightest, the sun tenderest and warmest, the earth greenest and fairest; you shrink ungraciously from the proffered joy, and darken the brilliancy without by a sense of despondency, expressed in How long will it last?' But when the inevitable shadow comes, when the glad heaven is temporarily hidden, and the chilling cloud hangs over the earth, stifling its sweetness, and dispersing its lustre in sad tears, then the feeling of anticipation, which should be bright as it was dark before, is unawakened; and Hope cries not out, as Discontent had cried, "How long?" "

"Come," thought I, straining my eyes to get a clearer view of my comical monitor, who was, however, enveloped in a dusky cloak that disclosed nothing, "this from the First of April is sufficiently sentimental;" but feeling bound to offer some reply, I was proceeding to remark again that Dr. Johnson had observed

"Not he," interrupted my April sprite, in a sharp tone like a sudden gust of wind; "he observed as little as any body, though he thought a great deal. Observe for yourself; when fools are the objects of your survey, by studying others you obtain self-knowledge, you know. Come, look at your opposite neighbours !"

I directed my eyes in obedience to the command, for there was something in the voice which, though mingled with laughter and mockery, enforced compliance; and dark as the day had become, I found no difficulty in discerning objects in the apartments opposite. There, in one of the attics, by a feeble light that gave the melancholy of the scene a still more sickly hue, sat a figure well-known to me in bookish history and Academy pictures, though I had never actually encountered it in life; a meagre youth, evidently enduring, not struggling with, poverty-evidently too, in ill-health-writing indifferent sonnets and unequal elegies, sad as night, for fame-yea, in the hope of a bright fame and in the very next room sat a greybeard, old enough to know better, a hale man, fully capable of digging, or of cross-sweeping at the least, there that strong man sat, writing real histories, not romances, with the view of making money-bright and solid gold.

"Is it so?" I inquired, half-inclined to believe that I was marked out for a victim to the make-believe humours of the day; "and is this the game they play at all the year round? Sit they so, pen in hand, from one First of April to another, partly self-cheated, partly duped by the sweet but cruel promises of the distributors of laurels and the proprietors of ledgers! Then two of our authors are foolsthat's certain.'

"Fools all!" said the chuckling notes of my dimly-seen companion.

Below this was a far brighter and more vivacious scene. Within a brilliant chamber, luxuriantly adorned, reclined its mistress, in the easiest of chairs, but in the uneasiest of humours. Jewels were tossed about, and elegancies of many a fantastic shape were upset in various parts of the boudoir, which was in admired disorder. A storm had been blowing there-nay, was blowing still. The lady was waging war against her lover, who, yet at her feet (where he was not at all safe), imploring forgiveness, had dared to manifest insensibility to her modest wish for new settlements; an annuity, double its existing amount, for

life, with a thousand or two for present trinkets, and silence to intrusive, low-born tradesmen, who had contracted a habit of knocking at the door.

It was not "beauty's door of glass" through which I gazed, for not a feature, in its very best of days, could Beauty have contributed to her face; never, in short, was Plainness more distinctly visible to the naked eye. Fury perhaps, rather improved the countenance by giving to it a character of some kind, though not the most fascinating. Sour, petulant, and vain, there was not a grace of mind, a charm of feeling, in the fair one's composition to atone for external defects.

Yet what of all this was visible to the eyes of the enslaved, the enraptured lover? Of what want of heart or mind did his blind passion permit him to be conscious! To his sight she was an angel-in his estimation a dove supremely gentle. For her he had impaired his fortune, damaged his reputation, spotted all that was purest in his nature, outraged the sanctities of his home, and banished its holy calm of happiness for ever. This he had willingly done, and he now as willingly submitted to the imperious whims of his vain and avaricious tyrant as he had flattered her vanities; but it would avail nothing; affection, gratitude, he could not command-for there is no water in a dry welland he could only purchase an insulting peace, a cold and insolent toleration, by yielding to fresh exactions, and bowing to unbridled

humours.

I closed my eyes upon the scene in inexpressible disgust. "After all," said I, to little April," the fair tyrant is as silly as she is saucy. She will play with her moth with the golden wings' until she loses him. She is a fool."

"Fools all!" cried little April again; and then, in a sweet and gentle tone, he bade me look upon a different scene, which was quite as clear as that before me in its outline and details, although it seemed at a great distance off.

As I looked in the direction pointed out, and saw with astonishing distinctness the sorrowful but lovely picture presented there, a gentle shower of rain fell upon the intervening scene, and the small blue eyes of April dropped glistening tears.

In a room stored with those comforts which are to be felt rather than described as constituting a home-furnished with prints, books, and music-sat a lady who had not outlived early youth, though its lustre had become a quiet shining light, and its gay freshness had subsided into a pensive charm-which the soul of the gazer felt to be more sweet and winning still. She was exquisitely beautiful, with calm eyes, a broad fair brow, and a mouth so soft and flexible, that the tenderest emotions, as well as the loftiest thoughts, could never want expression în its sensibility. Her figure was slight, yet it wore a noble air, and lacked no grace of dress that the purest taste in the arts of adornment could bestow.

papa.

She was not alone. A girl with the face of her mother-a mere child-was at her knees, repeating a simple lesson, ending with the evening prayer, a score of kisses, and prattle about " "Riddle too complex for solution!" I exclaimed. April trick or a living truth! Is it his wife-his child? trampled minister to the vices and vanities of his unsightly and odious

"Is this an

Can he, the

tyrant, the plundered of her avarice, the scorned of her caprice, be the master of such a home, the free tenant of such a paradise, the lord of such beauty and such affections? Can the poorest crawler alive be the possessor of such priceless riches?"

"The man's a fool!" whispered the voice beside me.

"Fool! Yes, but has the wide world such another?"

"Plenty of them walking about," said April the First, laughing and crying both in a breath.

"Look elsewhere," he continued, without losing the sixtieth part of a

moment.

At a little distance, in a room whose centre was occupied by a large desk surmounted by brass rods, across which lay ebony rulers, dusty papers tied with tape that never could have been red, and books bound in dirty parchment that might possibly have been the skins of lawyers in former ages, were congregated some half-dozen unpleasant men of business, in discussion upon a deed for signature. One of the party affixed his hand to it, drew forth bank-notes of large amount, together with a check-book, from which he gave drafts of high figure, and the transaction was concluded. He was a keen, quick-witted, experienced speculator-really wealthy-and he had taken one of the national theatres, having first paid down, past mistake, the full rent for the

season.

In the theatre itself, which was close by, I could discern the principal tragedian alone upon the stage, studying and rehearsing a light comedy part-the figure resembled the ghost of John Kemble, practising himself for appearance in the apparition of Charles Surface. And in the green-room sat a dramatist, a man of genuine talent and elevated tastes, writing with the best of his brain and animal spirits, a legitimate five-act comedy, in the sure and certain hope of meeting the most honest and gentlemanly treatment; confident, in fact, that it would be admirably acted, and that he should be liberally paid for it.

At these spectacles, I could not suppress the resentment natural to a generous mind when it discovers that it has been made the victim of a "dead take-in."

"Here, Sir Sprite," said I, "you are playing April-day pranks at my expense, making me the sole fool of the party. These men have taken a final leave of their senses. They are not fools, but maniacs."

"Fools all!" laughed April the First. "Veluti in speculum. The mirror is wide enough for authors, actors, and audience. Come, look again."

So I did, but was a little bewildered by the multitude of visions-if so they might be called, though in truth they were not unfamiliar realities-staring upon me, rather than I on them, from every nook and corner of the wide transparency before me. Every cloud, by this time had dissolved in light, and a world of action was working, like steam-engines turned into semblances of humanity, under my unstrained and clearly-seeing eyes.

Peeping into No. 16, on the other side of the way, I detected that mean-souled scapegrace, Grint, "putting the question," as the phrase used to be, but "popping" it, as modern pronunciation goes, to the rich heiress, Miss Bankstock, for the sole sake of her three hundred in the three-and-a-halfs; and the rich heiress accepted him, for

the simple reason that she hated Wiggle. And next door in that sensible and, indeed, devout family, there was a very distressing scene to which I was compelled to be a witness-a conscientious wrangle, the more lamentable, as every one said, because it was associated with religion; and a very desperate lovers' quarrel ensued between the most discreet and sober-minded of young couples and all about the biscuit that Uncle Fry cracked and munched in church on Sunday morning; Jane protesting that it was an Abernethy, and Joseph vehemently asserting that it was a Captain's.

"Fools all!" said little April, as, in an infinite variety of keys, he said upon numberless occasions, with a perseverance worthy of the eloquent fudge" of friend Burchell himself.

The secret conferences for a more effectual development of the mesmeric principle; the open meetings for the institution of railroads to connect the districts which are most destitute of education with county prisons, thereby saving the cost of erecting parish schools; the plans for importing cotton-manufactures from America, instead of the raw material, thus lessening the evil of excessive labour in our factories; and all the other schemes of a truly grand and practical character with which I easily became acquainted, are subjects for special reports, and not herein to be indicated or vindicated. The less so, indeed, as they produced in my mind a complexity of ideas, and a confusion of images, that by degrees, in the course of several hours it might be, rendered the faculties of sight and hearing considerably less acute, and ultimately shut up both.

The sun had now again withdrawn the vivifying influence which gave a transparent character to every visible object in the outer world; the duskiness increased to darkness; not only the inhabitants, but the tenements, and the streets themselves faded utterly from view; and the sole token of the existence of such a scene as I had but lately witnessed was an audible one-a tremendous clatter as of stone-throwing, -a smash of glass, past the power of Brobdignagian hailstones, rattling on conservatories miles in circumference, to describe; a sound that proclaimed an earthquake in the fragile, glazier-built city; the destruction of a worse than" crockery-ware metropolis."

I had only time for a single reflection, brief as a flash of lightning. "These unhappy people," thought I, "all lived in glass-houses; alas! then, it was their destiny to throw stones."

"All fools!" said a small, clear, laughing, and yet dying voice in my ear, as I started up in broad daylight, and saw with the most sober gaze in the world, the face of my landlady, intruding at the partially opened door-opened sufficiently wide to admit her head, but how that pair of extended eyes, straining their powers to take in a thousand wonders at once, ever found admittance at so contracted a space, is a mystery for ever; but there they were, and in an audible voice they spake, before her tongue had power to move, "What is the matter?"

"Come in, Mrs. Mildmay.

over the breakfast-table ?"

Why, so, I seem to have knocked

"Yes, to be sure, sir, and all that nice new set-"

"Yes; what is the day of the month, Mrs. Mildmay?"

"The second, sir."

"The first, you mean; the first of April !"