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the book) in her rich silk damask gown, with large flowers, her little dried hands armoured with rings, and her pink shoes with high heels, like those that were the mode at the commencement of the last reign;" Mr. Boothby with his stockings gone at the knees, and his waistcoat closely buttoned to the throat to conceal the want of a shirt; and Mr. Fitzpatrick the actor in his red plush breeches, white dimity waistcoat, and pinchbeck-plate buckles hiding his shoes. The book is one to be read twice: first for its story, and secondly for the hundred little touches which are the secret of its perfect verisimilitude. Here is one of those touches: "To Mr. Garrick I had but one objection: that he spoke too much as though he was rather off the stage than on; whereas you might always see both Mr. Barry and Mr. Quin delivered their parts as though they were acting them, and impressed by their solemn slow delivery where Mr. Garrick wearied by a tedious naturalness." Only an author intimately acquainted with the dramatic taste of that age could have written this. Take this song, written by Mr. Bracebridge:

As when within the warrior's breast
The foeman's fatal dart is buried,
If from the wound the dart you wrest,
The warrior to his death is hurried.
So now, since Damon in her heart

A lodgement's found, and Chloe's willing,
Sure should you force him to depart,

You'd find your kindness more than killing.

Take this speech of Lady Ringwood's: "In my day a tradesman was a sober, respectable person; he knew his condition, and did not trespass beyond it; for his treats he was satisfied with a ride on a Moorfields hack at eighteen-pence a side, and twice a year would carry his family to Edmonton or Hornsey; his holiday fare was a plum-pudding and a loin of veal, and his drink elder or raisin wine; he was a man, my dear, who paid his bills; his son was taught to despise Latin, and was well-grounded in Cocker, which was sure all the learning he needed to carry on his father's business; his daughter was instructed in every kind of needlework, and was not above waiting at table when the maid was at a show. But your modern tradesman, forsooth, is a clubman; he is above his shop, and leaves his 'prentices to ruin his custom; he cultivates the friendship of the underplayers, hath a box at the opera, foots it at Ranelagh, takes his wife and daughters to the monthly assembly, and in the summer months visits Brightelmstone or Bath dressed in toupet, snuff-box, and sword-knot. He drinks claret and Madeira, hath a footman in

livery to serve him, walks in the minuet step and converses in recitativo. The young lady, as he styles his daughter, is sent to a boarding-school, of which the mistress is the wife of a broken exciseman, where French is taught by a Swiss or an Irish Papist, the learned languages by a Welsh curate, dancing by a valet-dechambre, and musick by a puppet-show fiddler."

Though the book deals with an epoch of English society notorious for its looseness and profligacy, it is as wholesome in its tone as a novel by Miss Mulock or Mr. Macdonald. The charming style in which it is printed and bound is very conducive to the enjoyment of its perusal; and to every lover of the good old days it may be recommended as a work eminently entitled to take its place on the library shelves by the side of the established favourites in English fiction.

ALLEGORIES OF THE MONTHS.

JANUARY.

"BEHOLD, I make all things new!" is among the predictions most frequently misread in that much-abused book of the Apocalypse. Among the literal interpreters of that possibly incomprehensible composition there is a prevalent idea that between this life and the next is an indefinite period of torpor on the part of the imprisoned spirit; and, by consequence, a well-nigh impassable hiatus between the man who dies and the spirit that lives. To many who hold that death is not even the momentary suspension of consciousness, this prolonged lethargy would seem almost to involve loss of personal identity. One man lies down, and another rises up. An active, scheming, busy man departs, and from his ashes emerges a calm, passionless angel. Surely, such is not the lesson which is taught by the changing months, the alternating years.

The analogy suggested here is rather identity in diversity. The new is only the old with a difference. Janus, who gave the month its name, was the two-faced heathen deity looking both ways, back upon the past and forward to what was coming. This Christmas was substantially the same as last Christmas, this

new year as last new year. The same, yet how different! So surely will the new life be only a deepening of the old.

And our Allegory of the Month and Year is corroborated by all nature. Nothing is lost, only changed; only enters on new and infinitely varying combinations. So our old lives will be lived again; our old selves will live again. Live again! they never die. Anastasis is the standing up, not the rising again. "There is no death. What seems so is transition."

Surely no sterner homily than this could stand the preacher in stead. We are for ever what we make ourselves. Changing like the changeful years and months, yet the same in diversity. What life makes us, death will deepen, and judgment stamp and stereotype.

And there is an intuitive longing that this should be so, which is half an evidence of its truth. We do not want rudely to uproot the past and plant something novel in its stead. There is a grand conservatism in nature which tells us the past shall be perpetuated in its best aspects, only with the bar sinister of the fall blotted out from the scutcheon.

In no revolutionary sense, any more than now we greet one another with the familiar salutation, "A happy new year!" shall those bright ones address us who, when time is ended and eternity begun,

to the new home, which shall only be a repetition and an intensification of the old.

FEBRUARY.

Scarcely has January come and gone when winter is-theoretically, at least-over. The "time of singing birds" comes. February brings on St. Valentine's Day, the traditional era for the mating of the song-birds.

That same St. Valentine's Day is an instance of wisdom on the part of the early Church in pressing into its service the old heathen festival of Juno Februata, when lads and lasses mated for the time being, and consecrating it to a Christian martyr; just as, no doubt, the old pagan festival itself was simply in its turn a consecration of nature, and that exceedingly natural process of "mating," which is so instinctively suggested at spring-tide. It forces us grizzled men and matrons back, just as it urges

smooth-faced Corydon and blushing Phyllis forward, to ask are marriages made in heaven? What amount of freewill is brought to bear on the matrimonial process; and how far are lads and maidens predestinate? Man and wife seem often the unlikeliest people to have come together. There is something which looks immensely like gravitation, or magnetic attraction, or some other irresponsible but plainly invincible agency at work in the first meeting, and subsequent association.

And then with regard to the end of that association. Does the mating in time remain throughout eternity? What Benedict has not paused to speculate on that? Double marriages, of course, complicate the problem considerably; but the permanence and purity of affection point at least to a solution. Nobody would deem a mariage de convenance made in heaven, or likely to endure. But the marriage of affection, however imprudent, may, though unfortunate in its results here, bear in it that element of gravitation which promises permanence. Here, of course, somebody will suggest that "gravitations" take place occasionally after marriage, and ask whether a new "sorting" will ensue. On the subject of "spiritual wives" it is confessedly dangerous to speak. Let us drop speculation, then, and, fancying we are Corydon again, write, as in duty bound, a double acrostic to Phyllis:

Could I but sip the sweetness of thy li P,
Or taste the dewy freshness on thy mout H,
Right gladly would I face eternit Y,

Y et hopeful thou wouldst be my Phyllis stil L.
Deem not, dear girl, this little life is al L,

Or death can dim affection. Sure am I

N or time, nor death can sever our linked heart S.

MAURICE DAVIES.

THE GARDEN AND SPRING.

FROM THE OORDOO OF THE "BAGH O BAHAR" AND THE PERSIAN OF THE "FOUR DERVISHES."

TRANSLATED BY THE AUTHOR OF THE "Two OFFICERS," "WIDOW DALLAS," &c.

XII.

THE second dervish continued his story as follows:

This, then, is the story of the state that you see me in. Moved as I was with hearing it, I put on the dress of a dervish and went to wander about in the wildernesses and the jungles, and pursued my journey until I reached a port, from which I embarked, and after some time reached the island of which he had given me an account. I proceeded to the great city and lodged myself there privately. I wandered about in its streets and by-lanes, and I visited every approach that there was to the palace of the princess; but I could not find out any means by which I could obtain access. I was exceedingly harassed and distressed at the long disappointment which I had borne and which apparently I was further to bear. But one day, as I was standing in the marketplace, I saw the crowd running away precipitately in each direction, and the shop-keepers shutting up their shops and retreating inside their houses. The display of goods which had been like a fair, in a moment vanished, and the streets became deserted. After a short time, a young, able-bodied man like a Roostum in strength and stature, approached. He had on a helmet, and his body was cased in armour. He carried pistols in his belt, and a two-edged sword in his hand. He strutted on roaring and raging, as it were in fury, and seemed in his gestures and language insane. After him, two slaves followed, dressed in woollen clothes and bearing on their heads a coffin covered with velvet. When they came up I wanted to join them, and the persons in the street told me not, but I heeded them not, and following him, we came up to a large house. When he saw me near him at the door he cut at me twice with a sword in a menacing manner; I swore to him that if he took my life I should not be sorry and would forgive him the deed, for, said I, "Life is a burden to me."

When he saw that I was really wishing to die, the Almighty