us, and menace us with their sundering ! I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that, rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to be laughed at by a dozen generations, in the hope that it might happen to me that the thirteenth, out of sheer weariness at the prolonged lampooning, might grow pitiful at my purgatorial experiences, and so betake itself to nursing and fondling me into repute, furnishing me with halfa-dozen of those lynx-eyed commentators who would discern innumerable beauties and veracities through the calfskin walls of my beatified bantling. They might find, at last, that I had "the gold-strung harp of Apollo" and played a "most excellent diapason,-celestial music of the spheres," hearing the harmony

"As plainly as ever Pythagoras did," when "Venus the treble ran sweet division upon Saturn the bass.”

Write for posterity! Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them! The age capers in its own fee simple" and cries with the Host in "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," "Away with punctilios and orthography!" Write poetry now! Thank you, my ancient friend! "My fiddlestick cannot play without rosin." To be sure, I am, like most minstrels, ready for an offer; and should any lover of melody propose

66

"Two hundred crowns, and twenty pounds a year

For three good lives,"

I should not be slow in responding, "Cargo! hai Trincalo!" and in presently getting into the best possible trim and tune. But the poet may say now, with the Butler in the old play, "Mine are precious cabinets, and must have precious jewels put into them; and I know you to be

merchants of stock-fish, dry meat, and not men for my market; then vanish!”

Barrow said that "poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense"; and I think, that, deceived by the glut, the present time is very much of Barrow's mind. But, courage, my music-making masters! Your warbling, if it be of genuine quality, shall echo upon the other side of the hill which hides the unborn years. Only be sure, the song be pure; and you may "give the fico to your adversaries." You may live in the hearts and upon the lips of men and women yet unborn; and should the worst come, you may figure in "The Bibliographer's Manual," with a star of honor against your name, to indicate that you are exceedingly scarce and proportionally valuable; rival collectors, with fury in their faces, will run you up to a fabulous price at the auction, and you will at last be put into free quarters for life in some shady alcove upon some lofty shelf, with unlimited rations of dust, as you glide into a vermiculate dotage. Why should you be faint-hearted, when the men of the stalls ask such a breath

stretching price for the productions of William Whitehead, Esq., who used to celebrate the birthdays of old George the Third after this fashion :"And shall the British lyre be mute,

Nor thrill through all its trembling strings, With oaten reed and pastoral flute

While every vale responsive rings?" Ben Jonson called Inigo Jones Sir Lanthorn Leatherhead, but St. Paul's still stands; and how many flies are there in the sparkling amber of" The Dunciad"! Have the critics, poor birdling, torn your wings, and mocked at your recording? I know, as Howell wrote to "Father Ben," that "the fangs of a bear and the tusks of a wild-boar don't bite worse and make deeper gashes than a goose-quill sometimes; no, not the badger himself, who is said to be so tenacious of his bite that he will not give over his hold until he feels his teeth meet and bone crack." I know all about it, my minstrel boy! for have I not, in my day, given and taken, and shouldered back again when

I have been shouldered? Pray, do not finger your eyes any longer! Screw your lyre up to concert pitch, and go on with your stridulous performances! Neither you nor I know how bad may be the taste of our grandchildren, or how high you may stand when they have

"Made prostitute and profligate the Muse."

If you cannot be a poet, be a poetaster; and if you cannot be that, be a poetess, or "she-poet," as Johnson, in his big dictionary, defines the word. So "gently take all that ungently comes," and hammer away as sedulously as old Boileau. Somebody will, undoubtedly, in the next age, relish your rinsings. A poet, you know, is a prophet. Console yourself by vaticinating in the bower of your bedchamber, as you count the feet upon your fingers, your own immortality. If 'tis a delusion, 'tis a cheap one, to which even a poet can afford to treat himself. Play with and humor your life, till you fall asleep, and then the care will be over! Meanwhile, you must be more stupid than I think, if you cannot find somebody to give you your fodder of flattery. You need not blush, for I know that you like it, and you need not be ashamed of liking it. We all do,-we are all women in that regard; although the honestest man to confess it that I ever heard of was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who said to Pope, when he was painting his picture, "I can't do so well as I should do, unless you flatter me a little; pray, flatter me, Mr. Pope! You know I love to be flattered."

You see, my excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, "something of a

philosopher and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life; and I shrewdly suspect, that, so far from knowing the difference between a male and a female rhyme, you are unfamiliar with the close family connection between "trees" and "breeze," or between "love" and "dove." My episodical remarks are for the benefit of young Dolce Pianissimo, who has taken, I am sorry to say, to gin, shirt-collars prodigious, and the minor magazines, and whose friends are standing aghast and despairing at his lunacy. But, after all, 'tis my best irony quite thrown away; for the foolish boy will believe me quite in earnest, and will still be making love to that jade, Mistress Fame, although he knows well enough how many she has jilted. But as he grows in stature, he may grow in sense. If you see him very savagely cut up in "The Revolver," you will recognize the kindly hands which held the bistoury, scalpel, and tenaculum, and the gentleman who wept while he wounded.

But I have long enough, I fear too long, tormented you with my drivel. It must be your consolation, that, in spirit, you have been with me to-night, as I have thought of the old days, pausing for a moment over these mute but eloquent companions, to dream or to sigh, and then once more turning the old familiar pages as I try to forget, for just a little while, that dear familiar face. If something of indifference has tinctured these hurried lines, if I have been unjust in my estimate of the world's honors and the rewards of the Muses, you will forgive me, if you will remember how the great Burke reduced the value of earthly honors and emoluments to less than that of a peck of wheat. My fire is gone out. My candle is flickering in the socket. There is light in the cold, gray East. Good-morning, Don Bob!— good-morning!

into form and infuse them with life. In all the distinct creations of God, from the time when the waters first subsided and the dry land appeared, in everything organized and inorganized, earth, air, sea, and their inhabitants, there is no element which was not in existence when the earth was without form and void.

-

Philosophers tell us that three hundred and fifty millions of years elapsed after the globe began to solidify, before it was fitted for the lowest plants. And more than one million years more were necessary, after the first plants began to grow upon its young surface, to bring it forward to the condition which the Divine Father deemed suitable for the reception of man. If the days of Cain and Abel were the infancy of the world,—as we have sometimes heard, when will it come to maturity? Its divisions of life cannot follow the plan of animated beings; for, with an embryonic condition of an indefinite period, and an infancy of three hundred and fifty millions of years, more or less, we can hardly expect that it will really have begun to enjoy the freedom of adult life, before the human race will have attained to its earthly limit of perfectibility, or have so overstocked the surface of the globe as to make it necessary to remove to some larger sphere.

It is curious, we say, to think that everything now on the earth or composing its substance was present, though in far different form, at the beginning, — that the Almighty gathered together in this part of the universe all the materials out of which to create all the forms of things which it was his pleasure to evolve here through all time,-that in that nebulous mass were revolving, not only the gases which were at last to combine in various manners and proportions to form the rocky crust and the watery investment of the earth, but that in that dense and noisome cloud floated also the elements of all the beautiful objects that furnish the daily enchantments of life. Flowers and trees, birds and fishes, locusts and mastodons, all things, from the

tiniest animalcule to man, were there, unmodelled, not even in embryo,—their separate existences then only in the mind of God. There, Christian and Saracen, Jew and Gentile, Caucasian and Negro, Hindoo and Pariah, all the now heterogeneous natures which are as oil and water, were blended in one common vapor.

Finally the condensation of all the gaseous elements began, and the aëriform masses became liquid, and the waters, – what mineral waters they were, when they were saturated with granite and marble, diamonds, rubies, arsenic, and iron-thus deposited by the vapor, left a gas above them light enough to bear some faint resemblance to our air. Still this atmosphere was surcharged with vapors which no lungs could tolerate, whether of man or reptile; and other steps must be taken to clear it of its unwholesome properties. Then did the Almighty will introduce, one after another, the germs of plants,- first of all, the lower orders, the ferns, which seek the shade, and the lichens, which grow in damp and dark recesses, mosses, which cling to bare rocks, living almost on air and water alone,— everything which needed not bright sunlight to invigorate it nor soil to cling to. Year by year and age by age did these humble plants extract their nourishment from the murky vapors that shrouded the earth, and, after fashioning those gases into a living tissue of stems and leaves, year after year did they die and lay their remains upon the rocks, accumulating by slow steps a soil which would in time be capable of giving holding-ground to mightier plants. The trees came,-and gigantic they must have been; and every species of tree, shrub, and herb now upon the earth, and of all animals that walk, fly, or swim, was introduced before the creation of man.

It was as if the elements were too gross for the constitution of man, when they were first collected from the nebulous mass, as if they needed to go through the intermediate forms of plants and animals, passing in succession from one to