sort of abuses, the red side of their cheek, the jollity of a refectory. Pope's picture is before me, of

Happy convents, buried deep in vines,

Where slumber abbots purple as their wines,"

(A couplet as plump and painted as the subject.) The transition to Horace and Anacreon is a pleasing necessity. I am in the very thick of the vines of Redi, the author of the Bacchus in Tuscany. His Bacchus is as flourishing a god as ever, and sworn by as devoutly, though the saints have displaced his image. Florence, at a little distance, meets the turn of my eye at every opening of the trees. In short, I am in a world of poetry and romance, of vines and olives, and myrtles (which grow wild), of blue mountains and never-ending orchards, with a beautiful city in the middle of it. What signifies? I think of an English field in a sylvan country, a cottage and oaks in the corner, a path and a stile, and a turf full of daisies; and a child's book with a picture in it becomes more precious to me than all the landscapes of Claude.

I intended to sprinkle this article with some flowers out of the Italian poets; but positively I will not do it. They are not good. They are not true. The grapes are sour. Commend me to the cockney satisfactions of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, who talk of "merry London," of lying whole hours looking at the daisies, and of walking out on Sunday mornings to enjoy the daisies and green fields. There are no daisies here that I can see, except those belonging to the Grand Duke. What is a daisy belonging to a duke? Nature is not to be put upon a gentleman's establish

been published. They designate them as the sweepings of his study, his private weaknesses, unworthy of so great a genius, and exclaim against his friends for collecting them. I really cannot see the humiliation. If he had written nothing else, there might be some color of accusation against him; though I do not see why a dean is bound to be a dull private gentleman. But if he had written nothing else, I think it may be pretty safely pronounced that he would not have written these trifles. They bear the mark of a great hand, trifling as they are. Their extravagance is that of power, not of weakness; and the wilder Irish waggery of Dr. Sheridan, slatternly and muddled, stands rebuked before them. What should we have done had we lost Mary the Cook-maid's Letter, and the Grand Question about the Barracks? These, to be sure, are excepted by everybody; but I like, for my part, to hear all that such an exquisite wag has to say. I except the coarseness of two or three pieces, which I never read. I wish the critics could say as much. I have such a disgust of this kind of writing that there are poems, even in Chaucer, which I never look at. But this does not hinder me from loving all the rest. Perhaps I carry my dislike of what I allude to too far. It is possible that it may not be without its use in certain stages of society. But so it is, and I mention it, that I may not be thought to be confounding or recommending two different things.

It is our own fault if we take this Rainy-Day Poetry for more than the author intended it. It is our loss if we do not take it for as much. I give

it this title, because we may suppose it written to while away the tedium of rainy days, or of the feelings that resemble it. There is also Rainy-Day Prose; of a great deal of which my own writings are composed, though I was hardly aware of it at the time. I relish all that Swift has favored us with, of either kind. The only approach that we minor humorists can make to such men, is to show that we understand them in all their moods, that nothing is lost on us. The greatest fit of laughter I ever remember to have had, was in reading the Commination piece against William Wood, in which all his enemies are introduced execrating him in puns. The zest was heightened by the presence of a deaf old lady, who had desired a friend of mine and myself to take a book, while waiting to see a kinsman of hers: Her imperturbable face, the shocking things we said before her, and even the dread of being thought rude, produced a sort of double drama in our minds, extreme and irresistible.

...

A periodical writer derives the same privileges from necessity which other men do from wit. The rainy days here in Italy are very rare compared with those of England; but the damps which the latter produce within us sometimes make their appearance when we are away; and a . . . In short, it is not necessary to inform the reader that periodical writers produce a great deal of rainy-day poetry, voluntary or involuntary. If he excuses it, all is well. I shall, therefore, whenever I am inclined, make use of this title to pass off rhymes that I have more pleasure in writing than in publishing. The other day I was

moved to vent my pluviose indignation on the subject of Ferdinand, King of Spain; a personage who has had the extraordinary fortune (even for a prince) to become the spectacle of the whole world, precisely because he is destitute of every quality which deserves their notice. That my poem might be as small as my subject, I wrote it in Lilliputian lines and miniature cantos; but, in consequence of the variety of feelings that pressed upon me as I proceeded, three out of the four became neither one thing nor t'other, and are not worth indulgence. The exordium I lay before the reader, because it contains an anecdote of his majesty's first appearance on the stage, with which he may not be acquainted. I had it from a Spanish gentleman now in England.

"I sing the least of things,
To wit, the least of kings.
Imprimis, when the nation
First raised him to his station,
And blest him as he rid

In triumph to Madrid,

A gentleman who saw him

(And hugely longed to claw him)

Said, that he never showed

One feeling on the road,

But sat in stupid pride,

Staring on either side,
Letting his hand be kissed
(I think I see the fist).

As if, where'er they took it,

They meant to pick his pocket;

And goggling like an owl,

The hideous beaky fool!"

The last line is emphatic! I had not patience to continue in a proper style of burlesque. Ferdinand has

astonished even those who were never astonished at kings before. And yet what was to be expected from this portentous specimen of royalty, royalty, naked, instinctive, unmitigated, unadorned? What examples he had before him! What an education! What contempt of decencies, public and private! What a mother, what a minister, what a father! The same gentleman who related to me the above anecdote, told me that he had seen the old king dining in public, and that the spectacle was disgusting beyond description. Such brutal feeding, such pawing and grinding, such absorption in the immediate appetite and will, and contempt of everything else in the world, could only be exhibited by one who was accustomed to set up the mere consciousness of royalty as superior to every other consideration. This is Ferdinand's principle. He has no other, nor ever had, even when he petitioned to be made a member of Bonaparte's family. Bonaparte dazzled him, like something supernatural, and was an emperor to boot; but if he had not been one, it would have made no difference. The royal will, the immediate security, interest, or even whim, sanctions everything; and' royalty is to come out clear from the furnace upon the strength of its divine right, let it have gone through what it may. How much right have we to complain of it, flattering it as we do, even in the best regulated monarchies? The frog in the fable swelled herself to bursting, as it was; but if she had, besides, had all frogland for spectators and applauders, if she had been puffed up with huzzas! and vivas! and been made a worshipped spectacle wherever she carried