Cy gist ma femme; ah! qu'elle est bien
Pour son repos, et pour le mien,"

which Boileau stupidly pronounced to be the best epigrammatic epitaph upon record, to the more recent

"Here lies my dear wife, a sad vixen and shrew;

If I said I regretted her I should lie too."

And his facetious dullness will be wound up with a few hard hits at widows, from the dame of Ephesus to the last new subject of scandal ; though he will prudently say nothing of those upon the coast of Malabar, who for many ages have continued to afford instances of conjugal devotion to which no solitary parallel can be produced, upon the part of a husband, throughout the whole wide extent of time and space.

His babble, in short, will be a faithful echo of the old jest-books, none of which can be opened without our stumbling upon a hundred of such stale flippancies. Let us consult the Virgilian lots, for instance, of the "Musarum Delicia," by opening it hap-hazard, and we encounter the following venerable joke:

"Women are books, and men the readers be
In whom ofttimes they great errata see;
Here sometimes we've a blot, there we espy
A leaf misplaced, at least a line awry;
If they are books, I wish that my wife were
An almanack, to change her every year.”

Another dip and we turn up the following dull invective :

"Commit the ship unto the wind,

But not thy faith to woman-kind;
There is more safety in a wave,
Than in the faith that women have;
No woman's good ;-if chance it fall
Some one be good amongst them all,
Some strange intent the Destinies had,
To make a good thing of a bad.”

The next venture exhibits some quibbling, too stupid to transcribe, upon the etymology of the word woman, which is made synonimous with woe-to-man, while we are sapiently informed that a very little alteration would convert Eve into evil and devil. Once more we open upon the old falsehood of female inconstancy.

"A woman's love is like a Syrian flower,

That buds, and spreads, and withers in an hour."

And shortly after we begin with the fertile subject of marriage.
Marriage, as old men note, hath liken'd been
Unto a publick fast, or common rout,
Where those that are without would fain get in,
And those that are within would fain get out."

Even in an epitaph upon a young woman, which was meant to be encomiastic, the writer cannot forbear a misplaced taunt upon the sex. "The body which within this earth is laid,

Twice six weeks knew a wife, a saint, a maid;

Fair maid, chaste wife, pure saint,-yet 'tis not strange,
She was a woman, therefore pleased to change :

And now she's dead some woman doth remain,
For still she hopes once to be changed again."

In justice to the author we shall conclude with the following, both because it is in a better style as well as taste:

On Husband and Wife.

"To these whom Death again did wed,
The grave's the second marriage-bed;
For though the hand of Fate could force
'Twixt soul and body a divorce,
It could not sever man and wife,
Because they both lived but one life.
Peace, good reader, do not weep,
Peace, the lovers are asleep:
They, sweet turtles, folded lie
In the last knot that love could tie:
Let them sleep, let them sleep on,
Till this stormy night be gone,
And the eternal morrow dawn,
Then the curtains will be drawn,
And they waken with that light,
Whose day shall never sleep in night."

And now, before dismissing the gentle reader, we not only caution him against the sorry and stale impertinences levelled at a sex, which in these days of sordid or ambitious scrambling among men, remains the redeeming bright spot of humanity, and almost the exclusive depositary of the virtues; but we do in all sincerity of friendly purpose admonish him to perpend our motto from Middleton; and if he be a bachelor, to lose no time in becoming a candidate for those ineffable comforts, "locked up in woman's love." To guide him in this pious undertaking, we will transcribe for him Sir John Mennis's instructions

How to Choose a Wife.

"Good Sir, if you'll show the best of skill

To pick a virtuous creature,

your

Then pick such a wife, as you love a life,
Of a comely grace and feature.

The noblest part let it be her heart,

Without deceit or cunning,

With a nimble wit and all things fit,

With a tongue that's never running;

The hair of her head it must not be red,
But fair and brown as a berry;

Her forehead high with a crystal eye,
Her lips as red as a cherry."

H.

THE MAN WITH THE HEMD.

THERE is scarcely any man that has lived much in the world, who does not know what it is to be haunted. I do not mean by ghosts, goblins, or devils, (unless they be blue devils,) brownies, bogles, or banshees;-I allude to the continual meeting of some individual face, which seems as if it had been formed for the sole purpose of being always opposite your own. Wherever you may chance to be," in church or market, at wedding or at burial, Sunday or Saturday, meal-time or fasting," the everlasting haunter is sure to be at your side. In town (and of course when I spoke of a man living much in the world, I meant in London) this has happened to me to a degree very nearly intolerable; for sometimes your haunter chances to be your horror also; and the conjunction of the characters is truly deplorable. In the course of one evening I have dined at the same coffee-house with one of this genus-found myself in the same box with him at the playand afterwards been squeezed against him at the same party. It has sometimes happened to me to have a haunter, who evidently regarded me in the same light-till at last the absurdity of continually finding ourselves nose to nose has caused us to half smile, half laugh at each other in recognition, whenever we met. I have once or twice become acquainted with some of these subsequently, and we have compared notes in amicable disputation, which had played the part of haunter, and which that of apparition. I shall never forget being introduced to a man who had been my torment for nearly two years. I did not know who he was; but I had noted him as possessing a countenance of the most stolid, obese, and intolerable self-satisfaction on which it had ever been my ill fortune to gaze. There must, indeed, have been something peculiarly insupportable in this person's appearance; for a friend of mine, who is rather nervous, was at last very nearly driven to confine himself to the house, to avoid the never-failing meeting which was sure to follow his venturing out. It was at a very small party where I became known to him:-we were waiting dinner for two or three who had not arrived. At last they came; and in walked my monster at the head of them! I happened to be standing by the side of my host; but when he turned to me to introduce me to the new comers, I had started back several paces in the extremity of my surprise and dismay. There was no real occasion for wonder-for I had often seen this terrible man in fashionable crowds enough-but I certainly should have as soon expected to have been presented to the ghost in Hamlet, or the bleeding nun in Raymond and Agnes, as to this much more formidable apparition. While I met him only in the streets, or at theatres-or at parties-it was like seeing the spirits I have mentioned on the stage, or reading of them in Shakspeare and Monk Lewis; but to sit at the same small table with him-to be named to him, and have him named to me--and to see the creature open its lips and talk, and talk to myself, can be compared only to Hamlet's sensations during his interview with his dead father, or to the still more unpleasant ones of poor Raymond at finding himself wedded to a bleeding corpse, instead of to a young lady whose flesh was living, and whose blood was warm.

But the person of whom I am about to speak does not come into this class. So far from having met him at every turn, I have seen him only

four or five times in the course of my life, after periods of considerable interval, and at places and under circumstances the most distant and dissimilar from each other. Neither has there been any thing to connect me with him, farther than these very casual meetings. There is nothing mysterious about him, for I know his name and rank in lifewhich are in no way peculiar or romantic. In fact, I doubt whether I shall be able to convey the causes or the nature of my sensations and impressions with respect to him; it is probable, indeed, that I shall not, for I am not quite confident that they are perfectly clear to myself. His very extraordinary personal aspect must have been the origin of the whole; and my falling in with him again in places and at points of time when he has been the farthest from my thoughts, and consequently when his appearances have had something of the nature of apparitions, has probably confirmed and strengthened the original feeling concerning him.

The first time I saw him was at the door of a French post-house, where I had the satisfaction of being detained above two hours for horses, during one of which he was my fellow-sufferer. I had overtaken him in the early part of the preceding stage; and as the neverto-be-sufficiently-accursed laws of the French post would not allow us to pass him, he arrived about three quarters of a minute before us, and was, therefore, to be served first. It was an extremely cold day, and, as I was very comfortably wrapped up, and packed into the carriage (an arrangement which had taken me some pains and considerable time in the morning,) I remained where I was, digesting my ill-humour as best I might. The stranger fortified himself against the weather by the warmth derivable from walking up and down before the door at a stout pace, and from the fumes of a German tobacco-pipe. For some time I took no particular notice of him-but when my eye did glance upon him, it was not speedily removed. There was nothing peculiar in his figure, or in his dress, or in any thing but the extraordinary and almost superhuman length of his face. The features in themselves were good; and the eyes intrinsically had no peculiarity of expression. But the excessive elongation of the whole head had changed the aspect of the individual details. It seemed as if a face of comely and quiet intelligence had been seized by the chin and the forelock, and drawn out as though it had been made of putty or of dough. Or it may, perhaps, be a more intelligible illustration to compare it to a face reflected on the convex side of a spoon held perpendicularly—a pleasant pastime, in which I have no doubt some of my readers (to say nothing of myself) have occasionally indulged. The expression of the eyes was not, as I have said, of itself particularly remarkable-but their very quietness seemed to possess something unnatural when contrasted with the unearthly head in which they were set. Such an outline ought to have had a filling up as strange and singular as itself. The mouth placidly puffing forth the successive volumes of smokethe eyes, like any other eyes, varying their meditative expression only by occasional glances of moderate impatience towards the stable-all this seemed quite out of keeping, even in a discrepancy which was irksome and disagreeable, when considered with reference to the portentous and unspeakable head of which they formed (though they scarcely seemed to form) a part.

My companion and I had some discussion as to the country and the calling of "the Man with the Head." His carriage was a German drotsky; but this proved nothing-for a person of any country, coming from Vienna, would very probably have such a vehicle. His servant was a courier, so this proved nothing-for the members of that craft may almost, like the gipsies, be considered a nation of themselves. They speak all languages, and live in no country for a quarter of a year together. The master did not open his lips except to let out the smoke; the servant talking, bustling, and swearing, as the French say, pour quatre. At length the horses were ready, when "the man" put his "head" into the carriage, followed it, and drove off. We agreed, from his smoke and his silence, that he was a German. Au reste, I was convinced that he was a disciple of Kant, as nothing upon earth could possibly fill such a head short of the subtleties of the transcendental philosophy.

It was some years before I saw him again, but I did not forget him. I used frequently to talk of the extraordinary man I had seen at and tried as well as I could to describe him ;-ill enough I dare say; for there is nothing so difficult as to describe personal appearance so as to produce any defined and embodied idea in the party upon whom the description is inflicted. Eyes, hair, nose, mouth, and chin may be described with an exactness which would satisfy Sterne's critic, or the Austrian police when granting an Italian passport ;-but the air, the expression, the ensemble, cannot be thus noted; of them every one is left to form his own idea, and probably a different one is formed by each. Description of scenery (on which, except in the Scotch novels, I entreat the Chancellor of the Exchequer immediately to lay a duty amounting to a prohibition) does not labour-would that it did!under the same difficulty. If you give so much trees to one side, so much ruin to the other, so much water to the centre, and so much hill to the back ground,-set half a dozen painters to work, and their halfdozen pictures will be pretty nearly alike. But describe a face to them, and you would have a row of pictures, resembling each other, indeed, in general characteristics, but not to be recognized as springing from the same source, still less as intended to represent the same individual. Anacreon's directions to his painter would have produced a very beautiful, a very luxuriant and luxurious creature, such as his mistress probably was; but the portrait would have been equally that of any other voluptuously beautiful woman in Teos. Thus, I am conscious that I have never been able fully to convey the effect produced by the heterogeneous conjunction of feature, formation, and size, which existed in the head of my mega-cephalistic friend. If I could but borrow for two minutes the graver of Cruickshank with the power of using it, I would in a dozen strokes convince my readers that "the head" was indeed calculated to make even more than the impression which I have described it to have done upon me.

I had no idea, however, of ever seeing this well-remembered countenance again. I had ranked it among those which, as they flit across you once during your life, leave nevertheless a remembrance which lasts as long as that life itself. I speak (as of course all people do speak in such matters) from my own feelings and experience:-I do not know whether it is the case with others; but for my own part, some faces