venerable young ladies are loudly and frequently invoked by poetasters, writers in albums and annuals, and other scribblers; but, like Mungo in the farce, each of them replies, "Massa, massa!—the more you call, the more me wont come." One of our tourists, at Paris, observing that there were only statues of eight muses on the Opera House, which was then incomplete, inquired of a labouring mason what had become of the ninth. "Monsieur, je ne vous dirois pas," replied the man; -"mais probablement elle s'amuse avec Apollon !"—An English operative would hardly have given such an answer. A gentleman once expressed his surprise that, in so rich a literary country as England, the Muses should not attain their due honours." Impossible !" cried a whist-playing old lady"They are nine, and of course cannot reckon honours."

MUSIC.-" Music, like man himself, derives all its dignity from its subordination to a loftier and more spiritual power. When, divorcing itself from poetry, it first sought to be a principal instead of an accessory, to attach more importance to a sound than to a thought, to supersede sentiment by skill, to become, in short, man's play-fellow, rather than his assistant teacher, a sensual instead of an intellectual gratification, its corruption, or at least its application to less ennobling purposes, had already

commenced. As the art of music, strictly so called, was more assiduously cultivated, as it became more and more perplexed with complicated intricacies, only understood by a few, and less and less an exponent of the simple feelings and sentiments that are intelligible to all, it may be said to have lost in general utility and value, what it gained in science, and to have been gradually dissolving that union between sound and sense, which imparted to it its chief interest and influence.”

So entirely do I agree with the writer from whom the above extract is taken, that I have often rode back after a morning concert, to my residence in the country, that I might enjoy the superior pleasures of natural music. It was upon such an occasion, while strolling in the fields, that my thoughts involuntarily arranged themselves, as the novelists say, into the following stanzas :

I.

There's a charm and zest when the singer thrills

The throbbing breast with his dulcet trills,

And a joy more rare than the sweetest air

Art ever combined,

When the poet enhances,

By beautiful fancies,

The strain, and entrances

Both ear and mind.

Thy triumph, O music! is ne'er complete,

Till the pleasures of sense and of intellect meet.

II.

Delights like these, to the poor unknown,
Are reserved for the rich and great alone,
In diamonds and plumes, who fill the rooms
Of some grand abode,

And think that a guinea,

To hear Paganini

Or warbling Rubini,

Is well bestow'd;

Since then, only then, they the pleasures share
Of science, voice, instrument-equally rare.

III.

But the peasant at home, in gratuitous boon,
Has an opera dome and orchestral saloon,
With melody gay from the peep of day
Until evening dim:

Whenever frequented,

With flowers it is scented,

Its scenes all invented

And painted by Him,

Who suspended its blazing lamps on high,
And its ceiling formed of the azure sky.

IV.

Oh! what can compare with the concert sublime,
When waters, earth, air, all in symphony chime ?
The wind, herds, and bees, with the rustle of trees,
Varied music prolong;

On the spray as it swingeth,
Each bird sweetly singeth,
The sky-lark down flingeth

A torrent of song,—

Till the transports of music, devotion, and love,
Waft the rapturous soul to the regions above.

MUSICIANS-Machines for producing sounds; human instruments, generally so completely absorbed

by their own art, that they are either ignorant of all others, or undervalue them. In a company at Vienna, where the conversation was nearly engrossed by the praises of Goethe, Catalani exclaimed, with great naïveté, "Who is this Göethe?—I have never heard any of his music!" A poor German composer being introduced to Mozart, whom he considered the greatest man in the world, was so overcome with awe, that he dared not lift his eyes from the ground, but remained, for some time, stammering " Ah, Imperial Majesty! Ah, Imperial Majesty!" In the same spirit Cafarielli, when told that Farinelli had been made a sort of Prime Minister in Spain, replied— "No man deserves it better, for his voice is absolutely unrivalled.”

MYSTERY.-To him who has been sated and disappointed by the actual and the intelligible, there is a profound charm in the unattainable and the inscrutable. Infants stretch out their hands for the moon; children delight in puzzles and riddles, even when they cannot discover their solution; and the children of a larger growth desire no better employment than to follow their example, however it may lead them astray. The mystery of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was a frequent source of idolatry; the type being taken for the prototype, until leeks and onions received the homage originally meant for their

divine Giver. The attractive mystery of Irving's unknown tongues has engendered a fanaticism, at which we need the less wonder, if we remember the confession of the pious Baxter, that, in order to awaken an interest in his congregation, he made it a rule, in every sermon, to say something that was above their capacity.

There is a glorious epoch of our existence, wherein the comprehensible appears common and insipid, and in abandoning ourselves to the enthusiasm of imagination, we attain a middle state between despair and deification;-a beatific ecstacy, when the spirit longs to fly upward-when the finite yearns for the infinite, the limited in intellect for the omniscient, the helpless for the omnipotent, the real for the impossible. Thus to flutter above the world, on the extended wings of fancy, is to be half a deity. And yet the forwardspringing and ardent mind, which, running a-head of its contemporaries, stands upon the forehead of the age to come, only renders itself the more conspicuous mark for obloquy and assault. Like a Shrovetide cock, tethered to the earth, it can but partially raise itself, when it again sinks down, amid the sticks and stones of its cruel persecutors.

NAMES.-The character of different æras may, to a certain extent, be discovered by the various ways in which our ambitious nobility, and others, have endea