An amiable, a delicate animation Informs our thought, and earnest we rehearse Heard in this hour's delicious divagation How soft the song! the epigram how terse! We rearrange the rumbling universe, And map the course of man's regeneration Over a pipe. W. E. Henley. To C. F. Bradford. On the Gift of a Meerschaum Pipe THE pipe came safe, and welcome too, ΤΗ As anything must be from you; A meerschaum pure, 'twould float as light Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; And very Venus of a pipe. When high I heap it with the weed To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve. When curls the smoke in eddies soft, That gives and takes, though chance-designed, While slowly o'er its candid bowl And if my soul must part with all Dream-forger, I refill thy cup With reverie's wasteful pittance up, I'll think,-As inward Youth retreats, 'Twill leap to welcome C. F. B., Who sent my favourite pipe to me. J. R. Lowell. Mounsey HE is the oldest frequenter of the place, the latest sitter-up, well-informed, inobtrusive, and that sturdy old English character, a lover of truth and justice. I never knew Mounsey approve of anything unfair or illiberal. There is a candour and uprightness about his mind which can neither be wheedled nor brow-beat into unjustifiable complaisance. He looks straight-forward as he sits with his glass in his hand, turning neither to the right nor the left, and I will venture to say that he has never had a sinister object in view through life. Mrs. Battle (it is recorded in her Opinions on Whist) could not make up her mind to use the word "Go." Mounsey from long practice has got over this difficulty, and uses it incessantly. It is no matter what adjunct follows in the train of this despised monosyllable :—whatever liquid comes after this prefix is welcome. Mounsey, without being the most communicative, is the most conversible man I know. The social principle is inseparable from his person. If he has nothing to say, he drinks your health; and when you cannot from the rapidity and carelessness of his utterance catch what he says, you assent to it with equal confidence you know his meaning is good. His favourite phrase is, “We have all of us something of the coxcomb"; and yet he has none of it himself. Before I had exchanged half a dozen sentences with Mounsey, I found that he knew several of my old acquaintance (an immediate introduction of itself, for the discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetener and cement of friendship) -and had been intimate with most of the wits and men about town for the last twenty years. He knew Tobin, Wordsworth, Porson, Wilson, Paley, Erskine, and many others. He speaks of Paley's pleasantry and unassuming manners, and describes Porson's long potations and long quotations formerly at the Cider-Cellar in a very lively way. He has doubts, however, as to that sort of learning. On my saying that I had never seen the Greek Professor but once, at the Library of the London Institution, when he was dressed in an old rusty black coat, with cobwebs hanging to the skirts of it, and with a large patch of coarse brown paper covering the whole length of his nose, looking for all the world like a drunken carpenter, and talking to one of the Proprietors with an air of sauvity, approaching to condescension, Mounsey could not help expressing some little uneasiness for the credit of classical literature. "I submit, sir, whether common sense is not the principal thing? What is the advantage of genius and learning if they are of no use in the conduct of life?"-Mounsey is one who loves the hours that usher in the morn, when a select few are left in twos and threes like stars before the break of day, and when the discourse and the ale are "aye growing better and better." William Hazlitt. Conversation YE pow'rs who rule the tongue, if such there are, And make colloquial happiness your care, Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate, |