motes !

How etherial! as if its living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country "good Unknown." The hare has many friends, but none sincerer than

ELIA.

TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA

THE

(1833 and 1834)

HE greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it; how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence, we see

so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man, that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture wives; as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in their dining parlours.

Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm, which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute.

It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hard-heartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is perhaps the wisest. His bestloved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would

never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the streets of Ware ;-Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him? "Ha! Sukey, is it you?" with that benevolent aspect, with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel, “come and dine with us on Sunday;" then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, “and Sukey, do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected?

"We read the Paradise Lost as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. 66 Nobody ever wished it longer;"-nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it, which makes us imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it, with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus? Do we wish her taller?

Lear. Who are you?

Mine eyes are not o' the best I'll tell you straight

Kent. The same;
Your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius ?
Lear. He's a good fellow, I can tell you that;
He'll strike, and quickly too: he's dead and rotten.
Kent. No, my good Lord; I am the very man-
Lear. I'll see that straight-

Kent. That from your first of difference and decay,

Have follow'd your sad steps.

Lear. You are welcome hither

Albany. He knows not what he says; and vain it is

That we present us to him.

Edgar. Look up, my Lord.

Kent. Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him much. That would upon the rack of this rough world

Stretch him out longer.

So ends 'King Lear,' the most stupendous of the Shakspearian dramas; and Kent, the noblest feature of the con

ceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master!—to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, as one that

-served not for gain, Or follow'd out of form,

are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in Shakspeare.

Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pith and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but pregnant words, in which the man in the old Nut-brown Maid' rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the

woman:

Now understand, to Westmorland,

Which is my heritage,

I will you bring, and with a ring,
By way of marriage,

I will you take, and Lady make.

Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat. Prior-in his own way unequalled, and a poet now-adays too much neglected-"In me," quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma-with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive :

:

In me behold the potent Edgar's heir,
Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war,
Let Loire confess.

And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, presents the Lady with a full and true enumeration of his Papa's rent-roll in the fat soil by Deva.

But of all parentheses, (not to quit the topic too suddenly,) commend me to that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of Fair Rosamund :—

Now mark

When good King Henry ruled this land,

The second of that name,

(Besides the Queen) he dearly loved

A fair and comely dame.

There is great virtue in this besides.

Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine, which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit. We mean those practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that Whatever is is bestthe Cads of Omnibuses; who, from their little back pulpitsnot once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of "God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries; but every minute, at the entry or exit of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim-(Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets,)—ALL'S RIGHT.

Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in difficulties. But, in common speech, we are apt to confound with it admonition; as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that admonishes. M- sent to his friend L--, who is no water-drinker, a twopenny tract Against the Use of Fermented Liquors.' L acknowledged the obligation, as far as to twopence. Penotier's advice was the safest after

all:

But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature, had been dumb-founding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied his friend, and thought,

God help the man so wrapt in error's endless maze :

when, suddenly brightening up his placid countenance, like

one that had found out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired, "At last," said he, "I advised him--"

Here he paused, and here we were again interminably thrown back. By no possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to be delivered of. "I advised him," he repeated, "to have some advice upon the subject." A general approbation followed; and it was unanimously agreed, that, under all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious counsel could have been given. A laxity pervades the popular use of words. Parson Wis not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty. Is Parson W— therefore a hypocrite? I think not. Where the concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the bare-faced publication of it would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secrecy. Parson W-- is simply an immoral clergyman. But if Parson W- were to be for ever haranguing on the opposite virtue, choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 39th of Exodus-dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it-then Parson W

might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W-rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from "obedience to the powers that are " "submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful; "" on which he can delight to expatiate with equal fervour and sincerity. Again, to despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none, or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces, with a peculiar emphasis, that she "despises the fellow," depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine. One more instance :-If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism, as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the world. We seem to be