fore, they became pure cosmopolites, and no partial affections interrupted their philanthropy, and when yet they retained their country, their language, and their arts, what noble works, what mighty discoveries, might we not expect from them? If the applause of a little city, a first-rate town, a small province, and the encouragement of a Pericles, produced a Phidias, a Sophocles, and a constellation of other stars scarcely inferior in glory, what will not the applause of the world effect, and the boundless munificence of the world's imperial masters? Alas! no Sophocles appeared, no Phidias was born; individual genius fled with national independence, and the best products were cold and laborious copies of what their fathers had thought, and invented in grandeur and majesty. At length nothing remained, but dastardly and cunning slaves, who avenged their own degradation and ruin by assisting to degrade and ruin their conquerors; and the golden harp of their divine language remained only as the frame on which priests and monks spun their dirty cobwebs of sophistry and superstition!"

Such were the Greeks-such, thank Heaven! they are no longer."

E. H.

SONNET.

So, froward maiden, thou wilt quit for ever
Thy country and her many-weather'd skies,
All old home-thoughts and early sympathies
Abjuring, and wilt strive with vain endeavour
To quench thine English spirit:-never, never,
Though herding with our natural enemies,
May'st thou do this; for thou art bound by ties
Which neither thou, nor time, nor fate can sever.
Therefore, although thy children must not claim
Freedom, the Briton's birth-right; though the song
Of Milton be to them an idle name,

And English wisdom vain, thou wilt not wrong
Thy country with cold scorn, nor think it shame

To weep when thoughts of home into thy bosom throng.

Moultric

G. M.

Knight, excepting
Articles marked. marked

WHAT YOU WILL.

NO. ΙΙ.

EDITED BY PETER ELLIS.

2

BREAKFAST was just over; my aunt had retired to the nursery, and Charles to his brother's office; William stood at the window, watching the progress of an approaching stage amidst its retinue of dust; John lay reclined on the sofa, his attention divided between the unpromising aspect of the heavens and an old volume of the "Lady's Magazine," from which he was in vain endeavouring to extract something like amusement, with the air of a hungry silkworm prowling among a heap of withered mulberry-leaves; my sister was ostensibly engaged in re-perusing the thrice-conned county paper, but, in reality, deliberating on the expediency of her uncle's presenting her with a new and improved edition of her cousin's silk gown; my own meditations were of a graver cast, passing alternately from hexameters to diameters, from Thucydides to Euclid, according as the tripos or the medal presented itself to my mind's eye, with the feelings so well known to those who have the work of three years to do, with hardly three months to do it in.

It was at this conjuncture of affairs that my friend, Heaviside, entered the breakfast-parlour, with dismay in his face, and an open letter in his hand. All stood aghast.

" I told you how it would be, Ellis," said he, marching up directly to me, and making an unceremonious lodgment in my button-hole: "the press is at a stand; the editor is at his wits' end, and wonders at having received no answers to the five letters he has sent you, requesting contributions. I told you what would come of your racketting, and riding, and sporting, and idling-talking metaphysics with Haselfoot, and eating oysters with Murray-sketching tragedies and organizing chess-clubs-quadrilling with your fair neighbours, and drinking radical toasts with your male ones! I told you, all along, how it would be; I knew from the first."

As I have a natural and inveterate dislike to the species of personage called Job's comforters, I interrupted my monitor with-" This is quite in your way, Martin-laying the blame of every thing that happens upon my unfortunate head. Did not a fever nail me fast for three weeks, and Mrs. Crump and her family for a month? Did not Demosthenes make a deep

incision into July, and Marriott's troublesome affair occиру half August? Have I not had to translate the Impudentiæ Encomium for Blackwood, besides reviewing Tomkins's work for the Monthly Censor?-a whole mortal week did that man's book take me, and he not satisfied after all. Then you talk as if I was the only culprit. Prate not to me of my particular delinquencies, as if I were the master-wheel in the machine, and every thing must needs go wrong without me. Another thing, you know that I"

"Come, come," said Heaviside, cutting short my self-defence, " 'tis no use arguing; all you can now do is to make the best of a bad matter, and sit down manfully to work. have nothing else to do, and the rain".

You

"To work!" exclaimed I, "why the magazine will be out on the first of October, and to-day is the twenty-third of September."

"Pooh!" replied he, "surely you can manage half a sheet before dinner, prose or verse-Pemberton is going to town by the mail this afternoon, and he will take it."

" But the carpenter has been at work in my study, and it is in a state of complete confusion."

"Then write here."

"Here! what, in the midst of tape, bobbins, and China crape-my sister chattering to my cousin, and John whispering to my sister-William beating the Devil's tattoo with variations-women popping in and popping out and yourself, Martin, peeping over my shoulder ever and anon, 'just to see how I get on,' a practice I detest mortally?"

"To cut a long matter short, it is determined that you shall not rise from the chair on which you are sitting, till you have manufactured eight statute pages of readable English, errors excepted. I beg leave to take the sense of the public on this matter."

The question was accordingly put, and carried by the unanimous voice of the whole synod, with the exception of John, who had just left the room to countermand his orders for the morning's ride. Resistance was useless. My escritoire was ordered down from the study; Mary placed before me a quire of her own fragrant unsunned wire-wove, spotless as the ivory fingers which presented it; a pen was planted in my passive hand, and there I sat, the picture of sullen resolution, condemned to try, against my will, my friend Trismegistus's paradoxical experiment of "social silence and undisturbing voices."

"Well then," said I, "since it is decreed that write I must, though my brain be as dry as a lemon-chip, and my fancy as barren as a Scotch metaphysician's, the next question is, what shall I write? and in what form shall I embody my thoughts, or no-thoughts? shall it be ode, elegy, epigram, tale, sonnet, or pastoral-essay, dialogue, critique, sermon, oration, or argument? I am equally prepared for all, that is, equally unprepared."

"Psha!" said Heaviside, "never mind the subject; write first, and choose the subject afterwards. Or-stay-why not strike off a description of last Thursday's ball?"

I shook my head. "It would be encroaching on Peregrine's province."

"Or an ode on the Spanish revolution?" said William.
Another shake.

"But, for my part, I never like to meddle
With politics, Sir."

"Why not a sonnet on me, Harcourt?" said my sister. "A sonnet! why, bless your life, Mary, I have not written a fourteener these five years; let me see, not since the day Susan Willis married young Croft. (Here a parenthetical sigh to the memory of early but ill-placed attachment.) And, besides, you are only my sister, and I have left my book of rhymes at Cambridge; and"

" Apropos," interrupted Martin, " now you talk of Cambridge, what say you to College Sketches, or Recollections of an Academic Life?'"

" I detest Cambridge," said I.

"So much the better. Fiction is the soul of poetry, as my friend the author of Lacon observed to me the other day." "Besides, how can I recollect what is not yet past?" "Nothing more easy. You have only to imagine yourself a cross-grained old bachelor of fifty, full of discontent and hypochondria, looking back to the golden days when gout and spleen were not."

Accordingly, after a little more hesitation and coy drawingback, I began as follows:

"Of all the years of our life, there are none, perhaps, so delightful in retrospect as those spent at college. Our academic existence may be considered as a kind of blissful intermediate state, exempt alike from the petty restraints and annoyances of boyhood, and the oppressive cares of maturer life-an oasis between two deserts-a green isle in the waste ocean of life. We sit down full of youth and spirits, exulting in our newly-acquired liberty, with enough to do, indeed, but under little or no restriction as to the time and manner of doing it, which makes all the difference-honour and emolument, and perhaps still sweeter rewards, in prospect-all one's old school friendships revived, and new ones formed-alas! our only true friendships! Never shall I forget my sensations on first entering college-the reverence with which I looked round on the nursery of philosophers, and poets, and statesmen-the superstitious awe with which, in my freshman's insignificance, I regarded the ruling authorities of the place— tutors, lecturers, deans, fellows, senior fellows-things which were then to me ' a marvel and a mystery'-a graduated scale of dignity, terminating in that most solemn of abstractions, the Master. Never shall I forget the delightful feeling of self-importance with which I looked round on my undisputed dominion of an attic, seven feet by six, containing three obsolete-looking chairs, and a small mahogany table delicately marbled with ink; together with correspondent appendages of bed-chamber and lumber-room; with what a sigh of full contented rest' I planted my feet on my own fender!

"Often, at the peaceful time of evening, when I return to my solitary chamber, sick and tired of the frivolities and vexations of the day, reclining on my easy chair in a pensive mood of dreamy abstraction, while the kettle is beginning to simmer, and my cat,

Friend and sole solace of my solitude,'

lies with her party-coloured length stretched along the genial hearth-rug, singing her monotonous song, the very soul of vacant happiness and lazy self-complacency, often do I, in imagination, live over my academical days from first to last from my freshman state even to the moment when I put on a Bachelor's gown, casting aside the former tattered investment with a sigh, as if it were the falling leaf of youth and youthful happiness. I think of the old college with its sculptured gate and broad green courts,' and antique hall, (alas! why did Dr.- overlay its noble oak wainscot with a tawdry coat of postdiluvian paint, making the brown one green?') and the piety-compelling chapel-bell, and the grim-faced porter, and the round good-natured face of the college-clock, and the rowing-match, and the cricket-club, and the debating society, and the wine-party; even the lecture-room and the hall of examination look beautiful through the softening medium of memory

Making the very darkness there
More beautiful than light elsewhere!""

Here I laid down my pen, and burst into a long, loud, irrepressible fit of laughter, to the consternation of the whole assembly. "I can stand it no longer," exclaimed I, as soon

✓ as I recovered a little, " it is too much: I have not Courtenay's art of telling a lie with a grave face; I am a bad hand at makebelieve. So you may finish the college sketches yourself."