realm, for this beautiful emblem and natural sanction of the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE!) All, all are to be found in the age we live in-whose attributes to enumerate would exhaust the epithets of an Orphic hymn, and beggar the Gradus ad Parnassum !—All, all, and half besides the feasibility of which I first learnt during the last war, at two public dinners severally given, one by Scottish, and the other by Irish patriots, where each assigned to their countrymen three fourths of our whole naval and military success. In each case, à priori, the thing was possible, nay, probable; as each meeting the assertion passed nem. con. though there were eye-witnesses, if not pars-maximists present-and both were so much in earnest, that I could not find it in my heart to disbelieve either. But this is a digression. Or it may be printed as a parenthesis. All close thinkers, you know, are apt to be parenthetic. One other point, and I conclude. You are a mighty man for parallel passages, Dick! a very ferret for hunting out the pedigree and true parentage of a thought, phrase, or image. So far from believing in equivocal generation, or giving credit to any idea as an Autochthon, i. e. as self-sprung out of the individual brain, or natale solum, whence (like Battersea Cabbages, Durham mustard, Stilton cheese, &c.) it took its market name, I verily suspect you of the heresy of the Præ-Adamites! Nay, I would lay a wager that the Thesis for your Doctor's Degree, should you ever descend from your correctorship of typical errata to that of misprints in the substance, would be: quod fontes sint nullibi. In self-defence, therefore, by warrantable anticipation,-a pregnant principle, Richard! by virtue of which (as you yourself urged at the time) the demagogues that threw open the election of the Mayor of Garrett, hitherto vested in the blackguards of Brentford exclusively, to the blackguards of the country at large, "posed us to an invasion from the aristocracies of Tunis and Algiers! N.B. Clarendon and the Quarterly are of the same opinion-prospectively, I say, for informers, and informatively for the reader, I make known the following: Some ten or twelve years ago, as the Vassals of the Sun, i. e. the Bodies, count their time, being in the world of spirits, as above-mentioned, and in the Parnassian quarter, in literary chitchat with Lucian, Aristophanes, Swift, Rabelais, and Molière, over a glass of green gooseberry wine (since the departure of the last-named spirit, articles of French produce have been declared contraband in the spiritual Parnassia)-I read them a rough preexistent, or as we say here, copy, of Maxilian. When who should be standing behind my chair, and peeping over my shoulder (I had a glimpse of his face when it was too late, and I never saw a more Cervantic one), but a spirit from Thought-land (North Germany I should say), who, it seems, had taken a trip thither, during the furlough of a magnetic crisis, into which his Larva had been thrown by Nic, senior, M.D.* and a Mesmerist still in great practice. Well! there would have been no harm in this, for in such cases it was well known, that the spirit, on its return to the body, used to forget all that had happened to it during its absence, and became as ignorant of all the wondrous things it had seen, said, heard and done, as Balaam's ass. Γίνεται δ ̓ αὖ ὄνος ὁ ὄνος ἐξαγγελιζόμενος. But unluckily, and only a few months before, Mr. Van Ghert (who, as privy counsellor to the King of the Netherlands, ought to have known better) had, by metaphysical skill, discovered the means of so softening the wax tablet in the patient's cranium, that it not only received, but retained, the impression from the movements of the soul, during her trance, resuggesting them to the patient sooner or later, sometimes as dreams, and sometimes as original fancies. Thus it chanced, that the great idea, and too many-of the sub-ideas, of my ideal work awoke, in the consciousness of this Prussian or Saxon,Frederic Miller is the name, he goes by- -soon after the return of the spirit to its old chambers in his brain. Alas! my unfortunate intimacy with a certain well-known "Thief of Time," for which my originality had suffered on more than one former occasion, was part in fault! But, be this as it may, so it chanced, however, that before I had put a single line on paper (my time being, indeed, occupied in determining which of ten or twelve pre-existents I should transcribe first) out came the surreptitious duplicate, with such changes in names, scene of action, thought, * See "Archiv des thierischen Magnetismus," edited by Professor Eschenmiayer and Co. I mentioned one of Dr. Nic's cases, with a few of Doctors Kieser's and Nasse's, and of Mr. Van Ghert's, to Lemuel Gulliver; but I found him strangely incredulous. He (he said) had never seen any thing like it. But what is that to the purpose? What does any one man's experience go for, in proving a negative at least? I could not even learn from him that he had ever met with a single Meteorolithe, or sky-stone, on its travels from the volcanoes of Jupiter, or the moon, to our earth. images, and language, as the previous associations, and local impressions of the unweeting plagiarist had clothed my ideas in. But what I take most to heart, it so nearly concerning the credit of Great Britain, is, that it came out in another country, and in high Dutch! I foresee what my anticipator's compatriots will say —that admitting the facts as here related, yet the Anselmus is no mere transcript or version, but at the lowest a free imitation of the Maxilian: or rather that the English and German works are like two paintings by different masters from the same sketch, the credit of which sketch, secundum leges et consuetudines mundi corpuscularis, must be assigned to the said Frederic Miller by all incarnate spirits, held at this present time in their senses, and as long as they continue therein; but which I shall claim to myself, if ever I get out of them. And so farewell, dear Corrector! for I must now adjust myself to retire bowing, face or frontispiece, towards THE READER, with the respect due to so impartial and patient an Arbiter from the AUTHOR. MAXILIAN. FLIGHT I It was on a Whitsunday afternoon-the clocks striking five, and while the last stroke was echoing in the now empty churches -and just at the turn of one of the open streets in the outskirts of Dublin-that a young man, swinging himself round the corner, ran full butt on a basket of cakes and apples, which an old barrow-wife was offering for sale; and with such force, that the contents shot abroad, like the water-rays of a trundled mop, and furnished extempore-on the spur of the occasion, as we say-a glorious scramble to the suburban youngsters, that were there making or marring this double holiday. But what words can describe the desperate outburst, the blaze of sound, into which the beldam owner of the wares exploded! or the "boil and bubble" of abuse and imprecation, with which the neighbor gossips, starting from their gingerbread and whiskey stands, and clustering round him, astounded the ears and senses of the ill-starred aggressor! a tangle-knot of adders, with all its heads protruded towards him, would not have been more terrific. Reeling with surprise and shame, with the look and gesture of a child, that, having whirled till it was giddy-blind, is now trying to stop itself, he held out his purse, which the grinning scold with one snatch transferred to her own pocket. At the sight of this peace-offering, the circle opened and made way for the young man, who instantly pursued his course with as much celerity as the fulness of the street, and the dread of a second mishap, would permit. The flame of Irish wrath soon languishes and goes out, when it meets with no fuel from resistance. The rule holds true in general. But no rule is of universal application; and it was far from being verified by the offended principal in this affray. Unappeased, or calling in her fury only to send it out again condensed into hate, the implacable beldam hobbled after the youth, determined that though she herself could not keep up with him, yet that her curses should, as long at least as her throat and lungs could supply powder for their projection. Alternately pushing her limbs onward, and stopping not so much to pant as to gain a fulcrum for a more vehement scream, she continued to pursue her victim with "vocal shafts," as Pindar has it, or ós noivos éμngηobels i. e. spitting fire like a wet candle-wick, as Aristophanes ! And well if this had been all-an intemperance, a gust of crazy cankered old age, not worth recording. But, alas! these jets and flashes of execration no sooner reached the ears of the fugitive, but they became articulate sentences, the fragments, it seemed, of some old spell, or wicked witch-rhyme : Ay! run, run, run, Pass The glass! the glass, Though there is reason to believe that this transformation of sound, like the burst of a bomb, did not take effect till it had reached its final destination, the youth's own meatus auditorius; and that for others, the scold's passionate outcry did not verbally differ from the usual outcries of a scold in a passion yet there was a something in the yell and throttle of the basket-woman's voice so horrific, that the general laugh, which had spread round at the young man's expense, was suspended. The passengers halted, as wonder-struck; and when they moved on, there was a general murmur of disgust and aversion. The student MAXILIAN-for he it was, and no other, who, following his nose, without taking counsel of his eyes, had thus plunged into conflict with the old woman's wares-though he could attach no sense or meaning to the words he heard, felt himself, nevertheless, seized with involuntary terror, and quickened his steps, to get as soon as possible out of the crowd, who were making their way to the pleasure-gardens, the Vauxhall of the Irish metropolis, and whose looks and curiosity converged towards him. His anxious zig-zag, however, marked the desire of haste, rather than its attainment: and still as he pushed and winded through the press of the various gay parties, all in holiday finery, he heard a whispering and murmuring, "The poor young man! Out on the frantic old hag!" The ominous voice and the wicked looks which the beldam seemed to project, together with the voice-and we are all, more or less, superstitious respecting looks-had given a sort of sentimental turn to this ludicrous incident. The females regarded the youth with increasing sympathy and in his well-formed countenance (to which the expression of inward distress lent an additional interest), and his athletic growth, they found an apology, and, for the moment, a compensation, for the awkwardness of his gait, and the more than most unfashionable cut of his clothes. It can never be proved, that no one of the Seven Sleepers was a tailor by trade; neither do I take on myself to demonstrate the affirmative. But this I will maintain, that a tailor, disenthralled from a trance of like duration, with confused and fragmentary recollections of the fashions at the time he fell asleep, blended with the images hastily abstracted from the dresses that passed before his eyes when he first reopened them, might, by dint of conjecture, have come as near to a modish suit, as the ambulatory artist had done, who made his circuit among the recesses of Macgillicuddy's Reeks, and for whose drapery the person of our luckless student did at this present time perform the office of Layman.* A pepper-and-salt frock, that might be taken for * The jointed image, or articulated doll, as large, in some instances, as a full-grown man or woman, which artists employ for the arrangement and probation of the drapery and attitudes of the figures in their paintings, is called Layman. POSTSCRIPT. Previously to his perusal of the several par |